you can sell herbal supplements with the same claim and weak/non-existent scientific support and be in the clear
The difference is food/supplements/medical are the FDA, and consumer products are FTC.
And if the FDA truly cracked down on all products with only weak scientific support, perhaps a number of the major pharmaceuticals could no longer be sold.
Personally, I think this system is not working, and manufacturers of all products should be required to back up the claims of all benefits and composition with independent verification and vetting by unrelated researchers, Also, they should be required to provide a link to digital documents with source material.
So if a manufacturer claims their food product is "Low in Fat", they should be required to have a researcher analyze samples from every manufacturing batch, and continuously publish the detailed analysis to show it, with a link included in a QR code on their products.
Also, the publications should be required to be annotatable by 3rd parties with reviews and aggregate ratings tallied to 10-point scales and including the common prices per package and per ounce of product, and easily viewable by customers and can only be moderated by FDA-licensed neutral moderators.
Are you sure that you have not reversed the causal direction?
People who are not mentally agile in old age tend to have a lack of interest or lack of ability to have fun reading, puzzle solving, luminosity, and posting intelligently, therefore, they tend to not engage in those activities --- leaving mostly only people who are mentally agile to do those things.
But if only 1 million people pay at $11 a month, a 2 Million dollar fine is peanuts
2 out of 11 million = 18% of your revenue is NOT peanuts.
Also, do keep in mind, they likely have at least a couple million or so in business expenses for that many customers, so $2M would be more like 25% of their revenue.
As for their profit.... better subtract out the $2M in expenses, and 35% = $3.15 Million in taxes on the whole $9 million, Because the dollar amount of fines and penalties are a portion that is always taxable (Cannot deduct the fine).
So the normal profit is something like $5 Million, then a $2 Million fine from that is actually 40% of their profit.
I would call that quite a sizable penalty, and definitely something they should seek to avoid in the future.
They incur fines like that, they might find themselves in bankruptcy, because it causes them to be in violation of accounting ratios required by their lenders as a condition of loans, and they may have investors insisting on getting their money back.
Purpose of such fines is to enforce the law, penalize violations, and modify behavior, not bankrupt companies and put people out of work.
What your not supposed to program the disarm button to disarm and send the silent alarm?
This is technically feasible but not recommended. One of the troubles with keyfobs is you put them in your pocket, and the buttons accidentally get pushed: also if the alarm is silent, then you won't know you have accidentally triggered it until the cops show up.
If all people were truly that dumb, then there would be no such thing as an unsolved crime because nobody would be smart enough to get away with doing anything illegal.
What makes you think unsolved crimes are people getting away with things because they are smart?
Perhaps they just got lucky, and the investigators missed or accidentally spoiled evidence that was sitting right in front of them.
Also, perhaps they got away with it, because the team investigating their particular crime was so dumb and incompetent, and failed to investigate things they should, and/or lazy, because they reported the right lead as ruled out (based on fallacious thinking).
Mind you the zigbee wireless is a hell of a lot more secure than what ADT is putting in for wireless.
Personally; I think a Keyfob is crappy security, regardless of the system used ---- unless its functions are essentially limited to "Force Arm" and "Panic".
Keyfobs can be lost, misplaced, stolen, or a criminal can forcibly take it from you, or force you to disarm using it.
Combinations do not suffer from these security issues; and if forced to disarm, modern panels allow durress codes to be pre-programmed.
Last I check; ADT is just using rebadged Honeywell/VISTA Ademco panels, which they rebadge, and possibly use custom firmware on.
The Honeywell 5883H security panel RF module is capable of supporting secure two-way wireless keyfobs, and the Honeywell 5834-4 is a high-security keyfob that uses two-way radio and encrypted challenge+response, and can check current arming status.
I think those types of vulnerabilities like the one mentioned above are by no means specific to Comcast.
Also, by and large, "experts" and manufacturers in the physical security industry are clueless in regards to IT security, Information security, and Systems security.
Home security companies' core competence is in providing systems to mitigate physical security issues, but they are largely ignorant to specialized attacks and weaknesses in the systems themselves that they provide for the purpose of improving security.
