Yeah, I thought of that. Well, actually I thought of the lobster example but yours is equally valid. You'd have to have those live goods in containers before you put them in the capsule. The container could have an RFID that tells the capsule that the life form inside is supposed to be in there. It would also probably be fairly trivial to limit the bio detection to mammals only - - a lobster or a live fish is not going to have the same temperature readings as a person. Then further limit the biodetection to something weighing more than whatever the average toddler weighs and you'd even be able to transport squirrels and possums to the local southern restaurant;)
The trouble is that our society has decided that protecting idiots from themselves is not only the right thing to do, but legally mandated. The whole reason all those moronic warning labels are on everything (Do not drive vehicle with sunshade in place. Do not eat silicon moisture absorber in the stereo box. Do not spray water into electrical outlet.) is because somewhere, someone actually did whatever it's warning you against, and sued, and won.
In our society a burglar who falls through a skylight can sue the homeowner and has a good chance of winning. The same will happen here. Even though everyone knows the little moron shouldn't have been there, and that our gene pool will be far better off without him polluting it with his inevitably mentally deficient offspring, his estate will still collect a lot of money over it.
That's going to be the biggest problem if this system goes live. Not the terrorist crap, but morons looking for a free roller coaster ride. They'll probably have to put some sort of bio sensor inside the capsules that will stop it from moving if there's something alive inside.
The flip side to that is that when the peacock is inflated, the thinking will be "Well hell! I got plenty'a cash! Think I'll buy that useless $100 widget after all!"
Education doesn't help. People do dumb things all the time despite having been "educated" that they're dumb. We all know it's dumb to tailgate, but the majority of drivers do it all the time.
It does try to address a legitimate problem, but I think people will get them with good intentions and then a month or two later end up bypassing the alerts. If I set myself a monthly budget of 2 grand, but I have 4 coming in, I'm eventually going to get annoyed at the hard-to-open wallet.
Do you happen to know if this includes the unlimited Droid plan, which is currently required if you get a Droid, and which unlike their normal 5GB "unlimited" plan is actually unlimited.
I agree, to a point. Just unlocking a phone should not be illegal. Unlocking a phone with intent to sell stolen merchandise should be.
There are plenty of things that you can do as long as you're doing them without criminal intent:
You can cross state lines all you want, but if you do it during or preparatory to the commission of a crime, the crossing of state lines becomes criminal.
Buying Sudafed is perfectly legal, unless you're buying it to make meth, and so on.
Doubtless. The point was that Miranda decided that being ignorant of your rights, in that case your right to an attorney, was, in fact, an excuse and that the state was responsible for informing you of your rights.
In this case, if he pled guilty without realizing he was pleading guilty to a nonexistent crime, I think it could be argued that it was the state's responsibility to admit that what he did isn't illegal.
Well, if the allegations that the guy bought *stolen* phones are true, then that doesn't really apply. No business model can survive against a large enough competitor who's selling the products he stole from the business.
Hell we sharpened ours by rubbing them on the cinderblocks of the building at recess. We could slice paper with those things. With all the stupid crap we did (which I now know was similar to what convicts do to build weapons - you may take that as a commentary on the educational system if you wish) it's a miracle no one got (seriously) hurt.
My 6th grade class could have told you. We used to get those nice fat rubber bands, stretch them between thumb and forefinger as a slingshot, and launch pencils with them. We'd usually only bury them in the ceiling tiles, but it wouldn't have taken much of a leap of imagination to start using them as crossbows.
No, that's true, but when you allow the navigation computer (which is linked to the stereo) to monitor the SRS system, you by definition hook the systems together. That means that if you screw with the stereo, you might piss off the SRS monitoring system, which would trip the light.
The poster with the Volvo probably didn't actually damage anything - he probably just disconnected the wiring harness, which would have registered with the computer as a fault code since a module that's supposed to be hooked up suddenly wouldn't be. The dealer probably charged him to clear the fault code, which was caused by him, and therefore not covered by the warranty.
Acura. My 07 TL monitors the status of the SRS (and just about every other electronic system including the ECU) and displays it via the diagnostic function (that customers aren't supposed to know about or access) of the navi computer. It even allows you to perform manual system checks.
I read somewhere (I think it was here) that a modern car generally has more lines of code than the F22 fighter jet. They're incredibly complex, and systems you'd never think would have anything to do with each other are interconnected. The weirdest one on my car (that I know about anyway) is that the climate control is connected to the navigation system, so that it can monitor the angle of the sun and adjust each vent's output accordingly.
