What are the two claims that seem so convincing to you?
The two that I could find are:
1) claimant doesn't state the specific infringements that occured. Umm, yes they did, it's only 6 files, but the RIAA respresentative said that those 6 were downloaded, and listened to, and confirmed that they were owned by the various companies
2) claimant didn't specify when the infringement occured. Umm, they sort of did. They said that the files were located on the computer on 11-4-04. The RIAA can't specifically say that other people copied files off on that specific day, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't have to be proved. Simply putting up a website with illegal content or standing on a corner with a box of CD's is sufficient for litigation, without specifically naming any buyer/downloader.
whether she thinks the defendant should actually win the case
Eh?
because I would love to see a mom fighting
one of these.
That's awfully close to saying that the defendant should win.
She's also already made her mind up that there's a group of cases that all seem alike. That may not be legally problematic, but frankly divulging such information seems like it's crossing a line that most judges don't cross at the beginning of a case.
Certainly, it's possible and probable that the judge was thinking that the cases often had endings that didn't further the goals of objective judicial justice. But to start making sweeping statements about a particular plaintiff at the very beginning gives too much of an appearance of predjudice.
Yeah, modding of duplicate information is extremely arbitrary (just like all modding... I've had several Score:5 that should have been Score:3 at the very most, and weren't trolls), and the -1 Redundant mod is the most evil ever, because half the time, it gets assigned to the post with the earlier timestamp.
(and no I don't have a low ID, but yes, I could have had 15 max-karma accounts by now if I really wanted. I've got the adamantium-plated crackpipe for spending most of my employer's time today creating the wikipedia entry for this lawsuit)
That's what I thought. So what did the judge's comments mean then?
I live in perpetual fear that something I don't know my kids are doing is going to come back and bite me in the butt. And the difference between you and me, Ms. Santangelo, if it happens to me, it will be in the headlines of the New York Post.
...
Right. So, anyway, you have my sympathy. I mean, I can look at this list and I can look at you and I can see that you weren't the person who downloaded these pieces.
No news?! She found a lawyer, and the lawyer is really gung-ho about the case. There are references to the EFF being involved too. Anyway, she has an enthusiastic lawyer and enthusiastic judge, she could have a chance...
Well, I think it would be a really good idea for you to get a lawyer, because I would love to see a mom fighting one of these.
A little sexist, but she is the single parent of 5 kids, so it would make for good PR.
By the way, how far does the judge have to go in saying that he's leaning towards a particular party before the evidence is even presented, before he starts risking invalidating the whole trial?
Right, but defendants standing up to the RIAA have already caused the RIAA problems (requiring a separate $200 subpeona for each john/jane doe, where they used to be able to get many john/jane does on one subpeona). If defendants stand up to the RIAA, and particularly if they prove in court that the RIAA is a bully and often files frivolous lawsuits, then that could make it much easier for other defendants to get a successful motion for dismissal.
I don't know, I'd give it about even odds. The mom originally didn't have money to pay for a lawyer. Now she has a lawyer, but the lawyer is still charging 50% of his normal rate, who knows where she's getting the money from.
The case isn't THAT obviously open-and-shut, is it? The computer has been wiped, so neither side can say too much more about the physical evidence directly. It sounds like Kazaa was actually on the computer at one point, even if she didn't personally sign the Kazaa EULA.
Yeah, the judge seems to lean heavily towards the defendant from the word go, but if RIAA loses, they can get an appeal from a different judge. And if the judge says things that are too far out there, that can count against her case.
The RIAA's representation seems to suck quite a bit now too... saying that there's an "an ongoing and continuous infringement" AFTER the defendant told the court that the computer "was wiped out and taken by my ex-husband".
There's an inherent tension between financing art and producing art for its own sake that has existed for a long time, and is overall a good thing (otherwise no art projects could reach beyond a small group's income).
But other creative fields are facing a greater crisis now than they have before (most notably the movie industry). I don't know if it's due to the internet resulting in broader exposure of people to more creative works, leading to disillusionment at the similarity between works, or what, but even if it's a problem that exists across all fields, it still may need to be grappled with now.
