Your line of reasoning is a bit off, but your conclusion is right. The fundamental problem with all these RIAA cases is that the RIAA is using laws drafted to thwart commercial copyright infringers, and applying them against individual infringers. Not only is this a perversion of these laws, it's a perversion of common sense. Say 100,000 people get a song via filesharing. There are two ways to model the filesharing copyright infringement case(s) against them.
The first way is to file a lawsuit against each of them individually. You have 100,000 instances of copyright infringement, and 100,000 defendants. Therefore, by simple arithmetic, each defendant gets charged with illegally making one and only one copy of a song. An adequate fine to discourage this activity is probably about $10-$20 per song. Something on the order of a speeding ticket - you did something bad and got caught, don't do it again. Given the difficulty of enforcement, you might even be able to convince me it should go up to about $250. The exact amount doesn't matter much, as long as it's something people can pay out of one paycheck. The important thing to understand is that in this model each file sharer is only responsible for the one illegal copy s/he makes for her/himself.
The other way to model the infringement case is that there's one ringleader who is behind the whole thing, and that person (or company) needs to be punished. You file suit against that one person, and charge them with making and distributing 100,000 illegal copies of a song. In this case a $200,000-$2 million fine is reasonable. But the important thing in this model is that after you've fined that one person, that's it. All 100,000 cases have been settled by the one fine. The crime has been fully paid for and the party you felt was responsible has been punished. The 100,000 people who got copies of the song illegally are indemnified by the one judgment.
Commercial copyright infringement fits the second model. A company makes bootleg CDs and sells them on the street corner. They get caught and are hit with a massive fine. But the people who bought the bootleg CDs are indemnified by the fine. The fine essentially made all their copies legit because the copyright owner was compensated and then some.
The RIAA is trying (and succeeding) at perverting the distinction between these two models. They're getting $1-$2 million judgments against Ms. Thomas because they keep telling the jury that she's responsible for tens of thousands of illegal copies of the songs which were made via the filesharing network she was on. That follows the second "ringleader" model. They're saying she's responsible for everything, so she should have to pay for it all.
But then they're turning right around and sending letters threatening lawsuits against those same tens of thousands of people, essentially suing them for something they've already sued for and won a judgment for. First they say Ms. Thomas was responsible for those tens of thousands of copies, extract money from her. Then they say someone else was responsible for those tens of thousands of copies, and try to extract money from them. If you use their reasoning and all 100,000 infringers were brought to trial, they'd be fined for a total of 10 billion illegal copies, even though only 100,000 illegal copies were ever made. It is illogical to mix up these two models as they have. It has to be either one or the other.
They keep buying the RIAA's line that she's somehow responsible for the tens of thousands of other people who partially or indirectly downloaded the songs from her. There are two ways to look at this:
100,000 people download a song. Each person is criminally liable for their own download. Fines should thus reflect people trying to be cheap and get a $1 product for free. Something on the order of $2-$20 per song would probably be the right amount.
100,000 people download a song. One person is determined to be the criminal mastermind and fined for the infringement of all of those people. So a fine on the order of $200k-$2 mil is probably the right amount here. But because you've made one person pay for everyone's infringement, that one fine indemnifies the 100,000 from any charges for the crime.
What the RIAA is trying to do is get a fine on this woman as if she were the criminal mastermind behind it all, and then apply the same fine to the other 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way logically. Either each person is responsible for their own actions, or one person is responsible for everyone's actions. It's totally illogical to argue that each person is responsible for everyone's actions.
As has been pointed out, the real problem here is that the RIAA is taking copyright laws written to be used against commercial copyright infringement, and using them against individuals. Commercial copyright infringement (e.g. mass-producing bootleg CDs) fits the "criminal mastermind" model, and the fines were set up to reflect that. If a bootleg shop got caught, they'd be sued, fined, and the people who bought those bootleg CDs weren't liable for anything. Totally different situation, totally different penalties, which the RIAA is misusing (or abusing if you prefer) against individual infringers.
According to many polls, the number one concern this election was the economy. Somehow in the minds of many, the economy is the fault of the Democrats, in spite of the fact that the 2008 candidates left the campaign trail to focus on the rapidly failing economy.
The Republicans couldn't have timed it better. Pillage the economy, let it fail just before the Democrats take office, and two years later when the Dems have halted and begun reversal of the worst economic disaster of all time, the Republicans come in, blaming the Democrats.
You have demonstrated exactly why the Dems lost so many seats this time - the "not our fault" attitude. I saw it in 2008 when they managed to shift all blame for the housing bubble onto the Republicans. "Lack of regulation! All the fault of Republicans! Easy credit for low income people? Why no, that had absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble. We're completely innocent!"
The Democrats didn't see the 2008 election for what it really was - not an endorsement of the Democrat viewpoint that it wasn't their fault, but a repudiation of then-current (primarily Republican) policies and agenda. Emboldened by their "not our fault" attitude, they went ahead with a far-left agenda that doomed them in 2010.
And with the 2010 election now history, you still exhibit the "not our fault" attitude. To you, this election wasn't a repudiation of Democrat policy and agenda. No, it was somehow the result of a Republican conspiracy which tricked the people into thinking the Democrats were at fault.
