That statement is unsupportable and follows a tactic I've seen too many times to avoid rational discussion of various issues.
No, it's based upon repeated observations.
You start with the assumption that the only difference between men and women is the sexual organs.
No, I don't. You appear to trying to find reasons to disagree with my comment rather than actually addressing the points made. This is a tactic I see all to many times to avoid rational discussion of various issues. Read my comment in context. It doesn't matter if it's an organal difference or a brain shape difference or anything else. The sheer number of differences between different women, and differences between different men, make such studies irrelevent for the most part.
Despite what you choose to believe, there are actual differences in the makeup of the brains of the typical male versus that of the typical female. I'm sure you'll twist that statement to mean "men are better than women", but that's of course not what I am saying.
I'm sure there are differences, but, as I made perfectly clear in my comment, who gives a fuck? The entire point is that there are very few sets of circumstances in which it matters whether a larger number of men than women are good at a particular thing. I made that point clear, repeatedly, by example.
You, on the other hand, are trying to repeat the original argument in the hope that someone will find it relevent. It's a classic "trying to pull the wool over the eyes" trick.
I don't care about your argument. I'm not going to discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender. I'm not going to accept discrimination on the basis of your argument. Your argument is not an acceptable reason to discriminate. The fact that more of one group is better at something than another doesn't not mean that qualified people only exist in one group.
You have only reached the conclusion because you want to believe there is still rampant discrimination against women. If you accept that baseless statement as fact then anytime someone makes an observation regarding the differences between the sexes you can assume that he is merely trying discriminate against women thereby supporting your out of date belief that rampant discrimination against women still exists.
I made my statement because of what I've seen. Your comment is baseless. I'm not going to name names, but people I know in senior positions in particular companies have outright told me and friends they don't intend to employ women in particular positions or men in others because of perceived skill differences. Specific people. People I'd name if (a) you were likely to have heard of them and (b) I wouldn't get in a whole heap of trouble for doing so.
And the root of those perceptions are idiotic inferences made from trying to work out whether certain group splits have statistical skillset splits too.
I'm happy for you that you believe discrimination doesn't exist, as it probably, hopefully, despite your other comments, means you're not one of those who do. But prepare yourself for a rude awakening if you think that everyone thinks like you do.
Why? Is sociology an example of people coming up with arbitrary distinctions between groups of people in order to use ultimately harmful arguments to bolster discrimination?
I thought it was an academic discipline. But I'm prepared to admit I may be wrong.
If it is the case that men have some statistical edge in mathematical aptitude, then perhaps we should be striving not for a 50/50 ratio in academic departments but rather for 65/35 or some other number.
Or maybe quotas are a bad start to begin with. Maybe we should be looking at application rates, numbers of "qualified" people who apply, and then - within each group - whether the ratio of successful applications to qualified applications is about equal in those groups we're concerned about.
If, for example, there are 100 women who pass a particular set of tests (which are not, themselves, gender discriminatory) and 300 men, then you'd expect around one quarter of the successful applicants to be women, in a non-discriminatory environment. If the numbers differ wildly from that, say 1% of the successful candidates are women, or 50% of them are, then you have some kind of problem.
There's an argument for saying that this still doesn't solve the problem because there are external factors that might also be responsible for that 100:300 ratio to begin with (poor education standards at a school level, etc.) However, those issues need to be tackled at source, an institution (be it a university, business, etc) needs to work with what it has got.
I get uneasy about quotas. I've heard of cases where they've been implemented for the best of possible reasons with a long term view in mind (encouraging groups who believe they will never get a chance to see more successful likeminded members of those groups getting chances, that kind of thing), but - while like everything it may be useful in moderation - we need to get away from the idea of using these things by default to fix any discrimination problem.
There are historical reasons that people see such comments as "automatically sexist".
There's not just that. There's also, in my view, the utter absurdity of asking the question for the most part.
It's extremely rare there's any relevent reason to try to compare arbitrary groups of people (having a penis vs having breasts being arbitrary in the context of mathematics) in terms of skills. As a result, when people have done so, it's usually to back some agenda for which the argument, while it may or may not have some technical basis, is actually damaging.
