Well, if you're the manufacturer -- or really, Foxconn or somebody MAKES everything, Apple is just Design and Quality Control -- and problems are reported, you see how many problems there are, how many machines are affected, what the precise problem is -- bad battery lot, bad fab, design flaw, whatever -- and then respond appropriately. Maybe there's a bad batch somewhere, who knows?
I'd agree, if you want trouble-free operation, don't buy any version 1.0. Around the second revision, things get reliable. But one or two pictures of fat batteries look bad. Are there eight of them out there, or 800, or 8,000? Frankly, I'd bet around 80.
Why are there still problems with automobile engines? Are they new products? But people still get lemons, after 100-whatever years.
Not entirely true. Look up Moses and Jesus in the Chicago Manual of Style. Jesus' and Moses' followers.
But there it has to do with two "s" sounds in a row. They figured three was overload.
I saw one tech writer who actually tried this on his MacBook, and the temperature lowered 2 degrees. Hardly worth a conniption over. Also, some of the extreme cases, at least, were a simple manufacturing error, where a plastic film was left over a vent in some units. Remove the plastic, remove the excess heat.
I've got to say, over at digg, the degree of positive stories about Apple makes even me cringe at times. But here on Slashdot there is an unending parade of exaggerated negativity about the company entirely. People have to learn how to make judgments, and not be ruled by their hatred of all things Jobsian. You don't have to like it, but when you see the negativity chorus at work, it's not entirely clear what's motivating them.
But isn't this quite normal? A lawsuit is announced, countersuits start, and the ITC, or whatever governing body, is notified and start an investigation. Ho-hum. They will not stop the iPod being imported, particularly since the whole question depends on a point of patent law, which they're not qualified to look at. Only if the infringement was perfectly obvious, for instance, if the iPod was tricked out to look like a Zen player, and had the Creative logo on it. THEN the ITC might intervene. This is just the Creative lawyers making a mountain out of a mole hill.
This is because Creative is hemorraghing cash, so they're trying to win in court instead of the marketplace.
Yes, but we should close our minds to the nonsense: the paid propaganda from the oil lobby, that made that ridiculous spot that says, "Carbon dioxide? It's not pollution! You breathe it out, the trees breathe it in! We need it for life!" Which is true, but a complete crock in this context.
In an era when otherwise serious minds can talk about "Intelligent Design," and a leading scientist with denialist theories of AIDS was allowed to distort the policy of South Africa for nearly a decade, these questions of science are vital, and impact life and death issues.
It's not the people who suggest that maybe the Greenland thaw will not be that bad, according to this or that theory, that are the problem. The problem is politicians and business interests who are desperately trying to deny the basic truth.
Actually, there was a celebrated case in the L.A. area where the owner had built a huge fence, and had kept Asian women working at her sweatshop for many years. She was busted, and the illegal immigrants were compensated and allowed to stay. And the contracts signed by smuggled Chinese workers in particular ensure a life of indentured servitude here, and if they escape they're punished or their relatives at home are punished.
If it was in our economic benefit to allow those conditions, I'd say we'd pass a different law.
"Evading" the law in this way is legal. You get subsidies to help move your plant overseas. Apple was once unique, in having a completely automated factory in the United States that put out the Macintosh. If it was still making Macs, Macs would cost about $8000. Dell might like this, but nobody else would.
If this is true, then all American companies, I'm sure, who do business in China, will also fold their tents, right? Or at least double the salaries we pay to the women who assemble their products, right? Well, no. Lemme tell you about the Mail and the attacks against the iPod. Apple has 80% of the (US?) market, and it's growing. Making a player that is widely accepted as BETTER seems to be beyond Apple's rivals. So all kinds of atacks are going on, some of it naked -- on the front page of MSN "news" is a link, entitled "iPod Killer", to a C/Net article detailing the alternatives to iPod -- and some of it stealth.
If you notice, the US economy is tied, cheek to jowl, to the Red Chinese pretend-Marxist gummint in PEKING!!!! China is our leading trading partner. Wal-Mart is their distributor. We don't export much there -- they can't afford it -- but we sure as hell profit from the factories we have exported there. We have had, in the last ten years but especially in the last six, a huge, looming trade deficit. What do we offer the Chinese in exchange? Well, our debt. The yuan is bailing out the dollar. Gee, that sounds funny, especially for such an anti-communist gummint as W's. It is funny.
