I guess it never occurred to anyone at Disney that milking these franchises to the point of nearly destroying them not only ruins the value of the first few good ones for future generations (like what the Matrix sequels did to the first one) and the exploitation of old stories instead of creating new ones tends to make a company look washed up to its customers.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
That "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" coming from an American is naivete at best. Innocence has never been a defense against paranoid "officials." Stalin used to execute people at a whim for political reasons, even if they did everything they could to be good cogs in the machine.
Bad governments have murdered more people than any other type of institution or any individual combined. It's amazing to me sometimes how so many Bush supporters can talk about tradition while disregarding history and regarding our founders' traditions and advise with open contempt.
If they deliberately mislead the ratings board to give them a lower rating, then they're trying to get away with fraud. And yes, they knew that the PC version had a good chance of getting hacked to make the sex scene availible.
They are asking Google to pay for this part of their lawsuit to protect the COPA law at their own expense. Google gets nothing out of it. I'm sure that Google could have been paid a few hundred thousand dollars to write a test suite to prove the DoJ's case. One Google engineer could have written a script that would have given them millions of results based on simulating actual search queries.
Yet the DoJ didn't want to be bothered to have to pay for this. This is slavery because they are forcing someone to work for their benefit without compensation or as a form of restitution for a crime against their life or property. There is no middle ground here. The DoJ is in the wrong because they refused to pay for the data they wanted and attempted to extort it using the force of law.
Why economic equality is sometimes bad
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For better or for worse, the stock market used to be something that only those that knew how to invest really did anything with. Those with no clue on how to invest usually just avoided it, or invested in safe mutual funds or big companies like GE or IBM. Then millions of average families got involved, went crazy thinking it was the lottery and lost obscene sums of money.
I am a pretty good investor, but then my mom taught me the basics of investing. My father and I are two archetypes of investors. He's the type that goes with the flow, whereas I'm conservative with the amount of money I'll invest, but willing to take risks with small companies that I rationally believe have a good shot of growing big. If I had control over my assets in the dotcom era (I was still in high school), I'd have made almost $1,000,000 before taxes and would have ended up keeping the bulk of it after the bubble burst. My father would have lost everything because he never researched what he was investing in, he'd just buy what the latest rag said was a cool company... like most of the Linux "companies" back then.
The biggest problem we have is that most people don't want to realize that investing is serious work and that it requires that you **learn** what you're doing. It's not the "insert money into slot to double each year for five years" game that they want it to be. Losing everything you invest is a realistic possibility which is why it should come after savings and bills... not before. And if you do nothing but short term investments, you'll only make your broker rich and yourself poor unless you're GOOD at it and have a lot of money to buy in bulk.
My point is that maybe enough of the casual investors have left that we can move forward now. Google's stock, though, is still a holdover from the.com era. Sorry, but at barely $6.00B in projected revenues for this year, they aren't worth $500/share. If they were consistently making $25B in profit on expenses of $2B, yes, I could see that. God help us, though, when Google utilizes all of its information its indexed to maximize its profits. Privacy won't be just dead, but it'll be publically humiliated, tortured, executed, its body cremated and its ashes unceremoniously pissed on for good measure.
If piracy is still rampant on P2P networks, and music sales are still down... doesn't that mean that more people are not buying the music that they claim on slashdot and elsewhere that they'd buy to support the band? What is going on with this? If most of the new music is so shitty you cannot buy a CD online for $12-$15 (sorry, most of the time claiming you're forced to pay $20 is bullshit with the internet) then why is piracy still rampant?
Unless... few P2P defenders want to admit that they really have no interest in paying for music that they could otherwise get for free. Look, I despise the RIAA as much as the next guy, but if you're downloading the music of a small band, you're not supporting them. No one will notice that and think "hey this is the next great band" except for maybe the hated RIAA's lawyers if they see a spike in P2P traffic. One of my all time favorite bands, Lacuna Coil, has only combined sold a few hundred thousand copies of their albums, most of which came from Ozzfest 2004, and I fail to see how downloading all of Comalies and their new Karmacode album would help them if I cannot see their shows.
Now that I am out of college, I find myself no longer able to support P2P networks used for this purpose. It's a great file sharing approach that's often spoiled by teens and young adults who do have the money to pay for their music, but won't. The turning point came for me when I saw a few poor metalheads non-chalantly paying $17-$20 at Ozzfest for Comalies, then noticed some of my almost upper class friends in CS had no desire to actually buy Comalies, even though they loved every song on the album.
