I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.
But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam.
You should really get started on that, you have a lot of work ahead of you.
You say 'nothing is being done' as if you expect others to do it for you. Some people are, and cheers to them. Are you? If so, then my apologies, and a cheers to you too. Otherwise you don't have much room to complain.
You can pitch in and help too, anything from technical expertise (coding new better filters) to legal expertise (better laws to deal with the problem, realistic things to enforce) to financial ($$ donated to those whom do) and everything in between.
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"ya, about 55."
"no you were doing 85. 30mph faster than the rest of the cars on the road."
Just a peeve, but it can't be called a lie when the question was not asked to request the truth.
You have two options, in one of two situations. In basically all of them, you are forced into answering exactly that way.
If you were not speeding, and you answer with the speed limit, you are in fact not only 'not lying' but telling the truth. Good!
If you were not speeding, and you answer above the limit, you just admitted to a crime which you will now get convicted for. Bad.
If you were speeding, and you answer with above the limit, while you might be telling the truth, you just admitted to a crime that despite any (or lack of) proof, you gave up any slim chance of not being punished, as your admission is all that's needed. Bad.
If you were speeding, and you answer with the speed limit, then the officer has to prove it (assuming you go to court), and you still have a slim (at least it's non-zero) chance of not getting charged. Not great but could be worse..
So not answering with the speed limit is a guaranteed punishment, even if you were not speeding, and on the chance the case goes in your favor. At least answering with the speed limit is not 100% bad with 0% left for good. No matter how small 'non-zero chance' is at the time, anyone would take that over 'zero percent chance'.
Oh, and answering with "I don't know" are the only three words needed to add a reckless operations charge with guaranteed guilty court outcome, if the officer wishes to.
While legally the best answer is nothing beyond 'name, rank, serial'. Unfortunately in todays world, doing that is generally unhealthy for you. It really only leaves one option left. Always say you were doing equal to or below the posted speed limit. This is the trained response the officers wanted, so one should not be surprised they get it.
If you're buying your books elsewhere, Amazon's going to take a loss on the whole shebang, and that's most likely what they're trying to prevent (while counting on the fact that you can't get non-drm'd copies of most books such as in.txt,.pdf, or.htm format).
I still don't see why you or ANYONE can claim this is an OK thing
Amazon has no right to spew libel AND slander towards anyone by claiming they broke laws that clearly they didn't.
Seriously, a DMCA take down? the DMCA protects EXACTLY THIS!
What will it take for you people to see this as bad??
Amazon issuing "We claim you are a murderer and demand you take down a webpage or we turn you in!"
This guy clearly did not commit murder anymore than he violated the DMCA.. When does this excusing amazon for lies stop?
It's not about the Kindle's usefullness to the user, it's about the Kindle's usefullnes to amazon. The Kindle is not where Amazon makes their money, it's on the sale of the ebooks-- if people are buying them from elsewhere, Amazon is not getting their profit, and in fact it may be costing them money-- the Kindle is essentially subsidised by their ebooks.
And I think I can speak for most of slashdot when I respond:
What does breaking a law have to do with this at all?
Seeing as the RIAA presses charges against printers, the elderly with no computers, dead people, and people downloading creative commons music (OMG\OHNOZ!! FREE MUSIC! THIEF!11OnE), how can you honestly and blindly believe anything they claim anymore?
Seeing as they have no problems suing all of those types of people when nothing the RIAA had copyrighted was involved, who is to say you aren't next? I for one sorta hope you are, so we can laugh.. Ok, no, wrong is wrong, I'd help.
But you still sound like a troll for claiming you have no problems with them suing and then blackmailing you for doing nothing wrong...
What about "Life of author or x years, whichever is longer"?
I'd still prefer X years where X is single digit, or Very low double digit.
Just because its 'intellectual property' doesn't mean they shouldn't have to work for a living just like every one else.
If one album can only guarantee income for 5 years, then they would be encouraged to, i don't know, make another one! Or perhaps get out and find a real job. Either would be better for society as a whole.
Your argument contradicts reality. Let me explain...
Don't break the law and you aren't in trouble.
This is exceptionally unlikely for nearly everyone to do. First off, if you are not a lawyer by profession, you already lost at that game. All of us reading this have broken probably around a hundred laws just today in our normal daily lives. You included.
Most of those laws aren't even known, occasionally even by the police! They are still public record and 'on the books', thus are law.
