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Comment Re:Jurisdiction (Score 1) 210

Copyright, as in "intellectual property", is a notion that exploded from The Shining City on the Hill, namely Jesus's country, America. We've rammed each and every treaty down the world's throat for almost thirty years. Now that it's established, of course European copyright lords are helping seal us in with our cask of Amontlliado. But it is American in origin.

Comment Re:The Law of Intended Consequences (Score 4, Insightful) 210

Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.

Comment Re:Jurisdiction (Score 2, Insightful) 210

"How can the government of country A fine a company from country B any money when that company's dealing has NOTHING to do with country A in the first place ???"

Empire. Rules of an empire. We've thousands of nukes, hundreds of military bases in a hundred+ counties, and we create every single "treaty" that governs our actions. You are either a vassal, or a cooperating and subordinate power.

Americans are fine with this idea. They never leave home much, and even if they did, they would not mind the hate. We are the fhining City on the Hill, the Nation Favoured by Providence, the people chosen by God Almighty to lead the world to a perfect age, so that Jesuf can come back, deftroy the world, hurl the unbelieverf and the wicked into the Pit of Fire for ever and ever and build a new Fhining City of Gold for uf, the chofen, to live with Jefus forever, along with perhaps a few foreigners who listened to the Holy Word of America.

If you don't understand the news coming from America, the above is THE explanation. You need no others; it is not hyperbole. And it will get so much worse.

Comment Re:I lost the password (Score 1) 560

While it’s true that they will open a physical safe themselves if you refuse, you can indeed be held in contempt if you have the ability to open a safe and refuse to do so when presented with a valid warrant. The “physical safe” analogy is one of the things that’s (unfortunately) applied as an existing-law analogy to crypto.

That's actually only true if they already know for certain it's your safe and you have access to it. Otherwise, admitting that you know how to open the safe (by opening it or providing the combination) is admitting that the contents of it are in fact yours. That's self-incrimination and you can't be forced to do it, though of course with a valid warrant they can still try to break into the safe. They just can't make you admit it's yours, and that's what you're doing if you open it.

In this case, however, the idiot went and bragged to the police that yeah, that stuff is all mine! To extend the safe analogy, that's like saying to the police "Yeah, I know the combination, but I'm not giving it to you!" Now you wouldn't be telling them anything they don't know, so opening the safe is no longer self-incriminating. If he'd kept his mouth shut (first rule of being questioned by the police, keep your fucking mouth shut, they mean it when they say anything you say will be used against you), this case would likely have been decided differently.

Comment Re:Most interesting part... (Score 1) 461

American incomes have been stagnant, or declining in real purchasing power for thirty years. That hasn't not happened in Germany, which allows unions to exist - and operate properly.
A large number of the American middle class are months away from losing their homes, given a health cost issue or a job loss, a situation that doesn't happen often in Germany.
We are adopting private solar plants at a slower rate primarily because a chunk of our middle class can't afford it, not with the hell that they've been taking since the "free marketers" took over. Germany's people are more secure and more prosperous, because they've made fewer ideological decisions about income distribution.
Germany ain't perfect, but it's middle class is richer than ours. It's that simple.

Comment Economically impossible! Government is bad! (Score 1, Insightful) 461

It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer.
They are an economic powerhouse with strong exports, a union-based worker's economy, and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun, in something less than ten-twenty years. WHILE they absorbed a pauperized East Germany after the Soviets finally gave up. Oh yep - they innovate like mad. With health care for everyone.
Randites, avoiding the No True Scottman fallacy, examine why you are wrong on this. Seriously, before your wreck us beyond repair.

Comment Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Case (Score 5, Informative) 448

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

Owner (APPLICANT) WeTag, Inc. CORPORATION TEXAS 3309 San Mateo Drive Plano TEXAS 75023

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Mars

Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026 275

An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

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