"Good will" is part of what you sell when you sell a business. If I have a store called "Joe's Bakery," and I sell it, then past customers are going to continue to patronize that store under its new owners, based on the expected quality of the merchandise sold. This is why businesses sell for more than the sum total of the fixtures, inventory, receivables, and raw materials on hand less liabilities--that extra is "good will". Another example: let's say I work as a hairdresser at Jane's Hair Salon and Day Spa. Lots of Jane's customers make appointments with me because they like my work. One day Emma comes in to get her hair cut, and "Hey, where's Frank?" "Oh, Frank doesn't work here any more." Emma does some research and finds out that I'm working at Vera's Coiffure, in the next town over. Emma then starts coming to Vera's so that I can cut and style her hair. These are the kinds of "good will" that CNCs are meant to cover.
I'm coming up on five-oh soon. It's been fun, but the party's over. I'm semi-retiring from the field, buying a house outright for cash in a large square state in flyover country, and settling back while I figure out what my next career is going to be. It's probably going to be something fairly low-level, enough to pay the property taxes on the house and keep the lights turned on, and probably won't involve doing systems work or programming. I'm pretty mechanically ept. Were I thirty years younger, I might go into auto repair, but I don't really have the body or the physical stamina for that any more at my age. We'll see what happens.
I agree. We all like to think we're being responsible citizens and good Samaritans by alerting people to dangerous situations. In an ideal world, that would be true. With the trend of treating whistleblowers in the U.S. as criminals, criminal prosecution is a very real possibility. Think about what happened to Randal Schwartz. I would absolutely not move forward with something like this without benefit of legal counsel.
...are already here. Ever seen the Boston MBTA at rush hour? Seriously, after half a century of disinvestment and abandonment, people are moving back in to cities en masse. Transportation infrastructure was cut back over the entirety of the second half of the 20th century to cope with dwindling tax revenues. What's left is already past crush loading in Boston, and in NY and SF, too, I'm sure.
This. There have been a number of articles written about why the mantra to "do what you love" can be a bad one, and this is one of the reasons. If you're passionate about what you do, many employers will exploit this fact. You'll end up being one of these chumps who works 80+ hours a week, sleeps on the couch in the office, and subsists on leftover Chinese takeout reheated in the office microwave, cold pizza, and Mountain Dew.
Once people get older, they also develop other priorities: a spouse, kids, aging parents, health problems of their own caused by a couple of decades of lack of sleep and eating crap food and not exercising. They realize that no one ever dies wishing they'd spent more time in the office. They start to establish boundaries around their working life so that they can engage in better self-care, and having meaningful relationships with the other people in their lives. It doesn't mean that they're not passionate about what they do any more; it's a sign that they're no longer willing to allow someone else to exploit that passion to another person's profit rather than their own.
It is *technically* legal, but it is an abuse of the law. Asset forfeitures were originally intended to prevent drug kingpins from using their ill-gotten gains to hire high-priced lawyers, and to thwart money-laundering, but it's become a form of legalized highway robbery against people who do all manner of legitimate business in cash for whatever reason.
From what I've been reading, some of the models were under 18 when the photos were taken, which makes those photos child pornography. Hosting, linking to, uploading, distributing, possessing, or downloading those particular pics is illegal. "Child pornography" is a whole other level of illegality to "stolen pics," with much heavier penalties.
As far as the argument that "Nobody cares until it happens to a celebrity," sometimes a famous case that happens to a celebrity is what people need to get them to start caring about an issue. A lot of people started caring more about AIDS once Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury died. Nobody really knew what ALS was until Lou Gehrig got it, and it ended his baseball career and then his life. While the events themselves are regrettable, I think it's great that this has started a dialog about stolen pics and revenge porn. Look, there are plenty of people who willingly place themselves on display. Why fap/shlik it to stuff that was posted nonconsensually?
It seems like the US and UK governments have been using various works of dystopian fiction as how-to manuals for some time now. Blatantly, since 9/11, and probably for quite some while before.
