ECC RAM costs (a little) more, and patents makes the motherboards way more expensive, which is why no OEM uses it on desktop class boards. The BIOS hasn't been replaced by EFI yet thanks to microsoft; EFI support was supposed to be in Vista, then was dropped and finally has been added in windows 7. Give it another few years for the legacy base of XP to die down some more, then you'll hopefully start to see windows 7 EFI motherboards shipped by OEMs. After all, macs have been using EFI for years; look how long it took for floppy drives to die on PCs as standard.
I do feel sorry for software guys sometimes; there is this huge, huge legacy pile of cruft - as you say - that they can't kill support for, but have to shave costs at every possible avenue so end up farming the drivers out to the intern. Making their new stuff a couple of cents cheaper will get the sales - if there's anything most PC customers have shown, they don't give a crap about quality, they just want the absolute cheapest possible product. Those willing to spend money for perceived quality buy apple.
It's just like anything though, I'm sure. Sysadmins loathe that legacy POS ancient old monotask server that you just can't seem to get rid of (and the software devs who just _won't update their fecking code_), software guys hate the systems that haven't been pdated in the last 10 years, the desktop guys hate those old, crappy yet essential PCs that nobody seems to be able to scrape up the money to replace and those new shitty ones that were bought at bargain basement prices, but because they're new they're expected to run every goddamn legacy app under the sun all at the same time, and when they crap out it's the support guys fault.
Everything is done as cheap as possible, and legacy support is king. This is what the customer wanted, and we're the poor sods who have to bridge the gap between their wallets and their expectations.
The other thing they want to do is kill second hand sales. As I understand it, you get a one-use registration on your account on ubi.com, and you have to have that registration account logged in via the server-auth DRM all the time you're playing.
Game makers hate second hand sales, it means their own product directly competes with new sales, where they actually make money. It's especially a problem for single-player games, as those have a much higher circulation in the second hand market once played. So DRM is much more about killing that market stone dead as it is about preventing piracy. Hell, look at the favourite 'benign' DRM, steam - no resale or even transfer to a family member there unless you register one game per steam account, which rather breaks the whole social aspect of having a steam account. That copyright law explicitly allows second hand sales as a counter-balance to the copyright holders otherwise excessive control doesn't matter; technical measures like these render the protections for customers in law completely worthless.
Ubisoft are trying to change the market, to make this sort of extreme DRM acceptable by making it common. Preventing piracy is the cover; extending copyright far beyond what the law actually says is the real aim. If you look at all the DRM schemes, even the broken ones, and the retail schemes such as single-use codes for significant chunks of gameplay otherwise cut-out at launch, it's all about taking on and killing the second hand market - and so far, they're doing extremely well at it.
I fully expect the next generation of consoles to have online registration of discs that tie them to a single console and/or account. The online shops on all three consoles do precisely that for purchased games.
The UK Sale of Goods Act means the retailer is still on the hook. The goods should be fit for purpose, which means they should work for a period of time suitable for the product. For home electricals, this is generally around 6 years, with a sliding scale of refund for the length of time you've had it for, unless they repair it at their expense (which obviously doesn't apply in this case)
Given it's been intentionally broken after possibly only what, 8 months (when they started selling the slim, without the other os function) that's well within the period in which the customer can expect it to still function as sold. It doesn't matter if Sony says they're not paying the retailer for the refund, the retailer is still responsible for the quality of the product they sold - and being intentionally broken by an update is no different than if a part fails due to shoddy workmanship, it's still not fit for the purpose for which it was sold. Retailers *like* to pretend that your warranty is solely with the manufacturer, but as UK law stands it's crystal clear that the seller is on the hook for it for way longer than the 12 months weakass call-the-makers-indian-helpline warranty they try to fob you off with.
But, if you don't send/receive 100% of the content to/from that single peer, it would be hard to claim copyright infringement, as you couldn't prove a full copy had been shared by that IP address.
Which is why the RIAA were working so hard to get 'making available' count as copyright infringement. Traditionally, without evidence of actual distribution of a copy (or sufficient of a copy to count as a derived work, i.e. not fair use) you couldn't sue. The RIAA, quite successfully, managed to get their new interpretation of merely making available for download, i.e. having the files up for offer on kazaa, or as part of your torrent download process also offering to anybody else what you currently had as a valid 'extension' to the law, though they also failed in some cases.
Assuming the movie studios use the same principle on anyone that goes to court; that you haven't actually committed copyright infringement under the law as written, because they can't demonstrate you've shared a copy or even part of a copy won't matter, as they can still claim statutory damages which count as if you've given away thousands of copies because you're 'making available'.
There's nothing wrong with the protocol. Newzbin are an indexing site; one of many. In their case, they provided a commercial service for hand-categorized nzbs, which are pretty analogous to.torrent files, from a legal point of view at least. That they had categories labelled up for 'screener', 'R5', 'Warez' etc etc along with the documentation explicitly advising editors how to post infringing material.
What's interesting is that they've not been threatened with shut down or massive fines yet, unlike the pirate bay; as far as I'm aware, contributory infringement is illegal in the UK.
