Follow that rule, and you may well end your ass up in jail. The rule in most jurisdictions is that you do not have a right to resist arrest unless one "reasonably believes that such force is immediately necessary to protect against an arresting officer's use of unlawful and deadly force"
I'm curious -- is there a specific set of exemptions for police officers? I read the a first-year-law textbook on this, and it seemed that in most situations, the standard use-of-force rules apply.
The way *I* understood things, if (admittedly hypothetical situation) you are an electrician working on a system where another person will die unless you rapidly perform a task (say, something is about to overload and destroy a transformer that a bunch of unaware kids are sitting on), and police attempt to arrest you, and you're sure that you can't convince them that you need to finish what you're working on in the thirty seconds or whatever you have remaining, you are entitled to use nondeadly force to resist arrest (Macing the officer, for instance) to resume work. If you get charged with assult or similar, you have a necessity justification -- the potential consquences of not using force are legally worse than the consequences of using force, the consequences were immediate and otherwise unavoidable, and you are not resorting to deadly force).
Note that this probably changes slightly from state to state -- some locales, like NYC, are extremely tough on use of force, and some places, like Texas, are extremely lax on use of force.
Note that Ray Bradbury was stopped and given almost *exactly* this same spiel (sans the refusal to hand over ID), though with some incredulity on the side of the officers that he was actually out for some exercise, which is what prompted him to write Farenheight 451.
First off to everyone here asking "why didn't he just show is ID?"
Because it's a right that, if not defended, can slip away. As demonstrated by the people saying this, it already has to some degree.
If the only people that refuse to show an ID *are* criminals, than refusal to show ID becomes extremely suspicious in and of itself.
For the people saying "If you've done nothing wrong, why not just comply?" -- this is *exactly* the mantra that Orwell used to justify everything in his state. It works well. If you're doing nothing wrong, then why should you object to being monitored by state-controlled cameras in your house or any of the other elements of a police state?
A concerned citizen called 911 to report a possible domestic violence situation, saying they had seen punches thrown.
Okay, fair enough.
The officer arrives to find the vehicle had been stopped in an erratic, sudden, and aggressive manner.
I'm not even sure *how* you'd stop a vehicle in such a manner that it fits all those adjectives. It certainly didn't look like an "erratic, sudden, and aggressive" parking job to me. It could have been more nicely lined up, I suppose, but it was certainly safely off the road. You're reading an awful lot into the truck's position.
The man is immediately belligerent.
Not in my reading of the video. The first thing he did was move around the other side of the truck to make sure that he was off the road. The only thing he objected to was handing over ID. He was brusque but straightforward -- certainly not beligerant -- even after he told the officer that he wasn't going to show his ID papers. He didn't get angry until he watched the cops grab his screaming daughter (the girl trying to do no more than run to him), throw her to the ground, and handcuff her. Then he *still* wasn't even swearing (and I'm not sure that I wouldn't be at that point) -- he just kept saying "Big man!", as in "You're such a big man to be beating up on a teenage girl."
I can see giving an officer quite a bit of leeway in a situation where there is immediate potential personal danger to the officer or citizens. If there's a gun out, yes, following protocol might be ideal, but it's kind of hard to think about details of rules when someone has your life resting in their trigger finger and you have maybe a second to make a flash decision. This officer had all the time in the world. He certainly had the ability to think about what he was doing, and follow proper procedure.
I've spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, and know several people that are black, latin, etc. None of them has mentioned any problems with cops in the area.
3. You do not have to show them identification if you don't want to. This does not apply if you are in your car and driving, and are pulled over: then you must produce Driver's ID. If you are a cyclist, like me, you have to have some kind of ID if you a cycling on the road, but it does not have to be a Driver's license.
Watching this video, this guy is making a lot of mistakes. Look, I don't like dealing with the police, but if your real intent is to be left alone to exercise your freedoms (and not to just cause trouble), you are well advised to:
I'm not entirely sure about this, and it may vary from state to state.
In West Virginia, driving without a driver's license in your posession is a misdemeanor. However, you will not be charged if you can produce the license in court.
