Of course they would let her walk out, you are right, they are not the police. But remember that they did not approach her until the police officer was already accompanying the theater employees into the theater (i.e. she didn't know that she had even been spotted until they all approached her seat together). She may not have been recording anymore at that point, but the police officer is the one who does all of the policing. You don't really think that theater employees would do anything physical do you? However, neither would they do anything that might tip off the target prior to the arrival of the police, otherwise the target would simply leave as soon as they realized that they had been spotted. The theater probably has a policy or procedure regarding this sort of thing. Maybe it is their policy to confront the target and ask them to leave first (thereby allowing them an opportunity to do so). All that matters to the theaters, so long as the patron has a ticket and is not being disruptive, is that the studios are satisfied with the policy and that they (the theater chain) has covered their butts legally (nobody wants to be left without a chair when the music stops).
Another reason could be payoffs offered by the MAFIAA to theater employees. Another poster in this discussion mentioned that when he worked for a theater chain (not Regal) there was a poster in the break room advertising $1000 for a sworn statement that leads to a conviction following the arrest of patrons recording the movies. I don't know if that is true, but I wouldn't put it past the MAFIAA. It is not the theaters that you should be angry at, its the MAFIAA and the studios who are ultimately dictating the policies and the laws who are to blame.
Litigation is expensive and always risky. You might not go to theater anymore because of the treatment you get, but most of their customers don't complain or care enough to stop going to the theater over annoyances like this (i.e. the grumble and complain to their friends, but that doesn't stop them from buying admission and over priced snacks in spite of it all). The theater is a business...it will not take a risk that it does not have to. The goal of a business is to maximize profit and any considerations like "good customer service", "corporate consciousness", "mission statements", and yes litigation are all subordinate to that goal. If the risk of litigation and the potential loss are not outweighed by the potential award and the side benefit of maybe getting a few customers back who chose not to buy tickets because of the anti-piracy clips then the theaters will simply continue showing the anti-piracy clips because that is what earns them the best return with the least amount of risk. Simply put, the few of us out there who choose not to go to the theater on principle are statistically insignificant to the theater...just a rounding error on their balance sheets.
All they had to do was explain the law, then ask the owner if they could kindly cooperate and delete the stuff... not make a federal case out of it
If the movie studios who lease the movies that theater shows agrees then I am sure that the theater would be amenable to that policy. The theater is as much a pawn in the whole game as the patron with the camcorder. The movie studio is the hand that feeds the theater and the theater will do almost anything to make the studios happy because if they don't and the studio refuses to lease them movies in the future then the theater is out of business.
Its the same as showing those stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" clips they show - "HEY ASSHOLES, IF I'M IN YOUR THEATRE WATCHING THE MOVIE, DON'T ACCUSE ME OF BEING A CROOK!!!" Insulting your customers ethics and intelligence will just drive them away.
Again, the theater has no choice they have to show the lame anti-piracy clip before all of their films because the studios or their distributers, agents, etc require that they show it in the contract signed by the theater. Does it piss of some theater goers? Probably. Is it better than having your contract to show movies canceled and being forced out of business? Definitely.
The theater business is highly competitive and margins are low so they cannot afford to risk alienating the studios. They have no pricing power, very little bargaining power, and no recourse against the studios. The truth be known they probably dislike the studios as much as their patrons (i.e. the studios having been knocking them dead for years by taking 98%+ of all of the box office receipts...that is why popcorn and soda cost $10 at the theater since they have to make up most of their revenue from the concessions).
That is the way that real auctions work. Do you think that you could just walk into Sotheby's or Christie's, register as a bidder, bid, and then refuse to pay? Just try that in real life and see what happens. If eBay wants to be taken seriously then they need to clean out the trash, otherwise they will always be relegated to bit player type items because nobody in their right mind would trust them to sell big ticket items such as unique real estate, rare automobiles, valuable art, or any other item in excess of say $20,000, especially when the sky is the limit (as it is in the serious real world auction houses). In an auction all sales are final...caveat emptor.
in the employee room at my theatre, there was a sign saying that any employee who witnessed and reported someone recording a movie, and then gave a sworn statement about it to the police, would get $1000 from the MPAA.
That alone should give anyone reason for pause. If a person making a sworn statement accepts money from a third party as a "reward" for making the statement then it should make the validity of said statement null and void or at the very least *highly* suspect. It is nice to note that in your case you didn't give into the "Dark Side" by selling out the homeless man. Very commendable.
That is a good point and it brings up a larger issue in our legal system of failure to reserve the criminal part of the system for acts which are truly criminal and not simply petty matters involving small (relative to say Enron, what included fraud on a massive scale and gross breach of trust / duty that elevated the whole thing to a criminal matter) amounts of money. The vast majority of copyright cases in recent years have not reached the level of criminality that we should require for a criminal proceeding and thus should be relegated to civil court where there is no jail time and only fines in proportion to damages actually caused. The only reason that copyright stands out as criminal is because MAFIAA lobbyists pushed hard for the strongest protections that they could wrangle out of congress for their industry, without regard to true justice and indeed out of a sense of malice and a desire for revenge against those whom they saw as costing them even one penny of potential revenue (real or imagined).
They're just being dickheads. A 20-second clip isn't a clear case of copyright infringement, since copyright allows for short exerpts to be used without the copyright owners' permission, for example, in reviews.
