I trust any rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth 14 year old ad-hominem mongering and shoot-the-messenger troll who lives in his parent's basement and calls Microsoft M$.
I was about to say, "Said the pot to the kettle," but that's way too obvious with this post. I mean, in the best case scenario, this assumes that "M$ lackey" is an ad-hominem on some level. The OP quoted Ed's own profile, his description of himself fits the definition of "M$ lackey". But then to spew a half-dozen real ad-hominem attacks, that's more comic irony than anything. Well, that would assume that the AC who posted it was actually trying to be funny and wasn't just a M$ lackey who's taken offense.
Speaking of ad-hominem attacks, though, the M$ lackey who was originally being discussed, Ed Bott, launched into a bunch of what could be considered indirect ad-hominems as he babbled about just how BAD Gutmann's paper is (as he implies that Gutmann is ignorant, inexperienced, a liar, a sloppy & disorganized writer, and he distorts the truth, etc.). When I first read Bott's article around the time it came out, I was struck by how it seemed to be more of a rambling tirade directed at someone who gave M$ a bit of a black eye than a rebuttal that offered any appreciable substance. That's a personal tone that I don't feel is all that appropriate in tech journalism.
That said, I don't think that "lackey" characterizes Bott correctly. The description of "M$ sycophant" is far more apropos for him.
I was expecting another article beating the zombie-horse that is Creationism apologetics junk science. While I take guilty pleasure in reading those articles too (nothing like having relabelled creationism nonsense masquerading as science get debunked, it's just annoying that some outlets portray them as outspoken underdogs when they're only outspoken because they're bad at science), this article discusses the greater peer-reviewed scientific process in greater detail. Not only that, but its impact is greater since it uses a relatively neutral example that isn't so prone to the circular arguments and intellectual dishonesty that gets introduced whenever origin theories are discussed. I guess it's only appropriate that science journalism is also subject to peer review just as the field it reports on.
My astrological profile (Aquarius) flatters me by telling me I'm rational and open-minded, the traits that caused me to become an agnostic leaning towards the ultimate heresy of atheism and to become a scientist. Depending on who you talk to, they also say the age of Aquarius is nearly upon us and is ushering in another intellectual renaissance, the likes of which will perhaps see religions, superstition, astrology, and other magical thinking marginalized and replaced by understanding. I would like to believe that as well. It's almost like the practitioners of astrology signed their own death warrant in a futile attempt to win me over by telling me what I want to hear, damn them!
Nothing drives me crazier than mystical prognosticators who predict their own downfall and then say, "I told you so, see, I'm right! And now I'm out the door so you can't continue to debunk me!"
I found that particularly amusing, I'm glad whoever wrote that article saved the best for last. So-called 'living fossils' are anything but an embarrassment to evolutionary theory; they usually strengthen it. Not only can they help to establish what scientists would otherwise have to largely imagine about soft-tissue physiology as they gazed at fossilized bones, but they also underscore other principles of population science-- how one isolated population that's thriving in a static environment can exist, relatively unchanged, generation after generation, but how another isolated population with a selection pressure on it might change to gain a competitive advantage. There is no law that says that every member of a species must either evolve or die. The author behind that creationmoments website is proof that some humans can evolve in terms of their intellectual processes, while others continue to thrive in a bit of a backwards state...
While MobiTV is apparently staffed by morons, and should probably make a stronger effort to secure their content, it would seem that even though what they claimed is proprietary information was hidden in plain sight, was discovered by use of a debugging tool in violation of their TOS. Almost every software license prohibits decompiling, reverse-engineering, and the like, because almost every secret in the most proprietary software is hidden in plain sight, if someone has the correct tools.
If MobiTV is correct that someone didn't just happen across that URL or received it in a normal browser error dump, and actually used an unauthorized debugging tool to obtain the URL, then they may have a leg to stand on. Information acquired through illegal means and leaked to the public DOES NOT public information make. And I'd say they may be well within their rights to demand the information be taken down...but sometimes what's within one's rights isn't necessarily prudent to act on (hello, Streisand Effect!). But of course, that ultimately assumes that the individual who leaked that URL information acquired it by violating a contract he agreed to somewhere along the lines. Just so long as the instructions to obtain that URL are (a) usable by anyone coming from a public starting point, and (b) don't involve taking an illegal action along the way to the ultimate destination of that media URL, there really doesn't seem to be any leg for MobiTV to stand on. However, if the destination URL cannot be reached under those conditions, it should probably be considered to be as stolen and illegal as the TV some guy is trying to sell from the back of his car. Just because you bought stolen goods in an open and public transaction doesn't mean the transaction was legal in the first place. In this example, the seller didn't have the legal right to sell the item, so he couldn't legally transfer ownership to you.
I'd always just used Google's Cache feature to see the content. I figured if Google could see the content, since I was using Google to search & they offer the cache view to their users, I'd vicariously inherited the right to view what EE was trying to claim as premium content. So I guess I was taking a longer route than I needed to, but the highlighting of my search terms is usually worth the effort when sifting through a lot of garbage anyway. The main difference is that the version Google sees has a "View Solution" button at the bottom of the first post, where the "public" version of the site has a subscription sign-up link.
I don't think it's all that scummy though, it's clever. It's sort of like the "Obtain key from office to use elevator" sign that's posted outside the building elevator (primarily used for freight or disabled people) in one of my workplaces. The only keyhole I could see near the control was the test/override one that all elevators have, so I pushed the summoning button, and found the elevator to be fully functional sans key. Not only that, but it doesn't even have the current possibility of being locked-out in such a way as to require a key. But does it deter 95% of the people who walk by the elevator, who instead use the stairs? Yep.
It's the same sort of social engineering trickery, discourage people with something that is designed to be prima facie misleading, but is actually utterly irrelevant to anyone who wishes to observe and test the purported limit. Other, less amusing examples include the ubiquitous "beware of dog", "premises under surveillance", and "security provided by $alarm_company" signs that project an unnecessarily elevated notion of trespassing risk on private property.
Thought of this a bit after I clicked submit on my previous comment.
That patents become public knowledge when they're gained creates an interesting dichotomy as well, since some R&D ISN'T patented. This is especially in the pharmaceutical or other extremely proprietary and experimental industries, where companies will not even attempt to patent something and protect themselves SOLELY by relying on everybody else being ignorant of what they're doing to create the product. They (quite astutely) realize that by patenting their knowledge, it becomes common knowledge, and nothing will prevent a competitor from learning their methods and applying them in a similar but "different enough" manner to circumvent the legal restrictions. By taking this tack, they seem to acknowledge that their ideas are ONLY property so long as they're not patented or otherwise known by anyone else, and the moment they are, knowledge of the process for creating the product would become part of the public domain.
I think this aspect of the debate may be summarized by simply saying, "Ideas are only exclusive property under two conditions: the first, that they are unknown to anyone else and kept close; the second, when they're protected by a patent." Doesn't this basically make a patent roughly equivalent to inflicting legally-enforced ignorance on everyone but the patent holder? How is that in society's best interests?
I tend to regard property as needing to possess at least one of the following: tangibility, fungibility, or liquidity. If not one of these is present, how is it property?
Tangibility is self-expalanatory-- if you can touch it (or sense it with one of the other senses), it exists. It's something physical and in some way uniquely identifiable, and necessarily exclusive. In this way, I actually would have to side with artists who use their voices (as they have exclusive use of their own vocal cords) and/or instruments (specific instruments or play styles and skill are exclusive) in the copyright of art they produce. This would be a tad shakier on written copyright, but anyone who's used to my babbling would recognize my writing style and thought processes, which makes them nearly as tangible as my own voice; this is really the case with any composition, and copyright protects the specific manner of expression (this is the notion that you can convey a similar idea to mine, but you can't use my exact copyrighted words). Anyone can play back, say, FDR's famous speech blurb on fear, but everyone who's familiar with it knows it was FDR who said that, no explicit attribution is necessary most of the time, the speech and FDR's voice have a tangible quality to them.
