Yes, it's censorship. If Google, and only Google, has the right to scan and host a book, then for Google not to do it is censorship.
If it weren't for the absurd decision of the court then I would agree that it wasn't censorship. As, however, the government has granted this monopoly to Google, then for Google to refuse to publish a work is censorship.
I, personally, think that this decision is absurd, illegal, and unfair to everyone except Google and the lawyers. And I'm dubious that the court had the legal right to make the decision that it did. The authors' guild doesn't represent all authors, and it may well not even represent most authors. (I'll grant it probably represents all the authors in the English speaking world who make most of their income from writing. I won't admit that it considers their interests very seriously...except, possibly, in contract negotiations with publishers. [I'm neither an author of anything longer than a short technical manual, nor closely enough connected with any authors to have discussed how the authors' guild goes about representing them. But I know that they didn't represent me, and I *did* write that now obsolete and out of print technical manual.])
They should be REQUIRED to scan and host every book under they sun because they have been granted the status of a governmentally approved monopoly by the court decision that allows them to scan and host the books if they choose to.
Not only are they a monopoly, within the year they are revealing themselves as an abusive monopoly.
Monopolies are inherently dangerous. Sometimes they are, perhaps, necessary...though one should always try to avoid them. But abusive monopolies should be immediately destroyed.
I don't know about others, but to me this make a joke out of Google's company motto.
Still, it's probably best that we are warned at this early stage of the process. (It should have been obvious, but there's always a tendency to forget.)
"An Open Source license" isn't very specific. What's the license?
If they're proposing GPL3 then it's interesting. If they're proposing MSPL (or whatever that MS license is is called) then I can't see many people bothering. Each license has it's own community, and it makes a lot of difference which one they choose.
Or are they just going to host a site for projects? If so, what's the criteria for being hosted? Especially, what languages and licenses do they accept? (Google and SourceForge have shown that this is a reasonable approach. You need some bait, but they probably have that. If the licenses are right. If nothing else they probably hold the rights to some first person shooter software. [I don't know to what extent they own "America's Army", or whatever they called that game...but they probably own at least PART of it.])
I'm one of those people who thinks the corporations juggle the books and don't pay the musicians what they've agreed to pay them. Just try to find the results of an audit on a media company. (Some results have been made public. In every case that I'm aware of they show the company to have been cheating the artist.)
P.S.: I don't download music or movies, so your question is almost irrelevant. For the remainder...I don't think that how much people pay the corporations affects how much the musicians get. I think the companies pay just enough to keep stringing the musicians along until they cut them off. I haven't heard equivalent reports about actors, so they may have better, more enforceable, contracts. But I doubt it. I think they just haven't been able to force an audit.
That is, indeed, a classic list. Anyone who follows those rules is being ethical. This doesn't make anyone who doesn't follow them unethical.
My objection to illegal downloading is that it doesn't damage the villainous parties. As such it is at best an ineffective means of protest.
OTOH, when one party purchases a set of laws I see no ethical grounds for requiring others to accept them. Practical, yes, but not ethical. As such, when the Ballentine edition of Tolkien's work came out, I bought it despite having already purchased the ACE version. Tolkien didn't subvert a legal system that I agreed appeared reasonably honest, and as the author I respected his right to claim respectful treatment. No artist I am aware of supports the RIAA or the MPAA. This doesn't mean much, since I long since stopped purchasing their media, and thus I don't know anyone who first published in the audio/visual media since the DMCA was passed.
As such, I think I can fairly state that in my opinion the only reason that downloading A/V media licensed under an RIAA/MPAA member organization isn't civil disobedience is that it doesn't injure either the RIAA or the MPAA. It's certainly more ethical than the purchase of laws by those organizations. This doesn't make it wise. Just not unethical. I'll consider it moderately unethical when the RIAA/MPAA member organizations are independently audited on a yearly basis to prove that they are actually paying the artists the money that they have contractually agreed to. In every case that I'm aware of where an artist has been able to force such an audit, it has been proven that the media companies were seriously in default. I.e. they weren't paying the money that they had agreed to pay in a contract that they wrote, and at a time when they controlled whether the artist in question could get his work performed.
