Punishing those that violate the law is only possible if we have a means for determining that they violated the law. Theoretically, a genetic database containing information on all our citizens could be classified as a state secret, and anyone attempting to sue for information about it (in an attempt to determine any such wrongdoing) could be stonewalled under the same state secrets doctrine that both Bush and Obama have been using for years (specifically with regards to surveillance of US citizens).
I'm generally supportive of the researcher's idea, just as I'm generally supportive of the idea of a national ID card. But there are serious hurdles that have to be addressed before we could put something like this into practice, and saying "we'll just punish those that violate the law", even when the violators would amount to an entire institution of the US Government with no transparency and no oversight, is just naive.
Say there was a website you enjoyed visiting on a daily basis that provided you with news content that's relevant to you. They have no advertising.
One day, they realize they can no longer afford to continue without revenue (probably Day 1). They give you three choices: pay a subscription fee (with the cost being determined by how much they need to make to maintain business operations (possibly including a reasonable profit, or at least earnings in order to expand their content), divided by how many people are willing to pay it); view ads while using their site (disabling any viewing if you have an ad blocker); or go elsewhere (where elsewhere might not exist without the same options). Which one do you choose?
Me, I'll take the ads. I could turn off Slashdot advertising but I don't. If the ads get too obnoxious, I'll find another site where the ads aren't so bad, or I'll leave entirely. But I won't block the ads. See, I recognize that if the website derives the revenue they need to survive from advertising, and everyone who uses the site blocks ads, then no revenue is generated, and either the site closes (or at least suffers horribly in quality) or moves to a subscription model. Thanks, but I'd rather keep the site free.
I don't disagree that you're not obligated to give a site money, but I hope you realize that if your war on ads succeeds, and you win people over to your point of view, then all of the things you love on the internet will require a subscription, and you'll be forced to pay up or go elsewhere. And if enough people choose to go elsewhere, then the subscription fee will start high and possibly keep getting higher. If a sustainable price point can't be found, then the site will fail.
Amen. For example, I'm never going to use E-trade, or any other product that feels the need to use talking babies in their advertisements. In fact, I've had cases where I've been using a product and then found their ads so terrible that I've switched to a competitor.
Subway, you earned my business when Quiznos was making some of the dumbest ads on the planet a few years ago. But you've lost it again with that idiotic $5 song. Now I try to find non-chain sandwich places whenever possible.
Right, and for the clueless masses, you make sure that all your machines come pre-loaded with MSIE and not Firefox/Chrome/et al. And any business logic web applications specific to your hospital, you make sure they're fully functional in MSIE, and maybe you don't care if they're not functional in Firefox. But if a tech-savvy member of your medical staff wants to use Firefox to browse the latest issue of some popular medical journal, you shouldn't be sending him cease and desist letters. TFS even goes further than that, saying that "comments promoting other Operating Systems" are prohibited. That's even worse than having certain software restricted from your machines... now your opinions are being pre-squelched!
Point being, if this was just for the sake of reducing support costs, they could have handled it intelligently, and instead they cracked the whip way too hard.
There's a massive difference between saying that you're only offering support for a single browser and FORCIBLY REMOVING any other browsers found on a user's computer. I'd have less of an issue with this if the hospital's IT department had said "Here's the list of applications/OSes we support, anything else you have to fix yourself" and proceeded to list only MS products. But to persecute anyone who chooses an alternative crosses the line in a big way.
In order to conclusively prove which one of you is correct, I'd like to conduct a simple experiment in which we set hair on fire. One of you gets to be in the control group... which will it be?
Your logic only applies if the number of people who decide not to buy the game because of its DRM exceeds the number of people who decide to buy the game because they can't figure out how to pirate their way around the DRM. The better the DRM, the greater the likelihood of the company making a profit through its inclusion. (Yes, you also have to offset by the cost of developing the DRM in the first place, but as one successful DRM process can be tied to almost every game they produce, that value is potentially very small.)
Of course, both of these values are nebulous and almost impossible to accurately gauge.
I really can't see why you would want to drink industrial alcohol. To me, as I said, the very fact that you want to drink what is a poison, suggests that you got a problem and apparently society at times thinks it needs to protect people against themselves.
