However, employment contracts still can't can't keep you from being able to get a job. You have a fundamental right to be employed somewhere, and a current job cannot make you sign things that would make it impossible for you to get a job elsewhere.
Even NDAs and non-competes have to be fairly strictly worded and contained to a small subject matter.
It's not a first amendment issue, though. 'The right to be able to get gainful employment if someone wants to hire you' is not explicitly listed anywhere. Although an argument could be made it counts as 'servitude', because everyone needs a job, and if you can't change your jobs, you're in servitude.
If a contact stops you from being able to talk abut your job at all, solely for the public relations benefit of the company, (As opposed to legitimate protection of actual trade secrets.), it could, indeed, be shot down in court on the grounds it makes it unnecessarily difficult to get another job.
It's not that people are 'chickenshit', it's that in this country there's an entire political party dedicated to making sure that corporations can continue to act like that.
We have failed to recognize that the entire existence of any corporation is dependent on the state allowing it to exist, and that corporations have no rights at all.
The funniest obsolete reference is the 'roll down your car window' hand signal. I don't think they've manufactured any car with manual windows in the last decade. I can just imagine young kids wondering why adults thinks circular hand motions have anything to do with car windows. (Perhaps you want them to clean it?)
I actually wonder how long the direction will be preserved. Strictly speaking, it's 'the top moves towards the front of the car' for 'down', and the opposite for 'up', which means it's sometimes clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise, depending on where the person making the motion is. I suspect that people who grow up without window cranks will fail to grasp this distinction.
Or maybe even the phrase itself. Maybe someday people will wonder if car windows ever 'rolled down', presumably like posters and wires get 'rolled up', and like the plastic windows on some Jeeps actually do, and why we stopped using such amazing glass that could bend like that.
Actually, the funniest phrase is probably 'crank your car'. Yeah, I'll just go and use the crank on my car, which was apparently build 80 years ago, before electric starters.
You apparently didn't read my post, where I said exactly what you said, except you said it in a stupider way.
People who are actually skilled at computers undervalue their time and knowledge in repairing them.
You, for some reason, acknowledged this, but then said that they should set the value of their time, in some hypothetical universe where they think they're worth more than they're actually asking for.
Which, of course, not the actual situation...all people, great or small, ask for what they think their time is worth. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing the job in the first place. (Barring exceptions like desperation jobs, which is not what we're talking about, we're talking about people who repair computers in their spare time.)
Thus suggesting that they should 'charge what they think they are worth' that is somewhat idiotic.
The actual problem in the real universe is they think they're worth less than what they're asking for. Computer repair amateurs underestimate their value, because they don't understand how valuable their knowledge and skills are.
And, incidentally, both the clients and service people set the rate. That is, in fact, how the free market works. Two people agree on a set amount of money in exchange for goods or services.
What I was actually suggesting is that people judge their rates by the opportunity cost of the client, to ask themselves 'If I did not exist, how much would this cost them'. Once repairmen have that in their head as a reasonable cost of 'the problem', they'd can knock off $100 or so and still feel comfortable with themselves. I.e, don't charge based on how much work it is to you, charge based on how much cost it would be if you weren't there and they had to go to a real repairman.
Which, as you're apparently failing to grasp, actually means charging more, not less, because this advice is for people who underestimate their value because 'they didn't do much'.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that most criminals are this way.
Maybe not even most caught criminals. Some are, indeed, caught after a lot of actual work tracking them down.
I was just saying 'assuming no one else knows what they are doing' is a fairly large failure mode of criminals.
Especially amateur, first-time criminals, who often fail to consider what basic security the victim could have. Like threatening people with a knife from ten feet away...if they have a gun, or even mace, that's rather stupid behavior. Or breaking into businesses at night without bothering to figure out if they have an alarm system.
If there was a list of the origins of criminal's mistakes, that would be right at the top. 'Failed to consider what sort of basic steps someone who was trying to stop this crime would take'.
And the same with getting caught afterwards. Like the moron in this story, who robbed a place, with video cameras, using a car with his company logo on it. 'Failed to consider the trivially easy way of figuring out if he did it or not.'
A rather large competency failure-mode in criminals is to assume that everyone is very very incompetent.
The very very very first thing anyone should ask themselves before committing a crime is 'If I wished to prevent this crime, what would I have done?'.
I mean, it seems such a basic first step.
And the next step is 'If I wished to find out who committed this crime, what would I do?'.
Not that criminals often know those things, it's often totally pathetic about how unaware they are of actual investigative procedure and that real life usually doesn't throw five red-herrings in front of the investigator like what happens on TV. Most criminal investigations are like L&O except the first guy they suspect is the right guy and there's no other suspects. Like a ten minute L&O.
But you'd think they would at least be aware enough to ask the questions and attempt to answer them.
It's the general rule that people who are very incompetent at something don't know they're incompetent, or even what competency looks like in others. There's a paper on that somewhere, I used to have it bookmarked.
Crime has never been the exception.
