I know some enterprise backends that run in Java with a web frontend and that seems mostly fine, the run like a 747 in that they're huge, resource intensive but take a large number of passengers and are reliable. I think most of java's bad reputation comes from the UI classes. They look like crap, they are memory hogs and slow. And it seems like no java developer has ever learned the pattern with one GUI thread and one worker thread to do the work so it doesn't freeze up and shit.
If authors cannot sell many copies of their book (the fruit of labor) because people just copy the few that were sold, and then copy the copies, and so on, they'll just change models or get a better job. Perhaps an author will demand payment up front -- $10 per hour of writing, or something -- and find that it works better, since no one yet knows how to copy him.
The problem is it's near impossible to fund any new and innovative books or books by new authors this way. Also the consumer has no guarantee he'll ever finish the book, half a book is not worth half the price. Or maybe he puts a ton of effort into writing a stellar first chapter, only then to write some crap to finish it up. Still, if this was a one-to-one transaction that'd be manageable as the patron would make those decisions. But as one member of a big swarm, like thousands of people each funding 0.001$/hour you're entirely dependent on everyone else. It doesn't matter if you like it, if many others abandon it then the author will too and you lose. And if the funding level is hit then there's no point in giving the author more money, so it becomes a sucker game of not being in the pool but still getting the book.
If you do it the other way around, that the book must be written first then the author really has no market power, he's got to sell it as all the time is spent, all the costs sunk and not selling is a 100% loss. If this was a single patron you could consider this a repeated prisoner's dilemma with (book, no book) and (pay, no pay) as the sides, if the author doesn't deliver or the patron doesn't pay, the deal ends and there are no more books so better that both provide. But you can't reason that way with a swarm, it doesn't act like one individual at all. Fundamentally, the only market power that could possibly exist post-production is that if you don't pay, you don't get to read it.
It's a bit understated and underrated that copyright is in fact a working micropayment system. Yes, when you fund a $10 million dollar project through $10 purchases then it's a micropayment of the whole. And it works without trying to get a million people coordinated up front. It works without the consumer taking on a whole lot of risk. It works without any form of sucker games. Basically someone (publisher, TV network, label or self-funded) takes the risk, puts up funding and produces it, then people can at their own leisure after reading reviews of the finished product pay to get in the pool and take part of what is produced. Eventually it will be sold for less and less, until it ought to enter the public domain.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it. And all the efforts to mend it hurt society so bad it's better to let it go and just see what we can do with a donation model.
This is the main point. Copyright infringement is not a crime. Repeat after me: "Copyright infringement is not a crime". It is a civil matter.
There are criminal copyright laws on the books, and large scale commercial copying could land you in federal prison. With all the pushing of FBI messages, didn't you read a single one?
Should we have a cap on damages? Hell no! Why would we? If you burn down my house, but you are an otherwise nice person I should still be able to sue you to replace my house. Even if you did it by accident. Burning down my house by accident is not a crime. I'm not punishing you. I'm trying to replace my house.
There is no cap on actual damages, except they have to be actual. The problem right now is that there's hardly a cap on imaginary damages, with one song sold at a dollar retail you can be fined up to 150,000$.
If in some incredible fluke of the universe the publisher distributed my book by accident but didn't receive any money for it, I *should* be able to sue them -- even though it was an accident.
Absolutely, neglect is clearly a cause for liability. But if someone illegally put some code into the Linux kernel, should they be able to sue me? Every Linux distro? Linus Torvalds? Or just the person who accidentally or intentionally submitted it with a fraudulent license. That I find a much less obvious question.
Arguing for a cap on penalties runs right into the arms of the RIAA. They *want* to make copyright infringement a crime so that they don't have to pursue damages themselves. They can sick the police on people instead. Creating a fine based system enables their logic.
