The DMCA was passed by congress, therefore it is a law passed by congress that abridges freedom of speech. The fact that suits are initiated by private parties is irrelevant.
Is there a specific term for a lawsuit which involves bogus application of a law?
Go back and read the first amendment. Note the subject.
What it actually says is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
CONGRESS--and by extension, the government--cannot abridge your freedom of speech, aside from military or criminal reasons. And for a lot of things, not even then.
Congress cannot pass a law which abridges freedom of speach. Which is a subtle, but very important, distinction. PRIVATE PARTIES, like MIT and Microsoft, can do whatever the hell they please, up to the point where they're a goverment.
Except that a private party cannot use any law passed through the US Congress in order to enforce this.
If Microsoft owns a town, they can't made a law abridging speech there.
Up until fairly recently any level of government other than federal, in the US, could make such a law.
despite using the metric system for quite a while now, brits still drink PINTS of beer/ale/piss (whatever it is they call it)
Only milk and draught beer. Soft drinks are sold in 0.5,1, 1.5, 2, 3 litre bottles or 0.33, 0.44 litre cans. Most commonly 2 litre plastic bottles and 0.33 litre cans. Beer is sold in 0.44 or 0.5 litre cans, 0.25 glass bottles or larger plastic bottles. Most common is 2 litre plastic bottles and 0.44 litre cans.
He said we have nothing to compare sizes in our drinks, to what you have over in the States.. this was made even more obvious when a friend recently returned from visiting his brother in Missouri - he bought some plastic cups whilst he was over there that could pretty much hold an entire litre of drink - I have never seen anything like that over here. I guess Americans just drink (and pee) more.
The 80oz cup is in excess of two litres. The 30 litre coke bottle must be a joke, most people couldn't even lift such a bottle. Even those who could would have trouble pouring it.
If you signed a lease for your Britney Spears CD then I've got a bridge in New York that I'd like to lease to you.
In the UK DVDs are often advertised with the slogan "yours to own". Maybe they don't do that in the US or maybe they don't have laws about truth in advertising:)
product placement is almost useless as an advertising mechanism. sure you watch a movie or a tv show and you may see bond using a mac or driving a bmw and you think to yourself, i want one. but look at most commercials on tv. they are not of the "see this a bmw" or "see this is a mac" variety. certainly they show the product, but they also tell what it does and almost always how much you would pay for it
Advertisments, especially of sales/promotions tend to be both time and geography sensitive. There's also little that looks dafter than a product placement for a product or even company which no longer exists.
Well, I don't agree. Water, and food both *do* have a price -- somebody has to pay the cost of purification and distribution of water, and production of food.
With something like water or air their is a subtle difference between charging for the substance itself and charging for providing a useful service on it. Distribution of water and ensuring it does not contain harmful pathogens is a service. As is filling up a scuba tank.
I suggest you learn something about the nature and causes of scarcity and famine. Sometimes starvation is due to factors that only last a season, and then all is well again.
Assuming the famine or whatever is going on around it dosn't disrupt agriculture. Most often the problem isn't so much nature as human actions.
Most programs used by (fire/police/ambulance/etc.) are SPECIALIZED, that means that won't find that at your local shop:) Their softwares are made by special firms, so they surely have all the support they need.
One possible future nightmare here is COTS. (Commercial Off The Shelf). Which is practice means building a bespoke system on top of proprietary software. Build one from scratch or using open source and it will always be supportable. Use proprietary software as the basis and you could be held to ransom by a software company or left with a system which is impossible to support.
Many of the points that the GAO guy brought up are simply not true, and all of them should be taken with a huge grain of salt. There haven't been any "massive security" issues with Linux (although the same can't be said for some other PC based server operating systems written in Redmond), and there haven't been any major reliability problems either.
This appears to be quite common with anti-Linux FUD. Critisisms actually more applicable to some other system...
As for commercial support, I have been using Linux since 1994, and there has always been someone you could call for support (granted, they were probably fairly small).
