... and I can see a high-tech ransom outfit using this data to know where one certain child would be for quicker in-and-out kidnapping. Or knowing when that child might have been separated from it's protecive older siblings.
Or how bout this: 5-year-old son of European royalty is playing at legoland, taken out by a sniper from a huge distance based on his location from an SMS query to their wristband system...
OK, I'm being dystopian, and hopefully the crypto on those wristbands is bulletproof, but if the potential is there it will be abused and to think otherwise is naive.
hahahaha.... don't mean to be rude but don't we all wish... I almost got written up the other day cuz o some faulty docs. And now this weekend we find that due to a change on our main ftp server, all our ftp jobs are gonna come back with new and different return codes, but guess how important it is for them update docs? There's so many jobs to update doclib for that they're basically telling us that it's not a priority, it'll get done when it gets done...
mp2 is actually better from a perceuptual standpoint at lower bitrates, but the advantage above about 128k goes to mp3. Funny you should ask, I was just reading about this the other day... here
and i agree that people wouldn't tolerate any *perceptible* change in the music, i just think there's ways to change the audio that humans wouldn't percieve but software would. And I also agree that if it means the authorities only have to deal with 10% of the enforcement workload then that means "mission accomplished" for them. And I do agree that any additional data encoded into the audio for obfuscation purposes would increase the file size, meaning that for files of the same size audio quality would be decreased by at least a little bit.
I just can't imagine an autolistener that would function on the incredibly complex data of an audio file (even an mp3) any better than the email-address-crawlers do now on the very simple data of text email adresses posted on websites like this one.
"But changing the frequencies of the sounds in the file means changing the audio coming out."
That's fine. People have proven through the widespread acceptance of MP3 that audio quality is not nearly as much of an issue as cost and availability. MP3 has never sounded as good as PCM and never will, that's not what it's for. What it's good at is fitting down a narrow pipe quickly. In my opinion the development of MP3 was driven as much by dial-up modem speeds as anything else.
"You may need to make lots of changes to make an audio file a weak match to the frequency pattern of the unaltered track, and there's got to be a limit to how much can be changed while still leaving an audio file which people would want to listen to."
Not really. Time compress the entire song by one second, thus altering all time domain information. Pitch-shift the entire song down a half-step, thus altering all frequency domain information - either way it'll still be recognizable to human ears as the song it is but BOY will it's metrics look different. Superharmonics. Subharmonics. Subtle Compression or expansion. A couple seconds of random musical content before the song starts or after it ends. And let's not forget that now that the DVD industry has rammed 24bit96kHz recording down our throats, that that opens up all kinds off possibilites for doing things with the audio that humans can't hear (my oringinal complaint about 24/96 in the first place).
In short, there are almost as many ways to obfuscate any automated metric-based song identifier program as there are ways to obfuscate your email addy on slashdot so you don't get crawler-spam. That's why so many DRM models use data that's contained in the file but not the audio. Hell, every commercial radio station in existance (in America anyway) uses so many exciters, compressors, subharmonic synthesizers and limiters that I'd be willing to wager that this hypothetical auto-music-listener program wouldn't even be able to recognize the song played on the airwaves, even without obfuscation.
"Add in lots of extra frequencies in small amounts? That's white noise (more or less)."
Actually, every CD ever made has a small amount of white noise added during the mastering process - it's called dither, and it (supposedly) aids humans in the auditory perception of high frequencies. But I digress...
Adding small amounts of random data is only white "noise" when it's within the audible frequency range. If you added random data below 20Hz or above 20kHz, the listener wouldn't hear a thing. Might want to lock up the Doberman, though.
The main drawback of random frequency domain data as a metric obfuscator is that it's, well, random, and random is surprisingly easy to spot. You'd be better off using pink or brown noise, or better still generate inaudible superharmonics from a whole nother song and add them. As you can probably tell, I could go on and on...
Beat frequencies wouldn't be a significant problem with dynamic obfuscation since the frequencies would change, preferably as rapidly as possible.