I think the point was that in this case, for whatever reason, the SRS system was hooked into the car stereo wiring, and so when he messed with the wiring to install the new equipment, he pissed off the SRS system. Since his actions caused the SRS issue, it wouldn't fall under warranty coverage.
Well, let's keep to the scientific accuracy meme here: "Cold" does not equal "Snow." At very cold temperatures, it won't snow. Ask anyone who lives in the upper Midwest. It is only at moderately cold temperatures that you actually get snowfall. So, if a region that has historically not seen snow around Jan/Feb because it's usually somewhere around -20 or so, starts exhibiting a pattern of snow, this does not prove that the region is now colder. In fact, it's evidence that the region is now probably warmer.
While that does not in itself prove warming on a global scale, the fact (Fact, not opinion, and not television sensationalism) that the ice caps and glaciers are melting does indicate that it is warmer. That doesn't mean it doesn't still get cold, even where the glaciers are, but it means the number of below freezing days are fewer, giving the glacier more time above freezing to melt. That's really not all that hard to comprehend. What's harder for most people to understand is that we're not talking about an overall average climate change of large amounts. Average warming by just a few degrees is enough to get us in trouble.
The fact is, as will be supported by any just about any climatologist not employed by an energy company, that global warming does exist. Whether or not it's caused by man is up for a bit more debate, though it's pretty inconceivable that a species could balloon from around 600 million or so in 1700 to nearly 7 billion now, and in that time that species has gone from riding around on horses to putting billions of cars on the road, planes in the sky, ships on the water, etc, all of which burn carbon-based fuel, without having some sort of impact on the environment.
There's a very large difference between wanting to shove the "undesirables" (your word, not mine) under the rug, and wanting to be able to have an ad-supported internet venture without getting fined by the feds.
As someone who had a father who died of a degenerative muscle disease, and who benefited from ADA-won societal improvements for the 12 years he was wheelchair bound, I'm not going to trash the ADA.
But that same father also believed that there are limits as to how far you can go to accommodate people with disabilities. Forcing businesses to be generally handicap-accessible is one thing. Forcing them to be accessible to all handicaps, no matter what the disability, is quite another. Putting in a wheelchair ramp has wide reaching benefits to people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, and the elderly. Forcing a website to be 100% compliant with a standalone text reader benefits the vanishingly few people who are both blind and who visit that specific site.
The long and the short of it is, sometimes shit happens, and people just have to work with the hand they're dealt. I went to a college that had set itself up as a disability-friendly campus. I saw all kinds of disabilities there, and not all of them could be reasonably accommodated. I expect there to be curb cuts and grade-level entries to benefit the large number of people with wheelchairs, walkers, and canes. I do not expect there to be robotic assistance arms in every aisle of a store to benefit the tiny number of people who were born without limbs. This proposal would push onto internet vendors and hosts the same level of absurdity as would be required to push robotic assistance arms on brick and mortar stores.
TFA says exceptions will be made for some *personal* web sites. It doesn't say anything about non-profit or organizational web sites. Presumably this means I'm going to have to make my car club's web site (a public organization that is incorporated as a non-profit) accessible to the blind, despite the fact that the car club doesn't have any blind people in it. That is monumentally stupid.
No. I don't cater to the ADD mentality that thinks only Twitter posts are short enough to bother reading. If you can't manage to read 5 short paragraphs, that's a reflection on you, not me.
This woman did not take away the vendor's right to distribute. They can still distribute it. They probably still are.
Now, if you're arguing that she should be fined more than a buck because 400 people downloaded part of the file from her, then you're on a bit more solid ground. But then I'd say we need to find out exactly how much of that file they got, and charge her accordingly.
Since torrents only have a small part of any given file downloaded from any one machine, I don't think the owner of that machine should be treated as though she distributed the file. It would be like me tearing a page out of a library book and showing it to 30 people. Sure, I should be charged for screwing with the book, but to charge me with giving the whole book for free to 30 people would be asinine, even if they went around to other vandals and collected the rest of the book. That's not my problem. I'm responsible for what I did, not what other petty criminals did.
So if you want to go down that path, then you should have to submit direct evidence as to how much of the file I actually sent. I only sent 100k of a 3 meg file? Then I guess I'm only responsible for 1/30th of the file. So we can amend the original $1 fee for downloading the file to, what? $1+xy, where y is the average percentage of the file that got sent out and x is the number of people that downloaded from me? I'm fine with that, but I'm not sure the lawyers, judge, and jury will like having to figure the math quite so precisely. Especially since assuming 1,000 people download 1/30th of the file from me, that adds up to 30 bucks. You'll pay the lawyer a lot more than that to have his clerk do the math.
