Right, but when they're taking $x off the bill at the cash register instead of mailing you $x, you can be damned sure $n isn't going to be equal to zero anymore.
I used to go to Office Max some weeks, leave with $100 worth of products and $100 worth of rebate forms. I pretty much always got every single one back, so for the hassle of filling out a few forms I was getting all sorts of free items (CD burners, surge protectors, mice, canned air, blank CDs, jewel cases, phones).
Now because of everyone else's bitching, those days are over. I don't know how the saving on other things are going to be affected by the end of the mail in rebate, but I know for damned sure they're never going to have an instant savings that leaves a dozen items in their store free for the taking.
Neither EFF nor the ACLU is obligated to defend any rights at all, so I think we should be grateful for what aid they may provide in their particular areas of expertise and set it upon ourselves to fill in whatever holes may be left.
barring a global nuclear war, humanity is going to survive the next 100 years. Its fun to speak with quiet awe of all the impending dooms facing humanity, but a degree or two of temperature difference or a couple billion people here or there aren't going to threaten the survival of the species.
Nothing will, short of irradiating the planet. And the threat of that in the next 100 years seems no greater than was the threat of it in the past 100 years.
We could run entirely out of fossil fuels tomorrow, we could have almost non-stop conventional war for the next 100 years (which would make it hard to distinguish from the last 100 years, or most 100 year periods, really), global warming could do every single horrible thing that's been predicted by the most pessimistic scientist and then some. Humanity's not going anywhere.
Think of it from the perspective of an exterminator. You've got billions of household pests that, though very vulnerable to the elements, are also impressively able to adapt themselves to harsh climates and survive in places that seems completely uninhabitable, like the arctic circle or downtown Detroit. This infestation is very entrenched. and it's going to be very hard to deal with it in the timeframe of basically the lifespan of a member of the species.
Right now, there's some baby being born in Gaza. That kid is going to be around in 100 years, and is going to look back on this post and say "boy, we dodged a bullet there". Assuming somebody doesn't shoot him between now and then. Then, in all likelihood, he's going to post a question on Slashdot about how we're ever going to get through the next 100 years.
I didn't mean to accuse you in particular, it's more the general tone of the discussion. Everyone seems to be rushing to condemn eBay.
Ebay's policy may be arbitrary in and of itself (though it may have some very important legal reason), but the discrimination within it is very clearly defined. They've had a list of reasons for refusal on their site for a very long time now, and nothing I've seen from the list implies they are doing anything but universally enforcing their own rules. That is, I don't see a site on the refused list that meets all their criteria, nor do I see a site on their accepted list that appears to fail in some regard.
On the other hand if eBay accepted Google Checkout the day it launched, despite not meeting certain of their long standing criteria, for the simple reason that "it's Google for godsake" then it would be very fair for those other refused sites to accuse eBay of arbitrary discrimination. As it stands, it seems to me like they're just following a policy they've had since long before anyone was even discussing Google Checkout as a possibility.
Its funny how eager everyone is to assume to worst of eBay, yet how willing everyone is to give Google the benefit of the doubt on the crap they've done in the past.
This payment system is brand new. It literally came out of nowhere, and it's probably a good bet that Google didn't go out of their way to tell eBay, their potential major competitor, beforehand. That means eBay has probably known about this payment system as long as we have, which means they've had precious little time to examine it fully. The lawyers may be dragging their feet a little bit in vetting it and for the time being they're just erring on the side of caution.
We have absolutely no evidence on what's going on behind the scenes. eBay may well have already contacted them on this and the whole thing may be sorted out in a week or two. Google may be refusing to cooperate with eBay's inquiry for fear of giving away trade secrets to a competitor. We just flat out don't know yet.
But everyone assumes poor little over a hundred billion dollar market cap Google is being victimized by this big bad "monopoly" that's a quarter of their size.
A "monopoly", I might add, that allows its payment system on other auction sites, and allows plnety of other payment systems on their auction site.
But no, they didn't instantly approve a new payment system that's been around for a week... so we've all got to assume the worst.
Having billed customers electronically in the past is not the same thing as having an established money transfer product.
The fact is this is the first time Google Checkout, no matter how long it existed in some form, has been opened up to general public use, and that can very easily mean opening it up to previously impossible exploits. I certainly plan on waiting a while before I open up an account myself for that reason, and I'm hard pressed to find fault in a company that's doing essentially the same thing.
