Exactly. For some operations, RFID makes sense, but there isn't just ONE RFID system installed. Most of these companies also supply other big chain stores who may have other requirements. This was the whole reason for going with Barcodes. Barcodes are standardized. RFID systems are not, as far as I know. Walmart hammers it suppliers for price decreases, while the shipping costs rise due to higher petroleum. The supplier has a choice: make money or go out of business. Walmart can use its huge purchasing power to drive companies out of business, so perhaps the company looks at it business and says: losing a dime on ten million units is much worse than making 50 cents on a hundred thousand, and just decides to pass on the Walmart supply agreement. That might be why the selection has been diminishing in Walmart to the point that if I want to buy everything on my list, I have to go to other stores. The only reason that Walmart has been able to bully any suppliers is that the cost of the bullying is significantly less than the cost of the delivered product. Once that changes and the supplier is forced to improvise, the Walmart account might become a liability rather than a profit center.
No it's not reasonable. Inventory has been done for thousands of years without a discount for well, COUNTING the stuff as it comes in. Just because walmart was to automate it's systems does not mean that this is efficient, reasonable, or cost effective for anyone else. With Walmart squeezing the suppliers on price, and the rising cost of shipping, how is this effective thing for Walmart help the supplier?
Walmart may be the big gorrilla, but as of late customer satisfaction has been decreasing. The stores have begun to look more and more like K-mart in it's final years: dingy dirty and filled with unhelpful dour employees.
The US has already spent more money on operations in Iraq than it would cost to fund multiple manned missions to Mars. How much good did we get for that money? How is war in Iraq and Afghanistan helping us? Higher gas prices? It has been reported that the US Department of Defense has "misplaced" 2.3 trillion dollars of "stuff." How does that help us?
I'd say that we could spend our money on Space exploration and get a lot of cool pictures for our trillions, or we could misplace it in to who know what/where and get nothing for our money, or we could blow up things and people in other countries.
As for whether we can afford to spend the money, who cares? The government will always make more.
As the law and the courts have repeatedly stated. . . "attempting" to violate the copyright act is not a crime and is also harmless to the copyright holder. SO it is legal to put your files in a shared folder. However, if you do that AND someone unauthorized by the copyright holder makes a copy of the file, then you are liable for a violation of copyright law.
This is interesting, because the telecommunications companies long ago ran with the "I can't control what goes over my wires" defense when the governments of various nations wanted to punish them as an accessory to crimes committed via the wires. The phone made it easier for V. and L. to conspire to murder T. The phone company claimed that it could not monitor and control every call and so the common carrier defense arose.
Now, however, there is the demonstrated ability to monitor and control and perhaps the common carrier denotation is what is being tossed aside in the pursuit of the last nickel. What is an ISP to argue when faced with copyright allegations? They can monitor the traffic to sell targeted ads but can't tell the when an illegal MP3 is being downloaded? That might not fly in a courtroom. Wouldn't the temptation to try to sell the user a similar song be too tempting to pass up? Or maybe the judge or jury doesn't get that there is a technology barrier and figures if the ISP can monitor one they can monitor them all.
How about a political move like enforcing a completely non-encrypted internet to monitor for kiddie porn? All encrypted packets could be criminalized - except to "authorized sites" like your bank.
What about the copyright on the page being mangled? I liken this type of technology as a form of vandalism, or perhaps and unauthorized derivative work. How would this be different than Amazon reprinting a Harry Potter book on demand and inserting hundreds of ads? Maybe those ads would be targeted to text on a facing page so that you'd get an advertisement for cleaning supplies every time the Nimbus 2000 flying broom was mentioned, or pet supplies every time one of the owls was mentioned. How about the death scene with Dumbledor opposite some funeral home ad?
What about anticompetitive actions? The ISP could redirect or replace traffic with that of a competitor's product. I'm sure some companies would be delighted to ensure that no one every hears of Brand-X again. How could this type of control and monitoring be used to prevent the accurate discussion of topics? AT&T is a backbone ISP and has been shown to be a good bit lax when it comes to protecting the data it carries. Could a large company or government change the internet by use of this technology to stop dissent?
The abuse potential is huge.
Then what about the privacy issues with reading every packet? Gee, Mr. Smith, why were you searching for pipes, fertilizer, and biodiesel last month?
Ah yes, the folks who spend their lives glued to the blinking lights and canned music of the latest and greatest video game are quietly honing their UBER L33T Skilz. The 80 plus hours a week spent in the dark, alone, bereft of actual human contact - the pizza guy doesn't count, clearly develop the necessary and vital skills that the rest of the world is lacking. And in due time, the next video game will come around and those few, dedicated gamers will rise to the digital challenge and dominate the world. . .
for 15 bucks a month.
