Obviously in the context of your mature and well-exressed legal argument I'll have to concede defeat.
Remember, people. crazy aunt Ethel's coffee club is not a good source of legal principle. When you're negotiating a contract you are entitled to secure any benefit to yourself that you wish, provided you don't engage in unconscionable dealing, undue influence or fraud. Good faith is a much higher standard that is simply incompatible with these rights. You are absolutely not required to exercise good faith when negotiating a contract.
Okay, I'll offer myself up as the sacrificial lamb and ask the obvious: Why would this be illegal?
Illegal is probably not the right word to use - the correct term would be "of no legal effect". Now, there are reasons why this would be of no legal effect. The consequence of there being no legal effect is that Real would not legally have the consent they claim to have.
At its most favourable to Real, this would be a question of contract law, and there are three legal avenues here:
If you mislead (intentionally or unintentionally) the other party to a contract that you wrote regarding the contents of the contract, you cannot rely on any provisions that are inconsistent with the misleading statment, conduct or representation. That's an estoppel - you are estopped from asserting rights inconsistent with your represenation.
Furthermore, if you (intentionally) assert that you have obligations that are not present in the a contract that you wrote, you will be liable for any damage suffered by the other party. That's deceit - a tort.
In either case, if your conduct was deliberate deception, the other party has the right to rescind the contract for fraud. That's rescission, a right to avoid a contract for reasons including that it was induced by a fraudulent misrepresentation.
Now, in the present case, they have apparently (I stopped downloading and installing anything from Real years ago because of their fraudulent tactics, so I can only go by what others say) given a listbox of checkboxes, each checkbox indicating if Real has permission to market X to the downloader. The visible checkboxes are all unchecked, and the ones below that in the scrollable box are checked. This is clearly intended to, and does, convey the false impression that the checkboxes (all of them) are unchecked. That is an deliberate (and therefore fraudulent) misrepresentation, and it renders the purported "consent" to be of no legal effect.
As for illegality - that is, behaviour that is contrary to a law forbidding that behavious - this conduct may also be illegal under general trade laws governing misleading and deceptive conduct.
This conduct does not surprise me - the company that produced RealPlayer is thoroughly reprehensible. They are manifestly dishonest and irresponsible, and the sooner people stop installing their crud, the better for all concerned.
I believe you should have the right to neutralize a worm process running on someone else's infected system, if it's relentlessly attacking your network.
Technically speaking, you do. No, I'm not kidding. It's called the right of "abatement", and it's a right dating back a millenium or so. It's even a defence to criminal charges that you were exercising your right of abatement in a manner that was reasonable in the circumstances.
The problem with this is that they might still charge you.
Now if you're willing to take the risk, the right of abatement is a right to take steps to prevent a trespass or nuisance affecting your property or your enjoyment of your property, even if this requires violating the property rights of somebody else from whose property the trespass or nuisance originates. For example, if somebody sits outside your house at midnight, playing a ghetto blaster at maximum volume, and refuses your request to stop, you can slap them around until they stop, or smash the ghetto blaster. Legally, you will be exercising your right to abate a nuisance.
Yes, theoretically this could be applied against spammers and open relays too.
"Ill-advised and stupid" does not, unfortunately, mean "unconstitutional."
No, but I agree with the dissent of Stevens J. The Constitution provides a purpose and a means. The purpose is "to promote the Progress of Science" (with arts presumably included by implication - otherwise any copyright law that includes fiction would be unconstitutional). The means is by "securing... the exclusive right to their writings".
When there is a purpose and a means, then the use of the means to achieve another purpose is ultra vires (beyond power), and the use of another means to achieve the purpose is also ultra vires (unless the power to use the means exists somewhere else in the Constitution).
Extending the term of copyright of an already published work cannot possibly achieve the permitted purpose. The work is already published - a later Act cannot possibly encourage its publication.
