Effectivly you are arguing that the majority of judges and jurists would believe the RIAA regardless of the evidence.
Actually, what I'm arguing is that the evidence is likely to be pretty much the same in most cases: the presentation of an IP address, server logs and perhaps a traceroute, etc. The RIAA is likely to have the same material on anyone it sues. And that evidence certainly CAN point to the wrong person.
If the evidence is good enough to convince a jury in one case, it makes little sense to me to say that the mere fact of innocence should be what determines whether or not a defendant should fight. Perhaps on principle, this is true, but it won't make much difference in the outcome.
They'll request it all. And they'll likely ask you under oath if you erased anything. And what it was that you erased. And why you decided to erase it.
I'm sure they would. Of course, if someone were going to fold on the stand in the first place, obtaining forensic evidence from a computer would hardly be necessary.
If I had a client in one of these matters who really hadn't done it, then it might be worthwhile to fight, but it doesn't make much sense to do so when they're right.
Just out of curiosity, why would it be worthwhile to fight? If, as you say, a plaintiff only needs to set up a 51% chance of being right, and considering the difficulty of convincing a judge or jury that the RIAA's simply wrong, then why would the simple fact of innocence change anything?
I would think that evidence would be the deciding factor, and that in the vast majority of cases, innocence or guilt would play only a small role in whether a defendant settled. In other words, as things stand the RIAA can do pretty much whatever it wants, up to and including falsifying evidence, with little chance of getting caught.
...how about someone challenge the law as unconstitutional? The clear intent of the constitution in authorizing Congress to limit the free exchange of information in certain cases was to encourage artistic and scientific endeavor, not to enable maximum profits for certain individuals.
The simple fact is that it's quite likely many of these people wouldn't have bought the material in the first place. It is thus unconstitutional to criminalize their conduct. QED.
Our democracy was founded on the principle of protecting the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.
Actually, both are important: protection of the rights of the minority through a framework of laws, and following the will of the majority via representative democratcy.
Ultimately, if the vast majority of people want something, it will happen, even if it takes Constitutional amendments to make it happen.
Irrelevant. DeLay chose to have the plug pulled. If he hadn't, his father would have been kept alive.
Terri Schiavo was also being kept alive by a machine, since she can't swallow food.
The courts have unanimously found that Terri Schiavo did not want to live under these circumstances. She refused treatment, and both Republican and Democratically-appointed judges have found the same way.
Should the money someone else pays the government under threat of imprisonment be used for something they don't want, won't use, and won't enjoy?
Happens all the time. That's called representative democracy.
It's funny, though, what some people consider theft. As far as I'm concerned, people who consider taxes "theft" think it's OK to squat on US land for free.
Don't like the deal you're getting here? Either work to change it, or leave. But don't call having to pay your fair share "theft". That's dishonest.
Here's a brick and mortar example that applies to this issue: Music concerts/Drive-In Movie Theaters, by your logic if you can't afford to pay it's totally ok to go outside the back fence of the theater/ampitheater and watch the show/movie from there. Nobody has been deprived of anything right?
As long as you're not trespassing, I agree that no one has been deprived of anything, and according to the Constitution your actions should be seen as legal. That's not to say you wouldn't run afoul of the law, but statutory law and the Constitution, of course, don't always mesh very well (until the Supreme Court has a say, that is).
And that justifies you being able to get it for free?
There's no justification needed. The only "justification" involved in this issue is the "justification" for copyright protection in the first place: the Constitutionally-mandated purpose of encouraging the arts and sciences. Actions that don't run afoul of this goal don't require "justification"; they are allowed by definition as a form of free exchange of ideas and information protected by the First Amendment. The Founders were pretty explicit about this: information and ideas were protected from government interference except for certain narrowly-defined purposes. A loophole, perhaps, but a relevant one that goes to the heart of the matter.
I'm sorry, but this simply doesn't qualify as "stealing", no matter how much you might like to think otherwise. To steal something, someone must be deprived of property that they would otherwise have had. And if there was no chance said someone would have received payment (i.e. the person allegedly doing the "stealing" could not have paid), then again by definition, no one has been deprived of anything. QED.
Only if your default is to not have SP2 installed. RTFA.
Since Microsoft recommended everyone upgrade to SP2, and since SP2 INTRODUCED the vulnerability, I'd say your system isn't "default", and most people, by default, are vulnerable.
You can see the URL in the download dialog box. The trouble appears to be that the URL can be structured such that it appears right, unless you click on the URL and scroll right to see the whole thing.
