Please, read the actual bill. It says you must reach 500 people AND make $100,000 working as a paid shill. Not OR!!!
Please don't link to a propaganda piece by a professional conservative lobbyist and claim it to be equal evidence to the above cited UCLA law professor and the above cited Orginal Bill. Payment and Reach were considered separately in the bill. Why don't you read the actual bill, and see if that alleviates your concerns.
Perhaps you should actually read the bill*. Note that the part labelled "definitions", a "grassroots lobbying firm" is defined as someone who "is retained by 1 or more clients to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of such clients; and receives income of, or spends or agrees to spend, an aggregate of $25,000 or more for such efforts in any quarterly period."
The "500 person" rule you're concerned about describes the action of influencing, not the influencer. Specifically: "The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public."
To be affected, you must be all three of these:
An Astroturfer with 1 or more clients
Reaching 500 people
Being paid $100,000 a year
So if you're a regular blogger, you likely are safe.
*=if that doesn't work, search for S.1 on thomas.loc.gov
Ok, but that's a non-unique argument. If government search standards are as low as you describe, there are dozens, if not hundreds of laws or regulations law enforcement could already use as an excuse to harass you. The issue in your scenario is the lax requirements for warrants, not the lobbyist law.
This is not a freedom of the press issue. This would have required bloggers who receive money from causes to file as lobbyists. As CNet puts it:
certain political bloggers who make or spend $25,000 per quarter and who encourage readers to contact their elected representatives would be forced to register as lobbyists.
A blogger who gets money from coroporations, parties, or organizations to blog for them is a lobbyist and an astroturfer. This doesn't cover Billy Blogger who talks about the local sports team, or even unsponsored political blogs. It isn't a way to surpress dissent, any more than requiring the same of lobbyists is. "But it's on the Internet" does not change the fact that politically active bloggers with $100,000 salaries or budgets are lobbyists and should be treated like the normal K Street type.
Correct. Until they've got the sizes down to something reasonable, the number of downloaders is gonna be rather limited. As I understand it, it's already VC-1 (of which WMV is an implementation), so that implies some degree of compression already, no? That likely complicates the task of getting the filesize down with minimal quality-loss. I mean, this is so large it won't even fit on a SL HD-DVD. This is the equal of 5000 songs in size (assuming iTunes-level bitrates).
Come on folks, now that White Collar Crime, Terrorism, Murder and Political Corruption have been virtually eliminated from America, what do you expect Prosecutors to spend their time on?
See, that would be an acceptable answer if the label Timbaland is signed to didn't go around suing people. But the major labels and their artists can't come out against piracy while coming worse infringements themselves.*
10 million Xbox 360s is not the number they need to have a viable market to push their other entertainment products to. I mean, offering a service that only benefits people with Xbox360s who have Vista (.95 maybe), have a working home network (.8 maybe), and have broadband internet (again, let's say it's.9), and you're down to 68% of Xbox owners, even though in all three conditions (Vista, broadband, home network) the vast majority of people have it.
And expecting Xboxes to be as ubiquitous as PS2s is asking for a lot. The market conditions that led to a runaway in the console fight last year no longer exist. For starters, whatever you say about the PS3, it's not that bad, and could easily be a contender versus the Xbox if Sony stops screwing up (a big if). And the Wii is looking very attractive to people.
The PS2 blew the competition away last time because it had backwards compatibility, multiple revisions, and impressive graphics. We've reached the point where everyone has at least limited backwards compatibility, all three consoles can have multiple revisions, and graphics only become a limiting factor on HDTVs (and even there, MS and Sony are mostly tied). Hence, there's no assurance the console fight won't be 30/30/40 instead of 60/20/20.
If it's got Darwin, it probably can get X11 stuck onto it, as well as Java. That could lead to at least functional (if not pretty) 3rd-party add-ons.
My system folder is about 1.5 GB. Assuming that a decent amount of that is drivers, I imagine they could squeeze all the installed Applications and the OS down into a GB if they tried and still have a fully function install.
