It is manufacturing new crimes, and prosecuting 12-year-old children.
It's not manufacturing new crimes. The civil prosecution of people who appropriate and distribute unauthorized copies of music is not a crime, it's a civil wrong for which their is a civil penalty: getting sued in court, even if you are only 12 years old. There are criminal prosecutions for violating copyright, but these are few and far between. All of the people getting sued by RIAA are getting sued civilly, and are not being prosecuted for allegedly committing a crime.
You are certainly correct about the moral aspect of all this. It doesn't feel wrong to listen to music for free, when you can listen to it on the radio for free - especially when RIAA consists almost entirely of shady corporations whose only "value added" benefit to artists is the marketing clout from their unholy alliance with FM radio and MTV/VH1/etc.
But that has nothing to do with the law. What is happening to the music industry is that technological progress has made the production of perfect copies very easy, and in the hands of anyone with a computer. The music industry is floundering, because the means of distribution is out of their control.
This, however, does not change the law, and even 12 year old children can be sued for "stealing" music in roughly the same way that they can be sued for shoplifting.
The point of all this is that instead of pretending that copying music is legal, act to change the law. That's what the industry is doing - trying to change the law to benefit it. What we should be doing is to our best to prevent this from happening, and to change the law.
Because the means of distribution of music is now up for grabs, the only thing the labels have going for it is marketing clout. The way to defeat them, once and for all, is to break the alliance of the music industry and radio. If we can prevent the industry from using their influence in what gets played on the radio to dictate to us what music is cool to listen to, artists and consumers will be freed from the shackles of RIAA.
How about releasing the DVDs actually filled with content instead of shipping DVDs with 50 minutes of video so I need to store piles of them.
God, that irritates me. FLCL is a great series, but it's only 2 hours, 30 minutes long. It fits on a single DVD with space to spare. Why is FLCL spread out over three DVDs? Okay, so the publisher wants to be greedy and justify the $65 I'm going to have to spend on it ("Oooooh, look, I get three pieces of $0.50 plastic instead of just one"). Just gouge me the $65 and give me a single, easy to store DVD. You've got a government granted monopoly in the form of copyright, your customers are relatively price tolerant.
I absolutely agree with you, but I tend not to get angry about it if there are at least four episodes on the DVD. When I see three episodes on a DVD, I feel ripped off. It's probably just because VCR tapes could hold only two hours in SP mode and AnimEigo set the standard by selling Urusei Yatusura with four episodes per tape (I was buying anime before DVDs existed).
Maybe what they ought to do is to release the first 2-3 episodes on a single DVD and sell it cheap enough to get people willing to risk buying it, and then cram succeeding DVDs with as many episodes as can fit, because those DVDs will be bought by people who want the whole series.
Better yet, how about a single "teaser" DVD, sold for $10, with first episodes from six or eight different series. I'd buy that, even if I may be interested in only one or two of the programs, because it's anime and it's cheap and it may lead me to discover good anime (and buy DVD's) that I would have otherwise completely ignored.
- He said that the producers of these (non-US) releases don't release the last DVD until they release the whole series as a boxed set. Their plan is to force all the fools (like myself) who bought the single DVDs to buy them all again in the boxed set in order to get the last episodes.
Can anyone confirm or debunk this theory?
I've seen where the producer will release either the first DVD (too many titles to name) or the last DVD (FLCL) in a box designed to hold all of the DVD's in the series.
Time magazine recently yanked an archived article quoting Bush Sr. as basically saying that invading Iraq would not be a wise thing to do.
The article was written in the mid 1990's, not last week. This is an important distinction to make, as your post implies that Bush the Elder disapproves of the actons of Bush the Younger.
But your major point about Time magazine yanking their archived article off the Internet is valid and significant. Unless it was part of a routine culling of articles off their online archives in order to preserve their resources, it is certainly a great wrong to pull this, or any other article, away from free public access.
A person is walking down the street and drops a $20 bill into the gutter. A short while later, I am the first to come along and see it. Because I am the first, as soon as I see it and intend to pick it up, it becomes my property, so long as there is no evidence found of the identity of the unfortunate one.
Near Shoemaker's equity is very similar to the $20 bill example. Should the $20 bill be left to rot or be claimed by another? No, of course not. The same is true with the $225M equity left in-situ Eros by the spacecraft. The first claimant of the un-owned thing, would be the owner.