They will probably notice glaringly obvious issues that humans interact with: Such as 1234 as your passcode, Or exposed security wiring without a tamper sensor, but not much more.
And it's probably just White-label hardware and software from the least-expensive source they could find badged with their company name, anyways.
Sure he wasn't doing something to intentionally kill people (so it wouldn't be first degree murder) but he was intentionally doing something dangerous.
He was deliberately doing something illegal that can kill people, operating a device that is extremely well-known to have this danger. I am not too sure that the person who was killed cares what degree murder it was.
IMO, in such extreme circumstances where someone so suddenly causes the death of an innocent person, without voluntary participation of their target, through such flagrant and reckless misbehavior, then it is basically equivalent to Murder 2, Or Murder 1, if the reckless misbehavior was actually pre-meditated/planned in advance, or the person knew of a death from that in advance, if an implement involved is: (1) A deadly machine, (2) A projectile such as a dart or arrow, (3) A tripping hazard created by the offender, or (4) A drug, chemical, poisonous substance, or rotten food product past its use by date.
I consider the same about people driving on the road who intentionally run red lights, or intentionally commit other major violations; If you plow over a pedestrian while talking on your cell phone, it should be Murder 2.
Take a person who fires a gun in the air for new years. The bullet comes down and kills someone.
Unless the offender is a child or already found mentally incompetent, they are likely to be held to the standard that any reasonable person will be aware that the output of a deadly weapon is a substantial and unjustifiable risk of danger to life and limb.
The act of firing the gun into the air is itself a criminal infraction, and committing any crime when acting with intentional disregard while handling a deadly weapon meets the general mens rea requirement for commission of a crime through negligent or reckless act.
So it is not unlikely that they would be guilty of manslaughter.
If she has a condition that gives her a DUI, she shouldn't be driving, ever. Sucks for her but too bad.
No.... since she had a Blood Alcohol content of 0.3, but no symptoms of being drunk, at a level that renders other people unconcious, then apparently her body has adapted to the condition in some manner, so the traditional BAC measurement became meaningless for her, and they should independently determine if she is "capable of safely driving" using criteria other than their apparently flawwed techniques of analyzing human body chemistry.
If so, then they should through testing establish the 0.3 BAC baseline, And accommodate the disability or her special ability by allowing her to drive, provided she test and ensure the BAC is 0.30 or less, before driving, and stop at least once per 30 minutes to re-test while driving for an extended period.
For sure they should hold her 'innocent', because there is no way she could have known about her BAC of 0.3, if she was functioning normally at that level and not feeling ill or unusual.
The values the authorities are commonly using for assessing possible drunkenness are valid for the typical healthy human with no such conditions are adaptations, But in fact, these values are specific to individuals' bodies ---- people can be drunk with a much lower BAC than the commonly used threshold, and people can be not influenced with a BAC higher than the commonly used threshold.
The article says she "Suffers from Auto-brewery syndrome", suggesting it as a disease or infliction, and therefore implying possibe negative experiences, or unwanted affects resulting from it, and if so, then she should have doctors looking at if it could be safe and beneficial to end the condition such as by administering anti-fungal medications.
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
Use HTML+CSS+JS as your Ebook format, problem solved. The more restricted formats are specifically for wrapping content in DRM encryption and targeting old-style LCD and eInk readers that have limited capabilities than a tablet, and they are not platforms for innovating and providing richly-interactive content.
iBooks also support Javascript interactivity with EPUB content, and Adobe PDF has support for Javascript as well, although I do not know if these will work with viewing applications available on the Kindle
Sounds like a pain, and then it'd always be a risk of forgetting to log out one time.... I'd just use a different device the kids can't touch to make the actual purchase of content to the shared account, and then the kids can Download it to their device over the account their device is linked to.
I guess if I used iTunes Drive/AirDrop for remote password vault and cloud-based file storage, then I might use a separate account for the kids altogether ---- keeping all your devices logged into iTunes has the benefit that you can share all the Apps and Music on all the devices
Also, in Settings > Restrictions > Password Settings
I have the "Purchases and In-App Purchases" option set to "Always Require" password, instead of "Require after 15 minutes"
I also have In-App Purchases simply disabled altogether, and of course, I don't give out the Restrictions PIN numbers.
