Tons of companies sell technology that will allow a company to track the location of every RFID tag in a warehouse down to the inch.
Why couldn't a grocery store do the same? Stick on RFID on everything. Track where everything is every second, match it up to the register you were at when the items were bought, check the transaction record and match it video surveillance and from there they can easily match your name and customer info with every item you bought, looked at, hesitated in front, how you and wife seem to be getting along, how fat your kids are, and other things that some people find terrifying. My view is, I don't give a fuck. Stopping them from using it for anything else is a fight for a different arena. It's not Safeway's fault they can't inform me of products I might actually want in the most efficient way possible without there being the risk someone else might take it and use the knowledge they have of me for fuckery.
I use the ads on Amazon all the time to find things I wouldn't have known to or thought to look for. Maybe I don't need a automatic dog walker right now, but it's good to have been informed it exists. Maybe a neighbor will ask where to find one. I can now tell her I saw it on Amazon.
JESUS! FUCKITY! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUCK! It's just not possible to agree with something a company like Amazon does without sounding like a fucking shill. I don't see how, but the evidence is conclusive. I have to be wrong.
While we usually associate "facility" with just physical space, the (standard and legal) definition of the word it also includes the equipment necessary for doing something which extends the section to also include "virtual space" like a website. It's intended to target hackers but it's use of a word with a wide definition like "facility" rather than something more specific means that legally, bypassing an "adblock block" or telling others how to do so would be illegal under the law as it "intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility" by bypassing their requirement that you accept viewing their ads in return for consuming the content on their site.
So, either the Illinois law considers all photos containing faces "biometric identifiers"
It doesn't. The Illinois law they're using to sue considers face geometry scans a "biometric identifier", but it specifically excludes photographs as biometric identifiers.
The plaintiffs are claiming that the defendants digitally "scanned" the facial geometry from the photos, which exposes an ambiguity in the law and a Federal judge basically said he wasn't going to resolve ambiguities within the state's statute and left the issue in the hands of the state courts.
In the end, the suit is likely to fail, at least on the privacy issue. If it doesn't, it could make simply recognising someone in a photo a criminal act. While an involuntary basic human ability, it requires one to visually "scan" the photo and match it up to a mental database of "scanned" faces which the plaintiff's claim the law makes illegal. Of course, there's been far worse legal decisions so who knows? A positive outcome for the plaintiffs would certainly make many lawyers very, very happy.
It's doubtful that Newlin and her estate have kept up with the technical requirements of the 1909 Copyright Act to continue the copyright protection beyond the original 28-year copyright period. There's no record of renewal, or any notice at all in the Catalogs of Copyright Entries that I could find under "Warm Kitty" or Newlin's name. And while copyright could be renewed by an assignee, there's very specific rules and procedures that have to be followed in the renewal application for that to happen. It's doubtful Willis Music did what was needed to renew the copyright of the lyrics for Newlin. Rather, their copyright renewal would only affect publication, ownership and copyright of the lyrics held by the author which would only cover the lyrics when matched to the same particular public domain tune. Responsibility for retaining the rights to the lyrics alone would have fallen to Newlin, who did not apparently ever register a copyright on the lyrics, meaning her copyright would have expired 28 years after she wrote the poem.
So, the song (lyrics + music) as it appears in the book is certainly still copyrighted by Willis Music, but the lyrics by themselves are almost certainly public domain.
Few people bemoan the loss of favor of stone and metal tablets or papyrus scrolls for print. Paper won't be any more enduring to the public than those technologies were.
In 150 years, paper books will likely be a tiny niche market, at best, as people with sentimental and institutional attachments to paper die off and people get acclimated to whatever form of digital media consumption is most convenient at the time.
And while I don't own an 8-track player, a VCR, or a punch card reader but if I had media in those formats and wanted to convert them to a modern format, it wouldn't be anything close to impossible to do so now. It's unlikely it'll become so within 150 years, assuming human society doesn't regress or collapse before then, so file formats aren't a major concern for personal media.
One of my coworkers ended up paying a total of $1900 and spent 3 days locked up over a license plate light that wasn't "bright enough". He got pulled over and got a $96 ticket. Rather than fight it, he just paid it. But, 3 months later he was pulled over and arrested because while the ticket said $96, the total was actually $104 after a "processing fee". They never notified him of the difference but after 90 days, his outstanding $8 debt caused an arrest warrant to be issued and since he got arrested on a Friday night, he had to spend the entire weekend in lockup for which he was charged the additional ~$1800 on top of the $8 to pay for his weekend in jail.
