In dogs, where the individual dog ranks in the pack's social hierarchy is inherited, not made.
An alpha NEVER has to enforce its position -- the alpha (of which there may be several in a pack) is the natural leader, and all the beta and "nobody" dogs *avoid* giving offense. The alpha will graciously allow other dogs to take its toys or food (unless it REALLY wants them, in which case it need merely "ask") and will generally not act dominant at all -- but no beta EVER challenges a true alpha. Alphas do not fight with other alphas, either. Alphas train easily but are go-getters, so can overwhelm the inexperienced.
Betas (which come in several gradients, from top-rung outright aggressive types to bottom-rung sneak-fighters) DO fight among themselves, but the winner is *always* the dog that was socially higher to begin with, and occasionally the loser is killed since *everyone* will gang up on any dog that goes down (tho fights to the death happen much more often with females than with males). An alpha WILL participate once the loser goes down, but will not fight with anyone else. Betas are much like a human with "short man's complex" or "a chip on their shoulder", and are often difficult to train since their first thought is usually "you can't make me". Low-end betas have a relatively high incidence of juvenile-onset psychosis.
(Betas are a PITA in a kennel, which is why I've bred most of the "beta crap" out of my own dogs:)
Nobodies don't "count" in the social order, and are ignored by alphas and by most betas, tho a few low-end betas will pick on nobodies. They train easily for anyone, as they are purely followers and never "argue". A nobody is essentially an alpha without the go-gettum (initiative).
There are pack behaviour thresholds at 5-6, 12-15, and around 25, where some behaviours change. Once you get more than ~25 dogs that can all *see* one another (it does not matter if they are together, separated, or how much personal space each one has, only if they can SEE the others), there is some social breakdown and you get more aggression than from the same dogs in smaller pack units.
Now, look around at the human race, and you'll see pretty much the same social sets: leaders with no need to bully to get their way (alphas), average joes who sometimes feel a need to show off how tough they are (high and middling betas), varying degrees of misfits (low-end betas), and people who just live their lives and keep their heads down (nobodies), with aggressive tendencies sometimes exacerbated by population pressures.
"He was a leader because he did not look back to see who was following him." -- from Mr.Roberts
Oh yes, having WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing modes in the same app is the way to go! saves tons of learning curve, yet you have the real thing there to learn from and/or twiddle as may be required.
I have DW3, 4, and MX living on various machines (the entire MX family is too unstable to be on anything but a W2K or XP box) and I have to agree.. I don't know where they are taking it, but it is getting less and less useful, and more difficult to just get work done. The WYSIWYG and raw HTML panes are still there, but... gad, have these people never heard of context menus that work at the point where you wish to alter something? Why does every little change require mousing around in some microscopically-fonted properties box? And we used to bitch about how Frontpage promptly forced itself on your code... well, DW now does that AND it saves those changes to disk without asking, AND it seems to have gone off in an IE-only direction. And yeah, I spent hours fighting with the last DW site I had to clean up.
Frontpage now has raw and GUI editing modes (I don't remember when this came about), and can be taught manners about formatting and branding. I'd still like to hurt whoever organized the menus (probably a refugee from the Word team;) but at least I can't really complain about the output anymore. And I've actually had it pipe up (on its own) with a suggestion on how to put old-browser helper code in an EMBED section. I about fell off my chair!
But when I want to get real work done, I always find myself reverting to old AOLpress -- which also has both modes, does the prettiest formatting you'll ever see, is easy to use, and is anal about proper HTML. Now if only someone at AOL would dig up and release the source so it could be updated!!
[grin] Same thought I had: "No WONDER Word's file format is so horrible!!" But see my post above comparing Word and Wordperfect -- Word in fact dumps pretty much all the text into the file in the order you type it, while WP organises substructures into what are effectively independent documents inside the same file.
Even tho small filesize meant something up to perhaps the Word95 era, it still pales in comparison to having an INTACT file. Wonked files are a *total* waste of disk space.
