The reasonable cost-per-tag really depends on what you're tagging. If you're tagging flat panel TVs 20c/tag is perfectly reasonable. If you're doing item-level tagging on tupperware, even 5c/tag is too much. Unfortunately ultra-cheap items where the manufacturer's margins are super tight are the norm in Wal*Mart stores, so for most of them, 10-20c is way too much.
I tried to buy 2 Stevie Wonder songs using Amazon's MP3 store the other day. I didn't want to use their "one click to buy" mechanism but there was no alternative. I wanted to add them to a "shopping cart" so that I could order a bunch at once. I bought one song, clicked on the album title again, found the other song, bought it, then tried to hit the back button my browser a bunch of times to get back to the page I was at before I got the stevie wonder songs.
Somehow in that process, it decided that I wanted to buy the first song again -- i.e. an HTTP get = purchase a song, even when just refreshing a cache after the user hits the back arrow, so it downloaded that one song twice. I guess there's some logic somewhere in the system though, since I was only charged for the download once, but to me that points to a big flaw in the one-click ordering system. The back button should never constitute a purchase agreement.
Before anybody here comments saying "it looks like a bomb" or "it doesn't look like a bomb", you should really qualify your viewpoint. Are you trained in explosives, or do you just watch a lot of TV?
On TV bombs have curly red wires, green and blue wires, red LED clocks that count backwards to zero, etc. On TV getting shot with a gun will knock you 6 feet back through the air. On the tires of a car skidding on a dirt road will make a squealing sound. On TV high explosives explode with bright orange flames, rolling up into the air.
Just because it looks like something you might see on 24 doesn't mean it looks like a bomb.
In my opinion, something out in the open is less likely to be a bomb. Bombers try to stay hidden until they're ready to detonate their bombs. This poor girl didn't do that. The police and airport workers overreacted to a movie plot threat.
[quote]So, if Tommy Hilfiger or Polo or whatever, come out with the latest in breadboard tech clothing...we're all gonna get threatened with a machine gun? Sounds silly, doesn't it?[/quote]
No, of course not, because anything mass-produced is known [i]a priori[/i] to be safe, of course. Anybody can tell at a glance if something is mass-produced, and since major corporations should be implicitly trusted, anything they produce is completely safe, especially if it has logos on it.
What is obviously the sign of a terrorist is something that isn't yet mass produced. If you have a breadboard, you're a terrorist. If you have a messy product that's in the prototype stages, you're a terrorist. If you're a hobbyist playing with thru-hole resistors, capacitors and such, you're a terrorist. Only surface mount components are so safe you can't make bombs from them. But to be sure they're 100% safe, enclose them in professional-looking cases and plaster them with logos. Better safe than sorry.
Hey NYCL, is it really Ms. Lindor who is "pointing out to the Judge not only that the RIAA's arguments had no legal basis, but also that its brief was completely silent as to any justification for the record companies' copyright-pooling agreement" etc.? Or is it you (collectively) as her attorneys who are doing all these things, and she's encouraging you and signing off on them?
I'd be really impressed if a "home health worker who has never even used a computer" was able to such an amazing job of fighting off the RIAA, but if it really is you guys, on her behalf, who are fighting the good fight and coming up with these legal maneuvers, you deserve some credit too. How involved is she in her own defense? Is she now using a computer, looking up case law, etc. or is she merely encouraging you to fight as vigorously as you can?
Being suspicious and combative is not a crime, nor should it be. Feel free to lobby your lawmaker to draft an "Arrogant Asshole" law. See how far you get.
I disagree that this guy wanted to "feel superior to the lowly Circuit City workers". It seems to me that all he wanted to do was exercise his rights: "I am not interested in living my life smoothly. I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being."
