It would be interesting to see some proper statistics on how many home users actually buy/run games on windows.
From my gut feeling it might fall both ways - it may be that a lot of people need the home computer to support DirectX games, as it is a must-have feature for myself.
Or it may be just as likely that most typical home-users actually just use the computers for Web+Word, and quite likely get their gaming done on sites like facebook (which has more daily-active players than the entire PC FPS+RTS+MMORPG sales combined) or on consoles - in which case they don't really care about the PC games and Wine.
Does not seem to apply here. In some crimes, there is no way to prove guilt if the victim does not testify - and that's why prosecutors may drop it. Here the government got all the evidence they wanted by confiscating the NGO's computers, and they don't really need any testimony from Microsoft to continue. And don't forget that the point is that prosecutors are intent on destroying the NGO by any legal means allowed, not finding some abstract justice - with such motivation the same laws could be applied also in USA.
Also, in the previous cases they don't really say "my client does not want to press the issues" - Russian government had started a criminal process, and as in most criminal process the 'victim' does not get a choice to stop the persecution, and granting a license after a request would not help either (as the violation occurred in the past, when the license was not there yet) - so if the prosecutors want to press charges, they have a valid case.
These same issues may apply to any other country where criminal penalties apply for copyright violations.
I can't agree with your comment "lifestyle will no longer be possible...for anyone".
There are two options, both (sadly) quite possible that will allow such lifestyle - 1) Even greater increase in disparity between 'rich' and 'poor' stratas would allow the 'rich' part to keep this lifestyle. Of course, USA/Europe middle class would not fit in the 'rich' part anymore, but even with this a lot of military tension/resource conflicts would arise - but hey, that's probably why USA keeps having >50% of world's military budget and China focuses on arms-for-resources cooperation with African countries having conflicts. 2) Global reduction of number of humans to ~0.5 billion might allow enough resources for everyone to flourish. Given the short timeframe until resource shortages, though, this can't happen in natural generation changes but would mean 90% of humanity killed in resource wars and/or genocides, and these actions (and the people who would lead in such actions) more likely would mean going back to the first option.
Suspecting a man is perfectly ok - he has a right not to be punished unless he actually does something, but sending a cop to potentially risky place to allow quick reaction in case of violence is the right thing to do.
There are men who have performed brutal attacks on opponent's fans at nearly every football game where they have been, they are well known within their own team's fans, who are eyewitnesses but don't testify due to team loyalty; and they are known by the police as well. It isn't an appropriate reason to convict them with a "beyond a reasonable doubt" criteria, which is perfectly fine, but it is a sufficient reason to always put some cops next to these hardcore "fan" areas.
It's just basic common sense - instead, ignoring the advance knowledge with a "precrime" argument and allowing them to repeat this next game and cripple another person would be criminally stupid. The victims and their families would definitely prefer preventing the incident from happening. Prevention is the best appropriate usage of police - regular beat patrols, etc make much better results than just persecution. If cops in the USA would receive notice that 30+ men groups of opposite street gangs are advancing on each other, should they come there and disperse them? Or should they say "well, wait until someone is injured and then we'll try to convict the culprit" ?
The pirates targeted by the DoS are unlikely to identify themselves to bring up legal action. An owner of the computer in the botnet might. And it would take just one of the computers to be linked with them to turn it into a criminal offense where the corporation's limited liability wouldn't help.
Any device that's more autonomous than a Roomba will need to understand and recognize deception in order to function in a society, since it sometimes happens and needs to be worked around.
Still, it's something that these big companies can arrange - it would take something like an hour every morning for an intern to do, and even if it would reduce the uptime of these sites by 10%, it would be worth it.
How is koran burning hate speech? It's not a nice thing to do, but burning symbols, flags, books, etc to show your attitude is a widely practiced action and considered protected action of free speech type.
It would be hate speech if he'd call on muslim burning instead, or asking to steal korans, incited to hurt people - that's for sure. But asking others to destroy inanimate objects that they own does not harm anyone.
