Sorry, but that's retarded. It's like saying you don't have to return a company laptop when you're fired if they forget to take it from your office before they throw you out of the building.
Just because your job is over doesn't mean you are allowed to hold on to things that do not belong to you. These aren't his passwords and it's not his network. It never was, despite what he obviously thinks in his little mind, but it certainly isn't anymore.
I think this is more likely protection against hacking (which is much safer) or a gigantic mistake. Always good to ask the question "If everything fails, how are we going to rebuild it?" That's what this is.
Eh, maybe. That's perfectly reasonable of course, and they should have exactly that planning. But they're taking some strange precautions if that's all they're guarding against. Why physically separate the cards? That's just going to make any effort to restore after a gigantic mistake take even longer, which is highly undesirable. Why not a few safes, or a few safety deposit boxes or some such? "Hey Bill. We fucked up, we need your combination" is much faster than "we need you to fly down here." Especially if it's really some sort of disaster situation that destroyed the facilities to begin with, and it still limits the damage one rogue individual could do.
So the facility housing the cards could blow up -- fair enough. Two copies. Three. Twelve. Backups of the backups, so to speak. Have one set of copies per facility. Now if something happens to both sets, we really are talking some epic disaster or conspiratorial plot. And if not, again, so much easier to get things back on track.
Please remember that vast kidnapping conspiracies and so on require a lot of people acting in concert. That is hard to keep hidden.
Perhaps. And yet a number of frankly more complicated various terrorist attacks have succeeded, especially when they take place somewhere we're not expecting. It would be much harder to kidnap these people as some sort of blackmail plot, of course, but for anybody who's content with the damage they caused being reward enough, who wants you to panic and spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop them from doing it again, it's much easier. How many billions did the US spend after 9/11? How many more billions were lost as the entire airline industry almost went under from sheer, baseless panic? It's not like the hijackers got rich; actually they got dead. Their damage was their reward.
Seven cards on seven guys takes, oh, about seven bullets. Doesn't even have to be the same time, though it's obviously easier if it is. How hard is that, really? Send some guys out, give them a date -- or hell, just tell them to keep CNN on until they see news that the facilities just got blown up. It would take some extra work to figure out where they keep the cards, I suppose, but the average person is going to keep them in a handful of potential locations. And even if you don't get it, you still greatly delay the rebuilding process.
The facilities themselves are the bigger trick. I know nothing about them so I can't even posit a guess as to how hard they might be to destroy in any meaningful way.
What happens is the governments send in hundreds of heavily armed, highly trained, soldiers that will kill or capture anyone who is involved, or perhaps just as likely simply destroys the building they are in with a well placed smart bomb from a bomber you cannot see.
Which is, no doubt, exactly what would happen. But that didn't deter bin Laden, did it? Nor did it catch him. Oh, we toppled a few governments who may or may not have been actually involved in ANY tangible way (much less directly with what happened) because, well, we like to blow shit up when something bad happens and governments and buildings and things we can clearly see from satellites are nice, easy targets. But the people who did it, by and large, have escaped.
Blackmail is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but again, people who consider the damage they cause to be payment enough are an entirely different story. The majority of this post-9/11 stuff is security theater not because it's an inappropriate thing to try or even because of how much we spend relative to the actual risks, it's theater because of how ridic
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think it's more of an aggravating factor than a cose. Actually I think the rise in tuition is due to the idea we're increasingly adopting that everybody must go to college. I remember my barber telling a story--this would have been about 10 years ago now--about his daughter interviewing for some positions and being shocked that even secretarial positions were beginning to require bachelor's degrees. (If I remember right she did have one, so the shock wasn't indignation as much as WTF?) They're even trying to convince people that being a mechanic is something you're going to need to go to a two-year school for.
Demand skyrocketed, but the supply is roughly the same -- meaning prices will also jump. But it also means capital expenditures (new dorms, new classroom buildings, new facilities, possibly land, etc) as well as hiring extra faculty and everything else that goes along with a larger student body, all of which are going to be reflected in prices as well.
Now, you're not entirely wrong. Ordinarily schools would have to weigh the supply/demand curve for their price increases. IE, does the extra money they're going to make per student offset the amount they'll lose from students who can no longer afford their school? With essentially unlimited student loans at low interest rates, combined with the societal pressure to attend, it becomes essentially a non-factor. Very few people anywhere will go "well $40,000 in debt for a four-year was okay but $50,000 -- fuck it, I'm not going to school." And there's somebody out there who will give them the money.
