Nor is GDP a good measure of economical success. If I go and do your housekeeping chores in my time off, and you do mine, and we pay each other $100, we just increased GDP by $200, but we didn't do anything that wouldn't otherwise have been done just as efficiently.
US consumer spending ends up mostly in China and Taiwan and other foreign producing countries, so working less might actually be better for the US economy as a whole, and it would create jobs (one of the reasons Europeans cut down on their working hours).
Google is a brand name. It should always be capitalized, just like Kleenex and Xerox.
No. Plenty of brands aren't capitalized, or not on the first letter (e.g. easyJet). Some are all-caps (SPAM); in fact the USPTO only lists brands in all-caps (because capitalization doesn't matter), except for logo's submitted by the owner. If you use your brand with no leading captital letter, that's all up to you; it doesn't bestow any more "brandiness" to a word to capitalize it.
Spybot S&D makes the host file (in which in can store a lot of ad/spy-related hostnames to point to 127.0.0.1) read-only. It's been doing this for ages, so I'm guessing spyware makers will have found out about it by now.
There are multiple security risks to keep in mind a) the systems will be connected to the internet. Even if they are heavily firewalled, they will have to get their information somehow, so some port will be open listening for incoming requests; so watch out for buffer overrun exploits and spoofed packets. b) targetted denial of service attacks c) the network simply going down or being slowed; slammer slowed down the internet, not just a few machines. If that means some transactions get delayed, some people will be losing money. d) the traffic will be intercepted, and, if not decrypted, at least the volume of messages will be interesting information for corporate espionage (though the fact that unencrypted e-mail is used in business all the time makes this less of a priority). e) targetted BGP spoofing, DNS poisoning attacks and the like resulting in loss of service
That's not to say a private network is always more secure (especially since on private networks less thought is given to authentication and things of that nature), but it does make life complicated.
Gartner is always 100%, can't fail, rigt on target when it comes to stating the blindingly obvious.
Re:moral compass of companies?
on
Craig and his List
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ridiculous. The only way for an organization of individuals to have any sort of lasting "moral compass" is to dilute power among it members. There is a practical method for this, it's called democracy. In business circles it's called a cooperative.... It is quite amusing (well disheartening actually) these days to watch all these "internet activists" attempt to recreate (in complete ignorance) what syndicalists were doing over a century ago.
You're confusing two things. Syndicalism puts trade unions in charge of industry, whereas co-operatives are organizations that are owned by their customers (so if they make a profit, they usually pay it back to the customers, in effect they're non-profit organizations).
Co-operatives are alive and kicking, my health insurer is a coop, and I'm considering switching my banking business to a credit union.
Co-ops even have their own TLD,.coop which has3181 domains under it.
Co-ops can be just as evil as normal businesses though, in that their members might ask them to maximize their profitability, just like ordinary stock-holders. The one thing that guards against too much evil is that in big co-ops no one entity has a controlling interest, nor are there major shareholders that can easily collude, since it's a situation of one-man-one-vote more or less.
Apparently, publishers don't like libraries. It decreases sales of their book.
On the other hand, it massively decreases incentives to set up efficient second hand marketplaces for books. After all, first doctrine means the publisher never gets money for "used" books getting read by their new owners anyway. And if a library doesn't offer the latest Stephen King, romance novel or in a nutshell, a lot of people end up buying a new copy..
Having said that, they're always working their evil little ways to get libraries to pay for lending out books or having copying machines.. When you have a dead poet's estate prohibiting a poetry festival from "performing" his poems, you know the system's gone mad.
the next engine, working on it, won't be done before next year.
the Xbox, Same demo shown as on E3, "The game, to put it simply, looks great, and it reminded me a lot of the recently released Chronicles of Riddick", dolby 5.1 sound, not as good as PC.
OS X, Port runs, no plans for release, platform (I'm guessing they mean videocards) sucks too much.
Linux ports, Linux server done, client will be out when Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
id's standing on piracy It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering next engine will be Good Enough.
The new system they're proposing here isn't analogue repeater based "just dial up the frequency".
The main feature is that it is a digitally encrypted system. The way in which this is done is totally braindead from a security viewpoint (one big old shared key, rather than one key per transceiver keyed by a smartcard, like in GSM). The system is called TETRA.