Null routing an IP address under DDoS attack in an emergency is standard industry practice across all major ISPs and hosting providers; companies that use more advanced techniques either have a few tricks up their sleeves which only work in the most common situations, or they bought some $5 million anti-DoS appliances to help mitigate it (usually).
The simple fact is DoS mitigation is not part of a basic hosting service, once an attack exceeds a few million packets per second, or a couple Gigabits: you are simply not paying network providers enough money for it to be feasible for any ISP to come close to justifying effective DoS mitigation for those rare sizes of attack, for every customer, because the cost involves provisioning hundreds of million$$$ in extra upstream capacity, internal network capacity, and operations staff.
Then even with all that extra capital spend: (1) It's still not possible to make every attack seamless, Null-routing might still be required in cases, there will still be outages, people like the above will still be unhappy, And.... (2) Most ISPs don't have that much throwaway cash, and most hosting customers aren't going to be willing to pay their share of what it costs to provision 10000x as much capacity as needed.
(3) Its less expensive to just shed overly-demanding customers who pay little by allowing them to make themselves unhappy and go to a competitor. If someone's paying $100 a month and their site is constantly getting DDoS'd, then it makes perfect sense to terminate them as a customer to, and let the other 10000 $100/Month customers have a better experience, instead of leaving due to the DoS being suffered as a result of 1 customer.
And if someone wants to arrange for their website to be handled differently, then this is part of a negotiation that should be made with the ISP or provider before turning up hosting service and added to the contract, with response SLA and recourse/refund policy.
Or you're better off enlisting a 3rd party DoS-scrubbing service such as CloudFlare to conceal your infrastructure from attackers.
There are also DoS-cleanup services that work at a network range level where your DDoS provider announces your/24 into BGP, cleans DoS, and forwards you traffic.
Many ISPs do have the flexibility for alternate handling of DDoS, up to a certain point, they can avoid Null-routing an IP, or avoid the Null-routing of one IP from making your service unavailable.... generally, the cost will be much higher --- E.g. $10,000 per month instead of $100 per month.
Forget about attempting to negotiate expert-level DoS management that will require the provisioning of engineer and infrastructure resources in advance that are quite costly to the providers to keep on hand, Unless you are willing to pay sufficiently to be a large client of the provider with a multi-year committed contract and cover the costs of those extra resources plus sizable profit.
Also: to host a website resiliently, however, the provider will most likely require that the website be served from multiple server farms in multiple IP ranges with an anycasted internet presence for both the services' IP addresses, and the supporting DNS services.
This is because in spite of additional resources, it might still be necessary at times to fall back to Null-routing.
These attacks cost money. People don't do them for fun anymore.
You are sadly mistaken.... just b/c attacks cost money, does not mean people do not still launch them willy-nilly ---- you are a hosting provider, and some website you are hosting makes the wrong person or wrong group angry, or they have a political message to send, they may attack the entire provider.
Although, quite often such large-scale attacks are launched, then followed up by "ransom demands", and as long as the target does not pay the huge cash ransom, the attacks continue, And the attacker stands to make much more $$$ from ransom than the attacks would have cost them.
Should a conservative be able to tell his or her employees that there will be "consequences" if any of them ever publicly supports any pro-homosexual cause? It's a private company so they don't deserve any special protection from "consequences," right?
My answer is NO. And even making the policy statement informal or otherwise should become a sue-able offense.
Ditto for the opposite statement, about a Democrat telling his/her employees there will be consequences if they support an anti-homosexual cause.
An employer shall not be allowed to dictate their employees have or don't have certain views on politics, and shall not be allowed to retaliate or order that their employees don't publish their opinions on such matters.
But opinions are not like ethnicity. You can safely change them or keep them private.
You are not free if you cannot share your views.
Boycotts and organized shunning are legitimate free speech responses to send a message about continuing abhorrent actions or business practices.
But Boycotts and such should not be allowed as a method of showing mere disagreement with someone's opinion, what political views they have, who they choose to hire, or activities outside their business ----- the courts should disallow it as tortious interference, up to, and including putting organizers and participants in jail, if they attempt to organize a boycott against someone merely for having a different opinion.
