A funny thing. When napster first came out, I downloaded a bunch of songs, which got me excited about music in general and several bands in particular. In the year before napster got shut down, I probably bought a dozen CDs. Then for quite a while I lost interest in music, or just played the music I had. Then I got broadband and an iPod and discovered eMule, and ended up buying another dozen or so CDs after a few years of not setting foot in a record store. The the RIAA started cracking down, and well, I just sort of lost interest in music again.
Number of terrorist bombs that have blinky LEDs: ~0 Number of terrorist bombs that are in nondescript packages or backpacks: ~1000
Number of fictional terrorist bombs in movies that have blinky LEDs: ~1000 Number of fictional terrorist bombs in movies that are in nondescript packages or backpacks: ~10
Number of terrorist bombs your average security official has seen: ~0 Number of fictional terrorist bombs your average security official has seen in movies: ~1000
Stallman spends time and effort making a new license and even lets other people use it for free. Torvalds, a user of the license, would like to make some modifications to the license for his own purposes, but Stallman, the creator of the license won't let him. For refusing to allow users to make personal modifications, Torvalds likens Stallman to a totalitarian dictator.
And what is the problem with the new license? Well, it seems that users of Tivos would like to make some modifications of their Tivos for their own purposes, but the creator of Tivos won't let them. Torvalds thinks that it's perfectly reasonable for Tivo to forbid users from making modifications to their Tivos for their own purposes, while Stallman likens Tivo to a totalitarian dictator for refusing to allow users to make personal modifications.
Seems they have more in common than the article would have you believe...
If, still, you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs. I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye -- not even his -- could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out -- no stain of any kind -- no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all -- ha! ha!
Who buys the stock? Well, Idiots(0) do - these are the people that believe the spam and think "wow! how nice of them to forward on this great opportunity." There there are the Idiots(1) - elitists who see through the spam but think everyone else is an Idiot(0). There there are the people who think that everyone is generally pretty smart, but wrong about everyone else being dumb - these are the Idiots(2) who believe everyone is an Idiot(1). I'm an Idiot(938) and that's why I buy the stock - how about you?
On a totally unrelated tangent, only Vegetarians(N) with large N are at risk of mad cow disease. Vegetarians(0) don't eat animals, Vegetarians(N) only eat up to Vegetarians(N-1). I try to stick around 1 or 2, but sometimes I eat at McDonalds, which I guess makes me a Vegetarian(50000).
Electric car manufacturers decide on a few standard battery packs. You drive up to the battery station, the attendent ejects the low battery, pops in a charged up battery, and throws the low one on the charger. Doesn't really matter what the charge time is.
I'm all with you about needing a secure alternative, but then I hear stuff about mandatory ID, etc.
Corporate whistleblowers, Chinese democracy activists, union organizers, etc. all have a legitimate reason to want to be able to send an email without it being traced back to them. How do we support that without opening the floodgates for spam/phishing/etc?
Essentially, I should be able to somehow generate an ID, where I am the only one that can connect the ID to my person. At the same time, if I send an email, my recipient will receive it - they will be aware of the fact that the email is from someone who is hiding their personal identity, but some other form of information will be connected with that ID that shows that the email can be trusted more than some bulk-mailed viagra ad. Ideally the system would not require human intervention to screen. For example, maybe the ID is such that it requires 1 week of CPU-time to generate, and the encryption method has a secure method for storing the total number of emails sent using the ID.
This way, a spammer would have to have acess to a million machines for a week to be able to send 10 million emails with a ID that has a count of less than 10.
On the receiver end, they would get the email, and it would be flagged as unsolicited and anonymous, but they would know that I've only sent 5 other emails with the same ID and that the ID was difficult to obtain.
The basic idea is that with each email you receive, there would be a set of information that you are guaranteed to know about the sender, with some of it optional. The email reader would only accept mass emails from trusted known IDs, but non-mass emails could come from anonymous IDs.