Note that the man was *not* actually driving the vehicle (and was, in fact, outside of the vehicle) when the officer came by. The vehicle could have been driven by the man's daughter, by someone else if the truck broke down and someone went for help, or God knows what. I'm not sure whether there might be case law in the area clarifying whether an officer can ask for a driver's license from the person who seems likely to be driving the truck, but I don't think that it's as clear cut as you think it is. There was no point where the officer could clearly establish that the man had been operating the vehicle.
Furthermore, the officer asked specifically for some kind of ID. He did not ask to see a driver's license. I'm not sure whether this is an issue, and it does come off as a bit nitpicky, but it might be a legal issue.
The man asked whether he was being arrested, and if so, why. If the officer intended to arrest him, he needed to give him the reason he was being arrested, and chose not to do so. If you are right, that the man was being arrested under suspicion of driving without a license, then the officer should have told him so.
I have to say that my guess is that the officer doesn't often run across people who refuse to give him their license, and probably acted inappropriately, since it's not like training in what to do in such a case is necessary very often.
I'm (personally) willing to give policemen some leeway for violating procedure if they're in a situation where it's difficult for them to make a clear judgement call. Perhaps they think someone is shooting at them, and they yell "Freeze" instead of "Freeze, Police!". That's not great, but at least you have someone operating in fight-or-flight with a split second to make a decision. The sheriff had no reason to think that the man was a danger, and had all the time in the world to make his decision. He didn't follow procedure.
I'm not a police officer, but I think the first thing I would have done is separate the man and the girl, and second make sure that the girl is okay. If the man asks why he's being asked for identification, there is absolutely no legal reason that I can think of for the officer to refuse to say that he's investigating possible domestic violence or battery.
Police officers are human too. They have bad days, just like me. They make mistakes, and I don't think that they can be held to a perfect standard. However, if they make mistakes, then they (well, the state) needs to take the consequences of its actions. In this case, that means not getting the $250 fine. Such is life. Perhaps, in the future, the officer will be more forthcoming if the man asks what the officer is doing.
I agree that the man should not have gotten upset, but he probably didn't have a couple of days to plan exactly what he was going to do, and he was clearly already upset when the officer came along -- he managed to make himself calm for the beginning, and only got upset when the officer violated procedure.
Sick as you are using it -- as a statement of ethical norms -- varies greatly from culture to culture. A lot of people in Victorian Europe would think a great many things that are currently acceptable in US society, and that you probably accept, are sick and twisted. It's a pretty good bet that non-Christians once found circumcision to be sick and twisted -- for Chrissake, it's mutilation of a baby's genitals! We (USians), on the other hand, generally accept male circumcision, but find female circumcision to be disgusting and unacceptable. Ancient Greece found homosexual pedophilia to be not only acceptable, but a noble and high thing (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but it's a reasonable simplification). I just like finding standards that people don't seem to justify, other than for some archaic reason, and question the necessity of that standard.
Most people find pictures of island natives taking part in cannibalism to be offensive and barbaric. Of course, then they go to church every Sunday and engage in ritual cannibalism (and note that there are a number of Christian sects that literally hold that the blood and wine of the Eucharist are physically transformed into the Body and the Blood, rather than simply containing the spirit of the two, or being a symbolic act).
What about the death penalty? Most first-world nations have gotten rid of the death penalty. It's acceptable in the United States, though many places feel that it's simply institutionalized murder, and barbaric.
Remember that sixty years ago, in many countries homosexuality was commonly considered perverse and disgusting, something entirely unacceptable. Today, homosexual marriages are just beginning to become common.
Almost everywhere in the United States, prostitution is illegal -- prostitution has run the gamut from entirely illegal to entirely legal many times over the ages. Polygamy is offensive to many, but was par for the course for a long, long time. We consider organ transplants to be acceptable and healthy today -- there were people that were quite freaked out by the idea of combining parts of different human bodies, much like some people are disturbed by cloning or genetic engineering today.
