The other day I asked a programmer to bring me some cofee on the spot. The next day I had a new screen saver in java.
Clearly a specification error on the customer's behalf. You should have requested 8 (or so) fluid ounces of liquid caffeine-bearing (I assume!) sustenance produced by passing hot water through the ground, blended beans of particular coffee tree species, while supported in a paper (or copper, or gold. Again, assumptions!) filter.
anarchist groups and other "radical" organizations can now be filed under the heading "terrorist groups" (and you know, maybe they should be?) and they can be acted against.
Can we then file church groups and other "reactionary" organizations under the heading "terrorist groups" too? After all, they're the ones out there holding up gun stores to steal guns because God told them to fight to the death to save Terri Schiavo's life, bombing and shooting up abortion clinics, and burning crosses in colored peoples' yards.
If their sissy webmaster is any indication, I'd bet this group of "anarchists" never blew up anything bigger than a cherry bomb stuck in a tin can in their back yard when their mommy wasn't looking. I bet they really showed her who was the boss.
If you believe that, I've got a can of hairspray^WElephant Repellant to sell you. See! No elephants here so it MUST be working!
Maybe if the government would open up and say "we arrested the following five people for attempting to blow shit up" or hell, put someone on trial every now and then instead of holding American Citizens in jail for years without one, then I'll believe that lives have been saved thanks to all of this crap. (Whether it was "worth it" would be a different matter.) Until the government deigns to show us that it has had any effect at all, I don't see any reason to believe that even a single person's life has been saved.
Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?
If the supreme court rules that ads are expressions of speech, then the government cannot make laws forbidding people from sending ads, because it would infringe on their right to express themselves in the form of ads.
Even in that case, a company could just shitcan all the spam, since they're not the US Government and can ignore the first amendment all they want.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Oh wow, Mr. "I run a webserver with one active email address", clearly you're an expert in all things email, since obviously an ISP server hosting thousands of email addresses would NEVER have to deal with more spam than you.
Even with the (what, 20? 30?) disabled email addresses bouncing spam back, your pathetic little server is nothing compared to what the likes of what AOL or hotmail (or even smaller ISPs with a few thousand customers) have to deal with.
That's why you can make HUGE amounts of money by advertising. It would be irrational (IMO) to believe that what we see affects us only in how we spend, and not in our other behaviors.
It may affect us in HOW we spend, but it doesn't MAKE us spend. Unless you're one of the basket cases who stay up all night with the phone in their lap calling in for all that late night infomercial crap, and then we're back to "if you weren't fucked in the head in the first place, it wouldn't have happened".
Or do you have a closet full of tampons from rushing to the store every time you see a "feminine hygene" commercial? Maybe, given the number of commericals for vehicles I see on TV, you've got a whole fleet of cars and trucks? Do you loving it enough at McDonalds to get breakfast, lunch, dinner, an early night snack, and a late night snack? What do you do when you're on the way to McDonalds and hear a Wendys commercial on the radio, do you go to both, or do you make a decision on what you are going to buy based on the information provided by the commercials?
People who buy shit because the commercial told them to are only slightly more mentally stable than people who kill someone because god told them to.
Yes, actually. This isn't just some sand scooped off a beach. Solar panel grade silicon comes from the leftovers after semiconductor grade silicon users have picked through their crystal wafers, which is why there is a shortage in the first place, since there is a narrow range of quality ("almost" good enough for semiconductors). As for titanium, my 30 year old encyclopeda says its one of the 10 most common metals on the planet. Titanium Oxide is cheaply produced and used liberally in paint.
Titanium is malleable when hot (meaning you can flatten it into foil). So producing titanium foil is probably not a difficult task, depending on how hot "hot" is. (Though the article mentions that the titanium foil used is thinner than household aluminum foil. The process looks like it would be easy anyway, but time consuming.)
As for your post on waste products, the most common smelting procedure in use works without catalyst or flux to produce pig-iron and Titanium Oxide, though this process is common because of its use in paint. This process was recently developed for producing metallic titanium, its outputs are salt (NaCl), titanium, and whatever impurities get washed into the liquid sodium stream and removed later.
