or they *could* offer to do it for free, since they're the ones whingeing about what already paying customers are (inadvertently) doing with the service that they're paying for.
Which will work beautifully until month 6, at which point disgruntled customers will instruct their banks not to honour any further direct debit mandates from the ISP and organise paying ONLY for the days during which they received service. Between the lost income and the insane administrative headache of dealing with cancelled direct debits and partial payment of bills, it'll cost the ISP's big time.
Any policy which tries to penalise average customers for what someone else illegally does with their computer will go down like a lead balloon inflated with osmium.
if they can only access the internets to actually upload stuff *at home* then anything they upload will be 6 to 15 months out of date. Firstly, this means that it's unlikely that anything that would compromise current operations would get out and secondly, it means that as Iraq descends further into chaos, the youtube clips will be showing an Iraq 6 to 15 months earlier when it wasn't quite so bad.
that it should be illegal to publish pictures of people (who have a reasonable expectation that their image will not be published without their permission) with the object of drawing negative attention to that person - thus stopping 'naming and shaming' exercises without restricting the right to lampoon politicians. No, I wouldn't like to try and draft legislation to implement that.
As we saw from the betamax decision, and activity can only be outlawed if it has no legitimate purpose. My argument is that having a name & shame wall does not have a legitimate purpose because all that it seeks to do is allow a shopkeeper to run their own perverted justice system. And given that they have no legitimate purpose, it's an awful lot easier to just ban them, than force people to go litigating individual libel cases to get pictures taken down. I'd rather the state got involved at the business regulation level and stopped it happening in the first place than individuals having to sue for every picture - all that does is create work for the lawyers, and by the time that the case is concluded, the damage is done, and you find your face on a third wall labelled "PEOPLE WHO DAMAGE MY BUSINESS by suing me".
Let's look at another, similar, situation. What if businesses published in a newspaper the names of all the unsuccessful applicants for a job along with why they were unsucessful? Or the names of fired employees and why they were fired?
A business can choose to employ who they like, but if they start publishing the fact the Joe Bloggs was not employed because his hair was too long and he didn't wear a tie (by putting his picture on the wall of tardiness) I think most people would see that as crossing the line. Why should it be different because in the proposed transaction the money will be going in the opposite direction?
once your photo was taken, on the wall, and your reputation ruined? What if, when you see the wall and tell the shopkeeper that you're taking your business elsewhere because of your objection to it he snaps your picture and puts it on another wall entitled "PEOPLE WHO HAVE DAMAGED MY BUSINESS by shopping elsewhere"? There's your photo on a wall which people are unlikely to read the second half of the title of and which, because a court will consider the full title, isn't libellous. Still happy that your only protection is to shop elsewhere?
this would be sex offender registries which, in civilised countries, are not available to the public?
Maybe I should add at this point that I live in the UK where we don't have different license plates for drunk drivers and where our sex offenders register is secret. Maybe it's just that at an official level 'naming and shaming' is not normally condoned (although it's beginning to creep in) and the same attitude permiates downwards (or percollates upwards from a population that won't tolerate it) - it seems like a great policy, right up until you do something stupid and your own name & photo are spread across the billboards.
Although you seem to have hit the nail on the head - you can't do you time and then get back to your life if someone with a large advertising budget has spread your name around as a nasty piece of work - criminal convictions become 'spent' after a certain amount of time so you don't have to declare them on job applications, if that information got throw across the newspapers a few years back, the fact that you don't have to declare the convictions on the form won't make a blind bit of difference.
and if, say, someone typed the wrong date in when you returned the tape? and you got put on the wall actually having done nothing wrong? My point is that in a wall full of pictures, the odds that they're all accurate and that you can defend that in court are pretty slim. Which means that you've effectively libelled a whole bunch of people. Further, you're using their image without their permission, which may well be illegal, depending on what angle the lawyers take (like, if you successfully argue that they're advertising with your image).
May I point you to the village stocks of the middle ages? Fines were mostly for the rich (because they were the only people who could pay) and imprisonment wasn't used as a punishment in itself until the last few hundred years - whippings, beatings, the stocks, tarred & feathered, or death. Instead we see store owners who, of course, can't imprison or fine people, reverting to trying to run their stores like mediaeval fiefdoms instead.
Being in public (and so being able to be photographed) does not normally also make publication of the photographs of you legal.
