Well back in reality of course. This story has nothing to do with copyright and nothing to do with a pack of ass hats at some trolling, racketeering firm. This is all about some cowardly building manager who simply took the easy way out.
The easy way in this case was to simply turf the student out onto the street because it is the quickest, cheapest solution. They know a struggling student can't afford to challenge them in court and they get to keep the students deposits etc. So the real target for the ire of the community is really the manager.
For the racketeering firm practising in intimidation and extortion, by targeting students with threatening bull shit letters couched in legal terms and made to look like they have some legal import, well they just are the liars cheats and thieves that they, really worthless individuals.
As for uni students, always, always, endeavour to use an independent isp that has nothing to do with you school or your residence, as not only will you that solution often cheaper, but you will also discover it is far less privacy invasive and has no ramifications upon your place of residence or you grades.
It would also help to know what was the place of residence and who was the manager.
Stress as a result of frustration and idiotic gaming choices or stress as a result of anxiety with challenging gaming choices. learning the game is the most fun, continually repeating an action over and over again until you get the timing right is boring and pointless.
The really big changes in gaming coming up. Virtual reality games where the hardware finally starts to catch up to the hype finally making it possible and mesh network gaming on netbooks. Mesh network multi player gaming on netbooks, quick and easy, link with people in the immediate vicinity, very much like the old board games and card games of the previous century, a much more social gaming experience but it requires netbooks to become nearly universal similar to mobile phones. You can bet mesh networking will also become very popular for 'er' file trading.
Virtually reality gaming, nothing could be cooler for a whole range of different types of games but the hardware requires some really serious and expensive processing power and the technology for the headsets still has a ways to go.
You should have really read the full article. Ubuntu only got an honourable mention where as Vista made it to number 1 of the top 10 most disappointing technologies.
Now of course if people where expecting Ubuntu to take over the operating system in one year that is very unrealistic, it really does take many years as an OS to gain significant market share because the OS really only changes when people change their hardware and that often takes at least five years for the typical user, they stick with it until it breaks. Or a new product comes at that suits different software, ala the netbook, which forced M$ to change to compete with Linux or lose the market (and Vista is dead on netbooks, a major failure for ballmer).
So interesting times coming up, will windows 7 be a rerun of vista with hype and B$ covering over a reality of failure, will XP survive into to foreseeable future in order for M$ to be able compete with Linux in the netbook market.
Don't forget M$ did everything they could to kill the nebook in it's first incarnation the OLPC because of the threat implied by $100 hardware to $1000 dollars worth of software licences and, they failed big time and were forced to acknowledge the netbook and, redo XP licensing, else they were going to lose that market to Linux.
There are some very valuable 'free' business models. The best 'free' business models are based upon saving money, rather than generating an income. A good example is the BBC, basically delivered free but funded by taxpayers, the intent to provide a news and information resource to the public which is continually vetted publicly to try to ensure accuracy and completeness. This compared to for profit news, which has been horribly tainted, the worst example being Fox News fighting a civil suit upon the basis they were entitled to lie and call it news and winning. Of course no large profits to be made in truth in news versus advertising as news but the damage and the cost to society is huge.
Another interesting example is free open source operating systems and the range of generally default applications. Again although they are distributed freely they cost money to produce. The business model of course is as businesses, government and individuals invest in creating open source software, they save themselves the cost of purchasing software licences on an ongoing basis, so the shared cost of investing FOSS is less than the continuing cost of software licences and the associated inflated profits, wasteful advertising, software released under false claims, software released too early, lackadaisically patching and bug fixing models and of course no control over the future direction of that software.
So the best 'free' business models are not really based around advertising but based around providing a cost efficient service usable by the greater community with funding either by public donations, cooperatives or via taxes.
What this all points out is there is an obvious market for dumbed down science fiction and that it represents a profitable sector. Personally the disconnect of seeing a cadet promoted to captain of the fleet flagship of a federation of planets broke it for me, to much of a reach and oddly enough nothing to do with scifi or is that syfy, yeah I know young and pretty sells crap;).