Another possibility would be some form of trusted anonymous emails. Without further external knowledge, a single message from that ID would not be trusted, but it would be possible for an ID to create some form of trust structure. For example, imagine you anonymously donate $100 to some charity, using the ID. Then you send an email using that ID to people who respect that charity. The message header would include information that would allow automatic verification that the same ID was used for the donation and the email. The receiver would then be fairly certain that the message was not spam, but they couldn't trust it enough to give out their credit card number or other info.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of - decentralized, and secure in the sense that the sender and receiver can in some secure way communicate a level of trust to each other without outside interference or exposure.
"Do you find it acceptable that without warrant or probable cause, the NSA has obtained the complete phone records of every Democrat considering running for president in 2008?"
Not to mention their staff, the leadership and staff of the ACLU, MoveOn.org, and any other organization opposed to Bush and his policies.
Imagine civil rights groups back in the 60s going into Mississippi to register black voters, only the FBI had access to the full phone records of everyone in the U.S., and fast computers to search it. Here's what they could have done:
1. Get a list of publicly known members of the civil rights groups. 2. Grab their phone numbers from a comercial database 3. Graph the network of calls from those numbers to find other common neighboring nodes in the graph - these are the phone numbers of non-public members of the organization, and allies. 4. Extend the graph, filtering for numbers located in Mississippi with high connectivity to previous search - these are your local non-public contacts based in Mississippi. 5. Graph the network of calls from/to the locals in Mississippi, filtering for high connectivity. These are mass of local organizers and sympathizers secretly organizing locally to support the upcoming voter registration drive. 6. Sort the list of locals based on connectivity - the more connected, the more integral the person is to the day-to-day organizing work. 7. Look up the phone numbers in a comercial database to get names/addresses. 8. Hand off this prioritized hit-list to the local KKK in Mississippi
With even very crude software, this should take someone less than 5 minutes to do the searches and email the result. In the 60's this would have required hundreds of hours of surveillance and risky break-ins to obtain lists, etc.
Or, how about some random guy who has access to the database also beats his wife. She packs up and goes into hiding. Agent wife-beater does a search to find calls to/from his home number, removes people he talks to, whittling it down to friends and family of his wife that she calls a lot -- these are likely to be people that would help her. Now, he monitors the database daily to look for anomolies -- one of his wife's friends starts calling his wife's sister. Bingo! She staying with that friend. Then he straps on his gun, drinks a few beers and heads on over to teach that bitch a lesson.
Now, if the database is properly secure and all accesses are properly monitored to prevent abuse, these cases will be much less likely. But that's the WHOLE POINT of the 4th Ammendment and various laws requiring court oversight. Bush and his guys claim that we have nothing to fear because they are policing themselves in some top-secret can't-talk-about-it way. That's nonsense. When you give someone power like that (or they just take it), you need some external check on that power.
Without checks and balances, you get a nasty feedback loop. Part of the government gives itself immense power, but promises to only use it for the greater good. The government then uses that power to hold onto the power and to get more, with the only limit being their personal conscience. At some point, you cross a sort of event horizon, where the government has so much unchecked power, that the people are powerless to take any of it back. By analogy, the thrust for the ship is the political power of the people. At some point, you cross the event horizon, nothing too crazy happening, but if you tried to switch to maximum thrust to reign in the power of the government, you'd notice that even at full throttle, Bush gets re-elected for a 5th term and nobody is able to stop it.
Actually, fast turnover means less innovation. All the fresh kids just out of school making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Then they burn out before they learn from the mistakes and come up with better ways of doing things.
Arranging 4 of these together on a platform the size of a (american) football field (360*160 = 57600 sq. ft.) would mean that you could cover the Pacific with these if you managed to produce a hair under 31 billion platforms...
So, what you're saying... is... that the individual platforms should have 64 bit IDs?