In case you're in doubt, I think we'd all be much better off if every studio in Hollywood (and many others) had it's corporate charter canceled, and all it's directors sued for monies owed to the artist dating back multiple decades.
It's a valid point that is true in some cases. In other cases it's to shield those who ordered the wrong to be committed. If the corporation admitted to having committed a felony, e.g., the actual felony would have been committed by individual people. And ordered by others. At this point conspiracy laws could be used to send most of management of the corporation to prison. But as no guilt has been admitted, no prosecution of the individuals is usually done.
Technically there's no reason that the managers couldn't be charged separately, but somehow it almost never happens.
Vioxx wasn't specifically anti-arthritis. It was a Non-Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drug. Like aspirin. But it only suppressed a part of the reactions that aspirin suppressed, so it didn't cause gastric distress. Unfortunately, it also had some other effects. If you didn't get them, then it was a reasonable drug.
In a way it was rather like thalidomide. Only some people had the problem that caused it's recall, but the result was that nobody could use it. Not even terminal cancer patients. (For some terminal cancer patients, thalidomide was the only drug that would relieve their pain. But it was forbidden. Even if they were also male, and thus quite unlikely to get pregnant.)
His point is that the information is being provided by people who have a vested interest in your deciding one particular way.
You don't know what the effects of something you are being injected with will be. You are operating on trust. And so is the person who injects you. He is unlikely to have prepared the substance himself, but rather to have purchased it from someone he trusts.
But in this case, the injection is for something that little is known about the effects of, and what is known is given by biased sources. You can decide to trust them anyway, but you should be aware that that's what you are doing. And that there is, indeed, a history of drug companies selling things that didn't do precisely what they claimed, and had side effects that weren't precisely what they claimed. Sometimes it was because they didn't know, but also sometimes it was because they had intentionally suppressed any adverse commentary. This has been proven to have happened within the past decade. So currently existing laws and practices don't prevent it from happening. It's fair to decide whichever way you want, but you ARE deciding based on trust...or mistrust. Not based on knowledge. And you have no feasible way to get the knowledge. It's quite possible that nobody knows.
You say "It's a vaccine". I say it's a complex of substances, some of which are intended, or at least claimed, to activate the immune system. There are other components that serve various other functions. And there are some which are just there because it's too expensive to remove them. (They're just trace...but sometimes mere traces can have profound effects. Not usually, of course.)
Maybe it does precisely what they claim and has no side effects they don't mention. It's possible. But that would be a foolish bet. It *is* likely that any serious side effects are extremely rare, or no mentioned. Or very long term. And the long term ones are unlikely. But there'll be something. Perhaps it will make you allergic to anteaters. Few would care, but it would be a real undisclosed side effect. Perhaps it will cause your heart to grow at the rate of 0.5%/year. How would they know? Unlikely, of course. But there are *LOTS* of possible unlikely side effects that they don't disclose...and often don't know about. At least one of them will occur at least occasionally. The purpose of testing is supposed to be to weed out those drugs that cause serious side effects with any frequency. But the tests won't detect any effects with a frequency of less than, say, 1 in 10,000 or with a latency of over a year. (I may have those precise numbers wrong, but the idea's correct.) And that's if the tests are honest. But they are being conducted by an entity that has an investment in getting certain results. So adverse results have a history of occasionally being swept under the rug. And so we come back to trust.
But even if you trust them, they may be ignorant of a problem that will affect you. Cautious people prefer large scale studies to be done first. Say on the population of another state or country. Or on a self-selected group of experimenters over an extended period of time. But diseases evolve too. So the cautious approach has it's own problems.
Sometimes there aren't any good answers, but it's clear that having the qualification trials run by an entity that has a vested interest in the results is a very bad approach.
Like hiring unlicensed investigators to investigate those criticizing them. Including other members of the board.
I'm sure they did other things, but that's the only thing that pops up to the top of my mind. I generally ignore HP these days. They no longer make decent equipment.