Free speech is free speech, but does not include a right to use your free speech to scream over other people or spam to drown them out, harass their person or their character into submission, or otherwise chill others' free speech, in response to something you don't like to hear.
Many of them should be called SMBs SMTs instead Social Media Bullies, Social Media Terrorists ---- in other words basically bullies posting bullshit and claiming to have a righteous cause for what they post.
SJW is just the currently in-vogue self-described term used by people who are Cyberbullies on Social Media claiming to be in support of justice, and using Cyberbully tactics to support an enhanced form of "Political Correctness" that is some form of "Political Correctness" with Anti-American, Anti-Christian, Anti-White, Anti-Male, Anti-Heterosexual affirmative action; these retarted bullies' tactics include magical thinking, outright lying, recklessly throwing around false accusations whenever it suits them, sensationalist posts, outright deception, misrepresenting what other people have said and/or its meaning, and forming ad-hoc mobs to harrass people.
They can go for the "whole enchilada", and argue they don't even need the fair use defense, because their usage is claimed to be non-infringing and not a derivative work, despite the references to the original series by name, and possible use of some imagery or descriptions that reminds people of the original (Without actually copying plot, scenarios, or characters).
Or they could argue they fall under 1st amendment Fair Use protection by using so little of the work; if their amount used falls below some threshold, then they are likely to be allowed, even if they have some commercial activity, and their primary purpose is entertainment.
professionally produced "Star Trek" film certainly COULD compete with Paramount's 2016 Star Trek Film....
If they want to argue their market for the work is affected adversly, they'll need to show that it Already is affected, not that it might be in the future ---- If it is affected in the future, they can then always go and drag the case back into the courts, and argue that Indie's continued Fair Use stopped being fair use at time X.....
It's entirely possible the gift-giver (who isn't a Star Trek fan) would buy the wrong one, buying the unauthorized movie rather than Paramount's official Star Trek.
That's a Trademark misappropriation issue, not a Copyright issue.
all the state can do is attach a lien to your property.
No... Attaching a lien to the property is just Step 1. This is also the polite approach, they will use by default for a minor debt.
If you do something major to bother your state, such as tax fraud, they can cancel the deed entirely, and resell the property. This is commonly done if the property's owner was involved in other crimes as well.
Step 2. after attaching a lien is where the state forces a foreclosure within a few months and auctions off the property to satisfy the lien.
Also, some states will spare themselves of having to do the collections work involved in Step 2, by simply auctioning off the lien to private investors instead ---- then whoever buys the tax lien will foreclose on the preceding tenant, should the previous tenant fail to pay off the lien and allow their redemption opportunity time limit to expire.
thanks to the bailout, the banks can afford to not sell those homes for whatever the market can bear, so they are sitting on them and refusing to sell them in order to keep real estate values high
If that's true, then the government should file charges against them for housing market manipulation, and forcibly liquidate the properties on their behalf.
so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are owners
There is no fundamental right to exclusive control of land, not even in a capitalist society. If the property owner decides to build housing, and rent out housing, then their customer's lives depend on this relationship, which is in danger of becoming tyrannical or unfairly exploitative, so the property owner automatically cedes certain rights, Even rights that might not be in their best financial interest to lose, and even rights they do not willingly give up.
Actually.... the deedholder or claimholder is just a renter too. The ultimate owner of land is the state government, and in most places, they even charge the current deedholder a rent called property tax to maintain any privileges, and their usage of the land has to be compliant with the law and in the interest of the public (E.g. You cannot just dump hazardous wastes on your land, however you like).
It makes perfect sense, that a government respecting the interest of the public would have reasonable regulation of the government deedholders' subleasing arrangements with members of the public, where people secure their housing / apartment living spaces, or even, where people secure housing for other vital purchases: such as the usage to host the main office of a small business.
Slashdot Mirror
you can sell herbal supplements with the same claim and weak/non-existent scientific support and be in the clear
The difference is food/supplements/medical are the FDA, and consumer products are FTC.
