Mission creep: Originally, yes, spectrum regulation was intended to allow a more efficient market to emerge by artificially creating exclusivity, and thereby a kind of propery right. But anything that becomes a source of tax revenue will eventually be justified by government on that premise alone. Like you do.
Based on this article, it would seem more like a bunch of bored bureacrats in Brussels (Ooh! Alliteration!) are the ones with all the power.
Hey, Europe: At least WE get rid of Bush in 2008, and we have a chance to put someone else in charge. You guys are stuck with the EU until someone starts WWIII. Sucks to be you!
Once again the reasoning behind such legislation is said to be in order to set minimum standards on areas such as hate speech and the protection of children.
As for protecting the children, I think they'd be more interested in regulating MySpacesterKut et al. I mean, that's where all the pedophiles are gathering, which represents an ACTUAL threat to children, rather than the viewing of naughty videos, which represents... well, no real threat at all. I mean, WTF?
But more to the point: anytime someone wants to do something "in the interests of the children", doesn't your bullshit detector go off like crazy? Mine did, so I thought this through:
1) Hate speech and naughty content can occur equally as well via the media of text and pictures. Video doesn't necessarily add anything to either one. In fact, any smart, savvy Holocaust denier will tell you that text is a far more efficient and cost-effective method of defaming Jews.
2) Text (chat, specifically) is really the ONLY thing for which you can make a halfway-serious argument about the protection of children online. The idea that videos will somehow threaten children (they'll come get you in the middle of the night!) is just inane.
3) Broadcast license fees open up a new revenue source for the government, which can be used to directly tax internet content (which so far is nearly unheard of).
I mean, this is practically a QED: It's about money, specifically taxes.
Isn't this a good thing? At least the player has a choice and not like tv/movies where you have to watch gore all the way through (unless you can make yourself to pick up the remote).
You seem to miss the point of JT's comment: since the game is interactive, with multiple paths of play through it, the judge cannot be sure that he didn't miss some content that was much, MUCH more violent. That would nullify judge's conclusion that the level of violence was less than on prime-time TV.
Unfortunately, this is logically correct. There, I said it--JT was right, on this point, that the judge can't possibly make a factual conclusion about the content of the game based on watching an agent of Take Two play it through for him. The fact that choices exist means that the judge could have been fooled.
Relevance to the debate? Well, if Jack is trying to get the game banned on the grounds that it meets the definition of "obscene material", his point is quite relevant, because the judge can't determine whether something is obscene or not if the judge never saw it.
At the end of the day its parents responisbility to monitor what they buy their children and what their children do.
This sentence is a complete non sequitur to the previous sentence. WTF?
Before I get attacked as being complicit, I'd like to point out that I don't agree with JT.
"Fast" can refer to either bandwidth (how much data the pipe carries at one time), or latency (the delay between when a signal is sent and when it is received). Here, they're talking about bandwidth.
But as other have pointed out, the summary is QUITE misleading. Copper wire of a given spec (length, guage, etc.) has a maximum theoretical bandwidth. The actual bandwidth we get out of it depends on the aim and sophistication of the signaling mechanism. My 3.0 MBps DSL line uses the exact same copper pair of phone wires as a dial-up 56k modem would, but it achieves much greater bandwidth because it crams more signal onto the wires. For last-mile distances (which may be more or less than a mile, obviously), the current practical maximum is much higher than current DSL rates, but we would have to use a more sophisticated signaling mechanism than DSL does.
Optical fiber has similar theoretical limits, governed by length and cable spec, and similar practical limits depending on how the signaling works. If we're talking about realistic cable guages and last-mile distances, optical fiber will always have a higher theoretical bandwidth than copper wire--that's just physics.
HOWEVER... since the practical maximum is governed by the signaling technologies in use, the theoretical maximums don't really matter.
So you just run around on Slashdot, saying "Wrong" to things, without justifying yourself? Come on, at least tell me WHY I'm wrong. That's what makes this fun!
Actually, that's a very good point. I was wrong on the facts--SpamHaus apparantly got mucked up following different sets of legal advice, and ended up not responding to a lawsuit--always a bad idea. I guess you got me, there.
What are the legal rights of the third-parties that are issued court orders? Can they fight a court order to do something based on the original merits of the case? Could Tucows argue that their client had done nothing wrong?
If not, could they argue that complying with such an order would damage their ability to attract domain registrations, especially from entities in foreign countries? If so, would something like an online petition that promises to boycott Tucows' services if they de-list spamhause.org and is signed by 10k-15k slashdotters be admissible in court as proof of that claim?
3rd parties get dragged into lawsuits all the time, and there are rules about what rights they do and do not have. It really depends on the situation and the judge, but generally, you need standing (legal term) to make a claim. In this case, you would have to make arguments as to how the ruling affected your own party.
A common argument is hardship: I'm a bank, and a court orders me to turn over financial records relating to a case (as part of a discovery order or something) between two other companies. For some reason, the records requested include 50 million pages of documents that have no digital verison, so someone has to hand-copy them all. I can argue that this is an unfair hardship for me, the bank, to endure--the court would probably either restrict the scope of the request to a reasonable amount, or it would force the two parties in the lawsuit to pay me to produce the documents.
But if you can't claim a significant hardship, or you can't claim any hardship to your own party, you're probably not going to get the judge to change his mind. I doubt that any judge would take the petition argument seriously, but the only way to find out for sure is to try it and see.
