Ah, tell me more about your solar setup. In the near future I need to heat a barnlike building in Montana.... and the achieved temps you cite are plenty good enough. Thanks!
One of the home-heating systems I've heard about uses hot water circulated from the water heater. It's being heated all the time and most of that goes to waste, so why not run it thru the house whenever it would just be cooling in the tank otherwise?
Exactly. At that point, you're free to block it if you wish, and if the spammer doesn't like it, he can buy his own router and pay for his own upstream access. If that makes spamming unprofitable -- oh well!!
Indeed, the entire permit/license concept has largely become corrupted -- it is no longer "you are certified competent/legally allowed to"; it is now a laundry list of ways that the gov't can restrict your rights, or coerce you into compliance if you wish to retain (some portion of) said rights.:(
I note from the Wiki article that the Court was not unanimous on that:
"I do not see a philosophical or historical basis for asserting that 'commercial' speech is of 'lower value' than 'noncommercial' speech." -- Clarence Thomas
And I have to agree with this, because if you can assign a 'lower value' to one type of speech, you've just set a precedent for setting a lower value on ANY type of speech. Maybe next time it'll be religious speech that is determined to have "lower value". Maybe speaking out against government activities gets a 'lower value' too.
And he might be correct -- so long as he only uses his OWN equipment and a legitimate internet connection which he has lawful permission to use (even if that's an anonymous, open-to-all site like a public library). But the moment he *steals* someone else's bandwidth or CPU cycles, he should lose that protection.
BTW I've received anonymous spam that promoted unpopular political viewpoints; imagine if this were, say, China and such spam might be your only way of learning about western democracy.
Whether it's a First Amendment issue is actually a good question, but IMO it isn't really all that hard to distinguish whether that applies:
Someone sending spam *entirely* with their own equipment (NOT using botnets, hacked servers, open relays, etc.) is within their rights. They may be a PITA but so are streetcorner preachers hollering over the town square -- the venue is different but the effect is the same: annoying, but still "free speech", as free to the spammer or preacher as it is to everyone else. However, anyone else is also within their rights to block said spam, much as the streetcorner preacher can't prevent you from wearing earplugs.
However, the moment the spammer illicitly uses someone else's equipment, they are in the wrong and First Amendment protection no longer applies, since they commited variously computer-trespass and/or theft of services. Likewise, the streetcorner preacher is not allowed to co-opt your front porch and use it to harangue passersby.
Hell, slashdot has to be among 'em -- how many of the over a million registered users get the daily mailing?? if even 5% do, that's 50,000 per DAY.
And it's the sort of thing that once established, the threshold will creep downward until we DO wind up paying (in some way, maybe not cash) to send each email, even email for personal use.
And I don't like the idea of punishing legit users for the sins of spammers, any more than I like wholesale restrictions from the gov't because there are also idiots in the world. The principle is the same, even if the venue is elsewhere. I'd rather have the freedom and risks of the wild west, than the safety and constriction of 1984, be that in real life or cyberlife.
And this isn't the 2nd time it's happened; it's the third. Western Digital got bit by the first (that I know of) of these stupid class action lawsuits.
In the case against W.D., the plaintiff was asking something like $8 MILLION dollars (which was more than W.D.'s income for that year; such an award would have put them out of business). Fortunately the judge saw through it, awarded something like $250k in legal fees (half what the lawyer was asking just for HIS "expenses") and a few grand to the main plaintiff. (Members of the "class" got a free download of some backup software.) And the judge then severely lectured the plaintiff's lawyer for being a sleazebag.
W.D. now carefully labels HDs with both binary and decimal units.
As to the so-called "merits" of these cases -- since when do computers run on anything but binary? Why is an industry standard notation "cheating" the customer?? Why are YOUR CHOSEN OS's filesystem's formatted capacity and filesystem overhead the MANUFACTURER'S problem?? These are the points that the class action plaintiff, and MOST of the posters here today, are wilfully misunderstanding.
In these types of class action suits, the result is always the same: the lawyers make out like bandits, ONE person (the primary plaintiff, I forget the legal term) gets some substantial part of the "award", and ALL of the other "class members" wind up with something trivial, like a coupon to buy more of whatever.
And then prices go up on all of the company's other merchandise, because the shortfall caused by having to pay out the "award" has to be made up from SOMEWHERE. And that means more money out of OUR pockets.
Or require a permit and license to purchase CD/DVD media. And as a condition of the license, you agree to allow warrantless search of your property at any time.
