I think the percentage of cases ending in default judgments and in settlements has diminished, and the percentage being contested has increased, thus moving them from breaking even to losing money.
So their efforts are no longer self-sustaining. That's what I was getting at. If they're operating in the black they can keep this up forever, but if this has turned into into an ineffective money sink their masters may eventually call a halt.
That's true, if your goal is to be independent of the electric grid. But for everyone else, any power you don't use can be fed back into the grid with a synchronized inverter. If you're using less than the incoming solar output, your meter will run backwards. So yes, a few million homes and businesses with panels on their roofs could really help out on those hot summer days, without a storage battery in sight. One problem is that the power companies don't really want this, for a variety of reasons.
That's interesting. I have attorneys in my family (and they maintain the same opinion on the RIAA's core motivation as you) but I have no feel for the costs involved. I had sort of tacitly assumed that they were profiting from the cases that settled immediately.
Of course, terrorism (which apparently doesn't always require the application of high explosive, just a certified letter or two) has little to do with specific targets: quite the opposite. The more you can encourage everyone to believe that they are at significant risk (especially if they're not) and to modify their behavior accordingly, the more you have succeeded. But you're right, untold millions of people are laughing at them, and you can still find just about any song you want via any Gnutella client. Whether that will prove to be beneficial for society in the long run is an open question, but it is as great a testament to their failure as any.
Depression is a medical-neuorlogical problem yes, but it is often treated as a medical disorder by doctors and psychologists when it is sometimes a social disorder.
My experience (I have had a number of family members suffer from clinical/major depression over the years) is that it is far more often diagnosed as a purely psychological disorder and ineffectively treated with psychotherapy alone. And that's a tragedy, because the proper application of antidepressants can turn a life of misery into one worth living.
That's not really correct, I'm afraid. Probably you have your V635 configured to map itself in as a USB drive (Connections menu, I think.) Now, that's a nice feature, and I wish mine worked that way, but it doesn't. I suspect that Windows would handle your phone just fine: protocol drivers are built-in for that. Same ones any thumb drive would use. Windows has traditionally had a wider range of USB support than Linux anyway, even if it still isn't all that reliable.
The vast majority of phones, if they can talk to a PC at all, use a proprietary interface protocol of some kind. Mine has an interface port (not USB) but didn't come with a cable so I had to buy a converter cable to plug into my USB port. I use the free, open-source. cross-platform BitPim application to access the few features that Sprint lets me use.
The only crippleware here is the firmware in the damn phone itself.
Well, if current trends in surveillance and invasive micro-management of society continue, at some point an enemy state wouldn't need to go to war to take us over. They'd just replace a few key button pushers and we'd be pwned.
Maybe, but that's what we pay DARPA to do, when you get right down to it.
People come up with nifty toys all the time. It's part of living in a high-tech society. The problem comes in when law-enforcement substitutes ineffective technological measures for quality police work.
Well, how would you feel about a mobile police AI that could do all of that without the wages, meal breaks or holidays? They had one in a movie once. It was called "ED-209". Didn't work very well as I recall.
Probably that means they should be spying upon themselves more. That way, if an agent figures out something useful maybe someone in another agency will learn about it and be able to make use of it. At least they won't need to worry about lack of inter-agency cooperation and all that.
Well, I meant learning as in LEGAL PROCESS learning:)
Well, no question they seem to be good at that. So far as learning about anything else, that's really a matter for their member companies to figure out for themselves.
I mean, let's put the blame where it belongs. The RIAA is just an enforcement arm at this point: if Sony et. al woke up one day and said, "That's it. This whole DRM/anti-fair-use/lawsuit/rootkit thing just isn't working and we're going to sell 320 kbit/sec archival-quality DRM-free MP3 files from now on" this would all go away overnight. They might even make more money. Hell, I might even buy another Sony product, something I've sworn I'll never do.
What it will take for that to happen I don't know. It's not happening anytime soon. We may have to wait until the current management teams at the major record companies die off.
Well, either way I'd say the robber baron appellation is a good fit. Give us your stuff, or we'll just bop you on the head and take it.
Speaking of money, I had always thought the RIAA was funded by the various member corporations, and was to some degree subject to their will. With the RIAA extracting substantial sums from these settlements, are they functioning now as an independent profit-making enterprise? Are they operating this lawsuit mill at a loss? If not... where does the money go, anyway?
We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.
I don't suffer... I don't own a single Apple product, and haven't since I retired my Apple//e decades ago. Suffering is relative. Now, if Apple had a de facto monopoly on cell phones I might feel differently, but there is such an incredible array of competing equipment out there I just don't see the point in whining about one vendor. Consumers will decide if the iPhone survives or not: obviously Apple is hoping for a repeat of their success with the iPod. Cell phones are a much more complex marketplace but, hey, time will tell.
