Indeed, if the 'compatibility' issue was the signal sent when the hacker refused to run the content, what's to stop him from sacrificing a spare box to catching (DL and physically disconnect) the thing and prodding it? As amusing as that may be, it aught to be interesting to watch virus wars from a distance.
You may be right on capitalism being a good driving force of economies, the problem is min/maxing.
Think about it this way: without [crock]"socialist"[/crock] services like minimum wage, minimizing help to the people that run your industry and maximizing personal gain leads to tipping points like the riots of the 1920s. Industry leaders were dead set against minimum wage, if anyone recalls, and they still cry when it goes up to (hardly) match cost of living increases. You can't have a single blind pipe-vision concept of wealth concentration run amok without its weakness becoming so glaring that peasants can stop it.
To those who would argue otherwise, I say we're all in this together, and though some may know how to make people do work, they themselves would be worthless if their deeds pushed all their allies away. So suck it up, personal gain isn't the only thing you have to worry about.
Business as usual includes systematic behavior of the government passing itself off as a democracy, but publicly holds its structure as a republic, and privately runs post-election decisions as a plutocracy.
People see this behavior as corruption, when in reality it's the logical extreme result of individualistic culture in a republic.
Before you reflexively mark me a troll for suggesting such a thing, think this through: The bottle-neck, or choke-point for decision-making in republics lies in the representatives, who in addition to having 'constituents' from their home region, are promoted to those constituents by large profit centers. Should the promotion money dry up, a position of power is now likely under threat, your very livelihood could vanish at the whims of some 'rich' individual(s). In the interest of living life easier rather than harder election year to election year, politicians make sacrifices of their constituents' interests for the profit center's interest, or as they put it in Washington, the 'hard' choices behind legislation. I doubt this is done consciously (in most cases), and certainly it is never articulated like this, but this does happen.
There's ways to fix it, but none (so far) are easy, and nearly all involve subcultures who aren't individualistic in their behavior. The incumbent system is not friendly to such radical change, so either people will put up or get fed up. Hopefully the fed up ones will be smart, and not get arrested for insurrection, but instead start their project outside the US to foster new values.
Sure, the wording there from your citation is also important: two thirds of the senators present. If ACTA gets drafted, the 'on-board' senators will simply schedule a weekend or holiday session quietly and hope no one notices. Once in session, even if there's only 3 of them, they could call the vote unanimous of senators present. The treaty portion you quoted simply needs to be re-worded as follows to fix this:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the elected Senators concur;
Treaties are a big deal, and cannot be treated with enough seriousness for any country. If this loophole isn't fixed, you can literally kiss your virtual rights goodbye as corporate interests move to change our world to favor their greed and desire for control. Really, people, wake up.
Yes, this should be the way it falls out, but as has been mentioned, law lags WELL behind technology. FAT was allowed to be used with no consequence, a consequence of expecting people to use the platform you provided. MS didn't license the use of fat to every software developer that ever had to write a save function. If it did, the software industry today might be stuck somewhere in the early 90s, and MS would have killed itself by scaring away the good developers from wanting to write anything, and the corps away from overly complex domain intersections of legal and software before the business world was ready to consider such things.
Now that EULAs are a mainstay in business practice (and some trying to write them to override right of first sale), MS can easily pursue this line of legal action because it was 'always' their prerogative to do so. MS doesn't do things because they are right, they do them because the legal landscape permits them to. Now that they have monopolistic leverage and billions stored up in cash and assets, getting rulings against these actions is going to be difficult to say the least.
My suggestion would be to leverage the free software market to leverage the online community to sign or write for action requests and send them all to the appropriate geomapped governor/senator emails AS they roll into the servers. Microsoft wants to play hardball with lobbyists? Why not turn the entire 'net into a giant lobbyist machine with auto-forwards to elected emails? MS's consumer base is easily larger than any lobbyist base it could buy. Why can't we show officials, in this manner or something similar, that the paths MS has been pursuing and the lobbyists it hires are NOT in the democratic interests?
