It was there in plain English, for ****'s sake! I'm trying to figure out if (a) You actually read what you were replying to, (b) You "read" it, but made some kneejerk assumptions about what I was saying and didn't actually pay attention, or (c) You're just stupid. I don't know which. Well, just to make you happy (which is odd, because I find you rude and dislike you just from your two posts), I read your post again. What I still take away from it is that you discourage people who are not lawyers from commenting on points of law. I do not see any clear declaration that law should be easily understood by any reasonable person off the street.
If your intent was as you stated in your reply, I have some advice for you: learn to write and speak so that people can easily understand your position. "I am for this." "I am against this."
You must be a first year law student Valdrax. If he was, he'd still be better-qualified to talk about how the law works than 99.9% of the people contributing to this and similar Slashdot discussions. BS.
Law should make sense. In other words, if you took a competent person off the street and explained a law to them (and I don't mean something that takes hours of classes - more like 5 minutes) they should then tell you, "That makes sense." I detest the idea, and the fact, that laws, even simple ones, require specially trained people to interpret them.
Society makes the law, so why shouldn't a member of that society be able to understand it and explain it?
I stopped watching professional sports years ago. The players are overpaid. The whole sport is overpaid. They are not role models, but people constantly hold them up as role models and idolize them - because they can play a sport well, not because they are good people in other ways.
Want to slap the NFL awake? Don't watch the game. Get a lot of people to not watch the game, because you disagree with what they do. I mean on a huge scale, something that would have to be organized and talked up online to reach lots and lots of people. After the suits realize "We lost 80% of our audience due to a boycott, because we are jerks." you might see a change. It doesn't have to be for the Super Bowl, just a game, and people have to know why nobody watched it.
Obviously, there are exceptions to what I am saying about players, but I haven't noticed too many in recent years.
This is right out of one of the DoD instructions, how to dispose of unclassified hard drives (paraphrased):
In an approved facility and on an approved surface (concrete), wearing appropriate safety gear (goggles and hearing protection) strike the hard drive repeatedly with a heavy object (a sledgehammer) until it is physically destroyed.
I tell you, Marines have all sorts of fun following those instructions.
Employee #1: "You know, our operating systems sure do piss off a lot of people." Employee #2: "Do you think that there is any way to make money off of that?"
That's a very good point and definitely a factor for laptops. Still, one of the "golden bullets" I want now is a blazing fast way to retrieve data from the storage.
Well, that and size. Give me the power of a laptop in something the size of a cell phone, with a projected screen in midair, with a way of registering me typing commands (without a keyboard) and I will be happy with my computer - for a year or two.
The new solid state drives did beat out older drives in terms of performance, but I can honestly say that I was hoping for a bigger difference between the two in terms of performance. Not just "beating" the older technology, but beating it by an order of magnitude.
Looking at it, the biggest benefit I can see is that the solid state drives should be better at withstanding shock and vibration - which normal hard drives hate. If they cannot improve the performance (which will still be useful for gamers, servers, and other speed freak things) then reliability and security of data is the selling point. I can see rugged notebooks using these.
Years ago, if someone was walking down the street and having a conversation with the empty air, I knew that they were crazy. Now, if someone does that, they are probably chatting on their cell phone. However, they could be crazy and I'd never know it at first glance.
Add this to the mix: invisible voices whispering in my ear as I walk down the street. So now I cannot tell if I am crazy.
Something I didn't see mentioned, but some seem to be wondering about, is how his hosting and registrar were the same. They probably weren't the same, but he might have chosen a host that offers to register the domain name for you at a bargain rate. If you read the fine print, the domain name is tied to their service or even owned by them and leased to you as part of the package. To keep it, you have to keep hosting with them.
What I described above is always a bad idea. Register your domain through a stable registrar and then go find a host. Saving $10/year isn't worth the pitfalls.
I used to love the text-based games, like "Zork" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos." Add to that a couple of excellent turn-based games that, to this day, fit on my list of the best games ever created. For Role Playing, there was "Pool of Radiance" and it was amazing at the time. However, my favorite was the original "Questron." I spent days playing that. Not to be forgotten were some of the turn-based wargames, like the ones put out by SSI. I liked the "Wargame Construction Set" a lot.
