If you hire a bunch of unrepentant criminals to (say) go steal you a new car, get you a new stereo, and shut up the neighbor's dog, you shouldn't be surprised when they turn on you.
In the same way, to see that the online poker industry's deep ties to people who will do awful things with computers for cheap may have come back and hurt them -- I don't have any sympathy for them either.
* technically it is their affiliates who do it through affiliate programs, but same difference, they are all guilty and could crack down on it if they wanted.
This is a good line, but it's not supported by evidence. On my blog, which gets attacked constantly, the comment spam for Party Poker is clean -- that is, there's no redirect, no affiliate code, nothing but a link directly to their site.
If it's a scummy affiliate, how are they getting paid? If it's a scummy incompetent affiliate, why do they persist at spamming clean URLs -- wouldn't they realize at some point that they're not getting credit for their spam, and knock it off?
PCs with two drives won't be offered because it's still cheaper to make a PC with one, and you can't convince the average user that RAID is an expense that they want to pay for.
Don't think of it from a user's perspective. If Dell can offer desktop systems that are dramatically more reliable and so reduce the number of troubleshooting and service calls, that's not only a marketing advantage ("Runs forever!") it's a support advantage.
Now, the cost per unit to put RAID-1 in is still going to exceed the reduction in support costs, but there's a point where the marketing advantage combined with that cost savings makes it economical.
I hope folks don't take Tintin seriously. At least early Tintin is hella racist.
Biting:
Early Tintins are bad. They're an unfortunate reflection of the attitudes and conventions when they were written. In the first ones African people in particular get the Sambo treatment, with big red lips on almost gorilla faces.
But Herge gets past it. You can read Tintins and see him develop as a storyteller and forsake that kind of easy stereotype. His stories depend less on coincidence, the characters become deeper and the comic relief is pushed further into the background, and in some of them there's a subtle progressive politic to it.
Hey, I just got out of AWS IT, and it's all incompetence: they're outsourcing all their work to India, morale is absymal (my friends still there tell me the annual survey had unbelievably bad results), and everyone who's really good and can jobs elsewhere (like, uh, me) has left.
They went to this consulting model where no one competent owns their product: there are solution managers, who have no technical or system experience, and there are resource managers who have 20-30 analysts or devs working on different projects... so if you want something done (like "how come LNP doesn't work") someone has to assemble a team by going through this process that's *supposed* to take two weeks. All the work that's getting done is through back-channels, knowing people who used to touch the API you need...
They're totally screwed. Their customer service problems with their CRM and LNP are the tip of the iceberg: with the best and brightest gone and the work in India, we're going to see the IT side of AWS get much, much worse.
Man, it feels good to finally be able to comment openly on this stuff now that I'm out from under my employment agreement.
Rather than your point, which is that the RIAA's legal actions may be driving people to buying digitial music, couldn't you also argue that the decrease in p2p activity is due to people finally having access to a number of viable, legitimate, cheap online music outlets?
I'm sure the number of people who stopped pirating music because they could sample it and buy it for cheap on iTunes is pretty significant.
That's not true: if they use an auto-dialer of any kind, it's illegal to call a cell phone. Live dialing is still legal. You can go look this up if you.
I used to read GIA a long time ago, but they're gone -- are there any good game sites out there? I'm mostly interested in quality reviews, rather than breathless previews. Writers who know the its/it's distinction would be great.
Name a popular RIAA member artist that condones their music being ripped off their CD and freely traded on P2P networks. I'm not talking about concert bootlegs or limited samples, I'm talking about direct CD rips.
The Offspring were vocal Napster proponents. And before you say they're not popular, go look up their sales. Further, you then argue that
The ONLY artists that don't mind - or even LIKE - their music being freely traded are indies.
Which is also clearly not true, as they're a big-label band.
That's one off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
Here's the distinction they're going to try to make, though: they're going to say that these VC dudes funded a project designed to violate the law, and specifically exploting the RIAA's IP, for the intent of making a profit. Think of it like this: a venture capital firm funds a murder-for-hire firm that kills people and then is shut down by the government. Are the VC guys responsible in any way for the crimes of the company they funded, when it was clear the function of the company was to murder people for money?
If you buy that, they can be held liable pretty easily for funding a criminal operation. There are a number of distinctions between this and limited liability: for one, shareholders of Exxon are investing in an oil business, and didn't make the decision to stick Alaska with the cleanup bill, for instance.
Re:How does a website spend $80mln?
