I imagine if they could find the person who recorded that, some legal fucks would be given. Whether they'd amount to anything is another story, but you can be sure that Anniston's lawyers would at least be pursuing civil remedies even if criminal charges were somehow deemed inapplicable.
Of course celebrities in general have to have a lower reasonable expectation of privacy due to their status.. I doubt that's encoded in law anywhere as it would be discriminatory but a judge would likely have the thought in his mind somewhere along the way.
The one thing you absolutely need in order to punish a perpetrator though is you know.. the perp. Doesn't really matter who's laws you're running under if you don't know who to punish you can't punish them.
Of course, I'm excluding places where the rule of law is "if you don't come forward we'll just decimate your entire town" and similar such extremes.
Also note that the publishers generally get off the hook due to freedom of the press combined with their ability to protect sources. So any publisher with a penchant for pictures of questionable legal status just has get the word out that they're willing to pay and will protect their sources.. as long as they don't explicitly solicit the material they're mostly safe and can in turn give a reasonable guarantee of safety to whatever source happen to show up with goodies.
Or something like that -- I certainly don't know the exact wording of the relevant laws, never mind any regional differences.. but as a general overview that seems to be how things work in a lot of places (if not most) where freedom of the press is a thing.
Absolutely correct. Nintendo publishes games. That is they take someone else's labor of love and puts their name on it (they might still have their own development division -- but even they will be kept far away from the publishing end of things for just that reason. People who are proud of their work tend to want to share it, money or no money. And the business-y types aren't fond of that.
No, what he's saying is that nobody writing for IE6 had the ability to magically know what IE10 was going to look like, so they coded for what they had at the time.
You can go ahead and call it a bug if you want. I'd almost be tempted to agree. The ticket will be sitting there waiting for you with a priority level somewhere around installing central heating in hell as there's more immediate issues to handle that are causing actual problems now rather than just causing potential problems later.
"Fix everything" is a great and lofty goal, and you should always strive for perfection to be sure. But in the real world, there's costs and priorities to consider and absolute perfection rarely makes the cut when "good enough" is good enough and there's fifty other things that also need doing.
it was their first priority to clean up after former, horribly inept individual
No, a business' first priority is to make a profit. That is income minus costs. Upgrading software is a pure cost with zero income, so all you can argue is whether upgrading now will cost less than upgrading later.
Sometimes you'll convince the check-writers that "now" will eventually justify the up-front cost, but I can guarantee you that your argument will need to have more depth than just "old is bad because I say so!" You will need to include things like mean time to failure estimates of hard-to-replace critical hardware, some indication that MS ending support of XP/IE6 actually means a piss in the ocean to your app and/or user base (its not like existing installs will magically stop working) and so on.
You might be able to tack on an efficiency argument in an attempt to increase the "income" side of the equation to something above zero, but you'd have to show both that the existing system (hardware and/or software) is the limiting factor rather than the users or some other external influence, and that the new versions of said hardware/software make a large enough improvement to the process to warrant (or at least help offset) the costs.
Basically, you need to stop thinking like a techie and start thinking like a suit. They see technology in a very different light than we do.
Not a single one of them got tied to IE6 because of what they do. They got tied to IE6 because MS decided to make later versions of IE incompatible with it rendering any apps above a certain complexity unusable.
So the choice is stick with it or upgrade. And few people are of the opinion that spending thousands (or millions) of dollars to replace something that works with something untested is a smart business decision.
Never mind the cases where you're using a third party app and the third party no longer exists, or you've lost the source code along the way (maybe less of an issue for a website than a compiled application, but there might be customer AX controls or whatever involved) -- then you no longer have to just upgrade it, you have to complete reverse engineer it on top of everything else.
Basically the choice is: $0 - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. $LOTS - reengineer/rewrite/retest it all (because some guy on the internet said you should) and hope to hell you get it right. And probably complete your IE10 upgrade just in time for IE11 to drop anyway, potentially rendering the whole point moot if IE11 ends up being incompatible with IE10 in some way you rely on.
When you're balancing a budget, you'd be hard pressed to argue the latter option. Worried about hackers? Throw it behind a firewall. Need to access it through the firewall? Throw up a VPN and make users connect through that. Or write a nanny proxy to watch the connection and catch bad before it gets to the real server. Ok that one's a little harder than a VPN but it may well be easier than rewriting your legacy app depending the relative complexity of the data protocol compared to the business logic.
"EOL" doesn't mean the same thing to a software user as it does to a software producer.
