Maybe I should say "what basic broadband costs now". I strongly doubt ISDN costs that now, though I also haven't looked into it in quite some time.
As to 20 MB being a reasonable amount of time, you've got a very tolerant boss, apparently. Even if we figure that the ISDN operated at absolute maximum capacity for the full transfer, 128 kbit = 16 kB per second. At that rate, transferring a 20 MB file would take (20000 KB/16 KB/s) = 1250 seconds = 20.8 minutes. And that's under the most optimal circumstances. A 20 MB file is by no means the largest file size I work with in a given day, nor is my connection idle while I'm sending one.
And while we're at it, why don't you show me a $1000 ISDN setup? I'm finding plenty for no setup charge at all. That may have been true years ago, but many things were. I'm old enough to remember when a 56k modem seemed blazing fast, as compared to a 14.4. Times change. That's not true anymore.
Boss: I need those reports back from the 20 MB spreadsheets I gave you.
Employee: Sure thing, boss! You should have the first one a couple days from now!
Even for standard "web surfing and email" type access, dialup is inadequate. For any type of real work, it's not an option at all.
That's quite aside from the fact that fewer and fewer people need or want POTS anymore at all. To get POTS just to accommodate dialup, plus the dialup, you'll probably be paying more than basic broadband.
Obviously, the right to publicly hate on minorities (or majorities) is totally awesome!
Yes, actually, it is. Now that doesn't mean actually doing it is awesome, or that I in any way agree with doing such a thing. In fact, most people find such speech highly offensive (and that includes many who are not members of the minority in question).
However, it means I can also say things, without worrying if people find them offensive. I can say "Religions are fairy tales for adults" or "The last president was a sack of shit and this one's only marginally better if at all" or "I wish all corporations larger than a certain size would be broken up". I cannot be prosecuted for saying any of those things, even though there are people who will strongly dislike each of those statements.
In exchange for that right, I'll gladly accept a few idiots wearing their white hoods and going around spouting crap. If anything, that educates the public on just how ridiculous and ignorant those people are. And a lot of people exercise the right they do have in that scenario-to point out just how stupid it is.
Lock up anyone who might become a child abuser?
Possibly.
I don't downmod for disagreeing, but I sure came awfully close here, especially with as high up as this was modded. I think it requires a response, though.
Locking up anyone who "might" become a criminal would require locking us all up. Time and time again, the person that was "always so nice" or "was a little quiet but seemed harmless" commit horrible crimes. On the other hand, time and time again, the person that seems really nice is nice, and the person who's quiet and a little eccentric really is harmless.
I could wind up killing someone, or abusing children, or starting up the next Madoff-style ripoff tomorrow. I have no intent of doing any of those things, but you have no way to verify that's actually true. Of course, I can't verify that you won't do them either, so both of us might. Guess they better lock both of us up.
Certainly appreciate the offer, but I could do that myself as well. GGP seemed to have some specific examples in mind, though, so I was just curious as to what those were.
The "problematic" patent numbers are too numerous to list. If you would like a list of them, however, look for any patent on software, genes, business methods, or anything else not tangible.
I'm not sure that's specifically what's meant (TFA seems to be more about privacy, so I rather presumed the post was addressing that issue directly), but you're quite possibly right. If that's the case, you can always copy and paste (for a few things), or write a script if it'll be a larger task.
The comparison still works just the same. If I decide I don't like Slashdot (or any number of other places) anymore, I can quit posting any further, but I can't remove what I already did post. And even if I could, someone may well have mirrored, copied, or reproduced it elsewhere.
The bottom line remains, never put something on the Internet that you do not want the world to know in perpetuity. Quite often, there is no way to "take it back".
I'm not even sure there should be a means to take it back. An author can't decide two years later that they regret writing a book, and demand that all copies be confiscated and burned, reviews of it be deleted and destroyed, and other records of it be erased. When you publish something in a public medium, it is part of the public record. Regret it or not, you really can't unsay something.
"Think before you speak, not after" is really not a bad lesson.
If I tell you something in this very reply, can I then prohibit you from divulging you to somewhat else?
