All work produced by a person during the course of his/her employment is owned by the employer,
Oh? And what happened to the empowerment of Federal authority: The Constitution?
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
It looks fairly obvious to me that, at least at a Federal level, the Federal courts have no option but to side with the individual author.
If they follow the strict spec for the codec, there wouldn't be any problem.
I half expect that codecs with exploits are products of IP battles. "We can't do it the right way, but if we do it this way we can still achieve the same compression/decompression algorithm--albeit with a potential code fault."
How about we just raise the bar on coding practices and actually secure programming? Maybe we could teach strict logic flow structures.
The biggest excuse I hear from programmers for why they've violated strict logic flow is always,"Well, I was coding for speed and efficiency". With 3.0+GHz machines, what does it matter anymore? It's all a lot of hooey, too. The person learned that excuse from someone in 8th grade and they've latched onto it. When pressed they rarely even know what logical structure they've violated. They only know the excuse.
I think the biggest problem facing us is the inundation of object oriented programming languages. There's very little need to learn the strict mathematics of programming anymore. It is this laziness, and not any particular language, which is the root cause of the problem. Programming environments with sandboxes (ie. Java) are band-aids to a bigger problem.
All I can say is, "you're wrong". I'm proof of that
You're proof that you're thinking inside of the box and not recognizing all of the social programs (aka. pyramid schemes) that you benefit from.
It costs $5/hour just to live in this society. Go over your bills. Go over the cost of everything you do. Prove me wrong.
If you're "making it" and bringing home less than $43k/year then you have some additional advantages: maybe your family gives nice gifts around the holidays. Maybe your friends foot the bill for the neat new PS/2 games. Maybe you're priveleged with a lower average rent payment. Maybe you're so easily amused that you can spend 8 hours/day staring a blank wall.
Most normal humans require stimuli. That stimuli, in today's society, costs $5/hour. Go to a health club. There's no great cosmic mystery to why they're about $50-$100/mo. They figure their members will be in 3-5 days/week at 30 mins to an hour each. 5 days x 30 mins = 2.5 hours. 2.5 hours x 4 = 10 hours. $50/10 hours = $5 hour. And they're still making a profit. It costs $5/hour just to live in this world.
Just because you don't recognize the priveleges and cost-breaks that you receive doesn't mean they're not there. You are further obvious testimony that the majority of the public just has not yet sat down to really figure out exactly how much they really do spend each and every day. And you obviously haven't spent more than the most cursory amount of time thinking about where that money goes.
Between rent, electricity, water, gas, food, etc. I've estimated that it costs at least $5/hour, 24/7/365, just to exist in this society. You want to drive your car? That'll be $5/hour in gas, maintenance, wear-n-tear. You want to watch a movie? That'll be $5/hour for the movie, electricity, popcorn, etc. You want to breathe in your own apartment? That'll be at least $20/day just for to rent the structure for most middle class city citizens renting a modest apartment (that covers 4 of the 24 daily hours alone!), then add in the distributed cost of electricity and water. You want to go out shopping for groceries? Consider yourself anorexic if you only spend $5 for every hour you're out grocery shopping. You want to eat at McDonald's? You'll be lucky to get 20 minutes out of a $5 meal.
If you're not making at least $43k, take home, per year then you're likely involved in some sort of system to cost-share or else you will fall into debt. Accountants know this. Banks know this. Credit card companies know this. Investment brokers know this. Insurance companies know this. The Government knows this (mainly because of the kickbacks that they get and the social cost-sharing programs they create to hide it). Every single one of them is playing that knowledge against people who don't know it.
The biggest card they play is to lead people, like you, to browbeat anyone who falls into debt. Guilt is a powerful game. People who accept their browbeating never look to see how they're being screwed because they accept that their plight is through some fault of their own. That's not the case in this society. The plight is created for the financial profit of those who administer the browbeating.
Follow the money trail. It leads to a very different conclusion than living within your means. You're not living within your means. You've been allowed to have means which give you the privelege of living a lifestyle which satisfies your need for entertainment and stimuli. Maybe you're easily amused or maybe your salary is priveleged. Take a week out sometime and cut out all activities which cost any money at all. Spend one week doing nothing every night after work but twiddling your thumbs while staring blankly at the wall. I guarantee you that, by the end of the third day, you'll be doing something which costs money. For many people living within their means translates into twiddling thumbs for 20 days out of the month--and that's just stupid when you consider the wealth of this nation.
