APPL needs to either needs to tell investors it has some plan to exercise that money or it should disperse it as dividends. Dividend disbursements are away to get strong hands to hold a stock; when you reach a plateau in share price valuation. Once a stock stops going up (somewhat predictably) over a time, either it sells off (I don't think anyone at Apple wants that), or becomes a volatile thing that gets day traded, which is tough place to be because judgment gets passed on management each and every day at those companies.
You make me laugh. Truly make me laugh. First off, anyone talking about APPL shows their complete ignorance of the stock market. APPL (APPELL PETE CORP) hasn't traded for many years. Second, if we talk about AAPL, that is one company that has demonstrated year after year that they give a shit about what investors want and what they think. Apple's only interest is making excellent products and sell gazillions of them at a huge profit to happy customers. The excellent share price is just an inevitable side effect.
Apple, and their fans, have long insinuated that Macs don't get malware.
Fact: Macs used by reasonable intelligent users don't get malware. Fact: There are no known viruses for the Macintosh in the wild. Fact: There is malware in the form of Trojans and scareware trying to attack Macs or Mac users; such malware relies on user stupidity.
Here in the UK, people get phone calls from a company claiming that their computer is infected by malware, and they should pay this company money to clean up the infection. Does having a Mac protect you from these calls? Of course not. I got three of them, an only Macs in my house. Now does a strong believe that Macs cannot get malware protect you? Interestingly, yes. A Mac user who doesn't know anything about computers but believes very strongly that Macs can't get malware would then identify these calls as the scam that they are.
making you work 80 hours a week, making you live in a tiny room with 20 other people, make you use dangerous chemicals that damage your brain, threaten you with prison for even talking about a union, etc?
1. I'd like to see evidence of working 80 hours at week. Plus Foxconn actually pays overtime for every additional hour worked; many companies in the USA don't pay anything for overtime.
2. Foxconn doesn't make anyone live in a tiny room with 20 other people. They offer accomodation in dormitories with 8 people per room, at a cost of less than 10 hours salary per month. Perfect for someone who wants to work for 3, 6 or 12 months, save as much money as possible, and return to their home village with a big pile of cash. These people are free to find other accomodation, which will cost them more.
3. There are no dangerous chemicals in use anywhere in the USA. Not anywhere. Never. Ever. Do you believe that? Shit happens, and responsible companies like Apple act when shit happens.
4. Chinese employees are free to join a union. The company even has to pay for the majority of union fees. Now it is true that you can't start a union other than the state union, but you _can_ join a union.
If Apple's management were such geniuses, then why don't they take that cash and start another business line that will make them even more successful?
Because taking cash, starting another business line, and making it successful, takes an awful lot of work. Being a genius doesn't help. Cloning might help.
So long as said contracts are done with the company's approval. In most cases, subsidiaries do not have free reign and must operate on a contractual basis with the parent company.
In this case, both companies had the same CEO. And Apple has email evidence that the subsidiary agreed to the sale, which wasn't shown in the first court case in China.
If it's impossible to implement securely in an open-source program, it's impossible to implement securely, period. There is nothing magical about machine instructions. A compiled program is just harder to interpret. For one person, out of the 7 billion on this planet. And then it's out there, forever and ever.
Strong DRM usually has the problem that is gets harder to break, it also gets harder to make it work without problems for legitimate users. Therefore there are cases now where weak DRM is used, just strong enough not to overcome it by accident, and the DRM gives the rights holder strong legal rights. See Apple with the ridiculously weak DRM preventing to run MacOS X on non-Apple computer.
You could easily implement DRM in open source. It would of course be breakable, but it would be strong enough to give the copyright holder the additional legal protection.
IMNAL, Illegal contracts are still contracts. i.e., if you sign an illegal contract, you canâ(TM)t benefit by squelching on your end after you have received payment.
Oh no, they are not. A contract to commit a crime is void. If I kill your wife and you refuse to pay, no court will convict you for refusing to pay. And if you paid in advance and I refuse to kill her, no court will make me kill her _or_ refund the money.
