Would you consider a "Welcome" mat to be an invitation to enter a house? Or even an open door?
It's all about what a reasonable man might consider an invitation. It seems that the court decided a reasonable man would assume that the access point was left open accidentally. If the access point has a name that suggests it's open then you can reasoanbly assume it's there for public use.
You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law. This is why it's interpreted by humans and not robots.
Yep. You would have thought they would have wanted to get all their evidence lined up for an easy conviction. Surely the school's call logging system isn't going to be enough on its own, and the kid's inexplicable insistence that he's innocent would cause problems.
I know the police can often be inept, but this kid was celarly innocent, and there should have been somebody to take his side when he was being charged. The system should handle incompetent police.
The principal is an ordinary member of the public. She didn't arrest the kid or charge him. She supplied mistaken evidence that this was the culprit, which was pretty inept, but the rest of the system should have caught this.
Why wasn't he interviewed by the police in the prescence of an adult immediately? Isn't there meant to be some advocate protecting the accused rights, especially with a 15 year old?
Surely a decent investigation should have gone something like:
cop: We have this recording of the threat. Defender: Uhm. That doesn't sound much like this kid. Are you sure you got the right guy?
Defender and cop disappear. Re-appear later. cop: Sorry about that. You're free to go.
Well, the way I see it, is if they wanted to buy Sega's brand name and console business when Sega pulled out of console production, it would have cost a comparable amount, but if they were in the same position as they are now everyone would be saying what a bargain MS got.
My understanding is that this isn't strictly legal per se (although you could argue fair use), but it's not a criminal offence. The copyright holders would have to sue and demonstrate damages
Yes there is. It's unsuitableof the purpose sold. It doesn't play on my DVD player.
It is exactly as Sony intended it to be shipped,
So? A company can't deliberately make a faulty product and say "it's meant to be that way". Ford didn't claim the tires on the Explorer were meant to be underinflated. Because if they did, they'd get their asses sued off.
Retailers can't "not carry" Sony pictures, because people will notice the gaping holes in the collection and buy them elsewhere
Wallmart can. So can any shop that relies primarily on impulse purchases. If a product is a net loss-maker then any shop other then DVD-only stores can't afford to sell them.
It was a whole series of errors. Either that or every accident ever is caused by a single minor fault. Here's what the article says
The review panel found that the management team followed procedures in dealing with the problem but that the procedures "were inadequate to catch the errors that occurred."
The review also said the spacecraft's onboard fault protection system failed to respond to the errors. Instead of protecting the spacecraft, the programmed response made it worse.
So, if the procedures were better, this wouldn't have happened. If the fault protection system was better, this wouldn't have happened. If the designers had predicted this exact problem might occur this wouldn't have happened.
Of course, these things do happen. Al we can do is find out why, and stop it from happening again.
Because blocking sites works so well. Esecially CC licenced ones.
I'm sure the students will go for a much more reliable source, such as Answers.com. Or google's cache of wikipedia. Or Wikpipedia itself via a proxy. Or wikipedia on their home computers.
God forbid that learning about reliability of sources should be part of the education curriculum.
Did you actually violate traffic laws? If so the laws are wrong, and should be amended such that the laws do not apply to emergency services in specific situations.
The cinematic bits were pretty good, but I was disappointed that the Amiga version left out a couple of the weapons that were in the C64 version. I believe these were in the Atari ST conversion though, so perhaps this should be considered the most influential Atari ST game.
So, they think they can increase sales of their processor by reducing its utility to the customer, and increasing its utility to someone else entirely; effectively giving a component of the CPU to someone else?
How many other devices are marketted on intagible potential benfits?
As mentioned before, the songs were already recorded by RedOctane, so there was no extra cost for this for the DLC tracks. Not only that but the 'cover bands' which did the recordings were mostly employees of RedOctane/Harmonix anyway.
Probably. Very likely a work for hire. They'll have been paid for their time, but the total cost would have been a few hours of studio time and the salary of the band. This comes to a few hundred dollars. Same goes for transcription. I'm sure they're expecting more than a few hundred sales.
A few people say that price point is reasonable. I have yet to see a valid argument for that statement.
No. Ultimately it comes down to whether you're willing to pay for it. It's not the most satisfactory answer, but "take it or leave it" is the only real response we have.
They choose a value p such that s(p)×p > s(p+1)×(p+1) and s(p)×p > s(p-1)×(p-1), where s(p) is an estimate of the total sales at price p.
Now then. Let's look at what happens to this equation when we add the extra costs of transcription t. Well, looks like there's no t in the equation, so what happens is nothing at all! So even if they could get the content for free, and convert it for free, they'd still charge the same amount for them because this maximises their profits, and maximising profits is what a typical business tries to do.
Trying to justify the price on grounds of cost of production is extremely naive.
Considering there's more than just a song, there's the data needed to sync the game to the music.
That's little more than transcription. It's a bit of work, considering it needs balancing and testing, but hardly the same level that goes into writing, performing recording and marketting. Not that this has any effect on the end price at all.
and do you really think this is going to be sold completely without any form of copy protection?
HWSpirit did a proof of concept here. I wonder if these guys were inspired by that.
But it's a decent idea. Oil has a high thermal capacity and will circulate through convection keeping the temperature down. Repairs and upgrades aren't going to be all that pleasant but some swarfega will get the grease of your hands after changing the motherboard.
Unless we stop being human once we get to the workplace, it is. At least within reason. The exact level of privacy we can expect is a matter of opinion.
I'm not quite sure what your point here is. People have paid for the game, and expected certain reasonable rights to control of their computer to remain.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you consider a "Welcome" mat to be an invitation to enter a house? Or even an open door?