Actually that wouldn't quite work right, since the point of view then would start from behind the monitor instead of from where you're sitting (the reason most of these are laptops is because the easiest way to do it is close the laptop, sit back, take a picture, then cut out the part of the picture where the laptop's screen would be and use that as the background.
Though now that I think of it, if you used the whole picture, and a program that displayed part of the picture based on the results of the motion sensor in the powerbook, the end result might be pretty cool.
Notoriously? The "old" way of using a centrifuge to seperate X and Y semen apparently has about a 80% chance to reliably produce a female and a 60% chance of correctly producing a male, still better than 50%. Newer methods are more expensive, and involve in vitro fertilization using a single, carefully selected sperm cell, in which case the gender is not in question. I suspect that if permitted to continue, spermicides could be developed that specifically targeted cells bearing the X or Y chromosome for destruction. In fact, those could appear on the market Real Soon Now.
How about shaking children? People around here are lobbying for a law that would require doctors to tell expectant mothers and their partners (If they have one) about shaken baby syndrome, how it can be fatal, and how easily it can be diagnosed in an attempt to stop people from doing it. Striking your child with the intent to injure it is also up there on the list of things to teach people not to do. If you have to take your anger out on something, buy a FPS game and blow peoples' brains out.
"the basics of nutrition"
DO feed your kid on a regular basis. DO select a diet that will support growth and nourishment, whether its based on the food pyramid or pushed by PETA. DON'T experiment with the latest fad diet on your child. DON'T use excessively fatty foods in your diet. DO learn to recognize signs of an improper diet so that you can fix it before your child ends up sick. DO consult with a trained dietician or doctor if its all just too confusing to you.
have the opportunity to learn to be independent
DON'T lock your child in the closet for days. DON'T chain your child to the bed to use as your personal fucktoy. DO set out rules and expectations in advance, DO set out clear guidelines for punishment, DO stick to meteing out such punishment in a fair manner. DON'T string a kid up by their thumbs for breaking the random rule of the day while their little brother continues to raise cain with impunity.
See, by breaking it down, there are truths that can be taught to prospective parents that are acceptable to just about everyone involved. Beyond "how to treat your child like a human and help ensure it survives childhood with most of their psyche intact" theres other things too: How to change a diaper. How to identify common childhood illnesses. How to deal with minor and severe injuries. Infant CPR. The list continues, but you get the point.
Male...until there are so many men than women become more valuable. Then I'd chose a woman.
And what exactly will make women more valuable? You are aware of WHY people want males right? Reasons vary from place to place and time to time, but they do exist. These are all very sexist reasons, but we're dealing with sex here:
-Males work on the farm. -Males get better paying jobs and bring more money into the family. -Males make better soldiers. -In some cultures, males are responsible for caring for the parents. -In most cultures, males pass on the family name.
These are just the reasons off the top of my head. Sure some of them (like the jobs) will start to lose value when there are "too many" men (note that if people only have 1 boy and no girls as in China, this "too many" case may never come about), but the rest will never lose value without a fast-enough change in culture.
Remember that passing on your own genes is the ultimate act of selfishness. When these people have children, they're not doing it for the sake of anyone else, they're doing it for themselves.
The cost of living is lower, the air is cleaner, the people are friendlier, the criminals are fewer, the schools are better, etc
Ok, I'll buy "cost of living is lower" but for any town small enough for COLA to be seriously low, the rest isn't going to hold true (except maybe clean air, if you end up in a farming town as opposed to a factory town). I don't know how large of a city you live in now, but I grew up in a town of about 1000 people (after moving to Houston, I ended up in a highschool with a graduating class of 1500, think on that). The schools there sucked. They had no money, the students there were just there to be babysat while they were too young to run the tractor. While I was there, I was in a class of about 60 in middle school. After graduating from HS here, I got in touch with one of my friends from my hometown, who actually managed to graduate from HS, 4th in a class of 9.