One purpose of contracts is to make people work together. You couldn't sell a car if there was no way to make one side hand over the money and the other side hand over the car. Contracts to commit crimes are void intentionally to make that kind of collaboration harder.
IE should try to parse the P3P according to the spec. If that fails, then display the contents to a user, with buttons: "Accept cookie", "Reject cookie", and "never allow visits to this site again".
Making the code free doesn't address any sort of patent problem. So it doesn't really matter how much of a BSD troll you want to be. The BSDL and any other non-commercial license has exactly the same problems as the GPL. The GPL is hardly special here.
First, bastard for calling people "trolls". Second, idiot for not realizing that the GPL _is_ special and has painted itself in a corner: The GPL _requires_ an unlimited free license for all patents involved. If I have a patent, I could ask for one dollar for the license. With BSD, _someone_ would volunteer to pay that dollar. With GPL, the fact that there is any payment involved means the GPL licensed software cannot use the patent.
The problem is that "fair and reasonable" completely locks out all free software. This is not about ideology, the two concepts are mutually exclusive. A "reasonable" price between two giant corporations is too expensive for free software (and most small businesses). Can you afford to write free software when the reasonable license for a patent is in 5 digit figures?
That's not the problem. The problem is that GPL3 only allows software to be distributed if it comes with an unlimited license for all patents involved. So if you have a GPL3 project producing some software, even if the patent holder gives you a license to use their patent for free _for that project_, that's not enough. So a license grant "you can use this patent for free inside the Firefox browser" is not acceptable.
Your post, Sir, assumes that we people in rural areas actually obey traffic signals. Especially during non-peak hours (I've never observed vehicles blowing red lights @ 3 a.m. down my street).
With this design on a low traffic road, there should be just two possibilities: 1. You arrive at the traffic light, and the traffic light is green and no traffic from the other sides. 2. You arrive at the traffic light, the traffic light is red, and there _is_ traffic from the other sides. In other words, the light is very rarely red, but if it is red, then you absolutely _must_ stop or there will be an accident.
I dropped by to voice the same concern but you beat me to it. What indeed happens when one of the other monitored cars has an impulsive driver who decides in the last few seconds before the intersection to floor the accelerator?
Traffic lights would still operate, and traffic rules would still apply. What would happen in your case: If the driver goes at constant speed, the traffic light changes at exactly the right time to let him through. If the driver accelerates, the traffic light doesn't change to green in time, so he has to break. Or get a red light ticket.
The article looks back at the year 2006. 2006 was also the year when Apple switched to x86 computers. At the time, there was obviously the choice between AMD processors and Intel processors. And many people at the time said that Apple should have gone with AMD; we now know that would have been a big mistake.
In 2006, AMD processors were better than Pentium 4 processors. Pentium 4 design goal was "highest possible clock rate" with complete disregard of actual performance, because customers bought GHz. AMD countered by using processor numbers. Instead of a 3800 MHz Intel chip you could buy an "AMD 3800" chip which many customers thought was the same as the Intel chip, but in reality had much lower clock speed and slightly higher performance.
At the same time, the old Pentium 3 had much better performance per Megahertz than Pentium 4. Pentium M was a slight improvement of that, and Core Duo was again an improvement. Apple built a few Pentium 4 3.6 GHz Macs for developers. My first MacBook with 1.83 GHz Core Duo (May 2006) ran faster.
I think with the introduction of Core Duo, and with Intel getting rid of the abomination that was Pentium 4, AMD was beaten. They just didn't know yet for a long time. Reading the description of Pentium 4 internals, all I could think was "WTF". Same with Itanium (which was WTF squared). Athlon was in comparison a clean design, which was why it performed so much better per Megahertz. So was Core Duo, and since then Intel managed to stay with clean design and improve performance bit by bit.
