The whatwasthat Bay now? Oh... er... "Pirate" Bay... Right. No obvious support or encouragement for copyright infringement there.
The problem is that any law that still allows legitimate activity (as they should) will have to allow generous loopholes. Yes, they may "only be hosting harmless trackers", for instance, but let's not kid ourselves as to the goals.
I've seen several reasoned, articulate rebuttals to anti-MS bullshit* around here, and nearly every such post gets modded into oblivion and the poster labelled as a fanboy shill. It's really quite sad, because in the same thread there will usually be several incoherent anti-MS rants that somehow get +5 Informative.
And this argument, this is a classic too. Where are these reams of eloquently expressed and concretely reasoned ideas that are apparently instawhackamoled to -1 because they go counter to the prevailing opinion? I'll agree that a lousy argument that swims with the current is all-too-often undeservedly upmodded, but if an idea is backed by displayed truth and logic, and eloquently put forth, it rarely eats a downmod, and even that is often corrected by cooler heads.
Hell, I vocally support copyright protection. Try that around here sometime.
(b) Why do you believe justice should be cheap? Medicine isn't cheap. Gas isn't cheap. Media isn't cheap.
Ideally, justice should be natural. It is, after all, nothing more than the rebalancing of inequities. "Just" is "the way things should be". Unfortunately, the fuzzy definition of "equity" and peoples' interests in pushing that definition to their favor (or forgoing it entirely) means that an obtuse snarl of laws and procedures has been grown to define fairness in every conceivable situation. With this snarl comes those who adept at navigating it, and as in most competitive systems, oneupsmanship is often a ratcheting, irreversible process, and the barrier to entry in order to regain justice-- a state of the world being exactly as it should be-- involves expensive professionals and obtuse procedures, because that's the way it is.
I'm not saying that knowledgeable professionals should not be paid, or that lawyers do no work, simply that it's a shame that the simple process of regaining fairness should be a process that requires the work of such a rare practitioner. "Ignorance is no excuse" becomes an obvious farce when the laws that all laymen are bound under are so snarled that they require an $x-an-hour professional to determine that a particular behavior may even be punishable.
(c) Lawyers aren't screwing up the system: lawyers cannot do anything clients don't pay them to do. That's like saying doctors are screwing up the medical system: the responsibility lies in the people who pay lawyers to do things.
So, they're only professionals giving trained advice and guidance so far as they do well for the world, but when it comes to detrimental effect, they're merely tools of their clients, incapable of resisting or offering alternatives. Although I understand that in many cases, what you don't stoop to the other guy will (be the other guy an opponent or your client's alternative), this is shaky. Rebut the accusations or own up to the faults-- don't pass the buck.
I just wish that callbacks were more common. There are only one or two places I ever deal with that do that, but it makes a whole lot more sense than making everyone stick to their phone and listen to hold music.
In that situation, I'd recommend looking for a good used laptop. That's what I did to get mine, and I find it to be a good tradeoff. There are little things, like you mentioned, like the keyboard, available ports, construction quality, that are just done better in a higher-end laptop. I've got a Dell Latitude from about 2000-2001 that I got for about $600 (although I've seen them for $300-400-- my fault for the instant gratification bug) and to compare it with the low-end modern laptop I use at work, I like mine more. It's a little more rugged (the Latitudes, IIRC, were the business-class and rather hardy models), and the keyboard is solid and a standard layout (something that bugs the hell out of me on my work machine). It's got a full array of ports and hot-swappable batteries, and I can find replacement accessories much cheaper, since it was pretty much "the" business machine, meaning that the used-parts store around me is flooded with Latitude C-Series docks, power supplies, and all that. About the only drawback is that new batteries can be expensive and necessary, although I got lucky enough to get a new one off a guy who was dumping his own Latitude after he'd busted the screen. The processing power is solid enough for everything I use it for (it plays DVDs, runs Photoshop well enough to do in a pinch, and does the Web like no problem), and I'm slowly loading up on the RAM as I find it.