They're fast, but they aren't THAT fast. I think that 20 minutes is a fair guess at a generation time without any additional information. And they don't change environments with each generation. You'll bet multiple generations within a single cell.
That said, you've got tremendous numbers of virus particles reproducing simultaneously in an extremely large number of places. So unlikely events ARE to be expected. Still, this seems a bit of an extreme example. As described it requires at least 5 cross-over mutations between 5 different strains with different geographical locations of high frequency. Probably more than that, as the information was a bit sketchy. So it's extremely unlikely. But unlikely isn't impossible...and it isn't impossible without directed assistance. This could be quite normal. It could also be artificial. And sloppy practice in a lab dealing with dangerous biochemicals isn't at all unheard of. And, of course, it could also be intentional. I can't guess which way to bet. My personal guess would be natural evolution, but in an environment that caused this multiple exposure some how.
Sounds to me like you've got it precisely. If you want to consider international IP law, ask India about patents of Neem Tree Oil.
These laws aren't about justice. They aren't about fair recompense. They're about letting powerful corporations steal more stuff and then force you to pay for it. Ask Indonesia why it won't share it's recent strains of flu? They know that if they do, they're likely to be left to die when the next epidemic strikes. So they want to bargain for something they can count on while they still have leverage. It's to my disadvantage, but I can sure understand their point of view. History is on their side. You can't count on the law when you don't have the power. The lesson is repeated over and over in scenario after scenario. And not just internationally. And it isn't racially biased either. Ask Joe Hill about the justice of law. It's about who has power.
Now to limit that argument, let me say they sometimes you can't buy justice no matter how powerful and rich you are. Being rich and powerful is no guarantee that the abusive forces of law won't be turned against you. It's just that this will only happen when someone else who is at least almost as rich and powerful as you instigates (even if covertly). A recent example was the suit against IBM by SCOx.pk apparently funded, in part, by Microsoft. SCOx had no case, and hasn't been able to demonstrate that it had a reasonable belief that it might have a case. But IBM has been cost millions of dollars that it will never be able to recover. Sometimes justice isn't available for sale because they're out of stock.
OK. I can accept that. It's odd that they should WANT that as the resolution, however. Still, that does seem to be the message that they're trying to send.
The US would probably need to spend more like 30-40% of it's transportation budget on rail to get decent coverage. Remember the US contains VAST stretches of essentially uninhabited areas (not quite uninhabitable, but close). These would need to be bridged by rails multiple times, and the rails kept in repair. (Well, the roads also need to be kept in repair, but roads with light traffic are, in some ways, easier.) And that estimate is AFTER the initial period of build-up. GM et al. were rather complete in their destruction of the old infrastructure supporting rail transport. Replacing it would be expensive. Especially if one wanted separate grade for rail (which is quite desirable).
Long train rides are also uncomfortable, though not nearly as bad as a bus or car. The real problem is the truly incredible expense.
The train companies paid the government to set up a separate company to relieve them of the obligation to transport passengers...thus AmTrak was born. But the train companies still own the rails, and they give their freight trains priority. Whoops! Also they aren't interested in the same destinations as the passengers are, so they don't enhance service in those areas. Occasionally they don't even maintain existing service...but that's not necessarily them being unfair to passenger rail service, as they also don't adequately maintain the rails used by freight. It's just that a freight train overturning because the rails failed on a curve doesn't quite have the same effect as a passenger train doing the same thing. But their cost analysis focuses on maintenance for the sake of the freight trains.
The train companies have wanted out of the business of hauling passengers since the 1950's, or possibly earlier. AmTrak doesn't own tracks or right-of-way. This is not a marriage made in heaven, not even though the railroad companies brought AmTrak into existence. Also, AmTrak has been cash starved since it's initial creation.