There are two problems with the $20 bill argument.
First, Mr. Nemitz has not taken actual possession and cannot take possession of an asteroid. He's claiming title by fiat - his title is less legally justified as the Pope's Line of Demarcation dividing the world between Spain and Portugol. Under English Common law, the old way of tranferring title to real property required the "livery of seisen". Essentially the grantor and the grantee had to meet on the property, and the grantor had to pick up a clod of soil and hand it over to the grantee. We don't do this these days, but the principal remains the same. Also, under well-established law concerning "adverse possession", in order to acquire title after taking possession of property, you have to actually improve the property. Since there are no condo's going up on Mr. Nemitz's asteroid, it's not his. Virtual possession is completely bogus, because virtual use of anything is by nature non-exclusive. I can't keep Mr. Nemitz from dreaming about his asteroid, but he can't stop me from dreaming about it either.
Second, the $20 bill argument is fatally flawed because if you find a $20 bill in the street, it's not yours. Technically you have acquired legal possession by picking it up, but you don't have title to the money. If you pick it up and decided to keep it for yourself, you are actually committing embezzlement. While nobody cares particularly about a $20 bill, multiply that into a sack of money falling out of the getaway car after a bank robbery. The money still belongs to the bank, not the person who picked it up off the street. Furthermore, most states have statutes that require you to deliver missing property to the police. If no one claims it within a specified period of time, then the police will give it back to the person who found it.
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Every law is "idiotic" to those who don't like what it means.
Using the DCMA to protect digital cameras of this type isn't an injustice. Many people cannot afford to buy expensive digital cameras or have only a limited use for them - there is definitely a market for this sort of thing. By striking against the company that sells this service, you are really attacking the people who would want to use this service by making it economically impossible for the company to provide "rental" cameras.
The technically "savvy" means of circumventing the system here isn't morally different from putting one quarter into the newspaper box and taking all of the copies for yourself. Your argument is that if newspapers want to protect themselves they shouldn't rely on laws prohibiting theft but should instead invest in expensive newspaper vending technology that will prevent customers from taking more newspapers than they pay for. Fair enough, I suppose, but that doesn't excuse the actions of people circumventing the system that's in place. The DCMA isn't such a bad thing, and it's not as if Ritz is ripping people off with their system.
How will Ritz react? They'll probably have to create rental agreements with customers, under which the customers agree to return the camera to Ritz within a specified period of time and also agree not to use any other means of accessing the photos stored in the camera. Then they'll have to sue people who won't return their cameras or obviously use an alternate means of getting the photographs out. The net result of this isn't a victory for freedom of information. It will be a matter of a few jerks ruining it for the rest of us.
I'm not really an enviormentalist, but since the power transfer isn't 100% efficient, the rest of the energy beamed down to Earth has to go somewhere - I'm sure it will simply heat the atmosphere and flash-cook the occasional stray bird.
The heat generated could be offset by less heat being generated by other means of power production, but that would require us to cut down on coal and oil power plants, etc. while building the microwave power network. Is this really going to happen? It seems it's more than likely that this whole thing will just result in mankind cooking the planet a little bit faster.
If DBZ is being made into a movie I recommend the Wachowski brothers.
Nah, there'd be too much tedious and repetitious mindless violence in a Wachowski brothers film for them to pull off Dragonball Z while making any sense whatsoever.
Sorry, but I'm not a shill for Microsoft. And yes, it is only my opinion that IE is better than Navigator, and it doesn't have to be your opinion. But your resentment at your employer's refusal to allow non-Microsoft browsers doesn't mean that Navigator was a better browser, and the actions of your employer were the actions of your employer, not of Microsoft.
Did bundling have an effect on who won the browser wars? Sure. But Netscape Navigator floundered - it could have stood a chance had it been a better product, and I'd have a lot more sympathy towards Netscape if it was.
I'm not weeping any tears for 3dfx, or even nVidia. Why should I cry for Netscape?
I think a bigger contributor to Navigator's loss was that IE came free, and was 'bundled' with the OS.
I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who ever had to pay for a copy of Netscape Navigator, and IE 4 wasn't bundled with Windows 95 (I remember that I had to download it). In my experience, IE 4 was easier to use and less buggy than Netscape 4 (or whatever version was out at that time).
