But when folks are downloading songs from the Internet that they have not paid a single bit of royalties for then it doesn't seem to me that the record labels are being unreasonable by being upset about that.
Copyright infringement without profit motive is a new crime. It was invented in 1997 with the No Electronic Theft Act. Since that time, approximately 13,000 people have been sued by the RIAA for sharing music files online. In each case, defendants face penalties that do not fit the crime, are being threatened with evidence that is shaky at best, and are required to spend enormous amounts of money to defend themselves if they feel they are innocent.
Look at Mrs. Santangelo for an example. She has spent $24,000 defending herself rather than settling for $7,500. If she is guilty, she'd have to be insanely stupid to do that, no? At this point, she has run out of money to pay for representation and has been left to defend herself in court. The RIAA can afford this fight, a single mother of five cannot. She had an interview on CNN's American Morning with Miles O'Brien over the holidays. O'Brien's lead-ins were assuming guilt for thirty minutes before she ever got a chance to speak. Once she finally did get her say, she defended her innocence, and the last word was given to Cary Sherman, RIAA President.
What Miles failed to tell the audience was that CNN's parent company, AOL Time Warner, is a member of the RIAA. She was being interviewed without legal representation, on national TV, by the prosecution on the prosecution's terms. He also failed to mention that her service provider (AOL-CNN's parent company-RIAA member) stands to benefit directly from a successful lawsuit/settlement and is providing the one shaky piece of evidence the prosecution has presented: An IP address.
As you can see from the linked article, they knew who they were suing before they approached her. They knew she was a poor defenseless prole rather than someone in 'the family' or someone important like a Senator. So you decide: Is the RIAA just being "reasonably upset" or are they extorting money from defenseless Americans?
Yeah, whatever dude. What I'm hearing is the Linux/Mac crowd fixed 2000+ bugs while Microsoft only squashed about 850. To be unbiased, let's assume that each platform has an equal number of bugs, 3000 for the sake of argument. Anyway you spin that, we're closer to being done than they are!
If a herbicide-resistant weed is going to "just happen" to pop up in a GM field, it must also "just happen" to pop up in non-GM fields and we should have seen this weed years ago (especially because of the lower dosages used). Either this is a remarkable coincidence on the verge of being miraculous, or it comes from cross-pollenization.
Four weeks later, the scientist sends me an email saying that he has completed the DNA analysis and found no evidence of modification. He tested specifically for the presence of CP4 - a telltale indicator of the Roundup Ready modification - as well as for the cauliflower mosaic virus, the gene most commonly used to insert foreign DNA into a plant. It is still possible that the plant has been genetically modified using other genes, but not likely. Discovering new methods of engineering glyphosate resistance would require the best scientific minds and years of organized research. And given that there is already a published methodology, there would be little reason to duplicate the effort.
So you see, mother nature can develop Roundup resistance faster than our genetic engineers. She's been at it longer though. I would imagine "survival of the fittest" works quite nicely with with roundup resistance just like it does with antibiotic resistance. But there's no reason to argue about it. Obviously, it's possible to test this cross-pollenation theory by looking at the genes in these weeds. According to TFA:
"The frequency of such an event [the cross-fertilisation of charlock] in the field is likely to be very low, as highlighted by the fact it has never been detected in numerous previous assessments."
However, he adds: "This unusual occurrence merits further study in order to adequately assess any potential risk of gene transfer."
Apparently, they haven't bothered to do genetic testing yet. No reason to bitch one way or the other until they do. And you both know what they say about arguing on the internet, right?
I agree with you, however, Monsanto has been suing farmers who have not planted Monstano's Canola seeds yet the farmer's crops get cross-pollinated from a neighbouring Monsanto Canola field. Farmers call it 'Nature', Monstanto calls it 'Theft'.