I can tell you a large part of the reason we moved is because it most certainly wasn't friendly. My dad worked out of town and would be gone from early in the morning to late at night. Neighbors would openly talk about what they thought my dad was doing out late with the "loose city girls" in front of my little sister and I, before I was even 10 years old. We weren't welcome in church, mostly because of that, and because we weren't in church, we were "heathens" in that tiny little town's tiny little minds.
Oh and crime? According to my friend I missed all the fun. Most of the difference between those 60 students in my middle school classes and the 9 who made it through highschool wasn't in the number of people who went back to the farm after middle school. Most of them were arrested, died of drug overdoses, or killed themselves or each other. Not a lot to do when you're growing up in a boring little town.
Given that this is what "some design studio" staffed with ex-Apple designers (the lead left Apple in 96, there wasn't even an iPod then!) THINKS apple will do, you don't need to worry about anyone going downhill just yet.
If any of these "happen", I would say it would be just the video conferencing iSight-phone shown in the "media server hub" concept. The rest of these scream hand-held convergence, which Apple has been avoiding (they want everything to converge on your shiny new powerbook, mac mini, or G5... not some cheap handheld toy!)
So let me get this straight... If I have www.crappywebsite.com and I want to pump up its pagerank, all I need to do is have "www.crappywebsite.com" redirect googlebot to www.cnn.com, and suddenly www.crappywebsite.com is a font of highly-ranked information?
The REAL answer would be to have google not index redirects (which is pretty stupid, all things considered. Why link searchers to the "wrong" URL, instead of the destination URL of the redirect?)
People do distribute, however, and DRM is a reasonable way of stopping or limiting that. Another would be crazy insane shit that nobody would agree to, so DRM is clearly perfectly fine, because NOBODY could come up with a solution somewhere in between.
Of course your proposals aren't reasonable. They aren't meant to be.
We could simply continue to require the RIAA and MPAA to perform the oh-so-onerous task of connecting to a torrent announcer and getting a list of IP addresses using it. Hey, they could pay people to run IRC bots too, looking for random channels like #!!!!!moviez and troll there for the XDCC bots. I bet if they were willing to spend a billion dollars on enforcement, they could have a human punch in words on google to find websites that have their properties up for download.
But thats too much work and far too expensive to ask any company to do, so lets get the feds to pass laws to make copyright infringement a criminal rather than a civil issue, then it all comes out of taxpayers dollars and the MPAA gets its own police force for "free"!
Typically through caller ID. They have your phone number and name and a great big database that matches that to addresses. Usually, anyway. No idea why it didn't work for the grandparent, maybe the system was down that day.
Even if you do call from a fixed landline, you should still give your address, just in case that database is wrong (especially if you've moved across town and kept your old number).
And in the end, if the iTMS protocol changes faster than PyMusic can, someone else will use libpcap to write something that NEVER talks to iTMS. It simply waits for iTunes to make an order, captures what comes back, and from the recorded packet stream, out pops the music!
Even the DMCA can't be used against something like this, its not an access control problem. If Apple wants this fixed, they MUST do the encryption server side.
I'm with you on this one. While its possible that whoever did this knew what they were doing and picked up those files, the most likely scenario runs something like this: (Second most likely scenario is to substitute some Romanian luser)
Chico State Student A: Gee, I want to serve up warez and get some cred with my buddiez in my distro group, but I've gotta get a server with at least a 10mbit connection to move up on the distro ladder. I don't want to run the server from my own machine, what can I do? Roommate (B): Dude, just run an IIS scanner against our subnet, somebody here has to be a clueless fuck of an admin. Hurry up dude, I want that 0-day release of UT2k3 (this was 2 years ago, right?) A: Excellent idea. [goes to rootkits'arr'us, picks one at random, runs it, his computer crashes. Reboots, picks a different one, infests his computer with spyware. Picks a different one, this one asks him for an IP range]... to.255. There, that'll get all the machines on campus. Hey, look a hit. [Presses "R3wt N0w"] I'm in! Let's start getting shit on the site so I can request an upgrade from my budz!
