HTML/CSS is a fair text markup language, it's a horrible tool to design user interfaces JavaScript is a fair way to make small DOM scripts, it's a horrible programming language.
But with a big enough hammer called the World Wide Web, you can make a square peg fit a round hole.
I can still see the business in large scale printing, like for hanging it up on a wall... but the 10x15 or 13x18 paper copies? Nah.... And for the photos on the wall, it's not exactly an impulse buy. I can just do this at a bunch of services online that work really well. I just don't see the market either.
Not to mention I think this is relevant. A lot of people today have completely disassociated the slabs of meat found vacuum packed in the store from actual livestock. I don't mean that they don't actually know, they just don't like to think about it. I don't particularly like reminding myself that a rump steak is an animal's butt myself, but it tastes good. Same with sausages, try reminding people the skin is made of intestines and see how many friends you make. I don't think lab made meat would be a hard sell at all, once you got over any concerns that the meat might not be healthy for you..
I'm sorry this is one of the lamest arguments I have heard. Your typical e-book reader will last MONTHS in the hands of a heavy reader without recharge. The most common problem around our house is that by the time these things need charging we need to try and actually find the charger.
That doesn't stop you from having a "doh" moment when you realize it's out and you're not near an outlet. Same as Steam's offline mode is great if you've planned to be offline and checked that it works, but it sucks when the service is down and for some reason it insists on connecting to the mothership before you can play. Same if it breaks, if it happens often you're doing it wrong but it's almost impossible to "break" a book, while I have managed to damage a netbook because the suitcase got flipped around by the airport system until the netbook was stuck at an angle and all the heavy stuff landed on top of it. Books always work and are all but indestructible.
I think the in-order architecture was just as much based on the other key feature of Atom that Intel didn't talk so much about to consumers - die size and cost for Intel. If we compare the early 230 and 330 to contemporary 45nm processors then a single core Atom was 25 mm^2, dual core 2x25 mm^2, Wolfsdale dual-core 107 mm^2 and quad core 2x107 mm^2. On top of that comes better edge utilization of wafers and lower defect rate since each chip is smaller. In practice Intel could probably produce 5 single-cores Atoms for the cost of one Wolfsdale dual core, allowing Intel to sell a $29 CPU in a market they'd otherwise charge $100+.
I think that even if Atom and Haswell starts to overlap they'll belong to two quite different markets for Intel, one is the low performance - low cost market and the other the high performance - high cost market even if they're in the same power envelope. And if the Atoms are smaller than the Haswells, well Intel can have high margins on both. Besides I doubt Intel has forgotten that the Atoms are their SoC solution for smart phones and such, Anandtech did a pretty solid power analysis of their Clovertrail platform and the Atom CPU peaked at <1W, the platform at <5W. Haswell has a long way to go to reach those levels, even if a turbocharged Atom and ULV Haswell could intersect at 10W.
I think I experienced that. It was in the 80s, old IBM PC and somehow the machine froze - not just the screen but it didn't respond to input or anything, but I left it running in the hope it'd recover. Suddenly there was a rather loud bang as a capacitor blew and released its magic smoke. Of course it could be coincidence, but I suspect it was the computer crashing and sending a very bad signal to the screen. This was the age where you'd check machine and screen compatibility before plugging it in, probably for a good reason.
They'll also have ULX Haswells that go down to 10W and support 4K, I think both price and performance-wise they'd be a better match. Besides, going from 132 ppi on the iPad 2 to 264 ppi on the iPad 3 was huge and the Nexus 10 tops that with 299 ppi, but I don't see that race going much further since they are hitting the limits on human vision. I just hope we'll see reasonably priced 4K desktop monitors soon, they're also good for huge TVs but really serve no point on a 50" TV.
If this particular case does not turn out to be an insulated incident it can put a lot of people in jail.
Isolated incident, you can only use insulated in the same meaning as shielded. "I try to isolate/insulate/shield my team from management's whims" works but "a shielded incident" doesn't work so "an insulated incident" doesn't either. The reason is isolation is a state but insulation a barrier, so the opposite of isolated is widespread while the opposite of insulated is uninsulated. This has been a service announcement from your friendly neighborhood grammar Nazi.
