> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).
I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software. Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.
> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.
Something that gives you certain rights is also a contract, in many cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.
The elements of a contract, in simplest terms: person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y. person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.
A contract that is also a license: person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial) person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"
The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes. They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.
In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.
> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).
I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software. Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.
> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.
Something tat gives you certain rights is also a contract, in most cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.
The elements of a contract, in simplest terms: person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y. person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.
A contract that is also a license: person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial) person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"
The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes. They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.
In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.
That would work, if the judge were a complete moron. More like:
Fred and Jim select a design, looking under the category "CCL - not for commercial use". Fred and Jim render it. Fred and Jim knowingly use it for commercial use, in violation of the license they voluntarily agreed to. Fred and Jim insult the judge's intelligence claiming that neither Jim nor Fred had any idea what the other was doing. Fred and Jim end up paying treble damages.
You said "easy to circumvent". It's generally not a good idea to try to "circumvent" the law. That only changes you from a law-breaker to a smartass law-breaker.
No, it's called copy right because because it's the right to make a copy. It has zip to do with giving or recieving. You'll notice that "RIAA like bullshit" gets you busted in court because that's the law of the land and has been for centuries. That was law before the phrase "copy right" was used as a shorthand term for it.
You might not LIKE the law, but that's the law. If you don't like it, go back and talk to Queen Elizabeth.
Although you are in theory correct on your facts, in practical application it is not so for digital works. Digital works are more flexible, allowing anything from pay-per-view to WTFPL.
You can do none of those things without first obtaining a copy and thereby dealing with copy rights. As Kindle and Nook users know, at that point each capability you listed above is negotiable. You can pay $65 to fully purchase a dead-tree edition of the book, or you can choose to pay $1 to rent the book for a day. Only the $65 copy can be loaned out. That's nothing new, really movie tickets are the same way - you can watch the movie, but not loan it to a friend. For twice the cost of the ticket, you can get the DVD, which is loanable. It's up to you what capabilities you want to actually have, or whether you want to save a few bucks. That choice is made when you get your copy, right?
Ps - I realize that when I say the license is the contract, I'm assuming meeting of the minds. The license contract should be clear about printed renditions, so both parties know what they are agreeing to.
I believe you're right. An important connection, I think, is that copyright law says they can't download the design at all, until they get permission. They get permission through the contract, aka licence. So they don't legally have the design at all unless they have it by contract.
* recognizing that a) courts have a BROAD definition of "exchange of consideration", and have ruled that a promise to do or not do something is consideration and b) clearly the claimant provided consideration. You cannot often invalidate a contract by saying "I didn't pay him enough". Thus, the CCL agreement for the design is probably a contract.
We can make a deal saying "I'll give you a hamburger if you agree to wash the dishes". Can we not also make a deal saying "I'll give you my designs if you agree not to sell the objects I designed"?
I'd think that in a free society we'd be allowed to make that deal. The designer believes that's the deal he made by applying the non-commercial CCL to the designs.
A pdf file is a program, written in the postscript language, directing a 2D printer to create some 2D object. I can't print copies of someone's book and sell them without permission based on the argument that the book is the output of the PDF program.
I don't see how adding an extra D changes that. Some people, probably including Stallman, would say that authors (and programmers) SHOULD work for free, giving their stuff away. Maybe so. That doesn't mean they DO. This particular designer gave away his work to people who wanted to use it for non-commercial purposes. Good for him. He didn't give his work free to companies to use commercially. If you're going to make a living from my work, I get a cut, he decided. Fine, that's his decision.
It's often said around here that adding "on a computer" to an old invention doesn't make it a new invention. Same with stealing. If someone earns their living designing things and selling those designs, you shouldn't steal them. Stealing on a computer is still stealing.
Nothing will ever be proven 100% secure because it's easier to break things than make them. However, typical software is akin to a car door that's not only unlocked, but swung wide open. 95% of developers have less than two weeks of security training, often less than 8 hours. They put approximately zero effort into security. It doesn't take a huge team of security experts to close the door and lock it.
