One of the primary arguments that the RIAA has floated is that they're actually only selling you a license for the music.
Nothing stating that the license is via CD-playback. They've suggested in the past that ripping your CD to your iPod is not legal, which is pretty implausible - I doubt that anyone doesn't rip CDs, once they have an iPod. (I know one out of X, where X is a large number.)
In my mind, if they're just selling a license to play the music you bought, then it should be legal to play it for yourself on that license. Wherever it is...you're licensed to listening to only one of those copies at a time. You can't listen it to the same time that your SO listens to it at a seperate location. It's impossible to enforce, so I'm sure they want stronger DRM to push it on people...except that DRM violates the agreement on what a CD is.
I don't comment all that much, but there are some points being missed.
1. The big automakers got hefty grants/tax breaks to research said cars. This served three functions. First, it denied it to other companies by sucking up money that could go to future competitors. Next, it's free money and good publicity. Finally, if they did hit something magic, they'd get it...as opposed to the other companies.
2. Let's talk about cars of the future for a moment. Think about how many small companies are out there, with good ideas and noble goals, going to trade shows and conventions for VC? Where they talk about the challenges and successes they've had? The entrenched automakers applies pressure with their money to put a PR edge on the shows...company A wants to promote their ideas? We bump them from the speaking schedule, kick them out to being a small booth that now only 1% of the attendees now see, and no investors hear a pitch.
GE had a car, deliberately sabotaged it, and then claims it is a failure. Where does this put venture capital for new electric car companies? Nobody's going to buy into it now.
Ticket to Ride is a fast lunch board game. It can handle up to 5 players, and you can play it online for free (as long as one of you has a Days of Wonder account that someone got for buying one of their games - that person sets up the game).
Settlers of Catan is a little long to play over lunch, but as long as your boss plays, it's cool, right?
A quick & dirty: The big automakers have not committed to really migrating to electric cars. They're more than willing to suck away any R&D funding they can...free money and also kills funding for startups.
The process kills startups twice. Not only does GM (etc) take up the best speaking spots at electric car shows, it takes the money as well. (Some have said to sink it into recycled technology.)
1) If it has an adverse effect on you driving your car, it would be bad. (Interference for your car's own GPS unit, interference with health panic buttons, etc...)
2) If someone puts an APB on your car it's tracked. Let's say a sheriff who thinks you're doing his wife, wants to trace you - grabs one of them fancy trackers...maybe only he knows. (Different from a car following you - you at least have a chance.)
It does not exclude a satellite tracking you, optically. Hopefully it's expensive enough, that it would be of a national security kind of thing.
As far as tagging being reasonable, sure, it's less expensive and safer than having a car follow the suspect. I don't find those facets a mandate to change the balance of privacy vs. society's needs.
Play Talisman? Do you like the beer-and-pretzels, hack-slash/monopoly feel?
Try Runebound. Every time I host a game night where Runebound is an option, it's a full table of 6. (As a caution, it's slightly more complex to get into.)
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Fantasy Flight Games.
Sadly, bills are presented for vote with little chance to read them. It happens in every Congress, unfortunately, politics aside, this one more than most. (There are stats available for the more energetic folks, however, I'm not sober. Suffer, or use Google.)
Night sessions, and excluding the minority political party (even if they're part of that sub-commitee), with bills being presented the next day. In some cases, you're looking at having to vote on bills with hundreds of pages, with no time to read them.
There are several ways to vote on them, at this point. Ideology, or relying on special interests (and their biased information sources.
In the article, she's confident that the person who was offering her the VoteHere information was NOT the person who was a contact regarding Diebold.
She also states that the investigators rarely even ask her about VoteHere, that they seem to be fishing for something else...what else is there?
Diebold gets kicked out of California. There are reasons why that company/industry would want to see her/her website/whistleblowers to go away.
I'd be really sad, if we've reached a point in our history, where the FBI gets involved in covering up the Diebold mess. Diebold has *more* than earned its place of shame, and electronic voting needs more watchdogs and whistleblowers...not less.
Before just outright quitting their flight plan, mail them, and tell them why they're wrong. Cutting up your card tells them nothing, and if you tell them you've done it, they can't salvage anything.
Ask them how they're going to regain your trust. So, they lied. Sure, it's a violation of trust. It should be a horrible business practice. I *do* hope they get sued.
I would strongly prefer that they get such a deluge of mail, that they, and other airlines who would consider it, to be reminded that they serve their passengers or no one.
