I must have been off, I remember at one point mars was a few years away, must have my brain stuck in the 90's(it happens).
I think overall we agree though. Manned space flight is important, but it's sort of a final phase type of thing, you send em when there's a real reason for them to go, and you send them in something better than the shuttle.
It's 10 years just travel time to get there. 5 years there, 5 years back. The problem with putting them there in the first place is that, while they can build a machine shop, and everything else, they might not be able to do it within the confines of the shuttle which takes them there.
If you build them a nice base with food, and shelter, and oxygen, a nice machine shop, a few things like that, then they can stay there for quite some time and actually accomplish something.
True, humans can do things robots can't, and manned space exploration is important.
The problem is that for them to be able to do any of those things, they have to be there long enough to have a chance. If we stick a couple of people insane enough to want to spend a minimum of 10 years away from all other humans into a ship and blast them out there and back. Presuming that at present we can actually manage it, what are they actually going to do when they get there? Wander around for a few hours, plant a flag, bring back some rocks? A robot can do all that stuff.
What you need is to build a place on Mars that they can spend some time in, perform experiments in, etc. Ideally somewhere you could spend a few years in without going totally insane since it's a 10 year trip. You need robots for that, and you need them to go first.
Certainly sticking people into LEO to see the earth from a different perspective has helped(though arguably a camera could have accomplished the same thing), but sending men to the moon was just a PR stunt. We didn't do anything there, or accomplish anything there that we couldn't have done with a robot today. A couple of hours on the surface for a few billion of today's dollars was a collosal waste of time and money.
An attacker indexes the entire user list and group memberships of a social networking sites.
You regularly visit a large number of the groups you belong to on said social networking site so that their url paths are in your history.
You're the only person who uses your PC to log onto said social networking site.
You visit a malicious website using this technique.
then an attacker might be able to work out the name you use on that social networking site?
Why would anyone bother. Indexing facebook would take quite a bit of time and resources and at the end of it you'd have something which might or might not be someones real name. Even if it is their real name, what exactly are you going to do with it? So you've unmasked(maybe) the name(maybe) of someone who visited your site. It's not going to give you anything else useful unless you combine it with some other attack vector which could quite easily pick up their real name for free anyway.
I suppose you could use it to set up a honey pot site for people with certain beliefs or interests and use it to accumulate a list of people with those beliefs or interests, but to be honest, you'd probably do better social engineering their ISP to get their account details.
A lot of folks don't remember it, or choose not to, but Internet Explorer 5 was once the best browser you could get and 6 was better still. The period between netscape 4.9 and a functional Mozilla build(let alone the rise of firefox among the great unwashed) was a long and dark one though, and Microsoft got complacent and let it rot.
I've got nothing against netbooks aside from the fact that I hate those tiny keyboards. I think it's a market niche that will disappear as lighter cheaper laptops and more powerful phones squeeze in on that space, but that's a story for 5 years from now.
ChromeOS on the other hand is google trying to sell an appliance to run their apps(with no native code executing that isn't written by google(so no flash, silverlight, applets, or javafx) no one elses will run properly.
Netbooks are great, if you need that sort of thing.
Netbooks with expensive hardware requirements(SSDs still aren't cheap) and no non google native code, only running Chrome(so no IE only web sites), are not great.
ChromeOS is pretty much the most insane thing I've ever heard of, the iPad is less locked down, has more functionality, and is probably going to be cheaper, and even that's probably a toy.
I remember reading a study a few years back where they discovered that people have an unusual relationship with their phones as compared to other electronic devices. If you stick a camera on someone's phone they will love it, but if you stick a phone on someone's camera they'll hate it, and it's not just because of odd form factors.
A successful gaming phone has to be a successful phone first. It has to make calls well, it has to send text messages well, these days if it's a smart phone it has to check your e-mail well, and give you directions. It has to do all these things first, and if it does, and it has games which are fun to play then the games will sell.
Every single attempt(and there have been several) to do the opposite, make a gaming device which is a phone has failed. Nintendo doesn't make phones, they could potentially make phones, but they don't and it would likely be expensive and risky for them to do so.