When I started my current job, it took me maybe 40 hours to reduce our attack surface by 90% because my predecessor either knew nothing about security, or just didn't care.
ABC News is STILL puffing the idea that major cities are soon to be underwater:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup?id=3599774
In 1989 the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of â€oeeco-refugees,†threatening political chaos, said Brown.
In 2007, the chairman of the University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences testified to Congress that much of Florida will be underwater.
January 1970 Life Magazine â€Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support …the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….â€
How about that ice age?: Earth Day 1970 Kenneth Watt, ecologist â€The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.â€
1976 Lowell Ponte in â€oeThe Cooling,†â€This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.â€
July 9, 1971, Washington Post â€oeIn the next 50 years fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sunâ€(TM)s rays that the Earthâ€(TM)s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to ten years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.â€
> Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility
You are correct there. The people who say such things, including the U.N. Environment Program and University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences, are not basing their statements on credible research, but on scare-mongering. So why do you believe them? You pretty much quote Goddard, and he's the guy who tried to sell both global cooling and a year later catastrophic global warming.
Which pisses off newer congress critters who think they should have oversight, and they begin hearings. In the last 50 years, the president has been allowed to take too much power from Congress, though. Just last week Obama unilaterally decided to rewrite the health care law himself, which is absolutely the purview of Congress, not the president. That's absurd, and Congress has allowed that shift to happen.
At the same time, the voters have allowed, and sometimes demanded, that both Congress and the president far exceed their constitutional power, stripping that power from the states. The Consitution says most government functions should be handled at the state and local level, where citizens can more directly affect it. We've abdicated our role as citizens of our states by insisting that the federal government force our ideas on other states, and thereby move the power further away from the people.
Indeed. Also in a case like the old testament, not only is it scrambled as it's retold, but the original refers to "fire from the heavens" and the like. Is that a severe lightning storm? Meteors? Volcanic eruption? We don't know because they didn't know.
More and more evidence suggests that the old testament is kind of like Saint Nick - based on a true story, and evolved over time.
The founding fathers wrote that they tried to create a system in which greed and other human failings would end up resulting in good. The Consitution is designed that way. The principle is sound, as shown by our economic system. (ppeople are greedy and want "stuff". Society wants work done, investment made, and educated people. Set up system where greed results in investment, education, and hard work.)
A Constitutional example is balance of power. Congress critters are power hungry. So are presidents. So they set it up where one of the best ways for a president to gain power is by taking it from Congress, and Congress can get power by taking it from the president. Each politician's quest for power takes it from other politicians, so it keeps them balanced, avoids dictatorship.
Of course some people live in "wouldn't it be great" land and keep passing laws that only work if everyone is highly moral. For example, they assume if you pass a law paying people who "can't find" work for three solid years, you and I will keep paying their bills for years, no-one will put off working just because we're paying their bills for them.
They pass laws putting government bureaucrats and politicians in charge of the most important, private things in our lives, and assume that not only will the government bureaucrats be good guys, they'll also be highly competent and do a good job. Those are the bad laws, in my opinion, because politicians are neither magnanimous nor highly competent.
Yes, it's similar in the US. Local courts routinely rule that an ACTION was illegal because it was unconstitutional - that a specific search was illegal, for example. In those cases, they are ruling that one cop was wrong. It's far less common that they strike down a LAW, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. To do so, they are overruling Congress, the people's elected representatives. The courts rightfully show more deference to the carefully considered acts of Congress than to in-the-moment decisions by one cop.
I wonder about future historians and archeologists.TThere are now more web pages than people. Several 24/7 news channels document everything in excruciating detail. Will people in the future wonder about anything that happened in the 21st century, or will they merely need to decide which stories are interesting enough to tell in history books?
