You can only text a limited number of person and you never know if the message arrived, or if there is someone still alive to read it. With facebook you know you will reach people you would not have thought of, or whose phone number you don't have.
Right. You could also get your message out by posting your SOS as a comment on news stories at cnn, fox, slashdot...
You will reach potentially 10s of thousands of people you don't even know exist. And while many will write it off as a prank, a good message is not hard to construct... just post lots of authentic verifiable contact information (names, phone numbers, hotels, airline, flight #s, travel agency/tour company, contact information for family members...) . It will get someones attention, who will report it, and its only a few phone calls to validate it, and report it to the people who need to know... hell... I figure odds are you'll get too much help rather than too little.
I think the best to do is to use everything you can: text messages to every contact in your phone, and facebook/twitter/etc updates.
Agreed. I'm not saying "don't update your facebook status". I'm saying its a lousy way to get an emergency message out. That doesn't mean it won't ever work. And if its really an emergency you should try everything, in the hope that something works.
If you'd said twitter, I would've bought it, but texting EVERY person that MAY be able to help? That's awful redundant and subject to error isn't it?
yes. but its also more likely to reach people. your right, a broadcast SOS feature that sends a help message to all your contacts might be a cool feature. But twitter and facebook aren't that feature. That it worked out incidentally this one time is great, but its not a solution. Its not even the platform for a solution.
I have both Twitter and Facebook statuses on my Android home screen at all times.
That's great. And if some other friend posted about his greasy pizza 3 seconds after the SOS, you'd have missed the message.
The part you quoted, yes, but not the part that kicked the whole thing off: he noticed someone's Facebook status update on his home screen widget.
Correct. But the person trapped could have just as easily sent a text message to the people he's friends with instead of updating his facebook page and hoping someone would see the status update.
I don't know about all the other smartphone platforms, but I'm pretty sure this is something the iPhone can't do. It doesn't have widgets; its home screen only shows app icons. You can get push notifications for certain events, but friends' status updates aren't among them, and you likely wouldn't want to get a message for every status update anyway.
No I wouldn't. So this right there makes it pretty much useless. Because normal people don't want notifications everytime someone they know updates their home. So, I'm not quite sure how this widget works... does it beep every time someone updates so you know to look at it (if so, how utterly annoying), or was it just blind chance this guy happened to look at his phone at just the right time to see the sos on the widget.
For emergency communications, I want to interrupt people. So a passive facebook widget is a lousy way to get through. You WANT something that makes the recipients phone beep and vibrate. regular text messaging already does this so... why drag some data-mining / advertising behemoth into it? It adds nothing of value.
Doesn't interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?
Yes and no. The hiccup is the semantics of 'diverse'.
I could, for example, argue that a random sampling of end users computers make for a collection of 'diverse systems'.
The wikipedia article you linked for example contains this bit of doublespeak:
According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units"
If you were to interpret 'functional units' to be end users PCs, then the most interoperable format is the one that works seamlessly on the most PCs.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions *unnecessary*.
of course, that's why a utopia is generally considered unachievable. Its an ideal to strive for.
To make matters worse - while I agree that these values are in the right direction they are not inherently correct in any real sense. You and I have grown up in western society where these values where imbued in us through the culture we exist in
Its more than merely just a cultural argument, its a philosophical argument that these values are 'good'.
Imagine an intelligent ant species - to them what you described in your example would be perfectly reasonable (replacing overlord with queen / colony) - and not due to propaganda or dictatorship but simply the nature of their species.
"The nature of their species" can be overcome with technology. Just as the nature of ours is being overridden by technology.
They'll find my four trillion digits of pi boring until they realize that every trillionth digit is the start of a datetime stamp followed by geographic coordinates indicating when and where I'm going to kill next.
(T = trillion) Lets see, its four trillion digits, and an attack is coded starting at digit 1T, then again at 2T,... However there isn't any data following the 4Tth digit.
How many people have to die before they realize that it's GMT with no adjustments for daylight savings!?
John just wasn't conditioned with the proper morality for such an environment
That pretty much applies to any environment. Working hard in the sugar mines for your insect overlords is utopia too. Serving the insect overlords is good, and serving them should bring you a sense of tranquil satisfaction. The pain they inflict in their whippings is cleansing, and motivational, and while you should avoid failing to live up to their expectations you should take pride in knowing that they care enough about you to invest time in you like that. As for the fact that you are dying of malnutrition? Death is a welcome and inevitable end to all things, and your passing will make more room and food available for your children, who are much stronger than you, and much more able to serve the overlords. In a way, this is really for the best, and you should recognize this, and it should give you tranquil satisfaction and happiness.
If you disagree, you just aren't conditioned with the proper morality for such an environment, for it is truly utopia.
Or to pose a more interesting question: What is utopia if not happiness, and if you don't care how does an invasion of privacy (in and of itself) affect your happiness?
Utopia is not simply "happiness". As a result, the follow up question misses the point.
What -is- utopia? It is an "ideal society" of liberty, equality, and harmony.