I applaud you for being such a stoic resister of earthly pleasures. Can I assume that you apply this same logic to the rest of your actions? Have you ever eaten fatty foods? Candy? Used prescription drugs of almost any kind? Like alcohol and hard drugs, all of the things I just mentioned can be unhealthy in small amounts and toxic in large amounts. And all of them can be considered addictive to one degree or another.
Frankly, if you see what current drugs are doing in some areas, I can see the logic. You can't tell me the ghettos of this world wouldn't be better if there was no drug trade. Legalize it all? Sure, you could argue that with me, if your eyes weren't the size of saucers and you weren't twitching because you haven't had your fix yet.
IANADrug User, but I can absolutely say that the slums of the United States would indeed be better off if drugs were decriminalized. The large majority of urban violence is tied directly to the profits derived from the illegal drug trade. If such drugs were available in pharmacies rather than street corners, said violence levels would drop precipitously... perhaps not overnight, but pull out the major revenue stream for organized crime and its impact will be minimalized. Further, through legalizing the drug trade, we also gain the ability to regulate it. We can eliminate the possibility of poisonous additives that cause so many drug-related deaths, and we can establish limits on the potency, to help break the cycle of increasing addiction, where the user needs more and more each time just to get the same effect. Who would go buy possibly tainted drugs from the man on the corner when they could get them cheaper and safer from the drugstore down the street?
To really address the inner-city crime problem, we'll also need to address our inane laws against prostitution and gambling, but if all three of those profit centers disappeared, most organized crime would fall apart. Sure, we'd still have to fight against weapons trafficking, human slavery, and some of the nastier sides of the underworld, but there simply wouldn't be enough money available to support the same number of people as there is today... and we'd be able to free up a ton of our police manpower to focus on the remaining problems.
For those who want to discuss freedom in a democracy. Grow up. Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority voting group. There is no freedom when you got more then 1 person. Never can be. All you can do is make a large portion of the people not run into to many restrictions during their life. I am free? Fine, so I can piss on your carpet can I? Thought so.
Is it your lifelong desire to live under a system that allows you to urinate on someone else's property? If so, then you're right, democracy is not for you.
No, Christianity is defined by its principles, NOT its "followers". The logical distinction between the fallacy you presented and the current case is that being a Scotsman is an intrinsic property of a human being that cannot be changed, while being a Christian is an individual's elective choice and can be changed. (Yes, I'm defining Scotsman as one who was born a Scot, not allowing for the possibility of emigration from one country to another, but that's the premise on which the fallacy is built.)
You can definitely make the argument that someone who claims to be a Christian but doesn't adhere to the tenets of Christianity is not a Christian, just as you can make the argument that someone who claims to be a communist but doesn't adhere to the tenets of communism is not a communist.
EVERY movement is founded on the principle of "Do what you're told", even if "what you're told" is to rebel against authority, or to think for yourself and make your own decisions. Every movement is a series of principles, and all followers of the movement obey those principles... else they aren't really followers of the movement.
In our democratic system, laws are often enacted to protect the rights of the minority, even when the majority would not necessarily support such laws. Our history is littered with examples of our legislators standing up and supporting oppressed minorities (blacks, women, homosexuals, the handicapped, etc.). The fundamental question here is not whether or not the majority believe marijuana use should be illegal; it's whether or not our government is within its charter to enact such a law. Marijuana use, in and of itself, harms no one but the user. Yes, we would have to enact/enforce laws regarding the use of marijuana while driving, smoking in a public place, etc. etc. to ensure public safety; no one is really contesting that point. But the base case for marijuana use (a guy sitting at home smoking up on his couch) doesn't inflict harm on or violate the rights of any other person.
So: is the government mandated with the responsibility to protect an individual citizen from the consequences of his own decisions, if those consequences would not result in harming anyone but himself? It's a debatable point; I say no. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Actually a backup generator would be completely unnecessary in this scenario. The reason you need a backup generator is because you are relying on grid power, and if it goes out you need to generate the electricity yourself.
The reason to need a backup generator is in the event of a failure of your main power source. It doesn't matter if your main power source is the electrical grid or a Bloom Box; it has the potential to fail.
