But, if everyone else is cheating, at a certain point you have to assume you'd be a moron to do it honestly.
It would be nice if people did the honest thing. But if the goal it to make yourself look employable so you can talk your way into a job, that's what you do.
By the time everyone realizes everyone cheated, doesn't actually know anything, and are incapable of doing the job... the damage is already done.
Years ago, our company had outsourced some of our development work (over the objections of people who vehemently said quality would suffer).
We lost track of how many times we got crap work which demonstrated no real understanding of the problem and no technical skills. Eventually someone realized we were getting no benefit from it... sure, a bunch of people in India were dirt cheap. But, they produced crap, and it took much of an employee's time to try to get anything out of them. Especially since that employee could have done the job in a fraction of the time instead of hand-holding them through even the most basic of things.
That many of them might have cheated on their exams, or lied about their qualifications... that doesn't really come as any surprise. Because what were pitched as experienced developers, were really a bunch of clowns with no skills.
I cringe when I see some companies continuing the trend of outsourcing, because you never really know what you're going to get, and by the time you realize how bad they can be, getting back to where you started can be almost impossible -- because you no longer have your own people left.
Sadly, it probably means they will go on to cheat future employers.
Imagine, a work force of people who will lie and cheat because they feel entitled to.
WTF do you think they're going to do when they're working for a company? Because, they will talk their way into jobs, and they will be incompetent.
In this case, the cheaters can harm far more than just themselves.
In fact, if they're all cheating... you pretty much have to assume that tons of employers end up with people who don't actually have the skills an education they claim.
While this is a good point, in the end Wheeler's reporting chain ends at the executive branch
Of the cable industry.
I think the argument is that Wheeler doesn't give a crap about anything other than his true bosses, who he will no doubt return to after he's done at the FCC.
In other words, he was never going to be good at his job, unless that is defined relative to how the Cable/Wireless industry define "good".
He starts from a position of having drank the industry kool-aid. So, when he was appointed, many people kind of expected him to only represent the same businesses he used to.
That's called shilling, and people wonder why the media is trusted less these days.
Some of us might argue that CNN got out of the news business after the first Gulf War.
They've spent a very large amount of time being a completely partisan agency, shilling for certain positions, and being uncritical cheerleaders of bad government policy. To the point that they made sure any body they had as a guest giving the "counter point" was the least credible person they could find, and that they were presented as such.
When Bush the second went into Iraq in 2003, CNN was first in line to say "rah rah rah" and accept the terrible evidence at face value. They spent the next bunch of years defending it, and then switched to blaming Obama for it.
Many of us haven't seen CNN as a credible, objective news agency in a very long time. Because, well, they're not.
They may be trying to reverse that, or at least the glaring perception of it... but CNN is a mouthpiece for what Ted Turner wants broadcast.
It's way too late to lament that CNN are a bunch of partisan shills. That's been self evident for over a decade.
Well, I would wager there was some form of license even then. And since all forms of license have been construed to be something the issuer can rewrite in any way they choose... we'll see.
Look, I want to agree with you. I want to sound somewhat farcical and loony. That's kind of my point.
But, increasingly, we seem to live in some bizarro world where the law is whatever the fuck the corporations paying the politicians say it is.
And then I discover that the most crazy and paranoid thing you can say in jest doesn't always even come close to reality.
So, these days, I just assume the worst-case, impossible sounding scenario will be held true. Sadly, I'm often proven right.
Is it really true that there are no penalties and liabilities of any kind for the person that filed the fraudulent DMCA notice?
In theory someone could get charged with perjury.
In practice, all you have to do is say you acted in good faith and nothing at all happens.
The system really has no checks and balances, and starts from a presumption of "anybody saying this is a violation of their copyright is assumed to not be lying". There is no threshold they need to cross, they just make the claim.
Which is why organizations like Righthaven have been getting away with abusing it.
The whole system has been set up to basically say "you don't get sued if you act as quickly as possible and give us what we want".
The implicit threat is that if you don't immediately comply, you will be also legally liable, and therefore it's in your best interests to just do what we tell you.
There's simply no checks and balances in it. None that are meaningful. Corporations got their wishlist over the objections of everyone else. Someone has now figured out how to use that to game the system to threaten their detractors.
Really, that the terrorists have borrowed the business tactics of the MPAA et al... well, that pretty much reaffirms what many of us think about the tactics of the copyright cartels. Shady, dishonest, heavy handed, and exceedingly one sided.
