I see a lot of the comments so far are about how stupid it was to go through with the transaction after it was mentioned that the buyer was going purchase illicit material with it.
However, as I understand it from Krebs' post - and the Florida law in question - that doesn't necessarily factor into it. The law seems to state that as soon as you act as a money transmitter, and the exchange is between $300 and $20k within a 12 month period, without being licensed to do so makes you liable for a third degree felony.
Some questions I would have for a lawyer that actually knows the ins&outs of Florida state law in this field: 1. Is the above, in fact, the case? I.e. are the charges on those accounts completely unrelated to the disclosure of what the purchased material (in this case, Bitcoin) would be used for? 2a. Does that mean that the state of Florida sees Bitcoin as a currency? 2b. If it does not, then how would this same law be applied to e.g. physical goods if used as a material for exchange (e.g. gold nuggets, diamonds, etc.) 3. Would similar apply to a travelers going in opposite directions exchanging their currencies when the value exceeds $300 (something easily possible if you forget to empty out your wallet), rather than going through the official exchange bureaus at the airport (and incurring the rather hefty exchange fees)?
Exactly. The reason no-one RTFA is because it's usually shit, and they probably read it two days ago anyway. The comments are the interesting bit. Slashdot isn't a news site, it's a debate site.
And in furtherance of that truth: Bring back Slashback. Slashback fit brilliantly in that very notion, it also re-affirms that Slashdot acknowledges this by providing some editorial control over a week's wrap-up and pushing further discussion on the best items, the most controversial items, etc. Maybe it was too much work, maybe it didn't help bring in enough revenue - I have no idea why it was dropped. But remember that story earlier about what news is worth paying for? Slashback and the comments it highlighted and spawned, to me, would be worth paying for.
( I actually don't mind the redesign too much.. there's always CSS overrides if I feel like there's too much whitespace or whatever. Functionality changes (already pointed out aplenty) on the other hand.. mangling CSS is one thing, replacing swaths of js to get things to not be broken is another entirely. )
Okay, maybe not entirely. Let's instead admire the fact that the Arduino platform is, in many ways, what early computers were to people a generation or two ago. But growth out of that and onto more powerful platforms (Raspberry Pi or BBB, maybe a PCduino first or Intel's oddball attempt at smashing a PC and an Arduino together) will indeed drive a push toward FPGA use. Xilinx is certainly doing its share to help make that happen (it is in their interest, after all.) by making reasonably cheap development boards, not to mention very cheap solutions that others then turn into development boards. For $50 you can have a decent FPGA (Spartan-3A) dev board in a breadboard-friendly package. Breadboard... FPGA... $50. Crazy. Crazy cool.
That's one direction. Then there's the other direction - it has become easier than ever before for people to start using their smartphones and tablets for hobby programming / I/O purposes (at least in the Android landscape). It just tends to get lost among the hundreds of clones of Candy Crush, twitter/facebook clients or the latest photo-filter-effect fad.
The PC will remain but might return to its business roots - which in turn means they might actually return to just being thin clients ('cloud'.. bleh.)
But the idea of the GP and many others had it can definitely still be found, perhaps now more than ever, just not necessarily in the PC ecosystem.
Who is left - based on products actually available in stores in NL (and this is not 100% coverage): HP+Compaq (437), Lenovo (270), Asus (260), Acer (191), Toshiba (173), Dell (166), [Sony (68)], Samsung (66), MSI (58), Fujitsu (37), Medion (21), Apple (20), Packard Bell (19), BTO (8). Then there's a few more from Panasonic, Razer, Gigabyte, Wortmann, System76, Google and Alternate. Medion and BTO are local-ish brands, Wortmann seems like a peculiar import out of Germany. ( Source:tweakers.net pricewatch )
Looks like there's plenty left in the notebook/laptop/etc. market. Still, it's sad to SONY exit the market as the VAIOs were rather shiny - the matching price tags didn't exactly help their popularity despite the shiny factor, though.
Actually, because you have no real way to figure out if they're specifically speeding anyway, it's more like warning *everyone* there's a neighborhood watch in a certain place....which, uh, happens at all the time with signs, and appears to be legal.
I'm pretty sure it would be legal either which way. However, I do not think it is equivalent.
