- The basic idea of civil society, as articulated - is this: You give up your "natural rights", that = is, the right to take by force whatever you have - the power to take, to the state, and in return, - you are granted "civil rights"...
I haven't read the "great social philosophers" you refer to, but this is nonsense. It sounds more like propaganda than the reality.
The reality is this: The state says, "You give us everything you have (including your life if we say so) and do exactly what we tell you to do, and we will protect you from the bad people outside and inside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some - by simply telling you they're bad."
This is the historical reality of government - it is a protection racket, pure and simple.
And no one has a "natural right" to steal. First, because there is no such as a "natural right". Second, because coercion as an economic activity is nonproductive for the species as a whole.
The idea of the state being defined as a "monopoly on the use of the coercion" is basically from Ayn Rand, and is refuted by her own acceptance of the Austrian School identification of the fact all monopolies must be basically coercive to exist. The same problem exists for a monopoly on coercion as exists for any monopoly - namely, investment to try to achieve monopoly profit. If coercion is profitable, more and more people will try to invest in it, resulting in competition and the eventual collapse of the monopoly. The only way to maintain a monopoly on coercion is to be imperialistic as well as coercive - basically you have to rule the world, which brings you into conflict with the whole world, which becomes the very unproductive general spread of coercion that you intended to avoid by having a monopoly on coercion.
And if everyone agrees you should have the monopoly on coercion, then why bother? Everyone already agrees not to coerce in that case.
No, the state is a protection racket, and there are absolutely no rational arguments to justify its existence.
You are also misconstruing the nature of monopoly. In a sense, everything is a "monopoly of one". That is irrelevant. A monopoly can only exist if it is enforced by coercion. Otherwise, you have the situation you describe with Coca Cola (which, BTW, I suspect, relies on trade secret IP, and therefore, yes, is a monopoly in that sense.) The reason Coke can sign agreements with bottling plants to produce their product is because they own the trade secret of Coke and anyone who obtains that trade secret will be prevented by the state from producing that product. This is state-supported monopoly, exactly as you describe.
The fact that other companies can produce competing soft drinks merely proves the basic problem with monopolies - there is more than one way to do something and a product which is the result of a "natural monopoly" (i.e., the proprietary Coke formula) can be competed against by some other way of doing the same thing (unless of course it runs afoul of overly broad patents, which is another IP problem). The only way to achieve a true monopoly is via coercion.
IP laws create a monopoly for a given product, not an industry. You are conflating an industry monopoly with a product monopoly. But the same economic effects apply. Some one is granted a monopoly profit and everyone else is prohibited from investing in this profit at the point of a gun (i.e., state law). The result is a distortion of investment, higher prices for goods to everyone else, and as Bodrin and Levine point out, lack of reason of innovate on the part of the monopolist.
Someone was complaining recently about Beethoven having to put out a lot of product to compete with guys down the street, since he didn't have IP laws to protect him. This seems to fly in the face of the notion that a creator is only motivated to produce when he has protection. It is clear that if you are producing to survive, you will produce more, not less, if you have to compete. And without IP, you have to compete more, not just in creation, but in production, marketing, etc. And if you cannot compete, then by definition your product is not as valuable to the rest of the world as those of your competitors.
The notion that IP has some sort of "objective value", and that the producer has to be compensated commensurately, is nonsense. The basis of human economics is subjective value. You value something to the degree that you will give up something you have for it. If you don't actually do that, your actual valuation of that product is much less than your stated valuation. IOW, everybody gets exactly what they deserve...unless of course they can use coercion to get it...
So the idea of IP boils down to some people wanting to get more of your money for their product than you are willing to pay for it, and they are willing to use a gun (IP law) to get it by preventing other people from producing the same or similar product at lower cost.
The supposed positive effect of this behavior as increasing the net amount of useful concepts in the world has never been established, and is probably dwarfed by the many other reasons and methods for producing useful concepts.
The fact of the matter is, most people produce a useful concept, go into business, sell it, make a living, and never have to sue anybody for "infringement". Only those people who suddenly find themselves unable to compete (due to changes in the market and/or changes in technology) suddenly feel a need to invoke "intellectual property".
- In capitalist systems, this is theft. Trade - occurs only when the producer and consumer reach - mutually agreed upon terms for the exchange of - goods and services.
The mutually agreed upon terms throughout human history usually include that the purchaser has complete control of his property - including the ability to give it away, or reproduce and distribute it (if they can - Mercedes Benz isn't really concerned about that since a BMW is hard to replicate - at least now, pre-nanotech). The IP industry wants to change that. They want to extend contract law over the basic definition of property for the purpose of giving themselves control of your property - the sole purpose for this is not some "moral right of the artist" but simply to allow them to charge you more money and make more profit by replacing the concept of property with the concept of monopoly.
