Ideal solution (which also solves the related problems of copyrights, DoS attacks, and crackers):
Remove common carrier protection from ISPs in civil cases.
You get spammed. You can sue the operator of any network the spam traveled on or through (except, of course those with whom you've agreed not to sue).
This solves the spamhaus problem immediately. Either the spamhaus eats the damages and a) raises their customer rates, b) goes out of business, or c) directly passes the liability onto the spammer by suing them.
You running an open proxy? You better have good insurance, or know who's using your proxy.
You running easily trojaned software? Tough. Better have good insurance. Or is using OE worth losing your house over?
This would also effectively outlaw spam and so forth worldwide. Because the fiber operator from Korea to the US could be sued in the US for transmitting spam from Korea, either:
said ISP goes out of business, in which case spam decreases
said ISP raises rates to certain classes of customers in Korea: spam decreases
said ISP drops spam-relaying customers: spam decreases
Repeat for copyright infringement, DDoS attacks (including zombies), etc.
US law would not apply to anything done outside the borders of the US (for that reason, I think that the precedent used to justify Camp X-Ray (the German saboteurs in WW-II) is an invalid application of a sound doctrine).
Most of the EU did not implement presumption of innocence until fairly recently. But the Continent (and the UK on this issue) are only 2 centuries behind the US.
My point was that the US legal system (and any legal system worthy of respect) has the defining characteristic that an act is assumed to be legal unless specifically made illegal (much like how one is innocent until proven guilty).
I apologize for the lack of clarity in the argument.
Perhaps I was unclear in the argument (which in retrospect I was).
My point in citing "innocent until proven guilty" is that the US legal system (and I would argue it's a sine qua non of any legal system worthy of respect) treats all behaviors as OK, except for those specifically blacklisted.
The Supreme Court considers treaties to be of equal precedence to the Constitution. Thus the WIPO treaty supercedes the first amendment (which is why a first amendment challenge to the DMCA cannot work).
Re:GWI wasn't a formally declared war...
on
Saddam Hussein Arrested
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You ever hear of "innocent until proven guilty"?
I realize that in most of Europe, you don't have that standard, so you may not know what it means, but it means that all actions are legal unless outlawed.
Taiwan would only use them as a last resort (ie if the PRC started hurling nukes at them). They're strictly there as a deterrent. Is bringing down the Communist regime (which is what the combination of a decapitation strike on Beijing and setting the economy back a decade or so would do) worth it to get rid of Taiwan? The Taiwanese are betting that that the PRC answers "no" to that question.
Taiwan does have nukes (last I heard, circa 20 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles). Launch those into Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and a few other choice locations, and while it's far from mutually assured destruction, it would set the Chinese economy back at least a decade and into chaos for a while.
Indeed, I've found that the best albums I've bought are ones wherein I didn't like every song right out of the gate. What I think this indicates is that truly great art takes a long time to grok, but once you grok it it's like the veil falling from your eyes and you fall in love with it.
Consider Rush's Vapor Trails. I bought it the day it came out, having heard only "One Little Victory" on the radio once (and not really paying attention to it; the fact that Rush had a new album out soon registered with me). The first time I listened to the record, nothing jumped out at me. I marked it down as a waste of $16.
A couple of weeks later, I noticed the CD sitting by my computer and that I had yet to rip it for more convenient listening. So I fired up cdparanoia and lame (this being a few months before I jumped to ogg) and started ripping away.
As per my standard procedure when ripping, I used play to listen to the wavs before encoding to MP3. A song jumped out at me and I listened to it a few times before encoding it. As it happens, it was "Peaceable Kingdom", a song which, in retrospect, is one of the biggest turds Rush have laid at our feet in their 30 year career. From there, "Ghost Rider", "Nocturne", "One Little Victory", "Ceiling Unlimited", "The Stars Look Down", and "Out of the Cradle" broke through.
The four songs, though, that took the longest for me to grok ("Vapor Trail", "Secret Touch", "Earthshine", and "Freeze (part IV of 'Fear')") are now the ones that I recognize as absolute masterpieces wherein the music, lyrics, and vocals fuse together create something of solid construction, pleasing to the ear, and a compliment to their architect and builders.
This happens time and time again with me. The songs that leap out as great to me on the first listen or two end up being near the bottom of my list and songs that I dismissed at first glance turn out to be the ones that I can't deny as essential.
Why is this?
I conjecture that the reason we like a piece of music is not because of anything "in" the song; it is a confluence of the song, our state of mind at the time of listening, and connections made with our state at previous listenings. One of these (our state at the time of listening) is highly variable, and another is akin to the integral of that variable. But this is all conjecture and could never be proven anyway.
