Analysts say the fact the authorities are being more open about this launch may indicate that they are more confident of its success. "
It may indicate that and then again, it may not. Are you sure that you want to go out on a limb and actually commit yourself, your career, and your family's future to such a profoundly confrontational and opinionated statement?
Perhaps we should best call in another team of $200,000 a year analyists before we let something like this actually go out in public. Not just for the sake of ourselves and our own reputations, but for the sake of entire public perception of our institution.
the fact most of its citizens didn't know the US had been on the moon in 1967 untill the early 1990's...
The only American on the moon in 1967 was Jimi Hendrix. The astronauts didn't land there until July 1969.
Competely off topic except that it deals with US-China relations: Why is Hollywood so obsessed with 'pirate' DVDs of their movies in China? Do they really believe that a bunch of pig farmers and truck drivers in some distant inland provence are seriously interested in the latest Steve Martin - Diane Keaton comedy? Out of a billion plus people in China, there can't be more that a few hundred thousand who have anything more than a remote passing interest in Hollywood movies. Even if the translations were excellent.
What? there are no translations on Chinese 'pirate' copies of Hollywood DVDs? And the fMPAA (guess what that little f stands for) is obsessed that they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars in China. Please... give me a break.
not so many years ago in the telecine room film motion pictures were projected onto screens and recorded with a video camera to port movies to television.
The telecine machine projected the film image right onto the image sensor of the video camera. It used a very low rated light bulb. The focus was precisely set. The light of the image was not put onto a screen and reflected onto the video camera lens.
The big trick of the telecine machine was changing the frame rate of the mediums. The film was about 24 frames per second and the video was about 30 frames per second. I believe that the film was slowed a bit and a frame or two were dropped.
The music recording industry has painted itself into a corner by going digital. There was formerly a clear difference between an audio presentation (the sound that goes into people's ears) and the recording of that sound. Digitization of the entire industry has completely removed that difference. If a sound is heard, it has been digitized and stored.
The financial structure of the industry as developed in the 20th century depends on a high price paid by the listener to the music industry for each individual recording. This price is roughly one hour of minimum wage earnings per fifteen minutes of music recording. This price has been stable throughout the 20th century and has been inflation-proof. In return, the music industry provides a centralized repository of all the musical styles currently of popular interest, a filtering service of the junk and mediocrity, and exposure to the best of new music performances.
It was successful. There was pure capitalism among the various large and small record companies. There was a separation between the new music presenting services (radio and discos) and the record distribution networks. Talented people could gain exposure to many new styles from many different parts of the globe. They could create important new musical styles and have a marketplace and a financial structure to successfully present them.
Everything changed by going digital and by corporate consolidation. Three companies own and control a vast percentage of the radio stations of the USA. Four or five corporations control about 80-90% of the music industry in the world. Digitization of the music playback machines means that all music presentation comes from recordings. There is no longer any difference between exposed to new music and having a recording of that music. This plays havoc with the structure of companies that sell recordings and use the proceeds of the sales to finance the filtering, product distribution, and new music exposure services.
The companies want to return to the old business model, but only in the ways that are most profitable to them. They want their customers to continue to buy recordings at the old price, and also pay again for the new music exposure , junk filtering, and distribution services that used to be incorporated into the recording's price. As Slashdot readers know, they are meeting resistance from their customers.
With lots of money going to technology development of digital encryption of recordings and payoffs to politicians for custom-tailored laws protecting their interests, they will be successful in reconstructing their old business model in the short run. In the long run (ten years or more) they will cut off their supply of new musical influences. All the people who are shut out of consuming music industry product because they can't afford to buy it will develop new musical alternatives that they will deliberately hide from the music industry. The music industry won't be the center of musical culture and development in the way that it is now. The best musicians now all want record contracts and seek out the music company executives. That means that music industry employees have been the most knowledgeable about the best new music. That will end.
But no one will notice because music is basically a young person's industry and the number of young people in the world continues to grow rapidly each year. So the music industry will continue to grow. But the principle that the music industry is the source of the best music available will pass. There will develop many underground secret music societies.
The real question is whether the music industry will take the position that they 'own' the music created by these secret societies. Will they chose to hunt them down, imprison their musicians and steal their ideas, or simply ignore them as being non-commercially viable and therefore unworthy of investment.
the theatrical release of movies is (and has been, for fifty years) a money-losing proposition.
Two points, Home entertainment hasn't been around for fifty years. Except if you consider broadcast television in the definition. The ability to select and watch a movie in the home has only been around for twenty years. Since the introduction of inexpensive VHS players and rentals.
Two, most movies then and now do make their costs of production back through theatrical ticket sales. Check the numbers on BoxOfficeMojo.com.
I don't believe that much revenue actually comes from licensing of products associated with movies. The Star Wars films are the major exception. But most Hollywood films have very little licensed product offered.
When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back."
Someone who is 2/3rds your physical size comes into your store, makes a selection, and has a brief private conversation with a friend. You eavesdrop on the conversation, get upset, and physically threaten the customer after he gives you money for the purchase. Then tell him never to come back.
And you wonder why people have stopped coming into your store?
Why should you care what your customers i.e. the people who come into your store and give you money do with the stuff that they buy from you?
I too wonder if this post is actually a cut-and-paste job written by the RIAA for use as a block upload to any discussion on the web about file sharing. A pseudo-testimonial. The beginning seems real, but the ending text reads like a Karl-Rove-style political dirty trick.
I would include some condoms (about 8), a few packs of cigarettes (even if you don't smoke, they are fantastic for bartering with nicotine addicts, and an emergency contraception kit of a few birth-control pills, like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
If you can find one, a hand-crank flashlight with super-bright white LED bulbs and a hand-crank radio would be good too. An unusual item that might be useful would be a software program for the USB keychain that has a 10000-word English/Spanish dictionary/phrase book. A PDF file of wild edible plants (with photos and drawings) would be more useful than a cannibal cookbook.
Don't forget to scan all your family photos and all the photos from your parents collections of you and your siblings. Scan high resolution like 600 DPI.
Scan examples of the work that you have done. Source code, schematics, written documentation, blueprints, photos, letters of recommendation. Include these with the family photos and financial info. Don't forget medical records (remember also childhood immunizations and disease records, ask your parents if you don't have them) and hi-res scans of any X-Ray photos and dental records if you have them.
