[reading 'letters of apology' at an Amensty International gig] "This one is from the Shah of Persia (retired). What your organisation needs is a strong and charismatic figurehead. I won't make the same mistake I made last time; there's no point employing psychopathically cruel secret police who leave a lot of burnt and mangled bodies all over the place - one needs to employ psychopathically cruel secret police who leave no evidence at all!"
you might not want to, but society as a whole needs you to or we'll have a large proportion of the population being little more than a dead weight on the rest.
suing for something that someone else made (wrote, in this case), and being able to do so simply because you gave them a few bucks for the rights to it...just ridiculous.
Can she force them to disclose how much they paid for it, then limit damages to how much it was worth when they paid for it. Surely, if complete rights to something are worth $X, the danmage caused by an unauthorized copy cannot possibly be greater than $X; in the same way that if you have 3 cars I can't steal 4 from you.
He also attacked Russia while he was still fighting Britain. The only hope of success that would have had would have ben if Germany had dedicated everything to it AND persuaded the Japanese into attacking Russia from the other side. Operation Barbarossa had no planned knock-out blow and no way to actually win. Even if they had taken Moscow (which a bit more effort, and a bit less meddling may have enabled), history suggests that the Russians would not have surrendered - by that point they were well advanced with moving most of their production behind the Urals and would probably have waited until the Germans were well stuck in to the Russian winter in Moscow before unleashing the Siberians to do what eventually happened in Stalingrad. So, as I said, the only hope for an axis victory would have been a Japenese invasion of the eastern end of Russia tying up the Siberians, and pushing them further west until they JUST had the Urals. Even then it's doubtful, given their record, that the Japenese could have done more than tie up Russian troops - they had various border skirmishes with the Russians in the years before the war and were roundly beaten.
In short, had Germany not had to try and keep Britain supressed (perhaps had Moussolini managed to fight in North Africa on his own - suppressing Britain by invading her may have tied up more troops in an army of occupation than the forces required to bottle her up), AND got the Japanese to invade the Rusians, AND had a four-leaf clover, rabbit's foot & lucky horseshoe, they MAY have been able to roll the Russians up, and dominate Europe, Asia and Africa. Then, they may have been able to subject the United States to war on two fronts, which would likely have got messy.
then the legal system is broken. All cases should always go to trial. The prosecution should have to lay out a beyond-reasonable doubt case even if someone pleads guilty (so pleading guilty would be like opting not to present a defence).
If the present system can't cope with that, the present system needs to be expanded (or there need to be less laws). The same with justice as with everything else - you get what you pay for.
Unless you concede that plea bargains are equally extortionist
Um, yep, absolutely. They pervert the entire system, seeing people who didn't do anything plead out to avoid risking big charges, and let people who do seriously bad stuff get away with a light sentence by only pleading to a relatively minor crime. All plea bargains do is get society the worst of both worlds.
It's likely that to a normal firewall (i.e. one that a home user might have) the connection the game makes to be able to play is the same as the ones it makes to torrent stuff to other people. While it may be theoretically possible to isolate the handful of IP adresses that a given game actually needs to access to work, good luck finding a firewall that will actually let you restrict that game to those addresses, and that doesn't even begin to tackle games with a multiplayer mode which just hook individual users together (not sure how many still do that now, but there are bound to be some).
Do you just mean you don't want them mashing the keys on a normal keyboard?
You can get giant-key kids keyboards like this, you can also get trackballs like this. Of course, if you go for a more unusual input device you may run into the problem of not being easily able to find software that will play nice with it (unless you also want to fiddle with key mappers).
why? she'd be dismissed from the jury, they're put in a substitute (or start again) and I'd get a fair trial. I'd be far more worried about being tried by jurors who couldn't mentally compartmentalize not showing themselves before it was over. All this has done is tell jurors, "If you find yourself coming to conclusions before you've heard even half the case; for Pete's sake, don't tell anyone".
