Could this be the first real battle waged mostly in the digital world?
No. There have been several previous battles between states and non-state entities waged in the digital realm. One of which -- the Chinese Politburo-directed attack on Google -- is being reported on because it was discussed in the cables in the WikiLeaks dump.
Instead of spending time on useless things like this, they should really focus on making it a legal requirement that cars drive themselves.
Making something a legal requirement when there is no safe, proven, widely deployable implementation doesn't make sense. Usable backup cameras exist.
On the self-driving cars front, various government agencies have been funding research on that for quite some time, and Google is testing self-driving cars on the road. Once usable self-driving cars are on the road and are a proven technology, discussion of whether they should be made mandatory might be something other than ludicrously premature. But its not like government and industry aren't working toward them
I watched my sister-in-law in a vehicle with a camera shortly after she bought it. She couldn't back up to save her ass, since she spent more time looking at the camera's feed then actually turning her head to look behind her. Took her three tries to back out of our neighbor's crowded driveway with no success. Then her sister's husband did it first try. He just looked out of the damned window. Newsflash - the camera has a limited field of view.
The backup camera on my Prius has a very wide field of view. The only probably using it until I got used to it is that, because it has a very wide field of view and the display only occupies a very narrow slice of my field of view, the mapping between the apparent angle and the actual angle is a bit odd until you get used to it.
Still, I usually use it exactly as intended -- I don't stare at it to reverse in a typical open situation, I use it to double check that there isn't an unexpected pedestrian immediately behind the vehicle -- especially if I have cargo obstructing the view from the center-rear mirror -- and I use it to as an additional view to the mirrors and direct rear window view when backing up in a tight parking or similar situation.
Unless its a toddler or a VERY short person, having an image on your dashboard, or to your top will make no difference to whether you can see them or not. If your kid is small enough such that someone reversing his car can't see him - then s/he probably shouldn't be out on their own.
If your center rear-view mirror's path is obstructed (which is generally not an illegal driving condition), most cars have a considerable distance behind them that an adult will not be visible in the side mirrors. Even with that clear, you don't have to be very small to be invisible behind an SUV or other tall vehicle.
Not if they're properly adjusted. Rearview -> sideview -> peripheral vision. With overlap.
And with a blindspot of varying length extending a certain distance and height immediately behind your car (carying by . This is usually not all that significant in any passenger car, light truck, SUV, etc. (commercial vehicles like semis are a different story) when it comes to seeing traffic on the road. OTOH, when backing to or from parking in a area where pedestrians (and particularly children) may be present and may have significant angular speed (such that they may cross the field of view of one mirror to the blindspot close behind the vehicle between the time between checks of that mirror) this can be particularly dangerous. A backup camera -- a wide-angle camera mounted on the rear of the vehicle with, typically, an in-dash display -- is designed to address this specific problem, not to deal with visibility during normal road driving (usually, they only activate when the car is shifted into reverse.)
Seriously useful tip: your car has a nice, wide rearview mirror to let you see what's behind you.
All car designs have a close-behind blind spot that no combination of side- and center-mounted mirrors can address (how far back it extends, and how high it extends, vary based on the height, width, body shape, window height, and other design features of the car.) This is a bigger problem with longer and higher vehicles (among "consumer" vehicles, large SUVs are notable in both categories, and thus particularly problematic.) Because rear-view cameras are mounted behind the car, and thus don't have to look past its length or over the bottom of the rear view and any trunk deck, avoid this problem.
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
Potentially, quite a lot. A case could arguably be made for espionage under 18 USC Sec. 793, particularly subsections (b), (c), (e), and/or (g) or 18 USC Sec. 798, either one of which carries a ten year federal prison sentence. It would probably be harder to make a case that it meets the requirements for the death or life imprisonment espionage provisions of 18 USC Sec. 794, but given the way the US government is responding to WikiLeaks right now, I wouldn't rule out a federal prosecutor, given the opportunity, going for that with the lesser offenses as an alternative to make a point.
Its somewhat parallel to the Pentagon Papers case, which might seem reassuring, but its worth noting that when the Supreme Court struck down the restraining order against the New York Times in that case it was only on prior restraint grounds, it did not hold that the government could not prosecute for espionage (the Espionage Act was the basis of the injunction sought) based on the fact of the publication (though no charges were ever filed on that basis.)
"We owe it to the people who entrusted us with the documents"
So they're concerned about the people who leaked the documents, but not about the people who could be killed because of them?
