1995 was 17 years ago. Why did it take 17 years to start the suits? It's not like any of this was hidden in those 17 years. Google's been around since 1998. Amazon was from 1995. Yahoo was from 1995. What part of these companies took 14-17 years to finally bring a suit to? Until I see that, he's a damn dirty patent troll taking advantage of the status quo.
Eolas sued Microsoft in 1999 and the suit took almost a decade to go through all the appeals and such. After they finished taking down MS, Eolas started working on suing everyone else. This information is out there if you bother to look...
Child porn is how .au passed their censorship stuff and it has quickly expanded. Child porn is already illegal and, in my opinion, doesn't need deep cutting censorship bills to combat.
Understood and agreed. Existing statues on child porn are sufficient, and given the tendencies for governments and corporations to expand their abilities at the expense of the people, I would support no new laws, and would be suspicious were any proposed in my country.
Honest question, is it illegal everywhere? I'm just taking a stab in the dark that there are societies somewhere in this world that either haven't established laws or are terribly enforced if they do exist. Playing devils advocate what if a child porn site is hosted in that area, then what? I realize that the situation is unlikely but if it's possible wouldn't there need to be a way to handle it?
Politicians tried that line in Germany. They even gave a number of countries that have "no laws" or don't follow up on them.
For every country named, the ambassador to Germany was able to cite laws that prohibit child pornography (or just porn, eg. in countries with sharia law). In all cases, they stated interest in enforcement by their governments, too.
Given that they tried a couple of times, and failed just as often, I'll assume that no such country exists - otherwise some advisor to our local propagandists would have found and presented it on the second or third try.
Not too long ago in human history (and even today in some places and with some different forms) it was customary for young boys to orally pleasure old men, or wed off girls before or at puberty. Playing more devil's advocate, the only thing that should really be illegal is exploiting children when they can be shown to be incapable of sound personal choices. (So covering both child porn and Britney-Spears-pattern Disney stars at once.) Now we just have to worry about where we draw the line at exploitation and whether potential monetary or status gain is important or not. The main point though is the act has already occurred by the time some pedo sees it on a tor page, and I don't think it's ever been shown that pedo-consumers are much more likely to become pedo-producers if they weren't already. (Someone please correct my belief if that's not the case, and then explain Japan.) Of course, catching either the consumers or producers is fairly difficult without draconian, invasive practices, and on the producers side it reduces to the classic problem of domestic abuse.
"So if a company starts infringing trademarks, polluting search engines en masse, tricking people into buying their rubbish"
eBay? also, already illegal based on trademarks, copyright, etc etc.
"What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?" "How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc"
already illegal
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from my understanding, SOPA is more about removing due process than making bad things illegal
Another reason is that the speaker is on the side with the home button. Having that edge face downwards when sitting down e.g. in bed muffles the sound. Not sure if this still applies to iPad 2, but it certainly does for the original.
I find that I'm often using the iPad "upside down". It wasn't on purpose, but there are very few reasons to care which way you're picking it up. It would be jarring to discover an app that cared.
I meant rating for age restrictions by the App Store, not end-user ratings.
This is done on a game-by-game basis by a government agency in South Africa, and requires an additional fee, but, based on what I've read, other manufacturers have gotten their internal rating systems approved, so this fee is not applicable. Apple hasn't bothered. They just don't let South Africans buy games.
Do realize it's not Apple not letting South Africans to buy games. It's South African bureaucracy that's preventing South Africans from buying games. The barrier for entry is too high to justify the ROI for Apple to bother. Otherwise, there's no reason for a company to choose to forego more profit per effort.