Something missing in many games these days is that a well-designed, turn-based game is a lot of fun. It is also something you can play without feeling pressed for time. I like stuff based in real time, but there is also something to be said for the turn-based stuff. It just doesn't work well when people want to play over the internet.
Oh, and "Forbidden Forest!" You kill the monsters with your arrows, then your little stick figure archer dude dances while funky music plays!
Stopping spurious search results is a good idea (I have mentioned scraper malware.cn domain sites before). However, a big problem is the hurdles you have to jump to shut down servers and home computers that are spewing spam and acting as a base of operations for malware. Say you find one, pin it down to the IP, then pin down the ISP/data center. Your next course of action is to submit a complaint to the abuse department. Then you wait for days. The server continues doing what it is doing. You submit another complaint, then place a phone call or login to the livechat for the provider. The person on the other end tells you to submit the complaint via the abuse email or webpage. "I have already done that, twice now." you tell them. "Well, that is what you need to do." comes back down the line. Finally, you give up - because trying to fix this issue is taking up too much time and the provider just doesn't care.
Filing a legitimate DMCA complaint actually works better than trying to shut down a malware server. I am talking about a provider in the US, but good providers in the UK and Europe seem to respond well to similar complaints. Within a few days, the infringing content is taken down. The reason is that there are laws saying a provider must take action to be protected. That I know of, nothing of the sort exists pertaining to malware/spam (if it does, nobody is paying attention). Good data centers and hosting companies will take action, but others could care less. Oh, and have fun trying to shut down a DSL/cable modem subscriber who is spewing spam.
Sooner or later, the Internet needs a watchdog group that can impose real penalties on ISPs that will force them to take action:
"This is WATCHDOG. I have a verified spam server in your data center at IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. Please check the WATCHDOG website to verify and take action within the next 2 hours." "Um, I don't know..." "Failure to take action will result in your IP block being blacklisted until the server is taken offline."
Controlling/guiding a RC plane and a small single-engine aircraft is a huge difference. It is an order of magnitude more complex.
Again, going back to the simple stuff. If you want to kill one person, or just terrorize a few, using a high-power rifle with a scope or a homemade mortar is a better choice than creating computer-guided RC planes with grenades on them. Iraqi insurgents using cellphones, garage door openers, etc. to detonate IEDs works, because it is simple. All they want is a way to detonate the artillery shells they buried under the road when a truck is passing over them.
I don't buy this entirely. You can test with ordinary hobbyist RC aircraft and connect it to a ground guidance system by radio. When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of places you could test them without drawing undue attention.
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications. The story blurb specifically mentions missiles, which is why I addressed that: "Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3."
RC planes have a limited payload for loading them down to blow up a building, and it would be difficult to take out an airliner with one. Actually, there is a low-budget film called "City Limits" that has James Earl Jones flying bomb-laden RC planes to destroy the watchtowers being used by a bunch of after-the-apocalypse capitalist Nazis. It would be difficult to put enough explosives in one to do a large amount of damage. A car or truck bomb is a better vehicle for that purpose.
Replacing the guidance system for something with the guts of a PS2 is just silly. If a rogue nation wants to build cheap anti-ship missiles, I think they would just purchase a batch of compact chipsets and such to make them. Converting a gaming system is amusing, not practical.
I seriously doubt we will see many cobbled-together anti-aircraft missiles with Linux guidance programs in the near future. The testing phase alone (to make sure it wouldn't lock onto something else, like a tree) would carry too much of a risk of discovery. It is far more effective for them to load a truck full of fertilizer, propane, or fuel, and drive it into a building. Oh, and even if they do pick a government building as a target, it's doubtful to be a military building. Those are too much of a hard target. They would go after an office building full of civilian government employees.
Look at that. Doesn't sound like warfare, does it? Sounds more like run-of-the-mill terrorism and defending against that is incredibly difficult without adversely affecting Liberty itself. The price of not living in a police state is that, sometimes, bad people will manage to do bad things. Horrible cost, but that's life. Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.
