...why not just forbid Dish from carrying their channel?
(Oh, yes, because they can't. Dish's HD DVRs can take an ATSC signal and record from that, and any home that's capable of erecting a satellite dish can erect a normal UHF/VHF antenna too. That's one thing I really rather like about Dish Network.)
Still, they could try, and then Dish subscribers - who don't want to erect an additional antenna - would be denied access to great shows like House, 24, Dollhouse, Terminator: Sarach Connor Chronicles, Firefly, Dark Angel... {insert rest of updated Family Guy skit here}
Considering the subject line I submitted for this story was way more hysterical, I guess yes. I can't defend, as the submitter, the CEO/CIO thing, I screwed up there, and I'm not quire sure why because I still have the tab up and it clearly says "CIO".
1. Bing and Google don't, by default, tie searches to an individual. (Yes, I know, they can, you can log in, and sometimes are already, but you can use both services with cookies turned off without problems.)
2. Siri searches your personal information. At least, that's what I figure from the ads. If Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson can cancel his golf game by telling Siri to cancel it, then clearly Siri knows SLMFJ's schedule, amongst other things. Google and Bing, unless your business uses Office 365 or Google Apps (in which case...), only has limited personal information on you.
I'm not arguing they're not potential security holes, but they're not in the same ballpark as Siri. If you're talking to Siri all the time, in order to modify your work schedules, send emails, etc, then, well, you are passing much, much, more information to Apple.
I kinda felt bad for the editor on that one. It felt like some school yard debate that ends with the loser saying "Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Yeah? Well, uh, at least I don't have a gay haircut".
Come to think of it, I'm a little concerned our next President might be someone who once did actually debate like that.
If he finds the right swaps, then it's not going to be a problem. The descriptions are rarely that informative, and it's quite possible that "LEGO SW MIL.FALC" replaced by "LEGO 700PC SET" would be missed by someone trying to ring up items in a hurry, especially given you're not going to be expecting the wrong barcode to be scanned. You have some big box of lego, are you really going to look at it that hard?
Now, some Scented Holiday Candles being rung up for a dollar on the other hand...
It still utterly bewilders me that Apple was the one of the bunch that survived, but I suspect at least a part of it was building up a substantial cash base which wasn't the case with the others.
And I continue to remain upset about what happened to Commodore and what happened to the Amiga afterwards. But if I wasn't, I wouldn't be a geek, or human.
Still, my experience of buying Amigas was:
1. Nobody at University understood why I'd get one. C'mon, the professors say get Macs! And the rest of the world are getting PCs! Get a PC, I'll copy Zortech C++ for you!
2. Wait, you bought a HARD DRIVE for that Amiga? Isn't that, like, a games console or something? What do you need a hard disk for?
Now, true, this was Britain, but the "serious" computing media in Britain in 1990/1 was comprised of "Personal Computer World" and "Computer Shopper". Of the two, the former had apparently made a policy decision to ignore virtually anything that wasn't a PC clone since the late eighties, with the occasional exception of mentioning/reviewing something Acorn had done. And CS had little "sections" for non-PCs, which felt like little ghettos. Otherwise, both papers, month after month after month, were PC only, and generally computer reviews had titles like "100 identical PC clones compared!" Imported copies of Byte were slightly more agnostic, but not much.
So I did feel like the market was pushing proprietary alternatives out. Computers that didn't have ISA slots and processors ending in "86" were considered toys or worse. Apple got some cred purely because of academic support.
And I think you saw some of that on Usenet, in groups like comp.sys.amiga.*, where Amigans were loud and, well, a little defensive most of the time. We knew we had a fantastic, beautiful, system. We knew it was light years ahead of what the rest of the world was using, even despite the problems Commodore was having. And yet the rest of the world simply... ignored it. And seemed to be ignoring it primarily because nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM or Microsoft.
Well, at this point it's marketing driven. Yes, technically you can attach both to a TV. No, in practice, you're not encouraged to play games on a TV screen on them.
