We don't have all users store everything on the server because we don't have room for that (some of these users work with huge databases and other such stuff, or more commonly have gigantic archives of e-mail). Our users (with one exception) don't have admin access to their own boxes, so they can only store stuff in their own user profile folders, which typically means Desktop/My Documents. In this case it was known that nothing outside the profile needed to be backed up, it was the (incomplete) backing-up of the profile that was the whole issue:)
Of course we have a backup server which this particular user should have been on, but wasn't, because the guy whose job it was to install the backup app on her PC hadn't done so.
And yeah, I should have verified the backup:) Ultimately it was no more than an annoyance, and as I pointed out at the time, the same thing could have happened at any time due to random disk lossage corrupting her mail folders (a weak defense, but valid to a point).
I got burned by this a year or two ago. I copied our facilities person's profile to a server folder, reimaged her machine, then copied it back down. What I didn't know is that Outlook and Outlook Express both store user e-mail folders in Local Settings by default.
She lost about six years' worth of mail, modulo the three-year-old backup and the two weeks' worth that was still saved on the server. Boy did I feel like an ass.
As a result our documented procedures for migrating users to new standard images now have a big bold note NOT to use the MS profile tool, and really the only reason you would ever need to is if you were copying a user's folder to a server to be a multi-user mandatory profile (because the MSPT makes it easy to change the scope of who is allowed to run that profile). I do that in the labs at another location, which was why I automatically went for the tool in this case.
The iMac looked like it could have been a "network computer." Did the 'i' in iMac stand for "internet" Mac?
Why yes, yes it did. It was even considered "edgy" because the Internet (capital I) was abbreviated with a lowercase letter!
The degree of the industry's plagiarism of Apple's style decisions can be measured by the fact that prior to the iMac introduction, anything vaguely Internet-related was tagged "e-" (for "electronic) -- e-commerce, e-mail, e-this, e-that. Almost immediately after the iMac exploded on the scene, the e- was quietly dropped and new Internet things were tagged "i" or "i-".
People use to talk each other as an expession of being human for social relationshinps and for knowledge transfers.
But those employers could be more interested in bodies rather than in minds.
Who said anything about employers? As an employee I'm interested in anything that cuts the noise level in my environment. Two days out of the week I'm in an office where the permanently-installed cube desk is right next to the server rack and the aircon unit, and since I'm IT support during class hours I'm supposed to keep the top half of my Dutch door open for people to stick their head in if they need help. Practically all the foot traffic in the hallway goes past my office since I'm between the two labs and near the elevators.
What I need is something that will block out all the external noise, and some sort of alert bell device people can press that will give me a visual alert (they make doorbells like this for deaf people, but I want something wireless if I can get it so I don't have to string wire around).
Since I'm the only IT employee based at this site, most knowledge transfer with my co-workers and management is conducted via e-mail, IM, the occasional phone call and the rare face-to-face meeting. Being able to selectively hear things would be an incredible boon for me.
That said, others have already noted the Slashvertised product in question looks pretty bogus.
Don't be a dumb-dumb. Of course Windows is used in applications where a failure could cost a life. I've written a few myself.
I'm not saying it hasn't happened ever -- just that those companies who perpetrate such abominations are beyond clueless and most likely will bear full legal liability if anything goes wrong leading to loss of life.
"I do not even want to think of the consequences of Vista turning itself off in enterprise situations such as airline reservations or a hospital full of patients on life support. A serious collapse of the authentication network that could not be fixed without sending out discs or one-by-one-downloads will end up in the courts, and you can be certain that the shrink-wrap license agreement that holds Microsoft blameless will be tossed out as bogus."
Patients on life support? Is this the new "it's for the chilllldren!" in the software industry? Hospitals and life-support systems seem to come up really often when validation scenarios like this are discussed, yet, I have never, EVER heard of a patient dying because Windows crashed. I suspect this might be due to medical equipment manufacturers not quite being dumber than a bag of hammers and therefore not using Windows in life-critical situations.
I bet you anything there is a clause in the EULA that says something like "this software is not to be used in life support equipment, nuclear power plants, or other life-critical systems."