Enough so that their customers will endure a significant lack of software offerings to stay their customers.
I disagree here. With things like iLife and Final Cut, I think a lot of Apple's market lately is from their proprietary exclusive software (and hardware). They might not have the edge in breadth of software (I still can't find a fraction of what the Wintel platform offers for freeware), but their strategies of offering a small number of apps unique to the platform, plus enough general apps to get by out-of-the-box, does them well.
Unless they were misrepresenting your face as an endorsement, labeling, or other relation to you and your service, I don't think you'd have a defensible position. It's no infringement to take a photo of a street scene with a business' sign in the frame, unless there's a real chance of people thinking the trademark-holder endorsed the photo.
Why wouldn't I just steal children and television sets from my hometown... especially given the rising price of gas? It's a possible argument you've got there, but it's a real stretch. If I was looking for children, I'd need only go looking where children congregate, locally, or perhaps make friends online. If I was looking for people's stuff, I'd get a much more high-res and versatile experience just going out and taking a walk or taking my own photos. Even if I lived in one of those cities, the distorted, low-res, and aged images would be nearly useless.
Google's spell checking is purely statistical, if a majority (or even just a "large number") of people spell the word incorrectly, Google corrects to that incorrect spelling of the word.
I know it's a possibility, but has this ever actually come up? Although I could understand that a lot of people could be looking for the wrong information, I would expect that a majority of the indexed sites about that information would have the term spelled correctly.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong?
Another "not the original poster", but here's my take... and mind you, I'm a pro-copyright/anti-piracy advocate in general.
I suppose that I must agree that mixtaping should remain within the sphere of things that are illegal, simply because to carve a niche out for it would doubtlessly leave legal loopholes that would allow legitimately wholesale piracy.
However, I think that personal mixtaping is enough of an expressive work on the part of the mixtaper (I'll admit, it's a minimally creative action, simply compiling together a list of songs, but it is moreso than simply putting your "Shares" directory online) to overcome the trivial "piracy" of transferring a few songs over, once.
In short-- mixtaping is minutely, infinitesimally, trivially damaging, but can be a form of interpersonal creative expression for the people doing it, and... well... who cares? There is some element of the "advertising" angle in there as well, although I've never liked that argument, as I'm of the mind that it's up to the merchant to advertise or not as they see fit.
Thing of it is, you could probably pull something like that off quite easily now with the advent of USB and PnP. You could even homebrew something-- hide a hub in there, hook in a flashdrive with the virus on Autorun, and put the printer itself back in line. Make the virus (trojan?) quickly install itself, then hide the flashdrive.
I wonder if someone could reasonably sue MS for 'usurping' someone's copyright due to this. I'm reasonably knowledgeable about copyright, but not that knowledgeable.
I doubt it. The person loading the files onto the Zune (w|sh)ould know its sharing characteristics of it, and they're loading it on of their own will. I could see there being some violation if the license for the content explicitly forbid applying DRM to the file, but even then, Microsoft is only providing the mechanism, not the decision to use it... and open-licensors don't tend to sue their licensees for such trifles.
It's really one of those curious situations where an incomplete extra feature ends up looking more like a limitation, even against competitors that don't have the feature at all, because there is an obvious shortfall from what is clearly possible.
Not that I'm Zune-cheerleading. I'm still sticking with plain ol' MP3/CD players.
One large practical problem in collecting state taxes for buying across state lines is that everyone selling-- from a store down to some Ebayer, would have to know the tax rates and codes, and have to send off money to each state that any of their customers were from. This could be said to be a deal-breaking hairball.
As far as the constitutional angle goes, it does prevent individual states from protectionism and money-grabbing by creating inflated or restrictive tariffs for items coming into or out of their states.
Read on... my point was that right-click-blocking is not and access control, hence no "cracking" took place, and that that argument is more sound (and true) than saying it's fair game to circumvent because it's a trivially-crackable access control.
As an interested re-user, just imagine trying to look that up. Now, even once you tracked down the owner, you have to determine who is the legal money-maker, how much money they're making, and how much of it is a result of that work.
