Example- I break in your house to steal silverware, and find 100 pot plants. I report it to the police. Yes, I am guilty of burglary, but the police would still have probable cause to search your living room!!! (aside from the fact that a burgular may not be a trustworthy informant).
Yes. Police may have probable cause to get a warrant before searching your house. But they can't just break into your house on a burglar's say-so (unless, say, you were strangling someone to death with said plants).
Like others pointed out, you drop of a roll of film, your car, your suit (dry cleaning), etc. to a 3rd party, you have ZERO expectation of privacy anymore.
If I drop off a roll of film, of course every picture on it is "in plain sight". But if I drop my car off to rotate the tires, I don't expect them to go through my locked glove compartment.
If I drop off my computer to the shop for them to repair my DVD drive, I don't expect them to be looking through every file on my hard drive. They shouldn't need to go through any of it other than enough to boot up and see that the device works.
Otherwise, people have to get into the habit of removing their hard drives before ever taking the computer in for servicing. For one, this is not feasible for certain monolithic case designs, or for people who are not computer-savvy. For another, if the problem is "it won't boot", the hard drive itself may be necessary for diagnosing the problem.
Judges usually give you more leniency if you bought stuff in good faith and just couldn't pay for it in the end. I would think they'd be less sympathetic if it could be proven that you bought something KNOWING that you would not have the money to pay, since that's tantamount to fraud.
In theory, a judge could demand that a given copyright/license violator comply with the licence they broke. In this case, it would be SCO and the GPL. It's highly unlikely, particularly if SCO argued that they would effectively be out of business if they did this, however this scenario could happen.
Since when does someone's inability to sustain a viaable business model by adhering to a contract, absolve him of the responsibility of doing so?
If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit, and then can't pay for it, can I tell the judge to let me off because paying my bills will make me go bankrupt?
There was a similar article in June about uniquely identifying Torah scrolls to discourage theft. This relied on inter-character gaps, paper tears, etc. to generate a unique document signature.
B&W2 looks cool...but this presents me (and a few others out there) with a problem... It's published by EA. How am I supposed to boycott EA and buy B&W2 at the same time:/
Westley to Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride: "Have you ever considered piracy?"
As to you Slashdot-robots who are screaming how Telus is wrong for censoring, open your mind and tell me how you would react if it was YOUR network staff who's safety was being threatened. Hell, half of you were glad when that spammer was murdered, imagine if someone actually THREATENED your staff.
Well, considering that their ban will ONLY protect their network staff from Telus customers and nobody else, it's a pretty shoddy security measure. It owuld be far more effective to go to a judge to get an injunction against the site itself, and possibly file a lawsuit (assuming, of course that judge would buy their arguments).
My point was that if there is an exploit that permits duping of items (in this case, money), the serial numbers aren't enough. How often have you gone into a store to spend a $100 bill, and had the clerk look the serial number up in a national database to make sure that the same serial number hasn't already been spent?
You could fix this problem (say) by having authenticating RFID cards for every [valuable] bill in your wallet, but once you have to start carrying physical objects around to authenticate the values of virtual objects, why not just use physical objects with value (like gold coins) in the first place?
Can you imagine carrying a USB dongle (or RFID smart card) in your pocket for every individual dollar bill in your wallet?:) Might as well go back to using real physical gold coins for everything:)
Most gamers of games such as MMORPGs aren't casual gamers due to the amount of time necessary to level, obtain items, complete quests and acquire the necessary in-game knowledge to actually enjoy these games. Therefore, the word addiction comes to mind and you won't leave no matter how much you bitch about rollbacks.
Similar effects happen in single-player RPGs as well, perhaps to a lesser extent.
I tend to play a lot of games, and might even be considered an addict, but I find that frustration of being forced to do re-do things is enuogh to make me abandon one game (which has caused me needless frustration) and pick up a new one.
Most RPGs I have abandoned in tbe past (before completion, or at least getting to the final undefeatable boss) have been as a result of "rollbacks" - being forced to to undo several games of gameplay (or worse, having to start from scratch) because of a bug in the game engine, flaw in the plot, or some critical item that can only be obtained at one point in the game but which it is easy to overlook.
It is very frustrating to play a game, build up a charcter, taking copious notes, including a list of things to do, then cross them off the list, only to find that you must later restore from a backup several days earlier, in which many of the "already done" tasks must now be done again, and it's difficult to remember which (and if you happen to forget one, and remember it later, you may have to roll back yet again).