Personally, I think that if Apple wants the iPhone to last, to have a substantial ecosystem develop around their hardware, they should open it up for third-party code. I believe they eventually will, once they've squeezed the last drop out of the early-adopter crowd.
People complain because cellular companies insist that the phones be crippled so that they can force users to pay extra for some stupid "service". This has nothing to do with the operating system on your PC. It has to do with what the particular version of the firmware in the phone will let you do. In the case of my Sanyo Katana, it's been crippled so that you can only do a few things with bluetooth and a few things with the comm port. Not that the phone itself couldn't do a whole lot more (and I understand that versions sold in other countries do) but they're explicitly limited for the U.S. market.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I will rephrase that. You do not have an idea what you're talking about. I'm not even going to debate with you about suffering: I put human beings first and animals second. If it comes down to a choice between a human being and 4,000 animals, I know which way I'd choose. Period. End-of-statement.
When you've finished dealing with the fact that I disagree with you on every point, go read this. After you've educated yourself on how wrong you are, come back tell me that what you said is even slightly relevant. Like the GP, I've had two family members suffer from severe clinical depression, suicide was narrowly averted multiple times. In one case the onset was before the age of antidepressants: he drank to mask the effects of the depression, but overall alcohol simply worsens the problem. When one of the early drugs became available we got him on it (Elevil in the late seventies, I think... it's been a long time) and the difference was like night and day. "I have my life back" he said, and stopped drinking... he didn't need it anymore, just to feel normal for a while. It was astonishing, and the relief we all felt was palpable. He still suffered from the effects of his condition 'til he died, but at least he had a life. If that drug hadn't come out when it did he wouldn't have lasted another six months, a year tops. He switched to different drugs over time, as better ones became available, but he got an extra twenty five years because of them.
People who claim that no-one needs antidepressants ("Tom Cruise, are you listening?") are fools. Ignorant assholes who would cheerfully consign other human beings to a living hell contained within their own skulls. I still don't understand how it must feel to suffer from this disease, and yet I had to deal with the consequences of it for almost thirty years. All of us did, and it was... very difficult. I'm not saying that antidepressants (like virtually all drugs) aren't capable of being abused, but to claim that people suffering from clinical depression should just "get over themselves" is a preposterous falsehood. Period. End of statement.
If there is a God, I hope He delivers people like you a sample of what you say doesn't exist. For just a few years: I wouldn't want you to get so depressed that you actually off yourself. Maybe then you'll understand why what you just said offended me to the core.
Never happen. The Internet is just too damned convenient, not to mention cheap. The fact that everything you send over it is vulnerable to one degree or another doesn't seem to matter to some people.
From a security perspective, they'd be better off on dial-up.
what I want to know is, should I decide to buy an iPhone, will the well-documented Steve Jobs reality-distortion field affect my reception? What about my wireless access point and cordless phones at home?
No kidding. I'm on Sprint and I dropped the data plan because it was too costly, and if you don't have a plan data is about 7c per kilobyte. Per K! Let alone the fact that Sprint won't let you get a goddamn picture off your own camera phone unless you subscribe to "PCS Vision". Fortunately, I found an outfit selling a USB cable for my phone, and it was compatible with BitPim. It's still limited in what it can do by the firmware (can't dump my own ringtones or pictures into the thing) but it's better than having to pay extra to email pictures to myself! Bloodsucking leeches, all of them.
Seriously though, cellular companies have a lot of justifying to do. They have a fraction of the infrastructure to maintain vs. a traditional telco, yet their rates are still in the "gouge the customers eyes out with a rusty spoon" category.
I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.
Indeed they have. People download entire movies now! Really!!!
Seriously though, "overselling" is less a technical issue as it is a business issue, i.e. promising some service level and then simply not providing it. Of course, the reason that ISPs oversell is because nobody would pay what they are charging if they had to call it like it is in their sales pitches. "Unlimited Always-On Service" sounds ever so much better than "Intermittently-fast Generally-slow Heavily-throttled Mostly-On Service with Outsourced Technical Support." The question then becomes: how do you educate consumers as to what they can realistically expect? Realistically you can't, because the issue is legitimately complex and it would require too many syllables. Sure, if the majority of broadband users understood what you just wrote it might be different. But they don't, and they never will, and that's the problem. At least, it's the problem until networks become as fast in reality as we're being told they are now.
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I think the percentage of cases ending in default judgments and in settlements has diminished, and the percentage being contested has increased, thus moving them from breaking even to losing money.
So their efforts are no longer self-sustaining. That's what I was getting at. If they're operating in the black they can keep this up forever, but if this has turned into into an ineffective money sink their masters may eventually call a halt.