Maybe in the US, but in the rest of the world the police would tell them to pick and number and get to waaaaay back in the line. In Sweden the last research I read (swedish, bottom page 49) a total of 20% of the population now file share. In males 16-25 half file share and another 25% have file shared, And that is despite several laws being passed and new services like Spotify trying to stem the tide.
You're deliberately confusing a legal term and a casual conversation term. "He stole my girlfriend" or "He stole first base", whether in baseball or stealing a kiss are perfectly reasonable uses of the word. But they aren't stealing in the legal sense, unless your girlfriend is a slave and someone literally stole your property. They're not even illegal, even though other things we could casually call stealing might be. Pretending things others have made are your own is typically fraud or plagiarism. China stealing a fighter jet design would be espionage or industrial espionage. And in the age before spy cameras and the like you would probably steal the blueprints, the physical drawings which in a legal sense would be stealing.
I'm sure you know that piracy is already a "scary" word, made to make us equal to the boat-robbers of the past that made a livelihood of stealing and killing and raping and general lawlessness. It was supposed to be even worse than thief, if we were to pick our own word it'd probably be sharing like in file sharing and file sharers. Your problem is that the scary word isn't working anymore, if it ever did. We took it on and turned into a honorific, like the pirate bay, the pirate party, pirate flags and on the whole turned it into a grand joke on those who coined it. And even if we were to buy your logic, then it doesn't stop people from being a modern day Robin Hood - who most definitively did do stealing, taking wealth from the rich to the general population. By seeding to others it is not just for ourselves we do it.
So as a legal term, you're wrong. As a casual term, you've lost. Everybody knows what piracy is and they reject your attempts at moral equivalence.
Because you didn't hurt from it. If the guy who bought the first car off the assembly line shouted "free cars for everyone" and started duplicating then car manufacturing would have to change rather drastically...
Basically Intel locked down all I/O on many of their chips to specifically lock out Nvidia and force their lousy GPUs onto you, whether you like it or not.
They did, but the DPI license is mostly a diversion. The real story is that with the Core i3/i5s you already have integrated graphics on the CPU, so even if nVidia manage to claw their way back into the motherboard game there's nothing for them there since graphics used to be the main differentiator. By turning it into a license/contract issue it seems a lot cleaner than "oh, you can still produce boards but we moved the essential functionality into the CPU". Though honestly AMD has been talking about the merger of the CPU and GPU ever since they bought ATI so I think Intel will have enough legitimate reason for doing it.
Marketing may involve a lot of crystal balls and tea leaves, but if they ran huge ad campaigns with no sales response we'd know. So at least a good share of the viewers do watch ads...
He's just still in the phase where you drool over 18yo blonde supermodels. Not that they're not pretty to look at, but looking that good is a full time job and you'd probably go crazy with all the health/fitness/makeup/styling/wardrobe/diet/anorexia/whatever stuff they do if you actually lived with one. Not that I'd turn any of them down...
He's referring to the draft process that has been held almost in secrecy, something the parliament has complained about too. Obviously it has to hit the parliament sooner or later, but the commission wants to drop a big pile of paper in front of them and say "sign on the dotted line, now". The links you point to is the parliament telling the commission that they don't accept being treated that way.
It should not be too hard to make a mode where Wayland renders it, then sends it over X as a dumb pixmap. It would not be pretty nor fast, but it would function for occasional use.
I figured it was something like that, because Wayland is far from a finished state. Also it depends extremely heavily on KMS, that Intel and AMD is working on but won't be widespread until at least another few years. And nVidia is not doing KMS at all, and probably has no plans to. In short, this is way, way out there.
She's not going to "win" though, it's not like any court is going to say "well that is too high, case dismissed" and the plaintiffs can't back out and drop it now. They're not going to tear up copyright law, or that she has been found guilty. At some point she's going to hit some form of supreme court that might cap the damages, but they'll probably still be too high for her. This is just taking the opponent with you.
I'm not agreeing with any of the damage amounts that have been awarded, but just to be clear, she's not being charged with stealing 24 songs, she's being charged with distributing 24 songs.