Did you know in the state of Ohio, it's illegal to walk down the street with two ice cream cones in your pocket? It's true.. and despite the unlikelihood of that happening, in addition to its harmlessness, it is still a crime.
It's like people who complain when they get a ticket for "only going 5mph over the limit" (ie, only breaking the law a little).
No, not really at all like that. In that example, a police officer both is witness to your crime, and generally has proof in the form of a radar/laser gun readout.
In the case of what the article speaks of, there is no proof (because it is not needed to make an accusation, by definition.) Simply by having someone else CLAIM you committed a crime is enough to count as a strike. Three such CLAIMs and you are offline.
If actual evidence and proof were required in the law, and it went before a judge or a jury of peers, then most of us would not have a problem with this law. But that isn't the case, and so most all of us have a problem with it.
What exactly is the problem? You break the law, you are punished.
Again, if that was actually what the article was saying, not only would it not be a problem, but it wouldn't even be posted on slashdot. But somehow you missed that part in the article (like, you know, all of it)
These people may or may not have committed any crime. It doesn't at all matter.
You are accused of breaking the law, and you get punished. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to you?
If not, then just wait until you get your way. I can find more than three people which will claim you broke a law, just so you won't feel bad about being punished for it when you are punished.
that's a whopping idea. imagine, warner bros is accused of copyright infringement 3 times. and entire warner bros ip range is off the net.
I like that idea!
Ok, first you send in complaint #1, then I will send complaint #2, and then.. oh damn.. if only there was some place we could find just one more anonymous coward...
Norton's forum is not a government. "Censorship" is done by governments, not private businesses.
Umm, no, not at all.
Censorship -noun 1. the act or practice of censoring. 2. the office or power of a censor. 3. the time during which a censor holds office. 4. the inhibiting and distorting activity of the Freudian censor.
No mention of government anywhere. What you are probably thinking of is the US's First Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights:
First Amendment The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that expressly prohibits the United States Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion" or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, laws that infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to peaceably assemble, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
and presumably they should also be prosecuting the people who told them about the servers, since pointing to a server that you can infringe copyright at is also prosecutable.. or is it?
It is if you start to refer to doing so as 'verbal hyperlinking', then it becomes accessory to copyright infringement! yaay
Robots don't need air, food, or water. They can work for long periods of time in utterly hostile environments with little to no supervision. They don't get sick or bored. They can be mass produced. When you are done with them, they don't want to go home
It's a machine, Schroeder. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes......IT JUST RUNS PROGRAMS!
If you want to nitpick, regardless if you purchased the drm version or not, downloading the torrent is always copyright infringement.
Go tell that to Linus and the Linux distros that are all up on torrents. Tell that to all the people that legally purchased World of Warcraft and just got forced to update.
If you are trying to force a non $0 price tag on works of art i choose to give away for free, then how can you possibly be against the pirates for forcing other authors to have a $0 price tag when they choose a non zero dollar amount for their own works???
Shame on you for forcing authors into doing something they don't want to do. You're no better than the pirates, just in the other direction.
Keep your opinion of what my own works should cost to yourself, you have NO right to tell me otherwise, nor to accuse the people i choose to give my works away for free to 'copyright violators' and 'thieves' (Of which neither crime did they commit against me)
Anyone remember that old animated show God, the Devil, and Bob? That fat fuck Jerry Falwell led a crusade against it as being blasphemous, the same way he did with the Last Temptation of Christ. Oddly enough, both examples here had a greater understanding of and sympathy for Christ's point of view than that bloviating, closet-case fucktard and all of his ass-hatted minions.
At the end of the day you have to ask: Why vitrualize if doing so means you are going to have to buy new hardware? Just buy the new iron and split out your functions across different platforms and take advantage of the redundancy, and reliability of not having all services disappear do to a single component failure.
It's funny you mention services disappearing due to a single component failure, which your described setup guarantees, and is one of the nicer features of VMs.
You have 4 services to offer that need their own machines. Say you have 2 real machines. You can do as you describe, maybe putting service A and B on machine 1 with service C and D on machine 2. You just created two potentials for a single point of failure. Either machine can have a failure, and such a failure causes two services to disappear. Not to mention reboots.