And they want to do this by state fiat, i.e. law, i.e, at the point of someone else's gun.
I'm reminded of a line by Dean Martin in the move "Bandolero". Deano and his gang enter a bank where a farmer is proclaiming that the bank are thieves because they are charging him excessive interest on his farm loan. The bank clerk tells him that nobody forced him to take out the loan. The farmer proclaims that with six kids and a mule, he had to and all the fool clerk can say is "force".
Deano shoves him away from the teller window, pulls out his gun and says, "This is force, mister."
What you are complaining about is not force, it is the stupidity of the average human - on both sides of the sale.
Humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious and fearful. While capitalism is the inevitable result of these conditions, it's better than Deano's alternative.
Actually, the basis of capitalism is that your ability to make money may be constrained by demand, but demand is constrained by the general market - i.e, all the other needs and desires compete for limited resources with your product. The free market directly addresses each need and desire and establishes the "actual" value of those needs and desires against all others by counting the profit.
IOW, the market is always "right" - not in an absolute value sense, but in a "teleological" (i.e., relative) sense.
OTOH, if humans were rational, the market would reward technology even more over art than it does now...
The fact of the matter is that art is valued less by most humans than technology, food, sex, etc... The notion that art is somehow privileged over everything else is an artist's view not shared by the rest of the species...
There's a difference between not being able to make money because there's no money to be made and not being able to make money because when you do, someone takes it...
As for Abba, they were offered a BILLION dollars to reunite and tour - they turned it down because they knew it would be a travesty of their old popularity...
During the height of their popularity, Abba was one of the largest corporations in their country...
How many movies did she ever make? She was famous because she went on Merv Griffin's show every week...and that was when she was already old...
A younger equivalent is Brooke Shields - another pretty face that never did figure out what the hell she is or what she should do. But she probably made more movies than Zsa Zsa...
Another equivalent to the Gabor sisters are the Hilton sisters - in forty years, they'll still be famous for being famous sluts...
To paraphrase you, when you pay a kid to mow your lawn, do you pay him because of how many people he supports, or his value to you?
Nobody's job supports other people. Everybody supports themselves - or not, in some cases.
And when a profession no longer supports people because the market has changed (usually because of technology), then those people either starve or find another profession.
Welcome to the real world (instead of the world of "art"), musicians...
The issue is whether art or technology is more important to human survival and therefore which one should get more economic investment.
I think the fact that the entire US music and movie industries combined are far smaller than several of the individual US companies in the tech industry clearly answers that question.
That's why you don't see the RIAA sueing Phillips and Sony for producing CD players with built-in CD recorders.
then you'll be in good physical condition and can kick people's asses when they're snotty towards you, and make people fear you, which is a lot better than the reverse situation...
Also:
Get laid frequently. (Note: Requires the above to be done first, as well as most of the following...)
Don't settle for stupid jobs - work for yourself and make money for yourself, not other people.
CRAS - Calm, Relaxation, Awareness, Spirit.
As Crowley put it, "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law" - or as Abbie Hoffman put it, "Do Your Thing And Only Your Thing"...
Remember - humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious, and fearful. Nothing they say or do (except physical assault) should be taken seriously.
No one can harm you unless you permit it.
You have a purpose in life and that purpose is to survive indefinitely, which has corollaries which must influence your thought and behavior.
My Asus A7V8X mobo has that, too. It's called the ASUS POST Reporter which uses the WinBond speech controller. If your boot fails, you hear the specific reason for the failure.
You can edit the messages using the WinBond Voice Editor.
You can disable the feature in the IO Device Configuration screen of the BIOS. I've never heard the thing myself because I instantly did that as soon as I read about it...
That's correct, I have a Compaq Deskpro 4000 as my old machine, and it has a Compaq Diagnostics Partition (about 16MB or something like that) on the front of the first hard drive. When I first got the machine, the partition had been damaged and I had to download the BIOS from Compaq and put it on diskettes to access it. Later, I changed drives, recreated the Diagnostic Partition and reloaded it from the Compaq diskettes.
It definitely is not as safe as ROM, but it really wasn't THAT much of a pain to deal with it. You just had to boot off diskette and insert a second diskette to get into Compaq's diagnostics and Setup programs. You usually don't need to do that too often, though, so it isn't that big a deal.
OTOH, if you are a maintenance person and have to do it with dozens of machines a day, it would be a huge hassle, so ROM is definitely better.
Google and also poke around the fee-paid databases like Dialog and Factiva, etc., among other things.
