Even if Verizon deletes the logs every day, the subpoena (request) can force them to retain the logs as evidence....but that (apparently) isn't what happened here.
It's almost certainly the case that the RIAA had someone use Kazaa or the like, find a user, see what they had, get their IP address, and then subpoena their identity. And thus it's likely this person is sharing the files, not just downloading. The RIAA would then have to present additional information -- its record of the Kazaa session, for example -- to actually take legal action against this person.
A great concern here is the "turbo-charged" nature of these subpoenas; the RIAA doesn't need to go to court to subpoena the user associated with a given IP. So what protection does the user have against the RIAA getting the address wrong and falsely accusing someone? Very little.
Mentions that John Doe was accused of sharing over 600 files. I guess that would make a little more sense for them to go after him.
Legally, as well as logically.
The onus is on the distributor to make sure they are legally allowed to provide it, not on the receiver. If I go into Best Buy and buy a CD, I should not be liable if it turns out the maker of that CD was not entitled to make and sell CDs for it.
Regardless of the variable, whether it's a number, string, boolean, etc., in many languages, there's a way to determine if the variable is undefined.
And at times this is useful, and at other times it gets in the way. You no longer can rely on a variable being true or false, you have to worry about it being undefined too.
For instance, if a function grabs and returns a given number of infinite range from a file
Can't be done. Computers are finite machines. That number has to be stored somewhere.
In this case, it's impossible to return "-1" to mean "value not found"...which means you have no way of setting your variable to undefined either; you have to expand the type with an additional field.
In the above case, I find that it's much more logical to test if (var == null)
But again, you have to test everywhere else.
Think of all the instances in C where testing for null is helpful....and think of all the places where people fail to do so, and the program crashes.
In C++, there are reference variables. References serve much the same purpose as pointers, but a reference can never be NULL in valid code. So you never have to test it for NULL. In the many cases where there's no reason for an argument to be NULL, this saves you from the added complexity of having to check for it.
What's wrong with that is that when you need a type with more than boolean values, you should use a non-boolean type. Got an optional boolean in a file? Define and use an OptionalBoolean type to record it with the three relevant values (true, false, not defined). Save booleans for values which are, in fact, boolean.
Re:What's in a name: JamCracker
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I specifically remember seeing the name "JamCracker" and thinking, good grief, the picture that paints in my head is just not to be shared!
Wil Wheaton's website is hosted by logjamming.com. Apparently it's actually not about gay lumberjack porn...
How about this story about Congress realizing that patent problems may take away their blackberrys? Who knows, maybe they'll wake up a bit to all that we've been kvetching about for some long...
Of course, when was the last time that Disney released any of its classic movies to theatres?
They don't, but they do put them on tape or DVD, then stop making them for a while. Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast tapes were getting valuable for a while because the movies were "back in the vault," and apparently B&B is going back in again. (No doubt to be brought out for DRM'ed, HD DVDs when they come out.)
What boggles the mind is how little this really benefits the corporations. With rare exceptions (Snow White, Happy Birthday, and Gershwin), what percentage of content revenues come from old material? For record companies, a good year comes from a big hit created that year, not the old stuff.
In fact, this is one of the most amicable cease and desist letters I've seen....except that they have no legal justification beyond the mark for their claims.
This fellow is using PCI descriptively, not branding: " Pursuant to 33(b)(4) of the Lanham Act, a defense to a claim of trademark infringement exists where:
(4) the use of the name, term, or device charged to be an infringement is a use, otherwise than as a mark . . . of a term or device which is descriptive of and used fairly and in good faith only to describe the goods or services of such party, or their geographic origin. . .."
But more importantly, although I can't find a reference, you can't violate a trademark if you are not a commercial concern. I can call that box of facial tissues Kleenexes all day long and there's nothing legally that can be done about it.
Yes, but is Apple helping the effort? Has there been a recent influx of new developers? Has there een a recent focus on code separation that might help make an Aqua version easier to write?
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
That would be Kenwood Tech and their TrueX drives. Seems a nice idea since they probably don't sound like an airplane taking off like other high-speed CDs do, but they had a high failure rate on their first ones that I don't think they ever lived down. It's too bad they didn't license the tech rather than trying to build it themselves.
You can find their TrueX pages on google, but their home page announces that they've stopped making the drives.
but do I really want/need the ability to access gigabytes of it no matter where I travel?
Yes. Why do you think the execs all want notebook PCs with big hard drives?
Now why you would bother with a teeny phone display, I don't know. Seems like you would generally want your porn in a situation where you're in private and can use a larger display.
You could have died happy a long time ago. 1600x1200 monitor resolution is a higher resolution than 720p or 1080i HDTV resolution.
Yes, but a computer screen is generally smaller than an HDTV system. Personally, I'm still hoping for 60 inch, 1920x1080 res plasma displays.
