So if a competitor can't be bought or beaten in fair competition, public companies are obligated to take such measures as threatening bodily harm to the competitor's key employees?
It's what copyright law was intended for. It's not Joe Schmoe making a mix CD for his best friends that's a problem. It's not even the guy who allows 10,000 people who weren't going to buy an album anyway to download it from his server. The problem is people and organizations who make a career out of profiting from other people's work.
The RIAA, CRIA and the MPAA are effectively no better than pimps. It's good that the law is finally being applied as it should.
in general, that the smarter the man the more he values intelligence
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, even the brightest guys, especially when they themselves are a little dumbed down with some alcohol, can be distracted from their real desires by many things, including, but not limited to a glimpse of cleavage or other nice body parts, or the promise of sex.
Really, it all comes down to emotional regulation, short- vs. long-term thinking. I know a lot of really bright guys who totally got lost in the dot-com boom, living it up as if they were kings, and who are still recovering financially and emotionally from the big bust that just didn't have to happen if they had been thinking more than 5 minutes ahead.
I think the point was that whenever regulations on corps are proposed, the corps cry "Fascism!" and decry all regulation. The irony is that they are more than happy to use--and in some cases, abuse--whatever regulations are in place to further their own profits.
Obviously, we don't know the full story, but this sounds like pure silliness. My guess is that the theater manager figures he'll lose his job if he doesn't press charges.
I totally agree. In fact, I think that there should be either tiered or per-usage pricing. Flat-rate is what makes this so difficult. The tiered or metered usage charges shouldn't be ridiculous, but enough so that heavy users pay a little more of their share than the light users. Here's what I think would resolve the whole problem:
Everyone pays a base-rate for the connection, say $10/mo for the physical line, i.e. cable or DSL.
Offer tiered rates for a few different levels of sustained/burst rate combinations, as well as some premium packages, including different options for up/down-stream feed speeds.
Offer a base amount of data transfer with each package, with reasonable, fully detailed overage charges, say $0.50/GB, rounded up to the next GB for any given month's overages.
Offer tools to monitor usage so nobody gets surprised at the end of the month.
Offer tools to shape your own connection to avoid overages while still getting the service you need.
I work out of my home office and I'm on the system all day, pushing gobs of data. My wife is at home, taking care of our kid while I work, and when he's napping, she'll often watch a show over streaming video. The service is good and fast, and I am fine paying $50 a month for it like I do. But someone who does email and facebook updates for an hour a day should be able to do so for $15/mo, and someone who is pushing 500GB of torrents back and forth each month should be paying more.
Argue the legality, morality and other merits and liabilities of file sharing--which is part of what this is all about--part of the reason people do it is that it's effectively free. If downloading a 5 GB HD movie cost them an extra $2.00, then they may be more likely to go down to the local BlockBuster and just rent the darn thing.
I know you're joking, but there's something to that. Cringely wrote an interesting opinion piece on what would be the downfall of Google one day, and his idea was that it would be a job satisfaction issue.
With so many brights working there, all coming up with ideas in their 20% time and developing them, only the top tier of ideas will become official products, supported and released by Google; there's only so much time in the day, you know.
Well, some of those engineers who have one, two or N ideas passed over may decide that one or more of them may not make the Google cut, but might be successful business ideas which would fly quite well outside the organization. Those folks might leave, which would lead to two things.
First, all the institutional knowledge, all the investment in that engineer walks out the door with them, and there's a huge cost to that. Second, they may take some of their favorite colleagues with them, and suddenly the losses multiply.
There's something to be said for controlled growth, not trying to take over the world too fast. I wouldn't doubt that, if this is indeed official policy, that it's a sort of sustainable selfishness, an understanding that hoarding all the best engineers will inevitably lead to an internal breakdown and a loss of that talent.
The knowledge trade is much like an economy; maybe they realize that as fast as they're growing, pushing the envelope further would lead to an amazing boom that would inevitably lead to a massive bust. Good on them for avoiding it.
I have to agree with you. I lived my life in fear of the "Columbia House" records deal, where you get 10 albums free, and then you have to buy a certain number of albums afterwards, because people said that it was harder to quit than the foreign legion. CH would keep sending you their pick of the month, and billing you for it, and they would never let you quit.
