My understanding of this -- and I am not a lawyer, nor do I even play one on television -- is that for the parody defense to work you have to be parodying the product in question. Unless the book was in some way poking fun *at Jack Daniels*, I don't think you can assert that defense.
If memory serves, the guys at Penny Arcade discovered this the hard way when they did a tarted up Strawberry Shortcake to make fun of Todd McFarlane's Twisted Fairy Tales series. And American Greetings hit them with a C&D that was not quite so polite as this one, explaining that *did not* have the legal right to use an American Greetings property to make fun of Todd McFarlane under parody fair use.
Oh, they can make a profit. Just not a profit of the size they would prefer. Remember that, now, they're pulling in $1 for a good song. They liked it better when they were pulling in $15 for an album... with one good song. Okay, that's unfair to a lot of artists who put out albums that were more good than bad -- but even if you're talking about an album with only good songs on it (and I don't think it's unfair to say that there aren't very many of those), it's still only $8 or $9 to buy all the songs individually. eg: "Bat ouf of Hell," which I think has all solid songs, only has 7 of them.
Not only is this one of the ugliest, most mis-placed pieces of architecture in the metro, its reflective stainless steel skin blinds drivers crossing the Washington Avenue bridge in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind them and they're headed eastbound.
This pinged in my head, and I went a-lookin'. Yep, it was Gehry's concert hall that accidentally implemented Archimedes' Death Ray on the unsuspecting sidewalk , nearby buildings, and the occasional passerby (where, thankfully, it only had the potential to cause sunburn, and not, you know, instantaneous firey death).
Entropy and all that. Nature is a big promoter of entropy.
I dunno -- nature is pretty good at grabbing all that energy that comes sleeting by from the sun and binding it into structures. It's just that it's not in the business of maintaining that infinitessimal bit of the structure that is you.
They didn't prevent anyone from unlocking the phone. They're just not supporting you if you do so.
I don't think anybody would complain about Apple not supporting the phone if you modified the software on it. (Okay, I'm sure somebody would complain, but we'll ignore them for the moment.) If you tried to run a software update and the phone said "Sorry, Dave, this is not a stock software load. Update exiting.", that would be fine. I think folks are upset that Apple may be going out of their way to write the update so that modified phones will be busted by it. Which, really, they can do if they want -- it's their software, and nobody is forcing the update down your throat. But grow some balls and own up to it -- save the "Well, gee, it might bust your phone if you modded it, we honestly have no idea." If it's how you want to roll, come out and say "The update will break your phone if you modded it; you can do what you want with your phone, and we can do what we want with our software." Is that petty and vindictive? Yeah, kinda. If they don't want to take the PR hit for being petty and vindictive, they could just, y'know, not be. This wishy-washy crap where they get to be petty and vindictive and claim it was an accident is, I think, what grates.
Well, it's what grates on me. But then, I don't own an iPhone, so at the end of the day I don't suppose Apple really needs to give a damn what grates on me.
Copy on YouTube, which is not yet Slashdotted
on
Realtime ASCII Goggles
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I found the video posted on YouTube, for folks (like me) who didn't get to the main site before it started smoking.
As a result, you may now set a price floor and not have the Feds come after you as long as you are able to show a federal judge that your price floor actually leads to more competition, not less.
Drat, now I'm going to have to go read the decision, because there can still be a big problem. My understanding (and this is largely from/. commentary, so you're free to start ignoring me immediately) is that, before the decision, a manufacturer setting a minimum sale price was just flat-out illegal, so nobody could do it, ever, full-stop. Now that it's not always illegal, is the onus on the manufacturer to show that it doesn't impede competition, or on someone else to show that it does? Because if it's the latter, small businesses are likely still fucked, because now they need a team of lawyers (who must be paid) and it's going to take a lot more time, which, if they're losing money already (before hiring the lawyers) is going to be enough to starve them out.
But, again, I don't know where the decision places the obligation, so behold! I shall shut up now.
How can a normal fraudster use a credit card number to his personal gain? Does he get goods delivered to his house?
