It wouldn't cost millions to defend agaisnt the charges. Thousands, yes -- far more than the RIAA is asking for -- but not millions. Sure, you could spend millions, but you don't have to.
Unfortunately, that's the heart of the problem: people see a demand for money, and they decide that they can't afford _not_ to pay. Regardless of wether they're required to pay or not, they decided they can't afford the consequence of refusing to pay.
And that's extortion, pure and simple. Furthermore, it's systematic extortion being carried out en masse.
The fact that it is legal doesn't mean it is not wrong.
Note that even defending yourself isn't free - that's time off work, which for many people just isn't an option. And the big-bad-corporate can always afford to drag things out longer than you can.
While it [the BCC licence fee] might be officially setup as you paying for a 'licence', it's essentially a tax similar to all other taxes
No, it's not a tax. It's a licence fee, just like a pet licence or a driver's licence fee.
It's even easy to avoid paying: just don't own a television. Of course, you have to be able to prove that.
(Personally, I'd do something like work out how often people buy new TVs, then turn this license into a sales tax, but only because it'd be more efficient to collect)
The score is in the public domain. Each and every performance is copyrighted as of the time of the performance.
This means that there are exactly _zero_ digitally recorded performances that are in the public domain through copyright expiration (though there are some that have been explicitly released).
(Note that transferring from one format to another would re-create a copyright. So taking a recording from a gramaphone record and digitising it would give you a valid copyright over the digital version)
Preventing terrorism is what the cameras are for, right?
Well, preventing crime in general, yes.
You see, it's very hard to stop the first incident. However, if you can see who did it, it makes it a lot easier to find them later and arrest them. And that sort of delays them doing it a second time...
Nothing about prophecies concerning the last days said that Christ's church was going to be in a majority
Nor would you expect it to be. Isn't the City of Heaven, as described in Revalations, only slightly larger than New York State? And this is Heaven, so I don't think you'll want to have high-density housing...
Big Pharma regularly conducts extensive drug trials on natural therapies.
When they find one is effective, they direct significant research funds into finding out why. They then isolate the aspect of the natural therapy that causes the desired result, and produce a treatment incorporating just that ingredient (as opposed to the other non-beneficial and potentially harmful aspects)
And you seriously just accept that? The notion that, for a very small expenditure of time on their part, they could walk away with one million dollars.... one million dollars that they could donate to any charity in the world (if they weren't interested in the money themselves)... and yet they say they're not interested?
Correction: that they are _all_ uninterested.
That some wouldn't be interested is not surprising. That all such individuals would be uninterested is surprising, unless there is a casual link between possessing psychic powers and altruistic behaviour (not bloody likely, IMHO)
When a car has a safety flaw, they issue a recall notice. This is analagous to the update mechanism for Windows.
In some cases, car manufacturers have been sued over flaws. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that the car manufacturers were at fault: some action they took (or a reasonable one they failed to take) caused the flaw.
In a similar vein, Microsoft (and other software vendors) could be considered liable for zero-day exploits, on the grounds that the flaw shouldn't have been introduced in the first place.
These things need to be published for their deterrent value. One big problem with cybercrime is that the criminals feel that they'll never be caught, and if they ever are, then the punishment will be a slap on the wrist.
As long as this perception (which is very valid!) exists, the risk-reward ratio makes cybercrime attractive. Busting the crooks isn't enough to change the perception - you need to let the other crooks know that they could be busted next.
Organised crime, in particular, is a business. If they start to feel that their criminal ventures are too risky, they'll go elsewhere (quite possibly into legit business, where their complete lack of ethics will help them fit in with the rest of the corporate sharks)
The most profitable and largest companies on Earth tend to be in commodity businesses. Sure, competition is tough, but commodity businesses have _volume_.
If I sell a hundred units, I might need to make a hundred dollars off each. If I sell a million, and only make a dollar, then I'm ten thousand times better off. If I sell 10 billion and only make a cent, I'm a million times better off than I was in the first case.
One of the major factors keeping the US dollar afloat is that there's a couple of dozen countries around the world that peg their currency to the US dollar, and buy up lots of US dollars to keep the currencies pegged. China is merely the biggest example.
If these other countries stop doing that, the US currency will fall dramatically - look at the scare that came from the South Koreans even hinting that they might stop buying US dollars.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the changes Apple's made involve porting what started out as KHTML to a completely different API, and no matter how frequently Apple released the patches, or in what sized chunks they released the patches, they'd still be full of changes related to the fact that Apple's APIs have evolved along a completely separate path from X11 for their entire lives.
Yes. That's KHTML's problem. They want changes being written for another platform, but they don't have an application or code-base structure that makes it easy to seperate platform-specific code. Nor have they taken the time or effort to introduce one, _after_ they saw the nature of the Apple patches.
