it's a heck of a lot better than keeping IE hardwired into the operating system.
Errr, that's exactly what it is. They offer to remove the desktop shortcut and such, but all the files remain in place, just as executable and exploitable as before.
No, seriously. This isn't as some Slashdot geek, this is as a user.
Why does program X need to violate normal security principles? Imagine hiring an employee whose skills you need but who informs you that he'll only work for you if you can install binaries on your servers - which you are legally forbidden to inspect. It sounds silly there...
I'd rather my OS vendor took a tough pro-user stance. Not to mention Apple in a positive light, but by recompiling their libraries to break code which static linked to them they prevented a whole class of bugs that Microsoft eventually just had to upgrade to features.
Microsoft's UAC requires users to regularly solve impossible problems
Like, uh, what?
Like, uh, rolling the complex issue of trust, especially without proper audit trails, sandboxing, etc, into a simple 'Yes/No' question.
"Do you want to allow POTENTIALLY ANYTHING - note that if you say no you can't connect to your bank. Yes/No"
Well, since you obviously have all the answers... tell Microsoft... and be their greatest hero?
While it's true that if they simply saw the emperor had no clothes they'd be far better off, and it's true that many on Slashdot are qualified to point that out, it's not like simple exposure to the truth would do anything. A culture of willful ignorance is almost impossible to crack.
Besides, the end-user isn't Microsoft's customer. The MPAA, Dell, Adobe, etc are. Understanding that explains a lot about their choices.
It's because if enough people do something stupid it's not stupid, it's culture. Like religion. Or buying outside your means (banks or people).
If he (the anti-NSer) can't convince you to blindly trust JS then he has to deal with the uncomfortable fact that there IS a solution to not getting viruses - one that he is not doing adequately.
On the other hand, if he convinces you then you reinforce his "It's too big to handle so close your eyes" delusion. One day he'd wake up in bot-net of the week, shrug, and go back to sleep - warm with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
You spoil his blissful ignorance.
He finds your unwillingness to sell your safety for a few cheesy JS gimmicks threatening.
The actions of third-parties before the contract is negotiated creates a certain environment. In that environment certain contracts may (not) be enforceable.
A minimum of 5 minutes, with more contracts to read, details to enter, etc. For $10?
Maybe $10 just isn't worth as much to me as to you, because I'm with Batman. If I had more than two games it might be worth going through extra work...
as if you have have a constitutional right to the [...] games you consume every year without paying a dime.
So the retail purchase price I pay doesn't count?
if 10,000 copies of a game sell, but they go through a million hands due to rampant resales that the publishers/developers never see a cent of, well, there goes another dev
I can buy a newspaper and lend it to ten people at the office? I can buy a novel, or DVD, and do the same? Why aren't all the good newspapers, book publishers, and movie producers out of business?
Why should we think game publishers would be any different?
a REAL business model that doesn't [...] make the games industry completely unsustainable as a business.
Sell the games for appropriate prices, and have enough content to justify the prices.
If a game keeps someone's attention for months they aren't going to be able to loan it out. A good example of this is how in GTA the driving around is the fun, so people can just load the game and enjoy the game mechanic long after completing the missions. If someone loans out a GTA-type game it's not going to be soon enough to cut into your initial sales boom.
Or, make something small that could probably be beaten in an hour or two, but charge far less than $60 so there's less barrier to casual purchases. (Why wait to borrow it when it's so cheap?) And there's no desire to compensate for an overly high price by sharing so many people might not bother.
But if you prevent sharing unreasonably (DRM), breaking what I see as your side of copyright law (making the work available, in trade for my tax-funded support of your copyright), I'll simply crack it and treat it as if it were public domain.
Offer customers a fair value instead of whining about your sense of entitlement.
But you're right, there is an expectation. And it's not wrong. If you sit around and wait to be asked you're going to be asked by people with their own goals in mind. If someone tries to woo you and you want that behavior to continue (expensive meals, etc) then you need to consider what they're looking for.