Wake up. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth. And in the vast majority of cases, nobody really knows whether or not an idea will work until we actually try it. If you think your party has almost never been at fault, has almost never made a mistake, then it is you who is being tricked by your own party, not the rest of the public by the opposition party. You sit comfortably in your safe self-affirming circle of friends with similar political beliefs, mocking and never actually seriously considering what the other side has to say. If you actually read and think about the arguments of both sides, you'll find that like classical physics vs. quantum mechanics, both of them make a lot of sense within a range of circumstances. The ideas only start to fall apart when you try to apply them to all circumstances.
That said, what really happened in 2008 and 2010 is a moderating factor in our political process which even the Founding Fathers didn't foresee. To pass an agenda and make it stick, it isn't sufficient just to get enough votes to pass it, enough votes to overcome a filibuster, and sometimes enough votes to override a veto. You also have to be sure that whatever it is you're passing isn't so extreme that it will incense opposition voters from coming out in huge numbers during the next election. In 2006/2008, it was a charismatic Presidential candidate and Republican policy (primarily Bush) which incensed Democrats and left-leaning voters into turning out in huge numbers. In 2010, it was Democrat health care reform and spending which incensed Republicans, Libertarians, and right-leaning voters into turning out in huge numbers. If you're the party in power, you pass the moderate stuff your party wants, but not the extreme stuff that'll guarantee virtually everyone opposed to you will show up to vote next election.
The emotional, rhetoric-laden argument style that humanities teaches doesn't hold water in the legal profession, because judges are usually very sharp and aren't going to fall for that shit.
Unfortunately it seems to work very well in political ads, which is where the real power is.
But discovery has never been patentable in any other field, and that's what's being discussed in TFA. You can't patent if there's prior art, can't patent something you've found rather than made, and can't patent abstract scientific knowledge.
I'm curious how you'd square that stance with the invention of velcro. It wasn't truly invented - the guy looked at the burrs which stuck to his clothing under a microscope and saw the hook and loop system. So he didn't think up the idea, nature had already invented it. But there was still a massive engineering effort required to replicate the idea synthetically, and the idea was mostly ignored by the textile industry until NASA showed the public that the stuff was actually pretty useful. If it had not been patentable, I'm doubtful anyone would have bothered doing the R&D and PR on it, and we would be without a very useful product today.
I'm holding out similar hope for nanotape - sticky tape based on carbon nanotubes modeled after the microscopic hairs on gecko feet. Nature invented it, but it's proving to be an enormous engineering challenge to replicate it. Without the carrot of patents to spur on R&D, would so many researchers really be trying to make this stuff commercially viable?
Another thing to keep in mind that unlike copyrights which have been abused so much that their duration now spans two lifetimes, patents are only valid for ~20 years. While some industries (e.g. software) move quickly enough that this is intolerably long, for the vast majority of industries 20 years is about the right amount of time for the inventor/discoverer to do the R&D, market the idea, have the idea become popular, and make some money for a few years before the idea falls into the public domain. The harm from patenting stuff which probably shouldn't be patentable isn't as long-lived as with copyrights, so you don't have to err as much on the side of the public domain.
It doesn't sound like it's locking down the hardware or software. It's locking you out of an online service (Xbox Live). Generally, I don't have problems with services which operate this way. A product, you buy and take home, and it's yours to do with as you wish (or should be). In contrast, a service is an ongoing thing. You agree to abide by certain terms (and usually pay a recurring fee), they agree to let you use the service. Violate those terms or fail to provide satisfactory service and either side can break the deal.
The problem here actually stems from the fact that the hardware is needlessly tied to a single service. That's what's turning what should be a service problem into a hardware problem. If the hardware wasn't locked to Xbox Live and you could hop onto whatever other Internet Xbox gaming service was out there, this would be a non-issue. All that would happen is that Microsoft's attempt at control would hurt themselves by cutting people off from their own Xbox Live service, thus driving these people to other services. But because the hardware is locked, the fallout from the error becomes the Xbox owner's problem instead of Microsoft's.
For the obligatory car analogy, imagine if car manufacturers could make it so your car could only run on roads owned by the manufacturer. So Ford cars would only run on Ford roads, GM cars would only run on GM roads, etc., each owner paying a monthly fee to their respective auto manufacturer to use the roads which are being provided as a service. Once the owner is locked in that way, you effectively have a monopoly and free market forces cease to work. There's very little incentive for Ford or GM to improve their respective roads so long as their cars are distinctive enough that most of the purchasing decision is based on the features of the car, not the roads they drive on. If suddenly Ford roads develop potholes, it's a problem for the Ford car owners, not a problem for Ford. They can take as long as they like to fix the potholes because the Ford owners are forced to continue using Ford roads.
OTOH, if cars aren't locked to their manufacturer's roads, and owners are allowed to buy the service to operate on another manufacturer's roads, then Ford owners would simply stop subscribing to Ford roads. They'd switch their subscription to GM roads until the pothole problem was fixed (and probably many of them wouldn't switch back). Now the negatives caused by the problem are correctly directed at the entity which is responsible for dealing with it, and market forces create a huge incentive for Ford to fix those potholes mighty quick to staunch the loss of drivers paying to use their roads. So the real problem here is that the hardware is needlessly tied to a single service provider, causing incidents like this to become a problem for the customer rather than for the manufacturer.