I further bet you that in the unlikely event some cosmically stupid company actually built life-critical systems around Windows Vista and it caused loss of life, that company, not Microsoft, would be held 100% liable for a) not doing due diligence on whether or not their off-the-shelf components were suitable for the intended purpose and b) being dumber than the aforementioned bag of hammers. The EULA wouldn't need to be held enforceable per se, the court would merely need to find that they ought to have read the EULA and from it derived knowledge that Vista should not be used for certain purposes.
I have read multiple WND pieces (they often are posted to a gun-rights mailing list I'm on). They are as right-wing wingnut loony as Democratic Underground or most of the posters on dailykos are left-wing moonbat nutty. I mentally mod anything WND releases as an automatic -2 or -1 (rense.com is even worse).
Pretending that WND is an unbiased source is roughly on the same intellectual level as trying to say that Ted Turner had absolutely no political agenda in how he ran his media holdings.
Scheff herself had prevailed in defending herself against damages after she had posted under numerous pseudonyms (actual forum location unknown to me) trashing her competitor and also took part in a group which actively lobbied potential customers against her competitor.
...but that was a separate case, with questionable relevance to the one at issue here.
This was not a special *sucks website that the defendant set up. This was a series of postings to an already-widely-known forum specific to the plaintiff's field of business. We're not talking about, to make an analogy, fordsucks.com but rather a series of postings about Ford Motor Company on edmunds.com.
Okay, to follow up on your hard drive example, lets say that you hear from some random person on the internet that XYZ hard drives are made from the souls of orphans, not unlike this case, except in this hypothetical example it's definitely false. The orphan-soul theory is, however, the preponderance of evidence that has been presented to you.
The courts have already dealt with that in the advertising world, in which they've consistently held that statements so outlandish no reasonable person could believe them are not false advertising. I would presume some similar standard exists for slander/libel, and if it doesn't, I think it would be a good thing if it did.
Wouldn't it, however, be better to let society do the critical thinking and decide for themselves if they're going to believe everything they hear?
In some ways the law is trying to deal with the fact that people are imperfect creatures. For example there was the case of a guy with a serious cognitive deficiency who ended up owing a dealership for some absurd number of new cars. His family sued on the grounds that the dealership knowingly took advantage of his memory impairment (he would literally forget he had bought a new car within a day or two). As I recall they won.
You could think of it as taking unfair advantage of the terrain -- if you know where a gopher hole is on a football field, and you play in such a way as to try to maneuver the opposing team's star receiver into stepping in the hole and breaking his ankle, you're not really playing fair, are you? Libel/slander law is just trying to keep people from taking unfair advantage of this particular hole in the perfection of the field.
If the $11 million is the final figure accepted by the judge, the judge should be de-frocked. One woman, who isn't a well-known public figure, talking smack on the internet isn't going to do nearly as much as $11 million or even $1 million of damage.
Not necessarily true. We're not talking about random websites; we're apparently talking about a specialized site dedicated to the particular business that Scheff operated in. Given the non-ephemeral, ubiquitously-accessible nature of message-board postings in the era of the Wayback Machine and Google, it's entirely conceivable that a series of postings on a single message board could do irreparable harm to Scheff's reputation for years to come.
The huge amount is not about the damages incurred so far, but the damages potentially incurred for the rest of Scheff's working life (much like injury awards).
$11.3 million sure looks big to me, but I don't quite dismiss it as farcical without knowing things like Scheff's typical income and any demonstrated variation in her income after the postings in question. If you're making $250,000 a year and suddenly somebody's online spew reduces it to $50K, that's a $200,000 annual loss right off, to say nothing of lost growth opportunity.
IANAL, but I have some direct experience in serving others and being served myself in minor matters. In law there's the concept that you have "actual knowledge" of something if you in fact knew it or reasonably should have known it. The idea is not to let people off the hook for ignorance caused by their own neglect. This usually takes the form of people being assumed to have been served under various circumstances: if you see the process server coming and run to hide, you have demonstrated knowledge that you are about to be served, and even if he never puts the papers in your hands, he can post them on your door and you are officially deemed to be served (he can post them on the door even if he never sees you, in fact).
You are also, by the way, deemed to have been served if copies of the papers were sent by registered mail to your last known address, whether or not you ever sign for them. USPS posts a delivery attempt notice on your door, and the law assumes that you check your mail at regular intervals or at least come home now and again (often enough to get such a notice and sign for the letter before it's returned, at least). So the fact that the papers came back at this stage doesn't necessarily mean anything to the lawyers -- they probably just assumed it was another lame attempt to dodge service, because a year later is plenty of time to have filed a forwarding address and informed the court of your new temporary residence, at which point I expect they would say "and by the way, your trial date has been scheduled, it is..."
