But what if your torrent client is also uploading at the same time as is usually the case? Wouldn't that be seen as infringement even in locales where downloading might be legitimate?
According to the press release, and the statement on Clear's website, the information would only be sold to another company engaged in the same business as Clear and approved by the Transportation Safety Administration. I don't know whether that was a stipulation of Clear's contract with the TSA, though I doubt Clear would tie its hands this way just out of a sense of civic duty.
Sex offenders in Miami-Dade County cannot live within 2,500 feet of a place where children congregate; apparently this bridge is one of the few places that qualifies.
They were abused by having their likeness (a picture of their face) pasted onto someone else's naked body. This is an intangible, virtual abuse, but still an abuse all of its own, esp. if the fellow also distributed said pics.
I read the linked article in its entirety. At no time was there any mention of distribution. As far as I could tell, the guy created these images for his own purposes. He apparently had no contact with any of the girls; one was Miley Cyrus! The article also fails to say how the police and DA became aware of the altered photographs.
Listen to the assistant DA in this case:
Investigators do not believe Campbell had any contact with the three girls, but "when you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity," Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny said during Wednesday's hearing.
Simply the act of grafting the girls' faces onto the adult bodies constitutes "simulated sexual activity" because it is for "sexual gratification?" There's no claim that he distributed the pictures or even told anyone else about them. He's being prosecuted for having made the pictures, period. I'm as opposed to the actual exploitation of real children as the next guy, but I fail to see what crime has been committed here.
Stevens and Ginsberg appear to agree with you and not the majority. In a separate opinion they both joined, Stevens writes:
[The majority decision] simply applies [New Jersey v. T. L. O., the controlling precedent on school searches] to declare unconstitutional a strip search of a 13-year-old honors student that was based on a groundless suspicion that she might be hiding medicine in her underwear. This is, in essence, a case in which clearly established law meets clearly outrageous conduct. I have long believed that " `[i]t does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.' " Id., at 382, n. 25
Ginsberg seems, if anything, more outraged than Stevens. She believes the officials deserved to be held individually accountable for their actions, writing:
Here, "the nature of the [supposed] infraction," the slim basis for suspecting Savana Redding, and her "age and sex," ibid., establish beyond doubt that Assistant Principal Wilson's order cannot be reconciled with this Court's opinion in T. L. O. Wilson's treatment of Redding was abusive and it was not reasonable for him to believe that the law permitted it.
Still the economics of this are a bit puzzling. In 2008, California used 285 million megawatt-hours of electricity, so even if this project could generate 200 MW 24x7 that still comes to just 511,000 megawatt-hours per year, or a little under 0.2% of Californian consumption. At a wholesale price of $50 per megawatt-hour, that would earn Solaren about $25 million per year. Even over the fifteen year projected lifespan that comes to just $375 million (actually less if you take inflation into account). Is $375 million anywhere near what the actual cost of this project will be? Space engineers, please help here.
KDE4 was introduced far too soon in the major distros and even promoted to the "default" Desktop Environment in some of them, while still being horribly buggy and crashing all the time. The haste to make the GNU/Linux desktop look cool just made it look bad.
In the case of Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE4, one problem is that Ubuntu sees the x.04 ("Long Term Support") releases as stable, and the x.10 releases as developmental. Unfortunately this distinction doesn't hold up in the minds of Ubuntu users who think all releases are created equal. I'd agree that the 8.10 release of Kubuntu was pretty buggy, but the 9.04 release has been pretty stable for me. Sure it has some known bugs (the static IP issue mentioned above is one), but overall it's pretty slick.
I wish either RedHat or Canonical would opt for KDE over GNOME as the default environment. It would force the distro packagers to pay more attention to KDE than they seem to do now. I, for one, find it puzzling why both Fedora and Ubuntu continue to put GNOME first with KDE as the also-ran.
That procedure exists already in the DMCA. It's called a "take-down" request. People sharing anime fansubs via BT have been the target of such requests for a while now. They contact the ISP; the ISP forwards the request to you; you stop sharing the material. End of story, though I wouldn't use a BT client for quite a while after receiving one of those.
Remember that, in the consumer and small-to-medium-sized business market, Microsoft doesn't provide any end-user support beyond patches; it's the manufacturers' responsibility. I'm sure Dell isn't thrilled about supporting WinXP for years to come, but I'd bet that if they could just keep rolling out XP machines to the customers that want them, they'd be happy to continue to support them. OEMs can't be happy about having to dodge all these obstacles Microsoft puts in their way either.
