Sadly, belief in education and a drive for learning cannot be taken as a given. Unfortunately, it usually is.
Quite a lot of kids get rewarded in some form by the parents for good grades. Maybe it's a pocket money bonus, maybe it's a family meal out, maybe it's a proud pat on the back or the report card stuck to the refrigerator. At some point during their childhood the vast majority of these kids find themselves believing in the value of education, or at least anticipating sufficient reward from it. Even without, educated parents who earn well leaves a easy exercise for the kids to connect the dots. For the kids who don't have this parental input, either they figure it out for themselves, or they don't. Teachers can have some input, but with class sizes what they are, unless the parents give them a good head start they have no chance.
When I ask any teacher what their biggest problem is they make sure nobody is in earshot then tell me it's the parents. Some think theirs is the special snowflake, which is a nuisance, but then there are those who don't care at all (and oh boy does it get worse). Trying to solve that is a real problem, these parents do not get involved in the debate and sure as hell no paper or politician is going to start telling their readers/voters that the reason grades are down is because they are bad parents.
I'm not sure that paying for grades is the right way, but I applaud whomever it was that conjured it up because I'm pretty sure they have at least figured out this one part of the problem.
I did a little experiment. I loaded up Firefox, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Google comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they had it delivered from Dell with Firefox as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Google whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?
FWIW, both IE & FF show the search provider in the search box, and both allow you to change who the default search provider is. Both also told me during installation/first run who the default search provider is and actually prompted me to set an alternative. And yes, Firefox does ship on some PCs as default, including at least for a time, those from Dell.
The Google/Bing results page is a pretty good clue to enable these "idiots" to see who they are getting their search results from. It's actually one of very few things I noticed "idiots" to not only noticing if it changes, but making a concerted effort to change back. Most computer novices (or those completely disinterested in them) that I have been around may have a lack of knowledge about computers in general but they tend to be a bit savvier with the internet, because it's the thing that interests them. They are simply not interested in the computer, it is just the tool that gets them on the internet and anything complicated with it is merely an annoyance.
Unlike the topic title, TFA does not call out the UK Copyright Industry, it calls out shoddy research and shoddy journalism.
Repeatedly here on slashdot we call out on whatever copyright industry. Apparently it's insightful and/or informative to point out what everyone pretty much assumed before they finished reading the title - the figures are obviously total nonsense. Like it's any kind of surprise that the lobby of such an industry have their own motives. The real problem is the journalists and politicians recite this drivel as if they believe it to be fact, and the only plausable explanations for doing so are:
- not doing any diligence at all and taking whatever "facts" anyone gives them at face value.
- having not only no basic knowledge of economics, statistics or piracy, but frankly no common sense whatsoever.
- dishonesty and/or nor caring in their truth.
In journalism, I think many do not care aslong as it makes a few sales or pleases advertisers. Some seem content to mildy question the figures, but nonetheless imply agreement to their principle argument. The Guardian is one of few that seem surprised and reluctant when they are asked to eat this shit.
For politicians, given the current farce over their expenses claims in the UK, but in particular their inability to grasp what they have done wrong or how they have failed us, I assume all of the above. Sadly, the Labour party are in the process of imploding, which may weaken the public's ability to express their fury and disgust at the next general election.
I think at some point, probably around the time the US gets around to adopting International Financial Reporting Standards, the major economies are going to start talking about harmonising tax rates to a certain extent. Many major governments are currently tackling transfer pricing and offshore tax havens, it is no coincidence that they are all doing it at the same time.
Piracy is not what is stopping the music industry embracing online distribution. How could it possibly be worse than the existing position? What they are frightened of is their lack of control and competition. Piracy is making their existing business untenable, but competing with it will cause them all kinds of problems that they are used to having control over. What's Wall Mart going to do when the label is actively competing with it? What are their mega stars going to do when the labels no longer control the channel? What happens when pricing becomes competitive?
"Allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply" might be good for music, consumers and the industry as a whole but there is not much there that is attractive to the labels. They will do it when they really have to, I think presently they are clinging on while they can and meanwhile negotiating for the best position possible for when they do.
The labels aren't nearly as stupid, out of touch and unable to adapt as they seem. They were incredibly quick and successful in moving to exploit the surge in popularity of live music, I'm not even sure whether that was a natural change in consumer tastes or something instigated by the labels.
The difference between a professional and a laborer is that the professional practices his profession to the best of his ability in the interest of his profession, and the laborer puts the ditch where he's told to put the ditch.
