I'm not sure why you're so surprised. Have you seen the legal costs associated with copyright infringement issues? If an ordinary person someone can get fined $80,000 per song shared from their computer, what kind of fines do you think Amazon would be up against?
There's a difference between being instantly killed via a giant boot and being boiled alive. It's not about whether or not we should kill them, it's about how.
This falls back to nature vs nurture. The kid was obviously a nutjob to begin with. Probably autistic which would explain his inability to interact with other children. Maybe bipolar as well. One thing's for sure, he's been committed and evaluated several times and the conclusion was that he was not sane and was a potential danger to himself and to others.
Now, how exactly does this fall completely on the parents? They sent him to doctors who subsequently let him out. He was then able to obtain two firearms despite this. The family was obviously aware of his condition and had taken measures to address them but nothing worked. His teachers tried as well but none of that worked. What else was there to do? The kid was born insane and all attempts to "fix" him failed. I would say that the system that's in place to keep these types of people off the streets and away from deadly weapons is what failed here if anything.
Fair enough. I understand your point. I suppose it boils down to what the strap is intended to do. Personally, I think Nintendo could get away with argueing that it is simply there to prevent the occasional, random drop and not there to prevent the throwing of their controllers. It would seem that although the safety strap is there to keep the Wiimote attached to the user, it cannot guarantee to do so for all velocities. Maybe it'll come down to whether Nintendo designed the strap well enough for normal usage. If they didn't, then yes it is negligent. However, something tells me these kids were really flinging this thing around hard, which, should not be Nintendo's fault.
then you assume some amount of liability unless the user was using the device in an unsuitable manner.
Don't you think letting go of the controller counts as "using the device in an unsuitable manner"? To use someone else's example, if you swing a ping pong paddle and let go of it during your swing and it breaks your tv, do you get to sue the ping pong paddle manufacturer?
If you don't add a safety feature to prevent against a potential hazard, and the hazard itself is "obvious", like releasing a bowling ball on the backswing, then in no way could you be considered liable for an accident of this nature.
Personally, I think the hazard here is pretty obvious. Don't throw the Wiimote. This really applies to any hard object regardless of whether it is tethered to your body or how strong the tether is.
No, I don't think you could sue the bowling ball manufacturer for that unless letting go of the bowling ball on your backswing was part of the game. How does adding a safety feature to an item that doesn't need one open a company up to lawsuits?
You fail to take into consideration the possibility of Joe Schmoe suing Big Corporation X. Big Corporation X rolls out its team of 50 lawyers, destroys Joe Schmoe because of it, and Joe Schmoe ends up having to pay for an army of lawyers he can't possibly afford. It works in both directions.
That is a silly argument.
First, just because the Nazis did something doesn't mean we shouldn't. They had plenty of policies that I do not agree with and several that outright offend me, but that doesn't mean that everything they did was wrong.
Second, if you read the OP, you would notice that he / she isn't against owning a home. Gun control doesn't mean you can't keep a loading gun at home to defend yourself and your family. It simply means that in order to have a gun you need to have it and yourself licensed. All gun control is advocating is that guns go to people who know how to use them and are not likely to abuse them. How does this prevent you from protecting your family? If anything, it reduces the chances of some ex-con having a gun to break into your house with in the first place.
It's about proportions. Would you like the U.S. gov to cut your taxes to 0% now and then 100% in 5 years? Didn't think so. If the tax cuts were met with a proportional reduction in spending, then paying higher taxes later would be favorable because you could earn interest on the money you're saving now. But since spending has actually INCREASED while taxes are CUT, then the higher taxes you're going to be paying are going to far outweigh whatever interest you can make from the money you're saving now.
1. It'd be lovely if the drunk who hit the cripple could pay for the damage he caused, but that's often not the case. I know a kid who, when he was only 6 years old, was paralyzed in a car accident because of some drunk lunatic losing control of his car. Luckily for him, his parents were well off because the drunk had little to no money at all. They sued, they won, but there's no way they'll ever see the money. If his family weren't already well off and there were no social benefits to rely on, he'd be in a very difficult situation.
As for your friend. Good for him. But I think he'd be the first to admit that his path to success was much more difficult than his peers. And it's not always the parent's fault. If it were, then you could easily blame the grandparent's since the parents were most likely born into poverty. And then the grandparents. And the great grandparents. Until you trace back the blame to some slave who probably shouldn't be held accountable for the situation he wound up in. The world's not quite as cut and dry as "tough shit, deal with it".