A few weeks back, I lost my thumbdrive. Last I remember seeing it was in my pocket, and I couldn't find it any obvious place it would've fallen out.
I finally found it in the dryer. Turns out it went through one load in the washing machine and two loads in the dryer. Plugged it into my laptop and everything was fine.
Of course, that's why it's important for IBM employees to push back to make the layoff expensive. If IBM knows that massive layoffs will have repurcussions that hit the bottom line, they will think twice in the future.
Does an amoral multinational tool for enriching shareholders have a moral obligation to care about human beings? In the end it doesn't matter -- whether or not there is such an obligation, multinational corporations will only honor it if forced to. The mechanisms of force are consumers, the workers, and the government. Most of the consumers are corporations themselves and don't give a shit. Governments are bought and sold by corporations nowadays. That leaves one mechanism -- the one IBM workers are exercising. Good for them.
The reason it is "still too early to tell" is because of the gag rule. That's the problem with "anti-terrorism" laws that throw our rights out the window. The government violates people's rights, and if anyone gives details about it they go to jail.
In a free and democratic society, if the government violates your rights, you can go to the press to draw attention to the issue. You are also allowed to give enough information so that people can come to their own conclusions.
Oh come on! If your boss takes a big chunk of the money that you earned for him and gives it to political causes, you have no right to stop him, complain, or even *know* that he is doing it.
And the fact is that all businesses have one thing in common -- they are all employers who have an interest in fighting against the rights of workers. So quitting and working for another company isn't much of a possibility.
On the other hand, for a company to be unionized, the workers have to vote for representation. Legally, they need over 50% of the workers to vote for the union representation, but in practice, employers use all sorts of illegal tricks - firing union supporters, hiring anti-union workers, promoting pro-union workers (so that they aren't elegible to vote), threats, bribes, lies, intimidation, etc. And the laws are rarely enforced, and when they are, the punishment is always years later and just a slap on the wrist.
Ask any union organizer how many workers you need to win an election, and they will tell you that you absolutely need 70% support or there is no point in moving forward because you will lose.
And after the workers vote for union recognition, the employer can and will build a committee of anti-union workers to fight for a decertification election. Again, they will do everything in the book to try to get 51% of the votes against the union, and then there will be no union.
So if most of the workers don't want the union, but it is still around, you can bet that the reason is because it is a "company union", basically a fake union set up by the boss as a way to further screw their employees. Company unions are of course illegal, and, of course, the government does little to enforce the law. If most of the workers don't want a union, and the employer doesn't want a union, it is trivial to hold and win a decertification election.
Levin cautions that unionization frequently means increased labor costs, which does no one any good.
Wait a minute! What he means when he says "increased labor costs" is that game developers will get paid more and/or work less hours. How exactly does that not do anyone any good? It sounds to me like it's good for you if you're the one on the receiving end and bad for you if you happen to be one of Levin's management clients.
Sure, one can argue that it might result in layoffs or outsourcing. But layoffs aren't bad for the people that remain if they have more pay for fewer hours. And even outsourcing is good if you happen to be a programmer in India. Hell, outsourcing would likely only be used for the low-risk, less creative grunt-work -- which means it's not that bad for you if you are highly skilled.
And anyway, the highly skilled ones are the ones that tend to burn out and leave the industry after a few years. Which is better? Having highly skilled people quit the industry in disgust, leaving shitty jobs with long hours and low pay for people who can't get a job in another industry -- or outsource the shitty jobs, layoff the people without talent and have better pay and shorter hours for the more talented ones, so that they stay in the industry? Sounds to me like the anti-union guy is arguing that unions will result in better games and better jobs for talented developers. Where do I sign up?
"So everyone needs to be aware that, with increased labor costs, which are inevitable when you have a union, there are going to be consequences."
