Sooooo, what does this mean to a citizen of another country (say the United States) who has no assets in GB? Are they able to reach out and touch you?
In principle, yes, although it's a bastard to actually do.*
If I win a case against you in the UK (or Australia, where I am located), I can then start a proceeding in the US in which I ask the US court to recognise and give effect to the foreign judgment. Unless you can convince the US court of one of a number of factors which would prevent them from doing so, they will give judgment in such a way as to make the UK judgment enforceable in the US as though it were a decision of a US court.
Worse yet for you, if I sue you in the UK and you don't even show up I can get default judgment against you, then enforce that in the US. This is quite a common scenario with foreign defendants.
Although I think the above is valid in respect of cases where there is a real connection with the UK (e.g. you do some business in the UK; the thing you are alleged to have done took place in the UK) it definitely highlights a flaw in the approach to "publication" on the Internet which has been adopted in the UK and Australia.
On the other hand, damages might be rather limited if you published something on-line in the US for a US audience but I sue you in the UK. It might well be hard for me to show that my reputation in the UK was damaged in the eyes of people in the UK by your publication. This presents a practical limitation to the ability of people to use the UK as a "one-stop libel shop" or whatever alarmist nonsense is in TFA.
Merely having to pay a lawyer means that you've already lost. Merely having to take the time to defend yourself is already a cost that will not be recompensed, and definitely not at a fair rate.
You can protect yourself from your financial costs, to a certain extent. (IAAL.)
If someone brings an utterly frivolous suit against you, you may be entitled to an order for indemnity costs as well as dismissal of the suit. This means that your opponent pays virtually all of your legal costs which were reasonably related to the proceedings.
Even if the suit wasn't totally frivolous, you would ordinarily be entitled to an order for your legal costs if successful in defending it ("costs follow the event" is the ordinary rule). This might work out to something in the order of half to two-thirds of your actual out of pocket expenses, which is not ideal but still much better than nothing.
You can improve your position further by making a confidential, commercial offer of settlement early in the proceeding. If the plaintiff rejects your offer then fails to better it at trial, there will be a presumption that you should get all of your costs from the date of the offer. Thus a sensible course with a totally frivolous law suit is to make a very token offer - say, $1 to represent a commercial settlement of the matter (i.e. "I think your claim is worth 0, but to make you go away I will give you $1").
You are right that you can never get your time back. But this is true of so many things in life - you can't stop people suing you any more than you can stop them complaining about frivolous things in other contexts. But if you get a half decent lawyer they should be able to minimise the time and cost of frivolous law suits.
One area that has always bothered me though is impecunious (i.e. broke) plaintiffs. It has long been the position that the Courts will let a person with no assets bring a claim in the first instance (appeals might be another question). This has the obvious consequence that you will not be able to practically recover your costs from them. Although this is legitimate in some cases (if the very thing that sent someone broke is what they are suing over, for instance), it also opens the door for every asset-free nutter going around to sue someone with assets in an attempt to make some point, get some of those assets in a settlement or judgment, or just to satisfy their own, often twisted, psychological needs.
It responds to the parent, who responds to the grandparent.
It is drawing an analogy to highlight the flaw in the reasoning that a person can be trusted to return power which is given to them.
It might be a little over dramatic to compare it to the terrorism situation, but the point is that it is utterly naive to assume that when you hand your rights over to someone else for "safekeeping" on their say-so that they will return them to you in due course.
You're right, it's what the industry needs, not what consumers need.
DRM has failed not because the concept is flawed, it's not, but because the implementations have been silly.
Actually, DRM was doing fine for many years when all it involved was having a CD/DVD in a disc drive. Although philosophically it was objectionable, it was still relatively unintrustive and worked 100% of the time.
DRM is failing now because of the outrageously intrusive to borderline illegal approaches now being pushed by these companies. Including mandatory on-line authentication and monitoring of use, which is exactly what Steam is.
Are you going to travel back in time and punch him in the face?
I prefer products which I KNOW will work in the future. You know, like physical DVDs with no on-line authentication.