Fixed. That's not cynicism, it's actually the only ethical position and is a typical requirement for membership of a professional body.
An agent acts to the best of his ability in the interest of his client. Perhaps the confusion arises because people who act as agents in a commercial capacity are usually also professionals.
True professions are governed by a professional body that the professional is required to be qualified for, subscribed to and supervised by. The body may have a Charter and have authority to set by laws (legally enforceable rules) over their members. A substantial part of the rules for the professional body surrounds the potential for conflict of interest. They almost universally require that where any conflict arises, the professional must default to the position that is in the interest of, in order, his profession, his client and himself.
Admittedly, that is a little simplistic. Consider that prioritising the interests of the profession is often a tool for prioritising the interests of clients as a whole - if a profession is brought into disrepute it impacts everybody who relies on the profession. If the conflict is between two clients, prioritising the profession is an objective way for treating both of them fairly and evenly.
(I use British terms but the set up is broadly the same in most Western countries.)
Yes, it is broadly the same idea in the speculator's point of view. But there are key differences: domains are not originally sold at a market price, domains are not inherently valuable and there is not a liquid market.
This means squatters can obtain vast tracts of domains a little cost of capital in order to grossly inflate the price to the very few who have an interest in the domain. With land and property, a significant amount of capital is required to acquire it and therefore there is a significant cost (cost of capital) just to do nothing with it until the prices are higher. Furthermore people are able to relatively easily choose a different patch of land, whereas brand-owners are stuck with relatively few choices that connect to their brand (and sometimes, may have good reason to acquire all of them). Market forces naturally provide a degree of regulation over land and property, but very little over domains.
It's arguably like saying the government provides a water supply which it provides at incredibly low cost to it's citizens, but then people obtain the rights to 1cm wide strips of land around the water plant and charge an exorbitant rent to anyone who's home is connected via that one little strip.
(Apologies for any lack of paragraphing, if the preview is accurate then my p tags only seem to be doing the job of a br tag)
Whether substantial change is inevitable or not is a moot point. We can still delay problems and minimise their effect. Just because you are going to die some day does not mean you might as well make it today. The same applies to whether the change is man made or not - we know change will be bad so we should fight it. Regardless, what is most important is the rate of change.
I mean, shit happens and the everything adapts. If the food supply is cut, eventually it will be OK because it will feed fewer people. That might not be a good thing, but the awful thing will be getting there.
The rate of change is the sensitive factor. Nature is good at adapting. But it needs time to do it in a way that is not very bad for us. Time also allows us to adapt to it with the minimum of pain.
That said, there are some specific points of major concern, such as if the global air and ocean currents (distributing heat from the equator, amongst other things) cease to function. There are some tipping points that when reached, will result in dramatic change. Again though, we can delay when that happens, and minimise all the other problems we will be dealing with at the same time.
I'm an accountant, I see pretty much the full-spectrum of what everyone gets paid, whether as the business owner or on it's payroll.
Everything they tell you in school is total bullshit. Everything everyone tells you after school is total bullshit too.
Do what you want to do. Do it well, do it smart, work hard, make friends and retain contact. Do not do what they tell you in school, which is to be the insignificant guy in the office who slaves away with no impact in his pay packet because there's a queue of other guys available to replace him. You do not get special money unless you have something special to offer.
Do study hard at school though - even if you plan on being a bricklayer. You will find yourself negotiating contracts and maybe even being the contractor one day. But most important is understanding the process of learning and being able to set your sights on the end game.
How prevalent are viruses really? I've never had one in 16 years of Windows, at least 10 of which the PC's regularly been connected to the internet. Not even at the office, where we have about 80 machines with each one restoring data from a client at least once a week.
I've only once seen a friend/family have an infection (more on that later), though admittedly some of them wouldn't know unless it was crippling. On the other hand there was a couple of years into XP where malware, mostly the odd toolbar, was not uncommon, but I hardly see that anymore unless you count google and yahoo.
I play games, use forums, download stuff, don't take any particular precautions bar free firewall and anti-virus software. I do keep windows up to date and I don't pirate anything though, and I only used an email client (Thunderbird) for about a year, when I had a good junk filter (the only time my AV has had a positive it was in that junk folder).