And the problem is that the dialog box, by default, shows the beginning of the URL, not the end. Thus, a URL can be created that looks complete and accurate, but has more to it (the true domain isn't displayed).
For example, the download dialog box might display:
I'm running Firefox 1.0, and just confirmed the bug from the demo on Bugzilla. It's not a huge deal, but you could be fooled into downloading something other than what you thought you were getting.
Microsoft has chosen to include as much stuff in their OS as they have. No one said, for example, that they had to integrate the kernel and the GUI, or the web browser, etc.
That said, the article specifically refers to the number of bugs per lines of code, so this is accounted-for.
Since they've found all 985 bugs in the 2.6 Kernel, did they submit them for fixing, or submit patches to fix the bugs themselves? Seems like a waste to just count the bugs, rather than fix them.
Of course, justice, truth and "what's right" don't jive with the current corporate mindset. Love it, or leave it. Don't bitch about it.
The third option, of course, is to go after them for violating antitrust laws. Which (if they continue to leverage their monopoly to garner more monopolies, as you freely admit they're doing) is the appropriate thing to do.
Cato is primarily libertarian. Their opposition to the war on drugs does not come from a "left wing" philosophy. Rather, it stems from an anti-government, pro-individual-freedom-at-nearly-all-costs, "leave-me-the-heck-alone-I'm-just-fine-without-all -of-you" point of view. That falls solidly into the "right wing" part of the spectrum.
Left-wingers, for the most part, oppose the war on drugs and champion gay and lesbian equality because they want to further egalitarianism and promote government policy that treats people equally. Not the same thing at all...
Actually, you have a good point, and I'd like to modify my previous remarks: Considering his condition, I'm not at all sure Saddam wasn't happy to have been captured.
Sort of brings home the fact that Hussein wasn't in much of a position to have been directing the guerilla war against American troops (hell, Bremer's having enough trouble directing events in Iraq from a palace). Which makes me a tad nervous for the future...
Oh really, so we haven't been fighting Taliban and Afghani terrorists? My bad
Indeed. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention: resources were pulled out of Afghanistan (notably special ops) in order to invade Iraq and hunt for non-existent WMD. Afghanistan itself is suffering from neglect, as the Taliban and al Qaeda have made a resurgence (the only safe place appears to be Kabul, now) and damage was done to our international efforts to stem al Qaeda terrorism through the heavy-handed non-diplomatic efforts leading up to the Iraq war. Even now, Bush is sticking his thumb in the eye of our NATO allies. These are things we can't afford.
cost/benefit analysis? Were you doing a cost/benefit analysis when Clinton reduced our intelligence to peanuts? Did you do one when he bombed the aspirin factory?
I'd be very interested in why you make the first claim, since the intelligence apparatus and military Bush has been using over the last couple of years have essentially been Clinton's.
As for a "cost/benefit" analysis on the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant bombing (putting aside, of course, the huge disparity in scale between that and the Iraq boondogle), the answer is, "of course". And it would seem that that was a bad choice, too.
As I said, I'm very happy Saddam's captured. The cost makes it very bittersweet.
This is, of course, exactly the point. We can't afford to take out every evil dictator. So we need to use our resources sparingly, if we're going to go around doing this sort of thing. And I hate to break it to you, but Saddam wasn't the baddest ass around in the "tin-horn dictator" dept. So what was the reasoning here?
Even worse, Saddam's been on the lam for nearly 9 months. Planning for the war took longer, and involved damage to international relations we need to fight al Qaeda, to say nothing of taking valuable resources away from fighting our real enemy for the Iraq effort. Bush has basically taken more than a year of vacation from fighting the people who killed nearly 3000 Americans in order to overthrow Saddam, who wasn't a threat to us in any way, using nearly 500 more American lives. So the question remains: what was the reasoning here?
No one will be unhappy Saddam's captured (except, perhaps, Saddam himself). I'm very happy about it. I'm not happy about the cost/benefit analysis.
You hit the nail on the head here. The author thinks he failed the polygraph because polygraphs aren't reliable. Instead he failed because he crumbled miserably under stress.
Ironic that this post has been rated "insightful". I'd say "psychic" would be more accurate. Otherwise, I'd love to know how you know the author "crumbled miserably under stress".
That's the problem. Questions such as "did you ever steal candy when you were a kid" are so-called control questions, which are intended as a calibration tool for the polygraph. The idea is that everybody hoes done these, but nobody admits, so everybody will lie. Now they know what the subject's biological parameters are when he lies. This is important to have, as each person reacts differently.
