Sort of.. but sort of not. In the Word example, the person you're selling it to would have to have a licensed copy of Word. So you're more kind of shifting the licensing question rather than removing it (we'll exclude the fact that they can use OpenOffice or whatever and avoid the whole issue -- you could have done that as well.)
Obviously that kind of shifting wouldn't work for fonts (companies haven't found a way to license our own eyeballs back to us yet) but I think the parallels can still be drawn even under your scenario.
Apparently, since I was replying to the part about them hiring a designer, not the part about picking a freely licensed font and you seem to have skipped right over the whole "reading my comment" bit and jumped straight to ZOMGFOSS zealotry.
But if you want to talk about freely licensed fonts well then.. great.. sure they could have done that. But again, since this was through a third party the problem wasn't the license itself.. UMG didn't tell the designer what font to use. The designer could just as easily have paid the $100 as he could have picked a $0 one. He did neither, so claiming that he could have done something else is.. well kind of the problem -- he DIDN'T do something else. He did something stupid.
If you're lucky. And you're assuming that whatever healthcare your job sticks you with is better than whatever healthcare the government would stick you with. The only distinction I see is that your employer has little incentive to give you more than the bare minimum unless you happen to be in a position that's difficult to replace and healthcare can be used as a perk. Aka: not most jobs. Maybe I'm not American enough but for me, people's literal lives is not a thing I want to be nickle and diming on.
access to the best health care on the planet
True, you do have the best healthcare on the planet. Too bad only 1% of your citizens can afford it. For the other 99%, you have at best equal and in many ways worse healthcare because the people can't pay for the good stuff themselves and nobody else is willing to cover it. That job-based insurance, assuming you didn't get fired for missing work in the first place, will only pay for the minimum possible procedures and drugs, and they'll still try to stiff you on the bill if they can find a way to do so.
If you are poor in the US, you get access to Meidcaid
For now anyway, Trump and McConnell are doing their best to get rid of that as well. Thankfully they've been unsuccessful so far.
So you have Medicaid to cover the poorest people of society. There's also Medicare to cover the elderly. Between those two groups, you've accounted for most of the "unproductive" people (children being the last large group.) By definition, these people don't have the money to pay for their own healthcare so guess what? You are!
So you're saying that in your perfect world, you're happy to cover the healthcare of everyone except yourself -- your own healthcare you want to be tied to whether or not you happen to be employed, and at whatever level your employer can be bothered paying. And then having to deal with the HMOs trying to screw you at every opportunity to boot. Rather than just paying into the pot and knowing for sure that you'll be covered if you happen to get sick a week after your company lays you off.
in other countries they just die because they can't get the procedure because it is too expensive
[Citation needed] I've heard of lots of people dying in the US because they couldn't afford a procedure and their HMO found a loophole to let themselves off the hook. While I'm sure such a thing has happened elsewhere, you certainly don't hear about it as often.
he US absorbs the vast majority of the development cost of new drugs, procedures and devices
And no, we don't "wait for" the generics. We use the patented products just like you do, and pay the full price (sort of.. we implement price controls to prevent life-saving drugs from being unattainably expensive, but of course the companies charge the maximum allowed under the controls and of course we pay that rather than letting people die needlessly.)
Once the patent expires though, sure we switch to generics because why wouldn't we? For that matter, the US switches to generics as well when a patent expires because well.. why wouldn't they?
I think the question is when it stops being a "font" and starts being a "typeface." For example if I download a font, create a.psd with it that I don't plan on selling, and then export that.psd to a.png (still using the font) and then finally send the.png to a printer in order to create a bunch of posters that I do intend to sell. By your logic, I'm clear of copyright since the.png no longer contains the font data, only the rasterized typeface.
Obviously I'd still be considered infringing in that case -- otherwise, the whole idea of copyrighting fonts is irrelevant (at least when used in print.) And that's sort of what we have here (or maybe even less steps away since its unlikely anyone would print from a.png when they've got the source.psd available.)
I don't see how that follows.. they failed to get a commercial license and are now being sued for it so your solution is to.. not use the font at all? Rather than paying the $100 license fee? I can almost guarantee you that any freelance font designer will be charging more than $100 for their time. Even a college student will likely cost you more than $100.
The only tricky part in this whole shebang is that there's a third party involved -- the designer -- and UMG wasn't paying enough attention to the licenses the designer was (inappropriately) using. Likely they just assumed the designer wasn't an idiot and kind of shot themselves in the foot for that. You're absolutely right it was stupid of them, but I think your suggestions for a solution are somewhat overkill compared to just paying the very small (for them at least) license fee.
Pretty much all software programs "get away with that." If I download a program under a "free for private use" license, and then 6 months later I start a business well guess what -- I can't (legally) use that software for my business unless I turn around and purchase a commercial license.
Similar for the font case. If you use a font with a non-commercial license for a non-commercial product and then you commercialize it later.. go buy yourself a commercial license. The fact that whatever you designed with that font was done 6 months ago rather than today doesn't really matter at that point.
The fact that the designer purchased a license pretty much derails the argument that it was done by coincidence (though I'm not sure such an argument would hold up.. but hard to say since I imagine two people independently coming up with an identical creative work of any substance is unlikely enough that its probably never been tried.)
