Being honest in business only makes sure that you fall behind the cheaters that somehow don't get caught because they've bribed the referee to look the other way.
When a monopoly provides a service you desperately need, it's hard to stop them from milking you for all you're worth.
You have to maintain an internet presence these days, and failure to "keep with the times" may well jeopardize your ability to do business, hold down a job, and so on.
Regulation will come either from a government answering to its voters, or a monopoly corporation answering to its shareholders. No matter how close those two alternatives may actually be, you cannot have a power vacuum and not expect it to be filled.
Considering that we have graphics cards potentially on the way to being hacked so that you can't even be sure of the URL after checking the address bar, I think it's high time to stop blaming the victim and start calling these "separators of fools and their money" what they really are.
Thieves, cheaters, hackers, and most of all, terrorists.
Thieves because they steal, cheaters because they happily break the same rules that the rest of us are required to follow, hackers because of how they draft our machines into their botnet armies, and terrorists because of how they use that electronic firepower.
I will never forget when one company called Blue Security had the balls to stand up to spam...and got blown to bits by a DDoS attack.
They are victims, plain and simple. Sure, the stupid ones fall first, but nobody is really immune. It's just a case of low hanging fruit being the first to be harvested. If the scammers run out of stupid people they will happily start escalating to snare smarter folks.
Their computers do, however, pose a menace. They are infectious. And we should treat them like we do real people who have communicable diseases. We should quarantine them, and stop them from causing more damage.
Anyone who plays the "blame the victim" card is blinding themselves to just how serious of a problem there is, not to mention giving all those hackers a free pass just because they're giving out electronic darwin awards.
It's "illegal" because governments can abuse this to backdoor civil rights and scoop up information without getting a warrant against the person it was collected against.
And those governments are drooling over the prospect of getting their hands on the data.
"Oracle is a bag of sleaze for using patents on their stuff as a weapon against people who relied in good faith on the alleged copyrightwise openness of the same stuff."
Or to be blunt, using copyright to lure them, and then patents to club them.
Nobody even gets close to the campaign trail without kissing corporate ass.
You run as a republicrat, you have to sell your soul.
And any shred of decency you haven't shed to get into office is wrung out by political wrangling with people who have likewise sold their soul. And who will probably get marching orders to have your ass impeached if you piss off their corporate overlords.
Now, any attempt one makes to start a movement to change this, well, guess who owns mass media?
Just because the guy is an idiot doesn't mean his money belongs in the hands of a *pack of thieves* that will probably use the money to do some nasty things that will be bad for everyone.
A fool and his money may deserve to be parted, but there's also the issue of whose pockets that money winds up going into.
Donating the money to charity just because he didn't earn it isn't really a moral issue. At the very least, having the money in his possession will keep it out of the wrong hands, and considering the way many charities these days are almost as corrupt as our own government, it may be for the best to do some manual philanthropy, or better yet, invest the money and create some jobs.
Also, I seriously doubt you would be willing to do so were you in his position.
I would also take the step of immediately terminating with prejudice the wise guy who installed it, and possibly anyone in IT whose failure to properly supervise the network allowed it to persist.
Because the legal guild...er, industry, has made it so lame-ass complicated that only a lawyer is able to navigate it.
There's a lot of traps to avoid, one of which is near-automatic default judgement if you no-show in court. I haven't even gotten into all the fun regarding venue and jurisdiction.
There's also zillions of motions which have to be made on a "speak now or forever hold your peace" basis, which gives lawyers plenty of excuse to drag out your billable hours for fear that you may miss an important motion and shoot yourself in the foot with a dose of lethal poison.
If you fail to make a motion at the original trial, you forfeit the right to appeal the issue if you lose the case.
So the system is designed so that you almost always need a lawyer to navigate.
And since lawyers also are the ones that usually become politicians to legislate and execute the law itself, they have a vested interest in keeping it that way.
This is America, home of the litigious after all...
Assuming the case even made it to trial, it probably would be dismissed with prejudice, and Pixar would probably be told to go sue the person who exhibited it in public.
Now, if Best Buy tampered with any of the copyright notices, or otherwise encouraged you to violate Pixar's copyright by showing it in public, they may be liable to for breach of warranty to you, if they falsely claimed that it could be shown in public when in fact it could not. Supposing Pixar DID sue your balls off for showing it in public, even though Best Buy said you could use it to show in public.