I can't understand how anyone who dislikes unique numbers assigned by government would even consider involving your mother's/father's name, your birthdate and place of living. "name, fathers name, mother name and birthdate" = much, much bigger invasion of privacy than a unique ID number. If a document being processed by some official lists your name+birthdate, then it opens up issues for possible discrimination by age/sex/nationality - think officials processing permits looking if the guy has a muslim or hindu name, or age-screening of CVs by the birth-dates listed for identification.
Why should anyone care who your father is and even if you know his name? Why should your ID change when you move to a different state, a paternity suit decides that there is a different father, you change your name and recolor your hair?
Given an average Indian level of corruption, any objective systems of identification are far superior to subjective ones, where some random official can decide if you are or aren't person X based on some criteria. Your comment "I am assuming not many" is ridiculous - the only acceptable answer would be "I can personally guarantee that only 1 such person exists", otherwise it means that it's ok for one person to be held accountable for another persons debts or misdeeds simply because their names/birthdays might happen to randomly match, or one person has deliberately claimed to have a different name/birthdate in a identity theft attempt.
Why should ID numbers be difficult to guess? They are the identification/user name part of authorisation, so they should be as simple and easy to remember/use as possible.
If you spend your 40 EUR entertainment funds buying cd's "copied locally" without paying royalties, go to a movie theatre which doesn't pay royalties to the producers and go to a bowling hall with the rest of the money, then all the money has stayed within the country - and a country could achieve that by either officially reducing copyright (say, getting out of Berne convention and setting a 5-7 year max) or by not bothering to enforce foreign copyrights, as some SE Asia countries or Russia tends to do.
This is not about individual decisions on piracy vs. buying, this is about government interest to deliberately hurt all sales of all foreign media cartels and their royalty models.
All that TFA says is if you earned an additional 25K extra, then there would be a measurable positive effect on your happiness due to less restrictions in your budgeting. Would you agree or disagree?
I said *net* exporter; for both Japan and France music+movies are a negative effect on balance of payments - according to money flows they import more "copyright" than they export. There are no "multinational" concept in import/export issues - in the end, money stops somewhere at some person or company in some country which gains the benefit of this trade. I am not speaking about content flow as much as about the effect on national balance of payments - which for movie and music industry mostly flow to USA according to the statistics.
Still, my main topic is that no matter how much money the teenager has and what he is going to buy with it, maybe the governments should be thinking on building incentives how (s)he can spend his entertainment money in a way it does not flow to RIAA/MPAA - for example, if he buys music CD's in shops, then it may be beneficial (ignoring the moral issues here) for the country if these CD's are copied and no royalties paid out to foreign companies. This has been seen as an argument by, for example, Russian officials when not especially bothering with enforcing foreign copyright complaints.
The sad fact is that for most of the world it would make sense to intentionally abandon Berne treaties as far as they apply to movies and music - copyright is enforceable internationally only because countries around 1904 thought that it was a good idea politically and didn't matter much economically; but now entertainment is a huge industry and for most countries it is a financial burden when their citizens purchase 'copyrighted entertainment' from abroad. Almost countries, except USA, would benefit greatly from, say, setting maximum copyright length at 5-7 years - the money their citizens pay for this stuff would drop in half immediately, as any popular recordings/movies older than that would be available from local distributors at very low prices. MPAA/RIAA would scream bloody murder, naturally, and USA would use all it's pressure in WTO to prevent this like they did with pharmaceutical patents when Brazil and India needed to manufacture generic medicines to save millions of their citizens. They would likely succeed at the moment. Which is good for USA. And bad for everyone else.
Who cares about his nationality? I was speaking about the record sales, and even most European artists get handled by the big couple record labels which are headquartered in the USA, pay taxes in USA and execs spend money in USA - and only a few percent get back to the artist in his country.
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
As for any other document, you don't need to write it from scratch - you can reuse parts from documents you have previously written, or you may copy documents that the author has given you permission to copy and adapt - but you are not allowed to copy&adapt other authors works that you somehow downloaded from the internet.
Copyright applies to legalese letters in exactly the same manner as to novels or music.
Doing without O'Leary would probably mean that Ryanair would have the same profitability than other competitors - negative. He is a good example of why CEO's can be more valuable than most of the company employees together, as a good CEO can create efficient teams from cheap, replaceable commodity worker-drones, as Ryanair has shown. They haven't achieved their results by having exceptionally valuable employees, they have achieved by having exceptional management get great results from average people.
