It's in the public's interest not to pay for 11 hours of police twiddling their thumbs because of a mere $20, which is still eligible for collection now anyway. Verizon just blew at least a few thousand taxpayer dollars over trying to collect 20, by saying no to a request, not from the customer, but from parties that had no obligation or prior involvement in the billing. The same laws that allow rescuers to bill people who did outrageously stupid things that got them into trouble, or the police to bill for costs associated with prank 911 calls, generally justify presenting Verizon with the bill for the waste of taxpayer dollars, at the very least.
Right in several respects. The practitioners probably deserve to be called dentists. A group that has invented dental drills and probably a good local anaestetic is pretty far along in that respect. The whole practice may well have been for cavity treatment and not just cosmetic appeal - it's pretty easy to imagine a culture where a person gets one tooth drilled for disease and then the culture supports getting others done to match for aestetics even though our modern western culture rejects dentists tampering with healthy teeth like that. (So this could be partially for status, or class related, and partially for health, and it will be difficult to show conclusively just how much part each reason played).
This practice was seen in several, perhaps many social classes, depending on just which ways you stack the class structure. It could have still been reflective of class or status in other ways, and I strongly suspect that's what the professionals meant, and the reporter is oversimplifying. My bet would be that it cost enough that there was some bias towards it only being done on people with some bucks, and maybe also being much more common for certain classes than others because of diet, but it wasn't something that was color coded to class by gemstone type or anything such as that. (That is, there was no rule that only generals got to use lapis lazuli plugs, or whatever).
This seems to have been part of the more settled, agricultural Native American cultures, which means there as a huge population percentage that were farmers, and as usual not all farmers were socially equal (Just picture a southern plantation owner and a white sharecropper in 19th century America, living on the same road with adjacent fields, both counting as farmers and further selected as members of the favored race in their society. By some anthropological models, these would be counted as the same class, although a typical US resident of today would see that as pretty silly.). Given the resources needed to carefully drill teeth and cut and polish gemstones to fit, this probably took some real money or barter to afford. Maybe the researchers just mean there were merchants, warriors, and fishermen all getting the treatment, not that it wasn't a status thing.
From its conception, there have been lots of former governors and senators appointed to the Supreme Court. Some have been Chief Justice. Historically, courts full of them have heard about 25% more cases each session. The legal texts used for most university law schools all at least somewhat support the claim that courts full of non-lawyers have done better in general, although I'm sure that historians can argue that either way. Just about nobody would say they did worse.
There's about four posts above this AC's that don't seem to see any distinction between kids and adults or criminal intent and lack thereof. The AC should have posted with a name and should be modded up. The real sign of a failing society is people who think they are good citizens yet try to reduce an issue to such a simple, single principle that other principles such as public safety get totally omitted from their reasoning, and horrible actions get 'justified'.
Drinkypoo, you're creating a false argument by excluding a few middles. The social contract doesn't let you put nails in fences for several reasons.
First, you have other alternatives - Starting with talking to the kids, their parents or even the police if needed. Beyond that you have legal action.
Second, the society has always made other people responsible for KIDS safety when KIDS are doing things they are not supposed to do, simply because no society ever has been able to get KIDS to act responsibly by themselves. That's why we have laws against presenting an attractive nuisance, such as an unfenced swimming pool.
Third, in the vast majority of situations such as you describe, there are other people the homeowner legally has to give access to or has agreed to give access to who can blunder into those nails, i.e. a cop patrolling on foot, a fireman responding to an emergency at the home, or just a meter reader. If the case you have in mind actually didn't have any such problems associated, that would be highly unusual.
Forth, sharpened nails will quickly rust, and may not be very visible at all seen on end against a wood fence, so your substituting the word 'blind' for 'unsuspecting' is verbal trickery at best. Many people of normal vision might fail to see such nails until an accident occurred. What, did your homeowner paint red concentric circles around each one? Imagine paramedics responding to an emergency call from the home? It's night, they are trying to set up field equipment, including erecting a wheeled stretcher to transport a probable patient, and they maybe have a cop with a flashlight to help them avoid obstacles in the yard, if they are lucky. That cop is likely to point the light at the ground rather than the fence-line, as it's more normal to have trouble with inadvertently placed obstacles such as garden hoses or plants than a deliberate trap. What's likely to happen there?
One tidbit criminals in prison often share with each other is that, if you have a knife on you and the police catch you going in through a window, you are going to be charged with armed robbery. On the other hand, if you enter unarmed, and grab a knife in the kitchen or a gun from the homeowner's own cabinet, you can make it look like you were not prepared to commit a violent assault if you are caught early. Since the chances are if the cops catch you, it will be either entering or leaving, this minimizes your risks. I don't know if that's really very logical and I doubt the crooks consult actuarial tables or whatever before coming up with such ideas, but that's the sort of thing that's taught to new crooks, often as minors in 'juvie', before they even get to the adult prison system.
Now, knowing that, should I assume that there's a good chance anyone breaking into my home isn't actually likely to plan to use violence, or should I assume that there's a high probability. much higher than people generally suspect. If the percentage of burglars who plan to use violence is significantly higher than the percentage caught already armed as they enter, then that's what I should be basing my response on.
If the intruder is really just committed to grabbing some stuff and running, that's a tough break, but still, it happens in part because there's such a good chance he's really a pro who has been given some nasty guidance by his peers. I'm not saying this to defend the cases where a guy gets shot in the back as he is running away with the TV, but where there's reasonable doubt if force was really appropriate, I think that doubt has to go to the homeowner.