It's pretty much like joining the host in whatever activity they have planned. You aren't required to play cards, or join their orgy, but they probably aren't going to invite you back if you didn't fit in.
Presumably they'd be quieter about the government-mandated thought-control edits.:)
But the question is a good one, books are hard to diff, especially if font/margin/etc have been changed to make it difficult to match text.
How do you know Mark Twain hasn't been changed, only recently, to be anti-racism? (After all, the moon is a ridiculous liberal myth.) Presumably someone trying to redact the past wouldn't blatantly rewrite up as down, going in one revision from pro-slavery to anti. Instead of changing the events drastically they'd probably choose subtly different adjectives with which to describe the events and how people saw them. Eventually, though no version was starkly at contrast with the previous one, the tone of the work could be changed until almost unrecognizable.
Consider how much of a change it made in the bible when they redacted that one line: "This story is fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is accidental." People suddenly started reading so much more into it.
Dead trees rot and fall apart - unlike your old Usenet posts the lies of the past fall into oblivion. People couldn't afford the cost or space of having every edition of a book. Now not only can we download every edition as easily as a single one, but we can view them in a diff'ing reader and automatically see one or more sets of differences at a time. (I spent a while at some university's website looking at scans of Hamlet, comparing old printings.)
Never before have we have the ability to be amateur sociologist/historians and analyze the versions of a work over time. Now Stalin's redacted photos are a great resource. People are freaked out about their tenuous hold (paper) on history slipping away but they're totally missing their opportunity to single-handedly build a collection of all human knowledge on a removable HD and how this transparency will keep us from being deceived in the future.
Printed copies should always exist [...] ensuring that power mongers [...] can't [...] make subtle changes
You're far safer with e-texts actually! You can hash (SHA, etc) a file instantly, and compare that hash to someone around the world quickly.
Imagine trying to look for a subtle comma-change in a printed book ("I helped my uncle Jack, off the horse"). It could totally change the meaning and yet be almost invisible, especially because once you knew how the sentence was meant to be you'd never notice the comma not matching. You can't diff dead trees.
Also, you can print an ebook. Once you've verified the hash and know it's correct.
But the purpose of copyright is to enrich the public domain, by offering authors a limited monopoly on their works. It's not intended to let you control who can read your work, merely to guarantee you whatever profit is to be had selling it.
but shouldn't that be my choice?
No. You already get paid for your words. Anything else merely lets you use copyright law in place of trademark law (Sega v Accolade), or post-facto NDAs for censorship (Scientology v World).
Once a movie like Little Black Sambo has been released it's in our best interests to not let it be hidden, which would censor our past, but copyright prevents this - even though the studio has declared no interest in profit by hiding the film.
However, I think it's too convenient that Google (or anyone for-profit) wants to do this. If it were the EFF, or the Library of Congress, or such, it'd be fine. Google really would seem to get the best of this situation.
But, it's more important that everything ever written, from the Weekly World News to Mein Kampf ends up online and searchable. Censorship, even weak or passive forms such as hiding now-embarrassing films, can't help anything. The world will look incredibly depressing if we hide all evidence of wrong-doing in the past - like this generation suddenly invented sex, drugs, and evil.
I've seen an almost even split in programmers, those who code everywhere and those who only code exactly what they're told to code. As one of the first sort, who is always making life easier with some new hack or utility, I can't imagine the second sort are one-for-one as good an employee as the others.
For some jobs a personal skill in the task is almost a detriment. I doubt McDonalds wants chefs because those chefs will make their own judgments instead of following the rules precisely. The few errors a chef could fix there would be offset by not having identified the problem and sending it back to HQ to get the rules fixed.
But a programmer... You want them to be able to make suggestions, and know when to take shortcuts. If you tried to micromanage your programmers, like McDonalds micromanages its cooks, you'd never get anything done. So you need people with a deeper understanding, and who've got experience trusting their instincts by writing programs without direct guidance. Experience with recognizing problems and fixing them.