The trouble is, the NSA doesn't use the Control Question Test format. They use the ancient "Relevant/Irrelevant" format. Basically, they just look for reactions. Pure and simple. If you can imagine being in a chair, strapped to a machine, being questioned by a government "special agent" about prosecutable acts and with a potential career on the line, you can see why not reacting might pose a problem.
It's a test format that understandably tends to generate a lot of "false positives" (on the order of 80% of innocent people are fingered as lying). That's one reason R/I isn't used much anymore. Except by the NSA, that is, which apparently uses it because that's what they've always done.
In fairness, the NSA also claims it approaches the polygraph less as a tool for determining truthfulness than as an excuse for a high-pressure interrogation -- something for which the R/I might be well suited. Whether this is true is, of course, a matter for debate.
I went through three polygraphs with the NSA, and was interrogated at length each time. I have no idea whether I would have ended up passing the process, because after the experience of the polygraphs (and with the prospect of going through the same every five years), my enthusiasm for the job pretty much evaporated.
As I understand it, SCO isn't just trying to get the GPL declared invalid. They're trying to get the GPL declared invalid and all GPLed software declared public domain. Basically, their argument (however invalid it may be) is that anyone who gives you as much freedom as the GPL gives must obviously not care to do anything with their copyright, and therefore "GPL" == "public domain".
And since they've distributed their own alleged code under the same license, they basically want the court to declare everyone else's code public domain, but keep their own rights. Yeah, that'll fly...
Which doesn't matter, of course. According to legal types, the court will assume a minimum of competency on the part of SCO, and say they should have known better than to distribute "their own" (alleged) intellectual property under the GPL for two years, continuing after they explicitly acknowledged concerns about infringement.
It's called the "pregnant cow" defense, and it evidently doesn't hold much legal water. Basically, SCO wants the court to save them from their own stupidity and incompetence, and allow them a "do over" so they can re-license the same code under different terms. Supposedly, judges aren't generally too keen on that, which is probably why SCO's now mounting idiot legal arguments regarding the GPL and copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the same thing, of course -- unless they only get paid when they find security problems.
Nope. Generally, it's "less buggy than IE, even though it's been out a lot less time". A little more complete in its description...
Effectivly you are arguing that the majority of judges and jurists would believe the RIAA regardless of the evidence.
Actually, what I'm arguing is that the evidence is likely to be pretty much the same in most cases: the presentation of an IP address, server logs and perhaps a traceroute, etc. The RIAA is likely to have the same material on anyone it sues. And that evidence certainly CAN point to the wrong person.
If the evidence is good enough to convince a jury in one case, it makes little sense to me to say that the mere fact of innocence should be what determines whether or not a defendant should fight. Perhaps on principle, this is true, but it won't make much difference in the outcome.
They'll request it all. And they'll likely ask you under oath if you erased anything. And what it was that you erased. And why you decided to erase it.
I'm sure they would. Of course, if someone were going to fold on the stand in the first place, obtaining forensic evidence from a computer would hardly be necessary.
If I had a client in one of these matters who really hadn't done it, then it might be worthwhile to fight, but it doesn't make much sense to do so when they're right.
Just out of curiosity, why would it be worthwhile to fight? If, as you say, a plaintiff only needs to set up a 51% chance of being right, and considering the difficulty of convincing a judge or jury that the RIAA's simply wrong, then why would the simple fact of innocence change anything?
I would think that evidence would be the deciding factor, and that in the vast majority of cases, innocence or guilt would play only a small role in whether a defendant settled. In other words, as things stand the RIAA can do pretty much whatever it wants, up to and including falsifying evidence, with little chance of getting caught.
...how about someone challenge the law as unconstitutional? The clear intent of the constitution in authorizing Congress to limit the free exchange of information in certain cases was to encourage artistic and scientific endeavor, not to enable maximum profits for certain individuals.
The simple fact is that it's quite likely many of these people wouldn't have bought the material in the first place. It is thus unconstitutional to criminalize their conduct. QED.
Our democracy was founded on the principle of protecting the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.
Actually, both are important: protection of the rights of the minority through a framework of laws, and following the will of the majority via representative democratcy.
Ultimately, if the vast majority of people want something, it will happen, even if it takes Constitutional amendments to make it happen.
Irrelevant. DeLay chose to have the plug pulled. If he hadn't, his father would have been kept alive.
Terri Schiavo was also being kept alive by a machine, since she can't swallow food.
