You're the one who supported vigilante justice. That's the subject here, not just 'friggin' software. You're the one who talked about matters of law, and is now calling them just "technical issues". You want to claim there's some special group of people who are guilty before a court finds them guilty and another group that can take the law into their own hands, that's your choice, but saying this was just about software is a weasel-worded evasion. You've been claiming that some special priviledged people have a special right to break the law. Yes, I take that seriously. You did too, when you made your claims, even if you're trying to hide that now. Sorry if I lack social graces. You lack honor.
You know how you differ from Stalin? He believed that one group (the prolitariat), could be presumed automatically innocent, and could go outside the law to judge and punish another automatically guilty group (the capitalist 'exploiters') You believe that one group (the software authors), can be presumed automatically innocent, and can go outside the law to judge and punish another automatically guilty group (the end users). He had more power, you have less power. The more I read what you wrote in response, the more I'm sure you use what little power you have just as badly as he did.
I didn't mod it either insightful or flamebait, and I would find the poster's antisemitism and misogamy repulsive if it wasn't simply foolish in someone bright enough to understand the basics of market theory. However, you apparently don't understand how the original poster is using the word comoditization, and it is a standard and quite acceptable use, some economists would even say the preferred use. Please allow me to elaborate.
In this use, not all saleables are commodities. Most objects or services for sale have prices well above the level they would if they were priced as commodities. In fact a commodity price is effectively the bottom level price for things in that economy, usually as indexed to some reasonably objective standard, such as the energy cost to produce item X. Commodities have low profit margins. Things that are generally commoditized are nearly ubiquitous in their era, and proportionately cheap compared to whatever else anyone is buying, usually because there are many sources of supply and those sources either can't or for some reason haven't entered into a cartel or otherwise found some ways to create barriers to entry or fix prices.
Medical services, for example, are very far from a commodity - reducing the educational requirements for doctors, preventing doctors from associating in mass, or at least from using the AMA as a means of lobbying legislatures, or removing laws prohibiting some alternative medical practices would all be steps that would in theory shift medical care closer to commodity pricing. (Note that a shift towards commoditization, in such case, may have other, undesirable consequences).
Fancy foodstuffs such as french wines are normally far from commoditization. Basic foodstuffs such as dried beans are very close to absolutely commoditized. So's Sam's Choice generic soda in 2 liter bottles. Steaks in New York are pretty durned far from commodity status. Steaks in El Paso TX are at very near commodity prices. A 30" plasma display is much farther from commoditization than a 15" CRT display.
Of course sexual organs are close to commodities by this definition. There's lots of them around, certainly no one has a corner on the market, and they are sold (well usually offered for very short term lease) by at least some posessors. In market theory, prostitution should show a lot of tenedencies towards commodity pricing. It categorically does - for example, the average base price for a sex act by the lowest grade of prostitute marches, and apparently always has marched, in near perfect lockstep with the price of a fix, whether it be a crack rock today, a pint of Gin in the 1890's in the Whitchapel district of London, or a pot of beer in Babylon 4,000 years ago.
And yes, the RIAA and MPAA do have strong concerns that the price of media will drop to near commodity levels as it becomes obvious there is overwhelming supply and demand is predicated on an illusion of scarcity. Saying 'fear' might be metaphorical, but personally, I don't think that word is too strong at all.
The most important viewpoint is that of the author.
Sorry, but NO. This is still a semi-rational society. Everyone has rights. Until someone is convicted of something by a court,, a private citizen, (yes, even you) deciding some of the involved people have pre-guarenteed more important viewpoints than others, on legal issues, is just plain wrong. Stop it, or you'll grow up to be all icky like that Stalin kid or something. (Notice how cleverly I avoided Godwinning the thread?).
To make your arguement more precise, I suggest you split TV into Broadcast and Cable, as they are effectively entirely different media when it comes to legal regulations. Broadcast is subject to more control than cable and yet there are some possibly fair arguements for regulating the two differently. This doesn't invalidate your more general point.
Which raises another question - Why (aside from the cable vrs broadcast example) are there such different standards for the various media? Why not use a G, PG, PG 13, R, and X code for video games, or a single TV seal of approval? If one medium has a standard originally based on age 12 (film's PG rating), and another only has one presumably based on age 13 (The video game industry's T for Teen rating), then isn't the system saying in effect that some things are inherently a little more dangerous in a video game than those very same things would be for films?
Actually, If I'm going to make assumptions about you, I'd prefer to assume you aren't just parroting Sartre or Camus, and particularly their lesser fans (a bunch of philosophers who have made what is at least interesting in French numbing in translation). The Logotherapy remark shows promise - I don't recall seeing it before, but all I've read there is some Frankl - Is that from Man's Search for Meaning and I missed it, or is that from elsewhere?
You could indeed say that moral implications (malevolent or benign) require intention. I'm just not certain how many people are just doing that.
What I usually see people doing with that arguement is creating a paradox instead. We don't complain to nature because nature simply can't listen. Many of us either complain to God, or say we would if we believed he existed. Intelligence, awareness, and choice all being attributed to God means God (considered merely as a theoretical construct) is more powerful than nature, but that extra power somehow becomes a limit. Nature is free to conduct itself without our moral judgement, but God, being more powerful (Super-natural), is made subject to our criticism by the very things that give him more power.
Arguing that God has certain obligations to "His" creation if "He" posesses intelligence is very like redefining the very word intelligence in an unusual and quite nonstandard way, to say that an intelligent being is generally more limited than a non-intelligent one. So far as I know the only thing like it is the idea in the Western legal system that proving that someone has enough intelligence to foresee the consequiences of their actions is required before we can go from simple to criminal negligence. While charity is generally considered a good thing, we don't normally expect every person to devote more and more effort to helping the less fortunate if they are more intelligent. Did Karl Sagan have less obligation to be decent than Einstein, but more than Paris Hilton?
As an ethical arguement, it sounds like we are supposed to assume in advance of logical proof God needs to be judged by the sort of standard we use in criminal trials, rather than as we would judge a typical hyper-intelligent being we encountered on a day to day basis. It's kind of like God=Galactus, there's a planet missing, and he just burped!
Imagine yourself as about to be sued by the RIAA, and it should be clearer
1. The RIAA is suing you. You have a 30,000$ a year income. You don't want to settle, but it will cost a lot by your standards to fight it, and even if you win, you will still be out those costs. Do You Fight It?
vrs.
2. The RIAA is suing you. You have a 30,000$ a year income. You don't want to settle, though it will still cost a lot by your standards to fight it, if you win now, it will all cost you nothing. Now Do You Fight It?
Now Imagine you are the RIAA and it should become even clearer.
1. You sue some chump making only 30,000$ a year. If that suit starts looking troublesome, you can drop it, and the chump can't force the case into court.
vrs.