You can make a defense to either of these cases by showing that the other party knew or reasonably should have known that the address they served you at is not your current address, so the burden goes both ways.
In this case we have someone who knew there was an ongoing legal proceeding against her and just dropped out of sight in the middle of it. That's never a defense to presumption of service.
First, this lady asks us to believe that she completely forgot about a court date. She acknowledged that she knew it was "approaching", which means she darn well ought to have had at least a rough idea of when she would need to appear and definitely ought to have been aware that she had a legal responsibility to keep track of the proceedings. Second, Katrina hit in August 2005. This verdict was last month, over a year later, and with no defense present you can bet the verdict was rendered on the same day the trial was scheduled. A year is plenty of time to have changed your address, informed people, had your mail forwarded, and checked on "oh by the way, do we have a court date set yet on this legal proceeding I'm involved in?"
Even if she found out too late to appear in person, I've never heard of a court that won't let you appear in writing. Even a simple letter to the court explaining your side is better than just blowing the whole thing off.
To me this looks like the lady knew she was going to (and deserved to) lose, and tried to take an easy out when a hurricane forced her to relocate. She got hit with a bigger judgement than I would have expected, but I can't say I feel too much sympathy for her even so. The jury was probably punishing her for wasting their time as much as anything else.
Merriam-Webster accept the version with the 'e' as a variant; the OED actually seems to list with-the-e as the preferred spelling. It only makes sense from a phonetic and orthographic point of view -- other verb-ending-in-e words retain the 'e' when you add -ment, such as impale, encase, enforce, etc.
I once thought as you do, but I realized that that conclusion is predicated on the premise of perfect and complete information flow. You assume that people have the means and the data to make a complete and fair judgement. Reality doesn't work like that -- there will always be people who happen to only hear one side or the other, and even if these people have Solomonic wisdom, they can only judge on what they know and hear. If one side is not represented, they can be unfairly damaged by false allegations.
If I have two friends who buy XYZ hard drives, and they both tell me the XYZ drive sucks, I'm that much less likely to buy an XYZ drive, simply because the sum of my knowledge is slanted against them. It doesn't mean I take it as an absolute fact that XYZ drives suck, but I'll at least think twice about spending money on one. It's the concept of "preponderance of evidence", which is also the standard of proof in a case like this one -- if one side is not represented it pretty much means the other side wins automatically. (That also means this lady would have been better served to file her defense in writing than to simply make no defense at all. By failing to appear she implicitly concedes that the other side is 100% correct and there is nothing to defend.)
In a world of perfect and complete information flow, where everything that is said is known by or at least accessible to everyone instantly, there's no need for libel or slander laws, but that day is not yet.
The original desire was "They aren't in my dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through." The proposed solution (use separate windows instead of tabs) allows them to at least be apple-ticked through. And they'll show up separately in the dock and you can apple-tab if you use different web browsers for them, but I suspect he cares less about the dock and the literal tab key than the easy flip-through from the keyboard which separate windows in the same browser provides.
Can you cycle through an app's windows using a keyboard shortcut on a Mac? Why yes... yes, you can. So far from being useless, his advice is spot-on, whether he knows the keyboard shortcut in question or not. Way to be pointlessly, repellently elitist.
Personally I like the behavior of the XP Alt-Tab Power Toy better than either the Mac behavior or the default Windows behavior.
...they need to invest some time in readability. Squashing a bitmap to a smaller size and leaving it unreadable (on the front page, no less) is a big red flag that this was thrown together by people who aren't bothering to do a thorough job. Sure, maybe if I click through I'll get the full-size bitmap in all its pie-wedge glory, but given the obvious lack of thought and review signaled by that graph, I'm not very inclined to read any further.
I remember $0.99 / gallon in 1999... only 7 years ago. I remember because I was in my third year of college at the time, and was happy gas was so cheap on my college budget.
My experience may be skewed by the fact that in 1994 I left home to go to college and the gas prices in Charlottesville, VA were appreciably higher than back home at any given time. But I'm pretty sure gas was over $1.00 back in my hometown within a year or two of me leaving home; your experience obviously differed. The more interesting question is to compare gas prices where you went to college then, and now. Any idea what that looks like? I'd expect that if it was that cheap there in 1999 when I was paying well over a dollar in central VA, it's still pretty cheap now.