Remember Shakespeare, a core of high society and culture? Juliet was thirteen when she was married. Marrige at thirteen would definitely not go over well today.
If you cannot justify your value system, I think that you should not attempt to criticise those seriously questioning elements of it. If you *can* justify it, then why not simply shoot down people questioning it with something more than claiming that a suggestion violates your value system? Describe what is *wrong* with it, what practical, real life issues are raised by it! If Martin Luther hadn't criticized a lot of what people accepted as fundamental moral values at the time (priests not being chaste? God forbid!), we'd still be stuck in the bleeding Middle Ages.
To be fair, the Bush administration also takes fairly anti-environment stances, and a centrist is probably more likely to accuse them of fudging data to allow environmental abuse than, say, a Gore administration.
Let's see -- Microsoft just bought a license to do an online version of Settlers of Catan, and there's already an excellent GPL implementation in the form of Gnocatan. I have a bad feeling that the poor maintainer may be llooking at a lawsuit.:-(
Blizzard is very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever. should be Blizzard is not very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever.
Note that I'm not a Blizzard customer (don't even have a Windows machine around), and have never used Battle.Net, so I'm not sure of their policies, but I'd guess that Blizzard will probably ban someone that they feel is cheating at games. They *may* have bans for what they consider to be inappropriate behavior via chat -- not sure. I remember some people griping on Slashdot about getting banned for something they did in Diablo that they thought they shouldn't have been banned for -- those folks can still use the game they bought. That way, Battle.Net is a useful service (a monitored, relable network for use), but it's not an attempt to require that people not be able to play their copy if Blizzard feels that they shouldn't.
Diablo alone provides a whole mess of potential things to ban people for, just because it provides long-term characters in a competitive environment. That sort of thing is ripe for nasty behavior.
I don't think that this is the most reasonable way of looking at the issue. It seems that saying that you cannot prevent someone *else* from distributing child pornography using your bandwidth (just as other people cannot prevent *you* from distributing whatever you like using *their* bandwidth). On the other hand, you will never know what content your node is passing through your node.
There is no hammer that you can *prevent* someone else from breaking a window with.
Note that a telecom company is not considered a "distributor" of data that passes through its network, which is about the same role that you are playing as a Freenet node.
I'm a little curious about this. Conservative religious influences (well, okay, Christian sects) in the United States have always had a major impact on many laws and standards. Does Christianity have less secular impact in Canada than in the United States?
Come to think of it, I don't believe that the Bible ever forbids sexual interaction with someone of a particular age. The Bible contains a number of standards that are now frequently considered quite conservative, but I don't believe age is ever mentioned as a standard.
This is tantamount to eradicating the rule of law: but it is exactly the rule of law that is supposed to uphold the freedom of speech!
I don't believe that your logic here is correct -- you are mixing two different kinds of "law" -- the free speech case law that establishes that we have the ability to transmit the data that we want to, and the kind of laws that allow us to punish those who prevent freedom of speech. That is really the only way I can see that law upholds the freedom of speech -- in the second definition. Freenet makes it difficult to distinguish between protected and unprotected speech. I cannot figure out how the inability to distinguish between these two types damages the ability to punish those who prevent freedom of speech.
What I'm saying is that that is not legally significant -- that it is financially beneficial to Blizzard for something to happen is not enough to have the courts rule in their favor. Even crime reduction is not enough to force someone to do something -- if packaged food were eliminated, it's likely that people would litter much less. However, food packers do not need to get rid of packaged food.
I am quite sure that there are many people out there that have used bnetd to avoid paying for a copy of a Blizzard game. I am also sure that plenty of illegal content is swapped in IRC channels. Neither is a reason for shutting down a group of people that produce a tool that *may* be used to facilitate pirating a game.
I've never used bnetd, but here are a number of reasons I could see someone legitimately using it:
* Blizzard kicks a player off Battle.Net, for whatever reason. They can still play their game, just not using Blizzard's servers.
* The player and his friends have limited or nonexistant network access. If I work in village in many countries, I probably have lousy network access, but a fair number of folks that would like to play a game locally all in one place (especially an older game like Warcraft II that works on older computers).