At any rate, I defy you to prove to me that sending out 1/30th of a file does $64,000 in damages to the file's creator per offense.
(yes I know 100k is not precisely 1/30th of 3 megs, but I don't feel like complicating the calculation)
I think it's the woman's prose that she would have objected to. I have trouble believing that she would be pissed off that a magazine revealed how much butter she used, but that they lifted her entire article.
As someone who works in media, I'm not one who agrees with the "It's OK to pirate as long as you don't sell it" philosophy. Perhaps I'm in the/. minority, but I don't have any pirated software/media on my computer.
Now I'm not here to be on a high horse and tell the pirates how much they suck even if I thought that, which I don't. And I'm certainly not going to defend the RIAA, which needs to be smacked down hard.
Is piracy copyright infringement? Yes. You can come up with all the justifications you want about how it's not stealing. And you're right. It's not. It's copyright infringement, and I do think that people deserve to be paid for their work. I don't work for free at my job, and I don't expect you to work for free either, even if you record a song I really want to put on my mp3 player. No matter how you justify it, it's still wrong, just like I'm wrong when I speed even though I justify it by saying that everyone else is doing it.
Copyright infringement is wrong, and illegal. Should the RIAA be allowed to direct the prosecution of pirates? No. Should they be allowed to have what amounts to their own police force that conducts raids to catch the pirates? Certainly not. Should you be fined 65 grand per file? Hell no. They sell them for a buck. You owe them a buck. You then owe damages totaling whatever your state's damages for a misdemeanor are set to as your punishment. This is all gonna amount to around 500 bucks at worst. That's plenty. It's a deterrent without being ridiculously over the top.
But my original point stands. Piracy is wrong. It's more wrong to turn around and sell what you pirated. It's even more wrong to do it and then suggest that the creator of the content owes you money for the privilege of having her work stolen and published without permission.
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Yeah, I thought of that. Well, actually I thought of the lobster example but yours is equally valid. You'd have to have those live goods in containers before you put them in the capsule. The container could have an RFID that tells the capsule that the life form inside is supposed to be in there. It would also probably be fairly trivial to limit the bio detection to mammals only - - a lobster or a live fish is not going to have the same temperature readings as a person. Then further limit the biodetection to something weighing more than whatever the average toddler weighs and you'd even be able to transport squirrels and possums to the local southern restaurant ;)
The trouble is that our society has decided that protecting idiots from themselves is not only the right thing to do, but legally mandated. The whole reason all those moronic warning labels are on everything (Do not drive vehicle with sunshade in place. Do not eat silicon moisture absorber in the stereo box. Do not spray water into electrical outlet.) is because somewhere, someone actually did whatever it's warning you against, and sued, and won.
In our society a burglar who falls through a skylight can sue the homeowner and has a good chance of winning. The same will happen here. Even though everyone knows the little moron shouldn't have been there, and that our gene pool will be far better off without him polluting it with his inevitably mentally deficient offspring, his estate will still collect a lot of money over it.
That's going to be the biggest problem if this system goes live. Not the terrorist crap, but morons looking for a free roller coaster ride. They'll probably have to put some sort of bio sensor inside the capsules that will stop it from moving if there's something alive inside.
The flip side to that is that when the peacock is inflated, the thinking will be "Well hell! I got plenty'a cash! Think I'll buy that useless $100 widget after all!"
Education doesn't help. People do dumb things all the time despite having been "educated" that they're dumb. We all know it's dumb to tailgate, but the majority of drivers do it all the time.
As they say in the south, "you can't fix stupid."
It does try to address a legitimate problem, but I think people will get them with good intentions and then a month or two later end up bypassing the alerts. If I set myself a monthly budget of 2 grand, but I have 4 coming in, I'm eventually going to get annoyed at the hard-to-open wallet.
Do you happen to know if this includes the unlimited Droid plan, which is currently required if you get a Droid, and which unlike their normal 5GB "unlimited" plan is actually unlimited.
I agree, to a point. Just unlocking a phone should not be illegal. Unlocking a phone with intent to sell stolen merchandise should be.
There are plenty of things that you can do as long as you're doing them without criminal intent:
You can cross state lines all you want, but if you do it during or preparatory to the commission of a crime, the crossing of state lines becomes criminal.
Buying Sudafed is perfectly legal, unless you're buying it to make meth, and so on.