This was, in fact, why I abandoned Final Fantasy VII when I first played it. I had gotten about 1/4 of the way through, but missed something, so I rolled back about a day and continued - in doing so, I missed a vital item that I had gotten the first time around, but missed the second time (and which you had only one opportunity to get). I didn't notice for about 3 days, and would have been forced to roll back yet again. I just got disgusted with it and dropped it, and didn't pick it up again until just this year.
This is easy to do for items (especially rare ones). It's much harder to do for things like gold, unless you want a unique ID for every single gold coin in the universe.
You could do that, but they would likely have some "standard" sentence length for billing purposes. After all, when typing, one "word" is considered five characters, EvenIfYouTypeStuffThatLooksLikeThis.
What makes art valuable is not the instantiation of it, but the concept behind it. When someone writes a book, the value is not in writing the words down on paper, but in arranging the words into the correct order in the first place. If I spend years labouring over writing a book, is it right that someone else with a printing press should profit from printing it just as much as I do from my own printing press? If so, then writers will work for next to nothing, and publishers will grow rich (which is basically how things work now). Is this right?
If all the rewards come from providing content rather than creating it, what incentive does the artist have to bother creating it?
Yes, as the great advances in ways of disseminating art made the lives of artists more miserable... say what?! You mean now that they can make their creations available to many, many more people then before, it puts them at a disadvantage? I was under the impression that artists cared about spreading their art as far and as wide as possible, and that it was this dissemination of their art which drove them to create in the first place, no?
But see my previous point: In the past, an artist could paint a painting, get paid for it, and use the money to live off while he made his next painting. Now, an artis (say, n musician) can make some music, it goes all over the net via p2p, but he earns nothing from that, so instead of spending his time creating more music, he has to take a 9-5 to put food on the table, which means he creates LESS art than he would have under the old system.
That is fine if you like the preinstalled setup. But usually I dislike a few things about how the shop has set it up. Which ends with me reinstalling the machine anyway. So option 2) would cost me $400 for the hardware plus 8 hours of time.
This is of course true for someone doing their own custom setup (I do this myself all the time). But I'm speaking mostly about people who use computers as appliances, who either have to hire somebody else to do it for them, or manage to corner a geeky brother/cousin/friend to do it for them. Now in such a case, you can spend 8 hours billing clients $50/hour while Mom buys a brand new off-the-shelf machine (and gives you a new server box you can play with), or you can spend those 8 hours reformatting Mom's hard drive and reinstalling Windows. Which would you prefer?
The thing I'm dying to know is, if your time is worth $50/hour to you, why the heck are you using a $400 PC? And why are you not protecting it properly in the first place?
Well, that is certainly true:) But I was thinking more about the cost that a computer-challenged person would have to pay someone else to do so for them.
Surely you could at least just reformat the harddrive?
Throwing out the whole PC seems a bit excessive..
Reformat the hard drive. AND re-install the operating system. AND the virus scanner. AND the applications. AND download the patches.
What is your time worth? Whenever I install a new system from scratch, it takes me about a day to get it the way I want it. If time is worth $50/hour, 8 hours of time alone is $400. So one is left with two choices:
1) spend $400 in labour to fix the box, or
2) spend $400 to buy a totally new box (in which case they can give the old one to their geek nephew to wipe clean and install Linux on).
Computers have gotten sufficiently cheap and prevalent these days that many people treat them as appliances, much like typewriters were 30 years ago. Whenever my VCR breaks down, I just spend $80 to buy a new one, rather than $100 to repair the old one. Have you ever taken a toaster to a repair shop?
Back in the '70s, National Lampoon had an article that was a magazine parody called "Popular Workbench". In it was a career ad promising "Earn big $$$ in transistor repair". Even at tht time, the notion was absurd - when individual transistors cost less than a dollar, repairing them was totally cost-ineffective.
In case you did not notice, all the art before the age of copyright and even long after (as copyright did not apply to music and paintings for a long time) was produced this way.
Yes, and most of the artists in this era were paupers, because it's hard to devote your life to art and at the same time hold a 9-to-5 job to support yourself and your family, unless you happen to be lucky enough to find a patron. Much of the art we consider great today came from artists who did it for the love of art, without any such third-party support.
