It's not a very profitable business [. ..] They have substantial revenue ($127 million), but their operating costs and compensation eat up almost all of that.
Profitable for whom? I wouldn't invest in such a stock, but a glance through their proxy statement indicates that their CEO was paid salary of $50,000 (which he wanted held at that "historical" rate). Two other members of the board were paid $135,000 and $95,000, respectively. The salaries for those two executives for next year were raised to $255,000 and $200,000. They were also awarded $562,000 and $686,000 in stock option to this date. I may be reading some of these things wrong, but it seems correct.
So... it's quite profitable for the board of directors at the very least. I doubt this company has a ton of low-level employees (I could probably find that in the docs but am too lazy!), so there's definitely profit going on for those involved. Just not a lot of extra bucks to be shared with investors.
Meh. You're really making too much of it in this case.
I don't understand cheating in games such as, say, Counterstrike or America's Army. The whole point of the game there is: how good are you? Can you beat the other guy? I simply can't understand what the fun is in using aimbots or firing cheats or whatever.
For the most part, WOW isn't that. If people enjoy playing more if they don't have to worry so much about gold, I really don't care that much. It may have a minor effect on prices in the auction house, but neither my brother nor I have seen any notable fluctuations that stayed up. It's really more supply-and-demand (how many of this item are there?) than a factor of how much gold people have in their pockets.
Cheating really only affects me as a player if I chose to do PvP, in which case what do I really care if I'm slaughtered by somebody who bought their levels instead of getting them the hard way? I'll never know, and I'm still dead.
The point is, there is no "win" in WOW. I don't think there's a "win" in any MMPORPG, because the whole point of them is to keep them going. They're a grind. If somebody wants to trade some real money for some in-game money to enjoy it more, it's just not a big deal to me.
The spam I could do without, but I installed SpamSentry a couple weeks back and that's pretty much enough.
but the roads don't get built by themselves, and the cops don't protect your house for free. The money has to come from somewhere.
That's true, and I think most people wouldn't necessarily argue with collecting same taxes.
But haven't we been building roads and hiring police for decades? Why do they need more money all of the sudden? We pay federal income taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes in many jurisdictions. We pay consumption taxes and use taxes and many places still have the balls to even have toll booths on their major roads despite all of that. There are property taxes and estate taxes and capital gains taxes. Taxes on businesses before the money makes it to a person who is then taxed. There are taxes that they pretend aren't really taxes, like filing fees for starting a business. At my house we pay for garbage stickers and lawn waste stickers. There are fees for other services, like water fees and sewage fees. Many states have lotteries which also funnel money into their coffers.
And for the most part we bitch a little bit but largely are okay with paying all this because, after all, roads don't get built by themselves and police don't protect our houses for free. Then we hear about the constant corruption, and pork-barrel projects like the wonderful Highway to Nowhere. We hear about programs we may not personally agree with*. We hear how illegal immigrants are entitled to free education, free lunches and free healthcare--all of which come out of our pockets--for as long as they can avoid getting caught. We see politicians spending millions of dollars of their own money to win a job that pays them a bit over a hundred grand a year and we know something has to be up.
It comes to a point where one has to begin wondering how much money they really need and how much is just us getting fleeced for no apparent reason, to funnel back to bullshit projects that don't do anything but get that congressman re-elected and make his friends rich.
We seem to be getting along fine without these new taxes. If we really need more money for schools and streets and police, we should look at cutting out some of the crap that goes on and fixing broken programs. Unfortunately the solution always seems to be "let's find something new to tax."
* I'm not saying this is an excuse against taxes by any stretch, merely that it contributes to the annoyance.
It seems to me that the squatters aren't the problem so much as people who let their registrations lapse. I think we can agree that if somebody legitimately gets to a domain name first and decides to just plaster ads on it that's perfectly fine for him to do, even if it's not necessarily desirable overall.
So it seems to me that any solutions should involve making it more difficult to swipe a domain name. What about a system such as this as an example:
1. A domain name expires. It is held for 30 or 60 days.
2. An email is sent to the registered email address for the domain. It's not a "renew your domain!" notice (presumably those would already have been sent). It's actually the opposite: "If you intentionally didn't renew your domain name, click here." If they do so, the domain is instantly released and available to whomever. Presumably if they got the email but DIDN'T mean to let the registration lapse they will go and recover it; they should be permitted the exclusive right to do that during that holding period. (Registrars also shouldn't rip people off. It should cost the renewal fee to get back, not some extortion "we own your domain now!" fee.)
3. If they neither register nor acknowledge they don't want it within, say, a week, they are contacted at their registered mail address. The letter basically says "you have until ___ to renew or your domain will be released." That's their final chance. Either they renew their domain or it is open to anybody at the end of the hold period.