Fungibility means that something is interchangeable with another thing. This property of an item is an indication that it possesses some form of value that can be specifically assessed, and that there isn't an abstract, extrinsic value placed on it due to scarcity. This is important when considering that, while fungible items may be monopolized, they can't be monopolized by an extrinsic value assigned to an item by a special right (such as patent or copyright granting exclusive use) or uniqueness (such as a Picasso original, since those are irreplaceable).
Liquidity means that something can be readily traded. It can be bought or sold without changing appreciably, even if it's somewhat unique. It's something that has a largely intrinsic value that can, as with a fungible item, be readily assessed. Licenses (to use something) could be considered liquid assets, but the products licenses typically govern, not so much.
I think that Intellectual Property as far as copyright goes, while it's not necessarily intellectual, is tangible enough to be considered property. "Creative Property" might be a better term for it. This would include the source code computer programmers have written too, insofar as complexity and creativity are involved. I think licenses make some degree of sense and don't oppose the notion of licensing such works in the least-- even though I am a strong believer in legally requiring those licenses to be made known prior to purchase and to be transferable insofar as they purport to govern tangible property and should be treated as such (under all the laws that govern tangible property). That said, it's up to the individual to determine if the license is acceptable, just as the individual would negotiate price or any other part of the transfer of property in a transaction.
Intellectual Property as far as patents goes, is intellectual, but I can't see it as being property at all. IP not tangible-- it's an abstract idea by its very nature, and uniquely identifiable expression is not a trait; anyone can implement it, with only abstract legal concepts (patents) standing in the way. IP is not fungible-- a patented item is unique, it's monopolized, and it's (supposed to be) non-obvious. There's nothing like it. There's not legally supposed to be anything like it. IP is not liquid-- patents themselves have no intrinsic value whatsoever. They're an idea, and have no value on their own unless they can be implemented. That means that anyone can possess the idea, but it (theoretically) only holds value for those who hold the patent or have licensed others to use it. This is antithetical to the very notion of property, which is that it holds value or liability for anyone who possesses it.
Problem: Buyers are giving sellers negative feedback even though the exchange was fair and square?
Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback
I'm a former eBay Powerseller (off and on for the past decade), and while sometimes this is the way it works (buyer whines about how long FedEx took, or inexplicably expected more than was advertised), more often than not, nonpaying buyers would leave negative feedback after I left a negative comment for them. I guess I was one of the few who didn't care about a perfect rating, so I wound up with a few negatives, and almost all were from deadbeats who never responded to emails and didn't pay, but somehow were able to find the negative feedback button when I made good on my statements that I would leave negative feedback for them if they didn't respond and didn't pay. I never believed in letting bad buyers off the hook so easily, if ever seller left bad feedback for a deadbeat, then more sellers would see that wreck coming and cancel the idiots' bids. EBay did eventually reform the deadbeat retaliation problem briefly (retracting buyer feedback automatically if a seller filed for a commission refund over nonpayment), but it's moot now that they're just letting bad buyers run amok.
And lately, the quality of buyers has gone down dramatically. They seem to enjoy "tasting" items at the seller's expense, just forcing returns through Paypal, which refunds everything to them, no questions asked, regardless of whether the sale was as-is, leaving the seller holding the bag for shipping fees AND charging full Paypal fees on the transaction that didn't occur (the only way to avoid the double-dipping is to just give-in to the bullying and not contest the dispute) and was reversed against the seller's wishes. No thanks, I don't need those headaches. No more Paypal or eBay for me.
...relative to the income and and standards of living of the people they're pursuing, I feel it would be an outrage if they didn't have to provide more.
Then again, civil cases just require a preponderance of the evidence to be in favor of one party or another. If the defense does its job in establishing doubts as to the RIAA's methodology, it would probably behoove the RIAA to disclose its methodologies in great detail to back up its claims of investigative accuracy, which would then subject them to more scrutiny and attempts to find fault. Does evidence really count for much of anything if it can't be substantiated? I think that any competent judge would, in weighing the evidence presented, be compelled to largely discount the RIAA's evidence when confronted with all the times they've been documented to have been dead-wrong, if they don't demonstrate how their evidence holds water.
Well, Adobe's CS won't be functionality-impaired under Wine if Google's initiative is successful. Some games work, some games don't, some work better under Wine than they do under their native environment in terms of performance and stability. The full-blown ports will be made more often when developers realize there's enough demand to make the hassles of supporting their product under various Linux environments worthwhile. That's really the main problem, since there isn't a Linux compatibility standard. Without a standard (that Linux distros would have to meet in order to be certified), you know the devs would be expecting a support nightmare. It's easier just to say, "No," to Linux officially, while cooperating with the Wine, Cedega, and Crossover people. Once Linux distributions are homogeneous enough that one easy installer package would fit all and the devs were comfortable with the licensing, then it would be feasible. Until then, Windows and Wine-based environments are the standard they'll develop for.
If I am wrong, it is because I am the victim of bad science, not because I am grasping at any evidence to support my belief system.
(snip)
The problem with the books on evolution I have read is that they assume evolution is true, and then fit the pieces into that assumption. This is different from books on the other branches of science, which start with the basic experiments, and then introduce the theory to explain them.
No, this is exactly how science works. You do the ground work. The research. You figure out the basics, and then you build upon that. When a geologist does his research he builds upon existing and peer-reviewed research that has been shown to be supported by all known facts. Evolution is exactly the same as any other scientific field. The difference is in your head. It is wishful thinking on your part.
I think the old saying about teaching pigs to sing applies here. Creationists are typically exceptionally credulous and gullible. They've been taught that if you read something in a particular book, it must be true. They generally will say if they're a fool as a result of believing such things on faith, that it's not their fault, that someone else lied-to and betrayed them. They are NOT personally accountable for their lives, they trust that church leadership and scripture translators are acting in their own best interests and utilize recursive arguments that use the scriptures to describe a divine being that keeps the scriptures pure and infallible.
You obviously understand, as do I, that science makes no such promises. Every statement of theory that a scientist makes publicly is subject to scrutiny, there are no gods, there is no gospel. There is also no room for willful ignorance; every individual is held accountable for understanding and being critical of theories, and nobody is let off the hook for being ignorant and/or believing what was printed in a research paper or book without further scrutiny. There is simply no, "I am a victim, I was misled (by someone else)," in science; there is only, "If you believed that 'junk science' at face value & didn't scrutinize it sufficiently, it turned out to be wrong, AND you happened to base your beliefs on the subject matter on it & wound-up looking foolish, you fail at the scientific process." The only victims in the scientific world are those of their own stupidity if they fail in their due diligence of analysis.
But what evidence does anyone have to establish that such a thing as a soul exists? I believe that ultimately, the notion that souls exist are due only to some sort of selfish arrogance or magical thinking that somehow we (and possibly other animals) have an existence that transcends the plane of corporeal existence. If the evidence amounts to unsubstantiated, anecdotal "ghost stories" and the belief that we're so special that somehow there must be more to our fleeting existence, I can only say "dream on".
