However, suppose they're torturing me to get a password out of me to decrypt the files on the seized computer.
You need a system of plausible deniability. A system with an unknown number of levels of encrypted data. Thus, you have at least one set of encrypted data that is not sensitive and another set that is sensitive. When tortured you give the password that decrypts the non-sensitive data. The torturers are none the wiser and the secret remains safe.
If the torturer recognizes the encryption system as supporting multiple levels they can keep torturing you for more passwords. But they can never be sure that you've given them all of the passwords since that part is configurable by each user. You might have 10 sets of "clean" encrypted data, and an 11th that is sensitive. Joe might have 15 sets of clean and Mary might only have two.
Unless they already know what they are looking for, they'll never know when you've given them the "real" password. And if they already know, what are they doing torturing you for in the first place?
I'm still waiting for you to get to the part where P2P solves the problem of artists needing money.
Commission.
One form being live concerts - people pay for their ticket, the band takes the money and then gets up on stage and entertains them.
Another form being the group-buy - people pay for the creation and release of an album, the band takes the money and goes to a recoding studio, makes an album and releases it into the public domain with distribution via P2P. Everyone who paid for it can download it, anyone else who downloads it is really getting advertising for the band's next album. It may sound like good music, even taste and smell like good music, but it is really advertising.
If it is good music (advertising), the band will be able to get an even higher asking price for their next album because their fan(customer) base will have grown since the last release.
It is interesting to see Manny Cotto's (the new lead writer for this last season and a major writer for the 3rd season) hands all over this --
Peter Weller - Lead from Manny's awesome and prematurely cancelly Odyssey5 series.
set six years later - Odyssey5 was about astronauts that went back five years in time to prevent the destruction of the Earth, since Odyssey5 was cancelled they never had a chance to even do a "wrap-up" episode - so jumping six years later sounds exactly like the kind of "wrap-up" Odyssey5 would have had if they had known they were being cancelled.
If I buy a CD, I have every right to make a backup copy of that. Its called fair use.
In the USA,"Fair Use" is not a right. It is defense against prosecution. It is also very nebulously defined, on purpose to make it applicable to future situations without requiring amendment, but that also means the application is not clear cut, generally relying on case law to determine specifics.
Here is the section of US copyright law that defines fair use:
Well, I did say that most don't have access myself in my first post.
But - 1) It is possible to use those guys as an additional layer between the job shop and the contractor so as to have access to much better benefits. Its a hassle, but they will do it and know how to talk to the job shops to make it easier.
2) Some employers are using services like their's to replace the traditional job shop because its becoming more obvious that traditional job shops do not provide the kind of value for the money on either side that they pretend to.
Neither of these people publishes anything whatsoever on the web any more, because the resulting tedious negotiations with their publisher's lawyers over distribution rights just aren't worth it. Ultimately, it's not the authors who have lost out here, it's the people who were benefitting from having their content at a much cheaper rate. That was the very distribution of work that copyright and similar concepts are intended to promote, and when copyright wasn't respected, it stopped. Go figure...
Of course it is the consumer who lost out. The book publishers are an obsolete distribution system and they know it. Just like the RIAA and MPAA, they will do whatever they can to hang on to their current business model as long as they can. Their only way to do that, beyond purchasing draconian legislation, is to abuse what power their position as distributors still gives them.
These publishers saw that your author friends had bypassed their obsolete distribution systems and decided that your friends were getting a little too uppity with this internet thing and laid the smack down on them.
It worked too, now your friends have been scared off from using the internet to bypass the publisher's distribution systems which only serves to prop up the decaying business model a little longer.
The irony here is that you seem to think that the publisher's abuse of their dying, yet still substantial oligopoly on distribution is appropriate.
We would need to figure out a way to get money to the people that make good data, and away from the a-holes that profit from today's forms of data sharing (books, CDs, DVDs).
The commission model it does not rely on altruism the way donations do. The infrastructure ain't quite there yet, but that's merely a business opportunity for the sufficiently motivated. http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142894&cid =11976289
Your friend was NOT a contractor. He worked for a body shop
Uh, no you are wrong.
Did he get paid or was working on internal projects while 'sitting on the bench'?
His only source of income was his client billings.
Did he have health insurance paid for?
Perhaps you did not read what I wrote - ALL of his "benefits" were paid for by his billings.
Did someone have to pay payroll taxes for him?
Just like his "benefits" his payroll taxes were paid from his client billings.
Did his paystub/cheque say HP on it?
The only checks that he received were from his agency, not any of his clients - HP or otherwise.
Once his contract (sorry, TERM) was over, could he decline if HP wanted to extend it?