Naturally any ideal society will have happy and contented citizens, but any society with happy citizens is not necessarily a utopia. Put people in cages and condition them to be happy there is not a path to utopia. It is a means to an end that bears some superficial semblance of utopia.
Taking away liberty and equality to enforce harmony is dystopian, even if you replace liberty with 'conditioning not value it'.
Perhaps you should take a moment to define what sets the quality of your life - I define it by clean drinking water, warm shelter, and having access to entertainment.
Premise 1: for all p in {People} "Wikipedia is intended to be useful" Premise 2: for all t in {Terrorists} t is in {People} Therefore: [ for all t in {Terrorists} "Wikipedia is intended to be useful" QED
VS Express cannot be used for Windows Mobile development; you need the $300+ version for that. At least according to Microsoft.
Development in general is still freely available. And at the end of the day, you need a developer license from apple @ $100 to actually make mobile development of any interest on the Mac too.
And the student version of MS tools are still free, you can get VS 2008 Pro for free as a student. (And as a university student, I just had to provide valid student id, and it was all automated. It looks like high school is a little more of a hassle, but by no means unreasonable.)
but you cannot then use what you build with it for any other purpose than those related to your education.
I'm not really sure what your complaint is here.
You can't go into professional / commercial software development with it. But that shouldn't be an issue; you can do everything you would realistically want to do with them in a high school / undergrad / educational / self-directed learning / personal use context. I used them when I was in university, for school and personal use, and they weren't locked down or crippled at all.
"Only on a Mac" is no different from the "only on a Windows box" development for Windows Mobile.
Philisophically its no different.
In practice its worlds apart.
Mac has what? 90% marketshare of the home market. So in practice, its not all that unreasonable to "assume" the family has a "free PC". 90% of them actually do.
And the 10% that have a mac can add windows to it for ~$100. Or you can buy a whole laptop for $300. The 90% that have a PC would have to buy a Mac, and there isn't a Mac at the $300 price point.
Bottom line, in practice, the cost of entry to get windows if your a mac owner is pretty low, while the reverse is not true. And in an average pool of kids most of them will already have access to a windows PC, far fewer will already have access to a mac. So, no, "only on Windows" is not really the same thing as "only on OSX" in the real world.
And Visual Studio, last time I checked, did not ship with all PCs... unlike X-Code's presence on Mac (if you choose to install it).
High school and post secondary school students also have access to: https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx Which gives them access to Server 2008, SQL Server, and Pro development tools for free (for non-commercial use).
Microsoft is pretty decent to students if you ask me. What sucks is graduating university, and losing it. Although a Technet Subscription or MSDN subscription is pretty good for what you get.
Do you think authors should read you a bed time story to get paid?
No. They should write another book.
How should authors should be compensated in the 21st century? How about "Ransom"?
They create the work and release it for a lump sum payment. Then it gets released. Then they create another work...
An established author will do fine. Obviously an unknown author won't be able to command much if anything for his book, so he'll have to release his work for free while working another job until he gains a following who will pay for his next piece.
Authors/Muscisians will also continue to be able to monetize their work by granting movie rights, product placements, whatever. They will also continue to hold the rights for commercial duplication. (So if you want to buy a printed book, or pressed disc, the companies doing that will still need to obtain permission (and pay) the rights holder.
If you have a legitimate argument as to why America (or any other nation) should simply allow itself to be dismantled and sold off piecemeal to the rest of the world, please make it.
Look who is ranked in first, look who is ranked last (and by how much). America has already sold itself off to the rest of the world under your very nose.
Nearly every Google product competes with at least two other brands for the same thing. If you don't like Google, you can use something else.
If a site integrates a google search, I cannot easily search the site without using google. If a site integrates a youtube video, I cannot easily watch that video withou using google. If a site uses google analytics, I would have to actively block it to avoid being tracked by google. If a site displays google ads, I would have to actively block it to avoid being tracked by google.
If a friend publishes their photos on picasa, uses their blogger, etc, etc I have to actively browse through proxies or sacrifice access to the content to avoid being tracked by google.
If a friend uses a gmail account, there is little I can do except refuse to email him to avoid having my mail datamined by google; and nothing at all I can do to prevent having my address cross referenced with other gmail address books enabling google to fit me into a social network.
No, sorry, but its not as simple as just choosing another brand(s) to deal with.
Personally I can't wait to have a load of Orange Cables behind my desk that I have to avoid bending too much lest they stop working...
Me too. Finally when the pointy-haired-one is behind his desk straightening cables to help the 1s and 0s get through, he'll actually doing the right thing. My head asplode at the very thought.
Finally HFCS is CHEAP. That is the main difference, a food maker can easily put more in to make their product more appealing why leaving the price pretty low
HFCS is "CHEAP" because of corn subsidies. So its not really cheap, you are just paying the difference on your taxes instead of at the super market. Meanwhile, actual sugar can't really compete.
Average people, sure...but they're already overpaying for what they use. If anything, there should be more reasonably priced "slow internet" accounts available for mom and gramps. Heaven forbid we actually use a service that we pay $40-60 a month for, if not more.