This is true, but think about it from the standpoint of Regal Cinemas, they have no way of knowing, at the time that the recording is being made, how much has already been recorded (she could have started at the beginning of the film and then only been caught half-way through...if the theater said nothing then would she have recorded the rest? maybe, probably, who knows) and what it will ultimately be used for. If word gets out that a certain licensee, Regal Cinemas in this case, is lax on camcorders in their theaters then they might loose the ability to show films from the major studios (i.e. the studios cancel their contract because they are lax on recording devices) or worse the studios might go after Regal Cinemas for vicarious copyright infringement (i.e. inducing people to come and record movies by letting it slide or being generally known for not checking too carefully). There is basically no chance that a first time offender, like this girl, is going to get jail time. In fact, Regal may be gracious enough to drop the charges or recommend leniency (i.e. community service or something like that...I am not a lawyer so I don't know the exact legal procedures) since the publicity alone is enough to show their masters (i.e the MAFIAA) that they are 'tough' on camcorders and can be allowed to continue to show first run movies made by the major studios without taking the whole thing too far in the media.
The theater is a business with investors and they do not want to jeopardize their ability to continue earning income after spending many millions of dollars on theaters, equipment, concessions, etc. They aren't going to stick their necks out for just one customer in the face of a potential loss of the ability to operate as a business when the major studios jerk their license or cancel their contract to show their films, there is simply too much money at stake for that.
It is this type of incident which raises the specter of Payola in system whereby well heeled and politically well connected companies and industries can "buy" (indirectly of course through campaign contributions and lobbyists) greater enforcement considerations on behalf of federal law enforcement then they might otherwise receive. It is, as you say, interesting that the feds are spending their limited time and resources to keep the world safe for the likes of Sony and their Play Station while the souther border of the United States is still leaking like a sieve and hordes of illegal immigrants are pouring across. It gives one cause to despair that our system, founded upon such wise and noble principles, is being overrun by the barbarians at the gates.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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The DRM Scorecard
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Just because the ability exists to crack it, doesn't mean that the average Joe on the street can do so.
Its a moot point since the pirates crack it and then sell bootleg copies on the streets (in Asia) or at fleamarkets, swapmeets, and other temporary locations for $1 apiece ($2-$5 if you care about copied retail packaging). From there the movie ends up on the download sites (or perhaps it was even there before, who knows) because the ripped versions, wherever the come from are always ripped into an unencumbered format for re-distribution by the pirates.
The trap which the Guardian falls into, and it is a common one among the public, is the notion that because people now use the Internet for certain tasks, which it was not specially designed to accommodate but rather *could* accommodate in a layered approach, that it must be redesigned to carve out special support for tasks which it now coincidentally supports, but may or may not in the future. They forget that among the original design goals of the Internet (the ARPANET rather) was to have the most robust, generic, expandable, and scalable system possible, even at the expense of support for more specific and advanced features which could be built on top of the basic protocols anyway (and they have been). In networking it is not so much what one puts into a protocol, but rather what one judiciously leaves out in order not to limit what can built on top. The basic protocols of the Internet have served us well for over 30 years now and really do need to be changed much if at all. If they want to offer new "services" then they should submit their proposals to W3C and build a special banking layer which clients must support, on top of basic HTTPS, to support the features that they want so that the principle of least knowledge applies. Alas, the principles of good engineering and good software engineering are lost on the consumer society which loves all-in-one devices that do nothing really well and don't force people to think about really *good* solutions.
I do not ordinarily respond to those who engage in ad hominem, but in this case I feel compelled to reply because it is clear that dunkelfalke has completely misunderstood the argument. I did not argue that taxes are *never* acceptable, but merely that we should limit the use of taxes to providing only those public goods which are absolutely necessary to the continued functioning of the society. There are others who have pointed out that pure research is a public good in that everyone potentially benefits, but it is not generally possible to exclude those who did not pay for the initial research. In practice, with patents, this becomes complicated but I agree with the point, that pure research is a public good. However, I would not place pure research in the same category of immediate need as national defense, provision of law and justice, and environmental regulation. The disagreement between myself and the original poster hinges upon the provision of what I perceive to be a public good which that is not, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary to the continuation of our society. If pure research were completely useless then no corporations would be engaging in it, but they *are* funding it so the good may not be as public as some of the others. Pure research will not disappear completely in the absence of generous government funding.
Now, in response to your, "you have no rights", theory here is the basic problem with that: If the government abuses their privilege to use violent force (i.e. coercion) to strip from the citizens any pretense of the right to self determination then you have made everyone who is not part of that government elite a slave to the state (this is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union and what is happening in North Korea). Civilized people have elected to grant each other "inherent" rights to avoid the widespread barbarism and violence that was once common in western society (and still is in the middle east) where if your tribe doesn't get exactly what it wants then we all pick up the guns, swords, clubs, and rocks and take our appeal to the court of last resort (i.e. violence).
You suggest that the government should be the primary source of funding for pure research, presumably though our collective and compulsory tax dollars, but I must confess that I did not find your argument to be very compelling, even though I personally support such research, for the following basic reasons.
First, the government derives its resources (i.e. funds) from compulsory payments backed up by threat of coercion (i.e. taxes). There are some countries which run businesses or have national resources to sell, but unless your country is swimming in oil then it is hard for the government, being inefficient at running such concerns, to earn a substantial portion of money from those activities which means that taxes are the rule of the day. Taxes are a good thing when they are used to fund those narrowly defined and specific activities delegated to them by most democratic governments which includes keeping the peace, enforcing the laws, and protecting everyone from coercion and threat thereof in their everyday lives (to the extent that such protection is possible anyway, it is never absolute). What is wrong with using compulsory contributions to fund basic research you ask? Well that leads me into my second point.
Everyone disposes of their money in such a way as to derive the maximum amount of gain, whether that is saving and investing for gain of wealth or spending the money in the ways that make us the most happy (i.e. maximizing one's marginal utility). Now obviously not everyone is happiest with the same things so people, left to their own devices, tend to spend, save, or invest their money in a wide variety of ways and that is good.
