Well, why should the Internet be singled out? Long before the Internet, there existed mail order catalogs. You choose the items you want out of a catalog, magazine ad, television ad, etc., and phone in your order, which is then mailed to you. If the business you are ordering from has a presence in your state, they are required to collect state sales tax. Otherwise they aren't.
So why should a business be treated differently just because it takes its order via a web page rather than from a telephone operator? The only thing such legislation would accomplish is to force businesses to set up a system in which people prepare their order on the web, and then have to phone in to "confirm" their order, thus making it a telephone order which isn't taxable. This would create extra overhead for the business, and do nothing to raise revenues for the government!
I for one am tired of hearing why the Internet has to be treated as a special case. Why not let existing laws and common sense govern the Internet. Why do we need a heap of new legislation?
well, I am quite sure, that this is the wrong answer, since it is way too simple, but could anybody explain, what exactly is wrong with it:
Actually, your solution would be quite correct if you knew in advance the maximum number of soldiers that are allowed.
Contrary to what others have said, you can implement counters and conditional logic in FSMs, but in order for it to be a finite state machine, you must specify in the design of the FSM exactly how many states there are as well as the transition rules. Now each possible value for a counter is a separate state, so they must be enumerated in advance. Your soldiers would have 2k+1 states where k is the maximum value allowed for the counter. There is the initial wait state, plus k states after recieving the first message and waiting to pass it along to the next soldier, plus k decrement states.
Now, the total number of soldiers must be finite, but unlimited. If you design your soldiers with k counter states, what if there are k+1 soldiers? Then your solution would fail.
So, if the problem were modified so that the maximum possible number of soldiers were specified in advance, then your solution would be a correct minimum-time solution. But if no such maximum is specified, then the solution must be more complicated.
Unfortunatly, there is some law that specifies all US companies must use UPS when delivering to Canada.
This is completely false. I live in Canada and have had things shipped here by several different methods, UPS being only one of them.
we must also pay a *UPS tax*
Again, that's bullshit. In some cases you may need to pay a broker's fee to get it through customs, but it doesn't usually apply to individuals (as opposed to corporations), although if you have to pay it once you'll have to pay it each future time you receive a shipment via UPS.
Try checking your facts before posting such nonsense.
From the quote: Those who sing or play but don't pay, Ascap warns, may be violating the law.
At least they have the honesty to use the word "may". Unlike the RIAA and MPAA which have issued letters and press statements which give the impression that they write the laws, the ASCAP at least uses the word "may" indicating they are aware that they are not the ultimate authority on this issue.
I guess it depends on what constitutes a "public performance". Given that the Boy Scouts were determined to be a private organization by the courts, and hence are allowed to exclude gays, then I don't see how singing songs at their camps constitutes a public performance subject to royalty payments.
I'm curious to see how this plays out in the courts.
From the end of the Unwin paperback edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (recall Unwin was Tolkein's original publisher.):
Here ends the first part of the history of the War of the Rings.
The second part is called The Two Towers, since the events recounted in it are dominated by Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, and the fortress Minas Morgul, that guards the secret entrance to Mordor...
This is found on page 529 of the 1987 reprinting of the Unwin Paperback (ISBN 0-04-823185-1).
I'm not sure if Tolkein wrote those words himself, or if they were added by his publisher, but unless Tolkein said something to the contrary, they are probably as canonical as anything.
As to your first paragraph, you are correct in that the hardware you use to make your digital recordings must conform to the Serial Copy Management System in order for you to be protected under the AHRA. However, as far as I can tell the only evidence in this case is download logs, so I don't know how they would know if you are recording the music using an SMCS compliant device or not.
As for the second paragraph, it is simply not correct. The AHRA exemption for personal use copies does not require that you own the original copy.
I wish I hadn't used up all my mod points earlier, or I'd mod the parent up. I was just about to ask the very same question.
This is a very important distinction, because in America, I believe (IANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong), the AHRA allows downloading for personal use. The 9th circuit court of appeals stated (in the Napster case) that sharing isn't so protected because you are making the file available to a wide audience, but copying for your own personal use (which is what downloading is) is protected. Whether the same protection applies to movies or not is unclear, since I think the AHRA applies to music only.