Personally, I think this guy is standing up for me more than any soldier. What is the use of laws and civil rights if they can simply be ignored when someone is acting suspicious? What if Circuit City decided that instead of just looking into your bag as you left, their new store policy was a pat down? Sure, you could go elsewhere, but other stores might just jump on the bandwagon and enact the same policy. Once people got used to the pat down, why not a strip search, or at least an automatic strip search with some kind of IR camera. Hey, if you're not stealing things, you have nothing to lose, right?
Even without the slippery slope argument, what if you threw your purchases into your knapsack, on top of your "coping with AIDS" booklet you just got from your doctor, or on top of your "surviving the trauma of rape" pamphlet. In a small town, the guy searching your bag may know you, and may see you often. Someone demanding to search your bag may see things you don't want anybody to see, even though you've done nothing wrong.
As for the officer, he arrested the guy for a non-existent crime due to his poor understanding of the law. If anybody's an arrogant asshole it's the cop who: 1) arrested the guy for a non-existent crime, 2) didn't remember to read him his Miranda rights.
I'm glad you see that the Circuit City people and the cop are also in the wrong, but you're not going far enough. The Circuit City people deserve jail time for illegally detaining him. Sure, they were just following corporate policy, but so what. That's no excuse for breaking the law. The cop deserves jail time for false arrest. If ignorance of the law is no excuse for the average joe, it certainly shouldn't be an excuse for an officer of the law.
I'll believe it when I can actually buy one. Much as I'd like a flying car, his always seem to be "Real Soon Now(TM)" AFAIK, Moller has never actually had anything for sale. Downside(R) lists his company as a scam because it has been a few years from production for 30 years. There have also been SEC complaints for "fraudulent, unregistered offering and the filing of a fraudulent Form 10-SB by Moller International, Inc. ("MI" or "the company"), a California company engaged in the development of a personal aircraft known as "the Skycar.""
I'd like to be wrong, but I sure won't be putting down any money just yet.
The right to download is one thing, the right to take as part of a compilation is something else entirely. Nobody is complaining that someone at VH1 downloaded the file. What's at issue was whether VH1 violated his copyright by including his video in their TV show without asking. I looked and I can't find anything about YouTube's copyright stance on material people upload, but unless they require that everything you upload be placed in the public domain, or something similar, VH1 had no automatic right to use it in their TV show.
Have you really looked up what Fair Use really means?
VH1 copied his commercial in its entirety for use in its entertainment, non-educational show. For something to qualify as Fair Use, four things are considered:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
For test #1, "Web Junk 2.0" is commercial, not nonprofit educational. Test #2 may have some bearing, the copyrighted work (the political ad), isn't designed as an artistic work, however it seems more like art than it does like facts useful to the public, and the way in which it was used by VH1 is due to its artistic nature. Test #3 is a complete failure for VH1, from what he's saying, they used it in its entirety. Test #4 is another tricky one. There never was any market or value for the work.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like those tests indicate that what VH1 did is not covered under fair use.
On the other hand, what he did seems like it would be covered.
It was done in a non-profit manner
The original work was commercial, but his use of it isn't trying to cash in on it, but rather to point to it as a sort of reference
He only used a small clip of the original copyrighted material
His use of the small clip won't have any negative impact on the original material, and may in fact have a positive impact
It seems clear to me that his use was fair, their use was unfair.
Yeah, that's really the best approach. Try to get the students thinking about a lot of the thornier issues:
What is the fair length of a copyright term?
What is the purpose of granting someone a copyright?
At what point should copyright violation go from a civil offense to a criminal one?
Are artists helped by copyright? If so, does the medium matter? Is it different for chart-topping bands than it is for much smaller acts?
Can limited copyright infringement have a positive benefit for a copyright holder, either through promotion or building a market?
When someone receives an infringing copy of something, how much potential revenue is lost to the copyright holder? For a downloaded movie, is it the cost of a ticket in a movie theater? The cost of a DVD? A percentage of the cost of a DVD? Does it depend on the quality of the copy?
Is copyright infringement the same as theft? Should it be called piracy?
