To be fair, there's not a lot the judge can do that would help apart from publicly criticise the law. She is obliged to follow the law as it's written. The law as written does seem to apply to file sharers. What's she to do?
I disagree with the the editorial. The defendants end up able to pool their resources. The record companies have more than adequate resources such that the economies of scale are irrelevant.
We're just trying to forcibly mould it into an application is wasn't designed to be; that's a network with several billion nodes. If having more nodes is essential then that will be a feature of the replacement. A feature of the current internet is that it exists. This is an important feature!
It's just the screwed up legal system. They could just about get Computer trespass to stick, although probably wouldn't get a particularly harsh sentence passed. What they can do though is threaten the kid with these charges, mention that he could potentially serve 20 years and get him to plea bargain to a lesser crime.
If he maintained his innocence and demanded a jury trial he'd have a good chance of being found innocent and if not the penalty would probably be minor. His behaviour just isn't that of a criminal. The whole system is broken. It's a game of bluff, but the stakes are the liberty of innocent people.
In fact it's far from perfect. The "Safe Harbor" provisions are useful but really badly implemented.
Since we all agree that it isn't perfect perhaps it could be made a little better. Something like providing notice and allowing time for a response before the takedown.
Would you bet your house on that? That was a question from our legal guys when I questioned their overly conservative opinion on the legality of something.
Copyright violation and breach of contract. Not criminal, but not exactly legal either. It might be possible to apply some anti-hacking laws. Legislation tends to be quite vague here which, although unlikely, could make it possible to charge them with something and the OP would be directly liable.
People take a placebo and feel better. If they just want the symptoms to be treated, then the symptoms are being treated. The placebo works. Why does it matter if it's psychological or physical.
Google are successful because they have the world's most popular search engine and revenue based directly off that. They'd be raking in the money if they insisted that their programmers wore suits and sung company songs.
His idea is presumably a solution to a perceived problem. There may be other solutions to the problem that he hasn't considered. We're all about creative solutions here.
I'm unaware of a developer "Needing" a console at his desk in order to do his job, unless he happens to be a game developer on that console.
Even then we don't need them. We use a dedicated devkit, which is functionally pretty similar but many of them won't play actual commercial releases of games.
People don't realise how fast a 486, or even something much older like a Zilog Z80 actually is. As long as you don't need to process video, even an early 80's CPU can do basic processing on millions of pixels in a few seconds. Something with the power of a 486 will take a fraction of a second.
If you're after real time controls then you don't even need to do that much.
He's a passive aggressive jerk, applying his passive aggressiveness in what he thinks is a positive way. There are worse things he could be doing but he's not all that effective.
More and more checkpoints are popping up and what used to be a few routine questions(if even that) is now full-blown random drug searches which targer mostly recreational users.
Trouble is, when you're breaking the law on drugs, no matter how much you disagree with it, you are undermining your case somewhat in the eyes of the public.
You think that what businesses do and how they do them don't change over time?
I think banks take peoples money, lend it to other people, and charge interest, possibly paying some of that interest to other the depositors. I also think they handle electronic transfers of funds. I think they've been doing this for a long time. Laws and regulations change, and tax systems get modified a lot, but I'm surprised the fundamentals of the businesses change enough that they can keep a significant number of COBOL programmers in work. It seems there are still a fair number of full time COBOL developers.
Obviously things do change enough but I'm surprised, and generally curious as to how they've changed.
I'm intrigued about this so hoping there might be a COBOL programmer to answer. Have the applications been ported to newer hardware, or are some banks still running ancient machines based on transistors and 1st generation microchips?
I'm surprised there's still code to maintain on these old workhorses. Surely every bug must have been discovered by now, and every feature anyone could want added. Obviously not but what do COBOL programs need done to them?
Oh, and guys - you can type directly on one of these new fangled desktop computers. No need to use punch cards.