You might really enjoy donating time or money or resources to open source projects or other organizations which do things that you feel are important enough to warrant your money and that is fine and good. However, one cannot force another to spend *his* money, or more precisely to spend it for him, in ways that you and everyone else might think is better for him without trampling the notions of self determination, pursuit of happiness, and freedom from tyranny as set down in the Constitution of the United States. I may not like the fact that some people spend money on cigarettes for example, but I would not begrudge them their right to spend their money on them if that is what makes them happy.
There are other ways to fund research besides government grants backed up by taxes. Universities have long been the beneficiaries of grants from the estates of deceased alumni, corporate grants, and other tax deductible and charitable giving. There are probably non-profit organizations out there that engage or fund, through grants, pure research or "interesting" projects which advance the human condition or have the potential to do so despite the fact that they are not immediately profitable or concrete in their applications.
I agree with you that pure and basic research are worthy activities, but I do not support spending the public money (i.e. taxes) on these activities, however noble they may be, because they do not fall within the strict responsibilities of limited government.
NOTE: By way of fairness I should probably say that I am not in favor of the government doing or funding much of anything besides legislation in support of applying and maintaining the powers and responsibilities defined in the Constitution (i.e. legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government), law enforcement and national defense (i.e. protection against coercion through violent force at personal and national levels).
I believe that he is not arguing about the amount per se, but rather the defendant is suggesting that the law upon which the case of the RIAA is built (i.e. Federal Copyright Law or some portion thereof) is unconstitutional, which would make the precise amount of damages a moot point (provided the defendant prevails, although that is probably a long shot).
Never the less, it seems like a high bar for the defendant to meet (having set it up for himself). The only argument that I can think of that goes in his favor is an argument concerning the "equal protection under the law" clause whereby he would argue that he is unfairly being singled out for a higher amount than would usually be demanded of any other defendant in a similar situation due to some factor which is external to the matter at hand. However, the RIAA appears to treat all of its targets with equal contempt so the argument might not hold any water (i.e. the RIAA is an equally opportunity litigant...I mean they even sue grandmas and dependent minors so that nobody feels left out). The constitution simply says that the treatment under the law has to be equal, which would mean that "equally egregious, provided that it didn't violate the cruel and unusual clause (which typically only applies to non-monetary punishments in criminal cases)" is fair play.
It is possible to include a Stirling engine in present electric or hybrid automobile designs (or even conventional engines if there is a mechanism to mechanically store output from the sterling engine while it is not in use...a pneumatic or hydraulic system for example), but it is not without its drawbacks. For example, a Stirling engine should have as large a difference in temperature as possible between the "hot" and "cold" cylinders in order to achieve maximal efficiency, which is difficult with the confines of an automobile body. Also, while it is true that some heat energy in internal combustion engines is wasted, heat is also needed in order to maximize the thermal efficiency of the engine. I am not an automotive engineer, but is seems likely that Stirling engine would introduce a substantial parasitic load on the thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engine, reducing its efficiency and power output per unit of energy input. Perhaps someone with a more extensive understanding of mechanical or automotive engineering could comment?
And for Europe the price isn't bad, particularly as many countries have lower taxes for electric cars.
This may be true, but using taxes to artificially distort markets into what some people in Europe would call socially egalitarian outcomes is generally very bad economic policy since it masks the inefficiencies of particular economic choices from the consumers actually making them resulting in a dead weight loss to the economy. If these technologies are better then let them compete on the merits, but it should not be the policy of governments to interfere in the market through taxes to "promote" a certain social agenda. This goes for subsidies for existing technologies as well, they should be slashed and ultimately eliminated. It is only through allowing the marketplace to determine the outcomes in fair and open competition that we will achieve the best results most quickly. This may require some regulation and enforcement on the part of the government to ensure that the competition is really open and fair, but the market will deliver the optimal solution if we allow the invisible hand do its work.
It depends upon the state that one lives in as well. Here on the west coast of the United States, and California in particular, the distances between residential and commercial areas tend to be much larger than they are on the eastern seaboard. It is not unusual here in Southern California to have a 45+ minute commute at 70-80 miles per hour to get from your residential neighborhood into the commercial areas where people work and shop. This translates into 30+ mile commutes each way and longer commutes are still very common (some people commute up to two (2) hours into the Los Angeles area from the outlying regions or about 140 miles each way every day). The problem may be with the definition of "rural". The major metropolitan population centers here in the United States are, while not strictly speaking rural (hundreds of miles of light industrial, strip malls, and other urban sprawl), still separate residential and shopping areas with medium to large driving distances. So there are probably many more Americans living with a long commute than the rural statistic suggests.
It might be nice if there was a mechanism whereby a priority queue was maintained with pointers into the red-black tree or other data structures used by the CFS module so that the superuser could designate that certain programs, identified via cryptographic hash, are special and should receive first consideration for scheduling while they are running. For example, during normal operations the priority queue would be empty and the CFS would handle scheduling in the usual fashion. However, once certain processes were loaded into the CFS *and* put into the priority queue (not every process goes into the priority queue, only the designated special ones), the CFS would know to check the priority queue when scheduling to see if there were any special processes running so that it could give those processes first crack at the processor and other resources in order of their priority (there could be multiple special processes running at the same time as well). In gaming, for example, it is usually the case that the user is focused entirely on the game and not on other processes running in the background so it would make sense for the game program's hash to be in the special priority queue so that it would receive top billing while it was running. It would also be possible to use this mechanism for other more usual processes (say on a server), but the CFS alone would probably be sufficient for most server type scenarios. The special scheduler add-on would really only be useful for special scenarios such as gaming, graphics rendering, and other long running and high demand processes. Perhaps something similar already exists, but I am not a Linux kernel programmer so maybe I just don't know about it...
