If people would just stop buying RIAA-produced crap (and stop stealing it!),
If a significent number of people did stop buying it then they'd have their lobbiests claim that this was "proof" of piracy to try and get more extreme laws passed.
Astronomical pay has everything to do with the crisis, because you give executives an enormous incentive to take enormous risk. What would you rather do: make a couple million a year with steady growth, or make $25 million a year by taking crazy risks? Even if your company goes up in 4 years, that's $100 million in your pocket.
Except that it wasn't really a "risk", since these executives wern't themselves risking anything. Part of the problem is that people have been able to walk away from failed banks rich...
Man this is a gross distortion of my argument, No one FORCED the banks to give credit to people who couldn't afford it. To clue you in, I know people on disability who are offered 10,000-20,000 line of credit, who have 5+ credit cards all with 5-10,000 dollar limits.
This is unsecured credit, which is just plain daft. Giving secured loans to people who couldn't afford them actually made some sense short term when property prices were rising. Long term, since one of the factors for rising property prices was the availablity of credit (to people who had little or no money of their own), such a rise could not be sustained.
When you apply for these things at banks they have to be ok'd and green lighted by the banks themselves. It's obvious that people who run these institutions are just passing the buck (being irresponsible)
Especially since they did not take the risks themselves. IMHO banking executives should have had their assets confiscated before any taxpayers money was put into the banking industry.
You may choose to think of it as a problem, but markets are mostly fashion. Movement in the price of a stock is 80% fashion statement, 20% fundmentals. That's just th nature of the stock market.
This is also why stock market prices can vary rapidly and be affected by all sorts of things which do not appear to be that relevent to anything.
On the other hand would it not invalidate all MPAA lawsuits?
They sue people for doing the exact practice they are engaged in, this could indeed justify the actions of people the MPAA wishes to sue.
It would require such cases to actually "go to court". IIRC The technical term is "unclean hands". In many cases the MPAA (together with the RIAA) tends to threaten legal action. Without actually suing...
It would be very ironic - the MPAA, who is always accusing movie pirates of committing "theft of intellectual property", being charged with that in a court of law.
But it wouldn't be that much of a suprise. Considering that the MPAA have previously been caught "pirating" software, even a movie...
if china were hacking into our powerplants and infrastructure, what purpose would it seriously serve? china manufactures a bulk of american goods, and holds a bulk of american debt.
we are an economic interest, so one could argue harm to us is harm to china.
If this is happening maybe you'd need to look for a party interested in harming both the US and China.
Since Windows 7 appears to be Vista SP3, corporates will have to stick to XP for the time being. Maybe forever, or undertake to replace all the infrastructure and appln. software with Vista-compatible ones with zero improvement in productivity - just to stay in the same place.
This would cost not only software but also the costs of training and deployment. As well as taking the huge risk of spending lots of money and winding up with something which may not even work as well as things did before.
MAD still works against the pizza-box-bomb terrorists. You just have to make it clear that you will nuke something they love. In the case of Islamic terrorist, you just make it clear that if they use a nuke on us, we will nuke Mecca.
This only works so long as nobody who wants Mecca nuked is able to stage a "pizza-box-bomb" attack. You'd have to have lots of possible targets to even make this possible. N.B. number of potential anti-Islamic terrorists, both state backed and non state is likely to be considerably larger. Even that wouldn't stop someone who's actual intention was to get a lot of people dead or to bring about some "end of days"...
That is my point. Our military power is ineffective against such threats. We can kick Russia's ass, and they can kick ours, but we are very weak when it comes to stopping Pizza-Bomb Man.
Or even knowing who is employing "Pizza-Bomb Man". Which need not be whoever "Pizza-Bomb Man" thinks their employer actually is. The relevent movie here being "You only Live Twice" from 1967. Here real world examples such as the Reichstag fire are in some ways worst than fiction.
Warfare has now "evolved" to the point where I don't think all the players who could potentially have nukes care if their side gets nuked to hell in retaliation.
This has been the case for a long time. Even to the point where a movie was made about this in 1964.
In addition, warfare is no longer country-to-country. It is "one dude in a subway with with a bomb in a pizza box".
All the fighter jets in the world can't help you against a pizza-box-bomb. Nukes don't help either. The things that really help are surveillance devices hooked up to massive computers running statistics software. Unfortunately (er, fortunately) such things are really not tolerated by our culture here in the US.
Such systems are also of little practical use since virtually all of the alarms would be due to false positives. Also "massive computers running statistics software" tend to especially poor at spotting the smart or the insane. That's before you even consider that such systems might well have deliberate "blindspots" for anything like the movie Dr Strangelove...
