Re:Mock it if you will, but...
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...)
Apple at the time was on System 7.5, and TFA has it wrong... True preemptive multitasking, protected memory, etc., didn't really arrive until OS X in the late '90s. (Anyone remember the failed promises for Copland, of which only the interface facelift survived into the eventually released System 8?)
Byte Magazine, writing on the release of System 7 in 1990, chided Apple for not releasing an OS with protected memory and preemptive multitasking. (That article doesn't seem to be online; I have it at home, though home is 2000 miles away...)
I was a Mac user at the time, on 68040 and eventually PowerPC 603 machines. But Apple lost their step there in the mid-90s, and were turning out crap computers (exploding and cracking PowerBook 5300s anyone?) and couldn't get out a next-gen O/S to save their life -- literally! I was hoping for BeOS, but what became OS X was enough to grab me back from dual-booting Windows 95/98/2000 and Linux on VAIO laptops and hand-built grey-box PIIIs... Haven't looked back since!
What I wanna know, is if this is so dubious why doesn't someone go to court and request a clarification from a judge? Surely someone somewhere must care enough about this issue to spend some discovery money on it.
Probably because copyright is a preemptive Federal Question (17 USC 301) that must be heard in Federal court. Federal courts cannot issue 'advisory opinions,' and require an 'actual case or controversy.' There are ways around that, but you have to establish a lot before you can play ball...
My biggest problem with the GPL is the FSF's position that even dynamically linking against a library under GPL is enough to make the resulting code a derivative work (and thus also subject to the GPL). The BSD license affords much more flexibility. The LGPL is also not so encumbered. (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html)
Note also that the FSF's interpretation may not be binding, but it hasn't been tested in court (that I'm aware of, and I recently attended a symposium on this very topic). So, in my mind, it creates an unacceptable exposure for anyone who wants to develop software but not adopt the GPL. The BSD license is substantially safer.
He's claiming that his termination violates the Human Rights Act (though that tends to bind governments acts against the people, rather than between private entities), and he will sue accordingly.
He's also insisting that there's no way the U.S. courts could possibly have absolutely any jurisdiction over him, despite him entering into a contract in California with an ISP there located, to run the DVD-Core server. Anyone with an even layman's grasp of Federal Civil Procedure knows the point is at least arguable (long arm statutes + 'minimum contacts' -- purposeful availment and foreseeabilit -- so far so good; then you argue over 'traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice'), and not a slam dunk in his favor.
My impression is that Mr. Hanff doesn't know/understand the law quite as well as he'd like to believe he does. In other words, Inconceivable!
I can't speak to Minnesota law, but most states look more or less like the Federal Rules of Evidence. FRE 401 reads:
Rule 401. Definition of "Relevant Evidence"
"Relevant evidence" means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. (Emphasis added.)
The article suggests that the opinion isn't condemning encryption per se or even unnaturally linking lawful tools with illicit activity, only that "evidence of appellant's Internet use and the existence of an encryption program on his computer was at least somewhat relevant to the state's case against him."
"Any" is a pretty low threshold to meet; evidence that the guy had an FTP client could/would (presumably) be relevant to a child pornography distribution charge...
This isn't the end of the world as we know it. It's up to the opposing counsel to explain away the existence of the PGP, and/or to illustrate to the jury how having a tool doesn't mean the tool has been used for evil.
So how about the new series of Doctor Who, aired on the BBC (so no advertisements)?
There's still the issue of secondary markets. Internet availabilty, especially of high quality digital TV rips, arguably reduce the market for DVD boxed sets and foreign market licensing, both of which I'm sure the BBC would like to profit as much as possible from, to have larger budgets to develop new programming than they would otherwise receive from UK TV licenses. Whether or not Slashdotters believe that Internet 'pirate' availability reduces these markets, it's enough if the purchasing agents for the remote networks believe that it does, and lower their offers accordingly.
Can I, as a license paying Brit, download episodes which have already been broadcast without fear of legal action?
Possibly; I don't know UK law at all (though we received your common law a couple of centuries ago). If you're interested, I'd recommend contacting a local barrister.