I made the switch to IE not because it was free (because Netscape was also free), and not because it was bundled with Windows (because at the time, it wasn't).
I switched from Netscape to IE solely because I, the user, thought it was better.
If you read the entire opinion, the court held that tomatoes are vegetables for the purpose of the tariff act under consideration. The court wasn't dictating scientific fact - it was only determining whether or not tomatoes would be subject to the tariff. The court came to a very common-sense decision - tomatoes are vegetables for the purpose of the tariff because people eat them as vegetables and think of them as vegetables.
It's better than the alternative - letting scientists dictate the law by classifying tomatoes as a fruit.
Of course, in the Dredd Scott decision, the Supreme Court decided that slaves who managed to make it into free states were property in the nature of loose cattle, and not people with legal rights, even if granted to them by the state government.
What part of the 3 H's don't the director/writers understand? The Predator hunts when it is very very hot -- that was the underlying theme of the first 2 movies. They need heat, possibly because they are reptilian/cold blooded. Put them in the arctic, and you take them out of their natural hunting environmental conditions, and quite possibly kill them like a Vampire in the desert at high noon.
Ah hell. You've just unveiled a plot point. My guess, substantiated by watching many many bad movies, is that the Predators put the pyramid on the South Pole so that their Predator children can't escape by running away from the aliens - the cold would kill them. I'm sure that the inside of the pyramid is nice and toasty (I'm still downloading the trailer as we speak).
An even better guess is that I'm not going to watch any of this movie beyond the trailer.
What does MS offer that nobody else does in the digital music market?
Perhaps (and this is only a perhaps) the MS product will have superior integration with XP, in the way that the iPod has been successfully integrated with Apple's OS, and support for WMA files, and an iTunish online product that works well with XP also.
I'll judge it when it comes out.
Also, keep in mind that while the "too little, too late" argument may work for you (and more power to you when it does) it doesn't work for the people who wake up next year and say "Gee, I'd like an.mp3 player now." Those people shouldn't base their purchasing decision on what was available in the market in October, 2003. They will purchase one of the products available when they are ready to purchase.
I disagree. I think that they should be prosecuted for impersonating a public official and get jail time, and possible civil forfeiture of their vehicle.
People drive without licenses and insurance all the time - this sort of thing should be punished severely.
of all of these so-called "benchmark" discussions. Everyone really knows, in their heart of hearts, that the only valid benchmark is to be found in real-world applications such as Quake III. I want to know how many fps this alleged "supercomputer" gets.
The poster doesn't understand the burden of proof. In most civil cases, the burden of proof is that the plaintiff (RIAA) has to prove their case by a "preponderance of the evidence". What this really means is that they have to show that their claim is more likely to be true than not.
It isn't the much more difficult "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof in criminal cases.
So, in one of these RIAA cases, a defendant's lawyer can argue that the defendant could have been the victim of this sort of hacking, but it's up to the trier of fact to decide whether or this was actually likely to occur. And frankly, RIAA could get an expert witness to testify that while this loophole may exist, there isn't any likelihood that it was ever exploited prior to, say, today when this story was posted on/.
Even in a criminal case, the jury would not have to come to the conclusion that the possibility of this sort of hacking creates a reasonable doubt preventing the jury from issuing a guilty verdict.
It's a defense, and it'll help, but don't expect it to be the magic pill that will throw RIAA cases out of court.
They would have better luck legalizing and taxing drugs (and it would be more moral) than trying to enforce crazy e-commerce regualtions across state lines. Seriously, the money gets taxed once as income in the state is is spent from and once as income in the state it gets spent in. Isn't that good enough? Why try to put a brake on the great whell of e-commerce that is just starting to get our economy spinning again?
What makes you think it would be so difficult to pull this off? Even if there were 50,000 sales tax jurisdictions, it wouldn't be that difficult to create a standardized database of sales tax requirements based on the location of the buyer or seller or either or both. The enforcement mechanism used to make sure the taxes are collected will be the same used today to ensure that sales tax is collected by brick and mortar retailers - the business is liable for the tax, whether or not they pass the cost on to the consumer.