Unless you just really prefer allowing every two-bit dictatorship in the world to have as many nukes as they can build.
Some people would consider Mr Bush to qualify as such. Also Israel and Pakistan have both nuclear weapons and a recent capacity to wind up with extremists in power.
China couldn't care less about any nukes North Korea might build. China could be seen as the cool headed negotiator in this situation right now. If they want to exert influence, all they have to do is turn off the gas and oil flowing into North Korea. No fuel == no power and transportation. However, if North Korea ever did begin attacking its neighbors, and became a threat to China, I have no doubt China would squash them like a bug.
The only possible use for North Korean nuclear weapons would be against another country attacking them. It would stop China being able to "squash them like a bug" or China, Russia or the US being able to turn the entire country into glass but the loss of Beijing, Moscow or Washington might be too high a price to pay.
Selective enforcement is precisely a lot of the concern. If my damage deposit is not returned by my landlord in accordance with the contract, that's illegal; if my landlord deliberately fudged documents to do so, that's fraud. But you will not find the FBI doing much on these sorts of things; it's generally up to the wronged individuals to file civil suits themselves.
If you went to the local police they might well tell you that it was a "civil matter". They probably wouldn't be interested in the case even if said landlord was not doing anything to make being found difficult.
Except that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA. An installer treating it as an EULA dosn't make it anymore an EULA than if that installer contained lorem ipsum, a newspaper report, a poem, a short story, a quote from a holy book, etc, etc. Though the creator of the installer could be accused of copyright infringement in certain cases, possibly including that of misrepresenting the GPL as an EULA...
You can't do anything in a EULA that is unconstitutional, it doesn't hold up in court to say "Oh, but we have this clause in the EULA that gets rid of right X, which they signed."
Actually it's anything against the "Law of the Land", which is rather broader than "unconstitutional". Most of the time such an "agreement" will contain clauses to the effect of even if some parts are unenforcable or just plain bogus the rest still stands. There might even be such documents where such "by parts" clauses are actually the valid parts:)
Do you still have to click through the GPL license to install Firefox?
Is Firefox GPL?
That always irritates me when a GPL program does that. I don't understand why anybody who understands the GPL would think that made any sense.
Maybe whoever packages the installer dosn't actually understand this at all. Thus instead of either putting "There is no EULA" in the box or disabling the "accept EULA" section of the installer they instead put something which is utterly meaningless in that context. Thing is that this dosn't only happen in relation to big corporations who also deal in proprietary software.
This isn't a matter of closing the barn door after the horse already left. It is a matter of finding the people responsible for letting the horse run away in the first place.
The problem is this "horse" is a small pony foal. It makes no sense to even bother with it whilst there are herds of much larger horses running around because someone keeps demolishing their stable doors.
Just because you dislike the law doesn't make it wrong.
It's more that limited law enforcement resources should be used wisely. e.g. it makes no sense to ignore burglars whilst arresting anyone who steals trash. It only makes sense to do anything about the latter once you have done all you can about the former.
Yeah, like the FBI's computer nerds are really going to be the ones to go out and bust down doors at your favorite meth lab if they weren't working on this case.
Probably because they should be too busy with spammers, 419ers, phishers, botnet operators, virus writers, etc. With a view to getting their bank accounts frozen, even if they can't get other agents to go and visit them.
This really should be their primary task. A secondary task would be to try and locate people using The Internet to plan and execute crimes in the "real world". They literally shouldn't have the time to go after something as trivial as a single movie being pirated. If they have been ordered to drop everything else to investigate this movie issue then at best their boss is an idiot who should be fired, at worst they are conspiring with criminals and should spend the rest of their life behind bars.
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If people would just stop buying RIAA-produced crap (and stop stealing it!),
If a significent number of people did stop buying it then they'd have their lobbiests claim that this was "proof" of piracy to try and get more extreme laws passed.
the problem would eventually solve itself.
How much damage will be done before that happens?
Um - that's a really funny way of thinking about saving energy. 9Mw/3000= 3kw/kettle. That's a hell of a kettle.
When you have an electricity supply of 13A at 230V it's perfectly reasonable. It's only when you have 15A at 115V that it's a problem...
What does the 9 megawatts statistic mean then?
That it delivers 9,000,000 joules of useful energy per second...
Astronomical pay has everything to do with the crisis, because you give executives an enormous incentive to take enormous risk. What would you rather do: make a couple million a year with steady growth, or make $25 million a year by taking crazy risks? Even if your company goes up in 4 years, that's $100 million in your pocket.
