Joe Engineer from NHTSA may talk to the New York Times and use some intra-agency jargon like "in our latest survey, 99% of the bridges in the country got a designation of 'likely to collapse'." It turns out that 'likely to collapse' is an agency term measuring whether it is more likely to collapse or be struck by a meteor, but the reporter (who doesn't know any better, and wouldn't be expected to know better unless Joe explains it to him - and we've never heard before of a technical person who fails to explain their jargon) puts in the paper verbatim: "NHTSA says 99% of bridges likely to collapse." (Cue mass hysteria.) And of course, the blame would fall squarely on the hapless engineer, not on the reporter who takes the quote and runs with it as a headline without finding out - and probably not caring - what the engineer actually meant.
Honestly, all this secrecy about talking to the press would be unneccessary if reporters would do their job, investigate, and reporter accurate facts rather than attention grabbing headlines. Instead, they're focused on ratings for their show and how many people they can scare.
How many broad, sweeping laws recently have been caused by news shows putting on a program about some mysterious danger (chemicals in the water! Aiiie!), got the facts wrong, and later put up a news article on a backwater site saying, 'our bad'? I can think of at least two in my local area that made it on the ballot just in the last year, and I'm sure there's a horde of little ones about fire codes and whatnot that we haven't even been allowed to vote on because they're created by our appointed officials.
The framework for the environmental is very similar to the one established for food imports. All it requires is application to all goods. No exemptions. Licensing of importers and mandatory certification. Same as for food.
The only way you could make this stick was if you required all people who use your car to sign an agreement that they'd only ever install Such-and-Such Company licensed components in their car. I can tell you right now, the day I have to sign a EULA to purchase a car is the day I buy a bicycle.
Of course when they all but ordered me to hack into a rival companies servers and steal their data I put my foot down - stripping it from webservers and demo versions of their software is fair game... hacking? I wasn't going to do jail time for them and refused.
Fair game? Information on websites and in demo versions are protected by copyrights, again exposing you, the person committing the illegal acts, to liability. All a company has to do is say, 'What, huh, we didn't tell him to do that', and you'll end up twisting in the wind.
Even if these acts that company was telling you to do weren't illegal, they're definitely unethical. My company holds high standards of ethics. We don't do things like sell customers equipment that we wouldn't stand behind, or undercut competitors to get business and then put customers over a single-vendor barrel. We act with our customers interests first - and I'm not sure that a lot of our customers understand that, actually.:)
Lastly, if you are actually working at a company that has hundreds of unlicensed copies of software, you can put them out of business with a single phone call. Heck, you can report it online. bsa.org/reportpiracy. And if your employers don't realize how much power that gives you, they've got their head in the sand.
I believe the 'standard' rate of fines from the BSA for unlicensed copies of software is four times the value of each license. Not just each copy of the software - each license. So if you're running a Win2k server in per-server mode, and you have a hundred clients connecting to it, that's one hundred client-access licenses you'll get fined for, at four times the value per license. Think that might make a dent in this quarter's budget?
Libertarians are the group most vehemently against this concept, but I have never heard a single one of them coherently explain how exactly the free market will remain free without regulation. The Libertarian argument is that a government-free market and a base of informed consumers are as effective as any regulatory commission you might come up with.
Of course, if you don't have a base of informed consumers to start with, you're screwed. And hey, who's in charge of running the education system, to educate consumers in the first place? Why, I believe it's the people running commissions to regulate education.
Oops.
Smart people are willing to pay for quality, someone just needs to offer a quality printer. Have you noticed that the vast majority of American consumers aren't that smart? Hence why HP offers a line of crappy, cheap printers with high priced ink - for the 'stupid consumer' market segment. It's been doing gangbusters so far.
The truth is that so many people are trying to shove content down your throat in Second Life (mostly advertising, no less) that the servers just don't have the bandwidth capacity. I think that's why they're making this move - to distribute the bandwidth load among many, many users. I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps.
And now we can all dream about 'how I'd run my private digital world', can't we?
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In Soviet Russia, Information writes You!
Bioshock is definitely a work of art. Chock full of art, I would say. The question that should be asked is whether it was any good as a game.
The only way you could make this stick was if you required all people who use your car to sign an agreement that they'd only ever install Such-and-Such Company licensed components in their car. I can tell you right now, the day I have to sign a EULA to purchase a car is the day I buy a bicycle.
Fair game? Information on websites and in demo versions are protected by copyrights, again exposing you, the person committing the illegal acts, to liability. All a company has to do is say, 'What, huh, we didn't tell him to do that', and you'll end up twisting in the wind.
Even if these acts that company was telling you to do weren't illegal, they're definitely unethical. My company holds high standards of ethics. We don't do things like sell customers equipment that we wouldn't stand behind, or undercut competitors to get business and then put customers over a single-vendor barrel. We act with our customers interests first - and I'm not sure that a lot of our customers understand that, actually. :)
Lastly, if you are actually working at a company that has hundreds of unlicensed copies of software, you can put them out of business with a single phone call. Heck, you can report it online. bsa.org/reportpiracy. And if your employers don't realize how much power that gives you, they've got their head in the sand.
I believe the 'standard' rate of fines from the BSA for unlicensed copies of software is four times the value of each license. Not just each copy of the software - each license. So if you're running a Win2k server in per-server mode, and you have a hundred clients connecting to it, that's one hundred client-access licenses you'll get fined for, at four times the value per license. Think that might make a dent in this quarter's budget?
You mean they had a failover plan? I didn't see any evidence of it from where I was standing.
The truth is that so many people are trying to shove content down your throat in Second Life (mostly advertising, no less) that the servers just don't have the bandwidth capacity. I think that's why they're making this move - to distribute the bandwidth load among many, many users. I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps. And now we can all dream about 'how I'd run my private digital world', can't we?