And I simply do not believe you can have that understanding, and those skills, and use a computer on a regular basis without feeling the need to program something other than strictly what your boss asked for.
It's an odd passion for an activity that can be totally fulfilled at work, doing what other people want.
You can assume that the adult employee who still believes in Santa Claus is of sound mind and capable of doing good work if you want. For a burger flipper you might even be right...
None from the employee whose desk was searched. But plenty for what they find in the employee's desk, and on the walk over to it.
Who's to say the illegal porn in the employee's desk has his name on it? Maybe you were the one who loaded the printer and your prints are all over it.
Whereas if you say "No, if you don't have a warrant you'll need to get one because I *can't* consent to a search" they'll go away and may not return. And if they do suspect anything and don't go away, or come back, you're no worse off than before.
without first confirming it themselves or testing whether it's consistent with what they already know to be true.
I wouldn't believe one outlet, or one hundred, saying that New Orleans had been vaporized by aliens, because it wouldn't be consistent with anything else I've seen.
But being nearly sunk in a hurricane due to massive government incompetence, civilian apathy in the face of imminent danger, a total failure of untested emergency systems... That's pretty consistent.
You're argument is that you can develop a "skill" to see past the nonsense. I'm not so sure you can, short of going to the source yourself, which is likely too high of a burden.
You can certainly train yourself to recognize bogus or useless news more accurately. Sources don't make something believable, but a total lack of them makes it pretty unbelievable. Something that conveniently supports someone's political views is likely to be wrong, if only because they misread it, and you should consider their motives in what they forward.
Look for corroborating reports, not just repeat reports.
I agree on the difficulty. What do you do when you know there's nothing to do but that the patient won't accept it and will shop around until they find someone pushing something?
The best for that deluded person might be to give them a real placebo (ie, not a prescription med you just think isn't going to be effective but a real "sugar pill" known to be safe) because nothing else they get will be any better, but it establishes a bad precedent.
I'm very against quack remedies. If I believed in one I'd want someone to point it out. I complain to pharmacies about selling homeopathic crap. But that's just it - the crap is everywhere, even places that sell "real" medicine. What's someone to do if they're clueless and don't know it? Especially as proponents of quack medicine are so vocal - and the remedies sound great because they're told there are never any side effects from anything natural. It's like they need to be de-programmed, like a cultist. Presented with the evidence and given time to think, then freed to make their own choice.
I'd like a doctor who would say no where reasonable, but explain themselves. Depending on who I end up with I can either get any test or med I want even if anatomically impossible, or end up with the silent inflexible type who may or may not have reasons for their decisions but are incapable of explaining them.
Can you fire a patient? When you get someone who demands placebo-antibiotics sit them down and explain why that is more likely to hurt them and more likely to hurt everyone. If they go off and get antibiotics or such elsewhere after this simply don't see them again. Perhaps you'd get patients you could really work with and do more good, have more fun...
Then they'd just misspell words like spammers do, to avoid the filter. And do more annoying things, like sticking that in the middle of a real post they cut & pasted from some other thread.
No filter can get around this sort of thing because the trolls would just keep trying until they figured out what it didn't like. It's like watermarks - if there's a way to check for them there's a way to check if you've properly removed them.
In industries where there are identically jobs requires essentially the same skill and same work, it makes sense to set the wage per-job and per-experience and all sorts of things via unions.
The illusion this creates that there are equal employees, let alone all of them into one of a few slots, is very damaging. Far worse is that unions tend to base pay on seniority, not tested skills, performance reviews, etc. This kills people's drive and cheats not only the good employees who'd be worth more, but also the company who only gets as much out of them as from an average employee.
It's a problem where the industry is dominated by a union to the point where people can't make the choice not to participate. Movies seem to be like this.