Au contraire. Now that I don't have to get from the west Valley to downtown everynight in a half hour to make it to school on time, I've been walking to work... (I live in "Mid-City West" and work in Century City; the walk's about 3 miles each way, through Beverly Hills.) Many people at my firm walk or ride bikes to work, from as far out as Malibu.
Also, for the record, when I was living in the Inland Empire, I used to take MetroLink into Union Station, where I picked up the Red Line subway into Hollywood, where I schlepped part-time at a dot-com (this was '99-'00). It's certainly possible, though only in the denser urban areas (and Pasadena, now, with the Gold Line).
I'll take being able to see the sky and the mountains from pretty much anywhere in town to the steel-and-concrete canyons of Manhattan any day (and my dad's place is at 59th & Park, so I know The City fairly well, too; I could choose either coast, and I chose - wisely.;)
My Porsche 3L Porsche 968 (at 11 years and 91,000 miles old) gets 32+ MPG on the freeway, and mid-20s in city traffic. My BMW motorcycle gets over 70MPG. (Granted, those of you who don't live in SoCal probably can't motorcycle commute 49 weeks out of the year the way we can;) I expected a lot more out of the Accord. (I don't expect anything from Ford, except maybe mechanical problems.;)
How come no one just creates a p2p network where all data is encrypted with a simple algorithm. . . . RIAA could never check to see if any files are copyrighted, because they would be violating the DMCA is they broke the encryption on the files.
The DMCA doesn't outlaw breaking encryption, only 'circumventing' technological measures (including encryption schemes) that protect copyrighted works. Since a protocol is a method of operation, and thus cannot be protected by copyright (see 17 USC 102 and Borland), the DMCA wouldn't apply. Nice try though.
3) Archival, the right to make backup copies of purchased works.
Note that even the page you link to notes that this applies only to computer software (and, no, the motion picture embodied in a DVD is not computer software; look at 17 USC 101 for the definition of a 'phonorecord' and you'll learn why just because something's digitally encoded and requires a computer 'machine' to make perceivable, doesn't make it software).
The mere thought almost makes me feel nauseous enough to skip high tea.
Funny that you'd have a High Tea, the commoner's (working class) supper mean, when your language speaks of a more rarified upbringing; I'd expect you'd be more likely to have an Afternoon Tea?
http://coffeetea.about.com/cs/culture/a/aftervshig h.htm
In the US you are allowed to tape a television broadcast . . .
Timeshifting was held to be a valid fair use, yes. But...
. . . and give that tape to a friend.
The Court defined 'time shifting' pretty narrowly: noting that their opinion "concerned the private, home use of VTR's for recording programs broadcast on the public airwaves without charge to the viewer" and not "the transfer of tapes to other persons, the use of home-recorded tapes for public performances, or the copying of programs transmitted on pay or cable television systems . .." Indeed, the Court nodded to the District Court's opinion, which highlighted "the private character of the activity conducted entirely within the home." Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). There was no mention of "giving it to a friend," and indeed, in dicta, even "library building" (saving copies of the taped programming, rather than reusing the tapes) was suggested as infringing. ("time-shifting without librarying")
Thus, I don't think you can "give that tape to a friend."
Seriously. I got more done in five uninterrupted hours of staring at white letters on a black screen (especially now with vi's color syntax highlighting and dangling } identifiers; where was this stuff when I was hacking code on VT220s?) than I ever possibly could in *any* GUI. With a GUI you've got Outlook's siren call (when forced to use Windows) or the Mac Mail.app icon and it's little red "you've got XX pieces of new mail!" appendage, the effortless ability to click over to a web browser "just for a few seconds," etc. ARGH.
Grab three O'Reilly books, fire up the console, and get codin'! I did cheat a little bit, keeping a virtual console open that I used for:
- `man strncasecmp` - telnet localhost 1390 (was working on, and debugging, a network app) - ssh @ for the occasional pine session - lynx http://www.google.com/ (for digging for sample code when I got stuck)
Just finished a "estimated time: 1 week" piece of a project this morning. Five hours. Console mode.
