well, in that it's meant to deter the casual thief by tricking them into believing that your car has an alarm, it IS an anti-theft device. Just a rather unsophisticated one which most nefarious types will see through these days. It's just an LED, some flashing thingumy wotsit and something (probably a simple logic gate of some variety) to turn it off when the engine is running - it adds probably less than $1 to the cost of the car, which you'll more than make back if even one particularly gullible criminal decides not to break into your car because of it.
Here is a machine for playing chess. Feel free to have a quick nose around inside. Now, watch it win.
Do you want to buy a) the schematics and b) my practical expertise in how it works to get a product to market before someone else invents one?
And yeah, if it turns out to be a mechanical turk which can't actually play chess, you'd still be able to sue me for breach of contract.
Seeing the abstract which says "a hand driven mechanical device for the playing of chess against a human player" is not going to give BigEvilCorp inc. much of a leg-up in actually developing a nontrivial chess playing machine, compared to their competitor who you now go and sell your machine to instead.
Balancing your asking price such that someone buys it before someone else develops their own and freezes you out is the art of business. And if no-one buys it, or develops their own, your idea was probably a turkey.
taking the number from the article; there are 2,111,479 articles on wikipedia. ln(2111479) is ~14.5.
hence there must be >> 2(14.5) links per node.
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?
on
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
well, according to "Complexity vs. stability in small-world networks." (Sitabhra Sinha. Journal of Physics. 2004):
The number of links per node (bi-directional), k (must be) >> ln(N), where N is the number of nodes, to avoid a fragmented network (assuming undirected link distribution). So - figure out the number of pages (nodes) in wikipedia, slap a natural log around it and you know how many links you would need to double and then have much more than to avoid fragmentation.
So, you need much more than ~29 links per node to ensure no fragmentation. That leads me to conclude that there are well over 61.2m individual inter-article links on wikipedia. I wonder if that's accurate.
Also, I thought of that algorithm first and it's called HPSAUCE!
no, you offer to let him get first dibs on your next lightyears-ahead invention for a reasonable sum and let him take the risk of someone else copying it. Or do you think that you should be able to retire on a single good idea which was probably a fluke? (Because if it weren't a fluke, you'd probably be able to come up with another good idea).
Or, you could sell a higher-quality version, and see who would be willing to pay for it. You could sell an equally low quality version with a 'made in the USA' sticker on it and flog it to the patriotic. You could improve the product and have enough initially that you more-or-less saturate the market before it can be reverse-engineered and cloned. You could offer a longer guarantee. You could get a marketing gimmick. You could sell it as 'the original'.
If you thought that was a risk in the first place, you could have sold your idea to someone else - made a guaranteed sum and got out whilst you were ahead, leaving them to bear the risk of the product being knocked off. Or you bear the risk yourself and this time it doesn't pay off.
that would deny them the english-speaking-and-don't-want-a-badly-dubbed-version market in China. Why deny yourself that market when you can use region codes to keep that market and still stop the discs moving around.
that wouldn't make them legal in the UK necessarily. There's a man in gloucestershire who makes and sells gallows to dubious regimes around the world, even though you can't use them here.
Ah, I must have misread your post - I thought that you were implying that people could make & sell illegitimate copies into other markets, and was pointing out that the copies need not be illegitimate - legitimate copies intended for another market are what region encoding is there to stop; if you are going to start copying the discs, you might as well entirely strip the region encoding off them at the same time. For vehicles; I think you will find that it is national import regulations that keep dangerous low-cost vehicles off the roads, not manufacturers trying to control where their products are resold. (Have I misread your post again?)
The idea of region encoding is so that they can set different price points (and release dates) for different parts of the world.
They can sell a DVD in region 6 (China) for the equivalent of $2 (say) because that is the maximum price that the market will bear. The region encoding stops someone from buying up 10,000 DVDs at $2 and then importing them to the US and selling them for $10. Making $8 profit whilst still significantly undercutting the discs that the studios want to sell in the US.
It also means that they can stagger the release of a movie around the world, and then stagger the DVD release whilst keeping people from getting DVDs from one of the earlier regions into one of the other regions whilst the movie is still in the theatres there (thus creating extra ticket sales from the people who just have to see the movie more than once and can not get it on a DVD yet)
I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere if you think that we're arguing about the current state of the law, and I think we're arguing about what the law should be.
And to think it started over a discussion about whether this protester brought the whole incident on himself, and my nit-picking a post that I otherwise agreed with...
