Heck, I just priced out and ordered 2 laptops for 2 different clients-- they come with i3s, 4GB of RAM, a 4hr battery life, and very high build quality, all for under $500. Where the heck could you have gotten a laptop anywhere close to that value 3 years ago? A celeron? A crappy AMD mobile?
Seriously, come back to reality please.
Look, not all of us are benchmarking machines on a constant basis. Nor do we all constantly buy and install new hardware. I get a new laptop when my company gives me one, and I replace my desktop every couple of years. Beyond that, the only machines I'm involved in are ones we plan out for work -- and even then, the server team does the physical builds. I just tell them that I need x machines so I can install my stuff and build it out. None of the tasks I run are sufficiently CPU intensive to notice for the most part --- but IO speeds, now that's a big deal.
So when I look at the company I bought my last several machines from, and see what looks like the same specs as three years ago... it's hard to see that anything significant has happened. That quad core AMD with 4GB still has the same CPU speed as it did a couple of years ago. It might be a bit cheaper, but the posted specs are pretty much identical. It's not like there's anything which makes me think "oooh, this machine is faster than what I have now."
Unless you have a large amount of turnover of machines, to simply read the specs of machines they read like they did 2-3 years ago. If you're talking about consumer machines like you'd buy at Best Buy, I'd be surprised if there's all that much difference over the last few years.
Get off your sanctimonious high horse and get over yourself.
While the there is a good point buried in that question, the speed of light through dirt and rock, just like any other opaque materials, is, well, zero.
Except that neutrinos which pass right through dirt and rock like it's not there are still supposed to be bounded by the speed of light.
We're not talking about shining a flashlight here.:-P
No, but if you actually RTFA, the author is talking about machines no longer getting faster. There's even a graph showing the speed of Intel processors at release, and it plateaued several years ago.
Clock speeds haven't grown any more, we just keep throwing more cores on. (Don't get me wrong, I love me some CPU cores.)
I realize Moore's law is about transistor density, but there was a good period of time where CPU speed was growing proportionally with the Moore's law curve. Back in the early 90's, CPU speed actually did double every couple of months.
No, but if I look at consumer laptops, it's more or less the same quad-core AMD CPU as I bought three years ago. There actually was a good solid decade where the CPU speed was growing at super crazy speeds.
In a lot of ways, I don't miss the whole "oh, crap, the machine I bought six months ago is half the speed of the one I can buy now"... there was nothing more annoying than spending $2K on a box only to have it become obsolete right away.
Though, I am hoping that next time I get a new PC I can go beyond the 4 cores/8GB of RAM I have now and not be outrageously expensive. That would rock.
You should at least open the bet with 'back then, we ate our own shit' -> then add 'young whippersnappers' and whatnot. noone can top 'eating our own shit back at that time'
It seems computers have been stuck at 3GHz (plus or minus a bit) for a while.
Sure, we've added more cores and the like, but it's interesting to see that plateau at the end of the curve.
I'm sure some things actually are faster, but in terms of what's available to consumers, it hasn't seemed to get all that much faster the last few years.
So, if I buy a harddrive from someone, and it has some software installed on it, that means that I can do whatever I want with it because I didn't agree to the ToS! Right...?
Someone should distribute the information for the entire management-level people at B&N. Phone, address, list of children, VISA numbers... And, then of course, anybody with that information would say that they couldn't possibly be bound by any terms of use because they never made any agreement.
That might demonstrate to these people why customers do not want their information to be bought and sold.
In Canada, I believe this would be illegal, because we actually have privacy legislation designed to limit what companies can do with your information.
Sadly, I just can't see the US passing a law which would actually restrict what a corporation can do -- the lawmakers are too beholden to corporate interests.
It's so obvious that it's stated clearly in the article that you didn't bother reading. Hit Submit and run like hell works pretty well on Slashdot, right?
And, what did you contribute other than a snide remark?
Shallow water squid will eat each other if they get too close. At depths when they can't see one another, it's hardly surprising they would run like hell after an attempt at mating.
This is like a lot of other science... when someone observes it and documents it, it's fairly obvious. Until someone observes it, it's a complete mystery.
That doesn't mean that even if you only know a small amount about squid, you might not read the summary and kinda go "well, yeah, they're carnivorous".
I don't know where you live, but here all ATM's are in walls, so unless you print a whole building...
In both Canada and the US I have routinely seen free-standing ATMs (usually with jacked up transaction fees) in all kinds of places for over a decade now... hotels, bars, convenience stores, malls, airports.