As an example of this, in my state a woman similarly sized to your example defended herself against a much larger man against whom she already had a restraining order. She fired through the door that he was attempting to batter down. The court accepted self defense even though she didn't wait until he was actually inside her home. The logic was straight-forward - she lived out in the country, it would typically take the sheriff's dept. half an hour to respond, and the door was obviously of such construction it would have been battered down long before then.
It's been mostly lawyers trying to make points such as whether entry was already accomplished, or the intruder was armed, into proscriptive rules that need to be met in all cases, instead of just examples which the jury can use to help decide whether the defensive use of force was reasonable in the new case. that have made people wary of lawyers. There's a big difference between telling a client "In prior cases, the court gave favorable weight to X", and "If you do X you will win all disputes, and if you don't, you will lose them".
I'll try to avoid car analogies and stick to something closer to the original: 1. all Copyright and patent law is federal, and most other IP law, such as trademarks, gets settled only in federal courts 99% of the time. If you were a lawyer who had practiced 20 years with a good success rate, but most or all of that practice was before state courts. that's a good reason. 2. You could be a public defender or district attorney - lots of experience with criminal law may not help you much where the very standard of evidence is different in a civil case. 3. By your argument, There's 'no reason' why a competent surgeon shouldn't be able to perform any type of surgery. Does that really sound right, or would you prefer a heart surgeon to do your next bypsass over a cosmetic surgeon? I've seen cases where the difference between a real plastic surgeon and a cosmetic one mattered, let alone wider variations, and even if I knew less about law than the little I do, I would have assumed similar principles apply.
Probably, Glucose has more effect than Fructose. Glucose is a small sugar which passes straight across the blood brain barrier and IS a brain regulating chemical. Fructose is a larger sugar which has to first be metabolized into glucose to have brain effects. The difference is a blood sugar level chart that looks like rolling hills vrs one that can look like a wild roller coaster ride. Since Glucose is also used in the muscles, I'd expect it promotes equally rapid changes in how well muscles react to nervous impulses. Even if there's no other cause for muscle weakness, it's hard to actually build muscle or avoid injuries if individual fibers react very differently from one session to the next when being put under the same loads. Apparently, the original experiment was careful to use standardized modalities to test muscle condition, although the article doesn't really stress that.
US copyright law was an intentional break with European law. The history you're mentioning was a history of the King deciding which friends got protection. So if we're moving back to that era, are we gonna have state religions and divine right of kings too? Cause that's a pretty damned good reason to go back to something more like what the US founding fathers envisioned.
There's a real need for investor education. Most market analysts will steer investors away from buying into a profitable business if the projected labor costs are rising. It's common for some industries to regard anything above 10% of costs being labor related as a sure sign of failure on the horizon.
A law firm that takes on an IP lawsuit usually expects 33-35% of the projected profits or more if they succeed - sometimes 50% or more. That ought to be viewed as a labor situation. If you wouldn't buy stock in a company because a union threatened to raise general labor costs to 30% of total costs, you should avoid like the plague a company which expects to win an IP suit that is costing them 50% to a law firm.
If anything, because lawsuits are mostly one shots that don't necessarily translate into more profits in subsequent quarters, and because the time-frame for actually receiving a profit is extremely variable, (if it even happens), an investor should be even more reluctant to buy stock in a firm in litigation than just about any other possible firm.
Not realizing a hired law firm is still a hiring profitability issue is currently institutionalized dumbness. Not realizing the lawyers can often get what they want without giving you what you want results chiefly from a failure to teach Finance 101 properly to freshmen MBA's. Until US business schools start teaching right, SCO v IBM's will keep happening.
When companies spend millions to implement a particular solution, it's fair to assume they have a goal. For broadcasts that are 'free' (usually with the price of watching commercials), we can rule out some goals.
Copyright law is primarily economic - that is, the original goal was to prevent direct, measurable economic harm to the owner, not to prevent other kinds of harm. The exception, of course, is the European moral copyright model.
If DRM isn't protecting from direct economic harm, then what it ends up doing is making an end run around the limitations built into US style copyright, limitations such as fair use, or first sale rights. All these end runs are wrong. It really doesn't matter if the goal is to protect against indirect economic harm from perfectly lawful competition, or to restrict consumer rights that the courts have long upheld, or to selectively enforce 'moral copyright' in countries where there's no actual law passed, and only for certain privileged entities. None of those is a good thing.
It's like catching somebody sneaking into a woman's dorm with a roll of duct tape, a bowie knife, and six pairs of handcuffs at 2 AM. We're getting into an argument over whether the goal was rape, murder, or robbery, and ignoring that none of the options are good things. When it comes to public airwaves style channels, no one has seriously been able to suggest a reason for DRM backed by the DMCA that doesn't involve something bad, whether it's an unfair government granted monopoly, an effort to screw consumers, or an attempt to enforce laws that haven't actually been passed.
You do know that, every time you decide to buy or not buy anything or pay for or not pay for any service, you've decided the worth of work. We're discussing which methods are legal or ethical here. If you want to take the position that whatever the creator says goes automatically, then at least say so explicitly.
A lot of people downloading are evidently using services such as Giganews or Easynews, that charge around 21 to 24 dollars (US) per month. (last I looked, maybe you have more accurate figures) At least some of the people paying for broadband access would drop back to dial up if they weren't downloading. Itunes and other pay services all seem to be making money too off legal downloading. That's all straight monetary costs.
Then there's hardware costs. (People aren't upgrading to 1 TB + hard drives just because they have too many family photos to fit on their old 200 GB drives). Nobody is getting free hardware.