This isn't a hard technical problem: it's a political and organisational problem, for the KHTML project.
IMHO, part of the problem here is that KHTML wasn't designed to be extended in piecemeal fashion. Look at Eclipse: totally plug-in based, and if one port goes in an undesired (by the general community) direction, you simply swap out the affected plugin. Very manageable.
Hah! In Australia, I reported a problem with Hellstra BigPond about my cable modem not being able to get an ethernet address via DHCP between 6pm and 10pm (peak usage hours, naturally). Obvious problem, right? They'd oversubscribed their local gear and needed to put in more hardware to get more connections (and thus more addresses) available.
But before they do anything... they want to send a technican out, between 9am and 2pm, to check out a problem that only occurs in the evening.
I said fuck that, and simply left my computer on during the day (thus not giving up the IP address when I did get it).
Ever read what the Church of Lucifer says about this bit? Basically goes that God created Adam and Eve to be chattels and toys. Lucifer (aka the Lightbringer), who was then still God's major domo, decided that this wasn't really fair and helped out poor old Adam and Eve by giving them the gift of knowledge. For that, Adam and Eve got kicked out, and Lucifer got cast out.
Not that I'm any more a believer in the Church of Lucifer than I am about the more popularly accepted aspects of Christianity, but it's another interpretation of the same exact sequence of events: just with a different spin.
Except that Intelligent Design doesn't count as a theory. The trick with a theory is that you can use it to explain some of the evidence, then make predictions about what other types of evidence is out there so you can explain that to.
Evolution counts as a theory because you can do this. Take, for example, the evolution of the sabre-tooth tiger. You can predict that the teeth evolved to penetrate tough hide, which was also evolving to be tougher. The fossil record bears this out. You can also predict that this cycle (sharper/longer teeth vs better armour) would probably play itself out a few times, and sure enough, the fossil record indicates that as well.
Intelligent Design doesn't count as a theory because saying that "God made it like that" doesn't let you make predictions about the nature of future evidence.
Which is exactly why a lot of fundamentalists focus on translations via prayer for added accuracy, and look rather disdainfully at those who go and ask the Jews for an English-Hebrew dictionary...
Have you noticed that if you're a scientist, you're free to posit any sort of large-scale catastrophe you like to help explain teh cataclysmic extintions in the fossil record - Supernovae, giant meteorites, etc, so long as it's not a flood?)
No, you're allowed floods as well. You just have to explain:
1. Where do the water come from? 2. Where did it go afterwards? 3. Where are the marks in the rock records to indicate it?
Giant meteorites have some nice properties to them:
1. They come from the sky. We know there's lot of big rocks out there - we can see them with telescopes. 2. They leave impact craters, and boy the Earth has a few doozies. Roughly every large circular formation on the Earth is from a meteor impact (such as, oh, the Gulf of Mexico). 3. A large enough meteor will quite literally set the air on fire - an exploding shockwave that burns up everything as it goes around the Earth only to rebound on the rest of the wave on the other side. 4. "Smaller" (but still huge) meteors will simply throw several cubic kilometers of water (but _not_ enough for a Biblical Flood!) and dust into the atmosphere blocking off the sunlight for months. They'll also happily cause major volcanic eruptions from the tectonic shockwaves, adding more fun and games to the atmosphere. 5. Both sort of impacts would leave distinctive marks in the rock layers (such as a really thin layer of iridium), which turn out to actually be there and be more or less uniformly distributed.
Giant Floods don't have these characteristics. Scientists tend to need both a possible explanation and the evidence before they consider a theory as being potentially true.
Incidentally, it's not hard to disprove evolution - at least the part which suggests that it was shaped by merely random events. Simply write a program which fills a framebuffer with random numbers and tell me if it ever produces anything structured or resembling life, or even anything worth looking at.
It's been done: it's called genetic programming. And it works.
Life evolves fairly easily: matter gets thrown around in random configurations. Some (an extremely small percentage) turn out to be self-organising and reproductive. That is, they are stable, and can use other matter around them to create more-or-less identical copies. Pretty soon, the replicating material is the only thing in the game. And all it takes to accept this is the awareness that some configurations of matter (particularly those involving carbon) are self-organising and reproductive, and an awareness of the timescales invovled.
The astronomical evidence is the big one; it shows that the rate of atomic decay, in particular, is reasonably constant, certainly for the last several billion years.
This is mostly due to the fact that ID's arguments are statistical in nature - while ID shows (and rather convincingly) that a universe as complex as ours would be a statistical anomoly, it does nothing to show that we aren't exactly that - a statistical anomoly.
Actually, that's not exactly true. The universe isn't such a statistical anomaly as you'd think. It turns out that most of the values in the fine-structrue constant (which is what the ID folks attack) are interrelated. Bump one of them up, another part of the constant goes down. The physics which allow for carbon to be such a wonderful atom for life has a high tolerance.