I joined, bought the complete Led Zeppelin box set for $89, about $60 less than the price at all other outlets, bought four more albums to meet their minimum requirements, then quit.
They kept sending me advertisements, which was annoying, but there was no problem with recurring billing. Come to think of it, I ended up buying some checks from one of their ad packets, so it couldn't have been all that annoying.
So as long as VP makes it clear what the commitment is and lets you terminate when you've met that commitment, well, I've got no problem with them.
There are some great tools for doing this, too. Companies like New Relic are building monitoring tools that will let you drill down on every transaction in your Java or Ruby app--I presume there are folks out there who do something similar for PHP and Perl--to see where the slowdowns are. Whether it's something in the code, a non-optimized database query or whatever, there are tools to find and remove bottlenecks that are really taking the mystery out of the process.
The tool isn't a bad thing; they just need to be able to use it right. I had the honor of taking CS60A from John Osterhout at UC Berkeley, and while he didn't use PowerPoint, it was clear that his lectures were pre-planned to a T.
How did I know this? The reader he recommended that we purchase was his lecture notebook that he planned to use during class. So as a student, I could do the reading, show up to class with the reader, follow along and make whatever notes I needed to, but I didn't have to waste time writing down what he was saying because it was already there. I just wrote down my own clarifications.
And this high level of preparation did not lead to rigidity; in fact, compared to other professors I had in similarly-sized classes, he was more flexible than most, leaving a lot of time for interactive questions from his students.
I wish all professors did the same thing. I spent a lot of my energy in most lecture classes writing things down instead of digesting, which would have been a more appropriate use of the time. I guess it could be argued that some people learn better by writing things down, but I think there are limits to that.
Slashdot Mirror
So if a competitor can't be bought or beaten in fair competition, public companies are obligated to take such measures as threatening bodily harm to the competitor's key employees?
It's what copyright law was intended for. It's not Joe Schmoe making a mix CD for his best friends that's a problem. It's not even the guy who allows 10,000 people who weren't going to buy an album anyway to download it from his server. The problem is people and organizations who make a career out of profiting from other people's work.
The RIAA, CRIA and the MPAA are effectively no better than pimps. It's good that the law is finally being applied as it should.
This is cool and all, but Apple doesn't really care about selling music. They want to sell more devices. Music is just a means to that end.
in general, that the smarter the man the more he values intelligence
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, even the brightest guys, especially when they themselves are a little dumbed down with some alcohol, can be distracted from their real desires by many things, including, but not limited to a glimpse of cleavage or other nice body parts, or the promise of sex.
Really, it all comes down to emotional regulation, short- vs. long-term thinking. I know a lot of really bright guys who totally got lost in the dot-com boom, living it up as if they were kings, and who are still recovering financially and emotionally from the big bust that just didn't have to happen if they had been thinking more than 5 minutes ahead.
LOL. I think this is the first "I had sex with your mother"-implication joke I've ever seen on /. Well played, sir. Well played.
I was thinking that going to see the movie was punishment enough.
I think the point was that whenever regulations on corps are proposed, the corps cry "Fascism!" and decry all regulation. The irony is that they are more than happy to use--and in some cases, abuse--whatever regulations are in place to further their own profits.
Obviously, we don't know the full story, but this sounds like pure silliness. My guess is that the theater manager figures he'll lose his job if he doesn't press charges.
Yes, but the ones under 30 weren't reading Salon.com by 2001.
I work out of my home office and I'm on the system all day, pushing gobs of data. My wife is at home, taking care of our kid while I work, and when he's napping, she'll often watch a show over streaming video. The service is good and fast, and I am fine paying $50 a month for it like I do. But someone who does email and facebook updates for an hour a day should be able to do so for $15/mo, and someone who is pushing 500GB of torrents back and forth each month should be paying more.
Argue the legality, morality and other merits and liabilities of file sharing--which is part of what this is all about--part of the reason people do it is that it's effectively free. If downloading a 5 GB HD movie cost them an extra $2.00, then they may be more likely to go down to the local BlockBuster and just rent the darn thing.
