A family watching the Super Bowl has a reasonable expectation that they won't be subjected to someone else's idea of what acceptable sexual mores are these days.
This statement includes the implicit assumption that it's OK to be subjected to prudish sexual mores. (and if you don't think they can be legitimately offensive, you're wrong -- I know people offended by women who dress in burkhas and such)
Personally, I don't care about porn being available but I can sympathize with folks who were offended by Go Daddy's poor taste. I watched the game at a friend's house and ofter the Go Daddy Ad aired, they decided to switch registrars for their family domain away from Go Daddy.
That's certainly the right move, even if for the wrong reason.
Credit card details on an insecure e-commerce server are intangible... the money in their bank accounts is also intangible... does that means credit card fraud isn't stealing? Wicked.
There's a reason the crime is called "credit card fraud" and not "credit card theft" (and the recent term "identity theft" just muddies the water). It's fraud, not theft; the crime is that the fraudster tricks the merchant into thinking that someone else has agreed to pay for the item.
I'll never understand why Slashdot, primarily a group of code-authors are so willing to shoot themselves in the feet and claim that they have no property rights in their works.
In as much as it is true, it is probably largely for two reasons. One, because we'd rather be free to stand on the shoulders of giants (or pyramids of pygmies, for that matter) than to have to stand on our own, even if that meant exclusivity in our work. Would you like to have to develop your own operating system, compiler, drivers, and every library you use in your code... or to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for each one? How much code would you develop on your own if every library and support tool you used cost cash money?
And two, the fact that copyright and patents are far more likely to be used by the large corporation to crush the small player, and much less likely to be used the other way around by legitimate developers. The only small players who win the IP game are the patent trolls, and they aren't legitimate.
I agree with another poster--it's time for some basic "global laws."
It's too bad those global laws, if enacted, would likely go the other way (since they're going to be written by politicians) -- you wouldn't be protected from extradition to China; rather, you'd be forbidden from criticizing China on the Internet, and the US would be required to extradite you.
I name my machines after fictional bad guys. Melkor (a bit of a double-entendre, as my street address is similar) Sauron Vader Vorpal (after the bunny) Freddy Morningstar (Lucifer being too obvious) Ringwraith Fenris (at a place where other machines were named after Norse mythological figures.)
The oddball is a laptop which I named d-minor. I'd originally intended to call it 'sauron' and decommission the older machine by that name, but I never did. D-minor is named after the common horror theme music.
One thing to be sure of -- if you're a geek, don't choose a naming scheme that's too limited, or you'll run out sooner than you think.
At least in the US, that's not generally true. The general rule now is that EULA are enforceable if you have notice that there are additional terms and an ability to return the software once you have had a chance to review the terms. The "notice of terms" often happens with a brief notice on the outside of the box.
Or, at least, that's the case in some Federal Circuits.
When you buy a TV, the warranty comes inside the box. And, nobody says that's not binding. Why is software different?
Warrantees, and disclaimers thereof, are governed by specific legislation including the Federal Magnussen-Moss Warranty Act. What's the equivalent for EULAs? There's no specific legislation aside from in the two UCITA states. So you have to fall back to contract law. But under contract law, EULAs are an awful strange beast. A product is sold by a manufacturer, to a distributor, to a retailer, to an end user... but now the end user has the obligation to either agree to a contract of adhesion, or give up the benefits of the product which he already bought? That makes no sense. There's no meeting of the minds. There's no consideration given, in most cases. There's not even any contact between the two supposedly contracting parties. And you can't validly bring the Uniform Commercial Code into it, because the UCC is limited to a contract for the sale of goods -- and EULAs nearly always try to claim the software hasn't been sold but licensed.
Nobody can fix the US public primary and secondary education system. It's so entrenched in its brokenness that it not only successfully resists any attempts to make it better, but it competently attacks any attempt to supplant it by educating people outside the system. This is why, for example, there are those limits on charter schools that Gates complains about. To fix the system would require essentially destroying it and starting from scratch, with the majority of those in the current system barred from participating.
And this is true despite the fact that there is no single US public primary and secondary education system, but rather one system for every state, and districts often with high degrees of independence within those states. There is, however, one major commonality tying all the systems together, and that's the unions -- they DO operate across state lines.
Well, they could build an altar on the front steps of the Lincoln Memorial and sacrifice their lawyers on it. I bet thousands of people would be willing to give up illegal file sharing for a while as the price for attending such a ceremony.
Perhaps, but for millions of others, the official broadcast of the event would be the most popular torrent on The Pirate Bay.
...so I sure as heck don't want a $5/month fee on my ISP going to the RIAA. I wouldn't want it in any case, but not listening to music gives me 100% justification for that position. If such a fee were instituted, I'd try to make it back somehow. Perhaps by pirating music on behalf of others, or perhaps by doing direct damage to the RIAA. How much does it cost them to clean up urine stains in their HQ lobby, I wonder?