In fact, it's always sorta been the anti-exception, as people tend to interact with other people, and some of their knowledge will rub off and make them aware of how little they know. Like if I know an auto mechanic who talks about his job, I might become vaguely aware of how cars work and how little I know, and thus my estimation of my competency will go down.
Criminals are the huge exception to that, as they obviously rarely openly discuss their jobs with non-criminals. Most people's understanding of crime comes from police procedural, which often hilariously over and understate the different way criminals get caught.
So would-be criminals fail to realize that almost all crimes are solved simply by looking for the most obvious suspect, and poking around a bit to discover that, in fact, they did it. Seriously, something like 90% of solved crimes are just 'Okay, who had the motives, means, and opportunity to do this? Let's search his house. Hey, look, it's his bank-robbing outfit and the money.'
They like to imagine they're living in some convoluted TV plot and wear gloves to keep from leaving 'DNA', when in actuality they parked their company car in the parking lot and got out on video cameras. If they had any basic interaction with criminals they'd know that, but it's all TV.
I don't know if people who are more intelligent are prone to this more, or if they just choose different crime. The two guys you're talking about, if they were dumber, would have done something like tried to hide in the store after closing and walk out with the stuff...the method might change, the incompetency does not.
There are three kinds of computer repair people out there.
There are the scam artists, who take a 'broken' computer, reformat the drive, spend five minutes starting a non-legal Windows install, and charge $500. And possibly with some imaginary added hardware costs tacked on too. Person gets a computer they're going to get spyware on six months and it will be messed again. Usually they don't resort to deliberately breaking computers, but who knows.
And then there are the legit repair centers, who tend to take the easy way out, but at least they are honest. Most of the time the easy way is 'replace the computer' so people lose their data, though.
Then there are the good guys, who sit down, don't reformat the drive, work for two hours installing AVG and Ad-Aware, give an hour of instruction during that, and think it's worth maybe $20 and a Coke from their fridge.
All you good guys out there, start charging more. Honestly. You are not charging for work, you are charging for knowledge.
Or think of it this way: The alternative to what you're doing is requires $200 of (legit) repairs or a $300 new computer. You can, indeed, change them $100 for that.
Your time is not worth what you think it's worth. For you, half of it is a game, and the other half is satisfaction at a job well done, but you don't set the value for your time.
Your time is worth what they think it's worth, and I assure you, you're a hell of a lot cheaper than the alternatives. (And provide better value, considering that half the time you're sitting fixing stuff you're providing a computer class in how to not have this happen again.)
That would work, but that's why I suggested GPG. No need for them to keep the software around it proprietary, or attempt to turn it into a DRM scheme after the release date.
Yes, and if you or other sane people were implementing it, that's how it would be done. Possibly not with permanent decryption build in.
We'd encrypt standard video files, with commercials in them, give them out freely, and then when the TV show airs, we'd give out the key. We'd count downloads of the key to see how many people are viewing it, which wouldn't be exact but a good deal more exact than existing broadcast viewers.
You and I would want to actually store the keys, but I can see even the most reasonable network demanding a new download of the key for each viewing, and most people wouldn't have a problem with that. With maybe some sort of 'export' to watch on an iPod or cell phone at lower quality.
Aka, essentially iTunes, for free. You'd have to use their interface and player, and of course people would crack it, but most people would be perfectly happy with it.
However, television networks combine all the copyright paranoia of the RIAA and MPAA with the stupidity of television networks. They aren't stupid because they don't understand the chances in the wold like the *AA, they're stupid because they are inherently, fundamentally, impossibly stupid. (Whereas the *AA is just in a universe it does not understand yet, and doesn't want to understand.)
In actuality, TV networks aren't 'stupid', they're fiefdoms with rapid turnovers, and executives that will destroy success projects of the predecessors and 'competitors' in the company, thus rendering them totally dysfunctional as a company.
I actually did some research to find out why Fox kept purchasing sci-fi shows it wanted to kill, and came to understand that TV executives are not attempting to do what is best for their company, the major people they are fighting are other people at their own company. It's 'not invented here' to an absurd level, it's give multi-million decisions to suits who think they are 'artists' with 'vision' that 'make TV', and any successful vision that isn't theirs reflects poorly on them.
To the outside universe, however, they appear less intelligent than garden slugs.
Frankly, we're lucky TV networks haven't killed Hulu yet. They really are that functionally stupid. At some point, some executive is going to come along and kill Hulu because doing so makes him look better. Maybe a 'competing' show is getting better Hulu ratings and worse broadcast ratings, or maybe it will just the guy replacing the Hulu guy who will suddenly decide it was a bad idea.
The more permanent solution here is the CDN solution: Just take whatever content you anticipate to be popular in a given area, push it out to massive caches there, and serve it locally. Or, simpler still, run connections through a caching proxy.
That was the point of torrents, to share among the people on the same ISP so tons of bandwidth isn't being used. And reduce demand on the originating servers.
