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User: canajin56

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  1. Re:They've taken a leaf out of the UK's book on No Hand-Held Devices In Ontario Cars · · Score: 1

    You can in Canada. Judges hate it though, so you'll lose. My brother got a speeding ticket because a car passed him and the cop found my brother easier to catch. The radio report indicated he was pulling over a different colored car with a different make and model and he also got the wrong license plate when he actually went to write the ticket. The judge said "I don't see what any of that proves" and then took my brothers license away for wasting the courts time.

  2. Re:Can someone explain.. on Film Studios May Block DVD Rentals For One Month · · Score: 2, Informative

    rental is a subset of performance.

    Interesting legal theory. Let us consult 17 U.S.C., Section 106. (That's the Copyright Act)

    (3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
    (4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

    I'm no lawyer, but that looks to be included in right #3, the right to distribute the work, the same right that's limited by the Doctrine of First Sale, and NOT under right #4, the right to publicly perform the work.

  3. Re:Can someone explain.. on Film Studios May Block DVD Rentals For One Month · · Score: 1

    No, you can't publicly perform. There's no law against making money off of it in any way, shape, or form. Rental is legal without a license, period. Unless it's music or software. But that's not part of the copyright act, those are special laws passed to prevent the rental of music and software, by the reason that the only reason you'd rent them is to pirate them. You really think it's a crime to resell a disk after you buy it? That's the first sale doctrine. Copyright grants a right holder 5 exclusive rights. Right #4 is public performance, hence the FBI warning. Right #3 is distribution, which includes sale, gift, lease, and rental. The first sale doctrine says that right #3 goes away once you sell a copy. As in, if you buy a DVD, you can resell it, you can gift it, you can lease it, and you can rent it out. Period.

  4. Re:You've gotta love this entitlement mentality on Microsoft Freeloading In Washington State Courts · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft is the one who feels entitled. They are HQd in Washington State. They feel entitled to declaring another state as their "real HQ" and that "everything we sell is sold from this tiny one room office in Nevada!" This is akin to getting a PO box in Washington State to avoid paying income tax in your home state. "No, this is my secondary residence, my primary is a PO box in Seattle, so I'm an out of state worker!" On top of that, they feel entitled to say "Even though we have legally declared that we are NOT a Washington based company, we deserve free access to the Washington courts, to settle a dispute over a legal contract bewteen a Nevada based company and a New York based company." Not the correct venue. The judge should throw their asses out and hand them a fine for wasting his time. Why on EARTH should a WASHINGTON judge settle a dispute between two out of state corporations? It doesn't involve Washington State at all, except that the Nevada based corporation has a branch office in Washington.

  5. Re:Publishers are not the problem on Are Game Publishers a Necessary Evil, Or Just Necessary? · · Score: 1

    Atari is pure evil. Well first, they're a really shitty publisher who bought a new name to try and make people forget how shitty they are. Didn't work because they kept on being shitty. Also, they somehow acquired the Starcontrol trademark at some point in their buying trademarks spree. (The copyright is still in the hands of the original developers). Now, if you have a trademark but don't use it, you lose it. So they hammered out a 5 second job Flash game called Starcontrol, just to cockblock the original developers from ever making another one.

  6. Re:Is this a real writable chip? on NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB · · Score: 1

    So, ComputerWorld fabricated the fabrication of the chip?

  7. Re:My vote, my business on Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law · · Score: 1

    If you really think petitions should be top secret, you may change your tune when somebody who doesn't like you take a petition to evict you from your town, signed by every person on town. Remember, to prevent intimidation, it's top secret so nobody is allowed to view it, but trust him, the entire town wants you out, better get packing. If you can't look at names, that's the same as a vote where nobody can count the votes. You pull a lever, and then the president announces he won another term. Trust him, he's the president after all.