In this case, for example, the argument will be used by people who do not like women, who do not want to employ women, and feel it's a convenient excuse to not consider them in recruitment. Yet, by doing so, it excludes that proportion of women who are mathematically talented.
A construction company might choose to discriminate against women because of the entirely true argument that the average woman is shorter and less strong than the average man. Yet while the argument is true, it, alone, is not enough to back up the discrimination. The average woman may be shorter and weaker than the average man, but that doesn't mean I don't know women that couldn't kick Danny DeVito's butt.
Discrimination on the basis of anything other than ability to do the job is a massive can of worms. Unfortunately, by and large, the vast majority of people who promote the "men are better than A", "women are better at B" discussions are those who want to back their preference for discriminatory behaviour. There are instances I can think of where this is not the case, but by far, they're a minority.
I can see why people'd be upset about the Harvard comments.
I can't speak for either of those two examples, but I can't be the only person who has stumbled across a website for some organization, spent ten minutes browsing it, and still been totally confused as to what it is they actually do.
Wikipedia can be nice because it gets to the point.
No, if you read my journal you'll see that it deteriorated from something close to the original to less than two hours of use in the space of about three months.
Dunno. I was looking at my journal and finally found when I had to. Essentially, the battery life had decayed to less than two hours of playing time after a little over a year of use. I used the device just about every working day, around four to six hours in general (I listen while I work.)
This isn't a geek thing, so I suspect a large proportion of "average users" also use their's every day, in much the same way as I used mine.
My guess is that a huge proportion of average users will need to replace their iPod battery within a year or two of buying it. My guess, too, is that most don't, they get a different player or try to get it repaired. A professional battery install is around $75-100 depending on who you go to.
That's a little absurd.
This kind of thing is exactly why infrastructure companies should play little or no part in email, beyond setting up MX records. Let users themselves decide how they want to manage email.
Back when everyone was on dial-up and had dynamic IP addresses, there were legitimate grounds for hosting a central email server. However, this shouldn't be necessary for DSL, except that most ISPs have policies outlawing the running of SMTP servers despite the fact that users who do so are using less of their resources and can control email the way they choose.
What we need is to encourage, not discourage, people from doing this. Encourage the $100 router/gateway device manufacturers to include little incoming SMTP and POP/IMAP servers in their devices. Remove the restrictions in AUPs that prevent this kind of thing. Set up MX records so that customer.isp.net's email is routed to them. With DSL being always-on, recognize it with the technology and scrap dynamic IP.
These types of steps will make a dramatic difference in use of the 'net:
Unsecured SMTP servers that are enabled by default and relay by default will become a thing of the past because ordinary users will be installing actual, useful software for the same port.
Fighting spam will become easier. The techniques used by the typical own-domain user - creating special addresses for entities to contact you that can be closed down if that entity ever passes on that address - will become common, normal, and easy. Unless you've used such a system, you have no idea how effective it is.
Spammers will suddenly have to send every email one time per recipient, rather than in batches as they do today. The resources required by the average spammer will increase dramatically with little gain to them. Regular commercial third-party spamming will, for the most part, die off.
With static IP, users will gain some accountability. Net abusers can simply be firewalled off from their victims.
The load on ISP servers will be dramatically reduced. The reduction in equipment and maintenance should translate into cost savings.
Regular IMAP servers will still be maintained by ISPs for dial-up users, but ISPs that make dumb decisions would no longer be in a position to cripple end users in quite the way described here.
I changed the battery on my (second generation - eg 10G, original form factor) iPod and it took several tries and finally took around 20 minutes to do with my hands feeling like they'd been put in a meat grinder afterwards. Removing the cover requires an understanding of what has to be done that's far from intuitive. Push on the middle and insert tool? WTF?
I'm sorry, but once I did it myself I started to agree with the anti-Apple battery-trolls to a certain extent. It isn't something an average person can be reasonably expected to do. The design of the iPod, in this regard, is seriously fucked up.
