They've also brought out a new product that does essentially what we all do at soda fountains: it goes half coke, half diet coke, for a drink that has half the calories and 90% of the flavor.
I think that's pretty darn responsible of them. But remember, the Coca-Cola people also make Gatorade...a drink I don't think you can associate with poor health.
Here's something I don't get: Why do fans of open source software need to sell people on open source software?
I'm a fan of tacos, but I don't have a shirt that says "They said bring a sandwich or better, so I brought a taco." I figure if you want to eat lunch, you'll weigh all the options out there. I also figure, if you don't want a taco already, you especially don't want to hear me tout the virtues of spicy hot julienne strips of steak or chicken and fresh picante sauce covered in cheddar cheese (man, I should have had breakfast).
It just seems to me that pimping a product without getting paid for it is a lot of work for no actualized returns returns. But then again, I feel the same way about "switching" from Windows to Linux. I don't see the danger in Longhorn or in DRM (since it's hardly requisite) and viruses have never hit me. What does Linux offer me that I've been missing? Nothing, so far as I've seen.
And yet, the richest 10% in America still pay 80% of all tax monies overall. That money isn't all coming from the hard working, honest, merely rich. Even with the loopholes, the super rich pay plenty of taxes, too. Whether they pay enough, or too much, depends which side of the fence you're sitting on. But it's not like they're getting off scot free.
It would be different with think tanks because they are not trying to be unbiased agents of the truth. Instead, they are lobbiests trying to acheive goals in a specific area. The funds they receive don't need to be disclosed because it should be obvious that they are from source on a single side of an issue.
Incidentally, if you look at other large sponsors of these agencies, you'll see other funding sources they have in common besides Microsoft. It's not like MS is the sole, driving force behind these organizations.
Nope. It was fairly presumptuous of me to offer said guarantee. I extrapolated this based on the fact that the band is a regional act whose CDs were sold only in regional music chains covering about 30% of the country's populous. It might be that their music only appeals to this region. But I'd guarantee they were. Of course, my guarantee has already been shown to be a worthless thing.
You, sir, are a little confused. It is music, not civil rights. People who want something for nothing are freeloaders, no matter how they justify it. I am perfectly willing to pay $16 for a good CD -- heck, I paid $19 for "Flood" back in 1991, and just paid $25 for a 2 disc indie of which I only like the first disc -- and am excited that many options (such as iTMS and unrestricted listening stations) to offer cheaper options and more assurance that the CDs I buy aren't 12 tracks of garbage.
As for the last paragraph: you are quoting the common complaints raised by independent artists, complaints which are based on very shitty experiences not shared by all artists, certainly not by the artists I know who would DIE for even a summarily shitty record contract. For one thing, anybody making less than $2 per CD is a moron who neglected to fight for a better contract. That was the standard a-way back in 1994; KRS-ONE wrote a song about it. You pay for your own studio time with the advance that they gave you on sales of the record, they release the CD when they want, it's true, but they do that to time it with promotion. Promotion doesn't mean POSTERS, by the way...it might be nothing more than sending out discs to review rags, but that's something you can't get as an independent. Self promotion is a rough racket, and if you want radio play these days you pretty much have to be an RIAA act. Nobody else has the sales to properly do promotions.
The RIAA is a cartel, I'll grant you that. I'm not against the independents and they make more and more economic sense each year, as the number of signing majors goes down. But my favorite record from my favorite Indie artist only sold 30,000 copies. I guarantee that, had they released that same record on a major with nationwide airplay and tightened production, they would have cleared at least 100,000 copies. The difference in pay percentage is pretty substantial, but it's not quite as big as the potential for becoming famous and paid, two things you have to be VERY lucky to get as an indie.
Because you don't put it into wierd text boxes, you don't use newsgroups, you don't have any enemies, you don't have any domains, and you don't have it in plaintext on your website.
I do all 4. I get my share of spam. It's not a HUGE deal, but it made it worth my while to get a spam filter.
Already if a server tries to send the same email to more than three fake addresses at my company, I blacklist the IP for two days. Not just for email, but for any IP traffic. I did this to prevent trojans, but it's a somewhat effective spam deterrant as well.
