Our 11 person firm had our policy cancelled due to ACA and we were forced to choose a different one for 30% more per year. Does anyone in Washington know who really creates jobs in this country? HINT: its not companies with more than 50 employees.
Actually, yes it is. For a detailed discussion, see below, but the short version is that small companies don't disproportionately create net new jobs; _new companies_ do.
"Forget the recent invasions of other countries, the US destabilized a democratic government and installed their own puppet dictator in Iran just over thirty years ago."
The coup against Mosaddegh was 60 years ago, not 30 (1953). Also, the dictator (the Shah) was already there.
Just because box office totals hit a record doesn't mean that piracy isn't a problem. I'm not saying that piracy IS a problem (or at least one that justifies what's being proposed in an attempt to deal with it), but it's entirely possible for this to be a record year AND for pirates to be really eating into box office sales.
If your dry cleaner made $100k last year, and you made $130k this year but someone held you up at gunpoint and stole $20k, you'd still (after the theft) have record revenues.
I believe the original location was zoned for retail, so they needed to have some sort of retail business in there, even though it was really a tutoring center.
What puzzled me is that they don't say what this document is, and how it shows that the file in fact exists. Maybe it's just poor editing, but another sentence about what the doc is and how they got it would be helpful.
1. Your point about region is true, except that Torrentspy are US-based, so they're obliged to follow US law. If there were acting legally locally, but illegally under the laws of another country (i.e. a US porn site that's access by someone in Saudi Arabia), that'd be a reasonable discussion.
2. Under our system of laws, complicity in, or contribution to, a crime does make one liable for consequences. That's long-established fact, well-established long before the US Constitution was drafted. Hiring someone to commit murder is clearly against the law. Being the driver in a bank robbery is a crime, even if you didn't go into the bank itself and take out the money.
3. Related to #2, there are limits on our freedom of speech. The right isn't absolute. In the classic example, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. You can't incite a riot. And so on. You may disagree with this interpretation, but that places you in a tiny minority.
4. As for your claim that "We don't hear the reports on how often an armed student or teacher stops a crazed shooter," I'd love to see some examples of this. Clearly, if we let all students walk around armed, the chance for a Columbine would be a lot lower. The death toll from fistfights that turn into gun battles and accidental shootings, though, would likely far outstrip any gains from stopping the occasional attack.
This is a rather apples-to-oranges comparison. Torrentspy wasn't just selling oil paints (to use your painting example), it was selling kits including paints, brushes, and a "Mona Lisa by numbers" template so you could just fill in the blanks. In fact, from a "how much effort does it require to violate copyright" point of view, they were darn close to just letting you click and receive a newly painted copy of the artwork.
As for the gun analogy, while the murderer clearly bears the final responsibility, if I walk into a gun store and say "what's the best weapon to use if I want to shoot my wife from a distance of 6 feet or less" and they sell me a weapon, they've gone beyond the "we didn't know what he was doing" defense. What Torrentspy had would be akin to a gun store which has shelves of weapons marked "Ideal for Convenience Store Holdup," "Perfect for Penetrating Law Enforcement Bulletproof Vests," and "Just the Thing For Killing Dozens in Your School Lunchroom." Instead of these categories, Torrentspy had movies, TV shows, etc. How many movies are really released without copyright? How many TV shows? Not many at all, and anybody taking the briefest look at what was in those categories would have their suspicions that they housed copyright material confirmed.
If Torrentspy had made any effort whatsoever to discourage the sharing of copyrighted torrents via the site, they might have a claim. They knew exactly what they were doing - it was their entire business model.
As to the "hosting a torrent is not hosting a file" argument, there are limits to that as well. The family of someone murdered by a hit man hired through the classified ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine sued the magazine, and won, since the magazine knew exactly what services (mercenary) were being advertised, and still carried the ad.
No, they're not. Some rights are statutory. Some are Constitutional. All can be revoked. Your right to own slaves was enshrined in the Constitution, and then revoked. Your legal right to free speech can be revoked as well (repeal the 1st Amendment). There may be "natural rights," due to you because your human, or because God says you should have them, but those aren't legal rights. There's a difference.
Fully agree - for it to be a crime, there has to be knowledge (or reasonable expectation of knowledge) that the goods didn't belong to whomever you got them from.
Only if the people who sent them to you are the owners. If you know, or have good reason to know, that they're not, it's possession of stolen property.
