A judge already committed him for testing once.
He braggs he's the only lawyer in FL to be certified as sane. Just goes to prove you can be sane and a nut job at the same time - sort of like having tea & no tea at the same time:)
When someone gets Windows, he installs it, starts it up and starts clicking around.
Um, check the sales records - box installs of Windows are less than 5% of Windows sales. When someone gets Windows, they open up the box Dell sent them & put the new computer on the desk.
want to 'put a little work into it'. Of course it doesn't matter if it's Windows or Linux, they want that work to be yours.
My computer's acting very funny & slow, can you take a look at it?
And just how many times have we all heard that?
Computers & cars both take maintenance time. I know a woman who goes through cars every 18 months, I have yet to see her take one of them in for an oil change. In the time I've known her, she'd gone through 3 & is about due for the 4th - and she bitches like hell when they die, but she's of the firm opinion that "the car tells me when it needs oil and radiator fluid". The desire to 'not know' is very strong, and the desire to 'not know about more work' is even stronger.
My first question has to be - how many different type of systems have you tried to install boxed copies of XP/NT/98/95 on?
I can tell you from repeated experiance on all of them - they crash too. Upgrades? Don't even really think about it as an option - hook up a USB drive & copy your files off. It might take a bit longer to reinstall all the software, but the thousand little glitches that pop up in a Windows upgrade will make it worthwile in the long run.
Driver compatiblity? Talk to people running 64 bit Vista about that - I'm sure they have some wonderful things to say. I personally know 2 people who bought new systems specifically with the intent of upgrading to Vista - neither one of them can use the copy they have because the video drivers won't work. For XP, I know that the RTL8139 Ethernet card driver changed from XP -> XP sp1 - for a lot of people that caused a lot of grief because it reset the minimum lease time to below what was used by several ISP's as the initial offering time on DHCP leases.
Bluntly, OS installs are not for the faint of heart no matter what the OS is. Once you know the quirks of a specific install, great - but until then - click OK & pray. In general, I've had better luck with Linux installs on generic hardware & with Windows on Compaq & Dell systems.
The fact that he's claiming the driver is just as good as specs demonstrates that he has never attempted to do that himself.
Have you ever done design from a spec you weren't involved in writing?! Half the specs I have seen come across my various desks - in 3 different industries in 20 years - have been almost useless. A good chunk of them refer to internal documents you can't get your hands on - because they're sensative. At least once, the document didn't even exist anymore - but it had been general practice in the place for years & everyone still kept refering to it.
Hell, right now I'm working on an integration project where the XML tag names in the spec don't match the tag names in the test environment, which are also different than the ones in the live environment. Some well writen code that's internally documented would be a blessing here. Especially since I would know that it actually works as opposed to trying to determine if it's the spec or my code that's broken.
The worst specs are those that come in cut & pasted from other specs - I once tested some tank parts - only to ruin my test oven when half of them melted at the quoted test temperature. Given all the test specs & the design specs I've seen over the years, unless it's a blueprint or an actual defined test protocol, it's almost worthless at best & self contradictory at worst.
Pay for Play is a violation of the trade rules that govern radio - several RIAA members just got fined $10M+ for this. Going to be a tough sell to get radio stations to pay them to play their specific music when they already just lost a chunk of their revenue.
Of course as someone else aready pointed out, the group that gathers the fees for this is authorized to claim for everyone - reguardless of whether they want the fees to be collected or not. So The Great Indies can authorize Small Time Radio to play their songs without a royalty, but the law currently says they have to pay the songwriter anyway.
You are correct in stating that it doesn't establish causality, however it does significantly challenge the RIAA argument that increased p2p downloads causes them lost sales. The fact that every spike in p2p activity in the study period was followed by a spike in CD sales offers stronger ancedotal evidence that p2p activity supports sales rather than the RIAA line of 'every p2p download is a lost sale'.
