They're got a government regulated monopoly to deliver local phone service.
No industry that is regulated wants to be deregulated. Regulation is not an impediment to profit, it is a usually insurmountable, barrier to entry for competition.
Look at the airline industry - going from regulated with tons of cushy waste and guaranteed profits to constantly on the edge of bankruptcy (either coming or going).
You can draw similar comparisons with just about any deregulation in recent memory.
One recent hire had 14 interviews before getting the job - and that was in the public relations department.'
This one is so obvious...
1) Engineering company - lotsa dorky engineers who can never get close to a babe in real life 2) PR department - #1 requirement is to be good looking, usually female (able to work as a "booth babe" if the regular unemployeed actress/model/singer/songwriter chicks are no shows).
Those 14 "interviews" was just google management sharing the wealth with the engineers, keeping up morale and all. Maybe even hooking up a couple with some nice poon since everybody knows google stock options are making the long-time employees rich.
Re:Is it just me
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
By your logic google is evil for having a DMCA policy. Now you might say "wait a minute, they have to do that, it's the law." Well I don't know if linking to infringing material is illegal, which means they're complying with censorship without being forced too.
I believe that there is case law (the 2600 DeCSS case) that says it is illegal to link to illegal information. If google were really interested in "doing good" (which is different from doing no evil) then they would do two things in DMCA censorship cases:
1) PROMINENTLY indicate that the search returned information that is being censored by the DMCA. When the crutch of scientology sued them to stop linking to bootlegs of their "religious" texts, they put a little dinky notice at the very bottom of the search results indicating something was amiss. In my opinion, Google should put a notice like that as the very first hit and it should be in red. It would link to the DMCA take-down notice or whatever other legal document was used to force them to not link.
2) They would wait for a really good test case and push to have it taken to the Supreme Court. They obviously have got the bucks for the lawyers and after all these years, I expect they have had at least one good test case slip through their fingers.
Re:Innovative practices...
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
One of the key things I remember reading about is their extraordinarily high employee satisfaction ratings, so it follows that a whole lotta people would want to work there.
It is standard human psychology to overvalue something that was dificult to obtain. That is one big reason that fraternities haze their pledges - the pledges that "survive" the hazing will usually overvalue their membership in the fraternity and behave accordingly.
Similarly, an extremely difficult interview process will tend to make the employees that put up with it feel that their new job is something really special and unique, when if looked at from an objective point of view, it might not really be so.
he strange part, the call was from his previous "now defunct" companies biggest competitor.
That just means they knew he was soon to be unemployed and that they initially lowballed the hell out of him with their first offer. He probably could have got a heck of a lot more if he had pushed even harder. Companies always know their competitors, employees move between competitors all the time and they bring the knowledge of who is good and who does what from their former job along with them, and they usually maintain their contacts at their former job. I'm sure at least one guy at the defunct place called up his buddy the day before and said, "well they are finally closing the doors" which started the chain of events that got your friend hired.
If you spoof your browser id to be googlebot, it lets you in without registration. I tried it first as googlebot and it let me in, then as firefox and it redirected to the registration page instead. Lots of these registration-required and even some pay-required sites let you in if your browser-id is googlebot. I am constantly amazed at how stupid "professional" webmasters are.
This is the second best use of Microsoft revenue. The first one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps people in Africa.
There is a conspiracy theory that their foundation is helping microsoft in africa more than it is helping the people of africa. The theory goes that the foundation will only pay for name brand AIDS drugs and that they actively work to discourage locally produced and orders of magnitude cheaper "clone" drugs.
The reasoning, or so the conspiracy theory posits, is that by supporting American-style intellectual-property rights in drug patents, they are helping American-style intellectual-property rights in copyrights (anti-piracy) and software patents (anti-OSS) in Africa too.
However, I still stand by the fact that we are debating over exceptions to the rule, and not the rule itself
Sounds good in theory. In reality, I think you have it backwards in that clean companies are the exception and the morally ambiguous are the rule. The Chinese have a saying (or at least one chinese girl who told it to me has a saying) that goes something like, "You can't be very sucessful in business without doing something immoral."
So, you are saying that corporate welfare is good, but social welfare is bad? Unless you are an adherent of Benito Mussolini, that's a pretty indefendsible position.
You cannot watch your kids 24 hours a day. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to because an important part of development is feeling a sense of control and independence.
