If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied. The issue here was bullying at the DOJ. You can't fix that with a few tweaks to the law, and if you lower maximum penalties you will find yourself regretting it when someone actually does do something worthy of those maximum penalties.
But then he gets not prosecuted for stealing scientific articles, but for transmitting weapon secrets to foreign powers -- independently of the means to get his hands on said documents. Your argument seems to be that we need to have harsh penalties for wielding a knife, because someone may stab a person with a dagger.
Why being forced to sell a name anyway? Gradiente registered the name "iphone" (lower case p) in 2000. At this time, Apple had two iProducts (iMac and iBook), but there was no sight yet of a long chain of i-labelled consumer gadgets from Apple, and an Apple phone wasn't even on the drawing boards. The iPod came in 2001, so Gradiente's registration surely was without any intention to squat on a future, valuable trademark of Apple.
Within the legal framework of trademark law, the name "iphone" (and all modifications of it, which can be easily confused with the original trademark), is rightfully Gradiente's. It's solely Apple which has a problem here, they tried the courts to solve it, and they lost. So they can beg Gradiente to sell the name to them, or at least get a license to use it, but there is no incentive for Gradiente to agree to any negotiations.
It wouldn't just be against consumer laws, but against trade laws in general, because it would violate the First Sale doctrin. As soon as Microsoft ships a retail copy to a store and gets paid for it, it does no longer control that copy, but the store does. And if the store sells the copy to whoever happens to buy it, the new owner owns and thus controls it. Microsoft's only means to control that copy are those the copyright law defines, e.g. it can control further copies and modifications, but not who owns a single copy.
And no EULA or other contract or license will change that, because the European Court of Justice has clearly said:
Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.
(Emphasis mine)
So even if some activation mechanism tries to stop a transfer, it's illegal, because the rightholder has no right to oppose the sale and thus is forbidden to use technical or organisational means to hinder it. And this is not only valid for sales to consumers, it's the same für business to business sales (the case in question was about Oracle licenses and software, which are not a typical consumer product).
When COBOL was being used for new development, I don't think the P1 was even out, we're on Xeons now.
When COBOL was being used for new development, the microprocessor wasn't even invented yet, and Intel founder Robert Noyce was working at Fairchild Semiconductor and had his first integreted circuit ready.
I don't see any reason to forbid cybersex at all. What's the point? Whose live gets improved if cybersex is generally outlawed? Who profits?
For me, this is not primarily a speech issue, it's more an issue of Why anyway?
People will have sex together with whatever means are available. If they can't touch each other, they will invent other ways. Once they wrote arousing mails, then they phoned each other and talked dirty. And now they are using the Internet. Why would one ever think that outlawing people talking about sex will in any way improve someone's live? A law that tries to forbid something so fundamentally human as an erotic talk is just plain silly. Whoever had the idea shows to be completely disconnected from any human reality.
Not only is most of a Lexus Toyota, Lexus is 100% Toyota. Lexus is just a badge at the front of a Toyota made car (and here around, they even share the showrooms).
Those are the people who fall for "work from home, no education required" scams. They are the real victims of this fraud. From an objective point of view, stealing passwords is just a way to trick those people into withdrawing large sums from their account and give it to the perpetrator without a chance to get it back, just by temporarily placing a large sum in their account. Password stealing is thus akin to getting hold of a carrot you can later place in front of the victim's nose.
You don't need an GPS to buy stuff from Amazon. So what's the incentive for Amazon to include a GPS capable chip into a device whose main raison d'etre is to buy from Amazon?
You overlook one of the most important aspects of TFA: Many transactions can be reversed, and it's especially simple to reverse easy to repudiate transfers.
So yes, all customers of the bank will pay their share for the increased security, fraud detection and the cost associated with reversing repudiated transaction, but the money actually retransferred does not come from the bank or the bank's customers.