I will pose a simple question.... since when? The concept of an idea as legal property began with the 'Statute of Anne' in 1709. As of the writing of the US constitution it was still not settled that this was a good thing. So, unless you would like to call Benjamin Franklin a 'hippie communist' I think you might want to look at the actual history of the system.
Given your attitude, I will assume you didn't read any of the things I referenced... so let me make it easier - courtesy of the Baen ELibrary - Thomas Babington Macaulay pointed out in 1841 that the granting of a monopoly on an idea harms society as a whole - this is not (or at least was not from the inception of copyright through the late 20th century a question, it was a given. The purpose of copyright is to balance that damage against the bennefit of freeing authors from a patronage system by providing them financial control over their works. (Actually it was to protect the publishers, but they got a bit screwed in the process with the authors initially coming out ahead until the publishers could buy the copyrights from them) The vast irony is that for music, we now have both the copyright system and the patronage system - both known to damage/restrict the public domain.
I really suggest you read the Macaulay speachs since they points out quite clearly the fact that marking the expiration of term of copyright from the death of the author cheats some of the greatest works of protection while simultaniously granting vast extensions on the - normally - much inferior works of the authors early career. Further they delv into the simple fact that people do not write or create art for the sake of people who won't be born until after their childred are dead. The stated purpose of copyright is to create an incentive for people to write by giving them control over their works. Beyond the lifespan of the author, there is little to no incentive. As Macaulay puts it 'But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson's [author of the first English Dictionary & dead 51 years at the time of the speach] none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.'
Perhaps the most telling point is that 160 years ago Macaulay pointed out exactly what will happen when people cease to feel that copyright balances against the damage done to society:
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, y
The 'files shared = sales lost' formula has never been proven by the RIAA, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, or anyone else.
I stopped reading there. While everyone can agree that it's wrong for the RIAA to prosecute people who do not have the means to commit copyright infringement, let's not forget that it's still against the law when it does happen. Slashdot is, in general, a technical and smart crowd, let's not pull the wool over our own eyes. It just makes us look foolish.
It's a perfectly valid statement to be making, the RIAA is pushing through all of the laws based on beeelionnns of $ stolen, stolen I tell you. They base the damages they are seeking on it. And yet, every peer reviewed study says it increases sales for the independent musicians - the members of the RIAA won't share detailed sales information so it's not possible to determine specifics. However, IIRC - one study found that sales jumped after every college break during which file sharing jumped.
Also check out Eric Flint's comments @ Baen books free library from back in 2002 reguarding his sales figures when he releases a book on the free elibrary. From the same collection of essays, I suggest you read the one reguarding copyright as presented in 1841 in England - pay special attention to the last paragraphs, the man is just frighteningly accurate.
Now, yes, it's illegal - not sure if it should be as the current scope of copyright law does not appear to strike a balance between the rights of society & the rights of the content producers. In that sense it needs some serious revamping. The DMCA is just bad - any law that garantees your right to fair use, but denies you access to the tools to exercise that right is bad.
So perhaps you should go back & read the whole artical & educate yourself about the whole argument not just 'stealing is wrong' - in a very real & moral sense, copyright steals from society, which is why Benjamin Franklin objected to it. The laws reguarding copyright are supposed to balance the need to compensate creative people with the rights of society at large to make use of what has been created. They do not currently balance anything.
The report in question is the final report by the Army Corps of Engineers - it is supposed to be the report that FEMA, the states, and the Federal Govt all base their spending & planning on. The NO report was set asside in favor of one of the reports it relied on. This is however fairly moot, even if the report had been taken seriously, there was no time between the issuing of the report & the hurricane to reinforce the levies.
Even if that were not the case, the incorperation of FEMA into Homeland Security was a cluster fuck of the highest order. More than any other single issue, the total collapse of the coordination/communication between FEMA, HS, National Guard, and the Red Cross turned what was a huge natural disaster into an even bigger societal one. We had water sitting on pallets for weeks, while people were drinking contaminated water because the people who knew where the water was needed didn't know where the water was.