Here's the thing though, what average people want is fast internet, not slow internet. Mom and Gramps use youtube and they don't like it stopping to buffer. They like their pages to load quickly. They send photos to friends. And they don't know and don't want to know how much data they use.
Basic consumer internet plans are aimed at them. The $40/mo high speed internet covers the infrastructure to give them say 10-20GB or so per month/per subscriber. The ISP can live up to that commitment, but it makes far more sense to oversell the bandwidth since most users won't use much, and many will use less.
Then along comes a guy like you, who runs it at the cap. And that's fine as long as you are an outlier. They can afford a few outliers. But at the end of the day, your internet was oversold, and the bandwidth YOU are using is being subsidized by those average consumers who use a lot less.
Heaven forbid we actually use a service that we pay $40-60 a month for, if not more.
That level of high speed service with massive bandwidth allowances, were it not oversold and effectively subsidized by 'low bandwidth users', would run 10x what you are currently paying.
From my experience, people are very aware of the RIAA and insane fines.
In my experience I routinely encounter people who haven't got the slightest idea. I went for a haircut the other day, and saw that the hair dresser was torrenting music, and playing it in the shop as background music. She was only vaguely aware that this wasn't ok (the torrenting), but completely ignorant of the penalties. And she had no idea at all that she needed an additional license to play the music in her shop as background music.
When you distribute to your friend, you are making a public distribution....
I disagree. "My friend" is not the "the public". Otherwise I am also prohibited from having my friends over to watch a movie or PPV event too. I am strictly prohibited from presenting these to the public without a license.
On the one hand, you have enjoyment of your purchase in your home (with your family). On the other, you have enjoyment by somebody else outside of your home.
What if I make a copy for my Mom who doesn't live with me? Or a room-mate who does? What if I play a CD a beach picnic with another couple?
And the reason nobody is prosecuted for mix tapes is because, in part, it's too difficult to find instances where this is happening. What channel would be monitored for finding this?
I agree it would be difficult to "monitor", but opportunities to enforce would still inevitably arise if anyone wanted to try. A guy gets his car impounded for some criminal act and on the seat lies a stack of mix CDs with labels like "Dear xxxx, hope you enjoy this mix, thinking of you... yyyyy"... strong evidence that infringement has occured. (And given that 22 counts of infringement carries a half million dollar or more penalty, you'd think prosecutions would be very interested in pursuing that, or a least waving it around for leverage. And given they'll get at best a revolving door sentence for the drug possession, or burglary they originally nabbed him for... turning them over to the RIAA might well actually be the strongest leverage they have.
In any case all this absurdity goes away if the court recognizes private non-commercial use between friends as 'private use' not 'public use'.
I -think- the courts would agree, and what little information exists seems to agree. For example if you have a wedding reception at a hall, the hall as a commercial venture must have a license for the music played, but if you have that wedding reception at someone's home you don't. And its not a case of "you can get away with not having a license", its a case where "you don't actually need one".
1) If the benefit were negligible, why would they do it?
Neglible means small. The benefit derived from not putting a quarter into a meter and chancing a ticket is small too, but people do it all the time.
People are aware of the risks. Then, taking those risks into account, consider the benefit derived, and decide whether to pirate or not.
a) People are not all that rational nor are they all that well informed about the actual risks or the absurd penalties.
b) Do YOU really claim to know the odds of getting caught downloading a song and fined an absurd amount? If its in the same ballpark as a lightning strike or a lottery win, how much weight does it have on your decision?
2) You may borrow a friend's CD, but you may not make a copy of it.
Right, mix tapes are 14 counts of infringment, and anyone whose ever made one for a friend or family member should be find several hundred thousand dollars. Legions of 14 year old girls should be incarcerated.
Actually, sarcasm aside, the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 section 1008 actually explicitly protects "noncommercial copying by consumers provided copies are not for direct or indirect commercial advantage". A senate report explicitly offers examples such as making copies for a family member, or copies for use in a car or portable tape player. I don't think anyone has EVER been charged with making a mix tape, or copying a CD for a friend so there really isn't much application of the law to draw from, but still, there is clearly an argument to be made that doing something like this is, in fact, perfectly ok.
3) There is measurable harm. Let's say there were 1000 illegal copies made of Song X. Let's then say 40% of those copies made would have led to purchases of the song on iTunes or something similar. That's $400 of harm, and 40 cents of harm per illegal copy.
Lets further say that 1% of those copies created a fan of that band, who then went to a concert and paid $50 a ticket each (and brought their significant other, bff, whatever...). That's 20 tickets. Total harm -$1000. Net harm -$600. Maybe the record company should be paying me??
Or perhaps 1% of those copies created a fan of that band, who then purchased a T-shirt bearing their logo. Or bought DDR for the PS3 so they could dance to that song.
And likely as not, 90% of copies of most songs were listened to once, and then never listened to again. Many were downloaded as a part of a larger compilation, and didn't even get listened to once. I've downloaded entire discographies to get a couple singles or a particular remix. 99% of what was there I either already owned, or couldn't care less about.
