However, downloaders be warned: the music industry will now proceed to actually participate in copyright infringement by downloading those shared songs or otherwise monitoring the downloads of those shared songs. The "my songs are shared out but were not actually downloaded" argument might not work next time.
Not to be too pedantic, but can a copyright holder actually violate their own copyright by pirating a copy of a song? It would seem to me that if I am the ultimate owner of a song, I have the right do do with it whatever I choose.
Therefore, an RIAA representative downloading a song from a Napster node is not an illegal act on their part-- which means that it's not an illegal act on the part of the uploader?
I feel like the RIAA can't have it both ways. If the act is illegal, then both parties are guilty. Or is the RIAA committing a crime, and then refusing to press charges against itself?
you need one simple change: a rule that the loser of a court case must pay the winner's costs.
Of course, then the pendulum has gone too far in the other direction. Let's say I have a beef with some company that I believe manufacture's a faulty product. If the company wishes to nip in the bud a series of class action suits, they may just outspend me. I get stuck with a bill for the millions they spent on defense if I lose... This isn't how the legal system here is supposed to work.
I agree with you though-- there must be some repercussion for abuse of the system... I happen to think that blatant abuses should be punished somehow- be it fines or community service.
So I used to work in the industry doing analysis of consumer buying habits based on shopper data. I don't happen to think it's bad, but that's besides the point. I would like to point out some facts though because there seems to be some severe misunderstanding about how the industry works. Maybe it will scare you more than you're scared now...
1) 75% of the time the data is used, it's to offer you a coupon. SKU and category level data is stored to your unique ID, and pieces of information like whether you paid cash or credit, which credit card, what denominations of cash you used, time, number of items in your basket, the clerk who helped you, just about everything you can think of is stored. Most of it is thrown out/never used because it doesn't help anyone.
2) Coupons are customized to your shopping profile based on two things: what you just bought, and what you have bought in the past. I've seen demos of crazy applications that would blow your mind. For example, if you bought tartar sauce last year at Lent, the implication is that you're catholic and might be interested in tartar sauce again this Lent. The opportunity to pitch you a coupon will be pitched to the manufacturer at say $.25 per coupon. If you don't want to share your information about this sort of thing, don't expect to get relevant coupons.
3) 20% of the time the information is used, it's in aggregated & repackaged in order to provide market research to all those companies that sell products in the supermarket-- food, toothpaste, etc. This is called scanner data in the trade, and companies like IRI and Nielsen and others use this data so that a brand manager can keep track of weekly sales by region/store/you name it. This is particularly useful to correlate with coupon distributions in newspapers (Free Standing Inserts or FSI's). This way, the brand manager can tweak the face value of the coupons distributed across regions and see the effects very quickly.
4) More and more, as databases get faster (b/c this requires a lot of processing time), you can match lists of addresses against their purchasing habits. Because this information is SO sensitive, it is carefully guarded by the owners (the supermarkets primarily). A supermarket might give this information to 3rd party vendor who has signed on the dotted line that he/she will give away his firstborn if he violates the anonymity of the shopper. For example, if I have a list of 100,000 people that i mailed coupons to, I can submit a list of these shoppers, and find out that 5,000 of them bought my product. I DO NOT KNOW WHO THEY ARE. Two parties do-- the retailer and the sworn-to-secrecy data vendor.
5) The stores are not the one's offering the discount, the manufacturer is. The industry has seen massive proliferation in trade promotion-- which are basically kickbacks given to retailers by the manufacturers. Much of their profit comes from these kickbacks. For example, if I'm managing a toothpaste brand, I pay for placement at eye level rather than feet level. Most of the frequent shopper discounts you're seeing are case discounts offered to the retailer in order to drive short term sales (promotions). It used to be that you didn't need a frequent shopper card to get these discounts. Nowadays, you're just plain lucky if the retailer doesn't pocket the case discount.
6) Frequent shopper cards weren't really created with the evil intentions of tracking our shopping habits. Grocery retailing is a brutally competitive business with margins in the 10% range (IIRC), and chain managers were looking for a way to build consumer loyalty. The EXACT same thing happpened with airline frequent flyer miles. What's good for the goose is not good for the gander. Now, you're at a competitive disadvantage if you don't track & make money off of consumer shopper data.
7) Finally, this is not the only industry to do this. Your telephone company, bank, pharmacy, credit card company, etc are all monitoring your activity to determine whethe
Not so much for the PC market, but especially for the console market, what is really hurting them is the presence of the used/pre-owned game.
I don't think you're correct here from an economic standpoint-- which makes the ethical question irrelevant.
I've studied a lot of pricing theory, and one of the tenets is that resale value is factored into the value the consumer is willing to pay for a new product. Say you intend to buy a car and get $10,000 value out of it over 5 years. Say the car will have a resale value of $10,000 in 5 years. The rational buyer will pay $20,000 for that car. The manufacturer of the car should price the car at $20,000. The fact that market exists really doesn't damage the manafacturer's bottom line-- they're still selling cars at the higher price.