Then there's serious time costs (just try getting a full movie from Usenet. You will need to find software to join 50 (or so) part.RARs, and due to the variety of.RAR making programs, you need multiple programs, and expertise to tell which ones work for what. Then you need.PAR and Par2 programs to verify completeness, and repair incomplete portions. You could get 'free' software for most of this, but it won't look or work like typical Windows programs, so if you're still using Windows, you face a learning curve about like mastering visual basic to use them. Surely, many people buy commercial software for at least some of these tasks - some people even buy commercial software for torrenting. (and the commercial makers of said software report sales, sometimes lots of them)).
People may be getting 'cheaper', but very few of them are getting 'free', and that makes the whole 'can't compete with free' argument a red herring. We need to move beyond it if there's ever to be a resolution the industry and consumers can be happy with.
This is sort of how it works in the US. I'm personally one of the exceptions. As a former military officer, I'm not eligible for jury duty by my state's rules.
(Military officers are given limited arrest authority over military personnel, including modified Miranda cards for use with military law situations, and are trained in proper rules for search and seizure. The military version of Miranda actually advises the accused of more rights than does the civilian standard version, and from what I have seen, the limits on S&S are more in the accused's favor than the civil versions. But both these facts make us ineligible in many locations to serve on a jury after leaving the service).
I'm not eager to start serving jury duty, but you have to admit, that's a hell of a definition of "good standing".
But what about the breadth of domain issue? Understanding a narrow domain of discourse requires having been exposed to it, and successfully reached an understanding. But once the domain is broad enough, everyone has been exposed to it. From your example, you could be ignorant of how to rebuild a carburator (on a car old enough to have one). That doesn't say anything much about stupidity, in fact it could be argued that you were more intelligent for choosing not to master a skill that is becoming less and less needed with each passing year. But, suppose you lack the skill to change a tire, or even to put fuel in a car. At some point, not picking up a few of the basics needed for emergencies becomes stupidity, not just ignorance. This is still assuming you own a car or drive one frequently enough that not mastering these basics becomes a serious risk factor, of course. If you lived all your life in a city with good public transit, and never even got a driver's liscence, the line gets drawn pretty broadly. But it's always there somewhere. There are things any person of normal experience and mental capabilty masters. You could be ignorant of what the initials FDIC stand for in the US financial system, but if you somehow made it to adulthood without understanding banks charge interest for borrowing money, that's not ignorance anymore. You could be ignorant of what the court case Plessy v Ferguson was about, but if you're surprised there's a law against practicing law without a liscense, that's not normally just ignorance. You may not know the 3 point fowl rule - that's ignorance. Asking why the football team is playing inside, with a round ball is stupidity.
Now you can make up examples of people who would be genuinely ignorant but not stupid in any of those cases. Maybe the example is an Inuit exchange student who has never seen ground not covered by snow, but did very well on an IQ test and can presumably master any of these ideas with just a little work. But these cases are exotically crafted exceptions.
In the 70's, a lot of studio synthesizer tracks were incredibly difficult to execute live, because the equipment weighed tens of tons (that's literal, not exaggeration) and often couldn't physically all fit on many stages. It was also so finicky about long rides in vehicles that often more instruments would be down for maintenance than up (imagine hundreds of vacuum tubes, in gear handled by locally hired roadies and thrown back underneath a tour bus four times a week or so. Stoned roadies.). Artists had to decide how much of three busloads or so of kit to take on tour, and often arrived at a live location and had to pick which synthesizers and amps they could squeeze into their part of the stage for each concert set-up. People such as Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman spent much of their effort as musicians on figuring out how to get some sort of decent performance out of a variable 20% to 30% of the gear they would like to have brought on tour.
But, this lead to some great music. Artists who actually composed learned to write pieces so they could still sound good transposed to many different combinations of instruments, and often this made better pieces. Having to work harder at an aspect of the craft paid off in quality.
People in the later 70's and 80's, such as Neal Pert, benefited from being able to take all their gear and even a few spare keyboards, but they followed the example of a prior generation, and worked hard to get as good as they could for when there were problems with the tech. A safety mechanism for one problem was seen mostly as something that freed them up to work on other problems. People preformed unplugged to prove they could still do music without the safties in place. Even as late as 1990, musicians remembered pseudo-bands such as the Monkees, and how they had worked to prove they weren't just actors, playing musicians, with variable success. Milli Vanilli showed that getting caught lip syncing was still something shameful.
Autotune doesn't compel this payoff in skill. Worse, it gives a payoff to a bad performer who is photogenic. It's part of a wider system which is mostly used to put people who look good on stage ahead of bland looking or unattractive musicians. Autotune deserves to be judged, not isolated on its own but as a mechanism of a wider system. People who didn't buy a Phoebe Snow album because they cared more about her weight than her voice are getting more of what they want now partly because of autotune. Totally tone deaf people can now judge performances by the person's skill as a dancer, or by their appearance, (or by their sex appeal), and can even proclaim someone a fine musician with the volume totally down, in part because of autotune.
Your argument is self proving - 'Autidorium' is spelled exactly as much like 'sanitorium' as you yourself intend, and if the two words seem close enough to you, who could dare dispute it with their very creator? I'm vleemmodic with eucompipulation at the addition of these two fine words to the English language.
I hope the analogy I'm going to offer isn't too simple. Not being a programmer doesn't make you stupid or anything, but I'm going to go to a very simple argument to respond, so, first off, that means nothing personal.
