Unfortunately today on the Internet there are no limits. Perhaps there should be, but there aren't.
This means that I can write lots of material and have it posted all over the Internet which discloses a lot of embarassing "facts" about someone. How they like to dress up in femle undergarments, how their last girlfriend once said she never went to bed without a magnifying glass and how they once stood outside a door pushing on it for 10 minutes when the door was labeled "pull". Then, all in the name of satire and good fun, we could continue with user contributions in the same vein with all sorts of abberations attributed to this person. Of course, it would be fun to get their cell phone number and publish it - just so people could read off the latest to them.
Sound like fun? Sure. How about we start with you and see how much fun it is?
There are no limits on the Internet, and I seriously doubt a lawsuit is going to get anywhere. After all, if all they have is an IP address you can't sue an IP address.
The EV-1 was filled with lead-acid batteries that were classified as hazardous waste. Lead, remember? It makes all the children stupid. Because of that standard car batteries are required to be recycled and you need special licensing to store more than a small quantity. Smaller than the quantity used in the EV-1.
Yes, but the WTO will not allow restriction to just US-based online casinos. Therefore, I can set up an unregulated (cheating) casino that operates just over the border in Mexico. There wouldn't be a thing the US could do about it. This is probably the biggest reason why online casinos are frowned upon. Once that door opens, there isn't any way to control it. The US easily has the most gullible population when it comes to gambling anywhere on the planet and opening Russian, Carribean and other online casinos to US citizens would be a disaster.
If poor people put money they can't really afford to lose on lottery tickets, why would they be any more sensible with a casino they don't have to get on a bus to get to?
How do you make a computer that is administered by a fool (er, a user) "fairly secure?" It cannot possibly be secure because the administrator does not know what should be done and what should not be done.
When they click on Weatherbug to install it because they think this is something they want, who is there to tell them they cannot do this? They want to install new and cool software on their computer. Preventing them from doing this is the only path to security there is - if you allow them to install Weatherbug, they can install anything, including trojans and malware.
Sorry, for 99% of the people using computers they do not need or want a computer - they want an appliance that serves up entertainment and email. Nothing more.
Sure, you might be able to track something back. Can the other 1,000 people that downloaded a compromised binary? I doubt it. Are you going to tell them? No, you might post it somewhere in some forum or blog but how to the other "users" know about this?
The only way to correctly use open software is for the person using it to personally examine the code. What? The user can't understand C++? Well, they have no business using open software then if they can't personally check it out.
This is a little harsh, but the problem is that if a user installs a binary package without checking it they are leaving themselves open to whatever the distributor allowed in. Distributors get compromised. Sure, this is eventually detected and some forum somewhere has 1,500 posts about it. But that does not mean that ever user that downloaded it, trusted it and installed it gets informed.
If you can't check it and do not know the history of what you are downloading, you shouldn't be downloading it.
Same goes for any unsigned binary. If you can't go back to the publisher/author and know, absolutely, they are solely responsible for the binary you are using you cannot trust it. Unsigned code is untrustworthy. Period.
If I send your brother and uncle an email that says "click this and get rich!!!" and they do it, they are going to get infected with something. Linux might be a bit harder, especially if you keep the user from doing anything "adminstratively" with the computer but if you execute a untrustworthy program on the computer you are going down the road to trouble. If your computer then asks for permission to do something "administrative" and you grant it, you're had.
99% of the users do not need to install software, run ActiveX controls or run executable things (scripts, programs, anything) on their computer. They need to use the software that was installed when they got it and nothing more. Opening the door to them installing any random piece of junk that comes along or executing some type of code from email or web pages is an invitation to disaster. It doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux - if the user can authorize unsafe actions on the machine and does so blindly the machine will be compromised.
Now it is true today that there are very few, if not zero, things that are targeting Linux. Most people run Windows and that is the environment that is targeted. But the problem isn't the operating system - you cannot protect the computer from an administrator that is a fool.