I hadn't noticed the "filtered HTML" option, so thanks for the tip, but... I just tried both with WordXP (only version I have to hand), starting from the same very simple document. Yeah, the "filtered HTML" is a lot smaller (1k vs 5k) but the resulting file still isn't proper HTML, still contains a LOT of Word-specific junk, and it confused the living shit out of IE6, to the point of making it behave oddly -- IE changed from an 800x600 window to somewhere beyond fullscreen, all the menus and widgets disappeared, and the file displayed as a blank page. (Conversely, Netscape3 didn't have any problem with it.)
But if you look at a Word document's innards, the text is inserted pretty much in the order you typed it, including text for substructures such as textbox contents, bullet lists, or footnotes; then formatting is applied by way of a remote pointer. That's why formatting tends to be hard to get to "stick" in these substructures.
OTOH, WordPerfect actually does handle such substructures as if they are independent documents within the same file, each with its own independent formatting, rather than the formatting being tied to a location like with substructures in Word documents.
Frontpage's notion of HTML *used* to be horrible, yes. But they evidently got tired of being the laughingstock of the internet. As of Frontpage2000 it was considerably cleaner, and FrontpageXP is actually nice, and it makes reasonably clean code even by my standards (and far more anybrowser-compatible than the ugly crap that Dreamweaver now makes!)
[Thanks for the SciTE link, it looks nicely useful too.]
I had Winword6 and WordPerfect 6.1 installed on the same machine, along with ~350 fonts. As a rule they handled one another's documents well enough, including fonts. One day I used WP's allfonts macro to create a document that sampled all 350 installed fonts. This printed fine in WP. However in Word -- after the first 20 or so fonts, it changed all the rest of the fonts to Wharmby. (This behaviour was reproducible, even with different fontsets, tho why it always picked on Wharmby is beyond me.)
BTW, Word6's HTML (via a free plugin from M$) was primitive but clean enough; I often used it to strip out unwanted code from HTML exported by other apps, because it would kill anything it didn't understand. However, WordXP's "HTML" is in fact a very ugly and bloated subspecies of XML.
Actually, this "your every disk is full" behaviour occured in Word6 with the very first and *immediate* save of a newly-created blank document that had not been edited *at all*.
The workaround was to load SHARE with absurd parameters (IIRC, files=512 and locks=4096, or something on that order -- I don't have my archived Win3.1 setup handy to check the exact numbers). Yes, this was M$'s official fix, which I got from their tech support way back when. Winword6 would ordinarily add the SHARE loadline itself, but occasionally failed to do so, and then you'd see the problem.
So M$ is still missing a critical piece of the diagnosis. I've contended for years that this bug hails from the DOS4 era (probably originating with Word286), and derives from some kludge that relies on the DOS4 SHARE fix to avoid leaving files open on disk. Witness not only how Winword6 required SHARE per above, but also how to this day SETVER sets the reported OS to DOS4.1 for winword.exe (and for excel.exe).
Friend of a friend who'd tracked the behaviour in a debugger said the root issue is that Word was writing to a null pointer.
Re:You have no idea how realistic it is.
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 0
That won't happen unless you've first upgraded to Wife 2.0 -- of course, that leads to all manner of problems if you try to reinstall Girlfriend 1.0.
"Who wants to volunteer to work that you normally have to pay people very well to get done in the first place?"
Well... maybe if the UI is designed well enough that average users want to pay money for it (and will do so in preference to buying commercialware or using freeware), you can get paid for this drudge work.
Good points about data being ignored if it doesn't fit the agenda. I'd guess that they also failed to control for substance abuse that can impact the fetus -- which is likely far higher among pregnant teens than among pregnant adults (if only because rebellious teens do such things, often without a thought for tomorrow).
Back to the nominal topic -- recently I received a survey from a normally-reputable consumer survey company (I've been doing their surveys for 27+ years, so I'm very familiar with them) which essentially cataloged everything on my main computer. We were assured that the data collected would not deliberately contain any personally identifiable information. Well, the output is an XML file, so I gave it a look -- and yeah, it doesn't exactly say who you are, but crosschecking against Google would very likely produce positive IDs for a lot of respondents (and most definitely would for myself).