Instead of receiving the actual e-mail when connecting, the customer receives the actual subject line, and the text is...
"Your account is temporarily disabled due to ****. Please contact the ISP at this number () during these hours (). Your business is important to us."
And apparently to others. Ha ha.
The individual now knows their information is in jeopardy. Closing the account is an option, or so is leaving it hanging while the suspension details are worked out.
Something that isn't being discussed is work e-mail. More specifically, a work e-mail address assigned for you specifically. Yes, using it for personal e-mail is bad. But consider what happens when you leave the company - what prohibits them from answering (any type of) e-mails from your account? You probably won't know about the responses given from your place of work. Maybe wrong answers, but it isn't clear on who the information is coming from. I tend to stay in the same field of work, I'll be running into these customers and business contacts again. It would be difficult to prove damage to your reputation and/or the monetary damage of such a thing.
With Pokemon decline, they looked for ways to make money from their purchase. Thus...
1) Sell off computer game rights. 2) Pare down business to the core games. (SW, Pokemon, D&D, Magic, and....oops.) 3) Remove high-end costs - long-term WotC employees usually, that are more likely to command higher salaries. 4) Trim down often.
Hasbro isn't interested in learning the gaming industry habits. Their purchase model is "Buy once, play a couple times or many, just buy." Their goal is not long-term success for a company they bought - they're faithful to the bottom line. (They're brutually honest about it - they are dipping into Wizards, which "very likely" *cough* out-performed its other companies/departments - not profitable enough.)
WotC shareholders sold to Hasbro - probably knowing at least some of this would happen. I wouldn't want to saddle Peter & Co, for the rest of their years, maintaining a monolith...selling it off has to be okay. The purchase of TSR, saved TSR from an earlier death. Who knows? Maybe Hasbro would have bought it, killing it immediately. (And it's not like OGL is something they would grok.)
Lessee... Microsoft has a flaw in their program. It doesn't exist as a problem, until some hacker pushes them to fix it. Therefore if hackers did not exist, it wouldn't be a problem, right?
So let's pass a law - hacking bad. The law gets passed, because of these bad programmers (I think we're talking hackers, but I digress.) Things like this causes the ball to roll much easier for their lobbying group.
*OR*
No one finds the flaw, *whew*. We don't have to fix it unless there's a real problem...that would *kill* my chances of moving up...
Now, what we should *really* be asking, is it an error being generated by flawed Microsoft code? Maybe Joe was working a little late, got sloppy, and when someone clicks *here* it generates a strange string in an e-mail, causing problems. (Or some programmer in their employ who was miffed with...?)
Someone's mentioned that MSNTV is a closed system - do we have faith that Microsoft would actually disclose its own error? That would be the *only* way the win/win condition does not occur, ie, bad press existing only for Microsoft.
-Jimmer Without noise you cannot filter truth. -DKM
Alternate Fuel (especially for cars) is dominated by the industries that already sell the "regular" mode of.
Let's say there ARE grants available to research new technologies...who do you think picks them up? Who hires more lobbyists? Who buys/gets more time at alternate fuel seminars?
This all sounds like a 'no-duh' scenario, and this isn't another argument for open source, but grants by the government need to belong to the public. In addition, those grants need to be publicly accountable - no, we don't want you dusting off research done during the 70's oil crisis, and suggesting that the grant paid for that.
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter about his 'consulting' as much any more. Consulting could still be arranged through friends of friends, with nary a party the wiser. Assuming you have friends to begin with.
But what's dumb, is giving the guy legitimacy... let's say Bill Maher has a show on Politically Incorrect, talking about spamming laws. Could Shifman be considered as a guest? He's part of the scene (as much as a target is on an archery range.) Sure, the whole thing is funny - but to who? And to the generic newspaper audience, it will be merely words about that internet thing, anyways.
I hope all parties receive what is deserved, not just what they ask for.
So, sure, you update to 5.5 so you can be patched. Oh...it installs MS Outlook Express. Express changes the regular Outlook as part of the update - now Outlook won't run properly without it. Greattt....and now I have a big blue E on my desktop.
Your IT guy runs the most recent fix, then it's discovered that the other criticals were not checked for.
Download more patches - wait! The Nov. 13 patch WON'T install now. Greaattt...
Is this a clever MS ploy to break up their monopoly by encouraging the use of other browsers?