To admonish someone to just "live within your means" is arrogant and ignorant at the same time. Yes, there are people who just spend like idiots, but that's not the majority of what's going on in society. The majority factor is that people are being milked by a system they don't even recognize exists and those who don't have it quite so bad are taught to hold themselves as high-and-mighty above those who utter even the smallest complaint.
Again I repeat that you have not spent three words justifying your worldview
Sure I have. If the authors had meant for the commerce clause to be a giant trojan backdoor to the restrictions on the powers of the federal government they wouldn't have bothered writing the 9th and 10th Amendments. If they had meant for it to be a living document where Congress could write laws to give itself more powers they wouldn't have included the mechanism for amending the document.
The Constitution was a finite set of authorities given to the Federal Government. There was a mechanism inserted to expand that set through further Amendments. At the end of the Bill of Rights is a cap which seals that finite set to only include things specifically mentioned in the document. To suggest that "living document" allows the Constitution to be enumerated is little more than whining about having to play by the rules--and a violation of the 9th Amendment. The Constitution is a living document--if you get further Amednments passed. To think that "commerce clause" is legal justification for circumventing that finite set is, as I've said, a product of political horse crap.
You know... I'm reading the Constitution, and I'm just not seeing anywhere about "The Federal Government shall have the power to regulate communications offices such as newspapers, pubs, market squares, and internet access points".
And don't pull any of that interstate commerce crap. Interstate commerce was not an all-encompassing blanket in 1776. It had a very specific meaning which was apparently obvious at that time. It'd be absurd to argue that the authors really left a backdoor open that wide. I don't know exactly what the meaning of 1776 "interstate commerce" was but I've a notion that it had to do with formalized business shipping--probably authenticated by a formally incorporated business.
An automated system could possibly infect a connected machine with spyware/keystroke recorders/etc
That's a running theory that I'd like to see either proven or debunked before it continues to be propagated.
Just how, praytell, are you going to infect someone's machine reliably just because they're using your access point? First you need to figure out which OS they're running. Can you tell that just from the simple packet headers? If I watch tcpdump on my border router, for example, it's pretty obvious to me when I boot one of my systems into Windows but, beyond that, I can't really tell from the DHCP noise if it's Windows 95, 98, or XP. Even if you could determine the OS, just how do you propose to randomly inject executable code into their network traffic?
One problem with that: those people didn't start out being in debt in the first place
That's where you're wrong. Who do you think bears the load of the federal debt?
It's a debtor society. The only question is which side of the debt line you're on.
In most all cases, said people CHOSE to saddle themselves with debt, so that they could have their new cars/clothes/house/whatever instead of chosing less expensive alternatives and/or locales
That's the common argument. It sounds pretty good and helps the speaker feel better about their own personal choices by elevating themselves above the unwashed masses. The argument holds no water when you face the reality that the federal debt does affect some people more than others. It's not an easy mathematical equation of salary and tax, either. Again, the only question is which side of the debt line you're on. If you're just barely scraping by on your salary and holding a 25% tax load then you're affected quite a bit more by the federal debt than someone who has $100k in the bank and a 28% debt load. Who is honestly responsible for the federal debt? Arguably the people who benefit the most--the CEOs and the VPs taking the lion's share of the cash flow from federal government contracts. Who, in reality, bears the majority of the debt burden? That would be the people earning less than $100k/year. In terms of payments only the folk earning millions per year pay more--but they also get more back. In terms of net contribution after all the kickbacks are figured in it is the common laborer who's paying the majority of the tax.
For example. Recently there was an expose on the east coast about CEOs of non profit organizations with absurd salaries. Some of them, as CEOs of non profit organizations, were taking home in excess of $4 million a year. Most of them were CEOs of organizations who dealt exclusively with federal contract money. That's 100% pure taxpayer money being funneled into the pocket of someone who's supposedly performing a public service.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Government is not your friend.
The only possible way your analogy could work is if you stated that said people decided to sell themselves into "slavery"... but then whose fault is it at that point?
Slavery is the natural state of anyone who lives paycheck-to-paycheck. That happens to be, in terms of population, a significant portion of society--probably close to 40%. We just don't call it slavery anymore because the cold hard facts are too much for most people to choke down through their public school education.
Doesn't it bother you, even a little bit, that a significant amount of tax money, which comes out of your paycheck, goes to support an industry which is set up explicitly to exploit you for someone else's benefit?
