The only actual features of the lightning connector are that it can be used by people who have suffered too much brain damage to understand spatial orientation
One way sockets that are hard to get the right way around first time annoy people. If you haven't noticed that, then you are very unobservant. If you think that kind of annoyance isn't worth fixing with new sockets, then you are an idiot.
Good plug & socket designs go in the first time, and don't require looking. Take the jack plug as an old, yet excellent example.
To be fair, a cable that is plugged in daily is a very different use case than one that is plugged in once and left plugged in until a component is replaced. The design tradeoffs are different if it gets a lot of plugging in/out action.
Yeah, I totally hate HDMI cables too, they suck! So what if I can get pure digital HD video and audio on the same tiny cable, as opposed to the five required for component (with stereo sound and lesser vidoe quality). I just hate having to actually look at the cable and port I'm trying to plug it into: I'd much rather just jab them together blindly until it goes in!
Same goes for DVI, S-Video and even VGA! Yeah, screw them all, I'll stick to composite, man! Fight the power!
Re:Pi day is overrated
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Yes, tau makes some of the more basic equations simpler, but it also makes some of the more complex equations messier when compared to pi. http://www.thepimanifesto.com/
Often though, the "simpler" equation with the pi in it is masking the more illustrative tau/2 that arises from the structure of the relationship. The reason that the area of a circle is (1/2)(tau)(r^2) due to the same type of integration that gives us (1/2)(m)(v^2) for kinetic energy or (1/2)(k)(x^2) for energy of a spring for example.
The fact that 2pi appears so very often in math and physics is a strong indication that it is a more "fundamental" quantity.
If anything helps a larger fraction of the student body deal with trigonometry and radian angle measurement, it would be a great win, in my opinion.
In any case, I have more hope that the US will go all in on the Metric System than Tau will make significant inroads against Pi in my lifetime.
Formal or informal, what there should not be is confusion. Take the date 12/8/10 for example. Is it in 2012, or 2010? August, or December? I am in Canada, and I see Y/M/D, M/D/Y, and D/M/Y formatted dates on receipts all the time. Is printing a three character month and a four digit year really all that hard?
Canada has officially moved to ISO 8601: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... at least according to the Treasury Board and the Canadian Standards Association since 1997 it looks like.
Man does it bug me when they don't use a four digit year! I can't wait until 2032 when that part at least will no longer be ambiguous.
The fact that the two-level legislative process is slow doesn't prove anything about being rotten. I'd rather have well thought out laws with concern for unintended side-effects than a book of doctrines and covenants made up on the fly by some guy who finds "golden plates" that nobody but his closest relatives ever saw.
Sure, but what we seem to get is not-so-well thought out laws with lots of added-on-non-related bits of pork or complete deadlock. Sometimes it makes the golden-plates thing look like a more effective method.
I wonder what sort of schools you went to where people "kept harping on the coming ice age". No school system that I am aware of in the past few decades has done anything like enough coverage of climate in any grade to justify the label of "kept harping" on anything.
I am guessing your schooling occurred sometime between the 1970s and the 2000s and in that time frame, I would be surprised if there was any district that did more than two weeks of instruction with at most one hour per day, on the entire topic of "climate" let alone possible future climate changes. I wish there was enough science instruction in schools to legitimately complain that any one "kept harping" about any one item.
With that said, there are valid criticisms to be made about science instruction that focuses on facts or current models without developing the understanding of how our knowledge about the world is refined and how better models are developed.
In terms of "contributions of the majority" vs "contributions of the minorities" I suspect you are picking your groupings in a way that has huge cultural biases (which of course we all do). Who is the "majority"? Males? White folk? People of Western European descent? Rich males of WE descent? While it is undeniable that Rich males of WE descent have done lots of important things, it is also true that understanding the histories experienced by poor females of non-European descent is important for a more well rounded picture of the world. I don't know that skimping on coverage of Hurst to devote some time to Parks is such a sin. Even future plutocrats could benefit by increasing knowledge of "the other", if only to make for better manipulation.
The last time I was in Paris for an extended stay, back in 2009, at least one of the major ISPs was doing this on all their customer routers. The world did not seem to come to an end (or at least I haven't noticed it - maybe I'm oblivious). I can't recall if it was SRF, Numericable or Orange or "free" or one of the other big telecom companies, but they certainly had a lot of hotspots. They might have started working with FON to get an international system going I seem to recall.
The "public" wifi did not eat into the subscriber's bandwidth or whatever data caps they had. I don't know how (or if) they addressed the potential for honeypots stealing credentials.