Buy or borrow a DVD recorder and copy all your photos, along with high resolution scans of birth certificates, tax returns, property deeds, financial records, etc. onto many copys of DVD ROM of all this data. Encrypt only the sensitive financial data. Make a copy of your and your family member's finger prints. Be sure to encrypt these before writing them to the disk. Make recordings of your voice. Record your spouse. Record your kids. Shrink these recordings into MP3 and OGG files (high quality 256KBPS) and include them on the disk. Not sure what to say? Dictate a will. Make a list of all your possessions. Include serial numbers, descriptions, digital photos, and estimated value. X sweaters, Y pairs of underwear, ect.
When you've done all this stuff listed above, make many copies of the CD/DVD-ROM. DVD-ROM blanks and CD ROM blanks are very cheap now (about 50 cents or less) and they can hold a great deal of information and photos. Send a copy each to your parents and spouse's parents.
Keep a copy of this disk in your car. If you get hit with a big disaster and have to get away quickly, you most likely will not remember to gather this stuff or you may have forgotten where your 'life disk' is located.
I'm not sure if this applies to you but sooner or later it applies to most people. If you are 'illegal', no proper immigration documentation, no passport, expired visa, fugitive from computerized bench arrest warrants regardless of how long ago it was issued, or if you are at risk of arrest because of lifestyle (you sell weed for a living) or are a political activist in a dictatorship, you might consider creating a complete new and separate identity for yourself. And keep the paperwork for this identity on a CD-ROM, encrypted of course. Put a few soft-core porn pictures (be sure to use ones that are not illegal) unencrypted on the CD in case you are forced to display the contents of the CD to the police (resulting from a search at a traffic stop or a random police stop-and-frisk on the street). You may want to have this info on a 512K Flash Disk (or a 3.5 inch mini CD) that you can carry with you at all times. If you are undocumented or a fugitive, you may find that you have to escape without being able to go back to your home to get your papers, contacts, or alternate identity papers. In this case, having a flash disk with a complete new identity on it is a big help in maintaining your freedom.
As a general rule, about 1/3 of the collected proceeds of a successful lawsuit go to the winning law firm. In this case, I assumed that about $5 million would be the expenses for the law firm, taxes, and the cost of setting up the distribution and recording network for all the people who contributed small 'investments'. It's a simple ballpark figure. A kind of lawsuit lottery.
Perhaps the best way to fight the RIAA is to use cases like this countersuit.
But let's get serious about this and make some money.
The law firm sets up an web bank account and links to PayPal or some other global small payment funds transfer provider. People who hate the RIAA put up a $1 to this firm's defense fund related to the case. If a million people send a $1 to destroy the RIAA, then there is a million dollars to fight the RIAA. Then the firm countersues for $10,000,000 in damages. If they win and collect, then each person who put in $1 to the defense fund gets $5 from the settlement minus expenses. If the countersuit loses, everyone loses a dollar. But the RIAA is now going up against an organized force that has millions of dollars and a serious desire to destroy them and take their money (and the money of their corporate sponsors). The RIAA will think twice about just randomly selecting people to fuck with.
In the real world, there is no justice and fairness. The only thing that works against a large corporation with a lot of money is an large organization of people who each contribute a small amount of money with the specific purpose of forcing the corporation to back off. (and pay them back for the trouble). Get used to it.
But let's not roll out the storm troopers IRL because it interferes with your 'online experience.'
A person reaches a certain age where they realize that when people do seriously evil to them then those people should be seriously punished. These assholes tried to steal my money and destory my credit rating. Fuck them. There are too many people in world who are not doing these things for me to get upset about what kind of horrible shit happens to people who are seriously trying to do bad things to me.
Reminds me of when I had my upteenth bicycle stolen and I vowed that if I ever caught someone stealing my bicycle (which I depended on at the time) then I would adopt the position that my property was more important to me that the lives of the people trying to take my property. Poor people have this perspective; middle-class people don't. A few years later I came out of a movie early and found some asshole stripping parts off my chained bicycle. There was no one around so I used the only weapon' that I had (a sharpened pencil) to convince him that I was crazy enough and pissed enough to poke it right through his dumb-ass T shirt into the center of his heart. And I would have too. Then this sleazy motherfucker calls the police on me and I get stopped while riding home on my bicycle. I explained everything to them exactly as it happened. Since it was in Silicon Valley California, the police just that it was too weird to do anything about whether a girl riding a bicycle after dark was seriously going to kill some loser with a pencil because he was taking $10 worth of parts off a worthless bicycle. When you're below a certain income level, you just don't exist in Silicon Valley.
Anyway, what middle-class Americans don't seem to realize is that you can take a lot of things from the rich before they realize that anything is missing, but you can't take but nothing from the poor before they will kill you in order to protect what little that they have. Middle-class people are always amazed that poor people (and rich people) will place property ahead of human life in importance. But in reality, with the world's population exploding, human life is pretty fucking disposable and cheap.
Kill a million here, ten million there, it doesn't mean shit. Get used to it.
thanks for the extended reply. Since rhetoric and logic are not taught in school any more it seems that these public focused forums are the only place to dissect the irrational arguments using the standardized but neglected tools of debate. I sound like a prig and a dweeb, but that's the price one pays for demanding clear rational thought.
Keep up the good work.
Spam is an annoying side effect of allowing open access to the web to the masses. You're going to get a lot of scumbags, er... people who don't share the same ethical standards as the original web designers. Spam is the pollution (unlimited access for commercial messages) of a general community resource (the web) for individual private gain (selling ad space in a medium that you don't own).
Phishing is a serious attempt to defraud individuals of large amounts of money by sending false e-mail communications that appear to be from official financial institutions. Phishing must be stopped because it will destroy the ability of people to use the web for commercial transactions (and defraud individuals of large amounts of money).
These criminals can be quite clever. For example, I received an e-mail that appeared to be a question from an eBay bidder about an item that I wasn't selling. The e-mail graphics looked exactly like eBay's question-from-bidders form. I clicked on reply to inform the writer that I was not offering this item at auction. The screen appeared for me to enter my eBay user name and password. It looked exactly like the standard eBay screen. I was about to when I realized that it was unlikely that eBay would misdirect a question like this. I went to eBay's site and did a search for the auction number from the phish email. It didn't exist. I forwarded the phish message to eBay's fraud department. I was pissed, because they almost got my account password.
People who do this should be thrown into an American rape torture prison for years. This shit is serious. Same with those Nigerian assholes. This shit isn't funny anymore and no one in the government will do anything about it. I believe that this Nigerian bank fraud transfer scam is something that the international web community should handle by themselves because the authorities won't touch it. The Americans get a large percentage of their oil from Nigeria so they just look the other way at all this endless fraud and theft inflicted on the American people by these clowns.
