That would of course be based upon the idea that we actually require even more crap commercial content. Now if you ascribe to the idea, that enough crap commercial content has already been produced and that we do not want or need any more, then of course by your reasoning copyright serves no purpose.
So your idea does present an interesting perspective and a sound reason for ending copyright. So no more copyright and no more drunken drugged up minstrals, no more media executives demanding BJs in limos, substantially fewer recruits for the scientologists, no more has been has been actor politicians etc. ect. ect., and of course in will immediately end the existence of 'perverted' copyright pirates.
Now that's a way of really sticking it to the pirates, end copyright and put them right out of business;).
Now of course that was during the cold war when most governments were not interested in first strike capability but rather in retaliatory strike mutually assured destruction. With the current US administration actively working towards first strike stealth cruise missile attacks and as long as the leaders are safe bugger the rest of the population. They are pretty much throwing out the whole idea of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation and the US Military industrial complex seems to be actually working towards driving nuclear proliferation and hence the future need for more even more advanced weapons.
So just show a little patience, I sure given a few more years they will eventually manage to kill off the majority of un-like minded humans and poison the rest of the planet for the next few thousand generations, all to feed unlimited greed.
As for alerting alien societies to the destructive nature of a minority of humanity that controls and directs the majority, why would they care unless they were an actual threat and then one high speed rock in space travelling at a substantial portion of the speed of light and there won't even be a single archaeological site to mark the end of a sadly, mostly unenlightened, some what destructive, species.
Oddly enough using something like http://noscript.net/ and you start to learn exactly how many sites are running the googlites anal-ytic web script, well at least until you disable script notifications of.
As for obscuring your searches try this http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/ it doesn't use much overhead and well, by far the majority of searches originating from my IP address have nothing to do with me at all, sometimes I wonder who google is targeting those adds at.
As far as I know the "do no evil" has already been edited from google's corporate policy with the more marketdroid speak version "6. You can make money without doing evil." http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html. Now WTF is that meant to mean anyhow, of course I simply read it as, but you can temporarily make more money with doing evil, well, at least until you get caught and you marketddoid trolls can't out shout or can't shut down the critics.
You shouldn't make the same mistake that Dvorak is trying to spread as the truth. The OLPC is not restricted to third world countries. Why wouldn't you use it in the first and second world. It is the ideal low cost computer for children to use in gaining an education. Sturdy cheap and reliable with a range of free software. The are hundreds of millions of children in the first and second world who do not currently have a laptop computer, in point of fact, there are far more of them in the first and second world that need a laptopn computer then there are in the third world.
That is the lie that Dvorak is trying to perpetuate, the lie that favours his master billy goat ballmer.
Now would some one explain to me, why you wouldn't give that child a laptop and the truck load of rice. Now of course the Dvorak truck load of rice is a very small truck, possibly a toy truck because rice is selling for well of $200 per ton at the farm gate, not husked, not cleaned, not packed and of course undelivered. Now if Dvorak can explain how he manages to deliver a ten ton truck load of rice to any point in the world for $200 I'm sure he can single handedly end world hunger. I also hardly think you can blame the OLPC for the dramatic fall in the value of the US dollar, but Dvork also seems to think that is their fault as well.
Feel free to find and submit all examples of companies that specifically train and instruct their sales team to lie. I would look forward to seeing more examples of lying, deceitful, untrustworthy companies which I will also avoid as much as possible.
For M$ this a just another example of a company that makes 'lie, cheat and steal' it's defining corporate ethos.
The funny thing is of course because you are accessing a specific website and they are intercepting and altering and delivering a different version of that web site, they are in fact committing are copyright infringement.
The ISP is in point of fact, creating and delivery a new different web page to your browser, which incorporates a copy of some else's work which they have then altered and submitted as their own work without recompensing the rightful copyright owner.
As the page is 'encoded' and both the supplying and receiver of the page expect that no one will intercept and alter that page, then it is also likely a DMCA infringement.
As a side issues Banks and other investment and financial corporations might take a strong dislike to the idea, as shoving it right in the customers face that their communications are being intercepted, monitored and altered to suit private interests will most certainly kill the idea of the safety and desirability of Internet transactions.