The majority spent most of their time making an argument that addresses not the law, but had two points - "Congress has always done this" (Stephens J quite rightly says something to the effect of "so what, Congress does a lot of things they shouldn't and if it's challenged we are obliged to apply the law as in the Constitution") and "it wouldn't be fair to the already published authors if they didn't get the same deal" (And again as pointed out by Stephens J - Why not? If they did the work and published, they must have thought the deal adequate at the time). Neither of these is a legal argument. Neither deals with the rule in the Constitution.
The only attempt to relate the argument back to the requirement to be using the means to achieve the purpose was a suggestion that copyright authors might have accounted for the inclusion of future extensions in their decision to publish, so that later exensions can encourage earlier people to publish. I repeat - this is the only attempt at a legal argument made in the majority opinion. It is a poor argument - at the time of publication you have no real way of knowing for sure what the future holds. You may have a hope, even a fervent hope, but that hope cannot be affected by the subsequent enactment of an extension, because the subsequent enactment can have no effect on the hope. The use of the power - the enactment granting the monopoly - must itself achieve the purpose. It is not enough that the mere future possibility of its exercise promote the purpose. It is not the rule stated by the constitution that must achieve the purpose - it is the exercise of the power. The majority are trying to adjust the rule to make the rule itself achieve the purpose for which the means is permitted, but this mistakes the interaction of the purpose and the means. Taking this into account, the sole legal argument made fails.
I found the majority opinion, quite frankly, amateurish. Stevens and Breyer JJ dissented "with respect". I would have omitted the words of respect, because the majority opinion deserves none. The dissent of Stevens J was well written, dealt with the law, and was clearly correct.
They did this with ActiveX too. For a while, everybody at MS said their project was part of the ActiveX initiative. Then they scaled back the use of the term
This sort of thing is not uncommon in software companies - they have a new project that becomes flavour of the month, and everybod will try to reclassify their project to fit within the new project. If the new project has attributes A, B and C, a project with attributes C, D and E will claim to be part of the trendy project because of the overlap at C, when the real value of the trendy project is the combination of A, B and C.
The other thing that happens with new projects at software companies is that the entire sales force will want to be selling the new project and ignoring everything else. My theory here is that the salespeople have such tiny brains they can't deal with more than one project at once. The other projects languish for a time, which creates another incentive for them to reclassify themselves into the trendy project's area. This can be a real problem for the company because their staple lines stop selling as much since the salespeople aren't pushing them, and the new trendy thing is either not ready or hasn't built enough following to take up the slack.
This case seems to fall under what they call "promissory estoppel". This is where a contract is entered that will cause grievous harm to the signee if it's not carried out.
This isn't what promissory estoppel is - promissory estoppel is where there is reasonable reliance on a promise or expectation without there being a contract, or where the representation is contrary to contractual rights. There is no obvious estoppel arising here.
The facts as reported in the article, however, would clearly make out the tort of deceit (broadly - making a knowingly or recklessly incorrect representation that causes loss to the person to whom the representation was made. This amounts also to fraud if the person making the representation gains from it), several breaches of contract, and several breaches of fiduciary duty.
As described, the facts suggest the relationship was a partnership arrangement, although we'd need to know more about the facts to decide on this. If it was a partnership relationship (and the fact that they call it a partnership has no bearing on this question), then MS had a fiduciary duty to its partner that was clearly breached.
However the facts described also indicate Microsoft breached the contract by delivering software late and by not meeting its capital injenction obligations. Assuming the facts supplied to be true and not omitting any important details, then Microsoft would be liable to put the the victim in the position they would have been in if the obligations were met - including covering the value of any porofits that would have been made. This could be expensive even in Microsoft terms, although it won't compensate the shareholders because it won't account for stock market gains.
If they can prove that M$ INTENDED for this to happen they can get punitive damages
Punitive damages might arise from deceit, but not from an estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty or a breach of contract.
To decide what the best prospects for employment are you need to look at not only how many jobs there are using a particular language, but how many applicants there are for those positions. There's far more Java programmers on the market than anythings else, so that as an employer of people who write in C++, and people who write in Java, I find I can fill the Java position far more quickly.
