Not if you're the RIAA, or someone hired by them. Media Sentry was only forbidden to practice in states where it already didn't have a license to play private detective, e.g.
FWIW, I wouldn't even demand plausible deniability. Of course, that's one reason I'd never end up on a jury in this kind of case.
My personal opinion is that music "pirates" are much less evil than those who purchase laws tailored to suit their company's business practice, with no regard to preserving our cultural heritage. As such, I would vote against them when on a jury even if the crime under investigation was an axe murder, much less a simple copying of files. (Actually the axe murderer would have a stronger case, as he would actually be doing damage to the people who supported this corruption of our legal system.)
So I'll never be on the jury to vote for your innocence. Sorry.
Given the ethics they have displayed so far, I wouldn't put planting evidence past the RIAA. They may be lawyers, but they've already ignored court orders and played fast and loose with the laws of evidence.
And gotten *no* punishment at all for their misdeeds. So why should they stop now?
If someone was unilaterally chosen by the RIAA as an expert, I would consider that probable evidence that he has already agreed to come to the conclusion that they want. It may be illegal, but they've already gotten away with rougher stuff, without ANY punishment.
To my mind the middle ground *IS* having the FDA (or someone) have a rating sticker, and to require that the rating sticker be displayed. They can be as fine grained or as coarse grained as they choose, and people can pay them as much attention as *they* choose.
Actually, embryonic stem cells would have been a very bad choice. Then you'd need to take immuno-suppressive drugs (for the rest of your life?) to keep your immune system from destroying them. So he had a very good reason to exclude embryonic stem cells. He wanted adult stem cells from the patient to be treated.
A Quack treatment is anything that the claimant claims is one. Sister Kinney's treatment for Polio was denounced by the AMA as "witchcraft". It frequently worked, sort of, and it was the only treatment available that had that kind of effectiveness, but the AMA didn't believe in the "laying on of hands". (Her treatment involved lots of physical manipulation, so the muscles were kept moving.)
I don't know the details, but I had a friend who had to have his treatments given secretly when he was a toddler. As an adult he was able to walk, albeit with a pronounced limp. Most of his compatriots who suffered from polio (anywhere nearly as seriously) died after spending some time in an iron lung.
I'm dubious about allowing ANYONE or ANY organization the right to forbid treatments of any nature. It's reasonable that organizations should own a trademark, and be able to restrict the use of such a trademark to those things that they have approved, but not that they should forbid the sale or use of non-approved items.
In this case the tape drive HAD a read after write head, it's just that the backup software wasn't using it. (I know, that doesn't make any sense. But that's how it was explained to me.)
Make that "additional layers". There are at least three additional layers for every job where the taxes are collected by the Feds, and then re-sent back to the states to be used. Sometimes there are more. (In the case of highway funds I think there are something like 7 or more additional layers of bureaucracy.)
I've got a conspiracy theory about it to...one based on one of Parkinson's laws. It goes "When someone's hired to manage the doing of something, he's likely to expand his job to cover anything he can make seem related, in order to justify hiring more subordinate to manage."
The off-site back up is also subject to being corrupted at the time it is written. If you don't have spare servers with tape drives, it can be impossible to check them safely. I remember one time we discovered that a years worth of backups had been written by a drive with a malfunctioning write head. Fortunately we discovered it when trying to set up a new system rather than in a disaster...but there still wasn't any way we could check that it wasn't still happening AFTER the new server went into production. At that point we couldn't afford to wipe it every week or so the check that the tapes were readable (by doing a restore). I don't know why the backup program didn't discover that the tapes weren't readable... except it was probably trying to back things up as quickly as possible. (Backing up an entire hard disk took most of the night.)
Well, we were a small shop, 3 programmers and a manager, with one of the programmers charged with also being system administrator. And nobody in nights or weekends, when we could take the servers down. And no more hardware than we absolutely needed!! But that's not an uncommon situation to be in (though hardware is cheaper now, so maybe some things have eased up).
Not exactly. In certain kinds of areas the free market works pretty well. Basically in areas with a low cost of entry. and transparent results.
If you can't easily tell the result of the purchase, then the free market doesn't work. If it's hard to start a new company, then the free market doesn't work. But a free market works quite well in selling paper clips.