With a VM layer in between, you give each service a virtual guest (also called A B C D), running on what is now a cluster of two real machines. When i need to make a major change on a host, be it hardware, software, kernel, whatever... I instruct the cluster to move all 4 services to host 2, do my work on a now idle host 1, reboot it, then move all 4 services over to host 1 while i do the same work on host 2 and reboot it. Then let it migrate the two services back to cpu balance. None of the guest OS's notice anything has happened. All services running the entire time. And your entire host cluster just got rebooted! With the fact this guest moving can be performed automatically, that sounds a lot more like the redundancy of which you speak.
It is in Sweden. Why do you think such a tiny population has the second biggest music industry in the world -- incentives (who do you think produce all that crap Americans listen to).
I thought it came from China, like all the rest of our stuff;P
Just because it doesn't exist in the USA, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Off the top of my head: beaches are the only thing, in the USA, I can think of that are always public and you can always cross private land to reach.
Well, the article Was about a Google van on a road in the USA. Just because t does exist outside of the USA, doesn't mean it does here.
I wouldn't think that a reasonable person could consider a dirt driveway to be a public access road. A case obviously existed, but their day in court ended because their lawyer apparently didn't know what s/he was doing.
Well, there is always that. I have seen nothing about the particular road, so can't say what I would choose personally in that situation. Then there is always the question of how do they know where they are going? Personally I would use GPS and a map... or two maps, one in paper form, Just Incase(tm)
The point is, there Are situations where it is not at all obvious. If it was listed on a map then no doubt they would go down there to check it out... seeing no signs indicating that would be amiss, in they went. Granted, I don't know if that was the case. Unfortunately that's my problem. I see no reason to suspect it wasn't a normal simple mistake, that was responded to by honoring the peoples request to not show pictures of them on the maps (or blurring them some as some/.er said.)
Ok, so I'm starting to sound like I'm defending him. All I am saying is I, nor you it seems (if i am wrong, please share!) have any reasons to suspect anything more than this being a simple mistake that they were there and didnt know they should not be.
Let's at least pretend to assume innocents until malisous intend can be establish, or even suspected, but I'd have to hear your explanation first to believe that you had one.
We can not afford to continue down the vein of 'If it isn't locked, then you deserve what happens to you' line of thinking.
But there is two sides to things here.
Yes, you can't have a blanket "if it isn't locked" type of rule, because that would lead to chaos.
However, you can't have a blanket rule the other way too far either. I mean, if you were wandering about outside some evening, and accidentally walked on someones private property that you didn't realize was theirs but thought was still public... What are you to do when you discover your mistake?
Most people would leave if told of that fact. You say 'whoops, my bad' and go away off the private property back the way you came. I don't believe we need to make that person a criminal for such a small and easily fixable mistake.
I don't know, i wasn't there, but it could easily have been just that type of mistake as it is to be a malicious attack on someones privacy by the Google van.
I'm fairly sure when asked that Google does remove photos people are in. That is similar to saying 'whoops, our bad, we will fix it' to me.
Maybe I'm missing something here for a reason the Google van drivers aren't getting the benefit of the doubt?
What about the First Anendment? Surely spammers have free speech rights?
Sure they do. And more power to them.
But free speech doesnt effect either of the points in this thread.
A) Killing a spammer with a sledgehammer is not about repressing their speech, its about punishing them for forcing said speech on me, of which they don't, and never did, have a right to do.
and B) If they at all cared about free speech rights, they would post their spam on their website and let people choose to view it or not. Stopping that would involve the first amendment. Fortunately the first amendment does not give spammers (or anyone) the right to force any speech on anyone, including me, so that amendment does not come into effect.
I'm glad you know what the law says, but saddened you didn't finish reading to what the law applies to.
Slashdot Mirror
Me, I didn't want to go in the first place, so no downside for me
Well, that's certainly taking the short-term view.
I think it is amusing you chose to use 'short-term view' to describe the act 'going to heaven'
Is there something about that slashdotters fate that we don't?
Sounds to me like the definition of long-term thoughts on that subject!
I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.
But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam.
You should really get started on that, you have a lot of work ahead of you.
You say 'nothing is being done' as if you expect others to do it for you. Some people are, and cheers to them. Are you?
If so, then my apologies, and a cheers to you too. Otherwise you don't have much room to complain.
You can pitch in and help too, anything from technical expertise (coding new better filters) to legal expertise (better laws to deal with the problem, realistic things to enforce) to financial ($$ donated to those whom do) and everything in between.
Heck, even in a traffic stop, people lie.
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"ya, about 55."
"no you were doing 85. 30mph faster than the rest of the cars on the road."