The only real answer - which you might have done with a Linux system - is remove any possibility of the user doing anything outside of a small set of "user" actions. No administration. No software installs. No executing anything that wasn't there when the administrator set it up. Computers for these people are not general-purpose programming environments but simple appliances. Deviating from that "appliance" concept is where the trouble starts.
If you gave your brother and uncle an appliance, more power to you. If you gave them a general purpose computer that they do not understand this isn't a solution.
In most parts of the US if you somehow "discover" child porn you are required to report it. You aren't collecting evidence in any way - you are reporting a potential crime.
The first thing the police will do is handle the computer as a source of potential evidence. They will have their forensic people image the hard drive and search out illegal materials. Whatever the technician found is irrelevent.
If the technician planted evidence on the computer, this will be clearly shown by a forensic examination of the hard drive. There is almost no chance someone would be able to successfully fake things well enough not to stand out as a frame-up.
If you have a green laser and you can't see the beam at night, you were probably robbed. Or you got a cheap one that pretends to be a real green laser pointer. The good ones have a beam that is almost visible in low lighting - think of a room with the shades pulled down. At night you can clearly see the beam.
They are extremely bright. And do wonders to night vision.
Let's see... if you do not have control, you can't stop someone from placing a copy where everyone on the planet can download it for free. Therefore, without control you can't get any money. At least without the level of control needed to prevent someone from making sure you can't get paid.
Today, about the only thing that will finally force both sides to some sort of compromise is to deprive everyone of revenue for all digital goods. Books, music, movies, software, everything. If it is digital it can be almost always anonymously stolen and redistributed on the Internet for free.
Much of the Western economy will collapse as a result of this because the network effects of where the money goes is not clearly understood by most people. But, after this it will be clear that either nothing digital will ever be made ever again or people will pay what it is worth. Today, people without high speed Internet connections are forced to pay - they can't download - while the rest of the world gets their stuff for free. As long as thsy clearly understand that the content is there for the taking and they might as well get in on the taking. Because of this you can effectively say there are two values for music: zero and what people without good connectivity are willing to pay. This is clearly unfair to everyone.
I think you have a distorted view of the 5th amendment. Protection from self-incrimination does not mean that you get to run around and clean up after your crime. It does not mean that physical evidence cannot be seized by either law enforcement or as part of civil discovery proceedings. What it does mean is that you cannot be forced to testify against yourself. Physical objects do not provide testimony in any respect.
Under your view after shooting someone your gun could not be examined to determine if it was fired recently and if the markings on the bullet are similar to those from your gun. Basically this would exclude all objective physical evidence from criminal and civil trials. What would you fall back on? Eyewitness testimony? Video recordings?
No, you don't get any sort of "common carrier" status because you want it.
You, personally, contracted with a service provider to give you an account for transfer of your data for your purposes. It almost certainly says that you are responsible for all use of the account in the terms of service. Nobody has really tried to enforce this, but it would seem to be pretty obvious.
An ISP that openly encouraged and tolerated illegal activity would get sued out of existance. Regardless of any DMCA safe harbor provisions - which is what ISPs fall back on. They do not and never did have common carrier status. Only wireline telephone companies have that.
Nobody wants advertising in movies. Yesterday, today or tomorrow. If they move to putting advertising in, without the oversight of organizations that have alternately controlled and just watched television advertising, the effect would be a block of ads every five minutes. A 90 minute movie would be almost certainly be 1/3 content and 2/3 advertising. No "happy balance" will be found because movies are just too expensive to make to be ad-supported.
Nobody is going to pay. Period. Get over it. There is no "new business model" - there is just taking. All digital content will be free and there is nothing that can be done about it. The age of paying for digital content is over.
The only possible chance is to have non-digital content that people pay for. Analog, like a concert or going to a movie theater for something that isn't on DVD, will never be on DVD and is never, ever committed to any digital form. If it is put on a DVD as a screener, it's over - nobody will pay for what is completely free.
