If you believe you have some kind of "employment contract", you are wrong. Ever single document I have seen from an employer since around 1980 states specifically that "this is not a contract for employment".
Maybe the CEO/COO has an employment contract. You don't.
Aside from that, if you signed an employment contract with survivable terms in it then it is likely valid. Except in California now, perhaps. If you are fired for cause there might be some way out of this, but it is going to depend on more than "it shouldn't."
Electronic voting is FAST. Fast to get results. Some folks would be just as happy with results announced after a few days. Sorry, that isn't the climate in the US. You see, the TV News programs are going to announce a winner by midnight Eastern time. They have to. If they do not, nobody will watch their election results the next election and they lose millions (maybe billions) in ad revenue. Therefore it is a foregone conclusion they are going to announce a winner. And it will be by midnight Eastern time.
This was done in 2000. CBS announced Gore as the winner just before midnight Eastern time. Lots of folks went to bed knowing "their man" had won the election. Turns out, CBS was basing their "winner" declaration on exit polls and trends - just like they all do and have been doing since the beginning of such things. Only this time they were wrong. People woke up Wednesday morning and found out that somehow, after actually counting the votes, their man didn't win at all. Obviously the election had been stolen by the evil Bush.
Well, in 2008 if the counting isn't completed by midnight the TV News folks are going to announce someone as the winner. Maybe they are right, maybe not. Do you want to be around if McCain is announced as the winner early and it turns out Obama gets the nod two days later? Or, worse, Obama is announced early and McCain turns out to really have won. I see burning cities in November should that come to pass.
Another thing: with the elections running 50.0001% vs. 49.9999% counting individual votes becomes extremely important. We are way, way past the point where the accuracy of hand counting will lead to consistent results. Every count by hand is going to deliver different results because the accuracy is maybe 0.5% This has no effect when the difference is 10% of the vote. It changes the outcome when the difference is less than 0.5% of the vote total. Hand counting isn't going to get better than 0.5%, no matter what anyone does. There are people involved and that is just a limit on their abilities. So how many recounts do we go through and when does someone (like the Supreme Court) say to stop?
At this point in the US paper ballots might as well be exchanged for flipping a coin. Same outcome. I suppose paper ballots would feel a little better.
You might be OK with the extra day or so, but will the TV news folks allow it?
You see, if they don't announce a winner before midnight Eastern time then nobody will watch that station the next election. This means losses of millions in ad revenue. So, they are going to announce a winner before midnight Eastern time. Period. It is going to happen.
Now in 2000 they announced before midnight Eastern time that Gore won. Millions of people went to bed believing "their man" had won the election. Come morning they found out that somehow, through some mysterious process after actually counting votes that Gore was no longer the winner. Even though he was announced as the winner the night before - based on exit polls and trends. So "obviously" the election was stolen by the evil Bush.
You want to see the result should this happen again? It is almost a dead certainty of it happening unless all the votes are really counted before midnight Eastern time. You understand that this gives California less than three hours to submit their vote totals, right?
Two choices: electronic voting or revolution. Pick one. See if you can guess which the current crop of politicians will pick. Or the next crop of politicians. They understand what is at stake.
IT Unions aren't ever going to work the way people would like them to. Unions have historically been exclusively for lower-paid "blue collar" type jobs. Nearly all IT work has been classified as professional work since the beginning. I recall long ago that in some places computer operators were unionized but the programming staff wasn't. This clearly fits in.
It could easily go that what is currently viewed as "professional" and "technical" jobs get unionized. Management will then obviously see they have made a mistake in classifying these jobs as professional (i.e., non-union) and that they are really more of a blue-collar type of job. This is certainly a direction programming jobs could go in - separate the coding from the design and treat the "coders" like assembly line workers. In fact, in some places that is exactly how it is done.
The problem is that the people we are trying to defend against have no fear of punishment. It is a fairly well-known axiom that you can't stop an assassin that is willing to die to accomplish their mission. What we have is a group of people that are absolutely willing to die to accomplish their missions. Tough job to defend against that.
We could take the attitude that their victims are just a cost of doing business. Folks in the US are incredibly willing to take casualties that are due to accidents, misfortune and so-called "acts of God." However, for the most part people in the US are incredibly vengeful when faced with casualties due to incompetence and deliberate acts.
This can be seen by the response to 40,000 highway fatalities each year vs. the five or so people that died because of the Tylenol tampering. Could the highway deaths be prevented or reduced? Maybe, but the general feeling is that these are not intentional acts or due to incompetence. So they are overlooked. The Tylenol tampering was an intentional act and resulted in vast changes to how products are made and distributed in the US.