It's unreasonable to expect Hollywood to warn you of everything that's going to be in a movie based on what may or may not offend certain segments of society. Having a warning for "gay scenes" is heading down a very slippery slope. Where do you stop? Keeping with the same analogy as before, if a movie has a white man and a black woman in a relationship, does Hollywood need to warn us of this in the previews as well?
As for why you have to pay for other people's misfortune? Well, it would be nice if the people directly responsible for putting those in need in the positions they are in had to pay to fix the situation. Unfortunately, that simply isn't possible. Usually, you can't pinpoint the ones responsible for a person's unfortunate situation. E.g. who do you blame for African American povery and education? The parents? White oppression? And even in the cases where you can actually point the finger to those responsible, they oftentimes lack the funds to adequately compensate for what they've done. So what do we do? We take the collective burden of the needy and distribute it to the people. A collective punishment to those who haven't done anything wrong? Yes. And on an individual level I agree with you, it isn't fair. But it would be a much larger injustice to those in need to have done nothing at all. And on a colder note, the government is going to do what is best for it. And frankly, it needs functioning members of society, not a bunch of disabled, poor, uneducated people out on the streets because they can't afford shelter.
Gays are not being "forced on you". If you agree that gays should be allowd to kiss, then you should be fine with them doing it wherever they please whether that be in the privacy of their own home, in public places, or on the big screen. Gays are not displayed in movies for the sole purpose of disgusting you, just like like fat people kissing each other or ugly people kissing each other in movies isn't done for the sole purpose of disgusting you. They're simply parts of everyday life. A racist person may find the idea of interracial relationships disgusting. That doesn't mean that those relationships should not be in movies, right? The same applies to homophobes and their view on gay relationships. Just because you don't happen to like watching it, doesn't mean that Hollywood should no longer be able to depict it.
As for government aid: it's easy to complain about the government digging into your pockets when you're not a victim of circumstance. Just realize there are people out there who deserve a chance to succeed. It's not the cripple's fault he lost the use of his legs in a car accident. It's not the african american child's fault he was born into poverty and gang violence. There are always going to be people who abuse the system, but there are plenty more who should have an equal right to live healthy, productive lives.
Exactly. The amount of physical damage terrorists can do to us is very limited. It's our reaction to their damage that will hurt us. 9/11 killed ~3,000 people. The war in Iraq that resulted has killed ~50,000. Reminds me of World War I where one act of terrorism that killed 1 man (Franz Ferdinand) led to the deaths of millions and the destruction of several nations.
No one is argueing that these sort of discrepencies are new or that they are harder to uncover. But when we're relying on computers to tally our votes and we discover that the computers are not operating the way they should and the last two elections have been decided by a relatively few number of votes, maybe we should look into it. At the very least, paper ballots have SOME sort of method for verification. And while I agree that this could also be tampered with, at least it's another safeguard. Computer voting offers no such protection. We might as well just have some volunteer memorize each person's vote since we have a) no assurance that a computer will tally our vote correctly or even that it won't purposefully tally our vote incorrectly due to tampering and b) no way to check to see that our vote was counted correctly because of the lack of a paper trail.
The Marty McFly time travel thing is addressed in the first Back to the Future quite well in that if you view time as a straight line, going back in time will put you somewhere further back on that line. However, if you take some sort of action in the past, then you suddenly branch off of that line off to basically form another reality. At this point, the previous reality (line) you were a part of is no longer reachable (well, I suppose you could travel back in time again to a point that existed on the previous line) and therefore, you would not exist because the reality you were a part of has ceased to continue. This is why the picture fades and Marty starts to disappear.
My guess is it would be fired by a prepositioned police officer standing on the side of the road, the same way they get runners with spike strips or when they want to shoot out the tires. Given the manpower devoted to stopping a car chase, it's pretty easy to extrapolate where the runner may go (usually it's just a straight line as they run on a highway) and dispatch a few officers to be ready and waiting. The stickyball method would be pretty advantageous over spike strips and shooting out tires here too since the officer would not have to place himself in immediate danger throwing out like he would when throwing out a spike strip and would not have to be a crackshot like he would when shooting out the tires on a moving vehicle.
