Your definition is more worthy of the term 'manslaughter'. Now that I look at it later, I'd put an alternative as a deliberate illegal killing.
I'm sorry, but if I kill somebody in the defense of my own life, I'd object to calling it 'justifiable murder'. Justifiable homicide sounds much better to me.
Of course, 'murder' holds connotations to me that I find really distasteful(as I have a restrictive definition of it).
Police officer shoots and kills a bank robber about to shoot a hostage: Justifiable homicide Husband kills wife he catches cheating: Murder Gang member kills somebody during a drive-by: Murder Parent shakes baby to death: Murder - but might be legally something else depending on state. Driver looses control and hits & kills pedestrian: Negligent homicide(possibly) Soldier kills an enemy soldier during time of war: Legal homicide. Executioner kills a convict under death sentence: Legal homicide.
While I've read that the new formats are capable of more advanced compression, I believe that they're both using MPEG-2 at the moment.
Still, you'd expect any artifact to have a much smaller effect on the experience, given that any given artifact is going to tend to affect a quarter the visual area the DVD version would. IE rather than affecting.1% of the screen, it'll affect.025%.
I remember a review where they tried to decide which was better for overall quality: downscaling video from 640x480 to 320x240 or simply turning the compression up to get a final video of the same size.
They concluded that turning the compression up was the better solution as the blockyness of the downscaled then fullscreened video was worse than the frequent artifacting of the highly compressed video also on fullscreen. Basically, even back then the codecs were better at deciding what to lose than just evenly throwing away of 75% of the pixels.
Of course, they were playing around with the video equivalent of 32kbit mp3 streams - quality loss was guarenteed, thus allowing them to get a much better overall impression of the quality comparison as compared to trying to go over the video with a magnifying glass.
Of course, going to 64kbit from 32kbit will give a more perceptible increase in quality than going from 64 to 128 - and going from 128 to 196 or 256 starts getting into 'just how good is your stereo system?' territory.
Clearly, the old standard was a compromise between people's perception and technical abilities at the time. Today, DVD quality, even upscaled, is more than enough to get the story point across in a fashion 'good enough', much like 128kbit MP3 is 'good enough' through cheap headphones.
While I'd willingly pay to be able to view HD content, I'm not willing to pay a huge(for me) amount of money for it.
I currently have a 32" CRT TV that's approaching a decade old, that I got on special when new. I can't remember what I paid for it, but it's completely functional(unlike my parents old one).
So for me to consider any HDTV I'm going to say that has to be at least within that size category.
The cheapest 720p 32" TV I've seen is $700, the cheapest 1080i is $1000. Consider that a standard TV by default is only 480i.
Then another $300 for one HD DVD player(whether HDDVD or Blueray).
I'm not willing to shell out $1k for HD at this time. Maybe when my TV dies I'll replace it.
You're spot on about quality - my parents made do for years with a standard TV that had a messed up horizontal - everything was stretched so wide that by setting the DVD player to thinking it was trying to dispay standard width on a widescreen using bars was just right.
They didn't get rid of it until they moved. It drove me nuts everytime I visited, but they just didn't care that much.
a quick jaunt over to wikipedia shows that the kill language is roman catholic in origin, and murder is the original...
I've also heard about the kill/murder thing... Murder being closer to the original language version. From a number of rabbis actually.
now that, you could argue I suppose, depending on what you consider murder. Strictly speaking, I would call it killing. Sometimes Justifiable murder, maybe, but always murder. but now....
What about self defense? Murder is killing, killing isn't necessarily murder. There are reasons why we have murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, etc... At least by my definition, murder is the intentional and unjustifiable killing of a human being.
If you're going to buy a multipurpose pistol like the Judge at least partially for home defense, load it up with the.45 long colt pistol rounds for people protection.
And when I say 'point blank', I mean just that. Less than 7 feet, certainly, and I made no mention of killing.
Though it's always sobering to realize just how much velocity increase you can get going from a pistol length barrel to a rifle/shotgun.
Keep the firearms in their holsters unless a problem requiring their withdrawal comes up.
Honestly, for airline carry I wouldn't object to restricting it to individuals who have CCW permits, that avoids most of the truly bad, and even Air Marshals aren't 100%(they seem to like leaving their firearms in bathrooms).