If I see a sign in a neighborhood that says "Neighborhood watch in effect", then sure.. I could at least make the reasonable assumption that that neighborhood is rather less attractive than the next one over without such signs.
But even with those signs, that neighborhood watch can't be everywhere at once. So I could take a risk and go to a specific block and try my chances there. Except now there's a person specifically saying "the neighborhood watch is on this block". Now I know taking my chances there is a bad idea.
The equivalent from your example would be to flash your beams along your entire route. Which, if the goal is to get people to slow down, might not be a bad idea. (Whereas if the goal is to stop people from getting ticketed...)
Of course it's a little difficult to get such evidence because you'd be hard-pressed to find any area willing to try it. Why would that be? ( I know, because it's a money-maker, right?:) )
Just because you may be a terrible driver with no regard for anyone but yourself, doesn't mean we all are.
Now, now.. no need to get all ad hominem about it. I tend to drive the speed limit unless *everybody else* around me decides to speed thus making me 'that guy' who is actually making it a dangerous situation. Sure, I'd have the law on my side, but that doesn't help me much if I'm stuck with a dented up car and somebody else with a broken neck. (oops, there's that absurdum again).
By the "logic" you've presented here, no one should have any rights, "because stupid people exist."
Wait.. what rights were we talking about? (Before I make a similar logical leap and decide you were suggesting that speeding is a right.)
Back to the matter at hand.. I think you can find plenty of studies that find that if something is not being enforced, that something quickly gets disregarded - and while I'm sure there are plenty of people who have the healthy judgment required to decide on when to speed, where to speed, and how much to speed - there's always those who lack that judgment, not to mention the people who don't partake but at least don't expect somebody to be speeding and may react surprised when they find that a safe maneuver is perhaps not so safe by the introduction of another member of traffic into the situation earlier than expected.
If and only if there's no enforcement of speed limits in any way shape or form, it only takes one such accident for people to wonder why there is no such enforcement. Not that absurd. Now if I said everybody started treating the roads like a demolition derby and before you know it vehicular manslaughter is turned into a spectator sport.. well that'd be more like it:)
It's a bit of a problem where by being the leading product, promoting your other products - even if inferior - allows you to make those products appear to be more popular, which in turn gets more people using them, which in turn means (at least as I understand the most basic aspects of ranking - I know there's way more variables) that it gets a higher spot.
Even if there's no favoritism being shown now, any past favoritism would have already skewed the market.
In addition, I question whether showing competing products - even if inferior - is a reduction in utility. Is it a reduction in the quality if quality is defined as 'show the top N solutions', yes. But utility could easily be 'show me solutions from different vendors'.
Slightly off-topic perhaps, but tangentially related... on imgur there was a post about 'good guy google' when faced with the query (and I'm sure I don't have this right word for word): how to commit suicide. Google gave a header with a number to call in the U.S. (I guess only if it was a US IP), and a bunch of suicide prevention sites. Bing gave a bunch of sites that, lo and behold, presented a variety of methods to commit suicide.
Bing unquestionably gave the user what they wanted. Google gave the user pretty much the opposite (arguments about 'cry for help' aside). So while Bing had greater quality, Google had greater utility - as determined by the good imgur/reddit people.
I think that the reworked results page is a compromise - Google still gets to put their products / the top results (regardless of overlap) first, but also shows alternatives.
Again, whether that force for compromise should be coming out of political / regulatory aspects is something I'm less convinced about. But if untouched, I really don't see any reason for Google not to just put their own products at the top, and not even bother mentioning alternatives, except maybe way down the search results. Would that make people use other search engines instead, or would it give people the impression that Google's products are simply best? Might be an interesting study.. bit unethical to run live on the mass populace though:)
Until, of course, people start speeding like mad (because given half a chance, who wouldn't want to drive way faster than allowed, given that most roads in the U.S. seem built for sessions of NASCAR re-enactment), people crash, other people get hurt, and they/their families start wondering why on Earth there's nobody and nothing (since people hate speed trap cameras even more than speed trapping actual cops) checking to make sure people are actually going the speed limit (or within some socially accepted limit above that, as is more common).
I don't see how this is different from warning people not to break other laws.
