if you aren't sharing the entire work how can somebody reasonably be nailed for sharing the entire work as opposed to part of the work
Nobody is being sued for sharing "the entire work". They're being sued for sharing any part of the work.
how can what they want be considered anywhere near proportional
The penalties in these cases are always statutory penalties, not damages. They're not designed to be proportional to the harm caused, they're designed to discourage that behavior. They may still be wildly inappropriate, unreasonable, or unfair for this kind of case. But "proportional" is not one of the things they're intended to be at all.
But, to more directly address the original problem -- what jbarr was proposing was trying to avoid prosecution on a clever technicality. That is, a bunch of people are collectively sharing a file, but no one person is the entirety of the file. The two problems with this are that (a) the technicality he's trying to exploit doesn't exist and (b) trying to exploit what you think is a clever technicality in the law generally doesn't work nearly as well as you would think.
Not true. It's rare for child pornography statutes to have strict liability.
For example, New York State's is penal code article 263. Possession: "A person is guilty of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child when, knowing the character and content thereof, he knowingly has in his possession or control, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any obscene performance which includes sexual conduct by a child less than sixteen years of age."
The federal statue is what you're most likely to get prosecuted under if they can demonstrate that the material was transmitted over the Internet (and if they don't like you). This is a decent summary, but 18 USC 2252 is probably the most illustrative. Note that every statement in subsection (a) indicates "knowingly".
Plus, it's great short-term strategy, and companies like short-term strategy, right? If you're the one that makes the universal flu vaccine, then people are going to buy from you and not your competitors. Never mind that you can charge a lot more (since it's much more useful) and that insurance is almost sure to pay for it.
Actually, the light flux per pixel is constant with respect to distance. The total flux from the object decreases as 1/r^2, but the number of pixels taken up by the object on the sensor also decreases as 1/r^2, cancelling this out.
You can try this out yourself: set a camera to manual exposure and take a picture of a brick at distances of 1 and 10 feet. Compare brightness of brick between photos. (Alternately, simply consider the apparent brightness different between a tree tens of feet away and trees a mile away. Does the latter appear hundreds of thousands of times darker?)
First, this is not insightful. It's hand-waving by someone who doesn't know the first thing about physics.
The Copenhagen interpretation [wikipedia.org] of quantum mechanics tells us... The many-words interpretation [wikipedia.org] of quantum mechanics tells us...
Quantum mechanics "interpretations" are more like philosophy for physics than actual physics. There's also a lot of disagreement about them, unless the physicist is trying to sell a book or TV special.
Various tests tell us photons are waves. No, particles. No, both! And electrons too! And more!
Actually, we know that all objects have a particular set of mechanical behaviors. For all but the smallest objects, these behaviors are approximately the same as classical mechanics. For very small objects, these behaviors are complicated and unintuitive. (Though, one might wonder why we'd expect the behavior of such small objects to be "intuitive" at all.) These behaviors of small objects have some similarity to what we call "waves" in classical mechanics and some similarity to what we call "particles" in classical mechanics.
Go read up on quantum entanglement [wikipedia.org] if you have not yet believed in enough impossible things before breakfast yet.
Well, I don't need to read up on quantum entanglement since IAAP, but why believe in something seemingly-impossible? It's much more fun to empirically confirm something seemingly impossible!
There aren't that many "game changers" to be statistically meaningful, and there really isn't much of a bias toward rejecting papers because they're controversial. I think the explanation posed above is much more likely. When you have a relatively low-impact paper, you fire it off to a low-impact journal that's likely to accept it and move on. When you have a really great paper, you start at the top and keep submitting to journals until it gets accepted. (Thing is, there's no shortage of pretty great papers, and there's a real shortage of space in very high-profile journals. So any paper that was great to start with is likely to see a lot of rejections unless it is absolutely one of the best.)
Now, my writing does comparatively suck, and I've never had the patience to do all the leg work as you're suggesting.
So, your writing is bad and you don't have the patience for proofreading or copyediting, but you're surprised -- or rather, have come up with a near-conspiratorial excuse for the fact -- that your submissions to journals whose purpose is, ostensibly, to communicate the results of your work to others so that they may learn from it have been rejected?...
3) 15% popular support. Why is this set so high when a majority or significant plurality of Americans don't vote?
...
Voting or not voting is a binary choice. There's no third option. So there's no "plurality". One is the majority and one is the minority. (In presidential election years, not voting is the minority.)
Presumably you have to be that guy because you're wrong. It's not a formula, it's a number with units. The royalty rate is 0.0021 (dollars / (song * listener)). That is, the unit is dollars / (song * listener). The use of multiplication in units is somewhat uncommon outside of science. Normally you'd see it written more like dollars/song/listener or dollars/song-listener (or with the highly appropriate word "per").
This actually happened in my case too -- they identified the piece of paper that caused the error and that was it. Most places I've been to, though, they make it abundantly clear that you need to remove *everything* from your pockets. As you point out, it's a pretty useless system if they don't.