There are always & will always be mistakes, but in his mad dash to make sure we're all safe, the Shrub has pretty much fucked up every internal system we had to deal with these problems. That's not a mistake, that's incompetence.
This is debateable. An ID photo has very specific requirements as to the size, subject, etc. In some states even the background is also defined. That really leaves little room for artistic expression in the photo. Following the requirements of the state to produce a fake ID photo would technically be creating an unauthorized derivative of an actual ID photo - an act that voids the fake ID's copyright. So, I don't see a lot of hope here for Ms. Lawyer-Wanabe. The photo wasn't generated via artistic methods - rather by technical ones. Even if she can clear that hurdle, there is the unautorized derivative hurdle in front of her.
I also don't believe you can copyright your signature - that's a trademark issue - your name is a public fact and therefore un-copyrightable. The specific stylization of your signature is a trademark - which must be registered. People have tried to do some funny things with copyrighting their names before, and the court has always slapped them down.
Actually this administration scrapped the FEMA structure & bundled it into homeland security without creating clear channels of communication - at the same time blocking a lot of the old channels.
Next they had a report that New Orleans was in danger from a cat 3 or better hurricane - a report that was frighteningly accurate - that they discarded because they felt the damage estimates were much too high. This is just one of many examples for this administration where they cherry pick the information to act on in order to further their private/political agendas instead of actually bothering to understand the situation and take action that might actually have a real & lasting benefit.
I've said it before - this Iraq war is just the Shrubs way of showing daddy his balls are bigger.
Once upon a time, it was considered acceptable that some information was unavailable to the public. For instance, the layout of nuclear facilities, the locations and materiel of defensive bases, or the site layouts and security measures of critical but vulnerable civilian infrastructure (dams, nuclear plants, hazardous waste facilities, fuel refineries, chemical plants, etc). It used to be that taking high-resolution pictures of such installations, systematically mapping the civilian and military infrastructure, and giving them out to foreign governments was considered treason. This was true for years in the USA, Canada, and wherever else in addition to "fucking North Korea." It seems reasonable that this should continue to be true.
Once upon a time the taking of photographs of tresle bridges & buildings with interesting archetecture was not only approved of, it was encouraged. Now, the police come to talk to you & demand your film & then arrest you if you don't give it to them. Talk to members of the photography clubs in your area, I am willing to bet that at least one of them has either been arrested or had their film confiscated for taking landscape/archetecture photos. In MA/CT it's a known & growing problem.
The US ows CA over $1B for the softwoods tarrifs - that's been settled for over 5 years now.
Antigua has won round 1 & 2 against the US for Online gambling.
The US is pursuing WTO sanctions against China.
Business as usual, if it's in our favor use it; if not, ignore it. I would love for the WTO to take the new complaints the US filed & hand them back saying "You can't start any new actions until you resolve the actions against you."
As for Copyright, it's a civil contract between society & authors - every country has the right to write that contract as best suits them & their needs. The problem is that the contracts are no longer writen to balance the needs of the society against the authors, it's viewed solely as an entitlement. I say go back to requiring registration & then requiring an increasing fee to maintain the registration at 10 year intervals. Hey, if a patent costs $5-10K over the course of it's 20 year life, why shouldn't a copyright cost $30-60K to cover it's 120 year lifespan?
They actually sued a guy in CA who owns a regional ISP - he was not amused & he's said he's going to go the distance to smack them down. But yes, when a congresman gets on TV & publicly acknowledges that his children did file sharing, then I would think that they aught to be pursuing that too.
In a civil suit it's 'a preponderance of evidence' (51%) not 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Now, the issue is still, if there is a likelyhood that the account is wrong, and there are multiple people in the house, how do you ever get to 51% that a specific individual is responsible for anything?
So the overwhelming question for me, is how they can get it so wrong?