I do recall I was once temporarily renting a room and I cleared out the landlady's laptop which was utterly infested (though, it turned out it was her boyfriends, he was working overseas). I'll chalk that one down to the user though since a short time later she found MSN, it logged into her boyfriend's account automatically and she was bombarded with his numerous girl and boyfriends asking if he could sneak off to the usual place at say 9 for a quickie? I told her it could be fake, generated by the viruses, but she had pretended to be him, they were clearly real people in the local area who knew him personally. We had several conversations about that but she was still too embarrassed to say what she found in the browser history. She was really something and that little episode nearly worked out very well for me, but, well it was all too likely that he had done to her what he had done to the laptop so I wasn't going to plug in my equipment.
Try read it later. I thought I wanted it as a means to manage what I was doing with tabs, but instead I found myself using it as intended. It's a middle ground between tabs and bookmarks: not quite so quick as tabs, but quicker than bookmarks and more easily managed than either.
It's a useful tool to managing time: the short and must-read articles go in tabs, longer stuff suitable for later goes on the reading list (bookmarks are for repeat reference). I get through my news site roundup much more quickly and have a pool of interesting articles to read whenever I feel like it.
Evidently most people are baffled by just how greedy monopolists are - how can these guys believe that they deserve it?
Firstly, corporations exist to maximise shareholder wealth. This is their side of the bargain and they generally stick to pursuing that goal. What else would you have them do? What would motivate them to do it? Greed is not a corporate problem, it is what they are for, and the very thing society manipulates to our own advantage. It is OUR job to ensure monopolies do not occur - competition is our tool that ensures we are whom benefits from corporate greed.
Secondly, the greed isn't as outragous as it seems. Exploiting monopoly profit turns into a ball and chain.
Simplifying massively for illustration, say a company has issued shares worth $100m, and the market has a 5% required rate of return (the amount you need to pay out just to convince people to part with their cash). At this point, between the share price and dividends, shareholders need to get $5m. Then the company somehow gets monopoly power, turns a $10m profit and all signs are that this will continue. Existing shareholders make a fortune that year, but this becomes reflected in the share price because the market can now pay twice as much for a share and still make it's required 5% - the share price doubles so the total is now at $200m.
Lo and behold, next year the company now MUST make $10m profit just to make the 5% return to shareholder. The company itself appears to be making a ton of money, customers are being royally shafted but actually everybody taking home the profits are only making the 5% everybody else is getting. Sure, old shareholders made a massive gain but that was last year, this year they can make 5% elsewhere, and likely many of the current shareholders bought in at the higher price.
The company is actually in a dangerous position because if anything happens to that monopoly they will dramatically fail to make the shareholders' required rate of return. The gravy train doesn't have brakes.
Tough shit for them, you rightfully say. But don't act all surprised and appalled when they put up a fight - we didn't like it when they screwed us over and they wont when we do it right back, especially when most of their losers won't even be the same guys who won out back in the day.
Some of the google issues have to do with mailboxes getting lost and reassigned, etc. If it doesn't happen to you, it doesn't count as an issue, according to your logic.
No, it doesn't count as an issue. For me. Just like it doesn't count as an issue for me when anybody else's random mail server goes down.
You're trying to buy something they don't sell individually. A (admittedly brief) look at their site confirms that. While perhaps it might appear to make business sense for them to sell the part, they don't. Spare parts aren't their business. They aren't doing their customers a disservice, you're not a customer.
To try and get you the part anyway, they're treating it as a warranty/after sales situation, so they need the warranty number. No warranty number, no warranty service. My reading of your blog leaves it unclear if the "thief" thing is wholly your assumption or not. If my interpretation of the situation is true, the CSR quotes fit right in with that, no suggestions of thievery, though perhaps what to them is a bizarre situation has aroused suspicions.
By the way, I doubt it is $150 for a $5 bent bit of metal, the other $145 is for the drive that comes with it.
Apologies if I come across a little negative, phone calls to confused companies are always frustrating. But the whole thing seems rather excessive, a typical forum rant (whether justified or not) that for some reason slashdot (which is whom I'm criticising) considered worthy and reliable on the strength of a blog which can be broken down as follows:
the first entry (wordpress installation?) on May 5th,
welcome to my first blog! on Wed 6th,
big rant against Alienware on Thurs 7th,
second posting on 7th, Thursday, noting having sent "snotty email to all the email addresses I could find for Alienware Corporate [...] I'll give them until the weekend to respond"
4. Extending the principles of consumer protection rules to cover licensing agreements of products like software downloaded for virus protection, games or other licensed content. Licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions.
