The lack of compassion and respect for human life some people are showing here scares me far more than any lack of compassion for consumer rights the MPAA has shown. Hell, the closest thing I can think of is when one of the RIAA's targets died, and they went after their family. Even they called that off after public uproar.
When weighed against the damage that Mr. Valenti has done to the american way of life, the value of one human life pales. Only a severely retarded person can stick to the claim that a single human life has that kind of value. I will even go so far as to stipulate that had Mr. Valenti not existed at all, our world would be a better place. I would bet you anything, that if you didn't know what he did for a living, and met him at a bar, you would have gotten along alright, but that doesn't justify or mitigate the EVIL this man has perpetrated through his chosen career. Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Its not good enough to believe what you are doing is the right thing to do, you also have to be correct. Mr. Valenti was paid too much to care wether he was doing good or evil, and the greed blinded him to the damage he was doing. He was singlemindedly trying to maximize the value of the company he worked for, a job which when taken to its logical extremes is not only immoral, but illegal as well. He was the worst kind of leader. A man with a huge amount to gain by trodding roughshod over anyone in his path, and a man charismatic enough to convince others that the trampling was nesescary. I say again, the man was EVIL.
Management is difficult in the same sense rappers say pimping is difficult - anyone could do it, they just have to be willing to do it.
I know slashdot isn't really the most receptive crowd, but I call BS on that one. If management were easy, then most managers would be "good managers". They would be the kind of people who get results, are well liked and repsected, and get promoted fast. I have met a few such people in my life, but not many. The reality is that tech managerment is damned hard. You have to have enough technical skills to understand your employees problems, know what to look for in new hires, and still retain the people skills to deal with the inevitable inter-personal problems, and office politics. Never mind the financial accumen to understand budgets, Return on investment, market trends, etc. How many competent engineers / programmers have you met with above average people skills? How about merely average. How many actually understand marketing? How about accounting? A good manager has to understand all of these things. An acceptable manager can handle about half of them, a mediocre manager only understands a few.
It turns out that teaching engineering is relatively easy. You have concrete ways of measuing progress and knowledge, the answers to engineering problems (like science problems), always produce predictable results. Math problems likewise have a repeatable answer every time. Management problems however, almost never have a right or wrong answer (well ok, they have plenty of wrong answers). Management is still very poorly understood, and is, subsequently, very poorly tought. The problem stems from the fact that management problems very rarely offer the opportunity to try controlled experiments with repeatable results. You can't eliminate the variables from the process, so its almost impossible to evaluate the effects of a decision in concrete measurable terms. You can never be sure that some other factor wasn't involved in the results.
DirectX 10 is the only reason I bothered to get Vista. But it appears that games taking advantage of DX10 are at least a few months away, and games that *require* DX10 are likely not going to show up for a couple of years at least. So until DX10 becomes necessary for a mainstream game, I don't see much interest in a majority of home users for Vista.
DX10 is not going to bring in customers the way MS had originally envisioned. Any halfway sane production house is not going to go all out to make their product DX10 only, unless it can be demonstrated that this will gain them more than it costs them. Since DX10 only games, would result in loosing pretty much the entire install base of existing gamers, the production house that opted for that, would in essence be committing suicide. The potential gain of going with DX10 is improved graphics? Batter quality sound? I may be out of touch with games these days, but it seems to me that the major improvements still to be made are in the physics engines and AI, neither of which falls under the pervue of DX_anything_. Now take the fact that You have a significantly higher overhead as a result of all that Damn DRM, and using DX10 could even be seen to cost enough to never be viable.
That having been said, we will see a slow adoption of Vista as, people who don't know better, buy vista for their kids / parents / selves, and get used to it, but MS isn't going to be able to phase out XP as easily as they did all their past OS's. Its been said before and I'll say it again, the biggest cost of competition to MS isn't linux, or apple, or any other factor, its themselves. The biggest threat to their empire is the increasing longevity of computer hardware, and the slowing need for anything more than bug fixes and patches for nearly all users.
This will prove an interesting test case, and demonstrate once and for all the results of unrestricted file sharing.
We already have an excellent test case. China has been operating under a structure where piracy (for profit) is more rampant than legitimate sales. This has not resulted in chinese culture shutting down, rather it has converted Chinese artists into "street performers" as another poster here suggested. We have our test case, and the only people who lost out were the monopolistic corporations, and the wealthy artists. The big winners are the rest of the artists, who labour to make a living out of it, and the public interest. Granted, the artists who earn their keep performing live, do not have it easy, they will typically perform 50 to 60 hours a week, but they draw a decent income for the work level, and if it weren't hard, they wouldnt call it work. The net result is that the Chinese "get rich quick" artists don't even bother, adn the only ones left are the ones who are serious about their art.
Just think a world without "Armeican idol"! I, for one, cosider that a plus all by itself.
Knowing that is not true, I guess you just made it up? IAAAD (I am an ambulance driver) and we use lights and sirens and run red lights on the way to the call. The dispatcher has prioritized the call, but often information about the call is not accurate, so to err on the safe side we get there as quickly as we can. After we have determined the severity of the call in person at the scene, we decide whether we need to run lights and sirens on the way to the hospital. I would estimate that in 95% of cases, we drive normally, following all traffic laws as we take the patient to the hospital. When a decision is made to go 'code 2' with lights and sirens, it is because the patient's status is critical and every minute will count (e.g. heart attacks, serious traumas). We don't ever "abuse the authority to run lights just to make passengers feel like more is being done." That's just nonsense.
I am speaking from personal experience. My sister had an object fall out of a tree into her eye. It was bleeding and looked pretty freaky. We weren't sure what had happened and called 911. The ambulance arrived, and I got in with my sister for the trip to the hospital. The paramedics determined pretty quickly that the injury was to my sisters eyeelid, and that although there was a lot of blood, there was no serious threat, but my sister was panicked from the whole thing, so the ambulance driver did the entire trip to the hospital with lights and sirens, and from what I could see in the back they went through *some* red lights. Now you cant tell me that that situation called for running red lights, so next time *you* accuse someone of something I suggest *you* get the facts first. The fact that *you* dont do something is not evidence that no-one does it.
Applying your strict utilitarian logic elsewhere, firetrucks and police cars shouldn't have the right to disobey traffic rules if the fire endangers fewer people than disobeying traffic rules does.
No, what the OP is getting at, is that if the probable harm from running the light is greater than the probable harm from the fire, then the truck should not run the light. It is however a pretty safe bet that fire represents a much greater probable harm under almost all circumstances. Ambulances sometimes abuse the authority to run lights just to make the passengers feel like more is being done. With police, the same is true, which is why the dispatcher makes the decision as to the seriousness of the call. The idea is to prevent the police from putting anyone at greater risk than is necessary. It is not the officers place to determine the severity of the situation until they are actually on the scene.
I have a personality, feelings, and none of this is explainable through science... not yet anyway.
