The U.S. is in a transition, for better or worse, from the manufacturing economy we've had since 1900 or so to an information economy
No, we've completed a transition from a productive, creditor nation to a consumer, debtor nation in about 30 years. Someone produced all those neat toys that make your "information economy" possible. Odds are, it wasn't an American. Ideas and "intellectual property" are not tangible goods being produced by this nation. They take nearly no effort to copy. No amount of DRM or IP laws are going to change that. As an extreme case, India is not going to sit by quietly and watch its population of PEOPLE die from AIDS because they cannot afford our patented AIDS drugs. They will simply break our laws, and infringe on our self declared, concocted monopoly to produce those drugs. "Intellectual property" only exists to provide incentive to people "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." When your family, friends, neighbors and countrymen are being decimated by disease, you need no other incentive. The drugs will continue to be researched and made by people with a personal investment in them. To a lesser extent, the same applies to books, movies, songs, and all other art, culture, and information "protected" by our "intellectual property" laws. We will soon wake up to the fact that it is a total sham, impoverished and struggling to survive. Outsourcing, piracy, draconian IP laws, and our weakening currency are only the symptoms of this eventual outcome. The American behemoth is being outmaneuvered and outsmarted by more nimble nations with real production capacity, real goods to sell, and few if any "intellectual property" laws to stifle the innovation of those goods.
Think of it this way... Google shed more share value in one day than GM's entire marketcap. That's a little more than 'ouch.' At a 12% loss, that means Google is worth 8 times more than GM? GM's gross revenues absolutely dwarfs that of Google's... somewhere in the neighborhood of two orders of magnitude. A startup isn't going to just pop up and knock out GM. There are too many barriers to entry. Maybe Google is making buckets of money right now, but lots of people are interested in making buckets of money. Some smart kids from some university can and I dare say *will* pop up and knock Google off its throne, just as Google did to Yahoo, and Yahoo did to Altavista. It's only a matter of time. Google's revenue is based on the location of a fickle public's eyeballs. Some upstart with "the buzz" could change the location of those eyeballs almost overnight. Basing Google's share value on "estimated future earnings" is therefore quite risky.
Clearly it's already rising back up to its once held position.
No, that's the kind of "can't loose" mentality that cost so many people so dearly during the first internet bubble. I don't think Google will disappear anytime soon, but I'd double check the numbers before investing a lot of money based on Slashdot groupthink. Personally, I'd invest in the band. At least if it's a bad investment, you'll still derive pleasure from it. Losing your ass in GOOG will only leave you poor and bitter.
The large majority of climatologists are reasonably certain that fossil fuel consumption is part of the equation. A very small minority, who are frequently cherry-picked by those who simply wish to avoid reality, do not think so.
And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.
Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?
And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.
Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?
That's my point. Where does inflation come from? Why, when we create more money, that's where. You can't dilute the value of gold by printing more of it. You have to work hard to dig it out of the ground and purify it. Unless you've got some magic way to siphon off the micro amounts of it in sea water, the value of gold will stay relatively fixed. Sure, there's periods of high and low demand in any commodity, but paper money isn't a commodity. The value of a dollar is easy to play with. The actual cost to the US Treasury to print a sheet of $100 bills is a tiny fraction of what that sheet is "worth" but only so long as they print very few of them and they are extremely difficult to counterfeit. The government is what creates the inflation, because the government prints the money. I'm not blind. I see a population living beyond its means (massive trade imbalance, a real estate bubble about to burst) and a government that can't pay its bills (8.2 trillion dollar national debt). We are a consumer, debtor nation. We are a net negative on this Earth. That won't last forever. When it comes time to pay the piper, the government is going to crank up the presses and print day and night to do it. Greenbacks will be worthless.
Looking the same thing by another side, there are some times when you WANT the government to print a little more money. So all the people that need to carry money to buy stuff, and all the people that want to keep some money at home can do that without the money value rising and without affecting the external transactions.