I very much doubt that the survey company is aware of this, but it's obvious to me that the survey company did not design this survey -- it appears to be of **AA origin, given the types of filenames it recorded in the output file.
Surveys can be screwed up in other ways, too, that can severely impact the data. Frex, a while back I took one regarding what browsers you prefer -- and when I got to the end, discovered that the SUBMIT function would only work in IE6. Erm, doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose??
Having worked in the industry -- IMO, bad movies are to some degree intentional; they're used as money laundries. In my experience, around 80% of all film productions that get as far as principle photography are either never released in the first place, or are to all appearances deliberately designed to lose money (at least on paper) -- after all, film tends to have a, um, "flexible" budget. -- Consequently, no one in power really CARES what you think of their lousy movie. (Despite this, the people on the set behave as if each film will be the greatest ever, even when it's blatantly obvious that it's a loser.)
Series TV, being shot on a fixed budget, doesn't seem to have this little monetary side function.
That's the problem with trying to fight back against a scheme that *appears* to target randomly -- as you note, it would very hard to prove that the RIAA is targeting a specific income bracket, since to most people, the victims appear "average". And 3000 cases may not be enough to convince a court of the statistical anomaly.
What would also work is to obtain the original list (one assumes such a list has been made) of ALL "caught filesharerers", and examine the *discards*. If everyone over a certain income level (and/or all the lawyers' kids) was discarded, that becomes extremely suspicious.
Okay, RIAA drones -- which of you has the balls to leak the original list of known filesharers, the financial reports on each of 'em, or the criteria used to select targets??
Tho if there was a lawsuit against the RIAA cartel -- couldn't someone subpoena their "research materials"??
Well, that's essentially what deterrence is -- making everyone feel guilty enough (or at least sufficiently filled with fear of being caught) that they don't do whatever behaviour The Authority wishes to restrict -- even if that restriction is really geared toward something else:
In this case, the RIAA couldn't care less if *consumers* share files. What they really want is to produce such a fear of filesharing, that ARTISTS cannot use it as an effective distribution mechanism -- because when an artist uses filesharing, it cuts the RIAA out of the loop, and the RIAA's cut of their artists' income is around 75%.
You're right, tho -- this is fundamentally similar to how the Church used various threats of "you'll go to hell if you do X" to put sufficient fear into the plebes that they were easily controllable (and incidentally would continue giving money to said Church).
I've long since concluded that the RIAA is indeed researching their victims (see my post above where I got into my chain of logic a bit) but that doesn't mean they are going to be 100% perfect -- maybe the legal research dept. got lazy that day, or mislaid a file, or just plain screwed up. And there've been what, half a dozen such blatant bloopers out of 3000 or so cases? that's well under one percent. I'd guess that average police departments make more investigative mistakes than that.
I've made this point in the past -- it's pretty clear that they are indeed targeting people who have some worth (in the low 4 to 5 figures) but who DON'T have the disposable resources (in the low 6 figures) to fight such a case.
What twigged me to this? Remember when the RIAA first targeted some college kids, they somehow managed to pick FOUR such kids who each had about 10 grand in the bank. Now, how unlikely is that, if you pick any four random college kids? chances are much more likely you'd find yourself with four kids whose combined net worth is about 200 bucks.
And every case I've heard of has been along the same lines -- people who could scrape together between $3000 and $10k (IOW, enough to be a scary number for average folks), but who certainly could not afford $50k for a lawyer. What are the chances that out of 3000 or however many cases, they've still not hit some rich lawyer's kid? Pretty damned slim, I think.**
Confronted with these unlikely financial coincidences, I deduce that the RIAA is researching potential victims' financial situations prior to filing.
Actually, that's a good idea. Putting some of these lawsuits in America's living rooms during prime time would give these cases the exposure they need, to make everyone aware of how ludicrously unbalanced the proceedings really are.