I recall reading that one guy had a bunch of credit card details, and of course came up against that very problem. His solution was to put up a pile of auctions on eBay for various big-ticket items. When those auctions ended and he got the funds, he used the credit cards to order the items and have them shipped to the winners' homes. By the time the people whose cards were used found out, the only information available was for the folks who won the auctions, and the seller was nowhere to be found.
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
The parent poster didn't say anything of the kind. He asserted that there is no victim if the person taking the drugs hurts only themselves. The person in your example has also hurt his children, and there should be (and is) a law against that. Likewise with your example of people who rob or kill for drug money -- there are laws against robbing and killing, which are sufficient whether the cause was getting money for drugs or getting money for a new car.
I've seen a lot of posts which said "Hey! Verizon isn't a person! The Bill of Rights doesn't apply!" This suggests a lack of familiarity with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, heard by the Supreme Court in 1886. The decision didn't say anything about corporations being granted protection by the 14th amendment, but the chief justice was quoted as saying "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." Now, if it's not part of the opinion, I'm given to believe, it's not supposed to count, but that didn't stop it from becoming part of future decisions.
Yes, indeed -- because those two threats were quite real and within the power of the people making them.
Er, as one of the two threats involved the defendant becoming "the boyfriend of a very bad man," I really hope that only one of those threats was within the power of the prosecutor. Because if the DA has to be a jailhouse pimp on the side, I don't think the state is paying him enough.
The NFL legal team have made the classic schoolboy error
Always scout your opponent before you play them.
So, besides being made to look all manner of stupid in front of their colleagues in the courtroom, the coaches are going to be calling and making fun of their basic strategy screwup? Cool. Maybe some of the players will give them wedgies and stuff them in their lockers, too.
Already (and, at the time I'm posting this, there are only around 25 comments), there are people talking about how copies of XP that they know they obtained legally fail to authenticate (so the reported piracy rate might be inflated), people pointing out, correctly, that even a modestly bright pirate will be smart enough not to try to authenticate when he knows it will fail (and so the estimated piracy rate might be too low), and people coming up with a smattering of other ways in which WGA could give false positives or negatives.
It seems safe to say that Microsoft has no frelling clue how many pirated copies of XP are out there, and that WGA is approximately useless as a tool for trying to count them. Not that it will matter at all in the media -- "One In Five Windows Installs Is Non-Genuine" is too good a headline to pass up.
But at this point they just want to see SCO die in a fire and send out a message to any other SCO wannabe.
(With apologies to JMS and Vir Cotto)
"What do you want, IBM?" "I'd like to live just long enough to be there when the judge cuts off your head and sticks it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of law school graduates that some cash grabs come with too high a price. I would look up at your penniless eyes and wave, like this." [waves, smiling]
A lot, speaking practically. Without cameras, it is infeasible (if not impossible) to follow huge numbers of people around on an ongoing basis, just speaking from a manpower perspective. Yes, it's entirely legal for a cop to follow me around all day, every day, for no reason at all -- but it's unlikely to happen, because it's a relatively large allocation of resources with very low expectation of gain. And, again, even if you were so inclined, you couldn't set a cop to follow everyone around all day, every day, for no reason, without half the population being in the employ of the police. So, while there's no reasonable expectation of privacy in any one public place, most people in fact do expect that their movements aren't being minutely watched for no reason, and that's what ubiquitous cameras provide in practical terms: the ability to find out everywhere someone has gone, once you decide you want to know, as if you've had someone tailing them.
And, this is a huge conceptual problem, because it's, well, statistical privacy. The expectation that, most of the time, no particular party is taking any special note of what I'm doing.
I don't know -- IANAM (I Am Not A Mathematician), but it sounds like an exceedingly difficult problem. To fingerprint a video, you're going to have to use specific information from it, and I don't know what information will remain constant between different encoding qualities and even encoding applications using the same theoretical quality. I assume you have to fuzz it up (the mathematical equivalent of "this area of the image from time index X to time index X+2 is reddish-orange, and this other area during this other time range is pinky-russet"), and that will result in false positives. And, if the algorithm is publicly known, people will mess with the areas that are known to be used in the fingerprinting to cause false negatives. Or just mess slightly with the saturation or intensity of the entire video, if they don't know the precise locations but do know that this is the kind of thing the algorithm checks. And with the number of people hammering at it, I don't expect the rough workings of the algorithm to remain entirely secret for long. And then it's a footrace like with Google's ranking algorithms, with lots of folks working to figure out how to beat it, Google improving it, and hackers having at it again.