It's a pain to leave the security screening, go back to the luggage check, check your stuff in your carry-on, and then get screened by security again. I'm not sure all airports will even let you do that.
Except that, per the article, Lithium batteries are expressly forbidden in check-in baggage. So you'd be screwed either way.
Makes me wish for an airline not subject to TSA stupidity.
Well, at least you could be sure that the airline wouldn't pull stuff like keeping people in the plane while it's on the tarmac for hours.
The trick to keep annoying people from getting shot would be to have multiple armed people - unless there's a real reason to use a weapon, you don't want to go waving it around because the other carriers would shoot you.
Heck, I once proposed something much like this.
'NRA Airlines, 10% discount for open carry'. They'd have to use stairs to load the plane like in many less developed areas that don't have gated terminals, but you wouldn't have to worry about the plane being hijacked, and the security check would consist of a retired bomb dog.
For example, if you put someone with Schizophrenia on "cheap" drug instead of the "expensive" one, you may and probably will get that person out of whatever productive life they had and hospitalize them regularly due to the neat side effects.
Even in the USA, with HMOs and such, there is indeed pressure for cheaper drugs over expensive ones. Still, I feel the need to point out that a expensive drug is not necessarily better than the cheap one. Everybody's different, after all. Still, from what I've heard the European system can result in new drugs being unavailable while the european medical boards fight with the production company over what they're willing to pay. I think that all the drugs should be available - I just wish there was more research into why Drug A works in patient 1 but will screw up patient 2, while Drug B will do just the opposite. That way we could do a workup on an individual and come out with a true treatment regime rather than the experimental model that's currently in effect.
I've seen it with my family - they start on drug A, find that that's not working well, switch to B, find that that's worse, switch to C - ah, there we go!
After all, radiation therapy machines have been around for long time now and enjoy economies of scale.
MRI machines were once hideously expensive, on the scale of these particle accelerators. Now they're used as standard tests for certain conditions. So while the bean counters have a point, so don't you. Economy of scale might eventually make this treatment standard for a number of types of cancer.
From pure financial POV with no consideration for ethics. And that's how these things are often decided.
Perhaps unfortuantly, we don't have unlimited resources. It's like triage for a major accident or battle. You only have so much in the way of resources. So you assess the patients, and make some hard choices - sure, you might be able to save the guy with massive trauma- but you'd have to let three other less injured people die in order to do it. So you make him as comfortable as you can(big shot of morphine), then save the other three.
We're capable of going a lot further with this stuff, but as long as we don't have unlimited resources we'll still have to make concessions in the name of cost effectiveness.
It doesn't often come down something as bleak as 'Well, we can treat 100 people with this facility, OR 1000 with traditional methods', but it's a factor.
For majority of cancer cases, thought, better to treat the 10 (or 50 or whatever) people with worse but manageable side-effects for the same resources.
I agree, though I'd consider this as second stage research into how to make the systems more affordable/effective. So a limited basis expansion isn't too bad. Then again - they're looking at using it for more types of cancer and a company is trying to develop one that costs a mere $20 million rather than the current $100M. The current situation, with only 1-10 units in a country of 300 million(and don't forget international patients), you're still adding the capacity to treat special cases where the 'side effects' are not 'manageable' if they attempted traditional therapy.
FTA: When 10-year-old Brooke Bemont was about to undergo X-ray treatment for a brain tumor last summer, a doctor warned her mother, "Do not plan on your daughter ever going to Harvard." The radiation would damage Brooke's mental capacity, she said.
There are all sorts of strategies of course, but my point is that if non-DRM tracks end up selling better than DRM tracks, then the executives might actually consider doing stuff like this more. While it could theoretically be used to cripple apple's itunes service, you could argue that Warner could do that simply by refusing to license to apple, so it's hardly a big deal.
Given that you can export non-drm music to pretty much anywhere, you're not locked into any one system. Which is the centerpoint - while apple generally does very well with their interfaces, it's still good to have competition. With no drm, I could use itunes or whatever to download the tracks, then turn around and play them in winamp if I want to.
Or a custom player I program up in my spare time for whatever reason.
While the watermark will give them a place to start, there's still some issues.
1: As you say, there are ways for the files to be stolen without the owner's knowledge. Any good defense lawyer will be able to tear this apart. 2: The average consumer won't be able to afford to cover the cost of the lawyers the company has to pay to get a conviction, much less $100k.