I'm just another heavy user of slashdot and other sites, who sees other sites passing Slashdot, even though Slashdot's comment/karma system is better. I really would like to see Slashdot to improve so there can be increasingly interesting ways to burn my time.
This article feels like an ad. Too many Slashdot articles feel like ads. If they are actually paid for, then that's really bad, because Slashdot editors have a financial incentive to make the content worse over time. If it's not actually an ad, it's still pretty bad because the editors aren't doing their jobs in 1) selecting interesting articles, or 2) in rewriting interesting articles that are worded too much like PR-speak or otherwise are written badly but would be interesting if rewritten.
Honestly, how likely would it be for this story to show up on Digg, or Blogdex, or any A-list blogs? Almost zero chance. Stories on Slashdot seem to be increasingly dumb, even though there's growing competition from alternatives. Slashdot can and should improve.
One of the reasons people switched away from Altavista/Lycos/etc to Google was that the previous search engines presented advertisements in the same exact format as actual content. Reputable newspapers don't do this either.
Fortunately, back then, Google was a great alternative. And fortunately today, we have another alternative that hasn't taken this practice up (yet).
Some random commenter in the dark depths of the internet should be able to say whatever they damn well please, because nobody is listening. If Bill O'Reilly gets on TV and says that I financially support terrorists, when I don't, then that can cause actual harm to my reputation, because way too many people watch his show. If some weirdo on the internet says that, and only 1 person reads the comment, who cares?
BRD/LBRS/Scholo/Strat are fine end-game instances and are still ~2 hours-ish.
There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).
It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.
It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.
One reason: player names aren't unique across servers. I would imagine that, internally, things like player-UID and other UID's wouldn't be unique across servers as well.
Can you trade items or money in Battlegrounds? If so, that would be a huge reason not to allow cross-server BG (as it would make gold farmer's job easier (they wouldn't have to make sure to farm gold on every single little server, and it would definitely help the money-laundering phase of gold farming), and it would increase the impact of dup bugs, if any). Though obviously they could disable trading in BG's to make it easier to span universes.
Do instance meeting stones queues have the same behavior? On my server, they're almost completely unused, which puts in place the vicious cycle mentioned for battlegrounds.
In my mind, instances are the most fun part of the game, but you have to allocate 4-5 hours to do an instance currently, because it takes so long for people to form a group, then get over to the instance. The fact that instances take more than an hour or two to do is fine, but the extra wasted time is such a drag, as it makes it much harder to spontaneously jump on and just have fun.
If Blizzard could encourage use of meeting stones on all servers, big and small, that'd be great.
Well, they definitely make money porting Flash client onto at least some embedded devices (can't be too specific, sorry), and the EULA definitely seems to be heading that direction, so my guess is that's the simple answer. (though it'd be interesting to know what percentage of their profits come from embedded client work, and how much comes from PC-authoring stuff)
Actually, the PC client is free. All others (DoCoMo Flash Lite, Symbian, etc.) are not free. (in some cases they seem to be free to the user, but are actually paid for by the device manufacturer, especially in cases where porting work is done)
Compared to all that, what benefit does Google Talk provide to customers? No, you can't hide behind "they MIGHT improve it"... Why does Google belong in this market? Is there something they're going to make available that makes it a stand-out? Do Google's existing skills make it likely that they can improve the IM market for consumers?
Or is Google entering that market, simply because they're like Microsoft now, and want to enter every market they possibly can, just because?
Yeah, there's a range of good/bad/average managers.
The startling thing though is that the NASA examples show that the best managers have to offer just isn't good enough.
Managers at my fortune-500 company have a ship-at-all-costs attitude, which I had come to accept, because we're not in a life-critical field, and our customers demand that we ship products on a schedule that's in step with our competition.