2. You sue some chump making only 30,000$ a year. If that suit starts looking troublesome, you can drop it, but the chump can probably still force the case into court as part of getting a declaration that makes him eligble to recover his legal costs in a countersuit, and he may well be able to countersue just based on you dropping the case even if he doesn't yet have a not- guilty verdict. In other words, depending on jurisdictional issues, either he can force the case to go on, or dropping it is still legal, but it doesn't help you (the RIAA) avoid costs anymore. You have no control over how quick that chump rushed out and found a lawyer, or how much he agreed to pay that lawyer on contingency. If he hired OJ's entire defense team (those still living) that's what you risk having to pay for. Any precedent he gets applies to all the other suits you have outstanding, so if he can get 450,000$ in legal fees, it's possible the other 1,329 cases you have outstanding can all get them too. Your downside is now over 600 million dollars. All those cases you settled earlier, out of court where no precident was established? They aren't really settled now, unless the duration for appeals has also lapsed. If some Boston Legal sized firm takes one client's case, they will call all the new and old litigants that look promising, put together a whopping big countersuit, and your worst nightmare downside is now, at the very least, several billion dollars.
The RIAA thought that having all those cases where the accused just settled without a trial made them very strong. They are now at risk of finding out that all those cases are worth precisely zero against just one precedent. This is how the American legal system is supposed to work - let's hope it actually does.
First, you do chose what you believe. You may start out either finding something believable or not, but as time passes, you have an area of effectively unlimited free choice where you can either choose to remain open to new evidence or not, to focus on further thought about the issue or put your attention elsewhere and so to modify and/or strengthen or weaken your opinions. I'm only qualifying that as "effectively" because obviously, just how many distractions to clear thought you experience varies, and unless you are very highly disciplined you probably seldom frame all the issues consiously, so when you are in habitual modes, your habits may be either good or bad (with regard to how well they help you think, rather than any absolute moral standard). I'm not saying any of that to belittle you, I'm pretty damned sure I myself function in habitual mode most of the time.
Personally, I find the idea that God punishes people for rational doubt or rewards them for blind adherence to be reprehensible as well, and I am also convinced it is simply incorrect. My point to you however, is rather different. Look at the alternative viewpoints - for most naturalists, if there are any absolute moral laws, they derive from physical laws. The most basic physical laws affect everything, while some laws (such as mandates to survive or reproduce) apply only to living things, and an even more derivative set applies only to those living things sophistocated enough to have notions of right and wrong.
There are Atheists and Agnostics who reject all concept of moral absolutes, and certainly others who believe that certain ethics, i.e. the golden rule, can be derived naturalisticly, and are still functionally as absolute as if they were handed down from on high. The point still remains there are very few non-deistic people who believe the converse, that basic physical laws are derived from more omnipresent or fundamental moral laws (Most people who do make that claim are actually locked away in loony bins. Yes many would argue that's where Deistic believers in moral law giving rise to physical law should be too. It's still a little different to believe that something with intelligence would put moral law first, than to believe a non-intelligent inchoate organizing force would do the same.).
So, my point to you - if God makes physical laws first, and the moral laws are somehow derived later for a more limited class of entities, you're still criticizing him for making moral laws that are 'Orwellian'. If nature makes physical laws first, you're cutting 'her' slack for the same consequences. Yes, blind, inanimate processes can't be characterized as 'Orwellian', but they can certainly be characterized as utterly incompatable with the idea of human freedom.
Applying the same logic you did to God to a naturalistic, non-God explanation for how we and everything else 'got here', means that naturalistic explanation is a blindly malevolent process, one in which all human hopes and asperations can mean precisely nothing, and are relentlessly violated, torn apart and consumed by an insensate, all devouring enthropic maw. The whole universe is meaningless, and the most basic question every human should ask his or herself is "Why don't I just kill myself now and avoid the rush?" In other words, congratulations, you are not just another Atheist, you are an Existentialist.
"You dont have to create a supreme being to explain the beginning of time. In fact it just complicates things because then you have to explain where the supreme being came from."
Why? There's a real reason why I may want to explain where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory won out over Steady State. If the Steady State theory had the preponderance of the evidence, then the Universe was (and is still in the present theoretical era) likely eternal, and needed no explanation for what came before it. We need an explanation because of what kind of universe our best theory specifically says we have, not because universes in general automatically are things that need explanations.
No one doing science has claimed that the Steady State was an unscientific theory just because it didn't have an origin included. But when someone posits "God" as an explanation, these same people suddenly start claiming that everything needs an origin, and everything has to have that origin explained or it's not science. Do you want to revoke Penzias and Wilson's Nobel because they never really needed to disprove Steady State, because all those scientists who considered Steady State a possible theory were automatically wrong, even before the cosmic microwave background evidence that tipped the balance was actually gathered? You're argueing for a definition of Science where some things are true or false in advance of actually gathering the evidence.
You yourself just made a statement in your next to last paragraph that contradicts your last paragraph. You also seem to be arguing that Science formally includes some rule that everything must have an origin. Sorry, but that's not one of the rules. Read some Karl Popper for insight into your last problem, or Kuhn if you can take lots of exposure to that annoyingly overused word "Paradigm". Don't just take my word for it, but Science allows for theories that claim a phenominon is unchanging or eternal.
How is this any different from argueing that people can't have free will unless they have absolute freedom in every action? If god makes Gravity always work, then "He" is limiting your freedom to defy Gravity. Even a God that doesn't impose any moral laws still presumably imposed the physical constraints of our universe. Your phrase "Orwellian" presumably is possibly relevant to limitations on political or moral freedom, but how can you justify it if the same God is responsible for non-moral or non-political limits? Is God behaving like Big Brother if "He" makes a universe where you can't live forever by sheer act of will or fly to the moon on a chariot drawn by swans?
Notifying the landowners in this case seems to be mostly the same as notifying the local government, since the devices were placed (mostly) on public land. A few locations might have been more a matter of notifying the railroad that owned an overpass right of way, or notifying state Depts of Transportation rather than just a local government. Giving the police or appropriate security photos as well as the basic story also seems pretty much common sense.
However, why would you notify the press?
A. You're not covering yourself legally - as the people who find these and think they are a bomb have no rational excuse if they then notify the press instead of the authorities. In fact if anyone did something stupid and got hurt "Why did you tell the press instead of the police?" might be one of the questions your lawyers would want to ask.
B. In this age of news hungry shows, desperate to fill any voids in their 24 hour always-on schedules, the chance of the whole campaign leaking is so high. This is not the press of the Morrow or even the Cronkheit era - typically they will give no guarentees they will sit on the story, and often the print media will flat out lie about employees with ties to national TV, and refuse to admit leaks came from their people and not fictious other parties. A few years ago, Fox news won a court decision that said, in effect "Fox apparently lied quite deliberately, but even proving that the protected sources they cite don't exist won't nulify their claim to be immune so long as they are protecting their sources." It's a masterpiece of legal double talk, and it puts the whole press morally on a par with snake oil salesmen. Until the rest of the industry repudiates that, why cooperate with any of them?
Given the Gee-Whiz factor normal to juries, GPS surveilance is practically an open invitation for a prosecutor to gloss over the differences between "We tracked the suspect to...", "We tracked the suspect's car to..." and "We tracked a device which may or may not have still been connected to the suspect's car to...".
It allows the GPS historical record to be admitted, and yes, that will be more accurate with regards to time and position than average testimony usually is. There's even some parellels with other technologies, for example many jurisdictions require surveilance cameras to have time stamp systems and support testing those for accuracy before their tapes can be submitted as evidence.
But, it allows certain things, it doesn't require them. If the officers don't use this in a certain case, and an officer gets hurt in persuit, or a civilian does, will that make the injury any less the fault of the suspect, since, by your point, the police could have mitigated it?