Has Nintendo ever considered that getting feedback on their recent crap might illuminate why people make the price zero? Renting is probably the best try-before-you-buy that you can legally get, and even if Nintendo makes % on that, the crap will always become much slower in making money, and the good stuff will result in a fresh sale.
I broke away from the Nintendo addiction I acquired as a kid, and have come to view them now as every other mega-corp. That is to say, yes, people need to eat, and money is what the food chain demands, but if your company is sitting on billions in excess (profit) each year, some 'lost revenue' for an easy, less costly try-before-you-buy system cannot be justifiably contested with such zeal. Not everyone does it, or company X would have been broke on the street. Take your profits, be happy.
The small game publisher who goes hungry from piracy activity gets my sympathy, companies making good profit despite piracy don't. And I'll tell you why: No one's, not even Nintendo's, market base is saturated with enough technical savvy to pull off a total piracy saturation. Anyone who's sought instructions on a Pandora battery knows this. Lop-sided? Yeah, but the tax system (as well as many other people/institutions) in America would treat them no differently; make more money, pay more of a share to support your consumers as a large group (country).
You make quite a few assumptions in your last statement. There are still MANY consumers here who just use IE because it came with the computer and it works well enough, AND have never heard that there are alternatives, let alone what firefox is.
As to your first comment, people have pointed out the competition angle, but consider also that when you connect to some site, your browser type is transmitted. Being the dominant search engine on the web, Google is in an excellent position to present statistical usage data across unique locations (look at it by MAC address). So, not only does it help Google, but they are now in a position to take a direct stab at the company that inspired their 'Do no evil' slogan. Now, whether this action is construed as evil on Google's part or not is up to the public, but at this point I look at it like the breaking point between two giants, and war is going to erupt.
Think about something like this plugged into hyperlocal shopping indexes. It would finally drive prices through the floor as you could have 2, 3, or 50 of these things doing your shopping for you, consulting your list of barred outlets/products, and choosing the cheapest of all your shopping list from the rest. The trade-off for most bargain hunters was often the time aspect of running to many stores, but something like this with a decent navigation software bundle could change that.
You are referring to 1st world countries, aren't you? Yeah, I'm sure the Congalese patrols (of either flavor) would love to put foreigners through all sorts of crap just for being there, but that should not compare with the inconvenience of casual border crossers from Canada being turned away (creating HUGE problems in Niagara/Buffalo) because the site didn't work on their blackberry, or they forgot to before they left home, or other such things. This will all but wipe out casual baby boomer border trade - half of them don't own a computer themselves let alone know how to follow these new rules about a website. Major ports bordering southern Ontario will see dramatic hits in commerce when this starts to be enforced, and may see a small recovery after that hickup, but after the first two years another big hit will occur as a portion of boomers throw up their hands and say it's not worth it to renew.
Classic indeed. I think the business administration community has heard enough about this, however. I know someone who recently got her bachelors in business management, and I was kind of skimming along on her materials. Turns out this is one of the pitfalls of systems meant to test honesty - the problem becomes that humans who aren't paying attention often aren't thinking exactly like the PhD's of psychology thought they would when the generic test was constructed, and the rest will probe the machine and become smarter than the tool.
Instead, the course material pointed to the value of tests like Myers-Biggs, and hiring to positions that fit personality types to avoid workplace pressure, things like the outgoing creative thinker in a technical sales position or the introverted linear thinker in places like QA.
You can't yet test honesty with a computer program unless there are stakes, and by the time there are stakes, you're already getting gamed by the dishonest people. There may be a solution for this in the future, but for now, the system is being gamed.
My wife works at a company with that implemented, and it works out relatively well except for going in early (45 minute commute). We're done dinner by 6:30 most days, she misses most of the bulk of traffic by about 20 minutes in the evening, and the off Fridays are great for getting in extra errands to places that maintain similar hours to when we work, like our banks.
The downside is she gets up at 5:15 every morning and gets into work at about 6:45, to leave around 4 and miss traffic. But she's gotten used to it now and enjoys the Fridays off.
I agree, but I'm not holding my breath. Several months ago I sent a scathing letter to Nintendo customer service as I felt I got the short end of the stick by a long shot by purchasing a Wii. The avoidance of "bundles of mini-games" would be a very welcome change to this hardcore gamer.
