Viacom is being sued for copyright infringement, too (by people whose copyrighted works were the subject of misguided DMCA removal demands to YouTube). I like the idea that these plaintiffs could get, not only all of Viacom's computers, but also all of Viacom's employees' computers.
If you applied the RIAA's "logic" that would probably include computers belonging to any relatives of Viacom employees. "Hand over your PC your third cousin, who you never knew existed, married the second cousin of someone who once did some agency work for Viacom!"
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied.
Sounds like a reasonable judge. Taking the defendant's computer would deprive them of it for a long period of time, whereas taking a copy of it's data only deprives them of it for a short time.
However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy.
Or something as simple as a typo on the part of the plaintiff.
What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother.
To the judge it may look as though the plaintiff is on a "fishing trip".
Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work).
Plenty of people may have confidential material on their computers. A lawyer has the advantage that he or she can phrase this in language a judge is likely to understand.
How can giving a secret key to a third-party 'secure DNS'. If I am the only one who has a key to my house and I make an additional copy and give it to a third-party, my house is now less secure.
It's less secure even if you can absolutly trust that party with your key. Together with you and they being the only people who know that they have the key. Here you have a situation of a not especially trustworthy party publically demanding you give them a copy of your key. Your "house" is now several orders of magnitude less secure.
The diarrhea claim is a common one, and for those who know the truth and still make the claim, it is egregiously dishonest. Large doses of vitamin C in the form of ascorbic acid will cause diarrhea; that's why people who take large doses use sodium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate, ascorbyl palmitate, etc..
Not too sure about sodium ascorbate, there appears to be a lot of fuss made about too much sodium in the diet anyway. Maybe potassium ascorbate would be a better choice or an ester with an "Omega 3" fatty acid. Wonder if the diarrhea is more a reaction to the pH of the gut being changed.
No human being in history has managed to eat 15g of vitamin C every day - that would be 300 oranges - but we seem to get by.
If someone was trying to do this by eating oranges they'd probably be doing little else with their day. If they had access to pure vitamin C then eating 15g isn't too hard. Just it wouldn't taste that nice.
That depends entirely on your definition of "enough". The USRDA of 60mg a day is just enough to prevent scurvy. The problem with vitamin C is that because it isn't a patentable drug, very little research is done beyond the occasional study of the classic wive's tales about it curing colds and such.
60mg isn't very much especially when you consider that pharmaceutical drugs intended only to act on certain types of cells can be given in far greater doses.
The problem with vitamin C is that because it isn't a patentable drug, very little research is done beyond the occasional study of the classic wive's tales about it curing colds and such. When you look at the animal kingdom and vitamin C, you can't help but question the 60mg USRDA. Most animals produce their own vitamin C, and only a very few do not. The biological process for making vitamin C from glucose requires four enzymes. Primates (which includes us) share a damaged gene for producing the fourth enzyme. We have the other three, but because we lack the fourth, the incomplete product of the third enzyme is simply broken down and recycled.
Is there any way of tracking the activities of this enzyme chain in humans. Alternativly how much vitamin C does a healthy chimpanzee or gorilla consume.
So the question then becomes, "how much vitamin C would we be producing internally if the enzyme chain were intact?" Well, an examination of vitamin C producing mammals indicates that a healthy animal produces and average of anywhere from 50 to 300mg per kg per day, and an animal with a serious illness will generate anywhere from 10 to 50 times that amount.
Which is several orders of magnitude from the few tens of milligrammes per day.
Even taking the low average, it sure seems like a 150kg man should be getting 7500mg per day rather than 90mg, and that doesn't even take into account how you'd need to take 15000mg orally to equal 7500mg self-produced because the digestive system destroys half of it in the absorption process.
It's also a lot less efficent to have to eat something, digest it, then transport the ascorbic acid in the blood stream than have the cells which need it produce it as and when needed. Mammalian cells can store glucose (as glycogen), so even at the highest possible rate of production feeding would not be an immediate need. There are also a lot more foods which glucose can be extracted from. Even the conservative 15 gammmes is about a US tablespoon full. Quite a bit of effort to make this into pills or something most people would be prepared to eat.