Don't think this could happen?? Well, here's an existing precedent: this is EXACTLY what you agree to if you have a kennel permit (notably in most California jurisdictions, but also in some other states) -- the terms of the permit state that your property can be searched at any time, for any or NO reason, WITHOUT A WARRANT.
Okay... so I have Oriental poppies blooming in my yard. You come along and steal them, refine them into heroin, and sell it. Then *I* get busted for "making available".
A funny told to me by someone who worked there and witnessed this:
There are secure rooms like that at Lockheed. Except for one little detail... one day they noticed that vines were coming up around the border of wall and floor. Seems they'd lavished security on the walls and ceiling, but til the vines invaded, had totally forgotten about the floor!!
Ah, I'd missed that, thanks. (Or forgotten about it. Mind like a...??) Yeah, no doubt some registrars are that crooked, and I imagine some of the kiters ARE registrars.... Google et al. will just have to figure out which can be trusted, and not deal with domains that come through the known crooks.
One man's clutter is another's indispensible feature.
And when the majority of users go "Hey! WTF? Where'd it go??" IT WASN'T CLUTTER.
There was a similar situation back in the early days of Mozilla development. The main devdude decided that he didn't want "BACK" on the context menu when the mouse pointer was over an image, because "it was too much clutter". The user community (then meaning the mozdev newsgroup) HATED this, and took a vote on it -- I still remember the result, because it was so astounding. 700 votes to KEEP "back" on the menu; only 2 votes in support of getting rid of it.
Despite which, the devdude said, in so many words, "Tough shit, this is how *I* like it." And so it stayed, despite a very upset userbase (which not being coders, couldn't really do anything about it).
And people still wonder why a lot of real users get soured on opensource....
Yeah, I agree there are a lot of guesses and assumptions there... a worst-case-for-tasters scenario. But even $50/year out of their pockets is that much less profit, and anything that makes their lives harder is good by me:)
As someone else pointed out, tho, the REAL financial *enablers* are the advertising vendors, primarily Google. If they would refuse to serve ads to any domain that hasn't been continuously registered for at least 30 days (which presumably could be confirmed by WHOIS info), a lot of this BS would go away, because the tasters would be forced to pay in full for each domain used (by the time ad revenue starts, it's too late to get a refund).
I believe the site I cited is looking at "sprawl density" not total density. But sprawl is what most of the "everyone should live near their jobs" bigots are usually talking about, not inner-city density.
And having lived in Minnesota, I know all all about triple digit temps, matching humitidy, and twin-engine mosquitos!!
No, what they figured (this is from TFA, not me) is that since it takes NN-many attempts to come up with ONE profitable domain, the cost of those NN-many attempts (if you don't get it entirely refunded) has to be figured into the profit equation.
And I was surprised that their number was so high, but consider that over 99% of tasted domains are rolled over.... without refunds, suddenly that's a good deal more cash, even at a few cents apiece.
I stopped using the DOCTYPE declaration after discovering that it causes some pages to be rendered blank in some older browsers... it is probably an interaction with some other tag (er, element if you insist), but I never did pin that part down. However, simply deleting the DOCTYPE line fixed the problem -- for the visitor, at least. If W3C is unhappy about it... well, their validator is not reading web pages!
I have pot growing in my front yard. You come along and pick some of my pot. I am then arrested for selling pot, even tho you stole my pot and I didn't sell you anything.
Back in the early days of filesharing, there was some client (BearShare maybe, I forget) that IF your Windows was in an Oriental language, would make the ENTIRE hard drive visible to the world. Since it only affected Oriental (and possibly only Thai) language setups, it's pretty clear it was a bug. -- Should victims of a software bug be held liable for unwitting breaches of the law that are directly caused by said bug??
I'm curious as to your opinion on whether judge or jury trial is more to the defendant's benefit in these cases?
A lawyer/judge of my acquaintance once advised me that in cases where the average man knows little or nothing about the subject the case addresses, you're better off to only have to convince one ignorant person (the judge) rather than having to convince 12 ignorant persons (the jury).
But I'm not sure how valid that is for the RIAA cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, tell me more about your solar setup. In the near future I need to heat a barnlike building in Montana.... and the achieved temps you cite are plenty good enough. Thanks!
One of the home-heating systems I've heard about uses hot water circulated from the water heater. It's being heated all the time and most of that goes to waste, so why not run it thru the house whenever it would just be cooling in the tank otherwise?