In addition, I like products which let me choose whether to update them, and which do not monitor my use of them and send it back to corporate HQ for "statistical purposes".
This is why I will never, ever use Steam again for a non-online game (I used it for HL2, and that was enough for me).
...a fancy way of saying "remembering where stuff is relative to other stuff"?
My cat can do that. If she wants to come upstairs in my house, she'll walk in a straight line to the bottom of the staircase from wherever she is, up the stairs, and in a straight line from there to wherever she wants to be.
I guess she's got "cat GPS" and/or is "using internal distance transform maps"... I never knew she was so talented.
I would think most semi-complex animals have this ability.
This is an important point. The evangelists who apparently want us to all own one, omni-purpose device with a changeable touch-screen as the interface need to wake up to the fact that people always have and always will like tangible, physical things with specialised purposes.
I want a remote with physical buttons reflecting the functionality of MY television as well as it can. I don't want the digital equivalent of a spork. I DEFINITELY don't want my remote's functionality dependent on a corporate entity other than the one which made my TV.
In any event, many TV/DVD remotes these days come with limited cross-device functionality, which again is designed into the physical layout of the things. And almost all amp remotes do the same, and so it better than an iphone or whatever ever will.
If you want to use other ear-/head-phones, take the Apple supplied buds, cut them off above the remote control, solder a 3.5mm female on the cords and plug in your other pair. Turn in your geek cards now, all of you.
Not a bad suggestion, but still wouldn't solve the problem of what you do when the remote itself breaks. It would also result in a very long headphone cable.
On reflection I am surprised/somewhat disappointed that Apple didn't go this path themselves - it would have shown that they respected their users' choices about headphones whilst still modifying the functionality in the way they intended.
You could try to learn to read. Or you could just shove it. He said the old ones aren't available anymore at the old price, he was wrong. But we "Apple apologists" aren't supposed to say that others are wrong, especially when they obviously aren't, is that right. Ooops, did it again.
No, he said the new one isn't available at the old price.
As he notes in this comment:
I sorely tempted to buy up all the old models left and hold on to them for a few months to sell them at a profit.
he is well aware that the old ones are still around at the old price.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and learn to read instead of spending all of your time looking for opportunities to employ your glib little pseudo-socratic responses to people who you disagree with?
Hey! That has nothing to do with intelligence! A funny fart joke is a funny joke, no matter how smart you are. And it seems like most fart jokes on TV are toungue-in-cheek anyway.
William Faulkner can write a fart joke that'd really make you think.
Jesus fucking Christ, when you want to know the name of the track you're listening to is - you press a button, and the Shuffle tells you - how fucking hard is that? You don't have to stop or wait for a red traffic light, you don't have to dig out your player, and you don't have to focus on a tiny screen.
You're an angry man. You also appear to be unable to distinguish between your personal preferences (including an apparently strong preference for 'whatever Apple just did' over 'other') and reasoned argument.
Listen, when some fuckwit tells me a tiny screen is the way to go when you want to know the name of the track that's playing specifically when he is jogging - it has nothing to do with Apple not including a tiny screen when I tell him he is clinically insane.
I jog and use an MP3 player, and have no difficulty whatsoever glancing at the "tiny screen" to see what is playing. Am I hallucinating this experience? Am I clinically insane?
Or are you just so hell-bent on defending a total gimmick that you are unable to accept the reality of empirical observation?
Yeah, and a Mini Cooper and a Hummer are also similar size.
Any two objects can be described as radically different when compared in isolation with no other reference point. Your implication (in numerous comments) that sansa, creative and other players aren't small is childish.
What is an ipod touch in your world, an oil tanker?
PC? As in a "computer" that is not build into the keyboard? Just a fad that will pass soon.
Yes, just as soon as people stop wanting to be able to easily select and change the parts in their computers from a continually improving range produced in a competitive market of independent hardware manufacturers.
You know, never.