What's strange though is that what I've read from NASA stories is that NASA managers ACT EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as they do at my lowly company, suggesting that maybe it's not the specifics of a particular job that causes them to behave the way they do (eg. they're not trying to behave appropriately for their particular situation), but instead something else is driving them (eg. management politics, the fact that they really only need to pay attention to their superiors, and only have to pay attention to their underlings when there's a crisis).
There ARE quality guidelines that all managers should follow. Most company's quality goals aren't as strict as NASA's, but if most managers are essentially ignoring quality standards everywhere (for whatever reason), then that's a problem.
GMail was clearly the obvious leader the instant it came out. GTalk isn't a standout at all. Maybe some blog people forced their hand by discovering the talk.google.com working server, but if Google wasn't ready to release yet, they should have shut the public server down, and waited until they were ready to release. Are google products absolute standouts in their field, or not?
Slashdot Mirror
The two that I could find are:
1) claimant doesn't state the specific infringements that occured. Umm, yes they did, it's only 6 files, but the RIAA respresentative said that those 6 were downloaded, and listened to, and confirmed that they were owned by the various companies
2) claimant didn't specify when the infringement occured. Umm, they sort of did. They said that the files were located on the computer on 11-4-04. The RIAA can't specifically say that other people copied files off on that specific day, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't have to be proved. Simply putting up a website with illegal content or standing on a corner with a box of CD's is sufficient for litigation, without specifically naming any buyer/downloader.
That's awfully close to saying that the defendant should win.
She's also already made her mind up that there's a group of cases that all seem alike. That may not be legally problematic, but frankly divulging such information seems like it's crossing a line that most judges don't cross at the beginning of a case.
Certainly, it's possible and probable that the judge was thinking that the cases often had endings that didn't further the goals of objective judicial justice. But to start making sweeping statements about a particular plaintiff at the very beginning gives too much of an appearance of predjudice.
(and no I don't have a low ID, but yes, I could have had 15 max-karma accounts by now if I really wanted. I've got the adamantium-plated crackpipe for spending most of my employer's time today creating the wikipedia entry for this lawsuit)
Here you go.
No news?! She found a lawyer, and the lawyer is really gung-ho about the case. There are references to the EFF being involved too. Anyway, she has an enthusiastic lawyer and enthusiastic judge, she could have a chance...
By the way, how far does the judge have to go in saying that he's leaning towards a particular party before the evidence is even presented, before he starts risking invalidating the whole trial?
She got a lawyer, who filed a motion for dismisal, the RIAA responded with some pretty stupid comments, and we're waiting to see whether the judge dismisses the case or not.
Right, but defendants standing up to the RIAA have already caused the RIAA problems (requiring a separate $200 subpeona for each john/jane doe, where they used to be able to get many john/jane does on one subpeona). If defendants stand up to the RIAA, and particularly if they prove in court that the RIAA is a bully and often files frivolous lawsuits, then that could make it much easier for other defendants to get a successful motion for dismissal.
The case isn't THAT obviously open-and-shut, is it? The computer has been wiped, so neither side can say too much more about the physical evidence directly. It sounds like Kazaa was actually on the computer at one point, even if she didn't personally sign the Kazaa EULA.
Yeah, the judge seems to lean heavily towards the defendant from the word go, but if RIAA loses, they can get an appeal from a different judge. And if the judge says things that are too far out there, that can count against her case.
Though, no doubt the RIAA will probably throw some legal weight onto this case soon (I'm surprised they didn't do it already, but the defendant's lawyer says RIAA still has junior lawyers on the case).
But other creative fields are facing a greater crisis now than they have before (most notably the movie industry). I don't know if it's due to the internet resulting in broader exposure of people to more creative works, leading to disillusionment at the similarity between works, or what, but even if it's a problem that exists across all fields, it still may need to be grappled with now.
This article feels like an ad. Too many Slashdot articles feel like ads. If they are actually paid for, then that's really bad, because Slashdot editors have a financial incentive to make the content worse over time. If it's not actually an ad, it's still pretty bad because the editors aren't doing their jobs in 1) selecting interesting articles, or 2) in rewriting interesting articles that are worded too much like PR-speak or otherwise are written badly but would be interesting if rewritten.
