Only a Republican would think it makes sense to fight terrorism by monitoring my 83 year old mom's phone calls.
They're not afraid of terrorists. They're afraid of us. Even your mom. And they have every reason to be afraid: criminals are often scared of being held accountable for their crimes.
We know that the US government claims to have shot down the satellite, and their purported reasons for doing it.
We don't know if they're telling the truth, why they did it if it's true, and, if they succeeded, how many attempts they made prior to success.
Based on the US government's record for truthfulness and competency, it would be prudent to doubt just about everything about their version of the story unless corroboration is available.
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 1
Cuba is only unique in that the destruction caused by communism is so apparent everywhere. The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles.
And none of that has anything to do with that embargo, right?
And what are Cuba's life expectancy and infant mortality rates compared to other Central American or Caribbean countries that did not suffer the "destruction caused by communism"? Say, Guatemala or Haiti? Or, for that matter, that larger banana republic to the north with its own strutting tinpot dictator, the US?
By the way, I don't like communism either. I'm anti-authoritarian. It's just that, when a lot of Americans start going on about "free markets," what they really mean is "imperialism managed by multinationals." And that's even worse than the Cuban system, since none of it is even nominally for the benefit of the people. Given the choice between rule by nosy, pushy social-worker types and domination by a kleptocratic ruling class, my first choice would be neither. But if that's not an available option, I would look closely at which would be less bad, and it's not obvious that, say, the Nicaraguan or Panamanian model is better than that of Cuba.
Poor guy said that Ada matters. I've had the misfortune to have had to develop some large systems in Ada. It's like a nightmare in which a QA person with some software engineering background decided to impose a language on the rest of us. Structured-programming hell, with lots of rigid structure in all the wrong places. IDE, build system, runtime, language, all in one: bad idea.
Government agencies tried hard to push Ada in the 80's but fortunately, it choked on the sleeves of its own straitjacket. When I consider frameworks now, one thing I look for is real modularity, not a monolith. If I can't swap out a component, it's not a useful framework. Ada completely failed in that regard. It was Ada's way or the highway.
Not that Java is devoid of faults. I've run into plenty of Java programmers who, in the day, would have been happily coding in COBOL. Baaaaah. But that's part of what Java was for: an OO-ish language for the boneheads who couldn't be trusted with something more powerful. Hence the strong typing, lack of pointers, built-in garbage collection, and absence of multiple inheritance. Having said that, I'd rather get a crew to code up a corporate IT app in Java than, say, C++. In fact there are few large problem domains where C++ would be on my list at all. And there are none where Ada would be an option, unless I needed a strawman solution alternative to eliminate from a shortlist.
Because low frequency sounds have much more "energy" than high frequency sounds, the sound on an LP is equalized before encoding onto the record.
That would be interesting if it were true. But the opposite is true: a low frequency wave of a given amplitude delivers less energy than a high frequency wave of the same amplitude. In fact, energy flux is directly proportional to frequency. In the electromagnetic world, that's why an x-ray or gamma-ray will cause more mayhem in your body than a radio wave of the same amplitude. They deliver more energy because they are higher frequency.
This only makes sense because if you double the frequency, the particles will have to move back and forth twice as often in a given time interval.
The reason audio engineers do equalizing is driven primarily by psychoacoustics and by expectations of the frequency response and quality of the playback apparatus. Suffice to say that a listener's perception of the relative volumes of different frequencies is non-linear, and the typical playback device is not some massively over-engineered stack of audiophile equipment that cost more than my car. It's a common practice for engineers to check out the results of the mastering process by listening to the mix on a shitty car stereo or a $49 boom box since that more closely replicates a typical listener's experience than a studio full of reference monitors. Some engineers will also rip a mix to 128-bit mp3 just to be sure that it's still listenable in that format. But don't tell the RIAA about that...
I am guessing, reading your post again, that what you were trying to say is that a low-frequency wave of a given energy will be of higher amplitude than a high-frequency wave of the same energy. So, for an analog recording medium using a linear encoding scheme, the required excursions for a low-frequency wave of a given energy will also have to be greater. Same would go for a linearly-encoded digital representation. And, as you mention, other schemes make better use of the available number of bits. If that's what you were trying to say, it makes sense.