They most definitely are explained to a large degree through science. In fact Psychology is the study of motivations and behaviors. There are many viable scientific theories regarding the human mind, and to their credit, the psychologists have followed the scientific method as closely as is possible with experiments that are not easily repeatable.
So because all humans have these characteristics of thoughts,feelings, etc, I think that lends itself to the fact that there is something else mysterious at work here. The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.
It is an exceptional leap, since there is no real evidence to support any claims of miracles or otherwise. One of the hallmarks of the scientific principle is that things must be repeatable. Any time you get things that are not repeatable, it is because *someone* is hiding important details, usually to further their own agenda. This is where miracles come from. Hence just because *you* can't explain it without having to invent god doesn't mean that there isn't an explanation that doesn't involve the supernatural.
These days, engineers are getting strikingly close to recreating some of the trickier human behaviors. Back in the 70's, people tried to create AI from the top down and failed. The reason they failed became obvious in retrospect... Human brains don't work at all like they beleived in the 70's. Today we understand a bit more about the system as a whole, and we have begun to understand that cognitive processing starts from the ground up. Inputs are processed and parsed, not in an exact process of translation, but rather in an assesment of weighted probabilities. When the weighted probabilities add up to enough of a stimulus, a trained response is elicited from the brain. i.e. when a human perceives the paterned sound of a growling tiger, fear is instilled which releases fight or flight hormones. The brain is put, chemically, on high alert, and the fear state translates into motivation to run. Babies don't intrinsically have this, they learn it from being bullied by other kids. That is why some people seem to have no fear, they never really learned it because they never got to experience the negative consequences that most people associate with certain kinds of stimulus. The trained response to stimulus doesn't have to include direct first hand knowledge of the consequences either, the human brian has the fantastic ability to generalize and create aproproate responses to new stimulas. For example, a kid who has seen a tiger eat an antelope on television, and has been bitten by a dog, will generalize the experience to intrinsioally know that being bitten by a tiger would hurt, and that if the tiger will eat an antelope, it will eat a human too. This combination of higher levels of knowledge being able to feed driectly back into the fear stimulus triggers is one of the most complicated parts of the human brain, but it is also the mot valuable from an evolution standpoint. It has tremendous survival value. It means that humans can learn from other peoples mistakes, not just their own. This feedback mechanism has not only tremendous survival value, but also has the nifty side effect of causing inteligence.
What makes this guy an expert? Aside from some kind of accreditation (I forget exactly what it was), it's nothing I couldn't do over a case of beer and a movie. There's no documentation, no real insight, and no deep understanding of the issue. I don't know what the legal standard for expert testimony is, but I'm going to be sorely disappointed if that's all it takes.
This guy is the closest thing that actually exists to an expert in computer forensics. The reality is that there aren't a half a dozen people in this country that are "licensed and acredited" to be a computer forensition, and of those, none are qualified to speak to any potential bugs in any closed or open source toolkits. The simple truth is that the only people who are qualified to speak to these products are the developers who have either actively participated in the development of these products, or who have been paid to professionally evaluate the source code for these products. These kinds of investigations are not like DNA testing or fingerprinting where there is some non-zero probability that you got a false result. Computer systems are designed by their very nature to *not* falsely represent data. This means that for all intents and purposes they do not lie. If the stuff was on the drive, then he would have found it, or some evidence that it had been there, or some evidence that something had been there, but was subsequently removed. What he stated in his reports was that the computer hard drive he inspected showed no signs that it had *ever* had KaZaa, nor did it show any signs of having been modified to try to hide the existence of said program at some point in the past. What he did however take great pains to say was that the evidence existed that a machine claiming to be at the IP address *beleived* to be The defendands computer, was exhibiting behavior that left no doubt that it had KaZaa and was actively serving copyrighted materials. Besides not being qualified to testify in a court of law, I found his testimony to be consistent with an expert trying to tell the examiner that his questions were unacceptably vague, failed to use correct terminology, and demonstrated a gross ignorance of the underlying principles. He was very careful to repeatedly ask for clarification where technical references were involved, and the examiner repeatedly tried to make the man look like a fool becase he refused to rise to the bait. All things considered I doubt I would have done as well as this man did in explaining to the examiner the facts of the investigation. The Expert should have kept full records of everything possible and submitted this as a small mountain of paperwork, but otherwise his investigation was in keeping with the typical computer forensics that are in practice today. Remember, computer forensics has not been extensively used to convict people, mostly it is just used to identify which John Doe to target for a sting operation. All the usual evidence is gathered the old fashioned way, by using undercover cops.
Also, he kept no records of the forensic analysis, and he is always trying to pin the idea that an IP address is a computer, even though it's obvious he's avoiding or twisting questions, even to someone who isn't so technically inclined.
I feel bad for the guy. Yes, he sold his soul to the mafiaa, but internetworking is difficult enough to explain to someone with some background in IT. This deposition is exactly the same kind of thing you would get if a lawyer had to explain tax law to a computer engineer, with the added benefit that the Q/A process is an exceptuionally difficult way to go about educating someone on how this crap actualy works. The long and the short is that The guy can demonstrate that the machine that was running KaZaa thought that its IP address and the IP address of the network connection were identical. This shows that either KaZaa was running on a machine that was *not* behind a NAT, or someone went to great lengths to convince KaZaa that it wasn't behind a NAT and have it work correctly. The net result is that it is reasonable to say that the computer that had that IP address was the *only* device connected through that particular Cable Modem / DSL line at that particular time. If it was behind a NAT, KaZaa would have showed a primary IP of 141.155.57.198, and the host IP of something like 192.168.1.100, or somesuch. Thus when he says that an IP address uniquely identifies a computer, in this case it does. He tried very hard not to say that it is always true because it isn't. That is why the lawyer (who clearly doesn't understand internetworking, but had a list of "gothchas") couldn't pin him down to anything. Otherwise, the only real glaring omission that should have been added is that some routers have *multiple* MAC address' one for each port. (modern routers only have one cause each connection can safely assume that it won't be rerouted back to the same router, but some early routers had a unique MAC for each port, before someone discovered that it was a waste of good MAC's)
It pissed me off enough that I actually walked out of the store, drove home, ordered it online and used the pick-up-in-store option
If it had really pissed you off that much, you could have gone over to the local Circuit City and bought the same product for $25 less than online price at best buy. I was burned by Best Buy once, and actually had the store staff call the police to escort me off the premesis for making a scene about their pricing the second time. Needless to say I won't shop there, and anyone who has done thir homework knows that 9 times out of 10 you can get the same exact product from Circuit City, or Sears, or even Wal-Mart for the same as Best Buy's "sale" price, or lower. Best Buy is for people too lazy and/or stupid to know that they aren't the best deal in town.
Like you inferred, I believe it mainly is age discrimination here. His lawyer even cites two people making snu-snu on a desk at IBM and they were just transferred. Also, I think you're right about them trolling his station, for the simple reason that before stomping off to a manager, common decency says you (the co-worker) turn off the monitor for him and have a talk with him personally.