Dime? That's high-density metal, of course they can detect it! I was more surprised when I failed the backscatter scan because of a folded-over receipt in my shirt pocket.
They make money even after devices have been shown unsafe (I believe the old xray machines have been banned in Europe for some time due to health concerns)
The latter is true: X-ray backscatter machines were banned in Europe because of health concerns. The former is not true: they have not been shown to be unsafe. (It's probably most accurate to say that they've been shown to be safe, but that the level of evidence is unconvincing to many.)
It shouldn't surprise you that the Europeans, too, sometimes make decisions based on the feelings of their politicians and populace and not on hard evidence.
It varies. Different lenses have different levels of resistance to flare, depending on the lens design. Modern lenses that are designed to be flare-resistant, like most decent SLR wide-angle lenses, can almost completely suppress flare. You can shoot straight in to the sun with no flare. However, many lenses aren't designed to be particularly flare-resistant.
Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be. Even if your study comes out a way you didn't expect, if you did it right, you should still be able to get it published. There's something beyond publish or perish that is at work here.
That's what you might think, but getting (most) journals to publish negative results is very difficult.
What're they going to do, stop buying US bonds? They're still one of the world's most stable investments. China getting into a disagreement with us won't change that much (though China deciding they're not as valuable could), so there will still be plenty of buyers. So the rate we're currently paying on bonds, which is incredibly low, will go up slightly? Big deal.
We sell bonds. As a result, we're not really beholden to the people who own that debt.
Arguably, the designation "printable character" does not imply a font at all. What the symbol font has is glyphs, which map to character code points -- ones that are already defined to mean something different and printable. "Printable" is more a property of the character (code point) and not of the glyph. Fortunately, there's this whole Unicode thing that (a) is a widely-accepted standard with easily-obtained libraries, (b) is supported by web browsers, Windows, Mac OS, etc., (c) will tell you if a character is printable or not.
you open up the crypto library on your system as a potential attack vector.
If your crypto library cannot hash an arbitrarily-long string of arbitrary binary data, then it's a very bad crypto library. Or, more likely, you are using it stupidly.
Slashdot Mirror
if you aren't sharing the entire work how can somebody reasonably be nailed for sharing the entire work as opposed to part of the work
Nobody is being sued for sharing "the entire work". They're being sued for sharing any part of the work.
how can what they want be considered anywhere near proportional
The penalties in these cases are always statutory penalties, not damages. They're not designed to be proportional to the harm caused, they're designed to discourage that behavior. They may still be wildly inappropriate, unreasonable, or unfair for this kind of case. But "proportional" is not one of the things they're intended to be at all.
But, to more directly address the original problem -- what jbarr was proposing was trying to avoid prosecution on a clever technicality. That is, a bunch of people are collectively sharing a file, but no one person is the entirety of the file. The two problems with this are that (a) the technicality he's trying to exploit doesn't exist and (b) trying to exploit what you think is a clever technicality in the law generally doesn't work nearly as well as you would think.
I think you'll find that sharing only part of a copyrighted work is just as illegal.
Not true. It's rare for child pornography statutes to have strict liability.
For example, New York State's is penal code article 263. Possession: "A person is guilty of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child when, knowing the character and content thereof, he knowingly has in his possession or control, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any obscene performance which includes sexual conduct by a child less than sixteen years of age."
The federal statue is what you're most likely to get prosecuted under if they can demonstrate that the material was transmitted over the Internet (and if they don't like you). This is a decent summary, but 18 USC 2252 is probably the most illustrative. Note that every statement in subsection (a) indicates "knowingly".
It hasn't stopped all the other vaccines.
Plus, it's great short-term strategy, and companies like short-term strategy, right? If you're the one that makes the universal flu vaccine, then people are going to buy from you and not your competitors. Never mind that you can charge a lot more (since it's much more useful) and that insurance is almost sure to pay for it.
Actually, the light flux per pixel is constant with respect to distance. The total flux from the object decreases as 1/r^2, but the number of pixels taken up by the object on the sensor also decreases as 1/r^2, cancelling this out.
You can try this out yourself: set a camera to manual exposure and take a picture of a brick at distances of 1 and 10 feet. Compare brightness of brick between photos. (Alternately, simply consider the apparent brightness different between a tree tens of feet away and trees a mile away. Does the latter appear hundreds of thousands of times darker?)
First, this is not insightful. It's hand-waving by someone who doesn't know the first thing about physics.
The Copenhagen interpretation [wikipedia.org] of quantum mechanics tells us...
The many-words interpretation [wikipedia.org] of quantum mechanics tells us...
Quantum mechanics "interpretations" are more like philosophy for physics than actual physics. There's also a lot of disagreement about them, unless the physicist is trying to sell a book or TV special.
Various tests tell us photons are waves. No, particles. No, both! And electrons too! And more!
