Who'd have guessed that element 114 would turn out to be a cancer-detecting breathalyzer?

I'd be fine with scrolling through pictures as described, but I'd hate to write an SMS with a touchscreen. I think that the difference with the iPhone is that it's a trade-off. You get a much bigger screen in return for dealing with the touchscreen.

It isn't extortion. The disconnection is legal under the terms of the contract (violation of TOS).

Reconnection is then subject to negotiation, or the customer can take their business elsewhere. That cannot be extortion because you aren't threatening the customer with anything. He can have his server back. He is under no obligation.

<i>...it's forcing entry to a legitimate server or tampering with their equipment (if you were mistaken about them being a spammer).</i>

It's not forcing entry at all. It is entry with permission as the result of a non-obligatory contract renegotiation.

Well, you probably broke quite a few laws by using coersion to gain access to a customer's servers. But I for one would overlook it, given the benefits to the world at large (still it could be risky).

Fortunately, given the use of GRE tunnels, the spammer probably broke more laws, and would probably be a bit hesitant to sue.

No legal problem there. It's a contract issue.

Yet the breaking news for Monday is that the China is planning to enforce a whitelist on foreign domains: in particular, any e-commerce will have to register locally and obey Chinese law before they get whitelisted.

Where does it say that? Citation needed!

Single speed provides a significant weight saving. Most of the bike disappears. A much simpler rear hub, no cassette or chainrings, no dérailleurs and no rear brake. You end up with so little bike that there is very little left that can fail.

Even if they have replaced every line that you wrote, surely if this was done step by step then their resultant work is still derivative of your work, so your copyright interest remains? Not that I'm a lawyer or anything.

Our industry considers it a minimum.

Which providers of competing systems can provide a comparable SLA, and at what cost?

> The printer that you buy with ink comes with cartridges that are, at most, half full.

I think you'll find that they're half empty.

> We had about 40 hard drive failures and 12 power supply failures coming back up that evening.

That could have just been due to an infrequent shut down. Hard drives are known for not being able to spin back up after being run for a very long time, for example.

This isn't backslashdot, it's slashdot. So that's GNU/Linux for you, not GNU\Linux.

Fonts are only protected in that they are "programs" for creating type. Once a font is used, you own the result. The shapes themselves are not protected.

With an image, if you subsequently use an image, you are making an unauthorised copy.

With a font, once you have the font and use it, then the output is entirely yours.

The different between fonts and images is that images need to be copied (infringement), but fonts only need to be used (not infringement).

Fonts may come with an EULA which tries to change this, but it is debatable whether this would be valid as you did not agree to any contract when you visited the website with an embedded font.

So you end up with a legitimate copy as you describe. Now you could move that copy to your system font directory. You could direct anyone else who needs the font to go to the same website you got yours from and move it to your system font directory in the same way.

So if any one website uses a font, everyone has access to a free font download.

Just a thought...the IWF have no special legal status, right? They're examining child pornography in order to determine what to put on the blacklist, right? So why is it not illegal for them to be doing this?

Is this a route to force them to be accountable?