I knew Carly was bad, but I never know anyone who worked for her personally.
PS - they did finally get rid of her, but I heard she's found an organization which matches her personality. I hope the Republicans have plan to get rid of her.
So, you'd be looking for something like NPR in the US. It's not very popular because it's not very sensational and the stories reported tend to get several minutes of airtime each. It tends to be a hair left of center. Both the left and right call it biased towards the opposite side, so that's a pretty good indicator of being either entirely random or fairly balanced. Since it is not random, and I tend to find their position neutral on the whole, I say it is the latter.
Federal funding has dropped year on year as budget pressures go elsewhere and, at least for the last 14 years, the Republican controlled legislatures tend not to favor them. It's part politics (they are not right leaning), and it's part core values (they "compete" with commercial radio and they are viewed as an entitlement/social program). It's about the only place I get my news, as commercial broadcast is generally biased to one side or the other, and neither give any significant time to develop and explore the background of their headlines in favor of "shock" journalism.
Pay-to-play for AP stories doesn't really bother me. In fact, it may - I say may - push some more local sites into doing more local journalism instead of pasting AP stories in place of local information. That, imho, would be a good thing. Of course, when you go to a pay model you go back to the crux of internet information sales - how do you charge in micropayments? Set the price to a nominal level, and all of the fee goes to payment processing. Raise it and you run into the problem that there are only so many monthly subscription fees a user will pay, which means everyone is competing for the one to three "slots" in an individuals budget. The industry isn't organized enough to have a central clearing house micropayment system. The big 3 could do it (V/MC, Amex, Discover), but they've grown accustomed to they're system and aren't going to change it to bring themselves less revenue (fewer transactions = less revenue). And, of course, by doing a consolidated micro-payment system, you have the issue of fraud and fraud prevention. I have enough fun sifting through my monthly CC statement of only 20-30 items. If I had a 1000 item micropayment bill, that would be rife for slipping in an extra penny or two - and who is going to pay to track and fix any errors? It's going to take a pretty good system to work that one out.
I suggest that, rather than taxing earned income, we exempt it and tax only unearned income.
That way, the more you work the more money you keep. If you make $20,000 in retail, you get to keep all of it. If you make $250,000 being a stock broker, you keep it. If you sit around on your ass waiting cashing in capitol gains (which means you sold a stock and are taking money _out_ of the system), living off the teat of dividends (again, money which is _not_ being reinvested directly by the company) or interest, you pay a flat rate...say 20%.
Businesses make up for the slack by paying a paltry 1-3% of gross receipts.
Or are you trying to defend those who don't work for a living?
I might note - and you'll no doubt agree as a fiscal conservative - that retirement is not a basic "right" guaranteed in the constitution. You should be careful not to rest on either taxing work (wages) or granting the undeserving a free ride (retirees who haven't saved enough) - as both hard work and paying your own way are planks in the Republican platform.
Man, I'd hate to see your change purse. The quarters in my pocket are just under an inch in diameter, or about 0.7in^2 per side. Allowing for a hub and spindle opening, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of that is available for data, which would be closer to 2.3-3.5Tb. Surprisingly close to the article claims (others above have posted 2.1Tb values; I didn't do the math).
Yes, but you've overlooked the downward pressure it would have on the gold market. That may seem a bit pedantic, but if we were to see huge power shifts to space based solar, energy costs would also go down. It still only takes $8-9/bbl to pull oil out of the ground in the easiest places to do so. Coal still only costs $20-25/tn to pull out of the ground, even though it was being sold for upwards of $150/tn.
More importantly, the GP makes a salient point, even if his numbers were a bit off - it's currently too fucking expensive to do anything in space. As fanstastic as it sounds, the simple practicality of getting anything into space is far more complex than it looks on paper. A good 15 years ago I attended a smallsat conference in Utah, and one of the presenters/vendors had a very promising plan to lift payloads into space with a clustered booster on a (three?) stage rocket. I remember it primarily because he has a "dollar per pound" number which he so eloquently related to ground beef - about $1.20/lb. Now, that was per pound of thrust, not per pound of payload, but the upshot was that he could put a medium size satellite in LEO for hundreds of dollars per pound instead of the then-current $10k/lb that the shuttle was running.