The idea of "ownership" of information is a slippery one at best. If an author's book goes to the public library, the author can't tell the library not to loan it out. If I tell someone something, I can't prohibit them from telling others. I might be able to ask them not to, or even ask them to sign a contract saying they won't and refuse to tell them if they won't sign, but I can't actually lock it away in a safe and prevent them from doing it once they know in the first place.
There's a very simple solution to keeping secrets, secret. Do not tell them. People like to have something to say that no one else knows, it's in our nature.
I'm not going to tell you anything in this post I don't want known to the public, because this is a public website. I've never had a major deep dark secret that I've never wanted anyone to know, but if I did, I wouldn't tell anyone at all.
That being said, if Facebook is promising users that it will keep something and not doing so, it is still culpable. But if users are just assuming that what they post is a secret, they're idiots. When I post something on any website (even if it's ostensibly "private"), the first thing I ask myself is: Would I mind if this were known to the public? If the answer is "yes", I don't post.
If they're not, it'll become an expensive oversight very quickly. Security precautions are a whole lot cheaper than just one lawsuit over a botched procedure, especially if they were notified in advance that someone was threatening extortion and intended to try to cause a problem. The jury would throw them straight under the bus on that one.
From: Daughter To: Mr. l33t h4xxor Mesho (by the way, is it Mesho or Meshko, you should really make up your mind.) Subject: Your extortion demand
I am pleased to inform you that I have notified the hospital of the potential problem, and they have notified me that remote surgeries are done via a dedicated connection, not the public Internet. In light of this issue, however, they have assigned a doctor to this case. Good luck with your DDoS.
I have also contacted the FBI, who will be in contact with Swiss authorities. I will also be pleased to inform you of exactly what you can do with your six million dollars, please contact me for further information.
The court also got "implicit consent" wrong, and any "implicit consent" provisions should be outlawed. Requiring "implicit consent" to search for a common activity (like driving) is just as wrong as requiring "implicit consent" to search for an activity like signing a mortgage. Consent should always be explicit and individual. Anything else requires probable cause.
Doesn't matter if I gave them before. Once you fire me, you're asserting that you've no more obligation to pay me. At that point, I've got no more obligation to work for you either. If you'd like me to do work for you after I'm no longer employed with you, let's have a talk about my hourly consulting fees.
The only time at which I am expected to make my employer's life easier, or obey their chain of command, is when they are paying me to do so. The moment that they cease writing the checks, I cease to have any obligation to them-and if they released me, that's their decision, not mine.
Where would something like this stop? If I'd been in the middle of developing custom code for an employer when terminated, would I be obliged (free of charge) to finish it to avoid "denying them access" to whatever I was working with? What if they fired me in the middle of doing a critical upgrade, and the fact I couldn't complete it caused problems? Am I now obligated to come finish that for them, again at no charge?
If they have a harder time getting access to them without me around, tough shit-they should've planned better to start with, or else they need to keep me employed, hire me (at consulting rates) once they realize their error (provided I'm willing to do it, I'm under no obligation even if they're willing to), or hire someone else to work around that issue. It should never be a felony to refuse to work with or comply with a former employer. If you're that valuable, they better keep you around.
At many checkpoints I've seen, Breathalyzers are performed. A biological test is absolutely a search, and indeed the Fourth Amendment specifically mentions the security of one's "person" as part of what should be free from search without probable cause.
Even if they do not perform a search of any type, however, the police are still detaining you at the checkpoint. By definition, you are being detained at any time you are not actually under arrest, but are also not free to leave-and you're not at a checkpoint, try asking. Detention should also require individualized, reasonable suspicion, not be done en masse.
If the police are canvassing the neighborhood for a burglar or the like, they have the right to knock on my door and ask if I can help. In most circumstances, I personally probably will. However, I can, if I so desire, refuse to talk to them and shut the door. If they then want to detain me or search my house, they need good cause (and of course, refusal of a search is not grounds for a search, that would render the Fourth Amendment rather meaningless!). That's the difference between a neighborhood door to door canvass and a roadside checkpoint, and why I would say one is acceptable and one is not.