He negotiated his contracts directly with his clients and was free to renegotiate, including raising his billing rate, or walk if he wanted too.
Could he take time off on no notice after his term and come back whenever he felt like it?
He could work whenever he had a client willing to pay for his time.
That is not a contractor. He was not working for HP
I never said he was working for HP, where did you get the idea that HP was one of his clients? You seem to be seriously confused about the issues here.
Being that kind of long-term contractor can be maddening. There may be campus facilities, like a gym, that you're not allowed to use. There will certainly be bennies -- matched 401Ks, stock options, tuition reimbursements -- that you won't be eligible for. And then there are the intangibles...
Most of those things, and better, are available to contractors too. I have a friend who is a long term contractor. His agency provides him the ability to put up to $25K/yr into 401K and other retirement plans, he can get tuition reimbursement with far less restrictions than most regular employers, he has his choice of a couple of nationwide high-quality/good-value health/dental insurance plans, he can get up to $10K of reimbursed business expenses (computers, DSL, software, books, etc) plus very good short/long-term disability.
Of course, all his "benefits" come out of the rate his clients pay to his agency, but that is really no different from the way benefits for a regular employee are funded, its just treated differently because the IRS says it is.
I understand that MOST contractors do not have such benefits available to them, mainly because the contract agencies are usually leeches dedicated to sucking as much money out of the relationship between them, the client and the contractor. But that is as much the contractor's fault for accepting such terms as it is the corp's fault for doing business with bloodsucking agencies.
The US gov't set the rules of the game. These large corporations are just playing the game to their maximum advantage.
So, it is the people's own fault for electing a government that set the rules of the game! The corporate citizens had nothing to do with the way the rules were written!
How weird that they would feel the need for a CU. Unless USAA employees are not automatically eligible to also be customers of their employer and/or USAA doesn't quite measure up to their reputation.
However, the natural consequence of this is that ANY marking made with the requisite intent to agree and for the mark to serve as proof of agreement constitutes a signature.
But, does it really signify intent to agree? Seems like it signifies intent to agree with a modification of the original contract - that you agree iff the cashier checks the cardholder's ID.
Now, maybe your intent is to agree to the original contract regardless of what the cashier does, but if I were the issuing bank, I sure would not want to take that chance. Its a huge loophole and they didn't spend all that money on the original contract language to just have their customers modify it whilly-nilly like that.
Which is probably why their policy has been to have the merchant confiscate such cards, although it appears they have relaxed it enough to now also simply requiring that you sign the card on the spot, as if it were completely unsigned. It's not clear from the website what the merchant should do if the card is not signable because there is not enough space left in the signature box.
You can rent a PIN-capable for, I believe, under a hundred bucks a month; or buy it outright for a couple thousand. If your business can't afford that, maybe you should come up with a new business plan.
Most "mom and pop" bookstores have very thin margins to begin with. Regardless, how many locally-owned businesses have you seen that actually have a PIN-capable terminal? In my experience the number has been very small.
It's best to have both a credit and a debit/ATM card:[for cash advances] ... So there's a single exception to what you said...yeah, I'm nitpicking, but I work in credit card processing so I should be allowed.
Nope, you've been warped by working in the business. There is no reason that a single card should be both a debit card and an ATM card. Yeah, a lot of banks like to tie them together, probably saves them from having to pay for their own ATM cards or maybe they just want to push them on as many people as they can. But from the customer's perspective, a plain old ATM card is sufficient to handle cash withdrawals.
I explicitly made both my bank and my credit union deactivate the debit portion of the debit/ATM cards they issued to me when I found out that I could no longer get a plain ATM card from them.
Not really useful to the discussion but that guy still bugs me when I think about it. I was trying to protect his credit not inconvenience him.
You may have been trying but you were not protecting him. You were protecting the store. If a store has a high incidence of fraudulent charges, their merchant processing fees go up. By checking the signature you were reducing the risk to the store of incresed fees.
But you were not reducing his risk at all - if he was a thief then validating the signature does not help him one bit. If he was the legit owner of the card, then he already knows he is the legit owner whether you verify his signature or not.
Furthermore, federal law limits his liability in the case of fraud to $50 at most, and almost all issuing banks just waive that $50 anyway. So, no consumer has much to gain by merchants verifying signatures and what little benefit can be attribute to keeping down prices by keeping down fraud is probably less than the hassle factor for the customer in the first place.
Using the card in debit mode is also much cheaper for the merchant,
That is only for PIN-based transactions. Signature only debit transactions are MORE expensive than credit card transactions. There was even a class-action lawsuit by merchants against VISA and MC about this because they required merchants who accepted credit cards to also accept debit cards, but since the fees for the debit cards were so much higher the merchants felt that MC and VISA were abusing their oligopoly status to force the higher fees on them. MC settled out of court, I don't know what happened with VISA.
