Actually, quite the opposite. Not for the lack of moral turpitude, but for the presence of it. Turpitude = depraved or wicked behaviour or character.
Quite true... I was so taken with the idea of moral turpitude that I ended up in two minds about how to phrase it, and ended up doing both, shooting myself in the grammatical foot in the process... that'll teach me to get excited about turpitude
As a university student, my uni grants access to MS products like Windows, Visual Studio etc. It really was a matter of entering a serial and that was all that had to be done. I take it off the shelf windows activates more obtusely?
Basically, yes. For Enterprise/Volume/Educational institution licences, there is a fairly basic serial number activation process to allow the mass-rollout of desktops from a central publishing server like SCCM. That means your IT department will not mutiny over having activation problems on 15% of your workstations after rolling out a new installation to 10,000 desks.
For the one-off retail items, either in terms of OEM or boxed product, the activation hassles lie with the end user (i.e. one individual... not much direct revenue to M$) even though the OEMs probably roll out the same installation image to a similar number of workstations as the mass-rollout IT crowd. Of course, the end user can call the OEM's support line to bitch about it, but unless the OEM's support line is a premium rate number that is generating revenue just by having know-nothing users being guided through activation by know-almost-nothing Tier 1 support, then the OEM will say "Activation problems... sorry, go talk to Microsoft. Our contract states that we provide hardware support only..."
From which ditch they will run their congressional campaigns.
I am not sure it would go quite that far... after all, they may be liars, cheats, bullies, shysters, conmen, and to cap it all... lawyers. But there is a long way to go from that to suggest they can make the leap to the next level of unconscionable evil and become Congressional Politicians.
Oh, damn, showing my jaundiced and cynical side there, making the overly broad generalization that all politicians are scum of the earth whose sole purpose in running for office seems to be to hop on the gravy train of lobbyists' "Campaign Contributions" and line their own pockets at the expense of the electorate and citizenry of the country they are elected to serve
An interesting side-question would be to ask how many competent and genuinely honest people would get into politics to do some real good, but are put off or corrupted in the face of the Gravy Train on one side, and world-weary cynics like me, seeing the worst in all politicians and condemning them without personal knowledge, on the other. Not too many, I guess... (but if you think that YOUR congressman/woman is doing a good job, don't just post about it here, send them a letter praising their performance - if enough people do that, so that they get some positivity once in a while, it might help them to make the right choice next time, too.
Oooo look, a Unicorn!!
It took this ONE judge basically collecting 5-10 other Fedral cases after putting out an order to consolidate Prenda's cases to fewer jurisdictions. It was only after getting a half dozen other circuit courts to agree, he could even read that they had been using different names and such in different courts. He broke down a lot of the corporate veil judges normally don't get to do.
It took special permissions from other courts and over a year of sorting paperwork to get ONE SET of troll lawyers. Effectively all this does its chase the trolls out of HIS court, and into courts where the judges won't catch them.
Actually, the Judge has gone a bit further than that - he has referred all of the individuals identified as actively culpable to the Bar Associations for the districts where they are legally allowed to practice due to their lack of "moral turpitude". Given that judges have no direct control (albeit with considerable influence, but no official ability to directly rule on such matters), he is effectively telling the American Bar association to strike these guys off, take them to a quiet spot, order them to dig a ditch and climb in, ready for the ditch to be filled in.
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Not to mention that it's already in orbit.
Nice idea... simple solution... but if we take this seriously (sorry, too early in the morning for my sense of humour to have woken up yet) the only problem with it is that any explosive method of dealing with orbiting debris just creates lots of small and tiny pieces of shrapnel, and traveling through a field of that crap at orbital velocities is not going to be the highlight of your day. Not a problem if you are in an M1 Abrams battle tank, but satellites do not have armour, except for shielding against the sun's radiation, and things like solar panels do not work very well after being hit a few times by orbital debris.
What we REALLY need is a small version of Mega Maid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VptOUWC-Itc) to go up there and hoover up all the junk, preferably while leaving all the viable stuff alone.
Where are all the machines they threw away?
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
There are many establishments which could have benefited here, but there are two issues with that - first, the machines would have to be sanitized so there is a guarantee that no confidential information is stored on them (90% of government IT disposals ignore that rule, but the Germans are actually among the best at following it); and second, I am pretty sure that the majority of recipient organisations would say "no thanks, we cannot handle the clean-up" if an organisation said "here you go, have 170 PCs that are infected with a virus, all you have to do is clean the virus off the system", either because the recipient organisation is lazy or because they are a charity/educational institution with little or no available IT expertise.