For specific workloads, Itanium is great. It can sustain 2 FP loads, 2 FP stores, and 2 FMA's in a cycle, which means for certain types of DSP-ish workloads, it has more performance per-cycle than just about any other mainstream CPU.
My MacBook Pro from 2010 with a Core 2 Duo processor (one generation behind current CPUs) is capabable of performing two multiplications and two additions per cycle and core. Hard to achieve because latency together with limited number of registers is a problem, but not impossible. 32 architectured registers instead of 16 would have been nice.
If any of them talk to each other about the possibility of starting a union, they serve 12 years in jail. I heard this from the source that started this whole Apple Foxconn thing... the John Stewart show.
Quote: "Laws protecting union rights in China are better than in many other countries. With 25 worker signatures in a workplace, the employer must recognize the union. Once recognized, the employer must pay 2% of payroll to the union and the workers must pay 0.5%. The new Labour Contract Law, which will come into effect January 1, 2008, will help to ensure unions have the right to negotiate collective agreements."
It still remains that the work conditions would be illegal were they done in the United States, and absolutely all of Europe.
What exactly is happening at Foxconn that wouldn't happen in the USA or in Europe? I mean not just wild accusations. And not asking about "what would be illegal", but "what would not be happening".
PS. If you say "working 60 hours a week" - I've done that. If you say "employing people below legal age" - I've been employed by one of the largest US companies while below the legal age.
I...stand corrected. I had assumed Apple wasn't spending that much on operations. You're right; a bit more Googling shows they're only pocketing about 1%. I was assuming it was closer to 20%.
The cheapest way to buy on the App Store is to buy gift cards which are often available at reduced prices. For example, last week I bought £25 gift cards for £20, from a legitimate source. If I buy the card for £20, and the store isn't selling at a less, then Apple gets less than £20 or less than 80% from the purchase and pays 70% to some developer or to a record company. So that is less than 10% left before the cost of running the store.
All Apple had to do to quash their critics is have two licenses: free and premium. Free lets you do whatever you want, provided you only sell it through Apple's store. Premium, which happens to cost $500 or something, lets you take it wherever you want AND entitles you to some sort of limited publicity if you make it on the Apple store.
What Apple did instead was changing a license that was open to be deliberately misunderstood to one that is much harder to misunderstand.
But tell me, if Apple creates an app specifically to get better quality ebooks than anyone else can make, why would Apple sell that app for _any_ amount of money?
Unless you pay a programmer to do it for you. The problem with closed source is you can't hire someone and tell them
"Here's $100, go sit in Microsoft's building and recompile their code with a couple of changes, just for me"
So you can pay a programmer $100 to build a new version of OpenOffice for you with a few changes? Where do you find programmers that cheap?
They're sending people on "Jobseekers Allowance" into "internships" with the likes of Tesco (our own national Wal-Mart), on the promise of gaining useful job experience which will gain them employment. So they stack shelves for the duration of their internship, which gives them literally zero marketable experience (and indeed, probably damages their prospects - who wants to hire a shelf-stacker for anything less menial?)
They gain the invaluable experience of actually working. That's very marketable. If two kids apply for a job, one says "I left school, sat on my fat arse and did nothing", the other says "I left school, couldn't find a decent job, so I took whatever I could get, including washing cars, stacking shelves...", which one would you hire? The one doing menial work, or the one doing nothing?
But who do you think is more likely to have valid patents in the digital imaging arena? Kodak (who have been in the business since 1889) or Apple (who have been in the business since 2007)? Yes, Kodak's move was one of desperation. Apple's move is just pure spite.
This is about the Quicktake 100 camera, developed by Apple and produced by Kodak, shipping in 1994. Oh, does that mean Apple developed and shipped a product 13 years before they were in business? No, Apple has been in business since 1976. And Apple is saying "Kodak is suing us about patents for stuff that we, Apple, actually developed". Not really spiteful.
I understand your offense but I wonder if anyone has considered that this whole thing could be a hoax.