I'm surprised you've never seen them -- they're actually quite common. Like, all over the place common. They've been in widespread use since at least 1998 when I spent some time in San Francisco.
Nobody seriously dedicated to something is flexible in their dedication. All the people who got something big done were uncompromising about it.
Yes, but unlike Martin Luther King and civil rights, I'm in favor of software not always being something which needs to be open.
Sure, RMS believes in it... that's fine. But not everybody agrees with him. At a certain point, his opinion becomes him telling other people what they're free to do.
If he holds a rigid "either/or" position on if, for example, software that I write needs to be open or not... well, he can go to hell because he doesn't get a vote on what it I do with code I write.
If all you're doing is trying to tell me that I'm committing some form of sin because I write proprietary software, you're a rabid zealot, and I will treat you as such.
Which, is what a lot of people do with RMS... they just tune him out as someone who has a very loud opinion, but that it's none of his damned business.
Disagreement is fine, calling people "rabid Stallmanites" is insulting and gets a troll mod from me automatically. If you seriously want to make that point you can make it a bit more politely.
It's sometimes difficult to not think like then when you're confronted with someone who has a rigid, ideological position, whose starting point in all discussions is that they're right and you're wrong, and there is no room for any give.
RMS and some people who agree with him are sufficiently fixed in their ideology that it's hard not to end up saying "rabid Stallmanites".
You might as well try to convince someone their religion is wrong as try to convince RMS that not all software needs to be open. He and others are pretty inflexible on this position.
The world, aside from the ranks of the rabid Stallmanites, only cares whether it's open, not whether it meets Stallman's ethical standards.
That's only true if you define "world" to be people who want it open.
If you want to define the "world" as every potential user of Android, the vast majority DON'T CARE if it's open. They care that it works, that's all.
People who rigidly cling to the notion that any software which hasn't been provided in a ideologically pure enough way is a Great Evil... well, those people are as rabid and narrow minded as any other fanatic.
It's sad you got a Troll mod for pointing out that not everyone cares what RMS has to say. Because, an awful lot of us tuned him out years ago. Sure, he's a smart guy who has been an advocate for free software... but his completely inflexible view that all software must live up to his notion, well, I just can't agree with him.
To me, he's that crazy guy on the corner with a "The End is Nigh" sign. Most of the times when I hear what he has to say, I disagree with him and then tune him out.
Computer is something that has either some kind of "intelligence" or performs something more than entertaining: some useful work.
Your wireless router has more rights to be called a computer than your iPad.
Horseshit.
In the strictest sense of the word, if it's capable of running a Turing complete language, it's a computer.
I have a telnet client on my iPad, I have a remote desktop client, I have a WebEx client, and I have several tools and text editors I use for productivity and note taking. I've got google maps, a web browser, Dragon Dictate if I really want it, and language references for at least 3 different programming languages. I have documented systems using a mind-mapping application I have, and I have reviewed 400 page PDF documents for work on it.
There is software that allows you to read and edit Office documents, and if you buy a bluetooth keyboard, you can have a physical keyboard without any problems. Type away.
You may not like the iPad, and you might not like the interface on it... but your subjective definition of what constitutes a computer is self serving and just plain wrong. In some ways, it's a much more useful and powerful computer than was a DOS machine in the mid-late 80s.
Arguably, when you're talking about smart phones having dual core CPUs (I'm talking about general purpose CPUs here), and the ability to do a lot of things... if you are claiming that a tablet or a modern smart phone isn't a computer, then you don't understand what a computer is.
I wonder if, in 30 years, we'll be talking about the discovery of exomoons.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I seem to recall in the early-mid 90's, some of my astronomy geek friends... at the time detecting an exo-planet was an exciting prospect, gravitational lensing was something to hope for, and possibly that black holes hadn't been confirmed by observation but were widely accepted.
Now exoplanets get discovered almost daily, we've confirmed through observation a bunch of black holes, and the universe continues to be even cooler and more complex than we'd even realized.
So, can anybody who understand this explain a little more.
Is the orbit of the planet around both stars, making it like the orbit is eccentric around some center of mass common to the two stars?
If it's that, then I think I get this. If it's anything beyond that, then I'm afraid my meager understanding of Kepplers laws falls apart.