You may say, "Well that's killing the manufacturer's opportunity for sales at the $10,000 price point." This is not the case. They made that sale already when you paid $20,000 for the car. You can almost think of it as though they sold 2 products then... A new car to you, and a used car to the person you resell to.
Unless there's something I'm missing, console games sales should work similarly... Add to this the fact that most stores give you store credit for games that you trade in. People have only so much disposable income to dump into video games, and used games doesn't change the amount flowing into industry coffers.
Your comment leads me to believe that you haven't. Find one and read it so you may be enlightened as well. It's really quite remarkable how the population was "controlled."
My point was merely that a signification portion of the population supported Prohibition. That fact is simply not diputable-- and since you're a self-proclaimed expert on the topic, you'd know that Prohibition ammendments to state constitutions predated the Federal one. Some of these happened in the 19th centure (Maine) and had little to do with the Temperance movement that began in Ohio. Unless you're reading conspiracy theory books about how the Illuminati are actually running the government, most historians would consider the Temperance movement to be a grassroots one. It started in Ohio! Can't get any more grassroots than that, except maybe Kansas...
What about the audience that wanted to hear what Howard Stern had to say? Wasn't that also their right?
The answer is no. 1957, Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court decided that "All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion - have the full protection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests. But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance."
I believe in Free Speech as much as anyone else and lecturing me on how important it is doesn't really prove your point. The wonderful thing about our country is that it protects our right to make political statements that disagree with those stated by our leaders. Having a limited "safe zone" that has been previously agreed upon to be sanitized from obscenity doesn't remove that right! If we have already agreed that the airwaves are supposed to be free from nipples, and my kid sees that nipple, then Janet Jackson has violated my right to privacy. Does that constitutional amendment mean anything to you?
I don't understand why people demand things to be all or nothing. A significant portion of the population wants the airwaves to be safe for their kids. Let them have it. Nobody's saying that obscenity should be illegal-- only in certain limited locations. Nobody's taking away your porn and obscenity- the Supreme Court wouldn't allow it.
Think of it like prohibition. A select handful of people wanted to rid themselves of alcoholics (Im' paraphrasing here). So they outlawed the drink. Did that work? Hell no. Its use increased and criminalized all that participated in the drink. Fast forward to today. A select handful of individuals want to rid themselves of those that don't share or support their views and openly speak against them. So they keep restricting speech until anything that's not inline with what they believe is outlawed. Those the speak out are criminals. How many times has history recorded this in the past?
1. Have you checked the US constitution lately? Do you know how hard it is to pass an amendment to this document? Based on the requirements, how you could possibly think that "a select few people" pushed prohibition legislation through? At the time, even congressmen who personally disagreed with the amendment voted in favor, claiming their constituencies supported it. It's probably fair to say that more than 50% of the population supported prohibition. This isn't a "select handful," it's democracy. Whether the amendment was misguided is irrelevant to the point. As long as the majority is not revoking the human rights of the majority, democracy is functioning ok. And no, human rights are much bigger than the right to get drunk. Which gets me to the next point.
2. Free Speech isn't boundless. Nobody ever guaranteed you the right to express yourself in every channel that exists. As long as you can reach an audience who wants to hear your thoughts, you're enjoying free speech. I don't see how sanitizing the airwaves (which are common property) restricts anyone's rights. You don't have the right to go around exposing yourself in public, likewise you shouldn't have the right to violate someone's right to enjoy "clean speech" in certain public media channels.
What do *you* think is the appropriate compensation for losing a limb due to a doctor's negligence? 1 million? Half a million? $250,000? A written apology?
Even though I don't agree with where you're going, it's a great question to ask. After all, in the end, you and I are the ones paying for the settlements through higher premiums on health insurance, taxes (Medicare/Medicaid payments keep Doctors/Hosptitals in business), and of course, medical fees.
The question everyone who's reading this article should ask themselves is how much am I willing to put into the pot every year so that the victim of malpractice gets some sort of recompense? For example, if.5% of the population every year is harmed by malpractice and deserves a $100,000 settlement, you personally should be willing to put $500 into the pot to cover those costs. Americans are complete idiots when it comes to shared costs-- we seem to think that these kinds of settlements come from money that grows on trees. All these settlements boil down to is a gigantic lottery where 100 people put in a dollar and one person walks away with $100. No, actually, the lawyer walks away with $50, and the malpractice victim gets the other $50...
If you're going to award malpractice victims for these things, why stop there? Shouldn't a murder victim's family receive more money from the public in compensation than a malpractice victim who suffers chronic pain? Does the fact that the offense was committed by a doctor mean that one person's suffering should be compensated differently than another (millions of dollars vs. no dollars)?
The real problem with massive lawsuits is that doctors are cowed into behaving in a non-optimal way-- ordering unnecessary tests, having arm's length relationships with their patients, refusing to treat "high-risk" patients- be they litigious or complicated, and retiring early. These hidden costs are killing our medical system, but the statistics are hidden from the public because they don't get rolled into front-page items the way a $40 million lawsuit does.
Let's stop having juries of folks who may or may not have received their high school degrees deciding the future of this country's health care system.