Well, if I tell you "don't kill, don't steal, don't speed" before your commute to work.. sure, that's one thing.
On the other hand, what you're doing in this scenario is more akin to "if you're going to speed, which you shouldn't be doing anyway, don't do it here and now because here and now they will actively try to catch you doing so".
It's a bit more like telling a warning a bunch of burglars that the neighborhood watch is approaching. Sure, you're 'just' telling them not to break in... but it's more like "if you're gonna break in and don't want to get caught, then don't break in right here, right now", which means the burglars will move on to a different area or try again some other night.
And no, you can't really compare the two (victimless unless you hit somebody vs definite victim, something people tend to do themselves quite regularly and get pissed off about when they get caught cursing to the heavens above and looking up how to get out of a speeding ticket first thing they get to a computer and don't really care too much about other people doing vs something that most people don't do and rather loathe"), but since you didn't see a difference...
Kind of like the decision of Windows * N, offered without windows media player?
And one can counter that "at least the user can still download an alternative media player", but then.. so could they with the regular version.
I'm not sure how Google's web pages are going to be less useful anyway. It's still going to give you Google's top results, just a few less of them to make space for alternatives. If those alternatives are demonstrably bad, then sure they don't deserve a spot in there. But if they're reasonably good, surely it only helps the user to check further options?
Whether or not Google should be forced to do this by political/regulatory mandate is another matter.
Ah, but the guy himself has plenty of money (he is one of the lead actors from the TV hit series Scrubs), was indeed in part funded through additions from the usual big wigs, and has opted not to offer downloads / DVDs as part of the kickstarter perks because otherwise the established distributors would be leery and may not pick it up to be shown on big screens around the world, thus creating artificial scarcity.
mcgrew! I didn't realize you could read Dutch. Stichting de Thuiskopie: http://www.thuiskopie.nl/nl/ov... (you'll want the "Downloaden is toch illegaal?" link.
"You wouldn't download a car" in TV antipiracy commercials pretty much puts the lie to the claim that they're OK with any downloading at all.
I think you may have interpreted 'and others' as including RIAA/MPAA/etc. This was within the context of The Netherlands:)
And yes, I too would download a car! Though I wouldn't steal the raw resources required to make that download happen. Of course if those could also be downloaded...
...in relatively few, localized, relatively strictly controlled, locations as opposed to the relatively wasteful, decentralized, pumping out exhaust all along the way, combustion engine car?
I'm sure the 'tree huggers' thank you for asking the question.
Fed doesn't even bother with the paper - just pushes some buttons, and *magically* $4 billion pops out into the system *every day.*
"The thing is, though.. this sum of money, that amount of money, is just some numbers on a computer. Sort of disappearing or re-appearing, or naughts going.. you know, It must be very tempting, at the point when you realize that, for someone to sneak up to you who goes "Just type it back in". There's no actual stuff. I mean, nothing's caught fire or exploded or sunk or anything. Just a load of wanker-bankers having made stupid bets with each other when they're drunk. No bad thing has happened - it's not like all the pigs in South America suddenly died of blight. It is.. it is just people were juggling with numbers that didn't exist and it got out of hand because they're arseholes, and they've known they're arseholes for ages..." - David Mitchell on the 2008/2009 recession.
Welcome to the end of a meaningful domain name system.
As you type this, on slashdot.org
The domain extension was originally created for non-profits, but this designation no longer exists and today it is commonly used by schools, open-source projects, and communities as well as by for-profit entities. - wiki
The domain name system hasn't really been meaningful in terms of descriptive for a very long time now. The only 'meaning' there was, for a long time, was that if you didn't have a.com domain, you might as well not exist, certainly if you were a business of reasonably large size. Heck, there isn't even a coca-cola.us .
Even now, if you have a domain name that's perfectly descriptive - say you're a business in Zambia - you're going to have more initial success with tompopcorn.com than you would with tompopcorn.co.zm , as people don't recognize '.zm'. See other comments about people ignoring the new TLDs the same way they would ignore a.cx domain (granted, part of that might be experience with some of the shadier sites that tend to choose.cx,.tk, etc.).