It's all about what a reasonable man might consider an invitation. It seems that the court decided a reasonable man would assume that the access point was left open accidentally. If the access point has a name that suggests it's open then you can reasoanbly assume it's there for public use.
You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law. This is why it's interpreted by humans and not robots.
Yep. You would have thought they would have wanted to get all their evidence lined up for an easy conviction. Surely the school's call logging system isn't going to be enough on its own, and the kid's inexplicable insistence that he's innocent would cause problems.
:)
I know the police can often be inept, but this kid was celarly innocent, and there should have been somebody to take his side when he was being charged. The system should handle incompetent police.
The principal is an ordinary member of the public. She didn't arrest the kid or charge him. She supplied mistaken evidence that this was the culprit, which was pretty inept, but the rest of the system should have caught this.
Why wasn't he interviewed by the police in the prescence of an adult immediately? Isn't there meant to be some advocate protecting the accused rights, especially with a 15 year old?
Surely a decent investigation should have gone something like:
cop: We have this recording of the threat.
Defender: Uhm. That doesn't sound much like this kid. Are you sure you got the right guy?
Defender and cop disappear. Re-appear later.
cop: Sorry about that. You're free to go.
Well, the way I see it, is if they wanted to buy Sega's brand name and console business when Sega pulled out of console production, it would have cost a comparable amount, but if they were in the same position as they are now everyone would be saying what a bargain MS got.
Hole?
They spent roughly 4 billion on creating a console empire.
Biuying a console empire would have cost a lot more than that.
They had to go through the court procedure, and pretend they were going to play nice in the future. And then buy various politicians.
All they're asking is that Googleclick are forced to do the same.
The XBox 360 is apparently slightly better than break even now as well.
Maybe they should, but the reason shouldn't be that the big fish are throwing their weight around.
And Microsoft have been duly punished.
Should we give another company the chance to do damage the market by abusing monopoly powers?
My understanding is that this isn't strictly legal per se (although you could argue fair use), but it's not a criminal offence. The copyright holders would have to sue and demonstrate damages
There's not a damn thing wrong with the disc.
Yes there is. It's unsuitableof the purpose sold. It doesn't play on my DVD player.
It is exactly as Sony intended it to be shipped,
So? A company can't deliberately make a faulty product and say "it's meant to be that way". Ford didn't claim the tires on the Explorer were meant to be underinflated. Because if they did, they'd get their asses sued off.
Retailers can't "not carry" Sony pictures, because people will notice the gaping holes in the collection and buy them elsewhere
Wallmart can. So can any shop that relies primarily on impulse purchases. If a product is a net loss-maker then any shop other then DVD-only stores can't afford to sell them.
Of course, these things do happen. Al we can do is find out why, and stop it from happening again.
Because blocking sites works so well. Esecially CC licenced ones.
I'm sure the students will go for a much more reliable source, such as Answers.com. Or google's cache of wikipedia. Or Wikpipedia itself via a proxy. Or wikipedia on their home computers.
God forbid that learning about reliability of sources should be part of the education curriculum.
Did you actually violate traffic laws? If so the laws are wrong, and should be amended such that the laws do not apply to emergency services in specific situations.
The cinematic bits were pretty good, but I was disappointed that the Amiga version left out a couple of the weapons that were in the C64 version. I believe these were in the Atari ST conversion though, so perhaps this should be considered the most influential Atari ST game.
Can't you get blu-ray players for non-crippled hardware?
So, they think they can increase sales of their processor by reducing its utility to the customer, and increasing its utility to someone else entirely; effectively giving a component of the CPU to someone else?
How many other devices are marketted on intagible potential benfits?
Okay. A little more transcription.
How long does it take for a competent musician to write down the chords needed for a piece of music?
As mentioned before, the songs were already recorded by RedOctane, so there was no extra cost for this for the DLC tracks. Not only that but the 'cover bands' which did the recordings were mostly employees of RedOctane/Harmonix anyway.
Probably. Very likely a work for hire. They'll have been paid for their time, but the total cost would have been a few hours of studio time and the salary of the band. This comes to a few hundred dollars. Same goes for transcription. I'm sure they're expecting more than a few hundred sales.
A few people say that price point is reasonable. I have yet to see a valid argument for that statement.
No. Ultimately it comes down to whether you're willing to pay for it. It's not the most satisfactory answer, but "take it or leave it" is the only real response we have.
They choose a value p such that s(p)×p > s(p+1)×(p+1) and s(p)×p > s(p-1)×(p-1), where s(p) is an estimate of the total sales at price p.
Now then. Let's look at what happens to this equation when we add the extra costs of transcription t. Well, looks like there's no t in the equation, so what happens is nothing at all! So even if they could get the content for free, and convert it for free, they'd still charge the same amount for them because this maximises their profits, and maximising profits is what a typical business tries to do.
Trying to justify the price on grounds of cost of production is extremely naive.
Considering there's more than just a song, there's the data needed to sync the game to the music.
That's little more than transcription. It's a bit of work, considering it needs balancing and testing, but hardly the same level that goes into writing, performing recording and marketting. Not that this has any effect on the end price at all.
and do you really think this is going to be sold completely without any form of copy protection?
HWSpirit did a proof of concept here. I wonder if these guys were inspired by that.
But it's a decent idea. Oil has a high thermal capacity and will circulate through convection keeping the temperature down. Repairs and upgrades aren't going to be all that pleasant but some swarfega will get the grease of your hands after changing the motherboard.
Unless we stop being human once we get to the workplace, it is. At least within reason. The exact level of privacy we can expect is a matter of opinion.
I'm not quite sure what your point here is. People have paid for the game, and expected certain reasonable rights to control of their computer to remain.