And even though I find it reprehensible as well as counterproductive for a government entity to have exclusive copyright, it appears that the MTA is indeed entitled to enforce its rights. In the USA, only works produced by the US (Federal) Government are explicitly placed in the public domain.
What if they release hardware at a loss, hoping you'll pay for other software?
I've got a crappy business model too. My plan is to quit my job and sit at home playing my PSP all day, hoping to guilt-trip Sony into sending me a paycheck every week. I'll even buy some of their games with the money. It's win-win all around.
What's the real reason for getting the FBI involved?
It's very simple. The Republicans' most hardcore constituency is the Religious Far Right (RFR). Bush is quite willing to throw them a juicy bone like this because, as you said, the audience who is strongly in favor of "deviant" porn is very small, so it costs him very few negative votes and cements his undying support among the "Born Again" crowd. He could quite literally drop a nuclear bomb on San Francisco and the RFR would support him because he is one of them, doing the Lord's work.
And that last point is one not to be overlooked. From all credible reports, he is apparently a true believer himself. He's going after porn because he really hates porn.
The fact you heard it in a commercial means you have the right to it for free? That doesn't even make sense.
No, the fact that it is 40 years old means that the creators got whatever profit they should be entitled to. Music which has entered the common culture over a generation ago no longer should be "owned."
Furthermore, even if we accept that copyright ought to be immortal and that copyright violaton is tantamount to theft, the punishment should fit the crime. Running a red light is a potentially deadly action. So why is the punishment for that less onerous than the punishment for uploading some old Kraftwerk?
And finally, the legal system should not be used as a weapon for the wealthy corporations to bludgeon poor individuals. Regardless of what the offense may be.
Reducing inherent rights is an impossibility in the States
Sophistry. In the US, such rights as you have that are enumerated by the man-written Constitution exist or defined/interpreted by the Supreme Court. Rights that are not enumerated/defined/interpreted don't exist, pure and simple. God doesn't enter into the equation.
In fact, what you say is demonstrably false. For almost 100 years in the USA, citizens defined as "slaves" had no right to freedom. The man-written Constitution said so, and consequently, God's feelings had no force. And once they were freed, their owners had no "right" to compensation for their "property." Probably in violation of the Constitution, but nevertheless, God did not speak up. So just as in other countries, your rights are granted and taken away at the stroke of a pen, which is why it is just as important in the US as in other places to elect leaders who will respect the freedoms that you deem important. Ignoring that and taking false comfort in some doctrine of inherent rights will lead very much to the situation we see today, where rights outlined in the fifth and sixth amendments have just been eviscerated.
We all know this but I can't believe that PC World are actually saying it. They are one of the hardest sellers of extended warranties that I know.
FYI, PC World, the American magazine, and PC World, the UK Superstore, are completely unrelated establishments. The magazine does share a common ownership with the UK Mag "PC Advisor."
That would've been a nice troll, except for the fact that the "potatoe" incident happened in 1992. There were no web search engines, no sites like "dictionary.com" and hence no way for you to search on the internet for "thousands of references to 'potatoe.'"
That this turn of events is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of the concept of "intellectual property." It used to be that business methods were not patentable -- they were valuable information but not strictly proprietary. What you learned at one company was freely yours to take somewhere else. Now, post State Street, we live in a world where increasingly, every piece of information is owned, and anything novel that you could possibly create or learn while in the service of your employer necessarily belongs to your employer. Under such a regime, Microsoft is correct to assert that Lee would inevitably contain within his head some of their intellectual property.
It's easy to look at Microsoft as the bad guys, but the real problem here are intellectual property laws that are assisting corporations in gobbling up all remaining vestiges of the public domain.
Blah blah blah indeed. You're missing a large point. Let's be overly generous and assume that, as you say, America has always been this way. Guess what? This way simply isn't good enough anymore. It's time for America to do something different, because the status quo love-hate relationship with science is causing it to lose ground to hungrier, more ambitious nations. And being cavalier about it is sure to hasten the relative decline.
While we fiddle around with "Intelligent Design" and such, embers are starting to burn. Realize:
America has NOT always been the world's largest debtor nation.
America has NOT always consumed more energy than it produces.
America has NOT always had a decreasing number of science grads.
Still, I'll grant you one thing. We'll all likely be dead by the time America goes the way of Rome.
Not only that, we have a 3-1/2th choice: DVD+divx/mp4
Next gen mp4 players will certainly be able to render in pseudo hi-def, which will be "good enough" for the large percentage of people who don't have HD sets compatible with the latest DRM. And since they'll be mass-produced in China for a fraction of the cost of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, there's a chance those latter two formats will go the way of SACD/DVDA.
if you aren't acting to maximize shareholder value.
