This "political BS" effects the livelihoods of many of the people that read/..
Honestly, I come here to read stories like this more than anything, because lord knows that the Mainstream Media doesn't give a fuck about covering this shit. We didn't even hear a peep about SOPA in the media until the fucking boycotts, months after it was making waves through the tech sites.
Of course! The question is, what are people going to do about it? We can't vote our way out of this mess because becoming a part of the system requires one to be corrupted by it first. Boycotts are ineffective because many of these companies have so many millions of customers that it's virtually impossible to effect their bottom line (besides the fact that they just make up the difference by ripping off their remaining customers), and others are so deeply enmeshed with the government that it would be pretty much impossible to send a message there, like our DoD contractors.
I fully believe that there's going to be armed insurrections within a decade in this country, but there's still a lot of people out there that refuse to entertain the notion that there would be any justification for it. I can't tell you how often I hear people tell me that revolution is ridiculous because we're not being starved, raped, and murdered by warlords and dictators like the people of Africa and The Middle East. I just do not understand why so many people are so willing to accept a "long train of abuses and usurpations" as long as massive quantities of blood aren't being spilled. It's ridiculous that it's going to have to get to that point...as a nation our ignorance of history (even our own history, let alone the rest of the world) is deplorable. If more people were cognizant of it than we would be able to see the slippery slope we're rocketing down and how it's going to end before it gets to the point of massive bloodshed, but as education is dismissed by a large portion of this country as propaganda and lies, it'll probably never happen.
Alaska doesn't have a state sales tax at all, and any attempt to impose one would likely result in riots. Shit's already ridiculously inflated price-wise up there, and there are already lots of people living well below the poverty line (simply having indoor plumbing up there is considered a premium in a lot of places and jacks rents up), so a Federal sales tax would severely hurt them.
Good for you. I'm not trying to be facetious, I really mean it, because some of the repugnant shit I've read about as concerns unscrupulous collection agencies (people getting threatened over the phone, burly people showing up at a "debtors" doorstep demanding payment, little kids being told that mommy or daddy is a deadbeat loser) casts really negative aspersions on the field in my opinion.
I've rarely ever had a legitimate collections call, but boy have I had some people try to convince me (often in a very condescending and rude manner) that I owed them money for pretty nebulous shit.
So provide a number that is valid, but goes nowhere.
That's kinda what I do. I've been giving businesses that want my phone number (but don't need it for anything I deem worthy) my landline home phone number for years, and that line's been out of service since 2005.
I feel bad for whoever has that number now, though.
Half the time the people calling to collect a debt can't even produce proof that they are legally authorized to collect it.
First response to any collections call should always be, "I would like written proof that your organization owns this debt and are authorized to collect it." A lot of the time, you never hear from them again. I'm not gonna come right out and say they're scammer fucks, but it's funny that said proof almost never, ever, shows up...
That has nothing to do with the fact that an entire website was nuked off the face of the internet without any judicial oversight whatsoever.
If I get stopped and searched for no reason whatsoever, when the cop decides to let me go because he had no reason to stop me in the first place, should I just say "Well, he let me go, so all's well that end's well"? Come on. That's retarded.
There's a reason why we require court orders before police are just allowed to do whatever they fuck they want, and situations like this are precisely why.
I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm so fucking sick and tired of the shit my government is doing lately, particularly this shit. Since we obviously can't vote our way out of this crap (since all players are bought long before they even get their fucking name on a ballot), what's next? Half the people in this country don't even care that their rights are being shit upon and just want to go watch NASCAR or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The rest are split between the people that still have faith in their government (although I can't see how, not anymore) and those that think the whole fucking thing is FUBAR and gave up long ago.
This country is going to end up in civil war again. If I were a foreign business that had any type of connection to the United States, I would get the fuck out ASAP.
True, but they never were in the past, either, and people managed to get divorced just fine.
