Every job I've ever worked was salary based, and I've always understood that going a bit over 40 hours (and still being paid my regular salary) is in exchange for those slow weeks where I might only work 20 hours, and still collect 40 hours worth of salary. It's a pretty fair trade-off since some weeks (as an IT person) I'm twiddling my thumbs doing nothing and other weeks I'll be pulling 12 hour work days.
That is the way it should work, but where I work, we are headed the same way as IBM. The problem is that those in charge keep adding responsibilities on to our work days until our weeks are 70 hours long without exception. I was hired with the understanding that we would be looking at 50 hour work weeks average, but the purpose of the lawsuits isn't to get more money, it is to convince the company to force fewer hours. There is absolutely no incentive for a company to reduce the workload on a salaried employee, and all the incentive in the world to increase the workload. That is why mandatory unpaid overtime is illegal. Its not the unpaid part that is thwe problem, its the mandatory part that is. Most people will gladly work a little extra when the company needs it, so long as the schedule gets back down to a reasonable amount of hours when the rush is over, but when the employer sees to it that the rush never ends... Thats when the employees need to force the employer to step back and find ways to reduce the hours. The law is correct, the only people who should be exempt from overtime, are the people who have 100% control over their own hours (managers, contractors, small business owners, etc...) The rest of us should get paid for our O.T. If that means getting paid less than 40 hours when the work is not available, so be it.
That's life for the gutless slaves who refuse to stand up and organise and fight these fascist moterfuckers back.
Why computer workers haven't properly organised with a union is something I still don't understand. If you work for someone else: YOU'RE A SLAVE. So ORGANISE! If you employ others, you're a SLAVE OWNER so EXPECT ORGANISATION.
You have obviously not thought that through to completion. You decide to form a union, and your employer does not like it. One of several things can happen:
1) Your employer takes it on the chin and suffers from a significant loss in net earnings (usually gets executive types all fired up, pun intended).
2) Your employer accepts it after fighting about it and is then undercut by union free competitors, typically using H1B labor, or worse yet simply outsourcing to another country altogether.
3) Your employer gets smart and simply outsources your job, thereby skipping all of the intermediate steps.
Our economy has become a service economy because those are the only jobs that cannot be outsourced easily, but a service economy can't survive indefinitely without outside support. Either way, unionization is not the answer, the only viable answer is to accept that you will suffer a significant drop in standard of living to adjust for the fact that you were way far above the median to start with. Don't like it? tough, welcome to the global economy, there isn't a damn thing you or I can do about it. If you shut down all foriegn trade, there goes your cheap goodies from china, and your standard of living plummets. Imagine if you had to pay $30,000 for a low end car, because it was made using exclusively american labor? How about $120 for a pair of jeans? What about $5,000 for an entry level PC? If you need proof, just look at the cost of housing. It is hideously expensive because there is no good way to offshore the labor needed to build the houses, and as such the cost of these things has been rising at many times the rate of inflation. It is a no-win situation. Americans are not going to enjoy their standard of living much longer, but there isn't anything we can do to stop it. Maybe slow it down a little, or speed it up, but there is no stopping it.
200 amps ? At 110 volts, that is 22000 Watts. My parent's house, which is rather large and located near the arctic circle and uses electricity for heating, makes do with 10000 Watt connection. So, I'd like to ask: just what the heck are you doing with that much power ? Nuclear research ?
Typical Electric Dryer: 2.5 kwatts peak load
Typical Electric oven: 4.5 kwatts peak load (all burners and oven on at once
Typical Dishwasher: 500 watts peak load
Typical microwave oven: 1 kwatt peak load
Typical Desktop comp: 350 watts peak load
Typical Laptop: 200 watts peak load
Typical home stereo: 300 watts peak load
Portable space heater: 1 kwatt peak load
Electric water heater: 2.5 kwatts peak load
If you add all that up, its gets big in a hurry, and that doesn't even count the lights. The basic design of a household system should be that everything that is plugged in and used under normal circumstances can be turned on without blowing breakers. The idea of the breakers isn't to limit power usage, its to prevent fires. Any good engineer will tell you to maintain at least a 50% margin to cover the unexpected, as well as future growth, so 22 kwatts really isn't that much. When electric cars become mainstream, most houses will require a 500 Amp service to provide all the service a household will require, but that doesn't mean that people will draw 500 amps continuous, they will have that capability in a pinch though.
Most homes use about 300 kwatt-hours of power every month. This translates to 10 kwatt hours / day, or 416 watts average draw. You can see that this is a far cry from the 22 kwatts available, but the system has to be designed to handle peak use, not just continuous use.
Nigeria, the land of scammers and con artists. no wonder thier country is in the state it's in.