In any case, I shall watch developments with much interest.
Do Slashdotters still wear watches? If so, I'd be curious as to why.
I do, and prefer mechanical movements. In a classic case of life immitating profound geekery, I was putting together a character for an RPG who was obsessed with watches, so I decided to research them a little, and ended up being fascinated myself with mechanical movements. The precision of the escapement mechanisms, the engineering that went into various complications. Then I discovered the really exotic complications, like minute repeaters; at the press of a button on the watch, it chimes -- one tone for the hour, a different one for the quarter-hour, and finally a third for the minute into that quarter-hour. Imagine the engineering that's required to do that entirely with gears, and then make it small enough to wear on your wrist. And, then, there are the really insane things, like the Ulysse Nardin Trilogy of Time series, one of which can act as an astrolabe.
I, sadly, can afford none of these. But my Seiko S-Wave Automatic is quite sturdy.
Worse, you put it in their heads without getting their permission. If we continue to pretend that thoughts are just like chairs, they should sue your ass for trespassing. Depending on the quality of the song, maybe for dumping garbage on their property, too.
... but Vista ist not yet released to retail and until then, it will support the Zune for sure...
I dunno; "ForSure" hasn't been the Zune's area of core competence, as it were.
Of course, that might be the joke you were going for, and I'm just a little slow on the uptake this late in the afternoon, in which case I beg your pardon.
Slashdot Mirror
(Actually, upon researching it, Penny Arcade was taking a poke at American McGee's take on "Alice in Wonderland". My bad.)
My understanding of this -- and I am not a lawyer, nor do I even play one on television -- is that for the parody defense to work you have to be parodying the product in question. Unless the book was in some way poking fun *at Jack Daniels*, I don't think you can assert that defense.
If memory serves, the guys at Penny Arcade discovered this the hard way when they did a tarted up Strawberry Shortcake to make fun of Todd McFarlane's Twisted Fairy Tales series. And American Greetings hit them with a C&D that was not quite so polite as this one, explaining that *did not* have the legal right to use an American Greetings property to make fun of Todd McFarlane under parody fair use.
Man. It's like these scientists have never even seen a horror movie.
Oh, they can make a profit. Just not a profit of the size they would prefer. Remember that, now, they're pulling in $1 for a good song. They liked it better when they were pulling in $15 for an album ... with one good song. Okay, that's unfair to a lot of artists who put out albums that were more good than bad -- but even if you're talking about an album with only good songs on it (and I don't think it's unfair to say that there aren't very many of those), it's still only $8 or $9 to buy all the songs individually. eg: "Bat ouf of Hell," which I think has all solid songs, only has 7 of them.
Not only is this one of the ugliest, most mis-placed pieces of architecture in the metro, its reflective stainless steel skin blinds drivers crossing the Washington Avenue bridge in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind them and they're headed eastbound.
This pinged in my head, and I went a-lookin'. Yep, it was Gehry's concert hall that accidentally implemented Archimedes' Death Ray on the unsuspecting sidewalk , nearby buildings, and the occasional passerby (where, thankfully, it only had the potential to cause sunburn, and not, you know, instantaneous firey death).
This guy could give Bloody Stupid Johnson a run for his money.
Entropy and all that. Nature is a big promoter of entropy.
I dunno -- nature is pretty good at grabbing all that energy that comes sleeting by from the sun and binding it into structures. It's just that it's not in the business of maintaining that infinitessimal bit of the structure that is you.
They didn't prevent anyone from unlocking the phone. They're just not supporting you if you do so.