Even if he was half the anticipated efficiency, he should have been the premier launch vehicle provider in the world by now. I haven't heard of him since. Being a high power rocket enthusiast myself, it's amazing how high we can send our hobby rockets, and even more amazing how far we are from suborbital flights. $2000 in expendables and 100lbs of rocket won't even get you a sniff at 100km altitude, even without any payload at all. And that's ignoring the fact that the cost to fabricate and launch such a rocket with nothing more to lose than the rocket itself would run well into five figures if you had to count the man hours it takes to assemble it.
It was simple - they took the right to reproduce anything you posted - writing, photos, etc. It was non-exclusive. The key was that if you deleted something or left Facebook, those rights were terminated.
The change was that you could not terminate those rights by leaving; they were indefinite. The lawyer-speak used was not clear that the allowed use of your content on facebook was exclusively limited to facebook. Now, that's not a huge deal if you can terminate those rights should they attempt to abuse them. That's a big stick held by the content creator, even in light of the all-encompassing rights they took in order to operate their business (and, technically they needed nearly all those rights to generate the facebook pages without running afoul of copyright law).
By removing the revocation provision, they basically granted themselves perpetual rights to everything. That's a major change. The original TOS had some real safeguards in it, and I read them quite thoroughly when I signed up. This was, dare I say it, the lynchpin of those safeguards - a last, final way to undo what you had done.
Facebook has real copyright issues with the content they manage, and they don't want to set themselves up for a legal collapse. This change would have made the legal side very, very clean for them. And very unbalanced against members.
So go spend $700 on a phone system for the crisis line. You call in, enter your code, and then dial out from the crisis number. My TalkSwitch can do that for my small business without breaking a sweat. The CallerID that goes out is the number from the business. In my case, that sucks, because if you call my office an bounce to my cell, the incoming number is my office number, not the original caller. In this case, it's just a simple matter of training for the volunteers.
Really? It's made national news outlets,/. (big deal), and has Facebook management scrambling to find a solution.
Organization is just a first step. Facebook is a tool (as in "something useful", not "male genitalia"). It's a very useful tool for those of us with friends a relatives scattered around the world. The way to bring about change without causing grief to both sides is to start a dialog. This is the first step. Next are threats. After that is termination. Ideally, before termination, part of the threat stage would be to build (or pretend to build) an alternate site.
I don't think this is possible with images, which is all I really care about. There's no commercial value in what I write, as it's all personal shit that nobody cares about. I don't write things that are offensive or overly personal - I treat it like email or a forum in which my own name is directly linked. However, I don't want them co-opting my images. I'm not aware of a way you can "change" an image once it is uploaded. You can "delete it," but it won't go away - there's no way to overwrite it.
In light of everyone else addressing you point by point, I'll pile on:
1. You already did, except that your government, presumably elected by you (if not, then you can't complain), has already spent that money. In return, you're taxes will be raised by $x less in return. It's like a refund or a tax credit, just that the number seems the same because the tax burden went up. Wait 'til you see the increase when they have to pay off the current stimulus! (hopefully, your reduced losses in the market will offset the increase).
2. Anecdotal evidence of poor reception is unacceptable. Just as my evidence that both my signal quality and the number of viewable channels has increased. There are winners and losers everywhere. I suggest to look into a good UHF antenna.
3. Maybe you missed the part about more effective spectrum now being available for emergency services. Of course, I'm sure you don't need those, but if you do you'll be happy for any efficiency they can realize since your life just might depend on it.
Now, if you want to talk about how the FCC totally fucked up the process starting back in the 80s, I'll grab a pitchfork and a torch and march with you.
Not really. Poor counting is profitable for the casinos. If you think the deck is more positive than it is, you'll be betting larger on hands where you may not hold a statistical advantage. The converse is also true, where you may be betting the table minimum when the deck is favorable. If you can't count accurately, you're better off playing to the basic strategy as perfectly as possible, and remembering to leave when you're ahead. (ahead can be be when you're losing money, just s long as you don't spend more than your one-session limit)
There's a really good reason most buildings are rectilinear - anything else is significantly more expensive to build. I love how these designers just think we'll magically come up with the ability to analyze, design and fabricate these types of structures. Have you even wondered why we don't all live in Gehry-inspired buildings? It's because, as interesting as they are to look at, they cost between 5 and 50 times as much per square foot of usable space to build. Now, I'm sure most Wall Street types, with annual salaries that look like my phone number, don't care how much their living space costs, but I work for a living and I just can't see multiplying my mortgage times 10 just so food that grows just great on a farm down the road can grow in the flat next to me.