Again, I don't see why stupid is her fault. 'Stupid' and 'poor judgement' are just part of the hand that life deals you. Maybe it's the sort of latent stupid which wasn't apparent at the start (i.e. it's no-one's fault that she ended up on the jury).
Nonetheless, if you have a juror who has demonstrated that they're not up to the job, they should be removed, but punishment should be reserved for people genuinely acting maliciously (e.g. you say you don't know the defendant, but actually it's the guy who was trying to hit on your girlfriend last week, so you intend to push for guilty whatever the evidence to get him locked up well away from her), i.e. situations you may expect to see about once a decade across the entire country.
no, I mean the contempt with which the courts treat 'sacred' juries.
This case is a partial example:
You are asked to do some work. You will not be paid, you may have to show up at different hours and substantially further from home than you may otherwise be going to your normal job (if you're unemployed you may be working without pay instead of having free time without pay, if you work nights, you may find yourself having to both show part time to your job AND jury service). Even when you do show up, you may have to sit around for hours on end, occasionally being asked impertinent questions by people deciding if they want you there at all, this may result in you spending several days sitting around and actually accomplishing nothing. If you speak out of turn, don't wear appropriate clothing, do your job badly (which may merely be because you're not cut out for the work being asked of you), or talk to anyone else about the work you're doing, (or a whole raft of other things) you can be berated as a matter of public record, fined, or even imprisoned without trial on the whim of a man (or woman) who is essentially taking it personally.
Why WOULDN'T you try to get out of that?
With the exception of the wider principle - in the unlikely event that you find yourself on trial some day, you'd like a jury - there really is no up side to jury service. Ergo, people try to avoid it. (That's why, elsewhere commenting on this story, I've described it as 'doing society a favour'.)
how would writing it into the contract between the user and the ISP create provable liability in a lawsuit between the user and a movie studio?
The ISP can have an agreement that they will consider the account holder responsible for all goings-on on the connection, but that doesn't force the courts to see it the same way (and they shouldn't either - courts are normally pretty picky about making sure that someone sues the right person).
because when election time comes around, people vote based on candidates policies on health, or defence, or education, so copyright reform stops being important. And, once people are voted in, they go off on 4 or 5 years of totally unaccountable power where most of their decisions are heavily influenced by lobbying from groups with money (in this case, the 'content industry').
Having a DVD (or BD) drive (can you get D software for Linux yet?) is a good idea, but if he already has a streaming server set up, wouldn't it be easier to put tuners in there and stream their output to the TV (or, therefore, any other computer)?. As for ripping DVDs, that should be done on the server, if you want to watch it now, you put the DVD in; if you want to watch it later there's no real obstacle to putting the DVD into the server machine to rip it.
Another suggestion, if OP is going to be using this as a permanent set-up (which I presume he is), set up a seperate connection between the streaming machine and the recieving machine so its regular use doesn't clog up the rest of your network (unless you have a gigabit network already, obviously).
It sounds like what OP wants is one of the better EEEboxes, but with an optical drive. Anyone know of such a product? (vested interest: I've been wanting to set something like this up for some time.)
urgh, jury decisions don't create precedents. But, it has been historically the case that impossibility to actually get a conviction through even where the dfendant is clearly guilty has caused the politicians to pull their collective finger out and change the law.
all citizens agree to all laws. Not random people who get extra rules foisted on them for varying lengths of time which can get them jailed without a proper trial if they break them.
perhaps if juries were not treated with the contempt which they are (this case is not a prime example, but it is a partial one), people may be less eager to try and get out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
[reading 'letters of apology' at an Amensty International gig]
"This one is from the Shah of Persia (retired).
What your organisation needs is a strong and charismatic figurehead. I won't make the same mistake I made last time; there's no point employing psychopathically cruel secret police who leave a lot of burnt and mangled bodies all over the place - one needs to employ psychopathically cruel secret police who leave no evidence at all!"
you might not want to, but society as a whole needs you to or we'll have a large proportion of the population being little more than a dead weight on the rest.
suing for something that someone else made (wrote, in this case), and being able to do so simply because you gave them a few bucks for the rights to it...just ridiculous.