Then the fact that they purchased the wrong license means that the license purchase itself is not a defense. So they can't claim coincidence nor can they claim that the lawsuit is invalid. They're stuck fighting it.
As for $1.25m being "insane".. we're talking about an organization that happily asks for multi-billion dollar judgements from 12 year olds. If anything, only asking for $1.25m is way underselling their case in the current copyright climate, especially given the history of the people they're filing against.
But of course they've also got to face up to the fact that they (probably) can't afford an extended court battle even if they're likely to win whereas UMG can, so they probably want to just get a summary judgement or a settlement for a few hundred thousand and call it a win rather than asking for $zillions and gambling on getting awarded $20 or 30m before they go bankrupt and can't continue the suit (and thus being awarded $squat.)
Pretty sure there's nothing in a standard Anton Piller order that involves an interrogation or requires the defendant to talk. Either the judge issued that part explicitly (article doesn't mention such a thing nor link to the order itself, and I'm too lazy to see if its publicly available somewhere never mind read it..)
Or the plaintiffs were just exceeding the order's authority and being abusive. I'd hazard to say this is the more likely case given the other abuses already involved that the article did mention.
The UK has been as bad or worse than the US for the better part of a decade now, maybe longer. So that's not really been a fair comparison for quite a while.
Canada is still better than the US for protecting civil liberties. That hardly means we're perfect though and there's no shortage of people attempting to abuse our civil liberties either. Occasionally things break down and one of those attempts is successful.
The main benefit that Canada (and even the UK) people usually talk about though is health care. The US is the only developed country that doesn't guarantee their citizens that rather essential component in ensuring their right to life, preferring business' "right" to profit.
With regards to this particular case though, it sounds like a judge authorizing a valid legal procedure (though I personally find it kind of sketchy that the plaintiffs are allowed to execute the order themselves rather than being done by an independent party..) But they abused their privilege and went way overboard, causing the whole thing to be subsequently thrown out as it should be.
The order is supposed to at least be overseen by an independent lawyer to ensure this kind of crap doesn't happen and that all parties remain within the bounds of the order, but apparently in this case they were either lazy or not as independent as they're supposed to be. I'd be surprised if the appeal gets upheld and the search results reinstated, assuming the reporting was even remotely accurate.
What we're seeing is a slow, world-wide collapse of leftist ideology in progress.
What we're seeing is a slow, world-wide collapse of democratic ideology.. regardless of what side of the isle you happen to like. Even in "democratic" states like the US, we're seeing all sorts of legislation being proposed to knock of voter "fraud" which, completely coincidentally of course, also happens to disproportionately affect democratic voters. Its was bad day when your choices for president were Trump lying to your face and Clinton lying behind your back. Its going to be a worse day when your choices are Trump Jr vs Paul Ryan -- that is, no democratic nominee at all. Even if you don't like the left, its pretty hard to argue that having an opposing view around is helpful to temper the worst ideas.
But as an inherently unsustainable ideology
You do realize that pure capitalism is equally unsustainable right? As with pretty much everything in the world, a balance is generally best. Well unless you're one of the guys at the top, then too far either direction is great as both ways give you nearly supreme power. But unless you're in the 1% (or maybe even 0.1%,) you're going to want to be in the middle where you can make your mark if you're lucky (not too far left) but not be entirely screwed when you're not (not too far right.)
The masses have rejected leftism.
No, the elite have rejected leftism, unsurprisingly. The masses have no idea wtf you're talking about and just vote for the guy who hates on Mexicans and Muslims the most (or whatever the baddie of the decade is if we're discussing other elections) when they see him on TV.
Those promoting leftist ideologies know this is happening.
Well this much is true.
The problem isn't that we're moving away from "leftism." The problem is that the right has sunk to slinging mud and the left hasn't got there yet. Left: "Climate change is happening, here's shitloads of evidence." Trump: "Nope fake news!" Left: "Ok so where's you're evidence to the contrary?" Trump: "Fake news! Its all Hillary's fault!" Left: "That doesn't even make sense." Trump: "I know all the things. FAKE NEWS!"
Its hard to argue like that when one side just refuses to even generate a point, never mind a conclusion. And unfortunately the proles are dumb enough to like the reality TV stupidity without realizing that they're losing things like their health care (Yay they can now "choose" to have no healthcare, or a plan that costs 4x as much as it does under the ACA. Too bad they can't choose to just not get sick..) Or their right to choose if they have an abortion or not (because the political right is overrun by Christian fundamentalists who throw their will around even though the US is supposed to have separation of church and state,) and many many other rights and freedoms that all get thrown under the bus in the name of making the already-rich a little bit richer.
You are correct in that the world is moving away from socialist policies.. but I don't think your reasoning about the causes is correct, and unless there's some reversal, the long goal of the current political climate is toward oppression of the masses, rather than freedom for them, as more and more of the currently-middle class get pushed closer to the poverty line.
challenging, but keeping yourself motivated to do the same thing over and over for two years straight with little or no reward sure as hell is mentally taxing.
And no, if he spent 2 years grinding the starting zone in an MMO he wouldn't have much of squat in terms of gear drops because starting zone gear isn't worth anything. At least not in any MMO I've ever seen (also, someone has indeed done that. And others have done similar things.)