I have to wonder if it's simply local optimization that the bees are using - i.e., "Fly to a close flower not yet visited" - that starts looking like they're solving a much more complex problem? Are they visiting *every* flower on the "map"? Are they ever skipping some? Do they visit the flowers in exactly the same order, or is there variance from bee to bee (or between two trips from the same bee?)
This. I suspect their "solving the traveling salesman problem" is just an artifact of the researchers re-defining the problem after the fact to only include the flowers the bee visited on that particular trip. If you watch bees as they fly around a flowering bush, they do not visit each flower. Unless you're positing that bees somehow know ahead of time which flowers they will or will not visit on the entire trip, all that's going on is a shortest route to/from the hive with a small allowance for deviation to visit flowers slightly off that path.
Making a promise to keep serious illegal and/or immoral information confidential is wrong. Breaking that promise is by far the "lessor of two evils".
In an case, the promise made to keep these classes of information confidential does not include a statement like "I promise to keep any war crimes committed by my country or its agents confidential".
The UCoMJ only requires you to obey lawful orders. Contrary to the thinking of many who don't like or don't know about the military, you can get in trouble for carrying out unlawful orders, like keeping war crimes secret. In fact, if you think there was a war crime committed, the moral and legal thing to do would be to report it to your superiors.
The problem in this case is that apparently Manning decided that an entire war was unlawful and gave to an outside entity all the classified documents pertaining to it on a network he had access to. Not just documents pertaining to a specific war crime. The "collateral murder" video in particular was in the folder of a JAG member, indicating it had already been reported as a possible war crime and the military was already in the process of investigating it. This is the procedure the military followed before deciding that the events in the Abu Ghraib prison constituted illegal abuse, reported it to the public, and court martialed almost a score of soldiers.
Manning (if it was him who released it) stepped way beyond his level of authority, and arguably moral responsibility, in releasing it. He had a role in the system, and it wasn't to act as judge and jury in deciding which information could/should be released. There was no moral quandary over war crimes since the most hotly debated incident to come forth from the leak was already under investigation as a war crime. If he felt the system was corrupt, then the proper avenue to change it would have been to work his way up high enough in the system so that he had the authority to implement those changes. Or failing that, to run for Congress and help pass laws to change it. Or as a risky and last recourse, releasing information specific to that war crime to the public. Not a whole-scale and unreviewed release of every classified document he could get his hands on.
Another problem is the overuse (even abuse) of the confidential classification system. A ton of stuff which clearly isn't and doesn't need to be classified, is, just to be on the safe side. A court needs to set some boundaries on what can and can't be classified. That way, requiring military personnel to classify stuff which clearly doesn't need it becomes an unlawful order, and service members further down the chain of command can legally refuse to overclassify documents.
There are penalties for false DMCA claims but no one goes after the abusers. This should have been established up front and tremendous penalties should be levied against those making false claims. The impact of a false claim has a much larger impact than some individual violating copyrighted materials, IMHO.
There are penalties for false DMCA claims. But unlike the rest of the DMCA which enumerates copious numbers of fines and jail time for different types of copyright infringement, the penalties for false DMCA claims is extraordinarily terse. So terse that I can quote it in full here:
(f) Misrepresentations. - Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section --
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
So basically, your liability for filing a false DMCA takedown notice is limited to paying the other guys' attorney fees, and any damages they suffered. If it's a video that wasn't posted in order to make money (such as this one, whose purpose was educational), then the damages suffered are zero. That section of the law really needs to be beefed up with penalties proportionate to those for knowingly infringing.
The original compositions are in the public domain. Simplified adaptations for amateur piano are derivative works that probably are not.
That argument only holds up if people were taking the derivative works (cleaned up published musical score) and posting it online. The moment they play the piece, the recording of the performance is a derivative work of a derivative work, and thus gains a new copyright owned by the person who played it. That's why you can't post a video of Michael Jackson's Thriller, but it's OK for a prison to post a video of their inmates re-creating Thriller. The new work has added sufficient creative changes to the original to gain a new copyright.
Publishers of sheet music exploited this aspect of copyright for decades. Whenever their copyright on a musical score was about to expire, they would change the type-setting (use slightly different fonts, style of notes, etc) and republish. The changes were deemed creative enough to warrant a new copyright. For them to turn around and claim someone actually playing the public domain score, adding all the creativity which comes with interpretation and expression, doesn't get a new copyright is disingenuous at best.
However, the courts have either tended to ignore that section of copyright law and consider that the license grants you the right to make the needed copies or consider that the sale itself never happened if the medium that was bought contains software. They have ruled, effectively, that if you walk into a store and give money for a shiny disc, that if that disc contains music or movies, you've bought a copy, but if it contains software you've only licensed a copy, which is, to say the least, bizarre.
Here's the sniff test I use to distinguish between buying and licensing.
Does the manufacturer provide free replacements (with nominal material/shipping costs) if the original is destroyed?
Does the manufacturer provide a discount for upgrades, indicating that they understand you've already paid to license some of the content in the new version?
Is some after-market service included with the purchase price? Stuff like patches and updates, or access to an online service.
If the answer is yes to all three, I'd definitely say it's a license. Software usually passes this test, so I generally don't have a problem with software companies claiming you've licensed the software. (Exceptions are mostly due to the license being in perpetuity. So they better not do something which prevents me from using it forever, like shutting down DRM servers. And the issue of reselling the license becomes particularly sticky unless they made clear up-front at the time of sale that I wouldn't be allowed to resell it.)