4. Nobody cries if all of this happens and their domain gets snagged by somebody else.
Obviously there would be a significant cumulative cost to the registrars, so perhaps the cost of a stamp or maybe a little more to handle international registrations could be added to the cost of a registration. It is not perfect and it's not going to prevent everybody who wants to keep their domain from losing it, but there comes a point where if a good-faith effort is given to allow people to keep their domains--often important property--that losing it leaves them nobody to blame but themselves.
Now now. I think the guy's point is unabashed asshattery, but so are most of yours.
- The descendents of Thomas Jefferson, for the quotation attributed to him.
Properly cited quotations have always been considered fair use. Since his comments appear to come from a public debate, that also makes them public comments without fixed form and therefore not even copyrighted to begin with.
- The descendents of William Shakespeare, for using the title of his play "Winter's Tale"
Referring to a literary work is not an issue of copyright.
- The descendents of Moses, for the phrase "Does not then the government's giveth support its taketh," which is clearly alluding to the book of Job in the bible ("the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away", Job 1:21).
Copyright does not have anything to do with allusions.
I'm not 100% sure about the comment about the Constitution, but I believe that public documents--which the Constitution certainly is--are by their nature public and usable. Certainly, even if it were not, quoting a segment of law to discuss that law is absolutely fair use. The only one you may have a point about is the ellipsis, assuming what you said there was actually true. Given your other points it's a fairly big assumption even if I don't doubt the idiocy of copyright grants.
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons not to support copyright extensions and probably even a fair amount of good reasons to support them. Pretending the law is something other than it is or that they are proposing something worse than they are just makes you look bad, and with it, the argument you're trying to make. Personally, I think it's an important debate to have.
"Frivolous lawsuit" does not mean "stupid lawsuit." They are lawsuits that have no basis in the law, where any competent lawyer should know that it has no merit. Sanctions along these lines are levied against the lawyers, not the entity that hired them. (Where those are one in the same--ie eg, corporate litigators--the effect is largely the same, but the distinction remains.)
The fact that "lots of people do it" or "it's easy to do" doesn't mean it's not illegal or tortious. Look at the DMCA, it's anti-circumvention aspects and the way THOSE are being used if you need any proof of that.
I think this is one of the world's stupidest lawsuits, but that doesn't instantly make it frivolous.
But that doesn't make it right, and we need to stop putting up with crap like this, much less justifying it with "as a private company...".
Then "we" need to stop being idiots. Your beef is with the public. Do you really believe that if people didn't get up and have a cry about what was said that XM would feel like they have to suspend two of their hosts to placate them?
The reason it is acceptable as a business is because we know why they're doing it. It's to placate the public. It's to placate "us."
If people stop throwing fits about it, XM will roll their eyes and tell them to get a life. Until then, don't blame them for trying to make as much money as they can. That's what businesses exist to do.
If you don't care for your life, there are hundreds of ways to sneak a bomb in close enough radius to kill one man.
I've seen a dozen comments like this in this article and they all seem to miss or ignore the fact that a lot more goes into protecting a US president than a helicopter hovering nearby. Do you have ANY idea what the Secret Service goes through for any planned trip of the president? Advance teams to scout any potential ambush points along any routes. Snipers all over the rooftops. Buildings are cleared and secured. A small army of agents that travel along with the motorcade whose job is basically to die for the president. Not to mention the fact that you can be pretty damn sure that the limo itself is seriously armor-plated. There may be hundreds of ways to sneak a bomb in close enough to kill one man, but in this case, getting the specific one man you're aiming for is pretty damn hard.
When he gets out of the car, you can be pretty sure that everybody allowed within any significant radius of him is very thoroughly searched. Not to mention that the people within a small radius of politicians are usually lackeys they can count on to clap at whatever they say rather than the general public anyway.
All of this is for domestic security. Though I have no proof, I seriously doubt security on international trips is any less stringent; it's probably more, and the helicopter overhead--while I think it's fairly useless and redundant--is a fair indication of that. Maybe if he were going to Iran or something like that it would be harder to get cooperation from the local authorities to do that sort of thing (which is probably one major reason he wouldn't go), but Australia shouldn't be any issue.
You're right that it is difficult to protect somebody against a person willing to die to get them, but the Secret Service is pretty good at their jobs.
Has anyone you know really gotten so frustrated with the limited font choices in regular e-mail that they started composing their messages in Photoshop?
Of course not. I have, however, had people who wanted to send me a picture and just dropped it in an email with no accompanying text. I've done it a time or two myself (when I've told somebody it was coming; gaim/pidgin (AIM protoctol) file transfers between the two of us over IM haven't worked for a while).
