As a dancer, I would laugh if any store tried that on me.
The trouble with dancing shoes is that you can't just judge them by the appearance. Comfort is a very personal thing in this market, and some shoes look great but are terribly badly made and will cut your foot to shreds if worn often for dancing. There is no way you can tell that just from looking at them.
Trying shoes on in a store and then buying them somewhere else is one (possibly unethical) thing, but trying shoes on in a store and then not buying them at all because they aren't actually very good is the manufacturer's/shop's problem.
Well, as the old saying goes, once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. Of course I can't really generalise my bad experiences with Amazon to the entire world, or even the entire country since I'm really talking about amazon.co.uk here. On the other hand, roughly every other order I have placed containing books over the past couple of years has had some item noticeably damaged on delivery, either due to careless packaging or probably in some cases due to not being stored carefully. Moreover, literally everyone I know who has been ordering from Amazon this Christmas season has had absurd delays in delivery and no meaningful contact from Amazon to explain/apologise. At some point, you stop believing that you're just the unlucky one at the wrong extreme on the curve.
At the moment, their customer support appear to be completely overwhelmed.
As for damaged goods, they are better than they used to be a few years ago, but that's not really the point: if I'm ordering something in time for Christmas and it's taking 2–3 weeks to delivery anything at all, there isn't time to send things back or get replacements shipped before the big day anyway, which is why I no longer buy books intended as presents from Amazon at all. I want it physically in my possession, and known to be in good condition, so I know I can give it to the recipient at the right time.
FWIW, I'm the in UK, and it's Amazon UK that I'm talking about here. Their deliveries have been completely stuffed by the snow over the past couple of weeks. Because, y'know, snow is completely unexpected in our country in the middle of December and none of the weather forecasters saw it coming days in advance or anything.
In fairness, up in the north of the UK, the snow has been heavier than usual this year, and I can understand and accept carriers having difficulty physically reaching certain locations during these conditions.
What I can't accept is that Amazon, who are obviously in close contact with these carriers and must have a great deal of influence to wield, still appear to have been consistently and dramatically overstating their ability to deliver products for much of December. Even when the worst of the snow had fallen and it was obvious that the carriers were struggling with delivery dates, the Amazon web site had a banner up saying that deliveries might be 1–2 days later than the original estimate because of the bad weather. As I said, mine is now 5 days late, my partner's stuff is overdue by more than a week, and I know various other family members are experiencing similar or worse.
Just for kicks, I'll also mention that Amazon claimed to have shipped my delivery the day after I put the order on the web site, yet according to the Royal Mail when I put the tracking number into their web page, they were still waiting for the package to come into their possession a full week later. I am now quite convinced that Amazon are outright lying to try to keep the orders coming in at a highly profitable time, even knowing that it is highly unlikely they will be able to honour the delivery dates they are quoting. Then again, given that the last ordering dates to receive goods by Christmas for the different delivery options have varied by as much as 2 days depending on which specific Christmas delivery information page you looked at on their site, or have been changed and then changed back again on the same page within a 10 minute window, maybe even Amazon themselves no longer have any idea of what they are actually promising...
The trouble is, nothing stops the phone-wielding shopper from enjoying any better experience that might be offered by a local book store, but still giving their money entirely to the cheap on-line supplier anyway.
I recently bought a book as a Christmas gift for one of my family. It's a best-seller in hardback, and it cost me nearly twice as much in my local bookstore as it would have cost me from Amazon.
On the other hand, it is in pristine condition (unlike the last books I ordered from Amazon, which were significantly damaged due to careless packaging) and it is here (unlike my order full of Christmas DVDs from Amazon, which is now five days overdue, and my other half's similar order, which is now more than a week late).
The trouble is, if most people start checking books out in the bricks and mortar stores but then buying on-line, the kind of crappy service I have received from Amazon lately will be the only option, while the reliable and helpful service provided by my local book store will go the way of the dodo because offering those benefits to potential customers does not directly generate profit. I'm not sure what the answer is, but a pure-capitalism, only-the-price-matters approach certainly isn't it.
Well, I was trying to say that if something is being dispatched from a snowed-in warehouse based in Scotland, your delivery is still going to be delayed
Sure, I understood what you meant. Given that Amazon UK tend to sell you things like DVDs using their "preferred Jersey merchant" these days (for tax reasons, presumably), I wouldn't expect a warehouse much further north to factor into the equation, but I suppose with business logistics these days you can't assume too much!