Now this is a hoot. The anti-union lawyer is actually promising us that if we unionize, we'll get more money for less hours. The fact is that it isn't actually inevitable. Most workers want more respect and better conditions. That doesn't necessarily mean more pay, though we're free to push for that if we want. And long hours are not some well-thought-out plan for greater productivity. Long hours are a result of incompetent planning and scheduling - and result in less productivity in the long run. If game developers unionize and force management to learn how to manage competently, that would result in less labor costs in the long term, not to mention less risk and better games.
I saw the article, and was hoping to find details about a bunch of female characters running rampage through the game killing people and burning down buildings. Instead it sounds like another boring flame war.
So was there any sort of riot or was that just hyperbole?
Yes, it's called negotiations and compromise. But why is it that the starting points of negotiation are what they are? Why don't we start with "information wants to be free" with every creative work being in the public domain vs. "authors need to be paid" with unlimited copyrights (and no DMCA) -- then we could adopt the compromise of having limited 14 year copyrights like we had when copyright law was first written.
Why do we need to accept 75+ year copyrights and the DMCA+DRM as a compromise? Because negotiations are all about power. The first thing you do before entering any negotiations is try to increase your power and decrease your opponents power. This puts you in a better position, making the compromise much more in your favor.
If this were all a simple matter of trying to maximize benefit to the consumer (citizen), then we'd try allow the most amount of free copying of creative work as possible without significantly diminishing the quality of the collective creative works of our society. We'd also try to do this without limiting the rights of citizens, except when absolutely necessary and then only to a small extent. In such a scenario, we'd probably have no DRM or DMCA and only crack down on those profiting from unauthorized copying. Alternative business models would be strongly encouraged, and probablymost existing publishers would go out of business.
But that's not what's going on. As tihngs stand, music consumers are not a powerful, organized force. The RIAA, on the other hand, *is* a powerful, organized force. How many dollars in campaign contributions came from large corporations that want to protect their old business models? How many dollars came from music consumer advocacy groups?
How many lawyers are employed by the RIAA vs. how many lawyers are paid to expand the public domain and resists DRM laws?
Ok, now imagine a society where music-consumers are as organized and as powerful as the RIAA, and artists are organized and powerful. Hell, imagine consumers and artists are organized and the RIAA is not. In such a society, the DMCA would be seen as some crazy fringe idea -- probably crazier than "everything is public domain" ideas are seen now.
Every year, that limit will lower, as inflation causes wages and the cost of living to both go up. Imagine if Nixon in 1970 had set $10,000 as the cap.
If the intention was to make sure that only those that make more money than most would lose overtime pay, then they would have the cap set as a fixed percentile -- say, everyone who is in the 90th percentile for income.
As it is, the real cap is lowered every year by default. Now why would Bush and his corporate friends prefer a cap that creeps lower every year vs. one that remains fixed?
These are pretty low-watt transmitters since they have such a short range. It shouldn't be too tough to build a little box that jams the signals -- it probably wouldn't even violate *current* FCC rules since you could use very little power.
I've watched plenty. I live a couple miles from a great video rental store. I bought a Malata 310 online and have been reasonably satisfied. The only downside is the screen gets squished if the DVD is PAL *and* widescreen. Malata makes some more expensive models that handle PAL+widescreen, supposedly.
One example of what I watched was the DVD box set for the TV show Angel -- the PAL version was released almost a year before the NTSC version. Scarecrow had the PAL version for rental the moment it came out in the UK...
btw, I haven't seen anyone on SlashDot pick up on this, but this appears to be a typical Utah-based scam. Darl isn't stupid, and he's not your average lying corporate asshole. He's a conman with a plan. The key to beating him is not to reactively defend against each of his thrusts -- he's counting on that. The key is to figure out what the scam is and how he expects to get-rich-quick.
I can imagine that a frontal legal assault on SCO would fail because that would just bog things down long enough for him to skip town.
