So, they didn't know it was a bad idea the first time they did it?
Apparently not, seeing as they got caught and had to hire me.
Also, I've had a few drinks and later drove, but I was sober. I have passed 2 field sobriety tests in over a year. So I don't buy that someone who has a DUI is anymore at risk than someone who hasn't. Either they're sober or they aren't.
You've never had a DUI, so you don't buy that someone who has had a DUI is at greater risk than you? That's some amazing powers of logic you have there.
The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets.
The big problem I see with this is that it encourages local police to target people (someone who gets pulled over for speeding) on the assumption that if the Feds investigated them, then they must be criminals. I tell all of my DUI clients that if they have been convicted once of DUI, they should never ever drive within ten hours of drinking ANY alcohol for the rest of their lives. The reason is that every time they get pulled over, the cop will see that conviction and will look very hard for evidence of drinking.
But this database has more than just arrest and conviction records. So it is going to cause heightened suspicion and prejudicial treatment of people who have never committed a crime in their lives.
If they can't get enough evidence to convict you or even to arrest you, then how reliable could their information be?
I see little reason for them to be sharing this information on a large scale with local police departments, except that it does give them the power to insert negative information about political activists who some anonymous person in the FBI may not like.
This is certainly not good for civil liberties, and I question its value for fighting crime.
Except that's not true if you've used iTunes. Simply burn your music to CDs. And that's the difference you claimed wasn't there.
Yeah sure. You could also rerecord through the analog hole, but that's not the point.
The answer of burning it to CD is not an answer at all. In order to keep the same quality, you've got to burn the files to a CDR (adding an additional 5-10 cents to your cost), and then rerip them to a lossless format.
After you've done that, you've wasted a bunch of CDRs, done a lot of work, and your music library takes up 5 to 10 times as much space as it did originally... that leaves you with the equivalent of an 80% reduction in space on your iPod.
Actually, they are if it helps them sell their stuff.
It would help them sell their stuff if there were any real difference between them. But there isn't.
The end result from purchasing an iTunes song or a "PlaysForSure" (Microsoft DRM) song is exactly the same: unless you keep the same computer in working condition forever, you eventually lose all of the music you purchased and have to rebuy it for the next computer. There's nothing lenient or acceptable about that.
Don't expect Apple or any other proprietary systems vendors to protect your freedom. They're not interested in your freedom.
They are very interested in making and maintaining sweetheart deals with studios and record companies, so that they can be the middleman who sells the movies and music that those other companies put out.
Only open systems can be expected to protect your freedom. Proprietary systems are by definition intended to take away your freedom to do as you wish with them. They are designed to remove your ability to modify them as you see fit. Your freedom is only guaranteed when source is available. Anything else is just a hope and a prayer.
As far as I am aware though, they're going to have to go upstream to your provider and watch you there to really know if your shared files are being downloaded.
That's bad, because now they'll push for the legal right to do so.
I don't believe that any provider keeps logs which are that detailed... they would essentially have to keep copies of every packet sent and received. There simply isn't enough hard drive space to do that.
As for whether the **AAs might seek the ability to directly monitor your communications with other people, I find it unlikely that they would get that. It would be such an obscene invasion of privacy, that I don't even believe Congress would do it.
Congress has done some pretty obscene things lately, but that has always been supported by the "Stop the Terraists" or "Think of the Children" arguments. "Think of the entertainment industry" and "think of the artists" doesn't have the same ring to it.
But even at that, the ACLU is not against banning advertising commercials 30 days from an election, which is absolutly horrible for democracy, and a complete violation of free speech. While they still might be for protecting some dumb skinhead's right to say hateful things (and cudos for the ACLU for taking that extremly unpopular and controversial stance towards freedom of speech), they would not get involved when the federal government demanded that no advertisements for Faranheit 9/11 30 days before the election (as they support the election advertising ban).
Making stuff up just doesn't work. Someone will eventually check up on what you say... especially when it sounds like bullshit.
Pay particular attention to paragraph 6 below. They don't sound OK with it at all.
Why Should Members of Congress Vote Against H.R. 2356, the Shays-Meehan Bill?
1. Shays/Meehan is patently unconstitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union believes that key elements of Shays-Meehan violate the First Amendment right to free speech because the legislation contains provisions that would:
* Violate the constitutionally protected right of the people to express their opinions about issues through broadcast advertising if they mention the name of a candidate.
