Every "non-compete" agreement that I have ever signed or given someone to sign is first and foremost a statement of ethics. The employee understand they are going to have some valuable materials at their disposal and to either share these with a competitor or to run out and start a business using them would be unethical. And possibly lead to legal sanctions.
The second part is assignment of inventions which is almost alway completely separate. Or at least it should be. If you are employed in a "creative" capacity where it is your job to come up with new things, do you honestly believe that you should have the right to (a) come up with something new that is within the scope of your job, (b) quit, and (c) form a new company to exploit this new idea?
Maybe you are thinking "Nobody would be that stupid!" but it has been done. Exactly like that, within the period of a few days, not weeks or months. It has even been done at the level where the new idea has been completely researched and proven to the point where it could be implemented. And they the "inventor" walks away to do it all independently. Motivations differ, but usually it is because their brother-in-law (the attorney) sold them on the idea that they could "make billions" this way and they would never see anything from it if they stayed with the company that paid for the research time.
Sure, there are people that have tried to behave ethically and gotten screwed. But for every one of those there have been people that have lied, cheated and stole from their employer. And in my experience the far larger quantity has been on the side of unethical behavior.
The problem is if I hire a developer that comes from a company with a competing product it is highly unlikely the company I hired him away from is going to be able to actually claim something new is the result of "trade secrets" that the developer brought (illegally?) with him. Where would you go to get any sort of evidence of this?
Now, if there is a non-compete agreement that I knowingly violate by hiring the developer, I am putting my company and the developer in trouble. There isn't any need to collect evidence - it is pretty obvious what is going on.
No, I don't think you are going to get very far trying to find trade secrets being shared improperly. Customer lists, maybe but even that is questionable.
It depends. Mostly, overbroad claims are nonsense. However, if you took it upon yourself in your new design job to call clients that you remembered from your two weeks and used knowledge of failings in the first company to lure their clients away, this would probably be actionable.
Most often however your non-compete would simply make it difficult to get hired by a new company that clearly was competing over clients with the old company. Unless the new company wants to try to defend in court their decision to hire you, it is much simpler and safer to exclude people with valid, reasonable non-compete agreement from the hiring process. Now if you lie about having one and it comes up later, you are going to find yourself in a difficult place indeed - your new company may just fire you for lying on your application. Regardless of whether or not they would have hired you or not if they knew about the non-compete.
Yes, I believe there have been several terrorist actions that have been stopped. Maybe a few real ones that have been prevented.
Unfortunately, nobody wants to say anything about those. Instead we get the absurd stuff in Boston and guys with big ideas and no way to implement them in the news. It makes everyone in the US look stupid.
It wouldn't surprise me that major media outlets know and have details about 9/11-scale terrorist actions that have been stopped and are sitting on it. It would make Bush look better. Maybe not much, but some. And we can't have that. The news folks are trying to sit on what today constitutes progress in Iraq, but that would screw up the election plans so nobody is talking about it.
We aren't going to hear anything until the classified documents rule puts stuff into the public's hands. In about 75 years or so. Kinda late, I'd say.
You don't see some of the obvious things that people do. I lived in a subdivision where the builder had three holdouts that wouldn't sell. They had to carve the plans up around them because they assumed they would get lots more than market value if they could hold the builder up. The builder went around them. Slowly and at great cost.
The problem with networks is that one or two holdouts can certainly push their way through. Local businesses? Ha. If I had the opportunity to shut a project down until I got my $500,000 for the rights to run a cable through, I'd do it in a second. And I wouldn't sign over some blanket rights that could be resold or re-leased to other, less friendly businesses. I'd make darn sure that nobody moved through my land without paying again and again. So would my neighbors because once someone a couple of towns over got rich that way it would be all over the news.
You are misjudging the scale of payments probably 1000-fold.
And do not forget there are people that do not want - at any price - electrical (or more accurately in their terminology electronical) wires of any kind run through, under, nearby or even close to their property. These electronical wires seem to emanate mysterious rays that make people sick. They read all about it in the Weekly World News or something like that. They will never, ever agree to these electronical wires that make them sick.
So you have the strike-it-rich folks and the EMF-phobic folks. You also have plain geography. If you could wire block-by-block it would be one thing. The problem is that you can't and nobody is going to want to. So you end up with one EMF-phobe blocking access for a subdivision of 250 homes. Do you send out flyers to the homeowners telling them why they can't have cheaper service? Do you want to pick up the tab for the 24-hour guard service to keep people from burning the EMF-phobe's house down?