I don't know the answer, but I think the key is to keep in mind that he's a conman -- by the time we (IBM, RedHat, etc.) have hold of SCO and are smashing them into the ground, we'll realize that the conmen got away with a bundle while we are left beating up on a paper-mache corporation.
It's perfectly appropriate. It is an "Act" aimed at "Preventing" things. What are the things that it is trying to prevent? Two things -- "Artist's Rights" and "Theft".
Why should anyone take his paper seriously? Look at his homepage -- he's an economist with an axe to grind (and funding). What do economists know about the earth's climate?
Tune in next week when corporate shill plastic-surgeon writes a paper showing cigarette smoking cures emphysema.
Sounds like you meant the cost grows exponentially, not logarithmically. But, yes, that makes perfect sense and probably applies to much more than software. Imagine you are a "developer" building a house. You put the foundation one foot too close to the property line, violating zoning laws. Imagine the costs if someone noticed the flaw in the blueprint before concrete was poured vs. after the foundation was poured, vs. after the whole house was built on top of it.
It certainly depends on the bug, but when you think about it, in the worst case, a bug is so fundamental that all the rest of the code depends on it and would need to be redesigned. If you catch such a catasrophic bug early in the process it's not such a big deal, but towards the end of the project, it could mean the death of the project.
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A funny thing. When napster first came out, I downloaded a bunch of songs, which got me excited about music in general and several bands in particular. In the year before napster got shut down, I probably bought a dozen CDs. Then for quite a while I lost interest in music, or just played the music I had. Then I got broadband and an iPod and discovered eMule, and ended up buying another dozen or so CDs after a few years of not setting foot in a record store. The the RIAA started cracking down, and well, I just sort of lost interest in music again.
What a bunch of morons.
Here's the problem:
Number of terrorist bombs that have blinky LEDs: ~0
Number of terrorist bombs that are in nondescript packages or backpacks: ~1000
Number of fictional terrorist bombs in movies that have blinky LEDs: ~1000
Number of fictional terrorist bombs in movies that are in nondescript packages or backpacks: ~10
Number of terrorist bombs your average security official has seen: ~0
Number of fictional terrorist bombs your average security official has seen in movies: ~1000
Stallman spends time and effort making a new license and even lets other people use it for free. Torvalds, a user of the license, would like to make some modifications to the license for his own purposes, but Stallman, the creator of the license won't let him. For refusing to allow users to make personal modifications, Torvalds likens Stallman to a totalitarian dictator.
And what is the problem with the new license? Well, it seems that users of Tivos would like to make some modifications of their Tivos for their own purposes, but the creator of Tivos won't let them. Torvalds thinks that it's perfectly reasonable for Tivo to forbid users from making modifications to their Tivos for their own purposes, while Stallman likens Tivo to a totalitarian dictator for refusing to allow users to make personal modifications.
Seems they have more in common than the article would have you believe...
And not just two of each hit, but whole walls with the same movie. Crazy. I go to http://www.scarecrow.com/
Who buys the stock? Well, Idiots(0) do - these are the people that believe the spam and think "wow! how nice of them to forward on this great opportunity." There there are the Idiots(1) - elitists who see through the spam but think everyone else is an Idiot(0). There there are the people who think that everyone is generally pretty smart, but wrong about everyone else being dumb - these are the Idiots(2) who believe everyone is an Idiot(1). I'm an Idiot(938) and that's why I buy the stock - how about you?
On a totally unrelated tangent, only Vegetarians(N) with large N are at risk of mad cow disease. Vegetarians(0) don't eat animals, Vegetarians(N) only eat up to Vegetarians(N-1). I try to stick around 1 or 2, but sometimes I eat at McDonalds, which I guess makes me a Vegetarian(50000).
Electric car manufacturers decide on a few standard battery packs. You drive up to the battery station, the attendent ejects the low battery, pops in a charged up battery, and throws the low one on the charger. Doesn't really matter what the charge time is.
I'm all with you about needing a secure alternative, but then I hear stuff about mandatory ID, etc.