So while Newsbin's nzb files will live on as the standard method of collating binary files on usenet, the site itself is destined to be filtered into 'uselessness' (see mininova) even if it isn't shut down with a followup judgement. I expect a number of other indexing sites to spring up, and a number of the existing ones to grow larger - probably hosted in countries that aren't quite so pro-copyright holders as the UK, especially if they don't have contributory copyright infringement laws common in the US and western Europe.
Two thoughts spring to mind; 1) will they get a copy of users search history (complete with creditcard logs linking them to the account)? (and no, I've never been a member) 2) when do they start going after the usenet providers themselves?
To see if economic data matches up with race data? I.e. are particular races in particular areas doing particularly poorly (or well) economically, compared to their neighbours. Then you can look at local government policies to see what effects, if any, that is having. i.e. are local government policies actively discriminating against a certain section of the population. If the government and local officials were already colourblind, then as you say, race data is unimportant. Given things like the recent ACORN events though, it's pretty damn clear that local government, media, corporate and charities are still actively racist in many places, and the census data can help prove that.
The issue is not the transition from paper to online interactions; in an ideal world, you're entirely correct that the savings are worthwhile and it's not like doing it on a web form directly is much different than visiting a local office to fill in a paper form, that the first thing you then see the clerk do is tap into a computer.
There are however issues with this plan. First, this government has screwed up IT plan after IT plan, at huge cost with marginal or no functional end product - the current plan to put all NHS patient records online for doctor's to use is massive behind, massively overbudget and still not working properly in the trial areas, and that's just one example. This government able to manage the build of a personalized portal access to every government service in a year? Hah. 10 years, at 10 times overbudget with it barely useable and constant crashes? Yes, maybe.
The next issue is that there are a significant proportion of the population who cannot get broadband at all (or only a very, very slow broadband), and also a significant number of those that can don't want it. Some 50% of the population can't yet get ADSL2+, and only 75% of the population can get broadband from anyone other than BT. Some 7% of the population can't get broadband at all, and under current plans, probably never will. If they're going to make this site the *only* way to access these services by shutting down local offices, as planned, they're going to basically require everyone to own a computer and have a broadband connection. In addition to those in rural areas, you can add poor people and many of the elderly to the list of the disenfranchised (given the rate libraries are closing, that won't be an option for the poor in 10 years)
Finally - the government is trying to rush through the Digital Economy Bill, which amongst other things, introduces a '3 strikes' law that will result in people's internet connections being crippled merely by being accused of copyright infringement by the content industry. Although people will not be cut off in this version of the bill, it also contains scope to introduce 'additional technical measures' at will, which would include cutting off people's internet connection if the current measures don't result in the goal of a 70% cut in piracy in the next couple of years, so pretty much a certainty. It also means that public access wifi in cafes etc will be shutdown, along with pretty much all cybershops, as it will make them liable for any copyright infringement their customers commit. So there goes another method that people without computers had of accessing this super site.
Bear in mind, this is about the findings of a British reasearch team applicable to the UK; it's not just shut-in children suffering from vitamin D but adults working all day in artificially lit offices, going to the gym with no windows instead of running, or just sitting inside all day watching tv or playing games instead of out kicking a ball about etc. The problem is especially seen in those who have trouble getting vitamin D from sunlight; those with darker skins, such as pakistani or asian origin need more sunlight to create the same amount of vitamin D, the elderly also suffer.
Also, ordinary milk in the UK is not fortfied with vitamin D; only baby formula. One of the suggestions of the researchers is to add it to foodstuffs such as milk to combat this modern resurgence.
I really hope I'm just feeding the troll here, because the alternative that it might be genuine is horrifying. I don't think I've ever read a bigger load of misogynistic tripe in my life. That 8 people at time of posting thought it was worth upmodding frankly scares me.
Women are not angels. They are not cooks, they are not money whores, they are not 'skilled life companions'. They are *people*. They are all individuals with different desires, loves, lusts, skills and minds.
Making love with a partner is not about just jamming a vibrating piece of plastic or your dick in her and expecting her to writhe with desire for you. Making love is as much in the head as it is the physicality of it. Building a relationship is not about exchanging money for sex, cooking and 'raising well-adjusted kids'.
I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for the women in your life, that you see them as just after the money in your wallet; that romance is about counting up how much the bill costs.
Yes, some women are not very nice people, just as some men are not very nice people either. But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
If a good gyndroid cost $10,000, it would be considerably less than a man spends on a woman when amortized over ten or fifteen years. Frankly, a gyndroid would be a real bargain.
If the only thing you're getting out the relationship is bad sex with a fucking sextoy, and all you're thinking about is complaining about how much it costs you; then yes, you're damn right you'd better off with a gyndroid. At least it won't care when you think of it as a piece of meat put on earth just to satisfy *you*.
And yet again, someone misunderstands antitrust laws. If you accept that a free market is a good thing, then you also need to accept that regulation is required to keep it free. Without competition, free markets cannot function; monopolies are dangerous and anti-competitive, and mean prices rise for customers in the long run.
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Having two monopolies isn't illegal. Bundling isn't illegal. Having one monopoly, then using bundling with that monopoly to gain a second monopoly, and to prop up your monopolies via mutual lock-in IS illegal. A monopoly isn't 100% of a market; it's a large enough share such that it is utterly dominant. 90% of the market is more than sufficent in microsoft's case.