What is it about Verizon?
on
Verizon vs. Europe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Virtually every story I hear about Verizon involves them blocking this, censoring that, outlawing the other. They seem to be the biggest control freaks in the telecommunications industry, and I used to live in Britain and had to put up with British Telecom, so trust me, I don't mean that lightly.
Maybe it's time to turn "Verizon" into a verb. As in:
I can't get to this website, either it's down or the firewall admin's verizoned it.
Damn it, this music download shop is totally verizoned, I can't even burn these files to a CD!
If you're planning to get to West Palm Beach today you might want to take the turnpike, I hear they've verizoned half of I-95 due to construction.
BTW, just to remind people 'cos this comes up a lot. While Verizon and Verisign are both power-mad groups with some connection to communications, they're not the same company. Thank you.
Why should evolution be questioned more in schools than any other scientific theory?
It's one thing to encourage skepticism. That's good. Skepticism should be encouraged in every field. However, the religious nut jobs (no sarcasm, because that's what they are) are responsible for singling out evolution as if it, somehow, is less scientific than any other part of science.
It isn't any less scientific. It's wrong for the nut jobs to debase education in this way. It's even more wrong that they'd abuse public funds by forcing taxpayer funded schools to make these kinds of claims.
Anyway truth isn't an absolute defense. If I accuse someone of being a serial liar, I can be successfully sued for libel even if I point out that they've told their kid Father Christmas exists, that the Tooth Fairy exists, their spouse that they were just getting groceries when, in fact, they were out getting the spouse an anniversary present, etc.
I think the RI would dearly love to embrace the digital age but is facing a number of major issues.
The first is that a significant number of groups have gone out of their way to create software designed specifically to distribute files to millions of anonymous strangers and prevent any kind of accountability being served to anyone involved in the chain - those who rip the tracks and upload them initially cannot be found, the directories listing the files available increasingly are designed to be decentralized, every so-often people come up with ways to try to make those peering files a little more bullet proof legally.
All of this is being done because those P2P systems are designed, primarily, to facilitate piracy. If they weren't, given the type of content they're designed for and the lack of usefulness they have for other applications that'd require anonyminity, so much effort wouldn't be invested in these schemes to reduce accountability. Put it this way: if I put an MP3 online for people to download, why shouldn't I be tracable? If the copyright belongs to me, then why should I care? If the copyright doesn't, then why shouldn't I be caught?
The RI already has a distribution method for the consensual mass distribution of their music - it's called the world wide web. There are also a million other ways in which they can allow people to sample their music. By and large, these same methods are also available to independent artists. In general, these are not the schemes the RI is going after. The RI is going after P2P.
Why? Because P2P isn't simply a "free sample" system they can ignore. It's a substitute mechanism for delivering music produced by the RI, one that actively prevents the RI from recovering their investment in that music. While you may see it as a great way of sampling stuff so you know which CDs you can get, you can bet that the majority of users (in my experience) use it as a way of avoiding spending money on CDs. Like my cheap would-be sister-in-law who has several bookshelves of CDRs that she's quite happy to admit were obtained by downloading entire albums from Kazaa and burning to CD. Like my friends who use it to build a server in a certain communal spot (precise details omitted to avoid getting anyone I know fired) so that those friends can listen to music all day without anyone having to actually go out and buy CDs to put on the server.
The RI knows, ultimately, that you can sample music without getting it from Kazaa. Hell, I do all the time. Visit band's website. Download sample tracks. Maybe even download their music videos. Systems like iRate exist to allow you to try things you've never heard of. Salon gives its subscribers a bunch of new MP3s periodically. iTMS allows you to download a sample song regularly. There are hundreds of legal net radio stations.
And we'd probably have more systems if the fuckwit cheapskates who constantly invest so much effort in inventing systems to distribute copyrighted unauthorized music with as little legal risk as possible spent their time instead on systems that create a little bit of accountability so that the music on these networks is consensual and legal. Such systems would have the added benefit of not being the same old crap repeated a thousand times, but with new and non-mainstream artists actually far more prominant than they are now. Couple such a system with some way of "sharing" playlists, and you'd have a winner.