To me the bottom line is that any system of incrimination and accusation that uses only "fuzzy" comparisons is bound to fail in the courts, even in today's environment of corporate feudalism. Imagine a cop saying, "well, your honor, he looked as though he might possibly have been a close relative of somebody who looked like our suspect, a fuzzy match is good enough for us!" One of the many lessons of the DNA testing revolution is that any system that incriminates (or exonerates for that matter) had damn well better be airtight.
No, the only way they can enforce this is to pay actual human beings with good ears and musical knowledge to sit down and listen to each individual MP3. Good luck.
"It occurs to me that this technique might be fairly good for uniquely identifying a song. Presumably certain high frequencies (harmonics of the stronger lower frequencies?) would be weighted less in the comparison, as most forms of lossless audio compression save space by eliminating these."
Ever heard of Sound Forge? Any method for identifying a music file based on it's audio content is practically begging to be circumvented. Change anything in the frequency or amplitude domains and you've created a file that will have a different identifier than it did before the change.
password-protected zip (or rar or ace) file. It's been working OK for the virus-writers. Then the question becomes, the RIAA can see a file called "Britney's new album.zip" on my machine, but since they don't have the password to the zip file, they'll never know if that's what it actually is, let alone be able to prove that's what it actually is in court. So either they'll wind up suing somebody frivolously who has a bunch of password-protected zip files that are named suggestive things but all contain only junk data (see my earlier post), or else they'll sue somebody who does have the goods but they won't be able to prove it.
If Ronald Reagan, as President, can "forget" authorizing the torture and death of hundreds, I think I can manage to "forget" the password for that zip file.
the only problem I can see with this is that there might exist somewhere a "master password" that will unlock *all* zip files (but boy, do I hope not... imagine what could happen if that leaked out)
Any validity this analogy might have ever had was blown to hell once you used "broke college student" and "lexus" in the same sentence.
In point of fact (inconvenient, I know... and yet, there it is), everywhere I've ever been that had a University has had some kind of discount/free public transportation for students. Here in Brewtown we call it the U-Pass.
So yeah, broke college students do have the right to cheap/free transportation, at least under the laws currently on the books. Next.
The present-day American Entertainment Monolith was built, for over a century, on complete and utter disregard for the intellectual property of England and Europe. We published their books and didn't pay them, published their music and didn't pay them, performed their plays and operas and didn't pay them.
For the American Entertainment Monolith to now say that fair's fair and everybody's got to pay up is the height of hypocrisy and gall... I'll pay them for all the crappy mp3's I dowloaded and erased (as opposed to the good mp3's I downloaded and bought the CD, they've already been paid for that) just as soon as they pay up what they owe to the estate/heirs of Charles Dickens.
Of course it is. It's performing the role vacated by radio when the Clear Channel monopoly took over. People *will* hear good music, no matter how they have to do it.
In the late 70's and early 80's cassette recorders were ILLEGAL to own in america because the RIAA was convinced it would be out of business within months. Sound familiar?
Cassette recorders are legal today due to a freaking ACT OF CONGRESS because enough people wrote their legislators wondering why they couldn't make their friends mixtapes. In fact i believe it was even called the "mixtape law". (I'd like to provide a link but I'm at work and the firewalls don't like the pages that contain the relevant information)
Why is it NOBODY sees the parllel?
1) they tried to get away with something 2) we wrote our congresspeople and kept them from getting away with it 3) now they think we're all idiots and 4) are trying to get away with the same thing AGAIN
So there's your format-shifting. This law is still on the books AFAIK. Of course there's probably another one that contradicts it directly, and it's probably the DMCA.
Yet somehow, in spite of cassettes, the RIAA has managed to not only avoid bankruptcy, but make a killing while doing so. how did they do this?
Format-shifting! They shifted the format of almost everybody's music collection to CD, thus opening Pandora's box and setting the stage for the populist digital content revolution that is P2P.
Why am I, as the legal owner of a CD that I purchased from a store, not allowed to shift the format of a recording (that I OWN) while the industry is allowed to shift formats every other week? Here's the progression. 78 RPM Vinyl; 45 RPM vinyl; 33 RPM vinyl; 33/45 stereo vinyl; 33/45 quadraphonic vinyl; 1/2" stereo reel-to-reel tape; 1/4" stereo reel-to-reel tape; stereo 8-track tape; quadraphonic 8-track tape; CART; Compact Disc; Digital Audio Tape; MiniDisc; Digital Compact Casette (remember those?); Super Audio CD; Super Audio CD 24; DVD-audio. And they'd be happy to sell me the same album on every single one of these formats and wouldn't see a thing wrong with it.