Oh, don't worry. You won't have to worry about the value of your dollar increasing if they print more of them. Quite the opposite occurs. Simple supply and demand there. That's the real problem with any monetary system not based on a relatively fixed supply of something like gold. Central bankers can just print to their hearts delight and make your savings worthless. When the US dropped the gold standard in 1971, gold was worth $40/oz. Now, it's worth $550/oz. If you had $10000 in the bank then, it was worth 250 oz. of gold. Now it's only worth about 18 oz. Needless to say, 250 oz of gold then is still worth 250 oz of gold today. Why would anyone save in greenbacks? They just keep printing more, making your savings worthless. So much so, that they are going to stop printing the M3 report. Can we say "Print money day and night, as fast as you can." Good... I thought you could.
Google is a business, a business with shareholders who demand results, results which include expanding into other markets via legal means.
Google is a business founded on the premise of "do no evil." If I were a shareholder, I think I'd have a right to be pissed. Results can preclude evil.
We need as much Chinese business as we can get to help with the ever-growing trade imbalances as we import much more than we export.
No, we need more fair trade and less 'free trade.' China sells whatever they want into our market with few, if any restrictions. Try selling American made anything there and see if you get the same deal. Of course, nobody on capital hill (yes, I misspelled that on purpose) has the balls to stand up for fair trade because we owe China lots of money. This is what you get when you "starve the beast."
If the government is using ID as a substitute for searches or X-ray or whatever is actually needed, they're kidding themselves.
This is old news, but (bomb + altimeter + airmail) == gaping hole in airport security. We know about it, just like we knew about lax screening at airports before 9/11. Nothing is being done. Nothing will be done until commercial airliners start to explode.
Asking for your identification before boarding a plane is no more unreasonable than asking for your ID when making a credit card transaction,
Visa and Mastercard think it's unreasonable, boss. If you ask for an ID with a credit card, and that card is signed on the back, you can loose your merchant account. That's how my contract reads anyway. I think that's pretty standard though. You don't need an ID to use cash, therefore, they don't want merchants requiring it for card transactions either. Ultimately, it's the merchant that gets hung with no goods and no funds in a fraudulent transaction, so they don't really care about anything besides that.
Instead of ever migrating to both sides conceding when they are wrong you get both sides never conceding anything.
Making both sides look like idiots. Introduce the possibility of real competition in elections, and you might see a lot of people start coming to sane conclusions. Right now, all we've got is rigged voting machines in gerrymandered districts re-electing the same good ol' boys in a forced two party system. That isn't democracy.
A key concern is that phone and cable companies could potentially use their power over the network to act as gatekeepers of the Internet, discriminating and limiting consumers' access to certain services so that some Web sites and online services are favored.
Now, go lobby congress for "network neutrality" while cable and phone companies lobby for a 2 tier internet and see who runs out of money first. Who's going to come to your rescue? Google? They'll like the deal. They've got the money to pay, upstarts who might take them out, don't.
This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law.
Sadly, that is no longer the case. Individuals have and continue to come into court and consistently get their way at the expense of the public. They do so routinely. The Supreme Court of the United States even upheld Congresses right to apply copyright retroactively with the Sonny Bono CTEA. Personally, I like this quote better, it seems much more relevant:
Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay
The MacWorld of 1998 had Jobs introducing Gates on stage, and they announced that M$ would make a US$150 million investment in Apple, buying US$75M of non-voting stock at twice the price (IIRC, AAPL was at $11/share, M$ paid $22/share). The deal also included a patent portfolio swap, where each has unlimited access to the other's patents royalty free. M$ agreed to support a fully functional version of office on the mac for at least 10 years. Apple agreed to drop its support of the anti-trust case. There were a bunch of other details in the deal which made the business rather unsavory, but both companies desperately needed each other at that moment in time.
August, 1997. Look at the old stock charts. See that spike? That day.