I didn't mention real income because it's not just gas that has gone up; everything has gone up, even things whose cost is only indirectly (if at all) affected by the price of gas, like health care. Even if you don't have a car, it's still harder to get by as a minimum wage earner than it was 10 years ago. Compared to other things gas is not that far out of the trend line. It's just something we're confronted by the price of everywhere we go, so everybody has an idea what gas costs, even people who don't drive.
While it's true gas prices are indeed dropping, they're still at an unacceptable level. If we see $1.15 (by the way, this is dependent on area, my recently "lowered" gas prices are still above $2.50, so I'm not sure where you're referring to) I will be truly shocked.
In my area (DC/Baltimore metro) prices have recently dropped from well over $3.00/gal to about $2.20/$2.30 depending on where you buy. I took a trip to see friends this weekend in Northern VA and saw it for $2.15 at several places near their home.
I remember the days of $.99/gallon (I know, I'm not that old) so getting the prices to $2.00 isn't exactly party worthy in my mind.
Have a look at US gasoline prices adjusted for inflation sometime. With minor variation from month to month, the graph is nearly flat. I remember the days of $0.89/$0.99 a gallon too -- they were 13 years ago, and that was at the cheapest gas station in town in an area where gas was (still is, as of last time I was home) much cheaper than elsewhere. Gas going up from $0.99 to $2.00 in 13 years is not that big a deal.
Incidentally I've been seeing articles for a couple of months now that gas was way over what the market should be seeing in economic terms, and was due for a big downward correction (kind of like the housing market some places). I haven't seen predictions of $1.15/gallon averages (and that would be way below where it ought to be economically), but I have seen predictions of $2.00 a gallon around December and that seems reasonable from the current perspective in late September.
Still I have to agree with you to some degree, while I think there's a need for a paradigm shift in fuel consumption, the American public has a short (sometimes non-existent) memory and will be downright ecstatic with an 50% price drop in gas; even when the original increase was 150%.
(100 + 150) * 0.5 = 125, so yes, such a trend line would be perfectly reasonable over a time period of a few years.
...or for anyone else who's checked the contents of their spam folder lately. I've been getting announcements that "you've been sent an e-card" with a link to an.exe on a bare IP address or a foreign site with a nonsensical DNS name for... years? Many months, definitely.
Given that many content producers are current paid only once, the only remaining potential harm that I can see is that piracy will cause a reduced demand for their time. That's kind of what you're implying with many of your arguments above, as far as I can tell,
Precisely.
but I haven't seen any evidence showing that piracy has or will decrease demand for new content. People continue to want new and different movies, music, and software, and pay for them to be created, as well as to attend live plays and concerts. If content producers will be paid for their time, and their time will continue to be in demand, I don't really see how piracy can hurt them. Can you show that piracy decreases demand (or even payment) for the time of content producers? If 'millions' of 'lost sales' can amount to significant harm through the power of calculus, then where is that harm?
Do I have sales figures? No, I'm not in that industry and their own figures on piracy and the impact from it are highly suspect in any case. But the nature of the current consumer culture is that there are a significant number of people who, given a choice between free downloads and paying for it, will download it. (There are also a significant number of people who, given the choice between downloads of sketchy quality, safety, and legality, or legal downloads of decent quality, will pay for the legal quality -- that's how iTunes makes money, and plenty of it.)
So it's more of a process of induction: if the people paying for the content to be created see (rightly or wrongly) a higher risk of not getting their investment back through subsequent sales, they're less likely to take the risk in the first place. It's the same force that has led to the decrease in long-term artist development -- why spend all that time and money developing a deep, complex artistic talent that people might not even like enough to let you break even, when you can have several Top-40 hit singles from another instant pop star who's forgotten next month (but not before you make a pile of money off him/her)?