High speed rail can mean many different things. It can mean trains that run on separate grade at 70-300 mph with very few stops. Such trains can be very efficient, but they need a good passenger distribution & accumulation system at the stops. Tricky. Ideally this would be a secondary net of local trains that ran at 20-70 mph, also on separate grade. These would fan out broadly from the high speed stations, and come to stops every 15-20 miles. From these streetcar or bus systems would accumulate/distribute passengers. All of these need to be designed to accommodate baggage!! That means the goal can't be to pack as many people in as will fit. Which means that the system can't be starved for money. Which means that you need a lot of auditing by independent auditors & system analysts.
I'll give you long odds that the US doesn't put together a system like this, whether public or private. And I don't care WHO is president. What I'm proposing is a multi-tiered system with a net that would cover the country with transportation. It would probably cost less than the current military budget, but it sure wouldn't be cheap. It would, however, mean that just about no-body needed a car for transportation. And it could run on wired electricity.
OTOH, I'm not certain that a system such as I have proposed is optimal. But it *IS* feasible. And it would probably both less intrusive and less flexible than the current system. If we were used to it, we'd probably consider the current system totally horrid.
Actually, you can't rightfully lay that problem on the IRS. The main problem is that the tax code is ridiculously complicated and ambiguous. Nobody can really figure it out, they can only rule by fiat as to what the law means. Also, as you say, it's not well enforced.
I'd be in favor a an EXTREMELY simplified tax formula. I'm thinking of something that would be sort of like: owed = income * rate - baseOffset. For this to work "income" would need to include ALL sources of income. Stocks, other investments, income from renting property, earnings from jobs, welfare, health insurance, EVERYTHING. You can fiddle with the effects of this by adjusting the rate and baseOffset variable to achieve everything from a negative income tax to no tax. It's smoothly graduated so there's never a reason to not earn more money. Etc.
This means that any subsidies for particular industries (say those important to national defense) and classes of people (say those requiring some kind of medical help) would require separate legislation. To me that seems proper.
P.S.: Yes, I'm aware that if your situation is at all complex and you ask the IRS for advice they will be likely to give you incorrect advice. Also that they are not legally required to guarantee their advice. I take that more as a criticism of the existing tax code than anything else (though it OUGHT to be safe to follow any advice they give you).
It seems as if he had purchased the books, but not actually downloaded them. And now he couldn't. So it wasn't as bad as I had thought, but it's still bad enough that I wouldn't consider a Kindle as a viable thing to purchase or even give shelf-space to.
I didn't say they were using the powers they had demonstrated. I said they demonstrated them. In both cases they retracted their actions, so claiming that they had performed the actions would be a true, but nugatory claim. They *did*, however, demonstrate the CAPABILITY to perform those actions. And those actions weren't simple, so they had lots of development time behind them.
If someone builds a weapon, it's a fair guess they intend to use it.
So if people don't know about the problem until after they've purchased, that makes it ok?
Amazon HAD a good record with me. They've mainly lost it during the past week. First censorship and now this. It's true the censorship may have been by mistake, but they've proven that they have the capability. And again with this, they've proven that they have the capability. I'd prefer to deal with a company that doesn't go around building so much capability to use against their customers.
Is it true that he could continue to use the material that he has already purchased? If so that would put a slightly less ominous tinge on the affair. (Still nothing that would inspire me to purchase a Kindle, but better than my original impression.)
However note that they COULD deactivate books he had previously purchased. That means that in the future they could do it intentionally for whatever reason suited them at the time.
In the past week they have demonstrated the ability to censor a large swath of publications and now to deactivate the right to read already purchased works. I.e., they have intentionally built the capabilities to do such things.
You can think whatever you want about the particular events that caused these capabilities to become evident, but they WERE revealed. Publicly.
Perhaps these two times were accidents. Next time it might not be. Next time it might be removing the ability to either read or purchase politically inconvenient items. Or religiously inconvenient. Or commercially. Or any other reason that suited them.
Decide for yourself if you want to trust a company that has intentionally implemented such capabilities. It's up to you. But if they've built the capability don't be surprised if they use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's censorship. If Google, and only Google, has the right to scan and host a book, then for Google not to do it is censorship.
If it weren't for the absurd decision of the court then I would agree that it wasn't censorship. As, however, the government has granted this monopoly to Google, then for Google to refuse to publish a work is censorship.