Maybe our children's children will finally find a solution. It is not going to be our generation; so do your best to teach the children the value of life and freedom. At the very least, they can push forward some more and will not spend their time trying to build missiles out of their PS2.
The problem will be if the sites that redirect that URL go out of business or are unreachable for any reason. Then all of the URLs are broken. It would be like a a section of DNS melting. What would be even worse is if the URL redirect site never came back online. Its a risk for people using the service.
However, the latest problem I am seeing a lot of is scraper sites (that immediately redirect) from China. A couple more of them pop up every day and all they are doing is trying to lure clicks via a search engine, then redirect the websurfer to a hostile/ad-laden page when they click on the link.
I noticed it when somebody brought it to my attention about my site, but the practice has to be systematic. Try going to Google and search for "badmovies.org" entries in the last 24 hours. Bet you see a lot of obvious junk sites that end in.cn. It has to apply to lots of other sites, but I haven't done any experimenting. Still, all those sites are junk. They just clutter up the search engines.
This is from just before Do Not Call went into action, but ADT is really awful about telemarketing calls.
When we bought our home, we started receiving calls from ADT trying to sell us a security system. When I say that, I mean several calls every day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. I always followed the procedure of "No I do not want your service. Remove me from your calling list." This continued for months. After 2 months I was pretty darn angry with them. I started contacting ADT direct, each time being told it would take a little while for my "do not call me" to take effect and that it was multiple franchise owners calling me and they could do nothing about it. The last time I called, I told them on the phone that any further calls would be reported to the police as harassment and sent a registered letter stating the same. The calls stopped immediately.
I will never purchase a security system from ADT; just based on that past experience.
If other online spamvertising models are to be trusted, any actual "human" in Second Life will be set upon by a mob of dirty spambot bums immediately after they log in. Want to find the humans on Second Life? Look in the middle of any spambot herd. That is, if you are able to look before a shuffling mob of spambots surrounds your avatar.
Maybe Second Life could start allowing a chainsaw item. That or they could hire bounty hunters who would ride around on platforms atop big black vans and harpoon the spambots, then hang the gutted spambot carcasses over the side of the van.
Or is this starting to sound too much like "Resident Evil: Second Life Edition?"
[quote]Thank God. There is an alarming trend among those who want to see a "neutral net" (a sentiment I agree with) to have "Dr. Government" fix it all.[/quote]
Actually, a good function of government is ensuring that those who have power (near-monopoly cable companies) do not abuse it. If the big providers started doing this and persisted as a group, they could make it the standard. That is when the government of the people needs to step in and fix the issue. Just another reason why government has to be free of corruption.
I did not see it mentioned, but an older science fiction film called "Creation of the Humanoids" dealt with the idea of human/robot relationships. A number of other films and shows have touched it too, but "Creation of the Humanoids" (1962) had a legal situation where a human could be formally "married" to a robot. If I remember correctly, it was called "being in report" in the film.
The movie is a bit talky, but has a couple of interesting ideas that rise above its budget and the dialog is usually engaging. The actors and actresses are not bad either, for the kind of film it is.
A lot of hosts are fly-by-night and single person jobs that have only been around for a limited period. Those disappear all the time. Something to always remember when shopping for a host is "you get what you pay for." However, every so often, a larger and established host like this one disappears and lots of people are left in the lurch who weren't expecting it.
The heartbreaking thing is that, quite often, the actual servers are are still there and the accounts are even on them, but the company that owns the servers (or the colocation facility) has them turned off, because their customer (the company that has disappeared) has not paid the bill. Now, everyone wants to look at the server owners or colo facility as the bad guys for not turning on the servers so that people can retrieve their data and migrate. The thing to remember is that they had no customer agreement with the end users. Their customer is the missing host. Quite often, the server owners/colo have no good POC's for those end users. Anybody could say, "Hey, I have 'this site' on 'this server.' Could you please give me access to get my data." It's a mess for anybody to sort out and do it right. Quite often, the server owner/colo is already out of pocket for the unpaid bills from the missing host. Now, everybody is asking for their servers to be turned on (and errors fixed, things managed) so they can get their data, thus incurring more costs to that unpaid server owner/colo.
