They don't need to prove, beyond any doubt, that you were the person who downloaded it. That's not the burden of proof in a civil case. Hell, that's not even the burden of proof in a criminal case.
They only need to prove that you were the one who likely downloaded it. Civil cases in the US are based on a "preponderance of evidence". That simply means that they need to be more than 50% right.
Their reasoning is "We have these records that this IP address downloaded this movie at this time. We have a statement from the internet provider who owns that IP that this account was the one who used it at the time of the download. That account belongs to Mr. Smith."
If they go to court with that level of evidence, and you simply show up and say "Prove it" or "It might have been someone who stole my wifi signal" then you are going to lose. You also need to submit evidence that makes their evidence tell a different story, and show that it is likely to have happened.
Now, if you showed up with logs from your router that showed that this MAC address downloaded the movie, records from the MAC address database that shows that the MAC was assigned to a particular manufacturer, plus an expert technical witness to explain what all that is, and a signed affidavit that says that you don't own, have never owned, and was not using a device by that manufacturer at that time, then you have just likely made a sufficient defense.
For those PS3 users who are currently using the “Other OS” feature but choose to install the system software update, to avoid data loss they first need to back-up any data stored within the hard drive partition used by the “Other OS,” as they will not be able to access that data following the update.
It looks like if you have an OS installed and do the update, the OS gets zapped as a part of the update.
You can support certain aspects of their business and not others...Apple has accountants, and they know where their money is coming from.
If enough people decide that they don't want to buy iPhones because of the closed nature of the platform, they will likely have customer survey's and such that will tell them so. And if they aren't making money on the iPhone because of that, then it will switch.
However, they will continue to see their mac platform, one that is open for anyone to develop and distribute for, shining and growing well. Apple has some very smart management...they will put 2 + 2 together....Assuming that is what actually happens.
This is true. Actual law supersedes all contracts, as you can't have a contract that is contrary to written law.
The Freedom of Information act was in place when Apple willingly agreed to enter in to their developer agreement with NASA. Apple should have known that NASA, and all of their business dealings with them would be subject to FOIA requests.
It might not be what Apple wanted, and Apple could certainly remove NASA's apps from the app store, but NASA would have no liability towards Apple for violating the agreement. That particular clause of the agreement was contrary to law and, therefor, invalid. (disclaimer: IANAL)
Compose an email and exit out to the web browser, do your googling, then return to the mail app. You'll be right where you left off in composing your email.
If your browsing the web and want to text someone, switch to the messaging app, then when you're done, and reopen the web browser, you will be right back where you left it... sessions, cookies, even partially entered form fields and all.
If you're on a phone call, you can do anything on the phone... including run all other apps, listen to your iPod, browse the web, and look at your contacts. There is even a link on the main "call" screen that says "Contacts" while you are on a call to quickly jump to them.
About the only legit complaints I have seen (so far) about the lack of background tasks have been the inability to listen to 3rd party audio apps while doing other things... you can't stream pandora while browsing the web.
Even IM apps have a good way to "run in the background" with push-notifications.
okay, let's assume that credit card processing costs are nothing, using the same example I used:
Apple's revenue would be $1.79 per app, $1.253 (70%) would be paid to the developer. That leaves $0.537 left for apple.
At one billion paid apps equals: $537 million dollars.
$537 Million dollars over the 18 months they've been doing the apps store so far is $89.5 million dollars per quarter.
$89.5 million dollars per quarter, compared to the 3.4 BILLION in profit's that Apple had in the last quarter is still only 2.6% of all of Apple's profits.
Of course, none of that still takes in to account the cost of developing the apps store in the first place.
Apple has publicly stated on several occasions that it makes very little, if any, money off of the iTunes store and Apps store.
The large majority of apps you have to pay for cost $0.99. Credit card processing likely costs apple around $0.20 + 1.5%... so $0.20+$0.015 = $0.215 for processing the transaction. Then it forwards 70% ($0.70) to the developer. So, total direct transaction costs are $0.915... That leaves $0.075 for Apple to cover all of their overhead (servers, bandwidth, maintenance staff, app approval, and customer support on the apps store). I bet the rest of that gets eaten up real quick and there is very little profit left. Any "profit" is most likely folded back in to future development and improvements.