I don't really see it, maybe if it was an unique theme park ride that lost a lot of its "uniqueness" when people could see it without going there but the movie theater he recorded it in didn't suffer any particular negative effects - not any more than any other movie theater trying to show the same movie at least. Sure it's probably a violation of the cinema's rules like not bringing your own food and drinks, but we don't put people in prison for 5 years because of that. The clash is between this guy and the owners of the copyright, just like with DVDs.
I think part of the defendant's actions do cross the line between intellectual property theft and criminal theft
From something that it wasn't to something that it wasn't? It passed the boundary between copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement, but nothing left their possession so nothing was stolen. Why does it have to be stolen to be "serious"? Espionage is serious. Leaking top secret documents or your medical records is serious. Comparing it to something entirely different instead only shows a lack of merits for why copying information should be wrong in this case.
Unless that was just the criminal legal system and the studios have yet to file civil lawsuit for a couple hundred billions. I think this guy can forget about owning anything ever again.
That IPv6 isn't adopted doesn't have anything to do with the qualities of the protocol. It's as simple as this:
1. We're not out of addresses yet. If you've been smart you've grabbed some space or if you're an international company you get some from the registries that still give them out that you don't have to worry. 2. Even when we hit that brick wall, you just buy them from somebody else. Short term it's probably cheaper than to fix your systems.
People knew that Y2K was coming waaaaaaaaaay before year 2000, yet most fixing happened in 1999 because now it couldn't be put off any longer. Guess what? People aren't going to switch to IPv6 until it's clear that doing it now has a better business case than buying some more IPv4 and waiting for the dust to settle.
That would probably be less inaccurate than friends, but there's plenty people on my Facebook I wouldn't say are acquaintances either. Contacts is probably the most relation-neutral word I can come up with, like the contact list at work which has everything from people I just happen to work with - like the people I just happened to go to class with on FB - to coworkers I talk to every day. Friends, family, acquaintances, class mates, colleagues all seem like natural subgroups of contacts. Then again, if I want to point it out I just use "friends" with the quotes, I think everyone knows what a Facebook "friend" is.
As far as I can tell this is not actually true, at least not in the US. IANAL, but the people here seem to be. As long as you're not in any way an accessory before or after the fact, as long as you remain silent and don't misrepresent or obstruct the course of justice by lying about not seeing anything when you did and as long as the victim isn't in your custody like being the parent or guardian and you don't have a professional relationship like a teacher, doctor or psychologist who has extra legal obligations then there's no general legal requirement to report crime. Even the crime of misprision require you to conceal the crime, not mere failing to report it. If you're just a completely unrelated bystander, you can do nothing. Cheering them on would make you an accessory, though.
FWIW I've stopped getting mod points for years. Maybe I was a crap moderator. But whatever it is, Slashdot is doing better than kuro5hin.
Try metamoderating, I have excellent karma but pretty much never get mod points. If I do then I usually get a batch of mod points soon after. I don't generally bother since the people who want to troll the mod system use non-moderated choices like "-1, Overrated" anyway.
If you are the operator of such a "third party file host", where are you going to get the IP addresses from?
As an operator you need to have a public IPv4 address but there's billions of them, it's not a that scarce resource. People just need to be able to share your files via a server, whether it's rapidshare or gmail or facebook albums or youtube or whatever doesn't matter. Hell even P2P networks will work as long as there's enough "active" hosts to talk to the passive ones. When we run out you'll probably have to pay a little to have a full IPv4 address to yourself, just like many now charge a little extra for a fixed IP and that'll be enough to free up IP space.
There's been at least a few projectors and the Toshiba TV that doesn't actually have any way of accepting a 4K signal, but they'll upscale to 4K for the buzzword compliance. And there's still a lot of awkward solutions for pairing cables to make it work, or HDMI 1.4 solutions that'll only do 30 fps max. I think I might be a year early but I too hope for an affordable true 4K monitor, so far the only pre-announcement I've heard is Sharp with a $5500 32" model which is still way over the top and it needs to have a single cable solution like DisplayPort 1.2 - as I understand it AMD and nVidia's cards are ready, Intel will be ready with Haswell but it still seems up in the air if there'll be any screens in consumer price ranges.
Don't call us, we'll call you. I actually had an Internet connection like that years back, entire campus hidden behind a single IP and no incoming ports. It was rather crippled but as long as the other half of the connection had a normal connection I could always connect to their servers and up/download. On modern IM services it'll even negotiate so that other people can send you files because under the hood you connect out instead. Worst case if you're both stuck behind such solutions you can always pass files via some third party file host. It's not pretty but it's not useless either, I bet enough people just browse and check their mail to not even notice.