It isn't anywhere near as simple as you would like it to be, sorry to say. The problem today is also the margins are pretty thin and nobody is going to want to spend lots with a 10% annual return on the investment. This is mostly why today nobody is building out anything that has to do with a physical plant. Costs too much and the returns are too thin to get investors excited. The cable build-out occured when they could promise (and deliver) 50% annual returns. 5 years = 250% return on your investment. That got people to put money in. Those days are over.
Why would they sell bandwidth to their competitors at wholesale prices when they don't have to?
The problem today is "wholesale prices" are dictated by a years-old decree that is today below cost. So the telecom folks are left with two choices: enable their competitors to undercut their prices while paying less than cost for the lines or block everybody and say it isn't available at all.
They can't charge "wholesale prices" because the tariffs were fixed in 1996 or so. There is no motivation at the state level to raise prices - anybody's prices - so there is no action to change these rates. Making rules like "wholesale market rates" would have seemed so reasonable, but that didn't fulfull the desire to stick it to the telecom companies and "encourage" competition.
Today we have a situation in Illinois where a CLEC can lease a T1 circuit for less than an analog phone line. Then they can turn around and offer multiple analog phone lines at half the cost of the ILEC and the ILEC has to do maintenance and support on the circuit. It makes no sense whatsoever but it does virtually guarantee that the ILEC isn't going to be around to support customers in the future.
This doesn't mean they get broken up and the competitors take over. This means the copper infrastructure folds up in favor of wireless or something completely different. Yes, that is the possibility. No, FIOS isn't coming to Northern Illinois anytime soon, either - it is SBC (now called AT&T) territory, not Verizon.
Legalize "hacking", provided no damage is done. Define "damge" in this context. Would you include theft as damage, like stealing all of someone's money from their bank account? How about copyright infringement - would that count as "damage"? Or would "damage" only be things that physically damage computer equipment, like making a monitor burn up because of incorrect settings?
Would you want to include injecting code into a system to allow easier future access? That wouldn't really be "damage" would it? How about some innocent identity spoofing, like sending an email to everone in an address book on someone else's computer? That couldn't be construed as "damage", could it?
Today it is practically impossible to do anything about attacks to home and small business computers. Local law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction and the FBI wants hard proof of greater than $25,000 in losses. No, your time as the administrator doesn't count - you're getting paid anyway. Besides, if all you have is an IP address, how does that identify a person? So such "hacking" is already non-prosecutable unless you go after government or Fortune 500-size companies.
Personally, I'm all for figuring out how to more easily stop folks that think they have a right to break in anywhere (or try to) than making it easier.
Good luck with that "withholding rent" strategy. Ever tried it? I doubt it. What you are claiming isn't true and landlords know it. You will find yourself in court with a nice judgement against you and probably evicted as well.
The eviction takes time. The judgement not as long.
I bought a 100GB hard disk the other day. It said right on the box "100 GB" but when it was connected there was not 100GB available. I was obviously robbed. Somewhere between the manufacturer and my purchase some of those gigabytes were stolen, removed from the disk and given to someone else. I didn't get what I paid for. This is obviously illegal and I want the store or the manufacturer prosecuted!!!!
I don't think Comcast is violating any law, and I'll bet Comcast has an user agreement that says they don't have to deliver what you want them to deliver.
Problem is, the ISPs are going to get paid. They are offering below-cost connectivity today to build market share. This isn't going to continue much longer. They see Google with a few extra billions and think there is some of that to go around.
Unfortunately, that probably isn't the way it is going to work either.
What I would be worried about is the $399 ISP bill, long before I worried about Comcast getting some money from Google.
It migth be $2 to manufacture a CD with paper inserts and jewel case. Maybe. If you are turning out 100,000 of them it is probably more like $1.25.
Don't forget that all those graphics designers get to work with the web developers to make the pages to advertise the music now. Also, they need to come up with more stuff to go with the music (flash, video clips, etc.) in the "digital domain".
Turns out the costs are about the same - unless you just pitch the whole thing over and say you're going to drop the music off in the bathroom and hope it advertises itself. In which case the costs are zero, but so are the sales.
Everyone here seems to look at the Internet as the all encompassing way to promote or learn about anything. Well, that would be true if the penetration of the Internet was 100%. It isn't. Not by a long shot. The US isn't 100% broadband capable, meaning there are places where you just can't get anything better than dialup. Satellite is going to work in most places, but even that is problematic and it is pretty expensive for what you get.
The real issue with "the music industry" is promotion. When it dies - as it probably will soon - music promotion goes away. There are significant numbers of people employed indirectly in this area, far more than you probably think. There will be a sizable economic impact, especially in larger cities. There will also be side effects, such as music format radio stations and a number of "trade" publications just folding up.