Chances of the local bookstore being equipped to handle PIN-based transaction is quite small. Thus using a debit card with them as the exact oppossite of your intended effect.
Furthermore, debit/check cards are evil. The ONLY people who should EVER use them are people who are unable (typically for reasons of bad credit history) to get a credit card. Federal law protects credit card holders from fraudulent use, only company promises protect debit card holders from fraudulent use. Plus, with the credit card, it is the BANK's money at risk, with a debit card it is YOUR money at risk since it comes out of your account immediately. No matter what the banks (and even most credit unions, ugh!) say, choosing a debit card over a credit card is never in YOUR best interest - only the bank's.
I write in "SEE ID" and then my signature next to it on my credit cars. I then say thank you to the cashiers who check my ID.
Then you should also say "thank you" to the cashiers who confiscate your card. They are the ones who are actually following the terms of their merchant agreement.
You see, the signature on the card is not meant as proof of identity. It is meant as proof of contractual agreement. As in you've signed the contract which requires you to pay for charges made with the card under the terms spelled out in little tiny print on that document that came with the card.
Thus, if there is anything other than a signature in that box, the contract is void and so the merchants are required to confiscate it and certainly should not be allowing you to use the card to make purchases since you are not legally bound by the contract.
That should also explain why the merchants require that you sign an unsigned card and then let you use it. Not that most register peons are going to know the "why" behind the rules, they just follow them, probably because their managers don't understand them either.
Technically, as long as you have signed your card, it should be usuable by anyone whom you have authorized to use it. Thus this recent trend towards verifying signatures is misdirected. Anyone who has been authorized to use the card by the owner can legally do so, and thus should sign with THEIR name, not forge the card holder's name. But, just try explaining THAT to a register peon...
You may disagree with this policy, but it is in the contracts that both the merchants and the cardholders have agreed to.
Chinese totalitarianism is not a "distinct culture" any more than middle-eastern dictatorships are. As far as the protection of actual cultures, the US's multicultural heritage probably makes the country as a whole far more sensitive to the issue than any other country, not perfection but no glass house either. Take a trip to another more ethnically homogenous country (pretty much all of them) and you'll be amazed at some of their common attitudes and policies that make people like David Duke and Matt Hale look like reasonable fellows.
it is more effective to use tools like Mass Media to do the dirty work.
Does not fit with:
they have been raised in isolation, they have never even been given the opportunity to make their own choices on the matter as an adult.
While the mass media usually presents one unified perspective, it does not isolate and remove all opportunity for people to make their own decisions based on other perspectives. They are not difficult to find if you look and certainly not illegal or outlawed, while that is pretty close to the definition of totalitarianism and official practice in China.
I recall an author who promised to release his book after he made a certain amount of money on it.
You are probably thinking of Stephen King, who made at least one fatal error. He released each chapter and then expected people to pay for it. In one sense it is the same sort of mechanism because he would not release the next chapter until the current one was "paid for" but in another sense it really encouraged the free-loader problem because people tended to think, "why should I pay for something I ALREADY have for free?"
The other problem is that, reportedly (I didn't bother to read them myself), the story was not very good, as far as it got. Which, if true, actually validates the idea - the product was sub par and so people didn't want to pay for it.
It'd be hard to break into the scene, though, since people don't know if they want to support you until you produce a product,
Today it is hard to break into the scene, any scene. You essentially have to give it away for free - unsigned musicians generally don't care, and often encourage the free trading of their MP3s, and signed musicians usually end up making negative money for their first few albums (and ~90% never make a second album).
Actors, directors, writers, etc all work on indies for peanuts. Many do get union jobs writing for established productions and then leverage the quality of that work and the connections they make there to move on to bigger roles, and/or convincing producers to risk some money on them. But that would not change much under a comission system, you'd have entire production companies acting as the creators of tv shows and megabucks movies and the reputations of both the production companies and their "star" directors/writers/actors would be a draw for the comission money.
A brand new production company, without any established reputation would probably have to accept the risk of releasing an episode or two for little to nothing in order to "hook" a paying audience - but as a risk that is fairly small compared to the kind of risk even established production companies routinely deal with today where something like 80% of all television series are net money losers.
I think you'll get a lot of leeches with this system, though. As many people think, even around here, why should I pay for something when I can get it for free? I'll just wait for someone else to pay for it. Some less-glamorous things would have a hard time getting funded.
