Ah - an anonymous coward who doesn't know how to read a URL. I'm not an Amazon referrer you idiot, and there is therefore no referrer ID in that link, it just tells you what the book is.
Why don't you learn what you're talking about before throwing accusations like that around, and if you're going to accuse people, have the guts to do it with your name attached.
Don't imagine a little operation in a back room of a dark apartment when you visualise pirates in Asia. These guys produce CDs using similar industrial processes to those in use by the production companies.
As far as the actual economics of it are concerned, I have no idea what the relationship between volume and marginal cost is when pressing CDs, but I do know that it's possible to get recent CDs (music or software) for between $3-$5, and there are a great many people who are very eager to flog them, so someone's making money...
One was the individual user putting his tape in a twin-deck system and copying it for his mates, which the RIAA doesn't really fundamentally care about and they're happy to turn a blind eye to because it introduces people to the music.
The other was the factories in Asia and elsewhere that print hundreds of CDs per hour and flog them cheap on the side of the road. They have a major issue with this because it loses them a fortune.
The problem, from their point of view, with Napster, gnutella and the rest, is that whereas before a single person might copy an album once or twice, now he makes it available to millions of people across the world at little or no cost. These new technologies are changing the first type of piracy into the second by giving it scale.
Your argument that people will go and buy the album anyway is incorrect in the main, because when they have the choice between buying it in the USA or the UK at $16, or buying it in Asia for $3, they buy it in Asia, that's why the losses due to CD ripping run into the billions and one of the reasons why the US has had some difficult discussions with China, Hong Kong etc during the GATT talks and regarding the WTO. If they're prepared to buy a copy that contributes nothing to the original artist, what makes you think they're unwilling to download it off the internet? Especially when nowadays, they're only going to put it on a minidisk or an MP3 player anyway - the days of having your collection on shelves lining your walls are almost over.
Now that I think about it, the case wouldn't work, because Jack would have no complaint against Joe. Joe didn't shut down the website, he asked the ISP to and the ISP did it, therefore once again it is the ISP that is being sued.
I agree that people have a right to protect their reputation - but it's not the ISP that's damaging their reputation. If a newspaper prints something libellous, you sue the newspaper, you do not sue their paper supplier. In the same way, if you receive abusive telephone calls, you catch the abusive party and take them to court, and telcos will be happy to help - you do not take the telco to court.
The fear of being taken to court (because of the size of damages and the fact that they are being made responsible for someone else's opinions) is now causing ISPs to shut down websites regardless of the content, but merely because they receive a solicitor's letter saying that if their client is ever slandered on this site in the future, they will sue - they've sent in the abuse report pre-emptively, before any abuse exists to report, but by doing so, they have made the ISP legally responsible for the content of all future postings on that site - no choice but to shut it down when the damages are in the region of half a million pounds...
The precedent that has been set is dreadful - it is a blanket permission to joe public to gag anyone out there who wants to use the web as a forum. We've reached the levels of limitation of speech whereby every word you print has to be carefully weighed up in case someone wants to sue you for it. If it can be interpreted as libellous, then someone out there's sure going to try, because hey - it's easy cash - the lawyer only wants a percentage, so if you lose, you lose nothing, but if you win, you win big.
Admittedly, it's never been tried in court, but which ISP is going to risk half a million pounds to find out? The last one bottled out when the damages reached £0.5m, unsurprisingly, but with ignorant lawmakers and judges, and greedy, opportunistic, litigious egomaniacs with too much time on their hands, you've got all the ingredients for disaster.
I'm certainly not a communist but I think that people with such huge sums of money hoarded all to themselves while we have people starving in shitholes on the street is absurd and criminal.
This is no doubt going to be a very unpatriotic post as far as Slashdot is concerned.
I am all for criticising Microsoft, and Gates when you believe him to have done something wrong, and you may be right when you say that he does it for the power and the fame, although I doubt you have the information or experience required to make that judgement since all you have to go on is what the press tells you, and in my experience that's pretty thin in the truth department.
