but that does not envoke the same emotion in the masses as "Jobs" do.
Which your congress spokesperson might have a hard time trying to disagree with this bill.
By and large people don't seem to be biting on the "lost jobs" argument against piracy. How long have they been showing those lame anti-piracy ads before movies that claim that piracy costs jobs for the little people on the sets? And how much has that impacted piracy online? Yeah, none at all. People don't seem to buy that line of argument, so I doubt this bill will find great support among the populace.
However, I figure they'll find a way to claim it's to "protect the children" before long, or failing that drag out the "fight terrorists" excuse. Those excuses seem to work better with the public.
Yah, I agree it he probably is a huge jerk and should've given up any passwords or other info when he was canned, just out of professionalism(and maybe a little "here's the knife, cut your own wrists").
Granted this is all speculation but I could see him feeling he was in a no-win situation. If he gave them the passwords and documentation and they fucked up the network they'd come after him claiming he sabotaged it. If he didn't, they'd claim he was holding it hostage. If you were in that situation (or just felt like you were), which option would you choose?
While not my favorite magazine, EGM takes at least a partial stand against this type of thing. They refused to go along with the ridiculous restrictions Konami wanted to place on reviews of Metal Gear Solid 4, choosing to tell their readers about Konami's actions and publishing a round table discussion about the game instead of a review. They also declined to give it a score, although I think they plan to do a proper review later after obtaining a retail copy on their own. They've also talked about this type of thing in the past, I remember an editor's note about it. There are companies that won't give EGM any pre-release info on games at all because EGM refuses to play along with their restrictions.
So, I don't really understand their business model here. Unless they offer some "value added" over the normal Wikipedia (quicker load times, vetted articles, better search, etc.), then they can't hope to attract eyeballs to their adds.
Wikipedia's blocked their pulling pages dynamically but you can still see the real business plan on the site. Check out the very bottom of the page. See all those links? That's the real prize, they were doing a dynamic mirror of Wikipedia so they'd have lots and lots of unique articles to toss spam links on. All those pages linking to the spam sites would help raise those sites page rank, or at least make it more likely people searching for something would run across them.
Basically, just a slightly more creative spammer. Instead of trying to spam their links to forums/shoutboxes/etc. they were pulling the content to them and tagging on their links instead.
How about just blocking the 88 groups that have been identified as carrying child porn? That's quite doable and they could even include a provision to drop other groups if they had more than X reports of child porn in them as well. That way they only drop groups that are known to have child porn in them but keep the rest for their customers.
I think Cuomo's mostly concerned that they took no action on the groups they reported in the sting. If they did something like the above it would probably satisfy him because they're acting on reports (which they should have been doing anyway).
Similarly, Verizon can choose to not carry a wide swath of net.news, provided their reasoning for not carrying it fills a technical requirement. All they have to say in front of a judge is that it is increasingly difficult to operate and maintain a news server to carry those groups, and any potential lawsuit is over.
Except they've very publicly said they're blocking them because New York's Attorney General leaned on them till they yelled uncle. It's going to be a tad difficult to claim they're difficult to operate after that. I'm skeptical that a claim of "it's too hard to tell which groups we should block" will fare much better when the AG's office only identified 88 groups, and those were already identified for them. Choosing to not carry some groups and carry others isn't hard with NNTP server software either. Lots of places have been doing so for years already. (For example not carrying the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy but carrying the rest of alt.*.)
If it even sees the inside of a courtroom. Last I checked, Verizon subscribers are tied to binding arbitration.. so good luck with this ever being seen by a judge.
If they can make a case that Verizon is violating the terms of the contract they agreed to when buying service they may still be able to sue them. I don't see any mention of how quickly Verizon is implementing this however. If they're waiting a few months so they can change their terms of service and give customers the opportunity to agree to the new terms or leave they can probably avoid any legal problems. If they do it abruptly there's a definite possibility of claiming breach of contract.
One thing that will probably hurt them is they're dropping more than just alt.*. They're only going to carry the Big 8, so groups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie (all groups the article mentions) are being dropped as well. I think they'd have been much safer just dropping Usenet entirely.
Actually, it's far worse than anyone thought. They aren't filtering a few minor websites, they are actually blocking major portions of USENET:
In a way I want to say good, since this was not forced on these companies via a law, they're going to be violating their agreements with their subscribers! Time Warner might get away with it since they're just dropping Usenet entirely, but since that's part of the service their users paid for and they're doing it so suddenly I could see some lawsuits about deceptive business practices. Sprint blocking all of alt.* is asking for trouble since there are lots of groups that have very legitimate uses, non-binary groups even, so I foresee some lawsuits about that. And Verizon may or may not be in trouble depending on what they block.
I have hope that lawsuits against the companies in this case will work because they can focus on the removal of access to non-pornographic materials. That way they can completely avoid being labeled as pedophiles/supporting child pornography. And since Cuomo's office themselves say they only found 88 newsgroups with child porn in them the companies are going to have trouble justifying this. It is possible to not carry specific groups, all three companies could easily block the 88 groups only and have not risked any legal troubles.
What I can't understand is how MediaDefender has been getting away with illegal DoS attacks for years, when ANY of us would be put in prison for doing it. Who have they paid off to be able to break the law with impunity?
Mostly they've gotten away with it because they've been attacking trackers that had mostly (if not all) illegal content on them. The owners of those trackers aren't about to risk calling up the FBI to report the DoS when there's a chance they might get charged for copyright violations. And so, MediaDefender didn't get reported.