What other music players are being manufactured in China, or in other low-cost manufacturing centers? Gee, I don't know. The only story is about Apple, and how Apple should raise the salaries of these women, thus pricing themselves out of the mp3 market. No mention of where other players are made.
I don't know if these women are paid enough, in line with the economy. I'd have to know something about the "market basket" of goods they need to support themselves and save some. In other reports, I've seen that young women are preferred, and that a lot of money they make ends up supporting their parents in the country, for whom a lot of the Marxist safety net has been removed. Try finding a doctor, barefoot or not, in rural China. So the post-communist authoritarian capitalist regime in China has recreated many of the horrors of feudalism, which is where we came in before the Revolution.
There are a lot of valid points to be made when you talk about our economy and its increasing dependence on low-cost labor, the collapse of our once world-beating manufacturing, and the dependence on goods made with low wages to continue the illusion of an American middle class.
I'd bet that Apple's workers in China are paid much the same as anyone else. The Nike scandal, and the Kathie Lee sweatshops in Central America, happened at the beginning of the modern global era. I don't think the same outrage can be used today, because the situation globally has gotten much worse.
And it is beyond the power of any single company to change global trade. If Apple switched to North American factories tomorrow, the iPod would go to $6-700 for the top of the line, and nobody would buy it.
Gee! Dvorak a troll? Oh, my God. Next you're gonna tell me they didn't find WMD in Iraq, and the people didn't greet us as liberators. That's ridiculous!
Oh, but that's not Soviet. That's what used to be referred to as "a mixed economy," and it can take many forms. You could just have the government building more capacity, so that it would be able to give it to areas that the private telcos choose to avoid, or as a means of dispelling any idea of a "shortage" of bandwidth -- which of course, is as phony as the Enron "shortages" we had in the power grid in 2000. That's the danger of the laxness about phone monopolies -- they'd rather gobble up each other and go for monopoly power over pricing than actually buy up the oceans of dark fiber that are still not being used. All we need are some telco smart guys and economists to think about it, and a government that is willing to serve the, uh, common good instead of the interests of the monopolists.
The absolutely false choice is "regulation vs. free-market." The telecommunications market has always insisted on two things: regulation and free market. Our phones worked. The Soviets' didn't. But government kept to the idea of the common carrier. And if they've changed from that, we're going to have to fight like hell to get it back. This is a hard issue, because very few people understand it. If we can find a way to dramatize it, it would be much easier. One problem is, the very name, "Net Neutrality" sounds boring and spayed. Can't rally people to that cause. "Freedom of the Internet?" Some other name would have been much more effective.
Interestingly enough, there's a "toll road" in Orange County that was supposed to be the cat's pyjamas, and the coming thing in the new, conservative universe. It's crapped out. Not enough people went on it.
Conservatives of the Delay era are the new Stalinists. Just in reverse.
First of all, we have very often in the past had public servants, not hogs at the trough.
And you can no longer stop state involvement than you can stop private investment. The state regulates to make a level playing field. Or at least it should. The private companies run their businesses to benefit the stockholders.
Nobody, but nobody, is calling for the Soviet model for the Internet. But the state determines (who else?) the basic rules of the Information highway. (Just because we have a bunch of clowns in there now doesn't mean we will forever.)
Right now, my AT&T DSL gives me a Yahoo affiliation. It means nothing to me other than having a custom site. They make a Special Browser for the thought-deprived, which thankfully isn't even available on my Mac.
But imagine if AT&T made that partnership into Yahoo's search working, and Google's being slow. Uh-uh. The corporate AT&T bums aren't gonna decide how I search.
Notice what wonderful measure the "Institute for Policy Innovation" has supported up to now: making "private accounts" part of social security. Obviously, this kind of crap is endemic to the mindset. The old Social Security program, and Net Neutrality too, are based on the idea of universal service. This is not good for the neocon baboons. They want a winner-take-all philosophy in all things, and they're willing to lie about what they doing in order to bamboozle people into going along with it.