I'd like for my tax dollars to start benefitting me. Not someone else. Tell them to get their own tax dollars.
Here it comes...wait for it...these companies want you to buy whatever crap it is they are selling!
Aren't price fixing consortiums illegal?
Given the amount of personal data which every business collects and freely trades around it'd be silly to think that they're not using it to fix prices at the maximum possible level, completely negate the effects of any competitive pricing, and create a social class of permanently exploitable people who, statistically, will simply never have a chance of getting out of debt. To me that's the same as slavery--except the owner doesn't have to worry about housing or feeding the slaves.
I, for one, don't want my tax dollars contributing to that sort of effort in any way.
Slavery hasn't been abolished. It's been redefined and obfuscated. Modern day slave markets are temp agencies, unemployement lines, and internet job boards.
In practice, a huge corporation that gets caught using GPL'd code would have the FSF helping out whomever the author is
Not when the laws prohibit authors from reverse engineering suspect software to verify the infringement. Additionally, that's nice PR, but there are cases where no action was possible due to cost:benefit analysis.
Then there's actual satisfaction. There's DrDOS, Miranda, RTLinux, KISS, tinyPEAP, CherryOS, Broadcom routers, and others not turned up by a simple Google search. Most violations probably go undocumented because the authors don't have legal teams scanning the industry watching for potential abuses. Apparently netfilter has been successful in its pursuits--but that's only in Germany. If you visit gpl-violations.org, you'd think that the only GPL licensed software being pirated is netfilter, and only in Germany. I find that pretty hard to believe.
There's also this post available on the debian-legal list:
So there is little or no prospect of any "GPL infringement" lawsuit in which the plaintiff doesn't have to prove material breach of contract under the most unfavorable construction the defendant can justify.
This fellow is being realistic about the way the courts function. You've been trolling me with the assumption that courts are a favorable environment to pursue GPL violations.
Then there's this fellow's opinion of how sharp the teeth of the FSF are:
Of all organisations in the world, be assured that the FSF is the least likely to sue you for anything less than brazen cut-and-pasting of entire programs, despite your personal vendetta against them.
It really sounds like you've been following these mailing lists and you're just using the same old tired junk on me since it's already been addressed everywhere else.
I hope you didn't think you were generating novel ideas and arguments.
The problem occurs with errors. THIS is the crucial problem
As I study the problem I start to see that this errors are not the crucial problem. Errors are the popular problem because they're easy to report on in the media and easy to prove in court.
The crucial problem is profiling, conflict of interest, and exploitation. Take a bank issuing a mortgage. For any given income level they can profile the customers according to their income, debts, and current monthly payments. Don't look at it as a business decision of loan or no-loan. Look at it as a business decision of who's milkable, who's downright fleeceable, and who's priveleged. People who are close to the break even point, for example, are less likely to research all of the avenues for obtaining the truly best home loan and interest rates. Those people are milkable. People who are close to the break even point and who have any sort of necessity (been denied by other lenders, need to move soon, etc.) are downright fleeceable if given even the slightest option. People who have a year's worth of savings, however, can probably afford the options to find the best deals.
I'm not worried about someone stealing my identity or putting false reports on my credit. I'm worried about my financial and consumer information being used in price fixing schemes which ensure that I'll have almost no opportunity of escaping the cycle of indentured servitude--where I'm always paying bills for someone else's profit and never getting out of debt.
And don't think that the stock market industry, the banking industry, the insurance industry, and the credit industry don't have thousands of statisticians and accountants putting all of this together in order to eke that last 0.1% of profit out of it. At that point it's not really personally malicious--it's just creating and identifying a slave segment of society.
That's the sort of thing that tax dollars should be fighting against--not supporting.
Rather, I think you have been upset all along by my repeating the facts of life to you about the Constitution.
I recognize the way things work. I was questioning the legitimacy of the people who are making it work that way. You can concede that they're acting illegitimately but don't try to argue that they're at all within their Constitutional authority.
The precedent set by the courts is extra-Constitutional. As such, we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic. The powers and authorities expressed by our government are no longer those indicative of a Constitutional Republic but rather more closely resembles the powers and authorities of a Socialist or Communist regime.
The Constitution can have meaning without rolling in "the strictest interpretation of the original document."
If the government chooses to operate outside the limitations of the 9th and 10th Amendments then the Constitution no longer has any meaning. They might as well justify their arguments using the "might makes right" approach.
