We also have caps on punative damages. [...] You can get back whatever is required to make up whtever loss your are suing for, plus reasonable damages (the cap is around $100,000).
I'd like to point out that the entire purpose of punitive damages is to be just that, punative. They are intendted to punish the wrongdoer, not just compensate the victim. Sure, to me $100,000 is a huge amount of money, but if, say, a major car company can save $10 million by inadequate testing some safefy feature, they may choose to do so because they know their liability would be capped at $100,000. To companies that have billions of dollars in assets (heck, didn't Microsoft have $40 billion just in cash recently?) 100,000 could fairly easily be chalked up to "the cost of doing business."
Furthermore, not every case involves punative damages. From this article:
They are available only if the defendant acted with malice or gross negligence. Punitive damages are not awarded often, and when they are, it is for acts that go beyond mere human error. They are supposed to be awarded when the defendant not only hurt the plaintiff, but did so in a way that expressed disdain or contempt for the plaintiff. Punitive damages, one might say, are the plaintiff's chance to get revenge -- through the court, and through the medium of money.
Nineteen CD-ROM discs containing the entire restricted library of sound effects
created during the past 25 years for use in the "Star Wars" films, with an
estimated "collectible value" of $95,000.
This seems a bit unreasonable, doesn't it? Not only do you have the plaintiff estimating the value of the item (although it doesn't say whether these were stolen CDs or his own CDs with pirated sound files on them), but they get to use the "collectible" value. I figure a napkin used by Lucas has a value to some fanatic Star Wars collector considerably inflated over its actual intrinsic value.
Think about it. Defining "spam" is about as easy as defining "offensive" content. Subjective decisions about which e-mail messages are deemed worthy to be delivered should NOT be made by politicians.
Defining spam is difficult? You've got to be kidding.
unsolicited AND (bulk OR commercial) AND email
Looks pretty easy to me. Sure, you can quibble about how many emails consititutes "bulk" and whether breathing air "solicits" offers for herbal Viagra, but that's why God made lawyers.
This is where I think you are wrong. The recipient of that email was not free to reject it. They never got it. The ISP which should be a common carrier blocked it. thereby, i feel, forgoing their status as a common carrier.
The recipient of the email rejected it by choosing an ISP that filters email via blacklists. He voted with his dollar. OK, I'll buy that the ISP should make it clear to their customers that they do filter, and it would be nice if they gave customers the option. Much like Earthlink does with their Spaminator service.
IANAL, but I don't think ISPs even *have* status as common carriers. They are specifically exempted from such.
Remember the Yahoo was not running an open relay and the have an explicit policy on prohibiting SPAM, which they enfore, but they were still blacklisted.
...the circle of people to whom I could send email started to shrink.
... I was no longer able to send email to many people in my address book.
The worst thing about being blacklisted, however, wasn't that I could no longer send email...
Granted, the damage caused by my inability to send an email is likely not terribly significant.
He can send all the email he wants. And the recipients of that email are free to reject it. Since his server is blacklisted (and it sounds like his server IS a relay, regardless of how many times he states that it isn't) there in an increased probability that any email coming from there is spam, and the recipient judged it accordingly. Deal.
Does anyone know what blacklist he's talking about? SPEWS is Russian. I don't know any that are Danish.
Why, because it's not auditory? You're splitting hairs. The first amendment specifies "speech" and "press". By that logic, nothing printed on a laser printer qualifies because there was no printing press involved. Sign language is to all intents and purposes, speech. The encoding method is just different.
Come on, it's reasonably clear that the intent of the 1st Amendment is to protect communication between people regardless of the medium involved. (Let's not bring copyright into this, OK?) Don't forget in the late 18th century, the only methods of communication were the spoken word, the (hand)written word, and anything created by a printing press. There was no sign language, no telegraph, no telephone. Heck, even Braille wasn't invented until 1809.
Because 90% of businesses who use MS products believe deep down that there are no alternatives.
Also don't forget that there is a significant cost involved in switching from Win-whatever to Linux. No, not in money, but in time and training. Quite frankly, most people are familiar with Windows systems. They know how to use them, and are familiar with how things look and feel.
There is a significant amount of time and effort (otherwise known as money) involved in switching to any new system, even if it will be cheaper in the long run.
I use Windows at home. I've thought about running Linux because a more stable computer would be a godsend. Why haven't I? Quite frankly: I don't know how; I'm afraid I won't be able to run all the applications I want to; and I'm worried about losing data in the migration process.