Best Buy would have made a warranty about the product it sold to you. A warranty that was breached when Pixar sued for infringement. Best Buy would then be responsible for your damages at least to some degree if you could prove that their promise of public exhibitability was an express warranty.
Like I said, using offensiveness to penalize credibility is a heuristic, and often times it's a damned good one at that, considering that attitude and intent are often interconnected to a profound degree.
It may indeed be ultimately more effective to use this heuristic. Considering that attention is a finite resource, and that furthermore, trolls generally should either be reformed or ignored to avoid increasing the resource wastage they cause, refusal to deal with a troll is almost invariable a wise choice.
Mental "spam" folders are quite effective in stemming the flow of crap. The intelligent folks who run afoul of such filtering because of their negative attitude are hardly the only fish in the ocean, and losing their opinions is quite minor a side effect IMHO more than amply made up for by the deterrent effect such filtering has on abuse, or in the alternative, the sanity of the person to whom the abusiveness was directed.
For my part, being a fairly emotionless autistic, I tend to be more or less immune to insults than most people, so my reaction would naturally be quite different from yours.
Slashdot Mirror
"at least not with their 'own' technology."
Selective quoting is fun isn't it?
I wouldn't put it past the chinese to lie, cheat, and steal their way to economic supremacy.
They have a market that any company would die to get access to.
And they've also shown willingness to play hardball over rare earths.
Rare earths.
'Nuff said.
Everyone cuts corners.
Being honest in business only makes sure that you fall behind the cheaters that somehow don't get caught because they've bribed the referee to look the other way.
Who cares about the environment?
As long as we can rape and exploit it today, who cares if we laugh all the way to the bank and leave our descendants the bill?
"in order to ensure that the installed DRM protocol meets the requirements laid out by the movie studios."
So it's the movie studios that are pushing DRM onto everyone.
No wonder HD-DVD took a dive in favor of Blu-Ray.
Considering how they and their competitors pull the same crap, I'd call it a de-facto cartel.
When a monopoly provides a service you desperately need, it's hard to stop them from milking you for all you're worth.
You have to maintain an internet presence these days, and failure to "keep with the times" may well jeopardize your ability to do business, hold down a job, and so on.
So you pay the piper.
There is no such thing as an un-regulated market.
Regulation will come either from a government answering to its voters, or a monopoly corporation answering to its shareholders. No matter how close those two alternatives may actually be, you cannot have a power vacuum and not expect it to be filled.
Considering that we have graphics cards potentially on the way to being hacked so that you can't even be sure of the URL after checking the address bar, I think it's high time to stop blaming the victim and start calling these "separators of fools and their money" what they really are.
Thieves, cheaters, hackers, and most of all, terrorists.
Thieves because they steal, cheaters because they happily break the same rules that the rest of us are required to follow, hackers because of how they draft our machines into their botnet armies, and terrorists because of how they use that electronic firepower.
I will never forget when one company called Blue Security had the balls to stand up to spam...and got blown to bits by a DDoS attack.
They are victims, plain and simple. Sure, the stupid ones fall first, but nobody is really immune. It's just a case of low hanging fruit being the first to be harvested. If the scammers run out of stupid people they will happily start escalating to snare smarter folks.
Their computers do, however, pose a menace. They are infectious. And we should treat them like we do real people who have communicable diseases. We should quarantine them, and stop them from causing more damage.
Anyone who plays the "blame the victim" card is blinding themselves to just how serious of a problem there is, not to mention giving all those hackers a free pass just because they're giving out electronic darwin awards.
Probably to make sure it got counted as a felony.
It's "illegal" because governments can abuse this to backdoor civil rights and scoop up information without getting a warrant against the person it was collected against.
And those governments are drooling over the prospect of getting their hands on the data.
Who cares if there's smart guys on the jury to begin with anyway?
Lawyers almost invariably challenge and remove them. They *like* dumb juries.
To be made simple:
"Oracle is a bag of sleaze for using patents on their stuff as a weapon against people who relied in good faith on the alleged copyrightwise openness of the same stuff."