To the producer: "We are no longer supporting this product." And often includes the subtext "mostly just because we want you to pay us again."
To the user: "The product no longer works."
The former generally precedes the latter by a large time gap -- frequently years. The user doesn't really care that the sales rep has a fancy acronym when they come calling with a price tag to update a product that already works as it is.
And of course add to the fact that most upgrades are a horrible experience. Its like being at the dentist all day every day for at least two weeks while you sort out and figure out how to ignore all of the new "features" that you don't care about and discover all of the ones you loved no longer exist or have been converted to a purchasable add-on.
Put it this way: Would you recommend upgrading from Win7 to Win8 at the moment? And I'm not talking about "you can't easily buy Win7 anymore," I mean an intentional purchase of Win8 and installing on your existing hardware. (And no need for a stream of "just upgrade to Linux" -- that's not the point of the question.)
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS?
Off the top of my head: - WYSIWYG. Sure it might not be theoretically as powerful as something like LaTeX, but all the theory in the world doesn't help people who aren't versed in the arcane -- and that's most of the people. Of course this only brings us to Windows 3.1 -- past DOS/WordPerfect but not quite up to XP.
- Staying stable for more than a day or two. Or an hour or two in a lot of cases. Windows XP was the first introduction the consumer and small business user had to a (mostly) stable operating system. Its not perfect sure, but its an enormous step forward from 98 or ME in terms of stability.
Sure Mac already did WYSIWYG a few years earlier and they've always been (comparatively) stable, but this is still a bit before the iPod made Apple a household name -- they were mostly only used by a few niche markets at the time and the significantly higher price tag over a comparable PC (and then not being able to use most software to boot) would have turned a lot of people away long before they had to worry about stability -- assuming they could find a local store that sold Macs in the first place.
For that matter, the rise of Apple probably didn't hurt the whole situation either -- it would mark the first time that average people would realize that "computer" != "Windows" and start considering possibilities and alternatives rather than just taking whatever gets shoveled at them.
I would hazard to suggest that copyright needs to be fixed, not dismantled entirely.
I'm not versed enough in legalese to know what all the ins and outs of a fixed copyright would look like, but I can say that it would not include (nearly) perpetual terms. Of all the faults of copyright, the fact that works effectively never enter the public domain under current copyright law is by far the worst.
Some anti-fishing laws would help a lot too. Its one thing to go after an infringer based on strong evidence. Its quite another to send out 100,000 C&D letters with settlement offers (before even filing a suit probably) based on a vague correlation. Spamming the legal system should NOT be allowed to remain a valid (if immoral) business method (wonder if someone's patented it.. Maybe someone should. It would be amusing to watch the RIAA stumble over something silly like that, even if it wouldn't really slow them much.)
The counter argument is that shareholders own the corporation, so why not tax them.
They do.. the problem is their "income" isn't usually all that great. I doubt the check Zuckerberg cashes at the end of the month is more than a couple times more than mine. (Heck, maybe less.. depending on his day-to-day spending habits and how much he can avoid charging directly to his personal accounts.)
Of course on paper he probably makes more in a couple minutes than I do in a year, but as long as its all just tied up in share value, he doesn't really have any "money" as far as taxation is concerned. He'd be hit like a truck with taxes if he randomly decided to completely cash out one day.. not that he has any reason to do something like that.
I can think of an obvious solution to that problem -- consider share increases as taxable income.. but I think we're a century or two too late for that to go over very well.
Or you know, enact laws to deincentivise the practice of tax havens. I couldn't begin to guess at the complexities needed to write it in useful legalese, but essentially: "money you earn in the country gets taxed in the country end of story."
Of course, such a thing will never happen while a large number of politicians have ties (at least "campaign contributions" if not a direct link) to the very companies that benefit from tax havens.
Is there a free middleware that would do similar things?
If the answer is 'no' (or if whatever there is isn't large enough to be useful,) then a developer has the choice of either using a closed service with a solid history or rolling their own and entering a very costly "not invented here" cycle with all of the attendant bugs and crap to deal with that could have been avoided.
Nobody's going to use a fly-by-night company to host important parts of their project to be sure.. but GameSpy and IGN have been around for years and years and nobody could have foreseen such problems 5-10 years ago!
And even an open system can die out in that time frame. Just because anyone -can- maintain an open system doesn't mean anyone -will-. And if the game devs aren't willing to drop a few thousand into updating their 5 year old games to work around GS, what are the chances that they'd be willing to install and maintain new servers themselves indefinitely when there's basically no ROI by that point?