However, if the Bloom Box was your main power source, you could certainly have a second one as your backup, or some sort of distributed system that would account for the potential failure of a single node.
Anyone who crosses the line into belief that "I have the right to take what's yours" ceases to be an Objectivist, regardless of whether they still consider themselves to be one. The first statement ("I have the right to keep what's mine") is a derivation of the core statement ("A person has the right to keep the products of his or her labor", for simplification's sake), and if you don't apply it equally across all persons, then you're not an Objectivist.
By contrast, this is the first news I plan to share with my wife when I get home tonight. Then, at the dinner table, we will have a long, detailed conversation analyzing our lives, attempting to decide:
1. Which activities we can sacrifice (sleeping and eating are obviously curtailed, but how long can we really go without cleaning the kitchen?)
2. Which people we can cut out of our lives (sorry guys, can't come out tonight... just one more turn...)
The true test of her addiction: will this news convince her to delay plans for our first pregnancy? Odds are about 50/50 right now.
In a statement issued to Wired.com, Google maintains that it warned the affected music bloggers after each of the complaints that led to deletion
Google says every notice e-mailed to bloggers included the URLs of the posts in question, and the notices we’ve seen do include the URLs
“Each e-mail includes information about the risks regarding repeat offenses and a link to our DMCA policy page with instructions on how to file a counter-claim,” Google spokeswoman Sara Jew-Lim told Wired.com. “The e-mail will also specifically identify the post or posts in question and will include a link to ChilingEffects.org so the blogger can view the actual complaint we received.”
So, Google sent out notices to the offending blogs; they include a URL to the offending material; they include their DMCA policy; and they TELL THE BLOGGER WHAT TO DO NEXT. What more do you fucking want from them?
This is like being issued a warning that you're parked in an illegal spot and if you keep doing it, your car will be towed. You get one warning and ignore it; you get another warning and ignore it; you get another warning and ignore it; then suddenly your car is towed and you start bitching and moaning. You were told what would happen!
I sympathize with the bloggers who lost their sites, but I echo the comments made by others: it's YOUR responsibility to back up anything that's precious to you. The bloggers that keep their own archive of their sites are protected from losing all their hard work due to legal problems, server troubles, or any other lost data disaster.
Anyone who is using this incident to further their own hatred of Google is doing everyone a disservice; aim that hatred at the corrupt music industry where it belongs. If you're going to raise hell over this, raise hell to the lawmakers who can do something about the state of copyright law in the US. I agree with the prevailing sentiment in these comments: until there are penalties instituted for issuing a false DMCA takedown notice, NOTHING will improve.
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces Google to take these actions — otherwise, it would lose the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” clause and could be found liable for any copyright infringement on its blogging networks.
and
after an unquantified number of complaints — valid or otherwise — the law forces Google (or any other blogging platform) to terminate the accounts of “repeat offenders,” even if their only mistake was not to file paperwork against the accusations of an anonymous robot — sad and wrong, but mandated by current law.
So... why do you fault Google for this, rather than the IFPI/RIAA? Do you think that "don't be evil" translates to "knowingly violate the (admittedly crappy) law"? I can't imagine how Google opening itself to a RIAA lawsuit would be beneficial to anyone involved in this whole mess.
Not true at all. Speaking as that rare breed who is both a sports nerd and a fantasy/gaming nerd, the method of information retention is the same in both cases. Honestly, it's all about how much you care about the subject in question, and how much time and energy you invest in it, and to some extent your natural intelligence (specifically your ability to retain any information at all). I'm terrible at remembering to pay bills on time (thank you, auto-pay!), or that I've got a meeting at 10 AM tomorrow morning, or that we're out of milk and I need to pick some up from the store on the way home. I'm terrible at remembering those things because on some fundamental level I just don't care about any of them, even though my finances and my career are important to me and I love drinking milk. I can't define why those important things don't typically make any impression on my memory, but I can still name most or all of the main characters in David Eddings' Belgariad or any of a number of other fantasy novel series, and I can describe the tactics I used to beat some of the hardest battles in Baldur's Gate 2 (down to the actions of each specific member of my party, based on which members I chose to use in that particular play through the game), or the exact rules text of a Magic: the Gathering card which I don't even own and haven't played with or against for over a decade.