It is more likely that what is going on here is the guy is not well like amoung his co-workers, and one of them found an opportunity to get the guy fired. IBM could be in a real bind with this one. If someone complained about the content, they have three choices: First, find somewhere to transfer the guy, but from the description, his job is not the kind of thing you can just switch to something else. My guess, is that its as close to blue collar as the compter industry gets, and that his high wages are a result of many years served. The second option is to ignore the problem, or give him a warning, which it sounds like IBM did once already (Companies do not make claims like that in court unless they can back them up with documentation). The trouble with this is that if the employee who filed the complaint sees no action taken, he/she then has cause to sue IBM for sexual harassment, or some variant thereof. The third option is to fire the guy. As we can see, the third option results in a lawsuit as well. It really is a no-win situation, and one which any marginally competent manager would avoid at all costs, not create.
I think it would be interesting to know if someone reported him because they were bothered by what they saw on his screen or if some HR manager asked IT to troll through his internet connection logs looking for something incriminating.
Being a manager myself, I find it more likely that this guy has a habit of pissing off his co-workers (which is not uncommon with PTSD employees). That having been said, it wouldn't take much for one of his co-workers who was pissed off about this guy taking excessive breaks (also not uncommon with PTSD employees) who decided that enough was enough and turned the guy in. Nobody likes having to pick up the slack for a guy who is not pulling his weight, especially not one who is making $65k / year.
was anybody in his right mind when he put that irresponsible child in charge of customer service?
Lycos probably only consists of about 2 dozen people, if that. A company like that does not require a lot of personell, so he probably is the customer service department. As for who hiured him, most likely he is one of the original founders and ended up doing customer support because no one else was willing to do it.
The problem is, the students are not employed. They recieve no compensation for their work.
They do, most definitely, receive compensation for their work. They receive grades on their work, which in the grand scheme of things tend to be significantly more valuable than any money they might be able to sell the work for. The school puts its reputation behind each grade, and if they give good grades to cheaters without checking, then they have diminished their reputation. It is and has always been understood that this is the implied social contract one enters when they submit work for review. Anyone who does not like the contract does not have to submit the work. You take your F's, and you go home.
The work is done "for hire", in the most direct sense imaginable. It is pure bartering, and the students tend to be overpaid for what they are producing. When a student cheats, it is akin to stealing, or violating a contract, as simple as that.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted.
Slashdot users are pretty adept at spotting slashvertisements and astrotrufing (better than the slashdot editors, it would seem. Did anyone think "lonelygirl15" was real?
Yeah, but this is the kind of advertising I can really get to enjoying.
Nothing holds the old attention span like a good smear campaign.
I wish I had a witty sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted.
Neither would this have happened if the maintenance tech had followed procedure and just switched the damned thing off. I don't see how this is any different from a normal industrial accident with something like a sheet metal press.
No one seems to have noticed that the accident in question happened in 1981... Thats a long time back in the world of technology. Todays machines are *significantly* more sophistocated, and so are the saftey proceedures.
The PLL component this is supposed to replace is a small-signal component. It is not a major user of the power budget of a cell phone. The big power users are the transmitter and the microprocessor. The PLL is not heat-sinked and does not run warm. If it's not hot, it's not a power hog.
The Problem is not that the PLL uses lots of energy, the problem is that digital circuitry, which the PLL feeds, uses power that is proportional to the frequency at which the PLL drives it. If you have a digital circuit at 2 GHz, it will use one tenth of the power of a circuit which runs at 20 GHz. This is important because traditional digital circuits which communicate with each other on specific frequencies, do so by running a clock speed of at least 10 times the communication frequency, and then using a microporcessor to count up clock pulses in order to exactly equal the right frequency. If you are running at 10x the communication frequency, then you need to count ten clock pulses for each communication signal cycle. If you need greater accuracy, then you need more clock pulses per communication cycle to get that accuracy. Thus, your digital circuits are in effect running at much higher clock frequencies than are necesary to actually achieve the communication. This is why your little 2 watt tx/rx chip actually consumes closer to 20 watts when it is communicatng actively.
What these researchers have done is found a way to adjust the frequency of the digital circuitry to exactly match the communication frequency, so instead of counting pulses, we can safely assume that 1 digital signal cycle = 1 communication cycle. This is just as good as clock pulse counting when it comes to processing digital communication signals, but up until now there was no way to adjust the source frequency with any real accuracy, so you had to run the source frequency very fast and count up pulses to get accuracy. Now, we no longer have to count, we just use one pulse / cycle, and were all set.
To explain in a slightly different way, we'll use the analogy of trying to accurately count a mountain of pennies. The easiest way to do so, is to weigh the whole pile, and then divde by the average weight of a single penny, and you get the total number of pennies. The question is how you get the "average weight" of a single penny. If you weigh just one penny, and use that as the average, then you have some total inaccuracy X. If you instead weigh 10 pennies and divde the weight by 10, the inaccuracy is much less: roughly X/10. This is how the old method of PLL circuit design worked. The greater the frequency, the more pennies you used to find the average weight, and so the greater the accuracy you could get in finding out the total number of pennies in the whole pile, or the exact frequency.
The new method described in the Article is roughly analagous to modifying all of your pennies to ensure that the variation in the weights of the pennies is much lower, so you can rely on just one penny to provide you with the precision needed to determine the total number in the pile.
To your 1st point: you may feel that IT's reaction was overly cautious (and perhaps it was) and that incurring a $2M hit is bad. But by slamming the doors shut for a day, they may have saved your company many times that amount, both financially, and in down-time. Worms like SoBig and friends are not simple problems to deal with. When an outbreak happens, often there's not much that can be done except to batten down and wait it out. Sure, that's going to cost money, but what other option is there? I'm sure it would have been *far* worse had the worm gotten inside your network to wreak havoc.
actually, a better solution would have been to shutdown only traffic that was nesescary to shut down. First, the default for all of our network machines is to have the firewall disable any unused ports anyway, so sobig was traveling through our systems by e-mail only. Granted it made some progress that way, but our network is already hardened against that kind of thing (despite being a largely windows shop). The only traffic that the router shutdown blocked was important business traffic. The sobig traffic was being shutdown at the local level, because none of the machines, nor dedicated firwalls allow unauthorized traffic. The total shutdown was a panic reaction, and it is that kind of reaction that gives the IT industry a black eye in the face of these kinds of problems. The speed of the reaction to a crisis is less important than the potency of the solution. You can be the fastest to respond to any incident, but if you act incorrectly, you can do far more damage than any security breach is capable of.
I am not a cracker or hacker. But I know a guy who uses password trading websites for porn. According to him, once you get a password for one porn website, that same password will work for others. According to him, these porn members use the same password for all sites they subscribe to.
I work for a large company (200k+ employees) and we have what can only be described as anal retentive security and administration. These guys do absolutely everything exactly the way they are supposed to as far as adminstration staff is concerned, but several things have become apparant to me over the last few years.