One of the main complaints is coverage; due to the higher frequencies in use, the indoor coverage is particularly bad, and the range is not that great. Seeing as the roll-out is in its infancy there are many black spots. (Indoor coverage can only be adressed by installing repeaters inside a building, at the owners' cost).
So far, TETRA has been an unmitigated failure. Not only is the equipment very expensive, short-range, and has short battery lifetimes, but the main need for the digital system was supposed to be confidenciality; which is a minor concern to emergency services.
One "benefit" of the new system is that it's an internationally agreed standard. Although that doesn't mean much as analogue equipment is also pretty standardized and cheap, and seeing as it's encrypted with different keys in each country, you'd have to keep rekeying for international/regional operations (or rather, keep 2 sets around with different keys)..
As a ham many areas of spectrum are underutilized because the technology does not exist to successfully exploit them. For example the repeater which takes a radio signal coming on one frequency and retransmits it on another is the basis for the entire cell phone industry.
Don't know about the states, but over here in the bad olde world, cell technology doesn't use repeaters except for indoor/underground coverage. Base stations relay calls onto either wired infrastructure, or onto line-of-sight microwave transceivers that, while technically RF, are a different beast altogether. (In fact, they're unlicensed since they don't interfere much, being line-of-sight).
The whole point of cellular technology is to hand off calls to regular infrastructure. If it were all completely wireless, you'd have calls being repeated from base station to base station until they reached their destination, meaning that your call would take up a channel over the entire area of that patch.
In fact, cell technology is so yummy good because you only use the channel locally. This means that with only a limited number of channels you can support dozens of simultanious calls per cell, rather than dozens of simultanious calls on the entire system. You can even split up particularly crowded cells into multiple micro-cells (although you have to shuffle around which frequencies are used in the neighboring cells).
(Of course, government is using the just-repeat-stuff-over-the-air model for their "next generation" digital communications systems for emergency services. Even the frigging railways use GSM! No wonder that project is failing..)
People care about having an app that looks like whatever else in on *their computer*, not that the app looks the same to them as it does to someone running it on a washing machine somewhere.
No, people don't care about that at all. Webpages are all different, some underline links, some don't, some use flash, others don't, the user-interface is all over the place. Do people care? No! People actually like all those applications that you can "skin" in order to make them look even more different and counter-intuitive.
People care about getting things done. A consistent GUI helps people figure out how to get things done. But they don't care about GUI consistency (whether on one platform, or cross-platform) as long as it's obvious how everything works.
There are exceptions; copy+paste should ALWAYS work, and people will go to great lengths to complain about "ugly" looking applications, and right-mouse-clicks should always pull up context menus (although I've seen apps that use the right button for something else and succeeded in not being completely annoying once you got used to it). But in general; what gets the job done, quickly and easily.
One of the early designs for the iBook was a design in which the screen could fold 180 degrees. In that position, the keyboard would be deactivated, and the screen would act as a touchscreen. Which is actually a pretty neat idea.
Windows Messenger is a slightly different beast from MSN Messenger.
Windows Messenger is used in Outlook (not express) to show if your contacts are online. Apart from the MSN Messenger service, it can also use an Exchange server as an IM server, by way of using SIP. Windows Messenger also supports SIP to do VoIP, it can be used with pulver's freeworlddialup for example (it does not support STUN). Windows Messenger hasn't been updated since XP came out, while MSN Messenger is at version 6.2 - it's been deprecated along the lines of NetMeeting (which is in XP by default, and handy if you need an H.263 VoIP client, it's already on your hard drive, called conf.exe).
MSN Messenger offers more features, like webcam, shared games, message history, custom emoticons, and of course lots of clutter and ads. It can be quite refreshing to switch back to Windows Messenger. However MSN Messenger will not do SIP (or H.263).
The Messenger Service is the one that simply puts a window on your screen with an OK button, meant for sending messages on a LAN, like "the server is on fire" etc.
I'm waiting for the day that Internet Explorer is rebranded as Messenger Explorer (MSN Explorer is halfway there!).
The gist of it is that there are many instructions in x86 that have the same result. You can replace these, and based on which instructions you encounter you can find a hidden message.
So much for theory. Here's an example; let's say we have a couple of synonyms, like so car, automobile; Robert, Bob; crashed, trashed; beer, whisky. Let's say we have a little story like so; "Bob got in his car. He crashed it, because he had been drinking too much beer. His car is now a total loss."