If I recall correctly, that dispute revolved around the farmer wanting to actually harvest his crop when Monsanto wanted the crop destroyed. The farmer lost, Monsanto gets to destroy the crop in the name of IP. Given that, farmers should simply threaten to harvest the weed crop. Then they get to watch and laugh as Monsanto is forced to do their weeding the hard way.;-)
How many retards out there won't get the incremental-cost-to-sony "free" downloads or rebates? How many people will stop buying their stuff? None. Its a trial balloon - and Sony now knows what the market will bear.
I wouldn't call them retards. I'd say uninformed... anyway the key is on page 17 of the settlement.
D. Defendants' Limited Right To Withdraw From Settlement Defendants have the right to withdraw from the settlement, if the number of timely and valid requests for exclusion from the Settlement Class exceeds 1,000.
1000 requests for exclusion is a pretty low bar guys. If only those qualified reading slashdot filed for exclusion, you could pull this off. Sony should be in a lot deeper shit that this settlement provides. Filing a request for exclusion from the settlement class should send a message to these people... I'm as mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore! If the settlement is approved by the court, everyone here should file for exclusion. Don't let them get away with a slap on the wrist this time. I personally would not be happy until someone responsible for this at Sony was facing criminal charges.
But seriously, "all paperless" that can't be good. I might be old school but I like a papertrail when giving someone my money.
Yeah, me too, but most Americans pay with credit cards these days. I prefer a paper trail too (cash) but most of my American customers live on debt. And if someone isn't who they say they are, guess who gets stuck with no merchandise and no money to pay for it. That's right... me, the merchant. What you are complaining about, ID theft, is what merchants call a chargeback. You, after much frustration and fighting, will eventually get your money back. I won't. You're complaining about the dangers of efficiency and convenience. IMO, you should be complaining about the dangers of an antiquated system of plastic cards and magnetic stripes that store important information in plain text.
Yeah, I'd be happy as a lark doing it your way if everyone who came into my store plonked down greenbacks instead of gold cards. But that isn't reality. If privacy is your concern, your problem isn't the retailer, it's Choicepoint. The privacy argument is between you and your card company. You did, after all, give them your SSN to get that credit line. As for offering you cash customers (people who like paper trails as much as I do) preferential treatment and discounts, I'd love to. However part of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly's merchant policy is explicit: no preferential treatment to cash customers or you loose your merchant account. And since that's 90% of my business, I can't afford to do that. Otherwise, I'd be giving all my cash customers a 2% discount and a fast pass to the front of the line. Maybe when the average American decides it really is better to save and spend rather than spend and pay interest, things could be different.
I'm not trying to be nasty here, but look at it from both sides for a minute and you'll see the problem is with the mediator (CC companies). Not providing a bulletproof paper trail from the shopper's end of the equation, yet expecting one from the merchant without any guarantees from the guy in the middle is a bit unfair and unrealistic.
The thing I like so much about IM is that only people who I've explicitly allowed to contact me can actually contact me.
Ever heard of email filters/rules? You can do that pretty easily with any email client. Email isn't going anywhere. Personally, I prefer email to IMs because I can give more consideration to the things I say, it's easily encrypted for most email apps, I can get to your email when *I* have time for it, and I don't have to have XYZ corporations proprietary email client to receive email. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Jabber, IRC,... enough! I don't need or want all that crap. Just send me an email. Yes I know about Fire, Trillian, etc etc. Every one I've tried is feature incomplete to the extent that I end up having to get the 'official' version from XYZ corp to receive a voice chat, file transfer, or whatnot anyway. IM is not very useful to me because everyone I know uses a different network.
FTFA: "We don't allow kids to buy cigarettes or alcohol or look at pornography," he said. "There are already situations in which we as society have said we have to protect kids by limiting what they can do."
It is the same as if you lease a car, or a building, or any other asset.
Leasing a car isn't really any different than buying a car with a balloon payment at the end of the contract. Either you arrange to cough up the other half when it's over, or you hand over the car and pay for anything you've done to the car to hurt its value outside of the lease. Software is different. It's like leasing a ballroom. You can turn around and sell your right to use the ballroom, but you don't own the ballroom. You're not even given the option to buy the ballroom. The ballroom is attached to the hotel, so the only way you're getting the ballroom is to buy the entire hotel. You don't pay property taxes on a leased ballroom do ya?