I'd like to see some high-profile news articles about MPAA suing the producers, the screeners, the guild members who leak out all those freebie discs. That'd be good for the debate, but I'm not gonna see CNN (a division of Time Warner) covering this sort of thing.
Who in the MPAA actually verifys the files are illegal and not just some homemade porn or some songs from your friends band that he gave you?
I'm sure someone does. These are court cases being filed, not automated C&D letters. They probably have a small army of paralegals and/or clerks looking over every case prior to filing.
And how do they justify the number ($150,000) per digital file?
It's called 'statutory damages,' and that's the exact amount per title (that is, per copyrighted work, not per file -- as I understand it) codified in U.S. Copyright Law, 17 USC 504.
The MPAA needs more clear guidelines than "If we catch you with a digital file we don't like, it's gonna cost you $150,000"
Like what, exactly? I think they've been pretty clear with their "you can click but you can't hide" thing (see, for example, LokiTorrent). Blather about 'fair use' all you want, but every U.S. court that's looked at it (I'm too lazy to dig out cites at the moment, and I doubt anyone here would ever read them if I did, but look at the courts' opinions in the various Napster, Grokster, and Aimster cases) has stated that 'swapping' whole copies of copyrighted works is not a fair use, period, whatever the liability of the P2P manufacturer may be. E.g., swap a movie or TV show or song in the U.S., it's a copyright violation and exposes you to the potential of a lawsuit. Pretty clear, IMHO. But, then, I do have copyright training.
Articles should have summaries in a manner that most respected news-sources use. Not like some used car salesman.
Say what?! You're new here, aren't you?;) Slashdot's summaries are almost always deliberately inflammatory and lopsided (anti-DMCA, anti-Microsoft Borgification, pro-Everything For Free Foundation;), and usually inaccurate. Google for 'site:slashdot.org RTFA!!!'; today's blurb about Australia's regulations on kiddie porn reporting is a perfect case in point. Nothing wrong with that, just don't go thinking Slashdot is any better than FauxNews, 'cause it ain't. And that's why I like it.
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apple didn't stop production on the IIe until like 1993, almost a decade after the Mac was introduced. The push was for Mac sales, but the II line was still supported for many years; I bought my IIgs new in 1988 IIRC. "Apple II Forever."
Why take the time and effort to make a site standard compliant when in the end it would probabaly use more bandwidth for google
You're talking a handful of bytes, at most. Things like making sure your 'id' tags conform with proper naming conventions (e.g., starting with a letter, rather than a number), and wrapping quotes around attributes' values, don't (or, shouldn't) break browsers, don't incur overhead, and are (gasp) standards compliant.
I'll point out that only on the 'Web is this type of sloppiness anticipated and handled gracefully; try the same level of lack of attention to syntactic detail in, say, Java, Perl, C/C++, etc., and you'd be in for a rude awakening.
What makes W3C standards anyway?
Are you serious? Ever here of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of this here world wide web?
Remember, the 'web isn't just MSIE and Firefox; my cellphone has to render Google these days, as does my PDA, as does . . . When sites are coded to standards, it makes it very easy for programmers to accomodate those sites. When sites disregard the standards, browsers have to become exponentially larger and more complicated, to address the myriad ways in which code is non-standardized. Standards adherence streamlines things for *everyone*; lack of standards compliance may work today but may break nastily tomorrow.
Having a standard document from which both parties are working (browesr builder and site programmer) means both are on the same page, literally. It's not "one way to make the internet more uniform," it's the only way in which the Internet will work the way it's designed to. If everyone didn't accomodate at least HTTP/0.9, you wouldn't be web surfing today; if every modern browser didn't support HTTP/1.1 no one could get cheap shared-server web hosting (and/or we'd have a serious shortage of IP addresses) . . . You use standards every day. Bringing HTML into compliance with basic standards is a no-brainer, and it's inexcusable (IMHO) for a company as large and prominent as Google to ignore them.
So this means the Google will get the features it wants and to hell with everyone else, including standards compliance which seems to be taken a back seat these days.
I've never done so before, but this comment prompted me to run the basic main Google page through the w3c validator; the results were suprising. It's such a simple page; why not take the (minimal!) time necessary to code proper HTML?! Yikes. I didn't expect that level of sloppiness.