The folks that would like us to "convert or die" - and let them have their own legal system in our country - are not being treated as something that is nobody's fault. There is clear intent there and malice. It wasn't easy or simple to change how food and drugs are packaged in the US, nor was it easy to go to the Moon. But it was done because there was a strong motivation to do it. I don't think anyone in the US is going to stand for treating terrorism as a "cost of doing business" or just stuff that happens that isn't intentional. It is intentional. It is done with malice. And the general feeling is that it isn't going to be tolerated.
Don't like it? Think we should just accept a few casualties now and then? I'd strongly suggest that you live elsewhere, somewhere where the general attitude is more in line with your feelings. It isn't going to happen anytime soon in the US.
I'd agree with you except you seem to think there is some rational reason behind "terrorism". It keeps getting proven over and over again that these people are not rational, at least the way we view rational thought.
If my religion tells me that there are two sorts of humans in world, good ones that believe as I do and bad ones that require converting or death, how exactly do you sit down for a nice talk with me? I'm already committed to the idea that you aren't fully human and nothing you say has any meaning. There certainly are people in the world like that. Their reasons for their actions don't seem to make any sense to us, but we are coming from a completely different cultural and religious perspective.
I don't think all fundamentalist Muslims hate non-Muslims. Do you hate cockroaches with an unreasoning madness that makes you want to blow up your house? No, probably not. Are you going to sit down and negotiate with cockroaches? No, you are going to kill them. If you could convince them to stop coming into your house there might be some path to mutual peace. Unfortunately, they aren't going to stop coming into your house. Neither are Christians and Jews going to leave the Muslim world to exist in all its 12th Century spendor in utter isolation.
Problem is the "goodies" aren't doing anything while the "baddies" are very, very active in making themselves known. All that is required is for the "baddies" to win - make the Internet unusable - is for the current situation to continue.
Too bad nobody is ever going to find the folks responsible for this. Pretty much any email that even has the letters "cnn" in it will go in the trash now. Do you think any email of a forwarded story from the CNN site would possibly get through today? Next week? It wouldn't surprise me if CNN.com ad rates took a nosedive because of this as well. Who wants to go to "the spammer" web site?
This is the sort of extremely bad PR that CNN would be well within their rights to sue the pants off of whoever started this nonsense. Unfortunately, it probably originated somewhere that doesn't care about US companies, US laws or what people think about spam. Also, how exactly would you prove where it came from?
Hope someone is getting paid real good for this. I don't think this can put CNN out of business, but it is certainly going to hurt real bad.
Sorry, but the Internet is a consequences-free zone. I can pretty much do what ever the heck I want to you and to anybody else and it is today almost impossible to prosecute me in any way. You might be able to guess who I am, but probably not well enough for court. You might be able to sue me in civil court where the rules of evidence are different, but it probably isn't going to get you anywhere.
Notice in this case that the have the real person and she is pretty much clearly responsible for causing (inciting?) the death of another and all they can think to charge her with is accessing a network without authorization. That is like getting a parking ticket because you parked your car on a homeless person and killed them.
The Internet is populated by children without any sense or morals. That much should be clear to anyone by now. Do we imprison children that shoplift? No. Neither do we associate any real penalties to people on the Internet. Sucks to be victim, doesn't it?
They aren't interested in "downloaders". You can't really catch a "downloader" because they aren't responding to network queries with offerings of songs or other files. On the other hand, "uploaders" are easy to catch. Simple answer is that you leech off others and upload nothing. You are then invisible to the techniques the RIAA is using to identify potential targets for lawsuits.
Why would anyone with the desire for a large collection of music want to pay? What would it cost to fill up a standard iPod these days? Around $10,000 or so? Would anyone in their right mind buy such a device with the expectation of paying for the content? I don't think so.
"pinholes" are usually meaningless. Just because you can see through the reflector does not mean the disc does not work. CDs and DVDs are read with infrared light, not visible light. So as long as the reflector is reflecting infrared light it works fine.
This is the same reason the "black" CDs work just fine. Just because it is opaque to visible light means nothing.
But going after a pirate (or a ninja) who probably wouldn't have paid for the book in the first place isn't helpful to me: it generates bad will, it's a bigger drain on society than the copy is, and I'd rather have the book read by someone who didn't pay for it than have it be not read by someone who wouldn't have read it otherwise.
I understand the sentiment, but you miss the point. Let's say I like your books but I utterly dispise the filthy capitalist pigs that control the world economy. So I buy your book (maybe with a stolen credit card) and post it on the Internet for free. I post links in every place I can think of pointing to my copy saying "Don't pay, get it for free!"
Others join in this and help out, finding more content from other authors and posting more and more links everywhere.
This happens with the next book as well. The end result is that everyone is downloading for free and nobody gives you another dime.
The end goal of "music piracy" is to remove revenue from music, period. This may not be the goal of every person that ever downloads a song, as there are some that are in it just to get something for free, but they aren't the bulk file-sharers. Most of the people with 10,000 songs shared have an agenda and it doesn't include paying for music ever again.