Oh, and if I were you, I'd call my lawyer before I start taking action on the assumption that he's going to back me up. Wantonly disregarding explicit terms of service is probably the most legally well established reason for terminating an account.
They've got a list of qualifications on their site, and the important one is that:
* Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)
That's been eBay's policy since way before Google came up with this brand new system of theirs. And the fact remains that Google has absolutely no past track record in financial transactions. While google is a big name in other services, eBay has absolutely no way of verifying the security measures that Google Payments offer. It's probably a great service, but eBay doesn't want to stick their necks out to potential lawsuits if this brand new service turns out to have some major security hole and a bunch of eBay site users get robbed.
That's not to say you can't use such payment, you can use whatever the hell you want. You can mail the guy beads if you really want to. What eBay is saying is that you can't use their site to advertise that you accept these payments and thus imply that eBay is in some way endorsing those payments.
This was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for eBay. If they refuse to accept Google, which is in keeping with their stated policy, everyone sees it as some sort of monopolistic wrangling. If they accept Google, then all those other sites on the forbidden list which were excluded for the same damned reason can cry foul by saying that eBay is playing favorites and arbitrarily excluding some.
I think the prudent thing to do is leave the system in place, wait a few months (IANAL, the better legal period might be shorter or longer) to make sure google's system actually works as advertised, then start accepting it. For the sake of public relations it might be wise to make it public that this is what's going on, and say "assuming there are no major security holes, Google Payments will be added on 9/7" or whatever date they think is ample time to cover their own necks.
It's not a question of beating, it's a question of offering the compatibility to enhance the value of your own proposition. What OS/2 offered in the Warp days was compelling, and I tend to think that if IBM had actually gotten Win32 compatibility working properly in the last version of Warp (as it originally promised), the OS would've continued to enjoy its niche.
OS/2 3.0 really was "the place to be" for power users, right up until late 96 when we started really seeing Win32 apps popping up in great number. Even then, I knew a lot of people who stuck with 4.0, despite the lack of Win32 support, because of the very robust Java performance.
Providing a compatibility layer for Win32 could make 10.5 what OS/2 Warp was in 1994, and it could attract some Windows users by doing so. The danger is that when the next Windows implementation springs up, Apple damned well better be sure they can get compatibility into OSX, and quickly. If they can't, they're going to face the same exodus that eventually killed OS/2
How was that tried with IBM? They gave us a 16-bit Windows implementation, then promised a Win32 implementation with their next revision of OS/2, and never delivered on it.
Anyhow, OS/2's Win 16 implementation worked great. If Apple was able to do the same thing with Win32, I'd be thrilled.
I was thinking more from the perspective of the kind of places where people probably would feel the need to make statements anonymously.
Though there are situations in which a reasonably Democratic nation would qualify. Take Canada and their hate speech laws, or most of western Europe's Holocaust denial laws for that matter. Or Britain's "Glorification of terror" laws.
Lots of comparatively democratic nations have restrictions on speech.
Not the US, of course. Legally, we can say about anything. We'll put aside the COINTELPRO stuff from the 60's and 70's, and the Valeri Plame situation, since those are comparatively rare and though they're executed by government employees, they're definitely extralegal.
But then, things change, and I think that's what the US people are worried about. We've got a US Senator from the majority party calling for the major newspaper in the nation to be shuttered for "treason" for its reporting. We've got military officials saying that the media in general is going to "Cost us the war". That stuff's not really new in wartime (compare FDR and the Chicago Tribune), but it's unsettling all the same.
Still, I don't worry about it. Fascists or Communists, if the US becomes a Myanmar style authoritarian nightmare, I've written enough libertarian and pacifist literature to hang myself 10 times over. To paraphrase the rather apocryphal John Hancock story many of us were taught in school, when some future King George III starts looking for dissidents, he's not going to have to look to hard to find my name.
Novell's like the guy who buys a car, never gets any oil changes, never does any preventative maintainance, and leaves it buried under the snow all winter. It seems fine at first, but it doesn't take long before problems start mounting, they chalk it up as a lemon, and pass it off on some poor schmuck who goes "wow, it's nearly a new car, it should be in decent shape".