Just a peeve, but it can't be called a lie when the question was not asked to request the truth.
You have two options, in one of two situations. In basically all of them, you are forced into answering exactly that way.
If you were not speeding, and you answer with the speed limit, you are in fact not only 'not lying' but telling the truth. Good!
If you were not speeding, and you answer above the limit, you just admitted to a crime which you will now get convicted for. Bad.
If you were speeding, and you answer with above the limit, while you might be telling the truth, you just admitted to a crime that despite any (or lack of) proof, you gave up any slim chance of not being punished, as your admission is all that's needed. Bad.
If you were speeding, and you answer with the speed limit, then the officer has to prove it (assuming you go to court), and you still have a slim (at least it's non-zero) chance of not getting charged. Not great but could be worse..
So not answering with the speed limit is a guaranteed punishment, even if you were not speeding, and on the chance the case goes in your favor.
At least answering with the speed limit is not 100% bad with 0% left for good.
No matter how small 'non-zero chance' is at the time, anyone would take that over 'zero percent chance'.
Oh, and answering with "I don't know" are the only three words needed to add a reckless operations charge with guaranteed guilty court outcome, if the officer wishes to.
While legally the best answer is nothing beyond 'name, rank, serial'. Unfortunately in todays world, doing that is generally unhealthy for you.
It really only leaves one option left. Always say you were doing equal to or below the posted speed limit. This is the trained response the officers wanted, so one should not be surprised they get it.
You do realise that the time shown is your local time, right? That's why there's no timezone there to qualify it.
No, no sir I did not.
Nevermind all of that then
Also kdawson is a douchebag. Not for this article, but just in general.
Indeed. This just adding to the douchbagary.
Yea but:
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 31, @04:28PM
from the fruits-of-competition dept.
Thou shalt not argue with slashdot time
I love the sound a new hardcover makes when you open it for the first time
Mmmm, the sound of book collectors crying at the sound of devaluing.. I love that too ;}
If you're buying your books elsewhere, Amazon's going to take a loss on the whole shebang, and that's most likely what they're trying to prevent (while counting on the fact that you can't get non-drm'd copies of most books such as in .txt, .pdf, or .htm format).
I still don't see why you or ANYONE can claim this is an OK thing
Amazon has no right to spew libel AND slander towards anyone by claiming they broke laws that clearly they didn't.
Seriously, a DMCA take down? the DMCA protects EXACTLY THIS!
What will it take for you people to see this as bad??
Amazon issuing "We claim you are a murderer and demand you take down a webpage or we turn you in!"
This guy clearly did not commit murder anymore than he violated the DMCA.. When does this excusing amazon for lies stop?
It's not about the Kindle's usefullness to the user, it's about the Kindle's usefullnes to amazon. The Kindle is not where Amazon makes their money, it's on the sale of the ebooks-- if people are buying them from elsewhere, Amazon is not getting their profit, and in fact it may be costing them money-- the Kindle is essentially subsidised by their ebooks.
And I think I can speak for most of slashdot when I respond:
Awwwwwwww
What does breaking a law have to do with this at all?
Seeing as the RIAA presses charges against printers, the elderly with no computers, dead people, and people downloading creative commons music (OMG\OHNOZ!! FREE MUSIC! THIEF!11OnE), how can you honestly and blindly believe anything they claim anymore?
Seeing as they have no problems suing all of those types of people when nothing the RIAA had copyrighted was involved, who is to say you aren't next? I for one sorta hope you are, so we can laugh.. Ok, no, wrong is wrong, I'd help.
But you still sound like a troll for claiming you have no problems with them suing and then blackmailing you for doing nothing wrong...
What about "Life of author or x years, whichever is longer"?
I'd still prefer X years where X is single digit, or Very low double digit.
Just because its 'intellectual property' doesn't mean they shouldn't have to work for a living just like every one else.
If one album can only guarantee income for 5 years, then they would be encouraged to, i don't know, make another one! Or perhaps get out and find a real job. Either would be better for society as a whole.
Three, copyright law has gone way off the rails to the point where it is significantly impairing free speech, innovation, and creativity.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but that was, is, always has been, and probably always will be the exact goal and purpose of copyright laws...
It was a way for a government to allow themselves the right to censor others.
Your argument contradicts reality.
Let me explain...
Don't break the law and you aren't in trouble.
This is exceptionally unlikely for nearly everyone to do.