The reality is simple: those video game skills have to be translated into areas outside of the video game for any effective leadership to happen. With so much time spent in the game(s) and so much less in the real world, these leaders will be most often found with titles like: "Raid Leader," "Guild Master," or "Class Leader." We'll be lucky if these folks hold jobs long enough to qualify for social security.
I think that this is simple. Blizzard makes games that are bought and installed and it is pretty obvious that they are installing a bittorrent like client that will consume some of your band width at fairly predictable intervals. And you have the option of not letting blizzard use your bandwidth. Microsoft has a history of lying about what it is doing, or simply not acting with any regard to the user's good. Microsoft could very well add a bit of legal jargon to the EULA granting themselves permission to use your band width if you run their operating system. They are already doing this with automatic downloads and all of the talk between microsoft and the windows installations. It is a small stretch to simply help themselves to your bandwidth. And in this case, what can you do? Nothing. Windows is the dominant OS, not some cool game you can install. So if you are lucky enough to be running some non-microsoft operating system, then this is not your issue. But for many people, whose time is valuable and whose internet connection is limited by quirks of money or geography, having Microsoft help themselves to a portion of it is very bad. Bad in the road rage sense of the word. It feels like theft. What Blizzard has done which is almost identical, is ok because it is a choice.
So what does the DHS intend to do to those "citizens" who don't have the required ID when it comes time for them to get on a plane? Hmm? DHS can simple deny anyone from those states from flying without a "federaly approved ID."
"I'm sorry sir, you don't have a Real ID approved by the DHS. Your state rejected that mandate. You can't fly. Sorry to hear about your deceased relative. Step over here for "processing" as you know trying to get on a plane without proper ID is an act of "terrorism."
Immigrants who will work for LESS in this country drive the standard of living lower. This is because the citizen programmer who remains unemployed is a burden to the country, and the taxes collected and the fund available for spending by the lower paid immigrant are less. The costs of domestic infrastructure which is now being used by both the unemployed citizen and the immigrant cost the same to the public. Other things such as housing will now have more people competing for them, and as in every crowded area, the prices of apartments and housing rise.
Providing a lucritive job for an immigrant? I guess if you compare their salary in their native thrid world country then it would be "lucritive" but they are being paid less to live in a higher cost of living country. Example: A person in field "A" makes 80K per year regardless of whether he lives in New York City or New Orleans Louisiana. However, the cost of living is vastly different between those two cities such that the 80K provides a small apartment in New York while 80K is a very nice living in New Orleans. So this really doesn't hold water.
They hiring of immigrants does not lower the price of good sold but rather the cost of goods sold, and therefore increases the PROFIT to the company, which in these days goes mostly into the pockets of the upper management often regardless of corporate performance. In the article, Microsoft is wanting to hire these immigrants. Do you expect this to drop the price of VISTA? X-BOX? Hmmm? I don't think it will have an impact on the price of the goods Microsoft sells,even if they relocated everything to Bangeldesh and paid their programers $2/year. This was one of the big arguments corporations made for moving the clothing industry to Bangladesh. We see $120 pairs of jeans made for mere pennies. The cost of the goods sold did not change but the profits became much more lucrative for the owner. The displaced workers in America were not so well off.
Shareholders benefit only if the stock price rises or dividends are paid. Many of the stock holders are large institutions so the benefit to society on incremental immigration is nebulous. The stock might rise a dollar today on this news but fall two dollars on some regulatory set back unrelated. The net loss is mitigated by a buck but it is still a net loss.
Tis a glorious day indeed when the artists are told by the "record labels" that because of "nasty little law" they'll have to choose their lyrics from a small set of "acceptable words." Of course, the record labels get 70 years on the copy right so all is well. Oh yes! All of those "oldies" will (hopefully) be "grandfathered" in so that we can still get our violent antisocial pron music, but only because it already exists. Those new artists will have to conform to the new "standard of acceptable music" which will probably sound much like "Yet another boy band" singing the lyrics to the Barney song.
I guess death metal will have to skip the lyrics and go all "Muzak" on us.
The artist, of course will have to find alternative means of getting their music out to the masses. Good thing there is this internet thingy.
Paint is based upon pigments which are chemical compounds having rather specific absorbances. Varying levels of these compounds are used when mixing one pigment with others to create the entire set of colors humans have to work with. So each pigment is a color, kinda like the pixels on the monitor, and they are mixed at varying levels to provide the illusion of a particular shade of color.
Quick! Sue the pigment makers and artists of the world! They are only giving us the ILLUSION of all those colors! EGADS! We've been CHEATED.
I hope quite sincerely that someone puts this class actions lawsuit in the recycle bin along with the greedy B*****ds who came up with this steaming pile of bovine excrement.