Heaven forbid someone should choose to economize the short time he has available to him by combining the two processes, so that he can use his art to also generate money, so that he doesn't have to spend most of his free time doing something else - which allows him to devote more time to his art. This used to be a lot easier in the days before the printing press and the photocopier and the internet.
"(B) No person shall cause the death of another as a proximate result of the offender's committing or attempting to commit an offense of violence that is a felony of the first or second degree "
(Ohio Rev. Code 2903.02)
In other words, if your commission of a felony promixately caused the death of another, you're guilty of murder.
Actually, from reading that statute, it sounds like Ohio only considers it such if the felony is violent. So if, say, you evade taxes and that makes your accountant jump out a window, it isn't felony murder. Simiarly, I don't know anywhere that considers pressing a few keys to be an act of violence per se.
Right. And one trip-over-the-power cord, or one BSOD crash, or one local power failure (if you aren't running a UPS) and all your data is toast.
On the other hand, you had better hope your machine is powered up when the cops arrive, or else your data will be embarrasingly visible.
My guess is you're too active. To get to moderate, you have to be somewhere midway between the very active users and the very inactive users. This is explained in the FAQ, in the part about moderating.
Please forgive me for seeming dense, but could you tell me which section title this is under?
I read the FAQ sections on "Comments and Moderation" and also "Meta-moderation" twice today, earlier this afternoon, and again after reading this post, and have been unable to find any mention of this. I also did a text search of both section and could not even find the word "active" anywhere.
I have heard one other person make a similar comment somewhere a while back, but seemed to be an educated guess becasue it did not refer to any specific "official" documentation)
I'm also not sure just what "active" means with regards to the software. I metamoderate 3 times daily, but otherwise rarely post (other than an occasional follow-up).
Slashdot Mirror
Example- I break in your house to steal silverware, and find 100 pot plants. I report it to the police. Yes, I am guilty of burglary, but the police would still have probable cause to search your living room!!! (aside from the fact that a burgular may not be a trustworthy informant).
Yes. Police may have probable cause to get a warrant before searching your house. But they can't just break into your house on a burglar's say-so (unless, say, you were strangling someone to death with said plants).
Like others pointed out, you drop of a roll of film, your car, your suit (dry cleaning), etc. to a 3rd party, you have ZERO expectation of privacy anymore.
If I drop off a roll of film, of course every picture on it is "in plain sight". But if I drop my car off to rotate the tires, I don't expect them to go through my locked glove compartment.
If I drop off my computer to the shop for them to repair my DVD drive, I don't expect them to be looking through every file on my hard drive. They shouldn't need to go through any of it other than enough to boot up and see that the device works.
Otherwise, people have to get into the habit of removing their hard drives before ever taking the computer in for servicing. For one, this is not feasible for certain monolithic case designs, or for people who are not computer-savvy. For another, if the problem is "it won't boot", the hard drive itself may be necessary for diagnosing the problem.
Judges usually give you more leniency if you bought stuff in good faith and just couldn't pay for it in the end. I would think they'd be less sympathetic if it could be proven that you bought something KNOWING that you would not have the money to pay, since that's tantamount to fraud.
In theory, a judge could demand that a given copyright/license violator comply with the licence they broke. In this case, it would be SCO and the GPL. It's highly unlikely, particularly if SCO argued that they would effectively be out of business if they did this, however this scenario could happen.
Since when does someone's inability to sustain a viaable business model by adhering to a contract, absolve him of the responsibility of doing so?
If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit, and then can't pay for it, can I tell the judge to let me off because paying my bills will make me go bankrupt?
There was a similar article in June about uniquely identifying Torah scrolls to discourage theft. This relied on inter-character gaps, paper tears, etc. to generate a unique document signature.
B&W2 looks cool...but this presents me (and a few others out there) with a problem... It's published by EA. How am I supposed to boycott EA and buy B&W2 at the same time :/
Westley to Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride: "Have you ever considered piracy?"
As to you Slashdot-robots who are screaming how Telus is wrong for censoring, open your mind and tell me how you would react if it was YOUR network staff who's safety was being threatened. Hell, half of you were glad when that spammer was murdered, imagine if someone actually THREATENED your staff.
