Actually, it's neither. Star Wars is in a genre called future fantasy, notwithstanding that it's set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It makes no pretence to scientific viability. It's literally fantasy set in a high tech era.
Science fiction is supposed to make plausible science and to explain, broadly, how things work.
Several things point to this being a joke. If it's not a joke, their lawyer is the most incompetent lawyer on the planet.
The "plaintiff" in the suit is not the party alleged to have suffered damage, and cannot sue for the alleged actions.
Several of the defendants described as "entities" are clearly not "entities".
Their claim for "conversion" fails to make out even the vaguest hint of a single element required for an action in conversion.
They claim a "right" to equitable relief. You don't have a right to equitable relief - you have a right to ask for it, and the court can refuse it for any reason the court sees fit.
They're claiming injunctive relief to prevent speech. Even if speech is illegal, injunctive relief is almost never granted to restrain speech.
They describe IP addresses as property. I'm fairly progressive on what can constitute property, but even I have major difficulties with the concept of IP addresses being property.
Paragraph 37 claims that none of the alleged statements of the defendants were regarding matters of legitimate public concern. They're going to have a hard time proving that something currently in consideration in Congress and at a meeting convened by the FTC lacks an element of legitimate public concern.
While some of the other grounds can be argued, they are not plausibly arguable, and the "wrong plaintiff" problem is fatal anyway.
I have difficulty believing that a lawyer coud really have drafted this crud.
The proposal in the Australian report is to ban unsolicited commercial e-mail (opt-in). Now if only the US Senate would pay attention to that instead of introducing idiotic opt-out bills like the one recently introduced, that would actually increase spam.
This is exactly like a bill (Murkowski - the famous S.1618) that passed the Senate in 1998 that the spammers crowed over because it would allow them to go after spammers under restraint of trade laws. A copy of the original DEAA crowing is below. It would actually increase spam because it would be otherwise respectable companies spamming.
When Korea introduced similar legislation, Korean spam increased by a factor of 12 within three months. Most of that spam comes from otherwise respectable companies.
Even if this weren't going to result in more spam, how many people have enough time in the day to "opt-out" of all the spam they get now?
From deaatop-owner Fri May 22 00:15:34 1998 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by charlottenet.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) id AAA04255 for deaatop-outgoing; Fri, 22 May 1998 00:15:34 -0400 X-Authentication-Warning: charlottenet.net: majordom set sender to owner-deaatop@biznessweb.net using -f Received: from www.deaa.org (root@www.deaa.org [207.204.174.64]) by charlottenet.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA04252 for <deaatop@biznessweb.net>; Fri, 22 May 1998 00:15:33 -0400 Received: from hal ( id AAA19072; Fri, 22 May 1998 00:15:55 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19980522001648.009928f0@deaa.org> X-Sen der: dan@deaa.org X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.3 (32) Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 00:16:48 -0400 To: Duane Kimball <legal@deaa.org> From: "postmaster@deaa.org" <postmaster@deaa.org> Subject: Re: AP Report - The Truth Please. Cc: deaatop@biznessweb.net In-Reply-To: <3561ACFE.C990B1CF@deaa.org> References: <3.0.3.32.19980519002342.00736200@deaa.org> Mime- Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-deaatop@biznessweb.net Precedence: bulk
Hello All
After reading Duane's explanation of where we are , and how the UCC will be the grounds for suits against the backbones, I must admit that what I already know about this lends more credence to the Lega Cte. position and I support it wholeheartedly.
Of course , if we are stuck on 100% of what we want or nothing at all , then we should likely forget working within the system at all and can DEAA would then be relegated to the mountain of purist organizations and parties like the Libertarian Party [ of which I am a registered member for 17 years ] and be completely ineffective for all intents and purposes.
As it stands now , Fate and hard work have worked together to give us a definite leg up and we must now seize this opportunity and drive our points home.
I am quite pleased and cannot wait until this bill is passed and we can go after the backbones under the UCC.