One of the realities of getting divorced is losing stuff. When my mother and father got divorced he lost hundreds of records in the process to her. However, given the fact that his marriage had failed, and facing the great reduction in the amount of time he would be able to spend with my brother and I, the last thing he gave a shit about at the time was his fucking records.
iTunes accounts and digital locker accounts and such may be relatively new wrinkles in divorces these days, but the courts have been splitting property up for decades. I'm sure the courts will make a determination as to their eProperty just the same as their physical property. He'll lose the iTunes account, she'll lose the Netflix account, life goes on...
I think the AC posing this question is worrying too much about what is, in the grand scheme of things, minutiae. If they can agree to an amicable split, great, if not, then it's lawyer time. Dividing digital assets really shouldn't be any more difficult than any other kind.
(Or they could, you know, just copy the shit and keep it on the hush. Who the hell would even know? This would be a complete non-issue to pretty much anyone I know...)
Yeah, really. I do not understand what the hell is so difficult about this. The media is trivial, everyone gets a copy, fucking done. The domain issue isn't even that complex...
It IS just 1's and 0's, after all. Copy, paste, than go get drunk and/or laid. Unless you're talking IP that is actually worth something, in which case, that's for your respective lawyers to scream at each other in a courtroom over.
Hey, I think it's ridiculous on both counts. My point was, if Steve Jobs deserves a Grammy for iTunes, than the fellows behind Napster deserve one, too. If it weren't for them, most of us would likely still be going to the record store buying CD's at $20 a piece to this day. I'm sure the RIAA cries bitter tears into their cocaine over that fact, but it doesn't make their impact in music today any less than Steve's. Arguably it's much larger...they brought the concept to the masses and let the genie out of the bottle in the first place.
They're essentially giving him an award for doing what they refused to do themselves for years despite enormous demand from the public. It's not like getting music online was fucking groundbreaking, people had been doing that already for years when iTunes launched. So what was the Grammy-worthy contribution? Having enough capitol to force the labels to get behind him and eschew iTunes' competitors? Producing a piece of hardware that essentially forced people to use his music service, thus guaranteeing a customer right out of the box?
This was just another Steve Jobs circle-jerk. I'm not trying to diminish the man's accomplishments, but giving him a Grammy was fucking retarded. Might as well give him an Oscar for his contribution to film because he fucking bought Pixar back in 1986.
Well, if the friend is deceased, she might as well just block them, since I doubt they'll be sending any legitimate emails from beyond the grave. Probably be a better solution than being bummed out every time her friend emails her about male enhancement or hot christian singles.
There is a big difference between a farmer who may have some Monsanto crops on the fringes of his fields, and a guy whose entire crop is Monsanto (but who trying to claim it's "just from stray pollination").
Is there? It seems like Monsanto really doesn't care one way or the other; as far as they're concerned, the seed police return a positive hit, it's time to mobilize the lawyer brigade and litigate someone out of existence.
This is a big problem with the legal system in my opinion. These huge corporations can use their considerable wealth to basically destroy anyone with the temerity to not immediately fold on just the threat of litigation. Sure, there can be a judgement for damages and the cost of the defense down the road (years down the road in most cases) but these aren't criminal cases, these are civil matters, so the burden of retaining representation is wholly on John Q. Farmer. How the hell can a regular Joe compete in the courtroom against these large corporations? Simply finding a lawyer that is willing to take the case is difficult a lot of the time because they know how hard it is going to be to fight these goliaths with their in-house legal staff. This creates an enormous chilling effect where a lot of lawsuits aren't even really fought, not because the case didn't have merit, but because they couldn't afford to make it in the first place.
I don't know how we solve that problem, but it needs solving. Our justice system is already ridiculously skewed towards the benefit of the wealthy, shit like this just tips the balance that much more.
So does the license agreement Monsanto must make people agree to require users to forfeit their right to sue and settle for arbitration like all the software companies are doing now? If not, I bet it's coming. That will solve their lawsuit problem once and for all.