The percentage doesn't really matter. It's just that you could find a percentage that matters.
Agreed. But the percentage might actually be negative, resulting in a net gain for the music industry. Or perhaps the gain and harm balance and its zero.
Further, lost dollars doesn't translate to dollars not spent. Odds are those 'lost sale dollars' when into somethign else... people generally have a segment of income for "discretionary spending"... if they don't buy a CD with it, they'll buy something else. So forcing us to pay for each copy of each song simply means some other industries sales will drop. At the societal level, its pretty much a zero sum game.
Finally, we're dealing with punitive damages here.
Right, but the punishment doesn't fit the crime. And in this case, sharing 50 songs should not be punished as 50 crimes. Statutory damages "per title" is absurd when applied to P2P network sharing. It might make sense when you are bootlegging blu-ray movies at the night markets... but torrenting a copy of Dance Mix 11! is not 20 separate punishable offenses, any more than shoplifting a pack of cigarettes is 20 separate counts of theft.
Nevertheless I agree they were excessive. Copyright's job is to incentivize expression. I don't think the amount here optimally does so.
Agreed.
The big question is whether the net effect of piracy is a positive for the music industry.
The BIG question is whether the idea of selling copies in a world where the cost of making copies dropped to zero is worth legally protecting in the first place.
The music industry simply needs to find and shift to a new revenue model; performances, sponsorship, whatever. Copyright, at least insofar as actually making copies is obsolete. You can't have an economy based on charging for something that costs nothing.
I realize music has a cost to make, produce, and promote. But it no longer has a cost to make copies. So a business model centered around recouping the costs of creating music by charging for copies is doomed. People can and will just make their own copies.
If I make elevators and give them away for free, maintain them for free, and then charge for highly trained elevator operators to actually make them go up, down, and ensure passengers are safe and secure... that's a fine business model.
If one day, thanks to technology, the elevator operators duties have been reduced to pushing a simple button and nothing more, then people will push the button themselves and send the operators packing. The elevator company will have to shift to a new model... maybe selling the elevators and charging for maintenance. The music industry is at this point now... making copies has been reduced to the push of a button. And people are rejecting the idea of paying for that because its worthless. Music, like elevators still has a cost to produce... and a new way of paying for it has to be found. But requiring people to pay to make copies is as absurd as requiring modern elevators to have operators.
The fine you listed for letting a parking meter run out is 120 times the actual damages. The speeding fine you listed is an infinitely greater amount than the actual damages assuming one does no physical damage to anything.
Your point? They are both reasonable amounts that your average driver can afford, and both high enough that your average driver will be deterred.
If a parking fine was much less, nobody would EVER pay the meter. Paying the odd fine would be far cheaper. If they could nail you every time the meter ran out, then sure a $5 fine might be sufficient deterrent, but that's not going to happen.
As for speeding what do you propose the fine be? $0.01 is infinitely greater than the actual damages too. So is $10,000,000. Would you prefer jail time, to take away the time you gained by speeding, or to compensate for the 'fun' you had? I figure a few hundred bucks for 'real speeding' is about right. (by 'real speeding' I mean traveling fast relative to normal traffic flow.)
In the state of Florida, car theft is a third degree felony. One can get 5 years and $5,000 fine. If one steals a car worth $1,000.00 and one makes $20,000 per year and one gets the maximum, one is fined, in effect $105,000 plus loss of freedom.
"can get" and "will get" are entirely separate concerns. If I were to steal a car, odds are high I would not face anywhere near the maximum sentence, and even the sentence I ultimately get would likely not have to be served to completion.
Had he not admitted to it, the damages would have been much less severe, possibly as little as $1,600.
But he did willfully infringe those copyrights. Not admitting to that would have been a lie. The issue here is precisely that infringing copyright by downloading and sharing a few songs is simply not a 22,500$ per title crime, EVEN if one does it on purpose.
I'm sure the very first settlement offer was for a few thousand dollars. Tenembaum made a choice to roll the dice and put it in the hands of a jury.
Irrelevant. A settlement offer has no bearing whatsoever on whether the statute penalty is fair or not.
If you are accused of speeding, and the penalty is loss of license, car siezed, and a $200,000 fine... is that right? What if they offer you a 'settlement' of $5000. That's not a fair legal system, its legalized blackmail.
Its a system where the prosecution don't even have to try to prove you were speeding. The mere accusation of guilt is all they realistically need to coerce a settlement. The risk of attempting to assert your innocence is too great. This is not a system of "justice".
That's not the purpose of settlements. They were never intended to blackmail people into giving up their right to a trial to avoid ridiculous statutory penalties.
Slashdot Mirror
You can only text a limited number of person and you never know if the message arrived, or if there is someone still alive to read it. With facebook you know you will reach people you would not have thought of, or whose phone number you don't have.
Right. You could also get your message out by posting your SOS as a comment on news stories at cnn, fox, slashdot...
