I would think inner-city youths have plenty of exposure to guns and many have experience firing them as well. All sorts of bad gang-banger habits with guns that it requires lots of training to help them overcome. Illegal weapons are very common in cities in the hands of children as young as 10 or 12.
What's illegal about it? Spam may be undesired and unwanted but there are plenty of ways it can be sent legally.
Also, with ISPs not cooperating (much) how many spam convictions have there been? Two or three, maybe. Without the ISPs getting on board, which they are loath to do right now, there can be no enforcement and almost all "enforcement" is vigitante action.
If you want a cell phone that has data rates subsidized by voice charges, you are going to have to live with the carrier blocking ways around voice charges.
If you want a cell phone with data that isn't subsidized in this manner, you aren't going to like the bill. You can get a cell modem for around $60 a month with a 5Gb limit on it. After the first 5Gb the rates go up. This starts to show where the billing is going to go with unsubsidized cell phone data plans.
Today, I have unlimited data at $19.95 with a cell phone. I expect if the data wasn't subsidized by voice charges it would be more like $219.95 a month for something that carried 20-30Gb a month.
Sadly, for the US the only solution is for someone to come in an eliminate the neighborhood nodes. You have X bandwidth to the node and 1000 homes connected to the node. When all 1000 are trying to download music, movies and watch Hulu you have a serious bottleneck that was never completely thought out.
You also have the economic realities of connecting 1000 homes in 500 neighborhoods. They were never going to run a 100Mbit dedicated fiber to each and every single home. They were always going to use some kind of concentrator. That means unless the concentrator has 1000 times the bandwidth that is being sold you aren't getting dedicated bandwidth. In reality, you are unlikely to get a fiber connection to the head end over 500Mb. So if marketing of streaming video succeeds 1000 homes get to divy up 500Mb - an average of 0.5Mb per home.
Works fine when 90% of the customers are web surfing and reading text email. Doesn't work so well when 90% of the customers are watching Hulu or other streaming video services. This isn't really fixable, either because to even get 500Mb you are dealing with 10 OC3 fiber connections (48Mb each). Sure, run an OC3 to each home. The home user will be plenty happy with paying $4K or $5K a month for their Internet connection.
Reality is going to intrude someday. Probably won't be this week.
Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?
Because (a) nobody else wants the job, (b) nobody else can do the job, and (c) the job really, really needs doing.
Wouldn't it be nice if botnet's were declared to be illegal? They aren't for the most part today. And because of that botnet traffic can't really be interfered with. Kicking a clearly infected computer off a network just raises a firestorm of protest because today it is not something that is clearly sanctioned. So small ISPs just watch as a few customers consume the network while saying "Looks like another botnet wave."
Similarly, there is no clear way for law enforcement to proceed when network intrusions occur. Right now the standard pretty much is $25,000 in provable damages. Until you have that, the FBI will not get involved and local law enforcement just passes everything to the FBI. The result is script kiddies get away with everything until the do something "really big", and then law enforcement may step in. May. Sometimes. Especially if the target isn't a Fortune 100 business. This is not a good solution.
Should the ISP be the copyright enforcement agents? Probably not. But there are literally hundreds of other enforcement activities that the ISP needs to be fully on board with. Sometimes this means doing something and other times it is just assisting. Today they are sitting on the sidelines and often as not actively preventing any enforcement activity from occurring.
The primary benefit that record companies provide to the artist today is promotion. Without promotion, most artists will remain in some kind of local niche. A few might get national attention for doing something that gathers lots of publicity - like running through a public park naked or something like that. That is about it.
What people do not understand is the full spectrum of promotion. Kill off the record companies and promotion dies. With it go a lot of magazines that music promotion is supporting. FM Radio is going to change a lot in the US, because it is mostly a music promotion vehicle. I would expect most stations to just give up and shut down. The rest will do something else. They will not be playing popular music.
How far do the tenacles of music promotion go? I don't really know. I suspect that the ripples from ending music promotion will go much further than anyone suspects.
Sorry, but strictly as a risk vs. reward calculation, stealing (er, downloading) music is a really good deal. Free wins out of over pay every time and just about everyone using the Internet is used to the idea of free.
