Location is not the point here. Much more telling is noting the lack of significant law school.
I'm not sure that is the whole story. Off the top of my head, Boston University, Syracuse, U of Wisconsin-Madison, and IU all have pretty well respected law schools.
Universities are not legally required to forward these to students. I believe Maine took a stand that they wouldn't forward the letters, as well as a few others. Universities do more so out of concern for their students - which sounds backwards, but let me explain.
If the letters aren't forwarded, or the student refuses to settle, the next step is for the RIAA to file a John Doe suit to get a court order (or subpoena, I forget which) and compel universities to hand over information on the student. Once the student is identified, they drop the John Doe suit & file a suit naming the student.
These letters are basically a request to settle for some amount. Many universities have thought students would prefer getting a letter extorting $3,000 than notice of a lawsuit - doubly so when you consider the insane statutory damages available to the copyright holders. That's why they've forwarded them, to give students a choice as to whether to give up $3,000 or fight a lawsuit.
Wifi increases your exposure, but hard wiring everything isn't a security solution. There are a lot of hops between your computers and most others (including others on the same intranet), removing the wireless hop doesn't secure all the others.
Or you can just get some heat resistant cat5 and run it through your cold air return ducts. That's what we did and it 5 years into it we've not had any problems.
This wasn't an honest mistake, and they didn't break a vague interpretive section of the constitution. The Privacy Act provides a private cause of civil action for unauthorized disclosure to government agents. Unauthorized meaning without a subpoena or court order. The telecos have been dealing with that act since its inception. Although it has been read to be largely toothless, it does have specific provisions for modest statutory damages against service providers for such unauthorized disclosures.
That is the issue here, if permitted access to the necessary information, courts could certify class action suits against complicit telecos involving anyone who's information was disclosed inappropriately. From what we know, that'd be *all* the customers of each major firm (except qwest), and such a suit would be likely to bankrupt the telecos. Some say this is a good enough reason for immunity, others say it is simply a price to protect freedom.
To a large extent the point is moot for the future. Feds can simply require telecos (or anyone else) to maintain certain information, then get it whenever they want with an NSL. An NSL does not require a court order (not even the court orders that only bear the courts name and never appear before the court), not even from the secret FISC. It does not require a subpoena, warrant, or super search warrant. An NSL has no boundaries on what information it can reach, there is no standard for issuing one (e.g. no probable cause), and an NSL compels the recipient to secrecy. That's where the action is.
How do you get these websites to tag at all? Seems to me that privacy policies are just there to protect the sites from lawsuits, not to help inform visitors about how their data will be used.
The government has sovereign immunity. Except where the feds (even the states) explicitly permit lawsuits, they cannot be sued. Congress has not abrogated sovereign immunity over copyright infringement. Thus the Feds can violate the GPL with impunity.
It is not the governments job to actively seek out and defend against infringements on private property.
Just to play devils advocate, what about government prosecution of theft? Why shouldn't the victim need to prosecute the thief to enforce their private property rights? Does the distinction hinge on the type of property (copyright versus real, or "temporary" property versus "permanent" property), or something else? Presumably catching a thief is typically not harder than catching an infringer - so there isn't a greater need to involve the investigative ability of the Feds. Or is the distinction simply because, for now, theft is a violation of criminal law and infringement is a violation of civil law? What if infringement becomes a criminal violation?
Options are great. I used kde for a while, then I found ratpoison. Once it is setup a way you're comfortable with, you'll never want any other gui - they're all too bloated and inefficient. For the feint hearted, fluxbox is a close approximation. But I'd never want my wife to be forced to learn my ratpoison setup - so I'm glad we have options.
But who do you endorse when none of the candidates explicitly endorse an end to this? I'm sure McCain doesn't, and if Obama's FISA vote tells us anything, he's not ending this either. Ditto goes for those running for congress in my district.
The fair use factors aren't a check list or a list of defenses. Your use doesn't need to qualify under all four factors to be fair use. By the same token, if one factor is on your side (e.g. nonprofit educational purposes, which BTW has a very specific meaning), but the other three aren't, you may still lose (and probably will). Fair use is a totally slushy doctrine determined case by case by judges & juries.
A judge could easily rule (or getting a jury to go along with a ruling) for the CoS. They'd say this behavior significantly harms the market for CoS materials, the uses may or may not be transformative, youtube videos don't count as "educational", and more was borrowed than necessary to make the point CoS=bad. They could further argue CoS material is entertaining material (not factual - something I think we can agree with), thus gets the highest standard of protection.