If I was an insurance company and had access to a database which lists which drivers really, really want to drive at 90mph, then I'd definitely use it when determining the rates.
It would have a very significant correlation to the insurance amounts paid out - even if the accident rate was the same, the accident consequences tend to be harsher/more expensive at higher speeds, so it makes sense to charge higher premiums to those that admit that they paid $25 for a license to speed.
RIM has made it known that they are giving the encryption keys to BlackBerry communications to various governments - ergo, it makes some sense for Saudi Arabia to say that Saudi businessmen are not allowed to use them despite the convenience, due to risk of business espionage by foreign governments.
Studio recorded music often sounds much better than the live recording - in live concerts the emotions rule, but the sound is often just so-so even if you are standing in the best spot - and most of the listeners aren't.
Given the money that's there to be made, the legitimate business starts backing away only when the law requires to do so (TFA, new credit card act), involvement with mafia doesn't matter as long as Visa can legally pretend not to see it.
That would be so incredibly insecure by design - that would automatically grant access to many people who definitely should NOT have access to the account and have an interest to get it - teenage sisters/brothers, close friends-pranksters, etc.
A good password reset question has to be of the type that you would know but your wife or mother would not.
It's far safer than magnetic cards; I've heard no fraud cases where the PIN has been successfully extracted from the chip or the chip data cloned - reading the chip's contents would generally be far more expensive than the maximum money limits on the card. Mag-stripe cards can be cloned by a cafe waiter or a tiny 10$ device hidden on an ATM and then your money used in any place that "verifies" only signatures.
Also for the ID card - if it has some way to send the fingerprint data or encryption key outwards, then that is a design fuckup; but if it is only able to verify pin and sign message packets with the key if the pin is valid, and permanently erase the key if pin is entered wrongly a few times, then the security is quite adequate.
If you have no information, you have no reason to prioritize one option over others, or to exclude other options - and that turns any argument involving a pretend-choice between 'no God' and '[Judeo-Christian] God' into a false dichotomy, thus carrying no weight at all in a logical discussion.
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It would be interesting to see some proper statistics on how many home users actually buy/run games on windows.
From my gut feeling it might fall both ways - it may be that a lot of people need the home computer to support DirectX games, as it is a must-have feature for myself.
Or it may be just as likely that most typical home-users actually just use the computers for Web+Word, and quite likely get their gaming done on sites like facebook (which has more daily-active players than the entire PC FPS+RTS+MMORPG sales combined) or on consoles - in which case they don't really care about the PC games and Wine.
Does not seem to apply here. In some crimes, there is no way to prove guilt if the victim does not testify - and that's why prosecutors may drop it. Here the government got all the evidence they wanted by confiscating the NGO's computers, and they don't really need any testimony from Microsoft to continue. And don't forget that the point is that prosecutors are intent on destroying the NGO by any legal means allowed, not finding some abstract justice - with such motivation the same laws could be applied also in USA.
Also, in the previous cases they don't really say "my client does not want to press the issues" - Russian government had started a criminal process, and as in most criminal process the 'victim' does not get a choice to stop the persecution, and granting a license after a request would not help either (as the violation occurred in the past, when the license was not there yet) - so if the prosecutors want to press charges, they have a valid case.
These same issues may apply to any other country where criminal penalties apply for copyright violations.
I can't agree with your comment "lifestyle will no longer be possible...for anyone".
There are two options, both (sadly) quite possible that will allow such lifestyle -
1) Even greater increase in disparity between 'rich' and 'poor' stratas would allow the 'rich' part to keep this lifestyle. Of course, USA/Europe middle class would not fit in the 'rich' part anymore, but even with this a lot of military tension/resource conflicts would arise - but hey, that's probably why USA keeps having >50% of world's military budget and China focuses on arms-for-resources cooperation with African countries having conflicts.
2) Global reduction of number of humans to ~0.5 billion might allow enough resources for everyone to flourish. Given the short timeframe until resource shortages, though, this can't happen in natural generation changes but would mean 90% of humanity killed in resource wars and/or genocides, and these actions (and the people who would lead in such actions) more likely would mean going back to the first option.
Being there and being prepared != precrime.