There are even people writing (er, copying from Wikipedia) books about free.
The music "industry" can't embrace "free" because there is no other product, it is all just recorded music. The record companies have never had a big stake in live performances or anything else other than selling recorded music in one form or another. If it is all available for free, then there isn't anything else for them.
I think in today's climate the real question is "would I get caught?" The answer is probably not, which while not deciding the legal status of the matter makes it all right for most people.
It's like speeding. If every single person that exceeded the speed limit got caught there would not be many people speeding. When it is 0.001% of the people exceeding the speed limit getting a ticket, lots of people will speed. Doesn't make it legal, just incredibly unlikely that you will get caught.
The same goes for armed robbery. You stick up a liquor store in a inner city neighborhood and you stand about a 20% chance of getting caught. That is plenty low enough for lots of people, so these sorts of robberys happen all the time. Rob a bank and the odds are more like 99% that you will be caught. Not so many bank robberies when compared to liquor stores is the result.
For most people it is a trade off between risk and reward. The reward of downloading stuff for free is pretty high - think what it would cost to fill up an iPod at $1 a song - and the risk is extremely low. Far, far less than even robbing liquor stores to pay for the songs.
I'd say that if this metric changed, we might see more liquor store robberies to pay for music and movies.
This is one of those issues where you do not want to waste people's time and piss off people trying to do their job.
Sure, it was a low offer to start. But then the whole trial came into being and it became a big dramatic deal with lots of publicity. I don't know what the plantiffs were asking for an award, but in civil trials the jury gets lots of room to decide what they want. The could have decided to award the RIAA $1 and be done with it.
If the defense was done competently, that might have happened. So far, in the two big trials so far there has not been a competent defense and in both cases the defendants have had far less than a strong case of innocence.
So while it might have been $500 to start I am sure the plantiffs were more than happy to let the jury decide what he proper compensation for putting everyone through the trial was to be.
There is nothing in the 5th amendment, much as you would like there to be, that says a person cannot admit guilt. That they do not have to is the point. If someone is stupid enough to say they are guilty, in either criminal or civil court, they are going to reap the rewards of that statement.
What was the proper response to the question being asked? Obviously, it would be the defendant's counsel objecting to the question and the defendant never, ever answering it. Even if material implying the answer would be "yes" has already been put into the record, there is no need to say it. This would seem like a critical point in the defense conduct of the case.
This is the same issue as the murder trial defendant saying he killed the person on the stand when testifying in his own behalf. No, the attorney can't stop it and can't unring the bell. But the whole point of being a defendant is not to say stupid stuff like that on the stand. But murders are convicted every day who do exactly that.
Sure. Statutory damages at $150,000 per act of infringement.
I think Amazon was quite willing to do whatever it took to not get stuck in court with that sort of penalty. 100 people or so? 15 million in damages? Nope, whatever it takes.
Remember, there is no Kindle edition of 1984. It simply isn't offered. Now maybe $15 million would be enough, maybe it might be just the beginning to properly license it for that sort of distribution.
Very hard to implement a rule like this - in general the Administration will not support the teachers. So you can have all the rules you want, they just aren't enforced.
Problem with a Saturday suspension is it punishes the teachers that have to monitor the students just as much. Therefore, it isn't going to happen.
Can't do that anymore - that is abusive and would destroy their self-esteem.
Teachers that ignore the rules get fired and sued. Teacher better have good insurance because the school and teacher's union are both going to leave them hanging.
Heck, the school would probably sue the teacher as well for damaging their reputation.
Of course it is silly - there is no discipline anywhere in American society today. But that is the facts of life.
Children today, especially in inner cities and a lot of afflulent suburbs have been raised to think that rules are for other people, not them. They see their father driving 80 when the speed limit sign says 55. They see their mother trying to get away an a coupon scam at a grocery store. Come April it is all about how much you can hide and get away with on income taxes. Their older brother or sister is downloading music and movies. Don't think the children don't notice this and understand - rules are for other people.
So they go to school and there is a rule against cell phones being turned on. No texting in school. They see someone else texting a friend while taking a test. Well, it's confirmed - rules are for other people.
