I don't know about anyone else, but even my signature tends to shift a bit every time I jot it down to take a delivery or acknowledge a credit card.
This is the classic way of detecting a forgery. If two signatures are identical, one has to be a tracing. Any kid who was reading The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew in the 'thirties would have been exposed to the idea.
How about not writing such obscenely bloated software that it needs a mainframe-on-a-chip to show an address book?
An address book is an address book and nothing more. It can't map your route. It can't schedule the meeting. Maintain your correspondence. Deliver the presentation. The Geek obsesses over "bloat" and forgets that his mainframe on a chip replaces a hundred other devices, systems, or services and their consumables.
When you buy a cd you own that cd and have the right to do with it what you want.
Use the CD to provide background music for your neighborhood gas and grill and you will be hearing from ASCAP and BMI. Stream it through an Internet radio station and you will be reminded again about the rights you did and not acquire when you paid for that alblum at Walmart. These issues were being litigated as early as 1914.
The "victim" can't even be bothered to present some guess as to what harm was done.
You cannot take a guess into court. The rights holder doesn't have to take a guess into court. The rights holder can stand on his demand for statutory damages.
But be careful what you ask for:
Your rip of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been downloaded 20,000 times, according to estimates that are reliable enough to go before a jury.
Do you want to chance being assessed civil damages based on retail list or the wholesale value of a distribution on that scale? You are in the U.S. well past the monetary threshold for criminal prosecution.
Linux is a free download, no one can stop anyone from using it.
all you need is an affordable connection to the net and the bandwidth to download the ISOs of distros that are increasingly scaled for DVD drives. this is precisely why the steet price of Windows can be cheaper than Linux.
Well, if you think paying $20 for a DRM'ed CD full of crappy, with low-audio quality music at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times is NOT a ripoff, then I ask what the fuck are YOU on
The good times for vinyl were in the 50's and 60's.
The only competition, magnetic tape.
Vinyl does not look inexpensive when you adjust for inflation - and vinyl needs to be handled with great care, any serious collector has always spent the big bucks on turntables, tone arms, pickups, and so on.
Did they obtain evidence legally? Did they entrap her? Have the RIAA used illegal tactics such as illegal file sharing themselves?
You are thinking in terms of the criminal law.
The RIAA is not a government agency. This was not a criminal trial.
The instinct of a judge in a civil case is the pare the issues down to their bare essentials. He does not want to see "the big picture." He wants to bring a mercifully quick end to the dispute.
She's NOT a victim for having to pay $222,000 because she was "making available" 24 songs? Give me a break.
The jury is never told the net worth of the parties - neither the defendant's to pay damages or the plaintiff's ability to absorb the loss.
There is no way to know how many downloads can be traced back to her as a source. I am not sure I would want to billed - at 99 cents a track or $20 for the video - if that ever beomes possible.
The jury applied the existing statutory formula for calculating damages.
There is little room for maneuver at that point.
It was her attorney's responsibility to abort a losing case before it ever got that far. To spell out his client's potential exposure before they took one step into court.
I'm glad that this person is not thinking solely of themselves, but of further cases down the line.
The jury left the box convinced she was a liar, and showed absolute contempt for her defense as a whole. The most she can expect to accomplish now is to minimize the damage.
The one fact that can't be erased is that a jury found for The Big Bad Wolf and not Little Red Riding Hood. That should - but almost certainly won't - silence talk of Jury Nullification.
The jury is small-C conservative. It believes in the rule of law. It does not share the Geek's sense of entitlement.
You can win on the facts. You cannot win on your "right" to a free media fix. Your "right" to lay out a free smörgåsbord of "The Transformers" and twenty other flicks for ten million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
Microsoft doesn't have any sense of ethics. They have a pervasive psychopathic corporate culture and it starts right at the top.
This kind of language plays well on Slashdot. But government ministers in Asia and Africa aren't reading Slashdot. The one bit of good news in this story for Mandriva.