Instead of a "chaos" of YouTube and all these other services clogging the net, you should understand that Net Neutrality is what we have now. It is the Internet, which is chaotic, true, but which produces universal access. What will happen if and when this is overturned is nothing less but the destruction of the Internet, in favor of the feudal control of the telecom monopolies. Instead of spending all that money on buying out competitors and buying congress critters, SBC now AT&T, spend those tens of billions on fiber to the home, or wireless access to a broadband signal. Like the 45 mbps we were supposed to have by now if we just deregulated you.
Somebody at the top of this discussion said there are two kinds of people: those sucked in by the Reality Distortion Field, and those (presumably) brave realists who are not sucked in. I suggest another category: the knee-jerk Apple haters. If, as happened at my business, four Dells that we ordered crapped out within days and needed to be replaced, we accept it as a given. But if one Apple had done the same, there are those who feel a sense of victorious self-righteousness. The Knee-Jerk Apple Haters.
So, a guy gets an Apple, and has kernel panics. Can't comment on that. Since 2002, in 10.2 particularly, I had maybe four. It's now four years later, and I haven't had to reinstall. No panic. Oh, that's not right. I bought a Belkin KVM that said it was Mac compatible, but it actually wasn't. Over a couple of weeks, it completely hosed the system. I did an Archive and Install, and an hour later everything was fine. I now use an iogear KVM that works great.
If anybody thinks that Windows or Apple machines are perfect, raise your hands so we know where the idiots are.
Slashdot is just like our political life. One party, Apple, has a stylish, successful event: the new Apple Store in very ritzy Manhattan. Other party fumes. Then, an embarrassing episode happens -- not untypical for a new building -- and the elevator jams. This is milked by the opposition party, made a cosmic excuse for little tribal dances around the despised party, as though this one episode sums up everything about the Apple Party. Just like Gates's several embarrassing flops at demos is derided by the Apple Party as proof that the Windows Party is junk code and a monopoly and nothing else.
But nobody knows how to end it. Aha! How about attacking the messenger, and a plagiarism riff?
I think you're misreading the decision. Apple wanted them to remove the journalist's shield, California variety, I suppose because it "isn't real journalism, in which the public interest is served." The court said, there is no test we can devise for that, and the whole enterprise of telling "real" journalists from "fake" journalists is not the court's business. So I think in essence, they said that the California shield law did apply to these bloggers, at least. By implication, I think a lot of California bloggers on other subjects can breathe a little easier, though this will not be the last on this subject.
One thing can be guaranteed, such a mathematical law would be unjust, foolish, and not a fit law for a democratic republic. There is no math involved in writing a law. I think, however, it's an art that is in danger of being lost. It must contain absolutes, but also be pragmatic, and contain enough exceptions that the courts don't fill up with people appealing this or that. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, Boolean about a just and livable law.
It means "decisive." The root is "disposing." In other words, in a lawsuit about property, the final decision has to do with the disposing of the property involved.
Let's see: part of your case is that "protesters" are wrong, because Nike pays better now. Why do you think they did that? Because protesters told what was happening, and Nike got a public relations black eye. SO they went and changed their policy. So the protesters helped the workers in those "sweatshops," didn't they? If there had been no protests, wages and working conditions would have been worse, wouldn't they?
The other flaw in your argument is that these sweatshops are doing work that is no longer being done in the United States, once the mightiest manufacturing power in the world. What do we do now? Can we all own sweatshops?
You know, Henry Ford had some crazy ideas, but one very good one was this: he raised all his worker's salaries to $5 a day, far above what other auto workers were getting. This way, he kept workers for a long time, and that gave him an advantage. Also, he got a bunch of workers who were rich enough to buy Fords. His competitors had to raise their wages, too, and THEY could buy Fords, though they couldn't afford what they made.
National economies, no doubt, have to go through a low-wages period. It's called exploitation, or primitive accumulation. But what all these countries have to eventually deal with is this: the point of economic development is to develop their own populations, and if their workers can't afford to buy the goods they produce, they aren't doing it. Auto plants in Mexico exist where the workers live with no roads, no cars, maybe no electricity. This benefits the auto manufacturer, because they can sell at a lower price -- or maybe just take a bigger profit. But in doing that, they strip our economy of auto manufacturing, and they don't develop Mexico. This kind of employment in the Third World is the biggest reason why so many come north to work on our farms, in our restaurants, and so on.