We, the web designers and internet system administrators, should shut off all internet communication to and from Nigeria until the bank transfer scam criminals are imprisoned and the defrauded funds returned. Remember, in the new information age, it is not the governments or violence technicians that control the power, it's the people who control the information. It's time to let the world understand this new reality. And shutting down the Nigerian bank fraud scammers by an ad-hoc group action is just the way to get that point across.
Is your experience and advice a cultural perspective that applies primarily to American companies? Do you know if people in similar positions have similar experiences in other cultures?
I'm amazed to read of the experiences of advanced technical people in Fortune 500 companies and how it parallels the experiences of technical people in the former Soviet Union. Especially some of the more extreme examples documented in The Gulag Archepello (no spell checker on this PC sorry).
It sometimes seems that after the Berlin Wall fell, the USA and USSR switched political administration systems. The American corporations all went Stalinist and the Soviet Appartchiks all went entrepenerial. If this is so then the corporations will start to become massively inefficient due massive distrust in the middle ranks and refusal to work in the trenches.
Anyway, thanks for posting the account of your experiences.
Microsoft said today that: "Anybody who doesn't buy Microsoft Office is more likely to commit arson or criminal damage"..
This is an example of the fallacy of Composition by which a characteristic of one small section of a group is assumed to apply to the entire group. By saying that of a million people who didn't buy MS Office two are arsonists therefore all the people who didn't buy Office are arsonists is, the proponent is making an obvious logical fallacy.
The RIAA argument could be reversed to say that because music company executives have a greater tendency to cheat artists out of royalities than the general public, then therefore record company executives are mostly criminals and have no moral basis to be in a position to judge music listeners as criminals in disagreements over music pricing issues.
When I was young, the US president Johnson told us that if the young men did not volunteer to 'serve' in Vietnam, then after the communists 'won', tens of thousands of Vietnamese would come here and take our jobs.
Well the young men refused to go to Vietnam, the communists 'won', and sure enough, tens of thousands of Vietnamese did come to the US and take our jobs.
I'll never doubt the government again.
yes, you are absolutely right. It is the possessive apostrophe that is missing in French. It's the possessive apostrophe that was banned. For example, Montreal's - Eaton's -Department store was forced to become Eaton.
This whole Quebec language police situation that outlaws the public use of any word not in French has always amazed me. Even more so because in the 1990s my formerly sleepy and insular suburb of Beaverton Oregon received many thousands of immigrants from all over the world. There's a chart in the unemployment office where you can point to the language that you speak out of selection of about thirty and they will get an interpreter on the telephone for you to help find a job. There are micro neighborhoods where most of the signs are in non-English languages, such as a Korean business block, a Mexican block, and a Vietnamese block. It's a game on the public transit to overhear random conversations and try to determine what language is being spoken. Beginners can just tell Spanish from Chinese. Good players can tell the various European languages apart. Advanced players can tell the various Asian languages apart. Masters can even differenciate between the various Chinese languages and sometimes even the SouthEast Asian languages, like being able to tell the difference between Hmong and Central Highland Vietnamese. That's way beyond my level. I can tell spoken Japanese from spoken Chinese and the written Korean from Japanese and Chinese.
Although I suspect that you're comment was meant to be ironic and the selection of the apostrophe was random, it really is true that there are Apostrophe police.
In Quebec, a quasi-independent section of eastern Canada, French language fundamentalists have prohibited the use of the apostrophe in any public sign or published document. According to them, the character doesn't exist in French language and therefore has no legal reason to exist in any publicly displayed word. Any use of the apostrophe is subjected to a fine of several hundred dollars.
No, seriously. I'm constantly amazed that these people once actually believed that they could run themselves as an independent country. And I like Quebec. Great people, great country. I guess that every culture has one or two points where stupidity just went recursive with no way out of the loop. As an American, I would know about this.
Anyway, I wonder if you could call an apostrophe a comma and get away with it. If they ask why it's placed so high in regards to the other letters, just look them straight in the eyes and say it's a Mexican Jumping Comma.
This press release is filled with double-talk and flat-out Orwellian nonsense. Like: Preventing people from backing up their data 'gives them more options'.
We get a bad feeling about all this because so much money and resources is going into developing a technology that no one who is actually buying the technology actually wants. The chip designer firm is working with the chip manufacturer who is negotiating with the global entertainment corporation who is linking with the agent who interfaces with the artist who toots up with the liaison of the technology company.
So who's missing here? How about the people who are actually putting out the money to actually pay for this stuff. One person buys an entertainment product and a little while later discovers that they can't do the simple and obvious things that they had come to expect that they could do with it; like backing it up or moving it to another medium like the car stereo. Suddenly the perceived value of this entertainment item drops to half or less of its previous value. So the consumer is only willing to pay $8 for the same CD that they were willing to previously buy at $16 when the CD or CD player has copy prevention technology built into it.
Now the entertainment corporation is raising the price to pay for the development of this new technology and also raising the price because the competition (from easy copies) is now restrained. So the perceived value (and price) is going down at the same time that the price for the entertainment product is shooting up. How exactly is this supposed to be good for the entertainment company or the artist? It must be that they fundamentally assume that because they are so cool and beautiful that the vast dork masses will buy the product regardless of how much it costs or difficult it is to use. This is what happens when entertainment people start talking business with computer people. The greed goes recursive and you end up with the worst mentalities of both industries in one package.
In the long run (10 years plus) this mentality will only act to reduce the importance and viability of the entertainment corporations. The board of directors will look to spin off the entertainment divisions in the way that everyone is now trying to dump their record companies. Maybe DRM is nothing more than a long term plan on the part of the technology companies to seriously depress the value of the entertainment companies so that ten years from now (when all the ultra-fast download-entertainment-directly-to-the-home technology is in place) they will be able to buy the entertainment companies for a tiny fraction of what they are worth now. Or maybe it's just the fantasy of immature greedheaded yuppies with too much access to other people's money.
Allow me to submit a realistic working definition of pornography, since no one else seems to be able to:
Pornography is a type of art that changes its level of aesthetic appeal according to the level of sexual arousal of the viewer.
It's not correct to say that porn is any work of art that deals primarily in sexuality, has unclothed persons, displays aroused genitalia, or induces a sexual response in the viewer. These are the standard porn definitions, but they all have undesired effect of causing the ban on serious and important works of art.
All porn has appeal to primarily males when they are sexually aroused. After sexual release, a work of porn (by my submitted definition) will seem trite, vulgar, and embarrassing. It will lose its aesthetic value as the viewer loses sexual arousal. A work that is considered as beautiful, valuable, and appealing after the ejaculation as it was during sexual arousal can not be considered porn. Almost all porn is consumed by males.