Combine the two and, well, why wouldn't tuition continue to skyrocket?
That doesn't mean it's not worth occasionally reiterating, especially when there's a specific reason to believe there may be an increased chance of something happening.
It's not like they're spending millions of dollars to defend it or something, just sending a few emails.
That individual probably copied the site, changed the style, dropped in new blurb and went on his merry way.
Did you look at the screenshots? They didn't even do that much. All they did was change the way it worked. The first site apparently sends you what it calls a case number and a password, while the ripoff sends only a Defendant Record ID. And they don't offer live chat, apparently, since they removed that button too (*snicker*).
What it looks like to me is somebody stole the entire website, including images, but forgot the CSS. The text on the copy is all default text (Times New Roman), the spacing on some graphics is off, etc. There's even a Verisign logo on one site that is conspicuously missing on the ripoff site. I don't know how it works specifically, but I wonder if the URL to the image checks the referrer.
That said, disbarment seems a bit much. I do wish they would get their asses sued rather than just sent a C&D though. What goes around comes around and all that. I'm sure the Copyright Enforcement Group will be happy to let them settle for a nominal fee.
Fact is, nothing remotely close to 99% of DS customers use R4s to infringe copyright
Do you have some data to back this up, or just some sort of gut feeling? When you say something like "fact is" I would actually expect you to have some facts to share, and I'm tempted to throw your own comment about corrections having more reach back in your face if that's not the case.
99% is probably high; it sounds hyperbolic to me. But 85-90% wouldn't shock me in the least. It's semantic at that point whether it is "[any]thing remotely close" to 99%. Or whether it matters even if it isn't, since it is such a substantial proportion.
There may well be more than 10-15% of users out there who use it for homebrew, but that doesn't mean they don't also pirate content.
The company field should not contain the company name?
The problem is obviously differences between Java distributions, or developers wouldn't bother polling the company field to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with what Oracle did. In fact, the Eclipse people should have seen it coming since just about every company re-brands things after an acquisition. It's not worthy of a story, much less one blaming Oracle.
I wouldn't say it changes things, but it does greatly complicate them.
Person A is in Germany. Exposes himself to Person B in the UK over Chatroulette, hosted in the US*. Where was the crime committed? Who prosecutes? Even if it were unequivical whose jurisdiction it is, indecent exposure is typically a misdemeanor. Is anybody really going to go through the hassle and expense of charging this person? Are they going to try to extradite for it? Because I'm not sure it's even legally possible, much less likely or worthwhile.
Person A is in South Carolina, exposes himself to Person B in Idaho over US-hosted service located in California. Woohoo! It's a US problem! Except... erp. It went over state lines, is it a federal problem? I don't think there is a federal indecency law that applies here (unless one party is a minor or something), so even if that were the case I don't think it gets anything done. Is it South Carolina's problem? Idaho's? California's?
The simplest but rarest case: Person A exposes to B over the service. All are in California. Sweet. So now it goes to court in... shit, what county? Okay, okay, they consult their laws and decide. You're back to step one: Is it really worth the time and expense to investigate, hash out the legal issues, try and convict this person? And what do you do when there just happens to be two men living in the house the IP + ISP logs point you to, since that's as close as you can get? "Excuse me sir. I'm going to need you to pop an erection and whip out your junk so we can compare to the video."
What happens when it does not actually constitute a crime in one of the jurisdictions? Are we really going to try to prosecute somebody for something that isn't illegal according to what they know?
Like I said, it doesn't change things -- it's a crime (or not) either way. But it greatly complicates the procedure, possibly beyond the point where it is worth pursuing.
* I don't know where it is actually hosted and it doesn't matter to the point I'm trying to make.
It's international waters. Very few laws at all apply.
These anti-whalers are essentially pirates. They have rammed these other boats as well as tried to board them or otherwise sabotage them. If it were me, and these twats tried any of that, I would shoot them. And not with a heat gun.
That is done by my browser, and the information stays on my browser. My browser doesn't (up to now) send mouseover events to a server and have the server read those and serve me content based on it. The HTML/javascript reacts in pre-arranged ways when the event happens, nothing more. No data leaves my computer.