And let me try summing up your S/N discussion by saying a couple things. First, signal-to-noise ratio is a ratio. That is, by definition, it's a relative measure. That allows "relative to what?" manipulation by self-interested parties. Second, there's an irreducible noise floor for any audio signal, imposed by the laws of physics. Where I'd add to your argument is that that noise floor in real life is present at every step of the signal chain, from the initial recording through the persistence mechanism used (including any encoding that happens) and subsequent reproduction. Clearly, the noise floor that matters the most is the one that comes along with the signal that is amplified most. And the air in a room at room temperature has a noise floor too, as does any electronic circuit, and as do people's ears. You can do clever things to improve headroom when designing an encoding process, whether it's analog or digital, but ultimataly you can't beat Mother Nature. Many of the claims made by audiophiles and by the hucksters who make livings extracting cash from their pockets are simply not consistent with the laws of physics.
If every business used 100% vanilla package software, and no customization was needed to integrate Package A to Package B, then maybe this conjecture might be true. But there are two rationales for having an in-house IT department: (a) One throat to choke when it comes to support; and (b) The widely prevalent and generally unfounded belief that "our business is unique and requires significant customization" which means you need IT business analysts and developers to specify, implement and maintain those customizations. The driver for this is not strategic advantage, it's just the inability to comply with standards and to manage arbitrary complexity.
These B-school weenies should really get out to some real IT departments more often.
I know I'd feel safer if the Gay State wasn't part of the Union...
Why does this remind me of something in The Onion?
Safer from what? The risk of finding yourself 69-ing a gay Bostonian while you're drunk? Because if that's what it's about, your problem isn't gays, it's closets. Me, I like near SF and am a straight male. Gay men never try hitting on me: I'm probably too old and/or not good-looking enough. Or more likely, if you're not actively looking for something, you're not likely to find it. Gays don't make trouble for anyone-- it's just that some people find the need to make trouble for them. There's no rational motivation for that.
In Rome, men had sex with men for hundreds of years. But when the Christians got power, everything went down the shitter.
I suspect that McAfee has been offered a Great Deal by someone, in exchange for publicly stating that the GPL is viral.
My proverb: never assume conspiracy when all that's necessary is an alignment of incentives.
What percentage of McAfee's install base is Windows rather than Linux? If it's almost entirely Windows, and there are smaller (or no) margins in porting their products to Linux, or even if there's more competition, then they have plenty of reason to spread FUD over the GPL. No need for a direct quid pro quo from Redmond. It's less lucrative, or riskier, for McAfee to make products on Linux, so they want to find reasons to convince their customers that Windows is better. It's like the economics of the US health care system: cheap, simple cures or cost-effective prevention aren't such good earners as expensive therapies for chronic conditions. So they're trying to scare the patients away from prevention (the more robust *nix security model) in order to keep selling the costly therapy. Any benefit to Microsoft is a side-effect.
Also know that when you go out on your own, you deserve all of the glory, credit, blame, and defeat.
Y'know, I read The Fountainhead too, I just saw it as a poorly-written paean to narcissism. Knowingly or not, it seems to have struck some deep chord with you. That's too bad. It's a stunted, solipsistic world-view.
I keep my private and business lives well-encapsulated, even to the extent of never introducing my coworkers to my friends. My employer asserts the customary feudal prerogative of controlling every moment of my waking life while still only paying me for part of it. This is not because they have some God-given right to direct my life, it is because they can get away with it in the present rigged system, and they have more power than I do. But having an unfeeling, brain-dead bureaucracy stick their nose into my private life is no better when it's an HR department than when it's a government agency. It's repression all the same. It's an odious feature of the present system.
I don't regard them as malicious so much as arrogant, overzealous and misguided. So I practise operational security and communication security in order to minimize their opportunities to mess with me. But that's out of necessity, not out of any belief that I owe it to them to do that. And I'm not talking about any "right" to a job. I'm just saying that they don't own me, yet in many respects they behave as though they do. And due to the extreme, government-backed asymmetry of power relations in the workplace (you think employers have it tough? Look at the restrictions on union activity sometime), those are the conditions we have to live under in the US. And I'm a well-compensated employee. It's far worse for those with lower-paid, more commoditized jobs. That's where employers really run amok.
And please, never talk about "extreme risk" when all you're referring to is money. I've lived in parts of the world where risk means you or your family getting killed, dismembered, driven from your home. That's risk. What you're talking about is just putting your money where your mouth is.