But if I so much as tape John McCormick singing "when irish eyes are smiling" off my grandmother's 78 RPM record player onto an 8-track cartridge, I'm the one doing something ethically wrong?
I believe it was a Congressman who said, "I may not know what thuggery is, but I know it when I see it." But maybe he was talking about something else...
"They will get away with anything they can get away with, and they will never stop until somebody makes them stop" - Max Barry, "Jennifer Government"
"It would seem to me that a really good solution would be that the legal costs of the plantiff and defendant can not exccede a certain ratio. Say 2 to 1, and if some one wants to exccede the ratio they must give a 1 to 1 ammount to the other party."
But that would be fair. We don't want to set that kind of precedent, now do we? There's no percentage.
My right to not have them beam tasteless crap like "Friends" through my BODY. At least not without paying me a fee for rental, or storage, or whatever. But it's my body, and if they can put invisible things in it today they can put visible things in it tomorrow.
"Do you also think hacking someone's wlan from their parking lot is OK, since they broadcast intentionally to the parking lot and you are there?"
Well let me share a story of my own. When I was 19 I had about $1000 worth of musical equipment stolen out of my car, parked in my parents' driveway in the suburbs. When I called the police, and again when I called the insurance company, guess what their first question was?
Was the car *locked*?
When the answer turned out to be that it wasn't, the cops shrugged and the insurance company wouldn't pay a claim. Turns out for it to be considered theft, at least here in Wisconsin, you have to make some effort to actually secure your property. Go figure.
"If a pervert spies on a lady undressing who forgot to close her window is the pervert justified in taking advantage in your opinion."
First let me just say that there is absolutely nothing "perverted" about me wanting to see a naked woman. Unless she's deformed or something. "Perverted" basically means "different for the sake of being different", and I can't think of anything that makes more men less different than the desire to see naked women. (I hear some people actually touch them!)
And how exactly is viewing what is publicly displayed "taking advantage"? I read part of the front page of our local newspaper in a vending machine but didn't buy it, so how much do I owe them for looking at what they chose to make freely viewable?
In any event, I find it curious that someody who appears to be such a social conservative chooses to make this particular argument, based as it apparently is on the very "victim mentality" that conservatives lambasted throughout the 80's and 90's - until they realized that assuming that every citizen was a complete idiot incapable of caring for themselves was a great way to ram intrusive, unconstitutional and unAmerican legislation down our throats. Why should the man walking by on the street who happens to glance up and see a naked woman that he then proceeds to stare at be considered any more of a criminal than the woman who is actively engaged in exhibiting herself to the neighborhood, children included? Why, because she's the Victim! She must be Protected by the Nanny State before she figures out how to close her freakin blinds already! Protected with really, really bad laws!
Your argument doesn't hold much water, and, not unlike many other social conservatives, you appear to have a great deal of hostility toward people who actually get to see naked women. Sorry about that.
Oh, and one more thing, Marco. If I'm supposed to look away from a naked woman, I think you should be able to look away from posts that you consider stupid. Unless, of course, your argument was flawed to begin with (don't worry, it was).
Wasn't Webster's a British dictionary? Wasn't this right about the time that American companies were engaging in rampant and unrepentant copyright infringement of English and European intellectual property?
Why, if I was a little more cynical, I'd say that it's almost as though those who have used "theft" and "piracy" for copyright infringement deliberately chose those words for their negative connotation. In 1828.
"radiologists are doctors, they need to be licensed in the state they practice in."
And it is to prevent this troublesome little legal speedbump that we proudly present - Deregulation II! Bigger, badder and meaner than the original, Deregulation II comes with all the extra features to make your life more profitable... I mean convenient!
Laws? We don't need no stinking laws. The power-mad right wing has declared their intention, verbally and publically, to make this supposed nation of laws into an unrepentant nation of men. Those who can take, take, and they will never stop until somebody makes them stop.