That's only half true. As a web developer, I have never personally developed any sort of mouse tracking software but I can tell you unequivocally that I could easily register a listener for mouse move (move, not hover or click which are both also possible) events and fire an AJAX request (or similar) to myself to log it. If I did it right I could re-create your entire experience with my page in terms of where you moved, when, in what order. In fact I can guarantee you there are sites doing this to some extent right now.
This could be blocked by something like NoScript, of course. I don't know if Google's proposed solution is similar, but suggesting that the current state of things has no data leaving your computer is not accurate. In fact your entire quote is only accurate if somebody has either gone out of their way to prevent such things from working, or somebody has chosen not to do it. I have seen links that you mouse over and get advertisements for. It's rudimentary and rather sucktastic, but it exists. The only limitation is each website has to do it or install something that does.
However just visiting a page, with no warning that I am going to be "tracked", does not imply consent to be "tracked". I have indicated a desire to visit a page, nothing more.
Don't worry, they'll bury it in the terms of service somewhere.
Routinely, eh? Then surely you can provide a citation delving into what percentage of protests end in police intervention more than a simple arrest of a person or persons acting in a clearly illegal manner? How many times tear gas has been fired at protesters in, say, the last decade? How many times rubber bullets were fired?
There's an awful lot of paperwork involved with such things, so surely you must have this information since you're comfortable characterizing its frequency.
Or you're making something that happens rarely sound, ahem, "routine" in order to bolster a silly claim?
Eagerly waiting to find out which. So suspenseful!
Does it matter? The criticisms are valid or not. If they are invalid, discredit them on their merits. If they are, why should I care if the criticizer's motives are truth and fairness or discrediting an organization they hate?
If you COPY a DVD for ANY purpose (other than the temporary copy in memory sort of a thing) and by any methods you have committed copyright infringement. You made a copy. The ruling has nothing to do with fair use whatsoever; it's an entirely separate matter. In fact, this exact case had a judgment against GE for its actions that was upheld.
GE had a contract to use something for a certain period of time and bypassed protection to use it longer. There are no more copies than they were authorized to have (or at least that has not been accused), they simply broke their contract terms. The judge said that since what they did was not copyright infringement, DMCA circumvention could not apply. It's roughly akin to cracking a shareware program. You're not making copies so it's not a DMCA issue, but that doesn't mean what you did was fair use or legal either.
What this seems to do is make something like DeCSS on Linux platforms--pulling out copy protection but not actually creating another copy--not a DMCA violation for use. It's not as clear on whether or not it is still a DMCA "trafficing" violation to distribute it.
I feel bad replying to a troll at all, but you're dreaming about the "start packing your bags" stuff.
I remember a story a few years ago saying congressional approval levels are always dismally low and yet historically about 90% of congressmen are re-elected. Why? Because the majority of people absolutely hate Congress but think their personal representatives are doing a pretty good job. Even in the Democrats' "sweeping victory" in the 2008 elections when everybody was beyond fed up with Bush and the Republicans, only 31 (voting) seats changed hands in the US House of Representatives. For those who don't know American politics, all 435 voting seats were up for re-election. 92.18% re-election rate. That's not to say there wasn't a strong consequence, of course, since the Democrats became the majority party in both houses and controlled the White House -- but it's still a small amount of change overall.
I wish I could find a source, but I honestly don't even know what I'd be searching for since "Congressional approval ratings" obviously won't get the job done. The data from the 2008 election was from Wikipedia.
I don't disagree with you, but if you plan to buy a game or more per month that you're going to download, maybe the Lite plan isn't for you. You're not exactly a light user at that point. Of course that will shift as time goes on since it's not like this Internet thing is going away, and I still think it's sleazy to be reducing limits at all (what, did bandwidth suddenly spike in price?) much less the timing of it.
I once read that the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team doesn't have a payroll budget per se; rather, they have a three-year budget. In years where it doesn't feel they have a chance to contend, they dump salaries and save as much money as possible for the next years. If they feel they have a chance, they're relatively free to add payroll for the run. It also allows them to plan ahead. If they spent $X in year one, $X + $30MM in year two then they know exactly what their budget is going to be in year three. Then they re-evaluate and set a new three-year budget.