6. google "how to get a bitcoin address" 6. google "what is a bitcoin address" or just 6. google "bitcoin address"
They'll lead you to other links that generally go into online wallets and I agree that will add a few (to several) minutes of reading. On the up side, it's for github users.. hopefully even when they're noobs they're tech-inclined:)
The fact that the DMCA says you cannot decrypt encrypted content, means that without the publishers giving you the keys to decrypt the content, it basically extens copyright to encrypted media to infinity.
I'm not sure if there has been a ruling on this, but would recording the output of the speaker line / pointing a camcorder at a nice flatscreen TV count as 'decrypting' the content?
Yes, I realize that this gives you an inferior copy - which is not really desirable - but it still gives you a copy.
Also keep in mind that the DMCA has not worked out all that well for the industry. They cannot effectively get major media sharing sites shutdown. File a DMCA complaint, file gets taken down, 15 minutes later it's back up - and since a DMCA complaint ask the service provider to preemptively block the file, they'll just have to keep refiling DMCA complaints (a relatively costly affair) while the service provider can practically automate the take-down.
1. Go to the website (5 seconds) 2. Find the Sign in link (5 seconds) 3. Realize this takes you to github, which asks you if you want to authorize them, read what they want to access and why (e-mail address... fine, whatever, it's in the git repo anyway) (maybe 15 seconds) 4. Get automatically back to the site, says I have no balance, click on that (5 seconds) 5. States my balance, the text "You will get your money when your balance hits the threshold of 0.00100000 Éf", and has a field titled "Your bitcoin address" followed by an 'update' button. Stare at that (for another 15 seconds). 6. Pretend I'm a noob and go google "generate bitcoin address" (5 seconds) 7. oh hey, gets me to https://www.bitaddress.org/. Visit that, read all the fluff there about it being a pure javascript address generator, etc. etc. Disregard that people will tell me I'm an idiot for using it online because really I don't give a damn and just want to set it up so that the tips go someplace other than into their pockets. 8. wiggle mouse and all that (30 seconds) 9. whoa, funky QR codes, here's a bit of reading. Okay, wait, no, one's the address and the other is a private key. I'm sure the latter is important, so I'll just copy/paste that somewhere and then clear the clipboard, and then copy/paste the address to the site. ( 15 seconds ) 10. paste to the site, click update.. done. (5 seconds) 11. There is no 11. 12. What about maintenance time? There are no maintenance time costs. Let it collect, keep the private key around, lose it, maybe think twice and decide to look up the bitcoin address of favorite charity and drop that in there instead, who cares, it's all over and done with.. at least until the site starts spamming you or something.
100 seconds, just under two minutes. Okay, so I'm not entirely a noob and maybe other people will read the pages a little more closely. Say it takes them 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes - that's still all it takes. Sure, if you get paid $500/hr and go by the logic that 15 minutes of your time is $250 so $100 in tips gets you a net loss, that seems unwise. Of course if you spend 15 minutes on a coffeebreak where you usually just zone out anyway, using a modicum of energy for the task won't hurt.
Then if at any point in the future you want to worry about getting that Bitcoin out to fiat (if you kept your own address in there), you can worry about it then. And even that doesn't require you to do much.. just find a store that accepts Bitcoins or exhanges them for gift cards, follow the steps, and ignore it again until the next time. Okay, sure, you shouldn't keep using that address once you've spent from it, but that's technical details you don't necessarily have to worry about if you don't want to.
I certainly don't know the ins and outs of the financial markets, stock market, brokerages, etc. etc. etc., but if somebody gives me a tip I don't really need to know those things.. I'll just spend it on a coffee instead. Looks like Linus could spend it on many coffees. Or set up a charity's address. Or let it rot. Or not - his choice, but certainly not one that he would have to spend days researching things for.
The Dutch 'populist weblog' GeenStijl faced a similar suit from the Dutch edition of Playboy magazine.
They had linked to an archive that contained leaked pictures of a yet-to-be-published issue, and Playboy initially won in a lower court which sided with them on the suggestion that said linking was effectively publishing,
GeenStijl appealed, and a higher court found that since Playboy could not prove that the link was absolutely private, GeenStijl could not be seen as the the publishers. ( GeenStijl still had to pay a fine because the judge found that just mentioning it would have sufficed for the purposes of press, and posting a part of one of the images breached copyright. )
This leaves the door open for any news organization (or tabloid magazine) to upload things anonymously, then link to it, and claim innocence. On the up side, it means that you can still link to things and not get sued for it on the basis that you would be seen as the publishing party. In the U.S. there's still the DMCA to contend with, of course.