Thus, what an account password thief has to do to empty a bank account is to initiate an untraceable and thus non-reversable transfer. One often used way is the use of a money-mule: An easily repudiatable transfer comes from the original victim's account, the money-mule withdraws the money (minus the "commission") and then initiates a second, non-repudiatable and non-reversable money transfer, e.g. via Money Transfer or handing the physical money bills to someone else.
If the original victim notices the theft, the first transfer is repudiated, and the money is retransferred from the money-mule's account, while the money-mule has no chance to reverse the second transaction, because this one is non-repudiatable. Thus the money-mule bears the actual cost of the fraudulent money transfer, the original victim gets the money back.
Fraudulent money transfers with stolen passwords don't actually steal from the person whose password was stolen (except this person for some reason doesn't reverse the transfer), they steal from the persons who are hired to play money-mules. And they are the actual bottle necks here. There is no point in having the passwords to accounts amounting several million dollars, if you have only a single money-mule, and this one will transfer less than $10,000 at once. It probably won't transfer the money a second time because of being already bankrupted by the first transfer going bad.
You don't have any clue what a primary actually does. Right?
If everyone can found his own party and even get elected to the European Parliament (look at the swedish Pirate Party!), there is no point to go through the primaries of two big parties. Just cut out the middleman and get your own election platform! You try to turn a sad necessity of the congealed U.S. two party system into something of an advantage.
Lobbyists are people who try to influence members of the parliament. In former times they were allowed to enter the lobby of the House of Commons in England to meet sympathetic members of the House between sessions, thus the name.
If you write to your congress critter, you are lobbying. If you discuss with them in town hall meetings, you are lobbying. If you talk to them in private, you are lobbying. Anything you do between elections to influence members of the parliament is lobbying. Do you really want to get rid of that?
But the gold is not actually held by the government. And there will be a certain quote of money that can not replaced by gold at any given time. This quote is totally open to manipulation and to political negotiations - not very much different than today.
Do some econ101 and find out why my statement isn't.
Yes, I know, money circulation etc.etc..
But if a currency is backed by gold, it means that I can replace the whole currency (not only paper bills, but also coins, savings and checking accounts) with gold. If I am not, then the currency is not fully backed by gold. And if the gold in stock is only enough to replace a certain amount of all money in M1, then the situation is really not that different from now, the amount of money that can be actually replaced by gold is up to negotiations, and if the need arises, a government will drop the backing quote to what is politically opportune at the moment.
And we have not only to replace a single currency, we have to replace all currencies (or at least the most important ones) with gold, otherwise it won't work - all gold would immediately flow out of the country with the gold backed currency to make up for the trade deficit.
1. There is more than one currency in the world, and if we all go back to the gold standard, all currencies have to be converted.
Yes, not all money has to be printed into paper, but no one ever called the dollar "a dollar bill backed security". Yes, the Federal Reserve would run into a problem if everyone went and tried to sell its assets noted in dollar into actual dollar bills. But that would be more a logistical problem. I don't need dollar bills to pay in dollar, I could just use cheques or credit cards. But if the dollar is backed by gold, the Federal Reserve actually has to stock enough real gold to allow for that situation. (Switzerland did at least store enough gold to convert 40% of the swiss M1 into gold until recently).
2. And the market price of gold would skyrock (more than hundredfold according to current prices), and only people owning gold now would profit, everyone else loses out. I would call that "a big, governmentally mandated wealth redistribution."
It has to sit there if we use it to back currencies. For the availability of gold, it's no difference if it is minted into coins in circulation or sitting cast in bars somewhere in a vault.
And you can use gold as a currency right now - currently no important industrial country forbids the gold trade. You are free to trade gold whenever or for whatever you want. For some reason, most people think trading with gold as being to cumbersome to even bother.
Actually, gold backed currencies won't work anymore because of the lack of gold.
Or to put it bluntly: There is not enough gold on this world to pay for your daily needs.
