I've no objections whatsoever to having the computer generate the paper ballots, and I think you're correct that this could in fact reduce the error rate in paper voting. But the end result should be something tangible, such as the piece of paper, that the voter can verify is correct (and in the event it is not, go to an election judge, say "This printout of my votes is wrong", and have the judge destroy the ballot and start them over.) My objection would be to having the votes electronically stored and counted, as this is far too subject to error and manipulation, and error or malice could have a much larger effect than a ballot or two getting dropped or miscounted.
Most people still prefer a computer that is useful.
Yes, exactly, which was why the grandparent was giving some advice as to how to make one useful. They always ship with some toy OS that's useless for anything, though I hear it's alright for video games.
So ultimately, it is all about how secure the process and implementation are, and not whether the medium is on a piece of paper or through the internet.
I program computers for a living. They are an excellent tool for a lot of things. Totally electronic voting (whether at a polling place or over the Internet) is not a good use for that tool.
Here is a user interface. Push some buttons on it. It is going to send some data somewhere. Did it send the data you thought it would? Did it send it at all? If so, was it properly received at the other end? How would you know? Even if the UI tells you so, it could be saying so incorrectly, by either accident or malice.
Here is a piece of paper with readable language on it. Are the dots in the columns where you wanted your votes to be cast? You can answer that.
Here is a data file with a million entries in it. 35% of those entries are for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence anything was changed. A well-designed script can do that in a blink.
Here are one million pieces of paper, 35% of which are (marked in ink or with punches) for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence any changes were made. Now you've got a laborious and intensive process ahead of you, that aside from the fact that the papers are watched and you are very likely to leave evidence of tampering.
Recognizing a technology's legitimate limitations does not a Luddite make. The Internet is great for informal polls. It is not a good tool for serious ones such as an election where the results must be accurate and verifiable.
How would you feel if your boss decided to do the same with your paycheck? Or are you trying to tell us that your work deserves compensation while the work of others does not?
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Those who support copyright are asking for a different standard, not the same, as everyone else gets. If you are employed to do something, you continue getting paid as long as you continue the work and no longer. If you want to get paid into your retirement, either ask for a pension as a condition of your employment (at which you may not be successful) or save and invest money during your working years.
If, on the other hand, you go into business for yourself, you must continually market and sell the products you offer. And if someone comes up with a technology that means you no longer can make money the way you once did? Tough. Find a new way to sell, find a new product, or file Chapter 11.
Copyright is an artificially created monopoly. Its like does not exist for anyone else. I don't continue to profit from my work after it's done and sold to someone. I don't get to tell people not to share it without slipping me cash. I don't get to tell them they can't tinker with it and improve it. That's the way it should be.
Removing copyright would simply level the playing field. Ideas aren't inherently scarce. If you can make money off selling them, or performing certain types of them, or coming up with them for people who enjoy your work, good on you. (People do sell bottled water, and water, at least in the US, is not inherently scarce and is effectively free, so it can work). If not, go find something else to do, and get paid in the same way on the same terms all the rest of us do. Quit whining that you have a "right" to a profit from doing anything at all. You have a right to try. You do not have a right to tell people they cannot share in an attempt to profit from something they could've replicated on their own.
If such a better method exists, and weren't "owned", why wouldn't you just use it yourself?
I develop and use FOSS, and I haven't yet met one person who's opposed to private property, so I'm going to say that's a straw man. Even if we had replication technology of some type, we would continue to want some private things, like homes or heirlooms. That's not unreasonable.
In the grand tradition here, I think we can use a car. I own my car. I can say to someone "No, you may not drive my car." I can say to someone "No, you may not ride in my car." It's my private property. I'm in no way against that, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone, FOSS developer or otherwise, who would disagree.
What I do have trouble with is the concept of an idea as property. My thoughts and ideas are my private property precisely as long as I keep them to myself. As soon as I present them to anyone, they become a part of the world as a whole.
The main difference here is, there is only one car. If anyone who wanted just got in and drove it, they would increase the mileage and wear on it, not to mention depriving me of it while they were using it. To say an idea can be property is more like trying to prohibit people from looking at one's car. Any number of people can look at it, without depriving me of it or degrading it in the slightest.