Americans love to root for the underdog, and in these cases, the defendant is clearly the underdog (regardless of whether they've violated copyright law, or whether said law is fair or just). It would certainly raise the level of awareness as to what is legally involved, and of the massive pressure such cases can bring to bear on a defendant who lacks the resources to mount a defense.
Regedit will run from the DOS prompt. Type "regedit" in real DOS (not just in a DOS window) to get a list of available commandline switches.
However, this doesn't give you the nice GUI with the automagically decoded-to-text representation of the registry's contents.
So to fix the registry in the DOS environment, you use the Regedit switch to dump the registry to a textfile (you should do this anyway for archival purposes), use a text editor to fix whatever needs fixing, then use Regedit to restore the registry.
You can also use Regedit in DOS to merge individual keys (whatever.reg files, which are themselves plaintext).
"Corrupted registry" gets a lot of bad press, but in my experience it is exceedingly rare, and takes the blame for a lot of other issues, usually involving mismatched Explorer components caused by AOL and its kin forcibly updating only *part* of the set. You might then wind up with some conflicting registry keys, but that does not equate to the registry itself being corrupted.
Very interesting -- a very good point that silence is also freedom of speech.
I've mentioned this here before, but wrt civil disobedience.. this happened in Bozeman MT in 1973, to my college roommate, whose family had escaped from the Ukraine during the Cold War (so he had a more direct sense of what civil liberties entail than most). One evening he was sitting on a curb in a residential neighbourhood a few blocks from our house, doing absolutely nothing, when a cop demanded his identity. My roommate refused, and spent the night in jail.
I don't remember what went down after that, but I know he was released without any charges being brought.
Not only that, but you have the "if I don't stick my neck out, *I* won't be shot" issue -- unless *everyone* is going to die for sure (as happened on the 9/11 plane that went down in Pennsylvania), you just can't get average people to cooperate sufficiently to nullify a lethal threat. To illustrate:
"Live killer games" used to be popular at SF conventions; one was based on Logan's Run, and went like this:
Two people are "Sandmen" and are issued dart guns. Everyone else are "runners". Any hit with a dart kills a runner. To kill a Sandman, a runner must get close enough to lay a hand flat on the Sandman's chest. The object of the game is for the Sandmen to kill all the runners, who in turn try to stay alive as long as possible -- but it is possible for the runners to "win" by taking out the Sandmen.
When the game starts, the runners all scatter like sheep. In a group of 100 or so runners, I was the only one who tried to organize a strike force to take out the Sandmen. I figured it would take 5 runners to swarm one Sandman, and probably 3 runners would "die" in the process. But wasn't the goal worth the risk? After all, it would set the remaining runners free (by winning the game).
Apparently not. I couldn't get one single runner to collaborate on a strike against the Sandmen, or even listen to the concept. They all just ran away like frightened sheep, and perforce I had to do the same, since no way in hell can a single runner get close enough to kill a Sandman without getting shot himself.
Now, imagine this same scenario in real life, with real guns and real bullets. That armed soldier is ordering a thousand citizens to go back to work, or you will be shot. Which of you are willing to risk your lives to take him out, with the knowledge that some of your children will be fatherless tonight??
Good idea:) At one time soldiers had to pay for their own equipment and weapons, which if nothing else ensured that they took care of what they were issued!
Tho taken to its logical extreme, one can envision an inverse scenario -- if the cops have to pay for everything they do that costs money, maybe they'll just sit back and draw their salaries -- after all, investigative costs come out of their pockets.;)
In reality, tho, you're right -- there should be some sort of penalty attached to requests for any sort of warrant (wiretap or other), so the cop has to think twice about asking for it, and ideally the judge should also have to think twice about issuing it.
Slashdot Mirror
[puts on professional dog trainer hat]
:)
In dogs, where the individual dog ranks in the pack's social hierarchy is inherited, not made.