With the technologies Facebook is developing and knowledge graphs being pioneered for Google Now, will historians of the future even need to compile narratives, or will Google 3000 interpret the database and narrate the story in real time when you query it? "Siri, tell me about my great-great-great-grandfather."
After the manufactures of the cars and laptops designed cars that needed these parts, the only suppliers who could make them in quantity COLLUDED to set high prices. The buyer's choice was
a) be overcharged b) stop making cars
That's not a real choice. The buyer gets ripped off, paying twice as much as they would with competition instead of conspiracy. In the US, that's illegal. You go to jail for that. Unless of course you donate much of the ill-gotten gain to the Democrats, in which case its illegal for buyers to try break the conspiracy. In some states, sellers are REQUIRED to be part of the price-fixing conspiracy, aka union.
The current topic is price fixing. Internet providers pay the politicians for a government enforced monopoly so they can set prices without effective competition in a market. Movie studios use 90s Microsoft style tactics to exploit and maintain artificially high prices.
At bankrate.com, I see dozens of banks competing on price. Certainly some in the scumbags are in the financial sector, and many offer services that aren't easy to understand, but where's the price fixing by banks? Not to say there isn't any, but where? The big issue I've seen with banks is that they loaned a lot of money to people who couldn't afford to repay the loans. In the beginning they were forced to by the government, but when they figured out how to resell the bad loans at a profit, they continued doing so voluntarily.
It appears that you've just accidentally spoken the truth. You probably didn't realize you were acknowledging that climate "scientists" and their bosses have a lot in common with oil barons, but you've inadvertently discovered the truth.
I've kind of done that "avoid predation" thing in bad neighborhoods. With my "nobody's going to fuck with me" walk, apparently some people have thought I was a cop. That's okay, as long as they didn't think I was a victim.
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age. In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
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> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).
I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software.
Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.
> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.
Something that gives you certain rights is also a contract, in many cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.
The elements of a contract, in simplest terms:
person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y.
person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.
A contract that is also a license:
person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial)
person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"
The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes.
They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.
In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't
use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a
deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.
> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).
I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software.
Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.
> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.
Something tat gives you certain rights is also a contract, in most cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.
The elements of a contract, in simplest terms:
person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y.
person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.
A contract that is also a license:
person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial)
person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"
The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes.
They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.
In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't
use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a
deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.
That would work, if the judge were a complete moron. More like:
Fred and Jim select a design, looking under the category "CCL - not for commercial use".
Fred and Jim render it.
Fred and Jim knowingly use it for commercial use, in violation of the license they voluntarily agreed to.
Fred and Jim insult the judge's intelligence claiming that neither Jim nor Fred had any idea what the other was doing.
Fred and Jim end up paying treble damages.
You said "easy to circumvent". It's generally not a good idea to try to "circumvent" the law.
That only changes you from a law-breaker to a smartass law-breaker.
No, it's called copy right because because it's the right to make a copy. It has zip to do with giving or recieving. You'll notice that "RIAA like bullshit" gets you busted in court because that's the law of the land and has been for centuries. That was law before the phrase "copy right" was used as a shorthand term for it.
You might not LIKE the law, but that's the law. If you don't like it, go back and talk to Queen Elizabeth.
Although you are in theory correct on your facts, in practical application it is not so for digital works. Digital works are more flexible, allowing anything from pay-per-view to WTFPL.
You can do none of those things without first obtaining a copy and thereby dealing with copy rights. As Kindle and Nook users know, at that point each capability you listed above is negotiable. You can pay $65 to fully purchase a dead-tree edition of the book, or you can choose to pay $1 to rent the book for a day. Only the $65 copy can be loaned out. That's nothing new, really movie tickets are the same way - you can watch the movie, but not loan it to a friend. For twice the cost of the ticket, you can get the DVD, which is loanable. It's up to you what capabilities you want to actually have, or whether you want to save a few bucks. That choice is made when you get your copy, right?
