Executives see themselves as the investors or cowboys or risktakers of the business world. If they can't risk it all on something with a 10% chance of succeeding, they aren't doing their jobs.
So when 90% of the companies are gone, we'll know why.
I'm sure they'd all like to be paying their bills, but when you set up a fiscal triage line, how important do you think payments to a multi-billion dollar corporation that sells software is going to be compared to say, keeping the lights on and paying the employees?
This is actually quite common in business. Just like how you or I would pay for electricity and food over our credit card bills if we wanted to survive.
Just another brick in their wall they're building to further close them off from the rest of reality.
I've had this thought for a while now, but now's an appropriate time to say it: Will there be a day when a British tourist visits America and remarks that our cameras must be hidden really well, because they can't see them at all!
When I took my previous car to Circuit City to have some stuff installed (four speakers and a head unit, nothing fancy) they screwed it up, double-charged my debit card, AND charged me for the full rate instead of the special rate.
They could have resolved the problem in an hour. By having someone skilled to go in and fix the wiring/install errors, and by either giving me cash or some kind of proof that the money would be put back into my account. Did they do it? Nope.
The same guy worked on my car again, and didn't see anything wrong. Even though the rear and driver side speakers went in and out as I was driving. Then he charged me for another install. The assistant manager told me that I'd have to take it up with corporate, that they have nothing to do with refunds or billing errors.
Long story short, I got my refunds processed (with some extra, for my trouble I guess), and the setup ended up being fixed by the guy's supervisor. But the general 'fuck the customer' attitude is what got them in this mess to begin with.
Best Buy, however, is about the same as far as customer satisfaction goes. They've always been the highest-priced of the general consumer electronics vendors, narrowly beating Circuit City. The Best Buy employees are paranoid and skittish, because they could be canned at any time when a sub-manager wants to hire his friends so they can sit out back and smoke weed on the clock. They could be canned if enough people say 'no' to their magazine subscriptions, candy sales offers, and/or extra warranty options. I suspect their prices will drift even higher now that they realize they have no major competition, other than from Wal-Mart.
The point of DRM isn't to give you your fair use rights.
The point of DRM is to lock the market out of your product unless they bought it, and everything that you decided should be required.
Like an HDMI-capable monitor. But even that doesn't guarantee that you can use HDCP. It needs to be have certain hardware to be able to do it.
Since the government and those companies aren't forcing you to use it, good luck suing them. Unless they're misrepresenting what they have, or are colluding to corner the market. Which they are.
This whole thing was a case of the Author's Guild settling something that wasn't theirs to begin with. Technically, the onus would be on Google to check and see if they ACTUALLY had rights to your work, which they obviously don't. However, the Author's Guild decided to speak for all authors instead of just the ones they had represented, and did so knowingly and with intent to profit from people's works that they were not affiliated with.
If you don't answer the customer's question and the reboot fails, they'll call back. So now you've doubled your work load with little to no effort. Doubling your work load and increasing your work speed by 50%. You take ten seconds to tell them to reboot and call back, and a few minutes when they call back to answer their question.
The issue is metrics. People live and die by the by them. Would you rather take 1,000 calls a month with an average resolve time of 10 minutes? Or 2000 calls with an average resolve time of 6 minutes? Look at it from a company's perspective that is contracting their phone work to another company.
Child pornography elicits a very emotional response from the public at large. You'd have almost no trouble whatsoever convicting someone at a jury trial of possessing it if the female model was below 30 and had pigtails. You can bet your ass that the prosecutor would use phrases like 'the little girl next door' and 'your children' to further sway the jury's emotions.
Common sense usually doesn't apply when strong emotions are involved.
The proof-of-age thing really hits picture collectors hard. For those pictures that do not have a site tag on them, if questioned, the collector must be able to come up with proof-of age. The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.' There are many models out there that are well above the age of consent that might raise suspicions.
Ever play World of Warcraft on a PvP server? Often times someone will attack you and either kill you and move on, or if you kill them, they'll go and get their lv80 and stand on your corpse for a half-hour.
It would be like someone challenging you to a wrestling match and upon you winning, they'd go get their 30 year old brother to step in for them.
You have to sign up SEVERAL times for the military because they want to have a valid 'he wasn't drunk when he signed up' defense for when you malinger out of basic training or go AWOL.
You sign papers when you express interest in joining the military. These are not binding. You sign papers a few days before you go in for your physical, screening, etc. These are not binding. You sign papers the day of the physical, screening, etc. These are not binding. When you go to take your oath, you sign papers. These papers are binding and will have the contract built in. If you're drunk, the physical and screening would show it.
Its possible for someone to get around the last one and be drunk, but very unlikely. The other three sets of times are just backups that they can use.
