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User: mark-t

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  1. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    You are still presuming that some third party has the right and/or authority to dictate what my ISP may or may not allow.

    Termination of the service because of illegal activities can be the ISP's own personal policy... nobody but them is forcing to abide by it but themselves. if, as I said, the evidence that alleged it was ever your subscribed line in the first place that the alleged crime took place using, then it makes sense to challenge the accusation against you on that basis.

    Go ahead and sue your ISP if you want to if they terminate your account for such basis... as I said elsewhere, it's not in their best interests to be wrong, so they'll tend to be fairly confident about the evidence that they have before they use it as a basis for termination. Such confidence would be determined by how you successfully defended yourself against the accusation in the first place. If you challenged the veracity of the evidence and won, then the ISP has no basis to terminate your account because of illegal activities. If you only challenged that the evidence pointed to you, in particuclar, then the ISP would have every reasonable right to terminate your account, since such a defense implicitly admits to the reliability of the evidence which pointed to your subscribed line. Whether or not this evidence actually refers to something that genuinely happened is entirely iirelevant when you choose to accept that it might have merit by only suggesting that the evidence doesn't point to you in particular. Like I said, if you have the ability to refute the evidence which implicates your subscribed line then it makes more sense to defend yourself on that basis than to just suggest that the evidence leaves sufficient doubt about who the guilty party really is to prosecute anyone in particular (which implicitly acknowledges that a guilty party actually exists).

  2. Re:Sincerity or Negotiating Ploy on Minecraft Creator Halts Plans For Oculus Version Following Facebook Acquisition · · Score: 1

    I can't help but find it ironic that an alleged general truth about a demographic seems to actually only very rarely be true when you start trying to apply it to specific individuals in that demographic... rather, it only seems to apply to the group as a collective whole.

    I'm certain there's a connection between that and the Pareto principle, somewhere. Which itself can seem ironic on the surface too, I suppose.

  3. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    Evidence or not, why is it legal for the ISP to terminate my contract based on the unsubstantiated "evidence" that some third party submits to the ISP?

    If the evidence is unsubstantiated, then presumably you will be capable of showing that when defending yourself... and obviously the ISP would not be able to cite illegal activities as grounds for termination. If, however, you accept the veracity of the evidence that they have insomuch as it links an IP which is associated with your subscription to the service to what is genuinely an illegal action, and only want to try to cast doubt on whether that evidence directly links to you, personally.... then that's entirely on you. You either have to accept the evidence that they have and only show sufficient doubt to remove you from suspicion, or else you don't accept the evidence in the first place and try to cast doubt on their evidence's veracity. Just because the latter might be harder work, doesn't mean it gets to be ignored if you can't be found guilty of any crime. It also doesn't entitle the ISP to do any policing, but it does entitle them to make decisions based on evidence which has already been accepted to be valid as showing that the alleged crime had occurred, even if it wasn't sufficient to identify you as the perpetrator.

    Like I said before... if you can challenge the validity of the evidence they had acquired which showed that the crime they are alleging had ever even occurred on your subscribed line, then it makes far more sense to take that route. Your choice. If you don't want to be bothered doing so, then just swich ISP's whenever your subscription gets terminated. Presumably, if you are not actually authorizing or performing such activities yourself, then you'll start trying to do something about avoiding such allegations in the future. One would imagine that at least part of this would entail being able to show that evidence which somehow connects your IP to an alleged crime was invalid in the first place, but again... that's entirely on you.

  4. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    So yeah, before my ISP triggers clauses in our agreement that hinge on a crime having been committed with my account, they better have something airtight.

    Well.... suffiicent enough to convince a court. In the initial accusation, there are two ways to really defend oneself: The first is to call into question that the evidence actually links to you. This is generally quite trivial in the case of illegally sharing copyrighted content, and there's no reason that I can see that anyone would ever actually be criminally convicted of this unless they actually admitted it. The second way, and more definitive, is to call into question the veracity of the evidence involved in the first place, suggesting that even if a crime had occurred, there is sufficient basis to conclude that anything that has to do with your subscribed line has nothing to do with it. This approach can be more difficult, depending on what the evidence that they have actually amounts to... and in many cases, may not even be feasible. It does, however, result in all legally valid suspicion against you being dropped, and your ISP having absolutely no basis to terminate your account based on illegal activities. If you do not take the latter approach, however, then they would most certainly be able to cite such reasons for termination. You could go ahead and try to sue them if you want, but really, if you were capable of successfully challenging the evidence that illegal activities had ever occurred on your line in the first place, then that probably should have been your defense in the first place as well. Nonetheless, if you can disprove that it ever occurred on your subscribed line, then the ISP would have to fully compensate you for any lost service, which is not in their best interests as an outcome, so they are motivated to be pretty certain about what they have before they would do something like that.