When the Chinese government announced that shipping a CD with the Green Dam software constituted compliance with the July 1st directive, that told me the government was implicitly agreeing that the software wouldn't be compulsory. I suspect we have to thank the PC manufacturers for this turn of events. It's a lot easier to throw a disk into the box. Parents might install Green Dam out of concern for their kids' browsing, but I can't imagine anyone who might be politically relevant would do so, especially if it's not illegal to operate a computer without it.
On the subject of infringement, what happens if it is demonstrable that Green Dam contains code stolen from Solid Oak? Can an American manufacturer, say Dell, continue to ship this product in China knowing that it infringes on the product of another American firm? Obviously Dell couldn't be sued in China, but could it be sued in the US?
No love for the cross-platform smplayer here, huh?
smplayer is an excellent gui front-end to mplayer. The Windows version packages a very up-to-date version of mplayer as well. On Linux machines with a recent nVidia card you can use the VDPAU driver which offloads H.264 decoding tasks to the graphics hardware.
Ubuntu users can download smplayer from the repositories, but you might want to compile mplayer from SVN. "apt-get build-dep mplayer-nogui" will get you all the devel packages you need. The daily source snapshot is available here (warning: bz2 archive).
My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV. Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?
Well, considering that all of those you list have a stake in closed architectures, I'm not too surprised. Neither Apple nor Sony has ever shown much interest in supporting open standards. Have you yet discovered that your PS3 also won't play all flavors of DivX/XviD even in the AVI container?
While some DVD players support DivX and often won't cough with XviD, the manufacturers did so to enable you to play the now-defunct DivX discs. I took back a Sony DVD player and replaced it with a Panny because the Sony had no DivX support and wouldn't play my XviD-encoded programs. Sony wants everyone to conform to the.mp4 container that they prefer.
In answer to your question, how about a COWON A3 for starters? It even supports 720p/H.264 Matroska files (I have a lot of those). Or maybe some of these devices?
If you buy products that are designed to close off your options, then you can't really complain when you find your choices are more limited. While it's possible to argue that hardware manufacturers have been slow to support Matroska because of its small market share, I think it's even more plausible that manufacturers prefer to support formats that give them more control. Not to mention that large manufacturers are much more comfortable dealing with something like the MPEG LA than with an open format like Matroska. They probably have a hard time getting their heads around supporting something that doesn't required licensing fees. (Like in the case of Linux, business types usually think "free" = "inferior".)
I don't think it really matters what motivated this change, it's the fact that they had to change their pronouncement that is the real news. Whether it's Linux, OS X, piracy, Android, Symbian, or what-have-you, it's become obvious to everyone that Windows is no longer the only choice. The notion that Microsoft would actually have to adapt in order to compete in the OS market would have been laughable a decade ago.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers.
I don't see how package managers could handle Firefox extensions since each user gets to install his or her own set. Isn't this the only way extensions make sense on a multi-user platform? I might want to use flashblock, but someone else using this machine may not.
What y'all are missing is that there isn't really a "charity" status where taxation is concerned in the US. Most churches are "not for profit" status, it has nothing to do with charity.
Actually, there is. 501c(3) organizations are divided into "private foundations" and "public charities." Churches fall into the latter group. I believe there are some subtle differences in how the two categories are treated in law, but I'm not an attorney nor an accountant. I only know about this since I once worked for a nonprofit that had obtained "public charity" status which apparently had some additional benefits compared to private foundations.
Because people can see dice falling, but they can't see a random-number generating algorithm at work. In cases like this, computers are inherently untrustworthy because they can be programmed to produce a desired result. It's all about credibility, not whether a computer algorithm is better or worse at randomization than this device.
While I didn't read every article here, nothing suggests that China directly aided the DPRK in developing nuclear weapons. Much of the original reactor technology appears either home-grown or based on alterations by DPRK technologists to a reactor built with the help of the USSR. Khan (with or without official support) provided centrifuge designs and at least one working centrifuge. In addition, the DPRK apparently participated in a joint test of a nuclear device in Pakistan in 1998.
I do agree with your assessment of Kim Jong-Il and the dangers inherent in the looming succession crisis in the DPRK.
There was one person I tried to introduce to linux, and to my distress the result wasn't exactly glamorous - after spending half a day figuratively breaking through brick walls with my forehead to configure PulseAudio with his 5.1 surround system
People working in government offices (or most businesses for that matter) don't have any need for technologies like these. What may present issues for consumers have little relevance to professional usage situations. Millions of people are sitting in front of vanilla machines with Intel motherboards and graphics.