Oh wait, I forgot we were talking about Apple, the same company that thinks that permanently bolting batteries into devices is a good idea. And that you will defend them to the death with your integrated keyputer.
Jesus fucking Christ, when you want to know the name of the track you're listening to is - you press a button, and the Shuffle tells you - how fucking hard is that? You don't have to stop or wait for a red traffic light, you don't have to dig out your player, and you don't have to focus on a tiny screen.
You're an angry man. You also appear to be unable to distinguish between your personal preferences (including an apparently strong preference for 'whatever Apple just did' over 'other') and reasoned argument.
What if you don't want your listening experience interrupted by some bullshit text-to-speech audio playing over the top of it? You know, if you are the kind of person who is more interested in the sound of the music they are listening to than some bullshit Apple gimmick. Yes, we do exist. Although I guess to be fair, people who care about the sound of the music they are listening to are unlikely to be using an ipod in the first place.
What if you want to be able to glance at your player and see how much time is left on a particular track?
I mean, according to your logic, why do any MP3 players have screens? Are purchasers of these players simply ill-informed about how great having no control or visual feedback is? Amazingly, many people find that the distance between their head and their arms does not magically extend when running, and so having a screen on an MP3 player remains somewhat useful.
"device will play just fine with ordinary headphones. in no way does it block access to your music."
Statement B:
"the headphones can contain a controller to tell it to advance to a given song or change volume."
So your definition of 'plays just fine' includes being unable to control the volume level or, in fact, to choose which of the several hundred tracks on a device you actually want to listen to?
No wonder you have no complaints about this product. Hey, I have a new MP3 player I would like to sell you. I know it looks like an ordinary rock, but I can assure you that it plays just fine. You just need special headphones if you want added features like actually hearing the music, which unfortunately are out of stock at the moment.
"Were you somehow expecting unmodified headpones to do that? how exactly?"
By having controls on the fucking player, you Apple-apologist troll.
I think you're quite right to highlight this, because it emphasises the fact that really the problem here is that this is a poorly designed music player. Whether Apple is evil or not, they are being stupid in this instance by moving away from interoperability and easily replaceable parts.
When their customers are on safari in northern Botswana or hiking through South America and the Apple-supplied headphones die, the whole MP3 player will become useless, because standard headphones (which will be readily available in such places) won't work, and Apple ones won't be available. I think Apple has already demonstrated that its attitude with the Shuffle is fairly anti-convenience by removing the ability to charge it without a special Apple cable.
I once had a Sony (boo! hiss!) tape walkman which had a proprietary controller on the headphone cable. Amazingly, if I wanted to plug in a different set of headphones - even one not made by Sony - I could, I just had to use the buttons on the player rather than on the cable. In other words, it was a convenience, not a hindrance. You could even use similar but not identical headphones from other Sony players if you had them handy, but if not normal headphones worked well.
Instead of bitching about how Apple is trying to "control" your life or music listening in some way, how about this: don't buy any more ipod shuffles, and make sure you educate your friends, family and acquaintances about why they shouldn't either. Tell them to get one of the myriad other micro-MP3 players, or maybe something which has actual decent sound quality like a Creative Zen X-Fi.
The simple fact that police carry lethal weapons has more than a little to do with the "sirs"...
That's kinda the point. If you call them 'sir' then it legitimises the thinking that "carrying a gun = creation of authority". If you treat them like an ordinary public servant, it emphasises that "carrying a gun = part of your job and not the thing which gives you any power over me."
I.e., their power comes from the law, not from the fact that they wear mirrored sunglasses and can hypothetically kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooooo, what does this mean to a citizen of another country (say the United States) who has no assets in GB? Are they able to reach out and touch you?
In principle, yes, although it's a bastard to actually do.*
If I win a case against you in the UK (or Australia, where I am located), I can then start a proceeding in the US in which I ask the US court to recognise and give effect to the foreign judgment. Unless you can convince the US court of one of a number of factors which would prevent them from doing so, they will give judgment in such a way as to make the UK judgment enforceable in the US as though it were a decision of a US court.