And by the same token, my favorite football team is in need of a wide receiver in this year's draft, and so I can tell you that Dez Bryant went to Oklahoma State and will probably go in the top ten picks of the draft. I can name another handful of the best receivers available, where they went to college, and whether or not they'd be a good fit for my team. And the NFL draft is months away. What's worse, I can tell you that I still remember wanting my team to draft Marcus McNeil, who went to Auburn and didn't allow a sack in four seasons there, because we needed a great tackle to anchor our offensive line. My team didn't draft Marcus McNeil (he went to the Chargers), and so the fact that he went to Auburn and didn't allow a sack (information that wasn't really relevant to my life to start with) should have LONG since been bumped out of my brain, in favor of things like that meeting at 10 AM tomorrow, or the names of members of my wife's extended family (no, I still don't know all of them yet, which leads to some very awkward moments at her family get-togethers).
Sports nerds (which are NOT the same as jocks; you can be one, both, or neither) have the same memory muscles as other types of nerds. We retain tons of information that even we know is irrelevant, like the key members of our fantasy team that went undefeated five years ago, and yet we can't get rid of it even if we wanted to. It's etched in our brains, perhaps forever. And it doesn't take a photographic memory to make that happen; just a really, really poor system of memory prioritization.
The fundamental flaw in this thinking is that reducing labor costs will reduce spending. In many industries, this would be true. In the software development industry, not so much.
A really great developer or small team of developers could produce a great application in six months, whereas a huge team of very cheap developers might not be able to replicate that application in five years.
I'm fully in support of drastic reductions to government spending, and the entire project is probably not worth doing and should be canned. But for those instances where government-sponsored software development is required, it's appropriate to spend money up-front on quality in order to reduce total costs over the lifespan of the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Punishing those that violate the law is only possible if we have a means for determining that they violated the law. Theoretically, a genetic database containing information on all our citizens could be classified as a state secret, and anyone attempting to sue for information about it (in an attempt to determine any such wrongdoing) could be stonewalled under the same state secrets doctrine that both Bush and Obama have been using for years (specifically with regards to surveillance of US citizens).
I'm generally supportive of the researcher's idea, just as I'm generally supportive of the idea of a national ID card. But there are serious hurdles that have to be addressed before we could put something like this into practice, and saying "we'll just punish those that violate the law", even when the violators would amount to an entire institution of the US Government with no transparency and no oversight, is just naive.
And I just used up all my mod points. Mod parent up!
Greatest. Product. Name. Ever.
Say there was a website you enjoyed visiting on a daily basis that provided you with news content that's relevant to you. They have no advertising.
One day, they realize they can no longer afford to continue without revenue (probably Day 1). They give you three choices: pay a subscription fee (with the cost being determined by how much they need to make to maintain business operations (possibly including a reasonable profit, or at least earnings in order to expand their content), divided by how many people are willing to pay it); view ads while using their site (disabling any viewing if you have an ad blocker); or go elsewhere (where elsewhere might not exist without the same options). Which one do you choose?
Me, I'll take the ads. I could turn off Slashdot advertising but I don't. If the ads get too obnoxious, I'll find another site where the ads aren't so bad, or I'll leave entirely. But I won't block the ads. See, I recognize that if the website derives the revenue they need to survive from advertising, and everyone who uses the site blocks ads, then no revenue is generated, and either the site closes (or at least suffers horribly in quality) or moves to a subscription model. Thanks, but I'd rather keep the site free.
I don't disagree that you're not obligated to give a site money, but I hope you realize that if your war on ads succeeds, and you win people over to your point of view, then all of the things you love on the internet will require a subscription, and you'll be forced to pay up or go elsewhere. And if enough people choose to go elsewhere, then the subscription fee will start high and possibly keep getting higher. If a sustainable price point can't be found, then the site will fail.
Amen. For example, I'm never going to use E-trade, or any other product that feels the need to use talking babies in their advertisements. In fact, I've had cases where I've been using a product and then found their ads so terrible that I've switched to a competitor.
Subway, you earned my business when Quiznos was making some of the dumbest ads on the planet a few years ago. But you've lost it again with that idiotic $5 song. Now I try to find non-chain sandwich places whenever possible.
