Gee, I wish I could lower supplies, decrease the product value, increase prices, and generally piss off my customers and then get the government to augment my mysteriously reduced profit margin.
I'm as aware as you the odds against it. Though as I recall, the airspeed of your average gaseous molecule is on the order of 2000 kps. You never notice it because they just keep running into one another and the net motion for a large group is comparatively zero. So, all you need (note the sarcasm) are a few quintillion million-to-one chances occuring in a row and you could have 99.5% of the atmosphere impart all of its kinetic energy to the remaining 0.5%, which would then go flying off at near-c. I think a few million tons of anything at that speed would do tremendous amounts of damage to a star, no?
But you are correct. We could wait quite literally forever and never see it happen.
The probability that a butterfly's actions could cause critical damage to a star is so low as to be totally impossible (i.e., a trllion stars could last a trillion years without it ever happnening once), but that probability is still non-zero. You familiar with the notion that the air in a room might evacuate itself under no force other than a freak concerted motion of the constituent molecules? Same principle. I find it just _slightly_ unlikely that butterfly wings could precipitate a storm that would blow half the atmosphere towards the sun at relativistic speeds, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
Drug deals being conducted with guns is entirely a consequence of their being illegal. You may note that gang warfare over alcohol is rather hard to find nowadays, but it was quite intense during Prohibition and in fact is a going concern over in Saudi Arabia where (purely coincidentally, of course) it's illegal.
Not only that, but who voted for it? In the Senate it was almost unanimous (97 or 98 ayes) but the House used a 'voice vote' so there's no record. Judging by the Senate's response, the chances are high that your rep voted for it.
But the RIAA never got a subpeona! Why couldn't Verizon have deleted the records in question immediately upon receiving a request for them? Are there subpeona/destruction-of-evidence clauses in the DMCA about this sort of thing? The RIAA could go to a judge and get a subpeona then, but it wouldn't do any good. If they wanted he info, they'd have to actually go to a judge beforehand, which is what this is all about.
Here's a thought. Since Verizon was never actually served a subpeona, what is stopping them from taking the parent's advice and deleting all their old IP-account logs? As you say, I can't delete it after it becomes court evidence, but since that wasn't the case, Verizon was under no compunction to keep them, no?
Libraries are starting to do this sort of thing, too.
That he committed a crime is not in question here. The debate is whether or not he committed the crime that he is being charged with. If the Espionage Act requires that the thief profit from the act and this kid did not, then it is entirely the wrong law to be using against him.
If you were guilty of assault, would you want be be charged with manslaughter because it was easier for the prosecution to nail you, even though nobody actually died?
But that doesn't mean they should plan for an event in which all users want all their bandwidth simultaneusly
And why is that? Power companies do it (and get roundly bitched out if they fail to live up). Phone companies do it. Airlines do it, though they do allow you to bet that there will be no-shows. Banks are legally required to be fairly well prepared for runs on their accounts. And yes, if an entire bank ran out of money and left their depositers SOL with a simple "Oh well", I would blame them. They may not be able to prepare for the absolute Armageddon-style worst case scenario, but if they advertise it, they damned well better deliver it and not bitch and moan if their customers actually call the bluff.
I never ever saw a pricing scheme in which a cable company would sell you additional connections for additional TVs
I bet you a whole dollar that we will start to see exactly this kind of nonsense over the next few years in states that have passed the super-DMCA laws. Cable is a communications line and it would be perfectly legal for Time Warner to demand that I account for every device connected. Hell, they could demand that I'm not allowed to use Sony TVs or Panasonic VCRs if they so wanted to. And don't think for a minute that some tin-pot PHB won't try it.
because that would degrade the signal's quality for other users
Huh? Care to provide some support for that little gem?
For phone extensions, on the other hand, applicable arguments are similar to the ISP story. Which also is an area in which you're not so very much in touch with reality, as we've already seen.