The more cold reality of the situation is that organisms are biochemical machines. We're very complex, fantastic machines. We have such a capacity to assimilate our own experiences and knowledge of the abstract that we set ourselves as the bar that any other machine or creature must be able to clear in order to be considered to possess higher intelligence. But in the end, it's a matter of degree. Is it so hard to fathom that there could be organisms or even computers somewhere that might be so far superior to our level intelligence that we would compare to them as amoeba compare to us. Researchers are able to identify more and more of our cognitive limitations. What are consciousness and self-awareness if not merely cognitive abilities? What sort of things might we be missing out on as a result of our limitations? Does it ultimately matter if we just shut-down and cease to function at some point like any other machine or organism when they are either damaged beyond repair or just wear-out from use?
I don't think it diminishes my existence in the least to view myself as a machine that came into existence, function largely as intended (at least from what I understand my purpose to be), and will eventually have some critical component fail and relegate me to the biological scrap heap for salvage. If anything, that view makes me even more determined to pursue a higher quality of experience and such, since I'm fairly certain I need to make the most of my existence here and now, as opposed to sacrificing such things and merely building to something nebulous that may or may not allow my existence to continue beyond the collapse of my current state. I chose to cherish the bird in hand.
I'd like to point out that trademark doesn't equal copyright doesn't equal patent.
Trademarks involve exclusive use of names. They contribute to nothing aside from product and/or manufacturer identification. They don't contain any inherent knowledge, they are symbolic. There would be no point in taxing trademarks such as "Linux" or putting them in the public domain.
Copyrights grant exclusive use on expressive creativity. Copyrighted works can contain knowledge and ideas, but even if they present an idea, they only cover the specific expression of that idea (i.e., the way the author depicted the idea in words or illustration), not the idea (pragmatic knowledge or other insight) itself. They keep specific works of creativity from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. Copyrights can be valuable, though there are ways around them...someone just has to understand the expression and re-express it in another unique manner.
Patents grant exclusive use on pragmatic creativity. They contain knowledge and ideas, and while they don't cover the expression of the knowledge, they do cover ANY implementation of the knowledge they contain. They're complementary to copyrights and don't really overlap. They keep the ability to apply knowledge from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. The only way around a patent is to make nontrivial changes to the application of the idea that achieves the same function.
So in a word, no, this proposal wouldn't affect Linux at all. When you hear about M$ or SCO trying to go after Linux for alleged infringements, it seems to be more on the basis of copyright violation than of patent violation. They allege that people working on Linux simply took pieces of their copyrighted code and stuck it in the kernel. They are NOT going after Linux because they hold a patent on OS behavior that Linux simply mimics and therefore infringes on a patent, they say that code was stolen, and they have to prove that they were the first to create the code, and that it was basically lifted verbatim. I have yet to hear anyone protest that Linux WASN'T designed to basically replicate UNIX in a non-proprietary way; I seem to recall that was Linus' original stated purpose-- to make something that worked like UNIX and could be used in almost exactly the same manner, but wasn't burdened by oppressive licensing baggage and proprietary code.
Further, Linux is safe because its copyright isn't Linus' responsibility or anyone else's; the license is public, and gives the work to the public with license restrictions. Even if there was something that required the copyright holder who released something under GNU/GPL to renew or pay taxes on something "or it would be turned over to the public domain", it would still be safe in the public domain. It would not bankrupt Linux, it would just make it more difficult to copyright works with restrictive licenses (whereas public domain works have no restrictions on use, release of source, or the other little things that the conditional licenses demand). Creative Commons is just another flavor of the FOSS licensing schemes, only for creative expression. It's not public domain either, but can be somewhat close. These are ways of sharing the knowledge and expression of copyrighted works, while still allowing the creator some level of control over the way the work is subsequently handled by the public.
Good on you for looking it up and not just taking the article at face value!
I knew I was dealing with shoddy journalism partway through that article, where the author referenced the "suicide of a Missouri girl who was bullied online by an adult." Apparently the author of that piece lacks reading comprehension skills, for that incident involved "bullying of a girl by another girl masquerading as a fictitious boy using an account under false pretenses that the 2nd girl's mother approved of for the sole purpose of spying on the first girl". The title also doesn't represent the content of the article accurately, which is online harassment and bullying, which is completely different from a "prank".
It suffices to say that the quality of that entire piece was on a par with a 3rd-rate blogger post. I usually expect better from the CSM. The author's lack of understanding of the definition of simple words (or an ill-fitting sensationalist headline), lack of understanding of the facts he's reporting on, and omission of critical details is beyond mere shoddy journalism. It's wastebasket journalism.
All of the examples you mention are criminal offenses. Some are felonies, some misdemeanors, but they are such fundamental principles that they don't necessarily have to have evidence of actual damages...you are committing offenses "against the dignity of the people of (fill in local, state, or federal government)." The standards of proof are higher in criminal cases, but the simple attempt to commit a crime can be sufficient grounds for conviction, even if law enforcement manages to foil the plot before actual harm takes place.
In a tort (civil) case, as the RIAA's cases all are, the plaintiff theoretically has to provide evidence of damages (I say theoretically, since the RIAA has had cases decided in its favor without doing so, pursuing statutory damages on claims of "making available" without providing any evidence of actual infringement is their way of avoiding this). Once damages have been established, there may be a punitive element added to just smack the perpetrator down more and teach him/her a lesson, or other solutions to remedy the situation.
IANAL, but I'm a bit disgusted by the whole mess-- you're apparently not the only one who confuses tort wrongs with criminal ones. The RIAA is apparently able to fool a lot of people, including judges, into not forcing them to provide evidence of actual, specific infringement actions that would warrant a judgement for statutory damages in their favor, saying the intent is sufficient as it would be in a criminal case. Kudos to judges who are competent enough to see through it.
One thing I wonder about are the RIAA stormtroopers who raid homes and seize hard drives...are they simply PIs who convince the accused to cooperate, or do judges actually sign search warrants that allow police to seize evidence on behalf of a tort plaintiff? I know under some circumstances, when a tort type of wrong is egregious enough to become a criminal offense, the government will step in; but in these cases, there don't appear to be government prosecutors involved, and the RIAA seeks only monetary damages as far as I've heard, not fines that are to be paid to the government. That situation just seems wrong.
Linux isn't free; it requires an investment of time and effort. The minimum would be the time taken to adapt to a new or different UI, similar to upgrading a commercial OS if all else is compatible. The maximum for most end users tends to come in the form of those things that dominate the ubuntu forums; things like getting fancy sound setups and video cards working, those odd devices that don't enjoy full support, and finding ways to make software from other platforms function correctly.
By contrast, the customer who sees value in something with a price tag is generally the big-box retailer computer shopper stereotype; they have no clue what they're doing, they don't really want to learn (or don't believe they're capable of learning), and so they get fleeced at the time of purchase (with all the add-ons that the sales reps foist on them) and several more times over the life of the computer, whether it's by software vendors (anti-virus or anti-malware vendors primarily who prey on insecurity) or technicians if things go wrong farther down the road when the machine is out of warranty. Ignorance is extremely costly, whether it's a car, home, or computer. Those who don't know how to maintain and repair their investments are at the mercy of those who do.
At the end of the day, I've found my investment in Linux to be worth every second. Every time I have to try to install the newest drivers on a bleeding-edge video chipset, I learn something. Same with installing software that's usually not designed to run under Linux natively. The value is there, though. My system is more stable than it's ever been. It boots twice as fast as Windows XP, but that hardly matters as rarely as I ever need to reboot it. I can play WoW and Steam games such as Portal. I can watch LOST from ABC's website in the XP virtual machine (that's its sole purpose these days). I just don't recognize or accept the "constraints of Linux" the way a lot of the Linux-complainers do, and I've found myself losing sympathy for them; I'll just shrug and smile. I guess if they don't see the value and aren't willing to put-in an honest effort, I shouldn't stand in their way of paying the Microsoft-tax. For those who do want to make Linux work and aren't looking just looking for something to complain about, I make it clear that they can ask me stuff and I'll do what I can to help them, free of charge, of course...that's my way of adding value to the project and community. For those who don't see the value in the community, there's not much I can really say; part of Linux seems to be contributing to the cause, either by being willing to ask for and receive help, or by helping others. It's the community-effort that makes Linux derivatives the most priceless OSes out there.
