Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/03/23/letters_2303/

Rocket launch scares pirated nipples onto sheep

RIAA plans to sewe

By Lucy Sherriff

Posted in Bootnotes, 23rd March 2007 17:01 GMT

Letters CD-Wow lost its battle to be allowed to import discs that were not intended for sale in the UK. A group of record labels pursued the retailer to the high court over the issue. CD-Wow was found to have infringed copyright and been in contempt of court over an earlier order. The spanking handed down by the judge (verbal or otherwise) has not scared any of you. No, you are in fact emboldened:

It is stories like these (the CD WOW story) that make me want to go home and DL all the movies/music I can for free, and not feel the least bit guilty doing so.

Corporations use the west to subsidize them getting into other markets. The same corporations that lay employees off in the west to show higher profits to their stock holders, yet people at the top keep getting multimillion dollar bonuses. The same sort of corporations that off shore work to those countries we subsidize so they can keep even more for the con men at the top (actually I guess I should say con people).

Then I remember the artists, and how they are likely screwed by the very same con people. And the guilt returns.

Shane


"The recordings were not pirated discs but their sale in the UK broke copyright law." What bit?

From the bits that I think I can remember, there is no breach: they have a license to make copies for sale in HK.

They make copies to sell in HK.

They send these copies to the UK.

These licensed copies are sold.

Now, they don't have the license to make copies in the UK (the bit about "for sale" doesn't matter here because we don't have a right to personal copy, except the turning copy [funny how that never gets mentioned in copyright law spiel]) but then again, they aren't MAKING copies here. There's no need to, since the form is already fixed.

So what bit of copyright are they breaking?

Now, the labels could refuse to license any music to CD WOW in HK if it is legal to do so and then this wouldn't be a problem for them.

Mark


Won't somebody think of the children and get them a decent database to hold all their little fingerprints in. Especially the poor ones. Little criminals, wandering around wearing hoodies. Lock 'em up, we say. Er, what? Yes, yes, we only want to fingerprint them to stop them from being teased. Honest:

If they some of the Lords think that fingerprinting children will mean that they don't get teased for being poor, as other pupils won't know they are getting free school meals, it just shows how out of touch people can be.

The real signs of how rich/poor you are include:

Pencil case (contents of) 3ft long scientific calculator - 99% of the functions, of no use to school kids Shoes Mobile phone or lack of.

I don't remember anyone getting the piss taken for getting free meals, but I certainly do remember people getting the piss taken for having the wrong calculator, etc.

Fraser

The Lords, out of touch? Shirely shome mishtake...


A few of the more alert readers out there have noticed the government's slightly circular argument about ID cards, passports and secure identity:

this whole passport/card thing is like the patient who is given pills for a simple ailment but has side effects from them and is given pills to cure these. the new pills have side effects so more pills are prescribed until the patient takes some 10+ types of medication a day. then one day they forget to take any pills and all the symptoms go away. thus saving not only a life from pill induced misery but a fortune for the NHS / taxpayer. then again perhaps I'm getting old and cynical

john


Just a minor observation - I understood part of the plan for ID cards was to verify peoples identity against recognised and reliable documentation. Such as passports?

I just can't work out if I'm being ironic or sarcastic here...

Nic


Joan Ryan admits that her department has handed British passports to thousands of fraudsters including members of Al Qaeda - and no one is calling for her head?

Bloody apathetic country - if this was France we'd be cheerily greasing the guillotine and picking out revolutionary knitting patterns.

Mike

Knit one, behead one, hand a passport to the other, style of thing?


Speaking of things that are bad for us, like politicians, how about drugs? No, we're not selling 'em. We're watching to see what happens now someone has suggested reclassifying them according to how dangerous they actually are:

Harm to society aside, if you just look at the addictiveness and/or the typical level of impairment after consumption, alcohol has never looked good. It always looks especially ridiculous when you start comparing the legal alcohol to various relatively harmless semilegal (illegality depending on your location) narcotics.

Yet society isn't about to change their opinions, no matter how silly they may be. This has never been a matter of intelligence, but of society's acceptance. So given that, I really don't know why anyone bothers with these studies as it won't change a thing.

Sincerely, Arah Leonard


Mr. Brown and his green red box, and the budget. Like it? Hate it? Have a guess:

Ah the logic of politicians...

I can't see many 4 litre Range Rover drivers being that worried about £400 a year road tax. If they're really interested in encouraging people into smaller engined vehicles, the fairest tax is on fuel. You use a lot of fuel, you pay a lot of tax. Oh hang on, we *all* already pay a lot of fuel tax.

As usual, the way they define what qualifies as a non-green vehicle and gets hit with the £400 is going to be the interesting bit. No doubt my 2.5 litre diesel BMW is going to get clobbered, despite running most of the time on 50% diesel and 50% old vegetable oil from the local pub (minus the bits of scampi).

Guess I'll just have to be happy with my green grin of smugness next time I pass a Prius, knowing I'm actually using less fossil fuel per mile than he is, and all without having to drive something that looks like a suppository.

Steve

The University of Nebraska has complained that the Recording Industry Ass. of America wants it do its work of tracking down file sharing ne'er-do-wells. And it says the RIAA has to pay it for the info:

I'll bet this mistake cost the Universities millions in litigation fees. NOT very bright decision for a institution of higher learning. You'd think they'd want to send a clear message to students that Piracy is a crime. Instead they look to profit from advising students Piracy will land them in jail. Pretty dumb.