Exactly. At that point, you're free to block it if you wish, and if the spammer doesn't like it, he can buy his own router and pay for his own upstream access. If that makes spamming unprofitable -- oh well!!
Indeed, the entire permit/license concept has largely become corrupted -- it is no longer "you are certified competent/legally allowed to"; it is now a laundry list of ways that the gov't can restrict your rights, or coerce you into compliance if you wish to retain (some portion of) said rights. :(
I note from the Wiki article that the Court was not unanimous on that:
"I do not see a philosophical or historical basis for asserting that 'commercial' speech is of 'lower value' than 'noncommercial' speech." -- Clarence Thomas
And I have to agree with this, because if you can assign a 'lower value' to one type of speech, you've just set a precedent for setting a lower value on ANY type of speech. Maybe next time it'll be religious speech that is determined to have "lower value". Maybe speaking out against government activities gets a 'lower value' too.
Don't think so? Check out http://www.seditionproject.net/ for a good ol' American realworld example.
Yep. Nifty how that works out. :)
And he might be correct -- so long as he only uses his OWN equipment and a legitimate internet connection which he has lawful permission to use (even if that's an anonymous, open-to-all site like a public library). But the moment he *steals* someone else's bandwidth or CPU cycles, he should lose that protection.
BTW I've received anonymous spam that promoted unpopular political viewpoints; imagine if this were, say, China and such spam might be your only way of learning about western democracy.
Whether it's a First Amendment issue is actually a good question, but IMO it isn't really all that hard to distinguish whether that applies:
Someone sending spam *entirely* with their own equipment (NOT using botnets, hacked servers, open relays, etc.) is within their rights. They may be a PITA but so are streetcorner preachers hollering over the town square -- the venue is different but the effect is the same: annoying, but still "free speech", as free to the spammer or preacher as it is to everyone else. However, anyone else is also within their rights to block said spam, much as the streetcorner preacher can't prevent you from wearing earplugs.
However, the moment the spammer illicitly uses someone else's equipment, they are in the wrong and First Amendment protection no longer applies, since they commited variously computer-trespass and/or theft of services. Likewise, the streetcorner preacher is not allowed to co-opt your front porch and use it to harangue passersby.
Some of the biggest lists are weekly newsletters.
Hell, slashdot has to be among 'em -- how many of the over a million registered users get the daily mailing?? if even 5% do, that's 50,000 per DAY.
And it's the sort of thing that once established, the threshold will creep downward until we DO wind up paying (in some way, maybe not cash) to send each email, even email for personal use.
And I don't like the idea of punishing legit users for the sins of spammers, any more than I like wholesale restrictions from the gov't because there are also idiots in the world. The principle is the same, even if the venue is elsewhere. I'd rather have the freedom and risks of the wild west, than the safety and constriction of 1984, be that in real life or cyberlife.
And this isn't the 2nd time it's happened; it's the third. Western Digital got bit by the first (that I know of) of these stupid class action lawsuits.
In the case against W.D., the plaintiff was asking something like $8 MILLION dollars (which was more than W.D.'s income for that year; such an award would have put them out of business). Fortunately the judge saw through it, awarded something like $250k in legal fees (half what the lawyer was asking just for HIS "expenses") and a few grand to the main plaintiff. (Members of the "class" got a free download of some backup software.) And the judge then severely lectured the plaintiff's lawyer for being a sleazebag.
W.D. now carefully labels HDs with both binary and decimal units.
As to the so-called "merits" of these cases -- since when do computers run on anything but binary? Why is an industry standard notation "cheating" the customer?? Why are YOUR CHOSEN OS's filesystem's formatted capacity and filesystem overhead the MANUFACTURER'S problem?? These are the points that the class action plaintiff, and MOST of the posters here today, are wilfully misunderstanding.
In these types of class action suits, the result is always the same: the lawyers make out like bandits, ONE person (the primary plaintiff, I forget the legal term) gets some substantial part of the "award", and ALL of the other "class members" wind up with something trivial, like a coupon to buy more of whatever.
And then prices go up on all of the company's other merchandise, because the shortfall caused by having to pay out the "award" has to be made up from SOMEWHERE. And that means more money out of OUR pockets.
Somehow I find Jackson's statement by far the more chilling of the two. Thanks for the cite.
Oh, fixed link, I hope: http://roberthjackson.org/
Or require a permit and license to purchase CD/DVD media. And as a condition of the license, you agree to allow warrantless search of your property at any time.
