Specifically, circumventing copyright protection. If the MPAA argued that this does NOT necessarily require making a PERMANENT (i.e. not just passing-through-memory) copy, and the court accepted the concept that a copy in memory is still a copy that doesn't fall under anything like fair use, then you might still be up the creek w/o a paddle.
Public libraries have specific exemptions for them under copyright law, and therefore you CANNOT use their behavior as an example unless you happen to be using this ONLY as a public library.
Use the US Code search engine; query for "libraries AND copyright"; and see 17 USC Sec. 108.
Perhaps they're worried that certain regions known to be rife with industrial-scale piracy might have entrepreneurs who'd cheerfully export pirated DVDs if they could? Now, they'd at least need the additional players (for testing purposes) and versions, and that might make it easier for investigating and tracking...
Unless you're simply tired of having a real machine crash when you could be crashing a virtual machine, or you're tweaking configurations and don't want to lose everything...
That's partly because our people don't care that much, and cheerfully ignore the documents we DO have.
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
Prohibition may have stopped at the Federal level, but its spirit lives on in a fairly warped way, with state liquor control boards and liquor licenses. Governments haven't exactly ignored the business from a regulatory perspective, especially when there's money to be made... if there's an angle here that benefits 'em, they'll probably check it out.
All the enlightened, open-minded, freedom-loving people would probably end up denounced as anarchists or kooks, while the more contented majority continues to digest reports about the dangers of the Internet.
I'm not kidding. I really don't see a lot of discontent out there, and what there is, often lies within relatively single-issue groups that as often as not hate each other's guts and likely will never unite. The NARAL, the NRA, and NORML, for instance, don't typically defend each other, and my suspicion is that the intersection between the three is close to nil.
What we see, for instance, is that most folks today consider the state of the union to be pretty good. They're happy. They're reasonably well-off. They're not openly at war, and the situations in Iraq and Kosovo are probably pretty far from their minds. Many seem willing to accept more restrictions on their rights -- in particular, on speech and firearms -- in return for (allegedly) security and safety, and dismiss any protests as extremism, and protesters as kooks. I doubt you'll see a mass uprising anytime soon.
Ummmm... MS isn't monolithic. That is, there are different groups within MS for various projects. The 'Office' group isn't often going to be working on the same code that the 'Home Entertainment' (or whatever it's name is) delves into, and so forth.
For most of the software engineers and such, they don't really work on multiple major projects at the same time IIRC. The bigger questions would deal with certain assets (like cash reserves, space...), and shared people (that aren't tied to one project, like HR folks, the lawyers, and senior management.)
Would he dare? Unless, say, Gore gets hit by a meteorite, Bush ain't going to be lucky enough to have an easy opponent. Whoever wins probably won't exactly have an overwhelming mandate to go nuts. Bush might make it easier for future mergers and such to go through, or perhaps ease off on other future anti-trust actions, but I don't know whether he has the chutzpah to tamper with a very, VERY public case.
a) An $8 *billion* dollar judgement against GM filed by distinctly non-rich people;
b) Microsoft -- one of the world's largest companies -- facing what looks to be a legal Afghanistan;
c) PM, RJR Reynolds and friends all being sued by multiple levels of government to the magnitude that the lawyer's fees alone exceed $1 billion;
d) S&W caving due to HUD repeatedly threatening to use its resources not to improve housing, but instead to sue, with the cooperation of every money-hungry mayor who sees an opportunity to demagogue;
e) The top marginal rate for personal income tax is 39.6%, versus 15% for the bottom.
That's funny. If the rich controlled everything, things would be a LOT different.
a) A US court can still enter a judgement, IIRC, which will matter if the programmers ever have assets within the US. I suspect it may matter if they enter (bodily), as well, but am not sure as it doesn't seem to be a criminal matter (yet).
b) Different countries have different arrangements. Italy, for instance, won't extradite suspects who would face the death penalty, and Israel has the Law of Return. Some nations simply won't cooperate at all, period. However, in many cases nations do cooperate, and may be obligated to do so by treaties...
Hm. O'er here, it depends a LOT on the course. In undergrad CS courses with TAs, they may have a bit of authority to change the scores they assigned. On the other hand, objective criteria mean that unless there was an inconsistency or other mistake, there's usually not a whole lot of grounds to argue for points.
Judging from the reviews of [Curzon-]Brown, at least some of the reviewers feel that [C-]B grades bizarrely, like penalizing a student for not using "pretty" instead of "beautiful". Odd.
