Really? You think it sucks that Mister Policeman will object if he notices somebody hauling away your stuff one fine evening?
If not -- and I presume that if you think about it, you'll come down on the "not" side -- the next step is to realize that most grownups realize that living by rule of law don't depend on whether or not it happens to work in one's favor at the moment.
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable.
The folly of going on public record with this statement where somebody in a legal dispute with you might dig it up, on this thread no less, just broke my irony meter.
Who actually can spend the time watching a baseball game that is over 2 season old? Thats freaking dedication right there. Its one thing to watch a baseball game when you don't know whats going to happen next, but to watch one where you know the outcome... 2 years after the fact just blows my mind
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces.... I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours....
I think it's at least odd if not sad or offensive that the school budgets will be used to prosecute this even if school districts can't directly sue anyone.
If (as described) they are suing as individuals in order to do an end-run around that, then tapping the school budget to fund the lawsuit is no different from tapping the school budget to fund a weekend in Aruba.
It's already bad enough that every garage band album has a page.
The difference between an AC saying "it's bad enough that garage band albums have Wikipedia pages" and a MAFIAA executive saying "it's bad enough that garage band albums have marketing channels" is...?
"There is a "Big-Band" sound that is impossible to produce without sufficient funding."
"That was true 15 years ago. It's not true any more. These days, a few thousand dollars worth of audio equipment, a PC and some software can do what used to require a multi million-dollar recording studio."
This source of up-and-coming competition, not any legitimate concerns about illegal bootlegging, is the impetus driving the MAFIAA anti-tech agenda.
The difference is that the credit card companies generally have legitimate evidence that the target actually owes the money. Many of the RIAA cases are so flimsy that (if corporations were consistently treated like persons) they would by now have gotten a "go away and don't bother the court system with any more of this nonsense" order, like some loony-toon who's finally abused a judge's patience with one two many lawsuits against the CIA and the Pope for shooting death rays at his geraniums.
For an attacker to correlate the code with the person, he must either:
a) surreptitiously monitor the person and computer as the person enters the code
b) obtain the unique ID directly from the user after the vote (e.g. by stealing the paper receipt or monitoring the voter when the voter attempts to verify the correctness of the vote)
Or, more specifically:
B-1) pay the user to reveal his ID
b-2) threaten the user with a series of unfortunate events if he declines to reveal his ID
These are exactly the forms of corruption that the secret ballot is intended to prevent, and why no system that allows a voter to verify a specific vote after the fact is compatible with clean elections.
Don't flash drives crap out after a few hundred thousand writes? That may not be a problem for most people's data and apps, but it would play hell with a Windows swap file. (Can a swap file be load-balanced to different parts of the flash drive without overhead that would lose much of the advantages of replacing a hard disk?)
What makes the lawsuits frivolous isn't that the offense (copyright infringement) does not exist or is not serious, but the lack of basic minimal efforts to determine that the targets of the lawsuit are in fact copyright infringers.
For example, dumping toxic waste in somebody's yard does happen sometimes and is genuinely dangerous when it does. However, that doesn't make somebody who files lawsuit after lawsuit with baseless allegations that his neigbor is dumping toxic waste in his yard any less guilty of wasting the courts' time with frivolous lawsuits.
This is an example of how corporate legal personhood is selectively interpreted to grant the positive benefits of being a person under the law while evading the negative consequences.
For example, if an actual person filed frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit, eventually a judge would tell them that they have to quit wasting the court system's time with any more nonsense. If the RIAA were a real person, rather than a legal "person", this would have happened to it long ago.
Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs has said that his company would make everybody happy by selling DRM-free music if only the record labels would agree to it. Color some Europeans unimpressed: a spokesperson for the Norwegian Consumer said that while Jobs' comments were welcome, they don't address the underlying problem of interoperability.
WTF? Selling DRM-free music most certainly would address the underlying problem of interoperability -- in the worst-case scenario, DRM-free music in one format (e.g. AAC) could be transcoded to a different format (e.g. MP3), albeit not at optimum quality.
"I personally witness the ill effects of these policies on an almost daily basis at Microsoft."...when I have to pay high salaries and keep people around after they get old enough to be a net drain on our health plan....
I assume this statement will be followed up by an explanation of how to use Google to find documents with verifiable timestamps proving that they were published before a specific date.
The RIAA also bemoans what it calls the premature end of the discovery process
Newspeak-to-English Translation: The mean old judge didn't let us drag out the case until the defendant had to cave in because the legal bills ruined her.
Slashdot Mirror
Zecharia Sitchin, the fellow who claims that humanity was genetically engineered from primates, in order to mine gold for their Alien Overlords.
"Why is it already in bars?"
Quite simple, laws suck.
Really? You think it sucks that Mister Policeman will object if he notices somebody hauling away your stuff one fine evening?
If not -- and I presume that if you think about it, you'll come down on the "not" side -- the next step is to realize that most grownups realize that living by rule of law don't depend on whether or not it happens to work in one's favor at the moment.
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable.
The folly of going on public record with this statement where somebody in a legal dispute with you might dig it up, on this thread no less, just broke my irony meter.
Employees can leave, owners can't.
