Might be a bit nit-picky, but a VAT/sales tax doesn't tax companies; in fact, companies are more or less exempt from it because they can reclaim the tax on everything they can book as a cost necessary for creating their product. If a government increases its VAT rate, a company doesn't make any less profit from a sale (only the number of sales might drop due to customers potentially prioritizing their spending differently after literally everything will have increased in price over night).
I'm not sure that they're just collecting points for ego purposes. I've seen job ads where companies were suggesting that applicants might want to add github and stackoverflow accounts names as a kind of portfolio.
I think you misunderstand what "conditions" refers to That speed limits gives you an appropriate speed, yes - under *good* conditions. But conditions might be less than good depending on the weather, the time of day, the state of the road, etc.
When there's poor visibility like in a fog - or at night in a poorly lit road - the appropriate speed also depends on how far you can see ahead: If one can't stop in time to avoid hitting something once it becomes visible in the headlights, then that speed isn't appropriate to the conditions.
Maybe they can get the RIAA to do the math: 150k of statutory damages per willful infringement multiplied by 100k infringements makes 15 billion in statutory damages.
Which leads to the question of who do you call to repo a carrier group.
I was so dumbfounded by the size and the packaging material, I didn't even realize that the box was double-walled until I tried tearing it up to throw it into recycling.
(Though to be fair and ruin part of the joke, that was an Amazon marketplace seller who didn't user amazon for shipping.)
That person's statement might be exaggerated for comedic effect, but there is truth in it:
I had to upgrade my Noteboook's distro for EOL reasons and the new one came with kde5 or plasma or whatever it is called now. Suddenly my notebook's 8GB of RAM weren't enough anymore to do my work.
Granted, it is somewhat memory intensive Java development (tomcat with 120+ webapps), but before the upgrade I didn't have any issues when spinning up an additional app server or throwing another GB of heap at a JVM. Under kde5, doing the same things as before, I sometimes had to wait for swapping when doing basic stuff like switching between Eclipse and the web browser or when right-clicking on something. After upgading to 16GB, I can work again.
Well, sort of. Now I sometimes have to kill akonadi to do a google search if kmail+akonadi's imap resource manage to saturate my downlink bandwidth again. But on the plus side, I could remove the "killall plasmashell; plasmashell&" shortcut for when a tray icon's never-ending animation would create 100% load on a CPU core. Well. I didn't need it anymore and with the current version it kills the entire X server anyway...actually, working under Linux currently reminds me a lot of working on pre [2000|XP] versions of Windows; except with kde5 I don't (yet?) have to keep a floppy for auto-flashing the graphic card's BIOS(*) in the drive when another plasmoid manages to crash the system to a reboot.
(*) Under Win98 I had a 50:50 chance that a freezing Hauppauge TV app would f*ck up the Matrox card to black screen and POST codes after a reset. Linux hasn't come that far, but it feels like someone is trying.
One legal reason why most software EULAs aren't enforceable in Germany:
If someone buys Windows from some retailer, the buyer enters into a contract with that retailer.
Any additional crap one party wants to enforce has to be made part of that contract; if the EULA isn't made explicitly a part of that contract, it's not enforceable:
If the seller hides a piece of paper with additional terms the customer doesn't know about somewhere in the box, then those terms aren't enforceable afterwards; and putting a sticker on the box a la "by opening the box, you agree to the unknown terms hidden inside" has been ruled to be a waste of sticker materials.
But the most important bit:
If the customer doesn't buy directly from MS (i.e. if MS isn't that retailer), then MS is not a party in that deal and has no say whatsoever regarding its terms
The customer enters into a contract with the retailer and nobody else.
There's no business relationship being established between the customer and MS just because MS happens to be the manufacturer of a product which the customer bought from somebody else.
I do mostly server-side Java stuff and have been using the same Linux laptop for it for the last 6+ years. But since working on a laptop for more than a couple of hours is literally a pain in the neck, I connect an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. So from a practical, prouctivity-related point of view, there really isn't a difference between laptop and desktop for me.
I'm mostly using the laptop instead of a desktop because it's nice to have my current environment wherever I am AND because I work mostly at home and it saves a lot of electricity. From my measurements, calculations and comparison of electricity bills, this 1000EUR laptop is getting close to having paid for itself.
The CPU is fast enough, so the only upgrades during those years were to replace the optical drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB after SuSE 13.x reached its end of life (the current SuSE and KDE have become incredible memory hogs and moving all work from Java 7 to Java 8 didn't exactly help either).