You will reach potentially 10s of thousands of people you don't even know exist. And while many will write it off as a prank, a good message is not hard to construct... just post lots of authentic verifiable contact information (names, phone numbers, hotels, airline, flight #s, travel agency/tour company, contact information for family members...) . It will get someones attention, who will report it, and its only a few phone calls to validate it, and report it to the people who need to know... hell... I figure odds are you'll get too much help rather than too little.
I think the best to do is to use everything you can: text messages to every contact in your phone, and facebook/twitter/etc updates.
Agreed. I'm not saying "don't update your facebook status". I'm saying its a lousy way to get an emergency message out. That doesn't mean it won't ever work. And if its really an emergency you should try everything, in the hope that something works.
If you'd said twitter, I would've bought it, but texting EVERY person that MAY be able to help? That's awful redundant and subject to error isn't it?
yes. but its also more likely to reach people. your right, a broadcast SOS feature that sends a help message to all your contacts might be a cool feature. But twitter and facebook aren't that feature. That it worked out incidentally this one time is great, but its not a solution. Its not even the platform for a solution.
I have both Twitter and Facebook statuses on my Android home screen at all times.
That's great. And if some other friend posted about his greasy pizza 3 seconds after the SOS, you'd have missed the message.
The part you quoted, yes, but not the part that kicked the whole thing off: he noticed someone's Facebook status update on his home screen widget.
Correct. But the person trapped could have just as easily sent a text message to the people he's friends with instead of updating his facebook page and hoping someone would see the status update.
I don't know about all the other smartphone platforms, but I'm pretty sure this is something the iPhone can't do. It doesn't have widgets; its home screen only shows app icons. You can get push notifications for certain events, but friends' status updates aren't among them, and you likely wouldn't want to get a message for every status update anyway.
No I wouldn't. So this right there makes it pretty much useless. Because normal people don't want notifications everytime someone they know updates their home. So, I'm not quite sure how this widget works... does it beep every time someone updates so you know to look at it (if so, how utterly annoying), or was it just blind chance this guy happened to look at his phone at just the right time to see the sos on the widget.
For emergency communications, I want to interrupt people. So a passive facebook widget is a lousy way to get through. You WANT something that makes the recipients phone beep and vibrate. regular text messaging already does this so... why drag some data-mining / advertising behemoth into it? It adds nothing of value.
Doesn't interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?
Yes and no. The hiccup is the semantics of 'diverse'.
I could, for example, argue that a random sampling of end users computers make for a collection of 'diverse systems'.
The wikipedia article you linked for example contains this bit of doublespeak:
According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units"
If you were to interpret 'functional units' to be end users PCs, then the most interoperable format is the one that works seamlessly on the most PCs.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions *unnecessary*.
But these values are often contradictory
of course, that's why a utopia is generally considered unachievable. Its an ideal to strive for.
To make matters worse - while I agree that these values are in the right direction they are not inherently correct in any real sense. You and I have grown up in western society where these values where imbued in us through the culture we exist in
Its more than merely just a cultural argument, its a philosophical argument that these values are 'good'.
Imagine an intelligent ant species - to them what you described in your example would be perfectly reasonable (replacing overlord with queen / colony) - and not due to propaganda or dictatorship but simply the nature of their species.
"The nature of their species" can be overcome with technology. Just as the nature of ours is being overridden by technology.
They'll find my four trillion digits of pi boring until they realize that every trillionth digit is the start of a datetime stamp followed by geographic coordinates indicating when and where I'm going to kill next.
(T = trillion) ...
Lets see, its four trillion digits, and an attack is coded starting at digit 1T, then again at 2T,
However there isn't any data following the 4Tth digit.
How many people have to die before they realize that it's GMT with no adjustments for daylight savings!?
Based on the above: at most 3.
John just wasn't conditioned with the proper morality for such an environment
That pretty much applies to any environment. Working hard in the sugar mines for your insect overlords is utopia too. Serving the insect overlords is good, and serving them should bring you a sense of tranquil satisfaction. The pain they inflict in their whippings is cleansing, and motivational, and while you should avoid failing to live up to their expectations you should take pride in knowing that they care enough about you to invest time in you like that. As for the fact that you are dying of malnutrition? Death is a welcome and inevitable end to all things, and your passing will make more room and food available for your children, who are much stronger than you, and much more able to serve the overlords. In a way, this is really for the best, and you should recognize this, and it should give you tranquil satisfaction and happiness.
If you disagree, you just aren't conditioned with the proper morality for such an environment, for it is truly utopia.
Or to pose a more interesting question: What is utopia if not happiness, and if you don't care how does an invasion of privacy (in and of itself) affect your happiness?
Utopia is not simply "happiness". As a result, the follow up question misses the point.
What -is- utopia? It is an "ideal society" of liberty, equality, and harmony.
Naturally any ideal society will have happy and contented citizens, but any society with happy citizens is not necessarily a utopia. Put people in cages and condition them to be happy there is not a path to utopia. It is a means to an end that bears some superficial semblance of utopia.
Taking away liberty and equality to enforce harmony is dystopian, even if you replace liberty with 'conditioning not value it'.