If you closely imitate the writing and thoughts of another and pass them off as your own ideas, then it is plagiarism. If you reuse your own work, even verbatim, it is not plagiarism. Nor is it cheating. I wrote a long paper for a high school English Class. Later, in college, I had to write another long English paper, and I found that I could re-use the old high school paper. I spruced up the old paper with some new citations, and polished it up a bit, but it was pretty much the same paper.
I would have a serious problem with a company keeping a copy of my high school paper and later using that copy to accuse me of plagiarism. That is the situation where actual economic damages from the copyright infringement occur. I'm not familiar with the workings of turnitin, but I can see how this could lead to trouble for students years down the road.
Ah, yes, but despite the efforts of English professors and teachers, the language loosely known as English has a fine tradition of "going with what ever works," from the old Shakespeare's "But me no buts," to this quite clear use of the adverbial "relatedly" to mean: "Hey! This story is related to the one that we just told you about."
Sorry, folks, but the purpose of language is to express meaning in a clear fashion, not follow arbitrary rules. In this case, "relatedly" works quite well as is.
And we must mention that the original christian bible was put together at the behest of a PAGAN casear, Constantine, who was interested in unifying a political and military EMPIRE with a common religion. As a matter of historical fact, Constantine was not baptisted into the christian religion until he lay upon his death bed. The protestant bible is a stripped down version that was changed mostly for POLITICAL reasons, though many of the issues that Martin Luther had with the Catholic Church of his era were quite valid and philosophical.
It is most annoying to me that more people are interested in forcing someone else to live according to a bible that they are not willing to live by. Many of these passionate campaigns against evolution, abortion, etc., are not CHRISTIAN values.
It's not the kids that I would worry about, but the adults with families who get so hooked on WOW and other MMORPG's that they neglect their children, spouse, work, etc and wind up hurting a lot of innocent people just so that they can spent 22 hours in BWL getting yet another "EPIC" item, which is completely useless by the time the next upgrade for the game comes out. (Hey! I've got the Burning Crusade Beta and the GREENS are better than a lot of the EPICS so many have slaved for in the last year.)
Games like WOW give people with low self-esteem or crappy situations an escape that can be so much more fun and interesting than their real lives that they prefer the escape to reality. This is NOT too different than the people who use alcohol and other mind altering drugs to escape from their real lives. Just as with Alcohol, where a little bit does you a lot of good, but too much ruins your life and your health, MMORPG's are fine in moderation.
So yeah, if the alcohol and tobacco companies can be sued for making an "addictive" product, then so can companies like Blizzard. Fact of the matter is that there will one day be (if not already) a "MMORPG anonymous" in the mold of Alcoholics Anonymous. Destructive behavior that adversely affects the lives of children is a social proplem with measurable costs to society, and will eventually need to be addressed.
A few words: "Class Action Lawsuit" Microsoft as a monopoly is adversely labeling businesses because they don't pay for a certificate and they can do this only because they are a monopoly. And if microsoft is doing this to fight phishing, where is the liability if that protection does not work? I'm sure someone will figure out how to get a green bar without a certificate and a phishing they will go. Meanwhile, the legitimate small business gets labeled "untrustworthy" by Microsoft software. Now THAT is ironic.
Wasn't he the same guy who said that all of the music on Ipods was stolen anyway and that Apple should cough up a percentage or some fixed amount of money per Ipod to "cover" all the "stolen" music?
Hmm... as far as I can tell, the RIAA seems to think that owning certain devices is prima facia evidence of copyright infringement. So if you have and ipod or other MP3player or you own a computer, or and internet address then you are a "pirate." What other eveidence do they need? These are the same folks that brought Canada the "tax" on every blank CD purchased because owning such a thing means that you are "pirating" something they "own."
Didn't one of the cartel actually claim that all the music on ipods was "stolen?"
Those pop-ups are the equivalent of someone yanking the magazine or newspaper out of your hands so that they can yammer some inane and uninteresting babble at me. the fools who think that I will buy something that is advertised in that way are wasting their money. Oh sure I REMEMBER the product, and when I see it in the store I WON'T buy it. Movie tickets.com did that to me the other day and I immediately sent them a nasty email and did not buy tickets through them. Sure is nice to do that, but I will not be treated rudely just for a moment's time savings.
Considering that the wheel was recently patented in Australia, and that playing with string and parting your hair in a particular way have all been patented, I doubt there is anyone on the face of the planet that doesn't infringe some patent somewhere simply by living. Patents are broken and probably hopelessly so.
Ridiculous is the word. Your position is exactly that.
First, copyright is AT LEAST 50 years PMA in most countries, which means that the copyright will not expire for at least 50 years after the DEATH of the author. So if you create a copyrighted material at age 20 and live until you are 80, the copyright will expire 110 years after you created the work.
