In./ parlance, this is stupid the same way download caps on your broadband are stupid.
Which ISP is it, again, that lets you override download caps at will? I think that's an excellent idea-they can cap it, you say "override", no longer capped. There's also the fact that except during the highest peak periods, a lot of Net capacity remains unused, which is not true of energy.
This is probably for the morons who can't throttle back the A/C before leaving for work and wait 20 minutes for it to cool down after they get home. If it's just got to be cool when you walk in the door, get a programmable thermostat.
Historically, this was not the case, but MS did release a 3 license pack of Office 2007 that was only Word, Excel, and Power Point for home users priced sub $200.
In terms of selling something when it is not naturally scarce, we're talking about selling it at a trivial price. If you're talking about really getting the average consumer to buy, we should be talking about sub $20, not sub $200. For music, get the major labels together to sell an "all you can eat" plan for $5-10. Same for movies, etc. Pay by the copy doesn't work for most things that can be digitally distributed, but if you can provide a convenient, all you can eat service, people will drop you cash by the truckload. Since the costs of replicating and delivering the product are minimal, that $5-$10 per person is essentially pure profit. Not too bad.
Unfortunately, what we're seeing here is the direct opposite. Prices get jacked up, pay-per-copy thinking continues, and DRM is imposed on the copies that are sold so that they are in fact less capable than the "pirate" versions with the silliness stripped out.
Ignoring reality, no matter how much you dislike it, is not a sustainable business model. The music, movie, software, etc., industries are based around certain technologies, and made a great deal of money from the state of those technologies for many years. Now technology has changed. The solution for them is to adopt to the new model, not to attempt to roll back the clock.
It may also turn out that the new, disruptive technology has made some aspects of content production and distribution obsolete. It's not the first time that's happened, and it won't be the last. Technology destroyed the market for everything from buggy whips to refrigeration ice hauled down from mountains.
These corporations cannot on one hand screech that it's a "free market" and that they "serve only their shareholders" when committing price gouging, mass layoffs without dire need, subsidizing their low pay with public welfare, and other such actions, and then turn around and demand protection from that very "free market" when it renders them obsolete. Can't have that one both ways.
Not everything that has the same outcome is the same thing. Take, for example, the following two scenarios:
Someone suffers a stuck accelerator, loses control of their vehicle, and strikes someone, killing them:
-Victim is dead.
Someone points a gun at that person and pulls the trigger, killing them:
-Victim is dead.
Yet, despite the same outcome, only one of these acts is a murder. It would be absurd to say they both are, just because the outcome was the same in both cases.
By your means of definition (similarity of outcome), a secondhand sale would also be a theft: the purchaser has the game, and the publisher got no money for the sale. Yet this would seem absurd, at least to me.
Theft requires a physical deprivation. That's the critical point. If someone steals my bicycle, it is theft because they now have it, I did not give them permission to have it (both true of copyright infringement), and I now do not have it (untrue of copyright infringement).
All of those conditions must be met for a theft to occur. To say that the "deprivation" is in not a loss but a lack of gain (a "deprivation" of a hypothetical profit which may or may not have occurred) is to stretch the definition until it screams, and I don't think it at all holds, as it results in an absurdity (secondhand sales also being "theft").
If someone could somehow make a copy of my bike, rather than purchasing one, it may not be something bike manufacturers would like too much. But it wouldn't be a theft.
I don't think this has anything to do with theft. Ironically, if you were to steal a copy of the game (walk into a store, put it up your shirt, walk out), you'd still have the DRM, and as far as Ubisoft's servers are concerned, your copy will be entirely "legitimate".
I think, however, that this topic is largely about copying. I'm not sure how any DRM system could impact actual theft, and I don't see anything in this one that even attempts to address it.
Now, of course, you weren't trying to disingenuously equate copyright infringement with theft, were you? They're not the same thing. Copying something cannot by definition be theft. It can still be illegal, just like murder, rape, and extortion are illegal. But copyright infringement is not equivalent to any of those things either, and to use one of those terms instead of the proper ones because it sounds "more serious" is misunderstanding what theft is at best and deliberately dishonest at worst.