Can she force them to disclose how much they paid for it, then limit damages to how much it was worth when they paid for it. Surely, if complete rights to something are worth $X, the danmage caused by an unauthorized copy cannot possibly be greater than $X; in the same way that if you have 3 cars I can't steal 4 from you.
He also attacked Russia while he was still fighting Britain. The only hope of success that would have had would have ben if Germany had dedicated everything to it AND persuaded the Japanese into attacking Russia from the other side.
Operation Barbarossa had no planned knock-out blow and no way to actually win. Even if they had taken Moscow (which a bit more effort, and a bit less meddling may have enabled), history suggests that the Russians would not have surrendered - by that point they were well advanced with moving most of their production behind the Urals and would probably have waited until the Germans were well stuck in to the Russian winter in Moscow before unleashing the Siberians to do what eventually happened in Stalingrad. So, as I said, the only hope for an axis victory would have been a Japenese invasion of the eastern end of Russia tying up the Siberians, and pushing them further west until they JUST had the Urals. Even then it's doubtful, given their record, that the Japenese could have done more than tie up Russian troops - they had various border skirmishes with the Russians in the years before the war and were roundly beaten.
In short, had Germany not had to try and keep Britain supressed (perhaps had Moussolini managed to fight in North Africa on his own - suppressing Britain by invading her may have tied up more troops in an army of occupation than the forces required to bottle her up), AND got the Japanese to invade the Rusians, AND had a four-leaf clover, rabbit's foot & lucky horseshoe, they MAY have been able to roll the Russians up, and dominate Europe, Asia and Africa. Then, they may have been able to subject the United States to war on two fronts, which would likely have got messy.
that's all very well, but what about those without half a brain?
Surely, it's not in society's interests that 30% (say) of the population are as good as unemployable, because they can't be discreet on Facebook.
then the legal system is broken. All cases should always go to trial. The prosecution should have to lay out a beyond-reasonable doubt case even if someone pleads guilty (so pleading guilty would be like opting not to present a defence).
If the present system can't cope with that, the present system needs to be expanded (or there need to be less laws). The same with justice as with everything else - you get what you pay for.
Unless you concede that plea bargains are equally extortionist
Um, yep, absolutely. They pervert the entire system, seeing people who didn't do anything plead out to avoid risking big charges, and let people who do seriously bad stuff get away with a light sentence by only pleading to a relatively minor crime. All plea bargains do is get society the worst of both worlds.
It's likely that to a normal firewall (i.e. one that a home user might have) the connection the game makes to be able to play is the same as the ones it makes to torrent stuff to other people. While it may be theoretically possible to isolate the handful of IP adresses that a given game actually needs to access to work, good luck finding a firewall that will actually let you restrict that game to those addresses, and that doesn't even begin to tackle games with a multiplayer mode which just hook individual users together (not sure how many still do that now, but there are bound to be some).
Do you just mean you don't want them mashing the keys on a normal keyboard?
You can get giant-key kids keyboards like this, you can also get trackballs like this. Of course, if you go for a more unusual input device you may run into the problem of not being easily able to find software that will play nice with it (unless you also want to fiddle with key mappers).
why? she'd be dismissed from the jury, they're put in a substitute (or start again) and I'd get a fair trial. I'd be far more worried about being tried by jurors who couldn't mentally compartmentalize not showing themselves before it was over. All this has done is tell jurors, "If you find yourself coming to conclusions before you've heard even half the case; for Pete's sake, don't tell anyone".
Again, I don't see why stupid is her fault. 'Stupid' and 'poor judgement' are just part of the hand that life deals you. Maybe it's the sort of latent stupid which wasn't apparent at the start (i.e. it's no-one's fault that she ended up on the jury).