Since this is a possibility, you can't just make a blind assumption that "image in email with no other text == spam." Without that assumption, you need some other method of determining whether it is or isn't, unless you want to end up looking at it anyway. Since we're talking about spam filters I assume that isn't the case.
Maybe there are better methods of capturing this case than trying to OCR the image, but I don't necessarily see that as a BAD idea depending on the speed and accuracy of the OCR algorithm.
Unfortunately, it may be impossible to re-implement those to avoid the patent issues, because the patents may cover core aspects that are required for interoperability.
I'm fairly sure this isn't the reality, but in my opinion, companies convicted of being illegal monopolies should lose their patents, or have them delegated to an unaffiliated non-profit organization to administer or some similar consequence. Patents are, after all, essentially a grant of monopoly on an idea. In other words patents cement the monopoly status the company was just convicted of.
No doubt Microsoft would cry a river (of money) to politicians, but they really can't claim it's any major damage to their business. After all, right now they are claiming hundreds of patents being infringed, which may be going on for years, and their stock is doing fine. I don't see any massive MS layoffs or other indication that they are struggling financially.
Patents are a deal with society: Tell us your secrets and you can have them to yourself for a while. Businesses are also a deal with society, at least in the US. They are granted tremendous rights and protections because of the benefits they can provide to the economy. When your company breaks the law, breaks the deal, you shouldn't be entitled to the legal protections of patents anymore.
I have just as much contempt for this flavor of arrogance as I do for the macho idiots who sneer at you if you get an oil change at a shop rather than do it yourself
So much so, it seems, that you explode even when there is no arrogance demonstrated.
"Either desktop linux tools have changed a lot in the past few years, or these people aren't digging that far into their systems." That's all he said. There was no value judgment. He didn't declare that these were clearly a lesser breed of human being because of it. There was not even a judgment made about whether or not digging into your system is good or bad, just an implication that you need command-line tools to do so (or that things have changed lately).
Maybe he did mean all the things you assumed he meant, but he certainly did not say them. Let's constrain our rants to actual insults rather than imagined ones.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Wow. Imagine my surprise to find slashdotters who think the most important part of making a semi-affordable laptop for poor children living in third world countries is that it promotes open source.
I don't really buy the "wow, 128 extra megs of RAM and 512MB more hard disk space--THEY'RE SLEEPING WITH MICROSOFT!" nonsense. I could buy the parts for that RETAIL and not pay an extra $75, with the exception that probably nobody bothers to sell that kind of super-low-end hardware anymore.
More likely, they had a goal of $100 laptop and have realized that manufacturing isn't cheap. Costs run up all the time in projects of any scope. They've said all along that they expect the price to come down each year; that's an effect of manufacturing, not a magical "Microsoft tax" that apparently would only apply for one year.
Yes, but you do not own the right to resell the music. Thus, the legal definition is not that of ownership; you are, indeed, licensing it.
No. People are just confused as to what the product is.
If I buy a CD, I own the CD. The actual CD. I can shred it, I can give it a friend (so long as I don't have any copies of it), I can sell it, etc. The same would apply to a downloaded song, though it is a bit of a harder stretch for some peoples' minds because of the difference between digital and physical goods.
In neither case did I buy the copyright. I don't control (re)distribution except of my own copy of the work, but I can transfer ownership so long as it is transfered in full.
Last time I checked, the schools discredit all such education. If you do not believe me, try to get anywhere in life without official certificates.
Schools do not determine where you get in life. If you can't get anywhere without official education--and I agree that in many cases that is true--it is because of businesses trying to save a buck or lazy HR departments. It is significantly easier to say "Requires CS degree" or something similar than to sit down any applicant who says they have the experience but not the schooling and actually test them. Likewise, it is easier to assume that somebody who has completed your required degree path has the ability and dedication to adapt and learn new materials. Determining that from somebody whose resume essentially says "trust me" is going to be costly. There are counterexamples on all sides, but in general this holds true.
Also, as a job applicant gets older, what matters the most on his resume, to most organizations, is previous work experience--not education. I guess as long as you can slip by once or twice this supposed stranglehold on success held by the schools loosens up?
They do not want students to behave like responsible adults.
Children are not responsible adults, that is why we call them children. But no, I would argue the direct opposite: They DO want them to act more like responsible adults. That means not picking on other students, or randomly calling people names. It means not libeling others, and contrary to your implication most courts would not take a 12 year old being sued for libel very seriously, even if that is exactly what it is. (Besides which, it is his parents who would be liable--which isn't particularly fair to them.) It means not threatening people with physical violence. The fact that many adults even engage in these behaviors doesn't make them any less inappropriate.
