And it's probably more cost effective to lose some impulse buys the day a shiny new product is announced than it is to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on beefing up the website to cope with traffic levels that it only gets for one day per year. Assuming they make $100 margin on the Mac Mini, they'd need to sell an awful lot of impulse buys to impatient people to justify spending $1 million on the site.
The problem is actually using a driving license for purposes for which it was never intended, as a general ID document. It should be illegal to request or present a driving license for any purpose other than to verify eligibility to drive -- problem solved, as the non-license-holders will no longer be discriminated against. And if the banks and the bars really need to be able to verify people's IDs, they'll have to pay to run their own systems -- as the bars do in the UK, in fact.
Re:Er... "20 Million users a week"??
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Ceefax Turns 30
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20 million people would be about 40% of the TV-viewing population -- and that sounds quite plausible, it really is still very widely used, and virtually every TV set is capable of receiving it.
I run a large site with a general audience, mostly UK based. Over the past three months, we've served around 350 million pages, and the browser stats are:
IE - 86.5%
AOL - 9.5%
Unspecified - 1.6%
Mozilla - 0.9%
Netscape - 0.6%
Safari - 0.6%
Opera - 0.1%
Konqueror - 0.01%
It doesn't look like Mozilla is catching on much among the general public.
People actually act in a semi-rational manner from time to time. A $40 late fee has an expected cost to you of $40, since you're pretty well bound to be caught. A $80 parking ticket has an expected cost to you of maybe $20 -- call it a one in four chance of getting a ticket. But a $1000 fine for illegal downloading has an expected cost of a tenth of a cent, with a one in a million chance of getting caught. And people will actually act accordingly.
Sure. So what you're really saying is that there is no appropriate level of penalty. Anything that's low enough to actually be a reasonable punishment for those who get caught is far too low to have any deterrent effect, or to provide any kind of compensation to those whose copyrights have been infringed.
Appropriate fines have to be related to the risk of getting caught -- and as has been amply demonstrated the risk is minuscule. If an appropriate fine would be $10 per track, if everyone were getting caught, but only one in a million is actually getting caught then you need a fine of $10 million per track in order to give file sharers the same expected loss.
London has had magnetic cards and tickets for decades. We're talking here about proximity smartcards that just need to be put near the sensor to activate, and can be kept in your wallet.
The simple solution won't work. For a monthly or annual season ticket, you need a photocard, and if the photocard number on your season ticket doesn't match the one on your photocard, or the face on the photocard doesn't match your face, then you're in trouble when there is a manual ticket check (which is common on buses, trams and the Docklands Light Railway, relatively infrequent on trains and almost unheard of on the Underground).
Perhaps you should consider actually reading the referenced article before posting. First, easyCinema isn't going to sell refreshments of any kind, so it's hard to see how they can jack up the prices. Second, 20p is the minimum price, for those who book well in advance at an unpopular time. They're expecting an average price of £1.50 per ticket, which seems more viable.
And in any case, even if Hollywood only made $500,000 profit from distributing a blockbuster in the UK, why wouldn't they do it? It's still $500,000 that they can get if they want.
It's not the schema that's covered by the compilation copyright, it's the content. A "clean room" re-implementation of the same database is legal, but means going out and getting the data manually rather than by sucking it out of someone else's database.
Not directly relevant to this case, but in the UK there exists a compilation copyright in a database, so that a complete database (or substantial part thereof) can be copyrighted even if all the individual items contained in the database are in the public domain. So regular web browsing is perfectly legitimate, but scraping the entire database into your own database is not.
Gving tax money to unemployed people is a much better way to boost jobs and grow the economy than giving it back to rich people. Because they'll go right out and spend it, keeping it circulating, and helping out all the businesses they buy from. Rich people have this bad habit of saving extra money, and taking it out of circulation.
5. It is not illegal to manufacture, distribute, or market means of circumventing copy protection for purposes of enabling non-infringing uses of the work if the copyright owners did not provide such a means themselves.
How far does this go? Is it just the DMCA that it overturns, or would it allow a manufacturer make, and market as such, a DVD player that has a switchable region code and does not recognise the flag for non-skippable content, in breach of their license from the DVD-CCA?
If you disregard the most significant figures, you may be measuring some properties of your weather apparatus, which may be signficantly non-random. Even using an outside source, generating verifiably random data is hard.
As long as you've got access to a Windows machine with Firewire, you can convert a Mac iPod to Windows by using the Windows iPod software installer from Apple. And it'll still work on the Mac -- Windows iPods work just fine with Macs, although not vice versa -- the only thing you lose is the desktop icon.
You can download software installers for both the Windows and Mac versions of the iPod from Apple, that will do a complete reformat and install. You can convert a Windows iPod to Mac and vice versa, and I'm sure they'll also reinstall over a Linux installation.