The weirdness you cite is actually due to the illogical stance the RIAA and MPAA have taken on their products. They don't provide free replacements for destroyed media (except Disney and DVDs), they don't give you discounts for upgrades (e.g. DVD -> BluRay), and they don't provide any free updates or online services with CD or DVD sales. So they're selling you a product, claiming they can control your use of it as if you've licensed it, but providing you with none of the benefits which come with a license. Basically they're claiming the best parts (for them) of both selling and licensing, while shafting us with the worst parts of both selling and licensing.
In contrast, the software industry is usually pretty good about upholding their obligations under the licensing bargain, so I'm less inclined to criticize them for claiming that you've bought a license.
They make the service stations advertise the after-tax price for gasoline. Why not the same with telecom? There's no reason we can't do it that way, other than the phone companies like to be able to advertise plans for below what the bill will be.
Gas prices vary station to station. Phone companies generally advertise one rate for a plan nationwide. Unfortunately the taxes and fees are usually set by local government, so vary considerably nationwide. So unless the company is willing to eat the taxes and fees, they'd lose the ability to advertise a single price nationwide if they were forced to advertise after-tax prices.
There's another possibility which occurred to me. You know all those reports we read warning that our power grid is vulnerable to computer attack? Maybe someone making those warnings got tired of being ignored and decided to demonstrate how easy it was?
They were smart enough to write and deploy a complex virus, but stupid enough to include a reference to an obscure execution date of a prominent Iranian Jew;
The stupidity of including a self-implicating date reference gives everything away. Obviously the whole virus is a plot by Iran to implicate Israel, so they have a good excuse for launching a "retaliatory" strike against Israel once their nuke program has produced a weapon.
But wait! The sophistication of the virus shows that the authors must have studied. And in studying, they would have learned that conspiracy theorists would have come up with the idea that Iran sabotaged themselves to get people to blame Israel. So Israel could've developed the worm themselves, deliberately leaving in "stupid" self-references so people would think they wouldn't have done something so obviously dumb and self-implicating. So clearly we must conclude that it was self-inflicted by Iran.
But then, Iranians are used to having people not trust them. So Iran could've gambled that people would think of Israel misdirecting people into thinking Iran was misdirecting people into thinking Israel did it. So the original theory that Iran did it to implicate Israel still works too.
And for people outside the U.S., if a criminal in another country is found guilty of committing a crime, do you really just want him deported to your country where he can run around free to do whatever he wants? I don't exactly agree with the magnitude of the sentence in this case, but the U.S. had a moral obligation to lock the guy up to protect not just Americans but people in the rest of the world from him.
They have a hobby - making money. It's kinda like managing resources in Starcraft to try to optimize and maximize your income so you can build as quickly as possible. If you're into that stuff, it's a lot of fun. Lobbying government to lower your taxes so you can keep more money is just part of the optimization process of the "game".
Because Washington State has no income tax, it has disproportionately higher sales and property taxes which support the rule of law, public infrastructure, etc.. I'm not necessarily against an income tax, but you would think that if the current level of taxation has worked for decades, then implementing an income tax would mean a lowering of the other taxes to keep the tax burden (and therefore state revenue) about the same. Strangely, I see no such tax cut being proposed.
Which brings us to the real reason for this idea. Like most states which based their spending budgets on the fantasy economy which was the housing boom, Washington State ended up badly in debt when the economy tanked and actual revenue fell far short of projections. Rather than attempting to fix it by cutting spending (y'know, remove the items they added to the budget while in the throes of the fantasy), they're trying to fix it by increasing revenue.
I escaped mostly undamaged from the recent economic downturn because I was fiscally responsible and didn't buy into the (quite obvious to me) fantasy. If there's a lesson to be learned from all this, it's that governments need to learn to be fiscally responsible too. Normally I'm all for taxing the super-rich; but if the rationale for doing it is so government can continue their fiscally irresponsible spending, then I am against it.
There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?
The problem is that if these extras are so cheap that Intel figures they can afford to put them in every CPU even if only a few people buy them, then there's clearly a large disparity between the cost to produce the feature and the current market price for it. Long-term, this typically happens when there's a distinct lack of competition and a natural monopoly is arising. Normally, competition will drive the market price for features down to a small percentage above their cost to produce.
I'm pretty pro-free market and have eaten my share of down-ratings here for it. But that Intel is considering something like this is a pretty big warning sign that the free market isn't working as it should in this market.
It's also ignoring type II errors. Ok, so people with higher testosterone tend to reject making deals regardless of how good they could be. That doesn't make them worse businessmen. To determine that, you also have to figure out how much lower testosterone correlates to making deals which are not in their best interests.
My hunch is, successful CEOs tend to be more testosterone-laden simply because they take more risks. Very few people who play it safe tend to become CEOs, much less successful ones. In other words, being testosterone-laden means you're more likely to fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly, instead of ending up just being average. It doesn't make you a better CEO, it just makes the market more likely to filter you out if you're a bad one.
Nope, absolutely false. Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof.
That's what the OP is getting at. Refusing to accept even the possibility of something's existence unless you're provided with irrefutable proof rests upon the implicit assumption that everything in the universe which exists can be proven to exist. This binary yes / no way of categorizing things in the universe is demonstrably wrong. The observable universe only extends out to a light sphere the size of the age of the universe. It's theoretically possible that there are stars beyond that sphere, but since we can't observe them, we can never prove their existence. That doesn't, however, mean they don't exist. They very well could be there, we just can't prove it. The mathematically concise way of categorizing things is actually ternary - yes / no / can't be determined.