Of course, if they wanted to put up a sign by the road saying "Police checkpoint-stop if you want to", that'd be similar to the canvass, and acceptable. Somehow, though, I don't see that being a particularly good use of their time. Conversely, if the police conducted a neighborhood canvass by detaining everyone who was walking down the sidewalk without individual suspicion, that would be unacceptable.
Just out of interest, who would the rightsholder be allowed to approach (going by the DEA and AAISP's definition of 'subscriber') if the individual's personal details are suppressed?
I think the idea here is "no one, get a warrant/subpoena". Since that information is, you know, private.
Good on this ISP. Refreshing to see a company actually care about its customers.
So long as a checkpoint is not applied selectively they are not nominally infringing on someone's rights. Police are not allowed to stop individual cars without cause, but they are allowed to stop all cars with a reasonable public safety purpose.
Let's rephrase:
So long as home searches are not applied selectively they are not nominally infringing on someone's rights. Police are not allowed to search individual homes without cause, but they are allowed to search every home in the neighborhood with a reasonable public safety purpose.
The courts may have indeed agreed with you. They got it wrong. Individual and reasonable suspicion should always be required for such actions. Doing it to a lot of people makes it less acceptable, not more.
If you're saying "should", then sure, there's cognitive dissonance. But that's a straw man.
If you want me to work in your IT department to install and maintain software on your computers, that's a job, and you need to pay me for it. If you'd like me to design, program, and test POS or support software tailored specifically to your company, that's a job, and you need to pay me for it. You don't have to hire me (or anyone) to do those things. If you're a one man shop, and perfectly comfortable doing your installs yourself, no one "should" get paid-you've every right to do it yourself. On the other hand, if you're a large corporation, chances are someone's going to get hired to do installation, maintenance, and customization. They're no more being paid for the software installing and maintaining Linux then they are installing Windows-they're not getting a cut of the licensing on Windows either. They're being paid for their time.
Even if we presume everything you say is true, I would much rather live in the situation you describe than that of sweatshops paying a few cents an hour. This, too, would have negative ripple effects. By failing to set a "floor" on what a wage is, you lower the wages of higher wage workers as well. If fast food is paying fifty cents an hour, a buck an hour for management is a nice raise. It also limits the ability of corporations to "externalize" the cost of not paying a living wage to social welfare systems funded by the public, while enjoying all the benefits of cheap labor.
At least with a minimum wage, it matters if you get hired or not. I'll gladly trade a slightly lower chance of getting hired for a better wage once I do. And if my hours are fewer, is that really a loss either? Am I better off working sixty hours a week at fifty cents an hour (with no overtime regulations), or forty hours a week at $7 an hour (with overtime if I'm periodically needed more)? Which would you choose, given the option?
Reality isn't economic theory. The people being hired are human beings. Given that, there are interests of human dignity and basic needs, not just the "optimal economic outcome". If the "optimal" outcome crushes a bunch of people under its wheels, it isn't the optimal outcome. As it stands, until the economy hit the crapper, most people were able to find work just fine, minimum wage notwithstanding.
The same is true of many other regulations. I'm very happy to take higher prices in exchange for safety in both products and the workplace. Lower prices don't do me a whole lot of good dead, and they certainly don't do me much good if I've got to regularly pay massive hospital bills to recover from illnesses and injuries caused from unsafe work environments and products and don't have a mechanism to recover damages from those responsible.
'Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,' wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. 'When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.'"
An amazing discovery! Most people like to interact socially with other people, are comforted by being able to talk to people they know and trust, and feel alone and secluded when they do not! I can't believe research hasn't figured that out yet, who would've ever guessed?
Social interaction with one's friends is still interaction. Technology may make it easier, but that's always been true. Before we had the Internet, people would use telephones to talk, or to plan face to face meetings (and probably use their cars to get to said meetings). The presence of technology in a social interaction doesn't make it any less of one, nor does that mean it's "addictive"-well, any more than any other form anyway, by and large, we're pretty social creatures.
That's even before you get to the fact that removing just about anything familiar from someone's environment will, to some degree, make them anxious. For some people, even getting a new home can be very stressful-you have to learn new ways around, find the places near you that you'll be going frequently and remember the way there, get used to the new layout for going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and all those other little things we take for granted. This isn't exactly groundbreaking research, and it sure in the hell doesn't demonstrate an "addiction".