As this sort of stuff expands, I see lawyers popping up to defend against this sort of stuff. As a result, much like now, the music company will find the burden of proof still on them.
Even if it's easy to break, if we can make it such that can see that offering a DRM free track for a reasonable price results in increased sales such that they make more profit, maybe we'll beat the DRM schemes.
Much like I've dumped many dollars into webscriptions - I recently had a reason to download all my books again in a new format - I hadn't realized I had quite that many. I hadn't realized that I had 356 of them.
Even if they were only ~$3 each*, it's over a thousand dollars. Just from me. How much have the other companies seen? $0.
*I buy the webscriptions, average 5 books for $15.
Maybe they're hoping to have you back for an undergraduate degree? Or perhaps continuing education?;)
Seriously, that they're the best of the lot doesn't mean that they don't have misses. UoP ads are probably more directed for you than serving up ads for feminine products, joint pain, or for various medical issues I don't suffer from. I mean, you'd think that erectile dysfunction is a national crisis from the advertising I've seen on the tube(when I bother to turn it on).
At least for search page results, if I don't like the ad I skip over it and go to the next one. No middle of the screen bothering, no blinking or animated 'punch the monkey' ads that caused me to uninstall flash for so long, no random redirects to full page ads that I've been seeing lately.
By not bugging people, you don't piss them off so that they won't buy the products, but by being targeted you keep your click-through rate high and useful.
I'm not proposing a second check as much as checking for yourself. I wouldn't trust an old home inspection report from the seller, and I wouldn't trust independent auditors hired by the people I didn't trust.
When I buy stock I do perform research. That is only prudent. However, how can I be sure that whatever company I invest in isn't doing something illegal on the side?
It's not like I can walk in, flash my stock certificates, and ask to check out their operations with a hope to find any problems.
If however, you financed a criminal enterprise for a few years because you didn't want to really know, it seems your liability should be unlimited.
There might be some sense to that - just remember that there needs to be a certain amount of choice. It's not like Walmart or Michelin don't have rather obvious revenue streams. Indeed - when you get to that size it'd be unusual not to have the occasional violation. For example, if the average rate for stores violating labor laws are.1%, you'd still expect Walmart to have dozens of offending stores each year. Doesn't mean that the company is criminal on the whole, just that the system breaks down occasionally(and Walmart needs to have controls in place).
If there's no individual liability for an owner, the less careful company is a lot better buy.
There is individual liability. Just limited. Generally speaking, a company that isn't careful is going to rack up enough civil matter costs to decrease it's profitability over a careful one.
I don't see how your idea of preventing corporate stock ownership is much better, or much less damaging to the economy. It makes the trail shorter, but if owning stock doesn't confer any risk, why bother?
Limited risk, not no risk. Currently, many companys subsection themselves up to limit liability to themselves. GMAC is a subsiderary of GM, etc...
In many cases a company will form a sub-company in order to limit their liability - so that the parent company isn't dragged down if the subsiderary is dragged down.
I think not being able to purchase stock with corporate funds would really slow down the market. Mutual funds are this, and in general, don't seem like too bad of a thing. (Except that they make people feel distant and thus not care about the actions done on their dollar.)
Actually, mutual funds aren't an example of this, at least in my view. I own shares of a mutual fund that owns shares of stock. The company that runs the mutual fund doesn't actually own the stock, they're merely holding it for me. Ownership of the fund is seperate from ownership of the offering company.
Yes, it insulates, but it also provides a good amount of diversification for a given amount of work as compared to working with individual stocks.
Many of the early ones, at least, used the sound level as a clue - Most television stations turned the volume up on commercials.
I'm not 100% sure how this worked, but apparently it's like the volume difference between commercial FM stations and PBS broadcasts. I generally have to give the volume knob a half turn up in my car when I switch to the public station. This 'turn up' was detectable even when no sound was present, and overwhelmed even loud segments of most movies.
They've gotten sneakier since then, but there was a time when many people grabbed for the remote to turn the volume down when ads came on.
From what I've read, google is the master of targeted ads. I frequently click on the ads when they come up during google searches - they're usually pretty good. They easily have the best rate going.
As a result, they have far better results than less targeted but more disruptive ads - as a result of TV, people already have a massive resistance to ads they're not really interested in. Add that to the fact that most television ads today are mostly brand awareness - can we really answer how much difference Coke/Pepsi ads make today?