The solution to the traffic problem is ultimately a technical one--within the next 50-75 years, we should have fully automated cars anyway (if not flying.)
I was kind of hoping that by then we'd be done with personal cars and would have working public transit. The automobile has had disastrous side-effects since it's become widely adopted: traffic accidents, suburbia, pollution, destruction of habitat by road-building, Jeremy Clarkson.
Meanwhile I don't mind hearing that people are putting out the eye of the cyclops. Public property or not, the potential of abuse of this information is just too great. Maybe it's being done for bad reasons, but it needs to be done.
By the way, those waterboards are public property too, and I'd like to see them destroyed.
While sympathetic to the ends, I do have some questions as to means: why can't a can of black spray paint do the job? Or even some tar at the end of a long-handled brush? Is it really necessary to burn them?
What do Radio Shack even sell these days? If you asked me, I couldn't tell you. Sprint cellphone contracts, some toys, and low-functioning A/V bits and pieces. Who buys that stuff anyway?
First, my reaction to the UN's declaration was that yes, a Taser can be used as a torture device. So can't a gun, knife, lead pipe, car battery, bamboo splinters, fire, torches, soldering irons, rubber shirts, spoons, etc...
Heck, even bare hands and feet can be used.
Or waterboarding. My take is that the UN is practising displacement activity: they are afraid to confront the Bush administration over undeniably brutal and often murderous acts of torture such as waterboarding (interesting how, when used in Korea, the US called it "Chinese water torture" but it got renamed when we started doing it), so instead they whinge about tasers. A functioning UN would be preparing world (especially US) public opinion for Bush, Cheney and gang's future trials for crimes against humanity, not picking this easier but less worthwhile fight.
I'm no fan of tasers either, and the last thing we need are more excuses for the police to use excessive force on us. But even more important is for the US government and its proxies to stop torturing people now. No exceptions. And those who have condoned and practised it should be put on trial and locked up. No exceptions to that either.
No real vendor support. Who is going to buy these things when they have to fix every single problem themselves?
Haven't travelled much, have you? What, you think Fedex does pickups in rural Chad at a rate the locals can afford? Believe me, it's difficult calling support when there's no phone. In much of the world, it's mend and make do. If someone local doesn't do the work for you, it isn't going to get done.
So perhaps you have some ideas about how vendor support will be provided by the likes of Microsoft?
I work in California. I redlined my contract. I don't recall the exact wording I used, but it was to the effect that anything I do during working hours or with company resources is theirs, and anything outside of working hours and with my resources is mine. They hired me anyway. Even if the draconian provisions of the contract were not enforceable in California, I wanted it very clear where the line is.
If they didn't accept my redlines, I would have walked. That's the secret of negotiation when you're the weaker party: if it really matters to you, stand up to them, and if you can't live with it, don't work for them. It's not a satisfactory situation, since you might have to pass up that dream job because the T's and C's are no good, but that's the way the world is. They'll take as much from you as they can get away with, and the only leverage you have is to push back or to work for someone else.
And having said all that, I don't bear my employer any grudge. It's just the nature of the system.
How can we get this slimeball fired? Who do you have to write to? Who do you need to pester? Which committees in the Congress oversee this kind of thing?
And yeah, I know, the Dems are the kind of watchdogs that keep their teeth in a glass in the bathroom. But with enough prodding, maybe they'll at least whine a bit.
I think Osama bin Laden hit the jackpot with his 9/11 attack.
It's like some auto-immune diesase. Some small trigger and the body's defenses react so excessively and inappropriately that it ends up consuming itself. Except that the Bush administration is more like a parasite than part of the body's defenses.
We've both given up on this country, and we are moving as soon as we can afford to.
Seen the value of the dollar lately? We've considered that too but have instead decided to tough it out.
Anyway, the best thing that could happen from the point of view of academic freedom is for universities to lose federal subsidies. Otherwise they become echo chambers for political fads rather than places where relatively independent research is done. This is just another case where big gifts from the government come with plenty of strings. It's hard not to take the money, but once you do, you're in a dependent relationship.
[...] he does excel at one aspect of business and politics. He delegates extremely well.