Hourly rates usually run $25-100/hour - actually, most individual IB's seem to be around $40-50/hour and larger services around $90/hour - depending on specialty - a lot of IB's specialize in legal, medical, industry, or technological areas.
I'm hoping it's a good job: 1) Take requests. 2) ??? (Research) 3) Profit!
- It's not a matter of contract law, it's a matter - of "violation of seclusion". There's no contract - saying you won't take pictures through my - bedroom window, but you could still be violated - for selling them.
Hardly the same thing - what was sold was essentially publicly available information - an address, maybe an SSN.
Not to mention that celebrities have unauthorized photos taken of them every day, and no one goes to jail for it... The Douglas/Zeta-Jones case going on now is evidence of that... They're suing but no one is going to jail for taking the photos.
- No part of the ruling said that obtaining - information under a pretext gave you liability - for misuse. It said it gave you liability for - damages under the fraudulent buisness practices - act.
What's the distinction? Using the pretext was the fraudulent business practice, wasn't it? Liability for damages for fraud seems to me to pertain to the client, not any third party. Even if you assume a third party could sue for damages resulting from the improper use of the information, I can't see how you can sue the supplier and not the client. The supplier did not directly or indirectly cause the damages - the client did. The problem with this sort of ruling is that the notion of responsibility and causal effect are completely ignored - essentially responsibility is spread all over hell and virtually anything is assumed to be a "cause". And whether the IB used a pretext or fraudulent practices is completely irrelevant to what the client did with that information.
- What would be wrong with having to submit to a - criminal background check before you can pay - someone for personal information about another - person? What legitimate public need would be - thwarted by such a scheme?
This is hilarious. It's called "privacy"! Essentially you are saying, "Let's invade everyone's privacy (it's not clear who should do the invading - the IB? The cops?) simply to prevent someone from misusing what is essentially public information in any event." This makes no sense. It might be construed to make some sense for background checks for gun owners (even though the Constitution specifically states that such possession "will not be infringed" which certainly includes the government tracking your purchase), but how this can be applied to a simple request for information is beyond me.
Where does it stop? If you drop your wallet and I find it and read your address so I can mail it back to you, do I need a background check first?
No, this is simply the court looking for someone to punish, and IB's are the convenient target in this case. Again, it's a case of "we can't handle the real problem, so we'll fake it just to look like we're doing something effective"...which is basically how all of government works, since it is simply a protection racket.
The function of government is to say: "You give us everything you have and do exactly what we tell you and we'll protect you from the bad people outside and inside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some." Which is exactly what is happening here (albeit the sleazy IB's are easy targets for this since no one appreciates "invasion of privacy" - even if the definition of that is a moving target...)
And as for liability for the cops, there have been repeated court decisions that government officials performing their official duties cannot be held liable for even the most egregious screwups - not to mention the problem of proving deliberate malice when they all protect each other...
Sure, if you prove someone was falsely imprisoned, the guy goes free - but in most cases the cop who framed him stays on the job..because no cop looks hard for the proof of that...
Humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious, and fearful.
Mostly what they fear is death.
They have this pre-rational idea that there is only a certain amount of life to go around and if anybody else gets some, they won't get enough.
This leads to the usual animal fight or flight behavior.
Flight reaction takes two forms: 1) Stand up, wave your arms, and try to attract the attention of whomever is giving out the "life". 2) Drag down anybody standing above you, and stomp on anybody below you, so they don't overshadow you and get "your" "life".
This is called mammalian dominance hierarchy.
Humans are domesticated primates and are entirely consumed by this behavior. Virtually every word and action of a human is conditioned by this overriding fear of death and consequent behavioral patterns.
You can't change this behavior without eliminating what people euphemistically and laughingly refer to as "human nature".
The only solution is Transhumanism, specifically the rearrangement of the human body and brain to maximize conceptual thought and minimize biochemical and evolutionary conditioning.
This will be done via nanotech and biotech over the next fifty years or so. The resulting Transhumans will give you humans exactly what you've been afraid of for thousands of years - either death or transmogrification into Transhumans (which you will perceive as the same as death, being morons).
1) There was no contract between the IB and anyone else (except maybe the stalker client) concerning protection of this information.
2) While obtaining the information using a pretext is sleazy, I don't see how this constitutes liability for the misuse of the information by a third party.
3) This seems to me to be just another attempt to spread liability around as a means to compel behavior that the legal system wants to occur without the formality of actually passing a considered law, i.e. bypassing the Constitution (Federal or State) and making law in the court. The criminal justice system doesn't like sleazy IB's, so they make them liable for something they have no control over.
