Kinda reminds me of that character in Monkey Island who wanted "something that will atract attention, but have no real importance". Now to be in the real spirit of Slashdot, mod me insightfull.
You not only cited Monkey Island, but in doing so referred obliquely to the legendary Rubber Chicken With A Pulley In The Middle. You're going to get modded into orbit.
This is not entrapment. You were already trading the drugs before the cop approached you.
Right, now prove that. All you have is hearsay from the barman. He hasn't ever actually seen me dealing crack, he just heard me mention once that I had crack, and so when the undercover policeman came asking for crack he directed him to me.
Similarly, the supernode (in the role of barman) knows what I have available and passes along appropriate incoming searches to me, but has no knowledge at all of whether any of those searches lead to actual downloads. Even given that I had those files listed, and even given that I transferred one to the RIAA's agent, there is still no proof that I ever transferred any other file to anybody else.
I realise the civil courts have a lower standard of proof, but if this was a criminal case (and we're so often told that piracy is theft, aren't we?) then it would (or at least IMO should, and IANAL) be thrown out of court every time.
Your computer has been sending out a broadcast "Hey, come over here for a copy of LatestBritneyAlbum", or some variant thereof (depending on which system you use). RIAA or any other downloader is not searching all computers on earth randomly.
As far as I'm aware: me arse it does.
The only other computer on the network that should know the complete list of files I'm sharing is my supernode. If a query comes to the supernode asking for LatestBritneyAlbum, it gets referred to me. Equivalent, in the drugs analogy: the cop asked the barman in a dodgy pub about who could get him some crack, the barman pointed me out, and the cop then asked me for crack. Still entrapment.
However, it now occurs to me that the RIAA might be running supernodes, and thereby obtaining the lists. In which case the conversation goes:
RIAA: 'Hi, I'm a supernode. What are you sharing?' Me: 'LatestBritneyAlbum.mp3.' RIAA: 'A-haaaaaa!' Much the same, really. And in any case if they're running supernodes, then they're facilitating any infringement themselves, and I'm pretty sure that would hurt their case in court.
But in any case, entrapment involves approaching someone who was not doing anything suspicious and offering them the chance to commit a crime. It is not entrapment if the suspect is asking you to participate in the crime.
So. The RIAA sent a message to my computer saying 'Hey, would you send me a copy of Latest_Britney_Album.mp3?' My computer replied 'Sure, here you go', and the RIAA then sued.
Who approached who here? Who actually made it happen? I think the RIAA approached me. I never went up to them and offered them music. I never asked them to participate in anything. They came to me and asked for the piracy to take place - piracy that wasn't piracy anyway, becauce the recipient was in fact the agent of the copyright holder himself!
They have downloaded one or many files (or even just a partial) from your computer. Of course it is legal for them to download. They OWN the music, see?
In which case no law has been broken. That copy was perfectly legal, since it was the RIAA doing it!
Now that they have a file from you, they analyze it. There is digital information in the file that proves that it has been transfered over the internet and how many times.
No there isn't.
So....... you got it from the internet and you made it available through the internet to anyone who wanted it, and THEY CAN PROVE IT.
No, I got it from somewhere, who knows where, and I made it available to only the RIAA themselves as far as they can prove. And making music available to the RIAA, I strongly suspect, is not illegal in any way - how am I infringing copyright if I allow the copyright owner himself to copy my music collection?
Hell, you could say a single sperm is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (an egg), can gestate into a human.
Of course you realise that it gets worse than that.
Every single cell in your body (except red blood cells) is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (a cloning laboratory), can gestate into a human.
Now don't you feel guilty about all those abortions every time you wash your face, SINNER?
NASA could put a tiny ship with barely any payload into low orbit decades ago. Not really all that comparible.
Especially since Scaled Composites can't put a tiny ship with barely any payload into low orbit now. They can put a tiny ship with barely any payload quite high up in the sky on a ballistic flea-hop, but they can't orbit yet. IIRC they didn't even match Shepard's flight, never mind Gagarin's.
I guess it would be possible to have electrons but NO protons, or protons with NO electrons, but you certainly couldn't have both.