That's always been their MO though. You certainly aren't paying full retail price for that OEM version that comes preinstalled on your PC (and since its hard to find a pre-built PC without Windows in the first place, your average consumer would see that OEM version as $0 additional cost since they have no basis for comparison.)
The number of users who would actually upgrade from a prior OS is pretty insignificant compared to the number of preinstall sales (for consumer level anyway. VLK sales might be a completely different story, but then they'd likely also not be getting the retail discounts either so there wouldn't be much comparison in that aspect.)
Yes. Of course its hard to codify "perceived" into law and that's where its up to a judge to use proper discretion. Fox News gets credibility not because they're necessarily good, but because there's a boatload of people who think they're good (regardless of evidence.)
People who don't see your posting or don't believe are not lost customers and thus not a harm to business.
Which suggests there should be a difference in law distinguishing between publishing (commercial) and "publishing" (rambling on your favorite forum.)
There's already a distinct difference from a user perspective -- if something is published in the Wall Street Journal, people assign it huge credibility. On the other hand, "these guys suck!" posted by J.Random.Dumbass on Yelp or Slashdot or anywhere else is pretty much ignored.
We (as users) will check the average *'s on review sites but we don't generally put a lot of faith in any single review because people have something the law doesn't -- logical reasoning and a concept about how people work.
The law is supposed to have that (in the form of a judge being impartial and not a complete moron) but implementation is pretty spotty since well.. judges are people too and nobody is completely impartial about much of anything (never mind if someone's slipping them a few bills behind the scenes.)
I suspect that in absence of the woman providing proof (especially the jewelry thing) that the company will probably win because regardless of circumstance, that is "publishing" and therefore libel.
But I also suspect that the $750k will be reduced to sub-$10k unless the judge is a complete asshat and/or has zero concept of what sites like yelp.com are for and allow users to do. (Well, things might also change if its discovered that she's plastered the post all over multiple sites. That goes from pissed off ranting to intentional damage to the business at that point.)
There's a pretty big difference between a state-enforced censorship affecting everybody all the time and a private censorship only affecting their customers and only when those customers are using the service.
If Google decides to censor something that I disagree with I can just not use Google and take my business to Bing (harhar.)
If my government does it, I have to move to a whole other country to avoid it.
And if an international treaty does it.. then what?
As for the US doing whatever it wants well.. that's another story all together. For many intents and purposes the US has been a subtle world "government" for a long time now thanks to being powerful enough and sociopathic enough to just bully every other country until they get their way.
But that's changing. They've got competition now. China's going to be getting up in the US' face more and more as their power expands. (But not on the topic of censorship.. China loves itself some censorship so no complaints on that one I'm sure!)
Because 50ms of latency on a call is horrendous. 50ms extra time on an 2hr download is unnoticeable.
Even within your own network, its pretty nice to have the ability to prioritize VOIP over BT. I know there's the argument that the user could just do it themselves but that has the pretty fatal flaw that 99% of the users have no idea how the fuck to do that.
And expecting every dumbass in the world to get 3-6mo of network training (not to mention having to buy more expensive network equipment as very few consumer grade routers support these features) in order to do something that their ISP is perfectly capable of is just asinine.
Network neutrality is important for allowing new innovations to thrive.. but HTTP and BT and VOIP aren't new innovations -- they're well-established protocols with well-established (at least by vast consensus) relative priority levels.
Its true that you're technically breaking neutrality to apply those priorities, but sometimes the tradeoff is necessary for practical reasons (as long as its strictly monitored to prevent abuse!) VOIP would have never made it to consumer level if such prioritization didn't happen.
And yes as another poster mentioned, you can rant about the ISPs overselling bandwidth. But you know what, you can always go get a dedicated line. Then you don't have that problem. Of course the full cost of the line then falls on your shoulders rather than splitting it with everyone else on your node.
But hey if you're expecting me to get an expensive commercial grade router and going through a networking course, I see now reason why I shouldn't expect you to already be paying for your own line.
Because they have the authority to license things however the hell they want. If they want to make it legal to watch a show on Hulu but not on Youtube, that's there prerogative. It doesn't have to make sense to you.
Not to say the FBI's actions were proper (or even legal,) but there was a fairly big distinction between the two sites -- namely, how users were using them and how they promoted themselves (or failed to promote themselves.)