Question for anyone who might know; is the response rate of plasma fast enough that it would conceivable that a plasma display could support 3-D shutter glasses? And do any plasma displays currently support 120Hz refresh or higher?
Namely, the fact that the US acts as a gigantic research sink (read 'brain drain') for the rest of the world....and as a result, American scientists have to compete against the best and brightest of the rest of the world. No wonder Americans don't want to do science. It's too bad there's no H1-B program for managers and lawyers...
More likely, the judge will just tell Lexmark that the law does not apply and acquit. This case won't affect the DMCA, I'm afraid.
It won't help get rid of the DMCA, but it may trim its scope. If a judge dismisses the case, ruling that the law does not apply in that situation, that will serve as a legal precedent to discourage further suits along these lines.
Re:Obnoxious
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Real has been moving toward this sort of thing for a long time. I don't know why anone sticks with them: their player is crap, they're just an obnoxious company, and they make it _really_ hard to download the free player.
But what about their open source initiative? Can one make a more tolerable player with that? (I tried sourceforge, but they're too busy for a search at the moment.)
Are you talking about running XP with LOOOOOOONA rubbish UI, because I am talking about running it with "classic" as any sane man does.
It's the menus you need in classic mode, I see little functional difference except the hiding system tray otherwise. But even in classic mode on XP, the clickable region extends to the bottom of the screen.
Bollocks- the quick launch icons, start button and taskbar buttons DO NOT extend the click region to the bottom of the screen.
Given that I'm running Windows XP right now and can duplicate clicking the very bottom to activate things, I'd bet that you're thinking of older Windows versions. Heck, in XP the start button itself extends to the bottom of the screen.
the Windows taskbar is flawed in that the bottom pixel of the screen doesn't represent the task a pixel above it
Not in XP it isn't. If you have a one row task bar, the task bar buttons don't extend all the way down, but the click region does. The quick launch icons also extend the click region; only the tray and clock don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if Verizon deletes the logs every day, the subpoena (request) can force them to retain the logs as evidence. ...but that (apparently) isn't what happened here.
It's almost certainly the case that the RIAA had someone use Kazaa or the like, find a user, see what they had, get their IP address, and then subpoena their identity. And thus it's likely this person is sharing the files, not just downloading. The RIAA would then have to present additional information -- its record of the Kazaa session, for example -- to actually take legal action against this person.
A great concern here is the "turbo-charged" nature of these subpoenas; the RIAA doesn't need to go to court to subpoena the user associated with a given IP. So what protection does the user have against the RIAA getting the address wrong and falsely accusing someone? Very little.
Mentions that John Doe was accused of sharing over 600 files. I guess that would make a little more sense for them to go after him.
Legally, as well as logically.
The onus is on the distributor to make sure they are legally allowed to provide it, not on the receiver. If I go into Best Buy and buy a CD, I should not be liable if it turns out the maker of that CD was not entitled to make and sell CDs for it.
Willful ignorance is not a defense to the law.
You are not generally required by law to keep user logs. Poor recordkeeping is not illegal.
Regardless of the variable, whether it's a number, string, boolean, etc., in many languages, there's a way to determine if the variable is undefined.
...which means you have no way of setting your variable to undefined either; you have to expand the type with an additional field.
...and think of all the places where people fail to do so, and the program crashes.
And at times this is useful, and at other times it gets in the way. You no longer can rely on a variable being true or false, you have to worry about it being undefined too.
For instance, if a function grabs and returns a given number of infinite range from a file
Can't be done. Computers are finite machines. That number has to be stored somewhere.
In this case, it's impossible to return "-1" to mean "value not found"
In the above case, I find that it's much more logical to test if (var == null)
But again, you have to test everywhere else.
Think of all the instances in C where testing for null is helpful.
In C++, there are reference variables. References serve much the same purpose as pointers, but a reference can never be NULL in valid code. So you never have to test it for NULL. In the many cases where there's no reason for an argument to be NULL, this saves you from the added complexity of having to check for it.
What's wrong with [multiple value booleans]?
What's wrong with that is that when you need a type with more than boolean values, you should use a non-boolean type. Got an optional boolean in a file? Define and use an OptionalBoolean type to record it with the three relevant values (true, false, not defined). Save booleans for values which are, in fact, boolean.
I specifically remember seeing the name "JamCracker" and thinking, good grief, the picture that paints in my head is just not to be shared!
Wil Wheaton's website is hosted by logjamming.com. Apparently it's actually not about gay lumberjack porn...
The only way to actually retry a person for the exact same crime, is if for example:
the person on trial paid someone to lie during the trial.
Even in that case the criminal could not be retried on the original offense. The perjury charge would be for a separate offense.
How about this story about Congress realizing that patent problems may take away their blackberrys? Who knows, maybe they'll wake up a bit to all that we've been kvetching about for some long...