Of course they'd fabricate evidence. What do you think MediaDefender and the RIAA's "expert witnesses" have been doing all this time?
That's true, if your goal is to be independent of the electric grid. But for everyone else, any power you don't use can be fed back into the grid with a synchronized inverter. If you're using less than the incoming solar output, your meter will run backwards. So yes, a few million homes and businesses with panels on their roofs could really help out on those hot summer days, without a storage battery in sight. One problem is that the power companies don't really want this, for a variety of reasons.
That's interesting. I have attorneys in my family (and they maintain the same opinion on the RIAA's core motivation as you) but I have no feel for the costs involved. I had sort of tacitly assumed that they were profiting from the cases that settled immediately.
Of course, terrorism (which apparently doesn't always require the application of high explosive, just a certified letter or two) has little to do with specific targets: quite the opposite. The more you can encourage everyone to believe that they are at significant risk (especially if they're not) and to modify their behavior accordingly, the more you have succeeded. But you're right, untold millions of people are laughing at them, and you can still find just about any song you want via any Gnutella client. Whether that will prove to be beneficial for society in the long run is an open question, but it is as great a testament to their failure as any.
Depression is a medical-neuorlogical problem yes, but it is often treated as a medical disorder by doctors and psychologists when it is sometimes a social disorder.
My experience (I have had a number of family members suffer from clinical/major depression over the years) is that it is far more often diagnosed as a purely psychological disorder and ineffectively treated with psychotherapy alone. And that's a tragedy, because the proper application of antidepressants can turn a life of misery into one worth living.
That's not really correct, I'm afraid. Probably you have your V635 configured to map itself in as a USB drive (Connections menu, I think.) Now, that's a nice feature, and I wish mine worked that way, but it doesn't. I suspect that Windows would handle your phone just fine: protocol drivers are built-in for that. Same ones any thumb drive would use. Windows has traditionally had a wider range of USB support than Linux anyway, even if it still isn't all that reliable.
The vast majority of phones, if they can talk to a PC at all, use a proprietary interface protocol of some kind. Mine has an interface port (not USB) but didn't come with a cable so I had to buy a converter cable to plug into my USB port. I use the free, open-source. cross-platform BitPim application to access the few features that Sprint lets me use.
The only crippleware here is the firmware in the damn phone itself.
Well, if current trends in surveillance and invasive micro-management of society continue, at some point an enemy state wouldn't need to go to war to take us over. They'd just replace a few key button pushers and we'd be pwned.
True, but as has been conclusively demonstrated in thousands of experiments with the little bastards ... they can learn if properly motivated.
Maybe, but that's what we pay DARPA to do, when you get right down to it.
People come up with nifty toys all the time. It's part of living in a high-tech society. The problem comes in when law-enforcement substitutes ineffective technological measures for quality police work.
Well, how would you feel about a mobile police AI that could do all of that without the wages, meal breaks or holidays? They had one in a movie once. It was called "ED-209". Didn't work very well as I recall.
Probably that means they should be spying upon themselves more. That way, if an agent figures out something useful maybe someone in another agency will learn about it and be able to make use of it. At least they won't need to worry about lack of inter-agency cooperation and all that.
I say we go with "plethora" or "vast cornucopia" instead.
Well, I meant learning as in LEGAL PROCESS learning :)
Well, no question they seem to be good at that. So far as learning about anything else, that's really a matter for their member companies to figure out for themselves. I mean, let's put the blame where it belongs. The RIAA is just an enforcement arm at this point: if Sony et. al woke up one day and said, "That's it. This whole DRM/anti-fair-use/lawsuit/rootkit thing just isn't working and we're going to sell 320 kbit/sec archival-quality DRM-free MP3 files from now on" this would all go away overnight. They might even make more money. Hell, I might even buy another Sony product, something I've sworn I'll never do.
What it will take for that to happen I don't know. It's not happening anytime soon. We may have to wait until the current management teams at the major record companies die off.
The occupant of Air force one ?
Well, and now we know why he believes he's above the law.
Well, either way I'd say the robber baron appellation is a good fit. Give us your stuff, or we'll just bop you on the head and take it.
... where does the money go, anyway?
Speaking of money, I had always thought the RIAA was funded by the various member corporations, and was to some degree subject to their will. With the RIAA extracting substantial sums from these settlements, are they functioning now as an independent profit-making enterprise? Are they operating this lawsuit mill at a loss? If not
We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.
... I don't own a single Apple product, and haven't since I retired my Apple //e decades ago. Suffering is relative. Now, if Apple had a de facto monopoly on cell phones I might feel differently, but there is such an incredible array of competing equipment out there I just don't see the point in whining about one vendor. Consumers will decide if the iPhone survives or not: obviously Apple is hoping for a repeat of their success with the iPod. Cell phones are a much more complex marketplace but, hey, time will tell.