"Support" has ended up meaning both "pass the buck" and "get the thing fixed". Also with proprietary software contacting support can wind up as "try and you sell the latest version".
The last point is especially weak. The GPL, arguably the most restrictive Free Software license, doesn't even attempt to control how you use the software.
Nor does it restrict what you can do with the output of GPL software. Write a program with GCC and it's yours to do with what you like.
Imagine you are in a pub and your phones battery runs down. A friend kindly lends you his handset to make a call. You want to call Zambia so rather than pump up his phone bill you slip your sim card into his phone. The network operators now have two User ids (your friends and yours) associated with one IMEI. Or conversly from their point of view two handsets with the same IMEI.
If you switch off the handset before changing the SIM then it will log off the network, so no contention. Even if you just pull the battery out the network can still tell that there isn't a duplicate IMEI. Since only one of the two SIMS will actually respond to any communications from the network.
Its nigh on impossible for the operator to tell the difference between you using two different sim cards sequentially in one handset and two different handsets (with independent sims) having the same IMEI.
It's trivial, in the former case only one SIM will respond to a paging request. Also swapping the SIMS will take place within the same cell group, probably the same cell. With cloned IMEIs both SIMS will be on the network at the same time.
IIRC, that's one of the biggest problems with mobile theft in the UK at the moment - in order to quickstart the whole network for low costs, they allowed multiple instances of the same IMEI (i.e. they shared IMEIs across different handsets).
How hard can it be to check that there are no duplicate IMEIs on the network? It would make more sense to point fingers at the network operators for allowing this or the manufactures for not having this flag as a fault condition.
Zimbabwe have refused food imports that could have done much to save the country from a very serious famine.
You assume Mugabe cares about the country. In reality all he cares about are his political supporters and own specific ethnic group. Which IIRC comprise a minority of the country's population.
If farmers can afford some, but not enough, they may simply breed pesticide resistant whatevers. That's assuming that pesticides designed for use in the US and Europe are actually much use in the first place.
They are part of the problem- what makes them necessary is the pushing of high yield crops on the Third World.
But only high yield if they are farmed in a specific way, otherwise they can wind up being no yield.
Without that, farmers grow low yield, inefficient crops with substantial diversity, subsisting off this behavior.
Only low yield by the standards of western agro-business. Most likely the best yield they can get. Farmers, left of their own devices, will seek to improve their crops and farming techniques.
You need to spray with pesticides as you're now growing a monoculture Western-style.
With a monoculture it only takes one thing to go wrong and you can have no crop at all. The something which goes wrong might be a minor mistake by the farm worker or the wrong type of weather.
The humanitarian aid that the Western World should provide to the people of Zimbabwe is to overthrow their corrupt government.
This sounds all well and good. But Western (especially US) initiated "regime changes" don't have a very good history. How likely would it be that the result would be a good government for the Zimbabwean people (all of them) as opposed to a bunch of thugs who happened to be well liked in Washington and London?
I've downloaded tools from the internet to remove the service provider locks on phones I've legally bought (these have nothing to do with the IMEI number, they're locks that prevent someone buying a phone with, say, BellSouth DCS, and then using it on a VoiceStream network), and the tools generally have the dodgy "change things like the IMEI and other things that shouldn't be changed" functionality as well as the useful bits. This is not, IMHO, a good thing...
The people to blame for this are the manufactures. Who have apparently both made the IMEI easily changable and linked the interface with things which might need to be changed.
Since this has resulted in a crime wave, and the Industry (with a few notable exceptions) is not moving to rectify, the goverment felt the public demand to step in.
Which they could do by pushing the industry to improve their practices. These companies run their business entirely subject to the rules of the UK government in the first place.
As the companies are reluctant to spend the resources on tracking this under fraud statutes,
Those poor upstanding "corporate citizens" can't have anything done to them. Even though Oftel's time probably works out rather cheaper than this bill. With enforcement against a handful of easily identifable companies being rather easier than against an unknown number of unknown people.
