Of course their fscking felons! Bad! Bad! But so what? Due process doesn't take a back
seat because "I just know that guy is guilty".
Also it dosn't make much sense to break laws in order to enforce laws.
If the fBI had all the warrants and permissions they needed, then why did the
case "prompt a sharp rebuke from Moscow"?
Most likely because they would never have got any such permissions in the first place. Would US courts give such permissions to the Russian police? Anyway the convictions are highly questionable, because the supposed "evidence" was gathered by crooks.
Interesting that they used human intelligence [HUMINT] to gain the passwords. Once
they had the passwords, however, I wonder if they got [or needed] a warrant to search
the Russian network.
Except they could not have got a warrent in the first place, unless Russian courts are in the habit of issuing warrents to foreigners.
For all you girlie-boyz with your panties tied up in knots, THESE RUSSKIES WERE
STEALING CREDIT CARD NUMBERS!!! THEY ARE FELONS, NOT HEROES!!!
Problem is that the people who caught them are just as crooked. If a serial burglar discovered evidence of a murder would they just walk free?
Ask yourself this question: What would you rather have, a justice system where only some
of the guilty people are punished but no innocent people; or, all the guilty people are
punished but consequently some of the innocent people are too. Personally I want to live
in a world where the first model is prevelant.
In practice with the second model some of the guilty will always escape punishment, they will be the corrupt cops framing up the innocent.
So what we have here is a case of the US government overstepping their bounds, but it
led to the capture and arrest of a genuine criminal.
This is effectivly saying "the end justifies the means". It is generally considered unacceptable for law enforcement to break the law.
This is certainly a tough one. I'm all for
dropping some of the technicalities that allow so many criminals to go free, but then we'd
only find ourselves in need of people to police the police, so to speak.
What about the technicality of criminals getting away their crimes because they are "police"? As appears to be the case here.
First, the US and the Russians should be working togehter in theese matters.
But the Americans chose not to, in the process breaking Russian law.
The russians surely don't want to protect theese guys but
they sure should have a fair amount of saying in the matter and that does not seem to
have been the case.
They probably do want to protect their citizens being effectivly kidnapped by foreign governments. This isn't the first time Russians have commited no crime in the US and been arrested there. Hopefully Russia will now put the US on its list of "bad countries".
However, the USA commited a crime themselves in trying to get these criminals. A
country MUST follow the rules they want others to obbey if they want to be taken serieus.
This is an absolute disaster for international law.
The US having double standards when it applies to laws is hardly news. This is the country which wants to bomb another one into the ground on the basis that it ignores UN resolution, has weapons of mass destruction, has invaded some of its neighbours, treats ethnic groups in their territories badly and is lead by a nasty man. At the same time giving lots of money to another country in the same region which ignores more UN resolutions, has more weapons of mass destruction, has invaded all of its neighbours, treats ethnic groups in their territories badly and is lead by a nasty man. The vast majority of the rest of the world has already come to the conclusion not to take the US seriously, this is just icing on the cake.
It is these damn people who never update a damn thing that spreads these viruses.
Unfortunately, this seems to include the majority of home PC users.
Updating software is not something home users are in the habit of doing. Most domestic appliances don't need anything similar, the likes of set top boxes and digital video recorders update automatically. Something like Windows Update requires a lot of user input. This can be just as much a problem in corporate settings.
Yup at around 11am the printer started to print garbage immidiately i knew it was bug
bear cause i sent en email wednesday to all my users to update the corporate anti-virus
software & i attached the update and i posted links to the various bugbear reports.
Ideally corporate AV software would be updated centrally. But not all the anti virous producers appear to have got a good handle on this.
If I want to drop a chevy engine into my ford, the car companies have no business making me stop from doinfg it, or making a mechanic not sell that service to there customers.
But Ford would probably love to be able to stop you. Currently the only time the government is likely to get involved is if you want to drive your modified car on the public roads. In which case all they care about is if it's "street legal" not that it's to the original manufacturer's spec.
Loss leaders simply invite later protectionism. Companies that use them will end up using intellectual property claims or lobby for more direct industry tariff/duty approaches (this last has yet to happen realy in the console industry). While loss leaders are legal, they end up pinching away separate and should-be-legitimate business activities because the parent company will scream bloody murder that they are being robbed.