No way. Or at least not to any significant proportion. Unless the number of electrons is the same as the number of protons to an unbelievably high tolerance, the star will blow itself apart. The electromagnetic force is far more powerful than the gravitational.
There were other 'failing terminator' shots that were cut from the movie that would have made it more interesting. One where he grabbed a rail and his arm automatically took on the stripes and texture of the rail, a few more like that. It's been awhile since I watched the dvd but that's about all I remember of it.
That was after the T1000 had been frozen, shattered and reformed. Presumably something fscked up, because after that it kept taking on the form of what it touched. The floor, the railings and so forth. This may explain why it suddenly decided to explode on being shot, unlike every other time that happened...
What bothered me, though, was: the T800 is presumably a pretty smart robot. It's frozen its opponent solid and rendered it temporarily harmless. But it then proceeds to shoot it and shatter it into countless shards. Then it says to Sarah and John, 'We don't have much time' and they leg it.
Why did the T800 act this way? Why shoot the frozen T1000? Doing that dramatically increased its surface area and made sure that it melted far more rapidly. Surely the T800 could have picked up the T1000 and just thrown it straight into the molten steel? It was an idiotic move for an AI that presumably has a reasonable knowledge of basic physics...
In the third world, a wind-up radio cost about ten bucks. But here in the West, where money grows on trees and the streets are paved with gold, the average Yuppie had to shell out up to $200 for the gizmo.
What? Company adjusts price of product to match amount market will bear?... Goodness, how evil.
Just buy one mail-order from India or somewhere. It's not as if they're region-coded.
This isn't about political spectrums such as right vs left, democracy vs communism; this is about power, and the maintenance of power. Money, which years ago used to actually have a value of some sort, has degenerated into just another form of power.
Money always was a form of power. That was what Communism was all about in the first place. Money is the form of power that the capitalists use to subjugate and exploit the proletariat. Perhaps Marx's proposed solution was unsuccessful, but his analysis of the problem is spot on.
Worse yet, for all its faults, Communism and the Left acted as a check on the worst excesses of the capitalists, even in the West. But now? With the ending of the workers' state in Russia, it seems that here in the west socialism in all its forms has collapsed. Now that the Labour Party is as much in bed with the corporate fat-cats as the Tories ever were, the Prime Minister governs by effective diktat with a massive majority in parliament rubberstamping everything, the unions still in pieces post-Thatcher, and Brussels full of political appointees bossing around an ineffectual parliament, what defence do the people have?
It seems that they've won. Feudal serfdom, here we come...
Oh, they needn't bother then - WAP already does a stellar job of limiting software downloads by dint of gradually eroding the soul until you give up and just pretend that you're playing that $4 copy of space invaders you just spent $20 trying to find whilst staring at a rotating hourglass.
Baka.
Find the software using your computer's internet connection. The unmetered one. Then, once you've identified the exact URL, fire up your phone and WAP it down.
There was a delightful bit of rules-abuse you could do with a Phasing Cloak and a Timewarp Facilitator, if I recall aright. Decloak, fire, recloak, all before the enemy had a chance to even move.
Granted, he's probably trying to dumb this down for the Slashdot masses, or perhaps astrophysicists refer to their own forms of super/subsonic, but that caught my eye. Conventional super and subsonic concepts should be pretty close to meaningless out there.
No, he means what he says. The interstellar medium is a very sparse gas indeed, but it is a gas, and there is such a thing as a speed of sound in it. Sure, it's not significant in most circumstances, but the Sun makes a hell of a lot of noise:-)
MoM is by far the greatest 4X game ever made. I _strongly_ urge any geeks who enjoyed the Civ, MOO, etc. games to seek it out. Takes the whole genre in a completely different direction and does it spectacularly.