I, personally, think that this decision is absurd, illegal, and unfair to everyone except Google and the lawyers. And I'm dubious that the court had the legal right to make the decision that it did. The authors' guild doesn't represent all authors, and it may well not even represent most authors. (I'll grant it probably represents all the authors in the English speaking world who make most of their income from writing. I won't admit that it considers their interests very seriously...except, possibly, in contract negotiations with publishers. [I'm neither an author of anything longer than a short technical manual, nor closely enough connected with any authors to have discussed how the authors' guild goes about representing them. But I know that they didn't represent me, and I *did* write that now obsolete and out of print technical manual.])
They should be REQUIRED to scan and host every book under they sun because they have been granted the status of a governmentally approved monopoly by the court decision that allows them to scan and host the books if they choose to.
No. They're a governmentally created monopoly.
Not only are they a monopoly, within the year they are revealing themselves as an abusive monopoly.
Monopolies are inherently dangerous. Sometimes they are, perhaps, necessary...though one should always try to avoid them. But abusive monopolies should be immediately destroyed.
I don't know about others, but to me this make a joke out of Google's company motto.
Still, it's probably best that we are warned at this early stage of the process. (It should have been obvious, but there's always a tendency to forget.)
WARNING: Single points of failure are dangerous!!
"An Open Source license" isn't very specific. What's the license?
If they're proposing GPL3 then it's interesting. If they're proposing MSPL (or whatever that MS license is is called) then I can't see many people bothering. Each license has it's own community, and it makes a lot of difference which one they choose.
Or are they just going to host a site for projects? If so, what's the criteria for being hosted? Especially, what languages and licenses do they accept? (Google and SourceForge have shown that this is a reasonable approach. You need some bait, but they probably have that. If the licenses are right. If nothing else they probably hold the rights to some first person shooter software. [I don't know to what extent they own "America's Army", or whatever they called that game...but they probably own at least PART of it.])
I'm one of those people who thinks the corporations juggle the books and don't pay the musicians what they've agreed to pay them. Just try to find the results of an audit on a media company. (Some results have been made public. In every case that I'm aware of they show the company to have been cheating the artist.)
P.S.: I don't download music or movies, so your question is almost irrelevant. For the remainder...I don't think that how much people pay the corporations affects how much the musicians get. I think the companies pay just enough to keep stringing the musicians along until they cut them off. I haven't heard equivalent reports about actors, so they may have better, more enforceable, contracts. But I doubt it. I think they just haven't been able to force an audit.
I agree. As long as it doesn't affect me and my friends and family.
Hmmm. Doesn't sound much like a pandemic, does it.
That is, indeed, a classic list. Anyone who follows those rules is being ethical. This doesn't make anyone who doesn't follow them unethical.
My objection to illegal downloading is that it doesn't damage the villainous parties. As such it is at best an ineffective means of protest.
OTOH, when one party purchases a set of laws I see no ethical grounds for requiring others to accept them. Practical, yes, but not ethical. As such, when the Ballentine edition of Tolkien's work came out, I bought it despite having already purchased the ACE version. Tolkien didn't subvert a legal system that I agreed appeared reasonably honest, and as the author I respected his right to claim respectful treatment. No artist I am aware of supports the RIAA or the MPAA. This doesn't mean much, since I long since stopped purchasing their media, and thus I don't know anyone who first published in the audio/visual media since the DMCA was passed.
As such, I think I can fairly state that in my opinion the only reason that downloading A/V media licensed under an RIAA/MPAA member organization isn't civil disobedience is that it doesn't injure either the RIAA or the MPAA. It's certainly more ethical than the purchase of laws by those organizations. This doesn't make it wise. Just not unethical. I'll consider it moderately unethical when the RIAA/MPAA member organizations are independently audited on a yearly basis to prove that they are actually paying the artists the money that they have contractually agreed to. In every case that I'm aware of where an artist has been able to force such an audit, it has been proven that the media companies were seriously in default. I.e. they weren't paying the money that they had agreed to pay in a contract that they wrote, and at a time when they controlled whether the artist in question could get his work performed.