Advertising is going to change. Today you still have publications in larger cities that are ad-supported and much of their advertising comes from music promotion in one way or another. These are publications doomed.
I do not see a radio station that is fed what is popular trying to figure out what to play themselves. Their advertisers pay to be on a station that is "popular" and is playing "popular" music. A radio station isn't a two-way medium and trying to move to an all-request format would be a big change. Trying to research and "discover" unknown bands would be even bigger. And neither of these would be something that every music-format radio station is going to do.
What we saw in the 1970s and 1980s was music-only format stations being replaced by talk radio. Why? Because it was cheaper to operate that way and looked like even more ad revenue was possible. Today talk radio is a known quantity with known ad revenues. I'd say music on radio stations is pretty much over because nobody is going to be paying to either get played or supplying stations with lists of what is popular.
IBM can sue, sure. Who's going to show up in court? The lawyers from a Chinese company? Why would they? There is no jurisdiction. I suppose IBM could sue in China. Fat lot of good that would do.
And exactly what is wrong with copyright and trademark infringement? What possible right does any government have to stick their nose into the manufacturing practices of a company in a foreign land? Is IBM somehow above the status of "government" now? I don't think so. IBM might be able to bully China into doing something but it certainly isn't going to have much effect.
China is busily producing cheaper manufactured goods by the shipload. People in the US seem to be happy to get them. So what if there are a few contaminated food items, some defective electronics and so on. Maybe a few pets die. The big deal is cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. By letting near slave labor produce stuff everone on welfare can afford a big new HDTV now. Aren't we just reaping the rewards of outsourcing all manufacturing to somewhere with no standards and shoddy practices? Yup, some stuff isn't going to be quite as good as the real trademarked, copyright blessed stuff manufactured elsewhere. Too bad.
You voted for the lowest price and Froogle isn't showing things rated by where they are made or quality. You can sort by price. If price is your only measure, you get what you pay for.
What possible international law enforcement agency would enforce a ban on work-alike/look-alike products? Who would you have enforce the copyrights and trademarks of IBM? Would you leave this to the Chinese government (never happen) or do you think that US Customs should be the filter and prevent such purchases from entering the US? And if you bought something like this on the Internet and it was confiscated, should the customer just lose their money? Or should the merchant refund their money?
Does anybody have the right to do this? Today, I do not believe so. At least not in the US.
I can't imagine any judgement that might be forthcoming would be enforceable. They will just ignore it. And there is no international enforcement.
Nice theory. Only problem with it is that Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence could be explained by this if it was just collaborators that were targeted. It isn't.
Next theory please.
Maybe the people there are just utterly lawless and need someone, either a local murderous dictator or a foreign army, to establish order? The murderous dictator was doing pretty well, except he was... well, a murderous dictator. And he couldn't separate his PR campaign from reality.
Besides, if you really believe the US government is as responsible as you seem to think, how come you're sitting around? Why hasn't anyone assassinated the folks they think are responsible? Why haven't YOU done SOMETHING? Or are you content to sit at home and type while all the atrocities that you think are happening continue IN YOUR NAME? After all, you are responsible, aren't you?
Why when you buy a 100GB hard drive does it only have about 96GB available on it? How come my car has a speedometer that is calibrated to 180 but I can't drive at 180MPH? How come when you go to a "all-you-can-eat" restaurant they don't let you stay there for a week and keep eating?
All of this assumes that you are swayed by the advertising and don't really check up on the claims being advertised. Or, it states things in common everyday language that are backed up by the fine print saying something quite different.
There clearly are two kinds of people - those that understand what is being advertised isn't exactly what is being sold and those that have managed to get through life until their 16th birthday without realizing this. Sorry, time to grow up.
I still want to ask the car salesman about the speedometer. And ask if we can check if the car will really go that fast on the test drive.
The message we will be getting soon from everywhere associated with "renewable" and "sustainable" energy is really simple. If you can't make do with less, we will help you to do so. If you currently use more electricity (or any other energy source) than can be reasonably supplied, you are just going to have to make do with less.
Make Do With Less.
What would happen if your local cable provider was powered exclusively by wind power? Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the time the service would be unavailable. That isn't a problem if you look at it from the correct perspective, that of being a responsible consumer of energy rather than a piggish American entitled to everything.
You are going to be seeing more and more news and commentary slanted this way. We are clearly going to take the world's largest economy and highest standard of living and run it into the ground. We will come out the other end with children that understand the meaning of being a responsible global citizen and preserving the planet's natural resources. Of course, those resources will be being preserved for the new owners, the Chinese and Indians.