If you want to argue about whether or not this sort of thing is effective, so be it. If you want to argue whether it is appropriate for the schools rather than parents to be enforcing codes of conduct outside of their walls, so be it. If you want to argue that some oversensitive teachers and principles are going to misuse rules like this, so be it. But your little "ZOMG THE SCHOOLS ARE HOLDING ME DOWN~!" conspiracy theory goes entirely too far.
Your ads are valueless when displayed on my PC anyway, so why should I expose myself to them?
Because that is the implicit agreement. They offer you content and do not charge you money for it; in return, they "charge" you some ads, which they may get paid for based on the impression even if you don't bother buying through it.
I don't like ads any more than the next guy, but I don't block them. Fair's fair.
he might also be SMART enough to make it run AUTOMATICALLY according to certain laws, such as gravitation and evolution, that don't require constant meddling and micromanagement?
That argument will not help. I am not aware of any Christians who overtly have any problem with the theory of gravity; the "it's just a theory!" thing about evolution is a knee-jerk response people make when you're questioning their faith.
The Bible doesn't say anything about gravity. The reason so many people reject evolution is because it DOES say things about man and some sort of timeline for how things happened. (Seven days? Obviously some believe that is literal and some do not, but there is a timeline of some sort.) It makes no mention of fish crawling out of the sea to become man; it says god made man in his image.
The bottom line is, you really can't debate people into giving up their faith. Faith is exactly that; it is belief in something we can't and don't know. It doesn't matter how many fantastic logical arguments you may make, because their belief is based on faith and not logic. I'm sure some religious folks will flame me for saying their belief is illogical, but that's the way it is.
Live and let live is my philosophy. Don't force your religious views on me and I won't thrust my atheism/agnosticism (depending on how you define the terms) on you.
With all due respect, Christians certainly have no place whatsoever to criticize others for murdering and marginalizing those who do not share their beliefs.
Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.
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The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.
But with all due respect, "we" means nothing more than "some of the people on this website."
I have never--literally never--heard a so-called "Joe user" complaining that IE or Firefox were too bloated. All those complaints and debates seem to exist only around sites like these.
Are they becoming Mozilla again? Yeah, maybe. Wasn't this sort of bloat the reason Firefox was created in the first place? Yeah again. Does any of that matter to the typical users that have been adopting it the past few years? Not as far as I can tell.
I am not a lawyer either, but I do not think you are correct.
if the court rules in favor of any one of the defendants, it would set a precedent
It really wouldn't set much of anything. Technically speaking it would set a precedent for that exact federal district that it was decided in, but the precedent is only binding where circumstances are essentially identical, as determined by the judge. Since circumstances in these cases are quite likely to change, the precedent wouldn't really matter.
all previous defendants to come together and file a class action lawsuit
One required feature of a class-action lawsuit is similarly of circumstances. If a product is defective, anybody who bought the product would be in the same class. The mere act of purchasing the product gives them the same circumstances, and it can be a class action in that sense.
Here, "I got sued by the RIAA" is almost certainly not enough to constitute a class. Circumstances are going to vary. The assumption that people are innocent and accused falsely is something that would need to be decided individually; the judge would almost certainly not paint every case with the same brush. Accordingly, a judge would almost certainly not permit the cases as a class.
a class action lawsuit for wrongful accusations.
I don't believe "wrongful accusations" is an actionable offense, except maybe in an attempt to recover attorneys fees (which would once again vary by respondent). Libel, perhaps, but that case would probably get tossed. They could claim the lawsuit is frivolous, but 1) I don't believe that entitles the person the suit was brought against to money (rather, it would result in a sanction against the attorney who brought it) and 2) it is seldom used.
All in all I hope the RIAA gets slapped around by judges at every turn, but I don't think it means a lot in the legal scheme of things.
You might argue that this isn't a voting irregularity, but the vote result was 'irregularly' thrown out on bogus grounds.
It seems to me that the biggest problem here is that they bothered to throw the vote out instead of simply ignoring it, since the measure was never binding to begin with.
Then again, that's actually a good thing even if it discounts the will of the voters. Because --
That is to say that our government is not listening to us, and THAT is something that matters!
-- now that they're on record as ignoring their constituents, the voters are free to toss them on their little white asses next time they're up for re-election.
If the voters choose not to do so--and that is probably fairly likely--then I think the "something wrong" part of this equation has little to do with the commissioners.
Despite what they claim, it'd be a tough row to hoe to get a court to agree that parsing factual information from NMAP's output constitutes a "derivative work".
Are you sure? Because it seems to me that you would have a tougher row to hoe to get a court to agree that they are forced to use the terms of the GPL itself rather than the terms that they explicitly laid out for their product.