Because there exist people that can't get vaccinated for various reasons, such as allergy or compromised immune system. Every person that buys into the anti-vaccine propaganda bullshit and doesn't have their children vaccinated weakens herd immunity. This means that the people with no other protection but herd immunity are being compromised by utter stupidity.
Ask most people that could have their children vaccinated but chose not to: "Would you allow your child to travel to a place where there is no herd immunity without vaccinating them first?" I have (I have several extended family members who are anti-vaccination fools) and almost every time they respond "Hell, no!" A few even wear their hypocrisy like a badge of honor..."I refuse to put my children through any risk of complication whatsoever since I know everyone else will risk their own children and my child will be safe anyway." They fully realize how herd immunity works, and that it's a shared risk, but they totally don't give a shit and are perfectly happy being selfish little fuckwits.
It's ridiculous how ignorant people are of history that we're going to end up having to suffer another major epidemic to squash this stupid anti-vaccination bullshit.
Netflix ought to send some representatives down to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make sure they get their honorary Oscar next year.
Steve Jobs contribution to music? What the hell has he done that's relevant to the Grammy's at all?
When's the Vatican going to beatify him? Saint Steve, bringer of attractive electronic devices...it's a miracle!!!!! Quick, start busing cripples to Cupertino! Behold the power of STEVE!!!!
We've all known these groups were anti-science. While seeing it spelled out on paper is amusing, and satisfying, I doubt that very many minds are going to be changed by this information. The people that populate and fund these groups ignore anything and everything that conflicts with their ideas as it is.
These people are used to the extreme mental acrobatics necessary to deny the reality right in front of them. This will be written off as "liberal lies and smear tactics" pretty much immediately. It's not so much that they believe the crap these groups spew, a lot of people simply take the opposite stance of their political opponents regardless. Since climate change is a "liberal" thing, it's all a lie, because all "liberals" are liars.
Still, like I said, it's nice to see what we've all already suspected confirmed in writing. These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit.
Unless you're from Atlantis, another planet, or the distant past/future, throwing the location of your birth around like it actually means a fucking thing is stupid. You can be proud of where you're from without demeaning every other location on the earth by thinking you're fucking special because of it.
It's like all the assholes out there that honestly believe the U.S. is somehow special and act accordingly. We're one nation of many; we all share this planet, and we're no better or worse than anyone else. That's not being unpatriotic; that's being fucking realistic. Mindless flag-wavers deserve all the mockery the receive...
After buying tons of CDs where it was obvious that the production quality was vastly different on the radio singles compared to the rest of the $20-fucking-dollar CDs a lot of the time (especially bad during the 90's), when Napster came around, I was done throwing money at the record industry.
That's not to say I don't support artists, I just refuse to give them money through their label. I've gone to many live shows, bought a lot of merchandise, even donated directly to some. I'll support an artist in any way that is possible without some Record Industry vampire fuck standing in between us.
Granted, my musical tastes have completely changed and I listen to very little major label music anymore, and thanks to the internet, there are tons of people out there giving great music away completely for free; you have to wade through some shit to find it, but then again, most of the stuff coming out of major labels these days is shit anyway. The RIAA is quickly becoming irrelevant, not because of piracy, but because artists don't need them anymore. People are getting huge online due to word of mouth. A friend forwarded me a video of a duo doing a cover of a Chris Brown song 9 months or so ago, and they were the musical guests on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. In less than a year they've gone from Youtube to NBC...it's not really my kind of music but it's impressive regardless.
Humanity was making music for thousands of years before the concept of a fucking record label even existed. I have a feeling that people will continue to make music long after they're gone. The only people terrified of a MAFIAA-less future is the MAFIAA itself.
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This "political BS" effects the livelihoods of many of the people that read /..
Honestly, I come here to read stories like this more than anything, because lord knows that the Mainstream Media doesn't give a fuck about covering this shit. We didn't even hear a peep about SOPA in the media until the fucking boycotts, months after it was making waves through the tech sites.
Although given the populace, the difference between 'riot' and 'armed rebellion' would be hard to distinguish.