No, according to the RIAA-happy folks, all the plantiff's lawyers have is an IP address. In no way does that equate to a person in any respect whatsoever. You cannot get a discovery motion against an IP address and if that is all you have, gee, that's too bad. No discovery. No lawsuit. Nothing.
The key here is how does the IP address connect to "the real world?" If you accept the premise that an IP address cannot be connected to an individual only one or more computers you are stuck. Similarly, there might be a way out if it could be established that the "owner" of an account using an IP address was responsible either for everthing that happened or at the very least identifying the responsible party. Unfortunately, I do not believe this is part of any user agreement or policy of any ISP. At least not in a legally binding way. So having an IP address gets you... nothing.
Of course, you might not like to live in a world where an IP address was impossible to connect to a person. What it means is there is utterly no accountability for anything online. Do we really like that?
The US can do nothing about the guns on the street today. If you shut off legal sales of guns, you will have people smuggling them in.
What would happen in Norway if someone was caught with a trunkfull of handguns? Would their boss make enough money from one day's sales that it wouldn't matter if the rest got confiscated? Or do you believe that it would be impossible to smuggle in a trunkful of handguns? How about a container load? With 300 million people there is a ready market for illegal sales of guns to at least five or ten million people. This means you can bring in a million handguns and sell them for $100 each and make $100,000,000 dollars. This level of money means gun control advocates are talking about a pointless and futile strategy.
The US is not in control of the ports. It would be trivial to ship in a container load of illegal weapons and there isn't anything that can be done about it. There is just too much money to be made that way.
A Taser runs off a small battery. Let's assume that the battery is smaller than a car battery...
W = V * A and in this case W is going to be constant. This means that if you can get 100A out of the battery at 10 volts (1000 Watts) you are only going to get 10A at 100 volts. At 50,000 volts you are going to get.02A. And that is assuming something a little smaller than a car battery.
In reality, a ordinary 9V battery is capable of delivering 1A (or a little less). This is 9 watts. Assuming absolutely zero loss and 100% efficency of the conversion, 9 watts at 50,000 volts is 0.0002A. In reality, there are going to be severe losses and you aren't even going to get that much amperage. The function of a Taser isn't to deliver lots of amps to kill but lots of volts to immobilize.
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that other (non-Western) governments give a rats ass about whether or not their citizens are "happy". Sure, if they aren't happy they might riot in the streets and require the army to suppress them. Happens a lot, I'd say. But still, the leaders aren't interested in happiness in the least.
The problem with places like North Korea and Iran is the citizens can just cower in their basements because the leaders are going to do whatever they want and do not require and are not interested in permission from their citizens.
Oh, and if there is any dissention at the top the folks in the minority generally end up with nice state funerals. Dissent doesn't last long under those terms.
I seriously doubt you have any sort of contract with Comcast. If you do, I further doubt that you have anything that promises any quality of service, lack of anything being blocked and certainly doesn't promise "unlimited" anything except perhaps access.
Too bad. It would be nice if you could get "unlimited use" from an ISP instead of just "unlimited access".
A useful software product needs no "user support". If the user has to call for help, the product is incomprehensible or it fails when the user needs it the most.
Some very complicated products require training (e.g., Oracle) to use properly. However, once trained nothing further is required other than using the product.
Prince? That guy has been known to have some not-so-nice friends. Friends that might want to do him a favor. Or, you go to a rough part of town and hire some "friends" who are in it for the money and don't care about the cops.
Prince may wear a lot of purple but don't think for a moment that he is going to walk away from a fight. If he believes the way to get his way is with hired thugs, expect to find hired thugs. Probably paid well enough to forget completely about who hired them.
Source code escrow was far more interesting in the late 1980s when some folks actually believed that if they paid for an application (and often a substantial fraction of its development) that they should have access to the source code if the author wasn't available. Part of this came from companies that got burned by the author abandoning their work for one reason or another. Part of it was also that it was a marketing tool - see, the source code can be gotten...
Today that fantasy has mostly dispersed. Most companies know that if they don't develop an application internally they are at someone else's mercy. There are fewer failures of larger software publishers but even the larger ones sometimes abandon some application leaving the users in a bad spot. But having the source for a 150,000 line (or more!) application doesn't mean a company could compile it, much less fix a serious bug. In general it would take someone a long time to get familiar enough with something like this to be able to work on it with any degree of confidence. Especially a company with a mission-critical application needing a bug fixed - it would take months, often paying a consultant $150+ an hour.
The "new" strategy seems to be:
deal with larger, established companies whenever possible and hope their user base is large enough that they can just keep pushing out updates and have the product remain revenue-positive.