From person experience, it works pretty well (I think Mail.App is good too, but the management of the junk once marked needs to be customized). But since it's not really a server side program, you can't run a server-side test on it. Hence why it wasn't included in this test.
Some anecdotal "evidence" for you: some of the users at my office run their own spam engines on their desktops because they're control freaks. I let them pass by SpamAssassin entirely. In my observation, SpamAssassin works WAY better. It cleans about 90% of the spam we get, whereas most of the add-on desktop clients I've seen are 60-70% effective. Meaning about every third email gets through.
Either way, I would never run an email address "in the wild" without some kind of spam software. Not any more. I resisted for YEARS, but when I started pulling up Squirrelmail...and the first three PAGES of mail were all spam missed by the (SLOWWWWW) Squirrelmail bayesspam plugin...I moved on to using only IMAP client apps with SOME KIND of spam detection built in.
You keep one account for people who don't know you. You spam check that one. You put that on business cards, use it to sign up for porn sites, and post it on slashdot.
You keep another account for responding to email. You set that as your reply-to. You do not spam check it.
This way, there is a way to reach you for customers, clients and friends that will ALWAYS work. Call it the direct line. And, there's a way for people to introduce themselves to you. Call it the "front desk." Anyhow, with SpamAssassin (which includes a bayesian filter, btw, which can be autotrained to learn spam-like language from other mail it sets up), most of the bullshit calls will be correctly tagged and most of the incoming calls will get to you. I haven't had a false positive in months. But I train the thing like Rocky Balboa.
It would also encourage companies to ignore the copyrights of smaller artists and producers. Fuck 'em, their lawyers won't take the case on contingency because if they lose, neither side will get paid.
No, the US policy that each side pays their own court fees is a very nice one that ensures fewer nuisance cases (imagine how many we'd have without it!) and equality in the eyes of the court no matter who wins.
It doesn't matter where the increase is coming from...the very fact that there is an increase in RIAA member sales indicates that purchasers in general don't give a wet slap that the RIAA is suing file sharers.
I don't care myself. I'm not going to deny myself good music just because the artist signed with a major label. Shit, I *like* Velvet Revolver. I don't care that they're popular nor that their CD had (easily defeated) copy protection. I wanted the disc, I bought the disc, I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have enjoyed it any more or any less if it were on Bumblestick Records.
Incidentally, I have never heard of a single artist who turned down a contract merely because it was with an RIAA label. It's hard to turn down worldwide exposure, active promotion, industry contacts and that nice advance just because they sued some freeloaders.
Maybe I am wrong. I don't know P2P. But I know the internet, and for the internet to work, you need both a server and a client. And for a server residing on a private network, such as that of a wireless LAN, to a request from the outside network, the request must be routed to it. A WAP will not automatically route requests to connect to a server; how could it, when it may have a hundred machines on the local network and it doesn't know which to refer a given request to? It can't send it to all of them...that'd be a security nightmare, and how do you handle three machines on the local network that ALL respond to port 80?
Maybe the major P2P networks work without using server sockets these days, like I said, I don't know. Torrent seems to, though I'm not exactly sure how (I assume it connects to the external machine as a client if it can and then services upload requests). But a-way back when, P2P networks behind a firewall were one way only... unless you told the firewall where you were.
Whoa. I didn't say anything about the scum who steal money from artists by indignantly giving away their only product and acting like they're doing them a favor. I was merely dealing with the tactics of the other group of scum. Believe me, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around in the world of digital music.
I think it's one of the major reasons we're seeing so many tech jobs go overseas. If I had some self important prick telling me how to do my job, and I found a way to get rid of him and save a ton of money in the process, I'd do it in a fucking instant. I don't need a policy telling me how many non-work buddies I can have in AIM. I need a multipurpose computing device.
Incidentally, I know a lot of IT workers who are worth their weight in silicon; truly intelligent, hard working and patient people. But these guys are hard to find, though they are easily identified: they care more about the sanctity of the SERVERS in the office than they do about the CLIENTS.
Please. Drum and Bass musicians aren't on RIAA labels. RIAA labels are for music that will sell! And you won't have any problem putting the music on P2P either -- because you can't give that shit away, either.