* Pure interest in reverse engineering and writing a server. It's *fun* to do something like this, and you feel good when you can sit back and look at the finished product. I remember when folks reverse engineered the Hotline protocol (a vaguely BBS-like server that was quite popular on the Mac at one point). It was very neat to have something like this done.
* Ensuring that the game continues working. Blizzard may give "lifetime access to Battle.Net", whatever that means, but at some point, Blizzard will go out of business, just as all companies do eventually. Blizzard is very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever. If there is an open-soruce implementation of the protocol, people can continue playing as long as they'd like, just as with Quake.
Any of these are good reasons, and if any of these were the primary purpose of bnetd, rather than bypassing copy protection mechanisms, then the bnetd people are in the clear relative to the DMCA.
The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important.
I believe that that game was meant to help produce an example that could be pulled out when judges seeking to censor games claim that games cannot contain significant political expression, and thus do not merit First Amendment protection. (This happenend some time ago when someone-or-other was suing someone-or-other over a game.)
I believe that you're factually incorrect on your second point, and I just plain disagree with you on the first.
At UC Berkeley, you can make your own majors. Maybe if games are so important to you, you can go there and become a network gaming major.
I mean really, what are you at college for? Is this a survival issue
And yet, college students look for entertainment. Some go to bars, some watch TV, some hunt girls, some learn to cook strange foods, some do dope, some hit movie theaters, clubs, go paintballing, etc, etc, etc.
The point is that gaming is a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment. You hvae many friends nearby on a fast network, and most of you just got a computer in the last few years for college. Why not? Do you really never play games?
I don't know if the bnetd project is right or wrong, but it should be argued on its own merits rather than whether or not the guy from I Phelta Thi can play WCIII against his tri-Lamda counterpart.
One of the clauses in the DMCA in determining whether a device is an illegal circumvention devices is whether the primary purpose of the device is for copyright infringement. Blizzard is representing bnetd as a device designed to facilitate software piracy. When people chime in and talk about all the legitimate reasons they use bnetd, it helps undermine Blizzard's arguments on that clause.
How about the one where if stores give you gift cases or other things with liquor, they can't charge more for them?
So you have a bottle of vodka sitting on the shelf, and a bottle of vodka in a gift case or with a mixer or something next to it for exactly the same price...
However, given that it is not random, I guess the odds are much better.
I would expect that it is random. There doesn't seem to be much reason not to have the codes be random.
I can randomly generate a vast quantity of numbers and dump them in a database somewhere, and mark one as "used" every time someone turns in a cap. (Actually, Pepsi probably already does the database thing just to take advantage of customer data.)
There's no reason to have a mechanism like "if the third letter is "L", the bottle is a winner". That sort of thing was popular back in the day when isolated systems existed (like computers with software with serial numbers not on the 'Net and unconnected credit card-using systems). Today, there's no reason for it.
I have tried this, with no success. GCJ still has severe problems working with many Java programs out there (both runtime and compiletime) and the last version I tried was still spitting out compile-time errors.
However, Java as a language imposes certain types of overhead that are very difficult to eliminate with optimization. The type model and other decisions in Java introduce some inescapable runtime overhead. I haven't seen analysis of 1.5, so it may be that some of this is fixed (the generic containers are a big deal), or it may be that the constraints that the designers were working under didn't let them get rid of some of these problems.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no legal requirement for an adult to posess photo ID (though life may be more frusterating without it).
Many people, such as blind people, cannot drive and do not have driver's licenses, the most common form of photo ID.
Follow that rule, and you may well end your ass up in jail. The rule in most jurisdictions is that you do not have a right to resist arrest unless one "reasonably believes that such force is immediately necessary to protect against an arresting officer's use of unlawful and deadly force"
I'm curious -- is there a specific set of exemptions for police officers? I read the a first-year-law textbook on this, and it seemed that in most situations, the standard use-of-force rules apply.