The simple fact is that these walls serve no legitimate purpose (trying to run your own mini justice system by shaming people is not a legitimate purpose) and since they're highly likely to end up libelling at least one of the people on them, they shouldn't be allowed. By which I don't mean that there should be laws in place to stop them, simply that there should be no laws in place against those people on the walls taking any action necessary to remove themselves from them.
but cheques won't be readable unless they're out from behind the counter. In which case you can just take some permanent marker to it (or remove it) - a cheque has a nominal value of a tiny fraction of a cent, they'd be unlikely to make a criminal damage charge stick (and it's possible that the cheque would, technically, still belong to you anyway). IANAL, etc.
"If not will video stores be forced to ban "BAD RENTER" walls and such other devices for shaming/controlling problem customers?"
Yes, but that's aside from the discussion - if you want to keep a collection of photos of bad renters as reference for your staff to know who not to rent to then go ahead, but photographing people and putting them on display is completely crossing the line. Not least because it's mass libel. 'Shaming' people, as a primary method of government sponsored punishment was done away with a very long time ago for good reason, private businesses should not be allowed to carry it on.
Doesn't something disturb and worry you about a shopkeeper whipping a polaroid camera out and snapping photos of customers that they don't like so that they can put them on the wall?
and why have you decided to make your own with improved physics rather than use the code for torcs or rars and change its physics? Because in the end torcs & rars physics engine are unsalvageable crap (for what you want the program to do, I'm sure they're beautiful physics engines for what the torcs and rars people want) - admittedly, in this case, the developers haven't reached this conclusion yet (I assume), but that may be because their aims are different.
To some extent, you're not competing with torcs or rars, because you're producing a physics simulation with cars, rather than a racing simulation with half-plausible physics (again, I assume).
Which reinforces my original point - you're either moving away from your 'competition' so you're not really competing anymore (people will choose one or the other primarily based on differing requirements, rather than one being better than the other at exactly the same thing), or you end up working on the project, or you fork it (which is really where the 'you make your competition by opening the source' idea comes from).
(no, obviously, this soon, I've not RTFA)
If you see a piece of OSS that you want to see X feature in and you're a coder you have 3 options:
Write a competing piece of software
Fork it
Join the development
And people will choose? 3. Exactly. Or, maybe, if they have personality differences, 2. Unless they've looked at the source and decided "this is an unsalvageable piece of crap" they won't be doing 1, and even if they have, the developers have probably done that too, and that leaves options 2 & 3 open again.
and if the defendant has, say, had to sell their house to cover their legal expenses in the mean time. Will they get the associated costs of moving out of their house and storing their property paid? And if their kids have had to do without, say, new clothes and had to suffer bullying because they've been wearing hand-me-downs, will they be compensated? What about the months of sleepless nights, family breakdown, complete loss of life outside of work/courtroom?
My cousin is a lawyer (in Britain, when the winner normally gets their costs from the other side) and he was explaining to me when I challenged him about contract law and 'valueless considerations' (such as promising not to sue for something that they wouldn't be able to successfully sue you for anyway) that even if the other side has no case you won't get all the costs incurred in defence back.
And here's another example, http://www.taubmansucks.com/, this guy was sued over a trademark issue by someone who had no case. A year later he finally won, and got the costs of engaging a lawyer back. Unfortunately, he couldn't afford to engage a lawyer at the start so had to defend himself. He's a consultant. When he was buried in legal documents, he couldn't work. (from act115) "I probably lost tens of thousands of dollars in potential billings;" - did he see any of that? nope. Work you do to defend yourself is free - if you want to be paid, be a lawyer.
Suing someone without a case is extortion in all but name. Infact it's worse than extortion. If you try to extort me by coming around with a baseball bat, I'd be allowed to take your head off with a big sword, if you did it with a court I have to roll over and take it, or end up in jail/dead.
What do you think about the judge who's suing a dry cleaners for $65million over a lost pair of trousers? if he wins outright they'll be ruined. If he wins 1% of what he's suing for they'll be ruined. Even if he doesn't win, the hidden costs that they've incurred (maybe the stress has caused them to make mistakes and damage other people's trousers) will be close to ruinous (assuming, then, that they get their costs back, which given that they did misplace his trousers, isn't guaranteed). How does that NOT fit the common definition of 'extortion', just because his enforcers have badges and are lead by a man in a wig and a toy hammer?
ah, yes, but the US seems to like handing out maximum or near-maximum sentences. What's the betting that he'll get credit for 3 years of time served fighting his extradition? (given that someone else who was wrongfully extradited to the US didn't when their time served was pretty much equal to their sentence). Perhaps Australian jail time is equivalent to American jail time.
" but making software available illegally in the USA could be considered to be taking place in the USA"
Only by someone blinded by a desperate desire to come up with any old crap to justify trying someone clearly outside their jurisdiction. Sadly, most judges used to be the same grandstanding lawyers interested in their own careers more than justice and so are willing to scratch the backs of the current generation (in the same way as the judges of their time no doubt did).