And having the stores act as mommies is going to make kids feel in control and independent?
If you can go to work any time of the day and get paid, well congratulations, I think. If I wasn't standing their getting my money back, I would have been doing something even less productive.
The policy doesn't extend to everything though. I belive things like CDs and DVDs can only be exchanged for the same item.
Yeah, they've got all their employees brainwashed into believing that accepting returns on opened DVDs is a violation of federal law! Literally, I've heard that at two different stores. A few months back I bought a DVD (for all of $5.50) that was labeled widescreen/full-screen but when opened, the actual disc was only full-screen.
They had no more copies of that disc in stock (and even if they did, I had learned that they were all defectively full-screen only). It was the most amazingly difficult experience trying to get my money back. Had to escalate it three levels, ultimately to someone who was not forced to wear a wal-mart uniform.
And then they wouldn't give me the tax back -- I didn't have the receipt and they claimed I could be working a scam of buying it in some other state that did not have sales tax.
Your citation mentions "production" also known as copying. I don't think dictionary references are going to get you anywhere because they will avoid using the words copy or copies in defining the word copyright because they wish to avoid even having the appearance of using a word to define itself.
(Author's note, Point #3 is intended to be a bit of a joke. But I expect at least one reader will not read all the way to this disclaimer, instead flaming me good and hard.)
Reader's note, If you have to put an a disclaimer on your humor, it ain't funny. If you aren't willing to encourage the misdirection of good, hard flaming, then you shouldn't be writing it in the first place.
Somehow I don't think it will happen, currently freenet doesn't have indexing / searching of contents, you need to find a link to the content through other means. Isn't that all that a torrent actually is? a link and identifier to the content and the tracker?
That's not too hard to overcome. Just use a known naming convention for the list of current torrents, say "freenova-YYMMDDHH.txt" that file would then contain a list of the current torrents as of YYMMDDHH.
When you run the torrents they can still find you the only diffrence between this and how something like emule works is you have to use freenet.
No, the goal here is to make it impossible to hard to figure out if a person is sharing just one item or thousands of items.
First a little background for other readers: You may be seeding 500 torrents, but the copyright cartel can only figure out that you are in one torrent swarm at a time - they have to go to each tracker and "ask" it who is in that one swarm.
That makes it eponentially more difficult to nail someone for sharing more than one piece of contraband information at a time. At what, $125,000 per item? that's still a big stick for the copyright cartel to swing. But previously the RIAA has only been suing people they claim are sharing thousands of songs. The MPAA has been issuing take-down notices for individual movies, but their actual suits have been limited to big aggregators like supernova (not supernova per se, but like them) and big multi-tracker sites.
Putting the torrents in freenet makes sense in theory because a) torrents are small so freenet's renowned inefficiencies are not that big of a problem and b) it "hides" torrent aggregators effectively eliminating the ability for the copyright cartel to go after them specifically rather than any random member of the network.
But you still have the problem of big multi-tracker sites being vulnerable. For that you need some sort of efficient system, but perhaps it can be designed specifically for the needs of tracking thus making it good at tracking, good at anonymization but sucky for any other types of data sharing. Unlike freenet which is reasonably good at anonymization, and equally sucky for all types of data sharing.
But making copies doesn't circumvent copyright, only *DISTRIBUTION* is a violation of copyright.
You are incorrect. If distribution were all that mattered, it would be called distribution-right, not copyright. Technically, even making more than a copy or two for your own private use would not be defensible as fair use. Read the statute, title 17.
As I understand it, the DMCA forbids any exchange of information relating to circumvention of copyright.
Absolutely not. At least not yet.
The DMCA is bad, but it isn't quite that bad. What is restricted is any exchange of information relating to circumvention of copy prevention mechanisms -- like CSS or macrovision. Simply talking about how to "circumvent copyrights" aka make copies, is not restricted.
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They're got a government regulated monopoly to deliver local phone service.
No industry that is regulated wants to be deregulated.
Regulation is not an impediment to profit, it is a usually insurmountable, barrier to entry for competition.
Look at the airline industry - going from regulated with tons of cushy waste and guaranteed profits to constantly on the edge of bankruptcy (either coming or going).
You can draw similar comparisons with just about any deregulation in recent memory.