I remember reading about this a while ago, so my memory on this may be somewhat fuzzy.
As I understand it, there's a fairly large database of checksums (MD5, SHA1, whatever) derived from known CP images that's maintained by law enforcement agencies and supplied to large email and hosting providers like Google, MS, Yahoo, etc., for use in detecting such content. If they get a checksum match, they take action. Apparently there's a small enough pool of commonly-circulated images that that approach works fairly well.
I think some news agency some years ago interviewed someone at Google whose job it was to review images to see if they were CP or not. People don't last long because they find the work so traumatizing.
Eventually, tech workers are going to have to demand pay like sports stars, and for the same reason: you only get an extremely abbreviated career, in your youth, that lasts maybe ten years, and by the time you hit your mid 30s, you're done. During that time, you need to make enough money to last the rest of your life. The only difference is that a tech worker doesn't face the risk of a work-related, career-ending injury in the same way that a pro athlete does.
I started Comcast service about a year ago, and supplied my own modem and router. They have not done anything like forcing me to use their internet hardware.
Yup, and magnetometers and x-raying carry-ons pretty much put a stop to those guys, because then they couldn't bring guns on board any more. That was the level of security that was in place from the early 70s up through the 9/11 attacks. Most people seemed to consider it minimally invasive, and security lines generally moved pretty quickly unless it was the day before Thanksgiving or something.
Where "Filthy Criminals" = "Commercial Infringers". "Commercial infringers" are the guys who make copies of CDs, or who bootleg concerts, and sell copies out of their car trunks to all and sundry for profit. Sometimes the counterfeit goods are even sold in legitimate stores. The statutory damages are fixed at an amount intended to be punitive, so that commercial infringers cannot figure lawsuit payouts into the cost of doing business. Statutory damages were also intended in part to cover lost sales from all the copies that were sold that the cops *didn't* confiscate as evidence when they busted the crooks. A single commercial infringer could represent hundreds or even thousands of lost sales. If the goal is to deter commercial infringers by making the potential profits not worth the risk of potential lawsuit payouts, then the sort of extreme statutory damages contemplated in the law are reasonable.
When these laws were passed, nobody considered legions of small-time, non-commercial copyright infringers infringing from their homes, with no greater benefit to them than a free movie or free music CD, and receiving no commercial profit therefrom. Each user represents at most one lost sale of a music CD or movie retailing for roughly $10-$25. The statutory damages provided for in the law are, therefore, way beyond what is reasonable.
Disclaimer: I live about a mile from the cordoned-off search area.
I think the response was warranted given the threat level. These guys had an obvious willingness to use IEDs to kill innocent bystanders and there was a firefight with over 200 rounds of ammo expended. Honestly, given that threat level, and the fact that there were legions of nervous, heavily armed cops walking around looking for a cop-killer, I wouldn't have wanted to be out and about yesterday either unless it was a matter of life and death. It's a testament to the professionalism of our local law enforcement people that there were no additional tragedies that went with this, like someone getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.
But now that we've done it once, a precedent has been set, and it will be that much easier to do it the next time. It's also scary how efficiently we turned a medium-density suburban neighborhood into a war zone, how efficiently the authorities were able to put a stop to civilian movement *just by asking*. I don't want to be all "ZOMG THIS WAS A DRY RUN FOR MARSHUL LAW!!!1!!!one!!1!!" like some people but we *have* created a dangerous precedent, and I'd at least like to see some kind of public discussion as to what threat level warrants that sort of lockdown and "How bad do things have to get for us to do this again?"
Yeah, most long-term-useful class I took in high school as well, in the early 1980s. Although we were a rich school district and had the luxury of IBM Selectrics. (Which probably accounts for my love of the IBM Model M buckling-spring keyboard.)
I do know that if 20 year old "me" could have seen the current, 45 year old "me", I would have taken much better care of my body, and spent more money and effort on upgrading and maintaining my appearance, rather than looking at the people who did do that as vain and shallow. Hindsight is always 20/20.