Ideas are not and cannot be property, because they can be infinitely replicated, especially now. We're already to the post-scarcity economy as far as anything that can be digitized goes, as there is no scarcity of bits, and any idea or concept can be digitized. The same is true of genes, methods, ideas, what have you. My use of it does not harm yours, you can still use it too. Trying to enforce "ownership" of something there's a potentially infinite number of, like uses of an idea, leads to absurdities, and absurdities like patenting pigs are exactly what we see here. Monsanto did not invent pigs, nor did they invent selective breeding for desirable traits. Vast amounts of prior art exist for both. Your enzyme maker likely just uses an economy-of-scale effect that you couldn't replicate in a college lab even if you knew and theoretically could use their methods, and if they don't and anyone can easily replicate what they do anywhere, it's not very novel anyway, and someone would have come up with it with or without them.
There is nothing wrong with saying one can own and sell the wheat used to make a loaf of bread, or a box of cereal flakes, or anything else, as that wheat is indeed a tangible and scarce good.
On the other hand, giving one rights to all wheat grown that has a given gene is much more questionable. Genes (especially desirable genes) spread naturally and are not really a scarce commodity. Selective breeding for desirable traits with the help of farmers has been practiced for millennia. Selective breeding for desirable traits without such help has been occurring for eons. Seems there's a bit of prior art there.
Seriously? Creating new sources of food is evil? Patents last for a few years or a couple decades (at most). New sources of food will continue to pay dividends for generations.
Since exactly when are pigs a new source of food? I seem to remember enjoying bacon my entire life.
If they can come up with a genuinely new source of food, rather than retreading an old one and trying to claim they own it, I might say there's a case to be made.
3. Program is usually relatively complete and bug free.
I suggest you try running Windows sometime. Complete? It is certainly not (often deliberately so, since you didn't purchase the super-ultra-deluxe version, many features are deliberately disabled), and...bug-free? I tried Vista, it's not even debugged enough to make it out of the alpha phase.
Don't believe anything was available to steal, as I'm quite sure if the song wasn't offered for download in the US it also would not be offered in record stores. I do recall the parent post stating that he downloaded a copy of it, which is not stealing.
Maybe the son is being an asshole, and maybe not. If my mother were acting that way, I would have serious reservations about her being around my kids too. Regardless, however, he is the parent, and asshole or not, he has the right to say "no" and have that respected. Calling someone 49 times in a day is harassment, regardless of the provocation, just as hitting someone is assault even if they were provoking you.
Amazon can certainly choose to do this. No one is arguing that this is not within their rights.
On the other hand, it's my right to choose not to purchase from them because they do it, and to buy from booksellers who do not censor based on content. And that's a choice I intend to make. From the comments I've seen thus far on the issue, here and elsewhere, I also don't believe I'm the only one. When I want a book on a subject, I want to see every book available and decide for myself what I wish to read. I'm quite capable of deciding that for myself, and don't need or want Amazon or anyone's "help" in keeping "offensive" material hidden.
Just because what a company is doing is legal doesn't mean it's the right choice, or that their customers will tolerate it. Amazon would also be perfectly well within the law to triple all their prices, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't lose business from it.
And it's certainly legal for anyone who wishes to bring attention to the practice.
When has prior law ever mattered to the Church of Scientology?
In this case, the Church of Scientology is not, to my knowledge, being sued. But Diskeeper is going to find out, like many companies have, that the law starts to matter to public corporations very quickly when equal opportunity violations happen.
Buying cheap crap that's pumping out power to sensitive electronics can damage the things it's connected to can make things go horribly wrong!
In other news, your computer is not a good thing to use as a coffee table, puppies should not be left unsupervised near cabling, and you should not leave your cell phone in your pocket while washing your clothing.
You're from the US. Post on an internet forum that you'd like to kill the President of the US.
Get ready for your visit from the treasury department.
How free are you? Is complying with the law a restriction on freedom or a social contract? If the law states that disseminating child pornography is illegal due to the very real impacts on the children involved then is it so wrong that the law also includes sanctions for doing so?
Am I free? Not as free as I'd like. Probably more free than most people on the planet.
On the other hand, I can view your post containing material regarding killing the President of the US, and could even if you were serious about it. No one would come arrest me simply for the act of viewing.