You're ignoring the basic tenets of open source here.
First off, you wouldn't use anything you didn't actually compile yourself, would you? While you're at it, you better look over the code for anything that someone submitted without completely checking also. There are thousands of users out there depending on YOU for the well-being of their systems. Be part of the team. Use (and verify) open source.
Assuming all users are going to do this is the first step in any open source venture. If you're not capable, how is it that you are using an open source package? What exactly is it that you are doing with the source then? Relying on others (leeching?) for their skills to compile, verify and support stuff you are then just going to use without any further verification? What if you have problems? You're going to fix them, right? No? You're going to post messages in a bunch of places and hope someone will help you? Is that all?
The "Sony rootkit fiasco" can't happen with open source - as long as everyone compiles and verifies every line of code that is on their system. When the balance starts to tip in favor of the "just users" not doing their part the whole community loses. If you're not reading code, you're part of the problem.
I seriously doubt any "mental health" is going to get people to not use drugs, alchohol and other things to distort their view of reality. It isn't that these people are sick per se, but they want/need something outside of themselves. And they aren't getting it.
Religion works for a large number of people, but it has serious side effects as well. Marx didn't call it the opiate of the masses for no reason at all.
Unfortunately, where we are today is the people using drugs and over-using alchohol are a burden on others. What happens is their dependence turns into a problem for everyone else but them. Personally, I have a problem taking care of these people generally for the rest of their lives. Criminalization has its problems as well, so attacking the users isn't the solution but many users support their habits by distributing as well. We've seen how well trying to reduce demand works - it doesn't. The demand is driven by human makeup. Could US society push for religion to replace drugs? I certainly do not want to go down that road. I do not know of any other realistic substitute today. Perhaps sex, but that affects others as well, especially those incapable of saying no.
I'd be a lot happier if drugs were rare and hard to get. Impossible to get isn't going to happen because too many are too easy to make. But it could be a lot harder than it is.
The drug solution is to make use non-criminal and the penalty for distribution to be something like exile - send them to South America or the Netherlands. Anywhere else. No reason to put them in prison but get them out of contact with the using community in the US.
E85 is made mostly of diesel fuel from the tractors and harvesters used to grow the corn. If we went back to by-hand weeding and harvesting there wouldn't be a problem for jobs and we wouldn't be using oil to make ethanol. Sure, it is about a 1.1 to 1 ratio so there is a benefit to ethanol, but most of this benefit is a gift to highly mechanized corn farming.
The question that I haven't seen anyone pose yet is if the claims by the RIAA attorneys are valid. Is it permitted under Oregon rules to raise the items that were raised in the University's reply? Are the seven different points all just meaningless drivel or is there something real there?
I don't know. It does not seem to be completely without merit and the University's reply seems to contain a bunch of material that is utterly irrelevalent. Certainly when arguing for the quashing of discovery bringing up opinions about what the plantiff's motivations may or may not be is not relevant to the issue at hand. Implying (or stating) that the plantiff is "spying" on the Does hardly seems to be on point in such a reply either.
Smaller stores have considerably higher costs. The problem is the building is pretty much going to cost the same whether they are selling $50,000 of merchandise a day or $1000. Sure, there is some scaling up for a larger retail store but it isn't linear. Both need phones. Both need to have lots of other things as well.
The next thing is if you are buying 100 pieces from a manufacturer you get one price but if you are buying 100,000 pieces they give you a better price. This means the small privately run stores cannot compete on price - and in today's Internet-driven shopping experience price is almost the only thing that matters. So you can buy your item for $100 or for $125 - which are you going to choose.
Customer service is almost irrelevent. If you have a problem with your purchase does it matter if they are real friendly about it when telling you that there isn't much that can be done or if they are rude about it? These days most things are non-repairable at least outside of a repair depot catering to that specific device. The margins are so thin nobody can "do you a favor" and replace something that isn't under warranty. So customer service doesn't mean all that much.
