The big piece of evidence is that when the cartridges were dug up - there were very few E.T. games among them. The great ET coverup never happened, this was just a bankrupt company that trashed it's worthless left-over stock supply in a dump. There were all sorts of different ATARI games there, ET was just one among many. It was never as bad a seller as it was made out to be.
ATARI, as executives from the time will tell you now - had been dying for ages before ET came out, at most it was the last straw, ATARI's death was the result of a long chain of bad decisions that left the company unable to adapt to a changing market, bad decisions made over a period of several years.
And most of the blame belongs with Warner, this is the classic problem with having some big megacorp own your company - when what it does stops being profitable - they shut it down, the fact that it was the fastest growing company in history 2 years earlier and that there's somewhere on the upside of 4 billion dollars in your bank account because of it doesn't matter. ATARI made at least 4 billion in nett profit for warner before it's demise, and once showed a loss of 350 million. That's not bankrupt, that's just one bad year. Surely 4 billion should have been worth saying "Lets take half of that and invest it in inventing the next game-changer - even if we fail we're still 2 billion up".
Literally not a single word in that post is relevant to my point. Moreover its anecdotal and unverified (read: utterly useless) and entirely subjective in its assessment. I shall give it the respect it deserves by ignoring it forthwith.
Wrong. They bragged. On twitter. Look it up. They only ended the surge pricing when instead of the praise they hoped for tge tweet unleashed a backlash.
Cheating on a school exam doesnt usually kill anyone. Cheating on a safety test always kills lots of people. VWs cheating has directly caused 60 deaths so far this year and its only February. Hell even the LRA - deadliest terrorist group on earth - cant manage an average of 2.4 people every day. Not even close.
Brand them terrorists (this would actually be a more apt meaning of "eco-terrorism" than what it usually refers to) and throw them in Gitmo.
If you can do it a sheep-herder from middle-of-fucking-nowhere Afghanistan then you can do it to the CEO of a billion dollar multinational corporation. If you can't do it to the latter, you can't do it to the former either. That's the whole POINT of your constitution. Get that one right or get out of town, the rest is simply less important because without that one - the others are an illusion anyway, you will never actually get to USE those rights without getting this one fixed. A plutocracy is no better for freedom than an autocracy, and in many ways worse since autocrats have far less interest in the average individual citizen than plutocrats do.
Erm... if you're worried about making a trip which is less than half of even the lowest-rated EV's range, then the problem isn't with the cars, it's with your education.
Nowhere is government here wanting to "design a final product", they are merely setting a product requirement, how that is met is still up to VW. But nice strawman.
You're conflating the legal and the common meanings of "arbitrary" - but in terms of that constitutional right only the former applies, and these standards meet none of the requirements for it.
Nor is this punishment "cruel". It does say cruel AND unusual not "cruel OR unusual".
It's also not even very unusual - a lot of the law is about suitable recompense for harm. The entire civil justice system is like that. A huge part of VW's crime was fraud - they lied to consumers about what they were buying, this would be a suitable recompense to both those consumers and the government I think.
This is the company who bragged about how their revenue spiked during the Sydney shooting - all the people calling Uber because they are desperate to get the hell out of the crossfire...
I get the feelingthat "giving a shit about people's lives" is even lower on their priority list than most corporations - which takes some doing.
Only for evidence presented in court. Destroying evidence against the accused would be something only a very dumb cop would do. Evidence in favor of the accused however, can easily be "lost" so it is never presented by either side. Even the best defense lawyers can't present a move based on evidence they never knew existed.
In many cases evidence proving somebody's innocence is only uncovered when the actual guilty person is prosecuted for a completely different crime years later. At which point the convicted person would have to request a retrial based on new evidence. Of course if Ted Cruz is your state A.G. he will dispute that claim in the state supreme court, even though the evidence of your innocence is absolutely incontrovertible, on the grounds that (according to the man who wants to be the next leader of the free world and claims to be a defender of freedom) once your appeals are used up you can't get a retrial no matter what new evidence is discovered. If this means you must serve the remaining 4 years or a 10 year sentence they unjustly gave you then according to Cruz this state of affairs is "justice".
Except that none of that is relevant since this isn't saying anything about civil cases or suing. This is requiring that states pass laws to *criminally* prosecute people for infringements even when there is no harm and even when the copyright holders does *not* object to the activity that is alleged to infringe.
The kind of technical copyright infringements that this criminalizes are more likely to make money for the copyright holder than to deny him any. The example in the article - of a non-profit provider of subtitle files would likely *increase* sales of the source movie in countries where subtitles have not been released.
Creative folk in general would almost never object to something like that, if anything it's flattering. The publishing companies on the other hand may because they overzealously (and pretty much automatedly) object to anything even when they have no standing and even when they stole the work in the first place. But that right there is the whole problem. Publishing companies should not be allowed to hold copyrights. Copyright law was created and intended to protect authors from publishers - it's an industrial regulation that was invented to restrict what publishing companies can do - it was never intended to, and never should have been allowed to, be subverted into working to their benefit.