The point of "going after the pirates" isn't necessarily to rescue the revenue that you would have gotten had the pirate paid. It is to prevent the collapse of the revenue model that you base your life on if you are professional author. The goal of the organized pirates is indeed to collapse that revenue model. Remember, these are the people that say the marginal cost of producing a copy of your work is zero - it is just bits. Therefore the cost of a copy should be zero. Forget the work that led up to that copy being available, that's just handwaving to mislead us away from the "its all free now" mantra.
We are looking towards a time when everything indeed will be free. We will have high-quality, professional books, movies and music all for free - as long as they were produced before 2010. Everything after that will be rough, amaturish and ego-building. But it will all be free.
The problem is that as copyright infringement is a civil offense the only penalty that can be exacted is to fine the offender. There are no other remedies available.
Would you argue that because a 70-year-old man has at most a $10,000 earning potential that the punishment for murdering said 70-year-old man should be at most $10,000? And similarly, the penalty for murdering a 20-year-old should be significantly greater, especially if college-educated and therefore a higher likly earning potential? Or, should there be a strong disincentive above and beyond the "earning potential" for crimes?
OK, murder might be a bit severe and over the top. How about car theft? Should the penalty be limited by the value of the car? So that stealing a 1975 Pinto gets you a $15 ticket and stealing a 2008 Bentley gets you life in prison?
Seriously, the reason for the statuory fine is to present the offender with a penalty completely out of proportion to the real financial gain they might obtain. If you make fines commesurate with the benefit of a crime you are basically removing the risk from crime and making it pay.
There is nothing about bypassing or breaking CSS protection that is going on. What is happening is a licensed player is playing a DVD in a manner that the DVD Forum has authorized. Period.
Circumventing the license brings you into conflict with the license, with various conventions that are part of the materials that are held to be trade secret - i.e., licensed by the DVD Forum. There are also patents involved held by Macrovision and violating them will get you sued also. All of this is clearly documented if you bother looking. Nothing secret whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, some DVD copying software makers were sued by MPAA and Macrovision and not by the DVD Forum. The original DeCSS trial involved the DVD Forum and not MPAA or Macrovision.
Don't forget the "Hollywood accounting" principals that say if you don't show any profit, you don't get taxed. That check for $500,000 the band got was for "unreimbursed expenses" and such. No, there isn't any profit here, none at all. Check Mr. IRS Man, and you will see all our books are clean. No profit.
Are there bands that make lots for their manager, agent and record company without ever getting a dime themselves? Sure, they spent their entire advance (and then some) and finished with less than steller sales. Does this happen often? Absolutely. Want a bowlfull of caviar before every concert? Sure. Someone will get paid for it in the end.
At the same time there are so many ways to hide income (ala "profits") that it would make your head swim. Anyone with a lick of financial sense hides as much income as they can, because the alternative is to losing it. It also isn't the sort of thing you tell the fans about because it might get around to the IRS Man and that would just ruin everything.
We may be electing a president that has significant ties to the "progressive" community. I see a few comments sprinkled in from such people on Slashdot every once in a while.
Personally, I think such idiocy needs to be called out, shown for what it is and make sure the author gets some education. The part the troubles me is Mr. Penn is hardly in the minority among celebrities. Lots of people that got rich off doing almost nothing seem to feel this way.
I think you miss the point with #4. There is no revenue in recorded music anymore. I know I'm not buying any, and nobody I know is buying any. Anyone that knows how to is downloading it for free. Some folks think they are clever by saying they will eventually buy something when it is the right price and right quality. In the meantime, they are downloading as well and not paying.
I'd like to hear about a business model whereby the artists produce the music and put it out on the Internet for free. Where is the "business" here? If I download and never, ever even think about going to a concert or buying an overpriced T-shirt, where exactly is the "business"? I surely do not see one.
I think the "business" of music is pretty much over. There are the people that know the world owes them an audience because they are so great, and there are the people that love the idea of singing or playing and will do it no matter if anyone pays them or not. We don't need more of the first sort - watch the beginning of the American Idol season for some examples. We may benefit in the end from the latter sort, but they gotta eat too. So there will be very few of them. Too bad, really.
Back before the Internet, copying a song from a record onto a cassette might deprive the RIAA member of a single sale. If that was what we were talking about, you would be correct.
This is not suing someone for downloading a song. This is about putting the song up for everyone on the Internet to download - potentially at least thousands or tens of thousands of people. So comparing it to stealing a single cup of coffee isn't quite correct. It is a lot closer to stealing hundreds of cups of coffee, maybe more.
The problem is, nobody knows how many people downloaded from Ms. Thomas. Nobody. Not even Ms. Thomas. Could be nobody. Could be the entire Internet-using population of the world. Nobody can find out. According to some, this means her liability should be... nothing. I'm not sure that makes sense either.