MAYBE the following happened: B: So what machine you hit? A: Hm, lemme lookup the IP.... says "foodservice3.chico.edu" B: Hahaha you r00ted the dininghall grill! A: Hahaha snort haha!
So as you can see, its entirely unlikely that anyone even cared what was on the machine beyond their skriptkiddie toy telling them it was vulnerable.
So this person voluntarily entered into a contract with HP (well, with a subcontractor of HP), with the understanding that she would be paid X dollars in exchange for Y hours work, with no additional compensation expected on either side. Fast forward a couple years and now we're supposed to let her renegotiate the contract BACKDATED TO THE START because she's changed her mind? Screw that, it's called a learning experience, next time take a FT job, not a contract.
So you've seen the contract and it says that Loser X will work N hours for $P pay? And Loser X worked N hours for $P pay? If thats true, then the suit really is baseless. But take a look at the behavior of the electronics industry with respect to its contractors recently: We have EA, for example, who worked people for 60-80+ hours a week, which was by contract (expected overtime), then at the end of the project said, "Yeah, I know we usually let you comp all that overtime after a project is done, but I think we'll just take our overtime back this time and not give you any time off or any extra pay, and assign you to new projects". Hardly "fair" "legal" or "by the contract" by any stretch of the imagination.
So the way I see it, there MIGHT be merit to the case. They could be working these contract workers overtime with no overtime pay or comp time, they could be assigning them jobs above and beyond their contractual role, if they're hourly they could be forcing them to "touch up" their time sheets, or any number of other abusive things. They may have been told the positions were contract-to-hire. Work for us 3 months and we'll hire you as soon as possible (4 years ago). The subcontractor may have misrepresented themselves as HP, rather than as a subcontractor. They may have gone for years unwilling to rock the boat thanks to the shitty economy.
Or it might just be a bunch of whiny brats who decided they wanted to be FTE's after all. They got themselves a fancy lawyer and figured that what they couldn't get from the HR department they'd take from the company's hide.
Either way, we'll see the truth when it comes out in the courts.
The problem then is "what if the hash is wrong"? Do you want to get arrested because some lab tech fucked up your DNA sample and now its hash matches some serial kiddie rapist's?
Even if you redid the DNA sample, you'd still have been arrested for being a serial child rapist, and nobody's going to look at you the same again.
The problem is that unlike a fingerprint where I can throw it up on a projector in the court room and show the crime scene sample against my own and demonstrate to the jury that the DA is so desperate to convict me for a crime I didn't commit, they're willing to claim my fingerprint is a match on one point.
Harder to do that with DNA. Instead, you get some "expert" coming in to say "yes, the DNA matched." And then you end up like Houston, with dozens of cases that turned out to be total bullshit. Hundreds of DNA retests, probably at taxpayer expense. Stories like this one where even after finding out the guy couldn't have matched the semen from the rape kit, keeping the guy around because he was picked from a lineup way back at the beginning and the victim doesn't want to change her mind and the DA only believes DNA evidence when it boosts his conviction count, and he finds it more convenient to shuffle the case to someone else than to take the heat for that view himself.
Yes, the code was written under the GPL, yes the SAE did then take that code and start selling it as if they had written it and without the GPL, but it seems that the entire process was over whether the SAE owns their own regulations after the government steps in and turns them into Law.
The answer, as it was in the prior case cited, was "no".
It seems that the license of the software involved wasn't related to the case at all, other than as a "starting point" for the case to begin. If the code had been BSD-licensed, they wouldn't have been suing the SAE first. If nothing else, it simply indicates that you can issue a DMCA takedown notice for GPL'd code someone else is using without obeying the GPL license.
Slashdot Mirror
The other day I asked a programmer to bring me some cofee on the spot. The next day I had a new screen saver in java.