This still makes the assessment grossly unfair. They others teams forced to run windows were effectively discriminated against and stuck in a no win situation, especially as the NSA created a more secure OS SELinux, so obviously there secure OS of choice and effectively checked for any known hacks they could implement.
Of course for real security you need to involve the CIA, rather than hacking the software, you hack the admins, free love, hard currency etc. and, you get direct access and the hardware of your choice installed, good luck trying to secure software on insecure hardware;D.
In this case step 1 of the security assessment, does it need to be connected to the internet, 'NO', then don't connect it. Step 2 risk assessment, just because web apps and the internet are the cheapest way of doing things, is it appropriate where thousands of peoples lives are at risk 'NO', then don't do it as a web app, spend the extra money or eventually the laws will change and you will go to jail for killing people just to save a few bucks.
Let's makes this clear, my focus is on the education market, and the education markets does require the full gamut of licences, from the OS right the way through to full fledged server's, with the associated client licences. So a large proportion of home users are children and of course young adults as well as older folks, in school.
I even lean towards the idea of parallel networks/computer systems in business, where the internal wired network is kept secure and off the internet, with the exception of hard wired and secure links and the external wireless network is used to access the internet with it's resources, email et al. So desktops/terminals internally and cheap netbooks externally with only limited company info on board, so losing it is more of a 'meh' rather than a disaster.
The typical? home users will not define the netbook, education and the business 2nd computer market will.
Of course the dominant market of netbooks will always be education, from primary school to university, hundreds of millions of units with hundreds of millions of licences, either they give it away for free and loose (FOSS advocates still win, we believe in bridging the digital divide) or give that market away to FOSS software and still lose (FOSS advocates prefer that as it gives people equal access to the software globally).
Of course they can attempt to follow the corrupt path and get governments to continue to throw away billions of dollars on licence fees but the general public is really starting to take a dim view on that flagrant waste of tax revenue, especially for the rest of the world outside of Redmond, WA, USA.
So here is a new point of study for you, the affect of lobbyists, PR/marketing, large publishing houses and greed upon the cost of free electronic textbooks. There are many people who derive large incomes from the old system and the greed combined with the intelligence will motivate them to do one particular thing over and over again. To become involved in free open electronic textbook projects and poison them, make the collapse in infighting and arguments, become buried in pointless arbitrary differences in technicalities, it other words do every deceitful pathetic thing they can do to keep the whole greater than $100 text book gravy train going.
So the simple first step to doing it, is expecting that this will happen. The simplest solution is forcing the full declaration of all vested interests by any person or organisation that wishes to contribute and publicly shaming those who contributions are disingenuous and motivated by greed. So the initial effort must be focussed on creating a tightly governed process with set achievement points and firm guidelines, with a real focus on eliminating spoilers from the project. Failure to do this, will result in failure on the project, not because of it's lack of value or the achievability of the project (wikipedia is a good example) but, because of the unending greed and venality of a few asshats.
What is just so wrong about windows being the future is it breaks the the very first claim about the future of netbooks, 'cheap'. The M$ solution represents licence fees for the OS, licence fees for the office suits, licence fees for the servers to connect them, licence fees for communications both email and web server. In fact a whole range of licence fees that far exceed the value of a netbook and, not just by a bit, but in total by a factor of at least 10.
So the very first claim is an out and out marketing lie, windows 7 and it's accomplices is a hugely expensive solution. This really egregious especially coming from a company out of China, where the majority of people can barely afford a $100 netbook and greater than $1000 dollars worth of licence fees is beyond their annual income.
The future of the netbook is cheap and semi-disposable, as it it's loss or destruction is not to financially painful. Having a netbook with bound software licences that disappear with the netbbook and require r-ebuying is just nuts and, just as pointless is having to reinstall all those, what a really basic applications, again and again.
The reality is that the netbook running FOSS will become the default education device and all the lies coming out of M$ or it's cronies are doomed to failure.
Which makes the whole thing so mind bogglingly stupid. Not only did that idiot executive fire them employee for the wrong reason but the executive in their own bloated self worth gave the unfairly dismissed employee all the evidence required to sue the company for unfair dismissal and of course the attempt by the company to strip away the rights of a citizen and to threaten all other employees of that company with similar action should they ever express an opinion that differs from the policies expressed by management.