Probably because chemical testing of soft drinks, while something that readily comes to mind, isn't actually likely to be done. The consumer product safety commission or whatever, relies on certified statements of contents and penalties if they are in fact incorrect.
Probably for a lot more things that just soft drinks.
Real chemists have better things to do with their time in most cases, and the general public doesn't have the skill...so really, the high school kids are perfectly primed to discover this sort of thing. They've got just enough skill to do the basic testing, and nothing better to do with their time -- and they need to use easily accessible materials. Bingo. Sodas and vitamins.
All we have to do is draw up a list of products school kids are unlikely to be interested in testing and ensure that someone actually is testing them.
This is a great example of why science should be taken out of highschools and substituted with bible study. We don't need our young people gettin' all booksmart and thinkin' they dun got themselves better than all'us in the bible belt of jebus.
Religious nutcases are unlikely to want people actually studying The Bible (or The Qur'an, The Granth, Vedas, etc). though:)
Yeah, a $200,000 fine. It'll take them minutes, maybe even hours to make such a huge sum of money back.
The article gives a figure in New Zealand Dollers and a rough comparison with Canadian Dollers. I US Dollers it's more like 163 thousand. (About 83 thousand GBP and 122 thousand Euros). The only way you can get it looking like a substantial sum of money is to convert it into Zimbabwe Dollers...
The plagiarism checking service keeping a copy of the work does NOT violate the student's copyright.
They can't both keep a copy and pass a copy on to some other party without making a copy. What they are doing is little different from you making a copy of something you have borrowed from a library.
I don't trust privacy policies. There's no laws that can be enforced if the company in question violates their own policy, and it's ridiculously hard to prove it even if they did. And, as you can see here, most privacy policies have a not-difficult-to-imagine scenario which would involve complete loss of control of the private information you did provide.
The most obvious loophole is to add a clause to the effect of "this policy can be changed any time we feel like it".
I'd like to see more work done on making companies stick to their privacy policies, and large fines or jail time if they don't.
Or maybe North America could catch up with Europe when it comes to data protection laws, which render "privacy policies" completly irrelevent.
On the contrary, a law lecturer at my university informed me that I and only I own the copyright to any work that I produce as part of my studies. The exception may be any project work you undertake as part of some industry related commercial project as a contractor.
Since such circumstances could qualify as "work for hire".
And I must say, as a student, I would be fairly upset if my work was being used by a company to make a profit without my permission,
It would be hard to find a clearer case of copyright infringment.
That's a good idea except it will only work for computers that do not need to save some sort of state, those such as school labs and the like (where user data is primarily saved in the servers). Enterprise computers are not in that category. For example, setting up email accounts (outlook, thunderbird, etc) would be quite a pain in that regard, unless you use web based email (TWIG, Squirrel, OWA) which will easily eat up storage in no time. User preferences (wallpapers, screensavers, themes, recent docs) will generally be wiped clean every boot.
With the possible exception of portable machines there's no good reason for any of this to be being stored anywhere other than on a server in the first place.
Your choice of words, and that outlook, are disturbing. We are stand-alone human animals, but we have complex symbiotic relationships with all the critters and bugs that live within and on us.
Without quite a few of these we wouldn't live long. e.g. the gut bacteria which produce vitamin K.
With the tone of some of the adverts ("There is more bacteria on your chopping board/table/baby's high chair than your toilet seat/a pavement!!!") I have been given to wonder how on earth we managed to survive this long as a species without all of these anti-bacterial cleaning products... Oh, that's right, we develop immunities - immunities we're in danger of losing because of our increasing over-reliance on these products, misuse of antibiotics, etc.
Actually it's even simpler than that. The vast majority of bacteria you are likely to find on a chopping board cannot live inside mammals. Whilst they might be ok on human skin if they were to enter into a wound that environment is likely to kill them, similarly any bacteria which are eaten have to avoid being digested. Any which are still alive then have to confront the immune system.
Don't vaccinate against things for which there is no real reason to i.e; varicella (chicken pox).