Sure, you can hydroponic this and aeroponic that, but I'm still waiting for anyone to actually make a sustainable, profit generating business which operates in all the sectors of agricultural products. And make a city produce it's own food? You've got to be kidding me. It takes something like three acres of flat land to support a person on an ongoing basis (no, I don't have a citation). I'll give you that I'm off by an order of magnitude AND that you can get an order of magnitude better results by using hydroponics. You'd need to double to quadruple the space for every person (1300SF hydroponics per person vs less than 600SF per person for living). So now instead of increasing your mortgage/rent tenfold, you'll have to double or triple that. But hey, you'll get free food (without processing) for just 29 times what you currently pay for your mortgage, which probably comes out to only a few times your annual income. And you still haven't figured out _how_ to harvest and process that material in such a system.
Why can't they just call these science fiction studies? I hope the winner didn't expect a cookie.
That's probably okay, but they've left the door open in their TOS - the way I read it - to continue to use any material for any purpose they choose even after you're gone. Now, if the use was limited to internal linking only, then there would be far less to worry about. They either need to really clean up the database, or really clean up the ToS. They've chosen neither, and that's unacceptable.
FTR, I'm okay with their old ToS because I could always opt out; even if the caches weren't scrubbed they couldn't use the license after my departure.
You know, now that I think about it, I'd probably be fine if the ToS simply stated that after content was removed it could not be used for any additional purpose by facebook beyond the current uses (i.e. content freeze). That might be more difficult to implement than it appears at first glance, though.
Yes, all the money goes there. But it turns out if you happen to need it back, they don't have any clue where it's gone, because it sure as hell isn't there anymore. As far as I can tell, to the Wall Street guys that's a feature, not bug.
Actually, reproducing the entire thing for your personal use (and only your personal use) is also generally considered to be fair use. Just as timeshifting an entire copyrighted audio or video program has been held by the courts to be fair use. (Has format shifting been tested in court?)
Redistribution of an altered work is somewhat of a gray area if you are the lawful owner of the original work. If you were to rip the binder off of a book and rearrange all the pages, then staple it back together, I don't think you'd be in violation of copyright. Nor would you be if you took said book and changed the chapter titles, as long as you used it for yourself. I suspect you could even publish the chapter titles you preferred, so others could manually edit their books to match yours.
I don't remember the outcome of the trial where the (UT or CO) DVD rental company would take your disc and remaster it with what they deemed to be offensive bits taken out. That would probably apply here, too.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to:
(a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website.
Note that anything you enable a user to post (are photos included if you allow someone to post to them or tag them?) is NOT subject to your privacy restrictions, since the (i) section on limiting distribution is OR'd with the (ii) section.
Being able to opt out at a later date if things got out of hand was a nice relief valve, and one which I took seriously when I sighed up. I'm not really a privacy Nazi or I wouldn't be on facebook at all. I don't begrudge them their basic operating necessities, or even marketing while I'm using the service, but if I decide I'm going to take my marbles and go home, I want to be able to.
If they decide to use some of my content for marketing and would like to use it in perpetuity, they only need to ask. They have me email address. If it's okay, I'll say so; if I have objections, they can just find another bit in their sea of information which fits their needs.
but we have yet to see this tested in a court of law, and I rather think we will
Unless, of course, they can make that arbitration clause in the TOS stick.
I personally don't mind Facebook using my posted info for internal use (inside facebook and for promotion of facebook), but if I leave I don't intend to have them continue to use my stuff. I can see, in some cases, how that can make for a sticky situation, as every hard-coded ad (like a broadcast commercial) would have to be checked for use of content from anyone who had left, but - hey - if they want a perpetual license, just send me a note and ask. It's not like they don't have a way to contact me.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard mention of the use of a Molniya orbit in more than a decade. I didn't know it was even used commercially for US coverage.
Thousands of truckers and commuters rely on Satellite for their source of entertainment and news.
Emphasis mine, of course, on the numbers involved. There just isn't a big enough market. Even in a society where commuting via car is standard, satellite can't muster enough subscribers to provide a viable business model. Between licensing of content (sports, stern, and statutory fees) and the cost of satellite broadcasts, you need a solid host of millions of paying customers. Thing is, most of the US can get what they want out of traditional broadcast services, or from their personal collections (ipods). Satellite TV is viable because it has a large installed base that can only get the majority of content from a for-pay source, and the competition is Cable TV (most companies should be so lucky as to have such an incompetent rival).