You got that right. I don't think I've been to a more well-armed state. It would just be bad news all around...
Man, the MAFIAA is sure gonna be pissed about this!
With every passing day, they become more and more irrelevant, and that's just fine with me...
Anyone else disgusted?
Of course! The question is, what are people going to do about it? We can't vote our way out of this mess because becoming a part of the system requires one to be corrupted by it first. Boycotts are ineffective because many of these companies have so many millions of customers that it's virtually impossible to effect their bottom line (besides the fact that they just make up the difference by ripping off their remaining customers), and others are so deeply enmeshed with the government that it would be pretty much impossible to send a message there, like our DoD contractors.
I fully believe that there's going to be armed insurrections within a decade in this country, but there's still a lot of people out there that refuse to entertain the notion that there would be any justification for it. I can't tell you how often I hear people tell me that revolution is ridiculous because we're not being starved, raped, and murdered by warlords and dictators like the people of Africa and The Middle East. I just do not understand why so many people are so willing to accept a "long train of abuses and usurpations" as long as massive quantities of blood aren't being spilled. It's ridiculous that it's going to have to get to that point...as a nation our ignorance of history (even our own history, let alone the rest of the world) is deplorable. If more people were cognizant of it than we would be able to see the slippery slope we're rocketing down and how it's going to end before it gets to the point of massive bloodshed, but as education is dismissed by a large portion of this country as propaganda and lies, it'll probably never happen.
Alaska doesn't have a state sales tax at all, and any attempt to impose one would likely result in riots. Shit's already ridiculously inflated price-wise up there, and there are already lots of people living well below the poverty line (simply having indoor plumbing up there is considered a premium in a lot of places and jacks rents up), so a Federal sales tax would severely hurt them.
Good for you. I'm not trying to be facetious, I really mean it, because some of the repugnant shit I've read about as concerns unscrupulous collection agencies (people getting threatened over the phone, burly people showing up at a "debtors" doorstep demanding payment, little kids being told that mommy or daddy is a deadbeat loser) casts really negative aspersions on the field in my opinion.
I've rarely ever had a legitimate collections call, but boy have I had some people try to convince me (often in a very condescending and rude manner) that I owed them money for pretty nebulous shit.
So provide a number that is valid, but goes nowhere.
That's kinda what I do. I've been giving businesses that want my phone number (but don't need it for anything I deem worthy) my landline home phone number for years, and that line's been out of service since 2005.
I feel bad for whoever has that number now, though.
Half the time the people calling to collect a debt can't even produce proof that they are legally authorized to collect it.
First response to any collections call should always be, "I would like written proof that your organization owns this debt and are authorized to collect it." A lot of the time, you never hear from them again. I'm not gonna come right out and say they're scammer fucks, but it's funny that said proof almost never, ever, shows up...
That has nothing to do with the fact that an entire website was nuked off the face of the internet without any judicial oversight whatsoever.
If I get stopped and searched for no reason whatsoever, when the cop decides to let me go because he had no reason to stop me in the first place, should I just say "Well, he let me go, so all's well that end's well"? Come on. That's retarded.
There's a reason why we require court orders before police are just allowed to do whatever they fuck they want, and situations like this are precisely why.
Goddamn right.
I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm so fucking sick and tired of the shit my government is doing lately, particularly this shit. Since we obviously can't vote our way out of this crap (since all players are bought long before they even get their fucking name on a ballot), what's next? Half the people in this country don't even care that their rights are being shit upon and just want to go watch NASCAR or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The rest are split between the people that still have faith in their government (although I can't see how, not anymore) and those that think the whole fucking thing is FUBAR and gave up long ago.
This country is going to end up in civil war again. If I were a foreign business that had any type of connection to the United States, I would get the fuck out ASAP.
True, but they never were in the past, either, and people managed to get divorced just fine.