Youtube promotes itself as a place for any dumbass to post a video of hurting himself while trying to do a jump kick off a trampoline. Even though it doesn't take too much effort to find pirated works on Youtube, its not really what people associate with their brand.
MU on the other hand promoted itself as a file sharing site, and (from what I understand/have read) provided users with credits for sharing popular files. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the most popular files in the digital age are going to be pop culture media. (And yes, I'm sure they hosted some Linux distros and the occasional business document but lets face it, those are a tiny tiny drop in the bucket comparatively.)
From a service aspect you're right, they were very similar -- file hosting is file hosting. From a political aspect however, they couldn't be more different. And like it or not, politics invaded the internet long ago and isn't showing any signs of letting up in the near future. Rubbing it in the faces of people who have the resources and power to send FBI agents after you is a relatively stupid thing to do.
Probably the people suing you for infringement.. and since they're the only people who can legally provide said licenses, there isn't much to rebuke when they say "nope you didn't have one."
Even more so when you're doing something like bittorrent for which there's only a very very short and explicit list of license holders and you aren't on it.
RCMP aren't, but there's nothing stopping the rightsholders from pursuing action themselves, which seems to be what's happening here (through a third party, but still.)
That's a fairly large distinction from the US having the FBI doing the investigation on the taxpayer's dollar.
Of course if it ends up requiring police enforcement then the RCMP will become involved, but that's no different than any other court-ordered enforcement action. Completely different from the RCMP proactively hunting infringers.
Then again, part of making copyright infringement a criminal act rather than a civil one is that the policing forces gain the ability (perhaps even responsibility) to investigate and pursue the "criminals" of their own accord. I'm personally glad the RCMP is refraining from doing so, but at this point its their decision and they could change their mind tomorrow or next year or whenever else they feel like.
Interesting theory, but I suspect its probably worse for non-porn. If the 30s video of Fluffy doing a backflip takes 20s to load or looks like a slideslow, chances are you'll already be searching around for something more entertaining long before Fluffy's feet leave the ground.
On the other hand if you're in the middle of getting your wank on, you're probably less likely to take a "break" while you hunt around for a site with better video quality and thus more likely to overlook / ignore blips in the video (assuming the blips are short enough.)
As for going to the local AES well.. there's no shortage of people who'd be too embarrassed to do that. Not to mention that's an even longer interruption if you didn't pre-plan the outing.
What they really should do is play the ad after the video. Sure you'd lose out on the people who close the window partway through the video, but since almost every video site has a "you might also like.." linkbox after the video, they have a perfect place to capture a semi-attentive audience who aren't leaving right away (they're looking around for the next video to view.)
Of course they'd want some metrics to determine things like the average length of time that a person spends on that page before deciding where to go next -- chances are most ads couldn't be more than about 5s long, which certainly would put some heavy limits on what advertisers could do (and thus video companies could charge.) But having a user watch 4s of a 5s ad is more useful than them watching 2s of a 30s ad and closing it before they even know what the ad is about.
Not quite. Einstein didn't work in a vacuum. There were plenty of other scientists working on exactly the same problems he was. Including lots and lots of "wild theories and postulations." Einstein's great insight was to put it all together in a way that happened to work.
If his formulation had turned out to be wrong, we'd be holding up someone else as the pinnacle of physics -- possibly even still Newton.
As for 300 years -- you're absolutely right on that. But you skim over the obvious problem with that time scale. We're 100 years since relativity. Given the enormously larger amount of people able to work in the field now, and the tremendously faster communications between those people, you'd think that by purely matching timescales we should be getting damned close to a solution (or at least, to the next stage of understanding.)
None of those are really the problem though. The problem is that the theory has gone far beyond what experiment can measure. Anyone who's interested and a bit clever can set up a double-slit experiment on a shoestring budget. That's the scale of experiment back when Einstein was working. It certainly took creativity and brilliance to invent the experiments originally, but once they were invented, repeating them was within the grasp your average physicist.
On the other hand, it takes a huge multinational investment to set up an LHC. And the LHC only has the potential to barely touch SUSY energy sales, never mind things like string- or M-theories. And even then, the only plan we've got to hit those energy levels is just slam things together really hard and see what the stains look like. Its more forensics than direct experimentation.
Hopefully someday someone will create an experiment that can probe those high energies in a better (and hopefully cheaper) way, but what format such an experiment would take, or its possible at all, will be a completely unanswerable question until someone goes ahead and actually does it.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine if they could find the person who recorded that, some legal fucks would be given. Whether they'd amount to anything is another story, but you can be sure that Anniston's lawyers would at least be pursuing civil remedies even if criminal charges were somehow deemed inapplicable.