I know nothing about Danish law, so I don't know what their situation is, but I'd love to know if these people receiving bills are merely downloaders, or sharers, and which activity are they being billed for. Can anyone fill us in? The article is indeed self-contradictory on this point.
This has a significant impact on the logistics of DMCA suits.
No. The DMCA is a federal law and thus any action brought under the DMCA will be heard in federal courts, not state courts. Since the defendent here is an American living in America, there would be no such jurisdictional issue. The case would most likely go to trial in his home district, as happened in the MPAA vs. 2600 lawsuit which was heard in the southern district of New York.
The only "home court" advantage which could obtain is if the defendent is in a circuit which has a different precedent regarding the DMCA. As far as I know, the only federal appeals court which has heard a DMCA suit is the 2nd Circuit which heard MPAA vs. 2600 and found in favor of the plaintiff, granting a permanent injunction against posting DeCSS and other CSS circumvention tools.
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Simple. Require that an I.D. (such as a driver's license) be presented when making cash purchases. This will be done in the name of preventing counterfeiting.
Actually, you're wrong. If you have enough cash and can prove it (by posting a bond for example), in many states you can avoid purchasing insurance.
True. In fact, many large cab companies are self-insured. They are distributing the risk over a large fleet of vehicles, so in the long run they come out ahead, even if there are a few nasty accidents.
Additionally, there is nothing preventing users from building a ppp, ssh, httptunnel or other tunnel over tcp and completely bypassing the UDP blocks from their workstation.
These tunnels are terrific if you have a shell account on a remote system that you can tunnel to. Many Panamanians who want to save on long distance will probably not have such an account. As someone who has a shell account at a university, I can tell you that I really take for granted the ability to tunnel from practically anywhere to avoid firewalls, sniffers, etc., but I realize that most people aren't so lucky.
Yes, you can buy shell accounts, but they tend to be expensive, so if your goal is to save money by using VoIP, it doesn't seem like a good solution.
Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better.
No, Ogg is only slightly better than mp3. What is massively better is MPC. The drawback is that MPC, like MP3, is encumbered by patents, and no one seems to be interested in it. I'm not sure why. Can anyone explain the lack of interest in MPC? Is it just the patent issues?
I object to them using MY modem to set their arbitrary limits.
Is it really your modem? I've never heard of a single cable modem company that sells, rather than rents or loans, the modem.
I'm not siding with the cops on this one, just pointing out a fact that you're not really hacking into your own hardware here. It may be in your house, but that doesn't make it yours.
You cannot buy a 2003 ford mustang, remove the muffler, and drive around at 3am generating 100db of sound.
You cannot drive it around in public places without its muffler, but if you owned a huge estate with its own network of roads, and it was large enough that the sound wouldn't reach your neighbors, you are not only allowed to drive without the muffler, but also without license plates, driver's license, insurance, registration, or serial numbers!
This is an argument frequently put forth by the anti-gun lobby: you have to license cars and drivers, why not guns and gun owners? The difference is that in the former case you are licensing the right to use the vehicle in a public road you share with others, whose safety depends on your ability to use it correctly, whereas the latter would be required even for ownership in your private home.
I think an analogy exists with consumer electronic hardware as well. As long as you are not entering or affecting a public space or other persons, shouldn't your hardware be yours to do with as you wish?
Just chose better devices and you're half way there
Problem is cost for many people. Serial port modems generally cost at least twice as much as winmodems, SCSI drives nearly twice as much as IDE, Postscript printers can easily be more than twice as much as equivalent winprinters, and even PCL printers tend to run 1.5x the cost of a winprinter.
For an office situation, where budgets tend to be larger, and compatibility is more of an issue, your advice makes sense, but for most home users, it's just to expensive to do it the way you suggest.
Re:Freedom to only do Right Is Not Freedom!
on
Freenet 0.5 Released
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· Score: 2
Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
Worse even than that is the fact is that people can and have been prosecuted for having deleted child porn files on their system. According to a recent Wired article (I don't have the link handy), dozens of people were prosecuted and received jail time for having kiddie porn only in their browser cache or as deleted file fragments. (Operation Candyman, I think it was called). Think about it, someone could e-mail you kiddie porn attachments through an anonymous remailer, you download your mail through a POP server, and delete the mail without opening the attachment thinking you've dodged a bullet and avoided a virus or something, but guess what? You now have deleted kidde porn files on your computer and people are in jail for exactly that!