There should never be a thought crime. By all means lock up those who actually abuse children, that's about as low as it gets. But there should never be a law against viewing, seeing, or knowing something. That way lies the worst type of madness, and as shown by your posts above, makes innocent citizens scared to even investigate the issue.
We can protect children from real, actual harm without thought crime laws, by focusing on those who actually perpetrate abusive acts rather than on those who have "evil thoughts". If we arrested someone for (even in passing) simply thinking about activity that might be criminal, we'd all be in jail.
Don't count on it because it is likely that the courts will find that the nature of passphrases, like that of combinations to a safe, is not testimonial. No, making your passphrase equal to "I committed the crime" won't cut it.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. For one, a passphrase, unlike the combination to a safe or the like, certainly may be, well, an actual phrase. If said phrase is "This computer contains unlawfully downloaded copyrighted material", that's a self-incriminating statement.
Also, one can easily enough, uh, forget a passphrase, what with all that stress of getting arrested and the like. Wouldn't that be too bad.
Now a positive externality of an alarm going off is that a burglar is going to assume that the cops will be there in ten minutes, but you never know...especially if he learns as an hour later, the alarm is still going off...
My three cents.
An hour later, the cops are going to be there, if for no other reason than an irritated neighbor calling them to get you to turn off the *$*#@(*@* alarm. So there's your monitoring service.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
I strongly hope that you asked for the warrant before sending out the "Sorry for the inconvenience" message, and told them to get lost if they couldn't produce it? Otherwise, I'd sure like to know where that is, so I can avoid it.
A more accurate question by way of analogy here would be to ask "Can you find a file on your hard drive that matches the MD5 hash of any corporation's logo?" This is a many-to-many match, hashing isn't terribly well suited to that and the odds of a collision raise dramatically that way.
Only thing is that as fun as it might be, and even just paybacks to the scraper for stealing the information, it could also open the scrapee up to legal ramifications from the scraper.
More than likely there is no click-through that says if we detect scraping we will feed you bad information or redirect you to porn sites which could damage your reputation with your customers.
And the kind of boss that thinks it is good business to piggyback and steal would possibly also think he had a right to piggyback and steal good information and not bad.
Just sayin'...
What legal ramifications? I doubt there's anything in the site agreement which does guarantee any given type or quality of data, and indeed site agreements often specifically state that there is no such guarantee. When you send a request to a webserver, you're going to get back whatever the server is set to send you. If you're sending actively malicious code designed to damage the requester's computer, that may certainly be illegal, but sending back something other than what they are expecting is entirely legal.
That's like saying if Slashdot decided to change its front page to RIAA and Microsoft press releases, Slashdot readers would have grounds for a lawsuit since that's not what they expect to see here. That's simply not the case and would get laughed out of court.
It certainly doesn't matter what our hypothetical PHB thinks he has a right to here. He might think he has a right to some certain type of information from someone else's server. I might think I have a right to have you pay me a million dollars. Neither of these imagined "rights" have any basis in law.
"Why do you need to plug in a USB drive? Are you trying to steal data? Are you trying to load a trojan onto the system? Are you trying to load pirated software so you can then call the BSA? Are you trying to load up MP3's and P2P software so that the RIAA will send nasty grams?"
I do notice that the grandparent mentioned a school environment. It would not be at all unusual in such an environment for a student to work on a project at home, put it on a flash drive, and then work on it or have it reviewed by other students or professors while at school. Similarly, they may start a project on school computers during downtime there and then put it on a flash drive to finish at home. Projects for a video or photo editing class certainly may be burned to a CD/DVD, or, again, stored on a flash drive. Many schools do not have any type of secure VPN providing any type of integration between the two, and even those that do wouldn't want to shut out students without home Internet access.
I do tend to agree that in a business environment there are not many good reasons your everyday office worker would need to be putting in a CD/DVD/flash drive, as it's pretty easy to implement a secure VPN if workers commonly work from home or telecommute, but schools are a different story.
"You can only play the song in our custom application" seems about as restrictive of DRM as you get. How would this possibly be considered to be DRM-free? I also fail to see how this would eliminate limitations on copying, it seems they're attempting to set that limit at exactly zero. (Like all DRM, that will be circumvented, but that doesn't mean there isn't any.)