Of course celebrities in general have to have a lower reasonable expectation of privacy due to their status.. I doubt that's encoded in law anywhere as it would be discriminatory but a judge would likely have the thought in his mind somewhere along the way.
The one thing you absolutely need in order to punish a perpetrator though is you know.. the perp. Doesn't really matter who's laws you're running under if you don't know who to punish you can't punish them.
Of course, I'm excluding places where the rule of law is "if you don't come forward we'll just decimate your entire town" and similar such extremes.
Also note that the publishers generally get off the hook due to freedom of the press combined with their ability to protect sources. So any publisher with a penchant for pictures of questionable legal status just has get the word out that they're willing to pay and will protect their sources.. as long as they don't explicitly solicit the material they're mostly safe and can in turn give a reasonable guarantee of safety to whatever source happen to show up with goodies.
Or something like that -- I certainly don't know the exact wording of the relevant laws, never mind any regional differences.. but as a general overview that seems to be how things work in a lot of places (if not most) where freedom of the press is a thing.
Absolutely correct. Nintendo publishes games. That is they take someone else's labor of love and puts their name on it (they might still have their own development division -- but even they will be kept far away from the publishing end of things for just that reason. People who are proud of their work tend to want to share it, money or no money. And the business-y types aren't fond of that.
No, what he's saying is that nobody writing for IE6 had the ability to magically know what IE10 was going to look like, so they coded for what they had at the time.
You can go ahead and call it a bug if you want. I'd almost be tempted to agree. The ticket will be sitting there waiting for you with a priority level somewhere around installing central heating in hell as there's more immediate issues to handle that are causing actual problems now rather than just causing potential problems later.
"Fix everything" is a great and lofty goal, and you should always strive for perfection to be sure. But in the real world, there's costs and priorities to consider and absolute perfection rarely makes the cut when "good enough" is good enough and there's fifty other things that also need doing.
it was their first priority to clean up after former, horribly inept individual
No, a business' first priority is to make a profit. That is income minus costs. Upgrading software is a pure cost with zero income, so all you can argue is whether upgrading now will cost less than upgrading later.
Sometimes you'll convince the check-writers that "now" will eventually justify the up-front cost, but I can guarantee you that your argument will need to have more depth than just "old is bad because I say so!" You will need to include things like mean time to failure estimates of hard-to-replace critical hardware, some indication that MS ending support of XP/IE6 actually means a piss in the ocean to your app and/or user base (its not like existing installs will magically stop working) and so on.
You might be able to tack on an efficiency argument in an attempt to increase the "income" side of the equation to something above zero, but you'd have to show both that the existing system (hardware and/or software) is the limiting factor rather than the users or some other external influence, and that the new versions of said hardware/software make a large enough improvement to the process to warrant (or at least help offset) the costs.
Basically, you need to stop thinking like a techie and start thinking like a suit. They see technology in a very different light than we do.
Not a single one of them got tied to IE6 because of what they do. They got tied to IE6 because MS decided to make later versions of IE incompatible with it rendering any apps above a certain complexity unusable.
So the choice is stick with it or upgrade. And few people are of the opinion that spending thousands (or millions) of dollars to replace something that works with something untested is a smart business decision.
Never mind the cases where you're using a third party app and the third party no longer exists, or you've lost the source code along the way (maybe less of an issue for a website than a compiled application, but there might be customer AX controls or whatever involved) -- then you no longer have to just upgrade it, you have to complete reverse engineer it on top of everything else.
Basically the choice is:
$0 - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
$LOTS - reengineer/rewrite/retest it all (because some guy on the internet said you should) and hope to hell you get it right. And probably complete your IE10 upgrade just in time for IE11 to drop anyway, potentially rendering the whole point moot if IE11 ends up being incompatible with IE10 in some way you rely on.
When you're balancing a budget, you'd be hard pressed to argue the latter option. Worried about hackers? Throw it behind a firewall. Need to access it through the firewall? Throw up a VPN and make users connect through that. Or write a nanny proxy to watch the connection and catch bad before it gets to the real server. Ok that one's a little harder than a VPN but it may well be easier than rewriting your legacy app depending the relative complexity of the data protocol compared to the business logic.
EOLed products and support.
"EOL" doesn't mean the same thing to a software user as it does to a software producer.
To the producer: "We are no longer supporting this product." And often includes the subtext "mostly just because we want you to pay us again."