Clearly a specification error on the customer's behalf. You should have requested 8 (or so) fluid ounces of liquid caffeine-bearing (I assume!) sustenance produced by passing hot water through the ground, blended beans of particular coffee tree species, while supported in a paper (or copper, or gold. Again, assumptions!) filter.
anarchist groups and other "radical" organizations can now be filed under the heading "terrorist groups" (and you know, maybe they should be?) and they can be acted against.
Can we then file church groups and other "reactionary" organizations under the heading "terrorist groups" too? After all, they're the ones out there holding up gun stores to steal guns because God told them to fight to the death to save Terri Schiavo's life, bombing and shooting up abortion clinics, and burning crosses in colored peoples' yards.
If their sissy webmaster is any indication, I'd bet this group of "anarchists" never blew up anything bigger than a cherry bomb stuck in a tin can in their back yard when their mommy wasn't looking. I bet they really showed her who was the boss.
If you believe that, I've got a can of hairspray^WElephant Repellant to sell you. See! No elephants here so it MUST be working!
Maybe if the government would open up and say "we arrested the following five people for attempting to blow shit up" or hell, put someone on trial every now and then instead of holding American Citizens in jail for years without one, then I'll believe that lives have been saved thanks to all of this crap. (Whether it was "worth it" would be a different matter.) Until the government deigns to show us that it has had any effect at all, I don't see any reason to believe that even a single person's life has been saved.
Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?
If the supreme court rules that ads are expressions of speech, then the government cannot make laws forbidding people from sending ads, because it would infringe on their right to express themselves in the form of ads.
Even in that case, a company could just shitcan all the spam, since they're not the US Government and can ignore the first amendment all they want.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Oh wow, Mr. "I run a webserver with one active email address", clearly you're an expert in all things email, since obviously an ISP server hosting thousands of email addresses would NEVER have to deal with more spam than you.
Even with the (what, 20? 30?) disabled email addresses bouncing spam back, your pathetic little server is nothing compared to what the likes of what AOL or hotmail (or even smaller ISPs with a few thousand customers) have to deal with.
perfectly valid moral laws that have sound logic behind them .
Demonstrate to me that my decade plus of playing wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and so on will compel me to go out and kill someone.
Then we'll talk about sound logic.
That's why you can make HUGE amounts of money by advertising. It would be irrational (IMO) to believe that what we see affects us only in how we spend, and not in our other behaviors.
It may affect us in HOW we spend, but it doesn't MAKE us spend. Unless you're one of the basket cases who stay up all night with the phone in their lap calling in for all that late night infomercial crap, and then we're back to "if you weren't fucked in the head in the first place, it wouldn't have happened".
Or do you have a closet full of tampons from rushing to the store every time you see a "feminine hygene" commercial? Maybe, given the number of commericals for vehicles I see on TV, you've got a whole fleet of cars and trucks? Do you loving it enough at McDonalds to get breakfast, lunch, dinner, an early night snack, and a late night snack? What do you do when you're on the way to McDonalds and hear a Wendys commercial on the radio, do you go to both, or do you make a decision on what you are going to buy based on the information provided by the commercials?
People who buy shit because the commercial told them to are only slightly more mentally stable than people who kill someone because god told them to.
Yes, actually. This isn't just some sand scooped off a beach. Solar panel grade silicon comes from the leftovers after semiconductor grade silicon users have picked through their crystal wafers, which is why there is a shortage in the first place, since there is a narrow range of quality ("almost" good enough for semiconductors). As for titanium, my 30 year old encyclopeda says its one of the 10 most common metals on the planet. Titanium Oxide is cheaply produced and used liberally in paint.
Titanium is malleable when hot (meaning you can flatten it into foil). So producing titanium foil is probably not a difficult task, depending on how hot "hot" is. (Though the article mentions that the titanium foil used is thinner than household aluminum foil. The process looks like it would be easy anyway, but time consuming.)
As for your post on waste products, the most common smelting procedure in use works without catalyst or flux to produce pig-iron and Titanium Oxide, though this process is common because of its use in paint. This process was recently developed for producing metallic titanium, its outputs are salt (NaCl), titanium, and whatever impurities get washed into the liquid sodium stream and removed later.