The police are remarkably effective at catching suspects on the ground when they have a general idea of where they are. They set up barracades, contain a perimeter, and send out the hounds. Granted, there's always the risk that a ground chase ends up with the criminal turning some civilian home or office into a fort that the SWAT team ends up having to lay seige to, but this threat existed with the current "chase him until he gives up" technique too so that's a push imo. At least this way they won't have to engage in 100 mph chases down residential or crowded streets and can afford to back off a bit without worrying that the suspect will get too far out of reach.
Agreed. When it comes to online games, people become very competitive and opportunistic. In almost any MMORPG, I'd say implementing a feature like this would result in the following:
1. Players paying in-game or real life money for positive points 2. Griefers who throw around negative ratings for the hell of it 3. Large guilds / clans that will dilute the meaning of the ratings by boosting their members up while boosting rival members down 4. Large guilds / clans gaining way too much influence in the game as the threat of being "blacklisted" looms larger.
Then fine, follow W. Cloning and stem cells and scientific research that goes against religious teachings is going to happen one way or another. If it doesn't happen in America because our administration and population is hell-bent on staying out of hell, then it'll just happen elsewhere. However, when the American populace is dying from genetic diseases and is watching its best and brightest go overseas where they can actually do some research, remember that this is what you wanted. You can't stand in the way of scientific progress, you can only accept it and find a way to deal with it. We're going to be left in the dust if we keep using religion to justify our research decisions.
It's not all that clear from the article but the FBI seemed to have determined that there wasn't a "clear and present danger" without access to the terminals as the librarian rejected their request to confiscate the computers. It sounded like they came, demanded that the library hand over all their computers, were asked for a warrant, then decided there wasn't a reasonable enough danger to take the computers anyway. If that were the case, then weren't they overstepping their bounds by demanding the computers when upon further reflection they really didn't need to? I fully understand if, by the time they reached the library, they thought there was still a credible threat and that time was of the essence, but considering they waited for a warrant in the end, that doesn't seem to be the case in this scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why you're so surprised. Have you seen the legal costs associated with copyright infringement issues? If an ordinary person someone can get fined $80,000 per song shared from their computer, what kind of fines do you think Amazon would be up against?
Nobody's arguing that we shouldn't eat crabs, only that we should kill them in a more humane manner.
There's a difference between being instantly killed via a giant boot and being boiled alive. It's not about whether or not we should kill them, it's about how.
Are Long URLs Wasting Bandwidth?
No. But this article is.
This falls back to nature vs nurture. The kid was obviously a nutjob to begin with. Probably autistic which would explain his inability to interact with other children. Maybe bipolar as well. One thing's for sure, he's been committed and evaluated several times and the conclusion was that he was not sane and was a potential danger to himself and to others. Now, how exactly does this fall completely on the parents? They sent him to doctors who subsequently let him out. He was then able to obtain two firearms despite this. The family was obviously aware of his condition and had taken measures to address them but nothing worked. His teachers tried as well but none of that worked. What else was there to do? The kid was born insane and all attempts to "fix" him failed. I would say that the system that's in place to keep these types of people off the streets and away from deadly weapons is what failed here if anything.
Fair enough. I understand your point. I suppose it boils down to what the strap is intended to do. Personally, I think Nintendo could get away with argueing that it is simply there to prevent the occasional, random drop and not there to prevent the throwing of their controllers. It would seem that although the safety strap is there to keep the Wiimote attached to the user, it cannot guarantee to do so for all velocities. Maybe it'll come down to whether Nintendo designed the strap well enough for normal usage. If they didn't, then yes it is negligent. However, something tells me these kids were really flinging this thing around hard, which, should not be Nintendo's fault.
then you assume some amount of liability unless the user was using the device in an unsuitable manner.
Don't you think letting go of the controller counts as "using the device in an unsuitable manner"? To use someone else's example, if you swing a ping pong paddle and let go of it during your swing and it breaks your tv, do you get to sue the ping pong paddle manufacturer?
If you don't add a safety feature to prevent against a potential hazard, and the hazard itself is "obvious", like releasing a bowling ball on the backswing, then in no way could you be considered liable for an accident of this nature.
Personally, I think the hazard here is pretty obvious. Don't throw the Wiimote. This really applies to any hard object regardless of whether it is tethered to your body or how strong the tether is.