It is obvious to everyone that the company will lose this case and loose it badly with a very strong likelihood of punitive damages, the only thing this is not so obvious is whether that idiot who choose to fire the employee well be fired themselves for gross stupidity.
Well doesn't that bring to mind the original principle of censorship, not to protect the people but to protect the leaders from wrath of the people. One might wonder whether more truth might be found in an ancient garbage dump than in a ancient royal library.
ACTA is far worse than that as it sets some terrible precedents.
1) The right of corporations to censor the communications of their customers.
2) Guilt upon accusation and you must prove your innocence at your own expense.
3) Prison terms for copyright infringement with no profit motive and regardless of the extent.
4) The gross and deceitful intent to place the artificial and arbitrary asset of IP above that or of real property by providing it laws which radically exceed those for the protection of real property.
5) The corruption of the political process with absolutely no benefit to society and to only serve the greed of a minority. Especially egregious as the harm caused to society by some of the copyright protected works can be demonstrated and in fact is considered so harmful that distribution of the copyright protected content to minors is considered a criminal offence.
Before any more laws are changed to protect copyright, first and foremost current copyright should be forced to align with current laws ie. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". So until the criminal abuse of the basic principle of copyright is corrected and that the work must actually promote the progress of science and useful arts (the intent can not be more glaringly obvious), not one cent of taxpayer dollars should be spent on protecting any of it. If fact it can literally be argued that as the value of any copyrighted has not as yet been substantiated as conforming to that requirement, no one can be charged with copyright infringement.
Bow the most amusing thing about this. All this from a society that can not even understand gravity yet, so can you travel faster than light, well, solve that little gravity problem and start to understand gravitons and you might have a better shot at formulating an answer. Where even still stuck on understanding the nature of photons so how can we expect to go faster than them.
Try this, photons are graviton clusters created by stressing the attractive and repulsive bonds between atoms and are formed until equilibrium is achieved;).
There are enormous differences between the quality of political appointees. The previous administration was marked with gross incompetence because those appointments weren't for the return of favours or support but because the appointments were for long term support in the corrupt efforts to basically steal as much money as possible, billions dollar no bid contracts for example. Perversely enough they were also there to run down the departments they were in control of to fulfil the corporate lobbyist's goals of privatise everything.
Under most circumstances this never happens not even in previous republican administrations, make no mistake the previous administration betrayed their own party in order to line their own pockets and those of their fellow conspirators. So the last lot of political appointees were not so much political but conspiratorial and they were neither republican nor democrats or libertarian, for the republicans to rebuild they must learn to accept that and take the appropriate actions to repair the damage.
Well perhaps there should be a slight differentiation between adults targeting adults and adults targeting children. Aside from that of course the reality is that on the internet, the insulted party must actively seek out the insulter, in order to be insulted, if they are reading a blog or even a social networking site. Of course if it is directed messages, email directly from the insulter to the insulted or even on person hounding another on a forum, then it might be viewed differently.
Actually/. is a very appropriate place to discuss this kind of activity. They got a programmer to automate a process basically because the executives in charge did not care about conducting anything even remotely resembling due diligence, all they cared about was getting paid as much as possible for doing as little as possible.
So did the programmer facilitate it, or did they just automate the process that corrupt executives were intent on creating regardless of how manual or automated it was. Clearly the whole scheme was intent on the creation of illusory profits in order to maximises short term executive bonuses regardless of the long term consequences, to paraphrase "mission accomplished" and yet the buggers still complain above not getting the final lot of bonuses after bankrupting their companies, which they knew was the inevitably result of their actions, hardly any surprises there.
So computer simulations are really good at creating all kinds of illusions, sometimes the manual way whilst it takes longer is still a whole lot safer.
To be fair the new administration has been in office for only one hundred days. No matter which government department you care to pick they are still loaded up to the gunnels with 8 years worth of previous administrations political appointees and not very competent employees. I would guess it would take all of this administration first term of office to clean the out and to create a far more honest and professional government service and not the current administration of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists.