The entire deal was for five years.
Apple agreed to settle its lawsuit with Microsoft for an undisclosed sum of money separate from the $150 million dollar investment.
The only concession Apple really made for Microsoft was to bundle IE as the default browser on the Mac for 5 years. Later in the DOJ's anti-trust case, Apple's Avi Tevanian testified that Microsoft had tried to get Apple to step out of the QuickTime for Windows business and focus only on video editing and playback on the Macintosh. Apple refused. Google for "quicktime knife the baby" for details.
it looks like Jobs is getting his revenge.
I think the only revenge Jobs ever wanted was for being kicked out of his own company. Not so much revenge even, it's more like vindication. He came back and led Apple out of the woods and back to greatness. The Mac/PC holy war was a lot like the Apple II/Mac holy war. Jobs invented it to serve his own purposes. He had no real emotional investment in it himself. That was made quite clear through his actions 8 1/2 years ago. I continued to allow folks like John Dvorak over at PC mag to goad me for a while after, but when the press no longer tagged Apple with the beleaguered moniker, I got over the whole thing myself. A computer is a tool. I prefer a Mac, but I can see where Windows PCs and various *nixes fit into the equation.
Bill Gates really doesn't figure into the picture here. He's always wanted to be the 'rockstar' that Jobs is, but no matter how much money he's made, he's never achieved that in his own mind. Jobs isn't concerned with Gates or money. After $100,000,000 he had more money than he could ever spend... to paraphrase Jobs. Jobs wants Apple to succeed out of personal pride. Beginning January 1, 1998 APPL has been a stock market superstar. Nobody can touch that track record. Given that they are still at 3% marketshare in their core market, they really have nowhere to go but up. Intel based Macs may very well be what turns the tables on Dell/HP/Lenovo dominance. And it won't have a thing to do with getting revenge on Gates. The technology deal with Microsoft announced at this MacWorld probably has a lot to do with that. Jobs wants Gates to support Windows on Apple hardware. Not as a replacement for OS X, but as a compliment to it. That way he can stand in front of a crowd at the next Macworld and say, "It slices, it dices, it runs Windows and Mac!" Jobs' "revenge" has nothing to do with Gates and everything to do with Jobs being escorted away from Apple campus in 1985. It's personal.
At first I was unhappy with the settlement, but then I got to the following section:
Yeah, that's great and all, but can you point me to the section where they promise to cooperate with felony computer trespass investigations? No? How about the section where they promise to make available copies of all data/information stolen from their victims' hard drives to the investigating authorities and then purge all such information from their own records? Oh, no section for that either huh? How about the section where they will offer a public apology for hypocritically violating the GPL and committing copyright infringement in the name of *preventing* copyright infringement? You're joking, no section for that either?? Well, this settlement just sucks. I'd still file for exclusion if I were a member of the class.
The post (from the previous article) I found that info in [slashdot.org]
You might want to check out MacDork's latest journal entry too;-) (Yes, my write up got beaten by this one... but mine is still pending, so I'm hoping for a dupe at least...)
So.... Sony isn't going to see any criminal charges, but you can definitely have a go at trying to get more blood out of them.
I wouldn't say criminal charges are out of the question... It's just that we can't get any public officials to investigate the fact that an entity controlled by foreign nationals has seized control of hundreds of thousands of computers in our technology dependent nation. Wouldn't it be ironic if the *Japanese* were the one's to bring about the much hyped "digital Pearl Harbor" after our politicians' stirring pledges of "Never Again!" during that other great war...
Male NIST Agent: "What's this we hear about a rootkit on music CDs?"
Sony Japan: "Everyone in your town have Big A-meh-akin Penis"
<Sony Japan rep sees female NIST agent>
Sony Japan: "What I mean to say is every MAN in your town have very big penis!"
Female NIST Agent: "He's changing the subject, he's probably just lying. I'll bet his penis is bigger than yours."