AFAIK, Xerox sold off/closed its inkjet and consumer printer units when it was going through hard times in 2001.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Lexmark designed this product and Xerox stamped their name on it. I used to work at Xerox as an engineer, and this used to happen occasionally with certain products.
For example, I think all of Dell's printers are made by Lexmark...
Martha is being charged with declaring her innocence nothing more. She went on live television and said she is innocent. What did the DA do, according to them, by declaring her innocence, she maliciously sought to raise her stock price in Omnimedia. Know what you're talking about. She's not charged with insider trading. She's charged with obstruction of justice, and the route they took even boggled the judge in case you didn't know. Martha's case if you also didn't know is the first of its kind being it's high profile though, most people don't even have a real clue about it, and look to the media to hold their hands and have it explained to them.
Martha Stewart is being charged with more than declaring her innocence. Obstruction of justice (in this case tampering with trade order information) is not the same as declaring one's innocence. Here are some quotes from the Yahoo news story of not too many minutes ago explaining what happened:
"Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice...
Stewart and Bacanovic claimed they had a standing agreement to sell when the price fell below $60. But the government contended that was a phony cover story and that Stewart sold because she was tipped by her broker that ImClone CEO Sam Waksal was frantically trying to dump his own holdings...
Stewart, who averted more than $51,000 in losses by selling when she did, was not charged with insider trading; instead, she and her broker were accused of lying about the transaction and altering records to support the alleged cover story."
You claim that the only crime she was accused of was going on TV in order to manipulate her stock price. This is not correct. She was charged with that crime, and it was thrown out... And with good cause-- declaring one's innocence publicly should not be illegal for obvious reasons. But, as I mentioned before, she did (and was just convicted of) more than just that.
At the risk of sounding redundant, every single point you made is true. I played Planetside for 3 months, then quit b/c I had gotten everything out of the game there was to get out of it. As a Tribes 2 fan, I loved cooperating in PS with a team to take bases-- small squad vs squad firefights using combined tactics (air/ground/infantry)... Unfortunately, the game boiled down to massive "zergs" involving just about everyone who was on the server at the same time. The majority of experience points were allocated based on how many defenders/attackers were killed during the assault/defense of a base, so players could accumulate more XP in massive battles than they ever would skulking around as an assasin way behind lines or participating in 15 on 15 battles. After a while, the only thing players cared about was "where is the zerg going." As soon as it seemed you might lose a battle, players would head somewhere else-- no point in staying around to play and not get experience! Not sure if they changed this, but it turned me off- even though i loved the gameplay.
I just started in with Puzzle Pirates this week after they advertised on Penny-Arcade and love it... Since I joined, I can't say whether it has long term staying power for me or not, but I will say that the quality of the players' personalities is far above what Planetside was... I have a feeling that puzzling just doesn't have the appeal to the l33tspeak crowd the way PS did...
Hidden deep within the first page of the article is this little nugget:
The most advanced use of computing in reducing crime is predictive analysis. The Deployment Operations Center (DOC), a 20-officer special unit, uses street intelligence, CLEAR data and a new CLEAR crime-mapping tool to identify potential hot spots, particularly for gang activity. "Our initial vision for information-driven policing has come full-circle with DOC," says McDonald. "They're using CLEAR data to anticipate where crime may occur so we can have the resources there before it happens."
When mapped by CLEAR, locations of recent gang-related crime (indicated on the screen maps by little green gun icons) reveal patterns that point to areas where rival gangs are likely to cross paths. "I know four gangs are vying for dominance in this area," says Sgt. David Betz, pointing to a map with a relatively clear zone of several blocks, ringed by a dozen gun icons. "I can drop 35 extra police in this one area and saturate it." DOC officers make weekly recommendations to district chiefs to redeploy patrol officers in these locations. They also supply them with gang member suspects to look out for. "I can use CLEAR to find their hangouts, nicknames, and put faces with the names," Betz says.
As long as there's a hole in Outlook allowing arbitrary code exploits, you're screwed. Even if you're box is fully upgraded, that just means that you're safe from the ones MS has bothered to fix so far. Even so, there's probably even more exploits yet to be discovered or created by a poorly coded patch.
Of course, it could be pointed out that this is true for any piece of software.
It's sort of a truism-- if a cracker is aware of an exploit that the OSS community does not know about, then your linux/BSD box is not secure either.
I think the real answer to the Original Poster's question is "Probably not." It seems to me that 99% of viruses use public, well known exploits to compromise unpatched systems. It seem to be a much rarer occurance where some black hat out there discovers the exploit and crafts a successful worm/virus/whatever around it.
The only people playing Tribes these days have been playing it for years and have mastered every single aspect of it. Don't take me wrong, I love the game, but the original poster was worried about starting up a game and getting his mouse handed to him on a plate. Plus, Tribes is so different from every other game, the learning curve is quite difficult... I don't think Tribes is a good first game to learn about online FPS.
The same thing happened to local appliance stores years ago. It's happening to toy stores right now... Up next, grocery stores and video stores.