There's still a vast conflict of interest which should be cause enough for a grand scale investigation by the Better Business Bureau, or someone.
Credit agencies, insurance agencies, and banking agencies are tied together. All of these agencies have a profit motive. That profit margin can be increased if a greater number of people have a lower credit score because a lower credit score is justification for higher interest rates. Higher interest rates will result in higher default rates if their income level decreases or the cost of living for their area increases more than their income. Higher default rates will further reduce the ability to advance income level and will also result in higher insurance rates--of which car insurance is legally mandatory in most states. While one can easily say "it's the consumers fault" it's impossible to deny that the businesses involved actually have an interest in encouraging this downward spiral. As long as they properly profile their customers ahead of time (those who we can screw, those who we can milk, and those we shouldn't mess with) there's little risk of a political or even media backlash. This profiling is justifiable from a business perspective. From the standpoint of "truth, justice, the American way, and leader of the Free World", however, one would expect that our tax dollars are working to prevent this wholesale exploitation of consumers.
As a basic business model this conflict of interest is very likely especially with the fanaticism for corporate growth and quarterly earnings on the stock market. From what I've seen my tax dollars have been aiding and abetting more than they've been securing me from this conflict of interest.
When it's my own tax money contributing to systems trying to lock me down as someone else's legally indentured servant I start to question everyone's motives.
How much does the infrastructure of the court system help me at all? Availability of funds is a prerequisite to taking advantage of this public justice service. If I don't have funds I get no satisfaction. Since I pay so much in taxes I have no funds.
If you steal my software I'm going to steal it back. That's the only cost effective approach.
until we as the 'consumers' start buying information about our Congressmen and Senators
But then we consumers would be labelled terrorist stalkers, apprehended by the police or FBI, interrogated, investigated by the IRS, our credit reports trashed, we'd be laid off from our employers due to downsizing or some other silly excuse, and we'd get the impression that you're not supposed to go generally investigating those who are more socially and politically powerful for you.
<i>I'm afraid that only such a breach - and the resulting fraud - would convince the morons who live in this country that something needs to change.
There would be a witch hunt. Some people (actually involved or not) would be apprehended. Several would be charged. After a lengthy and costly court battle complete with media pomp and display one or two would be convicted and never heard from again. Politicians would shuffle and propose a thousand new mandates. Five or ten would attract the interest of special interest lobbying groups who represent businesses who see how they could manipulate those new proposals for profit.
In general the citizens lose more money, gain more bureaucracy, and everything gets worse no matter how it goes.
living your life and in the process producing facts is not an act of creative authorship
I know we go round on copyright issues all the time. Forget about that for a few moments please.
If my neighbor collects a database about me which outlines my entire life it's typically viewed as stalking. If a company does it then it's a legal business.
What gives? If stalking is about motive it can be demonstrated that the company compiling the database is not worried in the least about my best welfare. If stalking is about the nature of the data collected then it stands to reason that tracking my spending habits is certainly a behavioral characterization and it'd be tough to write a mutually exclusive definition for stalking.
So, apart from the pleasantries we've exchanged about copyrights, how is it that the consumer database agencies are not empowering employees who may be stalkers? I'm positive that there've been cases where data was misused by internal employees, either first-hand or by giving that information to otherwise unpriveleged parties.
Re:Credit reporting == lower prices, more services
on
The Ethics Of Data Brokers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As long as people expect businesses to take risks on them those businesses will want to collect information on the riskiness of those consumers
Perfectly understandable.
it makes sense that other businesses would form to collect and sell consumer payment/risk data
This is the part under debate. I, and many others, do not feel that the sale of consumer information should be a business model at all. If some business wants to track information for business purposes let them do it internally and hold them accountable for every bit of information they collect.
They should treat consumer information databases the same way they treat stalking.
How would the FSF have forced Linksys to reveal their code changes on their router with the leverage given by the copyright on Linux?... break in to Linksys and steal back the code
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To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
It looks fairly obvious to me that, at least at a Federal level, the Federal courts have no option but to side with the individual author.
If they can't code it right then maybe they should be serving french fries.
If they follow the strict spec for the codec, there wouldn't be any problem.
I half expect that codecs with exploits are products of IP battles. "We can't do it the right way, but if we do it this way we can still achieve the same compression/decompression algorithm--albeit with a potential code fault."
Long live IP for MS. The Open Source King kives.