I think the RI is well aware of the digital age. They're also aware that some people are deliberately using it against them and the artists they fund. I'm not going to support everything they've done, but I will sympathize with them right now far more than I do 21 year olds who have only ever bought one CD, and that with the aim of ripping it and uploading it, and who are now facing a lawsuit.
They can force DePlume to hand over the identities of the people who leaked this information (assuming he has those identities) by court order. They don't have to bring a suit against DePlume, just a suit against the "John Does" and then subpeona DePlume for their identities. If he doesn't, and he has the information, he'd be in contempt of court.
Apple has taken this a little further and decided to sue DePlume directly. Whether he hands over the identities at this stage is immaterial, save for the fact that he can still be subpeona'd for the information on top of having to fight this lawsuit. This lawsuit doesn't go away unless one party wins it, Apple withdraws it, or DePlume negotiates a successful out of court settlement that Apple consents to.
Assuming by "RIAA" you mean "RI" eg Recording Industry (the RIAA is actually an organization, it represents companies in the recording industry), it's probably worth noting that the people that are being sued are being sued for not being customers. If they were obtaining their music by buying CDs instead of downloading it and then uploading the same stuff so other people can by-pass the "buying music" route too, then the RI wouldn't be suing a single person.
You know, if Slashdot is going to implement this dumb "2 minute rule", could they at least let us edit our misformatted messages in that time rather than force a delay of two minutes before we can post a correction?
Who certifies that your authentication is authentic? ICANN, Verisign, Network Solutions,.. Microsoft?
Depends. That's up to you. Back in the mid-nineties, there were various proposals and I think the major issue was the politics surrounding encryption (an indirect issue, but PGP was both an authentication system and encryption system) and the RSA patent more than disagreement on how it could work. PGP in particular used a pretty reasonable system that allowed you to create what boiled down to trusted networks. You'd certify your friends. Friends could certify each other. Get a key, see it's signed by people you know, and you can be pretty sure it's genuine.
It was a nice system but network and real politics really ensured it didn't take off. You had patents. You had paranoid government agencies enforcing export controls on encryption protocols. You had commercial enterprises making email clients who didn't want to enter that particular can of worms if they could get away with it.
The idea that the "anti-spam crowd" is a unified body is.. interesting. I'm sure that that being told that an idea was discussed years ago and rejected might be annoying, but have you really looked at the various trade-offs that were discussed then?
I think you're trying to find things to take issue with. Nobody ever suggested the anti-spam crowd is unified. If I were to say that only Dogs are particularly interested in peeing on lamp-posts, would you claim that this is unfair because you know a lot of dogs that do not do that kind of thing?
I also did explain the tradeoffs, in brief, in the whole accountable static IPs vs easy to administer and efficient with roaming dynamic IPs debate. (I could add paranoia over the supposed world wide shortage of IP addresses, but I don't think that was ever as big an issue as people maintained. If it had been, we'd be on IPv6 by now.)
SMTP is merely a transport system. Authentication, if wanted, was supposed to be part of the bodies of email messages according to whatever standard a user wanted.
SMTP's lack of sender authentication is a modern-day fetish of the anti-spam crowd, and that anti-spam crowd only wants it because back when ISPs were deciding between giving users dedicated IP addresses or dynamically providing them, a debate that raged in the mid-nineties, they ended up going for the relatively anonymous dynamic IP addresses for the most part, which meant it became impossible to track email back to its original sender. Everything we've seen since with the explosion in spam and the more and more extreme methods of dealing with it really goes back to the fact that we no longer can associate an abusive user with an IP address.
SMTP was designed at a time when the entire internet was peer to peer. In the process of turning it into a consumer product, many decisions have been made that while understandable (dynamic IP was seen as easier to maintain, roaming became seamless and efficient) nonetheless sat uneasily with how the Internet had been built thus far.
a. Robbery committed at sea.
b. A similar act of robbery, as the hijacking of an airplane.
The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy.
The operation of an unlicensed, illegal radio or television station
I know that the freeloaders hate any word with negative connotations being used to describe what they do, but the word "piracy" has had this definition for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
You, on the other hand, are trying to repeat the original argument in the hope that someone will find it relevent. It's a classic "trying to pull the wool over the eyes" trick.
