I should point out that I am an American citizen and have served on juries before. My comments are specific to the US legal system and may not be applicable to that of Canada, the UK, and other countries.
Having served on a couple of US juries I can assure you all that juries can contain people who are technologically illiterate. The last time I served on a jury, which was 5 years ago, I was shocked when 3 or 4 guys on the jury basically got into a contest to see who could claim to be the stupidest when it came to technology. I have never seen anything like this in my life, but these guys took turns trying to top each other and convince everyone on the jury that they were the stupidest person there was when it came to technology. There were exactly 2 people out of 13 (1 was an alternate) who had an IT background and I was one of those.
So on top of having people with weak to non-existent technology skills you may run into these people who see the world in black and white and want to punish evil doers. We had one of those on my jury. They tend to always be biased against defendants and want to apply the harshest sentence possible. I've read about this woman's various trials and she has had very poor lawyers and on top of that, jurors reported that they were sure she had lied in court and was completely guilty of the charges. I think she's a nut job who thinks she can beat the charges. So considering all of that, I can't say I'm surprised she got screwed with a fine she can never pay. Her life will be ruined as even thought the RIAA knows they'll never get the full amount, they can garnish her wages forever.
Are we talking US dollars here? Because I am just not seeing how this supposed "about $70" is even possible.
Tickets at IMAX near my house are $17.50 each. You don't say what you saw, but let's just use that price. Two ticket at $17.50 is $35 in total. So we are supposed to believe that you spent about $35 on 2 cokes, nachos and popcorn? No way Jose.
I can't blame the submitter for this one. The article itself uses the term "search and destroy" early on, yet says absolutely nothing about destroying anything.
I suppose if we could go back a few years and put Slashdot in the past, someone would post the following about serial killer Ted Bundy:
Ted Bundy is going to be executed by the state of Florida. His crime? He dared to defend himself in a legal trial rather than pay an attorney to represent him. So to make an example of him, the state is executing him.
Of course this completely covers up the fact that he got the death penalty because he happened to kill a lot of women and was a serial killer.
Anyway, as always an accurate summary of the article itself is too much to ask. Basically the guy is being prosecuted because it's felt that the purpose of his work was to allow people to play illegally copied games. He's got arguments against that that might hold up in court. But it's the whole possibility of infringing that has gotten him into trouble. It would probably be the same thing if jailbreaking an iPhone allowed you to download and use commercial apps without paying for them. Nobody in the government seems to care that he modified his console. It's the "now it can play pirated games" thing that got them interested.
Ridiculous. I don't agree with how IP law is implemented, but it doesn't mean I have the right to go and hack someone's site. If you want the laws to change, lobby congress and vote in people who agree with your point of view on this issue. This is basically internet terrorism.
I'm not sure if this would be better listed as being "funny" because you are joking, or "sad" because you are serious. I'm sure that "insightful" isn't accurate.
Maybe, maybe, in the past that approach actually worked. If you live in the USA you'd have to be pretty dumb to think that approach actually works now. IP law is what it is because the people who don't like it don't have the money to bribe enough Congressmen to change it.
Welcome, friend. You must be new around here. Let me tell you how things work here.
You see, there's no real requirement for submitters to read or understand the articles they link to. That makes it very common for us to get submissions where the submitter says something like "The article says X. The article says X!" when the fact the article says "not X". I wish it was better around here, but it's not.
Prior to reading your post, I suspected that Doxer was trying to deal with Israel. He had nothing of value for them so this provided a perfect opportunity for them to "help" the US by reporting it so they can say, in effect, "See. We don't always spy on you." Some of you out there may not know this, but quite a few recent espionage cases in the USA have involved Americans spying on behalf of Israel. I have to wonder if Doxer actually worked for the US government and had access to things that Israel would be interested in knowing about if they would have been so quick to rat him out to the Feds.
Remember, every time the government jumps in to save businesses under a cyber attack, valuable resources are being diverted that could be used to stop people from copying CDs and DVDs.
I can only hope that I'm being facetious there.
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable,
This is not common. I have CDs that are about 24 years old that still play fine. Anyway, not sure what your CDs are, but it might be worth pointing out that there was a known problem on some pressings from 1988 to 1993 made by the PDO plant in the UK. This mostly effected classical CDs.
