Yeah, humans definitely have the market on that particular brand of stupidity (RIP Beagle 2).:-P BR>There's a slight difference between crashing a robot probe on an unihabited planet next door and crashing a crewed ship on an alien planet, which you know full well has intelligent natives (with an industrial society) on it, in an alien star system...
If you consider UFO to be what it actually means, that it is an object in the sky for which there is no current explanation, then that's fine. Ball Lightening was a 'UFO' till it was explained.
Many many UFOs are only UFOs for a short time (possibly seconds) until they become IFOs e.g. aircraft. In other cases it can take longer. There are also photographs and video footage which are likely to remain "unidentified" simply because of poor technical quality.
To believe that these unexplained things are extra terrestrials is a huge leap, and one I would tend to scoff at. Not least because the whole 'flying saucer' and 'greys' crap only appeared in the US during the early cold war, with greys not being named till later.
It also makes a very good cover story for any secret aviation going on. Including that involving unusually shaped experimental aircraft. Not showing up on radar and being able to move in unusal ways are very desirable attributes in military aircraft as is "not looking like an aircraft".
I will never believe that an advanced race can travel all the way across the inconceivable distance between stars, and be dumb enough to crash.
Even if they were "dumb enough to crash" you might expect something more like the Columbia breakup. The only thing likely to crash would be a robot probe. It's hard to conceive of any intelligent beings going on a one way trip from orbit to the surface of an alien (to them) planet. It would make far more sense for a vehicle intended for a crew to explore the surface (or near surface) of a planet to have multiple redundent systems to get the crew back to their main craft if anything went wrong.
Nor that they would travel that far and buzz people on their own, which is all that has supposedly happened.
"Buzzing" members of an agressive, intelligent, alien species qualifies as stupid behavior.
Most alien visitation theories read like children's stories, and most 'the aliens operated on me' stories read like early memories of visits to a dentist mixed with sexual fantasies.
Any intelligent alien species capable of getting to Earth could learn a lot about the planet simply by observation. Together with quite a lot about humans the same way, including interception of video signals (it's not necessary to understand the language). Even if they did feel the need to start investigating terrestrial organisms there are plenty of non sentient species to choose from (including the same ones we humans use). Kidnapping sentients has the problem that it tends to be noticed, returning them with strange stories tends to be noticed even more.
How many years do you think they expected the show to run? You're commissioning a quirky semi-educational historical SF show basically aimed at kids.
It's rather hard to guess what an audiance will go for in the field of popular entertainment.
Do you seriously expect it to become a cultural icon and still be popular 44 years later? They probably expected it to run a few years and then get cancelled.
On the other hand TV execs expected ST:Enterprise to last at least as long as ST:TNG, ST:DS9 & ST:Voyager... This is something the BBC havn't assumed with New Who, even though many of the people working on the production (including the lead actor and lead writer) are fans of the original series.
It's actually "Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.". It's a privately held not-for-profit corporation based in New York.
Only a minority of corporate enties are publically traded. Whilst there may be some private trading going on the most likely way for shares to change hands is through inheritance. For both real and corporate people.
No way to tell for sure, but one would assume the vast majority of shares (if not all of them) are held by the member companies.
It's a fairly common situation with many sorts of clubs and associations that all members are shareholders (and that no non member can be a shareholder.)
That's their business model: They make you believe you have a reservation, then you have to go around all the rental places trying to find one.
It isn't even an original one. IIRC airlines started with the idea of deliberatly overbooking flights some thirty odd years ago, turn up "too late" and you don't get a seat. More recently some hotel chains have been caught taking bookings for more rooms than they actually have. Even including sending people round to other hotels in the chain. Same business model; the only difference is if you are hiring a seat on an aircraft, a room to sleep in or a truck/van.
The RIAA is just a consortium of the recording companies. At any point they can kill it off and start a new consortium to keep the heat off them without much issue.
The most obvious point would be when the RIAA starts accumulating court judgements. Presumably they go bankrupt to be replaced by the NRIAA...
Assume that you charge them JUST or below the amount that MS makes in the EU sales. Then MS has a strong incentive to continue with the sale. Why? because it is slowly draining their competitors.
They'd actually have to fine Microsoft more than their total sales. Otherwise Microsoft could cross subsidise their EU operations. Unless the EU has (and is prepared to use) the power to freeze all Microsoft's bank accounts in the EU and forbid any banks within the EU transfering money to any Microsoft accounts outside the EU.