Regular computers can generally be attached to a TV these days too (what doesn't have HDMI?) but they're not sold as such.
Well, hold on, Because with the exception of Apple, none of these companies has a complete range of devices in the space that Microsoft operates in.
Microsoft has a (mediocre) presence on tablets (awful, awful, tablets right now, but Windows 6150 might change that.) That's the one space all the companies above seem to have a presence.
Microsoft has a presence on mobile phones. Google and Apple do too. Amazon doesn't.
Microsoft has its own PC operating system. Apple does too. Google... uh, kinda. Well, seriously, who uses ChromeOS? Right now the most likely "Google OS that has something to do with desktops" is probably the Android part of Ubuntu for Android, and that's not even out yet. Amazon? Nope.
Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.
Now, I know that all three Microsoft rivals could potentially put something together, but that's a huge amount of work. I also know that some people think that tablets will displace desktops in the near future. Those people are what we in the business call "idiots".
Finally, Microsoft has the ability to fix the problem if, for some reason, those three actually start making a dent due to them owning hardware and software businesses. Microsoft could probably fairly easily get away with buying Nokia right now, for example.
Soups to nuts ecosystems are, perhaps, a little over-rated anyway. That's what we had during the eighties, with the exception of Microsoft's platforms.
We had: Atari. Commodore. DEC. Radio Shack. Sinclair. Wang.
However great the above businesses' products (Amiga! Amiga!) they (or at least their personal computer vertical businesses) were pushed six feet under by a market that didn't want anything that wasn't industry standard.
The Federal upper limit on garnishing is: (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/if-wages-are-garnished-rights-33050.html):
For court judgments, the amount that can be garnished is limited to 25% of your disposable earnings (what's left after mandatory deductions) or the amount by which your wages exceed 30 times the minimum wage, whichever is lower. Some states set a lower percentage limit for how much of your wages can be garnished.
So your $200 thing is basically bullshit. The only way a court is going to leave him with $200 per week is if his salary is $266.67 per week.
Paying 25% of your salary to the RIAA for the rest of your life (assuming he spends the rest of his life earning minimum wage and doesn't get something half decent) may suck, but it aint slavery, and it's not going to stop him living a normal life.
You can NOT live on $200 a month, you can't go where you please on $200 a month. You can't get any job you like with only $200 a month, lacking a car to drive there and bus fare to ride there, not to mention a phone to receive the job call back.
He will have his home taken if he owns one to pay the debt. $200 a month will not pay for rent along with electric.
All of which is why it won't be "net income minus $200 per month". Garnishment is almost never at these ridiculous levels you claim are standard, but are actually the upper limits. It's in no-one's interests for it to be.
Bankruptcy won't wipe away the judgement, but it will cover his existing debts, so it'll be part of the process of getting Tenenbaum financially in better health.
The only failure here is you, for apologizing for not doing your job. Your argument basically boils down to "I want a group of seven unelected lawyers to overturn any law I disagree with, which I'll define as "tyranny" simply because I don't like it.".
Here's an idea, stop swearing at people who give you the bad news and involve yourself in democracy. Oh, wait, that's too much like hard work!
Umm, no. The courts are there to block the sewage congress is likely to spew from destroying the fundamental rights as defined by the US Constitution.
Yes, but that's not the same thing as protecting us from Congress. Congress has the constitutional right to pass a lot of "sewage" that you're constitutionally obligated to swim in.
That's why elections matter. That's why civic responsibility matters. If you're going to sit there and expect the Supreme Court to bail you out each time your representative votes for jailing people over possession of a plant, requiring babysitters caught watching porn when their charge is asleep slander themselves in front of their neighbors for the rest of their lives, or, for that matter, voting to approve wars with countries which will result in more hatred towards the US, and nothing positive, then you're evading your responsibilities.