Perhaps you should take a moment to define what sets the quality of your life - I define it by clean drinking water, warm shelter, and having access to entertainment.
Ah, so for you 'Brave New World' was utopia.
Premise 1: for all p in {People} "Wikipedia is intended to be useful"
Premise 2: for all t in {Terrorists} t is in {People}
Therefore: [ for all t in {Terrorists} "Wikipedia is intended to be useful"
QED
VS Express cannot be used for Windows Mobile development; you need the $300+ version for that. At least according to Microsoft.
Development in general is still freely available. And at the end of the day, you need a developer license from apple @ $100 to actually make mobile development of any interest on the Mac too.
And the student version of MS tools are still free, you can get VS 2008 Pro for free as a student. (And as a university student, I just had to provide valid student id, and it was all automated. It looks like high school is a little more of a hassle, but by no means unreasonable.)
but you cannot then use what you build with it for any other purpose than those related to your education.
I'm not really sure what your complaint is here.
You can't go into professional / commercial software development with it. But that shouldn't be an issue; you can do everything you would realistically want to do with them in a high school / undergrad / educational / self-directed learning / personal use context. I used them when I was in university, for school and personal use, and they weren't locked down or crippled at all.
"Mac has what? 90% marketshare of the home market."
er... I had some less than greater than signs in that /. felt the need to edit out.
It should be
Mac has what? "less than" 10% marketshare, while Windows has "greater than" 90% marketshare of the home market.
"Only on a Mac" is no different from the "only on a Windows box" development for Windows Mobile.
Philisophically its no different.
In practice its worlds apart.
Mac has what? 90% marketshare of the home market. So in practice, its not all that unreasonable to "assume" the family has a "free PC". 90% of them actually do.
And the 10% that have a mac can add windows to it for ~$100. Or you can buy a whole laptop for $300.
The 90% that have a PC would have to buy a Mac, and there isn't a Mac at the $300 price point.
Bottom line, in practice, the cost of entry to get windows if your a mac owner is pretty low, while the reverse is not true. And in an average pool of kids most of them will already have access to a windows PC, far fewer will already have access to a mac. So, no, "only on Windows" is not really the same thing as "only on OSX" in the real world.
And Visual Studio, last time I checked, did not ship with all PCs... unlike X-Code's presence on Mac (if you choose to install it).
Visual Studio is only a download a way:
The express versions are free to all.
http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
High school and post secondary school students also have access to:
https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx
Which gives them access to Server 2008, SQL Server, and Pro development tools for free (for non-commercial use).
Microsoft is pretty decent to students if you ask me. What sucks is graduating university, and losing it. Although a Technet Subscription or MSDN subscription is pretty good for what you get.
Steps for starting a manual transmission car pointed up a steep grade:
These are not a manual transmission cars.
Do you think authors should read you a bed time story to get paid?
No. They should write another book.
How should authors should be compensated in the 21st century? How about "Ransom"?
They create the work and release it for a lump sum payment. Then it gets released. Then they create another work...
An established author will do fine. Obviously an unknown author won't be able to command much if anything for his book, so he'll have to release his work for free while working another job until he gains a following who will pay for his next piece.
Authors/Muscisians will also continue to be able to monetize their work by granting movie rights, product placements, whatever. They will also continue to hold the rights for commercial duplication. (So if you want to buy a printed book, or pressed disc, the companies doing that will still need to obtain permission (and pay) the rights holder.
If you have a legitimate argument as to why America (or any other nation) should simply allow itself to be dismantled and sold off piecemeal to the rest of the world, please make it.
Look who is ranked in first, look who is ranked last (and by how much).
America has already sold itself off to the rest of the world under your very nose.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html?countryName=Dominican%20Republic&countryCode=us®ionCode=ca&rank=153#us
Nearly every Google product competes with at least two other brands for the same thing. If you don't like Google, you can use something else.
If a site integrates a google search, I cannot easily search the site without using google.
If a site integrates a youtube video, I cannot easily watch that video withou using google.
If a site uses google analytics, I would have to actively block it to avoid being tracked by google.
If a site displays google ads, I would have to actively block it to avoid being tracked by google.
If a friend publishes their photos on picasa, uses their blogger, etc, etc I have to actively browse through proxies or sacrifice access to the content to avoid being tracked by google.
If a friend uses a gmail account, there is little I can do except refuse to email him to avoid having my mail datamined by google; and nothing at all I can do to prevent having my address cross referenced with other gmail address books enabling google to fit me into a social network.
No, sorry, but its not as simple as just choosing another brand(s) to deal with.
This computer is good for your life. Don't be so obsessed with stats.
So if they stick an apple logo on it and jack up the price a bit more, it'll sell like hotcakes?
I kid, I kid.
Personally I can't wait to have a load of Orange Cables behind my desk that I have to avoid bending too much lest they stop working...
Me too. Finally when the pointy-haired-one is behind his desk straightening cables to help the 1s and 0s get through, he'll actually doing the right thing. My head asplode at the very thought.