Bit more detailed if you go to the original resolution (mostly s.36 onwards). Free software doesn't even come into either the new or existing law because there is no consideration.
All we're really looking at here is blocking the damned "now that you've opened the box to read this notice, you can't get your money back". Liability is not going to go any further than a refund, unless the software maker expressly states they guarantee something. Unlike a toaster, normal use of consumer software cannot electrocute you or start fires. The aim of the whole thing is for the benefit of trade (particularily inter-EU) - to get consumers to buy more software and for them to shop around within the EU countries, they need to have standardised rights that give them confidence.
Is it necessary to scrub the whole drive? The responses to the parent appear to only address problems associated only with that approach. What if a person booted up linux from DVD, and only scrubbed the MP3, bittorrent and winamp, then booted into windows (after fiddling BIOS) and defragged?
If being proactive, what if your music, torrent and winamp were saved to an external HDD, and you have a second "clean" external HDD? I suppose you could even get one of those HDD media players (some are barely more expensive than a plain external drive), bypassing it from the OS entirely.
Since some people are bound to assume otherwise, I note I'm not advocating the approach even if it does work. I'm far from familiar with courts but I get a strong impression that they take a particular disposition towards abuse of their orders.
Well put, except missing emphasis and explanation of "pure-er capitalism", which is a key point.
Pure capitalism would naturally solve a lot of the problems associated with capitalism: any monopolistic ISP would very rapidly face competition from a new upstart. The problem is capitalism and free markets are very rarely pure. The situation in practice is the upstart has barriers to entry and various other issues not compatible with pure capitalism. These may be effectively inherent, caused nefariously by the incumbent, caused by failure of the upstart or be simply due to customers facing costs of switching, laziness, brand loyalty, being uninformed and so on.
Currency exchanges are about as close as plausibly possible: there is a sizeable, liquid market composed of skilled participants who are very rapidly informed and influenced by even the most minor of events, and they are free to act on them very conveniently and at a tiny transaction cost. The same cannot be said for so many other things, thus we need varying balances of capitalism and socialism to try and arrive at the best practicable solution.
No country comes close to pure capitalism. The US is perhaps furthest in it's direction, the UK some way behind and France even further, but non come close.
My reading of this is that it delays music from turning copyright-free only where the composer dies more than 20 years prior to the performer's demise. Otherwise, it just adds performers to the existing list of people who enjoy a copyright.
Other elements noted also seem to be quite significantly shifting the balance of rights towards actual performers and from the corporates; no changes to the public.
Am I misinterpreting the current and proposed legislation?
(personally I think copyright should hold for the same duration as patents, since the principle objective is the same, but that's beside the point I'm making.)
I agree the Royal Mail should be kept public but there's a few points that affect your argument.
Postage charges have gone up, but this is not like-for-like as previously you also paid for it through taxes, cross-subsidisation and so on (plus any tax on the privatised company's profits is something of an very indirect refund). All else remaining equal, the net cost of the royal mail service to you may not have changed in the way that would seem apparent from simply looking at the price of stamps.
One of the reasons for the price increase is to fund investment which was already necessary. The RM would have needed to cover this cost whether private or not, and we would have paid for it either through stamps or taxes. One of the reasons the government is giving RM money is because the amount of investment required was underestimated.
Another major problem for RM is the pensions liability built up when it was public. Private companies build up a pension fund with most of the contributions paid in while the employee is working. The government does no such thing, it pays pensions out of the taxes of the following generation of workers. Again, the liability was underestimated.
I refer above to the Royal Mail broadly as what the Royal Mail historically represented, the true current position is more complex. Currently Royal Mail Group Ltd is still government owned, while some of it's functions have been privatised and operate as Royal Mail Holdings PLC (formerly Consignia PLC). The media rarely distinguish (perhaps, don't even know) which one they're talking about which makes following any news difficult, quite often when they are talking about throwing the RM money they are talking about the one that is still government owned.
Personally I think the RM should remain wholly public because the service offers a substantial benefit to society that is not really reflected in the market mechanism. Consider, for example, that most of the benefits of a good postal service are enjoyed by the receiver of mail, not the person who pays for it. Secondly I strongly expect the mail is the type of service where monopoly scale efficiency outweighs the benefits from competition.
-- How does the Internet Police cross international boundaries in a legal fashion? A Status of Forces Agreement, perhaps? Would England really like Argentina (for example) to shut customers off because they're supporting a botnet?