Actually... strictly speaking it's crap. The game balance is so dire. There are so many completely game-breaking strategies that it's only a question of just how munchkin you can possibly be. Ultra-Elite Adamantium Halfling Slingers with Flame Blade, Giant Strength and added blessings from an accompanying Archangel and Torin the Chosen One, anybody? Or how about taking thirteen Death books and summoning Wraiths from the word go? Or taking Runemaster and Artificer and getting more mana from breaking artefacts than it costs to make them? I remember once I was raiding the Myrran nodes with an Invisible Flying Warrax the Chaos Warrior, equipped of course with artefacts of extreme unfairness (phantasmal attacks, big pluses to hit, bonus movement, pathfinder, the usual stuff) and managed to find a retort of Divine Power and another one of Infernal Power. They're supposed to be mutually exclusive. I was getting bonus power from both sets of gods;-)
But then, that's why we love it. It presses every single geek button, and lets you do all the things that would make any sane dungeon master scream in horror and ban you from the group for life:-)
It is sad that they have to support a government that is increasingly authoritarian, that supports our enemies (or soon to be enemies) and violates nuclear non-proliferation.
Hilarious, coming from (we can only assume) an American, from that land of inviolable freedoms and religious adherence to international treaty obligations.
We couldn't buy a Japanese launch vehicle instead?
Nope. Chinese, maybe. You reckon they're better? Only the USA, Russia and China have operational manned spacecraft. It's pretty obvious that the Shuttle can't be relied upon, and the Chinese are only just getting started in this business. You want a reliable manned spacecraft, you fly Russian.
Japan and Europe both have some very nice rockets, and are pretty damn good at flying robots, but neither has ever gone in for manned flights (although ESA did once put a good deal of work into a spaceplane called Hermes).
We couldn't insist that they cease aiding Iran as a condition of buying billions of dollars of space equipment?
I doubt it. Iran is likely paying the Russians rather a lot for help with their missile programmes and nuclear power project. After all, they've just seen what happens to countries that the US takes a dislike to that don't actually have real WMDs with which to fight back. Unless the USA wants to buy a whole hell of a lot of Soyuz launches, I think you're going to be outbid on this one.
We (I'm Russian) lost 4 men in space disasters, and you lost 14 men.
True enough, and the Russians haven't lost anyone for a long time - even after crashing a bloody great cargo ship into the side of their space station. Now that's tough engineering. Of course, if you count deaths on the ground then the Russian programme has a pretty poor score, but from the point of view of a prospective passenger, I'd far rather fly to ISS on a Soyuz than on a Shuttle.
Yes, this does raise some rather dire ethical concerns. Who's to be reponsible if one of these malfunctions and kills a bus full of school children? The programmer? The tech operating it? The government? The manufaturer? The military? Noone?
The terrorists, of course.
Or, depending upon the hate-figure of the day, the liberals, the Opposition Party, the paedophiles, the hackers, the French, or the Jews. Or, for that matter, fifth-columnists working for the traitor Snowball.
It's really not that difficult once you get the hang of it.
I have been selected for a random search when boarding airplanes over the last two years. Each time I thank the screeners, and I am quite enthusiastic about being searched. When the search is done, I thank the screeners again, for I know they're doing something to protect me.
Ah. Good, citizen! You have won the battle against yourself. You love Big Brother.
The traditional movie houses could do worse than to watch what pornographers do more.
I'm sorry. It's puerile, I'll grant you, and the sort of humour that most of us should give up on at about the age of fourteen, but... that sentence cracked me up like nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
You not only cited Monkey Island, but in doing so referred obliquely to the legendary Rubber Chicken With A Pulley In The Middle. You're going to get modded into orbit.
Right, now prove that. All you have is hearsay from the barman. He hasn't ever actually seen me dealing crack, he just heard me mention once that I had crack, and so when the undercover policeman came asking for crack he directed him to me.
Similarly, the supernode (in the role of barman) knows what I have available and passes along appropriate incoming searches to me, but has no knowledge at all of whether any of those searches lead to actual downloads. Even given that I had those files listed, and even given that I transferred one to the RIAA's agent, there is still no proof that I ever transferred any other file to anybody else.
I realise the civil courts have a lower standard of proof, but if this was a criminal case (and we're so often told that piracy is theft, aren't we?) then it would (or at least IMO should, and IANAL) be thrown out of court every time.
As far as I'm aware: me arse it does.