Are their terms 90% GPL? Yes. Did they add/modify/clarify (depending on your view) a term? Also yes. What makes you think the court's going to say "no no no, this is GPL and you're wrong, sorry" and not "they created their own license, what makes you think the condition is not valid?"
By cutting out Microsoft Office from Apple, they would hurt the Microsoft Office division
Would they? I mean sure, X sales is more than X-1 sales; in that sense they are hurt. I didn't read the article, but if I'm reading it correctly the summary indicates that they are fairly disappointed with the sales of the Mac version of Office anyway. It could be that they actually would be better off if they didn't have to pay developers to maintain and support that version for whatever disappointing sales numbers they're getting. Would that be monopolistic behavior, or good business sense?
Even if they are making some money, it might not be a good return on investment for the investment of developer and support resources that, possibly, could be better placed somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Profitable for whom? I wouldn't invest in such a stock, but a glance through their proxy statement indicates that their CEO was paid salary of $50,000 (which he wanted held at that "historical" rate). Two other members of the board were paid $135,000 and $95,000, respectively. The salaries for those two executives for next year were raised to $255,000 and $200,000. They were also awarded $562,000 and $686,000 in stock option to this date. I may be reading some of these things wrong, but it seems correct.
So... it's quite profitable for the board of directors at the very least. I doubt this company has a ton of low-level employees (I could probably find that in the docs but am too lazy!), so there's definitely profit going on for those involved. Just not a lot of extra bucks to be shared with investors.
Meh. You're really making too much of it in this case.
I don't understand cheating in games such as, say, Counterstrike or America's Army. The whole point of the game there is: how good are you? Can you beat the other guy? I simply can't understand what the fun is in using aimbots or firing cheats or whatever.
For the most part, WOW isn't that. If people enjoy playing more if they don't have to worry so much about gold, I really don't care that much. It may have a minor effect on prices in the auction house, but neither my brother nor I have seen any notable fluctuations that stayed up. It's really more supply-and-demand (how many of this item are there?) than a factor of how much gold people have in their pockets.
Cheating really only affects me as a player if I chose to do PvP, in which case what do I really care if I'm slaughtered by somebody who bought their levels instead of getting them the hard way? I'll never know, and I'm still dead.
The point is, there is no "win" in WOW. I don't think there's a "win" in any MMPORPG, because the whole point of them is to keep them going. They're a grind. If somebody wants to trade some real money for some in-game money to enjoy it more, it's just not a big deal to me.
The spam I could do without, but I installed SpamSentry a couple weeks back and that's pretty much enough.
That's true, and I think most people wouldn't necessarily argue with collecting same taxes.
But haven't we been building roads and hiring police for decades? Why do they need more money all of the sudden? We pay federal income taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes in many jurisdictions. We pay consumption taxes and use taxes and many places still have the balls to even have toll booths on their major roads despite all of that. There are property taxes and estate taxes and capital gains taxes. Taxes on businesses before the money makes it to a person who is then taxed. There are taxes that they pretend aren't really taxes, like filing fees for starting a business. At my house we pay for garbage stickers and lawn waste stickers. There are fees for other services, like water fees and sewage fees. Many states have lotteries which also funnel money into their coffers.
And for the most part we bitch a little bit but largely are okay with paying all this because, after all, roads don't get built by themselves and police don't protect our houses for free. Then we hear about the constant corruption, and pork-barrel projects like the wonderful Highway to Nowhere. We hear about programs we may not personally agree with*. We hear how illegal immigrants are entitled to free education, free lunches and free healthcare--all of which come out of our pockets--for as long as they can avoid getting caught. We see politicians spending millions of dollars of their own money to win a job that pays them a bit over a hundred grand a year and we know something has to be up.
It comes to a point where one has to begin wondering how much money they really need and how much is just us getting fleeced for no apparent reason, to funnel back to bullshit projects that don't do anything but get that congressman re-elected and make his friends rich.
We seem to be getting along fine without these new taxes. If we really need more money for schools and streets and police, we should look at cutting out some of the crap that goes on and fixing broken programs. Unfortunately the solution always seems to be "let's find something new to tax."
* I'm not saying this is an excuse against taxes by any stretch, merely that it contributes to the annoyance.
It seems to me that the squatters aren't the problem so much as people who let their registrations lapse. I think we can agree that if somebody legitimately gets to a domain name first and decides to just plaster ads on it that's perfectly fine for him to do, even if it's not necessarily desirable overall.