The reality is it will take them most of the first year to just carry out the required investigations prior to initiating prosecutions across the board for what history has demonstrated to have been a very corrupt 8 years. It certainly will be interesting but it ain't going to be easy to do.
Well obviously they where hoping for as many applications as possible, what did not work quite so well was general public interests. No stream of news stories, an absence of tens of thousands of articles on blog sites, tech magazines reported the initial offer then it all died off and even this extension of time to the scheme is treated more as a ho hum to be joked about.
So never am effective marketing scheme, oh my, you must love the googly woogly it is going to save the planet and, all those evil things you here about google bear trying to pry into all your private secrets regardless of your age (they even patented a scheme to target children playing computer games) and manipulate all your life choices with psychological targeted adds just ain't true, googly woogly only really manipulates it's employees that way not the general public, oh no no no;D.
The catch with all that is it can quite readily be argued that if there is any real value in the IP it can be patented or copyrighted, as such the employee is free to divulge the IP because it is already has the capacity to be protected. All other IP whilst certainly hyped up by database engineers, marketing types and various privacy invasive search engines et al is really only general knowledge that is already publicly available it is just collated in the one spot within the employees mind.
Whilst it can be said that collations of material into a particular formats are copyrightable, it certainly can't be claimed the the collation of said knowledge within an employees mind is the IP of an ex-employer. So for non-competes to survive payment must continue, even if it is at reduced levels.
Some companies where possible should seriously consider ways of making use of ex-employees within the non-compete period upon a contracted external basis on a home office basis. The other alternate it to make the company that the employee is shifting to pay a transfer fee as a percentage of the employees previous salary as by it's nature it defines the value of the employee to the company and any damages perceived can not really exceed it.
I don't know, I went through the whole windows patch nightmare, where M$ was quite readily able to bugger up patch after patch, some where so bad they required a system reinstall after a poorly executed bug fix, others not quite so bad required registry edits and service reconfiguration to get the system running properly after a bug fix. I really got used to the end work arounds and "this is a know fault" years after software was released.
Things like 'sometimes' system standby, numerous caching faults over years, shutdown and startup foibles etc. etc. You know, I can really believe they rushed it out the door with minimal testing just so they can say it does ODF regardless of how poorly it does it.
Now that is really a stupid idea. of course there should be an independent review of all prescriptions provided. Seriously get the prescription wrong and people die, an independent check can prevent a lot tragic consequences. Added benefit is tracking of bad side affects especially where those side affects cause greater harm than the condition the prescription is trying to mitigate and, of course tracking down and managing any addictive prescription is also very important, especially as there can be non-addictive alternatives.
So it is a excellent idea for the state to monitor all a doctors prescriptions to ensure validity of those prescription as of course inappropriately prescribed medications can result in death http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html and any state that doesn't take actions when that number of deaths is occurring is failing it's citizens.
Of course you have to be careful, when a person commits a crime when surrounded by people protesting, only that person committed a crime, the rest of the protesters are guilty of nothing and should not be subject to arrest as they are expressing their constitutional rights. As has happened in the past, only a very small minority of of agents provocateur have actually done any damage and the police have then basically lied and pressed false charges against innocent protesters, only to have to drop those charges when video evidence refutes their statements.
Peace protesting should always take place where appropriate. When a country is the dominant supplier of weapons, then obviously the protest should take place there, when a country funds the war effort obviously the protest should take place there, where a country is largely responsible for the war via it's intelligence operations obviously the protest should occur there.
Only a thoughtless person would consider it appropriate to peace protectors to protest in a combat zone, of course then the same thoughtless idiot would accuse the people being attacked of using the peace protesters as human shields and, demand even more violent actions be taken.
Let's be fair with M$, after all this is their first effort at producing documents to an open standard. So no real conspiracy here, no intent to enforce document lock in, just accept the reality, it is nothing more than sheer incompetence. You just have to look at M$'s first, second, third etc. efforts at the windows operating system, pretty lame and windows NT as a mutli users server system, not very effective at all.
