I don't think this is quite true... after all, a more complex tax code offers more opportunities for a tax lawyer to provide value. If the tax code is too simple, then there's no loopholes to suck money through.
Bad analogy. Languages don't expire in the same sense as OS's do. Also, are you implying that there exists a language that everyone should be switching to? Because there isn't really any 'good' universal language out there.
This is true.
Also, and more to the point, I would expect that the server code will be leaked and/or reasonably emulated long before the servers actually go down; so there'll be options. Just because something's an MMO doesn't mean it's immune to piracy, after all... just google "private server".
you find the thing that feeds on spinal fluid less creepy then the stuff that feeds on blood?
It isn't because I don't like bleeding, or have issues with seeing blood, it's because the stuff that feeds on blood is biological, and so can mutate, and who knows what it will do to you if the mutated yeast becomes particularly virulent and dominant. While the stuff that feeds on spinal fluid is just a pretty simple chemical reaction with a catalyst, and doesn't have the ability to start self-multiplying in your body.
Read before commenting, please. From TFA:
The fuel cell has no biological components: It consists of a platinum catalyst that strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell’s energy currency.
This. The moon doesn't really have much going for it but 'fairly close'; if you want a staging point, you're far better off with a space station of some kind. That way, you're not only even closer then the moon, but you don't have that pesky gravity well imposing an additional cost.
Exactly. Nobody writes viruses for Linux because, demographically speaking, nobody uses it. Same reason why viruses for Macs are starting to appear... more users means more targets. Linux isn't much more secure then Windows, really; it's just that not enough people use it to make attacking it worthwhile. That said, security through obscurity remains a form of security nonetheless. If you're prepared to deal with the downsides associated with using unpopular software, you get the incidental bonus that your system is too unpopular for viruses, as well.
This. Climate modelling is a science in it's infancy; we don't even have very good models for Earth's atmosphere, and we've got huge amounts of data on it. Since we've got, comparatively speaking, essentially no information on Pluto's atmosphere, I wouldn't expect any simulations of it to have any degree of accuracy. Indeed, it's rather unlikely the simulations will do more then superficially resemble the known observational data, and that only because the modelling team would've tweaked the model until it at least did that much. That is, after all, how you go about building climate models; which can be kind of okay for explaining the past, but isn't anywhere near good enough to predict the future just yet.
That said, these guys have at least taken their models, and then gone forward from that to make a fairly bold experimental prediction. Kudos to them for doing that much... now, if future observations confirm their predictions, that'll amount to a fairly serious triumph for the nascent field.
Fact of the matter is, it'd not just be best for the users and cheapest for the company to do that... more likely then not, it'd be the only legal thing the company could do. The laws regarding what an ISP can and cannot do with it's service are pretty thorny in most places... so a company that does more then the letter of the law requires, using the kind of aggressive monitoring system that might actually stop the standard workarounds, can open itself up to liability, If nothing else, privacy laws alone could get them in trouble. If the government specifically demands that they do a thing, they're covered... but monitoring specific details of a user's traffic just to see if they might possibly be trying to circumvent blocks will get them sued. Accordingly, any company with a competent legal staff will do exactly that minimum... because it's quite probably also the maximum. In this case, that which is not compulsory is forbidden.
If it worked as well as all that, you might have a case for 'fraud'. But in practice... it really doesn't. It's a fundamental principle of marketing... though people are pretty stupid, they aren't quite as stupid as you'd like them to be. If you go around advertising to your 'friends' on a regular basis, they WILL catch on, even if you try to be sneaky about it. And then you'll have less friends, and you'll have less people to advertise to. You can mitigate this somewhat by being selective, and not bothering everyone you know every time you get an offer... but if you do that, then you're seriously limiting your own effectiveness, and probably not making worthwhile money, unless you're VERY good at the selectiveness, and have particularly rich and gullible friends (unlikely). So you either crash and burn right away by doing too much or too little, and even if you try to strike a balance, you'll scare a bunch of people away regardless. As such, your job really ends up being a little bit of "think up clever advertising strategies", but mostly "make lots of new friends quickly to replace the ones you've alienated by vomiting ads all over them". This latter is called 'networking', and in practice, the other people who are doing it are in more or less the same line of work you're in. This is, not incidentally, why most of these things wind up becoming multi-level deals; networkers are inherently parasitic, and they can't really succeed without having some way to take advantage of the contact circles of lesser networkers. To actually make a living off this line of work, your job has to be "sucker other people into alienating their friends by pushing services on them for your own personal profit"; to get rich off it, your job has to be "find people who are good at suckering other people, and sucker them into working for you".