In my case, "here" means Cambridge, UK. There was a bit of snow here and rather more in places like Essex and Kent, but it was all cleared several days ago, and unlike those of you further north, we really weren't disrupted for that long. I can understand the various retailers and delivery services who are tightening up on what commitments they will give in Scotland, but I don't see any excuse for having a week or more of backlog in delivery services in this region.
I can't comment on the 503s except to say that I didn't see one, but Amazon UK have yet to hit any of their estimated delivery dates for our household's orders over the past month or so, and the delay is now measured in weeks in some cases. They did have a big banner up on their web site during the snow saying that some deliveries might be delayed by a couple of days, but they are way past that with us.
I would suggest that there is a fourth essential point, which is to introduce enough credible oversight of genuinely classified materials that massive leaks aren't necessary to expose corruption in the first place. I'm all for keeping governments on the straight and narrow, but it simply shouldn't be necessary for organisations like Wikileaks to do it, regardless of the legal and ethical issues with their behaviour.
Unfortunately, what I didn't know was that in the minor version upgrade that moved this particular parameter, they silently turned Java back on even if you'd explicitly disabled it before, so instead of enabling it only when work required, I was running with it enabled by default. By the way, if anyone is interested in a tragi-comic demonstration of people on the Firefox team completely missing the point when it comes to security issues, here you go. Please try not to throw rocks at your screen while reading...
The trouble is, I want the authorities to take action as a result of this. The way that governments and financial services have been mocked by a relatively small number of people over the past few days is absurd, and it's long past time we had more secure and verifiable communications over the Internet in general. I just want the authorities to take the right actions.
That is going to require expert guidance, because few people with the power to influence serious changes in this area have the necessary knowledge and understanding to make informed judgements by themselves. Unfortunately, I suspect the guidance the authorities actually take will be more political in nature, which is why I expect that lots of heat will be generated, but little light.
The problem with IE is insecure defaults. A browser that allows auto-install by default is BROKEN.
People in glass houses, and all that.
The only time any PC I run has been compromised to my knowledge was a relatively recent drive-by download via a Java applet. The machine was running Firefox, and both it and the Java VM were fully patched. The machine was also behind a properly configured firewall, and running up-to-date anti-virus software and assorted security/privacy plug-ins in the browser. Unfortunately, none of that helps if you get hit by a zero-day exploit. Also unfortunately, I hadn't yet found where they moved the "enable/disable Java" functionality in Firefox 3.6, not that knowing that would have helped me much, because some tools I need for work actually do use Java applets and therefore the related plug-ins anyway.
BTW, I had just started browsing social news sites like Slashdot, opening a handful of tabs to normally reputable sites to read the articles (yes, really, some of us actually do). I'm pretty sure I got hit via either a third party source that AdBlock missed or a compromised comment on a blog post.
In any case, please don't kid yourself that this is only a problem for dumb Windows/IE users surfing for warez/pr0n/whatever. Just because you're running Linux instead of Windows, or Firefox/Chrome/Opera/whatever instead of IE, or visiting legitimate sites that are themselves not going to attack your system, that doesn't mean you're somehow immune. It just means you're a less likely target. Pride comes before the fall.
First, a significant number of those who have been involved in the recent DDoS mess will be hunted down and thrown to the wolves as examples. It won't be the guys who set it up, who are hiding behind their anonymising proxies and not actually taking part in the DDoS attacks personally. A lot of young troublemakers/curious geeks* will suffer for playing along.
(* Delete as applicable)
Over the coming months and years, increasingly draconian lock-down of the Internet will follow. Wikileaks have helpfully provided the politically credible stick that major governments such as the US have been dying for to impose this on an international scale, and the end result of Wikileaks and its "supporters" acting like children will be the world's major governments treating us all like children and thus making things worse for everyone. It will be like all the security theatre (with the occasional genuine measure going by almost unnoticed) imposed after events like 9/11, because you can do anything as long as you're "fighting terrorism" now.