A Google search for the site name shows that it comes up with search results for "free mp3 files" with music that is most likely not there legally (assuming that Kanye West and Lady Gaga haven't given them permission to distribute their music for free). So the site is real; and it doesn't make "free mp3 files" available anymore.
Three possibilities: 1. The site owner made a very strange joke. 2. Some hacker has taken over the site. 3. It's real. Which one? You decide.
"... were stolen from the artists" - nothing was stolen. The authors and publishers still have possession of their property..
No, they don't. They have possession of _one_ copy. They have lost possession of all the other copies. If you make a copy illegally, then it is not your property. It is the property of the copyright holder. This would be similar to "borrowing" a cow, using it to produce calves, then returning the cow and keeping the calves.
explain the anti-suicide nets then? Is that how they cause a reduction in suicide? Because the workers cannot commit suicide at work, so they do it when away so the figures for Foxconn look better?
If you look at statistics in the USA, it turns out that the suicide rate among men is much higher than among women. A closer look shows that the rate of suicide _attempts_ is much higher among women. Women just use methods that work less well, like taking lots of sleeping tablets, while men quite often use violent mens like using a gun, which has a very high "success" rate.
It seems that people at Foxconn have found a method that "works well" - jumping off a high roof. Suicide nets can stop this from working. This may not reduce the number of suicidal people, and the number of suicide _attempts_, but it will force people to use methods that work less well, therefore fewer _successful_ suicide attempts.
And of course there is the fact that suicide may very well be a spontaneous decision that won't be repeated. That person on the roof staring at a net may very well decide that they were very close to making a horrible mistake and seek help. Without a net, the same person might have figured out about half the way down that they made a mistake; too late.
Yes. Because it was a problem. No one said "ah well, this is normal and there's nothing to look into". Workers threatening mass suicide in protest over working conditions is a problem. Anyone who claims otherwise must have a really bad job. Like mop boy at the porn theater bad.
Except it didn't happen. What happened was workers threatening mass suicide in protest of losing their jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
APPL needs to either needs to tell investors it has some plan to exercise that money or it should disperse it as dividends. Dividend disbursements are away to get strong hands to hold a stock; when you reach a plateau in share price valuation. Once a stock stops going up (somewhat predictably) over a time, either it sells off (I don't think anyone at Apple wants that), or becomes a volatile thing that gets day traded, which is tough place to be because judgment gets passed on management each and every day at those companies.
You make me laugh. Truly make me laugh. First off, anyone talking about APPL shows their complete ignorance of the stock market. APPL (APPELL PETE CORP) hasn't traded for many years. Second, if we talk about AAPL, that is one company that has demonstrated year after year that they give a shit about what investors want and what they think. Apple's only interest is making excellent products and sell gazillions of them at a huge profit to happy customers. The excellent share price is just an inevitable side effect.
Apple, and their fans, have long insinuated that Macs don't get malware.
Fact: Macs used by reasonable intelligent users don't get malware. Fact: There are no known viruses for the Macintosh in the wild. Fact: There is malware in the form of Trojans and scareware trying to attack Macs or Mac users; such malware relies on user stupidity.
Here in the UK, people get phone calls from a company claiming that their computer is infected by malware, and they should pay this company money to clean up the infection. Does having a Mac protect you from these calls? Of course not. I got three of them, an only Macs in my house. Now does a strong believe that Macs cannot get malware protect you? Interestingly, yes. A Mac user who doesn't know anything about computers but believes very strongly that Macs can't get malware would then identify these calls as the scam that they are.
making you work 80 hours a week, making you live in a tiny room with 20 other people, make you use dangerous chemicals that damage your brain, threaten you with prison for even talking about a union, etc?
1. I'd like to see evidence of working 80 hours at week. Plus Foxconn actually pays overtime for every additional hour worked; many companies in the USA don't pay anything for overtime.
2. Foxconn doesn't make anyone live in a tiny room with 20 other people. They offer accomodation in dormitories with 8 people per room, at a cost of less than 10 hours salary per month. Perfect for someone who wants to work for 3, 6 or 12 months, save as much money as possible, and return to their home village with a big pile of cash. These people are free to find other accomodation, which will cost them more.