The second half of this statement is correct, the first half is not. Just because the court decided they had jurisdiction doesn't mean that it's so. The court should not have accepted e360's contention that Spamhaus does business in Illinois without e360 providing some evidence.
You have to be careful when you say that a court is "wrong". If a court makes a decision, and it stands, the court is "right" in the most objective sense possible. There may be arguments for both sides, but whatever the court decided is a fact. You might want to re-phrase such a statement as "the court decided the issue wrongly", which means that the court's logic was faulty in coming to a decision. Or, use something like my "bone-headed" adjective. The point is, it's not considered correct (semantically) to call a court "wrong", unless you're an appeals court.
IANAL, but it sounds to me like Spamhaus withdrew from the case because they didn't want to have to prove each case in court or they'd get deluged in cases from every little one-man spam shop. They really need a finding that they are not under the jurisdiction of local courts.
While it seems unfair, the weight of legal opinion is such that local courts DO have jurisdiction in cases like this. One common theory of jurisdiction holds that if your actions have an effect within a particular place (state or locality), the courts serving that place have jurisdiction over you. For example, if I ship beef all over the U.S. of A. from my little farm in Texas, and some consumer in Vermont gets food poisoning, I can be sued in Vermont court.
I believe you are correct in the underlying opinion that SpamHaus SHOULD NOT be liable in these types of situation, but that's not the way that the law works.
The decision that e360 is being unfairly harmed by SpamHaus is utterly stupid. If they choose to declare e360 a spammer, and 3rd parties choose to use the SpamHaus list, then the courts should not enact penalties against SpamHaus. That's what I think is a stupid decision. You misunderstood me.
I think your anger over the decision is clouding your thinking. Calm down and take a second look. The federal government, not state government "oversees" the net:
You're an idiot, and you apparantly don't know anything about the law. Since the federal government created ICANN as a not-for-profit corporation, it is no longer a part of the government, per se. Therefore, your statement "The federal government, not state government, 'oversees' the net..." is incorrect. ICANN is nominally and practically independent of Congress and the executive branch.
But even so, whether ICANN is an actual Federal agency or not is beside the point. If a state court decides that it has jurisdiction over a matter, it can order around whomever it damn well pleases. Were ICANN a Federal agency (it isn't), and were it actually party to the lawsuit (it isn't), there would be a strong argument that the state court has no jurisdiction But it's up to any given court to decide for itself whether it has jurisdiction, unless the matter is appealed, so this is kind of moot.
One can also make an interstate commerce agument, again a federal jurisdiction not state:
Now you're REALLY showing your ignorance of the law. The ICC applies to actions by Congress and the executive branch, not the courts. It's perfectly acceptable for a local or state court to enact a remedy that affects interstate commerce. They do it all the time. (This is kind of like how the 1st amendment applies to Congress, but not to the courts: a court can impose a gag order without creating a violation of the freedom of speech.)
Your interpretation of events, not the Illinois court, is the only thing boneheaded here, assuming you are a fellow American.
Why don't you learn a little bit about the law before you go around correcting people? Might save you some pride.
What's stopping them from getting a domain name in a non-US-controlled TLD?
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
You're not the only person to make this mistake. The judge's order to pull the SOA for SpamHaus's domain has NOTHING TO DO with whether the TLD is.com,.uk,.de, or.mil. It doesn't matter where the domain is registered.
How can this be? Well, SpamHaus is subject to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants. It can also issue a court order compelling a 3rd party (in this case, the domain registrar) to take some action in regards to you. It doesn't matter whether one party in the lawsuit, or the 3rd party who isn't involved in the suit, is actually resident in the U.S.
Enforcement of a court order is a slightly different issue. It may be very, very difficult to enforce the order of a U.S. court in a foreign country. It's easy enough in the U.S. because the court can hold the non-compliant party in contempt (and enact fines, jail time, etc.), but these mechanisms don't automatically work overseas. Some countries, under some circumstances, will honor civil court orders from other nations, but usually you would have to sue in the foreign country's courts to effect any action on the part of a foreign body.
An important exception to the above is that many entities have assets or physical presence in multiple countries. If (hypotheticallly) the German arm of Register.com operated the.de TLD, a U.S. court could fine the U.S. company, order their CEO to jail, or do whatever else it thought necessary in order to force the German part of the company to comply with its orders. The judge might even order a German executive (residing in Germany) to jail for contempt, and when the German doesn't comply, issue an arrest warrant for the German. While German authorities will probably not be willing to act on that warrant (extradition treaties don't normally extend that far), it will be awfully hard for the German executive to travel in the U.S. with an outstanding warrant.
In short, the Illinois court made a STUPID FUCKING BONEHEADED decision, and the judge or jury should probably be removed and caned, but it is certainly procedurally possible for them to hassle SpamHaus regardless of where you register the domain name.
You're full of shit. I couldn't find a single reference to "gauss rifle" that meets your definition, in any of the journals, Google searches, or other places I looked. Spent a good 20 minutes on it, too, and I have a Lexis account.
You're just making this shit up, aren't you? Get real, dude. Or, cite a frickin' source.
For the record, I never claimed that railguns have *no* velocity limitations. But we're talking about two fundamentally different types of "limitations", here.