I found a more practical near term solution: pull the bandage off quick.
Just speak your mind in your own name and don't hold back. Once you get to the point where if your government turns fascist, or Maoist, or whatever you're liable to be executed... then you don't have to worry about anything else you write.
That's the nature of the internet. If you take a position on any issue people feel strongly about, some people are going to disagree with you... some of those people are even going to be exceedingly rude about it.
I wrote an article myself on the selfsame topic (with a different take, of course) and got plenty of pissy emails from people who thought I should be hung for treason.
Not to belittle it or anything, but I don't know if it's something to be "concerned about", at least not in the same way as getting dragged off by the secret police in Myanmar and executed. Sticks and stones, after all...
Jerks like that come with the territory when the territory is the internet. You write something interesting, someone's going to start calling you names. If you make good enough points, sooner or later you'll probably get an anonymous death threat or two. They're a little creepy at first, but eventually you'll get desensitized to it.
As a former Corel investor, this whole thing is bullshit. Corel dropped Linux and still wasn't anywhere near profitable for years afterwards.
Corel Linux was a symptom of a problem a lot of companies faced that time, that a buzzword compliant release of a product few wanted or needed was a great way to get attention on Wall Street.
Corel's problems go all the way back to 1996, when they bought the word processor that Novell had been running into the ground. Has anyone ever used the last Novell WordPerfect for Windows? It's not a pretty sight. The only value left in WordPerfect was the name, and Novell had already done major damage to it. It took Corel years to have anything resembling a usable Office-competitor.
Things got so bad that Microsoft had to pour millions into them to keep them afloat for the sake of avoiding anti-trust.
When Burney came on board, he pissed away so much money on marketing, it's only by the grace of the quality of their developers that the company survived at all. They made a few nice acquisitions to their imaging portfolio, but then came up with crap like Deepwhite. Their marketing department was dreadful. Does anyone else remember the controversy when the box art for one of their major imaging programs... a program that's supposed to be designed for advertising companies for Godssake, had emblazoned on it that the box art was made using Adobe Illustrator?
The rescue of the company came when they started getting smart and selling a trimmed down WP suite to OEM makers to pack-in with their new systems. Their imaging software was starting to recover a little from the Adobe fiasco. Then Vector Capital came along and snapped up the company at an almost insultingly low price.
But we don't have a clean, effective means of generating power. This huge, wonder of the world global cooling machine, even assuming we could physically build it, is going to use an enormous amount of energy, I would hazard a guess that it's vastly more than the amount we're currently generating. So lets say we decide to try it. We then go out and build a huge amount of power plants to get this underway.
The power plants are now kicking out more greenhouse gasses, which is exasperating the problem, which is going to require a bigger cooling machine, which is going to require more power plants... you get the idea.
This is actually a great way to break an unjust system like this. We've all got defacto copyright on all sorts of silly crap that could theoretically get burned to some disc or other.
If the number of penny checks they have to send to international copyright holders becomes onerous enough, they'll probably dump the whole thing.
The GPL was meant to ensure availability of source code. It was meant to empower the individual developer.
Now that GPL software has become big business, that same license is being used to chase the new, smalltime players out, by insisting that they provide expensive but meaningless mirrors of a bunch of unmodified software that's available a zillion other places.
I think it's a hard sell to the average customer myself, so ultimately I expect this company to try to make such bullets mandatory (at least for the private citizen).
If you're not occupying the foreign country in the first place and not shipping large amounts of munitions there to support that occupation, just imagine how much harder still you could make it.
Plus, I'm not sure if "It encourages people to accept foreign occupation" is really a selling point for a lot of people.
The Canadian government's funding the lobby group probably pales in comparison to the interested parties' donations to the political candidates that were responsible for this in the first place.
You buy some candidates, then you use those candidates to get state funding for buying more candidates. When they're to that point, you might as well make the copyright industry a branch of the government in it's own right.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, I always hated that about renting movies before... it felt like an obligation to watch them before they had to go back.
Right, but when they're taking $x off the bill at the cash register instead of mailing you $x, you can be damned sure $n isn't going to be equal to zero anymore.
Sure glad I don't have a choice in the matter anymore now that I can see you guys understand the value of my leisure time so much better than I do.