Let's say we want to send a secret binary message "0110". Cunningly, we substitute the first of each pair of synonyms if we want to encode a zero, and the second for a one. So the story is now
"Robert got in his automobile. He trashed it, because he had been drinking too much whisky. His car is now a total loss." (notice how not all key words changed).
This is a bit harder with natural language, as many words aren't quite right to use in place of the other ("got in his automobile" just doesn't sound right), so it's actually easier to do for machine code.
The BSA's position is that the owner of a copyright on a work has the exclusive right to copy that work. And that those who copy the work without permission owe the copyright holders restitution. This is an intriguing position to have, as it is exactly what copyright law says.
No it's not. The BSA's curriculum says that downloading in general is illegal. Which is bullcrap. You can download freeware and free software to your heart's content. Slashdot is copyrighted, but you can download the pages in your browser for you to look at at no cost; without permission, that's like, totally implied. Yeah, scroll down. Only a copyright claim there, no license.
And even then, copyright is limited in many and varies ways. It's time limited. It's limited to original works (or works that are in part original, but limited in scope to the original contributions).
But the BSA isn't just teaching the law, they're teaching morality. And they're on thin ice there. Both artists and consumers get gouged by the record industry in many immoral (and sometimes illegal) ways. The software industry (i.e. Microsoft) is involved in many immoral (and sometimes illegal) practices.
The BSA's objective with this campaign is clearly not only to prevent nasty illegal copying from happening (hey, kids are legally incompetent anyway), it's to shape their minds and opinions to stifle future debate about such practices as curbing Fair Use (including the broadcast flag that stifles time shifting), extending copyright indefinately one term at a time, sueing people for discussing copyrighted works (anti-benchmark EULA provisions) or trademarked brands (you can't have a Harry Potter® fansite, despite the fact you're not using the mark in trade and you're some 10 year old kid), employers grabbing copyright to works employees made in their own time, employers grabbing copyright under work-for-hire provisions from recording artists, the resistance to mandatory licensing (which only makes sense), submarine patents, reverse domain-hijacking, etc. etc. All those are just fine, legal, and moral in the BSA's worldview, and they don't want your kids thinking otherwise.
It's like Joe Camel teaching kids about caring for their body, and that their body is theirs to decide over (integrity of the human body, that's a human right!), and that no one should stop them from smoking, because people who work in the Tabacco industry have families to support. Of course, this would be specifically aimed and States that don't have smoking bans ("it's legal! it's the law!") and that have low taxes on tabacco ("some other States over-tax cigarettes, so poor people can't decide over their own bodies!").
How about one-sided and biased curriculums about defamation, slander and libel given to any kids that are thinking about becoming investigative journalists (perhaps by the Whitehouse)?
Or a course about the greatness of the War On Drugs, zero-tolerance, three-strikes-and-you're-out and mandatory sentencing, given by Wackenhut? The benefits of electronic voting, and why it should remain to be legal, by Diebold?
The stock market is absolutely a zero sum game. Most of the money "invested" in the market doesn't exist. If everyone in the market decided that they wanted their money today, there would be almost no money in the market. In fact it is reasonable to assume that the sum total of all the money actually "in" the stock market is zero. And that if every single person in the stock market asked for their money back today there would be NO money to give them. Stocks only have value as far as someone is willing to give money for them
This hold true up to a certain point. When shares in a company have a price that's lower than the value of the assets (and yes, some corporations trade at a price per share lower than the amount of real estate they own!) a corporate raider can come along, buy all the shares, or at least a controlling interest, and sell the company's assets at a profit.
Obviously this doesn't hold if all listed corporations were to be liquidated (as in a stock market crash).
On the other hand, if you take a close look at the fundamentals of a company, some investments are obviously not a ponzi scheme. If the P/E ratio of a firm is reasonably low, and they pay dividends, you can make money off your investment even if the share price stays the same and if the company doesn't grow. If you sell at the same price, you will still have pocketed the dividends.
A foreign land where Jews have lived for over 2000 years.
Hey, there are a lot of Jews living in my neighborhood too. Their families have been living here for hundreds of years. That doesn't mean they get to bomb the shit out of an Arab that moves into the neighborhood. Or vice versa.