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Seattle is not in the same league as those others. Seattle's cost of living is about 10% over the national average. Boston and New York is twice that at 120%, San Francisco's even more, at about 140% of the national average.
Eliminating the dividend tax is not a break for the rich, it's a break for everyone who owns stock.
Currently dividends are taxed twice, once when the corporation gives them and again when you receive them. Because of this, it's an inefficient way to distribute money to shareholders.
Take Oracle, for instance. They have tons of cash and not enough growth opportunities to pursue to use it all. The best use of that money, from a shareholder's perspective, is to give it back to the investors, because the investors can find other uses for it that Oracle, as a giant company, can't (for instance, you might want to invest in a small sweater store down the street... that might be a great investment, but Oracle doesn't want to make it).
The double tax promotes corporate cash-hoarding and even mindless speculation in risky ventures. It's a hold-over from the Depression, when they wanted to encourage companies to hoard cash and retain a cushion against hard times.
The majority of households in the US own stocks of one kind or another. Allowing them to make money on those stocks isn't a tax break for the rich at all.
The issue for the cell companies is this: people don't care.
Seriously. AT&T Wireless, for instance, won JD Power awards for best wireless service in (I think) 18 or 19 of the 21 markets they were in last year. PacBell did really well in SF, Verizon won a couple.
The problem is that for each person, their usage is going to be different than every other person, so cell companies (or at least AT&T Wireless) has to play a game of triage, where they use trouble tickets to figure out where their network's dropping calls and then send engineers out to work on the switches/towers/etc. When people don't call, they have to rely on system diagnostics and no matter what they're going to tell you, that's not as good as having someone call up and say "my calls drop at the intersection of 124th and North Pine".
People are inclined to write dropped calls off (I have a friend in Texas, his Sprint calls drop every time he goes into Duncanville, and he's given up complaining) and not call in. They're also seemingly unwilling to reward providers who have better local coverage, probably because knowing that AT&T Wireless is the best carrier in your market doesn't guarantee you'll have signal in your apartment.
And the other problem is that since people don't seem to respond to the "our coverage is best" ads, providers are competing on gee-whiz gadgets like cameras that (really) no one's asking for, in an attempt to differentiate themselves.
It's a knotty problem. If everyone who was frustrated with their service canceled and found a better provider, Sprint PCS would be driven from the market in a month, AT&T Wireless, Verizon, and Cingular would buy out their towers to fill network gaps and the world would be a better place. Heh.
AT&T Wireless has a 2G network that's TDMA. They built an interim solution, essentially, to do data during the transition to 3G. This is the "2.5G" network that has limited features and low data transfer speeds. That's the GSM/GPRS network.
Their plan is to deploy the advanced 2.5G stuff nationwide, getting up to ~384kbits, and then expand the spanking new 3G W-CDMA network which is GSM(ish) to do 2megabits.
The plan, eventually, is that AT&T Wireless is going to be the only US provider of 3G data over GSM systems, which means they'll be able to use the same amazingly cool phones and features the rest of the world uses, and be a good citizen of the world to sell phones that can do global roaming etc.
Something I don't think's been mentioned is that DoCoMo owns 15% of AT&T Wireless, and bought in at the IPO price of 29.5 (Wireless is at ~7 now), so they've got a huge investment and sway in driving the company to be able to use the features that DoCoMo uses to mint money in Japan.
Totally. I played Duke Nukem, Doom, but ROTT gave me splitting headaches and less enjoyable motion sickness problems.
It's weird that some games seem not to bother me while others do. I played all the way through Medal of Honor: Allied Assault without any problem, for instance, but Operation: Flashpoint makes me weird out.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I'll bet in most stupid copyright cases where the assertions are unfounded or ridiculous (like the "Bill Wyman the reporter needs to prove that's his real name" case) the lawyers are acting on their own, without any consent or direction from their clients.
Having experience employing lawyers, I'll say that with few exceptions, this is wrong. What will happen is that you go to your lawyer and you say "I'm mad that this web site is printing bad things about me. Is there anything we can do?"
And the lawyer will give you a menu, essentially -- what you could pursue and what your chances of success are. If they're any good, they'll be realistic -- "we can sue for this, and they'll probably cave, but if it goes to court, it'll take six months and you'll have to consider the public relations issues".
But they'll need you to give the go-ahead to file, to pursue certain actions, to negotiate a settlement. They're not lone wolves.
Now, they're going to want you to use them, generally speaking -- they're hammers, they're going to see nails. The mistake people make is using their lawyers as their only tools, or relying on them above all else.