Fair use is NOT going to protect any single individual from a large organization with lots of money. Fair use won't protect them from the financial ruin of protracted litigation, it won't protect them from losing that protracted litigation and the permanent financial ruin of a willful infringement judgment, to say nothing of the CoS's less savory methods of harassment.
European eh? I sure hope you don't ever contact anyone in the US, because you could be wiretapped. I also hope none of your communications ever go *through* the US, because you could be wiretapped.
Phone, voip, email, irc, im - all now legally tapable. Yep, good thing you're European, you're safe from this BS.
I had a similar experience with some cheap tear-out pages required for the course. $100+ hardback book had about 20 perforated pages at the back you needed to do the assignments. So there was no reselling those.
My one disagreement is on 4a. If the best & brightest were avoiding tech/research flooding lawyers/management - why are so many managers so dumb, where as so many tech people & researchers do smart? Thats my experience anyway. Lawywers I lump with politicians - they're smart, but largely devoid of a conscience.
Ah Patton Strikes Back. I never did beat that game unless it was on easy or I was the Americans (air strikes rock for cutting German supply lines). The historical information that popped up periodically was always fascinating to me as a kid. I think I spent more time in the glossary than I did in the game.
Forgot about the manual check, but sure enough that was copy protection.
The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work... Sounds like a console to me.
I'd say the internet is making us more demanding too. When I'm curious about something, I google & read about it. When my parents are curious about something they wonder about it. Not because they're less curious than me, but because for nearly all of their lives good information has been hard to get ahold of outside a library. When I wonder about something, I demand answers & the internet makes them accessible.
I'd like to point out that DirectX 10 is arbitrarily tied to Vista explicitly for backwards incompatibility & to force upgrades. , but so far the difference is nearly indistinguishable and not a uniform "win" for DX10. Not only that, but because DX10 only runs on Vista, it tends to render slower than DX9. As of yet I haven't seen a single DX10 feature worth upgrading for, nor have I seen a DX10-only game yet. Killer feature indeed.
There are good windows replacements too. PDF? Sumatra for speed or Foxit for more features. iTunes? Foobar2000 for speed, features, & customizability or MediaMonkey for no fiddling needed. Windows Update? Download, but ask me when to install or disable & use WindizUpdates. Realplayer? Realplayer alternative (ditto for quicktime). Java? Disable the tray icon. YahooIM? Pidgin comes on windows too, as does trillian. Norton? Antivir free or clamwin if you like source.
No need to switch your OS because of pesky add-on software.
You can run in XP as a limited user too. It really isn't a problem. When you need to install something with admin level privileges, right click > run as > enter credentials. And very very few programs refuse to run as a limited user once installed.
It is no sudo, but I've not had any problems in 6+ years of using XP as a limited user.
The US has a quarter of the world's prisoners but has less than 5% of the world's population. That must mean that the US has caught all the criminals and the rest of us are just going around letting the guilty free, right? No chance there might be a few false positives in that one, right? Nope, it means the US has enforced more laws with longer penalties which criminalize more behavior than other large countries. Would you do ten years for 5 grams of crack in Spain? I don't think so.
err... "these books" (beginning the second sentence of the second paragraph) is supposed to reference elementary/secondary textbooks, not the ones from TFA. Sorry for any confusion.
Only useless if you're using one of these to avoid paying for your required text. If this is your required text, no homework problems. As a side note, what are you going to college for anyway, to learn or to do homework? And the two need not be mutually exclusive, these books (if well written) and the recordings you suggest could be fine supplements to your existing set of materials.
I think there is an even bigger need for these type of books in elementary and secondary schools. These books are no cheaper than college textbooks, and as education is chronically underfunded in most countries, the ability to get reasonably up-to-date* books cheaply will be a huge boon for school's budgets. Maybe they won't have to cut that theater class after all.
* Math & science books may not need to be updated as much, but my high school American History book was printed 24 years before I got it.
Even easier - we should just be able to get a new SSN. Whenever a data breach occurs, you should be able to file a form with the federal government, showing your information was leaked, and get a new SSN. Better yet, any time personal information is leaked, the leaking entity must offer the victims to file with the government for new SSNs.
This identifier from cradle to grave is for the birds. It is the same for biometric stuff - once it is leaked a single time, the cat is out of the bag and you can't rely on it. However, unlike thumbprints, there is no good reason identity theft victims should have to worry about their credit & identity being stolen years after the data breach.