Bush also has the political instincts of a demagogue. He's adept at shifting the blame and taking credit when he can. It appears that his "excellence at delegation" is largely because he's intellectually lazy: there have been many inside accounts that depict him as being disengaged from the details of what's going on. Whether that's because he just lacks the intellect to grasp the details, or lacks the motivation, is irrelevant, since the result is the same either way. Real excellence at delegation includes being able to control the parameters of what has been delegated. Neglecting to maintain effective oversight and policy control is not delegation, it's shirking responsibility. The two themes of the Bush administration have been to assert unlimited authority, and to avoid even the most cursory accountability. It's the operating model of a tinpot dictatorship.
First, their only loss is on the profit, not the revenue, on the average post-discount price of each unit. For example, if they were losing money on each unit, fewer sales would actually reduce their losses.
Second, this only applies to those units that would have been purchased at that post-discount price instead of being downloaded. Quite a lot of downloaders would probably leave it rather than take it at that price. And even that potential loss is offset by those sales that would occur because of the downloads having taken place. Both these (loss due to sharing, and additional sales due to sharing) have to take into account the downstream effect of everyone who listens to the song/watches the video as a consequence of the download, not just the downloader. For example, if a friend plays me a song that was downloaded and I like it so much that I then go and buy it, that's a purchase that's attributable to the download.
The sum of all that might be negative, or it might be positive. Because of the advertising effect of the dissemination of the music or video, it's not at all straightforward to know if money is being made or lost because of downloading (consider the case of broadcast radio). Note also that this assumes a fixed post-discount price. Lowering that might increase revenue significantly, and also reduce the incentive to do an unapproved download.
This also assumes that what's downloaded is the same as what's bought. If one is DRM-crippled and the other isn't, there's a qualitative difference that potentially will affect demand. A more complete analysis would also take into account the effort expended by the buyer during the buying and consumption of the item. This would include how much effort goes into trying to find and obtain the item (by licit or illicit means) and the effort to use it once you have it (greater if there's DRM involved).
What it all boils down to is that these associations of marketeers (which is what most media conglomerates really are) are well aware of the real factors that influence revenue, but are lying in court about the cost to them of file-sharing. And I'm sure the legislators who they bought also knew that the DMCA penalties were based on nothing but lies. That's what's so loathsome about this whole business: there are long chains and networks of mendacity, and public policy has been based on them. This has done nothing but brought the law into disrepute.
By down-dressing below the level of just about anyone who would speak at a college, he *IS* diverting people's attention to what he is or isn't wearing.
By complying with the country-club dress code of a bunch of arrogant, privileged trust-fund parasites (leavened with the occasional poor person recruited on the basis of merit) he would be reinforcing a set of social norms that should be stamped out for any number of good reasons and which are in particular antithetical to the meritocratic ethos of coding.
I respect RMS because of his uncompromising nature. After all, if compromise worked, we'd all be happy with Shared Source serfdom and people like RMS would be irrelevant. But with respect to code, he has correctly identified the matters of principle that cannot be compromised, and has thought through the set of licensing conditions that protect those principles. Whether they're an optimal set or not is a matter for debate, but he's been directionally correct in approach, and the warnings he has made about how weaker conditions can be subverted have been proven by experience. In a hostage swap, I'd trade him for any number of Yalies, whether barefoot or in overpriced footwear. It saddens me that I'm unlikely ever to be given such a choice.
Say the Taliban make it punishable by death use the internet, should we now honor their requests for people to be killed in the West...
With international treaties on "intellectual property" they are moving that way. And when they've moved, they'll do what they do now with existing law: let you walk if you are a big criminal, but throw you in jail for forty years or kill you if you're small, powerless or in some way have pissed off the powers that be.
It's going to take a huge effort, decades maybe, for that to be changed. Meanwhile we have to find ways to work around the attempts at cultural repression. And that's what it is: the dead hand of the profit motive attempting to extract rents from cultural continuity. Too bad that, in the US, the only parties who oppose rapacious corporate interests are near-microscopic (no lectures, please: I support one of them). So whatever happens will have to be grass-roots, since the institutions aren't built yet.
2) Damages for torts should be divided by the probability of being caught.
So, the more incompetent the enforcement, the more draconian the punishment? This is a fair approximation of the system as it works now, but a very poor approximation of justice. The incompetence of the police and the court system should have no bearing on how society punishes crimes and torts. And some laws are on the books that are unenforceable: is the penalty for these infinite?
The variability over time is another problem. If we accept your principle, if enforcement rates increase, are defendants who had to pay fines based on the old rate entitled to refunds? If not, where's equal protection?