I'd like to see ISPs adopt a similar approach. I DO think there are legitimate reasons for even a Lite user to occasionally exceed their cap and $4/GB overage is fairly harsh to me. If they're doing it all the time, the Lite plan isn't for them and they need to either upgrade or deal with the costs. But if the download window was 45G/3 months instead, for example, there's some forgiveness baked in. Maybe you use 5G/mo on average, well within the plan, but you occasionally do buy that Steam game that eats up your entire limit in one fell swoop. 5GB + 25GB + 5GB still puts you under the cap with no overages, rather than "you ripped yourself off" + "you owe us $40" + "you ripped yourself off."
Of course that's bad for the ISPs' bottom lines in general, doesn't allow them to game their capacity so much because it actually encourages users to at least occasionally use their limits, and it doesn't help them to, you know, suppress competition to their addon services so I don't see it happening. It would be quite fair, though.
What Google is in fact saying is that Chrome is a very immature browser with a very immature feature set, and they are wiling to sacrifice everything else that once made Chrome a legitimate browser in an effort to make it buzzword compliant.
So Chrome is an immature browser with an immature feature set and yet a legitimate browser. But if they want to increase the maturity of the feature set "to make it buzzword compliant" that will be sacrificing everything? Does this compute to anybody?
Sometimes new features are just bloat, and they end up bad. That doesn't mean that new features are automatically bad, and it surely doesn't mean that their versioning scheme has anything at all to do with its quality.
Chrome is "legitimate" (whatever that means) or not on its own merits, not how often they release or what version number they attach to such releases. And frankly, if it's a "sleazy PR ploy" the only reason for it is that it works. If people truly believe Chrome is worse than Safari 5 or IE 8 just because of the version number why is it "sleazy" to take that excuse away and force people to actually evaluate the browser on its merits?
Government--the most corrupt organization in the world--is somehow going to be more neutral than a private organization that is beholden to customer satisfaction?
No, but you're begging the question when you say ISPs are beholden to customer satisfaction. The reality is that the truly lucky people may have three choices for their ISP; most probably have two, and if you get too far from an office you may very well have one. They're oligopolies, and they don't operate on the same rules as other free market participants. "Customer satisfaction" is a small factor. They can piss you off just less than it would take you to decide you don't need Internet access and that's about it.
On top of that, an ISP should absolutely be allowed to decide how its network is run and what traffic goes across it. Internet access isn't a constitutional right.
So what if Internet access isn't a constitutional right? Some people want to make it a legal right instead. As far as "an ISP should absolutely be allowed to decide how its network is run" -- why? "Their network" has been heavily subsidized by tax dollars and continues to be subsidized by taxes on our bills. It uses public lands to run its cables, and it has become a public necessity as much as telephones were decades ago. If we decide that the price for all of that is that they are not allowed to discriminate against traffic based on source or destination, they can just suck it up. It's an extremely reasonable demand, the lack of which could cause severe economic harm to non-ISPs using the Internet for money.
The only argument you seem to have other than "this is how I want it so you should too!" is that groups like the RIAA will try to game the system. Of course they will. There's nothing stopping them from trying to do the exact same things right now, only right now they can also try to influence the ISPs themselves--increasingly the owners of content they are giving access to--on top of the government. We're more vulnerable to their meddling now than we would be with a sensible net neutrality law.
Trusting a corporation to fairness over profits is pure folly. I'd rather take my chances with a well-crafted law.
And if typical usage of a blender involved sticking your hand into the spinning blades, you would have a valid point. Since it doesn't your comment was neither funny nor insightful. I hope it was just a bad joke and not more rampant Apple fanboism, because that shit is getting old.
There is, if the judge actually rules it frivolous -- and there can be some pretty nasty penalties for the lawyer on top of the fine. However it almost never happens. You have to really be a fuckup to get a judge to make that ruling.
As silly as this case would be, I don't think they're wrong. Having a copy for a good purpose is still having a copy, and that's what copyright is all about. Even if it would be ruled fair use, fair use is an affirmative defense meaning you technically did do what you're accused of but you have a reason so good that you shouldn't be punished.
Don't get me wrong: The very thought of simultaneously suing somebody for not stopping infringement and having a copy to try to stop infringement makes my skin crawl. But if they're technically right under the law, or even if there is a reasonable question as to whether they are technically right under the law, I don't think it can (or should) be called frivolous.