M$'s standard practice, do as little as possible, get it out the door and get the suckers 'er' customers to test it at their expense, hell of a lot cheaper than testing it yourself and, you get to charge for upgrades. So don't expect full ODF compatibility with M$ products until you pay for the next upgrade, you know the one, it is more secure, more reliable and faster than the current one, which will be but, is not yet lame.
Slashdot Mirror
Well back in reality of course. This story has nothing to do with copyright and nothing to do with a pack of ass hats at some trolling, racketeering firm. This is all about some cowardly building manager who simply took the easy way out.
The easy way in this case was to simply turf the student out onto the street because it is the quickest, cheapest solution. They know a struggling student can't afford to challenge them in court and they get to keep the students deposits etc. So the real target for the ire of the community is really the manager.
For the racketeering firm practising in intimidation and extortion, by targeting students with threatening bull shit letters couched in legal terms and made to look like they have some legal import, well they just are the liars cheats and thieves that they, really worthless individuals.
As for uni students, always, always, endeavour to use an independent isp that has nothing to do with you school or your residence, as not only will you that solution often cheaper, but you will also discover it is far less privacy invasive and has no ramifications upon your place of residence or you grades.
It would also help to know what was the place of residence and who was the manager.
Stress as a result of frustration and idiotic gaming choices or stress as a result of anxiety with challenging gaming choices. learning the game is the most fun, continually repeating an action over and over again until you get the timing right is boring and pointless.
The really big changes in gaming coming up. Virtual reality games where the hardware finally starts to catch up to the hype finally making it possible and mesh network gaming on netbooks. Mesh network multi player gaming on netbooks, quick and easy, link with people in the immediate vicinity, very much like the old board games and card games of the previous century, a much more social gaming experience but it requires netbooks to become nearly universal similar to mobile phones. You can bet mesh networking will also become very popular for 'er' file trading.
Virtually reality gaming, nothing could be cooler for a whole range of different types of games but the hardware requires some really serious and expensive processing power and the technology for the headsets still has a ways to go.
You should have really read the full article. Ubuntu only got an honourable mention where as Vista made it to number 1 of the top 10 most disappointing technologies.
Now of course if people where expecting Ubuntu to take over the operating system in one year that is very unrealistic, it really does take many years as an OS to gain significant market share because the OS really only changes when people change their hardware and that often takes at least five years for the typical user, they stick with it until it breaks. Or a new product comes at that suits different software, ala the netbook, which forced M$ to change to compete with Linux or lose the market (and Vista is dead on netbooks, a major failure for ballmer).
So interesting times coming up, will windows 7 be a rerun of vista with hype and B$ covering over a reality of failure, will XP survive into to foreseeable future in order for M$ to be able compete with Linux in the netbook market.
Don't forget M$ did everything they could to kill the nebook in it's first incarnation the OLPC because of the threat implied by $100 hardware to $1000 dollars worth of software licences and, they failed big time and were forced to acknowledge the netbook and, redo XP licensing, else they were going to lose that market to Linux.
There are some very valuable 'free' business models. The best 'free' business models are based upon saving money, rather than generating an income. A good example is the BBC, basically delivered free but funded by taxpayers, the intent to provide a news and information resource to the public which is continually vetted publicly to try to ensure accuracy and completeness. This compared to for profit news, which has been horribly tainted, the worst example being Fox News fighting a civil suit upon the basis they were entitled to lie and call it news and winning. Of course no large profits to be made in truth in news versus advertising as news but the damage and the cost to society is huge.
Another interesting example is free open source operating systems and the range of generally default applications. Again although they are distributed freely they cost money to produce. The business model of course is as businesses, government and individuals invest in creating open source software, they save themselves the cost of purchasing software licences on an ongoing basis, so the shared cost of investing FOSS is less than the continuing cost of software licences and the associated inflated profits, wasteful advertising, software released under false claims, software released too early, lackadaisically patching and bug fixing models and of course no control over the future direction of that software.
So the best 'free' business models are not really based around advertising but based around providing a cost efficient service usable by the greater community with funding either by public donations, cooperatives or via taxes.