Actually the problem isn't so much loss leaders as having a substantial portion of your business dependent on a loss leader product. When something like a supermarket uses loss leaders they don't need to kick up all this fuss. Because they are discounting a tiny proportion of their product lines. (If they discount a wide range of their products you can be sure they are still making a profit on those products.) The only thing they might have to do is say "no more than X per customer, per visit". Problem of applying the idea of a loss leader to games consoles or Internet appliancies is that these arn't a small portion of the product line, they are a large portion, sometimes even the vast majority of the product line...
Although there aren't enough details available (That I've seen) to judge this particular instance, virtually every time a purveyor of products that let you change what you've legally purchased to do something else gets shut down it is NOT with actual legal action, it is with the THREAT of legal action. The sickening fact of all this isn't whether or not these entities are within their legal right to do this, but that the question is never asked . Lawsuits are so onerous that the mere threat of one is sufficient to stop what MAY BE legal. The crucial legal court test NEVER OCCURS.
Quite likely the plaintiff never actually wants the case to be brought to court. Just to spin out the case long enough, including with having hearings about hearings, that the defendent will run out of money.
The fact that devices such as mod chips (And P2P networks, for that matter) have both legitimate and illegitimate uses is not just a side argument . It is important to realize that many freedoms enjoyed by Americans (And for that matter, citizens of many other countries) are freedoms that could be used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes.
Just about any tool or machine ever developed can be used for "legitimate" and "illegitimate" purposes. Sometimes the only difference between the two is political whim. Well though out laws address actions, rather than the tools or methods used.
Canada has the same basic rules as Britain. In this, the judge decides who should pay the costs. If the judge thinks that the looser had a good case, then he'll not award costs, and therefore each party has to pay their own costs.
Also the judge can decide the level of costs. Including rejecting any claims for costs where he or she is unconvinced that the winning party actually needed to do whatever to make their case.
If the looser had a bad case, and they shouldn't have been wasting everyones time, then the winner will be awarded costs, and the looser has to pay their costs. In rare cases, the looser will be awarded costs, so that the winner has to pay the loosers costs.
A possible situation for the latter would be if the winning party has done something to cause the losing party to incur unnecessary costs.
The problem with "loser pays" is that it favors the rich. A rich entity can sue a poor entity, and under "loser pays," at worst, the rich entity will have to pay the poor entity's legal bills, which are going to be tiny compared to the large entity's bills. But if a poor entity brings a valid suit against a rich entity, but gets out-lawyered, then the poor entity now has to pay a gigantic amount of money, which it does not have, since it is poor.
One way to help things is to have the costs awarded based around an assumption that all sides are expected to minimise costs. If someone used a lawyer when they could have been LIP they get nothing, if they used an expensive lawyer they get only up to the cost of an average priced lawyer. Another idea would be that the plaintiff spending more on legal costs than the value of the suit being likely to result in the case being dismissed.
I?d recommend striking the word ?perfect?, and putting to rest the urban legend that digital copies are somehow different from other method of copying.>
Or indeed the idea that something being "digital" somehow makes it special, thus needing special laws.
Probably so high that you could pay for your own fibre connection for the yearly charges if you're living in a civilized country. Which in turn leaves the people living on antarctica, the middle of the jungles in south america, in tibet or in the middle of africa being the only ones who could get access via satellite cheaper than by buying their own fibre.
You can probably discount the first one, since it's still cheaper to lay fibre across the ice than to have enough satellites in orbit to cover the poles.
What if access to massive amounts of information about everything on the Net (howto harverst, plant, increase yields, irrigate, topple corrupt leaders, etc.) helped them get out from under-development?
Assuming Western governments didn't want to stop distribution of this kind of information, especially the last one...
What's more interesting is that a CD typically costs $20 to purchase yet a cassette tape costs around $10. Yet the cassette costs much more to make! (Cassettes are recorded, CDs are pressed on a high capacity assemply line.)
Not only that but tapes cost more to ship and there are more ways in which you could wind up with a "dud".
This means that recording companies can turn a profit at $10 with higher cost of materials, so why the $%^@ do they charge us $20? This is the price fixing.
Because people will pay the 20 dollers, pounds, Euros or whatever for the CD. The pricing is based on what the customer is prepared to pay.
Let's turn that on its head. Patents should be granted grudgingly. Examiners should be looking for excuses to reject them.