I know that the inventory logs that tie the modems to the accounts was never all that accurate for RCN. Techs would pull a modem from one account & swap it for one on another - and not bother to tell us. That & converting through 3 different billing systems in the 3 years I was there - lots of data that really wasn't up to snuff for pursuing a lawsuit. It wouldn't surprise me if this is another case of that - the log said MAC: AA:AA:AA:AA:AA was assigned that IP address & that MAC belongs to Modem S#12345abcde which is assigned to Bob's account. Even though Bob turned his modem in 6 months ago & it's been given to someone else, the records show it's his modem & that's what gets passed to the RIAA. ISP's don't get anything out of this extra work to begin with, why would they do more on top of pulling data from the logs?
Re:How long must a number be to be copyrightable?
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 1
In the real world, since there is only 1 way to make the hexidecimal representation, it's not copyrightable. It is afterall, just a number. So, I'm not sure how exactly they are claiming to have 'writen' a numerical sequence that has arguably existed since the dawn of time itself.
Perhaps NYCL could provide some enlightenment for us, but it was my understanding that purely factual items can't be copyrighted. Thus you can't copyright "Water - H20;Hydrochloric Acid HCl;". Likewise if there is only 1 way to write something, it can't be under copyright - #define brokenerr = 4;
Thus given the fact that the key to the HDDVD encoding is as presented, and it's a number with only 1 way in each base to write it, it shouldn't be elligable for copyright protection.
Root security privileges are just fine for a multi-user box. But they don't make sense on most home desktops.
Oh just so wrong. On a home desktop it is even more important to have a barrier between the user & the administrative tasks than on a business one. On the home desktop everyone in the family get's to play with it - from Wiz kid Bill to baby sister, mom & pop. Hopefully 1 of them know's what they are doing, but chances are at least 2 of the 4 have no clue. Protecting the administrative functions from them is the only thing that keeps Bill from deleting the OS to make more room for his MP3s.
Check here they have a blurb that PC sales look to be down 12% year/year.
Also, part of the profit kick was that MS could finally register the Upgrade fees from all the big corperations, that paid 3 years ago for a garanteed upgrade, as earned income.
Pardon my french, but when the fuck did Google get to set how sites are made?
They never said how to make your site. Nor did they ever claim that that was the only way to make a site. The rules they laid down are simply "These are the rules we are going to be checking against for your site, if you score high, you get a good ranking, score low, get a bad one." They're not dictating how to make your site, just telling you the rules of the GoogleGame up front.
Since Google is the one who's doing the work of indexing you for free, they get to make the rules on how to rank things. Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask, they all have their own rules for what makes a notable site. As a note, all of them score you better the closer you get to W3 compliance & when you have meta tags that actually relate to the the information on the specific page as opposed to generic metas for the whole site.
The fact is that if you follow the rules for any of the major search engines, you will score high on all of them. You might not peak in Google if you optimize for Yahoo, but you're still going to rank high because you've built a solid, readable, content heavy page that is clearly labeled for bots to index.
I think it basically means that the RIAA might just have to call in a different biased expert witness.
Better, at this date, they can't call in a new one. You only get 1 shot at the litigation & you aren't supposed to change tack in the middle of the case. They are basing all of their testimony on MediaSentry's & the ISP's data, but they don't have any information on how that data is acquired, what the reliability of the data is, or what variables make it more or less likely to be accurate. Because the data doesn't pass review, they can get all the experts they want to make an opinion on it - not one of them will be able to use it in court.
I'm surprised there wasn't a more structured procedure for the examination of the disk, I know if I was billing the RIAA for my time I'd be sure to send them long documented lists of things checked for, even if the check turned out negative, and bill them for each printout of relevant settings.