Stewart will present his idea at RSA on Thursday, and follow that with a pitch to Interpol, the international police organization, in the near future.
Interpol already work on computer crime so TFA's argument may be implemented as a specific department, likely utilising legal agreements and working practices that already exist. Quite possibly, such a function already exists at Interpol and TFA is effectively arguing that it would be beneficial for it to change it's approach and have greater resources (such as teams of white hats).
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
Sadly, belief in education and a drive for learning cannot be taken as a given. Unfortunately, it usually is.
Quite a lot of kids get rewarded in some form by the parents for good grades. Maybe it's a pocket money bonus, maybe it's a family meal out, maybe it's a proud pat on the back or the report card stuck to the refrigerator. At some point during their childhood the vast majority of these kids find themselves believing in the value of education, or at least anticipating sufficient reward from it. Even without, educated parents who earn well leaves a easy exercise for the kids to connect the dots. For the kids who don't have this parental input, either they figure it out for themselves, or they don't. Teachers can have some input, but with class sizes what they are, unless the parents give them a good head start they have no chance.
When I ask any teacher what their biggest problem is they make sure nobody is in earshot then tell me it's the parents. Some think theirs is the special snowflake, which is a nuisance, but then there are those who don't care at all (and oh boy does it get worse). Trying to solve that is a real problem, these parents do not get involved in the debate and sure as hell no paper or politician is going to start telling their readers/voters that the reason grades are down is because they are bad parents.
I'm not sure that paying for grades is the right way, but I applaud whomever it was that conjured it up because I'm pretty sure they have at least figured out this one part of the problem.
I did a little experiment. I loaded up Firefox, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Google comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they had it delivered from Dell with Firefox as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Google whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?
FWIW, both IE & FF show the search provider in the search box, and both allow you to change who the default search provider is. Both also told me during installation/first run who the default search provider is and actually prompted me to set an alternative. And yes, Firefox does ship on some PCs as default, including at least for a time, those from Dell.
The Google/Bing results page is a pretty good clue to enable these "idiots" to see who they are getting their search results from. It's actually one of very few things I noticed "idiots" to not only noticing if it changes, but making a concerted effort to change back. Most computer novices (or those completely disinterested in them) that I have been around may have a lack of knowledge about computers in general but they tend to be a bit savvier with the internet, because it's the thing that interests them. They are simply not interested in the computer, it is just the tool that gets them on the internet and anything complicated with it is merely an annoyance.
People would probably get on a whole lot better if they had some aliens to hate.
Unlike the topic title, TFA does not call out the UK Copyright Industry, it calls out shoddy research and shoddy journalism.
Repeatedly here on slashdot we call out on whatever copyright industry. Apparently it's insightful and/or informative to point out what everyone pretty much assumed before they finished reading the title - the figures are obviously total nonsense. Like it's any kind of surprise that the lobby of such an industry have their own motives. The real problem is the journalists and politicians recite this drivel as if they believe it to be fact, and the only plausable explanations for doing so are:
- not doing any diligence at all and taking whatever "facts" anyone gives them at face value.
- having not only no basic knowledge of economics, statistics or piracy, but frankly no common sense whatsoever.
- dishonesty and/or nor caring in their truth.
In journalism, I think many do not care aslong as it makes a few sales or pleases advertisers. Some seem content to mildy question the figures, but nonetheless imply agreement to their principle argument. The Guardian is one of few that seem surprised and reluctant when they are asked to eat this shit.
For politicians, given the current farce over their expenses claims in the UK, but in particular their inability to grasp what they have done wrong or how they have failed us, I assume all of the above. Sadly, the Labour party are in the process of imploding, which may weaken the public's ability to express their fury and disgust at the next general election.
I think at some point, probably around the time the US gets around to adopting International Financial Reporting Standards, the major economies are going to start talking about harmonising tax rates to a certain extent. Many major governments are currently tackling transfer pricing and offshore tax havens, it is no coincidence that they are all doing it at the same time.
Piracy is not what is stopping the music industry embracing online distribution. How could it possibly be worse than the existing position? What they are frightened of is their lack of control and competition. Piracy is making their existing business untenable, but competing with it will cause them all kinds of problems that they are used to having control over. What's Wall Mart going to do when the label is actively competing with it? What are their mega stars going to do when the labels no longer control the channel? What happens when pricing becomes competitive?
"Allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply" might be good for music, consumers and the industry as a whole but there is not much there that is attractive to the labels. They will do it when they really have to, I think presently they are clinging on while they can and meanwhile negotiating for the best position possible for when they do.