It is high time that ISP were hit with the same strictly enforced wire tapping and monitoring restrictions for private communications. Technically they already are if you are using ADSL and it is still a phone line, but once they supply phone services down cable, then surely, those same restrictions then apply to all private transmissions down that line.
Some double trouble, wire tapping private communications and copyright infringement.
The fully privatised state is a monarchy ie. completely in control of a single private individual, you are a slave and now don't own anything. The state provides you with the opportunity, the state defines your ownership, the state attempts to provide for your safety, with out the state and with completely freedom of choice you would be as a beast in the field.
Don't think so, then bloody think from whom democracy had to initially steal the world so that you in your ignorance could own anything at all. In a private system the monarchy even owns you, fool serf.
Laws exist because a significant number of individuals are completely unable to sensibly or with some moral direction exercise their freedom of choice and the existence of the rich and greedy is a strong indication that the laws have not gone far enough.
Well, technically speaking, in you believe in B$ "After the purchase EULA", you agreed with M$, clicked on the button and established a direct contractual relationship with them, instantly severing your OS contractual ties with Dell.
Now combine that with reading the M$ 'We warrant and guarantee nothing EULA", it is now legally 'YOUR FAULT' for choosing to use their software.
As for M$ windows boot craziness, I found I solved a lot of problems by the simply expedient of installing Linux as a dual boot, when the M$ windows games console invariably stuffs up, you just boot to something like Ubuntu where you can then readily fix your toy OS windows install. When I run into people with windows problems that's what I always recommend. M$ would certainly save a lot of people, a lot of problems, if they just included a Linux boot partition and OS with their default install of windows;) (and that is a plain and honest fact).
Content filtering is censorship driven by greed. The obvious intent is to censor free legally copy able content which competes with mass media crap. There are only some many hours in the day to watch, listen to and read the last millenniums copyrighted content and each hour of each day and every year of this millennium produces ever more copyleft content of ever improving quality which is basically out competing the dead content of a soon to be forgotten and not missed generation of greed.
That's what content filtering/illegal censorship is about, attempting to eliminate a low cost distribution system for legally 'FREE' to copy, change, use, abuse but can no longer copyright/steal content.
Content filtering, fine, as long as there are penalties in the thousands of dollars range for each and every time that the rights of citizens where infringed when their content was illegally censored, and those penalties should not only be applied to the party bringing false, mendacious and slanderous charges but also against the ISP, for ignorance of the law or of the rights of citizens is no fucking excuse.
As for greed being "the primary identifying characteristics of a pirate", well, that is just a lie, certainly possible bad taste in their choice of content, but not greed unless they are selling the content but then I suppose robin hood the hero from yesteryear from your world viewpoint was also a greedy bastard, imagine robbing from the rich and giving to the poor how obscene, no more RIAA/MPAA approved copyrighted robin hood content, the message is just soooo wrong and blasphemes against the god of greed;).
What is a wonder is people like you, get the government out and let the people do what? The government is the people not some mysterious outside force, it is the people working together to achieve more then they ever can on their own. The abuses of past private industries and unenlightened self interest is where all the government regulation come from. It was the people reacting to the excesses of greed and corruption embedded within private industry which always ends up pursuing the lowest common denominators, unlimited greed and the right to exploit and abuse anyone and everyone they can.
The governments money is the people's money, the only time it ceases to be the people's money is when private interests, that's right 'private' interests corrupt the government and steal that money for themselves. After all those years of privatisation and deregulation are you blind to not seeing that you are worse off and defying all logic you want even more deregulation and privatisation because some how by reason of mass media BS marketing the past history of centuries of exploitation by unregulated private interests will not generate exactly the same kind of suffering, the strong democratic government with effective government departments ended.
Public education and public hospitals, and public services created the growth of the twentieth century, private industry is now running it all down and exploiting it and the people are far worse off. Ron Paul shares the same unrealistic disconnect that gullible voters do, that somehow quite stupidly that a weaker more privatised hence far less democratic government will make it better, look around surely a decade of exactly that, must convince you that a more democratic, more socially equitable and hence more powerful (as in the power of the people) government will create a healthy and happier society (look at the reality of the 50s and 60s not at the current B$ mass media greed is god distort).