I don't care about your argument. I'm not going to discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender. I'm not going to accept discrimination on the basis of your argument. Your argument is not an acceptable reason to discriminate. The fact that more of one group is better at something than another doesn't not mean that qualified people only exist in one group.
I made my statement because of what I've seen. Your comment is baseless. I'm not going to name names, but people I know in senior positions in particular companies have outright told me and friends they don't intend to employ women in particular positions or men in others because of perceived skill differences. Specific people. People I'd name if (a) you were likely to have heard of them and (b) I wouldn't get in a whole heap of trouble for doing so.And the root of those perceptions are idiotic inferences made from trying to work out whether certain group splits have statistical skillset splits too.
I'm happy for you that you believe discrimination doesn't exist, as it probably, hopefully, despite your other comments, means you're not one of those who do. But prepare yourself for a rude awakening if you think that everyone thinks like you do.
I thought it was an academic discipline. But I'm prepared to admit I may be wrong.
If, for example, there are 100 women who pass a particular set of tests (which are not, themselves, gender discriminatory) and 300 men, then you'd expect around one quarter of the successful applicants to be women, in a non-discriminatory environment. If the numbers differ wildly from that, say 1% of the successful candidates are women, or 50% of them are, then you have some kind of problem.
There's an argument for saying that this still doesn't solve the problem because there are external factors that might also be responsible for that 100:300 ratio to begin with (poor education standards at a school level, etc.) However, those issues need to be tackled at source, an institution (be it a university, business, etc) needs to work with what it has got.
I get uneasy about quotas. I've heard of cases where they've been implemented for the best of possible reasons with a long term view in mind (encouraging groups who believe they will never get a chance to see more successful likeminded members of those groups getting chances, that kind of thing), but - while like everything it may be useful in moderation - we need to get away from the idea of using these things by default to fix any discrimination problem.
It's extremely rare there's any relevent reason to try to compare arbitrary groups of people (having a penis vs having breasts being arbitrary in the context of mathematics) in terms of skills. As a result, when people have done so, it's usually to back some agenda for which the argument, while it may or may not have some technical basis, is actually damaging.
In this case, for example, the argument will be used by people who do not like women, who do not want to employ women, and feel it's a convenient excuse to not consider them in recruitment. Yet, by doing so, it excludes that proportion of women who are mathematically talented.
A construction company might choose to discriminate against women because of the entirely true argument that the average woman is shorter and less strong than the average man. Yet while the argument is true, it, alone, is not enough to back up the discrimination. The average woman may be shorter and weaker than the average man, but that doesn't mean I don't know women that couldn't kick Danny DeVito's butt.
Discrimination on the basis of anything other than ability to do the job is a massive can of worms. Unfortunately, by and large, the vast majority of people who promote the "men are better than A", "women are better at B" discussions are those who want to back their preference for discriminatory behaviour. There are instances I can think of where this is not the case, but by far, they're a minority.
I can see why people'd be upset about the Harvard comments.
Wikipedia can be nice because it gets to the point.
Electric razors and cordless phones do not cost $300-600.
Batteries do not die linearly.
What's your problem anyway? Why the abuse?
This isn't a geek thing, so I suspect a large proportion of "average users" also use their's every day, in much the same way as I used mine.
My guess is that a huge proportion of average users will need to replace their iPod battery within a year or two of buying it. My guess, too, is that most don't, they get a different player or try to get it repaired. A professional battery install is around $75-100 depending on who you go to. That's a little absurd.
Back when everyone was on dial-up and had dynamic IP addresses, there were legitimate grounds for hosting a central email server. However, this shouldn't be necessary for DSL, except that most ISPs have policies outlawing the running of SMTP servers despite the fact that users who do so are using less of their resources and can control email the way they choose.
What we need is to encourage, not discourage, people from doing this. Encourage the $100 router/gateway device manufacturers to include little incoming SMTP and POP/IMAP servers in their devices. Remove the restrictions in AUPs that prevent this kind of thing. Set up MX records so that customer.isp.net's email is routed to them. With DSL being always-on, recognize it with the technology and scrap dynamic IP.