Your argument about all this money being already subject to income tax is as applicable to brick and mortar retailers and therefore cannot be used to justify treating Internet sales any different from brick and mortar sales. The only justification for treating e-business any different is that e-business needs to develop. But for the most part, e-business is fully developed already. Amazon.com isn't going to get killed because people will have to pay the same sales tax buying books from them as they pay while buying books from the bookstore down the street. e-business may have to cut their margins to stay competitive, but it won't go away.
I buy plenty of stuff on the Internet, from computers to books/DVDs and even meat. This isn't going to change if I have to start paying California sales tax on anything that I buy on the Internet.
Basically, a law prohibiting product ad placement would be regulation of the content of speech, and would therefore be a violation of first amendment free speech guarantees.
Besides, this isn't new. Since the early days of television, advertisers have had a tremendous amount of influence over the producers of content. Product ad placement is just another form of this. If you don't like it, don't watch programs that have product ad placement. If enough people agree with you and do the same, the marketplace will take these programs off the air.
Actually, if you read the constitution, there is no mention that corporations and trade groups are covered and protected by the Bill of Rights. It has been the assumption by corporate lawyers that corporations have first amendment rights.
Sorry, but that's a simplistic view of the law aimed at enforcing the assumption that corporations are unnatural entities that we can completely control. Corporations ARE unnatural entities, but they have the same rights in our society as individuals. This is admittedly silly and ultimately unjust, but it is the law, until we change the law.
My internal images of the characters are still dominated by Ralph Bakshi's animated version, particularly the hobbits.
It could be worse. Your internal images of the characters could be based on the animated Return of the King, complete with that lovely Orc song, "Where there's a whip, there's a way".
As an aside, it occurs to me that Hollywood, or New Zealand, really, could do a whole TV series based on the Simillarion alone.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to be there when they try to use their 15 minutes of fame to get laid at a bar.
Yes, I bet you would like to be there.
It is manufacturing new crimes, and prosecuting 12-year-old children.
It's not manufacturing new crimes. The civil prosecution of people who appropriate and distribute unauthorized copies of music is not a crime, it's a civil wrong for which their is a civil penalty: getting sued in court, even if you are only 12 years old. There are criminal prosecutions for violating copyright, but these are few and far between. All of the people getting sued by RIAA are getting sued civilly, and are not being prosecuted for allegedly committing a crime.
You are certainly correct about the moral aspect of all this. It doesn't feel wrong to listen to music for free, when you can listen to it on the radio for free - especially when RIAA consists almost entirely of shady corporations whose only "value added" benefit to artists is the marketing clout from their unholy alliance with FM radio and MTV/VH1/etc.
But that has nothing to do with the law. What is happening to the music industry is that technological progress has made the production of perfect copies very easy, and in the hands of anyone with a computer. The music industry is floundering, because the means of distribution is out of their control.
This, however, does not change the law, and even 12 year old children can be sued for "stealing" music in roughly the same way that they can be sued for shoplifting.
The point of all this is that instead of pretending that copying music is legal, act to change the law. That's what the industry is doing - trying to change the law to benefit it. What we should be doing is to our best to prevent this from happening, and to change the law.
Because the means of distribution of music is now up for grabs, the only thing the labels have going for it is marketing clout. The way to defeat them, once and for all, is to break the alliance of the music industry and radio. If we can prevent the industry from using their influence in what gets played on the radio to dictate to us what music is cool to listen to, artists and consumers will be freed from the shackles of RIAA.
How about releasing the DVDs actually filled with content instead of shipping DVDs with 50 minutes of video so I need to store piles of them.
God, that irritates me. FLCL is a great series, but it's only 2 hours, 30 minutes long. It fits on a single DVD with space to spare. Why is FLCL spread out over three DVDs? Okay, so the publisher wants to be greedy and justify the $65 I'm going to have to spend on it ("Oooooh, look, I get three pieces of $0.50 plastic instead of just one"). Just gouge me the $65 and give me a single, easy to store DVD. You've got a government granted monopoly in the form of copyright, your customers are relatively price tolerant.
I absolutely agree with you, but I tend not to get angry about it if there are at least four episodes on the DVD. When I see three episodes on a DVD, I feel ripped off. It's probably just because VCR tapes could hold only two hours in SP mode and AnimEigo set the standard by selling Urusei Yatusura with four episodes per tape (I was buying anime before DVDs existed).