Now in the case of RP spam, he obviously attracts radical fringe elements who consider spamming etc acceptable in the pursuit of their own goals, hardly his fault it just defines the nature of some of his policies.
Well now you have it completely wrong. Any idiot jock strap/cheer leader air head would out source/off shore some smart chinese/indian geek to produce a fake blog/journal that they could submit to their employer, anything instead of letting them seeing their horrendous myspace/facebook page;).
There is of course the failure in the whole system. The jury were not presiding over whether there was sufficient evidence of guilt but only on hoe they felt about the defendant, they did not like her attitude, she failed to prove her innocence, we believe 'sic' she was lying. Clearly this shows all the signs of a stacked, incompetent, biased and ignorant jury.
As for what is now the obviously for profit DOiJ (injustice is far more appropriate than justice) how about a statement of the quality of evidence and how far that evidence would have gone in a criminal court, especially where the 'sic' civil settlement (where there is demonstrably no evidence of loss) is being applied as a criminal fine, in fact where the jurors stated as such.
In this case it is not the juries position to punish anybody, it is a civil court not a criminal court, they are there to evaluate the evidence and make a verdict as to whether the plaintiff supplied sufficient evidence of guilt, and make an award based upon the damage demonstrated and evidenced by the plaintiff.
To be honest. The more that the studio stuff about with M$ and it's immature attempts to create a content distribution monoply the more likely the winning format will be divx or ogg or what ever else but HD-DVD or blue ray.
As for M$ winning this consumer battle, well, just as likely as M$ beating Logitech mouse/keyboard/controller and that was with a massive head start, or beating google again with a massive lead, or beating firefox a battle where it is now steadily losing ground.
The reality is the studios don't really care about HD-DVD of blue ray all that much at the moment because the majority of money and sales is in DVDs and being able to bleed money out of M$ is just a bonus. M$ are of course are bunch of idiots, sure if it was HD-DVD versus video cassettes but with DVD's already out and the majority of the content in facts decades worth in reality looking no better on HD-DVD than DVD, it is all rather pointless.
Actually some of the press in this case seemed to be a lot more than would normally occur for some small company like SCO filing civil suit against IBM, in fact the press generated was an order of magnitude greater than would be expected. It was clear that journalist involved in the case were motivated to present a story well and truly beyond what one would normally expect.
Fact checking in this case likely revolves around the ability of a major tech company to leverage it's advertising dollar in order to keep the news in the spot light, going so far as to not only fund the litigant and provide support to the tune of millions of dollars but also to promote the storey directly from it's own web site and via press releases.
After it all finally fell over, that major company then had to pay off one those companies attacked by SCO to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in a shared patent agreement (which it still managed to twist with some abusive marketing tactics). So there is some mob justice going on, they are watching that major tech company like a bunch of starving penguins and any time any information comes out of that tech company that smells the least bit fishy it is pounced upon and gutted so that the lies can be publicly exposed (M$=B$).
That still leaves the user with pretty much a jumble of letters to remember. Personally I have found that three nonsense words, combined together with out spaces to be sufficient, all the words should be of varying length with minimum of four characters which combined get a password of between 15 and 20 characters, relatively safe from dictionary attack and a lot easier to remember than 15 to twenty random characters.
Re:Leaving money on the table is not always bad
on
What If Yoda Ran IBM?
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· Score: 1
Perhaps you missed all the press releases that corporations love about mergers, you know, synergies, consolidation, minimising overheads, eliminating redundancies. It is not really overheads that give small business an advantage of big business. It is simply staff quality ie. staff members who fulfil more than one role at a time, real live team work instead of meetings and empty talk, staff who are successful at climbing the corporate ladder but are useless at their job and hiring more staff to do the work not being done.