I think we can agree that the police should only be hassling persons breaking the law. If you support the police being allowed to hassle people for smart-mouthing them, then you support smart-mouthing the police being against the law.
I'd like to know what charge you think that not co-operating with the police would be prosecuted under. Obstructing != not helping.
"You're holding up a sign which you _think_ you have the right to hold up _in that particular place. Thinking you have a right is not the same as having a right." Whether I have that right can be determined from facts which do exist at the time (i.e. the situation, the wording of the sign, and the law as written at the time) - that the determination based upon those facts is made at a later date doesn't mean that the determination is not valid at the time.
Being in a common law jurisdiction means that you can't get a judgement before you do something that says that the something is specifically legal - you must do it and get the judgement later, but that doesn't mean that what you did doesn't become legal until the judgement is made. If you could, it would put the kibosh on this kind of thing from the start.
"It's therefore up to the CPS, and if necessary, the courts, to decide whether you actually have that right, not you or the police." So why, exactly, do you think that's it's ok for the police to make that decision and take action against a person if they don't think that they have such a right, and face no repercussions if a court subsequently decides that the person did have that right?
"He did not claim that the police threatened him." They threatened him with legal action and taking the sign away, the latter they actually did.
"They politely asked him to take the sign down twice, had told him why they thought he should take it down, and when he refused, they cited him and took it away." They, in a threatening manner, asked him to take the sign down, although the question of whether he had the right to hold that sign up was still unanswered, and when he refused they took it away, thus partially silencing his protest. They could have taken his details and left him with the sign. If he had the right to hold the sign up then the CPS would have told them to go away and the matter would be closed, and if not the CPS could have prosecuted. Instead they did irreparable damage to his right to free speech based on little more than a hunch, which turned out to be wrong.
So you get your property back (which is good). You still don't break even - your protest lost some of its potency, and nobody has been held responsible for that.
Like retroactive wiretap warrants. You put the tap on because you think you have the necessary cause to do it. You apply for a warrant - if the warrant is granted then everything is hunky-dorey - if the warrant is denied then you're up for a compensation claim and possible criminal charges, you don't get to just have everyone forget about it so long as you take the tap off as soon as the warrant is denied.
If you want to describe my last characterisation of your position as a straw man, here's another: You seem the be fully behind the idea that everyone's freedoms should exist solely at the whim of any police officer to not take them away (at least until they get to a court), and that in the intervening time any person who's freedom is taken away should be happy to suck that up.
This may be a minor, isolated incident, but the potential for abuse is scary:
Say you like wearing T-shirts with perfectly innocuous messages on them, but every day the same police officer comes up to you, tells you that they believe that the wording on your shirt breaches the public order act and takes it away. You'll get your shirt back in a week or so, but in the mean time, you have to spend every day of every week without a shirt on. As far as I can tell you'd be happy with this situation existing so long as you get your shirts back eventually, nevermind the inconvenienc
I didn't say "defending" I said "standing up for".
Smart-mouthing, a police officer, or other person, is not a crime.
Whether it looks like belligerance to them is irrelevant.
Citing somebody for what they think is a breech of one or more laws is well within police powers, as is the confiscation of property that they deem to be a contributing factor. I didn't say that his right to not be cited was being breached. Here's an example.
You're holding a sign up which you have a right to hold up
You don't have a specific judgement already in your hands detailing your right to hold the sign up (because this is a common law jurisdiction)
A police officer tells you that you may be in breach of the Public Order Act and advises you to take the sign down
You take the sign down
Congratulations, your right to hold that sign up means nothing, because the sign is now down, and because the police officer was never actually forced to put their money where their mouth was with their advice, they won't be held responsible, even though the sign you wanted to hold up is no longer up as a direct result of their threat.
as is the confiscation of property that they deem to be a contributing factor. And if a court decides that it wasn't? You seem to be proposing giving police summary power to take people's property with no oversight.
(1) they were responding to a complaint, and (2) there's no way to prove that they had any way of knowing whether "cult" was an appropriate description of Scientology, or as the complaining Scientologists said, an insult (1) And if I complain that you annoy me and some officer arrests you for annoying me, even though that's not a crime, it's still ok, because they were responding to a complaint? (2) Why does what they were able to know have to do with it? They had incomplete information, they chose to take action upon that information anyway. If it's later found that the situation was different to that on which they were assuming that it was (especially given that it wasn't a 99% insulting, 1% not situation) why should they NOT be held responsible? They could havce taken his name & adress and left him with the sign, and then been called a bunch of morons by the CPS later.