This. This is exactly why 99% of code written under corporate auspices sucks major ass. Try getting a Director/VP/C-suite to understand why unmaintainable, shitty code sucks and hurts the business. Believe me, I've tried. Maybe 1 in 100 understands.
Technical debt is like real debt, easy to acquire and a bitch to pay off. Which is why most managers don't do that, they just pay interest (extra development time and bugs) and take up more debt. Yes, eventually it might grind to a halt but that might take years and your manager isn't planning to stay around that long, at the very least he's looking for a promotion so it'll be his underling's failure to meet the deadlines. Or they've just been so convinced by marketing that the window is right now and they must just ship and get the product out there and hit it big before a competitor steals all the buzz and customers. I think they at some level understand but they aren't measured by it, whether you ship on time or not is clear. The state of the code base is just a fuzzy feeling. A manager can't use that to justify missing the deadline, it just sounds like a pathetic excuse for failure.
Or better yet, when Coolermaster and Silverstone make phone enclosures, Asus and Gigabyte sell phone boards, etc..
You really feel Asus, Gigabyte etc. contribute much when they're all using the same few chipsets from Intel/AMD? Almost all the "differentiation" could have been done with expansion cards in case you'd like another NIC or more USB3 ports or two more SATA3 ports. The differences otherwise are highly marginal.
There will be a brief sweet spot where the MI are roughly equivalent with humans, and the games will be as good as any humans can create. Eventually the games created by MI with minds more complex than any human will be unplayable to humans, or they'll seem patronizing and joyless.
You know, adults aren't all that bad at making kid's games. Besides, if you look at the formula for bumping WoW up another 5-10 levels I think you're vastly exaggerating our own complexity.
To me it appears that the current copyright law is unclear when it comes to hyperlinking to copyrighted content - it is probably simply not part of copyright law now, which is not surprising as the www is a very young medium.
The exclusive rights of a copyright holder are few and ennumerated, reproduction, derivates, distribution and public performance. Linking by itself is clearly not any of those things, so linking to a legal copy is legal. Now linking in furtherance of a copyright violation may potentially be illegal, just like providing a bank robber with a getaway vehicle may be illegal. That's the basis for contributory and vacarious liability plus of course all the general case law on "aiding and abetting".But asking for linking to be copyright infringement is to add an entirely new exclusive right to the copyright holder, not just the copyright but the "linkright". You don't just own the content, you own the right to say who, when and under what conditions anyone can point to the content. I'd own the rights to say who can link to this comment.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. (...) There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for.
Just because there isn't a taxi meter running it doesn't mean you don't have obligations. Consider say a fixed-bid delivery, would you accept that after working six months then two days before handover the client says "Actually, we've changed our minds. And since we've got nothing, we'll give nothing. Have a nice day!" or would you be calling the lawyers about a breach of contract? It was part of the contract when you signed it, you were given consideration for it even if "delivery" of your non-compete comes later.
The first two sentences seem aimed at things like The Pirate Bay and other sites linking to illegal copies, which they think should be illegal under some kind of contribution theory. And that you could at least argue, that there's a difference between pointing people to a legal gun shop and your illegal arms dealer friend Tony. Amending the law to say linking is never illegal would be a very strong result, if you're not hosting it you're not liable for it period. It would be very good for everyone casually linking to websites everywhere, but would would enable the business model of 1) Upload content anonymous to hosting sites, 2) Post links to said content on your ad-supported link site, 3) Profit from ad revenue. Not many "???" steps in that plan.
But the last sentence really takes it over the top, they assert the right to control all links pointing to their copyrighted work period and the "infringement" letters go with that definition too. It's like telling a map service that you made ad money on pointing people to our store, so you owe us money. To be illegal under copyright the, the law must be broken somehow because you can't have secondary infringement without a primary infringement. If I point people to your article, you can either choose to provide them a copy - which would be legal - or refuse them a copy - which would be legal. Under no circumstances could this lead to copyright law being violated as anything that happens once people follow the link is under full control of the copyright holder. Arguing otherwise is not just stupidity, but insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML/CSS is a fair text markup language, it's a horrible tool to design user interfaces
JavaScript is a fair way to make small DOM scripts, it's a horrible programming language.
