Re:The "axis of evil" is not going to win
on
Life on The Net in 2004
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In the 2004 scenario, practically everyone who owns a computer will be violating somebody's license or patent. The legal system may very well drown in it's own filth.
That's a nice idea, but it's not gonna happen. If it gets to the point where everybody who uses a computer is violating some obscure law, then all that does is give the authorities the ultimate powers of selective prosecution. Play along with them, and they'll ignore your little pecadillos. Do anything to piss them all, and they'll have every ability to drop the hammer on you just as hard as they feel like.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand
Or, to put it more contemporarily:
Agent Smith: We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. All that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
Neo: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger...and you give me my phone call.
I used to bring my bag into my university bookstore all the time. Yes, they had a policy against it. The very first time they gave me static about it, I informed them that not only was I already forking over $22,000/year to attend the school and did not appreciate the implication that I was a thief, but that if I were not allowed to retain my property as I browsed, I would gladly forego spending additional thousands at the bookstore and instead purchase all my textbooks online.
I received no further static. 'course, books aren't as shiny as WC3, so I don't expect many people to follow this policy with Blizzard.
It shows all the social sensitivity of 'negro' or 'indian'.
You mean, like the "American Indian Movement"?
"Native American" is a catch-all term invented by the US Department of the Interior that lumps together peoples as disparate as Inuit, Samoans, Nez Perce, Yuma, and Seneca. "Indian" is a *more* specific term, as it generally doesn't include various Polynesians and Micronesians and folks from tribes outside the continental US.
I've neber known an Indian who was offended by the term "Indian"; those who take offense to that term seem mostly to be well-meaning but self-important staunch white leftists who wouldn't know the difference between a Susquehanna and an Apache. "Native American" is generally to be avoided, but what they'd really rather for you to call them is their real name.
The point of this bill is not to provide broadband content, it's to stop piracy.
Where did you get this? Certainly not from the *title* of the bill, which after all is "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act of 2002." In Hollings's own statement, he refers to it as "legislation that will promote broadband and the digital television transition by securing content on the Internet and over the nation's airwaves. "
Read that again.
The means: Preventing piracy. The end: promotion of broadband and the digital television transmission.
If the law in fact fails to promote broadband, then it is fundamentally flawed, even if it magically prevents all piracy.
Frankly, I'm not so worried about the implications of this legislation. If it passes (unlikely), it'll just get attacked in the House or defeated in the courts if it somehow makes it past Dubya's desk.
I find that a worrying attitude. The point of the whole checks'n'balances dance is so that the Constitution has three lines of defense against unconstitutional laws. Saying "I'm not too worried about Congress passing an unconstitutional law, because the other branches of government'll take care of it," indicates that, fundamentally, you feel comfortable with only having two lines of defense for the Constitutional rights we all enjoy.
And, of course, there's others who say will say the same thing, but instead proclaim their apathy about the President's willingness to sign unconsitutional bills. Well, with the combined apathy of both groups, the sole remaining defense is the Supreme Court.
Much as I like Boucher's agenda, I don't think this law is necessarily a good thing.
Content providers should be allowed to encode whatever they want to, however they want to. Yes, I agree that if they encode copy prevention techniques in their CDs, they shouldn't tell everybody that they're actually CDs, because they aren't. But there shouldn't be any restrictions at all on what they can put on a 5" sandwich of aluminum and polycarbonate.
The problem here isn't CD copy prevention. It's the DMCA. Just like the content provider should be able to encode his content however he sees fit, the end user should be able to take whatever steps he needs to to access the bits that are sitting on the disc he purchased that's sitting inside his computer. But the DMCA prevents this, and makes illegal that users efforts to circumvent the copy-prevention code, feeble as it may be.
But I don't think the solution to this problem is another law. The proper solution to a problem caused by passage of a bad law is repeal of that bad law, not a new law that's intended to act as a band-aid. I respect Boucher's efforts, but overturning the DMCA is way more important.
As it stands under current law, fair use is a defense, not a right. Saying "Fair use!" might get you off the hook when someone accuses you of violating a copyright, but a copyright holder isn't required to provide you with the tools you need to exercise fair use. That's an important distinction.
