A much better solution would be for companies to simply stop pretending that knowing a social security number somehow magically proves that you are who you claim to be.
Presentations of facts, like the layout of any specific phone book, can be copyrighted, but the information itself can't be copyrighted. Only "creative works" can be copyrighted. The layout of a phonebook, its cover art, etc. are all creative works, but the names and phone numbers themselves aren't covered by copyright. Not in the US, anyway.
Does this mean that I wouldn't be allowed to keep a list of customers who wrote bad checks, so as to avoid doing business with them in the future? Can I keep a list of customers who have been banned from my store for attempted shoplifting? Or would I be required to take people off such lists at their request?
It's a funny idea, but you can't copyright facts. Your phone number, address, etc. would all fall into the realm facts; that's why the information in phone books isn't covered by copyright.
If a kidnapper wanted to know where a kid lived it would just be a matter of driving around any neighborhood for five minutes. Hell, I can't drive through my neighborhood around the time when the schools get out without constantly stopping to avoid running over children as they walk home from the bus stop. If you wanted to kidnap someone, why would you go through the trouble of searching myspace for a name, getting the appropriate phone book, and then looking their address?
I'm sure even the people who currently "own" Sealand know that they will never get hundreds of millions of dollars for it. If you really want to start your own country and you have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around, there are much better ways to go about it. There are many tiny island nations that have territorial claims to a lot of small, uninhabited islands. Many of these countries have GDPs in the low tens of millions of dollars. Tuvalu comes immediately to mind, but there are plenty of others. I'm sure you could find a few that would happily sell you sovereignty over one of their small, useless islands if you offered them a few hundred million dollars. This would be better than buying Sealand because:
1)Your new country would be made of actual land.
2)Even if the island that you purchased was only a few dozen acres, it would still be many times larger than Sealand.
3)You will have at least one other established country that will immediately recognize your claim to sovereignty.
4)If you ever have a dispute over the sovereignty of your new nation, you will be arguing with a neighboring country that probably has a population of around ten thousand and no military, rather than the U.K.
Corporations don't have rights "just as if they were real people." For example, they don't have the same free speech rights as people - it's well established that commercial speech isn't protected in the same manner as a person's right to free speech, which is why the Do Not Call List is constitutional. That's just one example; there are plenty of other ways in which corporations don't have the same rights as people.
It makes sense for corporations to be considered people for certain purposes; it's what allows the corporation to hold a bank account in its name, or to file a lawsuit on its behalf.
Perhaps more to the point, liquid methane's specific impulse is only very slighty better than kerosine, but kerosine has a much higher density (allowing you to store more of it in a smaller volume) and doesn't have the hassle of being a cryogenic liquid.
Dismissing someone's assertion that you're bad at science on the grounds that it's offensive is akin to rioting because your upset that someone accused you of having violent tendencies.
The problem is that there aren't any islands that aren't already claimed by a country. You might be able to buy property rights to an island, but no country would ever sell you sovereignty. Sealand, on the other hand, has an arguable claim to sovereignty.
It's not about the rights of the pedophiles, it's about the rights of normal people to not have the police scrutinize their personal financial records simply because some pedophile uses the same credit card company. The police knew that a few people had used credit cards to buy the porn, so they examined the records of all 22 million people.
I don't really know much about UK laws, but I'm willing to take your word for it that this game would be illegal on the grounds of incitement to religious hatred. However, with that in mind I can't help but wonder - shouldn't the christian bible itself also be illegal on such grounds? Because what this game depicts - god's followers going around converting or killing heathen - really is straight out of the bible. The bible is full is stories about god explicitly ordering his followers to massacre entire groups of people because they worshiped the wrong god.
"A felony requires "mens rea" - essentially foreknowledge that you're going to do something wrong."
False. It's true that some felonies require "mens rea," but many do not. Many crimes are "strict liability," meaning that merely committing the act is enough for a conviction regardless of whether or not the defendant knew he was committing a crime. Statutory rape laws are usually (I'm reluctant to say "always" because I'm not sure about every state) strict liability laws, and not knowing that you were committing a crime is not a defense.
If a crime requires mens rea there will usually be wording to the effect of "Any person who knowingly/willingly/with malice aforethought does XYZ..." while strict liability crimes simply say "Any person who does XYZ...".
I've noticed something pretty disturbing lately. I hear about all sorts of new laws or proposed laws all the time, on all sorts of different topics. Most of the laws deal with things that I don't really know anything about, so I don't have an opinion on them. I have absolutely no idea whether a new law related to banking regulation, corporate taxes, greenhouse gas emissions, automotive safety, zoning laws, construction codes, etc. is a good idea, so I just shrug and move on.
However, any time I hear about a law regarding and area that I do actually know something about, it seems like the laws are always some sort of stupid bullshit that either won't work, aren't enforceable, are designed to fix problems that aren't really problems, or fix a problem but introduce many more new problems. And it makes me wonder; if I were an expert at everything, would all the new laws that I hear about seem like stupid bullshit?
