The problem is due to whoever has been deciding how to do the record keeping for the Indian Land Trust, not only recently but for decades. Although BIA employees a lot of Indians, they haven't generally been in the most powerful positions, so I don't know if any of them have been the ones making these decisions. But what if they have? It's not like they were representing their tribes or the individual Indians to whom royalties are owed. Nobody is claiming that all whites are bad and all Indians are good.
Before somebody claims that Judge Lamberth is some kind of left wing judicial activist, let me point out that he served in the JAG corps, including one year in Vietnam and then as a prosecutor until he was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987. There he endeared himself to the Republicans by his rulings against the Clintons.
This is not a case of a judge gratuitously injecting himself into computer security.
This situation arose when Indians sued for royalties held in the Indian Land Trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is part of the Interior Department. During the suit, it turned out that the problem was not just that they weren't getting paid, but that BIA's record-keeping was woefully inadequate. Just figuring out what the plaintiffs were owed proved to be a huge problem. Judge Lamberth ordered the BIA disconnected because court-appointed experts had hacked into the BIA and found the Indian trust fund records to be insecure.
Of course, it isn't only external threats that are a concern. BIA is so incompetent or malicious that they are reported to have deleted their backup tapes. Judge Lamberth was so appalled that he threatened to jail the Secretary of the Interior for contempt of court. The government eventually got him removed on the dubious grounds that he was biased against the government, the only evidence of which was his well justified criticism BIA.
If the errors are as large as it seems they were, wouldn't one or more human analysts
notice? When your software says "Buy SCO" you should know that something is wrong.
Being detained by customs does not give you a criminal record. If you're a non-citizen, it may indeed cause trouble in entering the country again. To get
a criminal record, you must be tried and convicted of a crime.
The problem is that predators usually are not restricted to a single kind of
prey, so they will not only control the organism you want to get rid of but
prey on indigenous species that you don't want it to. A case in point is the rabbit problem in New Zealand, which has no indigenous mammals. Introducing predators such as foxes or coyotes is not an acceptable solution because they will also eat the various species of flightless birds. Even when there is a specialized predator, it is very difficult to be sure that it will stay specialized.
You need to read more carefully. The quotation about Muslims breeding like mosquitos comes from a Norwegian imam who was bragging about how rapidly his community is growing. Steyn is not quoting another critic of Islam in order to hide behind him, he is quoting a proponent of Islam as evidence of the views and intentions of Muslims.
McLeans has no obligation to publish material they believe to be false. This does not violate freedom of speech since McLeans is not a government publication or a common carrier and since there are numerous other outlets for contrary views. Moreover, McLeans published numerous letters in response to the article, from Muslims and non-Muslims, taking a wide variety of positions. It isn't true that the Canadian Islamic Congress had no opportunity to respond. What they didn't get is the right to publish their own piece in McLeans, something they didn't even ask for until five months after Steyn's article was published, and which they demanded along with monetary "compensation" for the alleged injury done to them. Their demands are absurd.
Furthermore, it is not true that the reason for the complaint against Steyn is that McLeans will not print a rebuttal. That plays no role whatever in the case and is of no significance to what the Human Rights Tribunal will rule. That issue only entered the case when the Canadian Islamic Congress offered to withdraw its complaint if McLeans would publish a rebuttal by an author they approved of.
I now think that the ordinance is valid. On closer reading, prompted by a colleague, this ordinance actually has to do with trademark, not copyright. That is, what it deals with is the sale of falsely marked goods, not copyright violation per se.
It doesn't apply to someone offering or downloading a song or movie both because no sale is involved and because they aren't falsely marked. What it applies to is the case in which someone creates their own copies of a movie, labels them like the authorized DVDs, and puts them up for sale. The preemption clause in 17 US 301(a) is specific to copyright infringement and does not apply to counterfeiting/trademark violation.
US federal copyright law explicitly preempts state copyright laws. I suspect therefore that this ordinance is invalid. (Cities, counties, etc. are delegated their powers by the state, so the fact that this is a county ordinance not a state law makes no difference, I don't think.) Any lawyers out there want to confirm or deny this?
I wish that the OO folks would improve the HTML that it exports. It is way too verbose, hard to read and modify, and because it uses so much low-level presentation markup, stylesheets have little effect on it. It also doesn't correspond as well as it should to the
document as rendered by Writer or to what the PDF output looks like.
Hear! Hear! I understand that one market is people used to MS Windows, but too much adherence to Microsoft's way of doing things interferes with usability for people like me who know and prefer a Unix environment. The most irritating thing about OO for me is the way file selection works. A file selection dialog should default to the directory in which I started the program. I just hate it when I go to the directory where I keep the files for a certain purpose, start up OOWriter, and get a listing of my home directory, from which I have to laboriously dig back down to the right directory. And then if I'm not careful it may want to save files in my home directory too.