Maybe what they ought to do is to release the first 2-3 episodes on a single DVD and sell it cheap enough to get people willing to risk buying it, and then cram succeeding DVDs with as many episodes as can fit, because those DVDs will be bought by people who want the whole series.
Better yet, how about a single "teaser" DVD, sold for $10, with first episodes from six or eight different series. I'd buy that, even if I may be interested in only one or two of the programs, because it's anime and it's cheap and it may lead me to discover good anime (and buy DVD's) that I would have otherwise completely ignored.
- He said that the producers of these (non-US) releases don't release the last DVD until they release the whole series as a boxed set. Their plan is to force all the fools (like myself) who bought the single DVDs to buy them all again in the boxed set in order to get the last episodes.
Can anyone confirm or debunk this theory?
I've seen where the producer will release either the first DVD (too many titles to name) or the last DVD (FLCL) in a box designed to hold all of the DVD's in the series.
Time magazine recently yanked an archived article quoting Bush Sr. as basically saying that invading Iraq would not be a wise thing to do.
The article was written in the mid 1990's, not last week. This is an important distinction to make, as your post implies that Bush the Elder disapproves of the actons of Bush the Younger.
But your major point about Time magazine yanking their archived article off the Internet is valid and significant. Unless it was part of a routine culling of articles off their online archives in order to preserve their resources, it is certainly a great wrong to pull this, or any other article, away from free public access.
A person is walking down the street and drops a $20 bill into the gutter. A short while later, I am the first to come along and see it. Because I am the first, as soon as I see it and intend to pick it up, it becomes my property, so long as there is no evidence found of the identity of the unfortunate one.
Near Shoemaker's equity is very similar to the $20 bill example. Should the $20 bill be left to rot or be claimed by another? No, of course not. The same is true with the $225M equity left in-situ Eros by the spacecraft. The first claimant of the un-owned thing, would be the owner.
There are two problems with the $20 bill argument.
First, Mr. Nemitz has not taken actual possession and cannot take possession of an asteroid. He's claiming title by fiat - his title is less legally justified as the Pope's Line of Demarcation dividing the world between Spain and Portugol. Under English Common law, the old way of tranferring title to real property required the "livery of seisen". Essentially the grantor and the grantee had to meet on the property, and the grantor had to pick up a clod of soil and hand it over to the grantee. We don't do this these days, but the principal remains the same. Also, under well-established law concerning "adverse possession", in order to acquire title after taking possession of property, you have to actually improve the property. Since there are no condo's going up on Mr. Nemitz's asteroid, it's not his. Virtual possession is completely bogus, because virtual use of anything is by nature non-exclusive. I can't keep Mr. Nemitz from dreaming about his asteroid, but he can't stop me from dreaming about it either.
Second, the $20 bill argument is fatally flawed because if you find a $20 bill in the street, it's not yours. Technically you have acquired legal possession by picking it up, but you don't have title to the money. If you pick it up and decided to keep it for yourself, you are actually committing embezzlement. While nobody cares particularly about a $20 bill, multiply that into a sack of money falling out of the getaway car after a bank robbery. The money still belongs to the bank, not the person who picked it up off the street. Furthermore, most states have statutes that require you to deliver missing property to the police. If no one claims it within a specified period of time, then the police will give it back to the person who found it.
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Every law is "idiotic" to those who don't like what it means.
Using the DCMA to protect digital cameras of this type isn't an injustice. Many people cannot afford to buy expensive digital cameras or have only a limited use for them - there is definitely a market for this sort of thing. By striking against the company that sells this service, you are really attacking the people who would want to use this service by making it economically impossible for the company to provide "rental" cameras.
The technically "savvy" means of circumventing the system here isn't morally different from putting one quarter into the newspaper box and taking all of the copies for yourself. Your argument is that if newspapers want to protect themselves they shouldn't rely on laws prohibiting theft but should instead invest in expensive newspaper vending technology that will prevent customers from taking more newspapers than they pay for. Fair enough, I suppose, but that doesn't excuse the actions of people circumventing the system that's in place. The DCMA isn't such a bad thing, and it's not as if Ritz is ripping people off with their system.