Want to know something amazing? I've seen those companies, that are already seeing a loss because somebody else didn't take care of their business, do just that. They sort through the mess and find a way to get customers into their accounts.
Now, the best solution for someone is to keep backups. I use www.bqbackup.com to make automatic nightly backups. At the very least, keep a local copy on your home computer or an external USB drive. If a website is that important, then part of managing it is to have a working (and tested now and then) backup system.
I am a Marine and my wife used to be a bank teller. She knew that if she encountered an ID that was expired or fake, she was to confiscate it. If the person had a problem, she called me and I would drive to her work.
Oddly, people did not wait around to argue when my wife told them that her Marine husband was on the way. Despite the fact that, at the time, it was a five minute drive for me to get there.
Back to the article: Making a statement that a forged ID was your copyrighted work sounds like a great way to save the prosecutor time and the taxpayers money. I am all for people who create forged IDs to make such statements.
Calling it "Pirate Bay" was just asking for lawsuits. True, but my two file sharing services prove that choosing a safe name is not easy either. Mother Teresa's File Sharing and NunSter have not exactly caught on with the college crowd...
I think the problem for new technology is overcoming the hill of an established format. In the case of CDs, this was pretty simple. The quality improvement from tape to CD was dramatic and reached the level of what consumers expected. DVD did this too, being much higher quality than VHS and more portable (the latter is one reason LD never reached critical mass).
What it comes down to is: what does the consumer want and expect? Moving everyone from VHS to DVD took some time and that was making a change to a much higher quality and compact format (you cannot put 50 VHS tapes in a little wallet storage case). Nor can you jump to chapter marks on a VHS - more added functionality that people wanted. Also, the picture and sound quality was something you could enjoy without upgrading the other parts of your entertainment system. In the case of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the high quality has extra costs. The television and players required to get the full effect are much more expensive.
I wonder if the next format should not be based on discs, but more like flash drives with your movie. The great part about that would be plugging it into your "home entertainment hard drive" and installing the movie for future viewings. I love the idea of having all my films on a hard drive array, though it would be bad news for companies that make shelving. Of course, then some sort of offsite backup service will become important (if not mandatory).
Slashdot Mirror
If your intent was as you stated in your reply, I have some advice for you: learn to write and speak so that people can easily understand your position. "I am for this." "I am against this."
If he was, he'd still be better-qualified to talk about how the law works than 99.9% of the people contributing to this and similar Slashdot discussions. BS.
Law should make sense. In other words, if you took a competent person off the street and explained a law to them (and I don't mean something that takes hours of classes - more like 5 minutes) they should then tell you, "That makes sense." I detest the idea, and the fact, that laws, even simple ones, require specially trained people to interpret them.
Society makes the law, so why shouldn't a member of that society be able to understand it and explain it?
I stopped watching professional sports years ago. The players are overpaid. The whole sport is overpaid. They are not role models, but people constantly hold them up as role models and idolize them - because they can play a sport well, not because they are good people in other ways.
Want to slap the NFL awake? Don't watch the game. Get a lot of people to not watch the game, because you disagree with what they do. I mean on a huge scale, something that would have to be organized and talked up online to reach lots and lots of people. After the suits realize "We lost 80% of our audience due to a boycott, because we are jerks." you might see a change. It doesn't have to be for the Super Bowl, just a game, and people have to know why nobody watched it.
Obviously, there are exceptions to what I am saying about players, but I haven't noticed too many in recent years.
...Dr. Malic and his submarine, the Black Shark in all of this. Has anyone in the Middle East spotted a flying lion that speaks with an Asian accent?
This is right out of one of the DoD instructions, how to dispose of unclassified hard drives (paraphrased):
In an approved facility and on an approved surface (concrete), wearing appropriate safety gear (goggles and hearing protection) strike the hard drive repeatedly with a heavy object (a sledgehammer) until it is physically destroyed.
