In regards to your first point, the system would have to be based on the offender's net worth rather than their income in the US, due to all of the tricks that the rich have paid to create in the tax code. And then we'd need a semi-accurate way of calculating net worth. (And then, of course, once we have that, we can adjust the tax code to pay attention to changes in net worth rather than "income", which would help a lot with the tax evasion problem!)
There is a solution for that.
Many years ago, when you transported goods by boat in England, you were charged a percentage of the value of the goods. But how would you determine the value? Quite simple. The owner of the goods stated what the value of the goods was. And the owner of the boat had the right to buy the goods for that amount.
So let the rich guy just state what his income is. And we'll believe him. And then the state takes every penny beyond the stated income.
A British furniture company sold a sofa in several colours, including one dark brown that they called "niger", which btw is the name of both a river and a country in West Africe.
You can imagine what spelling mistake happened. Or maybe someone thought that "niger" was a spelling mistake.
The problem with "bad English" is that it tends to be imprecise and ambiguous. Using a word "wrongly" might not be bad when talking to friends, but when placing a large order or designing an airplane, precise use of the language can really make a difference.
There was a story a few years ago where a company lost an eight digit dollar sum because of a misplaced comma in a contract, which totally changed the meaning.
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Oh bugger off. I can see from a mile whether some unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American or by someone who is learning the language. Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
However, since there are indeed many people on the internet whose first language isn't English, you should realize that using improper English makes it a lot harder for these people to understand you, and in the worst case they learn improper English from you. So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme.
So you have arbitrarily decided your definition of a portable device is what fits into your definition of the size of a pocket.
Many, many years ago when Apple built its first "portable" computer, they used the definition "a device that can be carried by an average ten year old girl for one mile". ( I assume they meant "can be carried" and not "can be carried without complaining").
The US could simply give Vietnam the cold shoulder.
What about giving some humanitarian help by coughing up for medical help or compensation for the thousands of Vietnamese children who are still born with damages from Agent Orange? Vietnam is still today suffering from the effects of the brutal US war machine.
Worked where it was tried, but I think it was dropped when the Next Great Idea came along.
In the UK, I'd explain that with the ridiculous "targets" based policies.
Say you put a cop walking around in a really bad neighbourhood and suddenly crime there stops altogether. You think that's perfect. The people living there (except the criminals) think it's perfect. Life is good. Then someone higher up in the police force notices that this cop hasn't solved a single crime, and his target is to solve x crimes per month. So he is taken off the beat, crime returns, and he happily solves ten percent of the crimes and makes his target.
So he patched for and worked with Apple and they said we'll see ?
The way he did this, it is probably difficult for the responsible person at Apple to actually pay him. He should have offered to do the work as a contractor, someone would have found money in a budget, and when he sends a bill for five days contracting work they pay the bill. That's how it works.
He seems to be asking for a donation to an open source project. How can someone at a commercial company put that in a budget? The financial guys say "is there any legal reason why we have to pay this money", the answer is no, so it won't get paid.
Will they be legal for sale in the USA, or will design patents prevent that?
Design patents would be relevant if someone tried to sell these watches under their own name. That's unlikely to happen. They will be sold as "Apple Watches". What makes this illegal is that it is fraud, and that it is infringing on a trademark.
Interestingly, if someone sells a cheap watch that looks like an Apple Watch and you think it is so cheap because it is stolen, and buy it, you are in the USA legally guilty of an attempt to buy stolen goods (it would obviously be hard to prove that you believed it was stolen).
Or just as ineffective. The very existence of the knock-offs defeats the status symbol, because even if you buy that $10,000 one, people are just going to assume that it is a knock-off.
There are plenty of Rollex watches and Rolodex watches around. And you'd have to be blind to not see the difference.
So in other words you are saying someone should die because of an exploit before something should be done? Sounds reckless to me. The car companies have been warned by many of these studies and still haven't done anything about it. Maybe this suit will get them off their asses. I won't hold my breath though...
In my country, there are millions and millions and millions of people who could kill me with a knife. And about the same number of people could kill me with a brick. Since guns are rare, the number of people who could kill me with a gun is lower, but still many thousands.
How many people are there who could kill me by manipulating the electronics in my car? It's not many. It's not something I worry about. It's possible, but anyone wanting to kill someone that way would have much, much easier methods available.