I grew up in California, bouncing between the central SQ valley (Fresno area) and the bay area but have lived in Northwest Arkansas for about 15 years now while still returning to CA frequently. It's really not a bad place to live. Pretty much anywhere more than 10 miles from a major highway is serious banjo country, but the cities (mostly) aren't. Springdale is in the Bentonville to Fayetteville strip of Arkansas where Walmart's HQ is. The schools and healthcare in the area are well funded and are miles above what can be found in the rural areas that make up the majority of the state that skew overall rankings and data to make things seem a lot more backwards than they actually are. It also has a very low cost of living. A new 2500sq ft. "luxury" home on a quarter acre in Arkansas cost me $320k (~$1.6k/mo on a 30 year note). Our 820 sq ft SF apartment cost almost 2x as much a month in 1994.
Living here seems more like Sacramento or a SF suburb than the boondocks I expected when I moved here. For refugees, it's not a bad place to settle.
The decisions do belong to the public. But the printed and electronic collections of case law that exist are sometimes copyrightable because they contain proprietary annotations, case histories and pagination or weren't paid for by the public but licensed out to a private publisher.
Anyone can go out and get the decisions from public records and state law libraries, but with millions of pages of case law just among the major Federal and State courts; obtaining, formatting, and publishing all that data from the uncopyrightable (usually) original sources is a massive job.
The real issue I'm wondering is.. why? Google Scholar has most, if not all, of what Harvard is looking to put out online already in a searchable form along with a cite history (lists cases that have cited the case you're researching. Aka "Shepardizing") and there's also Findlaw, Justia, and several other free options. Another source is always nice, but it's certainly not revolutionary or even newsworthy.
Are you a patent attorney? Adding "on a computer" to something does not make it different. The difference between having info released online or via phone book is no more than the difference between being published in a New York City phone book versus being published in a Owensboro, Kentucky phone book. It's a difference in scale, not mechanics. A phone book gives people just as much malicious potential as someone releasing your personal info on an internet forum.
Regardless of the medium in which it's released, the likelihood of someone using the information maliciously is highly proportional to the number of people with access to that information who perceive you to be a douchebag. A Pediatrician who has their name, address and phone number plastered all over the internet is far less likely to have that information used maliciously than a paroled child molester who has the same info published in the Owensboro, Kentucky phone book would.
The only real difference is that online, people perceive themselves as being free from any real world consequences to their words and actions because they're less likely to have their personal information revealed when they spout off on an internet forum than they would if they showed up on their local news talking shit. Just because a Klan member wears a hood in public, doesn't mean he's free from the consequences if someone is somehow able to identify him.
The only real solution to doxxing is to try and behave online in a way that if your information is revealed, no one has any reason to want to use it maliciously.
Well, your rationale is "He's doing what I'm doing but he's not me thus he must die!" so discussing rationality with you seems doomed to futility as you are obviously insane and if you do have a concealed carry permit as you claim, the authorities should revoke that immediately as your comments have demonstrated that you being armed is a serious threat to public safety.
But for those who aren't skipping their meds, my rationale is if he draws his weapon while standing in line at Chipotle or walks in the door screaming he's gonna kill someone at Lowes, then you'd have justification to assume hostile intent. Otherwise, you should assume he just wants a burrito or some light bulbs and you should refrain from blowing his head off.
The problem I see is though, when a law abiding citizen walks into Lowe's or Chipotle's brandshing his piece as is his second amendment right and in his camos how are the other law abiding citizens in the same place going to know if he is a good gut or a bad guy?
Therein lies the problem. If I'm concealed carrying at the moment, they are going to have about a second to convince me they are not entering with harmful intent. At that point, it's now a really bad situation.
This is not a trivial problem.
It is a trivial problem. You and those like you merely have to stop assuming they're the only good person on Earth. Someone should have to prove they're entering with harmful intent before you assume they're not. Assuming they're bad until they somehow prove otherwise to you is a problem with you, not society or anyone else.