You will excuse me for a moment.
The thought of the Geek lecturing Nigeria and China on corporate - capitalist - ethics has me ROTFL.
The news is full of stories lately about people who where convicted by juries of their peers, spent 15-20 years in jail and eventually proven innocent by DNA evidence. Also, OJ was not convicted by a jury of his peers. That pretty much illustrates the value of a jury of your peers.
The standard in the U.S. is "quilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
The jury has to make a decision based on the evidence before the court. Not what the lab technician
of 2007 can retrieve from a sample stored in 1985.
Man bites dog is news. Dog bites man is not.
How many prisoners serving time for rape or murder will ever see their convictions overturned on new DNA evidence? How many are praying right now that testing won't link them to other crimes?
O.J. won because a critical witness and piece of evidence [the glove] was successfully impeached. There are lessons here for the prosecutor.
Leather shrinks. The witness caught in a string of lies irrelevant to the case losesa all credibility. You can't blame the jury.
The country is now safe from terrorist grandmothers!
Seniors are not incapable of crimes. "Arsenic and Old Lace" [1939] is a comic take on a familiar story even then: the elderly housekeeper who kills a border for his pension check.
What makes you think that this woman is the first, the last, or the most important fugitive who will be found through the database?
Mandriva - only recently out of bankruptcy - is a small commercial Linux distribution employing less than 150 people world-wide and has perhaps eight million users. Mandriva
Mandriva didn't have an office in west Africa until January of this year.
In contrast, Microsoft has hundreds of millions of users world-wide, directly employs 31,000 people abroad and has billions to spend on development projects in Africa and elsewhere in the third world.
A search of allAfrica.com" returns 1,300 hits for Microsoft and Nigeria in English alone.
Dismiss as many of these stories as you like as PR. The reality remains that to a Financial Minister, the Minister of Education, a partnership with Microsoft can make very good sense.
NGLUG, the Nigerian Linux Users Group presents an earnest face. But stories such as these suggest that Linux has a long way to catch up with Microsoft in West Africa:
Linux girl bags first Novell certification in Nigeria [2005] "You are the first Lady CLE in Africa and the first CLE in Nigeria - you have the highest mark so far amongst the other CLE's in Africa including South Africa."
"Linux Accademy of Nigeria has not started training and I have not found someone who knows when they will start." [August 2007]
Are you saying that OpenOffice.org and Firefox started as Windows applications and later got ported to other operating systems? I'd surely like to see some evidence for this.
You might begin by looking at the history of Netscape and Mozilla.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code for its popular Netscape Communicator internet suite under a free software/open source license, the Netscape Public License. The application developed from this was named Mozilla, as this was the codename of the original Netscape Navigator. After a series of lengthy pre-1.0 cycles, Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002.
The suite was well known as the free/open source base of the Netscape suite (versions 6 and 7), and its underlying code (most notably the Gecko layout engine) became the base of many standalone applications, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship products Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla
OpenOffice.org remains closely bound to Sun's StarOffice Suite.
StarOffice was originally developed by the German company StarDivision in Lüneburg, founded by Marco Börries in 1984. They developed the first version of StarWriter for the Zilog Z80 home computer system, the Amstrad CPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later for the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC, which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS and for Microsoft Windows, which was marketed from then on under the name "StarOffice."
The development of the integrated StarOffice started at the end of 1994. Until version 4.2, StarOffice was based on the cross-platform C++ class library StarView.
The company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 for US$73.5 million. Sun was seeking to compete with Microsoft Office, and also wanted to save money on licenses for Microsoft Office and Windows. Sun soon offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use.StarOffice
So they had a computer loaded with a bunch of apps and an OS, all tuned for the device. Then they wipe that off and put some version of Windows with write, paint and Outlook Express on it? Hopefully they got minesweeper and solitaire too, with the promise of porting Freecell with the next service pack.
What they will probably get is a localized version of Windows, Word, WMP, etc. With a lot of extra help for the novice PC user.