(Yes, my personal page validates just fine, thanks (though some subpages may not, given the age of a lot of the code, and the multiple generations of sites the content pages have churned through... After I graduate and pass the Bar, maybe I'll have time to go back and fix them...)
No, distribution is merely an exercise of freedom of speech, and that's a natural right.
How is distributing someone else's creative, "entertaining" works (Daredevil is not exactly a compelling political statement; Thomas Paine Ben Affleck is not) verbatim and without commentary an exercise of free speech? It's not a protest pamphlet, it's a Hollywood blockbuster. There's no statement being made here.
This will likely be settled and the guy will receive minimal if any jail time.
Criminal trials don't settle, though a defendant (or prosecutor) can attempt to make a deal whereby a guilty plea nets a lower charge or a lower sentence. Federal convictions, however, are bound by the federal sentencing guidelines, which accomodates guilty pleas by reducing (slightly!) the number of 'points' a conviction carries (for "taking responsibility," and, if done early enough, for "expediting" the flow of the criminal justice system). The lower the points, the shorter the sentence and, more importantly, the lower your inmate classification (e.g., you might end up in a Federal Prison Camp rather than a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison)... Depends on the mood of the prosecutor at this point, really. I'd expect this guy to do some time. We seem to be in a "let this be a lesson to all of you" mentality phase...
That's exactly why the pilot of a commercial aircraft rarely if ever flies the approach by hand.
Instrument landing systems can only take you so far; the last few hundred feet (or more, depending on the airport) are done manually. Google for "decision height" and "ILS."
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...)
Apple at the time was on System 7.5, and TFA has it wrong... True preemptive multitasking, protected memory, etc., didn't really arrive until OS X in the late '90s. (Anyone remember the failed promises for Copland, of which only the interface facelift survived into the eventually released System 8?)
Byte Magazine, writing on the release of System 7 in 1990, chided Apple for not releasing an OS with protected memory and preemptive multitasking. (That article doesn't seem to be online; I have it at home, though home is 2000 miles away...)
I was a Mac user at the time, on 68040 and eventually PowerPC 603 machines. But Apple lost their step there in the mid-90s, and were turning out crap computers (exploding and cracking PowerBook 5300s anyone?) and couldn't get out a next-gen O/S to save their life -- literally! I was hoping for BeOS, but what became OS X was enough to grab me back from dual-booting Windows 95/98/2000 and Linux on VAIO laptops and hand-built grey-box PIIIs... Haven't looked back since!
What I wanna know, is if this is so dubious why doesn't someone go to court and request a clarification from a judge? Surely someone somewhere must care enough about this issue to spend some discovery money on it.
Probably because copyright is a preemptive Federal Question (17 USC 301) that must be heard in Federal court. Federal courts cannot issue 'advisory opinions,' and require an 'actual case or controversy.' There are ways around that, but you have to establish a lot before you can play ball...
My biggest problem with the GPL is the FSF's position that even dynamically linking against a library under GPL is enough to make the resulting code a derivative work (and thus also subject to the GPL). The BSD license affords much more flexibility. The LGPL is also not so encumbered. (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html)
Note also that the FSF's interpretation may not be binding, but it hasn't been tested in court (that I'm aware of, and I recently attended a symposium on this very topic). So, in my mind, it creates an unacceptable exposure for anyone who wants to develop software but not adopt the GPL. The BSD license is substantially safer.
More discussion on this point: http://www.oslawblog.com/2005/01/static-linking-gp l-and-lgpl.html
He's claiming that his termination violates the Human Rights Act (though that tends to bind governments acts against the people, rather than between private entities), and he will sue accordingly.
He's also insisting that there's no way the U.S. courts could possibly have absolutely any jurisdiction over him, despite him entering into a contract in California with an ISP there located, to run the DVD-Core server. Anyone with an even layman's grasp of Federal Civil Procedure knows the point is at least arguable (long arm statutes + 'minimum contacts' -- purposeful availment and foreseeabilit -- so far so good; then you argue over 'traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice'), and not a slam dunk in his favor.