All of that doesn't take in to account for the cost to support the equally, if not larger, pool of apps that are free in the apps store and don't bring apple any revenue.
And, also, let's do an example:
apple just said yesterday that they had 3 billion apps store downloads. This includes free and paid apps. Let's say 1/3 of them were paid... However, I seriously doubt that high of a number of apps were paid. So 1 billion paid app downloads.
The large majority of apps sell for $0.99. The ones that don't usually sell for $1.99. There are a couple apps that are more expensive, but 8 of the top 10 paid apps store downloads are $0.99. The other 2 are $2.99 and $6.99. That's an average price of $1.79. I think it's fair guess to put that as the average price for a paid app.
At $1.79, Apple's direct cost on the purchase would be $1.253 to the developer, plus $0.227 in credit card processing. = $0.31 left after the costs of the transaction.
So, 1 billion paid apps at $0.31 revenue each, leave $310 million in revenue for the apps store. But then you have to subtract off the cost of the overhead (servers, technical staff, bandwidth, data centers, apps approval staff, customer support staff, developer support staff, the cost of paying the apps store developers and management staff) for the apps store. I bet that number is probably cut down to less than $100 million. That's $100 million. Over 18 months.... or $16.66 million per quarter.
Apple just announced that they had $3.4 billion in profits in the last quarter. $16.66 million is roughly 0.49% of all of Apple's profits in a quarter. It's officially a rounding error.
And in all of that, I didn't take in to account for any development costs in creating the apps store.
how about perhaps it was only $1000 to send the letter. But Universal refused to pay it. So they had to sue them for it. Now it's $1000 to send the letter and $399,000 worth of legal fees to pursue the original $1000. Knowing how the music industry loves their lawyers, I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up taking 10 month's worth of man hours to resolve this.
how about $1,000 for writing the letter and the work involved in that. Then when they asked for that money, Universal declined. So they had to file a lawsuit which racks up much more legal expenses. So, $1,000 for the original letter (about 4-5 hours of an attorney's time), and $399,000 for the cost of pursuing the original $1,000 in court.
They are going to have to go multi carrier before they do this. I think they've poached the majority of people they are going to by being tied to AT&T.
Once they're on Verizon, look out. Their sales numbers will likely double over night in the US market.
It's so that RIM can take a slice of the monthly fee pie. Just follow the $$. Not only do they charge you for the device, they charge you for the privilege of using it each month.
There exist continuously reshuffling card machines. They just pull cards out of it. When they are done with a hand, they put the used cards back in to the machine, and it will continuously shuffle the deck.
Card counters are thwarted completely and there is no time lost for reshuffling. Although, I don't think these machines are legal in vegas. I have seen them on cruise ships and other casinos.
How about not even windows has built-in exchange support. In order to get Exchange support on Microsoft's $300 OS, you need to install a $100 email software, or $250 office suite.
The DMCA Copyright safe harbor protection has something similar to this. The problem is that no (or very few) of the webhosts follow through on the 2nd part, in that most web hosts don't give an opportunity for their clients to sign an affidavit of legitimacy.
When I ran a very small web hosting company a few years ago, i'd occasionally receive a DMCA takedown notice (all of them via email, typically from an anonymous email service...hotmail, gmail, etc). My response to those was to send a reply asking the alleged content owner to provide a signed statement where they swore, under penalty of perjury, that the content they were asking to be removed was in fact their own copyright. I also required their full name, address, and real-world contact information. I gave them my mailing address and my fax number to provide the requested signed documents.
Not ONE of them ever followed through with the requested information. I received about 15-20 of them over the 4 years I did hosting. I only ever received one reply to my request for more information, and that was an email saying that they would get back to me.
I have a 360. Hooked to my TV. With an HDMI cable. It most certainly transmits the audio to the TV via the HDMI cable and my TV then passes the audio right along to my receiver.
That portion of the law only applies to unsolicited commercial telephone calls. And only to people you don't have an existing business relationship with.
Basically:
If someone is calling about something other than trying to sell you something, no liability If someone is calling and they are trying to sell you something, but they have an existing relationship with you, no liability
Stephen hawking can call people, so long as he's either not trying to sell something or he has an existing relationship with the person/organization he's calling.
