And The Bluebook (the most common citation/style manual for legal purposes) says this: "In general, spell out the numbers zero to ninety-nine intext and in footnotes; for larger numbers use numerals." Then there are exceptions for large round numbers (e.g., "hundred," "thousand"), using numbers below and above 100 together (i.e., "87, 99, and 154"), any number that begins a sentence, and some other minor exceptions.
No one agrees on this rule. In my personal writings I use your rule (zero through ten, 11-...), but in my legal writings, I use the Bluebook rule.
You forgot "make one mistake for every Grammar Nazi-esque sentense I include in the email." At least in my experience, that's how we Grammar Nazis roll.
I disagree. The user specified the content to be posted to a random group, and that was the point specified by the user. I don't think the statute defines what "point" is, and if it has to be a specific IP (clearly this is not it because emails are not to a specific IP, nor are Youtube uploads), a specific domain name (in which case, wouldn't "rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc" be sort of the same?), or to the more nebulous "location in cyberspace," which I think is probably the best and most beneficial and self-consistent reading.
But I haven't read the whole of the statute to see, so there might be something there contradicting me. I'm arguing not from the legal perspective I ought to be (since I'm in law school), but from a technical standpoint (which I think is the more valid in a case where the law seems to be very wishywashy; plus I prefer policy arguments).
the article uses a very narrow interpretation of the definition of "ISP"
I said that the author uses a very narrow interpretation. The interpretation of the definition given i Title 17 is what I was attacking, not the definition itself. I'm well aware that ISP is defined in law.
No, they'll keep working. You just won't be able to use the Boot Camp Assistant to resize the partitions. The partition will remain usable, though. I went through all the available information and learned that a couple weeks ago, when I created a partition on my shiny new (first Mac ever!) MacBook Pro for XP. I had the same concern as you.
I wonder if they will go after other providers, who are advertising the ability to have 20GB/month worth of conversations with other usenet users, but make no mention of copyrighted material that is available?
In that case, I think the RIAA would fail because there is a shitload of binaries posted to usenet that are public domain. And last time I checked, uh, ten years ago (yeah, that's it), porn site owners posted samples of their content as well.
There are numerous valid reasons to offer 20GB/mo. of downloads.
Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 2, Funny
Furthermore, I'm flummoxed why a student with a masters degree in computer science would attack usenet in the way this author did. It's like she's the one student in the whole world who doesn't pirate, and the one CS person in the world who wants usenet to go down.
Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
·
· Score: 4, Informative
For those who don't want to take the time to read the "iBrief" (wtf?), it says that AOL's usenet service should not have qualified AOL under the safe harbor provisions. However, the article uses a very narrow interpretation of the definition of "ISP": a party that offers transmission, routing, or provision of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing. The article says that the user does not control where the usenet post goes after they make it, so the user has not specified a point of transmission, so with respect to usenet, AOL does not qualify as an ISP.
However, the user specifies "rec.arts.whatever" as the end point. The user is oblivious to the IPs and server locations of various ISPs' usenet storage machines, but users don't know the actual IPs of Youtube.com, yet when they specify "youtube" as the location for an uploaded video, no one is suggesting that this technicality disqualifies Youtube from the safe harbor provisions. Youtube's video storage is probably on more than one machine with more than one IP, so, similar to Youtube, usenet is a web of servers, and the user does not choose a specific server as its target. Instead, the user chooses some nebulous "site" to send their data to. The site itself is not a real location, but an interconnected web of servers.
Thanks for the note about difference in registration post- and pre-accrual-of-action. I'm in an intellectual property law class right now, but we haven't arrived at the "real world" of how copyright is done with respect to lawsuits yet. So you've taught a law student something new about IP law today.:)
If that thing doesn't get the Pulitzer, I'll eat my hat. I've been seeing it all over the place the past couple days, and to me, it's the most important photograph of the year.
Granted, I may not have the most objective perspective, since this is going on currently, and when following a story closely it's difficult to stay objective.
*sigh* The one time a GNAA first post is actually relevant, and you failed to MAKE HISTORY! I honestly don't know if the GNAA still occasionally gets mentioned here; I read at +4 now.
I'd be willing to bet that it's because when your neice graduates, she'll start pulling in $130K+ a year. Combine this with the fact that lawyers are much more often alumnus donors than other professions, and we see that universities have a huge financial stake in making sure their law students really, really love their alma mater.
How many CS students donate large sums to their alma mater? I also remember reading that, among professions, doctors are the worst about donating to their former schools.