The DOE is assuming there isn't any more price incentive today than there was when the Gulf regions were being explored in the 1960's. When gas was $0.29 a gallon. This assumption by itself pretty much negates all of their fancy figures. The person responsible for the DOE report is apparently unaware that oil is a considerably more valuable commodity today than it was 40 years ago.
Renewable? What sort of "renewable" resources are you thinking of that will maintain any standard of living at all?
Wind? Yes, when it blows it is fine. Reliable, constant source of electricity? No. In some places it would be better than others.
Solar? When the sun is out, great. The sun is always out in Arizona, so just cover it with PV cells, right? Ignoring the environmental impact of that, we are still screwed unless everyone moves to Phoenix. We do not have loss-free superconducting transmission lines over the entire country. Today, we can't power the country from Arizona.
Ocean Thermal Energy? Sure, in Hawaii. Maybe. Doesn't work so well in Maine. Again there is the issue of transmission at the very least.
Geothermal? Do you really believe anyone is going to allow that level of drilling to be done anywhere? Sure, if you have an exposed spot, like Yellowstone or (maybe) Hot Springs, AR. But what about Georgia and Chicago? Just drill deep enough?
Using all of the techniques you might get up to 10-15% of the US energy supply in five years. It might be a good thing to have moved from 2% where we are today, but what would the cost be? It would certainly suck to be a lizard in Arizona. Could we just declare the difficult places to be abandoned, like New York City and Seattle?
Maybe a better solution would be FEWER PEOPLE. At around 200 million people just about everything is "renewable" because natural processes have time to work and recycle wastes. Beyond that, the wastes start building up and we're going to be buried in them. Especially if we are so focused on supposedly renewable energy that we do not look at any other alternatives. Face it, if you want the Earth to be a closed system you are going to have reduce the population. By a huge amount. Quickly.
Real solution: turn off the gas pumps tomorrow. Make it a federal crime to sell gasoline, diesel or any other petroleum product for transporation.
That would force electric mass transit and stop all this whining about gas prices. After all, it all has to end someday, right? Why not tomorrow? Do you really believe we will be any more "prepared" in 10 or 20 years?
Specifically, people that (as in example below) behead someone on a bus for laughs may not be fit for any society at all, even a highly restricted one in prison.
A vital component of "humanity" is the ability to recognize that others exist apart from your own needs. When you have a person (?) that does not have the that functional capacity, is there really any point? Someone that places zero value on the lives of others is not going to be able to function in any society, especially ours. There are some people that unless they are isolated from all human contact are just going to abuse, destroy and kill.
Jeffery Dalhmer, for example. He couldn't function in prison either. What exactly do we do with people like that? It has nothing to do with the "expense" of a life sentance. It has everything to do with the safety and wellbeing of the fellow prisoners and guards. If you have someone that is "in" for the rest of their life and other people mean nothing to them, what is there to stop them from killing other prisoners? What possible disincentive could there be? Beatings? Torture? Medical experiments? What?
I will say that your average murderer generally doesn't fit this profile at all. But there is clearly a difference between someone that kills people the way others step on ants and a functioning, social person. If you can't discern between the two, there is a problem. Because you are going to set up a situation where the remorseless sociopath is going to be turned loose on people that have done nothing to deserve that treatment.
So I guess you have to either find a way to permanently incarcerate people without any contact with others - so they can harm no one - or, you have to decide that society does not have the right to protect people from such danger. Most first-world countries other than the US have (a) very few sociopaths that need this sort of isolation and (b) decided the sociopath's rights outweigh those of other prisoners and society in general. The US has a confusing mix today, mostly from nobody wanting to really make a decision on this at all. In neither case is this a good outcome.
As an employer, if I have 100 resumes to go through for 1 job and after weeding out 80 of them that are completely incapable of performing the job I still have 20 to go through. I'm not going to interview 20 people. So I will look for some reason - any reason at all - not to interview some of them. If I find something, that resume goes in the "forget it" pile.
This was even more true when I got handed a stack of resumes to dig through for someone else to actually interview the real, qualified, eligble candidates.
So if it is on the Internet and it can be found, it will be used against you. Not because it might be true and accurate but because it is there. There is no good way to sort out what is true and accurate on the Internet, but there doesn't need to be for hiring decisions. It is much easier to filter on the basis of there being nothing vs. anything at all. So far today, the vast majority of candidates will have nothing or nothing outside of some completely innocent stuff.
Having the word "rape" on the same page with the candidate's name isn't innocent.
How? By IP address? Really, how exactly do you figure out who is behind the keyboard?
Sorry, this is the INTERNET. Even if you do go to court, there are ISPs that will destroy the logs (even in the face of court sanctions) to prevent you disturbing their customers.