It is about staff pursuing larger more profitable clients, rather than smaller clients. It is about the retail sector, low customer ethics, shopping prices, amateur negotiating tactics, customers looking for answers they want to hear rather than the truth ie chronic time wasters and quite simply stereotyping small customers upon that basis and avoiding them.
For large companies the best way to tackle small clients is as a three level company, major corporate services, medium business franchise (one per regional city) and small business franchise (many local locations). The franchises have to be fairly tightly controlled and your really after franchise teams (most of the staff at the franchise are part of the franchise), rather than franchiser and poorly paid under trained monkeys. It could be used as a side ways promotion for internal staff, where the company creates and funds the franchises, and creates a partnership with existing internal staff who would be willing and able to self manager, all as a significant staff development opportunity.
Perhaps you would prefer this, it is yet another M$=B$ marketing story. M$ yet again publicly makes a fool out of itself by ignoring the capacity of the internet to correct misleading advertising. M$ continually acknowledges the importance of the internet but time and time again the M$=B$ marketdroids push ahead with the same stupid marketing gimmicks.
Perhaps M$ might be immature but then it would be an accurate description of a company that continually displays immature business tactics. Two 2 eyes, might have been blind to the OS advantage they were giving away (IBM and Intel), but M$ has failed in the consumer market beyond the OS, time and time again. Of course technically this marketing might not be targeted at consumers as much as being targeted at investors.
I don't think you really get the idea. It is not about profiling for terrorists its is about establishing a legal reason for creating a security risk profile upon all US citizens. The typical US family going on an overseas holidays will have the father, mother and even the children all profiled aka a secret record established which will be updated as required through out the rest of their lives (with either valid or invalid data depending upon their political affiliations, their religious preferences, their willingness to speak their mind or the accidental aggravation of some mindless ignorant pencil dick in uniform).
Seriously do you think a foreigner will care in the US decides to keep a secret profile of them for the next forty years. For the majority of them it is a one off trip but of course for US residents coming and going, that secret profile, which they can not review, can not change, can not correct, will leave a permanent blight on their and their families future, get fired for no reason, cant pass a security check, cant fly, get random threatening visits from three letter agencies. If every citizens gets a terrorist profile then by definition every citizen is in part a terrorist suspect man woman and child, it is just the degree to which they are suspect.
The catch with doing the opposite, of basically selling your reviews, is the magazine soon gains a reputation for it and everybody just ignores those reviews and pretty soon starts to ignore the company. Gamespot once had a reputation for paid reviews but after a time cleaned it up to some extent but as a result the only reason to look at the site was for the simple analysis of game game play and screen shots. Possibly look at the end end users negative reviews (the first bunch tend to be company trolls).
At the end of the day, the tone used has to appeal to the readers, not the marketers, the number of readers is what gains the marketing revenue, with out those magazines have nothing to sell. As for Eidos it is just plain stupid, the last thing you want is a crap game getting into the hands of hundreds of thousands of gamers, who in a pissed off frame of mind stop buying Eidos games for a year or so. Some marketdroid fwit at Eidos thinks they are more powerful than the internet and thousands of pissed off gamers spreading the work. I wont touch any game until it has been out for a couple of months and reviewed by gaming 'argh' pirates.
As for trolling, this story seems to have taken a pretty strong hit from off topic trolls, it looks suspiciously like it is becoming the latest marketdroid tactic. Perhaps Eidos might be a bit sensitive about the quality of it's game library and inflated revenue projections.
The reason in most countries with a political system that has not been corrupted by criminal corporate executives. I that there is no reasonable means by which a person can tell whether a work can be legally download or not. It would imply that very person who has access to the internet knows every one of the millions of copyrighted works and every one of the millions of legally authorised sites to download the copyrighted works.
The law is wholly unreasonable, and as minors are the people the will most likely be subject to the law, are the Swiss intent on imprisoning the majority of their juveniles, indoctrinating them into a criminal life all for the unreasoning greed of a bunch of drunken, drugged up minstrels, especially as that work often has a strong anti-social content and by logical extension should not gain societies protection.