When you see a reputable law firm (ie, not Lionel Hutz, Law Talking Guy Ltd.) suing for something stupid, that's what's happened -- the plantiff went to them and told them to pursue whatever slim opportunity they had in front of them. And for the lawyers, it's as if you're a home builder and someone's insisting you put their mansion on a flood plain. You can advise them against it all you want, but if they're hell-bent on it, they're the boss.
Now we can argue if ethically they should refuse to prosecute these cases, but the core issue is that reputable lawyers don't pursue cases on their own.
I used to give the EFF money, and now I don't, for precisely the reason you cite -- I disagree with them whole-heartedly on a couple issues they're totally, utterly wrong about (particularly, their constant, wrong-headed attacks on spam-lists as being anti-free-speech, as if my decision to use the SBL somehow gags an activist, or is not a personal decision like chosing which newspaper to buy).
I won't give money to support an organization that makes such awful decisions and is unwilling to listen to reasonable arguments.
If you're like me, pick your fights more specifically -- donate to individual legal funds, find smaller, more issue-oriented causes.
That American Satellite deal is for a refurb Phillips unit. I bought the deal, and got:
- dead access card - refurb Tivo died - American Satellite took over a week to get me a replacement unit (after promising me to ship it 3-day) - various issues with programming not being turned on - now my Tivo says "your service has been cancelled!"
It's been almost a month since I ordered the deal and I haven't gotten to use Tivo since. As much as it pains me, I honestly recommend people go to their local Giant Box of Crappy Salespeople and buy their setup there. Faster returns and problem-solving.
What if you do business via the mail with companies in Washington State? You may be operating out of Oregon, but you're still selling to Washington companies.
If you do business by mail, you're required to obey relevant laws in the state the customer's in -- check out, for instance, contest fine print, which has different laws on how you get game pieces w/o purchase: if you're in certain states, you don't have to include return postage.
How about the anti-fax spam laws that are in place -- are those federal only, or do the laws of the state that you're faxing to apply to you as well?
The anti-fax laws are federal telecom legislation.
It's inserting ads into the streams. I can't believe a submitter didn't read the article, but...
They do this now, to some extent. Program feeds have spots in them which are filled by local broadcast affiliates/your cable company, so the ads are targeted for market. For instance, if I'm watching a baseball game, during the break my cable company gets to toss an ad in that break that they've sold themselves (this is the 'cablehead' they're talking about in the article), for a restaurant within the boundaries of the cable system's reach.
As to privacy, they're pretty much lying, or at the very least being intentionally oblivious. They're talking about knowing if you've just bought a car, or your lease is up -- they intend us to believe that it's okay to correlate that much personal data on me for purposes of serving me a targeted car ad, as long as they aren't able to deliver a sample pizza after a Domino's ad?
Microsoft caused a law in Washington to be enacted where dismissed employees cannot freelance for the same department for 1 year.
I believe you're confusing Microsoft policy with Washington law. Microsoft has any number of policies designed to protect them from lawsuits regarding contractors, and this may well be one of them.
But this isn't law. Do you think the Department of Labor enforces a regulation that specifies *department*? As if there's a legal distinction between working for a company's marketing or IT departments -- and then the DoL would have to get involved with writing standards for what constitutes a department and a division... no.
Boy, I hope you've got Tivo, or you're going to hate him after another couple commercial breaks.
-- q
Ebay vs. Amazon zShops
on
Ebay buys PayPal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While I don't have numbers, I think you'll find zShops is more popular than you think. I buy used stuff off of Amazon constantly, not only because I've found some great prices, but because I don't have to use PayPal.
And my wife, who runs a bookstore, tells me that her store lists their collectable stuff on Amazon and does well with it.
From a user perspective, it's much easier to wander around on Amazon, find the book you want, compare (if applicable) the new/used price, and then order it from some random book dealer without having to deal with back-and-forth emails or new payment options. If you head to eBay and search right off the front page for a book title, you're likely to turn up 20-some irrelevant responses (Brand New Copy L@@K!!! keyword keyword).
-- q
Kathy Acker does this, regarded as art
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There's a particularly heinous author named Kathy Acker who "writes" books that have *huge* chunks that are minimally changed from other authors (she rips off Neuromancer, for instance). The plots are ripped off entirely, lots of phrases, sentences, references.
She's regarded as "a proto-feminist icon who disrupts traditional male patriachial ownership of art" (seriously, that's what my lit professor in college told me... and my grade suffered for disagreeing).
Slashdot Mirror
Two wrongs=right?? To each his own I guess.