However, when I walk through my university's MBA and law buildings, I see wall after wall of plaques listing endowed chairs and scholarships named after alumni.
I think what you're experiencing is the same as when you hear a Jew disparage Jews. Or a black person say "nigger." "Because I'm part of X group, I am allowed to make disparaging comments about members of X group."
And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad.
You really, really don't remember correctly. Alfred Lord Tennyson called it piracy in 1879. I am studying copyright law right now, and I read a US appeals case from the 1930s using the term "piracy" for copyright infringement. And they didn't bother to define it as such, which means that it had already been in use in the legal realm. Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49 (2d Cir. 1936):
But though a copyright is for this reason less vulnerable than a patent, the owner's protection is more limited, for just as he is no less an "author" because others have preceded him, so another who follows him, is not a tort-feasor unless he pirates his work. *** If the copyrighted work is therefore original, the public demesne [edit: this is how "domain" was spelled then] is important only on the issue of infringement; that is, so far as it may break the force of the inference to be drawn from likenesses between the work and the putative piracy. (citations omitted)
That was Learned Hand writing, who is one of the mack daddies of law in the US, not some two-bit idiot judge.
The RIAA was founded in 1952.
Thus, there is no way the RIAA is responsible for the assignation.
To clarify a bit: copyright doesn't fall under criminal law in the US, either, but it's still allegedly illegal to operate a tracker here. Copyright infringement is a civil offense, and there are statutory and other damages involved.
As we all known, college textbooks have been corrupt for a long, long time. It actually makes me think that we ought to move to a "pharmacy" model, where the book stores must be independent from the colleges, just as the dispensing of drugs is separate from the prescribing doctor to prevent this kind of corruption.
Here at The University of Texas, we have the coop bookstore and two privately-owned bookstores within 5 minutes walking distance from the Coop (and one of them is closer to the largest dorm on campus than the Coop).
That being said, the Coop still does most of the sales. I've often thought about writing an article about the "corruption" of the bookstore, but I'm not so sure. The Coop gives scholarships, funds tons of student organizations, and technically speaking the students own it (hence the "coop"). You can send off your receipts each year for 10% back, and for good quality used books, you can get 50% on buyback.
So if you treat your books well and save your receipts, you can get 60% back on your textbooks each semester (unless, of course, you are unfortunate enough to be the last semester to use a certain edition). I've often thought about ordering my books from elsewhere and then doing buyback on those books to save some money, but I'm not sure if Amazon sells new editions more than 10% below the Coop for most books.
Are there any/.ers out there who've read into school book coops? I'm sure a movement could be started at UT to reform the coop, because most students hate spending (mommy and daddy's) money on textbooks. But I'm not sure if there's much room to improve (unless, since UT sells a truckload of college merchandise, we moved to a model where books were waaay below MSRP because we could subsidize the books with merchandise sales). Since the coop is partially owned by me, or by the public istitution, or something like that (haven't studied business associations law yet), I imagine I could get the finances and see how much the coop makes (and pays the managers/administrators) every year, but it might not be substantial. Who knows?
"Intellectual Property" is the high-ranking corporate imbecile's buzz word of the year.
Well, to be fair, it's definitely not a new fad; the phrase has been in use in the US since 1845. In France, the equivalent "propriété intellectuelle" shows up in 1846.
Slashdot Mirror
And The Bluebook (the most common citation/style manual for legal purposes) says this: "In general, spell out the numbers zero to ninety-nine intext and in footnotes; for larger numbers use numerals." Then there are exceptions for large round numbers (e.g., "hundred," "thousand"), using numbers below and above 100 together (i.e., "87, 99, and 154"), any number that begins a sentence, and some other minor exceptions.
No one agrees on this rule. In my personal writings I use your rule (zero through ten, 11-...), but in my legal writings, I use the Bluebook rule.
You forgot "make one mistake for every Grammar Nazi-esque sentense I include in the email." At least in my experience, that's how we Grammar Nazis roll.
;)
Bonus points if you spot my mistake
I disagree. The user specified the content to be posted to a random group, and that was the point specified by the user. I don't think the statute defines what "point" is, and if it has to be a specific IP (clearly this is not it because emails are not to a specific IP, nor are Youtube uploads), a specific domain name (in which case, wouldn't "rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc" be sort of the same?), or to the more nebulous "location in cyberspace," which I think is probably the best and most beneficial and self-consistent reading.