EULAs are binding contracts, in theory. However, giving a written contract to a blind man means the contract does not stand because the man cannot read the contract. Giving a legalese-filled and confusing EULA to a person who can read should mean that it doesn't stand because even most LAWYERS don't understand the entirety of the EULAs, some being 30-50 pages long.
You could do it with hydroponics. It might even be a good idea to generate extra food for a city's needs. You have an abundance of power, water, and minerals. We can turn them into delicious food.
Its been shown that if its challenged in court, it won't stand up.
Cell phone companies used to try the same thing. They'd jack your rates up and hide the fees deep in legalese. Or they'd slash your services and your wallet would get raped for some charge they added without saying anything. It went to court, and none of it stands up. The courts are MUCH more likely to side with the consumer. Letting companies get away with stealth changes to their EULA pretty much gives them free reign on what they can do to you, and the only way you can fix it is to take them to court over it.
Granting someone rights to your works is not usually a 'by default' process. For example, my ISP can't just say that anything I put through their wires of my own is now theirs. They can, but it would fail in court. Facebook can use the images as they see fit since they're on the site, but the laws are rather murky as to whether they can take them and use them for other things outside of the website. And if you ask for your material to be taken down, by God it better be taken down. A picture of you doesn't become THEIR picture of you because you hosted it on their site. Your picture of you is still yours but they may display it on their website while you're actively using their services.
Everyone who did not oppose this scam upon hearing about it should be fired or regulated to a minimum wage job at the bottom of the totem pole.
There is simply no excuse for wasting that much money that us taxpayers were forced to give to them. Even if they spent $2.5 million on a golden water fountain in an obscure park, at least the people could use it. No one except the scammers will get any use out of this money.
The issue is that everyone sees that America was still alive when gas prices were $4.50/gallon per regular unleaded (the lowest grade at the pump). Therefore, they realized that us Americans have way too much spending money that should be going back to companies and back to the state, and to the government.
Everyone is raising their prices. Punitive cost have gone up over the past few years..sometimes by as much as 50%. Administrative costs have skyrocketed for nearly everything. Price per ounce of most food product has gone way up, since the prices have mostly stayed the same but less product is packaged.
Point is, the economy isn't going to be able to bear it. What then? Will we just reduce prices, maybe take these toll roads away? What happens when unemployment is 30% and the national debt is dwarfed by the number of dollars being paid out for unemployment/welfare/food stamps? Reversing these fees will do nothing.
Suddenly you want people to pay for going to the other side of the state or country to find a new life. As if they didn't have to worry about moving costs, driving costs, food costs, and housing costs, soon they may have to worry about having to pay a dollar for every podunk town they drive through on the way there. Or more, most likely.
After you pay it all off, every red cent, something will happen that will drive you back into debt. As in, you're in a car wreck with an uninsured driver. He's faulted but disappears because he had a fake ID and no SSN. Your insurance company refuses to pay. You're now carless.
Hope you have enough savings to buy transportation in one form or another.
Or what about being laid off from your job, and then contracting MRSA as soon as your health insurance runs out? You'll be at least ten thousand in debt if you have to stay at the hospital for a few days.
And you know what? You won't get a damn cent of any bailout money, any stimulus package, or any of that $800 billion. Rest assured, however, the people that don't want jobs and don't look for jobs will sit at home and collect welfare, food stamps, and possibly unemployment checks. They'll have cars. They'll have food. Will you?
America's safety net system is more of a hammock than a safety net. One people get to the bottom, a large percent stretch out and enjoy the good life. After all, living in a decent place, having enough food to eat, and having a vehicle is pretty cool. Especially when you can wake up at noon and do whatever the hell you want, within the law.
If you can't make enough money selling sparkly and shiny things to stick onto phones, then cripple your phone and sell the features back to them. Am I really to believe that a phone charger would cost $20+ if there was none of this going on?
Instead of spending all of that money on legal battles, why doesn't he just buy new shoes..socks..bleach his bathroom floor and everything his bare feet contact..soak his feet in pure liquid antibiotic, and rub feet with some pretty girl that has non-vile foot odor? Its a bacterial thing..he picked up a type that produces way too many aromatic compounds.
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Sounds like signs of aggression to me.
Maybe this should warrant a strongly worded letter from the UN?
And people wonder why our economy is failing.
Executives see themselves as the investors or cowboys or risktakers of the business world. If they can't risk it all on something with a 10% chance of succeeding, they aren't doing their jobs.
So when 90% of the companies are gone, we'll know why.
Assassinate the MBA's.
I'm sure they'd all like to be paying their bills, but when you set up a fiscal triage line, how important do you think payments to a multi-billion dollar corporation that sells software is going to be compared to say, keeping the lights on and paying the employees?