Good plan. Except WAP doesn't pass through incoming socket requests by default. To get P2P file sharing to work, you have to NAT the internal IP to the external IP manually. Which takes some modicum of information about the AP and a LOT of intent.
Would you be the one to spend 10, 15 thousand dollars in court and lawyer fees to say "fuck you?" to an RIAA lawsuit claiming you illegally offered to let people copy a work you did not have the copyright for? Especially if you did it? Would you be the guy who, knowing that they have records and evidence that you did IN FACT allow their computer to access and download copyrighted material you hosted, claimed to be innocent? Would you spin some story about a theiving roommate, or a computer virus, or a cell of terrorist hackers? Where's the reasonable doubt needed to assert your innocence in the face of solid evidence proving your guilt?
And would you stand up to them, knowing your guilt, knowing the court's award would be much higher than the $3000 settlement they offered you, just because you were an idealist?
Methinks you'd have to be a very rich, foolish idealist. And if you're a rich, foolish idealist, I'd rather see you devote your energies to promoting a more palatable green party in this country than waste it fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit with that group of assholes at the RIAA. We broke the law, we got caught. Pay the fine, get it over with.
Uh, the RIAA is supported by their member record labels. Their "business plan" isn't sinking -- they exist through the funds of and solely to protect the interest of the industry. Monies got from suing file sharers are usually peanuts compared to the amount of work that went into suing them, and if there is a profit it's passed on to the members.
As for going to court, this is solely the auspice of the complainant. If both parties feel it is worth the time and money to press the issue in court, then and only then will it be defended. Copyright and patent infringement cases rarely go to court, because the settlement is usually less than court costs. Extortion? I don't think so. File sharers are obviously making copies of works they don't have the rights to, ergo, it is infringement. No lawyer would fight this on contingency. Now, those who are being sued unfairly have reason to fight...but for many of them, it won't be worth the time. THAT's extortion, IMO, but it's also the price you pay sometimes to live in a society that respects the rights of creators, even when these rights are sickly twisted like the RIAA's doing now.
-1, Ignores the Point. They aren't suing downloaders, they're suing uploaders. When you make available for copy to the general public a CD that you own, you are infringing on the exclusive right to copy posessed by the RIAA's member labels. That's why it is illegal regardless of whether you have the CD or not. It would be perfectly legal to get mp3s of a CD you own, so long as the person providing those mp3s had a right to give them to you. I have gotten mp3s and aacs from friends of several old, scratched to death CDs that I own and I'm not at all worried about it. Incidentally, some of these records are out of print and the only way TO get copies is from friends. The old Moon Ska catalog is a good example...I have at least 50 moon ska discs and many of them, such as the awesome Skarmageddon, are close to ten years old and dying.
When people stop buying CDs from RIAA artists. Which, after close to three years of this nonsense, they haven't. In fact, according to SoundScan, OTC sales are actually up.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that suing potential customers IS an effective business model, if you get more money from the suit then you would from their potential sales and if other customers want your product so much they're willing to buy from you even as you screw them. And seeing as how they're settling for $3k+ from filesharers who aren't likely to be buying 160+ cds any time soon, it looks like this is going to be just another line item in the budget. $5,000,000 from price fixed cd sales here, $2,000,000 from recouped advances, and another mil or so from suing grandmothers and preteen girls. Very effective; and you don't even have to call a sleazy accountant to do the books.
Work from home can also be MURDER on collaborative projects. I work at a company with several work-at-homes, and me at the office. The most common phrase is "has anybody heard from X?", where X is a work-at-home in the middle of a big project. X of course is deep in their work, and what they're doing has no bearing whatsoever on what we need. Instead, they're working on prettying up what THEY think is the bad part of the program. This happens even with very tight design specs and good communication...it's just really hard to get inside somebody's head on a collaborative, customer driven project if you're always two hours away. It's even harder to work through QA.
And then there's the stress put on me, the non-work at home. Besides my own projects, I also have to pick up all the support calls that trickle into development, go to all the meetings, and be the beck-and-call man who hears complaints and looks into the feasibility of repairing them even if a problem isn't my fault. I'm lucky if I get half as much work done as the other guys...and then I get to hear stories about how so-and-so's project was completed before mine. No shit -- that's because he doesn't drive 30 minutes to work every morning and wasn't squeezing in two or three overtime hours per day just to get his regular work done around the other work.