The difference might simply be that NZ like Australia, is not into conspiracy laws. You either committed or actually attempted to commit a crime. Whilst there are accessory before or after the fact, if there was not crime or no attempt to actually commit a crime, then no charge will be laid.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is a fairly bad law, especially when it can be so readily subject to abuse by over enthusiastic law enforcement officers and criminals seeking lighter sentences. So while the teenager might be guilty of a 'crime?' in the US he is possibly not guilty of a crime in New Zealand and likely not liable for extradition upon the same basis.
Conspiracy laws suck, I mean to say, you are guilty of a crime because a bunch of other criminals say so.
It is not the cost of the computer, is has never ever been the cost of the computer. It has always been and will always be the cost of the data you have created. It is the cost of lost time, nothing is more impressive then seeing a whole office sitting there idle until the network is back online.
Computer techs at $350/hour versus a hundred staff members at $15/hour sitting there idle for a couple of days while some $25/hour numb nuts plays nero with the network, all whilst your customers burn.
Here is an interesting point for you. What about minors and protecting their privacy, they can not legally agree to any privacy invasive contracts, and google by law must seek to protect the privacy of minors. Has google been lax and allowed their single minded drive for profits to over ride it's legal and moral responsibilities.
Then there is second and third party privacy. When people have records of other parties on their hard drives and google starts scanning and recording that data for a flood of psychologically targeted and manipulative marketing aimed at people who never agreed to anything, would that be fair or even legal. The same problem still holds with email, at which point is the email the senders or the receivers and if the receiver does not wish to have anything to do with the privacy invasive nature of the googlites where is their choice.
Just like google wanted to store medical records, it wants to target it's services at the medical practitioners and not give the patients/you any choice. Google as a commercial back up service can then scan records about you, with out your choice, simply because some one else was to naive enough not to encrypt the data before allowing the google marketing sneaks to snoop through those records.
Googlite employees driven to troll as a result of share options is evil. Yes, we know, every one that disagrees with google is a nimrod, and believes the sky is falling and wears a tin foil hat and blah, blah, blah;).
The leading difference in a countries crime and violence rate, the effectiveness of the social welfare net. Having a complete social welfare net simply reduces the stress in a society, the fear of failure is considerably diminished.
Can't compete in a low welfare state, kill/steal, to survive. can't compete in a high welfare state, your government looks after you. It is far cheaper to provide reasonable social security payments and free healthcare along with low cost accommodation than it is to imprison those same people in fact it's about 10 to 1, and that excludes the cost of the pain, loss and suffering of victims of a higher crime rate.
Whilst there is still a measure of violence and crime in those situations, it is only a fraction of the knee jerk, red neck, reactionary, greed is everything societies. Perhaps those countries with effective social welfare systems should consider the next step, free happy pills with integrated birth control medication, they could even throw in free electronic video games to keep them zoned out and pasive.
How to point out the stupidity of your statement, which is cheaper to produce, free dead tree textbooks or free digitised textbooks, either cd or DVD. In a third or second world situation given a scanner and blank cds/dvds, I would not have a single qualm about producing as many cd/dvd as were required for a class, quite simply in that situation fuck greed and copyright (no could I afford to do that with dead trees).
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So your idea does present an interesting perspective and a sound reason for ending copyright. So no more copyright and no more drunken drugged up minstrals, no more media executives demanding BJs in limos, substantially fewer recruits for the scientologists, no more has been has been actor politicians etc. ect. ect., and of course in will immediately end the existence of 'perverted' copyright pirates.
Now that's a way of really sticking it to the pirates, end copyright and put them right out of business ;).
So just show a little patience, I sure given a few more years they will eventually manage to kill off the majority of un-like minded humans and poison the rest of the planet for the next few thousand generations, all to feed unlimited greed.
As for alerting alien societies to the destructive nature of a minority of humanity that controls and directs the majority, why would they care unless they were an actual threat and then one high speed rock in space travelling at a substantial portion of the speed of light and there won't even be a single archaeological site to mark the end of a sadly, mostly unenlightened, some what destructive, species.
As for obscuring your searches try this http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/ it doesn't use much overhead and well, by far the majority of searches originating from my IP address have nothing to do with me at all, sometimes I wonder who google is targeting those adds at.