Actually that wouldn't quite work right, since the point of view then would start from behind the monitor instead of from where you're sitting (the reason most of these are laptops is because the easiest way to do it is close the laptop, sit back, take a picture, then cut out the part of the picture where the laptop's screen would be and use that as the background.
Though now that I think of it, if you used the whole picture, and a program that displayed part of the picture based on the results of the motion sensor in the powerbook, the end result might be pretty cool.
When negotiating with Microsoft, is there anyone who can NOT negotiate from a position of weakness?
Nobody can run from Conan the Librarian!
Notoriously? The "old" way of using a centrifuge to seperate X and Y semen apparently has about a 80% chance to reliably produce a female and a 60% chance of correctly producing a male, still better than 50%. Newer methods are more expensive, and involve in vitro fertilization using a single, carefully selected sperm cell, in which case the gender is not in question. I suspect that if permitted to continue, spermicides could be developed that specifically targeted cells bearing the X or Y chromosome for destruction. In fact, those could appear on the market Real Soon Now.
"why hitting children is counterproductive"
Well, there you go. You're wrong.
How about shaking children? People around here are lobbying for a law that would require doctors to tell expectant mothers and their partners (If they have one) about shaken baby syndrome, how it can be fatal, and how easily it can be diagnosed in an attempt to stop people from doing it. Striking your child with the intent to injure it is also up there on the list of things to teach people not to do. If you have to take your anger out on something, buy a FPS game and blow peoples' brains out.
"the basics of nutrition"
DO feed your kid on a regular basis. DO select a diet that will support growth and nourishment, whether its based on the food pyramid or pushed by PETA. DON'T experiment with the latest fad diet on your child. DON'T use excessively fatty foods in your diet. DO learn to recognize signs of an improper diet so that you can fix it before your child ends up sick. DO consult with a trained dietician or doctor if its all just too confusing to you.
have the opportunity to learn to be independent
DON'T lock your child in the closet for days. DON'T chain your child to the bed to use as your personal fucktoy. DO set out rules and expectations in advance, DO set out clear guidelines for punishment, DO stick to meteing out such punishment in a fair manner. DON'T string a kid up by their thumbs for breaking the random rule of the day while their little brother continues to raise cain with impunity.
See, by breaking it down, there are truths that can be taught to prospective parents that are acceptable to just about everyone involved. Beyond "how to treat your child like a human and help ensure it survives childhood with most of their psyche intact" theres other things too: How to change a diaper. How to identify common childhood illnesses. How to deal with minor and severe injuries. Infant CPR. The list continues, but you get the point.
Male...until there are so many men than women become more valuable. Then I'd chose a woman.
And what exactly will make women more valuable? You are aware of WHY people want males right? Reasons vary from place to place and time to time, but they do exist. These are all very sexist reasons, but we're dealing with sex here:
-Males work on the farm.
-Males get better paying jobs and bring more money into the family.
-Males make better soldiers.
-In some cultures, males are responsible for caring for the parents.
-In most cultures, males pass on the family name.
These are just the reasons off the top of my head. Sure some of them (like the jobs) will start to lose value when there are "too many" men (note that if people only have 1 boy and no girls as in China, this "too many" case may never come about), but the rest will never lose value without a fast-enough change in culture.
Remember that passing on your own genes is the ultimate act of selfishness. When these people have children, they're not doing it for the sake of anyone else, they're doing it for themselves.
The cost of living is lower, the air is cleaner, the people are friendlier, the criminals are fewer, the schools are better, etc
Ok, I'll buy "cost of living is lower" but for any town small enough for COLA to be seriously low, the rest isn't going to hold true (except maybe clean air, if you end up in a farming town as opposed to a factory town). I don't know how large of a city you live in now, but I grew up in a town of about 1000 people (after moving to Houston, I ended up in a highschool with a graduating class of 1500, think on that). The schools there sucked. They had no money, the students there were just there to be babysat while they were too young to run the tractor. While I was there, I was in a class of about 60 in middle school. After graduating from HS here, I got in touch with one of my friends from my hometown, who actually managed to graduate from HS, 4th in a class of 9.