While what you say is true, there's a tremendous difference between making counterfeit medicine (which could easily injure or kill someone), making a counterfeit watch (which is defrauding the customer by making them think it's something it's not), and sharing an MP3. Ultimately, the law is going to need to realize these distinctions. I think our tax money would be much better spent on bringing copyright and patent laws in line with the digital age, rather than trying to bring the digital age in line with copyright and patent law that was never designed with it in mind.
Hey, I can dream, can't I? But look at the fights the lawsuits caused. If Joe/Jane Average actually starts getting arrested for MP3 sharing, I think we'll see hell raised on a scale that'll make that look tame. It's just a shame that it would probably take that to get people to care.
There's always something, and this bill's got quite a "something" in it. This is India's very own version of our Mickey Mouse Copyright Perpetuation Act (ostensibly having something to do with Sonny Bono, but we all know who it really was for...), and extends a fixed 60-year term to life plus 60 (see sidebar here.
Why in the world would we want to see copyrights get longer, anywhere? They obviously already provide an incentive at current levels. Even ten years should be an adequate incentive for 99.9% of cases, and you never want to write law based on the edge cases. With digital distribution speeding up how quickly a work can have its initial distribution, copyright terms should be shrinking, not growing.
Sorry to reply to myself, but apparently Slashdot can't properly interpret the div tag with subscripts. The "line breaks" in the middle of the chemical formula are meant to be subscripts, I don't know why they didn't appear that way.
They are the only ones left. Those that didn't carry the torch lost funding, lost credibility and had to find other lines of work. All that is left are the scientist who played ball with those that pay the grants, the politicians!
An interesting and extraordinary claim, that tens of thousands of scientists are in concert with politicians worldwide. I will be awaiting your extraordinary evidence, which I'm sure will be forthcoming shortly.
It's especially interesting that these politicians got this vast conspiracy together to piece together such elementary concepts as:
Burning fossil fuels creates a great deal of carbon dioxide. For example, take octane: 2C
8
H
18
+ 25O
2
= 16CO
2
+ 18H
2
O. Takes me right back to high school chemistry.
Carbon dioxide creates a blanketing atmospheric effect. That's not even to high school astronomy, I don't think-but if you're skeptical, I hear Venus is nice this time of year.
We burn an awful lot of fossil fuel. If you don't believe that, I dunno what to tell you, but here's an idea of "a lot" from the Department of Energy.
I'm not entirely sure why you think a conspiracy is required to advance such simple principles. Seems like a whole lot of work for no reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I should say "what basic broadband costs now". I strongly doubt ISDN costs that now, though I also haven't looked into it in quite some time.
As to 20 MB being a reasonable amount of time, you've got a very tolerant boss, apparently. Even if we figure that the ISDN operated at absolute maximum capacity for the full transfer, 128 kbit = 16 kB per second. At that rate, transferring a 20 MB file would take (20000 KB/16 KB/s) = 1250 seconds = 20.8 minutes. And that's under the most optimal circumstances. A 20 MB file is by no means the largest file size I work with in a given day, nor is my connection idle while I'm sending one.
And while we're at it, why don't you show me a $1000 ISDN setup? I'm finding plenty for no setup charge at all. That may have been true years ago, but many things were. I'm old enough to remember when a 56k modem seemed blazing fast, as compared to a 14.4. Times change. That's not true anymore.
For a lot of people, that isn't an option.
Boss: I need those reports back from the 20 MB spreadsheets I gave you.
Employee: Sure thing, boss! You should have the first one a couple days from now!
Even for standard "web surfing and email" type access, dialup is inadequate. For any type of real work, it's not an option at all.
That's quite aside from the fact that fewer and fewer people need or want POTS anymore at all. To get POTS just to accommodate dialup, plus the dialup, you'll probably be paying more than basic broadband.
Yes, actually, it is. Now that doesn't mean actually doing it is awesome, or that I in any way agree with doing such a thing. In fact, most people find such speech highly offensive (and that includes many who are not members of the minority in question).