If the police use this method a lot, and don't get any more accurate results than old fasioned surveilance, is there any requirement they disclose they used this method on dozens of other people before they got evidence of a single crime?
If it turns out GPS surveilance doesn't actually produce better testimony, or more reliable convictions, do the police have to disclose the record to a jury, or can they claim it's infalliable, as they often have with DNA and other 'high tech' evidence?
You've described a pretty damned sloppy, poorly trained cop rather than the average detective on most forces. If GPS evidence is being interpreted by Warren and Goober, as supervised by Barney, it won't be any better than non-GPS, and if it's being interpreted by somebody well trained and competent, why does the police force not have some people who fit that discription on the front lines? If you really think surveilance is commonly conducted by people who never heard of syncronizing their watches, why aren't you trying to get the guns out of those people's hands? - they sound like a terrible menace! Thanks to you, I'm now not even worried about how they can misuse GPS, when many of them commonly have full auto assault rifles and semi-auto shotguns!
I'm starting to think Google already has a solution to the ISPs 'taxing' them in mind. Google has bought a lot of dark fiber, and more significantly, they are leasing a lot of fiber. At least by related precidence, Google simply can't be charged with abuse of a vertical monopoly if the case is based on that monopoly including pipes they only lease. (Not actulally owning even a simple majority of some asset is a tremendously strong defense against a claim of monopoly in that area). If some zealous prosecuter does try to build an antitrust case, any arguement against Google that mentions their bandwidth assets would be much more valid against the ISPs.
(And every other business out there is going to be tremendously concerned if the courts start establishing preliminary opinions that a business with less than 50% actual ownership of an asset can even remotely possibly be subject to antitrust based on vertical monopoly rules for that - the ISP that seeks such a verdict won't just find itself in a telecommunications war with Google after that announcement, rather businesses such as Nissan, Exxon, International Paper, and Caterpillar will all be working vigorously on driving them into bankrupcy before their case against Google can even be finished, once they realize the implications for their own business models. Just imagine how Alcoa Aluminum would react to the news that having the dedicated electrical output of only about 8% of all the power produced by TVA's dams could still make them legally a vertical monopoly, or how Pepsi would react if told a court case could open the way for #1 Coca Cola to proceed against #2 Pepsi on antitrust claims.).
If ISPs start imposing special fees on Google at that point, then Google uses fiber it controls to force peering arrangements, buys or leases more, AND converts some of those leases to purchases. Since Google is the underdog at that point, facing monopoly practices, and are 'just trying to minimize the damage being done', Google isn't seeking a Monopoly. Yes, they could end up with at least a pretty close approximation, but they can deny any intent to violate - argueing that if they meant to abuse a monopoly, they would have first intended to buid it in the form where it could most be abused, and the purchases they made show all they intended was self defense. That's another nice thing about antitrust law, you can't unintentionally abuse a monopoly.
With this, Google will be just about totally immune to antitrust charges anywhere an ISP is involved, for at least 20 years, even if they end up owning 80% of the internet backbone or something. Maybe even if they end up owning 80% of the GNP.
Machine Guns are normally crew served, but a M-60 is light enough to be effectively deployed with just 1 person in a pinch. The usual M-60 modern era replacement, the SAW, is definitely a 1 man weapon. Then there's the FN P90, just a 50 rounds per magazine light or 'sub'machinegun, but the ammo is 5.7x28 mm NATO rifle, so classifying it as a full machinegun isn't much of a stretch at all when you compare that to the 'dinky' bullets a Mac-10, Uzi or such fires.
Now nukes are definitely crew served. (I've become reconciled to that, really...)
In honesty though, a full extension of the "individuals bear arms" concept does allow some machine guns, light rocket launchers, and grenade launchers. We really should consider whether that's what we want. (Well, personally, I'd love to have an M-203, but I can't honestly say I should have a right to bear one as a private citizen).
The illegality comes in because people don't buy a stock because the got an e-mail saying "Go buy stock X" they got e-mails saying "Stock X is poised to move! - expect a big contract announcement for company X in the next 72 hours! - get in before this makes the papers!".
Some of the e-mail claims are things impossible to actually know unless the creator is violating the insider trading rules or those conflict of interest rules you mentioned. In many cases, the only possible way they can not be guilty of insider trading is if they are making the claims up, which is good old fashioned fraud. So they can be charged, on the well established legal principle that it's still OK to charge someone with a crime even if their only way of proving they didn't do that crime is to admit to another one (Or in legal latin: Sucksem tuem beum youous).
Stock Spammers often make false claims - sometimes fraudulent, sometimes libelous (for ex. claims a company's last quarterly report intentionally under-reports the companies projected profits so as to create a big opportunity are false claims that a CEO, CFO, and accounting firm have all lied to the SEC, that's certainly libelous to those individuals.). Some claims of DOD or intelligence agency type government contracts, (or occasionally even DOE related ones), if actually true, would also involve revealing seriously classified information. Naturally, the government has an interest in people effectively claiming to know classified info. Some claims regarding intra-corporate lawsuits, particularly over IP, may violate standing court orders, gag orders, and the like, or even constitute extortion by threat of legal action.
There's one more sensible conclusion. 1. Trends generally peak and eventually reverse themselves. 2. The more seriously out of balance things get before then, the more the correction involves overcorrecting, heavy-handed intervention, and even violence.
Spam can theoretically keep getting worse and worse until major businesses can't send legitimate e-mail. Stock touting can theoretically disrupt the market to the point of a major devaluation, multi-billion dollar pension fund loss, or similar crisis. It's even possible for far worse scenarios to happen.
But, the day after the national air traffic control grid runs 20 planes into each other in half an hour, or the market drops 2,000 points and there's a run on the banks, or the pension plan that takes a huge hit is an entire state government's and more, and it is all somehow connected to stock spammers, guess what?
Those rhetorical cries for death to spammers won't be so rhetorical any more. If they are U.S. citizens, some charges will be found that fit, and enforcement mechanisms will be what the government calls "designed to increase public awareness that we are handleing the crisis".
And if the spammers aren't U.S. citizens? Most people aren't aware of it, but there are already official regulations that say if any of the above events can be traced to a foreign power, it would be explicitly deemed an act of war. That's pretty obvious for the air traffic control scenario, but a big enough hit on the general economic system, or many other problems such as could sufficiently impact fuel supplies, basic infrastructure, or the nation's ability to deal with military events around the globe all have defined triggering thresholds that, when crossed, make them military rather than just economic problems.
Just maybe North Korea or Iran would ignore this, but at that point, most nations would round up their erring spammers and jump through flaming hoops backwards to prove these were private individuals acting against the wishes of their state. Even many less significant crisis are specifically grounds by various treaties for calling in all debts owed to the US, revoking most favored nation trade status, or otherwise inflicting millions of dollars in consequences on somebody else's government because we can't legally punish that somebody else directly.
I'm not saying things will go that far before a counterforce starts reining in the again rising trend in spamming, mind you, just that if things do go that far, there are mechanisms...
Except we are not automatically talking about "goodness of their hearts" just because there's no money involved. 'No monetary compensation' is not necessarily the same as 'no compensation at all', either.