Back-translated from German sources, there apparently is a requirement that member states have to notify the other members about laws which contain "technological regulation" specifically aimed at "services of the 'information society' ".
So I guess because this is about copyright on the internet, i.e. information plus technology, it's not far-fetched for the German court to ask "Hey, EU court, is this something they were required to notify the other members about to make it a valid law?"
I see nothing wrong with scraping and sharing the scripts even if not for research purposes.
And if there's a ToS violation, well, that's between tinder and the user and tinder is welcome to block the account.
But - morality aside - uploading the scraped images will certainly violate copyright law pretty much everywhere and at least in certain (European) countries it will also violate privacy laws which make it illegal to distribute images without the consent of the depicted persons. So, yeah, not cool.
Could be that they're developing a new editing function or a new interface: the stored settings are being applied, but there's currently no way to edit those settings - or at least no way to add new forwards.
IIRC from a different article ( DR-this-FA), the "knowledge" part made sense in this particular case:
1. The illegally hosted content was taken down
2. Then the commercial news site replaced its links to the taken down content with links to a different site hosting this content illegally
3. Instead of just playing whack-a-mole with hosters, the copyright owners also told the news site to knock it off.
4. The court either didn't buy the "we still had no idea the 2nd time around, nudegnudgewinkwink" excuse or at least said that the news people weren't working with due diligence, given how some staffer had to actively look for another source of the taken down content.
Requiring someone to prove "we had no knowledge" would be stupid, but it's not that unreasonable to expect a news site to be able to give convincing answers to questions like:
"So, what made you think - and what did you do to make sure - that your 2nd source was hosting the content legally after your 1st source turned out to be illegal?".
Well, here's a German who flosses daily before going to bed. Maybe it's because some of my teeth are very close together and there's no chance for a brush to get between them, but I can feel the difference before and after flossing so that l still feel a bit dirty if I just brush without flossing.
What I think makes a way bigger difference than flossing or not: using an electric toothbrush.
The obvious case would be people using it like any other file(-sharing) host. I don't think there's much if anything stopping you from adding e.g. an archive containing a movie or a bunch of ebooks into a throw-away repository and linking it from somewhere else.
Using Git might even make it easier to reupload stuff after one repo gets taken down - just add another remote to your source repo and push it.
And as a MT driver, I leave my car in neutral when I park. Because you start the car in neutral, and even though I check before starting it, it still seems like a good habit.
The good habit is to put the car in neutral via the clutch when turning the key.
IIRC they decided against using any name with "gear" in it for legal reasons. I guess there could've been trademark issues based on a fear of people confusing the two shows, if the trademarked titles are too close in addition(!) to the moderators and the general topic being the same.
I'm pretty sure I've read about trademark lawsuits based on flimsier similarity/confusion arguments.
A bunch of popular Java application servers like JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere or applications like Jenkins use RMI or at least similar (de)serialization of Java objects for a variety of things like e.g. remote management. They also seem to be rather trusting of the clients and serialized objects they receive and deserialize on the server side.
Now, if I remember correctly, you can only deserialize classes on your CLASSPATH, so you usually can't just send a serialized instance of net.some.exploit.MyEvilAndUnsafeToDeserializeObject.class and expect it to work on servers because they usually won't have your net.some.exploit.MyEvilAndUnsafeToDeserializeObject.class on their classpath
So someone looked for popular Java libraries which do some unsafe serialization/deserialization stuff and are used by lots of server software and found that the Apache Commons Collections library contains some dangerous deserialization code and is used by a lot of software - like JBoss and the others mentioned.
So if a server does RMI or RMI-like services and uses that library, you can basically get a remote shell on that server by sending some evil RMI to whatever port/servlet/service on that server accepts RMI or some other (proprietary) protocol which uses serialized Java objects somewhere.
the girl's voice had a kind of penetrating quality, like a corkscrew. When she spoke in italics, you could hear them. 'Oh, no. You can't say that. Because how can I tell if it works without trying it? That comes under the Sale of Goods Act (1983).' The awed watchers were astonished to see a slightly hunted look in Mr Patel's eyes. Up until now he'd never met anyone who could pronounce brackets.
Terry Pratchett kinda made 4th-wall-breaking fun of this in some of his books. I can't find the quote this made me think of right now, but it was a character accusing another not of being sarcastic, but of speaking some word in italics (IIRC Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax).
I just found some similar quotes from other books, like
from "Men at Arms"
He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.
..or taking it even further, from his scifi-gamer YA book "Only You Can Save Mankind" when Kristy argues with Mr Patel the game shop owner about returning her "defective" copy of the game which she had already opened:
the girl's voice had a kind of penetrating quality, like a corkscrew. When she spoke in italics, you could hear them.