The answer should now be this: Felton was approached by unsavory thugs. They told him unless he did what they said, they would do horrible things to him.
What does the average person do, when approached by someone they consider mostly untouchable? They concede. Afterwards, their friends bring them around, and tell them that they will stand up to the bully as well.
The RIAA/DMCA/etc dodged a bullet on this one. The victim remained a victim, and nothing changed.
And of course other companies are saying its bad - probably because they didn't have enough of a hand in it, that it would possibly be a negative effect on their area of business. Standard responses to attempted changes in copyright law.
Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman is a recommended read regarding copyright issues.
(And for a rousing speech to the masses - corporations DO write your copyright law!)
Evolution of rules.
It's an evil that occurs over time. Small companies run on the function of talent & successful products. Without the talent to drive it, the company goes nowhere. But what about the people who work there, as a job...they end up with rules and guidelines to direct them towards a goal. For the rules to be 'fair' they get applied to everyone...even the creative ones who don't need the rules to guide them. (The successful-product companies eventually get bigger needing more rules, of course...I mean, more people is less stress for everyone else...right?)
What happens? The creative ones will eventually leave due to the rules that get set down. (We're not looking at it as 'necessary' or 'unnecessary' at this time.)
In the Salon article, it mentions Peter getting docked pay. Whatever! A symptom of change - it doesn't really matter how hard you work, the PC environment rules can ruin the fun of hard work. (WotC's HR is pretty good as far as damage control goes, but it also promotes a strong-PC ideology.)
Hasbro's purchase of WotC was a known evil. If you're a shareholder of stock, and you've had enough of being part of a gaming company, you want to sell. Who buys? Another game company, one bigger than yours. Not that there were many game companies larger than WotC, really.
Hasbro's all about money. They don't want imagination, they want cash. And rules about making cash.
-Jimmer
Slashdot Mirror
One of the primary arguments that the RIAA has floated is that they're actually only selling you a license for the music.
Nothing stating that the license is via CD-playback. They've suggested in the past that ripping your CD to your iPod is not legal, which is pretty implausible - I doubt that anyone doesn't rip CDs, once they have an iPod. (I know one out of X, where X is a large number.)
In my mind, if they're just selling a license to play the music you bought, then it should be legal to play it for yourself on that license. Wherever it is...you're licensed to listening to only one of those copies at a time. You can't listen it to the same time that your SO listens to it at a seperate location. It's impossible to enforce, so I'm sure they want stronger DRM to push it on people...except that DRM violates the agreement on what a CD is.
IANAL.
I don't comment all that much, but there are some points being missed.
1. The big automakers got hefty grants/tax breaks to research said cars. This served three functions. First, it denied it to other companies by sucking up money that could go to future competitors. Next, it's free money and good publicity. Finally, if they did hit something magic, they'd get it...as opposed to the other companies.
2. Let's talk about cars of the future for a moment. Think about how many small companies are out there, with good ideas and noble goals, going to trade shows and conventions for VC? Where they talk about the challenges and successes they've had? The entrenched automakers applies pressure with their money to put a PR edge on the shows...company A wants to promote their ideas? We bump them from the speaking schedule, kick them out to being a small booth that now only 1% of the attendees now see, and no investors hear a pitch.
GE had a car, deliberately sabotaged it, and then claims it is a failure. Where does this put venture capital for new electric car companies? Nobody's going to buy into it now.
What, Superman is released soon...next there will be reports of flying men with capes originating from the meteor's site?
Ticket to Ride is a fast lunch board game. It can handle up to 5 players, and you can play it online for free (as long as one of you has a Days of Wonder account that someone got for buying one of their games - that person sets up the game).
Settlers of Catan is a little long to play over lunch, but as long as your boss plays, it's cool, right?
A quick & dirty:
The big automakers have not committed to really migrating to electric cars. They're more than willing to suck away any R&D funding they can...free money and also kills funding for startups.
The process kills startups twice. Not only does GM (etc) take up the best speaking spots at electric car shows, it takes the money as well. (Some have said to sink it into recycled technology.)
I was lucky enough to get a preview at the Science Fiction Museum last Sunday. (I watched the original show religiously as a young'un.)
I had my doubts. Female Starbuck? Female Asian Boomer? What's this 33 minute crap?
It's good. Not the same as the original, but solid. I almost wish to have the SciFi channel, just for Friday nights.
New way of doing the same things? I disagree.
So, they tagged your car with a device.