In case you're in doubt, I think we'd all be much better off if every studio in Hollywood (and many others) had it's corporate charter canceled, and all it's directors sued for monies owed to the artist dating back multiple decades.
correction
s"like letting people rip off artists."like letting people rip off corporations."
If you're going to be a **** at least be an honest one.
P.S.: the term was elided to allow you to fill in your own term of choice.
It's a valid point that is true in some cases. In other cases it's to shield those who ordered the wrong to be committed. If the corporation admitted to having committed a felony, e.g., the actual felony would have been committed by individual people. And ordered by others. At this point conspiracy laws could be used to send most of management of the corporation to prison. But as no guilt has been admitted, no prosecution of the individuals is usually done.
Technically there's no reason that the managers couldn't be charged separately, but somehow it almost never happens.
Vioxx wasn't specifically anti-arthritis. It was a Non-Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drug. Like aspirin. But it only suppressed a part of the reactions that aspirin suppressed, so it didn't cause gastric distress. Unfortunately, it also had some other effects. If you didn't get them, then it was a reasonable drug.
In a way it was rather like thalidomide. Only some people had the problem that caused it's recall, but the result was that nobody could use it. Not even terminal cancer patients. (For some terminal cancer patients, thalidomide was the only drug that would relieve their pain. But it was forbidden. Even if they were also male, and thus quite unlikely to get pregnant.)
His point is that the information is being provided by people who have a vested interest in your deciding one particular way.
You don't know what the effects of something you are being injected with will be. You are operating on trust. And so is the person who injects you. He is unlikely to have prepared the substance himself, but rather to have purchased it from someone he trusts.
But in this case, the injection is for something that little is known about the effects of, and what is known is given by biased sources. You can decide to trust them anyway, but you should be aware that that's what you are doing. And that there is, indeed, a history of drug companies selling things that didn't do precisely what they claimed, and had side effects that weren't precisely what they claimed. Sometimes it was because they didn't know, but also sometimes it was because they had intentionally suppressed any adverse commentary. This has been proven to have happened within the past decade. So currently existing laws and practices don't prevent it from happening. It's fair to decide whichever way you want, but you ARE deciding based on trust...or mistrust. Not based on knowledge. And you have no feasible way to get the knowledge. It's quite possible that nobody knows.
You say "It's a vaccine". I say it's a complex of substances, some of which are intended, or at least claimed, to activate the immune system. There are other components that serve various other functions. And there are some which are just there because it's too expensive to remove them. (They're just trace...but sometimes mere traces can have profound effects. Not usually, of course.)
Maybe it does precisely what they claim and has no side effects they don't mention. It's possible. But that would be a foolish bet. It *is* likely that any serious side effects are extremely rare, or no mentioned. Or very long term. And the long term ones are unlikely. But there'll be something. Perhaps it will make you allergic to anteaters. Few would care, but it would be a real undisclosed side effect. Perhaps it will cause your heart to grow at the rate of 0.5%/year. How would they know? Unlikely, of course. But there are *LOTS* of possible unlikely side effects that they don't disclose...and often don't know about. At least one of them will occur at least occasionally. The purpose of testing is supposed to be to weed out those drugs that cause serious side effects with any frequency. But the tests won't detect any effects with a frequency of less than, say, 1 in 10,000 or with a latency of over a year. (I may have those precise numbers wrong, but the idea's correct.) And that's if the tests are honest. But they are being conducted by an entity that has an investment in getting certain results. So adverse results have a history of occasionally being swept under the rug. And so we come back to trust.
But even if you trust them, they may be ignorant of a problem that will affect you. Cautious people prefer large scale studies to be done first. Say on the population of another state or country. Or on a self-selected group of experimenters over an extended period of time. But diseases evolve too. So the cautious approach has it's own problems.
Sometimes there aren't any good answers, but it's clear that having the qualification trials run by an entity that has a vested interest in the results is a very bad approach.
Like hiring unlicensed investigators to investigate those criticizing them. Including other members of the board.
