First the politicos divert a big chunk of money from maintaining the levees. Then a big storm hits. A day later the levee gets a big tear at its weakest point. Millions of gallons of water rush in and fill the bowl of the city, with the deepest part of the bowl in the poorer neighborhoods. All the people leave and gradually the richer people come back.
The insurance companies won't settle until the feds agree to strengthen the levees. The feds won't set standards for the levees until the insurance companies commit to rebuilding.
Time passes. Rich neighborhoods are rebuilt, poor neighborhoods aren't. Finally the politicos claim that 'something must be done' and use eminent domain to force the poor people to accept 15 cents or less on dollar for 'fair market value' of the property. Fair market value after the flood, which is next to nothing. The politicos offer huge tracts of formerly poor neighborhoods to their campaign contributors at a tiny fraction of the propertie's former worth. After the campaign contributors have completed the transfer, the feds announce that the levees will be rebuilt to Cat5 standards. The insurance companies don't have to make massive payouts to the former owners of the property.
The campaign contributors announce that they are relocating their headquarters to the new vacant areas of New Orleans. For this they get huge tax writeoffs, far exceeding the cost of relocating and the new construction. An area outside of the French Quarter is turned into a Disneyland-style theme park. The rest of the flooded formerly poor neighborhoods are turned into housing tracts, single-story cookie-cutter particle-board houses and ugly row apartments. Most of the people who move in are white from other parts of the country.
The black people who used to live in NOLA are scattered to the slums of Baton Rouge, Houston, Jackson, Memphis in such a way that they will never develop block voting power.
Hey, I used to live in New Orleans. I even voted for Edwin Edwards once or twice. This is just the way things work there.
This absurd situation is the direct result of buying a sysphisticated piece of electronic hardware from a software company. And not just a software company, from a huge software monopoly.
This kind of thing, and hell, this precise situation, would never happen in a company that is run by engineers. Real engineers, not software engineers or sanitation engineers. People who have been rigorous trained in the behavior of physical materials when acted upon by systematic application of an energy source. People in hardware companies don't sell stuff that gets fixed right out of the box by hanging the power supply by a piece of string. There are lots of other people with experience and scars from past mistakes that ensure that this doesn't happen. And if by some circumstance it does occur, the engineers in other companies don't forget about it and managers don't rehire the engineers who were responsible at that same level. Like Deng Shao Ping, they must first spend some time on the pig farm to contemplate the consequences of their mistakes.
But not designers in a software company. Real world hardware doesn't exist, in theory. If you put 100 volts across a eighth-watt 10-ohm resistor, you get 10 amps. My super calculator says so. Actually what you get is a bad smell. Couple this with the atmosphere of upwardly-mobile incompetence found in any large corporation. Lock it in place by the office politics of having "yes men and women" generally promoted over innovative corporate in-house entrepreneurs and you have a situation where your customers are hanging your new state-of-the-art showcase product by a piece of string in order to get it to work.
All this is worse in a monopoly corporation, because they have already reached the maximum possible business goal through past operations. Anything new and innovative can't improve the situation. Therefore managers have nothing to gain by encouraging and rewarding competence and innovation. Add the generalized hubris of 5000 pampered 30-year-old grade-point-angels who have spent their entire lives becoming the best in class at passing tests and pleasing the teacher, drop in a pinch of clinical psychotic behavior in the upper levels of management, and you've created the perfect Frankenstein organization.
The question of living in Canada vs USA depends a lot on your skill set (job qualifications), home language, tolerance of bad weather, politics, and intoxicational preference.
Let's say you have a good job skill set and can get a job more or less either north or south of the 49th parallel. If you speak French as a native language, you'll most likely feel more comfortable in Quebec. If you speak Spanish as a home language, Miami, Los Angeles, or New York would be more confortable. This issue is neutral for native English or other language speakers, eh?
If you don't really like the cold, but don't mind dark gloomy rainy days (say you're a goth programmer or gamer), Vancouver BC would definitely beat the rest of Canada, New England, California, or Florida (too much sunshine).
Fascists, either Christian or racial, will definitely feel more at home in the USA. It's your kind of place.
Cannibus lovers, ('Stoners' to everyone else) will be more comfortable in British Columbia than anywhere in the USA, except possibly Maui. Not even the Humboldt Thunderbolt beats the BC bud. And you're less likely to have a Hummerload of psycho Iraqi vets kicking in your door and sticking machine guns or tasers in your kid's faces at 3am if you smoke in British Columbia instead of the USA. That's important to some people, less to others.
In general, everything that you buy in a store is cheaper in the USA. Canada has insane sales taxes on top of high prices. This is the big issue for most people deciding USA vs. Canada. Big income taxes too. However the money collected in taxes mostly gets back to the Canadian people in some form, whereas in the US taxes paid go mostly to giant corporations with fat government contracts.
However if you're gonna get sick, try to get sick in Canada instead. With the new bankruptcy laws in the USA, along with a corrupt and insanely expensive health care system there, you'll be in debt forever if you need medical care in the USA. Like if you get shot. The US has more guns than people, Canada doesn't.
Let's not overlook certain religious considerations. Madonna Circone was named after the Virgin Mary, who is the central religious symbol of the Christian faith in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. The word 'madonna' is latin-based for 'my lady', and refers to the young woman who, in Christian belief, gave birth to the human form of God about 2000 years ago. In Christian belief, this divine conception of God in a human form was achieved without the natural implantation of sperm into her womb, hence the veneration of the mother of God as a virgin in this faith. The church has always used and continues to use this story to discourage young women of the faith from taking multiple sexual partners and instead focusing her sexuality on a single male husband, thus encouraging family stability as all religions tend to do.
The fact that this pop singer has used her religiously-oriented birth name to obsessively and ironically promote an image of excessive sexual promiscuity in her music and media image has been an essential element of her career success, especially in countries of primarily Catholic populations. Now her 'owners' of her 'product' wish to restrict access to her recordings and media image by making it illegal for her fans to access her image and recordings without the payment of a sum of their choosing for this privledge.
However there is the question of whether the RIAA or their funding sources have or even should have the right to actually restrict or control any media access to the name of the Madonna. By what right does this organization have to believe that they can restrict public access to the name of the mother of God? The RIAA company who 'owns' the 'right' to the name 'Madonna' should reconsider this action, lest they run the risk of pissing off one billion Christians by claiming that they have some bizarre legal right to the name of the Madonna regardless of the form or circumstances that they have come to assume that they have this 'right'.