New products make more sense to advertise - awareness hasn't built up yet. Still, I've been deluged with so many ads that I've stopped watching television most of the time, and I've certainly built up resistance to advertising.
Every so often the media companies go too far with advertising - resulting early on in people taping TV shows in order to be able to fast forward through them. Then they came up with auto-forwarding players, and players that would automatically pause recording during commercials.
Then DVRs came and the same features popped up.
On the internet, advertising just kept getting more and more intrusive until a backlash occurred - Firefox, pop-up blockers, various ad-removal services, etc...
Meanwhile google tools along generating ad revenue by concentrating on providing useful, directed, but not intrusive ads.
Agreed, though I'd tend to think that there might be a market for high availability/accuracy systems - enable it to use multiple systems and you increase the odds of enough satellites being available to get a fix. Increase the number of satellites available for determining location and such and you increase accuracy.
It's still a chunk of potential profit loss, especially if it can be done cheaper(which I'm fairly reasonable is possible).
Whether the extras will enable the sale of enough extras to justify a half million is in doubt - how many special features can you market for the average film?
If you have $100 to invest, perhaps you have $10 to invest to make sure the other $90 isn't going to go to buying guns, or whatever.
*Giggle*, *SNORT* - Points at signature.
It would eat into profits, but so do laws in general. So does general due diligence.
Shareholders elect executives, who operate much like senators do in our government. Depending on the corporate charter, they select a CEO*.
The executives also duly contracted a audit company(paid for out of profits that would have otherwise gone to investors), which gave them a clean slate.
So what we had with Enron was a failure of the backup system - you argue that this necessitates a second backup system, while I believe that a second backup system would, on average, cost the economy more than it would save in Enron type cases. I mean, adding a second system still wouldn't prevent the representatives from being corrupted.
If I buy a TV it's my responsibility to make sure it's not stolen. In simple cases where I could hardly have known it'd simply be given back to the original owner. In cases where I'd bought it off the back of a truck, repeatedly, I'd be charged with receiving stolen goods, conspiracy, etc. When due diligence is done I stand to lose my TV money. When it's not, I could lose far more including my freedom.M
Actually it's like investing in a LLC - as long as you weren't aware, didn't have reason to believe that the TV(or other item) was stolen, all you stand to be out of is your money/TV. Generally speaking, your 'due diligence' when buying stock(especially from an exchange such as the NYSE) is kinda like buying a TV from a retail store as versus off the back of a truck, or even from a pawn shop.
I think it's a reason to break them up for scrap and sell them to new owners who promise to follow societies laws.
Personally, I think it's a reason to fine the company an appropriate amount to pay for the civil matters while you hold criminal trials for those part of the decision making process, throwing them in prison where appropriate.
And there's a fairly poor record of companies being punished at all for this. If I filed a fake DMCA takedown I'd be criminally charged for lying, sued for slander, etc.
You might be surprised. It frequently takes some doing to get prosecutors interested in these matters. For example, look at the bloody pants lawsuit.
Besides, I'd give it some time. They've gotten slapped down in a number of cases and prosecutor's offices are looking into matters.
I've proposed two changes, anyways:
1: Make executives and CEOs more responsible for the actions of their company. This will help keep them on the straight and narrow. 2: Make it so that companies can't own stock in other companies. No more of those bloody shell games with various companies being used as shells.
I figure that that would help enough in increasing transparency and responsibility.
*Actually one of the alternate proposals for selecting the president, actually.
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Your definition is more worthy of the term 'manslaughter'. Now that I look at it later, I'd put an alternative as a deliberate illegal killing.
I'm sorry, but if I kill somebody in the defense of my own life, I'd object to calling it 'justifiable murder'. Justifiable homicide sounds much better to me.
Of course, 'murder' holds connotations to me that I find really distasteful(as I have a restrictive definition of it).
Police officer shoots and kills a bank robber about to shoot a hostage: Justifiable homicide
Husband kills wife he catches cheating: Murder
Gang member kills somebody during a drive-by: Murder
Parent shakes baby to death: Murder - but might be legally something else depending on state.
Driver looses control and hits & kills pedestrian: Negligent homicide(possibly)
Soldier kills an enemy soldier during time of war: Legal homicide.
Executioner kills a convict under death sentence: Legal homicide.