The way *I* understood things, if (admittedly hypothetical situation) you are an electrician working on a system where another person will die unless you rapidly perform a task (say, something is about to overload and destroy a transformer that a bunch of unaware kids are sitting on), and police attempt to arrest you, and you're sure that you can't convince them that you need to finish what you're working on in the thirty seconds or whatever you have remaining, you are entitled to use nondeadly force to resist arrest (Macing the officer, for instance) to resume work. If you get charged with assult or similar, you have a necessity justification -- the potential consquences of not using force are legally worse than the consequences of using force, the consequences were immediate and otherwise unavoidable, and you are not resorting to deadly force).
Note that this probably changes slightly from state to state -- some locales, like NYC, are extremely tough on use of force, and some places, like Texas, are extremely lax on use of force.
Ah, because nobody ever possesses fake IDs?
Sure, it's illegal, but so is giving a false name.
Refusing to give an ID, however, is legal.
Note that Ray Bradbury was stopped and given almost *exactly* this same spiel (sans the refusal to hand over ID), though with some incredulity on the side of the officers that he was actually out for some exercise, which is what prompted him to write Farenheight 451.
First off to everyone here asking "why didn't he just show is ID?"
Because it's a right that, if not defended, can slip away. As demonstrated by the people saying this, it already has to some degree.
If the only people that refuse to show an ID *are* criminals, than refusal to show ID becomes extremely suspicious in and of itself.
For the people saying "If you've done nothing wrong, why not just comply?" -- this is *exactly* the mantra that Orwell used to justify everything in his state. It works well. If you're doing nothing wrong, then why should you object to being monitored by state-controlled cameras in your house or any of the other elements of a police state?
A concerned citizen called 911 to report a possible domestic violence situation, saying they had seen punches thrown.
Okay, fair enough.
The officer arrives to find the vehicle had been stopped in an erratic, sudden, and aggressive manner.
I'm not even sure *how* you'd stop a vehicle in such a manner that it fits all those adjectives. It certainly didn't look like an "erratic, sudden, and aggressive" parking job to me. It could have been more nicely lined up, I suppose, but it was certainly safely off the road. You're reading an awful lot into the truck's position.
The man is immediately belligerent.
Not in my reading of the video. The first thing he did was move around the other side of the truck to make sure that he was off the road. The only thing he objected to was handing over ID. He was brusque but straightforward -- certainly not beligerant -- even after he told the officer that he wasn't going to show his ID papers. He didn't get angry until he watched the cops grab his screaming daughter (the girl trying to do no more than run to him), throw her to the ground, and handcuff her. Then he *still* wasn't even swearing (and I'm not sure that I wouldn't be at that point) -- he just kept saying "Big man!", as in "You're such a big man to be beating up on a teenage girl."
I can see giving an officer quite a bit of leeway in a situation where there is immediate potential personal danger to the officer or citizens. If there's a gun out, yes, following protocol might be ideal, but it's kind of hard to think about details of rules when someone has your life resting in their trigger finger and you have maybe a second to make a flash decision. This officer had all the time in the world. He certainly had the ability to think about what he was doing, and follow proper procedure.
I've spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, and know several people that are black, latin, etc. None of them has mentioned any problems with cops in the area.
Have you asked them?
3. You do not have to show them identification if you don't want to. This does not apply if you are in your car and driving, and are pulled over: then you must produce Driver's ID. If you are a cyclist, like me, you have to have some kind of ID if you a cycling on the road, but it does not have to be a Driver's license.
Watching this video, this guy is making a lot of mistakes. Look, I don't like dealing with the police, but if your real intent is to be left alone to exercise your freedoms (and not to just cause trouble), you are well advised to:
I'm not entirely sure about this, and it may vary from state to state.
In West Virginia, driving without a driver's license in your posession is a misdemeanor. However, you will not be charged if you can produce the license in court.