Well, what's actually happening is spambots over MSN. If you tell it anything long enough (it can be "fuck you" or whatever you like), it'll tell you to "see me on cam" at a site. I set up a script to get the bots to give the link (since they all use the same one, that was relatively simple), and then tracerouted the site they were advertising.
Ultimately, the site being advertised is the one responsible, in my opinion, and their host should hold them responsible. They're either directly encouraging people to spam, or at the very least running "affiliate" programs in such a manner that people are encouraged to do so and do not face consequences.
I don't think that I made a mistake as to where the hosting was, since I used the exact link the bot gives, but anything's possible. They never denied it's theirs, though.
Thanks for the insight into the situation, though-I've never myself been on the other end of that. When you get 10-30 IM spams a day, though, it sure gets frustrating pretty damn quickly, especially since I can't just ignore IM-if it is something important, I've got to respond to it.
I've been reporting an IM spammer for several weeks now an IM spammer hosting sites with a place called Flying Croc. I've even complained to their upstream provider, but to no avail from either. Both of these have AUPs specifically prohibiting spamming from or spam being used to advertise sites on their network, but it seems the AUPs are only really intended to let the host disconnect someone they don't like, not actually to prevent their customers from launching an attack or spamming campaign. Or at least, the webcam sites being spammed for still trace right back to the same networks as they did.
Maybe there needs to be some mandatory service level from companies above a certain size (a response from a human within X days, etc.). Service seems to be getting worse and worse across the board. And maybe a requirement that if said company says something, it damn well better back it up when called upon to.
Actually, quite often, it is not. And dialup is just fine for LOLCAT viewing, if that's really your thing.
On the other hand, if your job requires that you be able to move data at a reasonable rate, you have to have high speed. And in a lot of areas, that's Comcast, Comcast, or Comcast.
Let's quit with the "free market" garbage here. If we really had a free market, where Comcast was but one of many high speed providers in most areas (and at least some of the providers weren't pulling stunts like this), you'd have a point. As it is, a good lot of us don't.
Now, if we can go back to required line sharing, and actually enforce that with some teeth, so that there is real competition, I'm all for it. But that's not the case now. Generally, one or at most two providers have a monopoly of a given area.
The reason that telephone companies are so heavily regulated is that they provide a critical infrastructure service and generally are effectively local monopolies. The telephone company cannot, for example, block or degrade calls to the local public utility commission that accepts complaints about it. It must carry all traffic equally, except that it may prioritize traffic to emergency numbers.
Ironically, with the proliferation of cellular services, regular old telephone companies have more competition and less monopoly power than they used to, while ISPs are often in that very position they used to occupy. There's no reason that the ISPs should not be subject to the same types of rules-no blocking, no deliberately prioritizing stuff you want people to use or degrading the stuff you'd rather they not. Dumb pipe only-you sell people the pipe to put through it what they will, and if you need to upgrade your system to meet newer demands, then get to building.
I suppose that wasn't very clear, so thanks for calling me on it.
What I mean is not that it's just the same as setting up a video camera and recording a play on stage, as it is of course not. However, it is still theater in a new medium. Music played on an electric guitar and distributed on a CD sounds much different than music played on a bone flute around a campfire, but both are music. While movies do use a new medium, and often certainly use it to their advantage (CGI, camera tricks, etc.), a movie is still at its core a theatrical performance.
The same held true for me with Magnatune. They aren't just "whatever you want to throw in" and do filter for quality, but license under CC-BY-SA-NC. And despite the fact that it's entirely legal to share it (so long as you don't do so commercially, anyway), they've been around for several years now, and put out some very good music where the artists actually get paid a significant share.
I've also run across the independent band Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, and quite like them. They do amazing live shows (and most of the time you can sit down and have a beer with the band afterward), and I've been to several. They highly encourage fans to share their stuff-if my sister hadn't sent me a copy of Americano, I'd probably have never heard of them. That sharing sure didn't hurt them a bit.