But what really gets to me is the implicit assumption that Gates' millions are somehow related to the millions of starving people in the world. Have you ever read an audit of some of the worlds richest charities? Have you ever taken a close look at how little some of them (NOT all of them, some of them) manage to achieve with such vast amounts of money?
A while back, Gates and his wife made a donation to a foundation they names after themselves, . When they announced that they were going to make a donation, people did their usual "you're so rich you MUST be evil" judgement call, but when the amount was announced, most of the more rational observers concluded that the sheer size of the donation went well beyond what they needed to donate in order to just impress, and even for a man of his wealth, it demonstrated a sincere willingness to use his money to make a change, rather than a token gesture. His foundation has an asset base today of about $21.8 BILLION (which, by the way, would imply Bill Gates' net wealth is significantly above $50+ million which is where you say people's wealth becomes absurd and criminal).
In fact, he is probably one of the few individuals wealthy enough in the world to make this kind of a difference with cash alone.
Perhaps he is a money-grabbing, fame-seeking, real-life karma whore. But nobody on this forum has the faintest idea whether or not that is the case, and we should stick to making our judgements based on what we can observe. I observe this - he gave, in a single gesture, more money than I have ever seen donated direct to charity, so criticise him on any grounds you like, but on this playing field, he's got the bases covered.
Nick braces himself in anticipation of much flaming and the immediate loss of all of his karma
I can see why governments might want the ability to control speech. This is not to say that they have a right to limit it, but they should have the ability to prevent serious damage to an individual's reputation, livelihood or quality of life as a consequence of the defamatory activities of a vindictive third party.
Because of the internet, their ability to do this is, over time, determined by the restraint they exercise in the use of that power. If they use it only when the case is extreme, when the individual has a demonstrable complaint with demonstrable damages, and that we're not talking about someone calling a spade a spade, then I can't honestly say I feel that bad about someone being pushed off their soapbox. If you call an innocent man a rapist on a website, and lie about the facts you have to back that up, then you are causing harm, in effect, you're raping his/her reputation, and you should be stopped. This is why we have libel and slander laws.
If the government/legal system abuses the power it has to control speech, or uses it too often, then it will be removed from them. The old adage - "The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it" holds. People will go offshore, censorship will be seen as a terrible thing and people will lobby for that power to be removed from the hands of people who could otherwise have been genuinely helpful to the small minority that is getting badly and unjustly slandered.
Censorship of opinion is a bad thing, but as far as I'm concerned, the buck stops when someone has their quality of life unjustifiably diminished by what has been published. The attitude that says people can get web sites shut down because they disagree with the content is a squandering of the power people have over other people's speech, and as with all legal rights that are abused, in the end, it will be removed and the pendulum will probably swing too far the other way, with slander and libel on the internet being unstoppable because it is published from locations where such laws are not enforcable.
I don't see this issue going anywhere nice in the near future.
I don't agree with you, because I think this solution is for corporations or people who intend to record months worth of multi-channel television on hard disks.
But I can't believe you got moderated down 3 times as flamebait, one as a troll, and moderated up 3 times for being funny. It was none of these. Your post was well-reasoned and insightful, contentious and challengingly phrased, and I'm bitter and disappointed that morons decided to moderate you down.
I've spent a few posts arguing in favour of moderation because I tend to put some effort into it. I've defended the moderators because I believed them to be better than people make out. The moderation some of your posts seriously challenge my point of view that moderators tend to be Ok. You sometimes push the envelope a little too far in my opinion, but this consistent bashing of your posts is blatant censorship (and I don't care if people can read at -1, that means they have to sift through piles of real trolls to find the argumentative posts moderated down by jerks who would rather moderate you down when they disagree with you than argue against you because they lack the intellectual horsepower to make their point convincingly).