As far as I know the "do no evil" has already been edited from google's corporate policy with the more marketdroid speak version "6. You can make money without doing evil." http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html. Now WTF is that meant to mean anyhow, of course I simply read it as, but you can temporarily make more money with doing evil, well, at least until you get caught and you marketddoid trolls can't out shout or can't shut down the critics.
That is the lie that Dvorak is trying to perpetuate, the lie that favours his master billy goat ballmer.
Now would some one explain to me, why you wouldn't give that child a laptop and the truck load of rice. Now of course the Dvorak truck load of rice is a very small truck, possibly a toy truck because rice is selling for well of $200 per ton at the farm gate, not husked, not cleaned, not packed and of course undelivered. Now if Dvorak can explain how he manages to deliver a ten ton truck load of rice to any point in the world for $200 I'm sure he can single handedly end world hunger. I also hardly think you can blame the OLPC for the dramatic fall in the value of the US dollar, but Dvork also seems to think that is their fault as well.
For M$ this a just another example of a company that makes 'lie, cheat and steal' it's defining corporate ethos.
The ISP is in point of fact, creating and delivery a new different web page to your browser, which incorporates a copy of some else's work which they have then altered and submitted as their own work without recompensing the rightful copyright owner.
As the page is 'encoded' and both the supplying and receiver of the page expect that no one will intercept and alter that page, then it is also likely a DMCA infringement.
As a side issues Banks and other investment and financial corporations might take a strong dislike to the idea, as shoving it right in the customers face that their communications are being intercepted, monitored and altered to suit private interests will most certainly kill the idea of the safety and desirability of Internet transactions.
It is high time that ISP were hit with the same strictly enforced wire tapping and monitoring restrictions for private communications. Technically they already are if you are using ADSL and it is still a phone line, but once they supply phone services down cable, then surely, those same restrictions then apply to all private transmissions down that line.
Some double trouble, wire tapping private communications and copyright infringement.
Don't think so, then bloody think from whom democracy had to initially steal the world so that you in your ignorance could own anything at all. In a private system the monarchy even owns you, fool serf.
Laws exist because a significant number of individuals are completely unable to sensibly or with some moral direction exercise their freedom of choice and the existence of the rich and greedy is a strong indication that the laws have not gone far enough.
Now combine that with reading the M$ 'We warrant and guarantee nothing EULA", it is now legally 'YOUR FAULT' for choosing to use their software.
As for M$ windows boot craziness, I found I solved a lot of problems by the simply expedient of installing Linux as a dual boot, when the M$ windows games console invariably stuffs up, you just boot to something like Ubuntu where you can then readily fix your toy OS windows install. When I run into people with windows problems that's what I always recommend. M$ would certainly save a lot of people, a lot of problems, if they just included a Linux boot partition and OS with their default install of windows ;) (and that is a plain and honest fact).
That's what content filtering/illegal censorship is about, attempting to eliminate a low cost distribution system for legally 'FREE' to copy, change, use, abuse but can no longer copyright/steal content.
Content filtering, fine, as long as there are penalties in the thousands of dollars range for each and every time that the rights of citizens where infringed when their content was illegally censored, and those penalties should not only be applied to the party bringing false, mendacious and slanderous charges but also against the ISP, for ignorance of the law or of the rights of citizens is no fucking excuse.
As for greed being "the primary identifying characteristics of a pirate", well, that is just a lie, certainly possible bad taste in their choice of content, but not greed unless they are selling the content but then I suppose robin hood the hero from yesteryear from your world viewpoint was also a greedy bastard, imagine robbing from the rich and giving to the poor how obscene, no more RIAA/MPAA approved copyrighted robin hood content, the message is just soooo wrong and blasphemes against the god of greed ;).
The governments money is the people's money, the only time it ceases to be the people's money is when private interests, that's right 'private' interests corrupt the government and steal that money for themselves. After all those years of privatisation and deregulation are you blind to not seeing that you are worse off and defying all logic you want even more deregulation and privatisation because some how by reason of mass media BS marketing the past history of centuries of exploitation by unregulated private interests will not generate exactly the same kind of suffering, the strong democratic government with effective government departments ended.