I'll grant you that satellite radio is cool - my wife has XM. There are a couple of problems, though. They've created a model of one receiver, one subscription, so if you have two cars you need two subscriptions, or a tuner module you have to physically move. For SatTV and Cable, it's an extra 10% a month for each extra TV. In doing so, they also required bypassing your car tuner if you want to take your unit between vehicles, or you'd have to buy a separate, 100% cost subscription for each vehicle. And up until recently, you couldn't have a portable device the size of a personal audio player. Now, there are practical reception / link margin reasons for this, but you can't discuss that with consumers - all they know is that you have no portable device.
To put this kind of endeavor together, you'd have to generate a _lot_ of subscriptions, and they just can't do it. I'll probably drop this year - I've already removed XM from my wife's car when we got the new head unit that does DVDs. Thee only useful way to keep it would have been to spend (another) $200 to have a hardwired receiver, but then she couldn't have XM at work. Now it's just in a radio in her office. For $55/yr, it's not a huge deal, especially since I can also tune it in from time to time on my PC. Now they're going to drop the PC version (unless you pay more), and our promo is up in March. I'm not paying $150/yr. Especially now that Pandora makes a much better station (or, rather, I make a better one on Pandora). Enough interstates have good cell service that I can get a lot of XM-like stuff on my cell phone, too.
There is a place for satellite radio, but it's market size just isn't large enough to sustain it. Thousands of people just don't have the buying power.
Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on/. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
Really? If you surveyed a million consumers in the target demographic for mainstream media (the 14-35 group, iirc), would you really find that greater than 50% prefer paying for music over free distribution.
I'd like to see that survey. I have this odd suspicion that if you asked that question, "Would you prefer to pay for music and movies, or would you rather download them for free?" you would have a pretty lopsided result and it would not bear out your statement.
That's a great article. As with all management things, the simple breadth of motivating factors for people tend to make any given technique invalid for a significant portion of the group.
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I knew Carly was bad, but I never know anyone who worked for her personally.
PS - they did finally get rid of her, but I heard she's found an organization which matches her personality. I hope the Republicans have plan to get rid of her.
So, you'd be looking for something like NPR in the US. It's not very popular because it's not very sensational and the stories reported tend to get several minutes of airtime each. It tends to be a hair left of center. Both the left and right call it biased towards the opposite side, so that's a pretty good indicator of being either entirely random or fairly balanced. Since it is not random, and I tend to find their position neutral on the whole, I say it is the latter.
Federal funding has dropped year on year as budget pressures go elsewhere and, at least for the last 14 years, the Republican controlled legislatures tend not to favor them. It's part politics (they are not right leaning), and it's part core values (they "compete" with commercial radio and they are viewed as an entitlement/social program). It's about the only place I get my news, as commercial broadcast is generally biased to one side or the other, and neither give any significant time to develop and explore the background of their headlines in favor of "shock" journalism.
Pay-to-play for AP stories doesn't really bother me. In fact, it may - I say may - push some more local sites into doing more local journalism instead of pasting AP stories in place of local information. That, imho, would be a good thing. Of course, when you go to a pay model you go back to the crux of internet information sales - how do you charge in micropayments? Set the price to a nominal level, and all of the fee goes to payment processing. Raise it and you run into the problem that there are only so many monthly subscription fees a user will pay, which means everyone is competing for the one to three "slots" in an individuals budget. The industry isn't organized enough to have a central clearing house micropayment system. The big 3 could do it (V/MC, Amex, Discover), but they've grown accustomed to they're system and aren't going to change it to bring themselves less revenue (fewer transactions = less revenue). And, of course, by doing a consolidated micro-payment system, you have the issue of fraud and fraud prevention. I have enough fun sifting through my monthly CC statement of only 20-30 items. If I had a 1000 item micropayment bill, that would be rife for slipping in an extra penny or two - and who is going to pay to track and fix any errors? It's going to take a pretty good system to work that one out.
I suggest that, rather than taxing earned income, we exempt it and tax only unearned income.
That way, the more you work the more money you keep. If you make $20,000 in retail, you get to keep all of it. If you make $250,000 being a stock broker, you keep it. If you sit around on your ass waiting cashing in capitol gains (which means you sold a stock and are taking money _out_ of the system), living off the teat of dividends (again, money which is _not_ being reinvested directly by the company) or interest, you pay a flat rate...say 20%.
