What are you going to do with the tuner? Watch OTA TV? Why? What a waste of time?
Video game consoles older than the PlayStation 3 tend not to have HDMI outputs, and PC monitors tend not to have composite, S-Video, or YPbPr component inputs. Some pre-Genesis consoles don't even have a composite output, instead relying on an internal RF modulator. Nor did the North American market embrace SCART (240p/480i RGB video), and even if it did, I don't know what a PC monitor would do with a VGA input signal with a horizontal frequency as slow as 15.6 kHz.
Google added drivers for the Raspberry Pi's SoC to Android Open Source Project (AOSP). That doesn't mean Android with Google Play, as Google Play is only officially available preinstalled on a device's soldered flash memory. So an AOSP user would have to obtain the app not through Google Play Store but instead through Amazon Appstore, and even then it may rely on digital restrictions management (DRM) components available only through Google Play services or Fire OS services.
You could always buy more hard drives so that you can make and cache transcodes of each video to the preferred format of each device. For example, YouTube does this because the storage is cheaper than the CPU time for live transcoding would be.
How long is a web browser session? Do people actually ever close those, except to reboot?
Web browser sessions may run into the days or weeks on a personal laptop with working suspend or a single person's desktop, but I imagine that those are an exception overrepresented among Slashdot's demographic.
Except to reboot
Some laptop owners have found that suspend doesn't work due to defective device drivers, especially after an operating system upgrade or switch, and they work around it by taking advantage of an SSD's reduced boot time.
Except to switch users
If your family PC lacks enough RAM to keep desktop sessions running for you, the spouse, and all kids, then you may have to close your browser session and log out to free up enough RAM for another user to use the PC without swap hell. The same is true of PCs at a public library, Internet cafe, or university computer lab.
Because the authors who provide creative works to the video hosting service do so under the understanding that the video hosting service isn't going to let viewers easily download and keep durable copies of said authors' works. If every video had a download button, there wouldn't be quite as many videos uploaded to the service.
Some cities enact sit/lie laws, which force residents to either buy or lease real property to live on rather than buying a tent and temporarily occupying a common area. So if the choice is to either A. comply with the landlord's speech limits or B. get evicted for speaking and then go to jail for violating the sit/lie law, then the sit/lie law is effectively an abridgment of freedom of speech.
The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts.
Does trespass to real property count as "violence"?
And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service?
Presently, cities tend to own roads, which gives them a claim against unauthorized utilities under trespassing law. Or under your preferred society, who would own the roads?
The Gates foundation have done billions of times more good than I ever could. Their capacity to do good is magnified by their vast financial resources. [...] But while humans do both good or evil corporations can only ever do evil. They are fundamentalky designed by law to preclude the capacity to ever do sincere good.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit corporation with charitable tax status. Even among for-profit entities, the benefit corporation is a type of corporation that incorporates good into its charter.
As another AC pointed out, he isn't just making things up out of thin air. But let's suppose he is. So? Why can't he make up his own definitions?
You can make all the definitions you want so long as you first ensure that others understand them. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty claims that his words mean whatever he chooses them to mean, which causes Alice some confusion. Sometimes the reader can guess the definition you're using because it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. For example, if you look at an egg-shaped character and call his arms "legs", so long as they behave like legs, the reader can infer the sense via duck typing. But because most of us don't walk that way (with some exceptions), calling arms "legs" might need some explanation.
Let's look at another example inspired by Edward Josiah Stears' Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin:
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a kangaroo have?
Five.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a moo cow have?
Four.
The difference is that unlike a cow's tail, a roo's tail fulfills a role that speakers associate with the ideal of a "leg". In particular, a roo's tail is weight-bearing during pentapedal walking and during kicks when boxing. A cow's tail isn't weight-bearing. So if you want to "call a tail a leg" without confusion, you have to make clear to readers what the definition is and how it is useful.
Consider net neutrality. Most posters here seem to be in favor legislation forcing companies to act against their own profit interests in favor of something benefiting the greater good of the society that creates the rules.
This coming from an avowed libertarian.