At least in the US, truth is supposed to be a valid defense. Columnists can get off on reciting lists of the deceased associated with the Pres., even though it's tasteless and a bit cruel, as long as they don't step over the line and state (matter-of-factly) that he personally executed Vince Foster or something like that. And it apparently doesn't even need to be true, if it's obviously not meant to be taken seriously; if memory serves, it's darn hard to sue the _Weekly World News_ and such.
If memory serves, this is NOT the case in Canada, where spreading nasty-but-true rumors about, say, random MPs in print would be a BAD idea for legal reasons.
Where, exactly, is there a right for you to get what you want? Namely, that if no legal mechanism exists to do it (such as buying a single, online), why does using an illegal mechanism become *right* in your eyes?
Where, exactly, is there a right for you do get what you want? Namely, that if no legal mechanism exists to do it (such as buying a single, online), why does using an illegal mechanism become *right* in your eyes?
West End Games (defunct, IIRC) had a nice system in _Paranoia_ if clean mechanics are what you're looking for. It's so clean, players aren't supposed to know the rules.:)
Yeah. I was thinking that, if, say, radio were the method, then jamming might be a problem in the case of non-autonomous vehicles. Particularly if it allowed one to capture a unit intact, and there was anything that could be useful to the enemy, like recent Stealth technology.
If memory serves, there's been work here at Carnegie Mellon that's at least partly involved with some helicopter-ish drone, that can autonomously fly 'bout and land. So they're not completely clueless 'bout the issue.
Not only that... but there's a LOT lower political cost to losing a unmanned vehicle versus a manned one. The U.S. leadership tends to be *very* skittish about (U.S.) casualties, and if DARPA and friends develop better unmanned devices, it'll help avoid that issue.
And, it's hard to interrogate a machine for battle plans, as long as it doesn't store that information. Could be useful when going up against forces that don't exactly respect the Geneva Conventions.
Oh, more numbers. The NEA contributed $1,853,390 during that same cycle, 95% of it to Democrats. That's the PAC itself to Federal candidates, and doesn't count individual members donating on their own. That's almost UAW-scale of $1,915,460 for the same cycle (98% to Democrats). The aforementioned numbers all come from opensecrets.org, a VERY slow site...
In 1996, 40% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention came from the NEA, as reported in an Investor's Business Daily article.
Please don't claim that teachers do not have clout -- not if you want anybody to take you seriously.
They're not the only ones who can easily be involved in the alleged motivation of tenure, namely the threat of being removed due to controversy, but there are VERY few occupations where a position can be as safe as teaching, and where pay can be based on seniority alone. Merit-based pay is practically an unknown in the vocation, as well.
The American Federation of Teachers had 694,402 members in '97, according to my almanac. That's almost the size of the United Auto Workers (766,032), and more than the Communications Workers of America (503,558). Similarly with the NEA, with over 2.2 million members in 1995. Both unions send LARGE groups of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, accompanied by donations; in the 97-98 election cycle, the (smaller of the two) AFT PAC donated $1,415,400 to federal candidates, 98% of them Democratic.
*They have clout*. When you see the AFT spending its money opposing vouchers and merit-based pay instead of complaining about school supplies, that should tell you what their priorities are. This is NOT a weak union.
If you can ever mobilize 49% of the people in the right states, you've won, since there's almost no chance that *everybody* shows up. Well, at least in the US, where voting isn't mandatory and turnouts are fairly low. 'sides, you don't need a majority here, just a plurality in the Electoral College.
Guinier's position WAS racially-motivated, IIRC. Her proposal to give each voter multiple votes that they could distribute at will was based on the theory that self-perceived[*] minority voters would unite behind minority candidates, and vice versa... which is a remarkably ODD theory, because it supposes that qualifications and even party affiliation matter far less than race for most voters.
Italy? Oh my. Please, no. I LIKE not having the government collapsing and changing hands with alarming frequency, and considering that the US is huge, some stability is actually a good thing...
[*] Including areas where people normally considered minorities are actually the majority.
Yes. Techie issues... tend to be techie. I'd hate to marginalize myself by being in a party which concerns itself with only a few issues, as litmus tests and such annoy me to no end.
However, on those other issues, folks will be scattered all 'round. That's fine by me. As long as there's rational debate (heh! right...) and folks don't act juvenile 'coz they didn't get everything they asked for (um... on this planet?), disagreement is good.