To the user: "The product no longer works."
The former generally precedes the latter by a large time gap -- frequently years. The user doesn't really care that the sales rep has a fancy acronym when they come calling with a price tag to update a product that already works as it is.
And of course add to the fact that most upgrades are a horrible experience. Its like being at the dentist all day every day for at least two weeks while you sort out and figure out how to ignore all of the new "features" that you don't care about and discover all of the ones you loved no longer exist or have been converted to a purchasable add-on.
Put it this way: Would you recommend upgrading from Win7 to Win8 at the moment? And I'm not talking about "you can't easily buy Win7 anymore," I mean an intentional purchase of Win8 and installing on your existing hardware. (And no need for a stream of "just upgrade to Linux" -- that's not the point of the question.)
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS?
Off the top of my head:
- WYSIWYG. Sure it might not be theoretically as powerful as something like LaTeX, but all the theory in the world doesn't help people who aren't versed in the arcane -- and that's most of the people. Of course this only brings us to Windows 3.1 -- past DOS/WordPerfect but not quite up to XP.
- Staying stable for more than a day or two. Or an hour or two in a lot of cases. Windows XP was the first introduction the consumer and small business user had to a (mostly) stable operating system. Its not perfect sure, but its an enormous step forward from 98 or ME in terms of stability.
Sure Mac already did WYSIWYG a few years earlier and they've always been (comparatively) stable, but this is still a bit before the iPod made Apple a household name -- they were mostly only used by a few niche markets at the time and the significantly higher price tag over a comparable PC (and then not being able to use most software to boot) would have turned a lot of people away long before they had to worry about stability -- assuming they could find a local store that sold Macs in the first place.
For that matter, the rise of Apple probably didn't hurt the whole situation either -- it would mark the first time that average people would realize that "computer" != "Windows" and start considering possibilities and alternatives rather than just taking whatever gets shoveled at them.
I would hazard to suggest that copyright needs to be fixed, not dismantled entirely.
I'm not versed enough in legalese to know what all the ins and outs of a fixed copyright would look like, but I can say that it would not include (nearly) perpetual terms. Of all the faults of copyright, the fact that works effectively never enter the public domain under current copyright law is by far the worst.
Some anti-fishing laws would help a lot too. Its one thing to go after an infringer based on strong evidence. Its quite another to send out 100,000 C&D letters with settlement offers (before even filing a suit probably) based on a vague correlation. Spamming the legal system should NOT be allowed to remain a valid (if immoral) business method (wonder if someone's patented it.. Maybe someone should. It would be amusing to watch the RIAA stumble over something silly like that, even if it wouldn't really slow them much.)
The counter argument is that shareholders own the corporation, so why not tax them.
They do.. the problem is their "income" isn't usually all that great. I doubt the check Zuckerberg cashes at the end of the month is more than a couple times more than mine. (Heck, maybe less.. depending on his day-to-day spending habits and how much he can avoid charging directly to his personal accounts.)
Of course on paper he probably makes more in a couple minutes than I do in a year, but as long as its all just tied up in share value, he doesn't really have any "money" as far as taxation is concerned. He'd be hit like a truck with taxes if he randomly decided to completely cash out one day.. not that he has any reason to do something like that.
I can think of an obvious solution to that problem -- consider share increases as taxable income.. but I think we're a century or two too late for that to go over very well.
Or you know, enact laws to deincentivise the practice of tax havens. I couldn't begin to guess at the complexities needed to write it in useful legalese, but essentially: "money you earn in the country gets taxed in the country end of story."
Of course, such a thing will never happen while a large number of politicians have ties (at least "campaign contributions" if not a direct link) to the very companies that benefit from tax havens.
Is there a free middleware that would do similar things?
If the answer is 'no' (or if whatever there is isn't large enough to be useful,) then a developer has the choice of either using a closed service with a solid history or rolling their own and entering a very costly "not invented here" cycle with all of the attendant bugs and crap to deal with that could have been avoided.
Nobody's going to use a fly-by-night company to host important parts of their project to be sure.. but GameSpy and IGN have been around for years and years and nobody could have foreseen such problems 5-10 years ago!
And even an open system can die out in that time frame. Just because anyone -can- maintain an open system doesn't mean anyone -will-. And if the game devs aren't willing to drop a few thousand into updating their 5 year old games to work around GS, what are the chances that they'd be willing to install and maintain new servers themselves indefinitely when there's basically no ROI by that point?
