I'm too unfamiliar with the matter myself to argue the point personally, but I know plenty of people, who view New York's DA Eliot Spitzer's litigation against financial firms as just that.
RIAA or any similar organisation should not be allowed the potential to use the legal system that way
Sorry, I remain unconvinced. They cought some people sharing illegally. They did certain steps to stop them and to discourage others. None of the steps was in itself illegal... What's the problem? You don't like them? Buy somebody else's CD.
As for the criminal-vs.-civil litigations, I offer you the most recent discussion
where somepeople appear to disagree with you.
VERY few hospitals in the U.S. would be equipped or have the knowledge needed to treat a severe radiation injury either.
True enough. Still, I'd expect there to be more facilities here. Kyiv was the capital of USSR's second most populous republic (Russia was the first). After Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) it was, probably, USSR's third biggest city.
And yet there were no adequate facilities in it -- despite years of "preparations" for a nuclear attack by the "capitalist warmongers"...
Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top.
As someone, who was not only born then, but also lived there -- in Kyiv -- at the time, I authoritatively state: you are wrong.
This is a sign, that nuclear engineers were a really prized folk. Dozens of firefighters and lower-rank workers died right there -- radiation is like that, you don't feel it, until it is too late and noone bothered to warn them. Soviets most certainly did not care of their people, unless -- as in the case of these engineers -- educating them took a while.
They flew these guys to Moscow, which also means, that Kyiv -- Ukraine's capital, a city of 2.5 million people merely 100 miles away -- did not have the proper facilities. The medicine was not top -- individual scientists and labs did have notable successes, but the public health was awful.
The differences between various *BSD systems are, actually, less than between various Linux distros. Some are closer, some further away from the others in look and in feel. Pick one you like.
You should not wait till they are halfway on the list, you should not question how long the list is and how far they are from you, you should question the thing as a matter of principle.
As a matter of principle, there is nothing illegal about RIAA's tactics. I also know, that RIAA has no incentive for having too big a list, nor for putting innocent people on it. And I'm old enough to know, that evil does not spread far without incentive.
I have repeatedly stated that I do not mind action being taken against people who distibute copyrighted material illegally. I do object to a private organisation doing that.
This is where you are wrong, I think. A private entity will not be doing this for the sake of doing ("we have to enforce the law"). As long as it (the entity) is not making money on these suits, I'm comfortable, that it will not "go on a fishing expedition".
An overzealous district attorney, aiming, perhaps, for a governor's seat, on the other hand, could do just that, if empowered by a law. Less bothered by the profit, the government can use vastly bigger resources and be a lot nastier than a corporation (only as long as the said corporation makes no profit on each case, of course).
From the beginning of your post you aknowledge the fact, that the accused are responsible as the accusors charge. So why argue about the standard of proof at all?
Accused, when found guilty, are responsible for what they did. Untill they are found guilty, they are accused of, suspected of, but NOT GUILTY.
To start with, someone with your knowledge of the legal system, should know, that in the civil suit there is no "guilt". There is (or there is not) "responsibility". O.J. Simpson is not guilty of killing his wife (as per the criminal trial), but is responsible for her death (as per the subsequent civil suit). But I understand your meaning and will likewise use the term "innocent" as "not responsible"...
You still have to prove an accusation, AND IF IT IS TRUE, you can hold the person responsible for it.
I don't have to prove anything. RIAA does. You are trying to convince me -- and the rest of Slashdot, that we have something to worry about. And "I, for one," remain unimpressed.
There is a big difference between something being true and it being provable. For me to worry about something like this, I need to sincerely:
doubt the responsibility of the accused;
fear, that many innocents may be purposely targeted in the future in the same manner. ("And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.");
fear, that this kind of tactics may be used selectively against political opponents.
Your original post begins with the assertion, which takes care of the 1. Indeed, you claim, that:
WHat is beign questioned is how that is dealt with by RIAA and the legal system.