Filesharing is in no way bad for the artist. Now the media cartels, those are horrible for the artist-and distribution channels existing outside their control is in turn disastrous for the cartels. The "artists", aside from a few very big names, get very little to nothing out of record/box office/etc. sales, and then the cartels deliberately fudge the numbers to avoid paying even that small amount.
Theater existed quite some time ago. There are of course well known plays from ancient Greece, and it probably goes back even farther than that. Movies are just a recording of theater with a videocamera. Even many of the same terms are used-actors, set design, script, what have you.
There still certainly is a difference between theater and music. But the movie industry did not invent the idea of theater, they just mass marketed it using the then-new technology of recording video.
With digital delivery, there's no return policy, no trade-ins, no used game sales.
If you pay with a credit card, there's always a return policy. I don't hesitate to use it if someone delivers me crap and refuses to take it back for a refund, and it works.
So, report on what you actually know, not what you don't. You can say how many reports of rape you had. You can say how many people were busted for smoking pot or prostitution last year. At least there there's some known quantity.
You can report on how much piracy occurred, too, as most of the time raiding a ship at gunpoint is a pretty high profile crime, though I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic, or why pirates are after songs or movies (couldn't they easily copy those without the risk of a sea raid?) rather than more valuable cargo. For the topic (copyright infringement), though, it'd be hard to impossible to get any real statistics. Only the large scale, commercial infringers tend to face prosecution, as it's quite impractical to prosecute the millions upon millions who copy simply for personal use. Even if you were to monitor torrents and say how many people were connected, you have no idea if those people lost/damaged their purchased copy and are replacing it, are copying as an easier backup than the deliberately crippled original, are copying instead of purchasing but would have purchased had the copy been unavailable, or are copying instead of purchasing but would never have purchased even were the copy unavailable. Only one of those is a "lost sale", and it's impossible to tell how many people on a given torrent are in that group.
Perhaps you could explain why not? It looks to me like a company with a monopoly or near-monopoly in many areas is exploiting that monopoly in a way that would force customers to exclusively use its service, by deliberately forcing out other (if not for their tactics) perfectly viable options. Sounds like a textbook antitrust issue to me. What makes you say it is not one?
Now, let's look at your line of thought: American educators are going to be able to teach kids how to properly use contraception, in a way that they'll remember in the heat of the moment, and be able to recall from memory. Shit... most kids can't read, and they've been taught reading since first grade!
Actually, that's kind of the problem. It does seem to make sense. There's just the problem that every study done on whether it really does has pretty comprehensively proved it false. An example from the American Medical Association, with some useful footnotes to the more detailed studies, is here.
Comprehensive sex education does work. Contrary to what some people may think, the emphasis in that is most certainly not "Now go do it tonight, just make sure you use a condom!" The focus still is very much on waiting and why to do so (and in most programs I've looked at, this includes a discussion of the potential emotional issues). However, let's be realistic. If you put a bunch of kids in various stages of puberty together, some of them are going to have sex, no matter how much you tell them not to do it. That being the case, let's make sure they at least know how to do it in a much safer manner.
Dude, dude, dude you have it entirely wrong. If there was a well thought out and comprehensive sexual education curriculum, then dumb girls wouldn't believe that semen had a lot of protein in it and helps you lose weight.
Do you happen to know where I might be able to find some of these girls? Oh, and do avoid confusing them with too many of these fact things.
Promises from companies have been broken before. Quite often actually. You might want to trust some corporate entity who's directors can change and thus the direction of the company, but i dont.
And the moment that Ubuntu becomes nonfree and/or pay-to-play (either in a de jure or de facto sense), I have my data backed up. I'll move away without a regret or a second thought. And yes, free (free as in beer AND speech) software has existed for quite some time. No one needs a company for it. If you can figure a way to make money off it, great. If you can't, then to be honest, fuck yourself. It's not there for that purpose, it just allows for that purpose if you can pull it off.
That, however, is the exact reason that I absolutely insist on local storage of my data. If you control the data that I generate using my software, you control my use of it. I will not concede that control to even an entity that is now entirelty benevolent. That data is mine. If I wish to migrate it away, for any reason from malevolence to a simple wish to experiment, that's my right to do as well. I will not allow external storage or control of critical data.