If your bank really wants to make it easy for people to rip them off, it's not really your problem is it? I've never understood why people care so much about credit card security. If someone steals your credit card number and uses it to buy something, you just report the charge as fraudulent. No credit card company charges customers from fraudulent charges made on there account.
Using a credit card seems much safer than cash. If someone steals my cash, I'm out of luck. If someone steals my credit card or uses my account number without my authorization, I don't lose anything except the 10 minutes or so that I have to spend on the phone with the credit card company.
"If I were Chris, I'd thoroughly check and wipe the disks of the computers that the FBI gave back to him."
I would just sell them and buy new ones. Even if you carefully inspected all your hardware, would you really be able to tell if anything had been modified/removed/spliced in? It's probably safer to just assume that you won't find it if it's there and ditch everything.
At no point in the article do they claim that "Cyber Monday" is the biggest online shopping day of the year. You are complaining about something that they never actually said! In fact, the article explicitly states that it isn't the biggest online shopping day of the year.
"Despite all that online traffic, though, Cyber Monday sales lagged those of many other holiday-season days. "
Why should journalists bother to fact-check their articles when you don't even bother to read them?
Most places will simply assume that your card is fake and not serve you if it doesn't contain good magnetic data. You might as well simply refuse to show them the ID in the first place.
It is not a double standard. In both cases the standard is whether or not you have empirical data to support your claim.
There is strong statistical data indicating that education and intelligence are inversely correlated to strong religious belief and correlated to atheism, so it acceptable to make the apparently factual claim that religious people, as a group, are less intelligent and less educated than atheists as a group.
It's not ok to claim that atheists as a group are immoral, because there isn't any good statistical data to back up that claim. If you can come up with any data to support that (like perhaps data showing that atheists are disproportionally likely to commit crimes) then you can make the claim that atheists are immoral.
"But if the people of that state feel that they want that service, and are willing to pay for it, what's wrong with them banding together to set that service up themselves?"
Wait, I'm confused - are the people willing to pay, or not? I thought the entire premise here was that private companies won't provide the service because there aren't enough people to pay for it. If the majority of the people weren't willing to pay a private company to do it, why are they suddenly willing to pay the government to do it?
I believe that's only for a criminal investigation. In a civil trial I imagine that the worst that could happen would be the judge ruling against you...not that I really know anything about british law.
How do you explain all of the other "noise" on the disk after the first decryption? If I decrypted a volume with a password and the result was some data and some random ones and zeros, I would probably assume that there was still encrypted data on the drive.
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A much better solution would be for companies to simply stop pretending that knowing a social security number somehow magically proves that you are who you claim to be.
Presentations of facts, like the layout of any specific phone book, can be copyrighted, but the information itself can't be copyrighted. Only "creative works" can be copyrighted. The layout of a phonebook, its cover art, etc. are all creative works, but the names and phone numbers themselves aren't covered by copyright. Not in the US, anyway.
Does this mean that I wouldn't be allowed to keep a list of customers who wrote bad checks, so as to avoid doing business with them in the future? Can I keep a list of customers who have been banned from my store for attempted shoplifting? Or would I be required to take people off such lists at their request?
It's a funny idea, but you can't copyright facts. Your phone number, address, etc. would all fall into the realm facts; that's why the information in phone books isn't covered by copyright.
If a kidnapper wanted to know where a kid lived it would just be a matter of driving around any neighborhood for five minutes. Hell, I can't drive through my neighborhood around the time when the schools get out without constantly stopping to avoid running over children as they walk home from the bus stop. If you wanted to kidnap someone, why would you go through the trouble of searching myspace for a name, getting the appropriate phone book, and then looking their address?
I'm sure even the people who currently "own" Sealand know that they will never get hundreds of millions of dollars for it. If you really want to start your own country and you have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around, there are much better ways to go about it. There are many tiny island nations that have territorial claims to a lot of small, uninhabited islands. Many of these countries have GDPs in the low tens of millions of dollars. Tuvalu comes immediately to mind, but there are plenty of others. I'm sure you could find a few that would happily sell you sovereignty over one of their small, useless islands if you offered them a few hundred million dollars. This would be better than buying Sealand because:
1)Your new country would be made of actual land.
2)Even if the island that you purchased was only a few dozen acres, it would still be many times larger than Sealand.
3)You will have at least one other established country that will immediately recognize your claim to sovereignty.
4)If you ever have a dispute over the sovereignty of your new nation, you will be arguing with a neighboring country that probably has a population of around ten thousand and no military, rather than the U.K.
Corporations don't have rights "just as if they were real people." For example, they don't have the same free speech rights as people - it's well established that commercial speech isn't protected in the same manner as a person's right to free speech, which is why the Do Not Call List is constitutional. That's just one example; there are plenty of other ways in which corporations don't have the same rights as people.
It makes sense for corporations to be considered people for certain purposes; it's what allows the corporation to hold a bank account in its name, or to file a lawsuit on its behalf.
Perhaps more to the point, liquid methane's specific impulse is only very slighty better than kerosine, but kerosine has a much higher density (allowing you to store more of it in a smaller volume) and doesn't have the hassle of being a cryogenic liquid.