Sony does make phones, but so far they don't make much in the way of smart phones, so they aren't really in that arena either.
Essentially it's hard to make a gaming phone much more complex than the iPhone without making it not a phone anymore. You're unlikely to see a forray into this market from anyone who isn't currently in the smart phone busines, since you need good phone functionality to start with. Blackberry and Palm make pretty much exclusively business products, Nokia just lost a mint on their last attempt in the last couple of years, and Apple already has the market leader. Barring new technologies which allow a device with a more changeable nature(phone shaped sometimes, games device other times), the only real candidate for a gaming phone is google.
You know you can export steam games to install files and you don't actually have to redownload them. They're still locked to the account, but it makes convenient CD or DVD sized images and an installer. No need to download again.
Well, as bad as two grand a song is really the kind of scary they want to be. It's also a serious problem because it'll probably mean that even the cases they win will end up as being an overall loss for them by the time they cover all their expenses. The writing is probably on the wall, exorbitant fines and shoddy burdens of proof are probably on the way out, but they may want to try and hold onto it a little bit longer.
As for their business model, their business model relies on distributing entertainment to people who have disposable income. That's still a perfectly valid business model. They can still provide an awful lot of value add for musicians and the public.
The problem is that like a lot of people in the entertainment industry they've forgotten they're in the entertainment industry. They think that they're in the music industry and that there is some magical amount of money which people are supposed to be spending on them. They also think they are the ONLY mechanism for distributing music, which isn't true anymore. The combination of those two ideas leads them to believe that they can decide what people want, what they will pay for it, and what the artists should get. None of these are true.
There's no reason the big media companies cannot continue to exist and to turn a profit. Even in todays world of internet distribution, having a record contract has certain advantages.
The only way they're going to do this though is to eat a large helping of humble pie, lower their take from artists, work harder to discover real new acts instead of just creating clones of the latest big thing. Basically they're going to have to work for a living again, and that can be scary, but it's certainly not impossible.
This isn't about what her lawyer asserted, it's about what the judge ruled.
She's actually very clever to not take the settlement. Aside from the fact that there may well be someone behind her bankrolling that 25 grand difference anyway, she's more likely than not to end up paying nothing other than court costs.
The RIAA really doesn't want that 54k verdict to become official. It would set a legal precedent, one which would more likely than not be referred to, even in other jurisdictions. It's probably relatively close to a fair number(I can't recall the details of the case at the moment), but that's really not the point. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the RIAA ends up dropping the Thomas case. It'll cost them to do so, but it will severly limit their ability to extort and intimidate future defendents.
Yes, your local resolver knows your IP address. Yes, the final site knows your IP address, and yes the authoritative DNS server is probably associated with the site which will know your IP address.
However, unless DNS has drastically changed, it's not a two hop journey. Your local DNS server doesn't go straight to the authoritative server for a domain to get the ip address of the site(at least it's not supposed to). As I remember it, if you get a cache miss, the request goes to the root DNS server for that TLD, which then passes it down the chain until each segment of the dns name has been resolved. It doesn't go straight from your dns server to www.slashdot.com it goes through the root server for.com first.
That would mean that under this change the folks running the Christmas Island TLD would be able to tell within a reasonable distance exactly where the people looking at goatse live whereas before they'd only know what dns resolver they were using.
That may or may not be a big deal, but it is a concern, and could potentially allow blacklisting at a level we haven't seen before. China could block people from the west from using google.cn regardless of which dns resolver they use and with no concern for what google themselves might think. It's actually much more interesting to block people who know what the uncensored content looks like from seeing the censored version than you might think.
I did say it needed some balance, and that countries have not always managed this balance. Fair dismissal needs as much protection as unfair dismissal. Generally this doesn't happen, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who should be fighting for protection for fair dismissal tend instead to try and elminiate protections against unfair dismissal.