You could try purchasing the CDs used from a store which specializes in this type of merchandise (there is probably one somewhere near where you live unless you live in a very rural area). It may be difficult to find used CDs that satisfy your tastes if your tastes generally run counter to those of the area in which you live. However, there are also online options, such as Amazon, and others which specialize in music that offer used CDs. The advantage of a used CD is that the RIAA and the labels get no further royalties or perhaps a very little money from that sale, especially if it is a person to person sale. If you wanted the CDs, but didn't want your money to go to the labels then perhaps buying used would be an acceptable compromise, especially since you plan to spread the purchases out over a number of years and are willing to wait longer for some albums than you are for others. I would mention iTunes, but they are selling on behalf of the majors and you have stated that you don't want your money to go to the RIAA or its member organizations, at least not directly.
There was talk a while back about Ford using embedded Windows for managing engine functions and other operational systems in the vehicle (with the exception of the most critical parts, although that was not clear from reports). I don't know if they actually decided to follow through with it, but if they did then that would be yet another blow to the quality of the American automobile against the Japaneses and European makes. It is probably better that they (the Japanese auto makers) are developing this OS fram scratch since neither Windows or Linux is really designed to be a real-time OS for critical applications (i.e. avionics and flight systems, engine management, and nuclear power plant controllers). Those systems which do exist in this arena tend to be highly specialized anyway so it probably doesn't make sense to try and adapt the avionics or flight control systems of airliners to managing an automobile engine.
Free market capitalism is good at distributing goods and services, but not at providing equitable education available to all citizens.
If you want to carve out a special case for education then you must make a case for the argument. It is not very satisfying, from an intellectual standpoint, to say that free market capitalism (i.e. people spending their own money as they choose and freely) provides a good system for everything with a couple of exceptions without explaining the exceptions. For my own part I subscribe to the free market philosophy as espoused by the late economist Milton Friedman who famously proclaimed, "that nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely or frugally as he spends his own." The free market can absolutely provide the best result for education, provided that the *choice* of where to send one's children is placed in the hands of the parents in the form of vouchers. The parent could choose the local public school, in which case the voucher would be accepted as payment in full, OR they could select from any number of private schools where the voucher would provide full or partial payment, depending upon tuition. The government would administer standardized testing to ensure that students were receiving an education that covered the required areas of knowledge while the parents would be directly incentivized to choose the best school possible.
There is plenty of money for every student, at least here in California, to receive a very high quality education and thus there would be many high quality private institutions accepting those vouchers and providing high quality education in return *if* we allowed the system to work. The bankruptcy of the current system is due mainly to the inefficiency of the bureaucracy and the recalcitrance and political interference of the teacher's unions. For the amount that we are already spending we should be getting brand-new air-conditioned business park type campuses with manicured lawns, community college level professors, and the latest IT and other equipment all well maintained by dedicated staff. Instead we are getting overcrowded classrooms, peeling paint, and the worst standardized test scores in the nation. We should take that money and put it into the hands of the parents and let the market sort out the details. The parents will see to getting their children the best education that they can for those voucher dollars and competition among private institutions would ensure high quality at reasonable prices.
In fact, the only exception that I make to the free market providing a good or service is in the area of military grade coercive force (i.e. military power) and law enforcement. These must be above the free market because they could be used, in the wrong hands, to completely undermine the market through naked aggression. One could view the government as the referee with the power to modify, interpret, and enforce the rules on behalf of the common good and subject to our electoral approval. Other than that, competition should be the rule of the day.
If the guard had half a brain, he'd know that ITAR has to do with export, not possession.
Which clearly he does not or he wouldn't be working some rent-a-cop security job with a 9mm on his hip. Actually it wasn't the fault of the guard, he probably struggled with high school algebra so any of the technical details might as well be written in Chinese for all he knows or cares...he just does what he is told. The real "brains" behind this operation (if you could call it that) was probably some mid level political appointee, in the same general category as the one who was caught editing the technical reports of government climatologists for political correctness. The United States as a nation is reaping the harvest of a system which discourages interest among young people in science and engineering and rewards this ignorance with high paying paper pushing jobs. This was a trend even before 9/11 (In fact it began, albeit slowly, following the cancellation of the Apollo program), but now it is being pushed ever harder by political weasels, lawyers, and business interests that would rather have an ignorant population of docile consumers who are easier to manage, manipulate, and control. It will only require a few more generations of this sort of thing and we will be as backwards as the tribesmen on the Afghan border.
Any good encryption package will include Plausible Deniability as one of its features. You can put all of your financial records in the first partition and then anything else that you want in the second partition (hidden within the first). There is no way to prove that another encrypted partition exists within the first.
As for concealing information, the founding fathers proposed the 4th ammendment to the United States Constitution for a *reason* and it was not merely to prevent the government from searching your property without a warrent (although that is about all that is left of it these days and we are in the process of discarding that final nicety too what with the warantless wiretaps and all of that). They wanted to ensure that the citizens would not be subject to surveillance, interference, or harrasment by a tyrannical government...or at least that was the spirit of the whole "free country" concept.
The senators might as well pass a law saying that gravity and common sense are not in effect in Washington DC, at least they would be right on one count. It should be clear to everyone that *if* effective filtering of Internet content on a global scale were possible then it already would have been done by someone. Even the great firewall of China is not completely effective and those people live in a police state. Also, consider the massive financial incentive that has been in place for the music industry to fund discovery and implemention of this type of technology. The only thing stopping them is the near impossibility of the task. This proposed legislation will not change anything. If the free market couldn't provide effective global filtering despite massive financial incentives then how much less will such a system magically spring into being from legislative fiat?