I know that, but was going on the basis that a 32" widescreen LCD is at least within the size category I'd require of a replacement.
32" 4:3 484.5 in^2
32" 16:9 437.5 in^2
So a 16:9 screen would have 90% of the actual screen of a 4:3. They look large enough in the store, at least.
I knew I shoulda stuck a disclaimer about being sure people could find the stuff cheaper!
Either I'm missing the really good deals in my area, or my area doesn't offer them.
Some quick checking reveals that they're getting cheaper.
Olevia 32" 720P 16:9 - $600 w/shipping
Westinghouse 37" 1080P 16:9 - $860 w/shipping.
Hmm... At that price I'd spend the extra $260 for the 5" of screen estate and extra resolution.
If I was in a purchasing mood...
While I've read that the new formats are capable of more advanced compression, I believe that they're both using MPEG-2 at the moment.
.1% of the screen, it'll affect .025%.
Still, you'd expect any artifact to have a much smaller effect on the experience, given that any given artifact is going to tend to affect a quarter the visual area the DVD version would. IE rather than affecting
I remember a review where they tried to decide which was better for overall quality: downscaling video from 640x480 to 320x240 or simply turning the compression up to get a final video of the same size.
They concluded that turning the compression up was the better solution as the blockyness of the downscaled then fullscreened video was worse than the frequent artifacting of the highly compressed video also on fullscreen. Basically, even back then the codecs were better at deciding what to lose than just evenly throwing away of 75% of the pixels.
Of course, they were playing around with the video equivalent of 32kbit mp3 streams - quality loss was guarenteed, thus allowing them to get a much better overall impression of the quality comparison as compared to trying to go over the video with a magnifying glass.
Of course, going to 64kbit from 32kbit will give a more perceptible increase in quality than going from 64 to 128 - and going from 128 to 196 or 256 starts getting into 'just how good is your stereo system?' territory.
Clearly, the old standard was a compromise between people's perception and technical abilities at the time. Today, DVD quality, even upscaled, is more than enough to get the story point across in a fashion 'good enough', much like 128kbit MP3 is 'good enough' through cheap headphones.
While I'd willingly pay to be able to view HD content, I'm not willing to pay a huge(for me) amount of money for it.
I currently have a 32" CRT TV that's approaching a decade old, that I got on special when new. I can't remember what I paid for it, but it's completely functional(unlike my parents old one).
So for me to consider any HDTV I'm going to say that has to be at least within that size category.
The cheapest 720p 32" TV I've seen is $700, the cheapest 1080i is $1000. Consider that a standard TV by default is only 480i.
Then another $300 for one HD DVD player(whether HDDVD or Blueray).
I'm not willing to shell out $1k for HD at this time. Maybe when my TV dies I'll replace it.
You're spot on about quality - my parents made do for years with a standard TV that had a messed up horizontal - everything was stretched so wide that by setting the DVD player to thinking it was trying to dispay standard width on a widescreen using bars was just right.
They didn't get rid of it until they moved. It drove me nuts everytime I visited, but they just didn't care that much.
a quick jaunt over to wikipedia shows that the kill language is roman catholic in origin, and murder is the original...
I've also heard about the kill/murder thing... Murder being closer to the original language version. From a number of rabbis actually.
now that, you could argue I suppose, depending on what you consider murder. Strictly speaking, I would call it killing. Sometimes Justifiable murder, maybe, but always murder. but now....
What about self defense? Murder is killing, killing isn't necessarily murder. There are reasons why we have murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, etc... At least by my definition, murder is the intentional and unjustifiable killing of a human being.
To be honest, I'll agree with that.
.45 long colt pistol rounds for people protection.
If you're going to buy a multipurpose pistol like the Judge at least partially for home defense, load it up with the
And when I say 'point blank', I mean just that. Less than 7 feet, certainly, and I made no mention of killing.
Though it's always sobering to realize just how much velocity increase you can get going from a pistol length barrel to a rifle/shotgun.
Keep the firearms in their holsters unless a problem requiring their withdrawal comes up.
Honestly, for airline carry I wouldn't object to restricting it to individuals who have CCW permits, that avoids most of the truly bad, and even Air Marshals aren't 100%(they seem to like leaving their firearms in bathrooms).
It's a pain to leave the security screening, go back to the luggage check, check your stuff in your carry-on, and then get screened by security again. I'm not sure all airports will even let you do that.