The key difference is that in those other cases someone (the person suing) was actually hurt. In this case, nobody has been hurt, but somebody thinks that theoretically somebody could maybe possibly be hurt somehow under some condition.
Not just "could possibly be hurt somehow", but "could possibly be hurt by a criminal causing intentional damage". It's one thing to complain if your pet dies inside the microwave because there was no written warning, it's something else if someone dies because a criminal put a pound of TNT in the microwave and turned it on. Or if someone dies because a clever criminal damages the microwave so that it will explode the next time it is used.
If I owned a car that was susceptible to this sort of problem I would much rather the lawsuit compel the automaker to fix the problem rather than give me money. Pay the lawyers, but just fix the damn problem as a recall.
I'd prefer if any hacker attacking a car that way should go to jail according to the damage done or attempted. Like anyone trying to manipulate how the brakes on my car work should go to jail for attempted murder. (I'd prefer if that person doesn't go to jail for actual murder). But then, a person can do all kinds of damage, both expensive and dangerous, to a car without any hacking.
Wi-Fi has its advantages... but it has its insecurities as well. For example, if I want to use a wireless HDD, I have to have the device and the HDD on some SSID. If the SSID is hacked, then an intruder can gain access to the HDD and all data stored in... no physical access needed... just park nearby with a Pringle's can antenna.
Solution is to send encrypted data over an insecure channel.
An amazing statistic in the USA is that females have significantly more suicide attempts, while males have significantly more "successful" suicides. And that's due to the availability of guns, which provide an easy way to kill yourself with a high success rate.
An anecdote from the Golden Gate Bridge: A man was spotted on the bridge in some rather agitated state, so the police was called, and the got him. It turned out he had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Un)fortunately he found himself on the right side. Now there is absolutely no difference between jumping from the left or the right side, but he had decided to kill himself by jumping from the left side. (Un)fortunately there were six lanes of traffic between the right and the left side, and he didn't dare running across the traffic for fear of getting killed, which was actually quite reasonable.
A few years ago, when there was a statistically small number of suicides at Foxconn, the company put up suicide nets which would catch and save people jumping from the roof, and more likely prevent them from jumping in the first place (because these people wanted to die, not look like idiots caught in a net). That gave a course a lot of ammunition to the idiots among the Foxconn haters and Apple haters, but it actually worked. Take a simple way of killing yourself away, and suicide rates drop.
It's long known that the majority of suicides are not done for any rational reason, but because of some mental disturbance. The slightest obstacle in the way of killing themselves can save them.
There needs to be more-than-ten years of imprisonment for using DRM. One work sold with DRM makes multiple people need to pirate it in order to watch it. If you sell a DRMed work that results in six people pirating it, then you get 60 years.
If I was a shop owner, I'd have to shoot you in self defense, so I won't go to jail when you steal my goods.
I don't know what an "appropriate" punishment is for illegally downloading or distributing someone's content, but ten years sounds incredibly excessive unless you're running a vast, far-reaching network, distributing content to a million people and charging them for the convenience or something like that.
That's why you have "maximum" penalties, and you'd hope that a judge would handle this sensibly. There may be a "maximum" penalty for selling drugs, and it should be obvious that someone selling 1,000 kg of cocaine should likely get the maximum, and someone selling 5 grams should get much much less than the maximum. I'd fully agree with the maximum being horrendously high so that the guy selling 1,000 kg can get a fair punishment, but that maximum should be totally irrelevant for the 5 gram seller.
For something like murder it's different; there isn't that much difference between the most harmless and the most evil murder. For assault there is a huge difference, between a harmless slap, and breaking every bone of someone. For copyright infringement, as you say, an enormous range from a single download to a multi million dollar illegal enterprise.
Quite obvious that the maximum penalty will be excessive except for the few that deserve the maximum penalty. Instead of setting a maximum, they should have a guideline for the penalty depending on the severity of the crime.
If the kids can also keep their EU citizenship, it is worth it. I don't think there are any tax implications, maybe there are implications if you are a US citizen earning money overseas.
Even if you don't earn money overseas, for example if you stay in the UK without ever getting a job and living off benefits, you _still_ have to fill out your US tax forms, and if you don't and you ever dare going to the USA, you will be in deep trouble.
But then most US citizens living in Europe will at some point of their life try hard to earn money overseas.
Deal with it or stop earning US money, freeloader.