The problem of maximum velocity for a firearm projectile is a hard upper limit. Despite centuries of technological achievement, gunsmithing, and near-constant warfare, conventional guns are limited to sub-hypersonic projectile speeds--regardless of the barrel construction, recoil tolerance, projectile mass, air friction. NO MATTER WHAT, you cannot accelerate a projectile past the limits imposed by the velocity of the expanding propellant gas. And even the US Navy's advanced munitions program has only managed to achieve a marginal improvement over WWII-era technology, at least in terms of projectile velocity.
Railguns are limited by a number of factors, specifically those you cite, and a whole load more--inductance of the rails and the limits of sudden current generation are big ones. However, none of these are known to be 'fundamental speed limits'--they're engineering problems, which probably have solutions in practical designs. It's like building a stealth bomber, or an ICBM--yeah, it's going to take some figuring out, but it is *possible* to achieve higher speeds. New advances in barrel construction can significantly reduce friction, or increase the amount of current that can be dumped into the gun during the shot. In fact, given time and money, it's a virtual guarantee that these advances will take place. And the shot will travel as fast as it needs to travel.
Light gas guns are an incredibly useful experimental apparatus, but they have their own flaws and limits that make them totally unsuitable for either military applications (longe-range inertial artillery) or space-launch work. LGGs kind of 'cheat' to obtain enormous velocity, kind of like the discarding-sabot mechanism used in APFS-DS antitank weaponry, which works fine for relatively low-mass projectiles that are less affected by air resistance. Remember, all those super-high-velocity LGGs that you read about are firing projectiles that are very, very small. Building such a device capable of launching a 10-kg microsatellite, or a 20-kg artillery round, would be outside the realm of current designs. Also, since LGGs still require explosive propellant, weaponizing current LGG designs would result in something significantly more cumbersome than traditional guns, but without the major advantage of railguns (no more explosive propellant or warheads stored in vulnerable magazines).
All of which just goes to show why labs use LGGs (they're usable at present to deliver hypersonic projectiles), but why they're not being considered for miliary or space applications (too hard to scale up to higher-mass projectiles). Of course, neither railguns or LGGs are *fundamentally* limited by these concerns, so the situation may be different in 20 or 50 years. Conventional firearms, though, will still not be firing hypersonic rounds, no matter how long you wait. Do you get it, now?
Your lapse is forgivable, but only because the proliferation of terms like "Gauss gun", "rail gun", and "mass driver" in SF has overwhelmed their usage as technical terminology. But the point is, THIS IS NOT A RAIL GUN.
A rail gun is a parallel, non-touching pair of conductive rails, joined at the back-end by a partial circuit capable of generating an extremely high current flow (amps) of electicity in a very, very short time. A conductive projectile is injected into the gap between the rails (so that it touches both rails at once), which completes the circuit. As current flows from one rail to the other, through the projectile, it generates a powerful magnetic field. The Lorentz force causes the projectile to be pushed toward the far end of the rails--the magnitude of the force depends on the current flow.
Rail guns can achieve extremely high velocities, far higher than conventional explosive-charge guns. The velocity of a firearm projectile is limited by the velocity of the expanding explosive gasses that propel it out of the barrel; the gas velocity is in turn limited by the speed of sound in the gas medium, which has a physical upper limit for any type of explosive. Rail guns don't suffer from this limitation.
I have seen references to a 'Gauss gun' which consists of a series of solenoids stationed along a tube barrel, timed to trigger so that a ferrous metal projectile will be pulled faster and faster down the barrel by each of the solenoids in turn. I don't know how valid this terminology is, though.
you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that somehow the mind fills in the blanks, and makes things far worse.
Oh, you mean like the people who actually have their fingers on buttons in nuclear silos?
I don't know if I'm just old, or what, but back in the 80s we were all so afraid for our lives because of a nagging sensation (perhaps reinforced by "Dr. Strangelove" and "WarGames") that the people running the show didn't really care whether we died or not. In the event of a war, would it ever occur to any of the nuclear powers that their strategies of massive retaliation meant genocide?
Guys like Nixon, Johnson, and Reagan made me wonder whether high office renders one a sociopath. Today, we're wondering whether our current leadership is letting the Iraq situation go down the wrong road out of political expediency. I think that there is as much to be learned from the detachment as from the viscerality of violence.
This demonstrates one of the dangers of discussing violence in videogames: there is no way we can experience the same visceral reaction to videogame violence that we do to real violence. Trying to compare real world violence to videogame violence is like reading about climbing about Mount Everest and actually doing it; a superficial similarity, but not the same thing.
Um, why do we have to experience the same reaction to violence in order to be able to discuss it in videogames? How is this "dangerous"? What makes you the self-appointed moral arbiter of what are appropriate and inappropriate fictional experiences of violence.
IT'S NOT REAL--IT'S A VIDEOGAME! Video games are like books, or movies, or television. They are fiction--people playing make-believe in order to entertain or communicate.
But I don't understand what's illegal about clicking ads.
We're not talking about ads, bub. We're talking about breaking laws related to disability insurance, and possibly tax evasion. Read the whole post, next time.
You wouldn't? What would you do? Just stop eating, let them foreclose your house and take your kids to an orphanage? If you can't live on what you have, and there's a way to make more, you'd do it because you'd have to.
Where does this stop, then? Is it OK to shoplify a couple extra bags of rice and cans of soup from the supermarket, if you get that desperate? How about just holding up a liquor store or gas station, or robbing a bank, or mugging someone on the sidewalk to take their wallet?
The point is, if the law is wrong, CHANGE THE LAW. It's just crazy to justify people breaking laws because it fits their circumstances.