I *hate* it when quotes surface like that of somebody saying, "I'm going to vote for Al Gore because I'm a good Democrat" (A real quote, from a primary voter.). Um... Bradley's a Democrat too. It's OK to consider disagreeing, and to actually bother to think about the issues. Since many of us have different value systems, we're going to disagree a LOT. That's fine by me.
The mainstream, according to the polls I've seen, is quite conservative, so Buchanan's probably closer to most than Nader.
Buchanan's been involved w/ the media before (as a _Crossfire_ member), and as a Presidential speechwriter and candidate before, so he's a darn public figure. I'm not surprised that journalists would take an interest in him, if only because they can conveniently demonize him at will for a story and almost everybody will know who they're talking about.
Because the Religious Right has numbers. BIG numbers. And they turn out to the polls. And, if they don't like you, there convictions might be ideological enough that they'll stay home on Election Day; after all, we're talking *religion* here and not some random schmo's favored issue of the week that's in his mind only 'coz he saw it mentioned on _Dateline_.
ISTR that in the Virginia GOP primary, and others, a good 30+% of the GOP voters labelled themselves as members of that group (although it was probably yes/no, and I don't have the exact phrasing). When an election is going to be close (many general elections having rather thin popular margins; after all, many people vote solely on the basis of party affiliation), you don't neglect 30% of your base unless you intend to lose. That's why they have MUCH more sway, than, say, the Log Cabin Republicans.
The Democratic equivalent of this would be Mr. Gore ignoring unions and accusing their leaders of corruption. In certain cases, he may be right, but it'd be STUPID, perhaps even to the degree that Mondale's pledging to raise taxes was honest but, er, not a game-winner.
Infilitrate MIS departments and convince companies NOT to buy the software? Get software reviewers to utterly pan it? Make it a complete and utter PR disaster for Mattel?
Hopefully, it qualifies as libel, but do they define the categories precisely? (e.g. might they claim that a 'Pornography' category would include sites that allow access to either porn or lists of links to porn, and that allowing the viewing of their list qualifies? Or do they label the category as only listing sites which host pornographic material?)
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Specifically, circumventing copyright protection. If the MPAA argued that this does NOT necessarily require making a PERMANENT (i.e. not just passing-through-memory) copy, and the court accepted the concept that a copy in memory is still a copy that doesn't fall under anything like fair use, then you might still be up the creek w/o a paddle.
Public libraries have specific exemptions for them under copyright law, and therefore you CANNOT use their behavior as an example unless you happen to be using this ONLY as a public library.
Use the US Code search engine; query for "libraries AND copyright"; and see 17 USC Sec. 108.
Perhaps they're worried that certain regions known to be rife with industrial-scale piracy might have entrepreneurs who'd cheerfully export pirated DVDs if they could? Now, they'd at least need the additional players (for testing purposes) and versions, and that might make it easier for investigating and tracking...
*cough*
Unless you're simply tired of having a real machine crash when you could be crashing a virtual machine, or you're tweaking configurations and don't want to lose everything...
*snort*
That's partly because our people don't care that much, and cheerfully ignore the documents we DO have.
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
-- President William J. Clinton, March 22, 1994
Prohibition may have stopped at the Federal level, but its spirit lives on in a fairly warped way, with state liquor control boards and liquor licenses. Governments haven't exactly ignored the business from a regulatory perspective, especially when there's money to be made... if there's an angle here that benefits 'em, they'll probably check it out.
All the enlightened, open-minded, freedom-loving people would probably end up denounced as anarchists or kooks, while the more contented majority continues to digest reports about the dangers of the Internet.
I'm not kidding. I really don't see a lot of discontent out there, and what there is, often lies within relatively single-issue groups that as often as not hate each other's guts and likely will never unite. The NARAL, the NRA, and NORML, for instance, don't typically defend each other, and my suspicion is that the intersection between the three is close to nil.
What we see, for instance, is that most folks today consider the state of the union to be pretty good. They're happy. They're reasonably well-off. They're not openly at war, and the situations in Iraq and Kosovo are probably pretty far from their minds. Many seem willing to accept more restrictions on their rights -- in particular, on speech and firearms -- in return for (allegedly) security and safety, and dismiss any protests as extremism, and protesters as kooks. I doubt you'll see a mass uprising anytime soon.
Ummmm... MS isn't monolithic. That is, there are different groups within MS for various projects. The 'Office' group isn't often going to be working on the same code that the 'Home Entertainment' (or whatever it's name is) delves into, and so forth.