It is illegal for any telemarketer or any organization to call you on a cell phone for commercial purposes, including charities, etc. unless you already have an existing current business relationship with that specific business ("marketing partners, etc." don't count). This is also true for 800 numbers, pagers and any other type of phone line where you might be charged to receive the call.
The penalties are pretty stiff too. You don't have to ask them to remove you, you do not have to register your number with any private or government list. If they call you, and you don't have an existing current business relationship with that company, you can sue them for $1500 in statutory damages in small claims court. Courts have found that you can name both the telemarketing firm and the business that the firm may be calling on behalf of in the suit.
This fine gets extended to companies where you might have an ended business relationship with... i.e. you call your cable company and cancel your account, you've just ended the relationship. They can call you to finish business (i.e. past due collections, etc.) But if they call you to try and give you a special offer or to sell you anything, you can sue em.
From the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991: All unsolicited commercial telephone calls "No Person May" "Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice," "To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;"
type it in to bing without the quotes: why is windows so expensive?
the result "Why are Macs so expensive?" is the first result. There are 5 (out of 10) results on the first page related to Macs being so expensive. The windows results don't start until the 2nd page. There are only 2 on there. And there are another 3 on the second page that are still related to Macs being expensive.
Go to google and type the same thing: why is windows so expensive? (without the quotes) and the first result is about windows and office. 5 results (out of ten) actually about windows being expensive. There is ONE result about macs being expensive.
Type: why are macs so expensive? (without the quotes) in to bing and every result on the first page is actually relevant. Google does the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't need to prove, beyond any doubt, that you were the person who downloaded it. That's not the burden of proof in a civil case. Hell, that's not even the burden of proof in a criminal case.
They only need to prove that you were the one who likely downloaded it. Civil cases in the US are based on a "preponderance of evidence". That simply means that they need to be more than 50% right.
Their reasoning is "We have these records that this IP address downloaded this movie at this time. We have a statement from the internet provider who owns that IP that this account was the one who used it at the time of the download. That account belongs to Mr. Smith."
If they go to court with that level of evidence, and you simply show up and say "Prove it" or "It might have been someone who stole my wifi signal" then you are going to lose. You also need to submit evidence that makes their evidence tell a different story, and show that it is likely to have happened.
Now, if you showed up with logs from your router that showed that this MAC address downloaded the movie, records from the MAC address database that shows that the MAC was assigned to a particular manufacturer, plus an expert technical witness to explain what all that is, and a signed affidavit that says that you don't own, have never owned, and was not using a device by that manufacturer at that time, then you have just likely made a sufficient defense.
Note: IANAL.
from TFA:
For those PS3 users who are currently using the “Other OS” feature but choose to install the system software update, to avoid data loss they first need to back-up any data stored within the hard drive partition used by the “Other OS,” as they will not be able to access that data following the update.
It looks like if you have an OS installed and do the update, the OS gets zapped as a part of the update.
You can support certain aspects of their business and not others...Apple has accountants, and they know where their money is coming from.
If enough people decide that they don't want to buy iPhones because of the closed nature of the platform, they will likely have customer survey's and such that will tell them so. And if they aren't making money on the iPhone because of that, then it will switch.
However, they will continue to see their mac platform, one that is open for anyone to develop and distribute for, shining and growing well. Apple has some very smart management...they will put 2 + 2 together....Assuming that is what actually happens.
This is true. Actual law supersedes all contracts, as you can't have a contract that is contrary to written law.
The Freedom of Information act was in place when Apple willingly agreed to enter in to their developer agreement with NASA. Apple should have known that NASA, and all of their business dealings with them would be subject to FOIA requests.
It might not be what Apple wanted, and Apple could certainly remove NASA's apps from the app store, but NASA would have no liability towards Apple for violating the agreement. That particular clause of the agreement was contrary to law and, therefor, invalid. (disclaimer: IANAL)
You can do all of that on an iPhone.
Compose an email and exit out to the web browser, do your googling, then return to the mail app. You'll be right where you left off in composing your email.