To be clear, though, the way it was set up, the people who dialled in the back door weren't actually customers. They may be receiving the product-- one half of a customer relationship-- but they aren't contributing their ad-views-- the other half of the relationship.
Now, I'm not saying that alternative-platform listeners using this method may actually be able become customers, that the radio station couldn't change their system to allow these people to be customers, or that this whole debacle couldn't cause fallout among paying/ad-viewing customers, just that it isn't actually a case of them "suing the customer".
Still, though, just as a crackable WEP WiFi point is no longer a "open invitation", circumventing an access-control device that is easily circumvented does not mean that it was open.
I think a better argument would be that there was no "hacking" of a poorly-made access-control mechanism, because the mechanism was flat-out not an access control device in the first place.
Interpretation and execution of the JavaScript language that the right-click blocking used is an optional browser feature, so the blocking itself is inherently optional. Furthermore, the feature of JS that they were trying to exploit (the modality of the alert() box) is not specified as an access control feature, nor is it specified (and it's certainly not guaranteed) to function in a manner that would control access.
I think (might be wrong) that most of the problems come from some apps which:
1.) Use the DTD URI to determine a document's type, from a list of known URI/type associations in the application. (For instance, a web browser that checks the DTD to determine whether to render in HTML or XHTML mode.)
and
2.) Validate the document against the DTD from the copy stored at the URI (given that the URI is a URL... it does not necessarily have to be.)
And, if the DTD isn't at the URL (fails on 2), it barfs from not being able to validate the document. However, if the URI is not one from its known list (hosted elsewhere, for instance), it would not know which of its rendering schemes to use to display/process/etc. the document.
Slashdot Mirror
The whatwasthat Bay now? Oh... er... "Pirate" Bay... Right. No obvious support or encouragement for copyright infringement there.
The problem is that any law that still allows legitimate activity (as they should) will have to allow generous loopholes. Yes, they may "only be hosting harmless trackers", for instance, but let's not kid ourselves as to the goals.
I've seen several reasoned, articulate rebuttals to anti-MS bullshit* around here, and nearly every such post gets modded into oblivion and the poster labelled as a fanboy shill. It's really quite sad, because in the same thread there will usually be several incoherent anti-MS rants that somehow get +5 Informative.
And this argument, this is a classic too. Where are these reams of eloquently expressed and concretely reasoned ideas that are apparently instawhackamoled to -1 because they go counter to the prevailing opinion? I'll agree that a lousy argument that swims with the current is all-too-often undeservedly upmodded, but if an idea is backed by displayed truth and logic, and eloquently put forth, it rarely eats a downmod, and even that is often corrected by cooler heads.
Hell, I vocally support copyright protection. Try that around here sometime.
(b) Why do you believe justice should be cheap? Medicine isn't cheap. Gas isn't cheap. Media isn't cheap.
Ideally, justice should be natural. It is, after all, nothing more than the rebalancing of inequities. "Just" is "the way things should be". Unfortunately, the fuzzy definition of "equity" and peoples' interests in pushing that definition to their favor (or forgoing it entirely) means that an obtuse snarl of laws and procedures has been grown to define fairness in every conceivable situation. With this snarl comes those who adept at navigating it, and as in most competitive systems, oneupsmanship is often a ratcheting, irreversible process, and the barrier to entry in order to regain justice-- a state of the world being exactly as it should be-- involves expensive professionals and obtuse procedures, because that's the way it is.
I'm not saying that knowledgeable professionals should not be paid, or that lawyers do no work, simply that it's a shame that the simple process of regaining fairness should be a process that requires the work of such a rare practitioner. "Ignorance is no excuse" becomes an obvious farce when the laws that all laymen are bound under are so snarled that they require an $x-an-hour professional to determine that a particular behavior may even be punishable.
(c) Lawyers aren't screwing up the system: lawyers cannot do anything clients don't pay them to do. That's like saying doctors are screwing up the medical system: the responsibility lies in the people who pay lawyers to do things.