Nobody's mentioned the best part - none of those pesky, troublesome lawsuits! How are you gonna sue a tele-doctor in India? If malpractice was involved, where did the crime take place, in India (where the tele-doctor actually made the mistake), or in America (where the patient died?)
The Ford F-150's and other F-trucks are about the only thing Ford does that doesn't suck. Sturdy, quality, dependable... then again they haven't really changed the design in decades, think that has something to do with it?
"So, perhaps you guys should quit titling your articles, 'Technology makes cars disposable' and switch to a more honest assessment of the problem, which is 'Market Economics makes cars disposable'."
How about "stupid consumers make cars disposable"... As an older, wiser man once said, "Never mind what they're selling / It's what you're buying". Vote with your money.
Not to be too off-topic but... My last experience buying cable (not even TV, just roadrunner) will probably be my last. It took SIX VISITS from different techs to get the damn thing to work. Script for visits 1-5 follows:
Me: So you're here to hook up our roadrunner? Tech: Yes. I've just got to go out to the box and do some stuff... [thirty minutes pass] Me: So, is our roadrunner working yet? Tech: No. Your house is too big and has too many Digital Cable Receivers on too many splitters. There's no way this will work. Me: can't you just bring another feed into the attic, since I'm a renter and that's where I live? Tech: No, we can only have one feed per house. Me: But the person on the phone said many people on our block have the same service. They're charging us right now for the service you are saying your company can't provide. Tech: This won't work and I'm leaving now.
As you can imagine, the people on the phone were in a different country than the techs were (guess which one! go on, guess!) and apparently didn't read from the same script... I had a seven day weekend and spend six of those days waiting for time warner's bitch asses... After complaining to the point where they gave us free stuff on top of free stuff, they finally sent a team out to rewire the entire house for free, at which point they found that the problem was......the house was too big and there was no way this could work. Oh wait, actually the *real* problem turned out to be that the feed to our house was behind a bunch of splitters INSIDE THE BOX ON THE POLE!!!
Never, ever, again... They can put ten million commercials on TV advertising roadrnuner and ondemand and all these high-speed services that they simply don't have the infrastructure to provide, and have no intention of having the infrastructure to provide. You know, I can remember a time when shit like this was fucking illegal. Let's hear it for deregulation, friend of the consumer!
I personally think that the potential audience for the "high-brow" channels (discovery, history, et al) is much larger than anybody gives it credit for being. Of everybody I know that has cable, we all watch the same ten channels (Discovery, History, TLC, Comedy Central, DisWings, Science Channel, TechTV, Spike/TNN, VH1, MTV2). Of course, that could be my excellent taste in friends...
My prediction is that once ala carte cable is available, we will have proof that, Neilsen ratings be damned, nobody likes Friends, or crappy lowest-common-denominator shows like that anyway. I think ala carte cable and TiVo will be dealing the Neilsen system some serious blows in the future (I mean, could it *be* any more outmoded?).
In response to people fearing for the demise of lesser-subscribed to channels... they won't go away, they'll just cost more. And to me it would be worth it. You pay $3.99/month for USA or PAX, you get... $3.99 worth of programming. You pay $12.95 for the Science Channel, you get considerably more. Especially since Science is one of the few channels that don't go to all informercials, all the time, after 10PM.
Besides, my final prediction is that most cable providers will take the initial step of still having bundles of channels, they'll just make more sense (ie all discovery channels in one package, $12.95 a month) Seems like a reasonable comprimise, and not an unlikely outcome. This will give some added security for the channels nobody watches by way of the main, "flagship" channel in the bundle.
But I am fed up with having to surf past channels I absolutely HATE to see the 5-10 channels I want to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that for insurance purposes, this will change soon... you know that insurance and lawsuits are what's driving this...
... and I can see a high-tech ransom outfit using this data to know where one certain child would be for quicker in-and-out kidnapping. Or knowing when that child might have been separated from it's protecive older siblings.
Or how bout this: 5-year-old son of European royalty is playing at legoland, taken out by a sniper from a huge distance based on his location from an SMS query to their wristband system...