The ability to coerce subordinates into giving time, money, or even body parts is high in the scientific research fields because there are so few good quality job openings and much pressure to produce results. Therefore the need to establish an ethical boundary against having lab workers or other subordinates contribute anything but paid (often, but not always) labor to the project.
However, this happened in Korea where there is overwhelming pressure on people (applied since they are born) to self-sacrifice and give more and more to a group cause. There is also enormous pressure to serve without question the next higher figure in the chain of authority. The director of the project was most likely right in claiming that there was no pressure to actually placed or implied on the lab workers to give up their body parts. However the social pressure was overwhelming, and all the director had to do was mention that 'donors' were needed and the lab workers would comply.
This is the type of situation that the ethical guideline was established to prevent. The director would have realized that his subordinants would have delivered the eggs and should have taken stronger measures to prevent this from happening. However, given the cultural context, it is unlikely that the director felt that he should abide by the ethical constricture.
Sort of like American rock star mentioning that he enjoys fellatio to couple of backstage groupies. No pressure, no insinuations, but the need is serviced without question.
Let's see. I write a tiny terminal program that gets characters from the PC serial port and writes them to the screen. Not a big deal. Maybe ten lines of code in Turbo C for DOS maximum. Maybe a 10-20K byte executable.
Visual Studio requires me to either include the MS Run Time support supplemental file or have my users download it. Visual Basic 3 had a 330K RunTime supplemental file. Absurd, irritating, but no big deal. Visual Basic has a 1.2 Megabyte RunTime supplemental file. Bloated and stupid, but just roll your eyes 'cause it's Microsoft.
Now.NET has a mother fking 26 Megabyte RunTime supplemental file. For a ten line trival program. Forget it. Beyond reasonable. Time to switch to Linux. I doubt that anyone uses.NET who hasn't purchased the.NET development system. Certainly not anyone using ME, Win2000, or Win98.
So what's the size of the 'support' file foe Visual Studio 2005? Over 100 Megabytes? Or did someone in Redmond come to their senses and do away with the whole idea have having to download a RunTime supplemental file in order to run a relatively simple application?
--Not likely-- Common sense stops at Olympia and doesn't start to come back until the Canadian border.
The first syllable is pronounced like 'coop'- as in chicken coop or Harvard Coop. But not like coup-d'etat, which generally has the French pronounciation.
I grew up in Mass -sneeze - setts also but I've never seen the duo dots except in the New Yorker. Maybe we should make a list: cooperate, reenter, naive, uh... out of ideas.
Two dots over a vowel in English is called a dyersis. It is never seen except in The New Yorker magazine, and less commonly, over the word naïve.
It is used when two seperate vowel sounds are associated with the same letter.
Napster changed the distribution of the product, but not the nature of the product itself. The product being, in this case, an unchangeable audio recording. The true revolution of P2P will happen when people start assuming that what they are downloading is not a finished selling product, but a musical piece that is constantly changing and in development. Present technology doesn't allow the recording to be changed after it has been 'solidified' into a finished product. Future technology may allow this to happen. For example, if you don't like the guitar solo in a song, you can't change it, delete it, rerecord it, and upload your version. The best that you can do now is paste your change on top of what is there already. Nor does P2P like Kazaa have any way to keep track of or let others know in detail what you have done to the recording. It can only transfer the actual file from one PC to another.
The music industry has to get out of the 20th century mode of thinking that what they offer is a solidified unchangeable audio recording and start thinking in 21st century terms of marketing access to an artistic process. Their efforts to prevent the exchange of fixed recordings is bound to fail because of the nature of the new technology; its unlimited copying and distribution character of fixed unchanging files.
What the music industry really needs to worry about is that someone else will develop a means to financially profit from the concept that music can become a mass-collaborative process instead of the distribution of disks with unchangeable audio recordings. Were that to happen, then the current music recording companies would become irrelevant to the new music scene. A new scene that doesn't depend around the 20th-century concept of superstars. If that happens, then they may find themselves in a position where they couldn't give away their musical product for free even if they tried.
I'm constantly amazed that the American and European global media companies are so obsessed with China copying movies and pop music CDs. Because I can't understand why anyone in China would be that interested in American movies and rock'n'roll.
Sure there are always going to be a few people in the coastal cities, the oxymoronic Chinese super-hip people of Shanghai and Hong Kong who follow the latest western trends, but the average person? I don't get it.
Why would a factory worker in some interior provence have any interest what-so-ever in some Steve Martin suburban comedy? How could any female office drone file clerk relate in any possible way to gangster rap? especially since the pirated product is most likely not translated into Mandarin!
Media company executives are making fools of themselves (a redundancy, I realize) by insisting that they are losing billions of dollars to piracy in China. Their obsessional vanity in believing that hundreds of millions of people in China would pay billions of dollars for Hollywood product is really embarrassing to watch. If they weren't paying so much money in bribes to American politicians, then their absurd claims of losing billions of dollars to Chinese copyright pirates would be laughed away.
These people really do need to come to their senses.
Telling the truth with brevity and insight is a gift. Spend the weekend studying accounting, nursing, or farming. Get out of electronics/IT while you can. It has exactly the future described above.
You deserve better. Your (future) children deserve better.
C'mon, it takes a lot of money to look good and to develop the style to know when you look good. People in tech support don't get paid enough money to look good.
Plus,...well,...their brains work differently.
It could be worse. Lip Shit Ralph Lauren forced the people working in his stores to buy the company clothes from his company at full retail cost. And then he paid them minimum wage plus a few points commission on what they sold. How's that for suck?
Plus how about filling some of the cubicles with beautiful young women? Tech support guys know that they are zeros and will most likely always be zeros. They realize that they will constantly have to be studying new technologies in order to remain employed at chump wages. They know that they will never have the social status that their counterparts in Bangalore and Chennai have with the general public. They know that they will be working for the rest of their lives in dead soulless drab cubicles. They know that the only difference between their lives and the lives of those who are serving (in USA the same verb is used for being in the military and being in prison) 20 years for killing record company lawyers is that they are less likely to be raped after 'work'. So they figure, why not where whatever I feel like wearing.
When a company with 9 figures in sales buys code from a company with 5 figures in annual sales, they get to look over the source as much as they like. And 'suggest' changes. And be responsible for the results.
I'll bet that this article was written by impressively credentialed people who have never played a video game for hours or have ever gotten high, but are experts on addiction.
Force them to surrender 5 credit hours on their Master's degree every time that they write something stupid.
Anyone who protests that they like their own style better because they can read it easier (while everyone else can't) shouldn't be working for you.
Maybe instead these people can be requested to write programs that reformat the written code from their style to the company standard style. They should do this, of course, on their own time at home.