My personal information is being bought and sold by a million other people too, and they didn't give me free shit for my trouble.
Yeah, 15 minutes effort for a free $100 worth of stuff.
Sure dodged a bullet there, I'm glad you guys were around to save me from all the free stuff.
I used to go to Office Max some weeks, leave with $100 worth of products and $100 worth of rebate forms. I pretty much always got every single one back, so for the hassle of filling out a few forms I was getting all sorts of free items (CD burners, surge protectors, mice, canned air, blank CDs, jewel cases, phones).
Now because of everyone else's bitching, those days are over. I don't know how the saving on other things are going to be affected by the end of the mail in rebate, but I know for damned sure they're never going to have an instant savings that leaves a dozen items in their store free for the taking.
Neither EFF nor the ACLU is obligated to defend any rights at all, so I think we should be grateful for what aid they may provide in their particular areas of expertise and set it upon ourselves to fill in whatever holes may be left.
barring a global nuclear war, humanity is going to survive the next 100 years. Its fun to speak with quiet awe of all the impending dooms facing humanity, but a degree or two of temperature difference or a couple billion people here or there aren't going to threaten the survival of the species.
Nothing will, short of irradiating the planet. And the threat of that in the next 100 years seems no greater than was the threat of it in the past 100 years.
We could run entirely out of fossil fuels tomorrow, we could have almost non-stop conventional war for the next 100 years (which would make it hard to distinguish from the last 100 years, or most 100 year periods, really), global warming could do every single horrible thing that's been predicted by the most pessimistic scientist and then some. Humanity's not going anywhere.
Think of it from the perspective of an exterminator. You've got billions of household pests that, though very vulnerable to the elements, are also impressively able to adapt themselves to harsh climates and survive in places that seems completely uninhabitable, like the arctic circle or downtown Detroit. This infestation is very entrenched. and it's going to be very hard to deal with it in the timeframe of basically the lifespan of a member of the species.
Right now, there's some baby being born in Gaza. That kid is going to be around in 100 years, and is going to look back on this post and say "boy, we dodged a bullet there". Assuming somebody doesn't shoot him between now and then. Then, in all likelihood, he's going to post a question on Slashdot about how we're ever going to get through the next 100 years.
I didn't mean to accuse you in particular, it's more the general tone of the discussion. Everyone seems to be rushing to condemn eBay.
Ebay's policy may be arbitrary in and of itself (though it may have some very important legal reason), but the discrimination within it is very clearly defined. They've had a list of reasons for refusal on their site for a very long time now, and nothing I've seen from the list implies they are doing anything but universally enforcing their own rules. That is, I don't see a site on the refused list that meets all their criteria, nor do I see a site on their accepted list that appears to fail in some regard.
On the other hand if eBay accepted Google Checkout the day it launched, despite not meeting certain of their long standing criteria, for the simple reason that "it's Google for godsake" then it would be very fair for those other refused sites to accuse eBay of arbitrary discrimination. As it stands, it seems to me like they're just following a policy they've had since long before anyone was even discussing Google Checkout as a possibility.
Its funny how eager everyone is to assume to worst of eBay, yet how willing everyone is to give Google the benefit of the doubt on the crap they've done in the past.
This payment system is brand new. It literally came out of nowhere, and it's probably a good bet that Google didn't go out of their way to tell eBay, their potential major competitor, beforehand. That means eBay has probably known about this payment system as long as we have, which means they've had precious little time to examine it fully. The lawyers may be dragging their feet a little bit in vetting it and for the time being they're just erring on the side of caution.
We have absolutely no evidence on what's going on behind the scenes. eBay may well have already contacted them on this and the whole thing may be sorted out in a week or two. Google may be refusing to cooperate with eBay's inquiry for fear of giving away trade secrets to a competitor. We just flat out don't know yet.
But everyone assumes poor little over a hundred billion dollar market cap Google is being victimized by this big bad "monopoly" that's a quarter of their size.
A "monopoly", I might add, that allows its payment system on other auction sites, and allows plnety of other payment systems on their auction site.
But no, they didn't instantly approve a new payment system that's been around for a week... so we've all got to assume the worst.
Having billed customers electronically in the past is not the same thing as having an established money transfer product.