Also, look at the history of copyright, and the current state for developing nations:
Was the US wrong to reprint English copyrighted books early in its history?
Was the early US a pirate nation, and if so, did that help or hurt the development of the country?
Do the copyright terms in use in the United States make sense worldwide, or should each country have their own rules?
Would developing countries benefit most from the same copyright laws used in the United States, or from more lenient laws?
Finally, look at some of the alternatives:
Can artists make a living releasing works without a copyright, or under a Creative Commons type license?
Is the GPL a good idea, and fair to other programmers?
What kind of license should work done by the government be released under?
If he's willing to moderate or participate in the debate, that could do a really good job of bringing the issues to the table. I would expect that most students would have different opinions from his about what's fair, and that you might not have to prepare them very much. At a minimum have them read up on the Wikipedia entries for Intellectual Property and The History of Copyright Law.
One of the key features of a rootkit is to hide files, not just from the user, but from the OS. This software does just this. It doesn't provide administrator access to the system, but it makes it much easier to hide that sort of thing. From what I've seen, it's much easier to get administrator privileges on a typical Windows system than it is to hide files. So this isn't a full rootkit, but it's the harder half of one.
- By saying that you would have pirated the game instead of buying it you are actually making the publishers point that a copy protection is necessary more valid.
No, because he said that he would have pirated it *because* of the invasive "copy protection", and that the copy protection is ineffective against downloading a cracked copy. From what I've heard, it is effective against installing a legitimate copy on multiple machines at the same time. If the game *didn't* have protection against that and someone had said "I'll just install it on my friend's machine so he doesn't have to buy it", that would be an argument for the type of copy protection used here.
No America citizen should be under surveillance by the government unless they got these people on film building bombs
So... they shouldn't be under surveillance, unless there's surveillance footage showing them building a bomb? This surveillance footage showing them building a bomb, where exactly would it come from?
There are reasonable reasons to have someone under surveillance. If someone has done minor illegal things but nothing major, but there's a strong possibility they may do something major, I have no problem if they're under surveillance. For example, if someone uses a fake ID to get into a bar, that's no reason to put them under surveillance. If someone uses a fake ID to buy tons of dangerous chemicals, and there's a reason to believe they may do something dangerous and illegal with those chemicals, I have no problem putting them under surveillance. Surveillance allows you to not only find what other illegal things someone might be doing, but also who else they may be working with. Of course, some theoretically neutral entity should make the decision about whether the surveillance is justified, like a judge, a court, a jury, etc. Saying that nobody should be under surveillance is going a bit for, as far as I'm concerned.
How much extra room do they have? I imagine that all the other various pipes they might try to put fiber in are already used for something (steam, water, sewage, etc.) and that they were made a certain diameter based on the expected amount of space they would need. If they start reducing the available space by putting in cables, what effect will it have on the maximum capacity? Will the cables interfere with the flow of whatever was supposed to be in the pipes?
If having all these extra cables in the pipes makes the sewer system back up more often, or makes the system require more maintenance then it does now, maybe this isn't such a good idea. Maybe it's better to just cough up the money up front and put in some more infrastructure.
That makes it pretty clear that having files in a folder marked as "shared" in a P2P program is clearly not distribution.
I've seen other posts where the amount the mafia is seeking depends on the number of items in such a folder. Clearly, this number is irrelevant. Assuming (as the mafia would) that the user uses all their available upstream bandwidth for nothing but sharing files, they could just as easily share one file repeatedly as they could share one after another.
Available upstream bandwidth is the factor which limits the maximum number of files transferred. Having said that, it is extremely unlikely that someone would use all their bandwidth for uploading files to random people they don't know. This would leave them unable to do anything else at all, as even downloading things requires a certain amount of upstream traffic. So how much bandwidth is someone likely to use to upload files to people? Nobody knows, and that's why merely having files available says nothing about what may or may not have been transferred.