1) If it has an adverse effect on you driving your car, it would be bad. (Interference for your car's own GPS unit, interference with health panic buttons, etc...)
2) If someone puts an APB on your car it's tracked. Let's say a sheriff who thinks you're doing his wife, wants to trace you - grabs one of them fancy trackers...maybe only he knows. (Different from a car following you - you at least have a chance.)
It does not exclude a satellite tracking you, optically. Hopefully it's expensive enough, that it would be of a national security kind of thing.
As far as tagging being reasonable, sure, it's less expensive and safer than having a car follow the suspect. I don't find those facets a mandate to change the balance of privacy vs. society's needs.
Play Talisman? Do you like the beer-and-pretzels, hack-slash/monopoly feel?
Try Runebound. Every time I host a game night where Runebound is an option, it's a full table of 6. (As a caution, it's slightly more complex to get into.)
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Fantasy Flight Games.
Since when do you spell it with the extra "3"?
New math invades new speak.
Sadly, bills are presented for vote with little chance to read them. It happens in every Congress, unfortunately, politics aside, this one more than most. (There are stats available for the more energetic folks, however, I'm not sober. Suffer, or use Google.)
Night sessions, and excluding the minority political party (even if they're part of that sub-commitee), with bills being presented the next day. In some cases, you're looking at having to vote on bills with hundreds of pages, with no time to read them.
There are several ways to vote on them, at this point. Ideology, or relying on special interests (and their biased information sources.
In the article, she's confident that the person who was offering her the VoteHere information was NOT the person who was a contact regarding Diebold.
She also states that the investigators rarely even ask her about VoteHere, that they seem to be fishing for something else...what else is there?
Diebold gets kicked out of California. There are reasons why that company/industry would want to see her/her website/whistleblowers to go away.
I'd be really sad, if we've reached a point in our history, where the FBI gets involved in covering up the Diebold mess. Diebold has *more* than earned its place of shame, and electronic voting needs more watchdogs and whistleblowers...not less.
Before just outright quitting their flight plan, mail them, and tell them why they're wrong. Cutting up your card tells them nothing, and if you tell them you've done it, they can't salvage anything.
Ask them how they're going to regain your trust. So, they lied. Sure, it's a violation of trust. It should be a horrible business practice. I *do* hope they get sued.
I would strongly prefer that they get such a deluge of mail, that they, and other airlines who would consider it, to be reminded that they serve their passengers or no one.
Actually, I'm waiting for the next phase:
Spam from the ISP.
Instead of receiving the actual e-mail when connecting, the customer receives the actual subject line, and the text is...
"Your account is temporarily disabled due to ****. Please contact the ISP at this number () during these hours (). Your business is important to us."
And apparently to others. Ha ha.
The individual now knows their information is in jeopardy. Closing the account is an option, or so is leaving it hanging while the suspension details are worked out.
Something that isn't being discussed is work e-mail. More specifically, a work e-mail address assigned for you specifically. Yes, using it for personal e-mail is bad. But consider what happens when you leave the company - what prohibits them from answering (any type of) e-mails from your account? You probably won't know about the responses given from your place of work. Maybe wrong answers, but it isn't clear on who the information is coming from. I tend to stay in the same field of work, I'll be running into these customers and business contacts again. It would be difficult to prove damage to your reputation and/or the monetary damage of such a thing.
Hasbro bought in for Pokemon.
With Pokemon decline, they looked for ways to make money from their purchase. Thus...
1) Sell off computer game rights.
2) Pare down business to the core games. (SW, Pokemon, D&D, Magic, and....oops.)
3) Remove high-end costs - long-term WotC employees usually, that are more likely to command higher salaries.
4) Trim down often.
Hasbro isn't interested in learning the gaming industry habits. Their purchase model is "Buy once, play a couple times or many, just buy." Their goal is not long-term success for a company they bought - they're faithful to the bottom line. (They're brutually honest about it - they are dipping into Wizards, which "very likely" *cough* out-performed its other companies/departments - not profitable enough.)
WotC shareholders sold to Hasbro - probably knowing at least some of this would happen. I wouldn't want to saddle Peter & Co, for the rest of their years, maintaining a monolith...selling it off has to be okay. The purchase of TSR, saved TSR from an earlier death. Who knows? Maybe Hasbro would have bought it, killing it immediately. (And it's not like OGL is something they would grok.)
It's a complex argument.
Laws gets passed against hacking.