How will Ritz react? They'll probably have to create rental agreements with customers, under which the customers agree to return the camera to Ritz within a specified period of time and also agree not to use any other means of accessing the photos stored in the camera. Then they'll have to sue people who won't return their cameras or obviously use an alternate means of getting the photographs out. The net result of this isn't a victory for freedom of information. It will be a matter of a few jerks ruining it for the rest of us.
I'm not really an enviormentalist, but since the power transfer isn't 100% efficient, the rest of the energy beamed down to Earth has to go somewhere - I'm sure it will simply heat the atmosphere and flash-cook the occasional stray bird.
The heat generated could be offset by less heat being generated by other means of power production, but that would require us to cut down on coal and oil power plants, etc. while building the microwave power network. Is this really going to happen? It seems it's more than likely that this whole thing will just result in mankind cooking the planet a little bit faster.
If DBZ is being made into a movie I recommend the Wachowski brothers.
Nah, there'd be too much tedious and repetitious mindless violence in a Wachowski brothers film for them to pull off Dragonball Z while making any sense whatsoever.
Oh, wait...
Nevermind.
Sorry, but I'm not a shill for Microsoft. And yes, it is only my opinion that IE is better than Navigator, and it doesn't have to be your opinion. But your resentment at your employer's refusal to allow non-Microsoft browsers doesn't mean that Navigator was a better browser, and the actions of your employer were the actions of your employer, not of Microsoft.
Did bundling have an effect on who won the browser wars? Sure. But Netscape Navigator floundered - it could have stood a chance had it been a better product, and I'd have a lot more sympathy towards Netscape if it was.
I'm not weeping any tears for 3dfx, or even nVidia. Why should I cry for Netscape?
I think a bigger contributor to Navigator's loss was that IE came free, and was 'bundled' with the OS.
I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who ever had to pay for a copy of Netscape Navigator, and IE 4 wasn't bundled with Windows 95 (I remember that I had to download it). In my experience, IE 4 was easier to use and less buggy than Netscape 4 (or whatever version was out at that time).
I made the switch to IE not because it was free (because Netscape was also free), and not because it was bundled with Windows (because at the time, it wasn't).
I switched from Netscape to IE solely because I, the user, thought it was better.
And I was right.
If you read the entire opinion, the court held that tomatoes are vegetables for the purpose of the tariff act under consideration. The court wasn't dictating scientific fact - it was only determining whether or not tomatoes would be subject to the tariff. The court came to a very common-sense decision - tomatoes are vegetables for the purpose of the tariff because people eat them as vegetables and think of them as vegetables.
It's better than the alternative - letting scientists dictate the law by classifying tomatoes as a fruit.
Of course, in the Dredd Scott decision, the Supreme Court decided that slaves who managed to make it into free states were property in the nature of loose cattle, and not people with legal rights, even if granted to them by the state government.
What part of the 3 H's don't the director/writers understand? The Predator hunts when it is very very hot -- that was the underlying theme of the first 2 movies. They need heat, possibly because they are reptilian/cold blooded. Put them in the arctic, and you take them out of their natural hunting environmental conditions, and quite possibly kill them like a Vampire in the desert at high noon.
Ah hell. You've just unveiled a plot point. My guess, substantiated by watching many many bad movies, is that the Predators put the pyramid on the South Pole so that their Predator children can't escape by running away from the aliens - the cold would kill them. I'm sure that the inside of the pyramid is nice and toasty (I'm still downloading the trailer as we speak).
An even better guess is that I'm not going to watch any of this movie beyond the trailer.
What does MS offer that nobody else does in the digital music market?
.mp3 player now." Those people shouldn't base their purchasing decision on what was available in the market in October, 2003. They will purchase one of the products available when they are ready to purchase.
Perhaps (and this is only a perhaps) the MS product will have superior integration with XP, in the way that the iPod has been successfully integrated with Apple's OS, and support for WMA files, and an iTunish online product that works well with XP also.
I'll judge it when it comes out.
Also, keep in mind that while the "too little, too late" argument may work for you (and more power to you when it does) it doesn't work for the people who wake up next year and say "Gee, I'd like an
I disagree. I think that they should be prosecuted for impersonating a public official and get jail time, and possible civil forfeiture of their vehicle.