But, do you really think you can sue terrorists for perjury for misusing the DMCA? It's too late to think about the penalty when you've already done the damage.
So much like the copyright cartel thinks that any device which can be used to violate their rights should be illegal, we should be making laws illegal which are crafted in such a way as to violate our rights.
This was a tremendous snow job on the behalf of the copyright lobbyists. Between Copyright, Kiddie Porn, and terrorism... you can bypass almost any law in the world with the right fake paperwork.
And the level of secrecy prevents most of that paperwork from ever seeing any scrutiny.
This law is working exactly as the people who designed it intended... badly, and with little oversight.
One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don't adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Dubai brings sand for its beaches all the way from Australia.
But, hey thanks for playing... here's a copy of the home game, and some lovely parting gifts for you... these lovely serving spoons!
I know that in theory, once you throw it in the garbage it isn't yours.
But, in practice, with IP and EULAs and everything else around this... all they have to do is claim you violated the terms of a license they've changed the terms of since it was published, and then I honestly don't know.
Yes, what I said should not happen, and is intended to be a humorous observation.
Sadly, the world keeps disappointing me, and making the paranoid-sounding, ridiculous things come true.
It's not like they haven't been trying to make right of first sale go away completely.
we might find out that some loans were taken to cover others, which is a well known and common practice
Except TFS makes this sound much more like a ponzi scheme to inflate the stock value.
I'm pretty sure you don't borrow several billion dollars without either a) knowing you have an awesome business plan and will pay it back, or b) knowing you have a terrible business plan and won't.
I should think it takes some pretty fancy fast talking to borrow that much money. And if it was predicated on writing fraudulent documentation, there's no way in hell you can claim you did any of that in good faith.
Well its Korea so it'll involve having a big meeting with everyone; the people at the top can't make a decision without consulting with everyone all the way down to the janitors.
Then they will all get very very VERY drunk.
You know, judging by how their manufacturing economy has been going for the last decade or so... I would say they might be on to something.
Hyundai has caught up to Honda in terms of reliability and customer satisfaction. They also do some other major heavy manufacturing.
In common with Honda, I find consultation, and getting drunk... ergo... if you want a better company, consult with your people, and then get drunk and sing karaoke together. Put aside the massive egos of your executive and stop being a cult of personality, and include the people who actually do the work.
And then come in the next day and make an awesome product, and lots of money.
Well, there's the whole US threatening trade retaliations to countries which didn't.
Yes, those other countries passed the laws.
But, yes, the US government applied pressure on those governments to more or less force them to pass into law things which had been written by industry representatives.
So, yes, I do blame US foreign policy, and the fact that your government is so beholden to the copyright cartel that you more or less shoved this crap down the throat of the rest of the world.
America has hitched their cart to IP, and has been trying to ensure the world does the same. The badly written, one-sided laws which favor corporations, and don't require proof or accountability... that was pretty much the US.
That's assuming that these laws weren't intended to be bad from the beginning.
They were intended to have a low burden of proof, and little penalty for claimants in order to facilitate copyright holders protecting their profits.
By design, us little people are expected to obediently comply so that our corporate copyright overlords can protect their interests.
In this case, "bad" is in the eye of the beholder... so all of us who watched this crap happen to the world, thought it was bad at the time, because it was so badly written.
The copyright cartel and politicians who did this on their behalf (and got generous bribes/'contributions')... they were having none about how their badly written laws were one-sided, unfair, and required far too little proof. To them, they were 'good' laws, because they entrenched protection for corporate profits.
Lawmakers no longer care about if a law is 'good' or 'bad', or even some of the bad consequences which can be envisioned. All they care about is keeping their corporate overlords happy.
So, in that regard... mission accomplished!
Shitty laws, passed by incompetent people, written by industry lobbyists, and then foisted on the rest of the world by the US government in order to protect the interests of multi-national corporations, to the detriment of everyone else on the planet.
Thanks, America... this really is your fault.
I really hope that this is a wake up call about just how terrible some of these laws actually are. Because most of them are so one sided as to be laughable (if it wasn't so draconian).
This is precisely the stance of the US on such things, and why they've been pushing other countries to adopt IP laws which are even stricter than they've been able to pass domestically.
So, yes, profit above all is precisely why we have terribly written laws, with low evidentiary threshold, very little recourse when companies use it incompetently/maliciously, and which more or less say "if you comply, we won't grind you into dust... if we're morons or lying, there's no penalty for us".
