Well, to be fair, if you pirate one movie they estimate they've lost ten thousand dollars in lost sales. Their math is quite simple, really. First, estimate how many works are pirated annually. Next, divide that by the amount of works legitimately sold. Multiply by the average cost of a work. Finally, toss that number aside and pull some really large number out of your posterior. I was surprised when I tried their method and learned that I'm losing $10 quadrillion dollars annually thanks to Canadian piracy. Even more surprising considering I don't really sell any copyrighted works. Imagine my surprise.
Not to mention that a 100% opt-in service allowing parents to control what kids watch isn't censorship. This wouldn't be an attempt to dumb the Internet down for everyone or to limit what everyone can see. The only people affected by this would be kids.
That being said, there's really no need for Google to do this because a lot of other people have made programs for this purpose. (See a lot of the great links in previous replies.)
I'd echo all the recommendations you've made and add Kido'Z which is a full-screen "browser" that offers a limited (approved, kid friendly) selection of sites. You can add to the list or remove from the list via a parental control panel. Perhaps someone can code a YouTube Kid-Friendly addition that would let parents approve videos (either one by one or every video uploaded by certain users). This way your child could watch the latest Disney XD video without clicking on that "Disney" video that remixed an explicit rap song with Disney animations. (No, I don't have a specific video in mind and no, I wouldn't be surprised if a video like that existed.)
The key here, of course, would be two things:
1) It would be completely opt-in. Normal Internet users wouldn't see a single change. Parents would have the option of using this tool and setting the controls the way they want to allow the videos they want and deny access to the videos they don't want.
2) This would be like training wheels on a bike. Used to help prevent accidents (bike crashes/wrong video loading) while the child is learning how to use the tool (bike/Internet). Eventually, the child control settings would be relaxed and then removed entirely as the child learns how to properly use the Internet.
Ironically, this is indeed a rare case of "if you don't have anything to hide" as 99 times out of 100 the police who object to being recorded are doing something that they wouldn't want internal affairs knowing about. So long as the person videoing the interaction doesn't interfere with police procedures (e.g. walk all over a crime scene because it "looks cool on video") or act belligerent (e.g. threatening police officers arresting a friend while they are videoing the arrest) there shouldn't be a problem. And in those instances, the problem wouldn't be related to the videoing at all.
How much does it cost to print out all 24,000 pages (manpower, printer ink costs, paper costs)? Is all of that recovered in the fee? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is. Well, obviously, you can charge whatever you need to recover costs. Now let's examine the electronic version. Electronic doesn't need to mean online. You could burn the files (or one big PDF file) to a CD and mail it to the requesting person/organization.
Any cost incurred would be much less than printing 24K pages. First of all, supplies would cost less. A quick search of Staples' website shows paper costing $49 for 5,000 sheets. This means you'd need to spend over $235 for the paper to print out all of this. Ink or toner would, of course, add much more to the cost. Meanwhile, a 100 pack of CD-R's costs $13 so burning one copy of the Palin E-mails would cost 13 cents. Staff time would be much reduced also. Time required to burn a CD: 3 minutes, maybe 5 tops. Time required to print out 24K pages? Well, a quick search turned up a laser printer that does 25ppm. If we take that to be an average performance, the Palin E-mails would be printed in 16 hours. How much extra pay does 16 hours vs 5 minutes work out to?
Even if you add in costs for mailing a CD, the electronic form is clearly the easier and more cost-effective route. The only possible reason that they are demanding these documents be printed out and presented in person is to raise the barrier for obtaining them.
You know those alignment systems with Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, etc? I've always pictured Bush as being Chaotic Neutral (or perhaps True Neutral) by himself. The problem was the people he surrounded himself with (*cough*Cheney*cough*) pushed his policies and actions towards Evil alignment. Palin, on the other hand, is Chaotic Evil from the get-go. You just know that any "President Palin" is not going to surround herself with advisors and staff members that temper her alignment. If anything, she'll surround herself with people that enhance her Chaotic Evil-ness.
And now that I've earned my geek reference points for the day...
Please... Don't mention that name... I swear there's an AI built into that program. The more productive you try to be using Lotus Notes, the more Lotus Notes works against you to sabotage your productivity. *Tries to suppress traumatic memories of using Lotus Notes*
Exactly. In the past decade, how many millions of passengers flew without any intent of blowing up the planes or doing any other kind of harm? How many people boarded airplanes with the intent to do harm (hijack, blow up, or even just threaten)? I don't have the figures on hand but if 500,000,000 flew without intent to do harm and 500 flew intending to harm others, then the terrorist-to-passenger ratio is 0.0001%. And my guesstimate is likely on the high side.
