You may be able to balance the equation merely by making money not inheritable. Want to pass on your millions to your kids? Buy them houses, jets and jewelry and pass that along, not your money. This would have the advantage of at least turning all that money back into capital. (Don't attack me on this one please, as I'm not sure at all it would work, I'm still only toying with the idea)
Even this is a stupid idea in the long run, and shows a decided lack of understanding of what wealth, money, and capital really are.
Bravo. The very first thing you attack out of what I said was a throwaway comment that I explicitly said I haven't thought through at all. I'm going to return the favour and assume that the rest of your post is full of shit too.
Yes, you're right. In another post, I note this. Apple's problem is with first-sale rights and having their EULA tested, not with Anti-trust issues, for exactly the reasons you outline.
Oh, really? how many providers have you got for computers (legally) capable of running OSX? well, we *used* to have Psystar but...
So how many game companies, that make their games exclusively for Windows operating systems, are being sued for not making their games for the mac or linux? How are they violating anti-trust statutes? They can even "forbid" you to run the game under Wine by 1) making it incompatible with Wine or 2) simply forbidding it in the EULA. How is this any different? Keep in mind that Apple doesn't make or control the sale of the hardware they use, only the OS. The hardware is off-the-shelf stuff you can buy at Frys or Newegg or wherever.
IANAL, but as far as I know, anti-trust law deals not only with monopolies but also with unfair business practices that may lead to one,
So how are Apple's business practices leading them to a monopoly? I think you could argue that Apple's business practices have been keeping their market share low. You'll notice that the iPod, which is not tied to OS X or to Apple hardware, is very popular, while OS X is sitting around %10 or so of marketshare. I personally think they'd sell a ton of boxes of OS X if they opened up the licensing.
and tying through purely legal means their software to their hardware products could easily fall under the latter.
But there are lots of competing products. The OS market is currently dominated by Microsoft (who has been adjudged to have a monopoly), and in which there are several alternatives, some of them free. The market for hardware is rich and diverse, with multiple providers for just about any hardware component you can think of. How does tying the hardware to the software give Apple any more market share in either market? It' doesn't.
Anti-trust law specifically forbids using a monopoly in one area to increase your market in another. But in which area does Apple have a monopoly? Neither. No monopoly means no anti-trust violations.
I don't give a damn who the fruits of my labor is going to if it's not going to me. I work for me, not for anyone else.
Then why do you let the rich underpay you?
How? You need to understand that value!=money!=resources these things merely approximate each other. If we took money from rich people and gave it to poor people it would do little to improve their situation because the resources and the value aren't really there.
Actually, money doesn't get devalued by being taken from the rich and given to the poor, it gets devalued when more of it is created without also increasing the value it represents. You don't even need to give the money to the poor, just take it from the rich and destroy it. That alone will increase the value of the money remaining in the system. If the money is an (approximate) representation of the value of a nation's labour and capital, then moving that money from one place to another doesn't devalue it. Any discrepancy between money/value/labour is due to the monetary system that allows money to be created based on money itself, and not based on the value of capital/labour.
Also, don't forget, I'm not necessarily talking about giving money to the poor, I'm talking about raising the poor's wages, and giving them jobs where they don't already have them. If the money that's currently being hoarded was brought back into the economy (through purchasing, investing in infrastructure, whatever) then there would be more demand for goods and more supply of those goods, for better wages. Whenever something bad happens, what do the leaders say? Spend more money. Why? Because it gives the economy a boost. The problem with the rich is that they don't spend enough on real stuff, they hoard value. (Whether or not it's a good idea to base the economy on consumption is an argument for another day.)
In the end, any benefit to the poor would come at the expense of the middle class (by raising their costs).
Except that if the middle class were getting paid what their labour was worth, they'd have more money to compensate for the rising costs.
In the long term, it would hurt everybody, because some of the money you took from the rich was going to be used for new capital investment (to increase available resources in the future and thereby further enrich the wealthy) and now it won't be.