While nobody saw these laws being used by terrorists, at least not that I'm aware, the holes in these laws you could drive fleets of trucks through have been known from the start.
But the copyright cartels have bought and paid the politicians who created these laws, and foisted them on the world. Because the entire process around copyright has made lawmakers beholden to corporate profits, and protecting them before people.
So, yes, if the mere threat of a DMCA(/whatever treaty in your country) causes companies to take action with ABSOLUTELY ZERO PROOF and NO RECOURSE... this is exactly what you get.
The laws weren't written with the intent of being challenged, or with any proof required on behalf of the claimant. Everything presumes that all of us are guilty, and that the copyright people would be able to legally skirt around the niceties because it was convenient for them. False claims are nothing more than an "oops".
Welcome to the global oligarchy, my friend. The loopholes they paid to have put in for themselves are exploitable by someone else who knows the secret to navigating around them.
But these weaknesses have pretty much been built into them by design. Because the people who bought them wanted it that way.
No no no... monkeys like bananas, we like monkeys... I'm sure some monkeys like us, and I'm pretty sure monkeys also like other monkeys or they'd have died out by now... but we're talking, like, monkeys.
Monkeys, like, us. Monkeys, like us. Monkeys like us.
Faithful, yes, but if he didn't know how to navigate, how 'true' can they be?
Those people sank, and we do not have their log books.:-P
I don't think navigation on the ocean was very forgiving before modern electronics. And I gather you still do it the old fashioned way as a back up, in case you ever find yourself without them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's one way of looking at it.
But, if everyone else is cheating, at a certain point you have to assume you'd be a moron to do it honestly.
It would be nice if people did the honest thing. But if the goal it to make yourself look employable so you can talk your way into a job, that's what you do.
By the time everyone realizes everyone cheated, doesn't actually know anything, and are incapable of doing the job ... the damage is already done.
Years ago, our company had outsourced some of our development work (over the objections of people who vehemently said quality would suffer).
We lost track of how many times we got crap work which demonstrated no real understanding of the problem and no technical skills. Eventually someone realized we were getting no benefit from it ... sure, a bunch of people in India were dirt cheap. But, they produced crap, and it took much of an employee's time to try to get anything out of them. Especially since that employee could have done the job in a fraction of the time instead of hand-holding them through even the most basic of things.
That many of them might have cheated on their exams, or lied about their qualifications ... that doesn't really come as any surprise. Because what were pitched as experienced developers, were really a bunch of clowns with no skills.
I cringe when I see some companies continuing the trend of outsourcing, because you never really know what you're going to get, and by the time you realize how bad they can be, getting back to where you started can be almost impossible -- because you no longer have your own people left.
Sadly, it probably means they will go on to cheat future employers.
Imagine, a work force of people who will lie and cheat because they feel entitled to.
WTF do you think they're going to do when they're working for a company? Because, they will talk their way into jobs, and they will be incompetent.
In this case, the cheaters can harm far more than just themselves.
In fact, if they're all cheating ... you pretty much have to assume that tons of employers end up with people who don't actually have the skills an education they claim.
Of the cable industry.
I think the argument is that Wheeler doesn't give a crap about anything other than his true bosses, who he will no doubt return to after he's done at the FCC.
In other words, he was never going to be good at his job, unless that is defined relative to how the Cable/Wireless industry define "good".
He starts from a position of having drank the industry kool-aid. So, when he was appointed, many people kind of expected him to only represent the same businesses he used to.
Dude, seriously, Google ... https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1...
In my experience, the more senior the executives, the more they don't think basic security and precautions apply to them.
I'm inclined to think this kind of thing is quite real.
Some of us might argue that CNN got out of the news business after the first Gulf War.
They've spent a very large amount of time being a completely partisan agency, shilling for certain positions, and being uncritical cheerleaders of bad government policy. To the point that they made sure any body they had as a guest giving the "counter point" was the least credible person they could find, and that they were presented as such.
When Bush the second went into Iraq in 2003, CNN was first in line to say "rah rah rah" and accept the terrible evidence at face value. They spent the next bunch of years defending it, and then switched to blaming Obama for it.
Many of us haven't seen CNN as a credible, objective news agency in a very long time. Because, well, they're not.
They may be trying to reverse that, or at least the glaring perception of it ... but CNN is a mouthpiece for what Ted Turner wants broadcast.