Also, a lot of the application space covered by Java competes with the application space covered by Visual Basic rather than that covered by C or C++. That is, Java is being used for pretty end-user stuff, particularly if it's web based or an in-house project, whereas you use C or C++ for applications that require high performance (and these applications do still exist), and for shrink-wrapped software deloyed widely. There is some overlap, and some other things I haven't taken into account here.
Java is not necessarily used for platform independence. In fact even remaining on the same platform you have to special case things for different versions of the JVM, unless you have control of that, which you probably don't.
So, the questions are:
What type of software do you want to develop? If a specific type, target the language that is dominant for that type of software
If your primary concern is immediate employability, how many jobs are open for the languages you're considering, and how many applicants are there for those jobs? Choose the one that has the best ratio.
"Once it has been sent to the recipient, it's essentially the property of the recipient and not the sender," said Patty Smith, an Amazon.com spokeswoman.
Legally speaking, this is not true. The value represented by the certificate is only the property of the recipient once it has been placed beyond the recall of the giver. If it is possible for the giver to recall it, it's not the property of the recipient yet.
In other words, refusal to refund cannot be based on the property being that of the recipient. Rather, the property is that of the recipient only if the store will not, under any circumstances, cancel the certificate and refund the money to the giver.
There are widely deployed individual, private blocks on amazon.com anyway due to their habit of spamming their users (at least they used to have such a habit, but I'm not willing to find out if they've reformed), and probably also because of their excessive patenting. Sending a gift certificate from Amazon is thus an extraordinarily stupid thing to do - there are good reasons why it might never have a chance to get there.
Even without the blocks - seriously, should you trust what amounts to cash to email without having any way to know it was safely delivered? If you do, you get what you deserve.
What can they do to me, since I'm in the USA? Would they try to get the US Government to extradite me?
International extradition is only for criminal offences, and even then only when the conduct alleged is criminal in both contries.
The Court acknowledged (at paragraph 53) that a defamation action will be pointless if the defendant does not have assets in a jurisdiction that will enforce any judgement
At paragraphs 51-52 of the leading judgement, there is a strong suggestion that even though Victorian law will be applied, the defences available in New York will influence the effect of Victorian law in the circumstances of the case. This is something that Justice Gaudron repeatedly suggested in the hearing (she delivered a separate judgement that I haven't gotten to reading yet, but the fact that the lead judgement includes this suggestion is promising since it means the position won't disappear with her impending retirement).
Yet the dim bulb is calling a lawyer to file and civil lawsuit instead of a criminal one.
It might also make out the tort of deceit, and collectively (but not individually) the tort of nuisance. He might at least be able to get past summary judgement.
The idea here is obviously to create a domain that kids can use unsupervised, so you would limit their machines to that domain by use of a proxy of some description. If they need access to things outside that domain, they can do so under supervision
Inability to access other content is unlikely to be a problem anyway, since it's not merely a question of whether content is suitable for kids, but whether it is targetted to kids. Pre-teen kids aren't usually much interested in content that's not designed for kids anyway.
If the content is targetted to kids, the domain owner is likely to register under that domain anyway.
The only thing I'd like to have seen is that it be.kids, rather than.kids.us, but I guess the limitation to.us is for political reasons - surprisingly, for Bush, in an effort not to appear to be acting as the President of the World.
The article claims that 165dB is sufficient to cool a refrigerator - my neighbour's daughter exceeds that by a long shot. Does this mean we can put her inside a tube and get her to keep my beer cold?
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one. And while you can still do the things you cite in the future when you're spammed, the time you're actually dealing with the spam you're not in fact doing those things, so the difference you describe is really quite illusory, objectively speaking.
If we're going to look at "my personal experience" - I would rather lose five seconds from my time on earth than five seconds having to merely delete spam, because in fact the five seconds deleting spam is a significant negative, causing aggravation both throughout that time, and afterwards, whereas during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure.