It's true that scientests DO need to be more associated with sex than they have been of late.
Perhaps, but given that boffing is a slang term for having sex, removing that close association seems counterproductive.
Of course, when was the last time that Disney released any of its classic movies to theatres?
They don't, but they do put them on tape or DVD, then stop making them for a while. Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast tapes were getting valuable for a while because the movies were "back in the vault," and apparently B&B is going back in again. (No doubt to be brought out for DRM'ed, HD DVDs when they come out.)
What boggles the mind is how little this really benefits the corporations. With rare exceptions (Snow White, Happy Birthday, and Gershwin), what percentage of content revenues come from old material? For record companies, a good year comes from a big hit created that year, not the old stuff.
In fact, this is one of the most amicable cease and desist letters I've seen. ...except that they have no legal justification beyond the mark for their claims.
."
This fellow is using PCI descriptively, not branding:
" Pursuant to 33(b)(4) of the Lanham Act, a defense to a claim of trademark infringement exists where:
(4) the use of the name, term, or device charged to be an infringement is a use, otherwise than as a mark . . . of a term or device which is descriptive of and used fairly and in good faith only to describe the goods or services of such party, or their geographic origin. . .
But more importantly, although I can't find a reference, you can't violate a trademark if you are not a commercial concern. I can call that box of facial tissues Kleenexes all day long and there's nothing legally that can be done about it.
yup [openoffice.org]
Yes, but is Apple helping the effort? Has there been a recent influx of new developers? Has there een a recent focus on code separation that might help make an Aqua version easier to write?
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
That would be Kenwood Tech and their TrueX drives. Seems a nice idea since they probably don't sound like an airplane taking off like other high-speed CDs do, but they had a high failure rate on their first ones that I don't think they ever lived down. It's too bad they didn't license the tech rather than trying to build it themselves.
You can find their TrueX pages on google, but their home page announces that they've stopped making the drives.
This way, you have a bullet proof vest on while you're running from the store you just stole 3 shirts from ....
Thanks for the advice, Winona.
but do I really want/need the ability to access gigabytes of it no matter where I travel?
Yes. Why do you think the execs all want notebook PCs with big hard drives?
Now why you would bother with a teeny phone display, I don't know. Seems like you would generally want your porn in a situation where you're in private and can use a larger display.
You could have died happy a long time ago. 1600x1200 monitor resolution is a higher resolution than 720p or 1080i HDTV resolution.
Yes, but a computer screen is generally smaller than an HDTV system. Personally, I'm still hoping for 60 inch, 1920x1080 res plasma displays.
Question for anyone who might know; is the response rate of plasma fast enough that it would conceivable that a plasma display could support 3-D shutter glasses? And do any plasma displays currently support 120Hz refresh or higher?
Namely, the fact that the US acts as a gigantic research sink (read 'brain drain') for the rest of the world. ...and as a result, American scientists have to compete against the best and brightest of the rest of the world. No wonder Americans don't want to do science. It's too bad there's no H1-B program for managers and lawyers...
More likely, the judge will just tell Lexmark that the law does not apply and acquit. This case won't affect the DMCA, I'm afraid.
It won't help get rid of the DMCA, but it may trim its scope. If a judge dismisses the case, ruling that the law does not apply in that situation, that will serve as a legal precedent to discourage further suits along these lines.
Real has been moving toward this sort of thing for a long time. I don't know why anone sticks with them: their player is crap, they're just an obnoxious company, and they make it _really_ hard to download the free player.
But what about their open source initiative? Can one make a more tolerable player with that? (I tried sourceforge, but they're too busy for a search at the moment.)
And what happens when one of them loses - will "disposing" of the duplicate be murder?
If one pushes the other off a great height, she would be charged with making an obscene clone fall...
Are you talking about running XP with LOOOOOOONA rubbish UI, because I am talking about running it with "classic" as any sane man does.
It's the menus you need in classic mode, I see little functional difference except the hiding system tray otherwise. But even in classic mode on XP, the clickable region extends to the bottom of the screen.
Bollocks- the quick launch icons, start button and taskbar buttons DO NOT extend the click region to the bottom of the screen.
Given that I'm running Windows XP right now and can duplicate clicking the very bottom to activate things, I'd bet that you're thinking of older Windows versions. Heck, in XP the start button itself extends to the bottom of the screen.
the Windows taskbar is flawed in that the bottom pixel of the screen doesn't represent the task a pixel above it
Not in XP it isn't. If you have a one row task bar, the task bar buttons don't extend all the way down, but the click region does. The quick launch icons also extend the click region; only the tray and clock don't.
Sorry, one good Mac rant has been removed...
Young padawan, one day you will bring balance to the force.
Has there ever been any indication anywhere in Star Wars of why bringing balance to the force would be a good thing?