I leased a truck for 5 years. I had to pay property taxes on it.
Yeah, and you could let as many people as you wanted ride in that truck, right? Buy one copy of MS Office, distribute to 1000 employees over intranet. Hey, it's my property, I paid the tax. They can't have it both ways.
And if in, say, Java, how do you know the subclass didn't override superclass methods to do totally different things!
Well, if you make a method final in Java, the compiler generates an error when you try to compile an overridden subclass method. That's one way to take care of the problem:-) Perhaps Ruby has something similar...?
RoR, codegen.. from what I gather, there's nothing there that wasn't done years ago. It's called WebObjects. So far, no one has mentioned to me or pointed out anything RoR does in Ruby that WebObjects doesn't do already in Java. Meanwhile you loose the advantage of TONS of mature libraries written in Java. Am I missing something? Is there something particularly compelling about Ruby perhaps? I'm not trying to be condescending toward RoR or anything, but all the 'hype' I've read here about RoR was done a decade ago with WO. Plus, WO does a number of things that I haven't heard the RoR camp boasting, like deploying database connected apps over the internet directly to the desktop with WebStart/D2JC.
But if you don't buy the **AA's products, the **AA will claim that they are losing money due to "piracy".
Yeah, but in that case, they'd actually be losing money. Right now, they're making money hand over fist AND claiming they are losing money due to piracy. Once they ACTUALLY start to lose money, they're screwed. Lobbyists don't work for free.
Boycott the RIAA. Check your music on the RIAA Radar before you make a music purchase.
Why wouldn't you try to get your elected representatives to oppose such legislation? What other avenues are left? Start your own telecom business and compete with Verizon or SBC for those lucrative local phone customers? Not likely - the barriers to entry are too high. Sure, there's lots of dark fiber out there, but there's no excess capacity in the last-mile, local-loop side of things.
Ahhhh, I see how it will happen now... First they get the Brand X decision from the Supreme Court. Consolidation starts until the resulting monopoly makes price/quality of the internet unbearable. Politicians step in to "save" us from the big evil monopoly with municipal internet plans. Once ubiquitous, anti-terror rhetoric used to consolidate control of municipal ISPs at the federal level. Big brother, 1984 style, begins "for the children."
To a great extent record companys are to blame for their financial problems, but also the person that steals music via P2P bares some of the burden. Lame that the person who would never dream of walking out of a store with a CD under their coat sees nothing wrong with downloading hundreds of CD's worth of music.
Nah, just lame that lobbyists for the music industry got the law changed in 1997 to make such an action a criminal one. People who download music on P2P are more closely related to people who listen to music on the radio than they are to shoplifters. Try telling that to lawmakers who steal regularly from the public domain on behalf of the music cartels though.
Get people who are not experts, see how many problems they run into doing simple tasks that they're familiar with on Windows.
I think, while interesting, doing only that will prove useless as a whole. Why? Because you are testing usability of specific applications rather than the system as a whole.
IMHO, a better approach would be to have a look at that platform's Human Interface Guidelines and see how complete their respective documentation is and how closely application developers follow them. If the Human Interface standards are incomplete, then developers are free to do whatever they want in grey areas, which leads to inconsistency and confusion.
Following that, select a few prevalent apps on each platform and grade them on conformance. HIGs are pretty useless if developers do not respect them. If developers are not following the guidelines, then that is a red flag itself. Either the guidelines suck, or developers need to be given a stronger incentive to follow them.
Finally, once you've done those two things, test users on the most HIG compliant apps you can find and see if the HIG itself is any good. If the guidelines suck, then compliant apps will suck and it will be obvious with user testing. Make suggestions for changes to whoever controls the respective HIG, wait for changes, rinse, repeat.
American corporations will not stand for being refused entry to a market encompassing a sixth of the world's population. This pressure began to build in the seventies and has only increased. This is the determining factor in all US/China dialogue.