Moderate this down as offtopic if you are a letter-of-the-law type of person, but this stuff needs to get said and we haven't got a forum.
I'm currently on 4 moderator points, and so I'm browsing at -1 and reading the articles carefully, and trying to moderate in areas where I'm not biased (not that I can, I prefer to post in those forums).
Browsing at -1 is a real pain. I'm looking for abuses of moderation, but all I see are hundreds of trolls, flamebaits and idiots posting gibberish. What is it about Slashdot that has attracted these people here? Do they really have nothing better to do?
I really want to moderate positively, I'd love to find a load of articles that are really worth my ticking them as interesting, insightful or funny. But what are the chances that I'm going to come across one of those before I come across five posts that are so full of swearwords (and no content) that I do the slashdot community a greater service by sending them below the surface? Every so often I come across a good post, and it's with a sense of achievement that I can actually moderate it up, but the sheer volume of junk that I have to wade through in order to find the gems means that I tend to run out of points before I get there.
Not moderating down the trolls is not an option. When I'm not moderating I browse at 0 because ACs sometimes post interesting articles, and at that time I tend to thank the moderators that got rid of the trolls for me, so I do the same. The solution isn't about content, nor is this constant moaning about the quality of moderation going to get Slashdot anywhere - you have no real data on who moderated what, and how much they knew about it, and what proportion of moderators do a good or a bad job. The problem is accountability for posts, and this whole veil of anonymity thing is not helping in many cases (please note that I implicitly acknowledge that in other cases it is essential).
All this bitching at moderators is really pissing me off - it demotivates me from making an effort, since there will always be a hundred posters out there to criticise moderators no matter how much time and effort I personally put into it.
A big problem with slashdot is that regardless of the subject topic, people prefer to discuss the value of slashdot, the quality of moderation and the lack of quality articles. This problem is about users, not management.
Except that.linux doesn't exist and.org doesn't belong to someone who can make a sale of it (all the rights of people who have already bought a www.x.org address would be thrown into doubt).
I'm not sure I like it, but if Tuvalu had the foresight to ask for, or the luck to receive.tv as the last 3 characters of their country web address, then more power to them if they can more than double their GDP by selling/leasing it out to a company.
I wonder what kind of break clause the contract has - you've got to figure that they will want it back one day and they'll have taken steps to make that possible...
I didn't think I needed to explain that, it being quite obvious. The point I was making is that it seems to work very well and very fast in the case of online privacy. This is not necessarily the case when considering other issues such as quality of goods from certain large consumer goods and services companies.
The reason for this is probably twofold.
1. The community of users is much more reactive than the communities that represent consumers of other goods and services provided by major corporations, and is therefore prepared to make a loud fuss, in a semi-concerted way, and to use their buying decision collectively to hurt large corporations in the short term.
2. There are a large number of alternative suppliers of internet-related services, and given point 1, they have noticed that they can steal market share from competitors quite fast if they can stylize themselves as the "supplier that respects your privacy".
Another point is that companies do not exist to do what people want. Companies exist to maximize shareholder value, and in a perfect free market where Adam Smith's "Invisible hand" works as it should, that equates to supplying the goods and services in a competitive and efficient manner, such that consumers needs are satisfied to the maximum extent that they can be given limited resources. Market failure (monopoly power, certain types of goods, "non-rational" behaviour etc) means that this sometimes fails to happen, which is the economists' argument for government intervention. If companies existed solely to do what people want, we wouldn't need to call them to order like this all the time.
Isn't it interesting how this particular arena (privacy) seems to put so much more power in the hands of the consumer than any other?
I think it's because when someone's privacy gets threatened, they feel much more quickly capable of taking significant action, to the extent that they're willing to switch provider, give up a forum or a game they enjoy, or use alternatives (sometimes of dubious legality), in order to protect it.