While today, gold is only a minuscle part of world commerce, the amount of gold commerce would have to equal that of all other commerce. At current gold prices, just to pay all wages for a year in the U.S. would eat up nearly the whole gold ever mined thorough human history.
You can just put the idea of a gold backed currency to rest. To formulate it as a paradoxon: Gold is too valuable to waste it on money.
The main problem with the gold standard idea is that all the gold ever mined is not valuable enough to pay for one year's worth of world production. If you would force the world (or even the U.S.) to switch back to the gold standard, you just wouldn't have enough gold at today's prices to even pay the next month's wages.
For reference, the current per capita income per month in the U.S. is close to US$2000, which at current prices ($1600/ozt) is about 1.25 ozt per month and capita in the U.S.. With more than 315 mio inhabitants, this amounts to nearly 400 mio ozt or 12,000 metric tons of gold per month necessary just to pay the U.S. wages. And there are another 6.8 billion people in the world out there not paid yet. Only 170,000 tons of gold are mined since the dawn of history.
No, the infallibility is coupled with the office. The idea behind this dogma is that it's the Holy Chair, represented by its current occupier, who is infallible, not the person actually sitting there.
Because the Quebequois speak french, and thus the drones will probably be confused when their positioning system has to deal with abreviations spelled backwards and the date in different notation.
Yes and no. It's a fundamentally architectural thing. Of course you can abstract from the physical implementation of memory addressing, but then you run in lots of strange quirks. If you have n wires to address memory, you can enumerate 2^n memory addresses and not 10^(floor(n*ld 2)). It makes no sense to cut off the remaining memory just to fit exactly into the 10^x-sizes, it just makes things more complicated, because everywhere you have to check for the validity of a binary representation of a memory address compared to their decimal representation and the available memory.
It adds complexity without providing any advantages except adhering to a number representation whose only root in reality has to do with the fact, that some successful close relatives to Acanthostega (which had "bytes" of digits, e.g. eight digits per hand) evolved to have only two times five digits per hand.
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If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied. The issue here was bullying at the DOJ. You can't fix that with a few tweaks to the law, and if you lower maximum penalties you will find yourself regretting it when someone actually does do something worthy of those maximum penalties.
But then he gets not prosecuted for stealing scientific articles, but for transmitting weapon secrets to foreign powers -- independently of the means to get his hands on said documents. Your argument seems to be that we need to have harsh penalties for wielding a knife, because someone may stab a person with a dagger.
Why being forced to sell a name anyway? Gradiente registered the name "iphone" (lower case p) in 2000. At this time, Apple had two iProducts (iMac and iBook), but there was no sight yet of a long chain of i-labelled consumer gadgets from Apple, and an Apple phone wasn't even on the drawing boards. The iPod came in 2001, so Gradiente's registration surely was without any intention to squat on a future, valuable trademark of Apple.
Within the legal framework of trademark law, the name "iphone" (and all modifications of it, which can be easily confused with the original trademark), is rightfully Gradiente's. It's solely Apple which has a problem here, they tried the courts to solve it, and they lost. So they can beg Gradiente to sell the name to them, or at least get a license to use it, but there is no incentive for Gradiente to agree to any negotiations.
Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.
(Emphasis mine)
So even if some activation mechanism tries to stop a transfer, it's illegal, because the rightholder has no right to oppose the sale and thus is forbidden to use technical or organisational means to hinder it. And this is not only valid for sales to consumers, it's the same für business to business sales (the case in question was about Oracle licenses and software, which are not a typical consumer product).
When COBOL was being used for new development, I don't think the P1 was even out, we're on Xeons now.
When COBOL was being used for new development, the microprocessor wasn't even invented yet, and Intel founder Robert Noyce was working at Fairchild Semiconductor and had his first integreted circuit ready.
Because that's the only thing the user will know: "How long will it take?"