Leeching is probably the biggest obstacle to this approach, but I believe that it would be sufficiently countered by the lack of available product until the payment is made, if no one pays, no one gets anything. I also believe that smart marketing can encourage borderline people to buy "advance tickets" - from well targetted commercials, show "subscriptions" with automatic debiting (think of a show subscription that you pay for through your tivo service and your tivo automatically downloads each episode as soon as it is released) to bundling of knick-knacks and even delivery of official DVDs at certain price points.
The economic model may even affect the type of shows that become popular/sucessfull, like cliffhanger endings followed by an end-of-show commercial encouraging people to pay for the next episode RIGHT NOW so they can be guaranteed to find out the cliffhanger resolution. I suspect that there are a lot people who would gladly fork over a buck or two immediately after watching an episode of "24" to guarantee that they would get to see the next episode. Plus, with the reach of the net to a billion plus people, even niche audiences can number in the millions which allows the leecher/payer ratio to grow large and still adequetly fund production.
There are also reasons for corporations to partially fund production, the most obvious and most dangerous to artistic integrity is product placement, but you've also got merchandising tie-ins for certain types of productions and then, perhaps counter-intui
The same people who buy all the proprietary software now will continue to buy it as it serves them no benfit to change.
You neglect the change in mindset that would exist in a world where all source code is Freely distributed. Sure, if copyright went away today, all the people who currently don't understand the benefits would do as you say. The idea is that GPL is leading society to a new mindset. Will we ever reach that mindset? Is it some sort of RMS utopia? Maybe so. But it is fundamentally based on capitalism unlike similar utopic societies as postulated by socialist theory.
However, the issue is that then all software will become "freely distrubtable" as there are no legal ramifications for doing so, how will there be a fiscal advantage to paying programers. I know what stalman has to say on the issue, in short Custom Programing, and everyone else can get a differnt job, but is that really viable alternative?
When all software is Free then ALL programming will be "custom." But not necessarily what we think of today, typically in house business support systems. We have already seen IBM spend $1B to fund their Free software development, that's a lot of engineers working on various systems that are in a sense custom designed for IBM to enable their hardware and services (the traditional "custom" programming) divisions to earn money.
The kind of work most of those engineers are doing on Free software is essentially identical to the work they used to do on proprietary software. There will always be a market for newer and better hardware and thus there will always be a need for programmers to write and rewrite software for that hardware. Doing it as Free software just makes that work more efficient in the long run, which may translate into fewer jobs for equivalent quality or may mean the same number of jobs producting higher functionality software of higher quality.
Copyright makes for a nice way to scale this idea. You personally don't want to pay me $10k to record an album for you, but if 10k of your friends chip in, then it's a good deal. Copyright allows me to spread the costs over the number of people who value my work.
In fact, copyright is not merely a "nice way to scale" it is the only feasible way. Or it was, until the advent of the internet.
Prior to mass duplication systems like the press, copyright was not necessary since the artist's ability to reach an audience was roughly equal to his ability to reach a PAYING audience. Thus most work was done on commission, often through patronage.
Prior to the net, the artist's ability to reach an audience was extended to just about where ever he could ship a physical copy. But, his reach to find people willing to pay up front via comission or patronage was still limited to the local area. Thus, copyright enabled a new method by which the artist could reach his audience and still be compensated. But, he also had a new risk - his work might not find enough of an audience to make back even his production costs, never mind a profit.
Now, with the net, the artist's ability to reach audience (potentially everyone on the net) is equal to his ability to reach a paying audience (potentially everyeone on the net). Thus the comission model is again a reasonable business model.
With the connectivity of the net, we can get 10k people to each chip in a dollar to comission the production of that album. Once the album is done and the artist fully paid, it can be released to the public domain. If the album is good enough to attract a large audience, the artist can then increase his asking price for the comission of his next album, say to $20K. And, now once again, he no longer must risk his production costs on the fickle taste of the public since his payment is guaranteed before production even starts.
So, while copyright was once the only feasible method of rewarding creativity in the world of the printing press and similar machinery, it is now obsolete in the world of the internet.
If you want to change the default law to make this happen, then you need to convince the rest of society that it's a good model. They don't get convinced that it's a good model if you're not respecting their rights and plundering their goods.
It seems to me that given the sizable proportion of people online who are "not respecting rights and plundering goods" today, that society HAS already convinced itself.
The law has simply not stayed current because a small, self-interested minority has a vested interest in artificially maintaining the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
Your entire response boils down to, "Nothing new here, so quit complaining." That is not at all reassuring.
However, suppose they're torturing me to get a password out of me to decrypt the files on the seized computer.