The problem was not so much as his testemony about the HD & his findings, as he was also supposed to testify about the process of identifying the IP address & ownership of the account using the IP address. Because he had no information about how the IP address was obtained, he can't testify to it's accuraccy - thus the questions reguarding failure rate etc. Because he doesn't know how the IP information was stored by the ISP, he can't testify to the accuracy of linking the customer's computer to the IP address at the specific time in question.
IIRC, he could theoretically testify reguarding the contents of the HD, but there again, I do not believe he used any approved forensic methods to make any determinations reguarding the contents. If not, again, he fails the standard of generally accepted methodology.
In short, he's supposed to be in for 3 things - explaining how the RIAA got the IP address, how the address was tied to the PC, and finally how the HD showed evidence of the files. According to the rules governing evidence & experts, he can't testify for the first 2, & the third one is at best debatable - with it actually giving more weight to the defense than to the RIAA. In that situation, he shouldn't be there at all because he's worthless for 2/3 of the job & a loose cannon on the last one.
He didn't give you a correct term to use, because there is no real correlation between them when you go from criminal to civil suits.
A prosecutor is a state employee who is persuing resolution of a criminal complaint. In a civil case, the rough equivalent is the plaintiff - the person complaining.
The reason he stated that there is no concept of reasonable doubt is because that again is criminal law. In civil suits, only a preponderance of evidence is required. That is simply that it is more likely than not that the plaintiff is correct.
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Irony would be Jack being taken hostage by some nutjob & being saved by some overeager young cop who first learned to shoot on GTA :)
A judge already committed him for testing once. :)
He braggs he's the only lawyer in FL to be certified as sane. Just goes to prove you can be sane and a nut job at the same time - sort of like having tea & no tea at the same time
And just how many times have we all heard that?
Computers & cars both take maintenance time. I know a woman who goes through cars every 18 months, I have yet to see her take one of them in for an oil change. In the time I've known her, she'd gone through 3 & is about due for the 4th - and she bitches like hell when they die, but she's of the firm opinion that "the car tells me when it needs oil and radiator fluid". The desire to 'not know' is very strong, and the desire to 'not know about more work' is even stronger.
My first question has to be - how many different type of systems have you tried to install boxed copies of XP/NT/98/95 on?
I can tell you from repeated experiance on all of them - they crash too. Upgrades? Don't even really think about it as an option - hook up a USB drive & copy your files off. It might take a bit longer to reinstall all the software, but the thousand little glitches that pop up in a Windows upgrade will make it worthwile in the long run.
Driver compatiblity? Talk to people running 64 bit Vista about that - I'm sure they have some wonderful things to say. I personally know 2 people who bought new systems specifically with the intent of upgrading to Vista - neither one of them can use the copy they have because the video drivers won't work. For XP, I know that the RTL8139 Ethernet card driver changed from XP -> XP sp1 - for a lot of people that caused a lot of grief because it reset the minimum lease time to below what was used by several ISP's as the initial offering time on DHCP leases.
Bluntly, OS installs are not for the faint of heart no matter what the OS is. Once you know the quirks of a specific install, great - but until then - click OK & pray. In general, I've had better luck with Linux installs on generic hardware & with Windows on Compaq & Dell systems.
Have you ever done design from a spec you weren't involved in writing?! Half the specs I have seen come across my various desks - in 3 different industries in 20 years - have been almost useless. A good chunk of them refer to internal documents you can't get your hands on - because they're sensative. At least once, the document didn't even exist anymore - but it had been general practice in the place for years & everyone still kept refering to it.
Hell, right now I'm working on an integration project where the XML tag names in the spec don't match the tag names in the test environment, which are also different than the ones in the live environment. Some well writen code that's internally documented would be a blessing here. Especially since I would know that it actually works as opposed to trying to determine if it's the spec or my code that's broken.
The worst specs are those that come in cut & pasted from other specs - I once tested some tank parts - only to ruin my test oven when half of them melted at the quoted test temperature. Given all the test specs & the design specs I've seen over the years, unless it's a blueprint or an actual defined test protocol, it's almost worthless at best & self contradictory at worst.