I think at least in the United States, we've also hit the maximum commute times people are willing to tolerate. For a long time "drive till you qualify" (i.e. "drive outward from the city until you find a house you can afford") was the motto of the real estate industry. People found out how much the quality of life suffered when they were spending two hours in each direction behind the wheel of a car. They're now willing to make sacrifices in other areas (less living space, smaller yard, schools not as good) for more reasonable commute times.
I've been looking for a house to buy recently and there's a maximum commute time I'm willing to tolerate. Beyond that, I'll keep renting, thank you.
Many of the people who bought houses in far-flung exurbs "because it's where I can afford to buy" were also stretched pretty thin financially to afford those houses. The recent recession, with its layoffs and real estate bust, was not kind to those people. Many of them are not commuting long distances to work because they simply don't have a job anymore. Or they've lost their home and have moved back into a rental closer to the city.
Does anyone remember asking for most of this stuff? Because I sure didn't. I think the major "feature" of Vista and W7 is that they removed the Playskool "My First Computer" window-dressing they used in XP. That stuff was just tacky.
At least with previous versions of Windows, upgrading added significant functionality. 3.1 -> 95 got you a whole new user interface, and removed the clunkiness, for the most part, of having to work with DOS directly. 95 -> 98 got you FAT32, which allowed you to use bigger hard drives, and USB support, both of which were missing from most versions of 95. 98 -> XP got you CD burning native to the OS, plus it got you off the 16-bit code base, adding stability. XP -> Vista or W7 doesn't get you anything on that level. I think probably the biggest advantage is that with 64-bit versions of Vista or W7 you're able to use more than 4GB of RAM but how many computers ship with that configuration right now? (Yes, I'm aware there was a 64-bit version of XP, but it was largely ignored by both computer manufacturers and the public.)
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"Good will" is part of what you sell when you sell a business. If I have a store called "Joe's Bakery," and I sell it, then past customers are going to continue to patronize that store under its new owners, based on the expected quality of the merchandise sold. This is why businesses sell for more than the sum total of the fixtures, inventory, receivables, and raw materials on hand less liabilities--that extra is "good will". Another example: let's say I work as a hairdresser at Jane's Hair Salon and Day Spa. Lots of Jane's customers make appointments with me because they like my work. One day Emma comes in to get her hair cut, and "Hey, where's Frank?" "Oh, Frank doesn't work here any more." Emma does some research and finds out that I'm working at Vera's Coiffure, in the next town over. Emma then starts coming to Vera's so that I can cut and style her hair. These are the kinds of "good will" that CNCs are meant to cover.
In right-wing crony-capitalist America, the cab companies in many cities have gamed the regulatory system so as to maximize economic rents.
I'm coming up on five-oh soon. It's been fun, but the party's over. I'm semi-retiring from the field, buying a house outright for cash in a large square state in flyover country, and settling back while I figure out what my next career is going to be. It's probably going to be something fairly low-level, enough to pay the property taxes on the house and keep the lights turned on, and probably won't involve doing systems work or programming. I'm pretty mechanically ept. Were I thirty years younger, I might go into auto repair, but I don't really have the body or the physical stamina for that any more at my age. We'll see what happens.
I agree. We all like to think we're being responsible citizens and good Samaritans by alerting people to dangerous situations. In an ideal world, that would be true. With the trend of treating whistleblowers in the U.S. as criminals, criminal prosecution is a very real possibility. Think about what happened to Randal Schwartz. I would absolutely not move forward with something like this without benefit of legal counsel.
...are already here. Ever seen the Boston MBTA at rush hour? Seriously, after half a century of disinvestment and abandonment, people are moving back in to cities en masse. Transportation infrastructure was cut back over the entirety of the second half of the 20th century to cope with dwindling tax revenues. What's left is already past crush loading in Boston, and in NY and SF, too, I'm sure.