In terms of the influences faced by online companies today, it seems to be quite a high priority to satisfy the privacy needs of customers, even though this is not a natural consequence of their desire to make profits, but rather caused by an obsession (healthy, in my opinion) with privacy on the part of individuals.
We've seen quite a few radical reversals of policy on the part of some very large corporations (Doubleclick or Intel for example), which would seem to imply that online consumers, as a separately identifiable group, are becoming quite powerful in their own right.
Our constitution, and whatnot don't apply to them!!!
I think that depends. If they're being sued under US laws, in US courts, then yes, the constitution does apply to them in that case. You can't judge an American citizen and a foreigner in the same court with different standards applied to each. "He's American, so he can say anything he likes, but the foreigner can shut up or we'll sue him". I don't think so.
On the other hand, what if they are being sued abroad, under the laws of their own countries? Well in that case, one of two things can happen, either their countries let a mostly US organisation sue them for doing something that would have been legal in America, which they might, depending on their national laws, but it makes the MPAA look hypocritical and exploitative...
...or they acknowledge that it makes no difference whether the MPAA win in some countries if they're going to lose in other countries, because once the source code is on a website in the US, and protected by virtue of it's status as free speech, then it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you'll still be able to get a copy.
This would mean that the MPAA loses anyway and it becomes pointless for them to pursue this further in other countries.
If you look at the development curve on most industries over time, they all go through the "gold rush" stage with every small investor with some cash to spare trying to start his own business, then comes the weeding stage, where the really weak ones just die, then comes the consolidation stage when the companies without the potential to make profits, but with interesting intellectual property assets or brand equity get snapped up by the companies that have proper strategies and solid financial backing.
The sooner the better, this ridiculous mess is beginning to annoy...
Energy is directed towards either the most necessary or the most profitable research at any given point.
If it ever becomes necessary to get off this planet, the chances of our finding out how to do it will increase a thousandfold.
I just hope that by the time it becomes necessary, we're not too far away from the required discoveries that it takes more time than we have left to find out how to do it.
"SAN FRANCISC -- A group of instructors, incensed at being called ``incompetent'' on a student-run Web site, are seeking damages from City College of San Francisco for providing electronic links to the offending site."
Perhaps my source is wrong? By the time I'd read this article, I'd forgotten the detail of the Slashdot source, so you're right, maybe I'm in the dark. It is odd to see the two articles contradicting each other though. Maybe he's just sueing everyone in sight.
"Please spray-paint your opinions of [public figure] here." In both cases, teacherreview.com and the graffiti, it is obvious that the proprietor is not responsible for the what other people say, except that he does invite people to say it by using a medium he provides.
But it is neither Teacherreview.com nor the people writing the graffiti that are getting sued. It is the college, for linking to teacherreview.com, that is the target of the lawsuit.
This is yet another case of, "can someone get sued for linking to something". It has already been established that they can't be sued under copyright legislation for linking to content on someone else's website that is pirated, because they are not guilty of pirating, they're just telling you where to find the stuff.
The question now is, can someone be guilty of libel or slander when they link to a website that has nasty comments about someone else? My guess is that they can't, the college isn't responsible for the content, it just lets people know that it exists. It also links to the website indiscriminately, it doesn't say, "...and here's a very bad review of this professor, why don't you go read this review in particular".
I'm sorry he's been made to feel uncomfortable. From reading the reviews, he should walk away with at least one piece of learning : he's made his students uncomfortable with his aggressive homosexuality and they've been given a forum in which to gripe about it. But in terms of who he is suing and why, he should lose. The consequences of his winning would be a terrible blow to free speech on the internet. Much of the value of the internet comes from the fact that everything is linked, and a college ought to link to this kind of site. It's a shame it's not used as responsibly as it might be - there's a lot of venom in the reviews and not as much rational assessment for me to feel that they're entirely useful.
If you'll read my message, I want my **browser** to do this.
Ah - So you want it built into your browser, I misunderstood, I though you just didn't want it dependent on outside influence.