An alpha NEVER has to enforce its position -- the alpha (of which there may be several in a pack) is the natural leader, and all the beta and "nobody" dogs *avoid* giving offense. The alpha will graciously allow other dogs to take its toys or food (unless it REALLY wants them, in which case it need merely "ask") and will generally not act dominant at all -- but no beta EVER challenges a true alpha. Alphas do not fight with other alphas, either. Alphas train easily but are go-getters, so can overwhelm the inexperienced.
Betas (which come in several gradients, from top-rung outright aggressive types to bottom-rung sneak-fighters) DO fight among themselves, but the winner is *always* the dog that was socially higher to begin with, and occasionally the loser is killed since *everyone* will gang up on any dog that goes down (tho fights to the death happen much more often with females than with males). An alpha WILL participate once the loser goes down, but will not fight with anyone else. Betas are much like a human with "short man's complex" or "a chip on their shoulder", and are often difficult to train since their first thought is usually "you can't make me". Low-end betas have a relatively high incidence of juvenile-onset psychosis.
(Betas are a PITA in a kennel, which is why I've bred most of the "beta crap" out of my own dogs
Nobodies don't "count" in the social order, and are ignored by alphas and by most betas, tho a few low-end betas will pick on nobodies. They train easily for anyone, as they are purely followers and never "argue". A nobody is essentially an alpha without the go-gettum (initiative).
There are pack behaviour thresholds at 5-6, 12-15, and around 25, where some behaviours change. Once you get more than ~25 dogs that can all *see* one another (it does not matter if they are together, separated, or how much personal space each one has, only if they can SEE the others), there is some social breakdown and you get more aggression than from the same dogs in smaller pack units.
Now, look around at the human race, and you'll see pretty much the same social sets: leaders with no need to bully to get their way (alphas), average joes who sometimes feel a need to show off how tough they are (high and middling betas), varying degrees of misfits (low-end betas), and people who just live their lives and keep their heads down (nobodies), with aggressive tendencies sometimes exacerbated by population pressures.
"He was a leader because he did not look back to see who was following him." -- from Mr.Roberts
Oh yes, having WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing modes in the same app is the way to go! saves tons of learning curve, yet you have the real thing there to learn from and/or twiddle as may be required.
... gad, have these people never heard of context menus that work at the point where you wish to alter something? Why does every little change require mousing around in some microscopically-fonted properties box? And we used to bitch about how Frontpage promptly forced itself on your code... well, DW now does that AND it saves those changes to disk without asking, AND it seems to have gone off in an IE-only direction. And yeah, I spent hours fighting with the last DW site I had to clean up.
;) but at least I can't really complain about the output anymore. And I've actually had it pipe up (on its own) with a suggestion on how to put old-browser helper code in an EMBED section. I about fell off my chair!
I have DW3, 4, and MX living on various machines (the entire MX family is too unstable to be on anything but a W2K or XP box) and I have to agree.. I don't know where they are taking it, but it is getting less and less useful, and more difficult to just get work done. The WYSIWYG and raw HTML panes are still there, but
Frontpage now has raw and GUI editing modes (I don't remember when this came about), and can be taught manners about formatting and branding. I'd still like to hurt whoever organized the menus (probably a refugee from the Word team
But when I want to get real work done, I always find myself reverting to old AOLpress -- which also has both modes, does the prettiest formatting you'll ever see, is easy to use, and is anal about proper HTML. Now if only someone at AOL would dig up and release the source so it could be updated!!
Look again -- there's a whole shitload of Word-generated junk. And nope, I didn't hit F11. All I did was SendTo IE from Explorer.
[grin] Same thought I had: "No WONDER Word's file format is so horrible!!" But see my post above comparing Word and Wordperfect -- Word in fact dumps pretty much all the text into the file in the order you type it, while WP organises substructures into what are effectively independent documents inside the same file.
Even tho small filesize meant something up to perhaps the Word95 era, it still pales in comparison to having an INTACT file. Wonked files are a *total* waste of disk space.