And yet, every time I turn on the news these days, it's "Counterfeit Chinese" this and "Pirated Chinese" that. These western companies are expecting the Chinese government to respect 'Intellectual Property' rights of foreign corporations when the Chinese government doesn't even respect the REAL property rights of its own citizens. SuperShuffle anyone?
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt.
Yes, and the difference now is that the Chinese economy is propping up the American government, both by financing our massive debt/deficit
China and Japan have stopped buying American debt. When America hit somewhere around $7.5 Trillion, they said enough is enough. These days, we're getting money from unnamed benefactors who route money anonymously through caribbean banks. No, seriously.
and providing our consumer based economy with cheap goods, fueling our economy and tax base.
To some extent, yes, but here's the basic deal: They prop us up, we buy their shit. Well, with all the 'good jobs' going overseas, the money has to be coming from somewhere. That somewhere has been the housing market, which, by the way, is about to melt down. The US housing market is strained to its limits and consumer spending has tapered off as a result. Hence, China/Japan have stopped buying debt. The return on investment is no longer great enough. Of course, when the housing bubble pops, it won't be the S&L scandal of the 80's all over again. This time, there is no government bailout coming. The government simply doesn't have the money or the credit necessary for a real bailout. They'll have to print more money to do it, and that will make what money you have now worth about as much as confederate money. Central banks see it coming and are trading in dollars for hard assets as a result. Did you notice that gold happens to be at a 24 year high?
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement without profit motive is a new crime. It was invented in 1997 with the No Electronic Theft Act. Since that time, approximately 13,000 people have been sued by the RIAA for sharing music files online. In each case, defendants face penalties that do not fit the crime, are being threatened with evidence that is shaky at best, and are required to spend enormous amounts of money to defend themselves if they feel they are innocent.
Look at Mrs. Santangelo for an example. She has spent $24,000 defending herself rather than settling for $7,500. If she is guilty, she'd have to be insanely stupid to do that, no? At this point, she has run out of money to pay for representation and has been left to defend herself in court. The RIAA can afford this fight, a single mother of five cannot. She had an interview on CNN's American Morning with Miles O'Brien over the holidays. O'Brien's lead-ins were assuming guilt for thirty minutes before she ever got a chance to speak. Once she finally did get her say, she defended her innocence, and the last word was given to Cary Sherman, RIAA President.
What Miles failed to tell the audience was that CNN's parent company, AOL Time Warner, is a member of the RIAA. She was being interviewed without legal representation, on national TV, by the prosecution on the prosecution's terms. He also failed to mention that her service provider (AOL-CNN's parent company-RIAA member) stands to benefit directly from a successful lawsuit/settlement and is providing the one shaky piece of evidence the prosecution has presented: An IP address.
As you can see from the linked article, they knew who they were suing before they approached her. They knew she was a poor defenseless prole rather than someone in 'the family' or someone important like a Senator. So you decide: Is the RIAA just being "reasonably upset" or are they extorting money from defenseless Americans?
that would be enough to assist a 5 oz. bird carrying a 1 lb. coconut to Mercia? ;-)
This is what happens when sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads are misplaced and left to their own devices.
;-)
It must have been an intelligent designer!
So you see, mother nature can develop Roundup resistance faster than our genetic engineers. She's been at it longer though. I would imagine "survival of the fittest" works quite nicely with with roundup resistance just like it does with antibiotic resistance. But there's no reason to argue about it. Obviously, it's possible to test this cross-pollenation theory by looking at the genes in these weeds. According to TFA:
Apparently, they haven't bothered to do genetic testing yet. No reason to bitch one way or the other until they do. And you both know what they say about arguing on the internet, right?
If I recall correctly, that dispute revolved around the farmer wanting to actually harvest his crop when Monsanto wanted the crop destroyed. The farmer lost, Monsanto gets to destroy the crop in the name of IP. Given that, farmers should simply threaten to harvest the weed crop. Then they get to watch and laugh as Monsanto is forced to do their weeding the hard way. ;-)
When she was arrested, she was given the right to remain silent, but doing so constituted copyright infringement, ensuring an open and shut case!