The only other computer on the network that should know the complete list of files I'm sharing is my supernode. If a query comes to the supernode asking for LatestBritneyAlbum, it gets referred to me. Equivalent, in the drugs analogy: the cop asked the barman in a dodgy pub about who could get him some crack, the barman pointed me out, and the cop then asked me for crack. Still entrapment.
However, it now occurs to me that the RIAA might be running supernodes, and thereby obtaining the lists. In which case the conversation goes:
RIAA: 'Hi, I'm a supernode. What are you sharing?' Me: 'LatestBritneyAlbum.mp3.' RIAA: 'A-haaaaaa!' Much the same, really. And in any case if they're running supernodes, then they're facilitating any infringement themselves, and I'm pretty sure that would hurt their case in court.
So. The RIAA sent a message to my computer saying 'Hey, would you send me a copy of Latest_Britney_Album.mp3?' My computer replied 'Sure, here you go', and the RIAA then sued.
Who approached who here? Who actually made it happen? I think the RIAA approached me. I never went up to them and offered them music. I never asked them to participate in anything. They came to me and asked for the piracy to take place - piracy that wasn't piracy anyway, becauce the recipient was in fact the agent of the copyright holder himself!
In which case no law has been broken. That copy was perfectly legal, since it was the RIAA doing it!
Now that they have a file from you, they analyze it. There is digital information in the file that proves that it has been transfered over the internet and how many times.
No there isn't.
So....... you got it from the internet and you made it available through the internet to anyone who wanted it, and THEY CAN PROVE IT.
No, I got it from somewhere, who knows where, and I made it available to only the RIAA themselves as far as they can prove. And making music available to the RIAA, I strongly suspect, is not illegal in any way - how am I infringing copyright if I allow the copyright owner himself to copy my music collection?
Of course you realise that it gets worse than that.
Every single cell in your body (except red blood cells) is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (a cloning laboratory), can gestate into a human.
Now don't you feel guilty about all those abortions every time you wash your face, SINNER?
Especially since Scaled Composites can't put a tiny ship with barely any payload into low orbit now. They can put a tiny ship with barely any payload quite high up in the sky on a ballistic flea-hop, but they can't orbit yet. IIRC they didn't even match Shepard's flight, never mind Gagarin's.
No way. Or at least not to any significant proportion. Unless the number of electrons is the same as the number of protons to an unbelievably high tolerance, the star will blow itself apart. The electromagnetic force is far more powerful than the gravitational.
That was after the T1000 had been frozen, shattered and reformed. Presumably something fscked up, because after that it kept taking on the form of what it touched. The floor, the railings and so forth. This may explain why it suddenly decided to explode on being shot, unlike every other time that happened...
What bothered me, though, was: the T800 is presumably a pretty smart robot. It's frozen its opponent solid and rendered it temporarily harmless. But it then proceeds to shoot it and shatter it into countless shards. Then it says to Sarah and John, 'We don't have much time' and they leg it.
Why did the T800 act this way? Why shoot the frozen T1000? Doing that dramatically increased its surface area and made sure that it melted far more rapidly. Surely the T800 could have picked up the T1000 and just thrown it straight into the molten steel? It was an idiotic move for an AI that presumably has a reasonable knowledge of basic physics...
Innocent until proven proletarian.
What? Company adjusts price of product to match amount market will bear?... Goodness, how evil.
Just buy one mail-order from India or somewhere. It's not as if they're region-coded.
Money always was a form of power. That was what Communism was all about in the first place. Money is the form of power that the capitalists use to subjugate and exploit the proletariat. Perhaps Marx's proposed solution was unsuccessful, but his analysis of the problem is spot on.
Worse yet, for all its faults, Communism and the Left acted as a check on the worst excesses of the capitalists, even in the West. But now? With the ending of the workers' state in Russia, it seems that here in the west socialism in all its forms has collapsed. Now that the Labour Party is as much in bed with the corporate fat-cats as the Tories ever were, the Prime Minister governs by effective diktat with a massive majority in parliament rubberstamping everything, the unions still in pieces post-Thatcher, and Brussels full of political appointees bossing around an ineffectual parliament, what defence do the people have?