Instead of pretending that making files available is somehow equivalent to transferring them, the mafia should be required to prove that they were actually transferred. That would be easy to do. Simply obtain permission from the relevant people to put a packet sniffer on the appropriate network segment and watch the traffic flow.
Well I must be a one-eyed retarded leper, because if I look at the reasons for the success of the US, I'd have to credit the country's vast natural resources, lack of aggressive, powerful neighbors, and history of almost total peace on its home soil for more than a century. None of that has anything to do with taxation policy.
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The reasonable cost-per-tag really depends on what you're tagging. If you're tagging flat panel TVs 20c/tag is perfectly reasonable. If you're doing item-level tagging on tupperware, even 5c/tag is too much. Unfortunately ultra-cheap items where the manufacturer's margins are super tight are the norm in Wal*Mart stores, so for most of them, 10-20c is way too much.
I tried to buy 2 Stevie Wonder songs using Amazon's MP3 store the other day. I didn't want to use their "one click to buy" mechanism but there was no alternative. I wanted to add them to a "shopping cart" so that I could order a bunch at once. I bought one song, clicked on the album title again, found the other song, bought it, then tried to hit the back button my browser a bunch of times to get back to the page I was at before I got the stevie wonder songs.
Somehow in that process, it decided that I wanted to buy the first song again -- i.e. an HTTP get = purchase a song, even when just refreshing a cache after the user hits the back arrow, so it downloaded that one song twice. I guess there's some logic somewhere in the system though, since I was only charged for the download once, but to me that points to a big flaw in the one-click ordering system. The back button should never constitute a purchase agreement.
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/ Oh wait, they don't have it for 360 yet? Ok, give them some time.
Before anybody here comments saying "it looks like a bomb" or "it doesn't look like a bomb", you should really qualify your viewpoint. Are you trained in explosives, or do you just watch a lot of TV?
On TV bombs have curly red wires, green and blue wires, red LED clocks that count backwards to zero, etc. On TV getting shot with a gun will knock you 6 feet back through the air. On the tires of a car skidding on a dirt road will make a squealing sound. On TV high explosives explode with bright orange flames, rolling up into the air.
Just because it looks like something you might see on 24 doesn't mean it looks like a bomb.
Note "hidden in the bras".
In my opinion, something out in the open is less likely to be a bomb. Bombers try to stay hidden until they're ready to detonate their bombs. This poor girl didn't do that. The police and airport workers overreacted to a movie plot threat.
Why's that, because that's what bombs look like on TV?
[quote]So, if Tommy Hilfiger or Polo or whatever, come out with the latest in breadboard tech clothing...we're all gonna get threatened with a machine gun? Sounds silly, doesn't it?[/quote] No, of course not, because anything mass-produced is known [i]a priori[/i] to be safe, of course. Anybody can tell at a glance if something is mass-produced, and since major corporations should be implicitly trusted, anything they produce is completely safe, especially if it has logos on it. What is obviously the sign of a terrorist is something that isn't yet mass produced. If you have a breadboard, you're a terrorist. If you have a messy product that's in the prototype stages, you're a terrorist. If you're a hobbyist playing with thru-hole resistors, capacitors and such, you're a terrorist. Only surface mount components are so safe you can't make bombs from them. But to be sure they're 100% safe, enclose them in professional-looking cases and plaster them with logos. Better safe than sorry.
Perhaps it's a problem that a TSA screener is considered a layperson instead of a bomb expert?
You know... seeing as their one and only job is preventing bombs (and other dangerous things) from getting onto planes?
And Canada has 1/10th the population of the US...
Hey NYCL, is it really Ms. Lindor who is "pointing out to the Judge not only that the RIAA's arguments had no legal basis, but also that its brief was completely silent as to any justification for the record companies' copyright-pooling agreement" etc.? Or is it you (collectively) as her attorneys who are doing all these things, and she's encouraging you and signing off on them?