Not to mention of course, that your browser cache might be full of the stuff from the annoying popups on some losers site that you had the misfortune to visit.
The moral of the story? Clean your hard drive frequently. Delete your browser cache and run a utility to overwrite your unused sectors and sector fragments. And if you really are into kiddie porn, you've probably already encrypted your collection anyway, so you're safe.
As someone who has been the victim of credit card fraud myself, I can tell you that nine times out of ten, the address is a Mailbox's Etc. address, or a similar service that allows anonymous mail pickup.
For example; personal, non-secret, communication should not be encrypted.
I agree. I've also started flying only in the nude. The fewer clothed passengers there are in airports, the more time security officers can concentrate their searches on those who are potentially hiding something under their clothes.
The problem with your argument is that following it would encourage political leaders to create large issues (such as imminent war) in order to disctract us from "smaller" issues which are unpopular. Just because there are seemingly more important issues to discuss doesn't mean we can afford to lose sight of the smaller ones.
Remember that income tax was introduced as a "temporary measure" to fund the First World War. It wasn't widely criticized, as the winning the war seemed a much more important issue than the "slight" privacy invasion of having to report our income to the government. Well, the war is long since past, but we still pay enormous amounts of income tax.
Could it be that news.com is simply pointing out the obvious double standard given to "hacker" sites like 2600.com and "reputable news sites" like news.com?
Go back and read the decision. It is not a double standard. 2600 had been distributing decss.exe as well as linking to it, and in its page of links, made clear the purpose of said links was to disseminate the program, not merely to provide news. There is precedent for enjoining speech to a greater degree against parties who have been found to abuse free speech in the past. This is all discussed in great detail in both Judge Kaplan's decision, and in the 2nd Circuit court decision.
Let me be quite clear, I do not agree with these decisions, but that was their reasoning.
Here is the second game, Fritz playing black this time, and losing. Some were puzzled as to why Fritz resigned at this point. I'm not expert enough to see why either.
It's now been changed,/.'s front page summary had stated that Novak was "defending himself". It is now changed to "representing himself". Once again/. plays revisionist news.:)
Well, he may actually be defending himself soon, against a barrage of countersuits!
I find it astonishing that the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which was the basis for Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity didn't make the top ten list.
Special relativity changed the direction of physics in the 20th century. All modern physics incorporates it at a fundamental level. In some sense it is one of the most influential physics experiments of all time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, why should the Internet be singled out? Long before the Internet, there existed mail order catalogs. You choose the items you want out of a catalog, magazine ad, television ad, etc., and phone in your order, which is then mailed to you. If the business you are ordering from has a presence in your state, they are required to collect state sales tax. Otherwise they aren't.
So why should a business be treated differently just because it takes its order via a web page rather than from a telephone operator? The only thing such legislation would accomplish is to force businesses to set up a system in which people prepare their order on the web, and then have to phone in to "confirm" their order, thus making it a telephone order which isn't taxable. This would create extra overhead for the business, and do nothing to raise revenues for the government!
I for one am tired of hearing why the Internet has to be treated as a special case. Why not let existing laws and common sense govern the Internet. Why do we need a heap of new legislation?
Actually, your solution would be quite correct if you knew in advance the maximum number of soldiers that are allowed.
Contrary to what others have said, you can implement counters and conditional logic in FSMs, but in order for it to be a finite state machine, you must specify in the design of the FSM exactly how many states there are as well as the transition rules. Now each possible value for a counter is a separate state, so they must be enumerated in advance. Your soldiers would have 2k+1 states where k is the maximum value allowed for the counter. There is the initial wait state, plus k states after recieving the first message and waiting to pass it along to the next soldier, plus k decrement states.
Now, the total number of soldiers must be finite, but unlimited. If you design your soldiers with k counter states, what if there are k+1 soldiers? Then your solution would fail.
So, if the problem were modified so that the maximum possible number of soldiers were specified in advance, then your solution would be a correct minimum-time solution. But if no such maximum is specified, then the solution must be more complicated.
This is completely false. I live in Canada and have had things shipped here by several different methods, UPS being only one of them.
we must also pay a *UPS tax*
Again, that's bullshit. In some cases you may need to pay a broker's fee to get it through customs, but it doesn't usually apply to individuals (as opposed to corporations), although if you have to pay it once you'll have to pay it each future time you receive a shipment via UPS.