For every 1 honest P2P user, there are probably 10 who aren't. Don't ever forget that the boom in CD sales with Napster in 1998-2000 corresponded to the dotcom bubble!
All it took was one little patent holding company to bring down a legitimate product used by millions of business users. Does NTP even make a product of their own? The main reason that I see this as a problem is pretty simple: software patents' shelf-lives are too long to do anything but make them a pay day for the lawyers. A one or two year term would work, but the 17 year term makes the format/approach/algorithm completely unusuable to most competitors for derivatives, extensions, etc. for its entire useful life. Does anyone honestly think that a company in Microsoft, Apple or Oracle's position would license their patents to a small, but viable competitor without charging near bankrupcy rates?
Software development is the cheapest type of engineering there is. Unlike other industries, it's far easier for a small outfit to grow on a small budget and see a return on its investment.
Pay to clean up the governments in these regions by bringing in consultants to train new police forces, etc. and then encourage 1st world investors to invest in the infrastructure. This approach is starting to work in some of the small Eastern European countries like Macedonia where former US agents train their national police forces to use American standards and procedures. Or how about a food aid plan where they buy the native crops first and then hire locals (with 1st world military oversight) to prepare and distribute the food (that way our soldiers can shoot them if they try ransoming the food or handing it over to warlords like what happened in Somalia).
But... it I guess it appeals to Kofi Annan's inner geek and it's politically correct to attack the digital divide when the food, running water, electricity and semi-functional government divide is a far more serious threat to life, liberty, property and the future in these countries.
And at what point did the Chinese people decide this? At what point did they have a popular, 99% corruption-free referendum where they decided to cede all control over speech to their central government?
China is not democratic, and thus its government doesn't represent the will of the majority. Did you ever think that they might actually like to be able to search for whatever they want? With the furor over Wikipedia getting blocked off and on, it should be pretty obvious that most educated Chinese at least are not big fans of this.
But you'd never know since people who really come out with anti-Communist government views in China are routinely charged with the equivalent of felonies and locked away for as long as twenty years to life. Even more so for the ones who publish those views where westerners can easily see them. Afterall, they can't have their utopia questioned, now can they?
Proof of instinct for government?
on
The Primate Police
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, I guess this proves that there may not be a "state of nature" in the old philosophical sense. We naturally organize ourselves. Katrina was one of my examples, when people naturally formed hierarchical groups for survival and promotion of order. The question now is, do we recognize that there is a compelling argument now to question the extent and nature of government, since if evolution be true, it is organized more out of a primal fear than an enlightened attitude toward social interaction?
It certainly does help prove a point on why governments have often be so brutal toward their own people.
Is if they actually got involved full time with the blogosphere, at the same level as the "A-list" bloggers. Same legal restrictions, everything. And one other, very important thing. It's not enough that they open up comments, they need to do trackbacks to. Nothing can get a debate going on between bloggers like trackbacks. They're a good way to make sure that the other side doesn't have an excuse to make wild assertions and then say, "well no one challenged me."
Of course they'd shit a brick if people started providing factual trackbacks, especially ones that reference opensecrets.org on pet projects. Imagine a democratic senator getting called out on their support for repressive copyright law or a republican getting forced to own up to links to pharmaceuticals when they oppose drug liberalization measures.
$10,000,000 / 140,000 victims = $71/person. We given fines in the tens of thousand to hundreds of thousands for crack/cocaine/meth, but apparently white collar crime that targets over one hundred thousand people is worth only $71/victim when the identity theft can cost them hundreds of hours of time regaining their identity/fixing records and a lot of grief in general. Not to mention the damage it does to the businesses hit by the scammers.
Fine, then what should be a standard legal definition for time limit for liability if they don't fix the bug in a reasonable period of time? If it's severe, they get three months? Other companies have to do product recalls by law if their products fail in a way that is damaging to life or property, so at what point do they have to start making amends to their customers for failure? Kinda funny considering the bravado they had in the past. I guess they got called out and they were all bluster.
It's not enough that they burned down a customer's house... now they are going to set a customer on fire directly! I guess this is just part of their secret strategy to scare people away from game consoles and back into PC gaming...