There are lots of reasons why supporting Linux on consumer devices can be difficult; few of those apply to professional settings with IT staffs. For them the bigger issue is software compatibility, particularly with home-grown or vertical applications that only run on Windows. Some of these applications might run fine with something like Wine or Mono, but I doubt many admins in Windows-only shops spend any time testing to see how difficult it might be to convert to Linux.
The North Korean nuclear program is based on technology acquired from Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, not so far as I know from either China or the former USSR.
I think both the Chinese and the Russians understand that a nuclear armed Korea represents a threat to them. Their occasional diplomatic wavering probably has much more to do with internal political struggles than with blindness or deception.
I think Botsford denied the motion to suppress because no criminal proceeding has (yet) been brought against Calixte. Botsford makes this point in her Discussion on page 5:
"1. The Commonwealth argues that none of Calixte's three motions is properly appealable at this point, where the Commonwealth has already executed the search warrant and has not yet filed any criminal charges. I agree with respect to Calixte's request that any evidence flowing from the execution of the search warrant be suppressed; these suppression issues can be more appropriately considered in the context of a future criminal proceeding, if there is one."
Remember no charges have been brought against Calixte; this proceeding is purely procedural and concerns the legitimacy of the search warrant itself. If the Commonwealth were silly enough to bring charges at this point, then Calixte could file to suppress the evidence in any consequent criminal proceeding.
As for why she ruled that the motion to quash be allowed, I think this is something of semantic issue. Calixte moved to quash; the Commonwealth replied and said his motion should be denied. She ruled that his motion be allowed, and she ordered the return of his property. That's really all she can do at this point since there isn't any criminal proceeding against him.
in all my browsing I really haven't come to an occasion that Silverlight was ever necessary
Guess you didn't try to watch the NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney over the Internet this year. Not only was Silverlight required, but they required Version 2, which meant Moonlight wasn't an alternative.
Obviously many members of that department are members in organizations handling the immaterial rights or have connections with such organizations.
I have to say that's not so obvious to me. Why would a judge whose professional responsibility is to adjudicate cases concerning intellectual property be allowed to belong to such organizations? Is this a feature of the Swedish legal system? I can't imagine an American judge being able to belong to such organizations without having to recuse him or herself from cases concerning IP. Is Sweden more tolerant of conflicts of interest in its judicial system?
Slashdot Mirror
But what if your torrent client is also uploading at the same time as is usually the case? Wouldn't that be seen as infringement even in locales where downloading might be legitimate?
According to the press release, and the statement on Clear's website, the information would only be sold to another company engaged in the same business as Clear and approved by the Transportation Safety Administration. I don't know whether that was a stipulation of Clear's contract with the TSA, though I doubt Clear would tie its hands this way just out of a sense of civic duty.
Sex offenders in Miami-Dade County cannot live within 2,500 feet of a place where children congregate; apparently this bridge is one of the few places that qualifies.
They were abused by having their likeness (a picture of their face) pasted onto someone else's naked body. This is an intangible, virtual abuse, but still an abuse all of its own, esp. if the fellow also distributed said pics.
I read the linked article in its entirety. At no time was there any mention of distribution. As far as I could tell, the guy created these images for his own purposes. He apparently had no contact with any of the girls; one was Miley Cyrus! The article also fails to say how the police and DA became aware of the altered photographs.
Listen to the assistant DA in this case:
Simply the act of grafting the girls' faces onto the adult bodies constitutes "simulated sexual activity" because it is for "sexual gratification?" There's no claim that he distributed the pictures or even told anyone else about them. He's being prosecuted for having made the pictures, period. I'm as opposed to the actual exploitation of real children as the next guy, but I fail to see what crime has been committed here.
Stevens and Ginsberg appear to agree with you and not the majority. In a separate opinion they both joined, Stevens writes:
Ginsberg seems, if anything, more outraged than Stevens. She believes the officials deserved to be held individually accountable for their actions, writing:
Still the economics of this are a bit puzzling. In 2008, California used 285 million megawatt-hours of electricity, so even if this project could generate 200 MW 24x7 that still comes to just 511,000 megawatt-hours per year, or a little under 0.2% of Californian consumption. At a wholesale price of $50 per megawatt-hour, that would earn Solaren about $25 million per year. Even over the fifteen year projected lifespan that comes to just $375 million (actually less if you take inflation into account). Is $375 million anywhere near what the actual cost of this project will be? Space engineers, please help here.