One consolation we have is that most of the government measures will in practice probably be miscalculated and ineffective because they will be politically driven rather than planned and implemented by people with actual clue about computer security, which means they will hit stumbling blocks when serious money and/or international concessions are required to implement them. However, those who just want to continue using the Internet freely and responsibly will probably still have to live under the perpetual threat of coming up as a false positive on the wrong government agency's or ISP's automated system and being messed around as a result, even though they have done nothing wrong according to the new laws. Naturally, the most likely candidates for such treatment will be those in minorities, such as people who don't just run $DOMINANT_PLATFORM on the $FORTUNE_500_VENDOR hardware they bought from $MAJOR_NATIONAL_STORE_CHAIN.
Finally, the one thing that will almost certainly be seriously compromised is on-line anonymity. This will no doubt still be achievable but probably only with a much more serious level of skill and understanding than most script kiddies ever have. Whether this is a good thing or not is open to debate: about the only worthwhile information we have learned from the Wikileaks fiasco is that the actions of both sides stink to a significant extent but neither side is really as bad as the other makes out. Most people going about their daily lives seem to be getting bored of the whole affair already. The media here in the UK certainly are.
That might be the idea, and more so since Lisbon, but I suspect some wishful thinking is involved if you think everything always works like that in practice. It's a bit like arguing that separation of powers means the US President has little real influence on the legislative agenda of Congress.
in another related news, gamers say that EA as publisher has finished.
Indeed. I want to play games with a good single-player experience. I find MMORPGs and on-line FPS shoot-outs to be the things lacking in action and innovation. They become monotonous very quickly with each new game, and then you have all the issues with bots, connection problems, etc.
Total games played with some regularity in our household in, say, the past 6 months:
Single player only: 4
Social (single player, but comparing scores with others via Facebook etc.): 2
Full multiplayer: 0
Every one of those was legal, but none was a recent, high-cost, AAA title.
Good single player games used to have some replay value by virtue of non-linear storylines, different playing styles, taking different characters with you or making different alliances, etc. And they used to last more than 10 hours. And they used to ship at least reasonably bug-free.
Given that a lot of people seem to show up with this sort of opinion every time the multiplayer/online gaming discussion comes up, I have to think that if a giant like EA can't manage to produce games like that any more even with the crazy prices they are asking, then their management have lost the plot. Then again, given all the horror stories about working conditions there, it's not surprising.
I have always wondered why people are complaining about the commission being unelected, I cannot really see the issue here.
Firstly, some of us don't feel that having the administration of the day elected only indirectly as a result of who got the most MPs is a good idea either.
Secondly, the Commissioners are one step further removed.
Given that here in the UK our system for electing MPs is itself hardly democratic (it fails almost every common benchmark for a fair electoral system) you are talking about someone who wields a potentially very signficant amount of power, yet who is determined by something along the lines of an average of averages of averages. You don't need a PhD in statistics to see that this does not actually require any sort of popular mandate nor impose any real popular accountability at all.
Erm... OK... I had rashly assumed that by "put out a hit", you meant apply some sort of political pressure to have her removed from her (government appointed) role. If you are literally talking about assassinating her, you're way too crazy for me.
I'm guessing their next thing is to put out a hit on the commission members.
Bad idea. Her position as an unelected official notwithstanding, Neelie Kroes is one of the good ones. Under her leadership as Commissioner for Competition, the EU already imposed actually meaningful penalties on Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour. I don't suppose the telecoms companies are going to scare her, particularly given that they are so obviously ripping everyone off and the telecoms industry is so obviously not functioning effectively as a free market with open competition in this respect.
If they've copied things like graphics from the original game, then that is almost certainly a violation of copyright.
If they have only copied the ideas, but used original artwork etc., then that is an entirely different situation. For example, storylines are not inherently subject to copyright, which is lucky for every "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" romance author.
You're also presuming that [courts] act ethically, reasonably, and neutrally in their interpretations of the law.
That is true, but you have to start with some implicit trust for any civilised legal system to be worth anything.
If your courts are not going to act in a fair way according to the law, then you have far bigger problems than the current state of copyright law or a government agency rerouting a few DNS entries. I'm sure in some places in the world that is true, but I think it's rather outside the scope of this debate.
Slashdot Mirror
As a dancer, I would laugh if any store tried that on me.
The trouble with dancing shoes is that you can't just judge them by the appearance. Comfort is a very personal thing in this market, and some shoes look great but are terribly badly made and will cut your foot to shreds if worn often for dancing. There is no way you can tell that just from looking at them.