Second, there is no legal requirement to place expired matierals into the public domain, nor any requirement to have DRM release the material once the copyright has expired. The materials simply fall into the public domain. The Berne Convention gave copyright protection to everything created without requiring registration. This created millions of copyrighted works without a mechanism for anyone else to know who holds the copyright. The result is that there are millions of orphaned works unavailable for either preservation or use by the public, and certainly not being used by the creator or rights holder. There is also no legal requirement for the creator or rights holder to preserve the work for the duration of the copyright. Thus, it is very likely that the vast majority of copyrighted works will be lost to the public domain simply through neglect. Unless there is a compelling financial reason, most of the copyrighted works will vanish, simply because no one is going to create that "superior format from a master recording," if no one has bothered to keep the "master recording." Example: There are thousands of old movies rotting away because right now because the rights holder doesn't care enought too spend the money necessary to preserve the master recording. Digital files are a lot easier to destroy. DRM'd files that are hard to access because the technology has changed are very likely to simply be deleted, and expecting a DRM system to survive a hundred and ten years is absurd.
Given the fact that copyright was designed in the era prior to the creation of digital works, the designers thought that the surviving printed matierals would be fine and so there was no need for requirements that the copyrighted works be preserved. Also, the original term was 28 years from the time of creation. With the fast pace of change in the digital world, it is very likely that in 110 years, what ever digital file you create will be not only obsolete, but impossible to read. As for some DRM created now, that mechanism will likely be unusable by the end of the copyright and further, the people who created it are very likely to be dead.
As far as DRM being invasive, I would recommend you check out the Sony rootkit DRM as an example of why trust is so very limited. Computers contain confidential information whether this is for a corporation or a family business. Some of this information would allow other people and organizations to take advantage of your current situation and mostlikely to your detriment. Having a root kit secretly installed to "protect" some record label's interest in a twelve dollar music album is a grotesque violation of my privacy. In fact, if it was done by a teenager from the Phillipines using an email virus, the same actions would be considered a crime.
While am certain that there is an MBA thesis on the irrelevance of management to actually running a business, especially a large one, mabhatter564 nails one thing precisely: Most business owners don't know what they need from IT or even what they need their computers to do. I work for a company whose entire IT department was a guy who also ran a forklift as his primary job. He did "that computer stuff" on the side because he got a whole dollar and hour more for it.
So what happens when the network fails because it was put in 25 years ago and has finally just worn out?
Yep. . . Panic
Furthermore I agree with the lack of good understanding of what a business wants its employee to do. Many companies have NO job descriptions that mean anything, and the ones with detailed descriptions often have the phrase: "other duties as assigned." That is really informative.
With Vista no one will need virus protection because (1) third party antivirus will not work due to interface issues (2) Mircrosoft is in the Antivirus Software business now and their much better protection is built in, and (3) because the frustrated folks will switch to Mac or Linux.
I can't see why this would be any more realistic than anything Balmer has to say.
With Microsoft's legendary reputation for software that works perfectly and never falsely identifies legitimate software as pirated, how can you be sure that the software was activated even if the computer SAYS it was? Or even if the Indian in New Dehli tells you it was activated? And if the activation in Vista has the same failure rate as WGA, then some large number of windows servers are going to go into "reduced functionallity mode" because the software activation is faulty. As I have read in various articles, it seems that the simplest and easiest way to re-legitimize your software is to re-purchase a liscence, and that would also get the serverup ASAP. So, spend a long time (days perhaps) arguing with Microsoft, or pay them the cost of the server software liscence. The business decision is one made on what it costs you to be down for the time that it is going to take your company to convince Microsoft to fix the problem. How much extra money is this going to bring to Microsoft? Why would Microsoft be motivated to reduce these additional sales? Given the Microsoft's reputation in the industry, as exemplified in the illegal leveraging of their monopoly on computer operating software into the browser market, and now into the computer security and antivirus market, why would such piratical (extortionary?) practices be anything beyond business as usual at Microsoft?
It seems obvious to me that with Microsoft entering the computer security and anti-virus market, that there is now a NEGATIVE business motivation for securing Windows and related Microsoft software. The cost of the operating system is not going to decrease, but if you want to use it without getting your system hosed on a regular basis, then you have to buy the "protection plan" that Microsoft sells. This is, in my mind, exactly parrallel to the extortion racket used by the mafia and exemplified in so many movies. The criminal organization creates the crime and then sells a protection plan. In this case, Microsoft creates the crappy security, and then sells its "protection plan"--antivirus and security software.
Slashdot Mirror
"walmart isn't incentivising this."