This nonsense of leaving everything up to the free market will only result in an increasingly dysfunctional state, even if some people do become very wealthy as a result. It is not like you need to resort to complete socialism just because of placing restrictions on the private sector, providing some public services, and mitigating the more problematic aspects of capitalism.
Public untilties are never "free markets", they are actually what are known as "natural monopolies". Because if you actually had a "free market" you wouldn't be able to get out of your house without having to climb over a huge quantity of pipes and cables:)
Maybe they're just afraid that a company will come along and figure out how to wire up a street for less than $10,000. If they can provide "nowhere" customers with service that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, just think what will happen to the "somewhere" customers when they discover they're overpaying for their service.
That is probably the sort of thing they are afraid of. If they allow a "nowhere" company to get established they they are likely to lose customers (or potential customers).
agreed, but the real problem is when communities, frustrated at cable and telco's unwillingness or inability to bring in broadband (justified or not), decide to create their own community broadband networks and are blocked by the very telco's that don't want to spend the mony themselves.
The "problem" is that these operators would have a tough time competing these kind of operators. So they need to block them before they are in a position to threaten their monopoly/duopoly.
They have attempted to enter litigation with an EFF lawyer and a law professor at that. You would have thought that they would have been careful not to make any technical mistakes with that kind of opponent
Given that it isn't easy to tell who your opponent is in this kind of situation you'd have though they'd have been careful not to make any technical mistakes.
Please don't state the infraction as a done deal fact. A copyright notice was posted online for education in copyright law.
Quotation is generally considered "fair use" so long as it is not excessive. Where the original work is itself very small even quoting the entire thing is unlikely to be excessive. An analogy would be quoting a tradmark or advertising slogan (some of which are single words or collections of words which do not even form a sentence.) In such situation the proportion of original to quoted text might well be a better metric than what proportion of the original is quoted. Also quoting something to discuss it, comment on it or critique it generally indicates "fair use" even if there question of "excessive quotation".
It's just possible that the original take-down notice may have been legitimate (although, honestly, no lawyer could possibly pass the bar and have a good faith belief that her use of the clip was in violation of the law, so even that is an EXTREMELY gracious statement). Once she filed her counter-notice, however, they can no longer claim this...
AFAIK the bar is very low for both kinds of notices. The point is that these are ment to be "one shot" deals. Once someone has sent a counter notice the hoster should be "out of the loop" at least in respect of the work in question (or any parts of it). Not only should the hoster hot nonour a duplicate "take down" they probably arn't even obliged to say why. If things work as they should the plaintiff (in this case the NFL) must follow a normal procedure, including correctly identifying and serving legal notices to the defendent.
The NFL demanded that Youtube remove the clip as per the DMCA. This is their right as the content-holder if they believe that their copyright is being infringed.
Seltzer sent a notice to Youtube stating that she did not infringe the NFL's copyright (as it was a fair use of the clip). This is her right as per the DMCA.
At which point YouTube is obliged to reinstate the content in question.
What this really illustrates is that the DMCA safe harbor provisions are fairly flawed. It's economically infeasible to monitor clips, keep track of which ones have been C&D'd already, and then file suit for every infringement that comes back to them per section 512.
Whilst it might be "impossible" to monitor uploads the situation here is that someone has complained that a specific piece of content is infringing followed by a counter notice being submitted and acted on. This would apply to a tiny faction of the content being hosted. All that is needed is to apply a tiny piece of meta data to each item.
The issue here is that the NFL is trying to say that they are above the same copyright law that applies to everyone else - that they have holy authority bestowed from somewhere on high to forbid fair use of their material. They have no such thing,
Their claims arn't actually that unusual. Check out the front of the average book. Their mistake however is to believe their own bluff, rather than realising that someone was bound to fail to be fooled sooner or later.
I don't get this.. do you not have privacy laws in the U.S.?
Given the way in which many US companies trumpet "privacy policies" either such laws don't exist or are so weak they arn't worth the paper they are printed on.
The FBI seems to love terrorists, because they have bought about a regime in which anyone merely claiming to be an FBI agent can ask for and receive any confidential or private information on any US citizen.
Which probably means that the FBI isn't going to be too interested in catching terrorists. The worst case senario is that they will provide help to terrorists.
