Someone does you wrong? Fine. Take them to court. Sue them.
I think it's a fine line. Most lawsuits are settled, and they're settled precisely because both sides hedge their bets and realize that they have a lot to lose by going into an all-out court battle. It's hard for me to accept that offering a settlement up front is inherently wrong to do.
Furthermore, the sheer impossibility of going through with a full lawsuit for every person that the RIAA finds to be sharing files is a problem. While I tend to err on the side of the individual, the record companies should have a right to file suit, too. Copyright infringement is rampant on the Internet, and a copyright holder should have some recourse against it. The problem is that the system which normally makes good legal counsel unavailable to the common man now makes good legal counsel unavailable to The Man--that is, filing lawsuits is simply not sustainable against millions of people.
Probably, the most reasonable thing would be some sort of reverse-class action status. But then, you're swinging power pretty far away from the individuals, and that's something I can't tolerate.
What's worse is that technological measures to reduce copyright infringement just end up stomping on individual's rights.
This is all a very large and complicated problem, and one to which I certainly don't have a solution. In fact, I dare say that keeping the rights of copyright holders while keeping the rights of millions of infringers at the same time is simply intractable.
If they really believed they could win in court, why offer these settlement notices up front? Especially when they claim damages far in excess of $3k? Who throws money away like that?
Because one of their goals is to try to scare people. Another is to not go bankrupt suing everyone.
Most people don't have the money to pay fines in the amounts that they're looking at with copyright infringement. What is it now, a $750 minimum statutory award? Doesn't take many songs for that to be well outside of a person's ability to pay. And that's the low end. If the RIAA spends thousands upon thousands of dollars fighting these cases and the person is forced to file for bankruptcy, they're truly just throwing their money away.
Compare to the $3k settlements. That's sustainable. They can keep doing that as long as they want, because the settlements pay for the settlement center operation, and most people can work out a payment plan for that kind of money. The expected gain from a settlement is probably far higher than the expected gain if the lawsuit actually goes to court.
I have libertarian leanings, but the Libertarian party takes it all to an extreme. I'm not really die-hard--I do think that some infrastructural things are more likely to both improve the quality of life of Americans and which are long-term, difficult things to do. For example, if Libertarians had consistently been in control, I highly doubt that the national power grid would have gotten in place as early as it did. Balancing things like this would be very, very hard.
As for the telcos -- this was never a free market to begin with. The government used its taxes and legislation to create the monopoly in the first place, and to this day the major communications companies remain only semi-private, with special privileges and regulations at various levels, all of which contribute to maintaining high barriers against any potential competition.
The main issue, really, is an issue of power. The more power an entity has, the more important it is to ensure that that power isn't abused. Libertarians (with a capital L) would have us believe that "the market" will always work this out. Maybe it will, and maybe it won't, but monopolies have been broken up, and generally speaking, the consumer is believed to have been better for it.
I think that one of the reasons that the market doesn't always sort itself out is that it can be incredibly difficult to break into a new market. If telephone lines didn't have to be shared by telcos, one can only imagine how much it would cost to break into the telephone market. You'd have to lay all new lines everywhere, and even then, the current big player wouldn't have any obligation to let your customers talk to their customers. You'd never gain enough critical mass to have leverage against the monopoly.
So what it boils down to is that the more power an entity has, the more reasonable it is that the entity be regulated. ISPs currently have a lot of power (they're just not using it completely) and are frankly not regulated very much. Unregulated, I'm sure that it won't be long before the Internet is treated like Cable/Satellite TV. You only get access to certain websites that you pay for, in various tiers and packages (such that even if I don't care about espn.com, I get it alongside Google and Yahoo.) That's the model that cable companies understand, and it's the model that gets them the most revenue.
If I missed his point, it's due to his inability to express what he was trying to say. Go back through the thread:
"Yes but the fix was so EASY. Pick up the phone and call the State Department of Employment. Ask for anonymity and report that you worked half-an-hour after closing without pay."
"unless he sacks everyone to be sure (assuming at-will employment)"
"And that's also illegal. I don't think that there's an at-will state in America where you can be legally fired for reporting that your boss was doing something illegal." --- My post
"Funny thing "At will" employment
You get: To quit on a moments notice.