I don't know what these people think they are doing, but getting at the real individuals that have "harmed" them isn't going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe you have some kind of "employment contract", you are wrong. Ever single document I have seen from an employer since around 1980 states specifically that "this is not a contract for employment".
Maybe the CEO/COO has an employment contract. You don't.
Aside from that, if you signed an employment contract with survivable terms in it then it is likely valid. Except in California now, perhaps. If you are fired for cause there might be some way out of this, but it is going to depend on more than "it shouldn't."
Electronic voting is FAST. Fast to get results. Some folks would be just as happy with results announced after a few days. Sorry, that isn't the climate in the US. You see, the TV News programs are going to announce a winner by midnight Eastern time. They have to. If they do not, nobody will watch their election results the next election and they lose millions (maybe billions) in ad revenue. Therefore it is a foregone conclusion they are going to announce a winner. And it will be by midnight Eastern time.
This was done in 2000. CBS announced Gore as the winner just before midnight Eastern time. Lots of folks went to bed knowing "their man" had won the election. Turns out, CBS was basing their "winner" declaration on exit polls and trends - just like they all do and have been doing since the beginning of such things. Only this time they were wrong. People woke up Wednesday morning and found out that somehow, after actually counting the votes, their man didn't win at all. Obviously the election had been stolen by the evil Bush.
Well, in 2008 if the counting isn't completed by midnight the TV News folks are going to announce someone as the winner. Maybe they are right, maybe not. Do you want to be around if McCain is announced as the winner early and it turns out Obama gets the nod two days later? Or, worse, Obama is announced early and McCain turns out to really have won. I see burning cities in November should that come to pass.
Another thing: with the elections running 50.0001% vs. 49.9999% counting individual votes becomes extremely important. We are way, way past the point where the accuracy of hand counting will lead to consistent results. Every count by hand is going to deliver different results because the accuracy is maybe 0.5% This has no effect when the difference is 10% of the vote. It changes the outcome when the difference is less than 0.5% of the vote total. Hand counting isn't going to get better than 0.5%, no matter what anyone does. There are people involved and that is just a limit on their abilities. So how many recounts do we go through and when does someone (like the Supreme Court) say to stop?
At this point in the US paper ballots might as well be exchanged for flipping a coin. Same outcome. I suppose paper ballots would feel a little better.
You might be OK with the extra day or so, but will the TV news folks allow it?
You see, if they don't announce a winner before midnight Eastern time then nobody will watch that station the next election. This means losses of millions in ad revenue. So, they are going to announce a winner before midnight Eastern time. Period. It is going to happen.
Now in 2000 they announced before midnight Eastern time that Gore won. Millions of people went to bed believing "their man" had won the election. Come morning they found out that somehow, through some mysterious process after actually counting votes that Gore was no longer the winner. Even though he was announced as the winner the night before - based on exit polls and trends. So "obviously" the election was stolen by the evil Bush.
You want to see the result should this happen again? It is almost a dead certainty of it happening unless all the votes are really counted before midnight Eastern time. You understand that this gives California less than three hours to submit their vote totals, right?
Two choices: electronic voting or revolution. Pick one. See if you can guess which the current crop of politicians will pick. Or the next crop of politicians. They understand what is at stake.
IT Unions aren't ever going to work the way people would like them to. Unions have historically been exclusively for lower-paid "blue collar" type jobs. Nearly all IT work has been classified as professional work since the beginning. I recall long ago that in some places computer operators were unionized but the programming staff wasn't. This clearly fits in.
It could easily go that what is currently viewed as "professional" and "technical" jobs get unionized. Management will then obviously see they have made a mistake in classifying these jobs as professional (i.e., non-union) and that they are really more of a blue-collar type of job. This is certainly a direction programming jobs could go in - separate the coding from the design and treat the "coders" like assembly line workers. In fact, in some places that is exactly how it is done.
Anyone want that?
The problem is that the people we are trying to defend against have no fear of punishment. It is a fairly well-known axiom that you can't stop an assassin that is willing to die to accomplish their mission. What we have is a group of people that are absolutely willing to die to accomplish their missions. Tough job to defend against that.
We could take the attitude that their victims are just a cost of doing business. Folks in the US are incredibly willing to take casualties that are due to accidents, misfortune and so-called "acts of God." However, for the most part people in the US are incredibly vengeful when faced with casualties due to incompetence and deliberate acts.
This can be seen by the response to 40,000 highway fatalities each year vs. the five or so people that died because of the Tylenol tampering. Could the highway deaths be prevented or reduced? Maybe, but the general feeling is that these are not intentional acts or due to incompetence. So they are overlooked. The Tylenol tampering was an intentional act and resulted in vast changes to how products are made and distributed in the US.