KDE4 was introduced far too soon in the major distros and even promoted to the "default" Desktop Environment in some of them, while still being horribly buggy and crashing all the time. The haste to make the GNU/Linux desktop look cool just made it look bad.
In the case of Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE4, one problem is that Ubuntu sees the x.04 ("Long Term Support") releases as stable, and the x.10 releases as developmental. Unfortunately this distinction doesn't hold up in the minds of Ubuntu users who think all releases are created equal. I'd agree that the 8.10 release of Kubuntu was pretty buggy, but the 9.04 release has been pretty stable for me. Sure it has some known bugs (the static IP issue mentioned above is one), but overall it's pretty slick.
I wish either RedHat or Canonical would opt for KDE over GNOME as the default environment. It would force the distro packagers to pay more attention to KDE than they seem to do now. I, for one, find it puzzling why both Fedora and Ubuntu continue to put GNOME first with KDE as the also-ran.
Not to mention the "secret room" in the back of the cave where other activities might have been drawn.
That procedure exists already in the DMCA. It's called a "take-down" request. People sharing anime fansubs via BT have been the target of such requests for a while now. They contact the ISP; the ISP forwards the request to you; you stop sharing the material. End of story, though I wouldn't use a BT client for quite a while after receiving one of those.
Remember that, in the consumer and small-to-medium-sized business market, Microsoft doesn't provide any end-user support beyond patches; it's the manufacturers' responsibility. I'm sure Dell isn't thrilled about supporting WinXP for years to come, but I'd bet that if they could just keep rolling out XP machines to the customers that want them, they'd be happy to continue to support them. OEMs can't be happy about having to dodge all these obstacles Microsoft puts in their way either.
When the Chinese government announced that shipping a CD with the Green Dam software constituted compliance with the July 1st directive, that told me the government was implicitly agreeing that the software wouldn't be compulsory. I suspect we have to thank the PC manufacturers for this turn of events. It's a lot easier to throw a disk into the box. Parents might install Green Dam out of concern for their kids' browsing, but I can't imagine anyone who might be politically relevant would do so, especially if it's not illegal to operate a computer without it.
On the subject of infringement, what happens if it is demonstrable that Green Dam contains code stolen from Solid Oak? Can an American manufacturer, say Dell, continue to ship this product in China knowing that it infringes on the product of another American firm? Obviously Dell couldn't be sued in China, but could it be sued in the US?
No love for the cross-platform smplayer here, huh?
smplayer is an excellent gui front-end to mplayer. The Windows version packages a very up-to-date version of mplayer as well. On Linux machines with a recent nVidia card you can use the VDPAU driver which offloads H.264 decoding tasks to the graphics hardware.
Ubuntu users can download smplayer from the repositories, but you might want to compile mplayer from SVN. "apt-get build-dep mplayer-nogui" will get you all the devel packages you need. The daily source snapshot is available here (warning: bz2 archive).
My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV. Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?
Well, considering that all of those you list have a stake in closed architectures, I'm not too surprised. Neither Apple nor Sony has ever shown much interest in supporting open standards. Have you yet discovered that your PS3 also won't play all flavors of DivX/XviD even in the AVI container?
While some DVD players support DivX and often won't cough with XviD, the manufacturers did so to enable you to play the now-defunct DivX discs. I took back a Sony DVD player and replaced it with a Panny because the Sony had no DivX support and wouldn't play my XviD-encoded programs. Sony wants everyone to conform to the .mp4 container that they prefer.
In answer to your question, how about a COWON A3 for starters? It even supports 720p/H.264 Matroska files (I have a lot of those). Or maybe some of these devices?
If you buy products that are designed to close off your options, then you can't really complain when you find your choices are more limited. While it's possible to argue that hardware manufacturers have been slow to support Matroska because of its small market share, I think it's even more plausible that manufacturers prefer to support formats that give them more control. Not to mention that large manufacturers are much more comfortable dealing with something like the MPEG LA than with an open format like Matroska. They probably have a hard time getting their heads around supporting something that doesn't required licensing fees. (Like in the case of Linux, business types usually think "free" = "inferior".)
I don't think it really matters what motivated this change, it's the fact that they had to change their pronouncement that is the real news. Whether it's Linux, OS X, piracy, Android, Symbian, or what-have-you, it's become obvious to everyone that Windows is no longer the only choice. The notion that Microsoft would actually have to adapt in order to compete in the OS market would have been laughable a decade ago.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers.