Go onto any RPG forum on gamefaqs and you'll pretty much always find guides for doing some type of challenge play or other. Usually in the form of handicapping yourself but still completing the game (kind of the opposite of what TFA is talking about) but still.. people like to challenge themselves, in whatever way they can. Even if their version of challenge doesn't live up to your standards.
Well given that India has more than 3x the US population, and then taking into account the fact that 60% of the grads are unemployable. That actually works out fairly equal when you think about it. Per capita, India would still be somewhat higher (~2x if my math is right -- always a questionable assumption) but that's within the realm of local variability, especially since India is still one of the big outsourcing countries (that is, their excess engineers are filling in for jobs in the US and other nations. Every one or two Indian programmers in outsourcing means one less American programmer employed.)
The problem is that 60% unemployable rate. That's not good for anybody except the schools who get paid to (not) train these people. The people themselves can't get jobs (at least not jobs they want/are ostensibly trained for,) the unemployment statistics get negatively skewed, the government gets to deal with the mess and the whole country ends up as a bit of a laughing stock. If the government can do something to increase that percentage -- even if, and maybe especially if, it simultaneously lowers the enrollment rate, then it should be a benefit to the entire Indian economy. 600k useful engineers is far better than 800k useless ones.
And that's not even getting to the question of what level of competency they consider "employable" in India. My one experience with Indian outsourcing gave me a C# program that was written in VB6 style (not even VB.NET) as best they could, doing things like comparing the text of a label with a hardcoded string to do branching and all sorts of garbage. The code would compile, but that's about all I can say for it. Of course we had hired literally the cheapest of the cheap so its not surprising the kind of quality we got.. but they were obviously employed by the outsourcing firm, and if that's the bar for "employable" programmers in India, I don't even want to think about what level of training those 60% unemployable people are at.
Mostly because they've made a distinction between "freely available" as in accessible vs "freely available" as in beer. While some journals do indeed limit themselves to members and whatnot, the majority of them are happy to sell you a license for any paper you'd like.
Also, most other government data is like that as well. If you make a freedom of information request for example, you usually will be charged a processing fee. And that's just purely a government interaction -- throw in a private profit-driven entity between you and the government, and of course the charges will go up.
Overall though, this is pretty much going to end up like a miniature version of the RIAA vs basically everyone battle over music -- a necessary evil that is no longer necessary fighting against the inevitable and (short of a China-style great firewall.. maybe) unstoppable force of internet file sharing. If Sci-hub is shutdown, some other manner of sharing research papers will crop up somewhere.
The trouble is that many people don't see it as a better deal. They only see the sticker price and EV is still more expensive than ICE to purchase.
But there are costs that aren't registered in the ticket price: Climate change is the most discussed lately of course, but there's also things like political aspects of the petroleum trade (especially for countries that are on the import side of the deal.) Things that few individuals have to ever think about in more than the abstract, but affects the country as a whole.
So governments are stuck either waiting for the price of EVs to drop enough that a majority of people will choose to buy them (which may well happen before 2040 anyway, though the Netherlands' 2025 deadline is rather less likely barring a massive breakthrough in battery tech) and hoping that Donald Trump is somehow more right than all of the climate scientists in the world.. Or implement laws to force more immediate change.
Well its good thing words never ever ever change their meaning over time. Especially in common usage! How would we ever manage to communicate if that happened?
Well ignoring the fact that its pretty hard to implement technology that hasn't been developed yet, at any cost, "profitably" is a rather useless metric since the profitability of any reserve depends on the price of oil. Some specific reserve may not be profitable at say, $50/barrel but if all the $50/barrel oil is used up and the price has gone up to $70/barrel.. now you get to revisit those reserves you'd overlooked before.
Basically, any oil that can be extracted, at any price, should be considered part of the available reserve even if it can't be extracted at today's prices, because eventually the price will go up. Even some oil that can't currently be extracted at any price will become part of the available reserve in future as we invent new technologies that we perhaps can't even foresee at the moment.
I'm pretty sure all high-cost phones, including not-Android, send data to Google/Apple/MS. If only "some" of these low-cost ones are doing the same, that almost sounds like a worthy gamble.
(And yes, I realize that they mean "in addition to already sending your data to the OS makers" rather than "instead of." I'm just calling out the headline's phrasing..)
People have always liked to challenging themselves in one way or another. What's the point of climbing to the top of Everest, for example? You spent a couple of weeks braving freezing cold and oxygen deprivation and a high chance of death to accomplish what a helicopter could do in a couple of hours. Hell even without a helicopter, whats the point? Stand on a high mountain for a couple of hours and stare at other not-so-high mountains before turning around and making the trek back down. Yay.
But of course the answer is because people like the challenge of doing it. It gives them bragging rights and a story to tell. Obviously "I climbed Everest" is a much more impressive story than "I hit level 99 by grinding the starting zone for 2 years" but the purpose is the same, and the latter is a much more accessible challenge to average people who are neither rich enough nor fit enough to be mountaineers.
Wow. That was some verbal gymnastics you went to for essentially "durr gummint bad!"
you can sue yourself, the taxpayer
Unless you happen to be the ruler of a monarchy, the government, the people who pay for the government (ie: citizens) and the people who work for the government are all separate entities. Sure, your own taxes would in part pay for the settlement if you win the lawsuit, but that's not much different than suing McDonald's and having the Big Mac you ate 3 years ago pay for some tiny fraction of the settlement.