Your Boss gets: Able to fire you for no reason also on a moments notice." --- his post
Now, it's entirely possible that he was agreeing with me, but it sounded more like he was trying to claim that at-will means that you can fire a person without any repercussions. That's not the case. I outlined several cases where you simply can't fire someone. In these cases, as I said, the employer is realistically going to have to prove EITHER that there was no cause for the firing, or that the firing was for cause which was unrelated to the act of being reported for doing something illegal. Based upon context, and the common flow of conversation in threaded discussion boards, I don't think that my interpretation was unreasonable.
What he said was mostly true, with a few exceptions, but based upon context, I think he meant something else.
Don't buy into the copyright cartel's bullshit. You bought a copy of the OS, just like you buy a copy of a book or a copy of a CD. Copyright law is founded on the idea that you sell copies of your work.
Put another way, if everything is licensed, there's no need for copyright at all, yet I'm sure that these companies would fight to the death any measure which ended copyright in favor of contracts.
Funny thing is, they don't get to fire you for no reason. There are lots of reasons that they can't fire you, including but not limited to firings for the person's gender or race, the person's age (if over a certain age) and retaliatory firings for the worker filing a worker's comp claim, for taking leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or for whistle blowing (which is the specific issue discussed here.)
Now like I said, this varies somewhat by state. There are some federal statutes (like the protected class cases), but mostly, it's defined by the state. And like I said, I don't know of any state where it's legal to fire a person for whistle blowing, though if some allow for that, I'd love to know.
What often happens in these cases is that circumstances arise for which the employer wants to retaliate against the employee, so they fire him/her. The employee then files a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination, and gives the reason. Generally speaking, these cases are decided upon a preponderance of the evidence, so if the employee gets into court and says, "I reported my employer for doing this illegal thing, and then he fired me!" it's going to be up to the employer to prove that either a) the firing was for no cause (pretty hard to do with) or b) that the firing was with cause, and here's the list of reasons why he was fired.
The judge or jury or whomever then weighs the evidence to determine whether or not the termination was illegal.
"At will" isn't as simple as you tried to make it.
What's worse is that, as you point out, employer practices can make the bootup time longer. Mounting home drives across a slow, busy network (since everyone's getting there at the same time, ya know.)
At school, I worked in the helpdesk. It took a good two minutes to log in to the old, crappy Window network. Of course, we were still there to answer questions, so we were obviously getting paid, but the point stands.
And that's also illegal. I don't think that there's an at-will state in America where you can be legally fired for reporting that your boss was doing something illegal.
Well, I said a lot, not all. Remember, as a PC tech, you've got a locality bias. You're seeing a lot of people whose PCs were infected. The ones who practice safe computing probably don't come in as much.
Antivirus guards against trojans, too. Not much Microsoft can do to patch if the user is insistent upon running that program (i.e. the security hole is in the meat), but a whole lot of them will sit up and take notice if their antivirus pops up and warns them away.
I'm not specifically referring to tasks which are "hard to do" in the OS--I'm referring to the incessant stream of vulnerabilities in various components that makes working with Windows a virtual minefield.
What, you mention Ultima Underworld, but not Ultima 9?
I realize that the steaming pile that became Ultima 9 was largely driven by EA and deadlines rather than by Garriot, but Garriot had very little input on Underworld. He was far more creatively involved in Ultima 9, and couldn't manage to save that shipwreck from EA.
Then there's Ultima Online. Ok, being one of the earlier modern MMOs, I can forgive some of the quirks, but it was also ill-planned. I remember some of the marketing for the game was that you didn't have to run around killing things--you could instead become a tradesman. Own your own blacksmith shop! Become a tailor! Riiiight.... And buggy? Please.
Ultima through Serpent Isle was fantastic. Even Pagan was fun, if a bit awkward. Beyond that, I haven't seen a single enjoyable game come from Garriot, and that makes me pretty sad.