Doubtless. The point was that Miranda decided that being ignorant of your rights, in that case your right to an attorney, was, in fact, an excuse and that the state was responsible for informing you of your rights.
In this case, if he pled guilty without realizing he was pleading guilty to a nonexistent crime, I think it could be argued that it was the state's responsibility to admit that what he did isn't illegal.
Well, if the allegations that the guy bought *stolen* phones are true, then that doesn't really apply. No business model can survive against a large enough competitor who's selling the products he stole from the business.
Miranda v. Arizona would tend to disagree with that notion as applied here. . .
Hell we sharpened ours by rubbing them on the cinderblocks of the building at recess. We could slice paper with those things. With all the stupid crap we did (which I now know was similar to what convicts do to build weapons - you may take that as a commentary on the educational system if you wish) it's a miracle no one got (seriously) hurt.
My 6th grade class could have told you. We used to get those nice fat rubber bands, stretch them between thumb and forefinger as a slingshot, and launch pencils with them. We'd usually only bury them in the ceiling tiles, but it wouldn't have taken much of a leap of imagination to start using them as crossbows.
No, that's true, but when you allow the navigation computer (which is linked to the stereo) to monitor the SRS system, you by definition hook the systems together. That means that if you screw with the stereo, you might piss off the SRS monitoring system, which would trip the light.
The poster with the Volvo probably didn't actually damage anything - he probably just disconnected the wiring harness, which would have registered with the computer as a fault code since a module that's supposed to be hooked up suddenly wouldn't be. The dealer probably charged him to clear the fault code, which was caused by him, and therefore not covered by the warranty.
Acura. My 07 TL monitors the status of the SRS (and just about every other electronic system including the ECU) and displays it via the diagnostic function (that customers aren't supposed to know about or access) of the navi computer. It even allows you to perform manual system checks.
I read somewhere (I think it was here) that a modern car generally has more lines of code than the F22 fighter jet. They're incredibly complex, and systems you'd never think would have anything to do with each other are interconnected. The weirdest one on my car (that I know about anyway) is that the climate control is connected to the navigation system, so that it can monitor the angle of the sun and adjust each vent's output accordingly.
How is the cop going to know that it can play video unless you're dumb enough to actually watch a movie while driving, and he happens to notice?
They're pretty used to seeing integrated nav units these days. Unless you give him reason to think otherwise, that's what he'll assume you have.
I think the point was that in this case, for whatever reason, the SRS system was hooked into the car stereo wiring, and so when he messed with the wiring to install the new equipment, he pissed off the SRS system. Since his actions caused the SRS issue, it wouldn't fall under warranty coverage.
Well, let's keep to the scientific accuracy meme here: "Cold" does not equal "Snow." At very cold temperatures, it won't snow. Ask anyone who lives in the upper Midwest. It is only at moderately cold temperatures that you actually get snowfall. So, if a region that has historically not seen snow around Jan/Feb because it's usually somewhere around -20 or so, starts exhibiting a pattern of snow, this does not prove that the region is now colder. In fact, it's evidence that the region is now probably warmer.
While that does not in itself prove warming on a global scale, the fact (Fact, not opinion, and not television sensationalism) that the ice caps and glaciers are melting does indicate that it is warmer. That doesn't mean it doesn't still get cold, even where the glaciers are, but it means the number of below freezing days are fewer, giving the glacier more time above freezing to melt. That's really not all that hard to comprehend. What's harder for most people to understand is that we're not talking about an overall average climate change of large amounts. Average warming by just a few degrees is enough to get us in trouble.
The fact is, as will be supported by any just about any climatologist not employed by an energy company, that global warming does exist. Whether or not it's caused by man is up for a bit more debate, though it's pretty inconceivable that a species could balloon from around 600 million or so in 1700 to nearly 7 billion now, and in that time that species has gone from riding around on horses to putting billions of cars on the road, planes in the sky, ships on the water, etc, all of which burn carbon-based fuel, without having some sort of impact on the environment.
There's a very large difference between wanting to shove the "undesirables" (your word, not mine) under the rug, and wanting to be able to have an ad-supported internet venture without getting fined by the feds.
As someone who had a father who died of a degenerative muscle disease, and who benefited from ADA-won societal improvements for the 12 years he was wheelchair bound, I'm not going to trash the ADA.
But that same father also believed that there are limits as to how far you can go to accommodate people with disabilities. Forcing businesses to be generally handicap-accessible is one thing. Forcing them to be accessible to all handicaps, no matter what the disability, is quite another. Putting in a wheelchair ramp has wide reaching benefits to people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, and the elderly. Forcing a website to be 100% compliant with a standalone text reader benefits the vanishingly few people who are both blind and who visit that specific site.