Even if it's not perfect, there are advantages to a system you know and are familiar with.
I received one of these things myself a little while ago, and added a handful of sneakemail (sneakemail.com, great site, but that's neither here nor there) addresses just to see if it was a fraud or not. I got the initial "someone has a crush on you" message to each sneakemail addy, but pretty much nothing since then.
Maybe they're smart enough to cull these out of their database, but unless that's so, the site doesn't seem to be used for massive email harvesting.
Re:Streaming media illegal, says the RIAA
on
RIAA Smacked by DoS
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· Score: 1
Sorry, did I miss a memo? When was streaming declared illegal? Shouldn't someone notify Apple and Real that thier streaming server software is facilitating illegal activities?
Presumably, they mean that it is also copyright infringment to stream a track without authorization, as well as download an infringing MP3.
They're not saying that all streaming software is illegal. Calm down.
I'm curious out of that $30,000,000,000 cost for the ISS, how much actually went into PARTS for the Space Station and how much went to pay for people's paychecks ?
Yeah! This is obviously a case of a massive amount of government waste.
I mean, just the idea of designing and custom building and testing a space station! It should be built with off-the-shelf parts. Heck, I've got my ACME Space Station Module catalog around here somewhere...
"look for this and this information in THIS book" would be legal.
No, I'm sorry. That's deep-linking to the library. You will have to instead link to the front door of the library, where your users will have to search for the information themselves.
If the spam world isn't about fraud and shady dealings, but is instead about costing someone time and effort and money, do you have the same complaints about snail mail?
No, I don't. I don't pay for snail mail advertisements, the bulk mailers do. Bulk emailers force the cost off themselves and onto the recipients.
Spam *IS* about fraud and shady dealings -- by promoting illegitimate offers; by disguising the source; by relaying through other people's open servers; and by not honoring remove requests. Beyond that, bulk, unsolicited, commercial email is *NO* different than bulk, unsolicited commercial snail mail.
Piffle. I get maybe two or three pieces of snail junk mail per day. The only cost to me is maybe a negligible increase in the amount of trash hauling per week. The cost of that bulk mailing not only pays for itself, but subsidizes First Class USPS mail.
Spam is different. The majority of the cost is borne by the recipient in the form of bandwidth and storage costs and download times. Individually, these may be trivial, but in the aggregate they can be quite significant. In 1999 or 2000 Verizon's network in CA was brought to it's knees, and email delivery was delayed several days by the sheer number of spam emails it was processing.
I can't find the citation on the web right now, but the conventional wisdom is currently that if even a small fraction of the small businesses in the country sent out one spam per year, you'd wind up with several hundreds spam emails PER DAY. How much of this unsolicited advertising can i be expected to receive and pay for? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
I think the problem (at least one of them, anyway) is that it's not "serious" enough. Given the other drek that wins constantly, I'm not sure being "serious" is such a good thing.
The show is plenty serious. It's dealt the usual things you'd expect in a show with teens as the main characters: sex, the first boyfriend/girlfriend, cliques in schools, growing up, etc. Then it moved on to the really serious stuff: the death of a parent, the death of a friend, violence in schools, parental abuse, gay teens, drug use, rape, and that's just off the top of my head.
The problem is that the show is neither entirely a drama or entirely a comedy. That and the whole vampire/fantasy element means it will never be taken seriously by the Hollywood machine.
Which is a shame, quite frankly. Others may disagree, but Hush (which was entirely without dialog for roughly half an hour) was one of the most creative things I've ever seen on television, bar none.
But because of all the charlatans out there, we were taken to be just one more instance of spam -- which in some sense we were,
Not in "some" sense, you nitwit, in EVERY sense. You sent bulk, unsolicited, commercial email. That's the textbook definition of spam.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that if the email is not advertising a scam or fly by night operation, it's acceptable.
The spam war is not, and will never be about fraud and shady dealings. It's about YOU costing ME time and effort and money. It's about you foisting onto me the majority of the cost of your advertising, without so much as a by-your-leave.
Spammers like you are parasites, nothing more, nothing less.
But you OWE 15.4% on all your wages to this mythical retirement plan.
Social Security is NOT a retirement plan. It is a safety net. It is not something intended for you to retire to Florida on. It is intended to stop people from living in abject, utter poverty as they reach the end of their days.
Our FICA money is, for the most part, not invested for our future retirement. As fast as we pay it in, most of it is paid right back out to our parents and grandparents just as the taxes they paid when they were working were paid out in benefits to their parents (and the taxes your kids will pay when they are working will be paid out to you).