I'd be really impressed if a "home health worker who has never even used a computer" was able to such an amazing job of fighting off the RIAA, but if it really is you guys, on her behalf, who are fighting the good fight and coming up with these legal maneuvers, you deserve some credit too. How involved is she in her own defense? Is she now using a computer, looking up case law, etc. or is she merely encouraging you to fight as vigorously as you can?
What's amazing to me is that he was trying to do a burnout on a drag bike with a super wide slick back tire. Wow.
Joe should hide $500/year under his mattress so he can use it when the lawyers come calling.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know a lot of MITers.
Being suspicious and combative is not a crime, nor should it be. Feel free to lobby your lawmaker to draft an "Arrogant Asshole" law. See how far you get.
I disagree that this guy wanted to "feel superior to the lowly Circuit City workers". It seems to me that all he wanted to do was exercise his rights: "I am not interested in living my life smoothly. I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being."
Personally, I think this guy is standing up for me more than any soldier. What is the use of laws and civil rights if they can simply be ignored when someone is acting suspicious? What if Circuit City decided that instead of just looking into your bag as you left, their new store policy was a pat down? Sure, you could go elsewhere, but other stores might just jump on the bandwagon and enact the same policy. Once people got used to the pat down, why not a strip search, or at least an automatic strip search with some kind of IR camera. Hey, if you're not stealing things, you have nothing to lose, right?
Even without the slippery slope argument, what if you threw your purchases into your knapsack, on top of your "coping with AIDS" booklet you just got from your doctor, or on top of your "surviving the trauma of rape" pamphlet. In a small town, the guy searching your bag may know you, and may see you often. Someone demanding to search your bag may see things you don't want anybody to see, even though you've done nothing wrong.
As for the officer, he arrested the guy for a non-existent crime due to his poor understanding of the law. If anybody's an arrogant asshole it's the cop who: 1) arrested the guy for a non-existent crime, 2) didn't remember to read him his Miranda rights.
I'm glad you see that the Circuit City people and the cop are also in the wrong, but you're not going far enough. The Circuit City people deserve jail time for illegally detaining him. Sure, they were just following corporate policy, but so what. That's no excuse for breaking the law. The cop deserves jail time for false arrest. If ignorance of the law is no excuse for the average joe, it certainly shouldn't be an excuse for an officer of the law.
Distribution != creating derivative works.
I'll believe it when I can actually buy one. Much as I'd like a flying car, his always seem to be "Real Soon Now(TM)" AFAIK, Moller has never actually had anything for sale. Downside(R) lists his company as a scam because it has been a few years from production for 30 years. There have also been SEC complaints for "fraudulent, unregistered offering and the filing of a fraudulent Form 10-SB by Moller International, Inc. ("MI" or "the company"), a California company engaged in the development of a personal aircraft known as "the Skycar.""
I'd like to be wrong, but I sure won't be putting down any money just yet.
The right to download is one thing, the right to take as part of a compilation is something else entirely. Nobody is complaining that someone at VH1 downloaded the file. What's at issue was whether VH1 violated his copyright by including his video in their TV show without asking. I looked and I can't find anything about YouTube's copyright stance on material people upload, but unless they require that everything you upload be placed in the public domain, or something similar, VH1 had no automatic right to use it in their TV show.
Sure sounds to me like it wasn't the entire show.
Have you really looked up what Fair Use really means?
VH1 copied his commercial in its entirety for use in its entertainment, non-educational show. For something to qualify as Fair Use, four things are considered:
For test #1, "Web Junk 2.0" is commercial, not nonprofit educational. Test #2 may have some bearing, the copyrighted work (the political ad), isn't designed as an artistic work, however it seems more like art than it does like facts useful to the public, and the way in which it was used by VH1 is due to its artistic nature. Test #3 is a complete failure for VH1, from what he's saying, they used it in its entirety. Test #4 is another tricky one. There never was any market or value for the work.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like those tests indicate that what VH1 did is not covered under fair use.