Incidentally, I hate working at home. Home is where my dog is, home is where my project car is, home is where my record collection is. I don't want to be working here...where do I go when work gets too hectic and I need to relax? The bathroom?
"Corporate policy" is another term for "bullshit IT managers do while slacking on installing patches." Everybody's work will, at some time or another, require them to change system settings. Everybody's work will, at some time, require them to install software. If you assign me a computer, I expect to be able to use it. If I trash it, reprimand me, but it is LESS work for either of us over the life of the tool to let me use it the way I know and break it then it is to teach me a new way to use it and require your supervision to use it.
But seeing as you have your office has you locked down so tight you can't even use contractions, I don't expect you to understand. I've worked construction jobs and factory jobs...and none of the maintenance staff ever has the power, nor the indignancy, of IT workers. Face it guys: you are glorified digital janitors, and the only reason you have the power that you do is that CEOs have not yet realized how easy you are to fire and replace. I've seen offices that have high IT turnover, and you'd better believe they have clean, easy to use computers and no "policy" about the way i have to use the tools that do my job.
Patents offer protection from others selling your ideas on the market. Since you can't sell people, the patent offers no protection.
Furthermore, policy of the US government is that you can't patent research on the human genome -- only "inventions that display utility" that stem from said research. So you couldn't patent yourself, but if you invented a gene therapy that grew an extra leg, you could patent the process that creates the extra leg.
Even if you could patent a new piece added to the genome, you would have to prove that your invention took significant effort to produce. You can't patent things found in nature, and even if you did mistakenly receive a patent, it would be struck down upon the first challenge. So before you think about patenting superfluous nipples, realize you'd be dumping a few thousand dollars into a process that MIGHT result in a completely unenforcable grant.
But by gosh, how horrible would that be! Wow-ee zow-ee, those idiots in the patent office have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING! Let's get rid of patents and market pressures will stop people from stealing ideas; yes, that'll work.
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They've also brought out a new product that does essentially what we all do at soda fountains: it goes half coke, half diet coke, for a drink that has half the calories and 90% of the flavor.
I think that's pretty darn responsible of them. But remember, the Coca-Cola people also make Gatorade...a drink I don't think you can associate with poor health.
Here's something I don't get: Why do fans of open source software need to sell people on open source software?
I'm a fan of tacos, but I don't have a shirt that says "They said bring a sandwich or better, so I brought a taco." I figure if you want to eat lunch, you'll weigh all the options out there. I also figure, if you don't want a taco already, you especially don't want to hear me tout the virtues of spicy hot julienne strips of steak or chicken and fresh picante sauce covered in cheddar cheese (man, I should have had breakfast).
It just seems to me that pimping a product without getting paid for it is a lot of work for no actualized returns returns. But then again, I feel the same way about "switching" from Windows to Linux. I don't see the danger in Longhorn or in DRM (since it's hardly requisite) and viruses have never hit me. What does Linux offer me that I've been missing? Nothing, so far as I've seen.
And yet, the richest 10% in America still pay 80% of all tax monies overall. That money isn't all coming from the hard working, honest, merely rich. Even with the loopholes, the super rich pay plenty of taxes, too. Whether they pay enough, or too much, depends which side of the fence you're sitting on. But it's not like they're getting off scot free.
It would be different with think tanks because they are not trying to be unbiased agents of the truth. Instead, they are lobbiests trying to acheive goals in a specific area. The funds they receive don't need to be disclosed because it should be obvious that they are from source on a single side of an issue.
Incidentally, if you look at other large sponsors of these agencies, you'll see other funding sources they have in common besides Microsoft. It's not like MS is the sole, driving force behind these organizations.
Nope. It was fairly presumptuous of me to offer said guarantee. I extrapolated this based on the fact that the band is a regional act whose CDs were sold only in regional music chains covering about 30% of the country's populous. It might be that their music only appeals to this region. But I'd guarantee they were. Of course, my guarantee has already been shown to be a worthless thing.