She was convicted of making them available. No proof of actual distribution has been given, only assumed. And that said, on any P2P network one byte uploaded = one byte downloaded so if she was average for the network distributing 24 songs means distributing 24 copies. Not entirely unlike the 24 copies that disappeared off the shelf in the grandparent's analogy. If anybody made copies of those copies that is their copyright violation, not hers and she was hardly the initial seed of anything.
Forget the legal paragraphs here, go with the fundamental harm done. How significantly has she contributed to piracy? How large would the piracy problem have been without her? The answer is pretty much none at all. She's responsible for the few copies she shared, but it's not her responsibility or fault what everyone else is doing.
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens? Says who? I don't see any support for that claim in the Constitutional basis for copyright law; or in the first copyright act; or in any other subsequent copyright act that I've read...
Well from what I've read about the early history it was almost all about books. What was the average person to do, copy it with pen and ink like the monks of old? The kind of non-commercial sharing we see today wouldn't beat all relevant, it would all be about printing presses and large scale production far beyond personal use. I just read the original 1790 act, it didn't really say anything about commercial or not but the penalties were per copy so if you only had the one they wouldn't be much...
Tell me where I can get $12 - or indeed any money - for my pirated MP3s. If you can't relatively easily convert it to real money, then it's not "commercial gain" and speaking as if you had $62 is bullshit. Obviously you are getting some personal benefit from it - people rarely do things to harm themselves - but it doesn't practically have any value to sell. This is exactly what differentiates commercial and non-commercial activity. Actually it's probably even stricter than that, as things that do have a commercial value like a user dose of drugs can be considered to be for personal use, but being unsellable is quite definitive. Oddly enough the US decided to claim swapping one unsellable pirated copy for another unsellable pirated copy to be commercial gain, but in my book 0 + 0 still equals 0 real money.
Look at those dollar amounts. First trial: $220,000 Second: $1.92 million Third: $54,000 Fourth: $1.5 million
There has not been four trials, only the $220,000, $1.92 million and $1.5 million verdicts have been jury trials. The $54,000 figure comes from a judge setting aside a jury verdict claiming this is the highest constitutionally permissible amount. So a jury of your peers is willing to slam you with a million dollar verdict while the law still has some resemblance of sanity. I'm assuming this will go to some higher court now that will finally decide what is constitutionally permissible, I don't see what judge Davis can do. He can hardly let it stand as it is, and ordering another new trial is pointless. This exactly why we have high courts that deal in matters of law.
And people wonder why the economy is going to shit. The US is going from Silicon Valley, the high tech center of the world to riding the short bus on the information superhighway. But hey, it helps this quarter's profits...
No, we're not. But the rest of us is busy trying to get things done, not play a battle of wits with black hats. It's another one of the time thieves that prevent people from actually performing work and earning money, that you just want to deflect with the least amount of hassle and cost. More often than not that's not about a head-to-head comparison, it's just about being a harder, lower profit than the rest.
I've talked to people working for rather large companies and in the end they are simply amoral. If they can increase profits by a million through lowering security so they make two million in extra income and lose one million to black hats, they don't care about the morality of it. Catching criminals is really only relevant if you can set examples that lead to fewer attacks which has a dollar value.
If it was all about security we'd all be running OpenBSD and those who made Acrobat Reader would be put to the wall and shot. That is not how the world works, even for us regular users it's about usabilty and "good enough" security. Not that I like to have my computer hacked and my identity stolen, any more than I want a burglar to rob me. But I don't live in a bunker with vault doors either.
And, like it or not, Americans are center-right, and don't tend to like many pushes left.
Try listing the countries to the right of the US, the US is a right wing extremist in global politics with only sweatshop countries being more pro-business. Like in every other country of the world, the US is mostly filled with wage takers and few rich business owners. But unlike most countries, Americans don't vote in the best interest of who they are but rather of who they want to be.
