I don't think patents fit on the socialism to capitalism axis, they're really dictatorial. The government declares absolute ownership of something and parcels it out to cronies.
Capitalism is how we trade those rights, but patents would still exist even if they were just given out to nobility for arbitrary reasons.
so if a video's been ripped, they know which copy it was.
Yeah. Expect the large-scale commercial pirates to use that as a weapon.
A video stolen in a B&E can be used to direct the wrath of the MPAA on an innocent target while the criminals are totally undeterred.
Eventually buying a video (and risking being incorrectly fingered for releasing it) will be scarier than downloading and in yet another way the pirated version will be better than the "legit" one.
Chuckle. You couldn't make them be this dumb if you tried.
Actually, I'd believe it. Or, at least that it's true enough enough of the time to cause a problem.
One, you probably are a super-genius. Relatively speaking. In your area. If you're interested in your work you're in the top 1% at least. If you've got moderately wide training so that you use the right tools instead of beating what you know into the wrong hole you're far ahead of the game.
But it's not just the individual techs. There's easily at least one trained network admin for each ISP, and many work there, but it's amazing how many ways a company can find to sabotage its experts and their best efforts.
One ISP I'm familiar with had problems with spam, or rather, with saying no to money. They had an anti-spam department (one guy, but still enough if they let him work) and they claimed to be trying to stop it but whenever he'd identify a spammer (new customer, thousands of identical spamming outgoing emails...) and cut them off their regional partner would call up bitchy about a lost customer, they'd override the anti-spam dept and turn the account on, and then when the entire organization ended up blacklisted profess ignorance.
So yeah, huge multinational organization screwing things up worse than you can imagine, on a daily basis. Worse, over a $25/month subscriber account.
I've been overridden on purchasing decisions before for trivial amounts and spent more in time directly fixing the shortcoming. For instance, I bought two testing machines and speced $80 nvidia cards (back in ~2000 when they just worked and ATI just didn't), has this changed in favor of crappy $50 ATI cards (not even a good but older like the ones I specced, but the cheapest card that existed just to make crap PCs possible.) Together that saved the company $60 or so, most of which the manager wasted chewing me out for specing gaming cards for testing machines (blah, blah, blah, nvidia=games, blah, blah) and wasted literally THOUSANDS of dollars in fighting with those. (My job involved repeatedly installing various version of Windows (from scratch, couldn't just ghost/dd this part of it) and the ATI cards took more time, reboots, and caused more crashes, all of which had to be investigated to make sure they weren't caused by our product.)
Pft, not. One thing that obviously deserves the death penalty, if anything does, is knowingly demanding the death penalty for an innocent person. Technically it's not murder yet I don't think you'd be scum by arguing that this false accuser should face the same fate their victim did.
But be honest, the problem with the death penalty isn't the death - you probably aren't half as bugged by that as you'd want to appear. The problem is that the government hands it out years later, often(usually?) wrongly, and never (by then) necessarily.
If taken the other way being against the death penalty would make you against self defense. Obviously that's silly...
Put it another way - has any policeman been convicted of corruption in your city?
Great example actually, because while a few must here and there, largely, no. Not even of blatant murder when caught on camera. Nor were their supervisors charged with ANYTHING, let alone convicted for confiscating video evidence and trying to deny its existence. In fact, in a recent incident the police department is arguing that because its funding is federal, lower levels of government aren't even allowed to investigate or censure it.
It's a perfect example of an organization rotten to the top, even if only one in a thousand is technically "dirty" because we refuse to deal with it effectively. Perhaps things would be different if the people at the top were liable of triple-punishment for everything they participated in covering up, but we can't even enforce the trivial rules we do have.
I join your party under a false name, cheat blatantly and run like hell [...] Your leader gets a bullet in the head.
Yeah, absolutely. Why did he vouch for you?
India has a population over a billion. The major parties will have hundreds of thousands of low-level workers.