Trying shoes on in a store and then buying them somewhere else is one (possibly unethical) thing, but trying shoes on in a store and then not buying them at all because they aren't actually very good is the manufacturer's/shop's problem.
You must be unlucky
Well, as the old saying goes, once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. Of course I can't really generalise my bad experiences with Amazon to the entire world, or even the entire country since I'm really talking about amazon.co.uk here. On the other hand, roughly every other order I have placed containing books over the past couple of years has had some item noticeably damaged on delivery, either due to careless packaging or probably in some cases due to not being stored carefully. Moreover, literally everyone I know who has been ordering from Amazon this Christmas season has had absurd delays in delivery and no meaningful contact from Amazon to explain/apologise. At some point, you stop believing that you're just the unlucky one at the wrong extreme on the curve.
At the moment, their customer support appear to be completely overwhelmed.
As for damaged goods, they are better than they used to be a few years ago, but that's not really the point: if I'm ordering something in time for Christmas and it's taking 2–3 weeks to delivery anything at all, there isn't time to send things back or get replacements shipped before the big day anyway, which is why I no longer buy books intended as presents from Amazon at all. I want it physically in my possession, and known to be in good condition, so I know I can give it to the recipient at the right time.
FWIW, I'm the in UK, and it's Amazon UK that I'm talking about here. Their deliveries have been completely stuffed by the snow over the past couple of weeks. Because, y'know, snow is completely unexpected in our country in the middle of December and none of the weather forecasters saw it coming days in advance or anything.
In fairness, up in the north of the UK, the snow has been heavier than usual this year, and I can understand and accept carriers having difficulty physically reaching certain locations during these conditions.
What I can't accept is that Amazon, who are obviously in close contact with these carriers and must have a great deal of influence to wield, still appear to have been consistently and dramatically overstating their ability to deliver products for much of December. Even when the worst of the snow had fallen and it was obvious that the carriers were struggling with delivery dates, the Amazon web site had a banner up saying that deliveries might be 1–2 days later than the original estimate because of the bad weather. As I said, mine is now 5 days late, my partner's stuff is overdue by more than a week, and I know various other family members are experiencing similar or worse.
Just for kicks, I'll also mention that Amazon claimed to have shipped my delivery the day after I put the order on the web site, yet according to the Royal Mail when I put the tracking number into their web page, they were still waiting for the package to come into their possession a full week later. I am now quite convinced that Amazon are outright lying to try to keep the orders coming in at a highly profitable time, even knowing that it is highly unlikely they will be able to honour the delivery dates they are quoting. Then again, given that the last ordering dates to receive goods by Christmas for the different delivery options have varied by as much as 2 days depending on which specific Christmas delivery information page you looked at on their site, or have been changed and then changed back again on the same page within a 10 minute window, maybe even Amazon themselves no longer have any idea of what they are actually promising...
The trouble is, nothing stops the phone-wielding shopper from enjoying any better experience that might be offered by a local book store, but still giving their money entirely to the cheap on-line supplier anyway.
I recently bought a book as a Christmas gift for one of my family. It's a best-seller in hardback, and it cost me nearly twice as much in my local bookstore as it would have cost me from Amazon.
On the other hand, it is in pristine condition (unlike the last books I ordered from Amazon, which were significantly damaged due to careless packaging) and it is here (unlike my order full of Christmas DVDs from Amazon, which is now five days overdue, and my other half's similar order, which is now more than a week late).
The trouble is, if most people start checking books out in the bricks and mortar stores but then buying on-line, the kind of crappy service I have received from Amazon lately will be the only option, while the reliable and helpful service provided by my local book store will go the way of the dodo because offering those benefits to potential customers does not directly generate profit. I'm not sure what the answer is, but a pure-capitalism, only-the-price-matters approach certainly isn't it.
If you're using AdBlock, you can add a filter to block wikipedia.org##div#siteNotice.
Well, I was trying to say that if something is being dispatched from a snowed-in warehouse based in Scotland, your delivery is still going to be delayed
Sure, I understood what you meant. Given that Amazon UK tend to sell you things like DVDs using their "preferred Jersey merchant" these days (for tax reasons, presumably), I wouldn't expect a warehouse much further north to factor into the equation, but I suppose with business logistics these days you can't assume too much!