If ISPs are willing to do something like caching servers, it really doesn't matter what is used. However, I suspect that not only will ISPs not do this, they will actively oppose it, like they currently oppose streaming.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software.
If they do that, fuck it, another big point of going online is lost. Those past seasons of House? I can put them in my laptop and watch them on a road trip. I can watch them on Linux. I can plug my laptop into a TV and watch them there. I can basically do whatever I want with them.
As the whole point is to download them in advance, there's no way in hell TV networks will let that happen if they can't 'release' them when they want.
I agree, the best bet would be to create some sort of format that's an open standard, with a bunch of 0s for the decryption key in the distributed file, and then a program that sticks the key in, and, from that point on, anyone can play it. Or permanently decrypt it.
But they absolutely will not do anything of the sort.
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm
*facepalm* You really don't understand DRM, do you?
Again, no DRM needed. Just wrap it up in a plain old GPG file, hell, even an encrypted zip/rar. Let them be distributed via multicast, or bittorrent, or whatever -- it can be a completely open system. Provide the keys via RSS or something.
I understand DRM perfectly well, and, more to the point, I didn't say DRM. I said encrypted.
If you think TV networks are going to let you decrypt and play their video files whereever you want, you are very mistaken. Likewise, if you think they're not going to want a way to track your watching or disable it. If we're lucky, the program will include the ability to copy the TV show to other computers.
Of course, TV networks that think they can stop you from decrypting and playing their video files where you want are also very mistaken. Likewise if they think people won't write cracking programs that install and do all this automatically.
Ergo, my proposal was for an interface that isn't hackable before the release date of the file. (Simply because no one's going to crack the encryption in that time.)
But after that point, it's essentially standard DRM stupidity of having encrypted content and keys both accessible, and of course people will crack it. (But no one will care, as this cracked file will have commercials in it, so everyone who downloads illegally will just continue to download the fucking digital satellite commercial-less broadcast ripped by LOL or whatever.)
That's my window, and I don't have access to a DVR. Know how many shows I want to watch are on at those times? None. Does that mean there aren't shows I want to watch? Of course there are! And video streaming is the only way to do it.
Or, instead of video streaming, you could use the system I suggested in my post, which you apparently didn't bother to read.
Instead, you decided to argue against some sort of multicast system that I didn't suggest in any way. (In fact, you appear to be arguing against traditional TV broadcasting, which is just stupid of you, as I in no way promoted that as an alternative to anything.)
For the record, what I actually suggested was having an automated torrent system, either using the actual torrent protocol or something like it, to download TV shows you want to watch in advance, the night before, and then have a player that, when the show is 'aired', contacts a website and gets the key to play it.
The only disadvantage this has over steaming is that you'd have to select the shows in advance, which, as I pointed out, is something like 95% of all TV viewing. People may not know what they're going to watch, but they know what shows they like, and there's plenty of time for shows to download overnight, or, for you, during the day. And, of course, there's TiVo-like logic to predict shows you might want and download them automatically.
For that last 5%, services like Hulu could certainly continue to exist. Although if an episode of a show was torrented widely enough, i.e, if someone says you should download last night's episode of whatever, you could download it fairly quickly anyway.
Or even there could be some sort of 'distributed streaming', where the client downloads the stream as you watch it, but it's also requesting pieces later in the episode from others so it's not all downloaded from the provider. If the stream is half the speed of your internet connection, during the first 5% of the show it can download the first 5% to show you, and the second 5% it got from the torrent, if you see what I'm saying. It can use mainly the torrent, and use the streaming server only to start and in an emergencies when it runs out of data.
When they type your account info in, it should immediately inform the people that the account is not functional for whatever reason.
Considering how quickly the support people want to get you off the line, you'd think they'd bother to spend fifteen seconds checking that the account is active, because if not under no circumstances can they actually solve your problem.
Yeah, I know they don't want to 'solve your problem', they want to get you off the line, but, hell, checking that the account actually works is faster than telling people to reboot their computer and wait for it to come up.
If they know it was disabled, bam, problem solved, ticket closed, at least on their end. It's a job for customer service at that point.
Video streaming of TV shows makes no sense, period.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch. The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%, and everyone else is looking for a specific show, usually a specific episode of that show. There is no logical reason for 95% of 'streaming TV' to stream.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that, they can actually let people download them well before the broadcast, and then release the encryption key whenever so they can actually be watched. They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
They'd have exactly the same amount of control over videos as before, in fact they'd have more, they'd have much less bandwidth, especially at a single moment in time, and ISPs would quickly set up proxy servers that downloaded every TV show available using this method once.
In fact, if the TV networks were clever, they'd have a free service for ISPs to do just that, and give them ability to download a show a hour before everyone else had it, so they'd have it already cached when the nightly downloads started. (Of course, a hypothetical universe where TV networks were clever would probably be different in so many other ways that talking about 'ISPs' or 'human beings' or 'the existence of linear time' is probably just silly...such a universe would be so different those things would not exist.)