I suggest you bone up on your tele-history before you start bandying about insults about ridiculous corporate activities. Ma Bell used to do exactly this. If you wanted another phone on the same line, you had to pay for it. There are plenty of accounts right here on/. by people who, before the breakup, had to hide their 'illicit phones' whenever repairmen came by. It got rightly busted down because it was a bullshit practice.
This has been covered. Obviously the industries can't beat P2P on price. What they can beat it on is quality, organization, reliability, and completeness of works by an artist. Have you ever tried to get an entire album from KaZaA?
Hey, that's a great idea. You know, they should offer a contest to see if people could break it. Let's see, securing music on computers... let's call it the Secure Digital Music Initiative and offer rewards to people who can break the watermarking! I bet there's some university professors who would happily try it.
Actually, netting 5% would not be that bad. Lotsa businesses run on profit margins that low or even a few points lower. What is criminal about the recording industry schemes is that the artists are usually getting a fraction of a percent (pennies on the album) and are then expected to pay for many of the other expenses with their take. Just what are the RIAA members using their cut for if not to actually make, sell, and distribute the things? Lobbying and paying their legions of IP lawyers, evidently.
I'm kinda split. On the one hand, if they were releasing it in a totally open format, you'd think they'd make a point of saying so, right? On the other hand, these are the same guys who think that DRM is a perfectly logical and completely practical system for widespread public usage and it honestly might not occur to them that saying "We aren't using this piece of shit at all" would actually be a good marketing strategy.
They are also indiscriminantly calling their customers criminals and, despite complaints by virtually everyone, introducing DRM onto CDs which at best won't play and at worst screws up hardware. This sort of behavior simply does not fly in a market with easy entry, no matter what near-monopoly is currently gripping it.
PATRIOT 2 Act would allow for wiretapping without a warrant. Britain already has laws that require you to give up encyption passwords on demand and you just know Bush and Co. will want to 'harmonize' with them. Given the complete technical ineptitude the cops and the FBI have demonstrated in the past, why on earth should we trust them to do whatever they want, whenever they want to, without permission or accountability? Do you want to have citizenship revoked and be summarily deported (also a PATRIOT 2 power) because you pinged whitehouse.gov and some first-year moronic agent tapping your line mistook it for a DOS attack?
This government of ours is acquiring ridiculous amounts of power and the freedom to do anything they want with it. This is simply unacceptable.
Real people, who sometimes commit very real crimes, use it, too
Fine. If that is the case, the cops can go get a fucking warrant and actually perform some effort finding evidence. Forcing people to help the feds hoover up potentially incriminating data about _everyone_ is insane. Absolutely nobody would think it a good idea to put master-key capability into locks or bank vaults that only our Beloved Leaders could use. This sort of all-pervasive surveillance combined with the sheer stupidity of current tech laws is a very, very bad combination. The laws cannot be accurately or totally enforced, so they'll be used only for political or corporate pissing matches like the DMCA has been.
Yes, Alcohol Prohibition was repealed in 1933. And in 1937 began the War on Drugs in the guise of the Marijuana Tax Act (passed over the objections of the American Medical Association because the Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner said pot "causes violent effects in the degenerate races"). Let's see, lessons of 14 years of rampant corruption, pointless and unenforcable laws, and government-created black markets forgotten in less than four years. I would say that they simply replaced one stupid law with a stupid and deceitful one.
Remember the restrictions placed on Mitnick's legal counsel? They weren't even allowed to bring a laptop (even one without network capabilites) anywhere near him for fear he would start WW3 or something equally absurd. He may not have been the perfect defendent, but the legal system was most certainly misused against him.
Minor difference here. Any fool can kill people, and many do. But generally speaking, the skills and experience needed for breaking into computers also happen to be amazingly useful for keeping those same systems from being broken into.
So if you insist on using violent conflict analogies, how about long-term special forces veterans (that is, professionals in close-up killing and destruction and general mayhem) being slightly better suited than the average Joe for positions in law enforcement and jobs maintaining physical security of buildings and people?