It can have some unpleasant consequences though: some years ago, a batch of Nokia mobile phones was stolen, all of them with the same IMEI number. Those phones eventually ended up in stores, where they were, legally, bought by consumers.
Unavoidably, one of those phone got stolen and that IMEI number got blocked. Nokia refused to do anything about it, since they can be hold responsible for phone that were bought through 'grey' channels.
Why put all the blame on Nokia? Just as must to blame here are the network operators for not flagging duplicate IMEI usage. Had they done this then instead of all these phones becoming useless at once people who have just returned them as non working as they were sold. There is no reason for network operators to allow duplicate IMEIs. Doing so make things a lot easier for the crooks.
There can't be a list of all valid IMEI numbers - it'd be vast, since it would have to include all numbers issued on every GSM network in the world.
Actually there is a list. The relevent telephone regulators know which TACs they have issued, the manufactures know the serial numbers of the phones they have made. The operators of the GSM networks know the IMEIs of all the handsets which have used their network. Remember that these numbers a structured, which makes them easier to interpret.
I think you find most were being shipped abroad to other GSM using countries. It's worth it too because not every countries operators subsidise handsets like in the UK.
In which case this bill will do nothing much. Since the people doing this can just as easily change the IMEI once they get to their destination. e.g. giving them an apparently local TAC.
Because there won't be that many tools available to allow them to break this new law.
Yes you can make tools disappear just by making them illegal. All that will happen is that there will still be plenty of tools in existance. Just that they will tend to be in the hands of organised crime.
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The DMCA was passed by congress, therefore it is a law passed by congress that abridges freedom of speech. The fact that suits are initiated by private parties is irrelevant.
Is there a specific term for a lawsuit which involves bogus application of a law?
Go back and read the first amendment. Note the subject.
What it actually says is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
CONGRESS--and by extension, the government--cannot abridge your freedom of speech, aside from military or criminal reasons. And for a lot of things, not even then.
Congress cannot pass a law which abridges freedom of speach. Which is a subtle, but very important, distinction.
PRIVATE PARTIES, like MIT and Microsoft, can do whatever the hell they please, up to the point where they're a goverment.
Except that a private party cannot use any law passed through the US Congress in order to enforce this.
If Microsoft owns a town, they can't made a law abridging speech there.
Up until fairly recently any level of government other than federal, in the US, could make such a law.
despite using the metric system for quite a while now, brits still drink PINTS of beer/ale/piss (whatever it is they call it)
Only milk and draught beer. Soft drinks are sold in 0.5,1, 1.5, 2, 3 litre bottles or 0.33, 0.44 litre cans. Most commonly 2 litre plastic bottles and 0.33 litre cans. Beer is sold in 0.44 or 0.5 litre cans, 0.25 glass bottles or larger plastic bottles. Most common is 2 litre plastic bottles and 0.44 litre cans.
But at that size, hot drinks are cold when you finally finish them, and cold drinks are warm...
Or possibly the cold drink ends up highly dilute if it started with ice in.
He said we have nothing to compare sizes in our drinks, to what you have over in the States.. this was made even more obvious when a friend recently returned from visiting his brother in Missouri - he bought some plastic cups whilst he was over there that could pretty much hold an entire litre of drink - I have never seen anything like that over here. I guess Americans just drink (and pee) more.
The 80oz cup is in excess of two litres. The 30 litre coke bottle must be a joke, most people couldn't even lift such a bottle. Even those who could would have trouble pouring it.
If you signed a lease for your Britney Spears CD then I've got a bridge in New York that I'd like to lease to you.