Not to defend the vigilante actions of "the industry" here; but who's to say that the fake torrents injected into the tracker by them were the ONLY ones on it? Surely if they could find trackers with backdoors, so could others. For all we know R3's tracker had become a clearinghouse for all sorts of "community mirroring" projects.
I hate to feed trolls, but this needs to be pointed out: R3's still in the clear because they took action to both remove the illicit torrents and close the backdoor as soon as they found out about it. The DMCA, of all things, would protect them. Mistakes happen and the DMCA even recognizes that. Companies are given shelter as long as they remove offending content as soon as made aware of it. In this case they found it themselves and quickly removed it. They're completely clear under the law.
MediaDefender however blatantly violated several federal laws about computer crime, and R3 has plenty of evidence. The FBI is already investigating and R3 suffered a measurable loss due to MediaDefender's actions. I'd say they're in deep shit.
*sigh*... I know, I know. MediaDefender will likely claim that some poor (scapegoated) bastard employee of theirs did it without authorization, yadda yadda... then said poor bastard will get to watch in horror as his entire life goes down the toilet.
While this is certainly a time honored tactic for companies to use, it can backfire as well. Said poor employee may know more about MediaDefender's actions than they'd like the FBI to know about, and facing their life going down the tubes would probably be quite happy to tell the FBI all about it. The FBI very well might decide they like the chance to go after bigger fish (makes them look better since they can tout to the press how they're doing things to stop crime online) and may give the employee immunity (or a plea bargain) and start investigating MediaDefender even more thoroughly.
Note I'm not saying this would definitely happen, but it's a possibility and I think we all know that MediaDefender probably has a huge amount of skeletons in their closet. They'll have to play this one very carefully, and they can't count on the MPAA/RIAA bailing them out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that that particular aspect of this law is unenforcable, as there is no way you can establish the age of animated characters other than by asking the artists unless they are very obviously babies\small children as with lolicon type 'art'.
Good luck with that, already it's not uncommon to see characters that are "legal lolis", women who haven't developed but are 20+. It's more common in H games but it turns up in anime some too, for example the teacher in Doki Doki School Hours. She looks like she's a grade schooler but she's in her 20s. And while it's not terribly common there are cases of this occurring in real life so it's not completely fantasy. So if the author swears the girl who looks like she's 8 years old is really 25 does that mean it's OK? Or will the law just allow the police/prosecutors/etc. to decide what age they think the girl is supposed to be and prosecute based on that? I'm guessing it'll be the latter and that path will lead to horrid abuse, people will be getting thrown in jail that never really committed a crime.
This is about control, not protecting any children.
I believe what they're trying to do is "protect" against counterfeited items like designer bags/clothes/sunglasses/etc. In those cases it's a design patent that's being infringed so they're considering it IP. It's even more silly then as there are plenty of laws dealing with counterfeit goods already, they don't need this insane proposal to enforce that.
Of course this isn't really about counterfeiting and copyright infringement, it's about control.
I think the hatred for it is overstated, and largely perpetuated by people who don't use it
I've been using it regularly on a new laptop since January and I absolutely despise it. I'm also really sick of seeing people say what you did: just because YOU like it doesn't mean all the people saying it sucks don't really hate it. I'm sure there are some that bitch about it who haven't tried it, but then again I'm sure there are some who claim it's great who haven't tried it either so they balance out.
So why do I hate Vista? I have several very good reasons:
Vista refuses to show my XP machines under Network (what used to be called My Network Places in XP), I'm always forced to manually type in the address in the address bar to browse the shares on a computer. Yes I know about the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder that needs to be installed on XP machines, and yes it's installed, and yes it's working. Vista does show all the computers in the Network Map and shows the correct network topology, but none of the computers can be clicked on. The shares are browseable, just Vista refuses to make it easy to get to them. (Mapping network drives for all of the shares just isn't practical.)
Vista really hates my Linux box. In addition to refusing to show the shares on it under Network it's difficult to get it to connect. It makes me try several times (a random number, anywhere from 2 to over 30) until it'll finally connect. This is particularly annoying because I can watch Samba's log file when it does this and it doesn't actually attempt to connect until the time it finally works. It just keeps telling me that the login info is invalid but doesn't actually attempt to connect to the server to find out. Once it does it connects immediately. Frankly I find this behavior a tad suspicious, why does it only do this on Samba shares but not XP ones? Whatever the reason it's inexcusable, none of the XP machines have ever had problems connecting to the Samba shares.
Breaking standard UI conventions for something different that provides no benefit. The best example of this is that you can no longer right click on the back arrow in Windows Explorer to bring up a list of previous locations. No, NOW you have to click on a little down arrow next to the forward button to get this list (which shows forward and back both). Was there any real reason to break this? I can't think of any, they could have left right click behavior in and still added the arrow link for left clicking as well. This wastes my time a lot, even after 4 months of using Vista I can't get used to this. Another example is removing the up directory button and making you click on the name of the directory above your current one in the address bar. This is not intuitive at all.
Near constant disc activity until I disabled searching and ReadyBoost. I had serious problems with this when using Firefox, I believe it was constantly indexing Firefox's cache for search. Why? I have no idea but it was very common to open a new tab and wait for a full minute while the disc would thrash. The laptop's got plenty of RAM (1GB) and once I disabled those two services the thrashing mostly stopped so it apparently wasn't swapping. I ran Vista with those two services active for the first 2 months so I gave them plenty of time to prove they were beneficial, and they simply weren't.