What do I mean by that? That in most countries of the world being a worker is not so bad. You get decent pay, a fairly long termination period, decent unemployment benefits etc., your health care depends less on your income and it's not a disaster to get laid off, both through the law and through unions. There are much stronger programs to keep unemployment down and get long term unemployed back in the work force. The US is either float or sink, and if you sink you drown.
Most people vote for these things because they're most people, they see it as far more likely that they'll get thrown around by forces beyond their control than find that golden opportunity aka the American Dream. The US wants the government to stay out of your paycheck so that your 30k$ expenses out of a 50k$ salary will still be 30k$ expenses when you get a 500k$ salary. No taxes = no redistribution = the rich get venture capital and cheap labor, while the workers are busy making ends meet.
Of course some seem to think increasing taxes would mean mass unemployment, but I'd say the correlation between taxes and unemployment isn't exactly working in the US favor. It's always more productive to have people employed than have them do nothing, you just have to push for a work structure that makes it reasonable to employ people over leaving a part of the work force unemployed for greater profit. Ah well, enough ranting for one day.
What's the name of that FBI project again?! Virtual case file?! Oh well...
Things that fail this spectacularly normally fail for reasons completely unrelated to development methodology. I've not been in that huge projects but I've been in projects with very much plan and documentation and in projects with very little plan and documentation. Both tend to reach their goal, if just the goal is reasonably stable and someone is willing to take decisions.
Where I've noticed the biggest limitation is that agile just doesn't work to replace already large and old systems. You can't start with a system that does 10% of what the old one did, and it's not that easy to break it down into parts because the old system isn't very modular. Oh, you can still try for agile development but without actual users, only a few people to test progress it doesn't really work. You really have to draw up a list and say "We need features a, b, c, d and e before we can even start using it. Only when that's done can we make the kind of continous improvement you talk about."
That isn't what you're arguing. If a KKK member kills a black person for being in a white neighborhood, that can have a chilling effect: Black people will avoid white neighborhoods. But if a KKK member kills a black person for being black, not for being anywhere or doing anything in particular, there is no chilling effect since there is nothing for a black person to do differently to avoid it. But the hate crime laws still punish the latter more than a "normal" murder. So your position can only defend "hate crime" laws to the extent that a "hate crime" is limited to a crime that is intended to have chilling effects. The existing hate crime laws punish more than that.
You don't understand how a racist thinks. their very existence where they don't "belong" is a provocation and so is every time they pretend to be equal to the "superior" race. Maybe it's not so obvious in the US but here in Europe the neonazi paroles have been like "Norway for Norwegians, foreigners out". And they don't mean the nationality in your passport, what generation immigrant you are or how integrated you are, they mean are you ethnically native to the country. If not get out, go "home". Maybe the hypocrisy would be a bit too much for US racists, but I'm sure many of them want to ship them back to Africa all the same.
Remember that racists don't believe in the "all men are created free and equal". Essentially they want a do-over on the whole Rosa Parks thing and the civil rights movement. Every time inferior races think they have the same right to the same bus seat or the same schools or the same jobs or talking to a white girl as if they're good enough for her, that offends them. That is your "not for being anywhere or doing anything in particular". Hell, it was difficult to make a jury of white men convict a white man for killing a black man, some still like to think they are some kind of animal that can be put down like a dog.
Obviously it would be wrong on so many levels trying to appease the racists. But that there is "nothing for a black person to do differently to avoid it" is not true.
I think the biggest issue is that you take a huge brand, that millions of people know. Now some 200k people read it, which means the brand recognition is in freefall. Can they convert new people, that aren't already used to the NYT to sign up? I doubt it. That number will only be going down, not up as NYT readers find other sources, while other sources don't go beyond NYTs paywall. I think Murdoch is stubborn enough to give it a bit more than a year though...