I can tell you a large part of the reason we moved is because it most certainly wasn't friendly. My dad worked out of town and would be gone from early in the morning to late at night. Neighbors would openly talk about what they thought my dad was doing out late with the "loose city girls" in front of my little sister and I, before I was even 10 years old. We weren't welcome in church, mostly because of that, and because we weren't in church, we were "heathens" in that tiny little town's tiny little minds.
Oh and crime? According to my friend I missed all the fun. Most of the difference between those 60 students in my middle school classes and the 9 who made it through highschool wasn't in the number of people who went back to the farm after middle school. Most of them were arrested, died of drug overdoses, or killed themselves or each other. Not a lot to do when you're growing up in a boring little town.
Given that this is what "some design studio" staffed with ex-Apple designers (the lead left Apple in 96, there wasn't even an iPod then!) THINKS apple will do, you don't need to worry about anyone going downhill just yet.
If any of these "happen", I would say it would be just the video conferencing iSight-phone shown in the "media server hub" concept. The rest of these scream hand-held convergence, which Apple has been avoiding (they want everything to converge on your shiny new powerbook, mac mini, or G5... not some cheap handheld toy!)
So let me get this straight... If I have www.crappywebsite.com and I want to pump up its pagerank, all I need to do is have "www.crappywebsite.com" redirect googlebot to www.cnn.com, and suddenly www.crappywebsite.com is a font of highly-ranked information?
The REAL answer would be to have google not index redirects (which is pretty stupid, all things considered. Why link searchers to the "wrong" URL, instead of the destination URL of the redirect?)
People do distribute, however, and DRM is a reasonable way of stopping or limiting that. Another would be crazy insane shit that nobody would agree to, so DRM is clearly perfectly fine, because NOBODY could come up with a solution somewhere in between.
Of course your proposals aren't reasonable. They aren't meant to be.
We could simply continue to require the RIAA and MPAA to perform the oh-so-onerous task of connecting to a torrent announcer and getting a list of IP addresses using it. Hey, they could pay people to run IRC bots too, looking for random channels like #!!!!!moviez and troll there for the XDCC bots. I bet if they were willing to spend a billion dollars on enforcement, they could have a human punch in words on google to find websites that have their properties up for download.
But thats too much work and far too expensive to ask any company to do, so lets get the feds to pass laws to make copyright infringement a criminal rather than a civil issue, then it all comes out of taxpayers dollars and the MPAA gets its own police force for "free"!
And if yes, how do they do this ?
Typically through caller ID. They have your phone number and name and a great big database that matches that to addresses. Usually, anyway. No idea why it didn't work for the grandparent, maybe the system was down that day.
Even if you do call from a fixed landline, you should still give your address, just in case that database is wrong (especially if you've moved across town and kept your old number).
And in the end, if the iTMS protocol changes faster than PyMusic can, someone else will use libpcap to write something that NEVER talks to iTMS. It simply waits for iTunes to make an order, captures what comes back, and from the recorded packet stream, out pops the music!
Even the DMCA can't be used against something like this, its not an access control problem. If Apple wants this fixed, they MUST do the encryption server side.
I'm with you on this one. While its possible that whoever did this knew what they were doing and picked up those files, the most likely scenario runs something like this: (Second most likely scenario is to substitute some Romanian luser)
... to .255. There, that'll get all the machines on campus. Hey, look a hit. [Presses "R3wt N0w"] I'm in! Let's start getting shit on the site so I can request an upgrade from my budz!
Chico State Student A: Gee, I want to serve up warez and get some cred with my buddiez in my distro group, but I've gotta get a server with at least a 10mbit connection to move up on the distro ladder. I don't want to run the server from my own machine, what can I do?
Roommate (B): Dude, just run an IIS scanner against our subnet, somebody here has to be a clueless fuck of an admin. Hurry up dude, I want that 0-day release of UT2k3 (this was 2 years ago, right?)