I don't see any reason to forbid cybersex at all. What's the point? Whose live gets improved if cybersex is generally outlawed? Who profits?
For me, this is not primarily a speech issue, it's more an issue of Why anyway?
People will have sex together with whatever means are available. If they can't touch each other, they will invent other ways. Once they wrote arousing mails, then they phoned each other and talked dirty. And now they are using the Internet. Why would one ever think that outlawing people talking about sex will in any way improve someone's live? A law that tries to forbid something so fundamentally human as an erotic talk is just plain silly. Whoever had the idea shows to be completely disconnected from any human reality.
Not only is most of a Lexus Toyota, Lexus is 100% Toyota. Lexus is just a badge at the front of a Toyota made car (and here around, they even share the showrooms).
Those are the people who fall for "work from home, no education required" scams. They are the real victims of this fraud. From an objective point of view, stealing passwords is just a way to trick those people into withdrawing large sums from their account and give it to the perpetrator without a chance to get it back, just by temporarily placing a large sum in their account. Password stealing is thus akin to getting hold of a carrot you can later place in front of the victim's nose.
You don't need an GPS to buy stuff from Amazon. So what's the incentive for Amazon to include a GPS capable chip into a device whose main raison d'etre is to buy from Amazon?
You overlook one of the most important aspects of TFA:
Many transactions can be reversed, and it's especially simple to reverse easy to repudiate transfers.
So yes, all customers of the bank will pay their share for the increased security, fraud detection and the cost associated with reversing repudiated transaction, but the money actually retransferred does not come from the bank or the bank's customers.
Thus, what an account password thief has to do to empty a bank account is to initiate an untraceable and thus non-reversable transfer. One often used way is the use of a money-mule: An easily repudiatable transfer comes from the original victim's account, the money-mule withdraws the money (minus the "commission") and then initiates a second, non-repudiatable and non-reversable money transfer, e.g. via Money Transfer or handing the physical money bills to someone else.
If the original victim notices the theft, the first transfer is repudiated, and the money is retransferred from the money-mule's account, while the money-mule has no chance to reverse the second transaction, because this one is non-repudiatable. Thus the money-mule bears the actual cost of the fraudulent money transfer, the original victim gets the money back.
Fraudulent money transfers with stolen passwords don't actually steal from the person whose password was stolen (except this person for some reason doesn't reverse the transfer), they steal from the persons who are hired to play money-mules. And they are the actual bottle necks here. There is no point in having the passwords to accounts amounting several million dollars, if you have only a single money-mule, and this one will transfer less than $10,000 at once. It probably won't transfer the money a second time because of being already bankrupted by the first transfer going bad.
You don't have any clue what a primary actually does. Right?
If everyone can found his own party and even get elected to the European Parliament (look at the swedish Pirate Party!), there is no point to go through the primaries of two big parties. Just cut out the middleman and get your own election platform! You try to turn a sad necessity of the congealed U.S. two party system into something of an advantage.
Lobbyists are people who try to influence members of the parliament. In former times they were allowed to enter the lobby of the House of Commons in England to meet sympathetic members of the House between sessions, thus the name. If you write to your congress critter, you are lobbying. If you discuss with them in town hall meetings, you are lobbying. If you talk to them in private, you are lobbying. Anything you do between elections to influence members of the parliament is lobbying. Do you really want to get rid of that?
But the gold is not actually held by the government. And there will be a certain quote of money that can not replaced by gold at any given time. This quote is totally open to manipulation and to political negotiations - not very much different than today.
Do some econ101 and find out why my statement isn't. Yes, I know, money circulation etc.etc.. But if a currency is backed by gold, it means that I can replace the whole currency (not only paper bills, but also coins, savings and checking accounts) with gold. If I am not, then the currency is not fully backed by gold. And if the gold in stock is only enough to replace a certain amount of all money in M1, then the situation is really not that different from now, the amount of money that can be actually replaced by gold is up to negotiations, and if the need arises, a government will drop the backing quote to what is politically opportune at the moment. And we have not only to replace a single currency, we have to replace all currencies (or at least the most important ones) with gold, otherwise it won't work - all gold would immediately flow out of the country with the gold backed currency to make up for the trade deficit.