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm that was not crackable before the key was distributed. Which would mean that no one can get them in advance, and, yes, people would provide cracks to permanently decrypt the files after the key was released to let you play them in a normal player...but, of course, they'd still have ads, so who cares? (And the people who would cut out the ads and distribute them like that are already doing that with digital recordings off satellites that don't have ads to start with!)
Agreed. Even under the laxest consumer protection laws, companies do not have the ability to disconnect you and then not inform you, and certainly don't have the ability to not tell you when you call in trying to fix the problem, which is what happened to this guy...they didn't bother to inform their own technical support.
So their tech support jerked him around for hours trying to fix the problem, including multiple trips to the stores. It probably wasn't tech support's fault...if the tech support drones knew he'd been disconnected, they'd happily tell him and make him someone else's problem over in customer service.
He has, at minimum, a lawsuit for his time, his gas, and his lost productivity of not having an internet connection (Because he could have spent that time getting another ISP.) they wasted with that nonsense. Sadly, he's probably already returned the cable modems, or he could stick them with that bill too.
Congresspeople asking prosecutors, or their bosses, to do stuff with specific investigations is illegal. It's against the law. The law forbids it, and provides penalties for breaking it, once that is proven in court. (1)
It is, in many cases, illegal for them to even discuss specific investigations with anyone in the DOJ except the very top. (And the top, in turn, is forbidden from passing information downward.) This is so they can't call up and 'hint' without saying outright.
Granted, her saying she was going to do that isn't might not be illegal, it's often not illegal to say you're going to do illegal things.
But I didn't say it was illegal...I said she said she'd do something illegal, not that she actually had done something illegal. (I have no idea what the laws about bribery are in this case.)
1) I know it is confusing, after Bush, about what 'illegal' actually means, but I don't have time to get into the whole 'a bill is proposed and passed into law' stuff, not to mention the whole 'people who helped make a law can, indeed, violate it' stuff.
Yup i spend my time and money creating a work I am entitled to it.
No, you really aren't. Copyright does not exist in the US because authors have some sort of right to their work. Other countries might have that as some sort of right, but it is not a right in the US, and it is not why copyright exists.
Copyright solely exists so that authors are more likely to create artistic works. That's it. That is the entire stated purpose for copyright in the US constitution. 'Promoting the progress of the arts.', not 'Because people deserve to be rewarded for their works'.
People get 'rights' confused, and think that copy'right' is some sort of 'right'. Well, it is, but a right is simply an ability to do something. Civil rights are the ones granted to us because we're people.
A copyright is not one of those, it is the grant of a right, like the 'right of way' that railroads have been given in exchange for building rail lines and agreeing to carry other rail on them. You are granted a copyright in exchange for, presumably, being more productive. The US government is not required, in any way, to do this.
So you need to elaborate on your freedom of speech statement because as you stated it it doesn't make sense.
Copyright stops me from writing down the exact contents of said Stephen King novel and distributing it, something that would otherwise be free press. It stops me from singing the song 'Yesterday' in public, which would otherwise be free speech.
Aka, copyright is a restriction on free speech and free press. It stops people from expressing themselves if such expression has been copyrighted by others.
Of course, unlike most restrictions on those things, it's a constitutional restriction on free speech. Congress is expressly given the power to grant copyrights, just like it has the power to grant 'right of ways' for railroads and give them to people.
And, if copyrights are no longer serving their purpose, it has the right to ungrant them, or at least change the terms of new ones.
It's also only relevant if you care about being accessible to everyone.
Except that you started off this conversation talking about 'all websites', you loon.
But from now on you feel free to pretend 'all websites' are run by hobbyists who can afford to ignore 60% or more of the people out there, and everyone else can freely ignore you.
The device on House was just a binary interface, and it was entirely plausible.
The patient could make a cursor go up, or not make it go up, and that was it. He had to make it go up twice for 'no'. And he had a response time measured in seconds just to get the cursor to go up.
I'm pretty certain that's real. It's actually a good deal less complex than technology that already exists, because I'm pretty certain they've demonstrated full 2-D control of a cursor using brainwaves. Half an axis vs. two full axis. (Of course, this guy hadn't had any training, either. It took him hours to get it to move in the first place.)
And, of course, there's this thing. Although if it takes more than seven seconds to send a character, I suspect they're using a two-phase system...i.e, two brain reads, one to get to the right part of the alphabet (or however it's organized), and one to get to the exact right character.
If each read can be 'two axis', that means that there are eight possible selections on each read. (It's a 3x3 grid, minus the middle square, which is not making a choice.) Two of those would be 8x8 different combo, or 64.
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However, employment contracts still can't can't keep you from being able to get a job. You have a fundamental right to be employed somewhere, and a current job cannot make you sign things that would make it impossible for you to get a job elsewhere.
Even NDAs and non-competes have to be fairly strictly worded and contained to a small subject matter.
It's not a first amendment issue, though. 'The right to be able to get gainful employment if someone wants to hire you' is not explicitly listed anywhere. Although an argument could be made it counts as 'servitude', because everyone needs a job, and if you can't change your jobs, you're in servitude.