I'm not sure why someone doesn't simply go down there with $50k and bribe a judge to find the plaintiffs guilty of some truly dispicable crime, and watch the problem go away on its own... It would be cheaper than paying actual lawyers and, if my understanding of the current situation there is correct, this is the traditional method of settling legal disputes in Nigeria.
Or if I can't make each breath you take illegal, I at least want a 5-cent royalty. I figure I should be a trillionaire by noon
I have already attained a registered trademark for the word "breath", and as such you owe me $0.03 USD for each person who has viewed your unauthorized use. Furthermore, any future use of this word without first obtaining a specific right to use agreement, will constitute a deliberate violation of trademark law, and will be persued to the fullest extent of civil and criminal law.
Is that really a copyright violation? How is an email copyrighted? I thought something has to pass through the copyright offices in the basement of the LoC to actually have a copyright.
The copyright act of 1976 basically dictates that, unlike previous copyright law, all new works are automatically covered by copyright law, and are afforded its protections. This means that all new original and derivative works are protected by copyright whether they are registered or not, and whether the owner chooses to enforce their rights or not.
Eh, I'm lucky enough to have a comfortable income, so yeah, I pay a good bit. But then,
I get a top-notch highway system, a federally insured system of banks, police and
fire protection, my food and water are relatively safe, my workplace is held up to
a minimum saftey requirement... All in all I think I am getting a pretty good deal.
If we had all the money back that we've flushed down the Iraq toilet, who knows what
all nifty stuff I'd be getting for my investment in this nation? Ok, so for the same money, I have received:
1) A so-so highway system that is largely in need of repair, and for which I get charged already in the form of tolls
2) A system of banking in which those people who are responsible for loosing piles of money for their investors, are allowed to keep their own fortunes.
3) Police services who are very quick, methodical and vigilant... When it comes to handing out speeding or parking tickets, but couldn't be bothered to even so much as *show up* when my car was broken into. (as a side note, the perpetrator left their fingerprints everywhere, which my wife was easily able to recover as a demonstration to her first year criminology students).
4) A top notch fire department who hasn't lost a foundation yet, (And which incidentally consists of almost all volounteers).
5) You also forgot to mention the top rate schools our money buys...
6) what about all of the people who are now entering their fifth generation of living off the public dole? We have done such wonderful things for them too haven't we?
I'm a conservative, not because I think its right, but because the alternatives have all been demonstrated to be worse...
We aren't specifically evolved do algebra either, and we (well, many of us) do a decent job at that. Humans are evolved to learn and adapt.
We do a spectacularly bad job of it. Considering our brains operate at levels that are capable of processing and interpreting many high resolution frames per second, while intermixing this information with 4 other primary senses across tens of thousands of simultaneous channels, it should not take so long to do simple algebra. If we were really more than marginal for that kind of thing, we would describe the process as "intuitive", and we would know the answers a soon as the question could be framed. Furthermore, we will not evolve these abilities, because there is not enough survival advantage to this knowledge.
The only way for humanity to evolve their intelligence much beyond the point we have reached, is for stupidity to be fatal. Unfortuantly, we go to great lengths to avoid exactly that situation.
I'm not a huge fan of the "think about the children" type arguements, but would we be cheering this guy on if he'd hit a pedestrian, wrecked some property, or something else that may have occured had he not been lucky?
Except that he was driving on the highways pretty much the whole way, so you don't see many pedestrians (its a highway for good reason). The US highway system was designed with high speed trafic in mind, and most parts of it are relatively safe to drive at 100+ MPH. The only reason we don't usually is because of the law. As for the danger of hitting other vehicles, You'll notice the next time you are out on an actual highway that there is almost always high line of sight, meaning that you can see a very long way ahead without any obstructions, so you can see trouble coming way ahead of time. Furthermore, these guys were equiped with all kinds of tools to help them identify trouble beyond the line of sight, and under adverse conditions. They were not recklessly plowing down the road blind dumb and happy, they were prepared for all kinds of eventualities. In fact the only real significant threat to life or property would have been the deer they referenced in the article, and the infrared goggles should have given them plenty of opportunity to avoid that spot of trouble too.
The reviewer claimed nothing paranormal about the cables. He described them technically and then claimed they were "danceable." Taking poetic license is not the same as making claims of the paranormal. The author clearly wasn't referring to a mystical property of the cables.
From what I saw, he was making some pretty extraordinary claims about the kinds of signals he was getting out of those cables. If what he was claiming was correct then his cables were actually acting as amplifiers instead of passive filters. Without an external power source, and at least a few active componenets like vaccum tubes or transistors, that would most certainly qualify as supernatural.
Key words "did not respond". Looking at the "device", it is not obvious that it is benign.