Well, that's conflating the party members themselves and perhaps their staff with a volunteer who offers to print signs.
But yes, a country is large and say there are still thousands of these people - far to many for one person to personally vouch for... so? Who's to say you need giant monolithic parties? All we've proven so far is that they're so big you couldn't possibly all be on the same page.
What you should get out of this is that the excuse "it's too big to check" isn't good enough. Simply because a convenient solution doesn't present itself isn't a good reason for defending something obviously defective.
But you can't honestly tell me you're so paranoid about this that you now vote with gloves on because they might trace the fingerprints on the ballot?
In which election?
But no, that's crazy. To worry about your government you'd need to be in a nation of jack-booted thugs who use regularly use internationally decried methods of torture everywhere from POW camps (in undeclared wars against vaguely described groups of people) to suburban police stations. Further, there'd have to be ongoing precedent of unreasonably broad laws being enacted, courts routinely punishing people unreasonably, evidence going missing, photographers being beaten and arrested for taking pictures in public, etc.
Because yeah, unless people thought they were living in some hellhole where the police could just do whatever they wanted and the government would back them, they wouldn't have any reason to fear whatever party won. After all, we're all good sports about politics.
Seriously though, if your nation didn't call the recent Iranian elections fraudulent and loudly refuse to acknowledge the occupying thugs as a government you have a lot to worry about.
But the problem is always the same: the cheater won and is now in charge.
Bush hadn't won, and wasn't in charge. But it's easier to give a party of professional crybabies special treatment instead of recounting fucking ballots.
A recount is never the wrong thing to do - you'll know the liars by who refuses the recount. But instead we listen to their lawyering instead of just threatening to shoot (yes, death penalty - applied by the courts, a mob, or a revolutionary army - appearance of correctness is VERY important here) them until they agree to a recount.
You promote the death penalty in a situation where it is even more despicable then usual, especially since anyone can see the clear option to cheat by getting your opponent eliminated. Each election has some irregularities (and I assume most are not sanctioned by the candidates themselves) so it would be far too easy to cheat for the other guy while collecting 'evidence'.
Then don't call yourself leader of so many people you can't watch them. These giant parties are a symptom of the problem, not something we need to try to preserve.
People like you astound me - you see a problem with an idea and can't imagine any way around it so you act like it's ruined. If they had to be careful who they vouched for they might not say just anything.
Besides, all a politician would have to do for safety is implement procedures to catch the cheaters - if they discovered the problem and fixed it you wouldn't blame it on them. But the leaders who never bother looking for problems - they are the problem...
It's the exact same issue as military torture in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Everyone knows bad apples sneak in to any organization, but the US government (first under Bush, now identically under Obama) tries to white-wash and ignore as much as possible before blaming the lowest-ranking people possible. What could have been an explainable one-off accident instead becomes official government policy.
This will only change when it's not in their best interests to look away - such as when they get hung for doing so. You join the army (even involuntarily) and they reserve the right to enact military justice on you - if you run for office should people not have similar rights and responsibilities?
I think the only way to guarantee a cheater free process is by completely making every step of the process transparent.
Yeah, and the current government buys voting machines from the proven fraudsters at Diebold.
[E Voting]... The results as well as the timeline of the votes is made public from the start, when the voting closes the results are known *immediately*.
What the hell does this have to do with anything? The election is months early for a reason. It's baffling how this is supposedly important.
[current voting systems]... we have no idea how often these are already exploited.
Actually, yes, we do. For one, the systems can only be exploited in known ways. Votes cast in Chicago don't overwrite ones for San Francisco. One box can't contain billions of ballots. To put votes in a box, someone must touch it. To verify it's empty it can be disassembled (including destructively tested very cheaply), weighed, etc. To train someone to find an improperly stuffed ballot box you take anyone who can recognize a non-empty box - to prevent pre-loaded cards full of votes even an e-security expert at each machine couldn't do anything.