For commercial OS users who need help fixing Windows and Mac problems though, whether it's removing spyware or investigating whether dodgy software or hardware is causing the machine to not perform the way it should, my rate is $75/hour, 2-hour minimum onsite. I still try to impart the knowledge to my end users that will help them to help themselves in the future, which is a whole lot more than most technicians and the Windows culture in general fosters, which is more helplessness (and Mac culture is even worse). I'm all too happy to help them upgrade to "free" if they express interest in an alternative to Windows because they know it's bad. The Mac users never seem to have any doubts, and have no problem paying and paying.
Corel did that with Corel Linux OS. The "Deluxe" version came with an inflatable penguin, more applications and documentation, and a little more in the way of technical support. And the support is really where the value is. IMHO, the software may as well be considered to be worthless if there aren't resources to support it. With M$ products, that comes in the form of the trivial amount of tech support they might deign give a user. With k/ubuntu and other 'free' Linux distros, that comes in the form of forums and the like.
You clearly do not have a philosophy degree. Things aren't so black & white, and sometimes a philosopher will attempt to spin black as white and vice versa. There simply aren't many things that are absolutes.
From my perspective, if you have to burn the village to save it, burn away! Only in this case, it's not that dramatic or destructive; it's still an ethical trade-off, but it's one that commits a lesser wrong to avert a greater one. That is what situation ethics are all about...pushing an old man off a liferaft to stretch the provisions far enough to save the baby, exploit an ineptly-maintained computer's security problems in order to harden it and keep it from being commandeered by someone who has no qualms about using it to destroy others.
Ultimately, I think the best option is to smugly boot all incompetently-maintained computers off the public network until their operators become marginally competent. Solutions that propose doing things that are sketchy from an ethical standpoint are the result of frustration over how millions of clueless computer users (mostly Windows, of course) can ruin the internet for everyone by allowing their computers to become botnet zombies that spew malicious packets and spam EVERYWHERE for the rest of us to "enjoy". I'm sick and tired of all the harm they do, and I honestly don't care what sort of drastic method it takes to put a stop to the bulk of it.
You might want to start by reading the story. The laptop apparently never was "shipped-out" to any other service locations. It was lost almost immediately by the allegedly incompetent/thieving staff at Best Buy. They lied about shipping it around as a stall tactic and in a feeble attempt to cover it all up. BB didn't find the laptop, which was stored in a "secure area" for months, and I think under those circumstances, it's quite reasonable to assume it was, in fact, stolen rather than lost. It was not where it was supposed to be, in a secure area with what I'd assume is some level of organization, and it had to go --somewhere--. It didn't go somewhere without assistance; someone took it out of the secure area, one would assume out of the store, and there doesn't seem to be any store policy that would authorize that a customer's computer be removed from the store under those circumstances. I believe that quite convincingly meets the criteria for "theft".
With all the, "This is gay!" and "That is gay!" and "ur ghey!" and other somewhat homosexist (Is that even a word? It is now!) remarks I've heard while gaming recently, I would posit that the phallic joystick met its demise when the subconscious Freudian implications of groping a shaft (well, other one's own) and massaging it vigorously suddenly reached critical mass and repulsed a generation of gamers who are adamant that they're "Not Gay".
"Voting with the Republicans were the following eighteen Democrats (again, rough count):
Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln. Joe Lieberman also voted against stripping retroactive immunity.
Not present and voting was Senator Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate serving in the Senate to miss the vote."
There you have it, Republicans in lockstep, and those Democrats mentioned are traitors. Including Sen. Clinton, in her silence, she consented. The roll call for Sen. Dodd's attempts to strip the immunity provision out read much the same. I would like to believe that all those listed have no political future (and this of course includes "all Senate Republicans who weren't mentioned by name"). Sadly, I'm probably wrong on that.
The main reason I just don't care about writers' "hardships" is that they were primarily demanding royalties over so-called "new media" that haven't proven to be all that profitable yet.
And more to the point, I feel that they shouldn't get royalties in the first place. Sure, if you're a screenwriter who wrote a brilliant screenplay on your own time and on your own dime, you *should* rake in the money every time derivatives of your work are used if that's the way you shop it out (i.e., the film utilizing your screenplay is sold to a consumer in one form or another, because you licensed the studio to produce your work). But these unionized writers were demanding royalties on stuff they wrote while on the payroll of studios. They arrive in the morning, sit at a desk and write or edit scripts all day for a wage-- the studios pay them for their creative input.
Now take Joe Programmer. He works for a software developer. He sits in his cube all day, writing out code. He uses his creativity and produces a relatively unique product. His employer pays him for that creative input. But at the end of the day, when the product goes to market, he will have received only the paychecks his employer cut him based on his salary/hourly wages. How is this appreciably different from a screenwriter, that a programmer simply doesn't deserve to double-dip and make another few bucks every time the software he labored on is sold or used?
I feel this change is for the worse, I've been selling (and buying) a fair volume on eBay for the past 9 years and been a Power Seller off and on for a good bit of that time. I've had the occasional flake buyer and retaliatory feedback (7 of my 8 negatives out of 1190 feedbacks were from deadbeats I reported and left bad feedback for), but recently, it seems that the majority of my buyers are bad. They either don't bother paying or responding to emails in the first place, or even worse, they file disputes with Paypal demanding refunds, even though the product is exactly as described. They're now using that service as a vehicle to force sellers to accept returns due to buyer's remorse. Over the past 6 months, I've had:
One buyer purchase used, as-is electronics, admittedly tinker with the item trying to fix it, break it worse, and file a Paypal dispute & chargeback.
A buyer purchase a new component to repair his laptop. He filed a dispute with Paypal after discovering the part didn't fix his problem, forcing me to accept a return on a now used part, and conveniently "forgot" to return some screw covers that were in the kit. Paypal refunded his money and did nothing to address the fact that he'd returned a product incomplete. Nevermind that it was as advertised, and he just wanted to test potential faults at other folks' expense (he didn't even pay return shipping, he lied to FedEx and told them he was refusing the package).
A buyer purchase a laptop and experienced buyer's remorse. He hadn't even had the machine on long enough to finish the OS setup wizard. He promptly filed a dispute with Paypal with blatant lies (basically checking every last "significantly not as described" box and making some things up such as a battery life complaint, when he clearly hadn't even had it on long enough to deplete the battery) and forced a return, despite him not being able to name one thing that was actually not correctly described. Thanks Paypal & eBay!
It doesn't appear to me that eBay is any more concerned with that sort of "buyer" and what they cost sellers in real dollars than they've ever been. They're just more concerned with buyers feeling "secure", even if that security comes at the expense of those who pay eBay's bills-- the sellers. Perhaps they either need to get rid of all seller fees and charge buyer premiums on sales, but this nonsense is the last straw. These low-feedback buyers don't care if their accounts get suspended due to not paying for items. They can hide behind Paypal's "arbitration", which almost always sides with the buyer and won't defend the seller against even the most ridiculous chargebacks.