If Novell bought SCO, it'd have to deal with the IBM counter-claims. When you factor out the money that SCO owes Novell, they're in debt. They're also likely to lose the IBM case. They have basically zero assets. Any IP they have is either GPL'd or rightfully belongs to Novell. Novell wouldn't have to buy them, because it gets everything worthwhile about them if it wins the suit anyways.
The Vista DRM screw-job hurts a lot more than semi-pros. What if I want to watch a movie while browsing, or listen to music while coding, or do any number of other things? If anything is DRM'd, the whole thing gets downgraded in a hurry, so I strain my eyes with the coding or browsing.
The parent is right (if stating it poorly). The fact is that MS and the OEMs don't need to make it impossible to get a refund for Windows, just a PitA. I mean, if they can chase you off with 15 minutes from a $10/hour guy and making you do hours of work to prove you erased XP and send the copy back to them, you're not going to bother. 90% of the time, Dell just loses $5 in tech-support pay dealing with your complaint.
I was making the point that the RIAA's only contributions to an artist are straight monetary loans or illegal assistance, with payola being obviously illegal. Not that payola doesn't exist (although I personally have never seen it). Hence the quotes.
Actually, the DnD people have a sort of open source license that applies to what they call the "Standard Resource Document" (the 3 core rulebooks), allowing people to make their own custom rules for the game. I have a few of them. Works pretty well.
I spend a lot of time in the music industry. Half of those costs are pretty much obsolete now. I mean, I can't remember the last time I saw a commercial for a band that wasn't paid for by a concert promoter (Mix CDs with a theme don't count). And in radio, there's "no payola". And recording costs are falling pretty quickly. You're not at the point where anyone can record in their garage, but costs are rather down. Almost any group of college kids can record a decent demo nowadays (yeah, I'm stuck listening to about a dozen this week) that every year sounds more and more professional. When we book bands, we deal with their agents, or our agents deal with their agents.
Most of what the RIAA groups do could be replaced by VCs who specialize in music, and with managers/agents. If the RIAA wasn't being a monopolizing, price-fixing force, it might have happened already.
Wikibooks isn't particularly a failure, it's just not as large as WP. And they probably lost little on it. You make it sound like all these projects are going to work in months. Stuff like this takes years to pull off.
But if you're interested in working on fixing the problems of the WP model/implementation, check out Citizendium, which is trying to address some of the problems you cite, and is looking at a Q1 launch. Again, an effort that will take years, but certainly one worth trying.
The simple fact is that running a top 20 website is heinously expensive. Almost all of that money they make in the fundraiser will have to go right into buying more servers, especially specialized ones for things like searching or for replacing some of the slower database slaves. They could easily drop $50,000 on "servers we've needed for weeks" and still their IT guys would probably have a long list. And that's before they consider adding new features.
Re:Install a fix not from Apple? Fat Chance
on
Month of Apple Fixes
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· Score: 1
I'd give you odds that 50 people with the experience to know what they're doing downloaded it. Since it comes from a trusted source (a developer), and is promoted by another trusted source (Security Focus), and other people have downloaded it without issue, and others have looked at the code without issue, I'd say it's as safe as can be.
They download stuff. Some guy grabs 5 pictures of nude chicks off the net, photoshops them into an entrance page, and says "Download this for free pr0n". Kids who have a hard time getting pr0n or cheap adults click it, download it, and get owned. Repeat the process with "Crack for $ULTIMATE_GAME_OF_COOLNESS here!" or "Filesharing App of the Moment", and you have people downloading stuff illegally who can't really complain if they get screwed (assuming they notice).
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Please, read the actual bill. It says you must reach 500 people AND make $100,000 working as a paid shill. Not OR!!!
Please don't link to a propaganda piece by a professional conservative lobbyist and claim it to be equal evidence to the above cited UCLA law professor and the above cited Orginal Bill. Payment and Reach were considered separately in the bill. Why don't you read the actual bill, and see if that alleviates your concerns.