You, sir, are a little confused. It is music, not civil rights. People who want something for nothing are freeloaders, no matter how they justify it. I am perfectly willing to pay $16 for a good CD -- heck, I paid $19 for "Flood" back in 1991, and just paid $25 for a 2 disc indie of which I only like the first disc -- and am excited that many options (such as iTMS and unrestricted listening stations) to offer cheaper options and more assurance that the CDs I buy aren't 12 tracks of garbage.
As for the last paragraph: you are quoting the common complaints raised by independent artists, complaints which are based on very shitty experiences not shared by all artists, certainly not by the artists I know who would DIE for even a summarily shitty record contract. For one thing, anybody making less than $2 per CD is a moron who neglected to fight for a better contract. That was the standard a-way back in 1994; KRS-ONE wrote a song about it. You pay for your own studio time with the advance that they gave you on sales of the record, they release the CD when they want, it's true, but they do that to time it with promotion. Promotion doesn't mean POSTERS, by the way...it might be nothing more than sending out discs to review rags, but that's something you can't get as an independent. Self promotion is a rough racket, and if you want radio play these days you pretty much have to be an RIAA act. Nobody else has the sales to properly do promotions.
The RIAA is a cartel, I'll grant you that. I'm not against the independents and they make more and more economic sense each year, as the number of signing majors goes down. But my favorite record from my favorite Indie artist only sold 30,000 copies. I guarantee that, had they released that same record on a major with nationwide airplay and tightened production, they would have cleared at least 100,000 copies. The difference in pay percentage is pretty substantial, but it's not quite as big as the potential for becoming famous and paid, two things you have to be VERY lucky to get as an indie.
Because you don't put it into wierd text boxes, you don't use newsgroups, you don't have any enemies, you don't have any domains, and you don't have it in plaintext on your website.
I do all 4. I get my share of spam. It's not a HUGE deal, but it made it worth my while to get a spam filter.
No time to read it, son, just email it to me.
Why would I wait until spammers did that?
Already if a server tries to send the same email to more than three fake addresses at my company, I blacklist the IP for two days. Not just for email, but for any IP traffic. I did this to prevent trojans, but it's a somewhat effective spam deterrant as well.
From person experience, it works pretty well (I think Mail.App is good too, but the management of the junk once marked needs to be customized). But since it's not really a server side program, you can't run a server-side test on it. Hence why it wasn't included in this test.
Some anecdotal "evidence" for you: some of the users at my office run their own spam engines on their desktops because they're control freaks. I let them pass by SpamAssassin entirely. In my observation, SpamAssassin works WAY better. It cleans about 90% of the spam we get, whereas most of the add-on desktop clients I've seen are 60-70% effective. Meaning about every third email gets through.
Either way, I would never run an email address "in the wild" without some kind of spam software. Not any more. I resisted for YEARS, but when I started pulling up Squirrelmail...and the first three PAGES of mail were all spam missed by the (SLOWWWWW) Squirrelmail bayesspam plugin...I moved on to using only IMAP client apps with SOME KIND of spam detection built in.
Here's how you assuade false positives:
You keep one account for people who don't know you. You spam check that one. You put that on business cards, use it to sign up for porn sites, and post it on slashdot.
You keep another account for responding to email. You set that as your reply-to. You do not spam check it.
This way, there is a way to reach you for customers, clients and friends that will ALWAYS work. Call it the direct line. And, there's a way for people to introduce themselves to you. Call it the "front desk." Anyhow, with SpamAssassin (which includes a bayesian filter, btw, which can be autotrained to learn spam-like language from other mail it sets up), most of the bullshit calls will be correctly tagged and most of the incoming calls will get to you. I haven't had a false positive in months. But I train the thing like Rocky Balboa.
It would also encourage companies to ignore the copyrights of smaller artists and producers. Fuck 'em, their lawyers won't take the case on contingency because if they lose, neither side will get paid.
No, the US policy that each side pays their own court fees is a very nice one that ensures fewer nuisance cases (imagine how many we'd have without it!) and equality in the eyes of the court no matter who wins.
It doesn't matter where the increase is coming from...the very fact that there is an increase in RIAA member sales indicates that purchasers in general don't give a wet slap that the RIAA is suing file sharers.