  5. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    It is entirely legal, albeit probably unethical and immoral, to discrimate against anybody for absolutely any reason at all, even race, religion, race, or sexual preference, as long as the reason is left unspecified.

    And under certain circumstances, it can even be legal to specify such a reason when doing so falls under other fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, religion, etc. A church pastor, for example, can refuse to marry people who he or she believes do not faithfully practice the tenets of that church's religion.

  6. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    All of what I've been suggesting is supposing that the evidence they have is actually sufficient to dictate that a crime had genuinely occurred. Whether somebody is actually found guilty of this crime or not is irrellevant. If they do not, then obviously they could not terminate on grounds of illegal activity since they do not have sufficient evidence to establish that it had ever occurred in the first place. But again, if they don't even have that, then it's improbable in the extreme that anyone would have ever come after you for allegedly breaking the law unless the prosecution were simply fishing... which would be established in the evidence that they tried to present against you, and would obviously not be sufficient basis to terminate your ISP service on the grounds of illegal activity.

    If your wallet gets stolen, for example, you can clearly say that a crime has occurred, whether or not the perpretrator is ever caught... so it is entirely possible to know for certain that a law has definitely been broken long before sufficient evidence to actually convict any particular individual surfaces.

  7. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    Based on what, exactly?

    Based on the evidence that showed, presumably, that the IP was used for that activity.... whether or not it was you who personally did it, it would be a violation of the ToS. If there is no evidence that the incident for which you might stand accused ever even happened on your IP, then there would have been no basis to ever begin to accuse you in the first place. You might not be guilty, but that doesn't mean that any actual evidence that it happened is meaningless, it only means that they don't have evidence that it was *YOU* who did it... they still have evidence that proved somebody using your IP did it, which could reasonably be sufficient basis to terminate service.

    Like I said... if they didn't have such evidence, then they wouldn't have had any basis to accuse you in the first place... and the notion that your IP was used for illegal activity would still stand, regardless of whether you were personally considered guilty, unless you can also show that the evidence that pointed to your IP is also flawed. If you are going to be accused of a crime, after all, you will be able to examine the evidence against you, and can reasonably call into question how that evidence was collected.

    But again, if the evidence that pointed to your IP was flawed, it could have just as easily been determined before ever accusing you in the first place, and the ISP would not have been able to cite so-called 'illegal activity', because they never really had any evidence of it.

  8. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    I wasn't suggesting they would convict you... I was suggesting that they would terminate your service. The onus still lays on the prosecution in court to prove that you actually did it... but by the time it even gets that far, the proof that it had happened at all will have long since already been presented, which was the justification for termination in the first place. Even if the prosecution fail to convict you (which may be likely, but is far from certain), you'll still have to switch ISP's, since the illegal activity still occurred on your subscribed line, whether you authorized it or not.

    If this happens enough times, you will eventually run out of ISP's to deal with. Presumably, an intelligent person who genuinely had no knowledge of such activity before being accused of it would either stop allowing people who may break the law to use their network or else take measures to secure their network from unauthorized intrusion to avoid such inconvenience in the future. Ideally, they would cooperate with law enforcement to the best of their ability to see if they can help to identify who the actual perpetrator was, or at least provide evidence of a further trail that they can follow, although this might prove infeasable for many people... it is not outside the realm of possibility, depending on how the person's network is configured, what kinds of records that they keep, and how technically knowledgable that person actually is. Finally, depending on mitigating circumstances, evidence of efforts taken by an individual in these respects may even be sufficient for an ISP to reinstate a former customer who had been disconnected because of such a ToS violation (but this is far from certain or even necessarilly probable. It would depend on the ISP's own policies).