I agree with everything except for the grocery stores part. Wal-mart has been in the grocery business for a long time with its Supercenters. Grocery chains still dominate. Walmart's not nearly as effective at killing grocery stores as they are at killing the local mom n' pops or K-marts. The reason is that profit margins on grocery products are razor thin-- in the range of 1-2%. There's nowhere near as much room to compete on price when margins are that low. If you compare Walmart's food prices with a grocery chains, they're very close...
Or is there another reason the Chinese buy US govt and private debt?
Believe it or not, there are really no good mechanisms for Chinese banks to invest in China-- in the mortgage/small business loan way that Americans are used to. At least this is what I've been told...
The Chinese government is using this method, rather unfairly, to bolster their economy at the expense of their own. Lest you say this is the free market, get used to it, this method of maintaining the Yuen at a low rate violates free market principles.
The problem is more complicated than this. As mentioned elsewhere, the trade deficit with China is countered by the fact that Chinese financial institutions are buying up much of US govt and private debt. Were the Chinese government to adjust their currency, their banking system would go into a catastrophic failure that would probably trigger an Asian crisis many times worse than the last one.
For simplicity's sake, i've tossed out some details, but here's generally how things work:
A Chinese bank has 100,000 Yuan in deposits (liability). It buys 100,000 / 8(Yuan/Dollar) = $12500 of US debt.
If the Yuan was valued to say 5 Yuan/Dollar-- an increase in the value of the Yuan which is what you want-- then the conversion rate of that debt would be $12,500 * 5 (Yuan/Dollar) = 62500 Yuan.
Now, that bank has 100,000 yuan in liabilities but only 62500 in assets. It is now severely bankrupt, and when folks heard about this one going bad, they would hit up their banks-- a billion person bank run in the making. In order to recover, these banks would withdraw their funds from Japanese and American banks, spreading the bank run abroad. This kind of scenario would cause complete and utter chaos in the financial world.
This is one of the primary reasons why the US government isn't hammering the Chinese for the Yuan being at the level its at. Everyone knows the Chinese banking system is fragile, and it's unlikely it could handle this kind of shock.
The vast majority of s'kiddies will just scan 22, see there's nothing there, and move on to the next host. There will _always_ be far easier targets for them to attack. Why waste their time trying to guess my knock?
Two admins are walking in the woods when one of them spots a bear. The first admin desperately throws his backpack down, and puts on a pair of running shoes. The second one says "You're crazy, you'll never be able to outrun that bear!"
"I don't have to," the first admin says, "I only have to outrun you!"
I have to wonder if this would be like circumventing any other speed limit. Aren't roadway speed limits set partly for safety & partly to control traffic?
No, i pretty much think this is analagous to tampering with your electric meter or rolling back your odometer.
Yes, a good tinkerer can do it, and the device (in the case of the car at least) belongs to you, but the whole point of the activitity is to defraud someone.
Like: that courts of law are actually there to uphold the law, not to just bend over and grab their ankles if it's a big corporation. The sad mockery of justice that the US did with Microsoft would have not happened in any European country. Again, repeat after me: the role of a court of law is to uphold the law, not to promote the financial interests of big business.
Now really... The US political system may be in the pocket of big business, but the European political/judicial system is every bit as much in the pocket of the labor unions and farmers groups. Americans bow down to a different master than Europeans-- that is about all that can be said. Nobody's judicial system is this perfect little concoction you've made it out to be. And lets not get started on which system is better, because any claims that the distribution of wealth in America is unfair can be countered with claims that European enslavement to labor causes unnecessary unemployment...
As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell. Nobody is going to want to pay for software let alone software which is strictly limited in variety.
The cost to consumer of Windows XP Home when bundled with a computer from one of the major players is about $50. Yes the source is Balmer, so believe it as you like. As part of a $1500 computer, the price issue is pretty irrelevant. I think saying Linux is free on the desktop really won't get too many buyers to switch. The only thing that would catalyze a switch would be a pretty dramatic disparity in quality (Linux desktop would have to be much, much better than Windows in all respects to get people to get over the hump of switching costs).
Corporate customers (who should be price sensitive) aren't switching b/c of the price issue, they're switching because a) it's cool to push the envelope in certain IT cultures b) they believe the savings will come from having a more stable infrastructure-- ie dissatisfaction with MS products...
I think the Linux switch will happen on the desktop, but cost won't be the driving factor.
If you "rent" them something -- even at the exact same price -- and it involves a physical object that "self destructs", people are going to feel ripped off.
If this is true, then the logical conclusion to your argument is that people would willingly pay a premium to return a DVD (rather than throwing it away). I simply cannot believe this to be true, but I can't offer any more evidence than you did (which is nothing). Intuitively though, it doesn't make much sense that I would be willing to pay, say only $4.50 for a throwaway DVD but $5 to rent and then return a permanent DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice if someone would put up a BitTorrent link... These guys may not have the bandwidth to distribute this thing...
However, downloaders be warned: the music industry will now proceed to actually participate in copyright infringement by downloading those shared songs or otherwise monitoring the downloads of those shared songs. The "my songs are shared out but were not actually downloaded" argument might not work next time.