At the end of the day, only people can generate wealth, regardless of whether they're generating it for a company, or for their government (via taxes) or for themselves directly. If you don't believe me, go register a company and do nothing with it. You will see exactly $0 profit (actually somewhat negative since registration isn't free!)
Government seems to think that punishing 'human error' is a great way to prevent it
What? Whoever said that? Just because its impossible to pick out one accidental speeder from the 100s or 1000s of fully-aware ones, doesn't mean anyone -- even the government -- thinks its "great" to punish honest mistakes.
Businesses can and do punish human error by firing people
Well the government can't really "fire" a citizen, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.
If the government, e.g., 'accidentally' violates law concerning privacy of its citizens, no one is going to prison.
Just like all of the people who go to prison for the hundreds of corporate data breaches we see every year right? Of course not. In this case, the government fired and fined the employee in question -- exactly what you'd expect a businesses to do in that situation (hell, they wouldn't even get to levy a fine like that.. or at least would have no authority to enforce it if they did unless they successfully sue you for it.)
in only one case is there a significant incentive to avoid them.
I'm not sure which case you're talking about here. You've listed fines and jail if the government catches you and firings if your company catches you. Most people have a strong incentive to avoid all of that. The only "one case" where you claim nothing happens is if you're a government employee, and that's just bullshit since TFA itself straight up laid out the punishment for the employee who made the mistake.
Which is exactly the problem. You can use GIMP or Photoshop to do the same things you can do in Paint as well, but it takes you 100x longer because that's not their purpose so you spend most of your time fighting against a UI that's trying to do something you're not wanting to do.
Paint3D is the same sort of problem. Sure you might be able to do a 2D drawing in it, but you'll be fighting the UI the entire way since it wants you to be using models and crap.
Like when MS discovered that most people were using spreadsheets as a bunch of arbitrary columns more than an actual spreadsheet, they probably should look into Paint's primary usage: Its not to draw pretty pictures. Most people use it to add arrows, text annotations and other quick and dirty things onto existing images. I mean sure someone somewhere will probably be happy to add a 3D-looking cube in the same manner but that's not most of us (and there are better tools out there if you really want to do 3D modeling.)
Basically: Paint3D is not a replacement for Paint as it stands. Nor is Photoshop or GIMP or Paint.net or anything else that's trying to be much fancier than a line drawing tool and a text entry tool. They might be good for what they're supposed to do, but in terms of a Paint replacement, they just get in the way more than they help.
It actually shouldn't matter much whether you include them or not, for the simple reason that (approximately) the same number of people will be in that category at all times. Yes a mother may want to go back to work in 3 months.. but another woman somewhere is going to be taking maternity leave in 3 months. Unless there's some reason to believe that birth rates are going to change significantly in the short term, the year-over-year difference will be near zero.
Similar for university. Unless you're seeing a significant change in enrollment numbers, the year-over-year change will be negligible.
Now if you include them last year, and don't include them this year (or vice-versa) then anyone comparing the YoY will of course notice a significant difference which they will have to take into account.
Yes they do. That janitor getting minimum wage to clean the toilet? Means your high-priced ass doesn't have to bother. That janitor is indeed creating wealth indirectly by giving you more time to create wealth directly.
Of course the whole concept of creating "wealth" is pretty lame thanks to how we compute it (GDP and corporate profit margins and other mechanics that intentionally group the high-paid outliers in with the general masses in order to make pretty numbers while obscuring any non-numeric factors such as citizen/employee quality of life.)
For all of the crapshoot that Brexit is going to be if/when it finally goes through, I suspect unemployment won't be a major issue. In fact it will likely be the opposite problem: There's a lot of people from the less affluent EU countries that are happy to work crap jobs for crap wages because its still better than where they came from. Kicking them out means there will be a whole lot of crap jobs suddenly looking for employees among a British population that doesn't want to do that kind of work and definitely won't do it for the wages they were previously paying.
So companies at best are going to have to start paying higher wages for existing jobs in order to attract workers to replace the ones that got deported, and some number of them won't be able to afford to do so and go out of business. Of course as companies go out of business, more people will be looking for jobs again and eventually a new unemployment equilibrium will be reached. It could take a decade or two though before everything's kind of settled back down, for better or worse.
There's benefits to having everything in one place in terms of performance and data deduplication.. for example, if they had military and driving and health records in three different databases -- that means 3 different copies of a person's name and likely 3 different copies of their address and other "standard" information. That means 3 places it can be screwed up by a clerk mistyping or whatever, and 3 places that need to be updated whenever a person moves or changes their name (direct name changes aren't super common but marriage is..) or whatever else.
Now I'm assuming their database does have a very detailed credentials system -- they're not going to let some low level clerk at Sweden's DMV equivalent have access to data about their military's secret units or anything dumb like that.
But even if they had their databases separated, this would still be a colossal screwup. I can't even begin to imagine the sequence of events that would let a government organization, with all of its bureaucracy and paperwork and double and triple and quintuple checks, manage to release even a small database to a private corporation's cloud services with zero encryption. It just boggles the mind at how many things would have had to go wrong for this to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of.. but sort of not. In the Word example, the person you're selling it to would have to have a licensed copy of Word. So you're more kind of shifting the licensing question rather than removing it (we'll exclude the fact that they can use OpenOffice or whatever and avoid the whole issue -- you could have done that as well.)