This is actually quite common in business. Just like how you or I would pay for electricity and food over our credit card bills if we wanted to survive.
Just another brick in their wall they're building to further close them off from the rest of reality.
I've had this thought for a while now, but now's an appropriate time to say it: Will there be a day when a British tourist visits America and remarks that our cameras must be hidden really well, because they can't see them at all!
When I took my previous car to Circuit City to have some stuff installed (four speakers and a head unit, nothing fancy) they screwed it up, double-charged my debit card, AND charged me for the full rate instead of the special rate.
They could have resolved the problem in an hour. By having someone skilled to go in and fix the wiring/install errors, and by either giving me cash or some kind of proof that the money would be put back into my account. Did they do it? Nope.
The same guy worked on my car again, and didn't see anything wrong. Even though the rear and driver side speakers went in and out as I was driving. Then he charged me for another install. The assistant manager told me that I'd have to take it up with corporate, that they have nothing to do with refunds or billing errors.
Long story short, I got my refunds processed (with some extra, for my trouble I guess), and the setup ended up being fixed by the guy's supervisor. But the general 'fuck the customer' attitude is what got them in this mess to begin with.
Best Buy, however, is about the same as far as customer satisfaction goes. They've always been the highest-priced of the general consumer electronics vendors, narrowly beating Circuit City. The Best Buy employees are paranoid and skittish, because they could be canned at any time when a sub-manager wants to hire his friends so they can sit out back and smoke weed on the clock. They could be canned if enough people say 'no' to their magazine subscriptions, candy sales offers, and/or extra warranty options. I suspect their prices will drift even higher now that they realize they have no major competition, other than from Wal-Mart.
I guaran-fucking-tee you that even if you canceled your account today, that the information would still be stored and shared by Verizon.
The point of DRM isn't to give you your fair use rights.
The point of DRM is to lock the market out of your product unless they bought it, and everything that you decided should be required.
Like an HDMI-capable monitor. But even that doesn't guarantee that you can use HDCP. It needs to be have certain hardware to be able to do it.
Since the government and those companies aren't forcing you to use it, good luck suing them. Unless they're misrepresenting what they have, or are colluding to corner the market. Which they are.
Steam actually violates the first sale doctrine. If it were challenged in court, it'd probably fail.
We'd end up seeing serial numbers that were un-registerable and re-usable.
This type of exploit has been around for a while, actually.
I had certain common malware installed because a banner on a popular site carried a PDF that I didn't even have to click on.
This whole thing was a case of the Author's Guild settling something that wasn't theirs to begin with. Technically, the onus would be on Google to check and see if they ACTUALLY had rights to your work, which they obviously don't. However, the Author's Guild decided to speak for all authors instead of just the ones they had represented, and did so knowingly and with intent to profit from people's works that they were not affiliated with.
I'd seek damages from the Author's Guild.
I don't see this as an issue, or I would have returned my cat.
Pretty much all contract companies are like this.
If you don't answer the customer's question and the reboot fails, they'll call back. So now you've doubled your work load with little to no effort. Doubling your work load and increasing your work speed by 50%. You take ten seconds to tell them to reboot and call back, and a few minutes when they call back to answer their question.
The issue is metrics. People live and die by the by them. Would you rather take 1,000 calls a month with an average resolve time of 10 minutes? Or 2000 calls with an average resolve time of 6 minutes? Look at it from a company's perspective that is contracting their phone work to another company.
There are two main problems with EULAs.
1. You need a lawyer to interpret them correctly.
2. They generally have over-reaching and sometimes illegal demands.
Cory's idea would go a long way towards making these problems go away.
Child pornography elicits a very emotional response from the public at large. You'd have almost no trouble whatsoever convicting someone at a jury trial of possessing it if the female model was below 30 and had pigtails. You can bet your ass that the prosecutor would use phrases like 'the little girl next door' and 'your children' to further sway the jury's emotions.
Common sense usually doesn't apply when strong emotions are involved.
The proof-of-age thing really hits picture collectors hard. For those pictures that do not have a site tag on them, if questioned, the collector must be able to come up with proof-of age. The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.' There are many models out there that are well above the age of consent that might raise suspicions.
Ever play World of Warcraft on a PvP server? Often times someone will attack you and either kill you and move on, or if you kill them, they'll go and get their lv80 and stand on your corpse for a half-hour.
It would be like someone challenging you to a wrestling match and upon you winning, they'd go get their 30 year old brother to step in for them.
This is actually a valid defense in court.
You have to sign up SEVERAL times for the military because they want to have a valid 'he wasn't drunk when he signed up' defense for when you malinger out of basic training or go AWOL.
You sign papers when you express interest in joining the military. These are not binding.