"The longer this goes on, the further the show-going experience will get distanced from the actual show, and much like CD sales, the fans will stop consuming. Who will the RIAA blame when people don't go to concerts anymore ? The Internet ?:P"
But I thought the problem was that too _many_ people wanted to go see the shows in these crappy arenas, hence the scalpers?
Your argument sounds like the old joke about the restaurant: nobody goes there anymore, you can never get a table.
They tried this in New York - it was an utter failure, and they eventually gave up. In New York's case, the ticket brokers just had offices in New Jersey and Connecticut, and send a courier into New York City once a day to deliver the tickets.
Particularly now that there are emailable tickets, there's nothing stopping someone from doing the same thing from overseas to circumvent a national ban.
Price controls will always create a black market (whether it's cigarettes in postwar Germany, gas in the 1970s, or tickets in 2007) - unless there's a hugely compelling national interest in having those price controls, it's really hard to justify the resources necessary to crack down on it, when we could be spending those law enforcement dollars on other crimes where people get actually hurt, rather than either (a) not being able to see Genesis or (b) having to pay a high price to do so.
The money has already been spent in the FY 2008 federal budget - the buyers have to pay up by the end of June, 2008.
Basically, we (through our elected representatives) have decided that we want to license this spectrum out to private entities, and reap the revenue from this. We could have left it unlicensed (a la 2.4/5.8Ghz), but we (through our elected representatives) decided not to.
We could also have placed greater restrictions on the users of the spectrum, but decided not to, as that would lead to lower auction revenue.
I would hardly call Freedom to Fascism a source of "information" on the Fed. If the movie constitutes "information," then Scientology is a source of "information" about astrophysics and geology.
Definitely, for videoconferencing. Point-to-point videoconferencing setups are still very much with us. The tech works, and works well, and people have plunked a lot of money into it, so they're disinclined to rip out a perfectly good videoconferencing setup to spend $10k plus on a new IP infrastructure.
That's simply not true. While the city may have granted a franchise to a single provider, other providers can legally get franchises as well, if they want). After Community Communications Co. v. City of Boulder, cable franchises haven't been de jure monopolies. They may be de facto monopolies (because nobody's willing to spend the money to deploy a competing network, as well as meeting the city requirements for franchise fees, free connections to schools/city hall/firehouses/etc., free public access channels to broadcast city council meetings, yadda yadda yadda), but only in a very very very few cases are they actually legal monopolies.
"And the internet providers have been given government backed monopolies"
Which government backed monopolies are these, again? Remind me.
They're not gov't monopolies (i.e. the goverment prohibits anyone from competing), they're natural monopolies (the economics of building a second cable plant where one already exists are, in general, terrible, and the people who tried to do it have largely gone bankrupt).
*Lobbying: when someone I don't agree with attempts to influence Congress. *Activism: when someone I agree with attempts to influence Congress.
*Citizen participation: when I make a contribution to support a political candidate. *Bribery: when someone I disagree with makes a contribution to support a political candidate.
Nope, it's not like eBay - the bidding goes on until nobody wants to increase their bid. The bids go in rounds - one round per day, to begin with. If nobody bids on a particular license in (I believe) two consecutive rounds, then bidding on that license is complete. Once things get very close to being done, and only a few licenses are still outstanding (i.e. up in the air), the FCC can accelerate the process to 2 or 3 rounds per day, to bring the entire process to a close.
The "package of national licenses" refers to one of the frequency blocks being sold - it's broken up into about 8 regional licenses, but it will be possible to bid on all 8 as a "package" if you want to get a nationwide footprint (i.e. the same spectrum everywhere in the US.
The money goes the the US Treasury, and has to be paid by June 30th, 2008, because it's already been included in the budget by the Congress. In other words, it's already been spent.
To be fair, it appears that the Wii success caught Nintendo off guard as well - while a designed shortage in the first couple of months to drum up attention might have been a good idea, it's very hard to believe that the current lack of availability is something that Nintendo planned, rather than a result of sales having outstripped Nintendo's forecasts (and hence manufacturing capability).
Slashdot Mirror
Our 11 person firm had our policy cancelled due to ACA and we were forced to choose a different one for 30% more per year. Does anyone in Washington know who really creates jobs in this country? HINT: its not companies with more than 50 employees.
Actually, yes it is. For a detailed discussion, see below, but the short version is that small companies don't disproportionately create net new jobs; _new companies_ do.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/bo-burlingham/who-really-creates-the-jobs.html
"Forget the recent invasions of other countries, the US destabilized a democratic government and installed their own puppet dictator in Iran just over thirty years ago."