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Of course they would let her walk out, you are right, they are not the police. But remember that they did not approach her until the police officer was already accompanying the theater employees into the theater (i.e. she didn't know that she had even been spotted until they all approached her seat together). She may not have been recording anymore at that point, but the police officer is the one who does all of the policing. You don't really think that theater employees would do anything physical do you? However, neither would they do anything that might tip off the target prior to the arrival of the police, otherwise the target would simply leave as soon as they realized that they had been spotted. The theater probably has a policy or procedure regarding this sort of thing. Maybe it is their policy to confront the target and ask them to leave first (thereby allowing them an opportunity to do so). All that matters to the theaters, so long as the patron has a ticket and is not being disruptive, is that the studios are satisfied with the policy and that they (the theater chain) has covered their butts legally (nobody wants to be left without a chair when the music stops).
Another reason could be payoffs offered by the MAFIAA to theater employees. Another poster in this discussion mentioned that when he worked for a theater chain (not Regal) there was a poster in the break room advertising $1000 for a sworn statement that leads to a conviction following the arrest of patrons recording the movies. I don't know if that is true, but I wouldn't put it past the MAFIAA. It is not the theaters that you should be angry at, its the MAFIAA and the studios who are ultimately dictating the policies and the laws who are to blame.
Litigation is expensive and always risky. You might not go to theater anymore because of the treatment you get, but most of their customers don't complain or care enough to stop going to the theater over annoyances like this (i.e. the grumble and complain to their friends, but that doesn't stop them from buying admission and over priced snacks in spite of it all). The theater is a business...it will not take a risk that it does not have to. The goal of a business is to maximize profit and any considerations like "good customer service", "corporate consciousness", "mission statements", and yes litigation are all subordinate to that goal. If the risk of litigation and the potential loss are not outweighed by the potential award and the side benefit of maybe getting a few customers back who chose not to buy tickets because of the anti-piracy clips then the theaters will simply continue showing the anti-piracy clips because that is what earns them the best return with the least amount of risk. Simply put, the few of us out there who choose not to go to the theater on principle are statistically insignificant to the theater...just a rounding error on their balance sheets.
All they had to do was explain the law, then ask the owner if they could kindly cooperate and delete the stuff ... not make a federal case out of it
If the movie studios who lease the movies that theater shows agrees then I am sure that the theater would be amenable to that policy. The theater is as much a pawn in the whole game as the patron with the camcorder. The movie studio is the hand that feeds the theater and the theater will do almost anything to make the studios happy because if they don't and the studio refuses to lease them movies in the future then the theater is out of business.
Its the same as showing those stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" clips they show - "HEY ASSHOLES, IF I'M IN YOUR THEATRE WATCHING THE MOVIE, DON'T ACCUSE ME OF BEING A CROOK!!!" Insulting your customers ethics and intelligence will just drive them away.
Again, the theater has no choice they have to show the lame anti-piracy clip before all of their films because the studios or their distributers, agents, etc require that they show it in the contract signed by the theater. Does it piss of some theater goers? Probably. Is it better than having your contract to show movies canceled and being forced out of business? Definitely.
The theater business is highly competitive and margins are low so they cannot afford to risk alienating the studios. They have no pricing power, very little bargaining power, and no recourse against the studios. The truth be known they probably dislike the studios as much as their patrons (i.e. the studios having been knocking them dead for years by taking 98%+ of all of the box office receipts...that is why popcorn and soda cost $10 at the theater since they have to make up most of their revenue from the concessions).
That is the way that real auctions work. Do you think that you could just walk into Sotheby's or Christie's, register as a bidder, bid, and then refuse to pay? Just try that in real life and see what happens. If eBay wants to be taken seriously then they need to clean out the trash, otherwise they will always be relegated to bit player type items because nobody in their right mind would trust them to sell big ticket items such as unique real estate, rare automobiles, valuable art, or any other item in excess of say $20,000, especially when the sky is the limit (as it is in the serious real world auction houses). In an auction all sales are final...caveat emptor.
in the employee room at my theatre, there was a sign saying that any employee who witnessed and reported someone recording a movie, and then gave a sworn statement about it to the police, would get $1000 from the MPAA.
That alone should give anyone reason for pause. If a person making a sworn statement accepts money from a third party as a "reward" for making the statement then it should make the validity of said statement null and void or at the very least *highly* suspect. It is nice to note that in your case you didn't give into the "Dark Side" by selling out the homeless man. Very commendable.
That is a good point and it brings up a larger issue in our legal system of failure to reserve the criminal part of the system for acts which are truly criminal and not simply petty matters involving small (relative to say Enron, what included fraud on a massive scale and gross breach of trust / duty that elevated the whole thing to a criminal matter) amounts of money. The vast majority of copyright cases in recent years have not reached the level of criminality that we should require for a criminal proceeding and thus should be relegated to civil court where there is no jail time and only fines in proportion to damages actually caused. The only reason that copyright stands out as criminal is because MAFIAA lobbyists pushed hard for the strongest protections that they could wrangle out of congress for their industry, without regard to true justice and indeed out of a sense of malice and a desire for revenge against those whom they saw as costing them even one penny of potential revenue (real or imagined).
They're just being dickheads. A 20-second clip isn't a clear case of copyright infringement, since copyright allows for short exerpts to be used without the copyright owners' permission, for example, in reviews.
