Brandon Rinebold 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (18) comment rss

  • On the post: As ISPs Push Harder On Usage Caps, House Pushes Bill Preventing The FCC From Doing Anything About It

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 12 Apr, 2016 @ 06:47pm

    Re: Eating My Popcorn

    There isn't and never has been a broadband market in the US. There also never will be a broadband market unless you want to give everyone carte blanche to dig up your street every month to install lines for a new ISP.

    These are things that literally cannot exist without eminent domain claims to put up poles, dig trenches, etc. There is no free market which could possibly produce the national telephone system or Internet. Local communications networks are a maybe but spanning any significant distance is no more possible for telecomms than it was for interconnected national rail lines.

  • On the post: Ford Pretends To Open Up Its Patents Like Tesla, But Doesn't; Media Falls For It

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 30 May, 2015 @ 06:11am

    Re: making patents open?

    Well, technically companies with patents are not required to license them. I think they're technically hitting the definition of 'open' since they are opening them up to licensing deals. The false equivalency to Tesla in some of these stories is the only error.

  • On the post: LG Will Take The 'Smart' Out Of Your Smart TV If You Don't Agree To Share Your Viewing And Search Data With Third Parties

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 09 Feb, 2015 @ 06:33pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    A good monitor is much better at displaying text than a large TV. The pixels per inch on TVs, especially 50" ones, is way too low for comfortable viewing and the contrast isn't great either so the text all looks kind of blurry or jagged making it harder to read and increasing eyestrain.

    TLDR: Your eyes aren't any better off with the TV. It's probably actually causing more eyestrain for general computer use.

  • On the post: Ted Cruz Doubles Down On Misunderstanding The Internet & Net Neutrality, As Republican Engineers Call Him Out For Ignorance

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2014 @ 08:57pm

    Re: Re: Conservative Here

    Actually, I think it's because our government doesn't go back nearly as far as yours so our 'traditional' government was much more of a frontier type very loose group as opposed to yours, which at the same period was more of a monarchy-like representative government. You had a strong government getting looser and we had a loose government getting stronger.

  • On the post: Ridiculously Broad Ruling Against DVD Ripper Software Has Court Allow Seizure Of Domains, Social Media & More

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2014 @ 07:05am

    Re: You're all missing the point of the seizure

    DNS doesn't work that way. Your home router or computer never sends a single DNS query to the actual domain you're looking up (unless you're running something like BIND or a Windows Server DNS server). All DNS queries come from DNS servers, not clients, and they cache the results so you only see them at most once per TTL period.

    You can only tell whose DNS SERVER is requesting a domain. So you could definitively determine that TWC and Comcast are major copyright infringers via this method. :)

    If you were thinking of redirecting that update server to a server that logs connection attempts, even this judge wasn't crazy enough to reassign the registration to the plaintiffs. They only killed it via this order so their registrar had to remove the destination.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It's Going To Slap All Of Its Customers With Data Caps, Makes Half-Hearted Attempt To Walk Back Earlier Statements When Backlash Kicks In

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 20 May, 2014 @ 01:24pm

    Re: CC Won't Even Answer Honestly...

    No, but it is generally closer to what people actually want to know when they ask that question. Most people want an accurate measure of reasonable expectation when they ask for average (AKA what the average or 'normal' person can expect to see)not the actual statistical average.

  • On the post: Senator Leahy Tries To Sneak Through Plans To Make Merely Talking About Computer Hacking A Serious Crime

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2014 @ 06:32pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I think you're misunderstanding what he's saying.

    You don't need to agree with the conclusion he draws but if you don't even know the cases generally used as relevant legal precedent in these situations then you're not informed enough to argue legal matters.

  • On the post: FBI Admits That Obeying The Constitution Just Takes Too Much Time

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2013 @ 09:04am

    Re:

    I think a more accurate comparison is issuing a subpoena for everything about everyone at any time for investigation of anything. It's not that they're not getting court approval for this. It's that the court they're using is rubber-stamping something that negates the entire purpose of the courts' involvement.

    I don't blame the 3-letter agencies here as much as the court that ruled on this incredibly over-broad order in the first place and keeps renewing it every time it expires. The 3-letter agencies and police are expected to try to do everything they can to ensure they have everything they might possibly need to find criminals. It's the courts' job to keep telling them 'no' when they try to (or do) violate our rights.