Private. All of them.
An unpublicized reading or performance is a private performance (unpublicized meaning by definition not made known to the public). If the nursing home had advertised the performance using the title of the performed work in any way, as opposed to having "reading time" or "music time" on a schedule, then they would fall uner public performance guidelines.
If you don't make the performance of the specific work known to the public then it is a private performance.
Personally, I would love to come and live in the country you are writing the laws for...
However according to US law,
To perform or display a work “publicly” means—
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
So the fact that you are not advertising the "performance" is irrelevant. What makes it a public performance is whether it is in a place where members of the public might have a reasonable expectation of being able to go, or whether you are broadcasting it in a way that someone in such a "public" place might reasonably be able to receive that transmission.
Interestingly enough, one of the edge cases in this instance is a party. You sitting with your daughter to watch a Disney film is a private performance. You sitting with your octuplets (8 children born at the same time) is a private performance. You and your sister sitting watching the Disney film, with both your octuplets and her octuplets (2 adults, 16 children) is a private performance. Add a journalist and cameraman from the local newspaper who are there to cover the party, because both sets of octuplets were born on the same day and are now enjoying their second birthday, and where the journo and cameraman happen to be in the room when the film is playing, that is a public performance according to the current interpretation of the rules, even though it is a private party in a private residence, because they happen to be outside the normal circle of social acquaintances of the people at the party.
(I do not have a site link to a case for that, but it happened to my ex-wife and her new husband, just with not quite so many octuplets)
Aren't you just creating an atmosphere where a child interested in the opposite sex (or the same sex for that matter) has to be ashamed of that, and subsequently have to go around you to satisfy said interest? How is your "solution" even solving a problem? The kid sheltered like that is just going to have a much harder landing when they actually do have interact with the rest of the World.
Not at all. If you look objectively at most of the porn on the internet (I can think of a few people who would apply for a job, if that was in the description...), and consider that any children looking at the same material probably have much less sexual experience than you do (I say "probably", because I am sure there are one or two 40-year old virgin geeks on this site), that porn will come to form the majority of their "sexual experience" until they start to have such encounters themselves. So things like deep-throating, anal sex, DP, multiple partners, and guys (or women) treating women (or other guys) as a collection of holes that need to be penetrated while swearing and physically abusing the victim become normal.
For sure, parents have a duty of care to their children and should actually, you know... "talk" to them to explain about sex. Will teenagers find another way to get access to all that porn? Definitely, but denying them access to it at home is not going to engender shame in them. Your attitude as a parent when talking to (or not talking to) your children about the finer points of their relationships with other human beings will take care of that.
There needs to be heavy punitive measures against this sort of thing.
There ARE punitive measures against this sort of thing - they were added to counter concerns that content rights-holders would abuse the DMCA for just this sort of purpose.
Putting it in simple terms, the problem is that the person/organisation receiving the DMCA takedown has to (a) file an appeal against the takedown, and then in order for the punitive measures to kick in, they have to (b) prove that the organisation issuing the DMCA notice did so maliciously, knowing that they had no right to demand take-down of the subject material.
In other words, to avoid the punishment for falsely sending out DMCA notices, all the sender has to do is say "doh, silly me... sorry - I had no idea that I was not allowed to do that..."
Quoting from Ofcom on the suibject...
"Ofcom said that the aim of the auction was not to generate revenue for the government, but to promote competition that will ensure consumers will benefit from the rollout of 4G services."
However, I would be willing to bet my mortgage and my left testicle that the mobile carriers will say "this service is x% better than the 3G network, so we need to charge the consumer at least x% more than they paid for 3G services" irrespective of the relative cost of the 3G and 4G services to the provider.
Ofcom's approach is a nice idea, if the savings from reduced licence cost are passed on to the consumer, but in related news it has been discovered that the problems with the Curiosity rover on Mars are caused by the fact that the water we were hoping to find there is actually Champagne, and the rover is currently detoxing in a Martian Alcoholics Anonymous facility before resuming its place as a productive member of Martian society...
Reducing the cost to big business in the hope that there is a trickle-down effect will not see all of those savings go in Management bonuses at the mobile companies, but considering that the expected revenue will now have to be made up by the British taxpayer, the net result will be a win for the business and a loss for the man in the street.
There's a big difference between scanning all messages passing through an exchange on fishing expeditions and looking in the phone of somebody who's already under arrest for criminal activity.