This is true, but think about it from the standpoint of Regal Cinemas, they have no way of knowing, at the time that the recording is being made, how much has already been recorded (she could have started at the beginning of the film and then only been caught half-way through...if the theater said nothing then would she have recorded the rest? maybe, probably, who knows) and what it will ultimately be used for. If word gets out that a certain licensee, Regal Cinemas in this case, is lax on camcorders in their theaters then they might loose the ability to show films from the major studios (i.e. the studios cancel their contract because they are lax on recording devices) or worse the studios might go after Regal Cinemas for vicarious copyright infringement (i.e. inducing people to come and record movies by letting it slide or being generally known for not checking too carefully). There is basically no chance that a first time offender, like this girl, is going to get jail time. In fact, Regal may be gracious enough to drop the charges or recommend leniency (i.e. community service or something like that...I am not a lawyer so I don't know the exact legal procedures) since the publicity alone is enough to show their masters (i.e the MAFIAA) that they are 'tough' on camcorders and can be allowed to continue to show first run movies made by the major studios without taking the whole thing too far in the media.
The theater is a business with investors and they do not want to jeopardize their ability to continue earning income after spending many millions of dollars on theaters, equipment, concessions, etc. They aren't going to stick their necks out for just one customer in the face of a potential loss of the ability to operate as a business when the major studios jerk their license or cancel their contract to show their films, there is simply too much money at stake for that.
It is this type of incident which raises the specter of Payola in system whereby well heeled and politically well connected companies and industries can "buy" (indirectly of course through campaign contributions and lobbyists) greater enforcement considerations on behalf of federal law enforcement then they might otherwise receive. It is, as you say, interesting that the feds are spending their limited time and resources to keep the world safe for the likes of Sony and their Play Station while the souther border of the United States is still leaking like a sieve and hordes of illegal immigrants are pouring across. It gives one cause to despair that our system, founded upon such wise and noble principles, is being overrun by the barbarians at the gates.
Just because the ability exists to crack it, doesn't mean that the average Joe on the street can do so.
Its a moot point since the pirates crack it and then sell bootleg copies on the streets (in Asia) or at fleamarkets, swapmeets, and other temporary locations for $1 apiece ($2-$5 if you care about copied retail packaging). From there the movie ends up on the download sites (or perhaps it was even there before, who knows) because the ripped versions, wherever the come from are always ripped into an unencumbered format for re-distribution by the pirates.
The trap which the Guardian falls into, and it is a common one among the public, is the notion that because people now use the Internet for certain tasks, which it was not specially designed to accommodate but rather *could* accommodate in a layered approach, that it must be redesigned to carve out special support for tasks which it now coincidentally supports, but may or may not in the future. They forget that among the original design goals of the Internet (the ARPANET rather) was to have the most robust, generic, expandable, and scalable system possible, even at the expense of support for more specific and advanced features which could be built on top of the basic protocols anyway (and they have been). In networking it is not so much what one puts into a protocol, but rather what one judiciously leaves out in order not to limit what can built on top. The basic protocols of the Internet have served us well for over 30 years now and really do need to be changed much if at all. If they want to offer new "services" then they should submit their proposals to W3C and build a special banking layer which clients must support, on top of basic HTTPS, to support the features that they want so that the principle of least knowledge applies. Alas, the principles of good engineering and good software engineering are lost on the consumer society which loves all-in-one devices that do nothing really well and don't force people to think about really *good* solutions.
I do not ordinarily respond to those who engage in ad hominem, but in this case I feel compelled to reply because it is clear that dunkelfalke has completely misunderstood the argument. I did not argue that taxes are *never* acceptable, but merely that we should limit the use of taxes to providing only those public goods which are absolutely necessary to the continued functioning of the society. There are others who have pointed out that pure research is a public good in that everyone potentially benefits, but it is not generally possible to exclude those who did not pay for the initial research. In practice, with patents, this becomes complicated but I agree with the point, that pure research is a public good. However, I would not place pure research in the same category of immediate need as national defense, provision of law and justice, and environmental regulation. The disagreement between myself and the original poster hinges upon the provision of what I perceive to be a public good which that is not, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary to the continuation of our society. If pure research were completely useless then no corporations would be engaging in it, but they *are* funding it so the good may not be as public as some of the others. Pure research will not disappear completely in the absence of generous government funding.
Now, in response to your, "you have no rights", theory here is the basic problem with that: If the government abuses their privilege to use violent force (i.e. coercion) to strip from the citizens any pretense of the right to self determination then you have made everyone who is not part of that government elite a slave to the state (this is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union and what is happening in North Korea). Civilized people have elected to grant each other "inherent" rights to avoid the widespread barbarism and violence that was once common in western society (and still is in the middle east) where if your tribe doesn't get exactly what it wants then we all pick up the guns, swords, clubs, and rocks and take our appeal to the court of last resort (i.e. violence).
You suggest that the government should be the primary source of funding for pure research, presumably though our collective and compulsory tax dollars, but I must confess that I did not find your argument to be very compelling, even though I personally support such research, for the following basic reasons.
First, the government derives its resources (i.e. funds) from compulsory payments backed up by threat of coercion (i.e. taxes). There are some countries which run businesses or have national resources to sell, but unless your country is swimming in oil then it is hard for the government, being inefficient at running such concerns, to earn a substantial portion of money from those activities which means that taxes are the rule of the day. Taxes are a good thing when they are used to fund those narrowly defined and specific activities delegated to them by most democratic governments which includes keeping the peace, enforcing the laws, and protecting everyone from coercion and threat thereof in their everyday lives (to the extent that such protection is possible anyway, it is never absolute). What is wrong with using compulsory contributions to fund basic research you ask? Well that leads me into my second point.
Everyone disposes of their money in such a way as to derive the maximum amount of gain, whether that is saving and investing for gain of wealth or spending the money in the ways that make us the most happy (i.e. maximizing one's marginal utility). Now obviously not everyone is happiest with the same things so people, left to their own devices, tend to spend, save, or invest their money in a wide variety of ways and that is good.