Write off stuff that is abandoned because it is cheaper to switch to something else than try to independently resurrect something dead.
Never ever do anything internally that could possibly be bought as off-the-shelf.
Mostly, this is a lot smarter than the late 80s strategy.
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Every "non-compete" agreement that I have ever signed or given someone to sign is first and foremost a statement of ethics. The employee understand they are going to have some valuable materials at their disposal and to either share these with a competitor or to run out and start a business using them would be unethical. And possibly lead to legal sanctions.
The second part is assignment of inventions which is almost alway completely separate. Or at least it should be. If you are employed in a "creative" capacity where it is your job to come up with new things, do you honestly believe that you should have the right to (a) come up with something new that is within the scope of your job, (b) quit, and (c) form a new company to exploit this new idea?
Maybe you are thinking "Nobody would be that stupid!" but it has been done. Exactly like that, within the period of a few days, not weeks or months. It has even been done at the level where the new idea has been completely researched and proven to the point where it could be implemented. And they the "inventor" walks away to do it all independently. Motivations differ, but usually it is because their brother-in-law (the attorney) sold them on the idea that they could "make billions" this way and they would never see anything from it if they stayed with the company that paid for the research time.
Sure, there are people that have tried to behave ethically and gotten screwed. But for every one of those there have been people that have lied, cheated and stole from their employer. And in my experience the far larger quantity has been on the side of unethical behavior.
Maybe. Probably not.
The problem is if I hire a developer that comes from a company with a competing product it is highly unlikely the company I hired him away from is going to be able to actually claim something new is the result of "trade secrets" that the developer brought (illegally?) with him. Where would you go to get any sort of evidence of this?
Now, if there is a non-compete agreement that I knowingly violate by hiring the developer, I am putting my company and the developer in trouble. There isn't any need to collect evidence - it is pretty obvious what is going on.
No, I don't think you are going to get very far trying to find trade secrets being shared improperly. Customer lists, maybe but even that is questionable.
It depends. Mostly, overbroad claims are nonsense. However, if you took it upon yourself in your new design job to call clients that you remembered from your two weeks and used knowledge of failings in the first company to lure their clients away, this would probably be actionable.
Most often however your non-compete would simply make it difficult to get hired by a new company that clearly was competing over clients with the old company. Unless the new company wants to try to defend in court their decision to hire you, it is much simpler and safer to exclude people with valid, reasonable non-compete agreement from the hiring process. Now if you lie about having one and it comes up later, you are going to find yourself in a difficult place indeed - your new company may just fire you for lying on your application. Regardless of whether or not they would have hired you or not if they knew about the non-compete.
Yes, I believe there have been several terrorist actions that have been stopped. Maybe a few real ones that have been prevented.
Unfortunately, nobody wants to say anything about those. Instead we get the absurd stuff in Boston and guys with big ideas and no way to implement them in the news. It makes everyone in the US look stupid.
It wouldn't surprise me that major media outlets know and have details about 9/11-scale terrorist actions that have been stopped and are sitting on it. It would make Bush look better. Maybe not much, but some. And we can't have that. The news folks are trying to sit on what today constitutes progress in Iraq, but that would screw up the election plans so nobody is talking about it.
We aren't going to hear anything until the classified documents rule puts stuff into the public's hands. In about 75 years or so. Kinda late, I'd say.
You don't see some of the obvious things that people do. I lived in a subdivision where the builder had three holdouts that wouldn't sell. They had to carve the plans up around them because they assumed they would get lots more than market value if they could hold the builder up. The builder went around them. Slowly and at great cost.
The problem with networks is that one or two holdouts can certainly push their way through. Local businesses? Ha. If I had the opportunity to shut a project down until I got my $500,000 for the rights to run a cable through, I'd do it in a second. And I wouldn't sign over some blanket rights that could be resold or re-leased to other, less friendly businesses. I'd make darn sure that nobody moved through my land without paying again and again. So would my neighbors because once someone a couple of towns over got rich that way it would be all over the news.
You are misjudging the scale of payments probably 1000-fold.
And do not forget there are people that do not want - at any price - electrical (or more accurately in their terminology electronical) wires of any kind run through, under, nearby or even close to their property. These electronical wires seem to emanate mysterious rays that make people sick. They read all about it in the Weekly World News or something like that. They will never, ever agree to these electronical wires that make them sick.
So you have the strike-it-rich folks and the EMF-phobic folks. You also have plain geography. If you could wire block-by-block it would be one thing. The problem is that you can't and nobody is going to want to. So you end up with one EMF-phobe blocking access for a subdivision of 250 homes. Do you send out flyers to the homeowners telling them why they can't have cheaper service? Do you want to pick up the tab for the 24-hour guard service to keep people from burning the EMF-phobe's house down?