Well, it is certainly on the silly side and the money-grubbing-greedy-bitch side as well. But legally speaking, aren't they correct? Especially if they really were holding an entire copy of the work for their filter?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem to me like they actually need to hold a full copy of the work to do their filtering. Can't they just take a random sampling of phrases and search for those, or something else entirely?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but that's retarded. It's like saying you don't have to return a company laptop when you're fired if they forget to take it from your office before they throw you out of the building.
Just because your job is over doesn't mean you are allowed to hold on to things that do not belong to you. These aren't his passwords and it's not his network. It never was, despite what he obviously thinks in his little mind, but it certainly isn't anymore.
Eh, maybe. That's perfectly reasonable of course, and they should have exactly that planning. But they're taking some strange precautions if that's all they're guarding against. Why physically separate the cards? That's just going to make any effort to restore after a gigantic mistake take even longer, which is highly undesirable. Why not a few safes, or a few safety deposit boxes or some such? "Hey Bill. We fucked up, we need your combination" is much faster than "we need you to fly down here." Especially if it's really some sort of disaster situation that destroyed the facilities to begin with, and it still limits the damage one rogue individual could do.
So the facility housing the cards could blow up -- fair enough. Two copies. Three. Twelve. Backups of the backups, so to speak. Have one set of copies per facility. Now if something happens to both sets, we really are talking some epic disaster or conspiratorial plot. And if not, again, so much easier to get things back on track.
Perhaps. And yet a number of frankly more complicated various terrorist attacks have succeeded, especially when they take place somewhere we're not expecting. It would be much harder to kidnap these people as some sort of blackmail plot, of course, but for anybody who's content with the damage they caused being reward enough, who wants you to panic and spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop them from doing it again, it's much easier. How many billions did the US spend after 9/11? How many more billions were lost as the entire airline industry almost went under from sheer, baseless panic? It's not like the hijackers got rich; actually they got dead. Their damage was their reward.
Seven cards on seven guys takes, oh, about seven bullets. Doesn't even have to be the same time, though it's obviously easier if it is. How hard is that, really? Send some guys out, give them a date -- or hell, just tell them to keep CNN on until they see news that the facilities just got blown up. It would take some extra work to figure out where they keep the cards, I suppose, but the average person is going to keep them in a handful of potential locations. And even if you don't get it, you still greatly delay the rebuilding process.
The facilities themselves are the bigger trick. I know nothing about them so I can't even posit a guess as to how hard they might be to destroy in any meaningful way.
Which is, no doubt, exactly what would happen. But that didn't deter bin Laden, did it? Nor did it catch him. Oh, we toppled a few governments who may or may not have been actually involved in ANY tangible way (much less directly with what happened) because, well, we like to blow shit up when something bad happens and governments and buildings and things we can clearly see from satellites are nice, easy targets. But the people who did it, by and large, have escaped.
Blackmail is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but again, people who consider the damage they cause to be payment enough are an entirely different story. The majority of this post-9/11 stuff is security theater not because it's an inappropriate thing to try or even because of how much we spend relative to the actual risks, it's theater because of how ridic
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think it's more of an aggravating factor than a cose. Actually I think the rise in tuition is due to the idea we're increasingly adopting that everybody must go to college. I remember my barber telling a story--this would have been about 10 years ago now--about his daughter interviewing for some positions and being shocked that even secretarial positions were beginning to require bachelor's degrees. (If I remember right she did have one, so the shock wasn't indignation as much as WTF?) They're even trying to convince people that being a mechanic is something you're going to need to go to a two-year school for.
Demand skyrocketed, but the supply is roughly the same -- meaning prices will also jump. But it also means capital expenditures (new dorms, new classroom buildings, new facilities, possibly land, etc) as well as hiring extra faculty and everything else that goes along with a larger student body, all of which are going to be reflected in prices as well.
Now, you're not entirely wrong. Ordinarily schools would have to weigh the supply/demand curve for their price increases. IE, does the extra money they're going to make per student offset the amount they'll lose from students who can no longer afford their school? With essentially unlimited student loans at low interest rates, combined with the societal pressure to attend, it becomes essentially a non-factor. Very few people anywhere will go "well $40,000 in debt for a four-year was okay but $50,000 -- fuck it, I'm not going to school." And there's somebody out there who will give them the money.