Exactly. For some operations, RFID makes sense, but there isn't just ONE RFID system installed. Most of these companies also supply other big chain stores who may have other requirements. This was the whole reason for going with Barcodes. Barcodes are standardized. RFID systems are not, as far as I know. Walmart hammers it suppliers for price decreases, while the shipping costs rise due to higher petroleum. The supplier has a choice: make money or go out of business. Walmart can use its huge purchasing power to drive companies out of business, so perhaps the company looks at it business and says: losing a dime on ten million units is much worse than making 50 cents on a hundred thousand, and just decides to pass on the Walmart supply agreement. That might be why the selection has been diminishing in Walmart to the point that if I want to buy everything on my list, I have to go to other stores. The only reason that Walmart has been able to bully any suppliers is that the cost of the bullying is significantly less than the cost of the delivered product. Once that changes and the supplier is forced to improvise, the Walmart account might become a liability rather than a profit center.
No it's not reasonable. Inventory has been done for thousands of years without a discount for well, COUNTING the stuff as it comes in. Just because walmart was to automate it's systems does not mean that this is efficient, reasonable, or cost effective for anyone else. With Walmart squeezing the suppliers on price, and the rising cost of shipping, how is this effective thing for Walmart help the supplier?
Walmart may be the big gorrilla, but as of late customer satisfaction has been decreasing. The stores have begun to look more and more like K-mart in it's final years: dingy dirty and filled with unhelpful dour employees.
The US has already spent more money on operations in Iraq than it would cost to fund multiple manned missions to Mars. How much good did we get for that money? How is war in Iraq and Afghanistan helping us? Higher gas prices? It has been reported that the US Department of Defense has "misplaced" 2.3 trillion dollars of "stuff." How does that help us?
I'd say that we could spend our money on Space exploration and get a lot of cool pictures for our trillions, or we could misplace it in to who know what/where and get nothing for our money, or we could blow up things and people in other countries.
As for whether we can afford to spend the money, who cares? The government will always make more.
As the law and the courts have repeatedly stated. . . "attempting" to violate the copyright act is not a crime and is also harmless to the copyright holder. SO it is legal to put your files in a shared folder. However, if you do that AND someone unauthorized by the copyright holder makes a copy of the file, then you are liable for a violation of copyright law.
So I wonder what the odds are of getting search warrant based upon a statistical analysis of the residence's services and location?
This is interesting, because the telecommunications companies long ago ran with the "I can't control what goes over my wires" defense when the governments of various nations wanted to punish them as an accessory to crimes committed via the wires. The phone made it easier for V. and L. to conspire to murder T. The phone company claimed that it could not monitor and control every call and so the common carrier defense arose.
Now, however, there is the demonstrated ability to monitor and control and perhaps the common carrier denotation is what is being tossed aside in the pursuit of the last nickel. What is an ISP to argue when faced with copyright allegations? They can monitor the traffic to sell targeted ads but can't tell the when an illegal MP3 is being downloaded? That might not fly in a courtroom. Wouldn't the temptation to try to sell the user a similar song be too tempting to pass up? Or maybe the judge or jury doesn't get that there is a technology barrier and figures if the ISP can monitor one they can monitor them all.
How about a political move like enforcing a completely non-encrypted internet to monitor for kiddie porn? All encrypted packets could be criminalized - except to "authorized sites" like your bank.
What about the copyright on the page being mangled? I liken this type of technology as a form of vandalism, or perhaps and unauthorized derivative work. How would this be different than Amazon reprinting a Harry Potter book on demand and inserting hundreds of ads? Maybe those ads would be targeted to text on a facing page so that you'd get an advertisement for cleaning supplies every time the Nimbus 2000 flying broom was mentioned, or pet supplies every time one of the owls was mentioned. How about the death scene with Dumbledor opposite some funeral home ad?
What about anticompetitive actions? The ISP could redirect or replace traffic with that of a competitor's product. I'm sure some companies would be delighted to ensure that no one every hears of Brand-X again. How could this type of control and monitoring be used to prevent the accurate discussion of topics? AT&T is a backbone ISP and has been shown to be a good bit lax when it comes to protecting the data it carries. Could a large company or government change the internet by use of this technology to stop dissent?
The abuse potential is huge.
Then what about the privacy issues with reading every packet? Gee, Mr. Smith, why were you searching for pipes, fertilizer, and biodiesel last month?
Ah yes, the folks who spend their lives glued to the blinking lights and canned music of the latest and greatest video game are quietly honing their UBER L33T Skilz. The 80 plus hours a week spent in the dark, alone, bereft of actual human contact - the pizza guy doesn't count, clearly develop the necessary and vital skills that the rest of the world is lacking. And in due time, the next video game will come around and those few, dedicated gamers will rise to the digital challenge and dominate the world. . .
for 15 bucks a month.