Read in the full context from which you excerpted that quote, that is very clearly a part of an expression that is saying that the information itself is important enough that they don't want most of it getting ignored by the media because its all in one big dump, so in the short period in which the "dump" is news, no one actually gets to most of the material.
You may, of course, disagree with WikiLeaks evaluation of whether the information being released is that important for the public to know (so far, most of what has gotten covered in the media hasn't seemed that important to me, but I haven't gotten reviewed the raw data myself and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the media was not focussing on the most important bits) but deliberately distorting the argument being made doesn't advance your case well, especially in a forum where the context is readily available.
which they should want to recover from the plaintiff's efforts at harassing Google
No, they shouldn't. Sunk costs are gone. Making decisions based on trying to redeem sunk costs is bad decision-making.
Further, by winning -- and in an appellate decision, as the Borings unsuccessfully appealed the dismissal of the other claims they filed in this case besides the trespassing claim -- on all the other charges, they've won about as much as they could hope too from their legal expenditures in this case.
At any rate, its irrelevant. While TFS and even TFA don't make this clear, the source article linked in TFA notes that this was a consent decree, meaning the parties agreed to the judgement (after the Boring's failed in their appeal of the dismissal of the claims other than trespassing that they filed, and failed in their attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear a further appeal after they lost at the appellate level), and so there is nothing for Google to appeal.
Hmmm. Aren't military contracts also "lowest bidder" ?
Many government contracts, including most major NASA and military contracts involving development of new technology, are not lowest bidder, they are best-value using a per-project scoring in which cost is one, but not the only, factor.
I don't think straight lowest-bid is used for much of anything other than purchases of directly-substitutable, off-the-shelf commodities.
Your creditor's business records aren't your papers, and thus you don't have a Fourth Amendment right to protect them.
While the creditor whose records are sought may or may not have a Fourth Amendment right protecting them from seizure without a warrant, they generally have no incentive to assert any such right.
The U.S. Congress does not have the right to regulate the audio volume of your television.
The U.S. Congress doesn't have any rights.
Nor is it regulating the audio volume of your television.
The U.S. Congress does, however, have a power to regulate commercial use of the airwaves which falls within its express Article I power to regulate interstate commerce.
What he was, however, was a fighter against mercantilism and a supporter of free trade.
He was certainly a fighter against mercantilism. Whether he was a supporter of "free trade" depends on what you mean by that. If you simply mean free of the particular kinds of regulation present in mercantilism, certainly. If you mean, free of government involvement in the marketplace entirely, this is far less true. He advocated particular suspicion of mercantile regulations proposed by merchants engaged in some particular area of trade (as opposed to other powerful interests, specifically landholders -- he was writing at a time before fee-simple, easily-marketable landholdings were the norm -- whose interests he saw aligned with the general public interst.)
So, possibly EMI putting the files up on Rapidshare (and telling you to download it) gives you the right to download it. But it doesn't give you the right to then distribute it to everyone else.
If the copyright holder is putting it up for filesharing and inviting people to download it, then not only are they giving other people the right to download it, they may also be implicitly giving permission to redistribute it given that with many filesharing systems, sharing occurs incidentally to downloading such that downloading involves sharing.
Further, even ignoring that, if the copyright holder is distributing it using filesharing (or any other means) in a format that does not include a copyright notice that is apparent on normal use, they may lose or greatly limit their right to recovery in jurisdiction in which (as is the case in the US) the presence or absence of a copyright notice, while not relevant to whether or not the work is protected by copyright in general, is relevant to whether or not infringement can be considered "innocent infringement" and consequently is very much relevant to the remedies that can be sought.
And if the company is found to have placed the files and encouraged their download for the purpose of getting the music to spread virally (which means being re-shared) because they believe that spread would benefit the company, that would seem to weigh heavily against any claim that any harm they did not choose by their own actions resulted from any filesharing of that music.
Yep Sounds like a new infrastructure terrorist target. Blow up the tubes...kill trade easily.
Much harder to blow up a bunch of individual trucks driving all over the place.
So? If you want to hurt trade by truck, you don't blow up the individual trucks any more than you blow up individual canisters moving through the foodtubes. Instead, you blow up critical bridges and tunnels.
Or, critical facilities involved with the production, delivery, and refinement of fuel for the trucks.
Or you just work to destabilize regimes in countries where the fuel for the trucks is produced.