You'll keep being lied to as long as you buy it. When you let people tell you that instant results are important they conveniently hide the issue of accurate and provable results. When they complain they've got too many people to watch carefully you need to demand they change it, not merely use it as an ongoing excuse for failure.
Why should you pretend to care about a system with EULAs? Seriously...
When a system has a way to hide a binding contract in a box who honestly expects the elections to return a useful result?
It's a national security violation to let to voters know what's in upcoming treaties, that's their way of saying we're slaves and they're just enacting whatever they feel like. The principles of democracy are long gone. Less than 100th of a percent of the people in the country want things like EULAs, ACTA, no recount in Florida/2000, etc.
Dunno about that, the bombing of Germany/Japan was pretty reasonable. That's why we tell Palestinians that stopping violence is (partly) their responsibility by refusing to be used as meat shields.
Rwanda wasn't reasonable because it was racial (many victims were actually unaligned) even if it was roughly motivated by attacking those supporting the troops fighting your allies... But that says nothing about the general case of taking the fight to the enemy instead of playing nice and letting their mercenaries kill you over there in the "field".
There's a real double-standard around it though. On one hand it's presented as perfectly reasonable to treat the funders of violence like the perpetrators of violence (terrorist supporters!), except that all tax payers would be war criminals after Abu Ghraib came to light and was just brushed away.
it is time to act like a real business, and not hide behind consumer protection rules (like it didn't say so on the box)
Ummm, that's not a consumer protection law, that's a fundamental of contracts. It's your duty to know what you're getting, but misrepresentation is fraud. If there's something that needed to be said on the box it needs to be said in a non-implied contract too.
I don't see how you can say that is any different than a commercial movie producer buying a Canon camera from Best Buy.
One's a big company that can be notified and expected to understand this, the other is MILLIONS of individual consumers. If you think Slashdotters don't know copyright from patent from Matlock, what do you think the average person knows? Are they reasonably going to be able to know where the line is, between a real-estate agent taking property photos, an owner doing the same, a person taking photos for a charity, a user putting personal photos on a company's blog, etc...
There's no possible way to expect the camera companies to communicate this to the users and the users to comply.
If you sell 1000 copies, you owe them a max of $20.
Clearly $20 more than they deserve. Their work is done, they provided a product to a manufacturer, they need not be paid any further.
It isn't a perfect analogy but when the products are similar enough that either a commercial group or individual could use it and one clearly gets more use from the same product should they both be charged the same?
That's the wrong question, the right one is "should society foot the bill just to make it easier for companies to arbitrarily segment their market?"
I don't see how a law preventing you from using your soccer-licensed van for commercial projects benefits me and I see a million ways it directly hurts me. It's clearly legal, but it should not be.
Ideally we'd just practice jury nullification on patent cases - all of them. It's just a ridiculous concept.
the manufacturer may not even be aware of the patent on process X
That's the issue. Patents were justified on the theory that they'd benefit society. If you don't know of a patent when you create something you can't be helped by it.
Patent law can't be fixed, it's fundamentally broken. If we really want what it's for (not what it currently allows of course) we should just give tax-funded payouts to reward useful state-of-the-art advancing disclosures.. Pay out well after the fact so that we know how useful whatever the tech has been. That way we'd reward the people who actually make things possible - the grad-student who wrote the breakthrough paper, not the lawyer who wrote the "... on a computer network" patent application.
If the license agreement is between Canon and me, and I violate that agreement, how does MPEG-LA have any standing to negotiate with me for fees?
The gotcha is that it's a patent issue, not a EULA/copyright one - the patent laws just allow that. The camera company paid a lesser fee on the "assumption" that nobody would use the cameras for commercial use.
If you have a case, it's with the camera company for selling a product that doesn't do what you'd reasonably expect it to do. If your infringing use if a reasonable one they should have warned you more visibly that wouldn't be able to use the camera fully before you bought it.
That said, the law is just plain wrong. Government monopoly grants should have ended with the Hudson's Bay Company.