The "did not respond" part is what bothers me. In my own experience, people will go to great lengths to hide their own ignorance. I find that this become more true, with the increasing ignorance of the person. Given that experience, and the reported "facts" in this case, I find it most likely that the young woman in question did in fact try to explain what the electronic device was for, and the officers in question, failing to understand, decided to play safe, and detain the young woman. I believe that they, probably later, decided to pretend she did not answer at all in an effort to justify their reaction, without having to admit their own ignorance. Granted this is only a hypothesis, but my inclination is to believe that a person, who goes to the trouble of wearing something like this, wants to be asked about the object, and would have a definite answer (probably bolstered with long words), to explain its purpose and design.
On the other hand, if they asked her what it was and she answered: "It's a circuit board", they would probably have described her as unresponsive as well, so she was pretty much damned either way.
Any way you slice it, I would love to see a precise transcript of what was said, so that I could make my own opinions of the facts; Failing that I will definitely have to side with her on this one.
I'm shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport
I'm shocked and appalled that a person who is quite obviously ignorant of what could potentially be a bomb, and what can't, would be employed in a job where he or she would be tasked with identifying bombs.
FedEx, UPS, etc. are gonna make a fortune shipping all those entangled particles around the world.
I believe the article said "carefully taken to Jupiter" so that rules out UPS, FedEx, and especially the post office...
don't know why the/. crowd always assumes Microsoft is some crazy puppet master pulling strings in all these places to get more people involved in the ISO standardization and voting. If there's anything Microsoft doesn't want, it's to get caught up in more antitrust lawsuits.
That would be because these antitrust lawsuits have cost them so much in the past? So far the cost for microsoft to change its long standing behavioral model would be far greater than the costs associated with loosing these antitrust lawsuits at the current rate. Corporations are inherently a-moral and absolutely logical. The only thing a corporation undertsands is a cost statement. If a decision is to be made, then all of the relevant factors and probabilities are weighed and the resulting cost/benefit analysis determines future behavior. Except for a few aberrant corporations, most of which are short lived, this is simply the way things are done. Microsoft follows these behaviors not out of some deep seated evil, but because that is how the game is played. Any company's officers who don't understand that truth, and live with it, will not be in charge for long. They will see reduced corporate earnings and be replaced with people who will play the game. It also means that corporate officers will gladly sacrifice a campanies long term stability for short term profits, as will stock holders. The idea being simply to keep profits high and the charade going until after you are no longer in charge. This is most strongly supported by the fact that even the most far reaching companies to not make long range plans longer than 4 to 5 years out.
You want companies to behave with more concern for long term stability as well as good corporate citizenship, you have to make the stockholders care about more than just the P/E ratio and the ROI. There is only one way I know of to accomplish that... Eliminate Limited Liability. If you want stockholders to pay attention to how their companies are being run, then make then unlimitedly responsible for the companies actions. You better bet that things like the Enron scandal, and the various examples of public polutuion by industry would become a very rare critter. Make it so that people stand to loose a lot more than just their initial investment if the company they invest in is doing Evil, and they will become your much needed public watchdog. They would be able to access all company records without a court order, because they own the company, and they would have the best reason in the world to do so. To those people who sa y that this will destroy the economy, that simply is not true. People will always be trying to invest money for a return. People aren't suddenly going to stop investing, they'll just become a lot more carefull about it, especially those with deep pockets. Those who are currently the most likely to enable the current destructive behavior would now be the strongest force preventing the bad behaviors.
Microsoft's power is a temporary thing, just like IBM's before it. Quit wasting your time obsessing over it and worry about real social ills.
The only reason that Microsoft's power is temporary is because concerned people are spending large amounts of time obsessing about it. You get what you inspect, not necessarily what you expect.
This is inapplicable because there is no way for men in all-men workplaces to hit on others in a blatant and disrespectful way. Enter women, and abuse alley opens up. This speaks more of the insensitivity of men than of anything else.
This routinely happens to a large degree where I work. I don't particularly like it, but It's part of the basic culture. I would rather keep it than work in a place where the people interacted in a purely "politcally correct fashion". Women don't tend to last long where I work for reasons unrelated to the harassment.
That, and the 'facts' they use to back up their psuedo-science are wrong.
Might I trouble you for some examples? I generally like to know which parts of what I'm reading fall under the B.S. heading.
The hip to waist ratio theory was pushed by the "soft" sciences (sociology and psycology). But shortly after was shot down by hard science (anthropologist) who simple tested the theory globally and found tribal cultures that did not like the supposedly perfect 0.7 ratio.
I think its safe to say that most of thse definitely fall under the category of "unfalsified theory", but claiming that it is all crap because one or two of the theories are falsifiable, or alrady proven false is, at best, overly hasty.