Mergers in general take years to sort out and start bearing fruit. Hell, Time and Warner didn't look like a good idea until almost a decade after the fact.
It depends on the genre. FPS will probably be PC-dominated for quite a while. Flight sims aren't going console anytime soon. Ditto for RTS. Of course, the fact that there hasn't been anything innovative in those spaces for a while negates some of that...
It's mostly from people who come out of a regular job with an idea to sell widgets online. They see an ad in one of those "business opportunities" magazines for a spammer. They sign up, pay, say $10,000 for a list of 10 million email addresses ("A tenth of a cent per email? With a 1 percent response rate (and my widgets and pitch are so good, 1 percent is the minimum!) that means 10 cents per response. I make $10 on every widget. I'm going to be RIIIIIIIIIIIICH!"). The response rate is pitiful, they lose money on the promotion, and they either learn the lesson or move to another spammer. Eventually the business fails.
However, there's enough entrepreneurs (and pseudo-entrepreneurs thanks to tax code insanity like the fully-deductible Escalade...) to make spamming a gold mine.
The media isn't really publicizing how ineffective spamming is. All they say is how much money the spammers are making. In the mind of the mental midgets who start these companies, if they see that their SSP (Spam Service Provider) is a millionaire, they think, "this has gotta be working." Of course, it's that type of thinking that proves irrefutably that most people are idiots. Call me crazy, but I want those providing services to me to be as poor as possible....
Hell I know a guy in Michigan (goes by the name of Dell Dude online) who scams online sportsbooks through credit card fraud and kiting EFT transactions. One of these days, he'll hit a 10-way suicide parlay for $3 million and retire.
Exactly. Spam is one of those activities that's on the other side of the law. Spammers will be very hesitant to go to the cops as judges will laugh the cases out of courts. This is the reason why, in countries where prostitution is illegal, you can basically get away with defrauding a hooker (bouncing checks, counterfeit bills, or just a plain old stiffing). Ditto for bookies.
Slashdot Mirror
On slashdot: "karma-whoring, dupe-responding-to sectarianism"
He's talking about storing boxes at a warehouse, taking orders online, and shipping the boxes.
Try reading a post before replying, buddy.
Ideal solution (which also solves the related problems of copyrights, DoS attacks, and crackers):
Remove common carrier protection from ISPs in civil cases.
You get spammed. You can sue the operator of any network the spam traveled on or through (except, of course those with whom you've agreed not to sue).
This solves the spamhaus problem immediately. Either the spamhaus eats the damages and a) raises their customer rates, b) goes out of business, or c) directly passes the liability onto the spammer by suing them.
You running an open proxy? You better have good insurance, or know who's using your proxy.
You running easily trojaned software? Tough. Better have good insurance. Or is using OE worth losing your house over?
This would also effectively outlaw spam and so forth worldwide. Because the fiber operator from Korea to the US could be sued in the US for transmitting spam from Korea, either:
Repeat for copyright infringement, DDoS attacks (including zombies), etc.
US law would not apply to anything done outside the borders of the US (for that reason, I think that the precedent used to justify Camp X-Ray (the German saboteurs in WW-II) is an invalid application of a sound doctrine).
Most of the EU did not implement presumption of innocence until fairly recently. But the Continent (and the UK on this issue) are only 2 centuries behind the US.
What are you going on about?
My point was that the US legal system (and any legal system worthy of respect) has the defining characteristic that an act is assumed to be legal unless specifically made illegal (much like how one is innocent until proven guilty).
I apologize for the lack of clarity in the argument.
Perhaps I was unclear in the argument (which in retrospect I was).
My point in citing "innocent until proven guilty" is that the US legal system (and I would argue it's a sine qua non of any legal system worthy of respect) treats all behaviors as OK, except for those specifically blacklisted.
The Supreme Court considers treaties to be of equal precedence to the Constitution. Thus the WIPO treaty supercedes the first amendment (which is why a first amendment challenge to the DMCA cannot work).
You ever hear of "innocent until proven guilty"?
I realize that in most of Europe, you don't have that standard, so you may not know what it means, but it means that all actions are legal unless outlawed.
Bin Laden's probably dead in some cave somewhere.
Taiwan would only use them as a last resort (ie if the PRC started hurling nukes at them). They're strictly there as a deterrent. Is bringing down the Communist regime (which is what the combination of a decapitation strike on Beijing and setting the economy back a decade or so would do) worth it to get rid of Taiwan? The Taiwanese are betting that that the PRC answers "no" to that question.
Taiwan does have nukes (last I heard, circa 20 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles). Launch those into Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and a few other choice locations, and while it's far from mutually assured destruction, it would set the Chinese economy back at least a decade and into chaos for a while.