They probably need to invest gobs of money in their unprofitable operations to get them to turn a profit. Their options were
* Loan a bunch of money from banks or private investors, on the strength of your profitable unit. * Sell the profitable unit for a lump sum many times its annual profit and invest in in the online business. * Sell off the unprofitable unit and let it die.
They've retained the final option (they can always decide to fire everybody, though that's not cheap), and they've got a handfull of cash (no strings attached, unlike bankloans or investors) AND the assets of the online business so they don't even have to start a business from scratch to invest it in.
If it all makes sense depends greatly on what their plans are with the cash they've just earned, and the premium of getting a was of cash over other means of investment. It's still likely their online business will die, but if it does, it won't drag the profitable business down into Chapter 11. Possibly saving jobs.
What it comes down to is that the company thought it's unprofitable online music business is a better investment than the profitable business. It's a high risk strategy, so likely they think the potential reward is great. Whether they're wrong, well, they're right about the risk, so we'll see.
Jeremy Paxman once asked Michael Howard, a top-figure in the Conservative Party the same question "did you threaten to overrule him" fourteen times in succession in an attempt to get a straight answer.
It was shown in a satirical programme (The Day Today, which features fake news, much like The Onion) unedited. And quite rightly.
And here's an idea: a rule that says legislators cannot use a.gov address (which are avoided by spammers), but must use one from a regular ISP on.com or.net. I suspect they'll see the problem much more clearly.
Or start sending legal (as defined by CAN-SPAM) spam to.gov addresses.. Making sure to give each address that unsubscribes from a list to 10 other legal entities (i.e. slashdot users) to spam them silly with legal spam.
So we were initially worried CAN-SPAM would fail because we feared it was so weak it might actually protect certain "marketers" who bothered to follow its provisions to the letter. Now it turns out that it's going to fail because even it its weakened form, it isn't being enforced...
The CAN-SPAM act has been, and is, wildly succesful.. in protecting those "marketers" from any legal backlash.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor is GDP a good measure of economical success. If I go and do your housekeeping chores in my time off, and you do mine, and we pay each other $100, we just increased GDP by $200, but we didn't do anything that wouldn't otherwise have been done just as efficiently.
US consumer spending ends up mostly in China and Taiwan and other foreign producing countries, so working less might actually be better for the US economy as a whole, and it would create jobs (one of the reasons Europeans cut down on their working hours).
Google is a brand name. It should always be capitalized, just like Kleenex and Xerox.
No. Plenty of brands aren't capitalized, or not on the first letter (e.g. easyJet). Some are all-caps (SPAM); in fact the USPTO only lists brands in all-caps (because capitalization doesn't matter), except for logo's submitted by the owner. If you use your brand with no leading captital letter, that's all up to you; it doesn't bestow any more "brandiness" to a word to capitalize it.
Spybot S&D makes the host file (in which in can store a lot of ad/spy-related hostnames to point to 127.0.0.1) read-only. It's been doing this for ages, so I'm guessing spyware makers will have found out about it by now.
Well, it was a joke. But hey, you're from Germany. Which makes me think that last sentence of yours wasn't a joke. :-P
There are multiple security risks to keep in mind
a) the systems will be connected to the internet. Even if they are heavily firewalled, they will have to get their information somehow, so some port will be open listening for incoming requests; so watch out for buffer overrun exploits and spoofed packets.
b) targetted denial of service attacks
c) the network simply going down or being slowed; slammer slowed down the internet, not just a few machines. If that means some transactions get delayed, some people will be losing money.
d) the traffic will be intercepted, and, if not decrypted, at least the volume of messages will be interesting information for corporate espionage (though the fact that unencrypted e-mail is used in business all the time makes this less of a priority).
e) targetted BGP spoofing, DNS poisoning attacks and the like resulting in loss of service
That's not to say a private network is always more secure (especially since on private networks less thought is given to authentication and things of that nature), but it does make life complicated.
Gartner is always 100%, can't fail, rigt on target when it comes to stating the blindingly obvious.
Ridiculous. The only way for an organization of individuals to have any sort of lasting "moral compass" is to dilute power among it members. There is a practical method for this, it's called democracy. In business circles it's called a cooperative. ...
.coop which has3181 domains under it.
It is quite amusing (well disheartening actually) these days to watch all these "internet activists" attempt to recreate (in complete ignorance) what syndicalists were doing over a century ago.
You're confusing two things.