The reality is simple: those video game skills have to be translated into areas outside of the video game for any effective leadership to happen. With so much time spent in the game(s) and so much less in the real world, these leaders will be most often found with titles like: "Raid Leader," "Guild Master," or "Class Leader." We'll be lucky if these folks hold jobs long enough to qualify for social security.
I think that this is simple. Blizzard makes games that are bought and installed and it is pretty obvious that they are installing a bittorrent like client that will consume some of your band width at fairly predictable intervals. And you have the option of not letting blizzard use your bandwidth. Microsoft has a history of lying about what it is doing, or simply not acting with any regard to the user's good. Microsoft could very well add a bit of legal jargon to the EULA granting themselves permission to use your band width if you run their operating system. They are already doing this with automatic downloads and all of the talk between microsoft and the windows installations. It is a small stretch to simply help themselves to your bandwidth. And in this case, what can you do? Nothing. Windows is the dominant OS, not some cool game you can install. So if you are lucky enough to be running some non-microsoft operating system, then this is not your issue. But for many people, whose time is valuable and whose internet connection is limited by quirks of money or geography, having Microsoft help themselves to a portion of it is very bad. Bad in the road rage sense of the word. It feels like theft. What Blizzard has done which is almost identical, is ok because it is a choice.
So what does the DHS intend to do to those "citizens" who don't have the required ID when it comes time for them to get on a plane? Hmm? DHS can simple deny anyone from those states from flying without a "federaly approved ID."
"I'm sorry sir, you don't have a Real ID approved by the DHS. Your state rejected that mandate. You can't fly. Sorry to hear about your deceased relative. Step over here for "processing" as you know trying to get on a plane without proper ID is an act of "terrorism."
Not necessarily.
Immigrants who will work for LESS in this country drive the standard of living lower. This is because the citizen programmer who remains unemployed is a burden to the country, and the taxes collected and the fund available for spending by the lower paid immigrant are less. The costs of domestic infrastructure which is now being used by both the unemployed citizen and the immigrant cost the same to the public. Other things such as housing will now have more people competing for them, and as in every crowded area, the prices of apartments and housing rise.
Providing a lucritive job for an immigrant? I guess if you compare their salary in their native thrid world country then it would be "lucritive" but they are being paid less to live in a higher cost of living country. Example: A person in field "A" makes 80K per year regardless of whether he lives in New York City or New Orleans Louisiana. However, the cost of living is vastly different between those two cities such that the 80K provides a small apartment in New York while 80K is a very nice living in New Orleans. So this really doesn't hold water.
They hiring of immigrants does not lower the price of good sold but rather the cost of goods sold, and therefore increases the PROFIT to the company, which in these days goes mostly into the pockets of the upper management often regardless of corporate performance. In the article, Microsoft is wanting to hire these immigrants. Do you expect this to drop the price of VISTA? X-BOX? Hmmm? I don't think it will have an impact on the price of the goods Microsoft sells,even if they relocated everything to Bangeldesh and paid their programers $2/year. This was one of the big arguments corporations made for moving the clothing industry to Bangladesh. We see $120 pairs of jeans made for mere pennies. The cost of the goods sold did not change but the profits became much more lucrative for the owner. The displaced workers in America were not so well off.
Shareholders benefit only if the stock price rises or dividends are paid. Many of the stock holders are large institutions so the benefit to society on incremental immigration is nebulous. The stock might rise a dollar today on this news but fall two dollars on some regulatory set back unrelated. The net loss is mitigated by a buck but it is still a net loss.
Tis a glorious day indeed when the artists are told by the "record labels" that because of "nasty little law" they'll have to choose their lyrics from a small set of "acceptable words." Of course, the record labels get 70 years on the copy right so all is well. Oh yes! All of those "oldies" will (hopefully) be "grandfathered" in so that we can still get our violent antisocial pron music, but only because it already exists. Those new artists will have to conform to the new "standard of acceptable music" which will probably sound much like "Yet another boy band" singing the lyrics to the Barney song.
I guess death metal will have to skip the lyrics and go all "Muzak" on us.
The artist, of course will have to find alternative means of getting their music out to the masses. Good thing there is this internet thingy.
Paint is based upon pigments which are chemical compounds having rather specific absorbances. Varying levels of these compounds are used when mixing one pigment with others to create the entire set of colors humans have to work with. So each pigment is a color, kinda like the pixels on the monitor, and they are mixed at varying levels to provide the illusion of a particular shade of color.
Quick! Sue the pigment makers and artists of the world! They are only giving us the ILLUSION of all those colors! EGADS! We've been CHEATED.