I tell you, Marines have all sorts of fun following those instructions.
Employee #1: "You know, our operating systems sure do piss off a lot of people."
Employee #2: "Do you think that there is any way to make money off of that?"
That's a very good point and definitely a factor for laptops. Still, one of the "golden bullets" I want now is a blazing fast way to retrieve data from the storage.
Well, that and size. Give me the power of a laptop in something the size of a cell phone, with a projected screen in midair, with a way of registering me typing commands (without a keyboard) and I will be happy with my computer - for a year or two.
The new solid state drives did beat out older drives in terms of performance, but I can honestly say that I was hoping for a bigger difference between the two in terms of performance. Not just "beating" the older technology, but beating it by an order of magnitude.
Looking at it, the biggest benefit I can see is that the solid state drives should be better at withstanding shock and vibration - which normal hard drives hate. If they cannot improve the performance (which will still be useful for gamers, servers, and other speed freak things) then reliability and security of data is the selling point. I can see rugged notebooks using these.
Years ago, if someone was walking down the street and having a conversation with the empty air, I knew that they were crazy. Now, if someone does that, they are probably chatting on their cell phone. However, they could be crazy and I'd never know it at first glance.
Add this to the mix: invisible voices whispering in my ear as I walk down the street. So now I cannot tell if I am crazy.
Something I didn't see mentioned, but some seem to be wondering about, is how his hosting and registrar were the same. They probably weren't the same, but he might have chosen a host that offers to register the domain name for you at a bargain rate. If you read the fine print, the domain name is tied to their service or even owned by them and leased to you as part of the package. To keep it, you have to keep hosting with them.
What I described above is always a bad idea. Register your domain through a stable registrar and then go find a host. Saving $10/year isn't worth the pitfalls.
I used to love the text-based games, like "Zork" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos." Add to that a couple of excellent turn-based games that, to this day, fit on my list of the best games ever created. For Role Playing, there was "Pool of Radiance" and it was amazing at the time. However, my favorite was the original "Questron." I spent days playing that. Not to be forgotten were some of the turn-based wargames, like the ones put out by SSI. I liked the "Wargame Construction Set" a lot.
Something missing in many games these days is that a well-designed, turn-based game is a lot of fun. It is also something you can play without feeling pressed for time. I like stuff based in real time, but there is also something to be said for the turn-based stuff. It just doesn't work well when people want to play over the internet.
Oh, and "Forbidden Forest!" You kill the monsters with your arrows, then your little stick figure archer dude dances while funky music plays!
Stopping spurious search results is a good idea (I have mentioned scraper malware .cn domain sites before). However, a big problem is the hurdles you have to jump to shut down servers and home computers that are spewing spam and acting as a base of operations for malware. Say you find one, pin it down to the IP, then pin down the ISP/data center. Your next course of action is to submit a complaint to the abuse department. Then you wait for days. The server continues doing what it is doing. You submit another complaint, then place a phone call or login to the livechat for the provider. The person on the other end tells you to submit the complaint via the abuse email or webpage. "I have already done that, twice now." you tell them. "Well, that is what you need to do." comes back down the line. Finally, you give up - because trying to fix this issue is taking up too much time and the provider just doesn't care.
Filing a legitimate DMCA complaint actually works better than trying to shut down a malware server. I am talking about a provider in the US, but good providers in the UK and Europe seem to respond well to similar complaints. Within a few days, the infringing content is taken down. The reason is that there are laws saying a provider must take action to be protected. That I know of, nothing of the sort exists pertaining to malware/spam (if it does, nobody is paying attention). Good data centers and hosting companies will take action, but others could care less. Oh, and have fun trying to shut down a DSL/cable modem subscriber who is spewing spam.
Sooner or later, the Internet needs a watchdog group that can impose real penalties on ISPs that will force them to take action:
"This is WATCHDOG. I have a verified spam server in your data center at IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. Please check the WATCHDOG website to verify and take action within the next 2 hours."
"Um, I don't know..."
"Failure to take action will result in your IP block being blacklisted until the server is taken offline."