You can state that this is "to the detriment of the customer", and perhaps in some cases it is, but I would personally prefer the person performing surgery on my heart (or my teeth, or for that matter even my toilet) pass minimum standards of skill and professionalism before doing so. Otherwise, you wind up with all manner of quacks running around claiming to be a "doctor" and raking in the money, while failing to disclose their, uh, rather high failure rate.
We require a license to drive a car because it can be a dangerous thing to do if the operator is not properly skilled and trained to do so. Being a doctor, a pilot, a plumber, or, yes, a programmer, requires significantly more skill than the use of two or three pedals and a steering wheel.
Despite "only doing hardware", at least one company appears to think that distribution of set-top box hardware code is required (though, of course, as stated there, they also put some proprietary code in to make it impossible to actually perform a full build for the equipment, but they do distribute the GPL'd parts). I don't think "we just do hardware" would work if I were shipping computers that happened to have unlicensed proprietary software installed, why would it work for free software?
Well Obama is a change, a democrat who is willing to look at the big picture and not just try to punish the rich. Let be realistic if the Telco get a huge fine, who will pay for it in the long run... Us... Trickle down theory works very well when you take money away from the rich. It works a lot slower if you give money to the rich.
A lot of people on slashdot are so polarized on the issue of the illegal action of invasion of privacy that you are out for blood even if it will not help anything. All it will accomplish is the average joe (the victim of the privacy abuse) paying more for service and he will pay more in the longer run, besides any fine there will be the extra costs of the companies now having to use more Lawyers for every decision that goes on.
I'm personally quite willing to pay a couple bucks a month more for phone service to send a clear message that invasion of privacy is not an acceptable practice. What's the solution that you're proposing here, have no penalty for companies who violate the law because it could raise prices?
Even if they raise prices, it takes them time to make that capital back, and hurts them competitively (as competitors who did not break the law do not pay comparable penalties), so the deterrent value is still maintained. Corporations cannot be jailed (they can have their charters revoked, if only it ever happened in practice, but it does not), so financial penalties are really all there is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've no objections whatsoever to having the computer generate the paper ballots, and I think you're correct that this could in fact reduce the error rate in paper voting. But the end result should be something tangible, such as the piece of paper, that the voter can verify is correct (and in the event it is not, go to an election judge, say "This printout of my votes is wrong", and have the judge destroy the ballot and start them over.) My objection would be to having the votes electronically stored and counted, as this is far too subject to error and manipulation, and error or malice could have a much larger effect than a ballot or two getting dropped or miscounted.
Install Linux
Most people still prefer a computer that is useful.
Yes, exactly, which was why the grandparent was giving some advice as to how to make one useful. They always ship with some toy OS that's useless for anything, though I hear it's alright for video games.
I program computers for a living. They are an excellent tool for a lot of things. Totally electronic voting (whether at a polling place or over the Internet) is not a good use for that tool.
Here is a user interface. Push some buttons on it. It is going to send some data somewhere. Did it send the data you thought it would? Did it send it at all? If so, was it properly received at the other end? How would you know? Even if the UI tells you so, it could be saying so incorrectly, by either accident or malice.
Here is a piece of paper with readable language on it. Are the dots in the columns where you wanted your votes to be cast? You can answer that.
Here is a data file with a million entries in it. 35% of those entries are for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence anything was changed. A well-designed script can do that in a blink.
Here are one million pieces of paper, 35% of which are (marked in ink or with punches) for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence any changes were made. Now you've got a laborious and intensive process ahead of you, that aside from the fact that the papers are watched and you are very likely to leave evidence of tampering.
Recognizing a technology's legitimate limitations does not a Luddite make. The Internet is great for informal polls. It is not a good tool for serious ones such as an election where the results must be accurate and verifiable.
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Those who support copyright are asking for a different standard, not the same, as everyone else gets. If you are employed to do something, you continue getting paid as long as you continue the work and no longer. If you want to get paid into your retirement, either ask for a pension as a condition of your employment (at which you may not be successful) or save and invest money during your working years.