<Sony Japan rep drops pants. Male NIST agents all smile broadly.>
Male NIST Agent: "I'm sure it's just a copyright protection thing, nothing to worry about."
I submitted the same story. I think mine was slightly more informative than a simple rehash of settlement terms. It's still pending, but since now that it would be a dupe....:-/
When your own "great leader" is defending himself against charges of spying on the citizenry, holding captives indefinitely without trial, torturing prisoners, and invading sovereign nations based on fabricated evidence... you don't really have any moral high ground left to shout from. You act as though journalists are free to print whatever they want here in the United States. I beg to differ.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of email if you can't open your email?
No, we've completed a transition from a productive, creditor nation to a consumer, debtor nation in about 30 years. Someone produced all those neat toys that make your "information economy" possible. Odds are, it wasn't an American. Ideas and "intellectual property" are not tangible goods being produced by this nation. They take nearly no effort to copy. No amount of DRM or IP laws are going to change that. As an extreme case, India is not going to sit by quietly and watch its population of PEOPLE die from AIDS because they cannot afford our patented AIDS drugs. They will simply break our laws, and infringe on our self declared, concocted monopoly to produce those drugs. "Intellectual property" only exists to provide incentive to people "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." When your family, friends, neighbors and countrymen are being decimated by disease, you need no other incentive. The drugs will continue to be researched and made by people with a personal investment in them. To a lesser extent, the same applies to books, movies, songs, and all other art, culture, and information "protected" by our "intellectual property" laws. We will soon wake up to the fact that it is a total sham, impoverished and struggling to survive. Outsourcing, piracy, draconian IP laws, and our weakening currency are only the symptoms of this eventual outcome. The American behemoth is being outmaneuvered and outsmarted by more nimble nations with real production capacity, real goods to sell, and few if any "intellectual property" laws to stifle the innovation of those goods.
Think of it this way... Google shed more share value in one day than GM's entire marketcap. That's a little more than 'ouch.' At a 12% loss, that means Google is worth 8 times more than GM? GM's gross revenues absolutely dwarfs that of Google's... somewhere in the neighborhood of two orders of magnitude. A startup isn't going to just pop up and knock out GM. There are too many barriers to entry. Maybe Google is making buckets of money right now, but lots of people are interested in making buckets of money. Some smart kids from some university can and I dare say *will* pop up and knock Google off its throne, just as Google did to Yahoo, and Yahoo did to Altavista. It's only a matter of time. Google's revenue is based on the location of a fickle public's eyeballs. Some upstart with "the buzz" could change the location of those eyeballs almost overnight. Basing Google's share value on "estimated future earnings" is therefore quite risky.
Clearly it's already rising back up to its once held position.
No, that's the kind of "can't loose" mentality that cost so many people so dearly during the first internet bubble. I don't think Google will disappear anytime soon, but I'd double check the numbers before investing a lot of money based on Slashdot groupthink. Personally, I'd invest in the band. At least if it's a bad investment, you'll still derive pleasure from it. Losing your ass in GOOG will only leave you poor and bitter.
And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.
The soil releases an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned each year combined. No till farming in America could take as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking half of all the cars in America off the road. A full 40% of the Earth's arable land is being used for agriculture and most of it is being severely degraded by tillage. Why aren't you people up in arms about that? Hey, burn the f'in farmers right? They're greedy evil bastards.
Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?
Wow, the Sun IS getting hotter, and Earth's temperature correlates directly with it.
And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.
Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?