Blue screens. Vista's blue-screened on me at least 3 times since I got the laptop. I haven't seen a blue screen on XP in so long I couldn't even tell you when it last occurred. But it seems to be a far more common occurrence with Vista. This in particular reminds me a lot of Windows ME.
There are other things but they're more minor, the above cut into my productivity the most for no good reason. I've given Vista a chance but it's days are looking numbered, I'm probably going to go to XP Pro soon as I'm tired of Vista wasting my time.
How the hell did this get modded insightful? You're comparing apples and oranges here and you should know it. To wit:
The OP is wrong. We pay for lots of things long after they're created, based on a theory of credit or cost spreading. For example, a bank pays the people who built your house up front, because most people don't have that kind of cash sitting around to do it themselves. You pay the bank for 30 years. The job is done.
The OP's right, you're wrong. In the case you specify you're paying the bank for 30 years for giving you a loan. You're paying back that loan + interest. And it's you that pays the builders -- from the money the bank loaned you. The bank's not being paid for your house for 30 years, they're being paid back their money they lent you. If you don't pay up they can take your house away from you, but you _own_ the house until that point. No one in this situation is getting paid more than once for the service they provide. The builders get paid once for building the house and the bank's getting paid once for letting you have a loan. The bank's just letting you spread your loan payments out over time so that you can afford to pay them back. (Oh and they'll earn more interest if you don't pay it off early so they're more than happy to let you take the full 30 years.)
You pay insurance premiums every month even though the agreement was created years ago. The insurance company isn't actually providing you with hundreds or thousands of dollars in service every month. You can only afford to have insurance because millions of other people are sharing the cost with you. You pay that bill, even if your lifetime payments actually add up to more than the policy limit, and even if you never actually make a claim.
Actually your insurance company is providing you that service every month -- if you have an accident/etc. that qualifies as a claim on the policy. The rest of the time you're paying a fee to insure that they will cover you if something happens. Basically you're paying them to "insure" you can recover from catastrophic incidents. That others are paying into the pool as well is irrelevant, each of them is paying for the same service, they're not throwing money at nothing. As for lifetime payments being more than the policy limit, you can self-insure if you think that'll occur. Lots of companies do it, some people do as well. Most people aren't comfortable with self-insuring so they pay a company to insure them instead. The company's not getting paid for the same thing repeatedly, you're paying to make sure that they'll cover you each month in case something occurs. If you don't pay your premium for February and then have a wreck that month you'll find out that all that money you paid before doesn't help. That was because each payment was for the company to cover you for one period of time (be it 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or a year). And I don't know about you but my car insurance policy number actually changes every 6 months to reflect that it is indeed a new policy.
If you buy a big-ticket item on credit and pay it down over time, your credit card company is profiting from a purchase you made months ago (profit far exceeding their opportunity costs for advancing you the money in the first place).
In this case the store gets paid exactly once for the big-ticket item and you pay exactly once for it. You're paying the credit card company for giving you credit. The interest charged beyond the actual purchase price is their fee for letting you spread that big-ticket item's purchase out over time. Again, no one is getting paid more than once here. You pay interest to the credit card company until you've paid the balance off, then you don't. (Unless you charge more stuff to it, which is what they're counting on.)
When you buy into a co-op or timeshare, you're paying for something that was probably paid off years ago and is
1. Strip links from messages. The spammers are trying to game Google's (and other search engine's) page ranking, and they can't do this if you don't allow them to post links. The incentive to spam your site has now gone.
This is exceedingly wishful thinking on your part. We already see sites that strictly add the nofollow to all links in comments so that any URLs in said comments are completely useless for building page rank and yet the spambots still deluge the sites with spam on a constant basis. (Or at least attempt to.) I've seen the same thing happen on sites that do exactly what you suggest. You see spambots trying to use BBCode to link URLs in places that obviously don't use it, and so on. Spambots are automated, their owners don't give a damn if they spew lots of worthless stuff. All that matters is that some exceedingly small fraction of them DO work. And the way they achieve that is by spamming their crap everywhere and anywhere they can find a submit button.
Once a human spammer realises you've added captcha he'll come and have a look to see how easy it is to circumvent (very easy in my case). However after running a test personally he'll see there's no point and (hopefully) remove you from his list of sites to spam.
See above, they don't care and the vast majority of it's all automated. You may stop the bots that aren't prepared for your special CAPTCHA, but you'll still have to waste resources fighting them off.
I was cynical enough to believe that myself, that "Net Neutrality" would die an obscure inside baseball battle in which telcos easily rolled over a few geeks with a sense of history, economics and fair play. But then it turned out to be surprisingly popular and accessible to the public at large. I don't know how it happened, but it did.
I think we have Comcast & BitTorrent to thank for that. Using torrents to download music/movies/etc. is apparently far more mainstream than we thought. So when Comcast started interfering with torrent traffic, and said interference started getting media attention, people got pissed and wanted something done about it.
The real questions are will they stay pissed long enough for something to get done, and will they manage to not get mislead by some of the slimeballs wanting to destroy the Internet as we know it.
It is really not a death wish. Look at what is happening: Comcast is making the connection suck even more for p2p users, meaning that they will defect and become someone else's problem. This then puts strain on the other provider, and leaves Comcast with a light-duty network.
Except Comcast isn't just doing this to p2p users. I'm seeing this exact same thing, have been for months now, and I don't use p2p. The last time I downloaded anything using BitTorrent was in October, it hasn't been run since. And yet Comcast interrupts my web browsing, ssh sessions (want to use scp here to transfer a file to a server? Forget it, it always stalls out.), E-mail, etc. So no, Comcast isn't just targeting p2p users.