Yeah, and even those were rarely issued. The law had, and has, no teeth. If tomorrow they made downloading in NL illegal, but all I'd get would be strongly worded e-mails telling me to stop doing it, and I knew full-well that nothing would ever come of it, I'd add a filter to auto-delete those e-mails and continue downloading. Heck, it'd become a sport on several forums to see who could get the most such e-mails.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of the comments so far are about how stupid it was to go through with the transaction after it was mentioned that the buyer was going purchase illicit material with it.
However, as I understand it from Krebs' post - and the Florida law in question - that doesn't necessarily factor into it. The law seems to state that as soon as you act as a money transmitter, and the exchange is between $300 and $20k within a 12 month period, without being licensed to do so makes you liable for a third degree felony.
Some questions I would have for a lawyer that actually knows the ins&outs of Florida state law in this field:
1. Is the above, in fact, the case? I.e. are the charges on those accounts completely unrelated to the disclosure of what the purchased material (in this case, Bitcoin) would be used for?
2a. Does that mean that the state of Florida sees Bitcoin as a currency?
2b. If it does not, then how would this same law be applied to e.g. physical goods if used as a material for exchange (e.g. gold nuggets, diamonds, etc.)
3. Would similar apply to a travelers going in opposite directions exchanging their currencies when the value exceeds $300 (something easily possible if you forget to empty out your wallet), rather than going through the official exchange bureaus at the airport (and incurring the rather hefty exchange fees)?
And in furtherance of that truth: Bring back Slashback. Slashback fit brilliantly in that very notion, it also re-affirms that Slashdot acknowledges this by providing some editorial control over a week's wrap-up and pushing further discussion on the best items, the most controversial items, etc. Maybe it was too much work, maybe it didn't help bring in enough revenue - I have no idea why it was dropped. But remember that story earlier about what news is worth paying for? Slashback and the comments it highlighted and spawned, to me, would be worth paying for.
( I actually don't mind the redesign too much.. there's always CSS overrides if I feel like there's too much whitespace or whatever. Functionality changes (already pointed out aplenty) on the other hand.. mangling CSS is one thing, replacing swaths of js to get things to not be broken is another entirely. )
What Parent Poster said.
Okay, maybe not entirely. Let's instead admire the fact that the Arduino platform is, in many ways, what early computers were to people a generation or two ago. But growth out of that and onto more powerful platforms (Raspberry Pi or BBB, maybe a PCduino first or Intel's oddball attempt at smashing a PC and an Arduino together) will indeed drive a push toward FPGA use. Xilinx is certainly doing its share to help make that happen (it is in their interest, after all.) by making reasonably cheap development boards, not to mention very cheap solutions that others then turn into development boards. For $50 you can have a decent FPGA (Spartan-3A) dev board in a breadboard-friendly package. Breadboard... FPGA... $50. Crazy. Crazy cool.
That's one direction. Then there's the other direction - it has become easier than ever before for people to start using their smartphones and tablets for hobby programming / I/O purposes (at least in the Android landscape). It just tends to get lost among the hundreds of clones of Candy Crush, twitter/facebook clients or the latest photo-filter-effect fad.
The PC will remain but might return to its business roots - which in turn means they might actually return to just being thin clients ('cloud'.. bleh.)
But the idea of the GP and many others had it can definitely still be found, perhaps now more than ever, just not necessarily in the PC ecosystem.
Who is left - based on products actually available in stores in NL (and this is not 100% coverage):
HP+Compaq (437), Lenovo (270), Asus (260), Acer (191), Toshiba (173), Dell (166), [Sony (68)], Samsung (66), MSI (58), Fujitsu (37), Medion (21), Apple (20), Packard Bell (19), BTO (8). Then there's a few more from Panasonic, Razer, Gigabyte, Wortmann, System76, Google and Alternate. Medion and BTO are local-ish brands, Wortmann seems like a peculiar import out of Germany. ( Source:tweakers.net pricewatch )
Looks like there's plenty left in the notebook/laptop/etc. market. Still, it's sad to SONY exit the market as the VAIOs were rather shiny - the matching price tags didn't exactly help their popularity despite the shiny factor, though.