In any event, before you resort again to an emotional comparison that suffers from the fallacy of relevance (even if murder were objetively worse it wouldn't mean spam isn't a heinous crime, nor would it mean that spam is something that shouldn't be dealt with as a serious matter), you should consider that this is Slashdot, not the Tampa Mother's Association - a comment based on an irrelevancy in an attempt to trivialise a serious problem is going to be subjected to some logical analysis to expose it as the irrelevant emotional appeal that it is.
Incidentally, while it's not normal in most circles to compare the detriment of "being dead" to something else, courts have long had to deal with the question of comparison between being alive and suffering some detriment, and being dead. They actually value the "being dead" for a time experience at close to zero because when you're dead you are neither in a positive nor a negative state of happiness*. They value time spent suffering a detriment as a significant negative value because this is spent in a negative state of happiness. This is because the courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria, not to the subjective criteria arising from abhorrence of murder. By this standard I was being extraordinarily generous in evaluating the two as the same.
* They even value it as close to zero when compared to being alive because while alive many people, if not most, have a close balance of positive and negative experience. Living a life with significantly more positive than negative actually qualifies somebody as relatively privileged in world terms.
There is one very good reason for commercial source code to be closed - patents. A commercial organisation in the software development industry is almost certain to have inadvertently infringed on a large number of software patents. In most cases, a competitor who possesses software patents will not be able to tell there has been an infringement without source code.
The result is that, even where a commercial software company would like to open their code, they will not, particularly if they have competitors with few ethical constraints and many patents
Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time
Precisely as I said, you've completely missed the calculation, because you've only looked at the impact of one spam on one person. But a spam isn't sent to one person, it's sent to millions. And the spammer sends more than one spam. You need to look at the totality of the actions and their consequences, not the isolated impact on a single individual, as the spammers would have us do. When the totality is viewed, objective mathematics shows that a major spammer is clearly worse than a murderer.
As long as you view the isolated impact of a single spam on a single individual, your comparison is entirely invalid. The act is the thing that's evil, and you must view the entire consequences of the act. And if it's a serial spammer, this means the cumulative consequences of all their spam.
When you view the acts of a serial spammer with their consequences in their totality, there is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
As long as they are opposed to CAUCE, I am opposed to the EFF. Under no circumstances will I support an organisation that is determined to see that we don't get a law banning spam.
It really doesn't matter how much other good they might do, their support of spammers (including Hamidi <spit>) more than cancels out the good stuff
LIke I said, I think we are getting a bit carried away here.
Only because you, like many, look at the problem in terms of the one spammer * one recipient hit, rather than the totallity of the damage done by one spammer (or even the totality of damage to one recipient). It is meaningless to look at "just one message", because the one copy to one recipient is not representative of the problem
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation. If you are putting murder higher, it is because of a social predisposition to abhorrence of murder, not due to any objectively justifiable view that the damage to society is worse in the case of murder.
The article says he sends out a billion spams a day. Over the course of a year that's 365billion. Assuming 5 seconds just to delete, that's 5 * 365billion = 1.825trillion seconds. The nominal lifespan being three score and ten, that's 70 * 365.24 * 86400 seconds, which is 2.2billion seconds. Dividing 1.825trillion by 2.2billion, we get 826 lifetimes per year - more than two per day.
And this guy has been at it for many years now. To make his one life a bit more comfortable, he's taken the equivalent of thousands of lives
Is it any less evil because, instead of throwing away all the rest of somebody's time (which is, after all, what murder is), he takes little bits of time from everybody? Or is it because the little bits of death he gives everybody amounts to killing them softly?
Looking at it this way, Ralsky is the worst mass murderer of modern times.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit.
Obviously in the context of your mature and well-exressed legal argument I'll have to concede defeat.
Remember, people. crazy aunt Ethel's coffee club is not a good source of legal principle. When you're negotiating a contract you are entitled to secure any benefit to yourself that you wish, provided you don't engage in unconscionable dealing, undue influence or fraud. Good faith is a much higher standard that is simply incompatible with these rights. You are absolutely not required to exercise good faith when negotiating a contract.