Given all that, you might argue that MLM's should be illegal (a worthy argument, but too much money behind them to make it stick). Compared to such juggernauts, small fries like Social Loot, that offer neither the multi-level structure nor all that much in the way of payouts, are hardly a blip on the radar. Seriously, they're hiring people to put more spam on Facebook. It's like pissing into an ocean of piss. It works, of course, because they only pay for results. Like with any internet ads, there won't be all that many. Essentially, their business model is "convince people to betray their friends for pocket change". And there'll always be more then a few assholes out there willing to do just that.
That's how it goes, really. Democrats are married to the media, Republicans to big business. Between the two lies big content; a force neither party wants to annoy. And so your own rights as a consumer are steadily eroded, and laws are passed that make things ever more favorable for big content. Accordingly, with rare exceptions, a vote for either party is a vote for more restrictive IP law. Don't like it? Vote independent. A 'wasted vote', perhaps... but what's the alternative? Voting in the lesser of two evils just means it takes slightly longer for things to go to hell; it doesn't change the destination.
Available to the public =/= full text freely available online. You need to show up in person and request access, or submit a form online requesting access, paying a fee either way. I don't really want to create an account with the national archives just for the purpose of seeing how big that fee is; but if any UK slashdotters are interested enough to go through that process and order a copy, it would be interesting to know just how much they're charging.
Wait... we're still pretending there's an actual difference between the Republicans and Democrats now? Both clearly want the same thing; more spending, more debt, more rules. The only difference is what each side makes it's partisan points off of; Republicans like spending money on guns and subsidies to their rich backers, and Democrats like spending money on entitlements and subsidies to their special interest groups. Both sides like passing new laws that benefit whoever's bribed them, and neither likes tearing down laws, unless it's a specific law that's especially unpopular with their buddies. Neither likes going after the debt, since there's no political points to be made there; except in accusing the other side for not doing enough about it, and thus to attack the other side's spending preferences. Both sides are essentially doing the same thing, so the overall direction of things remains the same; the only 'change' is that whoever's winning at the moment can throw more tax money at their buddies.
Glad you approve. It's unwise to assume anything really is totally impossible; if you begin by assuming that, then whether it's true or not, you can no longer be convinced by evidence that proves otherwise.
Though, in this case, it really is such a degree of improbability that 'impossible under current theories' is about right; if we were to have evidence that proves otherwise, said evidence would imply that either causality is wrong, or locality is wrong. And as much as you'd like to think that means 'cool, time-travel and FTL'... what it would actually mean would be more along the lines of 'things can happen for no discernible reason, based on events in distant places or times'. Since we haven't seen any evidence that that kind of thing actually happens, and nothing like that happens in the rest of known physics, it's pretty unlikely... but again, it only takes one (solid, reproducible) observation to disprove a theory. If that experiment with the FTL neutrinos was replicated by other teams, on other equipment, instead of actually being caused by a loose cable, it would've been strong evidence against locality.
Speaking as someone who actually knows a bit about the science; this really is a very good analogy. I would add that basically all the work done to date doesn't actually have anything to do with getting useful information transfer from looking at the marbles (which is still actually impossible, under current theories), it's more preventing the marbles from falling into random buckets of paint (ie: getting their state changed by various environmental factors), and providing less then no information.
My bad; I was looking at the Mark 2, which uses Debian, and is totally different-looking.
Really, though, the interface is a more-or-less trivial concern. Hell, we're not even talking about actual, concrete, user-interface issues, we're talking about a skin image that can be dropped onto the interface and trivially replaced with anything else you'd like at will. Furthermore, since there is more to the product then just such an image, it's not a question of 'shutting it down automatically with no real chance of appeal by way of a DMCA notice', it's more 'making vaguely threatening legalish noises which can be easily averted by officially advocating that people not use an infringing skin'.
Too bad CBS will likely kill this the same way they killed the free Android tricorder. They claim to own the LCARS interface.
Having checked out the project's page, it doesn't use LCARS, so that won't happen.
So far as the other legal issues go, and to quote Wikipedia "The company was permitted to call this device a "tricorder" because Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name."