Combine the two and, well, why wouldn't tuition continue to skyrocket?
That doesn't mean it's not worth occasionally reiterating, especially when there's a specific reason to believe there may be an increased chance of something happening.
It's not like they're spending millions of dollars to defend it or something, just sending a few emails.
While I agree that somebody not selling a product to willing customers is stupid, you're just wrong.
Promoting the progress of science and the useful arts is about getting things made, not getting things exposed.
Did you look at the screenshots? They didn't even do that much. All they did was change the way it worked. The first site apparently sends you what it calls a case number and a password, while the ripoff sends only a Defendant Record ID. And they don't offer live chat, apparently, since they removed that button too (*snicker*).
What it looks like to me is somebody stole the entire website, including images, but forgot the CSS. The text on the copy is all default text (Times New Roman), the spacing on some graphics is off, etc. There's even a Verisign logo on one site that is conspicuously missing on the ripoff site. I don't know how it works specifically, but I wonder if the URL to the image checks the referrer.
That said, disbarment seems a bit much. I do wish they would get their asses sued rather than just sent a C&D though. What goes around comes around and all that. I'm sure the Copyright Enforcement Group will be happy to let them settle for a nominal fee.
Only on Slashdot can a $100,000-$150,000 salary be described as "[having] their blood sucked from them." Wow.
Do you have some data to back this up, or just some sort of gut feeling? When you say something like "fact is" I would actually expect you to have some facts to share, and I'm tempted to throw your own comment about corrections having more reach back in your face if that's not the case.
99% is probably high; it sounds hyperbolic to me. But 85-90% wouldn't shock me in the least. It's semantic at that point whether it is "[any]thing remotely close" to 99%. Or whether it matters even if it isn't, since it is such a substantial proportion.
There may well be more than 10-15% of users out there who use it for homebrew, but that doesn't mean they don't also pirate content.
The company field should not contain the company name?
The problem is obviously differences between Java distributions, or developers wouldn't bother polling the company field to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with what Oracle did. In fact, the Eclipse people should have seen it coming since just about every company re-brands things after an acquisition. It's not worthy of a story, much less one blaming Oracle.
Neither are you, if half of your post and all of another are about how to get away with it.
That's not making a stand. That's vandalism. You want to make a stand? Commit the crime -- then pay the penalty.
I wouldn't say it changes things, but it does greatly complicate them.
Person A is in Germany. Exposes himself to Person B in the UK over Chatroulette, hosted in the US*. Where was the crime committed? Who prosecutes? Even if it were unequivical whose jurisdiction it is, indecent exposure is typically a misdemeanor. Is anybody really going to go through the hassle and expense of charging this person? Are they going to try to extradite for it? Because I'm not sure it's even legally possible, much less likely or worthwhile.
Person A is in South Carolina, exposes himself to Person B in Idaho over US-hosted service located in California. Woohoo! It's a US problem! Except... erp. It went over state lines, is it a federal problem? I don't think there is a federal indecency law that applies here (unless one party is a minor or something), so even if that were the case I don't think it gets anything done. Is it South Carolina's problem? Idaho's? California's?
The simplest but rarest case: Person A exposes to B over the service. All are in California. Sweet. So now it goes to court in... shit, what county? Okay, okay, they consult their laws and decide. You're back to step one: Is it really worth the time and expense to investigate, hash out the legal issues, try and convict this person? And what do you do when there just happens to be two men living in the house the IP + ISP logs point you to, since that's as close as you can get? "Excuse me sir. I'm going to need you to pop an erection and whip out your junk so we can compare to the video."
What happens when it does not actually constitute a crime in one of the jurisdictions? Are we really going to try to prosecute somebody for something that isn't illegal according to what they know?
Like I said, it doesn't change things -- it's a crime (or not) either way. But it greatly complicates the procedure, possibly beyond the point where it is worth pursuing.
* I don't know where it is actually hosted and it doesn't matter to the point I'm trying to make.
It's international waters. Very few laws at all apply.
These anti-whalers are essentially pirates. They have rammed these other boats as well as tried to board them or otherwise sabotage them. If it were me, and these twats tried any of that, I would shoot them. And not with a heat gun.