  9. I might get one.... on Google Glass Signs Deal With Ray Ban's Parent Company · · Score: 1

    .... but only when they can make one with a battery that actually lasts at least 12 hours, and in a form factor that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to look like I'm from some kind of 70's version of the 21st century or something.

    I wear glasses already... if they can fit the technology into a form factor that does not substantially change the appearance of what I already wear on my face, I may be interested once they can improve the battery life.

    I am not, however, interested in any way, shape or form in looking like Locutus of Borg.

  10. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 1

    If you use my golf clubs to beat a homeless man, that's on you, not me.

    When buying golf clubs you do not usually agree to any kind of contract with anyone which states you can be held responsible for how those golf clubs get used. Such agreements are not unheard of in an ISP TOS.

    The service contract with the ISPs is at the ISPs discretion. 3rd parties can't dictate what the ISP does with your service.

    Of course... but most ISP's do prohibit using their service to do things which happen to illegal in the same jurisdiction as the ISP, even if they do not explicitly list the particular activity. And if using bittorrent to retrieve and share copyrighted content that one does not otherwise have recognized authorization to be freely copying is illegal in said jurisdiction, then it can also reasonably be grounds for the ISP to disconnect the user, regardless of who was doing it on their subscribed line, presuming of course, that they had enough evidence which satisfied them that this was actually going on in the first place (which is not outside of the realm of possibility, depending on what kind of records they may have regarding per-customer data usage).

  11. Re:GeoLocation is not evidence on Florida Judge Rules IP Address Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate · · Score: 0

    But it's still that guy's subscription... and whether or not the subscriber was personally responsible for any illegal activity, such activity still can violate the TOS of the ISP... and regardless of who was doing it, it can still be reasonably grounds for termination of service. If somebody was actually doing this without authorization and without his knowledge, then the person will hopefully take something positive from the experience and learn how to properly secure their own network so that it doesn't happen again.

  12. Re:Cyborg's Are People Too! on Google Tries To Defuse Glass "Myths" · · Score: 1

    Smashing someone's face in for wearing such technology, even where it is expressly disallowed, is still assault, and you would still be accountable for that. Contrary to widespread belief, simply being provoked into a physical confrontation by means that were not, by themselves, physically threatening in any way will usually not be sufficient cause to let you off of assault charges. If it is at all, it will usually be on account of some mitigating factor that tends to be an exceptional case, and not the general rule. And even then, you'd better have evidence of such a factor when facing the police for your actions or else it will not go well for you. The decision you make to turn it into something physical is something you would be held accountable for if that is the direction you decide to take it.

    But in fact, a far less violent solution would be to ask them to leave or charge them with trespassing when they don't.

    So as someone who was so quick to suggest such a solution, can you tell me why is it that some people think violence is an acceptable first response to a situation that is not, on its own, physically threatening in any way?

  13. Re: Just bear in mind, would-be banners: on Google Tries To Defuse Glass "Myths" · · Score: 1

    And what will you when said person does damage that could have been avoided if the person were able to see clearly? It was, after all, by *YOUR* insistence that they remove said prescription lenses... In reality, what you should be doing instead of telling such people to take them off is bar entry to your property at all... demand that they leave or hold them accountable for trespassing. If you want them on your property, you may have to just accept whatever consequences might happen as a result of their not being able to see.

    Or you could, you know... just ask them to turn it off and take their word for it when they tell you that it's not turned on.

  14. Or you could just not drive... on L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation · · Score: 1

    Unless they make walking or cycling illegal as well, of course.

  15. Re:Does it make Minecraft run faster? on Java 8 Officially Released · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your mistake is in thinking that constructing classes in Java with new would put them on the heap.

    It does not. It puts them into a special cache that is very similar to a stack, and which gets destroyed when the function exists. Objects that require more persistence than the scope they are allocated in migrate to another storage space automatically when the scope or function ends. This check isn't quite as free as just incrementing a stack pointer, but it is still extremely efficient... taking far less time than it would to manipulate values on a global heap.

  16. Re:"LONG extinct"? Hah. on 43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning · · Score: 1

    Really? How many are they planning on cloning?

  17. I'm not so sure about it being in death throes yet on Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! · · Score: 2

    As long as employers (game devs, in particular) are willing to keep paying people to write it, I'm pretty sure it's going to stay popular.