How exactly do you get children like this to understand a "rule"? It makes no sense to them whatsoever. They go out and get a job and have utterly no comprehension that surfing porn at the office might somehow end up getting them fired. Or stealing from their employer. After all, rules are for other people. They have spent their entire lives being shown over and over that rules do not apply to them.
Rules? Ha. It is currently against the rules to bring guns to school. How many schools have metal detectors to catch guns and knives being brought to school? How many students, in spite of the rules, bring guns anyway? Sorry, like the song says "Up with your rules!"
Until you change that basic philosophy, the only way to do it is a cell phone jammer. Or search the students for cell phones and take the away when one is brought to school. Or confiscate them when they are seen by a teacher. Forget about making rules - only direct action is going to get anywhere.
First off, if 10 people do this, Amazon is going to find out what it really costs, and it isn't $65 or anything close to that.
Secondly, they are't going to do this without some kind of verification. It sounds like someone asked for money and they gave it to them. Great customer service but hardly something they can operate a business on. So unless there is a verifiable way to determine that XP has been irrevocably uninstalled I don't see this happening too much more.
You sir are the exception. For the most part, once one person has purchased a piece of music or a movie it can then be shared infinitely across the planet. There is nothing to prevent this.
Sure, there might still be a few people that aren't sharing everything they bought. But not very many. The RIAA is very correct in being very, very afraid of this because it will put an end to any revenue associated with recorded music or movies. Only live performances will have any value. Just as it was in about 1600.
Why bother trying to educate anyone in this manner? Today in schools it is basically taught by both the teachers and fellow students how to pirate.
Of course, nobody is saying "Psst, this is illegal but you get free stuff this way." It is a lot more like "Look at the cultural riches that are here for the taking, all free." So little Johnny comes home to try out his newfound knowledge of downloading stuff from the Internet. Mommy looks on and smiles happily that her son is so very clever that he knows how to do this. Then she asks him to download some music that she would like as well.
This has been going on in one form or another since 1995. With software it has been going on since 1983. Trying to stop it now is like trying to stop a tsunami with a teacup.
Yes, but none of the really interesting, popular things are licensed that way.
Of course, as pointed out by others, quite a few people just don't understand all the complexity of licensing and law breaking. They see it can be done, can be done very easily and nobody is doing anything to stop them. Therefore, it must be legal. And you get free stuff.
The judge was clearly pissed off that nobody showed up. If you can't make it, you at least have an attorney put in an appearance. When nobody shows up there isn't much you can do and the judge is going to be pissed off. It is like you are questioning the validity of the court.
And that is a really bad beginning to something you would like to win.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are also sites for outing gays. So if someone is gay and they are trying to hide it from their friends, the power of the anonymous Internet is going to ruin their plans, big time.
Can't keep secrets anymore. Especially those that are deemed salacious or hurtful.
Further, today plenty of people are going to trust the blog from Random Joe more than they trust the Picayune Times or some other random ad-laden newspaper web site. So if Random Joe is copying and pasting articles from the Chicago Tribune or the LA Times into his blog there are people that will never notice this because they aren't going to the Chicago Tribune, LA Times or even the Picayune Times web site. Ever. Because they are part of the "corporate media conspiracy".
Of course, all of Random Joe's content is coming from "corporate media conspiracy" web sites.
Google's role in this is it can be used to show me 10 places to read a story with the headline "Man Bites Dog" and if the first nine of these are sites that I distrust and believe are part of the "corporate media conspiracy" I'm not going to go to any of those sites. Instead, Google shows me that Random Joe has pretty much the same story with Random Joe's ads wrapped around it. I'm happy because now I am able to view the news without that nasty bias from the "corporate media conspiracy".
Guess what? Random Joe is never going to get his hand slapped for copyright violation but will indeed end up putting AP out of business in the end. And anyone following the paragraph above is a delusional idiot. But that is how the Internet works today.
When will money-hungry people get a clue and realise more protection wont save your content from being copied. You dont lose money if your content is copied, as most people will still pay if they feel its worth the price for they want original quality content.
Huh? People aren't paying in droves. If something is available for free, it is free as in nobody will ever pay again unless they are uninformed. Uninformed people are keeping the music and movie business going today.