I wouldn't call them retards. I'd say uninformed... anyway the key is on page 17 of the settlement.
1000 requests for exclusion is a pretty low bar guys. If only those qualified reading slashdot filed for exclusion, you could pull this off. Sony should be in a lot deeper shit that this settlement provides. Filing a request for exclusion from the settlement class should send a message to these people... I'm as mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore! If the settlement is approved by the court, everyone here should file for exclusion. Don't let them get away with a slap on the wrist this time. I personally would not be happy until someone responsible for this at Sony was facing criminal charges.
Yeah, me too, but most Americans pay with credit cards these days. I prefer a paper trail too (cash) but most of my American customers live on debt. And if someone isn't who they say they are, guess who gets stuck with no merchandise and no money to pay for it. That's right... me, the merchant. What you are complaining about, ID theft, is what merchants call a chargeback. You, after much frustration and fighting, will eventually get your money back. I won't. You're complaining about the dangers of efficiency and convenience. IMO, you should be complaining about the dangers of an antiquated system of plastic cards and magnetic stripes that store important information in plain text.
Yeah, I'd be happy as a lark doing it your way if everyone who came into my store plonked down greenbacks instead of gold cards. But that isn't reality. If privacy is your concern, your problem isn't the retailer, it's Choicepoint. The privacy argument is between you and your card company. You did, after all, give them your SSN to get that credit line. As for offering you cash customers (people who like paper trails as much as I do) preferential treatment and discounts, I'd love to. However part of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly's merchant policy is explicit: no preferential treatment to cash customers or you loose your merchant account. And since that's 90% of my business, I can't afford to do that. Otherwise, I'd be giving all my cash customers a 2% discount and a fast pass to the front of the line. Maybe when the average American decides it really is better to save and spend rather than spend and pay interest, things could be different.
I'm not trying to be nasty here, but look at it from both sides for a minute and you'll see the problem is with the mediator (CC companies). Not providing a bulletproof paper trail from the shopper's end of the equation, yet expecting one from the merchant without any guarantees from the guy in the middle is a bit unfair and unrealistic.
Ever heard of email filters/rules? You can do that pretty easily with any email client. Email isn't going anywhere. Personally, I prefer email to IMs because I can give more consideration to the things I say, it's easily encrypted for most email apps, I can get to your email when *I* have time for it, and I don't have to have XYZ corporations proprietary email client to receive email. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Jabber, IRC, ... enough! I don't need or want all that crap. Just send me an email. Yes I know about Fire, Trillian, etc etc. Every one I've tried is feature incomplete to the extent that I end up having to get the 'official' version from XYZ corp to receive a voice chat, file transfer, or whatnot anyway. IM is not very useful to me because everyone I know uses a different network.
these guys would it? Nah, they pay royalties to some other russian front who pays to ... well ... not the RIAA.
And we know those laws are working effectively.
Leasing a car isn't really any different than buying a car with a balloon payment at the end of the contract. Either you arrange to cough up the other half when it's over, or you hand over the car and pay for anything you've done to the car to hurt its value outside of the lease. Software is different. It's like leasing a ballroom. You can turn around and sell your right to use the ballroom, but you don't own the ballroom. You're not even given the option to buy the ballroom. The ballroom is attached to the hotel, so the only way you're getting the ballroom is to buy the entire hotel. You don't pay property taxes on a leased ballroom do ya?
Yeah, and you could let as many people as you wanted ride in that truck, right? Buy one copy of MS Office, distribute to 1000 employees over intranet. Hey, it's my property, I paid the tax. They can't have it both ways.
Just like no one writes worms and viruses for iPods because there are so few of them.
That sounds an awful lot like "Don't open strange email attachments!!!" I do both and I have no problems. My secret?