Don't think this could happen?? Well, here's an existing precedent: this is EXACTLY what you agree to if you have a kennel permit (notably in most California jurisdictions, but also in some other states) -- the terms of the permit state that your property can be searched at any time, for any or NO reason, WITHOUT A WARRANT.
Heh heh, true enough...
:)
Okay... so I have Oriental poppies blooming in my yard. You come along and steal them, refine them into heroin, and sell it. Then *I* get busted for "making available".
Better?
A funny told to me by someone who worked there and witnessed this:
There are secure rooms like that at Lockheed. Except for one little detail... one day they noticed that vines were coming up around the border of wall and floor. Seems they'd lavished security on the walls and ceiling, but til the vines invaded, had totally forgotten about the floor!!
Ah, I'd missed that, thanks. (Or forgotten about it. Mind like a ...??) Yeah, no doubt some registrars are that crooked, and I imagine some of the kiters ARE registrars.... Google et al. will just have to figure out which can be trusted, and not deal with domains that come through the known crooks.
I only want to make size 6 shoes, because having all those different sizes available clutters up the store shelves.
Don't worry, you'll get used to them, eventually...
One man's clutter is another's indispensible feature.
And when the majority of users go "Hey! WTF? Where'd it go??" IT WASN'T CLUTTER.
There was a similar situation back in the early days of Mozilla development. The main devdude decided that he didn't want "BACK" on the context menu when the mouse pointer was over an image, because "it was too much clutter". The user community (then meaning the mozdev newsgroup) HATED this, and took a vote on it -- I still remember the result, because it was so astounding. 700 votes to KEEP "back" on the menu; only 2 votes in support of getting rid of it.
Despite which, the devdude said, in so many words, "Tough shit, this is how *I* like it." And so it stayed, despite a very upset userbase (which not being coders, couldn't really do anything about it).
And people still wonder why a lot of real users get soured on opensource....
Yeah, I agree there are a lot of guesses and assumptions there... a worst-case-for-tasters scenario. But even $50/year out of their pockets is that much less profit, and anything that makes their lives harder is good by me :)
As someone else pointed out, tho, the REAL financial *enablers* are the advertising vendors, primarily Google. If they would refuse to serve ads to any domain that hasn't been continuously registered for at least 30 days (which presumably could be confirmed by WHOIS info), a lot of this BS would go away, because the tasters would be forced to pay in full for each domain used (by the time ad revenue starts, it's too late to get a refund).
I believe the site I cited is looking at "sprawl density" not total density. But sprawl is what most of the "everyone should live near their jobs" bigots are usually talking about, not inner-city density.
And having lived in Minnesota, I know all all about triple digit temps, matching humitidy, and twin-engine mosquitos!!
No, what they figured (this is from TFA, not me) is that since it takes NN-many attempts to come up with ONE profitable domain, the cost of those NN-many attempts (if you don't get it entirely refunded) has to be figured into the profit equation.
And I was surprised that their number was so high, but consider that over 99% of tasted domains are rolled over.... without refunds, suddenly that's a good deal more cash, even at a few cents apiece.
I stopped using the DOCTYPE declaration after discovering that it causes some pages to be rendered blank in some older browsers... it is probably an interaction with some other tag (er, element if you insist), but I never did pin that part down. However, simply deleting the DOCTYPE line fixed the problem -- for the visitor, at least. If W3C is unhappy about it... well, their validator is not reading web pages!
Ah, that's a good point -- since you can always decide against a jury trial later on, if that seems the better course.
Maybe closer would be:
I have pot growing in my front yard.
You come along and pick some of my pot.
I am then arrested for selling pot, even tho you stole my pot and I didn't sell you anything.
Back in the early days of filesharing, there was some client (BearShare maybe, I forget) that IF your Windows was in an Oriental language, would make the ENTIRE hard drive visible to the world. Since it only affected Oriental (and possibly only Thai) language setups, it's pretty clear it was a bug. -- Should victims of a software bug be held liable for unwitting breaches of the law that are directly caused by said bug??
I'm curious as to your opinion on whether judge or jury trial is more to the defendant's benefit in these cases?
A lawyer/judge of my acquaintance once advised me that in cases where the average man knows little or nothing about the subject the case addresses, you're better off to only have to convince one ignorant person (the judge) rather than having to convince 12 ignorant persons (the jury).
But I'm not sure how valid that is for the RIAA cases.