I generally agree with all that, and, yes, I'd have put her at more than 20% at fault, too. But the compensatory damages were peanutes compared to the punitive ones, which were awarded because of McDonald's actions, not hers, and whenever anybody cites this case as an example of the worst abuses of the legal system, they're always griping about the huge punitive award.
This lady wouldn't have even sued in the first place had McD agreed to cover her medical expenses. That's all she was asking for, not even pain and suffering. Just the medical expenses. McD decided to take it to court, admitted to serving coffee 40-50 degrees hotter than everyone else did, admitted that the wisdom of doing so flew in the face of their own marketing research, admitted that they knew it caused burns, and maintained that no, they weren't interested in changing that.
Yes, I question the woman's wisdom in putting a cup of coffee between her thighs, but fer chrissakes, she was 81 years old! You should well damn recognize that people in that advanced state of age aren't likely to be the sharpest tack in the sack in the first place.
And begging your pardon, but I don't believe that most people treat every hot beverage as if it's almost boiling. If I had reason to suspect that a cup of coffee I've been served is that hot, I wouldn't even drive around in my car with the beverage securely placed in a cup holder. One sudden stop because a kid on a bike jumps out in front of me, and I'm looking at skin grafts. No, the fact that people drive away from drive-throughs with fresh cuppajoes all the time indicates that it's not standard practice to assume 185-degree temperatures for such beverages.
And that's probably because unless you buy your coffee at McDs, it's not anywhere near that hot.
I think the personal responsibility of the person involved should be a mitigating factor with regards to damages.
It was. The jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, but this amount was reduced to $160,000 because the jury also found that Liebeck was 20% at fault for the spill. The massive $2.7 million punitive damages award was, well, punitive, and likely had a helluva lot to do with the 700 claims McDonald's had settled since 1982 involving people scalded by its coffee, was aware that its coffee could cause and had caused serious burns, and was utterly unrepentant of that fact.
McDonald's knew its coffee burned people, and did nothing about it. A quality enforcement manager at McDonald's testified before the court that the coffee was required to be held in the pot at 185 degrees, +/- 5 degrees, and admitted that this would cause burns, but also that McDonald's had no intentions of reducing that holding temperature.
The judge reduced punitive damages to three times the compensatory damages, and called McDonald's conduct "reckless," "callous," and "willful."
It is entirely another thing to have a cup of potentially-scalding hot coffee wedged between your legs while driving.
It is, indeed. But that's not what this woman did. This woman wasn't even driving the goddamned car. She was a passenger. Her son was driving, and he stopped the car at her request so she could take the lid off the coffee and add cream and sugar. She held the coffee between her legs to pry the lid off, at which point it spilled.
She was not driving. She was not holding the coffee between her legs while she was driving. The car was not even MOVING when this incident occurred.
if you aren't assuming that hot coffee can burn you, you are being stupid
Do you routinely assume that beverages served to you for your consumption are capable of inflicting full-thickness third-degree burns in 2-7 seconds should they touch your skin? I'm aware that I should treat my coffee as if it were a hot beverage, not as if it were hydrocholoric fucking acid.
I'm sorry for the off-topic post, but I'm sick and fucking tired of how people who are ignorant of the fundamental facts of this case feel qualified to pronounce judgement upon it.
I don't think the First Amendment voids the libel provisions of English common law.
In America, libel isn't simply saying "X is a jackass." For a statement to be libelous, there must be actual malice. Actual malice only occurs in cases where someone makes a statement which he has prior knowledge is is inaccurate. This generally means that libel is confined to cases where factual statements are being made; opinions don't qualify. It's very difficult for me to see how "X is a jackass" is libelous to any degree under American law.
Under English law, all bets are off. You can even make a completely true statement and still be held liable for libel under English law; the fact that the statement is true is not a defense.
Normally, I'm all for the little guy, but in this case, seems like the poster was a troll, not an "outspoken critic of corporate America."
So then you're saying that the 1st Amendment has a codicil in it somewhere saying that it doesn't apply to trolls and posters of flamebait? Can/. start SLAPPing -1 posters?
Now, if he had provided a deep insight into the company's workings, and if he had some facts to prove that the company management is incompetent, that would've been a questionable case.