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And it's probably more cost effective to lose some impulse buys the day a shiny new product is announced than it is to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on beefing up the website to cope with traffic levels that it only gets for one day per year. Assuming they make $100 margin on the Mac Mini, they'd need to sell an awful lot of impulse buys to impatient people to justify spending $1 million on the site.
It's £339 including VAT. At today's exchange rates, US$499 + 17.5% is £311, so they're not screwing us too badly.
The problem is actually using a driving license for purposes for which it was never intended, as a general ID document. It should be illegal to request or present a driving license for any purpose other than to verify eligibility to drive -- problem solved, as the non-license-holders will no longer be discriminated against. And if the banks and the bars really need to be able to verify people's IDs, they'll have to pay to run their own systems -- as the bars do in the UK, in fact.
20 million people would be about 40% of the TV-viewing population -- and that sounds quite plausible, it really is still very widely used, and virtually every TV set is capable of receiving it.
The Democrats aren't socialist, they're a party of the moderate right wing, a bit further right than your average Christian Democrat party in Europe.
It doesn't look like Mozilla is catching on much among the general public.
People actually act in a semi-rational manner from time to time. A $40 late fee has an expected cost to you of $40, since you're pretty well bound to be caught. A $80 parking ticket has an expected cost to you of maybe $20 -- call it a one in four chance of getting a ticket. But a $1000 fine for illegal downloading has an expected cost of a tenth of a cent, with a one in a million chance of getting caught. And people will actually act accordingly.
Sure. So what you're really saying is that there is no appropriate level of penalty. Anything that's low enough to actually be a reasonable punishment for those who get caught is far too low to have any deterrent effect, or to provide any kind of compensation to those whose copyrights have been infringed.
Appropriate fines have to be related to the risk of getting caught -- and as has been amply demonstrated the risk is minuscule. If an appropriate fine would be $10 per track, if everyone were getting caught, but only one in a million is actually getting caught then you need a fine of $10 million per track in order to give file sharers the same expected loss.
Among its other useful features, uControl claims to make the function keys work the way you want. And it's GPLed.
You may have no doubt, but you're wrong. The magnetic card readers allow access but do not record any identifiable information about card usage.
London has had magnetic cards and tickets for decades. We're talking here about proximity smartcards that just need to be put near the sensor to activate, and can be kept in your wallet.
In 1948, calling the UK "Airstrip One" was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
The machines that scan the mag-strip cards do not record the timestamp, location and card number in a central database. The Oystercard machines do.
The simple solution won't work. For a monthly or annual season ticket, you need a photocard, and if the photocard number on your season ticket doesn't match the one on your photocard, or the face on the photocard doesn't match your face, then you're in trouble when there is a manual ticket check (which is common on buses, trams and the Docklands Light Railway, relatively infrequent on trains and almost unheard of on the Underground).
Actually, Liverpool is 0151. 0161 is Manchester.
And in any case, even if Hollywood only made $500,000 profit from distributing a blockbuster in the UK, why wouldn't they do it? It's still $500,000 that they can get if they want.
It's not the schema that's covered by the compilation copyright, it's the content. A "clean room" re-implementation of the same database is legal, but means going out and getting the data manually rather than by sucking it out of someone else's database.
Not directly relevant to this case, but in the UK there exists a compilation copyright in a database, so that a complete database (or substantial part thereof) can be copyrighted even if all the individual items contained in the database are in the public domain. So regular web browsing is perfectly legitimate, but scraping the entire database into your own database is not.
Gving tax money to unemployed people is a much better way to boost jobs and grow the economy than giving it back to rich people. Because they'll go right out and spend it, keeping it circulating, and helping out all the businesses they buy from. Rich people have this bad habit of saving extra money, and taking it out of circulation.
That would count as "additional burden" to the consumer, and thus wouldn't be an acceptable workround. It seems pretty balanced to me.
How far does this go? Is it just the DMCA that it overturns, or would it allow a manufacturer make, and market as such, a DVD player that has a switchable region code and does not recognise the flag for non-skippable content, in breach of their license from the DVD-CCA?
If you disregard the most significant figures, you may be measuring some properties of your weather apparatus, which may be signficantly non-random. Even using an outside source, generating verifiably random data is hard.
As long as you've got access to a Windows machine with Firewire, you can convert a Mac iPod to Windows by using the Windows iPod software installer from Apple. And it'll still work on the Mac -- Windows iPods work just fine with Macs, although not vice versa -- the only thing you lose is the desktop icon.
You can download software installers for both the Windows and Mac versions of the iPod from Apple, that will do a complete reformat and install. You can convert a Windows iPod to Mac and vice versa, and I'm sure they'll also reinstall over a Linux installation.