And you know what? I would sleep fine at night.
That's only half true. As a web developer, I have never personally developed any sort of mouse tracking software but I can tell you unequivocally that I could easily register a listener for mouse move (move, not hover or click which are both also possible) events and fire an AJAX request (or similar) to myself to log it. If I did it right I could re-create your entire experience with my page in terms of where you moved, when, in what order. In fact I can guarantee you there are sites doing this to some extent right now.
This could be blocked by something like NoScript, of course. I don't know if Google's proposed solution is similar, but suggesting that the current state of things has no data leaving your computer is not accurate. In fact your entire quote is only accurate if somebody has either gone out of their way to prevent such things from working, or somebody has chosen not to do it. I have seen links that you mouse over and get advertisements for. It's rudimentary and rather sucktastic, but it exists. The only limitation is each website has to do it or install something that does.
Don't worry, they'll bury it in the terms of service somewhere.
Routinely, eh? Then surely you can provide a citation delving into what percentage of protests end in police intervention more than a simple arrest of a person or persons acting in a clearly illegal manner? How many times tear gas has been fired at protesters in, say, the last decade? How many times rubber bullets were fired?
There's an awful lot of paperwork involved with such things, so surely you must have this information since you're comfortable characterizing its frequency.
Or you're making something that happens rarely sound, ahem, "routine" in order to bolster a silly claim?
Eagerly waiting to find out which. So suspenseful!
Oh, I don't know. I seem to remember the Romans running roughshod over half the world.
Does it matter? The criticisms are valid or not. If they are invalid, discredit them on their merits. If they are, why should I care if the criticizer's motives are truth and fairness or discrediting an organization they hate?
If you COPY a DVD for ANY purpose (other than the temporary copy in memory sort of a thing) and by any methods you have committed copyright infringement. You made a copy. The ruling has nothing to do with fair use whatsoever; it's an entirely separate matter. In fact, this exact case had a judgment against GE for its actions that was upheld.
GE had a contract to use something for a certain period of time and bypassed protection to use it longer. There are no more copies than they were authorized to have (or at least that has not been accused), they simply broke their contract terms. The judge said that since what they did was not copyright infringement, DMCA circumvention could not apply. It's roughly akin to cracking a shareware program. You're not making copies so it's not a DMCA issue, but that doesn't mean what you did was fair use or legal either.
What this seems to do is make something like DeCSS on Linux platforms--pulling out copy protection but not actually creating another copy--not a DMCA violation for use. It's not as clear on whether or not it is still a DMCA "trafficing" violation to distribute it.
I feel bad replying to a troll at all, but you're dreaming about the "start packing your bags" stuff.
I remember a story a few years ago saying congressional approval levels are always dismally low and yet historically about 90% of congressmen are re-elected. Why? Because the majority of people absolutely hate Congress but think their personal representatives are doing a pretty good job. Even in the Democrats' "sweeping victory" in the 2008 elections when everybody was beyond fed up with Bush and the Republicans, only 31 (voting) seats changed hands in the US House of Representatives. For those who don't know American politics, all 435 voting seats were up for re-election. 92.18% re-election rate. That's not to say there wasn't a strong consequence, of course, since the Democrats became the majority party in both houses and controlled the White House -- but it's still a small amount of change overall.
I wish I could find a source, but I honestly don't even know what I'd be searching for since "Congressional approval ratings" obviously won't get the job done. The data from the 2008 election was from Wikipedia.
I don't disagree with you, but if you plan to buy a game or more per month that you're going to download, maybe the Lite plan isn't for you. You're not exactly a light user at that point. Of course that will shift as time goes on since it's not like this Internet thing is going away, and I still think it's sleazy to be reducing limits at all (what, did bandwidth suddenly spike in price?) much less the timing of it.
I once read that the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team doesn't have a payroll budget per se; rather, they have a three-year budget. In years where it doesn't feel they have a chance to contend, they dump salaries and save as much money as possible for the next years. If they feel they have a chance, they're relatively free to add payroll for the run. It also allows them to plan ahead. If they spent $X in year one, $X + $30MM in year two then they know exactly what their budget is going to be in year three. Then they re-evaluate and set a new three-year budget.
