Any law that is "intended to punish" is a bad law. The purpose of a law is to set absolute standards of behavior; the punishment is merely a necessary component of the law to deal with noncompliance. If a law is drafted such that you don't feel like punishing some people who have violated the absolute standards of the law, that law has failed and is a bad law. So tell me: Do you really feel that the government should punish everyone who falsifies their identity in violation of the law?
You know, the new comment system would be a lot more awesome if it wasn't so effective at concealing the fact that five other guys already said the same thing I did.
If I go outside every night wearing overalls covered in blood stains, dig holes in my front yard, and bury body sized bundles wrapped in garbage bags every night for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be investigated for murder. Investigated, sure. They'll cordon off your yard, bring in body-sniffing dogs, dig everything up, search your garbage bags, find nothing, and conclude that you were just fucking with them. They would do this, rather than immediately strapping you to the electric chair, because "first degree hacking up of people into little bits" is a criminal matter, not a civil one, and circumstantial evidence is not sufficient for a criminal conviction. It's not "beyond a reasonable doubt". In the civil arena, though, the standards are much looser. The evidence that the **AA collected, and used to send threatening notices, are the beginning and the end of the investigation. They are the full extent of the evidence presented in court, and up until now that's often been good enough for the court to find in their favor. IOW, if you can get a takedown notice sent to your printer, you can get a thousands-of-real-money-dollars legal judgment levied against some random guy you don't like. That's what's a surprise. (Or not.)
Heck, this sounds like great news. After all, unlike many a failed new media content venture, Microsoft isn't going out of business and leaving their customers high and dry... just retiring this particular service. So they have plenty of time to come up with a migration plan for their customers, so that nobody who paid for music has to lose access to it. I mean, hell. They're a multinational corporation with an image to protect. They're not just going to tell their customers to go fuck themselves, right?
I think you mean "__________ ___________ Can Hurt Security". There's nothing Windows-specific about this approach. It would work just as well with apt-get.
The conclusions seem reasonable, but I'm disturbed that the researchers didn't consider the potential impact of overall hotter summers. Did neighboring states have relatively flat energy usage over the same period?
Please, allow me to be the twelfth person to encourage you to read the article, and to make accusations about your intellect, sexual prowess, and/or parentage!
Hey, let's improve on that a little! We can throw out the randomness and just do deterministic binary search. The advantage of this is, you never have to send your 64k to the server! Since the server already knows what 64k number you were going to send (since it's deterministic), it can just base its answers on that, sending a stream of highs and lows, each taking one bit.
Hmm, some more specifics. The first guess is, of course, halfway through the range, and a "high" answer means "your guess was equal to or greater than the number I was thinking of". A "low" answer means "your guess was less than the number I was thinking of".
Looking good! Let's try it with a sample four bit number... say, 0110. So the server knows that your first guess will be 1000, so it sends a "low". Your next guess will be half that, 0100, which is too high, so it sends a "high". So your next guess will be 0110 (halfway between 1000 and 0100); the server responds "high" because that's equal to or greater than. Finally, your guess will be 0111, and the server sends a "low", thereby reducing the range to the only possible number, 0110. So it sends four bits: low, high, high, low. Encoding a low as 0 and a high as 1, we get... 0110
Whoopsy.
Your introduction to Information Theory has begun.:-)
Wouldn't that be nice. But no, they aren't civilly liable for anything like "abridgement of rights" (keekles). It's a statement of position. If you agree with it, you cooperate with them. If you don't agree with it, you ignore them or tell them to fuck off. Its only legal significance is that later they can point to it as proof that you knew that they wanted you to stop.
Costs vs. Benefits of sending a doubtfully valid cease and desist notice:
Costs: * Postage. * Paralegal staffing costs (assume 15 minutes to prepare the boilerplate). * Small chance some guys on Slashdot get grumpy for a while, until the next time there's a sale on DVD-Rs (whereupon all is forgiven, transactionally speaking).
Benefits: * Decent chance the guy stops doing whatever it is you feel like stopping him from doing.
It's not even a close call. A C&D is a warning shot, an initial skirmish. It doesn't commit them to anything legally, and the public image repercussions are vanishingly low.
Oh, sure, maybe in the sense of "free" as in "free of restrictions". But what about other freedoms, like the freedom to keep other people from doing things they want to do? Why do you hate freedom so much?
Slashdot isn't able to stand up for basic editorial values like fact-checking, not shilling, or just plain copy editing for basic grammar and spelling. So pardon me if my faith is only as strong as the actual practice of their principles.
"Don't split that infinitive! It goes against our principles!"
Actually, they do. They signed a contract with the ESRB saying, in effect, "we give in to your demands on violence and nudity". That's why they have the ESRB logo, and it's why you'll find the game in GameStop. (There's still a GameStop, right?) Five years ago I would have been right there with you on the righteous indignation, because at that point the retail outlets and the ESRB essentially controlled the morality of any game which wanted to be commercially successful; and I would have applauded Rockstar's flouting of the rules. Now that digital distribution is a fact of life, though, that excuse is gone gone gone.
Remember that contract Rockstar signed? Along with it, they handed the ESRB a big wad of cash. Decrying the ESRB while simultaneously supporting the ESRB's business model is just hypocritical.
"Oh gee oh what has happened! Did we accidentally prolong the current media frenzy, keeping Manhunt 2 in headlines for another week? The shame of it all!"