4) When is the court ready to assign liability to cops and Feds who fake court orders, manufacture evidence, and otherwise abuse their responsibilities on a daily basis and thereby cause thousands of people to spend time in jail for crimes they did not commit? Oh, wait, I forgot - the criminal justice system is immune from prosecution for "screwups"...
This seems like a typical case of "something bad happened, we can't punish the guilty, so we'll find someone else - anyone else - and punish them.."
How is an IB supposed to verify their client's intentions? "Oh, excuse me, I really need this info so I can shoot my ex-girlfriend - or stalk Jodie Foster..." "Just check this block on the request form here: Will You Use This Info For Legal Purposes? YES: NO: "...
Or: "You realize, sir, that we have to ask you to turn over your criminal and mental health history to us, so we can verify that you will use this information only on a legal manner?"
Or worse, that if you ask for some innocuous info, that they then investigate YOU before investigating the subject...
Actually, since I'm planning to start up as an "information broker" I should clarify this misconception.
Information brokers do not sell people's SSN's. Those are sleazy operations that are more akin to private investigators (sleazy ones) than IB's.
An IB is more like a freelance librarian - you call them up and ask them how many widgets were sold in Thailand over the last five years and they do the research and find out for you.
Sometimes they do competitive intelligence research which is a little closer to what the sleazy operations do, but still legal.
There is a national organization for IB's called Association of Independent Information Professionals with a web site here which has the following Code of Ethics:
An Information Professional bears the following responsibilities:
Uphold the profession's reputation for honesty, competence, and confidentiality.
Give clients the most current and accurate information possible within the budget and time frames provided by the clients.
Help clients understand the sources of information used and the degree of reliability which can be expected from those sources.
Accept only those projects which are legal and are not detrimental to our profession.
Respect client confidentiality.
Recognize intellectual property rights. Respect licensing agreements and other contracts. Explain to clients what their obligations might be with regard to intellectual property rights and licensing agreements.
Maintain a professional relationship with libraries and comply with all their rules of access.
Assume responsibility for employees' compliance with this code.
I have a little problem with the "recognize IP rights" bit, but generally a legit IB ain't gonna sell you somebody's sister's SSN and address.
The kid being recruited is supposedly a whiz coder who has a program called Spartacus that does...something about seizing wireless broadcasts or something, Dell Computer was very interested (for some bizarre reason) before Al Pacino got his hooks into him...
One scene was really great - he was browsing the Net and HE WAS NOT USING IE - HE WAS USING OPERA!
The director must get it!
Unfortunately he was using Opera 5, two releases behind the current version...
Then later they blew it when they had Pacino telling him about ICE 9 - a virus program that you just have to plug into a wall socket and it travels through electrical circuitry and can fry the entire infrastructure of America...
How do you get executable code into electrical circuitry? (No, they didn't mean home networking through home wiring, either...)
Bridget Moynahan used a USB microdrive to smuggle the ICE 9 code in pieces out of CIA HQ by putting the tiny drive in the screwoff bottom of her coffee cup which went right through the scanners when she left the building every day... Kinda cool...
- But wouldn't that be true for all the women I - asked? They are _all_ young enough to be his - grand-daughters...
I thought you said one of them was under 20... The difference is in attitudes at various stages of life. Women (and men) think differently as they go from teen to adult to older adult to mature adult to Methuselah... Someone under 20 doesn't think the way a 25-year-old does and a 25-year-old doesn't think the way a 35-year-old does and so on up the line...
There's also demographics. Maybe the women you know aren't the same as other women.
Here's a quote from a Web site I just looked up on Sean Connery:
In 1999, New Woman named him the Sexiest Man of the Century, beating Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson for the honor.
About Connery's enduring sex appeal, film critic Pauline Kael explained, "Women want to meet him and men want to be him. I don't know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much."
Kael of course is not young, but I think New Woman - which IIRC is a magazine for younger women - naming him Sexiest Man of the Century only four years ago says it all.
Slashdot Mirror
- The basic idea of civil society, as articulated
- is this: You give up your "natural rights", that
= is, the right to take by force whatever you have
- the power to take, to the state, and in return,
- you are granted "civil rights"...
I haven't read the "great social philosophers" you refer to, but this is nonsense. It sounds more like propaganda than the reality.
The reality is this: The state says, "You give us everything you have (including your life if we say so) and do exactly what we tell you to do, and we will protect you from the bad people outside and inside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some - by simply telling you they're bad."
This is the historical reality of government - it is a protection racket, pure and simple.
And no one has a "natural right" to steal. First, because there is no such as a "natural right". Second, because coercion as an economic activity is nonproductive for the species as a whole.