When I fly I'm not scared of some terrorist killing us all. I'm scared of mechanical failure, weather-related issues and TSA overreaching causing inconvenience/loss of rights. The first is the responsibility of the airlines to prevent. The second is out of everyone's hands. The third is the government overreaching in a desperate attempt to be able to say "Hey, look! We're doing something!"
Ha! I've got them beat. I'm thinking about the latest crop of movies and I haven't seen them at all! What's that knocking?..... What do you mean, "under arrest for depriving the entertainment industry of deserved profits"?
You would think so, but I'd be willing to bet that the RIAA/MPAA would want it both ways. They'd want to be able to go after those who share out music (keep it illegal) *AND* get money from people just in case they share/download music. As it is, they get money from the sales of "Music" CD-Rs (same as regular CD-Rs but with an added RIAA tax on them to guard against people using them for non-legal purposes) but still pursue lawsuits.
D'uh. Just noticed the "over the next 3 days" part. Still, he could schedule tweets once every 5 minutes from 10:30am - 3am and have the tweets done over the next 2 days.
If he just spams out 100 "I did something wrong" tweets, he's sure to lose all his followers. Of course, he could use a tool like SocialOomph.com to schedule his tweets. He could spew out 20 a night from the hours of 11pm and 2am (one about every 8 minutes). He could be done scheduling them in about an hour's time and could be done with the tweets in 5 days. I wonder if they set any other conditions like "no scheduled tweets", "has to be during the daytime" or "has to be all in a row."
That's my stance whenever they make noise about bringing the "mandatory copyright fees" to the US for everything (especially ISP bills). I don't pirate music, but if I'm going to be charged $5 a month in "just in case you are a copyright pirate" fees, I might as well become a copyright pirate. Those fees will create more pirates then they "cure" (for lack of a better word).
It's not so much A as it is B. It would have been interesting had the damages been assessed similar to the Jamie Thomas verdict ($80,000 per song). $80,000 * 300,000 = $24 billion. I'd have loved to have seen them squirm over having to pay a $24 billion judgement against them and see them crying about how unfair it was and how it would bankrupt them. Granted, there wouldn't be any cognitive dissonance to burst. They really do think that infringement by the public should be punished by huge fines (and, I'm sure they'd love to add in, jail terms) while infringement by them should be punished by a vicious finger shaking and a fine not to exceed ten percent of the profits they made off of the infringement.
It still exists. Only "proven guilty" has now been redefined as "accused of copyright infringement." Just a small, minor change. Nothing to get worked up over, consumers... I mean citizens.
Who will be doing the accusing?
Only the most important people in this country: The Entertainment Industry*
* Pending the passage of the Entertainment Industry Is Better Than Everyone Else bill which the RIAA/MPAA is going to introduce into Congress later this year via some "concerned" (read: heavily lobbied) congressfolk.
I'd love to see this happen. It would force real compromise and talks. You couldn't buy votes with promises to send some $$$ to the senator/representative's district via a rider. (Thus, less pork.) You also couldn't try to torpedo a bill by adding an unreasonable rider that you know nobody would vote for. Instead, you would need to craft a bill that enough people would vote for. You would need to work *WITH* the minority and the excesses of each party could be counter-balanced.
If we can't do this, I'd at least like to see the President have the ability to line item veto things. So he could approve Very-Important-Spending-Bill without approving Rider-That-Restricts-Freedom-Of-Speech. To provide counterbalance, the vetoed riders could be individually voted on by Congress to override the line item veto. (Of course, if the rider has that much support, it should be its own bill, not a rider.)
Of course, none of this will ever happen because it would actually reduce Congress' power. No longer would they be able to funnel money to their districts by holding their votes for ransom and no longer would they be able to just stick any old text to a bill and have it pass because the bill *HAD* to be approved.
When is Ron Wyden up for reelection? I can't vote for him (I'm on the opposite coast) but we should let Slashdotters in Oregon know when they should vote to keep this guy in.
Also, who voted *FOR* this bill and when are they up for reelection so we can vote them out?