(Rant mode: on)
I've seen plenty of people involved who answer all criticism with "It's free, don't like it, shut up!", etc. In most cases, there are costs attached, often hidden costs that the coder is reluctant to have dragged out into the open and called what they are.
I knew a graphic designer/programmer once who did 23 skins in a package, all in blue shades, and answered all requests for something in green, gray, red, etc. with a lot of foul language and calling people stupid for asking for other colors because he liked blue. JERK!
(If he'd just said "I just felt like doing those, and don't want to do more.", I'd defend him. If he'd added "But you can adapt them if you want.", I'd praise him for doing it out of the goodness of his heart, as you put it. He didn't, and it wasn't.)
Then there's the freeware program author who used "RTFM!" a lot, but refused to include the manual in distributions in any language except Klingon (I kid you not). JERK!
(To be fair, he warned people on his website, so he wasn't as big a jerk as some, but still, this was such an arbitrary condition that he was wasting a lot of people's time, and that's not free.)
There's a programmer who finished out someone else's free project after the originator died in a car crash, but decided he'd done as much work as the dead guy so he should be allowed to distribute it without the originator's name attached. Then he left in the dead guy's contact info without explaining it, so the deceased's parents got lots of complaints directed to their son. JERK!
There's the guy who wrote a graphic painting program, and didn't use 8 bit color, didn't use 16 bit, etc, he used 32 bit alphablended color, on a Windows 95/98 based program! Insead of RGB, you had to input in GR(alphablendvalue)B order, in hex (except for a very few inputs that were decimal instead). X co-ord's started at 0, y co-ords started at 1! A young woman who asked him why he was supporting alpha in a windows environment that just plain didn't drew a public threat of rape from this JERK!, one which eventually resulted in him doing a little time. (Saying "Why don't I cornhole you until you shut the F*** up about things that are over your head." to a minor is not justifiable just because you aren't charging for your program. It's not justifiable to an adult either, but here it was egregious enough to be actionable and not just foul.).
So here's a hint to group number one. The only time it's an issue of fairness is when someone likes your program, and derives some benefits from using it. Then you deserve gratitude. If you have asked for something reasonable, in advance of your possibly wasting people's time, you deserve that. If you asked for something reasonable in return (and thus not truely free), but you didn't mention it until after the deal was consumated, you are doing the same thing as a typical commercial EULA, and 'free' doesn't make that kind of unfairness fair, whether you are asking for a little thing like a postcard, or a nice thing like not using the software to support warfare, or whatever. Even if I admire you're asking for so little for a good program, you still should put your cards on the table, and not try to get past the download and maybe the install stage before you mention that 'little' condition.
Even worse, there are things that don't actually cost money, but are near priceless. Freeware authors can claim that 'free' means they are not responsible for personal data they acquire on their web site, and even put it in a EULA, but the law is quite clear on what happens if you take and release people's SSNs or collect certain data fr
Quite possibly. Microsoft is dealing with a monopolistic cartel, that has considerable influence over the legislature. As monopolies go, the RIAA and MPAA have levels of market saturation similar to MS, in the 90% range, and while their members are run by a few hundred major stockholders, adding just the top hundred or so together gives a picture of financial clout far exceeding Bill Gates'.
Almost nobody in the houses of congress has shown any public sign of personally hating any RIAA spokesman since a few criticized Jack Valetti 20 years ago, while according to beltway insiders there are some congressmen who have publicly expressed great dissapointment that Microsoft didn't get more penalties from the justice dept., and a few that will still publicly say that the company should flat have been busted up.
Notice that that cartel members make much less per year than the hardware manufacturers collectively do (by some estimates, the hardware companies are about 8x-10x as big as all the commercial media conglomerates put together), but their representitive group seems to be strong arming the hardware makers just fine. Notice too that Sony, for just one example, makes a lot more money on hardware than media, but the media division has steered the company into several stupid decisions in a row and still seems to have plenty of clout, at least internally.
The **AAs have whole groups of the most charismatic spokesmen possible willing to speak for them, and that greatly amplifies the effects of their campaign contributions. One appearance by the right movie star endorsing a particular candidate can be worth millions in an election year, while few voters would change their minds simply because Gates or Balmer endorsed anyone. (In other words, Microsoft has to do just about everything with money, while big media has other tools that sometimes work better).
That's an interesting arguement, that all the regulatory complexity just helps diffuse issues and make it harder to see and do what would be done in a private case.
But, political figures are generally public figures, who enjoy less protection under Libel and Slander statutes for a given act directed against them already. Speech directed at causes or ideas likewise does not fall under libel or slander law even if it is downright false. The only area where Political speech is likely to fall under libel or slander laws is when the speaker is referring to a private individual (i.e. if a non-politician such as Valerie Plame were the subject of a political statement, and the statement were also normally libelous - Revealing Plame as a CIA agent wasn't libelous in itself because it wasn't demeaning or derogatory in itself, but claims that she exploited being revealed for either political or financial gain may well be, as I understand it).
So, if we cut out the BS about just who counts as a registered lobbyist and what obscure laws anyone falls under based on a particular income level or venue, we (as in the general public) might be able to focus on whether good old fashioned laws such as Libel or Slander apply to what they have done, but it wouldn't matter in the majority of cases, as most lobbying lies are not directed at private citizens.
Some routine bound and unimaginative people who were parts of various government assessment groups didn't expect terrorists to switch to non-plane targets until they actually did. That didn't particularly surprise most of us.
Some of these people saw the bombings in Madrid and London, and still are thinking like it can't happen anywhere else. That surprises more of us, because it's such exceptional stupidity involved. We apparently have a lot of our GS-13,Step6 or higher pay scale people, many of them given special powers, above top secret clearances, bodyguards with right to carry concealed for fully automatic weapons, and other such perks that can adversely affect either many innocent bystanders or the body politic as a whole, and these people are quite literally dumber than many private citizens who are getting disability for brain damage injuries.
I'm not trying to employ hyperbole here, but referring to the highly placed people who are on the record, for example three weeks after the London subway bombings, as saying there was no reason to think the terrorists would target the N.Y. subways, or similar obvious idiocies. We didn't even vote most of them in - In about 98% of cases, they were hired and worked their way up, or were appointed.
Note: I'm not saying that antimissile defenses for commercial aircraft are a dumb idea. I'm saying that some of the day to day decisions that will ultimately determine whether this is funded and widely adopted in the end will likely be made by people who have repeatedly and consistantly shown they are simply way too stupid to make such decisions.
I would say if you are going around telling people exactly what they need to do to break into my house, you have the happy fun of being an accessory, or a party to a conspiracy to commit a crime.
Accessory seems most likely there. You have described at least part of the elements of a conspiracy, but the way conspiracy is defined is usually more than just some one way communication occuring. Party A has to communicate something and Party B acknowledge receiving it, or Party B has to agree to pass some reward back to party A for the communication, or something reciprocal has to be communicated. Warnings:
a. I'm not a lawyer, and...
b. I've heard there are some cases (at least some drug distribution cases) where the state apparently got convictions without proving that communication flowed both ways.