In my case, "here" means Cambridge, UK. There was a bit of snow here and rather more in places like Essex and Kent, but it was all cleared several days ago, and unlike those of you further north, we really weren't disrupted for that long. I can understand the various retailers and delivery services who are tightening up on what commitments they will give in Scotland, but I don't see any excuse for having a week or more of backlog in delivery services in this region.
I suspect you're using the term "drive-by download" in a much more specific way that I am.
The process I'm talking about is this:
What protection is gained by having a separate execute permission on files, if you're already executing code that can chmod anyway?
I can't comment on the 503s except to say that I didn't see one, but Amazon UK have yet to hit any of their estimated delivery dates for our household's orders over the past month or so, and the delay is now measured in weeks in some cases. They did have a big banner up on their web site during the snow saying that some deliveries might be delayed by a couple of days, but they are way past that with us.
What makes you think a *nix OS is any different to a Windows one?
Running as a user with limited privileges protects against certain types of attack, but rarely the ones most of us are worried about.
I would suggest that there is a fourth essential point, which is to introduce enough credible oversight of genuinely classified materials that massive leaks aren't necessary to expose corruption in the first place. I'm all for keeping governments on the straight and narrow, but it simply shouldn't be necessary for organisations like Wikileaks to do it, regardless of the legal and ethical issues with their behaviour.
Oh, I know that noooooow... :-)
Unfortunately, what I didn't know was that in the minor version upgrade that moved this particular parameter, they silently turned Java back on even if you'd explicitly disabled it before, so instead of enabling it only when work required, I was running with it enabled by default. By the way, if anyone is interested in a tragi-comic demonstration of people on the Firefox team completely missing the point when it comes to security issues, here you go. Please try not to throw rocks at your screen while reading...
Now that we see it a parsec away, can we stop it?
The trouble is, I want the authorities to take action as a result of this. The way that governments and financial services have been mocked by a relatively small number of people over the past few days is absurd, and it's long past time we had more secure and verifiable communications over the Internet in general. I just want the authorities to take the right actions.
That is going to require expert guidance, because few people with the power to influence serious changes in this area have the necessary knowledge and understanding to make informed judgements by themselves. Unfortunately, I suspect the guidance the authorities actually take will be more political in nature, which is why I expect that lots of heat will be generated, but little light.
The problem with IE is insecure defaults. A browser that allows auto-install by default is BROKEN.
People in glass houses, and all that.
The only time any PC I run has been compromised to my knowledge was a relatively recent drive-by download via a Java applet. The machine was running Firefox, and both it and the Java VM were fully patched. The machine was also behind a properly configured firewall, and running up-to-date anti-virus software and assorted security/privacy plug-ins in the browser. Unfortunately, none of that helps if you get hit by a zero-day exploit. Also unfortunately, I hadn't yet found where they moved the "enable/disable Java" functionality in Firefox 3.6, not that knowing that would have helped me much, because some tools I need for work actually do use Java applets and therefore the related plug-ins anyway.
BTW, I had just started browsing social news sites like Slashdot, opening a handful of tabs to normally reputable sites to read the articles (yes, really, some of us actually do). I'm pretty sure I got hit via either a third party source that AdBlock missed or a compromised comment on a blog post.
In any case, please don't kid yourself that this is only a problem for dumb Windows/IE users surfing for warez/pr0n/whatever. Just because you're running Linux instead of Windows, or Firefox/Chrome/Opera/whatever instead of IE, or visiting legitimate sites that are themselves not going to attack your system, that doesn't mean you're somehow immune. It just means you're a less likely target. Pride comes before the fall.
I do wonder where it will all end.
That one is fairly easy, actually.
First, a significant number of those who have been involved in the recent DDoS mess will be hunted down and thrown to the wolves as examples. It won't be the guys who set it up, who are hiding behind their anonymising proxies and not actually taking part in the DDoS attacks personally. A lot of young troublemakers/curious geeks* will suffer for playing along.
(* Delete as applicable)
Over the coming months and years, increasingly draconian lock-down of the Internet will follow. Wikileaks have helpfully provided the politically credible stick that major governments such as the US have been dying for to impose this on an international scale, and the end result of Wikileaks and its "supporters" acting like children will be the world's major governments treating us all like children and thus making things worse for everyone. It will be like all the security theatre (with the occasional genuine measure going by almost unnoticed) imposed after events like 9/11, because you can do anything as long as you're "fighting terrorism" now.