Actually, we know that all objects have a particular set of mechanical behaviors. For all but the smallest objects, these behaviors are approximately the same as classical mechanics. For very small objects, these behaviors are complicated and unintuitive. (Though, one might wonder why we'd expect the behavior of such small objects to be "intuitive" at all.) These behaviors of small objects have some similarity to what we call "waves" in classical mechanics and some similarity to what we call "particles" in classical mechanics.
Go read up on quantum entanglement [wikipedia.org] if you have not yet believed in enough impossible things before breakfast yet.
Well, I don't need to read up on quantum entanglement since IAAP, but why believe in something seemingly-impossible? It's much more fun to empirically confirm something seemingly impossible!
There aren't that many "game changers" to be statistically meaningful, and there really isn't much of a bias toward rejecting papers because they're controversial. I think the explanation posed above is much more likely. When you have a relatively low-impact paper, you fire it off to a low-impact journal that's likely to accept it and move on. When you have a really great paper, you start at the top and keep submitting to journals until it gets accepted. (Thing is, there's no shortage of pretty great papers, and there's a real shortage of space in very high-profile journals. So any paper that was great to start with is likely to see a lot of rejections unless it is absolutely one of the best.)
Now, my writing does comparatively suck, and I've never had the patience to do all the leg work as you're suggesting.
So, your writing is bad and you don't have the patience for proofreading or copyediting, but you're surprised -- or rather, have come up with a near-conspiratorial excuse for the fact -- that your submissions to journals whose purpose is, ostensibly, to communicate the results of your work to others so that they may learn from it have been rejected? ...
Perhaps there's a simpler explanation here.
I'm pretty sure it was nationalist trolling.
I don't want a secure boot. I just want to be able to boot whatever I feel like booting.
Then... turn off secure boot?
3) 15% popular support. Why is this set so high when a majority or significant plurality of Americans don't vote?
...
Voting or not voting is a binary choice. There's no third option. So there's no "plurality". One is the majority and one is the minority. (In presidential election years, not voting is the minority.)
Yes, lets put accounting on an ipad; nevermind the spreadsheet he's larger than an ipads RAM
I'd really hate to see how Excel performs on a 1 GB spreadsheet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth#Etymology
Presumably you have to be that guy because you're wrong. It's not a formula, it's a number with units. The royalty rate is 0.0021 (dollars / (song * listener)). That is, the unit is dollars / (song * listener). The use of multiplication in units is somewhat uncommon outside of science. Normally you'd see it written more like dollars/song/listener or dollars/song-listener (or with the highly appropriate word "per").
This actually happened in my case too -- they identified the piece of paper that caused the error and that was it. Most places I've been to, though, they make it abundantly clear that you need to remove *everything* from your pockets. As you point out, it's a pretty useless system if they don't.
Dime? That's high-density metal, of course they can detect it! I was more surprised when I failed the backscatter scan because of a folded-over receipt in my shirt pocket.
They make money even after devices have been shown unsafe (I believe the old xray machines have been banned in Europe for some time due to health concerns)
The latter is true: X-ray backscatter machines were banned in Europe because of health concerns. The former is not true: they have not been shown to be unsafe. (It's probably most accurate to say that they've been shown to be safe, but that the level of evidence is unconvincing to many.)
It shouldn't surprise you that the Europeans, too, sometimes make decisions based on the feelings of their politicians and populace and not on hard evidence.
That doesn't result in a clone.
It varies. Different lenses have different levels of resistance to flare, depending on the lens design. Modern lenses that are designed to be flare-resistant, like most decent SLR wide-angle lenses, can almost completely suppress flare. You can shoot straight in to the sun with no flare. However, many lenses aren't designed to be particularly flare-resistant.
Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be. Even if your study comes out a way you didn't expect, if you did it right, you should still be able to get it published. There's something beyond publish or perish that is at work here.
That's what you might think, but getting (most) journals to publish negative results is very difficult.
Hiding in plain sight isn't actually more effective, it's just less expected. If it was more effective, they'd just call it "hiding".
What're they going to do, stop buying US bonds? They're still one of the world's most stable investments. China getting into a disagreement with us won't change that much (though China deciding they're not as valuable could), so there will still be plenty of buyers. So the rate we're currently paying on bonds, which is incredibly low, will go up slightly? Big deal.
We sell bonds. As a result, we're not really beholden to the people who own that debt.
Arguably, the designation "printable character" does not imply a font at all. What the symbol font has is glyphs, which map to character code points -- ones that are already defined to mean something different and printable. "Printable" is more a property of the character (code point) and not of the glyph. Fortunately, there's this whole Unicode thing that (a) is a widely-accepted standard with easily-obtained libraries, (b) is supported by web browsers, Windows, Mac OS, etc., (c) will tell you if a character is printable or not.
you open up the crypto library on your system as a potential attack vector.
If your crypto library cannot hash an arbitrarily-long string of arbitrary binary data, then it's a very bad crypto library. Or, more likely, you are using it stupidly.
Also, wasn't it Microsoft that came up with the oxymoronical term "reversible encryption"?
You're perhaps thinking of hashing. Reversibility is pretty much a requirement for encryption.