That's always been their MO though. You certainly aren't paying full retail price for that OEM version that comes preinstalled on your PC (and since its hard to find a pre-built PC without Windows in the first place, your average consumer would see that OEM version as $0 additional cost since they have no basis for comparison.)
The number of users who would actually upgrade from a prior OS is pretty insignificant compared to the number of preinstall sales (for consumer level anyway. VLK sales might be a completely different story, but then they'd likely also not be getting the retail discounts either so there wouldn't be much comparison in that aspect.)
base it on reliability and perceived accuracy?
Yes. Of course its hard to codify "perceived" into law and that's where its up to a judge to use proper discretion. Fox News gets credibility not because they're necessarily good, but because there's a boatload of people who think they're good (regardless of evidence.)
People who don't see your posting or don't believe are not lost customers and thus not a harm to business.
Which suggests there should be a difference in law distinguishing between publishing (commercial) and "publishing" (rambling on your favorite forum.)
There's already a distinct difference from a user perspective -- if something is published in the Wall Street Journal, people assign it huge credibility. On the other hand, "these guys suck!" posted by J.Random.Dumbass on Yelp or Slashdot or anywhere else is pretty much ignored.
We (as users) will check the average *'s on review sites but we don't generally put a lot of faith in any single review because people have something the law doesn't -- logical reasoning and a concept about how people work.
The law is supposed to have that (in the form of a judge being impartial and not a complete moron) but implementation is pretty spotty since well.. judges are people too and nobody is completely impartial about much of anything (never mind if someone's slipping them a few bills behind the scenes.)
I suspect that in absence of the woman providing proof (especially the jewelry thing) that the company will probably win because regardless of circumstance, that is "publishing" and therefore libel.
But I also suspect that the $750k will be reduced to sub-$10k unless the judge is a complete asshat and/or has zero concept of what sites like yelp.com are for and allow users to do. (Well, things might also change if its discovered that she's plastered the post all over multiple sites. That goes from pissed off ranting to intentional damage to the business at that point.)
There's a pretty big difference between a state-enforced censorship affecting everybody all the time and a private censorship only affecting their customers and only when those customers are using the service.
If Google decides to censor something that I disagree with I can just not use Google and take my business to Bing (harhar.)
If my government does it, I have to move to a whole other country to avoid it.
And if an international treaty does it.. then what?
As for the US doing whatever it wants well.. that's another story all together. For many intents and purposes the US has been a subtle world "government" for a long time now thanks to being powerful enough and sociopathic enough to just bully every other country until they get their way.
But that's changing. They've got competition now. China's going to be getting up in the US' face more and more as their power expands. (But not on the topic of censorship.. China loves itself some censorship so no complaints on that one I'm sure!)
Because 50ms of latency on a call is horrendous. 50ms extra time on an 2hr download is unnoticeable.
Even within your own network, its pretty nice to have the ability to prioritize VOIP over BT. I know there's the argument that the user could just do it themselves but that has the pretty fatal flaw that 99% of the users have no idea how the fuck to do that.
And expecting every dumbass in the world to get 3-6mo of network training (not to mention having to buy more expensive network equipment as very few consumer grade routers support these features) in order to do something that their ISP is perfectly capable of is just asinine.
Network neutrality is important for allowing new innovations to thrive.. but HTTP and BT and VOIP aren't new innovations -- they're well-established protocols with well-established (at least by vast consensus) relative priority levels.
Its true that you're technically breaking neutrality to apply those priorities, but sometimes the tradeoff is necessary for practical reasons (as long as its strictly monitored to prevent abuse!) VOIP would have never made it to consumer level if such prioritization didn't happen.
And yes as another poster mentioned, you can rant about the ISPs overselling bandwidth. But you know what, you can always go get a dedicated line. Then you don't have that problem. Of course the full cost of the line then falls on your shoulders rather than splitting it with everyone else on your node.
But hey if you're expecting me to get an expensive commercial grade router and going through a networking course, I see now reason why I shouldn't expect you to already be paying for your own line.
http://www.protectinternetfreedom.net/
Err just to be clear, by "things" I of course mean "things they own the copyrights for."
Because they have the authority to license things however the hell they want. If they want to make it legal to watch a show on Hulu but not on Youtube, that's there prerogative. It doesn't have to make sense to you.
Not to say the FBI's actions were proper (or even legal,) but there was a fairly big distinction between the two sites -- namely, how users were using them and how they promoted themselves (or failed to promote themselves.)