Some of these theories make good sense when you look at them from a behavioral psych point of view. I think it is worth saying that the most successful men (from a reproductive standpoint) can and will all tell you that everything they do is with an eye towards getting laid. Whereas men who do not think along those lines tend to be less successful reproductively. Everything else falls into line when you make that basic observation. Underlying most competitive human behavior is the male sex drive. Whereas, behind most co-operative human bahavior is the female sex drive. There will always be exceptions, but psychology is like that, which is why all psych students have to take abnormal psych and related coursework. The sad truth however is one that is known intuitively already, and that is that male psychology and female psychology are entirely different, and bear only superficial resemblance to one-another. This article covers male psych very well, but is completely unrelated to female psych. As for the hip to waist theories, I think that one falls under the falsified category, not just because of other cultures, but becuase it has changed radically over the course of western culture. There were times when fat and "frumpy" were attractive, and then there are times when scrawny has been attractive, depends on many factors. I think the author included this one to round it out to an even ten.
Most of the rest make good sense on the face of them, but could easily be falsified if they are in fact incorrect. Thats the way science works.
First, you argue that the university is supposed to "protect their students from the dangers of the net." How much protection do they have to offer?
The specific protection that I suggest is the same portection that all ISP's should provide: Basic protection of private information unless a *proper* and *legal* subpoena for information is presented to them in keeping with the laws of the various governments involved. Anything else is abdication of their responsibilities as surrogate gaurdians for children. The other kind of protection they should provide is for their own good, and that is simple firewall services. Blocking incoming rerquests is something that even the local DSL provider does by default, because it saves them a number of headaches that they don't need. Some ISP's abdicate this responsibility, as do most major universities, which is one reason that there are so many bot-nets running rampant. These firewall services should be turned on unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. If the customer knows enough to ask for their firewall services to be turned off, then they are probably able enough to cope with an unfiltered access, and can at lest take responsibility for the consequences.
But then you try to argue that college students should be able to do all the things that adults do, but still be treated like minors. And THAT is the sort of harmful thinking I was advocating against in my original post. I whole heartedly agree with you, which is why I beleive that the university should terminate access privilidges for those who are identified as infringing on copyright interests. That way the children can learn consequences without having to have a *judgement* show up on their credit record. Even assuming that the Mafiaa does not report the judgement to the credit agencies, a couple of thousand dollars is a lot of money to many college kids. The school I went to was a relatively expensive private school, and despite that, I found that many students (myself included) would have had a hell of a time paying a judgement on the order of a few thousand dollars. That sort of thing can make getting student loans very difficult, and schools are not prone to letting students continue who are not paying the tuition bills. How serious should the consequences be for copyright infringement be? I'm not even sure that copyright is a morally just law. It strikes me as an overly complicated solution to a problem that didn't ever actually exist. The laws should protect society, and I suspect that copyright law does more harm to society than good.
The best course of action for the university to take would be the one that many others universities have done: Automatically subscribe their students in an unlimited music service, and the legal question becomes moot... Ohio University had an easy way out and they were too cheap to take it. Now their students, and their students' parents are paying the price...
College is supposed to be about making the transition from childhood to adulthood. Now the schools want to abdicate this responsibility, but charge even more money.
But whatever happened to taking responsibility for what you do? Why would the university expose itself to lawsuits unnecessarily?
Because the university put themselves directly in the middle of the situation by agreeing to act as *the* ISP for their students. They include the cost in tuition and provide the service for "free". The result is that the students have no choice but to pay the university for Internet service. Consequently, the university has a responsibility to protect those same students from the dangers of the net.
Additionally, most college students are *not* adults when they start at a university, which is when most of them will run afoul of the RIAA / MPAA / Drinking laws. The university has agreed to act as the reponsible party for those students who are still minors, but instead of acting responsibly and defending the students from harm, they are actively handing over the students and the parents' to the Mafiaa. You tell me how many parents are going to let their kids attend a university that is abdicating the responsibility they agreed to take on, and leaving the kids and parents exposed to this kind of trouble.
A cease and desist letter takes about 20 minutes to write. ... Per incident. Even if you assume its only 5 minutes, if you multiply that by ten thousand notices, you have a thousand billable hours, and as mentioned, it still won't work anyway, because more people will post to the site, and you will have to issue *more* takedown notices. Who you gonna sue? Digg? They can rightly claim that their site is no different than a public square in which people are posting notices. You could go after the people posting, but that would only make the situation worse. As I mentioned, it is a loosing game, and the lawyers had a responsibility to inform their client of that simple truth.
Threatening to file a lawsuit sometimes works, and even if it doesn't there's no law that says you have to file that suit you threatened someone with.
It only works when you are sending one or two notices to people who are doing things that are *clearly* going to get them in trouble. In these kinds of cases, you would have a very hard time pinning anything on the original posters, and they know it, so they continue posting anywhere and everywhere just to spite the company using the heavy handed tactics. The balance of power is shifting back into the hands of the masses, and the masses know it.