I hadn't noticed the "filtered HTML" option, so thanks for the tip, but... I just tried both with WordXP (only version I have to hand), starting from the same very simple document. Yeah, the "filtered HTML" is a lot smaller (1k vs 5k) but the resulting file still isn't proper HTML, still contains a LOT of Word-specific junk, and it confused the living shit out of IE6, to the point of making it behave oddly -- IE changed from an 800x600 window to somewhere beyond fullscreen, all the menus and widgets disappeared, and the file displayed as a blank page. (Conversely, Netscape3 didn't have any problem with it.)
But if you look at a Word document's innards, the text is inserted pretty much in the order you typed it, including text for substructures such as textbox contents, bullet lists, or footnotes; then formatting is applied by way of a remote pointer. That's why formatting tends to be hard to get to "stick" in these substructures.
OTOH, WordPerfect actually does handle such substructures as if they are independent documents within the same file, each with its own independent formatting, rather than the formatting being tied to a location like with substructures in Word documents.
Frontpage's notion of HTML *used* to be horrible, yes. But they evidently got tired of being the laughingstock of the internet. As of Frontpage2000 it was considerably cleaner, and FrontpageXP is actually nice, and it makes reasonably clean code even by my standards (and far more anybrowser-compatible than the ugly crap that Dreamweaver now makes!)
[Thanks for the SciTE link, it looks nicely useful too.]
Funny but true story:
I had Winword6 and WordPerfect 6.1 installed on the same machine, along with ~350 fonts. As a rule they handled one another's documents well enough, including fonts. One day I used WP's allfonts macro to create a document that sampled all 350 installed fonts. This printed fine in WP. However in Word -- after the first 20 or so fonts, it changed all the rest of the fonts to Wharmby. (This behaviour was reproducible, even with different fontsets, tho why it always picked on Wharmby is beyond me.)
BTW, Word6's HTML (via a free plugin from M$) was primitive but clean enough; I often used it to strip out unwanted code from HTML exported by other apps, because it would kill anything it didn't understand. However, WordXP's "HTML" is in fact a very ugly and bloated subspecies of XML.
Actually, this "your every disk is full" behaviour occured in Word6 with the very first and *immediate* save of a newly-created blank document that had not been edited *at all*.
The workaround was to load SHARE with absurd parameters (IIRC, files=512 and locks=4096, or something on that order -- I don't have my archived Win3.1 setup handy to check the exact numbers). Yes, this was M$'s official fix, which I got from their tech support way back when. Winword6 would ordinarily add the SHARE loadline itself, but occasionally failed to do so, and then you'd see the problem.
So M$ is still missing a critical piece of the diagnosis. I've contended for years that this bug hails from the DOS4 era (probably originating with Word286), and derives from some kludge that relies on the DOS4 SHARE fix to avoid leaving files open on disk. Witness not only how Winword6 required SHARE per above, but also how to this day SETVER sets the reported OS to DOS4.1 for winword.exe (and for excel.exe).
Friend of a friend who'd tracked the behaviour in a debugger said the root issue is that Word was writing to a null pointer.
That won't happen unless you've first upgraded to Wife 2.0 -- of course, that leads to all manner of problems if you try to reinstall Girlfriend 1.0.
"PS. I wrote the company to complain about the damn auto-playing music on the web site. This is no longer 1996!"
It is too -- in the minds of the RIAA...
Yep... hard to attract users if the software isn't usable; hard to care if it's usable if you don't have users!
"Who wants to volunteer to work that you normally have to pay people very well to get done in the first place?"
Well... maybe if the UI is designed well enough that average users want to pay money for it (and will do so in preference to buying commercialware or using freeware), you can get paid for this drudge work.
Good points about data being ignored if it doesn't fit the agenda. I'd guess that they also failed to control for substance abuse that can impact the fetus -- which is likely far higher among pregnant teens than among pregnant adults (if only because rebellious teens do such things, often without a thought for tomorrow).