You sign papers a few days before you go in for your physical, screening, etc. These are not binding.
You sign papers the day of the physical, screening, etc. These are not binding.
When you go to take your oath, you sign papers. These papers are binding and will have the contract built in. If you're drunk, the physical and screening would show it.
Its possible for someone to get around the last one and be drunk, but very unlikely. The other three sets of times are just backups that they can use.
EULAs are binding contracts, in theory. However, giving a written contract to a blind man means the contract does not stand because the man cannot read the contract. Giving a legalese-filled and confusing EULA to a person who can read should mean that it doesn't stand because even most LAWYERS don't understand the entirety of the EULAs, some being 30-50 pages long.
You could do it with hydroponics. It might even be a good idea to generate extra food for a city's needs. You have an abundance of power, water, and minerals. We can turn them into delicious food.
No, they can't actually do it.
Its been shown that if its challenged in court, it won't stand up.
Cell phone companies used to try the same thing. They'd jack your rates up and hide the fees deep in legalese. Or they'd slash your services and your wallet would get raped for some charge they added without saying anything. It went to court, and none of it stands up. The courts are MUCH more likely to side with the consumer. Letting companies get away with stealth changes to their EULA pretty much gives them free reign on what they can do to you, and the only way you can fix it is to take them to court over it.
Granting someone rights to your works is not usually a 'by default' process. For example, my ISP can't just say that anything I put through their wires of my own is now theirs. They can, but it would fail in court. Facebook can use the images as they see fit since they're on the site, but the laws are rather murky as to whether they can take them and use them for other things outside of the website. And if you ask for your material to be taken down, by God it better be taken down. A picture of you doesn't become THEIR picture of you because you hosted it on their site. Your picture of you is still yours but they may display it on their website while you're actively using their services.
The downside would be that you actually pay for those 5MB webpages that would be 300k without the annoying advertisements everywhere.
Everyone who did not oppose this scam upon hearing about it should be fired or regulated to a minimum wage job at the bottom of the totem pole.
There is simply no excuse for wasting that much money that us taxpayers were forced to give to them. Even if they spent $2.5 million on a golden water fountain in an obscure park, at least the people could use it. No one except the scammers will get any use out of this money.
Might actually be cheaper to fly.
The issue is that everyone sees that America was still alive when gas prices were $4.50/gallon per regular unleaded (the lowest grade at the pump). Therefore, they realized that us Americans have way too much spending money that should be going back to companies and back to the state, and to the government.
Everyone is raising their prices. Punitive cost have gone up over the past few years..sometimes by as much as 50%. Administrative costs have skyrocketed for nearly everything. Price per ounce of most food product has gone way up, since the prices have mostly stayed the same but less product is packaged.
Point is, the economy isn't going to be able to bear it. What then? Will we just reduce prices, maybe take these toll roads away? What happens when unemployment is 30% and the national debt is dwarfed by the number of dollars being paid out for unemployment/welfare/food stamps? Reversing these fees will do nothing.
Suddenly you want people to pay for going to the other side of the state or country to find a new life. As if they didn't have to worry about moving costs, driving costs, food costs, and housing costs, soon they may have to worry about having to pay a dollar for every podunk town they drive through on the way there. Or more, most likely.
After you pay it all off, every red cent, something will happen that will drive you back into debt. As in, you're in a car wreck with an uninsured driver. He's faulted but disappears because he had a fake ID and no SSN. Your insurance company refuses to pay. You're now carless.
Hope you have enough savings to buy transportation in one form or another.
Or what about being laid off from your job, and then contracting MRSA as soon as your health insurance runs out? You'll be at least ten thousand in debt if you have to stay at the hospital for a few days.
And you know what? You won't get a damn cent of any bailout money, any stimulus package, or any of that $800 billion. Rest assured, however, the people that don't want jobs and don't look for jobs will sit at home and collect welfare, food stamps, and possibly unemployment checks. They'll have cars. They'll have food. Will you?
America's safety net system is more of a hammock than a safety net. One people get to the bottom, a large percent stretch out and enjoy the good life. After all, living in a decent place, having enough food to eat, and having a vehicle is pretty cool. Especially when you can wake up at noon and do whatever the hell you want, within the law.
That's what its all about, right there.
If you can't make enough money selling sparkly and shiny things to stick onto phones, then cripple your phone and sell the features back to them. Am I really to believe that a phone charger would cost $20+ if there was none of this going on?
Instead of spending all of that money on legal battles, why doesn't he just buy new shoes..socks..bleach his bathroom floor and everything his bare feet contact..soak his feet in pure liquid antibiotic, and rub feet with some pretty girl that has non-vile foot odor? Its a bacterial thing..he picked up a type that produces way too many aromatic compounds.