Worse yet for you, if I sue you in the UK and you don't even show up I can get default judgment against you, then enforce that in the US. This is quite a common scenario with foreign defendants.
Although I think the above is valid in respect of cases where there is a real connection with the UK (e.g. you do some business in the UK; the thing you are alleged to have done took place in the UK) it definitely highlights a flaw in the approach to "publication" on the Internet which has been adopted in the UK and Australia.
On the other hand, damages might be rather limited if you published something on-line in the US for a US audience but I sue you in the UK. It might well be hard for me to show that my reputation in the UK was damaged in the eyes of people in the UK by your publication. This presents a practical limitation to the ability of people to use the UK as a "one-stop libel shop" or whatever alarmist nonsense is in TFA.
* IAAL
You can protect yourself from your financial costs, to a certain extent. (IAAL.)
If someone brings an utterly frivolous suit against you, you may be entitled to an order for indemnity costs as well as dismissal of the suit. This means that your opponent pays virtually all of your legal costs which were reasonably related to the proceedings.
Even if the suit wasn't totally frivolous, you would ordinarily be entitled to an order for your legal costs if successful in defending it ("costs follow the event" is the ordinary rule). This might work out to something in the order of half to two-thirds of your actual out of pocket expenses, which is not ideal but still much better than nothing.
You can improve your position further by making a confidential, commercial offer of settlement early in the proceeding. If the plaintiff rejects your offer then fails to better it at trial, there will be a presumption that you should get all of your costs from the date of the offer. Thus a sensible course with a totally frivolous law suit is to make a very token offer - say, $1 to represent a commercial settlement of the matter (i.e. "I think your claim is worth 0, but to make you go away I will give you $1").
You are right that you can never get your time back. But this is true of so many things in life - you can't stop people suing you any more than you can stop them complaining about frivolous things in other contexts. But if you get a half decent lawyer they should be able to minimise the time and cost of frivolous law suits.
One area that has always bothered me though is impecunious (i.e. broke) plaintiffs. It has long been the position that the Courts will let a person with no assets bring a claim in the first instance (appeals might be another question). This has the obvious consequence that you will not be able to practically recover your costs from them. Although this is legitimate in some cases (if the very thing that sent someone broke is what they are suing over, for instance), it also opens the door for every asset-free nutter going around to sue someone with assets in an attempt to make some point, get some of those assets in a settlement or judgment, or just to satisfy their own, often twisted, psychological needs.
It responds to the parent, who responds to the grandparent.
It is drawing an analogy to highlight the flaw in the reasoning that a person can be trusted to return power which is given to them.
It might be a little over dramatic to compare it to the terrorism situation, but the point is that it is utterly naive to assume that when you hand your rights over to someone else for "safekeeping" on their say-so that they will return them to you in due course.
This documentary should bring you up to speed.
My apologies, I was ranting at the same poster you were ranting at - you are just an innocent bystander of a random drive by ranting.
because it does not restrict what you do with your copy, just how many copies can be played on Steam.
Interesting.
So can I sell my copy to another private individual without the consent and participation of a third party?
Can I play the game single player on my own PC without any interaction with a third party?
Can I be assured that no one is monitoring how often I play the game, or for how long?
Can I choose when to apply patches, and when not to?
Can I choose what hacks and content I add to the game?
"When CD sales go back up, we promise to quit suing people, RIAA"
"When the terrorists are defeated, we promise to give you your civil liberties back" - governments everywhere.
You're right, it's what the industry needs, not what consumers need.
DRM has failed not because the concept is flawed, it's not, but because the implementations have been silly.
Actually, DRM was doing fine for many years when all it involved was having a CD/DVD in a disc drive. Although philosophically it was objectionable, it was still relatively unintrustive and worked 100% of the time.
DRM is failing now because of the outrageously intrusive to borderline illegal approaches now being pushed by these companies. Including mandatory on-line authentication and monitoring of use, which is exactly what Steam is.
Are you going to travel back in time and punch him in the face?
