> What I'm wondering is why iiNet is the *only* ISP getting sued.
Because they stood up to the studios. Rather than kicking people offline, they forwarded the complaints to the cops because they had no intention of pretending to be policemen.
The summary is inaccurate on that point: they did NOT ignore the complaints. In fact, there are police in the same building as them, so they forwarded all those complaints over to them. The fact that the police did nothing is another matter, but perfectly understandable given the kind of "evidence" they're usually supplied with, especially when there are more important crimes to prosecute.
Anyhow, the studios obviously want to make an example out of the only ISP who isn't willing to play along with their power grabs in order to convince the others to be more compliant.
> You are overlooking the fact that it is NOT the teachers responsibility to maintain the school system's IT.
And yet, this poor teacher was held responsible.
I'd rather point out things people can do to protect themselves than worry about what should've been done. If what should've been done had been done, there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
Anyhow, Win 98 is just fine, so long as you don't install crap. It doesn't have much of anything listening. So long as you don't install spyware or other crap (or use IE) you're fine. I should know. I managed on Win 98 SE for ages and I visited plenty of dangerous sites.
"Oh honey, it's over. I feel wonderful," Amero said a few minutes after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct and agreeing to surrender her teaching license. She had originally been charged with 10 counts of risk of injury to a minor and later convicted on four of them.
Exactly what were the circumstances that inundated her with porno popups? Because it seems like she got a rather harsh sentence, even if she got off easy compared to the charges filed against her.
Also, this would be a good time to install Adblock Plus or a similar extension if you haven't already. Those advertisements have also been used as an infection vector to install viruses and such.
Might want to read your own Wikipedia link about particle masses. See that table with the mass of the electron and such? See the errors listed? Being off by 102.5 standard deviations on the mass of the electron is NOT close. The proton, his BEST calculation, is "only" 94.5 standard deviations off.
There might be some interesting ideas in there, but it doesn't appear to be cutting edge. He wasn't the first to posit neutrinos with mass, either.
While you're right that people aren't automatically copying other countries' laws, you missed the point that there are tons of lobbyists involved.
They go around and try to get us to "harmonize" the laws, except that with copyright terms, they managed to get them to leapfrog each other in the past few decades, so that they could always go to more countries and ask them to "catch up."
Now, it doesn't apply as much with legal precedents, but they do use that as an argument to tell lawmakers that we need "reform" so that they can do what they did in some other country here.
These are the people who called the VCR the equivalent of the Boston Strangler. They've fought tooth-and-nail against every single bit of progress since then. They won't stop. Their jobs are at stake. They've been going obsolete for decades now, and they won't vanish without a fight.
I personally prefer to use a unique pseudonym for each thing I do. Then I can link it to my real name if there's any advantage to doing so, while keeping as much privacy as possible.
Those who have always been able to use their real name can do that only because they've never met any of the creepy stalker people online.
Free emails don't cost anything and you can forward them to a central location to sort out your identities if need be. Heck, I don't even remember how many identities I have these days...
I think you're thinking of Mary Bono (who took over Sonny's Senate seat). Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. Though Wikipedia claims that someone said Sonny wanted unconstitutional, eternal copyrights. So go figure.
IANAL, but I agree with you that the notice is defective and that they shouldn't be under any obligation due to it (nor should they be obligated by any "invoice" Toyota sends).
Frankly, I would get a real lawyer to tell them off, but it couldn't hurt to refer them to the reply given in Arkell vs Pressdam.
> OK - so you are seriously suggesting Europe is to be blamed for some weird broken US IP laws inspired by Mickey Mouse and submitted by Sonny Bono?
While the US is responsible for exporting a lot of the copyright insanity, Sonny Bono's tragedy was just an excuse for them to attach his name to the law.
It's my understanding that he would not have been a fan of it.
I just hope there are no French people who have contributed code to Shareza. I wouldn't put it past them to go looking for someone with any sort of connection to the project at all to hold accountable for the entire thing...
Then again, maybe French law is different in that regard, but these crazy litigants all seem to be the same about doing that sort of thing, no matter what country they're suing from.
Do you have contact information for the university? It would be great if you could pass that information along to them, along with all the past troubles they've had for using unlicensed investigators...