Public education and public hospitals, and public services created the growth of the twentieth century, private industry is now running it all down and exploiting it and the people are far worse off. Ron Paul shares the same unrealistic disconnect that gullible voters do, that somehow quite stupidly that a weaker more privatised hence far less democratic government will make it better, look around surely a decade of exactly that, must convince you that a more democratic, more socially equitable and hence more powerful (as in the power of the people) government will create a healthy and happier society (look at the reality of the 50s and 60s not at the current B$ mass media greed is god distort).
Now in the case of RP spam, he obviously attracts radical fringe elements who consider spamming etc acceptable in the pursuit of their own goals, hardly his fault it just defines the nature of some of his policies.
Well now you have it completely wrong. Any idiot jock strap/cheer leader air head would out source/off shore some smart chinese/indian geek to produce a fake blog/journal that they could submit to their employer, anything instead of letting them seeing their horrendous myspace/facebook page ;).
As for what is now the obviously for profit DOiJ (injustice is far more appropriate than justice) how about a statement of the quality of evidence and how far that evidence would have gone in a criminal court, especially where the 'sic' civil settlement (where there is demonstrably no evidence of loss) is being applied as a criminal fine, in fact where the jurors stated as such.
In this case it is not the juries position to punish anybody, it is a civil court not a criminal court, they are there to evaluate the evidence and make a verdict as to whether the plaintiff supplied sufficient evidence of guilt, and make an award based upon the damage demonstrated and evidenced by the plaintiff.
As for M$ winning this consumer battle, well, just as likely as M$ beating Logitech mouse/keyboard/controller and that was with a massive head start, or beating google again with a massive lead, or beating firefox a battle where it is now steadily losing ground.
The reality is the studios don't really care about HD-DVD of blue ray all that much at the moment because the majority of money and sales is in DVDs and being able to bleed money out of M$ is just a bonus. M$ are of course are bunch of idiots, sure if it was HD-DVD versus video cassettes but with DVD's already out and the majority of the content in facts decades worth in reality looking no better on HD-DVD than DVD, it is all rather pointless.
Fact checking in this case likely revolves around the ability of a major tech company to leverage it's advertising dollar in order to keep the news in the spot light, going so far as to not only fund the litigant and provide support to the tune of millions of dollars but also to promote the storey directly from it's own web site and via press releases.
After it all finally fell over, that major company then had to pay off one those companies attacked by SCO to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in a shared patent agreement (which it still managed to twist with some abusive marketing tactics). So there is some mob justice going on, they are watching that major tech company like a bunch of starving penguins and any time any information comes out of that tech company that smells the least bit fishy it is pounced upon and gutted so that the lies can be publicly exposed (M$=B$).
That still leaves the user with pretty much a jumble of letters to remember. Personally I have found that three nonsense words, combined together with out spaces to be sufficient, all the words should be of varying length with minimum of four characters which combined get a password of between 15 and 20 characters, relatively safe from dictionary attack and a lot easier to remember than 15 to twenty random characters.
It is about staff pursuing larger more profitable clients, rather than smaller clients. It is about the retail sector, low customer ethics, shopping prices, amateur negotiating tactics, customers looking for answers they want to hear rather than the truth ie chronic time wasters and quite simply stereotyping small customers upon that basis and avoiding them.
For large companies the best way to tackle small clients is as a three level company, major corporate services, medium business franchise (one per regional city) and small business franchise (many local locations). The franchises have to be fairly tightly controlled and your really after franchise teams (most of the staff at the franchise are part of the franchise), rather than franchiser and poorly paid under trained monkeys. It could be used as a side ways promotion for internal staff, where the company creates and funds the franchises, and creates a partnership with existing internal staff who would be willing and able to self manager, all as a significant staff development opportunity.
Perhaps M$ might be immature but then it would be an accurate description of a company that continually displays immature business tactics. Two 2 eyes, might have been blind to the OS advantage they were giving away (IBM and Intel), but M$ has failed in the consumer market beyond the OS, time and time again. Of course technically this marketing might not be targeted at consumers as much as being targeted at investors.