One of the realities of getting divorced is losing stuff. When my mother and father got divorced he lost hundreds of records in the process to her. However, given the fact that his marriage had failed, and facing the great reduction in the amount of time he would be able to spend with my brother and I, the last thing he gave a shit about at the time was his fucking records.
iTunes accounts and digital locker accounts and such may be relatively new wrinkles in divorces these days, but the courts have been splitting property up for decades. I'm sure the courts will make a determination as to their eProperty just the same as their physical property. He'll lose the iTunes account, she'll lose the Netflix account, life goes on...
I think the AC posing this question is worrying too much about what is, in the grand scheme of things, minutiae. If they can agree to an amicable split, great, if not, then it's lawyer time. Dividing digital assets really shouldn't be any more difficult than any other kind.
(Or they could, you know, just copy the shit and keep it on the hush. Who the hell would even know? This would be a complete non-issue to pretty much anyone I know...)
Yeah, really. I do not understand what the hell is so difficult about this. The media is trivial, everyone gets a copy, fucking done. The domain issue isn't even that complex...
It IS just 1's and 0's, after all. Copy, paste, than go get drunk and/or laid. Unless you're talking IP that is actually worth something, in which case, that's for your respective lawyers to scream at each other in a courtroom over.
It's so groundbreaking! So visionary! No one else had ever thought to do something like this before!!
Yeah, you say that now...
Hey, I think it's ridiculous on both counts. My point was, if Steve Jobs deserves a Grammy for iTunes, than the fellows behind Napster deserve one, too. If it weren't for them, most of us would likely still be going to the record store buying CD's at $20 a piece to this day. I'm sure the RIAA cries bitter tears into their cocaine over that fact, but it doesn't make their impact in music today any less than Steve's. Arguably it's much larger...they brought the concept to the masses and let the genie out of the bottle in the first place.
They're essentially giving him an award for doing what they refused to do themselves for years despite enormous demand from the public. It's not like getting music online was fucking groundbreaking, people had been doing that already for years when iTunes launched. So what was the Grammy-worthy contribution? Having enough capitol to force the labels to get behind him and eschew iTunes' competitors? Producing a piece of hardware that essentially forced people to use his music service, thus guaranteeing a customer right out of the box?
This was just another Steve Jobs circle-jerk. I'm not trying to diminish the man's accomplishments, but giving him a Grammy was fucking retarded. Might as well give him an Oscar for his contribution to film because he fucking bought Pixar back in 1986.
Well, if the friend is deceased, she might as well just block them, since I doubt they'll be sending any legitimate emails from beyond the grave. Probably be a better solution than being bummed out every time her friend emails her about male enhancement or hot christian singles.
There is a big difference between a farmer who may have some Monsanto crops on the fringes of his fields, and a guy whose entire crop is Monsanto (but who trying to claim it's "just from stray pollination").
Is there? It seems like Monsanto really doesn't care one way or the other; as far as they're concerned, the seed police return a positive hit, it's time to mobilize the lawyer brigade and litigate someone out of existence.
This is a big problem with the legal system in my opinion. These huge corporations can use their considerable wealth to basically destroy anyone with the temerity to not immediately fold on just the threat of litigation. Sure, there can be a judgement for damages and the cost of the defense down the road (years down the road in most cases) but these aren't criminal cases, these are civil matters, so the burden of retaining representation is wholly on John Q. Farmer. How the hell can a regular Joe compete in the courtroom against these large corporations? Simply finding a lawyer that is willing to take the case is difficult a lot of the time because they know how hard it is going to be to fight these goliaths with their in-house legal staff. This creates an enormous chilling effect where a lot of lawsuits aren't even really fought, not because the case didn't have merit, but because they couldn't afford to make it in the first place.
I don't know how we solve that problem, but it needs solving. Our justice system is already ridiculously skewed towards the benefit of the wealthy, shit like this just tips the balance that much more.
So does the license agreement Monsanto must make people agree to require users to forfeit their right to sue and settle for arbitration like all the software companies are doing now? If not, I bet it's coming. That will solve their lawsuit problem once and for all.
America! Fuck Yeah!