The problem is a piece of software that assumes it is a good idea to automatically configure the software to "share" the contents of an existing folder without user approval.
Let us imagine an application that you install on your computer to send email. Upon installation it assumes that it would be a good idea to send an email to everyone in your address book and attach every file in the "My Documents" folder to these emails. Would this be a good idea? No. Why would implicitly sharing all of the contents of the same folder with the world be any better an idea?
This is the same kind of software idiocy that has permiated the PC world since the first PC came into being. Let's make things easier and simpler for the user, often by doing things that indeed to make things easier and simpler but at the cost of security and confidence in the platform.
You don't seem to get it. We, collectively, have a choice. We can try to put the genii back in the bottle and make sure that nobody ever uses a computer that is not fully qualified to use a computer. By that I mean they know at least one programming language and are fully competent on both the operating system and all of the software on the computer.
Or we can have dumb users.
Sometime, oh around 1982 or so, the "PC revolution" started where one of the main objectives was to pry the computing resources of the world away from the geeks and nerds that controlled access to computers before then. Suddenly, ordinary folks could own and operate a computer. And it didn't matter that they had not a clue what they were doing because this new age of computing was meant to be friendlier. Only it isn't. And we now have social engineering, botnets and spam. Just connecting a computer to the Internet opens the possibility that there is some exposure you don't know about and opening some attachment may compromise your computer.
Well, you got freedom from the geeks and nerds. An instead of having all the programming done by people whos job it was to know what they were doing, you can now do it yourself. If only you knew how.
I do not see a return anytime soon to the idea that a computer without an administrator may as well be turned off. I don't see the general public abandoning general purpose computers for email and web appliances, even though that is what they really want. And even though we would all be much better off if that is what they had.
So we have already made the decision that it isn't the user's fault. It is the software, or the operating system, or the government that needs to be blamed.
You misunderstand. These people are blocking the road with the intent of preventing you and other drivers from speeding.
They are assisting law enforcement.
It's working.
Sure, it is unsafe, creates accidents and is extremely annoying to anyone not in their frame of mind. But if you can't get around them, you aren't speeding. So it works.
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I would think inner-city youths have plenty of exposure to guns and many have experience firing them as well. All sorts of bad gang-banger habits with guns that it requires lots of training to help them overcome. Illegal weapons are very common in cities in the hands of children as young as 10 or 12.
What's illegal about it? Spam may be undesired and unwanted but there are plenty of ways it can be sent legally.
Also, with ISPs not cooperating (much) how many spam convictions have there been? Two or three, maybe. Without the ISPs getting on board, which they are loath to do right now, there can be no enforcement and almost all "enforcement" is vigitante action.
If you want a cell phone that has data rates subsidized by voice charges, you are going to have to live with the carrier blocking ways around voice charges.
If you want a cell phone with data that isn't subsidized in this manner, you aren't going to like the bill. You can get a cell modem for around $60 a month with a 5Gb limit on it. After the first 5Gb the rates go up. This starts to show where the billing is going to go with unsubsidized cell phone data plans.
Today, I have unlimited data at $19.95 with a cell phone. I expect if the data wasn't subsidized by voice charges it would be more like $219.95 a month for something that carried 20-30Gb a month.
Sadly, for the US the only solution is for someone to come in an eliminate the neighborhood nodes. You have X bandwidth to the node and 1000 homes connected to the node. When all 1000 are trying to download music, movies and watch Hulu you have a serious bottleneck that was never completely thought out.
You also have the economic realities of connecting 1000 homes in 500 neighborhoods. They were never going to run a 100Mbit dedicated fiber to each and every single home. They were always going to use some kind of concentrator. That means unless the concentrator has 1000 times the bandwidth that is being sold you aren't getting dedicated bandwidth. In reality, you are unlikely to get a fiber connection to the head end over 500Mb. So if marketing of streaming video succeeds 1000 homes get to divy up 500Mb - an average of 0.5Mb per home.
Works fine when 90% of the customers are web surfing and reading text email. Doesn't work so well when 90% of the customers are watching Hulu or other streaming video services. This isn't really fixable, either because to even get 500Mb you are dealing with 10 OC3 fiber connections (48Mb each). Sure, run an OC3 to each home. The home user will be plenty happy with paying $4K or $5K a month for their Internet connection.