'Oh, no. You can't say that. Because how can I tell if it works without trying it? That comes under the Sale of Goods Act (1983).'
The awed watchers were astonished to see a slightly hunted look in Mr Patel's eyes. Up until now he'd never met anyone who could pronounce brackets.
Besides them being different courts, those lawsuits might actually be somewhat different because, while they all wanted to stop adblock from blocking theirs ads, the plaintiffs might have used different approaches and accused adblock of violating different laws.
I haven't looked up the past lawsuits, but IIRC another article about this most recent case, this time the argument went along those lines:
1. The newspaper and adblock are competitors because of the acceptable ads program. The court agreed with this to a certain degree, at least to the extent that it agreed to hear a case in which adblock was accused of being a competitor who is applying unfair business practices violating German laws regulating fair competition between businesses (basically, one boxer was complaining to the ref that there's a guy in the ring who keeps punching him in the nuts)
2. The actual complaint was that there's an "implicit contract" between the newspaper's website and its users (i.e. users get articles in exchange for viewing ads) and that adblock is injecting themselves into and actively interfering with the contract between a competitor and the competitor's customers.
That's the contract which the quote
users have the right to block those or any ads, because no such contract exists
in the/. summary refers to.
Obviously from the quote, the court didn't agree that blocking ads is as trying to sabotage a competitor's contracts.
Anyway / tl;dr:
This case was about (specific) unfair business practices.
An earlier one was IIRC about adblock employees' sales pitches for "Acceptable Ads" (i.e. whitelisting in exchange for 30(?)% of your ad revenue) being essentially an extortion/protection money racket: "Beautiful website and traffic stats you've got there; would be a shame if something were to happen to your ads..."
Other were about..I don't remember..maybe a general "they're 'stealing' from us".
One lawsuit might have been about whether removing the ads can be considered copyright violation because it's altering the appearance of the site (creating a derivative work) without the original authors permission.
Slashdot Mirror
How about master and minion?
Might be a bit nit-picky, but a VAT/sales tax doesn't tax companies; in fact, companies are more or less exempt from it because they can reclaim the tax on everything they can book as a cost necessary for creating their product.
If a government increases its VAT rate, a company doesn't make any less profit from a sale (only the number of sales might drop due to customers potentially prioritizing their spending differently after literally everything will have increased in price over night).
I'm not sure that they're just collecting points for ego purposes.
I've seen job ads where companies were suggesting that applicants might want to add github and stackoverflow accounts names as a kind of portfolio.
I think you misunderstand what "conditions" refers to
That speed limits gives you an appropriate speed, yes - under *good* conditions.
But conditions might be less than good depending on the weather, the time of day, the state of the road, etc.
When there's poor visibility like in a fog - or at night in a poorly lit road - the appropriate speed also depends on how far you can see ahead:
If one can't stop in time to avoid hitting something once it becomes visible in the headlights, then that speed isn't appropriate to the conditions.
Maybe they can get the RIAA to do the math:
150k of statutory damages per willful infringement multiplied by 100k infringements makes 15 billion in statutory damages.
Which leads to the question of who do you call to repo a carrier group.
I wonder what reviews might lead an algorithm to decide that it's necessary to ship a gel wrist rest for keyboards like this:
https://i.imgur.com/t9gCMCM.jp...
I was so dumbfounded by the size and the packaging material, I didn't even realize that the box was double-walled until I tried tearing it up to throw it into recycling.
(Though to be fair and ruin part of the joke, that was an Amazon marketplace seller who didn't user amazon for shipping.)
As someone who had to get more than 8GB after a distro upgrade: Do you use any of the kmail/kontact/akondai/semantics-related stuff?
That person's statement might be exaggerated for comedic effect, but there is truth in it:
I had to upgrade my Noteboook's distro for EOL reasons and the new one came with kde5 or plasma or whatever it is called now.
Suddenly my notebook's 8GB of RAM weren't enough anymore to do my work.
Granted, it is somewhat memory intensive Java development (tomcat with 120+ webapps), but before the upgrade I didn't have any issues when spinning up an additional app server or throwing another GB of heap at a JVM.
Under kde5, doing the same things as before, I sometimes had to wait for swapping when doing basic stuff like switching between Eclipse and the web browser or when right-clicking on something.
After upgading to 16GB, I can work again.