So, they're only professionals giving trained advice and guidance so far as they do well for the world, but when it comes to detrimental effect, they're merely tools of their clients, incapable of resisting or offering alternatives. Although I understand that in many cases, what you don't stoop to the other guy will (be the other guy an opponent or your client's alternative), this is shaky. Rebut the accusations or own up to the faults-- don't pass the buck.
I just wish that callbacks were more common. There are only one or two places I ever deal with that do that, but it makes a whole lot more sense than making everyone stick to their phone and listen to hold music.
In that situation, I'd recommend looking for a good used laptop. That's what I did to get mine, and I find it to be a good tradeoff. There are little things, like you mentioned, like the keyboard, available ports, construction quality, that are just done better in a higher-end laptop. I've got a Dell Latitude from about 2000-2001 that I got for about $600 (although I've seen them for $300-400-- my fault for the instant gratification bug) and to compare it with the low-end modern laptop I use at work, I like mine more. It's a little more rugged (the Latitudes, IIRC, were the business-class and rather hardy models), and the keyboard is solid and a standard layout (something that bugs the hell out of me on my work machine). It's got a full array of ports and hot-swappable batteries, and I can find replacement accessories much cheaper, since it was pretty much "the" business machine, meaning that the used-parts store around me is flooded with Latitude C-Series docks, power supplies, and all that. About the only drawback is that new batteries can be expensive and necessary, although I got lucky enough to get a new one off a guy who was dumping his own Latitude after he'd busted the screen. The processing power is solid enough for everything I use it for (it plays DVDs, runs Photoshop well enough to do in a pinch, and does the Web like no problem), and I'm slowly loading up on the RAM as I find it.
Enough so that their customers will endure a significant lack of software offerings to stay their customers.
I disagree here. With things like iLife and Final Cut, I think a lot of Apple's market lately is from their proprietary exclusive software (and hardware). They might not have the edge in breadth of software (I still can't find a fraction of what the Wintel platform offers for freeware), but their strategies of offering a small number of apps unique to the platform, plus enough general apps to get by out-of-the-box, does them well.
Unless they were misrepresenting your face as an endorsement, labeling, or other relation to you and your service, I don't think you'd have a defensible position. It's no infringement to take a photo of a street scene with a business' sign in the frame, unless there's a real chance of people thinking the trademark-holder endorsed the photo.
Denver? New York? Florida? I live in Michigan.
Why wouldn't I just steal children and television sets from my hometown... especially given the rising price of gas? It's a possible argument you've got there, but it's a real stretch. If I was looking for children, I'd need only go looking where children congregate, locally, or perhaps make friends online. If I was looking for people's stuff, I'd get a much more high-res and versatile experience just going out and taking a walk or taking my own photos. Even if I lived in one of those cities, the distorted, low-res, and aged images would be nearly useless.
Google's spell checking is purely statistical, if a majority (or even just a "large number") of people spell the word incorrectly, Google corrects to that incorrect spelling of the word.
I know it's a possibility, but has this ever actually come up? Although I could understand that a lot of people could be looking for the wrong information, I would expect that a majority of the indexed sites about that information would have the term spelled correctly.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong?
... well... who cares? There is some element of the "advertising" angle in there as well, although I've never liked that argument, as I'm of the mind that it's up to the merchant to advertise or not as they see fit.
Another "not the original poster", but here's my take... and mind you, I'm a pro-copyright/anti-piracy advocate in general.
I suppose that I must agree that mixtaping should remain within the sphere of things that are illegal, simply because to carve a niche out for it would doubtlessly leave legal loopholes that would allow legitimately wholesale piracy.
However, I think that personal mixtaping is enough of an expressive work on the part of the mixtaper (I'll admit, it's a minimally creative action, simply compiling together a list of songs, but it is moreso than simply putting your "Shares" directory online) to overcome the trivial "piracy" of transferring a few songs over, once.
In short-- mixtaping is minutely, infinitesimally, trivially damaging, but can be a form of interpersonal creative expression for the people doing it, and
Hell, there's even precedent with airplanes. It's pretty much a dead-end.
