I hope they sue the pants off of the crooks who offer for copying works which they have no right to so offer. I just wish they would get a few things straight.
Copying music is not a crime; if it were, every record company employee would be in jail. Copying music is what record companies do for a living. Copying a creative work *without the owner's permission* is the crime, and soliciting criminal behavior is also a crime (and, I would argue in this setting, the greater of the two).
It's the "everyone who owns a crowbar must be a burglar" argument that falls on its face.
Security measures rarely stop anything in the long run, but they do slow it down and thin it out. Good measures can abate the problem to a level one can live with.
One helpful social change would be to *stop cheering the thieves on*. If you dislike the big labels, fine, but don't lionize criminal behavior just because it hurts someone you dislike. History seems to show that "the enemy of my enemy will probably turn and attack me next." I don't want to hang around with dishonest people; I get a crick in my neck from watching my back all the time.
If you want to oppose incorrect behavior, the most productive way in the long run is to oppose it with correct behavior, not more incorrect behavior. Reward good behavior by doing business with good people. Refuse to reward bad behavior -- *anyone's* bad behavior -- and find ways to punish it *properly*.
You've been subjected to a frivolous suit and you can't afford a lawyer, so what do you do? If you have lots of company, you all pool your chips and file a class action countersuit. There are limits to just how far baseless suits could go before the consequences become unacceptable. A litigant both unscrupulous and incautious will be eaten by his own greed.
In the meantime, I suppose you do negotiate for a smaller out-of-court settlement or plead "no contest", hoping to recover your loss later when the class suit wins. Audacity usually succeeds in the beginning -- it's only later that it becomes plain whose was the stronger position.
What you don't do is meekly take whatever deal they offer. You push back with whatever you have. Negotiate the best deal you can, and if that is not good enough then you have some breathing space to gather the power to force renegotiation for more favorable terms. And don't agree with false charges; just put off fighting to disprove them until you are prepared to win. In any conflict, never give up anything that doesn't buy you something better.
[*sigh* in case it's not obvious, IANAL and this is not legal advice.]
There. You see why we never make any progress on this? The issue was greenhouse gases, not jobs. If we don't do something about the greenhouse gases, we won't need jobs, 'cos we'll be dead.
Basically what I'm getting at is that the established interests need an incentive to *get out of the way*. "You can make at least as much money by getting out of the way as you do by clinging to the status quo" is a pretty good incentive.
No, *don't* think Chernobyl. That was a stupid design which never should have been built. Think decent designs with proper multilayered safety plans, and then find a way to make sure that's what we get.
3. Show the established interests a way to make a satisfactory amount of money out of new ideas, so they'll invest in those and let the old ones wither.
But that would be giving money to corporations, which is automatically evil.
Here we go again. Only the low-level waste is still there in "thousands of years". The highly radioactive stuff burns up in a few years, because it's, uh, highly active.
Of course we *could* reuse and recycle much of the "waste", but that causes politicians to get the jeebies about "proliferation" 'cos there's plutonium in them thar wastes.
Hmmm, maybe they should read old Popular Science backfiles. Considering the ruinous conversion rate and the nassty byproducts of refining so much silicon, PV doesn't look so good. But there have been a lot of ideas that show up and then disappear, and we never hear why they wouldn't work out.
You can pump water with excess energy and recover much of the energy later by letting the water flow back and drive the pump in generator mode. Do something similar with compressed air. (They wanted to pump the air into abandoned oil wells, IIRC. Re-use!)
You can get energy densities similar to nuclear power cores from big arrays of mirrors focused on a common collector -- more than enough to extract the energy as heat.
You could use the electricity to electrolyze water and store the energy as molecular hydrogen, or couple it to a hundred other energy-consuming but readily reversible reactions.
We know a lot about storing vast quantities of energy. We need to learn more, but we know enough to get started.
Style? I couldn't care less about style. Try fitting two tall, beefy teenagers in the back seat of a typical econobox.
A year ago I took my eldest son with me to the auto show and we tried on a lot of vehicles. The Grand Cherokee was cramped. The &%&^%& *Hummer H2* was cramped! The Dodge Ram Crew Cab half as big as our house was cramped!!! The smaller models caused him to emit sounds of pain as he tried to get in and out. He didn't even attempt the VW New Beetle.
The only two vehicles we tried that had enough room in back were the Ford Windstar van and [applause!] the tiny Toyota Echo. I'll be buying the Echo, but if you don't like Toyota and have big kids then you're kinda out of luck unless you are willing to accept something huge.
(Interestingly enough, Toyota had a *far* larger, SUV-type model there too, and it was *too small*! Much less roomy than the Echo. Dunno what the Echo engineering team did, but I hope they do a lot more of it. "Stood up to the stylists and insisted on a practical design" gets my vote.)