Try checking your facts before posting such nonsense.
At least they have the honesty to use the word "may". Unlike the RIAA and MPAA which have issued letters and press statements which give the impression that they write the laws, the ASCAP at least uses the word "may" indicating they are aware that they are not the ultimate authority on this issue.
I guess it depends on what constitutes a "public performance". Given that the Boy Scouts were determined to be a private organization by the courts, and hence are allowed to exclude gays, then I don't see how singing songs at their camps constitutes a public performance subject to royalty payments.
I'm curious to see how this plays out in the courts.
Here ends the first part of the history of the War of the Rings.
The second part is called The Two Towers, since the events recounted in it are dominated by Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, and the fortress Minas Morgul, that guards the secret entrance to Mordor...
This is found on page 529 of the 1987 reprinting of the Unwin Paperback (ISBN 0-04-823185-1).
I'm not sure if Tolkein wrote those words himself, or if they were added by his publisher, but unless Tolkein said something to the contrary, they are probably as canonical as anything.
As for the second paragraph, it is simply not correct. The AHRA exemption for personal use copies does not require that you own the original copy.
This is a very important distinction, because in America, I believe (IANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong), the AHRA allows downloading for personal use. The 9th circuit court of appeals stated (in the Napster case) that sharing isn't so protected because you are making the file available to a wide audience, but copying for your own personal use (which is what downloading is) is protected. Whether the same protection applies to movies or not is unclear, since I think the AHRA applies to music only.
I know nothing about Danish law, so I don't know what their situation is, but I'd love to know if these people receiving bills are merely downloaders, or sharers, and which activity are they being billed for. Can anyone fill us in? The article is indeed self-contradictory on this point.
No. The DMCA is a federal law and thus any action brought under the DMCA will be heard in federal courts, not state courts. Since the defendent here is an American living in America, there would be no such jurisdictional issue. The case would most likely go to trial in his home district, as happened in the MPAA vs. 2600 lawsuit which was heard in the southern district of New York.
The only "home court" advantage which could obtain is if the defendent is in a circuit which has a different precedent regarding the DMCA. As far as I know, the only federal appeals court which has heard a DMCA suit is the 2nd Circuit which heard MPAA vs. 2600 and found in favor of the plaintiff, granting a permanent injunction against posting DeCSS and other CSS circumvention tools.
Simple. Require that an I.D. (such as a driver's license) be presented when making cash purchases. This will be done in the name of preventing counterfeiting.
Or cloud cover...
True. In fact, many large cab companies are self-insured. They are distributing the risk over a large fleet of vehicles, so in the long run they come out ahead, even if there are a few nasty accidents.
These tunnels are terrific if you have a shell account on a remote system that you can tunnel to. Many Panamanians who want to save on long distance will probably not have such an account. As someone who has a shell account at a university, I can tell you that I really take for granted the ability to tunnel from practically anywhere to avoid firewalls, sniffers, etc., but I realize that most people aren't so lucky.
Yes, you can buy shell accounts, but they tend to be expensive, so if your goal is to save money by using VoIP, it doesn't seem like a good solution.
No, Ogg is only slightly better than mp3. What is massively better is MPC. The drawback is that MPC, like MP3, is encumbered by patents, and no one seems to be interested in it. I'm not sure why. Can anyone explain the lack of interest in MPC? Is it just the patent issues?
Is it really your modem? I've never heard of a single cable modem company that sells, rather than rents or loans, the modem.
I'm not siding with the cops on this one, just pointing out a fact that you're not really hacking into your own hardware here. It may be in your house, but that doesn't make it yours.
You cannot drive it around in public places without its muffler, but if you owned a huge estate with its own network of roads, and it was large enough that the sound wouldn't reach your neighbors, you are not only allowed to drive without the muffler, but also without license plates, driver's license, insurance, registration, or serial numbers!
This is an argument frequently put forth by the anti-gun lobby: you have to license cars and drivers, why not guns and gun owners? The difference is that in the former case you are licensing the right to use the vehicle in a public road you share with others, whose safety depends on your ability to use it correctly, whereas the latter would be required even for ownership in your private home.