The free Android 'Tricorder' was just a fancy interface, so CBS was allowed to cry foul. If, on the other hand, you make an actual working Tricorder (which name you could apply to any multifunctional handheld scanner), then you are specifically allowed to call it a Tricorder, and no lawyer can stop you. That said, they might be able to stop you from using the LCARS interface on it. Or, at the very least, from distributing the LCARS interface on it in such a way that does not bring cash to CBS.
Virtual Machines. They're a beautiful thing.
Trojans, viruses, keyloggers... who cares? Just revert your system back to the last snapshot, and it's like it never happened... and even the worst of what does happen, won't ever affect your important materials.
That's what the greater than sign was for. >44 years, because it cannot possibly be less, given our current understanding of the laws of physics. Naturally, just because there's no way for it to be less in no way means that it can't be more. In fact, it almost certainly will be.
This isn't for Egypt, Saudi Arabia or third world countries.
Duh. Those are full of spear-chuckin niggers, dune coons, and other undesirables.
I really like the name spear-chucker. It works. It fits. The white man invented sailing ships and sailed the globe and found the black man. Not the fucking other way around. For a reason. That is why blacks are inferior. This is not a few people vs a few people. This is much bigger than a statistically significant sample size. This is a whole people, tens upon tens of millions, over thousands of years.. vs a whole people, tens upon tens of millions, even more thousands of years. If all early human ancestors were from Africa than the fucking niggers had even more time than the white man. But they are the primitives. What does that tell you?
They fail at life. They are spear chuckers. They are tribal and savage and always will be except the white man found them. They sold each other into slavery too so don't even start with that shit. Oh and all white people have ancestors who were once slaves so again don't bother with that bullshit, it only works on the government educated masses not on me.
Wow. Racist of the year award goes to this man.
Why did Europe 'discover' Africa, and not vice-versa? Guns, Germs, and Steel: look it up. The macrohistorical advancement of a 'race' has more to do with geography, climate, and natural resources than anything else, and if you don't believe that, it's because you're an idiot.
And... why is it the US's responsibility to provide weather forecasting for foreign nations? Better yet, why is it the responsibility of the American taxpayer to pay for such forecasting?
I somewhat disagree. Their results met the criteria of scientific discovery and they (well, I certainly hope!) reviewed their process for any error. So even though they literally, by scientific standard, discovered FTL particles, they explicitly state that they don't actually think they did because it disagrees with existing theories. This is *biased* experimental physics.
Yes, relativity has a good track record, and they likely missed something. OTOH, neutrinos are still a pretty new research topic and maybe relativity doesn't cover all the universe has to offer. I do think that these results should be retested, verified, and studied as much as possible. But I'm also seriously disappointed that an ostensibly legitimate discovery has to be presented as 'we screwed up but we don't know why so look at these' in order to avoid raeg from close minded scientists.
'Biased'? No, we've got what amounts to one observation that conflicts with all the rest of the observations. Regardless of how well the scientists think they ran things, it's possible that someone screwed up somewhere. In fact, given how very much evidence we have here, 'we screwed up' is the simpler explanation. It's not 'biased' to go forward in the expectation that you're likely wrong if you've got evidence that seems to contradict the whole rest of science. Before you call upon everyone else to throw out all the rest of the measurements and start rethinking science from scratch, due scientific diligence demands *at least* one replication. It's not the scientists are 'close minded'; it's simple probability... there's a lot of people who might randomly come up with some 'brilliant' discovery that contradicts the whole rest of science, and there's a specific way of going about demonstrating that you're not just some crank. That way is just what they're doing now; releasing your results openly and humbly asking the scientific community at large to check your notes for errors and prove you wrong if they can. If nobody can do so, that's when the discovery becomes really legitimate.
Ok, ill give you that on the huge companies out there, but what about a mom and pop shop that barley makes a living selling their home made widgets? Why should they have to defend themselves, in effect?
$200 for.xxx $200 for.net, info, biz, bla bla bla.... ( and the time spent maintaining it all ) It does add up after a while.
By the same token, nobody's going to make any money going after an obscure mom and pop like that... simply because they're obscure. Maybe some fraudster might be able to pull something like that, given sufficient SEO investment... but really, why bother?
So they should go after the sites that host ROMs and such. Emulators are legal, regardless of how people may use them to do illegal things. Courts have stated this in many cases in the past.