How about we just raise the bar on coding practices and actually secure programming? Maybe we could teach strict logic flow structures.
The biggest excuse I hear from programmers for why they've violated strict logic flow is always,"Well, I was coding for speed and efficiency". With 3.0+GHz machines, what does it matter anymore? It's all a lot of hooey, too. The person learned that excuse from someone in 8th grade and they've latched onto it. When pressed they rarely even know what logical structure they've violated. They only know the excuse.
I think the biggest problem facing us is the inundation of object oriented programming languages. There's very little need to learn the strict mathematics of programming anymore. It is this laziness, and not any particular language, which is the root cause of the problem. Programming environments with sandboxes (ie. Java) are band-aids to a bigger problem.
The problem is with lazy programmers.
It costs $5/hour just to live in this society. Go over your bills. Go over the cost of everything you do. Prove me wrong.
If you're "making it" and bringing home less than $43k/year then you have some additional advantages: maybe your family gives nice gifts around the holidays. Maybe your friends foot the bill for the neat new PS/2 games. Maybe you're priveleged with a lower average rent payment. Maybe you're so easily amused that you can spend 8 hours/day staring a blank wall.
Most normal humans require stimuli. That stimuli, in today's society, costs $5/hour. Go to a health club. There's no great cosmic mystery to why they're about $50-$100/mo. They figure their members will be in 3-5 days/week at 30 mins to an hour each. 5 days x 30 mins = 2.5 hours. 2.5 hours x 4 = 10 hours. $50/10 hours = $5 hour. And they're still making a profit. It costs $5/hour just to live in this world.
Just because you don't recognize the priveleges and cost-breaks that you receive doesn't mean they're not there. You are further obvious testimony that the majority of the public just has not yet sat down to really figure out exactly how much they really do spend each and every day. And you obviously haven't spent more than the most cursory amount of time thinking about where that money goes.
Between rent, electricity, water, gas, food, etc. I've estimated that it costs at least $5/hour, 24/7/365, just to exist in this society. You want to drive your car? That'll be $5/hour in gas, maintenance, wear-n-tear. You want to watch a movie? That'll be $5/hour for the movie, electricity, popcorn, etc. You want to breathe in your own apartment? That'll be at least $20/day just for to rent the structure for most middle class city citizens renting a modest apartment (that covers 4 of the 24 daily hours alone!), then add in the distributed cost of electricity and water. You want to go out shopping for groceries? Consider yourself anorexic if you only spend $5 for every hour you're out grocery shopping. You want to eat at McDonald's? You'll be lucky to get 20 minutes out of a $5 meal.
If you're not making at least $43k, take home, per year then you're likely involved in some sort of system to cost-share or else you will fall into debt. Accountants know this. Banks know this. Credit card companies know this. Investment brokers know this. Insurance companies know this. The Government knows this (mainly because of the kickbacks that they get and the social cost-sharing programs they create to hide it). Every single one of them is playing that knowledge against people who don't know it.
The biggest card they play is to lead people, like you, to browbeat anyone who falls into debt. Guilt is a powerful game. People who accept their browbeating never look to see how they're being screwed because they accept that their plight is through some fault of their own. That's not the case in this society. The plight is created for the financial profit of those who administer the browbeating.
Follow the money trail. It leads to a very different conclusion than living within your means. You're not living within your means. You've been allowed to have means which give you the privelege of living a lifestyle which satisfies your need for entertainment and stimuli. Maybe you're easily amused or maybe your salary is priveleged. Take a week out sometime and cut out all activities which cost any money at all. Spend one week doing nothing every night after work but twiddling your thumbs while staring blankly at the wall. I guarantee you that, by the end of the third day, you'll be doing something which costs money. For many people living within their means translates into twiddling thumbs for 20 days out of the month--and that's just stupid when you consider the wealth of this nation.
To admonish someone to just "live within your means" is arrogant and ignorant at the same time. Yes, there are people who just spend like idiots, but that's not the majority of what's going on in society. The majority factor is that people are being milked by a system they don't even recognize exists and those who don't have it quite so bad are taught to hold themselves as high-and-mighty above those who utter even the smallest complaint.
The Constitution was a finite set of authorities given to the Federal Government. There was a mechanism inserted to expand that set through further Amendments. At the end of the Bill of Rights is a cap which seals that finite set to only include things specifically mentioned in the document. To suggest that "living document" allows the Constitution to be enumerated is little more than whining about having to play by the rules--and a violation of the 9th Amendment. The Constitution is a living document--if you get further Amednments passed. To think that "commerce clause" is legal justification for circumventing that finite set is, as I've said, a product of political horse crap.