You also have no right not to be cited by the police when they have a good faith reason to _suspect_ you of having broken one or more laws. The DPP are the ones who get to say whether any laws were actually broken, and the courts decide whether you were culpable of the breach, and if so, what punishment to mete out. Punishment has already been meted out - his sign has been taken. Why should you NOT have the right to not have your property confiscated if you weren't doing anything illegal? Here's a re-hash of the example:
You're holding up a sign which you have a right to hold up
You don't have a specific judgement already in your hands detailing your right to hold the sign up (because this is a common law jurisdiction)
A police officer tells you that you may be in breach of the Public Order Act and advises you to take the sign down
You keep the sign up
The sign is confiscated
You have no subsequent recourse against the officer personally, or the police force
How much is the right to hold that sign up worth to you now?
You're not 'given' a caution, you're offered one which you 'accept'. Aceepting a caution is an admission of guilt. Normally, refusing to accept a caution is grounds for arrest, but I'm not aware of any statutory prohibition of an officer offering people cautions even though he would have no grounds to arrest them, and just seeing how many people would accept them (and get themselves criminal records as a result), just for devilment.
Lawyering up is useless once you already have a caution. Once you've accepted the caution you've admitted guilt already. If you refuse, pending consultation with your lawyer as to wether you should accept, you'll likely get arrested, and may be offered the caution again. The whole point of on-the-spot police cautions is to allow constables to dispense 'justice' without any of that having to prove people gulty, or 'scrutiny' nonsense. You just get someone who is clearly not qualified to make a judgement on the matter declare themselves guilty and move on to the next mug. Similarly with fixed penalty notices. (Read the legislation for those, it's exactly like a protection racket.)
He may not have been given a summons, but the police have taken such information from him as necessary to issue one later. There's little practical difference between taking his details and sending a summons if the CPS decides that they have a case, and giving him a summons now and dropping it if the CPS decides that they haven't got a case. It used to be virtually impossible to demand someone's name & address on a British street. There are still only 3 circumstances (afaik) where you can:
This, so as to issue a summons, police may arrest you if you refuse to give them details or they believe that the details that you have given are false. Obviously requires a crime to have been committed that they believe can be pinned on you.
Under certain bits of anti-terror legislation, requires the home secretary to designate the geographical area that you're in as being under particular threat. Currently only used to harass political opposition (re: Walter Wolfgang)
When issuing a fixed penalty notice.
But you certainly can't just stop people and demand their details because you want to. That they have thus invoked one of these to take his details is a big step itself.
5) He refuses, and then plays smart-arse with the police. He stood up for himself in a rational, eloquent and non-violent way. I always remember being told that assertiveness was a good thing.
It's perfectly clear that he wouldn't have gotten in trouble if he'd been carrying the same placard elsewhere So he can criticise people, but only in specific areas, defined as 'where the people he wants to criticise aren't'?
There's no point in the powers of the police being limited if a person would have no recourse when they fold, having been incorrectly advised by the police that the extend of the police' powers is greater than it really is. It's crappy, but now that he's been adversely affected by this, (rather than voluntarily removing the sign), he can hopefully sue them into oblivion. You have no rights if you stop what you're doing whenever an officer gives you an 'opportunity' to stop, without exposing themselves to any risk by doing so.
so, to repeat, get a proverbial shot across their bows:
Get on to the IPCC. They're about the best avenue for getting the relevant officer held personally responsible for their actions.
Write to your MP, they can get questions asked in the house
Similarly, write to any member of the House of Lords that you think might be interested and could ask questions there
Write to the Minsiter of Justice (but write to their House of Commons address)
Write to the local newspaper
Write to all the nationals, particularly the ones who like to kick up a stink about this sort of thing (i.e. the Daily Mail)
Perhaps tip Private Eye off, they seem to like taking a pot-shot at corrupt police officers, and are quite used to dealing with legal threats, and if they go 'fair game' on Hislop, it's hitting prime-time national media at 9p.m. on Friday.
Tip the BBC off as a news organisation.
Look into getting legal aid, both for defence, and possibly to sue to get your sign returned - if they had no authority to take it, you can probably get it back. Repeat media-alerting when you get it back - big photo of you holding it up outside court.