There's another problem, which the free market solves in the areas where it works: Centralized power tends to corrupt the system. Unfortunately, it tends to corrupt all systems, free market or not. The low bar to entry tends to mitigate against centralized power coming into existence.
So it's not exactly "like the people who claim that vaccines are western plots to cause disease".
Note that software is an area where the free market could work, if it could be maintained free. Unfortunately, this is quite difficult given contract law. As a result the GPL is a compromise. It puts a minimal level of restraints on the market in an endeavor to protect the market's freedom. Other's prefer a different set of protections, so we have differing FOSS licenses. And some of them are better for some purposes, while others are better for others. But my general preference is for the GPL (version 3 by preference, or even the AGPL). To me that seems the best trade-off.
OTOH, I don't claim to be a believer in the free market. I'm a believer in decentralization. I view every centralization as a single point of failure waiting to happen.
I'm not sure that Vioxx should have been pulled. I *am* certain that Merck should have been punished *HARD* for the actions that they took to mute criticism. Those are two separate decisions.
An apt punishment would have been for Merck to loose all patent right to it's 5 most profitable patents. (I'll admit that there's no legal basis for that, but there isn't a legal basis for most effective punishments to corporations.)
Actually, the Supreme Court has carefully never made a statement on that. That was written by a legal clerk. Case law based on that is precedent, but the precedent has no legal basis, and the Supreme Court has carefully allowed this condition to continue, because there's not legal basis to affirm it, but they like the results...and so do many other powerful people.
Actually vaccinations saved fewer lives than sanitation systems and street cleaning. They're right up there though.
P.S.: I'm combining street cleaning in with sewage systems, but street cleaning probably wouldn't be near the top if considered separately. Sanitation would still be at the very top though. I'm not sure of the split between sanitation and sewer systems. Possibly sewer systems should be at the extreme top.
P.P.S.: A word on the internal combustion engine. Just image street cleaning without the internal combustion engine, and you'll see what an advance that was. Sorry the various public health measures don't separate cleanly, but they have deep interactions.
Since arthritis is not species specific, that's a silly bet.
Gibbons get arthritis. Dogs get arthritis. Neanderthals got arthritis. (I don't have detailed knowledge here, but my suspicion is that one could say Vertebrates get arthritis...but it might be limited to land animals, or even mammals, and perhaps only the species that live over a decade.)
Well, it may be factual that they say it performs better....
When somebody who pretends to have no interest in the outcome sells you advice...and it then turns out that their supposedly impartial advice was actually to do something that would put money in their pocket, can you really trust the advice to not have concealed anything else?
There's always a danger that somebody may make a mistake, but that's not the same as a lie. In this case, however, there's no way of checking whether or not they are lying. All you know (now) is that they're selling you advice to give them money. The ethics seem on a par with snake oil salesmen. (There is a snake native to China whose oil does appear to ease joint inflammation. But that's one particular species of snake, and it's not a US species. So, perhaps, somebody one ran some tests that showed that snake oil eased joint troubles.)
Those are sample of project that are GPL and get support. I'm not claiming that *you* should use GPL. I'm claiming that, in general and on the average, most FOSS projects getting a lot of corporate support are GPL. (I grant that there's a whole slue of FOSS projects that are GPL and get no corporate support, but that's irrelevant to my thesis.)
Projects that are BSD/MIT licensed and get lots of corporate support tend to be projects where an essential part of the project is that it have interfaces that can be accessed by other programs using ANY (or just about any) license. I could go into the reasons why I believe this pattern has developed, but those are arguable, where this particular assertion is observable.
FWIW, many dinosaurs appear to have also been warm-blooded. And current evidence has people thinking that many may have had feathers.
So possibly dinosaurs were just slightly more unlucky than mammals were. We know (believe) that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, so perhaps all surviving dinosaurs were smallish onithiscians that laid eggs. The survivors of these groups evolved into birds. Perhaps also seven species of dinosaur survived. Or eight. But they all happened to be rather similar in the same way that birds are similar to each other.
And maybe a part of the problem is in thinking of animals in terms of the classifications that we give them now, rather than how they were then. Personally I expect most of the survivors were rather omnivorous, and that they could eat dead plants when the dead animals became too decayed. And as insects began to reappear they ate them, too.