Apple does not have a monopoly in the desktop OS market, nor is safari a browser monopoly so bundling is ok. Neither paint or notepad have a monopoly in the image editing or document editing markets, so again bundling is A-OK. Free market competition is not threatened by them at this point.
Microsoft have a desktop monopoly. By bundling IE as the default 'free' browser (i.e. the price is included in windows) they gained a monopoly in the browser market. This in itself is not nececessarily a problem, but given microsoft's habit of also including custom extensions to the spec that promote lock-in, i.e. ActiveX it becomes a problem. Take a real world example; in Korea, online banking almost invariably requires activex, because 'everybody' has it. By having activex tied to the IE monopoly, which is tied to the windows monopoly, it means in order to do online banking there, you need to buy windows. Browser competitors and OS competitors are almost entirely locked out of the market, damaging customer choice and competition. And with no competition, microsoft can charge what the hell they like.
The same applies to the proprietary codecs bundled as part of media player; there was a real danger a few years ago that streaming video and audio online would gravitate to the WMV and WMA standards, which defacto only work in windows (patents providing lock-in), and mainly in IE. So by bundling media player's proprietary codecs with windows 'for free' there was a danger that microsoft would also gain a monopoly in the streaming video/audio market, and again harm competition and ultimately prices. As it happened, flash ended up winning, but it could have gone very differently, and may still if agreement cannot be reached with HTML5 for cross-platform support.
Providing a popup choice at first install may not be my preferred solution, but at least it means microsoft don't get an automatic free ride from customers with windows and IE who don't bother to look into the alternatives because they already have a bundled solution.
then the CRIA members would be faction quadrillions in damages, where each CD they sold would mean them owing $20,000 per song, PER CD. Instead, it's limited to per song.
That's not how statutory damages work.
There's three kinds of damages for copyright;
1) actual damages. This is where you work how much has been lost. So it would be the few cents per song per CD that was sold without permission that was owing on royalties. The difficulty of this in general though when it comes to copyright infringement is that you often don't know how many copies were distributed. So you have option 2, 2) statutory damages. This is a 'stand-in' figure for actual damages. They go - "we only caught bob the market trader with 2 copies of our CD. But he likely sold lots of copies, which we can't prove directly. So we'll ask for the statutory damages laid down in law instead". These are charged once per infringement (not per individual copy), but go from eye-watering to downright extortionate amounts, i.e. the $20,000 per track claimed for in this case. Of course, one reason they're so high is because the music industry lobbied for them to be. 3) punitive damages. This is where the court goes - "Ok, here's your (actual damages/statutory damages) fine to pay back for the financial harm you caused. Now here's an nice big extra punishment fine on top so you don't do it again, and neither does anybody else.
We don't have a DA filing charges and issuing a warrant.
No, because this is the British High Court of Justice, which deal with important and high profile cases. The judge is a senior one with many years of experience, and he issues a court order instead of a warrant. She requested the editor's IP from wikipedia; wikipedia refused, but said "Without waiving our insistence that no court in the United Kingdom has proper jurisdiction over us as a foreign entity, we nevertheless are willing to comply with a properly issued court order narrowly limited to the material you ask for in your letter".
So she's gone to the High Court to get the information, on the basis that the user who posted the article has a case to answer for, and the Judge agreed. If he didn't think there was a case to answer for, he wouldn't have issued the order. Whether that ends up being a civil case or a criminal case handled by the CPS likely depends upon who that IP belongs to. She believes it will belong to someone to she already has a dispute with, and if so (presuming she gets another court order for the ISP to hand over subscriber details for that IP) then there's quite possibly enough evidence there for the CPS to become interested, and the judge does think there's enough evidence for a blackmail prosecution.
But on the larger point - are you saying that a civil case appellant should never be able to gain user information from a 3rd party on the basis that that user has a case to answer for? Because that's an awfully restrictive setup, where only criminal proceedings can gather information from 3rd parties.
The thing is, the songwriters have already been paid - by the radio station. If it's BBC radio, we've already paid for that music out of our annual licence fee, or it's a commercial station with adverts. Every person in that store has the right to listen to that station already as the broadcast fees have already been paid.
Now that it's suddenly being able to be listened to while on a store premises, it's a 'new' public performance and more money needs to be paid. It's double dipping for the same performance.
You want to charge stores that play personal CDs through to customers? Fine. But leave my goddamn radio at my desk alone.
Previously The TV Licencing Authority was an arm of the post office; now it's run by capita, under contract to the BBC. So it is a separate (private) body, but it's sole purpose is to collect money for the BBC and take legal action against those who don't pay but should, and is contracted to the BBC for just that service. So it is a bit of an arms-length dodge to take the flak off the BBC admittedly.
And given the evil that is the TVLA, and their absolute hounding of people without a TV as potential fee-dodgers, I'm certainly not going to defend their way of going about business; their methods for payment are absolutely byzantine.
The BBC provides channels over unencrypted broadcast TV, both analog and digital, and satellite. They're also carried by both cable operators, but yes, your point is taken.
Oddly enough though, the BBC was actually founded as a combination of various electronics companies to provide the physical means to transmit radio, i.e. the studios, antennas and other physical plant; the content rather came along for the ride. It didn't become a publically owned company until several years later. I believe that the BBC still own and operate large amounts of the TV transmitters in the UK, and have a charter duty to provide coverage to the entire nation.