So is there some sort of automated system which gets every major telescope on, or orbiting, the planet to drop what it's doing and point at supernovae (if they can see them) as they appear? Or does someone have to get a telephone directory out and start asking some unfortunate Chilean the way to the beach in a loud voice?
I understand that astronomers have been wanting to gather as much data as they can from as many telescopes as they can on supernovae as they appear, and have organised lots of telescopes en masse before, I just wonder by what means it's achieved.
I also think that it would be incredibly cool if, in the dusty control room of an observatory up a mountain in Hawaii or somewhere, there was a big red button labeled "push in case of supernova", which grabbed the co-ordinates currently being observed, and took over every other telescope on the planet to point at them.
Also, have they done interferometry with this data? because that would be an awesomely large telescope diameter (and awesomely small resolution angle).
Numbers out of a hat - Congress decides on some arbitrary and completely implausible figure per infringement ($30,000), then the court multiplied that by the number of infringements (3,699). I'd be more interested to see how they managed to show that number of individual infringements than where the cost per infringement came from - that's stupid but fairly easy to track down.
yes, because we recognise that MP3s, movies and software, along with other imaginary goods, are a crappy thing to base our economy on. So rather than keep trying to force people to pay for them anyway to prop up a ludicrous idea we're in favour of making it impossible to turn a profit on them, thus forcing the economy to be based on actual tangible goods.
We allow women both in our military </quote> However, we still keep about 3% of the jobs closed from them - the 3% that involve intentional close-quarters combat with the enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
slap another lens at the output to diffuse the light again?
well, in that it's meant to deter the casual thief by tricking them into believing that your car has an alarm, it IS an anti-theft device. Just a rather unsophisticated one which most nefarious types will see through these days.
It's just an LED, some flashing thingumy wotsit and something (probably a simple logic gate of some variety) to turn it off when the engine is running - it adds probably less than $1 to the cost of the car, which you'll more than make back if even one particularly gullible criminal decides not to break into your car because of it.
Here is a machine for playing chess. Feel free to have a quick nose around inside. Now, watch it win.
Do you want to buy a) the schematics and b) my practical expertise in how it works to get a product to market before someone else invents one?
And yeah, if it turns out to be a mechanical turk which can't actually play chess, you'd still be able to sue me for breach of contract.
Seeing the abstract which says "a hand driven mechanical device for the playing of chess against a human player" is not going to give BigEvilCorp inc. much of a leg-up in actually developing a nontrivial chess playing machine, compared to their competitor who you now go and sell your machine to instead.
Balancing your asking price such that someone buys it before someone else develops their own and freezes you out is the art of business. And if no-one buys it, or develops their own, your idea was probably a turkey.
taking the number from the article; there are 2,111,479 articles on wikipedia. ln(2111479) is ~14.5.
hence there must be >> 2(14.5) links per node.
well, according to "Complexity vs. stability in small-world networks." (Sitabhra Sinha. Journal of Physics. 2004):
The number of links per node (bi-directional), k (must be) >> ln(N), where N is the number of nodes, to avoid a fragmented network (assuming undirected link distribution).
So - figure out the number of pages (nodes) in wikipedia, slap a natural log around it and you know how many links you would need to double and then have much more than to avoid fragmentation.
So, you need much more than ~29 links per node to ensure no fragmentation.
That leads me to conclude that there are well over 61.2m individual inter-article links on wikipedia.
I wonder if that's accurate.
Also, I thought of that algorithm first and it's called HPSAUCE!
no, you offer to let him get first dibs on your next lightyears-ahead invention for a reasonable sum and let him take the risk of someone else copying it. Or do you think that you should be able to retire on a single good idea which was probably a fluke? (Because if it weren't a fluke, you'd probably be able to come up with another good idea).
Or, you could sell a higher-quality version, and see who would be willing to pay for it. You could sell an equally low quality version with a 'made in the USA' sticker on it and flog it to the patriotic. You could improve the product and have enough initially that you more-or-less saturate the market before it can be reverse-engineered and cloned. You could offer a longer guarantee. You could get a marketing gimmick. You could sell it as 'the original'.
If you thought that was a risk in the first place, you could have sold your idea to someone else - made a guaranteed sum and got out whilst you were ahead, leaving them to bear the risk of the product being knocked off. Or you bear the risk yourself and this time it doesn't pay off.
That's some ideas to be getting on with.
that would deny them the english-speaking-and-don't-want-a-badly-dubbed-version market in China. Why deny yourself that market when you can use region codes to keep that market and still stop the discs moving around.
that wouldn't make them legal in the UK necessarily. There's a man in gloucestershire who makes and sells gallows to dubious regimes around the world, even though you can't use them here.