Seriously do you think a foreigner will care in the US decides to keep a secret profile of them for the next forty years. For the majority of them it is a one off trip but of course for US residents coming and going, that secret profile, which they can not review, can not change, can not correct, will leave a permanent blight on their and their families future, get fired for no reason, cant pass a security check, cant fly, get random threatening visits from three letter agencies. If every citizens gets a terrorist profile then by definition every citizen is in part a terrorist suspect man woman and child, it is just the degree to which they are suspect.
At the end of the day, the tone used has to appeal to the readers, not the marketers, the number of readers is what gains the marketing revenue, with out those magazines have nothing to sell. As for Eidos it is just plain stupid, the last thing you want is a crap game getting into the hands of hundreds of thousands of gamers, who in a pissed off frame of mind stop buying Eidos games for a year or so. Some marketdroid fwit at Eidos thinks they are more powerful than the internet and thousands of pissed off gamers spreading the work. I wont touch any game until it has been out for a couple of months and reviewed by gaming 'argh' pirates.
As for trolling, this story seems to have taken a pretty strong hit from off topic trolls, it looks suspiciously like it is becoming the latest marketdroid tactic. Perhaps Eidos might be a bit sensitive about the quality of it's game library and inflated revenue projections.
The law is wholly unreasonable, and as minors are the people the will most likely be subject to the law, are the Swiss intent on imprisoning the majority of their juveniles, indoctrinating them into a criminal life all for the unreasoning greed of a bunch of drunken, drugged up minstrels, especially as that work often has a strong anti-social content and by logical extension should not gain societies protection.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is a fairly bad law, especially when it can be so readily subject to abuse by over enthusiastic law enforcement officers and criminals seeking lighter sentences. So while the teenager might be guilty of a 'crime?' in the US he is possibly not guilty of a crime in New Zealand and likely not liable for extradition upon the same basis.
Conspiracy laws suck, I mean to say, you are guilty of a crime because a bunch of other criminals say so.
Computer techs at $350/hour versus a hundred staff members at $15/hour sitting there idle for a couple of days while some $25/hour numb nuts plays nero with the network, all whilst your customers burn.
Then there is second and third party privacy. When people have records of other parties on their hard drives and google starts scanning and recording that data for a flood of psychologically targeted and manipulative marketing aimed at people who never agreed to anything, would that be fair or even legal. The same problem still holds with email, at which point is the email the senders or the receivers and if the receiver does not wish to have anything to do with the privacy invasive nature of the googlites where is their choice.
Just like google wanted to store medical records, it wants to target it's services at the medical practitioners and not give the patients/you any choice. Google as a commercial back up service can then scan records about you, with out your choice, simply because some one else was to naive enough not to encrypt the data before allowing the google marketing sneaks to snoop through those records.
Googlite employees driven to troll as a result of share options is evil. Yes, we know, every one that disagrees with google is a nimrod, and believes the sky is falling and wears a tin foil hat and blah, blah, blah ;).
Can't compete in a low welfare state, kill/steal, to survive. can't compete in a high welfare state, your government looks after you. It is far cheaper to provide reasonable social security payments and free healthcare along with low cost accommodation than it is to imprison those same people in fact it's about 10 to 1, and that excludes the cost of the pain, loss and suffering of victims of a higher crime rate.
Whilst there is still a measure of violence and crime in those situations, it is only a fraction of the knee jerk, red neck, reactionary, greed is everything societies. Perhaps those countries with effective social welfare systems should consider the next step, free happy pills with integrated birth control medication, they could even throw in free electronic video games to keep them zoned out and pasive.
How to point out the stupidity of your statement, which is cheaper to produce, free dead tree textbooks or free digitised textbooks, either cd or DVD. In a third or second world situation given a scanner and blank cds/dvds, I would not have a single qualm about producing as many cd/dvd as were required for a class, quite simply in that situation fuck greed and copyright (no could I afford to do that with dead trees).