Re:OT: There ought to be a law...
on
Human Pac Man
·
· Score: 1
Not just telephone and e-mail, make television ad-free. I pay money for cable tv why should I pay again by watching ads on every channel, and then pay again if I buy a TiVo to skip them!
The point of this kind of research is to improve technology. The result is more efficient solar cells and batteries, the kind of tech which will improve thousands of things.
Its not just some guy with loads of money who thinks it would be cool to fly around the world, it is serious research into several important fields. The kind of research that without rich enthusiasts wouldn't get done.
I agree that people should be more willing to spread the wealth, which is why I applaud the "give so much a month" approach charities use, and wish more people would do it. Who would notice 10 pounds a month missing from their salary of thousands? If everyone gave an amount they could afford without even noticing then a hell of a lot of people could be helped.
This is the reason why most high profile films are now opening simultaneously. Best example recently is Matrix Revolutions which opened all over the world at exactly the same time. Seems piracy has benefits for paying customers too as in the UK we now don't have to wait up to a year for a movie thats already out in the states.
You can also use a program called DVD Region Free to remove the UOPs and allow you to skip whatever you want. It isn't free though, and why should we have to pay for an extra program to allow us to do what we want with a DVD that has already been paid for!
Aren't there enough restrictions on DVDs as it is, with region coding (aka price fixing), Macrovision and whatever annoying technology prevents legally purchased DVDs being played on any PC which has a TV-Out on the graphics card. If I pay for a DVD I should be able to play it how I want, and on the device of my choosing without spending more money on programs to work around all of this crap.
The University of Florida has the right to set terms of use for its network hardware and bandwidth, and if it decides that it doesn't want said hardware and bandwidth to be used for an activity whose moral status is debatable but whose legal status is quite clear, well, that's none of our business, is it?
So why don't they just block access to Kazaa, instead of attacking students who use it. If anyone who connects to Kazaa gets cut off from the network straight away wouldn't it be a lot easier to just ban the use of Kazaa and block it. No monitoring needed, no dealing with all the students who get banned and need reactivating. It does seem they have chosen an expensive and time consuming solution to a very simple problem.
Not even touching on the fact that P2P networks have many perfectly legal uses as has already been mentioned. Students are being banned for merely connecting to Kazaa. Even if you share nothing but free software and non-copyrighted music then you are still banned for connecting.
IANAL but if faced with a multi million pound fine which you clearly couldn't pay, couldn't you file for bankruptcy? Which would presumably write the debt off.
I don't know much about bankruptcy procedures so I shot an e-mail off to my lawyer and should hopefully have an answer to this soon.
I really don't see the RIAA as much of a threat. I mean if the worst thing happens and they slap me with a law suit claiming $10,000,000 or however much in damages then how does that make any difference. I don't have 10 million, or 2 million, or $3000. They are welcome to take my life savings of negative 8000 (got to love those Student loans) or attempt to claim my assets which probably add up to all of 2000. Its the best way to make people buy cds, take away their money, oh and their cd player, thats sure to put them back in line at the music store.
Its a civil case so they can't hit me with jail time, so their worst punishment is taking away something I don't have? Anyone know exactly what happens to people who can't pay these fines, a life of slavery in the RIAA music mines perhaps?
it's apparently okay to "pull the plug" on convalescents merely because they're a drain on their children's bank accounts.
No it isn't ok, legally or morally.
Discontinuing someone's life support by 'pulling the plug' would be euthanasia, which is illegal in the UK and as far as I know in the USA too. The only situation in which the family can choose to discontinue life support is if the patient is certified brain dead by a doctor. Someone who is brain dead is dead, end of story, their organs may still be functioning but the person themself is gone. In the same way that a computers fans and lights would still operate if the memory, hard drive and cpu were removed but the computer would no longer be functioning on any level meaningful or otherwise.
Or you may be thinking of a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order. This is very different, it is a legal document stating that no 'heroic measures' should be undertaken to prevent the patient from dying. The intention of a DNR is to prevent terminally ill patients from being kept in a painful state when they aren't lucid enough to tell the doctor's to stop. Yes they can be signed by a family member but only if the patient is not capable of making decisions about their treatment. A DNR is not a death warrant, it doesn't mean the patient is killed, or helped to die, just that they are allowed to die naturally without any intervention which would prolong their suffering.
Yes there is a wizard, but it is far from the best way to set up a network. It misses out a lot of settings that are important in order to keep it simple for unskilled users. You end up having to 'trick' it into setting things up how you want them, which is more work than doing it all manually.
Basically when it does work it is a very quick way to get a simple network up and running, but if you are planning anything more complicated than two computers connected to share files then its definetly best to set it up manually.