First: Having a super strong IT department won't prevent virus outbreaks. We got hit with a SoBig variant and it damn near put us out of commission for a day. The reason wasn't because the virus caused serious harm to our infrastructure (it didn't, we were almost unaffected by it), it was because our global IT folks, in their infinite wisdom, decided to lock down all the routers everywhere to prevent the worm from spreading. The result was that we were incapable of doing any of our normal business activities for one day. Using the facility I work at as typical, and extrapolating accross the entire company, this cost us about $2,000,000. The key to remember, was that it wasn't the worm that caused the loss, it was the IT reaction to it. They did "nothing wrong". Everything was done by the book, but from my experience the textbook reactions to these things need to be re-examined.
Second: Virtually every department in my company uses back door passwords just like the ones refered to in the article. We use them to a huge extent simply because we have a massive data infrastructure that is decades old and needs to interoperate seemlessly. There isn't anyone within the company who has any real grasp on how the whole system works together. For anyone who says that security through obscurity isn't the answer, I call bullshit. Security through obscurity is the single *most effective* method out there, and when coupled with other more active measures produces a system which is stronger than any system which does not include security through obscurity. The people who wrote pieces of the systems we use, don't understand the system well enough to make effective work arounds, much less exploit the system. The result is that we leave many "generic" accounts open using a standard pattern so that anyone in any department will know how to access business critical data in any other department. This keeps the employees productive even when moved to a new department, which happens quite frequently.
Third: Passwords and account tracking at my company are not so much intended to prevent outsiders from gaining access to our data, but are geared more towards knowing who did access what data, in the event that anyone ever wanted to know. That is not how the IT department wants it to work, but with hundreds of thousands of employees and a centralized standardized IT department, there is no way they can effectively administrate all these computer system, so they settle for being able to track what happened after the fact.
last, it should be noted that our systems have proved remarkably resillient to attack, and penetration. Critical systems such as our web site (which takes in excess of 100M hits / day), and a very few others are more closely guarded than most, but generally speaking no one pays any attention to security inside the company, becuase no one has the time, and despite that we have not had any real problems that couldn't have been simply ignored.
Patenting is really a boring issue unless your directly involved with its consequences but im happy the issue is starting to come up in mainstream media.
Everyone these days seems to be whining about how bad the patent system is. Why doesn't anyone propose something better? I have thought a great deal about the problem, because I would like to patent quite a few things, but can't afford the $500 per attempt, plus whatever the patent search costs.
So here's my solution to the problem.
First: Patents (and copyrights) can not be owned by corporations. In fact the original owner cant relinquish these rights at all, all they can do is expand the rights by allowing others to use their patents / copyright. This effectively kills the entertainment industry monopoly. If an artist doesn't like their current label, they take all of their works somewhere else and compete with their old label. Their contract with the old label could allow that label to use the works indefinitely, but it couldn't prevent the copyright holder from selling the rights to another party in the future.
This also puts an extreme value on the employees who hold patents. The corporations would have to keep these people happy, or they would take their patents elsewhere. This would cause a long term sustained increase in the salaries of white collar jobs. This would be enforced everywhere by the U.S. refusing to recognize any patents where the original patent holders rights were not supported in keeping with these new rules. The result would be that companies would fight to keep their patent holding and patent generating employees happy. And companies wouldn't offshore to countries where the patents wouldn't be recognized by the U.S. Everywhere that had these kinds of patent laws would have much higher salaries and so would not be as tempting for companies to offshore to. This would effectively slow offshoring, and might even cause a temporary reverse int he flow of jobs to other countries, while other countries modified their patent laws.
second: The life of a patent would be no longer than the life of the patent holder. When the patent holder dies, the patent becomes public domain . no exceptions. This settles the patent lifespan argument once and for all.
third: In order to be granted a patent, a working prototype must be presented to the patent office to be documented in full as part of the patent application. If the applicant hasn't put enough work into a product to make the prototype work, they don't deserve the patent.
fourth: If another person can demonstrate that development of a similar product was well underway, or completed at the time that the patent application was filed, then the patent is ammended to include the additional person as patent holder. The patent rights are then shared between both persons and rights are assigned equally.
Seems to me that this would fix a whole host of stupid problems with the existing patent system. I'm sure there are some details that would improve upon this framework as well, and I look forward to seeing some of them.
It seems fair on the surface until you think about the nasty circle that it creates. You can't deny that the industry is setup to screw people in many cases. Why the hell does a secured credit card (often used to rebuild credit) need a 24.99% APR? By definition a secured card represents absolutely no risk to the issuer. They charge those rates because nobody is stopping them.
thats right, but it is a captive market, and these people have no choice but to pay these predatory rates because they never bothetred to save for a rainy day.
And that means everybody is like that? Personally when I was having hard times I always made a point to pay my car insurance first (if I can't get to work and make money then everybody is screwed), my landlord second, my food and utilities third and everybody after that can take a number. Screwing your landlord while you drive around in a $25,000 car is deplorable. I just take exception to your statements that "most" people who are poor or who have bad credit are acting like this. Did you know that about 70% of bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills?
Actually, yes, most of the people I have seen are like that. I am a landlord, and I know many other landlords, so I know that my experience is almost universal for landlords. In my day to day activities I get to see many credit reports, and I can say with certainty that most of the renters that I deal with (and I cater to the top of the rental market, not the bottom) have delinquent unpaid debts that the issuing banks have written off. The rate is close to 90% of all applicants, and about 50% of my renters have had significant unpaid debts somewhere in the past. Sometimes its medical, but not as often as you might expect. Id have to say only about 10 - 20% of the time.
When I say most, I mean most. The people who have a major breakdown and then recover dont stay on the bottom for long, thats why they don't account for much of the bottom of the market. Even then, many times these people still manage to make minimum payments while they are recovering, and thus protect their credit record from significant damage. Hell, if you're going to miss a payment because you lost your job, simply calling you creditors and telling them what is going on will sometimes stop them from even reporting delinquencies.
And I would refuse to rent from you if you had those devices. If you felt the need to deploy such devices on your apartments then that alone is going to scare me away (who the hell else are you renting to? do I really want to live next to them?). And like RIAA I also have a serious problem with any business that treats me like a criminal before I've done anything wrong.
You are not the kind of clientell that I would be looking to defend myself from. Most of my units would not need, nor benefit from such a device, but for those that would, it would be invaluable. Everyone would be offended at having to deal with this kind of company, but the ones who have no choice are the ones who do simply disappear without paying, or worse yet, squat for 4 months during the winter without paying a dime, meanwhile the landlord can't evict because they keep showing up in court with their 14 children telling the judge they have nowhere to go.
Of course it doesn't work out that way in practice. They still charge anywhere from 15%-25% on a car loan. It's legalized loan sharking that takes advantage of the most desperate among us.
