Moreover, the US telecoms that are betting their financial futures on the eventual widespread adoption of broadband in the States would be hit hardest. A dozen high profile cases against kids trading files would scare the shit out of the parents and no doubt hundreds of thousands of cable modem/DSL contracts would be cancelled. Meanwhile, this would change nothing in countries outside the US where non commercial sharing of data is not considered infringement.
Well, at one time anyhow.
In fact, if you go look at ETS's TOEFL home page, you'll see that they've cut almost forty percent of the TOEFL testing center locations because students are not coming like they used to. Most Americans aren't aware of this because it's not a big news story, but it's a fact. The United States WAS the destination for every other kid in Taiwan a few years ago, but that has changed quite abruptly in the most recent two years.
Yeah, we recently had a good example of irony.
Republicans sweep the elections, the central bank lowers rates to historic rates, next day the market dropped a hundred points. That was a classic example of irony.
It certainly shouldn't be considered infringement in the US either. It's a moral issue and the copyright holders pursuing this are in the wrong and should be ashamed of themselves.
And since we're talking supply rumors now, I might as well toss in my favorite long running CPU supply rumor which is that both AMD and Intel are doomed by off-the-chart fab growth in China.
In fact, AMD has been increasingly outsourcing to UMC for 130nm and we learned last month that SMIC has bought 130nm tools from Europe despite, or more likely because of, Bush's bizarre antics in foreign affairs.
As the PC economy continues to tank, Taiwan's UMC and TSMC will eventually get the green light to finish the fabs they've already started in the mainland and there is going to be a massive glut of CPUs priced so cheap that IBM, Intel and AMDs CPU businesses will be worthless.
As I right this, the front page of the EETimes is running a story about an on-chip ethernet controller that also contains a rudimentary web server that they're planning to embed in all sorts of appliances for remote monitoring. Apparently it's much cheaper than what is being discussed in this article and it seems this on chip solution can act as a 100mbps ethernet hub for other devices as well.
This simplistic worship of competition as an ends in itself like some genie that will solve all problems is perhaps the most dangerous product of the American public's notorious complacency to have arisen up to this point.
The American way has traditionally been to advocate fair and managed competition as opposed to the icon of competition dumbed down to the point that it becomes a simple equation of might makes right.
If "Competition good" were indeed true then Microsoft would always be in the right because they're the biggest competitor. In my opinion, this simplistic equation is not only false, but it is dangerous and one of the greatest threats to the American way of life. Microsoft SHOULD be forced to play by rules and no doubt all Americans should be required by law to vote in every election but that's another story.
If you ask me.
I have found that using physically separate amps for, at least, trebel and bass makes a vast difference. With the right amp, even the cheapest radio shack speaker or even a PC speaker can sound as good as it possibly can and a lot of times that's surprisingly good even for the very very cheap stuff.
Keeping the bass on its own amp is the easiest way to get the most bang for your buck. To that end, I would recommend that Angela buy her husband two amps and not only that, I'd say go with car amps that have AC connectors. I know the audiophiles are going to find this appalling, but it works amazingly well. Cheap speakers and homemade boxes will rock the house when the amps are balanced.
My system rocks the walls and I live in three story brick building. At the same time it captures the subtleties with spooky clarity and most of the mid range speakers were ripped out of old boom boxes for $0.00. Amps are where the money should go if you want good sound on a budget. Speakers are everywhere and most sound cards should be good enough.
Oh, and the most important part for someone getting started in this is that you can use 1.5mm Y patch cords to split the output from the sound card. Doesn't work for input, but output is okay. Cheap trick and it definitely works.
I'm among those who suspect this will only lead to a faster shift away from the fortunes of video copyright holders and I think that's a Good Thing(TM)
I don't really know the wording of copyright law in all its many jurisdictions, but I do know that the original intent was to grant an exclusive right to profit from publication and that copyright was certainly not intended from the beginning to limit the free exchange of information which is how it is being re-constructed with all this language twisting and convenient redefinition of terms like piracy and theft.