I don't see how package managers could handle Firefox extensions since each user gets to install his or her own set. Isn't this the only way extensions make sense on a multi-user platform? I might want to use flashblock, but someone else using this machine may not.
Bloody git!
The standard method for data storage in the UK is up your nose, not up your arse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYLcZznNdvw
What y'all are missing is that there isn't really a "charity" status where taxation is concerned in the US. Most churches are "not for profit" status, it has nothing to do with charity.
Actually, there is. 501c(3) organizations are divided into "private foundations" and "public charities." Churches fall into the latter group. I believe there are some subtle differences in how the two categories are treated in law, but I'm not an attorney nor an accountant. I only know about this since I once worked for a nonprofit that had obtained "public charity" status which apparently had some additional benefits compared to private foundations.
Because people can see dice falling, but they can't see a random-number generating algorithm at work. In cases like this, computers are inherently untrustworthy because they can be programmed to produce a desired result. It's all about credibility, not whether a computer algorithm is better or worse at randomization than this device.
While I didn't read every article here, nothing suggests that China directly aided the DPRK in developing nuclear weapons. Much of the original reactor technology appears either home-grown or based on alterations by DPRK technologists to a reactor built with the help of the USSR. Khan (with or without official support) provided centrifuge designs and at least one working centrifuge. In addition, the DPRK apparently participated in a joint test of a nuclear device in Pakistan in 1998.
I do agree with your assessment of Kim Jong-Il and the dangers inherent in the looming succession crisis in the DPRK.
There was one person I tried to introduce to linux, and to my distress the result wasn't exactly glamorous - after spending half a day figuratively breaking through brick walls with my forehead to configure PulseAudio with his 5.1 surround system
People working in government offices (or most businesses for that matter) don't have any need for technologies like these. What may present issues for consumers have little relevance to professional usage situations. Millions of people are sitting in front of vanilla machines with Intel motherboards and graphics.
There are lots of reasons why supporting Linux on consumer devices can be difficult; few of those apply to professional settings with IT staffs. For them the bigger issue is software compatibility, particularly with home-grown or vertical applications that only run on Windows. Some of these applications might run fine with something like Wine or Mono, but I doubt many admins in Windows-only shops spend any time testing to see how difficult it might be to convert to Linux.
The North Korean nuclear program is based on technology acquired from Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, not so far as I know from either China or the former USSR.
I think both the Chinese and the Russians understand that a nuclear armed Korea represents a threat to them. Their occasional diplomatic wavering probably has much more to do with internal political struggles than with blindness or deception.
I think Botsford denied the motion to suppress because no criminal proceeding has (yet) been brought against Calixte. Botsford makes this point in her Discussion on page 5:
"1. The Commonwealth argues that none of Calixte's three motions is properly appealable
at this point, where the Commonwealth has already executed the search warrant and has not yet
filed any criminal charges. I agree with respect to Calixte's request that any evidence flowing
from the execution of the search warrant be suppressed; these suppression issues can be more
appropriately considered in the context of a future criminal proceeding, if there is one."
Remember no charges have been brought against Calixte; this proceeding is purely procedural and concerns the legitimacy of the search warrant itself. If the Commonwealth were silly enough to bring charges at this point, then Calixte could file to suppress the evidence in any consequent criminal proceeding.
As for why she ruled that the motion to quash be allowed, I think this is something of semantic issue. Calixte moved to quash; the Commonwealth replied and said his motion should be denied. She ruled that his motion be allowed, and she ordered the return of his property. That's really all she can do at this point since there isn't any criminal proceeding against him.
Asus did it before, what is to stop them doing it again?
Maybe because they saw their sales volumes go up when they started shipping netbooks with Windows?
in all my browsing I really haven't come to an occasion that Silverlight was ever necessary
Guess you didn't try to watch the NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney over the Internet this year. Not only was Silverlight required, but they required Version 2, which meant Moonlight wasn't an alternative.
Obviously many members of that department are members in organizations handling the immaterial rights or have connections with such organizations.
I have to say that's not so obvious to me. Why would a judge whose professional responsibility is to adjudicate cases concerning intellectual property be allowed to belong to such organizations? Is this a feature of the Swedish legal system? I can't imagine an American judge being able to belong to such organizations without having to recuse him or herself from cases concerning IP. Is Sweden more tolerant of conflicts of interest in its judicial system?