However, it means I can also say things, without worrying if people find them offensive. I can say "Religions are fairy tales for adults" or "The last president was a sack of shit and this one's only marginally better if at all" or "I wish all corporations larger than a certain size would be broken up". I cannot be prosecuted for saying any of those things, even though there are people who will strongly dislike each of those statements.
In exchange for that right, I'll gladly accept a few idiots wearing their white hoods and going around spouting crap. If anything, that educates the public on just how ridiculous and ignorant those people are. And a lot of people exercise the right they do have in that scenario-to point out just how stupid it is.
I don't downmod for disagreeing, but I sure came awfully close here, especially with as high up as this was modded. I think it requires a response, though.
Locking up anyone who "might" become a criminal would require locking us all up. Time and time again, the person that was "always so nice" or "was a little quiet but seemed harmless" commit horrible crimes. On the other hand, time and time again, the person that seems really nice is nice, and the person who's quiet and a little eccentric really is harmless.
I could wind up killing someone, or abusing children, or starting up the next Madoff-style ripoff tomorrow. I have no intent of doing any of those things, but you have no way to verify that's actually true. Of course, I can't verify that you won't do them either, so both of us might. Guess they better lock both of us up.
Certainly appreciate the offer, but I could do that myself as well. GGP seemed to have some specific examples in mind, though, so I was just curious as to what those were.
I would be quite interested to see those, if your offer still stands?
The "problematic" patent numbers are too numerous to list. If you would like a list of them, however, look for any patent on software, genes, business methods, or anything else not tangible.
I'm not sure that's specifically what's meant (TFA seems to be more about privacy, so I rather presumed the post was addressing that issue directly), but you're quite possibly right. If that's the case, you can always copy and paste (for a few things), or write a script if it'll be a larger task.
The comparison still works just the same. If I decide I don't like Slashdot (or any number of other places) anymore, I can quit posting any further, but I can't remove what I already did post. And even if I could, someone may well have mirrored, copied, or reproduced it elsewhere.
The bottom line remains, never put something on the Internet that you do not want the world to know in perpetuity. Quite often, there is no way to "take it back".
I'm not even sure there should be a means to take it back. An author can't decide two years later that they regret writing a book, and demand that all copies be confiscated and burned, reviews of it be deleted and destroyed, and other records of it be erased. When you publish something in a public medium, it is part of the public record. Regret it or not, you really can't unsay something.
"Think before you speak, not after" is really not a bad lesson.
If I tell you something in this very reply, can I then prohibit you from divulging you to somewhat else?
The idea of "ownership" of information is a slippery one at best. If an author's book goes to the public library, the author can't tell the library not to loan it out. If I tell someone something, I can't prohibit them from telling others. I might be able to ask them not to, or even ask them to sign a contract saying they won't and refuse to tell them if they won't sign, but I can't actually lock it away in a safe and prevent them from doing it once they know in the first place.
There's a very simple solution to keeping secrets, secret. Do not tell them. People like to have something to say that no one else knows, it's in our nature.
I'm not going to tell you anything in this post I don't want known to the public, because this is a public website. I've never had a major deep dark secret that I've never wanted anyone to know, but if I did, I wouldn't tell anyone at all.
That being said, if Facebook is promising users that it will keep something and not doing so, it is still culpable. But if users are just assuming that what they post is a secret, they're idiots. When I post something on any website (even if it's ostensibly "private"), the first thing I ask myself is: Would I mind if this were known to the public? If the answer is "yes", I don't post.
If they're not, it'll become an expensive oversight very quickly. Security precautions are a whole lot cheaper than just one lawsuit over a botched procedure, especially if they were notified in advance that someone was threatening extortion and intended to try to cause a problem. The jury would throw them straight under the bus on that one.
From: Daughter
To: Mr. l33t h4xxor Mesho (by the way, is it Mesho or Meshko, you should really make up your mind.)
Subject: Your extortion demand
I am pleased to inform you that I have notified the hospital of the potential problem, and they have notified me that remote surgeries are done via a dedicated connection, not the public Internet. In light of this issue, however, they have assigned a doctor to this case. Good luck with your DDoS.
I have also contacted the FBI, who will be in contact with Swiss authorities. I will also be pleased to inform you of exactly what you can do with your six million dollars, please contact me for further information.