Right, and for the clueless masses, you make sure that all your machines come pre-loaded with MSIE and not Firefox/Chrome/et al. And any business logic web applications specific to your hospital, you make sure they're fully functional in MSIE, and maybe you don't care if they're not functional in Firefox. But if a tech-savvy member of your medical staff wants to use Firefox to browse the latest issue of some popular medical journal, you shouldn't be sending him cease and desist letters. TFS even goes further than that, saying that "comments promoting other Operating Systems" are prohibited. That's even worse than having certain software restricted from your machines... now your opinions are being pre-squelched!
Point being, if this was just for the sake of reducing support costs, they could have handled it intelligently, and instead they cracked the whip way too hard.
If you're going to parody an anal-retentive /. spelling/grammar nazi, DO IT RIGHT GODDAMMIT :)
Which would be great, except you're still not spelling "vicious" correctly.
There's a massive difference between saying that you're only offering support for a single browser and FORCIBLY REMOVING any other browsers found on a user's computer. I'd have less of an issue with this if the hospital's IT department had said "Here's the list of applications/OSes we support, anything else you have to fix yourself" and proceeded to list only MS products. But to persecute anyone who chooses an alternative crosses the line in a big way.
If you put me in a secluded environment for six months with no video games, I'm pretty #&%$ing likely to become violent.
In order to conclusively prove which one of you is correct, I'd like to conduct a simple experiment in which we set hair on fire. One of you gets to be in the control group... which will it be?
Your logic only applies if the number of people who decide not to buy the game because of its DRM exceeds the number of people who decide to buy the game because they can't figure out how to pirate their way around the DRM. The better the DRM, the greater the likelihood of the company making a profit through its inclusion. (Yes, you also have to offset by the cost of developing the DRM in the first place, but as one successful DRM process can be tied to almost every game they produce, that value is potentially very small.)
Of course, both of these values are nebulous and almost impossible to accurately gauge.
I really can't see why you would want to drink industrial alcohol. To me, as I said, the very fact that you want to drink what is a poison, suggests that you got a problem and apparently society at times thinks it needs to protect people against themselves.
I applaud you for being such a stoic resister of earthly pleasures. Can I assume that you apply this same logic to the rest of your actions? Have you ever eaten fatty foods? Candy? Used prescription drugs of almost any kind? Like alcohol and hard drugs, all of the things I just mentioned can be unhealthy in small amounts and toxic in large amounts. And all of them can be considered addictive to one degree or another.
Frankly, if you see what current drugs are doing in some areas, I can see the logic. You can't tell me the ghettos of this world wouldn't be better if there was no drug trade. Legalize it all? Sure, you could argue that with me, if your eyes weren't the size of saucers and you weren't twitching because you haven't had your fix yet.
IANADrug User, but I can absolutely say that the slums of the United States would indeed be better off if drugs were decriminalized. The large majority of urban violence is tied directly to the profits derived from the illegal drug trade. If such drugs were available in pharmacies rather than street corners, said violence levels would drop precipitously... perhaps not overnight, but pull out the major revenue stream for organized crime and its impact will be minimalized. Further, through legalizing the drug trade, we also gain the ability to regulate it. We can eliminate the possibility of poisonous additives that cause so many drug-related deaths, and we can establish limits on the potency, to help break the cycle of increasing addiction, where the user needs more and more each time just to get the same effect. Who would go buy possibly tainted drugs from the man on the corner when they could get them cheaper and safer from the drugstore down the street?
To really address the inner-city crime problem, we'll also need to address our inane laws against prostitution and gambling, but if all three of those profit centers disappeared, most organized crime would fall apart. Sure, we'd still have to fight against weapons trafficking, human slavery, and some of the nastier sides of the underworld, but there simply wouldn't be enough money available to support the same number of people as there is today... and we'd be able to free up a ton of our police manpower to focus on the remaining problems.
For those who want to discuss freedom in a democracy. Grow up. Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority voting group. There is no freedom when you got more then 1 person. Never can be. All you can do is make a large portion of the people not run into to many restrictions during their life. I am free? Fine, so I can piss on your carpet can I? Thought so.