The "consumption goes down" step corresponds to the "then a miracle occurs" in the famous S. Harris cartoon. You'll see a little blip. Consumption will go down by an insignificant amount for an insignificant length of time and then return to pretty much the former trend. And then the tax disadvantage will be eaten away with a dozen abatements.
People can't afford to junk working vehicles just because fuel prices are spiking. They won't do it. Not for long, anyway. They hold onto older cars *longer* because the money they'd spend on new ones is being swallowed by the gas pump. Once they find a way to bring fuel prices down, the people who were *forced* to accept something smaller than they wanted will go back to bigger models and the manufacturers will be happy to supply their demand for premium merchandise. The only ones left driving small efficient cars will be those of us who prefer small efficient cars.
That's the way things work outside of repressive dictatorships -- people are free to make their own choices according to their own values. You won't make lasting changes in behavior without making lasting changes in values.
Besides, according to recent decisions, any act with communicative effect is "speech". My sticking my fingers in my ears and running away is speech, and thus protected, and you have no right to make me stop, so there!
I opted out quicker than that. Anything with "optin" anywhere in the headers goes directly down the virtual latrine, since I've never received a single piece of mail from them that didn't belong there.
Uhhuh, while the Franklin family watches the Edison case with interest, and an ancient Greek clan whose ancestor coined the word "elektron" is watching them....
Major Corporations, yes. I've never heard of All Computers Inc. Just how major are they? I couldn't find a listing for their securities, and yes, I did check Canadian exchanges.
Yes, isn't there a legal requirement for the plaintiff to limit damages by not taking forever to get around to trial? Certainly one can get in trouble for filing suit and *then* wasting months with foot-dragging (presumably to run up the damages), but what is the standard for showing that you couldn't have given notice to the defendant earlier given that the alleged violation has been ongoing for years?
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I hope they sue the pants off of the crooks who offer for copying works which they have no right to so offer. I just wish they would get a few things straight.
Copying music is not a crime; if it were, every record company employee would be in jail. Copying music is what record companies do for a living. Copying a creative work *without the owner's permission* is the crime, and soliciting criminal behavior is also a crime (and, I would argue in this setting, the greater of the two).
It's the "everyone who owns a crowbar must be a burglar" argument that falls on its face.
Security measures rarely stop anything in the long run, but they do slow it down and thin it out. Good measures can abate the problem to a level one can live with.
One helpful social change would be to *stop cheering the thieves on*. If you dislike the big labels, fine, but don't lionize criminal behavior just because it hurts someone you dislike. History seems to show that "the enemy of my enemy will probably turn and attack me next." I don't want to hang around with dishonest people; I get a crick in my neck from watching my back all the time.
If you want to oppose incorrect behavior, the most productive way in the long run is to oppose it with correct behavior, not more incorrect behavior. Reward good behavior by doing business with good people. Refuse to reward bad behavior -- *anyone's* bad behavior -- and find ways to punish it *properly*.
You've been subjected to a frivolous suit and you can't afford a lawyer, so what do you do? If you have lots of company, you all pool your chips and file a class action countersuit. There are limits to just how far baseless suits could go before the consequences become unacceptable. A litigant both unscrupulous and incautious will be eaten by his own greed.
In the meantime, I suppose you do negotiate for a smaller out-of-court settlement or plead "no contest", hoping to recover your loss later when the class suit wins. Audacity usually succeeds in the beginning -- it's only later that it becomes plain whose was the stronger position.
What you don't do is meekly take whatever deal they offer. You push back with whatever you have. Negotiate the best deal you can, and if that is not good enough then you have some breathing space to gather the power to force renegotiation for more favorable terms. And don't agree with false charges; just put off fighting to disprove them until you are prepared to win. In any conflict, never give up anything that doesn't buy you something better.
[*sigh* in case it's not obvious, IANAL and this is not legal advice.]
There. You see why we never make any progress on this? The issue was greenhouse gases, not jobs. If we don't do something about the greenhouse gases, we won't need jobs, 'cos we'll be dead.
Basically what I'm getting at is that the established interests need an incentive to *get out of the way*. "You can make at least as much money by getting out of the way as you do by clinging to the status quo" is a pretty good incentive.
"Yet none of your tests were of minivans."
A hollow voice says, "Ford Windstar". Read the post again.
We tried on a lot more than I mentioned, because it's a lot more than I remember. And the Windstar was about the only van there.
Oh, it's *always* the beginning of the end for email. COBOL is dying and Apple is about to tank, I hear.
No, *don't* think Chernobyl. That was a stupid design which never should have been built. Think decent designs with proper multilayered safety plans, and then find a way to make sure that's what we get.
You left out one:
3. Show the established interests a way to make a satisfactory amount of money out of new ideas, so they'll invest in those and let the old ones wither.