My impression is that Mr. Hanff doesn't know/understand the law quite as well as he'd like to believe he does. In other words, Inconceivable!
I can't speak to Minnesota law, but most states look more or less like the Federal Rules of Evidence. FRE 401 reads:
Rule 401. Definition of "Relevant Evidence"
"Relevant evidence" means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. (Emphasis added.)
The article suggests that the opinion isn't condemning encryption per se or even unnaturally linking lawful tools with illicit activity, only that "evidence of appellant's Internet use and the existence of an encryption program on his computer was at least somewhat relevant to the state's case against him."
"Any" is a pretty low threshold to meet; evidence that the guy had an FTP client could/would (presumably) be relevant to a child pornography distribution charge...
This isn't the end of the world as we know it. It's up to the opposing counsel to explain away the existence of the PGP, and/or to illustrate to the jury how having a tool doesn't mean the tool has been used for evil.
So how about the new series of Doctor Who, aired on the BBC (so no advertisements)?
There's still the issue of secondary markets. Internet availabilty, especially of high quality digital TV rips, arguably reduce the market for DVD boxed sets and foreign market licensing, both of which I'm sure the BBC would like to profit as much as possible from, to have larger budgets to develop new programming than they would otherwise receive from UK TV licenses. Whether or not Slashdotters believe that Internet 'pirate' availability reduces these markets, it's enough if the purchasing agents for the remote networks believe that it does, and lower their offers accordingly.
Can I, as a license paying Brit, download episodes which have already been broadcast without fear of legal action?
Possibly; I don't know UK law at all (though we received your common law a couple of centuries ago). If you're interested, I'd recommend contacting a local barrister.
Au contraire. Now that I don't have to get from the west Valley to downtown everynight in a half hour to make it to school on time, I've been walking to work... (I live in "Mid-City West" and work in Century City; the walk's about 3 miles each way, through Beverly Hills.) Many people at my firm walk or ride bikes to work, from as far out as Malibu.
;)
Also, for the record, when I was living in the Inland Empire, I used to take MetroLink into Union Station, where I picked up the Red Line subway into Hollywood, where I schlepped part-time at a dot-com (this was '99-'00). It's certainly possible, though only in the denser urban areas (and Pasadena, now, with the Gold Line).
I'll take being able to see the sky and the mountains from pretty much anywhere in town to the steel-and-concrete canyons of Manhattan any day (and my dad's place is at 59th & Park, so I know The City fairly well, too; I could choose either coast, and I chose - wisely.
My Porsche 3L Porsche 968 (at 11 years and 91,000 miles old) gets 32+ MPG on the freeway, and mid-20s in city traffic. My BMW motorcycle gets over 70MPG. (Granted, those of you who don't live in SoCal probably can't motorcycle commute 49 weeks out of the year the way we can ;) I expected a lot more out of the Accord. (I don't expect anything from Ford, except maybe mechanical problems. ;)
How come no one just creates a p2p network where all data is encrypted with a simple algorithm. . . . RIAA could never check to see if any files are copyrighted, because they would be violating the DMCA is they broke the encryption on the files.
The DMCA doesn't outlaw breaking encryption, only 'circumventing' technological measures (including encryption schemes) that protect copyrighted works. Since a protocol is a method of operation, and thus cannot be protected by copyright (see 17 USC 102 and Borland), the DMCA wouldn't apply. Nice try though.
3) Archival, the right to make backup copies of purchased works.
Note that even the page you link to notes that this applies only to computer software (and, no, the motion picture embodied in a DVD is not computer software; look at 17 USC 101 for the definition of a 'phonorecord' and you'll learn why just because something's digitally encoded and requires a computer 'machine' to make perceivable, doesn't make it software).
Kling v. Hallmark Cards, 225 F.3d 1030, 1036-37 (9th Cir. 2000)
Jackson v. Axton, 25 F.3d 884 (9th Cir. 1994)
Trust Company Bank v. Putnam Publishing Group, Inc., 5 U.S.P.Q.2d 1874 (C.D. Cal. 1988)
If we let the unauthorized derivative works go on for too long, I'm afraid we will create an estoppel that would limit the effect of the GPL.