I am not advocating banning porn, regardless of the definition. The United States Bill of Rights prevents banning pornography, because when it has been created by consenting adults, it lies in the category of protected free speech. I am merely submitting a realistic and workable definition of pornography that will prevent laws against porn from being used to destroy serious art works that deal with sexuality.
'Intellectual Property' is nothing more than a big American fantasy invented to compensate for the fact that they don't make anything anymore except ultra-high-tech death machines and recycled entertainment products.
And frankly, killing can be done, when needed, with the tried-and-true low-tech methods and the recycled entertainment product can all be easily copied by anyone with a $100 PC.
IP is what you use to try and convince people that you are still relevant in the world when you don't make anything anymore, your people are buffoons living on borrowed money from everyone, and you still have enough hydrogen bombs to make it awkward for anyone to point out the obvious fact that you are nowhere near as important as you were fifty years ago.
So all this effort to metamorphize a concept like 'intellectual property' into the legal equivalent of actual physical items that have intrinsic value is bound to fail internationally. In more ways than one, people just aren't going to buy it. They'll give you lots of lip service, sign your treaties, stay in expensive hotels for endless international conferences (as long as you pick up the tab), and then, just ignore whatever it was that you were getting so upset about.
The Americans thought they were so smart by trashing their industrial base, shipping all of their manufacturing jobs overseas, and laying off (or never hiring in the first place) all the people that comprised the only real asset that they ever had...smart people willing to come to termperate North America from all over the world in order to get away from the assholes that were making it impossible to make a good life in the old country. Now the Americans have fucked up their physical country, their economy, their good name, and their middle class.
So what's left? Intellectual Property! And just what exactly is that? One more illiterate, psychopathic 'rapper'? One more $100,000,000 buddy-cop movie?
I believe that the African-American dialect has developed into a different type of language that is primarily based on English. This unnamed language type is differenciated from standard English by its rate of change.
Africans in the early New World were in a difficult situation. All were slaves and most came from small tribes and villages that spoke their own local language. Most Africans in the New World could not understand the native speech of most other Africans. English had to become a common language.
However it was also necessary to develop a form of this common language that was not understood by the slave owners. I believe that the Africans used the vocal inflections of the native African languages using English words to communicate among themselves meanings that would not be understood by the slave owners. Even when the slave owners used exactly the same words. I believe that the key to this higher level of communication was a constant change in the meaning of the words spoken. As soon as the slave owners figured out what the slaves meant a whole new set of code words and vocal inflections would have spread through the community.
After 500 years the Africans became the African-American people and their language is still used in the same manner. Eubonics differs from other language types by its unusually rapid and constant rate of change. It's this ability to use and understand the pace of change in the language that African-American parents pass to their childern, not the vocabulary itself. The vocabulary and grammar stucture (for the most part) is identical to standard English.
The characteristic of having the Whites think that the Blacks 'talk funny' is one more general quality of this language. Adopting a word style that made the slaves appear 'funny' to the Whites was a necessary trait at a time when the people had no defence at all, legal or social, against arbitrary brutality and murder. It is now one of the first characteristics of Eubonics to be dropped as the African-American community develops parity with the world middle-class. The passage and general acceptance of civil-rights laws negates the need for 'Amos & Andy' dialog styles.
One disadvantage of the rapid rate of change of Eubonics is that is a group seperates from community, they lose the ability to communicate with the community after several generations. For example the 'gullah' dialect spoken by the African-Americans in the Carolinas coast who have lived in near isolation for generations is difficult to understand by others in the community and nearly incomprehensible to the whites. The Eubonics of New Orleans and Texas can be difficult to understand in the communities of the northern cities. This is offset by the constant circulation of music recordings throughout the entire range of the community.
Eubonics is not like the Chinese languages, where entire meanings of common phonemic clusters change according to the frequency tone accorded to the word. The meanings of the words is not solid but is a range of shades that is constantly changing. This makes Eubonics a different language type from word-ordered or declined languages.
There might develop a movement to make the language fit the technology. If it doesn't, then the message will be ignored.
An example of this is the simple code-like messages sent by young people over cell phones and instant messaging mediums. People will taylor their messages to a language dialect that is appropriate to the medium.
About ten years ago I got a contract 'temp' position at HP (Vancouver, WA, USA) to disassemble printers. My job was to open brand-new printers in packages and take them apart down to the metal chassis. The chassis was used to make prototypes for new models.
There was no chance of my being hired, but I had to go to three interviews and take a drug test. And the 'job' was at the factory where the printers were assembled from the metal chassis in the first place. But there was no way that they could get the metal chassis from the assembly line before it was assembled, so the printers had to be completely disassembled after being completely assembled and packaged for sale.
I'm assigned to a storage room with a million dollars worth of printers and truck loading port. I'm getting $9 an hour and was given the key to the warehouse with a lot of resellable product. But I passed the marijuana piss test, so according to H-P I'm 100% reliable and trustworthy.
There's another temp working there also, way in the back. He'd been a temp for three years already as noone ever gets hired at H-P. No one who actually works there, at least. I saw the 'boss' once for 10 minutes on the first day. He welcomed me to the 'team', gave me the key to warehouse, pointed to the stack of brand-new printers to be torn apart, and showed me where the dumpster was. All of the brand-new parts except the metal chassis were to be just tossed into the garbage.
Two months later, the day before Christmas, I get fired for:
(1) 'stealing the brand-new floppy disks.' I took them home and reused them instead of throwing them away.
(2) 'allowing the disemination of confidential H-P information.' This referred to the text files of the printer manual found on the floppy disks. The files that went with every printer sold. Any floppy in an H-P dumpster was assumed by H-P to be holding confidential information. Then why is in the dumpster, guys?
(3) 'contributing to the creation of an environment conductive to sexual harassment.' I was lonely spending all day all alone in the warehouse tearing apart printers. I put a GIF file of Claudia Schiffer (a head shot of Ms. Schiffer in a evening dress, no porn) on the PC as Windows wallpaper. It was ten years ago and at that time having photos acting as Windows wallpaper was considered very unusual and special.
Now I'm sure your corporate lawyer would give you what passes for good reasons as to why I had to be fired. But in the real world, it was all bullshit. I've never trusted H-P since then. I've never again believed any press release or 'independent' article in the press about how advanced of a company that they are.
And I was certainly not surprised when Hurricane Carly came through and wiped out the place and then left with many millions of dollars in go-away money. Hewlett-Packard was FUBAR long before Carly.