1. There is more than one currency in the world, and if we all go back to the gold standard, all currencies have to be converted. Yes, not all money has to be printed into paper, but no one ever called the dollar "a dollar bill backed security". Yes, the Federal Reserve would run into a problem if everyone went and tried to sell its assets noted in dollar into actual dollar bills. But that would be more a logistical problem. I don't need dollar bills to pay in dollar, I could just use cheques or credit cards. But if the dollar is backed by gold, the Federal Reserve actually has to stock enough real gold to allow for that situation. (Switzerland did at least store enough gold to convert 40% of the swiss M1 into gold until recently).
2. And the market price of gold would skyrock (more than hundredfold according to current prices), and only people owning gold now would profit, everyone else loses out. I would call that "a big, governmentally mandated wealth redistribution."
It has to sit there if we use it to back currencies. For the availability of gold, it's no difference if it is minted into coins in circulation or sitting cast in bars somewhere in a vault. And you can use gold as a currency right now - currently no important industrial country forbids the gold trade. You are free to trade gold whenever or for whatever you want. For some reason, most people think trading with gold as being to cumbersome to even bother.
Actually, gold backed currencies won't work anymore because of the lack of gold.
Or to put it bluntly: There is not enough gold on this world to pay for your daily needs.
While today, gold is only a minuscle part of world commerce, the amount of gold commerce would have to equal that of all other commerce. At current gold prices, just to pay all wages for a year in the U.S. would eat up nearly the whole gold ever mined thorough human history.
You can just put the idea of a gold backed currency to rest. To formulate it as a paradoxon: Gold is too valuable to waste it on money.
The main problem with the gold standard idea is that all the gold ever mined is not valuable enough to pay for one year's worth of world production. If you would force the world (or even the U.S.) to switch back to the gold standard, you just wouldn't have enough gold at today's prices to even pay the next month's wages. For reference, the current per capita income per month in the U.S. is close to US$2000, which at current prices ($1600/ozt) is about 1.25 ozt per month and capita in the U.S.. With more than 315 mio inhabitants, this amounts to nearly 400 mio ozt or 12,000 metric tons of gold per month necessary just to pay the U.S. wages. And there are another 6.8 billion people in the world out there not paid yet. Only 170,000 tons of gold are mined since the dawn of history.
So we could coin a new name: "the true communism fallacy" :)
No, it should belong to the Catholic Church, which does the most business under the "Madonna" label, by far exceeding the singer's revenue.
No, the infallibility is coupled with the office. The idea behind this dogma is that it's the Holy Chair, represented by its current occupier, who is infallible, not the person actually sitting there.
As Alfred Adler once observed: It's easier to fight for your principles than to live according to them.
Because the Quebequois speak french, and thus the drones will probably be confused when their positioning system has to deal with abreviations spelled backwards and the date in different notation.
Yes and no. It's a fundamentally architectural thing. Of course you can abstract from the physical implementation of memory addressing, but then you run in lots of strange quirks. If you have n wires to address memory, you can enumerate 2^n memory addresses and not 10^(floor(n*ld 2)). It makes no sense to cut off the remaining memory just to fit exactly into the 10^x-sizes, it just makes things more complicated, because everywhere you have to check for the validity of a binary representation of a memory address compared to their decimal representation and the available memory. It adds complexity without providing any advantages except adhering to a number representation whose only root in reality has to do with the fact, that some successful close relatives to Acanthostega (which had "bytes" of digits, e.g. eight digits per hand) evolved to have only two times five digits per hand.
You have bytes with 2^10 bits? So my 16-GByte-server is a 128-MByte server at your side?