I hope quite sincerely that someone puts this class actions lawsuit in the recycle bin along with the greedy B*****ds who came up with this steaming pile of bovine excrement.
If you closely imitate the writing and thoughts of another and pass them off as your own ideas, then it is plagiarism. If you reuse your own work, even verbatim, it is not plagiarism. Nor is it cheating. I wrote a long paper for a high school English Class. Later, in college, I had to write another long English paper, and I found that I could re-use the old high school paper. I spruced up the old paper with some new citations, and polished it up a bit, but it was pretty much the same paper.
I would have a serious problem with a company keeping a copy of my high school paper and later using that copy to accuse me of plagiarism. That is the situation where actual economic damages from the copyright infringement occur. I'm not familiar with the workings of turnitin, but I can see how this could lead to trouble for students years down the road.
Ah, yes, but despite the efforts of English professors and teachers, the language loosely known as English has a fine tradition of "going with what ever works," from the old Shakespeare's "But me no buts," to this quite clear use of the adverbial "relatedly" to mean: "Hey! This story is related to the one that we just told you about."
Sorry, folks, but the purpose of language is to express meaning in a clear fashion, not follow arbitrary rules. In this case, "relatedly" works quite well as is.
And we must mention that the original christian bible was put together at the behest of a PAGAN casear, Constantine, who was interested in unifying a political and military EMPIRE with a common religion. As a matter of historical fact, Constantine was not baptisted into the christian religion until he lay upon his death bed. The protestant bible is a stripped down version that was changed mostly for POLITICAL reasons, though many of the issues that Martin Luther had with the Catholic Church of his era were quite valid and philosophical. It is most annoying to me that more people are interested in forcing someone else to live according to a bible that they are not willing to live by. Many of these passionate campaigns against evolution, abortion, etc., are not CHRISTIAN values.
It's not the kids that I would worry about, but the adults with families who get so hooked on WOW and other MMORPG's that they neglect their children, spouse, work, etc and wind up hurting a lot of innocent people just so that they can spent 22 hours in BWL getting yet another "EPIC" item, which is completely useless by the time the next upgrade for the game comes out. (Hey! I've got the Burning Crusade Beta and the GREENS are better than a lot of the EPICS so many have slaved for in the last year.)
Games like WOW give people with low self-esteem or crappy situations an escape that can be so much more fun and interesting than their real lives that they prefer the escape to reality. This is NOT too different than the people who use alcohol and other mind altering drugs to escape from their real lives. Just as with Alcohol, where a little bit does you a lot of good, but too much ruins your life and your health, MMORPG's are fine in moderation.
So yeah, if the alcohol and tobacco companies can be sued for making an "addictive" product, then so can companies like Blizzard. Fact of the matter is that there will one day be (if not already) a "MMORPG anonymous" in the mold of Alcoholics Anonymous. Destructive behavior that adversely affects the lives of children is a social proplem with measurable costs to society, and will eventually need to be addressed.
A few words: "Class Action Lawsuit" Microsoft as a monopoly is adversely labeling businesses because they don't pay for a certificate and they can do this only because they are a monopoly. And if microsoft is doing this to fight phishing, where is the liability if that protection does not work? I'm sure someone will figure out how to get a green bar without a certificate and a phishing they will go. Meanwhile, the legitimate small business gets labeled "untrustworthy" by Microsoft software. Now THAT is ironic.
Wasn't he the same guy who said that all of the music on Ipods was stolen anyway and that Apple should cough up a percentage or some fixed amount of money per Ipod to "cover" all the "stolen" music?
Hmm... as far as I can tell, the RIAA seems to think that owning certain devices is prima facia evidence of copyright infringement. So if you have and ipod or other MP3player or you own a computer, or and internet address then you are a "pirate." What other eveidence do they need? These are the same folks that brought Canada the "tax" on every blank CD purchased because owning such a thing means that you are "pirating" something they "own."
Didn't one of the cartel actually claim that all the music on ipods was "stolen?"
Those pop-ups are the equivalent of someone yanking the magazine or newspaper out of your hands so that they can yammer some inane and uninteresting babble at me. the fools who think that I will buy something that is advertised in that way are wasting their money. Oh sure I REMEMBER the product, and when I see it in the store I WON'T buy it. Movie tickets.com did that to me the other day and I immediately sent them a nasty email and did not buy tickets through them. Sure is nice to do that, but I will not be treated rudely just for a moment's time savings.
Considering that the wheel was recently patented in Australia, and that playing with string and parting your hair in a particular way have all been patented, I doubt there is anyone on the face of the planet that doesn't infringe some patent somewhere simply by living. Patents are broken and probably hopelessly so.
Ridiculous is the word. Your position is exactly that.