The idea of the state being defined as a "monopoly on the use of the coercion" is basically from Ayn Rand, and is refuted by her own acceptance of the Austrian School identification of the fact all monopolies must be basically coercive to exist. The same problem exists for a monopoly on coercion as exists for any monopoly - namely, investment to try to achieve monopoly profit. If coercion is profitable, more and more people will try to invest in it, resulting in competition and the eventual collapse of the monopoly. The only way to maintain a monopoly on coercion is to be imperialistic as well as coercive - basically you have to rule the world, which brings you into conflict with the whole world, which becomes the very unproductive general spread of coercion that you intended to avoid by having a monopoly on coercion.
And if everyone agrees you should have the monopoly on coercion, then why bother? Everyone already agrees not to coerce in that case.
No, the state is a protection racket, and there are absolutely no rational arguments to justify its existence.
You are also misconstruing the nature of monopoly. In a sense, everything is a "monopoly of one". That is irrelevant. A monopoly can only exist if it is enforced by coercion. Otherwise, you have the situation you describe with Coca Cola (which, BTW, I suspect, relies on trade secret IP, and therefore, yes, is a monopoly in that sense.) The reason Coke can sign agreements with bottling plants to produce their product is because they own the trade secret of Coke and anyone who obtains that trade secret will be prevented by the state from producing that product. This is state-supported monopoly, exactly as you describe.
The fact that other companies can produce competing soft drinks merely proves the basic problem with monopolies - there is more than one way to do something and a product which is the result of a "natural monopoly" (i.e., the proprietary Coke formula) can be competed against by some other way of doing the same thing (unless of course it runs afoul of overly broad patents, which is another IP problem). The only way to achieve a true monopoly is via coercion.
IP laws create a monopoly for a given product, not an industry. You are conflating an industry monopoly with a product monopoly. But the same economic effects apply. Some one is granted a monopoly profit and everyone else is prohibited from investing in this profit at the point of a gun (i.e., state law). The result is a distortion of investment, higher prices for goods to everyone else, and as Bodrin and Levine point out, lack of reason of innovate on the part of the monopolist.
Someone was complaining recently about Beethoven having to put out a lot of product to compete with guys down the street, since he didn't have IP laws to protect him. This seems to fly in the face of the notion that a creator is only motivated to produce when he has protection. It is clear that if you are producing to survive, you will produce more, not less, if you have to compete. And without IP, you have to compete more, not just in creation, but in production, marketing, etc. And if you cannot compete, then by definition your product is not as valuable to the rest of the world as those of your competitors.
The notion that IP has some sort of "objective value", and that the producer has to be compensated commensurately, is nonsense. The basis of human economics is subjective value. You value something to the degree that you will give up something you have for it. If you don't actually do that, your actual valuation of that product is much less than your stated valuation. IOW, everybody gets exactly what they deserve...unless of course they can use coercion to get it...
So the idea of IP boils down to some people wanting to get more of your money for their product than you are willing to pay for it, and they are willing to use a gun (IP law) to get it by preventing other people from producing the same or similar product at lower cost.
The supposed positive effect of this behavior as increasing the net amount of useful concepts in the world has never been established, and is probably dwarfed by the many other reasons and methods for producing useful concepts.
The fact of the matter is, most people produce a useful concept, go into business, sell it, make a living, and never have to sue anybody for "infringement". Only those people who suddenly find themselves unable to compete (due to changes in the market and/or changes in technology) suddenly feel a need to invoke "intellectual property".
- Eventually, a near duplication of the existing
- criminal investigation/enforcement arms of a
- normal government would be created.
The difference is such a society would not be passing laws against consensual behavior such as anal sex and victimless crimes like smoking pot...
Because if they did, they'd get killed...
Oh, wait, we call that revolution, don't we?
Maybe that's a solution...
Naah, never happen...
Somebody defined reality once as that which does not go away when you stop believing in it...
Which is pretty much everything AFAIK...
Discussion about whether reality exists is why nobody pays any attention to philosophers - and justifiably so...
- his ideas were debuncled
Debuncled? Is that anything like having a carbuncle?
Lay off the Jolt Cola before posting, guy...
- In capitalist systems, this is theft. Trade
- occurs only when the producer and consumer reach
- mutually agreed upon terms for the exchange of
- goods and services.
The mutually agreed upon terms throughout human history usually include that the purchaser has complete control of his property - including the ability to give it away, or reproduce and distribute it (if they can - Mercedes Benz isn't really concerned about that since a BMW is hard to replicate - at least now, pre-nanotech). The IP industry wants to change that. They want to extend contract law over the basic definition of property for the purpose of giving themselves control of your property - the sole purpose for this is not some "moral right of the artist" but simply to allow them to charge you more money and make more profit by replacing the concept of property with the concept of monopoly.