Corporate whistleblowers, Chinese democracy activists, union organizers, etc. all have a legitimate reason to want to be able to send an email without it being traced back to them. How do we support that without opening the floodgates for spam/phishing/etc?
Essentially, I should be able to somehow generate an ID, where I am the only one that can connect the ID to my person. At the same time, if I send an email, my recipient will receive it - they will be aware of the fact that the email is from someone who is hiding their personal identity, but some other form of information will be connected with that ID that shows that the email can be trusted more than some bulk-mailed viagra ad. Ideally the system would not require human intervention to screen. For example, maybe the ID is such that it requires 1 week of CPU-time to generate, and the encryption method has a secure method for storing the total number of emails sent using the ID.
This way, a spammer would have to have acess to a million machines for a week to be able to send 10 million emails with a ID that has a count of less than 10.
On the receiver end, they would get the email, and it would be flagged as unsolicited and anonymous, but they would know that I've only sent 5 other emails with the same ID and that the ID was difficult to obtain.
The basic idea is that with each email you receive, there would be a set of information that you are guaranteed to know about the sender, with some of it optional. The email reader would only accept mass emails from trusted known IDs, but non-mass emails could come from anonymous IDs.
Another possibility would be some form of trusted anonymous emails. Without further external knowledge, a single message from that ID would not be trusted, but it would be possible for an ID to create some form of trust structure. For example, imagine you anonymously donate $100 to some charity, using the ID. Then you send an email using that ID to people who respect that charity. The message header would include information that would allow automatic verification that the same ID was used for the donation and the email. The receiver would then be fairly certain that the message was not spam, but they couldn't trust it enough to give out their credit card number or other info.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of - decentralized, and secure in the sense that the sender and receiver can in some secure way communicate a level of trust to each other without outside interference or exposure.
And not just crime. How about:
"Do you find it acceptable that without warrant or probable cause, the NSA has obtained the complete phone records of every Democrat considering running for president in 2008?"
Not to mention their staff, the leadership and staff of the ACLU, MoveOn.org, and any other organization opposed to Bush and his policies.
Imagine civil rights groups back in the 60s going into Mississippi to register black voters, only the FBI had access to the full phone records of everyone in the U.S., and fast computers to search it. Here's what they could have done:
1. Get a list of publicly known members of the civil rights groups.
2. Grab their phone numbers from a comercial database
3. Graph the network of calls from those numbers to find other common neighboring nodes in the graph - these are the phone numbers of non-public members of the organization, and allies.
4. Extend the graph, filtering for numbers located in Mississippi with high connectivity to previous search - these are your local non-public contacts based in Mississippi.
5. Graph the network of calls from/to the locals in Mississippi, filtering for high connectivity. These are mass of local organizers and sympathizers secretly organizing locally to support the upcoming voter registration drive.
6. Sort the list of locals based on connectivity - the more connected, the more integral the person is to the day-to-day organizing work.
7. Look up the phone numbers in a comercial database to get names/addresses.
8. Hand off this prioritized hit-list to the local KKK in Mississippi
With even very crude software, this should take someone less than 5 minutes to do the searches and email the result. In the 60's this would have required hundreds of hours of surveillance and risky break-ins to obtain lists, etc.
Or, how about some random guy who has access to the database also beats his wife. She packs up and goes into hiding. Agent wife-beater does a search to find calls to/from his home number, removes people he talks to, whittling it down to friends and family of his wife that she calls a lot -- these are likely to be people that would help her. Now, he monitors the database daily to look for anomolies -- one of his wife's friends starts calling his wife's sister. Bingo! She staying with that friend. Then he straps on his gun, drinks a few beers and heads on over to teach that bitch a lesson.