If your browsing the web and want to text someone, switch to the messaging app, then when you're done, and reopen the web browser, you will be right back where you left it... sessions, cookies, even partially entered form fields and all.
If you're on a phone call, you can do anything on the phone... including run all other apps, listen to your iPod, browse the web, and look at your contacts. There is even a link on the main "call" screen that says "Contacts" while you are on a call to quickly jump to them.
About the only legit complaints I have seen (so far) about the lack of background tasks have been the inability to listen to 3rd party audio apps while doing other things... you can't stream pandora while browsing the web.
Even IM apps have a good way to "run in the background" with push-notifications.
okay, let's assume that credit card processing costs are nothing, using the same example I used:
Apple's revenue would be $1.79 per app, $1.253 (70%) would be paid to the developer. That leaves $0.537 left for apple.
At one billion paid apps equals: $537 million dollars.
$537 Million dollars over the 18 months they've been doing the apps store so far is $89.5 million dollars per quarter.
$89.5 million dollars per quarter, compared to the 3.4 BILLION in profit's that Apple had in the last quarter is still only 2.6% of all of Apple's profits.
Of course, none of that still takes in to account the cost of developing the apps store in the first place.
Apple has publicly stated on several occasions that it makes very little, if any, money off of the iTunes store and Apps store.
The large majority of apps you have to pay for cost $0.99. Credit card processing likely costs apple around $0.20 + 1.5%... so $0.20+$0.015 = $0.215 for processing the transaction. Then it forwards 70% ($0.70) to the developer. So, total direct transaction costs are $0.915... That leaves $0.075 for Apple to cover all of their overhead (servers, bandwidth, maintenance staff, app approval, and customer support on the apps store). I bet the rest of that gets eaten up real quick and there is very little profit left. Any "profit" is most likely folded back in to future development and improvements.
All of that doesn't take in to account for the cost to support the equally, if not larger, pool of apps that are free in the apps store and don't bring apple any revenue.
And, also, let's do an example:
apple just said yesterday that they had 3 billion apps store downloads. This includes free and paid apps. Let's say 1/3 of them were paid... However, I seriously doubt that high of a number of apps were paid. So 1 billion paid app downloads.
The large majority of apps sell for $0.99. The ones that don't usually sell for $1.99. There are a couple apps that are more expensive, but 8 of the top 10 paid apps store downloads are $0.99. The other 2 are $2.99 and $6.99. That's an average price of $1.79. I think it's fair guess to put that as the average price for a paid app.
At $1.79, Apple's direct cost on the purchase would be $1.253 to the developer, plus $0.227 in credit card processing. = $0.31 left after the costs of the transaction.
So, 1 billion paid apps at $0.31 revenue each, leave $310 million in revenue for the apps store. But then you have to subtract off the cost of the overhead (servers, technical staff, bandwidth, data centers, apps approval staff, customer support staff, developer support staff, the cost of paying the apps store developers and management staff) for the apps store. I bet that number is probably cut down to less than $100 million. That's $100 million. Over 18 months.... or $16.66 million per quarter.
Apple just announced that they had $3.4 billion in profits in the last quarter. $16.66 million is roughly 0.49% of all of Apple's profits in a quarter. It's officially a rounding error.
And in all of that, I didn't take in to account for any development costs in creating the apps store.
how about perhaps it was only $1000 to send the letter. But Universal refused to pay it. So they had to sue them for it. Now it's $1000 to send the letter and $399,000 worth of legal fees to pursue the original $1000. Knowing how the music industry loves their lawyers, I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up taking 10 month's worth of man hours to resolve this.
how about $1,000 for writing the letter and the work involved in that. Then when they asked for that money, Universal declined. So they had to file a lawsuit which racks up much more legal expenses. So, $1,000 for the original letter (about 4-5 hours of an attorney's time), and $399,000 for the cost of pursuing the original $1,000 in court.
A sponge is pretty small.
or "Beardo the Bearded"
They are going to have to go multi carrier before they do this. I think they've poached the majority of people they are going to by being tied to AT&T.
Once they're on Verizon, look out. Their sales numbers will likely double over night in the US market.