Whilst in most cases this causes just a mild disease it can have nasty complications, especially amongst adults. "shingles" is a far more disabling disease caused by the same virus.
Part of the reason Antibiotics have been overprescribed is in our world of super ultra hygeine concious society, people are killing off all the germs they can everywhere. People sanitize their hands 50 times a day. This is all well and good, and healthy, but it also causes a problem.
Quite a bit of the advertising for smothering homes with bacteria killing chemicals comes with a "for the children" undercurrent. Quite a few of these chemicals appear to be quite toxic to human beings too.
Without exposure to various germs, bacteria, etc. people's immune systems actually atrophy.
Or it can wind up going "crazy" creating allergic responses or attacking parts of the body.
Nevermind that you might just be sick and need some rest and some time, that's sheer silliness. If I recall correctly doctors prescribed antibiotics something like 30% of the time when the patient did not need them.
They might be better off prescribing placebos or even pills with instructions to be swallowed with at least a certain quantity of water.
The #1 problem for Doctors is:
1. patient takes meds
2. patient starts to feel better
3. patient stops
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Dispite just about any drug perscription in the last 30 or so years coming with instructions to finish the treatment. One real problem with antibiotics is that just taking them is likely to make people feel ill. Because they also wind up altering the bacterial population of the gut.
Maybe if we didn't prescribe an antibiotic for everything that can ever go wrong with a person, there wouldn't be so many resistant strains.
It's actually worst than that. Antibiotics are also pumped into perfectly healthy animals reared for food. Plenty of bacteria parasites arn't that fussy about their hosts.
Slashdot Mirror
Viacom is being sued for copyright infringement, too (by people whose copyrighted works were the subject of misguided DMCA removal demands to YouTube). I like the idea that these plaintiffs could get, not only all of Viacom's computers, but also all of Viacom's employees' computers.
If you applied the RIAA's "logic" that would probably include computers belonging to any relatives of Viacom employees. "Hand over your PC your third cousin, who you never knew existed, married the second cousin of someone who once did some agency work for Viacom!"
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied.
Sounds like a reasonable judge. Taking the defendant's computer would deprive them of it for a long period of time, whereas taking a copy of it's data only deprives them of it for a short time.
However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy.
Or something as simple as a typo on the part of the plaintiff.
What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother.
To the judge it may look as though the plaintiff is on a "fishing trip".
Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work).
Plenty of people may have confidential material on their computers. A lawyer has the advantage that he or she can phrase this in language a judge is likely to understand.
Most of them just use the tactic of saying things longer and louder than everyone else in the room and eventually people will believe you.
At least those still in the room might do, assuming they havn't fallen asleep... Anyone who dosn't believe you having probably left at that point.
It's also the best day to invade unsuspecting countries. Who'd believe it until April 2nd!
Actually it is a fairly common day for governments to bring out unpopular legislation...
Everyday is April 1st at the Patent Office. Sadly though, they aren't playing jokes...they are the joke.
No doubt they hold an "evergreen" patent on April Fools Day as well as one on bad jokes.
So you are equating DHS with giant terroristic insectoid aliens bent on universal destruction? Hum. Seems reasonable.
:)
Whilst The Racnoss may not have lawyers, I'm sure The BBC do
How can giving a secret key to a third-party 'secure DNS'. If I am the only one who has a key to my house and I make an additional copy and give it to a third-party, my house is now less secure.
It's less secure even if you can absolutly trust that party with your key. Together with you and they being the only people who know that they have the key.
Here you have a situation of a not especially trustworthy party publically demanding you give them a copy of your key. Your "house" is now several orders of magnitude less secure.
The diarrhea claim is a common one, and for those who know the truth and still make the claim, it is egregiously dishonest. Large doses of vitamin C in the form of ascorbic acid will cause diarrhea; that's why people who take large doses use sodium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate, ascorbyl palmitate, etc..
Not too sure about sodium ascorbate, there appears to be a lot of fuss made about too much sodium in the diet anyway. Maybe potassium ascorbate would be a better choice or an ester with an "Omega 3" fatty acid.