To which I respond, that since RIAA is not making money out of these settlements -- they spend more on investigations and the lawyers, than they get from the folks -- there is no reason to fear, that this "abuse of the legal system" is sustainable. This aleviates the concerns of the 2.
As far as 3., well, we haven't seen that yet. The political process, luckily, remains such, that all sides have enough money to be able to defend themselves in courts.
What remains is your unabashed hatred of the RIAA, and your willingness to tolerate the abuse of the intricacies of the legal system to defend the illegal downloaders against the fines. I'd rather you defend the victims of anti-speeding laws...
From the beginning of your post you aknowledge the fact, that the accused are responsible as the accusors charge. So why argue about the standard of proof at all?
Or do you, in fact, sincerely believe, that some of the people RIAA, who has targeted so far, are innocent?
Or are you, perhaps, afraid, that RIAA (or MPAA) will, in the future use the same tactics to go after the much wider group of people, and there will be innocents there? That would be a legitimate concern, of course, but as long as it still costs RIAA more (in absolute terms) to wage each of these little battles, than it gets from the "victims" in settlements, there is no need to worry -- they are not making money off these settlements. They just want to scare people enough for the illegal downloads to stop. Whether this is a wise plan or not should not concern us...
It only takes 2 minutes on the net to see that the US army and administration has screwed not only themselves
Wow. In just two minutes on the web you determine all of this? About the country which has next to no Internet access? You must really be a military and administrative expert with serious background in Middle Eastern history to boot. Either that, or -- as far you are concerned -- the war was lost before being started, by a simple lemma of an axiom, stating that the presidency-stealing AWOL bastard can never do anything right.
their country wasn't a danger to anyone.
Just ask Kuwaitis. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Israel. Or Iraqi Kurds.
As far US is concerned, Saddam Hussein had the bio- and chemical weapons-technology (if not, as it seems now, the ready-to-use weapons themselves). Al'Qaeda was looking for them -- as is currently publicly known, and was known to our government long ago.
There was nothing to stop Saddam from -- at the time of his choosing -- giving some of this crap to Al'Qaeda. Nothing... True, Baathists and bin Laden disliked each other. But -- as the same link shows, Taliban-al'Qaeda's relationship was not always smooth either. Bin Laden and Saddam could've become allies or even friends at any time too -- Osama could be very eloquent. Fortunately, we had legitimate grounds for invading and kicking Saddam out.
After the US took Saddam, the terrorists had free reign to move in, recruit all the angry, armed men, and mobilise them against the US troops, and the US as a whole.
Heh, there are 42 million Iraqis. Even if 40 thousand (and Mahdi army only has 2K fighters) hate us and fight us -- that is still under 1/10th of one percent.
A binary-only driver is not "high-quality" support. I want my next machine to be an amd64-based FreeBSD box. XFree86 and X.org compile on the platform, but these NVidia drivers will not work...
The grandparent's example viz wifi and cordless phones may be wrong, but the point is valid -- your usage of part of spectrum interferes with my usage.
The property model may be a better way to manage the resource. And Economist makes a good point for it.
No sane person fights a war to "cover the whole country" with bases, disperse enemy army, and take the enemy leadership into custody.
Yes, achieving these goals alone may not be enough to claim victory. But it is enough to make any allegations of losing sound ridiculous.
Let's apply your logic to the "war" against P2P (which shows many similarities).
I'm sorry, if you are going to claim, that our war with Iraq is in any way similar to the war on P2p, I will not be participating in discussion. This is just too far off...
But what really bothers me is I still don't know why we invaded.
Well, here it is from a respected late journalist, and from myself -- in 1991 Iraq committed itself to the cease-fire agreement, and we stopped attacking. Over the years, Iraq did not honor its obligations under the agreement. In fact, it was quite contemptuos of them, as 17 UN Security Council resolutions confirm. The most often mentioned obligation was to prove, it had no WMDs. Notice, that Iraq was way beyond the presumption of innocence -- it was supposed to prove, it did not have them, but on the eve of the attack, the UN inspectors (some of them anti-American minded, BTW) still could not say for sure...