Back to the nominal topic -- recently I received a survey from a normally-reputable consumer survey company (I've been doing their surveys for 27+ years, so I'm very familiar with them) which essentially cataloged everything on my main computer. We were assured that the data collected would not deliberately contain any personally identifiable information. Well, the output is an XML file, so I gave it a look -- and yeah, it doesn't exactly say who you are, but crosschecking against Google would very likely produce positive IDs for a lot of respondents (and most definitely would for myself).
I very much doubt that the survey company is aware of this, but it's obvious to me that the survey company did not design this survey -- it appears to be of **AA origin, given the types of filenames it recorded in the output file.
Surveys can be screwed up in other ways, too, that can severely impact the data. Frex, a while back I took one regarding what browsers you prefer -- and when I got to the end, discovered that the SUBMIT function would only work in IE6. Erm, doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose??
Having worked in the industry -- IMO, bad movies are to some degree intentional; they're used as money laundries. In my experience, around 80% of all film productions that get as far as principle photography are either never released in the first place, or are to all appearances deliberately designed to lose money (at least on paper) -- after all, film tends to have a, um, "flexible" budget. -- Consequently, no one in power really CARES what you think of their lousy movie. (Despite this, the people on the set behave as if each film will be the greatest ever, even when it's blatantly obvious that it's a loser.)
Series TV, being shot on a fixed budget, doesn't seem to have this little monetary side function.
That's the problem with trying to fight back against a scheme that *appears* to target randomly -- as you note, it would very hard to prove that the RIAA is targeting a specific income bracket, since to most people, the victims appear "average". And 3000 cases may not be enough to convince a court of the statistical anomaly.
What would also work is to obtain the original list (one assumes such a list has been made) of ALL "caught filesharerers", and examine the *discards*. If everyone over a certain income level (and/or all the lawyers' kids) was discarded, that becomes extremely suspicious.
Okay, RIAA drones -- which of you has the balls to leak the original list of known filesharers, the financial reports on each of 'em, or the criteria used to select targets??
Tho if there was a lawsuit against the RIAA cartel -- couldn't someone subpoena their "research materials"??
Well, that's essentially what deterrence is -- making everyone feel guilty enough (or at least sufficiently filled with fear of being caught) that they don't do whatever behaviour The Authority wishes to restrict -- even if that restriction is really geared toward something else:
In this case, the RIAA couldn't care less if *consumers* share files. What they really want is to produce such a fear of filesharing, that ARTISTS cannot use it as an effective distribution mechanism -- because when an artist uses filesharing, it cuts the RIAA out of the loop, and the RIAA's cut of their artists' income is around 75%.
You're right, tho -- this is fundamentally similar to how the Church used various threats of "you'll go to hell if you do X" to put sufficient fear into the plebes that they were easily controllable (and incidentally would continue giving money to said Church).
I've long since concluded that the RIAA is indeed researching their victims (see my post above where I got into my chain of logic a bit) but that doesn't mean they are going to be 100% perfect -- maybe the legal research dept. got lazy that day, or mislaid a file, or just plain screwed up. And there've been what, half a dozen such blatant bloopers out of 3000 or so cases? that's well under one percent. I'd guess that average police departments make more investigative mistakes than that.
I've made this point in the past -- it's pretty clear that they are indeed targeting people who have some worth (in the low 4 to 5 figures) but who DON'T have the disposable resources (in the low 6 figures) to fight such a case.
What twigged me to this? Remember when the RIAA first targeted some college kids, they somehow managed to pick FOUR such kids who each had about 10 grand in the bank. Now, how unlikely is that, if you pick any four random college kids? chances are much more likely you'd find yourself with four kids whose combined net worth is about 200 bucks.
And every case I've heard of has been along the same lines -- people who could scrape together between $3000 and $10k (IOW, enough to be a scary number for average folks), but who certainly could not afford $50k for a lawyer. What are the chances that out of 3000 or however many cases, they've still not hit some rich lawyer's kid? Pretty damned slim, I think.**
Confronted with these unlikely financial coincidences, I deduce that the RIAA is researching potential victims' financial situations prior to filing.