That's my point. Where does inflation come from? Why, when we create more money, that's where. You can't dilute the value of gold by printing more of it. You have to work hard to dig it out of the ground and purify it. Unless you've got some magic way to siphon off the micro amounts of it in sea water, the value of gold will stay relatively fixed. Sure, there's periods of high and low demand in any commodity, but paper money isn't a commodity. The value of a dollar is easy to play with. The actual cost to the US Treasury to print a sheet of $100 bills is a tiny fraction of what that sheet is "worth" but only so long as they print very few of them and they are extremely difficult to counterfeit. The government is what creates the inflation, because the government prints the money. I'm not blind. I see a population living beyond its means (massive trade imbalance, a real estate bubble about to burst) and a government that can't pay its bills (8.2 trillion dollar national debt). We are a consumer, debtor nation. We are a net negative on this Earth. That won't last forever. When it comes time to pay the piper, the government is going to crank up the presses and print day and night to do it. Greenbacks will be worthless.
Oh, don't worry. You won't have to worry about the value of your dollar increasing if they print more of them. Quite the opposite occurs. Simple supply and demand there. That's the real problem with any monetary system not based on a relatively fixed supply of something like gold. Central bankers can just print to their hearts delight and make your savings worthless. When the US dropped the gold standard in 1971, gold was worth $40/oz. Now, it's worth $550/oz. If you had $10000 in the bank then, it was worth 250 oz. of gold. Now it's only worth about 18 oz. Needless to say, 250 oz of gold then is still worth 250 oz of gold today. Why would anyone save in greenbacks? They just keep printing more, making your savings worthless. So much so, that they are going to stop printing the M3 report. Can we say "Print money day and night, as fast as you can." Good... I thought you could.
My D&D character *is* a monk, you insensitive clod!
Google is a business founded on the premise of "do no evil." If I were a shareholder, I think I'd have a right to be pissed. Results can preclude evil.
We need as much Chinese business as we can get to help with the ever-growing trade imbalances as we import much more than we export.
No, we need more fair trade and less 'free trade.' China sells whatever they want into our market with few, if any restrictions. Try selling American made anything there and see if you get the same deal. Of course, nobody on capital hill (yes, I misspelled that on purpose) has the balls to stand up for fair trade because we owe China lots of money. This is what you get when you "starve the beast."
This is old news, but (bomb + altimeter + airmail) == gaping hole in airport security. We know about it, just like we knew about lax screening at airports before 9/11. Nothing is being done. Nothing will be done until commercial airliners start to explode.
Visa and Mastercard think it's unreasonable, boss. If you ask for an ID with a credit card, and that card is signed on the back, you can loose your merchant account. That's how my contract reads anyway. I think that's pretty standard though. You don't need an ID to use cash, therefore, they don't want merchants requiring it for card transactions either. Ultimately, it's the merchant that gets hung with no goods and no funds in a fraudulent transaction, so they don't really care about anything besides that.
Making both sides look like idiots. Introduce the possibility of real competition in elections, and you might see a lot of people start coming to sane conclusions. Right now, all we've got is rigged voting machines in gerrymandered districts re-electing the same good ol' boys in a forced two party system. That isn't democracy.
I think someone has tightened the belt on their hat too much. Check pages 58 and 195. How is that inappropriate in the least?
Game Over
The war's already over. We lost.
But it's still Disney, so it will be followed by iiNemo, iiiNemo, and ivNemo ;-)
Why would a Japanese company be interested in launching a stealth attack on US infrastructure... a "digital Pearl Harbor" so to speak? ;-)
Sadly, that is no longer the case. Individuals have and continue to come into court and consistently get their way at the expense of the public. They do so routinely. The Supreme Court of the United States even upheld Congresses right to apply copyright retroactively with the Sonny Bono CTEA. Personally, I like this quote better, it seems much more relevant:
;-)
The only concession Apple really made for Microsoft was to bundle IE as the default browser on the Mac for 5 years. Later in the DOJ's anti-trust case, Apple's Avi Tevanian testified that Microsoft had tried to get Apple to step out of the QuickTime for Windows business and focus only on video editing and playback on the Macintosh. Apple refused. Google for "quicktime knife the baby" for details.
it looks like Jobs is getting his revenge.