Controlling/guiding a RC plane and a small single-engine aircraft is a huge difference. It is an order of magnitude more complex.
Again, going back to the simple stuff. If you want to kill one person, or just terrorize a few, using a high-power rifle with a scope or a homemade mortar is a better choice than creating computer-guided RC planes with grenades on them. Iraqi insurgents using cellphones, garage door openers, etc. to detonate IEDs works, because it is simple. All they want is a way to detonate the artillery shells they buried under the road when a truck is passing over them.
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications. The story blurb specifically mentions missiles, which is why I addressed that: "Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3."
RC planes have a limited payload for loading them down to blow up a building, and it would be difficult to take out an airliner with one. Actually, there is a low-budget film called "City Limits" that has James Earl Jones flying bomb-laden RC planes to destroy the watchtowers being used by a bunch of after-the-apocalypse capitalist Nazis. It would be difficult to put enough explosives in one to do a large amount of damage. A car or truck bomb is a better vehicle for that purpose.
Replacing the guidance system for something with the guts of a PS2 is just silly. If a rogue nation wants to build cheap anti-ship missiles, I think they would just purchase a batch of compact chipsets and such to make them. Converting a gaming system is amusing, not practical.
I seriously doubt we will see many cobbled-together anti-aircraft missiles with Linux guidance programs in the near future. The testing phase alone (to make sure it wouldn't lock onto something else, like a tree) would carry too much of a risk of discovery. It is far more effective for them to load a truck full of fertilizer, propane, or fuel, and drive it into a building. Oh, and even if they do pick a government building as a target, it's doubtful to be a military building. Those are too much of a hard target. They would go after an office building full of civilian government employees.
Look at that. Doesn't sound like warfare, does it? Sounds more like run-of-the-mill terrorism and defending against that is incredibly difficult without adversely affecting Liberty itself. The price of not living in a police state is that, sometimes, bad people will manage to do bad things. Horrible cost, but that's life. Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.
Maybe our children's children will finally find a solution. It is not going to be our generation; so do your best to teach the children the value of life and freedom. At the very least, they can push forward some more and will not spend their time trying to build missiles out of their PS2.
The problem will be if the sites that redirect that URL go out of business or are unreachable for any reason. Then all of the URLs are broken. It would be like a a section of DNS melting. What would be even worse is if the URL redirect site never came back online. Its a risk for people using the service.
.cn. It has to apply to lots of other sites, but I haven't done any experimenting. Still, all those sites are junk. They just clutter up the search engines.
However, the latest problem I am seeing a lot of is scraper sites (that immediately redirect) from China. A couple more of them pop up every day and all they are doing is trying to lure clicks via a search engine, then redirect the websurfer to a hostile/ad-laden page when they click on the link.
I noticed it when somebody brought it to my attention about my site, but the practice has to be systematic. Try going to Google and search for "badmovies.org" entries in the last 24 hours. Bet you see a lot of obvious junk sites that end in
Darwin wept.
This is from just before Do Not Call went into action, but ADT is really awful about telemarketing calls.
When we bought our home, we started receiving calls from ADT trying to sell us a security system. When I say that, I mean several calls every day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. I always followed the procedure of "No I do not want your service. Remove me from your calling list." This continued for months. After 2 months I was pretty darn angry with them. I started contacting ADT direct, each time being told it would take a little while for my "do not call me" to take effect and that it was multiple franchise owners calling me and they could do nothing about it. The last time I called, I told them on the phone that any further calls would be reported to the police as harassment and sent a registered letter stating the same. The calls stopped immediately.
I will never purchase a security system from ADT; just based on that past experience.
If other online spamvertising models are to be trusted, any actual "human" in Second Life will be set upon by a mob of dirty spambot bums immediately after they log in. Want to find the humans on Second Life? Look in the middle of any spambot herd. That is, if you are able to look before a shuffling mob of spambots surrounds your avatar.
Maybe Second Life could start allowing a chainsaw item. That or they could hire bounty hunters who would ride around on platforms atop big black vans and harpoon the spambots, then hang the gutted spambot carcasses over the side of the van.