In my experience XP networking can be as easy as just plugging in the cable and running the wizard. But it can also be as hard as hours of changing settings, rebooting after each change. I have had a network that had to be fiddled with every morning after turning the machines off for the night. Then after a LAN party I set it all up in again and it worked fine first time and has done since.
This seems to be a trademark of XP, sometimes it works fine, but sometimes for no apparant reason it just won't work. There are few things more annoying than a problem that has bugged you for months just disappearing, because you know its going to come back at some point and you still won't have any idea what causes it.
I see what you mean now. This does highlight another issue though, software companies (and the RIAA and MPAA) spend so much time and money trying to stamp out piracy in the USA and to a lesser extent in Europe. But they ignore countries where piracy is rife.
They wave around statistics about piracy without mentioning that a large amount of it is happening virtually unopposed. Of course from their perspective there is no point in stopping people using pirate software when there is no way those people could afford legal licenses. So they let it continue unopposed and as a nice bonus get impressive piracy statistics to quote in their 'fight against piracy'.
If not being able to afford a legal license is no excuse, which is the view of most anti-piracy groups, then surely everyone who uses pirate softeare should be pursued, not just those who are in wealthy countries from whom money can be squeezed in law suits and future purchases.
An answer could be income assessed pricing. The consumer provides proof of their income to the software company who sell them their software at an appropriate price. So big businesses pay top whack whilst penniless students, low-income families and small businesses fall into a lower price band.
This 'Pay what you can' pricing model already exists in some form. Its the 'please donate' buttons you see on so many sites now. People give what they can afford. At the moment its based on generosity, not the persons actual income but it works none the less. There is no better example than Penny Arcade's Club PA, people donated money because the content was worth it, giving whatever they could afford.
This argument is heard a lot, people are willing to pay if the price is reasonable. Whether the product in question is an OS, music, a cinema ticket or a DVD. Where this falls down is the same price is not reasonable for everyone. Someone who earns 50,000 a year won't mind paying 250 for Windows XP Pro, 10 for a CD or 20 for a DVD. But someone who earns 10,000 can't afford these prices, so they turn to pirated content.
Its true people need music or DVDs. But selling your product at a lower price to people who wouldn't normally have been able to afford it can only be a good thing for a business. You won't make as much on each item, but you will have sold many more than you would with fixed pricing, as now everyone can afford your product.
This is just how taxation works, you pay an amount based on how much you earn, so in theory everyone pays what they can afford.
Sure the rich will complain that they are subsidising products for the poor, but in reality if someone who earns 50,000 a year had to pay a couple of pounds extra for their cd is hardly going to make a difference to their life.
Telling your clients to use pirated software isn't the smartest move. If they get investigated they will have to pay huge fines as well as having all the computers and software the company owns confiscated for an audit, which can take months.
I can't see many other clients taking your advice if this happened to a buisness you admin for.
However you feel about the price of software, or ridiculous copy protection and activation schemes, using pirated software in a commercial buisness is foolhardy.
By all means avoid giving money to Microsoft, use Linux and OpenOffice. Don't open up your clients to legal action because of your personal views.
" And calling the one nation that allows the most foreign immigration "xenophobic" is plain stupid. If we feared and distrusted other countries as your surmise, we wouldn't welcome their citizens to our country in overwhelming numbers."
The percentage of "foreign-born" residents in the USA is just 3.3%, if you compare this to the UK where 8% of the population are foreign-born you can see that the US are hardly allowing the most foreign immigration.
[percentages are taken from the year 2000 government immigration statistics from the respective countries.]
One of the worst examples of this 'moral' censorship I have seen is on 'Friends'. When the episodes are shown on cable in the UK they regularly cut jokes which are presumably deemed to be offensive. I could understand this if the show was being aired in the afternoon, but when I tune in at 10pm and half the jokes don't make sense because someone thinks the punchlines are too risque its just gone too far.
I know its because the cable channels (in this case Sky One and E4) are too lazy to air a cut version during the day and an original version at night. But if you are going to censor a show in a way that degrades its quality then is there really any point in airing it in the first place.
If a programme has too much swearing or violence for that matter then by all means show it later in the evening so children aren't exposed to it accidentally, or put a warning on before the show to say that it contains offensive language. But letting someone who has no grasp of proper editing cut out scenes and lines from tv shows and movies is unacceptable.
In films this practice is equally bad. Apart from immature filmakers who fill their scripts with swearing for sheer shock factor any such content is normally in keeping with the setting of the film. It is an integral part of the realism of the film and removing it removes a lot of the impact of the film's message.
Movies are barely worth watching on TV now they are so often cut to shreds so they can be aired at the most profitable time. Now this is happening to TV series as well. It is no wonder that so many TV shows are traded online. Interesting legal point there, if I pay for a cable channel from which I could legally tape shows for my own use (time-shifting). Does that mean I can download those same shows to watch minus adverts and without the cuts? The only thing the cable channel miss out on is me watching their ads, ads on a channel I already pay for the privilege of watching. How long before they adopt a software like approach of allowing customers to pay a premium for an ad free service?