Well, considering that their ban will ONLY protect their network staff from Telus customers and nobody else, it's a pretty shoddy security measure. It owuld be far more effective to go to a judge to get an injunction against the site itself, and possibly file a lawsuit (assuming, of course that judge would buy their arguments).
What makes you think you don't have an RFID tag in each dollar bill?
Oh right, I saw this somewhere before, but had forgotten about it. Frightening stuff.
My point was that if there is an exploit that permits duping of items (in this case, money), the serial numbers aren't enough. How often have you gone into a store to spend a $100 bill, and had the clerk look the serial number up in a national database to make sure that the same serial number hasn't already been spent? You could fix this problem (say) by having authenticating RFID cards for every [valuable] bill in your wallet, but once you have to start carrying physical objects around to authenticate the values of virtual objects, why not just use physical objects with value (like gold coins) in the first place?
Can you imagine carrying a USB dongle (or RFID smart card) in your pocket for every individual dollar bill in your wallet? :) Might as well go back to using real physical gold coins for everything :)
Most gamers of games such as MMORPGs aren't casual gamers due to the amount of time necessary to level, obtain items, complete quests and acquire the necessary in-game knowledge to actually enjoy these games. Therefore, the word addiction comes to mind and you won't leave no matter how much you bitch about rollbacks.
Similar effects happen in single-player RPGs as well, perhaps to a lesser extent.
I tend to play a lot of games, and might even be considered an addict, but I find that frustration of being forced to do re-do things is enuogh to make me abandon one game (which has caused me needless frustration) and pick up a new one.
Most RPGs I have abandoned in tbe past (before completion, or at least getting to the final undefeatable boss) have been as a result of "rollbacks" - being forced to to undo several games of gameplay (or worse, having to start from scratch) because of a bug in the game engine, flaw in the plot, or some critical item that can only be obtained at one point in the game but which it is easy to overlook.
It is very frustrating to play a game, build up a charcter, taking copious notes, including a list of things to do, then cross them off the list, only to find that you must later restore from a backup several days earlier, in which many of the "already done" tasks must now be done again, and it's difficult to remember which (and if you happen to forget one, and remember it later, you may have to roll back yet again).
This was, in fact, why I abandoned Final Fantasy VII when I first played it. I had gotten about 1/4 of the way through, but missed something, so I rolled back about a day and continued - in doing so, I missed a vital item that I had gotten the first time around, but missed the second time (and which you had only one opportunity to get). I didn't notice for about 3 days, and would have been forced to roll back yet again. I just got disgusted with it and dropped it, and didn't pick it up again until just this year.
couldn't they have a unique ID for each item?
This is easy to do for items (especially rare ones). It's much harder to do for things like gold, unless you want a unique ID for every single gold coin in the universe.
http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/
You could do that, but they would likely have some "standard" sentence length for billing purposes. After all, when typing, one "word" is considered five characters, EvenIfYouTypeStuffThatLooksLikeThis.
What makes art valuable is not the instantiation of it, but the concept behind it. When someone writes a book, the value is not in writing the words down on paper, but in arranging the words into the correct order in the first place. If I spend years labouring over writing a book, is it right that someone else with a printing press should profit from printing it just as much as I do from my own printing press? If so, then writers will work for next to nothing, and publishers will grow rich (which is basically how things work now). Is this right? If all the rewards come from providing content rather than creating it, what incentive does the artist have to bother creating it?
Yes, as the great advances in ways of disseminating art made the lives of artists more miserable... say what?! You mean now that they can make their creations available to many, many more people then before, it puts them at a disadvantage? I was under the impression that artists cared about spreading their art as far and as wide as possible, and that it was this dissemination of their art which drove them to create in the first place, no?
But see my previous point: In the past, an artist could paint a painting, get paid for it, and use the money to live off while he made his next painting. Now, an artis (say, n musician) can make some music, it goes all over the net via p2p, but he earns nothing from that, so instead of spending his time creating more music, he has to take a 9-5 to put food on the table, which means he creates LESS art than he would have under the old system.
That is fine if you like the preinstalled setup. But usually I dislike a few things about how the shop has set it up. Which ends with me reinstalling the machine anyway. So option 2) would cost me $400 for the hardware plus 8 hours of time.