Well, that's my preference, too. I guess the thought of paying a "premium" for a file without copy protection was first, an instinct to compromise, since a lot of actual friends within the industry need to take something to their boards to make them stop spluttering. The other fact is that a non-copy-protected file IS worth more than one with DRM. If the pricing model was low enough (not the $20 or so that Warner's wants you to pay for a DVD file that could only be played on your computer!), then a non-copy-protected file could command a slight premium.
But if they just wanted to sell you a DVD9 file for $5, no copy protection, I'd be happy.
that the MPAA represents a small number of mega-businesses that are trying to control our images. A similar cartel exists in the News business, which is why we have had an increasing amount of crap, and less and less journalism, since about 1990, when the mega-mergers started happening.
In a less cartelized world, bittorrent would be seen for what it is: an alternate means of distribution that is enormously powerful, and incredibly cheap for the distributor, since they wouldn't have to invest in much storage or bandwidth. SOMEBODY would be offering their product for download at a reasonable price. Say $5.00 for a full DVD9 movie that you'd have to burn yourself. A couple more bucks, and they remove the copy protection. Piracy, which is inevitable, would be seen as wastage and free publicity for the studio, the director, the actors and so on. It would be prosecuted only when done for resale.
But since there are only a few studios, they band together in the RIAA and MPAA, and no real competition is required.
I've only been involved in one lawsuit in my life -- but it was a good one, folks -- but it seems to me I spoke with the lawyer, his investigator talked to me at work, we went out to the place where I had the accident, he took pictures, and then I got a phone call and a contract to sign specifying our agreement, and who had what obligation. Then, when I got a settlement two years later, it was all split up according to the contract.
If he doesn't have a contract, I think a class action suit works the same way. You have to sign something agreeing to be the prime plaintiff or whatever it's called. If they have a signature, he's caught. If they don't, he's scot-free.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're the manufacturer -- or really, Foxconn or somebody MAKES everything, Apple is just Design and Quality Control -- and problems are reported, you see how many problems there are, how many machines are affected, what the precise problem is -- bad battery lot, bad fab, design flaw, whatever -- and then respond appropriately. Maybe there's a bad batch somewhere, who knows?
I'd agree, if you want trouble-free operation, don't buy any version 1.0. Around the second revision, things get reliable. But one or two pictures of fat batteries look bad. Are there eight of them out there, or 800, or 8,000? Frankly, I'd bet around 80.
Why are there still problems with automobile engines? Are they new products? But people still get lemons, after 100-whatever years.
Not entirely true. Look up Moses and Jesus in the Chicago Manual of Style. Jesus' and Moses' followers. But there it has to do with two "s" sounds in a row. They figured three was overload.
I saw one tech writer who actually tried this on his MacBook, and the temperature lowered 2 degrees. Hardly worth a conniption over. Also, some of the extreme cases, at least, were a simple manufacturing error, where a plastic film was left over a vent in some units. Remove the plastic, remove the excess heat.
I've got to say, over at digg, the degree of positive stories about Apple makes even me cringe at times. But here on Slashdot there is an unending parade of exaggerated negativity about the company entirely. People have to learn how to make judgments, and not be ruled by their hatred of all things Jobsian. You don't have to like it, but when you see the negativity chorus at work, it's not entirely clear what's motivating them.
What percentage of users? In all my years at MacFixit, I've had the problems described maybe twice.
It is, however, the first run of the first revision of a new product with a new design and new chip. Problems happen.
But isn't this quite normal? A lawsuit is announced, countersuits start, and the ITC, or whatever governing body, is notified and start an investigation. Ho-hum. They will not stop the iPod being imported, particularly since the whole question depends on a point of patent law, which they're not qualified to look at. Only if the infringement was perfectly obvious, for instance, if the iPod was tricked out to look like a Zen player, and had the Creative logo on it. THEN the ITC might intervene. This is just the Creative lawyers making a mountain out of a mole hill.
This is because Creative is hemorraghing cash, so they're trying to win in court instead of the marketplace.