Frankly, it's disingenuous to keep throwing around that old meme without adding the rest of the phrase, "...in the long term." And without mentioning that management has almost complete discretion in deciding how to accomplish this goal. It would be practically unheard of, outside of actual malfeasance, for a corporate officer to wind up in jail because of share performance. Bankruptcies don't usually wind up with the officers in jail, after all.
no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
That's exactly what many fundamentalist Xtians believe. That the very reason why human beings are mortal is because when Adam sinned, God was forced to sentence him to death, and the sentence carried down to every man, woman and child. Hence the need for Jesus. By his sacrificing own his perfect life for the one which was lost through sin, humans were given a second chance to regain the everlasting life that was thrown away by Adam. Humans are still born into original sin and worthy of death, but by accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we get back the righteous state that was lost in Eden. Hence we're "born again." It is considered a slap in Jesus's face if we throw away the lives he died for by having abortions.
I'm not saying this reflects my own personal beliefs. Just getting you up to speed.
I can assure you that when considering an infinite scale and a finite probability, that it will happen.
I can assure you that you are incorrect. What you mean to say is that it will happen with probability one, or 100%. But in mathematics, that does NOT mean that any given event is guaranteed to happen. What it means is that the events will "almost surely" occur, i.e., the non-events will have a measure of zero. But our lives are zero probability events, yet here we are.
And furthermore, from a cosmological standpoint, it's still an open question (npi) as to whether the universe is infinite or not. An open or flat universe will be infinite spatially and temporally. A closed ("big crunch") universe will be finite. At this point it is unknown and probably will always be unknowable whether the universe is open or closed. Even if we are in an inflationary bubble, the universe as a whole might be in a different state -- we have know way of knowing for sure.
Pretty simple, but wrong. There's no guarantee that any specific event would happen, even in an infinite universe. Proof: Imagine an infinitely long string (Q) of random digits....12717284729072339981467821128764219872649876234 67...
It turns out that by chance, the digit "5" has never happened in this string, even though the string is infinite in extent. And it doesn't have to happen, either. In fact, I'd turn your argument around on you and say that if we accept that an infinite universe means that there an object with infinitesimal odds must come into existence, then we have to accept that string Q must exist. But within string Q itself is a demonstration that there an object with infinitesimal odds (any substring containing "5") does not have to come into existence. There's a contradiction, and the resolution is that there is no such rule that all possible things must happen in an infinite universe.
OK, that was far from rigorous. Nevertheless, I believe the point holds.
Otherwise the submission makes no sense. Bingo. I think the submitter was ignorant of what the existing rules and laws are, and erroneously thought that more rights were being taken away from us than already have been. And I can see now that you were simply arguing from the context of not belaboring the obvious, no pun intended.
How can that be extended to what a free person does on their own time?
Not that I'm agreeing with the law, but basically it boils down to this. Your employer absolutely cannot tell you what to do with your free time. What they can do is say, "Look, we don't wish to employ people who fraternize with hotel guests. If you agree with that, then you can work for us. If you don't agree with that, then work elsewhere." One could even make the argument that this is a reasonable rule for a security firm to have for its employees. If you become buddies with a hotel guest off duty, you might be inclined to look the other way while on duty if that guest is committing a crime.
The moral is this: In principle, you are at equal footing with your employer. If you want to fraternize with the hot babe in Room 537, then you can "fire" Guardsmark and do as you wish. Or, they can fire you. In practice, of course, you generally "need" your employer's money more than they need you, Intron, and so there is a power differential. If that bugs you for some reason, then you should support laws that advance the concerns of labor and unions. If it doesn't bug you, if you feel strongly confident in your position vis-a-vis your employer, then you should be against pro-labor rules, since they will help others at your expense.
This has everything to do with Section 7 of the NLRA!
If by "this" you mean the ruling itself, yes, obviously. But what I am pointing out is that the area where you have made a mistake is about something entirely different. Reread your original post. You unequivocally state that GUARDSMARK rules are merely a ban on fraternizing while in uniform. And that is simply not so -- they prohibit fraternization "on or off duty" regardless of uniform status, and they prohibit soliciting while in uniform.
The gist of the NLRB ruling is that the Guardsmark rules are not voidable simply because someone might (unreasonably) construe them as prohibiting union activites. I think in that respect we can agree. I also agree with you that the original writeup is highly misleading, since, as you say, anti-fraternization "rules" were legal before and remain legal.
Now, can you at least admit that you erred in originally writing that there is some issue of " in-uniform, but off duty, fraternization"? That is not the issue and never was.