Pay for Play is a violation of the trade rules that govern radio - several RIAA members just got fined $10M+ for this. Going to be a tough sell to get radio stations to pay them to play their specific music when they already just lost a chunk of their revenue.
Of course as someone else aready pointed out, the group that gathers the fees for this is authorized to claim for everyone - reguardless of whether they want the fees to be collected or not. So The Great Indies can authorize Small Time Radio to play their songs without a royalty, but the law currently says they have to pay the songwriter anyway.
You are correct in stating that it doesn't establish causality, however it does significantly challenge the RIAA argument that increased p2p downloads causes them lost sales. The fact that every spike in p2p activity in the study period was followed by a spike in CD sales offers stronger ancedotal evidence that p2p activity supports sales rather than the RIAA line of 'every p2p download is a lost sale'.
I will pose a simple question .... since when? The concept of an idea as legal property began with the 'Statute of Anne' in 1709. As of the writing of the US constitution it was still not settled that this was a good thing. So, unless you would like to call Benjamin Franklin a 'hippie communist' I think you might want to look at the actual history of the system.
Given your attitude, I will assume you didn't read any of the things I referenced ... so let me make it easier - courtesy of the Baen ELibrary - Thomas Babington Macaulay pointed out in 1841 that the granting of a monopoly on an idea harms society as a whole - this is not (or at least was not from the inception of copyright through the late 20th century a question, it was a given. The purpose of copyright is to balance that damage against the bennefit of freeing authors from a patronage system by providing them financial control over their works. (Actually it was to protect the publishers, but they got a bit screwed in the process with the authors initially coming out ahead until the publishers could buy the copyrights from them) The vast irony is that for music, we now have both the copyright system and the patronage system - both known to damage/restrict the public domain.
I really suggest you read the Macaulay speachs since they points out quite clearly the fact that marking the expiration of term of copyright from the death of the author cheats some of the greatest works of protection while simultaniously granting vast extensions on the - normally - much inferior works of the authors early career. Further they delv into the simple fact that people do not write or create art for the sake of people who won't be born until after their childred are dead. The stated purpose of copyright is to create an incentive for people to write by giving them control over their works. Beyond the lifespan of the author, there is little to no incentive. As Macaulay puts it 'But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson's [author of the first English Dictionary & dead 51 years at the time of the speach] none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.'
Perhaps the most telling point is that 160 years ago Macaulay pointed out exactly what will happen when people cease to feel that copyright balances against the damage done to society:
It's a perfectly valid statement to be making, the RIAA is pushing through all of the laws based on beeelionnns of $ stolen, stolen I tell you. They base the damages they are seeking on it. And yet, every peer reviewed study says it increases sales for the independent musicians - the members of the RIAA won't share detailed sales information so it's not possible to determine specifics. However, IIRC - one study found that sales jumped after every college break during which file sharing jumped.
Also check out Eric Flint's comments @ Baen books free library from back in 2002 reguarding his sales figures when he releases a book on the free elibrary. From the same collection of essays, I suggest you read the one reguarding copyright as presented in 1841 in England - pay special attention to the last paragraphs, the man is just frighteningly accurate.
Now, yes, it's illegal - not sure if it should be as the current scope of copyright law does not appear to strike a balance between the rights of society & the rights of the content producers. In that sense it needs some serious revamping. The DMCA is just bad - any law that garantees your right to fair use, but denies you access to the tools to exercise that right is bad.
So perhaps you should go back & read the whole artical & educate yourself about the whole argument not just 'stealing is wrong' - in a very real & moral sense, copyright steals from society, which is why Benjamin Franklin objected to it. The laws reguarding copyright are supposed to balance the need to compensate creative people with the rights of society at large to make use of what has been created. They do not currently balance anything.