The labels aren't nearly as stupid, out of touch and unable to adapt as they seem. They were incredibly quick and successful in moving to exploit the surge in popularity of live music, I'm not even sure whether that was a natural change in consumer tastes or something instigated by the labels.
Fixed. That's not cynicism, it's actually the only ethical position and is a typical requirement for membership of a professional body.
An agent acts to the best of his ability in the interest of his client. Perhaps the confusion arises because people who act as agents in a commercial capacity are usually also professionals.
True professions are governed by a professional body that the professional is required to be qualified for, subscribed to and supervised by. The body may have a Charter and have authority to set by laws (legally enforceable rules) over their members. A substantial part of the rules for the professional body surrounds the potential for conflict of interest. They almost universally require that where any conflict arises, the professional must default to the position that is in the interest of, in order, his profession, his client and himself.
Admittedly, that is a little simplistic. Consider that prioritising the interests of the profession is often a tool for prioritising the interests of clients as a whole - if a profession is brought into disrepute it impacts everybody who relies on the profession. If the conflict is between two clients, prioritising the profession is an objective way for treating both of them fairly and evenly.
(I use British terms but the set up is broadly the same in most Western countries.)
If this reaction is anything to go by...
Yes, it is broadly the same idea in the speculator's point of view. But there are key differences: domains are not originally sold at a market price, domains are not inherently valuable and there is not a liquid market.
This means squatters can obtain vast tracts of domains a little cost of capital in order to grossly inflate the price to the very few who have an interest in the domain. With land and property, a significant amount of capital is required to acquire it and therefore there is a significant cost (cost of capital) just to do nothing with it until the prices are higher. Furthermore people are able to relatively easily choose a different patch of land, whereas brand-owners are stuck with relatively few choices that connect to their brand (and sometimes, may have good reason to acquire all of them). Market forces naturally provide a degree of regulation over land and property, but very little over domains.
It's arguably like saying the government provides a water supply which it provides at incredibly low cost to it's citizens, but then people obtain the rights to 1cm wide strips of land around the water plant and charge an exorbitant rent to anyone who's home is connected via that one little strip.
(Apologies for any lack of paragraphing, if the preview is accurate then my p tags only seem to be doing the job of a br tag)
Whether substantial change is inevitable or not is a moot point. We can still delay problems and minimise their effect. Just because you are going to die some day does not mean you might as well make it today. The same applies to whether the change is man made or not - we know change will be bad so we should fight it. Regardless, what is most important is the rate of change.
I mean, shit happens and the everything adapts. If the food supply is cut, eventually it will be OK because it will feed fewer people. That might not be a good thing, but the awful thing will be getting there.
The rate of change is the sensitive factor. Nature is good at adapting. But it needs time to do it in a way that is not very bad for us. Time also allows us to adapt to it with the minimum of pain.
That said, there are some specific points of major concern, such as if the global air and ocean currents (distributing heat from the equator, amongst other things) cease to function. There are some tipping points that when reached, will result in dramatic change. Again though, we can delay when that happens, and minimise all the other problems we will be dealing with at the same time.
I'm an accountant, I see pretty much the full-spectrum of what everyone gets paid, whether as the business owner or on it's payroll.
Everything they tell you in school is total bullshit. Everything everyone tells you after school is total bullshit too.
Do what you want to do. Do it well, do it smart, work hard, make friends and retain contact. Do not do what they tell you in school, which is to be the insignificant guy in the office who slaves away with no impact in his pay packet because there's a queue of other guys available to replace him. You do not get special money unless you have something special to offer.
Do study hard at school though - even if you plan on being a bricklayer. You will find yourself negotiating contracts and maybe even being the contractor one day. But most important is understanding the process of learning and being able to set your sights on the end game.
How prevalent are viruses really? I've never had one in 16 years of Windows, at least 10 of which the PC's regularly been connected to the internet. Not even at the office, where we have about 80 machines with each one restoring data from a client at least once a week.
I've only once seen a friend/family have an infection (more on that later), though admittedly some of them wouldn't know unless it was crippling. On the other hand there was a couple of years into XP where malware, mostly the odd toolbar, was not uncommon, but I hardly see that anymore unless you count google and yahoo.