Prisons serve no purpose in the US. Sure, there's about a dozen different ideas why prisons exist, but none of these ideas are agreed upon and none of them are empirically measured to ensure prisons actually serve that purpose.
Prisons keep convicts separate from the the rest of the population. They also, through their existence and the existence of prison rape, serve as a deterrent to crime, particularly the sort of white collar crime ordinary people might consider committing (embezzlement, fraud, DMCA violation).
All our local channels say they aren't delaying, no matter what the congress decides. There are reports last time this came up that some stations have already switched.
Congress (or the FCC given enough authority from Congress) can say "If you want to keep your digital license, you have to keep your analog station running until the transition."
Of course, if they do that, it'll be a major problem for stations with facilities leased until 2/17/2009...
Firstly, there's a pigeonhole problem here -- in order for some stations to take up their final digital frequency assignments, other stations will have to move theirs (usually back to their analog channel). This is one of the main reasons it was to be done all at once in the first place.
Secondly, this is going to be even MORE confusing. OK, so the person living in a cave for the past few months who comes out turns on their TV on February 18 would have gotten nothing. But at least they'd have some clue that something is wrong. With a gradual transition, maybe they'll lose CBS but not NBC and Fox... then the next month they'll lose Fox but keep CBS, etc. That's not making things any simpler.
It seems like each and every time Blizzard has filed a suit over something related to "violating the terms of their EULA", they've been handed a victory.
Often with the most twisted legal arguments you can imagine, the sort which clearly indicate that the conclusion was reached prior to the argument being constructed.
You don't do that unless you _want_ to build a nuke, since it's a waste of money for any other purpose.
Well, yeah, but who doesn't wan't to build a nuke? Evil governments (Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, US under W), less-evil governments (India, England, US under Nixon), supervillains, out of control corporate oligarchs (Massive Dynamics, GE, Omni Consumer Products), and geeks all want nukes.
1. Putin has been addressing the economy pretty darn well. There was pretty dramatic GDP growth during his tenure.
I'm sure $150/bbl oil had nothing to do with it.
2. While corruption is still high, it is MUCH lower than it was during Yeltsin years. Oligarchs don't open the doors in Kremlin with their foot anymore. The guy who tried to buy up enough of the parliament to pass his own laws (Khodorkovsky) is in the prison, where he will remain for a long time.
You have any room in that prison? There's a few US oligarchs who probably deserve a stay there.
No, the best way you can fight DRM is to come up with something better that would stop piracy to some significant degree.
The best way to defeat DRM, the way which has worked in the past, is to break it. Over, and over, and over again. As each scheme is broken, the DRM publishers come up with a new one. Each new one is nastier and more intrusive to the paying customers, causing compatibility problems and total failures. After enough of this, paying customers refuse to buy DRM encumbered products, not for ideological reasons but for practical ones. And then DRM largely goes away. It happened before.
What brought it back? The DMCA, of course. Making the DRM breakers hide from the law made DRM look viable again.
Slashdot Mirror
This statement includes the implicit assumption that it's OK to be subjected to prudish sexual mores. (and if you don't think they can be legitimately offensive, you're wrong -- I know people offended by women who dress in burkhas and such)
That's certainly the right move, even if for the wrong reason.
Exactly; it was an election year in the US last year, so the wind was particularly strong anywhere the candidates went.
There's a reason the crime is called "credit card fraud" and not "credit card theft" (and the recent term "identity theft" just muddies the water). It's fraud, not theft; the crime is that the fraudster tricks the merchant into thinking that someone else has agreed to pay for the item.
In as much as it is true, it is probably largely for two reasons. One, because we'd rather be free to stand on the shoulders of giants (or pyramids of pygmies, for that matter) than to have to stand on our own, even if that meant exclusivity in our work. Would you like to have to develop your own operating system, compiler, drivers, and every library you use in your code... or to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for each one? How much code would you develop on your own if every library and support tool you used cost cash money?
And two, the fact that copyright and patents are far more likely to be used by the large corporation to crush the small player, and much less likely to be used the other way around by legitimate developers. The only small players who win the IP game are the patent trolls, and they aren't legitimate.
It's too bad those global laws, if enacted, would likely go the other way (since they're going to be written by politicians) -- you wouldn't be protected from extradition to China; rather, you'd be forbidden from criticizing China on the Internet, and the US would be required to extradite you.
Thus, if you tether your Motorola cell phone to your laptop, you end up with Ockham's RAZR.
Saves a fortune in tattoo removal.
I name my machines after fictional bad guys.
Melkor (a bit of a double-entendre, as my street address is similar)
Sauron
Vader
Vorpal (after the bunny)
Freddy
Morningstar (Lucifer being too obvious)
Ringwraith
Fenris (at a place where other machines were named after Norse mythological figures.)