* Restrict soft money contributions and uses of soft money for no constitutionally justifiable reason.
* Chill free expression by redefining it as "coordination" through burdensome reporting requirements and greatly expanded FEC investigative and enforcement authority.
H.R. 2356 would burden and abridge the very speech that the First Amendment was designed to protect: political speech.
2.Shays-Meehan would have a chilling affect on issue advocacy speech that is essential in a democracy. H.R. 2356 contains the harshest and most unconstitutional controls on issue advocacy groups. The bill contains:
* A virtual ban on issue advocacy achieved through redefining express advocacy in an unconstitutionally vague and over-broad manner. The Supreme Court has held that only express advocacy, narrowly defined, can be subject to campaign finance controls. The key to the existing definition of express advocacy is the inclusion of an explicit directive to vote for or vote against a candidate. Minus the explicit directive or so-called "bright-line" test, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will decide what constitutes express advocacy. Few non-profit issue groups will want to risk their tax status or incur legal expenses to engage in speech that could be interpreted by the FEC to have an influence on the outcome of an election.
* A black-out on broadcast, cable and satellite issue advertising before primary and general elections. The bill's statutory limitations on issue advocacy would force groups that now engage in issue advocacy - including non-profit corporations known as 501(c)(4)s -- to create new institutional entities in order to "legally" speak within 30 days before a congressional primary or runoff and 60 days before a general election. This restriction applies to any ad that "can be received" by 50,000 or more "persons," including minors, within a district -- which covers almost all TV or radio ads, since few persons do not possess TVs and radios. If a group wanted to take out a broadcast, cable or satellite ad during this period they would have to create a PAC where donors would have to be disclosed to the FEC in a way never before sustained by the courts. The opportunities that donors now have to contribute anonymously (a real concern when a cause is unpopular or divisive -- see NAACP v. Alabama) would be eliminated.
*
Never heard of Ralph Nader saying this. Maybe some PERSON from a teachers union said something at some point. Whatever.
Yes... Is a form of authoritarianism any less bad because it is popular on the left?
Certainly not. But I find it curious that virtually all of your examples come from the left.
New York, Chicago, all the supposedly "cosmopolitian" progressive cities in the U.S. have stated they eventually plan to ban all smoking.
Again, maybe some politician somewhere said something... but "New York" and "Chicago" cannot state their intentions ahead of time without their respective City Councils passing legislation. I hardly think of this as an intellectual position.
Also, intellectuals overwelming support so-called "hate speech" laws, which while not the law yet in the U.S. (but the law virtually everywhere else), make it illegal to say anything that offends a politically powerful group. And they support laws that ban things like "pornography" that supposedly "exploits women".
I consider those to be decidedly non-intellectual positions. But then, maybe my intellect just isn't good enough. I am sure that the ACLU would agree with me, and certainly that is an "intellectual" organization, no?
So, I will ask the question in reverse: Name one mainstream intellectual who is against authoritarianism?
I can't even name one "mainstream intellectual." The phrase itself is an oxymoron, as intellectualism is not the mainstream.
But if I correctly understand who you refer to when you say "intellectuals," then I think you are being rather selective in your analysis.
It is not intellectuals who want to pass constitutional amendments to ban flag burning. It is not intellectuals who want to pass constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. And contrary to you, I really don't think it is intellectuals who want to ban pornography or ban alcohol sales on sunday...
If "intellectuals" means people who analyze things. Then we are at far greater risk from people who DON'T analyze things. Because those are the people who don't see the other side of the coin. And those are the people in the majority.
We don't have a problem with intellectuals in America. We don't have enough of them in fact.
Many of the most extreme expansions of government power are coming from intellectuals. If you look who supports banning all non-government schools
WTF? Who is that???
who supports banning guns, who supports banning trans-fats
Think I have a good idea who you're talking about here (liberals).
and ciggarettes and micromanaging personal lifestyles, who supports regulations and restrictions on free speech
WTF? Again, this is wild stuff. Please tell me who these people are?!?!?! Because they sound really really bad.
who wants to see the government regulate newspapers and broadcast media
I don't really see the problem with this. Broadcasters use a limited public resource (the airwaves), so it's the government's job to regulate them and make sure that they are using this limited resource for the public good. Making sure that the media is not concentrated in a few hands would actually help increase the flow of information and provide more diverse viewpoints. That's one kind of regulation that is good for freedom. But you apparently disagree. Fair enough.
those ideas are overwelmingly created and supported by today's intellectuals.