And they want to do this by state fiat, i.e. law, i.e, at the point of someone else's gun.
THIS in capitalism is theft.
- Making a sale is all about deception and force.
I'm reminded of a line by Dean Martin in the move "Bandolero". Deano and his gang enter a bank where a farmer is proclaiming that the bank are thieves because they are charging him excessive interest on his farm loan. The bank clerk tells him that nobody forced him to take out the loan. The farmer proclaims that with six kids and a mule, he had to and all the fool clerk can say is "force".
Deano shoves him away from the teller window, pulls out his gun and says, "This is force, mister."
What you are complaining about is not force, it is the stupidity of the average human - on both sides of the sale.
Humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious and fearful. While capitalism is the inevitable result of these conditions, it's better than Deano's alternative.
Actually, the basis of capitalism is that your ability to make money may be constrained by demand, but demand is constrained by the general market - i.e, all the other needs and desires compete for limited resources with your product. The free market directly addresses each need and desire and establishes the "actual" value of those needs and desires against all others by counting the profit.
IOW, the market is always "right" - not in an absolute value sense, but in a "teleological" (i.e., relative) sense.
OTOH, if humans were rational, the market would reward technology even more over art than it does now...
The fact of the matter is that art is valued less by most humans than technology, food, sex, etc...
The notion that art is somehow privileged over everything else is an artist's view not shared by the rest of the species...
There's a difference between not being able to make money because there's no money to be made and not being able to make money because when you do, someone takes it...
As for Abba, they were offered a BILLION dollars to reunite and tour - they turned it down because they knew it would be a travesty of their old popularity...
During the height of their popularity, Abba was one of the largest corporations in their country...
Zsa Zsa was ALWAYS famous for being famous!
How many movies did she ever make? She was famous because she went on Merv Griffin's show every week...and that was when she was already old...
A younger equivalent is Brooke Shields - another pretty face that never did figure out what the hell she is or what she should do. But she probably made more movies than Zsa Zsa...
Another equivalent to the Gabor sisters are the Hilton sisters - in forty years, they'll still be famous for being famous sluts...
To paraphrase you, when you pay a kid to mow your lawn, do you pay him because of how many people he supports, or his value to you?
Nobody's job supports other people. Everybody supports themselves - or not, in some cases.
And when a profession no longer supports people because the market has changed (usually because of technology), then those people either starve or find another profession.
Welcome to the real world (instead of the world of "art"), musicians...
The issue is whether art or technology is more important to human survival and therefore which one should get more economic investment.
I think the fact that the entire US music and movie industries combined are far smaller than several of the individual US companies in the tech industry clearly answers that question.
That's why you don't see the RIAA sueing Phillips and Sony for producing CD players with built-in CD recorders.
I spent two and a quarter years in the Hole in Federal prison - actually a total of over three years at various times - out of eight years.
And my butt is as tight as it was the day I went in...i.e., much tighter than anybody else's...
While prison is no fun, hanging yourself to avoid it is overreacting - and very permanent...
then you'll be in good physical condition and can kick people's asses when they're snotty towards you, and make people fear you, which is a lot better than the reverse situation...
Also:
Get laid frequently. (Note: Requires the above to be done first, as well as most of the following...)
Don't settle for stupid jobs - work for yourself and make money for yourself, not other people.
CRAS - Calm, Relaxation, Awareness, Spirit.
As Crowley put it, "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law" - or as Abbie Hoffman put it, "Do Your Thing And Only Your Thing"...
Remember - humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious, and fearful. Nothing they say or do (except physical assault) should be taken seriously.
No one can harm you unless you permit it.
You have a purpose in life and that purpose is to survive indefinitely, which has corollaries which must influence your thought and behavior.
- Right now the worst a virus can do is force you
- to blitz your drive...
Ever heard of Chernobyl? If your mobo supports it, this virus can flash your BIOS - which is a show-stopper...
My Asus A7V8X mobo has that, too. It's called the ASUS POST Reporter which uses the WinBond speech controller. If your boot fails, you hear the specific reason for the failure.
You can edit the messages using the WinBond Voice Editor.
You can disable the feature in the IO Device Configuration screen of the BIOS. I've never heard the thing myself because I instantly did that as soon as I read about it...
That's correct, I have a Compaq Deskpro 4000 as my old machine, and it has a Compaq Diagnostics Partition (about 16MB or something like that) on the front of the first hard drive. When I first got the machine, the partition had been damaged and I had to download the BIOS from Compaq and put it on diskettes to access it. Later, I changed drives, recreated the Diagnostic Partition and reloaded it from the Compaq diskettes.