Why would that be any more questionable than what we have? Are you seriously suggesting here that someone should not be allowed to post his opinion that a company is run by an incompetent bunch of lackwits without signed and notarized documentation proving that fact to a degree capable of withstanding legal analysis?
That's simply insane. I agree with you about the certified letter, but that's a side issue. It's irrelevant. The fact that a summary judgement was issued against him because he didn't show up is completely secondary to the fact that the lawsuit was filed in the first place. If corporate America is allowed to go around SLAPPing private citizens with lawsuits for non-libelous, non-slanderous statements, then that clearly and obviously has a chilling effect on free speech, and the fact that that chilling effect is generated by corporate behavior rather than government behavior isn't tremendously relevant.
No, not that much. Even the very strongest permanent magnets are too weak to do much with a massive projectile. A really strong permanent magnet clocks in at around 2 T, but ~12 T is considered pretty routine with superconducting magnets.
The advantage in a railgun is that you don't need magnets at all. The magnetic field arises purely from the passage of current. More current, a stronger magnetic field.
Now, the very strongest magnetic fields that we can create at all are created by explosive collapse, and this achieves (brief!) field strengths of 40 T or greater. If you could time everything right, you could probably launch a helluva projectile at helluva velocities. It would be a bit of a one-shot weapon, though.
Well, it's a "gauss gun." Gauss = magnetic flux density. It's true that this isn't a railgun, which accelerates a projectile by means of the Lorentz force on the projectile which arises from the interaction of the current through the projectile and the magnetic field created by the passage of that current. But "gauss gun" is something of a catch-all phrase which comprises railguns, coilguns, and so forth. I guess if you wanted to you could even refer to linear induction motors as gauss guns.
Those "neat" logo cut-outs on the side are like garage doors for EMI radiation.
That'd be a high frequency EM wave that can fit through what looks to be gap of about 1cm. About 30 GHz, actually, which puts it into the microwave range. If your PC is emitting in the microwave range, something's probably wrong in the first place. Plus, it's not going to interfere with much.
If you love Blizzard games, show some respect and let them launch their games as they desire.
This is so backwards.
I like Blizzard games. I've purchased and enjoyed them since Warcraft.
But I love my rights. I love your rights, and those of the bnetd developers. Anyone who values Blizzard software more than our rights under the law and constitution of the US, or your respective country, has some seriously skewed priorities.
You're saying that if I like Blizzard's games, I should be willing to forgive a little legal threatening, some innocent trampling of my rights.
I say the reverse: Because of Blizzard's actions here, I won't be buying any more of their games, enojoyable though they may be.
You should be fighting for fair-use, and reductions of copyight protection terms, not blatently fueling the flames of oppression.
I'm curious.
The issue of term limits and fair-use seems like a crucial one, but I'm not sure that it is. Wouldn't the DMCA be just as bad if copyright terms were only 75 years? 50? 14? Isn't the issue really the draconian laws that are being put into place to enforce copyright protection, and not the term of the protection itself?
Would any of us be satisfied with a world in which Skylarov and Johansen could be persecuted as they have been, in which the DMCA, WIPO regulations, and the SSSCA are enforced laws, but copyright terms were shortened to something reasonable?
I wouldn't be. I don't think fair use and copyright protection terms are the issue. I suspect the issue is that copyright laws simply can't effectively be applied to current and future technologies without draconian enforcement procedures being applied.
Nobody's going to sit down and write software to monitor the flow of power though an electrical grid, or software to control the fuel-air mixture in a GE90-115B turbine engine, or automatic flight stabilization software for the F-22 as a friggin' hobby.
Want a hobbyist-produced word processor? Fine. When teleoperated surgical tools become commonplace, I don't want the operating software for the machine that's tinkering around with my ticker designed by some guy living in his mom's basement who wears the same "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt for weeks on end.
They simply published a series of rebuttals by experts that pointed out factual and analytical errors in the book.
The rebuttals published by SA pretty uniformly acknowledged that Lomborg had his facts right; they attacked his person and questioned his conclusions.
Then SA refused to publish Lomborg's answers to those criticisms. Then when Lomborg posted his answers to those criticisms on his web site, SA threatened to sue him for violating its copyrights because he reproduced the criticisms in his answers.