OK, I'm being dystopian, and hopefully the crypto on those wristbands is bulletproof, but if the potential is there it will be abused and to think otherwise is naive.
hahahaha.... don't mean to be rude but don't we all wish... I almost got written up the other day cuz o some faulty docs. And now this weekend we find that due to a change on our main ftp server, all our ftp jobs are gonna come back with new and different return codes, but guess how important it is for them update docs? There's so many jobs to update doclib for that they're basically telling us that it's not a priority, it'll get done when it gets done...
mp2 is actually better from a perceuptual standpoint at lower bitrates, but the advantage above about 128k goes to mp3. Funny you should ask, I was just reading about this the other day... here
and i agree that people wouldn't tolerate any *perceptible* change in the music, i just think there's ways to change the audio that humans wouldn't percieve but software would. And I also agree that if it means the authorities only have to deal with 10% of the enforcement workload then that means "mission accomplished" for them. And I do agree that any additional data encoded into the audio for obfuscation purposes would increase the file size, meaning that for files of the same size audio quality would be decreased by at least a little bit.
I just can't imagine an autolistener that would function on the incredibly complex data of an audio file (even an mp3) any better than the email-address-crawlers do now on the very simple data of text email adresses posted on websites like this one.
"But changing the frequencies of the sounds in the file means changing the audio coming out."
That's fine. People have proven through the widespread acceptance of MP3 that audio quality is not nearly as much of an issue as cost and availability. MP3 has never sounded as good as PCM and never will, that's not what it's for. What it's good at is fitting down a narrow pipe quickly. In my opinion the development of MP3 was driven as much by dial-up modem speeds as anything else.
"You may need to make lots of changes to make an audio file a weak match to the frequency pattern of the unaltered track, and there's got to be a limit to how much can be changed while still leaving an audio file which people would want to listen to."
Not really. Time compress the entire song by one second, thus altering all time domain information. Pitch-shift the entire song down a half-step, thus altering all frequency domain information - either way it'll still be recognizable to human ears as the song it is but BOY will it's metrics look different. Superharmonics. Subharmonics. Subtle Compression or expansion. A couple seconds of random musical content before the song starts or after it ends. And let's not forget that now that the DVD industry has rammed 24bit96kHz recording down our throats, that that opens up all kinds off possibilites for doing things with the audio that humans can't hear (my oringinal complaint about 24/96 in the first place).
In short, there are almost as many ways to obfuscate any automated metric-based song identifier program as there are ways to obfuscate your email addy on slashdot so you don't get crawler-spam. That's why so many DRM models use data that's contained in the file but not the audio. Hell, every commercial radio station in existance (in America anyway) uses so many exciters, compressors, subharmonic synthesizers and limiters that I'd be willing to wager that this hypothetical auto-music-listener program wouldn't even be able to recognize the song played on the airwaves, even without obfuscation.
"Add in lots of extra frequencies in small amounts? That's white noise (more or less)."
Actually, every CD ever made has a small amount of white noise added during the mastering process - it's called dither, and it (supposedly) aids humans in the auditory perception of high frequencies. But I digress...
Adding small amounts of random data is only white "noise" when it's within the audible frequency range. If you added random data below 20Hz or above 20kHz, the listener wouldn't hear a thing. Might want to lock up the Doberman, though.
The main drawback of random frequency domain data as a metric obfuscator is that it's, well, random, and random is surprisingly easy to spot. You'd be better off using pink or brown noise, or better still generate inaudible superharmonics from a whole nother song and add them. As you can probably tell, I could go on and on...
Beat frequencies wouldn't be a significant problem with dynamic obfuscation since the frequencies would change, preferably as rapidly as possible.
To me the bottom line is that any system of incrimination and accusation that uses only "fuzzy" comparisons is bound to fail in the courts, even in today's environment of corporate feudalism. Imagine a cop saying, "well, your honor, he looked as though he might possibly have been a close relative of somebody who looked like our suspect, a fuzzy match is good enough for us!" One of the many lessons of the DNA testing revolution is that any system that incriminates (or exonerates for that matter) had damn well better be airtight.
No, the only way they can enforce this is to pay actual human beings with good ears and musical knowledge to sit down and listen to each individual MP3. Good luck.
"It occurs to me that this technique might be fairly good for uniquely identifying a song. Presumably certain high frequencies (harmonics of the stronger lower frequencies?) would be weighted less in the comparison, as most forms of lossless audio compression save space by eliminating these."