Except that it wasn't really a "risk", since these executives wern't themselves risking anything. Part of the problem is that people have been able to walk away from failed banks rich...
Man this is a gross distortion of my argument, No one FORCED the banks to give credit to people who couldn't afford it. To clue you in, I know people on disability who are offered 10,000-20,000 line of credit, who have 5+ credit cards all with 5-10,000 dollar limits.
This is unsecured credit, which is just plain daft. Giving secured loans to people who couldn't afford them actually made some sense short term when property prices were rising. Long term, since one of the factors for rising property prices was the availablity of credit (to people who had little or no money of their own), such a rise could not be sustained.
When you apply for these things at banks they have to be ok'd and green lighted by the banks themselves. It's obvious that people who run these institutions are just passing the buck (being irresponsible)
Especially since they did not take the risks themselves. IMHO banking executives should have had their assets confiscated before any taxpayers money was put into the banking industry.
You may choose to think of it as a problem, but markets are mostly fashion. Movement in the price of a stock is 80% fashion statement, 20% fundmentals. That's just th nature of the stock market.
This is also why stock market prices can vary rapidly and be affected by all sorts of things which do not appear to be that relevent to anything.
How about prosecution of the former associate under computer fraud and abuse act, for gaining access without authorization,
N.B. reconfiguring the mailserver to make copies for a third party would be such abuse, even if they did not have to "hack into it".
This is no different from a company paying a sysadmin working for another company to plant a virus on a server to forward them trade secrets.
Plus paying him once they had received the information...
On the other hand would it not invalidate all MPAA lawsuits?
They sue people for doing the exact practice they are engaged in, this could indeed justify the actions of people the MPAA wishes to sue.
It would require such cases to actually "go to court". IIRC The technical term is "unclean hands". In many cases the MPAA (together with the RIAA) tends to threaten legal action. Without actually suing...
It would be very ironic - the MPAA, who is always accusing movie pirates of committing "theft of intellectual property", being charged with that in a court of law.
But it wouldn't be that much of a suprise. Considering that the MPAA have previously been caught "pirating" software, even a movie...
Maybe it's not right to consider it "spying" because of the Wiretap excuse...
Which really is an excuse, considering that copying documents is a classic method of "spying".
but what about considering it "theft of intellectual property"?
As well as paying to receive stolen property.
Possibly the most important question is "Why is not being handled through the criminal justice system?"
if china were hacking into our powerplants and infrastructure, what purpose would it seriously serve? china manufactures a bulk of american goods, and holds a bulk of american debt. we are an economic interest, so one could argue harm to us is harm to china.
If this is happening maybe you'd need to look for a party interested in harming both the US and China.
This is another example where the intention of the law doesn't mean anything, what is actually written and what that can be stretched to mean does.
Stretched and reinterpreted by many groups of people...
If a law is supposed to have a specific intention, then it should be written just for that.
Which requires legislators to actually do their jobs. Both reading and critically examining proposed (and existing) laws.
Now make it affordable.
There's also the issue of how long it takes to recharge and that you are in trouble if you don't have recharging stations close enough together.
Since Windows 7 appears to be Vista SP3, corporates will have to stick to XP for the time being. Maybe forever, or undertake to replace all the infrastructure and appln. software with Vista-compatible ones with zero improvement in productivity - just to stay in the same place.
This would cost not only software but also the costs of training and deployment. As well as taking the huge risk of spending lots of money and winding up with something which may not even work as well as things did before.
MAD still works against the pizza-box-bomb terrorists. You just have to make it clear that you will nuke something they love. In the case of Islamic terrorist, you just make it clear that if they use a nuke on us, we will nuke Mecca.
This only works so long as nobody who wants Mecca nuked is able to stage a "pizza-box-bomb" attack. You'd have to have lots of possible targets to even make this possible. N.B. number of potential anti-Islamic terrorists, both state backed and non state is likely to be considerably larger. Even that wouldn't stop someone who's actual intention was to get a lot of people dead or to bring about some "end of days"...
That is my point. Our military power is ineffective against such threats. We can kick Russia's ass, and they can kick ours, but we are very weak when it comes to stopping Pizza-Bomb Man.
Or even knowing who is employing "Pizza-Bomb Man". Which need not be whoever "Pizza-Bomb Man" thinks their employer actually is. The relevent movie here being "You only Live Twice" from 1967. Here real world examples such as the Reichstag fire are in some ways worst than fiction.
Warfare has now "evolved" to the point where I don't think all the players who could potentially have nukes care if their side gets nuked to hell in retaliation.