Clinton should've attacked Iraq years ago. I'm glad, Bush had "the minerals" to do it...
Uh-oh... Loss of civility is the first sign of losing an argument...
Preferably within the next twelve months as the Iraqi people hand the US the worst military defeat in its history.
Of course, you'll be glad, when that happens, but it will not. I'm willing to wait 12 months to see you proven wrong. You can already start thinking about the reasons, you prediction did not come true. Just remind me by e-mail...
Were our objectives to "cover the whole country" with bases, disperse the enemy army, and take enemy leader ship into custory?
These are the immediate objectives of all full-out wars. A side achieving them all may not be considered "lost".
If our objective included peace in the Middle East, preventing attacks on America, saving the lives of innocent Iraqis or turning Iraq into a stable, free country, then we lost.
You are cheering too early -- even by these weird standards -- we did not lose yet, the game is not over. I'd say, we are doing fine. Iraq's population is 42 million. Even if 40K are fighting us (and Mahdi Army has only about 2K fighters), that is still less than one tenth of one percent.
I'll refer you to this journal entry which quotes an American serving in Iraq -- it lists our achievements...
All sh-scripts I saw on Solaris -- starting with Sun's own -- use/bin/ksh.
I'm not advocating change for the sake of change, but for the sake of bug-fixing and feature adding. A vi, that can't handle my window width is broken.
An awk, that can't handle, what nawk can, need not exist. And so on.
Why can't I edit a command line in the default shell? Why bother shipping csh at all, when tcsh is the fully compatible and (much) newer version?
Why does not find(1) accept ``-print0'' (and xargs -- ``-0'')?.. It is 21st century, files with blanks and other non-printables in their names have been around for years...
These are just random picks. All commercial Unixes, I saw, suffer from these problems.
For what I know, IPSEC doesn't stop me from (ab)using your wi-fi internetconnection.
You don't know enough -- it does. My NAT-ing gateway will not talk to you, nor will anything else on my network. You will not be able to read, what my network talks about, nor will you be able to use the Internet through my uplink.
Good kernel, but awful user-space.
Outdated utilities (starting with the/bin/sh itself), awfully user-unfriendly "out of the box" install.
Linux may not follow the standards either, but, at least, the command-line editing works out of the box...
FreeBSD remains my choice, of course...
The $500 limit is on cash withdrawals. In case of purchases, they have some heuristic algorithm, which has once prevented me from -- exactly -- buying the second pair of monitors from Dell.
I had to call the bank and remove the block they placed on my account.
Unlike with a credit card, of course, I'd still be liable for any unauthorized purchases/withdrawals, that went through. But it is not like banks don't care as other posters here alleged.
The security of CCs doesn't come free -- it is paid for by the huge rates and, in my case, huge fees for minor "offenses". That's why I prefer the debit card -- no checks to mail at the end of the month.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm too unfamiliar with the matter myself to argue the point personally, but I know plenty of people, who view New York's DA Eliot Spitzer's litigation against financial firms as just that.
Sorry, I remain unconvinced. They cought some people sharing illegally. They did certain steps to stop them and to discourage others. None of the steps was in itself illegal... What's the problem? You don't like them? Buy somebody else's CD.
As for the criminal-vs.-civil litigations, I offer you the most recent discussion where some people appear to disagree with you.
True enough. Still, I'd expect there to be more facilities here. Kyiv was the capital of USSR's second most populous republic (Russia was the first). After Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) it was, probably, USSR's third biggest city.
And yet there were no adequate facilities in it -- despite years of "preparations" for a nuclear attack by the "capitalist warmongers"...
As someone, who was not only born then, but also lived there -- in Kyiv -- at the time, I authoritatively state: you are wrong.
This is a sign, that nuclear engineers were a really prized folk. Dozens of firefighters and lower-rank workers died right there -- radiation is like that, you don't feel it, until it is too late and noone bothered to warn them. Soviets most certainly did not care of their people, unless -- as in the case of these engineers -- educating them took a while.