No magic numbers in the code is a good idea. Especially for embedded systems code where there are lots of configuration registers in the microcontrollers to set up. For example, avoid constructions like:
ldi config, 0x28 ; LoaD Immediate Value into register instead use:
ldi config, (1 bit5goodname) | (1 bit3goodname)
I'm always encouraging people on embedded coding sites to do this.
Running the comments through a spell checker is a good idea. If you can get the language environment to separate the comments from the active code and feed the comments alone into a good spell checker. I haven't seen any compiler yet that does this, but it should be too hard to set up a text filter program for it. A least no one in your company will be embarrassed by simple misspelled words in the comments. Great for your H1-B people also who are using English as a second or third language and haven't mastered the unusual spelling of thousands of common English words.
I'm also becoming a strong believer in Talking Documentation. Get a high quality Speech-To-Text converter program and a fast PC. Place this PC next to the development PC with the source code. Start the Sp-to-Tx and the source code listing. Describe in words the entire listing as if there were someone there who was endlessly fascinated by the code and you. Take hours if you need too. Save the text file of the transcribed dictated documentation with the source. Don't be concerned about formatting and paragraphs or even coherence. If needed, someone can do all that later. It's important just to have the detailed dictation text that describes the source. It seems strange, but it does work as a documentation technique.
Until corporations are run by robots, they are still run by people.
The whole idea behind a corporation is that it is a legal 'person'. But it doesn't have any human characteristics like ethics or morals.
Just the opposite, the function of the corporation is to maximize the return on investment to their shareholders. Given a choice between any ethical or moral position on any issue and the making money, the corporation must disregard the humanistic sides of the issue and always go with the choice to make money.
Summary: I Have A F***ing Grip. Perhaps my critics need to get a little more realistic about the forces that are making the decisions around here. Study some history. And learn to avoid using pronouns and swear words in the same sentence.
You guys see too many movies, you know the one's with the kind old scientist in a white coat played by Sam Jaffe who goes on and on about serving humanity through science and all that other nonsense.
Science today is totally corporatized and in service of the military/industrial complex. If we take this guy's claim at face value, that there is either something in his body or through a diet or herbal/vitamin supplement that enabled him to deplete the virus from his body, then why should he assume that he would benefit from enabling the global corporations access to this knowledge or genetics?
AIDS is big business in the west, and a way of getting rid of unneeded surplus people everywhere else. Protease inhibitors bring in tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year to the drug companies, and some guy comes along that can possibly destroy that income at the source? In all likelyhood, the drug companies would find the cure for themselves and their gay kids, then use the copyright laws to keep the research secret in order to protect their AIDS-maintanence profits. After they get this genetic knowledge from this one guy, they will kill him in order to prevent the genetic structure or technique from becoming known to the public. They'd simply say that he had HIV all the time and the second test results were only a false negative. Then they would apply for and get hundreds of millions of dollars in military grants to develop this 'cure' into a biological weapon.
Remember, you're dealing with American Corporations in the here and now. Assume the most paranoid and evil design and intent and you are going to be right most of the time. This is the real world. This guy is right not to trust corporate science.
Neither should you.
You all are misunderstanding the Republicans. The goal is not to discourage copying and file sharing. The goal is to find a new way to put millions of young people in prison. Private prisons are big business in the USA and the private prison companies like Correction Corporation of America and Wackenhut are big campaign contributors to Republicans. They get $30,000 per year from the government for every person that they hold in their private prisons. More prisoners means more profits for them, so they strongly encourage the criminalization of activities that are currently not considered by any civilized people to be incarceration crimes.
Rest assured that if this law permitting wholesale incarceration for copyright actually goes into effect that it won't be rich white boys going to jail for downloading music that is made by poor blacks yelling about how they are going to kill some other poor black guy for wearing the wrong color sneakers. Hell, this is America that we're talking about. The people who are going to jail for downloading files are black people who download copies of Dr. Martin Luther King's copyrighted speeches. Don't have any illusions about what this law is actually about.
Basically this a new form of American slave trading. Or maybe it's not so new, just the same old slave trading in a different form. Let's see, we got rich white people hiding behind 'corporate person-hood' status making $30000 a year for each person (mostly black in the USA) that is held in bondage for non-crimes like getting high instead of getting drunk. This is already responsible for over half of the people being held in slavery in American corporate prisons. Now they've come up with a new idea to put millions of more people into slavery for nothing.
Remember, this has nothing to do with copyright. Copyright is just an excuse this time to vastly increase the American slave trade. Copyright is the excuse this time just like drugs was the excuse last time. So what's it going to be next time?
I will direct you to expertly constructed MIDI compositions that YOU will not be able to tell if recorded by an orchestra or a synth.
Fine, please do direct us to some links of expert MIDI files. Post some links and URLs with your recommendations. I and the rest of us look forward to hearing these pieces.
The only real advantage of MIDI over audio files like MP3 or OGG is that the actual notes being played can be learned when viewing the MIDI file through a notation program. The best notation software that I've used is MIDIsoft Studio4 even though it's ten years old.
Notation software takes the MIDI file and displays it as sheet music. If you can read music (and anyone who can learn C can learn to read music) then you can learn how to play really complicated songs this way. Guitar Tab text files usually only give you simple and often wrong chord changes. Anything beyond G-Em-C-D (I-VIm-IV-V - the progression used in thousands of 1950s-1970s songs) is going to be hard to figure out for non-professionals just sitting down with a guitar and a recording. Almost all older songs have their most complicated chord structures and arpeggios mapped out into MIDI by musically-proficient fans. All the songs played on 'classic rock' FM stations can be learned this way. This is also a great way to learn big-band era stuff from the 1940s and even how older European classical music works. Mozart and Tchaikovsky (the Nutcracker Suite, etc...) can be learned even if you don't have access to the sheet music scores from a library or music store.
MIDI files played into synthesizers, even newer GM synths, don't sound very good even when they have been expertly constructed. It's a fact. There are too many nuances to the playing technique that don't get encoded into the MIDI file. The synths aren't really all that great either. Purely electronic ambient music works like Brian Eno and Steve Roach have a much better chance of being recreated from MIDI files fed into advanced synths. But the idea that a modern pop song can be recreated by MIDI should not be taken seriously. Synths can't reproduce standard instruments like electric guitars and saxophones realistically.
A number of sheet music publishers are trying to get all MIDI files removed from the web. This is short-sighted and cruel on their part. MIDI files encourage people to learn to read and play music far more better than anything that the music publishers could do to develop this market. With music classes being dropped extensively from American public schools, anything that teaches people to interact with printed music scores is a positive thing.