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You're the one who supported vigilante justice. That's the subject here, not just 'friggin' software. You're the one who talked about matters of law, and is now calling them just "technical issues". You want to claim there's some special group of people who are guilty before a court finds them guilty and another group that can take the law into their own hands, that's your choice, but saying this was just about software is a weasel-worded evasion. You've been claiming that some special priviledged people have a special right to break the law. Yes, I take that seriously. You did too, when you made your claims, even if you're trying to hide that now. Sorry if I lack social graces. You lack honor.
You know how you differ from Stalin? He believed that one group (the prolitariat), could be presumed automatically innocent, and could go outside the law to judge and punish another automatically guilty group (the capitalist 'exploiters') You believe that one group (the software authors), can be presumed automatically innocent, and can go outside the law to judge and punish another automatically guilty group (the end users). He had more power, you have less power. The more I read what you wrote in response, the more I'm sure you use what little power you have just as badly as he did.
I didn't mod it either insightful or flamebait, and I would find the poster's antisemitism and misogamy repulsive if it wasn't simply foolish in someone bright enough to understand the basics of market theory. However, you apparently don't understand how the original poster is using the word comoditization, and it is a standard and quite acceptable use, some economists would even say the preferred use. Please allow me to elaborate.
In this use, not all saleables are commodities. Most objects or services for sale have prices well above the level they would if they were priced as commodities. In fact a commodity price is effectively the bottom level price for things in that economy, usually as indexed to some reasonably objective standard, such as the energy cost to produce item X. Commodities have low profit margins. Things that are generally commoditized are nearly ubiquitous in their era, and proportionately cheap compared to whatever else anyone is buying, usually because there are many sources of supply and those sources either can't or for some reason haven't entered into a cartel or otherwise found some ways to create barriers to entry or fix prices.
Medical services, for example, are very far from a commodity - reducing the educational requirements for doctors, preventing doctors from associating in mass, or at least from using the AMA as a means of lobbying legislatures, or removing laws prohibiting some alternative medical practices would all be steps that would in theory shift medical care closer to commodity pricing. (Note that a shift towards commoditization, in such case, may have other, undesirable consequences).
Fancy foodstuffs such as french wines are normally far from commoditization. Basic foodstuffs such as dried beans are very close to absolutely commoditized. So's Sam's Choice generic soda in 2 liter bottles. Steaks in New York are pretty durned far from commodity status. Steaks in El Paso TX are at very near commodity prices. A 30" plasma display is much farther from commoditization than a 15" CRT display.
Of course sexual organs are close to commodities by this definition. There's lots of them around, certainly no one has a corner on the market, and they are sold (well usually offered for very short term lease) by at least some posessors. In market theory, prostitution should show a lot of tenedencies towards commodity pricing. It categorically does - for example, the average base price for a sex act by the lowest grade of prostitute marches, and apparently always has marched, in near perfect lockstep with the price of a fix, whether it be a crack rock today, a pint of Gin in the 1890's in the Whitchapel district of London, or a pot of beer in Babylon 4,000 years ago.
And yes, the RIAA and MPAA do have strong concerns that the price of media will drop to near commodity levels as it becomes obvious there is overwhelming supply and demand is predicated on an illusion of scarcity. Saying 'fear' might be metaphorical, but personally, I don't think that word is too strong at all.
The most important viewpoint is that of the author.
Sorry, but NO. This is still a semi-rational society. Everyone has rights. Until someone is convicted of something by a court,, a private citizen, (yes, even you) deciding some of the involved people have pre-guarenteed more important viewpoints than others, on legal issues, is just plain wrong. Stop it, or you'll grow up to be all icky like that Stalin kid or something. (Notice how cleverly I avoided Godwinning the thread?).
To make your arguement more precise, I suggest you split TV into Broadcast and Cable, as they are effectively entirely different media when it comes to legal regulations. Broadcast is subject to more control than cable and yet there are some possibly fair arguements for regulating the two differently. This doesn't invalidate your more general point.
Which raises another question - Why (aside from the cable vrs broadcast example) are there such different standards for the various media? Why not use a G, PG, PG 13, R, and X code for video games, or a single TV seal of approval? If one medium has a standard originally based on age 12 (film's PG rating), and another only has one presumably based on age 13 (The video game industry's T for Teen rating), then isn't the system saying in effect that some things are inherently a little more dangerous in a video game than those very same things would be for films?
Actually, If I'm going to make assumptions about you, I'd prefer to assume you aren't just parroting Sartre or Camus, and particularly their lesser fans (a bunch of philosophers who have made what is at least interesting in French numbing in translation). The Logotherapy remark shows promise - I don't recall seeing it before, but all I've read there is some Frankl - Is that from Man's Search for Meaning and I missed it, or is that from elsewhere?
You could indeed say that moral implications (malevolent or benign) require intention. I'm just not certain how many people are just doing that.
What I usually see people doing with that arguement is creating a paradox instead. We don't complain to nature because nature simply can't listen. Many of us either complain to God, or say we would if we believed he existed. Intelligence, awareness, and choice all being attributed to God means God (considered merely as a theoretical construct) is more powerful than nature, but that extra power somehow becomes a limit. Nature is free to conduct itself without our moral judgement, but God, being more powerful (Super-natural), is made subject to our criticism by the very things that give him more power.
Arguing that God has certain obligations to "His" creation if "He" posesses intelligence is very like redefining the very word intelligence in an unusual and quite nonstandard way, to say that an intelligent being is generally more limited than a non-intelligent one. So far as I know the only thing like it is the idea in the Western legal system that proving that someone has enough intelligence to foresee the consequiences of their actions is required before we can go from simple to criminal negligence. While charity is generally considered a good thing, we don't normally expect every person to devote more and more effort to helping the less fortunate if they are more intelligent. Did Karl Sagan have less obligation to be decent than Einstein, but more than Paris Hilton?
As an ethical arguement, it sounds like we are supposed to assume in advance of logical proof God needs to be judged by the sort of standard we use in criminal trials, rather than as we would judge a typical hyper-intelligent being we encountered on a day to day basis. It's kind of like God=Galactus, there's a planet missing, and he just burped!
Imagine yourself as about to be sued by the RIAA, and it should be clearer
1. The RIAA is suing you. You have a 30,000$ a year income. You don't want to settle, but it will cost a lot by your standards to fight it, and even if you win, you will still be out those costs. Do You Fight It?
vrs.
2. The RIAA is suing you. You have a 30,000$ a year income. You don't want to settle, though it will still cost a lot by your standards to fight it, if you win now, it will all cost you nothing. Now Do You Fight It?
Now Imagine you are the RIAA and it should become even clearer.
1. You sue some chump making only 30,000$ a year. If that suit starts looking troublesome, you can drop it, and the chump can't force the case into court.
vrs.
2. You sue some chump making only 30,000$ a year. If that suit starts looking troublesome, you can drop it, but the chump can probably still force the case into court as part of getting a declaration that makes him eligble to recover his legal costs in a countersuit, and he may well be able to countersue just based on you dropping the case even if he doesn't yet have a not- guilty verdict. In other words, depending on jurisdictional issues, either he can force the case to go on, or dropping it is still legal, but it doesn't help you (the RIAA) avoid costs anymore. You have no control over how quick that chump rushed out and found a lawyer, or how much he agreed to pay that lawyer on contingency. If he hired OJ's entire defense team (those still living) that's what you risk having to pay for. Any precedent he gets applies to all the other suits you have outstanding, so if he can get 450,000$ in legal fees, it's possible the other 1,329 cases you have outstanding can all get them too. Your downside is now over 600 million dollars. All those cases you settled earlier, out of court where no precident was established? They aren't really settled now, unless the duration for appeals has also lapsed. If some Boston Legal sized firm takes one client's case, they will call all the new and old litigants that look promising, put together a whopping big countersuit, and your worst nightmare downside is now, at the very least, several billion dollars.