I'm pretty sure it would be legal either which way. However, I do not think it is equivalent.
If I see a sign in a neighborhood that says "Neighborhood watch in effect", then sure.. I could at least make the reasonable assumption that that neighborhood is rather less attractive than the next one over without such signs.
But even with those signs, that neighborhood watch can't be everywhere at once. So I could take a risk and go to a specific block and try my chances there. Except now there's a person specifically saying "the neighborhood watch is on this block". Now I know taking my chances there is a bad idea.
The equivalent from your example would be to flash your beams along your entire route. Which, if the goal is to get people to slow down, might not be a bad idea. (Whereas if the goal is to stop people from getting ticketed...)
But then is it limited to:
Or would, say, 2 out of 3 suffice?
Of course it's a little difficult to get such evidence because you'd be hard-pressed to find any area willing to try it. Why would that be? ( I know, because it's a money-maker, right? :) )
Now, now.. no need to get all ad hominem about it. I tend to drive the speed limit unless *everybody else* around me decides to speed thus making me 'that guy' who is actually making it a dangerous situation. Sure, I'd have the law on my side, but that doesn't help me much if I'm stuck with a dented up car and somebody else with a broken neck. (oops, there's that absurdum again).
Wait.. what rights were we talking about? (Before I make a similar logical leap and decide you were suggesting that speeding is a right.)
Back to the matter at hand.. I think you can find plenty of studies that find that if something is not being enforced, that something quickly gets disregarded - and while I'm sure there are plenty of people who have the healthy judgment required to decide on when to speed, where to speed, and how much to speed - there's always those who lack that judgment, not to mention the people who don't partake but at least don't expect somebody to be speeding and may react surprised when they find that a safe maneuver is perhaps not so safe by the introduction of another member of traffic into the situation earlier than expected.
If and only if there's no enforcement of speed limits in any way shape or form, it only takes one such accident for people to wonder why there is no such enforcement. Not that absurd. Now if I said everybody started treating the roads like a demolition derby and before you know it vehicular manslaughter is turned into a spectator sport.. well that'd be more like it :)
It's a bit of a problem where by being the leading product, promoting your other products - even if inferior - allows you to make those products appear to be more popular, which in turn gets more people using them, which in turn means (at least as I understand the most basic aspects of ranking - I know there's way more variables) that it gets a higher spot.
Even if there's no favoritism being shown now, any past favoritism would have already skewed the market.
In addition, I question whether showing competing products - even if inferior - is a reduction in utility. Is it a reduction in the quality if quality is defined as 'show the top N solutions', yes. But utility could easily be 'show me solutions from different vendors'.
Slightly off-topic perhaps, but tangentially related... on imgur there was a post about 'good guy google' when faced with the query (and I'm sure I don't have this right word for word): how to commit suicide.
Google gave a header with a number to call in the U.S. (I guess only if it was a US IP), and a bunch of suicide prevention sites.
Bing gave a bunch of sites that, lo and behold, presented a variety of methods to commit suicide.
Bing unquestionably gave the user what they wanted. Google gave the user pretty much the opposite (arguments about 'cry for help' aside). So while Bing had greater quality, Google had greater utility - as determined by the good imgur/reddit people.
I think that the reworked results page is a compromise - Google still gets to put their products / the top results (regardless of overlap) first, but also shows alternatives.
Again, whether that force for compromise should be coming out of political / regulatory aspects is something I'm less convinced about. But if untouched, I really don't see any reason for Google not to just put their own products at the top, and not even bother mentioning alternatives, except maybe way down the search results. Would that make people use other search engines instead, or would it give people the impression that Google's products are simply best? Might be an interesting study.. bit unethical to run live on the mass populace though :)
Until, of course, people start speeding like mad (because given half a chance, who wouldn't want to drive way faster than allowed, given that most roads in the U.S. seem built for sessions of NASCAR re-enactment), people crash, other people get hurt, and they/their families start wondering why on Earth there's nobody and nothing (since people hate speed trap cameras even more than speed trapping actual cops) checking to make sure people are actually going the speed limit (or within some socially accepted limit above that, as is more common).