Slashdot Mirror
Analysts say the fact the authorities are being more open about this launch may indicate that they are more confident of its success. "
It may indicate that and then again, it may not. Are you sure that you want to go out on a limb and actually commit yourself, your career, and your family's future to such a profoundly confrontational and opinionated statement?
Perhaps we should best call in another team of $200,000 a year analyists before we let something like this actually go out in public. Not just for the sake of ourselves and our own reputations, but for the sake of entire public perception of our institution.
the fact most of its citizens didn't know the US had been on the moon in 1967 untill the early 1990's ...
The only American on the moon in 1967 was Jimi Hendrix. The astronauts didn't land there until July 1969.
Competely off topic except that it deals with US-China relations: Why is Hollywood so obsessed with 'pirate' DVDs of their movies in China? Do they really believe that a bunch of pig farmers and truck drivers in some distant inland provence are seriously interested in the latest Steve Martin - Diane Keaton comedy? Out of a billion plus people in China, there can't be more that a few hundred thousand who have anything more than a remote passing interest in Hollywood movies. Even if the translations were excellent.
What? there are no translations on Chinese 'pirate' copies of Hollywood DVDs? And the fMPAA (guess what that little f stands for) is obsessed that they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars in China. Please... give me a break.
not so many years ago in the telecine room film motion pictures were projected onto screens and recorded with a video camera to port movies to television.
The telecine machine projected the film image right onto the image sensor of the video camera. It used a very low rated light bulb. The focus was precisely set. The light of the image was not put onto a screen and reflected onto the video camera lens.
The big trick of the telecine machine was changing the frame rate of the mediums. The film was about 24 frames per second and the video was about 30 frames per second. I believe that the film was slowed a bit and a frame or two were dropped.
The music recording industry has painted itself into a corner by going digital. There was formerly a clear difference between an audio presentation (the sound that goes into people's ears) and the recording of that sound. Digitization of the entire industry has completely removed that difference. If a sound is heard, it has been digitized and stored.
The financial structure of the industry as developed in the 20th century depends on a high price paid by the listener to the music industry for each individual recording. This price is roughly one hour of minimum wage earnings
per fifteen minutes of music recording. This price has been stable throughout the 20th century and has been inflation-proof.
In return, the music industry provides a centralized repository of all the musical styles currently of popular interest, a filtering service of the junk and mediocrity, and exposure to the best of new music performances.
It was successful. There was pure capitalism among the various large and small record companies. There was a separation between the new music presenting services (radio and discos) and the record distribution networks.
Talented people could gain exposure to many new styles from many different parts of the globe. They could create important new musical styles and have a marketplace and a financial structure to successfully present them.
Everything changed by going digital and by corporate consolidation. Three companies own and control a vast percentage of the radio stations of the USA. Four or five corporations control about 80-90% of the music industry in the world. Digitization of the music playback machines means that all music presentation comes from recordings. There is no longer any difference between exposed to new music and having a recording of that music. This plays
havoc with the structure of companies that sell recordings and use the proceeds of the sales to finance the filtering, product distribution, and new music exposure services.
The companies want to return to the old business model, but only in the ways that are most profitable to them. They want their customers to continue to buy recordings at the old price, and also pay again for the new music exposure
, junk filtering, and distribution services that used to be incorporated into the recording's price. As Slashdot readers know, they are meeting resistance from their customers.
With lots of money going to technology development of digital encryption of recordings and payoffs to politicians for custom-tailored laws protecting their interests, they will be successful in reconstructing their old business model in the short run. In the long run (ten years or more) they will cut off their supply of new musical influences. All the people who are shut out of consuming music industry product because they can't afford to buy it will develop new musical alternatives that they will deliberately hide from the music industry. The music industry won't be the center of musical culture and development in the way that it is now. The best musicians now all want record contracts and seek out the music company executives. That means that music industry employees have been the most knowledgeable about the best new music. That will end.
But no one will notice because music is basically a young person's industry and the number of young people in the world continues to grow rapidly each year. So the music industry will continue to grow. But the principle that the music industry is the source of the best music available will pass. There will develop many underground secret music societies.
The real question is whether the music industry will take the position that they 'own' the music created by these secret societies. Will they chose to hunt them down, imprison their musicians and steal their ideas, or simply ignore them as being non-commercially viable and therefore unworthy of investment.
the theatrical release of movies is (and has been, for fifty years) a money-losing proposition.
Two points, Home entertainment hasn't been around for fifty years. Except if you consider broadcast television in the definition. The ability to select and watch a movie in the home has only been around for twenty years. Since the introduction of inexpensive VHS players and rentals.
Two, most movies then and now do make their costs of production back through theatrical ticket sales. Check the numbers on BoxOfficeMojo.com.
I don't believe that much revenue actually comes from licensing of products associated with movies. The Star Wars films are the major exception. But most Hollywood films have very little licensed product offered.
When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back."
Someone who is 2/3rds your physical size comes into your store, makes a selection, and has a brief private conversation with a friend. You eavesdrop on the conversation, get upset, and physically threaten the customer after he gives you money for the purchase. Then tell him never to come back.
And you wonder why people have stopped coming into your store?
Why should you care what your customers i.e. the people who come into your store and give you money do with the stuff that they buy from you?
I too wonder if this post is actually a cut-and-paste job written by the RIAA for use as a block upload to any discussion on the web about file sharing. A pseudo-testimonial. The beginning seems real, but the ending text reads like a Karl-Rove-style political dirty trick.
I would include some condoms (about 8), a few packs of cigarettes (even if you don't smoke, they are fantastic for bartering with nicotine addicts, and an emergency contraception kit of a few birth-control pills, like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
If you can find one, a hand-crank flashlight with super-bright white LED bulbs and a hand-crank radio would be good too. An unusual item that might be useful would be a software program for the USB keychain that has a 10000-word English/Spanish dictionary/phrase book. A PDF file of wild edible plants (with photos and drawings) would be more useful than a cannibal cookbook.
Don't forget to scan all your family photos and all the photos from your parents collections of you and your siblings. Scan high resolution like 600 DPI.
Scan examples of the work that you have done. Source code, schematics, written documentation, blueprints, photos, letters of recommendation. Include these with the family photos and financial info. Don't forget medical records (remember also childhood immunizations and disease records, ask your parents if you don't have them) and hi-res scans of any X-Ray photos and dental records if you have them.