So it seems to me that any solutions should involve making it more difficult to swipe a domain name. What about a system such as this as an example:
1. A domain name expires. It is held for 30 or 60 days.
2. An email is sent to the registered email address for the domain. It's not a "renew your domain!" notice (presumably those would already have been sent). It's actually the opposite: "If you intentionally didn't renew your domain name, click here." If they do so, the domain is instantly released and available to whomever. Presumably if they got the email but DIDN'T mean to let the registration lapse they will go and recover it; they should be permitted the exclusive right to do that during that holding period. (Registrars also shouldn't rip people off. It should cost the renewal fee to get back, not some extortion "we own your domain now!" fee.)
3. If they neither register nor acknowledge they don't want it within, say, a week, they are contacted at their registered mail address. The letter basically says "you have until ___ to renew or your domain will be released." That's their final chance. Either they renew their domain or it is open to anybody at the end of the hold period.
4. Nobody cries if all of this happens and their domain gets snagged by somebody else.
Obviously there would be a significant cumulative cost to the registrars, so perhaps the cost of a stamp or maybe a little more to handle international registrations could be added to the cost of a registration. It is not perfect and it's not going to prevent everybody who wants to keep their domain from losing it, but there comes a point where if a good-faith effort is given to allow people to keep their domains--often important property--that losing it leaves them nobody to blame but themselves.
Now now. I think the guy's point is unabashed asshattery, but so are most of yours.
Properly cited quotations have always been considered fair use. Since his comments appear to come from a public debate, that also makes them public comments without fixed form and therefore not even copyrighted to begin with.
Referring to a literary work is not an issue of copyright.
Copyright does not have anything to do with allusions.
I'm not 100% sure about the comment about the Constitution, but I believe that public documents--which the Constitution certainly is--are by their nature public and usable. Certainly, even if it were not, quoting a segment of law to discuss that law is absolutely fair use. The only one you may have a point about is the ellipsis, assuming what you said there was actually true. Given your other points it's a fairly big assumption even if I don't doubt the idiocy of copyright grants.
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons not to support copyright extensions and probably even a fair amount of good reasons to support them. Pretending the law is something other than it is or that they are proposing something worse than they are just makes you look bad, and with it, the argument you're trying to make. Personally, I think it's an important debate to have.
"Frivolous lawsuit" does not mean "stupid lawsuit." They are lawsuits that have no basis in the law, where any competent lawyer should know that it has no merit. Sanctions along these lines are levied against the lawyers, not the entity that hired them. (Where those are one in the same--ie eg, corporate litigators--the effect is largely the same, but the distinction remains.)
The fact that "lots of people do it" or "it's easy to do" doesn't mean it's not illegal or tortious. Look at the DMCA, it's anti-circumvention aspects and the way THOSE are being used if you need any proof of that.
I think this is one of the world's stupidest lawsuits, but that doesn't instantly make it frivolous.
Then "we" need to stop being idiots. Your beef is with the public. Do you really believe that if people didn't get up and have a cry about what was said that XM would feel like they have to suspend two of their hosts to placate them?
The reason it is acceptable as a business is because we know why they're doing it. It's to placate the public. It's to placate "us."
If people stop throwing fits about it, XM will roll their eyes and tell them to get a life. Until then, don't blame them for trying to make as much money as they can. That's what businesses exist to do.
I've seen a dozen comments like this in this article and they all seem to miss or ignore the fact that a lot more goes into protecting a US president than a helicopter hovering nearby. Do you have ANY idea what the Secret Service goes through for any planned trip of the president? Advance teams to scout any potential ambush points along any routes. Snipers all over the rooftops. Buildings are cleared and secured. A small army of agents that travel along with the motorcade whose job is basically to die for the president. Not to mention the fact that you can be pretty damn sure that the limo itself is seriously armor-plated. There may be hundreds of ways to sneak a bomb in close enough to kill one man, but in this case, getting the specific one man you're aiming for is pretty damn hard.
When he gets out of the car, you can be pretty sure that everybody allowed within any significant radius of him is very thoroughly searched. Not to mention that the people within a small radius of politicians are usually lackeys they can count on to clap at whatever they say rather than the general public anyway.
All of this is for domestic security. Though I have no proof, I seriously doubt security on international trips is any less stringent; it's probably more, and the helicopter overhead--while I think it's fairly useless and redundant--is a fair indication of that. Maybe if he were going to Iran or something like that it would be harder to get cooperation from the local authorities to do that sort of thing (which is probably one major reason he wouldn't go), but Australia shouldn't be any issue.
You're right that it is difficult to protect somebody against a person willing to die to get them, but the Secret Service is pretty good at their jobs.
I do, at least potentially.