I know you're joking, but there's something to that. Cringely wrote an interesting opinion piece on what would be the downfall of Google one day, and his idea was that it would be a job satisfaction issue.
With so many brights working there, all coming up with ideas in their 20% time and developing them, only the top tier of ideas will become official products, supported and released by Google; there's only so much time in the day, you know.
Well, some of those engineers who have one, two or N ideas passed over may decide that one or more of them may not make the Google cut, but might be successful business ideas which would fly quite well outside the organization. Those folks might leave, which would lead to two things.
First, all the institutional knowledge, all the investment in that engineer walks out the door with them, and there's a huge cost to that. Second, they may take some of their favorite colleagues with them, and suddenly the losses multiply.
There's something to be said for controlled growth, not trying to take over the world too fast. I wouldn't doubt that, if this is indeed official policy, that it's a sort of sustainable selfishness, an understanding that hoarding all the best engineers will inevitably lead to an internal breakdown and a loss of that talent.
The knowledge trade is much like an economy; maybe they realize that as fast as they're growing, pushing the envelope further would lead to an amazing boom that would inevitably lead to a massive bust. Good on them for avoiding it.
Mememe memememe! Mememememememe me meeee me me!
I have to agree with you. I lived my life in fear of the "Columbia House" records deal, where you get 10 albums free, and then you have to buy a certain number of albums afterwards, because people said that it was harder to quit than the foreign legion. CH would keep sending you their pick of the month, and billing you for it, and they would never let you quit.
I joined, bought the complete Led Zeppelin box set for $89, about $60 less than the price at all other outlets, bought four more albums to meet their minimum requirements, then quit.
They kept sending me advertisements, which was annoying, but there was no problem with recurring billing. Come to think of it, I ended up buying some checks from one of their ad packets, so it couldn't have been all that annoying.
So as long as VP makes it clear what the commitment is and lets you terminate when you've met that commitment, well, I've got no problem with them.
There are some great tools for doing this, too. Companies like New Relic are building monitoring tools that will let you drill down on every transaction in your Java or Ruby app--I presume there are folks out there who do something similar for PHP and Perl--to see where the slowdowns are. Whether it's something in the code, a non-optimized database query or whatever, there are tools to find and remove bottlenecks that are really taking the mystery out of the process.
I'm sorry, but your typo made me laugh.
I always think "Chandler Bing". He was a loser, too.
...F Microsoft.
It is going to be supported by more vendors as an OEM install than Linux ever had.
No, I think the Tivo has that honor.
Great. I advocated this for the 30-odd years I lived in California. Finally left for Oregon and NOW they're taking my advice!
Unfortunately, applying a patch causes the loss of depth perception.
And when a new flu virus hits, remind the Government that they won't get their money back if everyone dies, so you'll get the vaccinations first.
Durn it. Tried to mod you "underrated", but hit "off topic" instead. Commenting to delete my mod.
To wit: Who would take these guys away?
Impact: (v) To have an impact.
Sounds like one of those recursive TLAs, like GNU.
To give a sense of scale, global-catastrophic asteroids are 1 km in diameter; this one was 7 m.
So this could destroy 0.7% of all life on Earth? World War II was more dangerous.
The tool isn't a bad thing; they just need to be able to use it right. I had the honor of taking CS60A from John Osterhout at UC Berkeley, and while he didn't use PowerPoint, it was clear that his lectures were pre-planned to a T.
How did I know this? The reader he recommended that we purchase was his lecture notebook that he planned to use during class. So as a student, I could do the reading, show up to class with the reader, follow along and make whatever notes I needed to, but I didn't have to waste time writing down what he was saying because it was already there. I just wrote down my own clarifications.
And this high level of preparation did not lead to rigidity; in fact, compared to other professors I had in similarly-sized classes, he was more flexible than most, leaving a lot of time for interactive questions from his students.
I wish all professors did the same thing. I spent a lot of my energy in most lecture classes writing things down instead of digesting, which would have been a more appropriate use of the time. I guess it could be argued that some people learn better by writing things down, but I think there are limits to that.