Because there exist people that can't get vaccinated for various reasons, such as allergy or compromised immune system. Every person that buys into the anti-vaccine propaganda bullshit and doesn't have their children vaccinated weakens herd immunity. This means that the people with no other protection but herd immunity are being compromised by utter stupidity.
Ask most people that could have their children vaccinated but chose not to: "Would you allow your child to travel to a place where there is no herd immunity without vaccinating them first?" I have (I have several extended family members who are anti-vaccination fools) and almost every time they respond "Hell, no!" A few even wear their hypocrisy like a badge of honor..."I refuse to put my children through any risk of complication whatsoever since I know everyone else will risk their own children and my child will be safe anyway." They fully realize how herd immunity works, and that it's a shared risk, but they totally don't give a shit and are perfectly happy being selfish little fuckwits.
It's ridiculous how ignorant people are of history that we're going to end up having to suffer another major epidemic to squash this stupid anti-vaccination bullshit.
Did you learn that at the Time Masheen?!?!!?
I know, right?
Netflix ought to send some representatives down to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make sure they get their honorary Oscar next year.
Oh, so his Grammy-worthy contribution to music was creating a fucking store? Wow...
Where's Shawn Fanning's Grammy? Or Sean Parker's? If it wasn't for Napster iTunes probably wouldn't even fucking exist.
Steve Jobs contribution to music? What the hell has he done that's relevant to the Grammy's at all?
When's the Vatican going to beatify him? Saint Steve, bringer of attractive electronic devices...it's a miracle!!!!! Quick, start busing cripples to Cupertino! Behold the power of STEVE!!!!
We've all known these groups were anti-science. While seeing it spelled out on paper is amusing, and satisfying, I doubt that very many minds are going to be changed by this information. The people that populate and fund these groups ignore anything and everything that conflicts with their ideas as it is.
These people are used to the extreme mental acrobatics necessary to deny the reality right in front of them. This will be written off as "liberal lies and smear tactics" pretty much immediately. It's not so much that they believe the crap these groups spew, a lot of people simply take the opposite stance of their political opponents regardless. Since climate change is a "liberal" thing, it's all a lie, because all "liberals" are liars.
Still, like I said, it's nice to see what we've all already suspected confirmed in writing. These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit.
No, it's stupid no matter where a person's from.
Unless you're from Atlantis, another planet, or the distant past/future, throwing the location of your birth around like it actually means a fucking thing is stupid. You can be proud of where you're from without demeaning every other location on the earth by thinking you're fucking special because of it.
It's like all the assholes out there that honestly believe the U.S. is somehow special and act accordingly. We're one nation of many; we all share this planet, and we're no better or worse than anyone else. That's not being unpatriotic; that's being fucking realistic. Mindless flag-wavers deserve all the mockery the receive...
After buying tons of CDs where it was obvious that the production quality was vastly different on the radio singles compared to the rest of the $20-fucking-dollar CDs a lot of the time (especially bad during the 90's), when Napster came around, I was done throwing money at the record industry.
That's not to say I don't support artists, I just refuse to give them money through their label. I've gone to many live shows, bought a lot of merchandise, even donated directly to some. I'll support an artist in any way that is possible without some Record Industry vampire fuck standing in between us.
Granted, my musical tastes have completely changed and I listen to very little major label music anymore, and thanks to the internet, there are tons of people out there giving great music away completely for free; you have to wade through some shit to find it, but then again, most of the stuff coming out of major labels these days is shit anyway. The RIAA is quickly becoming irrelevant, not because of piracy, but because artists don't need them anymore. People are getting huge online due to word of mouth. A friend forwarded me a video of a duo doing a cover of a Chris Brown song 9 months or so ago, and they were the musical guests on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. In less than a year they've gone from Youtube to NBC...it's not really my kind of music but it's impressive regardless.
Humanity was making music for thousands of years before the concept of a fucking record label even existed. I have a feeling that people will continue to make music long after they're gone. The only people terrified of a MAFIAA-less future is the MAFIAA itself.