  8. Re:No one should have expected on Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law · · Score: 1

    So you're of the opinion that anything anti-gay or anti-minority should be automatic. Just FAKE a petition, don't even need real names because as long as it's against somebody you HATE then the petition should be classified top secret.

  9. Just trying to be like the USA on Canadian Copyright Lobby Fights Anti-Spyware Legislation · · Score: 1

    In several US states, including California, this is already law. In fact, the proposed changes are word-for-word ripped from the California lawbooks. This exception is needed or else people could press criminal charges against Sony. Since they're pushing for these laws, you have to assume that any music CD you buy will infect your PC with a virus, and any RIAA-member musician's website is also designed to infect you with viruses in order to monitor the usage of your computer and report on any illegal downloads. Pirating your music is the safest way to avoid the viruses that the RIAA and CRIA both plainly admit they intend to infect you with in order to monitor your downloads.

  10. Re:False positives on Computer-Based System To Crack Down On Casino Card Counters · · Score: 1

    How about this thought: It's an offense with a large amount of jail time to use an electronic device to assist you with gambling. That's why you go to jail when you use fancy lasers to predict roulette wheels, etc. If casinos are using electronic devices to know when to kick out people who are likely to win big, that should be illegal, and everybody involved should be in prison. But of course, they can kick the shit out of card counters and break their fingers, and nobody cares, so good luck with that.

  11. Re:I don't understand advertising on Toyota Claims Woman "Opted In" To Faux Email Stalking · · Score: 1

    It doesn't make the people Toyota is stalking want to. It's for the "friend". See, the "friend" goes to Toyota, and sees an ad for the Matrix on the page where they "punk" their friend by filling in their e-mail address. Toyota then sends the victim a "personality test" and in 6 point font at the bottom of the test is a "privacy policy" link that contains page after page of legal mumbo jumbo, including consent to receiving marketing messages. To submit their "personality test" you have to check the "I agree to the privacy policy" checkbox. There, Toyota contends that is written, informed consent. Then they send threatening messages to the victim, pretending a criminal on the run from the law is coming to get them, and talking about how he's going to "deal" with those who have wronged him, etc.

  12. Re: in spite of having their funding savaged? on Wi-Fi Patent Victory Earns CSIRO $200 Million · · Score: 1

    Well, when Obama increased the defense budget, all of the news networks announced as "Obama brutally slashes defense budget, America's future in grave danger." He probably is using the same criteria ;)

  13. Re:Some quantitative perspective on CT Scan "Reset Error" Gives 206 Patients Radiation Overdose · · Score: 1

    My text says you get hairloss starting with 2 grays and above, which is 200 rad? Is it wrong? Because if they noticed it because 80% lost hair, that implies it was a hell of a lot more than 8x, or if it was only 8x, that they were going WAY beyond the 2 rem that's typical for a contrasting CT scan...

  14. Re:Failsafe anyone? on CT Scan "Reset Error" Gives 206 Patients Radiation Overdose · · Score: 1

    The hardware designers made the unfortunate mistake of assuming competence of the operators. That is, you plug in your settings, the machine tells you the resulting dose and asks for verification, and the you say "OK". Far as they're concerned, that's that. You're suggesting that the machine should add extra flashies if that dose is particularly high. Good idea, maybe it would catch their attention, there's certainly no harm in it. Maybe not though, they're already pressing "OK" without reading their displays. Also, the safe limit varies depending on what part of the patient is being imaged, and how large the patient is, so it's not strictly possible for the machine to know what's dangerous. That's supposed to be the operators job, and they weren't doing it.

  15. Re:Film badges? on CT Scan "Reset Error" Gives 206 Patients Radiation Overdose · · Score: 1

    The software displays the dose level, and it was correct. The techs didn't LOOK. What should have happened is, the first time they used it, they should have said "whoops, that dose level is way higher than it should be, better not press OK" and then get the guy who reprogrammed it to check his code. A CT scan is already a high dosage scan, since it involves taking many many X-ray scans in rapid succession, to track the movements of the contrast material through blood vessels. So it's not a question of how large the X-ray setting is, but how many scans are taken. It sounds whoever programmed the new protocol increased the duration/number of scans, but left the dosage at the default, which was extremely wrong. Or he used the default from the wrong protocol, a protocol set up for single scans, not for a CT scan. Either way, dosage x scans was 8 times higher than was intended.