One consolation we have is that most of the government measures will in practice probably be miscalculated and ineffective because they will be politically driven rather than planned and implemented by people with actual clue about computer security, which means they will hit stumbling blocks when serious money and/or international concessions are required to implement them. However, those who just want to continue using the Internet freely and responsibly will probably still have to live under the perpetual threat of coming up as a false positive on the wrong government agency's or ISP's automated system and being messed around as a result, even though they have done nothing wrong according to the new laws. Naturally, the most likely candidates for such treatment will be those in minorities, such as people who don't just run $DOMINANT_PLATFORM on the $FORTUNE_500_VENDOR hardware they bought from $MAJOR_NATIONAL_STORE_CHAIN.
Finally, the one thing that will almost certainly be seriously compromised is on-line anonymity. This will no doubt still be achievable but probably only with a much more serious level of skill and understanding than most script kiddies ever have. Whether this is a good thing or not is open to debate: about the only worthwhile information we have learned from the Wikileaks fiasco is that the actions of both sides stink to a significant extent but neither side is really as bad as the other makes out. Most people going about their daily lives seem to be getting bored of the whole affair already. The media here in the UK certainly are.
That might be the idea, and more so since Lisbon, but I suspect some wishful thinking is involved if you think everything always works like that in practice. It's a bit like arguing that separation of powers means the US President has little real influence on the legislative agenda of Congress.
in another related news, gamers say that EA as publisher has finished.
Indeed. I want to play games with a good single-player experience. I find MMORPGs and on-line FPS shoot-outs to be the things lacking in action and innovation. They become monotonous very quickly with each new game, and then you have all the issues with bots, connection problems, etc.
Total games played with some regularity in our household in, say, the past 6 months:
Single player only: 4
Social (single player, but comparing scores with others via Facebook etc.): 2
Full multiplayer: 0
Every one of those was legal, but none was a recent, high-cost, AAA title.
Good single player games used to have some replay value by virtue of non-linear storylines, different playing styles, taking different characters with you or making different alliances, etc. And they used to last more than 10 hours. And they used to ship at least reasonably bug-free.
Given that a lot of people seem to show up with this sort of opinion every time the multiplayer/online gaming discussion comes up, I have to think that if a giant like EA can't manage to produce games like that any more even with the crazy prices they are asking, then their management have lost the plot. Then again, given all the horror stories about working conditions there, it's not surprising.
I have always wondered why people are complaining about the commission being unelected, I cannot really see the issue here.
Firstly, some of us don't feel that having the administration of the day elected only indirectly as a result of who got the most MPs is a good idea either.
Secondly, the Commissioners are one step further removed.
Given that here in the UK our system for electing MPs is itself hardly democratic (it fails almost every common benchmark for a fair electoral system) you are talking about someone who wields a potentially very signficant amount of power, yet who is determined by something along the lines of an average of averages of averages. You don't need a PhD in statistics to see that this does not actually require any sort of popular mandate nor impose any real popular accountability at all.
Erm... OK... I had rashly assumed that by "put out a hit", you meant apply some sort of political pressure to have her removed from her (government appointed) role. If you are literally talking about assassinating her, you're way too crazy for me.
I'm guessing their next thing is to put out a hit on the commission members.
Bad idea. Her position as an unelected official notwithstanding, Neelie Kroes is one of the good ones. Under her leadership as Commissioner for Competition, the EU already imposed actually meaningful penalties on Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour. I don't suppose the telecoms companies are going to scare her, particularly given that they are so obviously ripping everyone off and the telecoms industry is so obviously not functioning effectively as a free market with open competition in this respect.
Oh, I think plenty of Slashdotters get the first two parts of the analogy. It's that final step that always seems just a little too elusive...
As the Wikipedians would say, [citation needed].
If they've copied things like graphics from the original game, then that is almost certainly a violation of copyright.
If they have only copied the ideas, but used original artwork etc., then that is an entirely different situation. For example, storylines are not inherently subject to copyright, which is lucky for every "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" romance author.
You're also presuming that [courts] act ethically, reasonably, and neutrally in their interpretations of the law.
That is true, but you have to start with some implicit trust for any civilised legal system to be worth anything.
If your courts are not going to act in a fair way according to the law, then you have far bigger problems than the current state of copyright law or a government agency rerouting a few DNS entries. I'm sure in some places in the world that is true, but I think it's rather outside the scope of this debate.