One thing that I find very intriguing about P2P is that works from the 1910s and 20s and early 30s are very popular. Although I'm only in my thirties, I'm a huge fan of this stuff and I never had convenient access to it before P2P. One of the reasons you never see it isn't because it's not entertaining, interesting and informative, but because there's no longer any profit in it.
The rediscovery of our archived electronic entertainment history is a bigger challenge to the current entertainment industry than how to protect the latest warmed over reinventions of those old acts. The more I look and listen to the old media, the more astounded I am at how cyclical and repetitive the whole notion of recorded entertainment is.
And to address the topic head on, watching and listeing to those old recordings makes you very aware that quality is extremely relative. When you're really excited about hearing something you'll get up and dance and sing along to something that sounds like hell. The question is how to make people enthusiastic and obviously the entertainment industry if failing to even attempt to address this.
The recorded entertainment industry is like a lover who just didn't get it right one night. The consumer and the industry have been fucking for decades and then something happened and the recording industry says to the consumer --you've changed.
The consumer is like, no way baby. I'm still the same ol' cowboy. You know, let's get it on. But the entertainment industry is pulling this, no it's not the same anymore. You used to care about quality and now you try to get it anywhere you can. It makes me feel so cheap! If you really love me you'd at least spend some money.
And the consumer is like --what? Love you? What are you talking about? Why don't we just fuck like we always did. Nothing changed. It's the same ol deal. You say I changed, but you're the one who changed.
So, they don't fuck no more. But this relationship is special because it's all been recorded. So, the consumer goes back and starts watching the vids from back when things started and the fucking was still good.
Meanwhile, the recording industry joins the church and gets active in conservative politics and slowly starts developing these weird twitches.
Fucked up scenario. I'd hate to be the cop to do a domestic call on a couple like that.
Yeah, Spheral Solar is supposedly putting up a 20MW photovoltaic array in Ottowa that will be done by the end of 2003. Obstructing water flow is not the best source of energy. Either terrestrail or orbital solar or economically feasible fusion will make most dams redundnat and too expensive to maintain.
And the bottom line is that legal and economic systems are inherently public while the internet is primarily used by individuals in private.
Laws are there to regulate the public space and create an orderly society. There is very little need for laws regarding the behaviors of individuals within their homes. Many things that are criminal in public are perfectly legal within one's home. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a long list if you think about it.
For many individuals and organizations, this simple mental experiment is too dangerous to contemplate because it's so simple and it invalidates their assumptions about what is and is not legal. The same act can be both illegal in public and acceptable in private. Sharing music on the internet already is legal and so is all kings of other fair use of copyrighted materials that would be illegal in certain public scenarios. Even obscenity is only meaningful in public which is why the internet can be filled with obscenity that is illegal to display in public --it's not being displayed in public so no law is being violated.
If you can't imagine this, go ahead and get started with some experiments. Go outside to the street and take a shit in the street in front of your neighbor's house. Ask yourself, am I breaking the law? You'll probably catch on pretty quick, especially if your neighbors are watching. Taking a shit in your bathroom isn't illegal at all. But if you do it in the street in front of your neighbor's house it is. Holy multi faceted-reality Batman! Hmm, can you imagine other examples of things that are illegal in public but are perfectly legal in the privacy of your home? There are thousands of examples but many don't want to face that fact. The cool thing is that the law is not on their side. They've got nothing but smug refusal to face the fact that people do have liberties and they can keep it as long as they like.
What you're saying is true if you think all ISPs are DSL and cable, but that's a rather limited view of how wirelss can work.
There are plenty of ISPs offering to resell 100meg and 1GbE ethernet to smaller ISPs for extremely resasonable costs. (less than a thousand a month) The problem is still last mile distribution and this kind of tech could be useful in conjunction with mesh networks rather than having to be seen as a competing alternative as was suggested in the article. Freenets are cool, but they're hardly the beginning and end of wireless. Something like a co-op where users themselves provided the bulk of the network infrastructure and split the cost of wholesale ethernet bandwidth seems like an inevitable long-term outcome. It would seem to satisfy everyone except the telcos and cable companies. Screw them. They don't own the net and kissing their asses like they do only makes them more confident.