It definitely is not as safe as ROM, but it really wasn't THAT much of a pain to deal with it. You just had to boot off diskette and insert a second diskette to get into Compaq's diagnostics and Setup programs. You usually don't need to do that too often, though, so it isn't that big a deal.
OTOH, if you are a maintenance person and have to do it with dozens of machines a day, it would be a huge hassle, so ROM is definitely better.
Google and also poke around the fee-paid databases like Dialog and Factiva, etc., among other things.
Hourly rates usually run $25-100/hour - actually, most individual IB's seem to be around $40-50/hour and larger services around $90/hour - depending on specialty - a lot of IB's specialize in legal, medical, industry, or technological areas.
I'm hoping it's a good job:
1) Take requests.
2) ??? (Research)
3) Profit!
- It's not a matter of contract law, it's a matter
- of "violation of seclusion". There's no contract
- saying you won't take pictures through my
- bedroom window, but you could still be violated
- for selling them.
Hardly the same thing - what was sold was essentially publicly available information - an address, maybe an SSN.
Not to mention that celebrities have unauthorized photos taken of them every day, and no one goes to jail for it... The Douglas/Zeta-Jones case going on now is evidence of that... They're suing but no one is going to jail for taking the photos.
- No part of the ruling said that obtaining
- information under a pretext gave you liability
- for misuse. It said it gave you liability for
- damages under the fraudulent buisness practices
- act.
What's the distinction? Using the pretext was the fraudulent business practice, wasn't it? Liability for damages for fraud seems to me to pertain to the client, not any third party. Even if you assume a third party could sue for damages resulting from the improper use of the information, I can't see how you can sue the supplier and not the client. The supplier did not directly or indirectly cause the damages - the client did. The problem with this sort of ruling is that the notion of responsibility and causal effect are completely ignored - essentially responsibility is spread all over hell and virtually anything is assumed to be a "cause". And whether the IB used a pretext or fraudulent practices is completely irrelevant to what the client did with that information.
- What would be wrong with having to submit to a
- criminal background check before you can pay
- someone for personal information about another
- person? What legitimate public need would be
- thwarted by such a scheme?
This is hilarious. It's called "privacy"! Essentially you are saying, "Let's invade everyone's privacy (it's not clear who should do the invading - the IB? The cops?) simply to prevent someone from misusing what is essentially public information in any event." This makes no sense. It might be construed to make some sense for background checks for gun owners (even though the Constitution specifically states that such possession "will not be infringed" which certainly includes the government tracking your purchase), but how this can be applied to a simple request for information is beyond me.
Where does it stop? If you drop your wallet and I find it and read your address so I can mail it back to you, do I need a background check first?
No, this is simply the court looking for someone to punish, and IB's are the convenient target in this case. Again, it's a case of "we can't handle the real problem, so we'll fake it just to look like we're doing something effective"...which is basically how all of government works, since it is simply a protection racket.
The function of government is to say: "You give us everything you have and do exactly what we tell you and we'll protect you from the bad people outside and inside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some." Which is exactly what is happening here (albeit the sleazy IB's are easy targets for this since no one appreciates "invasion of privacy" - even if the definition of that is a moving target...)
And as for liability for the cops, there have been repeated court decisions that government officials performing their official duties cannot be held liable for even the most egregious screwups - not to mention the problem of proving deliberate malice when they all protect each other...
Sure, if you prove someone was falsely imprisoned, the guy goes free - but in most cases the cop who framed him stays on the job..because no cop looks hard for the proof of that...
Let me explain it all to you again...
Humans are stupid, ignorant, irrational, malicious, and fearful.
Mostly what they fear is death.
They have this pre-rational idea that there is only a certain amount of life to go around and if anybody else gets some, they won't get enough.
This leads to the usual animal fight or flight behavior.
Flight reaction takes two forms: 1) Stand up, wave your arms, and try to attract the attention of whomever is giving out the "life". 2) Drag down anybody standing above you, and stomp on anybody below you, so they don't overshadow you and get "your" "life".
This is called mammalian dominance hierarchy.
Humans are domesticated primates and are entirely consumed by this behavior. Virtually every word and action of a human is conditioned by this overriding fear of death and consequent behavioral patterns.
You can't change this behavior without eliminating what people euphemistically and laughingly refer to as "human nature".
The only solution is Transhumanism, specifically the rearrangement of the human body and brain to maximize conceptual thought and minimize biochemical and evolutionary conditioning.
This will be done via nanotech and biotech over the next fifty years or so. The resulting Transhumans will give you humans exactly what you've been afraid of for thousands of years - either death or transmogrification into Transhumans (which you will perceive as the same as death, being morons).