If a contact stops you from being able to talk abut your job at all, solely for the public relations benefit of the company, (As opposed to legitimate protection of actual trade secrets.), it could, indeed, be shot down in court on the grounds it makes it unnecessarily difficult to get another job.
It's not that people are 'chickenshit', it's that in this country there's an entire political party dedicated to making sure that corporations can continue to act like that.
We have failed to recognize that the entire existence of any corporation is dependent on the state allowing it to exist, and that corporations have no rights at all.
There are just as many old references in cars.
The funniest obsolete reference is the 'roll down your car window' hand signal. I don't think they've manufactured any car with manual windows in the last decade. I can just imagine young kids wondering why adults thinks circular hand motions have anything to do with car windows. (Perhaps you want them to clean it?)
I actually wonder how long the direction will be preserved. Strictly speaking, it's 'the top moves towards the front of the car' for 'down', and the opposite for 'up', which means it's sometimes clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise, depending on where the person making the motion is. I suspect that people who grow up without window cranks will fail to grasp this distinction.
Or maybe even the phrase itself. Maybe someday people will wonder if car windows ever 'rolled down', presumably like posters and wires get 'rolled up', and like the plastic windows on some Jeeps actually do, and why we stopped using such amazing glass that could bend like that.
Actually, the funniest phrase is probably 'crank your car'. Yeah, I'll just go and use the crank on my car, which was apparently build 80 years ago, before electric starters.
I don't want to see naked people strip. That sounds painful.
Dude, I'm don't do computer repairs at all. I've never done them professionally.
Although I have done a few amateur ones, years back, and I always undercharged because I, like everyone else, knew it 'wasn't a lot of work'.
You apparently didn't read my post, where I said exactly what you said, except you said it in a stupider way.
People who are actually skilled at computers undervalue their time and knowledge in repairing them.
You, for some reason, acknowledged this, but then said that they should set the value of their time, in some hypothetical universe where they think they're worth more than they're actually asking for.
Which, of course, not the actual situation...all people, great or small, ask for what they think their time is worth. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing the job in the first place. (Barring exceptions like desperation jobs, which is not what we're talking about, we're talking about people who repair computers in their spare time.)
Thus suggesting that they should 'charge what they think they are worth' that is somewhat idiotic.
The actual problem in the real universe is they think they're worth less than what they're asking for. Computer repair amateurs underestimate their value, because they don't understand how valuable their knowledge and skills are.
And, incidentally, both the clients and service people set the rate. That is, in fact, how the free market works. Two people agree on a set amount of money in exchange for goods or services.
What I was actually suggesting is that people judge their rates by the opportunity cost of the client, to ask themselves 'If I did not exist, how much would this cost them'. Once repairmen have that in their head as a reasonable cost of 'the problem', they'd can knock off $100 or so and still feel comfortable with themselves. I.e, don't charge based on how much work it is to you, charge based on how much cost it would be if you weren't there and they had to go to a real repairman.
Which, as you're apparently failing to grasp, actually means charging more, not less, because this advice is for people who underestimate their value because 'they didn't do much'.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that most criminals are this way.
Maybe not even most caught criminals. Some are, indeed, caught after a lot of actual work tracking them down.
I was just saying 'assuming no one else knows what they are doing' is a fairly large failure mode of criminals.
Especially amateur, first-time criminals, who often fail to consider what basic security the victim could have. Like threatening people with a knife from ten feet away...if they have a gun, or even mace, that's rather stupid behavior. Or breaking into businesses at night without bothering to figure out if they have an alarm system.
If there was a list of the origins of criminal's mistakes, that would be right at the top. 'Failed to consider what sort of basic steps someone who was trying to stop this crime would take'.
And the same with getting caught afterwards. Like the moron in this story, who robbed a place, with video cameras, using a car with his company logo on it. 'Failed to consider the trivially easy way of figuring out if he did it or not.'
A rather large competency failure-mode in criminals is to assume that everyone is very very incompetent.
The very very very first thing anyone should ask themselves before committing a crime is 'If I wished to prevent this crime, what would I have done?'.
I mean, it seems such a basic first step.
And the next step is 'If I wished to find out who committed this crime, what would I do?'.
Not that criminals often know those things, it's often totally pathetic about how unaware they are of actual investigative procedure and that real life usually doesn't throw five red-herrings in front of the investigator like what happens on TV. Most criminal investigations are like L&O except the first guy they suspect is the right guy and there's no other suspects. Like a ten minute L&O.
But you'd think they would at least be aware enough to ask the questions and attempt to answer them.
It's the general rule that people who are very incompetent at something don't know they're incompetent, or even what competency looks like in others. There's a paper on that somewhere, I used to have it bookmarked.
Crime has never been the exception.
In fact, it's always sorta been the anti-exception, as people tend to interact with other people, and some of their knowledge will rub off and make them aware of how little they know. Like if I know an auto mechanic who talks about his job, I might become vaguely aware of how cars work and how little I know, and thus my estimation of my competency will go down.