And this wasn't an excessive fine. It was damages, and the damages awarded were not higher than typical debt incurred through blameless activity by an innocent person today. Yes, the damages suck, but it's not as if Tenenbaum didn't go out of his way to fuck himself over with this one. Most people would have stopped committing infringement and accepted the relatively low settlement offer in the same circumstances.
But, hey, civil responsibility has that awful "R" word in it. Let's hope seven old people can swoop in and save us by overriding the democratic process!
My post did address the 8th Amendment argument. No, commonsense does not say that damages that are no worse than debts an ordinary person might run up through no fault of their own is "excessive".
If you're not going to read what I wrote, don't respond to it as if you did.
So your argument is that a lifetime of at least partial slavery is not cruel and unusual punishment? I'd much rather have 30 days in jail than a verdict that can never be repaid.
No, that's not my argument, because that's not what Tenenbaum is facing. He's facing a great big fine, which will either be partially or wholly paid off using bankruptcy, and/or wage garnishment.
He'll be able to pick any job for the rest of his life (or no job), and he'll be allowed to go where-ever he pleases.
If indeed the sentence was "You shall become "at least a partial" slave for the rest of your life", then, yeah, that would be cruel and unusual. But that really would have to involve actual, physical, slavery, not superficial slavery like "Having to pay $100 a month to a court appointed trust". For example, it might mean something like he'd have to spend several days a week, for the rest of his life, working at Lars Ulrich's house, doing whatever Ulrich demands of him, with Lars having the right to prevent him from leaving during that time, and possibly being shackled and denied basic bodily requirements.
But that's not the case. Tenenbaum's in a position that many people get into who haven't committed any crimes get into. He has debts that are very high. So do people who lost their jobs and become unable to afford their mortgages on now underwater properties. So are people who contracted cancer and have whopping create health care bills to settle.
And come to think of it, there are worse penalties out there for quite middling crimes. Should peeing behind a bush really result in a sentence that you have to register with the police whenever you move and tell the neighbors you're a "sex offender" for the rest of your life? I'd rather have the $700k fine, thankeweverymuch. Given the scales of what courts consider not cruel and unusual, Tenenbaum's fine hasn't left the pitcher's hand, let alone made it out of the ballpark.
And unlike those people, Tenenbaum got there deliberately. He knew the law, he broke it anyway. He probably thought he wasn't going to get court.
Is $700,000 a fair amount? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. In this context it doesn't matter, in this case. Because in this case we're not talking about fairness. We're talking about what we should expect the courts to overrule as unconstitutional.
The courts aren't there to wipe Congress's ass for them. If Congress believes the only way to protect copyrights is to have these kinds of fines, then that's Congress's decision, the Congress you elected. Your job, as a citizen, is to guide Congress.
If you believe the fine was too much, then you failed in your job.
The Supreme Court's job is not to protect you from the democratic system. If you don't like the current set of laws, running around like an over-caffeinated teabagger shouting "Unconstitutional! Unconstitutional!" isn't going to help.
What constitutes unconstitutional is relatively narrowly defined. Tenenbaum violated laws that have been on the books, in one shape or form, for centuries and are expressly blessed by the constitution. He did so knowingly, willingly, and unnecessarily. He may possibly have been unaware that the violations he committed would result in such a large financial penalty, but it's not as if he's going to suffer prison time, death, or injury as a result of this judgment. At worst, he's going to have to declare bankruptcy, and possibly have his wages garnished for the rest of his life.
Plenty of people suffer worse without breaking any laws. People are losing their homes because of a combination of a loss of income as they lost their jobs and their mortgages being too high. Others are going to suffer the same fate as Tenenbaum not because they did anything wrong, but because the cancer they've contracted that their insurance won't fully cover will result in a seven digit debt.
The Supreme Court ruling on this always struck me as somewhat ludicrous. If Congress does not have the right to set ballpark figures for fines to deter people from violating a law it has a constitutional mandate to pass, then what rights does it have?