The courts have unanimously found that Terri Schiavo did not want to live under these circumstances. She refused treatment, and both Republican and Democratically-appointed judges have found the same way.
Should the money someone else pays the government under threat of imprisonment be used for something they don't want, won't use, and won't enjoy?
Happens all the time. That's called representative democracy.
It's funny, though, what some people consider theft. As far as I'm concerned, people who consider taxes "theft" think it's OK to squat on US land for free.
Don't like the deal you're getting here? Either work to change it, or leave. But don't call having to pay your fair share "theft". That's dishonest.
One additional comment...
Here's a brick and mortar example that applies to this issue: Music concerts/Drive-In Movie Theaters, by your logic if you can't afford to pay it's totally ok to go outside the back fence of the theater/ampitheater and watch the show/movie from there. Nobody has been deprived of anything right?
As long as you're not trespassing, I agree that no one has been deprived of anything, and according to the Constitution your actions should be seen as legal. That's not to say you wouldn't run afoul of the law, but statutory law and the Constitution, of course, don't always mesh very well (until the Supreme Court has a say, that is).
And that justifies you being able to get it for free?
There's no justification needed. The only "justification" involved in this issue is the "justification" for copyright protection in the first place: the Constitutionally-mandated purpose of encouraging the arts and sciences. Actions that don't run afoul of this goal don't require "justification"; they are allowed by definition as a form of free exchange of ideas and information protected by the First Amendment. The Founders were pretty explicit about this: information and ideas were protected from government interference except for certain narrowly-defined purposes. A loophole, perhaps, but a relevant one that goes to the heart of the matter.
I'm sorry, but this simply doesn't qualify as "stealing", no matter how much you might like to think otherwise. To steal something, someone must be deprived of property that they would otherwise have had. And if there was no chance said someone would have received payment (i.e. the person allegedly doing the "stealing" could not have paid), then again by definition, no one has been deprived of anything. QED.
And who are the best people in the world at keeping information secure?
Depends upon what information you're talking about, and what systems.
Generally speaking, military intelligence has to secure an extremely small number of restricted-access systems with extremely specific uses.
Only if your default is to not have SP2 installed. RTFA.
Since Microsoft recommended everyone upgrade to SP2, and since SP2 INTRODUCED the vulnerability, I'd say your system isn't "default", and most people, by default, are vulnerable.
"Linux zealots", indeed.
And the problem is that the dialog box, by default, shows the beginning of the URL, not the end. Thus, a URL can be created that looks complete and accurate, but has more to it (the true domain isn't displayed).
For example, the download dialog box might display:
But the actual URL is:
(example borrowed from Bugzilla)
I'm running Firefox 1.0, and just confirmed the bug from the demo on Bugzilla. It's not a huge deal, but you could be fooled into downloading something other than what you thought you were getting.
Microsoft has chosen to include as much stuff in their OS as they have. No one said, for example, that they had to integrate the kernel and the GUI, or the web browser, etc.
That said, the article specifically refers to the number of bugs per lines of code, so this is accounted-for.
Since they've found all 985 bugs in the 2.6 Kernel, did they submit them for fixing, or submit patches to fix the bugs themselves? Seems like a waste to just count the bugs, rather than fix them.
Of course, justice, truth and "what's right" don't jive with the current corporate mindset. Love it, or leave it. Don't bitch about it.
The third option, of course, is to go after them for violating antitrust laws. Which (if they continue to leverage their monopoly to garner more monopolies, as you freely admit they're doing) is the appropriate thing to do.
Cato is primarily libertarian. Their opposition to the war on drugs does not come from a "left wing" philosophy. Rather, it stems from an anti-government, pro-individual-freedom-at-nearly-all-costs, "leave-me-the-heck-alone-I'm-just-fine-without-all -of-you" point of view. That falls solidly into the "right wing" part of the spectrum.
Left-wingers, for the most part, oppose the war on drugs and champion gay and lesbian equality because they want to further egalitarianism and promote government policy that treats people equally. Not the same thing at all...
Actually, you have a good point, and I'd like to modify my previous remarks: Considering his condition, I'm not at all sure Saddam wasn't happy to have been captured.
Sort of brings home the fact that Hussein wasn't in much of a position to have been directing the guerilla war against American troops (hell, Bremer's having enough trouble directing events in Iraq from a palace). Which makes me a tad nervous for the future...
