They're hypocrites, pure and simple. And nobody respects a hypocrite.
It isn't exactly unexpected, the MPAA having been caught as both movie and software pirates, it might be better to assume that all the major music and movie companies respect nobody's copyrights other than their own. This is also the same company which got caught putting computer malware on disks they were passing off as music CDs.
I work in one of the US divisions of Sony as a system administrator. I know for a fact that all the commercial software I have knowledge of is properly licensed.
Depending on the exact definition of "commercial software" you happen to be be using then you could be "pirating" quite a bit of software. Just because software is not "commercial" does not mean that it is exempt from copyright.
So inventions are not necessarily exclusive to an individual, but if someone wants to bring an invention to market, when nobody else has, they should be afforded some exclusivity over normal market competition to recover costs and make a profit.
Being "first to market" can be an advantage in itself. In order to even be in a position to compete someone else would first have to buy your product, reverse engineer it, then produce it. They might also have to have a situation where you couldn't meet demand, but they could or they could significently undercut you on price. When you are the only supplier of a product, for which there is high demand, you are also in a strong negotiating position to ask for exclusive contracts with resellers.
One of the things that I found interesting in reading Richard Stallman's account in Free as in Freedom of his early Free Software visions was that he was essentially using the copyright system against itself.
Yet, ironically, in a way which may be closer to the intention of the people who wrote "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
An interesting follow up would be to look at men and womens abilities to communicate their emotional states to others of the same sex, and also broaden the range of "intents" studied towards the opposite sex.
Also look at if the sexual orientation of the "recipient" has any effect. There is a known condition, Asberger's syndrome, which identifies people who are bad at understanding non verbal communication. (Which is also more commonly identified in men than women). Might there also be a condition of people being poor at expressing themselves non verbally. Effective communication does require mutual understanding. Of course there will always be people who deliberatly lie and mislead (who most likely have to be amongst the best communications in the human race to do this sucessfully).
Also, how about looking into this across cultures?
When people from different cultures are communicating they may be extra careful to avoid ambiguity. Even if they were to share the same verbal language they may well assume that they have a different non-verbal language and compensate accordingly. Of course you can't test this using just photographs or videos since there is no mutual dialogue involved.
While people may describe attacks on military targets as terrorism, it simply means they do not understand the basic definition of the term. It's not a problem with the definition, it's a problem with the people who do not have a good grasp of their own native language.
Of course where you get false positives you also tend to get false negatives. That's before you even consider that the lable of "terrorist" often get applied to people based more on who they are rather than what they do (or at least have credible plans to do). e.g. David Copeland is probably more deserving of the title "terrorist" than Kafeel Ahmed and Bilal Abdullah. Regardless of the impression many media sources give. Of course going by people's actions you might well find that the demographics of terrorists' religions are not much different from those of the general population. Actual terrorists in the US and UK being more likely to be Christian than Moslem. If anything Moslems appear to be undrepresented in the likes of "animal rights", "anti abortion", "anti gay", etc people who view terrorism as a suitable method to advance their political aims.
There is a significant portion of the US population that is functionally illiterate when it comes to anything more than the most basic English.
I assume you don't mean those who's first language is Spanish:)
why would you have to opt out? should be reverse. And where did they get your number? With proper privacy laws those calls should be a non issue and indeed they are here (germany). Unless you have a contract with someone they are not allowed to bother you and mostly that works.
Also where this is done properly consent for a company to call you for one purpose does not imply consent for any other purposes. e.g. if you give them a number for a company to contact you about the delivery of goods they can't then call you to try and sell you something you havn't ordered from them. But could use it for something related to any later orders you may make with them unless you give them other instructions.
On top of that, I'm on the 'National Do-Not-Call' Registry of the United States.
Do all the calls you get originate in the US? Nothing much to stop the operators being in another NANP country. Let alone the possibility that they might be anywhere on the planet and using a VoIP service which provides them with outgoing only telephone numbers which are in the same country as number being called. In which case unless a regulator had the right powers they will end up playing "whack a mole".