But that would be giving money to corporations, which is automatically evil.
Here we go again. Only the low-level waste is still there in "thousands of years". The highly radioactive stuff burns up in a few years, because it's, uh, highly active.
Of course we *could* reuse and recycle much of the "waste", but that causes politicians to get the jeebies about "proliferation" 'cos there's plutonium in them thar wastes.
Hmmm, maybe they should read old Popular Science backfiles. Considering the ruinous conversion rate and the nassty byproducts of refining so much silicon, PV doesn't look so good. But there have been a lot of ideas that show up and then disappear, and we never hear why they wouldn't work out.
You can pump water with excess energy and recover much of the energy later by letting the water flow back and drive the pump in generator mode. Do something similar with compressed air. (They wanted to pump the air into abandoned oil wells, IIRC. Re-use!)
You can get energy densities similar to nuclear power cores from big arrays of mirrors focused on a common collector -- more than enough to extract the energy as heat.
You could use the electricity to electrolyze water and store the energy as molecular hydrogen, or couple it to a hundred other energy-consuming but readily reversible reactions.
We know a lot about storing vast quantities of energy. We need to learn more, but we know enough to get started.
Hey, if we had all that cheap nuclear-generated electricity, we could have electric cars and emit no pollutants at all. :-)
And the snow plow hasn't been by for hours. They had to cut back on plowing because gas costs so much.
Style? I couldn't care less about style. Try fitting two tall, beefy teenagers in the back seat of a typical econobox.
A year ago I took my eldest son with me to the auto show and we tried on a lot of vehicles. The Grand Cherokee was cramped. The &%&^%& *Hummer H2* was cramped! The Dodge Ram Crew Cab half as big as our house was cramped!!! The smaller models caused him to emit sounds of pain as he tried to get in and out. He didn't even attempt the VW New Beetle.
The only two vehicles we tried that had enough room in back were the Ford Windstar van and [applause!] the tiny Toyota Echo. I'll be buying the Echo, but if you don't like Toyota and have big kids then you're kinda out of luck unless you are willing to accept something huge.
(Interestingly enough, Toyota had a *far* larger, SUV-type model there too, and it was *too small*! Much less roomy than the Echo. Dunno what the Echo engineering team did, but I hope they do a lot more of it. "Stood up to the stylists and insisted on a practical design" gets my vote.)
Indeed, and the main problem with nuclear waste is that so many people simply don't want to think about the barrels.
Yup, and the likelihood of that happening anytime soon is 1 in 999999999999999999999999999999999999.
The "consumption goes down" step corresponds to the "then a miracle occurs" in the famous S. Harris cartoon. You'll see a little blip. Consumption will go down by an insignificant amount for an insignificant length of time and then return to pretty much the former trend. And then the tax disadvantage will be eaten away with a dozen abatements.
People can't afford to junk working vehicles just because fuel prices are spiking. They won't do it. Not for long, anyway. They hold onto older cars *longer* because the money they'd spend on new ones is being swallowed by the gas pump. Once they find a way to bring fuel prices down, the people who were *forced* to accept something smaller than they wanted will go back to bigger models and the manufacturers will be happy to supply their demand for premium merchandise. The only ones left driving small efficient cars will be those of us who prefer small efficient cars.
That's the way things work outside of repressive dictatorships -- people are free to make their own choices according to their own values. You won't make lasting changes in behavior without making lasting changes in values.
Besides, according to recent decisions, any act with communicative effect is "speech". My sticking my fingers in my ears and running away is speech, and thus protected, and you have no right to make me stop, so there!
Your missives probably got diagnosed as spam due to all of the misspellings.
I opted out quicker than that. Anything with "optin" anywhere in the headers goes directly down the virtual latrine, since I've never received a single piece of mail from them that didn't belong there.
Uhhuh, while the Franklin family watches the Edison case with interest, and an ancient Greek clan whose ancestor coined the word "elektron" is watching them....
Major Corporations, yes. I've never heard of All Computers Inc. Just how major are they? I couldn't find a listing for their securities, and yes, I did check Canadian exchanges.
Yes, isn't there a legal requirement for the plaintiff to limit damages by not taking forever to get around to trial? Certainly one can get in trouble for filing suit and *then* wasting months with foot-dragging (presumably to run up the damages), but what is the standard for showing that you couldn't have given notice to the defendant earlier given that the alleged violation has been ongoing for years?
Since the little bugs seem to do their evil work by accumulating calcium deposits, maybe this is a new market for LimeAway. :-)
See "stromatolite".
Beverley: It appears to be a nanobacterial infection, Captain. It's resequencing Barclay's DNA.
Picard: Can you reverse the process?
Beverley: Not until after the next commercial break.
Barclay: Could we let someone *else* have *his* DNA resequenced next week? This is getting old.