There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement your income when you have shitloads of free time because you're stuck at home on disability.
Making any amount of money, even by babysitting, is supposed to be reported and wil endanger your disability check.
You missed the point of this, entirely. I'm saying that IF YOU ARE GOING TO SUPPLEMENT DISABILITY by making up to $85/month, why would you work at a $2 per day job in order to make your $60? Why not work at a $2/hour job, like dog sitting, or a $10/hour job, like babysitting kids for the nieghbors? That way, you could work for one week, make the maximum $85 allowed, and then spend the rest of the month reading or hanging out with your mom. WHY DO THE EXTRA WORK IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
She's a liar because she's in a business where you can clearly make hundreds or thousands a month, and she claims to make only $60/month by working night and day at it.
She's living with her mom, I doubt she's making a thousand a month or more(unless her mom and/or her have high medical bills). Anyways, I think it's understandable. Could you live on $600 a month? If you couldn't, and the only way to get more was illegal, would you do it?
Um... whether she should defraud the government, because it's rules are unfair, is a completely separate issue. I was talking about the question of whether she is actually doing it. I happen to believe that she should not, even if it's unfair. I mean, it's unfair that the government takes 40% of my paycheck every year, but I don't under-report my earnings because I think it's unfair--I vote for people and propositions that seem likely to lower my taxes in a responsible way. BUT... I will admit that there is reasonable room for disagreement--I won't call you a moron or a fool for believeing that she is doing what she needs to do to survive.
As to the question of whether she's making a thousand a month or not, did you even read the first half of the article talking about the Hungarian guy, "Kiss"? He's claiming to make thousands. Do you really think that this American woman is working night and day, and just (for instance) giving the rest away to the poor? Is she just not collecting any invoices past the first $60?
I don't know--maybe you're right. Maybe she IS a complete retard, incapable of figuring out that she's working in a thousands-per-month business but only making $60, and unable to either bring her earnings up to a reasonable level (for the time she spends on it) or quit it and find another job that will pay her the same income for a fraction of the work. WTF?
Yeah--living on disability is a shitty, shitty life. It's barely enough to get by in a trailer park, let alone at a decent standard of living. But that doesn't mean she's not a liar.
1) There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement your income when you have shitloads of free time because you're stuck at home on disability.
2) She claims to be working "night and day", making an average of $2/day. Now, that might be a good wage in Zimbabwe, but in the US it's clinically insane to work that hard for that little money, when there are many other jobs you can do at home that pay more for less effort! (see #1, above)
She IS making more than $60/month from click fraud, but she's not going to tell a reporter about it because she will lose her disability check, and might even be subject to criminal prosecution for defrauding the state. So it's not suprising that she's lying about it.
Chances are, she's not making more than a few thousand a month, at the absolute most. Maybe it's only a few hundred. But she's still cheating, and she's cheating on her income taxes, too.
Yeah, I find it interestig that the reporter seems to take these vampire's assertions about their financials at face-value. Fact is, this "Kiss" fellow is far outside the easy reach of US law (Budapest), he's young enough to be amoral and stupid (23), and he clearly engaged in a shady-but-legal business in high gear. I wouldn't trust this guy to tell me the time of day!
I also find this very interesting:
On disability since a 1996 car accident, Ballard, 36, lives with her ailing mother and her cat, Sassy. She says she works day and night running Owl-Post, a five-year-old group named after the postal system in the Harry Potter novels. Sometimes, Ballard says she takes a break at lunchtime to tend her vegetable garden or help her elderly neighbors with theirs.
OK, so she works like a dog at this job, "night and day". Interesting, but...
She claims her take amounts to only about $60 a month, noting that if she made more than $85, the government would reduce her $601 monthly disability check.
WTF??!! Why is she working like a dog, night and day, for $60 a month? She could make more money selling Herbalife shit. Clearly, this Ballard woman is lying, too--and the reporter doesn't bother to question it.
It's almost a given that both of these people are seriously under-reporting their income, cheating on taxes, etc. And you can bet that both of them are pushing WAAAY more click-fraud than they claim.
"am i alone when i say i am blown away that record labels ask stations for a penny to show their videos?"
Why the surprise? Music videos are certainly connected to albums sales, but they're also productive as entertainment in their own right. They're shown on TV, which generates viewership and sells ads, which means that someone is paying for it. Indirectly, sure, but they're paying for it.
That's all that UMG is trying to negotiate with Fuse. Both sides believe that UMG can charge Fuse, and Fuse can show the videos, generate viewership, and sell ads. If they didn't agree on that, they'd never have sat down to negotiate in the first place.
I suspect that, since the phenom is relatively new as a business idea, Fuse and UMG have somewhat different assumptions about what the value of the videos actually is. If Fuse pays too much, they can't turn enough of a profit on the content to bother, but UMG wants to charge as close to that point as they can get away with. This is a classic negotiation, and it's been done for years in TV. Give it time, and they'll work out how to do business in the new medium. Maybe another year or two, maybe different companies (YouTube, perhaps?), but it'll happen.
"...MY generation will NOT pay major labels to promote THEIR albums."
Which generation do you mean? If you're old, sure--geriatrics don't watch music videos so much. But if you're young, your generation most certainly DOES pay. You (collectively) buy product X, which was promoted by advertising runs on a channel showing music videos, which pays for the ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Mission creep: Originally, yes, spectrum regulation was intended to allow a more efficient market to emerge by artificially creating exclusivity, and thereby a kind of propery right. But anything that becomes a source of tax revenue will eventually be justified by government on that premise alone. Like you do.