I prefer products which I KNOW will work in the future. You know, like physical DVDs with no on-line authentication.
In addition, I like products which let me choose whether to update them, and which do not monitor my use of them and send it back to corporate HQ for "statistical purposes".
This is why I will never, ever use Steam again for a non-online game (I used it for HL2, and that was enough for me).
...a fancy way of saying "remembering where stuff is relative to other stuff"?
My cat can do that. If she wants to come upstairs in my house, she'll walk in a straight line to the bottom of the staircase from wherever she is, up the stairs, and in a straight line from there to wherever she wants to be.
I guess she's got "cat GPS" and/or is "using internal distance transform maps"... I never knew she was so talented.
I would think most semi-complex animals have this ability.
an actual remote
This is an important point. The evangelists who apparently want us to all own one, omni-purpose device with a changeable touch-screen as the interface need to wake up to the fact that people always have and always will like tangible, physical things with specialised purposes.
I want a remote with physical buttons reflecting the functionality of MY television as well as it can. I don't want the digital equivalent of a spork. I DEFINITELY don't want my remote's functionality dependent on a corporate entity other than the one which made my TV.
In any event, many TV/DVD remotes these days come with limited cross-device functionality, which again is designed into the physical layout of the things. And almost all amp remotes do the same, and so it better than an iphone or whatever ever will.
My god, you're citing Wikipedia about grammar???
An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols
And those writers would be totally, utterly wrong, as all of the examples cited in that article demonstrate.
If you want to use other ear-/head-phones, take the Apple supplied buds, cut them off above the remote control, solder a 3.5mm female on the cords and plug in your other pair. Turn in your geek cards now, all of you.
Not a bad suggestion, but still wouldn't solve the problem of what you do when the remote itself breaks. It would also result in a very long headphone cable.
On reflection I am surprised/somewhat disappointed that Apple didn't go this path themselves - it would have shown that they respected their users' choices about headphones whilst still modifying the functionality in the way they intended.
The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked
Except they possibly don't need any new legislation, in which case that will do us no good.
I would be interested to see anything from Labor saying definitively that they intend to pass legislation to support this scheme.
You could try to learn to read. Or you could just shove it. He said the old ones aren't available anymore at the old price, he was wrong. But we "Apple apologists" aren't supposed to say that others are wrong, especially when they obviously aren't, is that right. Ooops, did it again.
No, he said the new one isn't available at the old price.
As he notes in this comment:
I sorely tempted to buy up all the old models left and hold on to them for a few months to sell them at a profit.
he is well aware that the old ones are still around at the old price.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and learn to read instead of spending all of your time looking for opportunities to employ your glib little pseudo-socratic responses to people who you disagree with?
Prepare to laugh at fart jokes
Hey! That has nothing to do with intelligence! A funny fart joke is a funny joke, no matter how smart you are. And it seems like most fart jokes on TV are toungue-in-cheek anyway.
William Faulkner can write a fart joke that'd really make you think.
Jesus fucking Christ, when you want to know the name of the track you're listening to is - you press a button, and the Shuffle tells you - how fucking hard is that? You don't have to stop or wait for a red traffic light, you don't have to dig out your player, and you don't have to focus on a tiny screen.
You're an angry man. You also appear to be unable to distinguish between your personal preferences (including an apparently strong preference for 'whatever Apple just did' over 'other') and reasoned argument.
Listen, when some fuckwit tells me a tiny screen is the way to go when you want to know the name of the track that's playing specifically when he is jogging - it has nothing to do with Apple not including a tiny screen when I tell him he is clinically insane.
I jog and use an MP3 player, and have no difficulty whatsoever glancing at the "tiny screen" to see what is playing. Am I hallucinating this experience? Am I clinically insane?
Or are you just so hell-bent on defending a total gimmick that you are unable to accept the reality of empirical observation?
And they are still available for £31.
And therefore the pricing of the new ones is totally beyond criticism.
I gotta say, you often post quite interesting comments, but in this thread you have been nothing but an aggressive Apple apologist throughout. Sad.