I tend generally to like natural forces too, within reason. The problem is that when the power of the relative parties is severely unequal, they don't work particularly well. Employers have, generally speaking, far more power than employees. There are always exceptions where at certain times, for certain skill sets, this isn't the case, but generally speaking, the consequences of losing your job for you are far higher than the consequences of you quitting are for your employer.
This generally means that under natural forces, your employer will always win since they're the 800 pound gorilla. Personally I think the purpose of legislation and regulation should be to level the playing field so that market forces can come up with a more socially optimum result, but that's just me. A lot of folks on slashdot seem to believe that the free market is miraculous and will overcome substantial imbalances in power and that competition will spring up like weeds even in places where the cost of entry to market is in the billions of dollars if only the government will back off.
The reality of the situation is that unless they're breaking the law, the owners of a private company can do whatever the hell they want with that company, including drive it into the ground or smear the insides with their own excrement. It's their company and they can make whatever assinine decisions they like so long as they don't break any laws doing them(they can't steal from an LLC, burn the place down, shoot people, etc). Unless one of the other owners(if any) has a different opinion they can do what they like within reason.
It's not much different with a public company either, barring the fact that there are a few more laws which apply in regards to your behaviour towards other shareholders even if you own 99.9999% of the stock.
You can explain to them why they should follow the policy. You can report them to the relevant authorities if what they're doing breaks the law. Otherwise you're SOL.
Most people don't want to work where they're not wanted either. Almost anyone sane will start looking for a new job immediately under those kind of circumstances. That said, folks need insurance, they need to pay their bills, and having a steady pay check while they're looking can make that work out.
As for the rest of it, they had shitty contracts. My contract specifies my title, and my work duties, it specifies my yearly salary. My wife who gets paid by the hour has her minimum number of hours per week in her contract, as well as her work duties. I can do things outside of my duties and work extra unpaid hours to increase my likelihood of promotion, as can she, but my employer cannot force either of us to do so.
If you have an employment contract which allows them to drop your hours to almost nothing or give you a job you cannot physically do or which is not safe you have a shitty contract.
Aside from the fact that I've never seen a place which would let you quit a job without giving notice, there are a couple of major counter arguments.
The first, and perhaps the most important one is that "at will" termination provides a cover for all sorts of dodgy things. It's almost impossible to prove discriminatory termination where "because I felt like it" is a valid reason for termination. This leads to one of two outcomes. Either employers discriminate against certain groups resulting in all sorts of social and economic problems, or we end up with systems like affirmative action which provide reverse discrimination and help no one. It is and should be illegal to fire an otherwise good employee because of their gender, race, religious beliefs or non performance affecting disabilities. While you have at will termination, you can't really protect against that fairly.
The second is that when employees have a reasonable certainty that if they perform well they will have a job tomorrow, they are more likely to retain consumer confidence and put money back into the economy.
When done properly(and that's not saying that any given country has done it properly), reasonable employment protection actually helps the free market. Employees with good performance keep their jobs even if their boss is bigotted or insane, employees with bad performance can still be terminated, but they are given opportunities to improve their performance. With a reasonable balance between fair dismissal(broke the rules, position made redundant, poor performance) with protection against unfair dismissal(boss doesn't like you, boss having a bad day, boss hates everyone who is ______) gives a pretty optimal situation.
To a certain extent it also protects companies too. Your boss may or may not represent the best interests of the company he or she works for. The fact that they personally hate you might have nothing to do with your performance or value to the company.
The number of copies was limited because the people who had them never made any copies. These were never broadcast, never sold, there were no copies made. Copyright didn't stop anyone from making copies, the people who made it just didn't make any copies for anyone else.
As I said, even if copyright law didn't exist. Even if owning ideas was banned by the constitution upon pain of death, it wouldn't make any difference in this case. The only known copy of the shows is the copy created by CBS when they filmed it in the first place. They are under no legal obligation to ever show it to anyone, ever, and even if they'd never copyrighted it, they still wouldn't be under any obligation to show it to anyone, ever.