This. There have been a number of articles written about why the mantra to "do what you love" can be a bad one, and this is one of the reasons. If you're passionate about what you do, many employers will exploit this fact. You'll end up being one of these chumps who works 80+ hours a week, sleeps on the couch in the office, and subsists on leftover Chinese takeout reheated in the office microwave, cold pizza, and Mountain Dew.
Once people get older, they also develop other priorities: a spouse, kids, aging parents, health problems of their own caused by a couple of decades of lack of sleep and eating crap food and not exercising. They realize that no one ever dies wishing they'd spent more time in the office. They start to establish boundaries around their working life so that they can engage in better self-care, and having meaningful relationships with the other people in their lives. It doesn't mean that they're not passionate about what they do any more; it's a sign that they're no longer willing to allow someone else to exploit that passion to another person's profit rather than their own.
It is *technically* legal, but it is an abuse of the law. Asset forfeitures were originally intended to prevent drug kingpins from using their ill-gotten gains to hire high-priced lawyers, and to thwart money-laundering, but it's become a form of legalized highway robbery against people who do all manner of legitimate business in cash for whatever reason.
From what I've been reading, some of the models were under 18 when the photos were taken, which makes those photos child pornography. Hosting, linking to, uploading, distributing, possessing, or downloading those particular pics is illegal. "Child pornography" is a whole other level of illegality to "stolen pics," with much heavier penalties.
As far as the argument that "Nobody cares until it happens to a celebrity," sometimes a famous case that happens to a celebrity is what people need to get them to start caring about an issue. A lot of people started caring more about AIDS once Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury died. Nobody really knew what ALS was until Lou Gehrig got it, and it ended his baseball career and then his life. While the events themselves are regrettable, I think it's great that this has started a dialog about stolen pics and revenge porn. Look, there are plenty of people who willingly place themselves on display. Why fap/shlik it to stuff that was posted nonconsensually?
It seems like the US and UK governments have been using various works of dystopian fiction as how-to manuals for some time now. Blatantly, since 9/11, and probably for quite some while before.
I remember reading about this a while ago, so my memory on this may be somewhat fuzzy.
As I understand it, there's a fairly large database of checksums (MD5, SHA1, whatever) derived from known CP images that's maintained by law enforcement agencies and supplied to large email and hosting providers like Google, MS, Yahoo, etc., for use in detecting such content. If they get a checksum match, they take action. Apparently there's a small enough pool of commonly-circulated images that that approach works fairly well.
I think some news agency some years ago interviewed someone at Google whose job it was to review images to see if they were CP or not. People don't last long because they find the work so traumatizing.
Eventually, tech workers are going to have to demand pay like sports stars, and for the same reason: you only get an extremely abbreviated career, in your youth, that lasts maybe ten years, and by the time you hit your mid 30s, you're done. During that time, you need to make enough money to last the rest of your life. The only difference is that a tech worker doesn't face the risk of a work-related, career-ending injury in the same way that a pro athlete does.
I started Comcast service about a year ago, and supplied my own modem and router. They have not done anything like forcing me to use their internet hardware.
I was there. The term "corporate rock" was invented in the 1980s for a reason.
Yup, and magnetometers and x-raying carry-ons pretty much put a stop to those guys, because then they couldn't bring guns on board any more. That was the level of security that was in place from the early 70s up through the 9/11 attacks. Most people seemed to consider it minimally invasive, and security lines generally moved pretty quickly unless it was the day before Thanksgiving or something.
John Walker Lindh.
Where "Filthy Criminals" = "Commercial Infringers". "Commercial infringers" are the guys who make copies of CDs, or who bootleg concerts, and sell copies out of their car trunks to all and sundry for profit. Sometimes the counterfeit goods are even sold in legitimate stores. The statutory damages are fixed at an amount intended to be punitive, so that commercial infringers cannot figure lawsuit payouts into the cost of doing business. Statutory damages were also intended in part to cover lost sales from all the copies that were sold that the cops *didn't* confiscate as evidence when they busted the crooks. A single commercial infringer could represent hundreds or even thousands of lost sales. If the goal is to deter commercial infringers by making the potential profits not worth the risk of potential lawsuit payouts, then the sort of extreme statutory damages contemplated in the law are reasonable.