Syndicalism puts trade unions in charge of industry, whereas co-operatives are organizations that are owned by their customers (so if they make a profit, they usually pay it back to the customers, in effect they're non-profit organizations).
Co-operatives are alive and kicking, my health insurer is a coop, and I'm considering switching my banking business to a credit union.
Co-ops even have their own TLD,
Co-ops can be just as evil as normal businesses though, in that their members might ask them to maximize their profitability, just like ordinary stock-holders. The one thing that guards against too much evil is that in big co-ops no one entity has a controlling interest, nor are there major shareholders that can easily collude, since it's a situation of one-man-one-vote more or less.
Apparently, publishers don't like libraries. It decreases sales of their book.
On the other hand, it massively decreases incentives to set up efficient second hand marketplaces for books. After all, first doctrine means the publisher never gets money for "used" books getting read by their new owners anyway.
And if a library doesn't offer the latest Stephen King, romance novel or in a nutshell, a lot of people end up buying a new copy..
Having said that, they're always working their evil little ways to get libraries to pay for lending out books or having copying machines.. When you have a dead poet's estate prohibiting a poetry festival from "performing" his poems, you know the system's gone mad.
I own my body, and it's my property to do with as I like in life or death.
It's yours? I don't see how.. It's just the logical conclusion of your mother and father each contributing a cell, growing it, and feeding you.
They should have sold you in parts, then perhaps they could've turned a profit.
the next engine,
working on it, won't be done before next year.
the Xbox,
Same demo shown as on E3, "The game, to put it simply, looks great, and it reminded me a lot of the recently released Chronicles of Riddick", dolby 5.1 sound, not as good as PC.
OS X,
Port runs, no plans for release, platform (I'm guessing they mean videocards) sucks too much.
Linux ports,
Linux server done, client will be out when Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
id's standing on piracy
It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering
next engine will be Good Enough.
here is an account of the EAN activation from 1971; scroll down to 'Nuclear Alert' Proves False.
It must have been the most chilling false alert ever..
The new system they're proposing here isn't analogue repeater based "just dial up the frequency".
The main feature is that it is a digitally encrypted system. The way in which this is done is totally braindead from a security viewpoint (one big old shared key, rather than one key per transceiver keyed by a smartcard, like in GSM). The system is called TETRA.
One of the main complaints is coverage; due to the higher frequencies in use, the indoor coverage is particularly bad, and the range is not that great. Seeing as the roll-out is in its infancy there are many black spots. (Indoor coverage can only be adressed by installing repeaters inside a building, at the owners' cost).
So far, TETRA has been an unmitigated failure. Not only is the equipment very expensive, short-range, and has short battery lifetimes, but the main need for the digital system was supposed to be confidenciality; which is a minor concern to emergency services.
One "benefit" of the new system is that it's an internationally agreed standard. Although that doesn't mean much as analogue equipment is also pretty standardized and cheap, and seeing as it's encrypted with different keys in each country, you'd have to keep rekeying for international/regional operations (or rather, keep 2 sets around with different keys)..
As a ham many areas of spectrum are underutilized because the technology does not exist to successfully exploit them. For example the repeater which takes a radio signal coming on one frequency and retransmits it on another is the basis for the entire cell phone industry.
Don't know about the states, but over here in the bad olde world, cell technology doesn't use repeaters except for indoor/underground coverage. Base stations relay calls onto either wired infrastructure, or onto line-of-sight microwave transceivers that, while technically RF, are a different beast altogether. (In fact, they're unlicensed since they don't interfere much, being line-of-sight).
The whole point of cellular technology is to hand off calls to regular infrastructure. If it were all completely wireless, you'd have calls being repeated from base station to base station until they reached their destination, meaning that your call would take up a channel over the entire area of that patch.
In fact, cell technology is so yummy good because you only use the channel locally. This means that with only a limited number of channels you can support dozens of simultanious calls per cell, rather than dozens of simultanious calls on the entire system. You can even split up particularly crowded cells into multiple micro-cells (although you have to shuffle around which frequencies are used in the neighboring cells).
(Of course, government is using the just-repeat-stuff-over-the-air model for their "next generation" digital communications systems for emergency services. Even the frigging railways use GSM! No wonder that project is failing..)
People care about having an app that looks like whatever else in on *their computer*, not that the app looks the same to them as it does to someone running it on a washing machine somewhere.