3. There are no dangerous chemicals in use anywhere in the USA. Not anywhere. Never. Ever. Do you believe that? Shit happens, and responsible companies like Apple act when shit happens.
4. Chinese employees are free to join a union. The company even has to pay for the majority of union fees. Now it is true that you can't start a union other than the state union, but you _can_ join a union.
If Apple's management were such geniuses, then why don't they take that cash and start another business line that will make them even more successful?
Because taking cash, starting another business line, and making it successful, takes an awful lot of work. Being a genius doesn't help. Cloning might help.
So long as said contracts are done with the company's approval. In most cases, subsidiaries do not have free reign and must operate on a contractual basis with the parent company.
In this case, both companies had the same CEO. And Apple has email evidence that the subsidiary agreed to the sale, which wasn't shown in the first court case in China.
If it's impossible to implement securely in an open-source program, it's impossible to implement securely, period. There is nothing magical about machine instructions. A compiled program is just harder to interpret. For one person, out of the 7 billion on this planet. And then it's out there, forever and ever.
Strong DRM usually has the problem that is gets harder to break, it also gets harder to make it work without problems for legitimate users. Therefore there are cases now where weak DRM is used, just strong enough not to overcome it by accident, and the DRM gives the rights holder strong legal rights. See Apple with the ridiculously weak DRM preventing to run MacOS X on non-Apple computer.
You could easily implement DRM in open source. It would of course be breakable, but it would be strong enough to give the copyright holder the additional legal protection.
IMNAL, Illegal contracts are still contracts. i.e., if you sign an illegal contract, you canâ(TM)t benefit by squelching on your end after you have received payment.
Oh no, they are not. A contract to commit a crime is void. If I kill your wife and you refuse to pay, no court will convict you for refusing to pay. And if you paid in advance and I refuse to kill her, no court will make me kill her _or_ refund the money.
One purpose of contracts is to make people work together. You couldn't sell a car if there was no way to make one side hand over the money and the other side hand over the car. Contracts to commit crimes are void intentionally to make that kind of collaboration harder.
Suggested update for Internet Explorer:
IE should try to parse the P3P according to the spec. If that fails, then display the contents to a user, with buttons: "Accept cookie", "Reject cookie", and "never allow visits to this site again".
Making the code free doesn't address any sort of patent problem. So it doesn't really matter how much of a BSD troll you want to be. The BSDL and any other non-commercial license has exactly the same problems as the GPL. The GPL is hardly special here.
First, bastard for calling people "trolls". Second, idiot for not realizing that the GPL _is_ special and has painted itself in a corner: The GPL _requires_ an unlimited free license for all patents involved. If I have a patent, I could ask for one dollar for the license. With BSD, _someone_ would volunteer to pay that dollar. With GPL, the fact that there is any payment involved means the GPL licensed software cannot use the patent.
The problem is that "fair and reasonable" completely locks out all free software. This is not about ideology, the two concepts are mutually exclusive. A "reasonable" price between two giant corporations is too expensive for free software (and most small businesses). Can you afford to write free software when the reasonable license for a patent is in 5 digit figures?
That's not the problem. The problem is that GPL3 only allows software to be distributed if it comes with an unlimited license for all patents involved. So if you have a GPL3 project producing some software, even if the patent holder gives you a license to use their patent for free _for that project_, that's not enough. So a license grant "you can use this patent for free inside the Firefox browser" is not acceptable.
Your post, Sir, assumes that we people in rural areas actually obey traffic signals. Especially during non-peak hours (I've never observed vehicles blowing red lights @ 3 a.m. down my street).
With this design on a low traffic road, there should be just two possibilities: 1. You arrive at the traffic light, and the traffic light is green and no traffic from the other sides. 2. You arrive at the traffic light, the traffic light is red, and there _is_ traffic from the other sides. In other words, the light is very rarely red, but if it is red, then you absolutely _must_ stop or there will be an accident.