Actually, that's a good idea. Putting some of these lawsuits in America's living rooms during prime time would give these cases the exposure they need, to make everyone aware of how ludicrously unbalanced the proceedings really are.
Americans love to root for the underdog, and in these cases, the defendant is clearly the underdog (regardless of whether they've violated copyright law, or whether said law is fair or just). It would certainly raise the level of awareness as to what is legally involved, and of the massive pressure such cases can bring to bear on a defendant who lacks the resources to mount a defense.
Regedit will run from the DOS prompt. Type "regedit" in real DOS (not just in a DOS window) to get a list of available commandline switches.
However, this doesn't give you the nice GUI with the automagically decoded-to-text representation of the registry's contents.
So to fix the registry in the DOS environment, you use the Regedit switch to dump the registry to a textfile (you should do this anyway for archival purposes), use a text editor to fix whatever needs fixing, then use Regedit to restore the registry.
You can also use Regedit in DOS to merge individual keys (whatever.reg files, which are themselves plaintext).
"Corrupted registry" gets a lot of bad press, but in my experience it is exceedingly rare, and takes the blame for a lot of other issues, usually involving mismatched Explorer components caused by AOL and its kin forcibly updating only *part* of the set. You might then wind up with some conflicting registry keys, but that does not equate to the registry itself being corrupted.
Very interesting -- a very good point that silence is also freedom of speech.
.. this happened in Bozeman MT in 1973, to my college roommate, whose family had escaped from the Ukraine during the Cold War (so he had a more direct sense of what civil liberties entail than most). One evening he was sitting on a curb in a residential neighbourhood a few blocks from our house, doing absolutely nothing, when a cop demanded his identity. My roommate refused, and spent the night in jail.
I've mentioned this here before, but wrt civil disobedience
I don't remember what went down after that, but I know he was released without any charges being brought.
Not only that, but you have the "if I don't stick my neck out, *I* won't be shot" issue -- unless *everyone* is going to die for sure (as happened on the 9/11 plane that went down in Pennsylvania), you just can't get average people to cooperate sufficiently to nullify a lethal threat. To illustrate:
"Live killer games" used to be popular at SF conventions; one was based on Logan's Run, and went like this:
Two people are "Sandmen" and are issued dart guns. Everyone else are "runners". Any hit with a dart kills a runner. To kill a Sandman, a runner must get close enough to lay a hand flat on the Sandman's chest. The object of the game is for the Sandmen to kill all the runners, who in turn try to stay alive as long as possible -- but it is possible for the runners to "win" by taking out the Sandmen.
When the game starts, the runners all scatter like sheep. In a group of 100 or so runners, I was the only one who tried to organize a strike force to take out the Sandmen. I figured it would take 5 runners to swarm one Sandman, and probably 3 runners would "die" in the process. But wasn't the goal worth the risk? After all, it would set the remaining runners free (by winning the game).
Apparently not. I couldn't get one single runner to collaborate on a strike against the Sandmen, or even listen to the concept. They all just ran away like frightened sheep, and perforce I had to do the same, since no way in hell can a single runner get close enough to kill a Sandman without getting shot himself.
Now, imagine this same scenario in real life, with real guns and real bullets. That armed soldier is ordering a thousand citizens to go back to work, or you will be shot. Which of you are willing to risk your lives to take him out, with the knowledge that some of your children will be fatherless tonight??
Netstat exists on Win9* as well. And yes, it's useful there too.
Good idea :) At one time soldiers had to pay for their own equipment and weapons, which if nothing else ensured that they took care of what they were issued!
;)
Tho taken to its logical extreme, one can envision an inverse scenario -- if the cops have to pay for everything they do that costs money, maybe they'll just sit back and draw their salaries -- after all, investigative costs come out of their pockets.
In reality, tho, you're right -- there should be some sort of penalty attached to requests for any sort of warrant (wiretap or other), so the cop has to think twice about asking for it, and ideally the judge should also have to think twice about issuing it.