A quick run down of my letter is I outlined my number of nintendo purchases over the years and the fraction of those that I felt were worth the time and money. It went from 50/70 for the original gameboy to 11/30 for the Wii. I let them know that they lost my priceless customer loyalty. I'll return to a cold-hard analysis against their competitors for the next generation.
You realize how many corps might be vulnerable to serious interruptions if it was revealed that providing the source code for something they were using was required? I'm missing the link to the specific story at the moment, but I recall something about a DMCA takedown notice being issued to a firm associated with the RIAA for this very issue.
If that happened, it would likely be one of the fastest-overturned pieces of legislation in human history.
This is the first time I've delved into why Delaware was a 'sweet spot', so bear with me...
So lemme get this straight, you incorporate in DE, operate a studio in CA, have lawyers run 'rights to duplicate' licenses to CD-stampers, and get away scott free because you're not franchising additional locations, fund a few managers, trips, aired interviews, and habits, completely disregard the wishes of shareholders who are giving you their money, and reap EVERYTHING ELSE as profit?
Surely I'm not the first one to look at this and think DE isn't a corporate haven, but a CON ARTIST haven? If this industry follows corporate trend and asks for a bailout because CDs get faded out, I hope they get LAUGHED out of the chamber!
Someone please correct me if I've terribly over-simplified and missed some critical detail that makes this scenario not look like the one-sided legal railgun it seems.
When I first read the headline, I dismissed it out of hand in my head. "What," I thought, "could they have possibly expected, to have a defense system up around the entire solar system already?" Then I got over my cynicism and read the article. The guy is speculating wildly. He needs to talk to a chemist and an astrophysicist, as he is posing these chemical theories as questions in the interview.
Though, if we're all speculating about the weirdness of this 'alien' comet, perhaps this is the reason the Mayan calendar ends in 2012? Or maybe it was just a great work that took forever to compile by hand.
The main difference between then and now is that common people who would otherwise have no clue about what went on now have access to the discrepancies, and other peoples' interpretations and compilations of them. Sure, no one in America loved the Japanese immediately after Perl Harbor, but most of them also weren't aware of the economic warfare that was going on leading up to the attack, so they felt vindicated in ripping the constitution when it came to the Japanese Americans. It was controlled ignorance. It's much harder to do these days.
On a slightly scary, related note, now that we have a President-Elect who built his campaign using the internet, and who was able to control leaks so tightly that no one outside the circle knew who was being talked about for appointments, what else might he be able to hide under his hat? I'm a mild fan of his, barring the FISA vote, but the ability to direct his staff with such precision on information policy might not bode well if he has a shady agenda. I suggest we watch closely and listen where we can.
Everyone wants to make a buck. If we start with arguments like this about non-copyright holders not worth the cash, we will start to see the creep of legislation to "protect the retailers" from "unscrupulous pirates who would deny legitimate holders of copyrighted inventory their right to profit from that stock." Ridiculous? Outlandish? Wait for it, I'm sure it'll pop up somewhere eventually.
Can you imagine the upset, but also windfall profits that could be made if we patent the mixing of a drink? Surely there's some patent officer dumb enough to use McDonalds as a precedent and grant a method and apparatus for mixing a drink, applying appropriate shots to appropriate glasses? Then, imagine all the bars we could sweep into and take over by threat of litigation! So who's with me?[/sarcasm]
Quite right. I remember working in the call center for a large pizza chain years ago and they were using a really old ansi-display terminal, which had enforcement code for simultaneous connections, for access to some back-end, which was also accessable to a limited degree by a newer windows-based interface for the normal agents. When I finally found someone who could explain why without making crap up, it was explained that they were maintaining both because of an old license still being held on the back-end, and the ansi-interface. The company, in the interest of wanting out of two expensive license contracts was developing their own interface at HQ, and supposedly also their own back-end. It was suddenly clear how sometimes orders could get lost when entered in the new, default program.
On that note, Sears is also paying hefty licensing fees on ansi-interface software, yet they're still afloat. For a company like that, the cost of change is greater than the savings on training a new interface would provide.