I'm not arguing at all that the big media conglomerates are shining white knights -- I have as little patience for their legal and political tactics as most other people I know. Mostly I'm arguing on consequential grounds -- the choice is that piracy is legal or it is not. If it's legal, anyone can engage in it (and it's not piracy any more). If everyone does so, no money flows back to the content producers, so they have no money to finance the creation of new works whether they want to or not. To take an example, live music is a subset of the music industry, and I don't think if the recording industry went *poof* that there would be nearly the demand for technical audio folks as there is now. As far as wanting "new and different movies", etc. -- yes, they will be wanted, but whether enough people will be willing to pay for them to make them worth producing may be another matter. We're already at the point where movie theaters are taking a loss on ticket sales (and have been for years) and making up the difference in concessions. If enough people quit going to the movies in favor of just downloading them off the Internet, that concession revenue doesn't flow to the theaters, so they close. Then the ticket revenue quits flowing to the movie studios, so they have to jack up their prices to the rental trade (which they hate but are legally forced to tolerate anyway). The death-spiral either ends in rental prices going up to absurd levels, spurring rampant piracy and the final collapse of both rental outlets and movie studios, or the movie industry contracting so it can survive on rental income with the occasional art-house showing independent films in limited distribution. Everybody loses a lot in the doomsday everyone-gets-it-free scenario.
You also point out that various laws and consequences of sale of rights exist, but those differ from piracy in the concept of consent: a creator who sells the rights to their work does
Lets put it another way. As a software developer or other content producer in what way am I harmed when people pirate something I've worked on? Be sure the address the fact that open source developers give their products away for free, and can still be paid.
Ask any shareware developer who ever struggled to pay their bills knowing that millions of people downloaded their software and used it every day but never paid for it. Even for people whose benefit from sales is indirect (i.e. paid on a fixed salary instead of per-sale in some way), the fact that you can't show significant harm from a single lost sale doesn't mean there's no harm done from millions of lost sales.
Open-source developers choose to give their software away for free. In effect they've set the price at $0.00 and people are paying the asking price. Other developers do not choose to do so, and it's their right to choose that option. To force them to give you their software for free by pirating it is disrespecting their right to dispose of the product of their work as they see fit. If someone wants to buy millions of copies of a piece of commercial software and give it away, fine -- the first-sale doctrine protects them and I'll support them all the way. But to buy one copy, and give it away to millions for free on the Internet, thus costing the developer at least some portion of sales, is ethically and legally indefensible.
There is also the concept of intangible "harm", such as trespassing. It's illegal to trespass on private property even when no measurable damage is done, and if you refuse to leave after the owner tells to to, the police can and will haul you away. It's still grand theft auto even if you bring the car back before the owner misses it, washed, waxed, oil changed and with a full tank of gas. So your insistence on focusing on direct financial harm is irrelevant anyway, unless you also want to abolish all privacy and "quiet enjoyment" and exclusive-access property rights.
Is this the first time the submitter has been a media flack who doesn't even go through the formality of registering a Slashdot account to submit? (Check out where the link from the submitter's name goes.)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course we have a backup server which this particular user should have been on, but wasn't, because the guy whose job it was to install the backup app on her PC hadn't done so.
And yeah, I should have verified the backup :) Ultimately it was no more than an annoyance, and as I pointed out at the time, the same thing could have happened at any time due to random disk lossage corrupting her mail folders (a weak defense, but valid to a point).
She lost about six years' worth of mail, modulo the three-year-old backup and the two weeks' worth that was still saved on the server. Boy did I feel like an ass.
As a result our documented procedures for migrating users to new standard images now have a big bold note NOT to use the MS profile tool, and really the only reason you would ever need to is if you were copying a user's folder to a server to be a multi-user mandatory profile (because the MSPT makes it easy to change the scope of who is allowed to run that profile). I do that in the labs at another location, which was why I automatically went for the tool in this case.
Why yes, yes it did. It was even considered "edgy" because the Internet (capital I) was abbreviated with a lowercase letter!
The degree of the industry's plagiarism of Apple's style decisions can be measured by the fact that prior to the iMac introduction, anything vaguely Internet-related was tagged "e-" (for "electronic) -- e-commerce, e-mail, e-this, e-that. Almost immediately after the iMac exploded on the scene, the e- was quietly dropped and new Internet things were tagged "i" or "i-".
Who said anything about employers? As an employee I'm interested in anything that cuts the noise level in my environment. Two days out of the week I'm in an office where the permanently-installed cube desk is right next to the server rack and the aircon unit, and since I'm IT support during class hours I'm supposed to keep the top half of my Dutch door open for people to stick their head in if they need help. Practically all the foot traffic in the hallway goes past my office since I'm between the two labs and near the elevators.