I play games, use forums, download stuff, don't take any particular precautions bar free firewall and anti-virus software. I do keep windows up to date and I don't pirate anything though, and I only used an email client (Thunderbird) for about a year, when I had a good junk filter (the only time my AV has had a positive it was in that junk folder).
I do recall I was once temporarily renting a room and I cleared out the landlady's laptop which was utterly infested (though, it turned out it was her boyfriends, he was working overseas). I'll chalk that one down to the user though since a short time later she found MSN, it logged into her boyfriend's account automatically and she was bombarded with his numerous girl and boyfriends asking if he could sneak off to the usual place at say 9 for a quickie? I told her it could be fake, generated by the viruses, but she had pretended to be him, they were clearly real people in the local area who knew him personally. We had several conversations about that but she was still too embarrassed to say what she found in the browser history. She was really something and that little episode nearly worked out very well for me, but, well it was all too likely that he had done to her what he had done to the laptop so I wasn't going to plug in my equipment.
Security is only ever a priority for the initial period of a new system, and the initial period after a breach.
Try read it later. I thought I wanted it as a means to manage what I was doing with tabs, but instead I found myself using it as intended. It's a middle ground between tabs and bookmarks: not quite so quick as tabs, but quicker than bookmarks and more easily managed than either.
It's a useful tool to managing time: the short and must-read articles go in tabs, longer stuff suitable for later goes on the reading list (bookmarks are for repeat reference). I get through my news site roundup much more quickly and have a pool of interesting articles to read whenever I feel like it.
Evidently most people are baffled by just how greedy monopolists are - how can these guys believe that they deserve it?
Firstly, corporations exist to maximise shareholder wealth. This is their side of the bargain and they generally stick to pursuing that goal. What else would you have them do? What would motivate them to do it? Greed is not a corporate problem, it is what they are for, and the very thing society manipulates to our own advantage. It is OUR job to ensure monopolies do not occur - competition is our tool that ensures we are whom benefits from corporate greed.
Secondly, the greed isn't as outragous as it seems. Exploiting monopoly profit turns into a ball and chain.
Simplifying massively for illustration, say a company has issued shares worth $100m, and the market has a 5% required rate of return (the amount you need to pay out just to convince people to part with their cash). At this point, between the share price and dividends, shareholders need to get $5m. Then the company somehow gets monopoly power, turns a $10m profit and all signs are that this will continue. Existing shareholders make a fortune that year, but this becomes reflected in the share price because the market can now pay twice as much for a share and still make it's required 5% - the share price doubles so the total is now at $200m.
Lo and behold, next year the company now MUST make $10m profit just to make the 5% return to shareholder. The company itself appears to be making a ton of money, customers are being royally shafted but actually everybody taking home the profits are only making the 5% everybody else is getting. Sure, old shareholders made a massive gain but that was last year, this year they can make 5% elsewhere, and likely many of the current shareholders bought in at the higher price.
The company is actually in a dangerous position because if anything happens to that monopoly they will dramatically fail to make the shareholders' required rate of return. The gravy train doesn't have brakes.
Tough shit for them, you rightfully say. But don't act all surprised and appalled when they put up a fight - we didn't like it when they screwed us over and they wont when we do it right back, especially when most of their losers won't even be the same guys who won out back in the day.
Fixed that for you.
No, it doesn't count as an issue. For me. Just like it doesn't count as an issue for me when anybody else's random mail server goes down.
You're trying to buy something they don't sell individually. A (admittedly brief) look at their site confirms that. While perhaps it might appear to make business sense for them to sell the part, they don't. Spare parts aren't their business. They aren't doing their customers a disservice, you're not a customer.
To try and get you the part anyway, they're treating it as a warranty/after sales situation, so they need the warranty number. No warranty number, no warranty service. My reading of your blog leaves it unclear if the "thief" thing is wholly your assumption or not. If my interpretation of the situation is true, the CSR quotes fit right in with that, no suggestions of thievery, though perhaps what to them is a bizarre situation has aroused suspicions.
By the way, I doubt it is $150 for a $5 bent bit of metal, the other $145 is for the drive that comes with it.
Apologies if I come across a little negative, phone calls to confused companies are always frustrating. But the whole thing seems rather excessive, a typical forum rant (whether justified or not) that for some reason slashdot (which is whom I'm criticising) considered worthy and reliable on the strength of a blog which can be broken down as follows:
if the press release is anything to go by.
The only point that seems to come near TFA is:
Bit more detailed if you go to the original resolution (mostly s.36 onwards). Free software doesn't even come into either the new or existing law because there is no consideration.