The terrorists will surely be posing as agents NOW, and because there is no validation of authority, paper trail or any safeguards at all, they will be able to find out everything they want to know.
More likely blackmailers, identity fraudsters, even robbers, etc. Since these are the kind of criminal activities where finding out detailed information on specific people is likely to be useful. Terrorists probably arn't that bothered, except "terrorists" who want to do things like plant false evidence trails...
Even if only 1 person in the 143,000 investigated was a terrorist,
Remember also consider the number of terrorists amongst the people not being investigated. One of the basic problems with corrupt law enforcement is not only do they waste time harassing innocent people they also have a tendency to ignore (even "partner with") actual criminals. "Law enforcement" is by it's very nature attractive to criminals, which is why proper oversight is needed.
it was worth giving up my civil liberties to catch this child molester.
How do you know that giving up your civil liberties actually made it easier to catch this person. It may have made no difference, it may even have made them harder to catch. Mass snooping (even if conducted by entirely honest operatives) tends to increase "noise" far more than "signal".
The mosquito isn't the actual problem - the problem is if you create sufficient selective pressure against the malaria parasite, eventually you'll get malaria parasites resistant to the gene in these mosquitos and will be back at square 1 again.
The problem with most parsites is that they have very short life cycles. For that matter so do mosquitos.
The PNAS study shows an additional effect that isn't quite covered by the blurb above: heterozygous mosquitos (those with only one copy of the gene) are more fit than homozygous mosquitos (those with two copies).
This is quite interesting since a natural mutation in humans, that which causes sickle cell anemia, has exactly the same chracteristic. Maybe it's even working in a similar way.
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Yeah, humans definitely have the market on that particular brand of stupidity (RIP Beagle 2). :-P
BR>There's a slight difference between crashing a robot probe on an unihabited planet next door and crashing a crewed ship on an alien planet, which you know full well has intelligent natives (with an industrial society) on it, in an alien star system...
If you consider UFO to be what it actually means, that it is an object in the sky for which there is no current explanation, then that's fine. Ball Lightening was a 'UFO' till it was explained.
Many many UFOs are only UFOs for a short time (possibly seconds) until they become IFOs e.g. aircraft. In other cases it can take longer. There are also photographs and video footage which are likely to remain "unidentified" simply because of poor technical quality.
To believe that these unexplained things are extra terrestrials is a huge leap, and one I would tend to scoff at. Not least because the whole 'flying saucer' and 'greys' crap only appeared in the US during the early cold war, with greys not being named till later.
It also makes a very good cover story for any secret aviation going on. Including that involving unusually shaped experimental aircraft. Not showing up on radar and being able to move in unusal ways are very desirable attributes in military aircraft as is "not looking like an aircraft".
I will never believe that an advanced race can travel all the way across the inconceivable distance between stars, and be dumb enough to crash.
Even if they were "dumb enough to crash" you might expect something more like the Columbia breakup. The only thing likely to crash would be a robot probe. It's hard to conceive of any intelligent beings going on a one way trip from orbit to the surface of an alien (to them) planet. It would make far more sense for a vehicle intended for a crew to explore the surface (or near surface) of a planet to have multiple redundent systems to get the crew back to their main craft if anything went wrong.
Nor that they would travel that far and buzz people on their own, which is all that has supposedly happened.
"Buzzing" members of an agressive, intelligent, alien species qualifies as stupid behavior.
Most alien visitation theories read like children's stories, and most 'the aliens operated on me' stories read like early memories of visits to a dentist mixed with sexual fantasies.
Any intelligent alien species capable of getting to Earth could learn a lot about the planet simply by observation. Together with quite a lot about humans the same way, including interception of video signals (it's not necessary to understand the language). Even if they did feel the need to start investigating terrestrial organisms there are plenty of non sentient species to choose from (including the same ones we humans use). Kidnapping sentients has the problem that it tends to be noticed, returning them with strange stories tends to be noticed even more.
How many years do you think they expected the show to run? You're commissioning a quirky semi-educational historical SF show basically aimed at kids.
It's rather hard to guess what an audiance will go for in the field of popular entertainment.
Do you seriously expect it to become a cultural icon and still be popular 44 years later? They probably expected it to run a few years and then get cancelled.
On the other hand TV execs expected ST:Enterprise to last at least as long as ST:TNG, ST:DS9 & ST:Voyager... This is something the BBC havn't assumed with New Who, even though many of the people working on the production (including the lead actor and lead writer) are fans of the original series.