B) There's no true competition among ISPs. If a backbone provider does this, we're screwed. Period. Full stop. You can't just stop using the backbones. That's why they're backbones. The only way we can force them to listen is with regulation.
So it's not like we want regulation per se, it's more like regulation is the only way to keep them honest. Unless you know of some other way to control the behavior of natural monopolies that doesn't require duplicating billions of dollars of infrastructure when we've already paid for it once?
But you're right. Regulation is a responsibility. We can't just let the rules grow into a huge morass. We have to be careful to come up with clear, simple restrictions like "You cannot throttle traffic based on its destination unless it's part of a DoS attack." Let customers do their own QoS. They know better than the ISP what they want to prioritize, anyhow.
> Speaking of Obama, did he ever respond to that lawsuit about his birthplace? And no, a carefully-guarded fake-looking birth certificate doesn't count unless it's brought to court as evidence.
The lawsuit went nowhere, SFAIK, because it was meritless and frivolous. There's a nice image of it on Obama's website. The State of Hawaii doesn't go around showing everybody's birth certificate to everyone else, so it's no more "secret" than anyone else's. Obama showed it directly to the Associated Press, who confirmed its authenticity. And McCain & Obama both got together to sponsor a bill saying the whole issue was nonsense for both of them. McCain, as you may remember, was born on a US Army base in Panama and the law was corrected retroactively to make it clear that he should be counted as a citizen. Most of these "issues" have been raised by people who make up crap about people every single election (the people who did the "swift boating" of John Kerry were behind many of them). It's election year politics. People come up with all kinds of nonsense and it fades after the election. You know, like that lady who claimed to have a "B" cut into her face. Until the police saw that she was obviously lying and got her to confess to a hoax (which she then blamed the media for; mind you, the story was broken by Fox News and the Drudge Report...).
In short, the whole issue was utter nonsense that too many people wasted time on. Frankly, they're both Americans and I don't really give a damn about the ridiculous technicalities people claim bar them, except that if someone claims they're exclusive to one candidate, I will point out the controversy with respect to the other candidate. I consider the entire issue to be absurd.
But I'm surprised that you didn't know that Obama had addressed this. I mean, they started that "Fight the Smears" website just for that. You would have to live under a rock (or watch Fox News exclusively) not to know the whole story if you paid any attention to the information online.
Yeah, I listened to the actual question. But I can name at least a dozen news outlets that I read on a somewhat regular basis via Google News. She should be able to give an example. Period. If she can't, I have to believe she's hiding something. And whatever she's hiding can't be good, period. That same secrecy only lends credence to the claims made in the Wasillia email. She's also managed to unintentionally confirm several other bits of the other scandals via non-denial denials.
And we have a right to know how well-informed she is or isn't. We _should_ reject uninformed candidates. So like you said, she's trying (poorly) to hide the fact that she's not well-informed. Because anyone who is well-informed could rattle off a list with no problem. I mean, I personally have been reading the Anchorage Daily News (especially the good info on Sarah Palin from _before_ her VP days), the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired, Ars Technica, 538, Newsweek, SF Chronicle, and probably dozens of others that I don't see often enough to remember off the top of my head (I know some are websites, but that's because I get most of my news online). If you can't give a list like that, you're NOT well-informed. Period.
Frankly, I feel like she's the female version of Bush, in terms of policy, charisma and IQ. She is fairly likable, but I'm not voting for another Bush-like person and I don't care how big the R next to her name is.
Oh, and the "57" states thing? He meant to correct himself to say 47, but left out the forty. Listen to it and there's a pause there. He's not trying to hide who he is. Hell, he has an entire book about himself (which discusses the drug use mentioned in the summary) and a website filled with stuff people don't read (maybe they don't like the PDFs?). I bet he could list 20 news sources easily. Ask him sometime. And feel free to make it as big of a trap as you want.
> Funny, I was about to respond to the parent by saying that some people mistakenly think Godwin's law is an actual law.
Maybe not, but if your only argument is "he's like the Nazis!" you probably don't have much in the way of actual argument.
Unless, perhaps, you're talking about someone who used the panic following disasters to grant himself near-absolute power. But, hopefully, even that comparison will be proven invalid this January.
You know, it would also be a lot less "biased" to say that the 2003 Detroit Tigers or the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were just as good as the other sports teams. Who cares about losing a record 118 games or getting outscored 412-125?