What is so fucking difficult about simply saying, "No thanks," and hanging up, or just hanging up, period, no conversation required? No need to be rude, angry, uncivil or impolite, just businesslike.
Comments like this really need an "irony" tag. An alternative POV would be "My phone my rules. If you don't like the results of calling me then don't do it."
Ah, yes - it's even better if you actually speak an obscure language. I speak Welsh at people with clipboards or Bibles who try to talk to me in the street - strangely, I'd never thought of trying it with telemarketers.
Wait a minute, isn't your method just "security through obscurity" since a nine-digit "secret" phone number is hardly cryptographically secure?
It's even less "secure" than the number of digits might lead people to expect. Certain combinations of numbers are always invalid according to the numbering plan, others will always lead to places the telemarketing company certainly does not want to call and lists of allocated and unallocated numbers (which are likely to be in groups of something like 10,000) are hardly secret.
I prefer "Hello (short pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (short pause) Is anyone there? (short pause) Hello" Click. They sometimes call back after they realize there was nothing wrong on their end.
An alternative would be to do the same thing, but in a language the caller is not expecting and hopefully dosn't understand. Possibly one of the few situations where it can be an advantage to know Klingon.
I've worked with telemarketers, and the stuff people do to them is rather crazy. It's not the grunts you want to bitch at, complain to the heads of the company.
So all telemarketers will transfer you to a director if you ask or give you a list of names and direct (including home) numbers if they cannot transfer the call there and then?
People always seem to "shoot the messenger" rather than the company doing the actual advertising.
How is the person being called ment to know who this company is? Giving the name, address and telephone number of the company concerned may not be part of the caller's script; they may have been trained to give misleading information and it's very unlikely that they will know the executives home phone numbers for either their own comapny or a "client".
Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years.
Were there really no other possible jobs you could have done?
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales.
Any employer will try and pay its employees the least it possibly can. This is even the case with businesses in the "grey" or "black" economy. The reason "telemarketing" along with "door to door" selling is such a problem is that it involves disturbing people in their own homes. Whatever else might be wrong with the likes of prostitution or selling illegal drugs, at least they tend to follow the rule that customers have to activly seek suppliers.
I agree - whilst I have no general problem with restrictions on children (as long as it is just children, and not adults), I do note that it's only the unpopular things which get restricted or banned: films, computer games, sex (and it's sex viewed "deviant" that is more likely to be restricted), minority religions (like paganism, Wicca), rock music, swearing.
It's very difficult to get people to censor things they agree with. Thus you find definitions such as "hate speech" applied very selectivly.
On the other hand - and I honestly don't mean this as flamebait - one could make the same case that mainstream religious books such as the Bible are just as much as a potentially harmful influence on young children as computer games or rock music [*].
Most obvious would be the story of Lot in Genesis. Where you have rape, rape, genocide and finally drugged rape with incest.
There are no sides at all. The issue is one of continuously varying shades of gray. It's not a binary equation; there are more than two answers. There are, in fact infinite answers, to each variation of the question.
Yet it's very common to have complex issues treated as though they are binary. Even where the issue itself has more than one "dimension". Sometimes such thinking can produce results which are "obviously daft".
In some cases, people should be left alone to live their lives as they see fit. In other cases, they should receive guidance and protection from the government. This varies by the circumstances - everyone should have the government look for obvious signs of criminal behavior, because without government protection, we cannot protect ourselves against Might Makes Right gangs. It also varies by the people in question - some parents do, in fact, need strict government oversight in how they raise, or kill, their children.
There's also a complex issue of if "protection" where it is not needed is more or less damaging than the absence of it where it is. As well as how do you stop a government becoming allied to "Might Makes Right" which includes big/rich business and all kinds of "kooks" who have nothing better than to lobby for their brand of authoritarian laws.
There are no simple answers, only simple people asking the wrong question.
Or who expect simple questions to have simple answers.
Also, you're perfectly free to drive without a seatbelt, on private property.
Assuming the person who owns the land is ok with that. To avoid confusion owners of private roads are likely to apply similar rules to those of public roads with respect to both vehicles and drivers. Especially on a private road which directly connects to a public road.