    So that's human error number one. It should NOT have harmed a single patient, however. A film badge check for the guy programming would have been nice. But unnecessary. The hardware was functioning, and included a readout on the dosage about to be used, before the machine was activated. For 18 months, no techs read the safety monitors, they selected the protocol and hit "OK" without reading the question! That's the major human error. Not only did nobody verify the programming work the first time, they didn't verify it the 208 times it was used on patients, either. And that's hospital error. They should have been required to make note of it, and a radiologist should have been checking things out. Pretty scary that x-ray techs were not trained on x-ray safety, or were trained and couldn't be arsed to read. The article is only computer related because the initial error was in programming. However, if there was a hardware fault, and the techs weren't following safety procedures (or there WERE no safety procedures) then the same thing would have happened.

  16. Re:utopian socialism on Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek · · Score: 1

    It's a reasonable answer to the question of "what happens if food and manufacturing become practically free?" If nobody has to work constantly just to survive, what would they do? They'd work as much as they needed to, then slack off and do whatever they like. And so, one possibility is that enough people like to do the important things, that instead of practically free, those things become completely free. If you have enough engineers who like running power plants and replicators, food and manufacturing cost nothing anymore. At least in DS9, there was still currency. It didn't represent material scarcity, but infrastructure scarcity. Civilians, at least on Earth, had subspace rations, and transporter rations. I think replicator rations too, but rations so large they'd never meet them just from food and clothing and other small consumables.

    Ian M. Banks has the argument made much more eloquently than I could pull off, though I don't recall the URL. He is of the opinion that a "communist" utopian society is inevitable, given that we can eventually achieve sufficient automation that you only need a few engineers who love their work to provide all the necessities to EVERYBODY. He's also of the opinion that capitalism is the best way to GET there. The assumption is that you can get nano-assemblers, to basically replicate food and most other goods that people would need, and that you can automate it in such a way that either AI handles it and maintains it, or that it only takes a few humans to do so. If that technology is possible, then capitalism must get us there. Corporations can't stop researching, or they'll lose to competition that does. When it gets to that point, you have to decide if your an optimist, or a pessimist. Optimistically, if goods require almost $0 to make, then what will happen is everything will be free, and all your industry will be run by people who want to do it just for something to do. Researchers and designers and artists will do what they love, just for the sake of doing it. Then you get The Federation / The Culture. You'll still have currency, but it's in the forms of rationing off limited infrastructure, or just unofficial currency, in the form of "kudos" as it's often termed. Pessimistically, you have neo-feudalism. Automation means that the vast majority of humanity is relegated to living on welfare. 99% unemployment, all living off of government handouts. And a handful of corporations that have all of the money in the world, most of which is spent on taxes to pay the dole, and the rest is split evenly between R&D, maintenance, and brutalizing the serfs to keep them loyal to your corporation and not the competition, and to get the idea of Star Trek out of their heads. Being optimistic is more fun.