Businesses make up for the slack by paying a paltry 1-3% of gross receipts.
Or are you trying to defend those who don't work for a living?
I might note - and you'll no doubt agree as a fiscal conservative - that retirement is not a basic "right" guaranteed in the constitution. You should be careful not to rest on either taxing work (wages) or granting the undeserving a free ride (retirees who haven't saved enough) - as both hard work and paying your own way are planks in the Republican platform.
Man, I'd hate to see your change purse. The quarters in my pocket are just under an inch in diameter, or about 0.7in^2 per side. Allowing for a hub and spindle opening, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of that is available for data, which would be closer to 2.3-3.5Tb. Surprisingly close to the article claims (others above have posted 2.1Tb values; I didn't do the math).
Yes, but you've overlooked the downward pressure it would have on the gold market. That may seem a bit pedantic, but if we were to see huge power shifts to space based solar, energy costs would also go down. It still only takes $8-9/bbl to pull oil out of the ground in the easiest places to do so. Coal still only costs $20-25/tn to pull out of the ground, even though it was being sold for upwards of $150/tn.
More importantly, the GP makes a salient point, even if his numbers were a bit off - it's currently too fucking expensive to do anything in space. As fanstastic as it sounds, the simple practicality of getting anything into space is far more complex than it looks on paper. A good 15 years ago I attended a smallsat conference in Utah, and one of the presenters/vendors had a very promising plan to lift payloads into space with a clustered booster on a (three?) stage rocket. I remember it primarily because he has a "dollar per pound" number which he so eloquently related to ground beef - about $1.20/lb. Now, that was per pound of thrust, not per pound of payload, but the upshot was that he could put a medium size satellite in LEO for hundreds of dollars per pound instead of the then-current $10k/lb that the shuttle was running.
Even if he was half the anticipated efficiency, he should have been the premier launch vehicle provider in the world by now. I haven't heard of him since. Being a high power rocket enthusiast myself, it's amazing how high we can send our hobby rockets, and even more amazing how far we are from suborbital flights. $2000 in expendables and 100lbs of rocket won't even get you a sniff at 100km altitude, even without any payload at all. And that's ignoring the fact that the cost to fabricate and launch such a rocket with nothing more to lose than the rocket itself would run well into five figures if you had to count the man hours it takes to assemble it.
It was simple - they took the right to reproduce anything you posted - writing, photos, etc. It was non-exclusive. The key was that if you deleted something or left Facebook, those rights were terminated.
The change was that you could not terminate those rights by leaving; they were indefinite. The lawyer-speak used was not clear that the allowed use of your content on facebook was exclusively limited to facebook. Now, that's not a huge deal if you can terminate those rights should they attempt to abuse them. That's a big stick held by the content creator, even in light of the all-encompassing rights they took in order to operate their business (and, technically they needed nearly all those rights to generate the facebook pages without running afoul of copyright law).
By removing the revocation provision, they basically granted themselves perpetual rights to everything. That's a major change. The original TOS had some real safeguards in it, and I read them quite thoroughly when I signed up. This was, dare I say it, the lynchpin of those safeguards - a last, final way to undo what you had done.
Facebook has real copyright issues with the content they manage, and they don't want to set themselves up for a legal collapse. This change would have made the legal side very, very clean for them. And very unbalanced against members.
So go spend $700 on a phone system for the crisis line. You call in, enter your code, and then dial out from the crisis number. My TalkSwitch can do that for my small business without breaking a sweat. The CallerID that goes out is the number from the business. In my case, that sucks, because if you call my office an bounce to my cell, the incoming number is my office number, not the original caller. In this case, it's just a simple matter of training for the volunteers.
Really? It's made national news outlets, /. (big deal), and has Facebook management scrambling to find a solution.
Organization is just a first step. Facebook is a tool (as in "something useful", not "male genitalia"). It's a very useful tool for those of us with friends a relatives scattered around the world. The way to bring about change without causing grief to both sides is to start a dialog. This is the first step. Next are threats. After that is termination. Ideally, before termination, part of the threat stage would be to build (or pretend to build) an alternate site.
I hope you don't manage anything professionally.
I don't think this is possible with images, which is all I really care about. There's no commercial value in what I write, as it's all personal shit that nobody cares about. I don't write things that are offensive or overly personal - I treat it like email or a forum in which my own name is directly linked. However, I don't want them co-opting my images. I'm not aware of a way you can "change" an image once it is uploaded. You can "delete it," but it won't go away - there's no way to overwrite it.