Many parents today grew up with video games and it's a great way for the busy mom or dad to bond with their kids, at least in a superficial way given the probability that it will be the extent of their bonding. Also, it makes good sense that they are voters because to be able to easily afford a new game system and spend $50-$60/game, you'd have to have disposable income and IIRC, studies have shown that disposable income correlates to higher voter participation.
If taught correctly, creationism does not necessarily imply one religion. It implies intelligent design meaning God, gods or advanced aliens. And why shouldn't it be taught? If evolution is scientifically sound, can't you present sufficient evidence in the classroom to prove it? Or are you worried that *gasp* some people might prefer to continue to adhere to their faith? Growing up in America, I could never decide who had a greater missionary zeal: the Southern Baptists or the evolutionists, most of whom were not even fit to be called amateur biologists.
He certainly was candid about the whole thing. The one question I never got to ask was, "if Gates or Ballmer offered you the top 100-200 engineers and a large budget, would you reimplement Windows from scratch using all of your preferred security methods?"
Both parties appeal to their voters based on emotion, not logic. Take the Republicans for example, they have yet to make any serious attempts to:
1) Restore the RTKB to its 2nd amendment definition 2) Overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing justices to the SCOTUS that care more about the US Constitution than precedent 3) Provide viable reforms to the tax code 4) Tangibly reduce the regulation on business, especially small business, at the federal level which often strangles business in its infancy 5) Defend our country. Sorry country club boys, but it ain't just Mexicans coming across the border so either you hire legal grounds keepers and nannies, or you deal with a Muslim terrorist carrying a backpack nuke into your cushy suburb thanks to our lax border security. It's impossible to call them tough on national defense given the state of our immigration policy which shows no signs of being influenced by national security issues
Yet they still get voters based on: 1) A fear that gays will get married if they're not in control of the body politic 2) A fear that the hippies will take over "" 3) A fear that our kids will be corrupted by drugs || sex || alcohol "" 4) A few more terrorists will blow up a building or two "" (ironic in light of #5) 5) The democrats will win and make us Super Duper MegaBolshevik Uber-Communist (Bush's domestic spending is rather socialist when compared to a real conservative platform)
The democrats: 1) Appeal to their female base on fear: your right to abortion WILL go away and you'll be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for life if we aren't totally in control of the body politic. 2) Appeal to their minority base on racism fears 3) Appeal to their homosexual base on anti-homosexual fears 4) Appeal to their white middle class base on white guilt issues
So in short, if the politics of fear don't appeal to you, vote 3rd party. Any one of them will do.
Anyone want to bet that this "amazing, mathematically proven impossible to reverse engineer" software is going to implicate at least a few innocent people? A major part of the 9-11 problem was that the CIA had all but abandoned human intelligence in favor of the computerized variety. Computers can prove a lot of intel, but only so much and an agency that doesn't rely on agents and contacts in the field is one that'll miss key intel that could be disasterous. Only humans at this point can use intuition. We need that intuition in order to piece together intelligence reports correctly.
This software will only contribute to the "if you have nothng to hide, you have nothing to fear" mentality. People will ask why you showed up in the sweep if you aren't hiding something. Things like this just undermine guilty until proven innocent and will only serve to make our agencies lazier, not more efficient.
Why yes, it is your original creation and you have a full right to protect it, but oh wait... you have to respect the rights of the person who wrote the format you are now using to store your work in.
This is why I as a libertarian despise the arguments in favor of strong IP law. They are trying to make ideas behave like physical property, and in doing so they create a society where no one has absolute ownership over their own work that they made with their own money. As I said, yes it is your creative work/data, but you cannot fully excercise that ownership because your property rights are trumped by another party's patent rights.
That sounds like sharecropping, not property rights to me. You might as well say that by buying a framed picture you implicitly signed an agreement to not using a competing frame-maker's product to store your pictures. Oh wait, that basically is the argument of the defenders of strong IP law. You didn't see the contract, it wasn't even mentioned, but by God you implicitly signed some ephemeral social contract allegedly brokered 200 years ago by our forefathers in some secret masonic temple lacking euclidian geometry hidden away from common knowledge. But this implicit contract, really is there... we swear.