I'm just going to add to the chorus of people who are trying to explain to you that you have made an error, when you said
The critical and key aspect of the ruling was that it allowed for the prevention of such inappropriate fraternization while in Guardsmark uniform.
Sorry, but this is completely wrong. This is no Guardsmark regulation against fraternization while in uniform. There are TWO SEPARATE UNRELATED rules that were up for review, General Order 18 against union activities ("solicitation") in uniform, and Regulation 4, against any sort of fraternization with coworkers. So in fact the NLRB is saying it is okay for Guardsmark to prevent its employees from hanging out together away from work and out of uniform.
Furthermore, you keep portentiously referring to "Section 7" as if it is some kind of support to your claim. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act is mercifully short enough to reproduce here in full: "Employees shall have the right to self- organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3)." It's just about union activities. It has nothing to do with fraternization in general and says nothing to bolster your argument.
Ordinarily I would still consider your post to be informative, but since you seem to be wilfully refusing to acknowledge your own mistake, which is clear as day to everyone else who has read the actual text of the decision, I think you should be modded down as a troll.
As a sibling post mentions, the screen is too small. QVGA is so 2002. Even Palm does better than that now. This thing needs to be full VGA 640x480 to gain any real traction in the market.
What will probably happen is that the owners of that model will be required to obtain a patch or take their player in for servicing in order to both update the hardware key and disable the hack. Your "revoked" ZXDVD601 will come back to you as a ZXDVD602. Manufacturers will bear the brunt of the expense of the repair, meaning that they will have a very strong incentive (unlike now) to make their units virtually unhackable.
Manufacturers who refuse to lock down their boxes securely will wind up seeing all their keys revoked and it will be impossible to purchase any kind of warranty/insurance coverage on their devices.
Slashdot Mirror
100% true. Anybody can send you a "bill." Happens all the time, and there's nothing you can really do about it, unless they either
a) sue you, in which case you can defend yourself and/or countersue,
or
b) report you to a credit agency, in which case you can sue them for damaging your credit.
But, by and large, a bill/receipt, unless it's been acknowledged by the debtor, is just a piece of paper.
3) They're broke, and they're issuing licenses to desperately seek money.
They're not broke, they've got a $933 million surplus.
And even though I find it reprehensible as well as counterproductive for a government entity to have exclusive copyright, it appears that the MTA is indeed entitled to enforce its rights. In the USA, only works produced by the US (Federal) Government are explicitly placed in the public domain.
What if they release hardware at a loss, hoping you'll pay for other software?
I've got a crappy business model too. My plan is to quit my job and sit at home playing my PSP all day, hoping to guilt-trip Sony into sending me a paycheck every week. I'll even buy some of their games with the money. It's win-win all around.
What's the real reason for getting the FBI involved?
It's very simple. The Republicans' most hardcore constituency is the Religious Far Right (RFR). Bush is quite willing to throw them a juicy bone like this because, as you said, the audience who is strongly in favor of "deviant" porn is very small, so it costs him very few negative votes and cements his undying support among the "Born Again" crowd. He could quite literally drop a nuclear bomb on San Francisco and the RFR would support him because he is one of them, doing the Lord's work.
And that last point is one not to be overlooked. From all credible reports, he is apparently a true believer himself. He's going after porn because he really hates porn.
The more you tighten your grip, RIAA, the more digital copies will slip through your fingers.
The fact you heard it in a commercial means you have the right to it for free? That doesn't even make sense.
No, the fact that it is 40 years old means that the creators got whatever profit they should be entitled to. Music which has entered the common culture over a generation ago no longer should be "owned."
Furthermore, even if we accept that copyright ought to be immortal and that copyright violaton is tantamount to theft, the punishment should fit the crime. Running a red light is a potentially deadly action. So why is the punishment for that less onerous than the punishment for uploading some old Kraftwerk?
And finally, the legal system should not be used as a weapon for the wealthy corporations to bludgeon poor individuals. Regardless of what the offense may be.
Reducing inherent rights is an impossibility in the States
Sophistry. In the US, such rights as you have that are enumerated by the man-written Constitution exist or defined/interpreted by the Supreme Court. Rights that are not enumerated/defined/interpreted don't exist, pure and simple. God doesn't enter into the equation.
In fact, what you say is demonstrably false. For almost 100 years in the USA, citizens defined as "slaves" had no right to freedom. The man-written Constitution said so, and consequently, God's feelings had no force. And once they were freed, their owners had no "right" to compensation for their "property." Probably in violation of the Constitution, but nevertheless, God did not speak up. So just as in other countries, your rights are granted and taken away at the stroke of a pen, which is why it is just as important in the US as in other places to elect leaders who will respect the freedoms that you deem important. Ignoring that and taking false comfort in some doctrine of inherent rights will lead very much to the situation we see today, where rights outlined in the fifth and sixth amendments have just been eviscerated.