Yeah, and a Mini Cooper and a Hummer are also similar size.
Any two objects can be described as radically different when compared in isolation with no other reference point. Your implication (in numerous comments) that sansa, creative and other players aren't small is childish.
What is an ipod touch in your world, an oil tanker?
PC? As in a "computer" that is not build into the keyboard? Just a fad that will pass soon.
Yes, just as soon as people stop wanting to be able to easily select and change the parts in their computers from a continually improving range produced in a competitive market of independent hardware manufacturers.
You know, never.
Oh wait, I forgot we were talking about Apple, the same company that thinks that permanently bolting batteries into devices is a good idea. And that you will defend them to the death with your integrated keyputer.
Jesus fucking Christ, when you want to know the name of the track you're listening to is - you press a button, and the Shuffle tells you - how fucking hard is that? You don't have to stop or wait for a red traffic light, you don't have to dig out your player, and you don't have to focus on a tiny screen.
You're an angry man. You also appear to be unable to distinguish between your personal preferences (including an apparently strong preference for 'whatever Apple just did' over 'other') and reasoned argument.
What if you don't want your listening experience interrupted by some bullshit text-to-speech audio playing over the top of it? You know, if you are the kind of person who is more interested in the sound of the music they are listening to than some bullshit Apple gimmick. Yes, we do exist. Although I guess to be fair, people who care about the sound of the music they are listening to are unlikely to be using an ipod in the first place.
What if you want to be able to glance at your player and see how much time is left on a particular track?
I mean, according to your logic, why do any MP3 players have screens? Are purchasers of these players simply ill-informed about how great having no control or visual feedback is? Amazingly, many people find that the distance between their head and their arms does not magically extend when running, and so having a screen on an MP3 player remains somewhat useful.
Bigger than the old Shuffle is more like it.
Am I the only one who doesn't want something smaller than the old shuffle?
Hmm.
Statement A:
Statement B:
So your definition of 'plays just fine' includes being unable to control the volume level or, in fact, to choose which of the several hundred tracks on a device you actually want to listen to?
No wonder you have no complaints about this product. Hey, I have a new MP3 player I would like to sell you. I know it looks like an ordinary rock, but I can assure you that it plays just fine. You just need special headphones if you want added features like actually hearing the music, which unfortunately are out of stock at the moment.
By having controls on the fucking player, you Apple-apologist troll.
I think you're quite right to highlight this, because it emphasises the fact that really the problem here is that this is a poorly designed music player. Whether Apple is evil or not, they are being stupid in this instance by moving away from interoperability and easily replaceable parts.
When their customers are on safari in northern Botswana or hiking through South America and the Apple-supplied headphones die, the whole MP3 player will become useless, because standard headphones (which will be readily available in such places) won't work, and Apple ones won't be available. I think Apple has already demonstrated that its attitude with the Shuffle is fairly anti-convenience by removing the ability to charge it without a special Apple cable.
I once had a Sony (boo! hiss!) tape walkman which had a proprietary controller on the headphone cable. Amazingly, if I wanted to plug in a different set of headphones - even one not made by Sony - I could, I just had to use the buttons on the player rather than on the cable. In other words, it was a convenience, not a hindrance. You could even use similar but not identical headphones from other Sony players if you had them handy, but if not normal headphones worked well.
Instead of bitching about how Apple is trying to "control" your life or music listening in some way, how about this: don't buy any more ipod shuffles, and make sure you educate your friends, family and acquaintances about why they shouldn't either. Tell them to get one of the myriad other micro-MP3 players, or maybe something which has actual decent sound quality like a Creative Zen X-Fi.
That's kinda the point. If you call them 'sir' then it legitimises the thinking that "carrying a gun = creation of authority". If you treat them like an ordinary public servant, it emphasises that "carrying a gun = part of your job and not the thing which gives you any power over me."
I.e., their power comes from the law, not from the fact that they wear mirrored sunglasses and can hypothetically kill you.