In light of everyone else addressing you point by point, I'll pile on:
1. You already did, except that your government, presumably elected by you (if not, then you can't complain), has already spent that money. In return, you're taxes will be raised by $x less in return. It's like a refund or a tax credit, just that the number seems the same because the tax burden went up. Wait 'til you see the increase when they have to pay off the current stimulus! (hopefully, your reduced losses in the market will offset the increase).
2. Anecdotal evidence of poor reception is unacceptable. Just as my evidence that both my signal quality and the number of viewable channels has increased. There are winners and losers everywhere. I suggest to look into a good UHF antenna.
3. Maybe you missed the part about more effective spectrum now being available for emergency services. Of course, I'm sure you don't need those, but if you do you'll be happy for any efficiency they can realize since your life just might depend on it.
Now, if you want to talk about how the FCC totally fucked up the process starting back in the 80s, I'll grab a pitchfork and a torch and march with you.
Not really. Poor counting is profitable for the casinos. If you think the deck is more positive than it is, you'll be betting larger on hands where you may not hold a statistical advantage. The converse is also true, where you may be betting the table minimum when the deck is favorable. If you can't count accurately, you're better off playing to the basic strategy as perfectly as possible, and remembering to leave when you're ahead. (ahead can be be when you're losing money, just s long as you don't spend more than your one-session limit)
In the future, maybe we don't need more efficient use of space, but rather fewer humans?
Of course, that doesn't win you silly design competitions.
More like insightful. Perhaps if the summary had included something like "for recreation" and omitted the useless range.
There's a really good reason most buildings are rectilinear - anything else is significantly more expensive to build. I love how these designers just think we'll magically come up with the ability to analyze, design and fabricate these types of structures. Have you even wondered why we don't all live in Gehry-inspired buildings? It's because, as interesting as they are to look at, they cost between 5 and 50 times as much per square foot of usable space to build. Now, I'm sure most Wall Street types, with annual salaries that look like my phone number, don't care how much their living space costs, but I work for a living and I just can't see multiplying my mortgage times 10 just so food that grows just great on a farm down the road can grow in the flat next to me.
Sure, you can hydroponic this and aeroponic that, but I'm still waiting for anyone to actually make a sustainable, profit generating business which operates in all the sectors of agricultural products. And make a city produce it's own food? You've got to be kidding me. It takes something like three acres of flat land to support a person on an ongoing basis (no, I don't have a citation). I'll give you that I'm off by an order of magnitude AND that you can get an order of magnitude better results by using hydroponics. You'd need to double to quadruple the space for every person (1300SF hydroponics per person vs less than 600SF per person for living). So now instead of increasing your mortgage/rent tenfold, you'll have to double or triple that. But hey, you'll get free food (without processing) for just 29 times what you currently pay for your mortgage, which probably comes out to only a few times your annual income. And you still haven't figured out _how_ to harvest and process that material in such a system.
Why can't they just call these science fiction studies? I hope the winner didn't expect a cookie.
That's probably okay, but they've left the door open in their TOS - the way I read it - to continue to use any material for any purpose they choose even after you're gone. Now, if the use was limited to internal linking only, then there would be far less to worry about. They either need to really clean up the database, or really clean up the ToS. They've chosen neither, and that's unacceptable.
FTR, I'm okay with their old ToS because I could always opt out; even if the caches weren't scrubbed they couldn't use the license after my departure.
You know, now that I think about it, I'd probably be fine if the ToS simply stated that after content was removed it could not be used for any additional purpose by facebook beyond the current uses (i.e. content freeze). That might be more difficult to implement than it appears at first glance, though.
Yes, all the money goes there. But it turns out if you happen to need it back, they don't have any clue where it's gone, because it sure as hell isn't there anymore. As far as I can tell, to the Wall Street guys that's a feature, not bug.
Actually, reproducing the entire thing for your personal use (and only your personal use) is also generally considered to be fair use. Just as timeshifting an entire copyrighted audio or video program has been held by the courts to be fair use. (Has format shifting been tested in court?)
Redistribution of an altered work is somewhat of a gray area if you are the lawful owner of the original work. If you were to rip the binder off of a book and rearrange all the pages, then staple it back together, I don't think you'd be in violation of copyright. Nor would you be if you took said book and changed the chapter titles, as long as you used it for yourself. I suspect you could even publish the chapter titles you preferred, so others could manually edit their books to match yours.