If it is possible for me to download a movie and not pay anyone for it, I am going to. No matter what spiffy services the ISP offers, free is after all free. There can't be any royalities unless the potential purchasers give up the idea of "free" and buy stuff. Well, nobody I know is buying, we're taking for free and never going to stop.
Sure, people keep saying they would buy if the price was right. The right price is zero. As long as free is possible, that is the price I and everyone I know will be paying.
I do not believe there is any way to put the genii back in the bottle at this point. People have seen free and they like it. The only way to make money from a movie from now on is to release it in theaters only and never, ever put it in to any digital form. The minute a DVD is made it will be stolen and put on the Internet. That is the last sale they will ever get because everyone will get it from that one copy.
If it isn't nailed down, it will be stolen. Sooner or later someone will come along with the idea that if adequate measures aren't taken to prevent them from stealing it, then it must be OK - or they would have been prevented.
You would think in this case it would be pretty easy to prosecute the thief. Unfortunately, it is very unclear the value of an individual record, much less the value of a large collection. I seriously doubt this guy is going to get prosecuted for some kind of "privacy violation". My guess is more along the lines of one record being worth $100, therefore 8 million records = $800 million in damages. Ought to be worth a pretty long jail term.
Obviously. It is racist because the first assumption is that the statistic is made up by racists. Any connection to reality is quickly wiped away because if the system wasn't racist then fewer black males would be in prison.
The mere suggestion that the idea of a separate "black culture" that has values 180 degrees out of phase with "white culture" is a bad thing earns you the label of racist. And of course anything that does not reinforce this idea of a separate black culture is therefore racial genocide.
Sorry, but there is only one solution to the "race problem" and it can take 1,000 years or 10 years. It is the elimination of the idea that there is a "black culture" that is somehow separate, distinct and valuable. There are either people or there are races. If we want there to be people, the idea of a black culture, black identity or black anything has to be wiped out. Along with white culture, white identity and white anything else as well.
You want to save, preserve and continue black culture? Fine. Then where this culture conflicts with someone elses culture there is going to be trouble and the minority is going to end up on the short end of the stick. Including going to prison when that culture values criminal acts against other members of the black community and white community.
Define "efficient". What is "efficient" for the shipper is not necessarily the same as "efficient" for the person receiving the shipment. The shipper is going to want to control costs and make sure the package eventually gets there. 2 days or 10 days probably doesn't make a difference to the shipper.
The real shipping cost probably isn't reflected to the customer anyway - they aren't going to be charged less because the courier is charging a little less because they are paying for the packaging and the person putting the stuff in the box. So "efficient" to the recipient is both cost and delivery time, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
You assume a great deal. One of the basic problems with postal delivery is the "customer" isn't necessarily the one that is on the receiving end of poor service. Assuming that you receive bills in the mail, does the sender care when you receive them? Or in what condition? Not really. They care a lot about how much it costs them to send them out.
Similarly, most businesses care about shipping costs and not so much about shipping performance. If Netflix was charged $0.10 less for each envelope but it took two days longer, would they care? I'd say they would jump at the lower cost.
Different groups have different criteria for judging performance, and with delivery services in general the problem is the people that want excellent performance are not paying the bills and the people wanting low cost are. If you control for low cost you are going to get really cheap, poor service. Right now the overnight delivery companies are doing fairly well keeping everyone happy in their niche and the USPS is doing a fair job on both costs and performance. Upsetting the balance would take a lot of care and I don't think the all the aspects of the situation are clear.
BS. You can buy a portable device which plays DVDs today. They are cheap and do not interfere with any "rights" either the consumer or content creator has.
However, give me a way to take DVD content and make it into a transferrable file and I'll show you how many movies I can download without paying anyone. See, it is all fine and good to be able to exercise your "fair use" rights, but some folks consider it fair to take anything in digital form and provide it for the benefit of the planet. Too bad the folks producing these movies do not agree with it being a benefit.