The RIAA thought that having all those cases where the accused just settled without a trial made them very strong. They are now at risk of finding out that all those cases are worth precisely zero against just one precedent. This is how the American legal system is supposed to work - let's hope it actually does.
First, you do chose what you believe. You may start out either finding something believable or not, but as time passes, you have an area of effectively unlimited free choice where you can either choose to remain open to new evidence or not, to focus on further thought about the issue or put your attention elsewhere and so to modify and/or strengthen or weaken your opinions. I'm only qualifying that as "effectively" because obviously, just how many distractions to clear thought you experience varies, and unless you are very highly disciplined you probably seldom frame all the issues consiously, so when you are in habitual modes, your habits may be either good or bad (with regard to how well they help you think, rather than any absolute moral standard). I'm not saying any of that to belittle you, I'm pretty damned sure I myself function in habitual mode most of the time.
Personally, I find the idea that God punishes people for rational doubt or rewards them for blind adherence to be reprehensible as well, and I am also convinced it is simply incorrect. My point to you however, is rather different. Look at the alternative viewpoints - for most naturalists, if there are any absolute moral laws, they derive from physical laws. The most basic physical laws affect everything, while some laws (such as mandates to survive or reproduce) apply only to living things, and an even more derivative set applies only to those living things sophistocated enough to have notions of right and wrong.
There are Atheists and Agnostics who reject all concept of moral absolutes, and certainly others who believe that certain ethics, i.e. the golden rule, can be derived naturalisticly, and are still functionally as absolute as if they were handed down from on high. The point still remains there are very few non-deistic people who believe the converse, that basic physical laws are derived from more omnipresent or fundamental moral laws (Most people who do make that claim are actually locked away in loony bins. Yes many would argue that's where Deistic believers in moral law giving rise to physical law should be too. It's still a little different to believe that something with intelligence would put moral law first, than to believe a non-intelligent inchoate organizing force would do the same.).
So, my point to you - if God makes physical laws first, and the moral laws are somehow derived later for a more limited class of entities, you're still criticizing him for making moral laws that are 'Orwellian'. If nature makes physical laws first, you're cutting 'her' slack for the same consequences. Yes, blind, inanimate processes can't be characterized as 'Orwellian', but they can certainly be characterized as utterly incompatable with the idea of human freedom.
Applying the same logic you did to God to a naturalistic, non-God explanation for how we and everything else 'got here', means that naturalistic explanation is a blindly malevolent process, one in which all human hopes and asperations can mean precisely nothing, and are relentlessly violated, torn apart and consumed by an insensate, all devouring enthropic maw. The whole universe is meaningless, and the most basic question every human should ask his or herself is "Why don't I just kill myself now and avoid the rush?" In other words, congratulations, you are not just another Atheist, you are an Existentialist.
The fundamental question of Existentialism - Why didn't you already kill yourself?
Speak for yourself, I'm just a pretty good ape. (I'll get the brachiation thing down sooner or later... Ooof... Later it is then...).
"You dont have to create a supreme being to explain the beginning of time. In fact it just complicates things because then you have to explain where the supreme being came from."
Why? There's a real reason why I may want to explain where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory won out over Steady State. If the Steady State theory had the preponderance of the evidence, then the Universe was (and is still in the present theoretical era) likely eternal, and needed no explanation for what came before it. We need an explanation because of what kind of universe our best theory specifically says we have, not because universes in general automatically are things that need explanations.
No one doing science has claimed that the Steady State was an unscientific theory just because it didn't have an origin included. But when someone posits "God" as an explanation, these same people suddenly start claiming that everything needs an origin, and everything has to have that origin explained or it's not science. Do you want to revoke Penzias and Wilson's Nobel because they never really needed to disprove Steady State, because all those scientists who considered Steady State a possible theory were automatically wrong, even before the cosmic microwave background evidence that tipped the balance was actually gathered? You're argueing for a definition of Science where some things are true or false in advance of actually gathering the evidence.
You yourself just made a statement in your next to last paragraph that contradicts your last paragraph. You also seem to be arguing that Science formally includes some rule that everything must have an origin. Sorry, but that's not one of the rules. Read some Karl Popper for insight into your last problem, or Kuhn if you can take lots of exposure to that annoyingly overused word "Paradigm". Don't just take my word for it, but Science allows for theories that claim a phenominon is unchanging or eternal.
How is this any different from argueing that people can't have free will unless they have absolute freedom in every action? If god makes Gravity always work, then "He" is limiting your freedom to defy Gravity. Even a God that doesn't impose any moral laws still presumably imposed the physical constraints of our universe. Your phrase "Orwellian" presumably is possibly relevant to limitations on political or moral freedom, but how can you justify it if the same God is responsible for non-moral or non-political limits? Is God behaving like Big Brother if "He" makes a universe where you can't live forever by sheer act of will or fly to the moon on a chariot drawn by swans?
Notifying the landowners in this case seems to be mostly the same as notifying the local government, since the devices were placed (mostly) on public land. A few locations might have been more a matter of notifying the railroad that owned an overpass right of way, or notifying state Depts of Transportation rather than just a local government. Giving the police or appropriate security photos as well as the basic story also seems pretty much common sense.
However, why would you notify the press?
A. You're not covering yourself legally - as the people who find these and think they are a bomb have no rational excuse if they then notify the press instead of the authorities. In fact if anyone did something stupid and got hurt "Why did you tell the press instead of the police?" might be one of the questions your lawyers would want to ask.
B. In this age of news hungry shows, desperate to fill any voids in their 24 hour always-on schedules, the chance of the whole campaign leaking is so high. This is not the press of the Morrow or even the Cronkheit era - typically they will give no guarentees they will sit on the story, and often the print media will flat out lie about employees with ties to national TV, and refuse to admit leaks came from their people and not fictious other parties. A few years ago, Fox news won a court decision that said, in effect "Fox apparently lied quite deliberately, but even proving that the protected sources they cite don't exist won't nulify their claim to be immune so long as they are protecting their sources." It's a masterpiece of legal double talk, and it puts the whole press morally on a par with snake oil salesmen. Until the rest of the industry repudiates that, why cooperate with any of them?
Given the Gee-Whiz factor normal to juries, GPS surveilance is practically an open invitation for a prosecutor to gloss over the differences between "We tracked the suspect to...", "We tracked the suspect's car to..." and "We tracked a device which may or may not have still been connected to the suspect's car to...".
It allows the GPS historical record to be admitted, and yes, that will be more accurate with regards to time and position than average testimony usually is. There's even some parellels with other technologies, for example many jurisdictions require surveilance cameras to have time stamp systems and support testing those for accuracy before their tapes can be submitted as evidence.
But, it allows certain things, it doesn't require them. If the officers don't use this in a certain case, and an officer gets hurt in persuit, or a civilian does, will that make the injury any less the fault of the suspect, since, by your point, the police could have mitigated it?