Of course not. I have, however, had people who wanted to send me a picture and just dropped it in an email with no accompanying text. I've done it a time or two myself (when I've told somebody it was coming; gaim/pidgin (AIM protoctol) file transfers between the two of us over IM haven't worked for a while).
Since this is a possibility, you can't just make a blind assumption that "image in email with no other text == spam." Without that assumption, you need some other method of determining whether it is or isn't, unless you want to end up looking at it anyway. Since we're talking about spam filters I assume that isn't the case.
Maybe there are better methods of capturing this case than trying to OCR the image, but I don't necessarily see that as a BAD idea depending on the speed and accuracy of the OCR algorithm.
I'm fairly sure this isn't the reality, but in my opinion, companies convicted of being illegal monopolies should lose their patents, or have them delegated to an unaffiliated non-profit organization to administer or some similar consequence. Patents are, after all, essentially a grant of monopoly on an idea. In other words patents cement the monopoly status the company was just convicted of.
No doubt Microsoft would cry a river (of money) to politicians, but they really can't claim it's any major damage to their business. After all, right now they are claiming hundreds of patents being infringed, which may be going on for years, and their stock is doing fine. I don't see any massive MS layoffs or other indication that they are struggling financially.
Patents are a deal with society: Tell us your secrets and you can have them to yourself for a while. Businesses are also a deal with society, at least in the US. They are granted tremendous rights and protections because of the benefits they can provide to the economy. When your company breaks the law, breaks the deal, you shouldn't be entitled to the legal protections of patents anymore.
So much so, it seems, that you explode even when there is no arrogance demonstrated.
"Either desktop linux tools have changed a lot in the past few years, or these people aren't digging that far into their systems." That's all he said. There was no value judgment. He didn't declare that these were clearly a lesser breed of human being because of it. There was not even a judgment made about whether or not digging into your system is good or bad, just an implication that you need command-line tools to do so (or that things have changed lately).
Maybe he did mean all the things you assumed he meant, but he certainly did not say them. Let's constrain our rants to actual insults rather than imagined ones.
Yet another /. post bitching about /. articles, yet adding absolutely no value of their own.
Seriously. Do you have anything to add to the discussion or were you simply karma whoring?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Wow. Imagine my surprise to find slashdotters who think the most important part of making a semi-affordable laptop for poor children living in third world countries is that it promotes open source.
I don't really buy the "wow, 128 extra megs of RAM and 512MB more hard disk space--THEY'RE SLEEPING WITH MICROSOFT!" nonsense. I could buy the parts for that RETAIL and not pay an extra $75, with the exception that probably nobody bothers to sell that kind of super-low-end hardware anymore.
More likely, they had a goal of $100 laptop and have realized that manufacturing isn't cheap. Costs run up all the time in projects of any scope. They've said all along that they expect the price to come down each year; that's an effect of manufacturing, not a magical "Microsoft tax" that apparently would only apply for one year.
No. People are just confused as to what the product is.
If I buy a CD, I own the CD. The actual CD. I can shred it, I can give it a friend (so long as I don't have any copies of it), I can sell it, etc. The same would apply to a downloaded song, though it is a bit of a harder stretch for some peoples' minds because of the difference between digital and physical goods.
In neither case did I buy the copyright. I don't control (re)distribution except of my own copy of the work, but I can transfer ownership so long as it is transfered in full.
Nah. It just increased the shooting fatalities among people not actually being shot at.
I'm seriously beginning to think that if you're in an urban area where a gunfight is going on, the safest person to be is the one being shot at.
Schools do not determine where you get in life. If you can't get anywhere without official education--and I agree that in many cases that is true--it is because of businesses trying to save a buck or lazy HR departments. It is significantly easier to say "Requires CS degree" or something similar than to sit down any applicant who says they have the experience but not the schooling and actually test them. Likewise, it is easier to assume that somebody who has completed your required degree path has the ability and dedication to adapt and learn new materials. Determining that from somebody whose resume essentially says "trust me" is going to be costly. There are counterexamples on all sides, but in general this holds true.
Also, as a job applicant gets older, what matters the most on his resume, to most organizations, is previous work experience--not education. I guess as long as you can slip by once or twice this supposed stranglehold on success held by the schools loosens up?
Children are not responsible adults, that is why we call them children. But no, I would argue the direct opposite: They DO want them to act more like responsible adults. That means not picking on other students, or randomly calling people names. It means not libeling others, and contrary to your implication most courts would not take a 12 year old being sued for libel very seriously, even if that is exactly what it is. (Besides which, it is his parents who would be liable--which isn't particularly fair to them.) It means not threatening people with physical violence. The fact that many adults even engage in these behaviors doesn't make them any less inappropriate.