First, copyright is AT LEAST 50 years PMA in most countries, which means that the copyright will not expire for at least 50 years after the DEATH of the author. So if you create a copyrighted material at age 20 and live until you are 80, the copyright will expire 110 years after you created the work.
Second, there is no legal requirement to place expired matierals into the public domain, nor any requirement to have DRM release the material once the copyright has expired. The materials simply fall into the public domain. The Berne Convention gave copyright protection to everything created without requiring registration. This created millions of copyrighted works without a mechanism for anyone else to know who holds the copyright. The result is that there are millions of orphaned works unavailable for either preservation or use by the public, and certainly not being used by the creator or rights holder. There is also no legal requirement for the creator or rights holder to preserve the work for the duration of the copyright. Thus, it is very likely that the vast majority of copyrighted works will be lost to the public domain simply through neglect. Unless there is a compelling financial reason, most of the copyrighted works will vanish, simply because no one is going to create that "superior format from a master recording," if no one has bothered to keep the "master recording." Example: There are thousands of old movies rotting away because right now because the rights holder doesn't care enought too spend the money necessary to preserve the master recording. Digital files are a lot easier to destroy. DRM'd files that are hard to access because the technology has changed are very likely to simply be deleted, and expecting a DRM system to survive a hundred and ten years is absurd.
Given the fact that copyright was designed in the era prior to the creation of digital works, the designers thought that the surviving printed matierals would be fine and so there was no need for requirements that the copyrighted works be preserved. Also, the original term was 28 years from the time of creation. With the fast pace of change in the digital world, it is very likely that in 110 years, what ever digital file you create will be not only obsolete, but impossible to read. As for some DRM created now, that mechanism will likely be unusable by the end of the copyright and further, the people who created it are very likely to be dead.
As far as DRM being invasive, I would recommend you check out the Sony rootkit DRM as an example of why trust is so very limited. Computers contain confidential information whether this is for a corporation or a family business. Some of this information would allow other people and organizations to take advantage of your current situation and mostlikely to your detriment. Having a root kit secretly installed to "protect" some record label's interest in a twelve dollar music album is a grotesque violation of my privacy. In fact, if it was done by a teenager from the Phillipines using an email virus, the same actions would be considered a crime.
While am certain that there is an MBA thesis on the irrelevance of management to actually running a business, especially a large one, mabhatter564 nails one thing precisely: Most business owners don't know what they need from IT or even what they need their computers to do. I work for a company whose entire IT department was a guy who also ran a forklift as his primary job. He did "that computer stuff" on the side because he got a whole dollar and hour more for it.
So what happens when the network fails because it was put in 25 years ago and has finally just worn out?
Yep. . . Panic
Furthermore I agree with the lack of good understanding of what a business wants its employee to do. Many companies have NO job descriptions that mean anything, and the ones with detailed descriptions often have the phrase: "other duties as assigned." That is really informative.
With Vista no one will need virus protection because (1) third party antivirus will not work due to interface issues (2) Mircrosoft is in the Antivirus Software business now and their much better protection is built in, and (3) because the frustrated folks will switch to Mac or Linux.
I can't see why this would be any more realistic than anything Balmer has to say.
With Microsoft's legendary reputation for software that works perfectly and never falsely identifies legitimate software as pirated, how can you be sure that the software was activated even if the computer SAYS it was? Or even if the Indian in New Dehli tells you it was activated? And if the activation in Vista has the same failure rate as WGA, then some large number of windows servers are going to go into "reduced functionallity mode" because the software activation is faulty. As I have read in various articles, it seems that the simplest and easiest way to re-legitimize your software is to re-purchase a liscence, and that would also get the serverup ASAP. So, spend a long time (days perhaps) arguing with Microsoft, or pay them the cost of the server software liscence. The business decision is one made on what it costs you to be down for the time that it is going to take your company to convince Microsoft to fix the problem. How much extra money is this going to bring to Microsoft? Why would Microsoft be motivated to reduce these additional sales? Given the Microsoft's reputation in the industry, as exemplified in the illegal leveraging of their monopoly on computer operating software into the browser market, and now into the computer security and antivirus market, why would such piratical (extortionary?) practices be anything beyond business as usual at Microsoft?
It seems obvious to me that with Microsoft entering the computer security and anti-virus market, that there is now a NEGATIVE business motivation for securing Windows and related Microsoft software. The cost of the operating system is not going to decrease, but if you want to use it without getting your system hosed on a regular basis, then you have to buy the "protection plan" that Microsoft sells. This is, in my mind, exactly parrallel to the extortion racket used by the mafia and exemplified in so many movies. The criminal organization creates the crime and then sells a protection plan. In this case, Microsoft creates the crappy security, and then sells its "protection plan"--antivirus and security software.