No one owns what's on the tapes, but CBS owns the tapes. The whole case hinges on property law, and has nothing to do with intellectual property whatsoever.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
TFA even says that they're in the public domain. The only thing stopping anyone from preserving this stuff is the fact that the only copies in existence are owned by CBS. CBS owns the medium on which these things are stored and they are perfectly within their rights, even if the constitution prohibited any sort of copyright whatsoever, to refuse to give them to anyone for any reason they damned well feel like.
They're not refusing the right to copy the work(they can't) they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
Not that I'm agreeing with the laptop searches, but borders are funny places and the usual rules don't always apply. Customs officials can already search your belongings and/or your person(including rather invasive search procedures) with very little cause and certainly without a warrant. If they couldn't they couldn't do their jobs. To use the example from the summary, if you walk through customs with your locked briefcase you're expected to open it if they ask you. If it contained your confidential medical records, there's very little you could do to stop customs from looking at them if they wanted to. If you were importing pirated dvds in a physical format, you could be searched and charged.
Now there are certainly some new issues with computers that never existed before. Very few people travel with a folder full of their financial records for the last 5 years, but a lot of people store that on computers. It's certainly a thorny legal issue, but I'll make the prediction that the ACLU is going to lose the case they've brought about this particular issue. The search of laptops is an obvious application of the current rules, and while it may raise some issues that we've not encountered before, the legal premise is likely sound.
Well, the problem is that if you're talking about trying to encrypt the majority of your communications, you've got to get everyone who e-mails you to use your public key, and everyone you e-mail to have a key pair of their own. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
Since you can't really encrypt the majority of your communications in any meaningful way, that leaves encrypting specific traffic, usually business. Encrypting business traffic generally involves quite a number of key pairs, and some sort of way to distribute and store them. That becomes very difficult for everyone involved.
I can tell you that Health Care for one is crying out for a secure e-mail platform which actually works, and I'm sure that there are a number of other industries in the same boat. The easy solution is to have the government or some other body issue and manage the key infrastructure, but no one trusts the government with their medical records, let alone anything else. That's why I said it was a license to print money.
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I must have been off, I remember at one point mars was a few years away, must have my brain stuck in the 90's(it happens).
I think overall we agree though. Manned space flight is important, but it's sort of a final phase type of thing, you send em when there's a real reason for them to go, and you send them in something better than the shuttle.
It's 10 years just travel time to get there. 5 years there, 5 years back. The problem with putting them there in the first place is that, while they can build a machine shop, and everything else, they might not be able to do it within the confines of the shuttle which takes them there.
If you build them a nice base with food, and shelter, and oxygen, a nice machine shop, a few things like that, then they can stay there for quite some time and actually accomplish something.
True, humans can do things robots can't, and manned space exploration is important.
The problem is that for them to be able to do any of those things, they have to be there long enough to have a chance. If we stick a couple of people insane enough to want to spend a minimum of 10 years away from all other humans into a ship and blast them out there and back. Presuming that at present we can actually manage it, what are they actually going to do when they get there? Wander around for a few hours, plant a flag, bring back some rocks? A robot can do all that stuff.
What you need is to build a place on Mars that they can spend some time in, perform experiments in, etc. Ideally somewhere you could spend a few years in without going totally insane since it's a 10 year trip. You need robots for that, and you need them to go first.
Certainly sticking people into LEO to see the earth from a different perspective has helped(though arguably a camera could have accomplished the same thing), but sending men to the moon was just a PR stunt. We didn't do anything there, or accomplish anything there that we couldn't have done with a robot today. A couple of hours on the surface for a few billion of today's dollars was a collosal waste of time and money.
This was sort of my point. What on earth can they do with this?
So basically if
then an attacker might be able to work out the name you use on that social networking site?
Why would anyone bother. Indexing facebook would take quite a bit of time and resources and at the end of it you'd have something which might or might not be someones real name. Even if it is their real name, what exactly are you going to do with it? So you've unmasked(maybe) the name(maybe) of someone who visited your site. It's not going to give you anything else useful unless you combine it with some other attack vector which could quite easily pick up their real name for free anyway.
I suppose you could use it to set up a honey pot site for people with certain beliefs or interests and use it to accumulate a list of people with those beliefs or interests, but to be honest, you'd probably do better social engineering their ISP to get their account details.
