It is a very specific case brought about because fedral funds were used to build the phone network. It is not relevant in any way to Usenet.
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978. AT&T and the regional Bell companies were privately financed from day one and evolved into regulated public utilities.
The common carrier rule can be traced back to the days when Western Union was in its prime and censoring telegrams it found inconvenient.
With the the exception of civil engineering projects like the Panama Canal, federal spending on infrastructure begins with the New Deal of the 1930s.
It's funny, I'm holding out on buying a huge-display HDTV until prices drop due to the increased production/sales volume from the forced conversion to digital.
Another thing, pretty tangential, that occurs to me is that forced conversion to digital TV will probably cause more civic unrest than anything else the US government has done lately
Try counting the number of small dish/big dish TVRO antennas in the outer suburbs and rural areas. Well, heck, try counting the number of dishes in the inner city.
Then millions of people need to follow them in stringing those responsible for this circus up by the neck. You don't negotiate with racketeers and terrorists.
You'd better make damn sure it's not your neck in the noose before you call for a hanging.
What needs to happen is for someone to stand up and say "Yes, this woman downloaded music. But it's your corrupt laws that are at fault, serving the interests of criminal racketeers and destroying lives, and we're going to put a stop to it."
The jury heard these arguments - perhaps a trifle more refined - and rejected every one of them.
Her lawyers were persuaded to take a flawed case - and a flawed witness - the defendant herself - into court knowing it would expose her to the risk of an award of statutory damages.
If her life has been "destroyed" - which it has not - she has only to look into a mirror to find the reason.
A M rated game is reasonably close to other M rates games while a R rated film varies greatly in it's content.
This strikes me as about the most damning thing you could say: That instead of drawing on a broad spectrum of ideas and content the M-rated game runs along a very narrow and predictable track.
Look at "Barbarella" (1968) - full frontal nudity on a number of occasions with a PG rating
not quite true:
Barbarella was released in the USA before the MPAA introduced the motion picture rating system on November 1, 1968. It was consequently released with a tag "Suggested For Mature Audiences". A re-release in 1977 (to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977)) was edited to obtain a "PG" rating and was called "Barbarella: Queen Of The Galaxy. The video version is of the original uncut version and not the "PG" version (despite the subtitle "Queen of the Galaxy" and the "PG" rating on the cover) The version now on video in Australia is of the Laser Disc version which has a more "nude" opening credit scene. The difference {is] in the floating titles [which] reveal more of Jane Fonda than the original version and video did. The original European version had all the nudity intact on its first release.Barbarella: Alternate Versions
As the legitimate owner of ~400 legally purchased CD's, do I not have the right to download MP3's to use on my own MP3 player instead of ripping them myself?
This is a question you think worth paying your lawyer to answer at $200 per billable hour?
But a word of advice:
Don't leave rips of "your" 400 CDs in a P2P "Shared Files" folder.
Imagine you are in the dark ages and you are summoned for not having paid tithe to the local church. What would you say when asked whether you did in fact pay your tithe?
You ante up before the affair becomes public.
The feudal lord defends your village against attack. There is a market place. But every other aspect of civic life is built around your church. You will not be able to do anything without contributing to its support.
Even then, a lot of people download stuff they would never buy
Laziness and greed is not an effective defense. Not an argument you can sell to a jury.
People pocket ball point pens all the time.
But when these cases go to court the plaintiff is always the guy who silk screens or laser engraves novelties as a living. The defendant the employee who walked off work each night carrying cartons of 1,000.
2. Hold your ace close and play the first round to lose
Anyone going into court "playing to lose" in the first round is a nincompoop.
The first round decides the facts - which - in all but the most extraordinary cases - are thereafter set in stone.
When damages are awarded based on a existing statutory formula - you have one chance to guess who holds the upper hand on appeal.
There is at least one juror who has already opened his mouth to the press and said something to the effect of "the punishment is so high because we want to send a message that this is a bad thing to do... mmmmKay..." Which...::cough cough:: is against our Constitution in America.
The law of torts sets boundaries. It helps to define right and wrong, good and bad conduct in a civilized society.
The jury verdict always sends a message. To the plaintiff and defendant. To all those in a similar situation.
It is a bad thing to drive when drunk. To let your kids play with matches. To sell asbestos as a consumer product when you know it can cause cancer.
The problem is that this jury sent a message you didn't want to hear.