  18. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    Risk isn't what makes somebody a hero... Neither is sacrifice. The latter makes one a martyr, and the former makes one a gambler. Heroism is defined by actually facing whatever it is that is being overcome. Whether the battle was ever realy his to finish or not, running away isn't facing anything.

    That doesn't make what he did something not good or worth to be respected, but it does mean he's not a hero.

  19. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    Being heroic is not the same thing as being intelligent or wise... It might very well be smart or prudent to run away from a foe that can harm you... but that's still not heroic.

  20. Except backers hadn't paid for anything.... on Kickstarted Veronica Mars Promised Digital Download; Pirate Bay Delivers · · Score: 1

    Backers chose to support a kickstarter project. They didn't "buy" anything by supporting the project, they pledged an amount towards it and were promised to receive something in return.

    Now where WB has failed spectacularly here is that they have gone back on this promise... which is, of course, utterly inexcusable. They have absolutely *NO* right to keep even one penny of any of the money that was pledged where they had promised something that they will not make good on (whether it was entirely by choice or simply because of contractual obligations). Refund absolutely all of them. Not just the ones that complain... but *ALL* of them... or at least all of the ones that were promised a digital download. I'd dare say that probably accounts for a majority of the monies received.

    I get that sometimes sh!t happens, and one can't always come through on what they promised (which is what I personally suspect is what has happened here).... but if that's the case, then they should own up to the fact and just fucking give everybody back their money... even the backers that were promised more than just the download, because, as I said... the money donated through kickstarter was a pledge amount, not a purchase... and in addition to their other promises at most of the donation levels, they *DID* promise a digital download version of the movie. And if they can't or won't come through on what was promised in return for those pledges, then what just reason do they have to keep any of that money?

    Had I backed this project, I wouldn't be trying to download it from pirate bay.... I'd be asking for my money back.. *ALL* of it... not just the portion that kickstarter themselves didn't keep, and I'd be sorely wishing that they'd be required to refund everybody, whether or not the individual ever complained about it,because in the end. this isn't just about an incomplete purchase, it's about breaking an effing promise. And you can't put a price on that.

  21. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    Heroes *face* adversity... They do not run away from challenges simply because they may not overcome them. In this case snowmen didn't personally face anything... He basically fought by "remote control" and ran away when he was going to be caught. However good what he dd was, it's still not heroic.

  22. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    I don't know if I'd agree that a person who is trying to save himself can't be a hero.... I would actually place the criteria for hero as being someone who actually personally faces some level of danger, and whether or not they personally overcome it, somehow manages to help one or more other people get past a threat that they are facing. A hostage victim who manages to foil the plans of the people who have taken them and others hostage certainly has a personal vested interest in trying to get out of the situation, but I wouldn't hesitate to call such a person a hero when his or her actions have saved the lives of others. I find myself ambivalent on your example of a pilot being a hero, however. I think I'd really be willing to use the word to describe a pilot only in circumstances where the pilot had shown personal creativity and resourcefulness in overcoming the situation that went far beyond what he or she was actually trained to do in such circumstances, and by all rights and reason they should not have survived at all.

    To that end, ordinary people may become heroes, but heroes are anything but ordinary.

    And Snowden didn't face any real danger by doing what he did. In the end, he still ran away.

    That doesn't make what he did meaningless, it just means he's not cut from the same cloth as what I'd call a hero.

  23. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    Heroes don't run away from fights that they might find themselves in, simply because they know that they cannot win. That's what makes them heroes, and what really distinguishes them from everyone else.

    Is it a narrow view of heroism? Perhaps... but I don't think that everybody is cut out to actually *be* a hero. In fact, most aren't.

    That doesn't mean that every single person is not capable of doing tremendous good, or making a positive difference in the world around them, however.

    But running away is just not something I can associate with heroism.

  24. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    No.... someone who sticks it out and wins a fight can be a hero too... martyrdom is not remotely necessary.

    But running away is not heroic.

    Is what Snowden did a good thing? Yes... that doesn't make him a hero, however.

  25. Re:A hero isn't someone who runs away on Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes · · Score: 1

    There's a pretty big difference between walking away from a fight that is already done and over with, and running away from a fight you can't or you do not think you can ever win. Snowden did the latter... and however wise that choice might have been (I don't fault him for it for a second), it definitely was not cut from the same cloth as what I would call a hero.