You're correct in that I wasn't specific enough there, and thanks for pointing that out. My intent was to say that "I was just following orders" never makes something ethical that would otherwise be unethical, even if it does turn out to work to prevent prosecution. A murderer may escape prosecution, but that does not make the murder ethical or acceptable.
Identify companies which would have a catastrophic effect due to their size if they were to fail for any reason.
Develop a step by step plan to make an orderly split of those companies into truly independent, separate companies that are not "too big to fail". Absolutely no exceptions for any reason, even if some temporary pain will result.
Split them up.
Ensure that antitrust law is updated to prevent ever creating a "Too Big to Fail" again.
Re:Prosecuting corporations for crimes is asinine.
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The Short Arm of the Law
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"I was just following orders" does not work. Ever. Even when disobedience might mean death, let alone just getting fired.
Now, if you want to pass a law requiring triple damages for employees who are discharged based on refusal to follow an illegal or unethical request, and establish a system whereby they can get that redress without a drug out court battle, I'll be behind you 100%. But if you perform the unethical act, you are responsible for doing so, regardless of whether it was your idea or not. The people who "gave the order" are also responsible, but to avoid complicity yourself, you must disobey it and blow the whistle.
The only case where this would not be possible is if, for example, ten people are each instructed to do one thing, each of which in itself seems innocuous but when put together add up to something sinister. Since it would not be reasonable in this case for the individuals to know what they're doing is unethical, they could not be expected to disobey and/or blow the whistle. In a scenario like that, only those who developed, approved, and/or orchestrated the scheme are responsible. But most of the time, that's not the case:
"Oh, come on, John, you know how flighty investors can get, and there's really no need to worry them. If we just count things a little differently, I'm sure we can ease their concerns..." "Well, sure, there is a safety flaw in the product, but at this point it appears that it would be cheaper to pay off the lawsuits than to fix it." "Well, we want to cut the workforce by half, but not deal with unemployment. Go find even the most minor flaws in whatever someone's doing, and say they were terminated for cause."
Anyone who goes along with these practices is responsible for them. People need to grow a backbone. Maybe if we start throwing some people in jail, people will worry less about having to job hunt and more about doing it right. The people you're helping cheat (or in some cases even kill, see the exploding Pinto case) may have families to feed, too. There's absolutely no excuse for not blowing the whistle when you become aware of something like this.
Well, I won't claim I know the entire answer. Nor do I need to, to know there is a question.
Laissez-faire capitalism does work in some ways, but it also has a significant number of flaws (look up "Gilded Age"). Its polar opposite, a totally nationalized economy, also turned out to be fatally flawed.
So, for now, why don't we look at building a society like building anything? You need more than one tool in the toolbox. Some things might work best totally nationalized, some might work best largely unregulated, most will fall somewhere in between. Some things might need totally novel solutions that we've not even come up with yet.
Absolute laissez-faire capitalism and totally nationalized communism actually shared the same flaw. They tried to treat everything in the same way, when not all of them are the same thing. Why not try treating the two as a spectrum, and treating different areas as though they're, well, different?
Realistically, it's been done for a while. Some things, like police and fire protection, are effectively totally nationalized. Other things, such as luxury goods, have little regulation or price control beyond basic consumer-protection law. Yet others, like utilities (generally private but heavily regulated), fall somewhere in between.
History has already shown that doing everything one way or the other will fail, so why not learn that lesson, avoid that mistake, and spend our time and resources deciding what should be where along that spectrum? The world's most successful and stable societies and economies are hybrids of this nature.
But the fact still remains, any treatment, drug, etc., based upon the gene's discovery, is as patentable as it ever was. The only thing you can't patent is the gene itself, and that's quite correct. If you discover a certain isotope, and find a way to make workable fusion energy from it, you can patent your reactor, but not the isotope itself. That's exactly how the patent system is meant to work-you can patent things you invent, but not things you just find.
That being said, it always saddens me to see "capitalism" thrown around like it's some unimpeachable, unquestionable good force. I wish people would question it, as it's sure got an awful lot of negatives. At some point, I sure hope we can find a better system.