People are confusing this master key that breaks HDCP, saying it can help decrypt Blu-Ray discs. That's not the case: Blu-Ray is encrypted with AACS, which has a similar concept of device keys derived by a master key. AACS has a mechanism of revoking compromised device keys. Getting the AACS master key would bypass that mechanism, and would be great news.
While I agree that there is some confusion going on, your post is not clear. I want to point out that BluRay discs have been able to be decrypted and copied for years now. Most of the online news about this cracking of HDCP seems to be woefully ignorant of the fact that BluRay discs can be copied right now .
I realize you are being sarcastic but I would like to point out that he was here legally to begin with. Weird isn't it how some people can actually navigate the Byzantine immigration process instead of just sneaking across the boarder?
You must be American. If you only knew how the process really worked you might not have made that smart ass, ignorant comment. Here's how it really works.
If you are an athlete that an American sports team wants, you'll get a visa.
Entertainer? In general, you'll get a visa too.
Rich? Come on in!
Student? You're in. Note that this was how 30+ year olds got into the US to cause 9-11.
American business wants to sponsor your visa? You got it.
That's it. Now where exactly does leave the honest, hardworking people who don't fit into those categories?
I'm going to skip the very long response I was going to write on the "fun" that honest people have in trying to simply get tourist visas to come to the USA. Or go into details about the "fun" that people legally here on work visas have when trying to marry American citizens and then remain here with their spouse when the job ends. Not to mention how a colleague of mine married a girl from South America who had overstayed her tourist visa by years illegally and he no problems of any kind getting her status changed to legal. Read the sentence I wrote that starts with "Or go..." and think about that. The US immigration system isn't "Byznatine". It's nonsensical.
All I've got to say is if we see this on our (a university) network, we will go after them. Conveniently we've got a company name now and them admitting who hired them. I'll be looking up some IPs and adding them to our network monitors. If these guys decide to DoS our network, we'll get the logs and turn it over to the lawyers and the police.
And you think that you will be able to do something via the legal system against a company in India because...?
I'm serious. I'd like an explanation of why you think that you actually have a method that will work to deal with this.
We can't even get people to read the articles referenced in submissions. That's wildly optimistic to expect us to watch a video that is over 2 hours long.
This is begging for an "executive summary" from anyone who has time to watch it, if there is such a person.
As much as Dr. Dickhead and Congress should be excoriated appropriately, let's not forget that the Comics industry bent over backwards to censor itself. If they'd shown a little more backbone, imagine what Lee and Kirkby could have done with the "Marvel Way" in the sixties. Imagine not having that fucking glut of saccharine Archie products.
Mind you, we probably wouldn't have gotten Mad magazine if things had turned out differently, so it's hard to be judgmental.
The problem with this is that you are applying modern behavior to events that happened over 50 years ago. Or to put it another way, what you suggest is kind of like going back in time to the 1950s and getting angry because nobody has a cell phone. (That's "mobile phone" to you non-North Americans).
I've read some books that talk about the era, which was before I was born. One of the problems is that people and American society were a lot less litigious back then. Sometimes people screwed you over and you didn't go to court over it. You just took it and moved on. People didn't run around suing each other over everything like they do today. I guess, in theory, Bill Gaines of EC and publishers of similar fare could have tried to stand up, but the reality was that the distributors wouldn't touch books that weren't blessed by the "Comics Code" and the Code was specifically written to put companies like EC out of business by forbidding them from doing exactly what they had done. And keep in mind too that plenty of publishers of what I will call "family safe" comic books such as Archie, various Disney comics (these are a lot better than many realize - look up Carl Barks for more info) and others were more than happy to play along with the Comics Code because they didn't do what it forbade and they were really happy to see competitors driven out of the business. Some people probably really did believe that comics turned kids into juvenile delinquents and those people thought that the Code was just doing a public service. There's always been a rumor that John Goldwater, the publisher of Archie Comics, was infuriated by Mad's (then a comic book not a magazine) parody called "Starchie" and he vowed to put EC out of business. Goldwater did substantial work for the Code and it's probably no coincidence that a lot of what the Code forbade applied to EC directly.
Mad became a magazine specifically to evade the Code. It was a huge gamble that worked. But many artists, writers and others in the comic industry lost jobs and had to scramble to find new ones thanks to the Code. I'm pretty sure that if Bill Gaines and others could have stood up to the Code they would have.
To a certain extent I think your concerns are valid ones, but your specific examples are poor.