If, on the other hand, you go into business for yourself, you must continually market and sell the products you offer. And if someone comes up with a technology that means you no longer can make money the way you once did? Tough. Find a new way to sell, find a new product, or file Chapter 11.
Copyright is an artificially created monopoly. Its like does not exist for anyone else. I don't continue to profit from my work after it's done and sold to someone. I don't get to tell people not to share it without slipping me cash. I don't get to tell them they can't tinker with it and improve it. That's the way it should be.
Removing copyright would simply level the playing field. Ideas aren't inherently scarce. If you can make money off selling them, or performing certain types of them, or coming up with them for people who enjoy your work, good on you. (People do sell bottled water, and water, at least in the US, is not inherently scarce and is effectively free, so it can work). If not, go find something else to do, and get paid in the same way on the same terms all the rest of us do. Quit whining that you have a "right" to a profit from doing anything at all. You have a right to try. You do not have a right to tell people they cannot share in an attempt to profit from something they could've replicated on their own.
If such a better method exists, and weren't "owned", why wouldn't you just use it yourself?
I develop and use FOSS, and I haven't yet met one person who's opposed to private property, so I'm going to say that's a straw man. Even if we had replication technology of some type, we would continue to want some private things, like homes or heirlooms. That's not unreasonable.
In the grand tradition here, I think we can use a car. I own my car. I can say to someone "No, you may not drive my car." I can say to someone "No, you may not ride in my car." It's my private property. I'm in no way against that, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone, FOSS developer or otherwise, who would disagree.
What I do have trouble with is the concept of an idea as property. My thoughts and ideas are my private property precisely as long as I keep them to myself. As soon as I present them to anyone, they become a part of the world as a whole.
The main difference here is, there is only one car. If anyone who wanted just got in and drove it, they would increase the mileage and wear on it, not to mention depriving me of it while they were using it. To say an idea can be property is more like trying to prohibit people from looking at one's car. Any number of people can look at it, without depriving me of it or degrading it in the slightest.
Ideas are not and cannot be property, because they can be infinitely replicated, especially now. We're already to the post-scarcity economy as far as anything that can be digitized goes, as there is no scarcity of bits, and any idea or concept can be digitized. The same is true of genes, methods, ideas, what have you. My use of it does not harm yours, you can still use it too. Trying to enforce "ownership" of something there's a potentially infinite number of, like uses of an idea, leads to absurdities, and absurdities like patenting pigs are exactly what we see here. Monsanto did not invent pigs, nor did they invent selective breeding for desirable traits. Vast amounts of prior art exist for both. Your enzyme maker likely just uses an economy-of-scale effect that you couldn't replicate in a college lab even if you knew and theoretically could use their methods, and if they don't and anyone can easily replicate what they do anywhere, it's not very novel anyway, and someone would have come up with it with or without them.
There is nothing wrong with saying one can own and sell the wheat used to make a loaf of bread, or a box of cereal flakes, or anything else, as that wheat is indeed a tangible and scarce good.
On the other hand, giving one rights to all wheat grown that has a given gene is much more questionable. Genes (especially desirable genes) spread naturally and are not really a scarce commodity. Selective breeding for desirable traits with the help of farmers has been practiced for millennia. Selective breeding for desirable traits without such help has been occurring for eons. Seems there's a bit of prior art there.
Do only evil
Seriously? Creating new sources of food is evil? Patents last for a few years or a couple decades (at most). New sources of food will continue to pay dividends for generations.
Since exactly when are pigs a new source of food? I seem to remember enjoying bacon my entire life.
If they can come up with a genuinely new source of food, rather than retreading an old one and trying to claim they own it, I might say there's a case to be made.
3. Program is usually relatively complete and bug free.
I suggest you try running Windows sometime. Complete? It is certainly not (often deliberately so, since you didn't purchase the super-ultra-deluxe version, many features are deliberately disabled), and...bug-free? I tried Vista, it's not even debugged enough to make it out of the alpha phase.
Don't believe anything was available to steal, as I'm quite sure if the song wasn't offered for download in the US it also would not be offered in record stores. I do recall the parent post stating that he downloaded a copy of it, which is not stealing.