Even if a class action suit is filed and they are found guilty or w/e ill receive a coupon in the mail for something i didnt want and have to pay real money to get anyways. Thanks alot Sony. I dont use my Linux on my PS3 whole lot, but i didnt give up 10 GB of precious HDD space for nothing.
Small claims court is a great thing, and will quite often let you recover the full value of damages rather than getting a coupon or some similar crap from a class-action suit. File for the full value of the thing, claiming that whether you accept the update or don't, irreparable damage will be done to functions you purchased the system to perform. Quite often, they won't even bother to show up and will just quietly pay off what you win. I'd strongly encourage you to look into the small-claims rules in your jurisdiction, and you can also find some basic information here.
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Which ISP is it, again, that lets you override download caps at will? I think that's an excellent idea-they can cap it, you say "override", no longer capped. There's also the fact that except during the highest peak periods, a lot of Net capacity remains unused, which is not true of energy.
This is probably for the morons who can't throttle back the A/C before leaving for work and wait 20 minutes for it to cool down after they get home. If it's just got to be cool when you walk in the door, get a programmable thermostat.
Your points are very interesting, and probably more accurate than mine. So thanks to you too.
In terms of selling something when it is not naturally scarce, we're talking about selling it at a trivial price. If you're talking about really getting the average consumer to buy, we should be talking about sub $20, not sub $200. For music, get the major labels together to sell an "all you can eat" plan for $5-10. Same for movies, etc. Pay by the copy doesn't work for most things that can be digitally distributed, but if you can provide a convenient, all you can eat service, people will drop you cash by the truckload. Since the costs of replicating and delivering the product are minimal, that $5-$10 per person is essentially pure profit. Not too bad.
Unfortunately, what we're seeing here is the direct opposite. Prices get jacked up, pay-per-copy thinking continues, and DRM is imposed on the copies that are sold so that they are in fact less capable than the "pirate" versions with the silliness stripped out.
Ignoring reality, no matter how much you dislike it, is not a sustainable business model. The music, movie, software, etc., industries are based around certain technologies, and made a great deal of money from the state of those technologies for many years. Now technology has changed. The solution for them is to adopt to the new model, not to attempt to roll back the clock.
It may also turn out that the new, disruptive technology has made some aspects of content production and distribution obsolete. It's not the first time that's happened, and it won't be the last. Technology destroyed the market for everything from buggy whips to refrigeration ice hauled down from mountains.
These corporations cannot on one hand screech that it's a "free market" and that they "serve only their shareholders" when committing price gouging, mass layoffs without dire need, subsidizing their low pay with public welfare, and other such actions, and then turn around and demand protection from that very "free market" when it renders them obsolete. Can't have that one both ways.
Not everything that has the same outcome is the same thing. Take, for example, the following two scenarios:
Someone suffers a stuck accelerator, loses control of their vehicle, and strikes someone, killing them:
-Victim is dead.
Someone points a gun at that person and pulls the trigger, killing them:
-Victim is dead.
Yet, despite the same outcome, only one of these acts is a murder. It would be absurd to say they both are, just because the outcome was the same in both cases.
By your means of definition (similarity of outcome), a secondhand sale would also be a theft: the purchaser has the game, and the publisher got no money for the sale. Yet this would seem absurd, at least to me.
Theft requires a physical deprivation. That's the critical point. If someone steals my bicycle, it is theft because they now have it, I did not give them permission to have it (both true of copyright infringement), and I now do not have it (untrue of copyright infringement).
All of those conditions must be met for a theft to occur. To say that the "deprivation" is in not a loss but a lack of gain (a "deprivation" of a hypothetical profit which may or may not have occurred) is to stretch the definition until it screams, and I don't think it at all holds, as it results in an absurdity (secondhand sales also being "theft").
If someone could somehow make a copy of my bike, rather than purchasing one, it may not be something bike manufacturers would like too much. But it wouldn't be a theft.
I don't think this has anything to do with theft. Ironically, if you were to steal a copy of the game (walk into a store, put it up your shirt, walk out), you'd still have the DRM, and as far as Ubisoft's servers are concerned, your copy will be entirely "legitimate".