And if the FDA truly cracked down on all products with only weak scientific support, perhaps a number of the major pharmaceuticals could no longer be sold.
Personally, I think this system is not working, and manufacturers of all products should be required to back up the claims of all benefits and composition with independent verification and vetting by unrelated researchers, Also, they should be required to provide a link to digital documents with source material.
So if a manufacturer claims their food product is "Low in Fat", they should be required to have a researcher analyze samples from every manufacturing batch, and continuously publish the detailed analysis to show it, with a link included in a QR code on their products.
Also, the publications should be required to be annotatable by 3rd parties with reviews and aggregate ratings tallied to 10-point scales and including the common prices per package and per ounce of product, and easily viewable by customers and can only be moderated by FDA-licensed neutral moderators.
Luminosity, reading, puzzle solving, posting intelligently... everything helps.
Stagnation is the great killer.
Are you sure that you have not reversed the causal direction?
People who are not mentally agile in old age tend to have a lack of interest or lack of ability to have fun reading, puzzle solving, luminosity, and posting intelligently, therefore, they tend to not engage in those activities --- leaving mostly only people who are mentally agile to do those things.
But if only 1 million people pay at $11 a month, a 2 Million dollar fine is peanuts
2 out of 11 million = 18% of your revenue is NOT peanuts.
Also, do keep in mind, they likely have at least a couple million or so in business expenses for that many customers, so $2M would be more like 25% of their revenue.
As for their profit.... better subtract out the $2M in expenses, and 35% = $3.15 Million in taxes on the whole $9 million, Because the dollar amount of fines and penalties are a portion that is always taxable (Cannot deduct the fine).
So the normal profit is something like $5 Million, then a $2 Million fine from that is actually 40% of their profit.
I would call that quite a sizable penalty, and definitely something they should seek to avoid in the future.
They incur fines like that, they might find themselves in bankruptcy, because it causes them to be in violation of accounting ratios required by their lenders as a condition of loans, and they may have investors insisting on getting their money back.
Purpose of such fines is to enforce the law, penalize violations, and modify behavior, not bankrupt companies and put people out of work.
What your not supposed to program the disarm button to disarm and send the silent alarm?
This is technically feasible but not recommended. One of the troubles with keyfobs is you put them in your pocket, and the buttons accidentally get pushed: also if the alarm is silent, then you won't know you have accidentally triggered it until the cops show up.
If all people were truly that dumb, then there would be no such thing as an unsolved crime because nobody would be smart enough to get away with doing anything illegal.
What makes you think unsolved crimes are people getting away with things because they are smart?
Perhaps they just got lucky, and the investigators missed or accidentally spoiled evidence that was sitting right in front of them.
Also, perhaps they got away with it, because the team investigating their particular crime was so dumb and incompetent, and failed to investigate things they should, and/or lazy, because they reported the right lead as ruled out (based on fallacious thinking).
Mind you the zigbee wireless is a hell of a lot more secure than what ADT is putting in for wireless.
Personally; I think a Keyfob is crappy security, regardless of the system used ---- unless its functions are essentially limited to "Force Arm" and "Panic".
Keyfobs can be lost, misplaced, stolen, or a criminal can forcibly take it from you, or force you to disarm using it.
Combinations do not suffer from these security issues; and if forced to disarm, modern panels allow durress codes to be pre-programmed.
Last I check; ADT is just using rebadged Honeywell/VISTA Ademco panels, which they rebadge, and possibly use custom firmware on.
The Honeywell 5883H security panel RF module is capable of supporting secure two-way wireless keyfobs, and the Honeywell 5834-4 is a high-security keyfob that uses two-way radio and encrypted challenge+response, and can check current arming status.
I think those types of vulnerabilities like the one mentioned above are by no means specific to Comcast.
Also, by and large, "experts" and manufacturers in the physical security industry are clueless in regards to IT security, Information security, and Systems security.
Home security companies' core competence is in providing systems to mitigate physical security issues, but they are largely ignorant to specialized attacks and weaknesses in the systems themselves that they provide for the purpose of improving security.
They will probably notice glaringly obvious issues that humans interact with: Such as 1234 as your passcode, Or exposed security wiring without a tamper sensor, but not much more.