Social Security was never intended as an investment program, nor as being sufficient to provide a comfortable middle-class retirement. It was intended as a bare-bones, bare-minimum safety net a pact between generations to assure that none would starve, each successive generation taking care of the last and it has served that purpose, and is likely to continue to.
The first generation paid very little in taxes and got, relatively speaking, huge benefits in return. (For one thing, people started living longer than the original draftsmen of Social Security expected they would. Instead of collecting benefits for three years, they might collect for twenty-three.) That first generation made out like bandits. By now, with so many more retirees to support, the "return" you are likely to get on the taxes you pay in will be much smaller. But neither, as John Seiffer points out above, are you as likely to have your grandmother living in your house with you for the next 20 years.
It's true that in the past decade or so we've begun collecting more than we need to pay out right now, hoping to build a cushion for when the baby boomers are retired, with too few workers to support them all. (When Social Security was launched, there were about 40 workers paying into the system for each retiree receiving benefits. Now it's more like 3 workers and headed for 2.)
This surplus is invested in a special form of Treasury bond. I forget the exact formula that determines the rate, but it's a lot more than 2%, at least before allowing for the effect of inflation.
How is it possible that on the same PC I have a 70 day uptime with linux?
Perhaps, because with linux you have a system designed by people not concerned with cost-effectiveness?
No, I'm not trolling. There is a considerable difference between people who write code because they enjoy it, and people who code because they are attempting to market a profitable product. (Abusive monopoly-ness notwithstanding.)
It takes an infinite amount of time (i.e. money) to make a product perfect. Therefore, any for-profit business must operate in a mode that allows them to release a product that is good enough to sell, but not so good it is perpetually in development.
As an old boss of mine used to say, "The enemy of the good is the better."
I think you missed the fact that a MEMS chip with a laser light source could easily be used to power a big-screen television. You'd watch TV just like you do now -- by looking at a big box -- only it would be the MEMS chip powering the display instead of a CRT (or several CRTs, in the case of some big-screen televisions).
Unlikely. First of all, a CRT uses an incredibly high energy beam of electrons, several tens of kilovolts IIRC, not a laser. Secondly, MEMS are small. Very small. To get enough energy coming off of one of those things to be visible to the eye as a reflection several meters away from the source, you'd have to really crank up the power. The headset displays seem feasable because you can use a small light beam, since it's getting projected directly into the eye. But a really high power beam might melt the MEMS mirror.
Combining all three or four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, sometimes even black) in one physical cartridge unit, so that when one color runs out, you HAVE to replace the others, even though they may be perfectly full still!
For what it's worth, Consumer Reports, in one of their printer reviews a year or so ago, found that normal usage should use up the colors in three-color cartridges at approximately the same rate. Black being an exception, of course. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, not every case involves punative damages. From this article:
Perhaps we should call it ... Nerdbonics.
Defining spam is difficult? You've got to be kidding.
Looks pretty easy to me. Sure, you can quibble about how many emails consititutes "bulk" and whether breathing air "solicits" offers for herbal Viagra, but that's why God made lawyers.
The recipient of the email rejected it by choosing an ISP that filters email via blacklists. He voted with his dollar. OK, I'll buy that the ISP should make it clear to their customers that they do filter, and it would be nice if they gave customers the option. Much like Earthlink does with their Spaminator service.
IANAL, but I don't think ISPs even *have* status as common carriers. They are specifically exempted from such.
No, they do not enforce it:
http://www.needsoftware.com/
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=needsoftware+si
You seem to be confusing justice with retribution.
He can send all the email he wants. And the recipients of that email are free to reject it. Since his server is blacklisted (and it sounds like his server IS a relay, regardless of how many times he states that it isn't) there in an increased probability that any email coming from there is spam, and the recipient judged it accordingly. Deal.
Does anyone know what blacklist he's talking about? SPEWS is Russian. I don't know any that are Danish.
Come on, it's reasonably clear that the intent of the 1st Amendment is to protect communication between people regardless of the medium involved. (Let's not bring copyright into this, OK?) Don't forget in the late 18th century, the only methods of communication were the spoken word, the (hand)written word, and anything created by a printing press. There was no sign language, no telegraph, no telephone. Heck, even Braille wasn't invented until 1809.
Perhaps you've heard of sign language?