First off, if you are not a lawyer by profession, you already lost at that game. All of us reading this have broken probably around a hundred laws just today in our normal daily lives. You included.
Most of those laws aren't even known, occasionally even by the police! They are still public record and 'on the books', thus are law.
Did you know in the state of Ohio, it's illegal to walk down the street with two ice cream cones in your pocket?
It's true.. and despite the unlikelihood of that happening, in addition to its harmlessness, it is still a crime.
It's like people who complain when they get a ticket for "only going 5mph over the limit" (ie, only breaking the law a little).
No, not really at all like that. In that example, a police officer both is witness to your crime, and generally has proof in the form of a radar/laser gun readout.
In the case of what the article speaks of, there is no proof (because it is not needed to make an accusation, by definition.)
Simply by having someone else CLAIM you committed a crime is enough to count as a strike.
Three such CLAIMs and you are offline.
If actual evidence and proof were required in the law, and it went before a judge or a jury of peers, then most of us would not have a problem with this law. But that isn't the case, and so most all of us have a problem with it.
What exactly is the problem? You break the law, you are punished.
Again, if that was actually what the article was saying, not only would it not be a problem, but it wouldn't even be posted on slashdot. But somehow you missed that part in the article (like, you know, all of it)
These people may or may not have committed any crime. It doesn't at all matter.
You are accused of breaking the law, and you get punished. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to you?
If not, then just wait until you get your way. I can find more than three people which will claim you broke a law, just so you won't feel bad about being punished for it when you are punished.
that's a whopping idea. imagine, warner bros is accused of copyright infringement 3 times. and entire warner bros ip range is off the net.
I like that idea!
Ok, first you send in complaint #1, then I will send complaint #2, and then.. oh damn.. if only there was some place we could find just one more anonymous coward...
Norton's forum is not a government. "Censorship" is done by governments, not private businesses.
Umm, no, not at all.
Censorship -noun
1. the act or practice of censoring.
2. the office or power of a censor.
3. the time during which a censor holds office.
4. the inhibiting and distorting activity of the Freudian censor.
No mention of government anywhere.
What you are probably thinking of is the US's First Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights:
First Amendment
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that expressly prohibits the United States Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion" or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, laws that infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to peaceably assemble, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
and presumably they should also be prosecuting the people who told them about the servers, since pointing to a server that you can infringe copyright at is also prosecutable.. or is it?
It is if you start to refer to doing so as 'verbal hyperlinking', then it becomes accessory to copyright infringement! yaay
If you don't know who sat in which seat on what showing on what date, knowing which seat a video was shot from isn't going to help you.
And you have just pointed out step 2 in their plan to ruin the movie theater experience, or stop piracy, whichever comes first.
Don't be shocked once metal detectors, checking in your cell phone at the lobby to get back after the movie, and numbered on ticket seating.
Of course, when nearly anyone wants to put up with that crap, the loss in sales to their annoying practices will be blamed on even more piracy.
Good riddance to them
Robots don't need air, food, or water. They can work for long periods of time in utterly hostile environments with little to no supervision. They don't get sick or bored. They can be mass produced. When you are done with them, they don't want to go home
It's a machine, Schroeder. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes... ...IT JUST RUNS PROGRAMS!
If you want to nitpick, regardless if you purchased the drm version or not, downloading the torrent is always copyright infringement.
Go tell that to Linus and the Linux distros that are all up on torrents.
Tell that to all the people that legally purchased World of Warcraft and just got forced to update.
If you are trying to force a non $0 price tag on works of art i choose to give away for free, then how can you possibly be against the pirates for forcing other authors to have a $0 price tag when they choose a non zero dollar amount for their own works???
Shame on you for forcing authors into doing something they don't want to do. You're no better than the pirates, just in the other direction.
Keep your opinion of what my own works should cost to yourself, you have NO right to tell me otherwise, nor to accuse the people i choose to give my works away for free to 'copyright violators' and 'thieves' (Of which neither crime did they commit against me)
Anyone remember that old animated show God, the Devil, and Bob? That fat fuck Jerry Falwell led a crusade against it as being blasphemous, the same way he did with the Last Temptation of Christ. Oddly enough, both examples here had a greater understanding of and sympathy for Christ's point of view than that bloviating, closet-case fucktard and all of his ass-hatted minions.
Ok, once more... But this time, with *feeling*
At the end of the day you have to ask: Why vitrualize if doing so means you are going to have to buy new hardware? Just buy the new iron and split out your functions across different platforms and take advantage of the redundancy, and reliability of not having all services disappear do to a single component failure.