Now, I think Media committee needs to concentrate on developing our public campaign that will lead up to the Hearings if they should still occur and we must still put out alerts to the general membership to press in and call their congress and exactly what to say to them.
Any comments??
Jack???
Dan Hufnal
At 12:02 PM 5/19/98 -0400, you wrote: >By the nature of your questions, I assume you have not seen all of the emails >released by the legal committee. So, let's try and answer your questions one by >one. > >The Senate bill passed by a margin of 99-0. That is acclamation. The bill that >passed (the McCain bill) included the Murkowski bill as an Amendment. In this >way, the committee hearings on the Murkowski bill which had already been >scheduled to begin on June 17th were avoided. Stopping this bill would have >been something akin to standing in front of a freight train both for us and for >our adversaries. > >The process from here is that it goes to the House of Representatives. It must >be passed there. Rep. Smith from New Jersey has a competing bill in which UCE >is outlawed
It's more like this. A shopkeeper lets you in. You are wearing a T shirt that he objects to so he kicks you out. The next day you ask to be let in by his wife/business partner and are granted access.
It's not. Intel told Hamidi either not to send any email, or alternatively not to send email of type 'X'. He continued contrary to that instruction. There is no other human involed. There is nothing else to contradict the explicit withdrawal of implied consent.
Your example really demonstrates that you don't understand the legal conception of consent, let alone that of implied consent.
When there is an SMTP connection to their mail server, that mail server gives permission again for that content to be passed through.
Wow, that's so wrong it's amazing. It's like saying "the shopkeeper kicked me out of the store and told me never to come back, but then he opened the door the next morning, so there was new implied consent." It doesn't work that way. You can never imply consent in a way that is different to a clear expression of consent or non-consent between the parties.
And even if you could, the SMTP banner is not the place where the implied consent comes from.
The same college has assigned its janitors
to teach brain surgery.
Honestly, if he's teaching a college class he
ought to either know what he's talking about, or
at least be able to research it without a post to
"ask Slashdot"
He is being held in solitairy confinement as a "material witness". Perhaps they want him to testify against the charity. If he were to claim that he had no idea they were sending money to terrorists then it could make a great case for fraud against the charity.
Yes, (assuming they are funding terrorists) - that's what terrorists are most afraid of, a civil suit for fraud.
Normally people don't START in solitairy confinement.
"Material witnesses" of this kind do because the information is taken to be of military significance and thus secrecy to be required.
No person shall be held.. for... infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia...
The lesson here is that assuming freedom ever gets restored in the USA, if you want to join the armed forces, join the air force.
There are bunches of comments here about what
any particular outcome would mean. Let me save
everybody some time. They're all wrong. Don't
count on the EFF to provide accurate information
on this either - the EFF is wrong.
The injunction ("restraining order") Intel
got is exactly what this case is about. It's not
Intel trying to get more beyond that, it's
Hamidi trying to get that overturned.
The "gives permission by connecting to the
Internet" argument is completely bogus because
that would be talking about implied permission,
and Intel specifically told Hamidi not to send
the messages in question. An explicit withdrawal
of permission trumps implied permission.
It won't mean anything for 1:1 emails
where the implied permission has not been
explicitly withdrawn.
"Commercial" is not a requirement
for something to be spam. Even CAUCE denies that
commecrial is a relevant requirement for
something to be spam.
There's a number of tools and libraries (with Perl or other languages) beyond plain DOM and SAX that use proper XML parsers and are reasonably easy to use. He should use one of those, and stop complaining.
About two years ago I was looking at all of the publicly available code to parse XML. Not only did I look at the API or callback facility used (all the ones I found had extraordinarily bad APIs and/or extraordinarily bad callback architectures), I looked at the code itself to check its conformance to the XML standard. Not one that I found conformed.
In the end I wrote a new one from scratch, based on all of the relevant standards documents (and with the standards documents basically forming the design spec). It ended up being a hell of a lot simpler to use than any of the publicly available code, and a hell of a lot more flexible.