~3MB / song / (~1Mbit/s upload) = 24 seconds a song. And 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 / 24 MO: The size of your catalog does not matter if you don't have the bandwidth to transmit it.
The function of a P2P net is to share bandwidth among its tens of thousands or millions of users.
You upload a file which in turn will be uploaded by A, B, C, D, E and so on into infinity. How many files on LimeWire, let us say, have 20 sources, 50 sources, 100 sources --- all of which when can be traced back to a single source?
None. MS can live with a 99% share of Dell's direct sales. Not least because it has a 100% share of Dell's sales through the big box retailer like Walmart.
Well it still could be a cruel and unusual punishment, cruel because it could bankrupt her and/or ruin her life, and unusual because it is rather large for the crime that was committed
The geek needs to learn the most elemental distinctions between civil and criminal law.
It is neither cruel or unusual for a civil judgment to end in the bankruptcy of a defendant. The bankrupt is protected through other means. The debt can be structured, some assets protected.
A rule of thumb: if you're clever enough to think of a way to fool the courts, then they're clever enough to see through it, and they won't appreciate your attempt.
I would like to see this lesson pounded into the head of every Geek who thinks that Slashdot law and logic will be persuasive to a jury.
n a reasonable world, file sharing would attract a parking ticket type fine
In the real world you have been caught uploading files to 10 million of your closest friends on the P2P nets. Music that sells at $1 a track through iTunes. The $20 video, the $50 video game.
Broadband penetration in the U.S. is about 40%. The service costs $20 to $50 a month. The file sharer on any scale will have a mid-line system or better - with hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of storage.
To the civil jury you don't look like a senior on a starvation budget. You look like a petty thief and a liar, a white collar criminal who sees his free media fix as a middle class entitlement.
The civil jury isn't a traffic court, it doesn't issue fines payable to the state. That is not its job.
The civil jury compensates the injured party. It awards punitive damages when the public interest demands it.
It can be very comfortable awarding damages based on a rigorous statutory formula that treats the uploader as an unlicensed wholesaler whose total distribution has no known or knowable limits.
don't blame AOL for customers being 'comfortable'.
AOL was among the first to profit from the discovery that the future of online services didn't lie with the Geek - and with a half-dozen or more arcane clients for the BBS, FTP, TELNET, USENET, IRC chat, etc.
AOL pioneered flat monthly rates, automatic updates. There were perfectly intelligible reasons why users became comfortable with dial-up AOL and why they remain comfortable with portals like Yahoo now.
I think the real problem here lies with the game retailers, specifically the ones who refuse to stock AO titles. The AO rating has become a big no-no for games. I think comparisons to movies here are inevitable.
It is a big no-no for theaters too.
When was the last time your local multiplex ran an NC-17 title? That was not an exploitation flick like Saw or Hostel?
The answer is probably not since Brokeback Mountain in 2005.
Print Shop will do as a stand-in for every popular application that has been around forever, appeals directly to the home and SOHO user, and still has no FOSS equivalent.
One "ultra-secure" lock they tested was fooled by a photocopy of a fingerprint that had been blown up, had the prints darkened with a marker pen and then shrunk back down again. They obtained Grant's fingerprint by giving him a stack of CDs to copy. Not exactly rocket science.
How many times did this trick fail in rehearsal? To me it sounds clumsy and time-consuming and it works only if you have contact with the subject and can collect a print under perfect conditions.
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.
There are also an ungodly number of third party applications and plug-ins that more or less seamlesly integrate with Office or are designed for use within an Office environment.
Why can't they release an AO version called "Manhunt 2: For Real"?
It's because no one in the gaming industry wants to be associated with a title whose only retail outlet is the adult bookstore. That includes established online distributors like Valve and Steam and Amazon.com.
Bell Canada, was for a very long time a state sanctioned monopoly and thus recieved tons of public funds to help build its infrastructure (not unlike the situation in the US)
The AT&T of 1878 was and would remain privately financed.
New York Sate financed construction of the Erie Canal on its own because it couldn't persuade the federal government to share in the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure.
In 1938 there was - 1 - US public airport with a runway that could take the weight of a transatlantic aircraft.
Resistance to government spending on infrastructure is a theme that conservatives have returned to time and time again.
I watched my boyfriend playing the Bioshock demo and found that to be blood porn, too. I was almost physically sick as he bludgeoned his way through the first few rooms with a wrench. Why are all the "AAA" titles all about lovingly-rendered ways to kill?
It is a fair question to ask.
In this season of the year I tend to return to games like Grim Fandango.