A: Excellent idea. [goes to rootkits'arr'us, picks one at random, runs it, his computer crashes. Reboots, picks a different one, infests his computer with spyware. Picks a different one, this one asks him for an IP range]
MAYBE the following happened:
B: So what machine you hit?
A: Hm, lemme lookup the IP.... says "foodservice3.chico.edu"
B: Hahaha you r00ted the dininghall grill!
A: Hahaha snort haha!
So as you can see, its entirely unlikely that anyone even cared what was on the machine beyond their skriptkiddie toy telling them it was vulnerable.
So this person voluntarily entered into a contract with HP (well, with a subcontractor of HP), with the understanding that she would be paid X dollars in exchange for Y hours work, with no additional compensation expected on either side. Fast forward a couple years and now we're supposed to let her renegotiate the contract BACKDATED TO THE START because she's changed her mind? Screw that, it's called a learning experience, next time take a FT job, not a contract.
So you've seen the contract and it says that Loser X will work N hours for $P pay? And Loser X worked N hours for $P pay? If thats true, then the suit really is baseless. But take a look at the behavior of the electronics industry with respect to its contractors recently: We have EA, for example, who worked people for 60-80+ hours a week, which was by contract (expected overtime), then at the end of the project said, "Yeah, I know we usually let you comp all that overtime after a project is done, but I think we'll just take our overtime back this time and not give you any time off or any extra pay, and assign you to new projects". Hardly "fair" "legal" or "by the contract" by any stretch of the imagination.
So the way I see it, there MIGHT be merit to the case. They could be working these contract workers overtime with no overtime pay or comp time, they could be assigning them jobs above and beyond their contractual role, if they're hourly they could be forcing them to "touch up" their time sheets, or any number of other abusive things. They may have been told the positions were contract-to-hire. Work for us 3 months and we'll hire you as soon as possible (4 years ago). The subcontractor may have misrepresented themselves as HP, rather than as a subcontractor. They may have gone for years unwilling to rock the boat thanks to the shitty economy.
Or it might just be a bunch of whiny brats who decided they wanted to be FTE's after all. They got themselves a fancy lawyer and figured that what they couldn't get from the HR department they'd take from the company's hide.
Either way, we'll see the truth when it comes out in the courts.
Paranoia mistakenly assumes a great deal of competence, cunning, and motive in the average worker.
And stupidity underestimates the power of one malcontent in an underpaid dead-end government job.
The problem then is "what if the hash is wrong"? Do you want to get arrested because some lab tech fucked up your DNA sample and now its hash matches some serial kiddie rapist's?
Even if you redid the DNA sample, you'd still have been arrested for being a serial child rapist, and nobody's going to look at you the same again.
The problem is that unlike a fingerprint where I can throw it up on a projector in the court room and show the crime scene sample against my own and demonstrate to the jury that the DA is so desperate to convict me for a crime I didn't commit, they're willing to claim my fingerprint is a match on one point.
Harder to do that with DNA. Instead, you get some "expert" coming in to say "yes, the DNA matched." And then you end up like Houston, with dozens of cases that turned out to be total bullshit. Hundreds of DNA retests, probably at taxpayer expense. Stories like this one where even after finding out the guy couldn't have matched the semen from the rape kit, keeping the guy around because he was picked from a lineup way back at the beginning and the victim doesn't want to change her mind and the DA only believes DNA evidence when it boosts his conviction count, and he finds it more convenient to shuffle the case to someone else than to take the heat for that view himself.
Yes, the code was written under the GPL, yes the SAE did then take that code and start selling it as if they had written it and without the GPL, but it seems that the entire process was over whether the SAE owns their own regulations after the government steps in and turns them into Law.
The answer, as it was in the prior case cited, was "no".
It seems that the license of the software involved wasn't related to the case at all, other than as a "starting point" for the case to begin. If the code had been BSD-licensed, they wouldn't have been suing the SAE first. If nothing else, it simply indicates that you can issue a DMCA takedown notice for GPL'd code someone else is using without obeying the GPL license.