[blockquote]And you are broadly assuming that the people being sued here entered in to a contract with Blizzard.[/blockquote] Where did I assume that? When you try to point out a hidden, and presumably false, assumption in an argument you need to show that the argument does in fact depend on the assumption, and that the assumption is in fact false.
Copyright and contract law both allow for cases against third parties that help or encourage people to violate copyright or breech contract. Again there are lots of exceptions, but I don't think any of them apply in this case.
This is not gross abuse of the law. Copyright law broadly assumes that owners can attach contractual terms to the sale of copies, and contract law broadly assumes that people can make whatever contracts they like. There are of course lots of large and small exceptions to these default positions in copyright and contract law, but most of those are the result of cases where competition, or the public good, are harmed by specific types of contracts. In this case it is hard to see what the harm is supposed to be.
If the contract said that users could not have another MMORPG installed on the same machine then the harm to competition would be obvious. If they hid a clause in the fine print saying "you owe us your first born child if you cheat" then the harm would be obvious. But in this case there is a clear public benefit from including terms that prevent players from using bots, so my guess is that the courts will look at this contract and say it's just fine. And that won't be an expansion of copyright - it will just be the default position of both copyright and contract law.
Are you saying that if, for instance, florida makes a law which explicitly forbids capital punishment, for whatever reason, but a citizen in florida does something in Florida which allows the federal governement to ask for the deathpenalty, he risks being put to death in florida anyway, regardless of the states' own laws?
That's correct - state law cannot override federal law. In the US there is some division of legislative authority between the federal government and the states. The way it works is that the federal government can make laws about *almost* anything, but there are certain specific issues that only the states can make laws about. In India the division of authority is less robust. Although there are some matters that the states typically deal with, I don't think there is anything in the constitution that prevents the federal government from making laws about whatever it likes.
When I said that US and Indian federal laws "allow" for the death penalty I meant that the death penalty is a possible punishment, but not a mandatory punishment, for certain federal crimes. In other words there are certain crimes for which you can be executed regardless of which state you are in, so the whole of the US and India have the death penalty.
Huh? Since when is is the legal system dependend on per capita basis?
I'm not sure what you're asking. My point was that most of the free world still has the death penalty. Indeed some places in Europe would still have the death penalty if the public had any say in the matter.
Besides, did you count in (or rather out) all the states (well, follow your reasoning, all the people from those states) in the USA where capital punishment has been abolished? And doesn't India have states too, where laws differ?
Laws at the federal (or national) level in the US and India allow for the death penalty.
US prosecutors routinely make deals where the death penalty is taken off the table in return for testimony (against accomplices for example), information (about where other bodies might be buried for example), because they think it might be easier to get a conviction, or even because they think it would be a waste of money to pursue the death penalty in a particular case. So your claim that the US prosecutors were ignoring US law is incorrect. They have wide discretion when it comes to pursuing the death penalty.
EU countries are not supposed to allow extradition if the individual in question might face the death penalty. If the extraditing country agrees not to pursue the death penalty then this requirement is satisfied. Whether or not the death penalty is on the books has nothing to do with it. So your claim that EU countries are hypocritical or "buckling" to US pressure is also incorrect. The US and most EU countries have extradition treaties, and in such cases both sides are living up to their legal obligations.
BTW, if you count countries, then most democratic countries do not have the death penalty, but if you count population then most of the democratic world has the death penalty (the US, Japan, and India, alone make up more than 2/3s of the democratic world).
Captain America began in WWII - a war in which the US locked up an entire segment of its population just to be on the safe side (Japanese internment), conscripted millions of others, routinely executed unlawful combatants, and mass bombed civilian populations (and it wasn't "collateral damage" either - the civilians were often the primary target).
Back then people knew that the survival of democracy and civil liberty required an unflinching willingness to seriously fuck up anyone who wanted to take those good things away. Today the people who talk most about civil liberties wouldn't lift a finger to defend them.
Captain America wasn't crushed by irony, he was made obsolete by indifference.