Oh really, so we haven't been fighting Taliban and Afghani terrorists? My bad
Indeed. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention: resources were pulled out of Afghanistan (notably special ops) in order to invade Iraq and hunt for non-existent WMD. Afghanistan itself is suffering from neglect, as the Taliban and al Qaeda have made a resurgence (the only safe place appears to be Kabul, now) and damage was done to our international efforts to stem al Qaeda terrorism through the heavy-handed non-diplomatic efforts leading up to the Iraq war. Even now, Bush is sticking his thumb in the eye of our NATO allies. These are things we can't afford.
cost/benefit analysis? Were you doing a cost/benefit analysis when Clinton reduced our intelligence to peanuts? Did you do one when he bombed the aspirin factory?
I'd be very interested in why you make the first claim, since the intelligence apparatus and military Bush has been using over the last couple of years have essentially been Clinton's.
As for a "cost/benefit" analysis on the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant bombing (putting aside, of course, the huge disparity in scale between that and the Iraq boondogle), the answer is, "of course". And it would seem that that was a bad choice, too.
As I said, I'm very happy Saddam's captured. The cost makes it very bittersweet.
This is, of course, exactly the point. We can't afford to take out every evil dictator. So we need to use our resources sparingly, if we're going to go around doing this sort of thing. And I hate to break it to you, but Saddam wasn't the baddest ass around in the "tin-horn dictator" dept. So what was the reasoning here?
Even worse, Saddam's been on the lam for nearly 9 months. Planning for the war took longer, and involved damage to international relations we need to fight al Qaeda, to say nothing of taking valuable resources away from fighting our real enemy for the Iraq effort. Bush has basically taken more than a year of vacation from fighting the people who killed nearly 3000 Americans in order to overthrow Saddam, who wasn't a threat to us in any way, using nearly 500 more American lives. So the question remains: what was the reasoning here?
No one will be unhappy Saddam's captured (except, perhaps, Saddam himself). I'm very happy about it. I'm not happy about the cost/benefit analysis.
You hit the nail on the head here. The author thinks he failed the polygraph because polygraphs aren't reliable. Instead he failed because he crumbled miserably under stress.
Ironic that this post has been rated "insightful". I'd say "psychic" would be more accurate. Otherwise, I'd love to know how you know the author "crumbled miserably under stress".
That's the problem. Questions such as "did you ever steal candy when you were a kid" are so-called control questions, which are intended as a calibration tool for the polygraph. The idea is that everybody hoes done these, but nobody admits, so everybody will lie. Now they know what the subject's biological parameters are when he lies. This is important to have, as each person reacts differently.
The trouble is, the NSA doesn't use the Control Question Test format. They use the ancient "Relevant/Irrelevant" format. Basically, they just look for reactions. Pure and simple. If you can imagine being in a chair, strapped to a machine, being questioned by a government "special agent" about prosecutable acts and with a potential career on the line, you can see why not reacting might pose a problem.
It's a test format that understandably tends to generate a lot of "false positives" (on the order of 80% of innocent people are fingered as lying). That's one reason R/I isn't used much anymore. Except by the NSA, that is, which apparently uses it because that's what they've always done.
In fairness, the NSA also claims it approaches the polygraph less as a tool for determining truthfulness than as an excuse for a high-pressure interrogation -- something for which the R/I might be well suited. Whether this is true is, of course, a matter for debate.
I went through three polygraphs with the NSA, and was interrogated at length each time. I have no idea whether I would have ended up passing the process, because after the experience of the polygraphs (and with the prospect of going through the same every five years), my enthusiasm for the job pretty much evaporated.
As I understand it, SCO isn't just trying to get the GPL declared invalid. They're trying to get the GPL declared invalid and all GPLed software declared public domain. Basically, their argument (however invalid it may be) is that anyone who gives you as much freedom as the GPL gives must obviously not care to do anything with their copyright, and therefore "GPL" == "public domain".
And since they've distributed their own alleged code under the same license, they basically want the court to declare everyone else's code public domain, but keep their own rights. Yeah, that'll fly...
Which doesn't matter, of course. According to legal types, the court will assume a minimum of competency on the part of SCO, and say they should have known better than to distribute "their own" (alleged) intellectual property under the GPL for two years, continuing after they explicitly acknowledged concerns about infringement.
It's called the "pregnant cow" defense, and it evidently doesn't hold much legal water. Basically, SCO wants the court to save them from their own stupidity and incompetence, and allow them a "do over" so they can re-license the same code under different terms. Supposedly, judges aren't generally too keen on that, which is probably why SCO's now mounting idiot legal arguments regarding the GPL and copyright law.