If the police use this method a lot, and don't get any more accurate results than old fasioned surveilance, is there any requirement they disclose they used this method on dozens of other people before they got evidence of a single crime?
If it turns out GPS surveilance doesn't actually produce better testimony, or more reliable convictions, do the police have to disclose the record to a jury, or can they claim it's infalliable, as they often have with DNA and other 'high tech' evidence?
You've described a pretty damned sloppy, poorly trained cop rather than the average detective on most forces. If GPS evidence is being interpreted by Warren and Goober, as supervised by Barney, it won't be any better than non-GPS, and if it's being interpreted by somebody well trained and competent, why does the police force not have some people who fit that discription on the front lines? If you really think surveilance is commonly conducted by people who never heard of syncronizing their watches, why aren't you trying to get the guns out of those people's hands? - they sound like a terrible menace! Thanks to you, I'm now not even worried about how they can misuse GPS, when many of them commonly have full auto assault rifles and semi-auto shotguns!
I'm starting to think Google already has a solution to the ISPs 'taxing' them in mind. Google has bought a lot of dark fiber, and more significantly, they are leasing a lot of fiber. At least by related precidence, Google simply can't be charged with abuse of a vertical monopoly if the case is based on that monopoly including pipes they only lease. (Not actulally owning even a simple majority of some asset is a tremendously strong defense against a claim of monopoly in that area). If some zealous prosecuter does try to build an antitrust case, any arguement against Google that mentions their bandwidth assets would be much more valid against the ISPs.
(And every other business out there is going to be tremendously concerned if the courts start establishing preliminary opinions that a business with less than 50% actual ownership of an asset can even remotely possibly be subject to antitrust based on vertical monopoly rules for that - the ISP that seeks such a verdict won't just find itself in a telecommunications war with Google after that announcement, rather businesses such as Nissan, Exxon, International Paper, and Caterpillar will all be working vigorously on driving them into bankrupcy before their case against Google can even be finished, once they realize the implications for their own business models. Just imagine how Alcoa Aluminum would react to the news that having the dedicated electrical output of only about 8% of all the power produced by TVA's dams could still make them legally a vertical monopoly, or how Pepsi would react if told a court case could open the way for #1 Coca Cola to proceed against #2 Pepsi on antitrust claims.).
If ISPs start imposing special fees on Google at that point, then Google uses fiber it controls to force peering arrangements, buys or leases more, AND converts some of those leases to purchases. Since Google is the underdog at that point, facing monopoly practices, and are 'just trying to minimize the damage being done', Google isn't seeking a Monopoly. Yes, they could end up with at least a pretty close approximation, but they can deny any intent to violate - argueing that if they meant to abuse a monopoly, they would have first intended to buid it in the form where it could most be abused, and the purchases they made show all they intended was self defense. That's another nice thing about antitrust law, you can't unintentionally abuse a monopoly.
With this, Google will be just about totally immune to antitrust charges anywhere an ISP is involved, for at least 20 years, even if they end up owning 80% of the internet backbone or something. Maybe even if they end up owning 80% of the GNP.
Machine Guns are normally crew served, but a M-60 is light enough to be effectively deployed with just 1 person in a pinch. The usual M-60 modern era replacement, the SAW, is definitely a 1 man weapon. Then there's the FN P90, just a 50 rounds per magazine light or 'sub'machinegun, but the ammo is 5.7x28 mm NATO rifle, so classifying it as a full machinegun isn't much of a stretch at all when you compare that to the 'dinky' bullets a Mac-10, Uzi or such fires.
Now nukes are definitely crew served. (I've become reconciled to that, really...)
In honesty though, a full extension of the "individuals bear arms" concept does allow some machine guns, light rocket launchers, and grenade launchers. We really should consider whether that's what we want. (Well, personally, I'd love to have an M-203, but I can't honestly say I should have a right to bear one as a private citizen).
The illegality comes in because people don't buy a stock because the got an e-mail saying "Go buy stock X" they got e-mails saying "Stock X is poised to move! - expect a big contract announcement for company X in the next 72 hours! - get in before this makes the papers!".
Some of the e-mail claims are things impossible to actually know unless the creator is violating the insider trading rules or those conflict of interest rules you mentioned. In many cases, the only possible way they can not be guilty of insider trading is if they are making the claims up, which is good old fashioned fraud. So they can be charged, on the well established legal principle that it's still OK to charge someone with a crime even if their only way of proving they didn't do that crime is to admit to another one (Or in legal latin: Sucksem tuem beum youous).
Stock Spammers often make false claims - sometimes fraudulent, sometimes libelous (for ex. claims a company's last quarterly report intentionally under-reports the companies projected profits so as to create a big opportunity are false claims that a CEO, CFO, and accounting firm have all lied to the SEC, that's certainly libelous to those individuals.). Some claims of DOD or intelligence agency type government contracts, (or occasionally even DOE related ones), if actually true, would also involve revealing seriously classified information. Naturally, the government has an interest in people effectively claiming to know classified info. Some claims regarding intra-corporate lawsuits, particularly over IP, may violate standing court orders, gag orders, and the like, or even constitute extortion by threat of legal action.
There's one more sensible conclusion.
1. Trends generally peak and eventually reverse themselves.
2. The more seriously out of balance things get before then, the more the correction involves overcorrecting, heavy-handed intervention, and even violence.
Spam can theoretically keep getting worse and worse until major businesses can't send legitimate e-mail.
Stock touting can theoretically disrupt the market to the point of a major devaluation, multi-billion dollar pension fund loss, or similar crisis.
It's even possible for far worse scenarios to happen.
But, the day after the national air traffic control grid runs 20 planes into each other in half an hour, or the market drops 2,000 points and there's a run on the banks, or the pension plan that takes a huge hit is an entire state government's and more, and it is all somehow connected to stock spammers, guess what?
Those rhetorical cries for death to spammers won't be so rhetorical any more. If they are U.S. citizens, some charges will be found that fit, and enforcement mechanisms will be what the government calls "designed to increase public awareness that we are handleing the crisis".
And if the spammers aren't U.S. citizens? Most people aren't aware of it, but there are already official regulations that say if any of the above events can be traced to a foreign power, it would be explicitly deemed an act of war. That's pretty obvious for the air traffic control scenario, but a big enough hit on the general economic system, or many other problems such as could sufficiently impact fuel supplies, basic infrastructure, or the nation's ability to deal with military events around the globe all have defined triggering thresholds that, when crossed, make them military rather than just economic problems.
Just maybe North Korea or Iran would ignore this, but at that point, most nations would round up their erring spammers and jump through flaming hoops backwards to prove these were private individuals acting against the wishes of their state. Even many less significant crisis are specifically grounds by various treaties for calling in all debts owed to the US, revoking most favored nation trade status, or otherwise inflicting millions of dollars in consequences on somebody else's government because we can't legally punish that somebody else directly.
I'm not saying things will go that far before a counterforce starts reining in the again rising trend in spamming, mind you, just that if things do go that far, there are mechanisms...
Except we are not automatically talking about "goodness of their hearts" just because there's no money involved. 'No monetary compensation' is not necessarily the same as 'no compensation at all', either.