According to wikipedia, £1.08 a month of the fee goes on transmission costs.
Having said all that, I'd MUCH rather pay AN ADDITIONAL $20 a month and get advert-free programming where a one hour show is actually one hour long.
I'd actually pay the entirety of the licence fee just to keep BBC radio 4, so I can see where you're coming from. Having watched TV in the US - or the snatches of it you get between ad breaks, anyway - and listened to what clearchannel affiliates call music, and seen what Fox News call news, I'm deeply and eternally grateful for the BBC; even if you don't like their content, they keep the commercial broadcasters, such as Sky (owned by the same parent as fox news, i.e. Rupert Murdoch) honest.
Uhh, not quite. You need a licence to watch broadcast TV, per household. So if you have 10 TVs, you still only need one licence. If you don't connect any TV to an aerial, i.e. you use it for a console or DVDs, you don't need a licence.
The annual cost is £140 odd a year; £12 or about $20 a month. For that we get 4 main tv channels, 4 minor ones, 7 national and a whole bunch of local radio stations, and arguably the best news website on the planet. All commercial advert free. Personally, I think the BBC TV is pretty good; their documentaries and nature programmes are top notch, at least, and they get the important sports rights, again free to watch. Nor is it government run, or funded; the tax is collected by a separate body, and given direct to the BBC, with no government control over editorial or programming decisions.
How much is the average cable subscription in the US - with adverts - again?
Well, there's exFAT - a patented filesystem supported natively in windows 7 and vista, that supports 64ZiB instead of the 8TiB FAT32 supports, and has ACL support (win 7/2008R2 only tho), with a max filesize of 127PiB.
OK, it's patented and proprietary, but so is FAT32 and NTFS, it's just what you have to put up with dealing with windows.
Also, the company behind NTFS-3G has recently signed a licence agreement with Microsoft in order to provide a commercial exFAT implementation for linux OEMs.
But in the interim, microsoft makes bucketloads of cash from selling their infringing product, and since they're not being hurt in any way from that infringement, they can drag out the court case for many years and there's no rush to fix it via patch. Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money before the patent case is ever resolved, and may eventually end up as just a patent shell company.
Justice delayed is justice denied. An injunction against microsoft selling new copies of their infringing product will make them very quickly remove the infringing code so they can get it back on the shelves minus that feature, and get cracking on resolving the case speedily. Microsoft can much more easily afford to drag this out than i4i can, and an injuction will prevent the usual microsoft foot-dragging.
No-one would have criticised them for withdrawing the books from new sales when they discovered they didn't actually have publishing rights for that book.
They're angry that after a sale was completed, and with the slimmest of justifications from the EULA, they deleted books already sold - something just not possible with real books. Last I checked, people who purchase illegally copyrighted works are not held liable, it's the producer that's commited copyright infringement; though they may have them confiscated by the police if they 'should' have known the goods were infringing. What amazon should have done is stop sales, leave the copies sold already in place, then work with the copyright holder to recompense them for the copies already sold.
Amazon acting like copyright cops after the sale, and on very iffy legal grounds - especially by destroying people's annotations - that damage to their reputation is done, and no amount of backtracking, apologising, or 'here, have it back' fixes it, for me. Who knows when they'll next decide to use a remote kill switch on what I've already paid for?
This has long been one of the criticisms of ebooks and ereaders; DRM and the ability to retroactively render a purchase unusable. It's why I didn't buy a kindle, and seeing amazon so handily demonstrate their power, I'm amazed anyone with half a brain would willingly do so either.
Anyone who works with children or the mentally disabled even peripherally (teachers, sports coaches, authors who give school talks) already has to submit themselves to a criminal records check (CRB check) to confirm they're not a pedophile. I work in a school, and it was a huge long form with a substantially amount of additional ID such as my passport and driving licence I had to provide in order to be employed. There's already been a number of high-profile incidents of false positives; people with a similar name getting accused of having a criminal record and losing their job or worse despite being entirely innocent, and vice-versa, people with relevent criminal records not getting flagged.
So this plan to tie CRB checks to the ID cards database as well as the police database, using the biometrics submitted for one system (ID cards) to bolster another (criminal records checks), is entirely why feature creep is such a scary problem with these giant government databases. This likely will be two way, so that having an ID card will also mean your criminal record (or quite possibly someone elses) will end up associated with your details, and queryable by pretty much anybody with access to the national ID database, which is going to be pretty much everybody. How long before they tie in the DNA database too; it's already linked to the criminal records database, so it's no great stretch to tie biometrics, DNA, personal ID, financial records, medical records and criminal records all under one giant database roof, they're already most of the way there.
And what's the odds that once that is done, that an ID card will be made mandatory to do the mandatory CRB check to work in education or healthcare? Something like 10% of the working population have already had to do a CRB check due to the work, so that's a massive amount more of people forced into the 'voluntary' ID biometrics database; assuming of course, they aren't already in it because they wanted to renew their passport.
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ECC RAM costs (a little) more, and patents makes the motherboards way more expensive, which is why no OEM uses it on desktop class boards. The BIOS hasn't been replaced by EFI yet thanks to microsoft; EFI support was supposed to be in Vista, then was dropped and finally has been added in windows 7. Give it another few years for the legacy base of XP to die down some more, then you'll hopefully start to see windows 7 EFI motherboards shipped by OEMs. After all, macs have been using EFI for years; look how long it took for floppy drives to die on PCs as standard.