Suspecting a man is perfectly ok - he has a right not to be punished unless he actually does something, but sending a cop to potentially risky place to allow quick reaction in case of violence is the right thing to do.
There are men who have performed brutal attacks on opponent's fans at nearly every football game where they have been, they are well known within their own team's fans, who are eyewitnesses but don't testify due to team loyalty; and they are known by the police as well. It isn't an appropriate reason to convict them with a "beyond a reasonable doubt" criteria, which is perfectly fine, but it is a sufficient reason to always put some cops next to these hardcore "fan" areas.
It's just basic common sense - instead, ignoring the advance knowledge with a "precrime" argument and allowing them to repeat this next game and cripple another person would be criminally stupid. The victims and their families would definitely prefer preventing the incident from happening. Prevention is the best appropriate usage of police - regular beat patrols, etc make much better results than just persecution. If cops in the USA would receive notice that 30+ men groups of opposite street gangs are advancing on each other, should they come there and disperse them? Or should they say "well, wait until someone is injured and then we'll try to convict the culprit" ?
The pirates targeted by the DoS are unlikely to identify themselves to bring up legal action.
An owner of the computer in the botnet might. And it would take just one of the computers to be linked with them to turn it into a criminal offense where the corporation's limited liability wouldn't help.
Any device that's more autonomous than a Roomba will need to understand and recognize deception in order to function in a society, since it sometimes happens and needs to be worked around.
Still, it's something that these big companies can arrange - it would take something like an hour every morning for an intern to do, and even if it would reduce the uptime of these sites by 10%, it would be worth it.
How is koran burning hate speech? It's not a nice thing to do, but burning symbols, flags, books, etc to show your attitude is a widely practiced action and considered protected action of free speech type.
It would be hate speech if he'd call on muslim burning instead, or asking to steal korans, incited to hurt people - that's for sure. But asking others to destroy inanimate objects that they own does not harm anyone.
I can't understand how anyone who dislikes unique numbers assigned by government would even consider involving your mother's/father's name, your birthdate and place of living.
"name, fathers name, mother name and birthdate" = much, much bigger invasion of privacy than a unique ID number. If a document being processed by some official lists your name+birthdate, then it opens up issues for possible discrimination by age/sex/nationality - think officials processing permits looking if the guy has a muslim or hindu name, or age-screening of CVs by the birth-dates listed for identification.
Why should anyone care who your father is and even if you know his name? Why should your ID change when you move to a different state, a paternity suit decides that there is a different father, you change your name and recolor your hair?
Given an average Indian level of corruption, any objective systems of identification are far superior to subjective ones, where some random official can decide if you are or aren't person X based on some criteria. Your comment "I am assuming not many" is ridiculous - the only acceptable answer would be "I can personally guarantee that only 1 such person exists", otherwise it means that it's ok for one person to be held accountable for another persons debts or misdeeds simply because their names/birthdays might happen to randomly match, or one person has deliberately claimed to have a different name/birthdate in a identity theft attempt.
Why should ID numbers be difficult to guess? They are the identification/user name part of authorisation, so they should be as simple and easy to remember/use as possible.
If you spend your 40 EUR entertainment funds buying cd's "copied locally" without paying royalties, go to a movie theatre which doesn't pay royalties to the producers and go to a bowling hall with the rest of the money, then all the money has stayed within the country - and a country could achieve that by either officially reducing copyright (say, getting out of Berne convention and setting a 5-7 year max) or by not bothering to enforce foreign copyrights, as some SE Asia countries or Russia tends to do.
This is not about individual decisions on piracy vs. buying, this is about government interest to deliberately hurt all sales of all foreign media cartels and their royalty models.
All that TFA says is if you earned an additional 25K extra, then there would be a measurable positive effect on your happiness due to less restrictions in your budgeting. Would you agree or disagree?
I said *net* exporter; for both Japan and France music+movies are a negative effect on balance of payments - according to money flows they import more "copyright" than they export.
There are no "multinational" concept in import/export issues - in the end, money stops somewhere at some person or company in some country which gains the benefit of this trade. I am not speaking about content flow as much as about the effect on national balance of payments - which for movie and music industry mostly flow to USA according to the statistics.