Screen actors got ripped off badly by studios for the first 60 years of their existence. There are reruns on TV Land that people still watch that the actors[/etc] don't make a penny from.
There are antiques selling for a fortune, none of which goes to the designer, worker, or supply chain. We don't call it a rip-off because it was a voluntary trade, even if in retrospect it turned out much better for one person than another.
I'm not aware of any guild that operates the way you think a photography guild would operate, by setting a minimum price on sold goods.
In fact, that would probably be a violation of anti-trust laws.
Yes. But that doesn't stop photographers used to this gravy train from berating people for selling below their "fair" price.
I release many of my photos under permissive licenses because they don't represent a lot of work to me. Some I might be able to charge for, and sure some company could afford to pay, but why should I jack up prices for some third-party (their customers) just because I could?
In photography the photographer owns the copyright to the photos you've paid them to take, by default. It's legal, but it's misleading and imho greedy. The customer is the one putting out the money to finance the shot, all the risk is theirs, why should the photographer get to keep potentially 99% of the value?
Technically programming works the same way. I own the copyrights to my programs even if I wrote them for a client, unless they specify otherwise which few do. I still make sure my clients end up with at least a perpetual license. (An actual exclusive copyright would be unreasonable because much of the code would on any job is my pre-existing library code.)
Watching the threads where old pro photogs harass newbies with digital cameras for killing prices it's a lot like watching unions scream at "scabs".
Harassing people like that might be reasonable if the union were saving lives. But I've seen, personally, more anti-social behavior from unions than not.
Transit workers in my city shut down most of the transit for over a month, for a wage dispute when they already made nearly double the average non-union wage for those positions. Worse, they blockaded independent business who tried to provide an alternative by renting tour buses.
I talked to a few workers who were picketing around the closed transit stations. I told them that most of the transit users are in the lower wage brackets - earning far less than them. They were making people who earned literally a third of what they made, pay much more to get to work, lose jobs, etc.
I never got one iota of compassion for anyone else from these people. They had a legal right to block our way and that was the best and only thing they could say to justify their behavior. Like if it were legal to bulldoze my house to build a swimming pool for theirs simply because of a surveying error, that they would.
And don't go anywhere the porn images in your browser cache (even banner ads, etc) are illegal.
Our children (16) are another country's young adults, and some tyrannical states think people are never able to consent to having their nude picture taken regardless of what we think.
If we're trying to do what's best for society why don't we let the artificial news market die and simply setup an organization like the BBC.
If it can't be done profitably and yet we all insist on doing it then it sounds like a fit for a co-op, or government project. Not run for profit, but because we think free news is more valuable than some amount of tax money.
Maybe the AP is bloated. We'd never know if we simply gave them welfare (like our airlines, auto companies, farmers, etc... ugh!) We'll find out the value of the news when they and other companies compete while trying to claw expenses down. It's a global economy - if you can't do it there's someone hungry who'd like to try.
Is the company misrepresenting themselves as being the original witnesses? Or are they just not pointing that out? AP customers should just say "Straight from AP - faster and more likely to be correct".
But the success of AP and their business model isn't relevant. It's a free market. If the current model isn't profitable let companies adjust. Nobody promises you you'll have the same job in fifty years, so why should we do that for companies?
Think about the hassle this law will cause. A whole new type of intellectual property with its own ever-lengthening duration. More laws, more lawyers. More corporate welfare, more stringent calls for further protectionism.
If you want to increase our tax burden and complicate our lives over this why not just create something like the BBC and we can do our own news collection instead of being at the mercy of corporate providers.
Slashdot Mirror
it's a heck of a lot better than keeping IE hardwired into the operating system.
Errr, that's exactly what it is. They offer to remove the desktop shortcut and such, but all the files remain in place, just as executable and exploitable as before.
No, seriously. This isn't as some Slashdot geek, this is as a user.