They played hard! It's the media's fault for their biased reporting! They shouldn't report scores, they should let _US_ decide who won those seasons!
Because we can't admit that someone who can't answer the question "What magazines do you read?" without claiming that it's "gotcha journalism" is not prepared to lead anything, right? Oh, but it was a verbal gaffe, right? A gaffe that spanned several minutes. And the answer "I don't read many magazines." was somehow rejected in favor of "All of them." which made the follow-up questions asking for an example difficult. And that kind of gaffe somehow spread over three different interviews, with her getting tripped up even on Fox News.
But what do I know? I've only been a Republican my whole life. That's not long enough. I _have_ to be secretly biased against them! Avoid the media and their liberally-biased "facts" or you could turn out like me! You might accidentally vote for a Radical Liberal Christo-Muslim Terrorist Baby-Eating Commie Pinko Socialist like Obama!
Sometimes I wonder if a hack like that wouldn't be the best way to alert people to their flaws. I mean, if the vote showed that "Diebold" won with 700% of the vote...
They won't understand if you put things like that, because most of us have our own ideas about what China is like based on the news we see in our own newspapers. Most of us have never been and will never go to China, so I doubt people will understand how the Chinese see their country.
That said, I recently found a site called chinaSMACK which has helped me better understand how things are over there. Apparently, someone has enough spare time to translate random, popular blog posts and the comments on them into English. Maybe that will provide some perspective. Assuming anyone reads the information there, that is. We all know how many people like to comment without RTFA...
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> What I'm wondering is why iiNet is the *only* ISP getting sued.
Because they stood up to the studios. Rather than kicking people offline, they forwarded the complaints to the cops because they had no intention of pretending to be policemen.
The summary is inaccurate on that point: they did NOT ignore the complaints. In fact, there are police in the same building as them, so they forwarded all those complaints over to them. The fact that the police did nothing is another matter, but perfectly understandable given the kind of "evidence" they're usually supplied with, especially when there are more important crimes to prosecute.
Anyhow, the studios obviously want to make an example out of the only ISP who isn't willing to play along with their power grabs in order to convince the others to be more compliant.
> You are overlooking the fact that it is NOT the teachers responsibility to maintain the school system's IT.
And yet, this poor teacher was held responsible.
I'd rather point out things people can do to protect themselves than worry about what should've been done. If what should've been done had been done, there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
Anyhow, Win 98 is just fine, so long as you don't install crap. It doesn't have much of anything listening. So long as you don't install spyware or other crap (or use IE) you're fine. I should know. I managed on Win 98 SE for ages and I visited plenty of dangerous sites.
Sure, network based is good, but like you said: they have no IT department to speak of from the look of things.
So it's a hell of a lot easier for most people to install Firefox and one extension than to rewire the network and install new hardware.
I'm not daft. I just know that my idea is a lot more feasible for the average teacher than redoing the network.
Exactly what were the circumstances that inundated her with porno popups? Because it seems like she got a rather harsh sentence, even if she got off easy compared to the charges filed against her.
Also, this would be a good time to install Adblock Plus or a similar extension if you haven't already. Those advertisements have also been used as an infection vector to install viruses and such.
While I agree that this looks pretty harmless, what if they alter the portrait to make someone ugly?
That's not hypothetical, either. At least one TV station likes to play with photos of people they hate and doesn't appear to mention that fact.
Might want to read your own Wikipedia link about particle masses. See that table with the mass of the electron and such? See the errors listed? Being off by 102.5 standard deviations on the mass of the electron is NOT close. The proton, his BEST calculation, is "only" 94.5 standard deviations off.
There might be some interesting ideas in there, but it doesn't appear to be cutting edge. He wasn't the first to posit neutrinos with mass, either.
While you're right that people aren't automatically copying other countries' laws, you missed the point that there are tons of lobbyists involved.
They go around and try to get us to "harmonize" the laws, except that with copyright terms, they managed to get them to leapfrog each other in the past few decades, so that they could always go to more countries and ask them to "catch up."
Now, it doesn't apply as much with legal precedents, but they do use that as an argument to tell lawmakers that we need "reform" so that they can do what they did in some other country here.