Obviously that kind of shifting wouldn't work for fonts (companies haven't found a way to license our own eyeballs back to us yet) but I think the parallels can still be drawn even under your scenario.
Is that so hard to understand?
Apparently, since I was replying to the part about them hiring a designer, not the part about picking a freely licensed font and you seem to have skipped right over the whole "reading my comment" bit and jumped straight to ZOMGFOSS zealotry.
But if you want to talk about freely licensed fonts well then.. great.. sure they could have done that. But again, since this was through a third party the problem wasn't the license itself.. UMG didn't tell the designer what font to use. The designer could just as easily have paid the $100 as he could have picked a $0 one. He did neither, so claiming that he could have done something else is.. well kind of the problem -- he DIDN'T do something else. He did something stupid.
you get health insurance through your job
If you're lucky. And you're assuming that whatever healthcare your job sticks you with is better than whatever healthcare the government would stick you with. The only distinction I see is that your employer has little incentive to give you more than the bare minimum unless you happen to be in a position that's difficult to replace and healthcare can be used as a perk. Aka: not most jobs. Maybe I'm not American enough but for me, people's literal lives is not a thing I want to be nickle and diming on.
access to the best health care on the planet
True, you do have the best healthcare on the planet. Too bad only 1% of your citizens can afford it. For the other 99%, you have at best equal and in many ways worse healthcare because the people can't pay for the good stuff themselves and nobody else is willing to cover it. That job-based insurance, assuming you didn't get fired for missing work in the first place, will only pay for the minimum possible procedures and drugs, and they'll still try to stiff you on the bill if they can find a way to do so.
If you are poor in the US, you get access to Meidcaid
For now anyway, Trump and McConnell are doing their best to get rid of that as well. Thankfully they've been unsuccessful so far.
So you have Medicaid to cover the poorest people of society. There's also Medicare to cover the elderly. Between those two groups, you've accounted for most of the "unproductive" people (children being the last large group.) By definition, these people don't have the money to pay for their own healthcare so guess what? You are!
So you're saying that in your perfect world, you're happy to cover the healthcare of everyone except yourself -- your own healthcare you want to be tied to whether or not you happen to be employed, and at whatever level your employer can be bothered paying. And then having to deal with the HMOs trying to screw you at every opportunity to boot. Rather than just paying into the pot and knowing for sure that you'll be covered if you happen to get sick a week after your company lays you off.
in other countries they just die because they can't get the procedure because it is too expensive
[Citation needed]
I've heard of lots of people dying in the US because they couldn't afford a procedure and their HMO found a loophole to let themselves off the hook. While I'm sure such a thing has happened elsewhere, you certainly don't hear about it as often.
he US absorbs the vast majority of the development cost of new drugs, procedures and devices
[Citation needed]
According to http://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurethe-top-10-biggest-pharmaceutical-companies-of-2014-4396561/, only 5 of the top 10 drug makers are US-based. So even if we ignore the fact that they're all multinational anyway and thus spread the cost around between many labs in multiple countries, the US is still only covering at most half of the R&D costs.
And no, we don't "wait for" the generics. We use the patented products just like you do, and pay the full price (sort of.. we implement price controls to prevent life-saving drugs from being unattainably expensive, but of course the companies charge the maximum allowed under the controls and of course we pay that rather than letting people die needlessly.)
Once the patent expires though, sure we switch to generics because why wouldn't we? For that matter, the US switches to generics as well when a patent expires because well.. why wouldn't they?
I think the question is when it stops being a "font" and starts being a "typeface." For example if I download a font, create a .psd with it that I don't plan on selling, and then export that .psd to a .png (still using the font) and then finally send the .png to a printer in order to create a bunch of posters that I do intend to sell. By your logic, I'm clear of copyright since the .png no longer contains the font data, only the rasterized typeface.
Obviously I'd still be considered infringing in that case -- otherwise, the whole idea of copyrighting fonts is irrelevant (at least when used in print.) And that's sort of what we have here (or maybe even less steps away since its unlikely anyone would print from a .png when they've got the source .psd available.)
I don't see how that follows.. they failed to get a commercial license and are now being sued for it so your solution is to.. not use the font at all? Rather than paying the $100 license fee? I can almost guarantee you that any freelance font designer will be charging more than $100 for their time. Even a college student will likely cost you more than $100.
The only tricky part in this whole shebang is that there's a third party involved -- the designer -- and UMG wasn't paying enough attention to the licenses the designer was (inappropriately) using. Likely they just assumed the designer wasn't an idiot and kind of shot themselves in the foot for that. You're absolutely right it was stupid of them, but I think your suggestions for a solution are somewhat overkill compared to just paying the very small (for them at least) license fee.
Pretty much all software programs "get away with that." If I download a program under a "free for private use" license, and then 6 months later I start a business well guess what -- I can't (legally) use that software for my business unless I turn around and purchase a commercial license.
Similar for the font case. If you use a font with a non-commercial license for a non-commercial product and then you commercialize it later.. go buy yourself a commercial license. The fact that whatever you designed with that font was done 6 months ago rather than today doesn't really matter at that point.
No, that's the point.
The fact that the designer purchased a license pretty much derails the argument that it was done by coincidence (though I'm not sure such an argument would hold up.. but hard to say since I imagine two people independently coming up with an identical creative work of any substance is unlikely enough that its probably never been tried.)