Slashdot Mirror
What we know and don't know:
We know that the US government claims to have shot down the satellite, and their purported reasons for doing it.
We don't know if they're telling the truth, why they did it if it's true, and, if they succeeded, how many attempts they made prior to success.
Based on the US government's record for truthfulness and competency, it would be prudent to doubt just about everything about their version of the story unless corroboration is available.
And what are Cuba's life expectancy and infant mortality rates compared to other Central American or Caribbean countries that did not suffer the "destruction caused by communism"? Say, Guatemala or Haiti? Or, for that matter, that larger banana republic to the north with its own strutting tinpot dictator, the US?
By the way, I don't like communism either. I'm anti-authoritarian. It's just that, when a lot of Americans start going on about "free markets," what they really mean is "imperialism managed by multinationals." And that's even worse than the Cuban system, since none of it is even nominally for the benefit of the people. Given the choice between rule by nosy, pushy social-worker types and domination by a kleptocratic ruling class, my first choice would be neither. But if that's not an available option, I would look closely at which would be less bad, and it's not obvious that, say, the Nicaraguan or Panamanian model is better than that of Cuba.
Plato was wrong about a lot of things, but he did rightly observe that the desire to hold power is evidence of one's unfitness to hold power.
Confounding and frustrating those who want to exercise power over us is not just enjoyable, it's a survival imperative.
Putting out the eye of the cyclops is our only choice besides being eaten.
Poor guy said that Ada matters. I've had the misfortune to have had to develop some large systems in Ada. It's like a nightmare in which a QA person with some software engineering background decided to impose a language on the rest of us. Structured-programming hell, with lots of rigid structure in all the wrong places. IDE, build system, runtime, language, all in one: bad idea.
Government agencies tried hard to push Ada in the 80's but fortunately, it choked on the sleeves of its own straitjacket. When I consider frameworks now, one thing I look for is real modularity, not a monolith. If I can't swap out a component, it's not a useful framework. Ada completely failed in that regard. It was Ada's way or the highway.
Not that Java is devoid of faults. I've run into plenty of Java programmers who, in the day, would have been happily coding in COBOL. Baaaaah. But that's part of what Java was for: an OO-ish language for the boneheads who couldn't be trusted with something more powerful. Hence the strong typing, lack of pointers, built-in garbage collection, and absence of multiple inheritance. Having said that, I'd rather get a crew to code up a corporate IT app in Java than, say, C++. In fact there are few large problem domains where C++ would be on my list at all. And there are none where Ada would be an option, unless I needed a strawman solution alternative to eliminate from a shortlist.
This only makes sense because if you double the frequency, the particles will have to move back and forth twice as often in a given time interval.
The reason audio engineers do equalizing is driven primarily by psychoacoustics and by expectations of the frequency response and quality of the playback apparatus. Suffice to say that a listener's perception of the relative volumes of different frequencies is non-linear, and the typical playback device is not some massively over-engineered stack of audiophile equipment that cost more than my car. It's a common practice for engineers to check out the results of the mastering process by listening to the mix on a shitty car stereo or a $49 boom box since that more closely replicates a typical listener's experience than a studio full of reference monitors. Some engineers will also rip a mix to 128-bit mp3 just to be sure that it's still listenable in that format. But don't tell the RIAA about that...
I am guessing, reading your post again, that what you were trying to say is that a low-frequency wave of a given energy will be of higher amplitude than a high-frequency wave of the same energy. So, for an analog recording medium using a linear encoding scheme, the required excursions for a low-frequency wave of a given energy will also have to be greater. Same would go for a linearly-encoded digital representation. And, as you mention, other schemes make better use of the available number of bits. If that's what you were trying to say, it makes sense.
And let me try summing up your S/N discussion by saying a couple things. First, signal-to-noise ratio is a ratio. That is, by definition, it's a relative measure. That allows "relative to what?" manipulation by self-interested parties. Second, there's an irreducible noise floor for any audio signal, imposed by the laws of physics. Where I'd add to your argument is that that noise floor in real life is present at every step of the signal chain, from the initial recording through the persistence mechanism used (including any encoding that happens) and subsequent reproduction. Clearly, the noise floor that matters the most is the one that comes along with the signal that is amplified most. And the air in a room at room temperature has a noise floor too, as does any electronic circuit, and as do people's ears. You can do clever things to improve headroom when designing an encoding process, whether it's analog or digital, but ultimataly you can't beat Mother Nature. Many of the claims made by audiophiles and by the hucksters who make livings extracting cash from their pockets are simply not consistent with the laws of physics.