Not to be too pedantic, but can a copyright holder actually violate their own copyright by pirating a copy of a song? It would seem to me that if I am the ultimate owner of a song, I have the right do do with it whatever I choose.
Therefore, an RIAA representative downloading a song from a Napster node is not an illegal act on their part-- which means that it's not an illegal act on the part of the uploader?
I feel like the RIAA can't have it both ways. If the act is illegal, then both parties are guilty. Or is the RIAA committing a crime, and then refusing to press charges against itself?
I feel like I'm chasing my tail on this one...
you need one simple change: a rule that the loser of a court case must pay the winner's costs.
Of course, then the pendulum has gone too far in the other direction. Let's say I have a beef with some company that I believe manufacture's a faulty product. If the company wishes to nip in the bud a series of class action suits, they may just outspend me. I get stuck with a bill for the millions they spent on defense if I lose... This isn't how the legal system here is supposed to work.
I agree with you though-- there must be some repercussion for abuse of the system... I happen to think that blatant abuses should be punished somehow- be it fines or community service.
So I used to work in the industry doing analysis of consumer buying habits based on shopper data. I don't happen to think it's bad, but that's besides the point. I would like to point out some facts though because there seems to be some severe misunderstanding about how the industry works. Maybe it will scare you more than you're scared now...
1) 75% of the time the data is used, it's to offer you a coupon. SKU and category level data is stored to your unique ID, and pieces of information like whether you paid cash or credit, which credit card, what denominations of cash you used, time, number of items in your basket, the clerk who helped you, just about everything you can think of is stored. Most of it is thrown out/never used because it doesn't help anyone.
2) Coupons are customized to your shopping profile based on two things: what you just bought, and what you have bought in the past. I've seen demos of crazy applications that would blow your mind. For example, if you bought tartar sauce last year at Lent, the implication is that you're catholic and might be interested in tartar sauce again this Lent. The opportunity to pitch you a coupon will be pitched to the manufacturer at say $.25 per coupon. If you don't want to share your information about this sort of thing, don't expect to get relevant coupons.
3) 20% of the time the information is used, it's in aggregated & repackaged in order to provide market research to all those companies that sell products in the supermarket-- food, toothpaste, etc. This is called scanner data in the trade, and companies like IRI and Nielsen and others use this data so that a brand manager can keep track of weekly sales by region/store/you name it. This is particularly useful to correlate with coupon distributions in newspapers (Free Standing Inserts or FSI's). This way, the brand manager can tweak the face value of the coupons distributed across regions and see the effects very quickly.
4) More and more, as databases get faster (b/c this requires a lot of processing time), you can match lists of addresses against their purchasing habits. Because this information is SO sensitive, it is carefully guarded by the owners (the supermarkets primarily). A supermarket might give this information to 3rd party vendor who has signed on the dotted line that he/she will give away his firstborn if he violates the anonymity of the shopper. For example, if I have a list of 100,000 people that i mailed coupons to, I can submit a list of these shoppers, and find out that 5,000 of them bought my product. I DO NOT KNOW WHO THEY ARE. Two parties do-- the retailer and the sworn-to-secrecy data vendor.
5) The stores are not the one's offering the discount, the manufacturer is. The industry has seen massive proliferation in trade promotion-- which are basically kickbacks given to retailers by the manufacturers. Much of their profit comes from these kickbacks. For example, if I'm managing a toothpaste brand, I pay for placement at eye level rather than feet level. Most of the frequent shopper discounts you're seeing are case discounts offered to the retailer in order to drive short term sales (promotions). It used to be that you didn't need a frequent shopper card to get these discounts. Nowadays, you're just plain lucky if the retailer doesn't pocket the case discount.
6) Frequent shopper cards weren't really created with the evil intentions of tracking our shopping habits. Grocery retailing is a brutally competitive business with margins in the 10% range (IIRC), and chain managers were looking for a way to build consumer loyalty. The EXACT same thing happpened with airline frequent flyer miles. What's good for the goose is not good for the gander. Now, you're at a competitive disadvantage if you don't track & make money off of consumer shopper data.
7) Finally, this is not the only industry to do this. Your telephone company, bank, pharmacy, credit card company, etc are all monitoring your activity to determine whethe
Not so much for the PC market, but especially for the console market, what is really hurting them is the presence of the used/pre-owned game.
I don't think you're correct here from an economic standpoint-- which makes the ethical question irrelevant.
I've studied a lot of pricing theory, and one of the tenets is that resale value is factored into the value the consumer is willing to pay for a new product. Say you intend to buy a car and get $10,000 value out of it over 5 years. Say the car will have a resale value of $10,000 in 5 years. The rational buyer will pay $20,000 for that car. The manufacturer of the car should price the car at $20,000. The fact that market exists really doesn't damage the manafacturer's bottom line-- they're still selling cars at the higher price.
You may say, "Well that's killing the manufacturer's opportunity for sales at the $10,000 price point." This is not the case. They made that sale already when you paid $20,000 for the car. You can almost think of it as though they sold 2 products then... A new car to you, and a used car to the person you resell to.