You want to change things, get more active in your democratic system. That's it. That's about your only option. That was always your option. You just couldn't be bothered. It's so much easier to whine about how "unfair" everything is, and expect seven judges to agree with you and strike something down as "unconstitutional" because it violates the "It's so unfair, OMG, I didn't ask to be born, you people suck" amendment than it is to actually push for the laws you want.
Why would they be more likely to take a car rather than a plane/bus/train?
- People take trains because they want to ride in comfort.
- People fly because the distance involved is too far to travel via a slower form of transport
- People take buses long distance because they can't afford to own a car in the first place.
- People take buses short distances because they're more convenient than trying to navigate a car through traffic, and relatively stress free.
I'm utterly baffled that anyone thinks that the thing that's holding people off from driving is the cost. Even at today's prices, it's cheaper for me to drive to New York from here in Florida (as in, I've done it) than to travel by plane or train. I've done it twice, once with my wife and once not, solely because of specific route requirements. It takes too long, and is too uncomfortable, even in a nice big mini-van, to be a normal mode of transport.
My time is valuable. My control over my stress level is valuable. My safety is valuable. Even if the fuel were free, I wouldn't friggin drive more than a hundred miles if I had a choice in the matter, and I wouldn't regularly drive at all. Unfortunately, idiotic US planning and zoning policies mean I don't have that choice 99% of the time.
MySpace failed because someone (whose surname starts with the letter Z, if that's a clue) figured out a way or two in which it could be bettered and, combined with competent marketing, beat it. That's it.
Is Facebook perfect? Is that your argument? Are you seriously telling us nobody out there could possibly come up with anything better than Facebook, that it's the pinnacle of perfection, and there's no entity out there that couldn't come up with something a zillion times better?
If Google had hit upon the right marketing for Google+, which is objectively a better social networking platform, Facebook would be toast right now. Fortunately for Facebook, Google hasn't - yet - figured out the marketing. Fortunately for Facebook, the little third party bolt-ons to Twitter haven't yet turned the microblogging system into a substantial enough replacement that people have completely left Facebook. Fortunately for Facebook, MySpace was bought by the Prince of Darkness (No, not Karl Rove, the other one), and didn't get the chance to fix itself.
If Facebook can replace MySpace, then the only way Facebook can not be vulnerable is if it's perfect. It's not. It's not even close to perfect. And quite honestly, if Google hadn't messed up Google+'s marketing, with the obsession with "real names", the early lack of functionality, and the assumption that copying the invitation model would somehow solve the "What's ??? in the three step model" conundrum, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and Facebook would be on the phone to David Boies, not having an IPO.
Why the hell would anyone drive more just because the price of fuel is lower? People drive largely because they have to, not because they want to.
I would insert an analogy here, but the fact of the matter is I have several thousand in mind right now, and it's proving impossible to choose between them.
Moreover, I'd assume stuff made by Indian companies (as in, the products are designed and created there) to be infinitely better quality than stuff made by American companies who outsource.
I've experienced outsourcing, and had to work with people who are on the end of a telephone in a different country, timezone, and living in a different culture. The issue wasn't that the guys on the other end were especially incompetent (many were, but I've worked in IT long enough to know that 75% of the people who work with you are usually barely able to string a subroutine together), but that the wall between us made development close to impossible. The only project management worth a damn under the circumstances was waterfall, and the downsides to being reliant on formal, comprehensive, specs were all too apparent.
There's no substitute for people who work together on a project working together. Which is why, ultimately, companies like HP who think that the way to solve temporary financial issues is to get rid of their US operations and become marketing shells for goods "designed" and "manufactured" by themselves only nominally, will eventually go the way of the do-do. With no imagination, and with native operators being more efficient, HP cannot beat companies like Asus and Acer.
Slashdot Mirror
(Oh, yes, because they can't. Dish's HD DVRs can take an ATSC signal and record from that, and any home that's capable of erecting a satellite dish can erect a normal UHF/VHF antenna too. That's one thing I really rather like about Dish Network.)