There are 2 manufacturers of processors and graphics hardware because either no one else wants to enter the business or those who have attempted to do so have failed (ie. Transmeta). And I'm sure you know that AMD has been getting its butt kicked by Intel for a while now. They needed ATI out of desperation as a way to stay in the game. Without ATI, there's some possibility that Intel would be the only CPU game in town. No customers will benefit from that. I remain unconvinced that consumers have suffered as a result of the AMD-ATI deal, so you're going to need to give examples on that.
The US airline industry badly needs to consolidate. We need maybe 3 big national carriers to go along with cheaper, regional players like AirTran, Southwest, etc. The Justice Department did slap down a proposed United - US Airways merger just a few years ago. I thought they should have allowed that one as I don't see US Airways as a viable player in today's US airline market, but I suppose it's just a matter of time before they merge with American as the last 2 at the dance without a partner.
I'm in my 40s so for those of you not old enough to know this, for the past 30 years in the USA, parents, schools and doctors have all been looking for the quick fix for "problem" kids.
In the 1980s psychiatric hospitals were the answer. The kids were all "crazy" and need psychiatric help. Some got put on medication. Some did not. But if you caused a problem anywhere, your butt was going to a psych hospital to get you "help".
In the 1990s, everybody was diagnosed as being hyperactive and put on ritalin.
Roughly since 2000, now the answer is that all kids have ADD or whatever term du jour they use for it. So maybe now instead of getting ritalin you get some other drug, but you're still on medication.
So since the medical community and the schools change their method of treatment and diagnosis every 10 years according to whatever faddish diagnosis takes hold, is it really any wonder that people question whether ADD/ADHD or whatever you call it exists? Because 20+ years ago these same kids were sent to psychiatric hospitals and nobody every said they were "hyperactive" or had "attention deficit disorder". And prior to the 1980s, NOBODY went to psych hospitals or got pumped full of pills for simply being bored.
Look I'm sure that some people really do have ADHD/ADD or whatever they call it and really do need medication for it. But do I think that most kids diagnosed with it have it? Nope.
I use Facebook all the time. I've never heard of Foursquare. Is this another one of those "I use it, therefore I assume everybody uses it" kind of things?
Unlike what mister anonymous submitter says, I'm not convinced that the motivation for HDMI was for manufacturers to "make their products easier to set up than ever before". Maybe at first it was, but once Hollywood got involved early on, that all changed. It was all about the copy protection. As far as I know, no one has yet broken HDMI copy protection. So I am not surprised at all that the terms to describe HDMI 1.4 are going to get even more confusing and unhelpful as I don't think HDMI has ever been about making consumers happier. I'm not really sure what is supposed to be gained by the confusion to come, but was it created by design (ie. perhaps Hollywood thinks that the confusion will strengthen copy protection somehow) or by stupidity?
I'm a little paranoid so I'd prefer to not be too specific about where I live, but I live in one of the largest urban areas in the Old South of the USA and we have a decent sized Asian population here. While I've never seen black duck eggs on the menu of any Chinese restaurant that I've been to here, I could easily go to any of several Asian supermarkets nearby and within 30 minutes buy as many black duck eggs as I want. And I do go to Asian supermarkets from time to time and I do indeed know what black duck eggs are.
This is mostly a joke, but not 100% a joke. I sincerely hope it's not true. However, the thought occurs to me that maybe this "key" is nothing more than, say, a copy of Windows 98 on floppy discs. Seriously, without more information about this supposed "key" we have no way to know if those involved actually did include something that might really be useful to future generations who want to get at the data or if they did something as stupid as what I suggested.
1) Someone posted that the user wasn't actually fined - yet. But he could be fined if the copyright owner goes after him for failing to secure his wireless device. However, in the USA I'd be afraid that somehow the wireless owner would be sued and blamed by the RIAA for whatever happened. Given 2 high profile losses of exorbitant amounts of money by consumers to the RIAA in some relatively recent court cases, a 100 Euro fine would seem like a good deal.
2) I'd bet that the mysterious unnamed artist is Prince. He's been known to go after Europeans (ask The Pirate Bay) in European courts. And for a guy who for a while was an early embracer of the internet and used it to make money, he's turned into a fuddy duddy old school technophobe.
For some reason I can't help but think that it would be hilarious and kind of scary if everyone chuckles a bit at this and in a couple of months news reports come in saying that for some strange reason the long-running North Korean energy crisis seems to have been solved...
Well, North Koren could release another news report saying just that very thing and if nothing else satellite imagery could verify at least that much of the story by looking at North Korea at night.