What, didn't you get that memo?
Based on this article, it would seem more like a bunch of bored bureacrats in Brussels (Ooh! Alliteration!) are the ones with all the power.
Hey, Europe: At least WE get rid of Bush in 2008, and we have a chance to put someone else in charge. You guys are stuck with the EU until someone starts WWIII. Sucks to be you!
Once again the reasoning behind such legislation is said to be in order to set minimum standards on areas such as hate speech and the protection of children.
As for protecting the children, I think they'd be more interested in regulating MySpacesterKut et al. I mean, that's where all the pedophiles are gathering, which represents an ACTUAL threat to children, rather than the viewing of naughty videos, which represents... well, no real threat at all. I mean, WTF?
But more to the point: anytime someone wants to do something "in the interests of the children", doesn't your bullshit detector go off like crazy? Mine did, so I thought this through:
1) Hate speech and naughty content can occur equally as well via the media of text and pictures. Video doesn't necessarily add anything to either one. In fact, any smart, savvy Holocaust denier will tell you that text is a far more efficient and cost-effective method of defaming Jews.
2) Text (chat, specifically) is really the ONLY thing for which you can make a halfway-serious argument about the protection of children online. The idea that videos will somehow threaten children (they'll come get you in the middle of the night!) is just inane.
3) Broadcast license fees open up a new revenue source for the government, which can be used to directly tax internet content (which so far is nearly unheard of).
I mean, this is practically a QED: It's about money, specifically taxes.
Isn't this a good thing? At least the player has a choice and not like tv/movies where you have to watch gore all the way through (unless you can make yourself to pick up the remote) .
You seem to miss the point of JT's comment: since the game is interactive, with multiple paths of play through it, the judge cannot be sure that he didn't miss some content that was much, MUCH more violent. That would nullify judge's conclusion that the level of violence was less than on prime-time TV.
Unfortunately, this is logically correct. There, I said it--JT was right, on this point, that the judge can't possibly make a factual conclusion about the content of the game based on watching an agent of Take Two play it through for him. The fact that choices exist means that the judge could have been fooled.
Relevance to the debate? Well, if Jack is trying to get the game banned on the grounds that it meets the definition of "obscene material", his point is quite relevant, because the judge can't determine whether something is obscene or not if the judge never saw it.
At the end of the day its parents responisbility to monitor what they buy their children and what their children do.
This sentence is a complete non sequitur to the previous sentence. WTF?
Before I get attacked as being complicit, I'd like to point out that I don't agree with JT.
"Fast" can refer to either bandwidth (how much data the pipe carries at one time), or latency (the delay between when a signal is sent and when it is received). Here, they're talking about bandwidth.
But as other have pointed out, the summary is QUITE misleading. Copper wire of a given spec (length, guage, etc.) has a maximum theoretical bandwidth. The actual bandwidth we get out of it depends on the aim and sophistication of the signaling mechanism. My 3.0 MBps DSL line uses the exact same copper pair of phone wires as a dial-up 56k modem would, but it achieves much greater bandwidth because it crams more signal onto the wires. For last-mile distances (which may be more or less than a mile, obviously), the current practical maximum is much higher than current DSL rates, but we would have to use a more sophisticated signaling mechanism than DSL does.
Optical fiber has similar theoretical limits, governed by length and cable spec, and similar practical limits depending on how the signaling works. If we're talking about realistic cable guages and last-mile distances, optical fiber will always have a higher theoretical bandwidth than copper wire--that's just physics.
HOWEVER... since the practical maximum is governed by the signaling technologies in use, the theoretical maximums don't really matter.
So you just run around on Slashdot, saying "Wrong" to things, without justifying yourself? Come on, at least tell me WHY I'm wrong. That's what makes this fun!
Actually, that's a very good point. I was wrong on the facts--SpamHaus apparantly got mucked up following different sets of legal advice, and ended up not responding to a lawsuit--always a bad idea. I guess you got me, there.
What are the legal rights of the third-parties that are issued court orders? Can they fight a court order to do something based on the original merits of the case? Could Tucows argue that their client had done nothing wrong?
If not, could they argue that complying with such an order would damage their ability to attract domain registrations, especially from entities in foreign countries? If so, would something like an online petition that promises to boycott Tucows' services if they de-list spamhause.org and is signed by 10k-15k slashdotters be admissible in court as proof of that claim?
3rd parties get dragged into lawsuits all the time, and there are rules about what rights they do and do not have. It really depends on the situation and the judge, but generally, you need standing (legal term) to make a claim. In this case, you would have to make arguments as to how the ruling affected your own party.
A common argument is hardship: I'm a bank, and a court orders me to turn over financial records relating to a case (as part of a discovery order or something) between two other companies. For some reason, the records requested include 50 million pages of documents that have no digital verison, so someone has to hand-copy them all. I can argue that this is an unfair hardship for me, the bank, to endure--the court would probably either restrict the scope of the request to a reasonable amount, or it would force the two parties in the lawsuit to pay me to produce the documents.
But if you can't claim a significant hardship, or you can't claim any hardship to your own party, you're probably not going to get the judge to change his mind. I doubt that any judge would take the petition argument seriously, but the only way to find out for sure is to try it and see.