In which you begin your journey through the Land of the Dead embittered and self-pitying.
You advance in the game through decisions in which your character betrays a growing self-confidence, generosity and grace.
There are moments in the game - bits of poetry and play - which do nothing to advance the story, but are there simply to be savored and recalled with pleasure.
Heart disease, cancer, and stroke are better defined as diseases associated with lifestyle choices and environment. For example, heart disease and stroke are very strongly linked to smoking, a lack of exercise, and a high-cholesterol diet.
Which means they are essentially diseases of a medically advanced, post-industrial society. In which a male can reasonably expect to live more than forty years.
The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, in 1919, might have wondered during his last days why all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr. George Dock, chairman of the department of medicine, asked all third-and fourth-year medical students at the teaching hospital to observe the autopsy. The patient's disease had been so rare, he said, that most of them would never see it again. The disease was lung cancer.Cigarette Century
Slashdot Mirror
The first US telephone exchange opened in 1978. AT&T and the regional Bell companies were privately financed from day one and evolved into regulated public utilities.
The common carrier rule can be traced back to the days when Western Union was in its prime and censoring telegrams it found inconvenient.
With the the exception of civil engineering projects like the Panama Canal, federal spending on infrastructure begins with the New Deal of the 1930s.
Holding out for what, may I ask?
The 52" 1080i Rear Projection RCA is $700 at your local Walmart.
The 47" 1080p Vizio LCD $1600.
The 1080p 60" Sony SXRD Rear Projection set $2100 at Circuit City.
xvYCC color, 120 Hz refresh. PC and 3 HDMI 1.3 inputs, etc.,etc.
Another thing, pretty tangential, that occurs to me is that forced conversion to digital TV will probably cause more civic unrest than anything else the US government has done lately
Try counting the number of small dish/big dish TVRO antennas in the outer suburbs and rural areas. Well, heck, try counting the number of dishes in the inner city.
You'd better make damn sure it's not your neck in the noose before you call for a hanging.
What needs to happen is for someone to stand up and say "Yes, this woman downloaded music. But it's your corrupt laws that are at fault, serving the interests of criminal racketeers and destroying lives, and we're going to put a stop to it."
The jury heard these arguments - perhaps a trifle more refined - and rejected every one of them.
Her lawyers were persuaded to take a flawed case - and a flawed witness - the defendant herself - into court knowing it would expose her to the risk of an award of statutory damages.
If her life has been "destroyed" - which it has not - she has only to look into a mirror to find the reason.
This strikes me as about the most damning thing you could say: That instead of drawing on a broad spectrum of ideas and content the M-rated game runs along a very narrow and predictable track.
not quite true:
Barbarella was released in the USA before the MPAA introduced the motion picture rating system on November 1, 1968. It was consequently released with a tag "Suggested For Mature Audiences". A re-release in 1977 (to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977)) was edited to obtain a "PG" rating and was called "Barbarella: Queen Of The Galaxy. The video version is of the original uncut version and not the "PG" version (despite the subtitle "Queen of the Galaxy" and the "PG" rating on the cover) The version now on video in Australia is of the Laser Disc version which has a more "nude" opening credit scene. The difference {is] in the floating titles [which] reveal more of Jane Fonda than the original version and video did. The original European version had all the nudity intact on its first release. Barbarella: Alternate Versions
This is a question you think worth paying your lawyer to answer at $200 per billable hour?
But a word of advice:
Don't leave rips of "your" 400 CDs in a P2P "Shared Files" folder.
You ante up before the affair becomes public.
The feudal lord defends your village against attack. There is a market place. But every other aspect of civic life is built around your church. You will not be able to do anything without contributing to its support.
Laziness and greed is not an effective defense. Not an argument you can sell to a jury.
People pocket ball point pens all the time. But when these cases go to court the plaintiff is always the guy who silk screens or laser engraves novelties as a living. The defendant the employee who walked off work each night carrying cartons of 1,000.
Anyone going into court "playing to lose" in the first round is a nincompoop.
The first round decides the facts - which - in all but the most extraordinary cases - are thereafter set in stone.
When damages are awarded based on a existing statutory formula - you have one chance to guess who holds the upper hand on appeal.
There is at least one juror who has already opened his mouth to the press and said something to the effect of "the punishment is so high because we want to send a message that this is a bad thing to do... mmmmKay..." Which... ::cough cough:: is against our Constitution in America.