:)
In the UK DVDs are often advertised with the slogan "yours to own". Maybe they don't do that in the US or maybe they don't have laws about truth in advertising
product placement is almost useless as an advertising mechanism. sure you watch a movie or a tv show and you may see bond using a mac or driving a bmw and you think to yourself, i want one. but look at most commercials on tv. they are not of the "see this a bmw" or "see this is a mac" variety. certainly they show the product, but they also tell what it does and almost always how much you would pay for it
Advertisments, especially of sales/promotions tend to be both time and geography sensitive. There's also little that looks dafter than a product placement for a product or even company which no longer exists.
Because you need it to use for Microsoft's Passport crap which is now incorporated into nearly all their web pages and products.
The computer illiterate insisting on using Hotmail predates this though. Even when a better, faster, more reliable system is available.
Well, I don't agree. Water, and food both *do* have a price -- somebody has to pay the cost of purification and distribution of water, and production of food.
With something like water or air their is a subtle difference between charging for the substance itself and charging for providing a useful service on it. Distribution of water and ensuring it does not contain harmful pathogens is a service. As is filling up a scuba tank.
I suggest you learn something about the nature and causes of scarcity and famine. Sometimes starvation is due to factors that only last a season, and then all is well again.
Assuming the famine or whatever is going on around it dosn't disrupt agriculture. Most often the problem isn't so much nature as human actions.
With proprietary software you have a closed development team that you can more easily identify and hold accountable.
In theory you can. That dosn't do much to stop proprietary software shipping with both deliberate "easter eggs" and debugging code still attached.
Most programs used by (fire/police/ambulance/etc.) are SPECIALIZED, that means that won't find that at your local shop :) Their softwares are made by special firms, so they surely have all the support they need.
One possible future nightmare here is COTS. (Commercial Off The Shelf). Which is practice means building a bespoke system on top of proprietary software. Build one from scratch or using open source and it will always be supportable. Use proprietary software as the basis and you could be held to ransom by a software company or left with a system which is impossible to support.
Many of the points that the GAO guy brought up are simply not true, and all of them should be taken with a huge grain of salt. There haven't been any "massive security" issues with Linux (although the same can't be said for some other PC based server operating systems written in Redmond), and there haven't been any major reliability problems either.
This appears to be quite common with anti-Linux FUD. Critisisms actually more applicable to some other system...
As for commercial support, I have been using Linux since 1994, and there has always been someone you could call for support (granted, they were probably fairly small).
"Support" has ended up meaning both "pass the buck" and "get the thing fixed". Also with proprietary software contacting support can wind up as "try and you sell the latest version".
The last point is especially weak. The GPL, arguably the most restrictive Free Software license, doesn't even attempt to control how you use the software.
Nor does it restrict what you can do with the output of GPL software. Write a program with GCC and it's yours to do with what you like.
Imagine you are in a pub and your phones battery runs down. A friend kindly lends you his handset to make a call. You want to call Zambia so rather than pump up his phone bill you slip your sim card into his phone. The network operators now have two User ids (your friends and yours) associated with one IMEI. Or conversly from their point of view two handsets with the same IMEI.
If you switch off the handset before changing the SIM then it will log off the network, so no contention. Even if you just pull the battery out the network can still tell that there isn't a duplicate IMEI. Since only one of the two SIMS will actually respond to any communications from the network.
Its nigh on impossible for the operator to tell the difference between you using two different sim cards sequentially in one handset and two different handsets (with independent sims) having the same IMEI.
It's trivial, in the former case only one SIM will respond to a paging request. Also swapping the SIMS will take place within the same cell group, probably the same cell.
With cloned IMEIs both SIMS will be on the network at the same time.
IIRC, that's one of the biggest problems with mobile theft in the UK at the moment - in order to quickstart the whole network for low costs, they allowed multiple instances of the same IMEI (i.e. they shared IMEIs across different handsets).
How hard can it be to check that there are no duplicate IMEIs on the network? It would make more sense to point fingers at the network operators for allowing this or the manufactures for not having this flag as a fault condition.
Zimbabwe have refused food imports that could have done much to save the country from a very serious famine.