This is how they should be working in the first place:)
I'd quite seriously propose a deposit of $10,000 for each patent filing, most of which would be refundable on granting. I want filers to be sure that they're actually filing genuine inventions, and I want the PTO examiner (and/or subcontractor) to be eyeing that $10,000 as her reward for finding prior art that you've missed or "forgotten" to mention.
The problem here is whilst big corporates can consider this a small amount of money the "lone inventor" could easily find this a very difficult amount of money to raise.
Permitting Win98 and denying Win2k? For all it's faults, it's not as bad as the 9x series of exploits. Plus with Win2k up to SP3, it's likely more secure than XP.
Since XP is newer it's exploits are less likely to be known about by the "white hats".
Two, Microsoft has been MORE responsive to
fixing the bugs, XP now comes with an auto updater and sends fixes out automatically (if configured to do
so).
This is simply a method of sending out updates. It may or may not have anything to do with fixing bugs. Indeed it could just as easily ensure that buggy code gets distributed quickly.
I think thats why the software industry is quite a bit different from most "material" industries economically. The fixed cost of development so massively outweighs the cost of materials that the normal tendancy of price to approach marginal costs just doesn't seem to happen.
Note that you have at least two different approachs to selling software. In the first case software is specifically commissioned by a small group of customers (or one customer) thus the cost charged had better cover the development cost straight away. The other model is to treat software as though it is a "widget". Where the attempt is to spread the development cost over many units. The actual development cost of software tends to relate to how much new software needs to be written.
For comapnies who have a mature ownership position in a software market, it is not uncommon to see margins of 50% or higher.
There is also likely to be a difference between software specifically comissioned (with the possibility of other customers in the future) and software intended to be sold as a "widget".
Try finding that in any manufacturing industry.
In a manufacturing industry you typically have two development costs, one for the product itself and one for manufacturing the product as well as an ongoing cost of manufacture. With software you don't have to develop a manufacturing process.
Microsoft has reported margins much higher than that.
Microsoft is in the sell software as widget business, with more or less a captive market. Also they can push a lot of the already small manufacturing costs onto OEMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course their fscking felons! Bad! Bad! But so what? Due process doesn't take a back seat because "I just know that guy is guilty".
Also it dosn't make much sense to break laws in order to enforce laws.
If the fBI had all the warrants and permissions they needed, then why did the case "prompt a sharp rebuke from Moscow"?
Most likely because they would never have got any such permissions in the first place. Would US courts give such permissions to the Russian police?
Anyway the convictions are highly questionable, because the supposed "evidence" was gathered by crooks.
Interesting that they used human intelligence [HUMINT] to gain the passwords. Once they had the passwords, however, I wonder if they got [or needed] a warrant to search the Russian network.
Except they could not have got a warrent in the first place, unless Russian courts are in the habit of issuing warrents to foreigners.
For all you girlie-boyz with your panties tied up in knots, THESE RUSSKIES WERE STEALING CREDIT CARD NUMBERS!!! THEY ARE FELONS, NOT HEROES!!!
Problem is that the people who caught them are just as crooked. If a serial burglar discovered evidence of a murder would they just walk free?
Ask yourself this question: What would you rather have, a justice system where only some of the guilty people are punished but no innocent people; or, all the guilty people are punished but consequently some of the innocent people are too. Personally I want to live in a world where the first model is prevelant.
In practice with the second model some of the guilty will always escape punishment, they will be the corrupt cops framing up the innocent.
So what we have here is a case of the US government overstepping their bounds, but it led to the capture and arrest of a genuine criminal.
This is effectivly saying "the end justifies the means". It is generally considered unacceptable for law enforcement to break the law.
This is certainly a tough one. I'm all for dropping some of the technicalities that allow so many criminals to go free, but then we'd only find ourselves in need of people to police the police, so to speak.
What about the technicality of criminals getting away their crimes because they are "police"? As appears to be the case here.
First, the US and the Russians should be working togehter in theese matters.
But the Americans chose not to, in the process breaking Russian law.
The russians surely don't want to protect theese guys but they sure should have a fair amount of saying in the matter and that does not seem to have been the case.
They probably do want to protect their citizens being effectivly kidnapped by foreign governments. This isn't the first time Russians have commited no crime in the US and been arrested there. Hopefully Russia will now put the US on its list of "bad countries".
However, the USA commited a crime themselves in trying to get these criminals. A country MUST follow the rules they want others to obbey if they want to be taken serieus. This is an absolute disaster for international law.