That said, it's also possible that some groups survived a bit longer before dying out. Nothing surprising about that. Almost every species that's ever existed went extinct at some point. We're just familiar with the ones that haven't done so yet. So in some sheltered valley, perhaps small plants survived. And some larger dinosaurs. Perhaps only as eggs, that later hatched. This doesn't mean that they would continue to survive. We're talking about the kind of change in ecology that doesn't happen very often....say 7 or 8 times in the planet's history so far. Even if a species lives through the immediate effects, one could expect that it would be quite likely to go extinct fairly quickly. And as time goes on, brand new competitors would be coming in (here we're talking multiple millions of years). These new competitors would have new and different ways of competing.
I'm not convinced by (the summary of) the article...but I don't find it impossible either. I'll wait for more consideration by professionals before I make up my mind. (And even if this is wrong, I suspect the scenario is true somewhere, even if we never find evidence for it.) But we already know that they didn't survive over the long term...except the ones whose descendants became birds.
The theory may be decent, but the implementation of class-actions is so bad that it's worse than not having any. What good does a free copy of MSWindows do me? I don't want it, I don't want to push it on anyone else. It has NEGATIVE value. But due to a class action suit about MS monopolizing the market I was once entitled to a free copy of MS VisualJ++ (the name was something like that)... long after I'd decided I didn't want to have anything more to do with their EULAs. A big HUZZAH!
The only time class actions were ever of value was when it was more important to punish the wrong-doers than to compensate the victims. Now even that part has been turned into a joke.
I don't really object to Google publishing out of print works. (I think that copyright should lapse if a work is out of print for over a year, now that print-on-demand publishers exist.) I do object to their being given a monopoly. And I don't accept that there is any validity to the Authors' Guild representing those who aren't members. (It may be legal. I can't argue with that, as IANAL, but it's definitely not just.)
I also *strenuously* object to Google first being given a monopoly, and then choosing to be selective about which works it publishes. That's censorship. When Google becomes a government granted monopoly, then it should lose the right to choose what to publish and what not to publish.
There are situations where your decisions are correct. I don't know your situation, so I can't speak to it.
OTOH, as an objective measure, GPL projects get more support from companies than BSD project do, on the average. LOTS more. So, you see, most companies don't evaluate things the way yours does.
This doesn't mean that your decisions are incorrect. In some situations BSD is definitely a preferable license. That just not usually the case. (E.g., Sun was eventually willing to license Java under the GPL. It would never have agreed to license it under the BSD.)
To me it appears that you need to think more deeply. It seems as if you thought this at about five beers. Try again before one.
There are justifications and occasions where BSD or MIT is the correct license. I can't think of ANY where the correct license is none. (Study up on the Berne Copyright convention.)
That said, I personally usually prefer the GPL...specifically either GPL3 or AGPL. There are, however, cases where other licenses are more appropriate.
If you don't understand why different licenses are appropriate to different purposes, let's consider front door keys. A few people know where to find the key to my front door. This is because I trust them. I don't at all see how this is an argument for removing the lock on my front door. (If this doesn't speak to your point, you need to try different words, because I didn't understand you the first time.)
FWIW, I'm approx. familiar with both licenses, and I expect most FOSS developers are. I prefer GPL... actually, these days I'm leaning towards either GPL3 or AGPL, but I recognize the Apache license as a good one. Just one that's a bit more open to being ripped off than I prefer.
For a business, it seems to me the important consideration would be what you want to do. You need the right code, and it's a lot easier if you can just modify slightly something already done. And in that case you must use whatever license that code is under. (Unless you are just using it as a library or some such.)
If you are publishing FOSS code, the only reason for the Apache (or BSD) license is if it's important to you to get wide adoption. E.g., some code implementing standards was published under BSD *specifically* because that allowed proprietary applications to include it. The primary goal was to get the standard widely adopted.
So it all depends on what you are doing and why. But for MY general purposes, it's either GPL3 or AGPL...except when I need to use a different license because I'm adapting pre-existing code.
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Not if you're the RIAA, or someone hired by them. Media Sentry was only forbidden to practice in states where it already didn't have a license to play private detective, e.g.