Well, sort of. ..actually, working under Linux currently reminds me a lot of working on pre [2000|XP] versions of Windows; except with kde5 I don't (yet?) have to keep a floppy for auto-flashing the graphic card's BIOS(*) in the drive when another plasmoid manages to crash the system to a reboot.
Now I sometimes have to kill akonadi to do a google search if kmail+akonadi's imap resource manage to saturate my downlink bandwidth again.
But on the plus side, I could remove the "killall plasmashell; plasmashell&" shortcut for when a tray icon's never-ending animation would create 100% load on a CPU core. Well. I didn't need it anymore and with the current version it kills the entire X server anyway.
(*)
Under Win98 I had a 50:50 chance that a freezing Hauppauge TV app would f*ck up the Matrox card to black screen and POST codes after a reset. Linux hasn't come that far, but it feels like someone is trying.
One legal reason why most software EULAs aren't enforceable in Germany:
If someone buys Windows from some retailer, the buyer enters into a contract with that retailer.
Any additional crap one party wants to enforce has to be made part of that contract; if the EULA isn't made explicitly a part of that contract, it's not enforceable:
If the seller hides a piece of paper with additional terms the customer doesn't know about somewhere in the box, then those terms aren't enforceable afterwards; and putting a sticker on the box a la "by opening the box, you agree to the unknown terms hidden inside" has been ruled to be a waste of sticker materials.
But the most important bit:
If the customer doesn't buy directly from MS (i.e. if MS isn't that retailer), then MS is not a party in that deal and has no say whatsoever regarding its terms
The customer enters into a contract with the retailer and nobody else.
There's no business relationship being established between the customer and MS just because MS happens to be the manufacturer of a product which the customer bought from somebody else.
I do mostly server-side Java stuff and have been using the same Linux laptop for it for the last 6+ years.
But since working on a laptop for more than a couple of hours is literally a pain in the neck, I connect an external keyboard, mouse and monitor.
So from a practical, prouctivity-related point of view, there really isn't a difference between laptop and desktop for me.
I'm mostly using the laptop instead of a desktop because it's nice to have my current environment wherever I am AND because I work mostly at home and it saves a lot of electricity.
From my measurements, calculations and comparison of electricity bills, this 1000EUR laptop is getting close to having paid for itself.
The CPU is fast enough, so the only upgrades during those years were to replace the optical drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB after SuSE 13.x reached its end of life (the current SuSE and KDE have become incredible memory hogs and moving all work from Java 7 to Java 8 didn't exactly help either).
Back-translated from German sources, there apparently is a requirement that member states have to notify the other members about laws which contain "technological regulation" specifically aimed at "services of the 'information society' ".
So I guess because this is about copyright on the internet, i.e. information plus technology, it's not far-fetched for the German court to ask "Hey, EU court, is this something they were required to notify the other members about to make it a valid law?"
Just because a 3rd party is legally allowed to access something, doesn't mean that 3rd party has the right to redistribute or relicense the stuff.
I see nothing wrong with scraping and sharing the scripts even if not for research purposes.
And if there's a ToS violation, well, that's between tinder and the user and tinder is welcome to block the account.
But - morality aside - uploading the scraped images will certainly violate copyright law pretty much everywhere and at least in certain (European) countries it will also violate privacy laws which make it illegal to distribute images without the consent of the depicted persons. So, yeah, not cool.
Nah, they've just assigned all the SuSE stuff to Novell.
Hey, *someone* has to provide the answers for all those barely understandable urgent questions on stackoverflow and mailing lists.
Could be that they're developing a new editing function or a new interface:
the stored settings are being applied, but there's currently no way to edit those settings - or at least no way to add new forwards.
IIRC from a different article ( DR-this-FA), the "knowledge" part made sense in this particular case:
1. The illegally hosted content was taken down
2. Then the commercial news site replaced its links to the taken down content with links to a different site hosting this content illegally
3. Instead of just playing whack-a-mole with hosters, the copyright owners also told the news site to knock it off.
4. The court either didn't buy the "we still had no idea the 2nd time around, nudegnudgewinkwink" excuse or at least said that the news people weren't working with due diligence, given how some staffer had to actively look for another source of the taken down content.
Requiring someone to prove "we had no knowledge" would be stupid, but it's not that unreasonable to expect a news site to be able to give convincing answers to questions like:
"So, what made you think - and what did you do to make sure - that your 2nd source was hosting the content legally after your 1st source turned out to be illegal?".
Well, here's a German who flosses daily before going to bed.
Maybe it's because some of my teeth are very close together and there's no chance for a brush to get between them, but I can feel the difference before and after flossing so that l still feel a bit dirty if I just brush without flossing.