The fact is this is the first time Google Checkout, no matter how long it existed in some form, has been opened up to general public use, and that can very easily mean opening it up to previously impossible exploits. I certainly plan on waiting a while before I open up an account myself for that reason, and I'm hard pressed to find fault in a company that's doing essentially the same thing.
Oh, and if I were you, I'd call my lawyer before I start taking action on the assumption that he's going to back me up. Wantonly disregarding explicit terms of service is probably the most legally well established reason for terminating an account.
They've got a list of qualifications on their site, and the important one is that:
* Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)
That's been eBay's policy since way before Google came up with this brand new system of theirs. And the fact remains that Google has absolutely no past track record in financial transactions. While google is a big name in other services, eBay has absolutely no way of verifying the security measures that Google Payments offer. It's probably a great service, but eBay doesn't want to stick their necks out to potential lawsuits if this brand new service turns out to have some major security hole and a bunch of eBay site users get robbed.
That's not to say you can't use such payment, you can use whatever the hell you want. You can mail the guy beads if you really want to. What eBay is saying is that you can't use their site to advertise that you accept these payments and thus imply that eBay is in some way endorsing those payments.
This was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for eBay. If they refuse to accept Google, which is in keeping with their stated policy, everyone sees it as some sort of monopolistic wrangling. If they accept Google, then all those other sites on the forbidden list which were excluded for the same damned reason can cry foul by saying that eBay is playing favorites and arbitrarily excluding some.
I think the prudent thing to do is leave the system in place, wait a few months (IANAL, the better legal period might be shorter or longer) to make sure google's system actually works as advertised, then start accepting it. For the sake of public relations it might be wise to make it public that this is what's going on, and say "assuming there are no major security holes, Google Payments will be added on 9/7" or whatever date they think is ample time to cover their own necks.
It's not a question of beating, it's a question of offering the compatibility to enhance the value of your own proposition. What OS/2 offered in the Warp days was compelling, and I tend to think that if IBM had actually gotten Win32 compatibility working properly in the last version of Warp (as it originally promised), the OS would've continued to enjoy its niche.
OS/2 3.0 really was "the place to be" for power users, right up until late 96 when we started really seeing Win32 apps popping up in great number. Even then, I knew a lot of people who stuck with 4.0, despite the lack of Win32 support, because of the very robust Java performance.
Providing a compatibility layer for Win32 could make 10.5 what OS/2 Warp was in 1994, and it could attract some Windows users by doing so. The danger is that when the next Windows implementation springs up, Apple damned well better be sure they can get compatibility into OSX, and quickly. If they can't, they're going to face the same exodus that eventually killed OS/2
How was that tried with IBM? They gave us a 16-bit Windows implementation, then promised a Win32 implementation with their next revision of OS/2, and never delivered on it.
Anyhow, OS/2's Win 16 implementation worked great. If Apple was able to do the same thing with Win32, I'd be thrilled.
Of course not.
I was thinking more from the perspective of the kind of places where people probably would feel the need to make statements anonymously.
Though there are situations in which a reasonably Democratic nation would qualify. Take Canada and their hate speech laws, or most of western Europe's Holocaust denial laws for that matter. Or Britain's "Glorification of terror" laws.
Lots of comparatively democratic nations have restrictions on speech.
Not the US, of course. Legally, we can say about anything. We'll put aside the COINTELPRO stuff from the 60's and 70's, and the Valeri Plame situation, since those are comparatively rare and though they're executed by government employees, they're definitely extralegal.
But then, things change, and I think that's what the US people are worried about. We've got a US Senator from the majority party calling for the major newspaper in the nation to be shuttered for "treason" for its reporting. We've got military officials saying that the media in general is going to "Cost us the war". That stuff's not really new in wartime (compare FDR and the Chicago Tribune), but it's unsettling all the same.
Still, I don't worry about it. Fascists or Communists, if the US becomes a Myanmar style authoritarian nightmare, I've written enough libertarian and pacifist literature to hang myself 10 times over. To paraphrase the rather apocryphal John Hancock story many of us were taught in school, when some future King George III starts looking for dissidents, he's not going to have to look to hard to find my name.
Novell's like the guy who buys a car, never gets any oil changes, never does any preventative maintainance, and leaves it buried under the snow all winter. It seems fine at first, but it doesn't take long before problems start mounting, they chalk it up as a lemon, and pass it off on some poor schmuck who goes "wow, it's nearly a new car, it should be in decent shape".