Reality is going to intrude someday. Probably won't be this week.
Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?
Because (a) nobody else wants the job, (b) nobody else can do the job, and (c) the job really, really needs doing.
Wouldn't it be nice if botnet's were declared to be illegal? They aren't for the most part today. And because of that botnet traffic can't really be interfered with. Kicking a clearly infected computer off a network just raises a firestorm of protest because today it is not something that is clearly sanctioned. So small ISPs just watch as a few customers consume the network while saying "Looks like another botnet wave."
Similarly, there is no clear way for law enforcement to proceed when network intrusions occur. Right now the standard pretty much is $25,000 in provable damages. Until you have that, the FBI will not get involved and local law enforcement just passes everything to the FBI. The result is script kiddies get away with everything until the do something "really big", and then law enforcement may step in. May. Sometimes. Especially if the target isn't a Fortune 100 business. This is not a good solution.
Should the ISP be the copyright enforcement agents? Probably not. But there are literally hundreds of other enforcement activities that the ISP needs to be fully on board with. Sometimes this means doing something and other times it is just assisting. Today they are sitting on the sidelines and often as not actively preventing any enforcement activity from occurring.
The primary benefit that record companies provide to the artist today is promotion. Without promotion, most artists will remain in some kind of local niche. A few might get national attention for doing something that gathers lots of publicity - like running through a public park naked or something like that. That is about it.
What people do not understand is the full spectrum of promotion. Kill off the record companies and promotion dies. With it go a lot of magazines that music promotion is supporting. FM Radio is going to change a lot in the US, because it is mostly a music promotion vehicle. I would expect most stations to just give up and shut down. The rest will do something else. They will not be playing popular music.
How far do the tenacles of music promotion go? I don't really know. I suspect that the ripples from ending music promotion will go much further than anyone suspects.
Sorry, but strictly as a risk vs. reward calculation, stealing (er, downloading) music is a really good deal. Free wins out of over pay every time and just about everyone using the Internet is used to the idea of free.
There are even people writing (er, copying from Wikipedia) books about free.
The music "industry" can't embrace "free" because there is no other product, it is all just recorded music. The record companies have never had a big stake in live performances or anything else other than selling recorded music in one form or another. If it is all available for free, then there isn't anything else for them.
I think in today's climate the real question is "would I get caught?" The answer is probably not, which while not deciding the legal status of the matter makes it all right for most people.
It's like speeding. If every single person that exceeded the speed limit got caught there would not be many people speeding. When it is 0.001% of the people exceeding the speed limit getting a ticket, lots of people will speed. Doesn't make it legal, just incredibly unlikely that you will get caught.
The same goes for armed robbery. You stick up a liquor store in a inner city neighborhood and you stand about a 20% chance of getting caught. That is plenty low enough for lots of people, so these sorts of robberys happen all the time. Rob a bank and the odds are more like 99% that you will be caught. Not so many bank robberies when compared to liquor stores is the result.
For most people it is a trade off between risk and reward. The reward of downloading stuff for free is pretty high - think what it would cost to fill up an iPod at $1 a song - and the risk is extremely low. Far, far less than even robbing liquor stores to pay for the songs.
I'd say that if this metric changed, we might see more liquor store robberies to pay for music and movies.
This is one of those issues where you do not want to waste people's time and piss off people trying to do their job.
Sure, it was a low offer to start. But then the whole trial came into being and it became a big dramatic deal with lots of publicity. I don't know what the plantiffs were asking for an award, but in civil trials the jury gets lots of room to decide what they want. The could have decided to award the RIAA $1 and be done with it.
If the defense was done competently, that might have happened. So far, in the two big trials so far there has not been a competent defense and in both cases the defendants have had far less than a strong case of innocence.
So while it might have been $500 to start I am sure the plantiffs were more than happy to let the jury decide what he proper compensation for putting everyone through the trial was to be.
There is nothing in the 5th amendment, much as you would like there to be, that says a person cannot admit guilt. That they do not have to is the point. If someone is stupid enough to say they are guilty, in either criminal or civil court, they are going to reap the rewards of that statement.