You need a system of plausible deniability. A system with an unknown number of levels of encrypted data. Thus, you have at least one set of encrypted data that is not sensitive and another set that is sensitive. When tortured you give the password that decrypts the non-sensitive data. The torturers are none the wiser and the secret remains safe.
If the torturer recognizes the encryption system as supporting multiple levels they can keep torturing you for more passwords. But they can never be sure that you've given them all of the passwords since that part is configurable by each user. You might have 10 sets of "clean" encrypted data, and an 11th that is sensitive. Joe might have 15 sets of clean and Mary might only have two.
Unless they already know what they are looking for, they'll never know when you've given them the "real" password. And if they already know, what are they doing torturing you for in the first place?
I'm still waiting for you to get to the part where P2P solves the problem of artists needing money.
Commission.
One form being live concerts - people pay for their ticket, the band takes the money and then gets up on stage and entertains them.
Another form being the group-buy - people pay for the creation and release of an album, the band takes the money and goes to a recoding studio, makes an album and releases it into the public domain with distribution via P2P. Everyone who paid for it can download it, anyone else who downloads it is really getting advertising for the band's next album. It may sound like good music, even taste and smell like good music, but it is really advertising.
If it is good music (advertising), the band will be able to get an even higher asking price for their next album because their fan(customer) base will have grown since the last release.
It is interesting to see Manny Cotto's (the new lead writer for this last season and a major writer for the 3rd season) hands all over this --
Peter Weller - Lead from Manny's awesome and prematurely cancelly Odyssey5 series.
set six years later - Odyssey5 was about astronauts that went back five years in time to prevent the destruction of the Earth, since Odyssey5 was cancelled they never had a chance to even do a "wrap-up" episode - so jumping six years later sounds exactly like the kind of "wrap-up" Odyssey5 would have had if they had known they were being cancelled.
If I buy a CD, I have every right to make a backup copy of that. Its called fair use.
0 000107----000-.html
In the USA,"Fair Use" is not a right.
It is defense against prosecution.
It is also very nebulously defined, on purpose to make it applicable to future situations without requiring amendment, but that also means the application is not clear cut, generally relying on case law to determine specifics.
Here is the section of US copyright law that defines fair use:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_0
Well, I did say that most don't have access myself in my first post.
But -
1) It is possible to use those guys as an additional layer between the job shop and the contractor so as to have access to much better benefits. Its a hassle, but they will do it and know how to talk to the job shops to make it easier.
2) Some employers are using services like their's to replace the traditional job shop because its becoming more obvious that traditional job shops do not provide the kind of value for the money on either side that they pretend to.
Neither of these people publishes anything whatsoever on the web any more, because the resulting tedious negotiations with their publisher's lawyers over distribution rights just aren't worth it. Ultimately, it's not the authors who have lost out here, it's the people who were benefitting from having their content at a much cheaper rate. That was the very distribution of work that copyright and similar concepts are intended to promote, and when copyright wasn't respected, it stopped. Go figure...
Of course it is the consumer who lost out. The book publishers are an obsolete distribution system and they know it. Just like the RIAA and MPAA, they will do whatever they can to hang on to their current business model as long as they can. Their only way to do that, beyond purchasing draconian legislation, is to abuse what power their position as distributors still gives them.
These publishers saw that your author friends had bypassed their obsolete distribution systems and decided that your friends were getting a little too uppity with this internet thing and laid the smack down on them.
It worked too, now your friends have been scared off from using the internet to bypass the publisher's distribution systems which only serves to prop up the decaying business model a little longer.
The irony here is that you seem to think that the publisher's abuse of their dying, yet still substantial oligopoly on distribution is appropriate.
We would need to figure out a way to get money to the people that make good data, and away from the a-holes that profit from today's forms of data sharing (books, CDs, DVDs).
d =11976289
The commission model it does not rely on altruism the way donations do. The infrastructure ain't quite there yet, but that's merely a business opportunity for the sufficiently motivated.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142894&ci
Your friend was NOT a contractor. He worked for a body shop
Uh, no you are wrong.
Did he get paid or was working on internal projects while 'sitting on the bench'?
His only source of income was his client billings.
Did he have health insurance paid for?
Perhaps you did not read what I wrote - ALL of his "benefits" were paid for by his billings.
Did someone have to pay payroll taxes for him?
Just like his "benefits" his payroll taxes were paid from his client billings.
Did his paystub/cheque say HP on it?
The only checks that he received were from his agency, not any of his clients - HP or otherwise.
Once his contract (sorry, TERM) was over, could he decline if HP wanted to extend it?
He negotiated his contracts directly with his clients and was free to renegotiate, including raising his billing rate, or walk if he wanted too.
Could he take time off on no notice after his term and come back whenever he felt like it?