"Let them eat inherent rights."
We all know this but I can't believe that PC World are actually saying it. They are one of the hardest sellers of extended warranties that I know.
FYI, PC World, the American magazine, and PC World, the UK Superstore, are completely unrelated establishments. The magazine does share a common ownership with the UK Mag "PC Advisor."
That would've been a nice troll, except for the fact that the "potatoe" incident happened in 1992. There were no web search engines, no sites like "dictionary.com" and hence no way for you to search on the internet for "thousands of references to 'potatoe.'"
That this turn of events is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of the concept of "intellectual property." It used to be that business methods were not patentable -- they were valuable information but not strictly proprietary. What you learned at one company was freely yours to take somewhere else. Now, post State Street , we live in a world where increasingly, every piece of information is owned, and anything novel that you could possibly create or learn while in the service of your employer necessarily belongs to your employer. Under such a regime, Microsoft is correct to assert that Lee would inevitably contain within his head some of their intellectual property.
It's easy to look at Microsoft as the bad guys, but the real problem here are intellectual property laws that are assisting corporations in gobbling up all remaining vestiges of the public domain.
Blah blah blah indeed. You're missing a large point. Let's be overly generous and assume that, as you say, America has always been this way. Guess what? This way simply isn't good enough anymore. It's time for America to do something different, because the status quo love-hate relationship with science is causing it to lose ground to hungrier, more ambitious nations. And being cavalier about it is sure to hasten the relative decline.
While we fiddle around with "Intelligent Design" and such, embers are starting to burn. Realize:
America has NOT always been the world's largest debtor nation.
America has NOT always consumed more energy than it produces.
America has NOT always had a decreasing number of science grads.
Still, I'll grant you one thing. We'll all likely be dead by the time America goes the way of Rome.
we DO have a 3rd choice: DVD
Not only that, we have a 3-1/2th choice: DVD+divx/mp4
Next gen mp4 players will certainly be able to render in pseudo hi-def, which will be "good enough" for the large percentage of people who don't have HD sets compatible with the latest DRM. And since they'll be mass-produced in China for a fraction of the cost of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, there's a chance those latter two formats will go the way of SACD/DVDA.
I'd mod you back up hawkeye_82, if I could. Obviously concealed humor doesn't work as well on /. as it does on Flickr.
if you aren't acting to maximize shareholder value.
Frankly, it's disingenuous to keep throwing around that old meme without adding the rest of the phrase, "...in the long term." And without mentioning that management has almost complete discretion in deciding how to accomplish this goal. It would be practically unheard of, outside of actual malfeasance, for a corporate officer to wind up in jail because of share performance. Bankruptcies don't usually wind up with the officers in jail, after all.
Stopping people from accessing desired materials is the POLAR OPPOSITE of a librarian's responsibility.
Things seem to be heating up around here. A smidgen over four hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit, even.
As we usher in a new era of reduced costs and consumer savings!!!!1!1
no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
That's exactly what many fundamentalist Xtians believe. That the very reason why human beings are mortal is because when Adam sinned, God was forced to sentence him to death, and the sentence carried down to every man, woman and child. Hence the need for Jesus. By his sacrificing own his perfect life for the one which was lost through sin, humans were given a second chance to regain the everlasting life that was thrown away by Adam. Humans are still born into original sin and worthy of death, but by accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we get back the righteous state that was lost in Eden. Hence we're "born again." It is considered a slap in Jesus's face if we throw away the lives he died for by having abortions.
I'm not saying this reflects my own personal beliefs. Just getting you up to speed.
I can assure you that when considering an infinite scale and a finite probability, that it will happen.
I can assure you that you are incorrect. What you mean to say is that it will happen with probability one, or 100%. But in mathematics, that does NOT mean that any given event is guaranteed to happen. What it means is that the events will "almost surely" occur, i.e., the non-events will have a measure of zero. But our lives are zero probability events, yet here we are.
And furthermore, from a cosmological standpoint, it's still an open question (npi) as to whether the universe is infinite or not. An open or flat universe will be infinite spatially and temporally. A closed ("big crunch") universe will be finite. At this point it is unknown and probably will always be unknowable whether the universe is open or closed. Even if we are in an inflationary bubble, the universe as a whole might be in a different state -- we have know way of knowing for sure.