Shenanigans. You're making my arguments for me. The problem is that they hoard their wealth now. Rich people don't invest in new capital unless they are sure they'll get more money to hoard out of that investment. There's nothing wrong with taking profits as a return on your investment, but the game is rigged so that they take more profits than they could ever need. They do this at YOUR expense.
You may be able to balance the equation merely by making money not inheritable. Want to pass on your millions to your kids? Buy them houses, jets and jewelry and pass that along, not your money. This would have the advantage of at least turning all that money back into capital. (Don't attack me on this one please, as I'm not sure at all it would work, I'm still only toying with the idea)
you can't make a poor person wealthy simply by giving them money.
I'm not talking about making a poor person wealthy, I'm talking about making a poor person not starving or malnourished. Making sure poor people are reasonably healthy and have a roof over their heads. Making sure poor people have an education. It doesn't take all that much to make sure everyone has a minimum standard of living. I'm not saying everyone should make the same wage, just that there be a minimum (that supports a decent life) and a maximum (I'm thinking a few hundreds of thousands a year, just not in the millions/year range), and between those two points you're free to compete with your peers. Currently, this isn't possible. Or rather, for the middle class it i
You mistakenly believe that the fruits of your labour are going to the poor. But by and large, they're not. The poor in North America are getting poorer all the time. For the most part, the fruits of your labour that are taken from you are going to the super-rich, and their share gets bigger every day. Why should the value of your labour go into Warren Buffet's pocket? or Soros'? or any other multi-billionaire?
The fact is, we could probably bring all the poor up to a middle-class standard with very little expenditure on our part. But there will never be enough money (=value=labour) to satisfy people who are literally addicted to making money. If you work in a big company, how much more would you make if everyone in that company made the same wage? I would wager that the only people to suffer a wage decrease would be the directors and/or the board. That's it.
The problem with the laissez-faire capitalist system is that it's just as fictitious as a pure communist system. The system we have now is rigged in favour of the richest few people on the planet, and most of us don't even see it. They've conned us into thinking we all can be as successful as they are, if we just work hard enough. But it's bullshit. The game is rigged.
In a world with men who are so rich they can't possibly spend all their money, there should be nobody starving.
Munroe's elderly comic makes GREAT sense, but you have to get the in-joke. Have you seen the comic captioned "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? And if so, what magazine do you think it first appeared in? I thought it was the best one of all of them, with so many delicious levels of irony and meta-references.
But this just highlights a key difference between the Apple world and the MS/commodity hardware world (for lack of a better name). Apple has always about sacrificing backwards compatibility, and getting rid of Firewire on the consumer grade laptops is perfectly consistent with that. Everyone knows (or should know) that any product they buy today is not guaranteed to work with Apple products that come out 3-5 years down the road.
Conversely, in the MS/commodity hardware world, Microsoft and the hardware vendors go out of their way to make sure that their comoponents are has backward-compatible as possible with stuff they put out many years previously. With either philosophy, there are trade-offs.
One of the reasons why MS operating systems get more bloated and crufty every interation is because Vista has to be able to run software that was designed to be run on an OS designed 10 years ago. I remember seeing motherboards that had ISA slots long after PCI had taken over the market, and troubleshooting the resource conflicts was a nightmare.
On the Apple side, you get an OS like leopard that actually runs better than Tiger, but it won't run on hardware more than 5 years old or so. You get hardware and software that "just works" (most of the time) but you don't get a floppy drive, or serial/parallel ports, or whatever technology is fading into the past.
It amounts to 6 of one and a half-dozen of the other. If you want something future-proof, go with MS/commodity hardware, and if you want something that isn't crufty and bloated due to backward compatibility, go with the Apple. But don't bitch if your choice bites you in the ass, whichever choice you make.
this could be me to the T. I myself choose A, but it burns my ass that the game publishers will attribute their loss of a sale to me to piracy, and not to their shitty DRM scheme.