As for the atheist world view: you can think what you feel like. But don't go around trying to tell _me_ that the Earth is only 6000 years old without some evidence better than "God made it that way". Believe it or not, most scientists aren't engaged in a struggle for cultural authority. Most scientists don't care - they're trying to explore truth, and truth simply is. As Gailleo said: But it does move
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that's the heart of the problem: people see a demand for money, and they decide that they can't afford _not_ to pay. Regardless of wether they're required to pay or not, they decided they can't afford the consequence of refusing to pay.
And that's extortion, pure and simple. Furthermore, it's systematic extortion being carried out en masse.
The fact that it is legal doesn't mean it is not wrong.
Note that even defending yourself isn't free - that's time off work, which for many people just isn't an option. And the big-bad-corporate can always afford to drag things out longer than you can.
Um, for the _second_ time... go read up about the War of 1812 (you know, the one where Canadians burnt down the White House?)
No, it's not a tax. It's a licence fee, just like a pet licence or a driver's licence fee.
It's even easy to avoid paying: just don't own a television. Of course, you have to be able to prove that.
(Personally, I'd do something like work out how often people buy new TVs, then turn this license into a sales tax, but only because it'd be more efficient to collect)
The score is in the public domain. Each and every performance is copyrighted as of the time of the performance.
This means that there are exactly _zero_ digitally recorded performances that are in the public domain through copyright expiration (though there are some that have been explicitly released).
(Note that transferring from one format to another would re-create a copyright. So taking a recording from a gramaphone record and digitising it would give you a valid copyright over the digital version)
Well, preventing crime in general, yes.
You see, it's very hard to stop the first incident. However, if you can see who did it, it makes it a lot easier to find them later and arrest them. And that sort of delays them doing it a second time...
Nor would you expect it to be. Isn't the City of Heaven, as described in Revalations, only slightly larger than New York State? And this is Heaven, so I don't think you'll want to have high-density housing...
Big Pharma regularly conducts extensive drug trials on natural therapies.
When they find one is effective, they direct significant research funds into finding out why. They then isolate the aspect of the natural therapy that causes the desired result, and produce a treatment incorporating just that ingredient (as opposed to the other non-beneficial and potentially harmful aspects)
Correction: that they are _all_ uninterested.
That some wouldn't be interested is not surprising. That all such individuals would be uninterested is surprising, unless there is a casual link between possessing psychic powers and altruistic behaviour (not bloody likely, IMHO)
When a car has a safety flaw, they issue a recall notice. This is analagous to the update mechanism for Windows.
In some cases, car manufacturers have been sued over flaws. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that the car manufacturers were at fault: some action they took (or a reasonable one they failed to take) caused the flaw.
In a similar vein, Microsoft (and other software vendors) could be considered liable for zero-day exploits, on the grounds that the flaw shouldn't have been introduced in the first place.
No it won't.
Think sensibly: this is going to be boring, mundane, unskilled labor work. It will be outsourced to India or China, of course.
I'm not sure if I'm joking, either...
These things need to be published for their deterrent value. One big problem with cybercrime is that the criminals feel that they'll never be caught, and if they ever are, then the punishment will be a slap on the wrist.
As long as this perception (which is very valid!) exists, the risk-reward ratio makes cybercrime attractive. Busting the crooks isn't enough to change the perception - you need to let the other crooks know that they could be busted next.
Organised crime, in particular, is a business. If they start to feel that their criminal ventures are too risky, they'll go elsewhere (quite possibly into legit business, where their complete lack of ethics will help them fit in with the rest of the corporate sharks)
Why do people keep saying that?
The most profitable and largest companies on Earth tend to be in commodity businesses. Sure, competition is tough, but commodity businesses have _volume_.
If I sell a hundred units, I might need to make a hundred dollars off each. If I sell a million, and only make a dollar, then I'm ten thousand times better off. If I sell 10 billion and only make a cent, I'm a million times better off than I was in the first case.
You're probably right about that...
One of the major factors keeping the US dollar afloat is that there's a couple of dozen countries around the world that peg their currency to the US dollar, and buy up lots of US dollars to keep the currencies pegged. China is merely the biggest example.
If these other countries stop doing that, the US currency will fall dramatically - look at the scare that came from the South Koreans even hinting that they might stop buying US dollars.
Yes. That's KHTML's problem. They want changes being written for another platform, but they don't have an application or code-base structure that makes it easy to seperate platform-specific code. Nor have they taken the time or effort to introduce one, _after_ they saw the nature of the Apple patches.
This isn't a hard technical problem: it's a political and organisational problem, for the KHTML project.