Alright then, I assume you would agree that what happened at Enron was felony theft and anybody who profited from the proceeds of that felony activity --like say the president of the US--should be held accountable in court on charges of accessory to felony theft --right? I mean you would apply this across the board wouldn't you?
No kidding, theft has to be the most abused concept of the latter half of the twentieth century.
I'ts not just IP either. Think about what we've gone through with welfare. It took forever to get to the point that welfare moved from these welfare stores of the thirties with their dehumanizing proselytizing to food stamps to simple cash payments. Once the stigma was finally being stripped away the rhetoric immediately turned to THIEVERY! Those fucking thieving nigger bitchez is stealing frum our fragile economy. Dear Lordy, them thieving snakes are gonna kill us all!
Now nevermind that the money that disappeared from a bankruptcy like Enron could have supported hundreds of thousands of crack dependent welfare moms who could have at least been there for at home watching the kids instead of taking some menial position outside the home to gratify the expiatory fantasy of the revenge seeking TV audiance.
And nevermind the fact that the scandanvian nations are total welfare states. That's not thieving because everything is "fair" there.
Now we've gone from mothers caring for children as thievery to accessing information as thievery.
I don't believe the Chinese are sincere about this crackdown on intellectual property because the Chinese intellectual tradition is a tradition based on a surprising degree of anonymity in authorship. One can argue that this is a product of political expediency, but over so many centuries that seems to be a bit of a stretch. Moreover, many truly proud Chinese authors have historically denied their authorship because they felt it was the honorable thing to take a humble position with regards to their authorship even when there was abundant evidence attributing their work to them.
And then there's this thing about the adoption of open hardware cores and the Dragon CPU. That doesn't go well with a new hardline attitude towards intellectual property.
In the sense that people tend to refer to it as a monolithic event when there were distinct phases with geographically and temporally secific characteristics. And the anaology is particularly telling in regards to what was going on in Europe and New York in the late seventies -vs- what happned in California in the early and mid-eighties --the RayGun dayz.
As a California kid from that period, the second period is real punk and it was only remotely related to the sex pistols or anything from
The point is, it's very subjective to say what is an important event in the history of punk. For me personally, it was when Geraldo Rivera did his ultra hyped 80's special on punk runaways living in squats in Hollywood. The night it aired, about seven of the runaways from the special were in my studio apartment smoking speed and watching themselves on my little black and white TV getting ready for a weekend of shows in San Diego.
So Johnny Rotten may be an important symbol to Hemos and Neil Young, but it's a bit of a stretch to imagine an international readership will easily share this point of view.
Oh, and I like McLaren's later work. It's all so subjective.
As soon as the sixty dollar mainland Chinese version comes out I'm buying one! This is definitely the toy of joy. The inevitable cheap verstions of stuff like this will screw up so many business plans where the primary focus is on controlling the user's media experience in specific place based scenarios. But hey, that's business, if you can't see the competition coming you're gonna get hit.
This is what I call Casey Jones technology. It aint got nothing to lose and it's heading for a bump.
I thought the same thing. Real?
I was just compaining to NPR about using Real and making it tough on Linux users while calling themselves community based radio and now here's Real saying they're all Linux friendly now. It sounds mighty suspicious since it's only been a few months since they took some website to court offering a Real stream ripper.
But hey, maybe they just want to kick MS in the nuts. It is had to believe they would make such an abrupt change when there's nothing in the news about new management, but perhaps it has something to do with Windows Media Player 9 screwing with them. That's possible.
Ouch, I was afraid of that. This is bogus. I couldn't care less about these what-if suppositions. For those people I'd suggest you listen to Shel Silverstein's Killed by a Coconut. You don't know what's going to happen and speculating on all the possible negative consequences is what is properly referred to as boring behavior.