Okay, I'll offer myself up as the sacrificial lamb and ask the obvious: Why would this be illegal?
Illegal is probably not the right word to use - the correct term would be "of no legal effect". Now, there are reasons why this would be of no legal effect. The consequence of there being no legal effect is that Real would not legally have the consent they claim to have.
At its most favourable to Real, this would be a question of contract law, and there are three legal avenues here:
If you mislead (intentionally or unintentionally) the other party to a contract that you wrote regarding the contents of the contract, you cannot rely on any provisions that are inconsistent with the misleading statment, conduct or representation. That's an estoppel - you are estopped from asserting rights inconsistent with your represenation.
Furthermore, if you (intentionally) assert that you have obligations that are not present in the a contract that you wrote, you will be liable for any damage suffered by the other party. That's deceit - a tort.
In either case, if your conduct was deliberate deception, the other party has the right to rescind the contract for fraud. That's rescission, a right to avoid a contract for reasons including that it was induced by a fraudulent misrepresentation.
Now, in the present case, they have apparently (I stopped downloading and installing anything from Real years ago because of their fraudulent tactics, so I can only go by what others say) given a listbox of checkboxes, each checkbox indicating if Real has permission to market X to the downloader. The visible checkboxes are all unchecked, and the ones below that in the scrollable box are checked. This is clearly intended to, and does, convey the false impression that the checkboxes (all of them) are unchecked. That is an deliberate (and therefore fraudulent) misrepresentation, and it renders the purported "consent" to be of no legal effect.
As for illegality - that is, behaviour that is contrary to a law forbidding that behavious - this conduct may also be illegal under general trade laws governing misleading and deceptive conduct.
This conduct does not surprise me - the company that produced RealPlayer is thoroughly reprehensible. They are manifestly dishonest and irresponsible, and the sooner people stop installing their crud, the better for all concerned.
I believe you should have the right to neutralize a worm process running on someone else's infected system, if it's relentlessly attacking your network.
Technically speaking, you do. No, I'm not kidding. It's called the right of "abatement", and it's a right dating back a millenium or so. It's even a defence to criminal charges that you were exercising your right of abatement in a manner that was reasonable in the circumstances.
The problem with this is that they might still charge you.
Now if you're willing to take the risk, the right of abatement is a right to take steps to prevent a trespass or nuisance affecting your property or your enjoyment of your property, even if this requires violating the property rights of somebody else from whose property the trespass or nuisance originates. For example, if somebody sits outside your house at midnight, playing a ghetto blaster at maximum volume, and refuses your request to stop, you can slap them around until they stop, or smash the ghetto blaster. Legally, you will be exercising your right to abate a nuisance.
Yes, theoretically this could be applied against spammers and open relays too.
"Ill-advised and stupid" does not, unfortunately, mean "unconstitutional."
No, but I agree with the dissent of Stevens J. The Constitution provides a purpose and a means. The purpose is "to promote the Progress of Science" (with arts presumably included by implication - otherwise any copyright law that includes fiction would be unconstitutional). The means is by "securing... the exclusive right to their writings".
When there is a purpose and a means, then the use of the means to achieve another purpose is ultra vires (beyond power), and the use of another means to achieve the purpose is also ultra vires (unless the power to use the means exists somewhere else in the Constitution).
Extending the term of copyright of an already published work cannot possibly achieve the permitted purpose. The work is already published - a later Act cannot possibly encourage its publication.
The majority spent most of their time making an argument that addresses not the law, but had two points - "Congress has always done this" (Stephens J quite rightly says something to the effect of "so what, Congress does a lot of things they shouldn't and if it's challenged we are obliged to apply the law as in the Constitution") and "it wouldn't be fair to the already published authors if they didn't get the same deal" (And again as pointed out by Stephens J - Why not? If they did the work and published, they must have thought the deal adequate at the time). Neither of these is a legal argument. Neither deals with the rule in the Constitution.