JunkBuster isn't an outside source (unless you mean it's a different program). It's a local proxy, running on your computer, configured by local files and controlled entirely by you. JunkBusters have no influence over it once you've downloaded it. Unlike the Net Nannies and CyberPatrols or whatever out there, the killfiles have to be created by you (well, a killfile for URLs you don't want to see, and an accept file for Cookies you want to receive/send), it doesn't come with these, so you can selectively block or accept cookies based upon your configuration.
I don't want them to ship browsers with an added function for this or that special group that happens to understand something, or have special needs, because then there will be so many built-in functions that nobody uses that the programs will be bloated, and these programs are quite big enough as they are. I prefer the modular approach, where I can install a proxy or I can choose not to, and if I choose not to, it doesn't take up any space, hence a jazzed-up version of JunkBusters would be ideal.
As it is, what you ask for is exactly what JunkBuster does, and once it's on your computer, it's not an "outside source" any more than the browser itself. In fact, it gives away much less information than the browser does and protects your privacy and security as an added bonus, should you choose to ask it to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you learn what you're talking about before throwing accusations like that around, and if you're going to accuse people, have the guts to do it with your name attached.
Here is the link: On the BBC News Website
and you might enjoy the book Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which talks about offshore data havens and is a reasonably good read.
As far as the actual economics of it are concerned, I have no idea what the relationship between volume and marginal cost is when pressing CDs, but I do know that it's possible to get recent CDs (music or software) for between $3-$5, and there are a great many people who are very eager to flog them, so someone's making money...
One was the individual user putting his tape in a twin-deck system and copying it for his mates, which the RIAA doesn't really fundamentally care about and they're happy to turn a blind eye to because it introduces people to the music.
The other was the factories in Asia and elsewhere that print hundreds of CDs per hour and flog them cheap on the side of the road. They have a major issue with this because it loses them a fortune.
The problem, from their point of view, with Napster, gnutella and the rest, is that whereas before a single person might copy an album once or twice, now he makes it available to millions of people across the world at little or no cost. These new technologies are changing the first type of piracy into the second by giving it scale.
Your argument that people will go and buy the album anyway is incorrect in the main, because when they have the choice between buying it in the USA or the UK at $16, or buying it in Asia for $3, they buy it in Asia, that's why the losses due to CD ripping run into the billions and one of the reasons why the US has had some difficult discussions with China, Hong Kong etc during the GATT talks and regarding the WTO. If they're prepared to buy a copy that contributes nothing to the original artist, what makes you think they're unwilling to download it off the internet? Especially when nowadays, they're only going to put it on a minidisk or an MP3 player anyway - the days of having your collection on shelves lining your walls are almost over.
And who do you work for?
Now that I think about it, the case wouldn't work, because Jack would have no complaint against Joe. Joe didn't shut down the website, he asked the ISP to and the ISP did it, therefore once again it is the ISP that is being sued.
I hadn't actually thought of that. Cool.
The fear of being taken to court (because of the size of damages and the fact that they are being made responsible for someone else's opinions) is now causing ISPs to shut down websites regardless of the content, but merely because they receive a solicitor's letter saying that if their client is ever slandered on this site in the future, they will sue - they've sent in the abuse report pre-emptively, before any abuse exists to report, but by doing so, they have made the ISP legally responsible for the content of all future postings on that site - no choice but to shut it down when the damages are in the region of half a million pounds...
The precedent that has been set is dreadful - it is a blanket permission to joe public to gag anyone out there who wants to use the web as a forum. We've reached the levels of limitation of speech whereby every word you print has to be carefully weighed up in case someone wants to sue you for it. If it can be interpreted as libellous, then someone out there's sure going to try, because hey - it's easy cash - the lawyer only wants a percentage, so if you lose, you lose nothing, but if you win, you win big.