I could never get a site of mine listed in any category, even personal, on Yahoo. They take forever and you have to practically pay them off to have have a shot at getting listed, even though they have a freebie option. If they'd open up their directory to a "community-maintained and policed" system, they'd have an incredibly useful system. Imagine if a Yahoo user could add a comment to an entry saying, "I found this useful for researching topic XYZ." You could have tons of metadata to enhance the search engine, and categories could be peer-moderated by people who pay a $5 processing fee to Yahoo to have a Yahoo rep receive a photo ID by fax proving that you're a real person, not some troll signing up for the 15th time in a row.
Yahoo could have made a lot of money if they'd bought Google, let them take over the entire search and directory side of Yahoo and opened up the directories to a community process.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it never occurred to anyone at Disney that milking these franchises to the point of nearly destroying them not only ruins the value of the first few good ones for future generations (like what the Matrix sequels did to the first one) and the exploitation of old stories instead of creating new ones tends to make a company look washed up to its customers.
That "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" coming from an American is naivete at best. Innocence has never been a defense against paranoid "officials." Stalin used to execute people at a whim for political reasons, even if they did everything they could to be good cogs in the machine.
Bad governments have murdered more people than any other type of institution or any individual combined. It's amazing to me sometimes how so many Bush supporters can talk about tradition while disregarding history and regarding our founders' traditions and advise with open contempt.
Anyone notice from the trailer that BloodRayne's general appearance aside, the movie and game have nothing in common?
If they deliberately mislead the ratings board to give them a lower rating, then they're trying to get away with fraud. And yes, they knew that the PC version had a good chance of getting hacked to make the sex scene availible.
They are asking Google to pay for this part of their lawsuit to protect the COPA law at their own expense. Google gets nothing out of it. I'm sure that Google could have been paid a few hundred thousand dollars to write a test suite to prove the DoJ's case. One Google engineer could have written a script that would have given them millions of results based on simulating actual search queries.
Yet the DoJ didn't want to be bothered to have to pay for this. This is slavery because they are forcing someone to work for their benefit without compensation or as a form of restitution for a crime against their life or property. There is no middle ground here. The DoJ is in the wrong because they refused to pay for the data they wanted and attempted to extort it using the force of law.
For better or for worse, the stock market used to be something that only those that knew how to invest really did anything with. Those with no clue on how to invest usually just avoided it, or invested in safe mutual funds or big companies like GE or IBM. Then millions of average families got involved, went crazy thinking it was the lottery and lost obscene sums of money.
.com era. Sorry, but at barely $6.00B in projected revenues for this year, they aren't worth $500/share. If they were consistently making $25B in profit on expenses of $2B, yes, I could see that. God help us, though, when Google utilizes all of its information its indexed to maximize its profits. Privacy won't be just dead, but it'll be publically humiliated, tortured, executed, its body cremated and its ashes unceremoniously pissed on for good measure.
I am a pretty good investor, but then my mom taught me the basics of investing. My father and I are two archetypes of investors. He's the type that goes with the flow, whereas I'm conservative with the amount of money I'll invest, but willing to take risks with small companies that I rationally believe have a good shot of growing big. If I had control over my assets in the dotcom era (I was still in high school), I'd have made almost $1,000,000 before taxes and would have ended up keeping the bulk of it after the bubble burst. My father would have lost everything because he never researched what he was investing in, he'd just buy what the latest rag said was a cool company... like most of the Linux "companies" back then.
The biggest problem we have is that most people don't want to realize that investing is serious work and that it requires that you **learn** what you're doing. It's not the "insert money into slot to double each year for five years" game that they want it to be. Losing everything you invest is a realistic possibility which is why it should come after savings and bills... not before. And if you do nothing but short term investments, you'll only make your broker rich and yourself poor unless you're GOOD at it and have a lot of money to buy in bulk.
My point is that maybe enough of the casual investors have left that we can move forward now. Google's stock, though, is still a holdover from the
If piracy is still rampant on P2P networks, and music sales are still down... doesn't that mean that more people are not buying the music that they claim on slashdot and elsewhere that they'd buy to support the band? What is going on with this? If most of the new music is so shitty you cannot buy a CD online for $12-$15 (sorry, most of the time claiming you're forced to pay $20 is bullshit with the internet) then why is piracy still rampant?
Unless... few P2P defenders want to admit that they really have no interest in paying for music that they could otherwise get for free. Look, I despise the RIAA as much as the next guy, but if you're downloading the music of a small band, you're not supporting them. No one will notice that and think "hey this is the next great band" except for maybe the hated RIAA's lawyers if they see a spike in P2P traffic. One of my all time favorite bands, Lacuna Coil, has only combined sold a few hundred thousand copies of their albums, most of which came from Ozzfest 2004, and I fail to see how downloading all of Comalies and their new Karmacode album would help them if I cannot see their shows.