What was the proper response to the question being asked? Obviously, it would be the defendant's counsel objecting to the question and the defendant never, ever answering it. Even if material implying the answer would be "yes" has already been put into the record, there is no need to say it.
This would seem like a critical point in the defense conduct of the case.
This is the same issue as the murder trial defendant saying he killed the person on the stand when testifying in his own behalf. No, the attorney can't stop it and can't unring the bell. But the whole point of being a defendant is not to say stupid stuff like that on the stand. But murders are convicted every day who do exactly that.
Sure. Statutory damages at $150,000 per act of infringement.
I think Amazon was quite willing to do whatever it took to not get stuck in court with that sort of penalty. 100 people or so? 15 million in damages? Nope, whatever it takes.
Remember, there is no Kindle edition of 1984. It simply isn't offered. Now maybe $15 million would be enough, maybe it might be just the beginning to properly license it for that sort of distribution.
I am pretty sure Amazon didn't want to find out.
Very hard to implement a rule like this - in general the Administration will not support the teachers. So you can have all the rules you want, they just aren't enforced.
Problem with a Saturday suspension is it punishes the teachers that have to monitor the students just as much. Therefore, it isn't going to happen.
Can't do that anymore - that is abusive and would destroy their self-esteem.
Teachers that ignore the rules get fired and sued. Teacher better have good insurance because the school and teacher's union are both going to leave them hanging.
Heck, the school would probably sue the teacher as well for damaging their reputation.
Of course it is silly - there is no discipline anywhere in American society today. But that is the facts of life.
Children today, especially in inner cities and a lot of afflulent suburbs have been raised to think that rules are for other people, not them. They see their father driving 80 when the speed limit sign says 55. They see their mother trying to get away an a coupon scam at a grocery store. Come April it is all about how much you can hide and get away with on income taxes. Their older brother or sister is downloading music and movies. Don't think the children don't notice this and understand - rules are for other people.
So they go to school and there is a rule against cell phones being turned on. No texting in school. They see someone else texting a friend while taking a test. Well, it's confirmed - rules are for other people.
How exactly do you get children like this to understand a "rule"? It makes no sense to them whatsoever. They go out and get a job and have utterly no comprehension that surfing porn at the office might somehow end up getting them fired. Or stealing from their employer. After all, rules are for other people. They have spent their entire lives being shown over and over that rules do not apply to them.
Rules? Ha. It is currently against the rules to bring guns to school. How many schools have metal detectors to catch guns and knives being brought to school? How many students, in spite of the rules, bring guns anyway? Sorry, like the song says "Up with your rules!"
Until you change that basic philosophy, the only way to do it is a cell phone jammer. Or search the students for cell phones and take the away when one is brought to school. Or confiscate them when they are seen by a teacher. Forget about making rules - only direct action is going to get anywhere.
First off, if 10 people do this, Amazon is going to find out what it really costs, and it isn't $65 or anything close to that.
Secondly, they are't going to do this without some kind of verification. It sounds like someone asked for money and they gave it to them. Great customer service but hardly something they can operate a business on. So unless there is a verifiable way to determine that XP has been irrevocably uninstalled I don't see this happening too much more.
You sir are the exception. For the most part, once one person has purchased a piece of music or a movie it can then be shared infinitely across the planet. There is nothing to prevent this.
Sure, there might still be a few people that aren't sharing everything they bought. But not very many. The RIAA is very correct in being very, very afraid of this because it will put an end to any revenue associated with recorded music or movies. Only live performances will have any value. Just as it was in about 1600.
Why bother trying to educate anyone in this manner? Today in schools it is basically taught by both the teachers and fellow students how to pirate.
Of course, nobody is saying "Psst, this is illegal but you get free stuff this way." It is a lot more like "Look at the cultural riches that are here for the taking, all free." So little Johnny comes home to try out his newfound knowledge of downloading stuff from the Internet. Mommy looks on and smiles happily that her son is so very clever that he knows how to do this. Then she asks him to download some music that she would like as well.
This has been going on in one form or another since 1995. With software it has been going on since 1983. Trying to stop it now is like trying to stop a tsunami with a teacup.
Yes, but none of the really interesting, popular things are licensed that way.