Or to be blunt, using copyright to lure them, and then patents to club them.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft wooed the PHB's bossing IT.
MS may suck at tech, but they're damned good at marketing. They know how to target the power people that send IT their marching orders.
Nobody even gets close to the campaign trail without kissing corporate ass.
You run as a republicrat, you have to sell your soul.
And any shred of decency you haven't shed to get into office is wrung out by political wrangling with people who have likewise sold their soul. And who will probably get marching orders to have your ass impeached if you piss off their corporate overlords.
Now, any attempt one makes to start a movement to change this, well, guess who owns mass media?
Does anyone follow me here?
Except from hardware glitches.
I agree.
Just because the guy is an idiot doesn't mean his money belongs in the hands of a *pack of thieves* that will probably use the money to do some nasty things that will be bad for everyone.
A fool and his money may deserve to be parted, but there's also the issue of whose pockets that money winds up going into.
Donating the money to charity just because he didn't earn it isn't really a moral issue. At the very least, having the money in his possession will keep it out of the wrong hands, and considering the way many charities these days are almost as corrupt as our own government, it may be for the best to do some manual philanthropy, or better yet, invest the money and create some jobs.
Also, I seriously doubt you would be willing to do so were you in his position.
The only problem with it is that the money thusly parted winds up in the wrong pockets.
And as it goes...the one who has the gold makes the rules.
I would also take the step of immediately terminating with prejudice the wise guy who installed it, and possibly anyone in IT whose failure to properly supervise the network allowed it to persist.
Because the legal guild...er, industry, has made it so lame-ass complicated that only a lawyer is able to navigate it.
There's a lot of traps to avoid, one of which is near-automatic default judgement if you no-show in court. I haven't even gotten into all the fun regarding venue and jurisdiction.
There's also zillions of motions which have to be made on a "speak now or forever hold your peace" basis, which gives lawyers plenty of excuse to drag out your billable hours for fear that you may miss an important motion and shoot yourself in the foot with a dose of lethal poison.
If you fail to make a motion at the original trial, you forfeit the right to appeal the issue if you lose the case.
So the system is designed so that you almost always need a lawyer to navigate.
And since lawyers also are the ones that usually become politicians to legislate and execute the law itself, they have a vested interest in keeping it that way.
lawyers are still lawyers.
Unfortunately, the economics of pre-trial negotiations often boil down to who can survive the gravy drain the longest.
Until you get to court, it's survival of the fittest, where backstabbing cheating, financial muscles, and outright bribery rule.
Faceless companies can outspend individuals any day, which is why they often win before the game even starts.
Stranger things have happened...
This is America, home of the litigious after all...
Assuming the case even made it to trial, it probably would be dismissed with prejudice, and Pixar would probably be told to go sue the person who exhibited it in public.
Now, if Best Buy tampered with any of the copyright notices, or otherwise encouraged you to violate Pixar's copyright by showing it in public, they may be liable to for breach of warranty to you, if they falsely claimed that it could be shown in public when in fact it could not. Supposing Pixar DID sue your balls off for showing it in public, even though Best Buy said you could use it to show in public.
Best Buy would have made a warranty about the product it sold to you. A warranty that was breached when Pixar sued for infringement. Best Buy would then be responsible for your damages at least to some degree if you could prove that their promise of public exhibitability was an express warranty.
Exactly.
Like I said, using offensiveness to penalize credibility is a heuristic, and often times it's a damned good one at that, considering that attitude and intent are often interconnected to a profound degree.
It may indeed be ultimately more effective to use this heuristic. Considering that attention is a finite resource, and that furthermore, trolls generally should either be reformed or ignored to avoid increasing the resource wastage they cause, refusal to deal with a troll is almost invariable a wise choice.
Mental "spam" folders are quite effective in stemming the flow of crap. The intelligent folks who run afoul of such filtering because of their negative attitude are hardly the only fish in the ocean, and losing their opinions is quite minor a side effect IMHO more than amply made up for by the deterrent effect such filtering has on abuse, or in the alternative, the sanity of the person to whom the abusiveness was directed.
For my part, being a fairly emotionless autistic, I tend to be more or less immune to insults than most people, so my reaction would naturally be quite different from yours.