Sadly, at the present time it is not possible to discerne between legal uses of a DVD and illegal uses. If you enable DVD ripping, you enable DVD ripping. Period. Once the protection has been removed it is then possible to send the material out to the rest of the movie-craving planet. There is no halfway measure that enables it to be used locally without being able to be also shared.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately today on the Internet there are no limits. Perhaps there should be, but there aren't.
This means that I can write lots of material and have it posted all over the Internet which discloses a lot of embarassing "facts" about someone. How they like to dress up in femle undergarments, how their last girlfriend once said she never went to bed without a magnifying glass and how they once stood outside a door pushing on it for 10 minutes when the door was labeled "pull". Then, all in the name of satire and good fun, we could continue with user contributions in the same vein with all sorts of abberations attributed to this person. Of course, it would be fun to get their cell phone number and publish it - just so people could read off the latest to them.
Sound like fun? Sure. How about we start with you and see how much fun it is?
There are no limits on the Internet, and I seriously doubt a lawsuit is going to get anywhere. After all, if all they have is an IP address you can't sue an IP address.
The EV-1 was filled with lead-acid batteries that were classified as hazardous waste. Lead, remember? It makes all the children stupid. Because of that standard car batteries are required to be recycled and you need special licensing to store more than a small quantity. Smaller than the quantity used in the EV-1.
EV-1 = Rolling toxic waste dump.
Yes, but the WTO will not allow restriction to just US-based online casinos. Therefore, I can set up an unregulated (cheating) casino that operates just over the border in Mexico. There wouldn't be a thing the US could do about it. This is probably the biggest reason why online casinos are frowned upon. Once that door opens, there isn't any way to control it. The US easily has the most gullible population when it comes to gambling anywhere on the planet and opening Russian, Carribean and other online casinos to US citizens would be a disaster.
If poor people put money they can't really afford to lose on lottery tickets, why would they be any more sensible with a casino they don't have to get on a bus to get to?
How do you make a computer that is administered by a fool (er, a user) "fairly secure?" It cannot possibly be secure because the administrator does not know what should be done and what should not be done.
When they click on Weatherbug to install it because they think this is something they want, who is there to tell them they cannot do this? They want to install new and cool software on their computer. Preventing them from doing this is the only path to security there is - if you allow them to install Weatherbug, they can install anything, including trojans and malware.
Sorry, for 99% of the people using computers they do not need or want a computer - they want an appliance that serves up entertainment and email. Nothing more.
Sure, you might be able to track something back. Can the other 1,000 people that downloaded a compromised binary? I doubt it. Are you going to tell them? No, you might post it somewhere in some forum or blog but how to the other "users" know about this?
Reading Slashdot?
The only way to correctly use open software is for the person using it to personally examine the code. What? The user can't understand C++? Well, they have no business using open software then if they can't personally check it out.
This is a little harsh, but the problem is that if a user installs a binary package without checking it they are leaving themselves open to whatever the distributor allowed in. Distributors get compromised. Sure, this is eventually detected and some forum somewhere has 1,500 posts about it. But that does not mean that ever user that downloaded it, trusted it and installed it gets informed.
If you can't check it and do not know the history of what you are downloading, you shouldn't be downloading it.
Same goes for any unsigned binary. If you can't go back to the publisher/author and know, absolutely, they are solely responsible for the binary you are using you cannot trust it. Unsigned code is untrustworthy. Period.
If I send your brother and uncle an email that says "click this and get rich!!!" and they do it, they are going to get infected with something. Linux might be a bit harder, especially if you keep the user from doing anything "adminstratively" with the computer but if you execute a untrustworthy program on the computer you are going down the road to trouble. If your computer then asks for permission to do something "administrative" and you grant it, you're had.