I figure it's one of two things: 1. They misconfigured the Sandvine appliances so they fuck with all traffic, or 2. There's someone that is a heavy p2p user on my segment and Comcast just fucks with everyone on the segment.
I should also note that time of day has no bearing on this, I see reset connections on all my traffic 24x7. If there were any alternatives for broadband here I'd have told Comcast to go to hell a long time ago.
While I agree with you, this reasoning may not hold up very well, since the movie more than paid for itself and DVD production at the box office - the DVD is gravy. (Assuming a movie worth getting the DVD for.)
The CD on the other hand doesn't have that - maybe there's a concert tour, but the tour usually makes money on merch and CD sales, so we're back to the CD being the main profit center again.
How about on back catalog releases where the majority of the costs were long ago paid off back when the album first was released? The record companies don't want to lower the wholesale price on the back catalog much either. They basically think $15 is just the price everyone should pay for a CD period.
I remember reading an article around that time that one of the executives at Warner Bros. wanted to make a DVD an impulse buy, with a price matching that of a magazine ($6 or so). At the time, it sounded insane. A few years later, it was a reality: bins of $5 titles at Wal-Mart. Two-for-$5 titles on Black Friday. Even at corner drugstores, $10 DVDs.
I was working at a Wal-mart back when they introduced the $5.50 DVDs (I think that's the price they were at first, I may have it confused with the current price though). There was an article in the company newsletter about it and according to that this was Wal-mart's idea. One of the buyers at HQ got the idea, and managed to convince a studio or two to go along with it. Once it was introduced and they started selling like hotcakes the other studios very quickly decided to jump on the bandwagon, and the rest is history.
Personally I'm glad Wal-mart's putting pressure on the record labels, there's a lot of inefficiency in how they do things. I'm quite certain they could get that price down to around $10 pretty easily if they wanted to. It's really hard to believe that it costs more to produce a CD than it does to produce a DVD when movies cost a hell of a lot more to make. The record companies don't even want to lower the pricing on back catalog CDs, ones where they long ago recouped all investment they made in the actual production and marketing of it.
One thing I thought of: if Wal-mart succeeds in this it should lower wholesale prices for everyone, including the mom and pop record stores. Wal-mart may still get them a bit cheaper (after all they buy in rather large volumes), but if CDs come down to close to $10 wholesale it'll be easier for the small stores to compete. Basically everyone wins -- except the record companies and probably the artists. I'm sure they'll find some way to screw the artists over.
After discussing the situation with Ryerson's IT staff, I found out that the students were told that I knew what they did, the school of engineering was notified of what happened, and their department chair was notified about what happened. I was told they all were going to face disciplinary action and that one of them would face expulsion since he committed a crime with university machines. I wasn't going to chase after them legally, I had no desire to; I just didn't want them installing pirated software on university computers. But Ryerson had some of their own punishments that they were going to mete out.
This is probably standard policy to protect the university itself from any copyright infringement claims. With cases involving university owned computers if they don't punish the offenders quickly and properly then they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit themselves. In this case you didn't intend to sue, but they may have not know that, or just felt it best to not allow an exception to the policy. (I can see a lawyer arguing that since they hadn't gone after all offenders equally that they weren't really enforcing their rules.)
In any case that's what happened at a university I worked at years ago. During routine maintenance I discovered one of the student employees in the office was running a Warez FTP server off his office computer (university owned) with many thousands of dollars worth of software on it. Normally we tried to keep punishment within the department but because of all the copyright infringement we had to turn him over to the student disciplinary process immediately, just to make sure that the department and university couldn't be help liable for what the student did. Admittedly the scale of things is vastly different here and this university was in the US instead of Canada, but I can see the same logic easily applying. I can say for certain that given the exact same case you've described we would have had to turn the student over to the student disciplinary process as well.
The OP is saying that's not going to happen - Broadband will still be $50/mo regardless of how much you use, PLUS a bandwidth surcharge.
And I'll bet that they still won't upgrade their network and will be crying foul again in a few years when things have changed enough that they'll have to up the base limits (at some point it will become so blatantly obvious that they're too low that the government would decide to get involved). How many times have we paid for upgraded networks by company X already and still not seen them happen? (The phone companies in particular.)
I'm in Comcast's Memphis market and haven't yet had any problems with BitTorrent. I don't doubt that the filter will probably be rolled out to all service areas, though, if it proves reliable and doesn't get them sued.
They started using it in the Knoxville market about a month ago, so I'd say your days are numbered. The appliances are quite heavy-handed, when they kick in they'll kill connections that aren't torrent related (web, SSH, etc.). Apparently once the appliances decide you're using Bittorrent they just start sending RST packets on any connection you might have open. That's been my experience at least, my service has gone from pretty good to absolutely abysmal, and no other options for broadband where I live.:(
People aren't COMPLETELY retarded. Only mostly. If there's an increase in accidents, people will slow down. And the solution is to put a speed limit NEAR what people are going through the area at.
In fact this is how speed limits are supposed to be determined, it's called the 85th percentile speed, the speed at or below which 85% of traffic moves. There's a good article here explaining how it works. One pertinent quote is this one:
Contrary to popular belief, lower speed limits do not necessarily improve safety. The more uniform the speeds of vehicles in a traffic stream, the less chance there is for conflict or crashes. Posting speed limits lower or higher than what the majority of drivers are traveling produces two distinct groups of drivers: 1) those attempting to observe the speed limit and 2) those driving at speeds they feel are reasonable and prudent. These differences can result in increased crashes due to tailgating, improper passing, and reckless driving.