More proof that the courts are bought and sold more easily than donuts.
You know... I'm reading the Constitution, and I'm just not seeing anywhere about "The Federal Government shall have the power to regulate communications offices such as newspapers, pubs, market squares, and internet access points".
And don't pull any of that interstate commerce crap. Interstate commerce was not an all-encompassing blanket in 1776. It had a very specific meaning which was apparently obvious at that time. It'd be absurd to argue that the authors really left a backdoor open that wide. I don't know exactly what the meaning of 1776 "interstate commerce" was but I've a notion that it had to do with formalized business shipping--probably authenticated by a formally incorporated business.
Just how, praytell, are you going to infect someone's machine reliably just because they're using your access point? First you need to figure out which OS they're running. Can you tell that just from the simple packet headers? If I watch tcpdump on my border router, for example, it's pretty obvious to me when I boot one of my systems into Windows but, beyond that, I can't really tell from the DHCP noise if it's Windows 95, 98, or XP. Even if you could determine the OS, just how do you propose to randomly inject executable code into their network traffic?
I smell FUD.
It's a debtor society. The only question is which side of the debt line you're on.
That's the common argument. It sounds pretty good and helps the speaker feel better about their own personal choices by elevating themselves above the unwashed masses. The argument holds no water when you face the reality that the federal debt does affect some people more than others. It's not an easy mathematical equation of salary and tax, either. Again, the only question is which side of the debt line you're on. If you're just barely scraping by on your salary and holding a 25% tax load then you're affected quite a bit more by the federal debt than someone who has $100k in the bank and a 28% debt load. Who is honestly responsible for the federal debt? Arguably the people who benefit the most--the CEOs and the VPs taking the lion's share of the cash flow from federal government contracts. Who, in reality, bears the majority of the debt burden? That would be the people earning less than $100k/year. In terms of payments only the folk earning millions per year pay more--but they also get more back. In terms of net contribution after all the kickbacks are figured in it is the common laborer who's paying the majority of the tax.
For example. Recently there was an expose on the east coast about CEOs of non profit organizations with absurd salaries. Some of them, as CEOs of non profit organizations, were taking home in excess of $4 million a year. Most of them were CEOs of organizations who dealt exclusively with federal contract money. That's 100% pure taxpayer money being funneled into the pocket of someone who's supposedly performing a public service.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Government is not your friend.
Slavery is the natural state of anyone who lives paycheck-to-paycheck. That happens to be, in terms of population, a significant portion of society--probably close to 40%. We just don't call it slavery anymore because the cold hard facts are too much for most people to choke down through their public school education.
Doesn't it bother you, even a little bit, that a significant amount of tax money, which comes out of your paycheck, goes to support an industry which is set up explicitly to exploit you for someone else's benefit?
I'd like for my tax dollars to start benefitting me. Not someone else. Tell them to get their own tax dollars.
Given the amount of personal data which every business collects and freely trades around it'd be silly to think that they're not using it to fix prices at the maximum possible level, completely negate the effects of any competitive pricing, and create a social class of permanently exploitable people who, statistically, will simply never have a chance of getting out of debt. To me that's the same as slavery--except the owner doesn't have to worry about housing or feeding the slaves.
I, for one, don't want my tax dollars contributing to that sort of effort in any way.
Slavery hasn't been abolished. It's been redefined and obfuscated. Modern day slave markets are temp agencies, unemployement lines, and internet job boards.
The only way to fix it is complete decentralization and minimization. Anything less is leaving the door open to the same cycle of exploit.
Then there's actual satisfaction. There's DrDOS, Miranda, RTLinux, KISS, tinyPEAP, CherryOS, Broadcom routers, and others not turned up by a simple Google search. Most violations probably go undocumented because the authors don't have legal teams scanning the industry watching for potential abuses. Apparently netfilter has been successful in its pursuits--but that's only in Germany. If you visit gpl-violations.org, you'd think that the only GPL licensed software being pirated is netfilter, and only in Germany. I find that pretty hard to believe.
There's also this post available on the debian-legal list:
This fellow is being realistic about the way the courts function. You've been trolling me with the assumption that courts are a favorable environment to pursue GPL violations.