What this all points out is there is an obvious market for dumbed down science fiction and that it represents a profitable sector. Personally the disconnect of seeing a cadet promoted to captain of the fleet flagship of a federation of planets broke it for me, to much of a reach and oddly enough nothing to do with scifi or is that syfy, yeah I know young and pretty sells crap ;).
This still makes the assessment grossly unfair. They others teams forced to run windows were effectively discriminated against and stuck in a no win situation, especially as the NSA created a more secure OS SELinux, so obviously there secure OS of choice and effectively checked for any known hacks they could implement.
Of course for real security you need to involve the CIA, rather than hacking the software, you hack the admins, free love, hard currency etc. and, you get direct access and the hardware of your choice installed, good luck trying to secure software on insecure hardware ;D.
In this case step 1 of the security assessment, does it need to be connected to the internet, 'NO', then don't connect it. Step 2 risk assessment, just because web apps and the internet are the cheapest way of doing things, is it appropriate where thousands of peoples lives are at risk 'NO', then don't do it as a web app, spend the extra money or eventually the laws will change and you will go to jail for killing people just to save a few bucks.
I even lean towards the idea of parallel networks/computer systems in business, where the internal wired network is kept secure and off the internet, with the exception of hard wired and secure links and the external wireless network is used to access the internet with it's resources, email et al. So desktops/terminals internally and cheap netbooks externally with only limited company info on board, so losing it is more of a 'meh' rather than a disaster.
The typical? home users will not define the netbook, education and the business 2nd computer market will.
Of course the dominant market of netbooks will always be education, from primary school to university, hundreds of millions of units with hundreds of millions of licences, either they give it away for free and loose (FOSS advocates still win, we believe in bridging the digital divide) or give that market away to FOSS software and still lose (FOSS advocates prefer that as it gives people equal access to the software globally).
Of course they can attempt to follow the corrupt path and get governments to continue to throw away billions of dollars on licence fees but the general public is really starting to take a dim view on that flagrant waste of tax revenue, especially for the rest of the world outside of Redmond, WA, USA.
So here is a new point of study for you, the affect of lobbyists, PR/marketing, large publishing houses and greed upon the cost of free electronic textbooks. There are many people who derive large incomes from the old system and the greed combined with the intelligence will motivate them to do one particular thing over and over again. To become involved in free open electronic textbook projects and poison them, make the collapse in infighting and arguments, become buried in pointless arbitrary differences in technicalities, it other words do every deceitful pathetic thing they can do to keep the whole greater than $100 text book gravy train going.
So the simple first step to doing it, is expecting that this will happen. The simplest solution is forcing the full declaration of all vested interests by any person or organisation that wishes to contribute and publicly shaming those who contributions are disingenuous and motivated by greed. So the initial effort must be focussed on creating a tightly governed process with set achievement points and firm guidelines, with a real focus on eliminating spoilers from the project. Failure to do this, will result in failure on the project, not because of it's lack of value or the achievability of the project (wikipedia is a good example) but, because of the unending greed and venality of a few asshats.
What is just so wrong about windows being the future is it breaks the the very first claim about the future of netbooks, 'cheap'. The M$ solution represents licence fees for the OS, licence fees for the office suits, licence fees for the servers to connect them, licence fees for communications both email and web server. In fact a whole range of licence fees that far exceed the value of a netbook and, not just by a bit, but in total by a factor of at least 10.
So the very first claim is an out and out marketing lie, windows 7 and it's accomplices is a hugely expensive solution. This really egregious especially coming from a company out of China, where the majority of people can barely afford a $100 netbook and greater than $1000 dollars worth of licence fees is beyond their annual income.
The future of the netbook is cheap and semi-disposable, as it it's loss or destruction is not to financially painful. Having a netbook with bound software licences that disappear with the netbbook and require r-ebuying is just nuts and, just as pointless is having to reinstall all those, what a really basic applications, again and again.
The reality is that the netbook running FOSS will become the default education device and all the lies coming out of M$ or it's cronies are doomed to failure.