On the other hand, what he did seems like it would be covered.
It seems clear to me that his use was fair, their use was unfair.
Yeah, that's really the best approach. Try to get the students thinking about a lot of the thornier issues:
Also, look at the history of copyright, and the current state for developing nations:
Finally, look at some of the alternatives:
If he's willing to moderate or participate in the debate, that could do a really good job of bringing the issues to the table. I would expect that most students would have different opinions from his about what's fair, and that you might not have to prepare them very much. At a minimum have them read up on the Wikipedia entries for Intellectual Property and The History of Copyright Law.
One of the key features of a rootkit is to hide files, not just from the user, but from the OS. This software does just this. It doesn't provide administrator access to the system, but it makes it much easier to hide that sort of thing. From what I've seen, it's much easier to get administrator privileges on a typical Windows system than it is to hide files. So this isn't a full rootkit, but it's the harder half of one.
No, because he said that he would have pirated it *because* of the invasive "copy protection", and that the copy protection is ineffective against downloading a cracked copy. From what I've heard, it is effective against installing a legitimate copy on multiple machines at the same time. If the game *didn't* have protection against that and someone had said "I'll just install it on my friend's machine so he doesn't have to buy it", that would be an argument for the type of copy protection used here.
So... they shouldn't be under surveillance, unless there's surveillance footage showing them building a bomb? This surveillance footage showing them building a bomb, where exactly would it come from?
There are reasonable reasons to have someone under surveillance. If someone has done minor illegal things but nothing major, but there's a strong possibility they may do something major, I have no problem if they're under surveillance. For example, if someone uses a fake ID to get into a bar, that's no reason to put them under surveillance. If someone uses a fake ID to buy tons of dangerous chemicals, and there's a reason to believe they may do something dangerous and illegal with those chemicals, I have no problem putting them under surveillance. Surveillance allows you to not only find what other illegal things someone might be doing, but also who else they may be working with. Of course, some theoretically neutral entity should make the decision about whether the surveillance is justified, like a judge, a court, a jury, etc. Saying that nobody should be under surveillance is going a bit for, as far as I'm concerned.
How much extra room do they have? I imagine that all the other various pipes they might try to put fiber in are already used for something (steam, water, sewage, etc.) and that they were made a certain diameter based on the expected amount of space they would need. If they start reducing the available space by putting in cables, what effect will it have on the maximum capacity? Will the cables interfere with the flow of whatever was supposed to be in the pipes?
If having all these extra cables in the pipes makes the sewer system back up more often, or makes the system require more maintenance then it does now, maybe this isn't such a good idea. Maybe it's better to just cough up the money up front and put in some more infrastructure.
That makes it pretty clear that having files in a folder marked as "shared" in a P2P program is clearly not distribution.
I've seen other posts where the amount the mafia is seeking depends on the number of items in such a folder. Clearly, this number is irrelevant. Assuming (as the mafia would) that the user uses all their available upstream bandwidth for nothing but sharing files, they could just as easily share one file repeatedly as they could share one after another.
Available upstream bandwidth is the factor which limits the maximum number of files transferred. Having said that, it is extremely unlikely that someone would use all their bandwidth for uploading files to random people they don't know. This would leave them unable to do anything else at all, as even downloading things requires a certain amount of upstream traffic. So how much bandwidth is someone likely to use to upload files to people? Nobody knows, and that's why merely having files available says nothing about what may or may not have been transferred.
Instead of pretending that making files available is somehow equivalent to transferring them, the mafia should be required to prove that they were actually transferred. That would be easy to do. Simply obtain permission from the relevant people to put a packet sniffer on the appropriate network segment and watch the traffic flow.
Well I must be a one-eyed retarded leper, because if I look at the reasons for the success of the US, I'd have to credit the country's vast natural resources, lack of aggressive, powerful neighbors, and history of almost total peace on its home soil for more than a century. None of that has anything to do with taxation policy.