One of the silliest things I've seen in my IT career was an old memo regarding some employees' desire to upgrade their Macs to OS X 10.2 (from OS 9.x). One of the notable objections was along the lines that "OS X is very new and we don't have Symantec AV for it, so computers running OS X would be at-risk".
Nevermind how pointless an AV program is on a *nix platform to begin with, I'm a bit horrified at the false sense of security that having an AV program installed on a Macintosh provides as well. Sure, there have been some recent exploits found, but most of them still rely on the end user making exceptionally poor choices and being tricked into granting escalated privileges to malware. If anything, the fallacious impression of being somehow "protected" could encourage users to make even more risky choices.
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to say, "Said the pot to the kettle," but that's way too obvious with this post. I mean, in the best case scenario, this assumes that "M$ lackey" is an ad-hominem on some level. The OP quoted Ed's own profile, his description of himself fits the definition of "M$ lackey". But then to spew a half-dozen real ad-hominem attacks, that's more comic irony than anything. Well, that would assume that the AC who posted it was actually trying to be funny and wasn't just a M$ lackey who's taken offense.
Speaking of ad-hominem attacks, though, the M$ lackey who was originally being discussed, Ed Bott, launched into a bunch of what could be considered indirect ad-hominems as he babbled about just how BAD Gutmann's paper is (as he implies that Gutmann is ignorant, inexperienced, a liar, a sloppy & disorganized writer, and he distorts the truth, etc.). When I first read Bott's article around the time it came out, I was struck by how it seemed to be more of a rambling tirade directed at someone who gave M$ a bit of a black eye than a rebuttal that offered any appreciable substance. That's a personal tone that I don't feel is all that appropriate in tech journalism.
That said, I don't think that "lackey" characterizes Bott correctly. The description of "M$ sycophant" is far more apropos for him.
I was expecting another article beating the zombie-horse that is Creationism apologetics junk science. While I take guilty pleasure in reading those articles too (nothing like having relabelled creationism nonsense masquerading as science get debunked, it's just annoying that some outlets portray them as outspoken underdogs when they're only outspoken because they're bad at science), this article discusses the greater peer-reviewed scientific process in greater detail. Not only that, but its impact is greater since it uses a relatively neutral example that isn't so prone to the circular arguments and intellectual dishonesty that gets introduced whenever origin theories are discussed. I guess it's only appropriate that science journalism is also subject to peer review just as the field it reports on.
My astrological profile (Aquarius) flatters me by telling me I'm rational and open-minded, the traits that caused me to become an agnostic leaning towards the ultimate heresy of atheism and to become a scientist. Depending on who you talk to, they also say the age of Aquarius is nearly upon us and is ushering in another intellectual renaissance, the likes of which will perhaps see religions, superstition, astrology, and other magical thinking marginalized and replaced by understanding. I would like to believe that as well. It's almost like the practitioners of astrology signed their own death warrant in a futile attempt to win me over by telling me what I want to hear, damn them!
Nothing drives me crazier than mystical prognosticators who predict their own downfall and then say, "I told you so, see, I'm right! And now I'm out the door so you can't continue to debunk me!"
I found that particularly amusing, I'm glad whoever wrote that article saved the best for last. So-called 'living fossils' are anything but an embarrassment to evolutionary theory; they usually strengthen it. Not only can they help to establish what scientists would otherwise have to largely imagine about soft-tissue physiology as they gazed at fossilized bones, but they also underscore other principles of population science-- how one isolated population that's thriving in a static environment can exist, relatively unchanged, generation after generation, but how another isolated population with a selection pressure on it might change to gain a competitive advantage. There is no law that says that every member of a species must either evolve or die. The author behind that creationmoments website is proof that some humans can evolve in terms of their intellectual processes, while others continue to thrive in a bit of a backwards state...
...as the destination itself.
While MobiTV is apparently staffed by morons, and should probably make a stronger effort to secure their content, it would seem that even though what they claimed is proprietary information was hidden in plain sight, was discovered by use of a debugging tool in violation of their TOS. Almost every software license prohibits decompiling, reverse-engineering, and the like, because almost every secret in the most proprietary software is hidden in plain sight, if someone has the correct tools.
If MobiTV is correct that someone didn't just happen across that URL or received it in a normal browser error dump, and actually used an unauthorized debugging tool to obtain the URL, then they may have a leg to stand on. Information acquired through illegal means and leaked to the public DOES NOT public information make. And I'd say they may be well within their rights to demand the information be taken down...but sometimes what's within one's rights isn't necessarily prudent to act on (hello, Streisand Effect!). But of course, that ultimately assumes that the individual who leaked that URL information acquired it by violating a contract he agreed to somewhere along the lines. Just so long as the instructions to obtain that URL are (a) usable by anyone coming from a public starting point, and (b) don't involve taking an illegal action along the way to the ultimate destination of that media URL, there really doesn't seem to be any leg for MobiTV to stand on. However, if the destination URL cannot be reached under those conditions, it should probably be considered to be as stolen and illegal as the TV some guy is trying to sell from the back of his car. Just because you bought stolen goods in an open and public transaction doesn't mean the transaction was legal in the first place. In this example, the seller didn't have the legal right to sell the item, so he couldn't legally transfer ownership to you.
I'd always just used Google's Cache feature to see the content. I figured if Google could see the content, since I was using Google to search & they offer the cache view to their users, I'd vicariously inherited the right to view what EE was trying to claim as premium content. So I guess I was taking a longer route than I needed to, but the highlighting of my search terms is usually worth the effort when sifting through a lot of garbage anyway. The main difference is that the version Google sees has a "View Solution" button at the bottom of the first post, where the "public" version of the site has a subscription sign-up link.
I don't think it's all that scummy though, it's clever. It's sort of like the "Obtain key from office to use elevator" sign that's posted outside the building elevator (primarily used for freight or disabled people) in one of my workplaces. The only keyhole I could see near the control was the test/override one that all elevators have, so I pushed the summoning button, and found the elevator to be fully functional sans key. Not only that, but it doesn't even have the current possibility of being locked-out in such a way as to require a key. But does it deter 95% of the people who walk by the elevator, who instead use the stairs? Yep.
It's the same sort of social engineering trickery, discourage people with something that is designed to be prima facie misleading, but is actually utterly irrelevant to anyone who wishes to observe and test the purported limit. Other, less amusing examples include the ubiquitous "beware of dog", "premises under surveillance", and "security provided by $alarm_company" signs that project an unnecessarily elevated notion of trespassing risk on private property.
Thought of this a bit after I clicked submit on my previous comment.
That patents become public knowledge when they're gained creates an interesting dichotomy as well, since some R&D ISN'T patented. This is especially in the pharmaceutical or other extremely proprietary and experimental industries, where companies will not even attempt to patent something and protect themselves SOLELY by relying on everybody else being ignorant of what they're doing to create the product. They (quite astutely) realize that by patenting their knowledge, it becomes common knowledge, and nothing will prevent a competitor from learning their methods and applying them in a similar but "different enough" manner to circumvent the legal restrictions. By taking this tack, they seem to acknowledge that their ideas are ONLY property so long as they're not patented or otherwise known by anyone else, and the moment they are, knowledge of the process for creating the product would become part of the public domain.
I think this aspect of the debate may be summarized by simply saying, "Ideas are only exclusive property under two conditions: the first, that they are unknown to anyone else and kept close; the second, when they're protected by a patent." Doesn't this basically make a patent roughly equivalent to inflicting legally-enforced ignorance on everyone but the patent holder? How is that in society's best interests?
I tend to regard property as needing to possess at least one of the following: tangibility, fungibility, or liquidity. If not one of these is present, how is it property?