This is of course true for someone doing their own custom setup (I do this myself all the time). But I'm speaking mostly about people who use computers as appliances, who either have to hire somebody else to do it for them, or manage to corner a geeky brother/cousin/friend to do it for them. Now in such a case, you can spend 8 hours billing clients $50/hour while Mom buys a brand new off-the-shelf machine (and gives you a new server box you can play with), or you can spend those 8 hours reformatting Mom's hard drive and reinstalling Windows. Which would you prefer?
The thing I'm dying to know is, if your time is worth $50/hour to you, why the heck are you using a $400 PC? And why are you not protecting it properly in the first place?
:) But I was thinking more about the cost that a computer-challenged person would have to pay someone else to do so for them.
Well, that is certainly true
Surely you could at least just reformat the harddrive?
Throwing out the whole PC seems a bit excessive..
Reformat the hard drive. AND re-install the operating system. AND the virus scanner. AND the applications. AND download the patches.
What is your time worth? Whenever I install a new system from scratch, it takes me about a day to get it the way I want it. If time is worth $50/hour, 8 hours of time alone is $400. So one is left with two choices:
1) spend $400 in labour to fix the box, or 2) spend $400 to buy a totally new box (in which case they can give the old one to their geek nephew to wipe clean and install Linux on).
Computers have gotten sufficiently cheap and prevalent these days that many people treat them as appliances, much like typewriters were 30 years ago. Whenever my VCR breaks down, I just spend $80 to buy a new one, rather than $100 to repair the old one. Have you ever taken a toaster to a repair shop?
Back in the '70s, National Lampoon had an article that was a magazine parody called "Popular Workbench". In it was a career ad promising "Earn big $$$ in transistor repair". Even at tht time, the notion was absurd - when individual transistors cost less than a dollar, repairing them was totally cost-ineffective.
In case you did not notice, all the art before the age of copyright and even long after (as copyright did not apply to music and paintings for a long time) was produced this way.
Yes, and most of the artists in this era were paupers, because it's hard to devote your life to art and at the same time hold a 9-to-5 job to support yourself and your family, unless you happen to be lucky enough to find a patron. Much of the art we consider great today came from artists who did it for the love of art, without any such third-party support.
Heaven forbid someone should choose to economize the short time he has available to him by combining the two processes, so that he can use his art to also generate money, so that he doesn't have to spend most of his free time doing something else - which allows him to devote more time to his art. This used to be a lot easier in the days before the printing press and the photocopier and the internet.
And instead of going to the hospital, you promptly go to Slashdot and post your story in an article about copyright law.
What's more important? Health, or fame? A man has got to have his priorities...
It's somewhat reminiscent of this:
<Opcode> i was gonna call 911...but i was downloading a file
"(B) No person shall cause the death of another as a proximate result of the offender's committing or attempting to commit an offense of violence that is a felony of the first or second degree " (Ohio Rev. Code 2903.02)
In other words, if your commission of a felony promixately caused the death of another, you're guilty of murder.
Actually, from reading that statute, it sounds like Ohio only considers it such if the felony is violent. So if, say, you evade taxes and that makes your accountant jump out a window, it isn't felony murder. Simiarly, I don't know anywhere that considers pressing a few keys to be an act of violence per se.
In Canada, P2P file sharing is legal (or at least easier to get away with), so all people have to do is share Google searches via P2P networks...
Right. And one trip-over-the-power cord, or one BSOD crash, or one local power failure (if you aren't running a UPS) and all your data is toast. On the other hand, you had better hope your machine is powered up when the cops arrive, or else your data will be embarrasingly visible.
My guess is you're too active. To get to moderate, you have to be somewhere midway between the very active users and the very inactive users. This is explained in the FAQ, in the part about moderating.
Please forgive me for seeming dense, but could you tell me which section title this is under?
I read the FAQ sections on "Comments and Moderation" and also "Meta-moderation" twice today, earlier this afternoon, and again after reading this post, and have been unable to find any mention of this. I also did a text search of both section and could not even find the word "active" anywhere.
I have heard one other person make a similar comment somewhere a while back, but seemed to be an educated guess becasue it did not refer to any specific "official" documentation)
I'm also not sure just what "active" means with regards to the software. I metamoderate 3 times daily, but otherwise rarely post (other than an occasional follow-up).
I mean, really.... you don't hear many cancer victims blaming Satan for their illness, so why the other way around?
In Soviet Russia, Satan blames cancer victims for their illness.