No, people don't care about that at all. Webpages are all different, some underline links, some don't, some use flash, others don't, the user-interface is all over the place. Do people care? No! People actually like all those applications that you can "skin" in order to make them look even more different and counter-intuitive.
People care about getting things done. A consistent GUI helps people figure out how to get things done. But they don't care about GUI consistency (whether on one platform, or cross-platform) as long as it's obvious how everything works.
There are exceptions; copy+paste should ALWAYS work, and people will go to great lengths to complain about "ugly" looking applications, and right-mouse-clicks should always pull up context menus (although I've seen apps that use the right button for something else and succeeded in not being completely annoying once you got used to it). But in general; what gets the job done, quickly and easily.
One of the early designs for the iBook was a design in which the screen could fold 180 degrees. In that position, the keyboard would be deactivated, and the screen would act as a touchscreen. Which is actually a pretty neat idea.
Windows Messenger is a slightly different beast from MSN Messenger.
Windows Messenger is used in Outlook (not express) to show if your contacts are online. Apart from the MSN Messenger service, it can also use an Exchange server as an IM server, by way of using SIP.
Windows Messenger also supports SIP to do VoIP, it can be used with pulver's freeworlddialup for example (it does not support STUN).
Windows Messenger hasn't been updated since XP came out, while MSN Messenger is at version 6.2 - it's been deprecated along the lines of NetMeeting (which is in XP by default, and handy if you need an H.263 VoIP client, it's already on your hard drive, called conf.exe).
MSN Messenger offers more features, like webcam, shared games, message history, custom emoticons, and of course lots of clutter and ads. It can be quite refreshing to switch back to Windows Messenger. However MSN Messenger will not do SIP (or H.263).
The Messenger Service is the one that simply puts a window on your screen with an OK button, meant for sending messages on a LAN, like "the server is on fire" etc.
I'm waiting for the day that Internet Explorer is rebranded as Messenger Explorer (MSN Explorer is halfway there!).
The gist of it is that there are many instructions in x86 that have the same result. You can replace these, and based on which instructions you encounter you can find a hidden message.
So much for theory. Here's an example; let's say we have a couple of synonyms, like so
car, automobile; Robert, Bob; crashed, trashed; beer, whisky.
Let's say we have a little story like so;
"Bob got in his car. He crashed it, because he had been drinking too much beer. His car is now a total loss."
Let's say we want to send a secret binary message "0110". Cunningly, we substitute the first of each pair of synonyms if we want to encode a zero, and the second for a one. So the story is now
"Robert got in his automobile. He trashed it, because he had been drinking too much whisky. His car is now a total loss." (notice how not all key words changed).
This is a bit harder with natural language, as many words aren't quite right to use in place of the other ("got in his automobile" just doesn't sound right), so it's actually easier to do for machine code.
The BSA's position is that the owner of a copyright on a work has the exclusive right to copy that work. And that those who copy the work without permission owe the copyright holders restitution. This is an intriguing position to have, as it is exactly what copyright law says.
No it's not. The BSA's curriculum says that downloading in general is illegal. Which is bullcrap. You can download freeware and free software to your heart's content. Slashdot is copyrighted, but you can download the pages in your browser for you to look at at no cost; without permission, that's like, totally implied. Yeah, scroll down. Only a copyright claim there, no license.
And even then, copyright is limited in many and varies ways. It's time limited. It's limited to original works (or works that are in part original, but limited in scope to the original contributions).
But the BSA isn't just teaching the law, they're teaching morality. And they're on thin ice there. Both artists and consumers get gouged by the record industry in many immoral (and sometimes illegal) ways. The software industry (i.e. Microsoft) is involved in many immoral (and sometimes illegal) practices.
The BSA's objective with this campaign is clearly not only to prevent nasty illegal copying from happening (hey, kids are legally incompetent anyway), it's to shape their minds and opinions to stifle future debate about such practices as curbing Fair Use (including the broadcast flag that stifles time shifting), extending copyright indefinately one term at a time, sueing people for discussing copyrighted works (anti-benchmark EULA provisions) or trademarked brands (you can't have a Harry Potter® fansite, despite the fact you're not using the mark in trade and you're some 10 year old kid), employers grabbing copyright to works employees made in their own time, employers grabbing copyright under work-for-hire provisions from recording artists, the resistance to mandatory licensing (which only makes sense), submarine patents, reverse domain-hijacking, etc. etc. All those are just fine, legal, and moral in the BSA's worldview, and they don't want your kids thinking otherwise.