"What if I don't die?" Don't worry dude, I'll help you any way I can.
I'm all for life extension, but if it only works at the fetal stage I say let's move on to the next solution. Anybody got links on GM bacterial sources of fetal bovine serum? I'll trade ya, I got one link to a British company and a few patents. Man, that's what I'm lookin' for. I'll take one viable petri dish of that culture. Bathtub biochem here I come.
That's a good point.
Proving intent on the net is very tricky especially when all you have is some IP addresses off a company with dozens of internal networks and proxys and routers and firewalls. Yeah, you have some numbers that might have entered the building. So what does that mean conclusively? Not much.
And if you say no, no it's hardline time. We're going to fuck these bastards. There's a war going on, it's like martial law. They gotta pay and pay and pay. Alright, in that scenario this becomes too easily abused. It's so easy to setup a remote eDonkey server with a little rootkit action. It's all far too ambiguous to make a court case on. Like the previous post suggests --if you prosecute aggressively, how do you prevent abuse; if you don't prosecute aggressively, how do you have a case?
Plainly the RIAA is just goofing around running up billable hours.
Actually, customs doesn't have a clue about any kind of books. I do commercial book imports into the States and they just ask you what the value is. If it's less than three thousand dollars --according to you-- then no problem. There is no set number of volumes and definitely no regard to content or origin or copyright. I learned this by bringing five thousand dollars worth of books in that definitely had no copyright history in the US and they told me the rule and let me slide. So they definitely would not take the time of day to hassle you unless you really made a point about insisting on being fined. They won't arrest you unless you get violent, but they'll probably give you a fine if you insist. The customs officers don't like to be made into test cases for stuff like copyright and they're good at ducking such things by offering to give you a small fine and then letting you walk if you'd prefer not. It's a good theoretical point you make though. US copyright law is absurd. Twenty years is enough for me and I'm an independent publisher and author.
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Moreover, the US telecoms that are betting their financial futures on the eventual widespread adoption of broadband in the States would be hit hardest. A dozen high profile cases against kids trading files would scare the shit out of the parents and no doubt hundreds of thousands of cable modem/DSL contracts would be cancelled. Meanwhile, this would change nothing in countries outside the US where non commercial sharing of data is not considered infringement.
Well, at one time anyhow.
In fact, if you go look at ETS's TOEFL home page, you'll see that they've cut almost forty percent of the TOEFL testing center locations because students are not coming like they used to. Most Americans aren't aware of this because it's not a big news story, but it's a fact. The United States WAS the destination for every other kid in Taiwan a few years ago, but that has changed quite abruptly in the most recent two years.
Yeah, we recently had a good example of irony.
Republicans sweep the elections, the central bank lowers rates to historic rates, next day the market dropped a hundred points. That was a classic example of irony.
In reality P2P is neither piracy or theft or copyright infringement.
It certainly shouldn't be considered infringement in the US either. It's a moral issue and the copyright holders pursuing this are in the wrong and should be ashamed of themselves.
And since we're talking supply rumors now, I might as well toss in my favorite long running CPU supply rumor which is that both AMD and Intel are doomed by off-the-chart fab growth in China.
In fact, AMD has been increasingly outsourcing to UMC for 130nm and we learned last month that SMIC has bought 130nm tools from Europe despite, or more likely because of, Bush's bizarre antics in foreign affairs.
As the PC economy continues to tank, Taiwan's UMC and TSMC will eventually get the green light to finish the fabs they've already started in the mainland and there is going to be a massive glut of CPUs priced so cheap that IBM, Intel and AMDs CPU businesses will be worthless.
As I right this, the front page of the EETimes is running a story about an on-chip ethernet controller that also contains a rudimentary web server that they're planning to embed in all sorts of appliances for remote monitoring. Apparently it's much cheaper than what is being discussed in this article and it seems this on chip solution can act as a 100mbps ethernet hub for other devices as well.
This simplistic worship of competition as an ends in itself like some genie that will solve all problems is perhaps the most dangerous product of the American public's notorious complacency to have arisen up to this point.