If nothing else, you'd give rise to a defense of laches, which can be asserted in © actions (actually, just about any civil action).
The mere thought almost makes me feel nauseous enough to skip high tea.
Funny that you'd have a High Tea, the commoner's (working class) supper mean, when your language speaks of a more rarified upbringing; I'd expect you'd be more likely to have an Afternoon Tea? http://coffeetea.about.com/cs/culture/a/aftervshig h.htm
In the US you are allowed to tape a television broadcast . . .
Timeshifting was held to be a valid fair use, yes. But...
. . . and give that tape to a friend.
The Court defined 'time shifting' pretty narrowly: noting that their opinion "concerned the private, home use of VTR's for recording programs broadcast on the public airwaves without charge to the viewer" and not "the transfer of tapes to other persons, the use of home-recorded tapes for public performances, or the copying of programs transmitted on pay or cable television systems . . ." Indeed, the Court nodded to the District Court's opinion, which highlighted "the private character of the activity conducted entirely within the home." Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). There was no mention of "giving it to a friend," and indeed, in dicta, even "library building" (saving copies of the taped programming, rather than reusing the tapes) was suggested as infringing. ("time-shifting without librarying")
Thus, I don't think you can "give that tape to a friend."
Seriously. I got more done in five uninterrupted hours of staring at white letters on a black screen (especially now with vi's color syntax highlighting and dangling } identifiers; where was this stuff when I was hacking code on VT220s?) than I ever possibly could in *any* GUI. With a GUI you've got Outlook's siren call (when forced to use Windows) or the Mac Mail.app icon and it's little red "you've got XX pieces of new mail!" appendage, the effortless ability to click over to a web browser "just for a few seconds," etc. ARGH.
;)
Grab three O'Reilly books, fire up the console, and get codin'! I did cheat a little bit, keeping a virtual console open that I used for:
- `man strncasecmp`
- telnet localhost 1390 (was working on, and debugging, a network app)
- ssh @ for the occasional pine session
- lynx http://www.google.com/ (for digging for sample code when I got stuck)
Just finished a "estimated time: 1 week" piece of a project this morning. Five hours. Console mode.
*That's* productive.
I'd like to see some high-profile news articles about MPAA suing the producers, the screeners, the guild members who leak out all those freebie discs. That'd be good for the debate, but I'm not gonna see CNN (a division of Time Warner) covering this sort of thing.
Funny you should use CNN... Arrest in movie bootlegging scheme...
Who in the MPAA actually verifys the files are illegal and not just some homemade porn or some songs from your friends band that he gave you?
I'm sure someone does. These are court cases being filed, not automated C&D letters. They probably have a small army of paralegals and/or clerks looking over every case prior to filing.
And how do they justify the number ($150,000) per digital file?
It's called 'statutory damages,' and that's the exact amount per title (that is, per copyrighted work, not per file -- as I understand it) codified in U.S. Copyright Law, 17 USC 504.
The MPAA needs more clear guidelines than "If we catch you with a digital file we don't like, it's gonna cost you $150,000"
Like what, exactly? I think they've been pretty clear with their "you can click but you can't hide" thing (see, for example, LokiTorrent). Blather about 'fair use' all you want, but every U.S. court that's looked at it (I'm too lazy to dig out cites at the moment, and I doubt anyone here would ever read them if I did, but look at the courts' opinions in the various Napster, Grokster, and Aimster cases) has stated that 'swapping' whole copies of copyrighted works is not a fair use, period, whatever the liability of the P2P manufacturer may be. E.g., swap a movie or TV show or song in the U.S., it's a copyright violation and exposes you to the potential of a lawsuit. Pretty clear, IMHO. But, then, I do have copyright training.
Articles should have summaries in a manner that most respected news-sources use. Not like some used car salesman.
Say what?! You're new here, aren't you? ;) Slashdot's summaries are almost always deliberately inflammatory and lopsided (anti-DMCA, anti-Microsoft Borgification, pro-Everything For Free Foundation ;), and usually inaccurate. Google for 'site:slashdot.org RTFA!!!'; today's blurb about Australia's regulations on kiddie porn reporting is a perfect case in point. Nothing wrong with that, just don't go thinking Slashdot is any better than FauxNews, 'cause it ain't. And that's why I like it.