The US having double standards when it applies to laws is hardly news. This is the country which wants to bomb another one into the ground on the basis that it ignores UN resolution, has weapons of mass destruction, has invaded some of its neighbours, treats ethnic groups in their territories badly and is lead by a nasty man. At the same time giving lots of money to another country in the same region which ignores more UN resolutions, has more weapons of mass destruction, has invaded all of its neighbours, treats ethnic groups in their territories badly and is lead by a nasty man.
The vast majority of the rest of the world has already come to the conclusion not to take the US seriously, this is just icing on the cake.
It is these damn people who never update a damn thing that spreads these viruses. Unfortunately, this seems to include the majority of home PC users.
Updating software is not something home users are in the habit of doing. Most domestic appliances don't need anything similar, the likes of set top boxes and digital video recorders update automatically.
Something like Windows Update requires a lot of user input. This can be just as much a problem in corporate settings.
Yup at around 11am the printer started to print garbage immidiately i knew it was bug bear cause i sent en email wednesday to all my users to update the corporate anti-virus software & i attached the update and i posted links to the various bugbear reports.
Ideally corporate AV software would be updated centrally. But not all the anti virous producers appear to have got a good handle on this.
The junk from the printer is probably due to the random network traffic it sends out.
One of the methods it uses to spread is by copying to network shares. Presumably the programmer was not sure how to deal with printer shares.
If I want to drop a chevy engine into my ford, the car companies have no business making me stop from doinfg it, or making a mechanic not sell that service to there customers.
But Ford would probably love to be able to stop you. Currently the only time the government is likely to get involved is if you want to drive your modified car on the public roads. In which case all they care about is if it's "street legal" not that it's to the original manufacturer's spec.
Loss leaders simply invite later protectionism. Companies that use them will end up using intellectual property claims or lobby for more direct industry tariff/duty approaches (this last has yet to happen realy in the console industry). While loss leaders are legal, they end up pinching away separate and should-be-legitimate business activities because the parent company will scream bloody murder that they are being robbed.
Actually the problem isn't so much loss leaders as having a substantial portion of your business dependent on a loss leader product. When something like a supermarket uses loss leaders they don't need to kick up all this fuss. Because they are discounting a tiny proportion of their product lines. (If they discount a wide range of their products you can be sure they are still making a profit on those products.) The only thing they might have to do is say "no more than X per customer, per visit".
Problem of applying the idea of a loss leader to games consoles or Internet appliancies is that these arn't a small portion of the product line, they are a large portion, sometimes even the vast majority of the product line...
Although there aren't enough details available (That I've seen) to judge this particular instance, virtually every time a purveyor of products that let you change what you've legally purchased to do something else gets shut down it is NOT with actual legal action, it is with the THREAT of legal action. The sickening fact of all this isn't whether or not these entities are within their legal right to do this, but that the question is never asked . Lawsuits are so onerous that the mere threat of one is sufficient to stop what MAY BE legal. The crucial legal court test NEVER OCCURS.
Quite likely the plaintiff never actually wants the case to be brought to court. Just to spin out the case long enough, including with having hearings about hearings, that the defendent will run out of money.
The fact that devices such as mod chips (And P2P networks, for that matter) have both legitimate and illegitimate uses is not just a side argument . It is important to realize that many freedoms enjoyed by Americans (And for that matter, citizens of many other countries) are freedoms that could be used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes.
Just about any tool or machine ever developed can be used for "legitimate" and "illegitimate" purposes. Sometimes the only difference between the two is political whim. Well though out laws address actions, rather than the tools or methods used.
Canada has the same basic rules as Britain. In this, the judge decides who should pay the costs. If the judge thinks that the looser had a good case, then he'll not award costs, and therefore each party has to pay their own costs.
Also the judge can decide the level of costs. Including rejecting any claims for costs where he or she is unconvinced that the winning party actually needed to do whatever to make their case.
If the looser had a bad case, and they shouldn't have been wasting everyones time, then the winner will be awarded costs, and the looser has to pay their costs. In rare cases, the looser will be awarded costs, so that the winner has to pay the loosers costs.
A possible situation for the latter would be if the winning party has done something to cause the losing party to incur unnecessary costs.
The problem with "loser pays" is that it favors the rich. A rich entity can sue a poor entity, and under "loser pays," at worst, the rich entity will have to pay the poor entity's legal bills, which are going to be tiny compared to the large entity's bills. But if a poor entity brings a valid suit against a rich entity, but gets out-lawyered, then the poor entity now has to pay a gigantic amount of money, which it does not have, since it is poor.