Plus, I understood XML much better when I was done.
Now you might suggest that by doing this I have forgone the community testing involved in public source code XML parsers. However in two years, there has been not a single bug detected in the parser I wrote. I attribute this largely to the fact that the XML specification and the other specifications it depends on are so thorough and have so many established test cases that if you exercise a little discipline, and make sure you implement as per the spec, it's very difficult to get it wrong.
This is simply a question of how your contract is written. If it says they pay for all inbound usage, then they pay for all inbound usage, except perhaps usage generated by your own systems (for various reasons which are not necessary to consider here).
Of course enforcing this may mean being unpopular with and/or losing the customer, but it's your call.
What kind of twisted in-bred retard would type in uk.co by accident?
Perhaps somebody who knows something we don't. Perhaps the Columbian drug lords really are buying governments around the world in the most literal possible way.
Now the million dollar question is what will happen to my 'permenant'.name if the TLD goes.bomb? Will it be grandfathered? I bought it explicitly for stability.
If the.name TLD ceased to function, all the registrars for it would be in breach of contract to all of their.name customers. Thus the registrars simply cannot afford to allow the domain to cease to function. I would fully expect to see a bailout of some description if GNR went near going belly up.
Spam is manifestly a social problem, not a technical one.
I can't even begin (in a forum such as this) to go into why the entire concept of it being impossible to forge headers is impossible on the modern Internet.
Realistically the only difference between ftp and dcc is how the start is negotiated.
Not true. DCC was designed to be slower than FTP and HTTP. When it was designed there were a lot of entire university campuses that were limited to 48kbit lines, and DCC was designed to be able to send files over these links without flooding them. Links also tended to be much more unreliable then, and by sending in smaller blocks you would stand a better chance of the files getting through (in fact this was why the ability to set the send block size was put in - somebody wanted to be able to successfully send over much flakier links by decreasing the block size).
Now, if you increase the block size to a very large number, it's similar to FTP or HTTP, and some IRC clients even come with the default block size being unlimited, which does run at the same speed as FTP or HTTP.
And the Australian PM has what say in this conflict???
I'm glad you asked.
Once day, in the body, there was a fight between the organs of the body over who was the leader. The brain said "I'm the leader because without me we couldn't think". The heart said "I'm the leader because without me your blood wouldn't circulate and we'd all die". The lungs said "I'm the leader because without me we couldn't get air and we'd all die". The asshole said "I'm the leader", and the others laughed. So the asshole clammed shut. Nothing got past for days. Then weeks. The passages started filling up, poisons started leaking into the blood stream, and eventually the other organs conceded and gave power to the asshole. Which just goes to show that you don't have to be a brain to be leader, you just have to be a retentive asshole.
Now, what does this have to do with Little Johnny? Well, aside from the obvious retort, Johnny is lodged so far up Bush's posterior that he could choke off that exit route, thus leaving Bush incapable of doing squat about the "war". What's Johnny doing there, I hear you ask? As near as I can tell, he's shining a flashlight so Bush thinks the sun shines out of his ass.
certainly Stevens never sullies his judgement with such extraneous factors
I agree. The opinion of the majority really had no contact with constitutional law. It was entirely about policy. The dissent of Breyer J while running counter to the majority, was also all about policy. The only opinion that read like it came from a judge at all was that of Stevens J. He addressed the law, directly and without concern about policy. Now while policy can be relevant in developing areas of the law not already specified, this was about interpreting the wording of the grant of power and whether the offending statute was within the grant.
I think this is probably where the mistake was made. If you concede that the exercise is literally within power, you lose. Approaching it from a theory that they have overextended themselves in the exercise of power is strange, because it admits that it's an exercise of that power. In fact I think the whole "limited times" argument was bogus.