The rebuttals posted at that site aren't really very good. The ones I read before I gave up in disgust were mostly arguments by assertion, with little concrete evidence given to support them, no footnotes or references to studies or data that I could see, and laced with a strong flavor of ad hominem, as in Devra Davis's "rebuttal," which she leads off by saying:
"You know what they say about people who become statisticians? They lacked the personality to become accountants."
That's not the dispassionate and unbiased practitioner of science speaking; that's someone with an axe to grind.
I'm not defending Lomborg's research; indeed, I haven't read the book. But what's utterly disgusting is the means by which the established viewpoints have chosen to attack it. Scientific American even went so far as to claim it was "defending science" against Lomborg's claim.
That's a repugnant attitude to take. Science is a method, a process of determining what is true, and if Lomborg's arguments are faulty, his analysis shoddy, and his conclusions flawed, than the proper application of science will demonstrate that and we will all be the better off for it.
But if, as Scientific American seems to think, science is something that takes a position of advocacy on complex issues, then science is far less likely to be useful as a process for examining that issue, and everybody loses.
Shame on SA. The Spectator has a nice piece on the controversy at: http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table =old& section=current&issue=2002-02-23&id=1602
Servers that emulate Battle.net facilitate software piracy of Blizzard products by circumventing Blizzard's authentication code.
This is, of course, pure bollocks. I could as easily write that "Playing Diablo II in single-player mode facilitates software piracy by circumventing Blizzard's authentication code. What's really at issue is that they don't want any competition for their pay-for-play servers in the future, and are willing to overlook the fact that the bnetd folks aren't the ones who added WC3 support.
Here's the letter I wrote to Blizzard:
Dear Sirs,
I have been a Blizzard customer for many years now. My shelves have accumulated boxes of Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, and sundry expansion packs for those games. But I'm afraid actions your company has undertaken have persuaded me that I should stop being your customer.
Like many others, I've been distressed recently by the damage hackers and cheaters have been doing to gameplay on Blizzard's Realms servers on the battle.net service. Duping items, hacking items, skill hacks, and various other methods of cheating have been running rampant. But until now, I've held out hope that Blizzard would take action to address these problems, and deliver on the cheat-free Realms that it has promised since before Diablo 2 was released.
Instead, I've noticed to my dismay that instead of investing its resources to improve the gaming environment for all legitimate players, Blizzard has instead chosen to squander those resources on stifling the innovation of those legitimate players. I speak, of course, of the letter threatening legal action Rod Rigole has sent to the bnetd project, hosted at http://www.bnetd.org. Mr. Rigole claims that this software violates the DMCA, and that it is Blizzard's interest that the software be suppressed.
Putting aside the fact that this is a questionable legal interpretation, given that bnetd is not a means to bypass anti-circumvention techology, does not facilitate copyright violation, and plainly lies within the DMCA's exemption for reverse engineering done for the purposes of interoperability between privately-created software and preexisting software, and also putting aside the fact that I have never used the bnetd software, I am writing this letter to tell you that it is not within Blizzard's interest to take such action.
As evidence of that, I will offer the fact that your draconian action against a piece of software that only serves to enrich the gaming experience for thousands of your customers, has convinced me that I should not again purchase one of your products.
Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this?
Imagine you own a gun store. Someone comes in and tells you "I want to buy a gun so I can shoot my wife and daughter."
No, you may thing there's nothing wrong with shooting wives and daughters. But that doesn't change the fact that if you sell this person a gun, you've done something immoral, unethical, and evil.
Cisco has chosen to help a totalitarian government which does things like lock people in jail for distributing Bibles and crush student protests under the treads of tanks. Cisco has chosen to help that government censor and control the flow of information.
How can you honestly not understand what's wrong with that?
Slashdot Mirror
In the 2004 scenario, practically everyone who owns a computer will be violating somebody's license or patent. The legal system may very well drown in it's own filth.
...and you give me my phone call.