This clearly shows the need for an overseeing body made up of impartial observers who aren't judges or lawyers to be able to bash them both around the head and toss cases clearly outside their jurisdiction.
no, no. Find a granny who DOES have a computer and is being sued by the RIAA for bonus marks. Not only is that harder, but the task of preparing the defence is fractionally harder too.
when the decision is left down to individual beaurocrats who are then free to go around grandstanding about how much good their doing (as opposed to it being a collective decision by an organisation like in Blighty). Although, on the other hand, it does make it easier to know who to hold responsible for malicious prosecutions. But then on the other hand (yes, I was near Chernobyl) when you get to court you'll know exactly who the prosecutor is and be free to publish (or at least know) their name anyway.
The real reform needed here is the ability to bring private criminal prosecutions against public figures - anyone can pay your fine so long as it's paid, no-one else can do your jail time.
because frankly a game map which you play with an on-screen 'gun' and the possession of a hammer don't add up to 'major al-qaeda cell'. They add up to normal teenager - I certainly had a hammer in my room as a teenager and an angle grinder, and a set of very sharp chisels.
And if the chance that he's actually a terrorist is negligible (which it seems to be), could they PLEASE stop bandying the word about, it cheapens the meaning.
Oh, and please, please, please stop using the word 'terroristic'. It doesn't exist.
Of course, the other lesson here is: 'I've got nothing to hide' is rubbish - they'll always find something that you should have hidden, like a hammer. NEVER consent to a search without a warrant.
rubbish. This security-through-obscurity method has taken 600 years to crack - plenty long enough for whoever encrypted it to not have to worry about the consequences. One in the eye for 'security experts'.
oh for crying out loud! that's what it is. I saw it on an earlier comment to something else and tried typing it into a hex convertor to find out what the secret message was! \me kicks the/. community
Don't forget, the RIAA would like some of that device-disabling action. It could autodetect copied MP3 and blow up in the pirate's face. A messy death is better than they deserve anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
or they *could* offer to do it for free, since they're the ones whingeing about what already paying customers are (inadvertently) doing with the service that they're paying for.
Which will work beautifully until month 6, at which point disgruntled customers will instruct their banks not to honour any further direct debit mandates from the ISP and organise paying ONLY for the days during which they received service. Between the lost income and the insane administrative headache of dealing with cancelled direct debits and partial payment of bills, it'll cost the ISP's big time.
Any policy which tries to penalise average customers for what someone else illegally does with their computer will go down like a lead balloon inflated with osmium.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: 'Anyone who wants a position of authority should under no circumstances be allowed to do the job'
if they can only access the internets to actually upload stuff *at home* then anything they upload will be 6 to 15 months out of date. Firstly, this means that it's unlikely that anything that would compromise current operations would get out and secondly, it means that as Iraq descends further into chaos, the youtube clips will be showing an Iraq 6 to 15 months earlier when it wasn't quite so bad.
that it should be illegal to publish pictures of people (who have a reasonable expectation that their image will not be published without their permission) with the object of drawing negative attention to that person - thus stopping 'naming and shaming' exercises without restricting the right to lampoon politicians. No, I wouldn't like to try and draft legislation to implement that.
As we saw from the betamax decision, and activity can only be outlawed if it has no legitimate purpose. My argument is that having a name & shame wall does not have a legitimate purpose because all that it seeks to do is allow a shopkeeper to run their own perverted justice system. And given that they have no legitimate purpose, it's an awful lot easier to just ban them, than force people to go litigating individual libel cases to get pictures taken down. I'd rather the state got involved at the business regulation level and stopped it happening in the first place than individuals having to sue for every picture - all that does is create work for the lawyers, and by the time that the case is concluded, the damage is done, and you find your face on a third wall labelled "PEOPLE WHO DAMAGE MY BUSINESS by suing me".
Let's look at another, similar, situation. What if businesses published in a newspaper the names of all the unsuccessful applicants for a job along with why they were unsucessful? Or the names of fired employees and why they were fired?
A business can choose to employ who they like, but if they start publishing the fact the Joe Bloggs was not employed because his hair was too long and he didn't wear a tie (by putting his picture on the wall of tardiness) I think most people would see that as crossing the line. Why should it be different because in the proposed transaction the money will be going in the opposite direction?
Is shopping elsewhere objectionable? Is saying that it damages their business untrue?