The coup against Mosaddegh was 60 years ago, not 30 (1953). Also, the dictator (the Shah) was already there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax#U.S._role
Just because box office totals hit a record doesn't mean that piracy isn't a problem. I'm not saying that piracy IS a problem (or at least one that justifies what's being proposed in an attempt to deal with it), but it's entirely possible for this to be a record year AND for pirates to be really eating into box office sales.
If your dry cleaner made $100k last year, and you made $130k this year but someone held you up at gunpoint and stole $20k, you'd still (after the theft) have record revenues.
I believe the original location was zoned for retail, so they needed to have some sort of retail business in there, even though it was really a tutoring center.
"...in this case, "progress" would mean "towards a Taliban-controlled state which is about half a millennium behind the rest of the world".
I think the Taliban would find 1508 to be at least 850 years too recent for their tastes. They're really much more about the 7th century.
What puzzled me is that they don't say what this document is, and how it shows that the file in fact exists. Maybe it's just poor editing, but another sentence about what the doc is and how they got it would be helpful.
Not clear to me from either article how exactly the Times knows that this file does in fact exist? Is it from a document from that same whistleblower.
You've got some interesting opinions here.
1. Your point about region is true, except that Torrentspy are US-based, so they're obliged to follow US law. If there were acting legally locally, but illegally under the laws of another country (i.e. a US porn site that's access by someone in Saudi Arabia), that'd be a reasonable discussion.
2. Under our system of laws, complicity in, or contribution to, a crime does make one liable for consequences. That's long-established fact, well-established long before the US Constitution was drafted. Hiring someone to commit murder is clearly against the law. Being the driver in a bank robbery is a crime, even if you didn't go into the bank itself and take out the money.
3. Related to #2, there are limits on our freedom of speech. The right isn't absolute. In the classic example, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. You can't incite a riot. And so on. You may disagree with this interpretation, but that places you in a tiny minority.
4. As for your claim that "We don't hear the reports on how often an armed student or teacher stops a crazed shooter," I'd love to see some examples of this. Clearly, if we let all students walk around armed, the chance for a Columbine would be a lot lower. The death toll from fistfights that turn into gun battles and accidental shootings, though, would likely far outstrip any gains from stopping the occasional attack.
This is a rather apples-to-oranges comparison. Torrentspy wasn't just selling oil paints (to use your painting example), it was selling kits including paints, brushes, and a "Mona Lisa by numbers" template so you could just fill in the blanks. In fact, from a "how much effort does it require to violate copyright" point of view, they were darn close to just letting you click and receive a newly painted copy of the artwork.
As for the gun analogy, while the murderer clearly bears the final responsibility, if I walk into a gun store and say "what's the best weapon to use if I want to shoot my wife from a distance of 6 feet or less" and they sell me a weapon, they've gone beyond the "we didn't know what he was doing" defense. What Torrentspy had would be akin to a gun store which has shelves of weapons marked "Ideal for Convenience Store Holdup," "Perfect for Penetrating Law Enforcement Bulletproof Vests," and "Just the Thing For Killing Dozens in Your School Lunchroom." Instead of these categories, Torrentspy had movies, TV shows, etc. How many movies are really released without copyright? How many TV shows? Not many at all, and anybody taking the briefest look at what was in those categories would have their suspicions that they housed copyright material confirmed.
If Torrentspy had made any effort whatsoever to discourage the sharing of copyrighted torrents via the site, they might have a claim. They knew exactly what they were doing - it was their entire business model.
As to the "hosting a torrent is not hosting a file" argument, there are limits to that as well. The family of someone murdered by a hit man hired through the classified ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine sued the magazine, and won, since the magazine knew exactly what services (mercenary) were being advertised, and still carried the ad.
"No, rights are irrevocable."
No, they're not. Some rights are statutory. Some are Constitutional. All can be revoked. Your right to own slaves was enshrined in the Constitution, and then revoked. Your legal right to free speech can be revoked as well (repeal the 1st Amendment). There may be "natural rights," due to you because your human, or because God says you should have them, but those aren't legal rights. There's a difference.
Fully agree - for it to be a crime, there has to be knowledge (or reasonable expectation of knowledge) that the goods didn't belong to whomever you got them from.
Only if the people who sent them to you are the owners. If you know, or have good reason to know, that they're not, it's possession of stolen property.