So deliberately posting a speed limit below the 85th percentile speed is not only greedy, it's likely to get more people killed as well. The only benefit is to allow more tickets to be written. Personally I'd prefer to see less people wreck.
Laws on speed limits are modeled after this, and should be nearly the same in all states in the US. As someone pointed out on Slashdot before (which is where I learned all this), you can often get out of a speeding ticket by asking if a traffic survey has been done recently on the road in question. (These have to be done every so many years to ensure the speed limit is still at the 85th percentile speed, it can change over time.) If one hasn't been done in the required time the speed limit's not valid as far as enforcement goes, and if the speed posted doesn't agree with the survey you're also likely to have your ticket dismissed. I've never tried this myself (I try not to speed nowadays myself) and it'll probably vary somewhat depending on where you're located and also on the judge you deal with, but speed limits are supposed to make sense so that only the truly dangerous drivers are breaking them. If everyone's speeding then it's definitely not the 85th percentile speed.
Bullshit. If organ donation is mandatory then all I have to do is find somebody that is a good match for me and kill him. If I'm at the top of the list I win and so do several others.
For an interesting look at the logical extension of the repercussions of that type of thing, I recommend reading some of Larry Niven's novels/short story collections, in particular Flatlander (the collection of short stories about Gil "The ARM" Hamilton) and The Patchwork Girl. In his future there's both stasis (to keep organs around until needed) and rejection isn't a problem (they've worked out all the rejection factors), so transplants are pretty much a routine procedure. And of course demand for them goes up, and death sentences for crimes = adding the person (in parts) to the organ banks.... You can get an idea of where that's heading. There's also issues with organ-leggers (think bootleggers, only trading in... bodies/organs). Interesting, and a bit scary stuff but it makes you think.
Have you ever seen someone from a good old german "Eichamt" turn up in your grocery store and check alle the balances? It's really fun, when he pulls out all those gauged weights and then tells you your balance is wrong (by.01 g!) - and you are not at the chemist's shop.
At least in my state (Tennessee) they do this as well. I've personally witnessed them come in and check the accuracy of the scale at a register I was working on at the time. I was impressed that they don't just check it at one weight, they use a series of them progressively upping the weight and checking the result. The scale has to be correct up to a certain weight, but they test past that weight as well. The one at my register was correct 2-3 sets past the required weight and even when it was off it was by a hundredth of an ounce. I'm not sure how often they check though, it may just be yearly, but having witnessed the test personally I feel a lot more confident when buying weighed stuff at the store.
Are you sure you buy 500g of strawberries, if that's what it says on the sticker? - Really?
Here it'd more likely be 1 pound, but yes, I'd be quite sure about it. The scales are given a sticker with the most recent test date that's from the department that does this stuff (it's one that would be quite difficult to forge, and I'm sure there are quite heavy fines if a store does so) so you can tell if it's been checked and when.
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but that does not envoke the same emotion in the masses as "Jobs" do.
Which your congress spokesperson might have a hard time trying to disagree with this bill.
By and large people don't seem to be biting on the "lost jobs" argument against piracy. How long have they been showing those lame anti-piracy ads before movies that claim that piracy costs jobs for the little people on the sets? And how much has that impacted piracy online? Yeah, none at all. People don't seem to buy that line of argument, so I doubt this bill will find great support among the populace.
However, I figure they'll find a way to claim it's to "protect the children" before long, or failing that drag out the "fight terrorists" excuse. Those excuses seem to work better with the public.
Yah, I agree it he probably is a huge jerk and should've given up any passwords or other info when he was canned, just out of professionalism(and maybe a little "here's the knife, cut your own wrists").
Granted this is all speculation but I could see him feeling he was in a no-win situation. If he gave them the passwords and documentation and they fucked up the network they'd come after him claiming he sabotaged it. If he didn't, they'd claim he was holding it hostage. If you were in that situation (or just felt like you were), which option would you choose?
While not my favorite magazine, EGM takes at least a partial stand against this type of thing. They refused to go along with the ridiculous restrictions Konami wanted to place on reviews of Metal Gear Solid 4, choosing to tell their readers about Konami's actions and publishing a round table discussion about the game instead of a review. They also declined to give it a score, although I think they plan to do a proper review later after obtaining a retail copy on their own. They've also talked about this type of thing in the past, I remember an editor's note about it. There are companies that won't give EGM any pre-release info on games at all because EGM refuses to play along with their restrictions.
Wikipedia's blocked their pulling pages dynamically but you can still see the real business plan on the site. Check out the very bottom of the page. See all those links? That's the real prize, they were doing a dynamic mirror of Wikipedia so they'd have lots and lots of unique articles to toss spam links on. All those pages linking to the spam sites would help raise those sites page rank, or at least make it more likely people searching for something would run across them.
Basically, just a slightly more creative spammer. Instead of trying to spam their links to forums/shoutboxes/etc. they were pulling the content to them and tagging on their links instead.
How about just blocking the 88 groups that have been identified as carrying child porn? That's quite doable and they could even include a provision to drop other groups if they had more than X reports of child porn in them as well. That way they only drop groups that are known to have child porn in them but keep the rest for their customers.
I think Cuomo's mostly concerned that they took no action on the groups they reported in the sting. If they did something like the above it would probably satisfy him because they're acting on reports (which they should have been doing anyway).