But anyway, if they were able to do it, which I doubt, that would mean that it definitely can be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it. Right now nobody knows if it's really even possible to do it or not. The main surprise to me is that they didn't give the Dear Leader credit for the breakthrough that allowed this to supposedly happen. If you've ever seen a documentary film about North Korea, you'll understand how the (late) Great Leader and the Dear Leader get credit for everything. I recently saw a short clip on the internet about a Canadian film crew that got to go to Pyongyang's movie studio. They spent most of their time at a rarely open museum where one of the tour guides personally gave Kim Jong-Il credit for inventing the idea of using multiple cameras at different locations on a set to shoot the same action from different angles. In one documentary I saw some kids singing a song that had some line about Kim Jong-Il or his father causing the sun to rise and I honestly don't know if it was just a case of simple exaggeration in a song's lyrics or if the people of North Korea actually believe he causes the sun to rise. In another documentary on the 1966 North Korean World Cup team (it reached the final 8 of the tournament before being eliminated - it's actually one of the all time great World Cup underdog stories), I saw some of the members weeping almost uncontrollably when they thought back on the death of Kim Il-Sung. I just can't imagine anyone in the west weeping 10+ years later for some dead American president and acting like it was some tremendous personal loss that he was gone. One day North Korea will fall apart and it will reunite with South Korea and then we're going to have a lot of seriously pissed off North Koreans who simply cannot believe that they fell for all that crap about the Kims for so long.
She has argued before the supreme court that if a prosecutor manufactures evidence, causing the conviction of an innocent person, that the prosecutor should not be subject to a lawsuit from the person they fucked over.
She has no interest in justice, only in power.
It's certainly fair to point this out. However, lawyers are not unique in looking out for their own. It happens in all kinds of fields. My best friend is a lawyer and you really would not believe some of the rather twisted logic he uses to defend just about everything that lawyers do. He honestly seems to believe that lawyers are a great force for good in the USA and the good badly outweighs any tiny amount of bad that they do.
Slashdot Mirror
I should point out that I am an American citizen and have served on juries before. My comments are specific to the US legal system and may not be applicable to that of Canada, the UK, and other countries.
Having served on a couple of US juries I can assure you all that juries can contain people who are technologically illiterate. The last time I served on a jury, which was 5 years ago, I was shocked when 3 or 4 guys on the jury basically got into a contest to see who could claim to be the stupidest when it came to technology. I have never seen anything like this in my life, but these guys took turns trying to top each other and convince everyone on the jury that they were the stupidest person there was when it came to technology. There were exactly 2 people out of 13 (1 was an alternate) who had an IT background and I was one of those.
So on top of having people with weak to non-existent technology skills you may run into these people who see the world in black and white and want to punish evil doers. We had one of those on my jury. They tend to always be biased against defendants and want to apply the harshest sentence possible. I've read about this woman's various trials and she has had very poor lawyers and on top of that, jurors reported that they were sure she had lied in court and was completely guilty of the charges. I think she's a nut job who thinks she can beat the charges. So considering all of that, I can't say I'm surprised she got screwed with a fine she can never pay. Her life will be ruined as even thought the RIAA knows they'll never get the full amount, they can garnish her wages forever.
Are we talking US dollars here? Because I am just not seeing how this supposed "about $70" is even possible.
Tickets at IMAX near my house are $17.50 each. You don't say what you saw, but let's just use that price. Two ticket at $17.50 is $35 in total. So we are supposed to believe that you spent about $35 on 2 cokes, nachos and popcorn? No way Jose.
Oops! Make that "seek and destroy" instead of "search and destroy", but still, it's just sensationalism.
I can't blame the submitter for this one. The article itself uses the term "search and destroy" early on, yet says absolutely nothing about destroying anything.
I suppose if we could go back a few years and put Slashdot in the past, someone would post the following about serial killer Ted Bundy:
Ted Bundy is going to be executed by the state of Florida. His crime? He dared to defend himself in a legal trial rather than pay an attorney to represent him. So to make an example of him, the state is executing him.
Of course this completely covers up the fact that he got the death penalty because he happened to kill a lot of women and was a serial killer.