I do feel sorry for software guys sometimes; there is this huge, huge legacy pile of cruft - as you say - that they can't kill support for, but have to shave costs at every possible avenue so end up farming the drivers out to the intern. Making their new stuff a couple of cents cheaper will get the sales - if there's anything most PC customers have shown, they don't give a crap about quality, they just want the absolute cheapest possible product. Those willing to spend money for perceived quality buy apple.
It's just like anything though, I'm sure. Sysadmins loathe that legacy POS ancient old monotask server that you just can't seem to get rid of (and the software devs who just _won't update their fecking code_), software guys hate the systems that haven't been pdated in the last 10 years, the desktop guys hate those old, crappy yet essential PCs that nobody seems to be able to scrape up the money to replace and those new shitty ones that were bought at bargain basement prices, but because they're new they're expected to run every goddamn legacy app under the sun all at the same time, and when they crap out it's the support guys fault.
Everything is done as cheap as possible, and legacy support is king. This is what the customer wanted, and we're the poor sods who have to bridge the gap between their wallets and their expectations.
The other thing they want to do is kill second hand sales. As I understand it, you get a one-use registration on your account on ubi.com, and you have to have that registration account logged in via the server-auth DRM all the time you're playing.
Game makers hate second hand sales, it means their own product directly competes with new sales, where they actually make money. It's especially a problem for single-player games, as those have a much higher circulation in the second hand market once played. So DRM is much more about killing that market stone dead as it is about preventing piracy. Hell, look at the favourite 'benign' DRM, steam - no resale or even transfer to a family member there unless you register one game per steam account, which rather breaks the whole social aspect of having a steam account. That copyright law explicitly allows second hand sales as a counter-balance to the copyright holders otherwise excessive control doesn't matter; technical measures like these render the protections for customers in law completely worthless.
Ubisoft are trying to change the market, to make this sort of extreme DRM acceptable by making it common. Preventing piracy is the cover; extending copyright far beyond what the law actually says is the real aim. If you look at all the DRM schemes, even the broken ones, and the retail schemes such as single-use codes for significant chunks of gameplay otherwise cut-out at launch, it's all about taking on and killing the second hand market - and so far, they're doing extremely well at it.
I fully expect the next generation of consoles to have online registration of discs that tie them to a single console and/or account. The online shops on all three consoles do precisely that for purchased games.
The UK Sale of Goods Act means the retailer is still on the hook. The goods should be fit for purpose, which means they should work for a period of time suitable for the product. For home electricals, this is generally around 6 years, with a sliding scale of refund for the length of time you've had it for, unless they repair it at their expense (which obviously doesn't apply in this case)
Given it's been intentionally broken after possibly only what, 8 months (when they started selling the slim, without the other os function) that's well within the period in which the customer can expect it to still function as sold. It doesn't matter if Sony says they're not paying the retailer for the refund, the retailer is still responsible for the quality of the product they sold - and being intentionally broken by an update is no different than if a part fails due to shoddy workmanship, it's still not fit for the purpose for which it was sold. Retailers *like* to pretend that your warranty is solely with the manufacturer, but as UK law stands it's crystal clear that the seller is on the hook for it for way longer than the 12 months weakass call-the-makers-indian-helpline warranty they try to fob you off with.
But, if you don't send/receive 100% of the content to/from that single peer, it would be hard to claim copyright infringement, as you couldn't prove a full copy had been shared by that IP address.
Which is why the RIAA were working so hard to get 'making available' count as copyright infringement. Traditionally, without evidence of actual distribution of a copy (or sufficient of a copy to count as a derived work, i.e. not fair use) you couldn't sue. The RIAA, quite successfully, managed to get their new interpretation of merely making available for download, i.e. having the files up for offer on kazaa, or as part of your torrent download process also offering to anybody else what you currently had as a valid 'extension' to the law, though they also failed in some cases.
Assuming the movie studios use the same principle on anyone that goes to court; that you haven't actually committed copyright infringement under the law as written, because they can't demonstrate you've shared a copy or even part of a copy won't matter, as they can still claim statutory damages which count as if you've given away thousands of copies because you're 'making available'.
There's nothing wrong with the protocol. Newzbin are an indexing site; one of many. In their case, they provided a commercial service for hand-categorized nzbs, which are pretty analogous to .torrent files, from a legal point of view at least. That they had categories labelled up for 'screener', 'R5', 'Warez' etc etc along with the documentation explicitly advising editors how to post infringing material.
What's interesting is that they've not been threatened with shut down or massive fines yet, unlike the pirate bay; as far as I'm aware, contributory infringement is illegal in the UK.
So while Newsbin's nzb files will live on as the standard method of collating binary files on usenet, the site itself is destined to be filtered into 'uselessness' (see mininova) even if it isn't shut down with a followup judgement. I expect a number of other indexing sites to spring up, and a number of the existing ones to grow larger - probably hosted in countries that aren't quite so pro-copyright holders as the UK, especially if they don't have contributory copyright infringement laws common in the US and western Europe.