Still, they could try, and then Dish subscribers - who don't want to erect an additional antenna - would be denied access to great shows like House, 24, Dollhouse, Terminator: Sarach Connor Chronicles, Firefly, Dark Angel... {insert rest of updated Family Guy skit here}
Ah, but you're missing the catch. The service imposes a 2Gb cap, after that you're throttled down to EDGE speeds.
Foreman: "Does anyone understand these patents?"
Juror 7: "No, still don't."
Juror 5: "My head hurts."
Juror 6: "This better be over with soon, or I'm going to be the third juror to take a medical leave of absence. I can't stand this crap any more."
Juror 2: "All I know is if we find Google guilty, we're going to have to sit here for another week deciding damages"
{silence}
Foreman: "Case dismissed?"
Rest of jury in unison: "Not guilty!"
Maybe I'm missing something, but the "troll" you cite seems to be... well, not a troll. In fact, I completely agree with him/her/it.
Considering the subject line I submitted for this story was way more hysterical, I guess yes. I can't defend, as the submitter, the CEO/CIO thing, I screwed up there, and I'm not quire sure why because I still have the tab up and it clearly says "CIO".
They probably are, but not to the same extent.
Siri differs in two crucial respects:
1. Bing and Google don't, by default, tie searches to an individual. (Yes, I know, they can, you can log in, and sometimes are already, but you can use both services with cookies turned off without problems.)
2. Siri searches your personal information. At least, that's what I figure from the ads. If Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson can cancel his golf game by telling Siri to cancel it, then clearly Siri knows SLMFJ's schedule, amongst other things. Google and Bing, unless your business uses Office 365 or Google Apps (in which case...), only has limited personal information on you.
I'm not arguing they're not potential security holes, but they're not in the same ballpark as Siri. If you're talking to Siri all the time, in order to modify your work schedules, send emails, etc, then, well, you are passing much, much, more information to Apple.
Let me guess, VP at SAP is like "Assistant Manager" at a branch of Wendy's?
I kinda felt bad for the editor on that one. It felt like some school yard debate that ends with the loser saying "Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Yeah? Well, uh, at least I don't have a gay haircut".
Come to think of it, I'm a little concerned our next President might be someone who once did actually debate like that.
If he finds the right swaps, then it's not going to be a problem. The descriptions are rarely that informative, and it's quite possible that "LEGO SW MIL.FALC" replaced by "LEGO 700PC SET" would be missed by someone trying to ring up items in a hurry, especially given you're not going to be expecting the wrong barcode to be scanned. You have some big box of lego, are you really going to look at it that hard?
Now, some Scented Holiday Candles being rung up for a dollar on the other hand...
It still utterly bewilders me that Apple was the one of the bunch that survived, but I suspect at least a part of it was building up a substantial cash base which wasn't the case with the others.
And I continue to remain upset about what happened to Commodore and what happened to the Amiga afterwards. But if I wasn't, I wouldn't be a geek, or human.
Still, my experience of buying Amigas was:
1. Nobody at University understood why I'd get one. C'mon, the professors say get Macs! And the rest of the world are getting PCs! Get a PC, I'll copy Zortech C++ for you!
2. Wait, you bought a HARD DRIVE for that Amiga? Isn't that, like, a games console or something? What do you need a hard disk for?
Now, true, this was Britain, but the "serious" computing media in Britain in 1990/1 was comprised of "Personal Computer World" and "Computer Shopper". Of the two, the former had apparently made a policy decision to ignore virtually anything that wasn't a PC clone since the late eighties, with the occasional exception of mentioning/reviewing something Acorn had done. And CS had little "sections" for non-PCs, which felt like little ghettos. Otherwise, both papers, month after month after month, were PC only, and generally computer reviews had titles like "100 identical PC clones compared!" Imported copies of Byte were slightly more agnostic, but not much.