All we're really looking at here is blocking the damned "now that you've opened the box to read this notice, you can't get your money back". Liability is not going to go any further than a refund, unless the software maker expressly states they guarantee something. Unlike a toaster, normal use of consumer software cannot electrocute you or start fires. The aim of the whole thing is for the benefit of trade (particularily inter-EU) - to get consumers to buy more software and for them to shop around within the EU countries, they need to have standardised rights that give them confidence.
Is it necessary to scrub the whole drive? The responses to the parent appear to only address problems associated only with that approach. What if a person booted up linux from DVD, and only scrubbed the MP3, bittorrent and winamp, then booted into windows (after fiddling BIOS) and defragged?
If being proactive, what if your music, torrent and winamp were saved to an external HDD, and you have a second "clean" external HDD? I suppose you could even get one of those HDD media players (some are barely more expensive than a plain external drive), bypassing it from the OS entirely.
Since some people are bound to assume otherwise, I note I'm not advocating the approach even if it does work. I'm far from familiar with courts but I get a strong impression that they take a particular disposition towards abuse of their orders.
Well put, except missing emphasis and explanation of "pure-er capitalism", which is a key point.
Pure capitalism would naturally solve a lot of the problems associated with capitalism: any monopolistic ISP would very rapidly face competition from a new upstart. The problem is capitalism and free markets are very rarely pure. The situation in practice is the upstart has barriers to entry and various other issues not compatible with pure capitalism. These may be effectively inherent, caused nefariously by the incumbent, caused by failure of the upstart or be simply due to customers facing costs of switching, laziness, brand loyalty, being uninformed and so on.
Currency exchanges are about as close as plausibly possible: there is a sizeable, liquid market composed of skilled participants who are very rapidly informed and influenced by even the most minor of events, and they are free to act on them very conveniently and at a tiny transaction cost. The same cannot be said for so many other things, thus we need varying balances of capitalism and socialism to try and arrive at the best practicable solution.
No country comes close to pure capitalism. The US is perhaps furthest in it's direction, the UK some way behind and France even further, but non come close.
My reading of this is that it delays music from turning copyright-free only where the composer dies more than 20 years prior to the performer's demise. Otherwise, it just adds performers to the existing list of people who enjoy a copyright.
Other elements noted also seem to be quite significantly shifting the balance of rights towards actual performers and from the corporates; no changes to the public.
Am I misinterpreting the current and proposed legislation?
(personally I think copyright should hold for the same duration as patents, since the principle objective is the same, but that's beside the point I'm making.)
I agree the Royal Mail should be kept public but there's a few points that affect your argument.
Postage charges have gone up, but this is not like-for-like as previously you also paid for it through taxes, cross-subsidisation and so on (plus any tax on the privatised company's profits is something of an very indirect refund). All else remaining equal, the net cost of the royal mail service to you may not have changed in the way that would seem apparent from simply looking at the price of stamps.
One of the reasons for the price increase is to fund investment which was already necessary. The RM would have needed to cover this cost whether private or not, and we would have paid for it either through stamps or taxes. One of the reasons the government is giving RM money is because the amount of investment required was underestimated.
Another major problem for RM is the pensions liability built up when it was public. Private companies build up a pension fund with most of the contributions paid in while the employee is working. The government does no such thing, it pays pensions out of the taxes of the following generation of workers. Again, the liability was underestimated.
I refer above to the Royal Mail broadly as what the Royal Mail historically represented, the true current position is more complex. Currently Royal Mail Group Ltd is still government owned, while some of it's functions have been privatised and operate as Royal Mail Holdings PLC (formerly Consignia PLC). The media rarely distinguish (perhaps, don't even know) which one they're talking about which makes following any news difficult, quite often when they are talking about throwing the RM money they are talking about the one that is still government owned.
Personally I think the RM should remain wholly public because the service offers a substantial benefit to society that is not really reflected in the market mechanism. Consider, for example, that most of the benefits of a good postal service are enjoyed by the receiver of mail, not the person who pays for it. Secondly I strongly expect the mail is the type of service where monopoly scale efficiency outweighs the benefits from competition.
Interpol? From TFA:
Interpol already work on computer crime so TFA's argument may be implemented as a specific department, likely utilising legal agreements and working practices that already exist. Quite possibly, such a function already exists at Interpol and TFA is effectively arguing that it would be beneficial for it to change it's approach and have greater resources (such as teams of white hats).