Ever heard of Sound Forge? Any method for identifying a music file based on it's audio content is practically begging to be circumvented. Change anything in the frequency or amplitude domains and you've created a file that will have a different identifier than it did before the change.
If it's digital, it's hackable.
password-protected zip (or rar or ace) file. It's been working OK for the virus-writers. Then the question becomes, the RIAA can see a file called "Britney's new album.zip" on my machine, but since they don't have the password to the zip file, they'll never know if that's what it actually is, let alone be able to prove that's what it actually is in court. So either they'll wind up suing somebody frivolously who has a bunch of password-protected zip files that are named suggestive things but all contain only junk data (see my earlier post), or else they'll sue somebody who does have the goods but they won't be able to prove it.
If Ronald Reagan, as President, can "forget" authorizing the torture and death of hundreds, I think I can manage to "forget" the password for that zip file.
the only problem I can see with this is that there might exist somewhere a "master password" that will unlock *all* zip files (but boy, do I hope not... imagine what could happen if that leaked out)
Here's my plan for taking down the MPAA. Generate a bunch of white noise .wav files in an audio program. Make them, oh, about 700 megs.
Rename them to things like, oh, chicago.avi. MatrixReloaded.mpg. Get sued (frivolously) for sharing these files.
Countersue for defamation, mental anguish, extortion...
I'm surprised nobody else has done this, I'm really not that smart...
Any validity this analogy might have ever had was blown to hell once you used "broke college student" and "lexus" in the same sentence.
In point of fact (inconvenient, I know... and yet, there it is), everywhere I've ever been that had a University has had some kind of discount/free public transportation for students. Here in Brewtown we call it the U-Pass.
So yeah, broke college students do have the right to cheap/free transportation, at least under the laws currently on the books. Next.
The present-day American Entertainment Monolith was built, for over a century, on complete and utter disregard for the intellectual property of England and Europe. We published their books and didn't pay them, published their music and didn't pay them, performed their plays and operas and didn't pay them.
For the American Entertainment Monolith to now say that fair's fair and everybody's got to pay up is the height of hypocrisy and gall... I'll pay them for all the crappy mp3's I dowloaded and erased (as opposed to the good mp3's I downloaded and bought the CD, they've already been paid for that) just as soon as they pay up what they owe to the estate/heirs of Charles Dickens.
Plus interest.
"They are a cartel defending their monopoly on distribution"
Somebody mod parent up, this is the most accurate description of the RIAA I've ever heard.
Of course it is. It's performing the role vacated by radio when the Clear Channel monopoly took over. People *will* hear good music, no matter how they have to do it.
Geez, here we go again...
In the late 70's and early 80's cassette recorders were ILLEGAL to own in america because the RIAA was convinced it would be out of business within months. Sound familiar?
Cassette recorders are legal today due to a freaking ACT OF CONGRESS because enough people wrote their legislators wondering why they couldn't make their friends mixtapes. In fact i believe it was even called the "mixtape law". (I'd like to provide a link but I'm at work and the firewalls don't like the pages that contain the relevant information)
Why is it NOBODY sees the parllel?
1) they tried to get away with something
2) we wrote our congresspeople and kept them from getting away with it
3) now they think we're all idiots and
4) are trying to get away with the same thing AGAIN
So there's your format-shifting. This law is still on the books AFAIK. Of course there's probably another one that contradicts it directly, and it's probably the DMCA.
Yet somehow, in spite of cassettes, the RIAA has managed to not only avoid bankruptcy, but make a killing while doing so. how did they do this?
Format-shifting! They shifted the format of almost everybody's music collection to CD, thus opening Pandora's box and setting the stage for the populist digital content revolution that is P2P.
Why am I, as the legal owner of a CD that I purchased from a store, not allowed to shift the format of a recording (that I OWN) while the industry is allowed to shift formats every other week? Here's the progression. 78 RPM Vinyl; 45 RPM vinyl; 33 RPM vinyl; 33/45 stereo vinyl; 33/45 quadraphonic vinyl; 1/2" stereo reel-to-reel tape; 1/4" stereo reel-to-reel tape; stereo 8-track tape; quadraphonic 8-track tape; CART; Compact Disc; Digital Audio Tape; MiniDisc; Digital Compact Casette (remember those?); Super Audio CD; Super Audio CD 24; DVD-audio. And they'd be happy to sell me the same album on every single one of these formats and wouldn't see a thing wrong with it.