Wonder if the diarrhea is more a reaction to the pH of the gut being changed.
No human being in history has managed to eat 15g of vitamin C every day - that would be 300 oranges - but we seem to get by.
If someone was trying to do this by eating oranges they'd probably be doing little else with their day. If they had access to pure vitamin C then eating 15g isn't too hard. Just it wouldn't taste that nice.
That depends entirely on your definition of "enough". The USRDA of 60mg a day is just enough to prevent scurvy. The problem with vitamin C is that because it isn't a patentable drug, very little research is done beyond the occasional study of the classic wive's tales about it curing colds and such.
60mg isn't very much especially when you consider that pharmaceutical drugs intended only to act on certain types of cells can be given in far greater doses.
The problem with vitamin C is that because it isn't a patentable drug, very little research is done beyond the occasional study of the classic wive's tales about it curing colds and such. When you look at the animal kingdom and vitamin C, you can't help but question the 60mg USRDA. Most animals produce their own vitamin C, and only a very few do not. The biological process for making vitamin C from glucose requires four enzymes. Primates (which includes us) share a damaged gene for producing the fourth enzyme. We have the other three, but because we lack the fourth, the incomplete product of the third enzyme is simply broken down and recycled.
Is there any way of tracking the activities of this enzyme chain in humans. Alternativly how much vitamin C does a healthy chimpanzee or gorilla consume.
So the question then becomes, "how much vitamin C would we be producing internally if the enzyme chain were intact?" Well, an examination of vitamin C producing mammals indicates that a healthy animal produces and average of anywhere from 50 to 300mg per kg per day, and an animal with a serious illness will generate anywhere from 10 to 50 times that amount.
Which is several orders of magnitude from the few tens of milligrammes per day.
Even taking the low average, it sure seems like a 150kg man should be getting 7500mg per day rather than 90mg, and that doesn't even take into account how you'd need to take 15000mg orally to equal 7500mg self-produced because the digestive system destroys half of it in the absorption process.
It's also a lot less efficent to have to eat something, digest it, then transport the ascorbic acid in the blood stream than have the cells which need it produce it as and when needed. Mammalian cells can store glucose (as glycogen), so even at the highest possible rate of production feeding would not be an immediate need. There are also a lot more foods which glucose can be extracted from.
Even the conservative 15 gammmes is about a US tablespoon full. Quite a bit of effort to make this into pills or something most people would be prepared to eat.
Probably because chemical testing of soft drinks, while something that readily comes to mind, isn't actually likely to be done. The consumer product safety commission or whatever, relies on certified statements of contents and penalties if they are in fact incorrect.
Probably for a lot more things that just soft drinks.
Real chemists have better things to do with their time in most cases, and the general public doesn't have the skill...so really, the high school kids are perfectly primed to discover this sort of thing. They've got just enough skill to do the basic testing, and nothing better to do with their time -- and they need to use easily accessible materials. Bingo. Sodas and vitamins.
All we have to do is draw up a list of products school kids are unlikely to be interested in testing and ensure that someone actually is testing them.
This is a great example of why science should be taken out of highschools and substituted with bible study. We don't need our young people gettin' all booksmart and thinkin' they dun got themselves better than all'us in the bible belt of jebus.
:)
Religious nutcases are unlikely to want people actually studying The Bible (or The Qur'an, The Granth, Vedas, etc). though
Yeah, a $200,000 fine. It'll take them minutes, maybe even hours to make such a huge sum of money back.
The article gives a figure in New Zealand Dollers and a rough comparison with Canadian Dollers. I US Dollers it's more like 163 thousand. (About 83 thousand GBP and 122 thousand Euros). The only way you can get it looking like a substantial sum of money is to convert it into Zimbabwe Dollers...
"No FDA approval for you! Come back, one year!"
:)
Presumably after the FDA have outsourced their lab testing to schools in New Zealand
The plagiarism checking service keeping a copy of the work does NOT violate the student's copyright.
They can't both keep a copy and pass a copy on to some other party without making a copy. What they are doing is little different from you making a copy of something you have borrowed from a library.