I don't think anybody would complain about Apple not supporting the phone if you modified the software on it. (Okay, I'm sure somebody would complain, but we'll ignore them for the moment.) If you tried to run a software update and the phone said "Sorry, Dave, this is not a stock software load. Update exiting.", that would be fine. I think folks are upset that Apple may be going out of their way to write the update so that modified phones will be busted by it. Which, really, they can do if they want -- it's their software, and nobody is forcing the update down your throat. But grow some balls and own up to it -- save the "Well, gee, it might bust your phone if you modded it, we honestly have no idea." If it's how you want to roll, come out and say "The update will break your phone if you modded it; you can do what you want with your phone, and we can do what we want with our software." Is that petty and vindictive? Yeah, kinda. If they don't want to take the PR hit for being petty and vindictive, they could just, y'know, not be. This wishy-washy crap where they get to be petty and vindictive and claim it was an accident is, I think, what grates.
Well, it's what grates on me. But then, I don't own an iPhone, so at the end of the day I don't suppose Apple really needs to give a damn what grates on me.
I found the video posted on YouTube, for folks (like me) who didn't get to the main site before it started smoking.
Yeah but you should see my Hummer H2!
[Looks out window]
Actually, I can.
As a result, you may now set a price floor and not have the Feds come after you as long as you are able to show a federal judge that your price floor actually leads to more competition, not less.
/. commentary, so you're free to start ignoring me immediately) is that, before the decision, a manufacturer setting a minimum sale price was just flat-out illegal, so nobody could do it, ever, full-stop. Now that it's not always illegal, is the onus on the manufacturer to show that it doesn't impede competition, or on someone else to show that it does? Because if it's the latter, small businesses are likely still fucked, because now they need a team of lawyers (who must be paid) and it's going to take a lot more time, which, if they're losing money already (before hiring the lawyers) is going to be enough to starve them out.
Drat, now I'm going to have to go read the decision, because there can still be a big problem. My understanding (and this is largely from
But, again, I don't know where the decision places the obligation, so behold! I shall shut up now.
How can a normal fraudster use a credit card number to his personal gain?
Does he get goods delivered to his house?
I recall reading that one guy had a bunch of credit card details, and of course came up against that very problem. His solution was to put up a pile of auctions on eBay for various big-ticket items. When those auctions ended and he got the funds, he used the credit cards to order the items and have them shipped to the winners' homes. By the time the people whose cards were used found out, the only information available was for the folks who won the auctions, and the seller was nowhere to be found.
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
The parent poster didn't say anything of the kind. He asserted that there is no victim if the person taking the drugs hurts only themselves. The person in your example has also hurt his children, and there should be (and is) a law against that. Likewise with your example of people who rob or kill for drug money -- there are laws against robbing and killing, which are sufficient whether the cause was getting money for drugs or getting money for a new car.
I've seen a lot of posts which said "Hey! Verizon isn't a person! The Bill of Rights doesn't apply!" This suggests a lack of familiarity with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, heard by the Supreme Court in 1886. The decision didn't say anything about corporations being granted protection by the 14th amendment, but the chief justice was quoted as saying "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." Now, if it's not part of the opinion, I'm given to believe, it's not supposed to count, but that didn't stop it from becoming part of future decisions.
Gah. I think they should plant him twelve feet deep, just to be safe.
Yes, indeed -- because those two threats were quite real and within the power of the people making them.
Er, as one of the two threats involved the defendant becoming "the boyfriend of a very bad man," I really hope that only one of those threats was within the power of the prosecutor. Because if the DA has to be a jailhouse pimp on the side, I don't think the state is paying him enough.
The NFL legal team have made the classic schoolboy error
Always scout your opponent before you play them.
So, besides being made to look all manner of stupid in front of their colleagues in the courtroom, the coaches are going to be calling and making fun of their basic strategy screwup? Cool. Maybe some of the players will give them wedgies and stuff them in their lockers, too.
Already (and, at the time I'm posting this, there are only around 25 comments), there are people talking about how copies of XP that they know they obtained legally fail to authenticate (so the reported piracy rate might be inflated), people pointing out, correctly, that even a modestly bright pirate will be smart enough not to try to authenticate when he knows it will fail (and so the estimated piracy rate might be too low), and people coming up with a smattering of other ways in which WGA could give false positives or negatives.