Oh! It's "intellectuals" you are talking about. Never mind then.
doesn't a successful application of the above have the approximately the same effect as government censorship?
The similarity to a government ban only goes as far as the loss of free publicity and sales that they may have received by having their game sold at Wal-Mart. It obviously doesn't affect their right to sell the game to people who choose to buy it from the publisher's online store if it has one.
But if Wal-Mart does "cave in," we have to put it in perspective. Wal-Mart censors a LOT of the products they sell already. They dictate what can be said in the music they will sell. They are such a big buyer that they often have "approximately" the same effect as a government censor.
So these protesters are not asking Wal-Mart to do anything new. They are just trying to let it know that "Focus on the Family, et al" aren't the only voices to consider when they make these decisions.
Real images are already illegal. You going to ban something because people **might** have been inspired by something that is illegal?
I guess we'll have to get rid of all the Beatles albums from Sgt. Pepper's and onward, since they **might have been** inspired by illegal drugs.
Or anyway, I personally don't think that no cartoon child porn maker has ever used real images as example for their drawings. Furthermore, it could be argued that this kind of stuff existing could alter the behavior of pedophiles.
Anything can be argued, but studies on pornography have shown that its legalization accompanies a **reduction** in sex crimes.
for "support" read "liability when it all breaks". That's what linux support is really all about. Would you want to be a technician personally responsible for downtime and several million of lost sales? Your bosses won't let it happen, because obviously you can't pay it back.
Any system has the potential to cause damage if it goes down. But this doesn't create "liability" for the company's support staff. Being the support provider does not automatically make you liable for any problem. But it does make you the responsible party... the person that they can turn to to fix their problem. That's called "having a job."
Some companies are big enough to keep their own support staff on hand. Other companies need to outsource it to companies like Red Hat and MySQL AB. But Red Hat does not become liable for your downtime just because they are your support provider. You can be sure that they their support contracts state that will NOT be liable for resulting damages of lost sales and the like.
The same is true of Microsoft's EULA and pretty much any software that you buy or use and any service that you purchase. Even if it is not written in the contract, it doesn't matter, because contract law does not presume liability for resulting damages, only direct damages.
In a lot of prison systems (a notable example being the Federal Bureau of Prisons), people who have worked with computers are denied ANY access to computers, because the administrators have fears that they will be able to "hack the system."
Yes, I know. But you're just throwing out a possibility. No one has said that the Plaintiff (an AOL user) was using NAT. There could be all kinds of defenses that she might have. But you don't get your case thrown out by saying that a hypothetical person MIGHT have a defense. You have to actually put up the defense first. That's what trials are for.
what AOL is saying in that letter is that a specific user account had those IP addresses leased at a particular time. That does not mean that a specific person was using that account.
And the Plaintiff's attorney didn't say that the letter said that.
It's the equivalent of the police charging me with reckless driving just because my car was involved. What they have to prove in court is not just that it was my car, but that it was me behind the wheel.
No. It's not the equivalent. It's quite different. You are talking about a criminal charge. The burden of proof is much higher for a criminal charge.
If the car was stolen, or I loaned it to a friend and they were driving at the time, and I can prove this, everything they prove about who the car was registered to won't get them a conviction.
Actually, you wouldn't have to prove anything, because the government bears the entire burden of proof in a criminal case (with some exceptions). There is no presumption that the owner of a car is always the one driving it.
But you are confusing the issue here, because this case is nowhere near the equivalent stage of "getting a conviction." The Defendant has asked for a summary judgment on the case. She's asked for this only two days after she filed her answer in the case.
Not only is the burden of proof much lower in this type of case (a civil case), but we haven't even come to the point where the Plaintiff has to meet that burden.
This is a very early stage of the case. So all the handwringing about how the RIAA hasn't proven anything is quite silly.
Defendant's October 28, 2006 letter also provides no basis for a motion for summary judgment. Defendant's Internet Service Provider, America Online, Inc., has confirmed that Defendant was the owner of the internet access account through which hundreds of Plaintiffs' sound recordings were downloaded and distributed to the public without Plaintiffs' consent.