The second half of this statement is correct, the first half is not. Just because the court decided they had jurisdiction doesn't mean that it's so. The court should not have accepted e360's contention that Spamhaus does business in Illinois without e360 providing some evidence.
You have to be careful when you say that a court is "wrong". If a court makes a decision, and it stands, the court is "right" in the most objective sense possible. There may be arguments for both sides, but whatever the court decided is a fact. You might want to re-phrase such a statement as "the court decided the issue wrongly", which means that the court's logic was faulty in coming to a decision. Or, use something like my "bone-headed" adjective. The point is, it's not considered correct (semantically) to call a court "wrong", unless you're an appeals court.
IANAL, but it sounds to me like Spamhaus withdrew from the case because they didn't want to have to prove each case in court or they'd get deluged in cases from every little one-man spam shop. They really need a finding that they are not under the jurisdiction of local courts.
While it seems unfair, the weight of legal opinion is such that local courts DO have jurisdiction in cases like this. One common theory of jurisdiction holds that if your actions have an effect within a particular place (state or locality), the courts serving that place have jurisdiction over you. For example, if I ship beef all over the U.S. of A. from my little farm in Texas, and some consumer in Vermont gets food poisoning, I can be sued in Vermont court.
I believe you are correct in the underlying opinion that SpamHaus SHOULD NOT be liable in these types of situation, but that's not the way that the law works.
The decision that e360 is being unfairly harmed by SpamHaus is utterly stupid. If they choose to declare e360 a spammer, and 3rd parties choose to use the SpamHaus list, then the courts should not enact penalties against SpamHaus. That's what I think is a stupid decision. You misunderstood me.
I think your anger over the decision is clouding your thinking. Calm down and take a second look. The federal government, not state government "oversees" the net:
You're an idiot, and you apparantly don't know anything about the law. Since the federal government created ICANN as a not-for-profit corporation, it is no longer a part of the government, per se. Therefore, your statement "The federal government, not state government, 'oversees' the net..." is incorrect. ICANN is nominally and practically independent of Congress and the executive branch.
But even so, whether ICANN is an actual Federal agency or not is beside the point. If a state court decides that it has jurisdiction over a matter, it can order around whomever it damn well pleases. Were ICANN a Federal agency (it isn't), and were it actually party to the lawsuit (it isn't), there would be a strong argument that the state court has no jurisdiction But it's up to any given court to decide for itself whether it has jurisdiction, unless the matter is appealed, so this is kind of moot.
One can also make an interstate commerce agument, again a federal jurisdiction not state:
Now you're REALLY showing your ignorance of the law. The ICC applies to actions by Congress and the executive branch, not the courts. It's perfectly acceptable for a local or state court to enact a remedy that affects interstate commerce. They do it all the time. (This is kind of like how the 1st amendment applies to Congress, but not to the courts: a court can impose a gag order without creating a violation of the freedom of speech.)
Your interpretation of events, not the Illinois court, is the only thing boneheaded here, assuming you are a fellow American.
Why don't you learn a little bit about the law before you go around correcting people? Might save you some pride.
What's stopping them from getting a domain name in a non-US-controlled TLD?
.com, .uk, .de, or .mil. It doesn't matter where the domain is registered.
.de TLD, a U.S. court could fine the U.S. company, order their CEO to jail, or do whatever else it thought necessary in order to force the German part of the company to comply with its orders. The judge might even order a German executive (residing in Germany) to jail for contempt, and when the German doesn't comply, issue an arrest warrant for the German. While German authorities will probably not be willing to act on that warrant (extradition treaties don't normally extend that far), it will be awfully hard for the German executive to travel in the U.S. with an outstanding warrant.
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
You're not the only person to make this mistake. The judge's order to pull the SOA for SpamHaus's domain has NOTHING TO DO with whether the TLD is
How can this be? Well, SpamHaus is subject to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants. It can also issue a court order compelling a 3rd party (in this case, the domain registrar) to take some action in regards to you. It doesn't matter whether one party in the lawsuit, or the 3rd party who isn't involved in the suit, is actually resident in the U.S.
Enforcement of a court order is a slightly different issue. It may be very, very difficult to enforce the order of a U.S. court in a foreign country. It's easy enough in the U.S. because the court can hold the non-compliant party in contempt (and enact fines, jail time, etc.), but these mechanisms don't automatically work overseas. Some countries, under some circumstances, will honor civil court orders from other nations, but usually you would have to sue in the foreign country's courts to effect any action on the part of a foreign body.
An important exception to the above is that many entities have assets or physical presence in multiple countries. If (hypotheticallly) the German arm of Register.com operated the
In short, the Illinois court made a STUPID FUCKING BONEHEADED decision, and the judge or jury should probably be removed and caned, but it is certainly procedurally possible for them to hassle SpamHaus regardless of where you register the domain name.
You're full of shit. I couldn't find a single reference to "gauss rifle" that meets your definition, in any of the journals, Google searches, or other places I looked. Spent a good 20 minutes on it, too, and I have a Lexis account.
You're just making this shit up, aren't you? Get real, dude. Or, cite a frickin' source.
For the record, I never claimed that railguns have *no* velocity limitations. But we're talking about two fundamentally different types of "limitations", here.