I also think we need a national law spelling out what software publishers may not put in a EULA.
We have them. They say you didn't know about the terms (of the EULA) when you bought the product so they can't be binding. Of course some people (even judges - wtf?!) don't get this.
One thing we need is a law making it a crime to knowingly represent something as a contract, or valid legal advice, when it is not. Making me click "I Accept" when it is clear that I would not accept, under false pretenses and duress, is clearly fraud.
If you stole a $20 item and were jailed for six months you'd suffer hugely, perhaps into bankruptcy. I suggest we implement similar punishments for companies - either staggeringly large fines that would hit them the same as a fraud/theft sentence would hit you, or perhaps just a "jail term" where the company's assets were frozen and it shuttered for a period. Something to make breaking the law unprofitable.
You can't see nuance, can you? You seem to think that if the cops are bad, this guy must be good?
What I can't see is any reason to bring it up, even if you were right.
I was merely pointing out a fact.
Picking a piece with corn out of your ass?
This guy was wandering around drunkenly hitting foam golf balls at people who they then heckled.
FAIL. He was with a group, some members of which did something resembling that at least once.
You claim they hit multiple balls at multiple people, all of whom were mocked. Instead the article says one guy hit one ball into one person, who felt heckled.
Nobody denies that.
Yeah, EVERYONE denies that. The "victim", the cops, the guy who really did it, etc.
Seriously, though, why so angry?
Stupid little lying fucker trying to shit-disturb. I can't imagine why everyone hates you./sarcasm
If you're a religious believer, you've already established yourself as partially insane
That's not bigoted. It's fact.
Religion is commonly accepted as belief in things without proof, having faith. Believing in something without proof is insane.
Intolerance would be to say these insane people can't have ice cream with everyone else, because even insane people like sweets and it wouldn't hurt anyone if they did have some. However it wouldn't be intolerance to ignore their opinion on complex matters because they've proven themselves to be incapable of rational thought or honesty.
I'm attacking someone who was drunkenly wandering around [...]
No you fucking imbecile, you're attacking someone you're desperately claiming was drunk and misbehaving, despite the article as much as saying otherwise.
Why do you care that I point this fact[CITATION NEEDED] out, anyhow?
It's not facts that come out of there. We object to what you spray because it smells and has no value.
I'm not defending the cops,
Yes you are.
When you say "she was dressed provocatively" you implicitly say "and thus the rape was justified" which defends the rapist.
[...] pertinent fact [...]
That word seems ridiculous coming from you.
doing one good thing doesn't mean that everything you do is good.
Now who's having some other conversation? Who said it did?
Do you do mental calisthenics to get this smart, like pounding a half-liter of rubbing-alcohol before each post?
You are so fucking dumb I expect your head to implode.
They don't need your name to arrest you. Had they actually had a reasonable suspicion that he had broken a law they could have arrested him immediately.
The only thing they didn't need was his name.
I heard some good advice recently, tell me what you think: Try a little nuance in your thinking
I think it's a good idea, but you don't seem to...
not everything is black and white, the hero fighting the villain. Sometimes it's just two villains fighting.
After all there's ZERO evidence that this guy is even a jerk, let alone that he did anything wrong, and you're trying as hard as Glen Beck to paint him as the problem.
There's a rape victim. Go not-so-subtly blame her clothing, or judgment. Quickly, for great justice!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think patents fit on the socialism to capitalism axis, they're really dictatorial. The government declares absolute ownership of something and parcels it out to cronies.
Capitalism is how we trade those rights, but patents would still exist even if they were just given out to nobility for arbitrary reasons.
If there's one word for patents, it's censorship.
so if a video's been ripped, they know which copy it was.
Yeah. Expect the large-scale commercial pirates to use that as a weapon.
A video stolen in a B&E can be used to direct the wrath of the MPAA on an innocent target while the criminals are totally undeterred.