Anyway, as always an accurate summary of the article itself is too much to ask. Basically the guy is being prosecuted because it's felt that the purpose of his work was to allow people to play illegally copied games. He's got arguments against that that might hold up in court. But it's the whole possibility of infringing that has gotten him into trouble. It would probably be the same thing if jailbreaking an iPhone allowed you to download and use commercial apps without paying for them. Nobody in the government seems to care that he modified his console. It's the "now it can play pirated games" thing that got them interested.
Ridiculous. I don't agree with how IP law is implemented, but it doesn't mean I have the right to go and hack someone's site. If you want the laws to change, lobby congress and vote in people who agree with your point of view on this issue. This is basically internet terrorism.
I'm not sure if this would be better listed as being "funny" because you are joking, or "sad" because you are serious. I'm sure that "insightful" isn't accurate.
Maybe, maybe, in the past that approach actually worked. If you live in the USA you'd have to be pretty dumb to think that approach actually works now. IP law is what it is because the people who don't like it don't have the money to bribe enough Congressmen to change it.
I saw this story covered at BoingBoing earlier and I have to say -- has anyone actually read this article?
Welcome, friend. You must be new around here. Let me tell you how things work here.
You see, there's no real requirement for submitters to read or understand the articles they link to. That makes it very common for us to get submissions where the submitter says something like "The article says X. The article says X!" when the fact the article says "not X". I wish it was better around here, but it's not.
Prior to reading your post, I suspected that Doxer was trying to deal with Israel. He had nothing of value for them so this provided a perfect opportunity for them to "help" the US by reporting it so they can say, in effect, "See. We don't always spy on you." Some of you out there may not know this, but quite a few recent espionage cases in the USA have involved Americans spying on behalf of Israel. I have to wonder if Doxer actually worked for the US government and had access to things that Israel would be interested in knowing about if they would have been so quick to rat him out to the Feds.
Remember, every time the government jumps in to save businesses under a cyber attack, valuable resources are being diverted that could be used to stop people from copying CDs and DVDs. I can only hope that I'm being facetious there.
I know that Soviet Russia meme gets overdone, but that is one of the funniest things I've seen here in a long time. Well done, advocate_one!
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable,
This is not common. I have CDs that are about 24 years old that still play fine. Anyway, not sure what your CDs are, but it might be worth pointing out that there was a known problem on some pressings from 1988 to 1993 made by the PDO plant in the UK. This mostly effected classical CDs.
People are confusing this master key that breaks HDCP, saying it can help decrypt Blu-Ray discs. That's not the case: Blu-Ray is encrypted with AACS, which has a similar concept of device keys derived by a master key. AACS has a mechanism of revoking compromised device keys. Getting the AACS master key would bypass that mechanism, and would be great news.
While I agree that there is some confusion going on, your post is not clear. I want to point out that BluRay discs have been able to be decrypted and copied for years now. Most of the online news about this cracking of HDCP seems to be woefully ignorant of the fact that BluRay discs can be copied right now .
I realize you are being sarcastic but I would like to point out that he was here legally to begin with. Weird isn't it how some people can actually navigate the Byzantine immigration process instead of just sneaking across the boarder?
You must be American. If you only knew how the process really worked you might not have made that smart ass, ignorant comment. Here's how it really works.
..." and think about that. The US immigration system isn't "Byznatine". It's nonsensical.
If you are an athlete that an American sports team wants, you'll get a visa.
Entertainer? In general, you'll get a visa too.
Rich? Come on in!
Student? You're in. Note that this was how 30+ year olds got into the US to cause 9-11.
American business wants to sponsor your visa? You got it.
That's it. Now where exactly does leave the honest, hardworking people who don't fit into those categories?
I'm going to skip the very long response I was going to write on the "fun" that honest people have in trying to simply get tourist visas to come to the USA. Or go into details about the "fun" that people legally here on work visas have when trying to marry American citizens and then remain here with their spouse when the job ends. Not to mention how a colleague of mine married a girl from South America who had overstayed her tourist visa by years illegally and he no problems of any kind getting her status changed to legal. Read the sentence I wrote that starts with "Or go
All I've got to say is if we see this on our (a university) network, we will go after them. Conveniently we've got a company name now and them admitting who hired them. I'll be looking up some IPs and adding them to our network monitors. If these guys decide to DoS our network, we'll get the logs and turn it over to the lawyers and the police.
And you think that you will be able to do something via the legal system against a company in India because...?
I'm serious. I'd like an explanation of why you think that you actually have a method that will work to deal with this.
We can't even get people to read the articles referenced in submissions. That's wildly optimistic to expect us to watch a video that is over 2 hours long.