The attack should have been centered on the "purpose". If the retrospective extension was incapable of achieving the "purpose", then it cannot be an exercise of that power, since the purpose in this case is a substantial part of the grant rather than a mere preamble, the provision must be capable of achieving the purpose, otherwise it can't be an exercise of that power. Tha majority really only deal with this once, towards the bottom of page 24 and the top of page 25, but for reasons I have already stated, that argument is without semblance of persuasion. They also sidestep the issue in the second paragraph on page 27. They also quote from Bonito Boats at the bottom of page 25 - "'It is for Congres to determine if the [balance struck by] the present system' effectuates the goals of the Copyright and Patent Clause" - but there is a difference between something that could be argued either way and something that cannot be rationally construed to effectuate the requisite purpose. is is beyond merely being "disproportionate".
This is substantially the entirety of the majority's consideration of this specific issue. By comparison, it seems most of Stevens' J's opinion addresses this issue. His consideration is well structured, sound and clearly correct. It is the only decision in the case that looks like it came from somebody delivering a dispassionate judgement on the constitutionality of the offending law.
Now, Lessig states that this is the end of the matter, in terms of legal challenges. But this isn't strictly true. It only settles the matter as between Eldred and the United States. Another person could conceivably challenge the law. The Supreme Court might well deliver a similarly unfavourable decision, but it is not impossible to bring it back to them for better consideration of this specific issue.
A guy in the apartment above you has left his door unlocked and then gone away. A malicous child walks in and turns the tap on for a laugh and then leaves. A while later the apartment is flooded and water is pouring though the ceiling into your property. Do you have the right to walk in though his unlocked door and turn off the tap?
This is easily answered - the answer is unequivocally "yes". This would be clearly within the right of abatement, and no action would lie against you for anything. Even if he'd left the door locked and left the tap on himself, you could bust down the door to turn off the tap (although you'd have to then take steps to make sure he was not more vulnerable to burlary as a result).
Slashdot Mirror
It's science fiction, not science fact.
Actually, it's neither. Star Wars is in a genre called future fantasy, notwithstanding that it's set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It makes no pretence to scientific viability. It's literally fantasy set in a high tech era.
Science fiction is supposed to make plausible science and to explain, broadly, how things work.
Several things point to this being a joke. If it's not a joke, their lawyer is the most incompetent lawyer on the planet.
I have difficulty believing that a lawyer coud really have drafted this crud.
Now what do you propose to do with the 95% of spam that originates from outside of the U.S.?
The same thing I plan to do about the bogeyman and other fictitious creatures.
The proposal in the Australian report is to ban unsolicited commercial e-mail (opt-in). Now if only the US Senate would pay attention to that instead of introducing idiotic opt-out bills like the one recently introduced, that would actually increase spam.
This is exactly like a bill (Murkowski - the famous S.1618) that passed the Senate in 1998 that the spammers crowed over because it would allow them to go after spammers under restraint of trade laws. A copy of the original DEAA crowing is below. It would actually increase spam because it would be otherwise respectable companies spamming.
When Korea introduced similar legislation, Korean spam increased by a factor of 12 within three months. Most of that spam comes from otherwise respectable companies.
Even if this weren't going to result in more spam, how many people have enough time in the day to "opt-out" of all the spam they get now?
It's more like this. A shopkeeper lets you in. You are wearing a T shirt that he objects to so he kicks you out. The next day you ask to be let in by his wife/business partner and are granted access.
It's not. Intel told Hamidi either not to send any email, or alternatively not to send email of type 'X'. He continued contrary to that instruction. There is no other human involed. There is nothing else to contradict the explicit withdrawal of implied consent.
Your example really demonstrates that you don't understand the legal conception of consent, let alone that of implied consent.
How about:
Alternatively, I don't see what's wrong with "System Administrator"
When there is an SMTP connection to their mail server, that mail server gives permission again for that content to be passed through.
Wow, that's so wrong it's amazing. It's like saying "the shopkeeper kicked me out of the store and told me never to come back, but then he opened the door the next morning, so there was new implied consent." It doesn't work that way. You can never imply consent in a way that is different to a clear expression of consent or non-consent between the parties.