A lot of folks don't remember it, or choose not to, but Internet Explorer 5 was once the best browser you could get and 6 was better still. The period between netscape 4.9 and a functional Mozilla build(let alone the rise of firefox among the great unwashed) was a long and dark one though, and Microsoft got complacent and let it rot.
I've got nothing against netbooks aside from the fact that I hate those tiny keyboards. I think it's a market niche that will disappear as lighter cheaper laptops and more powerful phones squeeze in on that space, but that's a story for 5 years from now.
ChromeOS on the other hand is google trying to sell an appliance to run their apps(with no native code executing that isn't written by google(so no flash, silverlight, applets, or javafx) no one elses will run properly.
Probably not meaningful statistics since Heroes of Might and Magic is a windows game.
Netbooks are great, if you need that sort of thing.
Netbooks with expensive hardware requirements(SSDs still aren't cheap) and no non google native code, only running Chrome(so no IE only web sites), are not great.
ChromeOS is pretty much the most insane thing I've ever heard of, the iPad is less locked down, has more functionality, and is probably going to be cheaper, and even that's probably a toy.
I bow to your pedantry and knowledge of obscure layout engines.
I remember reading a study a few years back where they discovered that people have an unusual relationship with their phones as compared to other electronic devices. If you stick a camera on someone's phone they will love it, but if you stick a phone on someone's camera they'll hate it, and it's not just because of odd form factors.
A successful gaming phone has to be a successful phone first. It has to make calls well, it has to send text messages well, these days if it's a smart phone it has to check your e-mail well, and give you directions. It has to do all these things first, and if it does, and it has games which are fun to play then the games will sell.
Every single attempt(and there have been several) to do the opposite, make a gaming device which is a phone has failed. Nintendo doesn't make phones, they could potentially make phones, but they don't and it would likely be expensive and risky for them to do so.
Sony does make phones, but so far they don't make much in the way of smart phones, so they aren't really in that arena either.
Essentially it's hard to make a gaming phone much more complex than the iPhone without making it not a phone anymore. You're unlikely to see a forray into this market from anyone who isn't currently in the smart phone busines, since you need good phone functionality to start with. Blackberry and Palm make pretty much exclusively business products, Nokia just lost a mint on their last attempt in the last couple of years, and Apple already has the market leader. Barring new technologies which allow a device with a more changeable nature(phone shaped sometimes, games device other times), the only real candidate for a gaming phone is google.
To be pedantic since you're talking about Gecko and Webkit, the layout engine for Internet Explorer is called trident, and Opera's is Presto.
You know you can export steam games to install files and you don't actually have to redownload them. They're still locked to the account, but it makes convenient CD or DVD sized images and an installer. No need to download again.
Well, as bad as two grand a song is really the kind of scary they want to be. It's also a serious problem because it'll probably mean that even the cases they win will end up as being an overall loss for them by the time they cover all their expenses. The writing is probably on the wall, exorbitant fines and shoddy burdens of proof are probably on the way out, but they may want to try and hold onto it a little bit longer.
As for their business model, their business model relies on distributing entertainment to people who have disposable income. That's still a perfectly valid business model. They can still provide an awful lot of value add for musicians and the public.
The problem is that like a lot of people in the entertainment industry they've forgotten they're in the entertainment industry. They think that they're in the music industry and that there is some magical amount of money which people are supposed to be spending on them. They also think they are the ONLY mechanism for distributing music, which isn't true anymore. The combination of those two ideas leads them to believe that they can decide what people want, what they will pay for it, and what the artists should get. None of these are true.
There's no reason the big media companies cannot continue to exist and to turn a profit. Even in todays world of internet distribution, having a record contract has certain advantages.
The only way they're going to do this though is to eat a large helping of humble pie, lower their take from artists, work harder to discover real new acts instead of just creating clones of the latest big thing. Basically they're going to have to work for a living again, and that can be scary, but it's certainly not impossible.
This isn't about what her lawyer asserted, it's about what the judge ruled.
