Posts by Tom 13

Re: 4 million small-claims damage suits.

which is why their lawyers would then apply for the class action status.

@ frank ly

Yes it is. You should file suit against MS. Maybe find some friends to join in a class action suit. And the secret settlement between the two should be irrelevant to your charges against MS as you were injured separately from their injury against NoIP.

Re: no copy of the Saturn V engine prints.

NASA has again found the prints for the Saturn V. I don't have a reference link, I think it was about 10 years back.

Re: they'd only seize the related accounts

Well, that's what they tell us. That's not the way the law is written. And there have been cases in which assets have been seized and there isn't clear proof that the owner of the asset was part of the criminal activity. In the case of PayPal, because it involves so many people, I tend to believe they would limit the number of accounts seized, but not because that's what the law says or out of any goodness of their heart. I think they wouldn't do it because they don't want that many people to know how truly arbitrary the process can be. If enough people know that, there might actually be an outcry to change the law.

Re: if the CEO of Paypal were charged with similar crimes

Depends on the circumstances. If the crimes are external to the operation of PayPal, then no they wouldn't be seized. BUT if the feds have sufficient evidence that PayPal is just a front organization for laundering drug money, yes they COULD.

IANAL either. It seems to me lawyers are the only ones who don't get the "something just doesn't feel right about this" feeling.

Re: UK law is even worse

Actually that makes them exactly equivalent, because under RICO that's what they do. Most common use is in a drug sting. Regardless of who owned the property (including vehicles driven that may have been stolen) the feds can seize anything that was used to facilitate the deal. They've also started to use it in underage drinking convictions. If the police pick up Eddie Jr for drunk driving and he's in daddy's car, they just might seize daddy's car.

@Paul 87

Progressives have no one to blame but themselves for that outcome. When you make a mockery of protecting citizens by turning loose criminals on the basis that it is better to release 10 mass murders than convict 1 innocent person of jaywalking, the citizens are prone to believing the authorities when they come and say "the only way we can stop The Mob is if we are granted these draconian RICO powers. Otherwise their lawyers will run circles around our underpaid prosecutors in court."

Re: "Rockstar and Take-Two’s use of her likeness was done solely to make money"

Except that in the US, that isn't a valid basis for a lawsuit. Especially as a public figure she is very, very subject to the parody exception.

Re: "Rockstar and Take-Two’s use of her likeness was done solely to make money"

I was thinking along the same line: character doesn't look skanky enough to be Lindsay.

Even if it did, in the US: Parody!

Re: requesting consent

The fact that requesting consent alters the outcome of the observation is well established in psychology. It's part of why they typically write the consent forms in a vague way before you sign them. Then they tell you they are testing for something when in fact they are testing for something else. A prime example is the experiment where they told the actual test subjects that they would be assisting a certified authority in questioning people who had committed a crime that resulted in its victims being in imminent danger. The subject was then asked to run the dials on an electroshock mechanism to encourage the criminal (who was in actuality an actor/actress) to tell the truth. They got the test subjects to turn up the dial to lethal levels with fair ease. If they had told the test subjects it was a test of their own morality, they would likely not have gotten those results. (I'd contend they'd have gotten different results if the alleged perp had been connected to a real machine and the pain and suffering had been real instead of an actor, but that's not relevant to the main point.)

The thing is, even though we KNOW informed consent is an obstacle to gathering accurate data, we as a society have decided it is more important to require informed consent than gather the information. This isn't merely theoretical. You can hunt down quite a few horror stories when informed consent is not required. The most prominent one to recently get a public film is probably the Tuskegee Airmen and of course the ultimate extreme is some of the experiments the Nazi's ran on "undesirables" in WW2.

Re: PR and leveraged never-never rather than actual money

That sounds like a good description of Bitcoin to me.

Re: No other law that I'm aware of works this way.

First up, it's "eminent" domain not "imminent" as your link name clearly indicates. The difference is IMPORTANT. Next up, no eminent domain is not like this either. There is a class which is and that is RICO, but even there the comparison is not quite near enough. Even under RICO there have to be prior legal convictions. That doesn't apply in this case.

Re: Fucked

If I might suggest?

Don't send it directly. First contact your law firm (if you don't have one I recommend Dewey, Suem, and Howe) and have them send the bill as an attachment to an official letter.

Re: Microsoft can grab the entire domain

Only when they also own the judge. Which it seems in this case they do.

Re: That's bat-shit insane.

Welcome to Harry Reid's Nevada.

Re: collateral damage

Please find yourself a good US lawyer and sue them. I mean that honestly as a crazy 'Merkin. With luck you might even get a few of their legal eagles disbarred for perjury in court. Or better yet get the judge who allowed this removed and disbarred for life.

Re: they couldn't be arsed

No, MS couldn't be arsed to contact Vitalwerks about the domains.

I fully expect this decision to be overturned on appeal. The fact that Vitalwerks was unaware even of the lawsuit until AFTER the judgement was rendered is the only relevant fact in this case. The judgment is a clear violation of the 4th amendment.

Re: I suppose the decision is the right one

Perhaps on the basis of the facts presented. The justices were correct that there is little effective distinction between cable companies and Aereo. They are also correct that broadcaster owns the rights to the material and has not granted a license for the rebroadcast from which Aereo makes their money. The recasting of legislation to require cable companies to pay broadcasters is at the heart of the issue. But given that broadcasters are using a public commodity licensed to them by the federal government, I'm quite sure the legislative rewrite was a bad one. And I suspect there ought to be some way to get it overturned vis a vie consumer interests.

Re: I love the American way..

Not just the equipment. Looks like they also brought in all those UMW members who are now unemployed as a result of the new coal regs.

Re: Manipulate my mind, but don't mess with the UI I know and love

Hadn't really thought about it before, but yeah, that was around the time I stopped using FB. That and it was synergistically linked to Zynga's free game server performance going to shit. And I mostly hung out for the Zynga games in the first place. I had even just reached the point where I would have been willing to toss them a Hamilton a month for the service.

Re: PNAS

Not enough "hold that tone" characters for it to be that phonetic spelling in the local dialect.

Re: not only email

Depending of course on your definition of "operating". Last time I checked, which admittedly was more than 5 years ago and probably closer to 10 the ratio of spam to data was about what I find in my Yahoo spam box.

Re: Seriously, I don't get how this is such a big deal.

NSA trawling everybody's data but not actually doing anything with most of it, that's a problem. Facebook actually submitting millions of users to a psychological test without consent and you don't get it?

I'll be honest, I've personally been "meh" about it, but only for myself and only because outside of the occasional visit home when my mother wants me to send her some stuff for Farmville, I haven't touched my accounts there in about two years, maybe three. But I DO get that if I were a regular FB user, particularly one who was attempting to use it to stay in touch with Friends and Family, I would be pissed (US, not UK) at this sort of revelation.