Still, my main topic is that no matter how much money the teenager has and what he is going to buy with it, maybe the governments should be thinking on building incentives how (s)he can spend his entertainment money in a way it does not flow to RIAA/MPAA - for example, if he buys music CD's in shops, then it may be beneficial (ignoring the moral issues here) for the country if these CD's are copied and no royalties paid out to foreign companies. This has been seen as an argument by, for example, Russian officials when not especially bothering with enforcing foreign copyright complaints.
The sad fact is that for most of the world it would make sense to intentionally abandon Berne treaties as far as they apply to movies and music - copyright is enforceable internationally only because countries around 1904 thought that it was a good idea politically and didn't matter much economically; but now entertainment is a huge industry and for most countries it is a financial burden when their citizens purchase 'copyrighted entertainment' from abroad. Almost countries, except USA, would benefit greatly from, say, setting maximum copyright length at 5-7 years - the money their citizens pay for this stuff would drop in half immediately, as any popular recordings/movies older than that would be available from local distributors at very low prices.
MPAA/RIAA would scream bloody murder, naturally, and USA would use all it's pressure in WTO to prevent this like they did with pharmaceutical patents when Brazil and India needed to manufacture generic medicines to save millions of their citizens. They would likely succeed at the moment. Which is good for USA. And bad for everyone else.
Who cares about his nationality? I was speaking about the record sales, and even most European artists get handled by the big couple record labels which are headquartered in the USA, pay taxes in USA and execs spend money in USA - and only a few percent get back to the artist in his country.
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
As for any other document, you don't need to write it from scratch - you can reuse parts from documents you have previously written, or you may copy documents that the author has given you permission to copy and adapt - but you are not allowed to copy&adapt other authors works that you somehow downloaded from the internet.
Copyright applies to legalese letters in exactly the same manner as to novels or music.
Doing without O'Leary would probably mean that Ryanair would have the same profitability than other competitors - negative.
He is a good example of why CEO's can be more valuable than most of the company employees together, as a good CEO can create efficient teams from cheap, replaceable commodity worker-drones, as Ryanair has shown. They haven't achieved their results by having exceptionally valuable employees, they have achieved by having exceptional management get great results from average people.
If I was an insurance company and had access to a database which lists which drivers really, really want to drive at 90mph, then I'd definitely use it when determining the rates.
It would have a very significant correlation to the insurance amounts paid out - even if the accident rate was the same, the accident consequences tend to be harsher/more expensive at higher speeds, so it makes sense to charge higher premiums to those that admit that they paid $25 for a license to speed.
RIM has made it known that they are giving the encryption keys to BlackBerry communications to various governments - ergo, it makes some sense for Saudi Arabia to say that Saudi businessmen are not allowed to use them despite the convenience, due to risk of business espionage by foreign governments.
Studio recorded music often sounds much better than the live recording - in live concerts the emotions rule, but the sound is often just so-so even if you are standing in the best spot - and most of the listeners aren't.
Given the money that's there to be made, the legitimate business starts backing away only when the law requires to do so (TFA, new credit card act), involvement with mafia doesn't matter as long as Visa can legally pretend not to see it.
That would be so incredibly insecure by design - that would automatically grant access to many people who definitely should NOT have access to the account and have an interest to get it - teenage sisters/brothers, close friends-pranksters, etc.
A good password reset question has to be of the type that you would know but your wife or mother would not.
It's far safer than magnetic cards; I've heard no fraud cases where the PIN has been successfully extracted from the chip or the chip data cloned - reading the chip's contents would generally be far more expensive than the maximum money limits on the card. Mag-stripe cards can be cloned by a cafe waiter or a tiny 10$ device hidden on an ATM and then your money used in any place that "verifies" only signatures.
Also for the ID card - if it has some way to send the fingerprint data or encryption key outwards, then that is a design fuckup; but if it is only able to verify pin and sign message packets with the key if the pin is valid, and permanently erase the key if pin is entered wrongly a few times, then the security is quite adequate.
If you have no information, you have no reason to prioritize one option over others, or to exclude other options - and that turns any argument involving a pretend-choice between 'no God' and '[Judeo-Christian] God' into a false dichotomy, thus carrying no weight at all in a logical discussion.