I'd think the frequency of a consumer converting to a power user is much rarer than the other way around. Most power users start off as power users as soon as they become computer literate. People don't often spend 10 years looking at cat videos on an eMachine and then suddenly decide they want to build their own computer. But a lot of power users do seem to get fed up with constantly chasing down benchmarks for new components when kids, work and life become more time consuming and all they want to do when they get home from work is watch some cat videos.
With the customer base of people who need what you're looking for being pretty much you, you're not likely going to ever find a better solution than the common solutions utilized by people who need PC access in multiple locations... Laptops and multiple computers. Every other solution is aimed at the much larger base of people who only need select features normally offered by a computer like video (Roku/Apple TV/Etc.), gaming (consoles), web browsing (phones and tablets) or basic screen mirroring for presentation purposes (AirTame. Which is not good for streaming HD video from upstairs. Roku+Plex or an HTPC would be better).
People didn't like the TSA screenings because they forced upon them by an agency whose employees could plainly be seen to be no more discreet or professional than a typical fast food employee and all for no obvious benefit to themselves. But, if the scanners were being offered voluntarily to improve the chances that someone's tux, wedding dress or jeans would fit like a custom tailored article of clothing at off-the-rack prices under the presumption that an automated system would be evaluating the results rather than being able to see the social misfits off to the side gawking at the scanned images like at the TSA; many, many people would be lined up around the block to get scanned.
I'm a 100% staunch advocate of building new nuclear power plants, so I'm not a nuclear fear monger. But even I have reservations about placing nuclear material in the Rockets used to launch science satellites as they'very been proven to be far less than 100% reliable in not exploding and dumping their payloads over a large area of the earth's surface and the upper atmosphere.
That's a bit like saying coders can just make a game then license the IP to TV stations, moviemakers, writers and merchandisers as a secondary revenue stream. It happens but it's rare enough that it may as well not exist for most. Musicians on the other hand almost all play gigs (as well as being able to sell their music to videogame makers, TV shows and movies), and the movie industry practically invented merchandising as well as other avenues of income.
That's like saying someone can go out and write books, get them published and sell enough copies to make a decent living doing it. It happens, but it's rare enough that it might as well not exist for most. "It's hard" doesn't refute the fact that it's possible. It's a lot more possible than increasing sales by targeting piracy.
Literary agents liaise between writers and publishers/producers etc. They have nothing to do with building up a fanbase, most authors do all of their marketbuilding themselves, in their own time, on their own dime.
I have a family member who is preparing to release a book at this very moment. Her literary agent's first action was to put together a marketing team to promote the book in order to grease the wheels in selling the book to a publisher. A good, modern literary agent also performs (or subcontracts) the duties of a manager and marketer as relying on just liaising with publishers vastly reduces their potential income where things like Amazon and iTunes are open to anyone with or without an agent or publishing deal and where a little buzz can vastly increase the publishing deals (and thus comission) they negotiate.
And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy.
Certainly established to the satisfaction of people who pirate books anyway.
Are you really one of those mindless idiots who jumps on the cock of the media conglomerates and believes that every connection to a torrent swarm is a lost sale? I didn't think there was really anyone who believed that and could actually get a computer to work, much less find their way to/.
Freely released books are a very different matter to piracy, especially from creators who can least afford it.
One of the first books I got for free was a the first piece of Twilight fan fiction from an unknown author on Smashwords who was certainly not a well known, filthy rich author at the time. The book wasn't my cup of tea, but it seems to have worked out fairly well for the author.
Company management mismanaged the company to the point that they had to fire a bunch of workers. They couldn't afford to pay the workers what they owed them and the shareholders weren't stupid enough to foot the bill so the executives could continue to draw a paycheck and bonuses while they continued to drive the company into the ground.
The company didn't suffer because the laws were weighted too heavily in the workers' favor. It failed because management sucked at running a business. Fucking the employees a little harder wouldn't have saved the company. It would only have allowed the management who fucked the business in the first place to collect a few more bonus checks while they sat around deciding which employees to fuck next.
Company management mismanaged the company to the point that they had to fire a bunch of workers. They couldn't afford to pay the workers what they owed them and the shareholders weren't stupid enough to foot the bill so the executives could continue to draw a paycheck and bonuses while they continued to drive the company into the ground. That the labor laws treat the workers equally to management only kept this from becoming a situation like so many others where the employees are left with nothing because the management take it all for themselves on their way out the door to relax in their summer home while they try to con their way into some other company's management structure so they can do it all over again.
what other means does a writer have to earn money beyond direct sales?