I like sitting on my couch and using my laptop. It's way more comfortable than sitting at a desk, and I can interact with other people in the room, watch TV, etc, so when I want to get a powerful computer, I always look at laptops first. To this end, things like weight, size, and battery life are less of a concern. You do tend to pay for the convenience, as you note, both in the fact that you can't upgrade cheaply and in a high up-front cost.
Well, I don't use ESC. I use ctrl-c. It takes you out of insert mode, though it has other semantic differences that I don't remember off of the top of my head. Regardless, I haven't noticed the differences, and I could certainly remap the keys if it ever became an issue.
ctrl-c is a really short movement for my left hand--just one row down from home position. You can also use ctrl-[, but it's a little more cumbersome for me. At this point, it's all muscle memory. Brain wants me to move the caret around, left hand hits ctrl-c. Brain wants to start typing, right hand hits i.
Neat shortcut. I tend to use ctrl-c, which functions similarly, but it's the context switch from insert mode into command mode that throws people, not the specific keystroke.
I use Vim primarily because I can perform almost any task without moving my fingers from the standard typing position. I certainly feel much more efficient being able to (for example) use j/k/l/h for movement than moving my hand over to the arrow keys, or worst, to the mouse. That's one of many tasks which simply becomes natural over time (in fact, when I'm typing in a web form, I frequently find myself trying to use Vi shortcuts) and which really make things go more smoothly for me. Even when I'm on a full desktop, I prefer using Vim. I only wish the OS X port of gvim worked better.
The reason that I don't use EMACS is because of the finger gymnastics you have to perform for even the simplest of tasks. Of course, one could complain similarly about Vi--having to switch to command mode is something that gets just about every single newbie.
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Someone does you wrong? Fine. Take them to court. Sue them.
I think it's a fine line. Most lawsuits are settled, and they're settled precisely because both sides hedge their bets and realize that they have a lot to lose by going into an all-out court battle. It's hard for me to accept that offering a settlement up front is inherently wrong to do.
Furthermore, the sheer impossibility of going through with a full lawsuit for every person that the RIAA finds to be sharing files is a problem. While I tend to err on the side of the individual, the record companies should have a right to file suit, too. Copyright infringement is rampant on the Internet, and a copyright holder should have some recourse against it. The problem is that the system which normally makes good legal counsel unavailable to the common man now makes good legal counsel unavailable to The Man--that is, filing lawsuits is simply not sustainable against millions of people.
Probably, the most reasonable thing would be some sort of reverse-class action status. But then, you're swinging power pretty far away from the individuals, and that's something I can't tolerate.
What's worse is that technological measures to reduce copyright infringement just end up stomping on individual's rights.
This is all a very large and complicated problem, and one to which I certainly don't have a solution. In fact, I dare say that keeping the rights of copyright holders while keeping the rights of millions of infringers at the same time is simply intractable.
If they really believed they could win in court, why offer these settlement notices up front? Especially when they claim damages far in excess of $3k? Who throws money away like that?
Because one of their goals is to try to scare people. Another is to not go bankrupt suing everyone.
Most people don't have the money to pay fines in the amounts that they're looking at with copyright infringement. What is it now, a $750 minimum statutory award? Doesn't take many songs for that to be well outside of a person's ability to pay. And that's the low end. If the RIAA spends thousands upon thousands of dollars fighting these cases and the person is forced to file for bankruptcy, they're truly just throwing their money away.
Compare to the $3k settlements. That's sustainable. They can keep doing that as long as they want, because the settlements pay for the settlement center operation, and most people can work out a payment plan for that kind of money. The expected gain from a settlement is probably far higher than the expected gain if the lawsuit actually goes to court.
I have libertarian leanings, but the Libertarian party takes it all to an extreme. I'm not really die-hard--I do think that some infrastructural things are more likely to both improve the quality of life of Americans and which are long-term, difficult things to do. For example, if Libertarians had consistently been in control, I highly doubt that the national power grid would have gotten in place as early as it did. Balancing things like this would be very, very hard.
As for the telcos -- this was never a free market to begin with. The government used its taxes and legislation to create the monopoly in the first place, and to this day the major communications companies remain only semi-private, with special privileges and regulations at various levels, all of which contribute to maintaining high barriers against any potential competition.