The only attempt to relate the argument back to the requirement to be using the means to achieve the purpose was a suggestion that copyright authors might have accounted for the inclusion of future extensions in their decision to publish, so that later exensions can encourage earlier people to publish. I repeat - this is the only attempt at a legal argument made in the majority opinion. It is a poor argument - at the time of publication you have no real way of knowing for sure what the future holds. You may have a hope, even a fervent hope, but that hope cannot be affected by the subsequent enactment of an extension, because the subsequent enactment can have no effect on the hope. The use of the power - the enactment granting the monopoly - must itself achieve the purpose. It is not enough that the mere future possibility of its exercise promote the purpose. It is not the rule stated by the constitution that must achieve the purpose - it is the exercise of the power. The majority are trying to adjust the rule to make the rule itself achieve the purpose for which the means is permitted, but this mistakes the interaction of the purpose and the means. Taking this into account, the sole legal argument made fails.
I found the majority opinion, quite frankly, amateurish. Stevens and Breyer JJ dissented "with respect". I would have omitted the words of respect, because the majority opinion deserves none. The dissent of Stevens J was well written, dealt with the law, and was clearly correct.
They did this with ActiveX too. For a while, everybody at MS said their project was part of the ActiveX initiative. Then they scaled back the use of the term
This sort of thing is not uncommon in software companies - they have a new project that becomes flavour of the month, and everybod will try to reclassify their project to fit within the new project. If the new project has attributes A, B and C, a project with attributes C, D and E will claim to be part of the trendy project because of the overlap at C, when the real value of the trendy project is the combination of A, B and C.
The other thing that happens with new projects at software companies is that the entire sales force will want to be selling the new project and ignoring everything else. My theory here is that the salespeople have such tiny brains they can't deal with more than one project at once. The other projects languish for a time, which creates another incentive for them to reclassify themselves into the trendy project's area. This can be a real problem for the company because their staple lines stop selling as much since the salespeople aren't pushing them, and the new trendy thing is either not ready or hasn't built enough following to take up the slack.
It states very clearly that you must act in good faith. Ok it deals with insurance and indivdual things, but law is the law...
Insurance contracts are a special case. In ordinary business contracts there is no requirement of good faith when negotiating the contract.
the case was of an old lady... The builders realised that she didn't have a clue and so got her to sign contracts with greatly inflated prices
This falls under unconscionable dealing. It is unlikely to ever apply where the victim is a corporation.
This case seems to fall under what they call "promissory estoppel". This is where a contract is entered that will cause grievous harm to the signee if it's not carried out.
This isn't what promissory estoppel is - promissory estoppel is where there is reasonable reliance on a promise or expectation without there being a contract, or where the representation is contrary to contractual rights. There is no obvious estoppel arising here.
The facts as reported in the article, however, would clearly make out the tort of deceit (broadly - making a knowingly or recklessly incorrect representation that causes loss to the person to whom the representation was made. This amounts also to fraud if the person making the representation gains from it), several breaches of contract, and several breaches of fiduciary duty.
As described, the facts suggest the relationship was a partnership arrangement, although we'd need to know more about the facts to decide on this. If it was a partnership relationship (and the fact that they call it a partnership has no bearing on this question), then MS had a fiduciary duty to its partner that was clearly breached.
However the facts described also indicate Microsoft breached the contract by delivering software late and by not meeting its capital injenction obligations. Assuming the facts supplied to be true and not omitting any important details, then Microsoft would be liable to put the the victim in the position they would have been in if the obligations were met - including covering the value of any porofits that would have been made. This could be expensive even in Microsoft terms, although it won't compensate the shareholders because it won't account for stock market gains.
If they can prove that M$ INTENDED for this to happen they can get punitive damages
Punitive damages might arise from deceit, but not from an estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty or a breach of contract.
I've often wondered how the worlds religious leaders would react if a flying saucer landed on the lawn of the white house
I don't know how the religious leaders would react, but I bet everbody else's reaction would be "well, that explains George Double-Yuh".