99% of the users do not need to install software, run ActiveX controls or run executable things (scripts, programs, anything) on their computer. They need to use the software that was installed when they got it and nothing more. Opening the door to them installing any random piece of junk that comes along or executing some type of code from email or web pages is an invitation to disaster. It doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux - if the user can authorize unsafe actions on the machine and does so blindly the machine will be compromised.
Now it is true today that there are very few, if not zero, things that are targeting Linux. Most people run Windows and that is the environment that is targeted. But the problem isn't the operating system - you cannot protect the computer from an administrator that is a fool.
The only real answer - which you might have done with a Linux system - is remove any possibility of the user doing anything outside of a small set of "user" actions. No administration. No software installs. No executing anything that wasn't there when the administrator set it up. Computers for these people are not general-purpose programming environments but simple appliances. Deviating from that "appliance" concept is where the trouble starts.
If you gave your brother and uncle an appliance, more power to you. If you gave them a general purpose computer that they do not understand this isn't a solution.
If you have a green laser and you can't see the beam at night, you were probably robbed. Or you got a cheap one that pretends to be a real green laser pointer. The good ones have a beam that is almost visible in low lighting - think of a room with the shades pulled down. At night you can clearly see the beam.
They are extremely bright. And do wonders to night vision.
My green laser pointer is rated for 25,000 feet visibility. The beam is collimated - it does not disperse.
Let's see... if you do not have control, you can't stop someone from placing a copy where everyone on the planet can download it for free. Therefore, without control you can't get any money. At least without the level of control needed to prevent someone from making sure you can't get paid.
Today, about the only thing that will finally force both sides to some sort of compromise is to deprive everyone of revenue for all digital goods. Books, music, movies, software, everything. If it is digital it can be almost always anonymously stolen and redistributed on the Internet for free.
Much of the Western economy will collapse as a result of this because the network effects of where the money goes is not clearly understood by most people. But, after this it will be clear that either nothing digital will ever be made ever again or people will pay what it is worth. Today, people without high speed Internet connections are forced to pay - they can't download - while the rest of the world gets their stuff for free. As long as thsy clearly understand that the content is there for the taking and they might as well get in on the taking. Because of this you can effectively say there are two values for music: zero and what people without good connectivity are willing to pay. This is clearly unfair to everyone.
I'm betting on the collapse.
I think you have a distorted view of the 5th amendment. Protection from self-incrimination does not mean that you get to run around and clean up after your crime. It does not mean that physical evidence cannot be seized by either law enforcement or as part of civil discovery proceedings. What it does mean is that you cannot be forced to testify against yourself. Physical objects do not provide testimony in any respect.
Under your view after shooting someone your gun could not be examined to determine if it was fired recently and if the markings on the bullet are similar to those from your gun. Basically this would exclude all objective physical evidence from criminal and civil trials. What would you fall back on? Eyewitness testimony? Video recordings?
No, you don't get any sort of "common carrier" status because you want it.
You, personally, contracted with a service provider to give you an account for transfer of your data for your purposes. It almost certainly says that you are responsible for all use of the account in the terms of service. Nobody has really tried to enforce this, but it would seem to be pretty obvious.
An ISP that openly encouraged and tolerated illegal activity would get sued out of existance. Regardless of any DMCA safe harbor provisions - which is what ISPs fall back on. They do not and never did have common carrier status. Only wireline telephone companies have that.
The only possible chance is to have non-digital content that people pay for. Analog, like a concert or going to a movie theater for something that isn't on DVD, will never be on DVD and is never, ever committed to any digital form. If it is put on a DVD as a screener, it's over - nobody will pay for what is completely free.
You're ignoring the basic tenets of open source here.
First off, you wouldn't use anything you didn't actually compile yourself, would you? While you're at it, you better look over the code for anything that someone submitted without completely checking also. There are thousands of users out there depending on YOU for the well-being of their systems. Be part of the team. Use (and verify) open source.