Maybe the son is being an asshole, and maybe not. If my mother were acting that way, I would have serious reservations about her being around my kids too. Regardless, however, he is the parent, and asshole or not, he has the right to say "no" and have that respected. Calling someone 49 times in a day is harassment, regardless of the provocation, just as hitting someone is assault even if they were provoking you.
Amazon can certainly choose to do this. No one is arguing that this is not within their rights.
On the other hand, it's my right to choose not to purchase from them because they do it, and to buy from booksellers who do not censor based on content. And that's a choice I intend to make. From the comments I've seen thus far on the issue, here and elsewhere, I also don't believe I'm the only one. When I want a book on a subject, I want to see every book available and decide for myself what I wish to read. I'm quite capable of deciding that for myself, and don't need or want Amazon or anyone's "help" in keeping "offensive" material hidden.
Just because what a company is doing is legal doesn't mean it's the right choice, or that their customers will tolerate it. Amazon would also be perfectly well within the law to triple all their prices, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't lose business from it.
And it's certainly legal for anyone who wishes to bring attention to the practice.
Not running as a fully-privileged user reduces your security risk? Who knew!
This is not news. The question is why it hasn't been meaningfully addressed in Windows for such a long time.
When has prior law ever mattered to the Church of Scientology?
In this case, the Church of Scientology is not, to my knowledge, being sued. But Diskeeper is going to find out, like many companies have, that the law starts to matter to public corporations very quickly when equal opportunity violations happen.
Buying cheap crap that's pumping out power to sensitive electronics can damage the things it's connected to can make things go horribly wrong!
In other news, your computer is not a good thing to use as a coffee table, puppies should not be left unsupervised near cabling, and you should not leave your cell phone in your pocket while washing your clothing.
Is this surprising anyone?
You're from the US. Post on an internet forum that you'd like to kill the President of the US.
Get ready for your visit from the treasury department.
How free are you? Is complying with the law a restriction on freedom or a social contract? If the law states that disseminating child pornography is illegal due to the very real impacts on the children involved then is it so wrong that the law also includes sanctions for doing so?
Am I free? Not as free as I'd like. Probably more free than most people on the planet.
On the other hand, I can view your post containing material regarding killing the President of the US, and could even if you were serious about it. No one would come arrest me simply for the act of viewing.
There should never be a thought crime. By all means lock up those who actually abuse children, that's about as low as it gets. But there should never be a law against viewing, seeing, or knowing something. That way lies the worst type of madness, and as shown by your posts above, makes innocent citizens scared to even investigate the issue.
We can protect children from real, actual harm without thought crime laws, by focusing on those who actually perpetrate abusive acts rather than on those who have "evil thoughts". If we arrested someone for (even in passing) simply thinking about activity that might be criminal, we'd all be in jail.
Don't count on it because it is likely that the courts will find that the nature of passphrases, like that of combinations to a safe, is not testimonial. No, making your passphrase equal to "I committed the crime" won't cut it.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. For one, a passphrase, unlike the combination to a safe or the like, certainly may be, well, an actual phrase. If said phrase is "This computer contains unlawfully downloaded copyrighted material", that's a self-incriminating statement.
Also, one can easily enough, uh, forget a passphrase, what with all that stress of getting arrested and the like. Wouldn't that be too bad.
Now a positive externality of an alarm going off is that a burglar is going to assume that the cops will be there in ten minutes, but you never know...especially if he learns as an hour later, the alarm is still going off... My three cents.
An hour later, the cops are going to be there, if for no other reason than an irritated neighbor calling them to get you to turn off the *$*#@(*@* alarm. So there's your monitoring service.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
I strongly hope that you asked for the warrant before sending out the "Sorry for the inconvenience" message, and told them to get lost if they couldn't produce it? Otherwise, I'd sure like to know where that is, so I can avoid it.
A more accurate question by way of analogy here would be to ask "Can you find a file on your hard drive that matches the MD5 hash of any corporation's logo?" This is a many-to-many match, hashing isn't terribly well suited to that and the odds of a collision raise dramatically that way.
Only thing is that as fun as it might be, and even just paybacks to the scraper for stealing the information, it could also open the scrapee up to legal ramifications from the scraper.
More than likely there is no click-through that says if we detect scraping we will feed you bad information or redirect you to porn sites which could damage your reputation with your customers.