It could have more precedential weight, once Google appeals this case to a higher court.
Given that the effect of the trial court decision itself is negligible, and given the fact that an appellate decision upholding the trial court award would be -- because of its precedential weight -- vastly more damaging to Google's operations than the trial court decision itself, Google has no rational reason to appeal the decision.
You also can't, at launch, use the network this pricing plan applies to on a phone (unless the USB modems that are the initial exclusive devices for accessing the network are attached to a computer which then serves as an WiFi access point for a phone with WiFi connectivity), so I'm not sure what you can do with a phone is relevant at all.
On a computer -- the kind of thing that will be directly attached to the USB modems that access this network -- you can certainly watch those kind of videos.
Why the hell are you measuring bandwidth in seconds? And why do you need over 5 GB on your phone?
Verizon's 4G LTE network isn't even available on phones initially, its limited to USB modems for computers (and Verizon's marketing of those USB modems and the associated plans is targetted primarily to business users); it will be rolled out to phones later.
So the more relevant question should be, "why do you need over 5GB/month in network data transfer to a computer, especially one you use for business?"
But since American law operates as much upon precedent as statute, this has significance.
In the American system, a trial court decision has very little precedential weight (it is not binding precedent on the application of the law on any court in any future case, including even the same court, and may not even be allowed by court rules in many courts to be cited in other cases.)
Yes, there are a some ads (which ones vary from user to user) which promote products or services that a user was not previously aware of and in which the user is interested and which are, in fact, ads the user wants to see.
Heck, people voluntarily choose to watch infomercials, which are really long ads that aren't even attached to other content.
Anybody can see that he meant "one nine after the decimal point".
99.9% is 0.999, which has three nines after the decimal point. Which is why, when talking about uptimes, "3 nines" always means 0.999 or 99.9%, and one nine -- not that anyone would ever use that -- always means 0.9 or 90%.
The fact is, when Congress strikes down a law, it is called "legislation."
Congress doesn't "strike down a law". It passes new laws. Some of which may have the effect of repealing older laws (which has a substantially different legal effect than a court interpreting, e.g., the Constitution as making a law invalid.)
When a court does exactly the same thing, you're calling it "interpretation."
Nothing a court does is the exact same thing as Congress repealing a law, either in the process by which it is done or the effect of it having been done.
Furthermore, there are plenty of times when the courts do, indeed, legislate from the bench. Check up on "gap filling," "common law," and other things like that.
Those things are all irrelevant to the point at issue, which was a response to a question about striking down laws that was posed in response to a statement about the separation of powers.
The "separation of powers" is not so simple as you are taught in elementary school.
To the extent this is true, it is irrelevant; specifically, it doesn't change the fact that what the court does when it "strikes down" a law is firmly within the interpretive role, and is essential to it in a system which features Constitutionally-limited government rather than absolute legislative (e.g., parliamentary) soveriegnty.
I'm just waiting for something like this to work with an e-reader that uses e-ink.
The e-Ink based Nook (which also runs Android) was rooted and used to run regular Android apps fairly quickly after it was released. As I understand it, though, the two screen layout made it awkward, because apps aren't designed for that setup.
Slashdot Mirror
No. There have been several previous battles between states and non-state entities waged in the digital realm. One of which -- the Chinese Politburo-directed attack on Google -- is being reported on because it was discussed in the cables in the WikiLeaks dump.
Making something a legal requirement when there is no safe, proven, widely deployable implementation doesn't make sense. Usable backup cameras exist.
On the self-driving cars front, various government agencies have been funding research on that for quite some time, and Google is testing self-driving cars on the road. Once usable self-driving cars are on the road and are a proven technology, discussion of whether they should be made mandatory might be something other than ludicrously premature. But its not like government and industry aren't working toward them
The backup camera on my Prius has a very wide field of view. The only probably using it until I got used to it is that, because it has a very wide field of view and the display only occupies a very narrow slice of my field of view, the mapping between the apparent angle and the actual angle is a bit odd until you get used to it.
Still, I usually use it exactly as intended -- I don't stare at it to reverse in a typical open situation, I use it to double check that there isn't an unexpected pedestrian immediately behind the vehicle -- especially if I have cargo obstructing the view from the center-rear mirror -- and I use it to as an additional view to the mirrors and direct rear window view when backing up in a tight parking or similar situation.