Then the fact that they purchased the wrong license means that the license purchase itself is not a defense. So they can't claim coincidence nor can they claim that the lawsuit is invalid. They're stuck fighting it.
As for $1.25m being "insane".. we're talking about an organization that happily asks for multi-billion dollar judgements from 12 year olds. If anything, only asking for $1.25m is way underselling their case in the current copyright climate, especially given the history of the people they're filing against.
But of course they've also got to face up to the fact that they (probably) can't afford an extended court battle even if they're likely to win whereas UMG can, so they probably want to just get a summary judgement or a settlement for a few hundred thousand and call it a win rather than asking for $zillions and gambling on getting awarded $20 or 30m before they go bankrupt and can't continue the suit (and thus being awarded $squat.)
Pretty sure there's nothing in a standard Anton Piller order that involves an interrogation or requires the defendant to talk. Either the judge issued that part explicitly (article doesn't mention such a thing nor link to the order itself, and I'm too lazy to see if its publicly available somewhere never mind read it..)
Or the plaintiffs were just exceeding the order's authority and being abusive. I'd hazard to say this is the more likely case given the other abuses already involved that the article did mention.
The UK has been as bad or worse than the US for the better part of a decade now, maybe longer. So that's not really been a fair comparison for quite a while.
Canada is still better than the US for protecting civil liberties. That hardly means we're perfect though and there's no shortage of people attempting to abuse our civil liberties either. Occasionally things break down and one of those attempts is successful.
The main benefit that Canada (and even the UK) people usually talk about though is health care. The US is the only developed country that doesn't guarantee their citizens that rather essential component in ensuring their right to life, preferring business' "right" to profit.
With regards to this particular case though, it sounds like a judge authorizing a valid legal procedure (though I personally find it kind of sketchy that the plaintiffs are allowed to execute the order themselves rather than being done by an independent party..) But they abused their privilege and went way overboard, causing the whole thing to be subsequently thrown out as it should be.
The order is supposed to at least be overseen by an independent lawyer to ensure this kind of crap doesn't happen and that all parties remain within the bounds of the order, but apparently in this case they were either lazy or not as independent as they're supposed to be. I'd be surprised if the appeal gets upheld and the search results reinstated, assuming the reporting was even remotely accurate.
What we're seeing is a slow, world-wide collapse of leftist ideology in progress.
What we're seeing is a slow, world-wide collapse of democratic ideology.. regardless of what side of the isle you happen to like. Even in "democratic" states like the US, we're seeing all sorts of legislation being proposed to knock of voter "fraud" which, completely coincidentally of course, also happens to disproportionately affect democratic voters. Its was bad day when your choices for president were Trump lying to your face and Clinton lying behind your back. Its going to be a worse day when your choices are Trump Jr vs Paul Ryan -- that is, no democratic nominee at all. Even if you don't like the left, its pretty hard to argue that having an opposing view around is helpful to temper the worst ideas.
But as an inherently unsustainable ideology
You do realize that pure capitalism is equally unsustainable right? As with pretty much everything in the world, a balance is generally best. Well unless you're one of the guys at the top, then too far either direction is great as both ways give you nearly supreme power. But unless you're in the 1% (or maybe even 0.1%,) you're going to want to be in the middle where you can make your mark if you're lucky (not too far left) but not be entirely screwed when you're not (not too far right.)
The masses have rejected leftism.
No, the elite have rejected leftism, unsurprisingly. The masses have no idea wtf you're talking about and just vote for the guy who hates on Mexicans and Muslims the most (or whatever the baddie of the decade is if we're discussing other elections) when they see him on TV.
Those promoting leftist ideologies know this is happening.
Well this much is true.
The problem isn't that we're moving away from "leftism." The problem is that the right has sunk to slinging mud and the left hasn't got there yet.
Left: "Climate change is happening, here's shitloads of evidence."
Trump: "Nope fake news!"
Left: "Ok so where's you're evidence to the contrary?" Trump: "Fake news! Its all Hillary's fault!"
Left: "That doesn't even make sense."
Trump: "I know all the things. FAKE NEWS!"
Its hard to argue like that when one side just refuses to even generate a point, never mind a conclusion. And unfortunately the proles are dumb enough to like the reality TV stupidity without realizing that they're losing things like their health care (Yay they can now "choose" to have no healthcare, or a plan that costs 4x as much as it does under the ACA. Too bad they can't choose to just not get sick..) Or their right to choose if they have an abortion or not (because the political right is overrun by Christian fundamentalists who throw their will around even though the US is supposed to have separation of church and state,) and many many other rights and freedoms that all get thrown under the bus in the name of making the already-rich a little bit richer.
You are correct in that the world is moving away from socialist policies.. but I don't think your reasoning about the causes is correct, and unless there's some reversal, the long goal of the current political climate is toward oppression of the masses, rather than freedom for them, as more and more of the currently-middle class get pushed closer to the poverty line.
How is it not a challenge? Sure its not
physically
challenging, but keeping yourself motivated to do the same thing over and over for two years straight with little or no reward sure as hell is mentally taxing.
And no, if he spent 2 years grinding the starting zone in an MMO he wouldn't have much of squat in terms of gear drops because starting zone gear isn't worth anything. At least not in any MMO I've ever seen (also, someone has indeed done that. And others have done similar things.)