Eventually buying a video (and risking being incorrectly fingered for releasing it) will be scarier than downloading and in yet another way the pirated version will be better than the "legit" one.
Chuckle. You couldn't make them be this dumb if you tried.
You know, I thought the same thing at that point but kept watching.
You were right.
Get this, *snicker*, they organized the "horse clans" and the "dragon clans" for one last big fight and charging of machine guns, and they won.
Actually, I'd believe it. Or, at least that it's true enough enough of the time to cause a problem.
One, you probably are a super-genius. Relatively speaking. In your area. If you're interested in your work you're in the top 1% at least. If you've got moderately wide training so that you use the right tools instead of beating what you know into the wrong hole you're far ahead of the game.
But it's not just the individual techs. There's easily at least one trained network admin for each ISP, and many work there, but it's amazing how many ways a company can find to sabotage its experts and their best efforts.
One ISP I'm familiar with had problems with spam, or rather, with saying no to money. They had an anti-spam department (one guy, but still enough if they let him work) and they claimed to be trying to stop it but whenever he'd identify a spammer (new customer, thousands of identical spamming outgoing emails...) and cut them off their regional partner would call up bitchy about a lost customer, they'd override the anti-spam dept and turn the account on, and then when the entire organization ended up blacklisted profess ignorance.
So yeah, huge multinational organization screwing things up worse than you can imagine, on a daily basis. Worse, over a $25/month subscriber account.
I've been overridden on purchasing decisions before for trivial amounts and spent more in time directly fixing the shortcoming. For instance, I bought two testing machines and speced $80 nvidia cards (back in ~2000 when they just worked and ATI just didn't), has this changed in favor of crappy $50 ATI cards (not even a good but older like the ones I specced, but the cheapest card that existed just to make crap PCs possible.) Together that saved the company $60 or so, most of which the manager wasted chewing me out for specing gaming cards for testing machines (blah, blah, blah, nvidia=games, blah, blah) and wasted literally THOUSANDS of dollars in fighting with those. (My job involved repeatedly installing various version of Windows (from scratch, couldn't just ghost/dd this part of it) and the ATI cards took more time, reboots, and caused more crashes, all of which had to be investigated to make sure they weren't caused by our product.)
Pft, not. One thing that obviously deserves the death penalty, if anything does, is knowingly demanding the death penalty for an innocent person. Technically it's not murder yet I don't think you'd be scum by arguing that this false accuser should face the same fate their victim did.
But be honest, the problem with the death penalty isn't the death - you probably aren't half as bugged by that as you'd want to appear. The problem is that the government hands it out years later, often(usually?) wrongly, and never (by then) necessarily.
If taken the other way being against the death penalty would make you against self defense. Obviously that's silly...
Put it another way - has any policeman been convicted of corruption in your city?
Great example actually, because while a few must here and there, largely, no. Not even of blatant murder when caught on camera. Nor were their supervisors charged with ANYTHING, let alone convicted for confiscating video evidence and trying to deny its existence. In fact, in a recent incident the police department is arguing that because its funding is federal, lower levels of government aren't even allowed to investigate or censure it.
It's a perfect example of an organization rotten to the top, even if only one in a thousand is technically "dirty" because we refuse to deal with it effectively. Perhaps things would be different if the people at the top were liable of triple-punishment for everything they participated in covering up, but we can't even enforce the trivial rules we do have.
I join your party under a false name, cheat blatantly and run like hell [...] Your leader gets a bullet in the head.
Yeah, absolutely. Why did he vouch for you?
India has a population over a billion. The major parties will have hundreds of thousands of low-level workers.
Well, that's conflating the party members themselves and perhaps their staff with a volunteer who offers to print signs.
But yes, a country is large and say there are still thousands of these people - far to many for one person to personally vouch for... so? Who's to say you need giant monolithic parties? All we've proven so far is that they're so big you couldn't possibly all be on the same page.