Copyright was created as a bridge between creators and the market to promote progress. It has mutated into a troll that prevents progress. Copyright is now a monster that must be slain.
Preaching to the choir here, though that is a great way to put the current situation. Too bad it will likely take quite a lot more abuse before it starts making sense to the rest of society.
Well, there's not much question that the big media companies are little more than international rogue organizations. They're causing damage to legal systems, corporations and individuals around the world. At some point, there are going to have to be international treaties banning such "industry trade organizations", at least the kind that like to sue everyone and corrupt governments.
A blanket ban isn't likely to even be mentioned from an official body, as union legal watchdogs would cry foul because it suddenly includes their organizations, and they would likely cite other big organizations that do good work such as ASPAC. However, some heavy hitters in US law have been showing signs of wearypatience towards the RIAA's pursuits. What may end up happening is a revamping of legal structure to finally adjust to the culture, but it's still unlikely to make these sorts of actions completely legally impossible.
And as for what this really is, it's just an extension of cost/benefit analysis when applied to legal structure and power around the world, much like it was applied to labor laws and relative currency value that gave rise to sweat shops overseas. The problem with trying this sort of BS, is that it IS highly public, and if it goes sour, you can bet more than North American eyes in power will raise an eyebrow and wonder why it didn't work.
"Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
Enough is enough. The demand factors that will go into this "commercialization" will put this out of reach of many who would seek it, despite success rates of these transplants. As if HIV wasn't a death sentence in today's world. While this isn't an end-all, be-all cure against the disease (Mod parent up Informative!), "commercialization" only puts procedures like this out of reach for people in both high-density population areas, and areas of high infection rates, like urban centers in South Africa and its neighbors. The Previous Poster was right about how it would be valued - "Naturally-resistant bone marrow is probably worth what, about 5 million dollars per gram?" This is unacceptable to curb populace infection densities.
You're right about the US military. While armed conflict is something to avoid, the US lost position as major power when they started keeping manned bases in previous enemy states like Japan. Lots of things got people galvanized to join the volunteer force over the years, but their resources are still spread. Sure, the US could draw in all those forces to redirect priorities, but considering lots of places could have an eye on force movement (including any state that can reach orbit), the 'secret' consolidation wouldn't remain that way for long. While the armed forces do have procedures to try and dodge such surveillance, no method is immune to being seen through.
You're right about the Chinese holding IOUs...What's to stop a newly capitalist China from wrapping up national debt from the USA into a collateral package to sell to a 3rd party for favors, influence, or labor? We might see more money flowing to African countries in the future without anything in return (because we already got something for it) if those IOUs are used and cashed in this manner. It's what caused a collapse in the housing sector, but international officers aren't likely to accept "we're broke" as an answer from a major commerce power.
The second this gets marketed to the world, IBM will 'sell' content of a back-end that will contain lists and assignments. Migration becomes a concern here. Some middle-eastern names that are perfectly masculine or feminine there can easily be mistaken for their opposite in the USA.
Besides that, I have not read the patent, but couldn't this just be a simple lookup similar to SELECT GenderIconHash FROM Names WHERE Name LIKE UserFirstName? Can they seriously expect to win patent lawsuits against a single line of SQL generated by someone who isn't even a real DBA?!
You're right, that's the spin term we should use for this:
From the Dictionary: Democracy: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. Republic: a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.::Note that this definition is sewn into "democracy".:: Plutocracy: a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.
Not in the dictionary: "American Democracy" : A republic celebrated as a democracy in public which operates in the background as a plutocracy to 'fund' the political process.
Permanent magnets are based on a local effect in each atom that makes electron orbits spin around a particular axis, when taken as a net effect across millions of atoms, you have a magnetic field whose net force on ferro- and ferri-magnetic materials seems to defy the difficult to measure current around each atom. (unless you're looking at X-Ray microscopy)
As for 'theoretical' or 'imaginary' lines, neither applies. Everything from your digital wrist watch to slashdot's servers depend on, exploit, and sometimes must be designed to account for the magnetic forces of permanent and electro-magnets. Hell, we were using the 'imaginary' lines of force for navigation as early as the 3rd centuryB.C.! The lines they are talking about are quite real, so 'practical' is the word I would choose to describe them.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, if the 'compatibility' issue was the signal sent when the hacker refused to run the content, what's to stop him from sacrificing a spare box to catching (DL and physically disconnect) the thing and prodding it? As amusing as that may be, it aught to be interesting to watch virus wars from a distance.