Most importantly, I love this part:
Computer models show that in early 2018, the planetary transits across the larger star will disappear from Kepler' view until around 2042. The passages across the smaller star's face, already slipping from view, will vanish in May 2014, and won't be back for 35 years.
the stuff we've just discovered will go away for the next 30+ years. That's really quite cool, since the window in which we could have identified this and worked it out is likely fairly short ever since we identified the very first exoplanets back in the 90s or so.
It's not legal, you can't put terms in a contract like that, there's no way that would ever stand up in court.
Sadly, I don't think there's enough established case-law and precedent to make that a guaranteed thing.
For example, SCOTUS has ruled that they can force you to arbitration... so as long as SCOTUS figures the rights of companies trump yours, I fear what you say might not be true.
But how many of the "unwashed masses" do actually flash their BIOS?
And, in fairness to the "unwashed masses"... how many of the, er, "washed masses" actually do this?
In 16 years in the computer industry, plus university and high school... I have never flashed a BIOS. It simply doesn't come up for me. Granted, I don't build systems, but I've simply never needed to do this.
No, seriously... when I first saw syntax highlighting I was literally like "WTF is this crap". It was just a jumble of colors on the screen, and I found it quite distracting.
I was used to working on monochrome VT52s and VT100s... so the first time I saw syntax highlighting, I turned it off. To this day, I find the color output of "ls" actually conveys less information that knowing that an "@" is a symlink.
Now, of course, I'll take syntax highlighting any day of the week. But it really did take me several years to get there, because I was used to working in vi, and vi didn't do such things.
I like bashing faceless mega corporations as much as the next guy, but this seems to be... a benign act.
It's worse than that... it's almost designed to improve the overall state of the art, without Intel gaining exclusive access to the research, thereby making it possible for just anybody to gain from this. I'm outraged.
I mean, that's almost communism. No patents? No royalties? No licensing fees? No lawyers? Just good old fashioned university research opened up for all to see?
Do you realize how badly this could cripple the economy?;-)
(Kidding aside... I wonder if the academic journals would muck with this somehow. They take copyright of the papers, for instance.)
I do applaud Intel for this... when I first read this, I thought the string was they they get the patents. This really is funding open research.
At least it has syntax highlighting, I'm no expert at Bash, but I don't think anyone would appreciate reading it with no syntax highlighting.
People have been doing clever things in bash long before there was syntax highlighting. In fact, it took me years to finally accept that as anything other than clutter. Though, I still can't stand colored output of the "ls" command.
Having cut my teeth using line editors over 300 baud modems (or terminals wired into the mainframe via serial cables), I am sometimes amused to watch people who have only ever had these modern fancy tools when they're in a real environment like a client site. Because suddenly they can't do anything because they're so dependent on these things.
To be clear, I'm not saying (in a DMCA takedown) that I own the rights to that/file/, I'm identifying a work (The Cairo Goose), saying under penalty of perjury that I'm authorized to act on behalf of the rights holder of that work (The Cairo Goose), and, not under penalty of perjury, that I have a good-faith belief that the file in question is a copy of The Cairo Goose.
Thanks for the interesting example... but don't Warner also need to provide some actual evidence that the thing they're insisting be taken down is actually infringing on their copyright?
Because, in your example, you clearly are not a rights holder to MSDN_Preview_WinNT_Cairo-{g00s3}.rar, it is clearly not infringing on your copyright, and therefore you have no legal standing to assert that it be taken down.
I fail to see how the statement "I am authorized to act on behalf of someone who owns an entirely different piece of property" in any way affects all of those myriad properties you don't own.
That more or less boils down to "I own a copyrighted piece of property... and therefore I insist that you take down this piece of copyrighted property"... unless you're asserting that the property is in fact yours, then shouldn't you STFU?
And, if you consistently claim that by virtue of holding the copyright to a piece of property with the word Cairo in it, that something is infringing without even checking if that is your property, can't you more or less be deemed to be acting in bad faith or being vexatious? Because you are alleging that the content is infringing on your copyright. Not merely that you're authorized for a specific property, but that you have undertaken steps to indicate that this file is infringing.
Surely there has to be a good mechanism to give Warner Brothers the kick in the groin they so justly deserve for either misrepresenting their standing, or simply failing to do their due diligence. They can't just go around making people take files off the internet without any consequences and process. Especially if the basis of the action is claiming that the reason for pulling the file is because it is supposed to be infringing on your copyright.
Obviously, I'm not a lawyer... but surely these clowns have to be held to a higher standard than "because we said so".