That's because ISPs and other utilities need permission from the city to operate in the city in the first place, which in turn is because cities own the roads under which utility lines are buried. It then becomes reasonable for the city to require some minimum quality of service from its tenant utilities.
OSes and browsers should be sued too then because they need to download a cache file of the video before playing it
You assume that a contract whose letter is inconsistent won't be interpreted according to the intent of the parties. A judge is a human being, not an automaton.
also I can look up for that file, move it
Which violates the terms presented to you at the bottom of the video playback page.
The video started playing, not downloading to durable storage. The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
So long as the users do not further distribute the copy given to them by the host, they are free to do with it as they wish unless they explicitly agreed otherwise.
Google would argue that by retrieving more than a single HTML document from the YouTube service, users indicate their having "explicitly agreed otherwise." In particular, a user who visits a video playback page on YouTube before then deciding to use a download tool has been given notice of the terms that apply to subsequent accesses.
If the case is about a breach of contract, the courts of the place where the contract should have been carried out should hear the case. If the case is about non-contractual matters (tort or delict), the courts of the place where the harmful event took place are competent.
Under this rule, a Slovak distributor with exclusive rights to distribute a work in Czechoslovakia since before the breakup could sue an unfairly competing French distributor in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic, at least before the proposed "Regulation on the cross-border portability of online content services" goes into effect.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't give a smart tv your wifi credentials it is essentially a dumb tv.
Provided it even lets you get past the setup screen without establishing a connection to the manufacturer's server through the Internet.
Why would I even consider a dedicated media-center when piracy is, in all it's glory, dying the hard death
Because a dedicated PC can also play games.
What else works with Duck Hunt and doesn't lag like heck in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!?
Just decline the EULA
I thought doing this caused the device to display a static screen full of instructions on how to return the device to the shop.
Your LG tablet's copy of Google Play may be pirated.
No smart TVs require an Internet connection.
Unless you want to look at something other than the "Please activate this Smart TV" screen.
Advertisements cannot jump an air gap.
What do you think Wi-Fi and OTA TV are? Air gaps bridged by RF.
What are you going to do with the tuner? Watch OTA TV? Why? What a waste of time?
Video game consoles older than the PlayStation 3 tend not to have HDMI outputs, and PC monitors tend not to have composite, S-Video, or YPbPr component inputs. Some pre-Genesis consoles don't even have a composite output, instead relying on an internal RF modulator. Nor did the North American market embrace SCART (240p/480i RGB video), and even if it did, I don't know what a PC monitor would do with a VGA input signal with a horizontal frequency as slow as 15.6 kHz.
Google added drivers for the Raspberry Pi's SoC to Android Open Source Project (AOSP). That doesn't mean Android with Google Play, as Google Play is only officially available preinstalled on a device's soldered flash memory. So an AOSP user would have to obtain the app not through Google Play Store but instead through Amazon Appstore, and even then it may rely on digital restrictions management (DRM) components available only through Google Play services or Fire OS services.
You could always buy more hard drives so that you can make and cache transcodes of each video to the preferred format of each device. For example, YouTube does this because the storage is cheaper than the CPU time for live transcoding would be.
How long is a web browser session? Do people actually ever close those, except to reboot?
Web browser sessions may run into the days or weeks on a personal laptop with working suspend or a single person's desktop, but I imagine that those are an exception overrepresented among Slashdot's demographic.
Except to reboot Some laptop owners have found that suspend doesn't work due to defective device drivers, especially after an operating system upgrade or switch, and they work around it by taking advantage of an SSD's reduced boot time. Except to switch users If your family PC lacks enough RAM to keep desktop sessions running for you, the spouse, and all kids, then you may have to close your browser session and log out to free up enough RAM for another user to use the PC without swap hell. The same is true of PCs at a public library, Internet cafe, or university computer lab.Because the authors who provide creative works to the video hosting service do so under the understanding that the video hosting service isn't going to let viewers easily download and keep durable copies of said authors' works. If every video had a download button, there wouldn't be quite as many videos uploaded to the service.
