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Comment Re:There's more to come... (Score 5, Informative) 454

a voter fraud ring in Indiana.

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/23/whos-behind-group-police-say-submitted-fraudulent-voter-registration-forms/90778006/

"the group has submitted about 40,000 registration forms" ... "at least 10 of the group's voter registration forms from Marion and Hendricks counties contained fraudulent information. Local election officials said some of the group's forms were missing key information, such as Social Security numbers and birth dates."

So, 10 out of 40000 had missing info.

I am underwhelmed.

Comment It's fair to use the influences of your childhood (Score 1) 255

look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.

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

The first factor is regarding whether the use in question helps fulfill the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public, or whether it aims to only "supersede the objects" of the original for reasons of personal profit. To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. A key consideration is the extent to which the use is interpreted as transformative, as opposed to merely derivative.

This isn't passing itself off as the very sought-after Power Rangers short movie everyone's dying to buy; this is a new work that takes the premise of an old work and does something new, with criticism about the whole "child soldier" angle.

Totally fair use.

Comment Celebrities are targeted more. (Score 1) 622

But out of the millions of nude photos that are probably sent between cell phone users every month, a vanishly small proportion of them get stolen in security breaches of cloud storage.

But J-Law is not an anonymous nobody that only a very small number of people want to see naked.

There's no reason to think that Jennifer Lawrence and other victims of the hacking scandal underestimated the risk of the photos being stolen from the cloud. If anything, most users are probably over-estimating the risk today

She is not most users, she's a special case. Her risk is not the same, she's much more visible, much more desired.

It's not just a sample of random numbers, there's value attached to these images, and the value of most user's images is much lower than the value of those who are professionally attractive. Something of greater value is obviously at a greater risk of unauthorized access than something of average value.

Comment Re:Environmentalists eat your heart out. (Score 1) 211

You know, a PIPELINE would be a lot safer way of transporting crude oil around the country... Stopping the construction of pipelines results in more of these rail car accidents you know.

The LaSalle Heights Disaster occurred in the early morning of March 1, 1965 in the city of LaSalle, Quebec when a gas line explosion destroyed a number of low-cost housing units. In all, 28 people lost their lives, 39 were injured and 200 left homeless. Most of the casualties were women and children because many men had left for work. The casualties might have been higher had it not been the first of the month when many men left earlier than usual to pay their monthly rent at the rental office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Comment Not all that long ago (Score 4, Interesting) 382

You dont have to look that far into the past. Back in the 1980s, I was flying about once or twice per year between Prague and Lisbon and back. Always used Czechoslovak Airlines. The plane was largely empty, so I got to sit in the front, in facing seats with a table between them. Even when I had to sit in the "regular" class (I hesitate to call it economy, because it was nothing like today's cattle pens), we got a stewardess taking orders for drinks and snacks. And we got linen napkins with the main meal...

Ok, enough nostalgia. I'm now at the stage where speed is secondary to comfort. I want my zeppelins back!

Comment Re:Nice new business model (Score 5, Insightful) 203

This would be true, if Megaupload willfully stopped paying Carpathia. However, they expressed the willingness to continue paying them for the servers, if they had the funds available. These funds, however, were frozen by the US government, who is thus responsible for Carpathia not getting paid, and as such has taken over the duty to maintain the data integrity. It's actually nothing new - authorities in the US have been doing similar things with physical property for a while, via asset forfeiture; the only difference here is that it's digital property. And that can be much more easily routed outside the authorities' reach in the future.

Comment Nice new business model (Score 5, Insightful) 203

1. Take people's data, hold it hostage
2. Tell people to pay if they want to see the data ever again
3. Profit!

All this, of course, is contingent of the hostage taker having access to the data storage. Solution is simple: don't store your data in a country with such practices, or with a company with ties to said country. The Internet should finally recognize the US as damaged area and route around it.

Piracy

Submission + - Slovak version of RIAA charges for public performance of public domain works (m.sme.sk)

NetDanzr writes: And you thought you had it back with the RIAA... On special occasions, such as religious holidays, villages all over Slovakia customarily have children concerts of centuries old folk songs. SOZA, the Slovak version of RIAA, has started sending invoices for these performances, despite the fact that the songs are hundreds of years old, have no known author and would have been considered public domain even before the country existed (if there were a concept of music copyright back then). SOZA's argument: Because the villages did not notify the organization about the concert, along with the list of songs to be performed (as required by the law), they had to assume the villages were planing to include copyrighted songs, and as such are guilty and must pay. Here is a Google translation of the story.

Comment Re:Here comes the complaning... (Score 2) 737

Same here. I was never willing to spend the money for Photoshop, so I "grew up" with GIMP. And with Inkscape, instead of Illustrator. So when my company, where I designed the marketing materials as a side job, decided to "professionalize" and get me Photoshop and Illustrator (I believe versions C2), I struggled for a while with the UI and then decided to go back to my old software. I'm sure Adobe products are amazing - otherwise they wouldn't sell so well - but after all the time, it's difficult for me to readjust.

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