The report in question is the final report by the Army Corps of Engineers - it is supposed to be the report that FEMA, the states, and the Federal Govt all base their spending & planning on. The NO report was set asside in favor of one of the reports it relied on. This is however fairly moot, even if the report had been taken seriously, there was no time between the issuing of the report & the hurricane to reinforce the levies.
Even if that were not the case, the incorperation of FEMA into Homeland Security was a cluster fuck of the highest order. More than any other single issue, the total collapse of the coordination/communication between FEMA, HS, National Guard, and the Red Cross turned what was a huge natural disaster into an even bigger societal one. We had water sitting on pallets for weeks, while people were drinking contaminated water because the people who knew where the water was needed didn't know where the water was.
There are always & will always be mistakes, but in his mad dash to make sure we're all safe, the Shrub has pretty much fucked up every internal system we had to deal with these problems. That's not a mistake, that's incompetence.
This is debateable. An ID photo has very specific requirements as to the size, subject, etc. In some states even the background is also defined. That really leaves little room for artistic expression in the photo. Following the requirements of the state to produce a fake ID photo would technically be creating an unauthorized derivative of an actual ID photo - an act that voids the fake ID's copyright. So, I don't see a lot of hope here for Ms. Lawyer-Wanabe. The photo wasn't generated via artistic methods - rather by technical ones. Even if she can clear that hurdle, there is the unautorized derivative hurdle in front of her.
I also don't believe you can copyright your signature - that's a trademark issue - your name is a public fact and therefore un-copyrightable. The specific stylization of your signature is a trademark - which must be registered. People have tried to do some funny things with copyrighting their names before, and the court has always slapped them down.
Actually this administration scrapped the FEMA structure & bundled it into homeland security without creating clear channels of communication - at the same time blocking a lot of the old channels.
Next they had a report that New Orleans was in danger from a cat 3 or better hurricane - a report that was frighteningly accurate - that they discarded because they felt the damage estimates were much too high. This is just one of many examples for this administration where they cherry pick the information to act on in order to further their private/political agendas instead of actually bothering to understand the situation and take action that might actually have a real & lasting benefit.
I've said it before - this Iraq war is just the Shrubs way of showing daddy his balls are bigger.
Once upon a time the taking of photographs of tresle bridges & buildings with interesting archetecture was not only approved of, it was encouraged. Now, the police come to talk to you & demand your film & then arrest you if you don't give it to them. Talk to members of the photography clubs in your area, I am willing to bet that at least one of them has either been arrested or had their film confiscated for taking landscape/archetecture photos. In MA/CT it's a known & growing problem.
The US ows CA over $1B for the softwoods tarrifs - that's been settled for over 5 years now.
Antigua has won round 1 & 2 against the US for Online gambling.
The US is pursuing WTO sanctions against China.
Business as usual, if it's in our favor use it; if not, ignore it. I would love for the WTO to take the new complaints the US filed & hand them back saying "You can't start any new actions until you resolve the actions against you."
As for Copyright, it's a civil contract between society & authors - every country has the right to write that contract as best suits them & their needs. The problem is that the contracts are no longer writen to balance the needs of the society against the authors, it's viewed solely as an entitlement. I say go back to requiring registration & then requiring an increasing fee to maintain the registration at 10 year intervals. Hey, if a patent costs $5-10K over the course of it's 20 year life, why shouldn't a copyright cost $30-60K to cover it's 120 year lifespan?
They actually sued a guy in CA who owns a regional ISP - he was not amused & he's said he's going to go the distance to smack them down. But yes, when a congresman gets on TV & publicly acknowledges that his children did file sharing, then I would think that they aught to be pursuing that too.
In a civil suit it's 'a preponderance of evidence' (51%) not 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Now, the issue is still, if there is a likelyhood that the account is wrong, and there are multiple people in the house, how do you ever get to 51% that a specific individual is responsible for anything?
In the real world, since there is only 1 way to make the hexidecimal representation, it's not copyrightable. It is afterall, just a number. So, I'm not sure how exactly they are claiming to have 'writen' a numerical sequence that has arguably existed since the dawn of time itself.