It isn't anywhere near as simple as you would like it to be, sorry to say. The problem today is also the margins are pretty thin and nobody is going to want to spend lots with a 10% annual return on the investment. This is mostly why today nobody is building out anything that has to do with a physical plant. Costs too much and the returns are too thin to get investors excited. The cable build-out occured when they could promise (and deliver) 50% annual returns. 5 years = 250% return on your investment. That got people to put money in. Those days are over.
The problem today is "wholesale prices" are dictated by a years-old decree that is today below cost. So the telecom folks are left with two choices: enable their competitors to undercut their prices while paying less than cost for the lines or block everybody and say it isn't available at all.
They can't charge "wholesale prices" because the tariffs were fixed in 1996 or so. There is no motivation at the state level to raise prices - anybody's prices - so there is no action to change these rates. Making rules like "wholesale market rates" would have seemed so reasonable, but that didn't fulfull the desire to stick it to the telecom companies and "encourage" competition.
Today we have a situation in Illinois where a CLEC can lease a T1 circuit for less than an analog phone line. Then they can turn around and offer multiple analog phone lines at half the cost of the ILEC and the ILEC has to do maintenance and support on the circuit. It makes no sense whatsoever but it does virtually guarantee that the ILEC isn't going to be around to support customers in the future.
This doesn't mean they get broken up and the competitors take over. This means the copper infrastructure folds up in favor of wireless or something completely different. Yes, that is the possibility. No, FIOS isn't coming to Northern Illinois anytime soon, either - it is SBC (now called AT&T) territory, not Verizon.
You must absolutely be 16...
Legalize "hacking", provided no damage is done. Define "damge" in this context. Would you include theft as damage, like stealing all of someone's money from their bank account? How about copyright infringement - would that count as "damage"? Or would "damage" only be things that physically damage computer equipment, like making a monitor burn up because of incorrect settings?
Would you want to include injecting code into a system to allow easier future access? That wouldn't really be "damage" would it? How about some innocent identity spoofing, like sending an email to everone in an address book on someone else's computer? That couldn't be construed as "damage", could it?
Today it is practically impossible to do anything about attacks to home and small business computers. Local law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction and the FBI wants hard proof of greater than $25,000 in losses. No, your time as the administrator doesn't count - you're getting paid anyway. Besides, if all you have is an IP address, how does that identify a person? So such "hacking" is already non-prosecutable unless you go after government or Fortune 500-size companies.
Personally, I'm all for figuring out how to more easily stop folks that think they have a right to break in anywhere (or try to) than making it easier.
Good luck with that "withholding rent" strategy. Ever tried it? I doubt it. What you are claiming isn't true and landlords know it. You will find yourself in court with a nice judgement against you and probably evicted as well.
The eviction takes time. The judgement not as long.
Nice try.
I bought a 100GB hard disk the other day. It said right on the box "100 GB" but when it was connected there was not 100GB available. I was obviously robbed. Somewhere between the manufacturer and my purchase some of those gigabytes were stolen, removed from the disk and given to someone else. I didn't get what I paid for. This is obviously illegal and I want the store or the manufacturer prosecuted!!!!
I don't think Comcast is violating any law, and I'll bet Comcast has an user agreement that says they don't have to deliver what you want them to deliver.
Problem is, the ISPs are going to get paid. They are offering below-cost connectivity today to build market share. This isn't going to continue much longer. They see Google with a few extra billions and think there is some of that to go around.
Unfortunately, that probably isn't the way it is going to work either.
What I would be worried about is the $399 ISP bill, long before I worried about Comcast getting some money from Google.
It migth be $2 to manufacture a CD with paper inserts and jewel case. Maybe. If you are turning out 100,000 of them it is probably more like $1.25.
Don't forget that all those graphics designers get to work with the web developers to make the pages to advertise the music now. Also, they need to come up with more stuff to go with the music (flash, video clips, etc.) in the "digital domain".
Turns out the costs are about the same - unless you just pitch the whole thing over and say you're going to drop the music off in the bathroom and hope it advertises itself. In which case the costs are zero, but so are the sales.
Everyone here seems to look at the Internet as the all encompassing way to promote or learn about anything. Well, that would be true if the penetration of the Internet was 100%. It isn't. Not by a long shot. The US isn't 100% broadband capable, meaning there are places where you just can't get anything better than dialup. Satellite is going to work in most places, but even that is problematic and it is pretty expensive for what you get.