The American way has traditionally been to advocate fair and managed competition as opposed to the icon of competition dumbed down to the point that it becomes a simple equation of might makes right.
If "Competition good" were indeed true then Microsoft would always be in the right because they're the biggest competitor. In my opinion, this simplistic equation is not only false, but it is dangerous and one of the greatest threats to the American way of life. Microsoft SHOULD be forced to play by rules and no doubt all Americans should be required by law to vote in every election but that's another story.
Respect for something that is decidedly dangerous because of clear evidence is healthy. Fear is not.
If you ask me.
I have found that using physically separate amps for, at least, trebel and bass makes a vast difference. With the right amp, even the cheapest radio shack speaker or even a PC speaker can sound as good as it possibly can and a lot of times that's surprisingly good even for the very very cheap stuff.
Keeping the bass on its own amp is the easiest way to get the most bang for your buck. To that end, I would recommend that Angela buy her husband two amps and not only that, I'd say go with car amps that have AC connectors. I know the audiophiles are going to find this appalling, but it works amazingly well. Cheap speakers and homemade boxes will rock the house when the amps are balanced.
My system rocks the walls and I live in three story brick building. At the same time it captures the subtleties with spooky clarity and most of the mid range speakers were ripped out of old boom boxes for $0.00. Amps are where the money should go if you want good sound on a budget. Speakers are everywhere and most sound cards should be good enough.
Oh, and the most important part for someone getting started in this is that you can use 1.5mm Y patch cords to split the output from the sound card. Doesn't work for input, but output is okay. Cheap trick and it definitely works.
I'm among those who suspect this will only lead to a faster shift away from the fortunes of video copyright holders and I think that's a Good Thing(TM)
I don't really know the wording of copyright law in all its many jurisdictions, but I do know that the original intent was to grant an exclusive right to profit from publication and that copyright was certainly not intended from the beginning to limit the free exchange of information which is how it is being re-constructed with all this language twisting and convenient redefinition of terms like piracy and theft.
One thing that I find very intriguing about P2P is that works from the 1910s and 20s and early 30s are very popular. Although I'm only in my thirties, I'm a huge fan of this stuff and I never had convenient access to it before P2P. One of the reasons you never see it isn't because it's not entertaining, interesting and informative, but because there's no longer any profit in it.
The rediscovery of our archived electronic entertainment history is a bigger challenge to the current entertainment industry than how to protect the latest warmed over reinventions of those old acts. The more I look and listen to the old media, the more astounded I am at how cyclical and repetitive the whole notion of recorded entertainment is.
And to address the topic head on, watching and listeing to those old recordings makes you very aware that quality is extremely relative. When you're really excited about hearing something you'll get up and dance and sing along to something that sounds like hell. The question is how to make people enthusiastic and obviously the entertainment industry if failing to even attempt to address this.
The recorded entertainment industry is like a lover who just didn't get it right one night. The consumer and the industry have been fucking for decades and then something happened and the recording industry says to the consumer --you've changed.
The consumer is like, no way baby. I'm still the same ol' cowboy. You know, let's get it on. But the entertainment industry is pulling this, no it's not the same anymore. You used to care about quality and now you try to get it anywhere you can. It makes me feel so cheap! If you really love me you'd at least spend some money.
And the consumer is like --what? Love you? What are you talking about? Why don't we just fuck like we always did. Nothing changed. It's the same ol deal. You say I changed, but you're the one who changed.
So, they don't fuck no more. But this relationship is special because it's all been recorded. So, the consumer goes back and starts watching the vids from back when things started and the fucking was still good.
Meanwhile, the recording industry joins the church and gets active in conservative politics and slowly starts developing these weird twitches.
Fucked up scenario. I'd hate to be the cop to do a domestic call on a couple like that.
Yeah, Spheral Solar is supposedly putting up a 20MW photovoltaic array in Ottowa that will be done by the end of 2003. Obstructing water flow is not the best source of energy. Either terrestrail or orbital solar or economically feasible fusion will make most dams redundnat and too expensive to maintain.