Criminals are the huge exception to that, as they obviously rarely openly discuss their jobs with non-criminals. Most people's understanding of crime comes from police procedural, which often hilariously over and understate the different way criminals get caught.
So would-be criminals fail to realize that almost all crimes are solved simply by looking for the most obvious suspect, and poking around a bit to discover that, in fact, they did it. Seriously, something like 90% of solved crimes are just 'Okay, who had the motives, means, and opportunity to do this? Let's search his house. Hey, look, it's his bank-robbing outfit and the money.'
They like to imagine they're living in some convoluted TV plot and wear gloves to keep from leaving 'DNA', when in actuality they parked their company car in the parking lot and got out on video cameras. If they had any basic interaction with criminals they'd know that, but it's all TV.
I don't know if people who are more intelligent are prone to this more, or if they just choose different crime. The two guys you're talking about, if they were dumber, would have done something like tried to hide in the store after closing and walk out with the stuff...the method might change, the incompetency does not.
What if he'd stolen a hard drive full of Metallica MP3s?
The mind boggles. He could have sold it back to them for trillions of dollars.
People are not charged with illegally receiving their own property. (I don't know if they can be, but they aren't.)
There are three kinds of computer repair people out there.
There are the scam artists, who take a 'broken' computer, reformat the drive, spend five minutes starting a non-legal Windows install, and charge $500. And possibly with some imaginary added hardware costs tacked on too. Person gets a computer they're going to get spyware on six months and it will be messed again. Usually they don't resort to deliberately breaking computers, but who knows.
And then there are the legit repair centers, who tend to take the easy way out, but at least they are honest. Most of the time the easy way is 'replace the computer' so people lose their data, though.
Then there are the good guys, who sit down, don't reformat the drive, work for two hours installing AVG and Ad-Aware, give an hour of instruction during that, and think it's worth maybe $20 and a Coke from their fridge.
All you good guys out there, start charging more. Honestly. You are not charging for work, you are charging for knowledge.
Or think of it this way: The alternative to what you're doing is requires $200 of (legit) repairs or a $300 new computer. You can, indeed, change them $100 for that.
Your time is not worth what you think it's worth. For you, half of it is a game, and the other half is satisfaction at a job well done, but you don't set the value for your time.
Your time is worth what they think it's worth, and I assure you, you're a hell of a lot cheaper than the alternatives. (And provide better value, considering that half the time you're sitting fixing stuff you're providing a computer class in how to not have this happen again.)
That would work, but that's why I suggested GPG. No need for them to keep the software around it proprietary, or attempt to turn it into a DRM scheme after the release date.
Yes, and if you or other sane people were implementing it, that's how it would be done. Possibly not with permanent decryption build in.
We'd encrypt standard video files, with commercials in them, give them out freely, and then when the TV show airs, we'd give out the key. We'd count downloads of the key to see how many people are viewing it, which wouldn't be exact but a good deal more exact than existing broadcast viewers.
You and I would want to actually store the keys, but I can see even the most reasonable network demanding a new download of the key for each viewing, and most people wouldn't have a problem with that. With maybe some sort of 'export' to watch on an iPod or cell phone at lower quality.
Aka, essentially iTunes, for free. You'd have to use their interface and player, and of course people would crack it, but most people would be perfectly happy with it.
However, television networks combine all the copyright paranoia of the RIAA and MPAA with the stupidity of television networks. They aren't stupid because they don't understand the chances in the wold like the *AA, they're stupid because they are inherently, fundamentally, impossibly stupid. (Whereas the *AA is just in a universe it does not understand yet, and doesn't want to understand.)
In actuality, TV networks aren't 'stupid', they're fiefdoms with rapid turnovers, and executives that will destroy success projects of the predecessors and 'competitors' in the company, thus rendering them totally dysfunctional as a company.
I actually did some research to find out why Fox kept purchasing sci-fi shows it wanted to kill, and came to understand that TV executives are not attempting to do what is best for their company, the major people they are fighting are other people at their own company. It's 'not invented here' to an absurd level, it's give multi-million decisions to suits who think they are 'artists' with 'vision' that 'make TV', and any successful vision that isn't theirs reflects poorly on them.
To the outside universe, however, they appear less intelligent than garden slugs.
Frankly, we're lucky TV networks haven't killed Hulu yet. They really are that functionally stupid. At some point, some executive is going to come along and kill Hulu because doing so makes him look better. Maybe a 'competing' show is getting better Hulu ratings and worse broadcast ratings, or maybe it will just the guy replacing the Hulu guy who will suddenly decide it was a bad idea.
The more permanent solution here is the CDN solution: Just take whatever content you anticipate to be popular in a given area, push it out to massive caches there, and serve it locally. Or, simpler still, run connections through a caching proxy.
That was the point of torrents, to share among the people on the same ISP so tons of bandwidth isn't being used. And reduce demand on the originating servers.