One way to help things is to have the costs awarded based around an assumption that all sides are expected to minimise costs. If someone used a lawyer when they could have been LIP they get nothing, if they used an expensive lawyer they get only up to the cost of an average priced lawyer.
Another idea would be that the plaintiff spending more on legal costs than the value of the suit being likely to result in the case being dismissed.
I?d recommend striking the word ?perfect?, and putting to rest the urban legend that digital copies are somehow different from other method of copying.>
Or indeed the idea that something being "digital" somehow makes it special, thus needing special laws.
Probably so high that you could pay for your own fibre connection for the yearly charges if you're living in a civilized country. Which in turn leaves the people living on antarctica, the middle of the jungles in south america, in tibet or in the middle of africa being the only ones who could get access via satellite cheaper than by buying their own fibre.
You can probably discount the first one, since it's still cheaper to lay fibre across the ice than to have enough satellites in orbit to cover the poles.
What if access to massive amounts of information about everything on the Net (howto harverst, plant, increase yields, irrigate, topple corrupt leaders, etc.) helped them get out from under-development?
Assuming Western governments didn't want to stop distribution of this kind of information, especially the last one...
What's more interesting is that a CD typically costs $20 to purchase yet a cassette tape costs around $10. Yet the cassette costs much more to make! (Cassettes are recorded, CDs are pressed on a high capacity assemply line.)
Not only that but tapes cost more to ship and there are more ways in which you could wind up with a "dud".
This means that recording companies can turn a profit at $10 with higher cost of materials, so why the $%^@ do they charge us $20? This is the price fixing.
Because people will pay the 20 dollers, pounds, Euros or whatever for the CD. The pricing is based on what the customer is prepared to pay.
Does anybody know if there are any retailers taking advantage of this price difference? Buy Canadian, sell American, pocket the difference.
If there were they would probably keep quiet about it. Since otherwise the record companies would be after they over "grey imports".
Let's turn that on its head. Patents should be granted grudgingly. Examiners should be looking for excuses to reject them.
:)
This is how they should be working in the first place
I'd quite seriously propose a deposit of $10,000 for each patent filing, most of which would be refundable on granting. I want filers to be sure that they're actually filing genuine inventions, and I want the PTO examiner (and/or subcontractor) to be eyeing that $10,000 as her reward for finding prior art that you've missed or "forgotten" to mention.
The problem here is whilst big corporates can consider this a small amount of money the "lone inventor" could easily find this a very difficult amount of money to raise.
Permitting Win98 and denying Win2k? For all it's faults, it's not as bad as the 9x series of exploits. Plus with Win2k up to SP3, it's likely more secure than XP.
Since XP is newer it's exploits are less likely to be known about by the "white hats".
Who still runs PPTP? It was found to be under-secured a while back.
Most likely it's more that people who don't have any intention of using it have it enabled, but don't know it's enabled...
Two, Microsoft has been MORE responsive to fixing the bugs, XP now comes with an auto updater and sends fixes out automatically (if configured to do so).
This is simply a method of sending out updates. It may or may not have anything to do with fixing bugs. Indeed it could just as easily ensure that buggy code gets distributed quickly.
I think thats why the software industry is quite a bit different from most "material" industries economically. The fixed cost of development so massively outweighs the cost of materials that the normal tendancy of price to approach marginal costs just doesn't seem to happen.
Note that you have at least two different approachs to selling software. In the first case software is specifically commissioned by a small group of customers (or one customer) thus the cost charged had better cover the development cost straight away.
The other model is to treat software as though it is a "widget". Where the attempt is to spread the development cost over many units.
The actual development cost of software tends to relate to how much new software needs to be written.
For comapnies who have a mature ownership position in a software market, it is not uncommon to see margins of 50% or higher.
There is also likely to be a difference between software specifically comissioned (with the possibility of other customers in the future) and software intended to be sold as a "widget".
Try finding that in any manufacturing industry.
In a manufacturing industry you typically have two development costs, one for the product itself and one for manufacturing the product as well as an ongoing cost of manufacture. With software you don't have to develop a manufacturing process.
Microsoft has reported margins much higher than that.
Microsoft is in the sell software as widget business, with more or less a captive market. Also they can push a lot of the already small manufacturing costs onto OEMs.