"The longer this goes on, the further the show-going experience will get distanced from the actual show, and much like CD sales, the fans will stop consuming. Who will the RIAA blame when people don't go to concerts anymore ? The Internet ? :P"
But I thought the problem was that too _many_ people wanted to go see the shows in these crappy arenas, hence the scalpers?
Your argument sounds like the old joke about the restaurant: nobody goes there anymore, you can never get a table.
They tried this in New York - it was an utter failure, and they eventually gave up. In New York's case, the ticket brokers just had offices in New Jersey and Connecticut, and send a courier into New York City once a day to deliver the tickets.
Particularly now that there are emailable tickets, there's nothing stopping someone from doing the same thing from overseas to circumvent a national ban.
Price controls will always create a black market (whether it's cigarettes in postwar Germany, gas in the 1970s, or tickets in 2007) - unless there's a hugely compelling national interest in having those price controls, it's really hard to justify the resources necessary to crack down on it, when we could be spending those law enforcement dollars on other crimes where people get actually hurt, rather than either (a) not being able to see Genesis or (b) having to pay a high price to do so.
The money has already been spent in the FY 2008 federal budget - the buyers have to pay up by the end of June, 2008.
Basically, we (through our elected representatives) have decided that we want to license this spectrum out to private entities, and reap the revenue from this. We could have left it unlicensed (a la 2.4/5.8Ghz), but we (through our elected representatives) decided not to.
We could also have placed greater restrictions on the users of the spectrum, but decided not to, as that would lead to lower auction revenue.
I would hardly call Freedom to Fascism a source of "information" on the Fed. If the movie constitutes "information," then Scientology is a source of "information" about astrophysics and geology.
Freedom to Fascism is mainly a screed by someone who has convinced himself that he has no obligation to pay income taxes (the IRS disagrees, hence the $2MM in tax liens against the director). Good debunking here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/movies/31russ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Definitely, for videoconferencing. Point-to-point videoconferencing setups are still very much with us. The tech works, and works well, and people have plunked a lot of money into it, so they're disinclined to rip out a perfectly good videoconferencing setup to spend $10k plus on a new IP infrastructure.
That's simply not true. While the city may have granted a franchise to a single provider, other providers can legally get franchises as well, if they want). After Community Communications Co. v. City of Boulder, cable franchises haven't been de jure monopolies. They may be de facto monopolies (because nobody's willing to spend the money to deploy a competing network, as well as meeting the city requirements for franchise fees, free connections to schools/city hall/firehouses/etc., free public access channels to broadcast city council meetings, yadda yadda yadda), but only in a very very very few cases are they actually legal monopolies.
"And the internet providers have been given government backed monopolies"
Which government backed monopolies are these, again? Remind me.
They're not gov't monopolies (i.e. the goverment prohibits anyone from competing), they're natural monopolies (the economics of building a second cable plant where one already exists are, in general, terrible, and the people who tried to do it have largely gone bankrupt).
"The cost per subscriber per month is about $14 [ESPN and ESPN HD]."
This must be a typo. I don't know how small your company is, but even reasonably small guys are only paying about $2-2.25/month/sub for ESPN.
A few definitions:
*Lobbying: when someone I don't agree with attempts to influence Congress.
*Activism: when someone I agree with attempts to influence Congress.
*Citizen participation: when I make a contribution to support a political candidate.
*Bribery: when someone I disagree with makes a contribution to support a political candidate.
I don't know where you buy coffee, but the last auction (AWS, in summer 06) raised nearly $14 billion, which ain't exactly pocket change.
Nope, it's not like eBay - the bidding goes on until nobody wants to increase their bid. The bids go in rounds - one round per day, to begin with. If nobody bids on a particular license in (I believe) two consecutive rounds, then bidding on that license is complete. Once things get very close to being done, and only a few licenses are still outstanding (i.e. up in the air), the FCC can accelerate the process to 2 or 3 rounds per day, to bring the entire process to a close.
The "package of national licenses" refers to one of the frequency blocks being sold - it's broken up into about 8 regional licenses, but it will be possible to bid on all 8 as a "package" if you want to get a nationwide footprint (i.e. the same spectrum everywhere in the US.
The money goes the the US Treasury, and has to be paid by June 30th, 2008, because it's already been included in the budget by the Congress. In other words, it's already been spent.
To be fair, it appears that the Wii success caught Nintendo off guard as well - while a designed shortage in the first couple of months to drum up attention might have been a good idea, it's very hard to believe that the current lack of availability is something that Nintendo planned, rather than a result of sales having outstripped Nintendo's forecasts (and hence manufacturing capability).