IMHO, part of the problem here is that KHTML wasn't designed to be extended in piecemeal fashion. Look at Eclipse: totally plug-in based, and if one port goes in an undesired (by the general community) direction, you simply swap out the affected plugin. Very manageable.
Hah! In Australia, I reported a problem with Hellstra BigPond about my cable modem not being able to get an ethernet address via DHCP between 6pm and 10pm (peak usage hours, naturally). Obvious problem, right? They'd oversubscribed their local gear and needed to put in more hardware to get more connections (and thus more addresses) available.
But before they do anything... they want to send a technican out, between 9am and 2pm, to check out a problem that only occurs in the evening.
I said fuck that, and simply left my computer on during the day (thus not giving up the IP address when I did get it).
Ever read what the Church of Lucifer says about this bit? Basically goes that God created Adam and Eve to be chattels and toys. Lucifer (aka the Lightbringer), who was then still God's major domo, decided that this wasn't really fair and helped out poor old Adam and Eve by giving them the gift of knowledge. For that, Adam and Eve got kicked out, and Lucifer got cast out.
Not that I'm any more a believer in the Church of Lucifer than I am about the more popularly accepted aspects of Christianity, but it's another interpretation of the same exact sequence of events: just with a different spin.
Except that Intelligent Design doesn't count as a theory. The trick with a theory is that you can use it to explain some of the evidence, then make predictions about what other types of evidence is out there so you can explain that to.
Evolution counts as a theory because you can do this. Take, for example, the evolution of the sabre-tooth tiger. You can predict that the teeth evolved to penetrate tough hide, which was also evolving to be tougher. The fossil record bears this out. You can also predict that this cycle (sharper/longer teeth vs better armour) would probably play itself out a few times, and sure enough, the fossil record indicates that as well.
Intelligent Design doesn't count as a theory because saying that "God made it like that" doesn't let you make predictions about the nature of future evidence.
Which is exactly why a lot of fundamentalists focus on translations via prayer for added accuracy, and look rather disdainfully at those who go and ask the Jews for an English-Hebrew dictionary...
So what? He's infinitely powerful, right? Maybe he needed to introduce that much complexity simply to make some element of challenge to it all.
No, you're allowed floods as well. You just have to explain:
1. Where do the water come from?
2. Where did it go afterwards?
3. Where are the marks in the rock records to indicate it?
Giant meteorites have some nice properties to them:
1. They come from the sky. We know there's lot of big rocks out there - we can see them with telescopes.
2. They leave impact craters, and boy the Earth has a few doozies. Roughly every large circular formation on the Earth is from a meteor impact (such as, oh, the Gulf of Mexico).
3. A large enough meteor will quite literally set the air on fire - an exploding shockwave that burns up everything as it goes around the Earth only to rebound on the rest of the wave on the other side.
4. "Smaller" (but still huge) meteors will simply throw several cubic kilometers of water (but _not_ enough for a Biblical Flood!) and dust into the atmosphere blocking off the sunlight for months. They'll also happily cause major volcanic eruptions from the tectonic shockwaves, adding more fun and games to the atmosphere.
5. Both sort of impacts would leave distinctive marks in the rock layers (such as a really thin layer of iridium), which turn out to actually be there and be more or less uniformly distributed.
Giant Floods don't have these characteristics. Scientists tend to need both a possible explanation and the evidence before they consider a theory as being potentially true.
Actually, strictly speaking, all we can prove is that is what it looks like from here.
I leave it up to the "intelligent" design folks to argue why God would go to the trouble of making it look like that for us.
It's been done: it's called genetic programming. And it works.
Life evolves fairly easily: matter gets thrown around in random configurations. Some (an extremely small percentage) turn out to be self-organising and reproductive. That is, they are stable, and can use other matter around them to create more-or-less identical copies. Pretty soon, the replicating material is the only thing in the game. And all it takes to accept this is the awareness that some configurations of matter (particularly those involving carbon) are self-organising and reproductive, and an awareness of the timescales invovled.
The astronomical evidence is the big one; it shows that the rate of atomic decay, in particular, is reasonably constant, certainly for the last several billion years.
Actually, that's not exactly true. The universe isn't such a statistical anomaly as you'd think. It turns out that most of the values in the fine-structrue constant (which is what the ID folks attack) are interrelated. Bump one of them up, another part of the constant goes down. The physics which allow for carbon to be such a wonderful atom for life has a high tolerance.
As for the atheist world view: you can think what you feel like. But don't go around trying to tell _me_ that the Earth is only 6000 years old without some evidence better than "God made it that way". Believe it or not, most scientists aren't engaged in a struggle for cultural authority. Most scientists don't care - they're trying to explore truth, and truth simply is. As Gailleo said: But it does move
Um... God liked the pretty patterns?