I'm sure they did other things, but that's the only thing that pops up to the top of my mind. I generally ignore HP these days. They no longer make decent equipment.
They're fast, but they aren't THAT fast. I think that 20 minutes is a fair guess at a generation time without any additional information. And they don't change environments with each generation. You'll bet multiple generations within a single cell.
That said, you've got tremendous numbers of virus particles reproducing simultaneously in an extremely large number of places. So unlikely events ARE to be expected. Still, this seems a bit of an extreme example. As described it requires at least 5 cross-over mutations between 5 different strains with different geographical locations of high frequency. Probably more than that, as the information was a bit sketchy. So it's extremely unlikely. But unlikely isn't impossible...and it isn't impossible without directed assistance. This could be quite normal. It could also be artificial. And sloppy practice in a lab dealing with dangerous biochemicals isn't at all unheard of. And, of course, it could also be intentional. I can't guess which way to bet. My personal guess would be natural evolution, but in an environment that caused this multiple exposure some how.
Sounds to me like you've got it precisely. If you want to consider international IP law, ask India about patents of Neem Tree Oil.
These laws aren't about justice. They aren't about fair recompense. They're about letting powerful corporations steal more stuff and then force you to pay for it. Ask Indonesia why it won't share it's recent strains of flu? They know that if they do, they're likely to be left to die when the next epidemic strikes. So they want to bargain for something they can count on while they still have leverage. It's to my disadvantage, but I can sure understand their point of view. History is on their side. You can't count on the law when you don't have the power. The lesson is repeated over and over in scenario after scenario. And not just internationally. And it isn't racially biased either. Ask Joe Hill about the justice of law. It's about who has power.
Now to limit that argument, let me say they sometimes you can't buy justice no matter how powerful and rich you are. Being rich and powerful is no guarantee that the abusive forces of law won't be turned against you. It's just that this will only happen when someone else who is at least almost as rich and powerful as you instigates (even if covertly). A recent example was the suit against IBM by SCOx.pk apparently funded, in part, by Microsoft. SCOx had no case, and hasn't been able to demonstrate that it had a reasonable belief that it might have a case. But IBM has been cost millions of dollars that it will never be able to recover. Sometimes justice isn't available for sale because they're out of stock.
Paraphrase: "His mistake was in trusting Amazon."
OK. I can accept that. It's odd that they should WANT that as the resolution, however. Still, that does seem to be the message that they're trying to send.
The US would probably need to spend more like 30-40% of it's transportation budget on rail to get decent coverage. Remember the US contains VAST stretches of essentially uninhabited areas (not quite uninhabitable, but close). These would need to be bridged by rails multiple times, and the rails kept in repair. (Well, the roads also need to be kept in repair, but roads with light traffic are, in some ways, easier.) And that estimate is AFTER the initial period of build-up. GM et al. were rather complete in their destruction of the old infrastructure supporting rail transport. Replacing it would be expensive. Especially if one wanted separate grade for rail (which is quite desirable).
Long train rides are also uncomfortable, though not nearly as bad as a bus or car. The real problem is the truly incredible expense.
The train companies paid the government to set up a separate company to relieve them of the obligation to transport passengers...thus AmTrak was born. But the train companies still own the rails, and they give their freight trains priority. Whoops! Also they aren't interested in the same destinations as the passengers are, so they don't enhance service in those areas. Occasionally they don't even maintain existing service...but that's not necessarily them being unfair to passenger rail service, as they also don't adequately maintain the rails used by freight. It's just that a freight train overturning because the rails failed on a curve doesn't quite have the same effect as a passenger train doing the same thing. But their cost analysis focuses on maintenance for the sake of the freight trains.
The train companies have wanted out of the business of hauling passengers since the 1950's, or possibly earlier. AmTrak doesn't own tracks or right-of-way. This is not a marriage made in heaven, not even though the railroad companies brought AmTrak into existence. Also, AmTrak has been cash starved since it's initial creation.