And even if you could, the SMTP banner is not the place where the implied consent comes from.
The same college has assigned its janitors to teach brain surgery.
Honestly, if he's teaching a college class he ought to either know what he's talking about, or at least be able to research it without a post to "ask Slashdot"
Yes, exactly my point.
Strange - I thought your point was that he must have done something to deserve to be put in solitary confinement.
He is being held in solitairy confinement as a "material witness". Perhaps they want him to testify against the charity. If he were to claim that he had no idea they were sending money to terrorists then it could make a great case for fraud against the charity.
Yes, (assuming they are funding terrorists) - that's what terrorists are most afraid of, a civil suit for fraud.
Normally people don't START in solitairy confinement.
"Material witnesses" of this kind do because the information is taken to be of military significance and thus secrecy to be required.
No person shall be held .. for ... infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia...
The lesson here is that assuming freedom ever gets restored in the USA, if you want to join the armed forces, join the air force.
Panama, 1989. The U.S. government called it "Operation Just Cause". The link is to a U.S. military web site
I think they misspelled this. Shouldn't it be "Operation Just 'Cause"?
There are bunches of comments here about what any particular outcome would mean. Let me save everybody some time. They're all wrong. Don't count on the EFF to provide accurate information on this either - the EFF is wrong.
There's a number of tools and libraries (with Perl or other languages) beyond plain DOM and SAX that use proper XML parsers and are reasonably easy to use. He should use one of those, and stop complaining.
About two years ago I was looking at all of the publicly available code to parse XML. Not only did I look at the API or callback facility used (all the ones I found had extraordinarily bad APIs and/or extraordinarily bad callback architectures), I looked at the code itself to check its conformance to the XML standard. Not one that I found conformed.
In the end I wrote a new one from scratch, based on all of the relevant standards documents (and with the standards documents basically forming the design spec). It ended up being a hell of a lot simpler to use than any of the publicly available code, and a hell of a lot more flexible.
Plus, I understood XML much better when I was done.
Now you might suggest that by doing this I have forgone the community testing involved in public source code XML parsers. However in two years, there has been not a single bug detected in the parser I wrote. I attribute this largely to the fact that the XML specification and the other specifications it depends on are so thorough and have so many established test cases that if you exercise a little discipline, and make sure you implement as per the spec, it's very difficult to get it wrong.
Conservation of angular momentum.
This is simply a question of how your contract is written. If it says they pay for all inbound usage, then they pay for all inbound usage, except perhaps usage generated by your own systems (for various reasons which are not necessary to consider here).
Of course enforcing this may mean being unpopular with and/or losing the customer, but it's your call.
What kind of twisted in-bred retard would type in uk.co by accident?
Perhaps somebody who knows something we don't. Perhaps the Columbian drug lords really are buying governments around the world in the most literal possible way.
Now the million dollar question is what will happen to my 'permenant' .name if the TLD goes .bomb? Will it be grandfathered? I bought it explicitly for stability.
If the .name TLD ceased to function, all the registrars for it would be in breach of contract to all of their .name customers. Thus the registrars simply cannot afford to allow the domain to cease to function. I would fully expect to see a bailout of some description if GNR went near going belly up.
Spam is manifestly a social problem, not a technical one. I can't even begin (in a forum such as this) to go into why the entire concept of it being impossible to forge headers is impossible on the modern Internet.
So it might not be a matter of corporate fascism as much as Federal mandate.
I think you meant "it might not be a matter of corporate mandate as much as Federal fascism."
Realistically the only difference between ftp and dcc is how the start is negotiated.
Not true. DCC was designed to be slower than FTP and HTTP. When it was designed there were a lot of entire university campuses that were limited to 48kbit lines, and DCC was designed to be able to send files over these links without flooding them. Links also tended to be much more unreliable then, and by sending in smaller blocks you would stand a better chance of the files getting through (in fact this was why the ability to set the send block size was put in - somebody wanted to be able to successfully send over much flakier links by decreasing the block size).