Someone needs to start a new religion that can speak freely - and as a religion it will be protected. Take down notices can be vehemently fought on religious grounds. Fight fire with fire, as it were...
Unless you start decapitating people, no one is going to take you seriously. No one takes christians seriously now that they no longer set fire to people who disagree with them.
This may come as a surprise, but very few countries have laws that require their governments to get court approval for wire-tapping in national security cases. For example, the Netherlands does not require court approval in cases involving serious crimes, has the second highest number of wire-taps per population in Western Europe (after Italy), and conducts roughly 120 times more wire-taps per population than the US (from what I can tell the Police in the Netherlands use wire-tapping as a routine tactic in all serious cases).
Americans make a lot more noise about privacy issues than people in other countries, but that is part of the reason why they have some of the strictest privacy protections.
BTW, I'm not claiming that the US is moving in the right direction here, but they are moving towards the ways things are in other democractic countries already.
Closer to the truth than you might think... sort of.
Courts will refuse to enforce contracts that are found to be contrary to the public interest. Put that together with the defference that courts typically give to considerations of national security, and I think it is highly unlikely that a "no military use" clause would stand up in court. The military will get what they want, not because they have all the guns, but because the courts typically regard national security as more important than enforcing private contracts.
I don't think there has ever been a man-carried suicide bombing that has killed hundreds of people. At most they kill dozens. The advantage of hitting a plane is that if you cause the plane itself to fail then everyone on board dies in the crash. The disadvantage of hitting a crowd is that the bodies of the people nearest the blast actually absorb both the blast and fragments from the bomb.
Why did this worthless ad hominem attack get modified as "insightful"?
The parent poster did not employ any analogies. The parent poster gave several different cases of applying a journalist shield law, and correctly said that we can't just have a policy of picking the cases we like, and excluding the cases we don't like. Having judges apply their own arbitrary preferences does not help at all. That would just mean handing arbitrary power to a state official.
What we need is a rule for distinguishing between the cases where the public's need to be informed is stronger the public's need to have the laws enforced. Peronally I doubt if such a rule can be constructed without it being hopelessly arbitrary, which is one reason why I don't support journalist shield laws.
With trademark violations the key question is usually whether the use of the trademark creates a false impression that the product originated with the trademark owner. The non-comercial nature of this video, and the way in which the trademark is used is unlikely to create that sort of impression, so no trademark violation here.
The image is also protected by copyright but the copyright owner says: "Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks." The key bit here being "if someone asks".
Are you suggesting that a democratic nation, which has a good record of treating its own citizens well and abiding by international law *should* be considered equal with the most barbaric totalitarian dictatorship on the planet - a nightmare of a country that starves its own citizens, gases them, kidnaps citizens from other countries, carries out terrorist attacks on its neighbours, and regularly threatens to nuke them?
Apart from (2) there is nothing all that bad about any of these conditions. She was certifiably nuts, he wanted to leave her, and she wanted him to stay. In that context (1) and (3) are entirely reasonable. He was just requiring that she leave him alone when he asked her to, and not bitch about the fact that he didn't love her anymore. As for (4), that sounds reasonable under any circumstances.
That just leaves (2). Maybe he just got sick of getting the silent treatment.
This kind of stem cell research is no more regulated than any other sort of medical research. I think you have it confused with *embryonic* stem cell research (which is subject to a ban on federal funding).
In any case, the US has provided cures or vaccines for lots of diseases which have plagued the world. The USMC eradicated malaria in Cuba for example. Fat lot of good that did in terms of good will. It has never changed attitudes and never will because the people who hate the US typically couldn't give a flying fuck about their own people dying from disease, or any other cause.
Do you think the terrorists, who blow up civillians in their own country every day, will be impressed if the US cures AIDS? Most of them think that AIDS was cooked up by the Jews, or the Americans, or both.
The line between disclosures that are required by law and those that are not is vague. They are probably looking at the current lawsuits in the US and figuring that it would be cheaper just to tell people up front that they have no privacy at all, than to worry about whether particular disclosures are really mandatory.