Unless there's something I'm missing, console games sales should work similarly... Add to this the fact that most stores give you store credit for games that you trade in. People have only so much disposable income to dump into video games, and used games doesn't change the amount flowing into industry coffers.
Your comment leads me to believe that you haven't. Find one and read it so you may be enlightened as well. It's really quite remarkable how the population was "controlled."
My point was merely that a signification portion of the population supported Prohibition. That fact is simply not diputable-- and since you're a self-proclaimed expert on the topic, you'd know that Prohibition ammendments to state constitutions predated the Federal one. Some of these happened in the 19th centure (Maine) and had little to do with the Temperance movement that began in Ohio. Unless you're reading conspiracy theory books about how the Illuminati are actually running the government, most historians would consider the Temperance movement to be a grassroots one. It started in Ohio! Can't get any more grassroots than that, except maybe Kansas...
What about the audience that wanted to hear what Howard Stern had to say? Wasn't that also their right?
The answer is no. 1957, Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court decided that "All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion - have the full protection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests. But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance."
I believe in Free Speech as much as anyone else and lecturing me on how important it is doesn't really prove your point. The wonderful thing about our country is that it protects our right to make political statements that disagree with those stated by our leaders. Having a limited "safe zone" that has been previously agreed upon to be sanitized from obscenity doesn't remove that right! If we have already agreed that the airwaves are supposed to be free from nipples, and my kid sees that nipple, then Janet Jackson has violated my right to privacy. Does that constitutional amendment mean anything to you?
I don't understand why people demand things to be all or nothing. A significant portion of the population wants the airwaves to be safe for their kids. Let them have it. Nobody's saying that obscenity should be illegal-- only in certain limited locations. Nobody's taking away your porn and obscenity- the Supreme Court wouldn't allow it.
Think of it like prohibition. A select handful of people wanted to rid themselves of alcoholics (Im' paraphrasing here). So they outlawed the drink. Did that work? Hell no. Its use increased and criminalized all that participated in the drink. Fast forward to today. A select handful of individuals want to rid themselves of those that don't share or support their views and openly speak against them. So they keep restricting speech until anything that's not inline with what they believe is outlawed. Those the speak out are criminals. How many times has history recorded this in the past?
1. Have you checked the US constitution lately? Do you know how hard it is to pass an amendment to this document? Based on the requirements, how you could possibly think that "a select few people" pushed prohibition legislation through? At the time, even congressmen who personally disagreed with the amendment voted in favor, claiming their constituencies supported it. It's probably fair to say that more than 50% of the population supported prohibition. This isn't a "select handful," it's democracy. Whether the amendment was misguided is irrelevant to the point. As long as the majority is not revoking the human rights of the majority, democracy is functioning ok. And no, human rights are much bigger than the right to get drunk. Which gets me to the next point.
2. Free Speech isn't boundless. Nobody ever guaranteed you the right to express yourself in every channel that exists. As long as you can reach an audience who wants to hear your thoughts, you're enjoying free speech. I don't see how sanitizing the airwaves (which are common property) restricts anyone's rights. You don't have the right to go around exposing yourself in public, likewise you shouldn't have the right to violate someone's right to enjoy "clean speech" in certain public media channels.
But throughout all of history, mankind has yearned for the day when we all get to die at the same time.
Actually, since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.
What do *you* think is the appropriate compensation for losing a limb due to a doctor's negligence? 1 million? Half a million? $250,000? A written apology?
.5% of the population every year is harmed by malpractice and deserves a $100,000 settlement, you personally should be willing to put $500 into the pot to cover those costs. Americans are complete idiots when it comes to shared costs-- we seem to think that these kinds of settlements come from money that grows on trees. All these settlements boil down to is a gigantic lottery where 100 people put in a dollar and one person walks away with $100. No, actually, the lawyer walks away with $50, and the malpractice victim gets the other $50...
Even though I don't agree with where you're going, it's a great question to ask. After all, in the end, you and I are the ones paying for the settlements through higher premiums on health insurance, taxes (Medicare/Medicaid payments keep Doctors/Hosptitals in business), and of course, medical fees.
The question everyone who's reading this article should ask themselves is how much am I willing to put into the pot every year so that the victim of malpractice gets some sort of recompense? For example, if
If you're going to award malpractice victims for these things, why stop there? Shouldn't a murder victim's family receive more money from the public in compensation than a malpractice victim who suffers chronic pain? Does the fact that the offense was committed by a doctor mean that one person's suffering should be compensated differently than another (millions of dollars vs. no dollars)?
The real problem with massive lawsuits is that doctors are cowed into behaving in a non-optimal way-- ordering unnecessary tests, having arm's length relationships with their patients, refusing to treat "high-risk" patients- be they litigious or complicated, and retiring early. These hidden costs are killing our medical system, but the statistics are hidden from the public because they don't get rolled into front-page items the way a $40 million lawsuit does.
Let's stop having juries of folks who may or may not have received their high school degrees deciding the future of this country's health care system.