Now if we absolutely _had_ to give Hussein a job in the peace corp... How about if there's ever a decision to be made that is split right down the middle by the people involved, they pose the problem to our friendly neighborhood dictator. Tthen whichever choice he opts for, do the exact opposite.
I assume you mean a computer or electronics security post? I would most certainly consider him an excellent candidate for the job. He simultaneously understands how bad security is, the potentially disastrous consequences that has, and more than most anyone else, the need to keep tech-law legislation and enforcement grounded on _this_ side of reality.
Obviously, Blackboard would be hard-pressed to replace thousands of hardware devices at all its locations, even if they'd started in late 2001 when Acidus claims he called to tell them of the flaws he'd found (and "was blown off").
And you know very well that this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
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Gee, I wish I could lower supplies, decrease the product value, increase prices, and generally piss off my customers and then get the government to augment my mysteriously reduced profit margin.
Ack, I'm off by a few orders of magnitude. That should be 2000kph.
But you are correct. We could wait quite literally forever and never see it happen.
The probability that a butterfly's actions could cause critical damage to a star is so low as to be totally impossible (i.e., a trllion stars could last a trillion years without it ever happnening once), but that probability is still non-zero. You familiar with the notion that the air in a room might evacuate itself under no force other than a freak concerted motion of the constituent molecules? Same principle. I find it just _slightly_ unlikely that butterfly wings could precipitate a storm that would blow half the atmosphere towards the sun at relativistic speeds, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
Drug deals being conducted with guns is entirely a consequence of their being illegal. You may note that gang warfare over alcohol is rather hard to find nowadays, but it was quite intense during Prohibition and in fact is a going concern over in Saudi Arabia where (purely coincidentally, of course) it's illegal.
And at wholesale!
Not only that, but who voted for it? In the Senate it was almost unanimous (97 or 98 ayes) but the House used a 'voice vote' so there's no record. Judging by the Senate's response, the chances are high that your rep voted for it.
But the RIAA never got a subpeona! Why couldn't Verizon have deleted the records in question immediately upon receiving a request for them? Are there subpeona/destruction-of-evidence clauses in the DMCA about this sort of thing? The RIAA could go to a judge and get a subpeona then, but it wouldn't do any good. If they wanted he info, they'd have to actually go to a judge beforehand, which is what this is all about.
Libraries are starting to do this sort of thing, too.
If you were guilty of assault, would you want be be charged with manslaughter because it was easier for the prosecution to nail you, even though nobody actually died?
And why is that? Power companies do it (and get roundly bitched out if they fail to live up). Phone companies do it. Airlines do it, though they do allow you to bet that there will be no-shows. Banks are legally required to be fairly well prepared for runs on their accounts. And yes, if an entire bank ran out of money and left their depositers SOL with a simple "Oh well", I would blame them. They may not be able to prepare for the absolute Armageddon-style worst case scenario, but if they advertise it, they damned well better deliver it and not bitch and moan if their customers actually call the bluff.
I never ever saw a pricing scheme in which a cable company would sell you additional connections for additional TVs
I bet you a whole dollar that we will start to see exactly this kind of nonsense over the next few years in states that have passed the super-DMCA laws. Cable is a communications line and it would be perfectly legal for Time Warner to demand that I account for every device connected. Hell, they could demand that I'm not allowed to use Sony TVs or Panasonic VCRs if they so wanted to. And don't think for a minute that some tin-pot PHB won't try it.
because that would degrade the signal's quality for other users
Huh? Care to provide some support for that little gem?
For phone extensions, on the other hand, applicable arguments are similar to the ISP story. Which also is an area in which you're not so very much in touch with reality, as we've already seen.