High speed rail can mean many different things. It can mean trains that run on separate grade at 70-300 mph with very few stops. Such trains can be very efficient, but they need a good passenger distribution & accumulation system at the stops. Tricky. Ideally this would be a secondary net of local trains that ran at 20-70 mph, also on separate grade. These would fan out broadly from the high speed stations, and come to stops every 15-20 miles. From these streetcar or bus systems would accumulate/distribute passengers. All of these need to be designed to accommodate baggage!! That means the goal can't be to pack as many people in as will fit. Which means that the system can't be starved for money. Which means that you need a lot of auditing by independent auditors & system analysts.
I'll give you long odds that the US doesn't put together a system like this, whether public or private. And I don't care WHO is president. What I'm proposing is a multi-tiered system with a net that would cover the country with transportation. It would probably cost less than the current military budget, but it sure wouldn't be cheap. It would, however, mean that just about no-body needed a car for transportation. And it could run on wired electricity.
OTOH, I'm not certain that a system such as I have proposed is optimal. But it *IS* feasible. And it would probably both less intrusive and less flexible than the current system. If we were used to it, we'd probably consider the current system totally horrid.
Actually, you can't rightfully lay that problem on the IRS. The main problem is that the tax code is ridiculously complicated and ambiguous. Nobody can really figure it out, they can only rule by fiat as to what the law means. Also, as you say, it's not well enforced.
I'd be in favor a an EXTREMELY simplified tax formula. I'm thinking of something that would be sort of like:
owed = income * rate - baseOffset.
For this to work "income" would need to include ALL sources of income. Stocks, other investments, income from renting property, earnings from jobs, welfare, health insurance, EVERYTHING. You can fiddle with the effects of this by adjusting the rate and baseOffset variable to achieve everything from a negative income tax to no tax. It's smoothly graduated so there's never a reason to not earn more money. Etc.
This means that any subsidies for particular industries (say those important to national defense) and classes of people (say those requiring some kind of medical help) would require separate legislation. To me that seems proper.
P.S.: Yes, I'm aware that if your situation is at all complex and you ask the IRS for advice they will be likely to give you incorrect advice. Also that they are not legally required to guarantee their advice. I take that more as a criticism of the existing tax code than anything else (though it OUGHT to be safe to follow any advice they give you).
It seems as if he had purchased the books, but not actually downloaded them. And now he couldn't. So it wasn't as bad as I had thought, but it's still bad enough that I wouldn't consider a Kindle as a viable thing to purchase or even give shelf-space to.
I didn't say they were using the powers they had demonstrated. I said they demonstrated them. In both cases they retracted their actions, so claiming that they had performed the actions would be a true, but nugatory claim. They *did*, however, demonstrate the CAPABILITY to perform those actions. And those actions weren't simple, so they had lots of development time behind them.
If someone builds a weapon, it's a fair guess they intend to use it.
So if people don't know about the problem until after they've purchased, that makes it ok?
Amazon HAD a good record with me. They've mainly lost it during the past week. First censorship and now this. It's true the censorship may have been by mistake, but they've proven that they have the capability. And again with this, they've proven that they have the capability. I'd prefer to deal with a company that doesn't go around building so much capability to use against their customers.
Is it true that he could continue to use the material that he has already purchased? If so that would put a slightly less ominous tinge on the affair. (Still nothing that would inspire me to purchase a Kindle, but better than my original impression.)
However note that they COULD deactivate books he had previously purchased. That means that in the future they could do it intentionally for whatever reason suited them at the time.
In the past week they have demonstrated the ability to censor a large swath of publications and now to deactivate the right to read already purchased works. I.e., they have intentionally built the capabilities to do such things.
You can think whatever you want about the particular events that caused these capabilities to become evident, but they WERE revealed. Publicly.
Perhaps these two times were accidents. Next time it might not be. Next time it might be removing the ability to either read or purchase politically inconvenient items. Or religiously inconvenient. Or commercially. Or any other reason that suited them.
Decide for yourself if you want to trust a company that has intentionally implemented such capabilities. It's up to you. But if they've built the capability don't be surprised if they use it.