It's so that RIM can take a slice of the monthly fee pie. Just follow the $$. Not only do they charge you for the device, they charge you for the privilege of using it each month.
iPhone uses GSM technology to speak to the networks. AT&T is a GSM carrier
Verizon is a CDMA Carrier.
Putting the AT&T iPhone on Verizon would be like trying to plug a USB Hard Drive in to a Firewire port. It just won't work.
There exist continuously reshuffling card machines. They just pull cards out of it. When they are done with a hand, they put the used cards back in to the machine, and it will continuously shuffle the deck.
Card counters are thwarted completely and there is no time lost for reshuffling. Although, I don't think these machines are legal in vegas. I have seen them on cruise ships and other casinos.
many people overclock their GPUs too, so it would make sense that a tool for Overclocking stability tool would stress that as well.
I like this one better:
There was a girl.
She had 69 boobs.
She had too, too, too many boobs
so she went to 51st street to see Doctor "X" 8 times and she came out:
6922251 X 8 = 55378008
Shouldn't it be "At least the calculator can work when the lights are on?"
How about not even windows has built-in exchange support. In order to get Exchange support on Microsoft's $300 OS, you need to install a $100 email software, or $250 office suite.
I got exchange support on my mac for $29.
The DMCA Copyright safe harbor protection has something similar to this. The problem is that no (or very few) of the webhosts follow through on the 2nd part, in that most web hosts don't give an opportunity for their clients to sign an affidavit of legitimacy.
When I ran a very small web hosting company a few years ago, i'd occasionally receive a DMCA takedown notice (all of them via email, typically from an anonymous email service...hotmail, gmail, etc). My response to those was to send a reply asking the alleged content owner to provide a signed statement where they swore, under penalty of perjury, that the content they were asking to be removed was in fact their own copyright. I also required their full name, address, and real-world contact information. I gave them my mailing address and my fax number to provide the requested signed documents.
Not ONE of them ever followed through with the requested information. I received about 15-20 of them over the 4 years I did hosting. I only ever received one reply to my request for more information, and that was an email saying that they would get back to me.
I have a 360. Hooked to my TV. With an HDMI cable. It most certainly transmits the audio to the TV via the HDMI cable and my TV then passes the audio right along to my receiver.
Not likely, since Apple licensed the exchange protocols from Microsoft. That would likely violate the licensing agreement if Microsoft did that.
That portion of the law only applies to unsolicited commercial telephone calls. And only to people you don't have an existing business relationship with.
Basically:
If someone is calling about something other than trying to sell you something, no liability
If someone is calling and they are trying to sell you something, but they have an existing relationship with you, no liability
Stephen hawking can call people, so long as he's either not trying to sell something or he has an existing relationship with the person/organization he's calling.
It is illegal for any telemarketer or any organization to call you on a cell phone for commercial purposes, including charities, etc. unless you already have an existing current business relationship with that specific business ("marketing partners, etc." don't count). This is also true for 800 numbers, pagers and any other type of phone line where you might be charged to receive the call.
The penalties are pretty stiff too. You don't have to ask them to remove you, you do not have to register your number with any private or government list. If they call you, and you don't have an existing current business relationship with that company, you can sue them for $1500 in statutory damages in small claims court. Courts have found that you can name both the telemarketing firm and the business that the firm may be calling on behalf of in the suit.
This fine gets extended to companies where you might have an ended business relationship with... i.e. you call your cable company and cancel your account, you've just ended the relationship. They can call you to finish business (i.e. past due collections, etc.) But if they call you to try and give you a special offer or to sell you anything, you can sue em.
From the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991: All unsolicited commercial telephone calls "No Person May" "Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice," "To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;"
type it in to bing without the quotes: why is windows so expensive?
the result "Why are Macs so expensive?" is the first result. There are 5 (out of 10) results on the first page related to Macs being so expensive. The windows results don't start until the 2nd page. There are only 2 on there. And there are another 3 on the second page that are still related to Macs being expensive.
Go to google and type the same thing: why is windows so expensive? (without the quotes) and the first result is about windows and office. 5 results (out of ten) actually about windows being expensive. There is ONE result about macs being expensive.
Type: why are macs so expensive? (without the quotes) in to bing and every result on the first page is actually relevant. Google does the same thing.