And the kind of boss that thinks it is good business to piggyback and steal would possibly also think he had a right to piggyback and steal good information and not bad.
Just sayin'...
What legal ramifications? I doubt there's anything in the site agreement which does guarantee any given type or quality of data, and indeed site agreements often specifically state that there is no such guarantee. When you send a request to a webserver, you're going to get back whatever the server is set to send you. If you're sending actively malicious code designed to damage the requester's computer, that may certainly be illegal, but sending back something other than what they are expecting is entirely legal.
That's like saying if Slashdot decided to change its front page to RIAA and Microsoft press releases, Slashdot readers would have grounds for a lawsuit since that's not what they expect to see here. That's simply not the case and would get laughed out of court.
It certainly doesn't matter what our hypothetical PHB thinks he has a right to here. He might think he has a right to some certain type of information from someone else's server. I might think I have a right to have you pay me a million dollars. Neither of these imagined "rights" have any basis in law.
"Why do you need to plug in a USB drive? Are you trying to steal data? Are you trying to load a trojan onto the system? Are you trying to load pirated software so you can then call the BSA? Are you trying to load up MP3's and P2P software so that the RIAA will send nasty grams?"
I do notice that the grandparent mentioned a school environment. It would not be at all unusual in such an environment for a student to work on a project at home, put it on a flash drive, and then work on it or have it reviewed by other students or professors while at school. Similarly, they may start a project on school computers during downtime there and then put it on a flash drive to finish at home. Projects for a video or photo editing class certainly may be burned to a CD/DVD, or, again, stored on a flash drive. Many schools do not have any type of secure VPN providing any type of integration between the two, and even those that do wouldn't want to shut out students without home Internet access.
I do tend to agree that in a business environment there are not many good reasons your everyday office worker would need to be putting in a CD/DVD/flash drive, as it's pretty easy to implement a secure VPN if workers commonly work from home or telecommute, but schools are a different story.
"You can only play the song in our custom application" seems about as restrictive of DRM as you get. How would this possibly be considered to be DRM-free? I also fail to see how this would eliminate limitations on copying, it seems they're attempting to set that limit at exactly zero. (Like all DRM, that will be circumvented, but that doesn't mean there isn't any.)
You can state that this is "to the detriment of the customer", and perhaps in some cases it is, but I would personally prefer the person performing surgery on my heart (or my teeth, or for that matter even my toilet) pass minimum standards of skill and professionalism before doing so. Otherwise, you wind up with all manner of quacks running around claiming to be a "doctor" and raking in the money, while failing to disclose their, uh, rather high failure rate.
We require a license to drive a car because it can be a dangerous thing to do if the operator is not properly skilled and trained to do so. Being a doctor, a pilot, a plumber, or, yes, a programmer, requires significantly more skill than the use of two or three pedals and a steering wheel.
Despite "only doing hardware", at least one company appears to think that distribution of set-top box hardware code is required (though, of course, as stated there, they also put some proprietary code in to make it impossible to actually perform a full build for the equipment, but they do distribute the GPL'd parts). I don't think "we just do hardware" would work if I were shipping computers that happened to have unlicensed proprietary software installed, why would it work for free software?
Well Obama is a change, a democrat who is willing to look at the big picture and not just try to punish the rich. Let be realistic if the Telco get a huge fine, who will pay for it in the long run... Us... Trickle down theory works very well when you take money away from the rich. It works a lot slower if you give money to the rich.
A lot of people on slashdot are so polarized on the issue of the illegal action of invasion of privacy that you are out for blood even if it will not help anything. All it will accomplish is the average joe (the victim of the privacy abuse) paying more for service and he will pay more in the longer run, besides any fine there will be the extra costs of the companies now having to use more Lawyers for every decision that goes on.
I'm personally quite willing to pay a couple bucks a month more for phone service to send a clear message that invasion of privacy is not an acceptable practice. What's the solution that you're proposing here, have no penalty for companies who violate the law because it could raise prices?
Even if they raise prices, it takes them time to make that capital back, and hurts them competitively (as competitors who did not break the law do not pay comparable penalties), so the deterrent value is still maintained. Corporations cannot be jailed (they can have their charters revoked, if only it ever happened in practice, but it does not), so financial penalties are really all there is.