Except they've very publicly said they're blocking them because New York's Attorney General leaned on them till they yelled uncle. It's going to be a tad difficult to claim they're difficult to operate after that. I'm skeptical that a claim of "it's too hard to tell which groups we should block" will fare much better when the AG's office only identified 88 groups, and those were already identified for them. Choosing to not carry some groups and carry others isn't hard with NNTP server software either. Lots of places have been doing so for years already. (For example not carrying the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy but carrying the rest of alt.*.)
If it even sees the inside of a courtroom. Last I checked, Verizon subscribers are tied to binding arbitration.. so good luck with this ever being seen by a judge.If they can make a case that Verizon is violating the terms of the contract they agreed to when buying service they may still be able to sue them. I don't see any mention of how quickly Verizon is implementing this however. If they're waiting a few months so they can change their terms of service and give customers the opportunity to agree to the new terms or leave they can probably avoid any legal problems. If they do it abruptly there's a definite possibility of claiming breach of contract.
One thing that will probably hurt them is they're dropping more than just alt.*. They're only going to carry the Big 8, so groups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie (all groups the article mentions) are being dropped as well. I think they'd have been much safer just dropping Usenet entirely.
In a way I want to say good, since this was not forced on these companies via a law, they're going to be violating their agreements with their subscribers! Time Warner might get away with it since they're just dropping Usenet entirely, but since that's part of the service their users paid for and they're doing it so suddenly I could see some lawsuits about deceptive business practices. Sprint blocking all of alt.* is asking for trouble since there are lots of groups that have very legitimate uses, non-binary groups even, so I foresee some lawsuits about that. And Verizon may or may not be in trouble depending on what they block.
I have hope that lawsuits against the companies in this case will work because they can focus on the removal of access to non-pornographic materials. That way they can completely avoid being labeled as pedophiles/supporting child pornography. And since Cuomo's office themselves say they only found 88 newsgroups with child porn in them the companies are going to have trouble justifying this. It is possible to not carry specific groups, all three companies could easily block the 88 groups only and have not risked any legal troubles.
Mostly they've gotten away with it because they've been attacking trackers that had mostly (if not all) illegal content on them. The owners of those trackers aren't about to risk calling up the FBI to report the DoS when there's a chance they might get charged for copyright violations. And so, MediaDefender didn't get reported.
I hate to feed trolls, but this needs to be pointed out: R3's still in the clear because they took action to both remove the illicit torrents and close the backdoor as soon as they found out about it. The DMCA, of all things, would protect them. Mistakes happen and the DMCA even recognizes that. Companies are given shelter as long as they remove offending content as soon as made aware of it. In this case they found it themselves and quickly removed it. They're completely clear under the law.
MediaDefender however blatantly violated several federal laws about computer crime, and R3 has plenty of evidence. The FBI is already investigating and R3 suffered a measurable loss due to MediaDefender's actions. I'd say they're in deep shit.
While this is certainly a time honored tactic for companies to use, it can backfire as well. Said poor employee may know more about MediaDefender's actions than they'd like the FBI to know about, and facing their life going down the tubes would probably be quite happy to tell the FBI all about it. The FBI very well might decide they like the chance to go after bigger fish (makes them look better since they can tout to the press how they're doing things to stop crime online) and may give the employee immunity (or a plea bargain) and start investigating MediaDefender even more thoroughly.
Note I'm not saying this would definitely happen, but it's a possibility and I think we all know that MediaDefender probably has a huge amount of skeletons in their closet. They'll have to play this one very carefully, and they can't count on the MPAA/RIAA bailing them out.
Good luck with that, already it's not uncommon to see characters that are "legal lolis", women who haven't developed but are 20+. It's more common in H games but it turns up in anime some too, for example the teacher in Doki Doki School Hours. She looks like she's a grade schooler but she's in her 20s. And while it's not terribly common there are cases of this occurring in real life so it's not completely fantasy. So if the author swears the girl who looks like she's 8 years old is really 25 does that mean it's OK? Or will the law just allow the police/prosecutors/etc. to decide what age they think the girl is supposed to be and prosecute based on that? I'm guessing it'll be the latter and that path will lead to horrid abuse, people will be getting thrown in jail that never really committed a crime.
This is about control, not protecting any children.
I believe what they're trying to do is "protect" against counterfeited items like designer bags/clothes/sunglasses/etc. In those cases it's a design patent that's being infringed so they're considering it IP. It's even more silly then as there are plenty of laws dealing with counterfeit goods already, they don't need this insane proposal to enforce that.
Of course this isn't really about counterfeiting and copyright infringement, it's about control.
I've been using it regularly on a new laptop since January and I absolutely despise it. I'm also really sick of seeing people say what you did: just because YOU like it doesn't mean all the people saying it sucks don't really hate it. I'm sure there are some that bitch about it who haven't tried it, but then again I'm sure there are some who claim it's great who haven't tried it either so they balance out.
So why do I hate Vista? I have several very good reasons:
There are other things but they're more minor, the above cut into my productivity the most for no good reason. I've given Vista a chance but it's days are looking numbered, I'm probably going to go to XP Pro soon as I'm tired of Vista wasting my time.
How the hell did this get modded insightful? You're comparing apples and oranges here and you should know it. To wit:
The OP is wrong. We pay for lots of things long after they're created, based on a theory of credit or cost spreading. For example, a bank pays the people who built your house up front, because most people don't have that kind of cash sitting around to do it themselves. You pay the bank for 30 years. The job is done.