* Cut it out with the byzantine copy protections. * Great special features, like deleted scenes and director's commentary-- content which is rarely maintained when ripping. * Ensure that there are insanely convenient, reasonably cost-effective legal distribution systems available. * Quit worrying so much. The industry's profits aren't falling off a cliff, and if they were going to they would have already.
Slashdot Mirror
i have searched there is no danger please come see for yourself bring glucose
That was the lamest In Soviet Russia joke ever.
Well, sure. Why should taxpayers underwrite their government becoming enforcers for car owners?
Thank you for debunking the debunking of the debunking.
Goodness, such hostility! You still haven't answered my question.
Any law that is "intended to punish" is a bad law. The purpose of a law is to set absolute standards of behavior; the punishment is merely a necessary component of the law to deal with noncompliance. If a law is drafted such that you don't feel like punishing some people who have violated the absolute standards of the law, that law has failed and is a bad law. So tell me: Do you really feel that the government should punish everyone who falsifies their identity in violation of the law?
You know, the new comment system would be a lot more awesome if it wasn't so effective at concealing the fact that five other guys already said the same thing I did.
But IBM doesn't use 32x drives. And therefore I am utterly baffled by the meaning of your comment.
Heck, this sounds like great news. After all, unlike many a failed new media content venture, Microsoft isn't going out of business and leaving their customers high and dry... just retiring this particular service. So they have plenty of time to come up with a migration plan for their customers, so that nobody who paid for music has to lose access to it. I mean, hell. They're a multinational corporation with an image to protect. They're not just going to tell their customers to go fuck themselves, right?
Right?
I think you mean "__________ ___________ Can Hurt Security". There's nothing Windows-specific about this approach. It would work just as well with apt-get.
You know, any sufficiently advanced country is indistinguishable from Sri Lanka.
Hmm, indeed. I missed that sentence.
The conclusions seem reasonable, but I'm disturbed that the researchers didn't consider the potential impact of overall hotter summers. Did neighboring states have relatively flat energy usage over the same period?
He's not being excluded because he's not the best. He's being excluded because he's not a presidential candidate.
Please, allow me to be the twelfth person to encourage you to read the article, and to make accusations about your intellect, sexual prowess, and/or parentage!
Hey, let's improve on that a little! We can throw out the randomness and just do deterministic binary search. The advantage of this is, you never have to send your 64k to the server! Since the server already knows what 64k number you were going to send (since it's deterministic), it can just base its answers on that, sending a stream of highs and lows, each taking one bit.
:-)
Hmm, some more specifics. The first guess is, of course, halfway through the range, and a "high" answer means "your guess was equal to or greater than the number I was thinking of". A "low" answer means "your guess was less than the number I was thinking of".
Looking good! Let's try it with a sample four bit number... say, 0110. So the server knows that your first guess will be 1000, so it sends a "low". Your next guess will be half that, 0100, which is too high, so it sends a "high". So your next guess will be 0110 (halfway between 1000 and 0100); the server responds "high" because that's equal to or greater than. Finally, your guess will be 0111, and the server sends a "low", thereby reducing the range to the only possible number, 0110. So it sends four bits: low, high, high, low. Encoding a low as 0 and a high as 1, we get... 0110
Whoopsy.
Your introduction to Information Theory has begun.
Wouldn't that be nice. But no, they aren't civilly liable for anything like "abridgement of rights" (keekles). It's a statement of position. If you agree with it, you cooperate with them. If you don't agree with it, you ignore them or tell them to fuck off. Its only legal significance is that later they can point to it as proof that you knew that they wanted you to stop.
Costs vs. Benefits of sending a doubtfully valid cease and desist notice:
Costs:
* Postage.
* Paralegal staffing costs (assume 15 minutes to prepare the boilerplate).
* Small chance some guys on Slashdot get grumpy for a while, until the next time there's a sale on DVD-Rs (whereupon all is forgiven, transactionally speaking).
Benefits:
* Decent chance the guy stops doing whatever it is you feel like stopping him from doing.
It's not even a close call. A C&D is a warning shot, an initial skirmish. It doesn't commit them to anything legally, and the public image repercussions are vanishingly low.
Sounds suspicious. Don't underestimate the power of the Martian lobby, especially in an election year. What is Mars trying to hide?
Oh, sure, maybe in the sense of "free" as in "free of restrictions". But what about other freedoms, like the freedom to keep other people from doing things they want to do? Why do you hate freedom so much?
"Don't split that infinitive! It goes against our principles!"
Actually, they do. They signed a contract with the ESRB saying, in effect, "we give in to your demands on violence and nudity". That's why they have the ESRB logo, and it's why you'll find the game in GameStop. (There's still a GameStop, right?) Five years ago I would have been right there with you on the righteous indignation, because at that point the retail outlets and the ESRB essentially controlled the morality of any game which wanted to be commercially successful; and I would have applauded Rockstar's flouting of the rules. Now that digital distribution is a fact of life, though, that excuse is gone gone gone.
Remember that contract Rockstar signed? Along with it, they handed the ESRB a big wad of cash. Decrying the ESRB while simultaneously supporting the ESRB's business model is just hypocritical.
"Oh gee oh what has happened! Did we accidentally prolong the current media frenzy, keeping Manhunt 2 in headlines for another week? The shame of it all!"
I would:
* Cut it out with the byzantine copy protections.
* Great special features, like deleted scenes and director's commentary-- content which is rarely maintained when ripping.
* Ensure that there are insanely convenient, reasonably cost-effective legal distribution systems available.
* Quit worrying so much. The industry's profits aren't falling off a cliff, and if they were going to they would have already.