In that respect, of the three groups (theists, agnostics, atheists), agnostics are on the most solid logical footing. Atheists are on the same level as theists since they've both taken a "can't be determined" and jumped to the conclusion on faith that the answer is yes or no. For the theist, their faith is based on trust in hearsay (old written accounts). For atheists, their faith is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the completeness of logic. There very well could be an actor overseeing and able to manipulate the whole universe, but currently doing his damnedest not to be detected. It just falls in the realm of "can't be determined."
A Foucault pendulum. It's only translational reference frames which have no absolute reference (if you and someone else are moving apart at constant direction and speed, you can't tell who is standing still and who is moving, or if both are moving). It's fairly easy to distinguish a rotating reference frame from a non-rotating one since rotation generates phantom centrifugal "forces" (consequently there is only one single absolute, universal non-rotating reference frame). These "forces" are what make a Foucault pendulum appear to rotate.
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I'm curious if this could be used as precedent when it comes to penalties for taking someone's website down with a false DMCA claim.
Your line of reasoning is a bit off, but your conclusion is right. The fundamental problem with all these RIAA cases is that the RIAA is using laws drafted to thwart commercial copyright infringers, and applying them against individual infringers. Not only is this a perversion of these laws, it's a perversion of common sense. Say 100,000 people get a song via filesharing. There are two ways to model the filesharing copyright infringement case(s) against them.
The first way is to file a lawsuit against each of them individually. You have 100,000 instances of copyright infringement, and 100,000 defendants. Therefore, by simple arithmetic, each defendant gets charged with illegally making one and only one copy of a song. An adequate fine to discourage this activity is probably about $10-$20 per song. Something on the order of a speeding ticket - you did something bad and got caught, don't do it again. Given the difficulty of enforcement, you might even be able to convince me it should go up to about $250. The exact amount doesn't matter much, as long as it's something people can pay out of one paycheck. The important thing to understand is that in this model each file sharer is only responsible for the one illegal copy s/he makes for her/himself.
The other way to model the infringement case is that there's one ringleader who is behind the whole thing, and that person (or company) needs to be punished. You file suit against that one person, and charge them with making and distributing 100,000 illegal copies of a song. In this case a $200,000-$2 million fine is reasonable. But the important thing in this model is that after you've fined that one person, that's it. All 100,000 cases have been settled by the one fine. The crime has been fully paid for and the party you felt was responsible has been punished. The 100,000 people who got copies of the song illegally are indemnified by the one judgment.
Commercial copyright infringement fits the second model. A company makes bootleg CDs and sells them on the street corner. They get caught and are hit with a massive fine. But the people who bought the bootleg CDs are indemnified by the fine. The fine essentially made all their copies legit because the copyright owner was compensated and then some.
The RIAA is trying (and succeeding) at perverting the distinction between these two models. They're getting $1-$2 million judgments against Ms. Thomas because they keep telling the jury that she's responsible for tens of thousands of illegal copies of the songs which were made via the filesharing network she was on. That follows the second "ringleader" model. They're saying she's responsible for everything, so she should have to pay for it all.
But then they're turning right around and sending letters threatening lawsuits against those same tens of thousands of people, essentially suing them for something they've already sued for and won a judgment for. First they say Ms. Thomas was responsible for those tens of thousands of copies, extract money from her. Then they say someone else was responsible for those tens of thousands of copies, and try to extract money from them. If you use their reasoning and all 100,000 infringers were brought to trial, they'd be fined for a total of 10 billion illegal copies, even though only 100,000 illegal copies were ever made. It is illogical to mix up these two models as they have. It has to be either one or the other.
They keep buying the RIAA's line that she's somehow responsible for the tens of thousands of other people who partially or indirectly downloaded the songs from her. There are two ways to look at this:
100,000 people download a song. Each person is criminally liable for their own download. Fines should thus reflect people trying to be cheap and get a $1 product for free. Something on the order of $2-$20 per song would probably be the right amount.
100,000 people download a song. One person is determined to be the criminal mastermind and fined for the infringement of all of those people. So a fine on the order of $200k-$2 mil is probably the right amount here. But because you've made one person pay for everyone's infringement, that one fine indemnifies the 100,000 from any charges for the crime.
What the RIAA is trying to do is get a fine on this woman as if she were the criminal mastermind behind it all, and then apply the same fine to the other 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way logically. Either each person is responsible for their own actions, or one person is responsible for everyone's actions. It's totally illogical to argue that each person is responsible for everyone's actions.
As has been pointed out, the real problem here is that the RIAA is taking copyright laws written to be used against commercial copyright infringement, and using them against individuals. Commercial copyright infringement (e.g. mass-producing bootleg CDs) fits the "criminal mastermind" model, and the fines were set up to reflect that. If a bootleg shop got caught, they'd be sued, fined, and the people who bought those bootleg CDs weren't liable for anything. Totally different situation, totally different penalties, which the RIAA is misusing (or abusing if you prefer) against individual infringers.