The problem of maximum velocity for a firearm projectile is a hard upper limit. Despite centuries of technological achievement, gunsmithing, and near-constant warfare, conventional guns are limited to sub-hypersonic projectile speeds--regardless of the barrel construction, recoil tolerance, projectile mass, air friction. NO MATTER WHAT, you cannot accelerate a projectile past the limits imposed by the velocity of the expanding propellant gas. And even the US Navy's advanced munitions program has only managed to achieve a marginal improvement over WWII-era technology, at least in terms of projectile velocity.
Railguns are limited by a number of factors, specifically those you cite, and a whole load more--inductance of the rails and the limits of sudden current generation are big ones. However, none of these are known to be 'fundamental speed limits'--they're engineering problems, which probably have solutions in practical designs. It's like building a stealth bomber, or an ICBM--yeah, it's going to take some figuring out, but it is *possible* to achieve higher speeds. New advances in barrel construction can significantly reduce friction, or increase the amount of current that can be dumped into the gun during the shot. In fact, given time and money, it's a virtual guarantee that these advances will take place. And the shot will travel as fast as it needs to travel.
Light gas guns are an incredibly useful experimental apparatus, but they have their own flaws and limits that make them totally unsuitable for either military applications (longe-range inertial artillery) or space-launch work. LGGs kind of 'cheat' to obtain enormous velocity, kind of like the discarding-sabot mechanism used in APFS-DS antitank weaponry, which works fine for relatively low-mass projectiles that are less affected by air resistance. Remember, all those super-high-velocity LGGs that you read about are firing projectiles that are very, very small. Building such a device capable of launching a 10-kg microsatellite, or a 20-kg artillery round, would be outside the realm of current designs. Also, since LGGs still require explosive propellant, weaponizing current LGG designs would result in something significantly more cumbersome than traditional guns, but without the major advantage of railguns (no more explosive propellant or warheads stored in vulnerable magazines).
All of which just goes to show why labs use LGGs (they're usable at present to deliver hypersonic projectiles), but why they're not being considered for miliary or space applications (too hard to scale up to higher-mass projectiles). Of course, neither railguns or LGGs are *fundamentally* limited by these concerns, so the situation may be different in 20 or 50 years. Conventional firearms, though, will still not be firing hypersonic rounds, no matter how long you wait. Do you get it, now?
Your lapse is forgivable, but only because the proliferation of terms like "Gauss gun", "rail gun", and "mass driver" in SF has overwhelmed their usage as technical terminology. But the point is, THIS IS NOT A RAIL GUN.
A rail gun is a parallel, non-touching pair of conductive rails, joined at the back-end by a partial circuit capable of generating an extremely high current flow (amps) of electicity in a very, very short time. A conductive projectile is injected into the gap between the rails (so that it touches both rails at once), which completes the circuit. As current flows from one rail to the other, through the projectile, it generates a powerful magnetic field. The Lorentz force causes the projectile to be pushed toward the far end of the rails--the magnitude of the force depends on the current flow.
Rail guns can achieve extremely high velocities, far higher than conventional explosive-charge guns. The velocity of a firearm projectile is limited by the velocity of the expanding explosive gasses that propel it out of the barrel; the gas velocity is in turn limited by the speed of sound in the gas medium, which has a physical upper limit for any type of explosive. Rail guns don't suffer from this limitation.
I have seen references to a 'Gauss gun' which consists of a series of solenoids stationed along a tube barrel, timed to trigger so that a ferrous metal projectile will be pulled faster and faster down the barrel by each of the solenoids in turn. I don't know how valid this terminology is, though.
you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that somehow the mind fills in the blanks, and makes things far worse.
Oh, you mean like the people who actually have their fingers on buttons in nuclear silos?
I don't know if I'm just old, or what, but back in the 80s we were all so afraid for our lives because of a nagging sensation (perhaps reinforced by "Dr. Strangelove" and "WarGames") that the people running the show didn't really care whether we died or not. In the event of a war, would it ever occur to any of the nuclear powers that their strategies of massive retaliation meant genocide?
Guys like Nixon, Johnson, and Reagan made me wonder whether high office renders one a sociopath. Today, we're wondering whether our current leadership is letting the Iraq situation go down the wrong road out of political expediency. I think that there is as much to be learned from the detachment as from the viscerality of violence.
This demonstrates one of the dangers of discussing violence in videogames: there is no way we can experience the same visceral reaction to videogame violence that we do to real violence. Trying to compare real world violence to videogame violence is like reading about climbing about Mount Everest and actually doing it; a superficial similarity, but not the same thing.
Um, why do we have to experience the same reaction to violence in order to be able to discuss it in videogames? How is this "dangerous"? What makes you the self-appointed moral arbiter of what are appropriate and inappropriate fictional experiences of violence.
IT'S NOT REAL--IT'S A VIDEOGAME! Video games are like books, or movies, or television. They are fiction--people playing make-believe in order to entertain or communicate.
But I don't understand what's illegal about clicking ads.
We're not talking about ads, bub. We're talking about breaking laws related to disability insurance, and possibly tax evasion. Read the whole post, next time.
You wouldn't? What would you do? Just stop eating, let them foreclose your house and take your kids to an orphanage? If you can't live on what you have, and there's a way to make more, you'd do it because you'd have to.
Where does this stop, then? Is it OK to shoplify a couple extra bags of rice and cans of soup from the supermarket, if you get that desperate? How about just holding up a liquor store or gas station, or robbing a bank, or mugging someone on the sidewalk to take their wallet?
The point is, if the law is wrong, CHANGE THE LAW. It's just crazy to justify people breaking laws because it fits their circumstances.