If your center rear-view mirror's path is obstructed (which is generally not an illegal driving condition), most cars have a considerable distance behind them that an adult will not be visible in the side mirrors. Even with that clear, you don't have to be very small to be invisible behind an SUV or other tall vehicle.
And with a blindspot of varying length extending a certain distance and height immediately behind your car (carying by . This is usually not all that significant in any passenger car, light truck, SUV, etc. (commercial vehicles like semis are a different story) when it comes to seeing traffic on the road. OTOH, when backing to or from parking in a area where pedestrians (and particularly children) may be present and may have significant angular speed (such that they may cross the field of view of one mirror to the blindspot close behind the vehicle between the time between checks of that mirror) this can be particularly dangerous. A backup camera -- a wide-angle camera mounted on the rear of the vehicle with, typically, an in-dash display -- is designed to address this specific problem, not to deal with visibility during normal road driving (usually, they only activate when the car is shifted into reverse.)
All car designs have a close-behind blind spot that no combination of side- and center-mounted mirrors can address (how far back it extends, and how high it extends, vary based on the height, width, body shape, window height, and other design features of the car.) This is a bigger problem with longer and higher vehicles (among "consumer" vehicles, large SUVs are notable in both categories, and thus particularly problematic.) Because rear-view cameras are mounted behind the car, and thus don't have to look past its length or over the bottom of the rear view and any trunk deck, avoid this problem.
Potentially, quite a lot. A case could arguably be made for espionage under 18 USC Sec. 793, particularly subsections (b), (c), (e), and/or (g) or 18 USC Sec. 798, either one of which carries a ten year federal prison sentence. It would probably be harder to make a case that it meets the requirements for the death or life imprisonment espionage provisions of 18 USC Sec. 794, but given the way the US government is responding to WikiLeaks right now, I wouldn't rule out a federal prosecutor, given the opportunity, going for that with the lesser offenses as an alternative to make a point.
Its somewhat parallel to the Pentagon Papers case, which might seem reassuring, but its worth noting that when the Supreme Court struck down the restraining order against the New York Times in that case it was only on prior restraint grounds, it did not hold that the government could not prosecute for espionage (the Espionage Act was the basis of the injunction sought) based on the fact of the publication (though no charges were ever filed on that basis.)
Read in the full context from which you excerpted that quote, that is very clearly a part of an expression that is saying that the information itself is important enough that they don't want most of it getting ignored by the media because its all in one big dump, so in the short period in which the "dump" is news, no one actually gets to most of the material.
You may, of course, disagree with WikiLeaks evaluation of whether the information being released is that important for the public to know (so far, most of what has gotten covered in the media hasn't seemed that important to me, but I haven't gotten reviewed the raw data myself and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the media was not focussing on the most important bits) but deliberately distorting the argument being made doesn't advance your case well, especially in a forum where the context is readily available.
And, essentially, won.
No, they shouldn't. Sunk costs are gone. Making decisions based on trying to redeem sunk costs is bad decision-making.
Further, by winning -- and in an appellate decision, as the Borings unsuccessfully appealed the dismissal of the other claims they filed in this case besides the trespassing claim -- on all the other charges, they've won about as much as they could hope too from their legal expenditures in this case.
At any rate, its irrelevant. While TFS and even TFA don't make this clear, the source article linked in TFA notes that this was a consent decree, meaning the parties agreed to the judgement (after the Boring's failed in their appeal of the dismissal of the claims other than trespassing that they filed, and failed in their attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear a further appeal after they lost at the appellate level), and so there is nothing for Google to appeal.
Many government contracts, including most major NASA and military contracts involving development of new technology, are not lowest bidder, they are best-value using a per-project scoring in which cost is one, but not the only, factor.
I don't think straight lowest-bid is used for much of anything other than purchases of directly-substitutable, off-the-shelf commodities.
Your creditor's business records aren't your papers, and thus you don't have a Fourth Amendment right to protect them.
While the creditor whose records are sought may or may not have a Fourth Amendment right protecting them from seizure without a warrant, they generally have no incentive to assert any such right.
The U.S. Congress doesn't have any rights.
Nor is it regulating the audio volume of your television.
The U.S. Congress does, however, have a power to regulate commercial use of the airwaves which falls within its express Article I power to regulate interstate commerce.
Which it has chosen to exercise here.
Article I, Sec. 8. Specifically, the Interstate Commerce Clause.