Is it your lifelong desire to live under a system that allows you to urinate on someone else's property? If so, then you're right, democracy is not for you.
No, Christianity is defined by its principles, NOT its "followers". The logical distinction between the fallacy you presented and the current case is that being a Scotsman is an intrinsic property of a human being that cannot be changed, while being a Christian is an individual's elective choice and can be changed. (Yes, I'm defining Scotsman as one who was born a Scot, not allowing for the possibility of emigration from one country to another, but that's the premise on which the fallacy is built.)
You can definitely make the argument that someone who claims to be a Christian but doesn't adhere to the tenets of Christianity is not a Christian, just as you can make the argument that someone who claims to be a communist but doesn't adhere to the tenets of communism is not a communist.
EVERY movement is founded on the principle of "Do what you're told", even if "what you're told" is to rebel against authority, or to think for yourself and make your own decisions. Every movement is a series of principles, and all followers of the movement obey those principles... else they aren't really followers of the movement.
In our democratic system, laws are often enacted to protect the rights of the minority, even when the majority would not necessarily support such laws. Our history is littered with examples of our legislators standing up and supporting oppressed minorities (blacks, women, homosexuals, the handicapped, etc.). The fundamental question here is not whether or not the majority believe marijuana use should be illegal; it's whether or not our government is within its charter to enact such a law. Marijuana use, in and of itself, harms no one but the user. Yes, we would have to enact/enforce laws regarding the use of marijuana while driving, smoking in a public place, etc. etc. to ensure public safety; no one is really contesting that point. But the base case for marijuana use (a guy sitting at home smoking up on his couch) doesn't inflict harm on or violate the rights of any other person.
So: is the government mandated with the responsibility to protect an individual citizen from the consequences of his own decisions, if those consequences would not result in harming anyone but himself? It's a debatable point; I say no. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
That's a very mallardramatic thing to say.
Actually a backup generator would be completely unnecessary in this scenario. The reason you need a backup generator is because you are relying on grid power, and if it goes out you need to generate the electricity yourself.
The reason to need a backup generator is in the event of a failure of your main power source. It doesn't matter if your main power source is the electrical grid or a Bloom Box; it has the potential to fail.
However, if the Bloom Box was your main power source, you could certainly have a second one as your backup, or some sort of distributed system that would account for the potential failure of a single node.
Anyone who crosses the line into belief that "I have the right to take what's yours" ceases to be an Objectivist, regardless of whether they still consider themselves to be one. The first statement ("I have the right to keep what's mine") is a derivation of the core statement ("A person has the right to keep the products of his or her labor", for simplification's sake), and if you don't apply it equally across all persons, then you're not an Objectivist.
By contrast, this is the first news I plan to share with my wife when I get home tonight. Then, at the dinner table, we will have a long, detailed conversation analyzing our lives, attempting to decide:
1. Which activities we can sacrifice (sleeping and eating are obviously curtailed, but how long can we really go without cleaning the kitchen?)
2. Which people we can cut out of our lives (sorry guys, can't come out tonight... just one more turn...)
The true test of her addiction: will this news convince her to delay plans for our first pregnancy? Odds are about 50/50 right now.
Once again, from TFA:
In a statement issued to Wired.com, Google maintains that it warned the affected music bloggers after each of the complaints that led to deletion
Google says every notice e-mailed to bloggers included the URLs of the posts in question, and the notices we’ve seen do include the URLs
“Each e-mail includes information about the risks regarding repeat offenses and a link to our DMCA policy page with instructions on how to file a counter-claim,” Google spokeswoman Sara Jew-Lim told Wired.com. “The e-mail will also specifically identify the post or posts in question and will include a link to ChilingEffects.org so the blogger can view the actual complaint we received.”
So, Google sent out notices to the offending blogs; they include a URL to the offending material; they include their DMCA policy; and they TELL THE BLOGGER WHAT TO DO NEXT. What more do you fucking want from them?
This is like being issued a warning that you're parked in an illegal spot and if you keep doing it, your car will be towed. You get one warning and ignore it; you get another warning and ignore it; you get another warning and ignore it; then suddenly your car is towed and you start bitching and moaning. You were told what would happen!