People drive without licenses and insurance all the time - this sort of thing should be punished severely.
What's next? That astronauts didn't actually drink Tang in space? All those glasses of orange drink just so I could be like them gone to waste?
Those glasses of orange juice didn't to go waste. They went to your waist.
of all of these so-called "benchmark" discussions. Everyone really knows, in their heart of hearts, that the only valid benchmark is to be found in real-world applications such as Quake III. I want to know how many fps this alleged "supercomputer" gets.
we're really asking for it now, aren't we?
Exactly. It's only a matter of time before someone develops Pusher Robots and Shover Robots to "protect" us from the Terrible Secrets of Space.
Since when a website ever directly killed anyone?
http://www.goatse.cx/
If you call them, you are establishing a relationship with them, allowing them to call you, even if you are on the don't call list.
/. for passing this on.
This leads me to conclude that Dave Barry is actually working for them, and so is
The poster doesn't understand the burden of proof. In most civil cases, the burden of proof is that the plaintiff (RIAA) has to prove their case by a "preponderance of the evidence". What this really means is that they have to show that their claim is more likely to be true than not.
/.
It isn't the much more difficult "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof in criminal cases.
So, in one of these RIAA cases, a defendant's lawyer can argue that the defendant could have been the victim of this sort of hacking, but it's up to the trier of fact to decide whether or this was actually likely to occur. And frankly, RIAA could get an expert witness to testify that while this loophole may exist, there isn't any likelihood that it was ever exploited prior to, say, today when this story was posted on
Even in a criminal case, the jury would not have to come to the conclusion that the possibility of this sort of hacking creates a reasonable doubt preventing the jury from issuing a guilty verdict.
It's a defense, and it'll help, but don't expect it to be the magic pill that will throw RIAA cases out of court.
They would have better luck legalizing and taxing drugs (and it would be more moral) than trying to enforce crazy e-commerce regualtions across state lines. Seriously, the money gets taxed once as income in the state is is spent from and once as income in the state it gets spent in. Isn't that good enough? Why try to put a brake on the great whell of e-commerce that is just starting to get our economy spinning again?
What makes you think it would be so difficult to pull this off? Even if there were 50,000 sales tax jurisdictions, it wouldn't be that difficult to create a standardized database of sales tax requirements based on the location of the buyer or seller or either or both. The enforcement mechanism used to make sure the taxes are collected will be the same used today to ensure that sales tax is collected by brick and mortar retailers - the business is liable for the tax, whether or not they pass the cost on to the consumer.
Your argument about all this money being already subject to income tax is as applicable to brick and mortar retailers and therefore cannot be used to justify treating Internet sales any different from brick and mortar sales. The only justification for treating e-business any different is that e-business needs to develop. But for the most part, e-business is fully developed already. Amazon.com isn't going to get killed because people will have to pay the same sales tax buying books from them as they pay while buying books from the bookstore down the street. e-business may have to cut their margins to stay competitive, but it won't go away.
I buy plenty of stuff on the Internet, from computers to books/DVDs and even meat. This isn't going to change if I have to start paying California sales tax on anything that I buy on the Internet.
Basically, a law prohibiting product ad placement would be regulation of the content of speech, and would therefore be a violation of first amendment free speech guarantees.
Besides, this isn't new. Since the early days of television, advertisers have had a tremendous amount of influence over the producers of content. Product ad placement is just another form of this. If you don't like it, don't watch programs that have product ad placement. If enough people agree with you and do the same, the marketplace will take these programs off the air.
Actually, if you read the constitution, there is no mention that corporations and trade groups are covered and protected by the Bill of Rights. It has been the assumption by corporate lawyers that corporations have first amendment rights.
Sorry, but that's a simplistic view of the law aimed at enforcing the assumption that corporations are unnatural entities that we can completely control. Corporations ARE unnatural entities, but they have the same rights in our society as individuals. This is admittedly silly and ultimately unjust, but it is the law, until we change the law.
My internal images of the characters are still dominated by Ralph Bakshi's animated version, particularly the hobbits.
It could be worse. Your internal images of the characters could be based on the animated Return of the King, complete with that lovely Orc song, "Where there's a whip, there's a way".
As an aside, it occurs to me that Hollywood, or New Zealand, really, could do a whole TV series based on the Simillarion alone.