Now that I am out of college, I find myself no longer able to support P2P networks used for this purpose. It's a great file sharing approach that's often spoiled by teens and young adults who do have the money to pay for their music, but won't. The turning point came for me when I saw a few poor metalheads non-chalantly paying $17-$20 at Ozzfest for Comalies, then noticed some of my almost upper class friends in CS had no desire to actually buy Comalies, even though they loved every song on the album.
For every 1 honest P2P user, there are probably 10 who aren't. Don't ever forget that the boom in CD sales with Napster in 1998-2000 corresponded to the dotcom bubble!
All it took was one little patent holding company to bring down a legitimate product used by millions of business users. Does NTP even make a product of their own? The main reason that I see this as a problem is pretty simple: software patents' shelf-lives are too long to do anything but make them a pay day for the lawyers. A one or two year term would work, but the 17 year term makes the format/approach/algorithm completely unusuable to most competitors for derivatives, extensions, etc. for its entire useful life. Does anyone honestly think that a company in Microsoft, Apple or Oracle's position would license their patents to a small, but viable competitor without charging near bankrupcy rates?
Software development is the cheapest type of engineering there is. Unlike other industries, it's far easier for a small outfit to grow on a small budget and see a return on its investment.
Pay to clean up the governments in these regions by bringing in consultants to train new police forces, etc. and then encourage 1st world investors to invest in the infrastructure. This approach is starting to work in some of the small Eastern European countries like Macedonia where former US agents train their national police forces to use American standards and procedures. Or how about a food aid plan where they buy the native crops first and then hire locals (with 1st world military oversight) to prepare and distribute the food (that way our soldiers can shoot them if they try ransoming the food or handing it over to warlords like what happened in Somalia).
But... it I guess it appeals to Kofi Annan's inner geek and it's politically correct to attack the digital divide when the food, running water, electricity and semi-functional government divide is a far more serious threat to life, liberty, property and the future in these countries.
And at what point did the Chinese people decide this? At what point did they have a popular, 99% corruption-free referendum where they decided to cede all control over speech to their central government?
China is not democratic, and thus its government doesn't represent the will of the majority. Did you ever think that they might actually like to be able to search for whatever they want? With the furor over Wikipedia getting blocked off and on, it should be pretty obvious that most educated Chinese at least are not big fans of this.
But you'd never know since people who really come out with anti-Communist government views in China are routinely charged with the equivalent of felonies and locked away for as long as twenty years to life. Even more so for the ones who publish those views where westerners can easily see them. Afterall, they can't have their utopia questioned, now can they?
Well, I guess this proves that there may not be a "state of nature" in the old philosophical sense. We naturally organize ourselves. Katrina was one of my examples, when people naturally formed hierarchical groups for survival and promotion of order. The question now is, do we recognize that there is a compelling argument now to question the extent and nature of government, since if evolution be true, it is organized more out of a primal fear than an enlightened attitude toward social interaction?
It certainly does help prove a point on why governments have often be so brutal toward their own people.
>:(
:-P
and I really want to
in the face of the lawyer who thought this up
Is if they actually got involved full time with the blogosphere, at the same level as the "A-list" bloggers. Same legal restrictions, everything. And one other, very important thing. It's not enough that they open up comments, they need to do trackbacks to. Nothing can get a debate going on between bloggers like trackbacks. They're a good way to make sure that the other side doesn't have an excuse to make wild assertions and then say, "well no one challenged me."
Of course they'd shit a brick if people started providing factual trackbacks, especially ones that reference opensecrets.org on pet projects. Imagine a democratic senator getting called out on their support for repressive copyright law or a republican getting forced to own up to links to pharmaceuticals when they oppose drug liberalization measures.
Yes! Next question?
$10,000,000 / 140,000 victims = $71/person. We given fines in the tens of thousand to hundreds of thousands for crack/cocaine/meth, but apparently white collar crime that targets over one hundred thousand people is worth only $71/victim when the identity theft can cost them hundreds of hours of time regaining their identity/fixing records and a lot of grief in general. Not to mention the damage it does to the businesses hit by the scammers.