Yep, this is a pretty old idea, though the discovery that you can get a similar effect just with a pair of eyes, rather than a life-size fake cop, is new. I seem to remember that the effect of the fake cops wore off over time though, and I would be surprised if that did not happen with the eyes as well. Once people get used to them they will go back to their usual behavior.
"In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by.05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.
The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does."
Note that he doesn't claim that changes in the Sun's energy output have caused most of the observed global warming, just that such changes could explain global warming.
1. The NYT and WP articles themselves make it clear that this program is legal, and that congress was informed.
2. The government said publicly that they were monitoring financial transactions (monintoring financial transations - not secret). The NYT informed terrorist organisations about exactly which financial transations the government is monitoring and how (ways and means - secret). Just like I said in my first post.
3. Except that this program excludes personal data, unless the name or other identifying information are already know from other intelligence sources.
4. There are dozens of ways for the government to legally spy on its own citizens without going anywhere near FISA. The constitutional requirement is that it has to be "reasonable" which in some cases means that they don't need to fill out any paper-work at all.
1. The House and Senate intelligence committes were informed, which are the normal means of congressional oversight. 2. Read my first post. 3. Read my first post. 4. You apparently don't know anything about US law and have never filled out a tax return.
BTW, domestic spying is not illegal and never has been. The 4th ammendment protects against unresonable search and seizure, but that just means that the government needs a good reason to spy on you, and they have to fill out the right paper-work. It doesn't mean that they can't spy on you at all.
There is nothing secretive about this program. First, Congress was kept informed. Second, the public has been told long loud and clear that the government is watching financial transactions with the aim of shuting down terrorist funding. Third, this program looks at institutional transactions, not private bank accounts. Fourth, the government already has complete access to *all* personal financial information as part of the tax system, and all transactions over US$10,000 are already reported to the government as part of the war on drugs. In other words this program has far fewer implications for privacy and civil liberties issues than the stuff that the IRS and law enforcement have been doing every day for a long time. Finally, the only new information in this story is detailed information about ways and means - or information about exactly what financial transations they are looking at and how. This is information that will be useful to terrorists who want to evade detection, but not information that will be useful to members of the public who want to know what their government is up to.
Slashdot Mirror
[blockquote]And you are broadly assuming that the people being sued here entered in to a contract with Blizzard.[/blockquote]
Where did I assume that? When you try to point out a hidden, and presumably false, assumption in an argument you need to show that the argument does in fact depend on the assumption, and that the assumption is in fact false.
Copyright and contract law both allow for cases against third parties that help or encourage people to violate copyright or breech contract. Again there are lots of exceptions, but I don't think any of them apply in this case.
This is not gross abuse of the law. Copyright law broadly assumes that owners can attach contractual terms to the sale of copies, and contract law broadly assumes that people can make whatever contracts they like. There are of course lots of large and small exceptions to these default positions in copyright and contract law, but most of those are the result of cases where competition, or the public good, are harmed by specific types of contracts. In this case it is hard to see what the harm is supposed to be.
If the contract said that users could not have another MMORPG installed on the same machine then the harm to competition would be obvious. If they hid a clause in the fine print saying "you owe us your first born child if you cheat" then the harm would be obvious. But in this case there is a clear public benefit from including terms that prevent players from using bots, so my guess is that the courts will look at this contract and say it's just fine. And that won't be an expansion of copyright - it will just be the default position of both copyright and contract law.
That's correct - state law cannot override federal law. In the US there is some division of legislative authority between the federal government and the states. The way it works is that the federal government can make laws about *almost* anything, but there are certain specific issues that only the states can make laws about. In India the division of authority is less robust. Although there are some matters that the states typically deal with, I don't think there is anything in the constitution that prevents the federal government from making laws about whatever it likes.
When I said that US and Indian federal laws "allow" for the death penalty I meant that the death penalty is a possible punishment, but not a mandatory punishment, for certain federal crimes. In other words there are certain crimes for which you can be executed regardless of which state you are in, so the whole of the US and India have the death penalty.
I'm not sure what you're asking. My point was that most of the free world still has the death penalty. Indeed some places in Europe would still have the death penalty if the public had any say in the matter.