Slashdot Mirror
I know some enterprise backends that run in Java with a web frontend and that seems mostly fine, the run like a 747 in that they're huge, resource intensive but take a large number of passengers and are reliable. I think most of java's bad reputation comes from the UI classes. They look like crap, they are memory hogs and slow. And it seems like no java developer has ever learned the pattern with one GUI thread and one worker thread to do the work so it doesn't freeze up and shit.
If authors cannot sell many copies of their book (the fruit of labor) because people just copy the few that were sold, and then copy the copies, and so on, they'll just change models or get a better job. Perhaps an author will demand payment up front -- $10 per hour of writing, or something -- and find that it works better, since no one yet knows how to copy him.
The problem is it's near impossible to fund any new and innovative books or books by new authors this way. Also the consumer has no guarantee he'll ever finish the book, half a book is not worth half the price. Or maybe he puts a ton of effort into writing a stellar first chapter, only then to write some crap to finish it up. Still, if this was a one-to-one transaction that'd be manageable as the patron would make those decisions. But as one member of a big swarm, like thousands of people each funding 0.001$/hour you're entirely dependent on everyone else. It doesn't matter if you like it, if many others abandon it then the author will too and you lose. And if the funding level is hit then there's no point in giving the author more money, so it becomes a sucker game of not being in the pool but still getting the book.
If you do it the other way around, that the book must be written first then the author really has no market power, he's got to sell it as all the time is spent, all the costs sunk and not selling is a 100% loss. If this was a single patron you could consider this a repeated prisoner's dilemma with (book, no book) and (pay, no pay) as the sides, if the author doesn't deliver or the patron doesn't pay, the deal ends and there are no more books so better that both provide. But you can't reason that way with a swarm, it doesn't act like one individual at all. Fundamentally, the only market power that could possibly exist post-production is that if you don't pay, you don't get to read it.
It's a bit understated and underrated that copyright is in fact a working micropayment system. Yes, when you fund a $10 million dollar project through $10 purchases then it's a micropayment of the whole. And it works without trying to get a million people coordinated up front. It works without the consumer taking on a whole lot of risk. It works without any form of sucker games. Basically someone (publisher, TV network, label or self-funded) takes the risk, puts up funding and produces it, then people can at their own leisure after reading reviews of the finished product pay to get in the pool and take part of what is produced. Eventually it will be sold for less and less, until it ought to enter the public domain.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it. And all the efforts to mend it hurt society so bad it's better to let it go and just see what we can do with a donation model.
This is the main point. Copyright infringement is not a crime. Repeat after me: "Copyright infringement is not a crime". It is a civil matter.
There are criminal copyright laws on the books, and large scale commercial copying could land you in federal prison. With all the pushing of FBI messages, didn't you read a single one?
Should we have a cap on damages? Hell no! Why would we? If you burn down my house, but you are an otherwise nice person I should still be able to sue you to replace my house. Even if you did it by accident. Burning down my house by accident is not a crime. I'm not punishing you. I'm trying to replace my house.
There is no cap on actual damages, except they have to be actual. The problem right now is that there's hardly a cap on imaginary damages, with one song sold at a dollar retail you can be fined up to 150,000$.
If in some incredible fluke of the universe the publisher distributed my book by accident but didn't receive any money for it, I *should* be able to sue them -- even though it was an accident.
Absolutely, neglect is clearly a cause for liability. But if someone illegally put some code into the Linux kernel, should they be able to sue me? Every Linux distro? Linus Torvalds? Or just the person who accidentally or intentionally submitted it with a fraudulent license. That I find a much less obvious question.
Arguing for a cap on penalties runs right into the arms of the RIAA. They *want* to make copyright infringement a crime so that they don't have to pursue damages themselves. They can sick the police on people instead. Creating a fine based system enables their logic.
Maybe in the US, but in the rest of the world the police would tell them to pick and number and get to waaaaay back in the line. In Sweden the last research I read (swedish, bottom page 49) a total of 20% of the population now file share. In males 16-25 half file share and another 25% have file shared, And that is despite several laws being passed and new services like Spotify trying to stem the tide.
