True, but ignorance of the law is no defense. Which basically means that not only must you know the text of the law, but the entire applicable body of law, relevant precedents and current interpretation of the law. Heck, you can still end up losing a trial because the Supreme Court will disagree with your reading of an ambiguous and previously unsettled area of law so being a psychic or clairvoyant could be quite useful. They'll try interpreting the law as intended and you bear the burden if they decide your gray area is on the illegal side.

In contract law you're not assumed to know anything about the background or history of the license except as written. Sure, if you've been negotiating a contract then that communication is relevant for the interpretation as you're one of the parties but developers and users of GPL software aren't generally in contact. You download a piece of software, accept the agreement and any ambiguity in a take it or leave it license will be almost certainly be interpreted in disfavor of the one who wrote it. Unlike the lawmaking it won't be assumed that their way to read the contract is the authoritative one.

Well, that part is actually not up to the GPL to define it's a key part of copyright law, if it's not derivative it's not covered by copyright so the GPL wouldn't apply.

That's fairly common here in Norway if you apply for it, they call it "account credit" though you typically don't get the 30 day free delay, you pay credit interest from day one but at least your payments don't bounce. With most terminals being online it's actually pretty hard to overdraft a debit account these days, if there's no money in the account the transaction will usually be refused.

More like the inverse debit card. When I pay with a debit card, money is withdrawn online there and then. Why can't we do the same for deposits and transfers? I just checked here in Norway and money only transfers between banks four times a day, 05.35, 11.05, 13.35 and 15.35. I guess that's fast enough for my uses, but if I pay a buddy at 4 PM why can't he buy a beer with it at 7 PM? It's not like it takes three hours to make a transaction. I understand that settling balances is hell when things change 24x7 but surely there must be some way to deal with that.

But it's usually far more than a month between theaters and DVD release. For example The Equalizer was released September 26th, DVD release is December 30th. So you get to watch it a few weeks before the others waiting for the disc, but you're still long after those who saw in in theaters stopped discussing it. Not to mention the chance of accidentally reading or hearing major spoilers, a month after release people don't put up the big spoiler warnings anymore. It sucks more for some kind of movies than others, for some that's really a downer.

If someone posts a photo taken by me I have a copyright claim.
If someone posts a photo taken of me by a hidden camera in the shower it's under a different law.
If someone posts a biography written by me I have a copyright claim.
If someone posts a biography written about me it might be libel, but not copyright infringement.

I really don't understand what kind of twisted logic they used to arrive at the conclusion that the actor has any kind of copyright claim, it's always belonged to the one pointing the camera or holding the pen. Assuming the cameraman is making a work for hire it'll pass from him to the company who hired him, the subject never had a claim nor was ever given a claim. It sounds like they wanted to arrive a conclusion and made bizarre leaps of logic to make it happen. I'm sorry but she should have filed a lawsuit and gotten a court to take it down, this copyright claim is simply fraudulent and to add insult to injury she should probably be prosecuted under the "penalty of perjury" clause.

The whole "if we offer better conditions than sweatshops, we will be run out of business by sweatshops" argument is bullshit. It's used by the economic elite to argue why you should slave all day for table scraps while they make millions and by "learning the rules" you mean "bend over and take it like a good boy". We can demand basic environmental conditions just like we demand worker health and safety, no child labor, minimum wage and a bunch of other conditions and a few might bugger off but you won't miss working there. If you squeeze too hard it will all go away though, it's not like grabbing water maybe more like pudding.

Besides, what you're talking about is not really capitalism it's human nature, of course we adapt how we play to the rules of the games. That's what they're trying to do, give people the right incentives. And yes, that is hard in a dynamic system and if you don't have a good enough model what you do might end up being counterproductive. Some of it is just ridiculous, like here in Norway we export gas and import coal-based power, because then the emissions didn't happen here. That makes no sense at all. But just because some things environmentalists do is facepalm-worthy, doesn't mean that it all is.