Tangibility is self-expalanatory-- if you can touch it (or sense it with one of the other senses), it exists. It's something physical and in some way uniquely identifiable, and necessarily exclusive. In this way, I actually would have to side with artists who use their voices (as they have exclusive use of their own vocal cords) and/or instruments (specific instruments or play styles and skill are exclusive) in the copyright of art they produce. This would be a tad shakier on written copyright, but anyone who's used to my babbling would recognize my writing style and thought processes, which makes them nearly as tangible as my own voice; this is really the case with any composition, and copyright protects the specific manner of expression (this is the notion that you can convey a similar idea to mine, but you can't use my exact copyrighted words). Anyone can play back, say, FDR's famous speech blurb on fear, but everyone who's familiar with it knows it was FDR who said that, no explicit attribution is necessary most of the time, the speech and FDR's voice have a tangible quality to them.
Fungibility means that something is interchangeable with another thing. This property of an item is an indication that it possesses some form of value that can be specifically assessed, and that there isn't an abstract, extrinsic value placed on it due to scarcity. This is important when considering that, while fungible items may be monopolized, they can't be monopolized by an extrinsic value assigned to an item by a special right (such as patent or copyright granting exclusive use) or uniqueness (such as a Picasso original, since those are irreplaceable).
Liquidity means that something can be readily traded. It can be bought or sold without changing appreciably, even if it's somewhat unique. It's something that has a largely intrinsic value that can, as with a fungible item, be readily assessed. Licenses (to use something) could be considered liquid assets, but the products licenses typically govern, not so much.
I think that Intellectual Property as far as copyright goes, while it's not necessarily intellectual, is tangible enough to be considered property. "Creative Property" might be a better term for it. This would include the source code computer programmers have written too, insofar as complexity and creativity are involved. I think licenses make some degree of sense and don't oppose the notion of licensing such works in the least-- even though I am a strong believer in legally requiring those licenses to be made known prior to purchase and to be transferable insofar as they purport to govern tangible property and should be treated as such (under all the laws that govern tangible property). That said, it's up to the individual to determine if the license is acceptable, just as the individual would negotiate price or any other part of the transfer of property in a transaction.
Intellectual Property as far as patents goes, is intellectual, but I can't see it as being property at all. IP not tangible-- it's an abstract idea by its very nature, and uniquely identifiable expression is not a trait; anyone can implement it, with only abstract legal concepts (patents) standing in the way. IP is not fungible-- a patented item is unique, it's monopolized, and it's (supposed to be) non-obvious. There's nothing like it. There's not legally supposed to be anything like it. IP is not liquid-- patents themselves have no intrinsic value whatsoever. They're an idea, and have no value on their own unless they can be implemented. That means that anyone can possess the idea, but it (theoretically) only holds value for those who hold the patent or have licensed others to use it. This is antithetical to the very notion of property, which is that it holds value or liability for anyone who possesses it.
There's something wrong with a sy
Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback
I'm a former eBay Powerseller (off and on for the past decade), and while sometimes this is the way it works (buyer whines about how long FedEx took, or inexplicably expected more than was advertised), more often than not, nonpaying buyers would leave negative feedback after I left a negative comment for them. I guess I was one of the few who didn't care about a perfect rating, so I wound up with a few negatives, and almost all were from deadbeats who never responded to emails and didn't pay, but somehow were able to find the negative feedback button when I made good on my statements that I would leave negative feedback for them if they didn't respond and didn't pay. I never believed in letting bad buyers off the hook so easily, if ever seller left bad feedback for a deadbeat, then more sellers would see that wreck coming and cancel the idiots' bids. EBay did eventually reform the deadbeat retaliation problem briefly (retracting buyer feedback automatically if a seller filed for a commission refund over nonpayment), but it's moot now that they're just letting bad buyers run amok.
And lately, the quality of buyers has gone down dramatically. They seem to enjoy "tasting" items at the seller's expense, just forcing returns through Paypal, which refunds everything to them, no questions asked, regardless of whether the sale was as-is, leaving the seller holding the bag for shipping fees AND charging full Paypal fees on the transaction that didn't occur (the only way to avoid the double-dipping is to just give-in to the bullying and not contest the dispute) and was reversed against the seller's wishes. No thanks, I don't need those headaches. No more Paypal or eBay for me.
...relative to the income and and standards of living of the people they're pursuing, I feel it would be an outrage if they didn't have to provide more.
Then again, civil cases just require a preponderance of the evidence to be in favor of one party or another. If the defense does its job in establishing doubts as to the RIAA's methodology, it would probably behoove the RIAA to disclose its methodologies in great detail to back up its claims of investigative accuracy, which would then subject them to more scrutiny and attempts to find fault. Does evidence really count for much of anything if it can't be substantiated? I think that any competent judge would, in weighing the evidence presented, be compelled to largely discount the RIAA's evidence when confronted with all the times they've been documented to have been dead-wrong, if they don't demonstrate how their evidence holds water.
Well, Adobe's CS won't be functionality-impaired under Wine if Google's initiative is successful. Some games work, some games don't, some work better under Wine than they do under their native environment in terms of performance and stability. The full-blown ports will be made more often when developers realize there's enough demand to make the hassles of supporting their product under various Linux environments worthwhile. That's really the main problem, since there isn't a Linux compatibility standard. Without a standard (that Linux distros would have to meet in order to be certified), you know the devs would be expecting a support nightmare. It's easier just to say, "No," to Linux officially, while cooperating with the Wine, Cedega, and Crossover people. Once Linux distributions are homogeneous enough that one easy installer package would fit all and the devs were comfortable with the licensing, then it would be feasible. Until then, Windows and Wine-based environments are the standard they'll develop for.
(snip)
The problem with the books on evolution I have read is that they assume evolution is true, and then fit the pieces into that assumption. This is different from books on the other branches of science, which start with the basic experiments, and then introduce the theory to explain them.
No, this is exactly how science works. You do the ground work. The research. You figure out the basics, and then you build upon that. When a geologist does his research he builds upon existing and peer-reviewed research that has been shown to be supported by all known facts. Evolution is exactly the same as any other scientific field. The difference is in your head. It is wishful thinking on your part.
I think the old saying about teaching pigs to sing applies here. Creationists are typically exceptionally credulous and gullible. They've been taught that if you read something in a particular book, it must be true. They generally will say if they're a fool as a result of believing such things on faith, that it's not their fault, that someone else lied-to and betrayed them. They are NOT personally accountable for their lives, they trust that church leadership and scripture translators are acting in their own best interests and utilize recursive arguments that use the scriptures to describe a divine being that keeps the scriptures pure and infallible.
You obviously understand, as do I, that science makes no such promises. Every statement of theory that a scientist makes publicly is subject to scrutiny, there are no gods, there is no gospel. There is also no room for willful ignorance; every individual is held accountable for understanding and being critical of theories, and nobody is let off the hook for being ignorant and/or believing what was printed in a research paper or book without further scrutiny. There is simply no, "I am a victim, I was misled (by someone else)," in science; there is only, "If you believed that 'junk science' at face value & didn't scrutinize it sufficiently, it turned out to be wrong, AND you happened to base your beliefs on the subject matter on it & wound-up looking foolish, you fail at the scientific process." The only victims in the scientific world are those of their own stupidity if they fail in their due diligence of analysis.
But what evidence does anyone have to establish that such a thing as a soul exists? I believe that ultimately, the notion that souls exist are due only to some sort of selfish arrogance or magical thinking that somehow we (and possibly other animals) have an existence that transcends the plane of corporeal existence. If the evidence amounts to unsubstantiated, anecdotal "ghost stories" and the belief that we're so special that somehow there must be more to our fleeting existence, I can only say "dream on".