Yes, but we should close our minds to the nonsense: the paid propaganda from the oil lobby, that made that ridiculous spot that says, "Carbon dioxide? It's not pollution! You breathe it out, the trees breathe it in! We need it for life!" Which is true, but a complete crock in this context.
In an era when otherwise serious minds can talk about "Intelligent Design," and a leading scientist with denialist theories of AIDS was allowed to distort the policy of South Africa for nearly a decade, these questions of science are vital, and impact life and death issues.
It's not the people who suggest that maybe the Greenland thaw will not be that bad, according to this or that theory, that are the problem. The problem is politicians and business interests who are desperately trying to deny the basic truth.
Actually, there was a celebrated case in the L.A. area where the owner had built a huge fence, and had kept Asian women working at her sweatshop for many years. She was busted, and the illegal immigrants were compensated and allowed to stay. And the contracts signed by smuggled Chinese workers in particular ensure a life of indentured servitude here, and if they escape they're punished or their relatives at home are punished.
If it was in our economic benefit to allow those conditions, I'd say we'd pass a different law.
"Evading" the law in this way is legal. You get subsidies to help move your plant overseas. Apple was once unique, in having a completely automated factory in the United States that put out the Macintosh. If it was still making Macs, Macs would cost about $8000. Dell might like this, but nobody else would.
Oh, wait a minute: where do they make Dells?
If this is true, then all American companies, I'm sure, who do business in China, will also fold their tents, right? Or at least double the salaries we pay to the women who assemble their products, right? Well, no. Lemme tell you about the Mail and the attacks against the iPod. Apple has 80% of the (US?) market, and it's growing. Making a player that is widely accepted as BETTER seems to be beyond Apple's rivals. So all kinds of atacks are going on, some of it naked -- on the front page of MSN "news" is a link, entitled "iPod Killer", to a C/Net article detailing the alternatives to iPod -- and some of it stealth.
If you notice, the US economy is tied, cheek to jowl, to the Red Chinese pretend-Marxist gummint in PEKING!!!! China is our leading trading partner. Wal-Mart is their distributor. We don't export much there -- they can't afford it -- but we sure as hell profit from the factories we have exported there. We have had, in the last ten years but especially in the last six, a huge, looming trade deficit. What do we offer the Chinese in exchange? Well, our debt. The yuan is bailing out the dollar. Gee, that sounds funny, especially for such an anti-communist gummint as W's. It is funny.
What other music players are being manufactured in China, or in other low-cost manufacturing centers? Gee, I don't know. The only story is about Apple, and how Apple should raise the salaries of these women, thus pricing themselves out of the mp3 market. No mention of where other players are made.
I don't know if these women are paid enough, in line with the economy. I'd have to know something about the "market basket" of goods they need to support themselves and save some. In other reports, I've seen that young women are preferred, and that a lot of money they make ends up supporting their parents in the country, for whom a lot of the Marxist safety net has been removed. Try finding a doctor, barefoot or not, in rural China. So the post-communist authoritarian capitalist regime in China has recreated many of the horrors of feudalism, which is where we came in before the Revolution.
There are a lot of valid points to be made when you talk about our economy and its increasing dependence on low-cost labor, the collapse of our once world-beating manufacturing, and the dependence on goods made with low wages to continue the illusion of an American middle class.
I'd bet that Apple's workers in China are paid much the same as anyone else. The Nike scandal, and the Kathie Lee sweatshops in Central America, happened at the beginning of the modern global era. I don't think the same outrage can be used today, because the situation globally has gotten much worse.
And it is beyond the power of any single company to change global trade. If Apple switched to North American factories tomorrow, the iPod would go to $6-700 for the top of the line, and nobody would buy it.
Gee! Dvorak a troll? Oh, my God. Next you're gonna tell me they didn't find WMD in Iraq, and the people didn't greet us as liberators. That's ridiculous!
Oh, but that's not Soviet. That's what used to be referred to as "a mixed economy," and it can take many forms. You could just have the government building more capacity, so that it would be able to give it to areas that the private telcos choose to avoid, or as a means of dispelling any idea of a "shortage" of bandwidth -- which of course, is as phony as the Enron "shortages" we had in the power grid in 2000. That's the danger of the laxness about phone monopolies -- they'd rather gobble up each other and go for monopoly power over pricing than actually buy up the oceans of dark fiber that are still not being used. All we need are some telco smart guys and economists to think about it, and a government that is willing to serve the, uh, common good instead of the interests of the monopolists.