If ISPs are willing to do something like caching servers, it really doesn't matter what is used. However, I suspect that not only will ISPs not do this, they will actively oppose it, like they currently oppose streaming.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software.
If they do that, fuck it, another big point of going online is lost. Those past seasons of House? I can put them in my laptop and watch them on a road trip. I can watch them on Linux. I can plug my laptop into a TV and watch them there. I can basically do whatever I want with them.
As the whole point is to download them in advance, there's no way in hell TV networks will let that happen if they can't 'release' them when they want.
I agree, the best bet would be to create some sort of format that's an open standard, with a bunch of 0s for the decryption key in the distributed file, and then a program that sticks the key in, and, from that point on, anyone can play it. Or permanently decrypt it.
But they absolutely will not do anything of the sort.
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm
*facepalm* You really don't understand DRM, do you?
Again, no DRM needed. Just wrap it up in a plain old GPG file, hell, even an encrypted zip/rar. Let them be distributed via multicast, or bittorrent, or whatever -- it can be a completely open system. Provide the keys via RSS or something.
I understand DRM perfectly well, and, more to the point, I didn't say DRM. I said encrypted.
If you think TV networks are going to let you decrypt and play their video files whereever you want, you are very mistaken. Likewise, if you think they're not going to want a way to track your watching or disable it. If we're lucky, the program will include the ability to copy the TV show to other computers.
Of course, TV networks that think they can stop you from decrypting and playing their video files where you want are also very mistaken. Likewise if they think people won't write cracking programs that install and do all this automatically.
Ergo, my proposal was for an interface that isn't hackable before the release date of the file. (Simply because no one's going to crack the encryption in that time.)
But after that point, it's essentially standard DRM stupidity of having encrypted content and keys both accessible, and of course people will crack it. (But no one will care, as this cracked file will have commercials in it, so everyone who downloads illegally will just continue to download the fucking digital satellite commercial-less broadcast ripped by LOL or whatever.)
Multicast is dead. It's never going to get implemented correctly, at least not until Ipv6.
Torrents are the new multicast. Nowhere near as efficient, but at least they reduce the demand on the original source.
That's my window, and I don't have access to a DVR. Know how many shows I want to watch are on at those times? None. Does that mean there aren't shows I want to watch? Of course there are! And video streaming is the only way to do it.
Or, instead of video streaming, you could use the system I suggested in my post, which you apparently didn't bother to read.
Instead, you decided to argue against some sort of multicast system that I didn't suggest in any way. (In fact, you appear to be arguing against traditional TV broadcasting, which is just stupid of you, as I in no way promoted that as an alternative to anything.)
For the record, what I actually suggested was having an automated torrent system, either using the actual torrent protocol or something like it, to download TV shows you want to watch in advance, the night before, and then have a player that, when the show is 'aired', contacts a website and gets the key to play it.
The only disadvantage this has over steaming is that you'd have to select the shows in advance, which, as I pointed out, is something like 95% of all TV viewing. People may not know what they're going to watch, but they know what shows they like, and there's plenty of time for shows to download overnight, or, for you, during the day. And, of course, there's TiVo-like logic to predict shows you might want and download them automatically.
For that last 5%, services like Hulu could certainly continue to exist. Although if an episode of a show was torrented widely enough, i.e, if someone says you should download last night's episode of whatever, you could download it fairly quickly anyway.
Or even there could be some sort of 'distributed streaming', where the client downloads the stream as you watch it, but it's also requesting pieces later in the episode from others so it's not all downloaded from the provider. If the stream is half the speed of your internet connection, during the first 5% of the show it can download the first 5% to show you, and the second 5% it got from the torrent, if you see what I'm saying. It can use mainly the torrent, and use the streaming server only to start and in an emergencies when it runs out of data.
Really? That's just an amazingly stupid design.
When they type your account info in, it should immediately inform the people that the account is not functional for whatever reason.
Considering how quickly the support people want to get you off the line, you'd think they'd bother to spend fifteen seconds checking that the account is active, because if not under no circumstances can they actually solve your problem.
Yeah, I know they don't want to 'solve your problem', they want to get you off the line, but, hell, checking that the account actually works is faster than telling people to reboot their computer and wait for it to come up.
If they know it was disabled, bam, problem solved, ticket closed, at least on their end. It's a job for customer service at that point.
Video streaming of TV shows makes no sense, period.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch. The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%, and everyone else is looking for a specific show, usually a specific episode of that show. There is no logical reason for 95% of 'streaming TV' to stream.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that, they can actually let people download them well before the broadcast, and then release the encryption key whenever so they can actually be watched. They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
They'd have exactly the same amount of control over videos as before, in fact they'd have more, they'd have much less bandwidth, especially at a single moment in time, and ISPs would quickly set up proxy servers that downloaded every TV show available using this method once.