WRONG! Here is the conditional for this law to affect you: (astroturfer == true)&&(reach >= 500)&&(salary >= 100000)
Note the &&s (ANDs) there. They're not ||s (ORs) All three must be true, not just any one of them.
Perhaps you should actually read the bill*. Note that the part labelled "definitions", a "grassroots lobbying firm" is defined as someone who "is retained by 1 or more clients to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of such clients; and receives income of, or spends or agrees to spend, an aggregate of $25,000 or more for such efforts in any quarterly period."
The "500 person" rule you're concerned about describes the action of influencing, not the influencer. Specifically: "The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public."
To be affected, you must be all three of these:
So if you're a regular blogger, you likely are safe.
*=if that doesn't work, search for S.1 on thomas.loc.gov
Ok, but that's a non-unique argument. If government search standards are as low as you describe, there are dozens, if not hundreds of laws or regulations law enforcement could already use as an excuse to harass you. The issue in your scenario is the lax requirements for warrants, not the lobbyist law.
This is not a freedom of the press issue. This would have required bloggers who receive money from causes to file as lobbyists. As CNet puts it:
certain political bloggers who make or spend $25,000 per quarter and who encourage readers to contact their elected representatives would be forced to register as lobbyists.
A blogger who gets money from coroporations, parties, or organizations to blog for them is a lobbyist and an astroturfer. This doesn't cover Billy Blogger who talks about the local sports team, or even unsponsored political blogs. It isn't a way to surpress dissent, any more than requiring the same of lobbyists is. "But it's on the Internet" does not change the fact that politically active bloggers with $100,000 salaries or budgets are lobbyists and should be treated like the normal K Street type.
Correct. Until they've got the sizes down to something reasonable, the number of downloaders is gonna be rather limited. As I understand it, it's already VC-1 (of which WMV is an implementation), so that implies some degree of compression already, no? That likely complicates the task of getting the filesize down with minimal quality-loss. I mean, this is so large it won't even fit on a SL HD-DVD. This is the equal of 5000 songs in size (assuming iTunes-level bitrates).
Come on folks, now that White Collar Crime, Terrorism, Murder and Political Corruption have been virtually eliminated from America, what do you expect Prosecutors to spend their time on?
Minesweeper?
On Jan 29th, 2002, Bush named 3 countries as the "Axis of Evil" - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Of those three countries:
Who'd we invade again?
See, that would be an acceptable answer if the label Timbaland is signed to didn't go around suing people. But the major labels and their artists can't come out against piracy while coming worse infringements themselves.*
It does, but it's probably harder to explain to people "You can only use the iTunes store at hotspots".
10 million Xbox 360s is not the number they need to have a viable market to push their other entertainment products to. I mean, offering a service that only benefits people with Xbox360s who have Vista (.95 maybe), have a working home network (.8 maybe), and have broadband internet (again, let's say it's .9), and you're down to 68% of Xbox owners, even though in all three conditions (Vista, broadband, home network) the vast majority of people have it.
And expecting Xboxes to be as ubiquitous as PS2s is asking for a lot. The market conditions that led to a runaway in the console fight last year no longer exist. For starters, whatever you say about the PS3, it's not that bad, and could easily be a contender versus the Xbox if Sony stops screwing up (a big if). And the Wii is looking very attractive to people.
The PS2 blew the competition away last time because it had backwards compatibility, multiple revisions, and impressive graphics. We've reached the point where everyone has at least limited backwards compatibility, all three consoles can have multiple revisions, and graphics only become a limiting factor on HDTVs (and even there, MS and Sony are mostly tied). Hence, there's no assurance the console fight won't be 30/30/40 instead of 60/20/20.
If it's got Darwin, it probably can get X11 stuck onto it, as well as Java. That could lead to at least functional (if not pretty) 3rd-party add-ons.
My system folder is about 1.5 GB. Assuming that a decent amount of that is drivers, I imagine they could squeeze all the installed Applications and the OS down into a GB if they tried and still have a fully function install.