Ps - I realize that when I say the license is the contract, I'm assuming meeting of the minds. The license contract should be clear about printed renditions, so both parties know what they are agreeing to.
I believe you're right. An important connection, I think, is that copyright law says they can't download the design at all, until they get permission. They get permission through the contract, aka licence. So they don't legally have the design at all unless they have it by contract.
* recognizing that a) courts have a BROAD definition of "exchange of consideration", and have ruled that a promise to do or not do something is consideration and b) clearly the claimant provided consideration. You cannot often invalidate a contract by saying "I didn't pay him enough". Thus, the CCL agreement for the design is probably a contract.
We can make a deal saying "I'll give you a hamburger if you agree to wash the dishes".
Can we not also make a deal saying "I'll give you my designs if you agree not to sell the objects I designed"?
I'd think that in a free society we'd be allowed to make that deal.
The designer believes that's the deal he made by applying the non-commercial CCL to the designs.
A pdf file is a program, written in the postscript language, directing a 2D printer to create some 2D object. I can't print copies of someone's book and sell them without permission based on the argument that the book is the output of the PDF program.
I don't see how adding an extra D changes that. Some people, probably including Stallman, would say that authors (and programmers) SHOULD work for free, giving their stuff away. Maybe so. That doesn't mean they DO. This particular designer gave away his work to people who wanted to use it for non-commercial purposes. Good for him. He didn't give his work free to companies to use commercially. If you're going to make a living from my work, I get a cut, he decided. Fine, that's his decision.
It's often said around here that adding "on a computer" to an old invention doesn't make it a new invention.
Same with stealing. If someone earns their living designing things and selling those designs, you shouldn't steal them. Stealing on a computer is still stealing.
You know the difference between commercially manufacturing a product and an estate sale.
So does the law. An estate sale is not commercial use.
Nothing will ever be proven 100% secure because it's easier to break things than make them. However, typical software is akin to a car door that's not only unlocked, but swung wide open. 95% of developers have less than two weeks of security training, often less than 8 hours. They put approximately zero effort into security. It doesn't take a huge team of security experts to close the door and lock it.
When I started my current job, it took me maybe 40 hours to reduce our attack surface by 90% because my predecessor either knew nothing about security, or just didn't care.
ABC News is STILL puffing the idea that major cities are soon to be underwater:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup?id=3599774
In 1989 the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of â€oeeco-refugees,†threatening political chaos, said Brown.
In 2007, the chairman of the University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences testified to Congress that much of Florida will be underwater.
January 1970 Life Magazine â€Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support …the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….â€
How about that ice age?:
Earth Day 1970 Kenneth Watt, ecologist â€The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.â€
1976 Lowell Ponte in â€oeThe Cooling,†â€This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.â€
July 9, 1971, Washington Post â€oeIn the next 50 years fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sunâ€(TM)s rays that the Earthâ€(TM)s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to ten years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.â€
> Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility
You are correct there. The people who say such things, including the U.N. Environment Program and University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences, are not basing their statements on credible research, but on scare-mongering. So why do you believe them? You pretty much quote Goddard, and he's the guy who tried to sell both global cooling and a year later catastrophic global warming.
Which pisses off newer congress critters who think they should have oversight, and they begin hearings. In the last 50 years, the president has been allowed to take too much power from Congress, though. Just last week Obama unilaterally decided to rewrite the health care law himself, which is absolutely the purview of Congress, not the president. That's absurd, and Congress has allowed that shift to happen.
At the same time, the voters have allowed, and sometimes demanded, that both Congress and the president far exceed their constitutional power, stripping that power from the states. The Consitution says most government functions should be handled at the state and local level, where citizens can more directly affect it. We've abdicated our role as citizens of our states by insisting that the federal government force our ideas on other states, and thereby move the power further away from the people.