And if you want a truly dysfunctional system - try South Africa, where well over half the population of our prisons have never been convicted of any crime whatsoever. They are all prisoners awaiting trial, a small fraction were denied bail - the rest simply could not afford bail.
>Those are the cases where indeed the copyright holder suffers damages from the marketing end.
Except that not a single one of your examples if a copyright case - those are all trademark cases. Trademark is generally misunderstood (and widely mispresented by lawyers) - it's not a right to a company, it's a consumer protection law. The *purpose* of trademark laws is to ensure that consumers can be reasonably certain that the product they buy is the product they *intended* to buy. It does have benefits for a company with a good name or brand (which is a reason for them to use it) but these benefits are not the intention of the law, they are merely a happy unintended consequence. A positive externality if you will.
>I'm pretty sure the entire point of the TPP is to put more power in the hands of corporations and circumvent sovereign nations legal systems.
It's a trade agreement, that's literally the definition of trade agreements. Perhaps there was a time when it wasn't, I doubt that because "lost golden ages" invariably turn out to be unsubstantiated nostalgia but it definitely has been the definition of a trade agreement for at least the full 36 years I've been on this planet. A trade agreement is essentially governments agreeing to modify their laws to make it easier for corporations to profit in the other country - which is a nice way of saying "get rid of any pesky legal protections that may reduce the foreign company's ability to exploit the citizens of another country the way they do at home".
Aaah yes, the standard libertarian pipe dream. "If the government does nothing, they can't screw anything up.
The problem is - with just about everything the government does - anybody else WILL do it MUCH worse.
And for a lot of it, any price is too high a price - so it HAS to be done with tax money. There are some things that should not have to be earned - because only a psychopath would WANT to live in a world where not EVERYBODY has them.
I did not whine. I am not opposed to the GI BIll. Your lack of reading comprehension (as proven by the fact that every other reply had understood what I said) is a failure on your part, not mine. The 700% return is not something the GI's get (more than a fraction of). It's what you, as the taxpayers, get. The GI bill may have been instiituted as a reward for service but in practice it's an investment the taxpayers make with tax money - and it's an investment which has been hugely successful.
My argument is that the GI bill proves free college is not an expense, it's an investment with guaranteed returns. If America makes public colleges free -the deficit shrinks by a LOT.
Slashdot Mirror
>The writer did not mean that Cameron would be literally thrown out of a window to his death
I'm pretty sure that is the only way for Cameron to leave office which the British public would consider appropriate.
Thats why.
The big piece of evidence is that when the cartridges were dug up - there were very few E.T. games among them. The great ET coverup never happened, this was just a bankrupt company that trashed it's worthless left-over stock supply in a dump. There were all sorts of different ATARI games there, ET was just one among many. It was never as bad a seller as it was made out to be.
ATARI, as executives from the time will tell you now - had been dying for ages before ET came out, at most it was the last straw, ATARI's death was the result of a long chain of bad decisions that left the company unable to adapt to a changing market, bad decisions made over a period of several years.
And most of the blame belongs with Warner, this is the classic problem with having some big megacorp own your company - when what it does stops being profitable - they shut it down, the fact that it was the fastest growing company in history 2 years earlier and that there's somewhere on the upside of 4 billion dollars in your bank account because of it doesn't matter.
ATARI made at least 4 billion in nett profit for warner before it's demise, and once showed a loss of 350 million. That's not bankrupt, that's just one bad year. Surely 4 billion should have been worth saying "Lets take half of that and invest it in inventing the next game-changer - even if we fail we're still 2 billion up".
There is a huge difference between assuring donors their money was well spent and proudly profiteering from death and humsn suffering.
Literally not a single word in that post is relevant to my point. Moreover its anecdotal and unverified (read: utterly useless) and entirely subjective in its assessment. I shall give it the respect it deserves by ignoring it forthwith.
Wrong. They bragged. On twitter. Look it up. They only ended the surge pricing when instead of the praise they hoped for tge tweet unleashed a backlash.
So.... not at all like doctors without borders then
Cheating on a school exam doesnt usually kill anyone. Cheating on a safety test always kills lots of people. VWs cheating has directly caused 60 deaths so far this year and its only February. Hell even the LRA - deadliest terrorist group on earth - cant manage an average of 2.4 people every day. Not even close.
What do you propose ? That Durex offers a returns program ? You can return yourself and be replaced by a cleaner model ?
Brand them terrorists (this would actually be a more apt meaning of "eco-terrorism" than what it usually refers to) and throw them in Gitmo.
If you can do it a sheep-herder from middle-of-fucking-nowhere Afghanistan then you can do it to the CEO of a billion dollar multinational corporation. If you can't do it to the latter, you can't do it to the former either. That's the whole POINT of your constitution. Get that one right or get out of town, the rest is simply less important because without that one - the others are an illusion anyway, you will never actually get to USE those rights without getting this one fixed. A plutocracy is no better for freedom than an autocracy, and in many ways worse since autocrats have far less interest in the average individual citizen than plutocrats do.
If this is what "more government" looks like - you've just made all the republican scare-talk about it's evils evaporate.
Apparently, "more government" is a sudden attack of good sense !