Well, if you make a method final in Java, the compiler generates an error when you try to compile an overridden subclass method. That's one way to take care of the problem :-) Perhaps Ruby has something similar...?
RoR, codegen.. from what I gather, there's nothing there that wasn't done years ago. It's called WebObjects. So far, no one has mentioned to me or pointed out anything RoR does in Ruby that WebObjects doesn't do already in Java. Meanwhile you loose the advantage of TONS of mature libraries written in Java. Am I missing something? Is there something particularly compelling about Ruby perhaps? I'm not trying to be condescending toward RoR or anything, but all the 'hype' I've read here about RoR was done a decade ago with WO. Plus, WO does a number of things that I haven't heard the RoR camp boasting, like deploying database connected apps over the internet directly to the desktop with WebStart/D2JC.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Error: NullCandidateException
Yeah, but in that case, they'd actually be losing money. Right now, they're making money hand over fist AND claiming they are losing money due to piracy. Once they ACTUALLY start to lose money, they're screwed. Lobbyists don't work for free.
Boycott the RIAA. Check your music on the RIAA Radar before you make a music purchase.
Ahhhh, I see how it will happen now... First they get the Brand X decision from the Supreme Court. Consolidation starts until the resulting monopoly makes price/quality of the internet unbearable. Politicians step in to "save" us from the big evil monopoly with municipal internet plans. Once ubiquitous, anti-terror rhetoric used to consolidate control of municipal ISPs at the federal level. Big brother, 1984 style, begins "for the children."
Nah, just lame that lobbyists for the music industry got the law changed in 1997 to make such an action a criminal one. People who download music on P2P are more closely related to people who listen to music on the radio than they are to shoplifters. Try telling that to lawmakers who steal regularly from the public domain on behalf of the music cartels though.
I think, while interesting, doing only that will prove useless as a whole. Why? Because you are testing usability of specific applications rather than the system as a whole.
IMHO, a better approach would be to have a look at that platform's Human Interface Guidelines and see how complete their respective documentation is and how closely application developers follow them. If the Human Interface standards are incomplete, then developers are free to do whatever they want in grey areas, which leads to inconsistency and confusion.
Following that, select a few prevalent apps on each platform and grade them on conformance. HIGs are pretty useless if developers do not respect them. If developers are not following the guidelines, then that is a red flag itself. Either the guidelines suck, or developers need to be given a stronger incentive to follow them.
Finally, once you've done those two things, test users on the most HIG compliant apps you can find and see if the HIG itself is any good. If the guidelines suck, then compliant apps will suck and it will be obvious with user testing. Make suggestions for changes to whoever controls the respective HIG, wait for changes, rinse, repeat.
And yet, every time I turn on the news these days, it's "Counterfeit Chinese" this and "Pirated Chinese" that. These western companies are expecting the Chinese government to respect 'Intellectual Property' rights of foreign corporations when the Chinese government doesn't even respect the REAL property rights of its own citizens. SuperShuffle anyone?
The already have.
They stopped buying months ago.
China and Japan have stopped buying American debt. When America hit somewhere around $7.5 Trillion, they said enough is enough. These days, we're getting money from unnamed benefactors who route money anonymously through caribbean banks. No, seriously.
and providing our consumer based economy with cheap goods, fueling our economy and tax base.
To some extent, yes, but here's the basic deal: They prop us up, we buy their shit. Well, with all the 'good jobs' going overseas, the money has to be coming from somewhere. That somewhere has been the housing market, which, by the way, is about to melt down. The US housing market is strained to its limits and consumer spending has tapered off as a result. Hence, China/Japan have stopped buying debt. The return on investment is no longer great enough. Of course, when the housing bubble pops, it won't be the S&L scandal of the 80's all over again. This time, there is no government bailout coming. The government simply doesn't have the money or the credit necessary for a real bailout. They'll have to print more money to do it, and that will make what money you have now worth about as much as confederate money. Central banks see it coming and are trading in dollars for hard assets as a result. Did you notice that gold happens to be at a 24 year high?
Yeah, we're in deep shit.