You may be right on capitalism being a good driving force of economies, the problem is min/maxing.
Think about it this way: without [crock]"socialist"[/crock] services like minimum wage, minimizing help to the people that run your industry and maximizing personal gain leads to tipping points like the riots of the 1920s. Industry leaders were dead set against minimum wage, if anyone recalls, and they still cry when it goes up to (hardly) match cost of living increases. You can't have a single blind pipe-vision concept of wealth concentration run amok without its weakness becoming so glaring that peasants can stop it.
To those who would argue otherwise, I say we're all in this together, and though some may know how to make people do work, they themselves would be worthless if their deeds pushed all their allies away. So suck it up, personal gain isn't the only thing you have to worry about.
Business as usual includes systematic behavior of the government passing itself off as a democracy, but publicly holds its structure as a republic, and privately runs post-election decisions as a plutocracy.
People see this behavior as corruption, when in reality it's the logical extreme result of individualistic culture in a republic.
Before you reflexively mark me a troll for suggesting such a thing, think this through: The bottle-neck, or choke-point for decision-making in republics lies in the representatives, who in addition to having 'constituents' from their home region, are promoted to those constituents by large profit centers. Should the promotion money dry up, a position of power is now likely under threat, your very livelihood could vanish at the whims of some 'rich' individual(s). In the interest of living life easier rather than harder election year to election year, politicians make sacrifices of their constituents' interests for the profit center's interest, or as they put it in Washington, the 'hard' choices behind legislation. I doubt this is done consciously (in most cases), and certainly it is never articulated like this, but this does happen.
There's ways to fix it, but none (so far) are easy, and nearly all involve subcultures who aren't individualistic in their behavior. The incumbent system is not friendly to such radical change, so either people will put up or get fed up. Hopefully the fed up ones will be smart, and not get arrested for insurrection, but instead start their project outside the US to foster new values.
Sure, the wording there from your citation is also important: two thirds of the senators present. If ACTA gets drafted, the 'on-board' senators will simply schedule a weekend or holiday session quietly and hope no one notices. Once in session, even if there's only 3 of them, they could call the vote unanimous of senators present. The treaty portion you quoted simply needs to be re-worded as follows to fix this:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the elected Senators concur;
Treaties are a big deal, and cannot be treated with enough seriousness for any country. If this loophole isn't fixed, you can literally kiss your virtual rights goodbye as corporate interests move to change our world to favor their greed and desire for control. Really, people, wake up.
Yes, this should be the way it falls out, but as has been mentioned, law lags WELL behind technology. FAT was allowed to be used with no consequence, a consequence of expecting people to use the platform you provided. MS didn't license the use of fat to every software developer that ever had to write a save function. If it did, the software industry today might be stuck somewhere in the early 90s, and MS would have killed itself by scaring away the good developers from wanting to write anything, and the corps away from overly complex domain intersections of legal and software before the business world was ready to consider such things.
Now that EULAs are a mainstay in business practice (and some trying to write them to override right of first sale), MS can easily pursue this line of legal action because it was 'always' their prerogative to do so. MS doesn't do things because they are right, they do them because the legal landscape permits them to. Now that they have monopolistic leverage and billions stored up in cash and assets, getting rulings against these actions is going to be difficult to say the least.
My suggestion would be to leverage the free software market to leverage the online community to sign or write for action requests and send them all to the appropriate geomapped governor/senator emails AS they roll into the servers. Microsoft wants to play hardball with lobbyists? Why not turn the entire 'net into a giant lobbyist machine with auto-forwards to elected emails? MS's consumer base is easily larger than any lobbyist base it could buy. Why can't we show officials, in this manner or something similar, that the paths MS has been pursuing and the lobbyists it hires are NOT in the democratic interests?