So I did feel like the market was pushing proprietary alternatives out. Computers that didn't have ISA slots and processors ending in "86" were considered toys or worse. Apple got some cred purely because of academic support.
And I think you saw some of that on Usenet, in groups like comp.sys.amiga.*, where Amigans were loud and, well, a little defensive most of the time. We knew we had a fantastic, beautiful, system. We knew it was light years ahead of what the rest of the world was using, even despite the problems Commodore was having. And yet the rest of the world simply... ignored it. And seemed to be ignoring it primarily because nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM or Microsoft.
That's how I felt at the time anyway.
Well, at this point it's marketing driven. Yes, technically you can attach both to a TV. No, in practice, you're not encouraged to play games on a TV screen on them.
Regular computers can generally be attached to a TV these days too (what doesn't have HDMI?) but they're not sold as such.
Well, hold on, Because with the exception of Apple, none of these companies has a complete range of devices in the space that Microsoft operates in.
Microsoft has a (mediocre) presence on tablets (awful, awful, tablets right now, but Windows 6150 might change that.) That's the one space all the companies above seem to have a presence.
Microsoft has a presence on mobile phones. Google and Apple do too. Amazon doesn't.
Microsoft has its own PC operating system. Apple does too. Google... uh, kinda. Well, seriously, who uses ChromeOS? Right now the most likely "Google OS that has something to do with desktops" is probably the Android part of Ubuntu for Android, and that's not even out yet. Amazon? Nope.
Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.
Now, I know that all three Microsoft rivals could potentially put something together, but that's a huge amount of work. I also know that some people think that tablets will displace desktops in the near future. Those people are what we in the business call "idiots".
Finally, Microsoft has the ability to fix the problem if, for some reason, those three actually start making a dent due to them owning hardware and software businesses. Microsoft could probably fairly easily get away with buying Nokia right now, for example.
Soups to nuts ecosystems are, perhaps, a little over-rated anyway. That's what we had during the eighties, with the exception of Microsoft's platforms.
We had: Atari. Commodore. DEC. Radio Shack. Sinclair. Wang.
However great the above businesses' products (Amiga! Amiga!) they (or at least their personal computer vertical businesses) were pushed six feet under by a market that didn't want anything that wasn't industry standard.
The Federal upper limit on garnishing is: (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/if-wages-are-garnished-rights-33050.html):
So your $200 thing is basically bullshit. The only way a court is going to leave him with $200 per week is if his salary is $266.67 per week.
Paying 25% of your salary to the RIAA for the rest of your life (assuming he spends the rest of his life earning minimum wage and doesn't get something half decent) may suck, but it aint slavery, and it's not going to stop him living a normal life.
All of which is why it won't be "net income minus $200 per month". Garnishment is almost never at these ridiculous levels you claim are standard, but are actually the upper limits. It's in no-one's interests for it to be.
Bankruptcy won't wipe away the judgement, but it will cover his existing debts, so it'll be part of the process of getting Tenenbaum financially in better health.
The only failure here is you, for apologizing for not doing your job. Your argument basically boils down to "I want a group of seven unelected lawyers to overturn any law I disagree with, which I'll define as "tyranny" simply because I don't like it.".
Here's an idea, stop swearing at people who give you the bad news and involve yourself in democracy. Oh, wait, that's too much like hard work!
Lazy jackass.
Yes, but that's not the same thing as protecting us from Congress. Congress has the constitutional right to pass a lot of "sewage" that you're constitutionally obligated to swim in.
That's why elections matter. That's why civic responsibility matters. If you're going to sit there and expect the Supreme Court to bail you out each time your representative votes for jailing people over possession of a plant, requiring babysitters caught watching porn when their charge is asleep slander themselves in front of their neighbors for the rest of their lives, or, for that matter, voting to approve wars with countries which will result in more hatred towards the US, and nothing positive, then you're evading your responsibilities.