One of the reasons they introduced the regeneration theme to Dr Who was to avoid having to deal with actors egos and salary demands.
It might have more to do with the first actor considering retirement. William Hartnell did most of his acting before Doctor Who.
It's actually "Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.". It's a privately held not-for-profit corporation based in New York.
Only a minority of corporate enties are publically traded. Whilst there may be some private trading going on the most likely way for shares to change hands is through inheritance. For both real and corporate people.
No way to tell for sure, but one would assume the vast majority of shares (if not all of them) are held by the member companies.
It's a fairly common situation with many sorts of clubs and associations that all members are shareholders (and that no non member can be a shareholder.)
That's their business model: They make you believe you have a reservation, then you have to go around all the rental places trying to find one.
It isn't even an original one. IIRC airlines started with the idea of deliberatly overbooking flights some thirty odd years ago, turn up "too late" and you don't get a seat. More recently some hotel chains have been caught taking bookings for more rooms than they actually have. Even including sending people round to other hotels in the chain.
Same business model; the only difference is if you are hiring a seat on an aircraft, a room to sleep in or a truck/van.
The RIAA is just a consortium of the recording companies. At any point they can kill it off and start a new consortium to keep the heat off them without much issue.
The most obvious point would be when the RIAA starts accumulating court judgements. Presumably they go bankrupt to be replaced by the NRIAA...
The RIAA isn't a company. It's a trade association
The two are not mutually exclusive. Anyway the RIAA would have a hard time suing people with out being a "legal person" in some sense or other.
Assume that you charge them JUST or below the amount that MS makes in the EU sales. Then MS has a strong incentive to continue with the sale. Why? because it is slowly draining their competitors.
They'd actually have to fine Microsoft more than their total sales. Otherwise Microsoft could cross subsidise their EU operations. Unless the EU has (and is prepared to use) the power to freeze all Microsoft's bank accounts in the EU and forbid any banks within the EU transfering money to any Microsoft accounts outside the EU.
This nonsense of leaving everything up to the free market will only result in an increasingly dysfunctional state, even if some people do become very wealthy as a result. It is not like you need to resort to complete socialism just because of placing restrictions on the private sector, providing some public services, and mitigating the more problematic aspects of capitalism.
:)
Public untilties are never "free markets", they are actually what are known as "natural monopolies". Because if you actually had a "free market" you wouldn't be able to get out of your house without having to climb over a huge quantity of pipes and cables
Maybe they're just afraid that a company will come along and figure out how to wire up a street for less than $10,000. If they can provide "nowhere" customers with service that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, just think what will happen to the "somewhere" customers when they discover they're overpaying for their service.
That is probably the sort of thing they are afraid of. If they allow a "nowhere" company to get established they they are likely to lose customers (or potential customers).
agreed, but the real problem is when communities, frustrated at cable and telco's unwillingness or inability to bring in broadband (justified or not), decide to create their own community broadband networks and are blocked by the very telco's that don't want to spend the mony themselves.
The "problem" is that these operators would have a tough time competing these kind of operators. So they need to block them before they are in a position to threaten their monopoly/duopoly.
They have attempted to enter litigation with an EFF lawyer and a law professor at that. You would have thought that they would have been careful not to make any technical mistakes with that kind of opponent
Given that it isn't easy to tell who your opponent is in this kind of situation you'd have though they'd have been careful not to make any technical mistakes.
Please don't state the infraction as a done deal fact. A copyright notice was posted online for education in copyright law.
Quotation is generally considered "fair use" so long as it is not excessive. Where the original work is itself very small even quoting the entire thing is unlikely to be excessive. An analogy would be quoting a tradmark or advertising slogan (some of which are single words or collections of words which do not even form a sentence.)
In such situation the proportion of original to quoted text might well be a better metric than what proportion of the original is quoted.
Also quoting something to discuss it, comment on it or critique it generally indicates "fair use" even if there question of "excessive quotation".
It's just possible that the original take-down notice may have been legitimate (although, honestly, no lawyer could possibly pass the bar and have a good faith belief that her use of the clip was in violation of the law, so even that is an EXTREMELY gracious statement). Once she filed her counter-notice, however, they can no longer claim this...