A lot of concepts such as 'files', 'folders', 'desktops', and such just don't match very well with what actually goes on in a machine. Take the 'move' operation - unlike the analog world, you never really move a file into a folder or move a folder from one desktop to another. In a PC a 'move' is really a 'copy' followed by an 'erase'. If that process gets interrupted by a power loss, say, just when that happens greatly affects what you have to do to correct the problem. The 'good' copy could be on either machine, both, or neither.
In many architectures, an 'erase' isn't really an erase either, as the file is simply labeled as blank space, not necessarily overwritten.
So, analogies such as folders are necessarily only very rough analogies to start with. Now, what happens when the file you are putting in a symbolic folder is an.AVI or.MP3 and not a text file? You wouldn't store a pile of videotapes, or CDs, or LP records in a real manila folder! An already stressed analogy now becomes less useful and more strained.
There are 'compartmentalizing' words that sometimes would fit better, such as calling your folders 'directories'. You could also draw a sharp distinction between data files and program files, by calling them programs and data, rather than using bulkier terms such as 'executable files' and 'non-executable files' that don't seem to work well, and so on. But, you'd have to change a lot of graphics too, for GUI users. Right now, Microsoft is still going to default to showing a sheaf of papers moving from one manila folder to another all too often.
The issue of the metaphors becoming antiquated isn't the core. Yes they are, but the core of it is the metaphors were already not a very good fit, even back when the typical file was text that could be printed to real world paper and fit in a real manila folder.
If there's any causal relationship, it could easily be the opposite, that is unrealistic violence in media might cause an increase in real world violence. For example, the 'Marshall Dillon' syndrome, where the heroes of TV shows always just get 'flesh wounds' and make full recoveries by next week's show, might encourage violence where showing more realistic results might deter it.
One suggestion some psychologists take pretty seriously is sometimes called the Die Hard effect. Media where fate (or God, or some supernatural seeming source), always seems to make the 'bad guys' come to an ending that seems ironically just, usually starting when the 'good guy' uses violence, might make for more real world violence, where ones that show how 'good guys' can lose, innocent bystanders be hit by stray bullets, etc, might deter it.
If there is something to either of these theories or some relatives of theirs, I, for one, don't see how the society could possibly write laws that could clearly differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' media depictions of violence. That seems to throw regulating games and films for minors back into the hands of their parents or guardians.
All the oxygen around seems to be already bound up in long duration coital pairs or three ways with hydrogen, except for some more promiscuous oxygen atoms linked in various, mostly downright orgiastic molecules, so stopping it from breeding seems like a long shot unless Oxygen atoms are naturally infertile.
There is something to prevent them prescreening all content, and its called the physical constraints of reality. That's not a flip answer BTW, that's actually established U.S. law - read on.
U.S. pornography cases during the 1950's included a number of cases against normally non-adult bookstores. When some of these cases involved books already determined to be obscene by 50's standards, but repackaged so there was little reason to suspect problems existed, a doctrine of physical limits of responsibility was established. In one of the major cases, a general bookstore was charged for distributing a book which had been classified as obscene, and was on a published list. The version they distributed was even in a Grove press paperback edition, with Grove a publisher widely known for sometimes printing obscene works (including such greats as Henry Miller).
However, the original cover, showing a nude photo (tastefully blurred and rather innocuous by modern standards), had been replaced by a shot of a mountainous landscape. The appellate court also noted that there was nothing in the title to suggest obscenity, and that checking for it on the technically published lists involved some real effort in seeking them out and reading through tens of thousands of entries written in fine point legalese. The court then held that it was not reasonable to require a bookstore to pay personnel what would amount to full time wages just to keep up with court decisions so as to avoid what were clearly occasional, inadvertent lapses. The appellate court, in fact, specified that in some cases, ignorance of the law was a legitimate excuse, where the ignorance was not willful and required substantial efforts and costs to mitigate.
A court could decide it is reasonable for a large company such as Google to pay some costs, such as a few full time salaried employees to screen content, but it cannot decide, in the face of cases such as this one, that it is reasonable to require either perfect compliance or unlimited spending to achieve it, Your last sentence is thus fallacious, in that taking responsibility doesn't mean they have to screen all content. If you want a more modern case supporting this conclusion, see the counterclaim brought in Jackson v. FCC, where Ms. Jackson's lawyers include claims based on this same principle.
Maybe, but most people genuinely want to 'play well with others', and many are smart enough to consider long term costs. People will tolerate small barriers so that they can "do the right thing", until the barriers become more severe (even if they don't all define the right thing exactly the same way). I'd submit that the high percentage of pirates doesn't reflect looser morals than in the past so much as it reflects increasing barriers.
For me, DRM is just one more. Getting money to the artist is doing the right thing, but getting it to the company that has decided the artist can't sign autographs except on their terms no longer is. Paying an increasing share for distribution while distribution costs are decreasing thanks to digital systems is a barrier. Being told I can't make a backup on content I bought is a barrier. EULAs are a barrier. Enough barriers, and gridlock occurs. People can be 'selfless' and want to pay the artist, they can be 'selfish', and still smart enough to realize they have to pay the artist if they want more works in the future, or they can even be 'selfish' and stupid, and the morality doesn't matter, gridlock still happens.
Right. The opposite of "People who pirate necessarily buy more too", is that there's no correlation. In other words, it would be "People who pirate don't generally buy more or less than people who don't.", or something like that. If it's impossible to prove that there's any causation for "people who pirate also buy more", then its also impossible to prove for "people who pirate buy less". The law assigning statutory damages in place of real ones for copyright violation is based on a causation argument, ergo, the industry is now claiming that causation only applies in court when it's in their favor. They ought to have to test that argument in front of SCOTUS.