I dropped by to voice the same concern but you beat me to it. What indeed happens when one of the other monitored cars has an impulsive driver who decides in the last few seconds before the intersection to floor the accelerator?
Traffic lights would still operate, and traffic rules would still apply. What would happen in your case: If the driver goes at constant speed, the traffic light changes at exactly the right time to let him through. If the driver accelerates, the traffic light doesn't change to green in time, so he has to break. Or get a red light ticket.
The article looks back at the year 2006. 2006 was also the year when Apple switched to x86 computers. At the time, there was obviously the choice between AMD processors and Intel processors. And many people at the time said that Apple should have gone with AMD; we now know that would have been a big mistake.
In 2006, AMD processors were better than Pentium 4 processors. Pentium 4 design goal was "highest possible clock rate" with complete disregard of actual performance, because customers bought GHz. AMD countered by using processor numbers. Instead of a 3800 MHz Intel chip you could buy an "AMD 3800" chip which many customers thought was the same as the Intel chip, but in reality had much lower clock speed and slightly higher performance.
At the same time, the old Pentium 3 had much better performance per Megahertz than Pentium 4. Pentium M was a slight improvement of that, and Core Duo was again an improvement. Apple built a few Pentium 4 3.6 GHz Macs for developers. My first MacBook with 1.83 GHz Core Duo (May 2006) ran faster.
I think with the introduction of Core Duo, and with Intel getting rid of the abomination that was Pentium 4, AMD was beaten. They just didn't know yet for a long time. Reading the description of Pentium 4 internals, all I could think was "WTF". Same with Itanium (which was WTF squared). Athlon was in comparison a clean design, which was why it performed so much better per Megahertz. So was Core Duo, and since then Intel managed to stay with clean design and improve performance bit by bit.
For specific workloads, Itanium is great. It can sustain 2 FP loads, 2 FP stores, and 2 FMA's in a cycle, which means for certain types of DSP-ish workloads, it has more performance per-cycle than just about any other mainstream CPU.
My MacBook Pro from 2010 with a Core 2 Duo processor (one generation behind current CPUs) is capabable of performing two multiplications and two additions per cycle and core. Hard to achieve because latency together with limited number of registers is a problem, but not impossible. 32 architectured registers instead of 16 would have been nice.
If any of them talk to each other about the possibility of starting a union, they serve 12 years in jail. I heard this from the source that started this whole Apple Foxconn thing... the John Stewart show.
I read different things. For example here: http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay/relay21_unions.pdf
Quote: "Laws protecting union rights in China are better than in many other countries. With 25 worker signatures in a workplace, the employer must recognize the union. Once recognized, the employer must pay 2% of payroll to the union and the workers must pay 0.5%. The new Labour Contract Law, which will come into effect January 1, 2008, will help to ensure unions have the right to negotiate collective agreements."
It still remains that the work conditions would be illegal were they done in the United States, and absolutely all of Europe.
What exactly is happening at Foxconn that wouldn't happen in the USA or in Europe? I mean not just wild accusations. And not asking about "what would be illegal", but "what would not be happening".
PS. If you say "working 60 hours a week" - I've done that. If you say "employing people below legal age" - I've been employed by one of the largest US companies while below the legal age.
I...stand corrected. I had assumed Apple wasn't spending that much on operations. You're right; a bit more Googling shows they're only pocketing about 1%. I was assuming it was closer to 20%.
The cheapest way to buy on the App Store is to buy gift cards which are often available at reduced prices. For example, last week I bought £25 gift cards for £20, from a legitimate source. If I buy the card for £20, and the store isn't selling at a less, then Apple gets less than £20 or less than 80% from the purchase and pays 70% to some developer or to a record company. So that is less than 10% left before the cost of running the store.