(Rant mode: on)
I've seen plenty of people involved who answer all criticism with "It's free, don't like it, shut up!", etc. In most cases, there are costs attached, often hidden costs that the coder is reluctant to have dragged out into the open and called what they are.
I knew a graphic designer/programmer once who did 23 skins in a package, all in blue shades, and answered all requests for something in green, gray, red, etc. with a lot of foul language and calling people stupid for asking for other colors because he liked blue. JERK!
(If he'd just said "I just felt like doing those, and don't want to do more.", I'd defend him. If he'd added "But you can adapt them if you want.", I'd praise him for doing it out of the goodness of his heart, as you put it. He didn't, and it wasn't.)
Then there's the freeware program author who used "RTFM!" a lot, but refused to include the manual in distributions in any language except Klingon (I kid you not). JERK!
(To be fair, he warned people on his website, so he wasn't as big a jerk as some, but still, this was such an arbitrary condition that he was wasting a lot of people's time, and that's not free.)
There's a programmer who finished out someone else's free project after the originator died in a car crash, but decided he'd done as much work as the dead guy so he should be allowed to distribute it without the originator's name attached. Then he left in the dead guy's contact info without explaining it, so the deceased's parents got lots of complaints directed to their son. JERK!
There's the guy who wrote a graphic painting program, and didn't use 8 bit color, didn't use 16 bit, etc, he used 32 bit alphablended color, on a Windows 95/98 based program! Insead of RGB, you had to input in GR(alphablendvalue)B order, in hex (except for a very few inputs that were decimal instead). X co-ord's started at 0, y co-ords started at 1! A young woman who asked him why he was supporting alpha in a windows environment that just plain didn't drew a public threat of rape from this JERK!, one which eventually resulted in him doing a little time. (Saying "Why don't I cornhole you until you shut the F*** up about things that are over your head." to a minor is not justifiable just because you aren't charging for your program. It's not justifiable to an adult either, but here it was egregious enough to be actionable and not just foul.).
So here's a hint to group number one. The only time it's an issue of fairness is when someone likes your program, and derives some benefits from using it. Then you deserve gratitude. If you have asked for something reasonable, in advance of your possibly wasting people's time, you deserve that. If you asked for something reasonable in return (and thus not truely free), but you didn't mention it until after the deal was consumated, you are doing the same thing as a typical commercial EULA, and 'free' doesn't make that kind of unfairness fair, whether you are asking for a little thing like a postcard, or a nice thing like not using the software to support warfare, or whatever. Even if I admire you're asking for so little for a good program, you still should put your cards on the table, and not try to get past the download and maybe the install stage before you mention that 'little' condition.
Even worse, there are things that don't actually cost money, but are near priceless. Freeware authors can claim that 'free' means they are not responsible for personal data they acquire on their web site, and even put it in a EULA, but the law is quite clear on what happens if you take and release people's SSNs or collect certain data fr
Quite possibly. Microsoft is dealing with a monopolistic cartel, that has considerable influence over the legislature. As monopolies go, the RIAA and MPAA have levels of market saturation similar to MS, in the 90% range, and while their members are run by a few hundred major stockholders, adding just the top hundred or so together gives a picture of financial clout far exceeding Bill Gates'.
Almost nobody in the houses of congress has shown any public sign of personally hating any RIAA spokesman since a few criticized Jack Valetti 20 years ago, while according to beltway insiders there are some congressmen who have publicly expressed great dissapointment that Microsoft didn't get more penalties from the justice dept., and a few that will still publicly say that the company should flat have been busted up.
Notice that that cartel members make much less per year than the hardware manufacturers collectively do (by some estimates, the hardware companies are about 8x-10x as big as all the commercial media conglomerates put together), but their representitive group seems to be strong arming the hardware makers just fine. Notice too that Sony, for just one example, makes a lot more money on hardware than media, but the media division has steered the company into several stupid decisions in a row and still seems to have plenty of clout, at least internally.
The **AAs have whole groups of the most charismatic spokesmen possible willing to speak for them, and that greatly amplifies the effects of their campaign contributions. One appearance by the right movie star endorsing a particular candidate can be worth millions in an election year, while few voters would change their minds simply because Gates or Balmer endorsed anyone. (In other words, Microsoft has to do just about everything with money, while big media has other tools that sometimes work better).
That's an interesting arguement, that all the regulatory complexity just helps diffuse issues and make it harder to see and do what would be done in a private case.
But, political figures are generally public figures, who enjoy less protection under Libel and Slander statutes for a given act directed against them already. Speech directed at causes or ideas likewise does not fall under libel or slander law even if it is downright false. The only area where Political speech is likely to fall under libel or slander laws is when the speaker is referring to a private individual (i.e. if a non-politician such as Valerie Plame were the subject of a political statement, and the statement were also normally libelous - Revealing Plame as a CIA agent wasn't libelous in itself because it wasn't demeaning or derogatory in itself, but claims that she exploited being revealed for either political or financial gain may well be, as I understand it).
So, if we cut out the BS about just who counts as a registered lobbyist and what obscure laws anyone falls under based on a particular income level or venue, we (as in the general public) might be able to focus on whether good old fashioned laws such as Libel or Slander apply to what they have done, but it wouldn't matter in the majority of cases, as most lobbying lies are not directed at private citizens.
Some routine bound and unimaginative people who were parts of various government assessment groups didn't expect terrorists to switch to non-plane targets until they actually did. That didn't particularly surprise most of us.
Some of these people saw the bombings in Madrid and London, and still are thinking like it can't happen anywhere else. That surprises more of us, because it's such exceptional stupidity involved. We apparently have a lot of our GS-13,Step6 or higher pay scale people, many of them given special powers, above top secret clearances, bodyguards with right to carry concealed for fully automatic weapons, and other such perks that can adversely affect either many innocent bystanders or the body politic as a whole, and these people are quite literally dumber than many private citizens who are getting disability for brain damage injuries.
I'm not trying to employ hyperbole here, but referring to the highly placed people who are on the record, for example three weeks after the London subway bombings, as saying there was no reason to think the terrorists would target the N.Y. subways, or similar obvious idiocies. We didn't even vote most of them in - In about 98% of cases, they were hired and worked their way up, or were appointed.
Note: I'm not saying that antimissile defenses for commercial aircraft are a dumb idea. I'm saying that some of the day to day decisions that will ultimately determine whether this is funded and widely adopted in the end will likely be made by people who have repeatedly and consistantly shown they are simply way too stupid to make such decisions.
So true. Now how do I give people half mod points?
Tom Baker was OK, but the best two doctors are still Rowan Atkinson (as the 9th), and Joanna Lumley (as the 13th).
I would say if you are going around telling people exactly what they need to do to break into my house, you have the happy fun of being an accessory, or a party to a conspiracy to commit a crime.
Accessory seems most likely there. You have described at least part of the elements of a conspiracy, but the way conspiracy is defined is usually more than just some one way communication occuring. Party A has to communicate something and Party B acknowledge receiving it, or Party B has to agree to pass some reward back to party A for the communication, or something reciprocal has to be communicated. Warnings:
a. I'm not a lawyer, and...
b. I've heard there are some cases (at least some drug distribution cases) where the state apparently got convictions without proving that communication flowed both ways.