As long as the emulator authors don't go so far as telling people where to get ROMs and the like, I don't see how Atari would have a leg to stand on.
This is true... but the fact remains that the average person is notoriously vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits. Most people don't want to go to court, even if they'd win, because the amount of money a big corporation can throw into harassing and delaying them in legal ways is very large. Even if you're totally in the right, what's easier... fighting a lengthy legal battle over your right to continue pursuing some hobby you're up to, spending large amounts of your own money in the process? Or simply conceding the point and walking away, losing neither time nor money?
That's the philosophy behind why corporations pursue lawsuits that they wouldn't have a chance to win in actual court; the mere threat of going to court is more then enough to convince most people to simply not bother.
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I don't think this is quite true... after all, a more complex tax code offers more opportunities for a tax lawyer to provide value. If the tax code is too simple, then there's no loopholes to suck money through.
Bad analogy. Languages don't expire in the same sense as OS's do. Also, are you implying that there exists a language that everyone should be switching to? Because there isn't really any 'good' universal language out there.
This is true. Also, and more to the point, I would expect that the server code will be leaked and/or reasonably emulated long before the servers actually go down; so there'll be options. Just because something's an MMO doesn't mean it's immune to piracy, after all... just google "private server".
you find the thing that feeds on spinal fluid less creepy then the stuff that feeds on blood?
It isn't because I don't like bleeding, or have issues with seeing blood, it's because the stuff that feeds on blood is biological, and so can mutate, and who knows what it will do to you if the mutated yeast becomes particularly virulent and dominant. While the stuff that feeds on spinal fluid is just a pretty simple chemical reaction with a catalyst, and doesn't have the ability to start self-multiplying in your body.
Read before commenting, please. From TFA:
The fuel cell has no biological components: It consists of a platinum catalyst that strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell’s energy currency.
This. The moon doesn't really have much going for it but 'fairly close'; if you want a staging point, you're far better off with a space station of some kind. That way, you're not only even closer then the moon, but you don't have that pesky gravity well imposing an additional cost.
Exactly. Nobody writes viruses for Linux because, demographically speaking, nobody uses it. Same reason why viruses for Macs are starting to appear... more users means more targets. Linux isn't much more secure then Windows, really; it's just that not enough people use it to make attacking it worthwhile. That said, security through obscurity remains a form of security nonetheless. If you're prepared to deal with the downsides associated with using unpopular software, you get the incidental bonus that your system is too unpopular for viruses, as well.
Smart money is a drunk driver, who does something far too stupid for the computer to compensate for, and dies after hitting the thing.
That said, these guys have at least taken their models, and then gone forward from that to make a fairly bold experimental prediction. Kudos to them for doing that much... now, if future observations confirm their predictions, that'll amount to a fairly serious triumph for the nascent field.
Fact of the matter is, it'd not just be best for the users and cheapest for the company to do that... more likely then not, it'd be the only legal thing the company could do. The laws regarding what an ISP can and cannot do with it's service are pretty thorny in most places... so a company that does more then the letter of the law requires, using the kind of aggressive monitoring system that might actually stop the standard workarounds, can open itself up to liability, If nothing else, privacy laws alone could get them in trouble. If the government specifically demands that they do a thing, they're covered... but monitoring specific details of a user's traffic just to see if they might possibly be trying to circumvent blocks will get them sued. Accordingly, any company with a competent legal staff will do exactly that minimum... because it's quite probably also the maximum. In this case, that which is not compulsory is forbidden.
Given all that, you might argue that MLM's should be illegal (a worthy argument, but too much money behind them to make it stick). Compared to such juggernauts, small fries like Social Loot, that offer neither the multi-level structure nor all that much in the way of payouts, are hardly a blip on the radar. Seriously, they're hiring people to put more spam on Facebook. It's like pissing into an ocean of piss. It works, of course, because they only pay for results. Like with any internet ads, there won't be all that many. Essentially, their business model is "convince people to betray their friends for pocket change". And there'll always be more then a few assholes out there willing to do just that.
That's how it goes, really. Democrats are married to the media, Republicans to big business. Between the two lies big content; a force neither party wants to annoy. And so your own rights as a consumer are steadily eroded, and laws are passed that make things ever more favorable for big content. Accordingly, with rare exceptions, a vote for either party is a vote for more restrictive IP law. Don't like it? Vote independent. A 'wasted vote', perhaps... but what's the alternative? Voting in the lesser of two evils just means it takes slightly longer for things to go to hell; it doesn't change the destination.