Yours truly,
Not as dumb as you think.
The court also got "implicit consent" wrong, and any "implicit consent" provisions should be outlawed. Requiring "implicit consent" to search for a common activity (like driving) is just as wrong as requiring "implicit consent" to search for an activity like signing a mortgage. Consent should always be explicit and individual. Anything else requires probable cause.
Doesn't matter if I gave them before. Once you fire me, you're asserting that you've no more obligation to pay me. At that point, I've got no more obligation to work for you either. If you'd like me to do work for you after I'm no longer employed with you, let's have a talk about my hourly consulting fees.
The only time at which I am expected to make my employer's life easier, or obey their chain of command, is when they are paying me to do so. The moment that they cease writing the checks, I cease to have any obligation to them-and if they released me, that's their decision, not mine.
Where would something like this stop? If I'd been in the middle of developing custom code for an employer when terminated, would I be obliged (free of charge) to finish it to avoid "denying them access" to whatever I was working with? What if they fired me in the middle of doing a critical upgrade, and the fact I couldn't complete it caused problems? Am I now obligated to come finish that for them, again at no charge?
If they have a harder time getting access to them without me around, tough shit-they should've planned better to start with, or else they need to keep me employed, hire me (at consulting rates) once they realize their error (provided I'm willing to do it, I'm under no obligation even if they're willing to), or hire someone else to work around that issue. It should never be a felony to refuse to work with or comply with a former employer. If you're that valuable, they better keep you around.
At many checkpoints I've seen, Breathalyzers are performed. A biological test is absolutely a search, and indeed the Fourth Amendment specifically mentions the security of one's "person" as part of what should be free from search without probable cause.
Even if they do not perform a search of any type, however, the police are still detaining you at the checkpoint. By definition, you are being detained at any time you are not actually under arrest, but are also not free to leave-and you're not at a checkpoint, try asking. Detention should also require individualized, reasonable suspicion, not be done en masse.
If the police are canvassing the neighborhood for a burglar or the like, they have the right to knock on my door and ask if I can help. In most circumstances, I personally probably will. However, I can, if I so desire, refuse to talk to them and shut the door. If they then want to detain me or search my house, they need good cause (and of course, refusal of a search is not grounds for a search, that would render the Fourth Amendment rather meaningless!). That's the difference between a neighborhood door to door canvass and a roadside checkpoint, and why I would say one is acceptable and one is not.
Of course, if they wanted to put up a sign by the road saying "Police checkpoint-stop if you want to", that'd be similar to the canvass, and acceptable. Somehow, though, I don't see that being a particularly good use of their time. Conversely, if the police conducted a neighborhood canvass by detaining everyone who was walking down the sidewalk without individual suspicion, that would be unacceptable.
I think the idea here is "no one, get a warrant/subpoena". Since that information is, you know, private.
Good on this ISP. Refreshing to see a company actually care about its customers.
Let's rephrase:
So long as home searches are not applied selectively they are not nominally infringing on someone's rights. Police are not allowed to search individual homes without cause, but they are allowed to search every home in the neighborhood with a reasonable public safety purpose.
The courts may have indeed agreed with you. They got it wrong. Individual and reasonable suspicion should always be required for such actions. Doing it to a lot of people makes it less acceptable, not more.
If you're saying "should", then sure, there's cognitive dissonance. But that's a straw man.
If you want me to work in your IT department to install and maintain software on your computers, that's a job, and you need to pay me for it. If you'd like me to design, program, and test POS or support software tailored specifically to your company, that's a job, and you need to pay me for it. You don't have to hire me (or anyone) to do those things. If you're a one man shop, and perfectly comfortable doing your installs yourself, no one "should" get paid-you've every right to do it yourself. On the other hand, if you're a large corporation, chances are someone's going to get hired to do installation, maintenance, and customization. They're no more being paid for the software installing and maintaining Linux then they are installing Windows-they're not getting a cut of the licensing on Windows either. They're being paid for their time.
Even if we presume everything you say is true, I would much rather live in the situation you describe than that of sweatshops paying a few cents an hour. This, too, would have negative ripple effects. By failing to set a "floor" on what a wage is, you lower the wages of higher wage workers as well. If fast food is paying fifty cents an hour, a buck an hour for management is a nice raise. It also limits the ability of corporations to "externalize" the cost of not paying a living wage to social welfare systems funded by the public, while enjoying all the benefits of cheap labor.