If every business used 100% vanilla package software, and no customization was needed to integrate Package A to Package B, then maybe this conjecture might be true. But there are two rationales for having an in-house IT department: (a) One throat to choke when it comes to support; and (b) The widely prevalent and generally unfounded belief that "our business is unique and requires significant customization" which means you need IT business analysts and developers to specify, implement and maintain those customizations. The driver for this is not strategic advantage, it's just the inability to comply with standards and to manage arbitrary complexity.
These B-school weenies should really get out to some real IT departments more often.
Safer from what? The risk of finding yourself 69-ing a gay Bostonian while you're drunk? Because if that's what it's about, your problem isn't gays, it's closets. Me, I like near SF and am a straight male. Gay men never try hitting on me: I'm probably too old and/or not good-looking enough. Or more likely, if you're not actively looking for something, you're not likely to find it. Gays don't make trouble for anyone-- it's just that some people find the need to make trouble for them. There's no rational motivation for that.
In Rome, men had sex with men for hundreds of years. But when the Christians got power, everything went down the shitter.
What percentage of McAfee's install base is Windows rather than Linux? If it's almost entirely Windows, and there are smaller (or no) margins in porting their products to Linux, or even if there's more competition, then they have plenty of reason to spread FUD over the GPL. No need for a direct quid pro quo from Redmond. It's less lucrative, or riskier, for McAfee to make products on Linux, so they want to find reasons to convince their customers that Windows is better. It's like the economics of the US health care system: cheap, simple cures or cost-effective prevention aren't such good earners as expensive therapies for chronic conditions. So they're trying to scare the patients away from prevention (the more robust *nix security model) in order to keep selling the costly therapy. Any benefit to Microsoft is a side-effect.
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on YouTube either.
I keep my private and business lives well-encapsulated, even to the extent of never introducing my coworkers to my friends. My employer asserts the customary feudal prerogative of controlling every moment of my waking life while still only paying me for part of it. This is not because they have some God-given right to direct my life, it is because they can get away with it in the present rigged system, and they have more power than I do. But having an unfeeling, brain-dead bureaucracy stick their nose into my private life is no better when it's an HR department than when it's a government agency. It's repression all the same. It's an odious feature of the present system.
I don't regard them as malicious so much as arrogant, overzealous and misguided. So I practise operational security and communication security in order to minimize their opportunities to mess with me. But that's out of necessity, not out of any belief that I owe it to them to do that. And I'm not talking about any "right" to a job. I'm just saying that they don't own me, yet in many respects they behave as though they do. And due to the extreme, government-backed asymmetry of power relations in the workplace (you think employers have it tough? Look at the restrictions on union activity sometime), those are the conditions we have to live under in the US. And I'm a well-compensated employee. It's far worse for those with lower-paid, more commoditized jobs. That's where employers really run amok.
And please, never talk about "extreme risk" when all you're referring to is money. I've lived in parts of the world where risk means you or your family getting killed, dismembered, driven from your home. That's risk. What you're talking about is just putting your money where your mouth is.
Meanwhile I don't mind hearing that people are putting out the eye of the cyclops. Public property or not, the potential of abuse of this information is just too great. Maybe it's being done for bad reasons, but it needs to be done.
By the way, those waterboards are public property too, and I'd like to see them destroyed.
While sympathetic to the ends, I do have some questions as to means: why can't a can of black spray paint do the job? Or even some tar at the end of a long-handled brush? Is it really necessary to burn them?
What do Radio Shack even sell these days? If you asked me, I couldn't tell you. Sprint cellphone contracts, some toys, and low-functioning A/V bits and pieces. Who buys that stuff anyway?
I'm no fan of tasers either, and the last thing we need are more excuses for the police to use excessive force on us. But even more important is for the US government and its proxies to stop torturing people now. No exceptions. And those who have condoned and practised it should be put on trial and locked up. No exceptions to that either.
So perhaps you have some ideas about how vendor support will be provided by the likes of Microsoft?
I work in California. I redlined my contract. I don't recall the exact wording I used, but it was to the effect that anything I do during working hours or with company resources is theirs, and anything outside of working hours and with my resources is mine. They hired me anyway. Even if the draconian provisions of the contract were not enforceable in California, I wanted it very clear where the line is.