AOL confirmed that the Defendant was the owner of the account. The rest of the sentence describes the account and is not a statement that AOL confirmed what the account was being used for.
This should be fairly obvious to most people who can read English.
because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider.
To say that something "confirms" something is not the same as saying that it has a specific statement. If they have a witness who can testify as to how the internet works and that packets were received from that IP address at that time, then guess what?
You guessed it, the letter would then "confirm that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed."
Jeez, you'd think we were biased against the RIAA or something.
Yeah! Everybody should conform to non-conformism. Everyone would be unique, just like everybody else.
You misunderstand the meaning of nonconformity. It has nothing to do with being unique.
It's about reaching your own conclusions, making your own decisions. If they happen to be the same as everyone else's, it doesn't make you a conformist.
It's a question of how you got where you are. You could have mainstream opinions and dress like everyone else but still be a nonconformist.
Also the fact that USA is hostile to the rest of the world and extremely selfish, means no other country could trust it as a source of energy anyway.... There might be even better places in Sahara, but we'd still face the problems of moving the energy efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
So, they didn't know it was a bad idea the first time they did it?
Apparently not, seeing as they got caught and had to hire me.
Also, I've had a few drinks and later drove, but I was sober. I have passed 2 field sobriety tests in over a year. So I don't buy that someone who has a DUI is anymore at risk than someone who hasn't. Either they're sober or they aren't.
You've never had a DUI, so you don't buy that someone who has had a DUI is at greater risk than you? That's some amazing powers of logic you have there.
The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets.
The big problem I see with this is that it encourages local police to target people (someone who gets pulled over for speeding) on the assumption that if the Feds investigated them, then they must be criminals. I tell all of my DUI clients that if they have been convicted once of DUI, they should never ever drive within ten hours of drinking ANY alcohol for the rest of their lives. The reason is that every time they get pulled over, the cop will see that conviction and will look very hard for evidence of drinking.
But this database has more than just arrest and conviction records. So it is going to cause heightened suspicion and prejudicial treatment of people who have never committed a crime in their lives.
If they can't get enough evidence to convict you or even to arrest you, then how reliable could their information be?
I see little reason for them to be sharing this information on a large scale with local police departments, except that it does give them the power to insert negative information about political activists who some anonymous person in the FBI may not like.
This is certainly not good for civil liberties, and I question its value for fighting crime.
Except that's not true if you've used iTunes. Simply burn your music to CDs. And that's the difference you claimed wasn't there.
Yeah sure. You could also rerecord through the analog hole, but that's not the point.
The answer of burning it to CD is not an answer at all. In order to keep the same quality, you've got to burn the files to a CDR (adding an additional 5-10 cents to your cost), and then rerip them to a lossless format.
After you've done that, you've wasted a bunch of CDRs, done a lot of work, and your music library takes up 5 to 10 times as much space as it did originally... that leaves you with the equivalent of an 80% reduction in space on your iPod.
"Lenient" is a really strange choice of words when you're talking about the use of your own computer.
I don't want lenience from Apple or Microsoft.
I want them to sell me software that works for ME, not for someone else.
Actually, they are if it helps them sell their stuff.
It would help them sell their stuff if there were any real difference between them. But there isn't.
The end result from purchasing an iTunes song or a "PlaysForSure" (Microsoft DRM) song is exactly the same: unless you keep the same computer in working condition forever, you eventually lose all of the music you purchased and have to rebuy it for the next computer. There's nothing lenient or acceptable about that.
Don't expect Apple or any other proprietary systems vendors to protect your freedom. They're not interested in your freedom.
They are very interested in making and maintaining sweetheart deals with studios and record companies, so that they can be the middleman who sells the movies and music that those other companies put out.
Only open systems can be expected to protect your freedom. Proprietary systems are by definition intended to take away your freedom to do as you wish with them. They are designed to remove your ability to modify them as you see fit. Your freedom is only guaranteed when source is available. Anything else is just a hope and a prayer.
As far as I am aware though, they're going to have to go upstream to your provider and watch you there to really know if your shared files are being downloaded.
That's bad, because now they'll push for the legal right to do so.
I don't believe that any provider keeps logs which are that detailed... they would essentially have to keep copies of every packet sent and received. There simply isn't enough hard drive space to do that.