You're deliberately confusing a legal term and a casual conversation term. "He stole my girlfriend" or "He stole first base", whether in baseball or stealing a kiss are perfectly reasonable uses of the word. But they aren't stealing in the legal sense, unless your girlfriend is a slave and someone literally stole your property. They're not even illegal, even though other things we could casually call stealing might be. Pretending things others have made are your own is typically fraud or plagiarism. China stealing a fighter jet design would be espionage or industrial espionage. And in the age before spy cameras and the like you would probably steal the blueprints, the physical drawings which in a legal sense would be stealing.
I'm sure you know that piracy is already a "scary" word, made to make us equal to the boat-robbers of the past that made a livelihood of stealing and killing and raping and general lawlessness. It was supposed to be even worse than thief, if we were to pick our own word it'd probably be sharing like in file sharing and file sharers. Your problem is that the scary word isn't working anymore, if it ever did. We took it on and turned into a honorific, like the pirate bay, the pirate party, pirate flags and on the whole turned it into a grand joke on those who coined it. And even if we were to buy your logic, then it doesn't stop people from being a modern day Robin Hood - who most definitively did do stealing, taking wealth from the rich to the general population. By seeding to others it is not just for ourselves we do it.
So as a legal term, you're wrong. As a casual term, you've lost. Everybody knows what piracy is and they reject your attempts at moral equivalence.
Because you didn't hurt from it. If the guy who bought the first car off the assembly line shouted "free cars for everyone" and started duplicating then car manufacturing would have to change rather drastically...
Basically Intel locked down all I/O on many of their chips to specifically lock out Nvidia and force their lousy GPUs onto you, whether you like it or not.
They did, but the DPI license is mostly a diversion. The real story is that with the Core i3/i5s you already have integrated graphics on the CPU, so even if nVidia manage to claw their way back into the motherboard game there's nothing for them there since graphics used to be the main differentiator. By turning it into a license/contract issue it seems a lot cleaner than "oh, you can still produce boards but we moved the essential functionality into the CPU". Though honestly AMD has been talking about the merger of the CPU and GPU ever since they bought ATI so I think Intel will have enough legitimate reason for doing it.
My DVR says hi.
Marketing may involve a lot of crystal balls and tea leaves, but if they ran huge ad campaigns with no sales response we'd know. So at least a good share of the viewers do watch ads...
He's just still in the phase where you drool over 18yo blonde supermodels. Not that they're not pretty to look at, but looking that good is a full time job and you'd probably go crazy with all the health/fitness/makeup/styling/wardrobe/diet/anorexia/whatever stuff they do if you actually lived with one. Not that I'd turn any of them down...
Shouldn't there be at least a decade of Princess Leia in there?
Suitable or not, I'd still take females. Men in tights do not look good. Ever.
He's referring to the draft process that has been held almost in secrecy, something the parliament has complained about too. Obviously it has to hit the parliament sooner or later, but the commission wants to drop a big pile of paper in front of them and say "sign on the dotted line, now". The links you point to is the parliament telling the commission that they don't accept being treated that way.
It should not be too hard to make a mode where Wayland renders it, then sends it over X as a dumb pixmap. It would not be pretty nor fast, but it would function for occasional use.
I figured it was something like that, because Wayland is far from a finished state. Also it depends extremely heavily on KMS, that Intel and AMD is working on but won't be widespread until at least another few years. And nVidia is not doing KMS at all, and probably has no plans to. In short, this is way, way out there.
The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.
I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary.
What about crap commenters? RTFA:
There's now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.
She's not going to "win" though, it's not like any court is going to say "well that is too high, case dismissed" and the plaintiffs can't back out and drop it now. They're not going to tear up copyright law, or that she has been found guilty. At some point she's going to hit some form of supreme court that might cap the damages, but they'll probably still be too high for her. This is just taking the opponent with you.