The first Lady CLE in Africa: Linux girl bags first Novell Certification in Nigeria [September 2005]
Mandriva opens office in West Africa [January 2007]
Linux Academy of Nigeria has not started training and I have not found someone who knows when they will start. [July 2007]
U.S. diplomatic personnel reopened the U.S. Interest Section in Tripoli on February 8, 2004. The mission was upgraded to a U.S. Liaison Office on June 28, 2004, and to a full embassy on May 31, 2006. The establishment in 2005 of an American School in Tripoli demonstrates the increased presence of Americans in Libya, and the continuing normalization of bilateral relations. Libya re-established its diplomatic presence in Washington with the opening of an Interest Section on July 8, 2004, which was subsequently upgraded to a Liaison Office in December 2004 and to a full embassy on May 31, 2006.
On May 15, 2006, the State Department announced its intention to rescind Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism in recognition of the fact that Libya had met the statutory requirements for such a move: it had not provided any support for acts of international terrorism in the preceding six-month period, and had provided assurances that it would not do so in the future. On June 30, 2006, the U.S. rescinded Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. In July 2007, Mr. Gene Cretz was nominated by President Bush as ambassador to Libya. Background Note: Libya
How many of those free applications have been ported to Windows or began as a native Windows app? Think OpenOffice.org., Firefox, and countless others.
How many of the remaining apps are even remotely of use in the elementary classroom?
How many have been localized for Nigeria?
How many Windows apps are used - and are licensed for use - in the Nigerian classroom?
If a kid has access to a computer outside of school what OS does it run? If a kid sees his dad at work using a computer what OS does it runs? What applications does it run?
Microsoft has a very large and very visible presence in Africa that goes far beyond the Geek's loose talk of bribery --- a search of allAfrica.com will return about 1000 news stories in English alone. Here is a small sampling:
Mandriva is a small company with a small presence world-wide. Microsoft directly employs 31,000 people abroad and has billions to invest in third-world economic development.
Mandriva, S.A. began as MandrakeSoft in 1998. It currently has about 130 employees (80 of whom are engineers) and has offices in France, USA, and Brazil. It sells its products in more than 140 countries and estimates the number of Mandriva Linux users to be in the 6-to-8 million range.Mandriva
Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear.
The BBC is more than media downloads. It is the prime news site in the U.K. If the BBC isn't seeing many Linux users, it could be because there aren't many Linux users.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the classic way of detecting a forgery. If two signatures are identical, one has to be a tracing. Any kid who was reading The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew in the 'thirties would have been exposed to the idea.
An address book is an address book and nothing more. It can't map your route. It can't schedule the meeting. Maintain your correspondence. Deliver the presentation. The Geek obsesses over "bloat" and forgets that his mainframe on a chip replaces a hundred other devices, systems, or services and their consumables.
it's a problem for those who have arthritis, Parkinson's Disease, and so on.
strong passwords are difficult to remember. complex procedures are difficult to repeat.
the more tolerant the drawing program becomes, the less likely it is to provide significantly more security than a fingerprint reader.
and a fingerprint reader doesn't have quite so naive and vulnerable as those demonstrated on Mythbusters
Use the CD to provide background music for your neighborhood gas and grill and you will be hearing from ASCAP and BMI. Stream it through an Internet radio station and you will be reminded again about the rights you did and not acquire when you paid for that alblum at Walmart. These issues were being litigated as early as 1914.
You cannot take a guess into court. The rights holder doesn't have to take a guess into court. The rights holder can stand on his demand for statutory damages.
But be careful what you ask for:
Your rip of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been downloaded 20,000 times, according to estimates that are reliable enough to go before a jury.
Do you want to chance being assessed civil damages based on retail list or the wholesale value of a distribution on that scale? You are in the U.S. well past the monetary threshold for criminal prosecution.
all you need is an affordable connection to the net and the bandwidth to download the ISOs of distros that are increasingly scaled for DVD drives. this is precisely why the steet price of Windows can be cheaper than Linux.
if you can't afford the expert witness
and your gut tells you it will be suicidal to put your client on the stand wihout damn good back-up
you settle out of court.