'Counseling' implies more time being spent in the process. Also, money.
Available to the public =/= full text freely available online. You need to show up in person and request access, or submit a form online requesting access, paying a fee either way. I don't really want to create an account with the national archives just for the purpose of seeing how big that fee is; but if any UK slashdotters are interested enough to go through that process and order a copy, it would be interesting to know just how much they're charging.
Wait... we're still pretending there's an actual difference between the Republicans and Democrats now? Both clearly want the same thing; more spending, more debt, more rules. The only difference is what each side makes it's partisan points off of; Republicans like spending money on guns and subsidies to their rich backers, and Democrats like spending money on entitlements and subsidies to their special interest groups. Both sides like passing new laws that benefit whoever's bribed them, and neither likes tearing down laws, unless it's a specific law that's especially unpopular with their buddies. Neither likes going after the debt, since there's no political points to be made there; except in accusing the other side for not doing enough about it, and thus to attack the other side's spending preferences. Both sides are essentially doing the same thing, so the overall direction of things remains the same; the only 'change' is that whoever's winning at the moment can throw more tax money at their buddies.
Glad you approve. It's unwise to assume anything really is totally impossible; if you begin by assuming that, then whether it's true or not, you can no longer be convinced by evidence that proves otherwise. Though, in this case, it really is such a degree of improbability that 'impossible under current theories' is about right; if we were to have evidence that proves otherwise, said evidence would imply that either causality is wrong, or locality is wrong. And as much as you'd like to think that means 'cool, time-travel and FTL'... what it would actually mean would be more along the lines of 'things can happen for no discernible reason, based on events in distant places or times'. Since we haven't seen any evidence that that kind of thing actually happens, and nothing like that happens in the rest of known physics, it's pretty unlikely... but again, it only takes one (solid, reproducible) observation to disprove a theory. If that experiment with the FTL neutrinos was replicated by other teams, on other equipment, instead of actually being caused by a loose cable, it would've been strong evidence against locality.
Speaking as someone who actually knows a bit about the science; this really is a very good analogy. I would add that basically all the work done to date doesn't actually have anything to do with getting useful information transfer from looking at the marbles (which is still actually impossible, under current theories), it's more preventing the marbles from falling into random buckets of paint (ie: getting their state changed by various environmental factors), and providing less then no information.
Too bad CBS will likely kill this the same way they killed the free Android tricorder. They claim to own the LCARS interface.
Having checked out the project's page, it doesn't use LCARS, so that won't happen.
You didn't look at the page very much.
http://www.tricorderproject.org/tricorder-mark1.html
Clearly that is using the LCARS interface.
My bad; I was looking at the Mark 2, which uses Debian, and is totally different-looking. Really, though, the interface is a more-or-less trivial concern. Hell, we're not even talking about actual, concrete, user-interface issues, we're talking about a skin image that can be dropped onto the interface and trivially replaced with anything else you'd like at will. Furthermore, since there is more to the product then just such an image, it's not a question of 'shutting it down automatically with no real chance of appeal by way of a DMCA notice', it's more 'making vaguely threatening legalish noises which can be easily averted by officially advocating that people not use an infringing skin'.
Too bad CBS will likely kill this the same way they killed the free Android tricorder. They claim to own the LCARS interface.
Having checked out the project's page, it doesn't use LCARS, so that won't happen. So far as the other legal issues go, and to quote Wikipedia "The company was permitted to call this device a "tricorder" because Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name." The free Android 'Tricorder' was just a fancy interface, so CBS was allowed to cry foul. If, on the other hand, you make an actual working Tricorder (which name you could apply to any multifunctional handheld scanner), then you are specifically allowed to call it a Tricorder, and no lawyer can stop you. That said, they might be able to stop you from using the LCARS interface on it. Or, at the very least, from distributing the LCARS interface on it in such a way that does not bring cash to CBS.
Virtual Machines. They're a beautiful thing. Trojans, viruses, keyloggers... who cares? Just revert your system back to the last snapshot, and it's like it never happened... and even the worst of what does happen, won't ever affect your important materials.