Sure, picking the right horse to begin with. But if you've made one kick ass movie and the studio is offering you $millions to do a sequel because you are that character and the audience is practically cheering you on before you even make a performance, don't you think he'd be a little bit interested in an easy gig whether or not the script sucks donkey balls? He's 72 and his glory days where in the 70s and 80s, I doubt he's looking for the next big thing just riding this one all the way home. Like the Rolling Stones touring even though they're soon senior citizens, I doubt they need the fame or the fortune either but it doesn't stop them replaying old hits.

I hear what you're saying but here in Norway we have stone age settlements that are 100-200 meters above the current sea level - glaciers depressed the whole country. Current coastal settlements may suffer, but even if you assume 100% of the ice melting it's not 2012 and we don't need a new Noah's ark. People live in temperatures from Sahara to Siberia and in weather patterns from rain forest to to desert. "Save us" makes it sound like we're heading towards some kind of extinction level event and clearly we're not.

The real threat to our environment is not our lifestyle, it's that we've been multiplying like rabbits. In 1900 the world population was 1650 million, they could all be polluting like Americans of 2014 and they'd still emit less CO2 in total than the world does today. If we double the population we need to cut the pollution in half to stay constant, it's not higher math. That's a very touch subject of personal freedom, but condoms, birth control and China's one child policy is probably the best long term action for the environment.

Since this is /. and the upstairs kitchen is probably his mom's it's more likely telling him to take a shower because even the beer is trying to flee from his man cave.

And if it's anything like a paper printer, does it have plastic jams the way we have paper jams? Clogged nozzles? Low "ink" or whatever the consumable is? Driver problems? Compatibility problems between template any my printer? To be fair purchasing is not without its problems either, but mass produced trinkets are usually done better by somebody else. And the odds of cost being lower is close to none, just like it costs way more idea to print your own book on your average home printer than buying it in the store.

The way I see it there's three potential winners: 1) Customization, some form of take your own measurements and adapt a template. 2) Availability, being able to print a part that's out of production. I guess you can add any restricted goods to this category. 3) Speed, I hear they're not speed demons but overnight "delivery" is still pretty fast. And while I might print "anything" on a printer a consumer 3D printer isn't working with metal, wood, leather or textiles it's just plastic trinkets. That's a very limited subset of the items I own.

That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.

Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine and I bet cops and lawyers shake their heads at the depiction of police work and the law too. For that matter I bet drug dealers and the mafia shake their heads at Weeds and Sopranos too. I'm not saying that you're wrong but it's in the nature of television to wildly misrepresent reality for dramatic effect, even in the shows that have a superficial resemblance to actual professions. Asking for that to change is to try making water not wet, it's entertainment and it needs to be entertaining while reality is full of dreary, boring routine. It should never be confused with reality unless you're watching a documentary.

This electronics retailer wouldn't happen to be in the business of selling people expensive new 4k TV sets by any chance? There's a lot of ways you could configure a 4K and 1080p TV to get that result like contrast, color and Netflix 4K probably got as many compression artifacts as an upscaled BluRay. I have a UHD monitor for gaming and such but TVs are way ahead of the content, I've no idea why 4K TVs are actually selling.

Well, one shortcoming of that chart is that it assumes 20/20 vision, that's the threshold for "normal" sight that doesn't need glasses but many people have better than that - 20/16 at least is not unusual - or can see better than that once they wear glasses/contact lenses. I think the most extreme cases are something like 20/8, meaning they can see from 20 feet what a normal person would have to be at 8 feet to see. I think it depends on source material and compression though, I've got a 28" UHD monitor (3840x2160) and done comparisons with a very high resolution, sharp image scaled down to UHD and 1080p respectively. It's noticable. It's not a huge difference, it's not like I think of 1080p as blurry. But when I watch the full resolution imagine it's more like wow, there's even more detail.