I'd contest that the most egregious offenders ever get busted. Look at most of the RIAA suits, and they're going after people who download 10-100 songs, not filling up terabyte drives with music. I have acquaintances who download compulsively as "archivists" who could never listen to the entirity of what they've infringed. It's not that the bigger infringers are any harder to bust, it's that if the RIAA goes after these major downloaders, the overall damages would be absolutely absurd, and people would realize how ludicrous the claims of damages truly are. For example, 1 TB drive = 1024^2 Mb = 1,048,576 Mb. Assuming an Mp3 is 3 Mb in size, you could fit 349,925 Mp3s (ignoring drive constraints and spare change). At $80,000 a pop from the Capital v. Thomas jury award (though later reduced by the judge, the jury found this to be the appropriate damages for infringement), you're talking $27,994,000,000. Twenty-eight billion dollars for a single drive. Fill it with eBooks instead just for fun and you're talking around $84 billion. No single human could do that much damage on the internet, not even Mitnick. So if the RIAA went after the big seeders, their whole scheme would unravel. If you want to pirate, pirate so big you become "too big to fail!"
I love how sony said that they would "fix" this in the next 24 hours yesterday. I'm glad they worked so hard and diligently to apply this fix. One might even say they moved the earth for it.
As far as help desks go, this type of baby-step process may work on an individual level, but it also contributes to the problem of inordinate queue times. I've been on both sides of the line, but that doesn't assuage my mood when I've been waiting 4 hours on hold to solve my legitimately complicated problem just because the tech has had to spend the last 2 hours figuring out that the person two up in front of me has her space bar confused with her enter key. As far as the OP's problem is concerned, there should probably be a differentiation between processes regarding how novice and expert users handle reporting of errors. Chocolate cake might work great for Joe CEO, but it doesn't necessarily help ME figure out what's going on.
For clarification, the Supreme Court ruling did not so much grant any new rights to corporations as it did close a loophole that allowed Big Content, but not other businesses, to publish advertisements by means of owning their own media outlets. While I'm with most to jump on the anti-corporate bandwagon, many a slashdotter will agree that more free speech for all is universally better than less. When we start taking free speech away from those we don't want having it, we're really no better than the corporations who do the exact same thing.
Brings new meaning to Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer":
Then, of course, the telephone's such a _convenient_ thing; it just sits
there and _demands_ you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were
always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. When it
wasn't the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it
wasn't the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the
corner theater, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low-lying cumulus
clouds. It doesn't rain rain any more, it rains soapsuds.
Can someone please explain to me why there is an immediately implied inverse correlation between "the right thing to do morally" and "the right thing to do financially"? I've spent five years in advanced business studies that do nothing but explain why ethics and morals lead to profitability and stable business. The disjoint, as far as I've seen it, is best explained by the CEO of Costco: "Wall Street is in the business of making money between now and next Tuesday. We're in the business of building an organization, an institution that we hope will be here 50 years from now. And paying good wages and keeping your people working with you is very good business."
Google may be more interested in the money (or loss thereof), but that doesn't qualify them as "evil". The problem with the policy "Don't be Evil." is that it doesn't parallel "Don't be Morally Ambiguous or Neutral." Still, if a company as big as Google can tell China to go f*ck themselves, and enough companies follow suit, then China will finally be in the same straits as the USSR was, minus the nukes -- unable to rely on the external stimulus of U.S. investments and not having an internally viable economy. We may once againce see the fall of communism with the collapse of the Berlin^H^H^H^Hijing [Fire]Wall, if you will.
It's a dirty tactic. First they refuse the money, then they sue you for not paying them the money they refused to take.
Good argument! By the way, on a totally unrelated note, I've enslaved your daughter for my own dastardly deeds. Why? Well, she can make me some good money. Yeah, yeah, I know you created her. I'll just pay you this sum of money and we'll call it even, k? Oh, yeah, and thanks for not suing me!
Any pseudo-interest I once had in Best Buy quickly died after some years ago when my parents bought me a new computer from there. At least, it was supposed to be new. When I opened the CD drive, I found a ghost file of the previous owner's journal entry that detailed how she was going to try to burn her journal entries to CD in one last test before she returned it to Best Buy because the CD drive refused to burn. After 40 hours of "negotiating" with Best Buy reps over the fact that they sold me a refurbished OOB computer as a new one, they deemed the most appropriate solution was to knock $50 off the price and cancel the $300 warranty. They are nothing more than a consortium of crooks hellbent on raping the wallets of the ignorant. This surprises me about as much as gravity.