Two thoughts spring to mind;
1) will they get a copy of users search history (complete with creditcard logs linking them to the account)? (and no, I've never been a member)
2) when do they start going after the usenet providers themselves?
To see if economic data matches up with race data? I.e. are particular races in particular areas doing particularly poorly (or well) economically, compared to their neighbours. Then you can look at local government policies to see what effects, if any, that is having. i.e. are local government policies actively discriminating against a certain section of the population. If the government and local officials were already colourblind, then as you say, race data is unimportant. Given things like the recent ACORN events though, it's pretty damn clear that local government, media, corporate and charities are still actively racist in many places, and the census data can help prove that.
Brown is replaced with purple and black by default. Good luck making a racist analogy with that.
The issue is not the transition from paper to online interactions; in an ideal world, you're entirely correct that the savings are worthwhile and it's not like doing it on a web form directly is much different than visiting a local office to fill in a paper form, that the first thing you then see the clerk do is tap into a computer.
There are however issues with this plan. First, this government has screwed up IT plan after IT plan, at huge cost with marginal or no functional end product - the current plan to put all NHS patient records online for doctor's to use is massive behind, massively overbudget and still not working properly in the trial areas, and that's just one example. This government able to manage the build of a personalized portal access to every government service in a year? Hah. 10 years, at 10 times overbudget with it barely useable and constant crashes? Yes, maybe.
The next issue is that there are a significant proportion of the population who cannot get broadband at all (or only a very, very slow broadband), and also a significant number of those that can don't want it. Some 50% of the population can't yet get ADSL2+, and only 75% of the population can get broadband from anyone other than BT. Some 7% of the population can't get broadband at all, and under current plans, probably never will. If they're going to make this site the *only* way to access these services by shutting down local offices, as planned, they're going to basically require everyone to own a computer and have a broadband connection. In addition to those in rural areas, you can add poor people and many of the elderly to the list of the disenfranchised (given the rate libraries are closing, that won't be an option for the poor in 10 years)
Finally - the government is trying to rush through the Digital Economy Bill, which amongst other things, introduces a '3 strikes' law that will result in people's internet connections being crippled merely by being accused of copyright infringement by the content industry. Although people will not be cut off in this version of the bill, it also contains scope to introduce 'additional technical measures' at will, which would include cutting off people's internet connection if the current measures don't result in the goal of a 70% cut in piracy in the next couple of years, so pretty much a certainty. It also means that public access wifi in cafes etc will be shutdown, along with pretty much all cybershops, as it will make them liable for any copyright infringement their customers commit. So there goes another method that people without computers had of accessing this super site.
On the other hand, witness the stunning universal success and popularity of the macbook air.
Bear in mind, this is about the findings of a British reasearch team applicable to the UK; it's not just shut-in children suffering from vitamin D but adults working all day in artificially lit offices, going to the gym with no windows instead of running, or just sitting inside all day watching tv or playing games instead of out kicking a ball about etc. The problem is especially seen in those who have trouble getting vitamin D from sunlight; those with darker skins, such as pakistani or asian origin need more sunlight to create the same amount of vitamin D, the elderly also suffer.
Also, ordinary milk in the UK is not fortfied with vitamin D; only baby formula. One of the suggestions of the researchers is to add it to foodstuffs such as milk to combat this modern resurgence.
I really hope I'm just feeding the troll here, because the alternative that it might be genuine is horrifying. I don't think I've ever read a bigger load of misogynistic tripe in my life. That 8 people at time of posting thought it was worth upmodding frankly scares me.
Women are not angels. They are not cooks, they are not money whores, they are not 'skilled life companions'. They are *people*. They are all individuals with different desires, loves, lusts, skills and minds.
Making love with a partner is not about just jamming a vibrating piece of plastic or your dick in her and expecting her to writhe with desire for you. Making love is as much in the head as it is the physicality of it. Building a relationship is not about exchanging money for sex, cooking and 'raising well-adjusted kids'.
I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for the women in your life, that you see them as just after the money in your wallet; that romance is about counting up how much the bill costs.
Yes, some women are not very nice people, just as some men are not very nice people either. But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
If a good gyndroid cost $10,000, it would be considerably less than a man spends on a woman when amortized over ten or fifteen years. Frankly, a gyndroid would be a real bargain.
If the only thing you're getting out the relationship is bad sex with a fucking sextoy, and all you're thinking about is complaining about how much it costs you; then yes, you're damn right you'd better off with a gyndroid. At least it won't care when you think of it as a piece of meat put on earth just to satisfy *you*.
And yet again, someone misunderstands antitrust laws. If you accept that a free market is a good thing, then you also need to accept that regulation is required to keep it free. Without competition, free markets cannot function; monopolies are dangerous and anti-competitive, and mean prices rise for customers in the long run.
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Having two monopolies isn't illegal. Bundling isn't illegal. Having one monopoly, then using bundling with that monopoly to gain a second monopoly, and to prop up your monopolies via mutual lock-in IS illegal. A monopoly isn't 100% of a market; it's a large enough share such that it is utterly dominant. 90% of the market is more than sufficent in microsoft's case.
Apple does not have a monopoly in the desktop OS market, nor is safari a browser monopoly so bundling is ok. Neither paint or notepad have a monopoly in the image editing or document editing markets, so again bundling is A-OK. Free market competition is not threatened by them at this point.