This needs to be addressed because; the problem isn't so much the predatory practices of the companies (who do make a tidy profit, but so do "regular" auto lenders and retailers), as it is the actual people who are their customers. By definition, someone with bad credit has bad credit *because* they tried to screw a creditor by not making payments on time. In most cases, these people have *never* paid of the balance they owe, and the banks have simply written these debts off. The result is that they pay huge interest rates on everything. Seems fair to me.
the next thing to realize is that most of the people at the bottom of the pay scale remain very poor because they insist on buying things (on credit) that they cant afford. I personally know more than a few people who "bought" a $25,000 car on credit at 20% interest at the same time they were being evicted for not paying their rent. Why didn't they buy a $15,000 car, or even buy a used car? Its because they have no money management skills, so they waste their money on 54 inch TV's, P4 Computers, Entire furniture sets, all from the rental place at $30 / week / item. The result is that after two years they've paid for the item twice over and still don't own it. Moreover, they never save any money up so that when they loose their job, they are really screwed.
I personally make only 20k / year, in a city where 30k / year is considered to be the line between middle class and poor, but in two years I have saved enough money to buy two rental houses, and the home I live in. I bought a used suzuki (on which I splurged) for $9,000. I don't own a TV (I use a TV card I bought for $5 from a local computer salvage store). I don't have a "kick ass stereo" I don't have a sweet living room set. I don't have a car stereo, and I wear clothing bought off the rack at a sears end of season clearance sale. Most importantly, I didn't marry a woman who is so stupid that she believes that children are a welfare funded meal ticket. If you want to get ahead in life stop trying to look like you're already ahead and put your mind towards the task of getting there.
You can't save stupid people from themselves, so don't bother trying.
Now as for these devices, I think they are a great idea. I want these for my rental units. The door would refuse to open from the outside unless they deposit $20 / day into the lock box... It would save me about 2 evictions every year, and I'll bet I would get paid more reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
When weighed against the damage that Mr. Valenti has done to the american way of life, the value of one human life pales. Only a severely retarded person can stick to the claim that a single human life has that kind of value. I will even go so far as to stipulate that had Mr. Valenti not existed at all, our world would be a better place. I would bet you anything, that if you didn't know what he did for a living, and met him at a bar, you would have gotten along alright, but that doesn't justify or mitigate the EVIL this man has perpetrated through his chosen career. Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Its not good enough to believe what you are doing is the right thing to do, you also have to be correct. Mr. Valenti was paid too much to care wether he was doing good or evil, and the greed blinded him to the damage he was doing. He was singlemindedly trying to maximize the value of the company he worked for, a job which when taken to its logical extremes is not only immoral, but illegal as well. He was the worst kind of leader. A man with a huge amount to gain by trodding roughshod over anyone in his path, and a man charismatic enough to convince others that the trampling was nesescary. I say again, the man was EVIL.
-=Geoskd
I know slashdot isn't really the most receptive crowd, but I call BS on that one. If management were easy, then most managers would be "good managers". They would be the kind of people who get results, are well liked and repsected, and get promoted fast. I have met a few such people in my life, but not many. The reality is that tech managerment is damned hard. You have to have enough technical skills to understand your employees problems, know what to look for in new hires, and still retain the people skills to deal with the inevitable inter-personal problems, and office politics. Never mind the financial accumen to understand budgets, Return on investment, market trends, etc. How many competent engineers / programmers have you met with above average people skills? How about merely average. How many actually understand marketing? How about accounting? A good manager has to understand all of these things. An acceptable manager can handle about half of them, a mediocre manager only understands a few.
It turns out that teaching engineering is relatively easy. You have concrete ways of measuing progress and knowledge, the answers to engineering problems (like science problems), always produce predictable results. Math problems likewise have a repeatable answer every time. Management problems however, almost never have a right or wrong answer (well ok, they have plenty of wrong answers). Management is still very poorly understood, and is, subsequently, very poorly tought. The problem stems from the fact that management problems very rarely offer the opportunity to try controlled experiments with repeatable results. You can't eliminate the variables from the process, so its almost impossible to evaluate the effects of a decision in concrete measurable terms. You can never be sure that some other factor wasn't involved in the results.
-=Geoskd
DX10 is not going to bring in customers the way MS had originally envisioned. Any halfway sane production house is not going to go all out to make their product DX10 only, unless it can be demonstrated that this will gain them more than it costs them. Since DX10 only games, would result in loosing pretty much the entire install base of existing gamers, the production house that opted for that, would in essence be committing suicide. The potential gain of going with DX10 is improved graphics? Batter quality sound? I may be out of touch with games these days, but it seems to me that the major improvements still to be made are in the physics engines and AI, neither of which falls under the pervue of DX_anything_. Now take the fact that You have a significantly higher overhead as a result of all that Damn DRM, and using DX10 could even be seen to cost enough to never be viable.
That having been said, we will see a slow adoption of Vista as, people who don't know better, buy vista for their kids / parents / selves, and get used to it, but MS isn't going to be able to phase out XP as easily as they did all their past OS's. Its been said before and I'll say it again, the biggest cost of competition to MS isn't linux, or apple, or any other factor, its themselves. The biggest threat to their empire is the increasing longevity of computer hardware, and the slowing need for anything more than bug fixes and patches for nearly all users.
-=Geoskd
We already have an excellent test case. China has been operating under a structure where piracy (for profit) is more rampant than legitimate sales. This has not resulted in chinese culture shutting down, rather it has converted Chinese artists into "street performers" as another poster here suggested. We have our test case, and the only people who lost out were the monopolistic corporations, and the wealthy artists. The big winners are the rest of the artists, who labour to make a living out of it, and the public interest. Granted, the artists who earn their keep performing live, do not have it easy, they will typically perform 50 to 60 hours a week, but they draw a decent income for the work level, and if it weren't hard, they wouldnt call it work. The net result is that the Chinese "get rich quick" artists don't even bother, adn the only ones left are the ones who are serious about their art.
Just think a world without "Armeican idol"! I, for one, cosider that a plus all by itself.
-=Geoskd
Knowing that is not true, I guess you just made it up? IAAAD (I am an ambulance driver) and we use lights and sirens and run red lights on the way to the call. The dispatcher has prioritized the call, but often information about the call is not accurate, so to err on the safe side we get there as quickly as we can. After we have determined the severity of the call in person at the scene, we decide whether we need to run lights and sirens on the way to the hospital. I would estimate that in 95% of cases, we drive normally, following all traffic laws as we take the patient to the hospital. When a decision is made to go 'code 2' with lights and sirens, it is because the patient's status is critical and every minute will count (e.g. heart attacks, serious traumas). We don't ever "abuse the authority to run lights just to make passengers feel like more is being done." That's just nonsense.