Yeah, and a Libertarian should hate that :)
This.
The main issue, really, is an issue of power. The more power an entity has, the more important it is to ensure that that power isn't abused. Libertarians (with a capital L) would have us believe that "the market" will always work this out. Maybe it will, and maybe it won't, but monopolies have been broken up, and generally speaking, the consumer is believed to have been better for it.
I think that one of the reasons that the market doesn't always sort itself out is that it can be incredibly difficult to break into a new market. If telephone lines didn't have to be shared by telcos, one can only imagine how much it would cost to break into the telephone market. You'd have to lay all new lines everywhere, and even then, the current big player wouldn't have any obligation to let your customers talk to their customers. You'd never gain enough critical mass to have leverage against the monopoly.
So what it boils down to is that the more power an entity has, the more reasonable it is that the entity be regulated. ISPs currently have a lot of power (they're just not using it completely) and are frankly not regulated very much. Unregulated, I'm sure that it won't be long before the Internet is treated like Cable/Satellite TV. You only get access to certain websites that you pay for, in various tiers and packages (such that even if I don't care about espn.com, I get it alongside Google and Yahoo.) That's the model that cable companies understand, and it's the model that gets them the most revenue.
If I missed his point, it's due to his inability to express what he was trying to say. Go back through the thread:
"Yes but the fix was so EASY. Pick up the phone and call the State Department of Employment. Ask for anonymity and report that you worked half-an-hour after closing without pay."
"unless he sacks everyone to be sure (assuming at-will employment)"
"And that's also illegal. I don't think that there's an at-will state in America where you can be legally fired for reporting that your boss was doing something illegal." --- My post
"Funny thing "At will" employment
You get: To quit on a moments notice.
Your Boss gets: Able to fire you for no reason also on a moments notice." --- his post
Now, it's entirely possible that he was agreeing with me, but it sounded more like he was trying to claim that at-will means that you can fire a person without any repercussions. That's not the case. I outlined several cases where you simply can't fire someone. In these cases, as I said, the employer is realistically going to have to prove EITHER that there was no cause for the firing, or that the firing was for cause which was unrelated to the act of being reported for doing something illegal. Based upon context, and the common flow of conversation in threaded discussion boards, I don't think that my interpretation was unreasonable.
What he said was mostly true, with a few exceptions, but based upon context, I think he meant something else.
Don't buy into the copyright cartel's bullshit. You bought a copy of the OS, just like you buy a copy of a book or a copy of a CD. Copyright law is founded on the idea that you sell copies of your work.
Put another way, if everything is licensed, there's no need for copyright at all, yet I'm sure that these companies would fight to the death any measure which ended copyright in favor of contracts.
You bought a copy. End of story.
You know damned well what I meant by the rest of my post. Just 'cause it's the Internet and mostly anonymous doesn't mean you have to be an asshole.
Funny thing is, they don't get to fire you for no reason. There are lots of reasons that they can't fire you, including but not limited to firings for the person's gender or race, the person's age (if over a certain age) and retaliatory firings for the worker filing a worker's comp claim, for taking leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or for whistle blowing (which is the specific issue discussed here.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_termination
Now like I said, this varies somewhat by state. There are some federal statutes (like the protected class cases), but mostly, it's defined by the state. And like I said, I don't know of any state where it's legal to fire a person for whistle blowing, though if some allow for that, I'd love to know.
What often happens in these cases is that circumstances arise for which the employer wants to retaliate against the employee, so they fire him/her. The employee then files a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination, and gives the reason. Generally speaking, these cases are decided upon a preponderance of the evidence, so if the employee gets into court and says, "I reported my employer for doing this illegal thing, and then he fired me!" it's going to be up to the employer to prove that either a) the firing was for no cause (pretty hard to do with) or b) that the firing was with cause, and here's the list of reasons why he was fired.
The judge or jury or whomever then weighs the evidence to determine whether or not the termination was illegal.
"At will" isn't as simple as you tried to make it.
What's worse is that, as you point out, employer practices can make the bootup time longer. Mounting home drives across a slow, busy network (since everyone's getting there at the same time, ya know.)