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It's in the public's interest not to pay for 11 hours of police twiddling their thumbs because of a mere $20, which is still eligible for collection now anyway. Verizon just blew at least a few thousand taxpayer dollars over trying to collect 20, by saying no to a request, not from the customer, but from parties that had no obligation or prior involvement in the billing. The same laws that allow rescuers to bill people who did outrageously stupid things that got them into trouble, or the police to bill for costs associated with prank 911 calls, generally justify presenting Verizon with the bill for the waste of taxpayer dollars, at the very least.
Right in several respects. The practitioners probably deserve to be called dentists. A group that has invented dental drills and probably a good local anaestetic is pretty far along in that respect. The whole practice may well have been for cavity treatment and not just cosmetic appeal - it's pretty easy to imagine a culture where a person gets one tooth drilled for disease and then the culture supports getting others done to match for aestetics even though our modern western culture rejects dentists tampering with healthy teeth like that. (So this could be partially for status, or class related, and partially for health, and it will be difficult to show conclusively just how much part each reason played).
This practice was seen in several, perhaps many social classes, depending on just which ways you stack the class structure. It could have still been reflective of class or status in other ways, and I strongly suspect that's what the professionals meant, and the reporter is oversimplifying. My bet would be that it cost enough that there was some bias towards it only being done on people with some bucks, and maybe also being much more common for certain classes than others because of diet, but it wasn't something that was color coded to class by gemstone type or anything such as that. (That is, there was no rule that only generals got to use lapis lazuli plugs, or whatever).
This seems to have been part of the more settled, agricultural Native American cultures, which means there as a huge population percentage that were farmers, and as usual not all farmers were socially equal (Just picture a southern plantation owner and a white sharecropper in 19th century America, living on the same road with adjacent fields, both counting as farmers and further selected as members of the favored race in their society. By some anthropological models, these would be counted as the same class, although a typical US resident of today would see that as pretty silly.). Given the resources needed to carefully drill teeth and cut and polish gemstones to fit, this probably took some real money or barter to afford. Maybe the researchers just mean there were merchants, warriors, and fishermen all getting the treatment, not that it wasn't a status thing.
They can have my quasar when they pry it from my gravitationally warped, isotopically transmuted fingers.
From its conception, there have been lots of former governors and senators appointed to the Supreme Court. Some have been Chief Justice. Historically, courts full of them have heard about 25% more cases each session. The legal texts used for most university law schools all at least somewhat support the claim that courts full of non-lawyers have done better in general, although I'm sure that historians can argue that either way. Just about nobody would say they did worse.
There's about four posts above this AC's that don't seem to see any distinction between kids and adults or criminal intent and lack thereof. The AC should have posted with a name and should be modded up. The real sign of a failing society is people who think they are good citizens yet try to reduce an issue to such a simple, single principle that other principles such as public safety get totally omitted from their reasoning, and horrible actions get 'justified'.
Drinkypoo, you're creating a false argument by excluding a few middles. The social contract doesn't let you put nails in fences for several reasons.
First, you have other alternatives - Starting with talking to the kids, their parents or even the police if needed. Beyond that you have legal action.
Second, the society has always made other people responsible for KIDS safety when KIDS are doing things they are not supposed to do, simply because no society ever has been able to get KIDS to act responsibly by themselves. That's why we have laws against presenting an attractive nuisance, such as an unfenced swimming pool.
Third, in the vast majority of situations such as you describe, there are other people the homeowner legally has to give access to or has agreed to give access to who can blunder into those nails, i.e. a cop patrolling on foot, a fireman responding to an emergency at the home, or just a meter reader. If the case you have in mind actually didn't have any such problems associated, that would be highly unusual.
Forth, sharpened nails will quickly rust, and may not be very visible at all seen on end against a wood fence, so your substituting the word 'blind' for 'unsuspecting' is verbal trickery at best. Many people of normal vision might fail to see such nails until an accident occurred. What, did your homeowner paint red concentric circles around each one? Imagine paramedics responding to an emergency call from the home? It's night, they are trying to set up field equipment, including erecting a wheeled stretcher to transport a probable patient, and they maybe have a cop with a flashlight to help them avoid obstacles in the yard, if they are lucky. That cop is likely to point the light at the ground rather than the fence-line, as it's more normal to have trouble with inadvertently placed obstacles such as garden hoses or plants than a deliberate trap. What's likely to happen there?
One tidbit criminals in prison often share with each other is that, if you have a knife on you and the police catch you going in through a window, you are going to be charged with armed robbery. On the other hand, if you enter unarmed, and grab a knife in the kitchen or a gun from the homeowner's own cabinet, you can make it look like you were not prepared to commit a violent assault if you are caught early. Since the chances are if the cops catch you, it will be either entering or leaving, this minimizes your risks. I don't know if that's really very logical and I doubt the crooks consult actuarial tables or whatever before coming up with such ideas, but that's the sort of thing that's taught to new crooks, often as minors in 'juvie', before they even get to the adult prison system.
Now, knowing that, should I assume that there's a good chance anyone breaking into my home isn't actually likely to plan to use violence, or should I assume that there's a high probability. much higher than people generally suspect. If the percentage of burglars who plan to use violence is significantly higher than the percentage caught already armed as they enter, then that's what I should be basing my response on.
If the intruder is really just committed to grabbing some stuff and running, that's a tough break, but still, it happens in part because there's such a good chance he's really a pro who has been given some nasty guidance by his peers. I'm not saying this to defend the cases where a guy gets shot in the back as he is running away with the TV, but where there's reasonable doubt if force was really appropriate, I think that doubt has to go to the homeowner.