Why does program X need to violate normal security principles? Imagine hiring an employee whose skills you need but who informs you that he'll only work for you if you can install binaries on your servers - which you are legally forbidden to inspect. It sounds silly there...
I'd rather my OS vendor took a tough pro-user stance. Not to mention Apple in a positive light, but by recompiling their libraries to break code which static linked to them they prevented a whole class of bugs that Microsoft eventually just had to upgrade to features.
Microsoft's UAC requires users to regularly solve impossible problems
Like, uh, what?
Like, uh, rolling the complex issue of trust, especially without proper audit trails, sandboxing, etc, into a simple 'Yes/No' question.
"Do you want to allow POTENTIALLY ANYTHING - note that if you say no you can't connect to your bank. Yes/No"
Well, since you obviously have all the answers ... tell Microsoft ... and be their greatest hero?
While it's true that if they simply saw the emperor had no clothes they'd be far better off, and it's true that many on Slashdot are qualified to point that out, it's not like simple exposure to the truth would do anything. A culture of willful ignorance is almost impossible to crack.
Besides, the end-user isn't Microsoft's customer. The MPAA, Dell, Adobe, etc are. Understanding that explains a lot about their choices.
It's because if enough people do something stupid it's not stupid, it's culture. Like religion. Or buying outside your means (banks or people).
If he (the anti-NSer) can't convince you to blindly trust JS then he has to deal with the uncomfortable fact that there IS a solution to not getting viruses - one that he is not doing adequately.
On the other hand, if he convinces you then you reinforce his "It's too big to handle so close your eyes" delusion. One day he'd wake up in bot-net of the week, shrug, and go back to sleep - warm with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
You spoil his blissful ignorance.
He finds your unwillingness to sell your safety for a few cheesy JS gimmicks threatening.
The actions of third-parties before the contract is negotiated creates a certain environment. In that environment certain contracts may (not) be enforceable.
But yeah, third-parties post-sale, no.
Sure, I could have gotten more by selling them on eBay
But then you'd have been using eBay... I hear you.
A minimum of 5 minutes, with more contracts to read, details to enter, etc. For $10?
Maybe $10 just isn't worth as much to me as to you, because I'm with Batman. If I had more than two games it might be worth going through extra work...
Whooosh.
I don't think writing a bad review of a game is the same as taking a copy w/o paying for it
It is as much as copyright violation is stealing. Which is to say, not at all.
Yes, the company might be out a bunch of money, but stealing is a specific crime. Burning their offices down would be arson, not theft.
Maybe you could work in car theft?
No, car theft and software piracy really have very little in common. You do seem somewhat confused.
as if you have have a constitutional right to the [...] games you consume every year without paying a dime.
So the retail purchase price I pay doesn't count?
if 10,000 copies of a game sell, but they go through a million hands due to rampant resales that the publishers/developers never see a cent of, well, there goes another dev
I can buy a newspaper and lend it to ten people at the office? I can buy a novel, or DVD, and do the same? Why aren't all the good newspapers, book publishers, and movie producers out of business?
Why should we think game publishers would be any different?
a REAL business model that doesn't [...] make the games industry completely unsustainable as a business.
Sell the games for appropriate prices, and have enough content to justify the prices.
If a game keeps someone's attention for months they aren't going to be able to loan it out. A good example of this is how in GTA the driving around is the fun, so people can just load the game and enjoy the game mechanic long after completing the missions. If someone loans out a GTA-type game it's not going to be soon enough to cut into your initial sales boom.
Or, make something small that could probably be beaten in an hour or two, but charge far less than $60 so there's less barrier to casual purchases. (Why wait to borrow it when it's so cheap?) And there's no desire to compensate for an overly high price by sharing so many people might not bother.
But if you prevent sharing unreasonably (DRM), breaking what I see as your side of copyright law (making the work available, in trade for my tax-funded support of your copyright), I'll simply crack it and treat it as if it were public domain.
Offer customers a fair value instead of whining about your sense of entitlement.
It's totally fair.