He could work whenever he had a client willing to pay for his time.
That is not a contractor. He was not working for HP
I never said he was working for HP, where did you get the idea that HP was one of his clients?
You seem to be seriously confused about the issues here.
The agency you describe is unusually generous, either for a job shop or a regular employer.
That's because unlike job shops, they see the contractor as their customer.
Check them out yourself -- www.mybizoffice.com.
Being that kind of long-term contractor can be maddening. There may be campus facilities, like a gym, that you're not allowed to use. There will certainly be bennies -- matched 401Ks, stock options, tuition reimbursements -- that you won't be eligible for. And then there are the intangibles...
Most of those things, and better, are available to contractors too. I have a friend who is a long term contractor. His agency provides him the ability to put up to $25K/yr into 401K and other retirement plans, he can get tuition reimbursement with far less restrictions than most regular employers, he has his choice of a couple of nationwide high-quality/good-value health/dental insurance plans, he can get up to $10K of reimbursed business expenses (computers, DSL, software, books, etc) plus very good short/long-term disability.
Of course, all his "benefits" come out of the rate his clients pay to his agency, but that is really no different from the way benefits for a regular employee are funded, its just treated differently because the IRS says it is.
I understand that MOST contractors do not have such benefits available to them, mainly because the contract agencies are usually leeches dedicated to sucking as much money out of the relationship between them, the client and the contractor. But that is as much the contractor's fault for accepting such terms as it is the corp's fault for doing business with bloodsucking agencies.
The US gov't set the rules of the game. These large corporations are just playing the game to their maximum advantage.
So, it is the people's own fault for electing a government that set the rules of the game! The corporate citizens had nothing to do with the way the rules were written!
How weird that they would feel the need for a CU. Unless USAA employees are not automatically eligible to also be customers of their employer and/or USAA doesn't quite measure up to their reputation.
The Answer: www.usaafcu.org
However, the natural consequence of this is that ANY marking made with the requisite intent to agree and for the mark to serve as proof of agreement constitutes a signature.
But, does it really signify intent to agree? Seems like it signifies intent to agree with a modification of the original contract - that you agree iff the cashier checks the cardholder's ID.
Now, maybe your intent is to agree to the original contract regardless of what the cashier does, but if I were the issuing bank, I sure would not want to take that chance. Its a huge loophole and they didn't spend all that money on the original contract language to just have their customers modify it whilly-nilly like that.
Which is probably why their policy has been to have the merchant confiscate such cards, although it appears they have relaxed it enough to now also simply requiring that you sign the card on the spot, as if it were completely unsigned. It's not clear from the website what the merchant should do if the card is not signable because there is not enough space left in the signature box.
You can rent a PIN-capable for, I believe, under a hundred bucks a month; or buy it outright for a couple thousand. If your business can't afford that, maybe you should come up with a new business plan.
...
Most "mom and pop" bookstores have very thin margins to begin with. Regardless, how many locally-owned businesses have you seen that actually have a PIN-capable terminal? In my experience the number has been very small.
It's best to have both a credit and a debit/ATM card:[for cash advances]
So there's a single exception to what you said...yeah, I'm nitpicking, but I work in credit card processing so I should be allowed.
Nope, you've been warped by working in the business. There is no reason that a single card should be both a debit card and an ATM card. Yeah, a lot of banks like to tie them together, probably saves them from having to pay for their own ATM cards or maybe they just want to push them on as many people as they can. But from the customer's perspective, a plain old ATM card is sufficient to handle cash withdrawals.
I explicitly made both my bank and my credit union deactivate the debit portion of the debit/ATM cards they issued to me when I found out that I could no longer get a plain ATM card from them.
Not really useful to the discussion but that guy still bugs me when I think about it. I was trying to protect his credit not inconvenience him.
You may have been trying but you were not protecting him. You were protecting the store. If a store has a high incidence of fraudulent charges, their merchant processing fees go up. By checking the signature you were reducing the risk to the store of incresed fees.
But you were not reducing his risk at all - if he was a thief then validating the signature does not help him one bit. If he was the legit owner of the card, then he already knows he is the legit owner whether you verify his signature or not.
Furthermore, federal law limits his liability in the case of fraud to $50 at most, and almost all issuing banks just waive that $50 anyway. So, no consumer has much to gain by merchants verifying signatures and what little benefit can be attribute to keeping down prices by keeping down fraud is probably less than the hassle factor for the customer in the first place.
