Yartrebo’s Techdirt Profile

yartrebo

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  • Sep 11th, 2012 @ 1:01pm

    (untitled comment)

    I think it's a fair payment considering he's been jailed for it and it's made him a lot of enemies.

    I know I wouldn't do it ... I value my life too dearly for even $100M.
  • Jul 24th, 2012 @ 8:25pm

    (untitled comment)

    What I find odd is what is the Red Cross doing provisioning belligerents? I thought they were supposed to be a humanitarian and transnational organization and not supporting militarism or nationalism.

    Anyways, my pet peeve against the Red Cross is their history of trademark bullying against people using crosses to represent first aid kits or hospitals. I'm not aware of anything else that can be well rendered in a 8x8 sprite that conveys the meaning 'medical' as well as that.

    Then again, some of the fault must lie with the trademark office for not revoking it due to being a genericised trademark (something which the trademark office is notorious for not doing).
  • Jul 20th, 2012 @ 8:46pm

    An Anecdote

    This effect can be see very clearly if you look at the dates for a lot of the biology-related images in Wikipedia. An awful lot date from the early 1900s, from various now-public domain textbooks and encyclopedias.

    For example, most of the pictures in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femur are from the 1918 edition of Gray's anatomy.

    I'm pretty sure it isn't out of some massive epidemic of nostalgia on the part of Wikipedians, but rather that the long term of copyright means that reference sources from the roaring 20s onwards are off-limits.
  • Jul 9th, 2012 @ 1:01pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Yup. I'm a New Yorker and my experiences are with the NY job market. Silicon Valley is just a tiny portion of the country. If that small locale is having a labor shortage, then start advertising nationally and offering incentives to relocate.

    If you offer enough, they will come.
  • Jul 9th, 2012 @ 8:30am

    (untitled comment)

    It feels that we have a glut of skilled labor, not a shortage. I'm trained in computer science (have a BS in the field), am quite skilled in it, but have left the field because of the perennially lousy employment conditions.

    Here is what I'd say a real shortage would look like:
    - Employers would be willing to hire those with no experience (but a degree).
    - More positions than applicants.
    - Employee-favorable work and hiring conditions (trends in pay, job security, vacation, hours worked, benefits, etc).
  • Jul 5th, 2012 @ 10:41pm

    (untitled comment)

    "A condition of the contract is that two electronic chips in each machine, which hold information on how the equipment works, are destroyed."

    Somehow I smell a cover-up here. If the systems are not fit for purpose and aren't being used any more, I can see no security reason.
  • Jun 27th, 2012 @ 9:12am

    Re: Re: Re:

    I'm pretty sure US anti-trust law and probably some US free trade agreements disallow this kind of discriminatory pricing and practices. It's just that it's never enforced or selectively interpreted to allow this activity, probably because there isn't a lobby with strong political connections pushing for enforcement.

    PS: I know it's in Norway, but the works themselves are produced and generally first sold in the USA, and the DVD being used for the subtitling probably was purchased from a US vendor.
  • Jun 15th, 2012 @ 10:23am

    Re: Re:

    It's just what Marxist economics predicts. A reserve army of the unemployed to beat down those who are employed. It doesn't just come in the form of wages (which are declining), but in the form of the conditions on the job.

    It probably does effect the quality of the product they deliver and it certainly is a social ill, but that shouldn't effect next quarter's profit.
  • Jun 4th, 2012 @ 11:05am

    Re: Smart?

    China probably isn't that happy. If they wanted the censorship to be in-your-face to this extent, they wouldn't be using a 404 error when a naughty term is spotted, but would instead redirect the user to a nasty government web page (the way our ICE department likes to operate).
  • May 30th, 2012 @ 11:11pm

    Re: Relativity...!

    There should be no effect - liquids are usually thoroughly stirred before fermentation so that the bacteria/fungi are evenly distributed. Even if there were, the effect would be to slow down any chemical process by greatly reducing convection.

    Considering the brand name was placed in the article, I think the real reason is clear - it's a marketing stunt.
  • May 23rd, 2012 @ 9:25am

    How is this legal?

    Pretty much any EULA I've ever seen for software, with the exception of open source, prohibits reverse engineering?