I don't care myself. I'm not going to deny myself good music just because the artist signed with a major label. Shit, I *like* Velvet Revolver. I don't care that they're popular nor that their CD had (easily defeated) copy protection. I wanted the disc, I bought the disc, I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have enjoyed it any more or any less if it were on Bumblestick Records.
Incidentally, I have never heard of a single artist who turned down a contract merely because it was with an RIAA label. It's hard to turn down worldwide exposure, active promotion, industry contacts and that nice advance just because they sued some freeloaders.
Maybe I am wrong. I don't know P2P. But I know the internet, and for the internet to work, you need both a server and a client. And for a server residing on a private network, such as that of a wireless LAN, to a request from the outside network, the request must be routed to it. A WAP will not automatically route requests to connect to a server; how could it, when it may have a hundred machines on the local network and it doesn't know which to refer a given request to? It can't send it to all of them...that'd be a security nightmare, and how do you handle three machines on the local network that ALL respond to port 80?
... unless you told the firewall where you were.
Maybe the major P2P networks work without using server sockets these days, like I said, I don't know. Torrent seems to, though I'm not exactly sure how (I assume it connects to the external machine as a client if it can and then services upload requests). But a-way back when, P2P networks behind a firewall were one way only
Whoa. I didn't say anything about the scum who steal money from artists by indignantly giving away their only product and acting like they're doing them a favor. I was merely dealing with the tactics of the other group of scum. Believe me, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around in the world of digital music.
I think it's one of the major reasons we're seeing so many tech jobs go overseas. If I had some self important prick telling me how to do my job, and I found a way to get rid of him and save a ton of money in the process, I'd do it in a fucking instant. I don't need a policy telling me how many non-work buddies I can have in AIM. I need a multipurpose computing device.
Incidentally, I know a lot of IT workers who are worth their weight in silicon; truly intelligent, hard working and patient people. But these guys are hard to find, though they are easily identified: they care more about the sanctity of the SERVERS in the office than they do about the CLIENTS.
Please. Drum and Bass musicians aren't on RIAA labels. RIAA labels are for music that will sell! And you won't have any problem putting the music on P2P either -- because you can't give that shit away, either.
Good plan. Except WAP doesn't pass through incoming socket requests by default. To get P2P file sharing to work, you have to NAT the internal IP to the external IP manually. Which takes some modicum of information about the AP and a LOT of intent.
Would you be the one to spend 10, 15 thousand dollars in court and lawyer fees to say "fuck you?" to an RIAA lawsuit claiming you illegally offered to let people copy a work you did not have the copyright for? Especially if you did it? Would you be the guy who, knowing that they have records and evidence that you did IN FACT allow their computer to access and download copyrighted material you hosted, claimed to be innocent? Would you spin some story about a theiving roommate, or a computer virus, or a cell of terrorist hackers? Where's the reasonable doubt needed to assert your innocence in the face of solid evidence proving your guilt?
And would you stand up to them, knowing your guilt, knowing the court's award would be much higher than the $3000 settlement they offered you, just because you were an idealist?
Methinks you'd have to be a very rich, foolish idealist. And if you're a rich, foolish idealist, I'd rather see you devote your energies to promoting a more palatable green party in this country than waste it fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit with that group of assholes at the RIAA. We broke the law, we got caught. Pay the fine, get it over with.
Uh, the RIAA is supported by their member record labels. Their "business plan" isn't sinking -- they exist through the funds of and solely to protect the interest of the industry. Monies got from suing file sharers are usually peanuts compared to the amount of work that went into suing them, and if there is a profit it's passed on to the members.
As for going to court, this is solely the auspice of the complainant. If both parties feel it is worth the time and money to press the issue in court, then and only then will it be defended. Copyright and patent infringement cases rarely go to court, because the settlement is usually less than court costs. Extortion? I don't think so. File sharers are obviously making copies of works they don't have the rights to, ergo, it is infringement. No lawyer would fight this on contingency. Now, those who are being sued unfairly have reason to fight...but for many of them, it won't be worth the time. THAT's extortion, IMO, but it's also the price you pay sometimes to live in a society that respects the rights of creators, even when these rights are sickly twisted like the RIAA's doing now.