Microsoft have a desktop monopoly. By bundling IE as the default 'free' browser (i.e. the price is included in windows) they gained a monopoly in the browser market. This in itself is not nececessarily a problem, but given microsoft's habit of also including custom extensions to the spec that promote lock-in, i.e. ActiveX it becomes a problem. Take a real world example; in Korea, online banking almost invariably requires activex, because 'everybody' has it. By having activex tied to the IE monopoly, which is tied to the windows monopoly, it means in order to do online banking there, you need to buy windows. Browser competitors and OS competitors are almost entirely locked out of the market, damaging customer choice and competition. And with no competition, microsoft can charge what the hell they like.
The same applies to the proprietary codecs bundled as part of media player; there was a real danger a few years ago that streaming video and audio online would gravitate to the WMV and WMA standards, which defacto only work in windows (patents providing lock-in), and mainly in IE. So by bundling media player's proprietary codecs with windows 'for free' there was a danger that microsoft would also gain a monopoly in the streaming video/audio market, and again harm competition and ultimately prices. As it happened, flash ended up winning, but it could have gone very differently, and may still if agreement cannot be reached with HTML5 for cross-platform support.
Providing a popup choice at first install may not be my preferred solution, but at least it means microsoft don't get an automatic free ride from customers with windows and IE who don't bother to look into the alternatives because they already have a bundled solution.
then the CRIA members would be faction quadrillions in damages, where each CD they sold would mean them owing $20,000 per song, PER CD. Instead, it's limited to per song.
That's not how statutory damages work.
There's three kinds of damages for copyright;
1) actual damages. This is where you work how much has been lost. So it would be the few cents per song per CD that was sold without permission that was owing on royalties. The difficulty of this in general though when it comes to copyright infringement is that you often don't know how many copies were distributed. So you have option 2,
2) statutory damages. This is a 'stand-in' figure for actual damages. They go - "we only caught bob the market trader with 2 copies of our CD. But he likely sold lots of copies, which we can't prove directly. So we'll ask for the statutory damages laid down in law instead". These are charged once per infringement (not per individual copy), but go from eye-watering to downright extortionate amounts, i.e. the $20,000 per track claimed for in this case. Of course, one reason they're so high is because the music industry lobbied for them to be.
3) punitive damages. This is where the court goes - "Ok, here's your (actual damages/statutory damages) fine to pay back for the financial harm you caused. Now here's an nice big extra punishment fine on top so you don't do it again, and neither does anybody else.
(and that should be applicant, not appellant. Whoops.)
We don't have a DA filing charges and issuing a warrant.
No, because this is the British High Court of Justice, which deal with important and high profile cases. The judge is a senior one with many years of experience, and he issues a court order instead of a warrant. She requested the editor's IP from wikipedia; wikipedia refused, but said "Without waiving our insistence that no court in the United Kingdom has proper jurisdiction over us as a foreign entity, we nevertheless are willing to comply with a properly issued court order narrowly limited to the material you ask for in your letter".
So she's gone to the High Court to get the information, on the basis that the user who posted the article has a case to answer for, and the Judge agreed. If he didn't think there was a case to answer for, he wouldn't have issued the order. Whether that ends up being a civil case or a criminal case handled by the CPS likely depends upon who that IP belongs to. She believes it will belong to someone to she already has a dispute with, and if so (presuming she gets another court order for the ISP to hand over subscriber details for that IP) then there's quite possibly enough evidence there for the CPS to become interested, and the judge does think there's enough evidence for a blackmail prosecution.
But on the larger point - are you saying that a civil case appellant should never be able to gain user information from a 3rd party on the basis that that user has a case to answer for? Because that's an awfully restrictive setup, where only criminal proceedings can gather information from 3rd parties.
The thing is, the songwriters have already been paid - by the radio station. If it's BBC radio, we've already paid for that music out of our annual licence fee, or it's a commercial station with adverts. Every person in that store has the right to listen to that station already as the broadcast fees have already been paid.
Now that it's suddenly being able to be listened to while on a store premises, it's a 'new' public performance and more money needs to be paid. It's double dipping for the same performance.
You want to charge stores that play personal CDs through to customers? Fine. But leave my goddamn radio at my desk alone.
They equipped her, someone whose most intensive task is copying photos off of a camera, with a quad core desktop with like 4 or 8 GB of RAM.
To be fair, it probably also had vista, norton and some OEM management program on it. That's minimum spec, baby.
He's talking about electric universe 'theory'. It's a form of free energy horseshit.
Previously The TV Licencing Authority was an arm of the post office; now it's run by capita, under contract to the BBC. So it is a separate (private) body, but it's sole purpose is to collect money for the BBC and take legal action against those who don't pay but should, and is contracted to the BBC for just that service. So it is a bit of an arms-length dodge to take the flak off the BBC admittedly.
And given the evil that is the TVLA, and their absolute hounding of people without a TV as potential fee-dodgers, I'm certainly not going to defend their way of going about business; their methods for payment are absolutely byzantine.
The BBC provides channels over unencrypted broadcast TV, both analog and digital, and satellite. They're also carried by both cable operators, but yes, your point is taken.