All limitations of Free Speech in the United States is when the issuance of such speech would infringe upon the constitutional rights of one or more individuals. Clear and Present Danger limits speech that would threaten the right to life or liberty. The sharing of credit card records or medical records would threaten a right to privacy. Thomas Jefferson said it best in his letter to Isaac McPherson:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property”
Clearly. When playing WoW, I simply ask myself, "What's the joy in doing the same thing over and over and over again to the same conclusion, day after day?" Then I remember and promptly log off to find some porn.
Easy fix. When they're caught doing this, entice the publishers to descend like harpies upon Amazon with the financial incentive of illegally modifying their copyrighted works. $80,000 per redistributed, infringed work would do well more than send a message to Amazon.
I can imagine... all of that hunger and no brains to be found anywhere!
Re:numb driving experience
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I consider myself a driving enthusiast, but I remember driving my old BMW 3-series from practically one end of the United States to the other. The features I came to love as an enthusiast - bucket seats, sports suspension and handling, black leather interior, tight manual transmission - didn't mean SQUAT when driving for sixteen hours across the vast nothingness of the Midwest. By the time I hit Topeka, KS, I was fantasizing through the numbing pain in my legs and ass and sweat dripping down my face from the 110 degree Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) weatherabout a big evil American suburban with cushy seats, mind-numbing DVD systems for the passengers, and an air conditioning unit not designed for the crisp mountain climate of the Fatherland.
That said, I still love my car, and I find it truly blissful to drive in any other occasion, but Americans really do have different driving habits and driving needs. For example, being an even six feet tall with size 12 feet (which is barely above average for American males), I am physically unable to cram legs into the well of the driver's seat of an Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio. Cars of European sizes I am literally incapable of driving.
Depends on the $$ pirated, as I stated to a post above. Ripping a DVD = civil matter. Recording a movie and distributing it before or alongside the publisher's release, that's going to be criminal.
Yeah, people keep talking about this, or building farraday cages or active-cell phone blockers because they get pissed that the teen girl won't stop texting and giggling in front of them. It sounds like a great idea until someone's trying to call you because your wife is in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital. Hell, her doctor might be sitting two rows behind you and can't get the message because he doesn't know his cell is being blocked. Cell phone blockers are illegal for a reason. People may be short on human decency, but government mandating civil behavior (beyond when civil behavior overrides civil rights) is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
Piracy is stealing if an appropriate amount of pirating has been done to elevate inflicted costs to above a civil crime. We here at/. just like to repeat that mantra so we don't feel compelled to add up the value of all those torrents going in background. Ripping your DVD so the kids can have a copy isn't stealing. Recording a movie and then giving/selling it to your buddy to rip thousands of copies to sell on the streets of Europe and Asia, yeah, that's stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd contest that the most egregious offenders ever get busted. Look at most of the RIAA suits, and they're going after people who download 10-100 songs, not filling up terabyte drives with music. I have acquaintances who download compulsively as "archivists" who could never listen to the entirity of what they've infringed. It's not that the bigger infringers are any harder to bust, it's that if the RIAA goes after these major downloaders, the overall damages would be absolutely absurd, and people would realize how ludicrous the claims of damages truly are. For example, 1 TB drive = 1024^2 Mb = 1,048,576 Mb. Assuming an Mp3 is 3 Mb in size, you could fit 349,925 Mp3s (ignoring drive constraints and spare change). At $80,000 a pop from the Capital v. Thomas jury award (though later reduced by the judge, the jury found this to be the appropriate damages for infringement), you're talking $27,994,000,000. Twenty-eight billion dollars for a single drive. Fill it with eBooks instead just for fun and you're talking around $84 billion. No single human could do that much damage on the internet, not even Mitnick. So if the RIAA went after the big seeders, their whole scheme would unravel. If you want to pirate, pirate so big you become "too big to fail!"
They won't let me in. My jeans are not sufficiently tight enough to be deemed a "cool cat."
That was a joke. Haha. Fat chance.
I love how sony said that they would "fix" this in the next 24 hours yesterday. I'm glad they worked so hard and diligently to apply this fix. One might even say they moved the earth for it.
As far as help desks go, this type of baby-step process may work on an individual level, but it also contributes to the problem of inordinate queue times. I've been on both sides of the line, but that doesn't assuage my mood when I've been waiting 4 hours on hold to solve my legitimately complicated problem just because the tech has had to spend the last 2 hours figuring out that the person two up in front of me has her space bar confused with her enter key. As far as the OP's problem is concerned, there should probably be a differentiation between processes regarding how novice and expert users handle reporting of errors. Chocolate cake might work great for Joe CEO, but it doesn't necessarily help ME figure out what's going on.
For clarification, the Supreme Court ruling did not so much grant any new rights to corporations as it did close a loophole that allowed Big Content, but not other businesses, to publish advertisements by means of owning their own media outlets. While I'm with most to jump on the anti-corporate bandwagon, many a slashdotter will agree that more free speech for all is universally better than less. When we start taking free speech away from those we don't want having it, we're really no better than the corporations who do the exact same thing.