Total idiot. We are talking here about US citizens who are not US residents, don't earn any US money, and are still harassed by the US tax office. We are even talking about US citizens who have never in their whole live touched the ground of the USA, and are still harassed by the US tax office.
that a rational answer is "hell no, there's no reason to get your kids burdened with dealing with the US government and laws". But I wouldn't be surprised if Europeans said the same about the EU.
Actually, having moved between EU countries, I haven't found any disadvantages whatsoever in having a EU nationality. The tax situation that US citizens living outside the USA are caught in is frankly bizarre. As a EU citizen, you can live wherever you want, pay your taxes there, and your own country will leave you alone (slight complication in a year where you move from one country to another, but that is independent of your nationality).
Until self driving cars can be held individually responbile for mishaps humans must be ultimately responsible for whatever damage they cause. I can forsee a future where self driving cars don't yield to pedestriasns walking againjst a lightl. A human would respect life and stop simply because a life is a life and humas respect life above all else., a self driving car would insist it was their right to run the pedastrian down simply because that was the rules of the road.
Where I got my driving license, paragraph one of the highway code says "1. Participating in road traffic requires continuous care and mutual consideration. 2. Anybody who takes part in road traffic has to act so that nobody is damaged, endangered, or inconvenienced more than unavoidable". So intentionally hitting a pedestrian, no matter how he or she violated traffic rules, is about the worst thing you can do. If a self driving car is programmed to do this, I'd firmly expect the engineers - who are through their programming participating in road traffic - to go to jail.
The problem with real life is that it is not constrained by simple rules like chess. There are two many variables and too many situations that are non deterministic. For example, if you see a person standing near the curb. What do you think they might do. The prediction is based on many things; age, gender, which way they are facing, what they are doing, etc. They might just stand there or they might dart out into traffic. It is very hard for a computer to make predictions. The same goes for other vehicles.
Chess is easier. However, in a game of chess, you have an opponent who actively tries to beat you. In a car, other drivers don't actively try to hit you. That person at the curb doesn't wait for an opportunity to throw himself in front of your car and get killed.
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to your first point, the system would have to be based on the offender's net worth rather than their income in the US, due to all of the tricks that the rich have paid to create in the tax code. And then we'd need a semi-accurate way of calculating net worth. (And then, of course, once we have that, we can adjust the tax code to pay attention to changes in net worth rather than "income", which would help a lot with the tax evasion problem!)
There is a solution for that.
Many years ago, when you transported goods by boat in England, you were charged a percentage of the value of the goods. But how would you determine the value? Quite simple. The owner of the goods stated what the value of the goods was. And the owner of the boat had the right to buy the goods for that amount.
So let the rich guy just state what his income is. And we'll believe him. And then the state takes every penny beyond the stated income.
This won't make your phone cooler; the manufacturers will just push their chips harder for the same temperature.
"Push the chips harder" = "Empty the battery quicker".
A British furniture company sold a sofa in several colours, including one dark brown that they called "niger", which btw is the name of both a river and a country in West Africe.
You can imagine what spelling mistake happened. Or maybe someone thought that "niger" was a spelling mistake.
The problem with "bad English" is that it tends to be imprecise and ambiguous. Using a word "wrongly" might not be bad when talking to friends, but when placing a large order or designing an airplane, precise use of the language can really make a difference.
There was a story a few years ago where a company lost an eight digit dollar sum because of a misplaced comma in a contract, which totally changed the meaning.
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Oh bugger off. I can see from a mile whether some unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American or by someone who is learning the language. Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
However, since there are indeed many people on the internet whose first language isn't English, you should realize that using improper English makes it a lot harder for these people to understand you, and in the worst case they learn improper English from you. So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme.
So you have arbitrarily decided your definition of a portable device is what fits into your definition of the size of a pocket.
Many, many years ago when Apple built its first "portable" computer, they used the definition "a device that can be carried by an average ten year old girl for one mile". ( I assume they meant "can be carried" and not "can be carried without complaining").
The US could simply give Vietnam the cold shoulder.
What about giving some humanitarian help by coughing up for medical help or compensation for the thousands of Vietnamese children who are still born with damages from Agent Orange? Vietnam is still today suffering from the effects of the brutal US war machine.
Worked where it was tried, but I think it was dropped when the Next Great Idea came along.
In the UK, I'd explain that with the ridiculous "targets" based policies.