As an example of this, in my state a woman similarly sized to your example defended herself against a much larger man against whom she already had a restraining order. She fired through the door that he was attempting to batter down. The court accepted self defense even though she didn't wait until he was actually inside her home. The logic was straight-forward - she lived out in the country, it would typically take the sheriff's dept. half an hour to respond, and the door was obviously of such construction it would have been battered down long before then.
It's been mostly lawyers trying to make points such as whether entry was already accomplished, or the intruder was armed, into proscriptive rules that need to be met in all cases, instead of just examples which the jury can use to help decide whether the defensive use of force was reasonable in the new case. that have made people wary of lawyers. There's a big difference between telling a client "In prior cases, the court gave favorable weight to X", and "If you do X you will win all disputes, and if you don't, you will lose them".
I'll try to avoid car analogies and stick to something closer to the original:
1. all Copyright and patent law is federal, and most other IP law, such as trademarks, gets settled only in federal courts 99% of the time. If you were a lawyer who had practiced 20 years with a good success rate, but most or all of that practice was before state courts. that's a good reason.
2. You could be a public defender or district attorney - lots of experience with criminal law may not help you much where the very standard of evidence is different in a civil case.
3. By your argument, There's 'no reason' why a competent surgeon shouldn't be able to perform any type of surgery. Does that really sound right, or would you prefer a heart surgeon to do your next bypsass over a cosmetic surgeon? I've seen cases where the difference between a real plastic surgeon and a cosmetic one mattered, let alone wider variations, and even if I knew less about law than the little I do, I would have assumed similar principles apply.
Probably, Glucose has more effect than Fructose. Glucose is a small sugar which passes straight across the blood brain barrier and IS a brain regulating chemical. Fructose is a larger sugar which has to first be metabolized into glucose to have brain effects. The difference is a blood sugar level chart that looks like rolling hills vrs one that can look like a wild roller coaster ride. Since Glucose is also used in the muscles, I'd expect it promotes equally rapid changes in how well muscles react to nervous impulses. Even if there's no other cause for muscle weakness, it's hard to actually build muscle or avoid injuries if individual fibers react very differently from one session to the next when being put under the same loads. Apparently, the original experiment was careful to use standardized modalities to test muscle condition, although the article doesn't really stress that.
US copyright law was an intentional break with European law. The history you're mentioning was a history of the King deciding which friends got protection. So if we're moving back to that era, are we gonna have state religions and divine right of kings too? Cause that's a pretty damned good reason to go back to something more like what the US founding fathers envisioned.
There's a real need for investor education.
Most market analysts will steer investors away from buying into a profitable business if the projected labor costs are rising. It's common for some industries to regard anything above 10% of costs being labor related as a sure sign of failure on the horizon.
A law firm that takes on an IP lawsuit usually expects 33-35% of the projected profits or more if they succeed - sometimes 50% or more. That ought to be viewed as a labor situation. If you wouldn't buy stock in a company because a union threatened to raise general labor costs to 30% of total costs, you should avoid like the plague a company which expects to win an IP suit that is costing them 50% to a law firm.
If anything, because lawsuits are mostly one shots that don't necessarily translate into more profits in subsequent quarters, and because the time-frame for actually receiving a profit is extremely variable, (if it even happens), an investor should be even more reluctant to buy stock in a firm in litigation than just about any other possible firm.
Not realizing a hired law firm is still a hiring profitability issue is currently institutionalized dumbness. Not realizing the lawyers can often get what they want without giving you what you want results chiefly from a failure to teach Finance 101 properly to freshmen MBA's. Until US business schools start teaching right, SCO v IBM's will keep happening.
When companies spend millions to implement a particular solution, it's fair to assume they have a goal. For broadcasts that are 'free' (usually with the price of watching commercials), we can rule out some goals.
Copyright law is primarily economic - that is, the original goal was to prevent direct, measurable economic harm to the owner, not to prevent other kinds of harm. The exception, of course, is the European moral copyright model.
If DRM isn't protecting from direct economic harm, then what it ends up doing is making an end run around the limitations built into US style copyright, limitations such as fair use, or first sale rights.
All these end runs are wrong. It really doesn't matter if the goal is to protect against indirect economic harm from perfectly lawful competition, or to restrict consumer rights that the courts have long upheld, or to selectively enforce 'moral copyright' in countries where there's no actual law passed, and only for certain privileged entities. None of those is a good thing.
It's like catching somebody sneaking into a woman's dorm with a roll of duct tape, a bowie knife, and six pairs of handcuffs at 2 AM. We're getting into an argument over whether the goal was rape, murder, or robbery, and ignoring that none of the options are good things. When it comes to public airwaves style channels, no one has seriously been able to suggest a reason for DRM backed by the DMCA that doesn't involve something bad, whether it's an unfair government granted monopoly, an effort to screw consumers, or an attempt to enforce laws that haven't actually been passed.
You do know that, every time you decide to buy or not buy anything or pay for or not pay for any service, you've decided the worth of work. We're discussing which methods are legal or ethical here. If you want to take the position that whatever the creator says goes automatically, then at least say so explicitly.
A lot of people downloading are evidently using services such as Giganews or Easynews, that charge around 21 to 24 dollars (US) per month. (last I looked, maybe you have more accurate figures) At least some of the people paying for broadband access would drop back to dial up if they weren't downloading. Itunes and other pay services all seem to be making money too off legal downloading. That's all straight monetary costs. .RARs, and due to the variety of .RAR making programs, you need multiple programs, and expertise to tell which ones work for what. Then you need .PAR and Par2 programs to verify completeness, and repair incomplete portions. You could get 'free' software for most of this, but it won't look or work like typical Windows programs, so if you're still using Windows, you face a learning curve about like mastering visual basic to use them. Surely, many people buy commercial software for at least some of these tasks - some people even buy commercial software for torrenting. (and the commercial makers of said software report sales, sometimes lots of them)).