Well, if I tell you "don't kill, don't steal, don't speed" before your commute to work.. sure, that's one thing.
On the other hand, what you're doing in this scenario is more akin to "if you're going to speed, which you shouldn't be doing anyway, don't do it here and now because here and now they will actively try to catch you doing so".
It's a bit more like telling a warning a bunch of burglars that the neighborhood watch is approaching. Sure, you're 'just' telling them not to break in... but it's more like "if you're gonna break in and don't want to get caught, then don't break in right here, right now", which means the burglars will move on to a different area or try again some other night.
And no, you can't really compare the two (victimless unless you hit somebody vs definite victim, something people tend to do themselves quite regularly and get pissed off about when they get caught cursing to the heavens above and looking up how to get out of a speeding ticket first thing they get to a computer and don't really care too much about other people doing vs something that most people don't do and rather loathe"), but since you didn't see a difference...
Kind of like the decision of Windows * N, offered without windows media player?
And one can counter that "at least the user can still download an alternative media player", but then.. so could they with the regular version.
I'm not sure how Google's web pages are going to be less useful anyway. It's still going to give you Google's top results, just a few less of them to make space for alternatives. If those alternatives are demonstrably bad, then sure they don't deserve a spot in there. But if they're reasonably good, surely it only helps the user to check further options?
Whether or not Google should be forced to do this by political/regulatory mandate is another matter.
Ah, but the guy himself has plenty of money (he is one of the lead actors from the TV hit series Scrubs), was indeed in part funded through additions from the usual big wigs, and has opted not to offer downloads / DVDs as part of the kickstarter perks because otherwise the established distributors would be leery and may not pick it up to be shown on big screens around the world, thus creating artificial scarcity.
mcgrew! I didn't realize you could read Dutch.
Stichting de Thuiskopie: http://www.thuiskopie.nl/nl/ov... (you'll want the "Downloaden is toch illegaal?" link.
BREIN: http://www.anti-piracy.nl/wat-... (you'll want the second paragraph)
I think you may have interpreted 'and others' as including RIAA/MPAA/etc. This was within the context of The Netherlands :)
And yes, I too would download a car! Though I wouldn't steal the raw resources required to make that download happen. Of course if those could also be downloaded...
That's a pretty common point of view. I always like to find out what a person's actual boundaries on this are.
How would you feel about 'ripping off' Zach Braff by pirating his "Wish I Was Here" movie, for example?
Silly Coke, they should at least put a 301 up.
I'm sure the 'tree huggers' thank you for asking the question.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As you type this, on slashdot.org
The domain name system hasn't really been meaningful in terms of descriptive for a very long time now. The only 'meaning' there was, for a long time, was that if you didn't have a .com domain, you might as well not exist, certainly if you were a business of reasonably large size. Heck, there isn't even a coca-cola.us .
Even now, if you have a domain name that's perfectly descriptive - say you're a business in Zambia - you're going to have more initial success with tompopcorn.com than you would with tompopcorn.co.zm , as people don't recognize '.zm'. See other comments about people ignoring the new TLDs the same way they would ignore a .cx domain (granted, part of that might be experience with some of the shadier sites that tend to choose .cx, .tk, etc.).
Ah, shoot. I'd mod you up if I could. The EFF is nothing if not horribad at (internal) page promotion and redacting.
They already can - just enter the Bitcoin address of whoever in the settings.
However, the EFF would not be an option, as the EFF stopped accepting Bitcoin and the EFF ditched their Bitcoin donated prior to that decision.
6. google "how to get a bitcoin address"
6. google "what is a bitcoin address"
or just
6. google "bitcoin address"
They'll lead you to other links that generally go into online wallets and I agree that will add a few (to several) minutes of reading. :)
On the up side, it's for github users.. hopefully even when they're noobs they're tech-inclined
I'm not sure if there has been a ruling on this, but would recording the output of the speaker line / pointing a camcorder at a nice flatscreen TV count as 'decrypting' the content?
Yes, I realize that this gives you an inferior copy - which is not really desirable - but it still gives you a copy.