Great. Just my luck. The Zombie Apocalypse comes and I'm well stocked with lots of Brain-In-A-Jars and the zombies that come for me prefer organic, free-range brains.
I don't know what the standard of evidence in this type of case would be (e.g. reasonable doubt), but if any of these things happened, you'd likely have deleted the offending tweet and/or tweeted an "I'm sorry, someone got access to my account" tweet. If both of those are lacking, the "someone else tweeted it under my name" defense gets pretty shaky.
I still think the fridge scene would make for a great Mythbusters episode. Obviously, they can't detonate a nuclear device (Jamie want BIIIIIIIG boom!), but they could put Buster with some shock discs in a fridge and drop it from the approximate height that Indy fell to simulate how much he'd have been hurt from the fall. They could also go back to the place that they ran the "Cockroaches survive nuclear bomb" experiment and put the fridge in the chamber with some equipment inside to test for radiation. Of course, the finale would be burying some explosive (C4?) under the fridge with shock-disc-enabled Buster inside and blowing the whole thing up.
I'm pretty sure the whole scene would be Busted, but it would turn that awful scene into something that was actually fun to watch!
I've shied away from getting data plans because I don't see how I could afford $60 a month ($30 for my phone and $30 for my wife's). If they get a plan like AT&T's 200MB for $15 a month, then my data plan costs would be halved and I might just consider it. (I don't think we would use smartphones for anything other than Twitter, Google searches, Facebook and the like.)
Of course, then the article said this:
Verizon's CFO mentioned that the carrier would likely one day offer family-based data plans, where you could have one giant plan to share among multiple people and multiple devices. But it was a vague sort of statement, with no definite time frame attached, so don't hold your breath just yet.
This is something I've been waiting for for awhile now. I get a family plan with shared texting across all phones, but need to pay per-phone for data plans? Why not simply say "You've paid $X and now have 2GB for your account; use it between your phones as you wish"? Of course, the CFO's statement doesn't mean they'll actually roll anything like this out (or that it would be reasonably priced), but it does at least indicate that they are aware of this need.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to be fair, if you pirate one movie they estimate they've lost ten thousand dollars in lost sales. Their math is quite simple, really. First, estimate how many works are pirated annually. Next, divide that by the amount of works legitimately sold. Multiply by the average cost of a work. Finally, toss that number aside and pull some really large number out of your posterior. I was surprised when I tried their method and learned that I'm losing $10 quadrillion dollars annually thanks to Canadian piracy. Even more surprising considering I don't really sell any copyrighted works. Imagine my surprise.
Not to mention that a 100% opt-in service allowing parents to control what kids watch isn't censorship. This wouldn't be an attempt to dumb the Internet down for everyone or to limit what everyone can see. The only people affected by this would be kids.
That being said, there's really no need for Google to do this because a lot of other people have made programs for this purpose. (See a lot of the great links in previous replies.)
I'd echo all the recommendations you've made and add Kido'Z which is a full-screen "browser" that offers a limited (approved, kid friendly) selection of sites. You can add to the list or remove from the list via a parental control panel. Perhaps someone can code a YouTube Kid-Friendly addition that would let parents approve videos (either one by one or every video uploaded by certain users). This way your child could watch the latest Disney XD video without clicking on that "Disney" video that remixed an explicit rap song with Disney animations. (No, I don't have a specific video in mind and no, I wouldn't be surprised if a video like that existed.)
The key here, of course, would be two things:
1) It would be completely opt-in. Normal Internet users wouldn't see a single change. Parents would have the option of using this tool and setting the controls the way they want to allow the videos they want and deny access to the videos they don't want.
2) This would be like training wheels on a bike. Used to help prevent accidents (bike crashes/wrong video loading) while the child is learning how to use the tool (bike/Internet). Eventually, the child control settings would be relaxed and then removed entirely as the child learns how to properly use the Internet.
Ironically, this is indeed a rare case of "if you don't have anything to hide" as 99 times out of 100 the police who object to being recorded are doing something that they wouldn't want internal affairs knowing about. So long as the person videoing the interaction doesn't interfere with police procedures (e.g. walk all over a crime scene because it "looks cool on video") or act belligerent (e.g. threatening police officers arresting a friend while they are videoing the arrest) there shouldn't be a problem. And in those instances, the problem wouldn't be related to the videoing at all.