But I haven't read the whole of the statute to see, so there might be something there contradicting me. I'm arguing not from the legal perspective I ought to be (since I'm in law school), but from a technical standpoint (which I think is the more valid in a case where the law seems to be very wishywashy; plus I prefer policy arguments).
No, they'll keep working. You just won't be able to use the Boot Camp Assistant to resize the partitions. The partition will remain usable, though. I went through all the available information and learned that a couple weeks ago, when I created a partition on my shiny new (first Mac ever!) MacBook Pro for XP. I had the same concern as you.
There are numerous valid reasons to offer 20GB/mo. of downloads.
Furthermore, I'm flummoxed why a student with a masters degree in computer science would attack usenet in the way this author did. It's like she's the one student in the whole world who doesn't pirate, and the one CS person in the world who wants usenet to go down.
For those who don't want to take the time to read the "iBrief" (wtf?), it says that AOL's usenet service should not have qualified AOL under the safe harbor provisions. However, the article uses a very narrow interpretation of the definition of "ISP": a party that offers transmission, routing, or provision of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing. The article says that the user does not control where the usenet post goes after they make it, so the user has not specified a point of transmission, so with respect to usenet, AOL does not qualify as an ISP.
However, the user specifies "rec.arts.whatever" as the end point. The user is oblivious to the IPs and server locations of various ISPs' usenet storage machines, but users don't know the actual IPs of Youtube.com, yet when they specify "youtube" as the location for an uploaded video, no one is suggesting that this technicality disqualifies Youtube from the safe harbor provisions. Youtube's video storage is probably on more than one machine with more than one IP, so, similar to Youtube, usenet is a web of servers, and the user does not choose a specific server as its target. Instead, the user chooses some nebulous "site" to send their data to. The site itself is not a real location, but an interconnected web of servers.
Email is similar.
Thanks for the note about difference in registration post- and pre-accrual-of-action. I'm in an intellectual property law class right now, but we haven't arrived at the "real world" of how copyright is done with respect to lawsuits yet. So you've taught a law student something new about IP law today. :)
You don't have to register copyrights in the United States. Editors, you need to fix the blurb.
If that thing doesn't get the Pulitzer, I'll eat my hat. I've been seeing it all over the place the past couple days, and to me, it's the most important photograph of the year.
Granted, I may not have the most objective perspective, since this is going on currently, and when following a story closely it's difficult to stay objective.
How up-to-date is that page? It still refers to Vista as "Longhorn"!
How is a third format going to be a "boon" for Blu-Ray? Wouldn't it just weaken Blu-Ray by providing a cheaper (media-wise) alternative to Blu-Ray?
*sigh* The one time a GNAA first post is actually relevant, and you failed to MAKE HISTORY! I honestly don't know if the GNAA still occasionally gets mentioned here; I read at +4 now.
I'd be willing to bet that it's because when your neice graduates, she'll start pulling in $130K+ a year. Combine this with the fact that lawyers are much more often alumnus donors than other professions, and we see that universities have a huge financial stake in making sure their law students really, really love their alma mater.
How many CS students donate large sums to their alma mater? I also remember reading that, among professions, doctors are the worst about donating to their former schools.
However, when I walk through my university's MBA and law buildings, I see wall after wall of plaques listing endowed chairs and scholarships named after alumni.
I think what you're experiencing is the same as when you hear a Jew disparage Jews. Or a black person say "nigger." "Because I'm part of X group, I am allowed to make disparaging comments about members of X group."
And since Slashdot skews American...
The RIAA was founded in 1952.
Thus, there is no way the RIAA is responsible for the assignation.
To clarify a bit: copyright doesn't fall under criminal law in the US, either, but it's still allegedly illegal to operate a tracker here. Copyright infringement is a civil offense, and there are statutory and other damages involved.
That being said, the Coop still does most of the sales. I've often thought about writing an article about the "corruption" of the bookstore, but I'm not so sure. The Coop gives scholarships, funds tons of student organizations, and technically speaking the students own it (hence the "coop"). You can send off your receipts each year for 10% back, and for good quality used books, you can get 50% on buyback.
So if you treat your books well and save your receipts, you can get 60% back on your textbooks each semester (unless, of course, you are unfortunate enough to be the last semester to use a certain edition). I've often thought about ordering my books from elsewhere and then doing buyback on those books to save some money, but I'm not sure if Amazon sells new editions more than 10% below the Coop for most books.
Are there any