The reason invading Kuwait didn't break any sanctions is that the sanctions were imposed as a result of the invasion of Kuwait, after the first Gulf War.
You can't break something before it has been put in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just telephone and e-mail, make television ad-free. I pay money for cable tv why should I pay again by watching ads on every channel, and then pay again if I buy a TiVo to skip them!
It's called 'withheld income tax'.
I would challenge you to find anyone who doesn't notice the amount of income tax they pay.
The point of this kind of research is to improve technology. The result is more efficient solar cells and batteries, the kind of tech which will improve thousands of things.
Its not just some guy with loads of money who thinks it would be cool to fly around the world, it is serious research into several important fields. The kind of research that without rich enthusiasts wouldn't get done.
I agree that people should be more willing to spread the wealth, which is why I applaud the "give so much a month" approach charities use, and wish more people would do it. Who would notice 10 pounds a month missing from their salary of thousands? If everyone gave an amount they could afford without even noticing then a hell of a lot of people could be helped.
This is the reason why most high profile films are now opening simultaneously. Best example recently is Matrix Revolutions which opened all over the world at exactly the same time. Seems piracy has benefits for paying customers too as in the UK we now don't have to wait up to a year for a movie thats already out in the states.
You can also use a program called DVD Region Free to remove the UOPs and allow you to skip whatever you want. It isn't free though, and why should we have to pay for an extra program to allow us to do what we want with a DVD that has already been paid for!
Aren't there enough restrictions on DVDs as it is, with region coding (aka price fixing), Macrovision and whatever annoying technology prevents legally purchased DVDs being played on any PC which has a TV-Out on the graphics card. If I pay for a DVD I should be able to play it how I want, and on the device of my choosing without spending more money on programs to work around all of this crap.
Well I suppose a POW camp looks pretty cosy after your country has been bombed to the ground.
IANAL but if faced with a multi million pound fine which you clearly couldn't pay, couldn't you file for bankruptcy? Which would presumably write the debt off. I don't know much about bankruptcy procedures so I shot an e-mail off to my lawyer and should hopefully have an answer to this soon.
I really don't see the RIAA as much of a threat. I mean if the worst thing happens and they slap me with a law suit claiming $10,000,000 or however much in damages then how does that make any difference. I don't have 10 million, or 2 million, or $3000. They are welcome to take my life savings of negative 8000 (got to love those Student loans) or attempt to claim my assets which probably add up to all of 2000. Its the best way to make people buy cds, take away their money, oh and their cd player, thats sure to put them back in line at the music store.
Its a civil case so they can't hit me with jail time, so their worst punishment is taking away something I don't have? Anyone know exactly what happens to people who can't pay these fines, a life of slavery in the RIAA music mines perhaps?
it's apparently okay to "pull the plug" on convalescents merely because they're a drain on their children's bank accounts.
No it isn't ok, legally or morally.
Discontinuing someone's life support by 'pulling the plug' would be euthanasia, which is illegal in the UK and as far as I know in the USA too. The only situation in which the family can choose to discontinue life support is if the patient is certified brain dead by a doctor. Someone who is brain dead is dead, end of story, their organs may still be functioning but the person themself is gone. In the same way that a computers fans and lights would still operate if the memory, hard drive and cpu were removed but the computer would no longer be functioning on any level meaningful or otherwise.
Or you may be thinking of a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order. This is very different, it is a legal document stating that no 'heroic measures' should be undertaken to prevent the patient from dying. The intention of a DNR is to prevent terminally ill patients from being kept in a painful state when they aren't lucid enough to tell the doctor's to stop. Yes they can be signed by a family member but only if the patient is not capable of making decisions about their treatment. A DNR is not a death warrant, it doesn't mean the patient is killed, or helped to die, just that they are allowed to die naturally without any intervention which would prolong their suffering.
There is a wizard for networking in XP?
Yes there is a wizard, but it is far from the best way to set up a network. It misses out a lot of settings that are important in order to keep it simple for unskilled users. You end up having to 'trick' it into setting things up how you want them, which is more work than doing it all manually.
Basically when it does work it is a very quick way to get a simple network up and running, but if you are planning anything more complicated than two computers connected to share files then its definetly best to set it up manually.
In my experience XP networking can be as easy as just plugging in the cable and running the wizard. But it can also be as hard as hours of changing settings, rebooting after each change. I have had a network that had to be fiddled with every morning after turning the machines off for the night. Then after a LAN party I set it all up in again and it worked fine first time and has done since.
This seems to be a trademark of XP, sometimes it works fine, but sometimes for no apparant reason it just won't work. There are few things more annoying than a problem that has bugged you for months just disappearing, because you know its going to come back at some point and you still won't have any idea what causes it.