For most of the software engineers and such, they don't really work on multiple major projects at the same time IIRC. The bigger questions would deal with certain assets (like cash reserves, space...), and shared people (that aren't tied to one project, like HR folks, the lawyers, and senior management.)
Would he dare? Unless, say, Gore gets hit by a meteorite, Bush ain't going to be lucky enough to have an easy opponent. Whoever wins probably won't exactly have an overwhelming mandate to go nuts. Bush might make it easier for future mergers and such to go through, or perhaps ease off on other future anti-trust actions, but I don't know whether he has the chutzpah to tamper with a very, VERY public case.
Explain how this is consistent with, say,
a) An $8 *billion* dollar judgement against GM filed by distinctly non-rich people;
b) Microsoft -- one of the world's largest companies -- facing what looks to be a legal Afghanistan;
c) PM, RJR Reynolds and friends all being sued by multiple levels of government to the magnitude that the lawyer's fees alone exceed $1 billion;
d) S&W caving due to HUD repeatedly threatening to use its resources not to improve housing, but instead to sue, with the cooperation of every money-hungry mayor who sees an opportunity to demagogue;
e) The top marginal rate for personal income tax is 39.6%, versus 15% for the bottom.
That's funny. If the rich controlled everything, things would be a LOT different.
Warning: IANAL.
But, as to jurisdiction:
a) A US court can still enter a judgement, IIRC, which will matter if the programmers ever have assets within the US. I suspect it may matter if they enter (bodily), as well, but am not sure as it doesn't seem to be a criminal matter (yet).
b) Different countries have different arrangements. Italy, for instance, won't extradite suspects who would face the death penalty, and Israel has the Law of Return. Some nations simply won't cooperate at all, period. However, in many cases nations do cooperate, and may be obligated to do so by treaties...
Hm. O'er here, it depends a LOT on the course. In undergrad CS courses with TAs, they may have a bit of authority to change the scores they assigned. On the other hand, objective criteria mean that unless there was an inconsistency or other mistake, there's usually not a whole lot of grounds to argue for points.
Judging from the reviews of [Curzon-]Brown, at least some of the reviewers feel that [C-]B grades bizarrely, like penalizing a student for not using "pretty" instead of "beautiful". Odd.
At least in the US, truth is supposed to be a valid defense. Columnists can get off on reciting lists of the deceased associated with the Pres., even though it's tasteless and a bit cruel, as long as they don't step over the line and state (matter-of-factly) that he personally executed Vince Foster or something like that. And it apparently doesn't even need to be true, if it's obviously not meant to be taken seriously; if memory serves, it's darn hard to sue the _Weekly World News_ and such.
If memory serves, this is NOT the case in Canada, where spreading nasty-but-true rumors about, say, random MPs in print would be a BAD idea for legal reasons.
*blinks*
Where, exactly, is there a right for you to get what you want? Namely, that if no legal mechanism exists to do it (such as buying a single, online), why does using an illegal mechanism become *right* in your eyes?
*blinks*
Where, exactly, is there a right for you do get what you want? Namely, that if no legal mechanism exists to do it (such as buying a single, online), why does using an illegal mechanism become *right* in your eyes?
West End Games (defunct, IIRC) had a nice system in _Paranoia_ if clean mechanics are what you're looking for. It's so clean, players aren't supposed to know the rules. :)
Of course, it's not your typical RPG...
Yeah. I was thinking that, if, say, radio were the method, then jamming might be a problem in the case of non-autonomous vehicles. Particularly if it allowed one to capture a unit intact, and there was anything that could be useful to the enemy, like recent Stealth technology.
If memory serves, there's been work here at Carnegie Mellon that's at least partly involved with some helicopter-ish drone, that can autonomously fly 'bout and land. So they're not completely clueless 'bout the issue.
Not only that... but there's a LOT lower political cost to losing a unmanned vehicle versus a manned one. The U.S. leadership tends to be *very* skittish about (U.S.) casualties, and if DARPA and friends develop better unmanned devices, it'll help avoid that issue.
And, it's hard to interrogate a machine for battle plans, as long as it doesn't store that information. Could be useful when going up against forces that don't exactly respect the Geneva Conventions.
Oh, more numbers. The NEA contributed $1,853,390 during that same cycle, 95% of it to Democrats. That's the PAC itself to Federal candidates, and doesn't count individual members donating on their own. That's almost UAW-scale of $1,915,460 for the same cycle (98% to Democrats). The aforementioned numbers all come from opensecrets.org, a VERY slow site...