A certain level of cultural awareness about what is and isn't safe might be required for a functioning society, but there is no inherent need for regulations.
It probably also helps if that awareness is reasonably in agreement with actual risk. So that people don't worry a lot about avoiding freak accidents whilst overlooking a real danger.
The modern world is no more dangerous that that of ancient agrarian societies, but the dangers have changed. Past cultures didn't need government regulations telling them not to eat all their seed stock, or not to confront a pack of wolves alone and unarmed.
Hence people such as shepherds went armed with weapons such as slingshots and the skills to use them accuratly. A more modern version of this rule might well be "Don't tease a siberian tiger unless you are armed with something capable killing it very quickly."
When I was in Rome, a friend there told me not to look before crossing the street. Drivers there are used to people darting into the street without looking. If you do look, they know you've seen them, and won't stop.
It's also quite possibly the case that in Italy pedestrians have right of way anywhere on a public road, not just on a marked "crosswalk". Remember than Imperial Rome is well known for building good quality roads all over Western Europe some two thousand years before the invention of the car.
School zones and crosswalks are fine; having crossing guards run out and demand you stop even though you have right of way is not.
If the relevent traffic regulations give them the authority to have you stop then you don't have right of way in the first place... The rules on who has right of way on a road can vary, especially in the US where they are not set by a national government.
I think it's the latter that people are against, not the former. Overall, there seems to be an inclination to always blame the driver in any kind of accident. That's simply not reasonable,
In a collision between a car and a pedestrian it's the pedestrian who is likely to come off worst. Since the driver is operating a machine which can be highly dangerous isn't it prefectly reasonable that they take care to avoid hitting anything, especially people? In the UK, where the report originates from, pedestrians always have right of way on a public road and are exempt from rules such as which side of the road to be on; one way streets; traffic lights; stop signs; etc which apply to vehicles.
The basic fundamental difference between protecting kids and nanny state rules comes down to the intent. The former focuses on known threats that are the most likely to leave a kid dead or unable to function in the future and acknowledges that freak accidents will happen regardless of number of resources spent trying to prevent them.
Also that there is a point beyond which trying to prevent such "freak acidents" just isn't worth it. Even if it could be proven that expending those resources will actually be in any way effective. Given that in the real world any resources are finite it makes most sense to apply such resources where they will have most effect.
The later focuses on anything which could possible harm a child.
Except such things as "nanny state rules". Quite often too little sense of either actual risk level or what (and what kind of) resources might be needed to significently reduce risk.
Does that really sound like something which has a lot of grey area to it? Of course not, the grey area has nothing to do with that, the grey area comes into it when we start deciding how much protection is prudent and how much risk is necessary for normal development. And that's a huge vast ocean of grey area.
Most of the things talked about aren't safety. Is the kid going to get hurt if they see something that scares them? Or if they see violence and no way should they ever be exposed to swear words. While some things are for safety this article isn't one of them.
Or the whole idea of "online safety" when sitting in front of a computer is probably one of the safest things it is possible to do. Indeed sitting down (in a building) is rather safer than standing up let alone walking around. Simply because a chair has less possible failure modes than the hugely complex system of bones, muscles, nerves and sense organs required for the, not especially stable, human body to stand upright.
The problem, IMHO, is that ANY simple childhood pleasure can be dangerous. I'll bet our older users can remember merry-go-rounds, and quite possibly being flung from one. A good real-world physics lesson, lost to time and litigation... all because a kid or three lost a baby-tooth after tumbling from one. Are they dangerous? Not especially... but shrill, overprotective parents will invariably make them out to be kid-killers. Ditto for see-saws.
What are the odds that these are the same parents who insist on chauffeuring their children to and from school, in the process creating both a traffic hazard and extra air pollution around the school. Considering that they are often more concerned with dropping their passengers as close to the school as possible, rather than paying attention to anything else, it's amazing that there are so few "accidents". Cars are in fact far more dangerous machines than any piece of playground equiptment. (IIRC they are actually more dangerous than most firearms).
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They're hypocrites, pure and simple. And nobody respects a hypocrite.