I once asked the lords of slashdot about this. The answer was that the use of non-ascii characters is severely restricted for fear that people would deface the site by using characters such as the direction codes. It seems to me that this is overly restrictive and that the software could just filter the small set of characters likely to cause trouble, but they seem to feel that it is better to be more cautious.
Yes, but if the only real issue is trademark and the issuer of the takedown notice does not own the copyright to the material, issuing a takedown notice is a crime. They are issued under penalty of perjury. So if you just don't like the name because you think it violates your trademark, issuing a takedown notice is not a good idea.
Anybody can send anybody a bill. Sending a bill does not create an obligation to pay it. In the absence of legislation creating a duty to pay for such searches, Mrs. Fossett can simply ignore the bill. In cases like the runaway bride, I believe that the basis for her paying is that her behavior constituted a crime for which the court makes her pay restitution.
Yes, Knopf likes classical music and doesn't like pop, but that's a side issue. He mentions it on his blog, but it has nothing to do with the main issues he discusses concerning copyright. As far as copyright goes, he isn't extreme at all. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright or anything really radical. Much of what he does is just point out the facts. The talk that he was going to give is on the same topic as a recent post in which he pointed out various ways in which Canadian copyright law is actually stronger than US copyright law, contrary to the US propaganda. I've seen no substantive response to his points. Indeed, the highly respected Michael Geist recently pointed out that according to the far from radical World Economic Forum, Canada ranks well above the US in its adherence to and enforcement of copyright norms.
I don't disagree with you. I think that the RIAA's approach is ridiculous. My point is that that isn't what the decision addressed. All it talks about is the question of whether the subpoena imposes an excessive burden on the university.
Unless I have missed something, the magistrate judge's opinion is not based on the idea that the RIAA "merely wants to talk to" the students. Where does it say that?
Curiously, the magistrate judge's opinion does not even address the central issue, of whether the RIAA's evidence is sufficient to support the subpoena. It is devoted entirely to the question of whether the subpoena imposes an excessive burden on the university. His ruling that the university's burden is not great because it is merely required to produced the names of the students associated with the IP addresses, not to determine who was using the machines at the times of the alleged infringement,appears to be correct.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is due to whoever has been deciding how to do the record keeping for the Indian Land Trust, not only recently but for decades. Although BIA employees a lot of Indians, they haven't generally been in the most powerful positions, so I don't know if any of them have been the ones making these decisions. But what if they have? It's not like they were representing their tribes or the individual Indians to whom royalties are owed. Nobody is claiming that all whites are bad and all Indians are good.
Before somebody claims that Judge Lamberth is some kind of left wing judicial activist, let me point out that he served in the JAG corps, including one year in Vietnam and then as a prosecutor until he was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987. There he endeared himself to the Republicans by his rulings against the Clintons.
Here is his official biography and here is the wikipedia article about him.
This is not a case of a judge gratuitously injecting himself into computer security. This situation arose when Indians sued for royalties held in the Indian Land Trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is part of the Interior Department. During the suit, it turned out that the problem was not just that they weren't getting paid, but that BIA's record-keeping was woefully inadequate. Just figuring out what the plaintiffs were owed proved to be a huge problem. Judge Lamberth ordered the BIA disconnected because court-appointed experts had hacked into the BIA and found the Indian trust fund records to be insecure.
Of course, it isn't only external threats that are a concern. BIA is so incompetent or malicious that they are reported to have deleted their backup tapes. Judge Lamberth was so appalled that he threatened to jail the Secretary of the Interior for contempt of court. The government eventually got him removed on the dubious grounds that he was biased against the government, the only evidence of which was his well justified criticism BIA.
If the errors are as large as it seems they were, wouldn't one or more human analysts notice? When your software says "Buy SCO" you should know that something is wrong.
Being detained by customs does not give you a criminal record. If you're a non-citizen, it may indeed cause trouble in entering the country again. To get a criminal record, you must be tried and convicted of a crime.
The problem is that predators usually are not restricted to a single kind of prey, so they will not only control the organism you want to get rid of but prey on indigenous species that you don't want it to. A case in point is the rabbit problem in New Zealand, which has no indigenous mammals. Introducing predators such as foxes or coyotes is not an acceptable solution because they will also eat the various species of flightless birds. Even when there is a specialized predator, it is very difficult to be sure that it will stay specialized.
You need to read more carefully. The quotation about Muslims breeding like mosquitos comes from a Norwegian imam who was bragging about how rapidly his community is growing. Steyn is not quoting another critic of Islam in order to hide behind him, he is quoting a proponent of Islam as evidence of the views and intentions of Muslims.
McLeans has no obligation to publish material they believe to be false. This does not violate freedom of speech since McLeans is not a government publication or a common carrier and since there are numerous other outlets for contrary views. Moreover, McLeans published numerous letters in response to the article, from Muslims and non-Muslims, taking a wide variety of positions. It isn't true that the Canadian Islamic Congress had no opportunity to respond. What they didn't get is the right to publish their own piece in McLeans, something they didn't even ask for until five months after Steyn's article was published, and which they demanded along with monetary "compensation" for the alleged injury done to them. Their demands are absurd.