I think the only revenge Jobs ever wanted was for being kicked out of his own company. Not so much revenge even, it's more like vindication. He came back and led Apple out of the woods and back to greatness. The Mac/PC holy war was a lot like the Apple II/Mac holy war. Jobs invented it to serve his own purposes. He had no real emotional investment in it himself. That was made quite clear through his actions 8 1/2 years ago. I continued to allow folks like John Dvorak over at PC mag to goad me for a while after, but when the press no longer tagged Apple with the beleaguered moniker, I got over the whole thing myself. A computer is a tool. I prefer a Mac, but I can see where Windows PCs and various *nixes fit into the equation.
Bill Gates really doesn't figure into the picture here. He's always wanted to be the 'rockstar' that Jobs is, but no matter how much money he's made, he's never achieved that in his own mind. Jobs isn't concerned with Gates or money. After $100,000,000 he had more money than he could ever spend... to paraphrase Jobs. Jobs wants Apple to succeed out of personal pride. Beginning January 1, 1998 APPL has been a stock market superstar. Nobody can touch that track record. Given that they are still at 3% marketshare in their core market, they really have nowhere to go but up. Intel based Macs may very well be what turns the tables on Dell/HP/Lenovo dominance. And it won't have a thing to do with getting revenge on Gates. The technology deal with Microsoft announced at this MacWorld probably has a lot to do with that. Jobs wants Gates to support Windows on Apple hardware. Not as a replacement for OS X, but as a compliment to it. That way he can stand in front of a crowd at the next Macworld and say, "It slices, it dices, it runs Windows and Mac!" Jobs' "revenge" has nothing to do with Gates and everything to do with Jobs being escorted away from Apple campus in 1985. It's personal.
But that's just MHO :-)
Pardon, hour-ish metric units of time. Here comes the onslaught of nanosecond wisecracks...
177000 Km/hr... or 49166.67 m/s... why is there no metric second?
Yeah, that's great and all, but can you point me to the section where they promise to cooperate with felony computer trespass investigations? No? How about the section where they promise to make available copies of all data/information stolen from their victims' hard drives to the investigating authorities and then purge all such information from their own records? Oh, no section for that either huh? How about the section where they will offer a public apology for hypocritically violating the GPL and committing copyright infringement in the name of *preventing* copyright infringement? You're joking, no section for that either?? Well, this settlement just sucks. I'd still file for exclusion if I were a member of the class.
You might want to check out MacDork's latest journal entry too ;-) (Yes, my write up got beaten by this one... but mine is still pending, so I'm hoping for a dupe at least...)
So.... Sony isn't going to see any criminal charges, but you can definitely have a go at trying to get more blood out of them.
I wouldn't say criminal charges are out of the question... It's just that we can't get any public officials to investigate the fact that an entity controlled by foreign nationals has seized control of hundreds of thousands of computers in our technology dependent nation. Wouldn't it be ironic if the *Japanese* were the one's to bring about the much hyped "digital Pearl Harbor" after our politicians' stirring pledges of "Never Again!" during that other great war...
Male NIST Agent: "What's this we hear about a rootkit on music CDs?"
Sony Japan: "Everyone in your town have Big A-meh-akin Penis"
<Sony Japan rep sees female NIST agent>
Sony Japan: "What I mean to say is every MAN in your town have very big penis!"
Female NIST Agent: "He's changing the subject, he's probably just lying. I'll bet his penis is bigger than yours."
<Sony Japan rep drops pants. Male NIST agents all smile broadly.>
Male NIST Agent: "I'm sure it's just a copyright protection thing, nothing to worry about."
I submitted the same story. I think mine was slightly more informative than a simple rehash of settlement terms. It's still pending, but since now that it would be a dupe.... :-/
When your own "great leader" is defending himself against charges of spying on the citizenry, holding captives indefinitely without trial, torturing prisoners, and invading sovereign nations based on fabricated evidence... you don't really have any moral high ground left to shout from. You act as though journalists are free to print whatever they want here in the United States. I beg to differ.