It isn't exactly unexpected, the MPAA having been caught as both movie and software pirates, it might be better to assume that all the major music and movie companies respect nobody's copyrights other than their own.
This is also the same company which got caught putting computer malware on disks they were passing off as music CDs.
I work in one of the US divisions of Sony as a system administrator. I know for a fact that all the commercial software I have knowledge of is properly licensed.
Depending on the exact definition of "commercial software" you happen to be be using then you could be "pirating" quite a bit of software. Just because software is not "commercial" does not mean that it is exempt from copyright.
So inventions are not necessarily exclusive to an individual, but if someone wants to bring an invention to market, when nobody else has, they should be afforded some exclusivity over normal market competition to recover costs and make a profit.
Being "first to market" can be an advantage in itself. In order to even be in a position to compete someone else would first have to buy your product, reverse engineer it, then produce it. They might also have to have a situation where you couldn't meet demand, but they could or they could significently undercut you on price. When you are the only supplier of a product, for which there is high demand, you are also in a strong negotiating position to ask for exclusive contracts with resellers.
One of the things that I found interesting in reading Richard Stallman's account in Free as in Freedom of his early Free Software visions was that he was essentially using the copyright system against itself.
Yet, ironically, in a way which may be closer to the intention of the people who wrote "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
An interesting follow up would be to look at men and womens abilities to communicate their emotional states to others of the same sex, and also broaden the range of "intents" studied towards the opposite sex.
Also look at if the sexual orientation of the "recipient" has any effect.
There is a known condition, Asberger's syndrome, which identifies people who are bad at understanding non verbal communication. (Which is also more commonly identified in men than women). Might there also be a condition of people being poor at expressing themselves non verbally. Effective communication does require mutual understanding. Of course there will always be people who deliberatly lie and mislead (who most likely have to be amongst the best communications in the human race to do this sucessfully).
Also, how about looking into this across cultures?
When people from different cultures are communicating they may be extra careful to avoid ambiguity. Even if they were to share the same verbal language they may well assume that they have a different non-verbal language and compensate accordingly. Of course you can't test this using just photographs or videos since there is no mutual dialogue involved.
A 7% increase is nothing for spammers.
Especially if they are also scammers who don't pay their bills in the first place.
While people may describe attacks on military targets as terrorism, it simply means they do not understand the basic definition of the term. It's not a problem with the definition, it's a problem with the people who do not have a good grasp of their own native language.
:)
Of course where you get false positives you also tend to get false negatives. That's before you even consider that the lable of "terrorist" often get applied to people based more on who they are rather than what they do (or at least have credible plans to do). e.g. David Copeland is probably more deserving of the title "terrorist" than Kafeel Ahmed and Bilal Abdullah. Regardless of the impression many media sources give. Of course going by people's actions you might well find that the demographics of terrorists' religions are not much different from those of the general population. Actual terrorists in the US and UK being more likely to be Christian than Moslem. If anything Moslems appear to be undrepresented in the likes of "animal rights", "anti abortion", "anti gay", etc people who view terrorism as a suitable method to advance their political aims.
There is a significant portion of the US population that is functionally illiterate when it comes to anything more than the most basic English.
I assume you don't mean those who's first language is Spanish
why would you have to opt out? should be reverse. And where did they get your number? With proper privacy laws those calls should be a non issue and indeed they are here (germany). Unless you have a contract with someone they are not allowed to bother you and mostly that works.
Also where this is done properly consent for a company to call you for one purpose does not imply consent for any other purposes. e.g. if you give them a number for a company to contact you about the delivery of goods they can't then call you to try and sell you something you havn't ordered from them. But could use it for something related to any later orders you may make with them unless you give them other instructions.
On top of that, I'm on the 'National Do-Not-Call' Registry of the United States.
Do all the calls you get originate in the US? Nothing much to stop the operators being in another NANP country. Let alone the possibility that they might be anywhere on the planet and using a VoIP service which provides them with outgoing only telephone numbers which are in the same country as number being called. In which case unless a regulator had the right powers they will end up playing "whack a mole".