Except that, per the article, Lithium batteries are expressly forbidden in check-in baggage. So you'd be screwed either way.
Makes me wish for an airline not subject to TSA stupidity.
1 mm pellets wouldn't do much, but there is a revolver handgun caliber which can have chambers compatible with .410 shotgun loads.
At close range it'd do more than piss off a person.
Well, at least you could be sure that the airline wouldn't pull stuff like keeping people in the plane while it's on the tarmac for hours.
The trick to keep annoying people from getting shot would be to have multiple armed people - unless there's a real reason to use a weapon, you don't want to go waving it around because the other carriers would shoot you.
Heck, I once proposed something much like this.
'NRA Airlines, 10% discount for open carry'. They'd have to use stairs to load the plane like in many less developed areas that don't have gated terminals, but you wouldn't have to worry about the plane being hijacked, and the security check would consist of a retired bomb dog.
Better nutrition and sanitation explains some of that, but yes.
Medical care is a BIG reason we not only live longer - we do so with fewer crippling diabilities.
I don't have a source, but I read somewhere that our disability rate is something like half of what it was before WWII.
Back then we couldn't really hope to reattach a finger, much less still have it retain at least some function.
Safer machinery, again, plays a big roll, but it's there.
For example, if you put someone with Schizophrenia on "cheap" drug instead of the "expensive" one, you may and probably will get that person out of whatever productive life they had and hospitalize them regularly due to the neat side effects.
Even in the USA, with HMOs and such, there is indeed pressure for cheaper drugs over expensive ones. Still, I feel the need to point out that a expensive drug is not necessarily better than the cheap one. Everybody's different, after all. Still, from what I've heard the European system can result in new drugs being unavailable while the european medical boards fight with the production company over what they're willing to pay. I think that all the drugs should be available - I just wish there was more research into why Drug A works in patient 1 but will screw up patient 2, while Drug B will do just the opposite. That way we could do a workup on an individual and come out with a true treatment regime rather than the experimental model that's currently in effect.
I've seen it with my family - they start on drug A, find that that's not working well, switch to B, find that that's worse, switch to C - ah, there we go!
After all, radiation therapy machines have been around for long time now and enjoy economies of scale.
MRI machines were once hideously expensive, on the scale of these particle accelerators. Now they're used as standard tests for certain conditions. So while the bean counters have a point, so don't you. Economy of scale might eventually make this treatment standard for a number of types of cancer.
From pure financial POV with no consideration for ethics. And that's how these things are often decided.
Perhaps unfortuantly, we don't have unlimited resources. It's like triage for a major accident or battle. You only have so much in the way of resources. So you assess the patients, and make some hard choices - sure, you might be able to save the guy with massive trauma- but you'd have to let three other less injured people die in order to do it. So you make him as comfortable as you can(big shot of morphine), then save the other three.
We're capable of going a lot further with this stuff, but as long as we don't have unlimited resources we'll still have to make concessions in the name of cost effectiveness.
It doesn't often come down something as bleak as 'Well, we can treat 100 people with this facility, OR 1000 with traditional methods', but it's a factor.
For majority of cancer cases, thought, better to treat the 10 (or 50 or whatever) people with worse but manageable side-effects for the same resources.
I agree, though I'd consider this as second stage research into how to make the systems more affordable/effective. So a limited basis expansion isn't too bad. Then again - they're looking at using it for more types of cancer and a company is trying to develop one that costs a mere $20 million rather than the current $100M. The current situation, with only 1-10 units in a country of 300 million(and don't forget international patients), you're still adding the capacity to treat special cases where the 'side effects' are not 'manageable' if they attempted traditional therapy.
FTA: When 10-year-old Brooke Bemont was about to undergo X-ray treatment for a brain tumor last summer, a doctor warned her mother, "Do not plan on your daughter ever going to Harvard." The radiation would damage Brooke's mental capacity, she said.
I know I'd go for proton therapy in that case.
There are all sorts of strategies of course, but my point is that if non-DRM tracks end up selling better than DRM tracks, then the executives might actually consider doing stuff like this more. While it could theoretically be used to cripple apple's itunes service, you could argue that Warner could do that simply by refusing to license to apple, so it's hardly a big deal.