Laws at the federal (or national) level in the US and India allow for the death penalty.
US prosecutors routinely make deals where the death penalty is taken off the table in return for testimony (against accomplices for example), information (about where other bodies might be buried for example), because they think it might be easier to get a conviction, or even because they think it would be a waste of money to pursue the death penalty in a particular case. So your claim that the US prosecutors were ignoring US law is incorrect. They have wide discretion when it comes to pursuing the death penalty.
EU countries are not supposed to allow extradition if the individual in question might face the death penalty. If the extraditing country agrees not to pursue the death penalty then this requirement is satisfied. Whether or not the death penalty is on the books has nothing to do with it. So your claim that EU countries are hypocritical or "buckling" to US pressure is also incorrect. The US and most EU countries have extradition treaties, and in such cases both sides are living up to their legal obligations.
BTW, if you count countries, then most democratic countries do not have the death penalty, but if you count population then most of the democratic world has the death penalty (the US, Japan, and India, alone make up more than 2/3s of the democratic world).
Captain America began in WWII - a war in which the US locked up an entire segment of its population just to be on the safe side (Japanese internment), conscripted millions of others, routinely executed unlawful combatants, and mass bombed civilian populations (and it wasn't "collateral damage" either - the civilians were often the primary target).
Back then people knew that the survival of democracy and civil liberty required an unflinching willingness to seriously fuck up anyone who wanted to take those good things away. Today the people who talk most about civil liberties wouldn't lift a finger to defend them.
Captain America wasn't crushed by irony, he was made obsolete by indifference.
Someone needs to start a new religion that can speak freely - and as a religion it will be protected. Take down notices can be vehemently fought on religious grounds. Fight fire with fire, as it were...
Unless you start decapitating people, no one is going to take you seriously. No one takes christians seriously now that they no longer set fire to people who disagree with them.
somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and Neanderthals decided to make love and not war
Isn't it just as likely that they decided to make love and war? Even now war and mass rape go together more often than not.
This may come as a surprise, but very few countries have laws that require their governments to get court approval for wire-tapping in national security cases. For example, the Netherlands does not require court approval in cases involving serious crimes, has the second highest number of wire-taps per population in Western Europe (after Italy), and conducts roughly 120 times more wire-taps per population than the US (from what I can tell the Police in the Netherlands use wire-tapping as a routine tactic in all serious cases).
Americans make a lot more noise about privacy issues than people in other countries, but that is part of the reason why they have some of the strictest privacy protections.
BTW, I'm not claiming that the US is moving in the right direction here, but they are moving towards the ways things are in other democractic countries already.
Closer to the truth than you might think ... sort of.
Courts will refuse to enforce contracts that are found to be contrary to the public interest. Put that together with the defference that courts typically give to considerations of national security, and I think it is highly unlikely that a "no military use" clause would stand up in court. The military will get what they want, not because they have all the guns, but because the courts typically regard national security as more important than enforcing private contracts.
I don't think there has ever been a man-carried suicide bombing that has killed hundreds of people. At most they kill dozens. The advantage of hitting a plane is that if you cause the plane itself to fail then everyone on board dies in the crash. The disadvantage of hitting a crowd is that the bodies of the people nearest the blast actually absorb both the blast and fragments from the bomb.
Why did this worthless ad hominem attack get modified as "insightful"?
The parent poster did not employ any analogies. The parent poster gave several different cases of applying a journalist shield law, and correctly said that we can't just have a policy of picking the cases we like, and excluding the cases we don't like. Having judges apply their own arbitrary preferences does not help at all. That would just mean handing arbitrary power to a state official.
What we need is a rule for distinguishing between the cases where the public's need to be informed is stronger the public's need to have the laws enforced. Peronally I doubt if such a rule can be constructed without it being hopelessly arbitrary, which is one reason why I don't support journalist shield laws.
Oh ... so that's the point. I've been wondering.
With trademark violations the key question is usually whether the use of the trademark creates a false impression that the product originated with the trademark owner. The non-comercial nature of this video, and the way in which the trademark is used is unlikely to create that sort of impression, so no trademark violation here.