What is so fucking difficult about simply saying, "No thanks," and hanging up, or just hanging up, period, no conversation required? No need to be rude, angry, uncivil or impolite, just businesslike.
Comments like this really need an "irony" tag. An alternative POV would be "My phone my rules. If you don't like the results of calling me then don't do it."
Ah, yes - it's even better if you actually speak an obscure language. I speak Welsh at people with clipboards or Bibles who try to talk to me in the street - strangely, I'd never thought of trying it with telemarketers.
:)
Presumably you don't live anywhere near Wales
Wait a minute, isn't your method just "security through obscurity" since a nine-digit "secret" phone number is hardly cryptographically secure?
It's even less "secure" than the number of digits might lead people to expect. Certain combinations of numbers are always invalid according to the numbering plan, others will always lead to places the telemarketing company certainly does not want to call and lists of allocated and unallocated numbers (which are likely to be in groups of something like 10,000) are hardly secret.
I prefer "Hello (short pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (short pause) Is anyone there? (short pause) Hello" Click. They sometimes call back after they realize there was nothing wrong on their end.
An alternative would be to do the same thing, but in a language the caller is not expecting and hopefully dosn't understand. Possibly one of the few situations where it can be an advantage to know Klingon.
I've worked with telemarketers, and the stuff people do to them is rather crazy. It's not the grunts you want to bitch at, complain to the heads of the company.
So all telemarketers will transfer you to a director if you ask or give you a list of names and direct (including home) numbers if they cannot transfer the call there and then?
People always seem to "shoot the messenger" rather than the company doing the actual advertising.
How is the person being called ment to know who this company is? Giving the name, address and telephone number of the company concerned may not be part of the caller's script; they may have been trained to give misleading information and it's very unlikely that they will know the executives home phone numbers for either their own comapny or a "client".
Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years.
Were there really no other possible jobs you could have done?
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales.
Any employer will try and pay its employees the least it possibly can. This is even the case with businesses in the "grey" or "black" economy.
The reason "telemarketing" along with "door to door" selling is such a problem is that it involves disturbing people in their own homes. Whatever else might be wrong with the likes of prostitution or selling illegal drugs, at least they tend to follow the rule that customers have to activly seek suppliers.
I agree - whilst I have no general problem with restrictions on children (as long as it is just children, and not adults), I do note that it's only the unpopular things which get restricted or banned: films, computer games, sex (and it's sex viewed "deviant" that is more likely to be restricted), minority religions (like paganism, Wicca), rock music, swearing.
It's very difficult to get people to censor things they agree with. Thus you find definitions such as "hate speech" applied very selectivly.
On the other hand - and I honestly don't mean this as flamebait - one could make the same case that mainstream religious books such as the Bible are just as much as a potentially harmful influence on young children as computer games or rock music [*].
Most obvious would be the story of Lot in Genesis. Where you have rape, rape, genocide and finally drugged rape with incest.
There are no sides at all. The issue is one of continuously varying shades of gray. It's not a binary equation; there are more than two answers. There are, in fact infinite answers, to each variation of the question.
Yet it's very common to have complex issues treated as though they are binary. Even where the issue itself has more than one "dimension". Sometimes such thinking can produce results which are "obviously daft".
In some cases, people should be left alone to live their lives as they see fit. In other cases, they should receive guidance and protection from the government. This varies by the circumstances - everyone should have the government look for obvious signs of criminal behavior, because without government protection, we cannot protect ourselves against Might Makes Right gangs. It also varies by the people in question - some parents do, in fact, need strict government oversight in how they raise, or kill, their children.
There's also a complex issue of if "protection" where it is not needed is more or less damaging than the absence of it where it is. As well as how do you stop a government becoming allied to "Might Makes Right" which includes big/rich business and all kinds of "kooks" who have nothing better than to lobby for their brand of authoritarian laws.
There are no simple answers, only simple people asking the wrong question.
Or who expect simple questions to have simple answers.
Also, you're perfectly free to drive without a seatbelt, on private property.
Assuming the person who owns the land is ok with that. To avoid confusion owners of private roads are likely to apply similar rules to those of public roads with respect to both vehicles and drivers. Especially on a private road which directly connects to a public road.