I am speaking from personal experience. My sister had an object fall out of a tree into her eye. It was bleeding and looked pretty freaky. We weren't sure what had happened and called 911. The ambulance arrived, and I got in with my sister for the trip to the hospital. The paramedics determined pretty quickly that the injury was to my sisters eyeelid, and that although there was a lot of blood, there was no serious threat, but my sister was panicked from the whole thing, so the ambulance driver did the entire trip to the hospital with lights and sirens, and from what I could see in the back they went through *some* red lights. Now you cant tell me that that situation called for running red lights, so next time *you* accuse someone of something I suggest *you* get the facts first. The fact that *you* dont do something is not evidence that no-one does it.
-=Geoskd
Applying your strict utilitarian logic elsewhere, firetrucks and police cars shouldn't have the right to disobey traffic rules if the fire endangers fewer people than disobeying traffic rules does.
No, what the OP is getting at, is that if the probable harm from running the light is greater than the probable harm from the fire, then the truck should not run the light. It is however a pretty safe bet that fire represents a much greater probable harm under almost all circumstances. Ambulances sometimes abuse the authority to run lights just to make the passengers feel like more is being done. With police, the same is true, which is why the dispatcher makes the decision as to the seriousness of the call. The idea is to prevent the police from putting anyone at greater risk than is necessary. It is not the officers place to determine the severity of the situation until they are actually on the scene.
-=Geoskd
This story was on slashdot about a year ago...
/ 14/0028208
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
-=Geoskd
They most definitely are explained to a large degree through science. In fact Psychology is the study of motivations and behaviors. There are many viable scientific theories regarding the human mind, and to their credit, the psychologists have followed the scientific method as closely as is possible with experiments that are not easily repeatable.
So because all humans have these characteristics of thoughts,feelings, etc, I think that lends itself to the fact that there is something else mysterious at work here. The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.
It is an exceptional leap, since there is no real evidence to support any claims of miracles or otherwise. One of the hallmarks of the scientific principle is that things must be repeatable. Any time you get things that are not repeatable, it is because *someone* is hiding important details, usually to further their own agenda. This is where miracles come from. Hence just because *you* can't explain it without having to invent god doesn't mean that there isn't an explanation that doesn't involve the supernatural.
These days, engineers are getting strikingly close to recreating some of the trickier human behaviors. Back in the 70's, people tried to create AI from the top down and failed. The reason they failed became obvious in retrospect... Human brains don't work at all like they beleived in the 70's. Today we understand a bit more about the system as a whole, and we have begun to understand that cognitive processing starts from the ground up. Inputs are processed and parsed, not in an exact process of translation, but rather in an assesment of weighted probabilities. When the weighted probabilities add up to enough of a stimulus, a trained response is elicited from the brain. i.e. when a human perceives the paterned sound of a growling tiger, fear is instilled which releases fight or flight hormones. The brain is put, chemically, on high alert, and the fear state translates into motivation to run. Babies don't intrinsically have this, they learn it from being bullied by other kids. That is why some people seem to have no fear, they never really learned it because they never got to experience the negative consequences that most people associate with certain kinds of stimulus. The trained response to stimulus doesn't have to include direct first hand knowledge of the consequences either, the human brian has the fantastic ability to generalize and create aproproate responses to new stimulas. For example, a kid who has seen a tiger eat an antelope on television, and has been bitten by a dog, will generalize the experience to intrinsioally know that being bitten by a tiger would hurt, and that if the tiger will eat an antelope, it will eat a human too. This combination of higher levels of knowledge being able to feed driectly back into the fear stimulus triggers is one of the most complicated parts of the human brain, but it is also the mot valuable from an evolution standpoint. It has tremendous survival value. It means that humans can learn from other peoples mistakes, not just their own. This feedback mechanism has not only tremendous survival value, but also has the nifty side effect of causing inteligence.
-=Geoskd
This guy is the closest thing that actually exists to an expert in computer forensics. The reality is that there aren't a half a dozen people in this country that are "licensed and acredited" to be a computer forensition, and of those, none are qualified to speak to any potential bugs in any closed or open source toolkits. The simple truth is that the only people who are qualified to speak to these products are the developers who have either actively participated in the development of these products, or who have been paid to professionally evaluate the source code for these products. These kinds of investigations are not like DNA testing or fingerprinting where there is some non-zero probability that you got a false result. Computer systems are designed by their very nature to *not* falsely represent data. This means that for all intents and purposes they do not lie. If the stuff was on the drive, then he would have found it, or some evidence that it had been there, or some evidence that something had been there, but was subsequently removed. What he stated in his reports was that the computer hard drive he inspected showed no signs that it had *ever* had KaZaa, nor did it show any signs of having been modified to try to hide the existence of said program at some point in the past. What he did however take great pains to say was that the evidence existed that a machine claiming to be at the IP address *beleived* to be The defendands computer, was exhibiting behavior that left no doubt that it had KaZaa and was actively serving copyrighted materials. Besides not being qualified to testify in a court of law, I found his testimony to be consistent with an expert trying to tell the examiner that his questions were unacceptably vague, failed to use correct terminology, and demonstrated a gross ignorance of the underlying principles. He was very careful to repeatedly ask for clarification where technical references were involved, and the examiner repeatedly tried to make the man look like a fool becase he refused to rise to the bait. All things considered I doubt I would have done as well as this man did in explaining to the examiner the facts of the investigation. The Expert should have kept full records of everything possible and submitted this as a small mountain of paperwork, but otherwise his investigation was in keeping with the typical computer forensics that are in practice today. Remember, computer forensics has not been extensively used to convict people, mostly it is just used to identify which John Doe to target for a sting operation. All the usual evidence is gathered the old fashioned way, by using undercover cops.
-=Geoskd
I feel bad for the guy. Yes, he sold his soul to the mafiaa, but internetworking is difficult enough to explain to someone with some background in IT. This deposition is exactly the same kind of thing you would get if a lawyer had to explain tax law to a computer engineer, with the added benefit that the Q/A process is an exceptuionally difficult way to go about educating someone on how this crap actualy works. The long and the short is that The guy can demonstrate that the machine that was running KaZaa thought that its IP address and the IP address of the network connection were identical. This shows that either KaZaa was running on a machine that was *not* behind a NAT, or someone went to great lengths to convince KaZaa that it wasn't behind a NAT and have it work correctly. The net result is that it is reasonable to say that the computer that had that IP address was the *only* device connected through that particular Cable Modem / DSL line at that particular time. If it was behind a NAT, KaZaa would have showed a primary IP of 141.155.57.198, and the host IP of something like 192.168.1.100, or somesuch. Thus when he says that an IP address uniquely identifies a computer, in this case it does. He tried very hard not to say that it is always true because it isn't. That is why the lawyer (who clearly doesn't understand internetworking, but had a list of "gothchas") couldn't pin him down to anything. Otherwise, the only real glaring omission that should have been added is that some routers have *multiple* MAC address' one for each port. (modern routers only have one cause each connection can safely assume that it won't be rerouted back to the same router, but some early routers had a unique MAC for each port, before someone discovered that it was a waste of good MAC's)
-=Geoskd
If it had really pissed you off that much, you could have gone over to the local Circuit City and bought the same product for $25 less than online price at best buy. I was burned by Best Buy once, and actually had the store staff call the police to escort me off the premesis for making a scene about their pricing the second time. Needless to say I won't shop there, and anyone who has done thir homework knows that 9 times out of 10 you can get the same exact product from Circuit City, or Sears, or even Wal-Mart for the same as Best Buy's "sale" price, or lower. Best Buy is for people too lazy and/or stupid to know that they aren't the best deal in town.