It's funny you mention services disappearing due to a single component failure, which your described setup guarantees, and is one of the nicer features of VMs.
You have 4 services to offer that need their own machines. Say you have 2 real machines.
You can do as you describe, maybe putting service A and B on machine 1 with service C and D on machine 2.
You just created two potentials for a single point of failure. Either machine can have a failure, and such a failure causes two services to disappear. Not to mention reboots.
With a VM layer in between, you give each service a virtual guest (also called A B C D), running on what is now a cluster of two real machines.
When i need to make a major change on a host, be it hardware, software, kernel, whatever... I instruct the cluster to move all 4 services to host 2, do my work on a now idle host 1, reboot it, then move all 4 services over to host 1 while i do the same work on host 2 and reboot it. Then let it migrate the two services back to cpu balance.
None of the guest OS's notice anything has happened. All services running the entire time. And your entire host cluster just got rebooted! With the fact this guest moving can be performed automatically, that sounds a lot more like the redundancy of which you speak.
It is in Sweden.
Why do you think such a tiny population has the second biggest music industry in the world -- incentives (who do you think produce all that crap Americans listen to).
I thought it came from China, like all the rest of our stuff ;P
Just because it doesn't exist in the USA, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Off the top of my head: beaches are the only thing, in the USA, I can think of that are always public and you can always cross private land to reach.
Well, the article Was about a Google van on a road in the USA.
Just because t does exist outside of the USA, doesn't mean it does here.
I wouldn't think that a reasonable person could consider a dirt driveway to be a public access road.
A case obviously existed, but their day in court ended because their lawyer apparently didn't know what s/he was doing.
Well, there is always that.
I have seen nothing about the particular road, so can't say what I would choose personally in that situation.
Then there is always the question of how do they know where they are going? Personally I would use GPS and a map... or two maps, one in paper form, Just Incase(tm)
The point is, there Are situations where it is not at all obvious. /.er said.)
If it was listed on a map then no doubt they would go down there to check it out... seeing no signs indicating that would be amiss, in they went.
Granted, I don't know if that was the case. Unfortunately that's my problem. I see no reason to suspect it wasn't a normal simple mistake, that was responded to by honoring the peoples request to not show pictures of them on the maps (or blurring them some as some
Ok, so I'm starting to sound like I'm defending him.
All I am saying is I, nor you it seems (if i am wrong, please share!) have any reasons to suspect anything more than this being a simple mistake that they were there and didnt know they should not be.
Let's at least pretend to assume innocents until malisous intend can be establish, or even suspected, but I'd have to hear your explanation first to believe that you had one.
We can not afford to continue down the vein of 'If it isn't locked, then you deserve what happens to you' line of thinking.
But there is two sides to things here.
Yes, you can't have a blanket "if it isn't locked" type of rule, because that would lead to chaos.
However, you can't have a blanket rule the other way too far either.
I mean, if you were wandering about outside some evening, and accidentally walked on someones private property that you didn't realize was theirs but thought was still public... What are you to do when you discover your mistake?
Most people would leave if told of that fact. You say 'whoops, my bad' and go away off the private property back the way you came.
I don't believe we need to make that person a criminal for such a small and easily fixable mistake.
I don't know, i wasn't there, but it could easily have been just that type of mistake as it is to be a malicious attack on someones privacy by the Google van.
I'm fairly sure when asked that Google does remove photos people are in. That is similar to saying 'whoops, our bad, we will fix it' to me.
Maybe I'm missing something here for a reason the Google van drivers aren't getting the benefit of the doubt?
R&D is not always "innovation". Often it's just making something practical.
Research is the transformation of money to knowledge.
Innovation is the transformation of knowledge to money.
What about the First Anendment? Surely spammers have free speech rights?
Sure they do. And more power to them.
But free speech doesnt effect either of the points in this thread.
A) Killing a spammer with a sledgehammer is not about repressing their speech, its about punishing them for forcing said speech on me, of which they don't, and never did, have a right to do.
and
B) If they at all cared about free speech rights, they would post their spam on their website and let people choose to view it or not. Stopping that would involve the first amendment. Fortunately the first amendment does not give spammers (or anyone) the right to force any speech on anyone, including me, so that amendment does not come into effect.
I'm glad you know what the law says, but saddened you didn't finish reading to what the law applies to.