Say you put a cop walking around in a really bad neighbourhood and suddenly crime there stops altogether. You think that's perfect. The people living there (except the criminals) think it's perfect. Life is good. Then someone higher up in the police force notices that this cop hasn't solved a single crime, and his target is to solve x crimes per month. So he is taken off the beat, crime returns, and he happily solves ten percent of the crimes and makes his target.
So he patched for and worked with Apple and they said we'll see ?
The way he did this, it is probably difficult for the responsible person at Apple to actually pay him. He should have offered to do the work as a contractor, someone would have found money in a budget, and when he sends a bill for five days contracting work they pay the bill. That's how it works.
He seems to be asking for a donation to an open source project. How can someone at a commercial company put that in a budget? The financial guys say "is there any legal reason why we have to pay this money", the answer is no, so it won't get paid.
Will they be legal for sale in the USA, or will design patents prevent that?
Design patents would be relevant if someone tried to sell these watches under their own name. That's unlikely to happen. They will be sold as "Apple Watches". What makes this illegal is that it is fraud, and that it is infringing on a trademark.
Interestingly, if someone sells a cheap watch that looks like an Apple Watch and you think it is so cheap because it is stolen, and buy it, you are in the USA legally guilty of an attempt to buy stolen goods (it would obviously be hard to prove that you believed it was stolen).
Or just as ineffective. The very existence of the knock-offs defeats the status symbol, because even if you buy that $10,000 one, people are just going to assume that it is a knock-off.
There are plenty of Rollex watches and Rolodex watches around. And you'd have to be blind to not see the difference.
So in other words you are saying someone should die because of an exploit before something should be done? Sounds reckless to me. The car companies have been warned by many of these studies and still haven't done anything about it. Maybe this suit will get them off their asses. I won't hold my breath though...
In my country, there are millions and millions and millions of people who could kill me with a knife. And about the same number of people could kill me with a brick. Since guns are rare, the number of people who could kill me with a gun is lower, but still many thousands.
How many people are there who could kill me by manipulating the electronics in my car? It's not many. It's not something I worry about. It's possible, but anyone wanting to kill someone that way would have much, much easier methods available.
The key difference is that in those other cases someone (the person suing) was actually hurt. In this case, nobody has been hurt, but somebody thinks that theoretically somebody could maybe possibly be hurt somehow under some condition.
Not just "could possibly be hurt somehow", but "could possibly be hurt by a criminal causing intentional damage". It's one thing to complain if your pet dies inside the microwave because there was no written warning, it's something else if someone dies because a criminal put a pound of TNT in the microwave and turned it on. Or if someone dies because a clever criminal damages the microwave so that it will explode the next time it is used.
If I owned a car that was susceptible to this sort of problem I would much rather the lawsuit compel the automaker to fix the problem rather than give me money. Pay the lawyers, but just fix the damn problem as a recall.
I'd prefer if any hacker attacking a car that way should go to jail according to the damage done or attempted. Like anyone trying to manipulate how the brakes on my car work should go to jail for attempted murder. (I'd prefer if that person doesn't go to jail for actual murder). But then, a person can do all kinds of damage, both expensive and dangerous, to a car without any hacking.
Wi-Fi has its advantages... but it has its insecurities as well. For example, if I want to use a wireless HDD, I have to have the device and the HDD on some SSID. If the SSID is hacked, then an intruder can gain access to the HDD and all data stored in... no physical access needed... just park nearby with a Pringle's can antenna.
Solution is to send encrypted data over an insecure channel.
An amazing statistic in the USA is that females have significantly more suicide attempts, while males have significantly more "successful" suicides. And that's due to the availability of guns, which provide an easy way to kill yourself with a high success rate.
An anecdote from the Golden Gate Bridge: A man was spotted on the bridge in some rather agitated state, so the police was called, and the got him. It turned out he had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Un)fortunately he found himself on the right side. Now there is absolutely no difference between jumping from the left or the right side, but he had decided to kill himself by jumping from the left side. (Un)fortunately there were six lanes of traffic between the right and the left side, and he didn't dare running across the traffic for fear of getting killed, which was actually quite reasonable.
A few years ago, when there was a statistically small number of suicides at Foxconn, the company put up suicide nets which would catch and save people jumping from the roof, and more likely prevent them from jumping in the first place (because these people wanted to die, not look like idiots caught in a net). That gave a course a lot of ammunition to the idiots among the Foxconn haters and Apple haters, but it actually worked. Take a simple way of killing yourself away, and suicide rates drop.