Which makes the whole thing so mind bogglingly stupid. Not only did that idiot executive fire them employee for the wrong reason but the executive in their own bloated self worth gave the unfairly dismissed employee all the evidence required to sue the company for unfair dismissal and of course the attempt by the company to strip away the rights of a citizen and to threaten all other employees of that company with similar action should they ever express an opinion that differs from the policies expressed by management.
It is obvious to everyone that the company will lose this case and loose it badly with a very strong likelihood of punitive damages, the only thing this is not so obvious is whether that idiot who choose to fire the employee well be fired themselves for gross stupidity.
Well doesn't that bring to mind the original principle of censorship, not to protect the people but to protect the leaders from wrath of the people. One might wonder whether more truth might be found in an ancient garbage dump than in a ancient royal library.
ACTA is far worse than that as it sets some terrible precedents.
1) The right of corporations to censor the communications of their customers.
2) Guilt upon accusation and you must prove your innocence at your own expense.
3) Prison terms for copyright infringement with no profit motive and regardless of the extent.
4) The gross and deceitful intent to place the artificial and arbitrary asset of IP above that or of real property by providing it laws which radically exceed those for the protection of real property.
5) The corruption of the political process with absolutely no benefit to society and to only serve the greed of a minority. Especially egregious as the harm caused to society by some of the copyright protected works can be demonstrated and in fact is considered so harmful that distribution of the copyright protected content to minors is considered a criminal offence.
Before any more laws are changed to protect copyright, first and foremost current copyright should be forced to align with current laws ie. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". So until the criminal abuse of the basic principle of copyright is corrected and that the work must actually promote the progress of science and useful arts (the intent can not be more glaringly obvious), not one cent of taxpayer dollars should be spent on protecting any of it. If fact it can literally be argued that as the value of any copyrighted has not as yet been substantiated as conforming to that requirement, no one can be charged with copyright infringement.
Bow the most amusing thing about this. All this from a society that can not even understand gravity yet, so can you travel faster than light, well, solve that little gravity problem and start to understand gravitons and you might have a better shot at formulating an answer. Where even still stuck on understanding the nature of photons so how can we expect to go faster than them.
Try this, photons are graviton clusters created by stressing the attractive and repulsive bonds between atoms and are formed until equilibrium is achieved ;).
There are enormous differences between the quality of political appointees. The previous administration was marked with gross incompetence because those appointments weren't for the return of favours or support but because the appointments were for long term support in the corrupt efforts to basically steal as much money as possible, billions dollar no bid contracts for example. Perversely enough they were also there to run down the departments they were in control of to fulfil the corporate lobbyist's goals of privatise everything.
Under most circumstances this never happens not even in previous republican administrations, make no mistake the previous administration betrayed their own party in order to line their own pockets and those of their fellow conspirators. So the last lot of political appointees were not so much political but conspiratorial and they were neither republican nor democrats or libertarian, for the republicans to rebuild they must learn to accept that and take the appropriate actions to repair the damage.
Well perhaps there should be a slight differentiation between adults targeting adults and adults targeting children. Aside from that of course the reality is that on the internet, the insulted party must actively seek out the insulter, in order to be insulted, if they are reading a blog or even a social networking site. Of course if it is directed messages, email directly from the insulter to the insulted or even on person hounding another on a forum, then it might be viewed differently.
Actually /. is a very appropriate place to discuss this kind of activity. They got a programmer to automate a process basically because the executives in charge did not care about conducting anything even remotely resembling due diligence, all they cared about was getting paid as much as possible for doing as little as possible.
So did the programmer facilitate it, or did they just automate the process that corrupt executives were intent on creating regardless of how manual or automated it was. Clearly the whole scheme was intent on the creation of illusory profits in order to maximises short term executive bonuses regardless of the long term consequences, to paraphrase "mission accomplished" and yet the buggers still complain above not getting the final lot of bonuses after bankrupting their companies, which they knew was the inevitably result of their actions, hardly any surprises there.
So computer simulations are really good at creating all kinds of illusions, sometimes the manual way whilst it takes longer is still a whole lot safer.
To be fair the new administration has been in office for only one hundred days. No matter which government department you care to pick they are still loaded up to the gunnels with 8 years worth of previous administrations political appointees and not very competent employees. I would guess it would take all of this administration first term of office to clean the out and to create a far more honest and professional government service and not the current administration of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists.