As far as secondary revenue streams go, authors can license their IP to TV, Movie and Video Game makers or they can sellmerchandise themselves.
But that requires they build a fanbase. And in that endeavor, a literary agent is far more beneficial than an industry trade group whose only interest in an individual author is whether they've paid their membership dues who goes out and does boneheaded things that are more likely to incite spite in burgeoning literary fans and thus encourage and spread piracy rather than stifle it.
And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy. People usually pirate things when buying isn't an option. I was no different. In my broke ass teens and twenties, I first got all my books from a library and then later when things like BBSs and gopher became available to me, via piracy. Authors didn't earn a dime from me for a couple decades, except perhaps via a few people who weren't as broke as me who might have bought books based on suggestions from me that I based on the books I borrowed or stole.
But what they did earn during those decades was my loyalty to their "brand". Now that I'm older and have a far greater amount of disposable income and far less patience for digging around looking for books I want on virii and annoying ad infested piracy sites, I'm a prolific purchaser of books (and other media). I've since bought many of the books I'd previously borrowed or stole. And most of the books I buy from new authors these days most often comes from authors who do things like release the first book in a trilogy for free or via word of mouth suggestions from people who are where I was in my teens and twenties and read stolen or borrowed versions of their books.
If "it's been studied" is absolute proof and ends all chance of danger and doubt, then I'm going to go fire up a cigarette that doesn't cause cancer, get in better shape by losing weight taking the safe and effective weight loss drug Fen-Phen and take a cruise to see the lip of our flat world!
Studies are often decent predictors, but history has shown time and time again that things that "studies" prove aren't harmful very, very often are harmful in mass implementation. The real question isn't whether something is safe or not, it's whether any harm it causes in implementation are manageable and/or outweighed by the benefits.
Trying to shut down talk of the potential for danger, often by calling those who do so unflattering names like "idiot" and "asshole", has been shown time and time again to be the stance of those who truly are idiotic assholes. Welcome to that not at all exclusive club!
Slashdot Mirror
Tons of companies sell technology that will allow a company to track the location of every RFID tag in a warehouse down to the inch.
Why couldn't a grocery store do the same? Stick on RFID on everything. Track where everything is every second, match it up to the register you were at when the items were bought, check the transaction record and match it video surveillance and from there they can easily match your name and customer info with every item you bought, looked at, hesitated in front, how you and wife seem to be getting along, how fat your kids are, and other things that some people find terrifying.
My view is, I don't give a fuck. Stopping them from using it for anything else is a fight for a different arena. It's not Safeway's fault they can't inform me of products I might actually want in the most efficient way possible without there being the risk someone else might take it and use the knowledge they have of me for fuckery.
I use the ads on Amazon all the time to find things I wouldn't have known to or thought to look for. Maybe I don't need a automatic dog walker right now, but it's good to have been informed it exists. Maybe a neighbor will ask where to find one. I can now tell her I saw it on Amazon.
JESUS! FUCKITY! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
It's just not possible to agree with something a company like Amazon does without sounding like a fucking shill. I don't see how, but the evidence is conclusive. I have to be wrong.
Hmmmm. All I got was that BT is cranking up data collection on phone calls and found something good to do with it so it doesn't sound nerfarious.
Again, take a look at sites already under the new owners' umbrella. You'll quickly realize you should have added a "yet" to your comment.
This kind of thing is the only reason I still buy stuff from Newegg instead of Amazon. So, in a way, they are getting some financial compensation.
Wooosh!!
While we usually associate "facility" with just physical space, the (standard and legal) definition of the word it also includes the equipment necessary for doing something which extends the section to also include "virtual space" like a website.
It's intended to target hackers but it's use of a word with a wide definition like "facility" rather than something more specific means that legally, bypassing an "adblock block" or telling others how to do so would be illegal under the law as it "intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility" by bypassing their requirement that you accept viewing their ads in return for consuming the content on their site.
So, either the Illinois law considers all photos containing faces "biometric identifiers"
It doesn't. The Illinois law they're using to sue considers face geometry scans a "biometric identifier", but it specifically excludes photographs as biometric identifiers.
The plaintiffs are claiming that the defendants digitally "scanned" the facial geometry from the photos, which exposes an ambiguity in the law and a Federal judge basically said he wasn't going to resolve ambiguities within the state's statute and left the issue in the hands of the state courts.