I think, however, that this topic is largely about copying. I'm not sure how any DRM system could impact actual theft, and I don't see anything in this one that even attempts to address it.
Now, of course, you weren't trying to disingenuously equate copyright infringement with theft, were you? They're not the same thing. Copying something cannot by definition be theft. It can still be illegal, just like murder, rape, and extortion are illegal. But copyright infringement is not equivalent to any of those things either, and to use one of those terms instead of the proper ones because it sounds "more serious" is misunderstanding what theft is at best and deliberately dishonest at worst.
Well, what's actually happening is spambots over MSN. If you tell it anything long enough (it can be "fuck you" or whatever you like), it'll tell you to "see me on cam" at a site. I set up a script to get the bots to give the link (since they all use the same one, that was relatively simple), and then tracerouted the site they were advertising.
Ultimately, the site being advertised is the one responsible, in my opinion, and their host should hold them responsible. They're either directly encouraging people to spam, or at the very least running "affiliate" programs in such a manner that people are encouraged to do so and do not face consequences.
I don't think that I made a mistake as to where the hosting was, since I used the exact link the bot gives, but anything's possible. They never denied it's theirs, though.
Thanks for the insight into the situation, though-I've never myself been on the other end of that. When you get 10-30 IM spams a day, though, it sure gets frustrating pretty damn quickly, especially since I can't just ignore IM-if it is something important, I've got to respond to it.
I've been reporting an IM spammer for several weeks now an IM spammer hosting sites with a place called Flying Croc. I've even complained to their upstream provider, but to no avail from either. Both of these have AUPs specifically prohibiting spamming from or spam being used to advertise sites on their network, but it seems the AUPs are only really intended to let the host disconnect someone they don't like, not actually to prevent their customers from launching an attack or spamming campaign. Or at least, the webcam sites being spammed for still trace right back to the same networks as they did.
Maybe there needs to be some mandatory service level from companies above a certain size (a response from a human within X days, etc.). Service seems to be getting worse and worse across the board. And maybe a requirement that if said company says something, it damn well better back it up when called upon to.
Actually, quite often, it is not. And dialup is just fine for LOLCAT viewing, if that's really your thing.
On the other hand, if your job requires that you be able to move data at a reasonable rate, you have to have high speed. And in a lot of areas, that's Comcast, Comcast, or Comcast.
Let's quit with the "free market" garbage here. If we really had a free market, where Comcast was but one of many high speed providers in most areas (and at least some of the providers weren't pulling stunts like this), you'd have a point. As it is, a good lot of us don't.
Now, if we can go back to required line sharing, and actually enforce that with some teeth, so that there is real competition, I'm all for it. But that's not the case now. Generally, one or at most two providers have a monopoly of a given area.
The reason that telephone companies are so heavily regulated is that they provide a critical infrastructure service and generally are effectively local monopolies. The telephone company cannot, for example, block or degrade calls to the local public utility commission that accepts complaints about it. It must carry all traffic equally, except that it may prioritize traffic to emergency numbers.
Ironically, with the proliferation of cellular services, regular old telephone companies have more competition and less monopoly power than they used to, while ISPs are often in that very position they used to occupy. There's no reason that the ISPs should not be subject to the same types of rules-no blocking, no deliberately prioritizing stuff you want people to use or degrading the stuff you'd rather they not. Dumb pipe only-you sell people the pipe to put through it what they will, and if you need to upgrade your system to meet newer demands, then get to building.
I suppose that wasn't very clear, so thanks for calling me on it.
What I mean is not that it's just the same as setting up a video camera and recording a play on stage, as it is of course not. However, it is still theater in a new medium. Music played on an electric guitar and distributed on a CD sounds much different than music played on a bone flute around a campfire, but both are music. While movies do use a new medium, and often certainly use it to their advantage (CGI, camera tricks, etc.), a movie is still at its core a theatrical performance.
The same held true for me with Magnatune. They aren't just "whatever you want to throw in" and do filter for quality, but license under CC-BY-SA-NC. And despite the fact that it's entirely legal to share it (so long as you don't do so commercially, anyway), they've been around for several years now, and put out some very good music where the artists actually get paid a significant share.