I see what you mean now. This does highlight another issue though, software companies (and the RIAA and MPAA) spend so much time and money trying to stamp out piracy in the USA and to a lesser extent in Europe. But they ignore countries where piracy is rife.
They wave around statistics about piracy without mentioning that a large amount of it is happening virtually unopposed. Of course from their perspective there is no point in stopping people using pirate software when there is no way those people could afford legal licenses. So they let it continue unopposed and as a nice bonus get impressive piracy statistics to quote in their 'fight against piracy'.
If not being able to afford a legal license is no excuse, which is the view of most anti-piracy groups, then surely everyone who uses pirate softeare should be pursued, not just those who are in wealthy countries from whom money can be squeezed in law suits and future purchases.
An answer could be income assessed pricing. The consumer provides proof of their income to the software company who sell them their software at an appropriate price. So big businesses pay top whack whilst penniless students, low-income families and small businesses fall into a lower price band.
This 'Pay what you can' pricing model already exists in some form. Its the 'please donate' buttons you see on so many sites now. People give what they can afford. At the moment its based on generosity, not the persons actual income but it works none the less. There is no better example than Penny Arcade's Club PA, people donated money because the content was worth it, giving whatever they could afford.
This argument is heard a lot, people are willing to pay if the price is reasonable. Whether the product in question is an OS, music, a cinema ticket or a DVD. Where this falls down is the same price is not reasonable for everyone. Someone who earns 50,000 a year won't mind paying 250 for Windows XP Pro, 10 for a CD or 20 for a DVD. But someone who earns 10,000 can't afford these prices, so they turn to pirated content.
Its true people need music or DVDs. But selling your product at a lower price to people who wouldn't normally have been able to afford it can only be a good thing for a business. You won't make as much on each item, but you will have sold many more than you would with fixed pricing, as now everyone can afford your product. This is just how taxation works, you pay an amount based on how much you earn, so in theory everyone pays what they can afford.
Sure the rich will complain that they are subsidising products for the poor, but in reality if someone who earns 50,000 a year had to pay a couple of pounds extra for their cd is hardly going to make a difference to their life.
Telling your clients to use pirated software isn't the smartest move. If they get investigated they will have to pay huge fines as well as having all the computers and software the company owns confiscated for an audit, which can take months. I can't see many other clients taking your advice if this happened to a buisness you admin for.
However you feel about the price of software, or ridiculous copy protection and activation schemes, using pirated software in a commercial buisness is foolhardy. By all means avoid giving money to Microsoft, use Linux and OpenOffice. Don't open up your clients to legal action because of your personal views.
" And calling the one nation that allows the most foreign immigration "xenophobic" is plain stupid. If we feared and distrusted other countries as your surmise, we wouldn't welcome their citizens to our country in overwhelming numbers."
The percentage of "foreign-born" residents in the USA is just 3.3%, if you compare this to the UK where 8% of the population are foreign-born you can see that the US are hardly allowing the most foreign immigration.
[percentages are taken from the year 2000 government immigration statistics from the respective countries.]
One of the worst examples of this 'moral' censorship I have seen is on 'Friends'. When the episodes are shown on cable in the UK they regularly cut jokes which are presumably deemed to be offensive. I could understand this if the show was being aired in the afternoon, but when I tune in at 10pm and half the jokes don't make sense because someone thinks the punchlines are too risque its just gone too far. I know its because the cable channels (in this case Sky One and E4) are too lazy to air a cut version during the day and an original version at night. But if you are going to censor a show in a way that degrades its quality then is there really any point in airing it in the first place. If a programme has too much swearing or violence for that matter then by all means show it later in the evening so children aren't exposed to it accidentally, or put a warning on before the show to say that it contains offensive language. But letting someone who has no grasp of proper editing cut out scenes and lines from tv shows and movies is unacceptable. In films this practice is equally bad. Apart from immature filmakers who fill their scripts with swearing for sheer shock factor any such content is normally in keeping with the setting of the film. It is an integral part of the realism of the film and removing it removes a lot of the impact of the film's message. Movies are barely worth watching on TV now they are so often cut to shreds so they can be aired at the most profitable time. Now this is happening to TV series as well. It is no wonder that so many TV shows are traded online. Interesting legal point there, if I pay for a cable channel from which I could legally tape shows for my own use (time-shifting). Does that mean I can download those same shows to watch minus adverts and without the cuts? The only thing the cable channel miss out on is me watching their ads, ads on a channel I already pay for the privilege of watching. How long before they adopt a software like approach of allowing customers to pay a premium for an ad free service?
The reason invading Kuwait didn't break any sanctions is that the sanctions were imposed as a result of the invasion of Kuwait, after the first Gulf War. You can't break something before it has been put in place.