If an old mainframe is still doing it's job and there's no need for anything more, then junking it and buying a new computer would be pretty environmentally irresponsible, wouldn't it?
Well, in this respect, a low power laptop is probably going to outperform some of the older mainframes (some organisations run 30 year old systems) so I'd say you can repay the environmental debt pretty quickly. The sense of replacing a proven system with an untested system is the main concern here.
Fedora contains a lot of redundancy. throwing in several text editors makes sense if they're already there and free, but you wouldn't rewrite emacs, joe, Vim and nano. You wouldn't rewrite Epiphany, if you'd rewritten Firefox.
Not just businessmen. A lot of fanfic writers get told by friends they should write for a living (just change the names), when they're usually quite happy working in a pleasant enough job and writing for fun.
Great. So how do you propose I handle an MFM drive? Last I checked, you needed an MFM controller, not just the right kind of connector.
True but you can get adapter circuitry that makes them look like SCSI devices. Or are they the other way round?
I truthfully doubt that you are going to be able to find a one-machine solution. You will not have enough ISA and PCI slots
IRQs will be a problem. PCI is too modern to be an issue. There aren't any interfaces that are only available in PCI format except USB. You'll want a machine with as few PCI and as many ISA slots as possible. I can't imagine there's any hardware that's OS/2 only. Very little that's Windows 3.1 only as well. Windows 95 had pretty good backward compatibility in this respect.
A bigger problem will older, non-PC formats. Early macs had variable speed drives. Amigas had a custom disk format that PC drives can't read. The BBC experimented with a laserdisc based format. Some early CD ROM experiments used bizarre formats that could be decoded but would need some data format information, or at least a crib.
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To be fair, there's not a lot the judge can do that would help apart from publicly criticise the law. She is obliged to follow the law as it's written. The law as written does seem to apply to file sharers. What's she to do?
I disagree with the the editorial. The defendants end up able to pool their resources. The record companies have more than adequate resources such that the economies of scale are irrelevant.
We're just trying to forcibly mould it into an application is wasn't designed to be; that's a network with several billion nodes. If having more nodes is essential then that will be a feature of the replacement. A feature of the current internet is that it exists. This is an important feature!
It's just the screwed up legal system. They could just about get Computer trespass to stick, although probably wouldn't get a particularly harsh sentence passed. What they can do though is threaten the kid with these charges, mention that he could potentially serve 20 years and get him to plea bargain to a lesser crime.
If he maintained his innocence and demanded a jury trial he'd have a good chance of being found innocent and if not the penalty would probably be minor. His behaviour just isn't that of a criminal. The whole system is broken. It's a game of bluff, but the stakes are the liberty of innocent people.
Short of building a cloning machine, what more can Nintendo really do?
Building a cloning machine for Wiis isn't that difficult. They're called factories.
In fact it's far from perfect. The "Safe Harbor" provisions are useful but really badly implemented.
Since we all agree that it isn't perfect perhaps it could be made a little better. Something like providing notice and allowing time for a response before the takedown.
Would you bet your house on that? That was a question from our legal guys when I questioned their overly conservative opinion on the legality of something.
There is a matter of magnitude here. Abusing peoples trust and killing 6 million Jews are slightly different crimes.
Illegal? Running a screen-scraper isn't illegal.
Copyright violation and breach of contract. Not criminal, but not exactly legal either. It might be possible to apply some anti-hacking laws. Legislation tends to be quite vague here which, although unlikely, could make it possible to charge them with something and the OP would be directly liable.
People take a placebo and feel better. If they just want the symptoms to be treated, then the symptoms are being treated. The placebo works. Why does it matter if it's psychological or physical.
Google are successful because they have the world's most popular search engine and revenue based directly off that. They'd be raking in the money if they insisted that their programmers wore suits and sung company songs.
His idea is presumably a solution to a perceived problem. There may be other solutions to the problem that he hasn't considered. We're all about creative solutions here.