AFAIK the bar is very low for both kinds of notices. The point is that these are ment to be "one shot" deals. Once someone has sent a counter notice the hoster should be "out of the loop" at least in respect of the work in question (or any parts of it). Not only should the hoster hot nonour a duplicate "take down" they probably arn't even obliged to say why. If things work as they should the plaintiff (in this case the NFL) must follow a normal procedure, including correctly identifying and serving legal notices to the defendent.
The NFL demanded that Youtube remove the clip as per the DMCA. This is their right as the content-holder if they believe that their copyright is being infringed.
Seltzer sent a notice to Youtube stating that she did not infringe the NFL's copyright (as it was a fair use of the clip). This is her right as per the DMCA.
At which point YouTube is obliged to reinstate the content in question.
What this really illustrates is that the DMCA safe harbor provisions are fairly flawed. It's economically infeasible to monitor clips, keep track of which ones have been C&D'd already, and then file suit for every infringement that comes back to them per section 512.
Whilst it might be "impossible" to monitor uploads the situation here is that someone has complained that a specific piece of content is infringing followed by a counter notice being submitted and acted on. This would apply to a tiny faction of the content being hosted. All that is needed is to apply a tiny piece of meta data to each item.
The issue here is that the NFL is trying to say that they are above the same copyright law that applies to everyone else - that they have holy authority bestowed from somewhere on high to forbid fair use of their material. They have no such thing,
Their claims arn't actually that unusual. Check out the front of the average book. Their mistake however is to believe their own bluff, rather than realising that someone was bound to fail to be fooled sooner or later.
I don't get this.. do you not have privacy laws in the U.S.?
Given the way in which many US companies trumpet "privacy policies" either such laws don't exist or are so weak they arn't worth the paper they are printed on.
The FBI seems to love terrorists, because they have bought about a regime in which anyone merely claiming to be an FBI agent can ask for and receive any confidential or private information on any US citizen.
Which probably means that the FBI isn't going to be too interested in catching terrorists. The worst case senario is that they will provide help to terrorists.
The terrorists will surely be posing as agents NOW, and because there is no validation of authority, paper trail or any safeguards at all, they will be able to find out everything they want to know.
More likely blackmailers, identity fraudsters, even robbers, etc. Since these are the kind of criminal activities where finding out detailed information on specific people is likely to be useful. Terrorists probably arn't that bothered, except "terrorists" who want to do things like plant false evidence trails...
Even if only 1 person in the 143,000 investigated was a terrorist,
Remember also consider the number of terrorists amongst the people not being investigated. One of the basic problems with corrupt law enforcement is not only do they waste time harassing innocent people they also have a tendency to ignore (even "partner with") actual criminals. "Law enforcement" is by it's very nature attractive to criminals, which is why proper oversight is needed.
it was worth giving up my civil liberties to catch this child molester.
How do you know that giving up your civil liberties actually made it easier to catch this person. It may have made no difference, it may even have made them harder to catch. Mass snooping (even if conducted by entirely honest operatives) tends to increase "noise" far more than "signal".
Dude, where have you been? I haven't had any vestiges in like 5 and a half years. I am completely out of vestiges!
Probably for rather longer than that, if you look at the history of the FBI and what they have actually been doing.
The mosquito isn't the actual problem - the problem is if you create sufficient selective pressure against the malaria parasite, eventually you'll get malaria parasites resistant to the gene in these mosquitos and will be back at square 1 again.
The problem with most parsites is that they have very short life cycles. For that matter so do mosquitos.
The PNAS study shows an additional effect that isn't quite covered by the blurb above: heterozygous mosquitos (those with only one copy of the gene) are more fit than homozygous mosquitos (those with two copies).
This is quite interesting since a natural mutation in humans, that which causes sickle cell anemia, has exactly the same chracteristic. Maybe it's even working in a similar way.
Then a good defense lawyer can apply the "true cost" of $.99 to each song since that is the most they sell for at "legitimate online outlets".
Since presumably the seller is making some kind of profit on that price the actual cost is likely to be somewhat lower.
In the same way, it's not the library's responsibility if you OCR or xerox one of their books,
Or copied a CD, DVD or video tape you borrowed. Which tends to be easier since machines which can turn pages arn't too common.
it's up to the litigant to prove you infringed on their copyright.
If they need some third party to help them that third party is perfectly justified in charging them. (Even if no relevent evidence is found.)