She's actually very clever to not take the settlement. Aside from the fact that there may well be someone behind her bankrolling that 25 grand difference anyway, she's more likely than not to end up paying nothing other than court costs.
The RIAA really doesn't want that 54k verdict to become official. It would set a legal precedent, one which would more likely than not be referred to, even in other jurisdictions. It's probably relatively close to a fair number(I can't recall the details of the case at the moment), but that's really not the point. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the RIAA ends up dropping the Thomas case. It'll cost them to do so, but it will severly limit their ability to extort and intimidate future defendents.
Yes, your local resolver knows your IP address. Yes, the final site knows your IP address, and yes the authoritative DNS server is probably associated with the site which will know your IP address.
However, unless DNS has drastically changed, it's not a two hop journey. Your local DNS server doesn't go straight to the authoritative server for a domain to get the ip address of the site(at least it's not supposed to). As I remember it, if you get a cache miss, the request goes to the root DNS server for that TLD, which then passes it down the chain until each segment of the dns name has been resolved. It doesn't go straight from your dns server to www.slashdot.com it goes through the root server for .com first.
That would mean that under this change the folks running the Christmas Island TLD would be able to tell within a reasonable distance exactly where the people looking at goatse live whereas before they'd only know what dns resolver they were using.
That may or may not be a big deal, but it is a concern, and could potentially allow blacklisting at a level we haven't seen before. China could block people from the west from using google.cn regardless of which dns resolver they use and with no concern for what google themselves might think. It's actually much more interesting to block people who know what the uncensored content looks like from seeing the censored version than you might think.
I did say it needed some balance, and that countries have not always managed this balance. Fair dismissal needs as much protection as unfair dismissal. Generally this doesn't happen, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who should be fighting for protection for fair dismissal tend instead to try and elminiate protections against unfair dismissal.
I tend generally to like natural forces too, within reason. The problem is that when the power of the relative parties is severely unequal, they don't work particularly well. Employers have, generally speaking, far more power than employees. There are always exceptions where at certain times, for certain skill sets, this isn't the case, but generally speaking, the consequences of losing your job for you are far higher than the consequences of you quitting are for your employer.
This generally means that under natural forces, your employer will always win since they're the 800 pound gorilla. Personally I think the purpose of legislation and regulation should be to level the playing field so that market forces can come up with a more socially optimum result, but that's just me. A lot of folks on slashdot seem to believe that the free market is miraculous and will overcome substantial imbalances in power and that competition will spring up like weeds even in places where the cost of entry to market is in the billions of dollars if only the government will back off.
The reality of the situation is that unless they're breaking the law, the owners of a private company can do whatever the hell they want with that company, including drive it into the ground or smear the insides with their own excrement. It's their company and they can make whatever assinine decisions they like so long as they don't break any laws doing them(they can't steal from an LLC, burn the place down, shoot people, etc). Unless one of the other owners(if any) has a different opinion they can do what they like within reason.
It's not much different with a public company either, barring the fact that there are a few more laws which apply in regards to your behaviour towards other shareholders even if you own 99.9999% of the stock.
You can explain to them why they should follow the policy. You can report them to the relevant authorities if what they're doing breaks the law. Otherwise you're SOL.
Most people don't want to work where they're not wanted either. Almost anyone sane will start looking for a new job immediately under those kind of circumstances. That said, folks need insurance, they need to pay their bills, and having a steady pay check while they're looking can make that work out.
As for the rest of it, they had shitty contracts. My contract specifies my title, and my work duties, it specifies my yearly salary. My wife who gets paid by the hour has her minimum number of hours per week in her contract, as well as her work duties. I can do things outside of my duties and work extra unpaid hours to increase my likelihood of promotion, as can she, but my employer cannot force either of us to do so.
If you have an employment contract which allows them to drop your hours to almost nothing or give you a job you cannot physically do or which is not safe you have a shitty contract.
Aside from the fact that I've never seen a place which would let you quit a job without giving notice, there are a couple of major counter arguments.