  • On the post: White House Makes It Impossible For The Blind To Sign Petition Supporting Copyright Treaty For The Blind

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 30 May, 2013 @ 10:49am

    Re: e-mail address filter is broken too

    Actually, it i remarkably easy to do. All you have to do is check for an @ symbol and if it has one, look up MX records via DNS. If there isn't a mail server for that lookup, you refuse to take the address because obviously it isn't going anywhere.

    It's not rocket surgery and it's actually easier than trying to parse the address based on a set of static rules but nobody does it.

  • On the post: White House Makes It Impossible For The Blind To Sign Petition Supporting Copyright Treaty For The Blind

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 30 May, 2013 @ 10:55am

    Equality

    The White House only placed the blind on par with the sighted by making audio capchas an unintelligible mess too.

  • On the post: Warner Bros., MGM, Universal Collectively Pull Nearly 2,000 Films From Netflix To Further Fragment The Online Movie Market

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 03 May, 2013 @ 07:34am

    Re:

    Unfortunately, the terms of service for most of these services explicitly prevents other people from doing something like throwing up netflix content in an iframe. Each of these services wants their website, whole and unfiltered, to be the sole source for their content.

    They do have legitimate concerns here with people providing poor service wrapped around netflix causing people to feel like netflix is to blame for that other service not working well or companies trying to rebrand netflix but I think they could be a bit more flexible.

  • On the post: Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 25 Mar, 2013 @ 06:20pm

    Re: Re:

    The issue with Internet radio is that it often runs over port 80 and therefore is excessively difficult to QoS efectively so that it does not interfere with other users on the network that acre trying to complete critical business functions.

    Sysadmins wouldn't mind it so much if they'd run on a port that could conveniently be deprioritized but the current setup means they're competing for bandidth with all of your actual business traffic.

    At a bit over 64kb/s each, just 2 people on pandora can cripple a T1 line costing >$200/mo for 1.44mb/s.

  • On the post: Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 25 Mar, 2013 @ 05:31pm

    Re: Re: Re: Thoughtcrime?

    You're only guilty if one of the people you discuss it with actually does it.

  • On the post: Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 25 Mar, 2013 @ 04:46pm

    Re: Re: Thoughtcrime?

    No. You would only be guilty of it if one of your buddies actually does rob them via their website.

    The goal of raqueteering laws is to be able to punish people who help plan and organize crimes without actively committing them directly. The lack of such laws made it effectively impossible to take down the organized crime families because all the really important people never did anything illegal themselves and there were always more desperate mooks to handle the dangerous work regardless of how many were arrested.

  • On the post: NASCAR Abuses DMCA To Try To Delete Fan Videos Of Daytona Crash

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 25 Feb, 2013 @ 05:17pm

    Re: Re:

    And how do you propose stopping large chunks of debris moving at 200mph without obstructing line of sight?

  • On the post: Unintended Consequences, Lead And Crime

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2013 @ 04:36pm

    Re: Re: wonderfully stated

    It's the latter. You can come to 500 different conclusions for causality for any situation in which you can't run a control study. Welcome to economicx where your pet theory can be the cause of everything good while the other sides' is the cause of everything bad without interfering with their ability to believe their pet theory is responsible for the good results while yours is responsible for the bad ones.

  • On the post: Bradley Manning's Defense: Releasing Over-Classified Information To The Public Would Be Good For The US, Not Bad

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2013 @ 04:14pm

    Re: don't tell those guys freed after 20 years by DNA evidence

    Beta,

    I think it's a non-transferrable coupon, figuratively speaking. However, if it did work that way...

    I'm pretty sure Arson carries more than a few months since it's often punished at the level of attempted murder if it is reasonably possible to be occupied. However, he could probably get away with a minor assault on almost 4 months of 'credit'.

    So, your honor, how much time would I be sentenced to if I kicked the prosecutors in the balls? 2-3 months? I'll be back in 5 minutes.

  • On the post: The Main Problem With Patented GM Food Is The Patent, Not The Fact That It's GM

    Brandon Rinebold ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2013 @ 03:50pm

    Re: Re:

    Greevar,

    Actually, your understanding of evolution is a bit misaligned.

    Random mutation is the only reason the natural selection is possible. Identical copies cannot be subject to natural selection because there is no effect regardless of which survive. Without mutation, there would be no tall or short members of a species to select from, only a handful of simple amino acids endlessly creating perfect 1:1 copies ad-infinitum. The variations you claim drive evolution are, in fact, solely the product of mutations.

    Let me phrase it this way, differences in genetic code drive natural selection but mutation is the only method of creating those differences. I agree that natural selection is not a random occurrance but it is a nonrandom process (natural selection) that requires the results of a random process (mutation).