I'm not agreeing with any of the damage amounts that have been awarded, but just to be clear, she's not being charged with stealing 24 songs, she's being charged with distributing 24 songs.
She was convicted of making them available. No proof of actual distribution has been given, only assumed. And that said, on any P2P network one byte uploaded = one byte downloaded so if she was average for the network distributing 24 songs means distributing 24 copies. Not entirely unlike the 24 copies that disappeared off the shelf in the grandparent's analogy. If anybody made copies of those copies that is their copyright violation, not hers and she was hardly the initial seed of anything.
Forget the legal paragraphs here, go with the fundamental harm done. How significantly has she contributed to piracy? How large would the piracy problem have been without her? The answer is pretty much none at all. She's responsible for the few copies she shared, but it's not her responsibility or fault what everyone else is doing.
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens? Says who? I don't see any support for that claim in the Constitutional basis for copyright law; or in the first copyright act; or in any other subsequent copyright act that I've read...
Well from what I've read about the early history it was almost all about books. What was the average person to do, copy it with pen and ink like the monks of old? The kind of non-commercial sharing we see today wouldn't beat all relevant, it would all be about printing presses and large scale production far beyond personal use. I just read the original 1790 act, it didn't really say anything about commercial or not but the penalties were per copy so if you only had the one they wouldn't be much...
Tell me where I can get $12 - or indeed any money - for my pirated MP3s. If you can't relatively easily convert it to real money, then it's not "commercial gain" and speaking as if you had $62 is bullshit. Obviously you are getting some personal benefit from it - people rarely do things to harm themselves - but it doesn't practically have any value to sell. This is exactly what differentiates commercial and non-commercial activity. Actually it's probably even stricter than that, as things that do have a commercial value like a user dose of drugs can be considered to be for personal use, but being unsellable is quite definitive. Oddly enough the US decided to claim swapping one unsellable pirated copy for another unsellable pirated copy to be commercial gain, but in my book 0 + 0 still equals 0 real money.
Look at those dollar amounts. First trial: $220,000 Second: $1.92 million Third: $54,000 Fourth: $1.5 million
There has not been four trials, only the $220,000, $1.92 million and $1.5 million verdicts have been jury trials. The $54,000 figure comes from a judge setting aside a jury verdict claiming this is the highest constitutionally permissible amount. So a jury of your peers is willing to slam you with a million dollar verdict while the law still has some resemblance of sanity. I'm assuming this will go to some higher court now that will finally decide what is constitutionally permissible, I don't see what judge Davis can do. He can hardly let it stand as it is, and ordering another new trial is pointless. This exactly why we have high courts that deal in matters of law.
And people wonder why the economy is going to shit. The US is going from Silicon Valley, the high tech center of the world to riding the short bus on the information superhighway. But hey, it helps this quarter's profits...
No, we're not. But the rest of us is busy trying to get things done, not play a battle of wits with black hats. It's another one of the time thieves that prevent people from actually performing work and earning money, that you just want to deflect with the least amount of hassle and cost. More often than not that's not about a head-to-head comparison, it's just about being a harder, lower profit than the rest.
I've talked to people working for rather large companies and in the end they are simply amoral. If they can increase profits by a million through lowering security so they make two million in extra income and lose one million to black hats, they don't care about the morality of it. Catching criminals is really only relevant if you can set examples that lead to fewer attacks which has a dollar value.
If it was all about security we'd all be running OpenBSD and those who made Acrobat Reader would be put to the wall and shot. That is not how the world works, even for us regular users it's about usabilty and "good enough" security. Not that I like to have my computer hacked and my identity stolen, any more than I want a burglar to rob me. But I don't live in a bunker with vault doors either.
And, like it or not, Americans are center-right, and don't tend to like many pushes left.
Try listing the countries to the right of the US, the US is a right wing extremist in global politics with only sweatshop countries being more pro-business. Like in every other country of the world, the US is mostly filled with wage takers and few rich business owners. But unlike most countries, Americans don't vote in the best interest of who they are but rather of who they want to be.