Pretty simple, but wrong. There's no guarantee that any specific event would happen, even in an infinite universe. Proof: Imagine an infinitely long string (Q) of random digits. ...12717284729072339981467821128764219872649876234 67...
It turns out that by chance, the digit "5" has never happened in this string, even though the string is infinite in extent. And it doesn't have to happen, either. In fact, I'd turn your argument around on you and say that if we accept that an infinite universe means that there an object with infinitesimal odds must come into existence, then we have to accept that string Q must exist. But within string Q itself is a demonstration that there an object with infinitesimal odds (any substring containing "5") does not have to come into existence. There's a contradiction, and the resolution is that there is no such rule that all possible things must happen in an infinite universe.
OK, that was far from rigorous. Nevertheless, I believe the point holds.
Otherwise the submission makes no sense. Bingo. I think the submitter was ignorant of what the existing rules and laws are, and erroneously thought that more rights were being taken away from us than already have been. And I can see now that you were simply arguing from the context of not belaboring the obvious, no pun intended.
I apologize for calling you a "troll" earlier.
How can that be extended to what a free person does on their own time?
Not that I'm agreeing with the law, but basically it boils down to this. Your employer absolutely cannot tell you what to do with your free time. What they can do is say, "Look, we don't wish to employ people who fraternize with hotel guests. If you agree with that, then you can work for us. If you don't agree with that, then work elsewhere." One could even make the argument that this is a reasonable rule for a security firm to have for its employees. If you become buddies with a hotel guest off duty, you might be inclined to look the other way while on duty if that guest is committing a crime.
The moral is this: In principle, you are at equal footing with your employer. If you want to fraternize with the hot babe in Room 537, then you can "fire" Guardsmark and do as you wish. Or, they can fire you. In practice, of course, you generally "need" your employer's money more than they need you, Intron, and so there is a power differential. If that bugs you for some reason, then you should support laws that advance the concerns of labor and unions. If it doesn't bug you, if you feel strongly confident in your position vis-a-vis your employer, then you should be against pro-labor rules, since they will help others at your expense.
This has everything to do with Section 7 of the NLRA!
If by "this" you mean the ruling itself, yes, obviously. But what I am pointing out is that the area where you have made a mistake is about something entirely different. Reread your original post. You unequivocally state that GUARDSMARK rules are merely a ban on fraternizing while in uniform. And that is simply not so -- they prohibit fraternization "on or off duty" regardless of uniform status, and they prohibit soliciting while in uniform.
The gist of the NLRB ruling is that the Guardsmark rules are not voidable simply because someone might (unreasonably) construe them as prohibiting union activites. I think in that respect we can agree. I also agree with you that the original writeup is highly misleading, since, as you say, anti-fraternization "rules" were legal before and remain legal.
Now, can you at least admit that you erred in originally writing that there is some issue of " in-uniform, but off duty, fraternization"?
That is not the issue and never was.
I'm just going to add to the chorus of people who are trying to explain to you that you have made an error, when you said
The critical and key aspect of the ruling was that it allowed for the prevention of such inappropriate fraternization while in Guardsmark uniform.
Sorry, but this is completely wrong. This is no Guardsmark regulation against fraternization while in uniform. There are TWO SEPARATE UNRELATED rules that were up for review, General Order 18 against union activities ("solicitation") in uniform, and Regulation 4, against any sort of fraternization with coworkers. So in fact the NLRB is saying it is okay for Guardsmark to prevent its employees from hanging out together away from work and out of uniform.
Furthermore, you keep portentiously referring to "Section 7" as if it is some kind of support to your claim. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act is mercifully short enough to reproduce here in full: "Employees shall have the right to self- organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3)." It's just about union activities. It has nothing to do with fraternization in general and says nothing to bolster your argument.
Ordinarily I would still consider your post to be informative, but since you seem to be wilfully refusing to acknowledge your own mistake, which is clear as day to everyone else who has read the actual text of the decision, I think you should be modded down as a troll.
As a sibling post mentions, the screen is too small. QVGA is so 2002. Even Palm does better than that now. This thing needs to be full VGA 640x480 to gain any real traction in the market.
What will probably happen is that the owners of that model will be required to obtain a patch or take their player in for servicing in order to both update the hardware key and disable the hack. Your "revoked" ZXDVD601 will come back to you as a ZXDVD602. Manufacturers will bear the brunt of the expense of the repair, meaning that they will have a very strong incentive (unlike now) to make their units virtually unhackable.
Manufacturers who refuse to lock down their boxes securely will wind up seeing all their keys revoked and it will be impossible to purchase any kind of warranty/insurance coverage on their devices.
It's actually a well thought-out evil plan.