But you're right, there is an expectation. And it's not wrong. If you sit around and wait to be asked you're going to be asked by people with their own goals in mind. If someone tries to woo you and you want that behavior to continue (expensive meals, etc) then you need to consider what they're looking for.
It's pretty much like joining the host in whatever activity they have planned. You aren't required to play cards, or join their orgy, but they probably aren't going to invite you back if you didn't fit in.
Presumably they'd be quieter about the government-mandated thought-control edits. :)
But the question is a good one, books are hard to diff, especially if font/margin/etc have been changed to make it difficult to match text.
How do you know Mark Twain hasn't been changed, only recently, to be anti-racism? (After all, the moon is a ridiculous liberal myth.) Presumably someone trying to redact the past wouldn't blatantly rewrite up as down, going in one revision from pro-slavery to anti. Instead of changing the events drastically they'd probably choose subtly different adjectives with which to describe the events and how people saw them. Eventually, though no version was starkly at contrast with the previous one, the tone of the work could be changed until almost unrecognizable.
Consider how much of a change it made in the bible when they redacted that one line: "This story is fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is accidental." People suddenly started reading so much more into it.
Dead trees rot and fall apart - unlike your old Usenet posts the lies of the past fall into oblivion. People couldn't afford the cost or space of having every edition of a book. Now not only can we download every edition as easily as a single one, but we can view them in a diff'ing reader and automatically see one or more sets of differences at a time. (I spent a while at some university's website looking at scans of Hamlet, comparing old printings.)
Never before have we have the ability to be amateur sociologist/historians and analyze the versions of a work over time. Now Stalin's redacted photos are a great resource. People are freaked out about their tenuous hold (paper) on history slipping away but they're totally missing their opportunity to single-handedly build a collection of all human knowledge on a removable HD and how this transparency will keep us from being deceived in the future.
Printed copies should always exist [...] ensuring that power mongers [...] can't [...] make subtle changes
You're far safer with e-texts actually! You can hash (SHA, etc) a file instantly, and compare that hash to someone around the world quickly.
Imagine trying to look for a subtle comma-change in a printed book ("I helped my uncle Jack, off the horse"). It could totally change the meaning and yet be almost invisible, especially because once you knew how the sentence was meant to be you'd never notice the comma not matching. You can't diff dead trees.
Also, you can print an ebook. Once you've verified the hash and know it's correct.
if I write a book, I want to be in control
Yeah, we know.
But the purpose of copyright is to enrich the public domain, by offering authors a limited monopoly on their works. It's not intended to let you control who can read your work, merely to guarantee you whatever profit is to be had selling it.
but shouldn't that be my choice?
No. You already get paid for your words. Anything else merely lets you use copyright law in place of trademark law (Sega v Accolade), or post-facto NDAs for censorship (Scientology v World).
Once a movie like Little Black Sambo has been released it's in our best interests to not let it be hidden, which would censor our past, but copyright prevents this - even though the studio has declared no interest in profit by hiding the film.
However, I think it's too convenient that Google (or anyone for-profit) wants to do this. If it were the EFF, or the Library of Congress, or such, it'd be fine. Google really would seem to get the best of this situation.
But, it's more important that everything ever written, from the Weekly World News to Mein Kampf ends up online and searchable. Censorship, even weak or passive forms such as hiding now-embarrassing films, can't help anything. The world will look incredibly depressing if we hide all evidence of wrong-doing in the past - like this generation suddenly invented sex, drugs, and evil.
I've seen an almost even split in programmers, those who code everywhere and those who only code exactly what they're told to code. As one of the first sort, who is always making life easier with some new hack or utility, I can't imagine the second sort are one-for-one as good an employee as the others.
For some jobs a personal skill in the task is almost a detriment. I doubt McDonalds wants chefs because those chefs will make their own judgments instead of following the rules precisely. The few errors a chef could fix there would be offset by not having identified the problem and sending it back to HQ to get the rules fixed.