When these laws were passed, nobody considered legions of small-time, non-commercial copyright infringers infringing from their homes, with no greater benefit to them than a free movie or free music CD, and receiving no commercial profit therefrom. Each user represents at most one lost sale of a music CD or movie retailing for roughly $10-$25. The statutory damages provided for in the law are, therefore, way beyond what is reasonable.
Disclaimer: I live about a mile from the cordoned-off search area.
I think the response was warranted given the threat level. These guys had an obvious willingness to use IEDs to kill innocent bystanders and there was a firefight with over 200 rounds of ammo expended. Honestly, given that threat level, and the fact that there were legions of nervous, heavily armed cops walking around looking for a cop-killer, I wouldn't have wanted to be out and about yesterday either unless it was a matter of life and death. It's a testament to the professionalism of our local law enforcement people that there were no additional tragedies that went with this, like someone getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.
But now that we've done it once, a precedent has been set, and it will be that much easier to do it the next time. It's also scary how efficiently we turned a medium-density suburban neighborhood into a war zone, how efficiently the authorities were able to put a stop to civilian movement *just by asking*. I don't want to be all "ZOMG THIS WAS A DRY RUN FOR MARSHUL LAW!!!1!!!one!!1!!" like some people but we *have* created a dangerous precedent, and I'd at least like to see some kind of public discussion as to what threat level warrants that sort of lockdown and "How bad do things have to get for us to do this again?"
Came here for this, leaving satisfied.
(Return of the Living Dead, 1985.)
Yeah, most long-term-useful class I took in high school as well, in the early 1980s. Although we were a rich school district and had the luxury of IBM Selectrics. (Which probably accounts for my love of the IBM Model M buckling-spring keyboard.)
I do know that if 20 year old "me" could have seen the current, 45 year old "me", I would have taken much better care of my body, and spent more money and effort on upgrading and maintaining my appearance, rather than looking at the people who did do that as vain and shallow. Hindsight is always 20/20.
You might want to avoid the "In a cave, with a box of scraps" part.
Actually, you can't. That's illegal under the Gun Control Act of 1968.
I think at least in the United States, we've also hit the maximum commute times people are willing to tolerate. For a long time "drive till you qualify" (i.e. "drive outward from the city until you find a house you can afford") was the motto of the real estate industry. People found out how much the quality of life suffered when they were spending two hours in each direction behind the wheel of a car. They're now willing to make sacrifices in other areas (less living space, smaller yard, schools not as good) for more reasonable commute times.
I've been looking for a house to buy recently and there's a maximum commute time I'm willing to tolerate. Beyond that, I'll keep renting, thank you.
Many of the people who bought houses in far-flung exurbs "because it's where I can afford to buy" were also stretched pretty thin financially to afford those houses. The recent recession, with its layoffs and real estate bust, was not kind to those people. Many of them are not commuting long distances to work because they simply don't have a job anymore. Or they've lost their home and have moved back into a rental closer to the city.
Does anyone remember asking for most of this stuff? Because I sure didn't. I think the major "feature" of Vista and W7 is that they removed the Playskool "My First Computer" window-dressing they used in XP. That stuff was just tacky.
At least with previous versions of Windows, upgrading added significant functionality. 3.1 -> 95 got you a whole new user interface, and removed the clunkiness, for the most part, of having to work with DOS directly. 95 -> 98 got you FAT32, which allowed you to use bigger hard drives, and USB support, both of which were missing from most versions of 95. 98 -> XP got you CD burning native to the OS, plus it got you off the 16-bit code base, adding stability. XP -> Vista or W7 doesn't get you anything on that level. I think probably the biggest advantage is that with 64-bit versions of Vista or W7 you're able to use more than 4GB of RAM but how many computers ship with that configuration right now? (Yes, I'm aware there was a 64-bit version of XP, but it was largely ignored by both computer manufacturers and the public.)