It just sucks that music classes are being dropped by stupid uncultured brain-dead public school administrators (is there any other type?). And to drop music classes for more algebra? Insane. Most people listen to music every single day; very few people ever use algebra after high school. The priorities of the public schools are completely wrong. It's a tragedy.
So where's the killer ap? In between the lines. Or rather in between the traces.
I got a copy of OrCAD Schematic Capture and Printed Circuit Board layout software from a job in 1990. Laying out a printed circuit board with 50 ICs waiting long periods of time (several minutes) after every ten minutes of work for the design to 'compile'. That was with a 20MegaHertz 80286 processor.
Now with a 2 GigaHertz system the designs compile in the amount of time that I can move from the Enter key back to the mouse. Same DOS-based software; 100 times the speed.
That's the killer ap for the 3 GigaHertz machines.
I've recently started using the web instead of the newspaper to compare the weekly food sales at the local supermarkets. After ten years, the supermarket chains have finally realized that many more young people are using the web instead the newspaper for shopping information.
The real threat to the big-box shopping outlets isn't from people googling for information of other big-box outlets, it's from people forming 'buying clubs' for their shopping from the ground up. It could be as simple as splitting a bulk buy from CostCo ("Anyone want to split a purchase of 100 rolls of toilet paper?") or as complex as setting up the purchase of the entire harvest of a farm located in a different state split between thirty families.
What the big-box outlets should realize is that they won't know that this high-information purchasing arrangements are happening. Their sales won't drop enough to trigger an alert, and no one entering alternate purchasing groups is going to be telling the big-box stores about their new arrangements. It would be a new market that starts and operates under their radar.
An example of this would be found now on eBay. Take for example used music instrument equipment for pop/rock bands. There's millions of instruments, amps, and sound modifiers that have been sold and not all that many rock bands making money from live music. But the music stores are completely oriented around selling new instruments at high prices to either bands squandering a record company advance or teenagers getting music equipment as a gift from their parents. So there is lots of stuff that is sitting in closets, lots of people who would be willing to buy the stuff, and no public developed markets to bring these parties together.
Enter eBay. Every day there's about 5000 stompboxes for sale at prices 1/10 to 1/2 of what the music stores are selling for the same item, along with thousands of instruments and amps. In my experience, the music stores have absolutely no clue that this alternative market has developed and is thriving. They are also not getting any of the money that is being exchanged: eBay and PayPal is getting the money.
Successful retailing is a combination of three things: a secure location for the merchandise to be stored and exchanged; information of the market-what people want to buy, what they will pay, what is being produced for sale, and what price it will be produced; and starting capital-money to get the business started and sustained. The web will significantly reduce to the customers the cost of information of the market, and eventually reduce the cost of the other items as well.
One by one the executives for the big-box outlets will become aware that grass-roots markets have developed outside their knowledge and control. What they do in response will depend on their intelligence and ethics. And we all know the level of intelligence and ethics of WalMart.
"That's one small step for a man one giant leap for mankind."
The fundamental irony in this statement is that it was not a small step for a man, it was a 250,000 mile step for the individual man. And the entire moon-landing program didn't really amount to much for the vast majority of people on earth. It wasn't a 'giant leap'.
This 'Armstrong Irony' is mentioned in the 1986 book Nature's End by Whitley Streiber and James Kuneka. A wonderful sci-fi book, highly recommended, and still probably available at your local library.
A Brilliant Mind An interesting movie. About a very smart man with a brain disorder that enabled (forced) him into creating a parallel reality that simply wasn't there. All his energy and brilliance went into coping with this imaginary world.
He was able to regain his senses and apply his intelligence to real-world problems. For this he was acclaimed and honored. But for the rest of his life, he was never sure whether the people that he met or even his interaction with daily routine was real or part of his unbalanced imagination.
Such an apt metaphor for the movie industry. $8 downloads per title is fantasy, and all the financial projections based on such a figure are fantasies. Maybe, just maybe, for some excellent movies, for some wealthy people, $1 per download might work.
Movies are simply too available now for there to be any vast difference in price between what is there and what is new. Blank DVD ROMs are about 25 cents each. This is the current 'swap meet-water cooler exchange' rock-bottom price for a movie. Anything above this price is the utility that is added by the MPAA companies. Store prices of last years theater releases are $15. That's the max upper price for a physical disk, box, packaging, and resellable legal license. Older movies go for $5 for the same deal, regardless of quality.
So what Sony is saying is that their new movies are so good, so special that they are worth far more than any of the titles of the 20th century. And this is so without the disk and packaging. And you have to pay for the downloading and storage costs.
Such incredible arrogance.
I give them about 10 years before they're gone. And that's because they are such an integrated hardware-software company and have a lot of built-up good will from the 20th century to squander on madness.
Someday, someone will point out to them that the era of 200 million dollar movies with $30 theater tickets-popcorn-baby sitter costs are over. Whether the fantasy infected minds of the top executives will be able to separate reality from fantasy will determine the fate of their company and the people who work for them.
The article gives a name. Ms. Kori Bernards, vice president of corporate communications for MPAA.
Let's take a time out for a brief lesson on how the world works. People have some money. People give a little of this money to lawyers. Lawyers give some of the money that they get to politicians. Politicians pass laws requiring you to give more of your money to the people who gave a little of their money to the lawyers. A positive feedback loop. It continues to grow until (1) people kill the politicians, or (2) people kill the lawyers. This is how the world works.
The MPAA (or any group with money to pay for politicians) will continue to extort your money from you until you either (1) kill the lawyers yourself, or (2) pay someone to do it for you.
When the entertainment lawyers collectively realize that they personally will suffer as a direct result of their applying their professional expertise to the topic of randomly selecting someone who watches a movie or listens to a music recording and demanding thousands of dollars, then this shit will stop. Until then, it will continue.
Be real, this is America in the 21st century. The corporations own the three branches of government, the military, the media, the police, and damn near everything else. NONE of these avenues is open any more for a systematic redress of grievances.
What else is left?
I can not and will not in good faith condone murder in either a public or private forum. What I can say is that, from a historical perspective, violence is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to either institute social change ( for better or worse ) or to seek redress from injustice.
There are alternatives to violence. Reread the works of Dr. Martin Luther King or Gandhi for powerful accounts of effective alternatives. Nonviolent tactics did work against far more dangerous and evil enemies than the entertainment industry. Perhaps the newer communications tools such as the web can be used to organize effective boycotts and other tools of social change.
Nevertheless, you asked for a name and you now have it.