Ah, I must have misread your post - I thought that you were implying that people could make & sell illegitimate copies into other markets, and was pointing out that the copies need not be illegitimate - legitimate copies intended for another market are what region encoding is there to stop; if you are going to start copying the discs, you might as well entirely strip the region encoding off them at the same time.
For vehicles; I think you will find that it is national import regulations that keep dangerous low-cost vehicles off the roads, not manufacturers trying to control where their products are resold. (Have I misread your post again?)
they are not. Infogrammes bought the remnants of the company so that they could use the name.
well, sort of.
The idea of region encoding is so that they can set different price points (and release dates) for different parts of the world.
They can sell a DVD in region 6 (China) for the equivalent of $2 (say) because that is the maximum price that the market will bear. The region encoding stops someone from buying up 10,000 DVDs at $2 and then importing them to the US and selling them for $10. Making $8 profit whilst still significantly undercutting the discs that the studios want to sell in the US.
It also means that they can stagger the release of a movie around the world, and then stagger the DVD release whilst keeping people from getting DVDs from one of the earlier regions into one of the other regions whilst the movie is still in the theatres there (thus creating extra ticket sales from the people who just have to see the movie more than once and can not get it on a DVD yet)
I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere if you think that we're arguing about the current state of the law, and I think we're arguing about what the law should be.
And to think it started over a discussion about whether this protester brought the whole incident on himself, and my nit-picking a post that I otherwise agreed with...
I think we can agree that the police should only be hassling persons breaking the law. If you support the police being allowed to hassle people for smart-mouthing them, then you support smart-mouthing the police being against the law.
I'd like to know what charge you think that not co-operating with the police would be prosecuted under. Obstructing != not helping.
"You're holding up a sign which you _think_ you have the right to hold up _in that particular place. Thinking you have a right is not the same as having a right."
Whether I have that right can be determined from facts which do exist at the time (i.e. the situation, the wording of the sign, and the law as written at the time) - that the determination based upon those facts is made at a later date doesn't mean that the determination is not valid at the time.
Being in a common law jurisdiction means that you can't get a judgement before you do something that says that the something is specifically legal - you must do it and get the judgement later, but that doesn't mean that what you did doesn't become legal until the judgement is made. If you could, it would put the kibosh on this kind of thing from the start.
"It's therefore up to the CPS, and if necessary, the courts, to decide whether you actually have that right, not you or the police."
So why, exactly, do you think that's it's ok for the police to make that decision and take action against a person if they don't think that they have such a right, and face no repercussions if a court subsequently decides that the person did have that right?
"He did not claim that the police threatened him."
They threatened him with legal action and taking the sign away, the latter they actually did.
"They politely asked him to take the sign down twice, had told him why they thought he should take it down, and when he refused, they cited him and took it away."
They, in a threatening manner, asked him to take the sign down, although the question of whether he had the right to hold that sign up was still unanswered, and when he refused they took it away, thus partially silencing his protest. They could have taken his details and left him with the sign. If he had the right to hold the sign up then the CPS would have told them to go away and the matter would be closed, and if not the CPS could have prosecuted. Instead they did irreparable damage to his right to free speech based on little more than a hunch, which turned out to be wrong.
So you get your property back (which is good). You still don't break even - your protest lost some of its potency, and nobody has been held responsible for that.
Like retroactive wiretap warrants. You put the tap on because you think you have the necessary cause to do it. You apply for a warrant - if the warrant is granted then everything is hunky-dorey - if the warrant is denied then you're up for a compensation claim and possible criminal charges, you don't get to just have everyone forget about it so long as you take the tap off as soon as the warrant is denied.
If you want to describe my last characterisation of your position as a straw man, here's another:
You seem the be fully behind the idea that everyone's freedoms should exist solely at the whim of any police officer to not take them away (at least until they get to a court), and that in the intervening time any person who's freedom is taken away should be happy to suck that up.
This may be a minor, isolated incident, but the potential for abuse is scary:
Say you like wearing T-shirts with perfectly innocuous messages on them, but every day the same police officer comes up to you, tells you that they believe that the wording on your shirt breaches the public order act and takes it away. You'll get your shirt back in a week or so, but in the mean time, you have to spend every day of every week without a shirt on. As far as I can tell you'd be happy with this situation existing so long as you get your shirts back eventually, nevermind the inconvenienc
All these puns just make me want to curl up into a corner...