Erm, I think CD key checks are DRM, actually, just not very intrusive or effective DRM. But certainly the CD Key check has the same intention as the Activation, to limit one copy of one game to one user.
Sorry, but it's not as if CD keys themselves were copy protected in any way, shape or form
I wonder if that's true. after all, if the CD key isn't copyrighted (and really, as far as the law is concerned, that little (c) is legally equivalent to DRM schemes, and just as illegal to circumvent), there's nothing stopping you from just going online and getting another, is there? But isn't that cracking the game?
I would say A, most of the time. Incidentally, I'll buy nothing from BioWare or Obsidian until Atari stops bolting SecuROM on like a fucking ball and chain. In fact, I probably wouldn't buy anything from Obsidian anyway, NWN2 was a letdown after NWN.
Of course, I don't pirate games now, so I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.
I think GP meant something a little more dramatic, like cutting loose big chunks of the company along natural fault lines, like splitting off the OS, gaming, office software divisions, and making them sink or swim on their own merits as separate companies. I think this might actually be a decent idea, as it would force lagging and stagnant divisions/products to innovate, instead of relying on the success of other divisions to prop them up. It would also have the added benefit of mollifying anti-trust watchdogs around the world.
Of course this would be a pretty risky move, so I'm not holding my breath.
There's nothing illegal about searching people at the border. All nations reserve the right to search anyone coming in, and to deny that person entry if they choose to (detaining them for extended periods of time may cause the person's rights to kick in). This laptop search business is just an extension of search powers that all border guards have, in every country.
Your civil rights start when you're in a nation, not when you're standing at the gate asking to be let in. This isn't really new at all. Is it disgusting? Sure, for us freedom-loving types it rankles that the border guards can basically do what they want to you, but it's been a fundamental feature of international law for a long time now, and no State is going to give that up without a fight.
Interesting. I live in Northern Ontario (about 500 km due north from Toronto, and I gotta say, my small and mid-size cars have done just fine with a decent set of winters. Our current car is a Toyota Matrix (standard transmission), and we've never gotten it stuck in 6 inches of snow, and we've driven through some pretty deep snow. It's somewhat wonky on ice, but really a top-heavy SUV performs worse on ice, where you lose any advantage at all from the 4 wheel drive. The only problem we might have had would be starting on ice, but the manual transmission helps a lot with that.
My other car is an old beater, a Skylark 6-cylinder, and it eats up snow and ice for dinner. Really, there's no need for an SUV or a 4x truck to get through a snowy winter.
Not a necessity, especially if it is putting young kids on the road that aren't old enough to handle the responsibilities of driving. Or just get a job close enough to ride your bike to.
This isn't always an option. GP mentions sprawling suburbs: I grew up in a rural area. My part time job was a 45 minute bike ride away. In the summer, I could do it but not in the fall, winter or spring. Not having a job was out of the question, as my family had a low income and we needed my job to supplement that income.
extracurricular activities...
That take place at the school that they are already at. And I'm pretty sure that buses generally take kids to and from school.
Extracurricular activities in my highschool often extended past the time when buses left. I often went to school, did extracurricular afterwards, went to my part time job after that, and then went home. This wouldn't have been possible without a car.
to take the burden off parents who work 2-4 hours away by picking up their younger siblings at school/daycare.
But those kids can't drive themselves to school at age 15, or age 14, etc. Why do they need to drive themselves to school once they hit 16? What has changed so much that we need to endanger teenagers and others on the road with drivers that are too young?
No sorry, you haven't addressed GP's point here, as presumably, if the laws allowed a kid to drive at 14 or 15, such overburdened families would be taking advantage of that.
Your assumption that a 16-18 year old can't be responsible enough to drive is just that, an assumption. There are a lot of kids who are more than capable of handling that responsibility at that age. In the rural area where I'm from, it's not uncommon for kids as young as 10 to drive cars and trucks on back roads and on their farms, and you never hear of them getting into accidents.