Honestly, how likely would it be for this story to show up on Digg, or Blogdex, or any A-list blogs? Almost zero chance. Stories on Slashdot seem to be increasingly dumb, even though there's growing competition from alternatives. Slashdot can and should improve.
Fortunately, back then, Google was a great alternative. And fortunately today, we have another alternative that hasn't taken this practice up (yet).
Some random commenter in the dark depths of the internet should be able to say whatever they damn well please, because nobody is listening. If Bill O'Reilly gets on TV and says that I financially support terrorists, when I don't, then that can cause actual harm to my reputation, because way too many people watch his show. If some weirdo on the internet says that, and only 1 person reads the comment, who cares?
There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).
It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.
It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.
Can you trade items or money in Battlegrounds? If so, that would be a huge reason not to allow cross-server BG (as it would make gold farmer's job easier (they wouldn't have to make sure to farm gold on every single little server, and it would definitely help the money-laundering phase of gold farming), and it would increase the impact of dup bugs, if any). Though obviously they could disable trading in BG's to make it easier to span universes.
In my mind, instances are the most fun part of the game, but you have to allocate 4-5 hours to do an instance currently, because it takes so long for people to form a group, then get over to the instance. The fact that instances take more than an hour or two to do is fine, but the extra wasted time is such a drag, as it makes it much harder to spontaneously jump on and just have fun.
If Blizzard could encourage use of meeting stones on all servers, big and small, that'd be great.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. No, it really does.
Well, they definitely make money porting Flash client onto at least some embedded devices (can't be too specific, sorry), and the EULA definitely seems to be heading that direction, so my guess is that's the simple answer. (though it'd be interesting to know what percentage of their profits come from embedded client work, and how much comes from PC-authoring stuff)
Actually, the PC client is free. All others (DoCoMo Flash Lite, Symbian, etc.) are not free. (in some cases they seem to be free to the user, but are actually paid for by the device manufacturer, especially in cases where porting work is done)
- Google Search blew everything away with far better ranking algorithm than anything else, and wasn't a bloated ad-ridden portal
- GMail blew everything away with 1GB of storage and a decent AJAX interface
- Google Maps blew everything away with heavy reliance on AJAX
- other things weren't quite blow-everything away, but were still good:
- Google DMOZ combined DMOZ with Google's excellent pagerank
- Google Groups kept the usenet archive from disapearing
- Google Images may not be wonderful, but google's core competency is searching, so it has a shot at improving competition among image search engines
- Google News was new and different
- the Blogger acquisition allowed Blogger to improve some
- etc etc
Compared to all that, what benefit does Google Talk provide to customers? No, you can't hide behind "they MIGHT improve it"... Why does Google belong in this market? Is there something they're going to make available that makes it a stand-out? Do Google's existing skills make it likely that they can improve the IM market for consumers?Or is Google entering that market, simply because they're like Microsoft now, and want to enter every market they possibly can, just because?
Managers at my fortune-500 company have a ship-at-all-costs attitude, which I had come to accept, because we're not in a life-critical field, and our customers demand that we ship products on a schedule that's in step with our competition.
What's strange though is that what I've read from NASA stories is that NASA managers ACT EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as they do at my lowly company, suggesting that maybe it's not the specifics of a particular job that causes them to behave the way they do (eg. they're not trying to behave appropriately for their particular situation), but instead something else is driving them (eg. management politics, the fact that they really only need to pay attention to their superiors, and only have to pay attention to their underlings when there's a crisis).
There ARE quality guidelines that all managers should follow. Most company's quality goals aren't as strict as NASA's, but if most managers are essentially ignoring quality standards everywhere (for whatever reason), then that's a problem.
GMail was clearly the obvious leader the instant it came out. GTalk isn't a standout at all. Maybe some blog people forced their hand by discovering the talk.google.com working server, but if Google wasn't ready to release yet, they should have shut the public server down, and waited until they were ready to release. Are google products absolute standouts in their field, or not?