Although I hate them as much as the next guy, they did not cause this mess.
This mess is caused by out-dated business models, corrupt legislation, impunity and progress, amongst other factors that have historically caused civil disobedience.
To blame the lawyers is not only a cliché, it is confusing the issue.
Lawyer language can be aggressive, but when you bring in lawyers it means you have already tried nicely.
The porblem isn't that the lawyers didn't do what they were told, nor even that they did do what they were told. Lawyers have a responsibility to their clients not only to take legal action when required, but also to advise their clients on the likely outcomes of their actions, as well as the likelihood of success. Any halfway honest lawyer should have told their client "You will pay us thousands of hours, You will not acheive your goal, and this will backfire causing yet another in a bad series of negative press about your company". The implication here is that the lawyers did not do this. Given the above statement, I find it hard to beleive that an executive at XYZ company would pursue this approach when a legal professional told them to call it a day and move on.
The lawyers should have known this would happen. Posting a song for others to download requires speical software (e.g. napster, kazaa, bittorrent, etc...), and people still manage to do it on a *massive* scale. Posting a 32 digit number is so easy, any 12 year old kid can post it in thousands of places in the space of a day or so. The lawyers all have plenty of precedent to say that takedown notices are more likely to backfire than to succeed, ergo it is their responsibility to advise their clients against this kind of behavior.
...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate something:)
It also has the added side benefit (for the lawyers) of racking up thousands of billable hours in record time...
I find the concept that your business somehow deserves to be on Google's first page for 'diamonds' pretty bizarre. Google is about finding information on the web. If you don't provide it you move off the front page. Seems sensible to me. What will happen when twenty diamond sellers all want to be on the front page?
Then you get what I found when I went looking for a diamond three years ago: Web pages stuffed with useful information about diamonds, buying diamonds, spotting fakes, identifying quality, diamond prices, and every other piece of useful information I could ever have wanted to know about diamonds. The technique obviously worked, because that was the number two entry on the Google results (the non ad ones). The real answer to getting traffic, is to have all the info that anyone needs to know when searching for information about diamonds. Remember, Google knows if someone searches for your website, finds it, and then keeps searching. So if you want Google to give you a higher credence, be the place where people stop searching for what they are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the way it should work, but where I work, we are headed the same way as IBM. The problem is that those in charge keep adding responsibilities on to our work days until our weeks are 70 hours long without exception. I was hired with the understanding that we would be looking at 50 hour work weeks average, but the purpose of the lawsuits isn't to get more money, it is to convince the company to force fewer hours. There is absolutely no incentive for a company to reduce the workload on a salaried employee, and all the incentive in the world to increase the workload. That is why mandatory unpaid overtime is illegal. Its not the unpaid part that is thwe problem, its the mandatory part that is. Most people will gladly work a little extra when the company needs it, so long as the schedule gets back down to a reasonable amount of hours when the rush is over, but when the employer sees to it that the rush never ends... Thats when the employees need to force the employer to step back and find ways to reduce the hours. The law is correct, the only people who should be exempt from overtime, are the people who have 100% control over their own hours (managers, contractors, small business owners, etc...) The rest of us should get paid for our O.T. If that means getting paid less than 40 hours when the work is not available, so be it.
-=Geoskd
You have obviously not thought that through to completion. You decide to form a union, and your employer does not like it. One of several things can happen:
1) Your employer takes it on the chin and suffers from a significant loss in net earnings (usually gets executive types all fired up, pun intended).
2) Your employer accepts it after fighting about it and is then undercut by union free competitors, typically using H1B labor, or worse yet simply outsourcing to another country altogether.
3) Your employer gets smart and simply outsources your job, thereby skipping all of the intermediate steps.
Our economy has become a service economy because those are the only jobs that cannot be outsourced easily, but a service economy can't survive indefinitely without outside support. Either way, unionization is not the answer, the only viable answer is to accept that you will suffer a significant drop in standard of living to adjust for the fact that you were way far above the median to start with. Don't like it? tough, welcome to the global economy, there isn't a damn thing you or I can do about it. If you shut down all foriegn trade, there goes your cheap goodies from china, and your standard of living plummets. Imagine if you had to pay $30,000 for a low end car, because it was made using exclusively american labor? How about $120 for a pair of jeans? What about $5,000 for an entry level PC? If you need proof, just look at the cost of housing. It is hideously expensive because there is no good way to offshore the labor needed to build the houses, and as such the cost of these things has been rising at many times the rate of inflation. It is a no-win situation. Americans are not going to enjoy their standard of living much longer, but there isn't anything we can do to stop it. Maybe slow it down a little, or speed it up, but there is no stopping it.