My personal, non-scientific, talking-out-of-my-ass opinion is that it's not the 16-18 year olds you have to worry about, it's the 18-22 year olds that cause more trouble, because they've been driving long enough to relax their guard, but not long enough to gain the requisite experience, but YMMV obviously.
Actually, in some jurisdictions, you can't give (some of) those rights away, no matter what your contract says. For example, most record contracts will include a clause saying that the artist assigns their moral rights away, but many jurisdictions interpret moral rights to be a basic human right, that can't be assigned. In the same way, you cannot sell yourself into slavery by contract, because the law does not recognize that a person can assign their right to freedom away.
Incidentally, the fairness of a contract is a live issue. If there is too much imbalance between the parties, in terms of their relative powers, or intelligence, a judge can rule that there has been no "meeting of the minds", or in really bad cases, that the contract is "unconscionable", and not enforceable. Record contracts would seem to fall into the "unconscionable" category, because the artist has no alternative to the contract being offered. They can choose to take the contract offered, or go to a rival label who will offer the same contract, or languish in obscurity. The oligarchical nature of the music business ensures that the artists are always in a position of weakness.
No lawyer in their right mind would recommend to a client artist that they sign a major-label contract as they are usually offered.
Erm, they seized the computer because they had reason to believe it had sensitive government documents on it. If you'd rtfa (I know, I know) you'd know that they reimbursed him some money for the electronic equipment they did seize, to the tune of 1000 pounds. Of course it's possible they may charge him with something, if his computer shows evidence of illegal activity, but that's not yet indicated.
Actually, as a Brit, it's your fault (or your ancestors', anyway). None of this would be a problem if the Puritans hadn't felt the need to leave Britain and go found a new country in the New World. Thanks a pile.
Slashdot Mirror
Even this is a stupid idea in the long run, and shows a decided lack of understanding of what wealth, money, and capital really are.
Bravo. The very first thing you attack out of what I said was a throwaway comment that I explicitly said I haven't thought through at all. I'm going to return the favour and assume that the rest of your post is full of shit too.
Yes, you're right. In another post, I note this. Apple's problem is with first-sale rights and having their EULA tested, not with Anti-trust issues, for exactly the reasons you outline.
Oh, really? how many providers have you got for computers (legally) capable of running OSX? well, we *used* to have Psystar but...
So how many game companies, that make their games exclusively for Windows operating systems, are being sued for not making their games for the mac or linux? How are they violating anti-trust statutes? They can even "forbid" you to run the game under Wine by 1) making it incompatible with Wine or 2) simply forbidding it in the EULA. How is this any different? Keep in mind that Apple doesn't make or control the sale of the hardware they use, only the OS. The hardware is off-the-shelf stuff you can buy at Frys or Newegg or wherever.
IANAL, but as far as I know, anti-trust law deals not only with monopolies but also with unfair business practices that may lead to one,
So how are Apple's business practices leading them to a monopoly? I think you could argue that Apple's business practices have been keeping their market share low. You'll notice that the iPod, which is not tied to OS X or to Apple hardware, is very popular, while OS X is sitting around %10 or so of marketshare. I personally think they'd sell a ton of boxes of OS X if they opened up the licensing.
and tying through purely legal means their software to their hardware products could easily fall under the latter.
Or not. See Above.
I would just add that it's the first-sale doctrine and probably the EULA test that Apple doesn't want to see happen in court.
But there are lots of competing products. The OS market is currently dominated by Microsoft (who has been adjudged to have a monopoly), and in which there are several alternatives, some of them free. The market for hardware is rich and diverse, with multiple providers for just about any hardware component you can think of. How does tying the hardware to the software give Apple any more market share in either market? It' doesn't.
Anti-trust law specifically forbids using a monopoly in one area to increase your market in another. But in which area does Apple have a monopoly? Neither. No monopoly means no anti-trust violations.
I don't give a damn who the fruits of my labor is going to if it's not going to me. I work for me, not for anyone else.