I've also run across the independent band Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, and quite like them. They do amazing live shows (and most of the time you can sit down and have a beer with the band afterward), and I've been to several. They highly encourage fans to share their stuff-if my sister hadn't sent me a copy of Americano, I'd probably have never heard of them. That sharing sure didn't hurt them a bit.
Filesharing is in no way bad for the artist. Now the media cartels, those are horrible for the artist-and distribution channels existing outside their control is in turn disastrous for the cartels. The "artists", aside from a few very big names, get very little to nothing out of record/box office/etc. sales, and then the cartels deliberately fudge the numbers to avoid paying even that small amount.
Theater existed quite some time ago. There are of course well known plays from ancient Greece, and it probably goes back even farther than that. Movies are just a recording of theater with a videocamera. Even many of the same terms are used-actors, set design, script, what have you.
There still certainly is a difference between theater and music. But the movie industry did not invent the idea of theater, they just mass marketed it using the then-new technology of recording video.
If you pay with a credit card, there's always a return policy. I don't hesitate to use it if someone delivers me crap and refuses to take it back for a refund, and it works.
So, report on what you actually know, not what you don't. You can say how many reports of rape you had. You can say how many people were busted for smoking pot or prostitution last year. At least there there's some known quantity.
You can report on how much piracy occurred, too, as most of the time raiding a ship at gunpoint is a pretty high profile crime, though I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic, or why pirates are after songs or movies (couldn't they easily copy those without the risk of a sea raid?) rather than more valuable cargo. For the topic (copyright infringement), though, it'd be hard to impossible to get any real statistics. Only the large scale, commercial infringers tend to face prosecution, as it's quite impractical to prosecute the millions upon millions who copy simply for personal use. Even if you were to monitor torrents and say how many people were connected, you have no idea if those people lost/damaged their purchased copy and are replacing it, are copying as an easier backup than the deliberately crippled original, are copying instead of purchasing but would have purchased had the copy been unavailable, or are copying instead of purchasing but would never have purchased even were the copy unavailable. Only one of those is a "lost sale", and it's impossible to tell how many people on a given torrent are in that group.
You mean like I can, by firing up a good old fashioned Bittorrent client at a total charge of nothing? Have fun paying DirecTV though.
Perhaps you could explain why not? It looks to me like a company with a monopoly or near-monopoly in many areas is exploiting that monopoly in a way that would force customers to exclusively use its service, by deliberately forcing out other (if not for their tactics) perfectly viable options. Sounds like a textbook antitrust issue to me. What makes you say it is not one?
From TFS:
Actually, that's kind of the problem. It does seem to make sense. There's just the problem that every study done on whether it really does has pretty comprehensively proved it false. An example from the American Medical Association, with some useful footnotes to the more detailed studies, is here.
Comprehensive sex education does work. Contrary to what some people may think, the emphasis in that is most certainly not "Now go do it tonight, just make sure you use a condom!" The focus still is very much on waiting and why to do so (and in most programs I've looked at, this includes a discussion of the potential emotional issues). However, let's be realistic. If you put a bunch of kids in various stages of puberty together, some of them are going to have sex, no matter how much you tell them not to do it. That being the case, let's make sure they at least know how to do it in a much safer manner.
Do you happen to know where I might be able to find some of these girls? Oh, and do avoid confusing them with too many of these fact things.
And the moment that Ubuntu becomes nonfree and/or pay-to-play (either in a de jure or de facto sense), I have my data backed up. I'll move away without a regret or a second thought. And yes, free (free as in beer AND speech) software has existed for quite some time. No one needs a company for it. If you can figure a way to make money off it, great. If you can't, then to be honest, fuck yourself. It's not there for that purpose, it just allows for that purpose if you can pull it off.
That, however, is the exact reason that I absolutely insist on local storage of my data. If you control the data that I generate using my software, you control my use of it. I will not concede that control to even an entity that is now entirelty benevolent. That data is mine. If I wish to migrate it away, for any reason from malevolence to a simple wish to experiment, that's my right to do as well. I will not allow external storage or control of critical data.