But if I so much as tape John McCormick singing "when irish eyes are smiling" off my grandmother's 78 RPM record player onto an 8-track cartridge, I'm the one doing something ethically wrong?
I believe it was a Congressman who said, "I may not know what thuggery is, but I know it when I see it." But maybe he was talking about something else...
"They will get away with anything they can get away with, and they will never stop until somebody makes them stop" - Max Barry, "Jennifer Government"
IANAL, but wouldn't a due dilligence suit have to come from their shareholders?
"It would seem to me that a really good solution would be that the legal costs of the plantiff and defendant can not exccede a certain ratio. Say 2 to 1, and if some one wants to exccede the ratio they must give a 1 to 1 ammount to the other party."
But that would be fair. We don't want to set that kind of precedent, now do we? There's no percentage.
"What "right" is being surrendered, exactly?"
My right to not have them beam tasteless crap like "Friends" through my BODY. At least not without paying me a fee for rental, or storage, or whatever. But it's my body, and if they can put invisible things in it today they can put visible things in it tomorrow.
That right.
"Do you also think hacking someone's wlan from their parking lot is OK, since they broadcast intentionally to the parking lot and you are there?"
Well let me share a story of my own. When I was 19 I had about $1000 worth of musical equipment stolen out of my car, parked in my parents' driveway in the suburbs. When I called the police, and again when I called the insurance company, guess what their first question was?
Was the car *locked*?
When the answer turned out to be that it wasn't, the cops shrugged and the insurance company wouldn't pay a claim. Turns out for it to be considered theft, at least here in Wisconsin, you have to make some effort to actually secure your property. Go figure.
"If a pervert spies on a lady undressing who forgot to close her window is the pervert justified in taking advantage in your opinion."
First let me just say that there is absolutely nothing "perverted" about me wanting to see a naked woman. Unless she's deformed or something. "Perverted" basically means "different for the sake of being different", and I can't think of anything that makes more men less different than the desire to see naked women. (I hear some people actually touch them!)
And how exactly is viewing what is publicly displayed "taking advantage"? I read part of the front page of our local newspaper in a vending machine but didn't buy it, so how much do I owe them for looking at what they chose to make freely viewable?
In any event, I find it curious that someody who appears to be such a social conservative chooses to make this particular argument, based as it apparently is on the very "victim mentality" that conservatives lambasted throughout the 80's and 90's - until they realized that assuming that every citizen was a complete idiot incapable of caring for themselves was a great way to ram intrusive, unconstitutional and unAmerican legislation down our throats. Why should the man walking by on the street who happens to glance up and see a naked woman that he then proceeds to stare at be considered any more of a criminal than the woman who is actively engaged in exhibiting herself to the neighborhood, children included? Why, because she's the Victim! She must be Protected by the Nanny State before she figures out how to close her freakin blinds already! Protected with really, really bad laws!
Your argument doesn't hold much water, and, not unlike many other social conservatives, you appear to have a great deal of hostility toward people who actually get to see naked women. Sorry about that.
Oh, and one more thing, Marco. If I'm supposed to look away from a naked woman, I think you should be able to look away from posts that you consider stupid. Unless, of course, your argument was flawed to begin with (don't worry, it was).
Wasn't Webster's a British dictionary? Wasn't this right about the time that American companies were engaging in rampant and unrepentant copyright infringement of English and European intellectual property?
Why, if I was a little more cynical, I'd say that it's almost as though those who have used "theft" and "piracy" for copyright infringement deliberately chose those words for their negative connotation. In 1828.
"radiologists are doctors, they need to be licensed in the state they practice in."
And it is to prevent this troublesome little legal speedbump that we proudly present - Deregulation II! Bigger, badder and meaner than the original, Deregulation II comes with all the extra features to make your life more profitable... I mean convenient!