Then why do you let the rich underpay you?
How? You need to understand that value!=money!=resources these things merely approximate each other. If we took money from rich people and gave it to poor people it would do little to improve their situation because the resources and the value aren't really there.
Actually, money doesn't get devalued by being taken from the rich and given to the poor, it gets devalued when more of it is created without also increasing the value it represents. You don't even need to give the money to the poor, just take it from the rich and destroy it. That alone will increase the value of the money remaining in the system. If the money is an (approximate) representation of the value of a nation's labour and capital, then moving that money from one place to another doesn't devalue it. Any discrepancy between money/value/labour is due to the monetary system that allows money to be created based on money itself, and not based on the value of capital/labour.
Also, don't forget, I'm not necessarily talking about giving money to the poor, I'm talking about raising the poor's wages, and giving them jobs where they don't already have them. If the money that's currently being hoarded was brought back into the economy (through purchasing, investing in infrastructure, whatever) then there would be more demand for goods and more supply of those goods, for better wages. Whenever something bad happens, what do the leaders say? Spend more money. Why? Because it gives the economy a boost. The problem with the rich is that they don't spend enough on real stuff, they hoard value. (Whether or not it's a good idea to base the economy on consumption is an argument for another day.)
In the end, any benefit to the poor would come at the expense of the middle class (by raising their costs).
Except that if the middle class were getting paid what their labour was worth, they'd have more money to compensate for the rising costs.
In the long term, it would hurt everybody, because some of the money you took from the rich was going to be used for new capital investment (to increase available resources in the future and thereby further enrich the wealthy) and now it won't be.
Shenanigans. You're making my arguments for me. The problem is that they hoard their wealth now. Rich people don't invest in new capital unless they are sure they'll get more money to hoard out of that investment. There's nothing wrong with taking profits as a return on your investment, but the game is rigged so that they take more profits than they could ever need. They do this at YOUR expense.
You may be able to balance the equation merely by making money not inheritable. Want to pass on your millions to your kids? Buy them houses, jets and jewelry and pass that along, not your money. This would have the advantage of at least turning all that money back into capital. (Don't attack me on this one please, as I'm not sure at all it would work, I'm still only toying with the idea)
you can't make a poor person wealthy simply by giving them money.
I'm not talking about making a poor person wealthy, I'm talking about making a poor person not starving or malnourished. Making sure poor people are reasonably healthy and have a roof over their heads. Making sure poor people have an education. It doesn't take all that much to make sure everyone has a minimum standard of living. I'm not saying everyone should make the same wage, just that there be a minimum (that supports a decent life) and a maximum (I'm thinking a few hundreds of thousands a year, just not in the millions/year range), and between those two points you're free to compete with your peers. Currently, this isn't possible. Or rather, for the middle class it i
You mistakenly believe that the fruits of your labour are going to the poor. But by and large, they're not. The poor in North America are getting poorer all the time. For the most part, the fruits of your labour that are taken from you are going to the super-rich, and their share gets bigger every day. Why should the value of your labour go into Warren Buffet's pocket? or Soros'? or any other multi-billionaire?
The fact is, we could probably bring all the poor up to a middle-class standard with very little expenditure on our part. But there will never be enough money (=value=labour) to satisfy people who are literally addicted to making money. If you work in a big company, how much more would you make if everyone in that company made the same wage? I would wager that the only people to suffer a wage decrease would be the directors and/or the board. That's it.
The problem with the laissez-faire capitalist system is that it's just as fictitious as a pure communist system. The system we have now is rigged in favour of the richest few people on the planet, and most of us don't even see it. They've conned us into thinking we all can be as successful as they are, if we just work hard enough. But it's bullshit. The game is rigged.
In a world with men who are so rich they can't possibly spend all their money, there should be nobody starving.
Munroe's elderly comic makes GREAT sense, but you have to get the in-joke. Have you seen the comic captioned "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? And if so, what magazine do you think it first appeared in? I thought it was the best one of all of them, with so many delicious levels of irony and meta-references.