To decide what the best prospects for employment are you need to look at not only how many jobs there are using a particular language, but how many applicants there are for those positions. There's far more Java programmers on the market than anythings else, so that as an employer of people who write in C++, and people who write in Java, I find I can fill the Java position far more quickly.
Also, a lot of the application space covered by Java competes with the application space covered by Visual Basic rather than that covered by C or C++. That is, Java is being used for pretty end-user stuff, particularly if it's web based or an in-house project, whereas you use C or C++ for applications that require high performance (and these applications do still exist), and for shrink-wrapped software deloyed widely. There is some overlap, and some other things I haven't taken into account here.
Java is not necessarily used for platform independence. In fact even remaining on the same platform you have to special case things for different versions of the JVM, unless you have control of that, which you probably don't.
So, the questions are:
Kevin Lawton got fired from Madrake (?) a couple years ago, and plex86 has been dead ever since.
It still exists here
"Once it has been sent to the recipient, it's essentially the property of the recipient and not the sender," said Patty Smith, an Amazon.com spokeswoman.
Legally speaking, this is not true. The value represented by the certificate is only the property of the recipient once it has been placed beyond the recall of the giver. If it is possible for the giver to recall it, it's not the property of the recipient yet.
In other words, refusal to refund cannot be based on the property being that of the recipient. Rather, the property is that of the recipient only if the store will not, under any circumstances, cancel the certificate and refund the money to the giver.
There are widely deployed individual, private blocks on amazon.com anyway due to their habit of spamming their users (at least they used to have such a habit, but I'm not willing to find out if they've reformed), and probably also because of their excessive patenting. Sending a gift certificate from Amazon is thus an extraordinarily stupid thing to do - there are good reasons why it might never have a chance to get there.
Even without the blocks - seriously, should you trust what amounts to cash to email without having any way to know it was safely delivered? If you do, you get what you deserve.
Suuuure. I'll file that one with the email offering me a free viagra substitute, breast enlargement and penile enlargement.
Honestly, what kind of idiot would use such a system to send a gift? No good can come of this.
What can they do to me, since I'm in the USA? Would they try to get the US Government to extradite me?
International extradition is only for criminal offences, and even then only when the conduct alleged is criminal in both contries.
The Court acknowledged (at paragraph 53) that a defamation action will be pointless if the defendant does not have assets in a jurisdiction that will enforce any judgement
At paragraphs 51-52 of the leading judgement, there is a strong suggestion that even though Victorian law will be applied, the defences available in New York will influence the effect of Victorian law in the circumstances of the case. This is something that Justice Gaudron repeatedly suggested in the hearing (she delivered a separate judgement that I haven't gotten to reading yet, but the fact that the lead judgement includes this suggestion is promising since it means the position won't disappear with her impending retirement).
Yet the dim bulb is calling a lawyer to file and civil lawsuit instead of a criminal one.
It might also make out the tort of deceit, and collectively (but not individually) the tort of nuisance. He might at least be able to get past summary judgement.
The idea here is obviously to create a domain that kids can use unsupervised, so you would limit their machines to that domain by use of a proxy of some description. If they need access to things outside that domain, they can do so under supervision
Inability to access other content is unlikely to be a problem anyway, since it's not merely a question of whether content is suitable for kids, but whether it is targetted to kids. Pre-teen kids aren't usually much interested in content that's not designed for kids anyway.
If the content is targetted to kids, the domain owner is likely to register under that domain anyway.
The only thing I'd like to have seen is that it be .kids, rather than .kids.us, but I guess the limitation to .us is for political reasons - surprisingly, for Bush, in an effort not to appear to be acting as the President of the World.
The article claims that 165dB is sufficient to cool a refrigerator - my neighbour's daughter exceeds that by a long shot. Does this mean we can put her inside a tube and get her to keep my beer cold?
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one. And while you can still do the things you cite in the future when you're spammed, the time you're actually dealing with the spam you're not in fact doing those things, so the difference you describe is really quite illusory, objectively speaking.