-=Geoskd
And we all know how acurately TV reflects reality, so this guy must be telling the truth.
-=Geoskd
It is more likely that what is going on here is the guy is not well like amoung his co-workers, and one of them found an opportunity to get the guy fired. IBM could be in a real bind with this one. If someone complained about the content, they have three choices: First, find somewhere to transfer the guy, but from the description, his job is not the kind of thing you can just switch to something else. My guess, is that its as close to blue collar as the compter industry gets, and that his high wages are a result of many years served. The second option is to ignore the problem, or give him a warning, which it sounds like IBM did once already (Companies do not make claims like that in court unless they can back them up with documentation). The trouble with this is that if the employee who filed the complaint sees no action taken, he/she then has cause to sue IBM for sexual harassment, or some variant thereof. The third option is to fire the guy. As we can see, the third option results in a lawsuit as well. It really is a no-win situation, and one which any marginally competent manager would avoid at all costs, not create.
-=Geoskd
Being a manager myself, I find it more likely that this guy has a habit of pissing off his co-workers (which is not uncommon with PTSD employees). That having been said, it wouldn't take much for one of his co-workers who was pissed off about this guy taking excessive breaks (also not uncommon with PTSD employees) who decided that enough was enough and turned the guy in. Nobody likes having to pick up the slack for a guy who is not pulling his weight, especially not one who is making $65k / year.
-=Geoskd
Lycos probably only consists of about 2 dozen people, if that. A company like that does not require a lot of personell, so he probably is the customer service department. As for who hiured him, most likely he is one of the original founders and ended up doing customer support because no one else was willing to do it.
-=Geoskd
The problem is, the students are not employed. They recieve no compensation for their work.
They do, most definitely, receive compensation for their work. They receive grades on their work, which in the grand scheme of things tend to be significantly more valuable than any money they might be able to sell the work for. The school puts its reputation behind each grade, and if they give good grades to cheaters without checking, then they have diminished their reputation. It is and has always been understood that this is the implied social contract one enters when they submit work for review. Anyone who does not like the contract does not have to submit the work. You take your F's, and you go home.
The work is done "for hire", in the most direct sense imaginable. It is pure bartering, and the students tend to be overpaid for what they are producing. When a student cheats, it is akin to stealing, or violating a contract, as simple as that.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted.
Yeah, but this is the kind of advertising I can really get to enjoying.
Nothing holds the old attention span like a good smear campaign.
I wish I had a witty sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted.
So; what they're really saying is that, statistically speaking, security through obscurity is more effective.
Now, that kind of irony I find downright amusing.
-=Geoskd
No one seems to have noticed that the accident in question happened in 1981... Thats a long time back in the world of technology. Todays machines are *significantly* more sophistocated, and so are the saftey proceedures.
-=Geoskd
The Problem is not that the PLL uses lots of energy, the problem is that digital circuitry, which the PLL feeds, uses power that is proportional to the frequency at which the PLL drives it. If you have a digital circuit at 2 GHz, it will use one tenth of the power of a circuit which runs at 20 GHz. This is important because traditional digital circuits which communicate with each other on specific frequencies, do so by running a clock speed of at least 10 times the communication frequency, and then using a microporcessor to count up clock pulses in order to exactly equal the right frequency. If you are running at 10x the communication frequency, then you need to count ten clock pulses for each communication signal cycle. If you need greater accuracy, then you need more clock pulses per communication cycle to get that accuracy. Thus, your digital circuits are in effect running at much higher clock frequencies than are necesary to actually achieve the communication. This is why your little 2 watt tx/rx chip actually consumes closer to 20 watts when it is communicatng actively.
What these researchers have done is found a way to adjust the frequency of the digital circuitry to exactly match the communication frequency, so instead of counting pulses, we can safely assume that 1 digital signal cycle = 1 communication cycle. This is just as good as clock pulse counting when it comes to processing digital communication signals, but up until now there was no way to adjust the source frequency with any real accuracy, so you had to run the source frequency very fast and count up pulses to get accuracy. Now, we no longer have to count, we just use one pulse / cycle, and were all set.
To explain in a slightly different way, we'll use the analogy of trying to accurately count a mountain of pennies. The easiest way to do so, is to weigh the whole pile, and then divde by the average weight of a single penny, and you get the total number of pennies. The question is how you get the "average weight" of a single penny. If you weigh just one penny, and use that as the average, then you have some total inaccuracy X. If you instead weigh 10 pennies and divde the weight by 10, the inaccuracy is much less: roughly X/10. This is how the old method of PLL circuit design worked. The greater the frequency, the more pennies you used to find the average weight, and so the greater the accuracy you could get in finding out the total number of pennies in the whole pile, or the exact frequency.
The new method described in the Article is roughly analagous to modifying all of your pennies to ensure that the variation in the weights of the pennies is much lower, so you can rely on just one penny to provide you with the precision needed to determine the total number in the pile.
I hope this cleared up some of the confusion.
-=Geoskd
actually, a better solution would have been to shutdown only traffic that was nesescary to shut down. First, the default for all of our network machines is to have the firewall disable any unused ports anyway, so sobig was traveling through our systems by e-mail only. Granted it made some progress that way, but our network is already hardened against that kind of thing (despite being a largely windows shop). The only traffic that the router shutdown blocked was important business traffic. The sobig traffic was being shutdown at the local level, because none of the machines, nor dedicated firwalls allow unauthorized traffic. The total shutdown was a panic reaction, and it is that kind of reaction that gives the IT industry a black eye in the face of these kinds of problems. The speed of the reaction to a crisis is less important than the potency of the solution. You can be the fastest to respond to any incident, but if you act incorrectly, you can do far more damage than any security breach is capable of.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I work for a large company (200k+ employees) and we have what can only be described as anal retentive security and administration. These guys do absolutely everything exactly the way they are supposed to as far as adminstration staff is concerned, but several things have become apparant to me over the last few years.
First: Having a super strong IT department won't prevent virus outbreaks. We got hit with a SoBig variant and it damn near put us out of commission for a day. The reason wasn't because the virus caused serious harm to our infrastructure (it didn't, we were almost unaffected by it), it was because our global IT folks, in their infinite wisdom, decided to lock down all the routers everywhere to prevent the worm from spreading. The result was that we were incapable of doing any of our normal business activities for one day. Using the facility I work at as typical, and extrapolating accross the entire company, this cost us about $2,000,000. The key to remember, was that it wasn't the worm that caused the loss, it was the IT reaction to it. They did "nothing wrong". Everything was done by the book, but from my experience the textbook reactions to these things need to be re-examined.