I think an analogy exists with consumer electronic hardware as well. As long as you are not entering or affecting a public space or other persons, shouldn't your hardware be yours to do with as you wish?
Problem is cost for many people. Serial port modems generally cost at least twice as much as winmodems, SCSI drives nearly twice as much as IDE, Postscript printers can easily be more than twice as much as equivalent winprinters, and even PCL printers tend to run 1.5x the cost of a winprinter.
For an office situation, where budgets tend to be larger, and compatibility is more of an issue, your advice makes sense, but for most home users, it's just to expensive to do it the way you suggest.
Worse even than that is the fact is that people can and have been prosecuted for having deleted child porn files on their system. According to a recent Wired article (I don't have the link handy), dozens of people were prosecuted and received jail time for having kiddie porn only in their browser cache or as deleted file fragments. (Operation Candyman, I think it was called). Think about it, someone could e-mail you kiddie porn attachments through an anonymous remailer, you download your mail through a POP server, and delete the mail without opening the attachment thinking you've dodged a bullet and avoided a virus or something, but guess what? You now have deleted kidde porn files on your computer and people are in jail for exactly that!
Not to mention of course, that your browser cache might be full of the stuff from the annoying popups on some losers site that you had the misfortune to visit.
The moral of the story? Clean your hard drive frequently. Delete your browser cache and run a utility to overwrite your unused sectors and sector fragments. And if you really are into kiddie porn, you've probably already encrypted your collection anyway, so you're safe.
Care to explain to us why using a cell phone near explosives is dangerous? Perhaps for the same reason they can bring down airplanes?
I agree. I've also started flying only in the nude. The fewer clothed passengers there are in airports, the more time security officers can concentrate their searches on those who are potentially hiding something under their clothes.
Remember that income tax was introduced as a "temporary measure" to fund the First World War. It wasn't widely criticized, as the winning the war seemed a much more important issue than the "slight" privacy invasion of having to report our income to the government. Well, the war is long since past, but we still pay enormous amounts of income tax.
Go back and read the decision. It is not a double standard. 2600 had been distributing decss.exe as well as linking to it, and in its page of links, made clear the purpose of said links was to disseminate the program, not merely to provide news. There is precedent for enjoining speech to a greater degree against parties who have been found to abuse free speech in the past. This is all discussed in great detail in both Judge Kaplan's decision, and in the 2nd Circuit court decision.
Let me be quite clear, I do not agree with these decisions, but that was their reasoning.
1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.e3 e6 5.Bxc4 c5 6.0-0 a6 7.dxc5 Qxd1 8.Rxd1 Bxc5 9.Kf1 b5 10.Be2 Bb7 11.Nbd2 Nbd7 12.Nb3 Bf8 13.a4 b4 14.Nfd2 Bd5 15.f3 Bd6 16.g3 e5 17.e4 Be6 18.Nc4 Bc7 19.Be3 a5 20.Nc5 Nxc5 21.Bxc5 Nd7 22.Nd6+ Kf8 23.Bf2 Bxd6 24.Rxd6 Ke7 25.Rad1 Rhc8 26.Bb5 Nc5 27.Bc6 Bc4+ 28.Ke1 Nd3+ 29.R1xd3 Bxd3 30.Bc5 Bc4 31.Rd4+ Kf6 32.Rxc4 Rxc6 33.Be7+ Kxe7 34.Rxc6 Kd7 35.Rc5 f6 36.Kd2 Kd6 37.Rd5+ Kc6 38.Kd3 g6 39.Kc4 g5 40.h3 h6 41.h4 gxh4 42.gxh4 Ra7 43.h5 Ra8 44.Rc5+ Kb6 45.Rb5+ Kc6 46.Rd5 Kc7 47.Kb5 b3 48.Rd3 Ra7 49.Rxb3 Rb7+ 50.Kc4 Ra7 51.Rb5 Ra8 52.Kd5 Ra6 53.Rc5+ Kd7 54.b3 Rd6+ 55.Kc4 Rd4+ 56.Kc3 Rd1 57.Rd5+ 1-0
Well, he may actually be defending himself soon, against a barrage of countersuits!
Special relativity changed the direction of physics in the 20th century. All modern physics incorporates it at a fundamental level. In some sense it is one of the most influential physics experiments of all time.