And it's probably just White-label hardware and software from the least-expensive source they could find badged with their company name, anyways.
Sure he wasn't doing something to intentionally kill people (so it wouldn't be first degree murder) but he was intentionally doing something dangerous.
He was deliberately doing something illegal that can kill people, operating a device that is extremely well-known to have this danger. I am not too sure that the person who was killed cares what degree murder it was.
IMO, in such extreme circumstances where someone so suddenly causes the death of an innocent person, without voluntary participation of their target, through such flagrant and reckless misbehavior, then it is basically equivalent to Murder 2, Or Murder 1, if the reckless misbehavior was actually pre-meditated/planned in advance, or the person knew of a death from that in advance, if an implement involved is: (1) A deadly machine, (2) A projectile such as a dart or arrow, (3) A tripping hazard created by the offender, or (4) A drug, chemical, poisonous substance, or rotten food product past its use by date.
I consider the same about people driving on the road who intentionally run red lights, or intentionally commit other major violations; If you plow over a pedestrian while talking on your cell phone, it should be Murder 2.
Take a person who fires a gun in the air for new years. The bullet comes down and kills someone.
Unless the offender is a child or already found mentally incompetent, they are likely to be held to the standard that any reasonable person will be aware that the output of a deadly weapon is a substantial and unjustifiable risk of danger to life and limb.
The act of firing the gun into the air is itself a criminal infraction, and committing any crime when acting with intentional disregard while handling a deadly weapon meets the general mens rea requirement for commission of a crime through negligent or reckless act.
So it is not unlikely that they would be guilty of manslaughter.
If she has a condition that gives her a DUI, she shouldn't be driving, ever. Sucks for her but too bad.
No.... since she had a Blood Alcohol content of 0.3, but no symptoms of being drunk, at a level that renders other people unconcious, then apparently her body has adapted to the condition in some manner, so the traditional BAC measurement became meaningless for her, and they should independently determine if she is "capable of safely driving" using criteria other than their apparently flawwed techniques of analyzing human body chemistry.
If so, then they should through testing establish the 0.3 BAC baseline, And accommodate the disability or her special ability by allowing her to drive, provided she test and ensure the BAC is 0.30 or less, before driving, and stop at least once per 30 minutes to re-test while driving for an extended period.
For sure they should hold her 'innocent', because there is no way she could have known about her BAC of 0.3, if she was functioning normally at that level and not feeling ill or unusual.
The values the authorities are commonly using for assessing possible drunkenness are valid for the typical healthy human with no such conditions are adaptations, But in fact, these values are specific to individuals' bodies ---- people can be drunk with a much lower BAC than the commonly used threshold, and people can be not influenced with a BAC higher than the commonly used threshold.
The article says she "Suffers from Auto-brewery syndrome", suggesting it as a disease or infliction, and therefore implying possibe negative experiences, or unwanted affects resulting from it, and if so, then she should have doctors looking at if it could be safe and beneficial to end the condition such as by administering anti-fungal medications.
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
Use HTML+CSS+JS as your Ebook format, problem solved. The more restricted formats are specifically for wrapping content in DRM encryption and targeting old-style LCD and eInk readers that have limited capabilities than a tablet, and they are not platforms for innovating and providing richly-interactive content.
iBooks also support Javascript interactivity with EPUB content, and Adobe PDF has support for Javascript as well, although I do not know if these will work with viewing applications available on the Kindle
What, like this and this ? Via Settings > General > Restrictions
Sounds like a pain, and then it'd always be a risk of forgetting to log out one time.... I'd just use a different device the kids can't touch to make the actual purchase of content to the shared account, and then the kids can Download it to their device over the account their device is linked to.
I guess if I used iTunes Drive/AirDrop for remote password vault and cloud-based file storage, then I might use a separate account for the kids altogether ---- keeping all your devices logged into iTunes has the benefit that you can share all the Apps and Music on all the devices
Also, in Settings > Restrictions > Password Settings
I have the "Purchases and In-App Purchases" option set to "Always Require" password, instead of "Require after 15 minutes"
I also have In-App Purchases simply disabled altogether, and of course, I don't give out the Restrictions PIN numbers.