Some cities enact sit/lie laws, which force residents to either buy or lease real property to live on rather than buying a tent and temporarily occupying a common area. So if the choice is to either A. comply with the landlord's speech limits or B. get evicted for speaking and then go to jail for violating the sit/lie law, then the sit/lie law is effectively an abridgment of freedom of speech.
The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts.
Does trespass to real property count as "violence"?
And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service?
Presently, cities tend to own roads, which gives them a claim against unauthorized utilities under trespassing law. Or under your preferred society, who would own the roads?
The Gates foundation have done billions of times more good than I ever could. Their capacity to do good is magnified by their vast financial resources. [...]
But while humans do both good or evil corporations can only ever do evil. They are fundamentalky designed by law to preclude the capacity to ever do sincere good.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit corporation with charitable tax status. Even among for-profit entities, the benefit corporation is a type of corporation that incorporates good into its charter.
As another AC pointed out, he isn't just making things up out of thin air. But let's suppose he is. So? Why can't he make up his own definitions?
You can make all the definitions you want so long as you first ensure that others understand them. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty claims that his words mean whatever he chooses them to mean, which causes Alice some confusion. Sometimes the reader can guess the definition you're using because it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. For example, if you look at an egg-shaped character and call his arms "legs", so long as they behave like legs, the reader can infer the sense via duck typing. But because most of us don't walk that way (with some exceptions), calling arms "legs" might need some explanation.
Let's look at another example inspired by Edward Josiah Stears' Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin:
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a kangaroo have? Five. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a moo cow have? Four.The difference is that unlike a cow's tail, a roo's tail fulfills a role that speakers associate with the ideal of a "leg". In particular, a roo's tail is weight-bearing during pentapedal walking and during kicks when boxing. A cow's tail isn't weight-bearing. So if you want to "call a tail a leg" without confusion, you have to make clear to readers what the definition is and how it is useful.
Consider net neutrality. Most posters here seem to be in favor legislation forcing companies to act against their own profit interests in favor of something benefiting the greater good of the society that creates the rules.
This coming from an avowed libertarian.
That's because ISPs and other utilities need permission from the city to operate in the city in the first place, which in turn is because cities own the roads under which utility lines are buried. It then becomes reasonable for the city to require some minimum quality of service from its tenant utilities.
Also there's such a thing as legal pedigree
If I own the CD, and I download an "illegal" copy, who's going to prove that those files are any different from the ones I could make from my own CD?
Vivendi. The relevant U.S. case is UMG Recordings v. MP3.com.
OSes and browsers should be sued too then because they need to download a cache file of the video before playing it
You assume that a contract whose letter is inconsistent won't be interpreted according to the intent of the parties. A judge is a human being, not an automaton.
also I can look up for that file, move it
Which violates the terms presented to you at the bottom of the video playback page.
The video started playing, not downloading to durable storage. The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
So long as the users do not further distribute the copy given to them by the host, they are free to do with it as they wish unless they explicitly agreed otherwise.
Google would argue that by retrieving more than a single HTML document from the YouTube service, users indicate their having "explicitly agreed otherwise." In particular, a user who visits a video playback page on YouTube before then deciding to use a download tool has been given notice of the terms that apply to subsequent accesses.
If you didn't like it, you should have configured your server not to respond!
<sarcasm>
Just what we always wanted: more interstitials to capture explicit assent to TOS. It'd be like the infamous Dutch cookie wall.
</sarcasm>
What counterpart to the DMCA would apply to a Russian search engine such as Yandex? Are operators of search engines even liable in Russia?
The EU's Brussels I regulation provides for cross-border civil litigation (English PDF):
Under this rule, a Slovak distributor with exclusive rights to distribute a work in Czechoslovakia since before the breakup could sue an unfairly competing French distributor in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic, at least before the proposed "Regulation on the cross-border portability of online content services" goes into effect.
used CD prices plummeted as the fourth quarter of 1999, which happens to be when Napster took off
Correlation does not equate causation.
Are you implying that both had a common cause or that it was coincidence?
a contract violation, which is still not "illegal"
It may or may not be, depending on what mood the judge is in when applying the CFAA (18 USC 1030(a)(2)(C)).
but is a possible tort.
Which would make providers of downloader tools gui^W liable of tortious interference.