Buy or borrow a DVD recorder and copy all your photos, along with high resolution scans of birth certificates, tax returns, property deeds, financial records, etc. onto many copys of DVD ROM of all this data. Encrypt only the sensitive financial data. Make a copy of your and your family member's finger prints. Be sure to encrypt these before writing them to the disk. Make recordings of your voice. Record your spouse. Record your kids. Shrink these recordings into MP3 and OGG files (high quality 256KBPS) and include them on the disk. Not sure what to say? Dictate a will. Make a list of all your possessions. Include serial numbers, descriptions, digital photos, and estimated value. X sweaters, Y pairs of underwear, ect.
When you've done all this stuff listed above, make many copies of the CD/DVD-ROM. DVD-ROM blanks and CD ROM blanks are very cheap now (about 50 cents or less) and they can hold a great deal of information and photos. Send a copy each to your parents and spouse's parents.
Keep a copy of this disk in your car. If you get hit with a big disaster and have to get away quickly, you most likely will not remember to gather this stuff or you may have forgotten where your 'life disk' is located.
I'm not sure if this applies to you but sooner or later it applies to most people. If you are 'illegal', no proper immigration documentation, no passport, expired visa, fugitive from computerized bench arrest warrants regardless of how long ago it was issued, or if you are at risk of arrest because of lifestyle (you sell weed for a living) or are a political activist in a dictatorship, you might consider creating a complete new and separate identity for yourself. And keep the paperwork for this identity on a CD-ROM, encrypted of course. Put a few soft-core porn pictures (be sure to use ones that are not illegal) unencrypted on the CD in case you are forced to display the contents of the CD to the police (resulting from a search at a traffic stop or a random police stop-and-frisk on the street). You may want to have this info on a 512K Flash Disk (or a 3.5 inch mini CD) that you can carry with you at all times. If you are undocumented or a fugitive, you may find that you have to escape without being able to go back to your home to get your papers, contacts, or alternate identity papers. In this case, having a flash disk with a complete new identity on it is a big help in maintaining your freedom.
Shalom
As a general rule, about 1/3 of the collected proceeds of a successful lawsuit go to the winning law firm. In this case, I assumed that about $5 million would be the expenses for the law firm, taxes, and the cost of setting up the distribution and recording network for all the people who contributed small 'investments'. It's a simple ballpark figure. A kind of lawsuit lottery.
Perhaps the best way to fight the RIAA is to use cases like this countersuit.
But let's get serious about this and make some money.
The law firm sets up an web bank account and links to PayPal or some other global small payment funds transfer provider. People who hate the RIAA put up a $1 to this firm's defense fund related to the case. If a million people send a $1 to destroy the RIAA, then there is a million dollars to fight the RIAA. Then the firm countersues for $10,000,000 in damages. If they win and collect, then each person who put in $1 to the defense fund gets $5 from the settlement minus expenses. If the countersuit loses, everyone loses a dollar. But the RIAA is now going up against an organized force that has millions of dollars and a serious desire to destroy them and take their money (and the money of their corporate sponsors). The RIAA will think twice about just randomly selecting people to fuck with.
In the real world, there is no justice and fairness. The only thing that works against a large corporation with a lot of money is an large organization of people who each contribute a small amount of money with the specific purpose of forcing the corporation to back off. (and pay them back for the trouble). Get used to it.
But let's not roll out the storm troopers IRL because it interferes with your 'online experience.'
A person reaches a certain age where they realize that when people do seriously evil to them then those people should be seriously punished. These assholes tried to steal my money and destory my credit rating. Fuck them. There are too many people in world who are not doing these things for me to get upset about what kind of horrible shit happens to people who are seriously trying to do bad things to me.
Reminds me of when I had my upteenth bicycle stolen and I vowed that if I ever caught someone stealing my bicycle (which I depended on at the time) then I would adopt the position that my property was more important to me that the lives of the people trying to take my property. Poor people have this perspective; middle-class people don't. A few years later I came out of a movie early and found some asshole stripping parts off my chained bicycle. There was no one around so I used the only weapon' that I had (a sharpened pencil) to convince him that I was crazy enough and pissed enough to poke it right through his dumb-ass T shirt into the center of his heart. And I would have too. Then this sleazy motherfucker calls the police on me and I get stopped while riding home on my bicycle. I explained everything to them exactly as it happened. Since it was in Silicon Valley California, the police just that it was too weird to do anything about whether a girl riding a bicycle after dark was seriously going to kill some loser with a pencil because he was taking $10 worth of parts off a worthless bicycle. When you're below a certain income level, you just don't exist in Silicon Valley.
Anyway, what middle-class Americans don't seem to realize is that you can take a lot of things from the rich before they realize that anything is missing, but you can't take but nothing from the poor before they will kill you in order to protect what little that they have. Middle-class people are always amazed that poor people (and rich people) will place property ahead of human life in importance. But in reality, with the world's population exploding, human life is pretty fucking disposable and cheap.
Kill a million here, ten million there, it doesn't mean shit. Get used to it.
thanks for the extended reply. Since rhetoric and logic are not taught in school any more it seems that these public focused forums are the only place to dissect the irrational arguments using the standardized but neglected tools of debate. I sound like a prig and a dweeb, but that's the price one pays for demanding clear rational thought.
Keep up the good work.
Spam is an annoying side effect of allowing open access to the web to the masses. You're going to get a lot of scumbags, er... people who don't share the same ethical standards as the original web designers. Spam is the pollution (unlimited access for commercial messages) of a general community resource (the web) for individual private gain (selling ad space in a medium that you don't own).
Phishing is a serious attempt to defraud individuals of large amounts of money by sending false e-mail communications that appear to be from official financial institutions. Phishing must be stopped because it will destroy the ability of people to use the web for commercial transactions (and defraud individuals of large amounts of money).
These criminals can be quite clever. For example, I received an e-mail that appeared to be a question from an eBay bidder about an item that I wasn't selling. The e-mail graphics looked exactly like eBay's question-from-bidders form. I clicked on reply to inform the writer that I was not offering this item at auction. The screen appeared for me to enter my eBay user name and password. It looked exactly like the standard eBay screen. I was about to when I realized that it was unlikely that eBay would misdirect a question like this. I went to eBay's site and did a search for the auction number from the phish email. It didn't exist. I forwarded the phish message to eBay's fraud department. I was pissed, because they almost got my account password.
People who do this should be thrown into an American rape torture prison for years. This shit is serious. Same with those Nigerian assholes. This shit isn't funny anymore and no one in the government will do anything about it. I believe that this Nigerian bank fraud transfer scam is something that the international web community should handle by themselves because the authorities won't touch it. The Americans get a large percentage of their oil from Nigeria so they just look the other way at all this endless fraud and theft inflicted on the American people by these clowns.