I found a more practical near term solution: pull the bandage off quick.
Just speak your mind in your own name and don't hold back. Once you get to the point where if your government turns fascist, or Maoist, or whatever you're liable to be executed... then you don't have to worry about anything else you write.
They can't hang you twice, after all.
That's the nature of the internet. If you take a position on any issue people feel strongly about, some people are going to disagree with you... some of those people are even going to be exceedingly rude about it.
I wrote an article myself on the selfsame topic (with a different take, of course) and got plenty of pissy emails from people who thought I should be hung for treason.
Not to belittle it or anything, but I don't know if it's something to be "concerned about", at least not in the same way as getting dragged off by the secret police in Myanmar and executed. Sticks and stones, after all...
Jerks like that come with the territory when the territory is the internet. You write something interesting, someone's going to start calling you names. If you make good enough points, sooner or later you'll probably get an anonymous death threat or two. They're a little creepy at first, but eventually you'll get desensitized to it.
As a former Corel investor, this whole thing is bullshit. Corel dropped Linux and still wasn't anywhere near profitable for years afterwards.
Corel Linux was a symptom of a problem a lot of companies faced that time, that a buzzword compliant release of a product few wanted or needed was a great way to get attention on Wall Street.
Corel's problems go all the way back to 1996, when they bought the word processor that Novell had been running into the ground. Has anyone ever used the last Novell WordPerfect for Windows? It's not a pretty sight. The only value left in WordPerfect was the name, and Novell had already done major damage to it. It took Corel years to have anything resembling a usable Office-competitor.
Things got so bad that Microsoft had to pour millions into them to keep them afloat for the sake of avoiding anti-trust.
When Burney came on board, he pissed away so much money on marketing, it's only by the grace of the quality of their developers that the company survived at all. They made a few nice acquisitions to their imaging portfolio, but then came up with crap like Deepwhite. Their marketing department was dreadful. Does anyone else remember the controversy when the box art for one of their major imaging programs... a program that's supposed to be designed for advertising companies for Godssake, had emblazoned on it that the box art was made using Adobe Illustrator?
The rescue of the company came when they started getting smart and selling a trimmed down WP suite to OEM makers to pack-in with their new systems. Their imaging software was starting to recover a little from the Adobe fiasco. Then Vector Capital came along and snapped up the company at an almost insultingly low price.
Worth pointing out: You're discussing a crime right now.
Is this an admission of guilt?
Shit, and now I'm discussing your discussion.
It's an interesting solution, to be sure.
But we don't have a clean, effective means of generating power. This huge, wonder of the world global cooling machine, even assuming we could physically build it, is going to use an enormous amount of energy, I would hazard a guess that it's vastly more than the amount we're currently generating. So lets say we decide to try it. We then go out and build a huge amount of power plants to get this underway.
The power plants are now kicking out more greenhouse gasses, which is exasperating the problem, which is going to require a bigger cooling machine, which is going to require more power plants... you get the idea.
This is actually a great way to break an unjust system like this. We've all got defacto copyright on all sorts of silly crap that could theoretically get burned to some disc or other.
If the number of penny checks they have to send to international copyright holders becomes onerous enough, they'll probably dump the whole thing.
The GPL was meant to ensure availability of source code. It was meant to empower the individual developer.
Now that GPL software has become big business, that same license is being used to chase the new, smalltime players out, by insisting that they provide expensive but meaningless mirrors of a bunch of unmodified software that's available a zillion other places.
That's a very good point.
I think it's a hard sell to the average customer myself, so ultimately I expect this company to try to make such bullets mandatory (at least for the private citizen).
If you're not occupying the foreign country in the first place and not shipping large amounts of munitions there to support that occupation, just imagine how much harder still you could make it.
Plus, I'm not sure if "It encourages people to accept foreign occupation" is really a selling point for a lot of people.
The Canadian government's funding the lobby group probably pales in comparison to the interested parties' donations to the political candidates that were responsible for this in the first place.
You buy some candidates, then you use those candidates to get state funding for buying more candidates. When they're to that point, you might as well make the copyright industry a branch of the government in it's own right.