Now, if you increase the block size to a very large number, it's similar to FTP or HTTP, and some IRC clients even come with the default block size being unlimited, which does run at the same speed as FTP or HTTP.
And the Australian PM has what say in this conflict???
I'm glad you asked.
Once day, in the body, there was a fight between the organs of the body over who was the leader. The brain said "I'm the leader because without me we couldn't think". The heart said "I'm the leader because without me your blood wouldn't circulate and we'd all die". The lungs said "I'm the leader because without me we couldn't get air and we'd all die". The asshole said "I'm the leader", and the others laughed. So the asshole clammed shut. Nothing got past for days. Then weeks. The passages started filling up, poisons started leaking into the blood stream, and eventually the other organs conceded and gave power to the asshole. Which just goes to show that you don't have to be a brain to be leader, you just have to be a retentive asshole.
Now, what does this have to do with Little Johnny? Well, aside from the obvious retort, Johnny is lodged so far up Bush's posterior that he could choke off that exit route, thus leaving Bush incapable of doing squat about the "war". What's Johnny doing there, I hear you ask? As near as I can tell, he's shining a flashlight so Bush thinks the sun shines out of his ass.
certainly Stevens never sullies his judgement with such extraneous factors
I agree. The opinion of the majority really had no contact with constitutional law. It was entirely about policy. The dissent of Breyer J while running counter to the majority, was also all about policy. The only opinion that read like it came from a judge at all was that of Stevens J. He addressed the law, directly and without concern about policy. Now while policy can be relevant in developing areas of the law not already specified, this was about interpreting the wording of the grant of power and whether the offending statute was within the grant.
I think this is probably where the mistake was made. If you concede that the exercise is literally within power, you lose. Approaching it from a theory that they have overextended themselves in the exercise of power is strange, because it admits that it's an exercise of that power. In fact I think the whole "limited times" argument was bogus.
The attack should have been centered on the "purpose". If the retrospective extension was incapable of achieving the "purpose", then it cannot be an exercise of that power, since the purpose in this case is a substantial part of the grant rather than a mere preamble, the provision must be capable of achieving the purpose, otherwise it can't be an exercise of that power. Tha majority really only deal with this once, towards the bottom of page 24 and the top of page 25, but for reasons I have already stated, that argument is without semblance of persuasion. They also sidestep the issue in the second paragraph on page 27. They also quote from Bonito Boats at the bottom of page 25 - "'It is for Congres to determine if the [balance struck by] the present system' effectuates the goals of the Copyright and Patent Clause" - but there is a difference between something that could be argued either way and something that cannot be rationally construed to effectuate the requisite purpose. is is beyond merely being "disproportionate".
This is substantially the entirety of the majority's consideration of this specific issue. By comparison, it seems most of Stevens' J's opinion addresses this issue. His consideration is well structured, sound and clearly correct. It is the only decision in the case that looks like it came from somebody delivering a dispassionate judgement on the constitutionality of the offending law.
Now, Lessig states that this is the end of the matter, in terms of legal challenges. But this isn't strictly true. It only settles the matter as between Eldred and the United States. Another person could conceivably challenge the law. The Supreme Court might well deliver a similarly unfavourable decision, but it is not impossible to bring it back to them for better consideration of this specific issue.
A guy in the apartment above you has left his door unlocked and then gone away. A malicous child walks in and turns the tap on for a laugh and then leaves. A while later the apartment is flooded and water is pouring though the ceiling into your property. Do you have the right to walk in though his unlocked door and turn off the tap?
This is easily answered - the answer is unequivocally "yes". This would be clearly within the right of abatement, and no action would lie against you for anything. Even if he'd left the door locked and left the tap on himself, you could bust down the door to turn off the tap (although you'd have to then take steps to make sure he was not more vulnerable to burlary as a result).