The absolutely false choice is "regulation vs. free-market." The telecommunications market has always insisted on two things: regulation and free market. Our phones worked. The Soviets' didn't. But government kept to the idea of the common carrier. And if they've changed from that, we're going to have to fight like hell to get it back. This is a hard issue, because very few people understand it. If we can find a way to dramatize it, it would be much easier. One problem is, the very name, "Net Neutrality" sounds boring and spayed. Can't rally people to that cause. "Freedom of the Internet?" Some other name would have been much more effective.
And unless YouTube comes up with a better model, they're going to burn through all their money in another year, paying for bandwidth.
Interestingly enough, there's a "toll road" in Orange County that was supposed to be the cat's pyjamas, and the coming thing in the new, conservative universe. It's crapped out. Not enough people went on it.
Conservatives of the Delay era are the new Stalinists. Just in reverse.
First of all, we have very often in the past had public servants, not hogs at the trough.
And you can no longer stop state involvement than you can stop private investment. The state regulates to make a level playing field. Or at least it should. The private companies run their businesses to benefit the stockholders.
Nobody, but nobody, is calling for the Soviet model for the Internet. But the state determines (who else?) the basic rules of the Information highway. (Just because we have a bunch of clowns in there now doesn't mean we will forever.)
Right now, my AT&T DSL gives me a Yahoo affiliation. It means nothing to me other than having a custom site. They make a Special Browser for the thought-deprived, which thankfully isn't even available on my Mac. But imagine if AT&T made that partnership into Yahoo's search working, and Google's being slow. Uh-uh. The corporate AT&T bums aren't gonna decide how I search.
Notice what wonderful measure the "Institute for Policy Innovation" has supported up to now: making "private accounts" part of social security. Obviously, this kind of crap is endemic to the mindset. The old Social Security program, and Net Neutrality too, are based on the idea of universal service. This is not good for the neocon baboons. They want a winner-take-all philosophy in all things, and they're willing to lie about what they doing in order to bamboozle people into going along with it.
Instead of a "chaos" of YouTube and all these other services clogging the net, you should understand that Net Neutrality is what we have now. It is the Internet, which is chaotic, true, but which produces universal access. What will happen if and when this is overturned is nothing less but the destruction of the Internet, in favor of the feudal control of the telecom monopolies. Instead of spending all that money on buying out competitors and buying congress critters, SBC now AT&T, spend those tens of billions on fiber to the home, or wireless access to a broadband signal. Like the 45 mbps we were supposed to have by now if we just deregulated you.
Somebody at the top of this discussion said there are two kinds of people: those sucked in by the Reality Distortion Field, and those (presumably) brave realists who are not sucked in. I suggest another category: the knee-jerk Apple haters. If, as happened at my business, four Dells that we ordered crapped out within days and needed to be replaced, we accept it as a given. But if one Apple had done the same, there are those who feel a sense of victorious self-righteousness. The Knee-Jerk Apple Haters.
So, a guy gets an Apple, and has kernel panics. Can't comment on that. Since 2002, in 10.2 particularly, I had maybe four. It's now four years later, and I haven't had to reinstall. No panic. Oh, that's not right. I bought a Belkin KVM that said it was Mac compatible, but it actually wasn't. Over a couple of weeks, it completely hosed the system. I did an Archive and Install, and an hour later everything was fine. I now use an iogear KVM that works great.
If anybody thinks that Windows or Apple machines are perfect, raise your hands so we know where the idiots are.
Slashdot is just like our political life. One party, Apple, has a stylish, successful event: the new Apple Store in very ritzy Manhattan. Other party fumes. Then, an embarrassing episode happens -- not untypical for a new building -- and the elevator jams. This is milked by the opposition party, made a cosmic excuse for little tribal dances around the despised party, as though this one episode sums up everything about the Apple Party. Just like Gates's several embarrassing flops at demos is derided by the Apple Party as proof that the Windows Party is junk code and a monopoly and nothing else.
But nobody knows how to end it. Aha! How about attacking the messenger, and a plagiarism riff?