Note that the man was *not* actually driving the vehicle (and was, in fact, outside of the vehicle) when the officer came by. The vehicle could have been driven by the man's daughter, by someone else if the truck broke down and someone went for help, or God knows what. I'm not sure whether there might be case law in the area clarifying whether an officer can ask for a driver's license from the person who seems likely to be driving the truck, but I don't think that it's as clear cut as you think it is. There was no point where the officer could clearly establish that the man had been operating the vehicle.
Furthermore, the officer asked specifically for some kind of ID. He did not ask to see a driver's license. I'm not sure whether this is an issue, and it does come off as a bit nitpicky, but it might be a legal issue.
The man asked whether he was being arrested, and if so, why. If the officer intended to arrest him, he needed to give him the reason he was being arrested, and chose not to do so. If you are right, that the man was being arrested under suspicion of driving without a license, then the officer should have told him so.
I have to say that my guess is that the officer doesn't often run across people who refuse to give him their license, and probably acted inappropriately, since it's not like training in what to do in such a case is necessary very often.
I'm (personally) willing to give policemen some leeway for violating procedure if they're in a situation where it's difficult for them to make a clear judgement call. Perhaps they think someone is shooting at them, and they yell "Freeze" instead of "Freeze, Police!". That's not great, but at least you have someone operating in fight-or-flight with a split second to make a decision. The sheriff had no reason to think that the man was a danger, and had all the time in the world to make his decision. He didn't follow procedure.
I'm not a police officer, but I think the first thing I would have done is separate the man and the girl, and second make sure that the girl is okay. If the man asks why he's being asked for identification, there is absolutely no legal reason that I can think of for the officer to refuse to say that he's investigating possible domestic violence or battery.
Police officers are human too. They have bad days, just like me. They make mistakes, and I don't think that they can be held to a perfect standard. However, if they make mistakes, then they (well, the state) needs to take the consequences of its actions. In this case, that means not getting the $250 fine. Such is life. Perhaps, in the future, the officer will be more forthcoming if the man asks what the officer is doing.
I agree that the man should not have gotten upset, but he probably didn't have a couple of days to plan exactly what he was going to do, and he was clearly already upset when the officer came along -- he managed to make himself calm for the beginning, and only got upset when the officer violated procedure.
Sick as you are using it -- as a statement of ethical norms -- varies greatly from culture to culture. A lot of people in Victorian Europe would think a great many things that are currently acceptable in US society, and that you probably accept, are sick and twisted. It's a pretty good bet that non-Christians once found circumcision to be sick and twisted -- for Chrissake, it's mutilation of a baby's genitals! We (USians), on the other hand, generally accept male circumcision, but find female circumcision to be disgusting and unacceptable. Ancient Greece found homosexual pedophilia to be not only acceptable, but a noble and high thing (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but it's a reasonable simplification). I just like finding standards that people don't seem to justify, other than for some archaic reason, and question the necessity of that standard.
Most people find pictures of island natives taking part in cannibalism to be offensive and barbaric. Of course, then they go to church every Sunday and engage in ritual cannibalism (and note that there are a number of Christian sects that literally hold that the blood and wine of the Eucharist are physically transformed into the Body and the Blood, rather than simply containing the spirit of the two, or being a symbolic act).
What about the death penalty? Most first-world nations have gotten rid of the death penalty. It's acceptable in the United States, though many places feel that it's simply institutionalized murder, and barbaric.
Remember that sixty years ago, in many countries homosexuality was commonly considered perverse and disgusting, something entirely unacceptable. Today, homosexual marriages are just beginning to become common.
Almost everywhere in the United States, prostitution is illegal -- prostitution has run the gamut from entirely illegal to entirely legal many times over the ages. Polygamy is offensive to many, but was par for the course for a long, long time. We consider organ transplants to be acceptable and healthy today -- there were people that were quite freaked out by the idea of combining parts of different human bodies, much like some people are disturbed by cloning or genetic engineering today.
Remember Shakespeare, a core of high society and culture? Juliet was thirteen when she was married. Marrige at thirteen would definitely not go over well today.