You have demonstrated exactly why the Dems lost so many seats this time - the "not our fault" attitude. I saw it in 2008 when they managed to shift all blame for the housing bubble onto the Republicans. "Lack of regulation! All the fault of Republicans! Easy credit for low income people? Why no, that had absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble. We're completely innocent!"
The Democrats didn't see the 2008 election for what it really was - not an endorsement of the Democrat viewpoint that it wasn't their fault, but a repudiation of then-current (primarily Republican) policies and agenda. Emboldened by their "not our fault" attitude, they went ahead with a far-left agenda that doomed them in 2010.
And with the 2010 election now history, you still exhibit the "not our fault" attitude. To you, this election wasn't a repudiation of Democrat policy and agenda. No, it was somehow the result of a Republican conspiracy which tricked the people into thinking the Democrats were at fault.
Wake up. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth. And in the vast majority of cases, nobody really knows whether or not an idea will work until we actually try it. If you think your party has almost never been at fault, has almost never made a mistake, then it is you who is being tricked by your own party, not the rest of the public by the opposition party. You sit comfortably in your safe self-affirming circle of friends with similar political beliefs, mocking and never actually seriously considering what the other side has to say. If you actually read and think about the arguments of both sides, you'll find that like classical physics vs. quantum mechanics, both of them make a lot of sense within a range of circumstances. The ideas only start to fall apart when you try to apply them to all circumstances.
That said, what really happened in 2008 and 2010 is a moderating factor in our political process which even the Founding Fathers didn't foresee. To pass an agenda and make it stick, it isn't sufficient just to get enough votes to pass it, enough votes to overcome a filibuster, and sometimes enough votes to override a veto. You also have to be sure that whatever it is you're passing isn't so extreme that it will incense opposition voters from coming out in huge numbers during the next election. In 2006/2008, it was a charismatic Presidential candidate and Republican policy (primarily Bush) which incensed Democrats and left-leaning voters into turning out in huge numbers. In 2010, it was Democrat health care reform and spending which incensed Republicans, Libertarians, and right-leaning voters into turning out in huge numbers. If you're the party in power, you pass the moderate stuff your party wants, but not the extreme stuff that'll guarantee virtually everyone opposed to you will show up to vote next election.
Facebook: "Bad developers! You can't sell private user info to advertisers and data brokers. Only we are allowed to do that!"
Unfortunately it seems to work very well in political ads, which is where the real power is.
I'm curious how you'd square that stance with the invention of velcro. It wasn't truly invented - the guy looked at the burrs which stuck to his clothing under a microscope and saw the hook and loop system. So he didn't think up the idea, nature had already invented it. But there was still a massive engineering effort required to replicate the idea synthetically, and the idea was mostly ignored by the textile industry until NASA showed the public that the stuff was actually pretty useful. If it had not been patentable, I'm doubtful anyone would have bothered doing the R&D and PR on it, and we would be without a very useful product today.
I'm holding out similar hope for nanotape - sticky tape based on carbon nanotubes modeled after the microscopic hairs on gecko feet. Nature invented it, but it's proving to be an enormous engineering challenge to replicate it. Without the carrot of patents to spur on R&D, would so many researchers really be trying to make this stuff commercially viable?
Another thing to keep in mind that unlike copyrights which have been abused so much that their duration now spans two lifetimes, patents are only valid for ~20 years. While some industries (e.g. software) move quickly enough that this is intolerably long, for the vast majority of industries 20 years is about the right amount of time for the inventor/discoverer to do the R&D, market the idea, have the idea become popular, and make some money for a few years before the idea falls into the public domain. The harm from patenting stuff which probably shouldn't be patentable isn't as long-lived as with copyrights, so you don't have to err as much on the side of the public domain.
It doesn't sound like it's locking down the hardware or software. It's locking you out of an online service (Xbox Live). Generally, I don't have problems with services which operate this way. A product, you buy and take home, and it's yours to do with as you wish (or should be). In contrast, a service is an ongoing thing. You agree to abide by certain terms (and usually pay a recurring fee), they agree to let you use the service. Violate those terms or fail to provide satisfactory service and either side can break the deal.
The problem here actually stems from the fact that the hardware is needlessly tied to a single service. That's what's turning what should be a service problem into a hardware problem. If the hardware wasn't locked to Xbox Live and you could hop onto whatever other Internet Xbox gaming service was out there, this would be a non-issue. All that would happen is that Microsoft's attempt at control would hurt themselves by cutting people off from their own Xbox Live service, thus driving these people to other services. But because the hardware is locked, the fallout from the error becomes the Xbox owner's problem instead of Microsoft's.
For the obligatory car analogy, imagine if car manufacturers could make it so your car could only run on roads owned by the manufacturer. So Ford cars would only run on Ford roads, GM cars would only run on GM roads, etc., each owner paying a monthly fee to their respective auto manufacturer to use the roads which are being provided as a service. Once the owner is locked in that way, you effectively have a monopoly and free market forces cease to work. There's very little incentive for Ford or GM to improve their respective roads so long as their cars are distinctive enough that most of the purchasing decision is based on the features of the car, not the roads they drive on. If suddenly Ford roads develop potholes, it's a problem for the Ford car owners, not a problem for Ford. They can take as long as they like to fix the potholes because the Ford owners are forced to continue using Ford roads.