In the end, the suit is likely to fail, at least on the privacy issue. If it doesn't, it could make simply recognising someone in a photo a criminal act. While an involuntary basic human ability, it requires one to visually "scan" the photo and match it up to a mental database of "scanned" faces which the plaintiff's claim the law makes illegal. Of course, there's been far worse legal decisions so who knows? A positive outcome for the plaintiffs would certainly make many lawyers very, very happy.
It's maybe protected. But probably not.
It's doubtful that Newlin and her estate have kept up with the technical requirements of the 1909 Copyright Act to continue the copyright protection beyond the original 28-year copyright period.
There's no record of renewal, or any notice at all in the Catalogs of Copyright Entries that I could find under "Warm Kitty" or Newlin's name.
And while copyright could be renewed by an assignee, there's very specific rules and procedures that have to be followed in the renewal application for that to happen. It's doubtful Willis Music did what was needed to renew the copyright of the lyrics for Newlin. Rather, their copyright renewal would only affect publication, ownership and copyright of the lyrics held by the author which would only cover the lyrics when matched to the same particular public domain tune. Responsibility for retaining the rights to the lyrics alone would have fallen to Newlin, who did not apparently ever register a copyright on the lyrics, meaning her copyright would have expired 28 years after she wrote the poem.
So, the song (lyrics + music) as it appears in the book is certainly still copyrighted by Willis Music, but the lyrics by themselves are almost certainly public domain.
Few people bemoan the loss of favor of stone and metal tablets or papyrus scrolls for print. Paper won't be any more enduring to the public than those technologies were.
In 150 years, paper books will likely be a tiny niche market, at best, as people with sentimental and institutional attachments to paper die off and people get acclimated to whatever form of digital media consumption is most convenient at the time.
And while I don't own an 8-track player, a VCR, or a punch card reader but if I had media in those formats and wanted to convert them to a modern format, it wouldn't be anything close to impossible to do so now. It's unlikely it'll become so within 150 years, assuming human society doesn't regress or collapse before then, so file formats aren't a major concern for personal media.
One of my coworkers ended up paying a total of $1900 and spent 3 days locked up over a license plate light that wasn't "bright enough". He got pulled over and got a $96 ticket. Rather than fight it, he just paid it. But, 3 months later he was pulled over and arrested because while the ticket said $96, the total was actually $104 after a "processing fee". They never notified him of the difference but after 90 days, his outstanding $8 debt caused an arrest warrant to be issued and since he got arrested on a Friday night, he had to spend the entire weekend in lockup for which he was charged the additional ~$1800 on top of the $8 to pay for his weekend in jail.
That's "excessive".
I grew up in California, bouncing between the central SQ valley (Fresno area) and the bay area but have lived in Northwest Arkansas for about 15 years now while still returning to CA frequently. It's really not a bad place to live.
Pretty much anywhere more than 10 miles from a major highway is serious banjo country, but the cities (mostly) aren't. Springdale is in the Bentonville to Fayetteville strip of Arkansas where Walmart's HQ is. The schools and healthcare in the area are well funded and are miles above what can be found in the rural areas that make up the majority of the state that skew overall rankings and data to make things seem a lot more backwards than they actually are.
It also has a very low cost of living. A new 2500sq ft. "luxury" home on a quarter acre in Arkansas cost me $320k (~$1.6k/mo on a 30 year note). Our 820 sq ft SF apartment cost almost 2x as much a month in 1994.
Living here seems more like Sacramento or a SF suburb than the boondocks I expected when I moved here. For refugees, it's not a bad place to settle.
The decisions do belong to the public. But the printed and electronic collections of case law that exist are sometimes copyrightable because they contain proprietary annotations, case histories and pagination or weren't paid for by the public but licensed out to a private publisher.
Anyone can go out and get the decisions from public records and state law libraries, but with millions of pages of case law just among the major Federal and State courts; obtaining, formatting, and publishing all that data from the uncopyrightable (usually) original sources is a massive job.
The real issue I'm wondering is.. why? Google Scholar has most, if not all, of what Harvard is looking to put out online already in a searchable form along with a cite history (lists cases that have cited the case you're researching. Aka "Shepardizing") and there's also Findlaw, Justia, and several other free options. Another source is always nice, but it's certainly not revolutionary or even newsworthy.