But with a big enough hammer called the World Wide Web, you can make a square peg fit a round hole.
I can still see the business in large scale printing, like for hanging it up on a wall... but the 10x15 or 13x18 paper copies? Nah.... And for the photos on the wall, it's not exactly an impulse buy. I can just do this at a bunch of services online that work really well. I just don't see the market either.
Here's a tough question: Should I start planning to move to California in a couple years
Actually, the question is not tough but the answer may be: No.
Not to mention I think this is relevant. A lot of people today have completely disassociated the slabs of meat found vacuum packed in the store from actual livestock. I don't mean that they don't actually know, they just don't like to think about it. I don't particularly like reminding myself that a rump steak is an animal's butt myself, but it tastes good. Same with sausages, try reminding people the skin is made of intestines and see how many friends you make. I don't think lab made meat would be a hard sell at all, once you got over any concerns that the meat might not be healthy for you..
I'm sorry this is one of the lamest arguments I have heard. Your typical e-book reader will last MONTHS in the hands of a heavy reader without recharge. The most common problem around our house is that by the time these things need charging we need to try and actually find the charger.
That doesn't stop you from having a "doh" moment when you realize it's out and you're not near an outlet. Same as Steam's offline mode is great if you've planned to be offline and checked that it works, but it sucks when the service is down and for some reason it insists on connecting to the mothership before you can play. Same if it breaks, if it happens often you're doing it wrong but it's almost impossible to "break" a book, while I have managed to damage a netbook because the suitcase got flipped around by the airport system until the netbook was stuck at an angle and all the heavy stuff landed on top of it. Books always work and are all but indestructible.
I think the in-order architecture was just as much based on the other key feature of Atom that Intel didn't talk so much about to consumers - die size and cost for Intel. If we compare the early 230 and 330 to contemporary 45nm processors then a single core Atom was 25 mm^2, dual core 2x25 mm^2, Wolfsdale dual-core 107 mm^2 and quad core 2x107 mm^2. On top of that comes better edge utilization of wafers and lower defect rate since each chip is smaller. In practice Intel could probably produce 5 single-cores Atoms for the cost of one Wolfsdale dual core, allowing Intel to sell a $29 CPU in a market they'd otherwise charge $100+.
I think that even if Atom and Haswell starts to overlap they'll belong to two quite different markets for Intel, one is the low performance - low cost market and the other the high performance - high cost market even if they're in the same power envelope. And if the Atoms are smaller than the Haswells, well Intel can have high margins on both. Besides I doubt Intel has forgotten that the Atoms are their SoC solution for smart phones and such, Anandtech did a pretty solid power analysis of their Clovertrail platform and the Atom CPU peaked at <1W, the platform at <5W. Haswell has a long way to go to reach those levels, even if a turbocharged Atom and ULV Haswell could intersect at 10W.
I think I experienced that. It was in the 80s, old IBM PC and somehow the machine froze - not just the screen but it didn't respond to input or anything, but I left it running in the hope it'd recover. Suddenly there was a rather loud bang as a capacitor blew and released its magic smoke. Of course it could be coincidence, but I suspect it was the computer crashing and sending a very bad signal to the screen. This was the age where you'd check machine and screen compatibility before plugging it in, probably for a good reason.
They'll also have ULX Haswells that go down to 10W and support 4K, I think both price and performance-wise they'd be a better match. Besides, going from 132 ppi on the iPad 2 to 264 ppi on the iPad 3 was huge and the Nexus 10 tops that with 299 ppi, but I don't see that race going much further since they are hitting the limits on human vision. I just hope we'll see reasonably priced 4K desktop monitors soon, they're also good for huge TVs but really serve no point on a 50" TV.
I have one more irritation, at the moment it uses 130MB of memory just sitting in the tray. Now I have 16GB of RAM, but seriously?
If this particular case does not turn out to be an insulated incident it can put a lot of people in jail.
Isolated incident, you can only use insulated in the same meaning as shielded. "I try to isolate/insulate/shield my team from management's whims" works but "a shielded incident" doesn't work so "an insulated incident" doesn't either. The reason is isolation is a state but insulation a barrier, so the opposite of isolated is widespread while the opposite of insulated is uninsulated. This has been a service announcement from your friendly neighborhood grammar Nazi.