No, I don't think you could sue the bowling ball manufacturer for that unless letting go of the bowling ball on your backswing was part of the game. How does adding a safety feature to an item that doesn't need one open a company up to lawsuits?
You fail to take into consideration the possibility of Joe Schmoe suing Big Corporation X. Big Corporation X rolls out its team of 50 lawyers, destroys Joe Schmoe because of it, and Joe Schmoe ends up having to pay for an army of lawyers he can't possibly afford. It works in both directions.
That is a silly argument. First, just because the Nazis did something doesn't mean we shouldn't. They had plenty of policies that I do not agree with and several that outright offend me, but that doesn't mean that everything they did was wrong. Second, if you read the OP, you would notice that he / she isn't against owning a home. Gun control doesn't mean you can't keep a loading gun at home to defend yourself and your family. It simply means that in order to have a gun you need to have it and yourself licensed. All gun control is advocating is that guns go to people who know how to use them and are not likely to abuse them. How does this prevent you from protecting your family? If anything, it reduces the chances of some ex-con having a gun to break into your house with in the first place.
It's about proportions. Would you like the U.S. gov to cut your taxes to 0% now and then 100% in 5 years? Didn't think so. If the tax cuts were met with a proportional reduction in spending, then paying higher taxes later would be favorable because you could earn interest on the money you're saving now. But since spending has actually INCREASED while taxes are CUT, then the higher taxes you're going to be paying are going to far outweigh whatever interest you can make from the money you're saving now.
1. It'd be lovely if the drunk who hit the cripple could pay for the damage he caused, but that's often not the case. I know a kid who, when he was only 6 years old, was paralyzed in a car accident because of some drunk lunatic losing control of his car. Luckily for him, his parents were well off because the drunk had little to no money at all. They sued, they won, but there's no way they'll ever see the money. If his family weren't already well off and there were no social benefits to rely on, he'd be in a very difficult situation.
As for your friend. Good for him. But I think he'd be the first to admit that his path to success was much more difficult than his peers. And it's not always the parent's fault. If it were, then you could easily blame the grandparent's since the parents were most likely born into poverty. And then the grandparents. And the great grandparents. Until you trace back the blame to some slave who probably shouldn't be held accountable for the situation he wound up in. The world's not quite as cut and dry as "tough shit, deal with it".
It's unreasonable to expect Hollywood to warn you of everything that's going to be in a movie based on what may or may not offend certain segments of society. Having a warning for "gay scenes" is heading down a very slippery slope. Where do you stop? Keeping with the same analogy as before, if a movie has a white man and a black woman in a relationship, does Hollywood need to warn us of this in the previews as well? As for why you have to pay for other people's misfortune? Well, it would be nice if the people directly responsible for putting those in need in the positions they are in had to pay to fix the situation. Unfortunately, that simply isn't possible. Usually, you can't pinpoint the ones responsible for a person's unfortunate situation. E.g. who do you blame for African American povery and education? The parents? White oppression? And even in the cases where you can actually point the finger to those responsible, they oftentimes lack the funds to adequately compensate for what they've done. So what do we do? We take the collective burden of the needy and distribute it to the people. A collective punishment to those who haven't done anything wrong? Yes. And on an individual level I agree with you, it isn't fair. But it would be a much larger injustice to those in need to have done nothing at all. And on a colder note, the government is going to do what is best for it. And frankly, it needs functioning members of society, not a bunch of disabled, poor, uneducated people out on the streets because they can't afford shelter.
Gays are not being "forced on you". If you agree that gays should be allowd to kiss, then you should be fine with them doing it wherever they please whether that be in the privacy of their own home, in public places, or on the big screen. Gays are not displayed in movies for the sole purpose of disgusting you, just like like fat people kissing each other or ugly people kissing each other in movies isn't done for the sole purpose of disgusting you. They're simply parts of everyday life. A racist person may find the idea of interracial relationships disgusting. That doesn't mean that those relationships should not be in movies, right? The same applies to homophobes and their view on gay relationships. Just because you don't happen to like watching it, doesn't mean that Hollywood should no longer be able to depict it. As for government aid: it's easy to complain about the government digging into your pockets when you're not a victim of circumstance. Just realize there are people out there who deserve a chance to succeed. It's not the cripple's fault he lost the use of his legs in a car accident. It's not the african american child's fault he was born into poverty and gang violence. There are always going to be people who abuse the system, but there are plenty more who should have an equal right to live healthy, productive lives.