Go onto any RPG forum on gamefaqs and you'll pretty much always find guides for doing some type of challenge play or other. Usually in the form of handicapping yourself but still completing the game (kind of the opposite of what TFA is talking about) but still.. people like to challenge themselves, in whatever way they can. Even if their version of challenge doesn't live up to your standards.
Well given that India has more than 3x the US population, and then taking into account the fact that 60% of the grads are unemployable. That actually works out fairly equal when you think about it. Per capita, India would still be somewhat higher (~2x if my math is right -- always a questionable assumption) but that's within the realm of local variability, especially since India is still one of the big outsourcing countries (that is, their excess engineers are filling in for jobs in the US and other nations. Every one or two Indian programmers in outsourcing means one less American programmer employed.)
The problem is that 60% unemployable rate. That's not good for anybody except the schools who get paid to (not) train these people. The people themselves can't get jobs (at least not jobs they want/are ostensibly trained for,) the unemployment statistics get negatively skewed, the government gets to deal with the mess and the whole country ends up as a bit of a laughing stock. If the government can do something to increase that percentage -- even if, and maybe especially if, it simultaneously lowers the enrollment rate, then it should be a benefit to the entire Indian economy. 600k useful engineers is far better than 800k useless ones.
And that's not even getting to the question of what level of competency they consider "employable" in India. My one experience with Indian outsourcing gave me a C# program that was written in VB6 style (not even VB.NET) as best they could, doing things like comparing the text of a label with a hardcoded string to do branching and all sorts of garbage. The code would compile, but that's about all I can say for it. Of course we had hired literally the cheapest of the cheap so its not surprising the kind of quality we got.. but they were obviously employed by the outsourcing firm, and if that's the bar for "employable" programmers in India, I don't even want to think about what level of training those 60% unemployable people are at.
Mostly because they've made a distinction between "freely available" as in accessible vs "freely available" as in beer. While some journals do indeed limit themselves to members and whatnot, the majority of them are happy to sell you a license for any paper you'd like.
Also, most other government data is like that as well. If you make a freedom of information request for example, you usually will be charged a processing fee. And that's just purely a government interaction -- throw in a private profit-driven entity between you and the government, and of course the charges will go up.
Overall though, this is pretty much going to end up like a miniature version of the RIAA vs basically everyone battle over music -- a necessary evil that is no longer necessary fighting against the inevitable and (short of a China-style great firewall.. maybe) unstoppable force of internet file sharing. If Sci-hub is shutdown, some other manner of sharing research papers will crop up somewhere.
The trouble is that many people don't see it as a better deal. They only see the sticker price and EV is still more expensive than ICE to purchase.
But there are costs that aren't registered in the ticket price: Climate change is the most discussed lately of course, but there's also things like political aspects of the petroleum trade (especially for countries that are on the import side of the deal.) Things that few individuals have to ever think about in more than the abstract, but affects the country as a whole.
So governments are stuck either waiting for the price of EVs to drop enough that a majority of people will choose to buy them (which may well happen before 2040 anyway, though the Netherlands' 2025 deadline is rather less likely barring a massive breakthrough in battery tech) and hoping that Donald Trump is somehow more right than all of the climate scientists in the world.. Or implement laws to force more immediate change.
Well its good thing words never ever ever change their meaning over time. Especially in common usage! How would we ever manage to communicate if that happened?
Well ignoring the fact that its pretty hard to implement technology that hasn't been developed yet, at any cost, "profitably" is a rather useless metric since the profitability of any reserve depends on the price of oil. Some specific reserve may not be profitable at say, $50/barrel but if all the $50/barrel oil is used up and the price has gone up to $70/barrel.. now you get to revisit those reserves you'd overlooked before.
Basically, any oil that can be extracted, at any price, should be considered part of the available reserve even if it can't be extracted at today's prices, because eventually the price will go up. Even some oil that can't currently be extracted at any price will become part of the available reserve in future as we invent new technologies that we perhaps can't even foresee at the moment.
I'm pretty sure all high-cost phones, including not-Android, send data to Google/Apple/MS. If only "some" of these low-cost ones are doing the same, that almost sounds like a worthy gamble.
(And yes, I realize that they mean "in addition to already sending your data to the OS makers" rather than "instead of." I'm just calling out the headline's phrasing..)
People have always liked to challenging themselves in one way or another. What's the point of climbing to the top of Everest, for example? You spent a couple of weeks braving freezing cold and oxygen deprivation and a high chance of death to accomplish what a helicopter could do in a couple of hours. Hell even without a helicopter, whats the point? Stand on a high mountain for a couple of hours and stare at other not-so-high mountains before turning around and making the trek back down. Yay.
But of course the answer is because people like the challenge of doing it. It gives them bragging rights and a story to tell. Obviously "I climbed Everest" is a much more impressive story than "I hit level 99 by grinding the starting zone for 2 years" but the purpose is the same, and the latter is a much more accessible challenge to average people who are neither rich enough nor fit enough to be mountaineers.
Wow. That was some verbal gymnastics you went to for essentially "durr gummint bad!"
you can sue yourself, the taxpayer
Unless you happen to be the ruler of a monarchy, the government, the people who pay for the government (ie: citizens) and the people who work for the government are all separate entities. Sure, your own taxes would in part pay for the settlement if you win the lawsuit, but that's not much different than suing McDonald's and having the Big Mac you ate 3 years ago pay for some tiny fraction of the settlement.