What I think makes a way bigger difference than flossing or not: using an electric toothbrush.
The obvious case would be people using it like any other file(-sharing) host.
I don't think there's much if anything stopping you from adding e.g. an archive containing a movie or a bunch of ebooks into a throw-away repository and linking it from somewhere else.
Using Git might even make it easier to reupload stuff after one repo gets taken down - just add another remote to your source repo and push it.
And as a MT driver, I leave my car in neutral when I park. Because you start the car in neutral, and even though I check before starting it, it still seems like a good habit.
The good habit is to put the car in neutral via the clutch when turning the key.
IIRC they decided against using any name with "gear" in it for legal reasons.
I guess there could've been trademark issues based on a fear of people confusing the two shows, if the trademarked titles are too close in addition(!) to the moderators and the general topic being the same.
I'm pretty sure I've read about trademark lawsuits based on flimsier similarity/confusion arguments.
It looks like an RMI / Apache Commons thing.
A bunch of popular Java application servers like JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere or applications like Jenkins use RMI or at least similar (de)serialization of Java objects for a variety of things like e.g. remote management. They also seem to be rather trusting of the clients and serialized objects they receive and deserialize on the server side.
Now, if I remember correctly, you can only deserialize classes on your CLASSPATH, so you usually can't just send a serialized instance of net.some.exploit.MyEvilAndUnsafeToDeserializeObject.class and expect it to work on servers because they usually won't have your net.some.exploit.MyEvilAndUnsafeToDeserializeObject.class on their classpath
So someone looked for popular Java libraries which do some unsafe serialization/deserialization stuff and are used by lots of server software and found that the Apache Commons Collections library contains some dangerous deserialization code and is used by a lot of software - like JBoss and the others mentioned.
So if a server does RMI or RMI-like services and uses that library, you can basically get a remote shell on that server by sending some evil RMI to whatever port/servlet/service on that server accepts RMI or some other (proprietary) protocol which uses serialized Java objects somewhere.
the girl's voice had a kind of penetrating quality, like a corkscrew. When she spoke in italics, you could hear them. 'Oh, no. You can't say that. Because how can I tell if it works without trying it? That comes under the Sale of Goods Act (1983).' The awed watchers were astonished to see a slightly hunted look in Mr Patel's eyes. Up until now he'd never met anyone who could pronounce brackets.
I can't find the quote this made me think of right now, but it was a character accusing another not of being sarcastic, but of speaking some word in italics (IIRC Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax).
I just found some similar quotes from other books, like from "Men at Arms"
He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.
..or taking it even further, from his scifi-gamer YA book "Only You Can Save Mankind" when Kristy argues with Mr Patel the game shop owner about returning her "defective" copy of the game which she had already opened:
the girl's voice had a kind of penetrating quality, like a corkscrew. When she spoke in italics, you could hear them. 'Oh, no. You can't say that. Because how can I tell if it works without trying it? That comes under the Sale of Goods Act (1983).' The awed watchers were astonished to see a slightly hunted look in Mr Patel's eyes. Up until now he'd never met anyone who could pronounce brackets.
I haven't looked up the past lawsuits, but IIRC another article about this most recent case, this time the argument went along those lines:
1. The newspaper and adblock are competitors because of the acceptable ads program. The court agreed with this to a certain degree, at least to the extent that it agreed to hear a case in which adblock was accused of being a competitor who is applying unfair business practices violating German laws regulating fair competition between businesses (basically, one boxer was complaining to the ref that there's a guy in the ring who keeps punching him in the nuts)
2. The actual complaint was that there's an "implicit contract" between the newspaper's website and its users (i.e. users get articles in exchange for viewing ads) and that adblock is injecting themselves into and actively interfering with the contract between a competitor and the competitor's customers.
That's the contract which the quote
users have the right to block those or any ads, because no such contract exists
in the /. summary refers to.
Obviously from the quote, the court didn't agree that blocking ads is as trying to sabotage a competitor's contracts.
Anyway / tl;dr:
This case was about (specific) unfair business practices.
An earlier one was IIRC about adblock employees' sales pitches for "Acceptable Ads" (i.e. whitelisting in exchange for 30(?)% of your ad revenue) being essentially an extortion/protection money racket:
"Beautiful website and traffic stats you've got there; would be a shame if something were to happen to your ads..."
Other were about..I don't remember..maybe a general "they're 'stealing' from us".
One lawsuit might have been about whether removing the ads can be considered copyright violation because it's altering the appearance of the site (creating a derivative work) without the original authors permission.