FWIW, I wouldn't even demand plausible deniability. Of course, that's one reason I'd never end up on a jury in this kind of case.
My personal opinion is that music "pirates" are much less evil than those who purchase laws tailored to suit their company's business practice, with no regard to preserving our cultural heritage. As such, I would vote against them when on a jury even if the crime under investigation was an axe murder, much less a simple copying of files. (Actually the axe murderer would have a stronger case, as he would actually be doing damage to the people who supported this corruption of our legal system.)
So I'll never be on the jury to vote for your innocence. Sorry.
Given the ethics they have displayed so far, I wouldn't put planting evidence past the RIAA. They may be lawyers, but they've already ignored court orders and played fast and loose with the laws of evidence.
And gotten *no* punishment at all for their misdeeds. So why should they stop now?
If someone was unilaterally chosen by the RIAA as an expert, I would consider that probable evidence that he has already agreed to come to the conclusion that they want. It may be illegal, but they've already gotten away with rougher stuff, without ANY punishment.
To my mind the middle ground *IS* having the FDA (or someone) have a rating sticker, and to require that the rating sticker be displayed. They can be as fine grained or as coarse grained as they choose, and people can pay them as much attention as *they* choose.
Actually, embryonic stem cells would have been a very bad choice. Then you'd need to take immuno-suppressive drugs (for the rest of your life?) to keep your immune system from destroying them. So he had a very good reason to exclude embryonic stem cells. He wanted adult stem cells from the patient to be treated.
A Quack treatment is anything that the claimant claims is one. Sister Kinney's treatment for Polio was denounced by the AMA as "witchcraft". It frequently worked, sort of, and it was the only treatment available that had that kind of effectiveness, but the AMA didn't believe in the "laying on of hands". (Her treatment involved lots of physical manipulation, so the muscles were kept moving.)
I don't know the details, but I had a friend who had to have his treatments given secretly when he was a toddler. As an adult he was able to walk, albeit with a pronounced limp. Most of his compatriots who suffered from polio (anywhere nearly as seriously) died after spending some time in an iron lung.
I'm dubious about allowing ANYONE or ANY organization the right to forbid treatments of any nature. It's reasonable that organizations should own a trademark, and be able to restrict the use of such a trademark to those things that they have approved, but not that they should forbid the sale or use of non-approved items.
In this case the tape drive HAD a read after write head, it's just that the backup software wasn't using it. (I know, that doesn't make any sense. But that's how it was explained to me.)
Make that "additional layers". There are at least three additional layers for every job where the taxes are collected by the Feds, and then re-sent back to the states to be used. Sometimes there are more. (In the case of highway funds I think there are something like 7 or more additional layers of bureaucracy.)
And, especially, recently ex- employees.
Do you *know* it isn't used for that purpose?
I've got a conspiracy theory about it to...one based on one of Parkinson's laws. It goes "When someone's hired to manage the doing of something, he's likely to expand his job to cover anything he can make seem related, in order to justify hiring more subordinate to manage."
The off-site back up is also subject to being corrupted at the time it is written. If you don't have spare servers with tape drives, it can be impossible to check them safely. I remember one time we discovered that a years worth of backups had been written by a drive with a malfunctioning write head. Fortunately we discovered it when trying to set up a new system rather than in a disaster...but there still wasn't any way we could check that it wasn't still happening AFTER the new server went into production. At that point we couldn't afford to wipe it every week or so the check that the tapes were readable (by doing a restore). I don't know why the backup program didn't discover that the tapes weren't readable ... except it was probably trying to back things up as quickly as possible. (Backing up an entire hard disk took most of the night.)
Well, we were a small shop, 3 programmers and a manager, with one of the programmers charged with also being system administrator. And nobody in nights or weekends, when we could take the servers down. And no more hardware than we absolutely needed!! But that's not an uncommon situation to be in (though hardware is cheaper now, so maybe some things have eased up).
Not exactly. In certain kinds of areas the free market works pretty well. Basically in areas with a low cost of entry. and transparent results.
If you can't easily tell the result of the purchase, then the free market doesn't work. If it's hard to start a new company, then the free market doesn't work. But a free market works quite well in selling paper clips.