The state gets involved if you sue.
once your photo was taken, on the wall, and your reputation ruined? What if, when you see the wall and tell the shopkeeper that you're taking your business elsewhere because of your objection to it he snaps your picture and puts it on another wall entitled "PEOPLE WHO HAVE DAMAGED MY BUSINESS by shopping elsewhere"? There's your photo on a wall which people are unlikely to read the second half of the title of and which, because a court will consider the full title, isn't libellous. Still happy that your only protection is to shop elsewhere?
this would be sex offender registries which, in civilised countries, are not available to the public?
Maybe I should add at this point that I live in the UK where we don't have different license plates for drunk drivers and where our sex offenders register is secret. Maybe it's just that at an official level 'naming and shaming' is not normally condoned (although it's beginning to creep in) and the same attitude permiates downwards (or percollates upwards from a population that won't tolerate it) - it seems like a great policy, right up until you do something stupid and your own name & photo are spread across the billboards.
Although you seem to have hit the nail on the head - you can't do you time and then get back to your life if someone with a large advertising budget has spread your name around as a nasty piece of work - criminal convictions become 'spent' after a certain amount of time so you don't have to declare them on job applications, if that information got throw across the newspapers a few years back, the fact that you don't have to declare the convictions on the form won't make a blind bit of difference.
and if, say, someone typed the wrong date in when you returned the tape? and you got put on the wall actually having done nothing wrong? My point is that in a wall full of pictures, the odds that they're all accurate and that you can defend that in court are pretty slim. Which means that you've effectively libelled a whole bunch of people. Further, you're using their image without their permission, which may well be illegal, depending on what angle the lawyers take (like, if you successfully argue that they're advertising with your image).
May I point you to the village stocks of the middle ages? Fines were mostly for the rich (because they were the only people who could pay) and imprisonment wasn't used as a punishment in itself until the last few hundred years - whippings, beatings, the stocks, tarred & feathered, or death. Instead we see store owners who, of course, can't imprison or fine people, reverting to trying to run their stores like mediaeval fiefdoms instead.
Being in public (and so being able to be photographed) does not normally also make publication of the photographs of you legal.
The simple fact is that these walls serve no legitimate purpose (trying to run your own mini justice system by shaming people is not a legitimate purpose) and since they're highly likely to end up libelling at least one of the people on them, they shouldn't be allowed. By which I don't mean that there should be laws in place to stop them, simply that there should be no laws in place against those people on the walls taking any action necessary to remove themselves from them.
but cheques won't be readable unless they're out from behind the counter. In which case you can just take some permanent marker to it (or remove it) - a cheque has a nominal value of a tiny fraction of a cent, they'd be unlikely to make a criminal damage charge stick (and it's possible that the cheque would, technically, still belong to you anyway). IANAL, etc.
"If not will video stores be forced to ban "BAD RENTER" walls and such other devices for shaming/controlling problem customers?"
Yes, but that's aside from the discussion - if you want to keep a collection of photos of bad renters as reference for your staff to know who not to rent to then go ahead, but photographing people and putting them on display is completely crossing the line. Not least because it's mass libel. 'Shaming' people, as a primary method of government sponsored punishment was done away with a very long time ago for good reason, private businesses should not be allowed to carry it on.
Doesn't something disturb and worry you about a shopkeeper whipping a polaroid camera out and snapping photos of customers that they don't like so that they can put them on the wall?
and why have you decided to make your own with improved physics rather than use the code for torcs or rars and change its physics? Because in the end torcs & rars physics engine are unsalvageable crap (for what you want the program to do, I'm sure they're beautiful physics engines for what the torcs and rars people want) - admittedly, in this case, the developers haven't reached this conclusion yet (I assume), but that may be because their aims are different.
To some extent, you're not competing with torcs or rars, because you're producing a physics simulation with cars, rather than a racing simulation with half-plausible physics (again, I assume).
Which reinforces my original point - you're either moving away from your 'competition' so you're not really competing anymore (people will choose one or the other primarily based on differing requirements, rather than one being better than the other at exactly the same thing), or you end up working on the project, or you fork it (which is really where the 'you make your competition by opening the source' idea comes from).
Also, still not RTFA.
If you see a piece of OSS that you want to see X feature in and you're a coder you have 3 options:
- Write a competing piece of software
- Fork it
- Join the development
And people will choose? 3. Exactly. Or, maybe, if they have personality differences, 2. Unless they've looked at the source and decided "this is an unsalvageable piece of crap" they won't be doing 1, and even if they have, the developers have probably done that too, and that leaves options 2 & 3 open again.and if the defendant has, say, had to sell their house to cover their legal expenses in the mean time. Will they get the associated costs of moving out of their house and storing their property paid? And if their kids have had to do without, say, new clothes and had to suffer bullying because they've been wearing hand-me-downs, will they be compensated? What about the months of sleepless nights, family breakdown, complete loss of life outside of work/courtroom?