This is begging for an "executive summary" from anyone who has time to watch it, if there is such a person.
As much as Dr. Dickhead and Congress should be excoriated appropriately, let's not forget that the Comics industry bent over backwards to censor itself. If they'd shown a little more backbone, imagine what Lee and Kirkby could have done with the "Marvel Way" in the sixties. Imagine not having that fucking glut of saccharine Archie products. Mind you, we probably wouldn't have gotten Mad magazine if things had turned out differently, so it's hard to be judgmental.
The problem with this is that you are applying modern behavior to events that happened over 50 years ago. Or to put it another way, what you suggest is kind of like going back in time to the 1950s and getting angry because nobody has a cell phone. (That's "mobile phone" to you non-North Americans).
I've read some books that talk about the era, which was before I was born. One of the problems is that people and American society were a lot less litigious back then. Sometimes people screwed you over and you didn't go to court over it. You just took it and moved on. People didn't run around suing each other over everything like they do today. I guess, in theory, Bill Gaines of EC and publishers of similar fare could have tried to stand up, but the reality was that the distributors wouldn't touch books that weren't blessed by the "Comics Code" and the Code was specifically written to put companies like EC out of business by forbidding them from doing exactly what they had done. And keep in mind too that plenty of publishers of what I will call "family safe" comic books such as Archie, various Disney comics (these are a lot better than many realize - look up Carl Barks for more info) and others were more than happy to play along with the Comics Code because they didn't do what it forbade and they were really happy to see competitors driven out of the business. Some people probably really did believe that comics turned kids into juvenile delinquents and those people thought that the Code was just doing a public service. There's always been a rumor that John Goldwater, the publisher of Archie Comics, was infuriated by Mad's (then a comic book not a magazine) parody called "Starchie" and he vowed to put EC out of business. Goldwater did substantial work for the Code and it's probably no coincidence that a lot of what the Code forbade applied to EC directly.
Mad became a magazine specifically to evade the Code. It was a huge gamble that worked. But many artists, writers and others in the comic industry lost jobs and had to scramble to find new ones thanks to the Code. I'm pretty sure that if Bill Gaines and others could have stood up to the Code they would have.
To a certain extent I think your concerns are valid ones, but your specific examples are poor.
There are 2 manufacturers of processors and graphics hardware because either no one else wants to enter the business or those who have attempted to do so have failed (ie. Transmeta). And I'm sure you know that AMD has been getting its butt kicked by Intel for a while now. They needed ATI out of desperation as a way to stay in the game. Without ATI, there's some possibility that Intel would be the only CPU game in town. No customers will benefit from that. I remain unconvinced that consumers have suffered as a result of the AMD-ATI deal, so you're going to need to give examples on that.
The US airline industry badly needs to consolidate. We need maybe 3 big national carriers to go along with cheaper, regional players like AirTran, Southwest, etc. The Justice Department did slap down a proposed United - US Airways merger just a few years ago. I thought they should have allowed that one as I don't see US Airways as a viable player in today's US airline market, but I suppose it's just a matter of time before they merge with American as the last 2 at the dance without a partner.
I'm in my 40s so for those of you not old enough to know this, for the past 30 years in the USA, parents, schools and doctors have all been looking for the quick fix for "problem" kids.
In the 1980s psychiatric hospitals were the answer. The kids were all "crazy" and need psychiatric help. Some got put on medication. Some did not. But if you caused a problem anywhere, your butt was going to a psych hospital to get you "help".
In the 1990s, everybody was diagnosed as being hyperactive and put on ritalin.
Roughly since 2000, now the answer is that all kids have ADD or whatever term du jour they use for it. So maybe now instead of getting ritalin you get some other drug, but you're still on medication.
So since the medical community and the schools change their method of treatment and diagnosis every 10 years according to whatever faddish diagnosis takes hold, is it really any wonder that people question whether ADD/ADHD or whatever you call it exists? Because 20+ years ago these same kids were sent to psychiatric hospitals and nobody every said they were "hyperactive" or had "attention deficit disorder". And prior to the 1980s, NOBODY went to psych hospitals or got pumped full of pills for simply being bored.
Look I'm sure that some people really do have ADHD/ADD or whatever they call it and really do need medication for it. But do I think that most kids diagnosed with it have it? Nope.
I use Facebook all the time. I've never heard of Foursquare. Is this another one of those "I use it, therefore I assume everybody uses it" kind of things?