-=Geoskd
Typical Electric Dryer: 2.5 kwatts peak load
Typical Electric oven: 4.5 kwatts peak load (all burners and oven on at once
Typical Dishwasher: 500 watts peak load
Typical microwave oven: 1 kwatt peak load
Typical Desktop comp: 350 watts peak load
Typical Laptop: 200 watts peak load
Typical home stereo: 300 watts peak load
Portable space heater: 1 kwatt peak load
Electric water heater: 2.5 kwatts peak load
If you add all that up, its gets big in a hurry, and that doesn't even count the lights. The basic design of a household system should be that everything that is plugged in and used under normal circumstances can be turned on without blowing breakers. The idea of the breakers isn't to limit power usage, its to prevent fires. Any good engineer will tell you to maintain at least a 50% margin to cover the unexpected, as well as future growth, so 22 kwatts really isn't that much. When electric cars become mainstream, most houses will require a 500 Amp service to provide all the service a household will require, but that doesn't mean that people will draw 500 amps continuous, they will have that capability in a pinch though.
Most homes use about 300 kwatt-hours of power every month. This translates to 10 kwatt hours / day, or 416 watts average draw. You can see that this is a far cry from the 22 kwatts available, but the system has to be designed to handle peak use, not just continuous use.
-=Geoskd
I'm not sure why someone doesn't simply go down there with $50k and bribe a judge to find the plaintiffs guilty of some truly dispicable crime, and watch the problem go away on its own... It would be cheaper than paying actual lawyers and, if my understanding of the current situation there is correct, this is the traditional method of settling legal disputes in Nigeria.
-=Geoskd
I have already attained a registered trademark for the word "breath", and as such you owe me $0.03 USD for each person who has viewed your unauthorized use. Furthermore, any future use of this word without first obtaining a specific right to use agreement, will constitute a deliberate violation of trademark law, and will be persued to the fullest extent of civil and criminal law.
-=Geoskd
The copyright act of 1976 basically dictates that, unlike previous copyright law, all new works are automatically covered by copyright law, and are afforded its protections. This means that all new original and derivative works are protected by copyright whether they are registered or not, and whether the owner chooses to enforce their rights or not.
-=Geoskd
1) A so-so highway system that is largely in need of repair, and for which I get charged already in the form of tolls
2) A system of banking in which those people who are responsible for loosing piles of money for their investors, are allowed to keep their own fortunes.
3) Police services who are very quick, methodical and vigilant... When it comes to handing out speeding or parking tickets, but couldn't be bothered to even so much as *show up* when my car was broken into. (as a side note, the perpetrator left their fingerprints everywhere, which my wife was easily able to recover as a demonstration to her first year criminology students).
4) A top notch fire department who hasn't lost a foundation yet, (And which incidentally consists of almost all volounteers).
5) You also forgot to mention the top rate schools our money buys...
6) what about all of the people who are now entering their fifth generation of living off the public dole? We have done such wonderful things for them too haven't we?
I'm a conservative, not because I think its right, but because the alternatives have all been demonstrated to be worse...
-=Geoskd
We do a spectacularly bad job of it. Considering our brains operate at levels that are capable of processing and interpreting many high resolution frames per second, while intermixing this information with 4 other primary senses across tens of thousands of simultaneous channels, it should not take so long to do simple algebra. If we were really more than marginal for that kind of thing, we would describe the process as "intuitive", and we would know the answers a soon as the question could be framed. Furthermore, we will not evolve these abilities, because there is not enough survival advantage to this knowledge.
The only way for humanity to evolve their intelligence much beyond the point we have reached, is for stupidity to be fatal. Unfortuantly, we go to great lengths to avoid exactly that situation.
-=Geoskd
Except that he was driving on the highways pretty much the whole way, so you don't see many pedestrians (its a highway for good reason). The US highway system was designed with high speed trafic in mind, and most parts of it are relatively safe to drive at 100+ MPH. The only reason we don't usually is because of the law. As for the danger of hitting other vehicles, You'll notice the next time you are out on an actual highway that there is almost always high line of sight, meaning that you can see a very long way ahead without any obstructions, so you can see trouble coming way ahead of time. Furthermore, these guys were equiped with all kinds of tools to help them identify trouble beyond the line of sight, and under adverse conditions. They were not recklessly plowing down the road blind dumb and happy, they were prepared for all kinds of eventualities. In fact the only real significant threat to life or property would have been the deer they referenced in the article, and the infrared goggles should have given them plenty of opportunity to avoid that spot of trouble too.
-=Geoskd
From what I saw, he was making some pretty extraordinary claims about the kinds of signals he was getting out of those cables. If what he was claiming was correct then his cables were actually acting as amplifiers instead of passive filters. Without an external power source, and at least a few active componenets like vaccum tubes or transistors, that would most certainly qualify as supernatural.