The oddball is a laptop which I named d-minor. I'd originally intended to call it 'sauron' and decommission the older machine by that name, but I never did. D-minor is named after the common horror theme music.
One thing to be sure of -- if you're a geek, don't choose a naming scheme that's too limited, or you'll run out sooner than you think.
Or, at least, that's the case in some Federal Circuits.
Warrantees, and disclaimers thereof, are governed by specific legislation including the Federal Magnussen-Moss Warranty Act. What's the equivalent for EULAs? There's no specific legislation aside from in the two UCITA states. So you have to fall back to contract law. But under contract law, EULAs are an awful strange beast. A product is sold by a manufacturer, to a distributor, to a retailer, to an end user... but now the end user has the obligation to either agree to a contract of adhesion, or give up the benefits of the product which he already bought? That makes no sense. There's no meeting of the minds. There's no consideration given, in most cases. There's not even any contact between the two supposedly contracting parties. And you can't validly bring the Uniform Commercial Code into it, because the UCC is limited to a contract for the sale of goods -- and EULAs nearly always try to claim the software hasn't been sold but licensed.
<diaboli subtype="advocatus">Leading to increasing populations, famine, and war.</diaboli>
Nobody can fix the US public primary and secondary education system. It's so entrenched in its brokenness that it not only successfully resists any attempts to make it better, but it competently attacks any attempt to supplant it by educating people outside the system. This is why, for example, there are those limits on charter schools that Gates complains about. To fix the system would require essentially destroying it and starting from scratch, with the majority of those in the current system barred from participating.
And this is true despite the fact that there is no single US public primary and secondary education system, but rather one system for every state, and districts often with high degrees of independence within those states. There is, however, one major commonality tying all the systems together, and that's the unions -- they DO operate across state lines.
I'm the designated signature collector; just sign one of your checks and send it to me, and I'll take care of it for you.
Perhaps, but for millions of others, the official broadcast of the event would be the most popular torrent on The Pirate Bay.
It isn't going to work not because people are unethical, but because they won't believe it; they'll just categorize it as propaganda.
People get annoyed at that, too. As a result, in the better neighborhoods, they try to be unobtrusive about it.
...so I sure as heck don't want a $5/month fee on my ISP going to the RIAA. I wouldn't want it in any case, but not listening to music gives me 100% justification for that position. If such a fee were instituted, I'd try to make it back somehow. Perhaps by pirating music on behalf of others, or perhaps by doing direct damage to the RIAA. How much does it cost them to clean up urine stains in their HQ lobby, I wonder?
Prisons keep convicts separate from the the rest of the population. They also, through their existence and the existence of prison rape, serve as a deterrent to crime, particularly the sort of white collar crime ordinary people might consider committing (embezzlement, fraud, DMCA violation).
Congress (or the FCC given enough authority from Congress) can say "If you want to keep your digital license, you have to keep your analog station running until the transition."
Of course, if they do that, it'll be a major problem for stations with facilities leased until 2/17/2009...
Firstly, there's a pigeonhole problem here -- in order for some stations to take up their final digital frequency assignments, other stations will have to move theirs (usually back to their analog channel). This is one of the main reasons it was to be done all at once in the first place.
Secondly, this is going to be even MORE confusing. OK, so the person living in a cave for the past few months who comes out turns on their TV on February 18 would have gotten nothing. But at least they'd have some clue that something is wrong. With a gradual transition, maybe they'll lose CBS but not NBC and Fox... then the next month they'll lose Fox but keep CBS, etc. That's not making things any simpler.
Often with the most twisted legal arguments you can imagine, the sort which clearly indicate that the conclusion was reached prior to the argument being constructed.
Yeah, but that would be foolish. If you're doing large scale solar, thermal solar makes a lot more sense than messing around with PVs.
Well, yeah, but who doesn't wan't to build a nuke? Evil governments (Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, US under W), less-evil governments (India, England, US under Nixon), supervillains, out of control corporate oligarchs (Massive Dynamics, GE, Omni Consumer Products), and geeks all want nukes.
I'm sure $150/bbl oil had nothing to do with it.
You have any room in that prison? There's a few US oligarchs who probably deserve a stay there.
No surprise; it's not exactly a new idea that his ambition is to become the next Joe Stalin.
The best way to defeat DRM, the way which has worked in the past, is to break it. Over, and over, and over again. As each scheme is broken, the DRM publishers come up with a new one. Each new one is nastier and more intrusive to the paying customers, causing compatibility problems and total failures. After enough of this, paying customers refuse to buy DRM encumbered products, not for ideological reasons but for practical ones. And then DRM largely goes away. It happened before.
What brought it back? The DMCA, of course. Making the DRM breakers hide from the law made DRM look viable again.