You're correct in that I wasn't specific enough there, and thanks for pointing that out. My intent was to say that "I was just following orders" never makes something ethical that would otherwise be unethical, even if it does turn out to work to prevent prosecution. A murderer may escape prosecution, but that does not make the murder ethical or acceptable.
"I was just following orders" does not work. Ever. Even when disobedience might mean death, let alone just getting fired.
Now, if you want to pass a law requiring triple damages for employees who are discharged based on refusal to follow an illegal or unethical request, and establish a system whereby they can get that redress without a drug out court battle, I'll be behind you 100%. But if you perform the unethical act, you are responsible for doing so, regardless of whether it was your idea or not. The people who "gave the order" are also responsible, but to avoid complicity yourself, you must disobey it and blow the whistle.
The only case where this would not be possible is if, for example, ten people are each instructed to do one thing, each of which in itself seems innocuous but when put together add up to something sinister. Since it would not be reasonable in this case for the individuals to know what they're doing is unethical, they could not be expected to disobey and/or blow the whistle. In a scenario like that, only those who developed, approved, and/or orchestrated the scheme are responsible. But most of the time, that's not the case:
"Oh, come on, John, you know how flighty investors can get, and there's really no need to worry them. If we just count things a little differently, I'm sure we can ease their concerns..."
"Well, sure, there is a safety flaw in the product, but at this point it appears that it would be cheaper to pay off the lawsuits than to fix it."
"Well, we want to cut the workforce by half, but not deal with unemployment. Go find even the most minor flaws in whatever someone's doing, and say they were terminated for cause."
Anyone who goes along with these practices is responsible for them. People need to grow a backbone. Maybe if we start throwing some people in jail, people will worry less about having to job hunt and more about doing it right. The people you're helping cheat (or in some cases even kill, see the exploding Pinto case) may have families to feed, too. There's absolutely no excuse for not blowing the whistle when you become aware of something like this.
Well, I won't claim I know the entire answer. Nor do I need to, to know there is a question.
Laissez-faire capitalism does work in some ways, but it also has a significant number of flaws (look up "Gilded Age"). Its polar opposite, a totally nationalized economy, also turned out to be fatally flawed.
So, for now, why don't we look at building a society like building anything? You need more than one tool in the toolbox. Some things might work best totally nationalized, some might work best largely unregulated, most will fall somewhere in between. Some things might need totally novel solutions that we've not even come up with yet.
Absolute laissez-faire capitalism and totally nationalized communism actually shared the same flaw. They tried to treat everything in the same way, when not all of them are the same thing. Why not try treating the two as a spectrum, and treating different areas as though they're, well, different?
Realistically, it's been done for a while. Some things, like police and fire protection, are effectively totally nationalized. Other things, such as luxury goods, have little regulation or price control beyond basic consumer-protection law. Yet others, like utilities (generally private but heavily regulated), fall somewhere in between.
History has already shown that doing everything one way or the other will fail, so why not learn that lesson, avoid that mistake, and spend our time and resources deciding what should be where along that spectrum? The world's most successful and stable societies and economies are hybrids of this nature.
But the fact still remains, any treatment, drug, etc., based upon the gene's discovery, is as patentable as it ever was. The only thing you can't patent is the gene itself, and that's quite correct. If you discover a certain isotope, and find a way to make workable fusion energy from it, you can patent your reactor, but not the isotope itself. That's exactly how the patent system is meant to work-you can patent things you invent, but not things you just find.
That being said, it always saddens me to see "capitalism" thrown around like it's some unimpeachable, unquestionable good force. I wish people would question it, as it's sure got an awful lot of negatives. At some point, I sure hope we can find a better system.
Small claims court is a great thing, and will quite often let you recover the full value of damages rather than getting a coupon or some similar crap from a class-action suit. File for the full value of the thing, claiming that whether you accept the update or don't, irreparable damage will be done to functions you purchased the system to perform. Quite often, they won't even bother to show up and will just quietly pay off what you win. I'd strongly encourage you to look into the small-claims rules in your jurisdiction, and you can also find some basic information here.