I don't really see it, maybe if it was an unique theme park ride that lost a lot of its "uniqueness" when people could see it without going there but the movie theater he recorded it in didn't suffer any particular negative effects - not any more than any other movie theater trying to show the same movie at least. Sure it's probably a violation of the cinema's rules like not bringing your own food and drinks, but we don't put people in prison for 5 years because of that. The clash is between this guy and the owners of the copyright, just like with DVDs.
I think part of the defendant's actions do cross the line between intellectual property theft and criminal theft
From something that it wasn't to something that it wasn't? It passed the boundary between copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement, but nothing left their possession so nothing was stolen. Why does it have to be stolen to be "serious"? Espionage is serious. Leaking top secret documents or your medical records is serious. Comparing it to something entirely different instead only shows a lack of merits for why copying information should be wrong in this case.
Unless that was just the criminal legal system and the studios have yet to file civil lawsuit for a couple hundred billions. I think this guy can forget about owning anything ever again.
That IPv6 isn't adopted doesn't have anything to do with the qualities of the protocol. It's as simple as this:
1. We're not out of addresses yet. If you've been smart you've grabbed some space or if you're an international company you get some from the registries that still give them out that you don't have to worry.
2. Even when we hit that brick wall, you just buy them from somebody else. Short term it's probably cheaper than to fix your systems.
People knew that Y2K was coming waaaaaaaaaay before year 2000, yet most fixing happened in 1999 because now it couldn't be put off any longer. Guess what? People aren't going to switch to IPv6 until it's clear that doing it now has a better business case than buying some more IPv4 and waiting for the dust to settle.
There is already a word for that, acquaintances.
That would probably be less inaccurate than friends, but there's plenty people on my Facebook I wouldn't say are acquaintances either. Contacts is probably the most relation-neutral word I can come up with, like the contact list at work which has everything from people I just happen to work with - like the people I just happened to go to class with on FB - to coworkers I talk to every day. Friends, family, acquaintances, class mates, colleagues all seem like natural subgroups of contacts. Then again, if I want to point it out I just use "friends" with the quotes, I think everyone knows what a Facebook "friend" is.
As far as I can tell this is not actually true, at least not in the US. IANAL, but the people here seem to be. As long as you're not in any way an accessory before or after the fact, as long as you remain silent and don't misrepresent or obstruct the course of justice by lying about not seeing anything when you did and as long as the victim isn't in your custody like being the parent or guardian and you don't have a professional relationship like a teacher, doctor or psychologist who has extra legal obligations then there's no general legal requirement to report crime. Even the crime of misprision require you to conceal the crime, not mere failing to report it. If you're just a completely unrelated bystander, you can do nothing. Cheering them on would make you an accessory, though.
FWIW I've stopped getting mod points for years. Maybe I was a crap moderator. But whatever it is, Slashdot is doing better than kuro5hin.
Try metamoderating, I have excellent karma but pretty much never get mod points. If I do then I usually get a batch of mod points soon after. I don't generally bother since the people who want to troll the mod system use non-moderated choices like "-1, Overrated" anyway.
If you are the operator of such a "third party file host", where are you going to get the IP addresses from?
As an operator you need to have a public IPv4 address but there's billions of them, it's not a that scarce resource. People just need to be able to share your files via a server, whether it's rapidshare or gmail or facebook albums or youtube or whatever doesn't matter. Hell even P2P networks will work as long as there's enough "active" hosts to talk to the passive ones. When we run out you'll probably have to pay a little to have a full IPv4 address to yourself, just like many now charge a little extra for a fixed IP and that'll be enough to free up IP space.
There's been at least a few projectors and the Toshiba TV that doesn't actually have any way of accepting a 4K signal, but they'll upscale to 4K for the buzzword compliance. And there's still a lot of awkward solutions for pairing cables to make it work, or HDMI 1.4 solutions that'll only do 30 fps max. I think I might be a year early but I too hope for an affordable true 4K monitor, so far the only pre-announcement I've heard is Sharp with a $5500 32" model which is still way over the top and it needs to have a single cable solution like DisplayPort 1.2 - as I understand it AMD and nVidia's cards are ready, Intel will be ready with Haswell but it still seems up in the air if there'll be any screens in consumer price ranges.