At the end of the day, only people can generate wealth, regardless of whether they're generating it for a company, or for their government (via taxes) or for themselves directly. If you don't believe me, go register a company and do nothing with it. You will see exactly $0 profit (actually somewhat negative since registration isn't free!)
Government seems to think that punishing 'human error' is a great way to prevent it
What? Whoever said that? Just because its impossible to pick out one accidental speeder from the 100s or 1000s of fully-aware ones, doesn't mean anyone -- even the government -- thinks its "great" to punish honest mistakes.
Businesses can and do punish human error by firing people
Well the government can't really "fire" a citizen, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.
If the government, e.g., 'accidentally' violates law concerning privacy of its citizens, no one is going to prison.
Just like all of the people who go to prison for the hundreds of corporate data breaches we see every year right? Of course not. In this case, the government fired and fined the employee in question -- exactly what you'd expect a businesses to do in that situation (hell, they wouldn't even get to levy a fine like that.. or at least would have no authority to enforce it if they did unless they successfully sue you for it.)
in only one case is there a significant incentive to avoid them.
I'm not sure which case you're talking about here. You've listed fines and jail if the government catches you and firings if your company catches you. Most people have a strong incentive to avoid all of that. The only "one case" where you claim nothing happens is if you're a government employee, and that's just bullshit since TFA itself straight up laid out the punishment for the employee who made the mistake.
mixed with basic modeling.
Which is exactly the problem. You can use GIMP or Photoshop to do the same things you can do in Paint as well, but it takes you 100x longer because that's not their purpose so you spend most of your time fighting against a UI that's trying to do something you're not wanting to do.
Paint3D is the same sort of problem. Sure you might be able to do a 2D drawing in it, but you'll be fighting the UI the entire way since it wants you to be using models and crap.
Like when MS discovered that most people were using spreadsheets as a bunch of arbitrary columns more than an actual spreadsheet, they probably should look into Paint's primary usage: Its not to draw pretty pictures. Most people use it to add arrows, text annotations and other quick and dirty things onto existing images. I mean sure someone somewhere will probably be happy to add a 3D-looking cube in the same manner but that's not most of us (and there are better tools out there if you really want to do 3D modeling.)
Basically: Paint3D is not a replacement for Paint as it stands. Nor is Photoshop or GIMP or Paint.net or anything else that's trying to be much fancier than a line drawing tool and a text entry tool. They might be good for what they're supposed to do, but in terms of a Paint replacement, they just get in the way more than they help.
It actually shouldn't matter much whether you include them or not, for the simple reason that (approximately) the same number of people will be in that category at all times. Yes a mother may want to go back to work in 3 months.. but another woman somewhere is going to be taking maternity leave in 3 months. Unless there's some reason to believe that birth rates are going to change significantly in the short term, the year-over-year difference will be near zero.
Similar for university. Unless you're seeing a significant change in enrollment numbers, the year-over-year change will be negligible.
Now if you include them last year, and don't include them this year (or vice-versa) then anyone comparing the YoY will of course notice a significant difference which they will have to take into account.
Yes they do. That janitor getting minimum wage to clean the toilet? Means your high-priced ass doesn't have to bother. That janitor is indeed creating wealth indirectly by giving you more time to create wealth directly.
Of course the whole concept of creating "wealth" is pretty lame thanks to how we compute it (GDP and corporate profit margins and other mechanics that intentionally group the high-paid outliers in with the general masses in order to make pretty numbers while obscuring any non-numeric factors such as citizen/employee quality of life.)
For all of the crapshoot that Brexit is going to be if/when it finally goes through, I suspect unemployment won't be a major issue. In fact it will likely be the opposite problem: There's a lot of people from the less affluent EU countries that are happy to work crap jobs for crap wages because its still better than where they came from. Kicking them out means there will be a whole lot of crap jobs suddenly looking for employees among a British population that doesn't want to do that kind of work and definitely won't do it for the wages they were previously paying.
So companies at best are going to have to start paying higher wages for existing jobs in order to attract workers to replace the ones that got deported, and some number of them won't be able to afford to do so and go out of business. Of course as companies go out of business, more people will be looking for jobs again and eventually a new unemployment equilibrium will be reached. It could take a decade or two though before everything's kind of settled back down, for better or worse.
There's benefits to having everything in one place in terms of performance and data deduplication.. for example, if they had military and driving and health records in three different databases -- that means 3 different copies of a person's name and likely 3 different copies of their address and other "standard" information. That means 3 places it can be screwed up by a clerk mistyping or whatever, and 3 places that need to be updated whenever a person moves or changes their name (direct name changes aren't super common but marriage is..) or whatever else.
Now I'm assuming their database does have a very detailed credentials system -- they're not going to let some low level clerk at Sweden's DMV equivalent have access to data about their military's secret units or anything dumb like that.
But even if they had their databases separated, this would still be a colossal screwup. I can't even begin to imagine the sequence of events that would let a government organization, with all of its bureaucracy and paperwork and double and triple and quintuple checks, manage to release even a small database to a private corporation's cloud services with zero encryption. It just boggles the mind at how many things would have had to go wrong for this to happen.