I'm unaware of a developer "Needing" a console at his desk in order to do his job, unless he happens to be a game developer on that console.
Even then we don't need them. We use a dedicated devkit, which is functionally pretty similar but many of them won't play actual commercial releases of games.
People don't realise how fast a 486, or even something much older like a Zilog Z80 actually is. As long as you don't need to process video, even an early 80's CPU can do basic processing on millions of pixels in a few seconds. Something with the power of a 486 will take a fraction of a second.
If you're after real time controls then you don't even need to do that much.
You can probably download most of these games anyway. And it's not like DRM ever stopped pirates.
Question: If someone in a hot, fast car refused to stop, does the New Mexico state or local police help the federal border cops stop the car?
Probably. Running the checkpoint would be a legitimate arrestable offence.
He's a passive aggressive jerk, applying his passive aggressiveness in what he thinks is a positive way. There are worse things he could be doing but he's not all that effective.
More and more checkpoints are popping up and what used to be a few routine questions(if even that) is now full-blown random drug searches which targer mostly recreational users.
Trouble is, when you're breaking the law on drugs, no matter how much you disagree with it, you are undermining your case somewhat in the eyes of the public.
I wonder whether employing people to do what this guy does apparently as a hobby would be a cost effective way to protest these laws.
plural of nucleius:P
You think that what businesses do and how they do them don't change over time?
I think banks take peoples money, lend it to other people, and charge interest, possibly paying some of that interest to other the depositors. I also think they handle electronic transfers of funds. I think they've been doing this for a long time. Laws and regulations change, and tax systems get modified a lot, but I'm surprised the fundamentals of the businesses change enough that they can keep a significant number of COBOL programmers in work. It seems there are still a fair number of full time COBOL developers.
Obviously things do change enough but I'm surprised, and generally curious as to how they've changed.
I'm intrigued about this so hoping there might be a COBOL programmer to answer. Have the applications been ported to newer hardware, or are some banks still running ancient machines based on transistors and 1st generation microchips?
I'm surprised there's still code to maintain on these old workhorses. Surely every bug must have been discovered by now, and every feature anyone could want added. Obviously not but what do COBOL programs need done to them?
Oh, and guys - you can type directly on one of these new fangled desktop computers. No need to use punch cards.
If an old mainframe is still doing it's job and there's no need for anything more, then junking it and buying a new computer would be pretty environmentally irresponsible, wouldn't it?
Well, in this respect, a low power laptop is probably going to outperform some of the older mainframes (some organisations run 30 year old systems) so I'd say you can repay the environmental debt pretty quickly. The sense of replacing a proven system with an untested system is the main concern here.
Fedora contains a lot of redundancy. throwing in several text editors makes sense if they're already there and free, but you wouldn't rewrite emacs, joe, Vim and nano. You wouldn't rewrite Epiphany, if you'd rewritten Firefox.
The number's a lot bigger than it needs to be.
Not just businessmen. A lot of fanfic writers get told by friends they should write for a living (just change the names), when they're usually quite happy working in a pleasant enough job and writing for fun.
Great. So how do you propose I handle an MFM drive? Last I checked, you needed an MFM controller, not just the right kind of connector.
True but you can get adapter circuitry that makes them look like SCSI devices. Or are they the other way round?
I truthfully doubt that you are going to be able to find a one-machine solution. You will not have enough ISA and PCI slots
IRQs will be a problem. PCI is too modern to be an issue. There aren't any interfaces that are only available in PCI format except USB. You'll want a machine with as few PCI and as many ISA slots as possible. I can't imagine there's any hardware that's OS/2 only. Very little that's Windows 3.1 only as well. Windows 95 had pretty good backward compatibility in this respect.
A bigger problem will older, non-PC formats. Early macs had variable speed drives. Amigas had a custom disk format that PC drives can't read. The BBC experimented with a laserdisc based format. Some early CD ROM experiments used bizarre formats that could be decoded but would need some data format information, or at least a crib.