You might really enjoy donating time or money or resources to open source projects or other organizations which do things that you feel are important enough to warrant your money and that is fine and good. However, one cannot force another to spend *his* money, or more precisely to spend it for him, in ways that you and everyone else might think is better for him without trampling the notions of self determination, pursuit of happiness, and freedom from tyranny as set down in the Constitution of the United States. I may not like the fact that some people spend money on cigarettes for example, but I would not begrudge them their right to spend their money on them if that is what makes them happy.
There are other ways to fund research besides government grants backed up by taxes. Universities have long been the beneficiaries of grants from the estates of deceased alumni, corporate grants, and other tax deductible and charitable giving. There are probably non-profit organizations out there that engage or fund, through grants, pure research or "interesting" projects which advance the human condition or have the potential to do so despite the fact that they are not immediately profitable or concrete in their applications.
I agree with you that pure and basic research are worthy activities, but I do not support spending the public money (i.e. taxes) on these activities, however noble they may be, because they do not fall within the strict responsibilities of limited government.
NOTE: By way of fairness I should probably say that I am not in favor of the government doing or funding much of anything besides legislation in support of applying and maintaining the powers and responsibilities defined in the Constitution (i.e. legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government), law enforcement and national defense (i.e. protection against coercion through violent force at personal and national levels).
I believe that he is not arguing about the amount per se, but rather the defendant is suggesting that the law upon which the case of the RIAA is built (i.e. Federal Copyright Law or some portion thereof) is unconstitutional, which would make the precise amount of damages a moot point (provided the defendant prevails, although that is probably a long shot).
Never the less, it seems like a high bar for the defendant to meet (having set it up for himself). The only argument that I can think of that goes in his favor is an argument concerning the "equal protection under the law" clause whereby he would argue that he is unfairly being singled out for a higher amount than would usually be demanded of any other defendant in a similar situation due to some factor which is external to the matter at hand. However, the RIAA appears to treat all of its targets with equal contempt so the argument might not hold any water (i.e. the RIAA is an equally opportunity litigant...I mean they even sue grandmas and dependent minors so that nobody feels left out). The constitution simply says that the treatment under the law has to be equal, which would mean that "equally egregious, provided that it didn't violate the cruel and unusual clause (which typically only applies to non-monetary punishments in criminal cases)" is fair play.
It is possible to include a Stirling engine in present electric or hybrid automobile designs (or even conventional engines if there is a mechanism to mechanically store output from the sterling engine while it is not in use...a pneumatic or hydraulic system for example), but it is not without its drawbacks. For example, a Stirling engine should have as large a difference in temperature as possible between the "hot" and "cold" cylinders in order to achieve maximal efficiency, which is difficult with the confines of an automobile body. Also, while it is true that some heat energy in internal combustion engines is wasted, heat is also needed in order to maximize the thermal efficiency of the engine. I am not an automotive engineer, but is seems likely that Stirling engine would introduce a substantial parasitic load on the thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engine, reducing its efficiency and power output per unit of energy input. Perhaps someone with a more extensive understanding of mechanical or automotive engineering could comment?
And for Europe the price isn't bad, particularly as many countries have lower taxes for electric cars.
This may be true, but using taxes to artificially distort markets into what some people in Europe would call socially egalitarian outcomes is generally very bad economic policy since it masks the inefficiencies of particular economic choices from the consumers actually making them resulting in a dead weight loss to the economy. If these technologies are better then let them compete on the merits, but it should not be the policy of governments to interfere in the market through taxes to "promote" a certain social agenda. This goes for subsidies for existing technologies as well, they should be slashed and ultimately eliminated. It is only through allowing the marketplace to determine the outcomes in fair and open competition that we will achieve the best results most quickly. This may require some regulation and enforcement on the part of the government to ensure that the competition is really open and fair, but the market will deliver the optimal solution if we allow the invisible hand do its work.
It depends upon the state that one lives in as well. Here on the west coast of the United States, and California in particular, the distances between residential and commercial areas tend to be much larger than they are on the eastern seaboard. It is not unusual here in Southern California to have a 45+ minute commute at 70-80 miles per hour to get from your residential neighborhood into the commercial areas where people work and shop. This translates into 30+ mile commutes each way and longer commutes are still very common (some people commute up to two (2) hours into the Los Angeles area from the outlying regions or about 140 miles each way every day). The problem may be with the definition of "rural". The major metropolitan population centers here in the United States are, while not strictly speaking rural (hundreds of miles of light industrial, strip malls, and other urban sprawl), still separate residential and shopping areas with medium to large driving distances. So there are probably many more Americans living with a long commute than the rural statistic suggests.
It might be nice if there was a mechanism whereby a priority queue was maintained with pointers into the red-black tree or other data structures used by the CFS module so that the superuser could designate that certain programs, identified via cryptographic hash, are special and should receive first consideration for scheduling while they are running. For example, during normal operations the priority queue would be empty and the CFS would handle scheduling in the usual fashion. However, once certain processes were loaded into the CFS *and* put into the priority queue (not every process goes into the priority queue, only the designated special ones), the CFS would know to check the priority queue when scheduling to see if there were any special processes running so that it could give those processes first crack at the processor and other resources in order of their priority (there could be multiple special processes running at the same time as well). In gaming, for example, it is usually the case that the user is focused entirely on the game and not on other processes running in the background so it would make sense for the game program's hash to be in the special priority queue so that it would receive top billing while it was running. It would also be possible to use this mechanism for other more usual processes (say on a server), but the CFS alone would probably be sufficient for most server type scenarios. The special scheduler add-on would really only be useful for special scenarios such as gaming, graphics rendering, and other long running and high demand processes. Perhaps something similar already exists, but I am not a Linux kernel programmer so maybe I just don't know about it...