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
Installing TiSP
Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process -- provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.
#1 Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.
#2 Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.
#3 Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes.
#4 When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.
#5 Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.
#6 Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer's network settings.
#7 Within sixty minutes -- assuming proper data flow -- the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.
#8 Congratulations, you're online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
Yeah, it is a problem for switchers, and those who communicate with them, and probably should be addressed in a better way. However, it isn't really a "lock-in" type of situation, in that I doubt that enough people know about it before thinking about switching to have any impact on the number of switchers. If anything, it makes it more likely that a switcher will not come back since it creates a bad "last impression".
It is challenging to figure out a way to design the system to allow for good inter-operation between iMessage (which is nicely encrypted) and the standard SMS. I think that one does want to preferentially use the more secure system when available, and it is certainly a bad idea to fall-back to a non-secure SMS without transparently. Maybe iMessage needs to always check if the phone number is associated with iMessage each time a message is sent and put up a warning "1234567890 is no longer associated with iMessage account fred@icloud.com - should I send an SMS to 1234567890 or an iMessage to fred@icloud.com ?" or something like that. Of course then we would get complaints from people who don't understand the choice.
One is bad science the other is denial of science. Bad science is making a falsifiable claim and then not properly verifying it. Denial of science is making a claim that isn't falsifiable. There's a big difference between saying probiotics will increase digestive regularity and reduce inflammatory disease (may not be true, but we could test it) and saying God created the earth and you can't disprove that because the Bible is irrefutable.
...Paying Tax Correctly for USA citizens on Crowdfunding
Fixed that for ya. Remember guys, the internet is WORLDWIDE.
The USA manages to stick its tax fingers into a whole lot more than just USA citizens. I suspect that if you use any USA based service (such as Kickstarter or any number of payment systems) you may run afoul of USA tax requirements. Hopefully you won't get hit with a net bill (as there are tax agreements between the USA and a lot of other countries that mostly prevent double taxation), but you can still be hit with non-reporting penalties and the like.
It is not pretty, and it is not limited to USA citizens.
Yeah, but he wasn't asking for the statuatory damages. He was asking for compensation for the photo plus a job (or at least his name plastered all over their site and being named their official photographer for life). If he is going to sue them for damages, they sure as hell aren't going to name him their official sponsor and plaster their name over their site--they are going to never mention his name, never buy an image from him, and make sure to remove all reference to his photos from their site.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
So, he can collect $150k per work in statutory damages after a court case, or CR can cut a cheque for a bunch less and correct their lack of license. That seems like a pretty reasonable beginning of negotiations. Now if this was negotiations before they had used the images improperly, asking for $100k + other stuff would probably be over the top and unlikely to be very effective.
Statutory damages are unavailable unless you have registered your copyright within 3 months of first publication or within 1 month of learning of infringement. It is unlikely he did this, and as a result, he can only collect actual damages.
Good point. I wonder how expensive it is to register photos with the correct bodies. Would one large image composed of a thousand small images give sufficient protection to those thousand images?
Of course CR probably is not happy to have their unethical business practices in terms of copyright infringement widely reported. Would cases like this also include court costs for the plaintiff if successful? Even if court costs were not included, it is probably still cheaper to settle at a price higher than what the expected damage award might be to save on CR court costs. Maybe not at hundreds of thousands, but it seems likely it would be in the tens of thousands.
I don,t believe the photographer paid the cyclist or got her permission to be photographed and published. Hes also claiming its art lol its NOT art all he did was push the camera button the scene was not posed in anyway nothing was thought out.
It is not clear that the photographer ever intended for the work to be published - all the publishing was done by CR, so they would be most liable from any claim made by the subjects of the images.
In any case, you do not need to prove the value of the "art" of your photos to claim copyright protection for them. If CR did not get permission to use them in their advertising, they they are liable for copyright infringement - which can carry some pretty significant statuory damages, as much as $150k per work.
You could be correct that the runners too might be owed some compensation if they have not already signed away some rights when they registered for the run, but the photographer in this case is not the publisher, so the subjects of the photo would not have any reasonable grounds to take action against the photographer, but they might against the people using their images in the advertising campaign.
The photos maybe were only worth a few dollars before they were misappropriated, but the point of statutory damages in this type of copyright infringement is to act as a deterrent against this type of misappropriation. Statutory damages for copyright infringement can be as much as $150k per work, so the photographer's requested price could be the cheaper route for CR.