Indeed. Also in a case like the old testament, not only is it scrambled as it's retold, but the original refers to "fire from the heavens" and the like. Is that a severe lightning storm? Meteors? Volcanic eruption? We don't know because they didn't know.
More and more evidence suggests that the old testament is kind of like Saint Nick - based on a true story, and evolved over time.
The founding fathers wrote that they tried to create a system in which greed and other human failings would end up resulting in good. The Consitution is designed that way. The principle is sound, as shown by our economic system. (ppeople are greedy and want "stuff". Society wants work done, investment made, and educated people. Set up system where greed results in investment, education, and hard work.)
A Constitutional example is balance of power.
Congress critters are power hungry. So are presidents. So they set it up where one of the best ways for a president to gain power is by taking it from Congress, and Congress can get power by taking it from the president. Each politician's quest for power takes it from other politicians, so it keeps them balanced, avoids dictatorship.
Of course some people live in "wouldn't it be great" land and keep passing laws that only work if everyone is highly moral. For example, they assume if you pass a law paying people who "can't find" work for three solid years, you and I will keep paying their bills for years, no-one will put off working just because we're paying their bills for them.
They pass laws putting government bureaucrats and politicians in charge of the most important, private things in our lives, and assume that not only will the government bureaucrats be good guys, they'll also be highly competent and do a good job. Those are the bad laws, in my opinion, because politicians are neither magnanimous nor highly competent.
Yes, it's similar in the US. Local courts routinely rule that an ACTION was illegal because it was unconstitutional - that a specific search was illegal, for example. In those cases, they are ruling that one cop was wrong. It's far less common that they strike down a LAW, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. To do so, they are overruling Congress, the people's elected representatives. The courts rightfully show more deference to the carefully considered acts of Congress than to in-the-moment decisions by one cop.
I wonder about future historians and archeologists.TThere are now more web pages than people. Several 24/7 news channels document everything in excruciating detail. Will people in the future wonder about anything that happened in the 21st century, or will they merely need to decide which stories are interesting enough to tell in history books?
With the technologies Facebook is developing and knowledge graphs being pioneered for Google Now, will historians of the future even need to compile narratives, or will Google 3000 interpret the database and narrate the story in real time when you query it? "Siri, tell me about my great-great-great-grandfather."
Look up "price fixing". It's an entirely unrelated concept.
After the manufactures of the cars and laptops designed cars that needed these parts, the only suppliers who could make them in quantity COLLUDED to set high prices. The buyer's choice was
a) be overcharged
b) stop making cars
That's not a real choice. The buyer gets ripped off, paying twice as much as they would with competition instead of conspiracy. In the US, that's illegal. You go to jail for that. Unless of course you donate much of the ill-gotten gain to the Democrats, in which case its illegal for buyers to try break the conspiracy. In some states, sellers are REQUIRED to be part of the price-fixing conspiracy, aka union.
The current topic is price fixing.
Internet providers pay the politicians for a government enforced monopoly so they can set prices without effective competition in a market.
Movie studios use 90s Microsoft style tactics to exploit and maintain artificially high prices.
At bankrate.com, I see dozens of banks competing on price. Certainly some in the scumbags are in the financial sector, and many offer services that aren't easy to understand, but where's the price fixing by banks? Not to say there isn't any, but where? The big issue I've seen with banks is that they loaned a lot of money to people who couldn't afford to repay the loans. In the beginning they were forced to by the government, but when they figured out how to resell the bad loans at a profit, they continued doing so voluntarily.
It appears that you've just accidentally spoken the truth. You probably didn't realize you were acknowledging that climate "scientists" and their bosses have a lot in common with oil barons, but you've inadvertently discovered the truth.
I've kind of done that "avoid predation" thing in bad neighborhoods. With my "nobody's going to fuck with me" walk, apparently some people have thought I was a cop. That's okay, as long as they didn't think I was a victim.
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age. In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Another example - six species of non-dangerous snakes mimic the bright stripe pattern of coral snakes.