What you should get out of this is that the excuse "it's too big to check" isn't good enough. Simply because a convenient solution doesn't present itself isn't a good reason for defending something obviously defective.
But you can't honestly tell me you're so paranoid about this that you now vote with gloves on because they might trace the fingerprints on the ballot?
In which election?
But no, that's crazy. To worry about your government you'd need to be in a nation of jack-booted thugs who use regularly use internationally decried methods of torture everywhere from POW camps (in undeclared wars against vaguely described groups of people) to suburban police stations. Further, there'd have to be ongoing precedent of unreasonably broad laws being enacted, courts routinely punishing people unreasonably, evidence going missing, photographers being beaten and arrested for taking pictures in public, etc.
Because yeah, unless people thought they were living in some hellhole where the police could just do whatever they wanted and the government would back them, they wouldn't have any reason to fear whatever party won. After all, we're all good sports about politics.
Seriously though, if your nation didn't call the recent Iranian elections fraudulent and loudly refuse to acknowledge the occupying thugs as a government you have a lot to worry about.
But the problem is always the same: the cheater won and is now in charge.
Bush hadn't won, and wasn't in charge. But it's easier to give a party of professional crybabies special treatment instead of recounting fucking ballots.
A recount is never the wrong thing to do - you'll know the liars by who refuses the recount. But instead we listen to their lawyering instead of just threatening to shoot (yes, death penalty - applied by the courts, a mob, or a revolutionary army - appearance of correctness is VERY important here) them until they agree to a recount.
You promote the death penalty in a situation where it is even more despicable then usual, especially since anyone can see the clear option to cheat by getting your opponent eliminated. Each election has some irregularities (and I assume most are not sanctioned by the candidates themselves) so it would be far too easy to cheat for the other guy while collecting 'evidence'.
Then don't call yourself leader of so many people you can't watch them. These giant parties are a symptom of the problem, not something we need to try to preserve.
People like you astound me - you see a problem with an idea and can't imagine any way around it so you act like it's ruined. If they had to be careful who they vouched for they might not say just anything.
Besides, all a politician would have to do for safety is implement procedures to catch the cheaters - if they discovered the problem and fixed it you wouldn't blame it on them. But the leaders who never bother looking for problems - they are the problem...
It's the exact same issue as military torture in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Everyone knows bad apples sneak in to any organization, but the US government (first under Bush, now identically under Obama) tries to white-wash and ignore as much as possible before blaming the lowest-ranking people possible. What could have been an explainable one-off accident instead becomes official government policy.
This will only change when it's not in their best interests to look away - such as when they get hung for doing so. You join the army (even involuntarily) and they reserve the right to enact military justice on you - if you run for office should people not have similar rights and responsibilities?
I think the only way to guarantee a cheater free process is by completely making every step of the process transparent.
Yeah, and the current government buys voting machines from the proven fraudsters at Diebold.
[E Voting] ... The results as well as the timeline of the votes is made public from the start, when the voting closes the results are known *immediately*.
What the hell does this have to do with anything? The election is months early for a reason. It's baffling how this is supposedly important.
[current voting systems] ... we have no idea how often these are already exploited.
Actually, yes, we do. For one, the systems can only be exploited in known ways. Votes cast in Chicago don't overwrite ones for San Francisco. One box can't contain billions of ballots. To put votes in a box, someone must touch it. To verify it's empty it can be disassembled (including destructively tested very cheaply), weighed, etc. To train someone to find an improperly stuffed ballot box you take anyone who can recognize a non-empty box - to prevent pre-loaded cards full of votes even an e-security expert at each machine couldn't do anything.
You'll keep being lied to as long as you buy it. When you let people tell you that instant results are important they conveniently hide the issue of accurate and provable results. When they complain they've got too many people to watch carefully you need to demand they change it, not merely use it as an ongoing excuse for failure.
Why should you pretend to care about a system with EULAs? Seriously...
When a system has a way to hide a binding contract in a box who honestly expects the elections to return a useful result?