That's a nice idea, but it's not gonna happen. If it gets to the point where everybody who uses a computer is violating some obscure law, then all that does is give the authorities the ultimate powers of selective prosecution. Play along with them, and they'll ignore your little pecadillos. Do anything to piss them all, and they'll have every ability to drop the hammer on you just as hard as they feel like.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand
Or, to put it more contemporarily:
Agent Smith: We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. All that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
Neo: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger
Or perhaps to aid in the design of smaller, more precise weapons in order to limit civilian casualties if they do have to be used?
I used to bring my bag into my university bookstore all the time. Yes, they had a policy against it. The very first time they gave me static about it, I informed them that not only was I already forking over $22,000/year to attend the school and did not appreciate the implication that I was a thief, but that if I were not allowed to retain my property as I browsed, I would gladly forego spending additional thousands at the bookstore and instead purchase all my textbooks online.
I received no further static. 'course, books aren't as shiny as WC3, so I don't expect many people to follow this policy with Blizzard.
It shows all the social sensitivity of 'negro' or 'indian'.
You mean, like the "American Indian Movement"?
"Native American" is a catch-all term invented by the US Department of the Interior that lumps together peoples as disparate as Inuit, Samoans, Nez Perce, Yuma, and Seneca. "Indian" is a *more* specific term, as it generally doesn't include various Polynesians and Micronesians and folks from tribes outside the continental US.
I've neber known an Indian who was offended by the term "Indian"; those who take offense to that term seem mostly to be well-meaning but self-important staunch white leftists who wouldn't know the difference between a Susquehanna and an Apache. "Native American" is generally to be avoided, but what they'd really rather for you to call them is their real name.
The point of this bill is not to provide broadband content, it's to stop piracy.
Where did you get this? Certainly not from the *title* of the bill, which after all is "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act of 2002." In Hollings's own statement, he refers to it as "legislation that will promote broadband and the digital television transition by securing content on the Internet and over the nation's airwaves.
"
Read that again.
The means: Preventing piracy.
The end: promotion of broadband and the digital television transmission.
If the law in fact fails to promote broadband, then it is fundamentally flawed, even if it magically prevents all piracy.
Frankly, I'm not so worried about the implications of this legislation. If it passes (unlikely), it'll just get attacked in the House or defeated in the courts if it somehow makes it past Dubya's desk.
I find that a worrying attitude. The point of the whole checks'n'balances dance is so that the Constitution has three lines of defense against unconstitutional laws. Saying "I'm not too worried about Congress passing an unconstitutional law, because the other branches of government'll take care of it," indicates that, fundamentally, you feel comfortable with only having two lines of defense for the Constitutional rights we all enjoy.
And, of course, there's others who say will say the same thing, but instead proclaim their apathy about the President's willingness to sign unconsitutional bills. Well, with the combined apathy of both groups, the sole remaining defense is the Supreme Court.
And I don't trust them alone to do the job.
Much as I like Boucher's agenda, I don't think this law is necessarily a good thing.
Content providers should be allowed to encode whatever they want to, however they want to. Yes, I agree that if they encode copy prevention techniques in their CDs, they shouldn't tell everybody that they're actually CDs, because they aren't. But there shouldn't be any restrictions at all on what they can put on a 5" sandwich of aluminum and polycarbonate.
The problem here isn't CD copy prevention. It's the DMCA. Just like the content provider should be able to encode his content however he sees fit, the end user should be able to take whatever steps he needs to to access the bits that are sitting on the disc he purchased that's sitting inside his computer. But the DMCA prevents this, and makes illegal that users efforts to circumvent the copy-prevention code, feeble as it may be.
But I don't think the solution to this problem is another law. The proper solution to a problem caused by passage of a bad law is repeal of that bad law, not a new law that's intended to act as a band-aid. I respect Boucher's efforts, but overturning the DMCA is way more important.
Wrong. Wrong wrong, wrong wrong wrong.
As it stands under current law, fair use is a defense, not a right. Saying "Fair use!" might get you off the hook when someone accuses you of violating a copyright, but a copyright holder isn't required to provide you with the tools you need to exercise fair use. That's an important distinction.
I generally agree with all that, and, yes, I'd have put her at more than 20% at fault, too. But the compensatory damages were peanutes compared to the punitive ones, which were awarded because of McDonald's actions, not hers, and whenever anybody cites this case as an example of the worst abuses of the legal system, they're always griping about the huge punitive award.