Unlike what mister anonymous submitter says, I'm not convinced that the motivation for HDMI was for manufacturers to "make their products easier to set up than ever before". Maybe at first it was, but once Hollywood got involved early on, that all changed. It was all about the copy protection. As far as I know, no one has yet broken HDMI copy protection. So I am not surprised at all that the terms to describe HDMI 1.4 are going to get even more confusing and unhelpful as I don't think HDMI has ever been about making consumers happier. I'm not really sure what is supposed to be gained by the confusion to come, but was it created by design (ie. perhaps Hollywood thinks that the confusion will strengthen copy protection somehow) or by stupidity?
I'm a little paranoid so I'd prefer to not be too specific about where I live, but I live in one of the largest urban areas in the Old South of the USA and we have a decent sized Asian population here. While I've never seen black duck eggs on the menu of any Chinese restaurant that I've been to here, I could easily go to any of several Asian supermarkets nearby and within 30 minutes buy as many black duck eggs as I want. And I do go to Asian supermarkets from time to time and I do indeed know what black duck eggs are.
This is mostly a joke, but not 100% a joke. I sincerely hope it's not true. However, the thought occurs to me that maybe this "key" is nothing more than, say, a copy of Windows 98 on floppy discs. Seriously, without more information about this supposed "key" we have no way to know if those involved actually did include something that might really be useful to future generations who want to get at the data or if they did something as stupid as what I suggested.
1) Someone posted that the user wasn't actually fined - yet. But he could be fined if the copyright owner goes after him for failing to secure his wireless device. However, in the USA I'd be afraid that somehow the wireless owner would be sued and blamed by the RIAA for whatever happened. Given 2 high profile losses of exorbitant amounts of money by consumers to the RIAA in some relatively recent court cases, a 100 Euro fine would seem like a good deal.
2) I'd bet that the mysterious unnamed artist is Prince. He's been known to go after Europeans (ask The Pirate Bay) in European courts. And for a guy who for a while was an early embracer of the internet and used it to make money, he's turned into a fuddy duddy old school technophobe.
For some reason I can't help but think that it would be hilarious and kind of scary if everyone chuckles a bit at this and in a couple of months news reports come in saying that for some strange reason the long-running North Korean energy crisis seems to have been solved...
Well, North Koren could release another news report saying just that very thing and if nothing else satellite imagery could verify at least that much of the story by looking at North Korea at night.
But anyway, if they were able to do it, which I doubt, that would mean that it definitely can be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it. Right now nobody knows if it's really even possible to do it or not. The main surprise to me is that they didn't give the Dear Leader credit for the breakthrough that allowed this to supposedly happen. If you've ever seen a documentary film about North Korea, you'll understand how the (late) Great Leader and the Dear Leader get credit for everything. I recently saw a short clip on the internet about a Canadian film crew that got to go to Pyongyang's movie studio. They spent most of their time at a rarely open museum where one of the tour guides personally gave Kim Jong-Il credit for inventing the idea of using multiple cameras at different locations on a set to shoot the same action from different angles. In one documentary I saw some kids singing a song that had some line about Kim Jong-Il or his father causing the sun to rise and I honestly don't know if it was just a case of simple exaggeration in a song's lyrics or if the people of North Korea actually believe he causes the sun to rise. In another documentary on the 1966 North Korean World Cup team (it reached the final 8 of the tournament before being eliminated - it's actually one of the all time great World Cup underdog stories), I saw some of the members weeping almost uncontrollably when they thought back on the death of Kim Il-Sung. I just can't imagine anyone in the west weeping 10+ years later for some dead American president and acting like it was some tremendous personal loss that he was gone. One day North Korea will fall apart and it will reunite with South Korea and then we're going to have a lot of seriously pissed off North Koreans who simply cannot believe that they fell for all that crap about the Kims for so long.
She has argued before the supreme court that if a prosecutor manufactures evidence, causing the conviction of an innocent person, that the prosecutor should not be subject to a lawsuit from the person they fucked over.
She has no interest in justice, only in power.
It's certainly fair to point this out. However, lawyers are not unique in looking out for their own. It happens in all kinds of fields. My best friend is a lawyer and you really would not believe some of the rather twisted logic he uses to defend just about everything that lawyers do. He honestly seems to believe that lawyers are a great force for good in the USA and the good badly outweighs any tiny amount of bad that they do.