That's not the point at all.
If you hire a bunch of unrepentant criminals to (say) go steal you a new car, get you a new stereo, and shut up the neighbor's dog, you shouldn't be surprised when they turn on you.
In the same way, to see that the online poker industry's deep ties to people who will do awful things with computers for cheap may have come back and hurt them -- I don't have any sympathy for them either.
The only problem I see with gambling is that is very easy to make everyone loose (everyone but the site/cassino owner).
You're thinking of online pornography. Online gambling could make everyone lose.
* technically it is their affiliates who do it through affiliate programs, but same difference, they are all guilty and could crack down on it if they wanted.
This is a good line, but it's not supported by evidence. On my blog, which gets attacked constantly, the comment spam for Party Poker is clean -- that is, there's no redirect, no affiliate code, nothing but a link directly to their site.
If it's a scummy affiliate, how are they getting paid? If it's a scummy incompetent affiliate, why do they persist at spamming clean URLs -- wouldn't they realize at some point that they're not getting credit for their spam, and knock it off?
PCs with two drives won't be offered because it's still cheaper to make a PC with one, and you can't convince the average user that RAID is an expense that they want to pay for.
Don't think of it from a user's perspective. If Dell can offer desktop systems that are dramatically more reliable and so reduce the number of troubleshooting and service calls, that's not only a marketing advantage ("Runs forever!") it's a support advantage.
Now, the cost per unit to put RAID-1 in is still going to exceed the reduction in support costs, but there's a point where the marketing advantage combined with that cost savings makes it economical.
I hope folks don't take Tintin seriously. At least early Tintin is hella racist.
Biting:
Early Tintins are bad. They're an unfortunate reflection of the attitudes and conventions when they were written. In the first ones African people in particular get the Sambo treatment, with big red lips on almost gorilla faces.
But Herge gets past it. You can read Tintins and see him develop as a storyteller and forsake that kind of easy stereotype. His stories depend less on coincidence, the characters become deeper and the comic relief is pushed further into the background, and in some of them there's a subtle progressive politic to it.
Hey, I just got out of AWS IT, and it's all incompetence: they're outsourcing all their work to India, morale is absymal (my friends still there tell me the annual survey had unbelievably bad results), and everyone who's really good and can jobs elsewhere (like, uh, me) has left.
They went to this consulting model where no one competent owns their product: there are solution managers, who have no technical or system experience, and there are resource managers who have 20-30 analysts or devs working on different projects... so if you want something done (like "how come LNP doesn't work") someone has to assemble a team by going through this process that's *supposed* to take two weeks. All the work that's getting done is through back-channels, knowing people who used to touch the API you need...
They're totally screwed. Their customer service problems with their CRM and LNP are the tip of the iceberg: with the best and brightest gone and the work in India, we're going to see the IT side of AWS get much, much worse.
Man, it feels good to finally be able to comment openly on this stuff now that I'm out from under my employment agreement.
Rather than your point, which is that the RIAA's legal actions may be driving people to buying digitial music, couldn't you also argue that the decrease in p2p activity is due to people finally having access to a number of viable, legitimate, cheap online music outlets?
I'm sure the number of people who stopped pirating music because they could sample it and buy it for cheap on iTunes is pretty significant.
That's not true: if they use an auto-dialer of any kind, it's illegal to call a cell phone. Live dialing is still legal. You can go look this up if you.
I used to read GIA a long time ago, but they're gone -- are there any good game sites out there? I'm mostly interested in quality reviews, rather than breathless previews. Writers who know the its/it's distinction would be great.
Name a popular RIAA member artist that condones their music being ripped off their CD and freely traded on P2P networks. I'm not talking about concert bootlegs or limited samples, I'm talking about direct CD rips.
The Offspring were vocal Napster proponents. And before you say they're not popular, go look up their sales. Further, you then argue that
The ONLY artists that don't mind - or even LIKE - their music being freely traded are indies.
Which is also clearly not true, as they're a big-label band.
That's one off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
Here's the distinction they're going to try to make, though: they're going to say that these VC dudes funded a project designed to violate the law, and specifically exploting the RIAA's IP, for the intent of making a profit. Think of it like this: a venture capital firm funds a murder-for-hire firm that kills people and then is shut down by the government. Are the VC guys responsible in any way for the crimes of the company they funded, when it was clear the function of the company was to murder people for money?
If you buy that, they can be held liable pretty easily for funding a criminal operation. There are a number of distinctions between this and limited liability: for one, shareholders of Exxon are investing in an oil business, and didn't make the decision to stick Alaska with the cleanup bill, for instance.