Assuming all users are going to do this is the first step in any open source venture. If you're not capable, how is it that you are using an open source package? What exactly is it that you are doing with the source then? Relying on others (leeching?) for their skills to compile, verify and support stuff you are then just going to use without any further verification? What if you have problems? You're going to fix them, right? No? You're going to post messages in a bunch of places and hope someone will help you? Is that all?
The "Sony rootkit fiasco" can't happen with open source - as long as everyone compiles and verifies every line of code that is on their system. When the balance starts to tip in favor of the "just users" not doing their part the whole community loses. If you're not reading code, you're part of the problem.
I seriously doubt any "mental health" is going to get people to not use drugs, alchohol and other things to distort their view of reality. It isn't that these people are sick per se, but they want/need something outside of themselves. And they aren't getting it.
Religion works for a large number of people, but it has serious side effects as well. Marx didn't call it the opiate of the masses for no reason at all.
Unfortunately, where we are today is the people using drugs and over-using alchohol are a burden on others. What happens is their dependence turns into a problem for everyone else but them. Personally, I have a problem taking care of these people generally for the rest of their lives. Criminalization has its problems as well, so attacking the users isn't the solution but many users support their habits by distributing as well. We've seen how well trying to reduce demand works - it doesn't. The demand is driven by human makeup. Could US society push for religion to replace drugs? I certainly do not want to go down that road. I do not know of any other realistic substitute today. Perhaps sex, but that affects others as well, especially those incapable of saying no.
I'd be a lot happier if drugs were rare and hard to get. Impossible to get isn't going to happen because too many are too easy to make. But it could be a lot harder than it is.
The drug solution is to make use non-criminal and the penalty for distribution to be something like exile - send them to South America or the Netherlands. Anywhere else. No reason to put them in prison but get them out of contact with the using community in the US.
E85 is made mostly of diesel fuel from the tractors and harvesters used to grow the corn. If we went back to by-hand weeding and harvesting there wouldn't be a problem for jobs and we wouldn't be using oil to make ethanol. Sure, it is about a 1.1 to 1 ratio so there is a benefit to ethanol, but most of this benefit is a gift to highly mechanized corn farming.
The question that I haven't seen anyone pose yet is if the claims by the RIAA attorneys are valid. Is it permitted under Oregon rules to raise the items that were raised in the University's reply? Are the seven different points all just meaningless drivel or is there something real there?
I don't know. It does not seem to be completely without merit and the University's reply seems to contain a bunch of material that is utterly irrelevalent. Certainly when arguing for the quashing of discovery bringing up opinions about what the plantiff's motivations may or may not be is not relevant to the issue at hand. Implying (or stating) that the plantiff is "spying" on the Does hardly seems to be on point in such a reply either.
Smaller stores have considerably higher costs. The problem is the building is pretty much going to cost the same whether they are selling $50,000 of merchandise a day or $1000. Sure, there is some scaling up for a larger retail store but it isn't linear. Both need phones. Both need to have lots of other things as well.
The next thing is if you are buying 100 pieces from a manufacturer you get one price but if you are buying 100,000 pieces they give you a better price. This means the small privately run stores cannot compete on price - and in today's Internet-driven shopping experience price is almost the only thing that matters. So you can buy your item for $100 or for $125 - which are you going to choose.
Customer service is almost irrelevent. If you have a problem with your purchase does it matter if they are real friendly about it when telling you that there isn't much that can be done or if they are rude about it? These days most things are non-repairable at least outside of a repair depot catering to that specific device. The margins are so thin nobody can "do you a favor" and replace something that isn't under warranty. So customer service doesn't mean all that much.
If it is possible for me to download a movie and not pay anyone for it, I am going to. No matter what spiffy services the ISP offers, free is after all free. There can't be any royalities unless the potential purchasers give up the idea of "free" and buy stuff. Well, nobody I know is buying, we're taking for free and never going to stop.
Sure, people keep saying they would buy if the price was right. The right price is zero.