-1, Ignores the Point. They aren't suing downloaders, they're suing uploaders. When you make available for copy to the general public a CD that you own, you are infringing on the exclusive right to copy posessed by the RIAA's member labels. That's why it is illegal regardless of whether you have the CD or not. It would be perfectly legal to get mp3s of a CD you own, so long as the person providing those mp3s had a right to give them to you. I have gotten mp3s and aacs from friends of several old, scratched to death CDs that I own and I'm not at all worried about it. Incidentally, some of these records are out of print and the only way TO get copies is from friends. The old Moon Ska catalog is a good example...I have at least 50 moon ska discs and many of them, such as the awesome Skarmageddon, are close to ten years old and dying.
When people stop buying CDs from RIAA artists. Which, after close to three years of this nonsense, they haven't. In fact, according to SoundScan, OTC sales are actually up.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that suing potential customers IS an effective business model, if you get more money from the suit then you would from their potential sales and if other customers want your product so much they're willing to buy from you even as you screw them. And seeing as how they're settling for $3k+ from filesharers who aren't likely to be buying 160+ cds any time soon, it looks like this is going to be just another line item in the budget. $5,000,000 from price fixed cd sales here, $2,000,000 from recouped advances, and another mil or so from suing grandmothers and preteen girls. Very effective; and you don't even have to call a sleazy accountant to do the books.
Work from home can also be MURDER on collaborative projects. I work at a company with several work-at-homes, and me at the office. The most common phrase is "has anybody heard from X?", where X is a work-at-home in the middle of a big project. X of course is deep in their work, and what they're doing has no bearing whatsoever on what we need. Instead, they're working on prettying up what THEY think is the bad part of the program. This happens even with very tight design specs and good communication...it's just really hard to get inside somebody's head on a collaborative, customer driven project if you're always two hours away. It's even harder to work through QA.
And then there's the stress put on me, the non-work at home. Besides my own projects, I also have to pick up all the support calls that trickle into development, go to all the meetings, and be the beck-and-call man who hears complaints and looks into the feasibility of repairing them even if a problem isn't my fault. I'm lucky if I get half as much work done as the other guys...and then I get to hear stories about how so-and-so's project was completed before mine. No shit -- that's because he doesn't drive 30 minutes to work every morning and wasn't squeezing in two or three overtime hours per day just to get his regular work done around the other work.
Incidentally, I hate working at home. Home is where my dog is, home is where my project car is, home is where my record collection is. I don't want to be working here...where do I go when work gets too hectic and I need to relax? The bathroom?
"Corporate policy" is another term for "bullshit IT managers do while slacking on installing patches." Everybody's work will, at some time or another, require them to change system settings. Everybody's work will, at some time, require them to install software. If you assign me a computer, I expect to be able to use it. If I trash it, reprimand me, but it is LESS work for either of us over the life of the tool to let me use it the way I know and break it then it is to teach me a new way to use it and require your supervision to use it.
But seeing as you have your office has you locked down so tight you can't even use contractions, I don't expect you to understand. I've worked construction jobs and factory jobs...and none of the maintenance staff ever has the power, nor the indignancy, of IT workers. Face it guys: you are glorified digital janitors, and the only reason you have the power that you do is that CEOs have not yet realized how easy you are to fire and replace. I've seen offices that have high IT turnover, and you'd better believe they have clean, easy to use computers and no "policy" about the way i have to use the tools that do my job.
Well, the difference is this:
Patents offer protection from others selling your ideas on the market. Since you can't sell people, the patent offers no protection.
Furthermore, policy of the US government is that you can't patent research on the human genome -- only "inventions that display utility" that stem from said research. So you couldn't patent yourself, but if you invented a gene therapy that grew an extra leg, you could patent the process that creates the extra leg.
Even if you could patent a new piece added to the genome, you would have to prove that your invention took significant effort to produce. You can't patent things found in nature, and even if you did mistakenly receive a patent, it would be struck down upon the first challenge. So before you think about patenting superfluous nipples, realize you'd be dumping a few thousand dollars into a process that MIGHT result in a completely unenforcable grant.
But by gosh, how horrible would that be! Wow-ee zow-ee, those idiots in the patent office have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING! Let's get rid of patents and market pressures will stop people from stealing ideas; yes, that'll work.