Are you a patent attorney? Adding "on a computer" to something does not make it different. The difference between having info released online or via phone book is no more than the difference between being published in a New York City phone book versus being published in a Owensboro, Kentucky phone book. It's a difference in scale, not mechanics.
A phone book gives people just as much malicious potential as someone releasing your personal info on an internet forum.
Regardless of the medium in which it's released, the likelihood of someone using the information maliciously is highly proportional to the number of people with access to that information who perceive you to be a douchebag. A Pediatrician who has their name, address and phone number plastered all over the internet is far less likely to have that information used maliciously than a paroled child molester who has the same info published in the Owensboro, Kentucky phone book would.
The only real difference is that online, people perceive themselves as being free from any real world consequences to their words and actions because they're less likely to have their personal information revealed when they spout off on an internet forum than they would if they showed up on their local news talking shit. Just because a Klan member wears a hood in public, doesn't mean he's free from the consequences if someone is somehow able to identify him.
The only real solution to doxxing is to try and behave online in a way that if your information is revealed, no one has any reason to want to use it maliciously.
Well, your rationale is "He's doing what I'm doing but he's not me thus he must die!" so discussing rationality with you seems doomed to futility as you are obviously insane and if you do have a concealed carry permit as you claim, the authorities should revoke that immediately as your comments have demonstrated that you being armed is a serious threat to public safety.
But for those who aren't skipping their meds, my rationale is if he draws his weapon while standing in line at Chipotle or walks in the door screaming he's gonna kill someone at Lowes, then you'd have justification to assume hostile intent. Otherwise, you should assume he just wants a burrito or some light bulbs and you should refrain from blowing his head off.
The problem I see is though, when a law abiding citizen walks into Lowe's or Chipotle's brandshing his piece as is his second amendment right and in his camos how are the other law abiding citizens in the same place going to know if he is a good gut or a bad guy?
Therein lies the problem. If I'm concealed carrying at the moment, they are going to have about a second to convince me they are not entering with harmful intent. At that point, it's now a really bad situation.
This is not a trivial problem.
It is a trivial problem. You and those like you merely have to stop assuming they're the only good person on Earth.
Someone should have to prove they're entering with harmful intent before you assume they're not. Assuming they're bad until they somehow prove otherwise to you is a problem with you, not society or anyone else.
I'd think the frequency of a consumer converting to a power user is much rarer than the other way around.
Most power users start off as power users as soon as they become computer literate. People don't often spend 10 years looking at cat videos on an eMachine and then suddenly decide they want to build their own computer. But a lot of power users do seem to get fed up with constantly chasing down benchmarks for new components when kids, work and life become more time consuming and all they want to do when they get home from work is watch some cat videos.
With the customer base of people who need what you're looking for being pretty much you, you're not likely going to ever find a better solution than the common solutions utilized by people who need PC access in multiple locations... Laptops and multiple computers.
Every other solution is aimed at the much larger base of people who only need select features normally offered by a computer like video (Roku/Apple TV/Etc.), gaming (consoles), web browsing (phones and tablets) or basic screen mirroring for presentation purposes (AirTame. Which is not good for streaming HD video from upstairs. Roku+Plex or an HTPC would be better).
People didn't like the TSA screenings because they forced upon them by an agency whose employees could plainly be seen to be no more discreet or professional than a typical fast food employee and all for no obvious benefit to themselves.
But, if the scanners were being offered voluntarily to improve the chances that someone's tux, wedding dress or jeans would fit like a custom tailored article of clothing at off-the-rack prices under the presumption that an automated system would be evaluating the results rather than being able to see the social misfits off to the side gawking at the scanned images like at the TSA; many, many people would be lined up around the block to get scanned.
In what sort of situation are we supposed to get all of the mineral resources for such a society in a manner in which everyone will be happy?
By mining them from space.
I'm a 100% staunch advocate of building new nuclear power plants, so I'm not a nuclear fear monger. But even I have reservations about placing nuclear material in the Rockets used to launch science satellites as they'very been proven to be far less than 100% reliable in not exploding and dumping their payloads over a large area of the earth's surface and the upper atmosphere.
That's a bit like saying coders can just make a game then license the IP to TV stations, moviemakers, writers and merchandisers as a secondary revenue stream. It happens but it's rare enough that it may as well not exist for most. Musicians on the other hand almost all play gigs (as well as being able to sell their music to videogame makers, TV shows and movies), and the movie industry practically invented merchandising as well as other avenues of income.