This lady wouldn't have even sued in the first place had McD agreed to cover her medical expenses. That's all she was asking for, not even pain and suffering. Just the medical expenses. McD decided to take it to court, admitted to serving coffee 40-50 degrees hotter than everyone else did, admitted that the wisdom of doing so flew in the face of their own marketing research, admitted that they knew it caused burns, and maintained that no, they weren't interested in changing that.
Yes, I question the woman's wisdom in putting a cup of coffee between her thighs, but fer chrissakes, she was 81 years old! You should well damn recognize that people in that advanced state of age aren't likely to be the sharpest tack in the sack in the first place.
And begging your pardon, but I don't believe that most people treat every hot beverage as if it's almost boiling. If I had reason to suspect that a cup of coffee I've been served is that hot, I wouldn't even drive around in my car with the beverage securely placed in a cup holder. One sudden stop because a kid on a bike jumps out in front of me, and I'm looking at skin grafts. No, the fact that people drive away from drive-throughs with fresh cuppajoes all the time indicates that it's not standard practice to assume 185-degree temperatures for such beverages.
And that's probably because unless you buy your coffee at McDs, it's not anywhere near that hot.
I think the personal responsibility of the person involved should be a mitigating factor with regards to damages.
It was. The jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, but this amount was reduced to $160,000 because the jury also found that Liebeck was 20% at fault for the spill. The massive $2.7 million punitive damages award was, well, punitive, and likely had a helluva lot to do with the 700 claims McDonald's had settled since 1982 involving people scalded by its coffee, was aware that its coffee could cause and had caused serious burns, and was utterly unrepentant of that fact.
McDonald's knew its coffee burned people, and did nothing about it. A quality enforcement manager at McDonald's testified before the court that the coffee was required to be held in the pot at 185 degrees, +/- 5 degrees, and admitted that this would cause burns, but also that McDonald's had no intentions of reducing that holding temperature.
The judge reduced punitive damages to three times the compensatory damages, and called McDonald's conduct "reckless," "callous," and "willful."
It is entirely another thing to have a cup of potentially-scalding hot coffee wedged between your legs while driving.
It is, indeed. But that's not what this woman did. This woman wasn't even driving the goddamned car. She was a passenger. Her son was driving, and he stopped the car at her request so she could take the lid off the coffee and add cream and sugar. She held the coffee between her legs to pry the lid off, at which point it spilled.
She was not driving. She was not holding the coffee between her legs while she was driving. The car was not even MOVING when this incident occurred.
if you aren't assuming that hot coffee can burn you, you are being stupid
Do you routinely assume that beverages served to you for your consumption are capable of inflicting full-thickness third-degree burns in 2-7 seconds should they touch your skin? I'm aware that I should treat my coffee as if it were a hot beverage, not as if it were hydrocholoric fucking acid.
I'm sorry for the off-topic post, but I'm sick and fucking tired of how people who are ignorant of the fundamental facts of this case feel qualified to pronounce judgement upon it.
I don't think the First Amendment voids the libel provisions of English common law.
In America, libel isn't simply saying "X is a jackass." For a statement to be libelous, there must be actual malice. Actual malice only occurs in cases where someone makes a statement which he has prior knowledge is is inaccurate. This generally means that libel is confined to cases where factual statements are being made; opinions don't qualify. It's very difficult for me to see how "X is a jackass" is libelous to any degree under American law.
Under English law, all bets are off. You can even make a completely true statement and still be held liable for libel under English law; the fact that the statement is true is not a defense.
Normally, I'm all for the little guy, but in this case, seems like the poster was a troll, not an "outspoken critic of corporate America."
/. start SLAPPing
So then you're saying that the 1st Amendment has a codicil in it somewhere saying that it doesn't apply to trolls and posters of flamebait? Can
-1 posters?
Now, if he had provided a deep insight into the company's workings, and if he had some facts to prove that the company management is incompetent, that would've been a questionable case.
Why would that be any more questionable than what we have? Are you seriously suggesting here that someone should not be allowed to post his opinion that a company is run by an incompetent bunch of lackwits without signed and notarized documentation proving that fact to a degree capable of withstanding legal analysis?