These types of steps will make a dramatic difference in use of the 'net:
- Unsecured SMTP servers that are enabled by default and relay by default will become a thing of the past because ordinary users will be installing actual, useful software for the same port.
- Fighting spam will become easier. The techniques used by the typical own-domain user - creating special addresses for entities to contact you that can be closed down if that entity ever passes on that address - will become common, normal, and easy. Unless you've used such a system, you have no idea how effective it is.
- Spammers will suddenly have to send every email one time per recipient, rather than in batches as they do today. The resources required by the average spammer will increase dramatically with little gain to them. Regular commercial third-party spamming will, for the most part, die off.
- With static IP, users will gain some accountability. Net abusers can simply be firewalled off from their victims.
- The load on ISP servers will be dramatically reduced. The reduction in equipment and maintenance should translate into cost savings.
Regular IMAP servers will still be maintained by ISPs for dial-up users, but ISPs that make dumb decisions would no longer be in a position to cripple end users in quite the way described here.I'm sorry, but once I did it myself I started to agree with the anti-Apple battery-trolls to a certain extent. It isn't something an average person can be reasonably expected to do. The design of the iPod, in this regard, is seriously fucked up.
Maybe it's time to turn "Verizon" into a verb. As in:
BTW, just to remind people 'cos this comes up a lot. While Verizon and Verisign are both power-mad groups with some connection to communications, they're not the same company. Thank you.My apologies, to you, the AC, and anyone else reading. I hope it didn't spoil the Vonnegut reference.
It's one thing to encourage skepticism. That's good. Skepticism should be encouraged in every field. However, the religious nut jobs (no sarcasm, because that's what they are) are responsible for singling out evolution as if it, somehow, is less scientific than any other part of science.
It isn't any less scientific. It's wrong for the nut jobs to debase education in this way. It's even more wrong that they'd abuse public funds by forcing taxpayer funded schools to make these kinds of claims.
Anyway truth isn't an absolute defense. If I accuse someone of being a serial liar, I can be successfully sued for libel even if I point out that they've told their kid Father Christmas exists, that the Tooth Fairy exists, their spouse that they were just getting groceries when, in fact, they were out getting the spouse an anniversary present, etc.
I'm not sure it's more expensive in terms of raw computing power unless this $450 "Headless Dell" comes with a real Radeon/nVidia level graphics card.
The first is that a significant number of groups have gone out of their way to create software designed specifically to distribute files to millions of anonymous strangers and prevent any kind of accountability being served to anyone involved in the chain - those who rip the tracks and upload them initially cannot be found, the directories listing the files available increasingly are designed to be decentralized, every so-often people come up with ways to try to make those peering files a little more bullet proof legally.
All of this is being done because those P2P systems are designed, primarily, to facilitate piracy. If they weren't, given the type of content they're designed for and the lack of usefulness they have for other applications that'd require anonyminity, so much effort wouldn't be invested in these schemes to reduce accountability. Put it this way: if I put an MP3 online for people to download, why shouldn't I be tracable? If the copyright belongs to me, then why should I care? If the copyright doesn't, then why shouldn't I be caught?
The RI already has a distribution method for the consensual mass distribution of their music - it's called the world wide web. There are also a million other ways in which they can allow people to sample their music. By and large, these same methods are also available to independent artists. In general, these are not the schemes the RI is going after. The RI is going after P2P.
Why? Because P2P isn't simply a "free sample" system they can ignore. It's a substitute mechanism for delivering music produced by the RI, one that actively prevents the RI from recovering their investment in that music. While you may see it as a great way of sampling stuff so you know which CDs you can get, you can bet that the majority of users (in my experience) use it as a way of avoiding spending money on CDs. Like my cheap would-be sister-in-law who has several bookshelves of CDRs that she's quite happy to admit were obtained by downloading entire albums from Kazaa and burning to CD. Like my friends who use it to build a server in a certain communal spot (precise details omitted to avoid getting anyone I know fired) so that those friends can listen to music all day without anyone having to actually go out and buy CDs to put on the server.