Oh Blunkett! you came, and you left, without implementing draconian biometric ID technologies.
Yeah, but it sounds like that fucker has planted the meme and his successor is going to push for them just as hard.
One recent hire had 14 interviews before getting the job - and that was in the public relations department.'
This one is so obvious...
1) Engineering company - lotsa dorky engineers who can never get close to a babe in real life
2) PR department - #1 requirement is to be good looking, usually female (able to work as a "booth babe" if the regular unemployeed actress/model/singer/songwriter chicks are no shows).
Those 14 "interviews" was just google management sharing the wealth with the engineers, keeping up morale and all. Maybe even hooking up a couple with some nice poon since everybody knows google stock options are making the long-time employees rich.
By your logic google is evil for having a DMCA policy. Now you might say "wait a minute, they have to do that, it's the law." Well I don't know if linking to infringing material is illegal, which means they're complying with censorship without being forced too.
I believe that there is case law (the 2600 DeCSS case) that says it is illegal to link to illegal information. If google were really interested in "doing good" (which is different from doing no evil) then they would do two things in DMCA censorship cases:
1) PROMINENTLY indicate that the search returned information that is being censored by the DMCA. When the crutch of scientology sued them to stop linking to bootlegs of their "religious" texts, they put a little dinky notice at the very bottom of the search results indicating something was amiss. In my opinion, Google should put a notice like that as the very first hit and it should be in red. It would link to the DMCA take-down notice or whatever other legal document was used to force them to not link.
2) They would wait for a really good test case and push to have it taken to the Supreme Court. They obviously have got the bucks for the lawyers and after all these years, I expect they have had at least one good test case slip through their fingers.
One of the key things I remember reading about is their extraordinarily high employee satisfaction ratings, so it follows that a whole lotta people would want to work there.
It is standard human psychology to overvalue something that was dificult to obtain. That is one big reason that fraternities haze their pledges - the pledges that "survive" the hazing will usually overvalue their membership in the fraternity and behave accordingly.
Similarly, an extremely difficult interview process will tend to make the employees that put up with it feel that their new job is something really special and unique, when if looked at from an objective point of view, it might not really be so.
he strange part, the call was from his previous "now defunct" companies biggest competitor.
That just means they knew he was soon to be unemployed and that they initially lowballed the hell out of him with their first offer. He probably could have got a heck of a lot more if he had pushed even harder. Companies always know their competitors, employees move between competitors all the time and they bring the knowledge of who is good and who does what from their former job along with them, and they usually maintain their contacts at their former job. I'm sure at least one guy at the defunct place called up his buddy the day before and said, "well they are finally closing the doors" which started the chain of events that got your friend hired.
They are not kosher.
They could be kosher if they are turkey hams.
(link [washingtonpost.com] - probably requires registration - sorry)
If you spoof your browser id to be googlebot, it lets you in without registration. I tried it first as googlebot and it let me in, then as firefox and it redirected to the registration page instead. Lots of these registration-required and even some pay-required sites let you in if your browser-id is googlebot. I am constantly amazed at how stupid "professional" webmasters are.
Has getting to the moon really done much for us lately?
Tang.
NEVER forget the Tang!
This is the second best use of Microsoft revenue. The first one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps people in Africa.
There is a conspiracy theory that their foundation is helping microsoft in africa more than it is helping the people of africa. The theory goes that the foundation will only pay for name brand AIDS drugs and that they actively work to discourage locally produced and orders of magnitude cheaper "clone" drugs.
The reasoning, or so the conspiracy theory posits, is that by supporting American-style intellectual-property rights in drug patents, they are helping American-style intellectual-property rights in copyrights (anti-piracy) and software patents (anti-OSS) in Africa too.
Make of it what you will.
However, I still stand by the fact that we are debating over exceptions to the rule, and not the rule itself
Sounds good in theory. In reality, I think you have it backwards in that clean companies are the exception and the morally ambiguous are the rule. The Chinese have a saying (or at least one chinese girl who told it to me has a saying) that goes something like, "You can't be very sucessful in business without doing something immoral."
So, you are saying that corporate welfare is good, but social welfare is bad? Unless you are an adherent of Benito Mussolini, that's a pretty indefendsible position.
Say what you want about the greedy "rich people," they got to be that way by trade, not theft.
Just like Dale Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Patrick Kennedy, among many others...