These are the people who called the VCR the equivalent of the Boston Strangler. They've fought tooth-and-nail against every single bit of progress since then. They won't stop. Their jobs are at stake. They've been going obsolete for decades now, and they won't vanish without a fight.
I personally prefer to use a unique pseudonym for each thing I do. Then I can link it to my real name if there's any advantage to doing so, while keeping as much privacy as possible.
Those who have always been able to use their real name can do that only because they've never met any of the creepy stalker people online.
Free emails don't cost anything and you can forward them to a central location to sort out your identities if need be. Heck, I don't even remember how many identities I have these days...
That's not a world record! The REAL record holders are
I think you're thinking of Mary Bono (who took over Sonny's Senate seat). Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. Though Wikipedia claims that someone said Sonny wanted unconstitutional, eternal copyrights. So go figure.
IANAL, but I agree with you that the notice is defective and that they shouldn't be under any obligation due to it (nor should they be obligated by any "invoice" Toyota sends).
Frankly, I would get a real lawyer to tell them off, but it couldn't hurt to refer them to the reply given in Arkell vs Pressdam.
> OK - so you are seriously suggesting Europe is to be blamed for some weird broken US IP laws inspired by Mickey Mouse and submitted by Sonny Bono?
While the US is responsible for exporting a lot of the copyright insanity, Sonny Bono's tragedy was just an excuse for them to attach his name to the law.
It's my understanding that he would not have been a fan of it.
I just hope there are no French people who have contributed code to Shareza. I wouldn't put it past them to go looking for someone with any sort of connection to the project at all to hold accountable for the entire thing...
Then again, maybe French law is different in that regard, but these crazy litigants all seem to be the same about doing that sort of thing, no matter what country they're suing from.
Do you have contact information for the university? It would be great if you could pass that information along to them, along with all the past troubles they've had for using unlicensed investigators ...
Well, you already have room mates who share PCs. So we're pretty much already there in terms of not knowing who the actual infringer was.
And yet the RIAA still likes to claim that they have detected a "person" doing unauthorized things with copyrighted files...
> Why do "net neutrality" advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," and then trust them to regulate it?
A) Ted "Tubes" Stevens is a convicted felon who won't be in the Senate much longer (even if that count goes the other way, he'll get expelled by the Republicans and replaced by Gov. Sarah Palin).
B) There's no true competition among ISPs. If a backbone provider does this, we're screwed. Period. Full stop. You can't just stop using the backbones. That's why they're backbones. The only way we can force them to listen is with regulation.
So it's not like we want regulation per se, it's more like regulation is the only way to keep them honest. Unless you know of some other way to control the behavior of natural monopolies that doesn't require duplicating billions of dollars of infrastructure when we've already paid for it once?
But you're right. Regulation is a responsibility. We can't just let the rules grow into a huge morass. We have to be careful to come up with clear, simple restrictions like "You cannot throttle traffic based on its destination unless it's part of a DoS attack." Let customers do their own QoS. They know better than the ISP what they want to prioritize, anyhow.
> Speaking of Obama, did he ever respond to that lawsuit about his birthplace? And no, a carefully-guarded fake-looking birth certificate doesn't count unless it's brought to court as evidence.
The lawsuit went nowhere, SFAIK, because it was meritless and frivolous. There's a nice image of it on Obama's website. The State of Hawaii doesn't go around showing everybody's birth certificate to everyone else, so it's no more "secret" than anyone else's. Obama showed it directly to the Associated Press, who confirmed its authenticity. And McCain & Obama both got together to sponsor a bill saying the whole issue was nonsense for both of them. McCain, as you may remember, was born on a US Army base in Panama and the law was corrected retroactively to make it clear that he should be counted as a citizen. Most of these "issues" have been raised by people who make up crap about people every single election (the people who did the "swift boating" of John Kerry were behind many of them). It's election year politics. People come up with all kinds of nonsense and it fades after the election. You know, like that lady who claimed to have a "B" cut into her face. Until the police saw that she was obviously lying and got her to confess to a hoax (which she then blamed the media for; mind you, the story was broken by Fox News and the Drudge Report...).
In short, the whole issue was utter nonsense that too many people wasted time on. Frankly, they're both Americans and I don't really give a damn about the ridiculous technicalities people claim bar them, except that if someone claims they're exclusive to one candidate, I will point out the controversy with respect to the other candidate. I consider the entire issue to be absurd.