That's like saying someone can go out and write books, get them published and sell enough copies to make a decent living doing it. It happens, but it's rare enough that it might as well not exist for most.
"It's hard" doesn't refute the fact that it's possible. It's a lot more possible than increasing sales by targeting piracy.
Literary agents liaise between writers and publishers/producers etc. They have nothing to do with building up a fanbase, most authors do all of their marketbuilding themselves, in their own time, on their own dime.
I have a family member who is preparing to release a book at this very moment. Her literary agent's first action was to put together a marketing team to promote the book in order to grease the wheels in selling the book to a publisher.
A good, modern literary agent also performs (or subcontracts) the duties of a manager and marketer as relying on just liaising with publishers vastly reduces their potential income where things like Amazon and iTunes are open to anyone with or without an agent or publishing deal and where a little buzz can vastly increase the publishing deals (and thus comission) they negotiate.
And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy.
Certainly established to the satisfaction of people who pirate books anyway.
Are you really one of those mindless idiots who jumps on the cock of the media conglomerates and believes that every connection to a torrent swarm is a lost sale? I didn't think there was really anyone who believed that and could actually get a computer to work, much less find their way to /.
Freely released books are a very different matter to piracy, especially from creators who can least afford it.
One of the first books I got for free was a the first piece of Twilight fan fiction from an unknown author on Smashwords who was certainly not a well known, filthy rich author at the time. The book wasn't my cup of tea, but it seems to have worked out fairly well for the author.
The company didn't suffer because the laws were weighted too heavily in the workers' favor. It failed because management sucked at running a business. Fucking the employees a little harder wouldn't have saved the company. It would only have allowed the management who fucked the business in the first place to collect a few more bonus checks while they sat around deciding which employees to fuck next.
Company management mismanaged the company to the point that they had to fire a bunch of workers. They couldn't afford to pay the workers what they owed them and the shareholders weren't stupid enough to foot the bill so the executives could continue to draw a paycheck and bonuses while they continued to drive the company into the ground.
That the labor laws treat the workers equally to management only kept this from becoming a situation like so many others where the employees are left with nothing because the management take it all for themselves on their way out the door to relax in their summer home while they try to con their way into some other company's management structure so they can do it all over again.
what other means does a writer have to earn money beyond direct sales?
As far as secondary revenue streams go, authors can license their IP to TV, Movie and Video Game makers or they can sell merchandise themselves.
But that requires they build a fanbase. And in that endeavor, a literary agent is far more beneficial than an industry trade group whose only interest in an individual author is whether they've paid their membership dues who goes out and does boneheaded things that are more likely to incite spite in burgeoning literary fans and thus encourage and spread piracy rather than stifle it.
And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy. People usually pirate things when buying isn't an option. I was no different. In my broke ass teens and twenties, I first got all my books from a library and then later when things like BBSs and gopher became available to me, via piracy. Authors didn't earn a dime from me for a couple decades, except perhaps via a few people who weren't as broke as me who might have bought books based on suggestions from me that I based on the books I borrowed or stole.
But what they did earn during those decades was my loyalty to their "brand". Now that I'm older and have a far greater amount of disposable income and far less patience for digging around looking for books I want on virii and annoying ad infested piracy sites, I'm a prolific purchaser of books (and other media). I've since bought many of the books I'd previously borrowed or stole. And most of the books I buy from new authors these days most often comes from authors who do things like release the first book in a trilogy for free or via word of mouth suggestions from people who are where I was in my teens and twenties and read stolen or borrowed versions of their books.
If "it's been studied" is absolute proof and ends all chance of danger and doubt, then I'm going to go fire up a cigarette that doesn't cause cancer, get in better shape by losing weight taking the safe and effective weight loss drug Fen-Phen and take a cruise to see the lip of our flat world!
Studies are often decent predictors, but history has shown time and time again that things that "studies" prove aren't harmful very, very often are harmful in mass implementation. The real question isn't whether something is safe or not, it's whether any harm it causes in implementation are manageable and/or outweighed by the benefits.
Trying to shut down talk of the potential for danger, often by calling those who do so unflattering names like "idiot" and "asshole", has been shown time and time again to be the stance of those who truly are idiotic assholes. Welcome to that not at all exclusive club!