I'd like to see ISPs adopt a similar approach. I DO think there are legitimate reasons for even a Lite user to occasionally exceed their cap and $4/GB overage is fairly harsh to me. If they're doing it all the time, the Lite plan isn't for them and they need to either upgrade or deal with the costs. But if the download window was 45G/3 months instead, for example, there's some forgiveness baked in. Maybe you use 5G/mo on average, well within the plan, but you occasionally do buy that Steam game that eats up your entire limit in one fell swoop. 5GB + 25GB + 5GB still puts you under the cap with no overages, rather than "you ripped yourself off" + "you owe us $40" + "you ripped yourself off."
Of course that's bad for the ISPs' bottom lines in general, doesn't allow them to game their capacity so much because it actually encourages users to at least occasionally use their limits, and it doesn't help them to, you know, suppress competition to their addon services so I don't see it happening. It would be quite fair, though.
So Chrome is an immature browser with an immature feature set and yet a legitimate browser. But if they want to increase the maturity of the feature set "to make it buzzword compliant" that will be sacrificing everything? Does this compute to anybody?
Sometimes new features are just bloat, and they end up bad. That doesn't mean that new features are automatically bad, and it surely doesn't mean that their versioning scheme has anything at all to do with its quality.
Chrome is "legitimate" (whatever that means) or not on its own merits, not how often they release or what version number they attach to such releases. And frankly, if it's a "sleazy PR ploy" the only reason for it is that it works. If people truly believe Chrome is worse than Safari 5 or IE 8 just because of the version number why is it "sleazy" to take that excuse away and force people to actually evaluate the browser on its merits?
No, but you're begging the question when you say ISPs are beholden to customer satisfaction. The reality is that the truly lucky people may have three choices for their ISP; most probably have two, and if you get too far from an office you may very well have one. They're oligopolies, and they don't operate on the same rules as other free market participants. "Customer satisfaction" is a small factor. They can piss you off just less than it would take you to decide you don't need Internet access and that's about it.
So what if Internet access isn't a constitutional right? Some people want to make it a legal right instead. As far as "an ISP should absolutely be allowed to decide how its network is run" -- why? "Their network" has been heavily subsidized by tax dollars and continues to be subsidized by taxes on our bills. It uses public lands to run its cables, and it has become a public necessity as much as telephones were decades ago. If we decide that the price for all of that is that they are not allowed to discriminate against traffic based on source or destination, they can just suck it up. It's an extremely reasonable demand, the lack of which could cause severe economic harm to non-ISPs using the Internet for money.
The only argument you seem to have other than "this is how I want it so you should too!" is that groups like the RIAA will try to game the system. Of course they will. There's nothing stopping them from trying to do the exact same things right now, only right now they can also try to influence the ISPs themselves--increasingly the owners of content they are giving access to--on top of the government. We're more vulnerable to their meddling now than we would be with a sensible net neutrality law.
Trusting a corporation to fairness over profits is pure folly. I'd rather take my chances with a well-crafted law.
And if typical usage of a blender involved sticking your hand into the spinning blades, you would have a valid point. Since it doesn't your comment was neither funny nor insightful. I hope it was just a bad joke and not more rampant Apple fanboism, because that shit is getting old.
There is, if the judge actually rules it frivolous -- and there can be some pretty nasty penalties for the lawyer on top of the fine. However it almost never happens. You have to really be a fuckup to get a judge to make that ruling.
As silly as this case would be, I don't think they're wrong. Having a copy for a good purpose is still having a copy, and that's what copyright is all about. Even if it would be ruled fair use, fair use is an affirmative defense meaning you technically did do what you're accused of but you have a reason so good that you shouldn't be punished.
Don't get me wrong: The very thought of simultaneously suing somebody for not stopping infringement and having a copy to try to stop infringement makes my skin crawl. But if they're technically right under the law, or even if there is a reasonable question as to whether they are technically right under the law, I don't think it can (or should) be called frivolous.
I know it was an attempt at a joke, but prior art has nothing to do with copyright -- just patents.
Well, it is certainly on the silly side and the money-grubbing-greedy-bitch side as well. But legally speaking, aren't they correct? Especially if they really were holding an entire copy of the work for their filter?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem to me like they actually need to hold a full copy of the work to do their filtering. Can't they just take a random sampling of phrases and search for those, or something else entirely?