The law of torts sets boundaries. It helps to define right and wrong, good and bad conduct in a civilized society.
The jury verdict always sends a message. To the plaintiff and defendant. To all those in a similar situation.
It is a bad thing to drive when drunk. To let your kids play with matches. To sell asbestos as a consumer product when you know it can cause cancer.
The problem is that this jury sent a message you didn't want to hear.
MO: The size of your catalog does not matter if you don't have the bandwidth to transmit it.
The function of a P2P net is to share bandwidth among its tens of thousands or millions of users.
You upload a file which in turn will be uploaded by A, B, C, D, E and so on into infinity. How many files on LimeWire, let us say, have 20 sources, 50 sources, 100 sources --- all of which when can be traced back to a single source?
None. MS can live with a 99% share of Dell's direct sales. Not least because it has a 100% share of Dell's sales through the big box retailer like Walmart.
The geek needs to learn the most elemental distinctions between civil and criminal law.
It is neither cruel or unusual for a civil judgment to end in the bankruptcy of a defendant. The bankrupt is protected through other means. The debt can be structured, some assets protected.
I would like to see this lesson pounded into the head of every Geek who thinks that Slashdot law and logic will be persuasive to a jury.
In the real world you have been caught uploading files to 10 million of your closest friends on the P2P nets. Music that sells at $1 a track through iTunes. The $20 video, the $50 video game.
Broadband penetration in the U.S. is about 40%. The service costs $20 to $50 a month. The file sharer on any scale will have a mid-line system or better - with hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of storage.
To the civil jury you don't look like a senior on a starvation budget. You look like a petty thief and a liar, a white collar criminal who sees his free media fix as a middle class entitlement.
The civil jury isn't a traffic court, it doesn't issue fines payable to the state. That is not its job.
The civil jury compensates the injured party. It awards punitive damages when the public interest demands it.
It can be very comfortable awarding damages based on a rigorous statutory formula that treats the uploader as an unlicensed wholesaler whose total distribution has no known or knowable limits.
AOL was among the first to profit from the discovery that the future of online services didn't lie with the Geek - and with a half-dozen or more arcane clients for the BBS, FTP, TELNET, USENET, IRC chat, etc.
AOL pioneered flat monthly rates, automatic updates. There were perfectly intelligible reasons why users became comfortable with dial-up AOL and why they remain comfortable with portals like Yahoo now.
It is a big no-no for theaters too.
When was the last time your local multiplex ran an NC-17 title? That was not an exploitation flick like Saw or Hostel?
The answer is probably not since Brokeback Mountain in 2005.
List of NC-17 rated films
Print Shop will do as a stand-in for every popular application that has been around forever, appeals directly to the home and SOHO user, and still has no FOSS equivalent.
How many times did this trick fail in rehearsal? To me it sounds clumsy and time-consuming and it works only if you have contact with the subject and can collect a print under perfect conditions.
Forget Publisher for a moment. Where is the FOSS Print Shop?
Consumer Reports only reviews products CU can purchase anonymously.
That becomes a problem when you are considering custom installations, bundled products and services of every sort.
There are also an ungodly number of third party applications and plug-ins that more or less seamlesly integrate with Office or are designed for use within an Office environment.
It's because no one in the gaming industry wants to be associated with a title whose only retail outlet is the adult bookstore. That includes established online distributors like Valve and Steam and Amazon.com.
The AT&T of 1878 was and would remain privately financed.
New York Sate financed construction of the Erie Canal on its own because it couldn't persuade the federal government to share in the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure.
In 1938 there was - 1 - US public airport with a runway that could take the weight of a transatlantic aircraft.
Resistance to government spending on infrastructure is a theme that conservatives have returned to time and time again.
It is a fair question to ask.
In this season of the year I tend to return to games like Grim Fandango.
In which you begin your journey through the Land of the Dead embittered and self-pitying.
You advance in the game through decisions in which your character betrays a growing self-confidence, generosity and grace.
There are moments in the game - bits of poetry and play - which do nothing to advance the story, but are there simply to be savored and recalled with pleasure.
Which means they are essentially diseases of a medically advanced, post-industrial society. In which a male can reasonably expect to live more than forty years.
The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, in 1919, might have wondered during his last days why all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr. George Dock, chairman of the department of medicine, asked all third-and fourth-year medical students at the teaching hospital to observe the autopsy. The patient's disease had been so rare, he said, that most of them would never see it again. The disease was lung cancer. Cigarette Century