The folks that would like us to "convert or die" - and let them have their own legal system in our country - are not being treated as something that is nobody's fault. There is clear intent there and malice. It wasn't easy or simple to change how food and drugs are packaged in the US, nor was it easy to go to the Moon. But it was done because there was a strong motivation to do it. I don't think anyone in the US is going to stand for treating terrorism as a "cost of doing business" or just stuff that happens that isn't intentional. It is intentional. It is done with malice. And the general feeling is that it isn't going to be tolerated.
Don't like it? Think we should just accept a few casualties now and then? I'd strongly suggest that you live elsewhere, somewhere where the general attitude is more in line with your feelings. It isn't going to happen anytime soon in the US.
I'd agree with you except you seem to think there is some rational reason behind "terrorism". It keeps getting proven over and over again that these people are not rational, at least the way we view rational thought.
If my religion tells me that there are two sorts of humans in world, good ones that believe as I do and bad ones that require converting or death, how exactly do you sit down for a nice talk with me? I'm already committed to the idea that you aren't fully human and nothing you say has any meaning. There certainly are people in the world like that. Their reasons for their actions don't seem to make any sense to us, but we are coming from a completely different cultural and religious perspective.
I don't think all fundamentalist Muslims hate non-Muslims. Do you hate cockroaches with an unreasoning madness that makes you want to blow up your house? No, probably not. Are you going to sit down and negotiate with cockroaches? No, you are going to kill them. If you could convince them to stop coming into your house there might be some path to mutual peace. Unfortunately, they aren't going to stop coming into your house. Neither are Christians and Jews going to leave the Muslim world to exist in all its 12th Century spendor in utter isolation.
Problem is the "goodies" aren't doing anything while the "baddies" are very, very active in making themselves known. All that is required is for the "baddies" to win - make the Internet unusable - is for the current situation to continue.
Too bad nobody is ever going to find the folks responsible for this. Pretty much any email that even has the letters "cnn" in it will go in the trash now. Do you think any email of a forwarded story from the CNN site would possibly get through today? Next week? It wouldn't surprise me if CNN.com ad rates took a nosedive because of this as well. Who wants to go to "the spammer" web site?
This is the sort of extremely bad PR that CNN would be well within their rights to sue the pants off of whoever started this nonsense. Unfortunately, it probably originated somewhere that doesn't care about US companies, US laws or what people think about spam. Also, how exactly would you prove where it came from?
Hope someone is getting paid real good for this. I don't think this can put CNN out of business, but it is certainly going to hurt real bad.
Sorry, but the Internet is a consequences-free zone. I can pretty much do what ever the heck I want to you and to anybody else and it is today almost impossible to prosecute me in any way. You might be able to guess who I am, but probably not well enough for court. You might be able to sue me in civil court where the rules of evidence are different, but it probably isn't going to get you anywhere.
Notice in this case that the have the real person and she is pretty much clearly responsible for causing (inciting?) the death of another and all they can think to charge her with is accessing a network without authorization. That is like getting a parking ticket because you parked your car on a homeless person and killed them.
The Internet is populated by children without any sense or morals. That much should be clear to anyone by now. Do we imprison children that shoplift? No. Neither do we associate any real penalties to people on the Internet. Sucks to be victim, doesn't it?
They aren't interested in "downloaders". You can't really catch a "downloader" because they aren't responding to network queries with offerings of songs or other files. On the other hand, "uploaders" are easy to catch. Simple answer is that you leech off others and upload nothing. You are then invisible to the techniques the RIAA is using to identify potential targets for lawsuits.
Why would anyone with the desire for a large collection of music want to pay? What would it cost to fill up a standard iPod these days? Around $10,000 or so? Would anyone in their right mind buy such a device with the expectation of paying for the content? I don't think so.
"pinholes" are usually meaningless. Just because you can see through the reflector does not mean the disc does not work. CDs and DVDs are read with infrared light, not visible light. So as long as the reflector is reflecting infrared light it works fine.
This is the same reason the "black" CDs work just fine. Just because it is opaque to visible light means nothing.
I understand the sentiment, but you miss the point. Let's say I like your books but I utterly dispise the filthy capitalist pigs that control the world economy. So I buy your book (maybe with a stolen credit card) and post it on the Internet for free. I post links in every place I can think of pointing to my copy saying "Don't pay, get it for free!"
Others join in this and help out, finding more content from other authors and posting more and more links everywhere.
This happens with the next book as well. The end result is that everyone is downloading for free and nobody gives you another dime.
The end goal of "music piracy" is to remove revenue from music, period. This may not be the goal of every person that ever downloads a song, as there are some that are in it just to get something for free, but they aren't the bulk file-sharers. Most of the people with 10,000 songs shared have an agenda and it doesn't include paying for music ever again.