At least with a minimum wage, it matters if you get hired or not. I'll gladly trade a slightly lower chance of getting hired for a better wage once I do. And if my hours are fewer, is that really a loss either? Am I better off working sixty hours a week at fifty cents an hour (with no overtime regulations), or forty hours a week at $7 an hour (with overtime if I'm periodically needed more)? Which would you choose, given the option?
Reality isn't economic theory. The people being hired are human beings. Given that, there are interests of human dignity and basic needs, not just the "optimal economic outcome". If the "optimal" outcome crushes a bunch of people under its wheels, it isn't the optimal outcome. As it stands, until the economy hit the crapper, most people were able to find work just fine, minimum wage notwithstanding.
The same is true of many other regulations. I'm very happy to take higher prices in exchange for safety in both products and the workplace. Lower prices don't do me a whole lot of good dead, and they certainly don't do me much good if I've got to regularly pay massive hospital bills to recover from illnesses and injuries caused from unsafe work environments and products and don't have a mechanism to recover damages from those responsible.
An amazing discovery! Most people like to interact socially with other people, are comforted by being able to talk to people they know and trust, and feel alone and secluded when they do not! I can't believe research hasn't figured that out yet, who would've ever guessed?
Social interaction with one's friends is still interaction. Technology may make it easier, but that's always been true. Before we had the Internet, people would use telephones to talk, or to plan face to face meetings (and probably use their cars to get to said meetings). The presence of technology in a social interaction doesn't make it any less of one, nor does that mean it's "addictive"-well, any more than any other form anyway, by and large, we're pretty social creatures.
That's even before you get to the fact that removing just about anything familiar from someone's environment will, to some degree, make them anxious. For some people, even getting a new home can be very stressful-you have to learn new ways around, find the places near you that you'll be going frequently and remember the way there, get used to the new layout for going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and all those other little things we take for granted. This isn't exactly groundbreaking research, and it sure in the hell doesn't demonstrate an "addiction".
While what you say is true, there's a tremendous difference between making counterfeit medicine (which could easily injure or kill someone), making a counterfeit watch (which is defrauding the customer by making them think it's something it's not), and sharing an MP3. Ultimately, the law is going to need to realize these distinctions. I think our tax money would be much better spent on bringing copyright and patent laws in line with the digital age, rather than trying to bring the digital age in line with copyright and patent law that was never designed with it in mind.
Hey, I can dream, can't I? But look at the fights the lawsuits caused. If Joe/Jane Average actually starts getting arrested for MP3 sharing, I think we'll see hell raised on a scale that'll make that look tame. It's just a shame that it would probably take that to get people to care.
Gives a whole new meaning to getting ripped off.
There's always something, and this bill's got quite a "something" in it. This is India's very own version of our Mickey Mouse Copyright Perpetuation Act (ostensibly having something to do with Sonny Bono, but we all know who it really was for...), and extends a fixed 60-year term to life plus 60 (see sidebar here.
Why in the world would we want to see copyrights get longer, anywhere? They obviously already provide an incentive at current levels. Even ten years should be an adequate incentive for 99.9% of cases, and you never want to write law based on the edge cases. With digital distribution speeding up how quickly a work can have its initial distribution, copyright terms should be shrinking, not growing.
Sorry to reply to myself, but apparently Slashdot can't properly interpret the div tag with subscripts. The "line breaks" in the middle of the chemical formula are meant to be subscripts, I don't know why they didn't appear that way.
An interesting and extraordinary claim, that tens of thousands of scientists are in concert with politicians worldwide. I will be awaiting your extraordinary evidence, which I'm sure will be forthcoming shortly.
It's especially interesting that these politicians got this vast conspiracy together to piece together such elementary concepts as:
8
H
18
+ 25O
2
= 16CO
2
+ 18H
2
O. Takes me right back to high school chemistry.
I'm not entirely sure why you think a conspiracy is required to advance such simple principles. Seems like a whole lot of work for no reason.