When you're under arrest as a drug dealer the police can search you and your belongings. They can even look up your ass if they want to.
When under arrest, the police certainly can search you and examine your belongings. However, the scope of their investigation is quite heavily restricted under law, and from a quick spin through the article (sorry
However, for the police to then use that mobile phone and impersonate the first suspect to arrange a meeting with the second suspect smacks to me of entrapment against that second suspect.
As an aside, if one of my friends sent me a sms along the lines of "dude, let's meet in 20 minutes at X, I want to sell you some drugs", I would (a) know that it is not one of my friends, because no-one would call me "dude", and (b) I would assume they were joking about the drugs so I would go along to the meeting place thinking he had a fight with his girlfriend and needed to get drunk... getting there and meeting the police would take me somewhat by surprise. Having said that, would a "suspected drug dealer" be among my list of friends, and would I still react i the same way if the person who wanted to meet was a suspected drug dealer?
But as a SMS is a point to point communication medium, I would expect a judge who understands technology (I hear these do exist, and they live at the North Pole with Santa Claus) to rule either that SMS messages are electronic letters and there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, or that they are private if the receiving phone has a passcode lock enabled and public if a passcode lock is not enabled. But enforcing that conditional privacy clause would be a nightmare.
So you are saying that the IP *DOES* uniquely identify "something" even if not a person, thus proving the original AC to be an idiot, which was my point.
The IP identifies a communication end-point on the ISP's network, but unless the ISP has allocated that as a static IP address, the allocation is done on a DNCP basis and is time-sensitive.
If you want to put this in terms of physical locations, that DHCP address is like saying that a bomb was mailed from a particular hotel room, and the hotel has given the authorities a list of the people who booked that room during the period in which the bomb might have been posted. The authorities then go and charge all of those people with a terrorist offence, rather than finding out which of them actually did it.
A copyright infringement shakedown to all of those individuals takes much less effort and will probably get better results than actually going through the process of determining which specific individual was responsible for the offence. In fact, I would not be surprised if there are a few trolls out there with teams cruising neighbourhoods for open wifi hotspots, who stop for an hour to leech that wifi connection, so that the troll can generate addittional "infringers" - they can probably find 8-10 open wifi hotspots per team member per day, and at the low low price of $7500 per infringement to make the problem go away, $60-75k per person per day is quite a good profit, even with lawyers fees. Not that I am saying Voltage Pictures are pulling that one... but I am not the world's most paranoid conspiracy theorist so I am fairly sure that someone has come up with that as a business model.
Wikipedia is almost nothing without contributors, and french government can put a heavy presure on french contributors.
What wil be the result if each government acts the same way ?
This is the core problem in this case. If the French government, or in deed any government outside the US, wanted to go after Wikipedia, they would find that for all the Wikimedia Foundation is not a money making machine, there are plenty of legally trained people willing to leap to its defence. Plus it would be a great bit of American flag-waving, with the forces of Goodness, Truth and The American Way protecting US Citizens from the corrupt/socialist/communist/feminist/European/Chinese/Arab/terrorist/non-Hollywood/pirate/non-Christian (delete as appropriate) evils.
If the US government wants to shut it down, one call from any number of unaccountable officials in shadowy agencies could pretty much bury the whole thing.
On the other hand, if a government wants to go after the contributors, they are much less likely to have any legal training, backup or knowledge of how the law works, and a couple of big guys with official-looking badges suddenly become very effective at getting the contributor censored.
Throwing the book at them (preferably an authentic replica of the stone tablets that the 10 Commandments were written on) would be very satisfying, but arguing premeditation would be a challenge - there are definitely elements to the scam that suggest it could be made to stick, but the defence would also have plausible arguments.
Manslaughter or culpable homicide would be easier to argue for, and given that you would almost certainly be looking at more than one death, the results should amount to a similar time in gaol (jail, to the American-English speakers among us).
The security of a computer is only as strong as its weakest link, and that weakest link is almost always the 6 inch gap between the ears of the computer user. And because the compromise of an entire network is easier to achieve once a single computer on the network is compromised, that makes the security of the corporate network only as strong as the weakest link... and every time you think you have found your company's dumbest user, you find another one who makes your previous candidate look like an IT geek.
So you almost have to plan for "when we have a breach, how are we going to mitigate it and recover" instead of "if we have a breach, how do we hide the evidence", while knowing that the company management will almost certainly shoot down your plan on cost grounds and then fire your ass when the breach occurs.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect "Hungry." -- a Larson cartoon