If you cannot justify your value system, I think that you should not attempt to criticise those seriously questioning elements of it. If you *can* justify it, then why not simply shoot down people questioning it with something more than claiming that a suggestion violates your value system? Describe what is *wrong* with it, what practical, real life issues are raised by it! If Martin Luther hadn't criticized a lot of what people accepted as fundamental moral values at the time (priests not being chaste? God forbid!), we'd still be stuck in the bleeding Middle Ages.
To be fair, the Bush administration also takes fairly anti-environment stances, and a centrist is probably more likely to accuse them of fudging data to allow environmental abuse than, say, a Gore administration.
Gnocatan has single-player support.
Let's see -- Microsoft just bought a license to do an online version of Settlers of Catan, and there's already an excellent GPL implementation in the form of Gnocatan. I have a bad feeling that the poor maintainer may be llooking at a lawsuit. :-(
Blizzard is very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever. should be Blizzard is not very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever.
Note that I'm not a Blizzard customer (don't even have a Windows machine around), and have never used Battle.Net, so I'm not sure of their policies, but I'd guess that Blizzard will probably ban someone that they feel is cheating at games. They *may* have bans for what they consider to be inappropriate behavior via chat -- not sure. I remember some people griping on Slashdot about getting banned for something they did in Diablo that they thought they shouldn't have been banned for -- those folks can still use the game they bought. That way, Battle.Net is a useful service (a monitored, relable network for use), but it's not an attempt to require that people not be able to play their copy if Blizzard feels that they shouldn't.
Diablo alone provides a whole mess of potential things to ban people for, just because it provides long-term characters in a competitive environment. That sort of thing is ripe for nasty behavior.
I don't think that this is the most reasonable way of looking at the issue. It seems that saying that you cannot prevent someone *else* from distributing child pornography using your bandwidth (just as other people cannot prevent *you* from distributing whatever you like using *their* bandwidth). On the other hand, you will never know what content your node is passing through your node.
There is no hammer that you can *prevent* someone else from breaking a window with.
Note that a telecom company is not considered a "distributor" of data that passes through its network, which is about the same role that you are playing as a Freenet node.
I'm a little curious about this. Conservative religious influences (well, okay, Christian sects) in the United States have always had a major impact on many laws and standards. Does Christianity have less secular impact in Canada than in the United States?
Come to think of it, I don't believe that the Bible ever forbids sexual interaction with someone of a particular age. The Bible contains a number of standards that are now frequently considered quite conservative, but I don't believe age is ever mentioned as a standard.
No, _your_ argument is astute....what kind of ridiculous argument is that?
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Astute \As*tute"\, a. [L. astutus, fr. astus craft, cunning;
perh. cognate with E. acute.]
Critically discerning; sagacious; shrewd; subtle; crafty.
Syn: Keen; eagle-eyed; penetrating; skilled; discriminating;
cunning; sagacious; subtle; wily; crafty. {As*tute"ly},
adv. -- {As*tute"ness}, n.
I think you might mean "asinine".
This is tantamount to eradicating the rule of law: but it is exactly the rule of law that is supposed to uphold the freedom of speech!
I don't believe that your logic here is correct -- you are mixing two different kinds of "law" -- the free speech case law that establishes that we have the ability to transmit the data that we want to, and the kind of laws that allow us to punish those who prevent freedom of speech. That is really the only way I can see that law upholds the freedom of speech -- in the second definition. Freenet makes it difficult to distinguish between protected and unprotected speech. I cannot figure out how the inability to distinguish between these two types damages the ability to punish those who prevent freedom of speech.
What I'm saying is that that is not legally significant -- that it is financially beneficial to Blizzard for something to happen is not enough to have the courts rule in their favor. Even crime reduction is not enough to force someone to do something -- if packaged food were eliminated, it's likely that people would litter much less. However, food packers do not need to get rid of packaged food.
I am quite sure that there are many people out there that have used bnetd to avoid paying for a copy of a Blizzard game. I am also sure that plenty of illegal content is swapped in IRC channels. Neither is a reason for shutting down a group of people that produce a tool that *may* be used to facilitate pirating a game.