Yes, copyright infringement is illegal. But, stating under penalty of perjury that you own a copyrighted work, and clearly not having checked to see if you do... well, that should be treated with some pretty harsh legal consequences. In fact, maybe someone can spin it so that the Warner pays the statutory damages as if they pirated the work... what's that, like 9 trillion dollars per offending file?
The last decade has been deeply disturbing and embarrassing. Not since the Sedition Act has there been such unconstitutional nonsense as 'free speech zones', 'warrantless wiretapping', etc. and such heinous SCotUS rulings as Kelo v. New London.
You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
There's always some bastard waiting in the wings who will happily cram his world view down every body else's collective throats in order to force people to do things "their way".
I think your Tea Party would do that, and everybody who is voting for constitutional amendments to make same sex marriage illegal is more or less doing the same thing.
Basically anybody is fighting to prevent other people from doing something, instead of fighting for their right to do something... they'll usually pretty happily trample on what you think you should be allowed to do. Because, in their view, what you want to do is Inexcusably Wrong.
Of course, they'll make the argument that what they're doing is Defending Absolute Truth. These people are not to be trusted.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, not all of us are benchmarking machines on a constant basis. Nor do we all constantly buy and install new hardware. I get a new laptop when my company gives me one, and I replace my desktop every couple of years. Beyond that, the only machines I'm involved in are ones we plan out for work -- and even then, the server team does the physical builds. I just tell them that I need x machines so I can install my stuff and build it out. None of the tasks I run are sufficiently CPU intensive to notice for the most part --- but IO speeds, now that's a big deal.
So when I look at the company I bought my last several machines from, and see what looks like the same specs as three years ago ... it's hard to see that anything significant has happened. That quad core AMD with 4GB still has the same CPU speed as it did a couple of years ago. It might be a bit cheaper, but the posted specs are pretty much identical. It's not like there's anything which makes me think "oooh, this machine is faster than what I have now."
Unless you have a large amount of turnover of machines, to simply read the specs of machines they read like they did 2-3 years ago. If you're talking about consumer machines like you'd buy at Best Buy, I'd be surprised if there's all that much difference over the last few years.
Get off your sanctimonious high horse and get over yourself.
Except that neutrinos which pass right through dirt and rock like it's not there are still supposed to be bounded by the speed of light.
We're not talking about shining a flashlight here. :-P
No, but if you actually RTFA, the author is talking about machines no longer getting faster. There's even a graph showing the speed of Intel processors at release, and it plateaued several years ago.
Clock speeds haven't grown any more, we just keep throwing more cores on. (Don't get me wrong, I love me some CPU cores.)
I realize Moore's law is about transistor density, but there was a good period of time where CPU speed was growing proportionally with the Moore's law curve. Back in the early 90's, CPU speed actually did double every couple of months.
No, but if I look at consumer laptops, it's more or less the same quad-core AMD CPU as I bought three years ago. There actually was a good solid decade where the CPU speed was growing at super crazy speeds.
In a lot of ways, I don't miss the whole "oh, crap, the machine I bought six months ago is half the speed of the one I can buy now" ... there was nothing more annoying than spending $2K on a box only to have it become obsolete right away.
Though, I am hoping that next time I get a new PC I can go beyond the 4 cores/8GB of RAM I have now and not be outrageously expensive. That would rock.
Do not tempt rule 34 ... I shudder to ponder it.
It seems computers have been stuck at 3GHz (plus or minus a bit) for a while.
Sure, we've added more cores and the like, but it's interesting to see that plateau at the end of the curve.
I'm sure some things actually are faster, but in terms of what's available to consumers, it hasn't seemed to get all that much faster the last few years.
Someone should distribute the information for the entire management-level people at B&N. Phone, address, list of children, VISA numbers ... And, then of course, anybody with that information would say that they couldn't possibly be bound by any terms of use because they never made any agreement.
That might demonstrate to these people why customers do not want their information to be bought and sold.
In Canada, I believe this would be illegal, because we actually have privacy legislation designed to limit what companies can do with your information.
Sadly, I just can't see the US passing a law which would actually restrict what a corporation can do -- the lawmakers are too beholden to corporate interests.
And, what did you contribute other than a snide remark?
Shallow water squid will eat each other if they get too close. At depths when they can't see one another, it's hardly surprising they would run like hell after an attempt at mating.
This is like a lot of other science ... when someone observes it and documents it, it's fairly obvious. Until someone observes it, it's a complete mystery.
That doesn't mean that even if you only know a small amount about squid, you might not read the summary and kinda go "well, yeah, they're carnivorous".