  17. Re:Almost... on The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate · · Score: 1

    You're thinking about a particle going back in time and exploding, causing damage. That's not at all what they are talking about. They are talking about avoiding a paradox. It's not based on anything concrete, and they admit it sounds crazy. It is, as you say, based around multiverse theory (I think). If you have a graph, every possibility for every instant of time is a node. Nodes are connected by edges, with weights corresponding to how likely it is to progress from one instant to the following instant. So reality is just one particular path through these nodes as time progresses. So, quantum physics and the like dictate what these probabilities are. Of course, you can't ever know the initial state, but whatever. Now, if there is an event that is impossible, because it creates a paradox, then that event cannot be reached. This requires either additional laws/forces to prevent it from being a possibility, or it requires that the edges into that node have weight 0. If they have weight zero, then the edges into THOSE nodes must be rebalanced so it sums to one still. And so on back in time. So if you have an instance where your gold atoms are about to impact, and this will cause a paradox, then however unlikely the quantum effects that cause them to miss are, those edges MUST be followed or you end up at a paradox. If your machine is firing an awful lot of these atoms at each other, and some or many of them require highly unlikely events in order to miss, then for all of those probabilities to sum correctly, you'll have to lower the probability of reaching such an initial state. And that means increasing the probability of any event that damages your machine. That is, if firing your machine requires highly unlikely events to occur in order to prevent a paradox, then it must be equally unlikely to get to such a firing state in the first place.

    It all sounds nuts to me ;) But it's not so much the future influencing the past, as it is the fact that we have to be in a possible universe forcing us to rethink our transition probabilities to avoid an impossibility.

  18. Re:This is silly. on Command & Conquer MMO a Possibility? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The more silly part is that EA said nothing about this shit. This is just some dude at a gaming website saying "Hey know what would be SWEEEEEEEEEET???????"

  19. Re:famous last words? on New Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K · · Score: 2, Funny

    More like buzzkilling. "Haha, get out of the oven, superconductor, you are not an element! You do not even provide resistive heating!"

  20. Re:How can sexism even be an issue in FOSS... on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    It's the same argument as you'll find in CS and Math departments. There are less women who want to be there, therefore the boys club must be discouraging them from even trying. Therefore, we are sexist. It doesn't matter than in FOSS we don't even KNOW that they're women. The mere fact that most FOSS developers are men makes women not want to associate with it. In CS programs they're always worried as hell about how few women apply, that they're going to be sued as sexist, even if they accept all female applicants. It's a serious and eternal panic. Affirmative action makes it worse. If you accept applicants based only on their qualifications, you get blasted for accepting so few women (because so few women applied) and are sexist. But do you know what they say when they see how much lower women score in your courses? Your faculty is sexist and marks women more harshly. It's a no-win situation. The feminists propose the solution of making Math more sexy. They claim Math was designed by men, for men, to exclude women by making it unappealing to them. This always strikes me as a horribly sexist opinion, but what do I know, with my primitive male brain.

  21. Obvious on Ted Dziuba Says, "I Don't Code In My Free Time" · · Score: 2, Funny

    If he doesn't code in his spare time, obviously he won't find himself working anywhere that only hires people that do.

  22. Re:google: another banker owned entity on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 2, Informative

    One should also note that not only does Newscorp NOT turn away Google spiders with robots.txt, they actually redirect them to Google-specific pages to reduce bandwidth and make it easier to parse.

  23. Re:Misinterpretation on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 1

    I can't see more than the first fragment of a sentence without having to click on the link on news.google.com. I guess I'm doing something wrong?

  24. Re:Terrible Photoshop work on Photoshop Disaster Draws DMCA Notice For Boing Boing · · Score: 1

    Yes, it's terrible, that's the joke. Somebody took 2 or 3 old promotional shots from a clothing line that's been done with for a long time, and they spliced them together, arms from one, sideways torso from another, legs from a third, then they put an oversized head on top from a current RL model, then they applied a perspective distortion to the whole thing to make it look even more distorted. Then they posted it on a blog saying "look lol, RL is evil!" RL rightfully issued a takedown notice. This was an unauthorized chimera made from 3-4 of their ads, that they own, and it's not being used for criticism, it's being used to directly attack them.

  25. Re:IANAL, question for real lawcritter on Photoshop Disaster Draws DMCA Notice For Boing Boing · · Score: 1

    Actually no, they didn't reproduce the ad unmodified. They photoshopped it to make her appear really skinny, so they could imply that Ralph Lauren did so and make fun of their own bad photoshop job.