I can't decide if a grammar Nazi making a spelling mistake on the word "grammar" (as "gramer") is ironic or requires the arrival of spelling Nazis.
How much does it cost to print out all 24,000 pages (manpower, printer ink costs, paper costs)? Is all of that recovered in the fee? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is. Well, obviously, you can charge whatever you need to recover costs. Now let's examine the electronic version. Electronic doesn't need to mean online. You could burn the files (or one big PDF file) to a CD and mail it to the requesting person/organization.
Any cost incurred would be much less than printing 24K pages. First of all, supplies would cost less. A quick search of Staples' website shows paper costing $49 for 5,000 sheets. This means you'd need to spend over $235 for the paper to print out all of this. Ink or toner would, of course, add much more to the cost. Meanwhile, a 100 pack of CD-R's costs $13 so burning one copy of the Palin E-mails would cost 13 cents. Staff time would be much reduced also. Time required to burn a CD: 3 minutes, maybe 5 tops. Time required to print out 24K pages? Well, a quick search turned up a laser printer that does 25ppm. If we take that to be an average performance, the Palin E-mails would be printed in 16 hours. How much extra pay does 16 hours vs 5 minutes work out to?
Even if you add in costs for mailing a CD, the electronic form is clearly the easier and more cost-effective route. The only possible reason that they are demanding these documents be printed out and presented in person is to raise the barrier for obtaining them.
You know those alignment systems with Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, etc? I've always pictured Bush as being Chaotic Neutral (or perhaps True Neutral) by himself. The problem was the people he surrounded himself with (*cough*Cheney*cough*) pushed his policies and actions towards Evil alignment. Palin, on the other hand, is Chaotic Evil from the get-go. You just know that any "President Palin" is not going to surround herself with advisors and staff members that temper her alignment. If anything, she'll surround herself with people that enhance her Chaotic Evil-ness.
And now that I've earned my geek reference points for the day...
Please... Don't mention that name... I swear there's an AI built into that program. The more productive you try to be using Lotus Notes, the more Lotus Notes works against you to sabotage your productivity. *Tries to suppress traumatic memories of using Lotus Notes*
Exactly. In the past decade, how many millions of passengers flew without any intent of blowing up the planes or doing any other kind of harm? How many people boarded airplanes with the intent to do harm (hijack, blow up, or even just threaten)? I don't have the figures on hand but if 500,000,000 flew without intent to do harm and 500 flew intending to harm others, then the terrorist-to-passenger ratio is 0.0001%. And my guesstimate is likely on the high side.
When I fly I'm not scared of some terrorist killing us all. I'm scared of mechanical failure, weather-related issues and TSA overreaching causing inconvenience/loss of rights. The first is the responsibility of the airlines to prevent. The second is out of everyone's hands. The third is the government overreaching in a desperate attempt to be able to say "Hey, look! We're doing something!"
What's worse than a shark with a frickin' laser attached to its head? A shark with a laser attached to its head playing hard rock while it zaps you!
Ha! I've got them beat. I'm thinking about the latest crop of movies and I haven't seen them at all! What's that knocking? ..... What do you mean, "under arrest for depriving the entertainment industry of deserved profits"?
You would think so, but I'd be willing to bet that the RIAA/MPAA would want it both ways. They'd want to be able to go after those who share out music (keep it illegal) *AND* get money from people just in case they share/download music. As it is, they get money from the sales of "Music" CD-Rs (same as regular CD-Rs but with an added RIAA tax on them to guard against people using them for non-legal purposes) but still pursue lawsuits.
D'uh. Just noticed the "over the next 3 days" part. Still, he could schedule tweets once every 5 minutes from 10:30am - 3am and have the tweets done over the next 2 days.
If he just spams out 100 "I did something wrong" tweets, he's sure to lose all his followers. Of course, he could use a tool like SocialOomph.com to schedule his tweets. He could spew out 20 a night from the hours of 11pm and 2am (one about every 8 minutes). He could be done scheduling them in about an hour's time and could be done with the tweets in 5 days. I wonder if they set any other conditions like "no scheduled tweets", "has to be during the daytime" or "has to be all in a row."
That's my stance whenever they make noise about bringing the "mandatory copyright fees" to the US for everything (especially ISP bills). I don't pirate music, but if I'm going to be charged $5 a month in "just in case you are a copyright pirate" fees, I might as well become a copyright pirate. Those fees will create more pirates then they "cure" (for lack of a better word).