Finally HFCS is CHEAP. That is the main difference, a food maker can easily put more in to make their product more appealing why leaving the price pretty low
HFCS is "CHEAP" because of corn subsidies. So its not really cheap, you are just paying the difference on your taxes instead of at the super market. Meanwhile, actual sugar can't really compete.
Average people, sure...but they're already overpaying for what they use. If anything, there should be more reasonably priced "slow internet" accounts available for mom and gramps. Heaven forbid we actually use a service that we pay $40-60 a month for, if not more.
Here's the thing though, what average people want is fast internet, not slow internet. Mom and Gramps use youtube and they don't like it stopping to buffer. They like their pages to load quickly. They send photos to friends. And they don't know and don't want to know how much data they use.
Basic consumer internet plans are aimed at them. The $40/mo high speed internet covers the infrastructure to give them say 10-20GB or so per month/per subscriber. The ISP can live up to that commitment, but it makes far more sense to oversell the bandwidth since most users won't use much, and many will use less.
Then along comes a guy like you, who runs it at the cap. And that's fine as long as you are an outlier. They can afford a few outliers. But at the end of the day, your internet was oversold, and the bandwidth YOU are using is being subsidized by those average consumers who use a lot less.
Heaven forbid we actually use a service that we pay $40-60 a month for, if not more.
That level of high speed service with massive bandwidth allowances, were it not oversold and effectively subsidized by 'low bandwidth users', would run 10x what you are currently paying.
From my experience, people are very aware of the RIAA and insane fines.
In my experience I routinely encounter people who haven't got the slightest idea. I went for a haircut the other day, and saw that the hair dresser was torrenting music, and playing it in the shop as background music. She was only vaguely aware that this wasn't ok (the torrenting), but completely ignorant of the penalties. And she had no idea at all that she needed an additional license to play the music in her shop as background music.
When you distribute to your friend, you are making a public distribution....
I disagree. "My friend" is not the "the public". Otherwise I am also prohibited from having my friends over to watch a movie or PPV event too. I am strictly prohibited from presenting these to the public without a license.
On the one hand, you have enjoyment of your purchase in your home (with your family). On the other, you have enjoyment by somebody else outside of your home.
What if I make a copy for my Mom who doesn't live with me? Or a room-mate who does? What if I play a CD a beach picnic with another couple?
And the reason nobody is prosecuted for mix tapes is because, in part, it's too difficult to find instances where this is happening. What channel would be monitored for finding this?
I agree it would be difficult to "monitor", but opportunities to enforce would still inevitably arise if anyone wanted to try. A guy gets his car impounded for some criminal act and on the seat lies a stack of mix CDs with labels like "Dear xxxx, hope you enjoy this mix, thinking of you... yyyyy"... strong evidence that infringement has occured. (And given that 22 counts of infringement carries a half million dollar or more penalty, you'd think prosecutions would be very interested in pursuing that, or a least waving it around for leverage. And given they'll get at best a revolving door sentence for the drug possession, or burglary they originally nabbed him for... turning them over to the RIAA might well actually be the strongest leverage they have.
In any case all this absurdity goes away if the court recognizes private non-commercial use between friends as 'private use' not 'public use'.
I -think- the courts would agree, and what little information exists seems to agree. For example if you have a wedding reception at a hall, the hall as a commercial venture must have a license for the music played, but if you have that wedding reception at someone's home you don't. And its not a case of "you can get away with not having a license", its a case where "you don't actually need one".
1) If the benefit were negligible, why would they do it? Neglible means small. The benefit derived from not putting a quarter into a meter and chancing a ticket is small too, but people do it all the time. People are aware of the risks. Then, taking those risks into account, consider the benefit derived, and decide whether to pirate or not. a) People are not all that rational nor are they all that well informed about the actual risks or the absurd penalties. b) Do YOU really claim to know the odds of getting caught downloading a song and fined an absurd amount? If its in the same ballpark as a lightning strike or a lottery win, how much weight does it have on your decision? 2) You may borrow a friend's CD, but you may not make a copy of it. Right, mix tapes are 14 counts of infringment, and anyone whose ever made one for a friend or family member should be find several hundred thousand dollars. Legions of 14 year old girls should be incarcerated. Actually, sarcasm aside, the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 section 1008 actually explicitly protects "noncommercial copying by consumers provided copies are not for direct or indirect commercial advantage". A senate report explicitly offers examples such as making copies for a family member, or copies for use in a car or portable tape player. I don't think anyone has EVER been charged with making a mix tape, or copying a CD for a friend so there really isn't much application of the law to draw from, but still, there is clearly an argument to be made that doing something like this is, in fact, perfectly ok. 3) There is measurable harm. Let's say there were 1000 illegal copies made of Song X. Let's then say 40% of those copies made would have led to purchases of the song on iTunes or something similar. That's $400 of harm, and 40 cents of harm per illegal copy. Lets further say that 1% of those copies created a fan of that band, who then went to a concert and paid $50 a ticket each (and brought their significant other, bff, whatever...). That's 20 tickets. Total harm -$1000. Net harm -$600. Maybe the record company should be paying me?? Or perhaps 1% of those copies created a fan of that band, who then purchased a T-shirt bearing their logo. Or bought DDR for the PS3 so they could dance to that song. And likely as not, 90% of copies of most songs were listened to once, and then never listened to again. Many were downloaded as a part of a larger compilation, and didn't even get listened to once. I've downloaded entire discographies to get a couple singles or a particular remix. 