Using the card in debit mode is also much cheaper for the merchant,
That is only for PIN-based transactions. Signature only debit transactions are MORE expensive than credit card transactions. There was even a class-action lawsuit by merchants against VISA and MC about this because they required merchants who accepted credit cards to also accept debit cards, but since the fees for the debit cards were so much higher the merchants felt that MC and VISA were abusing their oligopoly status to force the higher fees on them. MC settled out of court, I don't know what happened with VISA.
Chances of the local bookstore being equipped to handle PIN-based transaction is quite small. Thus using a debit card with them as the exact oppossite of your intended effect.
Furthermore, debit/check cards are evil. The ONLY people who should EVER use them are people who are unable (typically for reasons of bad credit history) to get a credit card. Federal law protects credit card holders from fraudulent use, only company promises protect debit card holders from fraudulent use. Plus, with the credit card, it is the BANK's money at risk, with a debit card it is YOUR money at risk since it comes out of your account immediately. No matter what the banks (and even most credit unions, ugh!) say, choosing a debit card over a credit card is never in YOUR best interest - only the bank's.
I write in "SEE ID" and then my signature next to it on my credit cars. I then say thank you to the cashiers who check my ID.
Then you should also say "thank you" to the cashiers who confiscate your card. They are the ones who are actually following the terms of their merchant agreement.
You see, the signature on the card is not meant as proof of identity. It is meant as proof of contractual agreement. As in you've signed the contract which requires you to pay for charges made with the card under the terms spelled out in little tiny print on that document that came with the card.
Thus, if there is anything other than a signature in that box, the contract is void and so the merchants are required to confiscate it and certainly should not be allowing you to use the card to make purchases since you are not legally bound by the contract.
That should also explain why the merchants require that you sign an unsigned card and then let you use it. Not that most register peons are going to know the "why" behind the rules, they just follow them, probably because their managers don't understand them either.
Technically, as long as you have signed your card, it should be usuable by anyone whom you have authorized to use it. Thus this recent trend towards verifying signatures is misdirected. Anyone who has been authorized to use the card by the owner can legally do so, and thus should sign with THEIR name, not forge the card holder's name. But, just try explaining THAT to a register peon...
You may disagree with this policy, but it is in the contracts that both the merchants and the cardholders have agreed to.
Instead they settle their differences peacefully and just agree to disagree.
Using walkie-talkies instead of guns, of course.
Oh wait, that was Speilberg.
Same difference.
Cute, but poor job.
Chinese totalitarianism is not a "distinct culture" any more than middle-eastern dictatorships are. As far as the protection of actual cultures, the US's multicultural heritage probably makes the country as a whole far more sensitive to the issue than any other country, not perfection but no glass house either. Take a trip to another more ethnically homogenous country (pretty much all of them) and you'll be amazed at some of their common attitudes and policies that make people like David Duke and Matt Hale look like reasonable fellows.
it is more effective to use tools like Mass Media to do the dirty work.
Does not fit with:
they have been raised in isolation, they have never even been given the opportunity to make their own choices on the matter as an adult.
While the mass media usually presents one unified perspective, it does not isolate and remove all opportunity for people to make their own decisions based on other perspectives. They are not difficult to find if you look and certainly not illegal or outlawed, while that is pretty close to the definition of totalitarianism and official practice in China.
I recall an author who promised to release his book after he made a certain amount of money on it.
You are probably thinking of Stephen King, who made at least one fatal error. He released each chapter and then expected people to pay for it. In one sense it is the same sort of mechanism because he would not release the next chapter until the current one was "paid for" but in another sense it really encouraged the free-loader problem because people tended to think, "why should I pay for something I ALREADY have for free?"
The other problem is that, reportedly (I didn't bother to read them myself), the story was not very good, as far as it got. Which, if true, actually validates the idea - the product was sub par and so people didn't want to pay for it.
It'd be hard to break into the scene, though, since people don't know if they want to support you until you produce a product,
Today it is hard to break into the scene, any scene. You essentially have to give it away for free - unsigned musicians generally don't care, and often encourage the free trading of their MP3s, and signed musicians usually end up making negative money for their first few albums (and ~90% never make a second album).
Actors, directors, writers, etc all work on indies for peanuts. Many do get union jobs writing for established productions and then leverage the quality of that work and the connections they make there to move on to bigger roles, and/or convincing producers to risk some money on them. But that would not change much under a comission system, you'd have entire production companies acting as the creators of tv shows and megabucks movies and the reputations of both the production companies and their "star" directors/writers/actors would be a draw for the comission money.
A brand new production company, without any established reputation would probably have to accept the risk of releasing an episode or two for little to nothing in order to "hook" a paying audience - but as a risk that is fairly small compared to the kind of risk even established production companies routinely deal with today where something like 80% of all television series are net money losers.