OTOH, if cars aren't locked to their manufacturer's roads, and owners are allowed to buy the service to operate on another manufacturer's roads, then Ford owners would simply stop subscribing to Ford roads. They'd switch their subscription to GM roads until the pothole problem was fixed (and probably many of them wouldn't switch back). Now the negatives caused by the problem are correctly directed at the entity which is responsible for dealing with it, and market forces create a huge incentive for Ford to fix those potholes mighty quick to staunch the loss of drivers paying to use their roads. So the real problem here is that the hardware is needlessly tied to a single service provider, causing incidents like this to become a problem for the customer rather than for the manufacturer.
This. I suspect their "solving the traveling salesman problem" is just an artifact of the researchers re-defining the problem after the fact to only include the flowers the bee visited on that particular trip. If you watch bees as they fly around a flowering bush, they do not visit each flower. Unless you're positing that bees somehow know ahead of time which flowers they will or will not visit on the entire trip, all that's going on is a shortest route to/from the hive with a small allowance for deviation to visit flowers slightly off that path.
It's mincing words. All those speeds are a lot higher than what passes for broadband in most of the U.S.
The UCoMJ only requires you to obey lawful orders. Contrary to the thinking of many who don't like or don't know about the military, you can get in trouble for carrying out unlawful orders, like keeping war crimes secret. In fact, if you think there was a war crime committed, the moral and legal thing to do would be to report it to your superiors.
The problem in this case is that apparently Manning decided that an entire war was unlawful and gave to an outside entity all the classified documents pertaining to it on a network he had access to. Not just documents pertaining to a specific war crime. The "collateral murder" video in particular was in the folder of a JAG member, indicating it had already been reported as a possible war crime and the military was already in the process of investigating it. This is the procedure the military followed before deciding that the events in the Abu Ghraib prison constituted illegal abuse, reported it to the public, and court martialed almost a score of soldiers.
Manning (if it was him who released it) stepped way beyond his level of authority, and arguably moral responsibility, in releasing it. He had a role in the system, and it wasn't to act as judge and jury in deciding which information could/should be released. There was no moral quandary over war crimes since the most hotly debated incident to come forth from the leak was already under investigation as a war crime. If he felt the system was corrupt, then the proper avenue to change it would have been to work his way up high enough in the system so that he had the authority to implement those changes. Or failing that, to run for Congress and help pass laws to change it. Or as a risky and last recourse, releasing information specific to that war crime to the public. Not a whole-scale and unreviewed release of every classified document he could get his hands on.
Another problem is the overuse (even abuse) of the confidential classification system. A ton of stuff which clearly isn't and doesn't need to be classified, is, just to be on the safe side. A court needs to set some boundaries on what can and can't be classified. That way, requiring military personnel to classify stuff which clearly doesn't need it becomes an unlawful order, and service members further down the chain of command can legally refuse to overclassify documents.
There are penalties for false DMCA claims. But unlike the rest of the DMCA which enumerates copious numbers of fines and jail time for different types of copyright infringement, the penalties for false DMCA claims is extraordinarily terse. So terse that I can quote it in full here:
Section 512(f) of the DMCA:
So basically, your liability for filing a false DMCA takedown notice is limited to paying the other guys' attorney fees, and any damages they suffered. If it's a video that wasn't posted in order to make money (such as this one, whose purpose was educational), then the damages suffered are zero. That section of the law really needs to be beefed up with penalties proportionate to those for knowingly infringing.
That argument only holds up if people were taking the derivative works (cleaned up published musical score) and posting it online. The moment they play the piece, the recording of the performance is a derivative work of a derivative work, and thus gains a new copyright owned by the person who played it. That's why you can't post a video of Michael Jackson's Thriller, but it's OK for a prison to post a video of their inmates re-creating Thriller. The new work has added sufficient creative changes to the original to gain a new copyright.
Publishers of sheet music exploited this aspect of copyright for decades. Whenever their copyright on a musical score was about to expire, they would change the type-setting (use slightly different fonts, style of notes, etc) and republish. The changes were deemed creative enough to warrant a new copyright. For them to turn around and claim someone actually playing the public domain score, adding all the creativity which comes with interpretation and expression, doesn't get a new copyright is disingenuous at best.
Here's the sniff test I use to distinguish between buying and licensing.
If the answer is yes to all three, I'd definitely say it's a license. Software usually passes this test, so I generally don't have a problem with software companies claiming you've licensed the software. (Exceptions are mostly due to the license being in perpetuity. So they better not do something which prevents me from using it forever, like shutting down DRM servers. And the issue of reselling the license becomes particularly sticky unless they made clear up-front at the time of sale that I wouldn't be allowed to resell it.)
The weirdness you cite is actually due to the illogical stance the RIAA and MPAA have taken on their products. They don't provide free replacements for destroyed media (except Disney and DVDs), they don't give you discounts for upgrades (e.g. DVD -> BluRay), and they don't provide any free updates or online services with CD or DVD sales. So they're selling you a product, claiming they can control your use of it as if you've licensed it, but providing you with none of the benefits which come with a license. Basically they're claiming the best parts (for them) of both selling and licensing, while shafting us with the worst parts of both selling and licensing.
In contrast, the software industry is usually pretty good about upholding their obligations under the licensing bargain, so I'm less inclined to criticize them for claiming that you've bought a license.
Gas prices vary station to station. Phone companies generally advertise one rate for a plan nationwide. Unfortunately the taxes and fees are usually set by local government, so vary considerably nationwide. So unless the company is willing to eat the taxes and fees, they'd lose the ability to advertise a single price nationwide if they were forced to advertise after-tax prices.