That's what the greater than sign was for. >44 years, because it cannot possibly be less, given our current understanding of the laws of physics. Naturally, just because there's no way for it to be less in no way means that it can't be more. In fact, it almost certainly will be.
This isn't for Egypt, Saudi Arabia or third world countries.
Duh. Those are full of spear-chuckin niggers, dune coons, and other undesirables. I really like the name spear-chucker. It works. It fits. The white man invented sailing ships and sailed the globe and found the black man. Not the fucking other way around. For a reason. That is why blacks are inferior. This is not a few people vs a few people. This is much bigger than a statistically significant sample size. This is a whole people, tens upon tens of millions, over thousands of years .. vs a whole people, tens upon tens of millions, even more thousands of years. If all early human ancestors were from Africa than the fucking niggers had even more time than the white man. But they are the primitives. What does that tell you?
They fail at life. They are spear chuckers. They are tribal and savage and always will be except the white man found them. They sold each other into slavery too so don't even start with that shit. Oh and all white people have ancestors who were once slaves so again don't bother with that bullshit, it only works on the government educated masses not on me.
Wow. Racist of the year award goes to this man. Why did Europe 'discover' Africa, and not vice-versa? Guns, Germs, and Steel: look it up. The macrohistorical advancement of a 'race' has more to do with geography, climate, and natural resources than anything else, and if you don't believe that, it's because you're an idiot.
And... why is it the US's responsibility to provide weather forecasting for foreign nations? Better yet, why is it the responsibility of the American taxpayer to pay for such forecasting?
I somewhat disagree. Their results met the criteria of scientific discovery and they (well, I certainly hope!) reviewed their process for any error. So even though they literally, by scientific standard, discovered FTL particles, they explicitly state that they don't actually think they did because it disagrees with existing theories. This is *biased* experimental physics. Yes, relativity has a good track record, and they likely missed something. OTOH, neutrinos are still a pretty new research topic and maybe relativity doesn't cover all the universe has to offer. I do think that these results should be retested, verified, and studied as much as possible. But I'm also seriously disappointed that an ostensibly legitimate discovery has to be presented as 'we screwed up but we don't know why so look at these' in order to avoid raeg from close minded scientists.
'Biased'? No, we've got what amounts to one observation that conflicts with all the rest of the observations. Regardless of how well the scientists think they ran things, it's possible that someone screwed up somewhere. In fact, given how very much evidence we have here, 'we screwed up' is the simpler explanation. It's not 'biased' to go forward in the expectation that you're likely wrong if you've got evidence that seems to contradict the whole rest of science. Before you call upon everyone else to throw out all the rest of the measurements and start rethinking science from scratch, due scientific diligence demands *at least* one replication. It's not the scientists are 'close minded'; it's simple probability... there's a lot of people who might randomly come up with some 'brilliant' discovery that contradicts the whole rest of science, and there's a specific way of going about demonstrating that you're not just some crank. That way is just what they're doing now; releasing your results openly and humbly asking the scientific community at large to check your notes for errors and prove you wrong if they can. If nobody can do so, that's when the discovery becomes really legitimate.
Ok, ill give you that on the huge companies out there, but what about a mom and pop shop that barley makes a living selling their home made widgets? Why should they have to defend themselves, in effect?
$200 for .xxx $200 for .net, info, biz, bla bla bla.... ( and the time spent maintaining it all ) It does add up after a while.
By the same token, nobody's going to make any money going after an obscure mom and pop like that... simply because they're obscure. Maybe some fraudster might be able to pull something like that, given sufficient SEO investment... but really, why bother?
So they should go after the sites that host ROMs and such. Emulators are legal, regardless of how people may use them to do illegal things. Courts have stated this in many cases in the past. As long as the emulator authors don't go so far as telling people where to get ROMs and the like, I don't see how Atari would have a leg to stand on.
This is true... but the fact remains that the average person is notoriously vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits. Most people don't want to go to court, even if they'd win, because the amount of money a big corporation can throw into harassing and delaying them in legal ways is very large. Even if you're totally in the right, what's easier... fighting a lengthy legal battle over your right to continue pursuing some hobby you're up to, spending large amounts of your own money in the process? Or simply conceding the point and walking away, losing neither time nor money? That's the philosophy behind why corporations pursue lawsuits that they wouldn't have a chance to win in actual court; the mere threat of going to court is more then enough to convince most people to simply not bother.