The long and the short of it is, sometimes shit happens, and people just have to work with the hand they're dealt. I went to a college that had set itself up as a disability-friendly campus. I saw all kinds of disabilities there, and not all of them could be reasonably accommodated. I expect there to be curb cuts and grade-level entries to benefit the large number of people with wheelchairs, walkers, and canes. I do not expect there to be robotic assistance arms in every aisle of a store to benefit the tiny number of people who were born without limbs. This proposal would push onto internet vendors and hosts the same level of absurdity as would be required to push robotic assistance arms on brick and mortar stores.
TFA says exceptions will be made for some *personal* web sites. It doesn't say anything about non-profit or organizational web sites. Presumably this means I'm going to have to make my car club's web site (a public organization that is incorporated as a non-profit) accessible to the blind, despite the fact that the car club doesn't have any blind people in it. That is monumentally stupid.
When this app hits the market, someone should see what permissions it's asking for.
I can see it now - uploads to an auto-twitter-updater. "LOL @Soandso has herpes!"
No. I don't cater to the ADD mentality that thinks only Twitter posts are short enough to bother reading. If you can't manage to read 5 short paragraphs, that's a reflection on you, not me.
This woman did not take away the vendor's right to distribute. They can still distribute it. They probably still are.
Now, if you're arguing that she should be fined more than a buck because 400 people downloaded part of the file from her, then you're on a bit more solid ground. But then I'd say we need to find out exactly how much of that file they got, and charge her accordingly.
Since torrents only have a small part of any given file downloaded from any one machine, I don't think the owner of that machine should be treated as though she distributed the file. It would be like me tearing a page out of a library book and showing it to 30 people. Sure, I should be charged for screwing with the book, but to charge me with giving the whole book for free to 30 people would be asinine, even if they went around to other vandals and collected the rest of the book. That's not my problem. I'm responsible for what I did, not what other petty criminals did.
So if you want to go down that path, then you should have to submit direct evidence as to how much of the file I actually sent. I only sent 100k of a 3 meg file? Then I guess I'm only responsible for 1/30th of the file. So we can amend the original $1 fee for downloading the file to, what? $1+xy, where y is the average percentage of the file that got sent out and x is the number of people that downloaded from me? I'm fine with that, but I'm not sure the lawyers, judge, and jury will like having to figure the math quite so precisely. Especially since assuming 1,000 people download 1/30th of the file from me, that adds up to 30 bucks. You'll pay the lawyer a lot more than that to have his clerk do the math.
At any rate, I defy you to prove to me that sending out 1/30th of a file does $64,000 in damages to the file's creator per offense.
(yes I know 100k is not precisely 1/30th of 3 megs, but I don't feel like complicating the calculation)
I think it's the woman's prose that she would have objected to. I have trouble believing that she would be pissed off that a magazine revealed how much butter she used, but that they lifted her entire article.
As someone who works in media, I'm not one who agrees with the "It's OK to pirate as long as you don't sell it" philosophy. Perhaps I'm in the /. minority, but I don't have any pirated software/media on my computer.
Now I'm not here to be on a high horse and tell the pirates how much they suck even if I thought that, which I don't. And I'm certainly not going to defend the RIAA, which needs to be smacked down hard.
Is piracy copyright infringement? Yes. You can come up with all the justifications you want about how it's not stealing. And you're right. It's not. It's copyright infringement, and I do think that people deserve to be paid for their work. I don't work for free at my job, and I don't expect you to work for free either, even if you record a song I really want to put on my mp3 player. No matter how you justify it, it's still wrong, just like I'm wrong when I speed even though I justify it by saying that everyone else is doing it.
Copyright infringement is wrong, and illegal. Should the RIAA be allowed to direct the prosecution of pirates? No. Should they be allowed to have what amounts to their own police force that conducts raids to catch the pirates? Certainly not. Should you be fined 65 grand per file? Hell no. They sell them for a buck. You owe them a buck. You then owe damages totaling whatever your state's damages for a misdemeanor are set to as your punishment. This is all gonna amount to around 500 bucks at worst. That's plenty. It's a deterrent without being ridiculously over the top.
But my original point stands. Piracy is wrong. It's more wrong to turn around and sell what you pirated. It's even more wrong to do it and then suggest that the creator of the content owes you money for the privilege of having her work stolen and published without permission.
I was referring to the non-legal definition of "public domain" which would be "place where the public can go."
Should have made that more clear. Apologies.