As for whether the **AAs might seek the ability to directly monitor your communications with other people, I find it unlikely that they would get that. It would be such an obscene invasion of privacy, that I don't even believe Congress would do it.
Congress has done some pretty obscene things lately, but that has always been supported by the "Stop the Terraists" or "Think of the Children" arguments. "Think of the entertainment industry" and "think of the artists" doesn't have the same ring to it.
But even at that, the ACLU is not against banning advertising commercials 30 days from an election, which is absolutly horrible for democracy, and a complete violation of free speech. While they still might be for protecting some dumb skinhead's right to say hateful things (and cudos for the ACLU for taking that extremly unpopular and controversial stance towards freedom of speech), they would not get involved when the federal government demanded that no advertisements for Faranheit 9/11 30 days before the election (as they support the election advertising ban).
Making stuff up just doesn't work. Someone will eventually check up on what you say... especially when it sounds like bullshit.
Pay particular attention to paragraph 6 below. They don't sound OK with it at all.
from: the the ACLU's website
ACLU Campaign Finance Reform Fact Sheet (2/12/2002)
ACLU Campaign Finance Reform Fact Sheet
Why Should Members of Congress Vote Against H.R. 2356, the Shays-Meehan Bill?
1. Shays/Meehan is patently unconstitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union believes that key elements of Shays-Meehan violate the First Amendment right to free speech because the legislation contains provisions that would:
* Violate the constitutionally protected right of the people to express their opinions about issues through broadcast advertising if they mention the name of a candidate.
* Restrict soft money contributions and uses of soft money for no constitutionally justifiable reason.
* Chill free expression by redefining it as "coordination" through burdensome reporting requirements and greatly expanded FEC investigative and enforcement authority.
H.R. 2356 would burden and abridge the very speech that the First Amendment was designed to protect: political speech.
2.Shays-Meehan would have a chilling affect on issue advocacy speech that is essential in a democracy. H.R. 2356 contains the harshest and most unconstitutional controls on issue advocacy groups. The bill contains:
* A virtual ban on issue advocacy achieved through redefining express advocacy in an unconstitutionally vague and over-broad manner. The Supreme Court has held that only express advocacy, narrowly defined, can be subject to campaign finance controls. The key to the existing definition of express advocacy is the inclusion of an explicit directive to vote for or vote against a candidate. Minus the explicit directive or so-called "bright-line" test, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will decide what constitutes express advocacy. Few non-profit issue groups will want to risk their tax status or incur legal expenses to engage in speech that could be interpreted by the FEC to have an influence on the outcome of an election.
* A black-out on broadcast, cable and satellite issue advertising before primary and general elections. The bill's statutory limitations on issue advocacy would force groups that now engage in issue advocacy - including non-profit corporations known as 501(c)(4)s -- to create new institutional entities in order to "legally" speak within 30 days before a congressional primary or runoff and 60 days before a general election. This restriction applies to any ad that "can be received" by 50,000 or more "persons," including minors, within a district -- which covers almost all TV or radio ads, since few persons do not possess TVs and radios. If a group wanted to take out a broadcast, cable or satellite ad during this period they would have to create a PAC where donors would have to be disclosed to the FEC in a way never before sustained by the courts. The opportunities that donors now have to contribute anonymously (a real concern when a cause is unpopular or divisive -- see NAACP v. Alabama) would be eliminated.
*
Ralph Nader, teachers unions, etc.
Never heard of Ralph Nader saying this. Maybe some PERSON from a teachers union said something at some point. Whatever.
Yes... Is a form of authoritarianism any less bad because it is popular on the left?
Certainly not. But I find it curious that virtually all of your examples come from the left.
New York, Chicago, all the supposedly "cosmopolitian" progressive cities in the U.S. have stated they eventually plan to ban all smoking.
Again, maybe some politician somewhere said something... but "New York" and "Chicago" cannot state their intentions ahead of time without their respective City Councils passing legislation. I hardly think of this as an intellectual position.
Also, intellectuals overwelming support so-called "hate speech" laws, which while not the law yet in the U.S. (but the law virtually everywhere else), make it illegal to say anything that offends a politically powerful group. And they support laws that ban things like "pornography" that supposedly "exploits women".