In 1996, 40% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention came from the NEA, as reported in an Investor's Business Daily article.
Please don't claim that teachers do not have clout -- not if you want anybody to take you seriously.
Tenure.
They're not the only ones who can easily be involved in the alleged motivation of tenure, namely the threat of being removed due to controversy, but there are VERY few occupations where a position can be as safe as teaching, and where pay can be based on seniority alone. Merit-based pay is practically an unknown in the vocation, as well.
The American Federation of Teachers had 694,402 members in '97, according to my almanac. That's almost the size of the United Auto Workers (766,032), and more than the Communications Workers of America (503,558). Similarly with the NEA, with over 2.2 million members in 1995. Both unions send LARGE groups of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, accompanied by donations; in the 97-98 election cycle, the (smaller of the two) AFT PAC donated $1,415,400 to federal candidates, 98% of them Democratic.
*They have clout*. When you see the AFT spending its money opposing vouchers and merit-based pay instead of complaining about school supplies, that should tell you what their priorities are. This is NOT a weak union.
If you can ever mobilize 49% of the people in the right states, you've won, since there's almost no chance that *everybody* shows up. Well, at least in the US, where voting isn't mandatory and turnouts are fairly low. 'sides, you don't need a majority here, just a plurality in the Electoral College.
Guinier's position WAS racially-motivated, IIRC. Her proposal to give each voter multiple votes that they could distribute at will was based on the theory that self-perceived[*] minority voters would unite behind minority candidates, and vice versa... which is a remarkably ODD theory, because it supposes that qualifications and even party affiliation matter far less than race for most voters.
Italy? Oh my. Please, no. I LIKE not having the government collapsing and changing hands with alarming frequency, and considering that the US is huge, some stability is actually a good thing...
[*] Including areas where people normally considered minorities are actually the majority.
Yes. Techie issues... tend to be techie. I'd hate to marginalize myself by being in a party which concerns itself with only a few issues, as litmus tests and such annoy me to no end.
However, on those other issues, folks will be scattered all 'round. That's fine by me. As long as there's rational debate (heh! right...) and folks don't act juvenile 'coz they didn't get everything they asked for (um... on this planet?), disagreement is good.
I *hate* it when quotes surface like that of somebody saying, "I'm going to vote for Al Gore because I'm a good Democrat" (A real quote, from a primary voter.). Um... Bradley's a Democrat too. It's OK to consider disagreeing, and to actually bother to think about the issues. Since many of us have different value systems, we're going to disagree a LOT. That's fine by me.
The mainstream, according to the polls I've seen, is quite conservative, so Buchanan's probably closer to most than Nader.
Buchanan's been involved w/ the media before (as a _Crossfire_ member), and as a Presidential speechwriter and candidate before, so he's a darn public figure. I'm not surprised that journalists would take an interest in him, if only because they can conveniently demonize him at will for a story and almost everybody will know who they're talking about.
Because the Religious Right has numbers. BIG numbers. And they turn out to the polls. And, if they don't like you, there convictions might be ideological enough that they'll stay home on Election Day; after all, we're talking *religion* here and not some random schmo's favored issue of the week that's in his mind only 'coz he saw it mentioned on _Dateline_.
ISTR that in the Virginia GOP primary, and others, a good 30+% of the GOP voters labelled themselves as members of that group (although it was probably yes/no, and I don't have the exact phrasing). When an election is going to be close (many general elections having rather thin popular margins; after all, many people vote solely on the basis of party affiliation), you don't neglect 30% of your base unless you intend to lose. That's why they have MUCH more sway, than, say, the Log Cabin Republicans.
The Democratic equivalent of this would be Mr. Gore ignoring unions and accusing their leaders of corruption. In certain cases, he may be right, but it'd be STUPID, perhaps even to the degree that Mondale's pledging to raise taxes was honest but, er, not a game-winner.
Numbers matter.
Infilitrate MIS departments and convince companies NOT to buy the software? Get software reviewers to utterly pan it? Make it a complete and utter PR disaster for Mattel?
Hopefully, it qualifies as libel, but do they define the categories precisely? (e.g. might they claim that a 'Pornography' category would include sites that allow access to either porn or lists of links to porn, and that allowing the viewing of their list qualifies? Or do they label the category as only listing sites which host pornographic material?)