And this wasn't an excessive fine. It was damages, and the damages awarded were not higher than typical debt incurred through blameless activity by an innocent person today. Yes, the damages suck, but it's not as if Tenenbaum didn't go out of his way to fuck himself over with this one. Most people would have stopped committing infringement and accepted the relatively low settlement offer in the same circumstances.
But, hey, civil responsibility has that awful "R" word in it. Let's hope seven old people can swoop in and save us by overriding the democratic process!
My post did address the 8th Amendment argument. No, commonsense does not say that damages that are no worse than debts an ordinary person might run up through no fault of their own is "excessive".
If you're not going to read what I wrote, don't respond to it as if you did.
No, that's not my argument, because that's not what Tenenbaum is facing. He's facing a great big fine, which will either be partially or wholly paid off using bankruptcy, and/or wage garnishment.
He'll be able to pick any job for the rest of his life (or no job), and he'll be allowed to go where-ever he pleases.
If indeed the sentence was "You shall become "at least a partial" slave for the rest of your life", then, yeah, that would be cruel and unusual. But that really would have to involve actual, physical, slavery, not superficial slavery like "Having to pay $100 a month to a court appointed trust". For example, it might mean something like he'd have to spend several days a week, for the rest of his life, working at Lars Ulrich's house, doing whatever Ulrich demands of him, with Lars having the right to prevent him from leaving during that time, and possibly being shackled and denied basic bodily requirements.
But that's not the case. Tenenbaum's in a position that many people get into who haven't committed any crimes get into. He has debts that are very high. So do people who lost their jobs and become unable to afford their mortgages on now underwater properties. So are people who contracted cancer and have whopping create health care bills to settle.
And come to think of it, there are worse penalties out there for quite middling crimes. Should peeing behind a bush really result in a sentence that you have to register with the police whenever you move and tell the neighbors you're a "sex offender" for the rest of your life? I'd rather have the $700k fine, thankeweverymuch. Given the scales of what courts consider not cruel and unusual, Tenenbaum's fine hasn't left the pitcher's hand, let alone made it out of the ballpark.
And unlike those people, Tenenbaum got there deliberately. He knew the law, he broke it anyway. He probably thought he wasn't going to get court.
Is $700,000 a fair amount? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. In this context it doesn't matter, in this case. Because in this case we're not talking about fairness. We're talking about what we should expect the courts to overrule as unconstitutional.
The courts aren't there to wipe Congress's ass for them. If Congress believes the only way to protect copyrights is to have these kinds of fines, then that's Congress's decision, the Congress you elected. Your job, as a citizen, is to guide Congress.
If you believe the fine was too much, then you failed in your job.
Actually I disagree that commonsense says anything of the sort. Keep reading after the bit you quoted.
The Supreme Court's job is not to protect you from the democratic system. If you don't like the current set of laws, running around like an over-caffeinated teabagger shouting "Unconstitutional! Unconstitutional!" isn't going to help.
What constitutes unconstitutional is relatively narrowly defined. Tenenbaum violated laws that have been on the books, in one shape or form, for centuries and are expressly blessed by the constitution. He did so knowingly, willingly, and unnecessarily. He may possibly have been unaware that the violations he committed would result in such a large financial penalty, but it's not as if he's going to suffer prison time, death, or injury as a result of this judgment. At worst, he's going to have to declare bankruptcy, and possibly have his wages garnished for the rest of his life.
Plenty of people suffer worse without breaking any laws. People are losing their homes because of a combination of a loss of income as they lost their jobs and their mortgages being too high. Others are going to suffer the same fate as Tenenbaum not because they did anything wrong, but because the cancer they've contracted that their insurance won't fully cover will result in a seven digit debt.
The Supreme Court ruling on this always struck me as somewhat ludicrous. If Congress does not have the right to set ballpark figures for fines to deter people from violating a law it has a constitutional mandate to pass, then what rights does it have?