Admittedly, it's never been tried in court, but which ISP is going to risk half a million pounds to find out? The last one bottled out when the damages reached £0.5m, unsurprisingly, but with ignorant lawmakers and judges, and greedy, opportunistic, litigious egomaniacs with too much time on their hands, you've got all the ingredients for disaster.
This is no doubt going to be a very unpatriotic post as far as Slashdot is concerned.
I am all for criticising Microsoft, and Gates when you believe him to have done something wrong, and you may be right when you say that he does it for the power and the fame, although I doubt you have the information or experience required to make that judgement since all you have to go on is what the press tells you, and in my experience that's pretty thin in the truth department.
But what really gets to me is the implicit assumption that Gates' millions are somehow related to the millions of starving people in the world. Have you ever read an audit of some of the worlds richest charities? Have you ever taken a close look at how little some of them (NOT all of them, some of them) manage to achieve with such vast amounts of money?
A while back, Gates and his wife made a donation to a foundation they names after themselves, . When they announced that they were going to make a donation, people did their usual "you're so rich you MUST be evil" judgement call, but when the amount was announced, most of the more rational observers concluded that the sheer size of the donation went well beyond what they needed to donate in order to just impress, and even for a man of his wealth, it demonstrated a sincere willingness to use his money to make a change, rather than a token gesture. His foundation has an asset base today of about $21.8 BILLION (which, by the way, would imply Bill Gates' net wealth is significantly above $50+ million which is where you say people's wealth becomes absurd and criminal).
In fact, he is probably one of the few individuals wealthy enough in the world to make this kind of a difference with cash alone.
Perhaps he is a money-grabbing, fame-seeking, real-life karma whore. But nobody on this forum has the faintest idea whether or not that is the case, and we should stick to making our judgements based on what we can observe. I observe this - he gave, in a single gesture, more money than I have ever seen donated direct to charity, so criticise him on any grounds you like, but on this playing field, he's got the bases covered.
Nick braces himself in anticipation of much flaming and the immediate loss of all of his karma
Taco, it might just be possible that by trying to celebrate her anniversary, and Slash-ing her URL, you broke her.
Because of the internet, their ability to do this is, over time, determined by the restraint they exercise in the use of that power. If they use it only when the case is extreme, when the individual has a demonstrable complaint with demonstrable damages, and that we're not talking about someone calling a spade a spade, then I can't honestly say I feel that bad about someone being pushed off their soapbox. If you call an innocent man a rapist on a website, and lie about the facts you have to back that up, then you are causing harm, in effect, you're raping his/her reputation, and you should be stopped. This is why we have libel and slander laws.
If the government/legal system abuses the power it has to control speech, or uses it too often, then it will be removed from them. The old adage - "The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it" holds. People will go offshore, censorship will be seen as a terrible thing and people will lobby for that power to be removed from the hands of people who could otherwise have been genuinely helpful to the small minority that is getting badly and unjustly slandered.
Censorship of opinion is a bad thing, but as far as I'm concerned, the buck stops when someone has their quality of life unjustifiably diminished by what has been published. The attitude that says people can get web sites shut down because they disagree with the content is a squandering of the power people have over other people's speech, and as with all legal rights that are abused, in the end, it will be removed and the pendulum will probably swing too far the other way, with slander and libel on the internet being unstoppable because it is published from locations where such laws are not enforcable.
I don't see this issue going anywhere nice in the near future.
Cool philosophy - next time I do an analysis, I'll be sure to include a couple of deliberate errors, just to make sure there are no accidental ones.
The really scary thing is, you're probably right, even though you meant it as a joke. You did mean it as a joke didn't you?
Well duh, welcome to the party, took you long enough.
But I can't believe you got moderated down 3 times as flamebait, one as a troll, and moderated up 3 times for being funny. It was none of these. Your post was well-reasoned and insightful, contentious and challengingly phrased, and I'm bitter and disappointed that morons decided to moderate you down.