I think you're misreading the decision. Apple wanted them to remove the journalist's shield, California variety, I suppose because it "isn't real journalism, in which the public interest is served." The court said, there is no test we can devise for that, and the whole enterprise of telling "real" journalists from "fake" journalists is not the court's business. So I think in essence, they said that the California shield law did apply to these bloggers, at least. By implication, I think a lot of California bloggers on other subjects can breathe a little easier, though this will not be the last on this subject.
One thing can be guaranteed, such a mathematical law would be unjust, foolish, and not a fit law for a democratic republic. There is no math involved in writing a law. I think, however, it's an art that is in danger of being lost. It must contain absolutes, but also be pragmatic, and contain enough exceptions that the courts don't fill up with people appealing this or that. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, Boolean about a just and livable law.
It means "decisive." The root is "disposing." In other words, in a lawsuit about property, the final decision has to do with the disposing of the property involved.
Let's see: part of your case is that "protesters" are wrong, because Nike pays better now. Why do you think they did that? Because protesters told what was happening, and Nike got a public relations black eye. SO they went and changed their policy. So the protesters helped the workers in those "sweatshops," didn't they? If there had been no protests, wages and working conditions would have been worse, wouldn't they?
The other flaw in your argument is that these sweatshops are doing work that is no longer being done in the United States, once the mightiest manufacturing power in the world. What do we do now? Can we all own sweatshops?
You know, Henry Ford had some crazy ideas, but one very good one was this: he raised all his worker's salaries to $5 a day, far above what other auto workers were getting. This way, he kept workers for a long time, and that gave him an advantage. Also, he got a bunch of workers who were rich enough to buy Fords. His competitors had to raise their wages, too, and THEY could buy Fords, though they couldn't afford what they made.
National economies, no doubt, have to go through a low-wages period. It's called exploitation, or primitive accumulation. But what all these countries have to eventually deal with is this: the point of economic development is to develop their own populations, and if their workers can't afford to buy the goods they produce, they aren't doing it. Auto plants in Mexico exist where the workers live with no roads, no cars, maybe no electricity. This benefits the auto manufacturer, because they can sell at a lower price -- or maybe just take a bigger profit. But in doing that, they strip our economy of auto manufacturing, and they don't develop Mexico. This kind of employment in the Third World is the biggest reason why so many come north to work on our farms, in our restaurants, and so on.
Well, that's my preference, too. I guess the thought of paying a "premium" for a file without copy protection was first, an instinct to compromise, since a lot of actual friends within the industry need to take something to their boards to make them stop spluttering. The other fact is that a non-copy-protected file IS worth more than one with DRM. If the pricing model was low enough (not the $20 or so that Warner's wants you to pay for a DVD file that could only be played on your computer!), then a non-copy-protected file could command a slight premium.
But if they just wanted to sell you a DVD9 file for $5, no copy protection, I'd be happy.
that the MPAA represents a small number of mega-businesses that are trying to control our images. A similar cartel exists in the News business, which is why we have had an increasing amount of crap, and less and less journalism, since about 1990, when the mega-mergers started happening.
In a less cartelized world, bittorrent would be seen for what it is: an alternate means of distribution that is enormously powerful, and incredibly cheap for the distributor, since they wouldn't have to invest in much storage or bandwidth. SOMEBODY would be offering their product for download at a reasonable price. Say $5.00 for a full DVD9 movie that you'd have to burn yourself. A couple more bucks, and they remove the copy protection. Piracy, which is inevitable, would be seen as wastage and free publicity for the studio, the director, the actors and so on. It would be prosecuted only when done for resale.
But since there are only a few studios, they band together in the RIAA and MPAA, and no real competition is required.
I've only been involved in one lawsuit in my life -- but it was a good one, folks -- but it seems to me I spoke with the lawyer, his investigator talked to me at work, we went out to the place where I had the accident, he took pictures, and then I got a phone call and a contract to sign specifying our agreement, and who had what obligation. Then, when I got a settlement two years later, it was all split up according to the contract.
If he doesn't have a contract, I think a class action suit works the same way. You have to sign something agreeing to be the prime plaintiff or whatever it's called. If they have a signature, he's caught. If they don't, he's scot-free.