At school, I worked in the helpdesk. It took a good two minutes to log in to the old, crappy Window network. Of course, we were still there to answer questions, so we were obviously getting paid, but the point stands.
And that's also illegal. I don't think that there's an at-will state in America where you can be legally fired for reporting that your boss was doing something illegal.
Well, I said a lot, not all. Remember, as a PC tech, you've got a locality bias. You're seeing a lot of people whose PCs were infected. The ones who practice safe computing probably don't come in as much.
Antivirus guards against trojans, too. Not much Microsoft can do to patch if the user is insistent upon running that program (i.e. the security hole is in the meat), but a whole lot of them will sit up and take notice if their antivirus pops up and warns them away.
Scrolling speed was the main thing that made the gVim port simply unusable to me. Someone else pointed me to MacVim, and I checked it out. It's great!
Thanks for the second recommendation, though.
I'm not specifically referring to tasks which are "hard to do" in the OS--I'm referring to the incessant stream of vulnerabilities in various components that makes working with Windows a virtual minefield.
Of course, if the OS is fighting you all the way while you're trying to work with the software, that's a problem.
What, you mention Ultima Underworld, but not Ultima 9?
I realize that the steaming pile that became Ultima 9 was largely driven by EA and deadlines rather than by Garriot, but Garriot had very little input on Underworld. He was far more creatively involved in Ultima 9, and couldn't manage to save that shipwreck from EA.
Then there's Ultima Online. Ok, being one of the earlier modern MMOs, I can forgive some of the quirks, but it was also ill-planned. I remember some of the marketing for the game was that you didn't have to run around killing things--you could instead become a tradesman. Own your own blacksmith shop! Become a tailor! Riiiight.... And buggy? Please.
Ultima through Serpent Isle was fantastic. Even Pagan was fun, if a bit awkward. Beyond that, I haven't seen a single enjoyable game come from Garriot, and that makes me pretty sad.
I like sitting on my couch and using my laptop. It's way more comfortable than sitting at a desk, and I can interact with other people in the room, watch TV, etc, so when I want to get a powerful computer, I always look at laptops first. To this end, things like weight, size, and battery life are less of a concern. You do tend to pay for the convenience, as you note, both in the fact that you can't upgrade cheaply and in a high up-front cost.
Hey, thanks for the tip! I tried it out, and it seems to work great!
Well, I don't use ESC. I use ctrl-c. It takes you out of insert mode, though it has other semantic differences that I don't remember off of the top of my head. Regardless, I haven't noticed the differences, and I could certainly remap the keys if it ever became an issue.
ctrl-c is a really short movement for my left hand--just one row down from home position. You can also use ctrl-[, but it's a little more cumbersome for me. At this point, it's all muscle memory. Brain wants me to move the caret around, left hand hits ctrl-c. Brain wants to start typing, right hand hits i.
Definitely. I've been lucky with my hands so far, so I hadn't thought of that aspect, but that's a good point, too.
Neat shortcut. I tend to use ctrl-c, which functions similarly, but it's the context switch from insert mode into command mode that throws people, not the specific keystroke.
I find it easier to type dG. Same effect, fewer keystrokes.
I much more frequently use c instead of C. With the lowercase-version, you can select where to end your edit. Great for modifying things in quotes:
c/"[enter]
You can leave off the first number to, in order to start from the current line:
:,Ys/FROM/TO/g
Or, to replace until the end of the file:
:,$s/FROM/TO/g
I use Vim primarily because I can perform almost any task without moving my fingers from the standard typing position. I certainly feel much more efficient being able to (for example) use j/k/l/h for movement than moving my hand over to the arrow keys, or worst, to the mouse. That's one of many tasks which simply becomes natural over time (in fact, when I'm typing in a web form, I frequently find myself trying to use Vi shortcuts) and which really make things go more smoothly for me. Even when I'm on a full desktop, I prefer using Vim. I only wish the OS X port of gvim worked better.
The reason that I don't use EMACS is because of the finger gymnastics you have to perform for even the simplest of tasks. Of course, one could complain similarly about Vi--having to switch to command mode is something that gets just about every single newbie.