I've spent a few posts arguing in favour of moderation because I tend to put some effort into it. I've defended the moderators because I believed them to be better than people make out. The moderation some of your posts seriously challenge my point of view that moderators tend to be Ok. You sometimes push the envelope a little too far in my opinion, but this consistent bashing of your posts is blatant censorship (and I don't care if people can read at -1, that means they have to sift through piles of real trolls to find the argumentative posts moderated down by jerks who would rather moderate you down when they disagree with you than argue against you because they lack the intellectual horsepower to make their point convincingly).
Moderate this down as offtopic if you are a letter-of-the-law type of person, but this stuff needs to get said and we haven't got a forum.
Slashdot needs to pick it's moderators better.
And I could play Elite on that... after I spent 20 minutes loading the game from a tape...
Browsing at -1 is a real pain. I'm looking for abuses of moderation, but all I see are hundreds of trolls, flamebaits and idiots posting gibberish. What is it about Slashdot that has attracted these people here? Do they really have nothing better to do?
I really want to moderate positively, I'd love to find a load of articles that are really worth my ticking them as interesting, insightful or funny. But what are the chances that I'm going to come across one of those before I come across five posts that are so full of swearwords (and no content) that I do the slashdot community a greater service by sending them below the surface? Every so often I come across a good post, and it's with a sense of achievement that I can actually moderate it up, but the sheer volume of junk that I have to wade through in order to find the gems means that I tend to run out of points before I get there.
Not moderating down the trolls is not an option. When I'm not moderating I browse at 0 because ACs sometimes post interesting articles, and at that time I tend to thank the moderators that got rid of the trolls for me, so I do the same. The solution isn't about content, nor is this constant moaning about the quality of moderation going to get Slashdot anywhere - you have no real data on who moderated what, and how much they knew about it, and what proportion of moderators do a good or a bad job. The problem is accountability for posts, and this whole veil of anonymity thing is not helping in many cases (please note that I implicitly acknowledge that in other cases it is essential).
All this bitching at moderators is really pissing me off - it demotivates me from making an effort, since there will always be a hundred posters out there to criticise moderators no matter how much time and effort I personally put into it.
A big problem with slashdot is that regardless of the subject topic, people prefer to discuss the value of slashdot, the quality of moderation and the lack of quality articles. This problem is about users, not management.
I'm not sure I like it, but if Tuvalu had the foresight to ask for, or the luck to receive .tv as the last 3 characters of their country web address, then more power to them if they can more than double their GDP by selling/leasing it out to a company.
I wonder what kind of break clause the contract has - you've got to figure that they will want it back one day and they'll have taken steps to make that possible...
The reason for this is probably twofold.
1. The community of users is much more reactive than the communities that represent consumers of other goods and services provided by major corporations, and is therefore prepared to make a loud fuss, in a semi-concerted way, and to use their buying decision collectively to hurt large corporations in the short term.
2. There are a large number of alternative suppliers of internet-related services, and given point 1, they have noticed that they can steal market share from competitors quite fast if they can stylize themselves as the "supplier that respects your privacy".
Another point is that companies do not exist to do what people want. Companies exist to maximize shareholder value, and in a perfect free market where Adam Smith's "Invisible hand" works as it should, that equates to supplying the goods and services in a competitive and efficient manner, such that consumers needs are satisfied to the maximum extent that they can be given limited resources. Market failure (monopoly power, certain types of goods, "non-rational" behaviour etc) means that this sometimes fails to happen, which is the economists' argument for government intervention. If companies existed solely to do what people want, we wouldn't need to call them to order like this all the time.
I think it's because when someone's privacy gets threatened, they feel much more quickly capable of taking significant action, to the extent that they're willing to switch provider, give up a forum or a game they enjoy, or use alternatives (sometimes of dubious legality), in order to protect it.