This has been the case for a long time. Even to the point where a movie was made about this in 1964.
In addition, warfare is no longer country-to-country. It is "one dude in a subway with with a bomb in a pizza box".
All the fighter jets in the world can't help you against a pizza-box-bomb. Nukes don't help either. The things that really help are surveillance devices hooked up to massive computers running statistics software. Unfortunately (er, fortunately) such things are really not tolerated by our culture here in the US.
Such systems are also of little practical use since virtually all of the alarms would be due to false positives. Also "massive computers running statistics software" tend to especially poor at spotting the smart or the insane. That's before you even consider that such systems might well have deliberate "blindspots" for anything like the movie Dr Strangelove...
Unless you just really prefer allowing every two-bit dictatorship in the world to have as many nukes as they can build.
Some people would consider Mr Bush to qualify as such. Also Israel and Pakistan have both nuclear weapons and a recent capacity to wind up with extremists in power.
China couldn't care less about any nukes North Korea might build. China could be seen as the cool headed negotiator in this situation right now. If they want to exert influence, all they have to do is turn off the gas and oil flowing into North Korea. No fuel == no power and transportation. However, if North Korea ever did begin attacking its neighbors, and became a threat to China, I have no doubt China would squash them like a bug.
The only possible use for North Korean nuclear weapons would be against another country attacking them. It would stop China being able to "squash them like a bug" or China, Russia or the US being able to turn the entire country into glass but the loss of Beijing, Moscow or Washington might be too high a price to pay.
Wait, after 6 years, you still think Sadam just hid the nukes really well?
So well that the Iraqi military couldn't find them when they were needed.
It was clear from the moment we set foot in iraq that it was all a huge fucking bluff!
But not one being made by Iraq...
Selective enforcement is precisely a lot of the concern. If my damage deposit is not returned by my landlord in accordance with the contract, that's illegal; if my landlord deliberately fudged documents to do so, that's fraud. But you will not find the FBI doing much on these sorts of things; it's generally up to the wronged individuals to file civil suits themselves.
If you went to the local police they might well tell you that it was a "civil matter". They probably wouldn't be interested in the case even if said landlord was not doing anything to make being found difficult.
Either way, it's just a EULA.
:)
Except that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA. An installer treating it as an EULA dosn't make it anymore an EULA than if that installer contained lorem ipsum, a newspaper report, a poem, a short story, a quote from a holy book, etc, etc. Though the creator of the installer could be accused of copyright infringement in certain cases, possibly including that of misrepresenting the GPL as an EULA...
You can't do anything in a EULA that is unconstitutional, it doesn't hold up in court to say "Oh, but we have this clause in the EULA that gets rid of right X, which they signed."
Actually it's anything against the "Law of the Land", which is rather broader than "unconstitutional". Most of the time such an "agreement" will contain clauses to the effect of even if some parts are unenforcable or just plain bogus the rest still stands. There might even be such documents where such "by parts" clauses are actually the valid parts
Do you still have to click through the GPL license to install Firefox?
Is Firefox GPL?
That always irritates me when a GPL program does that. I don't understand why anybody who understands the GPL would think that made any sense.
Maybe whoever packages the installer dosn't actually understand this at all. Thus instead of either putting "There is no EULA" in the box or disabling the "accept EULA" section of the installer they instead put something which is utterly meaningless in that context. Thing is that this dosn't only happen in relation to big corporations who also deal in proprietary software.
This isn't a matter of closing the barn door after the horse already left. It is a matter of finding the people responsible for letting the horse run away in the first place.
The problem is this "horse" is a small pony foal. It makes no sense to even bother with it whilst there are herds of much larger horses running around because someone keeps demolishing their stable doors.
Just because you dislike the law doesn't make it wrong.
It's more that limited law enforcement resources should be used wisely. e.g. it makes no sense to ignore burglars whilst arresting anyone who steals trash. It only makes sense to do anything about the latter once you have done all you can about the former.
Yeah, like the FBI's computer nerds are really going to be the ones to go out and bust down doors at your favorite meth lab if they weren't working on this case.
Probably because they should be too busy with spammers, 419ers, phishers, botnet operators, virus writers, etc. With a view to getting their bank accounts frozen, even if they can't get other agents to go and visit them. This really should be their primary task. A secondary task would be to try and locate people using The Internet to plan and execute crimes in the "real world". They literally shouldn't have the time to go after something as trivial as a single movie being pirated. If they have been ordered to drop everything else to investigate this movie issue then at best their boss is an idiot who should be fired, at worst they are conspiring with criminals and should spend the rest of their life behind bars.