Slashdot Mirror
First the politicos divert a big chunk of money from maintaining the levees. Then a big storm hits. A day later the levee gets a big tear at its weakest point. Millions of gallons of water rush in and fill the bowl of the city, with the deepest part of the bowl in the poorer neighborhoods. All the people leave and gradually the richer people come back.
The insurance companies won't settle until the feds agree to strengthen the levees. The feds won't set standards for the levees until the insurance companies commit to rebuilding.
Time passes. Rich neighborhoods are rebuilt, poor neighborhoods aren't. Finally the politicos claim that 'something must be done' and use eminent domain to force the poor people to accept 15 cents or less on dollar for 'fair market value' of the property. Fair market value after the flood, which is next to nothing. The politicos offer huge tracts of formerly poor neighborhoods to their campaign contributors at a tiny fraction of the propertie's former worth. After the campaign contributors have completed the transfer, the feds announce that the levees will be rebuilt to Cat5 standards. The insurance companies don't have to make massive payouts to the former owners of the property.
The campaign contributors announce that they are relocating their headquarters to the new vacant areas of New Orleans. For this they get huge tax writeoffs, far exceeding the cost of relocating and the new construction. An area outside of the French Quarter is turned into a Disneyland-style theme park. The rest of the flooded formerly poor neighborhoods are turned into housing tracts, single-story cookie-cutter particle-board houses and ugly row apartments. Most of the people who move in are white from other parts of the country.
The black people who used to live in NOLA are scattered to the slums of Baton Rouge, Houston, Jackson, Memphis in such a way that they will never develop block voting power.
Hey, I used to live in New Orleans. I even voted for Edwin Edwards once or twice. This is just the way things work there.
This absurd situation is the direct result of buying a sysphisticated piece of electronic hardware from a software company. And not just a software company, from a huge software monopoly.
This kind of thing, and hell, this precise situation, would never happen in a company that is run by engineers. Real engineers, not software engineers or sanitation engineers. People who have been rigorous trained in the behavior of physical materials when acted upon by systematic application of an energy source. People in hardware companies don't sell stuff that gets fixed right out of the box by hanging the power supply by a piece of string. There are lots of other people with experience and scars from past mistakes that ensure that this doesn't happen. And if by some circumstance it does occur, the engineers in other companies don't forget about it and managers don't rehire the engineers who were responsible at that same level. Like Deng Shao Ping, they must first spend some time on the pig farm to contemplate the consequences of their mistakes.
But not designers in a software company. Real world hardware doesn't exist, in theory. If you put 100 volts across a eighth-watt 10-ohm resistor, you get 10 amps. My super calculator says so. Actually what you get is a bad smell. Couple this with the atmosphere of upwardly-mobile incompetence found in any large corporation. Lock it in place by the office politics of having "yes men and women" generally promoted over innovative corporate in-house entrepreneurs and you have a situation where your customers are hanging your new state-of-the-art showcase product by a piece of string in order to get it to work.
All this is worse in a monopoly corporation, because they have already reached the maximum possible business goal through past operations. Anything new and innovative can't improve the situation. Therefore managers have nothing to gain by encouraging and rewarding competence and innovation. Add the generalized hubris of 5000 pampered 30-year-old grade-point-angels who have spent their entire lives becoming the best in class at passing tests and pleasing the teacher, drop in a pinch of clinical psychotic behavior in the upper levels of management, and you've created the perfect Frankenstein organization.
Microsoft.
The question of living in Canada vs USA depends a lot on your skill set (job qualifications), home language, tolerance of bad weather, politics, and intoxicational preference.
Let's say you have a good job skill set and can get a job more or less either north or south of the 49th parallel. If you speak French as a native language, you'll most likely feel more comfortable in Quebec. If you speak Spanish as a home language, Miami, Los Angeles, or New York would be more confortable. This issue is neutral for native English or other language speakers, eh?
If you don't really like the cold, but don't mind dark gloomy rainy days (say you're a goth programmer or gamer), Vancouver BC would definitely beat the rest of Canada, New England, California, or Florida (too much sunshine).
Fascists, either Christian or racial, will definitely feel more at home in the USA. It's your kind of place.
Cannibus lovers, ('Stoners' to everyone else) will be more comfortable in British Columbia than anywhere in the USA, except possibly Maui. Not even the Humboldt Thunderbolt beats the BC bud. And you're less likely to have a Hummerload of psycho Iraqi vets kicking in your door and sticking machine guns or tasers in your kid's faces at 3am if you smoke in British Columbia instead of the USA. That's important to some people, less to others.
In general, everything that you buy in a store is cheaper in the USA. Canada has insane sales taxes on top of high prices. This is the big issue for most people deciding USA vs. Canada. Big income taxes too. However the money collected in taxes mostly gets back to the Canadian people in some form, whereas in the US taxes paid go mostly to giant corporations with fat government contracts.
However if you're gonna get sick, try to get sick in Canada instead. With the new bankruptcy laws in the USA, along with a corrupt and insanely expensive health care system there, you'll be in debt forever if you need medical care in the USA. Like if you get shot. The US has more guns than people, Canada doesn't.
Let's not overlook certain religious considerations. Madonna Circone was named after the Virgin Mary, who is the central religious symbol of the Christian faith in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. The word 'madonna' is latin-based for 'my lady', and refers to the young woman who, in Christian belief, gave birth to the human form of God about 2000 years ago. In Christian belief, this divine conception of God in a human form was achieved without the natural implantation of sperm into her womb, hence the veneration of the mother of God as a virgin in this faith. The church has always used and continues to use this story to discourage young women of the faith from taking multiple sexual partners and instead focusing her sexuality on a single male husband, thus encouraging family stability as all religions tend to do.
The fact that this pop singer has used her religiously-oriented birth name to obsessively and ironically promote an image of excessive sexual promiscuity in her music and media image has been an essential element of her career success, especially in countries of primarily Catholic populations. Now her 'owners' of her 'product' wish to restrict access to her recordings and media image by making it illegal for her fans to access her image and recordings without the payment of a sum of their choosing for this privledge.
However there is the question of whether the RIAA or their funding sources have or even should have the right to actually restrict or control any media access to the name of the Madonna. By what right does this organization have to believe that they can restrict public access to the name of the mother of God? The RIAA company who 'owns' the 'right' to the name 'Madonna' should reconsider this action, lest they run the risk of pissing off one billion Christians by claiming that they have some bizarre legal right to the name of the Madonna regardless of the form or circumstances that they have come to assume that they have this 'right'.
The ability to coerce subordinates into giving time, money, or even body parts is high in the scientific research fields because there are so few good quality job openings and much pressure to produce results. Therefore the need to establish an ethical boundary against having lab workers or other subordinates contribute anything but paid (often, but not always) labor to the project.