The more cold reality of the situation is that organisms are biochemical machines. We're very complex, fantastic machines. We have such a capacity to assimilate our own experiences and knowledge of the abstract that we set ourselves as the bar that any other machine or creature must be able to clear in order to be considered to possess higher intelligence. But in the end, it's a matter of degree. Is it so hard to fathom that there could be organisms or even computers somewhere that might be so far superior to our level intelligence that we would compare to them as amoeba compare to us. Researchers are able to identify more and more of our cognitive limitations. What are consciousness and self-awareness if not merely cognitive abilities? What sort of things might we be missing out on as a result of our limitations? Does it ultimately matter if we just shut-down and cease to function at some point like any other machine or organism when they are either damaged beyond repair or just wear-out from use?
I don't think it diminishes my existence in the least to view myself as a machine that came into existence, function largely as intended (at least from what I understand my purpose to be), and will eventually have some critical component fail and relegate me to the biological scrap heap for salvage. If anything, that view makes me even more determined to pursue a higher quality of experience and such, since I'm fairly certain I need to make the most of my existence here and now, as opposed to sacrificing such things and merely building to something nebulous that may or may not allow my existence to continue beyond the collapse of my current state. I chose to cherish the bird in hand.
I'd like to point out that trademark doesn't equal copyright doesn't equal patent.
Trademarks involve exclusive use of names. They contribute to nothing aside from product and/or manufacturer identification. They don't contain any inherent knowledge, they are symbolic. There would be no point in taxing trademarks such as "Linux" or putting them in the public domain.
Copyrights grant exclusive use on expressive creativity. Copyrighted works can contain knowledge and ideas, but even if they present an idea, they only cover the specific expression of that idea (i.e., the way the author depicted the idea in words or illustration), not the idea (pragmatic knowledge or other insight) itself. They keep specific works of creativity from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. Copyrights can be valuable, though there are ways around them...someone just has to understand the expression and re-express it in another unique manner.
Patents grant exclusive use on pragmatic creativity. They contain knowledge and ideas, and while they don't cover the expression of the knowledge, they do cover ANY implementation of the knowledge they contain. They're complementary to copyrights and don't really overlap. They keep the ability to apply knowledge from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. The only way around a patent is to make nontrivial changes to the application of the idea that achieves the same function.
So in a word, no, this proposal wouldn't affect Linux at all. When you hear about M$ or SCO trying to go after Linux for alleged infringements, it seems to be more on the basis of copyright violation than of patent violation. They allege that people working on Linux simply took pieces of their copyrighted code and stuck it in the kernel. They are NOT going after Linux because they hold a patent on OS behavior that Linux simply mimics and therefore infringes on a patent, they say that code was stolen, and they have to prove that they were the first to create the code, and that it was basically lifted verbatim. I have yet to hear anyone protest that Linux WASN'T designed to basically replicate UNIX in a non-proprietary way; I seem to recall that was Linus' original stated purpose-- to make something that worked like UNIX and could be used in almost exactly the same manner, but wasn't burdened by oppressive licensing baggage and proprietary code.
Further, Linux is safe because its copyright isn't Linus' responsibility or anyone else's; the license is public, and gives the work to the public with license restrictions. Even if there was something that required the copyright holder who released something under GNU/GPL to renew or pay taxes on something "or it would be turned over to the public domain", it would still be safe in the public domain. It would not bankrupt Linux, it would just make it more difficult to copyright works with restrictive licenses (whereas public domain works have no restrictions on use, release of source, or the other little things that the conditional licenses demand). Creative Commons is just another flavor of the FOSS licensing schemes, only for creative expression. It's not public domain either, but can be somewhat close. These are ways of sharing the knowledge and expression of copyrighted works, while still allowing the creator some level of control over the way the work is subsequently handled by the public.
Good on you for looking it up and not just taking the article at face value!
I knew I was dealing with shoddy journalism partway through that article, where the author referenced the "suicide of a Missouri girl who was bullied online by an adult." Apparently the author of that piece lacks reading comprehension skills, for that incident involved "bullying of a girl by another girl masquerading as a fictitious boy using an account under false pretenses that the 2nd girl's mother approved of for the sole purpose of spying on the first girl". The title also doesn't represent the content of the article accurately, which is online harassment and bullying, which is completely different from a "prank".
It suffices to say that the quality of that entire piece was on a par with a 3rd-rate blogger post. I usually expect better from the CSM. The author's lack of understanding of the definition of simple words (or an ill-fitting sensationalist headline), lack of understanding of the facts he's reporting on, and omission of critical details is beyond mere shoddy journalism. It's wastebasket journalism.
All of the examples you mention are criminal offenses. Some are felonies, some misdemeanors, but they are such fundamental principles that they don't necessarily have to have evidence of actual damages...you are committing offenses "against the dignity of the people of (fill in local, state, or federal government)." The standards of proof are higher in criminal cases, but the simple attempt to commit a crime can be sufficient grounds for conviction, even if law enforcement manages to foil the plot before actual harm takes place.
In a tort (civil) case, as the RIAA's cases all are, the plaintiff theoretically has to provide evidence of damages (I say theoretically, since the RIAA has had cases decided in its favor without doing so, pursuing statutory damages on claims of "making available" without providing any evidence of actual infringement is their way of avoiding this). Once damages have been established, there may be a punitive element added to just smack the perpetrator down more and teach him/her a lesson, or other solutions to remedy the situation.
IANAL, but I'm a bit disgusted by the whole mess-- you're apparently not the only one who confuses tort wrongs with criminal ones. The RIAA is apparently able to fool a lot of people, including judges, into not forcing them to provide evidence of actual, specific infringement actions that would warrant a judgement for statutory damages in their favor, saying the intent is sufficient as it would be in a criminal case. Kudos to judges who are competent enough to see through it.
One thing I wonder about are the RIAA stormtroopers who raid homes and seize hard drives...are they simply PIs who convince the accused to cooperate, or do judges actually sign search warrants that allow police to seize evidence on behalf of a tort plaintiff? I know under some circumstances, when a tort type of wrong is egregious enough to become a criminal offense, the government will step in; but in these cases, there don't appear to be government prosecutors involved, and the RIAA seeks only monetary damages as far as I've heard, not fines that are to be paid to the government. That situation just seems wrong.
Linux isn't free; it requires an investment of time and effort. The minimum would be the time taken to adapt to a new or different UI, similar to upgrading a commercial OS if all else is compatible. The maximum for most end users tends to come in the form of those things that dominate the ubuntu forums; things like getting fancy sound setups and video cards working, those odd devices that don't enjoy full support, and finding ways to make software from other platforms function correctly.
By contrast, the customer who sees value in something with a price tag is generally the big-box retailer computer shopper stereotype; they have no clue what they're doing, they don't really want to learn (or don't believe they're capable of learning), and so they get fleeced at the time of purchase (with all the add-ons that the sales reps foist on them) and several more times over the life of the computer, whether it's by software vendors (anti-virus or anti-malware vendors primarily who prey on insecurity) or technicians if things go wrong farther down the road when the machine is out of warranty. Ignorance is extremely costly, whether it's a car, home, or computer. Those who don't know how to maintain and repair their investments are at the mercy of those who do.