Laws? We don't need no stinking laws. The power-mad right wing has declared their intention, verbally and publically, to make this supposed nation of laws into an unrepentant nation of men. Those who can take, take, and they will never stop until somebody makes them stop.
Nobody's mentioned the best part - none of those pesky, troublesome lawsuits! How are you gonna sue a tele-doctor in India? If malpractice was involved, where did the crime take place, in India (where the tele-doctor actually made the mistake), or in America (where the patient died?)
The Ford F-150's and other F-trucks are about the only thing Ford does that doesn't suck. Sturdy, quality, dependable... then again they haven't really changed the design in decades, think that has something to do with it?
"So, perhaps you guys should quit titling your articles, 'Technology makes cars disposable' and switch to a more honest assessment of the problem, which is 'Market Economics makes cars disposable'."
How about "stupid consumers make cars disposable"... As an older, wiser man once said, "Never mind what they're selling / It's what you're buying". Vote with your money.
"Google "current Nielsen ratings". "
Sure, now read what I said about the Neilsens in my post...
"Opinion polls and market research statistics are far from perfect, but they're way better than 'All my friends say...'"
Not all the time. Opinion polls or market research are far from infallible or impartial. Sometimes it can be better to take your own sampling.
Not to be too off-topic but... My last experience buying cable (not even TV, just roadrunner) will probably be my last. It took SIX VISITS from different techs to get the damn thing to work. Script for visits 1-5 follows:
...the house was too big and there was no way this could work. Oh wait, actually the *real* problem turned out to be that the feed to our house was behind a bunch of splitters INSIDE THE BOX ON THE POLE!!!
Me: So you're here to hook up our roadrunner?
Tech: Yes. I've just got to go out to the box and do some stuff...
[thirty minutes pass]
Me: So, is our roadrunner working yet?
Tech: No. Your house is too big and has too many Digital Cable Receivers on too many splitters. There's no way this will work.
Me: can't you just bring another feed into the attic, since I'm a renter and that's where I live?
Tech: No, we can only have one feed per house.
Me: But the person on the phone said many people on our block have the same service. They're charging us right now for the service you are saying your company can't provide.
Tech: This won't work and I'm leaving now.
As you can imagine, the people on the phone were in a different country than the techs were (guess which one! go on, guess!) and apparently didn't read from the same script... I had a seven day weekend and spend six of those days waiting for time warner's bitch asses... After complaining to the point where they gave us free stuff on top of free stuff, they finally sent a team out to rewire the entire house for free, at which point they found that the problem was...
Never, ever, again... They can put ten million commercials on TV advertising roadrnuner and ondemand and all these high-speed services that they simply don't have the infrastructure to provide, and have no intention of having the infrastructure to provide. You know, I can remember a time when shit like this was fucking illegal. Let's hear it for deregulation, friend of the consumer!
Bastards.
I personally think that the potential audience for the "high-brow" channels (discovery, history, et al) is much larger than anybody gives it credit for being. Of everybody I know that has cable, we all watch the same ten channels (Discovery, History, TLC, Comedy Central, DisWings, Science Channel, TechTV, Spike/TNN, VH1, MTV2). Of course, that could be my excellent taste in friends...
My prediction is that once ala carte cable is available, we will have proof that, Neilsen ratings be damned, nobody likes Friends, or crappy lowest-common-denominator shows like that anyway. I think ala carte cable and TiVo will be dealing the Neilsen system some serious blows in the future (I mean, could it *be* any more outmoded?).
In response to people fearing for the demise of lesser-subscribed to channels... they won't go away, they'll just cost more. And to me it would be worth it. You pay $3.99/month for USA or PAX, you get... $3.99 worth of programming. You pay $12.95 for the Science Channel, you get considerably more. Especially since Science is one of the few channels that don't go to all informercials, all the time, after 10PM.
Besides, my final prediction is that most cable providers will take the initial step of still having bundles of channels, they'll just make more sense (ie all discovery channels in one package, $12.95 a month) Seems like a reasonable comprimise, and not an unlikely outcome. This will give some added security for the channels nobody watches by way of the main, "flagship" channel in the bundle.
But I am fed up with having to surf past channels I absolutely HATE to see the 5-10 channels I want to watch.