That's simply insane. I agree with you about the certified letter, but that's a side issue. It's irrelevant. The fact that a summary judgement was issued against him because he didn't show up is completely secondary to the fact that the lawsuit was filed in the first place. If corporate America is allowed to go around SLAPPing private citizens with lawsuits for non-libelous, non-slanderous statements, then that clearly and obviously has a chilling effect on free speech, and the fact that that chilling effect is generated by corporate behavior rather than government behavior isn't tremendously relevant.
It makes me wonder... could this scale?
No, not that much. Even the very strongest permanent magnets are too weak to do much with a massive projectile. A really strong permanent magnet clocks in at around 2 T, but ~12 T is considered pretty routine with superconducting magnets.
The advantage in a railgun is that you don't need magnets at all. The magnetic field arises purely from the passage of current. More current, a stronger magnetic field.
Now, the very strongest magnetic fields that we can create at all are created by explosive collapse, and this achieves (brief!) field strengths of 40 T or greater. If you could time everything right, you could probably launch a helluva projectile at helluva velocities. It would be a bit of a one-shot weapon, though.
Well, it's a "gauss gun." Gauss = magnetic flux density. It's true that this isn't a railgun, which accelerates a projectile by means of the Lorentz force on the projectile which arises from the interaction of the current through the projectile and the magnetic field created by the passage of that current. But "gauss gun" is something of a catch-all phrase which comprises railguns, coilguns, and so forth. I guess if you wanted to you could even refer to linear induction motors as gauss guns.
Those "neat" logo cut-outs on the side are like garage doors for EMI radiation.
That'd be a high frequency EM wave that can fit through what looks to be gap of about 1cm. About 30 GHz, actually, which puts it into the microwave range. If your PC is emitting in the microwave range, something's probably wrong in the first place. Plus, it's not going to interfere with much.
If you love Blizzard games, show some respect and let them launch their games as they desire.
This is so backwards.
I like Blizzard games. I've purchased and enjoyed them since Warcraft.
But I love my rights. I love your rights, and those of the bnetd developers. Anyone who values Blizzard software more than our rights under the law and constitution of the US, or your respective country, has some seriously skewed priorities.
You're saying that if I like Blizzard's games, I should be willing to forgive a little legal threatening, some innocent trampling of my rights.
I say the reverse: Because of Blizzard's actions here, I won't be buying any more of their games, enojoyable though they may be.
You should be fighting for fair-use, and reductions of copyight protection terms, not blatently fueling the flames of oppression.
I'm curious.
The issue of term limits and fair-use seems like a crucial one, but I'm not sure that it is. Wouldn't the DMCA be just as bad if copyright terms were only 75 years? 50? 14? Isn't the issue really the draconian laws that are being put into place to enforce copyright protection, and not the term of the protection itself?
Would any of us be satisfied with a world in which Skylarov and Johansen could be persecuted as they have been, in which the DMCA, WIPO regulations, and the SSSCA are enforced laws, but copyright terms were shortened to something reasonable?
I wouldn't be. I don't think fair use and copyright protection terms are the issue. I suspect the issue is that copyright laws simply can't effectively be applied to current and future technologies without draconian enforcement procedures being applied.
Yes, this explains the surging popularity of shade-tree dentistry.
Nobody's going to sit down and write software to monitor the flow of power though an electrical grid, or software to control the fuel-air mixture in a GE90-115B turbine engine, or automatic flight stabilization software for the F-22 as a friggin' hobby.
Want a hobbyist-produced word processor? Fine. When teleoperated surgical tools become commonplace, I don't want the operating software for the machine that's tinkering around with my ticker designed by some guy living in his mom's basement who wears the same "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt for weeks on end.
They simply published a series of rebuttals by experts that pointed out factual and analytical errors in the book.
The rebuttals published by SA pretty uniformly acknowledged that Lomborg had his facts right; they attacked his person and questioned his conclusions.
Then SA refused to publish Lomborg's answers to those criticisms. Then when Lomborg posted his answers to those criticisms on his web site, SA threatened to sue him for violating its copyrights because he reproduced the criticisms in his answers.
Again: Shame on SA.
This is an emulator which would allow people to get around Blizzard's copy protection
How? It doesn't help you copy the game.