It's a national security violation to let to voters know what's in upcoming treaties, that's their way of saying we're slaves and they're just enacting whatever they feel like. The principles of democracy are long gone. Less than 100th of a percent of the people in the country want things like EULAs, ACTA, no recount in Florida/2000, etc.
Dunno about that, the bombing of Germany/Japan was pretty reasonable. That's why we tell Palestinians that stopping violence is (partly) their responsibility by refusing to be used as meat shields.
Rwanda wasn't reasonable because it was racial (many victims were actually unaligned) even if it was roughly motivated by attacking those supporting the troops fighting your allies... But that says nothing about the general case of taking the fight to the enemy instead of playing nice and letting their mercenaries kill you over there in the "field".
There's a real double-standard around it though. On one hand it's presented as perfectly reasonable to treat the funders of violence like the perpetrators of violence (terrorist supporters!), except that all tax payers would be war criminals after Abu Ghraib came to light and was just brushed away.
I think the real problem here is that you didn't spend the entire $100,000 on hookers and blow.
Fixed that for you.
I mean, what do you really want, a mere down-payment on an average overpriced plywood crapshack or memories of the craziest three months of your life?
it is time to act like a real business, and not hide behind consumer protection rules (like it didn't say so on the box)
Ummm, that's not a consumer protection law, that's a fundamental of contracts. It's your duty to know what you're getting, but misrepresentation is fraud. If there's something that needed to be said on the box it needs to be said in a non-implied contract too.
I don't see how you can say that is any different than a commercial movie producer buying a Canon camera from Best Buy.
One's a big company that can be notified and expected to understand this, the other is MILLIONS of individual consumers. If you think Slashdotters don't know copyright from patent from Matlock, what do you think the average person knows? Are they reasonably going to be able to know where the line is, between a real-estate agent taking property photos, an owner doing the same, a person taking photos for a charity, a user putting personal photos on a company's blog, etc...
There's no possible way to expect the camera companies to communicate this to the users and the users to comply.
If you sell 1000 copies, you owe them a max of $20.
Clearly $20 more than they deserve. Their work is done, they provided a product to a manufacturer, they need not be paid any further.
The law is clear, yes, but also clearly broken.
It isn't a perfect analogy but when the products are similar enough that either a commercial group or individual could use it and one clearly gets more use from the same product should they both be charged the same?
That's the wrong question, the right one is "should society foot the bill just to make it easier for companies to arbitrarily segment their market?"
I don't see how a law preventing you from using your soccer-licensed van for commercial projects benefits me and I see a million ways it directly hurts me. It's clearly legal, but it should not be.
Ideally we'd just practice jury nullification on patent cases - all of them. It's just a ridiculous concept.
Now here is where it gets nasty:
I think it got nasty earlier, right here:
the manufacturer may not even be aware of the patent on process X
That's the issue. Patents were justified on the theory that they'd benefit society. If you don't know of a patent when you create something you can't be helped by it.
Patent law can't be fixed, it's fundamentally broken. If we really want what it's for (not what it currently allows of course) we should just give tax-funded payouts to reward useful state-of-the-art advancing disclosures.. Pay out well after the fact so that we know how useful whatever the tech has been. That way we'd reward the people who actually make things possible - the grad-student who wrote the breakthrough paper, not the lawyer who wrote the "... on a computer network" patent application.
If the license agreement is between Canon and me, and I violate that agreement, how does MPEG-LA have any standing to negotiate with me for fees?
The gotcha is that it's a patent issue, not a EULA/copyright one - the patent laws just allow that. The camera company paid a lesser fee on the "assumption" that nobody would use the cameras for commercial use.
If you have a case, it's with the camera company for selling a product that doesn't do what you'd reasonably expect it to do. If your infringing use if a reasonable one they should have warned you more visibly that wouldn't be able to use the camera fully before you bought it.
That said, the law is just plain wrong. Government monopoly grants should have ended with the Hudson's Bay Company.