This seems fairly obvious. Squid will eat anything, including other squid.
I suspect this is to prevent your potential mate from turning you into dinner. So, fertilize and run like hell seems like a good strategy.
In both Canada and the US I have routinely seen free-standing ATMs (usually with jacked up transaction fees) in all kinds of places for over a decade now ... hotels, bars, convenience stores, malls, airports.
I'm surprised you've never seen them -- they're actually quite common. Like, all over the place common. They've been in widespread use since at least 1998 when I spent some time in San Francisco.
Yes, but unlike Martin Luther King and civil rights, I'm in favor of software not always being something which needs to be open.
Sure, RMS believes in it ... that's fine. But not everybody agrees with him. At a certain point, his opinion becomes him telling other people what they're free to do.
If he holds a rigid "either/or" position on if, for example, software that I write needs to be open or not ... well, he can go to hell because he doesn't get a vote on what it I do with code I write.
If all you're doing is trying to tell me that I'm committing some form of sin because I write proprietary software, you're a rabid zealot, and I will treat you as such.
Which, is what a lot of people do with RMS ... they just tune him out as someone who has a very loud opinion, but that it's none of his damned business.
It's sometimes difficult to not think like then when you're confronted with someone who has a rigid, ideological position, whose starting point in all discussions is that they're right and you're wrong, and there is no room for any give.
RMS and some people who agree with him are sufficiently fixed in their ideology that it's hard not to end up saying "rabid Stallmanites".
You might as well try to convince someone their religion is wrong as try to convince RMS that not all software needs to be open. He and others are pretty inflexible on this position.
That's only true if you define "world" to be people who want it open.
If you want to define the "world" as every potential user of Android, the vast majority DON'T CARE if it's open. They care that it works, that's all.
People who rigidly cling to the notion that any software which hasn't been provided in a ideologically pure enough way is a Great Evil ... well, those people are as rabid and narrow minded as any other fanatic.
It's sad you got a Troll mod for pointing out that not everyone cares what RMS has to say. Because, an awful lot of us tuned him out years ago. Sure, he's a smart guy who has been an advocate for free software ... but his completely inflexible view that all software must live up to his notion, well, I just can't agree with him.
To me, he's that crazy guy on the corner with a "The End is Nigh" sign. Most of the times when I hear what he has to say, I disagree with him and then tune him out.
Horseshit.
In the strictest sense of the word, if it's capable of running a Turing complete language, it's a computer.
I have a telnet client on my iPad, I have a remote desktop client, I have a WebEx client, and I have several tools and text editors I use for productivity and note taking. I've got google maps, a web browser, Dragon Dictate if I really want it, and language references for at least 3 different programming languages. I have documented systems using a mind-mapping application I have, and I have reviewed 400 page PDF documents for work on it.
There is software that allows you to read and edit Office documents, and if you buy a bluetooth keyboard, you can have a physical keyboard without any problems. Type away.
You may not like the iPad, and you might not like the interface on it ... but your subjective definition of what constitutes a computer is self serving and just plain wrong. In some ways, it's a much more useful and powerful computer than was a DOS machine in the mid-late 80s.
Arguably, when you're talking about smart phones having dual core CPUs (I'm talking about general purpose CPUs here), and the ability to do a lot of things ... if you are claiming that a tablet or a modern smart phone isn't a computer, then you don't understand what a computer is.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I seem to recall in the early-mid 90's, some of my astronomy geek friends ... at the time detecting an exo-planet was an exciting prospect, gravitational lensing was something to hope for, and possibly that black holes hadn't been confirmed by observation but were widely accepted.
Now exoplanets get discovered almost daily, we've confirmed through observation a bunch of black holes, and the universe continues to be even cooler and more complex than we'd even realized.
It really is interesting to watch.
So, can anybody who understand this explain a little more.
Is the orbit of the planet around both stars, making it like the orbit is eccentric around some center of mass common to the two stars?
If it's that, then I think I get this. If it's anything beyond that, then I'm afraid my meager understanding of Kepplers laws falls apart.
Most importantly, I love this part:
the stuff we've just discovered will go away for the next 30+ years. That's really quite cool, since the window in which we could have identified this and worked it out is likely fairly short ever since we identified the very first exoplanets back in the 90s or so.
Sadly, I don't think there's enough established case-law and precedent to make that a guaranteed thing.