It's way too late to lament that CNN are a bunch of partisan shills. That's been self evident for over a decade.
As I said, I don't disagree with the reasoning, and can't see how anybody could make the argument and have it hold up in court.
In which case I'll add another layer of tinfoil, and you get to be smug.
Otherwise, I'll add another layer of tinfoil, and I will get to be even more cynical and depressed. :-P
Well, I would wager there was some form of license even then. And since all forms of license have been construed to be something the issuer can rewrite in any way they choose ... we'll see.
Look, I want to agree with you. I want to sound somewhat farcical and loony. That's kind of my point.
But, increasingly, we seem to live in some bizarro world where the law is whatever the fuck the corporations paying the politicians say it is.
And then I discover that the most crazy and paranoid thing you can say in jest doesn't always even come close to reality.
So, these days, I just assume the worst-case, impossible sounding scenario will be held true. Sadly, I'm often proven right.
You think it's legislative over-reach to stop things like Enron and Bernie Madoff doing widespread fraud?
So, you think widespread fraud is a good thing, and protecting people from it is a bad thing? Really?
Are you so besotted with the idea of this fictional free market that you think theft should be legalized?
In theory someone could get charged with perjury.
In practice, all you have to do is say you acted in good faith and nothing at all happens.
The system really has no checks and balances, and starts from a presumption of "anybody saying this is a violation of their copyright is assumed to not be lying". There is no threshold they need to cross, they just make the claim.
Which is why organizations like Righthaven have been getting away with abusing it.
The whole system has been set up to basically say "you don't get sued if you act as quickly as possible and give us what we want".
The implicit threat is that if you don't immediately comply, you will be also legally liable, and therefore it's in your best interests to just do what we tell you.
There's simply no checks and balances in it. None that are meaningful. Corporations got their wishlist over the objections of everyone else. Someone has now figured out how to use that to game the system to threaten their detractors.
Really, that the terrorists have borrowed the business tactics of the MPAA et al ... well, that pretty much reaffirms what many of us think about the tactics of the copyright cartels. Shady, dishonest, heavy handed, and exceedingly one sided.
But, do you really think you can sue terrorists for perjury for misusing the DMCA? It's too late to think about the penalty when you've already done the damage.
So much like the copyright cartel thinks that any device which can be used to violate their rights should be illegal, we should be making laws illegal which are crafted in such a way as to violate our rights.
This was a tremendous snow job on the behalf of the copyright lobbyists. Between Copyright, Kiddie Porn, and terrorism ... you can bypass almost any law in the world with the right fake paperwork.
And the level of secrecy prevents most of that paperwork from ever seeing any scrutiny.
This law is working exactly as the people who designed it intended ... badly, and with little oversight.
Didn't even read the entire summary, did you?
Because, it pretty much says:
But, hey thanks for playing ... here's a copy of the home game, and some lovely parting gifts for you ... these lovely serving spoons!
I know that in theory, once you throw it in the garbage it isn't yours.
But, in practice, with IP and EULAs and everything else around this ... all they have to do is claim you violated the terms of a license they've changed the terms of since it was published, and then I honestly don't know.
Yes, what I said should not happen, and is intended to be a humorous observation.
Sadly, the world keeps disappointing me, and making the paranoid-sounding, ridiculous things come true.
It's not like they haven't been trying to make right of first sale go away completely.
And then they'll pass their losses on to the rest of their customers, and essentially we socialize the losses of corporations.
In the end, that doesn't really serve anybody except the bank, because they're not accountable for their own risk and due diligence.
Kind of like when Wall Street got bailed out of the mess they created with their own funny money problems.
Except TFS makes this sound much more like a ponzi scheme to inflate the stock value.
I'm pretty sure you don't borrow several billion dollars without either a) knowing you have an awesome business plan and will pay it back, or b) knowing you have a terrible business plan and won't.
I should think it takes some pretty fancy fast talking to borrow that much money. And if it was predicated on writing fraudulent documentation, there's no way in hell you can claim you did any of that in good faith.
You know, judging by how their manufacturing economy has been going for the last decade or so ... I would say they might be on to something.
Hyundai has caught up to Honda in terms of reliability and customer satisfaction. They also do some other major heavy manufacturing.
In common with Honda, I find consultation, and getting drunk ... ergo ... if you want a better company, consult with your people, and then get drunk and sing karaoke together. Put aside the massive egos of your executive and stop being a cult of personality, and include the people who actually do the work.