The point of "going after the pirates" isn't necessarily to rescue the revenue that you would have gotten had the pirate paid. It is to prevent the collapse of the revenue model that you base your life on if you are professional author. The goal of the organized pirates is indeed to collapse that revenue model. Remember, these are the people that say the marginal cost of producing a copy of your work is zero - it is just bits. Therefore the cost of a copy should be zero. Forget the work that led up to that copy being available, that's just handwaving to mislead us away from the "its all free now" mantra.
We are looking towards a time when everything indeed will be free. We will have high-quality, professional books, movies and music all for free - as long as they were produced before 2010. Everything after that will be rough, amaturish and ego-building. But it will all be free.
The problem is that as copyright infringement is a civil offense the only penalty that can be exacted is to fine the offender. There are no other remedies available.
Would you argue that because a 70-year-old man has at most a $10,000 earning potential that the punishment for murdering said 70-year-old man should be at most $10,000? And similarly, the penalty for murdering a 20-year-old should be significantly greater, especially if college-educated and therefore a higher likly earning potential? Or, should there be a strong disincentive above and beyond the "earning potential" for crimes?
OK, murder might be a bit severe and over the top. How about car theft? Should the penalty be limited by the value of the car? So that stealing a 1975 Pinto gets you a $15 ticket and stealing a 2008 Bentley gets you life in prison?
Seriously, the reason for the statuory fine is to present the offender with a penalty completely out of proportion to the real financial gain they might obtain. If you make fines commesurate with the benefit of a crime you are basically removing the risk from crime and making it pay.
I don't think it works like that at all.
There is nothing about bypassing or breaking CSS protection that is going on. What is happening is a licensed player is playing a DVD in a manner that the DVD Forum has authorized. Period.
Circumventing the license brings you into conflict with the license, with various conventions that are part of the materials that are held to be trade secret - i.e., licensed by the DVD Forum. There are also patents involved held by Macrovision and violating them will get you sued also. All of this is clearly documented if you bother looking. Nothing secret whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, some DVD copying software makers were sued by MPAA and Macrovision and not by the DVD Forum. The original DeCSS trial involved the DVD Forum and not MPAA or Macrovision.
Don't forget the "Hollywood accounting" principals that say if you don't show any profit, you don't get taxed. That check for $500,000 the band got was for "unreimbursed expenses" and such. No, there isn't any profit here, none at all. Check Mr. IRS Man, and you will see all our books are clean. No profit.
Are there bands that make lots for their manager, agent and record company without ever getting a dime themselves? Sure, they spent their entire advance (and then some) and finished with less than steller sales. Does this happen often? Absolutely. Want a bowlfull of caviar before every concert? Sure. Someone will get paid for it in the end.
At the same time there are so many ways to hide income (ala "profits") that it would make your head swim. Anyone with a lick of financial sense hides as much income as they can, because the alternative is to losing it. It also isn't the sort of thing you tell the fans about because it might get around to the IRS Man and that would just ruin everything.
We may be electing a president that has significant ties to the "progressive" community. I see a few comments sprinkled in from such people on Slashdot every once in a while.
Here is an especially telling example: Sean Penn.
Personally, I think such idiocy needs to be called out, shown for what it is and make sure the author gets some education. The part the troubles me is Mr. Penn is hardly in the minority among celebrities. Lots of people that got rich off doing almost nothing seem to feel this way.
I think you miss the point with #4. There is no revenue in recorded music anymore. I know I'm not buying any, and nobody I know is buying any. Anyone that knows how to is downloading it for free. Some folks think they are clever by saying they will eventually buy something when it is the right price and right quality. In the meantime, they are downloading as well and not paying.
I'd like to hear about a business model whereby the artists produce the music and put it out on the Internet for free. Where is the "business" here? If I download and never, ever even think about going to a concert or buying an overpriced T-shirt, where exactly is the "business"? I surely do not see one.
I think the "business" of music is pretty much over. There are the people that know the world owes them an audience because they are so great, and there are the people that love the idea of singing or playing and will do it no matter if anyone pays them or not. We don't need more of the first sort - watch the beginning of the American Idol season for some examples. We may benefit in the end from the latter sort, but they gotta eat too. So there will be very few of them. Too bad, really.
Back before the Internet, copying a song from a record onto a cassette might deprive the RIAA member of a single sale. If that was what we were talking about, you would be correct.
This is not suing someone for downloading a song. This is about putting the song up for everyone on the Internet to download - potentially at least thousands or tens of thousands of people. So comparing it to stealing a single cup of coffee isn't quite correct. It is a lot closer to stealing hundreds of cups of coffee, maybe more.
The problem is, nobody knows how many people downloaded from Ms. Thomas. Nobody. Not even Ms. Thomas. Could be nobody. Could be the entire Internet-using population of the world. Nobody can find out. According to some, this means her liability should be ... nothing. I'm not sure that makes sense either.