Has Nintendo ever considered that getting feedback on their recent crap might illuminate why people make the price zero? Renting is probably the best try-before-you-buy that you can legally get, and even if Nintendo makes % on that, the crap will always become much slower in making money, and the good stuff will result in a fresh sale.
I broke away from the Nintendo addiction I acquired as a kid, and have come to view them now as every other mega-corp. That is to say, yes, people need to eat, and money is what the food chain demands, but if your company is sitting on billions in excess (profit) each year, some 'lost revenue' for an easy, less costly try-before-you-buy system cannot be justifiably contested with such zeal. Not everyone does it, or company X would have been broke on the street. Take your profits, be happy.
The small game publisher who goes hungry from piracy activity gets my sympathy, companies making good profit despite piracy don't. And I'll tell you why: No one's, not even Nintendo's, market base is saturated with enough technical savvy to pull off a total piracy saturation. Anyone who's sought instructions on a Pandora battery knows this. Lop-sided? Yeah, but the tax system (as well as many other people/institutions) in America would treat them no differently; make more money, pay more of a share to support your consumers as a large group (country).
You make quite a few assumptions in your last statement. There are still MANY consumers here who just use IE because it came with the computer and it works well enough, AND have never heard that there are alternatives, let alone what firefox is.
As to your first comment, people have pointed out the competition angle, but consider also that when you connect to some site, your browser type is transmitted. Being the dominant search engine on the web, Google is in an excellent position to present statistical usage data across unique locations (look at it by MAC address). So, not only does it help Google, but they are now in a position to take a direct stab at the company that inspired their 'Do no evil' slogan. Now, whether this action is construed as evil on Google's part or not is up to the public, but at this point I look at it like the breaking point between two giants, and war is going to erupt.
Think about something like this plugged into hyperlocal shopping indexes. It would finally drive prices through the floor as you could have 2, 3, or 50 of these things doing your shopping for you, consulting your list of barred outlets/products, and choosing the cheapest of all your shopping list from the rest. The trade-off for most bargain hunters was often the time aspect of running to many stores, but something like this with a decent navigation software bundle could change that.
You are referring to 1st world countries, aren't you? Yeah, I'm sure the Congalese patrols (of either flavor) would love to put foreigners through all sorts of crap just for being there, but that should not compare with the inconvenience of casual border crossers from Canada being turned away (creating HUGE problems in Niagara/Buffalo) because the site didn't work on their blackberry, or they forgot to before they left home, or other such things. This will all but wipe out casual baby boomer border trade - half of them don't own a computer themselves let alone know how to follow these new rules about a website. Major ports bordering southern Ontario will see dramatic hits in commerce when this starts to be enforced, and may see a small recovery after that hickup, but after the first two years another big hit will occur as a portion of boomers throw up their hands and say it's not worth it to renew.
Surely someone else sees this?
Instead, the course material pointed to the value of tests like Myers-Biggs, and hiring to positions that fit personality types to avoid workplace pressure, things like the outgoing creative thinker in a technical sales position or the introverted linear thinker in places like QA.
You can't yet test honesty with a computer program unless there are stakes, and by the time there are stakes, you're already getting gamed by the dishonest people. There may be a solution for this in the future, but for now, the system is being gamed.
My wife works at a company with that implemented, and it works out relatively well except for going in early (45 minute commute). We're done dinner by 6:30 most days, she misses most of the bulk of traffic by about 20 minutes in the evening, and the off Fridays are great for getting in extra errands to places that maintain similar hours to when we work, like our banks.
The downside is she gets up at 5:15 every morning and gets into work at about 6:45, to leave around 4 and miss traffic. But she's gotten used to it now and enjoys the Fridays off.
I agree, but I'm not holding my breath. Several months ago I sent a scathing letter to Nintendo customer service as I felt I got the short end of the stick by a long shot by purchasing a Wii. The avoidance of "bundles of mini-games" would be a very welcome change to this hardcore gamer.