Nonsense. You want to leave, you just leave. The cost is exactly the same to you as to an employee (no workee, no money).
He is fighting for something he believes in.
His ego.
physical property rights don't automatically spring from nature
Hmmmm... who's more credible on political theory -- John Locke or UbuntuDupe? Decisions, decisions....
The boat sinks.
Rosebud was his sled.
Hamlet and Claudius both die.
No point watching any of those again, either.
I think it's at least odd if not sad or offensive that the school budgets will be used to prosecute this even if school districts can't directly sue anyone.
If (as described) they are suing as individuals in order to do an end-run around that, then tapping the school budget to fund the lawsuit is no different from tapping the school budget to fund a weekend in Aruba.
1.3 million people sign up in less than a month... but he's not a notable candidate?
Who knew that South Carolina ballot access was controlled by Wikipedia admins?
I say we scrap the whole thing and put up a webpage that says "Mostly harmless."
They're already headed there on their own.
It's already bad enough that every garage band album has a page.
The difference between an AC saying "it's bad enough that garage band albums have Wikipedia pages" and a MAFIAA executive saying "it's bad enough that garage band albums have marketing channels" is...?
Wikipedia can't hit a peak until the number of articles starts going down... that's not going to happen until all contributions stop.
Huh? If 50 articles are added and 500 are removed in some Wikiadmin's delitionist binge, the number of articles goes down by 450.
"That was true 15 years ago. It's not true any more. These days, a few thousand dollars worth of audio equipment, a PC and some software can do what used to require a multi million-dollar recording studio."
This source of up-and-coming competition, not any legitimate concerns about illegal bootlegging, is the impetus driving the MAFIAA anti-tech agenda.
...the Supreme Court of California have held that Jury Nullification is "contrary to [the court's] ideal of justice...
In other news, Microsoft has held that Linux "is contrary to the corporation's ideal of computer operation".
The difference is that the credit card companies generally have legitimate evidence that the target actually owes the money. Many of the RIAA cases are so flimsy that (if corporations were consistently treated like persons) they would by now have gotten a "go away and don't bother the court system with any more of this nonsense" order, like some loony-toon who's finally abused a judge's patience with one two many lawsuits against the CIA and the Pope for shooting death rays at his geraniums.
For an attacker to correlate the code with the person, he must either:
a) surreptitiously monitor the person and computer as the person enters the code
b) obtain the unique ID directly from the user after the vote (e.g. by stealing the paper receipt or monitoring the voter when the voter attempts to verify the correctness of the vote)
Or, more specifically:
B-1) pay the user to reveal his ID
b-2) threaten the user with a series of unfortunate events if he declines to reveal his ID
These are exactly the forms of corruption that the secret ballot is intended to prevent, and why no system that allows a voter to verify a specific vote after the fact is compatible with clean elections.
Don't flash drives crap out after a few hundred thousand writes? That may not be a problem for most people's data and apps, but it would play hell with a Windows swap file. (Can a swap file be load-balanced to different parts of the flash drive without overhead that would lose much of the advantages of replacing a hard disk?)
What makes the lawsuits frivolous isn't that the offense (copyright infringement) does not exist or is not serious, but the lack of basic minimal efforts to determine that the targets of the lawsuit are in fact copyright infringers.
For example, dumping toxic waste in somebody's yard does happen sometimes and is genuinely dangerous when it does. However, that doesn't make somebody who files lawsuit after lawsuit with baseless allegations that his neigbor is dumping toxic waste in his yard any less guilty of wasting the courts' time with frivolous lawsuits.
This is an example of how corporate legal personhood is selectively interpreted to grant the positive benefits of being a person under the law while evading the negative consequences.
For example, if an actual person filed frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit, eventually a judge would tell them that they have to quit wasting the court system's time with any more nonsense. If the RIAA were a real person, rather than a legal "person", this would have happened to it long ago.
I will bear this argument in mind next time I hear about how MS Office is evil and .doc/.xls file are the spawn of satan.
.doc/.xls to write the converter to the format you prefer.
Yes, bear that in mind while parsing the officially published spec for
Oh, wait....
Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs has said that his company would make everybody happy by selling DRM-free music if only the record labels would agree to it. Color some Europeans unimpressed: a spokesperson for the Norwegian Consumer said that while Jobs' comments were welcome, they don't address the underlying problem of interoperability.
WTF? Selling DRM-free music most certainly would address the underlying problem of interoperability -- in the worst-case scenario, DRM-free music in one format (e.g. AAC) could be transcoded to a different format (e.g. MP3), albeit not at optimum quality.
whether the attribution requirement is reasonable in the face of easy video copying and distribution
The hard part is having somebody run the cameras. Asking for attribution in exchange for using the results seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"I personally witness the ill effects of these policies on an almost daily basis at Microsoft." ...when I have to pay high salaries and keep people around after they get old enough to be a net drain on our health plan....
Nowadays google makes finding prior art simple
I assume this statement will be followed up by an explanation of how to use Google to find documents with verifiable timestamps proving that they were published before a specific date.
The RIAA also bemoans what it calls the premature end of the discovery process
Newspeak-to-English Translation: The mean old judge didn't let us drag out the case until the defendant had to cave in because the legal bills ruined her.