AFAIK, Xerox sold off/closed its inkjet and consumer printer units when it was going through hard times in 2001.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Lexmark designed this product and Xerox stamped their name on it. I used to work at Xerox as an engineer, and this used to happen occasionally with certain products.
For example, I think all of Dell's printers are made by Lexmark...
Martha is being charged with declaring her innocence nothing more. She went on live television and said she is innocent. What did the DA do, according to them, by declaring her innocence, she maliciously sought to raise her stock price in Omnimedia. Know what you're talking about. She's not charged with insider trading. She's charged with obstruction of justice, and the route they took even boggled the judge in case you didn't know. Martha's case if you also didn't know is the first of its kind being it's high profile though, most people don't even have a real clue about it, and look to the media to hold their hands and have it explained to them.
Martha Stewart is being charged with more than declaring her innocence. Obstruction of justice (in this case tampering with trade order information) is not the same as declaring one's innocence. Here are some quotes from the Yahoo news story of not too many minutes ago explaining what happened:
"Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice...
Stewart and Bacanovic claimed they had a standing agreement to sell when the price fell below $60. But the government contended that was a phony cover story and that Stewart sold because she was tipped by her broker that ImClone CEO Sam Waksal was frantically trying to dump his own holdings...
Stewart, who averted more than $51,000 in losses by selling when she did, was not charged with insider trading; instead, she and her broker were accused of lying about the transaction and altering records to support the alleged cover story."
You claim that the only crime she was accused of was going on TV in order to manipulate her stock price. This is not correct. She was charged with that crime, and it was thrown out... And with good cause-- declaring one's innocence publicly should not be illegal for obvious reasons. But, as I mentioned before, she did (and was just convicted of) more than just that.
Read here:
Martha Stewart charge thrown out
At the risk of sounding redundant, every single point you made is true. I played Planetside for 3 months, then quit b/c I had gotten everything out of the game there was to get out of it. As a Tribes 2 fan, I loved cooperating in PS with a team to take bases-- small squad vs squad firefights using combined tactics (air/ground/infantry)... Unfortunately, the game boiled down to massive "zergs" involving just about everyone who was on the server at the same time. The majority of experience points were allocated based on how many defenders/attackers were killed during the assault/defense of a base, so players could accumulate more XP in massive battles than they ever would skulking around as an assasin way behind lines or participating in 15 on 15 battles. After a while, the only thing players cared about was "where is the zerg going." As soon as it seemed you might lose a battle, players would head somewhere else-- no point in staying around to play and not get experience! Not sure if they changed this, but it turned me off- even though i loved the gameplay.
I just started in with Puzzle Pirates this week after they advertised on Penny-Arcade and love it... Since I joined, I can't say whether it has long term staying power for me or not, but I will say that the quality of the players' personalities is far above what Planetside was... I have a feeling that puzzling just doesn't have the appeal to the l33tspeak crowd the way PS did...
Hidden deep within the first page of the article is this little nugget:
The most advanced use of computing in reducing crime is predictive analysis. The Deployment Operations Center (DOC), a 20-officer special unit, uses street intelligence, CLEAR data and a new CLEAR crime-mapping tool to identify potential hot spots, particularly for gang activity. "Our initial vision for information-driven policing has come full-circle with DOC," says McDonald. "They're using CLEAR data to anticipate where crime may occur so we can have the resources there before it happens."
When mapped by CLEAR, locations of recent gang-related crime (indicated on the screen maps by little green gun icons) reveal patterns that point to areas where rival gangs are likely to cross paths. "I know four gangs are vying for dominance in this area," says Sgt. David Betz, pointing to a map with a relatively clear zone of several blocks, ringed by a dozen gun icons. "I can drop 35 extra police in this one area and saturate it." DOC officers make weekly recommendations to district chiefs to redeploy patrol officers in these locations. They also supply them with gang member suspects to look out for. "I can use CLEAR to find their hangouts, nicknames, and put faces with the names," Betz says.
As long as there's a hole in Outlook allowing arbitrary code exploits, you're screwed. Even if you're box is fully upgraded, that just means that you're safe from the ones MS has bothered to fix so far. Even so, there's probably even more exploits yet to be discovered or created by a poorly coded patch.
Of course, it could be pointed out that this is true for any piece of software.
It's sort of a truism-- if a cracker is aware of an exploit that the OSS community does not know about, then your linux/BSD box is not secure either.
I think the real answer to the Original Poster's question is "Probably not." It seems to me that 99% of viruses use public, well known exploits to compromise unpatched systems. It seem to be a much rarer occurance where some black hat out there discovers the exploit and crafts a successful worm/virus/whatever around it.
Stratjakt, Who do you work for?
The only people playing Tribes these days have been playing it for years and have mastered every single aspect of it. Don't take me wrong, I love the game, but the original poster was worried about starting up a game and getting his mouse handed to him on a plate. Plus, Tribes is so different from every other game, the learning curve is quite difficult... I don't think Tribes is a good first game to learn about online FPS.