Thing of it is, you could probably pull something like that off quite easily now with the advent of USB and PnP. You could even homebrew something-- hide a hub in there, hook in a flashdrive with the virus on Autorun, and put the printer itself back in line. Make the virus (trojan?) quickly install itself, then hide the flashdrive.
Then again, everyone except the top 5 gets... well... to sign their work over to Heinz.
I tend to mod 'em "Insightful", as well-executed humor often must be. Then of course, I go and make a comment and foul the thing up anyway.
Yet the Mystic Processes still keep showering me with modpoints.
I wonder if someone could reasonably sue MS for 'usurping' someone's copyright due to this. I'm reasonably knowledgeable about copyright, but not that knowledgeable.
I doubt it. The person loading the files onto the Zune (w|sh)ould know its sharing characteristics of it, and they're loading it on of their own will. I could see there being some violation if the license for the content explicitly forbid applying DRM to the file, but even then, Microsoft is only providing the mechanism, not the decision to use it... and open-licensors don't tend to sue their licensees for such trifles.
It's really one of those curious situations where an incomplete extra feature ends up looking more like a limitation, even against competitors that don't have the feature at all, because there is an obvious shortfall from what is clearly possible.
Not that I'm Zune-cheerleading. I'm still sticking with plain ol' MP3/CD players.
Yes... but at what cost.
For that matter, is backup even covered as a Fair Use? Where is backup covered? Or is it?
One large practical problem in collecting state taxes for buying across state lines is that everyone selling-- from a store down to some Ebayer, would have to know the tax rates and codes, and have to send off money to each state that any of their customers were from. This could be said to be a deal-breaking hairball.
As far as the constitutional angle goes, it does prevent individual states from protectionism and money-grabbing by creating inflated or restrictive tariffs for items coming into or out of their states.
Read on... my point was that right-click-blocking is not and access control, hence no "cracking" took place, and that that argument is more sound (and true) than saying it's fair game to circumvent because it's a trivially-crackable access control.
As an interested re-user, just imagine trying to look that up. Now, even once you tracked down the owner, you have to determine who is the legal money-maker, how much money they're making, and how much of it is a result of that work.
Don't forget after-the-fact DVD sales. That's become a large new part (read: moneymaker) for the TV studios.
To be clear, though, the way it was set up, the people who dialled in the back door weren't actually customers. They may be receiving the product-- one half of a customer relationship-- but they aren't contributing their ad-views-- the other half of the relationship.
Now, I'm not saying that alternative-platform listeners using this method may actually be able become customers, that the radio station couldn't change their system to allow these people to be customers, or that this whole debacle couldn't cause fallout among paying/ad-viewing customers, just that it isn't actually a case of them "suing the customer".
Still, though, just as a crackable WEP WiFi point is no longer a "open invitation", circumventing an access-control device that is easily circumvented does not mean that it was open.
I think a better argument would be that there was no "hacking" of a poorly-made access-control mechanism, because the mechanism was flat-out not an access control device in the first place.
Interpretation and execution of the JavaScript language that the right-click blocking used is an optional browser feature, so the blocking itself is inherently optional. Furthermore, the feature of JS that they were trying to exploit (the modality of the alert() box) is not specified as an access control feature, nor is it specified (and it's certainly not guaranteed) to function in a manner that would control access.
I think (might be wrong) that most of the problems come from some apps which:
1.) Use the DTD URI to determine a document's type, from a list of known URI/type associations in the application. (For instance, a web browser that checks the DTD to determine whether to render in HTML or XHTML mode.)
and
2.) Validate the document against the DTD from the copy stored at the URI (given that the URI is a URL... it does not necessarily have to be.)
And, if the DTD isn't at the URL (fails on 2), it barfs from not being able to validate the document. However, if the URI is not one from its known list (hosted elsewhere, for instance), it would not know which of its rendering schemes to use to display/process/etc. the document.
Solution: Less trendy hardware. Honestly-- ya' see blue, ya' walk away.