When downloading over celluar service, a 4MB download will suck. That's probably why. Not to even consider a movie download.
Don't forget, however, that they need to get the hardware OK'd by the FCC. While they do that, they can tweak the software.
If Novell bought SCO, it'd have to deal with the IBM counter-claims. When you factor out the money that SCO owes Novell, they're in debt. They're also likely to lose the IBM case. They have basically zero assets. Any IP they have is either GPL'd or rightfully belongs to Novell. Novell wouldn't have to buy them, because it gets everything worthwhile about them if it wins the suit anyways.
The Vista DRM screw-job hurts a lot more than semi-pros. What if I want to watch a movie while browsing, or listen to music while coding, or do any number of other things? If anything is DRM'd, the whole thing gets downgraded in a hurry, so I strain my eyes with the coding or browsing.
The parent is right (if stating it poorly). The fact is that MS and the OEMs don't need to make it impossible to get a refund for Windows, just a PitA. I mean, if they can chase you off with 15 minutes from a $10/hour guy and making you do hours of work to prove you erased XP and send the copy back to them, you're not going to bother. 90% of the time, Dell just loses $5 in tech-support pay dealing with your complaint.
I was making the point that the RIAA's only contributions to an artist are straight monetary loans or illegal assistance, with payola being obviously illegal. Not that payola doesn't exist (although I personally have never seen it). Hence the quotes.
Actually, the DnD people have a sort of open source license that applies to what they call the "Standard Resource Document" (the 3 core rulebooks), allowing people to make their own custom rules for the game. I have a few of them. Works pretty well.
I spend a lot of time in the music industry. Half of those costs are pretty much obsolete now. I mean, I can't remember the last time I saw a commercial for a band that wasn't paid for by a concert promoter (Mix CDs with a theme don't count). And in radio, there's "no payola". And recording costs are falling pretty quickly. You're not at the point where anyone can record in their garage, but costs are rather down. Almost any group of college kids can record a decent demo nowadays (yeah, I'm stuck listening to about a dozen this week) that every year sounds more and more professional. When we book bands, we deal with their agents, or our agents deal with their agents.
Most of what the RIAA groups do could be replaced by VCs who specialize in music, and with managers/agents. If the RIAA wasn't being a monopolizing, price-fixing force, it might have happened already.
Wikibooks isn't particularly a failure, it's just not as large as WP. And they probably lost little on it. You make it sound like all these projects are going to work in months. Stuff like this takes years to pull off.
But if you're interested in working on fixing the problems of the WP model/implementation, check out Citizendium, which is trying to address some of the problems you cite, and is looking at a Q1 launch. Again, an effort that will take years, but certainly one worth trying.
The simple fact is that running a top 20 website is heinously expensive. Almost all of that money they make in the fundraiser will have to go right into buying more servers, especially specialized ones for things like searching or for replacing some of the slower database slaves. They could easily drop $50,000 on "servers we've needed for weeks" and still their IT guys would probably have a long list. And that's before they consider adding new features.
I'd give you odds that 50 people with the experience to know what they're doing downloaded it. Since it comes from a trusted source (a developer), and is promoted by another trusted source (Security Focus), and other people have downloaded it without issue, and others have looked at the code without issue, I'd say it's as safe as can be.
Microsoft kept the money for that copy of XP, but this guy isn't gonna buy MS or HP for his next computer, or the one after that.
It's sort of a toss-up. Some people care if it has Windows and all the applications. Others just care that it does email and book reports and porn.
They download stuff. Some guy grabs 5 pictures of nude chicks off the net, photoshops them into an entrance page, and says "Download this for free pr0n". Kids who have a hard time getting pr0n or cheap adults click it, download it, and get owned. Repeat the process with "Crack for $ULTIMATE_GAME_OF_COOLNESS here!" or "Filesharing App of the Moment", and you have people downloading stuff illegally who can't really complain if they get screwed (assuming they notice).