They flew these guys to Moscow, which also means, that Kyiv -- Ukraine's capital, a city of 2.5 million people merely 100 miles away -- did not have the proper facilities. The medicine was not top -- individual scientists and labs did have notable successes, but the public health was awful.
The differences between various *BSD systems are, actually, less than between various Linux distros. Some are closer, some further away from the others in look and in feel. Pick one you like.
As a matter of principle, there is nothing illegal about RIAA's tactics. I also know, that RIAA has no incentive for having too big a list, nor for putting innocent people on it. And I'm old enough to know, that evil does not spread far without incentive.
This is where you are wrong, I think. A private entity will not be doing this for the sake of doing ("we have to enforce the law"). As long as it (the entity) is not making money on these suits, I'm comfortable, that it will not "go on a fishing expedition".
An overzealous district attorney, aiming, perhaps, for a governor's seat, on the other hand, could do just that, if empowered by a law. Less bothered by the profit, the government can use vastly bigger resources and be a lot nastier than a corporation (only as long as the said corporation makes no profit on each case, of course).
To start with, someone with your knowledge of the legal system, should know, that in the civil suit there is no "guilt". There is (or there is not) "responsibility". O.J. Simpson is not guilty of killing his wife (as per the criminal trial), but is responsible for her death (as per the subsequent civil suit). But I understand your meaning and will likewise use the term "innocent" as "not responsible"...
I don't have to prove anything. RIAA does. You are trying to convince me -- and the rest of Slashdot, that we have something to worry about. And "I, for one," remain unimpressed.
There is a big difference between something being true and it being provable. For me to worry about something like this, I need to sincerely:
Your original post begins with the assertion, which takes care of the 1. Indeed, you claim, that:
To which I respond, that since RIAA is not making money out of these settlements -- they spend more on investigations and the lawyers, than they get from the folks -- there is no reason to fear, that this "abuse of the legal system" is sustainable. This aleviates the concerns of the 2.
As far as 3., well, we haven't seen that yet. The political process, luckily, remains such, that all sides have enough money to be able to defend themselves in courts.
What remains is your unabashed hatred of the RIAA, and your willingness to tolerate the abuse of the intricacies of the legal system to defend the illegal downloaders against the fines. I'd rather you defend the victims of anti-speeding laws...
From the beginning of your post you aknowledge the fact, that the accused are responsible as the accusors charge. So why argue about the standard of proof at all?
Or do you, in fact, sincerely believe, that some of the people RIAA, who has targeted so far, are innocent?
Or are you, perhaps, afraid, that RIAA (or MPAA) will, in the future use the same tactics to go after the much wider group of people, and there will be innocents there? That would be a legitimate concern, of course, but as long as it still costs RIAA more (in absolute terms) to wage each of these little battles, than it gets from the "victims" in settlements, there is no need to worry -- they are not making money off these settlements. They just want to scare people enough for the illegal downloads to stop. Whether this is a wise plan or not should not concern us...
Wow. In just two minutes on the web you determine all of this? About the country which has next to no Internet access? You must really be a military and administrative expert with serious background in Middle Eastern history to boot. Either that, or -- as far you are concerned -- the war was lost before being started, by a simple lemma of an axiom, stating that the presidency-stealing AWOL bastard can never do anything right.
Just ask Kuwaitis. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Israel. Or Iraqi Kurds.As far US is concerned, Saddam Hussein had the bio- and chemical weapons-technology (if not, as it seems now, the ready-to-use weapons themselves). Al'Qaeda was looking for them -- as is currently publicly known, and was known to our government long ago.
There was nothing to stop Saddam from -- at the time of his choosing -- giving some of this crap to Al'Qaeda. Nothing... True, Baathists and bin Laden disliked each other. But -- as the same link shows, Taliban-al'Qaeda's relationship was not always smooth either. Bin Laden and Saddam could've become allies or even friends at any time too -- Osama could be very eloquent. Fortunately, we had legitimate grounds for invading and kicking Saddam out.