You could try purchasing the CDs used from a store which specializes in this type of merchandise (there is probably one somewhere near where you live unless you live in a very rural area). It may be difficult to find used CDs that satisfy your tastes if your tastes generally run counter to those of the area in which you live. However, there are also online options, such as Amazon, and others which specialize in music that offer used CDs. The advantage of a used CD is that the RIAA and the labels get no further royalties or perhaps a very little money from that sale, especially if it is a person to person sale. If you wanted the CDs, but didn't want your money to go to the labels then perhaps buying used would be an acceptable compromise, especially since you plan to spread the purchases out over a number of years and are willing to wait longer for some albums than you are for others. I would mention iTunes, but they are selling on behalf of the majors and you have stated that you don't want your money to go to the RIAA or its member organizations, at least not directly.
There was talk a while back about Ford using embedded Windows for managing engine functions and other operational systems in the vehicle (with the exception of the most critical parts, although that was not clear from reports). I don't know if they actually decided to follow through with it, but if they did then that would be yet another blow to the quality of the American automobile against the Japaneses and European makes. It is probably better that they (the Japanese auto makers) are developing this OS fram scratch since neither Windows or Linux is really designed to be a real-time OS for critical applications (i.e. avionics and flight systems, engine management, and nuclear power plant controllers). Those systems which do exist in this arena tend to be highly specialized anyway so it probably doesn't make sense to try and adapt the avionics or flight control systems of airliners to managing an automobile engine.
Free market capitalism is good at distributing goods and services, but not at providing equitable education available to all citizens.
If you want to carve out a special case for education then you must make a case for the argument. It is not very satisfying, from an intellectual standpoint, to say that free market capitalism (i.e. people spending their own money as they choose and freely) provides a good system for everything with a couple of exceptions without explaining the exceptions. For my own part I subscribe to the free market philosophy as espoused by the late economist Milton Friedman who famously proclaimed, "that nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely or frugally as he spends his own." The free market can absolutely provide the best result for education, provided that the *choice* of where to send one's children is placed in the hands of the parents in the form of vouchers. The parent could choose the local public school, in which case the voucher would be accepted as payment in full, OR they could select from any number of private schools where the voucher would provide full or partial payment, depending upon tuition. The government would administer standardized testing to ensure that students were receiving an education that covered the required areas of knowledge while the parents would be directly incentivized to choose the best school possible.
There is plenty of money for every student, at least here in California, to receive a very high quality education and thus there would be many high quality private institutions accepting those vouchers and providing high quality education in return *if* we allowed the system to work. The bankruptcy of the current system is due mainly to the inefficiency of the bureaucracy and the recalcitrance and political interference of the teacher's unions. For the amount that we are already spending we should be getting brand-new air-conditioned business park type campuses with manicured lawns, community college level professors, and the latest IT and other equipment all well maintained by dedicated staff. Instead we are getting overcrowded classrooms, peeling paint, and the worst standardized test scores in the nation. We should take that money and put it into the hands of the parents and let the market sort out the details. The parents will see to getting their children the best education that they can for those voucher dollars and competition among private institutions would ensure high quality at reasonable prices.
In fact, the only exception that I make to the free market providing a good or service is in the area of military grade coercive force (i.e. military power) and law enforcement. These must be above the free market because they could be used, in the wrong hands, to completely undermine the market through naked aggression. One could view the government as the referee with the power to modify, interpret, and enforce the rules on behalf of the common good and subject to our electoral approval. Other than that, competition should be the rule of the day.
If the guard had half a brain, he'd know that ITAR has to do with export, not possession.
Which clearly he does not or he wouldn't be working some rent-a-cop security job with a 9mm on his hip. Actually it wasn't the fault of the guard, he probably struggled with high school algebra so any of the technical details might as well be written in Chinese for all he knows or cares...he just does what he is told. The real "brains" behind this operation (if you could call it that) was probably some mid level political appointee, in the same general category as the one who was caught editing the technical reports of government climatologists for political correctness. The United States as a nation is reaping the harvest of a system which discourages interest among young people in science and engineering and rewards this ignorance with high paying paper pushing jobs. This was a trend even before 9/11 (In fact it began, albeit slowly, following the cancellation of the Apollo program), but now it is being pushed ever harder by political weasels, lawyers, and business interests that would rather have an ignorant population of docile consumers who are easier to manage, manipulate, and control. It will only require a few more generations of this sort of thing and we will be as backwards as the tribesmen on the Afghan border.
Any good encryption package will include Plausible Deniability as one of its features. You can put all of your financial records in the first partition and then anything else that you want in the second partition (hidden within the first). There is no way to prove that another encrypted partition exists within the first.
As for concealing information, the founding fathers proposed the 4th ammendment to the United States Constitution for a *reason* and it was not merely to prevent the government from searching your property without a warrent (although that is about all that is left of it these days and we are in the process of discarding that final nicety too what with the warantless wiretaps and all of that). They wanted to ensure that the citizens would not be subject to surveillance, interference, or harrasment by a tyrannical government...or at least that was the spirit of the whole "free country" concept.
The senators might as well pass a law saying that gravity and common sense are not in effect in Washington DC, at least they would be right on one count. It should be clear to everyone that *if* effective filtering of Internet content on a global scale were possible then it already would have been done by someone. Even the great firewall of China is not completely effective and those people live in a police state. Also, consider the massive financial incentive that has been in place for the music industry to fund discovery and implemention of this type of technology. The only thing stopping them is the near impossibility of the task. This proposed legislation will not change anything. If the free market couldn't provide effective global filtering despite massive financial incentives then how much less will such a system magically spring into being from legislative fiat?
"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it"
Publilius Syrus ~100BC