In fact, if the TV networks were clever, they'd have a free service for ISPs to do just that, and give them ability to download a show a hour before everyone else had it, so they'd have it already cached when the nightly downloads started. (Of course, a hypothetical universe where TV networks were clever would probably be different in so many other ways that talking about 'ISPs' or 'human beings' or 'the existence of linear time' is probably just silly...such a universe would be so different those things would not exist.)
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm that was not crackable before the key was distributed. Which would mean that no one can get them in advance, and, yes, people would provide cracks to permanently decrypt the files after the key was released to let you play them in a normal player...but, of course, they'd still have ads, so who cares? (And the people who would cut out the ads and distribute them like that are already doing that with digital recordings off satellites that don't have ads to start with!)
Agreed. Even under the laxest consumer protection laws, companies do not have the ability to disconnect you and then not inform you, and certainly don't have the ability to not tell you when you call in trying to fix the problem, which is what happened to this guy...they didn't bother to inform their own technical support.
So their tech support jerked him around for hours trying to fix the problem, including multiple trips to the stores. It probably wasn't tech support's fault...if the tech support drones knew he'd been disconnected, they'd happily tell him and make him someone else's problem over in customer service.
He has, at minimum, a lawsuit for his time, his gas, and his lost productivity of not having an internet connection (Because he could have spent that time getting another ISP.) they wasted with that nonsense. Sadly, he's probably already returned the cable modems, or he could stick them with that bill too.
Congresspeople asking prosecutors, or their bosses, to do stuff with specific investigations is illegal. It's against the law. The law forbids it, and provides penalties for breaking it, once that is proven in court. (1)
It is, in many cases, illegal for them to even discuss specific investigations with anyone in the DOJ except the very top. (And the top, in turn, is forbidden from passing information downward.) This is so they can't call up and 'hint' without saying outright.
Granted, her saying she was going to do that isn't might not be illegal, it's often not illegal to say you're going to do illegal things.
But I didn't say it was illegal...I said she said she'd do something illegal, not that she actually had done something illegal. (I have no idea what the laws about bribery are in this case.)
1) I know it is confusing, after Bush, about what 'illegal' actually means, but I don't have time to get into the whole 'a bill is proposed and passed into law' stuff, not to mention the whole 'people who helped make a law can, indeed, violate it' stuff.
Yup i spend my time and money creating a work I am entitled to it.
No, you really aren't. Copyright does not exist in the US because authors have some sort of right to their work. Other countries might have that as some sort of right, but it is not a right in the US, and it is not why copyright exists.
Copyright solely exists so that authors are more likely to create artistic works. That's it. That is the entire stated purpose for copyright in the US constitution. 'Promoting the progress of the arts.', not 'Because people deserve to be rewarded for their works'.
People get 'rights' confused, and think that copy'right' is some sort of 'right'. Well, it is, but a right is simply an ability to do something. Civil rights are the ones granted to us because we're people.
A copyright is not one of those, it is the grant of a right, like the 'right of way' that railroads have been given in exchange for building rail lines and agreeing to carry other rail on them. You are granted a copyright in exchange for, presumably, being more productive. The US government is not required, in any way, to do this.
So you need to elaborate on your freedom of speech statement because as you stated it it doesn't make sense.
Copyright stops me from writing down the exact contents of said Stephen King novel and distributing it, something that would otherwise be free press. It stops me from singing the song 'Yesterday' in public, which would otherwise be free speech.
Aka, copyright is a restriction on free speech and free press. It stops people from expressing themselves if such expression has been copyrighted by others.
Of course, unlike most restrictions on those things, it's a constitutional restriction on free speech. Congress is expressly given the power to grant copyrights, just like it has the power to grant 'right of ways' for railroads and give them to people.
And, if copyrights are no longer serving their purpose, it has the right to ungrant them, or at least change the terms of new ones.
It's also only relevant if you care about being accessible to everyone.
Except that you started off this conversation talking about 'all websites', you loon.
But from now on you feel free to pretend 'all websites' are run by hobbyists who can afford to ignore 60% or more of the people out there, and everyone else can freely ignore you.
His mother?
Hell, I text that fast, and I suck at it.
Hell, I actually type, with no predictive stuff, that fast, on a cell phone numeric pad.
The device on House was just a binary interface, and it was entirely plausible.
The patient could make a cursor go up, or not make it go up, and that was it. He had to make it go up twice for 'no'. And he had a response time measured in seconds just to get the cursor to go up.
I'm pretty certain that's real. It's actually a good deal less complex than technology that already exists, because I'm pretty certain they've demonstrated full 2-D control of a cursor using brainwaves. Half an axis vs. two full axis. (Of course, this guy hadn't had any training, either. It took him hours to get it to move in the first place.)
And, of course, there's this thing. Although if it takes more than seven seconds to send a character, I suspect they're using a two-phase system...i.e, two brain reads, one to get to the right part of the alphabet (or however it's organized), and one to get to the exact right character.
If each read can be 'two axis', that means that there are eight possible selections on each read. (It's a 3x3 grid, minus the middle square, which is not making a choice.) Two of those would be 8x8 different combo, or 64.