However, this happened in Korea where there is overwhelming pressure on people (applied since they are born) to self-sacrifice and give more and more to a group cause. There is also enormous pressure to serve without question the next higher figure in the chain of authority.
The director of the project was most likely right in claiming that there was no pressure to actually placed or implied on the lab workers to give up their body parts. However the social pressure was overwhelming, and all the director had to do was mention that 'donors' were needed and the lab workers would comply.
This is the type of situation that the ethical guideline was established to prevent. The director would have realized that his subordinants would have delivered the eggs and should have taken stronger measures to prevent this from happening. However, given the cultural context, it is unlikely that the director felt that he should abide by the ethical constricture.
Sort of like American rock star mentioning that he enjoys fellatio to couple of backstage groupies. No pressure, no insinuations, but the need is serviced without question.
Let's see. I write a tiny terminal program that gets characters from the PC serial port and writes them to the screen. Not a big deal. Maybe ten lines of code in Turbo C for DOS maximum. Maybe a 10-20K byte executable.
.NET has a mother fking 26 Megabyte RunTime supplemental file. For a ten line trival program. Forget it. Beyond reasonable. Time to switch to Linux. I doubt that anyone uses .NET who hasn't purchased the .NET development system. Certainly not anyone using ME, Win2000, or Win98.
Visual Studio requires me to either include the MS Run Time support supplemental file or have my users download it. Visual Basic 3 had a 330K RunTime supplemental file. Absurd, irritating, but no big deal.
Visual Basic has a 1.2 Megabyte RunTime supplemental file. Bloated and stupid, but just roll your eyes 'cause it's Microsoft.
Now
So what's the size of the 'support' file foe Visual Studio 2005? Over 100 Megabytes? Or did someone in Redmond come to their senses and do away with the whole idea have having to download a RunTime supplemental file in order to run a relatively simple application?
--Not likely-- Common sense stops at Olympia and doesn't start to come back until the Canadian border.
The first syllable is pronounced like 'coop'- as in chicken coop or Harvard Coop. But not like coup-d'etat, which generally has the French pronounciation. ... out of ideas.
I grew up in Mass -sneeze - setts also but I've never seen the duo dots except in the New Yorker. Maybe we should make a list: cooperate, reenter, naive, uh
Two dots over a vowel in English is called a dyersis. It is never seen except in The New Yorker magazine, and less commonly, over the word naïve.
It is used when two seperate vowel sounds are associated with the same letter.
Napster changed the distribution of the product, but not the nature of the product itself. The product being, in this case, an unchangeable audio recording. The true revolution of P2P will happen when people start assuming that what they are downloading is not a finished selling product, but a musical piece that is constantly changing and in development. Present technology doesn't allow the recording to be changed after it has been 'solidified' into a finished product. Future technology may allow this to happen. For example, if you don't like the guitar solo in a song, you can't change it, delete it, rerecord it, and upload your version. The best that you can do now is paste your change on top of what is there already. Nor does P2P like Kazaa have any way to keep track of or let others know in detail what you have done to the recording. It can only transfer the actual file from one PC to another.
The music industry has to get out of the 20th century mode of thinking that what they offer is a solidified unchangeable audio recording and start thinking in 21st century terms of marketing access to an artistic process. Their efforts to prevent the exchange of fixed recordings is bound to fail because of the nature of the new technology; its unlimited copying and distribution character of fixed unchanging files.
What the music industry really needs to worry about is that someone else will develop a means to financially profit from the concept that music can become a mass-collaborative process instead of the distribution of disks with unchangeable audio recordings. Were that to happen, then the current music recording companies would become irrelevant to the new music scene. A new scene that doesn't depend around the 20th-century concept of superstars. If that happens, then they may find themselves in a position where they couldn't give away their musical product for free even if they tried.
I'm constantly amazed that the American and European global media companies are so obsessed with China copying movies and pop music CDs. Because I can't understand why anyone in China would be that interested in American movies and rock'n'roll.
Sure there are always going to be a few people in the coastal cities, the oxymoronic Chinese super-hip people of Shanghai and Hong Kong who follow the latest western trends, but the average person? I don't get it.
Why would a factory worker in some interior provence have any interest what-so-ever in some Steve Martin suburban comedy? How could any female office drone file clerk relate in any possible way to gangster rap?
especially since the pirated product is most likely not translated into Mandarin!
Media company executives are making fools of themselves (a redundancy, I realize) by insisting that they are losing billions of dollars to piracy in China. Their obsessional vanity in believing that hundreds of millions of people in China would pay billions of dollars for Hollywood product is really embarrassing to watch. If they weren't paying so much money in bribes to American politicians, then their absurd claims of losing billions of dollars to Chinese copyright pirates would be laughed away.
These people really do need to come to their senses.
Telling the truth with brevity and insight is a gift. Spend the weekend studying accounting, nursing, or farming. Get out of electronics/IT while you can. It has exactly the future described above.
You deserve better. Your (future) children deserve better.
C'mon, it takes a lot of money to look good and to develop the style to know when you look good. People in tech support don't get paid enough money to look good.
Plus,...well,...their brains work differently.
It could be worse. Lip Shit Ralph Lauren forced the people working in his stores to buy the company clothes from his company at full retail cost. And then he paid them minimum wage plus a few points commission on what they sold. How's that for suck?
Plus how about filling some of the cubicles with beautiful young women? Tech support guys know that they are zeros and will most likely always be zeros. They realize that they will constantly have to be studying new technologies in order to remain employed at chump wages. They know that they will never have the social status that their counterparts in Bangalore and Chennai have with the general public. They know that they will be working for the rest of their lives in dead soulless drab cubicles. They know that the only difference between their lives and the lives of those who are serving (in USA the same verb is used for being in the military and being in prison) 20 years for killing record company lawyers is that they are less likely to be raped after 'work'. So they figure, why not where whatever I feel like wearing.
What difference does it make to anyone?
When a company with 9 figures in sales buys code from a company with 5 figures in annual sales, they get to look over the source as much as they like. And 'suggest' changes. And be responsible for the results.
I'll bet that this article was written by impressively credentialed people who have never played a video game for hours or have ever gotten high, but are experts on addiction.
Force them to surrender 5 credit hours on their Master's degree every time that they write something stupid.
Anyone who protests that they like their own style better because they can read it easier (while everyone else can't) shouldn't be working for you.
Maybe instead these people can be requested to write programs that reformat the written code from their style to the company standard style. They should do this, of course, on their own time at home.