Given that you can export non-drm music to pretty much anywhere, you're not locked into any one system. Which is the centerpoint - while apple generally does very well with their interfaces, it's still good to have competition. With no drm, I could use itunes or whatever to download the tracks, then turn around and play them in winamp if I want to.
Or a custom player I program up in my spare time for whatever reason.
While the watermark will give them a place to start, there's still some issues.
1: As you say, there are ways for the files to be stolen without the owner's knowledge. Any good defense lawyer will be able to tear this apart.
2: The average consumer won't be able to afford to cover the cost of the lawyers the company has to pay to get a conviction, much less $100k.
As this sort of stuff expands, I see lawyers popping up to defend against this sort of stuff. As a result, much like now, the music company will find the burden of proof still on them.
I have to agree with this.
Even if it's easy to break, if we can make it such that can see that offering a DRM free track for a reasonable price results in increased sales such that they make more profit, maybe we'll beat the DRM schemes.
Much like I've dumped many dollars into webscriptions - I recently had a reason to download all my books again in a new format - I hadn't realized I had quite that many. I hadn't realized that I had 356 of them.
Even if they were only ~$3 each*, it's over a thousand dollars. Just from me. How much have the other companies seen? $0.
*I buy the webscriptions, average 5 books for $15.
This might make for an interesting question:
Could the stockholders go after Mcbride and othe SCO executives for mismanagement and such?
When I read this I imagined being handed a sandwich from a local vender wrapped in SCO stock - much like fish&chips used to be wrapped in newspaper...
Maybe they're hoping to have you back for an undergraduate degree? Or perhaps continuing education? ;)
Seriously, that they're the best of the lot doesn't mean that they don't have misses. UoP ads are probably more directed for you than serving up ads for feminine products, joint pain, or for various medical issues I don't suffer from. I mean, you'd think that erectile dysfunction is a national crisis from the advertising I've seen on the tube(when I bother to turn it on).
At least for search page results, if I don't like the ad I skip over it and go to the next one. No middle of the screen bothering, no blinking or animated 'punch the monkey' ads that caused me to uninstall flash for so long, no random redirects to full page ads that I've been seeing lately.
By not bugging people, you don't piss them off so that they won't buy the products, but by being targeted you keep your click-through rate high and useful.
I'm not proposing a second check as much as checking for yourself. I wouldn't trust an old home inspection report from the seller, and I wouldn't trust independent auditors hired by the people I didn't trust.
.1%, you'd still expect Walmart to have dozens of offending stores each year. Doesn't mean that the company is criminal on the whole, just that the system breaks down occasionally(and Walmart needs to have controls in place).
When I buy stock I do perform research. That is only prudent. However, how can I be sure that whatever company I invest in isn't doing something illegal on the side?
It's not like I can walk in, flash my stock certificates, and ask to check out their operations with a hope to find any problems.
If however, you financed a criminal enterprise for a few years because you didn't want to really know, it seems your liability should be unlimited.
There might be some sense to that - just remember that there needs to be a certain amount of choice. It's not like Walmart or Michelin don't have rather obvious revenue streams. Indeed - when you get to that size it'd be unusual not to have the occasional violation. For example, if the average rate for stores violating labor laws are
If there's no individual liability for an owner, the less careful company is a lot better buy.
There is individual liability. Just limited. Generally speaking, a company that isn't careful is going to rack up enough civil matter costs to decrease it's profitability over a careful one.
I don't see how your idea of preventing corporate stock ownership is much better, or much less damaging to the economy. It makes the trail shorter, but if owning stock doesn't confer any risk, why bother?
Limited risk, not no risk. Currently, many companys subsection themselves up to limit liability to themselves. GMAC is a subsiderary of GM, etc...
In many cases a company will form a sub-company in order to limit their liability - so that the parent company isn't dragged down if the subsiderary is dragged down.
I think not being able to purchase stock with corporate funds would really slow down the market. Mutual funds are this, and in general, don't seem like too bad of a thing. (Except that they make people feel distant and thus not care about the actions done on their dollar.)
Actually, mutual funds aren't an example of this, at least in my view. I own shares of a mutual fund that owns shares of stock. The company that runs the mutual fund doesn't actually own the stock, they're merely holding it for me. Ownership of the fund is seperate from ownership of the offering company.
Yes, it insulates, but it also provides a good amount of diversification for a given amount of work as compared to working with individual stocks.