I sympathize with the bloggers who lost their sites, but I echo the comments made by others: it's YOUR responsibility to back up anything that's precious to you. The bloggers that keep their own archive of their sites are protected from losing all their hard work due to legal problems, server troubles, or any other lost data disaster.
Anyone who is using this incident to further their own hatred of Google is doing everyone a disservice; aim that hatred at the corrupt music industry where it belongs. If you're going to raise hell over this, raise hell to the lawmakers who can do something about the state of copyright law in the US. I agree with the prevailing sentiment in these comments: until there are penalties instituted for issuing a false DMCA takedown notice, NOTHING will improve.
From TFA:
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces Google to take these actions — otherwise, it would lose the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” clause and could be found liable for any copyright infringement on its blogging networks.
and
after an unquantified number of complaints — valid or otherwise — the law forces Google (or any other blogging platform) to terminate the accounts of “repeat offenders,” even if their only mistake was not to file paperwork against the accusations of an anonymous robot — sad and wrong, but mandated by current law.
So... why do you fault Google for this, rather than the IFPI/RIAA? Do you think that "don't be evil" translates to "knowingly violate the (admittedly crappy) law"? I can't imagine how Google opening itself to a RIAA lawsuit would be beneficial to anyone involved in this whole mess.
Not true at all. Speaking as that rare breed who is both a sports nerd and a fantasy/gaming nerd, the method of information retention is the same in both cases. Honestly, it's all about how much you care about the subject in question, and how much time and energy you invest in it, and to some extent your natural intelligence (specifically your ability to retain any information at all). I'm terrible at remembering to pay bills on time (thank you, auto-pay!), or that I've got a meeting at 10 AM tomorrow morning, or that we're out of milk and I need to pick some up from the store on the way home. I'm terrible at remembering those things because on some fundamental level I just don't care about any of them, even though my finances and my career are important to me and I love drinking milk. I can't define why those important things don't typically make any impression on my memory, but I can still name most or all of the main characters in David Eddings' Belgariad or any of a number of other fantasy novel series, and I can describe the tactics I used to beat some of the hardest battles in Baldur's Gate 2 (down to the actions of each specific member of my party, based on which members I chose to use in that particular play through the game), or the exact rules text of a Magic: the Gathering card which I don't even own and haven't played with or against for over a decade.
And by the same token, my favorite football team is in need of a wide receiver in this year's draft, and so I can tell you that Dez Bryant went to Oklahoma State and will probably go in the top ten picks of the draft. I can name another handful of the best receivers available, where they went to college, and whether or not they'd be a good fit for my team. And the NFL draft is months away. What's worse, I can tell you that I still remember wanting my team to draft Marcus McNeil, who went to Auburn and didn't allow a sack in four seasons there, because we needed a great tackle to anchor our offensive line. My team didn't draft Marcus McNeil (he went to the Chargers), and so the fact that he went to Auburn and didn't allow a sack (information that wasn't really relevant to my life to start with) should have LONG since been bumped out of my brain, in favor of things like that meeting at 10 AM tomorrow, or the names of members of my wife's extended family (no, I still don't know all of them yet, which leads to some very awkward moments at her family get-togethers).
Sports nerds (which are NOT the same as jocks; you can be one, both, or neither) have the same memory muscles as other types of nerds. We retain tons of information that even we know is irrelevant, like the key members of our fantasy team that went undefeated five years ago, and yet we can't get rid of it even if we wanted to. It's etched in our brains, perhaps forever. And it doesn't take a photographic memory to make that happen; just a really, really poor system of memory prioritization.
Pianos don't really fall from windows
Out of curiosity, what does happen when a piano exits a window? Does it just sort of hover there? Perhaps it floats away into the distance?
The fundamental flaw in this thinking is that reducing labor costs will reduce spending. In many industries, this would be true. In the software development industry, not so much.
A really great developer or small team of developers could produce a great application in six months, whereas a huge team of very cheap developers might not be able to replicate that application in five years.
I'm fully in support of drastic reductions to government spending, and the entire project is probably not worth doing and should be canned. But for those instances where government-sponsored software development is required, it's appropriate to spend money up-front on quality in order to reduce total costs over the lifespan of the project.