It is not extortion when you offer to not sue someone who has clearly broken the law. Unless the CR people have a contract that gives them some rights to the images (which they do not claim to have) then the CR people are clearly on the wrong side of the current copyright legislation. Sucks to be them - I guess they shouldn't have misappropriated someone else's work for their advertising campaign.
He can ask anything he wants to. What he should get is a different story. In negotiations, I sometimes ask for more that what I think I should get and am willing to negotiate towards a mutually agreed value. It's pretty much standard practice in negotiations.
Exactly. In this case, he has the strong negotiating position that statutory damages for copyright infringement can be as much as $150k per work.
Yeah, but he wasn't asking for the statuatory damages. He was asking for compensation for the photo plus a job (or at least his name plastered all over their site and being named their official photographer for life). If he is going to sue them for damages, they sure as hell aren't going to name him their official sponsor and plaster their name over their site--they are going to never mention his name, never buy an image from him, and make sure to remove all reference to his photos from their site.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
So, he can collect $150k per work in statutory damages after a court case, or CR can cut a cheque for a bunch less and correct their lack of license. That seems like a pretty reasonable beginning of negotiations. Now if this was negotiations before they had used the images improperly, asking for $100k + other stuff would probably be over the top and unlikely to be very effective.
If you are using someone's "something" worth $2-3k without permission, then you're in a pretty piss-poor bargaining position and $100k night actually be not such a bad price to pay. The statutory damages for copyright infringement can be pretty steep:
And how about he wore them in the swimming pool changing rooms during your sister's daughter's birthday party...?
Does your sister encourage the males in attendance at her daughter's birthday party to share a changing room with her (the daughter)? And you are only concerned about potential video recording?
Slashdot Mirror
The only actual features of the lightning connector are that it can be used by people who have suffered too much brain damage to understand spatial orientation
One way sockets that are hard to get the right way around first time annoy people. If you haven't noticed that, then you are very unobservant. If you think that kind of annoyance isn't worth fixing with new sockets, then you are an idiot.
Good plug & socket designs go in the first time, and don't require looking. Take the jack plug as an old, yet excellent example.
To be fair, a cable that is plugged in daily is a very different use case than one that is plugged in once and left plugged in until a component is replaced. The design tradeoffs are different if it gets a lot of plugging in/out action.
Yeah, I totally hate HDMI cables too, they suck! So what if I can get pure digital HD video and audio on the same tiny cable, as opposed to the five required for component (with stereo sound and lesser vidoe quality). I just hate having to actually look at the cable and port I'm trying to plug it into: I'd much rather just jab them together blindly until it goes in!
Same goes for DVI, S-Video and even VGA! Yeah, screw them all, I'll stick to composite, man! Fight the power!
I prefer Tau day.
Yeah, we get to eat TWO PIES!
Yes, tau makes some of the more basic equations simpler, but it also makes some of the more complex equations messier when compared to pi.
http://www.thepimanifesto.com/
Often though, the "simpler" equation with the pi in it is masking the more illustrative tau/2 that arises from the structure of the relationship. The reason that the area of a circle is (1/2)(tau)(r^2) due to the same type of integration that gives us (1/2)(m)(v^2) for kinetic energy or (1/2)(k)(x^2) for energy of a spring for example.
The fact that 2pi appears so very often in math and physics is a strong indication that it is a more "fundamental" quantity.
If anything helps a larger fraction of the student body deal with trigonometry and radian angle measurement, it would be a great win, in my opinion.
In any case, I have more hope that the US will go all in on the Metric System than Tau will make significant inroads against Pi in my lifetime.
Formal or informal, what there should not be is confusion. Take the date 12/8/10 for example. Is it in 2012, or 2010? August, or December? I am in Canada, and I see Y/M/D, M/D/Y, and D/M/Y formatted dates on receipts all the time. Is printing a three character month and a four digit year really all that hard?
Canada has officially moved to ISO 8601: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... at least according to the Treasury Board and the Canadian Standards Association since 1997 it looks like.
Man does it bug me when they don't use a four digit year! I can't wait until 2032 when that part at least will no longer be ambiguous.
well played sir, well played.
The fact that the two-level legislative process is slow doesn't prove anything about being rotten. I'd rather have well thought out laws with concern for unintended side-effects than a book of doctrines and covenants made up on the fly by some guy who finds "golden plates" that nobody but his closest relatives ever saw.
Sure, but what we seem to get is not-so-well thought out laws with lots of added-on-non-related bits of pork or complete deadlock. Sometimes it makes the golden-plates thing look like a more effective method.
