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Comment: Re:The sane judge (Score 1) 134

by cpghost (#43656889) Attached to: Judge Refers Prenda Copyright Trolls To Criminal Investigators

Unfortunately the Supreme Court refused to take up the absurd statutory award that was put forward in the Jamie Thomas case despite overturning the much (smaller proportionally speaking) Exxon Valdez award.

If the SCOTUS thinks that those absurd statutory awards are okay, what's the use of lower courts deciding otherwise, even if it is a whole string of cases? Couldn't the rights holders simply refer to the SCOTUS decision as overriding any kind of lower jurisprudence to enforce their claims and claim carte blanche to destroy peoples' lives with the help of the judicial system?

IMHO, the whole system, where special interest groups and corporations with deep pockets can buy their own laws, laws that are then backed by the courts, is broken beyond repair and can't be fixed from within. Even decent judges like Otis Wright can't fix a problem that runs much deeper than this. Nonetheless, it is still a bright day to see a little bit of sanity light up here and there, even though I don't think it would be enough to stick.

Comment: Re:"Fact": People who repair tech are "primitive" (Score 2) 347

Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.

Comment: Re:heh (Score 2) 684

by cpghost (#43570281) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are There <em>Any</em> Good Reasons For DRM?

Sorry "artists" but you don't deserve 10 million for your "creation". You deserve, at BEST, 200k a year for your work.

People rarely get what they deserve. They usually get that what the market gives them, and they deserve that which makes them useful to others. Say, a pop singer gets some millions selling his songs, while medics who save lives get far, far less than that. What said singer and those medics deserve though is something quite different... but that can't be determined by any kinds of objective criteria.

Comment: Re:It's time to move on from GCC. (Score 2) 291

by cpghost (#43508457) Attached to: LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete
While I agree that LLVM and Clang are superior, technologically and developer community-wise speaking, having multiple C++ compilers can actually improve client code quality. Right now, most OSS developers are using some GCC-isms in their code, knowingly or unknowingly, and when confronted with compiling that code with Clang, they realize just how far they left the C++ standard. Keeping more than one compiler implementation around and using them concurrently is always a good thing, IMHO.

Comment: Re:Metaphysical confusion (Score 1) 294

by cpghost (#43338151) Attached to: Judge Rules That Resale of MP3s Violates Copyright Law

Is it a physical thing? Is it an immaterial form? Is it a sequence of bits?

Mathematically, an MP3 file is nothing more than a BIG number. Nothing more, nothing less.

Think about this carefully. A couple of years ago, before someone invented the MP3 format, that very same number would have been nothing but a big number without any significance. It would have been uncopyrightable. In a couple of centuries, when the MP3 format would have become forgotten, that very same number would again become uncopyrightable, even with perpetual copyright, because it would have become meaningless (again).

Comment: Re:This Country is Going to Hell (Score 1) 283

by cpghost (#43294833) Attached to: Real-Time Gmail Spying a 'Top Priority' For FBI This Year

The thing is, any modernized country in the world has the same access to this type of technology and could be proposing similarly oppressive actions ... and yet most of them are not.

Well... actually they are. There's a world wide push for real-time scanning and deep packet inspection. Blame 9/11 or nonchalance and an apathetic populace for it, but that's the way it is.

Comment: Re:What are the alternatives? (Score 1) 283

by cpghost (#43291479) Attached to: Real-Time Gmail Spying a 'Top Priority' For FBI This Year

What are the alternatives for email services?

None, actually. If you need privacy, end-to-end encryption as in PGP is your only recourse... and it won't protect you against traffic analysis (they know with whom you communicate, when and how often, even if they can't decrypt). If you need something against traffic analysis as well, perhaps a an ip2p- or freenet-based darknet with enough family and friends as members would do? You can send e-mails on top of those networks just fine.

Comment: Re:PGP (Score 1) 283

by cpghost (#43291365) Attached to: Real-Time Gmail Spying a 'Top Priority' For FBI This Year
For a normal mail provider, sure, that's a good idea. For mail providers like Gmail that make money out of advertising, and thus (automatically) reading the mail of their users, it's not a viable alternative. Right now, Gmail tolerates the little group of users who use PGP/GnuPG, because that group is so small. But imagine that this groups grows above a certain threshold. What then?

Comment: But think of the lobbyists... (Score 1) 213

by cpghost (#43263747) Attached to: Should Congress Telecommute?
A telecommuting, decentralized Congress would make life for all those "poor" lobbyists much more difficult. They'll have to travel to all kinds of weird States they never heard before to deliver their corruption^Wcampaign money to Congresspeople, instead of having them all in one nice place inside the Beltway. Won't anybody please think of the lobbyists?!

"Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)

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