My cousin is a lawyer (in Britain, when the winner normally gets their costs from the other side) and he was explaining to me when I challenged him about contract law and 'valueless considerations' (such as promising not to sue for something that they wouldn't be able to successfully sue you for anyway) that even if the other side has no case you won't get all the costs incurred in defence back.
And here's another example, http://www.taubmansucks.com/, this guy was sued over a trademark issue by someone who had no case. A year later he finally won, and got the costs of engaging a lawyer back. Unfortunately, he couldn't afford to engage a lawyer at the start so had to defend himself. He's a consultant. When he was buried in legal documents, he couldn't work. (from act115) "I probably lost tens of thousands of dollars in potential billings;" - did he see any of that? nope. Work you do to defend yourself is free - if you want to be paid, be a lawyer.
Suing someone without a case is extortion in all but name. Infact it's worse than extortion. If you try to extort me by coming around with a baseball bat, I'd be allowed to take your head off with a big sword, if you did it with a court I have to roll over and take it, or end up in jail/dead.
What do you think about the judge who's suing a dry cleaners for $65million over a lost pair of trousers? if he wins outright they'll be ruined. If he wins 1% of what he's suing for they'll be ruined. Even if he doesn't win, the hidden costs that they've incurred (maybe the stress has caused them to make mistakes and damage other people's trousers) will be close to ruinous (assuming, then, that they get their costs back, which given that they did misplace his trousers, isn't guaranteed). How does that NOT fit the common definition of 'extortion', just because his enforcers have badges and are lead by a man in a wig and a toy hammer?
malicious civil prosecution and filing spurious, meritless, lawsuits need to become crimes with a 366 day maximum jail sentence
ah, yes, but the US seems to like handing out maximum or near-maximum sentences. What's the betting that he'll get credit for 3 years of time served fighting his extradition? (given that someone else who was wrongfully extradited to the US didn't when their time served was pretty much equal to their sentence). Perhaps Australian jail time is equivalent to American jail time.
" but making software available illegally in the USA could be considered to be taking place in the USA"
Only by someone blinded by a desperate desire to come up with any old crap to justify trying someone clearly outside their jurisdiction. Sadly, most judges used to be the same grandstanding lawyers interested in their own careers more than justice and so are willing to scratch the backs of the current generation (in the same way as the judges of their time no doubt did).
This clearly shows the need for an overseeing body made up of impartial observers who aren't judges or lawyers to be able to bash them both around the head and toss cases clearly outside their jurisdiction.
no, no. Find a granny who DOES have a computer and is being sued by the RIAA for bonus marks. Not only is that harder, but the task of preparing the defence is fractionally harder too.
when the decision is left down to individual beaurocrats who are then free to go around grandstanding about how much good their doing (as opposed to it being a collective decision by an organisation like in Blighty). Although, on the other hand, it does make it easier to know who to hold responsible for malicious prosecutions. But then on the other hand (yes, I was near Chernobyl) when you get to court you'll know exactly who the prosecutor is and be free to publish (or at least know) their name anyway.
The real reform needed here is the ability to bring private criminal prosecutions against public figures - anyone can pay your fine so long as it's paid, no-one else can do your jail time.
because frankly a game map which you play with an on-screen 'gun' and the possession of a hammer don't add up to 'major al-qaeda cell'. They add up to normal teenager - I certainly had a hammer in my room as a teenager and an angle grinder, and a set of very sharp chisels.
And if the chance that he's actually a terrorist is negligible (which it seems to be), could they PLEASE stop bandying the word about, it cheapens the meaning.
Oh, and please, please, please stop using the word 'terroristic'. It doesn't exist.
Of course, the other lesson here is: 'I've got nothing to hide' is rubbish - they'll always find something that you should have hidden, like a hammer. NEVER consent to a search without a warrant.
rubbish. This security-through-obscurity method has taken 600 years to crack - plenty long enough for whoever encrypted it to not have to worry about the consequences. One in the eye for 'security experts'.
So... 2 gigabytes?
oh for crying out loud! that's what it is. /. community
I saw it on an earlier comment to something else and tried typing it into a hex convertor to find out what the secret message was!
\me kicks the
power - the politicians want power, and have given the police those powers necessary to stop the people objecting in any worthwhile fashion.
Don't forget, the RIAA would like some of that device-disabling action. It could autodetect copied MP3 and blow up in the pirate's face. A messy death is better than they deserve anyway.