Actually it's the 3rd day in the 56th Month, using any sane date convention.
Or the 2014th day in the 56th month, using an even more sane date convention. ISO 8601 but it needs a few zeros to pad things out:
0003/56/2014
It might be difficult to show damages. With a dead body, the damages are a bit more clear.
I wonder what sort of schools you went to where people "kept harping on the coming ice age". No school system that I am aware of in the past few decades has done anything like enough coverage of climate in any grade to justify the label of "kept harping" on anything.
I am guessing your schooling occurred sometime between the 1970s and the 2000s and in that time frame, I would be surprised if there was any district that did more than two weeks of instruction with at most one hour per day, on the entire topic of "climate" let alone possible future climate changes. I wish there was enough science instruction in schools to legitimately complain that any one "kept harping" about any one item.
With that said, there are valid criticisms to be made about science instruction that focuses on facts or current models without developing the understanding of how our knowledge about the world is refined and how better models are developed.
In terms of "contributions of the majority" vs "contributions of the minorities" I suspect you are picking your groupings in a way that has huge cultural biases (which of course we all do). Who is the "majority"? Males? White folk? People of Western European descent? Rich males of WE descent? While it is undeniable that Rich males of WE descent have done lots of important things, it is also true that understanding the histories experienced by poor females of non-European descent is important for a more well rounded picture of the world. I don't know that skimping on coverage of Hurst to devote some time to Parks is such a sin. Even future plutocrats could benefit by increasing knowledge of "the other", if only to make for better manipulation.
Lots of people do this all over the world.
The last time I was in Paris for an extended stay, back in 2009, at least one of the major ISPs was doing this on all their customer routers. The world did not seem to come to an end (or at least I haven't noticed it - maybe I'm oblivious). I can't recall if it was SRF, Numericable or Orange or "free" or one of the other big telecom companies, but they certainly had a lot of hotspots. They might have started working with FON to get an international system going I seem to recall.
https://corp.fon.com/en
The "public" wifi did not eat into the subscriber's bandwidth or whatever data caps they had. I don't know how (or if) they addressed the potential for honeypots stealing credentials.
Looks like you are getting moded informative, not funny. Jokes on them, and April 1, 2014 is just around the corner.
Well, I got at least one "overrated", so there's that.
http://www.google.ca/tisp/
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
Installing TiSP
Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process -- provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.
#1 Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.
#2 Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.
#3 Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes.
#4 When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.
#5 Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.
#6 Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer's network settings.
#7 Within sixty minutes -- assuming proper data flow -- the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.
#8 Congratulations, you're online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
Yeah, it is a problem for switchers, and those who communicate with them, and probably should be addressed in a better way. However, it isn't really a "lock-in" type of situation, in that I doubt that enough people know about it before thinking about switching to have any impact on the number of switchers. If anything, it makes it more likely that a switcher will not come back since it creates a bad "last impression".
It is challenging to figure out a way to design the system to allow for good inter-operation between iMessage (which is nicely encrypted) and the standard SMS. I think that one does want to preferentially use the more secure system when available, and it is certainly a bad idea to fall-back to a non-secure SMS without transparently. Maybe iMessage needs to always check if the phone number is associated with iMessage each time a message is sent and put up a warning "1234567890 is no longer associated with iMessage account fred@icloud.com - should I send an SMS to 1234567890 or an iMessage to fred@icloud.com ?" or something like that. Of course then we would get complaints from people who don't understand the choice.
One is bad science the other is denial of science. Bad science is making a falsifiable claim and then not properly verifying it. Denial of science is making a claim that isn't falsifiable. There's a big difference between saying probiotics will increase digestive regularity and reduce inflammatory disease (may not be true, but we could test it) and saying God created the earth and you can't disprove that because the Bible is irrefutable.
That's an interesting difference.
...Paying Tax Correctly for USA citizens on Crowdfunding
Fixed that for ya. Remember guys, the internet is WORLDWIDE.
The USA manages to stick its tax fingers into a whole lot more than just USA citizens. I suspect that if you use any USA based service (such as Kickstarter or any number of payment systems) you may run afoul of USA tax requirements. Hopefully you won't get hit with a net bill (as there are tax agreements between the USA and a lot of other countries that mostly prevent double taxation), but you can still be hit with non-reporting penalties and the like.
It is not pretty, and it is not limited to USA citizens.
