Sure it does. You for some reason ASSuME that the fireworks will inevitably set your house on fire (apparently it has yet to happen), so you kill the fun for everyone else. Water your lawn that afternoon and hose down the roof, it'll be fine.

Unfortunately its not fear of the punishment that makes someone think twice before committing a crime. Its almost only the prospect of being caught that figures. And of course they think they are awesomely clever so they underestimate the prospects of being caught. So they still commit the crime even if the sentence for, say, stealing a loaf of bread is death by hanging or, possibly worse, being deported to Australia.

Punishment is pretty meaningless in this context. You have to make it really stupid easy for them to be caught so that even their arrogant minds can see it.

Theres a country where employers do background checks including looking at arrest records. If you've ever been arrested you'll never get a decent job again. So you were wrongfully arrested, acquitted, maybe the cops were even punished. You were still arrested and you still won't get a job.

Still want arrest records to be a matter of public record? Better also have laws prohibiting people from refusing a former arrestee a job, just like they do for gays and racial minorities. Mr "Sorry but my religion won't let me hire a gay" has a problem. Mr "Sorry but you were once arrested, I can't give you a job." should also have a problem.

At most the background check shouldn't be for arrests but for convictions...

Places where thats been tried, and chemical castration as well, these people tend to still rape they just do it with implements, like sticks.

The FBI operate within the USA. The NSA and CIA are supposed to operate outside the USA. So one would assume that either GCHQ, CSIS, NZSIS or ASIS are the ones feeding the data since, due to 5 eyes, these guys are all spying like crazy on 'Murcans and feeding their intel to the NSA/CIA/FBI

Strenuously disagree. This is more than a billing error here, it is an implicit threat of expensive legal action wrapped in a takedown that at the least interferes with someone's free expression. They need to take it seriously or go away.

Civilization has long understood the dangers of crying wolf and even has a number of fables about it in order to teach young children not to do it.

They are welcome to use their algorithm as a screening test, but they shouldn't be claiming ownership of things without human verification. Since their algorithm must have some 'idea' what it thinks the work is, it should only take a few seconds per filing to have a human verify that what is playing is what the algorithm thinks it is.

Perhaps the ban on the easy method of making a claim should expire after a time, but the message is fairly clear: If they prove they are unable to responsibly use a largely automated system, they will be forced to do it manually in order to force them to consider each case more carefully. It may even be acceptable to grant them 3 strikes rather than 1, but only if they issue a personal (hand written) apology from their CEO to the person they wrongly claimed against.

Alice posts a video using music that Bob owns the copyright to. Carol posts a video that uses music Bob falsely claims to also hold the copyright for. Unfortunately Bob's false claim against Carol doesn't change the fact that he actually does have a legitimate legal claim against Alice's video. So kicking him off the system means he's going to issue a takedown against Alice. The whole point of bringing him into the system was to give him an incentive to leave Alice alone.

The problem here isn't Bob and Alice -- that part of the scenario is working fine. The problem is Bob and Carol. There's no incentive for Bob not to make false claims against Carol. That's the bit that has to be fixed.

Well, if people can be born gay then they can be born religious too, I guess.

Phew, glad I didn't write that in NZ...

And the government can tell you 'Murcans to exercise your 'free speech' in special fenced areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This is NZ not the USA

Well, it may interest you to know that courts judging "emotional distress" is not some new Internet fad. In the year 1348 an innkeeper brought suit against a man who had been banging on his tavern door demanding wine. When the innkeeper stuck his head out the doorway to tell the man to stop, the man buried the hatchet he was carrying into the door by the innkeeper's head. The defendant argued that since there was no physical harm inflicted no assault had taken place, but the judged ruled against him [ de S et Ux. v. W de S (1348)]. Ever since then non-physical, non-financial harm has been considered both an essential element of a number of of crimes, a potential aggravating factor in others, and an element weighed in establishing civil damages.

This does *not*, however, mean that hurt feelings in themselves constitute a crime. It's a difficult and sometimes ambiguous area of the law, but the law doesn't have the luxury of addressing easy and clear-cut cases only.

As to why a new law is need now, when the infliction of emotional distress has been something the law has been working on for 667 years, I'd say that the power of technology to uncouple interactions from space and time has to be addressed. Hundreds of years ago if someone was obnoxious to you at your favorite coffeehouse, you could go at a different time or choose a different coffeehouse. Now someone intent on spoiling your interactions with other people doesn't have to coordinate physical location and schedule with you to be a persistent, practically inescapable nuisance.

Does this mean every interaction that hurts your feelings on the Internet is a crime? No, no more than everything that happens in your physical presence you take offense at is a crime.

What I stated was factual; it is a fact that a user does not need to remove their entire hand from typing to use the trackpoint. That is part of the reason why it was designed that way. You can hate the trackpoint as much as you want for whatever reasons you chose, but when you lie about it you just look ridiculous. Why would you move your entire hand to use something that is designed to be manipulated with one finger? You couldn't use your entire hand on it even if you wanted to.

Now I'm quite sure you've never done any embedded work. Debian USED to be a good base for an embedded system.