Of course, as pointed out by others, quite a few people just don't understand all the complexity of licensing and law breaking. They see it can be done, can be done very easily and nobody is doing anything to stop them. Therefore, it must be legal. And you get free stuff.
The judge was clearly pissed off that nobody showed up. If you can't make it, you at least have an attorney put in an appearance. When nobody shows up there isn't much you can do and the judge is going to be pissed off. It is like you are questioning the validity of the court.
And that is a really bad beginning to something you would like to win.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are also sites for outing gays. So if someone is gay and they are trying to hide it from their friends, the power of the anonymous Internet is going to ruin their plans, big time.
Can't keep secrets anymore. Especially those that are deemed salacious or hurtful.
Further, today plenty of people are going to trust the blog from Random Joe more than they trust the Picayune Times or some other random ad-laden newspaper web site. So if Random Joe is copying and pasting articles from the Chicago Tribune or the LA Times into his blog there are people that will never notice this because they aren't going to the Chicago Tribune, LA Times or even the Picayune Times web site. Ever. Because they are part of the "corporate media conspiracy".
Of course, all of Random Joe's content is coming from "corporate media conspiracy" web sites.
Google's role in this is it can be used to show me 10 places to read a story with the headline "Man Bites Dog" and if the first nine of these are sites that I distrust and believe are part of the "corporate media conspiracy" I'm not going to go to any of those sites. Instead, Google shows me that Random Joe has pretty much the same story with Random Joe's ads wrapped around it. I'm happy because now I am able to view the news without that nasty bias from the "corporate media conspiracy".
Guess what? Random Joe is never going to get his hand slapped for copyright violation but will indeed end up putting AP out of business in the end. And anyone following the paragraph above is a delusional idiot. But that is how the Internet works today.
When will money-hungry people get a clue and realise more protection wont save your content from being copied. You dont lose money if your content is copied, as most people will still pay if they feel its worth the price for they want original quality content.
Huh? People aren't paying in droves. If something is available for free, it is free as in nobody will ever pay again unless they are uninformed. Uninformed people are keeping the music and movie business going today.
Free will always win out in the end.
The problem is a piece of software that assumes it is a good idea to automatically configure the software to "share" the contents of an existing folder without user approval.
Let us imagine an application that you install on your computer to send email. Upon installation it assumes that it would be a good idea to send an email to everyone in your address book and attach every file in the "My Documents" folder to these emails. Would this be a good idea? No. Why would implicitly sharing all of the contents of the same folder with the world be any better an idea?
This is the same kind of software idiocy that has permiated the PC world since the first PC came into being. Let's make things easier and simpler for the user, often by doing things that indeed to make things easier and simpler but at the cost of security and confidence in the platform.
You don't seem to get it. We, collectively, have a choice. We can try to put the genii back in the bottle and make sure that nobody ever uses a computer that is not fully qualified to use a computer. By that I mean they know at least one programming language and are fully competent on both the operating system and all of the software on the computer.
Or we can have dumb users.
Sometime, oh around 1982 or so, the "PC revolution" started where one of the main objectives was to pry the computing resources of the world away from the geeks and nerds that controlled access to computers before then. Suddenly, ordinary folks could own and operate a computer. And it didn't matter that they had not a clue what they were doing because this new age of computing was meant to be friendlier. Only it isn't. And we now have social engineering, botnets and spam. Just connecting a computer to the Internet opens the possibility that there is some exposure you don't know about and opening some attachment may compromise your computer.
Well, you got freedom from the geeks and nerds. An instead of having all the programming done by people whos job it was to know what they were doing, you can now do it yourself. If only you knew how.
I do not see a return anytime soon to the idea that a computer without an administrator may as well be turned off. I don't see the general public abandoning general purpose computers for email and web appliances, even though that is what they really want. And even though we would all be much better off if that is what they had.
So we have already made the decision that it isn't the user's fault. It is the software, or the operating system, or the government that needs to be blamed.
You misunderstand. These people are blocking the road with the intent of preventing you and other drivers from speeding.
They are assisting law enforcement.
It's working.
Sure, it is unsafe, creates accidents and is extremely annoying to anyone not in their frame of mind. But if you can't get around them, you aren't speeding. So it works.