99% of what was there I either already owned, or couldn't care less about. The percentage doesn't really matter. It's just that you could find a percentage that matters. Agreed. But the percentage might actually be negative, resulting in a net gain for the music industry. Or perhaps the gain and harm balance and its zero. Further, lost dollars doesn't translate to dollars not spent. Odds are those 'lost sale dollars' when into somethign else... people generally have a segment of income for "discretionary spending"... if they don't buy a CD with it, they'll buy something else. So forcing us to pay for each copy of each song simply means some other industries sales will drop. At the societal level, its pretty much a zero sum game. Finally, we're dealing with punitive damages here. Right, but the punishment doesn't fit the crime. And in this case, sharing 50 songs should not be punished as 50 crimes. Statutory damages "per title" is absurd when applied to P2P network sharing. It might make sense when you are bootlegging blu-ray movies at the night markets... but torrenting a copy of Dance Mix 11! is not 20 separate punishable offenses, any more than shoplifting a pack of cigarettes is 20 separate counts of theft. Nevertheless I agree they were excessive. Copyright's job is to incentivize expression. I don't think the amount here optimally does so. Agreed.
The big question is whether the net effect of piracy is a positive for the music industry.
The BIG question is whether the idea of selling copies in a world where the cost of making copies dropped to zero is worth legally protecting in the first place.
The music industry simply needs to find and shift to a new revenue model; performances, sponsorship, whatever. Copyright, at least insofar as actually making copies is obsolete. You can't have an economy based on charging for something that costs nothing.
I realize music has a cost to make, produce, and promote. But it no longer has a cost to make copies. So a business model centered around recouping the costs of creating music by charging for copies is doomed. People can and will just make their own copies.
If I make elevators and give them away for free, maintain them for free, and then charge for highly trained elevator operators to actually make them go up, down, and ensure passengers are safe and secure... that's a fine business model.
If one day, thanks to technology, the elevator operators duties have been reduced to pushing a simple button and nothing more, then people will push the button themselves and send the operators packing. The elevator company will have to shift to a new model... maybe selling the elevators and charging for maintenance. The music industry is at this point now... making copies has been reduced to the push of a button. And people are rejecting the idea of paying for that because its worthless. Music, like elevators still has a cost to produce... and a new way of paying for it has to be found. But requiring people to pay to make copies is as absurd as requiring modern elevators to have operators.
The fine you listed for letting a parking meter run out is 120 times the actual damages. The speeding fine you listed is an infinitely greater amount than the actual damages assuming one does no physical damage to anything.
Your point? They are both reasonable amounts that your average driver can afford, and both high enough that your average driver will be deterred.
If a parking fine was much less, nobody would EVER pay the meter. Paying the odd fine would be far cheaper. If they could nail you every time the meter ran out, then sure a $5 fine might be sufficient deterrent, but that's not going to happen.
As for speeding what do you propose the fine be? $0.01 is infinitely greater than the actual damages too. So is $10,000,000. Would you prefer jail time, to take away the time you gained by speeding, or to compensate for the 'fun' you had? I figure a few hundred bucks for 'real speeding' is about right. (by 'real speeding' I mean traveling fast relative to normal traffic flow.)
In the state of Florida, car theft is a third degree felony. One can get 5 years and $5,000 fine. If one steals a car worth $1,000.00 and one makes $20,000 per year and one gets the maximum, one is fined, in effect $105,000 plus loss of freedom.
"can get" and "will get" are entirely separate concerns. If I were to steal a car, odds are high I would not face anywhere near the maximum sentence, and even the sentence I ultimately get would likely not have to be served to completion.
Had he not admitted to it, the damages would have been much less severe, possibly as little as $1,600.
But he did willfully infringe those copyrights. Not admitting to that would have been a lie. The issue here is precisely that infringing copyright by downloading and sharing a few songs is simply not a 22,500$ per title crime, EVEN if one does it on purpose.
I'm sure the very first settlement offer was for a few thousand dollars. Tenembaum made a choice to roll the dice and put it in the hands of a jury.
Irrelevant. A settlement offer has no bearing whatsoever on whether the statute penalty is fair or not.
If you are accused of speeding, and the penalty is loss of license, car siezed, and a $200,000 fine... is that right? What if they offer you a 'settlement' of $5000. That's not a fair legal system, its legalized blackmail.
Its a system where the prosecution don't even have to try to prove you were speeding. The mere accusation of guilt is all they realistically need to coerce a settlement. The risk of attempting to assert your innocence is too great. This is not a system of "justice".
That's not the purpose of settlements. They were never intended to blackmail people into giving up their right to a trial to avoid ridiculous statutory penalties.