If they didn't accept my redlines, I would have walked. That's the secret of negotiation when you're the weaker party: if it really matters to you, stand up to them, and if you can't live with it, don't work for them. It's not a satisfactory situation, since you might have to pass up that dream job because the T's and C's are no good, but that's the way the world is. They'll take as much from you as they can get away with, and the only leverage you have is to push back or to work for someone else.
And having said all that, I don't bear my employer any grudge. It's just the nature of the system.
One big union. That's what we all need.
How can we get this slimeball fired? Who do you have to write to? Who do you need to pester? Which committees in the Congress oversee this kind of thing?
And yeah, I know, the Dems are the kind of watchdogs that keep their teeth in a glass in the bathroom. But with enough prodding, maybe they'll at least whine a bit.
Anyway, the best thing that could happen from the point of view of academic freedom is for universities to lose federal subsidies. Otherwise they become echo chambers for political fads rather than places where relatively independent research is done. This is just another case where big gifts from the government come with plenty of strings. It's hard not to take the money, but once you do, you're in a dependent relationship.
MPAA Lose: (5257 + 11566) * $19.99 * (1 - discount - cost) * (1 - P_Buy_Instead) - (5257 + 11566) * $19.99 * (1 - discount - cost) * (Purchases_Due_to_Each_Unapproved_Download)
First, their only loss is on the profit, not the revenue, on the average post-discount price of each unit. For example, if they were losing money on each unit, fewer sales would actually reduce their losses.
Second, this only applies to those units that would have been purchased at that post-discount price instead of being downloaded. Quite a lot of downloaders would probably leave it rather than take it at that price. And even that potential loss is offset by those sales that would occur because of the downloads having taken place. Both these (loss due to sharing, and additional sales due to sharing) have to take into account the downstream effect of everyone who listens to the song/watches the video as a consequence of the download, not just the downloader. For example, if a friend plays me a song that was downloaded and I like it so much that I then go and buy it, that's a purchase that's attributable to the download.
The sum of all that might be negative, or it might be positive. Because of the advertising effect of the dissemination of the music or video, it's not at all straightforward to know if money is being made or lost because of downloading (consider the case of broadcast radio). Note also that this assumes a fixed post-discount price. Lowering that might increase revenue significantly, and also reduce the incentive to do an unapproved download.
This also assumes that what's downloaded is the same as what's bought. If one is DRM-crippled and the other isn't, there's a qualitative difference that potentially will affect demand. A more complete analysis would also take into account the effort expended by the buyer during the buying and consumption of the item. This would include how much effort goes into trying to find and obtain the item (by licit or illicit means) and the effort to use it once you have it (greater if there's DRM involved).
What it all boils down to is that these associations of marketeers (which is what most media conglomerates really are) are well aware of the real factors that influence revenue, but are lying in court about the cost to them of file-sharing. And I'm sure the legislators who they bought also knew that the DMCA penalties were based on nothing but lies. That's what's so loathsome about this whole business: there are long chains and networks of mendacity, and public policy has been based on them. This has done nothing but brought the law into disrepute.
I respect RMS because of his uncompromising nature. After all, if compromise worked, we'd all be happy with Shared Source serfdom and people like RMS would be irrelevant. But with respect to code, he has correctly identified the matters of principle that cannot be compromised, and has thought through the set of licensing conditions that protect those principles. Whether they're an optimal set or not is a matter for debate, but he's been directionally correct in approach, and the warnings he has made about how weaker conditions can be subverted have been proven by experience. In a hostage swap, I'd trade him for any number of Yalies, whether barefoot or in overpriced footwear. It saddens me that I'm unlikely ever to be given such a choice.
It's going to take a huge effort, decades maybe, for that to be changed. Meanwhile we have to find ways to work around the attempts at cultural repression. And that's what it is: the dead hand of the profit motive attempting to extract rents from cultural continuity. Too bad that, in the US, the only parties who oppose rapacious corporate interests are near-microscopic (no lectures, please: I support one of them). So whatever happens will have to be grass-roots, since the institutions aren't built yet.
The variability over time is another problem. If we accept your principle, if enforcement rates increase, are defendants who had to pay fines based on the old rate entitled to refunds? If not, where's equal protection?