It's long known that the majority of suicides are not done for any rational reason, but because of some mental disturbance. The slightest obstacle in the way of killing themselves can save them.
Good luck finding a hub that can supply enough power to charge a laptop.
Straight on Apple's website you find an adapter that provides HDMI, USB3.0 and charging, and another one with VGA instead of HDMI.
There needs to be more-than-ten years of imprisonment for using DRM. One work sold with DRM makes multiple people need to pirate it in order to watch it. If you sell a DRMed work that results in six people pirating it, then you get 60 years.
If I was a shop owner, I'd have to shoot you in self defense, so I won't go to jail when you steal my goods.
I don't know what an "appropriate" punishment is for illegally downloading or distributing someone's content, but ten years sounds incredibly excessive unless you're running a vast, far-reaching network, distributing content to a million people and charging them for the convenience or something like that.
That's why you have "maximum" penalties, and you'd hope that a judge would handle this sensibly. There may be a "maximum" penalty for selling drugs, and it should be obvious that someone selling 1,000 kg of cocaine should likely get the maximum, and someone selling 5 grams should get much much less than the maximum. I'd fully agree with the maximum being horrendously high so that the guy selling 1,000 kg can get a fair punishment, but that maximum should be totally irrelevant for the 5 gram seller.
For something like murder it's different; there isn't that much difference between the most harmless and the most evil murder. For assault there is a huge difference, between a harmless slap, and breaking every bone of someone. For copyright infringement, as you say, an enormous range from a single download to a multi million dollar illegal enterprise.
Quite obvious that the maximum penalty will be excessive except for the few that deserve the maximum penalty. Instead of setting a maximum, they should have a guideline for the penalty depending on the severity of the crime.
If the kids can also keep their EU citizenship, it is worth it. I don't think there are any tax implications, maybe there are implications if you are a US citizen earning money overseas.
Even if you don't earn money overseas, for example if you stay in the UK without ever getting a job and living off benefits, you _still_ have to fill out your US tax forms, and if you don't and you ever dare going to the USA, you will be in deep trouble.
But then most US citizens living in Europe will at some point of their life try hard to earn money overseas.
Deal with it or stop earning US money, freeloader.
Total idiot. We are talking here about US citizens who are not US residents, don't earn any US money, and are still harassed by the US tax office. We are even talking about US citizens who have never in their whole live touched the ground of the USA, and are still harassed by the US tax office.
that a rational answer is "hell no, there's no reason to get your kids burdened with dealing with the US government and laws". But I wouldn't be surprised if Europeans said the same about the EU.
Actually, having moved between EU countries, I haven't found any disadvantages whatsoever in having a EU nationality. The tax situation that US citizens living outside the USA are caught in is frankly bizarre. As a EU citizen, you can live wherever you want, pay your taxes there, and your own country will leave you alone (slight complication in a year where you move from one country to another, but that is independent of your nationality).
Until self driving cars can be held individually responbile for mishaps humans must be ultimately responsible for whatever damage they cause. I can forsee a future where self driving cars don't yield to pedestriasns walking againjst a lightl. A human would respect life and stop simply because a life is a life and humas respect life above all else., a self driving car would insist it was their right to run the pedastrian down simply because that was the rules of the road.
Where I got my driving license, paragraph one of the highway code says "1. Participating in road traffic requires continuous care and mutual consideration. 2. Anybody who takes part in road traffic has to act so that nobody is damaged, endangered, or inconvenienced more than unavoidable". So intentionally hitting a pedestrian, no matter how he or she violated traffic rules, is about the worst thing you can do. If a self driving car is programmed to do this, I'd firmly expect the engineers - who are through their programming participating in road traffic - to go to jail.
More than likely, the self-driving car would stop for the pedestrian in the crosswalk as well as the floating, plastic bag tossed around by the wind.
What makes you think that?
The problem with real life is that it is not constrained by simple rules like chess. There are two many variables and too many situations that are non deterministic. For example, if you see a person standing near the curb. What do you think they might do. The prediction is based on many things; age, gender, which way they are facing, what they are doing, etc. They might just stand there or they might dart out into traffic. It is very hard for a computer to make predictions. The same goes for other vehicles.
Chess is easier. However, in a game of chess, you have an opponent who actively tries to beat you. In a car, other drivers don't actively try to hit you. That person at the curb doesn't wait for an opportunity to throw himself in front of your car and get killed.