I consider those to be decidedly non-intellectual positions. But then, maybe my intellect just isn't good enough. I am sure that the ACLU would agree with me, and certainly that is an "intellectual" organization, no?
So, I will ask the question in reverse: Name one mainstream intellectual who is against authoritarianism?
I can't even name one "mainstream intellectual." The phrase itself is an oxymoron, as intellectualism is not the mainstream.
But if I correctly understand who you refer to when you say "intellectuals," then I think you are being rather selective in your analysis.
It is not intellectuals who want to pass constitutional amendments to ban flag burning. It is not intellectuals who want to pass constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. And contrary to you, I really don't think it is intellectuals who want to ban pornography or ban alcohol sales on sunday...
If "intellectuals" means people who analyze things. Then we are at far greater risk from people who DON'T analyze things. Because those are the people who don't see the other side of the coin. And those are the people in the majority.
We don't have a problem with intellectuals in America. We don't have enough of them in fact.
And here I was, thinking they were going to pick everyone else!
Oh happy day.
It comes with a prize right? It has to come with a prize. What? It doesn't??? Lame. Give it to someone else then.
Many of the most extreme expansions of government power are coming from intellectuals. If you look who supports banning all non-government schools
WTF? Who is that???
who supports banning guns, who supports banning trans-fats
Think I have a good idea who you're talking about here (liberals).
and ciggarettes and micromanaging personal lifestyles, who supports regulations and restrictions on free speech
WTF? Again, this is wild stuff. Please tell me who these people are?!?!?! Because they sound really really bad.
who wants to see the government regulate newspapers and broadcast media
I don't really see the problem with this. Broadcasters use a limited public resource (the airwaves), so it's the government's job to regulate them and make sure that they are using this limited resource for the public good. Making sure that the media is not concentrated in a few hands would actually help increase the flow of information and provide more diverse viewpoints. That's one kind of regulation that is good for freedom. But you apparently disagree. Fair enough.
those ideas are overwelmingly created and supported by today's intellectuals.
Oh! It's "intellectuals" you are talking about. Never mind then.
By the way, who are these intellectuals???
..now. He didn't say anything about DRM's inherent evil, which is that it makes your computer work AGAINST you.
I am sure Gates has a fabulous scheme to make DRM simpler in the long term. But he's not going to reveal to a bunch of bloggers in a room.
This is not a mea culpa or a reversal by Gates or Microsoft. He's merely acknowledging that it's a pain in the ass for consumers... in the short term.
doesn't a successful application of the above have the approximately the same effect as government censorship?
The similarity to a government ban only goes as far as the loss of free publicity and sales that they may have received by having their game sold at Wal-Mart. It obviously doesn't affect their right to sell the game to people who choose to buy it from the publisher's online store if it has one.
But if Wal-Mart does "cave in," we have to put it in perspective. Wal-Mart censors a LOT of the products they sell already. They dictate what can be said in the music they will sell. They are such a big buyer that they often have "approximately" the same effect as a government censor.
So these protesters are not asking Wal-Mart to do anything new. They are just trying to let it know that "Focus on the Family, et al" aren't the only voices to consider when they make these decisions.
They could be created after real images.
Real images are already illegal. You going to ban something because people **might** have been inspired by something that is illegal?
I guess we'll have to get rid of all the Beatles albums from Sgt. Pepper's and onward, since they **might have been** inspired by illegal drugs.
Or anyway, I personally don't think that no cartoon child porn maker has ever used real images as example for their drawings. Furthermore, it could be argued that this kind of stuff existing could alter the behavior of pedophiles.
Anything can be argued, but studies on pornography have shown that its legalization accompanies a **reduction** in sex crimes.
The reality does not jive with your theory.
No one is talking about banning anything.
There are some groups who are telling a private corporation that they do not approve of its decision to stock a game that they find offensive.
They are **expressing their opinion**. But they are not asking the government to make anything illegal.
You are free to express your opinion. It is protected by the First Amendment. Just like video games.
for "support" read "liability when it all breaks". That's what linux support is really all about. Would you want to be a technician personally responsible for downtime and several million of lost sales? Your bosses won't let it happen, because obviously you can't pay it back.
Any system has the potential to cause damage if it goes down. But this doesn't create "liability" for the company's support staff. Being the support provider does not automatically make you liable for any problem. But it does make you the responsible party... the person that they can turn to to fix their problem. That's called "having a job."