Jorge


Turn away now if you are easily offended. This one is about dead deer love. Ugh.

Hmmm. Minced beef in a pint glass was the favoured method of onanism of a particularly unpleasant friend of mine. I shall advise him to use Quorn instead. At least in Wisconsin.

Anon

And again, we say: ugh.


Get those filthy, pesky imaginary immigrants off my land:

Maybe they just read the poll as I did the headline at first glance, "Hungarians demand ejection of Parisian immigrants."

Mike


So if 90% are against further immigration and 2/3 (67%) are against immigrants from Piresa, does that mean only 23% actually knew Piresa is fictional? Too bad statistics are never that easy, but still kind of funny to think about. Of course one could also wonder how the results might have turned out if Piresa didn't sound so much like Persia. Maybe if people are going to invent names, they should invent some more uniquely sounding names to prevent the possibility of folks just assuming a typo/slip of the tongue.

Sincerely, Arah


In the spirit of treating others as you would wish to be treated, does this then mean that we can tell two-thirds of the sponging Hungarians working in the UK to fu^H^H go home? PS Even if Piresa is fictional, it has to have a lower tax burden than the UK.

Erik


You are not easily pleased, you Reg readers. Now, even rocket launches are ceasing to impress you. Well, we like em, as you can tell by our coverage of the Falcon One launch:

I must be missing something? The Falcon is just another chemical rocket is it not? There doesn't appear to be anything remotely "new" in its design. We've been firing rockets into space since ... oh the second world war. As a result I am finding it hard to be excited about. Not that I am criticising you article! Rather I find it a little sad that NASA weren't able to do this themselves - though I am unsurprised. In fact aren't the ex-soviets still using Soyuz - a rocket that is already considered to be pretty reliable.

I'm a little confused by the fanfare.

Cheers Gav


Isn't this a rather glowing report on what was actually a failed launch? I know they got further than last time, and their company has certainly matured it's launch processes, but the second stage engine shut down and the vehicle was a complete loss somewhere in the ocean. Don't believe Elon's spin :(

Mark


Good news everybody: four teated sheep provoke terrible punning:

There was a competition to name a four-teated sheep breed on Radio 4 must be 15-20 years ago now. The winning answer (and breed name) was 'Fortitude', which I think is rather smashing

Cliff


How many 4-nippled rams does this twit want? How about breeding ewes to carry on the trait? Seriously, we've recently retired from raising sheep in the US, and we had 4-nippled ewes for decades. The industry became enamored of the stupid but huge breeds; the Finn/Icelandic breeds typically raised three or four lambs for us. And the neighbor's prize 3-hundred-pound Suffolk ram was done in by a runt that looked to me like one of our rams got across the fence and back. Don't get me started on the Romanys, they're goats, not sheep, at least by temperament, but they do have 4 producing teats.

Donald


At last! A worthy use for GM technology: increasing the number of breasts in the world. But wait, I smell a (multi-mammaried) rat...this is obviously a PR offensive by the evil bio-tech companies aiming to weaken resistance to GM glow-in-the-dark sprouts that harvest themselves by buying off all the anti-GM males with the promise of extra nipples! Phew, lucky I spotted that one before I was sucked in...oops...

Ian


How to justify spending your degree in the pub, an elementary course, with some advanced skills:

I feel that the boffins in question should reference prior art in this study, namely almost any old episode of Bullseye currently being shown on the Challenge channel. Poorer darts players, particularly the ones who answer the questions, have always tended to throw for the 19 rather than the 20 for the reasons identified in the study.

Looks to me as though someone needed to explain to their grant committee why they spent all their time in the pub.

Dean


"the dart would land randomly within...a Gaussian probability distribution - or a bell-shaped curve". Hummm... something make me think that if you're *aiming*, then the darts don't land "randomly"... unless you're really really really bad (or drunk), and even if you're that bad, still they don't land 100% randomly. "We pinned paper on a darts board and threw darts at it" heuuu... hallo??? the board already has _targets_, couldn't they use those instead? what's wrong with those people? besides, don't they have anything more useful to do? D.


Did they study the effects of alcohol consumption on accuracy to determine where one should aim after each pint (i.e. each three darts)? Or did they consider that aim consists of two factors - left/right aim (probably Gaussian) and power (height on the dartboard - also probably Gaussian). My experience shows that the two curves are not necessarily related, I tend to get a distribution that looks like a tall ellipse, not a circle - and certainly not a point! Although that does tend to spread as the evening wears on and the arrows start making their own mind up. Once they decide they like the blackboards I tend to consider it time to quit before I break a pint glass...

John


I'd say your analysis is spot on. Over ten years ago I used to play darts regularly for a pub team - being less than entirely accurate, I used to always aim for 19 as the penalty for missing was less than for 20, whilst the rewards for hitting were only marginally lower. I suspect this 'research' is better explained as a bunch of students who realised that they'd spent far too much time in the pub and came up with a frankly brilliant wheeze to justify it.

Mike


And finally, typo of the week, an irregular column. We meant to write liVe, but something went wrong between brain and keyboard:

> Lice music giant Mean Fiddler [...]

Well, at least this proves Kelly has been to a Mean Fiddler festival...

Martin

That's all. Bon weekend, tout. ®