Posts by James Micallef

all money is virtual

the only difference between them is in the amount of people who accept that money. Using € or £ to buy Farmville virtual dollars that can only be spent in Farmville is no different to using € or £ to buy Outer Mongolian <whatever> that can only be spent in Outer Mongolia.

So for FB that's real money rolling in for doping nothing more than allowing Zynga to operate games on their platform.

Yes I know about Ultraviolet. If implemented as specified will be great, I alrady commented to that effect on the Reg article on UV.

But will copyright holders be willing to reduce copyright terms from the current.... what.... 70 years?? in exchange for laws that properly work against online piracy?

shall I draw you a diagram??

You're free to prefer blondes over brunettes.

You're not free to abuse brunettes just because you prefer blondes.

I'm generally against taxing unhealthy stuff (and Sugar is as bad for the health as HFCS when consumed in industrial amounts - the problem really is that every drink, fast-food, prepackaged meal etc has LOTS of it) . Treat people as adults and let them make their own choices. Stop subsidising corn for HCFS and remove sugar import taxes (Heck, isn't it the USAans who are usually banging on about free trade? Or is that only when free trade helps you to sell stuff to Africa & Latin America, not to help them to sell you stuff?)

Above all, people need to have a minimum of education about what rubbish is in a lot of food these days.

Heinlein got there first

The moon is a harsh mistress

Even if they charge a premium for the use of the 80A charger over the real cost of the electricity, I reckon it won't be more than a quid or two. Don't have time to do the maths though

The vast majority of people in prison in the US are for harmless drug offences (possession or personal use). Marijuana use in the US is about 50% white. People in jail for marijuana use / possession is about 10-20% white.

the vast majority of immigrants are law-abiding precisiely because they know they'll be deported if they do something criminal, so they keep their heads down and work.

Thanks for the answers, a lot clearer now :)

google will have to respond to infringement and take-down notices a bit more promptly, but it should already have such mechanisms in place. The key part from Google's (and any ad network's) point of view is that they are not required to proactively monitor the sites they link to / advertise on. So the burden on finding / asking to remove infringing sites is completely on the rights holder (which is as it should be)... and basically all they'll be doing is play whack-a-mole since as soon as a site gets taken off one place it will pop up in another

erm.... actually it's some people in the US and Israel who are begging to attack Iran. The politicians in the US are beholden to the Israel lobby to such an extent that most prioritise Israel's interests over US ones in the middle east. The US has no real strategic concern with Iran beyond a basic stability that keeps the strait of Hormuz open to oil tanker shipping.

Those who REALLY want to attack Iran are the Israeli far right, partly concerned about the 'destroy Israel' rhetoric coming from Iran (which is really mostly rhetoric), but mostly because they want to stay the only nuclear-capable country in the region (which allows them pretty much a free hand in dealing with Palestine without the other Arab countries interfering).

Sure there are some ultra-religious Islamist nuts in Iran ranting on about the great satan, executing gay people and blowing up Buddha statues, but they're no different from the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel who are intent on permanently occupying the whole of the west bank. nor from the right-wing Christianists* in the US.

*Christianist = Christian version of Islamists. Christians are in favour of love, peace and charity, Christianists are in favour of capital punishment, torture, war on non-Christians, and entrenching their religious prejudices in the US constitution. Since they can't execute gays in the US, they materially support this practice in places such as Uganda.

"How about rewarding customers for paying with DRM-free downloads"

I can see the studio's point of view in this. Instead of saying - here's your DRM-free download, you can do with it everything you like, they are now saying - here's your DRM-lite download, you can do everything you like with it EXCEPT make it available as a torrent to the general public.

That seems pretty fair to me.

no, different from voicemail 'hacking'

There's a huge difference, legally at least, between KNOWING a specific password (such as if this guy knowing his wife's password, which would imply that she consented to his access and GUESSING that password, even if it is trivial because the idiot user left the default password (because in this case there is no implied consent).

If the wife left her email open on a shared computer, even if there's maybe no implied consent, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, same as leaving an opened letter on the kitchen table

lawyers

Apple is supposed to have some pretty good ones, they should have read the small print better. No sympathy

...and even when their power gives up the ghost and stops transmission, they'll keep on going and going and going, potentially for tens, hundreds of thousands of years... perhaps even millions considering that the chances of them bumping into anything solid are fairly close to zero