There's another problem, which the free market solves in the areas where it works: Centralized power tends to corrupt the system. Unfortunately, it tends to corrupt all systems, free market or not. The low bar to entry tends to mitigate against centralized power coming into existence.
So it's not exactly "like the people who claim that vaccines are western plots to cause disease".
Note that software is an area where the free market could work, if it could be maintained free. Unfortunately, this is quite difficult given contract law. As a result the GPL is a compromise. It puts a minimal level of restraints on the market in an endeavor to protect the market's freedom. Other's prefer a different set of protections, so we have differing FOSS licenses. And some of them are better for some purposes, while others are better for others. But my general preference is for the GPL (version 3 by preference, or even the AGPL). To me that seems the best trade-off.
OTOH, I don't claim to be a believer in the free market. I'm a believer in decentralization. I view every centralization as a single point of failure waiting to happen.
Do blame the insurance companies. They actively lobby to maintain this system which you rightly call broken.
I'm not sure that Vioxx should have been pulled. I *am* certain that Merck should have been punished *HARD* for the actions that they took to mute criticism. Those are two separate decisions.
An apt punishment would have been for Merck to loose all patent right to it's 5 most profitable patents.
(I'll admit that there's no legal basis for that, but there isn't a legal basis for most effective punishments to corporations.)
Actually, the Supreme Court has carefully never made a statement on that. That was written by a legal clerk. Case law based on that is precedent, but the precedent has no legal basis, and the Supreme Court has carefully allowed this condition to continue, because there's not legal basis to affirm it, but they like the results...and so do many other powerful people.
Actually vaccinations saved fewer lives than sanitation systems and street cleaning. They're right up there though.
P.S.: I'm combining street cleaning in with sewage systems, but street cleaning probably wouldn't be near the top if considered separately. Sanitation would still be at the very top though. I'm not sure of the split between sanitation and sewer systems. Possibly sewer systems should be at the extreme top.
P.P.S.: A word on the internal combustion engine. Just image street cleaning without the internal combustion engine, and you'll see what an advance that was. Sorry the various public health measures don't separate cleanly, but they have deep interactions.
Since arthritis is not species specific, that's a silly bet.
Gibbons get arthritis. Dogs get arthritis. Neanderthals got arthritis. (I don't have detailed knowledge here, but my suspicion is that one could say Vertebrates get arthritis...but it might be limited to land animals, or even mammals, and perhaps only the species that live over a decade.)
Is it factual?
Well, it may be factual that they say it performs better....
When somebody who pretends to have no interest in the outcome sells you advice...and it then turns out that their supposedly impartial advice was actually to do something that would put money in their pocket, can you really trust the advice to not have concealed anything else?
There's always a danger that somebody may make a mistake, but that's not the same as a lie. In this case, however, there's no way of checking whether or not they are lying. All you know (now) is that they're selling you advice to give them money. The ethics seem on a par with snake oil salesmen. (There is a snake native to China whose oil does appear to ease joint inflammation. But that's one particular species of snake, and it's not a US species. So, perhaps, somebody one ran some tests that showed that snake oil eased joint troubles.)
I do. They either ignore me or lie about what they're getting ready to do.
(I count "Thank you for your helpful correspondence" and similar as ignoring me, unless it's followed by appropriate action.)
Those are sample of project that are GPL and get support. I'm not claiming that *you* should use GPL. I'm claiming that, in general and on the average, most FOSS projects getting a lot of corporate support are GPL. (I grant that there's a whole slue of FOSS projects that are GPL and get no corporate support, but that's irrelevant to my thesis.)
Projects that are BSD/MIT licensed and get lots of corporate support tend to be projects where an essential part of the project is that it have interfaces that can be accessed by other programs using ANY (or just about any) license. I could go into the reasons why I believe this pattern has developed, but those are arguable, where this particular assertion is observable.
FWIW, many dinosaurs appear to have also been warm-blooded. And current evidence has people thinking that many may have had feathers.
So possibly dinosaurs were just slightly more unlucky than mammals were. We know (believe) that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, so perhaps all surviving dinosaurs were smallish onithiscians that laid eggs. The survivors of these groups evolved into birds. Perhaps also seven species of dinosaur survived. Or eight. But they all happened to be rather similar in the same way that birds are similar to each other.