As long as free is possible, that is the price I and everyone I know will be paying.
I do not believe there is any way to put the genii back in the bottle at this point. People have seen free and they like it. The only way to make money from a movie from now on is to release it in theaters only and never, ever put it in to any digital form. The minute a DVD is made it will be stolen and put on the Internet. That is the last sale they will ever get because everyone will get it from that one copy.
Profit? Forget it. There isn't any left.
If it isn't nailed down, it will be stolen. Sooner or later someone will come along with the idea that if adequate measures aren't taken to prevent them from stealing it, then it must be OK - or they would have been prevented.
You would think in this case it would be pretty easy to prosecute the thief. Unfortunately, it is very unclear the value of an individual record, much less the value of a large collection. I seriously doubt this guy is going to get prosecuted for some kind of "privacy violation". My guess is more along the lines of one record being worth $100, therefore 8 million records = $800 million in damages. Ought to be worth a pretty long jail term.
Obviously. It is racist because the first assumption is that the statistic is made up by racists. Any connection to reality is quickly wiped away because if the system wasn't racist then fewer black males would be in prison.
The mere suggestion that the idea of a separate "black culture" that has values 180 degrees out of phase with "white culture" is a bad thing earns you the label of racist. And of course anything that does not reinforce this idea of a separate black culture is therefore racial genocide.
Sorry, but there is only one solution to the "race problem" and it can take 1,000 years or 10 years. It is the elimination of the idea that there is a "black culture" that is somehow separate, distinct and valuable. There are either people or there are races. If we want there to be people, the idea of a black culture, black identity or black anything has to be wiped out. Along with white culture, white identity and white anything else as well.
You want to save, preserve and continue black culture? Fine. Then where this culture conflicts with someone elses culture there is going to be trouble and the minority is going to end up on the short end of the stick. Including going to prison when that culture values criminal acts against other members of the black community and white community.
Define "efficient". What is "efficient" for the shipper is not necessarily the same as "efficient" for the person receiving the shipment. The shipper is going to want to control costs and make sure the package eventually gets there. 2 days or 10 days probably doesn't make a difference to the shipper.
The real shipping cost probably isn't reflected to the customer anyway - they aren't going to be charged less because the courier is charging a little less because they are paying for the packaging and the person putting the stuff in the box. So "efficient" to the recipient is both cost and delivery time, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
You assume a great deal. One of the basic problems with postal delivery is the "customer" isn't necessarily the one that is on the receiving end of poor service. Assuming that you receive bills in the mail, does the sender care when you receive them? Or in what condition? Not really. They care a lot about how much it costs them to send them out.
Similarly, most businesses care about shipping costs and not so much about shipping performance. If Netflix was charged $0.10 less for each envelope but it took two days longer, would they care? I'd say they would jump at the lower cost.
Different groups have different criteria for judging performance, and with delivery services in general the problem is the people that want excellent performance are not paying the bills and the people wanting low cost are. If you control for low cost you are going to get really cheap, poor service. Right now the overnight delivery companies are doing fairly well keeping everyone happy in their niche and the USPS is doing a fair job on both costs and performance. Upsetting the balance would take a lot of care and I don't think the all the aspects of the situation are clear.
BS. You can buy a portable device which plays DVDs today. They are cheap and do not interfere with any "rights" either the consumer or content creator has.
However, give me a way to take DVD content and make it into a transferrable file and I'll show you how many movies I can download without paying anyone. See, it is all fine and good to be able to exercise your "fair use" rights, but some folks consider it fair to take anything in digital form and provide it for the benefit of the planet. Too bad the folks producing these movies do not agree with it being a benefit.
Sadly, at the present time it is not possible to discerne between legal uses of a DVD and illegal uses. If you enable DVD ripping, you enable DVD ripping. Period. Once the protection has been removed it is then possible to send the material out to the rest of the movie-craving planet. There is no halfway measure that enables it to be used locally without being able to be also shared.