But this just highlights a key difference between the Apple world and the MS/commodity hardware world (for lack of a better name). Apple has always about sacrificing backwards compatibility, and getting rid of Firewire on the consumer grade laptops is perfectly consistent with that. Everyone knows (or should know) that any product they buy today is not guaranteed to work with Apple products that come out 3-5 years down the road.
Conversely, in the MS/commodity hardware world, Microsoft and the hardware vendors go out of their way to make sure that their comoponents are has backward-compatible as possible with stuff they put out many years previously. With either philosophy, there are trade-offs.
One of the reasons why MS operating systems get more bloated and crufty every interation is because Vista has to be able to run software that was designed to be run on an OS designed 10 years ago. I remember seeing motherboards that had ISA slots long after PCI had taken over the market, and troubleshooting the resource conflicts was a nightmare.
On the Apple side, you get an OS like leopard that actually runs better than Tiger, but it won't run on hardware more than 5 years old or so. You get hardware and software that "just works" (most of the time) but you don't get a floppy drive, or serial/parallel ports, or whatever technology is fading into the past.
It amounts to 6 of one and a half-dozen of the other. If you want something future-proof, go with MS/commodity hardware, and if you want something that isn't crufty and bloated due to backward compatibility, go with the Apple. But don't bitch if your choice bites you in the ass, whichever choice you make.
this could be me to the T. I myself choose A, but it burns my ass that the game publishers will attribute their loss of a sale to me to piracy, and not to their shitty DRM scheme.
Erm, I think CD key checks are DRM, actually, just not very intrusive or effective DRM. But certainly the CD Key check has the same intention as the Activation, to limit one copy of one game to one user.
Sorry, but it's not as if CD keys themselves were copy protected in any way, shape or form
I wonder if that's true. after all, if the CD key isn't copyrighted (and really, as far as the law is concerned, that little (c) is legally equivalent to DRM schemes, and just as illegal to circumvent), there's nothing stopping you from just going online and getting another, is there? But isn't that cracking the game?
I would say A, most of the time. Incidentally, I'll buy nothing from BioWare or Obsidian until Atari stops bolting SecuROM on like a fucking ball and chain. In fact, I probably wouldn't buy anything from Obsidian anyway, NWN2 was a letdown after NWN.
Of course, I don't pirate games now, so I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.
Except it works better in other countries, right now. Why doesn't it work so well in yours?
I think GP meant something a little more dramatic, like cutting loose big chunks of the company along natural fault lines, like splitting off the OS, gaming, office software divisions, and making them sink or swim on their own merits as separate companies. I think this might actually be a decent idea, as it would force lagging and stagnant divisions/products to innovate, instead of relying on the success of other divisions to prop them up. It would also have the added benefit of mollifying anti-trust watchdogs around the world.
Of course this would be a pretty risky move, so I'm not holding my breath.
Wait a minute, the government REQUIRED banks to loan money to bad credit risks? You want to provide a citation for that one?
There's nothing illegal about searching people at the border. All nations reserve the right to search anyone coming in, and to deny that person entry if they choose to (detaining them for extended periods of time may cause the person's rights to kick in). This laptop search business is just an extension of search powers that all border guards have, in every country.
Your civil rights start when you're in a nation, not when you're standing at the gate asking to be let in. This isn't really new at all. Is it disgusting? Sure, for us freedom-loving types it rankles that the border guards can basically do what they want to you, but it's been a fundamental feature of international law for a long time now, and no State is going to give that up without a fight.
How about, since we're talking about customs, a Canadian citizen?
Maher Arar, who got rendered to Syria by your friendly neighbourhood CIA? Dude wasn't toting a kalashinkov around in Afghanistan, either.