Many of the early ones, at least, used the sound level as a clue - Most television stations turned the volume up on commercials.
I'm not 100% sure how this worked, but apparently it's like the volume difference between commercial FM stations and PBS broadcasts. I generally have to give the volume knob a half turn up in my car when I switch to the public station. This 'turn up' was detectable even when no sound was present, and overwhelmed even loud segments of most movies.
They've gotten sneakier since then, but there was a time when many people grabbed for the remote to turn the volume down when ads came on.
From what I've read, google is the master of targeted ads. I frequently click on the ads when they come up during google searches - they're usually pretty good. They easily have the best rate going.
As a result, they have far better results than less targeted but more disruptive ads - as a result of TV, people already have a massive resistance to ads they're not really interested in. Add that to the fact that most television ads today are mostly brand awareness - can we really answer how much difference Coke/Pepsi ads make today?
New products make more sense to advertise - awareness hasn't built up yet. Still, I've been deluged with so many ads that I've stopped watching television most of the time, and I've certainly built up resistance to advertising.
Every so often the media companies go too far with advertising - resulting early on in people taping TV shows in order to be able to fast forward through them. Then they came up with auto-forwarding players, and players that would automatically pause recording during commercials.
Then DVRs came and the same features popped up.
On the internet, advertising just kept getting more and more intrusive until a backlash occurred - Firefox, pop-up blockers, various ad-removal services, etc...
Meanwhile google tools along generating ad revenue by concentrating on providing useful, directed, but not intrusive ads.
I do not see a huge market for the pay services.
Agreed, though I'd tend to think that there might be a market for high availability/accuracy systems - enable it to use multiple systems and you increase the odds of enough satellites being available to get a fix. Increase the number of satellites available for determining location and such and you increase accuracy.
It's still a chunk of potential profit loss, especially if it can be done cheaper(which I'm fairly reasonable is possible).
Whether the extras will enable the sale of enough extras to justify a half million is in doubt - how many special features can you market for the average film?
If you have $100 to invest, perhaps you have $10 to invest to make sure the other $90 isn't going to go to buying guns, or whatever.
*Giggle*, *SNORT* - Points at signature.
It would eat into profits, but so do laws in general. So does general due diligence.
Shareholders elect executives, who operate much like senators do in our government. Depending on the corporate charter, they select a CEO*.
The executives also duly contracted a audit company(paid for out of profits that would have otherwise gone to investors), which gave them a clean slate.
So what we had with Enron was a failure of the backup system - you argue that this necessitates a second backup system, while I believe that a second backup system would, on average, cost the economy more than it would save in Enron type cases. I mean, adding a second system still wouldn't prevent the representatives from being corrupted.
If I buy a TV it's my responsibility to make sure it's not stolen. In simple cases where I could hardly have known it'd simply be given back to the original owner. In cases where I'd bought it off the back of a truck, repeatedly, I'd be charged with receiving stolen goods, conspiracy, etc. When due diligence is done I stand to lose my TV money. When it's not, I could lose far more including my freedom.M
Actually it's like investing in a LLC - as long as you weren't aware, didn't have reason to believe that the TV(or other item) was stolen, all you stand to be out of is your money/TV. Generally speaking, your 'due diligence' when buying stock(especially from an exchange such as the NYSE) is kinda like buying a TV from a retail store as versus off the back of a truck, or even from a pawn shop.
I think it's a reason to break them up for scrap and sell them to new owners who promise to follow societies laws.
Personally, I think it's a reason to fine the company an appropriate amount to pay for the civil matters while you hold criminal trials for those part of the decision making process, throwing them in prison where appropriate.
And there's a fairly poor record of companies being punished at all for this. If I filed a fake DMCA takedown I'd be criminally charged for lying, sued for slander, etc.
You might be surprised. It frequently takes some doing to get prosecutors interested in these matters. For example, look at the bloody pants lawsuit.
Besides, I'd give it some time. They've gotten slapped down in a number of cases and prosecutor's offices are looking into matters.
I've proposed two changes, anyways:
1: Make executives and CEOs more responsible for the actions of their company. This will help keep them on the straight and narrow.
2: Make it so that companies can't own stock in other companies. No more of those bloody shell games with various companies being used as shells.
I figure that that would help enough in increasing transparency and responsibility.
*Actually one of the alternate proposals for selecting the president, actually.