    Why does this troll get to do it, but normal people can't (at least not legally)?
  • May 20th, 2012 @ 4:24pm

    (untitled comment)

    Yup - 0/0 only has meaning as a limit, and that's how I'm interpreting the court's statement.

    Since the site didn't actually host any content, we have no way of knowing which function was used to generate that limit, and thus no way to prove or falsify the stated value of 90%. Eg., the ratio .9x/x would give a limit of 90%, whereas the ratio .5x/x would not - and both give 0/0 when evaluated at x=0.

    So you're right that it's outside of the realm of mathematics - it fits in the same category as the truth value of the existence of God.
  • May 20th, 2012 @ 12:47pm

    (untitled comment)

    "I want to know how the court found that a site that doesn't host any content had 90% of its content devoted to infringing."

    If one wants to get mathematical, any percentage (including percentages below 0% and above 100% and +INF and -INF) are all valid, since both the numerator (number of infringing works hosted) and denominator (total works hosted) are zero. 0/0 can equal any real number.

    Maybe the judge figured that saying 5,000,000% wouldn't have the same impact as 90%, so he used the form of 0/0 that best served his agenda?
  • May 20th, 2012 @ 12:45pm

    (untitled comment)

    "I want to know how the court found that a site that doesn't host any content had 90% of its content devoted to infringing."

    If one wants to get mathematical, any percentage (including percentages below 0% and above 100% and +INF and -INF) are all valid, since both the numerator (number of infringing works hosted) and denominator (total works hosted) are zero. 0/0 can equal any real number.

    Maybe the judge figured that saying 5,000,000% wouldn't have the same impact as 90%, so he used the form of 0/0 that best served his agenda?
  • Apr 23rd, 2012 @ 11:37am

    Re: Is the tech sector slowly dying?

    About 30 years ago, the common opinion in the tech sector was the computer code was not copyrightable, as they were just a bunch of instructions and equations. My, how times have changed :(
  • Apr 21st, 2012 @ 3:46pm

    (untitled comment)

    If you came up with a foolproof way for a manufacturer of a physical good to reduce their manufacturing and distribution costs by 99%, would the price to the customer go up or down?

    If that producer has a monopoly, I would expect the price to drop only a small amount. If the demand is also perfectly inelastic (oil is pretty close to that), then the price will stay exactly the same.

    The key word is monopoly. All monopolies result in high prices and in no need for a corporation to pass through any savings (whereas a competitive market would force them to).
  • Mar 22nd, 2012 @ 2:44pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: This case should even be a case

    Well, the criminal punishment is pretty similar (~10 years either way), and the civil penalties are lighter for murder (actual damages, perhaps trebled, vs $500,000 statutory)
  • Mar 22nd, 2012 @ 2:12pm

    Perhaps Copy is the Wrong Word

    I have to disagree. Copying is a pretty broad word and it applies to the arrangement of matter or fields (ie., data or information). Even the copyright maximalists are missing out on some forms of copying. For example, the photons emitted from a TV screen are a copy, and if they're reflected off a half-silvered mirror (eg., a window or the surface of an eyeball), they become multiple copies, and if some of them make it into space, they're essentially permanent copies. To be even more pedantic, the gravitons emitted during a live performance constitute an essentially permanent copy, as nothing short of a neutron star or black hole can absorb or interfere with them to any significant degree. Likewise, the neutrinos emitted during beta decay in the naturally (or not so naturally in the nuclear age) occurring isotopes in any person's body would carry information, and thus be a copy of that data.

    The problem is that a restriction on copying makes about as much sense as a restriction on moving (eg., walking, breathing, turning your eyes, digesting, having your heart beat, being at a temperature greater than absolute zero). Both are basic actions that happen all the time in both the natural and human worlds.

    What is needed is a more appropriate word, not to redefine an already existing and very useful word.
  • Mar 22nd, 2012 @ 10:02am

    (untitled comment)

    I would think that it's already illegal, but if it's not, it certainly should be.
  • Mar 14th, 2012 @ 5:44pm

    Re: Re:

    I know, and nothing that I posted contradicts that.

    The laws against counterfeiting also quite a bit looser than copyright. For example, it's legal to make play money that use the image of a dollar bill, so long as it meets certain restrictions on size and quality, but it's illegal to make play Monopoly (R) money.

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