Lessee...
Microsoft has a flaw in their program. It doesn't exist as a problem, until some hacker pushes them to fix it. Therefore if hackers did not exist, it wouldn't be a problem, right?
So let's pass a law - hacking bad. The law gets passed, because of these bad programmers (I think we're talking hackers, but I digress.) Things like this causes the ball to roll much easier for their lobbying group.
*OR*
No one finds the flaw, *whew*. We don't have to fix it unless there's a real problem...that would *kill* my chances of moving up...
Now, what we should *really* be asking, is it an error being generated by flawed Microsoft code? Maybe Joe was working a little late, got sloppy, and when someone clicks *here* it generates a strange string in an e-mail, causing problems. (Or some programmer in their employ who was miffed with...?)
Someone's mentioned that MSNTV is a closed system - do we have faith that Microsoft would actually disclose its own error? That would be the *only* way the win/win condition does not occur, ie, bad press existing only for Microsoft.
-Jimmer
Without noise you cannot filter truth. -DKM
http://www.acpropulsion.com/
.
Alternate Fuel (especially for cars) is dominated by the industries that already sell the "regular" mode of
Let's say there ARE grants available to research new technologies...who do you think picks them up? Who hires more lobbyists? Who buys/gets more time at alternate fuel seminars?
This all sounds like a 'no-duh' scenario, and this isn't another argument for open source, but grants by the government need to belong to the public. In addition, those grants need to be publicly accountable - no, we don't want you dusting off research done during the 70's oil crisis, and suggesting that the grant paid for that.
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter about his 'consulting' as much any more. Consulting could still be arranged through friends of friends, with nary a party the wiser. Assuming you have friends to begin with.
But what's dumb, is giving the guy legitimacy... let's say Bill Maher has a show on Politically Incorrect, talking about spamming laws. Could Shifman be considered as a guest? He's part of the scene (as much as a target is on an archery range.) Sure, the whole thing is funny - but to who? And to the generic newspaper audience, it will be merely words about that internet thing, anyways.
I hope all parties receive what is deserved, not just what they ask for.
-Jimmer
So, sure, you update to 5.5 so you can be patched. Oh...it installs MS Outlook Express. Express changes the regular Outlook as part of the update - now Outlook won't run properly without it. Greattt....and now I have a big blue E on my desktop.
Your IT guy runs the most recent fix, then it's discovered that the other criticals were not checked for.
Download more patches - wait! The Nov. 13 patch WON'T install now. Greaattt...
Is this a clever MS ploy to break up their monopoly by encouraging the use of other browsers?
The answer should now be this: Felton was approached by unsavory thugs. They told him unless he did what they said, they would do horrible things to him.
What does the average person do, when approached by someone they consider mostly untouchable? They concede. Afterwards, their friends bring them around, and tell them that they will stand up to the bully as well.
The RIAA/DMCA/etc dodged a bullet on this one. The victim remained a victim, and nothing changed.
Are civil lawsuits out of the question now?
It attempts much the same thing.
And of course other companies are saying its bad - probably because they didn't have enough of a hand in it, that it would possibly be a negative effect on their area of business. Standard responses to attempted changes in copyright law.
Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman is a recommended read regarding copyright issues.
(And for a rousing speech to the masses - corporations DO write your copyright law!)
Evolution of rules. It's an evil that occurs over time. Small companies run on the function of talent & successful products. Without the talent to drive it, the company goes nowhere. But what about the people who work there, as a job...they end up with rules and guidelines to direct them towards a goal. For the rules to be 'fair' they get applied to everyone...even the creative ones who don't need the rules to guide them. (The successful-product companies eventually get bigger needing more rules, of course...I mean, more people is less stress for everyone else...right?) What happens? The creative ones will eventually leave due to the rules that get set down. (We're not looking at it as 'necessary' or 'unnecessary' at this time.) In the Salon article, it mentions Peter getting docked pay. Whatever! A symptom of change - it doesn't really matter how hard you work, the PC environment rules can ruin the fun of hard work. (WotC's HR is pretty good as far as damage control goes, but it also promotes a strong-PC ideology.) Hasbro's purchase of WotC was a known evil. If you're a shareholder of stock, and you've had enough of being part of a gaming company, you want to sell. Who buys? Another game company, one bigger than yours. Not that there were many game companies larger than WotC, really. Hasbro's all about money. They don't want imagination, they want cash. And rules about making cash. -Jimmer