Interesting. I live in Northern Ontario (about 500 km due north from Toronto, and I gotta say, my small and mid-size cars have done just fine with a decent set of winters. Our current car is a Toyota Matrix (standard transmission), and we've never gotten it stuck in 6 inches of snow, and we've driven through some pretty deep snow. It's somewhat wonky on ice, but really a top-heavy SUV performs worse on ice, where you lose any advantage at all from the 4 wheel drive. The only problem we might have had would be starting on ice, but the manual transmission helps a lot with that.
My other car is an old beater, a Skylark 6-cylinder, and it eats up snow and ice for dinner. Really, there's no need for an SUV or a 4x truck to get through a snowy winter.
part time jobs
Not a necessity, especially if it is putting young kids on the road that aren't old enough to handle the responsibilities of driving. Or just get a job close enough to ride your bike to.
This isn't always an option. GP mentions sprawling suburbs: I grew up in a rural area. My part time job was a 45 minute bike ride away. In the summer, I could do it but not in the fall, winter or spring. Not having a job was out of the question, as my family had a low income and we needed my job to supplement that income.
extracurricular activities...
That take place at the school that they are already at. And I'm pretty sure that buses generally take kids to and from school.
Extracurricular activities in my highschool often extended past the time when buses left. I often went to school, did extracurricular afterwards, went to my part time job after that, and then went home. This wouldn't have been possible without a car.
to take the burden off parents who work 2-4 hours away by picking up their younger siblings at school/daycare.
But those kids can't drive themselves to school at age 15, or age 14, etc. Why do they need to drive themselves to school once they hit 16? What has changed so much that we need to endanger teenagers and others on the road with drivers that are too young?
No sorry, you haven't addressed GP's point here, as presumably, if the laws allowed a kid to drive at 14 or 15, such overburdened families would be taking advantage of that.
Your assumption that a 16-18 year old can't be responsible enough to drive is just that, an assumption. There are a lot of kids who are more than capable of handling that responsibility at that age. In the rural area where I'm from, it's not uncommon for kids as young as 10 to drive cars and trucks on back roads and on their farms, and you never hear of them getting into accidents.
My personal, non-scientific, talking-out-of-my-ass opinion is that it's not the 16-18 year olds you have to worry about, it's the 18-22 year olds that cause more trouble, because they've been driving long enough to relax their guard, but not long enough to gain the requisite experience, but YMMV obviously.
Actually, in some jurisdictions, you can't give (some of) those rights away, no matter what your contract says. For example, most record contracts will include a clause saying that the artist assigns their moral rights away, but many jurisdictions interpret moral rights to be a basic human right, that can't be assigned. In the same way, you cannot sell yourself into slavery by contract, because the law does not recognize that a person can assign their right to freedom away.
Incidentally, the fairness of a contract is a live issue. If there is too much imbalance between the parties, in terms of their relative powers, or intelligence, a judge can rule that there has been no "meeting of the minds", or in really bad cases, that the contract is "unconscionable", and not enforceable. Record contracts would seem to fall into the "unconscionable" category, because the artist has no alternative to the contract being offered. They can choose to take the contract offered, or go to a rival label who will offer the same contract, or languish in obscurity. The oligarchical nature of the music business ensures that the artists are always in a position of weakness.
No lawyer in their right mind would recommend to a client artist that they sign a major-label contract as they are usually offered.
"the system...is down
the system... is down
down down down down doww
dodo dododoo dodo dododoo"
a sample (flash required)
Erm, they seized the computer because they had reason to believe it had sensitive government documents on it. If you'd rtfa (I know, I know) you'd know that they reimbursed him some money for the electronic equipment they did seize, to the tune of 1000 pounds. Of course it's possible they may charge him with something, if his computer shows evidence of illegal activity, but that's not yet indicated.
Actually, as a Brit, it's your fault (or your ancestors', anyway). None of this would be a problem if the Puritans hadn't felt the need to leave Britain and go found a new country in the New World. Thanks a pile.
"People are going to see the connection between little mundane things and transcendental concerns such as freedom and they will act accordingly."
good luck with that.