If we're going to look at "my personal experience" - I would rather lose five seconds from my time on earth than five seconds having to merely delete spam, because in fact the five seconds deleting spam is a significant negative, causing aggravation both throughout that time, and afterwards, whereas during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure.
In any event, before you resort again to an emotional comparison that suffers from the fallacy of relevance (even if murder were objetively worse it wouldn't mean spam isn't a heinous crime, nor would it mean that spam is something that shouldn't be dealt with as a serious matter), you should consider that this is Slashdot, not the Tampa Mother's Association - a comment based on an irrelevancy in an attempt to trivialise a serious problem is going to be subjected to some logical analysis to expose it as the irrelevant emotional appeal that it is.
Incidentally, while it's not normal in most circles to compare the detriment of "being dead" to something else, courts have long had to deal with the question of comparison between being alive and suffering some detriment, and being dead. They actually value the "being dead" for a time experience at close to zero because when you're dead you are neither in a positive nor a negative state of happiness*. They value time spent suffering a detriment as a significant negative value because this is spent in a negative state of happiness. This is because the courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria, not to the subjective criteria arising from abhorrence of murder. By this standard I was being extraordinarily generous in evaluating the two as the same.
* They even value it as close to zero when compared to being alive because while alive many people, if not most, have a close balance of positive and negative experience. Living a life with significantly more positive than negative actually qualifies somebody as relatively privileged in world terms.
There is one very good reason for commercial source code to be closed - patents. A commercial organisation in the software development industry is almost certain to have inadvertently infringed on a large number of software patents. In most cases, a competitor who possesses software patents will not be able to tell there has been an infringement without source code.
The result is that, even where a commercial software company would like to open their code, they will not, particularly if they have competitors with few ethical constraints and many patents
Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time
Precisely as I said, you've completely missed the calculation, because you've only looked at the impact of one spam on one person. But a spam isn't sent to one person, it's sent to millions. And the spammer sends more than one spam. You need to look at the totality of the actions and their consequences, not the isolated impact on a single individual, as the spammers would have us do. When the totality is viewed, objective mathematics shows that a major spammer is clearly worse than a murderer.
As long as you view the isolated impact of a single spam on a single individual, your comparison is entirely invalid. The act is the thing that's evil, and you must view the entire consequences of the act. And if it's a serial spammer, this means the cumulative consequences of all their spam.
When you view the acts of a serial spammer with their consequences in their totality, there is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
As long as they are opposed to CAUCE, I am opposed to the EFF. Under no circumstances will I support an organisation that is determined to see that we don't get a law banning spam.
It really doesn't matter how much other good they might do, their support of spammers (including Hamidi <spit>) more than cancels out the good stuff
LIke I said, I think we are getting a bit carried away here.
Only because you, like many, look at the problem in terms of the one spammer * one recipient hit, rather than the totallity of the damage done by one spammer (or even the totality of damage to one recipient). It is meaningless to look at "just one message", because the one copy to one recipient is not representative of the problem
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation. If you are putting murder higher, it is because of a social predisposition to abhorrence of murder, not due to any objectively justifiable view that the damage to society is worse in the case of murder.
The article says he sends out a billion spams a day. Over the course of a year that's 365billion. Assuming 5 seconds just to delete, that's 5 * 365billion = 1.825trillion seconds. The nominal lifespan being three score and ten, that's 70 * 365.24 * 86400 seconds, which is 2.2billion seconds. Dividing 1.825trillion by 2.2billion, we get 826 lifetimes per year - more than two per day.
And this guy has been at it for many years now. To make his one life a bit more comfortable, he's taken the equivalent of thousands of lives
Is it any less evil because, instead of throwing away all the rest of somebody's time (which is, after all, what murder is), he takes little bits of time from everybody? Or is it because the little bits of death he gives everybody amounts to killing them softly?
Looking at it this way, Ralsky is the worst mass murderer of modern times.