In terms of the influences faced by online companies today, it seems to be quite a high priority to satisfy the privacy needs of customers, even though this is not a natural consequence of their desire to make profits, but rather caused by an obsession (healthy, in my opinion) with privacy on the part of individuals.
We've seen quite a few radical reversals of policy on the part of some very large corporations (Doubleclick or Intel for example), which would seem to imply that online consumers, as a separately identifiable group, are becoming quite powerful in their own right.
Long may it last!
I think that depends. If they're being sued under US laws, in US courts, then yes, the constitution does apply to them in that case. You can't judge an American citizen and a foreigner in the same court with different standards applied to each. "He's American, so he can say anything he likes, but the foreigner can shut up or we'll sue him". I don't think so.
On the other hand, what if they are being sued abroad, under the laws of their own countries? Well in that case, one of two things can happen, either their countries let a mostly US organisation sue them for doing something that would have been legal in America, which they might, depending on their national laws, but it makes the MPAA look hypocritical and exploitative ...
This would mean that the MPAA loses anyway and it becomes pointless for them to pursue this further in other countries.
The sooner the better, this ridiculous mess is beginning to annoy...
If it ever becomes necessary to get off this planet, the chances of our finding out how to do it will increase a thousandfold.
I just hope that by the time it becomes necessary, we're not too far away from the required discoveries that it takes more time than we have left to find out how to do it.
I got it here.
Perhaps my source is wrong? By the time I'd read this article, I'd forgotten the detail of the Slashdot source, so you're right, maybe I'm in the dark. It is odd to see the two articles contradicting each other though. Maybe he's just sueing everyone in sight.
But it is neither Teacherreview.com nor the people writing the graffiti that are getting sued. It is the college, for linking to teacherreview.com, that is the target of the lawsuit.
This is yet another case of, "can someone get sued for linking to something". It has already been established that they can't be sued under copyright legislation for linking to content on someone else's website that is pirated, because they are not guilty of pirating, they're just telling you where to find the stuff.
The question now is, can someone be guilty of libel or slander when they link to a website that has nasty comments about someone else? My guess is that they can't, the college isn't responsible for the content, it just lets people know that it exists. It also links to the website indiscriminately, it doesn't say, "...and here's a very bad review of this professor, why don't you go read this review in particular".
I'm sorry he's been made to feel uncomfortable. From reading the reviews, he should walk away with at least one piece of learning : he's made his students uncomfortable with his aggressive homosexuality and they've been given a forum in which to gripe about it. But in terms of who he is suing and why, he should lose. The consequences of his winning would be a terrible blow to free speech on the internet. Much of the value of the internet comes from the fact that everything is linked, and a college ought to link to this kind of site. It's a shame it's not used as responsibly as it might be - there's a lot of venom in the reviews and not as much rational assessment for me to feel that they're entirely useful.
Ah - So you want it built into your browser, I misunderstood, I though you just didn't want it dependent on outside influence.
JunkBuster isn't an outside source (unless you mean it's a different program). It's a local proxy, running on your computer, configured by local files and controlled entirely by you. JunkBusters have no influence over it once you've downloaded it. Unlike the Net Nannies and CyberPatrols or whatever out there, the killfiles have to be created by you (well, a killfile for URLs you don't want to see, and an accept file for Cookies you want to receive/send), it doesn't come with these, so you can selectively block or accept cookies based upon your configuration.
I don't want them to ship browsers with an added function for this or that special group that happens to understand something, or have special needs, because then there will be so many built-in functions that nobody uses that the programs will be bloated, and these programs are quite big enough as they are. I prefer the modular approach, where I can install a proxy or I can choose not to, and if I choose not to, it doesn't take up any space, hence a jazzed-up version of JunkBusters would be ideal.
As it is, what you ask for is exactly what JunkBuster does, and once it's on your computer, it's not an "outside source" any more than the browser itself. In fact, it gives away much less information than the browser does and protects your privacy and security as an added bonus, should you choose to ask it to.