Seattle is not in the same league as those others. Seattle's cost of living is about 10% over the national average. Boston and New York is twice that at 120%, San Francisco's even more, at about 140% of the national average.
Eliminating the dividend tax is not a break for the rich, it's a break for everyone who owns stock.
Currently dividends are taxed twice, once when the corporation gives them and again when you receive them. Because of this, it's an inefficient way to distribute money to shareholders.
Take Oracle, for instance. They have tons of cash and not enough growth opportunities to pursue to use it all. The best use of that money, from a shareholder's perspective, is to give it back to the investors, because the investors can find other uses for it that Oracle, as a giant company, can't (for instance, you might want to invest in a small sweater store down the street... that might be a great investment, but Oracle doesn't want to make it).
The double tax promotes corporate cash-hoarding and even mindless speculation in risky ventures. It's a hold-over from the Depression, when they wanted to encourage companies to hoard cash and retain a cushion against hard times.
The majority of households in the US own stocks of one kind or another. Allowing them to make money on those stocks isn't a tax break for the rich at all.
The issue for the cell companies is this:
people don't care.
Seriously. AT&T Wireless, for instance, won JD Power awards for best wireless service in (I think) 18 or 19 of the 21 markets they were in last year. PacBell did really well in SF, Verizon won a couple.
The problem is that for each person, their usage is going to be different than every other person, so cell companies (or at least AT&T Wireless) has to play a game of triage, where they use trouble tickets to figure out where their network's dropping calls and then send engineers out to work on the switches/towers/etc. When people don't call, they have to rely on system diagnostics and no matter what they're going to tell you, that's not as good as having someone call up and say "my calls drop at the intersection of 124th and North Pine".
People are inclined to write dropped calls off (I have a friend in Texas, his Sprint calls drop every time he goes into Duncanville, and he's given up complaining) and not call in. They're also seemingly unwilling to reward providers who have better local coverage, probably because knowing that AT&T Wireless is the best carrier in your market doesn't guarantee you'll have signal in your apartment.
And the other problem is that since people don't seem to respond to the "our coverage is best" ads, providers are competing on gee-whiz gadgets like cameras that (really) no one's asking for, in an attempt to differentiate themselves.
It's a knotty problem. If everyone who was frustrated with their service canceled and found a better provider, Sprint PCS would be driven from the market in a month, AT&T Wireless, Verizon, and Cingular would buy out their towers to fill network gaps and the world would be a better place. Heh.
Sort of, but not really.
AT&T Wireless has a 2G network that's TDMA. They built an interim solution, essentially, to do data during the transition to 3G. This is the "2.5G" network that has limited features and low data transfer speeds. That's the GSM/GPRS network.
Their plan is to deploy the advanced 2.5G stuff nationwide, getting up to ~384kbits, and then expand the spanking new 3G W-CDMA network which is GSM(ish) to do 2megabits.
The plan, eventually, is that AT&T Wireless is going to be the only US provider of 3G data over GSM systems, which means they'll be able to use the same amazingly cool phones and features the rest of the world uses, and be a good citizen of the world to sell phones that can do global roaming etc.
Something I don't think's been mentioned is that DoCoMo owns 15% of AT&T Wireless, and bought in at the IPO price of 29.5 (Wireless is at ~7 now), so they've got a huge investment and sway in driving the company to be able to use the features that DoCoMo uses to mint money in Japan.
-- q
Totally. I played Duke Nukem, Doom, but ROTT gave me splitting headaches and less enjoyable motion sickness problems.
It's weird that some games seem not to bother me while others do. I played all the way through Medal of Honor: Allied Assault without any problem, for instance, but Operation: Flashpoint makes me weird out.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I'll bet in most stupid copyright cases where the assertions are unfounded or ridiculous (like the "Bill Wyman the reporter needs to prove that's his real name" case) the lawyers are acting on their own, without any consent or direction from their clients.
Having experience employing lawyers, I'll say that with few exceptions, this is wrong. What will happen is that you go to your lawyer and you say "I'm mad that this web site is printing bad things about me. Is there anything we can do?"
And the lawyer will give you a menu, essentially -- what you could pursue and what your chances of success are. If they're any good, they'll be realistic -- "we can sue for this, and they'll probably cave, but if it goes to court, it'll take six months and you'll have to consider the public relations issues".
But they'll need you to give the go-ahead to file, to pursue certain actions, to negotiate a settlement. They're not lone wolves.