You cannot watch your kids 24 hours a day. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to because an important part of development is feeling a sense of control and independence.
And having the stores act as mommies is going to make kids feel in control and independent?
If you can go to work any time of the day and get paid, well congratulations, I think. If I wasn't standing their getting my money back, I would have been doing something even less productive.
The policy doesn't extend to everything though. I belive things like CDs and DVDs can only be exchanged for the same item.
Yeah, they've got all their employees brainwashed into believing that accepting returns on opened DVDs is a violation of federal law! Literally, I've heard that at two different stores. A few months back I bought a DVD (for all of $5.50) that was labeled widescreen/full-screen but when opened, the actual disc was only full-screen.
They had no more copies of that disc in stock (and even if they did, I had learned that they were all defectively full-screen only). It was the most amazingly difficult experience trying to get my money back. Had to escalate it three levels, ultimately to someone who was not forced to wear a wal-mart uniform.
And then they wouldn't give me the tax back -- I didn't have the receipt and they claimed I could be working a scam of buying it in some other state that did not have sales tax.
Jesus Fucking Christ were they morons.
Of course, she takes the piss out of me
That, I'd like to see.
Or, on second thought, maybe not.
Your citation mentions "production" also known as copying. I don't think dictionary references are going to get you anywhere because they will avoid using the words copy or copies in defining the word copyright because they wish to avoid even having the appearance of using a word to define itself.
"newspaper copy"
I have never head that before, you got a reference?
PS, "copy" is not archaic, I use it almost every day, as I am sure anyone involved with any kind of journalism or advertising does.
(Author's note, Point #3 is intended to be a bit of a joke. But I expect at least one reader will not read all the way to this disclaimer, instead flaming me good and hard.)
Reader's note, If you have to put an a disclaimer on your humor, it ain't funny. If you aren't willing to encourage the misdirection of good, hard flaming, then you shouldn't be writing it in the first place.
Somehow I don't think it will happen, currently freenet doesn't have indexing / searching of contents, you need to find a link to the content through other means. Isn't that all that a torrent actually is? a link and identifier to the content and the tracker?
That's not too hard to overcome. Just use a known naming convention for the list of current torrents, say "freenova-YYMMDDHH.txt" that file would then contain a list of the current torrents as of YYMMDDHH.
When you run the torrents they can still find you the only diffrence between this and how something like emule works is you have to use freenet.
No, the goal here is to make it impossible to hard to figure out if a person is sharing just one item or thousands of items.
First a little background for other readers:
You may be seeding 500 torrents, but the copyright cartel can only figure out that you are in one torrent swarm at a time - they have to go to each tracker and "ask" it who is in that one swarm.
That makes it eponentially more difficult to nail someone for sharing more than one piece of contraband information at a time. At what, $125,000 per item? that's still a big stick for the copyright cartel to swing. But previously the RIAA has only been suing people they claim are sharing thousands of songs. The MPAA has been issuing take-down notices for individual movies, but their actual suits have been limited to big aggregators like supernova (not supernova per se, but like them) and big multi-tracker sites.
Putting the torrents in freenet makes sense in theory because a) torrents are small so freenet's renowned inefficiencies are not that big of a problem and b) it "hides" torrent aggregators effectively eliminating the ability for the copyright cartel to go after them specifically rather than any random member of the network.
But you still have the problem of big multi-tracker sites being vulnerable. For that you need some sort of efficient system, but perhaps it can be designed specifically for the needs of tracking thus making it good at tracking, good at anonymization but sucky for any other types of data sharing. Unlike freenet which is reasonably good at anonymization, and equally sucky for all types of data sharing.
But making copies doesn't circumvent copyright, only *DISTRIBUTION* is a violation of copyright.
You are incorrect. If distribution were all that mattered, it would be called distribution-right, not copyright.
Technically, even making more than a copy or two for your own private use would not be defensible as fair use. Read the statute, title 17.
LOL! How funny is it that your post was modded "informative..."
As I understand it, the DMCA forbids any exchange of information relating to circumvention of copyright.
Absolutely not. At least not yet.
The DMCA is bad, but it isn't quite that bad.
What is restricted is any exchange of information relating to circumvention of copy prevention mechanisms -- like CSS or macrovision. Simply talking about how to "circumvent copyrights" aka make copies, is not restricted.