You want to change things, get more active in your democratic system. That's it. That's about your only option. That was always your option. You just couldn't be bothered. It's so much easier to whine about how "unfair" everything is, and expect seven judges to agree with you and strike something down as "unconstitutional" because it violates the "It's so unfair, OMG, I didn't ask to be born, you people suck" amendment than it is to actually push for the laws you want.
and just to really stick the boot in, you could give the Chinese Premier THE MOST TERRIBLE INSULT of ALL! You could accuse him..
*horror*
Why would they be more likely to take a car rather than a plane/bus/train?
- People take trains because they want to ride in comfort. - People fly because the distance involved is too far to travel via a slower form of transport - People take buses long distance because they can't afford to own a car in the first place. - People take buses short distances because they're more convenient than trying to navigate a car through traffic, and relatively stress free.
I'm utterly baffled that anyone thinks that the thing that's holding people off from driving is the cost. Even at today's prices, it's cheaper for me to drive to New York from here in Florida (as in, I've done it) than to travel by plane or train. I've done it twice, once with my wife and once not, solely because of specific route requirements. It takes too long, and is too uncomfortable, even in a nice big mini-van, to be a normal mode of transport.
My time is valuable. My control over my stress level is valuable. My safety is valuable. Even if the fuel were free, I wouldn't friggin drive more than a hundred miles if I had a choice in the matter, and I wouldn't regularly drive at all. Unfortunately, idiotic US planning and zoning policies mean I don't have that choice 99% of the time.
Why wouldn't it?
MySpace failed because someone (whose surname starts with the letter Z, if that's a clue) figured out a way or two in which it could be bettered and, combined with competent marketing, beat it. That's it.
Is Facebook perfect? Is that your argument? Are you seriously telling us nobody out there could possibly come up with anything better than Facebook, that it's the pinnacle of perfection, and there's no entity out there that couldn't come up with something a zillion times better?
If Google had hit upon the right marketing for Google+, which is objectively a better social networking platform, Facebook would be toast right now. Fortunately for Facebook, Google hasn't - yet - figured out the marketing. Fortunately for Facebook, the little third party bolt-ons to Twitter haven't yet turned the microblogging system into a substantial enough replacement that people have completely left Facebook. Fortunately for Facebook, MySpace was bought by the Prince of Darkness (No, not Karl Rove, the other one), and didn't get the chance to fix itself.
If Facebook can replace MySpace, then the only way Facebook can not be vulnerable is if it's perfect. It's not. It's not even close to perfect. And quite honestly, if Google hadn't messed up Google+'s marketing, with the obsession with "real names", the early lack of functionality, and the assumption that copying the invitation model would somehow solve the "What's ??? in the three step model" conundrum, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and Facebook would be on the phone to David Boies, not having an IPO.
Why the hell would anyone drive more just because the price of fuel is lower? People drive largely because they have to, not because they want to.
I would insert an analogy here, but the fact of the matter is I have several thousand in mind right now, and it's proving impossible to choose between them.
Moreover, I'd assume stuff made by Indian companies (as in, the products are designed and created there) to be infinitely better quality than stuff made by American companies who outsource.
I've experienced outsourcing, and had to work with people who are on the end of a telephone in a different country, timezone, and living in a different culture. The issue wasn't that the guys on the other end were especially incompetent (many were, but I've worked in IT long enough to know that 75% of the people who work with you are usually barely able to string a subroutine together), but that the wall between us made development close to impossible. The only project management worth a damn under the circumstances was waterfall, and the downsides to being reliant on formal, comprehensive, specs were all too apparent.
There's no substitute for people who work together on a project working together. Which is why, ultimately, companies like HP who think that the way to solve temporary financial issues is to get rid of their US operations and become marketing shells for goods "designed" and "manufactured" by themselves only nominally, will eventually go the way of the do-do. With no imagination, and with native operators being more efficient, HP cannot beat companies like Asus and Acer.