He was certainly a fighter against mercantilism. Whether he was a supporter of "free trade" depends on what you mean by that. If you simply mean free of the particular kinds of regulation present in mercantilism, certainly. If you mean, free of government involvement in the marketplace entirely, this is far less true. He advocated particular suspicion of mercantile regulations proposed by merchants engaged in some particular area of trade (as opposed to other powerful interests, specifically landholders -- he was writing at a time before fee-simple, easily-marketable landholdings were the norm -- whose interests he saw aligned with the general public interst.)
If the copyright holder is putting it up for filesharing and inviting people to download it, then not only are they giving other people the right to download it, they may also be implicitly giving permission to redistribute it given that with many filesharing systems, sharing occurs incidentally to downloading such that downloading involves sharing.
Further, even ignoring that, if the copyright holder is distributing it using filesharing (or any other means) in a format that does not include a copyright notice that is apparent on normal use, they may lose or greatly limit their right to recovery in jurisdiction in which (as is the case in the US) the presence or absence of a copyright notice, while not relevant to whether or not the work is protected by copyright in general, is relevant to whether or not infringement can be considered "innocent infringement" and consequently is very much relevant to the remedies that can be sought.
And if the company is found to have placed the files and encouraged their download for the purpose of getting the music to spread virally (which means being re-shared) because they believe that spread would benefit the company, that would seem to weigh heavily against any claim that any harm they did not choose by their own actions resulted from any filesharing of that music.
So? If you want to hurt trade by truck, you don't blow up the individual trucks any more than you blow up individual canisters moving through the foodtubes. Instead, you blow up critical bridges and tunnels.
Or, critical facilities involved with the production, delivery, and refinement of fuel for the trucks.
Or you just work to destabilize regimes in countries where the fuel for the trucks is produced.
Given that the effect of the trial court decision itself is negligible, and given the fact that an appellate decision upholding the trial court award would be -- because of its precedential weight -- vastly more damaging to Google's operations than the trial court decision itself, Google has no rational reason to appeal the decision.
You also can't, at launch, use the network this pricing plan applies to on a phone (unless the USB modems that are the initial exclusive devices for accessing the network are attached to a computer which then serves as an WiFi access point for a phone with WiFi connectivity), so I'm not sure what you can do with a phone is relevant at all.
On a computer -- the kind of thing that will be directly attached to the USB modems that access this network -- you can certainly watch those kind of videos.
Verizon's 4G LTE network isn't even available on phones initially, its limited to USB modems for computers (and Verizon's marketing of those USB modems and the associated plans is targetted primarily to business users); it will be rolled out to phones later.
So the more relevant question should be, "why do you need over 5GB/month in network data transfer to a computer, especially one you use for business?"
In the American system, a trial court decision has very little precedential weight (it is not binding precedent on the application of the law on any court in any future case, including even the same court, and may not even be allowed by court rules in many courts to be cited in other cases.)
Yes, there are a some ads (which ones vary from user to user) which promote products or services that a user was not previously aware of and in which the user is interested and which are, in fact, ads the user wants to see.
Heck, people voluntarily choose to watch infomercials, which are really long ads that aren't even attached to other content.
99.9% is 0.999, which has three nines after the decimal point. Which is why, when talking about uptimes, "3 nines" always means 0.999 or 99.9%, and one nine -- not that anyone would ever use that -- always means 0.9 or 90%.
Congress doesn't "strike down a law". It passes new laws. Some of which may have the effect of repealing older laws (which has a substantially different legal effect than a court interpreting, e.g., the Constitution as making a law invalid.)
Nothing a court does is the exact same thing as Congress repealing a law, either in the process by which it is done or the effect of it having been done.
Those things are all irrelevant to the point at issue, which was a response to a question about striking down laws that was posed in response to a statement about the separation of powers.
To the extent this is true, it is irrelevant; specifically, it doesn't change the fact that what the court does when it "strikes down" a law is firmly within the interpretive role, and is essential to it in a system which features Constitutionally-limited government rather than absolute legislative (e.g., parliamentary) soveriegnty.
The e-Ink based Nook (which also runs Android) was rooted and used to run regular Android apps fairly quickly after it was released. As I understand it, though, the two screen layout made it awkward, because apps aren't designed for that setup.
Yes, including a competing app store would cost them many of the pennies they hope to make through selling apps via their own curated app store.
That's not even to mention the fact that the Nook doesn't, as I understand it, meet the requirements to have access to the Android Market.