The OP's right, you're wrong. In the case you specify you're paying the bank for 30 years for giving you a loan. You're paying back that loan + interest. And it's you that pays the builders -- from the money the bank loaned you. The bank's not being paid for your house for 30 years, they're being paid back their money they lent you. If you don't pay up they can take your house away from you, but you _own_ the house until that point. No one in this situation is getting paid more than once for the service they provide. The builders get paid once for building the house and the bank's getting paid once for letting you have a loan. The bank's just letting you spread your loan payments out over time so that you can afford to pay them back. (Oh and they'll earn more interest if you don't pay it off early so they're more than happy to let you take the full 30 years.)
You pay insurance premiums every month even though the agreement was created years ago. The insurance company isn't actually providing you with hundreds or thousands of dollars in service every month. You can only afford to have insurance because millions of other people are sharing the cost with you. You pay that bill, even if your lifetime payments actually add up to more than the policy limit, and even if you never actually make a claim.
Actually your insurance company is providing you that service every month -- if you have an accident/etc. that qualifies as a claim on the policy. The rest of the time you're paying a fee to insure that they will cover you if something happens. Basically you're paying them to "insure" you can recover from catastrophic incidents. That others are paying into the pool as well is irrelevant, each of them is paying for the same service, they're not throwing money at nothing. As for lifetime payments being more than the policy limit, you can self-insure if you think that'll occur. Lots of companies do it, some people do as well. Most people aren't comfortable with self-insuring so they pay a company to insure them instead. The company's not getting paid for the same thing repeatedly, you're paying to make sure that they'll cover you each month in case something occurs. If you don't pay your premium for February and then have a wreck that month you'll find out that all that money you paid before doesn't help. That was because each payment was for the company to cover you for one period of time (be it 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or a year). And I don't know about you but my car insurance policy number actually changes every 6 months to reflect that it is indeed a new policy.
If you buy a big-ticket item on credit and pay it down over time, your credit card company is profiting from a purchase you made months ago (profit far exceeding their opportunity costs for advancing you the money in the first place).
In this case the store gets paid exactly once for the big-ticket item and you pay exactly once for it. You're paying the credit card company for giving you credit. The interest charged beyond the actual purchase price is their fee for letting you spread that big-ticket item's purchase out over time. Again, no one is getting paid more than once here. You pay interest to the credit card company until you've paid the balance off, then you don't. (Unless you charge more stuff to it, which is what they're counting on.)
When you buy into a co-op or timeshare, you're paying for something that was probably paid off years ago and is
This is exceedingly wishful thinking on your part. We already see sites that strictly add the nofollow to all links in comments so that any URLs in said comments are completely useless for building page rank and yet the spambots still deluge the sites with spam on a constant basis. (Or at least attempt to.) I've seen the same thing happen on sites that do exactly what you suggest. You see spambots trying to use BBCode to link URLs in places that obviously don't use it, and so on. Spambots are automated, their owners don't give a damn if they spew lots of worthless stuff. All that matters is that some exceedingly small fraction of them DO work. And the way they achieve that is by spamming their crap everywhere and anywhere they can find a submit button.
Once a human spammer realises you've added captcha he'll come and have a look to see how easy it is to circumvent (very easy in my case). However after running a test personally he'll see there's no point and (hopefully) remove you from his list of sites to spam.See above, they don't care and the vast majority of it's all automated. You may stop the bots that aren't prepared for your special CAPTCHA, but you'll still have to waste resources fighting them off.
Spammers are ruining the Internet I'm afraid.
I think we have Comcast & BitTorrent to thank for that. Using torrents to download music/movies/etc. is apparently far more mainstream than we thought. So when Comcast started interfering with torrent traffic, and said interference started getting media attention, people got pissed and wanted something done about it.
The real questions are will they stay pissed long enough for something to get done, and will they manage to not get mislead by some of the slimeballs wanting to destroy the Internet as we know it.
Except Comcast isn't just doing this to p2p users. I'm seeing this exact same thing, have been for months now, and I don't use p2p. The last time I downloaded anything using BitTorrent was in October, it hasn't been run since. And yet Comcast interrupts my web browsing, ssh sessions (want to use scp here to transfer a file to a server? Forget it, it always stalls out.), E-mail, etc. So no, Comcast isn't just targeting p2p users.
I figure it's one of two things: 1. They misconfigured the Sandvine appliances so they fuck with all traffic, or 2. There's someone that is a heavy p2p user on my segment and Comcast just fucks with everyone on the segment.
I should also note that time of day has no bearing on this, I see reset connections on all my traffic 24x7. If there were any alternatives for broadband here I'd have told Comcast to go to hell a long time ago.
The CD on the other hand doesn't have that - maybe there's a concert tour, but the tour usually makes money on merch and CD sales, so we're back to the CD being the main profit center again.
How about on back catalog releases where the majority of the costs were long ago paid off back when the album first was released? The record companies don't want to lower the wholesale price on the back catalog much either. They basically think $15 is just the price everyone should pay for a CD period.
I was working at a Wal-mart back when they introduced the $5.50 DVDs (I think that's the price they were at first, I may have it confused with the current price though). There was an article in the company newsletter about it and according to that this was Wal-mart's idea. One of the buyers at HQ got the idea, and managed to convince a studio or two to go along with it. Once it was introduced and they started selling like hotcakes the other studios very quickly decided to jump on the bandwagon, and the rest is history.