The DOE is assuming there isn't any more price incentive today than there was when the Gulf regions were being explored in the 1960's. When gas was $0.29 a gallon. This assumption by itself pretty much negates all of their fancy figures. The person responsible for the DOE report is apparently unaware that oil is a considerably more valuable commodity today than it was 40 years ago.
Renewable? What sort of "renewable" resources are you thinking of that will maintain any standard of living at all?
Wind? Yes, when it blows it is fine. Reliable, constant source of electricity? No. In some places it would be better than others.
Solar? When the sun is out, great. The sun is always out in Arizona, so just cover it with PV cells, right? Ignoring the environmental impact of that, we are still screwed unless everyone moves to Phoenix. We do not have loss-free superconducting transmission lines over the entire country. Today, we can't power the country from Arizona.
Ocean Thermal Energy? Sure, in Hawaii. Maybe. Doesn't work so well in Maine. Again there is the issue of transmission at the very least.
Geothermal? Do you really believe anyone is going to allow that level of drilling to be done anywhere? Sure, if you have an exposed spot, like Yellowstone or (maybe) Hot Springs, AR. But what about Georgia and Chicago? Just drill deep enough?
Using all of the techniques you might get up to 10-15% of the US energy supply in five years. It might be a good thing to have moved from 2% where we are today, but what would the cost be? It would certainly suck to be a lizard in Arizona. Could we just declare the difficult places to be abandoned, like New York City and Seattle?
Maybe a better solution would be FEWER PEOPLE. At around 200 million people just about everything is "renewable" because natural processes have time to work and recycle wastes. Beyond that, the wastes start building up and we're going to be buried in them. Especially if we are so focused on supposedly renewable energy that we do not look at any other alternatives. Face it, if you want the Earth to be a closed system you are going to have reduce the population. By a huge amount. Quickly.
Real solution: turn off the gas pumps tomorrow. Make it a federal crime to sell gasoline, diesel or any other petroleum product for transporation.
That would force electric mass transit and stop all this whining about gas prices. After all, it all has to end someday, right? Why not tomorrow? Do you really believe we will be any more "prepared" in 10 or 20 years?
Specifically, people that (as in example below) behead someone on a bus for laughs may not be fit for any society at all, even a highly restricted one in prison.
A vital component of "humanity" is the ability to recognize that others exist apart from your own needs. When you have a person (?) that does not have the that functional capacity, is there really any point? Someone that places zero value on the lives of others is not going to be able to function in any society, especially ours. There are some people that unless they are isolated from all human contact are just going to abuse, destroy and kill.
Jeffery Dalhmer, for example. He couldn't function in prison either. What exactly do we do with people like that? It has nothing to do with the "expense" of a life sentance. It has everything to do with the safety and wellbeing of the fellow prisoners and guards. If you have someone that is "in" for the rest of their life and other people mean nothing to them, what is there to stop them from killing other prisoners? What possible disincentive could there be? Beatings? Torture? Medical experiments? What?
I will say that your average murderer generally doesn't fit this profile at all. But there is clearly a difference between someone that kills people the way others step on ants and a functioning, social person. If you can't discern between the two, there is a problem. Because you are going to set up a situation where the remorseless sociopath is going to be turned loose on people that have done nothing to deserve that treatment.
So I guess you have to either find a way to permanently incarcerate people without any contact with others - so they can harm no one - or, you have to decide that society does not have the right to protect people from such danger. Most first-world countries other than the US have (a) very few sociopaths that need this sort of isolation and (b) decided the sociopath's rights outweigh those of other prisoners and society in general. The US has a confusing mix today, mostly from nobody wanting to really make a decision on this at all. In neither case is this a good outcome.
Civilized people deserve civilized treatment. I guess that just about wraps it up.
As an employer, if I have 100 resumes to go through for 1 job and after weeding out 80 of them that are completely incapable of performing the job I still have 20 to go through. I'm not going to interview 20 people. So I will look for some reason - any reason at all - not to interview some of them. If I find something, that resume goes in the "forget it" pile.
This was even more true when I got handed a stack of resumes to dig through for someone else to actually interview the real, qualified, eligble candidates.
So if it is on the Internet and it can be found, it will be used against you. Not because it might be true and accurate but because it is there. There is no good way to sort out what is true and accurate on the Internet, but there doesn't need to be for hiring decisions. It is much easier to filter on the basis of there being nothing vs. anything at all. So far today, the vast majority of candidates will have nothing or nothing outside of some completely innocent stuff.
Having the word "rape" on the same page with the candidate's name isn't innocent.
How? By IP address? Really, how exactly do you figure out who is behind the keyboard?
Sorry, this is the INTERNET. Even if you do go to court, there are ISPs that will destroy the logs (even in the face of court sanctions) to prevent you disturbing their customers.
I don't know what these people think they are doing, but getting at the real individuals that have "harmed" them isn't going to happen.