Null routing an IP address under DDoS attack in an emergency is standard industry practice across all major ISPs and hosting providers; companies that use more advanced techniques either have a few tricks up their sleeves which only work in the most common situations, or they bought some $5 million anti-DoS appliances to help mitigate it (usually).
The simple fact is DoS mitigation is not part of a basic hosting service, once an attack exceeds a few million packets per second, or a couple Gigabits: you are simply not paying network providers enough money for it to be feasible for any ISP to come close to justifying effective DoS mitigation for those rare sizes of attack, for every customer, because the cost involves provisioning hundreds of million$$$ in extra upstream capacity, internal network capacity, and operations staff.
Then even with all that extra capital spend: (1) It's still not possible to make every attack seamless, Null-routing might still be required in cases, there will still be outages, people like the above will still be unhappy, And.... (2) Most ISPs don't have that much throwaway cash, and most hosting customers aren't going to be willing to pay their share of what it costs to provision 10000x as much capacity as needed.
(3) Its less expensive to just shed overly-demanding customers who pay little by allowing them to make themselves unhappy and go to a competitor. If someone's paying $100 a month and their site is constantly getting DDoS'd, then it makes perfect sense to terminate them as a customer to, and let the other 10000 $100/Month customers have a better experience, instead of leaving due to the DoS being suffered as a result of 1 customer.
And if someone wants to arrange for their website to be handled differently, then this is part of a negotiation that should be made with the ISP or provider before turning up hosting service and added to the contract, with response SLA and recourse/refund policy.
Or you're better off enlisting a 3rd party DoS-scrubbing service such as CloudFlare to conceal your infrastructure from attackers.
There are also DoS-cleanup services that work at a network range level where your DDoS provider announces your /24 into BGP, cleans DoS, and forwards you traffic.
Many ISPs do have the flexibility for alternate handling of DDoS, up to a certain point, they can avoid Null-routing an IP, or avoid the Null-routing of one IP from making your service unavailable.... generally, the cost will be much higher --- E.g. $10,000 per month instead of $100 per month.
Forget about attempting to negotiate expert-level DoS management that will require the provisioning of engineer and infrastructure resources in advance that are quite costly to the providers to keep on hand, Unless you are willing to pay sufficiently to be a large client of the provider with a multi-year committed contract and cover the costs of those extra resources plus sizable profit.
Also: to host a website resiliently, however, the provider will most likely require that the website be served from multiple server farms in multiple IP ranges with an anycasted internet presence for both the services' IP addresses, and the supporting DNS services.
This is because in spite of additional resources, it might still be necessary at times to fall back to Null-routing.
How about "Billy joe needs drug money, and so far Linode has failed to pay the 200 bitcoins ransom charge to stop the attacks?
These attacks cost money. People don't do them for fun anymore.
You are sadly mistaken.... just b/c attacks cost money, does not mean people do not still launch them willy-nilly ---- you are a hosting provider, and some website you are hosting makes the wrong person or wrong group angry, or they have a political message to send, they may attack the entire provider.
Although, quite often such large-scale attacks are launched, then followed up by "ransom demands", and as long as the target does not pay the huge cash ransom, the attacks continue, And the attacker stands to make much more $$$ from ransom than the attacks would have cost them.
Disney could have made it a fucking musical for all Lucas could have done about it.
I wouldn't count out that as a future possibility just yet.
Should a conservative be able to tell his or her employees that there will be "consequences" if any of them ever publicly supports any pro-homosexual cause? It's a private company so they don't deserve any special protection from "consequences," right?
My answer is NO. And even making the policy statement informal or otherwise should become a sue-able offense.
Ditto for the opposite statement, about a Democrat telling his/her employees there will be consequences if they support an anti-homosexual cause.
An employer shall not be allowed to dictate their employees have or don't have certain views on politics, and shall not be allowed to retaliate or order that their employees don't publish their opinions on such matters.
But opinions are not like ethnicity. You can safely change them or keep them private.
You are not free if you cannot share your views.
Boycotts and organized shunning are legitimate free speech responses to send a message about continuing abhorrent actions or business practices.