Now, if the database is properly secure and all accesses are properly monitored to prevent abuse, these cases will be much less likely. But that's the WHOLE POINT of the 4th Ammendment and various laws requiring court oversight. Bush and his guys claim that we have nothing to fear because they are policing themselves in some top-secret can't-talk-about-it way. That's nonsense. When you give someone power like that (or they just take it), you need some external check on that power.
Without checks and balances, you get a nasty feedback loop. Part of the government gives itself immense power, but promises to only use it for the greater good. The government then uses that power to hold onto the power and to get more, with the only limit being their personal conscience. At some point, you cross a sort of event horizon, where the government has so much unchecked power, that the people are powerless to take any of it back. By analogy, the thrust for the ship is the political power of the people. At some point, you cross the event horizon, nothing too crazy happening, but if you tried to switch to maximum thrust to reign in the power of the government, you'd notice that even at full throttle, Bush gets re-elected for a 5th term and nobody is able to stop it.
Actually, fast turnover means less innovation. All the fresh kids just out of school making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Then they burn out before they learn from the mistakes and come up with better ways of doing things.
So, what you're saying... is... that the individual platforms should have 64 bit IDs?
A few weeks back, I lost my thumbdrive. Last I remember seeing it was in my pocket, and I couldn't find it any obvious place it would've fallen out.
I finally found it in the dryer. Turns out it went through one load in the washing machine and two loads in the dryer. Plugged it into my laptop and everything was fine.
Does an amoral multinational tool for enriching shareholders have a moral obligation to care about human beings? In the end it doesn't matter -- whether or not there is such an obligation, multinational corporations will only honor it if forced to. The mechanisms of force are consumers, the workers, and the government. Most of the consumers are corporations themselves and don't give a shit. Governments are bought and sold by corporations nowadays. That leaves one mechanism -- the one IBM workers are exercising. Good for them.
In a free and democratic society, if the government violates your rights, you can go to the press to draw attention to the issue. You are also allowed to give enough information so that people can come to their own conclusions.
And the fact is that all businesses have one thing in common -- they are all employers who have an interest in fighting against the rights of workers. So quitting and working for another company isn't much of a possibility.
On the other hand, for a company to be unionized, the workers have to vote for representation. Legally, they need over 50% of the workers to vote for the union representation, but in practice, employers use all sorts of illegal tricks - firing union supporters, hiring anti-union workers, promoting pro-union workers (so that they aren't elegible to vote), threats, bribes, lies, intimidation, etc. And the laws are rarely enforced, and when they are, the punishment is always years later and just a slap on the wrist.
Ask any union organizer how many workers you need to win an election, and they will tell you that you absolutely need 70% support or there is no point in moving forward because you will lose.
And after the workers vote for union recognition, the employer can and will build a committee of anti-union workers to fight for a decertification election. Again, they will do everything in the book to try to get 51% of the votes against the union, and then there will be no union.
So if most of the workers don't want the union, but it is still around, you can bet that the reason is because it is a "company union", basically a fake union set up by the boss as a way to further screw their employees. Company unions are of course illegal, and, of course, the government does little to enforce the law. If most of the workers don't want a union, and the employer doesn't want a union, it is trivial to hold and win a decertification election.
Sure, one can argue that it might result in layoffs or outsourcing. But layoffs aren't bad for the people that remain if they have more pay for fewer hours. And even outsourcing is good if you happen to be a programmer in India. Hell, outsourcing would likely only be used for the low-risk, less creative grunt-work -- which means it's not that bad for you if you are highly skilled.
And anyway, the highly skilled ones are the ones that tend to burn out and leave the industry after a few years. Which is better? Having highly skilled people quit the industry in disgust, leaving shitty jobs with long hours and low pay for people who can't get a job in another industry -- or outsource the shitty jobs, layoff the people without talent and have better pay and shorter hours for the more talented ones, so that they stay in the industry? Sounds to me like the anti-union guy is arguing that unions will result in better games and better jobs for talented developers. Where do I sign up?