Heh, there are 42 million Iraqis. Even if 40 thousand (and Mahdi army only has 2K fighters) hate us and fight us -- that is still under 1/10th of one percent.
Ukraine is not doing too badly, thank you very much. Not for the third poorest country in Europe anyway.
A binary-only driver is not "high-quality" support. I want my next machine to be an amd64-based FreeBSD box. XFree86 and X.org compile on the platform, but these NVidia drivers will not work...
Wouldn't it be embarassing, if these guys were the first to introduce Linux to Afghanistan?..
The property model may be a better way to manage the resource. And Economist makes a good point for it.
Yes, achieving these goals alone may not be enough to claim victory. But it is enough to make any allegations of losing sound ridiculous.
I'm sorry, if you are going to claim, that our war with Iraq is in any way similar to the war on P2p, I will not be participating in discussion. This is just too far off...
Well, here it is from a respected late journalist, and from myself -- in 1991 Iraq committed itself to the cease-fire agreement, and we stopped attacking. Over the years, Iraq did not honor its obligations under the agreement. In fact, it was quite contemptuos of them, as 17 UN Security Council resolutions confirm. The most often mentioned obligation was to prove, it had no WMDs. Notice, that Iraq was way beyond the presumption of innocence -- it was supposed to prove, it did not have them, but on the eve of the attack, the UN inspectors (some of them anti-American minded, BTW) still could not say for sure...
Clinton should've attacked Iraq years ago. I'm glad, Bush had "the minerals" to do it...
Uh-oh... Loss of civility is the first sign of losing an argument...
Of course, you'll be glad, when that happens, but it will not. I'm willing to wait 12 months to see you proven wrong. You can already start thinking about the reasons, you prediction did not come true. Just remind me by e-mail...
These are the immediate objectives of all full-out wars. A side achieving them all may not be considered "lost".
You are cheering too early -- even by these weird standards -- we did not lose yet, the game is not over. I'd say, we are doing fine. Iraq's population is 42 million. Even if 40K are fighting us (and Mahdi Army has only about 2K fighters), that is still less than one tenth of one percent.
I'll refer you to this journal entry which quotes an American serving in Iraq -- it lists our achievements...
It does poorly...
I'm sorry to be off-topic and will be happy to be downmodded together with the parent post.
It amuses and puzzles me, how Bush-bashers can -- with a straight face, apparently -- claim, we lost the Iraq war, when all of the following is true:
Although Hummers are the easiest to hate, these solar-powered vehicles are too light to withstand a collision with a light pole...
Why not just add this stuff to water supply?
I'm not advocating change for the sake of change, but for the sake of bug-fixing and feature adding. A vi, that can't handle my window width is broken.
An awk, that can't handle, what nawk can, need not exist. And so on.
Why can't I edit a command line in the default shell? Why bother shipping csh at all, when tcsh is the fully compatible and (much) newer version?
Why does not find(1) accept ``-print0'' (and xargs -- ``-0'')?.. It is 21st century, files with blanks and other non-printables in their names have been around for years...
These are just random picks. All commercial Unixes, I saw, suffer from these problems.
You don't know enough -- it does. My NAT-ing gateway will not talk to you, nor will anything else on my network. You will not be able to read, what my network talks about, nor will you be able to use the Internet through my uplink.
Windows, BSD, Linux -- whatever...
Good kernel, but awful user-space. Outdated utilities (starting with the /bin/sh itself), awfully user-unfriendly "out of the box" install.
Linux may not follow the standards either, but, at least, the command-line editing works out of the box...
FreeBSD remains my choice, of course...
To avoid police misbehavior...
I had to call the bank and remove the block they placed on my account.
Unlike with a credit card, of course, I'd still be liable for any unauthorized purchases/withdrawals, that went through. But it is not like banks don't care as other posters here alleged.
The security of CCs doesn't come free -- it is paid for by the huge rates and, in my case, huge fees for minor "offenses". That's why I prefer the debit card -- no checks to mail at the end of the month.