I think you'll get a lot of leeches with this system, though. As many people think, even around here, why should I pay for something when I can get it for free? I'll just wait for someone else to pay for it. Some less-glamorous things would have a hard time getting funded.
Leeching is probably the biggest obstacle to this approach, but I believe that it would be sufficiently countered by the lack of available product until the payment is made, if no one pays, no one gets anything. I also believe that smart marketing can encourage borderline people to buy "advance tickets" - from well targetted commercials, show "subscriptions" with automatic debiting (think of a show subscription that you pay for through your tivo service and your tivo automatically downloads each episode as soon as it is released) to bundling of knick-knacks and even delivery of official DVDs at certain price points.
The economic model may even affect the type of shows that become popular/sucessfull, like cliffhanger endings followed by an end-of-show commercial encouraging people to pay for the next episode RIGHT NOW so they can be guaranteed to find out the cliffhanger resolution. I suspect that there are a lot people who would gladly fork over a buck or two immediately after watching an episode of "24" to guarantee that they would get to see the next episode. Plus, with the reach of the net to a billion plus people, even niche audiences can number in the millions which allows the leecher/payer ratio to grow large and still adequetly fund production.
There are also reasons for corporations to partially fund production, the most obvious and most dangerous to artistic integrity is product placement, but you've also got merchandising tie-ins for certain types of productions and then, perhaps counter-intui
The same people who buy all the proprietary software now will continue to buy it as it serves them no benfit to change.
You neglect the change in mindset that would exist in a world where all source code is Freely distributed. Sure, if copyright went away today, all the people who currently don't understand the benefits would do as you say. The idea is that GPL is leading society to a new mindset. Will we ever reach that mindset? Is it some sort of RMS utopia? Maybe so. But it is fundamentally based on capitalism unlike similar utopic societies as postulated by socialist theory.
However, the issue is that then all software will become "freely distrubtable" as there are no legal ramifications for doing so, how will there be a fiscal advantage to paying programers. I know what stalman has to say on the issue, in short Custom Programing, and everyone else can get a differnt job, but is that really viable alternative?
When all software is Free then ALL programming will be "custom." But not necessarily what we think of today, typically in house business support systems. We have already seen IBM spend $1B to fund their Free software development, that's a lot of engineers working on various systems that are in a sense custom designed for IBM to enable their hardware and services (the traditional "custom" programming) divisions to earn money.
The kind of work most of those engineers are doing on Free software is essentially identical to the work they used to do on proprietary software. There will always be a market for newer and better hardware and thus there will always be a need for programmers to write and rewrite software for that hardware. Doing it as Free software just makes that work more efficient in the long run, which may translate into fewer jobs for equivalent quality or may mean the same number of jobs producting higher functionality software of higher quality.
Copyright makes for a nice way to scale this idea. You personally don't want to pay me $10k to record an album for you, but if 10k of your friends chip in, then it's a good deal. Copyright allows me to spread the costs over the number of people who value my work.
In fact, copyright is not merely a "nice way to scale" it is the only feasible way. Or it was, until the advent of the internet.
Prior to mass duplication systems like the press, copyright was not necessary since the artist's ability to reach an audience was roughly equal to his ability to reach a PAYING audience. Thus most work was done on commission, often through patronage.
Prior to the net, the artist's ability to reach an audience was extended to just about where ever he could ship a physical copy. But, his reach to find people willing to pay up front via comission or patronage was still limited to the local area. Thus, copyright enabled a new method by which the artist could reach his audience and still be compensated. But, he also had a new risk - his work might not find enough of an audience to make back even his production costs, never mind a profit.
Now, with the net, the artist's ability to reach audience (potentially everyone on the net) is equal to his ability to reach a paying audience (potentially everyeone on the net). Thus the comission model is again a reasonable business model.
With the connectivity of the net, we can get 10k people to each chip in a dollar to comission the production of that album. Once the album is done and the artist fully paid, it can be released to the public domain. If the album is good enough to attract a large audience, the artist can then increase his asking price for the comission of his next album, say to $20K. And, now once again, he no longer must risk his production costs on the fickle taste of the public since his payment is guaranteed before production even starts.
So, while copyright was once the only feasible method of rewarding creativity in the world of the printing press and similar machinery, it is now obsolete in the world of the internet.
If you want to change the default law to make this happen, then you need to convince the rest of society that it's a good model. They don't get convinced that it's a good model if you're not respecting their rights and plundering their goods.
It seems to me that given the sizable proportion of people online who are "not respecting rights and plundering goods" today, that society HAS already convinced itself.
The law has simply not stayed current because a small, self-interested minority has a vested interest in artificially maintaining the status quo.