-=Geoskd
The "did not respond" part is what bothers me. In my own experience, people will go to great lengths to hide their own ignorance. I find that this become more true, with the increasing ignorance of the person. Given that experience, and the reported "facts" in this case, I find it most likely that the young woman in question did in fact try to explain what the electronic device was for, and the officers in question, failing to understand, decided to play safe, and detain the young woman. I believe that they, probably later, decided to pretend she did not answer at all in an effort to justify their reaction, without having to admit their own ignorance. Granted this is only a hypothesis, but my inclination is to believe that a person, who goes to the trouble of wearing something like this, wants to be asked about the object, and would have a definite answer (probably bolstered with long words), to explain its purpose and design.
On the other hand, if they asked her what it was and she answered: "It's a circuit board", they would probably have described her as unresponsive as well, so she was pretty much damned either way.
Any way you slice it, I would love to see a precise transcript of what was said, so that I could make my own opinions of the facts; Failing that I will definitely have to side with her on this one.
-=Geoskd
I'm shocked and appalled that a person who is quite obviously ignorant of what could potentially be a bomb, and what can't, would be employed in a job where he or she would be tasked with identifying bombs.
-=Geoskd
I believe the article said " carefully taken to Jupiter" so that rules out UPS, FedEx, and especially the post office...
-=Geoskd
That would be because these antitrust lawsuits have cost them so much in the past? So far the cost for microsoft to change its long standing behavioral model would be far greater than the costs associated with loosing these antitrust lawsuits at the current rate. Corporations are inherently a-moral and absolutely logical. The only thing a corporation undertsands is a cost statement. If a decision is to be made, then all of the relevant factors and probabilities are weighed and the resulting cost
You want companies to behave with more concern for long term stability as well as good corporate citizenship, you have to make the stockholders care about more than just the P/E ratio and the ROI. There is only one way I know of to accomplish that... Eliminate Limited Liability. If you want stockholders to pay attention to how their companies are being run, then make then unlimitedly responsible for the companies actions. You better bet that things like the Enron scandal, and the various examples of public polutuion by industry would become a very rare critter. Make it so that people stand to loose a lot more than just their initial investment if the company they invest in is doing Evil, and they will become your much needed public watchdog. They would be able to access all company records without a court order, because they own the company, and they would have the best reason in the world to do so. To those people who sa y that this will destroy the economy, that simply is not true. People will always be trying to invest money for a return. People aren't suddenly going to stop investing, they'll just become a lot more carefull about it, especially those with deep pockets. Those who are currently the most likely to enable the current destructive behavior would now be the strongest force preventing the bad behaviors.
-=Geoskd
The only reason that Microsoft's power is temporary is because concerned people are spending large amounts of time obsessing about it. You get what you inspect, not necessarily what you expect.
-=Geoskd
This routinely happens to a large degree where I work. I don't particularly like it, but It's part of the basic culture. I would rather keep it than work in a place where the people interacted in a purely "politcally correct fashion". Women don't tend to last long where I work for reasons unrelated to the harassment.
-=Geoskd
Might I trouble you for some examples? I generally like to know which parts of what I'm reading fall under the B.S. heading.
-=Geoskd
I think you may have cause and effect mixed up...
-=Geoskd
I think its safe to say that most of thse definitely fall under the category of "unfalsified theory", but claiming that it is all crap because one or two of the theories are falsifiable, or alrady proven false is, at best, overly hasty.
Some of these theories make good sense when you look at them from a behavioral psych point of view. I think it is worth saying that the most successful men (from a reproductive standpoint) can and will all tell you that everything they do is with an eye towards getting laid. Whereas men who do not think along those lines tend to be less successful reproductively. Everything else falls into line when you make that basic observation. Underlying most competitive human behavior is the male sex drive. Whereas, behind most co-operative human bahavior is the female sex drive. There will always be exceptions, but psychology is like that, which is why all psych students have to take abnormal psych and related coursework. The sad truth however is one that is known intuitively already, and that is that male psychology and female psychology are entirely different, and bear only superficial resemblance to one-another. This article covers male psych very well, but is completely unrelated to female psych. As for the hip to waist theories, I think that one falls under the falsified category, not just because of other cultures, but becuase it has changed radically over the course of western culture. There were times when fat and "frumpy" were attractive, and then there are times when scrawny has been attractive, depends on many factors. I think the author included this one to round it out to an even ten.
Most of the rest make good sense on the face of them, but could easily be falsified if they are in fact incorrect. Thats the way science works.