I don't remember the outcome of the trial where the (UT or CO) DVD rental company would take your disc and remaster it with what they deemed to be offensive bits taken out. That would probably apply here, too.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to:
(a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website.
Note that anything you enable a user to post (are photos included if you allow someone to post to them or tag them?) is NOT subject to your privacy restrictions, since the (i) section on limiting distribution is OR'd with the (ii) section.
Being able to opt out at a later date if things got out of hand was a nice relief valve, and one which I took seriously when I sighed up. I'm not really a privacy Nazi or I wouldn't be on facebook at all. I don't begrudge them their basic operating necessities, or even marketing while I'm using the service, but if I decide I'm going to take my marbles and go home, I want to be able to.
If they decide to use some of my content for marketing and would like to use it in perpetuity, they only need to ask. They have me email address. If it's okay, I'll say so; if I have objections, they can just find another bit in their sea of information which fits their needs.
but we have yet to see this tested in a court of law, and I rather think we will
Unless, of course, they can make that arbitration clause in the TOS stick.
I personally don't mind Facebook using my posted info for internal use (inside facebook and for promotion of facebook), but if I leave I don't intend to have them continue to use my stuff. I can see, in some cases, how that can make for a sticky situation, as every hard-coded ad (like a broadcast commercial) would have to be checked for use of content from anyone who had left, but - hey - if they want a perpetual license, just send me a note and ask. It's not like they don't have a way to contact me.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard mention of the use of a Molniya orbit in more than a decade. I didn't know it was even used commercially for US coverage.
For a week and a half I can find either a book on tape/CD or my personal collection.
And it's right in your post:
Thousands of truckers and commuters rely on Satellite for their source of entertainment and news.
Emphasis mine, of course, on the numbers involved. There just isn't a big enough market. Even in a society where commuting via car is standard, satellite can't muster enough subscribers to provide a viable business model. Between licensing of content (sports, stern, and statutory fees) and the cost of satellite broadcasts, you need a solid host of millions of paying customers. Thing is, most of the US can get what they want out of traditional broadcast services, or from their personal collections (ipods). Satellite TV is viable because it has a large installed base that can only get the majority of content from a for-pay source, and the competition is Cable TV (most companies should be so lucky as to have such an incompetent rival).
I'll grant you that satellite radio is cool - my wife has XM. There are a couple of problems, though. They've created a model of one receiver, one subscription, so if you have two cars you need two subscriptions, or a tuner module you have to physically move. For SatTV and Cable, it's an extra 10% a month for each extra TV. In doing so, they also required bypassing your car tuner if you want to take your unit between vehicles, or you'd have to buy a separate, 100% cost subscription for each vehicle. And up until recently, you couldn't have a portable device the size of a personal audio player. Now, there are practical reception / link margin reasons for this, but you can't discuss that with consumers - all they know is that you have no portable device.
To put this kind of endeavor together, you'd have to generate a _lot_ of subscriptions, and they just can't do it. I'll probably drop this year - I've already removed XM from my wife's car when we got the new head unit that does DVDs. Thee only useful way to keep it would have been to spend (another) $200 to have a hardwired receiver, but then she couldn't have XM at work. Now it's just in a radio in her office. For $55/yr, it's not a huge deal, especially since I can also tune it in from time to time on my PC. Now they're going to drop the PC version (unless you pay more), and our promo is up in March. I'm not paying $150/yr. Especially now that Pandora makes a much better station (or, rather, I make a better one on Pandora). Enough interstates have good cell service that I can get a lot of XM-like stuff on my cell phone, too.
There is a place for satellite radio, but it's market size just isn't large enough to sustain it. Thousands of people just don't have the buying power.
Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on /. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
Really? If you surveyed a million consumers in the target demographic for mainstream media (the 14-35 group, iirc), would you really find that greater than 50% prefer paying for music over free distribution.
I'd like to see that survey. I have this odd suspicion that if you asked that question, "Would you prefer to pay for music and movies, or would you rather download them for free?" you would have a pretty lopsided result and it would not bear out your statement.
That's a great article. As with all management things, the simple breadth of motivating factors for people tend to make any given technique invalid for a significant portion of the group.
Absolutely the only reason for going when I was young. Otherwise, meet me in the air an space museum.