Nonetheless, if you have a juror who has demonstrated that they're not up to the job, they should be removed, but punishment should be reserved for people genuinely acting maliciously (e.g. you say you don't know the defendant, but actually it's the guy who was trying to hit on your girlfriend last week, so you intend to push for guilty whatever the evidence to get him locked up well away from her), i.e. situations you may expect to see about once a decade across the entire country.
no, I mean the contempt with which the courts treat 'sacred' juries.
This case is a partial example:
You are asked to do some work. You will not be paid, you may have to show up at different hours and substantially further from home than you may otherwise be going to your normal job (if you're unemployed you may be working without pay instead of having free time without pay, if you work nights, you may find yourself having to both show part time to your job AND jury service). Even when you do show up, you may have to sit around for hours on end, occasionally being asked impertinent questions by people deciding if they want you there at all, this may result in you spending several days sitting around and actually accomplishing nothing. If you speak out of turn, don't wear appropriate clothing, do your job badly (which may merely be because you're not cut out for the work being asked of you), or talk to anyone else about the work you're doing, (or a whole raft of other things) you can be berated as a matter of public record, fined, or even imprisoned without trial on the whim of a man (or woman) who is essentially taking it personally.
Why WOULDN'T you try to get out of that?
With the exception of the wider principle - in the unlikely event that you find yourself on trial some day, you'd like a jury - there really is no up side to jury service.
Ergo, people try to avoid it. (That's why, elsewhere commenting on this story, I've described it as 'doing society a favour'.)
how would writing it into the contract between the user and the ISP create provable liability in a lawsuit between the user and a movie studio?
The ISP can have an agreement that they will consider the account holder responsible for all goings-on on the connection, but that doesn't force the courts to see it the same way (and they shouldn't either - courts are normally pretty picky about making sure that someone sues the right person).
no, the moths were the only hole.
Ha! haha! Boom! Boom!
that is the theory of criminal laws; but civil lawsuits are supposed to be to recover damage done, not to deter.
could you consider how it all works, rather than just comparing words and pronouncing them to be the same? Would that be too much to ask?
because when election time comes around, people vote based on candidates policies on health, or defence, or education, so copyright reform stops being important. And, once people are voted in, they go off on 4 or 5 years of totally unaccountable power where most of their decisions are heavily influenced by lobbying from groups with money (in this case, the 'content industry').
Having a DVD (or BD) drive (can you get D software for Linux yet?) is a good idea, but if he already has a streaming server set up, wouldn't it be easier to put tuners in there and stream their output to the TV (or, therefore, any other computer)?. As for ripping DVDs, that should be done on the server, if you want to watch it now, you put the DVD in; if you want to watch it later there's no real obstacle to putting the DVD into the server machine to rip it.
Another suggestion, if OP is going to be using this as a permanent set-up (which I presume he is), set up a seperate connection between the streaming machine and the recieving machine so its regular use doesn't clog up the rest of your network (unless you have a gigabit network already, obviously).
It sounds like what OP wants is one of the better EEEboxes, but with an optical drive. Anyone know of such a product? (vested interest: I've been wanting to set something like this up for some time.)
I've got a really good solution to that. Mandate that the budget for the public defender's office is identical to that of the AGs office.
urgh, jury decisions don't create precedents. But, it has been historically the case that impossibility to actually get a conviction through even where the dfendant is clearly guilty has caused the politicians to pull their collective finger out and change the law.
all citizens agree to all laws. Not random people who get extra rules foisted on them for varying lengths of time which can get them jailed without a proper trial if they break them.
duty - the reason you give when you haven't got an actual reason.
perhaps if juries were not treated with the contempt which they are (this case is not a prime example, but it is a partial one), people may be less eager to try and get out of it.
then the person responsible is the person who didn't screen her out. Ultimately, the judge. Will he be writing an essay too?
$250 fine. First class, well done. You hit back at someone doing you a favour when they do a bad job. *clap clap clap*.
What a self-important moron this judge is.