It's like Joe Camel teaching kids about caring for their body, and that their body is theirs to decide over (integrity of the human body, that's a human right!), and that no one should stop them from smoking, because people who work in the Tabacco industry have families to support. Of course, this would be specifically aimed and States that don't have smoking bans ("it's legal! it's the law!") and that have low taxes on tabacco ("some other States over-tax cigarettes, so poor people can't decide over their own bodies!").
How about one-sided and biased curriculums about defamation, slander and libel given to any kids that are thinking about becoming investigative journalists (perhaps by the Whitehouse)?
Or a course about the greatness of the War On Drugs, zero-tolerance, three-strikes-and-you're-out and mandatory sentencing, given by Wackenhut? The benefits of electronic voting, and why it should remain to be legal, by Diebold?
The stock market is absolutely a zero sum game. Most of the money "invested" in the market doesn't exist. If everyone in the market decided that they wanted their money today, there would be almost no money in the market. In fact it is reasonable to assume that the sum total of all the money actually "in" the stock market is zero. And that if every single person in the stock market asked for their money back today there would be NO money to give them. Stocks only have value as far as someone is willing to give money for them
This hold true up to a certain point. When shares in a company have a price that's lower than the value of the assets (and yes, some corporations trade at a price per share lower than the amount of real estate they own!) a corporate raider can come along, buy all the shares, or at least a controlling interest, and sell the company's assets at a profit.
Obviously this doesn't hold if all listed corporations were to be liquidated (as in a stock market crash).
On the other hand, if you take a close look at the fundamentals of a company, some investments are obviously not a ponzi scheme. If the P/E ratio of a firm is reasonably low, and they pay dividends, you can make money off your investment even if the share price stays the same and if the company doesn't grow. If you sell at the same price, you will still have pocketed the dividends.
A foreign land where Jews have lived for over 2000 years.
Hey, there are a lot of Jews living in my neighborhood too. Their families have been living here for hundreds of years. That doesn't mean they get to bomb the shit out of an Arab that moves into the neighborhood. Or vice versa.
They probably need to invest gobs of money in their unprofitable operations to get them to turn a profit. Their options were
* Loan a bunch of money from banks or private investors, on the strength of your profitable unit.
* Sell the profitable unit for a lump sum many times its annual profit and invest in in the online business.
* Sell off the unprofitable unit and let it die.
They've retained the final option (they can always decide to fire everybody, though that's not cheap), and they've got a handfull of cash (no strings attached, unlike bankloans or investors) AND the assets of the online business so they don't even have to start a business from scratch to invest it in.
If it all makes sense depends greatly on what their plans are with the cash they've just earned, and the premium of getting a was of cash over other means of investment. It's still likely their online business will die, but if it does, it won't drag the profitable business down into Chapter 11. Possibly saving jobs.
What it comes down to is that the company thought it's unprofitable online music business is a better investment than the profitable business. It's a high risk strategy, so likely they think the potential reward is great. Whether they're wrong, well, they're right about the risk, so we'll see.
Jeremy Paxman once asked Michael Howard, a top-figure in the Conservative Party the same question "did you threaten to overrule him" fourteen times in succession in an attempt to get a straight answer.
It was shown in a satirical programme (The Day Today, which features fake news, much like The Onion) unedited. And quite rightly.
Sadly this is a dead link.
And here's an idea: a rule that says legislators cannot use a .gov address (which are avoided by spammers), but must use one from a regular ISP on .com or .net. I suspect they'll see the problem much more clearly.
.gov addresses.. Making sure to give each address that unsubscribes from a list to 10 other legal entities (i.e. slashdot users) to spam them silly with legal spam.
Or start sending legal (as defined by CAN-SPAM) spam to
So we were initially worried CAN-SPAM would fail because we feared it was so weak it might actually protect certain "marketers" who bothered to follow its provisions to the letter. Now it turns out that it's going to fail because even it its weakened form, it isn't being enforced...
The CAN-SPAM act has been, and is, wildly succesful.. in protecting those "marketers" from any legal backlash.
I did mention stock swaps in my post, actually. I referred to them as "using monopoly money to buy monopoly money".