I've never used bnetd, but here are a number of reasons I could see someone legitimately using it:
* Blizzard kicks a player off Battle.Net, for whatever reason. They can still play their game, just not using Blizzard's servers.
* The player and his friends have limited or nonexistant network access. If I work in village in many countries, I probably have lousy network access, but a fair number of folks that would like to play a game locally all in one place (especially an older game like Warcraft II that works on older computers).
* Pure interest in reverse engineering and writing a server. It's *fun* to do something like this, and you feel good when you can sit back and look at the finished product. I remember when folks reverse engineered the Hotline protocol (a vaguely BBS-like server that was quite popular on the Mac at one point). It was very neat to have something like this done.
* Ensuring that the game continues working. Blizzard may give "lifetime access to Battle.Net", whatever that means, but at some point, Blizzard will go out of business, just as all companies do eventually. Blizzard is very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever. If there is an open-soruce implementation of the protocol, people can continue playing as long as they'd like, just as with Quake.
Any of these are good reasons, and if any of these were the primary purpose of bnetd, rather than bypassing copy protection mechanisms, then the bnetd people are in the clear relative to the DMCA.
You can't pardon someone from civil litigation.
A President of the United States of America "can't" commit his country to war, either, but it's manageable.
I agree that it'd be realy bizarre to see a Republican president doing something like this.
The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important.
I believe that that game was meant to help produce an example that could be pulled out when judges seeking to censor games claim that games cannot contain significant political expression, and thus do not merit First Amendment protection. (This happenend some time ago when someone-or-other was suing someone-or-other over a game.)
I believe that you're factually incorrect on your second point, and I just plain disagree with you on the first.
At UC Berkeley, you can make your own majors. Maybe if games are so important to you, you can go there and become a network gaming major.
I mean really, what are you at college for? Is this a survival issue
And yet, college students look for entertainment. Some go to bars, some watch TV, some hunt girls, some learn to cook strange foods, some do dope, some hit movie theaters, clubs, go paintballing, etc, etc, etc.
The point is that gaming is a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment. You hvae many friends nearby on a fast network, and most of you just got a computer in the last few years for college. Why not? Do you really never play games?
I don't know if the bnetd project is right or wrong, but it should be argued on its own merits rather than whether or not the guy from I Phelta Thi can play WCIII against his tri-Lamda counterpart.
One of the clauses in the DMCA in determining whether a device is an illegal circumvention devices is whether the primary purpose of the device is for copyright infringement. Blizzard is representing bnetd as a device designed to facilitate software piracy. When people chime in and talk about all the legitimate reasons they use bnetd, it helps undermine Blizzard's arguments on that clause.
You live in Pennsylvania and you say "pop"?
Pennsylvania has some interesting food laws.
How about the one where if stores give you gift cases or other things with liquor, they can't charge more for them?
So you have a bottle of vodka sitting on the shelf, and a bottle of vodka in a gift case or with a mixer or something next to it for exactly the same price...
The 20 ounce soda has probably been refrigerated. The 2 liter hasn't.
However, given that it is not random, I guess the odds are much better.
I would expect that it is random. There doesn't seem to be much reason not to have the codes be random.
I can randomly generate a vast quantity of numbers and dump them in a database somewhere, and mark one as "used" every time someone turns in a cap. (Actually, Pepsi probably already does the database thing just to take advantage of customer data.)
There's no reason to have a mechanism like "if the third letter is "L", the bottle is a winner". That sort of thing was popular back in the day when isolated systems existed (like computers with software with serial numbers not on the 'Net and unconnected credit card-using systems). Today, there's no reason for it.
I have tried this, with no success. GCJ still has severe problems working with many Java programs out there (both runtime and compiletime) and the last version I tried was still spitting out compile-time errors.
However, Java as a language imposes certain types of overhead that are very difficult to eliminate with optimization. The type model and other decisions in Java introduce some inescapable runtime overhead. I haven't seen analysis of 1.5, so it may be that some of this is fixed (the generic containers are a big deal), or it may be that the constraints that the designers were working under didn't let them get rid of some of these problems.