We, the web designers and internet system administrators, should shut off all internet communication to and from Nigeria until the bank transfer scam criminals are imprisoned and the defrauded funds returned. Remember, in the new information age, it is not the governments or violence technicians that control the power, it's the people who control the information. It's time to let the world understand this new reality. And shutting down the Nigerian bank fraud scammers by an ad-hoc group action is just the way to get that point across.
Is your experience and advice a cultural perspective that applies primarily to American companies? Do you know if people in similar positions have similar experiences in other cultures?
I'm amazed to read of the experiences of advanced technical people in Fortune 500 companies and how it parallels the experiences of technical people in the former Soviet Union. Especially some of the more extreme examples documented in The Gulag Archepello (no spell checker on this PC sorry).
It sometimes seems that after the Berlin Wall fell, the USA and USSR switched political administration systems. The American corporations all went Stalinist and the Soviet Appartchiks all went entrepenerial. If this is so then the corporations will start to become massively inefficient due massive distrust in the middle ranks and refusal to work in the trenches.
Anyway, thanks for posting the account of your experiences.
Microsoft said today that: "Anybody who doesn't buy Microsoft Office is more likely to commit arson or criminal damage"..
This is an example of the fallacy of Composition by which a characteristic of one small section of a group is assumed to apply to the entire group. By saying that of a million people who didn't buy MS Office two are arsonists therefore all the people who didn't buy Office are arsonists is, the proponent is making an obvious logical fallacy.
The RIAA argument could be reversed to say that because music company executives have a greater tendency to cheat artists out of royalities than the general public, then therefore record company executives are mostly criminals and have no moral basis to be in a position to judge music listeners as criminals in disagreements over music pricing issues.
When I was young, the US president Johnson told us that if the young men did not volunteer to 'serve' in Vietnam, then after the communists 'won', tens of thousands of Vietnamese would come here and take our jobs.
Well the young men refused to go to Vietnam, the communists 'won', and sure enough, tens of thousands of Vietnamese did come to the US and take our jobs.
I'll never doubt the government again.
Jeez, I gotta get me some of these for my dick...
yes, you are absolutely right. It is the possessive apostrophe that is missing in French. It's the possessive apostrophe that was banned. For example, Montreal's - Eaton's -Department store was forced to become Eaton.
This whole Quebec language police situation that outlaws the public use of any word not in French has always amazed me. Even more so because in the 1990s my formerly sleepy and insular suburb of Beaverton Oregon received many thousands of immigrants from all over the world. There's a chart in the unemployment office where you can point to the language that you speak out of selection of about thirty and they will get an interpreter on the telephone for you to help find a job. There are micro neighborhoods where most of the signs are in non-English languages, such as a Korean business block, a Mexican block, and a Vietnamese block.
It's a game on the public transit to overhear random conversations and try to determine what language is being spoken. Beginners can just tell Spanish from Chinese. Good players can tell the various European languages apart. Advanced players can tell the various Asian languages apart. Masters can even differenciate between the various Chinese languages and sometimes even the SouthEast Asian languages, like being able to tell the difference between Hmong and Central Highland Vietnamese. That's way beyond my level. I can tell spoken Japanese from spoken Chinese and the written Korean from Japanese and Chinese.
Although I suspect that you're comment was meant to be ironic and the selection of the apostrophe was random, it really is true that there are Apostrophe police.
In Quebec, a quasi-independent section of eastern Canada, French language fundamentalists have prohibited the use of the apostrophe in any public sign or published document. According to them, the character doesn't exist in French language and therefore has no legal reason to exist in any publicly displayed word. Any use of the apostrophe is subjected to a fine of several hundred dollars.
No, seriously. I'm constantly amazed that these people once actually believed that they could run themselves as an independent country. And I like Quebec. Great people, great country. I guess that every culture has one or two points where stupidity just went recursive with no way out of the loop. As an American, I would know about this.
Anyway, I wonder if you could call an apostrophe a comma and get away with it. If they ask why it's placed so high in regards to the other letters, just look them straight in the eyes and say it's a Mexican Jumping Comma.
This press release is filled with double-talk and flat-out Orwellian nonsense. Like: Preventing people from backing up their data 'gives them more options'.
We get a bad feeling about all this because so much money and resources is going into developing a technology that no one who is actually buying the technology actually wants. The chip designer firm is working with the chip manufacturer who is negotiating with the global entertainment corporation who is linking with the agent who interfaces with the artist who toots up with the liaison of the technology company.
So who's missing here? How about the people who are actually putting out the money to actually pay for this stuff. One person buys an entertainment product and a little while later discovers that they can't do the simple and obvious things that they had come to expect that they could do with it; like backing it up or moving it to another medium like the car stereo. Suddenly the perceived value of this entertainment item drops to half or less of its previous value. So the consumer is only willing to pay $8 for the same CD that they were willing to previously buy at $16 when the CD or CD player has copy prevention technology built into it.
Now the entertainment corporation is raising the price to pay for the development of this new technology and also raising the price because the competition (from easy copies) is now restrained. So the perceived value (and price) is going down at the same time that the price for the entertainment product is shooting up. How exactly is this supposed to be good for the entertainment company or the artist? It must be that they fundamentally assume that because they are so cool and beautiful that the vast dork masses will buy the product regardless of how much it costs or difficult it is to use. This is what happens when entertainment people start talking business with computer people. The greed goes recursive and you end up with the worst mentalities of both industries in one package.
In the long run (10 years plus) this mentality will only act to reduce the importance and viability of the entertainment corporations. The board of directors will look to spin off the entertainment divisions in the way that everyone is now trying to dump their record companies. Maybe DRM is nothing more than a long term plan on the part of the technology companies to seriously depress the value of the entertainment companies so that ten years from now (when all the ultra-fast download-entertainment-directly-to-the-home technology is in place) they will be able to buy the entertainment companies for a tiny fraction of what they are worth now. Or maybe it's just the fantasy of immature greedheaded yuppies with too much access to other people's money.
Allow me to submit a realistic working definition of pornography, since no one else seems to be able to:
Pornography is a type of art that changes its level of aesthetic appeal according to the level of sexual arousal of the viewer.
It's not correct to say that porn is any work of art that deals primarily in sexuality, has unclothed persons, displays aroused genitalia, or induces a sexual response in the viewer. These are the standard porn definitions, but they all have undesired effect of causing the ban on serious and important works of art.
All porn has appeal to primarily males when they are sexually aroused. After sexual release, a work of porn (by my submitted definition) will seem trite, vulgar, and embarrassing. It will lose its aesthetic value as the viewer loses sexual arousal. A work that is considered as beautiful, valuable, and appealing after the ejaculation as it was during sexual arousal can not be considered porn. Almost all porn is consumed by males.