The first, and perhaps the most important one is that "at will" termination provides a cover for all sorts of dodgy things. It's almost impossible to prove discriminatory termination where "because I felt like it" is a valid reason for termination. This leads to one of two outcomes. Either employers discriminate against certain groups resulting in all sorts of social and economic problems, or we end up with systems like affirmative action which provide reverse discrimination and help no one. It is and should be illegal to fire an otherwise good employee because of their gender, race, religious beliefs or non performance affecting disabilities. While you have at will termination, you can't really protect against that fairly.
The second is that when employees have a reasonable certainty that if they perform well they will have a job tomorrow, they are more likely to retain consumer confidence and put money back into the economy.
When done properly(and that's not saying that any given country has done it properly), reasonable employment protection actually helps the free market. Employees with good performance keep their jobs even if their boss is bigotted or insane, employees with bad performance can still be terminated, but they are given opportunities to improve their performance. With a reasonable balance between fair dismissal(broke the rules, position made redundant, poor performance) with protection against unfair dismissal(boss doesn't like you, boss having a bad day, boss hates everyone who is ______) gives a pretty optimal situation.
To a certain extent it also protects companies too. Your boss may or may not represent the best interests of the company he or she works for. The fact that they personally hate you might have nothing to do with your performance or value to the company.
The number of copies was limited because the people who had them never made any copies. These were never broadcast, never sold, there were no copies made. Copyright didn't stop anyone from making copies, the people who made it just didn't make any copies for anyone else.
As I said, even if copyright law didn't exist. Even if owning ideas was banned by the constitution upon pain of death, it wouldn't make any difference in this case. The only known copy of the shows is the copy created by CBS when they filmed it in the first place. They are under no legal obligation to ever show it to anyone, ever, and even if they'd never copyrighted it, they still wouldn't be under any obligation to show it to anyone, ever.
No one owns what's on the tapes, but CBS owns the tapes. The whole case hinges on property law, and has nothing to do with intellectual property whatsoever.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
TFA even says that they're in the public domain. The only thing stopping anyone from preserving this stuff is the fact that the only copies in existence are owned by CBS. CBS owns the medium on which these things are stored and they are perfectly within their rights, even if the constitution prohibited any sort of copyright whatsoever, to refuse to give them to anyone for any reason they damned well feel like.
They're not refusing the right to copy the work(they can't) they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
Well that's actually a fairly slim difference.
Generally speaking, if you can get a court order, you can get a warrant. It's not like the damned things are hard to get.
Not that I'm agreeing with the laptop searches, but borders are funny places and the usual rules don't always apply. Customs officials can already search your belongings and/or your person(including rather invasive search procedures) with very little cause and certainly without a warrant. If they couldn't they couldn't do their jobs. To use the example from the summary, if you walk through customs with your locked briefcase you're expected to open it if they ask you. If it contained your confidential medical records, there's very little you could do to stop customs from looking at them if they wanted to. If you were importing pirated dvds in a physical format, you could be searched and charged.
Now there are certainly some new issues with computers that never existed before. Very few people travel with a folder full of their financial records for the last 5 years, but a lot of people store that on computers. It's certainly a thorny legal issue, but I'll make the prediction that the ACLU is going to lose the case they've brought about this particular issue. The search of laptops is an obvious application of the current rules, and while it may raise some issues that we've not encountered before, the legal premise is likely sound.
Well, the problem is that if you're talking about trying to encrypt the majority of your communications, you've got to get everyone who e-mails you to use your public key, and everyone you e-mail to have a key pair of their own. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
Since you can't really encrypt the majority of your communications in any meaningful way, that leaves encrypting specific traffic, usually business. Encrypting business traffic generally involves quite a number of key pairs, and some sort of way to distribute and store them. That becomes very difficult for everyone involved.
I can tell you that Health Care for one is crying out for a secure e-mail platform which actually works, and I'm sure that there are a number of other industries in the same boat. The easy solution is to have the government or some other body issue and manage the key infrastructure, but no one trusts the government with their medical records, let alone anything else. That's why I said it was a license to print money.