But Boycotts and such should not be allowed as a method of showing mere disagreement with someone's opinion, what political views they have, who they choose to hire, or activities outside their business ----- the courts should disallow it as tortious interference, up to, and including putting organizers and participants in jail, if they attempt to organize a boycott against someone merely for having a different opinion.
Free speech is free speech, but does not include a right to use your free speech to scream over other people or spam to drown them out, harass their person or their character into submission, or otherwise chill others' free speech, in response to something you don't like to hear.
Many of them should be called SMBs SMTs instead Social Media Bullies, Social Media Terrorists ---- in other words basically bullies posting bullshit and claiming to have a righteous cause for what they post.
Remember this incident ?
SJW is just the currently in-vogue self-described term used by people who are Cyberbullies on Social Media claiming to be in support of justice, and using Cyberbully tactics to support an enhanced form of "Political Correctness" that is some form of "Political Correctness" with Anti-American, Anti-Christian, Anti-White, Anti-Male, Anti-Heterosexual affirmative action; these retarted bullies' tactics include magical thinking, outright lying, recklessly throwing around false accusations whenever it suits them, sensationalist posts, outright deception, misrepresenting what other people have said and/or its meaning, and forming ad-hoc mobs to harrass people.
They can go for the "whole enchilada", and argue they don't even need the fair use defense, because their usage is claimed to be non-infringing and not a derivative work, despite the references to the original series by name, and possible use of some imagery or descriptions that reminds people of the original (Without actually copying plot, scenarios, or characters).
Or they could argue they fall under 1st amendment Fair Use protection by using so little of the work; if their amount used falls below some threshold, then they are likely to be allowed, even if they have some commercial activity, and their primary purpose is entertainment.
professionally produced "Star Trek" film certainly COULD compete with Paramount's 2016 Star Trek Film ....
If they want to argue their market for the work is affected adversly, they'll need to show that it Already is affected, not that it might be in the future ---- If it is affected in the future, they can then always go and drag the case back into the courts, and argue that Indie's continued Fair Use stopped being fair use at time X.....
It's entirely possible the gift-giver (who isn't a Star Trek fan) would buy the wrong one, buying the unauthorized movie rather than Paramount's official Star Trek.
That's a Trademark misappropriation issue, not a Copyright issue.
all the state can do is attach a lien to your property.
No... Attaching a lien to the property is just Step 1. This is also the polite approach, they will use by default for a minor debt.
If you do something major to bother your state, such as tax fraud, they can cancel the deed entirely, and resell the property. This is commonly done if the property's owner was involved in other crimes as well.
Step 2. after attaching a lien is where the state forces a foreclosure within a few months and auctions off the property to satisfy the lien.
Also, some states will spare themselves of having to do the collections work involved in Step 2, by simply auctioning off the lien to private investors instead ---- then whoever buys the tax lien will foreclose on the preceding tenant, should the previous tenant fail to pay off the lien and allow their redemption opportunity time limit to expire.
thanks to the bailout, the banks can afford to not sell those homes for whatever the market can bear, so they are sitting on them and refusing to sell them in order to keep real estate values high
If that's true, then the government should file charges against them for housing market manipulation, and forcibly liquidate the properties on their behalf.
so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are owners
There is no fundamental right to exclusive control of land, not even in a capitalist society. If the property owner decides to build housing, and rent out housing, then their customer's lives depend on this relationship, which is in danger of becoming tyrannical or unfairly exploitative, so the property owner automatically cedes certain rights, Even rights that might not be in their best financial interest to lose, and even rights they do not willingly give up.
Actually.... the deedholder or claimholder is just a renter too. The ultimate owner of land is the state government, and in most places, they even charge the current deedholder a rent called property tax to maintain any privileges, and their usage of the land has to be compliant with the law and in the interest of the public (E.g. You cannot just dump hazardous wastes on your land, however you like).
It makes perfect sense, that a government respecting the interest of the public would have reasonable regulation of the government deedholders' subleasing arrangements with members of the public, where people secure their housing / apartment living spaces, or even, where people secure housing for other vital purchases: such as the usage to host the main office of a small business.