You assume Mugabe cares about the country. In reality all he cares about are his political supporters and own specific ethnic group. Which IIRC comprise a minority of the country's population.
pesticides cost MONEY.
If farmers can afford some, but not enough, they may simply breed pesticide resistant whatevers. That's assuming that pesticides designed for use in the US and Europe are actually much use in the first place.
They are part of the problem- what makes them necessary is the pushing of high yield crops on the Third World.
But only high yield if they are farmed in a specific way, otherwise they can wind up being no yield.
Without that, farmers grow low yield, inefficient crops with substantial diversity, subsisting off this behavior.
Only low yield by the standards of western agro-business. Most likely the best yield they can get. Farmers, left of their own devices, will seek to improve their crops and farming techniques.
You need to spray with pesticides as you're now growing a monoculture Western-style.
With a monoculture it only takes one thing to go wrong and you can have no crop at all. The something which goes wrong might be a minor mistake by the farm worker or the wrong type of weather.
long and vicious war was fought against the colonial-style white dominated government to gain democracy.
An additional note that it was the white minority government, lead by Ian Smith, who first declared independence.
The humanitarian aid that the Western World should provide to the people of Zimbabwe is to overthrow their corrupt government.
This sounds all well and good. But Western (especially US) initiated "regime changes" don't have a very good history. How likely would it be that the result would be a good government for the Zimbabwean people (all of them) as opposed to a bunch of thugs who happened to be well liked in Washington and London?
I've downloaded tools from the internet to remove the service provider locks on phones I've legally bought (these have nothing to do with the IMEI number, they're locks that prevent someone buying a phone with, say, BellSouth DCS, and then using it on a VoiceStream network), and the tools generally have the dodgy "change things like the IMEI and other things that shouldn't be changed" functionality as well as the useful bits. This is not, IMHO, a good thing...
The people to blame for this are the manufactures. Who have apparently both made the IMEI easily changable and linked the interface with things which might need to be changed.
Since this has resulted in a crime wave, and the Industry (with a few notable exceptions) is not moving to rectify, the goverment felt the public demand to step in.
Which they could do by pushing the industry to improve their practices. These companies run their business entirely subject to the rules of the UK government in the first place.
As the companies are reluctant to spend the resources on tracking this under fraud statutes,
Those poor upstanding "corporate citizens" can't have anything done to them. Even though Oftel's time probably works out rather cheaper than this bill. With enforcement against a handful of easily identifable companies being rather easier than against an unknown number of unknown people.
It can have some unpleasant consequences though: some years ago, a batch of Nokia mobile phones was stolen, all of them with the same IMEI number. Those phones eventually ended up in stores, where they were, legally, bought by consumers. Unavoidably, one of those phone got stolen and that IMEI number got blocked. Nokia refused to do anything about it, since they can be hold responsible for phone that were bought through 'grey' channels.
Why put all the blame on Nokia? Just as must to blame here are the network operators for not flagging duplicate IMEI usage. Had they done this then instead of all these phones becoming useless at once people who have just returned them as non working as they were sold.
There is no reason for network operators to allow duplicate IMEIs. Doing so make things a lot easier for the crooks.
There can't be a list of all valid IMEI numbers - it'd be vast, since it would have to include all numbers issued on every GSM network in the world.
Actually there is a list. The relevent telephone regulators know which TACs they have issued, the manufactures know the serial numbers of the phones they have made. The operators of the GSM networks know the IMEIs of all the handsets which have used their network. Remember that these numbers a structured, which makes them easier to interpret.
I think you find most were being shipped abroad to other GSM using countries. It's worth it too because not every countries operators subsidise handsets like in the UK.
In which case this bill will do nothing much. Since the people doing this can just as easily change the IMEI once they get to their destination. e.g. giving them an apparently local TAC.
Because there won't be that many tools available to allow them to break this new law.
Yes you can make tools disappear just by making them illegal. All that will happen is that there will still be plenty of tools in existance. Just that they will tend to be in the hands of organised crime.