Personally I'm glad Wal-mart's putting pressure on the record labels, there's a lot of inefficiency in how they do things. I'm quite certain they could get that price down to around $10 pretty easily if they wanted to. It's really hard to believe that it costs more to produce a CD than it does to produce a DVD when movies cost a hell of a lot more to make. The record companies don't even want to lower the pricing on back catalog CDs, ones where they long ago recouped all investment they made in the actual production and marketing of it.
One thing I thought of: if Wal-mart succeeds in this it should lower wholesale prices for everyone, including the mom and pop record stores. Wal-mart may still get them a bit cheaper (after all they buy in rather large volumes), but if CDs come down to close to $10 wholesale it'll be easier for the small stores to compete. Basically everyone wins -- except the record companies and probably the artists. I'm sure they'll find some way to screw the artists over.
This is probably standard policy to protect the university itself from any copyright infringement claims. With cases involving university owned computers if they don't punish the offenders quickly and properly then they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit themselves. In this case you didn't intend to sue, but they may have not know that, or just felt it best to not allow an exception to the policy. (I can see a lawyer arguing that since they hadn't gone after all offenders equally that they weren't really enforcing their rules.)
In any case that's what happened at a university I worked at years ago. During routine maintenance I discovered one of the student employees in the office was running a Warez FTP server off his office computer (university owned) with many thousands of dollars worth of software on it. Normally we tried to keep punishment within the department but because of all the copyright infringement we had to turn him over to the student disciplinary process immediately, just to make sure that the department and university couldn't be help liable for what the student did. Admittedly the scale of things is vastly different here and this university was in the US instead of Canada, but I can see the same logic easily applying. I can say for certain that given the exact same case you've described we would have had to turn the student over to the student disciplinary process as well.
And I'll bet that they still won't upgrade their network and will be crying foul again in a few years when things have changed enough that they'll have to up the base limits (at some point it will become so blatantly obvious that they're too low that the government would decide to get involved). How many times have we paid for upgraded networks by company X already and still not seen them happen? (The phone companies in particular.)
They started using it in the Knoxville market about a month ago, so I'd say your days are numbered. The appliances are quite heavy-handed, when they kick in they'll kill connections that aren't torrent related (web, SSH, etc.). Apparently once the appliances decide you're using Bittorrent they just start sending RST packets on any connection you might have open. That's been my experience at least, my service has gone from pretty good to absolutely abysmal, and no other options for broadband where I live. :(
In fact this is how speed limits are supposed to be determined, it's called the 85th percentile speed, the speed at or below which 85% of traffic moves. There's a good article here explaining how it works. One pertinent quote is this one:
Contrary to popular belief, lower speed limits do not necessarily improve safety. The more uniform the speeds of vehicles in a traffic stream, the less chance there is for conflict or crashes. Posting speed limits lower or higher than what the majority of drivers are traveling produces two distinct groups of drivers: 1) those attempting to observe the speed limit and 2) those driving at speeds they feel are reasonable and prudent. These differences can result in increased crashes due to tailgating, improper passing, and reckless driving.So deliberately posting a speed limit below the 85th percentile speed is not only greedy, it's likely to get more people killed as well. The only benefit is to allow more tickets to be written. Personally I'd prefer to see less people wreck.
Laws on speed limits are modeled after this, and should be nearly the same in all states in the US. As someone pointed out on Slashdot before (which is where I learned all this), you can often get out of a speeding ticket by asking if a traffic survey has been done recently on the road in question. (These have to be done every so many years to ensure the speed limit is still at the 85th percentile speed, it can change over time.) If one hasn't been done in the required time the speed limit's not valid as far as enforcement goes, and if the speed posted doesn't agree with the survey you're also likely to have your ticket dismissed. I've never tried this myself (I try not to speed nowadays myself) and it'll probably vary somewhat depending on where you're located and also on the judge you deal with, but speed limits are supposed to make sense so that only the truly dangerous drivers are breaking them. If everyone's speeding then it's definitely not the 85th percentile speed.
For an interesting look at the logical extension of the repercussions of that type of thing, I recommend reading some of Larry Niven's novels/short story collections, in particular Flatlander (the collection of short stories about Gil "The ARM" Hamilton) and The Patchwork Girl. In his future there's both stasis (to keep organs around until needed) and rejection isn't a problem (they've worked out all the rejection factors), so transplants are pretty much a routine procedure. And of course demand for them goes up, and death sentences for crimes = adding the person (in parts) to the organ banks.... You can get an idea of where that's heading. There's also issues with organ-leggers (think bootleggers, only trading in... bodies/organs). Interesting, and a bit scary stuff but it makes you think.
At least in my state (Tennessee) they do this as well. I've personally witnessed them come in and check the accuracy of the scale at a register I was working on at the time. I was impressed that they don't just check it at one weight, they use a series of them progressively upping the weight and checking the result. The scale has to be correct up to a certain weight, but they test past that weight as well. The one at my register was correct 2-3 sets past the required weight and even when it was off it was by a hundredth of an ounce. I'm not sure how often they check though, it may just be yearly, but having witnessed the test personally I feel a lot more confident when buying weighed stuff at the store.
Are you sure you buy 500g of strawberries, if that's what it says on the sticker? - Really?Here it'd more likely be 1 pound, but yes, I'd be quite sure about it. The scales are given a sticker with the most recent test date that's from the department that does this stuff (it's one that would be quite difficult to forge, and I'm sure there are quite heavy fines if a store does so) so you can tell if it's been checked and when.