Or is this starting to sound too much like "Resident Evil: Second Life Edition?"
[quote]Thank God. There is an alarming trend among those who want to see a "neutral net" (a sentiment I agree with) to have "Dr. Government" fix it all.[/quote]
Actually, a good function of government is ensuring that those who have power (near-monopoly cable companies) do not abuse it. If the big providers started doing this and persisted as a group, they could make it the standard. That is when the government of the people needs to step in and fix the issue. Just another reason why government has to be free of corruption.
I did not see it mentioned, but an older science fiction film called "Creation of the Humanoids" dealt with the idea of human/robot relationships. A number of other films and shows have touched it too, but "Creation of the Humanoids" (1962) had a legal situation where a human could be formally "married" to a robot. If I remember correctly, it was called "being in report" in the film.
The movie is a bit talky, but has a couple of interesting ideas that rise above its budget and the dialog is usually engaging. The actors and actresses are not bad either, for the kind of film it is.
IMDb Page for Creation of the Humanoids (1962)
A lot of hosts are fly-by-night and single person jobs that have only been around for a limited period. Those disappear all the time. Something to always remember when shopping for a host is "you get what you pay for." However, every so often, a larger and established host like this one disappears and lots of people are left in the lurch who weren't expecting it.
The heartbreaking thing is that, quite often, the actual servers are are still there and the accounts are even on them, but the company that owns the servers (or the colocation facility) has them turned off, because their customer (the company that has disappeared) has not paid the bill. Now, everyone wants to look at the server owners or colo facility as the bad guys for not turning on the servers so that people can retrieve their data and migrate. The thing to remember is that they had no customer agreement with the end users. Their customer is the missing host. Quite often, the server owners/colo have no good POC's for those end users. Anybody could say, "Hey, I have 'this site' on 'this server.' Could you please give me access to get my data." It's a mess for anybody to sort out and do it right. Quite often, the server owner/colo is already out of pocket for the unpaid bills from the missing host. Now, everybody is asking for their servers to be turned on (and errors fixed, things managed) so they can get their data, thus incurring more costs to that unpaid server owner/colo.
Want to know something amazing? I've seen those companies, that are already seeing a loss because somebody else didn't take care of their business, do just that. They sort through the mess and find a way to get customers into their accounts.
Now, the best solution for someone is to keep backups. I use www.bqbackup.com to make automatic nightly backups. At the very least, keep a local copy on your home computer or an external USB drive. If a website is that important, then part of managing it is to have a working (and tested now and then) backup system.
I am a Marine and my wife used to be a bank teller. She knew that if she encountered an ID that was expired or fake, she was to confiscate it. If the person had a problem, she called me and I would drive to her work.
Oddly, people did not wait around to argue when my wife told them that her Marine husband was on the way. Despite the fact that, at the time, it was a five minute drive for me to get there.
Back to the article: Making a statement that a forged ID was your copyrighted work sounds like a great way to save the prosecutor time and the taxpayers money. I am all for people who create forged IDs to make such statements.
I think the problem for new technology is overcoming the hill of an established format. In the case of CDs, this was pretty simple. The quality improvement from tape to CD was dramatic and reached the level of what consumers expected. DVD did this too, being much higher quality than VHS and more portable (the latter is one reason LD never reached critical mass).
What it comes down to is: what does the consumer want and expect? Moving everyone from VHS to DVD took some time and that was making a change to a much higher quality and compact format (you cannot put 50 VHS tapes in a little wallet storage case). Nor can you jump to chapter marks on a VHS - more added functionality that people wanted. Also, the picture and sound quality was something you could enjoy without upgrading the other parts of your entertainment system. In the case of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the high quality has extra costs. The television and players required to get the full effect are much more expensive.
I wonder if the next format should not be based on discs, but more like flash drives with your movie. The great part about that would be plugging it into your "home entertainment hard drive" and installing the movie for future viewings. I love the idea of having all my films on a hard drive array, though it would be bad news for companies that make shelving. Of course, then some sort of offsite backup service will become important (if not mandatory).