Now this is a hoot. The anti-union lawyer is actually promising us that if we unionize, we'll get more money for less hours. The fact is that it isn't actually inevitable. Most workers want more respect and better conditions. That doesn't necessarily mean more pay, though we're free to push for that if we want. And long hours are not some well-thought-out plan for greater productivity. Long hours are a result of incompetent planning and scheduling - and result in less productivity in the long run. If game developers unionize and force management to learn how to manage competently, that would result in less labor costs in the long term, not to mention less risk and better games.I saw the article, and was hoping to find details about a bunch of female characters running rampage through the game killing people and burning down buildings. Instead it sounds like another boring flame war.
So was there any sort of riot or was that just hyperbole?
Yes, it's called negotiations and compromise. But why is it that the starting points of negotiation are what they are? Why don't we start with "information wants to be free" with every creative work being in the public domain vs. "authors need to be paid" with unlimited copyrights (and no DMCA) -- then we could adopt the compromise of having limited 14 year copyrights like we had when copyright law was first written.
Why do we need to accept 75+ year copyrights and the DMCA+DRM as a compromise? Because negotiations are all about power. The first thing you do before entering any negotiations is try to increase your power and decrease your opponents power. This puts you in a better position, making the compromise much more in your favor.
If this were all a simple matter of trying to maximize benefit to the consumer (citizen), then we'd try allow the most amount of free copying of creative work as possible without significantly diminishing the quality of the collective creative works of our society. We'd also try to do this without limiting the rights of citizens, except when absolutely necessary and then only to a small extent. In such a scenario, we'd probably have no DRM or DMCA and only crack down on those profiting from unauthorized copying. Alternative business models would be strongly encouraged, and probablymost existing publishers would go out of business.
But that's not what's going on. As tihngs stand, music consumers are not a powerful, organized force. The RIAA, on the other hand, *is* a powerful, organized force. How many dollars in campaign contributions came from large corporations that want to protect their old business models? How many dollars came from music consumer advocacy groups?
How many lawyers are employed by the RIAA vs. how many lawyers are paid to expand the public domain and resists DRM laws?
Ok, now imagine a society where music-consumers are as organized and as powerful as the RIAA, and artists are organized and powerful. Hell, imagine consumers and artists are organized and the RIAA is not. In such a society, the DMCA would be seen as some crazy fringe idea -- probably crazier than "everything is public domain" ideas are seen now.
If the intention was to make sure that only those that make more money than most would lose overtime pay, then they would have the cap set as a fixed percentile -- say, everyone who is in the 90th percentile for income.
As it is, the real cap is lowered every year by default. Now why would Bush and his corporate friends prefer a cap that creeps lower every year vs. one that remains fixed?
These are pretty low-watt transmitters since they have such a short range. It shouldn't be too tough to build a little box that jams the signals -- it probably wouldn't even violate *current* FCC rules since you could use very little power.
One example of what I watched was the DVD box set for the TV show Angel -- the PAL version was released almost a year before the NTSC version. Scarecrow had the PAL version for rental the moment it came out in the UK...
I can imagine that a frontal legal assault on SCO would fail because that would just bog things down long enough for him to skip town.
I don't know the answer, but I think the key is to keep in mind that he's a conman -- by the time we (IBM, RedHat, etc.) have hold of SCO and are smashing them into the ground, we'll realize that the conmen got away with a bundle while we are left beating up on a paper-mache corporation.
It's perfectly appropriate. It is an "Act" aimed at "Preventing" things. What are the things that it is trying to prevent? Two things -- "Artist's Rights" and "Theft".
Tune in next week when corporate shill plastic-surgeon writes a paper showing cigarette smoking cures emphysema.
It certainly depends on the bug, but when you think about it, in the worst case, a bug is so fundamental that all the rest of the code depends on it and would need to be redesigned. If you catch such a catasrophic bug early in the process it's not such a big deal, but towards the end of the project, it could mean the death of the project.