And maybe a part of the problem is in thinking of animals in terms of the classifications that we give them now, rather than how they were then. Personally I expect most of the survivors were rather omnivorous, and that they could eat dead plants when the dead animals became too decayed. And as insects began to reappear they ate them, too.
That said, it's also possible that some groups survived a bit longer before dying out. Nothing surprising about that. Almost every species that's ever existed went extinct at some point. We're just familiar with the ones that haven't done so yet. So in some sheltered valley, perhaps small plants survived. And some larger dinosaurs. Perhaps only as eggs, that later hatched. This doesn't mean that they would continue to survive. We're talking about the kind of change in ecology that doesn't happen very often....say 7 or 8 times in the planet's history so far. Even if a species lives through the immediate effects, one could expect that it would be quite likely to go extinct fairly quickly. And as time goes on, brand new competitors would be coming in (here we're talking multiple millions of years). These new competitors would have new and different ways of competing.
I'm not convinced by (the summary of) the article...but I don't find it impossible either. I'll wait for more consideration by professionals before I make up my mind. (And even if this is wrong, I suspect the scenario is true somewhere, even if we never find evidence for it.) But we already know that they didn't survive over the long term...except the ones whose descendants became birds.
The theory may be decent, but the implementation of class-actions is so bad that it's worse than not having any. What good does a free copy of MSWindows do me? I don't want it, I don't want to push it on anyone else. It has NEGATIVE value. But due to a class action suit about MS monopolizing the market I was once entitled to a free copy of MS VisualJ++ (the name was something like that) ... long after I'd decided I didn't want to have anything more to do with their EULAs. A big HUZZAH!
The only time class actions were ever of value was when it was more important to punish the wrong-doers than to compensate the victims. Now even that part has been turned into a joke.
I don't really object to Google publishing out of print works. (I think that copyright should lapse if a work is out of print for over a year, now that print-on-demand publishers exist.) I do object to their being given a monopoly. And I don't accept that there is any validity to the Authors' Guild representing those who aren't members. (It may be legal. I can't argue with that, as IANAL, but it's definitely not just.)
I also *strenuously* object to Google first being given a monopoly, and then choosing to be selective about which works it publishes. That's censorship. When Google becomes a government granted monopoly, then it should lose the right to choose what to publish and what not to publish.
There are situations where your decisions are correct. I don't know your situation, so I can't speak to it.
OTOH, as an objective measure, GPL projects get more support from companies than BSD project do, on the average. LOTS more. So, you see, most companies don't evaluate things the way yours does.
This doesn't mean that your decisions are incorrect. In some situations BSD is definitely a preferable license. That just not usually the case. (E.g., Sun was eventually willing to license Java under the GPL. It would never have agreed to license it under the BSD.)
To me it appears that you need to think more deeply. It seems as if you thought this at about five beers. Try again before one.
There are justifications and occasions where BSD or MIT is the correct license. I can't think of ANY where the correct license is none. (Study up on the Berne Copyright convention.)
That said, I personally usually prefer the GPL...specifically either GPL3 or AGPL. There are, however, cases where other licenses are more appropriate.
If you don't understand why different licenses are appropriate to different purposes, let's consider front door keys. A few people know where to find the key to my front door. This is because I trust them. I don't at all see how this is an argument for removing the lock on my front door. (If this doesn't speak to your point, you need to try different words, because I didn't understand you the first time.)
FWIW, I'm approx. familiar with both licenses, and I expect most FOSS developers are. I prefer GPL ... actually, these days I'm leaning towards either GPL3 or AGPL, but I recognize the Apache license as a good one. Just one that's a bit more open to being ripped off than I prefer.
For a business, it seems to me the important consideration would be what you want to do. You need the right code, and it's a lot easier if you can just modify slightly something already done. And in that case you must use whatever license that code is under. (Unless you are just using it as a library or some such.)
If you are publishing FOSS code, the only reason for the Apache (or BSD) license is if it's important to you to get wide adoption. E.g., some code implementing standards was published under BSD *specifically* because that allowed proprietary applications to include it. The primary goal was to get the standard widely adopted.
So it all depends on what you are doing and why. But for MY general purposes, it's either GPL3 or AGPL...except when I need to use a different license because I'm adapting pre-existing code.