I don't suffer
Personally, I think that if Apple wants the iPhone to last, to have a substantial ecosystem develop around their hardware, they should open it up for third-party code. I believe they eventually will, once they've squeezed the last drop out of the early-adopter crowd.
People complain because cellular companies insist that the phones be crippled so that they can force users to pay extra for some stupid "service". This has nothing to do with the operating system on your PC. It has to do with what the particular version of the firmware in the phone will let you do. In the case of my Sanyo Katana, it's been crippled so that you can only do a few things with bluetooth and a few things with the comm port. Not that the phone itself couldn't do a whole lot more (and I understand that versions sold in other countries do) but they're explicitly limited for the U.S. market.
Right, which is why I said, "with a decent router they can allocate bandwidth more intelligently than that".
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I will rephrase that. You do not have an idea what you're talking about. I'm not even going to debate with you about suffering: I put human beings first and animals second. If it comes down to a choice between a human being and 4,000 animals, I know which way I'd choose. Period. End-of-statement.
... it's been a long time) and the difference was like night and day. "I have my life back" he said, and stopped drinking ... he didn't need it anymore, just to feel normal for a while. It was astonishing, and the relief we all felt was palpable. He still suffered from the effects of his condition 'til he died, but at least he had a life. If that drug hadn't come out when it did he wouldn't have lasted another six months, a year tops. He switched to different drugs over time, as better ones became available, but he got an extra twenty five years because of them.
... very difficult. I'm not saying that antidepressants (like virtually all drugs) aren't capable of being abused, but to claim that people suffering from clinical depression should just "get over themselves" is a preposterous falsehood. Period. End of statement.
When you've finished dealing with the fact that I disagree with you on every point, go read this. After you've educated yourself on how wrong you are, come back tell me that what you said is even slightly relevant. Like the GP, I've had two family members suffer from severe clinical depression, suicide was narrowly averted multiple times. In one case the onset was before the age of antidepressants: he drank to mask the effects of the depression, but overall alcohol simply worsens the problem. When one of the early drugs became available we got him on it (Elevil in the late seventies, I think
People who claim that no-one needs antidepressants ("Tom Cruise, are you listening?") are fools. Ignorant assholes who would cheerfully consign other human beings to a living hell contained within their own skulls. I still don't understand how it must feel to suffer from this disease, and yet I had to deal with the consequences of it for almost thirty years. All of us did, and it was
If there is a God, I hope He delivers people like you a sample of what you say doesn't exist. For just a few years: I wouldn't want you to get so depressed that you actually off yourself. Maybe then you'll understand why what you just said offended me to the core.
get your important data off the web.
Never happen. The Internet is just too damned convenient, not to mention cheap. The fact that everything you send over it is vulnerable to one degree or another doesn't seem to matter to some people.
From a security perspective, they'd be better off on dial-up.
In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn, "It's a joke, son!"
{sigh} You're right about that. To continue the Star Trek analogy, some people are like Commander Data ... literal-minded to a fault.
Note they are often given mod points.
what I want to know is, should I decide to buy an iPhone, will the well-documented Steve Jobs reality-distortion field affect my reception? What about my wireless access point and cordless phones at home?
No kidding. I'm on Sprint and I dropped the data plan because it was too costly, and if you don't have a plan data is about 7c per kilobyte. Per K! Let alone the fact that Sprint won't let you get a goddamn picture off your own camera phone unless you subscribe to "PCS Vision". Fortunately, I found an outfit selling a USB cable for my phone, and it was compatible with BitPim. It's still limited in what it can do by the firmware (can't dump my own ringtones or pictures into the thing) but it's better than having to pay extra to email pictures to myself! Bloodsucking leeches, all of them.
Seriously though, cellular companies have a lot of justifying to do. They have a fraction of the infrastructure to maintain vs. a traditional telco, yet their rates are still in the "gouge the customers eyes out with a rusty spoon" category.
I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.
Indeed they have. People download entire movies now! Really!!!
Seriously though, "overselling" is less a technical issue as it is a business issue, i.e. promising some service level and then simply not providing it. Of course, the reason that ISPs oversell is because nobody would pay what they are charging if they had to call it like it is in their sales pitches. "Unlimited Always-On Service" sounds ever so much better than "Intermittently-fast Generally-slow Heavily-throttled Mostly-On Service with Outsourced Technical Support." The question then becomes: how do you educate consumers as to what they can realistically expect? Realistically you can't, because the issue is legitimately complex and it would require too many syllables. Sure, if the majority of broadband users understood what you just wrote it might be different. But they don't, and they never will, and that's the problem. At least, it's the problem until networks become as fast in reality as we're being told they are now.