Also don't forget that there is a significant cost involved in switching from Win-whatever to Linux. No, not in money, but in time and training. Quite frankly, most people are familiar with Windows systems. They know how to use them, and are familiar with how things look and feel.
There is a significant amount of time and effort (otherwise known as money) involved in switching to any new system, even if it will be cheaper in the long run.
I use Windows at home. I've thought about running Linux because a more stable computer would be a godsend. Why haven't I? Quite frankly: I don't know how; I'm afraid I won't be able to run all the applications I want to; and I'm worried about losing data in the migration process.
Even if it's not perfect, there are advantages to a system you know and are familiar with.
Maybe they're smart enough to cull these out of their database, but unless that's so, the site doesn't seem to be used for massive email harvesting.
They're not saying that all streaming software is illegal. Calm down.
Yeah! This is obviously a case of a massive amount of government waste.
I mean, just the idea of designing and custom building and testing a space station! It should be built with off-the-shelf parts. Heck, I've got my ACME Space Station Module catalog around here somewhere...
No, I don't. I don't pay for snail mail advertisements, the bulk mailers do. Bulk emailers force the cost off themselves and onto the recipients.
Piffle. I get maybe two or three pieces of snail junk mail per day. The only cost to me is maybe a negligible increase in the amount of trash hauling per week. The cost of that bulk mailing not only pays for itself, but subsidizes First Class USPS mail.
Spam is different. The majority of the cost is borne by the recipient in the form of bandwidth and storage costs and download times. Individually, these may be trivial, but in the aggregate they can be quite significant. In 1999 or 2000 Verizon's network in CA was brought to it's knees, and email delivery was delayed several days by the sheer number of spam emails it was processing.
I can't find the citation on the web right now, but the conventional wisdom is currently that if even a small fraction of the small businesses in the country sent out one spam per year, you'd wind up with several hundreds spam emails PER DAY. How much of this unsolicited advertising can i be expected to receive and pay for? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
The show is plenty serious. It's dealt the usual things you'd expect in a show with teens as the main characters: sex, the first boyfriend/girlfriend, cliques in schools, growing up, etc. Then it moved on to the really serious stuff: the death of a parent, the death of a friend, violence in schools, parental abuse, gay teens, drug use, rape, and that's just off the top of my head.
The problem is that the show is neither entirely a drama or entirely a comedy. That and the whole vampire/fantasy element means it will never be taken seriously by the Hollywood machine.
Which is a shame, quite frankly. Others may disagree, but Hush (which was entirely without dialog for roughly half an hour) was one of the most creative things I've ever seen on television, bar none.
Not in "some" sense, you nitwit, in EVERY sense. You sent bulk, unsolicited, commercial email. That's the textbook definition of spam.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that if the email is not advertising a scam or fly by night operation, it's acceptable.
The spam war is not, and will never be about fraud and shady dealings. It's about YOU costing ME time and effort and money. It's about you foisting onto me the majority of the cost of your advertising, without so much as a by-your-leave.
Spammers like you are parasites, nothing more, nothing less.
He was probably just copyrighting the lyrics.
Social Security is NOT a retirement plan. It is a safety net. It is not something intended for you to retire to Florida on. It is intended to stop people from living in abject, utter poverty as they reach the end of their days.
Put much better than I ever could: Andrew Tobias's Column from 05/09/01
Perhaps, because with linux you have a system designed by people not concerned with cost-effectiveness?
No, I'm not trolling. There is a considerable difference between people who write code because they enjoy it, and people who code because they are attempting to market a profitable product. (Abusive monopoly-ness notwithstanding.)
It takes an infinite amount of time (i.e. money) to make a product perfect. Therefore, any for-profit business must operate in a mode that allows them to release a product that is good enough to sell, but not so good it is perpetually in development.
As an old boss of mine used to say, "The enemy of the good is the better."
No, more like:
Enforcing etiquette and responsible behavior in a social situation: good
Unlikely. First of all, a CRT uses an incredibly high energy beam of electrons, several tens of kilovolts IIRC, not a laser. Secondly, MEMS are small. Very small. To get enough energy coming off of one of those things to be visible to the eye as a reflection several meters away from the source, you'd have to really crank up the power. The headset displays seem feasable because you can use a small light beam, since it's getting projected directly into the eye. But a really high power beam might melt the MEMS mirror.
OK, the lockpick set is a bit iffy, but when did a flashlight become a burglary tool?!
A bunch of lawyers are complaining because the details are in the fine print? How wonderfully ironic.