Don't call us, we'll call you. I actually had an Internet connection like that years back, entire campus hidden behind a single IP and no incoming ports. It was rather crippled but as long as the other half of the connection had a normal connection I could always connect to their servers and up/download. On modern IM services it'll even negotiate so that other people can send you files because under the hood you connect out instead. Worst case if you're both stuck behind such solutions you can always pass files via some third party file host. It's not pretty but it's not useless either, I bet enough people just browse and check their mail to not even notice.
This. This is exactly why 99% of code written under corporate auspices sucks major ass. Try getting a Director/VP/C-suite to understand why unmaintainable, shitty code sucks and hurts the business. Believe me, I've tried. Maybe 1 in 100 understands.
Technical debt is like real debt, easy to acquire and a bitch to pay off. Which is why most managers don't do that, they just pay interest (extra development time and bugs) and take up more debt. Yes, eventually it might grind to a halt but that might take years and your manager isn't planning to stay around that long, at the very least he's looking for a promotion so it'll be his underling's failure to meet the deadlines. Or they've just been so convinced by marketing that the window is right now and they must just ship and get the product out there and hit it big before a competitor steals all the buzz and customers. I think they at some level understand but they aren't measured by it, whether you ship on time or not is clear. The state of the code base is just a fuzzy feeling. A manager can't use that to justify missing the deadline, it just sounds like a pathetic excuse for failure.
Or better yet, when Coolermaster and Silverstone make phone enclosures, Asus and Gigabyte sell phone boards, etc..
You really feel Asus, Gigabyte etc. contribute much when they're all using the same few chipsets from Intel/AMD? Almost all the "differentiation" could have been done with expansion cards in case you'd like another NIC or more USB3 ports or two more SATA3 ports. The differences otherwise are highly marginal.
There will be a brief sweet spot where the MI are roughly equivalent with humans, and the games will be as good as any humans can create. Eventually the games created by MI with minds more complex than any human will be unplayable to humans, or they'll seem patronizing and joyless.
You know, adults aren't all that bad at making kid's games. Besides, if you look at the formula for bumping WoW up another 5-10 levels I think you're vastly exaggerating our own complexity.
To me it appears that the current copyright law is unclear when it comes to hyperlinking to copyrighted content - it is probably simply not part of copyright law now, which is not surprising as the www is a very young medium.
The exclusive rights of a copyright holder are few and ennumerated, reproduction, derivates, distribution and public performance. Linking by itself is clearly not any of those things, so linking to a legal copy is legal. Now linking in furtherance of a copyright violation may potentially be illegal, just like providing a bank robber with a getaway vehicle may be illegal. That's the basis for contributory and vacarious liability plus of course all the general case law on "aiding and abetting".But asking for linking to be copyright infringement is to add an entirely new exclusive right to the copyright holder, not just the copyright but the "linkright". You don't just own the content, you own the right to say who, when and under what conditions anyone can point to the content. I'd own the rights to say who can link to this comment.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. (...) There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for.
Just because there isn't a taxi meter running it doesn't mean you don't have obligations. Consider say a fixed-bid delivery, would you accept that after working six months then two days before handover the client says "Actually, we've changed our minds. And since we've got nothing, we'll give nothing. Have a nice day!" or would you be calling the lawyers about a breach of contract? It was part of the contract when you signed it, you were given consideration for it even if "delivery" of your non-compete comes later.
The first two sentences seem aimed at things like The Pirate Bay and other sites linking to illegal copies, which they think should be illegal under some kind of contribution theory. And that you could at least argue, that there's a difference between pointing people to a legal gun shop and your illegal arms dealer friend Tony. Amending the law to say linking is never illegal would be a very strong result, if you're not hosting it you're not liable for it period. It would be very good for everyone casually linking to websites everywhere, but would would enable the business model of 1) Upload content anonymous to hosting sites, 2) Post links to said content on your ad-supported link site, 3) Profit from ad revenue. Not many "???" steps in that plan.
But the last sentence really takes it over the top, they assert the right to control all links pointing to their copyrighted work period and the "infringement" letters go with that definition too. It's like telling a map service that you made ad money on pointing people to our store, so you owe us money. To be illegal under copyright the, the law must be broken somehow because you can't have secondary infringement without a primary infringement. If I point people to your article, you can either choose to provide them a copy - which would be legal - or refuse them a copy - which would be legal. Under no circumstances could this lead to copyright law being violated as anything that happens once people follow the link is under full control of the copyright holder. Arguing otherwise is not just stupidity, but insanity.