The RI knows, ultimately, that you can sample music without getting it from Kazaa. Hell, I do all the time. Visit band's website. Download sample tracks. Maybe even download their music videos. Systems like iRate exist to allow you to try things you've never heard of. Salon gives its subscribers a bunch of new MP3s periodically. iTMS allows you to download a sample song regularly. There are hundreds of legal net radio stations.
And we'd probably have more systems if the fuckwit cheapskates who constantly invest so much effort in inventing systems to distribute copyrighted unauthorized music with as little legal risk as possible spent their time instead on systems that create a little bit of accountability so that the music on these networks is consensual and legal. Such systems would have the added benefit of not being the same old crap repeated a thousand times, but with new and non-mainstream artists actually far more prominant than they are now. Couple such a system with some way of "sharing" playlists, and you'd have a winner.
I think the RI is well aware of the digital age. They're also aware that some people are deliberately using it against them and the artists they fund. I'm not going to support everything they've done, but I will sympathize with them right now far more than I do 21 year olds who have only ever bought one CD, and that with the aim of ripping it and uploading it, and who are now facing a lawsuit.
They can force DePlume to hand over the identities of the people who leaked this information (assuming he has those identities) by court order. They don't have to bring a suit against DePlume, just a suit against the "John Does" and then subpeona DePlume for their identities. If he doesn't, and he has the information, he'd be in contempt of court.
Apple has taken this a little further and decided to sue DePlume directly. Whether he hands over the identities at this stage is immaterial, save for the fact that he can still be subpeona'd for the information on top of having to fight this lawsuit. This lawsuit doesn't go away unless one party wins it, Apple withdraws it, or DePlume negotiates a successful out of court settlement that Apple consents to.
Assuming by "RIAA" you mean "RI" eg Recording Industry (the RIAA is actually an organization, it represents companies in the recording industry), it's probably worth noting that the people that are being sued are being sued for not being customers. If they were obtaining their music by buying CDs instead of downloading it and then uploading the same stuff so other people can by-pass the "buying music" route too, then the RI wouldn't be suing a single person.
You know, if Slashdot is going to implement this dumb "2 minute rule", could they at least let us edit our misformatted messages in that time rather than force a delay of two minutes before we can post a correction?
It was a nice system but network and real politics really ensured it didn't take off. You had patents. You had paranoid government agencies enforcing export controls on encryption protocols. You had commercial enterprises making email clients who didn't want to enter that particular can of worms if they could get away with it.
I think you're trying to find things to take issue with. Nobody ever suggested the anti-spam crowd is unified. If I were to say that only Dogs are particularly interested in peeing on lamp-posts, would you claim that this is unfair because you know a lot of dogs that do not do that kind of thing?I also did explain the tradeoffs, in brief, in the whole accountable static IPs vs easy to administer and efficient with roaming dynamic IPs debate. (I could add paranoia over the supposed world wide shortage of IP addresses, but I don't think that was ever as big an issue as people maintained. If it had been, we'd be on IPv6 by now.)
SMTP is merely a transport system. Authentication, if wanted, was supposed to be part of the bodies of email messages according to whatever standard a user wanted.
SMTP's lack of sender authentication is a modern-day fetish of the anti-spam crowd, and that anti-spam crowd only wants it because back when ISPs were deciding between giving users dedicated IP addresses or dynamically providing them, a debate that raged in the mid-nineties, they ended up going for the relatively anonymous dynamic IP addresses for the most part, which meant it became impossible to track email back to its original sender. Everything we've seen since with the explosion in spam and the more and more extreme methods of dealing with it really goes back to the fact that we no longer can associate an abusive user with an IP address.
SMTP was designed at a time when the entire internet was peer to peer. In the process of turning it into a consumer product, many decisions have been made that while understandable (dynamic IP was seen as easier to maintain, roaming became seamless and efficient) nonetheless sat uneasily with how the Internet had been built thus far.
-
a. Robbery committed at sea.
-
The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy.
-
The operation of an unlicensed, illegal radio or television station
I know that the freeloaders hate any word with negative connotations being used to describe what they do, but the word "piracy" has had this definition for a long, long time.b. A similar act of robbery, as the hijacking of an airplane.