Then there's hardware costs. (People aren't upgrading to 1 TB + hard drives just because they have too many family photos to fit on their old 200 GB drives). Nobody is getting free hardware.
Then there's serious time costs (just try getting a full movie from Usenet. You will need to find software to join 50 (or so) part
People may be getting 'cheaper', but very few of them are getting 'free', and that makes the whole 'can't compete with free' argument a red herring. We need to move beyond it if there's ever to be a resolution the industry and consumers can be happy with.
This is sort of how it works in the US. I'm personally one of the exceptions. As a former military officer, I'm not eligible for jury duty by my state's rules.
(Military officers are given limited arrest authority over military personnel, including modified Miranda cards for use with military law situations, and are trained in proper rules for search and seizure. The military version of Miranda actually advises the accused of more rights than does the civilian standard version, and from what I have seen, the limits on S&S are more in the accused's favor than the civil versions. But both these facts make us ineligible in many locations to serve on a jury after leaving the service).
I'm not eager to start serving jury duty, but you have to admit, that's a hell of a definition of "good standing".
But what about the breadth of domain issue? Understanding a narrow domain of discourse requires having been exposed to it, and successfully reached an understanding. But once the domain is broad enough, everyone has been exposed to it.
From your example, you could be ignorant of how to rebuild a carburator (on a car old enough to have one). That doesn't say anything much about stupidity, in fact it could be argued that you were more intelligent for choosing not to master a skill that is becoming less and less needed with each passing year. But, suppose you lack the skill to change a tire, or even to put fuel in a car. At some point, not picking up a few of the basics needed for emergencies becomes stupidity, not just ignorance. This is still assuming you own a car or drive one frequently enough that not mastering these basics becomes a serious risk factor, of course. If you lived all your life in a city with good public transit, and never even got a driver's liscence, the line gets drawn pretty broadly. But it's always there somewhere.
There are things any person of normal experience and mental capabilty masters. You could be ignorant of what the initials FDIC stand for in the US financial system, but if you somehow made it to adulthood without understanding banks charge interest for borrowing money, that's not ignorance anymore. You could be ignorant of what the court case Plessy v Ferguson was about, but if you're surprised there's a law against practicing law without a liscense, that's not normally just ignorance. You may not know the 3 point fowl rule - that's ignorance. Asking why the football team is playing inside, with a round ball is stupidity.
Now you can make up examples of people who would be genuinely ignorant but not stupid in any of those cases. Maybe the example is an Inuit exchange student who has never seen ground not covered by snow, but did very well on an IQ test and can presumably master any of these ideas with just a little work. But these cases are exotically crafted exceptions.
In the 70's, a lot of studio synthesizer tracks were incredibly difficult to execute live, because the equipment weighed tens of tons (that's literal, not exaggeration) and often couldn't physically all fit on many stages. It was also so finicky about long rides in vehicles that often more instruments would be down for maintenance than up (imagine hundreds of vacuum tubes, in gear handled by locally hired roadies and thrown back underneath a tour bus four times a week or so. Stoned roadies.). Artists had to decide how much of three busloads or so of kit to take on tour, and often arrived at a live location and had to pick which synthesizers and amps they could squeeze into their part of the stage for each concert set-up. People such as Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman spent much of their effort as musicians on figuring out how to get some sort of decent performance out of a variable 20% to 30% of the gear they would like to have brought on tour.
But, this lead to some great music. Artists who actually composed learned to write pieces so they could still sound good transposed to many different combinations of instruments, and often this made better pieces. Having to work harder at an aspect of the craft paid off in quality.
People in the later 70's and 80's, such as Neal Pert, benefited from being able to take all their gear and even a few spare keyboards, but they followed the example of a prior generation, and worked hard to get as good as they could for when there were problems with the tech. A safety mechanism for one problem was seen mostly as something that freed them up to work on other problems. People preformed unplugged to prove they could still do music without the safties in place. Even as late as 1990, musicians remembered pseudo-bands such as the Monkees, and how they had worked to prove they weren't just actors, playing musicians, with variable success. Milli Vanilli showed that getting caught lip syncing was still something shameful.
Autotune doesn't compel this payoff in skill. Worse, it gives a payoff to a bad performer who is photogenic. It's part of a wider system which is mostly used to put people who look good on stage ahead of bland looking or unattractive musicians. Autotune deserves to be judged, not isolated on its own but as a mechanism of a wider system. People who didn't buy a Phoebe Snow album because they cared more about her weight than her voice are getting more of what they want now partly because of autotune. Totally tone deaf people can now judge performances by the person's skill as a dancer, or by their appearance, (or by their sex appeal), and can even proclaim someone a fine musician with the volume totally down, in part because of autotune.
Your argument is self proving - 'Autidorium' is spelled exactly as much like 'sanitorium' as you yourself intend, and if the two words seem close enough to you, who could dare dispute it with their very creator? I'm vleemmodic with eucompipulation at the addition of these two fine words to the English language.
I hope the analogy I'm going to offer isn't too simple. Not being a programmer doesn't make you stupid or anything, but I'm going to go to a very simple argument to respond, so, first off, that means nothing personal. .AVI or .MP3 and not a text file? You wouldn't store a pile of videotapes, or CDs, or LP records in a real manila folder! An already stressed analogy now becomes less useful and more strained.