But a programmer... You want them to be able to make suggestions, and know when to take shortcuts. If you tried to micromanage your programmers, like McDonalds micromanages its cooks, you'd never get anything done. So you need people with a deeper understanding, and who've got experience trusting their instincts by writing programs without direct guidance. Experience with recognizing problems and fixing them.
And I simply do not believe you can have that understanding, and those skills, and use a computer on a regular basis without feeling the need to program something other than strictly what your boss asked for.
It's an odd passion for an activity that can be totally fulfilled at work, doing what other people want.
And yet, if all of your coding is work related how much passion for coding can you have?
You can assume that the adult employee who still believes in Santa Claus is of sound mind and capable of doing good work if you want. For a burger flipper you might even be right...
None from the employee whose desk was searched. But plenty for what they find in the employee's desk, and on the walk over to it.
Who's to say the illegal porn in the employee's desk has his name on it? Maybe you were the one who loaded the printer and your prints are all over it.
Whereas if you say "No, if you don't have a warrant you'll need to get one because I *can't* consent to a search" they'll go away and may not return. And if they do suspect anything and don't go away, or come back, you're no worse off than before.
without first confirming it themselves or testing whether it's consistent with what they already know to be true.
I wouldn't believe one outlet, or one hundred, saying that New Orleans had been vaporized by aliens, because it wouldn't be consistent with anything else I've seen.
But being nearly sunk in a hurricane due to massive government incompetence, civilian apathy in the face of imminent danger, a total failure of untested emergency systems... That's pretty consistent.
You're argument is that you can develop a "skill" to see past the nonsense. I'm not so sure you can, short of going to the source yourself, which is likely too high of a burden.
You can certainly train yourself to recognize bogus or useless news more accurately. Sources don't make something believable, but a total lack of them makes it pretty unbelievable. Something that conveniently supports someone's political views is likely to be wrong, if only because they misread it, and you should consider their motives in what they forward.
Look for corroborating reports, not just repeat reports.
I agree on the difficulty. What do you do when you know there's nothing to do but that the patient won't accept it and will shop around until they find someone pushing something?
The best for that deluded person might be to give them a real placebo (ie, not a prescription med you just think isn't going to be effective but a real "sugar pill" known to be safe) because nothing else they get will be any better, but it establishes a bad precedent.
I'm very against quack remedies. If I believed in one I'd want someone to point it out. I complain to pharmacies about selling homeopathic crap. But that's just it - the crap is everywhere, even places that sell "real" medicine. What's someone to do if they're clueless and don't know it? Especially as proponents of quack medicine are so vocal - and the remedies sound great because they're told there are never any side effects from anything natural. It's like they need to be de-programmed, like a cultist. Presented with the evidence and given time to think, then freed to make their own choice.
I'd like a doctor who would say no where reasonable, but explain themselves. Depending on who I end up with I can either get any test or med I want even if anatomically impossible, or end up with the silent inflexible type who may or may not have reasons for their decisions but are incapable of explaining them.
Can you fire a patient? When you get someone who demands placebo-antibiotics sit them down and explain why that is more likely to hurt them and more likely to hurt everyone. If they go off and get antibiotics or such elsewhere after this simply don't see them again. Perhaps you'd get patients you could really work with and do more good, have more fun...
Then they'd just misspell words like spammers do, to avoid the filter. And do more annoying things, like sticking that in the middle of a real post they cut & pasted from some other thread.
No filter can get around this sort of thing because the trolls would just keep trying until they figured out what it didn't like. It's like watermarks - if there's a way to check for them there's a way to check if you've properly removed them.
In industries where there are identically jobs requires essentially the same skill and same work, it makes sense to set the wage per-job and per-experience and all sorts of things via unions.