No magic numbers in the code is a good idea. Especially for embedded systems code where there are lots of configuration registers in the microcontrollers to set up.
For example, avoid constructions like:
ldi config, 0x28 ; LoaD Immediate Value into register
instead use:
ldi config, (1 bit5goodname) | (1 bit3goodname)
I'm always encouraging people on embedded coding sites to do this.
Running the comments through a spell checker is a good idea. If you can get the language environment to separate the comments from the active code and feed the comments alone into a good spell checker. I haven't seen any compiler yet that does this, but it should be too hard to set up a text filter program for it. A least no one in your company will be embarrassed by simple misspelled words in the comments. Great for your H1-B people also who are using English as a second or third language and haven't mastered the unusual spelling of thousands of common English words.
I'm also becoming a strong believer in Talking Documentation. Get a high quality Speech-To-Text converter program and a fast PC. Place this PC next to the development PC with the source code. Start the Sp-to-Tx and the source code listing. Describe in words the entire listing as if there were someone there who was endlessly fascinated by the code and you. Take hours if you need too. Save the text file of the transcribed dictated documentation with the source. Don't be concerned about formatting and paragraphs or even coherence. If needed, someone can do all that later. It's important just to have the detailed dictation text that describes the source. It seems strange, but it does work as a documentation technique.
Don't forget to spell check your own stuff too.
Until corporations are run by robots, they are still run by people.
The whole idea behind a corporation is that it is a legal 'person'. But it doesn't have any human characteristics like ethics or morals.
Just the opposite, the function of the corporation is to maximize the return on investment to their shareholders. Given a choice between any ethical or moral position on any issue and the making money, the corporation must disregard the humanistic sides of the issue and always go with the choice to make money.
Summary: I Have A F***ing Grip. Perhaps my critics need to get a little more realistic about the forces that are making the decisions around here. Study some history. And learn to avoid using pronouns and swear words in the same sentence.
You guys see too many movies, you know the one's with the kind old scientist in a white coat played by Sam Jaffe who goes on and on about serving humanity through science and all that other nonsense.
Science today is totally corporatized and in service of the military/industrial complex. If we take this guy's claim at face value, that there is either something in his body or through a diet or herbal/vitamin supplement that enabled him to deplete the virus from his body, then why should he assume that he would benefit from enabling the global corporations access to this knowledge or genetics?
AIDS is big business in the west, and a way of getting rid of unneeded surplus people everywhere else. Protease inhibitors bring in tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year to the drug companies, and some guy comes along that can possibly destroy that income at the source? In all likelyhood, the drug companies would find the cure for themselves and their gay kids, then use the copyright laws to keep the research secret in order to protect their AIDS-maintanence profits. After they get this genetic knowledge from this one guy, they will kill him in order to prevent the genetic structure or technique from becoming known to the public. They'd simply say that he had HIV all the time and the second test results were only a false negative. Then they would apply for and get hundreds of millions of dollars in military grants to develop this 'cure' into a biological weapon.
Remember, you're dealing with American Corporations in the here and now. Assume the most paranoid and evil design and intent and you are going to be right most of the time. This is the real world. This guy is right not to trust corporate science.
Neither should you.
You all are misunderstanding the Republicans. The goal is not to discourage copying and file sharing. The goal is to find a new way to put millions of young people in prison. Private prisons are big business in the USA and the private prison companies like Correction Corporation of America and Wackenhut are big campaign contributors to Republicans. They get $30,000 per year from the government for every person that they hold in their private prisons. More prisoners means more profits for them, so they strongly encourage the criminalization of activities that are currently not considered by any civilized people to be incarceration crimes.
Rest assured that if this law permitting wholesale incarceration for copyright actually goes into effect that it won't be rich white boys going to jail for downloading music that is made by poor blacks yelling about how they are going to kill some other poor black guy for wearing the wrong color sneakers. Hell, this is America that we're talking about. The people who are going to jail for downloading files are black people who download copies of Dr. Martin Luther King's copyrighted speeches. Don't have any illusions about what this law is actually about.
Basically this a new form of American slave trading. Or maybe it's not so new, just the same old slave trading in a different form. Let's see, we got rich white people hiding behind 'corporate person-hood' status making $30000 a year for each person (mostly black in the USA) that is held in bondage for non-crimes like getting high instead of getting drunk. This is already responsible for over half of the people being held in slavery in American corporate prisons. Now they've come up with a new idea to put millions of more people into slavery for nothing.
Remember, this has nothing to do with copyright. Copyright is just an excuse this time to vastly increase the American slave trade. Copyright is the excuse this time just like drugs was the excuse last time. So what's it going to be next time?
I will direct you to expertly constructed MIDI compositions that YOU will not be able to tell if recorded by an orchestra or a synth.
Fine, please do direct us to some links of expert MIDI files. Post some links and URLs with your recommendations. I and the rest of us look forward to hearing these pieces.
The only real advantage of MIDI over audio files like MP3 or OGG is that the actual notes being played can be learned when viewing the MIDI file through a notation program. The best notation software that I've used is MIDIsoft Studio4 even though it's ten years old.
Notation software takes the MIDI file and displays it as sheet music. If you can read music (and anyone who can learn C can learn to read music) then you can learn how to play really complicated songs this way. Guitar Tab text files usually only give you simple and often wrong chord changes. Anything beyond G-Em-C-D (I-VIm-IV-V - the progression used in thousands of 1950s-1970s songs) is going to be hard to figure out for non-professionals just sitting down with a guitar and a recording. Almost all older songs have their most complicated chord structures and arpeggios mapped out into MIDI by musically-proficient fans. All the songs played on 'classic rock' FM stations can be learned this way. This is also a great way to learn big-band era stuff from the 1940s and even how older European classical music works. Mozart and Tchaikovsky (the Nutcracker Suite, etc...) can be learned even if you don't have access to the sheet music scores from a library or music store.
MIDI files played into synthesizers, even newer GM synths, don't sound very good even when they have been expertly constructed. It's a fact. There are too many nuances to the playing technique that don't get encoded into the MIDI file. The synths aren't really all that great either. Purely electronic ambient music works like Brian Eno and Steve Roach have a much better chance of being recreated from MIDI files fed into advanced synths. But the idea that a modern pop song can be recreated by MIDI should not be taken seriously. Synths can't reproduce standard instruments like electric guitars and saxophones realistically.
A number of sheet music publishers are trying to get all MIDI files removed from the web. This is short-sighted and cruel on their part. MIDI files encourage people to learn to read and play music far more better than anything that the music publishers could do to develop this market. With music classes being dropped extensively from American public schools, anything that teaches people to interact with printed music scores is a positive thing.