Exactly. The amount of physical damage terrorists can do to us is very limited. It's our reaction to their damage that will hurt us. 9/11 killed ~3,000 people. The war in Iraq that resulted has killed ~50,000. Reminds me of World War I where one act of terrorism that killed 1 man (Franz Ferdinand) led to the deaths of millions and the destruction of several nations.
Windows Vista still Rife with Insecure Code
See what happens when you constantly tease it? Now it's got an inferiority complex. You people should be ashamed.
Wii!!??!!!one!
I feel the need to post the link to the original heist: http://people.bu.edu/fmri/somers/cannon.html
No one is argueing that these sort of discrepencies are new or that they are harder to uncover. But when we're relying on computers to tally our votes and we discover that the computers are not operating the way they should and the last two elections have been decided by a relatively few number of votes, maybe we should look into it. At the very least, paper ballots have SOME sort of method for verification. And while I agree that this could also be tampered with, at least it's another safeguard. Computer voting offers no such protection. We might as well just have some volunteer memorize each person's vote since we have a) no assurance that a computer will tally our vote correctly or even that it won't purposefully tally our vote incorrectly due to tampering and b) no way to check to see that our vote was counted correctly because of the lack of a paper trail.
The Marty McFly time travel thing is addressed in the first Back to the Future quite well in that if you view time as a straight line, going back in time will put you somewhere further back on that line. However, if you take some sort of action in the past, then you suddenly branch off of that line off to basically form another reality. At this point, the previous reality (line) you were a part of is no longer reachable (well, I suppose you could travel back in time again to a point that existed on the previous line) and therefore, you would not exist because the reality you were a part of has ceased to continue. This is why the picture fades and Marty starts to disappear.
My guess is it would be fired by a prepositioned police officer standing on the side of the road, the same way they get runners with spike strips or when they want to shoot out the tires. Given the manpower devoted to stopping a car chase, it's pretty easy to extrapolate where the runner may go (usually it's just a straight line as they run on a highway) and dispatch a few officers to be ready and waiting. The stickyball method would be pretty advantageous over spike strips and shooting out tires here too since the officer would not have to place himself in immediate danger throwing out like he would when throwing out a spike strip and would not have to be a crackshot like he would when shooting out the tires on a moving vehicle.
The police are remarkably effective at catching suspects on the ground when they have a general idea of where they are. They set up barracades, contain a perimeter, and send out the hounds. Granted, there's always the risk that a ground chase ends up with the criminal turning some civilian home or office into a fort that the SWAT team ends up having to lay seige to, but this threat existed with the current "chase him until he gives up" technique too so that's a push imo. At least this way they won't have to engage in 100 mph chases down residential or crowded streets and can afford to back off a bit without worrying that the suspect will get too far out of reach.
Agreed. When it comes to online games, people become very competitive and opportunistic. In almost any MMORPG, I'd say implementing a feature like this would result in the following:
1. Players paying in-game or real life money for positive points
2. Griefers who throw around negative ratings for the hell of it
3. Large guilds / clans that will dilute the meaning of the ratings by boosting their members up while boosting rival members down
4. Large guilds / clans gaining way too much influence in the game as the threat of being "blacklisted" looms larger.
Then fine, follow W. Cloning and stem cells and scientific research that goes against religious teachings is going to happen one way or another. If it doesn't happen in America because our administration and population is hell-bent on staying out of hell, then it'll just happen elsewhere. However, when the American populace is dying from genetic diseases and is watching its best and brightest go overseas where they can actually do some research, remember that this is what you wanted. You can't stand in the way of scientific progress, you can only accept it and find a way to deal with it. We're going to be left in the dust if we keep using religion to justify our research decisions.
It's not all that clear from the article but the FBI seemed to have determined that there wasn't a "clear and present danger" without access to the terminals as the librarian rejected their request to confiscate the computers. It sounded like they came, demanded that the library hand over all their computers, were asked for a warrant, then decided there wasn't a reasonable enough danger to take the computers anyway. If that were the case, then weren't they overstepping their bounds by demanding the computers when upon further reflection they really didn't need to? I fully understand if, by the time they reached the library, they thought there was still a credible threat and that time was of the essence, but considering they waited for a warrant in the end, that doesn't seem to be the case in this scenario.