Some companies are big enough to keep their own support staff on hand. Other companies need to outsource it to companies like Red Hat and MySQL AB. But Red Hat does not become liable for your downtime just because they are your support provider. You can be sure that they their support contracts state that will NOT be liable for resulting damages of lost sales and the like.
The same is true of Microsoft's EULA and pretty much any software that you buy or use and any service that you purchase. Even if it is not written in the contract, it doesn't matter, because contract law does not presume liability for resulting damages, only direct damages.
In a lot of prison systems (a notable example being the Federal Bureau of Prisons), people who have worked with computers are denied ANY access to computers, because the administrators have fears that they will be able to "hack the system."
If the summary is correct ...
Remember: you're on slashdot.
It's called "network address translation".
Yes, I know. But you're just throwing out a possibility. No one has said that the Plaintiff (an AOL user) was using NAT. There could be all kinds of defenses that she might have. But you don't get your case thrown out by saying that a hypothetical person MIGHT have a defense. You have to actually put up the defense first. That's what trials are for.
what AOL is saying in that letter is that a specific user account had those IP addresses leased at a particular time. That does not mean that a specific person was using that account.
And the Plaintiff's attorney didn't say that the letter said that.
It's the equivalent of the police charging me with reckless driving just because my car was involved. What they have to prove in court is not just that it was my car, but that it was me behind the wheel.
No. It's not the equivalent. It's quite different. You are talking about a criminal charge. The burden of proof is much higher for a criminal charge.
If the car was stolen, or I loaned it to a friend and they were driving at the time, and I can prove this, everything they prove about who the car was registered to won't get them a conviction.
Actually, you wouldn't have to prove anything, because the government bears the entire burden of proof in a criminal case (with some exceptions). There is no presumption that the owner of a car is always the one driving it.
But you are confusing the issue here, because this case is nowhere near the equivalent stage of "getting a conviction." The Defendant has asked for a summary judgment on the case. She's asked for this only two days after she filed her answer in the case.
Not only is the burden of proof much lower in this type of case (a civil case), but we haven't even come to the point where the Plaintiff has to meet that burden.
This is a very early stage of the case. So all the handwringing about how the RIAA hasn't proven anything is quite silly.
Here is what the RIAA lawyer wrote in his letter
Defendant's October 28, 2006 letter also provides no basis for a motion for summary judgment. Defendant's Internet Service Provider, America Online, Inc., has confirmed that Defendant was the owner of the internet access account through which hundreds of Plaintiffs' sound recordings were downloaded and distributed to the public without Plaintiffs' consent.
AOL confirmed that the Defendant was the owner of the account. The rest of the sentence describes the account and is not a statement that AOL confirmed what the account was being used for.
This should be fairly obvious to most people who can read English.
She wasn't the only one with a lease to that IP address during the time period in question,
The letter says she was the account using that IP address at that second.
Where do you get the idea that someone else had the same IP address at that time?
That's not what the letter says, and that's not how the internet works.
The RIAA still has to prove that there was such activity going on on that account themselves.
Yes, but many of the comments here are people saying "Oooooh teh RIAA i2 lyears!"
Which according to the summary they aren't necessarily.
Should the judge require them to produce an affidavit to go with that letter? Yes. But it doesn't mean they lied about anything.
because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider.
To say that something "confirms" something is not the same as saying that it has a specific statement. If they have a witness who can testify as to how the internet works and that packets were received from that IP address at that time, then guess what?
You guessed it, the letter would then "confirm that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed."
Jeez, you'd think we were biased against the RIAA or something.
Yeah! Everybody should conform to non-conformism. Everyone would be unique, just like everybody else.
You misunderstand the meaning of nonconformity. It has nothing to do with being unique.
It's about reaching your own conclusions, making your own decisions. If they happen to be the same as everyone else's, it doesn't make you a conformist.
It's a question of how you got where you are. You could have mainstream opinions and dress like everyone else but still be a nonconformist.
Also the fact that USA is hostile to the rest of the world and extremely selfish, means no other country could trust it as a source of energy anyway. ... There might be even better places in Sahara, but we'd still face the problems of moving the energy efficiently.
Ah yes, the Sahara... no problems down there.