At the end of the day, I've found my investment in Linux to be worth every second. Every time I have to try to install the newest drivers on a bleeding-edge video chipset, I learn something. Same with installing software that's usually not designed to run under Linux natively. The value is there, though. My system is more stable than it's ever been. It boots twice as fast as Windows XP, but that hardly matters as rarely as I ever need to reboot it. I can play WoW and Steam games such as Portal. I can watch LOST from ABC's website in the XP virtual machine (that's its sole purpose these days). I just don't recognize or accept the "constraints of Linux" the way a lot of the Linux-complainers do, and I've found myself losing sympathy for them; I'll just shrug and smile. I guess if they don't see the value and aren't willing to put-in an honest effort, I shouldn't stand in their way of paying the Microsoft-tax. For those who do want to make Linux work and aren't looking just looking for something to complain about, I make it clear that they can ask me stuff and I'll do what I can to help them, free of charge, of course...that's my way of adding value to the project and community. For those who don't see the value in the community, there's not much I can really say; part of Linux seems to be contributing to the cause, either by being willing to ask for and receive help, or by helping others. It's the community-effort that makes Linux derivatives the most priceless OSes out there.
For commercial OS users who need help fixing Windows and Mac problems though, whether it's removing spyware or investigating whether dodgy software or hardware is causing the machine to not perform the way it should, my rate is $75/hour, 2-hour minimum onsite. I still try to impart the knowledge to my end users that will help them to help themselves in the future, which is a whole lot more than most technicians and the Windows culture in general fosters, which is more helplessness (and Mac culture is even worse). I'm all too happy to help them upgrade to "free" if they express interest in an alternative to Windows because they know it's bad. The Mac users never seem to have any doubts, and have no problem paying and paying.
Corel did that with Corel Linux OS. The "Deluxe" version came with an inflatable penguin, more applications and documentation, and a little more in the way of technical support. And the support is really where the value is. IMHO, the software may as well be considered to be worthless if there aren't resources to support it. With M$ products, that comes in the form of the trivial amount of tech support they might deign give a user. With k/ubuntu and other 'free' Linux distros, that comes in the form of forums and the like.
You clearly do not have a philosophy degree. Things aren't so black & white, and sometimes a philosopher will attempt to spin black as white and vice versa. There simply aren't many things that are absolutes.
From my perspective, if you have to burn the village to save it, burn away! Only in this case, it's not that dramatic or destructive; it's still an ethical trade-off, but it's one that commits a lesser wrong to avert a greater one. That is what situation ethics are all about...pushing an old man off a liferaft to stretch the provisions far enough to save the baby, exploit an ineptly-maintained computer's security problems in order to harden it and keep it from being commandeered by someone who has no qualms about using it to destroy others.
Ultimately, I think the best option is to smugly boot all incompetently-maintained computers off the public network until their operators become marginally competent. Solutions that propose doing things that are sketchy from an ethical standpoint are the result of frustration over how millions of clueless computer users (mostly Windows, of course) can ruin the internet for everyone by allowing their computers to become botnet zombies that spew malicious packets and spam EVERYWHERE for the rest of us to "enjoy". I'm sick and tired of all the harm they do, and I honestly don't care what sort of drastic method it takes to put a stop to the bulk of it.
You might want to start by reading the story. The laptop apparently never was "shipped-out" to any other service locations. It was lost almost immediately by the allegedly incompetent/thieving staff at Best Buy. They lied about shipping it around as a stall tactic and in a feeble attempt to cover it all up. BB didn't find the laptop, which was stored in a "secure area" for months, and I think under those circumstances, it's quite reasonable to assume it was, in fact, stolen rather than lost. It was not where it was supposed to be, in a secure area with what I'd assume is some level of organization, and it had to go --somewhere--. It didn't go somewhere without assistance; someone took it out of the secure area, one would assume out of the store, and there doesn't seem to be any store policy that would authorize that a customer's computer be removed from the store under those circumstances. I believe that quite convincingly meets the criteria for "theft".
With all the, "This is gay!" and "That is gay!" and "ur ghey!" and other somewhat homosexist (Is that even a word? It is now!) remarks I've heard while gaming recently, I would posit that the phallic joystick met its demise when the subconscious Freudian implications of groping a shaft (well, other one's own) and massaging it vigorously suddenly reached critical mass and repulsed a generation of gamers who are adamant that they're "Not Gay".
Source: http://holdfastblog.com/2008/02/12/fisa-vote-tallies-part-ii/
"Voting with the Republicans were the following eighteen Democrats (again, rough count):
Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln. Joe Lieberman also voted against stripping retroactive immunity.
Not present and voting was Senator Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate serving in the Senate to miss the vote."
There you have it, Republicans in lockstep, and those Democrats mentioned are traitors. Including Sen. Clinton, in her silence, she consented. The roll call for Sen. Dodd's attempts to strip the immunity provision out read much the same. I would like to believe that all those listed have no political future (and this of course includes "all Senate Republicans who weren't mentioned by name"). Sadly, I'm probably wrong on that.
The main reason I just don't care about writers' "hardships" is that they were primarily demanding royalties over so-called "new media" that haven't proven to be all that profitable yet.
And more to the point, I feel that they shouldn't get royalties in the first place. Sure, if you're a screenwriter who wrote a brilliant screenplay on your own time and on your own dime, you *should* rake in the money every time derivatives of your work are used if that's the way you shop it out (i.e., the film utilizing your screenplay is sold to a consumer in one form or another, because you licensed the studio to produce your work). But these unionized writers were demanding royalties on stuff they wrote while on the payroll of studios. They arrive in the morning, sit at a desk and write or edit scripts all day for a wage-- the studios pay them for their creative input.
Now take Joe Programmer. He works for a software developer. He sits in his cube all day, writing out code. He uses his creativity and produces a relatively unique product. His employer pays him for that creative input. But at the end of the day, when the product goes to market, he will have received only the paychecks his employer cut him based on his salary/hourly wages. How is this appreciably different from a screenwriter, that a programmer simply doesn't deserve to double-dip and make another few bucks every time the software he labored on is sold or used?
I feel this change is for the worse, I've been selling (and buying) a fair volume on eBay for the past 9 years and been a Power Seller off and on for a good bit of that time. I've had the occasional flake buyer and retaliatory feedback (7 of my 8 negatives out of 1190 feedbacks were from deadbeats I reported and left bad feedback for), but recently, it seems that the majority of my buyers are bad. They either don't bother paying or responding to emails in the first place, or even worse, they file disputes with Paypal demanding refunds, even though the product is exactly as described. They're now using that service as a vehicle to force sellers to accept returns due to buyer's remorse. Over the past 6 months, I've had:
It doesn't appear to me that eBay is any more concerned with that sort of "buyer" and what they cost sellers in real dollars than they've ever been. They're just more concerned with buyers feeling "secure", even if that security comes at the expense of those who pay eBay's bills-- the sellers. Perhaps they either need to get rid of all seller fees and charge buyer premiums on sales, but this nonsense is the last straw. These low-feedback buyers don't care if their accounts get suspended due to not paying for items. They can hide behind Paypal's "arbitration", which almost always sides with the buyer and won't defend the seller against even the most ridiculous chargebacks.
Goodbye, eBay.
One of the silliest things I've seen in my IT career was an old memo regarding some employees' desire to upgrade their Macs to OS X 10.2 (from OS 9.x). One of the notable objections was along the lines that "OS X is very new and we don't have Symantec AV for it, so computers running OS X would be at-risk".
Nevermind how pointless an AV program is on a *nix platform to begin with, I'm a bit horrified at the false sense of security that having an AV program installed on a Macintosh provides as well. Sure, there have been some recent exploits found, but most of them still rely on the end user making exceptionally poor choices and being tricked into granting escalated privileges to malware. If anything, the fallacious impression of being somehow "protected" could encourage users to make even more risky choices.
And yes, FWIW, the memo was produced by MCSEs...