A quick run down of my letter is I outlined my number of nintendo purchases over the years and the fraction of those that I felt were worth the time and money. It went from 50/70 for the original gameboy to 11/30 for the Wii. I let them know that they lost my priceless customer loyalty. I'll return to a cold-hard analysis against their competitors for the next generation.
You realize how many corps might be vulnerable to serious interruptions if it was revealed that providing the source code for something they were using was required? I'm missing the link to the specific story at the moment, but I recall something about a DMCA takedown notice being issued to a firm associated with the RIAA for this very issue.
If that happened, it would likely be one of the fastest-overturned pieces of legislation in human history.
This is the first time I've delved into why Delaware was a 'sweet spot', so bear with me...
So lemme get this straight, you incorporate in DE, operate a studio in CA, have lawyers run 'rights to duplicate' licenses to CD-stampers, and get away scott free because you're not franchising additional locations, fund a few managers, trips, aired interviews, and habits, completely disregard the wishes of shareholders who are giving you their money, and reap EVERYTHING ELSE as profit?
Surely I'm not the first one to look at this and think DE isn't a corporate haven, but a CON ARTIST haven? If this industry follows corporate trend and asks for a bailout because CDs get faded out, I hope they get LAUGHED out of the chamber!
Someone please correct me if I've terribly over-simplified and missed some critical detail that makes this scenario not look like the one-sided legal railgun it seems.
When I first read the headline, I dismissed it out of hand in my head. "What," I thought, "could they have possibly expected, to have a defense system up around the entire solar system already?" Then I got over my cynicism and read the article. The guy is speculating wildly. He needs to talk to a chemist and an astrophysicist, as he is posing these chemical theories as questions in the interview.
Though, if we're all speculating about the weirdness of this 'alien' comet, perhaps this is the reason the Mayan calendar ends in 2012? Or maybe it was just a great work that took forever to compile by hand.
The main difference between then and now is that common people who would otherwise have no clue about what went on now have access to the discrepancies, and other peoples' interpretations and compilations of them. Sure, no one in America loved the Japanese immediately after Perl Harbor, but most of them also weren't aware of the economic warfare that was going on leading up to the attack, so they felt vindicated in ripping the constitution when it came to the Japanese Americans. It was controlled ignorance. It's much harder to do these days.
On a slightly scary, related note, now that we have a President-Elect who built his campaign using the internet, and who was able to control leaks so tightly that no one outside the circle knew who was being talked about for appointments, what else might he be able to hide under his hat? I'm a mild fan of his, barring the FISA vote, but the ability to direct his staff with such precision on information policy might not bode well if he has a shady agenda. I suggest we watch closely and listen where we can.
Everyone wants to make a buck. If we start with arguments like this about non-copyright holders not worth the cash, we will start to see the creep of legislation to "protect the retailers" from "unscrupulous pirates who would deny legitimate holders of copyrighted inventory their right to profit from that stock." Ridiculous? Outlandish? Wait for it, I'm sure it'll pop up somewhere eventually.
In the mean time, stay off the radar.
Can you imagine the upset, but also windfall profits that could be made if we patent the mixing of a drink? Surely there's some patent officer dumb enough to use McDonalds as a precedent and grant a method and apparatus for mixing a drink, applying appropriate shots to appropriate glasses? Then, imagine all the bars we could sweep into and take over by threat of litigation! So who's with me?[/sarcasm]
Quite right. I remember working in the call center for a large pizza chain years ago and they were using a really old ansi-display terminal, which had enforcement code for simultaneous connections, for access to some back-end, which was also accessable to a limited degree by a newer windows-based interface for the normal agents. When I finally found someone who could explain why without making crap up, it was explained that they were maintaining both because of an old license still being held on the back-end, and the ansi-interface. The company, in the interest of wanting out of two expensive license contracts was developing their own interface at HQ, and supposedly also their own back-end. It was suddenly clear how sometimes orders could get lost when entered in the new, default program.
On that note, Sears is also paying hefty licensing fees on ansi-interface software, yet they're still afloat. For a company like that, the cost of change is greater than the savings on training a new interface would provide.
Copyright was created as a bridge between creators and the market to promote progress. It has mutated into a troll that prevents progress. Copyright is now a monster that must be slain.