A lot of concepts such as 'files', 'folders', 'desktops', and such just don't match very well with what actually goes on in a machine. Take the 'move' operation - unlike the analog world, you never really move a file into a folder or move a folder from one desktop to another. In a PC a 'move' is really a 'copy' followed by an 'erase'. If that process gets interrupted by a power loss, say, just when that happens greatly affects what you have to do to correct the problem. The 'good' copy could be on either machine, both, or neither.
In many architectures, an 'erase' isn't really an erase either, as the file is simply labeled as blank space, not necessarily overwritten.
So, analogies such as folders are necessarily only very rough analogies to start with. Now, what happens when the file you are putting in a symbolic folder is an
There are 'compartmentalizing' words that sometimes would fit better, such as calling your folders 'directories'. You could also draw a sharp distinction between data files and program files, by calling them programs and data, rather than using bulkier terms such as 'executable files' and 'non-executable files' that don't seem to work well, and so on. But, you'd have to change a lot of graphics too, for GUI users. Right now, Microsoft is still going to default to showing a sheaf of papers moving from one manila folder to another all too often.
The issue of the metaphors becoming antiquated isn't the core. Yes they are, but the core of it is the metaphors were already not a very good fit, even back when the typical file was text that could be printed to real world paper and fit in a real manila folder.
If there's any causal relationship, it could easily be the opposite, that is unrealistic violence in media might cause an increase in real world violence. For example, the 'Marshall Dillon' syndrome, where the heroes of TV shows always just get 'flesh wounds' and make full recoveries by next week's show, might encourage violence where showing more realistic results might deter it.
One suggestion some psychologists take pretty seriously is sometimes called the Die Hard effect. Media where fate (or God, or some supernatural seeming source), always seems to make the 'bad guys' come to an ending that seems ironically just, usually starting when the 'good guy' uses violence, might make for more real world violence, where ones that show how 'good guys' can lose, innocent bystanders be hit by stray bullets, etc, might deter it.
If there is something to either of these theories or some relatives of theirs, I, for one, don't see how the society could possibly write laws that could clearly differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' media depictions of violence. That seems to throw regulating games and films for minors back into the hands of their parents or guardians.
All the oxygen around seems to be already bound up in long duration coital pairs or three ways with hydrogen, except for some more promiscuous oxygen atoms linked in various, mostly downright orgiastic molecules, so stopping it from breeding seems like a long shot unless Oxygen atoms are naturally infertile.
There is something to prevent them prescreening all content, and its called the physical constraints of reality. That's not a flip answer BTW, that's actually established U.S. law - read on.
U.S. pornography cases during the 1950's included a number of cases against normally non-adult bookstores. When some of these cases involved books already determined to be obscene by 50's standards, but repackaged so there was little reason to suspect problems existed, a doctrine of physical limits of responsibility was established. In one of the major cases, a general bookstore was charged for distributing a book which had been classified as obscene, and was on a published list. The version they distributed was even in a Grove press paperback edition, with Grove a publisher widely known for sometimes printing obscene works (including such greats as Henry Miller).
However, the original cover, showing a nude photo (tastefully blurred and rather innocuous by modern standards), had been replaced by a shot of a mountainous landscape. The appellate court also noted that there was nothing in the title to suggest obscenity, and that checking for it on the technically published lists involved some real effort in seeking them out and reading through tens of thousands of entries written in fine point legalese. The court then held that it was not reasonable to require a bookstore to pay personnel what would amount to full time wages just to keep up with court decisions so as to avoid what were clearly occasional, inadvertent lapses. The appellate court, in fact, specified that in some cases, ignorance of the law was a legitimate excuse, where the ignorance was not willful and required substantial efforts and costs to mitigate.
A court could decide it is reasonable for a large company such as Google to pay some costs, such as a few full time salaried employees to screen content, but it cannot decide, in the face of cases such as this one, that it is reasonable to require either perfect compliance or unlimited spending to achieve it, Your last sentence is thus fallacious, in that taking responsibility doesn't mean they have to screen all content. If you want a more modern case supporting this conclusion, see the counterclaim brought in Jackson v. FCC, where Ms. Jackson's lawyers include claims based on this same principle.
Maybe, but most people genuinely want to 'play well with others', and many are smart enough to consider long term costs. People will tolerate small barriers so that they can "do the right thing", until the barriers become more severe (even if they don't all define the right thing exactly the same way). I'd submit that the high percentage of pirates doesn't reflect looser morals than in the past so much as it reflects increasing barriers.
For me, DRM is just one more. Getting money to the artist is doing the right thing, but getting it to the company that has decided the artist can't sign autographs except on their terms no longer is. Paying an increasing share for distribution while distribution costs are decreasing thanks to digital systems is a barrier. Being told I can't make a backup on content I bought is a barrier. EULAs are a barrier. Enough barriers, and gridlock occurs. People can be 'selfless' and want to pay the artist, they can be 'selfish', and still smart enough to realize they have to pay the artist if they want more works in the future, or they can even be 'selfish' and stupid, and the morality doesn't matter, gridlock still happens.
Right. The opposite of "People who pirate necessarily buy more too", is that there's no correlation. In other words, it would be "People who pirate don't generally buy more or less than people who don't.", or something like that. If it's impossible to prove that there's any causation for "people who pirate also buy more", then its also impossible to prove for "people who pirate buy less". The law assigning statutory damages in place of real ones for copyright violation is based on a causation argument, ergo, the industry is now claiming that causation only applies in court when it's in their favor. They ought to have to test that argument in front of SCOTUS.