And then come in the next day and make an awesome product, and lots of money.
Even though these were fished out of landfill, I'm betting some lawyers will come up with some basis to sue people for this.
Retroactively, you don't get to sell what we dumped in the landfill, because we're not getting paid and it's our IP.
Mark my words.
Well, there's the whole US threatening trade retaliations to countries which didn't.
Yes, those other countries passed the laws.
But, yes, the US government applied pressure on those governments to more or less force them to pass into law things which had been written by industry representatives.
So, yes, I do blame US foreign policy, and the fact that your government is so beholden to the copyright cartel that you more or less shoved this crap down the throat of the rest of the world.
America has hitched their cart to IP, and has been trying to ensure the world does the same. The badly written, one-sided laws which favor corporations, and don't require proof or accountability ... that was pretty much the US.
They were intended to have a low burden of proof, and little penalty for claimants in order to facilitate copyright holders protecting their profits.
By design, us little people are expected to obediently comply so that our corporate copyright overlords can protect their interests.
In this case, " bad " is in the eye of the beholder ... so all of us who watched this crap happen to the world, thought it was bad at the time, because it was so badly written.
The copyright cartel and politicians who did this on their behalf (and got generous bribes/'contributions') ... they were having none about how their badly written laws were one-sided, unfair, and required far too little proof. To them, they were 'good' laws, because they entrenched protection for corporate profits.
Lawmakers no longer care about if a law is 'good' or 'bad', or even some of the bad consequences which can be envisioned. All they care about is keeping their corporate overlords happy.
So, in that regard ... mission accomplished!
Shitty laws, passed by incompetent people, written by industry lobbyists, and then foisted on the rest of the world by the US government in order to protect the interests of multi-national corporations, to the detriment of everyone else on the planet.
Thanks, America ... this really is your fault.
I really hope that this is a wake up call about just how terrible some of these laws actually are. Because most of them are so one sided as to be laughable (if it wasn't so draconian).
This is precisely the stance of the US on such things, and why they've been pushing other countries to adopt IP laws which are even stricter than they've been able to pass domestically.
So, yes, profit above all is precisely why we have terribly written laws, with low evidentiary threshold, very little recourse when companies use it incompetently/maliciously, and which more or less say "if you comply, we won't grind you into dust ... if we're morons or lying, there's no penalty for us".
While nobody saw these laws being used by terrorists, at least not that I'm aware, the holes in these laws you could drive fleets of trucks through have been known from the start.
But the copyright cartels have bought and paid the politicians who created these laws, and foisted them on the world. Because the entire process around copyright has made lawmakers beholden to corporate profits, and protecting them before people.
So, yes, if the mere threat of a DMCA(/whatever treaty in your country) causes companies to take action with ABSOLUTELY ZERO PROOF and NO RECOURSE ... this is exactly what you get.
The laws weren't written with the intent of being challenged, or with any proof required on behalf of the claimant. Everything presumes that all of us are guilty, and that the copyright people would be able to legally skirt around the niceties because it was convenient for them. False claims are nothing more than an "oops".
Welcome to the global oligarchy, my friend. The loopholes they paid to have put in for themselves are exploitable by someone else who knows the secret to navigating around them.
But these weaknesses have pretty much been built into them by design. Because the people who bought them wanted it that way.
*pew* *pew* ... frickin' ray guns!!
Now, bring me some sharks!
For a sample size of 9, it's 100% effective.
As with all statistics, the devil is in the details. :-P
No no no ... monkeys like bananas, we like monkeys ... I'm sure some monkeys like us, and I'm pretty sure monkeys also like other monkeys or they'd have died out by now ... but we're talking, like, monkeys.
Monkeys, like, us. Monkeys, like us. Monkeys like us.
Old, strange, and dark ... I think my wife would say that describes me fairly accurately. :-P
Those people sank, and we do not have their log books. :-P
I don't think navigation on the ocean was very forgiving before modern electronics. And I gather you still do it the old fashioned way as a back up, in case you ever find yourself without them.
You know, fair enough on that one ... one does see many "it can't be this because of that" just getting tossed out there on Slashdot.
And most of us haven't got nearly enough background to assess any of that stuff.
Physics at this level gets pretty much into voodoo and "trust us, it's complicated, but we've done the math". :-P
But you can't disprove my cosmic, cross dressing clown theory, so I'm holding out hope. ;-)