Then there's this fellow's opinion of how sharp the teeth of the FSF are:
It really sounds like you've been following these mailing lists and you're just using the same old tired junk on me since it's already been addressed everywhere else.
I hope you didn't think you were generating novel ideas and arguments.
The crucial problem is profiling, conflict of interest, and exploitation. Take a bank issuing a mortgage. For any given income level they can profile the customers according to their income, debts, and current monthly payments. Don't look at it as a business decision of loan or no-loan. Look at it as a business decision of who's milkable, who's downright fleeceable, and who's priveleged. People who are close to the break even point, for example, are less likely to research all of the avenues for obtaining the truly best home loan and interest rates. Those people are milkable. People who are close to the break even point and who have any sort of necessity (been denied by other lenders, need to move soon, etc.) are downright fleeceable if given even the slightest option. People who have a year's worth of savings, however, can probably afford the options to find the best deals.
I'm not worried about someone stealing my identity or putting false reports on my credit. I'm worried about my financial and consumer information being used in price fixing schemes which ensure that I'll have almost no opportunity of escaping the cycle of indentured servitude--where I'm always paying bills for someone else's profit and never getting out of debt.
And don't think that the stock market industry, the banking industry, the insurance industry, and the credit industry don't have thousands of statisticians and accountants putting all of this together in order to eke that last 0.1% of profit out of it. At that point it's not really personally malicious--it's just creating and identifying a slave segment of society.
That's the sort of thing that tax dollars should be fighting against--not supporting.
The precedent set by the courts is extra-Constitutional. As such, we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic. The powers and authorities expressed by our government are no longer those indicative of a Constitutional Republic but rather more closely resembles the powers and authorities of a Socialist or Communist regime.
If the government chooses to operate outside the limitations of the 9th and 10th Amendments then the Constitution no longer has any meaning. They might as well justify their arguments using the "might makes right" approach.
There's still a vast conflict of interest which should be cause enough for a grand scale investigation by the Better Business Bureau, or someone.
Credit agencies, insurance agencies, and banking agencies are tied together. All of these agencies have a profit motive. That profit margin can be increased if a greater number of people have a lower credit score because a lower credit score is justification for higher interest rates. Higher interest rates will result in higher default rates if their income level decreases or the cost of living for their area increases more than their income. Higher default rates will further reduce the ability to advance income level and will also result in higher insurance rates--of which car insurance is legally mandatory in most states. While one can easily say "it's the consumers fault" it's impossible to deny that the businesses involved actually have an interest in encouraging this downward spiral. As long as they properly profile their customers ahead of time (those who we can screw, those who we can milk, and those we shouldn't mess with) there's little risk of a political or even media backlash. This profiling is justifiable from a business perspective. From the standpoint of "truth, justice, the American way, and leader of the Free World", however, one would expect that our tax dollars are working to prevent this wholesale exploitation of consumers.
As a basic business model this conflict of interest is very likely especially with the fanaticism for corporate growth and quarterly earnings on the stock market. From what I've seen my tax dollars have been aiding and abetting more than they've been securing me from this conflict of interest.
When it's my own tax money contributing to systems trying to lock me down as someone else's legally indentured servant I start to question everyone's motives.
How much does the infrastructure of the court system help me at all? Availability of funds is a prerequisite to taking advantage of this public justice service. If I don't have funds I get no satisfaction. Since I pay so much in taxes I have no funds.
If you steal my software I'm going to steal it back. That's the only cost effective approach.
In general the citizens lose more money, gain more bureaucracy, and everything gets worse no matter how it goes.
If my neighbor collects a database about me which outlines my entire life it's typically viewed as stalking. If a company does it then it's a legal business.
What gives? If stalking is about motive it can be demonstrated that the company compiling the database is not worried in the least about my best welfare. If stalking is about the nature of the data collected then it stands to reason that tracking my spending habits is certainly a behavioral characterization and it'd be tough to write a mutually exclusive definition for stalking.
So, apart from the pleasantries we've exchanged about copyrights, how is it that the consumer database agencies are not empowering employees who may be stalkers? I'm positive that there've been cases where data was misused by internal employees, either first-hand or by giving that information to otherwise unpriveleged parties.
This is the part under debate. I, and many others, do not feel that the sale of consumer information should be a business model at all. If some business wants to track information for business purposes let them do it internally and hold them accountable for every bit of information they collect.
They should treat consumer information databases the same way they treat stalking.