The real issue with "the music industry" is promotion. When it dies - as it probably will soon - music promotion goes away. There are significant numbers of people employed indirectly in this area, far more than you probably think. There will be a sizable economic impact, especially in larger cities. There will also be side effects, such as music format radio stations and a number of "trade" publications just folding up.
Advertising is going to change. Today you still have publications in larger cities that are ad-supported and much of their advertising comes from music promotion in one way or another. These are publications doomed.
I do not see a radio station that is fed what is popular trying to figure out what to play themselves. Their advertisers pay to be on a station that is "popular" and is playing "popular" music. A radio station isn't a two-way medium and trying to move to an all-request format would be a big change. Trying to research and "discover" unknown bands would be even bigger. And neither of these would be something that every music-format radio station is going to do.
What we saw in the 1970s and 1980s was music-only format stations being replaced by talk radio. Why? Because it was cheaper to operate that way and looked like even more ad revenue was possible. Today talk radio is a known quantity with known ad revenues. I'd say music on radio stations is pretty much over because nobody is going to be paying to either get played or supplying stations with lists of what is popular.
I'd say some big changes are coming.
IBM can sue, sure. Who's going to show up in court? The lawyers from a Chinese company? Why would they? There is no jurisdiction. I suppose IBM could sue in China. Fat lot of good that would do.
And exactly what is wrong with copyright and trademark infringement? What possible right does any government have to stick their nose into the manufacturing practices of a company in a foreign land? Is IBM somehow above the status of "government" now? I don't think so. IBM might be able to bully China into doing something but it certainly isn't going to have much effect.
China is busily producing cheaper manufactured goods by the shipload. People in the US seem to be happy to get them. So what if there are a few contaminated food items, some defective electronics and so on. Maybe a few pets die. The big deal is cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. By letting near slave labor produce stuff everone on welfare can afford a big new HDTV now. Aren't we just reaping the rewards of outsourcing all manufacturing to somewhere with no standards and shoddy practices? Yup, some stuff isn't going to be quite as good as the real trademarked, copyright blessed stuff manufactured elsewhere. Too bad.
You voted for the lowest price and Froogle isn't showing things rated by where they are made or quality. You can sort by price. If price is your only measure, you get what you pay for.
First off, Buyer beware
What possible international law enforcement agency would enforce a ban on work-alike/look-alike products? Who would you have enforce the copyrights and trademarks of IBM? Would you leave this to the Chinese government (never happen) or do you think that US Customs should be the filter and prevent such purchases from entering the US? And if you bought something like this on the Internet and it was confiscated, should the customer just lose their money? Or should the merchant refund their money?
Does anybody have the right to do this? Today, I do not believe so. At least not in the US.
I can't imagine any judgement that might be forthcoming would be enforceable. They will just ignore it. And there is no international enforcement.
Nice theory. Only problem with it is that Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence could be explained by this if it was just collaborators that were targeted. It isn't.
... well, a murderous dictator. And he couldn't separate his PR campaign from reality.
Next theory please.
Maybe the people there are just utterly lawless and need someone, either a local murderous dictator or a foreign army, to establish order? The murderous dictator was doing pretty well, except he was
Besides, if you really believe the US government is as responsible as you seem to think, how come you're sitting around? Why hasn't anyone assassinated the folks they think are responsible? Why haven't YOU done SOMETHING? Or are you content to sit at home and type while all the atrocities that you think are happening continue IN YOUR NAME? After all, you are responsible, aren't you?
Why when you buy a 100GB hard drive does it only have about 96GB available on it? How come my car has a speedometer that is calibrated to 180 but I can't drive at 180MPH? How come when you go to a "all-you-can-eat" restaurant they don't let you stay there for a week and keep eating?
All of this assumes that you are swayed by the advertising and don't really check up on the claims being advertised. Or, it states things in common everyday language that are backed up by the fine print saying something quite different.
There clearly are two kinds of people - those that understand what is being advertised isn't exactly what is being sold and those that have managed to get through life until their 16th birthday without realizing this. Sorry, time to grow up.
I still want to ask the car salesman about the speedometer. And ask if we can check if the car will really go that fast on the test drive.
The message we will be getting soon from everywhere associated with "renewable" and "sustainable" energy is really simple. If you can't make do with less, we will help you to do so. If you currently use more electricity (or any other energy source) than can be reasonably supplied, you are just going to have to make do with less.
Make Do With Less.
What would happen if your local cable provider was powered exclusively by wind power? Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the time the service would be unavailable. That isn't a problem if you look at it from the correct perspective, that of being a responsible consumer of energy rather than a piggish American entitled to everything.