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I'm not sure that is the whole story. Off the top of my head, Boston University, Syracuse, U of Wisconsin-Madison, and IU all have pretty well respected law schools.
Universities are not legally required to forward these to students. I believe Maine took a stand that they wouldn't forward the letters, as well as a few others. Universities do more so out of concern for their students - which sounds backwards, but let me explain.
If the letters aren't forwarded, or the student refuses to settle, the next step is for the RIAA to file a John Doe suit to get a court order (or subpoena, I forget which) and compel universities to hand over information on the student. Once the student is identified, they drop the John Doe suit & file a suit naming the student.
These letters are basically a request to settle for some amount. Many universities have thought students would prefer getting a letter extorting $3,000 than notice of a lawsuit - doubly so when you consider the insane statutory damages available to the copyright holders. That's why they've forwarded them, to give students a choice as to whether to give up $3,000 or fight a lawsuit.
Wifi increases your exposure, but hard wiring everything isn't a security solution. There are a lot of hops between your computers and most others (including others on the same intranet), removing the wireless hop doesn't secure all the others.
Or you can just get some heat resistant cat5 and run it through your cold air return ducts. That's what we did and it 5 years into it we've not had any problems.
This wasn't an honest mistake, and they didn't break a vague interpretive section of the constitution. The Privacy Act provides a private cause of civil action for unauthorized disclosure to government agents. Unauthorized meaning without a subpoena or court order. The telecos have been dealing with that act since its inception. Although it has been read to be largely toothless, it does have specific provisions for modest statutory damages against service providers for such unauthorized disclosures.
That is the issue here, if permitted access to the necessary information, courts could certify class action suits against complicit telecos involving anyone who's information was disclosed inappropriately. From what we know, that'd be *all* the customers of each major firm (except qwest), and such a suit would be likely to bankrupt the telecos. Some say this is a good enough reason for immunity, others say it is simply a price to protect freedom.
To a large extent the point is moot for the future. Feds can simply require telecos (or anyone else) to maintain certain information, then get it whenever they want with an NSL. An NSL does not require a court order (not even the court orders that only bear the courts name and never appear before the court), not even from the secret FISC. It does not require a subpoena, warrant, or super search warrant. An NSL has no boundaries on what information it can reach, there is no standard for issuing one (e.g. no probable cause), and an NSL compels the recipient to secrecy. That's where the action is.
How do you get these websites to tag at all? Seems to me that privacy policies are just there to protect the sites from lawsuits, not to help inform visitors about how their data will be used.
The government has sovereign immunity. Except where the feds (even the states) explicitly permit lawsuits, they cannot be sued. Congress has not abrogated sovereign immunity over copyright infringement. Thus the Feds can violate the GPL with impunity.
It is not the governments job to actively seek out and defend against infringements on private property.
Just to play devils advocate, what about government prosecution of theft? Why shouldn't the victim need to prosecute the thief to enforce their private property rights? Does the distinction hinge on the type of property (copyright versus real, or "temporary" property versus "permanent" property), or something else? Presumably catching a thief is typically not harder than catching an infringer - so there isn't a greater need to involve the investigative ability of the Feds. Or is the distinction simply because, for now, theft is a violation of criminal law and infringement is a violation of civil law? What if infringement becomes a criminal violation?
Options are great. I used kde for a while, then I found ratpoison. Once it is setup a way you're comfortable with, you'll never want any other gui - they're all too bloated and inefficient. For the feint hearted, fluxbox is a close approximation. But I'd never want my wife to be forced to learn my ratpoison setup - so I'm glad we have options.
But who do you endorse when none of the candidates explicitly endorse an end to this? I'm sure McCain doesn't, and if Obama's FISA vote tells us anything, he's not ending this either. Ditto goes for those running for congress in my district.
The fair use factors aren't a check list or a list of defenses. Your use doesn't need to qualify under all four factors to be fair use. By the same token, if one factor is on your side (e.g. nonprofit educational purposes, which BTW has a very specific meaning), but the other three aren't, you may still lose (and probably will). Fair use is a totally slushy doctrine determined case by case by judges & juries.
A judge could easily rule (or getting a jury to go along with a ruling) for the CoS. They'd say this behavior significantly harms the market for CoS materials, the uses may or may not be transformative, youtube videos don't count as "educational", and more was borrowed than necessary to make the point CoS=bad. They could further argue CoS material is entertaining material (not factual - something I think we can agree with), thus gets the highest standard of protection.