Furthermore, it is not true that the reason for the complaint against Steyn is that McLeans will not print a rebuttal. That plays no role whatever in the case and is of no significance to what the Human Rights Tribunal will rule. That issue only entered the case when the Canadian Islamic Congress offered to withdraw its complaint if McLeans would publish a rebuttal by an author they approved of.
I now think that the ordinance is valid. On closer reading, prompted by a colleague, this ordinance actually has to do with trademark, not copyright. That is, what it deals with is the sale of falsely marked goods, not copyright violation per se. It doesn't apply to someone offering or downloading a song or movie both because no sale is involved and because they aren't falsely marked. What it applies to is the case in which someone creates their own copies of a movie, labels them like the authorized DVDs, and puts them up for sale. The preemption clause in 17 US 301(a) is specific to copyright infringement and does not apply to counterfeiting/trademark violation.
US federal copyright law explicitly preempts state copyright laws. I suspect therefore that this ordinance is invalid. (Cities, counties, etc. are delegated their powers by the state, so the fact that this is a county ordinance not a state law makes no difference, I don't think.) Any lawyers out there want to confirm or deny this?
Interesting. My wine is 0.9.30. I guess 3d-level release numbers for wine are not just bugfixes.
Just in case you're tempted, I tried it under Wine. The installer ran fine, but the game itself doesn't work.
According to this item at the German Linux Magazine, Skype has withdrawn its appeal.
I wish that the OO folks would improve the HTML that it exports. It is way too verbose, hard to read and modify, and because it uses so much low-level presentation markup, stylesheets have little effect on it. It also doesn't correspond as well as it should to the document as rendered by Writer or to what the PDF output looks like.
Hear! Hear! I understand that one market is people used to MS Windows, but too much adherence to Microsoft's way of doing things interferes with usability for people like me who know and prefer a Unix environment. The most irritating thing about OO for me is the way file selection works. A file selection dialog should default to the directory in which I started the program. I just hate it when I go to the directory where I keep the files for a certain purpose, start up OOWriter, and get a listing of my home directory, from which I have to laboriously dig back down to the right directory. And then if I'm not careful it may want to save files in my home directory too.
I once asked the lords of slashdot about this. The answer was that the use of non-ascii characters is severely restricted for fear that people would deface the site by using characters such as the direction codes. It seems to me that this is overly restrictive and that the software could just filter the small set of characters likely to cause trouble, but they seem to feel that it is better to be more cautious.
Yes, but if the only real issue is trademark and the issuer of the takedown notice does not own the copyright to the material, issuing a takedown notice is a crime. They are issued under penalty of perjury. So if you just don't like the name because you think it violates your trademark, issuing a takedown notice is not a good idea.
The embargo is on commerce with Cuba. Mere communication with Cuba is not illegal.
Anybody can send anybody a bill. Sending a bill does not create an obligation to pay it. In the absence of legislation creating a duty to pay for such searches, Mrs. Fossett can simply ignore the bill. In cases like the runaway bride, I believe that the basis for her paying is that her behavior constituted a crime for which the court makes her pay restitution.
Yes, Knopf likes classical music and doesn't like pop, but that's a side issue. He mentions it on his blog, but it has nothing to do with the main issues he discusses concerning copyright. As far as copyright goes, he isn't extreme at all. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright or anything really radical. Much of what he does is just point out the facts. The talk that he was going to give is on the same topic as a recent post in which he pointed out various ways in which Canadian copyright law is actually stronger than US copyright law, contrary to the US propaganda. I've seen no substantive response to his points. Indeed, the highly respected Michael Geist recently pointed out that according to the far from radical World Economic Forum, Canada ranks well above the US in its adherence to and enforcement of copyright norms.
I don't disagree with you. I think that the RIAA's approach is ridiculous. My point is that that isn't what the decision addressed. All it talks about is the question of whether the subpoena imposes an excessive burden on the university.
Unless I have missed something, the magistrate judge's opinion is not based on the idea that the RIAA "merely wants to talk to" the students. Where does it say that?
Curiously, the magistrate judge's opinion does not even address the central issue, of whether the RIAA's evidence is sufficient to support the subpoena. It is devoted entirely to the question of whether the subpoena imposes an excessive burden on the university. His ruling that the university's burden is not great because it is merely required to produced the names of the students associated with the IP addresses, not to determine who was using the machines at the times of the alleged infringement,appears to be correct.
And, at least in California, talking to the janitor is likely to be a good opportunity to practice your Spanish.
Yes, that's true. I forgot that the 19th Amendment explicitly applied to the states.
Nice exposition. One further detail: a state can be sued in state court for violation of its own constitution.