What I need is something that will block out all the external noise, and some sort of alert bell device people can press that will give me a visual alert (they make doorbells like this for deaf people, but I want something wireless if I can get it so I don't have to string wire around).
Since I'm the only IT employee based at this site, most knowledge transfer with my co-workers and management is conducted via e-mail, IM, the occasional phone call and the rare face-to-face meeting. Being able to selectively hear things would be an incredible boon for me.
That said, others have already noted the Slashvertised product in question looks pretty bogus.
I'm not saying it hasn't happened ever -- just that those companies who perpetrate such abominations are beyond clueless and most likely will bear full legal liability if anything goes wrong leading to loss of life.
Pretending that WND is an unbiased source is roughly on the same intellectual level as trying to say that Ted Turner had absolutely no political agenda in how he ran his media holdings.
This was not a special *sucks website that the defendant set up. This was a series of postings to an already-widely-known forum specific to the plaintiff's field of business. We're not talking about, to make an analogy, fordsucks.com but rather a series of postings about Ford Motor Company on edmunds.com.
The courts have already dealt with that in the advertising world, in which they've consistently held that statements so outlandish no reasonable person could believe them are not false advertising. I would presume some similar standard exists for slander/libel, and if it doesn't, I think it would be a good thing if it did.
Wouldn't it, however, be better to let society do the critical thinking and decide for themselves if they're going to believe everything they hear?
In some ways the law is trying to deal with the fact that people are imperfect creatures. For example there was the case of a guy with a serious cognitive deficiency who ended up owing a dealership for some absurd number of new cars. His family sued on the grounds that the dealership knowingly took advantage of his memory impairment (he would literally forget he had bought a new car within a day or two). As I recall they won.
You could think of it as taking unfair advantage of the terrain -- if you know where a gopher hole is on a football field, and you play in such a way as to try to maneuver the opposing team's star receiver into stepping in the hole and breaking his ankle, you're not really playing fair, are you? Libel/slander law is just trying to keep people from taking unfair advantage of this particular hole in the perfection of the field.
Not necessarily true. We're not talking about random websites; we're apparently talking about a specialized site dedicated to the particular business that Scheff operated in. Given the non-ephemeral, ubiquitously-accessible nature of message-board postings in the era of the Wayback Machine and Google, it's entirely conceivable that a series of postings on a single message board could do irreparable harm to Scheff's reputation for years to come.
The huge amount is not about the damages incurred so far, but the damages potentially incurred for the rest of Scheff's working life (much like injury awards).
$11.3 million sure looks big to me, but I don't quite dismiss it as farcical without knowing things like Scheff's typical income and any demonstrated variation in her income after the postings in question. If you're making $250,000 a year and suddenly somebody's online spew reduces it to $50K, that's a $200,000 annual loss right off, to say nothing of lost growth opportunity.
You are also, by the way, deemed to have been served if copies of the papers were sent by registered mail to your last known address, whether or not you ever sign for them. USPS posts a delivery attempt notice on your door, and the law assumes that you check your mail at regular intervals or at least come home now and again (often enough to get such a notice and sign for the letter before it's returned, at least). So the fact that the papers came back at this stage doesn't necessarily mean anything to the lawyers -- they probably just assumed it was another lame attempt to dodge service, because a year later is plenty of time to have filed a forwarding address and informed the court of your new temporary residence, at which point I expect they would say "and by the way, your trial date has been scheduled, it is..."
You can make a defense to either of these cases by showing that the other party knew or reasonably should have known that the address they served you at is not your current address, so the burden goes both ways.
In this case we have someone who knew there was an ongoing legal proceeding against her and just dropped out of sight in the middle of it. That's never a defense to presumption of service.
Even if she found out too late to appear in person, I've never heard of a court that won't let you appear in writing. Even a simple letter to the court explaining your side is better than just blowing the whole thing off.
To me this looks like the lady knew she was going to (and deserved to) lose, and tried to take an easy out when a hurricane forced her to relocate. She got hit with a bigger judgement than I would have expected, but I can't say I feel too much sympathy for her even so. The jury was probably punishing her for wasting their time as much as anything else.