You forget that the GPL is about as viral as AIDS.
Flamebaiting jackass.
There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement your income when you have shitloads of free time because you're stuck at home on disability.
Making any amount of money, even by babysitting, is supposed to be reported and wil endanger your disability check.
You missed the point of this, entirely. I'm saying that IF YOU ARE GOING TO SUPPLEMENT DISABILITY by making up to $85/month, why would you work at a $2 per day job in order to make your $60? Why not work at a $2/hour job, like dog sitting, or a $10/hour job, like babysitting kids for the nieghbors? That way, you could work for one week, make the maximum $85 allowed, and then spend the rest of the month reading or hanging out with your mom. WHY DO THE EXTRA WORK IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
She's a liar because she's in a business where you can clearly make hundreds or thousands a month, and she claims to make only $60/month by working night and day at it.
She's living with her mom, I doubt she's making a thousand a month or more(unless her mom and/or her have high medical bills). Anyways, I think it's understandable. Could you live on $600 a month? If you couldn't, and the only way to get more was illegal, would you do it?
Um... whether she should defraud the government, because it's rules are unfair, is a completely separate issue. I was talking about the question of whether she is actually doing it. I happen to believe that she should not, even if it's unfair. I mean, it's unfair that the government takes 40% of my paycheck every year, but I don't under-report my earnings because I think it's unfair--I vote for people and propositions that seem likely to lower my taxes in a responsible way. BUT... I will admit that there is reasonable room for disagreement--I won't call you a moron or a fool for believeing that she is doing what she needs to do to survive.
As to the question of whether she's making a thousand a month or not, did you even read the first half of the article talking about the Hungarian guy, "Kiss"? He's claiming to make thousands. Do you really think that this American woman is working night and day, and just (for instance) giving the rest away to the poor? Is she just not collecting any invoices past the first $60?
I don't know--maybe you're right. Maybe she IS a complete retard, incapable of figuring out that she's working in a thousands-per-month business but only making $60, and unable to either bring her earnings up to a reasonable level (for the time she spends on it) or quit it and find another job that will pay her the same income for a fraction of the work. WTF?
Yeah--living on disability is a shitty, shitty life. It's barely enough to get by in a trailer park, let alone at a decent standard of living. But that doesn't mean she's not a liar.
1) There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement your income when you have shitloads of free time because you're stuck at home on disability.
2) She claims to be working "night and day", making an average of $2/day. Now, that might be a good wage in Zimbabwe, but in the US it's clinically insane to work that hard for that little money, when there are many other jobs you can do at home that pay more for less effort! (see #1, above)
She IS making more than $60/month from click fraud, but she's not going to tell a reporter about it because she will lose her disability check, and might even be subject to criminal prosecution for defrauding the state. So it's not suprising that she's lying about it.
Chances are, she's not making more than a few thousand a month, at the absolute most. Maybe it's only a few hundred. But she's still cheating, and she's cheating on her income taxes, too.
Yeah, I find it interestig that the reporter seems to take these vampire's assertions about their financials at face-value. Fact is, this "Kiss" fellow is far outside the easy reach of US law (Budapest), he's young enough to be amoral and stupid (23), and he clearly engaged in a shady-but-legal business in high gear. I wouldn't trust this guy to tell me the time of day!
I also find this very interesting:
On disability since a 1996 car accident, Ballard, 36, lives with her ailing mother and her cat, Sassy. She says she works day and night running Owl-Post, a five-year-old group named after the postal system in the Harry Potter novels. Sometimes, Ballard says she takes a break at lunchtime to tend her vegetable garden or help her elderly neighbors with theirs.
OK, so she works like a dog at this job, "night and day". Interesting, but...
She claims her take amounts to only about $60 a month, noting that if she made more than $85, the government would reduce her $601 monthly disability check.
WTF??!! Why is she working like a dog, night and day, for $60 a month? She could make more money selling Herbalife shit. Clearly, this Ballard woman is lying, too--and the reporter doesn't bother to question it.
It's almost a given that both of these people are seriously under-reporting their income, cheating on taxes, etc. And you can bet that both of them are pushing WAAAY more click-fraud than they claim.
"am i alone when i say i am blown away that record labels ask stations for a penny to show their videos?"
Why the surprise? Music videos are certainly connected to albums sales, but they're also productive as entertainment in their own right. They're shown on TV, which generates viewership and sells ads, which means that someone is paying for it. Indirectly, sure, but they're paying for it.
That's all that UMG is trying to negotiate with Fuse. Both sides believe that UMG can charge Fuse, and Fuse can show the videos, generate viewership, and sell ads. If they didn't agree on that, they'd never have sat down to negotiate in the first place.
I suspect that, since the phenom is relatively new as a business idea, Fuse and UMG have somewhat different assumptions about what the value of the videos actually is. If Fuse pays too much, they can't turn enough of a profit on the content to bother, but UMG wants to charge as close to that point as they can get away with. This is a classic negotiation, and it's been done for years in TV. Give it time, and they'll work out how to do business in the new medium. Maybe another year or two, maybe different companies (YouTube, perhaps?), but it'll happen.
"...MY generation will NOT pay major labels to promote THEIR albums."
Which generation do you mean? If you're old, sure--geriatrics don't watch music videos so much. But if you're young, your generation most certainly DOES pay. You (collectively) buy product X, which was promoted by advertising runs on a channel showing music videos, which pays for the ads.
Simple, simple stuff, here, people.