I am not advocating banning porn, regardless of the definition. The United States Bill of Rights prevents banning pornography, because when it has been created by consenting adults, it lies in the category of protected free speech.
I am merely submitting a realistic and workable definition of pornography that will prevent laws against porn from being used to destroy serious art works that deal with sexuality.
'Intellectual Property' is nothing more than a big American fantasy invented to compensate for the fact that they don't make anything anymore except ultra-high-tech death machines and recycled entertainment products.
And frankly, killing can be done, when needed, with the tried-and-true low-tech methods and the recycled entertainment product can all be easily copied by anyone with a $100 PC.
IP is what you use to try and convince people that you are still relevant in the world when you don't make anything anymore, your people are buffoons living on borrowed money from everyone, and you still have enough hydrogen bombs to make it awkward for anyone to point out the obvious fact that you are nowhere near as important as you were fifty years ago.
So all this effort to metamorphize a concept like 'intellectual property' into the legal equivalent of actual physical items that have intrinsic value is bound to fail internationally. In more ways than one, people just aren't going to buy it. They'll give you lots of lip service, sign your treaties, stay in expensive hotels for endless international conferences (as long as you pick up the tab), and then, just ignore whatever it was that you were getting so upset about.
The Americans thought they were so smart by trashing their industrial base, shipping all of their manufacturing jobs overseas, and laying off (or never hiring in the first place) all the people that comprised the only real asset that they ever had...smart people willing to come to termperate North America from all over the world in order to get away from the assholes that were making it impossible to make a good life in the old country. Now the Americans have fucked up their physical country, their economy, their good name, and their middle class.
So what's left? Intellectual Property! And just what exactly is that? One more illiterate, psychopathic 'rapper'? One more $100,000,000 buddy-cop movie?
Grow up, fools!
I believe that the African-American dialect has developed into a different type of language that is primarily based on English. This unnamed language type is differenciated from standard English by its rate of change.
Africans in the early New World were in a difficult situation. All were slaves and most came from small tribes and villages that spoke their own local language. Most Africans in the New World could not understand the native speech of most other Africans. English had to become a common language.
However it was also necessary to develop a form of this common language that was not understood by the slave owners. I believe that the Africans used the vocal inflections of the native African languages using English words to communicate among themselves meanings that would not be understood by the slave owners. Even when the slave owners used exactly the same words. I believe that the key to this higher level of communication was a constant change in the meaning of the words spoken. As soon as the slave owners figured out what the slaves meant a whole new set of code words and vocal inflections would have spread through the community.
After 500 years the Africans became the African-American people and their language is still used in the same manner. Eubonics differs from other language types by its unusually rapid and constant rate of change. It's this ability to use and understand the pace of change in the language that African-American parents pass to their childern, not the vocabulary itself. The vocabulary and grammar stucture (for the most part) is identical to standard English.
The characteristic of having the Whites think that the Blacks 'talk funny' is one more general quality of this language. Adopting a word style that made the slaves appear 'funny' to the Whites was a necessary trait at a time when the people had no defence at all, legal or social, against arbitrary brutality and murder. It is now one of the first characteristics of Eubonics to be dropped as the African-American community develops parity with the world middle-class. The passage and general acceptance of civil-rights laws negates the need for 'Amos & Andy' dialog styles.
One disadvantage of the rapid rate of change of Eubonics is that is a group seperates from community, they lose the ability to communicate with the community after several generations. For example the 'gullah' dialect spoken by the African-Americans in the Carolinas coast who have lived in near isolation for generations is difficult to understand by others in the community and nearly incomprehensible to the whites. The Eubonics of New Orleans and Texas can be difficult to understand in the communities of the northern cities. This is offset by the constant circulation of music recordings throughout the entire range of the community.
Eubonics is not like the Chinese languages, where entire meanings of common phonemic clusters change according to the frequency tone accorded to the word. The meanings of the words is not solid but is a range of shades that is constantly changing. This makes Eubonics a different language type from word-ordered or declined languages.
There might develop a movement to make the language fit the technology. If it doesn't, then the message will be ignored.
An example of this is the simple code-like messages sent by young people over cell phones and instant messaging mediums. People will taylor their messages to a language dialect that is appropriate to the medium.
About ten years ago I got a contract 'temp' position at HP (Vancouver, WA, USA) to disassemble printers. My job was to open brand-new printers in packages and take them apart down to the metal chassis. The chassis was used to make prototypes for new models.
There was no chance of my being hired, but I had to go to three interviews and take a drug test. And the 'job' was at the factory where the printers were assembled from the metal chassis in the first place. But there was no way that they could get the metal chassis from the assembly line before it was assembled, so the printers had to be completely disassembled after being completely assembled and packaged for sale.
I'm assigned to a storage room with a million dollars worth of printers and truck loading port. I'm getting $9 an hour and was given the key to the warehouse with a lot of resellable product. But I passed the marijuana piss test, so according to H-P I'm 100% reliable and trustworthy.
There's another temp working there also, way in the back. He'd been a temp for three years already as noone ever gets hired at H-P. No one who actually works there, at least. I saw the 'boss' once for 10 minutes on the first day. He welcomed me to the 'team', gave me the key to warehouse, pointed to the stack of brand-new printers to be torn apart, and showed me where the dumpster was. All of the brand-new parts except the metal chassis were to be just tossed into the garbage.
Two months later, the day before Christmas, I get fired for:
(1) 'stealing the brand-new floppy disks.' I took them home and reused them instead of throwing them away.
(2) 'allowing the disemination of confidential H-P information.' This referred to the text files of the printer manual found on the floppy disks. The files that went with every printer sold. Any floppy in an H-P dumpster was assumed by H-P to be holding confidential information. Then why is in the dumpster, guys?
(3) 'contributing to the creation of an environment conductive to sexual harassment.' I was lonely spending all day all alone in the warehouse tearing apart printers. I put a GIF file of Claudia Schiffer (a head shot of Ms. Schiffer in a evening dress, no porn) on the PC as Windows wallpaper. It was ten years ago and at that time having photos acting as Windows wallpaper was considered very unusual and special.
Now I'm sure your corporate lawyer would give you what passes for good reasons as to why I had to be fired. But in the real world, it was all bullshit. I've never trusted H-P since then. I've never again believed any press release or 'independent' article in the press about how advanced of a company that they are.
And I was certainly not surprised when Hurricane Carly came through and wiped out the place and then left with many millions of dollars in go-away money. Hewlett-Packard was FUBAR long before Carly.