It does bypass the CD key check that occurs when you connect to a Battle.net server. But then again, so does single-player play, and LAN play.
If bnetd is an infringement facilitator, then so is the big button that you click on to start a single-player game on your home computer.
Can Blizzard be sued under the DMCA for facilitating copyright infringement of its own product?
The rebuttals posted at that site aren't really very good. The ones I read before I gave up in disgust were mostly arguments by assertion, with little concrete evidence given to support them, no footnotes or references to studies or data that I could see, and laced with a strong flavor of ad hominem, as in Devra Davis's "rebuttal," which she leads off by saying:
e =old& section=current&issue=2002-02-23&id=1602
"You know what they say about people who become statisticians? They lacked the personality to become accountants."
That's not the dispassionate and unbiased practitioner of science speaking; that's someone with an axe to grind.
I'm not defending Lomborg's research; indeed, I haven't read the book. But what's utterly disgusting is the means by which the established viewpoints have chosen to attack it. Scientific American even went so far as to claim it was "defending science" against Lomborg's claim.
That's a repugnant attitude to take. Science is a method, a process of determining what is true, and if Lomborg's arguments are faulty, his analysis shoddy, and his conclusions flawed, than the proper application of science will demonstrate that and we will all be the better off for it.
But if, as Scientific American seems to think, science is something that takes a position of advocacy on complex issues, then science is far less likely to be useful as a process for examining that issue, and everybody loses.
Shame on SA. The Spectator has a nice piece on the controversy at:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?tabl
Funny how your argument doesn't apply equally well to the bnetd folks. They wrote it, but didn't earn the right to sell it and protect it?
Servers that emulate Battle.net facilitate software piracy of Blizzard products by circumventing Blizzard's authentication code.
This is, of course, pure bollocks. I could as easily write that "Playing Diablo II in single-player mode facilitates software piracy by circumventing Blizzard's authentication code. What's really at issue is that they don't want any competition for their pay-for-play servers in the future, and are willing to overlook the fact that the bnetd folks aren't the ones who added WC3 support.
Here's the letter I wrote to Blizzard:
Dear Sirs,
I have been a Blizzard customer for many years now. My shelves have accumulated boxes of Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2,
and sundry expansion packs for those games. But I'm afraid actions your company has undertaken have persuaded me that I should stop being your
customer.
Like many others, I've been distressed recently by the damage hackers and cheaters have been doing to gameplay on Blizzard's Realms servers on the battle.net service. Duping items, hacking items, skill hacks, and various other methods of cheating have been running rampant. But until now, I've held out hope that Blizzard would take action to address these problems, and deliver on the cheat-free Realms that it has promised since before Diablo 2 was released.
Instead, I've noticed to my dismay that instead of investing its resources to improve the gaming environment for all legitimate players, Blizzard has instead chosen to squander those resources on stifling the innovation of those legitimate players. I speak, of course, of the letter threatening legal action Rod Rigole has sent to the bnetd project, hosted at http://www.bnetd.org. Mr. Rigole claims that this software violates the DMCA, and that it is Blizzard's interest that the software be suppressed.
Putting aside the fact that this is a questionable legal interpretation, given that bnetd is not a means to bypass anti-circumvention techology, does not facilitate copyright violation, and plainly lies within the DMCA's
exemption for reverse engineering done for the purposes of interoperability between privately-created software and preexisting software, and also putting aside the fact that I have never used the bnetd software, I am writing this letter to tell you that it is not within Blizzard's interest to take such action.
As evidence of that, I will offer the fact that your draconian action against a piece of software that only serves to enrich the gaming experience for thousands of your customers, has convinced me that I should not again purchase one of your products.
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Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this?
Imagine you own a gun store. Someone comes in and tells you "I want to buy a gun so I can shoot my wife and daughter."
No, you may thing there's nothing wrong with shooting wives and daughters. But that doesn't change the fact that if you sell this person a gun, you've done something immoral, unethical, and evil.
Cisco has chosen to help a totalitarian government which does things like lock people in jail for distributing Bibles and crush student protests under the treads of tanks. Cisco has chosen to help that government censor and control the flow of information.
How can you honestly not understand what's wrong with that?