Erm... if you're worried about making a trip which is less than half of even the lowest-rated EV's range, then the problem isn't with the cars, it's with your education.
Nowhere is government here wanting to "design a final product", they are merely setting a product requirement, how that is met is still up to VW. But nice strawman.
I would be okay with "instead of a refund, we could give you this brand new electric vehicle".
You're conflating the legal and the common meanings of "arbitrary" - but in terms of that constitutional right only the former applies, and these standards meet none of the requirements for it.
Nor is this punishment "cruel". It does say cruel AND unusual not "cruel OR unusual".
It's also not even very unusual - a lot of the law is about suitable recompense for harm. The entire civil justice system is like that. A huge part of VW's crime was fraud - they lied to consumers about what they were buying, this would be a suitable recompense to both those consumers and the government I think.
This is the company who bragged about how their revenue spiked during the Sydney shooting - all the people calling Uber because they are desperate to get the hell out of the crossfire...
I get the feelingthat "giving a shit about people's lives" is even lower on their priority list than most corporations - which takes some doing.
Only for evidence presented in court.
Destroying evidence against the accused would be something only a very dumb cop would do. Evidence in favor of the accused however, can easily be "lost" so it is never presented by either side. Even the best defense lawyers can't present a move based on evidence they never knew existed.
In many cases evidence proving somebody's innocence is only uncovered when the actual guilty person is prosecuted for a completely different crime years later. At which point the convicted person would have to request a retrial based on new evidence. Of course if Ted Cruz is your state A.G. he will dispute that claim in the state supreme court, even though the evidence of your innocence is absolutely incontrovertible, on the grounds that (according to the man who wants to be the next leader of the free world and claims to be a defender of freedom) once your appeals are used up you can't get a retrial no matter what new evidence is discovered. If this means you must serve the remaining 4 years or a 10 year sentence they unjustly gave you then according to Cruz this state of affairs is "justice".
Except that none of that is relevant since this isn't saying anything about civil cases or suing.
This is requiring that states pass laws to *criminally* prosecute people for infringements even when there is no harm and even when the copyright holders does *not* object to the activity that is alleged to infringe.
The kind of technical copyright infringements that this criminalizes are more likely to make money for the copyright holder than to deny him any. The example in the article - of a non-profit provider of subtitle files would likely *increase* sales of the source movie in countries where subtitles have not been released.
Creative folk in general would almost never object to something like that, if anything it's flattering. The publishing companies on the other hand may because they overzealously (and pretty much automatedly) object to anything even when they have no standing and even when they stole the work in the first place. But that right there is the whole problem.
Publishing companies should not be allowed to hold copyrights. Copyright law was created and intended to protect authors from publishers - it's an industrial regulation that was invented to restrict what publishing companies can do - it was never intended to, and never should have been allowed to, be subverted into working to their benefit.
And if you want a truly dysfunctional system - try South Africa, where well over half the population of our prisons have never been convicted of any crime whatsoever. They are all prisoners awaiting trial, a small fraction were denied bail - the rest simply could not afford bail.
>Those are the cases where indeed the copyright holder suffers damages from the marketing end.
Except that not a single one of your examples if a copyright case - those are all trademark cases. Trademark is generally misunderstood (and widely mispresented by lawyers) - it's not a right to a company, it's a consumer protection law. The *purpose* of trademark laws is to ensure that consumers can be reasonably certain that the product they buy is the product they *intended* to buy. It does have benefits for a company with a good name or brand (which is a reason for them to use it) but these benefits are not the intention of the law, they are merely a happy unintended consequence. A positive externality if you will.
>I'm pretty sure the entire point of the TPP is to put more power in the hands of corporations and circumvent sovereign nations legal systems.
It's a trade agreement, that's literally the definition of trade agreements. Perhaps there was a time when it wasn't, I doubt that because "lost golden ages" invariably turn out to be unsubstantiated nostalgia but it definitely has been the definition of a trade agreement for at least the full 36 years I've been on this planet. A trade agreement is essentially governments agreeing to modify their laws to make it easier for corporations to profit in the other country - which is a nice way of saying "get rid of any pesky legal protections that may reduce the foreign company's ability to exploit the citizens of another country the way they do at home".
Aaah yes, the standard libertarian pipe dream. "If the government does nothing, they can't screw anything up.
The problem is - with just about everything the government does - anybody else WILL do it MUCH worse.
And for a lot of it, any price is too high a price - so it HAS to be done with tax money. There are some things that should not have to be earned - because only a psychopath would WANT to live in a world where not EVERYBODY has them.
I did not whine. I am not opposed to the GI BIll. Your lack of reading comprehension (as proven by the fact that every other reply had understood what I said) is a failure on your part, not mine. The 700% return is not something the GI's get (more than a fraction of). It's what you, as the taxpayers, get. The GI bill may have been instiituted as a reward for service but in practice it's an investment the taxpayers make with tax money - and it's an investment which has been hugely successful.
My argument is that the GI bill proves free college is not an expense, it's an investment with guaranteed returns. If America makes public colleges free -the deficit shrinks by a LOT.
I know about the folklore but thanks for the detailed explanation. I didnt know any details about it.