It's not so much A as it is B. It would have been interesting had the damages been assessed similar to the Jamie Thomas verdict ($80,000 per song). $80,000 * 300,000 = $24 billion. I'd have loved to have seen them squirm over having to pay a $24 billion judgement against them and see them crying about how unfair it was and how it would bankrupt them. Granted, there wouldn't be any cognitive dissonance to burst. They really do think that infringement by the public should be punished by huge fines (and, I'm sure they'd love to add in, jail terms) while infringement by them should be punished by a vicious finger shaking and a fine not to exceed ten percent of the profits they made off of the infringement.
Am I a geek if I just pictured someone photoshopping Ballmer's head onto Captain Christopher Pike's body?
It still exists. Only "proven guilty" has now been redefined as "accused of copyright infringement." Just a small, minor change. Nothing to get worked up over, consumers... I mean citizens.
Only the most important people in this country: The Entertainment Industry*
* Pending the passage of the Entertainment Industry Is Better Than Everyone Else bill which the RIAA/MPAA is going to introduce into Congress later this year via some "concerned" (read: heavily lobbied) congressfolk.
I'd love to see this happen. It would force real compromise and talks. You couldn't buy votes with promises to send some $$$ to the senator/representative's district via a rider. (Thus, less pork.) You also couldn't try to torpedo a bill by adding an unreasonable rider that you know nobody would vote for. Instead, you would need to craft a bill that enough people would vote for. You would need to work *WITH* the minority and the excesses of each party could be counter-balanced.
If we can't do this, I'd at least like to see the President have the ability to line item veto things. So he could approve Very-Important-Spending-Bill without approving Rider-That-Restricts-Freedom-Of-Speech. To provide counterbalance, the vetoed riders could be individually voted on by Congress to override the line item veto. (Of course, if the rider has that much support, it should be its own bill, not a rider.)
Of course, none of this will ever happen because it would actually reduce Congress' power. No longer would they be able to funnel money to their districts by holding their votes for ransom and no longer would they be able to just stick any old text to a bill and have it pass because the bill *HAD* to be approved.
When is Ron Wyden up for reelection? I can't vote for him (I'm on the opposite coast) but we should let Slashdotters in Oregon know when they should vote to keep this guy in.
Also, who voted *FOR* this bill and when are they up for reelection so we can vote them out?
Depends on where they jolted it. Pick just the right spot and it would be "OMFGGIVEMEMOREGIVEMEMOREGIVEMEMORE!"
Great. Just my luck. The Zombie Apocalypse comes and I'm well stocked with lots of Brain-In-A-Jars and the zombies that come for me prefer organic, free-range brains.
I don't know what the standard of evidence in this type of case would be (e.g. reasonable doubt), but if any of these things happened, you'd likely have deleted the offending tweet and/or tweeted an "I'm sorry, someone got access to my account" tweet. If both of those are lacking, the "someone else tweeted it under my name" defense gets pretty shaky.
I still think the fridge scene would make for a great Mythbusters episode. Obviously, they can't detonate a nuclear device (Jamie want BIIIIIIIG boom!), but they could put Buster with some shock discs in a fridge and drop it from the approximate height that Indy fell to simulate how much he'd have been hurt from the fall. They could also go back to the place that they ran the "Cockroaches survive nuclear bomb" experiment and put the fridge in the chamber with some equipment inside to test for radiation. Of course, the finale would be burying some explosive (C4?) under the fridge with shock-disc-enabled Buster inside and blowing the whole thing up.
I'm pretty sure the whole scene would be Busted, but it would turn that awful scene into something that was actually fun to watch!
I've shied away from getting data plans because I don't see how I could afford $60 a month ($30 for my phone and $30 for my wife's). If they get a plan like AT&T's 200MB for $15 a month, then my data plan costs would be halved and I might just consider it. (I don't think we would use smartphones for anything other than Twitter, Google searches, Facebook and the like.)
Of course, then the article said this:
This is something I've been waiting for for awhile now. I get a family plan with shared texting across all phones, but need to pay per-phone for data plans? Why not simply say "You've paid $X and now have 2GB for your account; use it between your phones as you wish"? Of course, the CFO's statement doesn't mean they'll actually roll anything like this out (or that it would be reasonably priced), but it does at least indicate that they are aware of this need.