Youtube promotes itself as a place for any dumbass to post a video of hurting himself while trying to do a jump kick off a trampoline. Even though it doesn't take too much effort to find pirated works on Youtube, its not really what people associate with their brand.
MU on the other hand promoted itself as a file sharing site, and (from what I understand/have read) provided users with credits for sharing popular files. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the most popular files in the digital age are going to be pop culture media. (And yes, I'm sure they hosted some Linux distros and the occasional business document but lets face it, those are a tiny tiny drop in the bucket comparatively.)
From a service aspect you're right, they were very similar -- file hosting is file hosting. From a political aspect however, they couldn't be more different. And like it or not, politics invaded the internet long ago and isn't showing any signs of letting up in the near future. Rubbing it in the faces of people who have the resources and power to send FBI agents after you is a relatively stupid thing to do.
Who says I don't have a license?
Probably the people suing you for infringement.. and since they're the only people who can legally provide said licenses, there isn't much to rebuke when they say "nope you didn't have one."
Even more so when you're doing something like bittorrent for which there's only a very very short and explicit list of license holders and you aren't on it.
RCMP aren't, but there's nothing stopping the rightsholders from pursuing action themselves, which seems to be what's happening here (through a third party, but still.)
That's a fairly large distinction from the US having the FBI doing the investigation on the taxpayer's dollar.
Of course if it ends up requiring police enforcement then the RCMP will become involved, but that's no different than any other court-ordered enforcement action. Completely different from the RCMP proactively hunting infringers.
Then again, part of making copyright infringement a criminal act rather than a civil one is that the policing forces gain the ability (perhaps even responsibility) to investigate and pursue the "criminals" of their own accord. I'm personally glad the RCMP is refraining from doing so, but at this point its their decision and they could change their mind tomorrow or next year or whenever else they feel like.
Interesting theory, but I suspect its probably worse for non-porn. If the 30s video of Fluffy doing a backflip takes 20s to load or looks like a slideslow, chances are you'll already be searching around for something more entertaining long before Fluffy's feet leave the ground.
On the other hand if you're in the middle of getting your wank on, you're probably less likely to take a "break" while you hunt around for a site with better video quality and thus more likely to overlook / ignore blips in the video (assuming the blips are short enough.)
As for going to the local AES well.. there's no shortage of people who'd be too embarrassed to do that. Not to mention that's an even longer interruption if you didn't pre-plan the outing.
What they really should do is play the ad after the video. Sure you'd lose out on the people who close the window partway through the video, but since almost every video site has a "you might also like.." linkbox after the video, they have a perfect place to capture a semi-attentive audience who aren't leaving right away (they're looking around for the next video to view.)
Of course they'd want some metrics to determine things like the average length of time that a person spends on that page before deciding where to go next -- chances are most ads couldn't be more than about 5s long, which certainly would put some heavy limits on what advertisers could do (and thus video companies could charge.) But having a user watch 4s of a 5s ad is more useful than them watching 2s of a 30s ad and closing it before they even know what the ad is about.
Not quite. Einstein didn't work in a vacuum. There were plenty of other scientists working on exactly the same problems he was. Including lots and lots of "wild theories and postulations." Einstein's great insight was to put it all together in a way that happened to work.
If his formulation had turned out to be wrong, we'd be holding up someone else as the pinnacle of physics -- possibly even still Newton.
As for 300 years -- you're absolutely right on that. But you skim over the obvious problem with that time scale. We're 100 years since relativity. Given the enormously larger amount of people able to work in the field now, and the tremendously faster communications between those people, you'd think that by purely matching timescales we should be getting damned close to a solution (or at least, to the next stage of understanding.)
None of those are really the problem though. The problem is that the theory has gone far beyond what experiment can measure. Anyone who's interested and a bit clever can set up a double-slit experiment on a shoestring budget. That's the scale of experiment back when Einstein was working. It certainly took creativity and brilliance to invent the experiments originally, but once they were invented, repeating them was within the grasp your average physicist.
On the other hand, it takes a huge multinational investment to set up an LHC. And the LHC only has the potential to barely touch SUSY energy sales, never mind things like string- or M-theories. And even then, the only plan we've got to hit those energy levels is just slam things together really hard and see what the stains look like. Its more forensics than direct experimentation.
Hopefully someday someone will create an experiment that can probe those high energies in a better (and hopefully cheaper) way, but what format such an experiment would take, or its possible at all, will be a completely unanswerable question until someone goes ahead and actually does it.