-=Geoskd
The specific protection that I suggest is the same portection that all ISP's should provide: Basic protection of private information unless a *proper* and *legal* subpoena for information is presented to them in keeping with the laws of the various governments involved. Anything else is abdication of their responsibilities as surrogate gaurdians for children. The other kind of protection they should provide is for their own good, and that is simple firewall services. Blocking incoming rerquests is something that even the local DSL provider does by default, because it saves them a number of headaches that they don't need. Some ISP's abdicate this responsibility, as do most major universities, which is one reason that there are so many bot-nets running rampant. These firewall services should be turned on unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. If the customer knows enough to ask for their firewall services to be turned off, then they are probably able enough to cope with an unfiltered access, and can at lest take responsibility for the consequences.
But then you try to argue that college students should be able to do all the things that adults do, but still be treated like minors. And THAT is the sort of harmful thinking I was advocating against in my original post. I whole heartedly agree with you, which is why I beleive that the university should terminate access privilidges for those who are identified as infringing on copyright interests. That way the children can learn consequences without having to have a *judgement* show up on their credit record. Even assuming that the Mafiaa does not report the judgement to the credit agencies, a couple of thousand dollars is a lot of money to many college kids. The school I went to was a relatively expensive private school, and despite that, I found that many students (myself included) would have had a hell of a time paying a judgement on the order of a few thousand dollars. That sort of thing can make getting student loans very difficult, and schools are not prone to letting students continue who are not paying the tuition bills. How serious should the consequences be for copyright infringement be? I'm not even sure that copyright is a morally just law. It strikes me as an overly complicated solution to a problem that didn't ever actually exist. The laws should protect society, and I suspect that copyright law does more harm to society than good.
The best course of action for the university to take would be the one that many others universities have done: Automatically subscribe their students in an unlimited music service, and the legal question becomes moot... Ohio University had an easy way out and they were too cheap to take it. Now their students, and their students' parents are paying the price...
College is supposed to be about making the transition from childhood to adulthood. Now the schools want to abdicate this responsibility, but charge even more money.
-=Geoskd
Because the university put themselves directly in the middle of the situation by agreeing to act as *the* ISP for their students. They include the cost in tuition and provide the service for "free". The result is that the students have no choice but to pay the university for Internet service. Consequently, the university has a responsibility to protect those same students from the dangers of the net.
Additionally, most college students are *not* adults when they start at a university, which is when most of them will run afoul of the RIAA / MPAA / Drinking laws. The university has agreed to act as the reponsible party for those students who are still minors, but instead of acting responsibly and defending the students from harm, they are actively handing over the students and the parents' to the Mafiaa. You tell me how many parents are going to let their kids attend a university that is abdicating the responsibility they agreed to take on, and leaving the kids and parents exposed to this kind of trouble.
-=Geoskd
Threatening to file a lawsuit sometimes works, and even if it doesn't there's no law that says you have to file that suit you threatened someone with.
It only works when you are sending one or two notices to people who are doing things that are *clearly* going to get them in trouble. In these kinds of cases, you would have a very hard time pinning anything on the original posters, and they know it, so they continue posting anywhere and everywhere just to spite the company using the heavy handed tactics. The balance of power is shifting back into the hands of the masses, and the masses know it.
-=Geoskd
The porblem isn't that the lawyers didn't do what they were told, nor even that they did do what they were told. Lawyers have a responsibility to their clients not only to take legal action when required, but also to advise their clients on the likely outcomes of their actions, as well as the likelihood of success. Any halfway honest lawyer should have told their client "You will pay us thousands of hours, You will not acheive your goal, and this will backfire causing yet another in a bad series of negative press about your company". The implication here is that the lawyers did not do this. Given the above statement, I find it hard to beleive that an executive at XYZ company would pursue this approach when a legal professional told them to call it a day and move on.
The lawyers should have known this would happen. Posting a song for others to download requires speical software (e.g. napster, kazaa, bittorrent, etc...), and people still manage to do it on a *massive* scale. Posting a 32 digit number is so easy, any 12 year old kid can post it in thousands of places in the space of a day or so. The lawyers all have plenty of precedent to say that takedown notices are more likely to backfire than to succeed, ergo it is their responsibility to advise their clients against this kind of behavior.
-=Geoskd
...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate somethingIt also has the added side benefit (for the lawyers) of racking up thousands of billable hours in record time...
-=Geoskd
Then you get what I found when I went looking for a diamond three years ago: Web pages stuffed with useful information about diamonds, buying diamonds, spotting fakes, identifying quality, diamond prices, and every other piece of useful information I could ever have wanted to know about diamonds. The technique obviously worked, because that was the number two entry on the Google results (the non ad ones). The real answer to getting traffic, is to have all the info that anyone needs to know when searching for information about diamonds. Remember, Google knows if someone searches for your website, finds it, and then keeps searching. So if you want Google to give you a higher credence, be the place where people stop searching for what they are looking for.
-=Geoskd