The illusion this creates that there are equal employees, let alone all of them into one of a few slots, is very damaging. Far worse is that unions tend to base pay on seniority, not tested skills, performance reviews, etc. This kills people's drive and cheats not only the good employees who'd be worth more, but also the company who only gets as much out of them as from an average employee.
It's a problem where the industry is dominated by a union to the point where people can't make the choice not to participate. Movies seem to be like this.
Screen actors got ripped off badly by studios for the first 60 years of their existence. There are reruns on TV Land that people still watch that the actors[/etc] don't make a penny from.
There are antiques selling for a fortune, none of which goes to the designer, worker, or supply chain. We don't call it a rip-off because it was a voluntary trade, even if in retrospect it turned out much better for one person than another.
I'm not aware of any guild that operates the way you think a photography guild would operate, by setting a minimum price on sold goods.
In fact, that would probably be a violation of anti-trust laws.
Yes. But that doesn't stop photographers used to this gravy train from berating people for selling below their "fair" price.
I release many of my photos under permissive licenses because they don't represent a lot of work to me. Some I might be able to charge for, and sure some company could afford to pay, but why should I jack up prices for some third-party (their customers) just because I could?
In photography the photographer owns the copyright to the photos you've paid them to take, by default. It's legal, but it's misleading and imho greedy. The customer is the one putting out the money to finance the shot, all the risk is theirs, why should the photographer get to keep potentially 99% of the value?
Technically programming works the same way. I own the copyrights to my programs even if I wrote them for a client, unless they specify otherwise which few do. I still make sure my clients end up with at least a perpetual license. (An actual exclusive copyright would be unreasonable because much of the code would on any job is my pre-existing library code.)
Watching the threads where old pro photogs harass newbies with digital cameras for killing prices it's a lot like watching unions scream at "scabs".
Harassing people like that might be reasonable if the union were saving lives. But I've seen, personally, more anti-social behavior from unions than not.
Transit workers in my city shut down most of the transit for over a month, for a wage dispute when they already made nearly double the average non-union wage for those positions. Worse, they blockaded independent business who tried to provide an alternative by renting tour buses.
I talked to a few workers who were picketing around the closed transit stations. I told them that most of the transit users are in the lower wage brackets - earning far less than them. They were making people who earned literally a third of what they made, pay much more to get to work, lose jobs, etc.
I never got one iota of compassion for anyone else from these people. They had a legal right to block our way and that was the best and only thing they could say to justify their behavior. Like if it were legal to bulldoze my house to build a swimming pool for theirs simply because of a surveying error, that they would.
And don't go anywhere the porn images in your browser cache (even banner ads, etc) are illegal.
Our children (16) are another country's young adults, and some tyrannical states think people are never able to consent to having their nude picture taken regardless of what we think.
But if you rewrote someone else's findings to be understandable you'd probably get published, if your work was helpful.
If we're trying to do what's best for society why don't we let the artificial news market die and simply setup an organization like the BBC.
If it can't be done profitably and yet we all insist on doing it then it sounds like a fit for a co-op, or government project. Not run for profit, but because we think free news is more valuable than some amount of tax money.
Maybe the AP is bloated. We'd never know if we simply gave them welfare (like our airlines, auto companies, farmers, etc... ugh!) We'll find out the value of the news when they and other companies compete while trying to claw expenses down. It's a global economy - if you can't do it there's someone hungry who'd like to try.
Is the company misrepresenting themselves as being the original witnesses? Or are they just not pointing that out? AP customers should just say "Straight from AP - faster and more likely to be correct".
But the success of AP and their business model isn't relevant. It's a free market. If the current model isn't profitable let companies adjust. Nobody promises you you'll have the same job in fifty years, so why should we do that for companies?
Think about the hassle this law will cause. A whole new type of intellectual property with its own ever-lengthening duration. More laws, more lawyers. More corporate welfare, more stringent calls for further protectionism.
If you want to increase our tax burden and complicate our lives over this why not just create something like the BBC and we can do our own news collection instead of being at the mercy of corporate providers.