For example, SCOTUS has ruled that they can force you to arbitration ... so as long as SCOTUS figures the rights of companies trump yours, I fear what you say might not be true.
OK, so we've narrowed it down to between zero and infinity ... thanks for your useful contribution. :-P
And, in fairness to the "unwashed masses"... how many of the, er, "washed masses" actually do this?
In 16 years in the computer industry, plus university and high school ... I have never flashed a BIOS. It simply doesn't come up for me. Granted, I don't build systems, but I've simply never needed to do this.
How many home users will ever do this task?
LOL ... funny.
No, seriously ... when I first saw syntax highlighting I was literally like "WTF is this crap". It was just a jumble of colors on the screen, and I found it quite distracting.
I was used to working on monochrome VT52s and VT100s ... so the first time I saw syntax highlighting, I turned it off. To this day, I find the color output of "ls" actually conveys less information that knowing that an "@" is a symlink.
Now, of course, I'll take syntax highlighting any day of the week. But it really did take me several years to get there, because I was used to working in vi, and vi didn't do such things.
It's worse than that ... it's almost designed to improve the overall state of the art, without Intel gaining exclusive access to the research, thereby making it possible for just anybody to gain from this. I'm outraged.
I mean, that's almost communism. No patents? No royalties? No licensing fees? No lawyers? Just good old fashioned university research opened up for all to see?
Do you realize how badly this could cripple the economy? ;-)
(Kidding aside ... I wonder if the academic journals would muck with this somehow. They take copyright of the papers, for instance.)
I do applaud Intel for this ... when I first read this, I thought the string was they they get the patents. This really is funding open research.
People have been doing clever things in bash long before there was syntax highlighting. In fact, it took me years to finally accept that as anything other than clutter. Though, I still can't stand colored output of the "ls" command.
Having cut my teeth using line editors over 300 baud modems (or terminals wired into the mainframe via serial cables), I am sometimes amused to watch people who have only ever had these modern fancy tools when they're in a real environment like a client site. Because suddenly they can't do anything because they're so dependent on these things.
Now get off my lawn. :-P
Thanks for the interesting example ... but don't Warner also need to provide some actual evidence that the thing they're insisting be taken down is actually infringing on their copyright?
Because, in your example, you clearly are not a rights holder to MSDN_Preview_WinNT_Cairo-{g00s3}.rar, it is clearly not infringing on your copyright, and therefore you have no legal standing to assert that it be taken down.
I fail to see how the statement "I am authorized to act on behalf of someone who owns an entirely different piece of property" in any way affects all of those myriad properties you don't own.
That more or less boils down to "I own a copyrighted piece of property ... and therefore I insist that you take down this piece of copyrighted property" ... unless you're asserting that the property is in fact yours, then shouldn't you STFU?
And, if you consistently claim that by virtue of holding the copyright to a piece of property with the word Cairo in it, that something is infringing without even checking if that is your property, can't you more or less be deemed to be acting in bad faith or being vexatious? Because you are alleging that the content is infringing on your copyright. Not merely that you're authorized for a specific property, but that you have undertaken steps to indicate that this file is infringing.
Surely there has to be a good mechanism to give Warner Brothers the kick in the groin they so justly deserve for either misrepresenting their standing, or simply failing to do their due diligence. They can't just go around making people take files off the internet without any consequences and process. Especially if the basis of the action is claiming that the reason for pulling the file is because it is supposed to be infringing on your copyright.
Obviously, I'm not a lawyer ... but surely these clowns have to be held to a higher standard than "because we said so".
I would really like someone to hold them to that.
Yes, copyright infringement is illegal. But, stating under penalty of perjury that you own a copyrighted work, and clearly not having checked to see if you do ... well, that should be treated with some pretty harsh legal consequences. In fact, maybe someone can spin it so that the Warner pays the statutory damages as if they pirated the work ... what's that, like 9 trillion dollars per offending file?
Hopefully Hotfile gets some traction on this one.
You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
There's always some bastard waiting in the wings who will happily cram his world view down every body else's collective throats in order to force people to do things "their way".
I think your Tea Party would do that, and everybody who is voting for constitutional amendments to make same sex marriage illegal is more or less doing the same thing.
Basically anybody is fighting to prevent other people from doing something, instead of fighting for their right to do something ... they'll usually pretty happily trample on what you think you should be allowed to do. Because, in their view, what you want to do is Inexcusably Wrong.
Of course, they'll make the argument that what they're doing is Defending Absolute Truth. These people are not to be trusted.