Merriam-Webster accept the version with the 'e' as a variant; the OED actually seems to list with-the-e as the preferred spelling. It only makes sense from a phonetic and orthographic point of view -- other verb-ending-in-e words retain the 'e' when you add -ment, such as impale, encase, enforce, etc.
If I have two friends who buy XYZ hard drives, and they both tell me the XYZ drive sucks, I'm that much less likely to buy an XYZ drive, simply because the sum of my knowledge is slanted against them. It doesn't mean I take it as an absolute fact that XYZ drives suck, but I'll at least think twice about spending money on one. It's the concept of "preponderance of evidence", which is also the standard of proof in a case like this one -- if one side is not represented it pretty much means the other side wins automatically. (That also means this lady would have been better served to file her defense in writing than to simply make no defense at all. By failing to appear she implicitly concedes that the other side is 100% correct and there is nothing to defend.)
In a world of perfect and complete information flow, where everything that is said is known by or at least accessible to everyone instantly, there's no need for libel or slander laws, but that day is not yet.
The original desire was "They aren't in my dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through." The proposed solution (use separate windows instead of tabs) allows them to at least be apple-ticked through. And they'll show up separately in the dock and you can apple-tab if you use different web browsers for them, but I suspect he cares less about the dock and the literal tab key than the easy flip-through from the keyboard which separate windows in the same browser provides.
Personally I like the behavior of the XP Alt-Tab Power Toy better than either the Mac behavior or the default Windows behavior.
...they need to invest some time in readability. Squashing a bitmap to a smaller size and leaving it unreadable (on the front page, no less) is a big red flag that this was thrown together by people who aren't bothering to do a thorough job. Sure, maybe if I click through I'll get the full-size bitmap in all its pie-wedge glory, but given the obvious lack of thought and review signaled by that graph, I'm not very inclined to read any further.
My experience may be skewed by the fact that in 1994 I left home to go to college and the gas prices in Charlottesville, VA were appreciably higher than back home at any given time. But I'm pretty sure gas was over $1.00 back in my hometown within a year or two of me leaving home; your experience obviously differed. The more interesting question is to compare gas prices where you went to college then, and now. Any idea what that looks like? I'd expect that if it was that cheap there in 1999 when I was paying well over a dollar in central VA, it's still pretty cheap now.
I didn't mention real income because it's not just gas that has gone up; everything has gone up, even things whose cost is only indirectly (if at all) affected by the price of gas, like health care. Even if you don't have a car, it's still harder to get by as a minimum wage earner than it was 10 years ago. Compared to other things gas is not that far out of the trend line. It's just something we're confronted by the price of everywhere we go, so everybody has an idea what gas costs, even people who don't drive.
While it's true gas prices are indeed dropping, they're still at an unacceptable level. If we see $1.15 (by the way, this is dependent on area, my recently "lowered" gas prices are still above $2.50, so I'm not sure where you're referring to) I will be truly shocked.
In my area (DC/Baltimore metro) prices have recently dropped from well over $3.00/gal to about $2.20/$2.30 depending on where you buy. I took a trip to see friends this weekend in Northern VA and saw it for $2.15 at several places near their home.
I remember the days of $.99/gallon (I know, I'm not that old) so getting the prices to $2.00 isn't exactly party worthy in my mind.
Have a look at US gasoline prices adjusted for inflation sometime. With minor variation from month to month, the graph is nearly flat. I remember the days of $0.89/$0.99 a gallon too -- they were 13 years ago, and that was at the cheapest gas station in town in an area where gas was (still is, as of last time I was home) much cheaper than elsewhere. Gas going up from $0.99 to $2.00 in 13 years is not that big a deal.
Incidentally I've been seeing articles for a couple of months now that gas was way over what the market should be seeing in economic terms, and was due for a big downward correction (kind of like the housing market some places). I haven't seen predictions of $1.15/gallon averages (and that would be way below where it ought to be economically), but I have seen predictions of $2.00 a gallon around December and that seems reasonable from the current perspective in late September.
Still I have to agree with you to some degree, while I think there's a need for a paradigm shift in fuel consumption, the American public has a short (sometimes non-existent) memory and will be downright ecstatic with an 50% price drop in gas; even when the original increase was 150%.
(100 + 150) * 0.5 = 125, so yes, such a trend line would be perfectly reasonable over a time period of a few years.