And the bottom line is that legal and economic systems are inherently public while the internet is primarily used by individuals in private.
Laws are there to regulate the public space and create an orderly society. There is very little need for laws regarding the behaviors of individuals within their homes. Many things that are criminal in public are perfectly legal within one's home. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a long list if you think about it.
For many individuals and organizations, this simple mental experiment is too dangerous to contemplate because it's so simple and it invalidates their assumptions about what is and is not legal. The same act can be both illegal in public and acceptable in private. Sharing music on the internet already is legal and so is all kings of other fair use of copyrighted materials that would be illegal in certain public scenarios. Even obscenity is only meaningful in public which is why the internet can be filled with obscenity that is illegal to display in public --it's not being displayed in public so no law is being violated.
If you can't imagine this, go ahead and get started with some experiments. Go outside to the street and take a shit in the street in front of your neighbor's house. Ask yourself, am I breaking the law? You'll probably catch on pretty quick, especially if your neighbors are watching. Taking a shit in your bathroom isn't illegal at all. But if you do it in the street in front of your neighbor's house it is. Holy multi faceted-reality Batman! Hmm, can you imagine other examples of things that are illegal in public but are perfectly legal in the privacy of your home? There are thousands of examples but many don't want to face that fact. The cool thing is that the law is not on their side. They've got nothing but smug refusal to face the fact that people do have liberties and they can keep it as long as they like.
What you're saying is true if you think all ISPs are DSL and cable, but that's a rather limited view of how wirelss can work.
There are plenty of ISPs offering to resell 100meg and 1GbE ethernet to smaller ISPs for extremely resasonable costs. (less than a thousand a month) The problem is still last mile distribution and this kind of tech could be useful in conjunction with mesh networks rather than having to be seen as a competing alternative as was suggested in the article. Freenets are cool, but they're hardly the beginning and end of wireless. Something like a co-op where users themselves provided the bulk of the network infrastructure and split the cost of wholesale ethernet bandwidth seems like an inevitable long-term outcome. It would seem to satisfy everyone except the telcos and cable companies. Screw them. They don't own the net and kissing their asses like they do only makes them more confident.
Alright then, I assume you would agree that what happened at Enron was felony theft and anybody who profited from the proceeds of that felony activity --like say the president of the US--should be held accountable in court on charges of accessory to felony theft --right? I mean you would apply this across the board wouldn't you?
No kidding, theft has to be the most abused concept of the latter half of the twentieth century.
I'ts not just IP either. Think about what we've gone through with welfare. It took forever to get to the point that welfare moved from these welfare stores of the thirties with their dehumanizing proselytizing to food stamps to simple cash payments. Once the stigma was finally being stripped away the rhetoric immediately turned to THIEVERY! Those fucking thieving nigger bitchez is stealing frum our fragile economy. Dear Lordy, them thieving snakes are gonna kill us all!
Now nevermind that the money that disappeared from a bankruptcy like Enron could have supported hundreds of thousands of crack dependent welfare moms who could have at least been there for at home watching the kids instead of taking some menial position outside the home to gratify the expiatory fantasy of the revenge seeking TV audiance.
And nevermind the fact that the scandanvian nations are total welfare states. That's not thieving because everything is "fair" there.
Now we've gone from mothers caring for children as thievery to accessing information as thievery.
I don't believe the Chinese are sincere about this crackdown on intellectual property because the Chinese intellectual tradition is a tradition based on a surprising degree of anonymity in authorship. One can argue that this is a product of political expediency, but over so many centuries that seems to be a bit of a stretch. Moreover, many truly proud Chinese authors have historically denied their authorship because they felt it was the honorable thing to take a humble position with regards to their authorship even when there was abundant evidence attributing their work to them.
And then there's this thing about the adoption of open hardware cores and the Dragon CPU. That doesn't go well with a new hardline attitude towards intellectual property.