Communism and fascism are equivalent. They are both diametrically opposed to capitalism.
Both Fortune and Time are owned by the same company (and have been since Time Inc. launched Fortune in the late 1920s).
Indeed, I've found that the best albums I've bought are ones wherein I didn't like every song right out of the gate. What I think this indicates is that truly great art takes a long time to grok, but once you grok it it's like the veil falling from your eyes and you fall in love with it.
Consider Rush's Vapor Trails. I bought it the day it came out, having heard only "One Little Victory" on the radio once (and not really paying attention to it; the fact that Rush had a new album out soon registered with me). The first time I listened to the record, nothing jumped out at me. I marked it down as a waste of $16.
A couple of weeks later, I noticed the CD sitting by my computer and that I had yet to rip it for more convenient listening. So I fired up cdparanoia and lame (this being a few months before I jumped to ogg) and started ripping away.
As per my standard procedure when ripping, I used play to listen to the wavs before encoding to MP3. A song jumped out at me and I listened to it a few times before encoding it. As it happens, it was "Peaceable Kingdom", a song which, in retrospect, is one of the biggest turds Rush have laid at our feet in their 30 year career. From there, "Ghost Rider", "Nocturne", "One Little Victory", "Ceiling Unlimited", "The Stars Look Down", and "Out of the Cradle" broke through.
The four songs, though, that took the longest for me to grok ("Vapor Trail", "Secret Touch", "Earthshine", and "Freeze (part IV of 'Fear')") are now the ones that I recognize as absolute masterpieces wherein the music, lyrics, and vocals fuse together create something of solid construction, pleasing to the ear, and a compliment to their architect and builders.
This happens time and time again with me. The songs that leap out as great to me on the first listen or two end up being near the bottom of my list and songs that I dismissed at first glance turn out to be the ones that I can't deny as essential.
Why is this?
I conjecture that the reason we like a piece of music is not because of anything "in" the song; it is a confluence of the song, our state of mind at the time of listening, and connections made with our state at previous listenings. One of these (our state at the time of listening) is highly variable, and another is akin to the integral of that variable. But this is all conjecture and could never be proven anyway.
Agreed 100%... I'd have no problem with a wheel mouse if the wheel was at least 50-60% wider...
Nothing like a straw man...
I'm surprised that this was the only DeCSS post...
The only issue I think there would be is that screenwriters might not be attuned to the open-ended plots of games.
But I would definitely like to see more screenwriters brought in as script doctors for dialogue!
Mergers in general take years to sort out and start bearing fruit. Hell, Time and Warner didn't look like a good idea until almost a decade after the fact.
It depends on the genre. FPS will probably be PC-dominated for quite a while. Flight sims aren't going console anytime soon. Ditto for RTS. Of course, the fact that there hasn't been anything innovative in those spaces for a while negates some of that...
The bootleggers at a drive-in would be the only ones actually watching the movie...
And the only decent music from that list is by a Toronto-based power trio (though Neil Peart is based out of California now).
That said, "Time Stand Still", featuring Aimee Mann on backing vocals is a fairly good Rush song.
It's mostly from people who come out of a regular job with an idea to sell widgets online. They see an ad in one of those "business opportunities" magazines for a spammer. They sign up, pay, say $10,000 for a list of 10 million email addresses ("A tenth of a cent per email? With a 1 percent response rate (and my widgets and pitch are so good, 1 percent is the minimum!) that means 10 cents per response. I make $10 on every widget. I'm going to be RIIIIIIIIIIIICH!"). The response rate is pitiful, they lose money on the promotion, and they either learn the lesson or move to another spammer. Eventually the business fails.
However, there's enough entrepreneurs (and pseudo-entrepreneurs thanks to tax code insanity like the fully-deductible Escalade...) to make spamming a gold mine.
The media isn't really publicizing how ineffective spamming is. All they say is how much money the spammers are making. In the mind of the mental midgets who start these companies, if they see that their SSP (Spam Service Provider) is a millionaire, they think, "this has gotta be working." Of course, it's that type of thinking that proves irrefutably that most people are idiots. Call me crazy, but I want those providing services to me to be as poor as possible....
Hell I know a guy in Michigan (goes by the name of Dell Dude online) who scams online sportsbooks through credit card fraud and kiting EFT transactions. One of these days, he'll hit a 10-way suicide parlay for $3 million and retire.
Exactly. Spam is one of those activities that's on the other side of the law. Spammers will be very hesitant to go to the cops as judges will laugh the cases out of courts. This is the reason why, in countries where prostitution is illegal, you can basically get away with defrauding a hooker (bouncing checks, counterfeit bills, or just a plain old stiffing). Ditto for bookies.