Second: Virtually every department in my company uses back door passwords just like the ones refered to in the article. We use them to a huge extent simply because we have a massive data infrastructure that is decades old and needs to interoperate seemlessly. There isn't anyone within the company who has any real grasp on how the whole system works together. For anyone who says that security through obscurity isn't the answer, I call bullshit. Security through obscurity is the single *most effective* method out there, and when coupled with other more active measures produces a system which is stronger than any system which does not include security through obscurity. The people who wrote pieces of the systems we use, don't understand the system well enough to make effective work arounds, much less exploit the system. The result is that we leave many "generic" accounts open using a standard pattern so that anyone in any department will know how to access business critical data in any other department. This keeps the employees productive even when moved to a new department, which happens quite frequently.
Third: Passwords and account tracking at my company are not so much intended to prevent outsiders from gaining access to our data, but are geared more towards knowing who did access what data, in the event that anyone ever wanted to know. That is not how the IT department wants it to work, but with hundreds of thousands of employees and a centralized standardized IT department, there is no way they can effectively administrate all these computer system, so they settle for being able to track what happened after the fact.
last, it should be noted that our systems have proved remarkably resillient to attack, and penetration. Critical systems such as our web site (which takes in excess of 100M hits / day), and a very few others are more closely guarded than most, but generally speaking no one pays any attention to security inside the company, becuase no one has the time, and despite that we have not had any real problems that couldn't have been simply ignored.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
Everyone these days seems to be whining about how bad the patent system is. Why doesn't anyone propose something better? I have thought a great deal about the problem, because I would like to patent quite a few things, but can't afford the $500 per attempt, plus whatever the patent search costs.
So here's my solution to the problem.
First: Patents (and copyrights) can not be owned by corporations. In fact the original owner cant relinquish these rights at all, all they can do is expand the rights by allowing others to use their patents / copyright. This effectively kills the entertainment industry monopoly. If an artist doesn't like their current label, they take all of their works somewhere else and compete with their old label. Their contract with the old label could allow that label to use the works indefinitely, but it couldn't prevent the copyright holder from selling the rights to another party in the future.
This also puts an extreme value on the employees who hold patents. The corporations would have to keep these people happy, or they would take their patents elsewhere. This would cause a long term sustained increase in the salaries of white collar jobs. This would be enforced everywhere by the U.S. refusing to recognize any patents where the original patent holders rights were not supported in keeping with these new rules. The result would be that companies would fight to keep their patent holding and patent generating employees happy. And companies wouldn't offshore to countries where the patents wouldn't be recognized by the U.S. Everywhere that had these kinds of patent laws would have much higher salaries and so would not be as tempting for companies to offshore to. This would effectively slow offshoring, and might even cause a temporary reverse int he flow of jobs to other countries, while other countries modified their patent laws.
second: The life of a patent would be no longer than the life of the patent holder. When the patent holder dies, the patent becomes public domain . no exceptions. This settles the patent lifespan argument once and for all.
third: In order to be granted a patent, a working prototype must be presented to the patent office to be documented in full as part of the patent application. If the applicant hasn't put enough work into a product to make the prototype work, they don't deserve the patent.
fourth: If another person can demonstrate that development of a similar product was well underway, or completed at the time that the patent application was filed, then the patent is ammended to include the additional person as patent holder. The patent rights are then shared between both persons and rights are assigned equally.
Seems to me that this would fix a whole host of stupid problems with the existing patent system. I'm sure there are some details that would improve upon this framework as well, and I look forward to seeing some of them.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
thats right, but it is a captive market, and these people have no choice but to pay these predatory rates because they never bothetred to save for a rainy day.
Actually, yes, most of the people I have seen are like that. I am a landlord, and I know many other landlords, so I know that my experience is almost universal for landlords. In my day to day activities I get to see many credit reports, and I can say with certainty that most of the renters that I deal with (and I cater to the top of the rental market, not the bottom) have delinquent unpaid debts that the issuing banks have written off. The rate is close to 90% of all applicants, and about 50% of my renters have had significant unpaid debts somewhere in the past. Sometimes its medical, but not as often as you might expect. Id have to say only about 10 - 20% of the time. When I say most, I mean most. The people who have a major breakdown and then recover dont stay on the bottom for long, thats why they don't account for much of the bottom of the market. Even then, many times these people still manage to make minimum payments while they are recovering, and thus protect their credit record from significant damage. Hell, if you're going to miss a payment because you lost your job, simply calling you creditors and telling them what is going on will sometimes stop them from even reporting delinquencies.
You are not the kind of clientell that I would be looking to defend myself from. Most of my units would not need, nor benefit from such a device, but for those that would, it would be invaluable. Everyone would be offended at having to deal with this kind of company, but the ones who have no choice are the ones who do simply disappear without paying, or worse yet, squat for 4 months during the winter without paying a dime, meanwhile the landlord can't evict because they keep showing up in court with their 14 children telling the judge they have nowhere to go.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
This needs to be addressed because; the problem isn't so much the predatory practices of the companies (who do make a tidy profit, but so do "regular" auto lenders and retailers), as it is the actual people who are their customers. By definition, someone with bad credit has bad credit *because* they tried to screw a creditor by not making payments on time. In most cases, these people have *never* paid of the balance they owe, and the banks have simply written these debts off. The result is that they pay huge interest rates on everything. Seems fair to me.
the next thing to realize is that most of the people at the bottom of the pay scale remain very poor because they insist on buying things (on credit) that they cant afford. I personally know more than a few people who "bought" a $25,000 car on credit at 20% interest at the same time they were being evicted for not paying their rent. Why didn't they buy a $15,000 car, or even buy a used car? Its because they have no money management skills, so they waste their money on 54 inch TV's, P4 Computers, Entire furniture sets, all from the rental place at $30 / week / item. The result is that after two years they've paid for the item twice over and still don't own it. Moreover, they never save any money up so that when they loose their job, they are really screwed.
I personally make only 20k / year, in a city where 30k / year is considered to be the line between middle class and poor, but in two years I have saved enough money to buy two rental houses, and the home I live in. I bought a used suzuki (on which I splurged) for $9,000. I don't own a TV (I use a TV card I bought for $5 from a local computer salvage store). I don't have a "kick ass stereo" I don't have a sweet living room set. I don't have a car stereo, and I wear clothing bought off the rack at a sears end of season clearance sale. Most importantly, I didn't marry a woman who is so stupid that she believes that children are a welfare funded meal ticket. If you want to get ahead in life stop trying to look like you're already ahead and put your mind towards the task of getting there.
You can't save stupid people from themselves, so don't bother trying.
Now as for these devices, I think they are a great idea. I want these for my rental units. The door would refuse to open from the outside unless they deposit $20 / day into the lock box... It would save me about 2 evictions every year, and I'll bet I would get paid more reliably.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com