This works only if the geek's indie band defines your tastes in music forever.
The good times for vinyl were in the 50's and 60's.
The only competition, magnetic tape.
Vinyl does not look inexpensive when you adjust for inflation - and vinyl needs to be handled with great care, any serious collector has always spent the big bucks on turntables, tone arms, pickups, and so on.
You are thinking in terms of the criminal law.
The RIAA is not a government agency. This was not a criminal trial.
The instinct of a judge in a civil case is the pare the issues down to their bare essentials. He does not want to see "the big picture." He wants to bring a mercifully quick end to the dispute.
The jury is never told the net worth of the parties - neither the defendant's to pay damages or the plaintiff's ability to absorb the loss.
There is no way to know how many downloads can be traced back to her as a source. I am not sure I would want to billed - at 99 cents a track or $20 for the video - if that ever beomes possible.
The jury applied the existing statutory formula for calculating damages.
There is little room for maneuver at that point.
It was her attorney's responsibility to abort a losing case before it ever got that far. To spell out his client's potential exposure before they took one step into court.
The jury left the box convinced she was a liar, and showed absolute contempt for her defense as a whole. The most she can expect to accomplish now is to minimize the damage.
The one fact that can't be erased is that a jury found for The Big Bad Wolf and not Little Red Riding Hood. That should - but almost certainly won't - silence talk of Jury Nullification.
The jury is small-C conservative. It believes in the rule of law. It does not share the Geek's sense of entitlement.
You can win on the facts. You cannot win on your "right" to a free media fix. Your "right" to lay out a free smörgåsbord of "The Transformers" and twenty other flicks for ten million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
This kind of language plays well on Slashdot. But government ministers in Asia and Africa aren't reading Slashdot. The one bit of good news in this story for Mandriva.
You will excuse me for a moment.
The thought of the Geek lecturing Nigeria and China on corporate - capitalist - ethics has me ROTFL.
The standard in the U.S. is "quilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
The jury has to make a decision based on the evidence before the court. Not what the lab technician of 2007 can retrieve from a sample stored in 1985.
Man bites dog is news. Dog bites man is not.
How many prisoners serving time for rape or murder will ever see their convictions overturned on new DNA evidence? How many are praying right now that testing won't link them to other crimes?
O.J. won because a critical witness and piece of evidence [the glove] was successfully impeached. There are lessons here for the prosecutor.
Leather shrinks. The witness caught in a string of lies irrelevant to the case losesa all credibility. You can't blame the jury.
Seniors are not incapable of crimes. "Arsenic and Old Lace" [1939] is a comic take on a familiar story even then: the elderly housekeeper who kills a border for his pension check.
What makes you think that this woman is the first, the last, or the most important fugitive who will be found through the database?
I suspect that, throughout the U.S., an escape from imprisonment on a felony charge will be prosecuted as a felony charge. 75 Year Old Male Fugitive arrested 28 years after prison escape [October 24, 2007]
The Fugitive makes a good movie.
In real life the news that a convicted killer is on the loose frays nerves and puts a great many innocent lives at risk.
Mandriva didn't have an office in west Africa until January of this year.
In contrast, Microsoft has hundreds of millions of users world-wide, directly employs 31,000 people abroad and has billions to spend on development projects in Africa and elsewhere in the third world.
A search of allAfrica.com" returns 1,300 hits for Microsoft and Nigeria in English alone.
Dismiss as many of these stories as you like as PR. The reality remains that to a Financial Minister, the Minister of Education, a partnership with Microsoft can make very good sense.
NGLUG, the Nigerian Linux Users Group presents an earnest face. But stories such as these suggest that Linux has a long way to catch up with Microsoft in West Africa:
Linux girl bags first Novell certification in Nigeria [2005]
"You are the first Lady CLE in Africa and the first CLE in Nigeria - you have the highest mark so far amongst the other CLE's in Africa including South Africa."