...or for anyone else who's checked the contents of their spam folder lately. I've been getting announcements that "you've been sent an e-card" with a link to an .exe on a bare IP address or a foreign site with a nonsensical DNS name for... years? Many months, definitely.
Precisely.
but I haven't seen any evidence showing that piracy has or will decrease demand for new content. People continue to want new and different movies, music, and software, and pay for them to be created, as well as to attend live plays and concerts. If content producers will be paid for their time, and their time will continue to be in demand, I don't really see how piracy can hurt them. Can you show that piracy decreases demand (or even payment) for the time of content producers? If 'millions' of 'lost sales' can amount to significant harm through the power of calculus, then where is that harm?
Do I have sales figures? No, I'm not in that industry and their own figures on piracy and the impact from it are highly suspect in any case. But the nature of the current consumer culture is that there are a significant number of people who, given a choice between free downloads and paying for it, will download it. (There are also a significant number of people who, given the choice between downloads of sketchy quality, safety, and legality, or legal downloads of decent quality, will pay for the legal quality -- that's how iTunes makes money, and plenty of it.)
So it's more of a process of induction: if the people paying for the content to be created see (rightly or wrongly) a higher risk of not getting their investment back through subsequent sales, they're less likely to take the risk in the first place. It's the same force that has led to the decrease in long-term artist development -- why spend all that time and money developing a deep, complex artistic talent that people might not even like enough to let you break even, when you can have several Top-40 hit singles from another instant pop star who's forgotten next month (but not before you make a pile of money off him/her)?
I'm not arguing at all that the big media conglomerates are shining white knights -- I have as little patience for their legal and political tactics as most other people I know. Mostly I'm arguing on consequential grounds -- the choice is that piracy is legal or it is not. If it's legal, anyone can engage in it (and it's not piracy any more). If everyone does so, no money flows back to the content producers, so they have no money to finance the creation of new works whether they want to or not. To take an example, live music is a subset of the music industry, and I don't think if the recording industry went *poof* that there would be nearly the demand for technical audio folks as there is now. As far as wanting "new and different movies", etc. -- yes, they will be wanted, but whether enough people will be willing to pay for them to make them worth producing may be another matter. We're already at the point where movie theaters are taking a loss on ticket sales (and have been for years) and making up the difference in concessions. If enough people quit going to the movies in favor of just downloading them off the Internet, that concession revenue doesn't flow to the theaters, so they close. Then the ticket revenue quits flowing to the movie studios, so they have to jack up their prices to the rental trade (which they hate but are legally forced to tolerate anyway). The death-spiral either ends in rental prices going up to absurd levels, spurring rampant piracy and the final collapse of both rental outlets and movie studios, or the movie industry contracting so it can survive on rental income with the occasional art-house showing independent films in limited distribution. Everybody loses a lot in the doomsday everyone-gets-it-free scenario.
You also point out that various laws and consequences of sale of rights exist, but those differ from piracy in the concept of consent: a creator who sells the rights to their work does
Ask any shareware developer who ever struggled to pay their bills knowing that millions of people downloaded their software and used it every day but never paid for it. Even for people whose benefit from sales is indirect (i.e. paid on a fixed salary instead of per-sale in some way), the fact that you can't show significant harm from a single lost sale doesn't mean there's no harm done from millions of lost sales.
Open-source developers choose to give their software away for free. In effect they've set the price at $0.00 and people are paying the asking price. Other developers do not choose to do so, and it's their right to choose that option. To force them to give you their software for free by pirating it is disrespecting their right to dispose of the product of their work as they see fit. If someone wants to buy millions of copies of a piece of commercial software and give it away, fine -- the first-sale doctrine protects them and I'll support them all the way. But to buy one copy, and give it away to millions for free on the Internet, thus costing the developer at least some portion of sales, is ethically and legally indefensible.
There is also the concept of intangible "harm", such as trespassing. It's illegal to trespass on private property even when no measurable damage is done, and if you refuse to leave after the owner tells to to, the police can and will haul you away. It's still grand theft auto even if you bring the car back before the owner misses it, washed, waxed, oil changed and with a full tank of gas. So your insistence on focusing on direct financial harm is irrelevant anyway, unless you also want to abolish all privacy and "quiet enjoyment" and exclusive-access property rights.
Is this the first time the submitter has been a media flack who doesn't even go through the formality of registering a Slashdot account to submit? (Check out where the link from the submitter's name goes.)