There's another possibility which occurred to me. You know all those reports we read warning that our power grid is vulnerable to computer attack? Maybe someone making those warnings got tired of being ignored and decided to demonstrate how easy it was?
The stupidity of including a self-implicating date reference gives everything away. Obviously the whole virus is a plot by Iran to implicate Israel, so they have a good excuse for launching a "retaliatory" strike against Israel once their nuke program has produced a weapon.
...
But wait! The sophistication of the virus shows that the authors must have studied. And in studying, they would have learned that conspiracy theorists would have come up with the idea that Iran sabotaged themselves to get people to blame Israel. So Israel could've developed the worm themselves, deliberately leaving in "stupid" self-references so people would think they wouldn't have done something so obviously dumb and self-implicating. So clearly we must conclude that it was self-inflicted by Iran.
But then, Iranians are used to having people not trust them. So Iran could've gambled that people would think of Israel misdirecting people into thinking Iran was misdirecting people into thinking Israel did it. So the original theory that Iran did it to implicate Israel still works too.
*points* What in the world could that be!?!
As if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
And for people outside the U.S., if a criminal in another country is found guilty of committing a crime, do you really just want him deported to your country where he can run around free to do whatever he wants? I don't exactly agree with the magnitude of the sentence in this case, but the U.S. had a moral obligation to lock the guy up to protect not just Americans but people in the rest of the world from him.
They have a hobby - making money. It's kinda like managing resources in Starcraft to try to optimize and maximize your income so you can build as quickly as possible. If you're into that stuff, it's a lot of fun. Lobbying government to lower your taxes so you can keep more money is just part of the optimization process of the "game".
Because Washington State has no income tax, it has disproportionately higher sales and property taxes which support the rule of law, public infrastructure, etc.. I'm not necessarily against an income tax, but you would think that if the current level of taxation has worked for decades, then implementing an income tax would mean a lowering of the other taxes to keep the tax burden (and therefore state revenue) about the same. Strangely, I see no such tax cut being proposed.
Which brings us to the real reason for this idea. Like most states which based their spending budgets on the fantasy economy which was the housing boom, Washington State ended up badly in debt when the economy tanked and actual revenue fell far short of projections. Rather than attempting to fix it by cutting spending (y'know, remove the items they added to the budget while in the throes of the fantasy), they're trying to fix it by increasing revenue.
I escaped mostly undamaged from the recent economic downturn because I was fiscally responsible and didn't buy into the (quite obvious to me) fantasy. If there's a lesson to be learned from all this, it's that governments need to learn to be fiscally responsible too. Normally I'm all for taxing the super-rich; but if the rationale for doing it is so government can continue their fiscally irresponsible spending, then I am against it.
The problem is that if these extras are so cheap that Intel figures they can afford to put them in every CPU even if only a few people buy them, then there's clearly a large disparity between the cost to produce the feature and the current market price for it. Long-term, this typically happens when there's a distinct lack of competition and a natural monopoly is arising. Normally, competition will drive the market price for features down to a small percentage above their cost to produce.
I'm pretty pro-free market and have eaten my share of down-ratings here for it. But that Intel is considering something like this is a pretty big warning sign that the free market isn't working as it should in this market.
It's also ignoring type II errors. Ok, so people with higher testosterone tend to reject making deals regardless of how good they could be. That doesn't make them worse businessmen. To determine that, you also have to figure out how much lower testosterone correlates to making deals which are not in their best interests.
My hunch is, successful CEOs tend to be more testosterone-laden simply because they take more risks. Very few people who play it safe tend to become CEOs, much less successful ones. In other words, being testosterone-laden means you're more likely to fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly, instead of ending up just being average. It doesn't make you a better CEO, it just makes the market more likely to filter you out if you're a bad one.
That's what the OP is getting at. Refusing to accept even the possibility of something's existence unless you're provided with irrefutable proof rests upon the implicit assumption that everything in the universe which exists can be proven to exist. This binary yes / no way of categorizing things in the universe is demonstrably wrong. The observable universe only extends out to a light sphere the size of the age of the universe. It's theoretically possible that there are stars beyond that sphere, but since we can't observe them, we can never prove their existence. That doesn't, however, mean they don't exist. They very well could be there, we just can't prove it. The mathematically concise way of categorizing things is actually ternary - yes / no / can't be determined.
In that respect, of the three groups (theists, agnostics, atheists), agnostics are on the most solid logical footing. Atheists are on the same level as theists since they've both taken a "can't be determined" and jumped to the conclusion on faith that the answer is yes or no. For the theist, their faith is based on trust in hearsay (old written accounts). For atheists, their faith is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the completeness of logic. There very well could be an actor overseeing and able to manipulate the whole universe, but currently doing his damnedest not to be detected. It just falls in the realm of "can't be determined."
A Foucault pendulum. It's only translational reference frames which have no absolute reference (if you and someone else are moving apart at constant direction and speed, you can't tell who is standing still and who is moving, or if both are moving). It's fairly easy to distinguish a rotating reference frame from a non-rotating one since rotation generates phantom centrifugal "forces" (consequently there is only one single absolute, universal non-rotating reference frame). These "forces" are what make a Foucault pendulum appear to rotate.