Oddly enough though, the BBC was actually founded as a combination of various electronics companies to provide the physical means to transmit radio, i.e. the studios, antennas and other physical plant; the content rather came along for the ride. It didn't become a publically owned company until several years later. I believe that the BBC still own and operate large amounts of the TV transmitters in the UK, and have a charter duty to provide coverage to the entire nation.
According to wikipedia, £1.08 a month of the fee goes on transmission costs.
Having said all that, I'd MUCH rather pay AN ADDITIONAL $20 a month and get advert-free programming where a one hour show is actually one hour long.
I'd actually pay the entirety of the licence fee just to keep BBC radio 4, so I can see where you're coming from. Having watched TV in the US - or the snatches of it you get between ad breaks, anyway - and listened to what clearchannel affiliates call music, and seen what Fox News call news, I'm deeply and eternally grateful for the BBC; even if you don't like their content, they keep the commercial broadcasters, such as Sky (owned by the same parent as fox news, i.e. Rupert Murdoch) honest.
hefty fine on the purchase of any new TV set.
Uhh, not quite. You need a licence to watch broadcast TV, per household. So if you have 10 TVs, you still only need one licence. If you don't connect any TV to an aerial, i.e. you use it for a console or DVDs, you don't need a licence.
The annual cost is £140 odd a year; £12 or about $20 a month. For that we get 4 main tv channels, 4 minor ones, 7 national and a whole bunch of local radio stations, and arguably the best news website on the planet. All commercial advert free. Personally, I think the BBC TV is pretty good; their documentaries and nature programmes are top notch, at least, and they get the important sports rights, again free to watch. Nor is it government run, or funded; the tax is collected by a separate body, and given direct to the BBC, with no government control over editorial or programming decisions.
How much is the average cable subscription in the US - with adverts - again?
Well, there's exFAT - a patented filesystem supported natively in windows 7 and vista, that supports 64ZiB instead of the 8TiB FAT32 supports, and has ACL support (win 7/2008R2 only tho), with a max filesize of 127PiB.
OK, it's patented and proprietary, but so is FAT32 and NTFS, it's just what you have to put up with dealing with windows.
Also, the company behind NTFS-3G has recently signed a licence agreement with Microsoft in order to provide a commercial exFAT implementation for linux OEMs.
But in the interim, microsoft makes bucketloads of cash from selling their infringing product, and since they're not being hurt in any way from that infringement, they can drag out the court case for many years and there's no rush to fix it via patch. Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money before the patent case is ever resolved, and may eventually end up as just a patent shell company.
Justice delayed is justice denied. An injunction against microsoft selling new copies of their infringing product will make them very quickly remove the infringing code so they can get it back on the shelves minus that feature, and get cracking on resolving the case speedily. Microsoft can much more easily afford to drag this out than i4i can, and an injuction will prevent the usual microsoft foot-dragging.
No-one would have criticised them for withdrawing the books from new sales when they discovered they didn't actually have publishing rights for that book.
They're angry that after a sale was completed, and with the slimmest of justifications from the EULA, they deleted books already sold - something just not possible with real books. Last I checked, people who purchase illegally copyrighted works are not held liable, it's the producer that's commited copyright infringement; though they may have them confiscated by the police if they 'should' have known the goods were infringing. What amazon should have done is stop sales, leave the copies sold already in place, then work with the copyright holder to recompense them for the copies already sold.
Amazon acting like copyright cops after the sale, and on very iffy legal grounds - especially by destroying people's annotations - that damage to their reputation is done, and no amount of backtracking, apologising, or 'here, have it back' fixes it, for me.
Who knows when they'll next decide to use a remote kill switch on what I've already paid for?
This has long been one of the criticisms of ebooks and ereaders; DRM and the ability to retroactively render a purchase unusable. It's why I didn't buy a kindle, and seeing amazon so handily demonstrate their power, I'm amazed anyone with half a brain would willingly do so either.
Anyone who works with children or the mentally disabled even peripherally (teachers, sports coaches, authors who give school talks) already has to submit themselves to a criminal records check (CRB check) to confirm they're not a pedophile. I work in a school, and it was a huge long form with a substantially amount of additional ID such as my passport and driving licence I had to provide in order to be employed. There's already been a number of high-profile incidents of false positives; people with a similar name getting accused of having a criminal record and losing their job or worse despite being entirely innocent, and vice-versa, people with relevent criminal records not getting flagged.
So this plan to tie CRB checks to the ID cards database as well as the police database, using the biometrics submitted for one system (ID cards) to bolster another (criminal records checks), is entirely why feature creep is such a scary problem with these giant government databases. This likely will be two way, so that having an ID card will also mean your criminal record (or quite possibly someone elses) will end up associated with your details, and queryable by pretty much anybody with access to the national ID database, which is going to be pretty much everybody. How long before they tie in the DNA database too; it's already linked to the criminal records database, so it's no great stretch to tie biometrics, DNA, personal ID, financial records, medical records and criminal records all under one giant database roof, they're already most of the way there.
And what's the odds that once that is done, that an ID card will be made mandatory to do the mandatory CRB check to work in education or healthcare? Something like 10% of the working population have already had to do a CRB check due to the work, so that's a massive amount more of people forced into the 'voluntary' ID biometrics database; assuming of course, they aren't already in it because they wanted to renew their passport.