Apple didn't stop production on the IIe until like 1993, almost a decade after the Mac was introduced. The push was for Mac sales, but the II line was still supported for many years; I bought my IIgs new in 1988 IIRC. "Apple II Forever."
Why take the time and effort to make a site standard compliant when in the end it would probabaly use more bandwidth for google
You're talking a handful of bytes, at most. Things like making sure your 'id' tags conform with proper naming conventions (e.g., starting with a letter, rather than a number), and wrapping quotes around attributes' values, don't (or, shouldn't) break browsers, don't incur overhead, and are (gasp) standards compliant.
I'll point out that only on the 'Web is this type of sloppiness anticipated and handled gracefully; try the same level of lack of attention to syntactic detail in, say, Java, Perl, C/C++, etc., and you'd be in for a rude awakening.
What makes W3C standards anyway?
Are you serious? Ever here of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of this here world wide web?
Remember, the 'web isn't just MSIE and Firefox; my cellphone has to render Google these days, as does my PDA, as does . . . When sites are coded to standards, it makes it very easy for programmers to accomodate those sites. When sites disregard the standards, browsers have to become exponentially larger and more complicated, to address the myriad ways in which code is non-standardized. Standards adherence streamlines things for *everyone*; lack of standards compliance may work today but may break nastily tomorrow.
Having a standard document from which both parties are working (browesr builder and site programmer) means both are on the same page, literally. It's not "one way to make the internet more uniform," it's the only way in which the Internet will work the way it's designed to. If everyone didn't accomodate at least HTTP/0.9, you wouldn't be web surfing today; if every modern browser didn't support HTTP/1.1 no one could get cheap shared-server web hosting (and/or we'd have a serious shortage of IP addresses) . . . You use standards every day. Bringing HTML into compliance with basic standards is a no-brainer, and it's inexcusable (IMHO) for a company as large and prominent as Google to ignore them.
So this means the Google will get the features it wants and to hell with everyone else, including standards compliance which seems to be taken a back seat these days.
I've never done so before, but this comment prompted me to run the basic main Google page through the w3c validator; the results were suprising. It's such a simple page; why not take the (minimal!) time necessary to code proper HTML?! Yikes. I didn't expect that level of sloppiness.
(Yes, my personal page validates just fine, thanks (though some subpages may not, given the age of a lot of the code, and the multiple generations of sites the content pages have churned through... After I graduate and pass the Bar, maybe I'll have time to go back and fix them...)
No, distribution is merely an exercise of freedom of speech, and that's a natural right.
How is distributing someone else's creative, "entertaining" works (Daredevil is not exactly a compelling political statement; Thomas Paine Ben Affleck is not) verbatim and without commentary an exercise of free speech? It's not a protest pamphlet, it's a Hollywood blockbuster. There's no statement being made here.
This will likely be settled and the guy will receive minimal if any jail time.
Criminal trials don't settle, though a defendant (or prosecutor) can attempt to make a deal whereby a guilty plea nets a lower charge or a lower sentence. Federal convictions, however, are bound by the federal sentencing guidelines, which accomodates guilty pleas by reducing (slightly!) the number of 'points' a conviction carries (for "taking responsibility," and, if done early enough, for "expediting" the flow of the criminal justice system). The lower the points, the shorter the sentence and, more importantly, the lower your inmate classification (e.g., you might end up in a Federal Prison Camp rather than a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison)... Depends on the mood of the prosecutor at this point, really. I'd expect this guy to do some time. We seem to be in a "let this be a lesson to all of you" mentality phase...
That's exactly why the pilot of a commercial aircraft rarely if ever flies the approach by hand. Instrument landing systems can only take you so far; the last few hundred feet (or more, depending on the airport) are done manually. Google for "decision height" and "ILS."
"MPAA did not win a single court case in 2004."
What about 321 Studios? Rossi? (That's all Lexis shows after a cursory search; I can dig deeper if anyone's truly that bored...)