But I'm surprised that you didn't know that Obama had addressed this. I mean, they started that "Fight the Smears" website just for that. You would have to live under a rock (or watch Fox News exclusively) not to know the whole story if you paid any attention to the information online.
It's on Idle because this idea was invented by Shampoo.
> He did not imply the guy was anything like Hitler.
You don't list people's names next to Hitler's to imply that they're a wonderful person, you know.
Even Hitler knew that! ;-P
Yeah, I listened to the actual question. But I can name at least a dozen news outlets that I read on a somewhat regular basis via Google News. She should be able to give an example. Period. If she can't, I have to believe she's hiding something. And whatever she's hiding can't be good, period. That same secrecy only lends credence to the claims made in the Wasillia email. She's also managed to unintentionally confirm several other bits of the other scandals via non-denial denials.
And we have a right to know how well-informed she is or isn't. We _should_ reject uninformed candidates. So like you said, she's trying (poorly) to hide the fact that she's not well-informed. Because anyone who is well-informed could rattle off a list with no problem. I mean, I personally have been reading the Anchorage Daily News (especially the good info on Sarah Palin from _before_ her VP days), the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired, Ars Technica, 538, Newsweek, SF Chronicle, and probably dozens of others that I don't see often enough to remember off the top of my head (I know some are websites, but that's because I get most of my news online). If you can't give a list like that, you're NOT well-informed. Period.
Frankly, I feel like she's the female version of Bush, in terms of policy, charisma and IQ. She is fairly likable, but I'm not voting for another Bush-like person and I don't care how big the R next to her name is.
Oh, and the "57" states thing? He meant to correct himself to say 47, but left out the forty. Listen to it and there's a pause there. He's not trying to hide who he is. Hell, he has an entire book about himself (which discusses the drug use mentioned in the summary) and a website filled with stuff people don't read (maybe they don't like the PDFs?). I bet he could list 20 news sources easily. Ask him sometime. And feel free to make it as big of a trap as you want.
Obama can take the heat. Palin can't.
> Funny, I was about to respond to the parent by saying that some people mistakenly think Godwin's law is an actual law.
Maybe not, but if your only argument is "he's like the Nazis!" you probably don't have much in the way of actual argument.
Unless, perhaps, you're talking about someone who used the panic following disasters to grant himself near-absolute power. But, hopefully, even that comparison will be proven invalid this January.
You know, it would also be a lot less "biased" to say that the 2003 Detroit Tigers or the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were just as good as the other sports teams. Who cares about losing a record 118 games or getting outscored 412-125?
They played hard! It's the media's fault for their biased reporting! They shouldn't report scores, they should let _US_ decide who won those seasons!
Because we can't admit that someone who can't answer the question "What magazines do you read?" without claiming that it's "gotcha journalism" is not prepared to lead anything, right? Oh, but it was a verbal gaffe, right? A gaffe that spanned several minutes. And the answer "I don't read many magazines." was somehow rejected in favor of "All of them." which made the follow-up questions asking for an example difficult. And that kind of gaffe somehow spread over three different interviews, with her getting tripped up even on Fox News.
But what do I know? I've only been a Republican my whole life. That's not long enough. I _have_ to be secretly biased against them! Avoid the media and their liberally-biased "facts" or you could turn out like me! You might accidentally vote for a Radical Liberal Christo-Muslim Terrorist Baby-Eating Commie Pinko Socialist like Obama!
Sometimes I wonder if a hack like that wouldn't be the best way to alert people to their flaws. I mean, if the vote showed that "Diebold" won with 700% of the vote...
Either way, you still need a czar in there somewhere. And I'd rather it not be a former RIAA leader.
Hillary Rosen is entirely too available and politically active. I'd be leery of someone with strong MAFIAA connections in that office.
They won't understand if you put things like that, because most of us have our own ideas about what China is like based on the news we see in our own newspapers. Most of us have never been and will never go to China, so I doubt people will understand how the Chinese see their country.
That said, I recently found a site called chinaSMACK which has helped me better understand how things are over there. Apparently, someone has enough spare time to translate random, popular blog posts and the comments on them into English. Maybe that will provide some perspective. Assuming anyone reads the information there, that is. We all know how many people like to comment without RTFA...