If you say that you know it's broken because you were able to go in and walk around, then yes, you could be guilty of trespassing.
Dismissing someone's assertion that you're bad at science on the grounds that it's offensive is akin to rioting because your upset that someone accused you of having violent tendencies.
The problem is that there aren't any islands that aren't already claimed by a country. You might be able to buy property rights to an island, but no country would ever sell you sovereignty. Sealand, on the other hand, has an arguable claim to sovereignty.
American scientists all use metric, but American engineers often don't.
It's not about the rights of the pedophiles, it's about the rights of normal people to not have the police scrutinize their personal financial records simply because some pedophile uses the same credit card company. The police knew that a few people had used credit cards to buy the porn, so they examined the records of all 22 million people.
I don't really know much about UK laws, but I'm willing to take your word for it that this game would be illegal on the grounds of incitement to religious hatred. However, with that in mind I can't help but wonder - shouldn't the christian bible itself also be illegal on such grounds? Because what this game depicts - god's followers going around converting or killing heathen - really is straight out of the bible. The bible is full is stories about god explicitly ordering his followers to massacre entire groups of people because they worshiped the wrong god.
"A felony requires "mens rea" - essentially foreknowledge that you're going to do something wrong."
False. It's true that some felonies require "mens rea," but many do not. Many crimes are "strict liability," meaning that merely committing the act is enough for a conviction regardless of whether or not the defendant knew he was committing a crime. Statutory rape laws are usually (I'm reluctant to say "always" because I'm not sure about every state) strict liability laws, and not knowing that you were committing a crime is not a defense.
If a crime requires mens rea there will usually be wording to the effect of "Any person who knowingly/willingly/with malice aforethought does XYZ..." while strict liability crimes simply say "Any person who does XYZ...".
I've noticed something pretty disturbing lately. I hear about all sorts of new laws or proposed laws all the time, on all sorts of different topics. Most of the laws deal with things that I don't really know anything about, so I don't have an opinion on them. I have absolutely no idea whether a new law related to banking regulation, corporate taxes, greenhouse gas emissions, automotive safety, zoning laws, construction codes, etc. is a good idea, so I just shrug and move on.
However, any time I hear about a law regarding and area that I do actually know something about, it seems like the laws are always some sort of stupid bullshit that either won't work, aren't enforceable, are designed to fix problems that aren't really problems, or fix a problem but introduce many more new problems. And it makes me wonder; if I were an expert at everything, would all the new laws that I hear about seem like stupid bullshit?
How many cashiers today bat an eye at a card whose magnetic strip is damaged/erased?
If your bank really wants to make it easy for people to rip them off, it's not really your problem is it? I've never understood why people care so much about credit card security. If someone steals your credit card number and uses it to buy something, you just report the charge as fraudulent. No credit card company charges customers from fraudulent charges made on there account.
Using a credit card seems much safer than cash. If someone steals my cash, I'm out of luck. If someone steals my credit card or uses my account number without my authorization, I don't lose anything except the 10 minutes or so that I have to spend on the phone with the credit card company.
"If I were Chris, I'd thoroughly check and wipe the disks of the computers that the FBI gave back to him."
I would just sell them and buy new ones. Even if you carefully inspected all your hardware, would you really be able to tell if anything had been modified/removed/spliced in? It's probably safer to just assume that you won't find it if it's there and ditch everything.
At no point in the article do they claim that "Cyber Monday" is the biggest online shopping day of the year. You are complaining about something that they never actually said! In fact, the article explicitly states that it isn't the biggest online shopping day of the year.
"Despite all that online traffic, though, Cyber Monday sales lagged those of many other holiday-season days. "
Why should journalists bother to fact-check their articles when you don't even bother to read them?
Most places will simply assume that your card is fake and not serve you if it doesn't contain good magnetic data. You might as well simply refuse to show them the ID in the first place.
It is not a double standard. In both cases the standard is whether or not you have empirical data to support your claim. There is strong statistical data indicating that education and intelligence are inversely correlated to strong religious belief and correlated to atheism, so it acceptable to make the apparently factual claim that religious people, as a group, are less intelligent and less educated than atheists as a group. It's not ok to claim that atheists as a group are immoral, because there isn't any good statistical data to back up that claim. If you can come up with any data to support that (like perhaps data showing that atheists are disproportionally likely to commit crimes) then you can make the claim that atheists are immoral.
"But if the people of that state feel that they want that service, and are willing to pay for it, what's wrong with them banding together to set that service up themselves?"
Wait, I'm confused - are the people willing to pay, or not? I thought the entire premise here was that private companies won't provide the service because there aren't enough people to pay for it. If the majority of the people weren't willing to pay a private company to do it, why are they suddenly willing to pay the government to do it?
I believe that's only for a criminal investigation. In a civil trial I imagine that the worst that could happen would be the judge ruling against you...not that I really know anything about british law.
How do you explain all of the other "noise" on the disk after the first decryption? If I decrypted a volume with a password and the result was some data and some random ones and zeros, I would probably assume that there was still encrypted data on the drive.