The image is also protected by copyright but the copyright owner says: "Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks." The key bit here being "if someone asks".
Are you suggesting that a democratic nation, which has a good record of treating its own citizens well and abiding by international law *should* be considered equal with the most barbaric totalitarian dictatorship on the planet - a nightmare of a country that starves its own citizens, gases them, kidnaps citizens from other countries, carries out terrorist attacks on its neighbours, and regularly threatens to nuke them?
Apart from (2) there is nothing all that bad about any of these conditions. She was certifiably nuts, he wanted to leave her, and she wanted him to stay. In that context (1) and (3) are entirely reasonable. He was just requiring that she leave him alone when he asked her to, and not bitch about the fact that he didn't love her anymore. As for (4), that sounds reasonable under any circumstances.
That just leaves (2). Maybe he just got sick of getting the silent treatment.
This kind of stem cell research is no more regulated than any other sort of medical research. I think you have it confused with *embryonic* stem cell research (which is subject to a ban on federal funding).
In any case, the US has provided cures or vaccines for lots of diseases which have plagued the world. The USMC eradicated malaria in Cuba for example. Fat lot of good that did in terms of good will. It has never changed attitudes and never will because the people who hate the US typically couldn't give a flying fuck about their own people dying from disease, or any other cause.
Do you think the terrorists, who blow up civillians in their own country every day, will be impressed if the US cures AIDS? Most of them think that AIDS was cooked up by the Jews, or the Americans, or both.
The line between disclosures that are required by law and those that are not is vague. They are probably looking at the current lawsuits in the US and figuring that it would be cheaper just to tell people up front that they have no privacy at all, than to worry about whether particular disclosures are really mandatory.
Yep, this is a pretty old idea, though the discovery that you can get a similar effect just with a pair of eyes, rather than a life-size fake cop, is new. I seem to remember that the effect of the fake cops wore off over time though, and I would be surprised if that did not happen with the eyes as well. Once people get used to them they will go back to their usual behavior.
From space.com
.05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.
"In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by
The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does."
Note that he doesn't claim that changes in the Sun's energy output have caused most of the observed global warming, just that such changes could explain global warming.
1. The NYT and WP articles themselves make it clear that this program is legal, and that congress was informed.
2. The government said publicly that they were monitoring financial transactions (monintoring financial transations - not secret). The NYT informed terrorist organisations about exactly which financial transations the government is monitoring and how (ways and means - secret). Just like I said in my first post.
3. Except that this program excludes personal data, unless the name or other identifying information are already know from other intelligence sources.
4. There are dozens of ways for the government to legally spy on its own citizens without going anywhere near FISA. The constitutional requirement is that it has to be "reasonable" which in some cases means that they don't need to fill out any paper-work at all.
1. The House and Senate intelligence committes were informed, which are the normal means of congressional oversight. 2. Read my first post. 3. Read my first post. 4. You apparently don't know anything about US law and have never filled out a tax return.
BTW, domestic spying is not illegal and never has been. The 4th ammendment protects against unresonable search and seizure, but that just means that the government needs a good reason to spy on you, and they have to fill out the right paper-work. It doesn't mean that they can't spy on you at all.
There is nothing secretive about this program. First, Congress was kept informed. Second, the public has been told long loud and clear that the government is watching financial transactions with the aim of shuting down terrorist funding. Third, this program looks at institutional transactions, not private bank accounts. Fourth, the government already has complete access to *all* personal financial information as part of the tax system, and all transactions over US$10,000 are already reported to the government as part of the war on drugs. In other words this program has far fewer implications for privacy and civil liberties issues than the stuff that the IRS and law enforcement have been doing every day for a long time. Finally, the only new information in this story is detailed information about ways and means - or information about exactly what financial transations they are looking at and how. This is information that will be useful to terrorists who want to evade detection, but not information that will be useful to members of the public who want to know what their government is up to.
Sure, if you literally make dog food, then the whole "eat your own dog food" idea doesn't look so attractive.