Fair use is NOT going to protect any single individual from a large organization with lots of money. Fair use won't protect them from the financial ruin of protracted litigation, it won't protect them from losing that protracted litigation and the permanent financial ruin of a willful infringement judgment, to say nothing of the CoS's less savory methods of harassment.
European eh? I sure hope you don't ever contact anyone in the US, because you could be wiretapped. I also hope none of your communications ever go *through* the US, because you could be wiretapped.
Phone, voip, email, irc, im - all now legally tapable. Yep, good thing you're European, you're safe from this BS.
I had a similar experience with some cheap tear-out pages required for the course. $100+ hardback book had about 20 perforated pages at the back you needed to do the assignments. So there was no reselling those.
My one disagreement is on 4a. If the best & brightest were avoiding tech/research flooding lawyers/management - why are so many managers so dumb, where as so many tech people & researchers do smart? Thats my experience anyway. Lawywers I lump with politicians - they're smart, but largely devoid of a conscience.
Ah Patton Strikes Back. I never did beat that game unless it was on easy or I was the Americans (air strikes rock for cutting German supply lines). The historical information that popped up periodically was always fascinating to me as a kid. I think I spent more time in the glossary than I did in the game.
Forgot about the manual check, but sure enough that was copy protection.
I'd say the internet is making us more demanding too. When I'm curious about something, I google & read about it. When my parents are curious about something they wonder about it. Not because they're less curious than me, but because for nearly all of their lives good information has been hard to get ahold of outside a library. When I wonder about something, I demand answers & the internet makes them accessible.
I'd like to point out that DirectX 10 is arbitrarily tied to Vista explicitly for backwards incompatibility & to force upgrades. , but so far the difference is nearly indistinguishable and not a uniform "win" for DX10. Not only that, but because DX10 only runs on Vista, it tends to render slower than DX9. As of yet I haven't seen a single DX10 feature worth upgrading for, nor have I seen a DX10-only game yet. Killer feature indeed.
Sources: http://webpages.charter.net/bliss/ http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/directx-9-vs-directx-10-worth-upgrading-to-vista-for-243099.php http://www.gamespot.com/features/6171326/index.html
There are good windows replacements too. PDF? Sumatra for speed or Foxit for more features. iTunes? Foobar2000 for speed, features, & customizability or MediaMonkey for no fiddling needed. Windows Update? Download, but ask me when to install or disable & use WindizUpdates. Realplayer? Realplayer alternative (ditto for quicktime). Java? Disable the tray icon. YahooIM? Pidgin comes on windows too, as does trillian. Norton? Antivir free or clamwin if you like source.
No need to switch your OS because of pesky add-on software.
You can run in XP as a limited user too. It really isn't a problem. When you need to install something with admin level privileges, right click > run as > enter credentials. And very very few programs refuse to run as a limited user once installed.
It is no sudo, but I've not had any problems in 6+ years of using XP as a limited user.
Nope, it means the US has enforced more laws with longer penalties which criminalize more behavior than other large countries. Would you do ten years for 5 grams of crack in Spain? I don't think so.
err... "these books" (beginning the second sentence of the second paragraph) is supposed to reference elementary/secondary textbooks, not the ones from TFA. Sorry for any confusion.
Only useless if you're using one of these to avoid paying for your required text. If this is your required text, no homework problems. As a side note, what are you going to college for anyway, to learn or to do homework? And the two need not be mutually exclusive, these books (if well written) and the recordings you suggest could be fine supplements to your existing set of materials.
I think there is an even bigger need for these type of books in elementary and secondary schools. These books are no cheaper than college textbooks, and as education is chronically underfunded in most countries, the ability to get reasonably up-to-date* books cheaply will be a huge boon for school's budgets. Maybe they won't have to cut that theater class after all.
* Math & science books may not need to be updated as much, but my high school American History book was printed 24 years before I got it.
Even easier - we should just be able to get a new SSN. Whenever a data breach occurs, you should be able to file a form with the federal government, showing your information was leaked, and get a new SSN. Better yet, any time personal information is leaked, the leaking entity must offer the victims to file with the government for new SSNs.
This identifier from cradle to grave is for the birds. It is the same for biometric stuff - once it is leaked a single time, the cat is out of the bag and you can't rely on it. However, unlike thumbprints, there is no good reason identity theft victims should have to worry about their credit & identity being stolen years after the data breach.