Preaching to the choir here, though that is a great way to put the current situation. Too bad it will likely take quite a lot more abuse before it starts making sense to the rest of society.
Well, there's not much question that the big media companies are little more than international rogue organizations. They're causing damage to legal systems, corporations and individuals around the world. At some point, there are going to have to be international treaties banning such "industry trade organizations", at least the kind that like to sue everyone and corrupt governments.
A blanket ban isn't likely to even be mentioned from an official body, as union legal watchdogs would cry foul because it suddenly includes their organizations, and they would likely cite other big organizations that do good work such as ASPAC. However, some heavy hitters in US law have been showing signs of weary patience towards the RIAA's pursuits. What may end up happening is a revamping of legal structure to finally adjust to the culture, but it's still unlikely to make these sorts of actions completely legally impossible.
And as for what this really is, it's just an extension of cost/benefit analysis when applied to legal structure and power around the world, much like it was applied to labor laws and relative currency value that gave rise to sweat shops overseas. The problem with trying this sort of BS, is that it IS highly public, and if it goes sour, you can bet more than North American eyes in power will raise an eyebrow and wonder why it didn't work.
"Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
Enough is enough. The demand factors that will go into this "commercialization" will put this out of reach of many who would seek it, despite success rates of these transplants. As if HIV wasn't a death sentence in today's world. While this isn't an end-all, be-all cure against the disease (Mod parent up Informative!), "commercialization" only puts procedures like this out of reach for people in both high-density population areas, and areas of high infection rates, like urban centers in South Africa and its neighbors. The Previous Poster was right about how it would be valued - "Naturally-resistant bone marrow is probably worth what, about 5 million dollars per gram?" This is unacceptable to curb populace infection densities.
You're right about the US military. While armed conflict is something to avoid, the US lost position as major power when they started keeping manned bases in previous enemy states like Japan. Lots of things got people galvanized to join the volunteer force over the years, but their resources are still spread. Sure, the US could draw in all those forces to redirect priorities, but considering lots of places could have an eye on force movement (including any state that can reach orbit), the 'secret' consolidation wouldn't remain that way for long. While the armed forces do have procedures to try and dodge such surveillance, no method is immune to being seen through.
You're right about the Chinese holding IOUs...What's to stop a newly capitalist China from wrapping up national debt from the USA into a collateral package to sell to a 3rd party for favors, influence, or labor? We might see more money flowing to African countries in the future without anything in return (because we already got something for it) if those IOUs are used and cashed in this manner. It's what caused a collapse in the housing sector, but international officers aren't likely to accept "we're broke" as an answer from a major commerce power.
The second this gets marketed to the world, IBM will 'sell' content of a back-end that will contain lists and assignments. Migration becomes a concern here. Some middle-eastern names that are perfectly masculine or feminine there can easily be mistaken for their opposite in the USA.
Besides that, I have not read the patent, but couldn't this just be a simple lookup similar to SELECT GenderIconHash FROM Names WHERE Name LIKE UserFirstName? Can they seriously expect to win patent lawsuits against a single line of SQL generated by someone who isn't even a real DBA?!
You're right, that's the spin term we should use for this:
::Note that this definition is sewn into "democracy".::
From the Dictionary:
Democracy: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
Republic: a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
Plutocracy: a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.
Not in the dictionary:
"American Democracy" : A republic celebrated as a democracy in public which operates in the background as a plutocracy to 'fund' the political process.
Permanent magnets are based on a local effect in each atom that makes electron orbits spin around a particular axis, when taken as a net effect across millions of atoms, you have a magnetic field whose net force on ferro- and ferri-magnetic materials seems to defy the difficult to measure current around each atom. (unless you're looking at X-Ray microscopy)
As for 'theoretical' or 'imaginary' lines, neither applies. Everything from your digital wrist watch to slashdot's servers depend on, exploit, and sometimes must be designed to account for the magnetic forces of permanent and electro-magnets. Hell, we were using the 'imaginary' lines of force for navigation as early as the 3rd century B.C.! The lines they are talking about are quite real, so 'practical' is the word I would choose to describe them.