You're going to die, one way or the other.
We won't.
Have a nice day.
1) There was no contract between the IB and anyone else (except maybe the stalker client) concerning protection of this information.
2) While obtaining the information using a pretext is sleazy, I don't see how this constitutes liability for the misuse of the information by a third party.
3) This seems to me to be just another attempt to spread liability around as a means to compel behavior that the legal system wants to occur without the formality of actually passing a considered law, i.e. bypassing the Constitution (Federal or State) and making law in the court. The criminal justice system doesn't like sleazy IB's, so they make them liable for something they have no control over.
4) When is the court ready to assign liability to cops and Feds who fake court orders, manufacture evidence, and otherwise abuse their responsibilities on a daily basis and thereby cause thousands of people to spend time in jail for crimes they did not commit? Oh, wait, I forgot - the criminal justice system is immune from prosecution for "screwups"...
This seems like a typical case of "something bad happened, we can't punish the guilty, so we'll find someone else - anyone else - and punish them.."
How is an IB supposed to verify their client's intentions? "Oh, excuse me, I really need this info so I can shoot my ex-girlfriend - or stalk Jodie Foster..." "Just check this block on the request form here: Will You Use This Info For Legal Purposes? YES: NO: "...
Or: "You realize, sir, that we have to ask you to turn over your criminal and mental health history to us, so we can verify that you will use this information only on a legal manner?"
Or worse, that if you ask for some innocuous info, that they then investigate YOU before investigating the subject...
Yeah, right...
Actually, since I'm planning to start up as an "information broker" I should clarify this misconception.
Information brokers do not sell people's SSN's. Those are sleazy operations that are more akin to private investigators (sleazy ones) than IB's.
An IB is more like a freelance librarian - you call them up and ask them how many widgets were sold in Thailand over the last five years and they do the research and find out for you.
Sometimes they do competitive intelligence research which is a little closer to what the sleazy operations do, but still legal.
There is a national organization for IB's called
Association of Independent Information Professionals with a web site here
which has the following Code of Ethics:
An Information Professional bears the following responsibilities:
Uphold the profession's reputation for honesty, competence, and confidentiality.
Give clients the most current and accurate information possible within the budget and time frames provided by the clients.
Help clients understand the sources of information used and the degree of reliability which can be expected from those sources.
Accept only those projects which are legal and are not detrimental to our profession.
Respect client confidentiality.
Recognize intellectual property rights. Respect licensing agreements and other contracts. Explain to clients what their obligations might be with regard to intellectual property rights and licensing agreements.
Maintain a professional relationship with libraries and comply with all their rules of access.
Assume responsibility for employees' compliance with this code.
I have a little problem with the "recognize IP rights" bit, but generally a legit IB ain't gonna sell you somebody's sister's SSN and address.
WARNING! SPOILERS!
The kid being recruited is supposedly a whiz coder who has a program called Spartacus that does...something about seizing wireless broadcasts or something, Dell Computer was very interested (for some bizarre reason) before Al Pacino got his hooks into him...
One scene was really great - he was browsing the Net and HE WAS NOT USING IE - HE WAS USING OPERA!
The director must get it!
Unfortunately he was using Opera 5, two releases behind the current version...
Then later they blew it when they had Pacino telling him about ICE 9 - a virus program that you just have to plug into a wall socket and it travels through electrical circuitry and can fry the entire infrastructure of America...
How do you get executable code into electrical circuitry? (No, they didn't mean home networking through home wiring, either...)
Bridget Moynahan used a USB microdrive to smuggle the ICE 9 code in pieces out of CIA HQ by putting the tiny drive in the screwoff bottom of her coffee cup which went right through the scanners when she left the building every day... Kinda cool...
The bosses do...
"We don't know what we're doing"...
"So we'll fake it"...
- But wouldn't that be true for all the women I
- asked? They are _all_ young enough to be his
- grand-daughters...
I thought you said one of them was under 20... The difference is in attitudes at various stages of life. Women (and men) think differently as they go from teen to adult to older adult to mature adult to Methuselah... Someone under 20 doesn't think the way a 25-year-old does and a 25-year-old doesn't think the way a 35-year-old does and so on up the line...
There's also demographics. Maybe the women you know aren't the same as other women.
Here's a quote from a Web site I just looked up on Sean Connery:
In 1999, New Woman named him the Sexiest Man of the Century, beating Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson for the honor.
About Connery's enduring sex appeal, film critic Pauline Kael explained, "Women want to meet him and men want to be him. I don't know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much."
Kael of course is not young, but I think New Woman - which IIRC is a magazine for younger women - naming him Sexiest Man of the Century only four years ago says it all.