Smart-mouthing, a police officer, or other person, is not a crime.
Whether it looks like belligerance to them is irrelevant. Citing somebody for what they think is a breech of one or more laws is well within police powers, as is the confiscation of property that they deem to be a contributing factor. I didn't say that his right to not be cited was being breached. Here's an example.
Congratulations, your right to hold that sign up means nothing, because the sign is now down, and because the police officer was never actually forced to put their money where their mouth was with their advice, they won't be held responsible, even though the sign you wanted to hold up is no longer up as a direct result of their threat. as is the confiscation of property that they deem to be a contributing factor. And if a court decides that it wasn't? You seem to be proposing giving police summary power to take people's property with no oversight. (1) they were responding to a complaint, and (2) there's no way to prove that they had any way of knowing whether "cult" was an appropriate description of Scientology, or as the complaining Scientologists said, an insult (1) And if I complain that you annoy me and some officer arrests you for annoying me, even though that's not a crime, it's still ok, because they were responding to a complaint?
(2) Why does what they were able to know have to do with it? They had incomplete information, they chose to take action upon that information anyway. If it's later found that the situation was different to that on which they were assuming that it was (especially given that it wasn't a 99% insulting, 1% not situation) why should they NOT be held responsible? They could havce taken his name & adress and left him with the sign, and then been called a bunch of morons by the CPS later. You also have no right not to be cited by the police when they have a good faith reason to _suspect_ you of having broken one or more laws. The DPP are the ones who get to say whether any laws were actually broken, and the courts decide whether you were culpable of the breach, and if so, what punishment to mete out. Punishment has already been meted out - his sign has been taken. Why should you NOT have the right to not have your property confiscated if you weren't doing anything illegal?
Here's a re-hash of the example:
How much is the right to hold that sign up worth to you now?
It used to be virtually impossible to demand someone's name & address on a British street. There are still only 3 circumstances (afaik) where you can:
But you certainly can't just stop people and demand their details because you want to. That they have thus invoked one of these to take his details is a big step itself.
There's no point in the powers of the police being limited if a person would have no recourse when they fold, having been incorrectly advised by the police that the extend of the police' powers is greater than it really is. It's crappy, but now that he's been adversely affected by this, (rather than voluntarily removing the sign), he can hopefully sue them into oblivion.
You have no rights if you stop what you're doing whenever an officer gives you an 'opportunity' to stop, without exposing themselves to any risk by doing so.
So is there some sort of automated system which gets every major telescope on, or orbiting, the planet to drop what it's doing and point at supernovae (if they can see them) as they appear? Or does someone have to get a telephone directory out and start asking some unfortunate Chilean the way to the beach in a loud voice?
I understand that astronomers have been wanting to gather as much data as they can from as many telescopes as they can on supernovae as they appear, and have organised lots of telescopes en masse before, I just wonder by what means it's achieved.
I also think that it would be incredibly cool if, in the dusty control room of an observatory up a mountain in Hawaii or somewhere, there was a big red button labeled "push in case of supernova", which grabbed the co-ordinates currently being observed, and took over every other telescope on the planet to point at them.
Also, have they done interferometry with this data? because that would be an awesomely large telescope diameter (and awesomely small resolution angle).
that has got to be the fastest that we've achieved Godwin on such an uncontrovertial topic!
like what tracks it's going to have.
There's a copy of Guitar Hero III at home and apart from maybe half a dozen tracks it's just noisy crap that blocks up the TV.
Here's hoping that Guitar Hero IV has some proper stuff, like most of The Shadows back catalogue, in it.
$30,000, $150,000, they're both arbitrary and completely implausible.
Numbers out of a hat - Congress decides on some arbitrary and completely implausible figure per infringement ($30,000), then the court multiplied that by the number of infringements (3,699). I'd be more interested to see how they managed to show that number of individual infringements than where the cost per infringement came from - that's stupid but fairly easy to track down.
yes, because we recognise that MP3s, movies and software, along with other imaginary goods, are a crappy thing to base our economy on. So rather than keep trying to force people to pay for them anyway to prop up a ludicrous idea we're in favour of making it impossible to turn a profit on them, thus forcing the economy to be based on actual tangible goods.
We allow women both in our military
</quote>
However, we still keep about 3% of the jobs closed from them - the 3% that involve intentional close-quarters combat with the enemy.