Then, of course, the telephone's such a _convenient_ thing; it just sits there and _demands_ you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. When it wasn't the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it wasn't the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the corner theater, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn't rain rain any more, it rains soapsuds.
Reality begs to differ. But thanks for playing!
Can someone please explain to me why there is an immediately implied inverse correlation between "the right thing to do morally" and "the right thing to do financially"? I've spent five years in advanced business studies that do nothing but explain why ethics and morals lead to profitability and stable business. The disjoint, as far as I've seen it, is best explained by the CEO of Costco: "Wall Street is in the business of making money between now and next Tuesday. We're in the business of building an organization, an institution that we hope will be here 50 years from now. And paying good wages and keeping your people working with you is very good business."
Google may be more interested in the money (or loss thereof), but that doesn't qualify them as "evil". The problem with the policy "Don't be Evil." is that it doesn't parallel "Don't be Morally Ambiguous or Neutral." Still, if a company as big as Google can tell China to go f*ck themselves, and enough companies follow suit, then China will finally be in the same straits as the USSR was, minus the nukes -- unable to rely on the external stimulus of U.S. investments and not having an internally viable economy. We may once againce see the fall of communism with the collapse of the Berlin^H^H^H^Hijing [Fire]Wall, if you will.
All very amusing political humor and shamwow references aside, it's a rare occasion where I can read a slashdot article and go "Wow, Cool!"
Neat and important creative advances like this pus back into me a little bit of the faith in humanity eroded by most of slashdot articles.
It's a dirty tactic. First they refuse the money, then they sue you for not paying them the money they refused to take.
Good argument! By the way, on a totally unrelated note, I've enslaved your daughter for my own dastardly deeds. Why? Well, she can make me some good money. Yeah, yeah, I know you created her. I'll just pay you this sum of money and we'll call it even, k? Oh, yeah, and thanks for not suing me!
Legislation that protects consumers against the profit-interests of large corporations... Why does the word "vaporware" come to mind?
Any pseudo-interest I once had in Best Buy quickly died after some years ago when my parents bought me a new computer from there. At least, it was supposed to be new. When I opened the CD drive, I found a ghost file of the previous owner's journal entry that detailed how she was going to try to burn her journal entries to CD in one last test before she returned it to Best Buy because the CD drive refused to burn. After 40 hours of "negotiating" with Best Buy reps over the fact that they sold me a refurbished OOB computer as a new one, they deemed the most appropriate solution was to knock $50 off the price and cancel the $300 warranty. They are nothing more than a consortium of crooks hellbent on raping the wallets of the ignorant. This surprises me about as much as gravity.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property”
Boba Fett is not pleased.
Clearly. When playing WoW, I simply ask myself, "What's the joy in doing the same thing over and over and over again to the same conclusion, day after day?" Then I remember and promptly log off to find some porn.
Easy fix. When they're caught doing this, entice the publishers to descend like harpies upon Amazon with the financial incentive of illegally modifying their copyrighted works. $80,000 per redistributed, infringed work would do well more than send a message to Amazon.
I can imagine... all of that hunger and no brains to be found anywhere!
That said, I still love my car, and I find it truly blissful to drive in any other occasion, but Americans really do have different driving habits and driving needs. For example, being an even six feet tall with size 12 feet (which is barely above average for American males), I am physically unable to cram legs into the well of the driver's seat of an Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio. Cars of European sizes I am literally incapable of driving.
Clearly there's a screw loose behind the steering wheel.
Depends on the $$ pirated, as I stated to a post above. Ripping a DVD = civil matter. Recording a movie and distributing it before or alongside the publisher's release, that's going to be criminal.
Yeah, people keep talking about this, or building farraday cages or active-cell phone blockers because they get pissed that the teen girl won't stop texting and giggling in front of them. It sounds like a great idea until someone's trying to call you because your wife is in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital. Hell, her doctor might be sitting two rows behind you and can't get the message because he doesn't know his cell is being blocked. Cell phone blockers are illegal for a reason. People may be short on human decency, but government mandating civil behavior (beyond when civil behavior overrides civil rights) is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
Piracy is stealing if an appropriate amount of pirating has been done to elevate inflicted costs to above a civil crime. We here at /. just like to repeat that mantra so we don't feel compelled to add up the value of all those torrents going in background. Ripping your DVD so the kids can have a copy isn't stealing. Recording a movie and then giving/selling it to your buddy to rip thousands of copies to sell on the streets of Europe and Asia, yeah, that's stealing.
"In Soviet America, watch watch you!"
- War and Peace