Also keep in mind that the DMCA has not worked out all that well for the industry. They cannot effectively get major media sharing sites shutdown. File a DMCA complaint, file gets taken down, 15 minutes later it's back up - and since a DMCA complaint ask the service provider to preemptively block the file, they'll just have to keep refiling DMCA complaints (a relatively costly affair) while the service provider can practically automate the take-down.
I went through the process. I stopwatched myself.
1. Go to the website (5 seconds)
2. Find the Sign in link (5 seconds)
3. Realize this takes you to github, which asks you if you want to authorize them, read what they want to access and why (e-mail address... fine, whatever, it's in the git repo anyway) (maybe 15 seconds)
4. Get automatically back to the site, says I have no balance, click on that (5 seconds)
5. States my balance, the text "You will get your money when your balance hits the threshold of 0.00100000 Éf", and has a field titled "Your bitcoin address" followed by an 'update' button. Stare at that (for another 15 seconds).
6. Pretend I'm a noob and go google "generate bitcoin address" (5 seconds)
7. oh hey, gets me to https://www.bitaddress.org/. Visit that, read all the fluff there about it being a pure javascript address generator, etc. etc. Disregard that people will tell me I'm an idiot for using it online because really I don't give a damn and just want to set it up so that the tips go someplace other than into their pockets.
8. wiggle mouse and all that (30 seconds)
9. whoa, funky QR codes, here's a bit of reading. Okay, wait, no, one's the address and the other is a private key. I'm sure the latter is important, so I'll just copy/paste that somewhere and then clear the clipboard, and then copy/paste the address to the site. ( 15 seconds )
10. paste to the site, click update.. done. (5 seconds)
11. There is no 11.
12. What about maintenance time? There are no maintenance time costs. Let it collect, keep the private key around, lose it, maybe think twice and decide to look up the bitcoin address of favorite charity and drop that in there instead, who cares, it's all over and done with.. at least until the site starts spamming you or something.
100 seconds, just under two minutes. Okay, so I'm not entirely a noob and maybe other people will read the pages a little more closely. Say it takes them 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes - that's still all it takes. Sure, if you get paid $500/hr and go by the logic that 15 minutes of your time is $250 so $100 in tips gets you a net loss, that seems unwise. Of course if you spend 15 minutes on a coffeebreak where you usually just zone out anyway, using a modicum of energy for the task won't hurt.
Then if at any point in the future you want to worry about getting that Bitcoin out to fiat (if you kept your own address in there), you can worry about it then. And even that doesn't require you to do much.. just find a store that accepts Bitcoins or exhanges them for gift cards, follow the steps, and ignore it again until the next time. Okay, sure, you shouldn't keep using that address once you've spent from it, but that's technical details you don't necessarily have to worry about if you don't want to.
I certainly don't know the ins and outs of the financial markets, stock market, brokerages, etc. etc. etc., but if somebody gives me a tip I don't really need to know those things.. I'll just spend it on a coffee instead. Looks like Linus could spend it on many coffees. Or set up a charity's address. Or let it rot. Or not - his choice, but certainly not one that he would have to spend days researching things for.
The Dutch 'populist weblog' GeenStijl faced a similar suit from the Dutch edition of Playboy magazine.
They had linked to an archive that contained leaked pictures of a yet-to-be-published issue, and Playboy initially won in a lower court which sided with them on the suggestion that said linking was effectively publishing,
GeenStijl appealed, and a higher court found that since Playboy could not prove that the link was absolutely private, GeenStijl could not be seen as the the publishers.
( GeenStijl still had to pay a fine because the judge found that just mentioning it would have sufficed for the purposes of press, and posting a part of one of the images breached copyright. )
This leaves the door open for any news organization (or tabloid magazine) to upload things anonymously, then link to it, and claim innocence. On the up side, it means that you can still link to things and not get sued for it on the basis that you would be seen as the publishing party. In the U.S. there's still the DMCA to contend with, of course.
Yeah, and even those were rarely issued. The law had, and has, no teeth. If tomorrow they made downloading in NL illegal, but all I'd get would be strongly worded e-mails telling me to stop doing it, and I knew full-well that nothing would ever come of it, I'd add a filter to auto-delete those e-mails and continue downloading. Heck, it'd become a sport on several forums to see who could get the most such e-mails.