"Linux Accademy of Nigeria has not started training and I have not found someone who knows when they will start." [August 2007]
You might begin by looking at the history of Netscape and Mozilla.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code for its popular Netscape Communicator internet suite under a free software/open source license, the Netscape Public License. The application developed from this was named Mozilla, as this was the codename of the original Netscape Navigator. After a series of lengthy pre-1.0 cycles, Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002.
The suite was well known as the free/open source base of the Netscape suite (versions 6 and 7), and its underlying code (most notably the Gecko layout engine) became the base of many standalone applications, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship products Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla
OpenOffice.org remains closely bound to Sun's StarOffice Suite.
StarOffice was originally developed by the German company StarDivision in Lüneburg, founded by Marco Börries in 1984. They developed the first version of StarWriter for the Zilog Z80 home computer system, the Amstrad CPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later for the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC, which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS and for Microsoft Windows, which was marketed from then on under the name "StarOffice."
The development of the integrated StarOffice started at the end of 1994. Until version 4.2, StarOffice was based on the cross-platform C++ class library StarView.
The company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 for US$73.5 million. Sun was seeking to compete with Microsoft Office, and also wanted to save money on licenses for Microsoft Office and Windows.
Sun soon offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use. StarOffice
The adult content remains embedded in the game. The hack appears "out of thin air" on the day after its release. To the surprise of no one.
Jack Thompson couldn't script this better if he wrote the scenario himself.
I'd like to see the expression on the face of the Walmart exec who has to pull the plug on another Rockstar game.
In the opening days of the Christmas shopping season, no less.
What they will probably get is a localized version of Windows, Word, WMP, etc. With a lot of extra help for the novice PC user.
For a reality check on the state of Linux in Nigeria: Nigerian Linux User Group
The first Lady CLE in Africa: Linux girl bags first Novell Certification in Nigeria [September 2005]
Mandriva opens office in West Africa [January 2007]
Linux Academy of Nigeria has not started training and I have not found someone who knows when they will start. [July 2007]
On May 15, 2006, the State Department announced its intention to rescind Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism in recognition of the fact that Libya had met the statutory requirements for such a move: it had not provided any support for acts of international terrorism in the preceding six-month period, and had provided assurances that it would not do so in the future. On June 30, 2006, the U.S. rescinded Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. In July 2007, Mr. Gene Cretz was nominated by President Bush as ambassador to Libya. Background Note: Libya
How many of those free applications have been ported to Windows or began as a native Windows app? Think OpenOffice.org., Firefox, and countless others.
How many of the remaining apps are even remotely of use in the elementary classroom?
How many have been localized for Nigeria?
How many Windows apps are used - and are licensed for use - in the Nigerian classroom?
If a kid has access to a computer outside of school what OS does it run? If a kid sees his dad at work using a computer what OS does it runs? What applications does it run?
Africa: UN Partners With Microsoft to Bring Technology Benefits to Millions
Nigeria: Microsoft Releases 'Unlimited Potential to Learn'"
Nigeria: Microsoft Contributes 47 Percent to Nigeria's IT and Economic Growth
Mandriva is a small company with a small presence world-wide. Microsoft directly employs 31,000 people abroad and has billions to invest in third-world economic development.
Mandriva, S.A. began as MandrakeSoft in 1998. It currently has about 130 employees (80 of whom are engineers) and has offices in France, USA, and Brazil. It sells its products in more than 140 countries and estimates the number of Mandriva Linux users to be in the 6-to-8 million range. Mandriva
It is 10 AM ET. There have been 68 replies to the lead story on Slashdot. What does that tell you about Linux in the UK?
The BBC is more than media downloads. It is the prime news site in the U.K. If the BBC isn't seeing many Linux users, it could be because there aren't many Linux users.