All Apple had to do to quash their critics is have two licenses: free and premium. Free lets you do whatever you want, provided you only sell it through Apple's store. Premium, which happens to cost $500 or something, lets you take it wherever you want AND entitles you to some sort of limited publicity if you make it on the Apple store.
What Apple did instead was changing a license that was open to be deliberately misunderstood to one that is much harder to misunderstand.
But tell me, if Apple creates an app specifically to get better quality ebooks than anyone else can make, why would Apple sell that app for _any_ amount of money?
Unless you pay a programmer to do it for you. The problem with closed source is you can't hire someone and tell them "Here's $100, go sit in Microsoft's building and recompile their code with a couple of changes, just for me"
So you can pay a programmer $100 to build a new version of OpenOffice for you with a few changes? Where do you find programmers that cheap?
They're sending people on "Jobseekers Allowance" into "internships" with the likes of Tesco (our own national Wal-Mart), on the promise of gaining useful job experience which will gain them employment. So they stack shelves for the duration of their internship, which gives them literally zero marketable experience (and indeed, probably damages their prospects - who wants to hire a shelf-stacker for anything less menial?)
They gain the invaluable experience of actually working. That's very marketable. If two kids apply for a job, one says "I left school, sat on my fat arse and did nothing", the other says "I left school, couldn't find a decent job, so I took whatever I could get, including washing cars, stacking shelves...", which one would you hire? The one doing menial work, or the one doing nothing?
But who do you think is more likely to have valid patents in the digital imaging arena? Kodak (who have been in the business since 1889) or Apple (who have been in the business since 2007)? Yes, Kodak's move was one of desperation. Apple's move is just pure spite.
This is about the Quicktake 100 camera, developed by Apple and produced by Kodak, shipping in 1994. Oh, does that mean Apple developed and shipped a product 13 years before they were in business? No, Apple has been in business since 1976. And Apple is saying "Kodak is suing us about patents for stuff that we, Apple, actually developed". Not really spiteful.
I understand your offense but I wonder if anyone has considered that this whole thing could be a hoax.
A Google search for the site name shows that it comes up with search results for "free mp3 files" with music that is most likely not there legally (assuming that Kanye West and Lady Gaga haven't given them permission to distribute their music for free). So the site is real; and it doesn't make "free mp3 files" available anymore.
Three possibilities: 1. The site owner made a very strange joke. 2. Some hacker has taken over the site. 3. It's real. Which one? You decide.
"... were stolen from the artists" - nothing was stolen. The authors and publishers still have possession of their property. .
No, they don't. They have possession of _one_ copy. They have lost possession of all the other copies. If you make a copy illegally, then it is not your property. It is the property of the copyright holder. This would be similar to "borrowing" a cow, using it to produce calves, then returning the cow and keeping the calves.
explain the anti-suicide nets then? Is that how they cause a reduction in suicide? Because the workers cannot commit suicide at work, so they do it when away so the figures for Foxconn look better?
If you look at statistics in the USA, it turns out that the suicide rate among men is much higher than among women. A closer look shows that the rate of suicide _attempts_ is much higher among women. Women just use methods that work less well, like taking lots of sleeping tablets, while men quite often use violent mens like using a gun, which has a very high "success" rate.
It seems that people at Foxconn have found a method that "works well" - jumping off a high roof. Suicide nets can stop this from working. This may not reduce the number of suicidal people, and the number of suicide _attempts_, but it will force people to use methods that work less well, therefore fewer _successful_ suicide attempts.
And of course there is the fact that suicide may very well be a spontaneous decision that won't be repeated. That person on the roof staring at a net may very well decide that they were very close to making a horrible mistake and seek help. Without a net, the same person might have figured out about half the way down that they made a mistake; too late.
Yes. Because it was a problem. No one said "ah well, this is normal and there's nothing to look into". Workers threatening mass suicide in protest over working conditions is a problem. Anyone who claims otherwise must have a really bad job. Like mop boy at the porn theater bad.
Except it didn't happen. What happened was workers threatening mass suicide in protest of losing their jobs.