Now, they're going to want you to use them, generally speaking -- they're hammers, they're going to see nails. The mistake people make is using their lawyers as their only tools, or relying on them above all else.
When you see a reputable law firm (ie, not Lionel Hutz, Law Talking Guy Ltd.) suing for something stupid, that's what's happened -- the plantiff went to them and told them to pursue whatever slim opportunity they had in front of them. And for the lawyers, it's as if you're a home builder and someone's insisting you put their mansion on a flood plain. You can advise them against it all you want, but if they're hell-bent on it, they're the boss.
Now we can argue if ethically they should refuse to prosecute these cases, but the core issue is that reputable lawyers don't pursue cases on their own.
-- q
I used to give the EFF money, and now I don't, for precisely the reason you cite -- I disagree with them whole-heartedly on a couple issues they're totally, utterly wrong about (particularly, their constant, wrong-headed attacks on spam-lists as being anti-free-speech, as if my decision to use the SBL somehow gags an activist, or is not a personal decision like chosing which newspaper to buy).
I won't give money to support an organization that makes such awful decisions and is unwilling to listen to reasonable arguments.
If you're like me, pick your fights more specifically -- donate to individual legal funds, find smaller, more issue-oriented causes.
-- q
That American Satellite deal is for a refurb Phillips unit. I bought the deal, and got:
- dead access card
- refurb Tivo died
- American Satellite took over a week to get me a replacement unit (after promising me to ship it 3-day)
- various issues with programming not being turned on
- now my Tivo says "your service has been cancelled!"
It's been almost a month since I ordered the deal and I haven't gotten to use Tivo since. As much as it pains me, I honestly recommend people go to their local Giant Box of Crappy Salespeople and buy their setup there. Faster returns and problem-solving.
--q
What if you do business via the mail with companies in Washington State? You may be operating out of Oregon, but you're still selling to Washington companies.
If you do business by mail, you're required to obey relevant laws in the state the customer's in -- check out, for instance, contest fine print, which has different laws on how you get game pieces w/o purchase: if you're in certain states, you don't have to include return postage.
How about the anti-fax spam laws that are in place -- are those federal only, or do the laws of the state that you're faxing to apply to you as well?
The anti-fax laws are federal telecom legislation.
-- q
It's inserting ads into the streams. I can't believe a submitter didn't read the article, but...
They do this now, to some extent. Program feeds have spots in them which are filled by local broadcast affiliates/your cable company, so the ads are targeted for market. For instance, if I'm watching a baseball game, during the break my cable company gets to toss an ad in that break that they've sold themselves (this is the 'cablehead' they're talking about in the article), for a restaurant within the boundaries of the cable system's reach.
As to privacy, they're pretty much lying, or at the very least being intentionally oblivious. They're talking about knowing if you've just bought a car, or your lease is up -- they intend us to believe that it's okay to correlate that much personal data on me for purposes of serving me a targeted car ad, as long as they aren't able to deliver a sample pizza after a Domino's ad?
-- q
I believe you're confusing Microsoft policy with Washington law. Microsoft has any number of policies designed to protect them from lawsuits regarding contractors, and this may well be one of them.
But this isn't law. Do you think the Department of Labor enforces a regulation that specifies *department*? As if there's a legal distinction between working for a company's marketing or IT departments -- and then the DoL would have to get involved with writing standards for what constitutes a department and a division... no.
-- q
Boy, I hope you've got Tivo, or you're going to hate him after another couple commercial breaks.
-- q
While I don't have numbers, I think you'll find zShops is more popular than you think. I buy used stuff off of Amazon constantly, not only because I've found some great prices, but because I don't have to use PayPal.
And my wife, who runs a bookstore, tells me that her store lists their collectable stuff on Amazon and does well with it.
From a user perspective, it's much easier to wander around on Amazon, find the book you want, compare (if applicable) the new/used price, and then order it from some random book dealer without having to deal with back-and-forth emails or new payment options. If you head to eBay and search right off the front page for a book title, you're likely to turn up 20-some irrelevant responses (Brand New Copy L@@K!!! keyword keyword).
-- q
There's a particularly heinous author named Kathy Acker who "writes" books that have *huge* chunks that are minimally changed from other authors (she rips off Neuromancer, for instance). The plots are ripped off entirely, lots of phrases, sentences, references.
She's regarded as "a proto-feminist icon who disrupts traditional male patriachial ownership of art" (seriously, that's what my lit professor in college told me... and my grade suffered for disagreeing).
Acker's never been sued or prosecuted.