Perhaps NYCL could provide some enlightenment for us, but it was my understanding that purely factual items can't be copyrighted. Thus you can't copyright "Water - H20;Hydrochloric Acid HCl;". Likewise if there is only 1 way to write something, it can't be under copyright - #define brokenerr = 4;
Thus given the fact that the key to the HDDVD encoding is as presented, and it's a number with only 1 way in each base to write it, it shouldn't be elligable for copyright protection.
Oh just so wrong. On a home desktop it is even more important to have a barrier between the user & the administrative tasks than on a business one. On the home desktop everyone in the family get's to play with it - from Wiz kid Bill to baby sister, mom & pop. Hopefully 1 of them know's what they are doing, but chances are at least 2 of the 4 have no clue. Protecting the administrative functions from them is the only thing that keeps Bill from deleting the OS to make more room for his MP3s.
Check here they have a blurb that PC sales look to be down 12% year/year.
Also, part of the profit kick was that MS could finally register the Upgrade fees from all the big corperations, that paid 3 years ago for a garanteed upgrade, as earned income.
They never said how to make your site. Nor did they ever claim that that was the only way to make a site. The rules they laid down are simply "These are the rules we are going to be checking against for your site, if you score high, you get a good ranking, score low, get a bad one." They're not dictating how to make your site, just telling you the rules of the GoogleGame up front.
Since Google is the one who's doing the work of indexing you for free, they get to make the rules on how to rank things. Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask, they all have their own rules for what makes a notable site. As a note, all of them score you better the closer you get to W3 compliance & when you have meta tags that actually relate to the the information on the specific page as opposed to generic metas for the whole site.
The fact is that if you follow the rules for any of the major search engines, you will score high on all of them. You might not peak in Google if you optimize for Yahoo, but you're still going to rank high because you've built a solid, readable, content heavy page that is clearly labeled for bots to index.
Better, at this date, they can't call in a new one. You only get 1 shot at the litigation & you aren't supposed to change tack in the middle of the case. They are basing all of their testimony on MediaSentry's & the ISP's data, but they don't have any information on how that data is acquired, what the reliability of the data is, or what variables make it more or less likely to be accurate. Because the data doesn't pass review, they can get all the experts they want to make an opinion on it - not one of them will be able to use it in court.
NYCL can correct me on this if I'm wrong.....
The problem was not so much as his testemony about the HD & his findings, as he was also supposed to testify about the process of identifying the IP address & ownership of the account using the IP address. Because he had no information about how the IP address was obtained, he can't testify to it's accuraccy - thus the questions reguarding failure rate etc. Because he doesn't know how the IP information was stored by the ISP, he can't testify to the accuracy of linking the customer's computer to the IP address at the specific time in question.
IIRC, he could theoretically testify reguarding the contents of the HD, but there again, I do not believe he used any approved forensic methods to make any determinations reguarding the contents. If not, again, he fails the standard of generally accepted methodology.
In short, he's supposed to be in for 3 things - explaining how the RIAA got the IP address, how the address was tied to the PC, and finally how the HD showed evidence of the files. According to the rules governing evidence & experts, he can't testify for the first 2, & the third one is at best debatable - with it actually giving more weight to the defense than to the RIAA. In that situation, he shouldn't be there at all because he's worthless for 2/3 of the job & a loose cannon on the last one.
He didn't give you a correct term to use, because there is no real correlation between them when you go from criminal to civil suits.
A prosecutor is a state employee who is persuing resolution of a criminal complaint. In a civil case, the rough equivalent is the plaintiff - the person complaining.
The reason he stated that there is no concept of reasonable doubt is because that again is criminal law. In civil suits, only a preponderance of evidence is required. That is simply that it is more likely than not that the plaintiff is correct.
IANAL etc so if NYCL would like to correct me ....