This is a good "science fair" level of experiment with a few controls. Not "Big Mac"s but "regular" hamburgers and quarter bounders.
http://aht.seriouseats.com/arc...
Yeah, but he wasn't asking for the statuatory damages. He was asking for compensation for the photo plus a job (or at least his name plastered all over their site and being named their official photographer for life). If he is going to sue them for damages, they sure as hell aren't going to name him their official sponsor and plaster their name over their site--they are going to never mention his name, never buy an image from him, and make sure to remove all reference to his photos from their site.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
So, he can collect $150k per work in statutory damages after a court case, or CR can cut a cheque for a bunch less and correct their lack of license. That seems like a pretty reasonable beginning of negotiations. Now if this was negotiations before they had used the images improperly, asking for $100k + other stuff would probably be over the top and unlikely to be very effective.
Statutory damages are unavailable unless you have registered your copyright within 3 months of first publication or within 1 month of learning of infringement. It is unlikely he did this, and as a result, he can only collect actual damages.
Good point. I wonder how expensive it is to register photos with the correct bodies. Would one large image composed of a thousand small images give sufficient protection to those thousand images?
Of course CR probably is not happy to have their unethical business practices in terms of copyright infringement widely reported. Would cases like this also include court costs for the plaintiff if successful? Even if court costs were not included, it is probably still cheaper to settle at a price higher than what the expected damage award might be to save on CR court costs. Maybe not at hundreds of thousands, but it seems likely it would be in the tens of thousands.
I don,t believe the photographer paid the cyclist or got her permission to be photographed and published. Hes also claiming its art lol its NOT art all he did was push the camera button the scene was not posed in anyway nothing was thought out.
It is not clear that the photographer ever intended for the work to be published - all the publishing was done by CR, so they would be most liable from any claim made by the subjects of the images.
In any case, you do not need to prove the value of the "art" of your photos to claim copyright protection for them. If CR did not get permission to use them in their advertising, they they are liable for copyright infringement - which can carry some pretty significant statuory damages, as much as $150k per work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You could be correct that the runners too might be owed some compensation if they have not already signed away some rights when they registered for the run, but the photographer in this case is not the publisher, so the subjects of the photo would not have any reasonable grounds to take action against the photographer, but they might against the people using their images in the advertising campaign.
The photos maybe were only worth a few dollars before they were misappropriated, but the point of statutory damages in this type of copyright infringement is to act as a deterrent against this type of misappropriation. Statutory damages for copyright infringement can be as much as $150k per work, so the photographer's requested price could be the cheaper route for CR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In this case, he has the strong negotiating position that statutory damages for copyright infringement can be as much as $150k per work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is not extortion when you offer to not sue someone who has clearly broken the law. Unless the CR people have a contract that gives them some rights to the images (which they do not claim to have) then the CR people are clearly on the wrong side of the current copyright legislation. Sucks to be them - I guess they shouldn't have misappropriated someone else's work for their advertising campaign.
He can ask anything he wants to. What he should get is a different story. In negotiations, I sometimes ask for more that what I think I should get and am willing to negotiate towards a mutually agreed value. It's pretty much standard practice in negotiations.
Exactly. In this case, he has the strong negotiating position that statutory damages for copyright infringement can be as much as $150k per work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yeah, but he wasn't asking for the statuatory damages. He was asking for compensation for the photo plus a job (or at least his name plastered all over their site and being named their official photographer for life). If he is going to sue them for damages, they sure as hell aren't going to name him their official sponsor and plaster their name over their site--they are going to never mention his name, never buy an image from him, and make sure to remove all reference to his photos from their site.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
So, he can collect $150k per work in statutory damages after a court case, or CR can cut a cheque for a bunch less and correct their lack of license. That seems like a pretty reasonable beginning of negotiations. Now if this was negotiations before they had used the images improperly, asking for $100k + other stuff would probably be over the top and unlikely to be very effective.
Can you make reasonable attempts to settle a case when someone asks $100k for something worth $2-3k and then threatens legal action?
If you are using someone's "something" worth $2-3k without permission, then you're in a pretty piss-poor bargaining position and $100k night actually be not such a bad price to pay. The statutory damages for copyright infringement can be pretty steep:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Plaintiffs who can show willful infringement may be entitled to damages up to $150,000 per work."
Because they're guilty.
We hope.
Two times out of three...
And how about he wore them in the swimming pool changing rooms during your sister's daughter's birthday party...?
Does your sister encourage the males in attendance at her daughter's birthday party to share a changing room with her (the daughter)? And you are only concerned about potential video recording?