I also think we need a national law spelling out what software publishers may not put in a EULA.
We have them. They say you didn't know about the terms (of the EULA) when you bought the product so they can't be binding. Of course some people (even judges - wtf?!) don't get this.
One thing we need is a law making it a crime to knowingly represent something as a contract, or valid legal advice, when it is not. Making me click "I Accept" when it is clear that I would not accept, under false pretenses and duress, is clearly fraud.
If you stole a $20 item and were jailed for six months you'd suffer hugely, perhaps into bankruptcy. I suggest we implement similar punishments for companies - either staggeringly large fines that would hit them the same as a fraud/theft sentence would hit you, or perhaps just a "jail term" where the company's assets were frozen and it shuttered for a period. Something to make breaking the law unprofitable.
Right.
You can't see nuance, can you? You seem to think that if the cops are bad, this guy must be good?
What I can't see is any reason to bring it up, even if you were right.
I was merely pointing out a fact.
Picking a piece with corn out of your ass?
This guy was wandering around drunkenly hitting foam golf balls at people who they then heckled.
FAIL. He was with a group, some members of which did something resembling that at least once.
You claim they hit multiple balls at multiple people, all of whom were mocked. Instead the article says one guy hit one ball into one person, who felt heckled.
Nobody denies that.
Yeah, EVERYONE denies that. The "victim", the cops, the guy who really did it, etc.
Seriously, though, why so angry?
Stupid little lying fucker trying to shit-disturb. I can't imagine why everyone hates you. /sarcasm
Where you make up lies about the victim of police abuse.
from his bad behavior.
What bad behavior? The same shit you're making up? Everyone else read the article and knows this guy was totally innocent.
I'm incapable?!? I absolutely and completely separated them.
No, you absolutely and completely fabricated lies and conflated them with the article.
No no, you forgot to read anything...
If you're a religious believer, you've already established yourself as partially insane
That's not bigoted. It's fact.
Religion is commonly accepted as belief in things without proof, having faith. Believing in something without proof is insane.
Intolerance would be to say these insane people can't have ice cream with everyone else, because even insane people like sweets and it wouldn't hurt anyone if they did have some. However it wouldn't be intolerance to ignore their opinion on complex matters because they've proven themselves to be incapable of rational thought or honesty.
I'm attacking someone who was drunkenly wandering around [...]
No you fucking imbecile, you're attacking someone you're desperately claiming was drunk and misbehaving, despite the article as much as saying otherwise.
Why do you care that I point this fact[CITATION NEEDED] out, anyhow?
It's not facts that come out of there. We object to what you spray because it smells and has no value.
I'm not defending the cops,
Yes you are.
When you say "she was dressed provocatively" you implicitly say "and thus the rape was justified" which defends the rapist.
[...] pertinent fact [...]
That word seems ridiculous coming from you.
doing one good thing doesn't mean that everything you do is good.
Now who's having some other conversation? Who said it did?
Do you do mental calisthenics to get this smart, like pounding a half-liter of rubbing-alcohol before each post?
The constitution guarantees him the right to pursue personal happiness. Not everything is about you.
Even if he weren't helping anyone else, and I guarantee he is, he'd still be in the right.
but who knows
Somehow you do.
Or, you know nothing and can't tell the difference.
You are so fucking dumb I expect your head to implode.
They don't need your name to arrest you. Had they actually had a reasonable suspicion that he had broken a law they could have arrested him immediately.
The only thing they didn't need was his name.
I heard some good advice recently, tell me what you think: Try a little nuance in your thinking
I think it's a good idea, but you don't seem to...
not everything is black and white, the hero fighting the villain. Sometimes it's just two villains fighting.
After all there's ZERO evidence that this guy is even a jerk, let alone that he did anything wrong, and you're trying as hard as Glen Beck to paint him as the problem.
There's a rape victim. Go not-so-subtly blame her clothing, or judgment. Quickly, for great justice!