I don't trust privacy policies. There's no laws that can be enforced if the company in question violates their own policy, and it's ridiculously hard to prove it even if they did. And, as you can see here, most privacy policies have a not-difficult-to-imagine scenario which would involve complete loss of control of the private information you did provide.
The most obvious loophole is to add a clause to the effect of "this policy can be changed any time we feel like it".
I'd like to see more work done on making companies stick to their privacy policies, and large fines or jail time if they don't.
Or maybe North America could catch up with Europe when it comes to data protection laws, which render "privacy policies" completly irrelevent.
On the contrary, a law lecturer at my university informed me that I and only I own the copyright to any work that I produce as part of my studies. The exception may be any project work you undertake as part of some industry related commercial project as a contractor.
Since such circumstances could qualify as "work for hire".
And I must say, as a student, I would be fairly upset if my work was being used by a company to make a profit without my permission,
It would be hard to find a clearer case of copyright infringment.
That's a good idea except it will only work for computers that do not need to save some sort of state, those such as school labs and the like (where user data is primarily saved in the servers). Enterprise computers are not in that category. For example, setting up email accounts (outlook, thunderbird, etc) would be quite a pain in that regard, unless you use web based email (TWIG, Squirrel, OWA) which will easily eat up storage in no time. User preferences (wallpapers, screensavers, themes, recent docs) will generally be wiped clean every boot.
With the possible exception of portable machines there's no good reason for any of this to be being stored anywhere other than on a server in the first place.
Your choice of words, and that outlook, are disturbing. We are stand-alone human animals, but we have complex symbiotic relationships with all the critters and bugs that live within and on us.
Without quite a few of these we wouldn't live long. e.g. the gut bacteria which produce vitamin K.
With the tone of some of the adverts ("There is more bacteria on your chopping board/table/baby's high chair than your toilet seat/a pavement!!!") I have been given to wonder how on earth we managed to survive this long as a species without all of these anti-bacterial cleaning products... Oh, that's right, we develop immunities - immunities we're in danger of losing because of our increasing over-reliance on these products, misuse of antibiotics, etc.
Actually it's even simpler than that. The vast majority of bacteria you are likely to find on a chopping board cannot live inside mammals. Whilst they might be ok on human skin if they were to enter into a wound that environment is likely to kill them, similarly any bacteria which are eaten have to avoid being digested. Any which are still alive then have to confront the immune system.
Don't vaccinate against things for which there is no real reason to i.e; varicella (chicken pox).
Whilst in most cases this causes just a mild disease it can have nasty complications, especially amongst adults. "shingles" is a far more disabling disease caused by the same virus.
Part of the reason Antibiotics have been overprescribed is in our world of super ultra hygeine concious society, people are killing off all the germs they can everywhere. People sanitize their hands 50 times a day. This is all well and good, and healthy, but it also causes a problem.
Quite a bit of the advertising for smothering homes with bacteria killing chemicals comes with a "for the children" undercurrent. Quite a few of these chemicals appear to be quite toxic to human beings too.
Without exposure to various germs, bacteria, etc. people's immune systems actually atrophy.
Or it can wind up going "crazy" creating allergic responses or attacking parts of the body.
Nevermind that you might just be sick and need some rest and some time, that's sheer silliness. If I recall correctly doctors prescribed antibiotics something like 30% of the time when the patient did not need them.
They might be better off prescribing placebos or even pills with instructions to be swallowed with at least a certain quantity of water.
The #1 problem for Doctors is:
1. patient takes meds
2. patient starts to feel better
3. patient stops
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Dispite just about any drug perscription in the last 30 or so years coming with instructions to finish the treatment. One real problem with antibiotics is that just taking them is likely to make people feel ill. Because they also wind up altering the bacterial population of the gut.
Maybe if we didn't prescribe an antibiotic for everything that can ever go wrong with a person, there wouldn't be so many resistant strains.
It's actually worst than that. Antibiotics are also pumped into perfectly healthy animals reared for food. Plenty of bacteria parasites arn't that fussy about their hosts.