It seems safe to say that Microsoft has no frelling clue how many pirated copies of XP are out there, and that WGA is approximately useless as a tool for trying to count them. Not that it will matter at all in the media -- "One In Five Windows Installs Is Non-Genuine" is too good a headline to pass up.
But at this point they just want to see SCO die in a fire and send out a message to any other SCO wannabe.
(With apologies to JMS and Vir Cotto)
"What do you want, IBM?"
"I'd like to live just long enough to be there when the judge cuts off your head and sticks it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of law school graduates that some cash grabs come with too high a price. I would look up at your penniless eyes and wave, like this." [waves, smiling]
Well, it's like that old British saying: "If the pennies look after you, the lookers will get themselves pounded."
Wait...
EMI, in a recent press release, has declared that water is wet and the Earth is very likely in orbit around the sun.
"We're as surprised as anyone," said one EMI representative.
How much privacy are you giving up?
A lot, speaking practically. Without cameras, it is infeasible (if not impossible) to follow huge numbers of people around on an ongoing basis, just speaking from a manpower perspective. Yes, it's entirely legal for a cop to follow me around all day, every day, for no reason at all -- but it's unlikely to happen, because it's a relatively large allocation of resources with very low expectation of gain. And, again, even if you were so inclined, you couldn't set a cop to follow everyone around all day, every day, for no reason, without half the population being in the employ of the police. So, while there's no reasonable expectation of privacy in any one public place, most people in fact do expect that their movements aren't being minutely watched for no reason, and that's what ubiquitous cameras provide in practical terms: the ability to find out everywhere someone has gone, once you decide you want to know, as if you've had someone tailing them.
And, this is a huge conceptual problem, because it's, well, statistical privacy. The expectation that, most of the time, no particular party is taking any special note of what I'm doing.
I don't know -- IANAM (I Am Not A Mathematician), but it sounds like an exceedingly difficult problem. To fingerprint a video, you're going to have to use specific information from it, and I don't know what information will remain constant between different encoding qualities and even encoding applications using the same theoretical quality. I assume you have to fuzz it up (the mathematical equivalent of "this area of the image from time index X to time index X+2 is reddish-orange, and this other area during this other time range is pinky-russet"), and that will result in false positives. And, if the algorithm is publicly known, people will mess with the areas that are known to be used in the fingerprinting to cause false negatives. Or just mess slightly with the saturation or intensity of the entire video, if they don't know the precise locations but do know that this is the kind of thing the algorithm checks. And with the number of people hammering at it, I don't expect the rough workings of the algorithm to remain entirely secret for long. And then it's a footrace like with Google's ranking algorithms, with lots of folks working to figure out how to beat it, Google improving it, and hackers having at it again.
In any case, I shall watch developments with much interest.
Do Slashdotters still wear watches? If so, I'd be curious as to why.
I do, and prefer mechanical movements. In a classic case of life immitating profound geekery, I was putting together a character for an RPG who was obsessed with watches, so I decided to research them a little, and ended up being fascinated myself with mechanical movements. The precision of the escapement mechanisms, the engineering that went into various complications. Then I discovered the really exotic complications, like minute repeaters; at the press of a button on the watch, it chimes -- one tone for the hour, a different one for the quarter-hour, and finally a third for the minute into that quarter-hour. Imagine the engineering that's required to do that entirely with gears, and then make it small enough to wear on your wrist. And, then, there are the really insane things, like the Ulysse Nardin Trilogy of Time series, one of which can act as an astrolabe.
I, sadly, can afford none of these. But my Seiko S-Wave Automatic is quite sturdy.
By letting them hear it, you gave it to them.
Worse, you put it in their heads without getting their permission. If we continue to pretend that thoughts are just like chairs, they should sue your ass for trespassing. Depending on the quality of the song, maybe for dumping garbage on their property, too.
... but Vista ist not yet released to retail and until then, it will support the Zune for sure...
I dunno; "ForSure" hasn't been the Zune's area of core competence, as it were.
Of course, that might be the joke you were going for, and I'm just a little slow on the uptake this late in the afternoon, in which case I beg your pardon.