I suggest you bone up on your tele-history before you start bandying about insults about ridiculous corporate activities. Ma Bell used to do exactly this. If you wanted another phone on the same line, you had to pay for it. There are plenty of accounts right here on /. by people who, before the breakup, had to hide their 'illicit phones' whenever repairmen came by. It got rightly busted down because it was a bullshit practice.
This has been covered. Obviously the industries can't beat P2P on price. What they can beat it on is quality, organization, reliability, and completeness of works by an artist. Have you ever tried to get an entire album from KaZaA?
Hey, that's a great idea. You know, they should offer a contest to see if people could break it. Let's see, securing music on computers... let's call it the Secure Digital Music Initiative and offer rewards to people who can break the watermarking! I bet there's some university professors who would happily try it.
Actually, netting 5% would not be that bad. Lotsa businesses run on profit margins that low or even a few points lower. What is criminal about the recording industry schemes is that the artists are usually getting a fraction of a percent (pennies on the album) and are then expected to pay for many of the other expenses with their take. Just what are the RIAA members using their cut for if not to actually make, sell, and distribute the things? Lobbying and paying their legions of IP lawyers, evidently.
I'm kinda split. On the one hand, if they were releasing it in a totally open format, you'd think they'd make a point of saying so, right? On the other hand, these are the same guys who think that DRM is a perfectly logical and completely practical system for widespread public usage and it honestly might not occur to them that saying "We aren't using this piece of shit at all" would actually be a good marketing strategy.
They are also indiscriminantly calling their customers criminals and, despite complaints by virtually everyone, introducing DRM onto CDs which at best won't play and at worst screws up hardware. This sort of behavior simply does not fly in a market with easy entry, no matter what near-monopoly is currently gripping it.
I get the impression that it would be a bad idea to use *nix syntax to answer a question during a Microsoft interview.
Fine by me, I'm not getting any anyway.
This government of ours is acquiring ridiculous amounts of power and the freedom to do anything they want with it. This is simply unacceptable.
Real people, who sometimes commit very real crimes, use it, too
Fine. If that is the case, the cops can go get a fucking warrant and actually perform some effort finding evidence. Forcing people to help the feds hoover up potentially incriminating data about _everyone_ is insane. Absolutely nobody would think it a good idea to put master-key capability into locks or bank vaults that only our Beloved Leaders could use. This sort of all-pervasive surveillance combined with the sheer stupidity of current tech laws is a very, very bad combination. The laws cannot be accurately or totally enforced, so they'll be used only for political or corporate pissing matches like the DMCA has been.
Yes, Alcohol Prohibition was repealed in 1933. And in 1937 began the War on Drugs in the guise of the Marijuana Tax Act (passed over the objections of the American Medical Association because the Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner said pot "causes violent effects in the degenerate races"). Let's see, lessons of 14 years of rampant corruption, pointless and unenforcable laws, and government-created black markets forgotten in less than four years. I would say that they simply replaced one stupid law with a stupid and deceitful one.
Hey, does anyone have a copright on "All your base..."?
Remember the restrictions placed on Mitnick's legal counsel? They weren't even allowed to bring a laptop (even one without network capabilites) anywhere near him for fear he would start WW3 or something equally absurd. He may not have been the perfect defendent, but the legal system was most certainly misused against him.
So if you insist on using violent conflict analogies, how about long-term special forces veterans (that is, professionals in close-up killing and destruction and general mayhem) being slightly better suited than the average Joe for positions in law enforcement and jobs maintaining physical security of buildings and people?
Now if we absolutely _had_ to give Hussein a job in the peace corp... How about if there's ever a decision to be made that is split right down the middle by the people involved, they pose the problem to our friendly neighborhood dictator. Tthen whichever choice he opts for, do the exact opposite.
I assume you mean a computer or electronics security post? I would most certainly consider him an excellent candidate for the job. He simultaneously understands how bad security is, the potentially disastrous consequences that has, and more than most anyone else, the need to keep tech-law legislation and enforcement grounded on _this_ side of reality.
And you know very well that this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.