You are going to be seeing more and more news and commentary slanted this way. We are clearly going to take the world's largest economy and highest standard of living and run it into the ground. We will come out the other end with children that understand the meaning of being a responsible global citizen and preserving the planet's natural resources. Of course, those resources will be being preserved for the new owners, the Chinese and Indians.
No, according to the RIAA-happy folks, all the plantiff's lawyers have is an IP address. In no way does that equate to a person in any respect whatsoever. You cannot get a discovery motion against an IP address and if that is all you have, gee, that's too bad. No discovery. No lawsuit. Nothing.
The key here is how does the IP address connect to "the real world?" If you accept the premise that an IP address cannot be connected to an individual only one or more computers you are stuck. Similarly, there might be a way out if it could be established that the "owner" of an account using an IP address was responsible either for everthing that happened or at the very least identifying the responsible party. Unfortunately, I do not believe this is part of any user agreement or policy of any ISP. At least not in a legally binding way. So having an IP address gets you... nothing.
Of course, you might not like to live in a world where an IP address was impossible to connect to a person. What it means is there is utterly no accountability for anything online. Do we really like that?
The US can do nothing about the guns on the street today. If you shut off legal sales of guns, you will have people smuggling them in.
What would happen in Norway if someone was caught with a trunkfull of handguns? Would their boss make enough money from one day's sales that it wouldn't matter if the rest got confiscated? Or do you believe that it would be impossible to smuggle in a trunkful of handguns? How about a container load? With 300 million people there is a ready market for illegal sales of guns to at least five or ten million people. This means you can bring in a million handguns and sell them for $100 each and make $100,000,000 dollars. This level of money means gun control advocates are talking about a pointless and futile strategy.
The US is not in control of the ports. It would be trivial to ship in a container load of illegal weapons and there isn't anything that can be done about it. There is just too much money to be made that way.
A Taser runs off a small battery. Let's assume that the battery is smaller than a car battery...
.02A. And that is assuming something a little smaller than a car battery.
W = V * A and in this case W is going to be constant. This means that if you can get 100A out of the battery at 10 volts (1000 Watts) you are only going to get 10A at 100 volts. At 50,000 volts you are going to get
In reality, a ordinary 9V battery is capable of delivering 1A (or a little less). This is 9 watts. Assuming absolutely zero loss and 100% efficency of the conversion, 9 watts at 50,000 volts is 0.0002A. In reality, there are going to be severe losses and you aren't even going to get that much amperage. The function of a Taser isn't to deliver lots of amps to kill but lots of volts to immobilize.
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that other (non-Western) governments give a rats ass about whether or not their citizens are "happy". Sure, if they aren't happy they might riot in the streets and require the army to suppress them. Happens a lot, I'd say. But still, the leaders aren't interested in happiness in the least.
The problem with places like North Korea and Iran is the citizens can just cower in their basements because the leaders are going to do whatever they want and do not require and are not interested in permission from their citizens.
Oh, and if there is any dissention at the top the folks in the minority generally end up with nice state funerals. Dissent doesn't last long under those terms.
I seriously doubt you have any sort of contract with Comcast. If you do, I further doubt that you have anything that promises any quality of service, lack of anything being blocked and certainly doesn't promise "unlimited" anything except perhaps access.
Too bad. It would be nice if you could get "unlimited use" from an ISP instead of just "unlimited access".
A useful software product needs no "user support". If the user has to call for help, the product is incomprehensible or it fails when the user needs it the most.
Some very complicated products require training (e.g., Oracle) to use properly. However, once trained nothing further is required other than using the product.
Prince? That guy has been known to have some not-so-nice friends. Friends that might want to do him a favor. Or, you go to a rough part of town and hire some "friends" who are in it for the money and don't care about the cops.
Prince may wear a lot of purple but don't think for a moment that he is going to walk away from a fight. If he believes the way to get his way is with hired thugs, expect to find hired thugs. Probably paid well enough to forget completely about who hired them.
Today that fantasy has mostly dispersed. Most companies know that if they don't develop an application internally they are at someone else's mercy. There are fewer failures of larger software publishers but even the larger ones sometimes abandon some application leaving the users in a bad spot. But having the source for a 150,000 line (or more!) application doesn't mean a company could compile it, much less fix a serious bug. In general it would take someone a long time to get familiar enough with something like this to be able to work on it with any degree of confidence. Especially a company with a mission-critical application needing a bug fixed - it would take months, often paying a consultant $150+ an hour.
The "new" strategy seems to be:
Mostly, this is a lot smarter than the late 80s strategy.