It just sucks that music classes are being dropped by stupid uncultured brain-dead public school administrators (is there any other type?). And to drop music classes for more algebra? Insane. Most people listen to music every single day; very few people ever use algebra after high school. The priorities of the public schools are completely wrong. It's a tragedy.
So where's the killer ap? In between the lines. Or rather in between the traces.
I got a copy of OrCAD Schematic Capture and Printed Circuit Board layout software from a job in 1990. Laying out a printed circuit board with 50 ICs waiting long periods of time (several minutes) after every ten minutes of work for the design to 'compile'. That was with a 20MegaHertz 80286 processor.
Now with a 2 GigaHertz system the designs compile in the amount of time that I can move from the Enter key back to the mouse. Same DOS-based software; 100 times the speed.
That's the killer ap for the 3 GigaHertz machines.
I've recently started using the web instead of the newspaper to compare the weekly food sales at the local supermarkets. After ten years, the supermarket chains have finally realized that many more young people are using the web instead the newspaper for shopping information.
The real threat to the big-box shopping outlets isn't from people googling for information of other big-box outlets, it's from people forming 'buying clubs' for their shopping from the ground up. It could be as simple as splitting a bulk buy from CostCo ("Anyone want to split a purchase of 100 rolls of toilet paper?") or as complex as setting up the purchase of the entire harvest of a farm located in a different state split between thirty families.
What the big-box outlets should realize is that they won't know that this high-information purchasing arrangements are happening. Their sales won't drop enough to trigger an alert, and no one entering alternate purchasing groups is going to be telling the big-box stores about their new arrangements. It would be a new market that starts and operates under their radar.
An example of this would be found now on eBay. Take for example used music instrument equipment for pop/rock bands. There's millions of instruments, amps, and sound modifiers that have been sold and not all that many rock bands making money from live music. But the music stores are completely oriented around selling new instruments at high prices to either bands squandering a record company advance or teenagers getting music equipment as a gift from their parents. So there is lots of stuff that is sitting in closets, lots of people who would be willing to buy the stuff, and no public developed markets to bring these parties together.
Enter eBay. Every day there's about 5000 stompboxes for sale at prices 1/10 to 1/2 of what the music stores are selling for the same item, along with thousands of instruments and amps. In my experience, the music stores have absolutely no clue that this alternative market has developed and is thriving. They are also not getting any of the money that is being exchanged: eBay and PayPal is getting the money.
Successful retailing is a combination of three things: a secure location for the merchandise to be stored and exchanged; information of the market-what people want to buy, what they will pay, what is being produced for sale, and what price it will be produced; and starting capital-money to get the business started and sustained. The web will significantly reduce to the customers the cost of information of the market, and eventually reduce the cost of the other items as well.
One by one the executives for the big-box outlets will become aware that grass-roots markets have developed outside their knowledge and control. What they do in response will depend on their intelligence and ethics. And we all know the level of intelligence and ethics of WalMart.
"That's one small step for a man one giant leap for mankind."
The fundamental irony in this statement is that it was not a small step for a man, it was a 250,000 mile step for the individual man. And the entire moon-landing program didn't really amount to much for the vast majority of people on earth. It wasn't a 'giant leap'.
This 'Armstrong Irony' is mentioned in the 1986 book Nature's End by Whitley Streiber and James Kuneka. A wonderful sci-fi book, highly recommended, and still probably available at your local library.
A Brilliant Mind An interesting movie. About a very smart man with a brain disorder that enabled (forced) him into creating a parallel reality that simply wasn't there. All his energy and brilliance went into coping with this imaginary world.
He was able to regain his senses and apply his intelligence to real-world problems. For this he was acclaimed and honored. But for the rest of his life, he was never sure whether the people that he met or even his interaction with daily routine was real or part of his unbalanced imagination.
Such an apt metaphor for the movie industry. $8 downloads per title is fantasy, and all the financial projections based on such a figure are fantasies. Maybe, just maybe, for some excellent movies, for some wealthy people, $1 per download might work.
Movies are simply too available now for there to be any vast difference in price between what is there and what is new. Blank DVD ROMs are about 25 cents each. This is the current 'swap meet-water cooler exchange' rock-bottom price for a movie. Anything above this price is the utility that is added by the MPAA companies. Store prices of last years theater releases are $15. That's the max upper price for a physical disk, box, packaging, and resellable legal license. Older movies go for $5 for the same deal, regardless of quality.
So what Sony is saying is that their new movies are so good, so special that they are worth far more than any of the titles of the 20th century. And this is so without the disk and packaging. And you have to pay for the downloading and storage costs.
Such incredible arrogance.
I give them about 10 years before they're gone. And that's because they are such an integrated hardware-software company and have a lot of built-up good will from the 20th century to squander on madness.
Someday, someone will point out to them that the era of 200 million dollar movies with $30 theater tickets-popcorn-baby sitter costs are over. Whether the fantasy infected minds of the top executives will be able to separate reality from fantasy will determine the fate of their company and the people who work for them.
The article gives a name. Ms. Kori Bernards, vice president of corporate communications for MPAA.
Let's take a time out for a brief lesson on how the world works. People have some money. People give a little of this money to lawyers. Lawyers give some of the money that they get to politicians. Politicians pass laws requiring you to give more of your money to the people who gave a little of their money to the lawyers. A positive feedback loop. It continues to grow until (1) people kill the politicians, or (2) people kill the lawyers. This is how the world works.
The MPAA (or any group with money to pay for politicians) will continue to extort your money from you until you either (1) kill the lawyers yourself, or (2) pay someone to do it for you.
When the entertainment lawyers collectively realize that they personally will suffer as a direct result of their applying their professional expertise to the topic of randomly selecting someone who watches a movie or listens to a music recording and demanding thousands of dollars, then this shit will stop. Until then, it will continue.
Be real, this is America in the 21st century. The corporations own the three branches of government, the military, the media, the police, and damn near everything else. NONE of these avenues is open any more for a systematic redress of grievances.
What else is left?
I can not and will not in good faith condone murder in either a public or private forum. What I can say is that, from a historical perspective, violence is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to either institute social change ( for better or worse ) or to seek redress from injustice.
There are alternatives to violence. Reread the works of Dr. Martin Luther King or Gandhi for powerful accounts of effective alternatives. Nonviolent tactics did work against far more dangerous and evil enemies than the entertainment industry. Perhaps the newer communications tools such as the web can be used to organize effective boycotts and other tools of social change.
Nevertheless, you asked for a name and you now have it.