The same thing happened to local appliance stores years ago. It's happening to toy stores right now... Up next, grocery stores and video stores.
I agree with everything except for the grocery stores part. Wal-mart has been in the grocery business for a long time with its Supercenters. Grocery chains still dominate. Walmart's not nearly as effective at killing grocery stores as they are at killing the local mom n' pops or K-marts. The reason is that profit margins on grocery products are razor thin-- in the range of 1-2%. There's nowhere near as much room to compete on price when margins are that low. If you compare Walmart's food prices with a grocery chains, they're very close...
Or is there another reason the Chinese buy US govt and private debt?
Believe it or not, there are really no good mechanisms for Chinese banks to invest in China-- in the mortgage/small business loan way that Americans are used to. At least this is what I've been told...
The Chinese government is using this method, rather unfairly, to bolster their economy at the expense of their own. Lest you say this is the free market, get used to it, this method of maintaining the Yuen at a low rate violates free market principles.
The problem is more complicated than this. As mentioned elsewhere, the trade deficit with China is countered by the fact that Chinese financial institutions are buying up much of US govt and private debt. Were the Chinese government to adjust their currency, their banking system would go into a catastrophic failure that would probably trigger an Asian crisis many times worse than the last one.
For simplicity's sake, i've tossed out some details, but here's generally how things work:
A Chinese bank has 100,000 Yuan in deposits (liability). It buys 100,000 / 8(Yuan/Dollar) = $12500 of US debt.
If the Yuan was valued to say 5 Yuan/Dollar-- an increase in the value of the Yuan which is what you want-- then the conversion rate of that debt would be $12,500 * 5 (Yuan/Dollar) = 62500 Yuan.
Now, that bank has 100,000 yuan in liabilities but only 62500 in assets. It is now severely bankrupt, and when folks heard about this one going bad, they would hit up their banks-- a billion person bank run in the making. In order to recover, these banks would withdraw their funds from Japanese and American banks, spreading the bank run abroad. This kind of scenario would cause complete and utter chaos in the financial world.
This is one of the primary reasons why the US government isn't hammering the Chinese for the Yuan being at the level its at. Everyone knows the Chinese banking system is fragile, and it's unlikely it could handle this kind of shock.
The vast majority of s'kiddies will just scan 22, see there's nothing there, and move on to the next host. There will _always_ be far easier targets for them to attack. Why waste their time trying to guess my knock?
Two admins are walking in the woods when one of them spots a bear. The first admin desperately throws his backpack down, and puts on a pair of running shoes. The second one says "You're crazy, you'll never be able to outrun that bear!"
"I don't have to," the first admin says, "I only have to outrun you!"
Hiyo!
I have to wonder if this would be like circumventing any other speed limit. Aren't roadway speed limits set partly for safety & partly to control traffic?
No, i pretty much think this is analagous to tampering with your electric meter or rolling back your odometer.
Yes, a good tinkerer can do it, and the device (in the case of the car at least) belongs to you, but the whole point of the activitity is to defraud someone.
Asking the sender to process a quick math question seems a better solution to me.
Ok Einstein, how would the marketing department send emails?
Like: that courts of law are actually there to uphold the law, not to just bend over and grab their ankles if it's a big corporation. The sad mockery of justice that the US did with Microsoft would have not happened in any European country. Again, repeat after me: the role of a court of law is to uphold the law, not to promote the financial interests of big business.
Now really... The US political system may be in the pocket of big business, but the European political/judicial system is every bit as much in the pocket of the labor unions and farmers groups. Americans bow down to a different master than Europeans-- that is about all that can be said. Nobody's judicial system is this perfect little concoction you've made it out to be. And lets not get started on which system is better, because any claims that the distribution of wealth in America is unfair can be countered with claims that European enslavement to labor causes unnecessary unemployment...
As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell. Nobody is going to want to pay for software let alone software which is strictly limited in variety.
The cost to consumer of Windows XP Home when bundled with a computer from one of the major players is about $50. Yes the source is Balmer, so believe it as you like. As part of a $1500 computer, the price issue is pretty irrelevant. I think saying Linux is free on the desktop really won't get too many buyers to switch. The only thing that would catalyze a switch would be a pretty dramatic disparity in quality (Linux desktop would have to be much, much better than Windows in all respects to get people to get over the hump of switching costs).
Corporate customers (who should be price sensitive) aren't switching b/c of the price issue, they're switching because a) it's cool to push the envelope in certain IT cultures b) they believe the savings will come from having a more stable infrastructure-- ie dissatisfaction with MS products...
I think the Linux switch will happen on the desktop, but cost won't be the driving factor.
If you "rent" them something -- even at the exact same price -- and it involves a physical object that "self destructs", people are going to feel ripped off.
If this is true, then the logical conclusion to your argument is that people would willingly pay a premium to return a DVD (rather than throwing it away). I simply cannot believe this to be true, but I can't offer any more evidence than you did (which is nothing). Intuitively though, it doesn't make much sense that I would be willing to pay, say only $4.50 for a throwaway DVD but $5 to rent and then return a permanent DVD.