In the sense that people tend to refer to it as a monolithic event when there were distinct phases with geographically and temporally secific characteristics. And the anaology is particularly telling in regards to what was going on in Europe and New York in the late seventies -vs- what happned in California in the early and mid-eighties --the RayGun dayz.
As a California kid from that period, the second period is real punk and it was only remotely related to the sex pistols or anything from
The point is, it's very subjective to say what is an important event in the history of punk. For me personally, it was when Geraldo Rivera did his ultra hyped 80's special on punk runaways living in squats in Hollywood. The night it aired, about seven of the runaways from the special were in my studio apartment smoking speed and watching themselves on my little black and white TV getting ready for a weekend of shows in San Diego.
So Johnny Rotten may be an important symbol to Hemos and Neil Young, but it's a bit of a stretch to imagine an international readership will easily share this point of view.
Oh, and I like McLaren's later work. It's all so subjective.
Well if Real Audio is cozying up to open source then perhaps MS is going to open WMA. I doubt it, but I doubt Real's intentions as well.
As soon as the sixty dollar mainland Chinese version comes out I'm buying one! This is definitely the toy of joy. The inevitable cheap verstions of stuff like this will screw up so many business plans where the primary focus is on controlling the user's media experience in specific place based scenarios. But hey, that's business, if you can't see the competition coming you're gonna get hit.
This is what I call Casey Jones technology. It aint got nothing to lose and it's heading for a bump.
I thought the same thing. Real?
I was just compaining to NPR about using Real and making it tough on Linux users while calling themselves community based radio and now here's Real saying they're all Linux friendly now. It sounds mighty suspicious since it's only been a few months since they took some website to court offering a Real stream ripper.
But hey, maybe they just want to kick MS in the nuts. It is had to believe they would make such an abrupt change when there's nothing in the news about new management, but perhaps it has something to do with Windows Media Player 9 screwing with them. That's possible.
Ouch, I was afraid of that. This is bogus. I couldn't care less about these what-if suppositions. For those people I'd suggest you listen to Shel Silverstein's Killed by a Coconut. You don't know what's going to happen and speculating on all the possible negative consequences is what is properly referred to as boring behavior.
"What if I don't die?" Don't worry dude, I'll help you any way I can.
I'm all for life extension, but if it only works at the fetal stage I say let's move on to the next solution. Anybody got links on GM bacterial sources of fetal bovine serum? I'll trade ya, I got one link to a British company and a few patents. Man, that's what I'm lookin' for. I'll take one viable petri dish of that culture. Bathtub biochem here I come.
That's a good point.
Proving intent on the net is very tricky especially when all you have is some IP addresses off a company with dozens of internal networks and proxys and routers and firewalls. Yeah, you have some numbers that might have entered the building. So what does that mean conclusively? Not much.
And if you say no, no it's hardline time. We're going to fuck these bastards. There's a war going on, it's like martial law. They gotta pay and pay and pay. Alright, in that scenario this becomes too easily abused. It's so easy to setup a remote eDonkey server with a little rootkit action. It's all far too ambiguous to make a court case on. Like the previous post suggests --if you prosecute aggressively, how do you prevent abuse; if you don't prosecute aggressively, how do you have a case?
Plainly the RIAA is just goofing around running up billable hours.
Actually, customs doesn't have a clue about any kind of books. I do commercial book imports into the States and they just ask you what the value is. If it's less than three thousand dollars --according to you-- then no problem. There is no set number of volumes and definitely no regard to content or origin or copyright. I learned this by bringing five thousand dollars worth of books in that definitely had no copyright history in the US and they told me the rule and let me slide. So they definitely would not take the time of day to hassle you unless you really made a point about insisting on being fined. They won't arrest you unless you get violent, but they'll probably give you a fine if you insist. The customs officers don't like to be made into test cases for stuff like copyright and they're good at ducking such things by offering to give you a small fine and then letting you walk if you'd prefer not. It's a good theoretical point you make though. US copyright law is absurd. Twenty years is enough for me and I'm an independent publisher and author.
Try this link. A/