It seems that they've won. Feudal serfdom, here we come...
Baka.
Find the software using your computer's internet connection. The unmetered one. Then, once you've identified the exact URL, fire up your phone and WAP it down.
No, but I played MOO2 to an unhealthy extent.
There was a delightful bit of rules-abuse you could do with a Phasing Cloak and a Timewarp Facilitator, if I recall aright. Decloak, fire, recloak, all before the enemy had a chance to even move.
Do ya? Do ya?
No, he means what he says. The interstellar medium is a very sparse gas indeed, but it is a gas, and there is such a thing as a speed of sound in it. Sure, it's not significant in most circumstances, but the Sun makes a hell of a lot of noise :-)
Actually... strictly speaking it's crap. The game balance is so dire. There are so many completely game-breaking strategies that it's only a question of just how munchkin you can possibly be. Ultra-Elite Adamantium Halfling Slingers with Flame Blade, Giant Strength and added blessings from an accompanying Archangel and Torin the Chosen One, anybody? Or how about taking thirteen Death books and summoning Wraiths from the word go? Or taking Runemaster and Artificer and getting more mana from breaking artefacts than it costs to make them? I remember once I was raiding the Myrran nodes with an Invisible Flying Warrax the Chaos Warrior, equipped of course with artefacts of extreme unfairness (phantasmal attacks, big pluses to hit, bonus movement, pathfinder, the usual stuff) and managed to find a retort of Divine Power and another one of Infernal Power. They're supposed to be mutually exclusive. I was getting bonus power from both sets of gods ;-)
But then, that's why we love it. It presses every single geek button, and lets you do all the things that would make any sane dungeon master scream in horror and ban you from the group for life :-)
Hilarious, coming from (we can only assume) an American, from that land of inviolable freedoms and religious adherence to international treaty obligations.
We couldn't buy a Japanese launch vehicle instead?
Nope. Chinese, maybe. You reckon they're better? Only the USA, Russia and China have operational manned spacecraft. It's pretty obvious that the Shuttle can't be relied upon, and the Chinese are only just getting started in this business. You want a reliable manned spacecraft, you fly Russian.
Japan and Europe both have some very nice rockets, and are pretty damn good at flying robots, but neither has ever gone in for manned flights (although ESA did once put a good deal of work into a spaceplane called Hermes).
We couldn't insist that they cease aiding Iran as a condition of buying billions of dollars of space equipment?
I doubt it. Iran is likely paying the Russians rather a lot for help with their missile programmes and nuclear power project. After all, they've just seen what happens to countries that the US takes a dislike to that don't actually have real WMDs with which to fight back. Unless the USA wants to buy a whole hell of a lot of Soyuz launches, I think you're going to be outbid on this one.
True enough, and the Russians haven't lost anyone for a long time - even after crashing a bloody great cargo ship into the side of their space station. Now that's tough engineering. Of course, if you count deaths on the ground then the Russian programme has a pretty poor score, but from the point of view of a prospective passenger, I'd far rather fly to ISS on a Soyuz than on a Shuttle.
Quieter -- They use non-metallic wheels, often on a non-metallic surface, though I don't know if this applies to high-speed monorails.
Really? Cool! But... is there a chance the track could bend?
Safer -- They're relatively hard to derail, and since the rails don't usually run at ground level, there are fewer things to hit.
Wow! Well, I'm convinced! Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
The terrorists, of course.
Or, depending upon the hate-figure of the day, the liberals, the Opposition Party, the paedophiles, the hackers, the French, or the Jews. Or, for that matter, fifth-columnists working for the traitor Snowball.
It's really not that difficult once you get the hang of it.
Ah. Good, citizen! You have won the battle against yourself. You love Big Brother.
As for me, I know that the Computer is my friend!
* begins work on 'Dalek: Apocalypse' FPS game *
Headline: 'Authors' Guild sues library for lending books to third-party'.
Somehow I can't see that attracting anything resembling good publicity.
I'm sorry. It's puerile, I'll grant you, and the sort of humour that most of us should give up on at about the age of fourteen, but... that sentence cracked me up like nothing else.