If you want to argue about whether or not this sort of thing is effective, so be it. If you want to argue whether it is appropriate for the schools rather than parents to be enforcing codes of conduct outside of their walls, so be it. If you want to argue that some oversensitive teachers and principles are going to misuse rules like this, so be it. But your little "ZOMG THE SCHOOLS ARE HOLDING ME DOWN~!" conspiracy theory goes entirely too far.
Because that is the implicit agreement. They offer you content and do not charge you money for it; in return, they "charge" you some ads, which they may get paid for based on the impression even if you don't bother buying through it.
I don't like ads any more than the next guy, but I don't block them. Fair's fair.
That argument will not help. I am not aware of any Christians who overtly have any problem with the theory of gravity; the "it's just a theory!" thing about evolution is a knee-jerk response people make when you're questioning their faith.
The Bible doesn't say anything about gravity. The reason so many people reject evolution is because it DOES say things about man and some sort of timeline for how things happened. (Seven days? Obviously some believe that is literal and some do not, but there is a timeline of some sort.) It makes no mention of fish crawling out of the sea to become man; it says god made man in his image.
The bottom line is, you really can't debate people into giving up their faith. Faith is exactly that; it is belief in something we can't and don't know. It doesn't matter how many fantastic logical arguments you may make, because their belief is based on faith and not logic. I'm sure some religious folks will flame me for saying their belief is illogical, but that's the way it is.
Live and let live is my philosophy. Don't force your religious views on me and I won't thrust my atheism/agnosticism (depending on how you define the terms) on you.
With all due respect, Christians certainly have no place whatsoever to criticize others for murdering and marginalizing those who do not share their beliefs.
But with all due respect, "we" means nothing more than "some of the people on this website."
I have never--literally never--heard a so-called "Joe user" complaining that IE or Firefox were too bloated. All those complaints and debates seem to exist only around sites like these.
Are they becoming Mozilla again? Yeah, maybe. Wasn't this sort of bloat the reason Firefox was created in the first place? Yeah again. Does any of that matter to the typical users that have been adopting it the past few years? Not as far as I can tell.
I am not a lawyer either, but I do not think you are correct.
It really wouldn't set much of anything. Technically speaking it would set a precedent for that exact federal district that it was decided in, but the precedent is only binding where circumstances are essentially identical, as determined by the judge. Since circumstances in these cases are quite likely to change, the precedent wouldn't really matter.
One required feature of a class-action lawsuit is similarly of circumstances. If a product is defective, anybody who bought the product would be in the same class. The mere act of purchasing the product gives them the same circumstances, and it can be a class action in that sense.
Here, "I got sued by the RIAA" is almost certainly not enough to constitute a class. Circumstances are going to vary. The assumption that people are innocent and accused falsely is something that would need to be decided individually; the judge would almost certainly not paint every case with the same brush. Accordingly, a judge would almost certainly not permit the cases as a class.
I don't believe "wrongful accusations" is an actionable offense, except maybe in an attempt to recover attorneys fees (which would once again vary by respondent). Libel, perhaps, but that case would probably get tossed. They could claim the lawsuit is frivolous, but 1) I don't believe that entitles the person the suit was brought against to money (rather, it would result in a sanction against the attorney who brought it) and 2) it is seldom used.
All in all I hope the RIAA gets slapped around by judges at every turn, but I don't think it means a lot in the legal scheme of things.
It seems to me that the biggest problem here is that they bothered to throw the vote out instead of simply ignoring it, since the measure was never binding to begin with.
Then again, that's actually a good thing even if it discounts the will of the voters. Because --
-- now that they're on record as ignoring their constituents, the voters are free to toss them on their little white asses next time they're up for re-election.
If the voters choose not to do so--and that is probably fairly likely--then I think the "something wrong" part of this equation has little to do with the commissioners.
Are you sure? Because it seems to me that you would have a tougher row to hoe to get a court to agree that they are forced to use the terms of the GPL itself rather than the terms that they explicitly laid out for their product.
Are their terms 90% GPL? Yes. Did they add/modify/clarify (depending on your view) a term? Also yes. What makes you think the court's going to say "no no no, this is GPL and you're wrong, sorry" and not "they created their own license, what makes you think the condition is not valid?"
Would they? I mean sure, X sales is more than X-1 sales; in that sense they are hurt. I didn't read the article, but if I'm reading it correctly the summary indicates that they are fairly disappointed with the sales of the Mac version of Office anyway. It could be that they actually would be better off if they didn't have to pay developers to maintain and support that version for whatever disappointing sales numbers they're getting. Would that be monopolistic behavior, or good business sense?
Even if they are making some money, it might not be a good return on investment for the investment of developer and support resources that, possibly, could be better placed somewhere else.