The reality is it will take them most of the first year to just carry out the required investigations prior to initiating prosecutions across the board for what history has demonstrated to have been a very corrupt 8 years. It certainly will be interesting but it ain't going to be easy to do.
Well obviously they where hoping for as many applications as possible, what did not work quite so well was general public interests. No stream of news stories, an absence of tens of thousands of articles on blog sites, tech magazines reported the initial offer then it all died off and even this extension of time to the scheme is treated more as a ho hum to be joked about.
So never am effective marketing scheme, oh my, you must love the googly woogly it is going to save the planet and, all those evil things you here about google bear trying to pry into all your private secrets regardless of your age (they even patented a scheme to target children playing computer games) and manipulate all your life choices with psychological targeted adds just ain't true, googly woogly only really manipulates it's employees that way not the general public, oh no no no ;D.
The catch with all that is it can quite readily be argued that if there is any real value in the IP it can be patented or copyrighted, as such the employee is free to divulge the IP because it is already has the capacity to be protected. All other IP whilst certainly hyped up by database engineers, marketing types and various privacy invasive search engines et al is really only general knowledge that is already publicly available it is just collated in the one spot within the employees mind.
Whilst it can be said that collations of material into a particular formats are copyrightable, it certainly can't be claimed the the collation of said knowledge within an employees mind is the IP of an ex-employer. So for non-competes to survive payment must continue, even if it is at reduced levels.
Some companies where possible should seriously consider ways of making use of ex-employees within the non-compete period upon a contracted external basis on a home office basis. The other alternate it to make the company that the employee is shifting to pay a transfer fee as a percentage of the employees previous salary as by it's nature it defines the value of the employee to the company and any damages perceived can not really exceed it.
I don't know, I went through the whole windows patch nightmare, where M$ was quite readily able to bugger up patch after patch, some where so bad they required a system reinstall after a poorly executed bug fix, others not quite so bad required registry edits and service reconfiguration to get the system running properly after a bug fix. I really got used to the end work arounds and "this is a know fault" years after software was released.
Things like 'sometimes' system standby, numerous caching faults over years, shutdown and startup foibles etc. etc. You know, I can really believe they rushed it out the door with minimal testing just so they can say it does ODF regardless of how poorly it does it.
So it is a excellent idea for the state to monitor all a doctors prescriptions to ensure validity of those prescription as of course inappropriately prescribed medications can result in death http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html and any state that doesn't take actions when that number of deaths is occurring is failing it's citizens.
Of course you have to be careful, when a person commits a crime when surrounded by people protesting, only that person committed a crime, the rest of the protesters are guilty of nothing and should not be subject to arrest as they are expressing their constitutional rights. As has happened in the past, only a very small minority of of agents provocateur have actually done any damage and the police have then basically lied and pressed false charges against innocent protesters, only to have to drop those charges when video evidence refutes their statements.
Peace protesting should always take place where appropriate. When a country is the dominant supplier of weapons, then obviously the protest should take place there, when a country funds the war effort obviously the protest should take place there, where a country is largely responsible for the war via it's intelligence operations obviously the protest should occur there.
Only a thoughtless person would consider it appropriate to peace protectors to protest in a combat zone, of course then the same thoughtless idiot would accuse the people being attacked of using the peace protesters as human shields and, demand even more violent actions be taken.
Let's be fair with M$, after all this is their first effort at producing documents to an open standard. So no real conspiracy here, no intent to enforce document lock in, just accept the reality, it is nothing more than sheer incompetence. You just have to look at M$'s first, second, third etc. efforts at the windows operating system, pretty lame and windows NT as a mutli users server system, not very effective at all.
M$'s standard practice, do as little as possible, get it out the door and get the suckers 'er' customers to test it at their expense, hell of a lot cheaper than testing it yourself and, you get to charge for upgrades. So don't expect full ODF compatibility with M$ products until you pay for the next upgrade, you know the one, it is more secure, more reliable and faster than the current one, which will be but, is not yet lame.