What do I mean by that? That in most countries of the world being a worker is not so bad. You get decent pay, a fairly long termination period, decent unemployment benefits etc., your health care depends less on your income and it's not a disaster to get laid off, both through the law and through unions. There are much stronger programs to keep unemployment down and get long term unemployed back in the work force. The US is either float or sink, and if you sink you drown.
Most people vote for these things because they're most people, they see it as far more likely that they'll get thrown around by forces beyond their control than find that golden opportunity aka the American Dream. The US wants the government to stay out of your paycheck so that your 30k$ expenses out of a 50k$ salary will still be 30k$ expenses when you get a 500k$ salary. No taxes = no redistribution = the rich get venture capital and cheap labor, while the workers are busy making ends meet.
Of course some seem to think increasing taxes would mean mass unemployment, but I'd say the correlation between taxes and unemployment isn't exactly working in the US favor. It's always more productive to have people employed than have them do nothing, you just have to push for a work structure that makes it reasonable to employ people over leaving a part of the work force unemployed for greater profit. Ah well, enough ranting for one day.
What's the name of that FBI project again?! Virtual case file?! Oh well...
Things that fail this spectacularly normally fail for reasons completely unrelated to development methodology. I've not been in that huge projects but I've been in projects with very much plan and documentation and in projects with very little plan and documentation. Both tend to reach their goal, if just the goal is reasonably stable and someone is willing to take decisions.
Where I've noticed the biggest limitation is that agile just doesn't work to replace already large and old systems. You can't start with a system that does 10% of what the old one did, and it's not that easy to break it down into parts because the old system isn't very modular. Oh, you can still try for agile development but without actual users, only a few people to test progress it doesn't really work. You really have to draw up a list and say "We need features a, b, c, d and e before we can even start using it. Only when that's done can we make the kind of continous improvement you talk about."
That isn't what you're arguing. If a KKK member kills a black person for being in a white neighborhood, that can have a chilling effect: Black people will avoid white neighborhoods. But if a KKK member kills a black person for being black, not for being anywhere or doing anything in particular, there is no chilling effect since there is nothing for a black person to do differently to avoid it. But the hate crime laws still punish the latter more than a "normal" murder. So your position can only defend "hate crime" laws to the extent that a "hate crime" is limited to a crime that is intended to have chilling effects. The existing hate crime laws punish more than that.
You don't understand how a racist thinks. their very existence where they don't "belong" is a provocation and so is every time they pretend to be equal to the "superior" race. Maybe it's not so obvious in the US but here in Europe the neonazi paroles have been like "Norway for Norwegians, foreigners out". And they don't mean the nationality in your passport, what generation immigrant you are or how integrated you are, they mean are you ethnically native to the country. If not get out, go "home". Maybe the hypocrisy would be a bit too much for US racists, but I'm sure many of them want to ship them back to Africa all the same.
Remember that racists don't believe in the "all men are created free and equal". Essentially they want a do-over on the whole Rosa Parks thing and the civil rights movement. Every time inferior races think they have the same right to the same bus seat or the same schools or the same jobs or talking to a white girl as if they're good enough for her, that offends them. That is your "not for being anywhere or doing anything in particular". Hell, it was difficult to make a jury of white men convict a white man for killing a black man, some still like to think they are some kind of animal that can be put down like a dog.
Obviously it would be wrong on so many levels trying to appease the racists. But that there is "nothing for a black person to do differently to avoid it" is not true.
I think the biggest issue is that you take a huge brand, that millions of people know. Now some 200k people read it, which means the brand recognition is in freefall. Can they convert new people, that aren't already used to the NYT to sign up? I doubt it. That number will only be going down, not up as NYT readers find other sources, while other sources don't go beyond NYTs paywall. I think Murdoch is stubborn enough to give it a bit more than a year though...