A certain level of cultural awareness about what is and isn't safe might be required for a functioning society, but there is no inherent need for regulations.
It probably also helps if that awareness is reasonably in agreement with actual risk. So that people don't worry a lot about avoiding freak accidents whilst overlooking a real danger.
The modern world is no more dangerous that that of ancient agrarian societies, but the dangers have changed. Past cultures didn't need government regulations telling them not to eat all their seed stock, or not to confront a pack of wolves alone and unarmed.
Hence people such as shepherds went armed with weapons such as slingshots and the skills to use them accuratly. A more modern version of this rule might well be "Don't tease a siberian tiger unless you are armed with something capable killing it very quickly."
When I was in Rome, a friend there told me not to look before crossing the street. Drivers there are used to people darting into the street without looking. If you do look, they know you've seen them, and won't stop.
It's also quite possibly the case that in Italy pedestrians have right of way anywhere on a public road, not just on a marked "crosswalk". Remember than Imperial Rome is well known for building good quality roads all over Western Europe some two thousand years before the invention of the car.
School zones and crosswalks are fine; having crossing guards run out and demand you stop even though you have right of way is not.
If the relevent traffic regulations give them the authority to have you stop then you don't have right of way in the first place... The rules on who has right of way on a road can vary, especially in the US where they are not set by a national government.
I think it's the latter that people are against, not the former. Overall, there seems to be an inclination to always blame the driver in any kind of accident. That's simply not reasonable,
In a collision between a car and a pedestrian it's the pedestrian who is likely to come off worst. Since the driver is operating a machine which can be highly dangerous isn't it prefectly reasonable that they take care to avoid hitting anything, especially people?
In the UK, where the report originates from, pedestrians always have right of way on a public road and are exempt from rules such as which side of the road to be on; one way streets; traffic lights; stop signs; etc which apply to vehicles.
The basic fundamental difference between protecting kids and nanny state rules comes down to the intent. The former focuses on known threats that are the most likely to leave a kid dead or unable to function in the future and acknowledges that freak accidents will happen regardless of number of resources spent trying to prevent them.
:)
Also that there is a point beyond which trying to prevent such "freak acidents" just isn't worth it. Even if it could be proven that expending those resources will actually be in any way effective. Given that in the real world any resources are finite it makes most sense to apply such resources where they will have most effect.
The later focuses on anything which could possible harm a child.
Except such things as "nanny state rules". Quite often too little sense of either actual risk level or what (and what kind of) resources might be needed to significently reduce risk.
Does that really sound like something which has a lot of grey area to it? Of course not, the grey area has nothing to do with that, the grey area comes into it when we start deciding how much protection is prudent and how much risk is necessary for normal development. And that's a huge vast ocean of grey area.
It's better known as "life"
Most of the things talked about aren't safety. Is the kid going to get hurt if they see something that scares them? Or if they see violence and no way should they ever be exposed to swear words. While some things are for safety this article isn't one of them.
Or the whole idea of "online safety" when sitting in front of a computer is probably one of the safest things it is possible to do. Indeed sitting down (in a building) is rather safer than standing up let alone walking around. Simply because a chair has less possible failure modes than the hugely complex system of bones, muscles, nerves and sense organs required for the, not especially stable, human body to stand upright.
The problem, IMHO, is that ANY simple childhood pleasure can be dangerous. I'll bet our older users can remember merry-go-rounds, and quite possibly being flung from one. A good real-world physics lesson, lost to time and litigation... all because a kid or three lost a baby-tooth after tumbling from one. Are they dangerous? Not especially... but shrill, overprotective parents will invariably make them out to be kid-killers. Ditto for see-saws.
What are the odds that these are the same parents who insist on chauffeuring their children to and from school, in the process creating both a traffic hazard and extra air pollution around the school. Considering that they are often more concerned with dropping their passengers as close to the school as possible, rather than paying attention to anything else, it's amazing that there are so few "accidents". Cars are in fact far more dangerous machines than any piece of playground equiptment. (IIRC they are actually more dangerous than most firearms).