Fine, then what should be a standard legal definition for time limit for liability if they don't fix the bug in a reasonable period of time? If it's severe, they get three months? Other companies have to do product recalls by law if their products fail in a way that is damaging to life or property, so at what point do they have to start making amends to their customers for failure? Kinda funny considering the bravado they had in the past. I guess they got called out and they were all bluster.
It's not enough that they burned down a customer's house... now they are going to set a customer on fire directly! I guess this is just part of their secret strategy to scare people away from game consoles and back into PC gaming...
Many parents today grew up with video games and it's a great way for the busy mom or dad to bond with their kids, at least in a superficial way given the probability that it will be the extent of their bonding. Also, it makes good sense that they are voters because to be able to easily afford a new game system and spend $50-$60/game, you'd have to have disposable income and IIRC, studies have shown that disposable income correlates to higher voter participation.
If taught correctly, creationism does not necessarily imply one religion. It implies intelligent design meaning God, gods or advanced aliens. And why shouldn't it be taught? If evolution is scientifically sound, can't you present sufficient evidence in the classroom to prove it? Or are you worried that *gasp* some people might prefer to continue to adhere to their faith? Growing up in America, I could never decide who had a greater missionary zeal: the Southern Baptists or the evolutionists, most of whom were not even fit to be called amateur biologists.
He certainly was candid about the whole thing. The one question I never got to ask was, "if Gates or Ballmer offered you the top 100-200 engineers and a large budget, would you reimplement Windows from scratch using all of your preferred security methods?"
God knows they have the resources!
Both parties appeal to their voters based on emotion, not logic. Take the Republicans for example, they have yet to make any serious attempts to:
1) Restore the RTKB to its 2nd amendment definition
2) Overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing justices to the SCOTUS that care more about the US Constitution than precedent
3) Provide viable reforms to the tax code
4) Tangibly reduce the regulation on business, especially small business, at the federal level which often strangles business in its infancy
5) Defend our country. Sorry country club boys, but it ain't just Mexicans coming across the border so either you hire legal grounds keepers and nannies, or you deal with a Muslim terrorist carrying a backpack nuke into your cushy suburb thanks to our lax border security. It's impossible to call them tough on national defense given the state of our immigration policy which shows no signs of being influenced by national security issues
Yet they still get voters based on:
1) A fear that gays will get married if they're not in control of the body politic
2) A fear that the hippies will take over ""
3) A fear that our kids will be corrupted by drugs || sex || alcohol ""
4) A few more terrorists will blow up a building or two "" (ironic in light of #5)
5) The democrats will win and make us Super Duper MegaBolshevik Uber-Communist (Bush's domestic spending is rather socialist when compared to a real conservative platform)
The democrats:
1) Appeal to their female base on fear: your right to abortion WILL go away and you'll be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for life if we aren't totally in control of the body politic.
2) Appeal to their minority base on racism fears
3) Appeal to their homosexual base on anti-homosexual fears
4) Appeal to their white middle class base on white guilt issues
So in short, if the politics of fear don't appeal to you, vote 3rd party. Any one of them will do.
Anyone want to bet that this "amazing, mathematically proven impossible to reverse engineer" software is going to implicate at least a few innocent people? A major part of the 9-11 problem was that the CIA had all but abandoned human intelligence in favor of the computerized variety. Computers can prove a lot of intel, but only so much and an agency that doesn't rely on agents and contacts in the field is one that'll miss key intel that could be disasterous. Only humans at this point can use intuition. We need that intuition in order to piece together intelligence reports correctly.
This software will only contribute to the "if you have nothng to hide, you have nothing to fear" mentality. People will ask why you showed up in the sweep if you aren't hiding something. Things like this just undermine guilty until proven innocent and will only serve to make our agencies lazier, not more efficient.
Why yes, it is your original creation and you have a full right to protect it, but oh wait... you have to respect the rights of the person who wrote the format you are now using to store your work in.
This is why I as a libertarian despise the arguments in favor of strong IP law. They are trying to make ideas behave like physical property, and in doing so they create a society where no one has absolute ownership over their own work that they made with their own money. As I said, yes it is your creative work/data, but you cannot fully excercise that ownership because your property rights are trumped by another party's patent rights.
That sounds like sharecropping, not property rights to me. You might as well say that by buying a framed picture you implicitly signed an agreement to not using a competing frame-maker's product to store your pictures. Oh wait, that basically is the argument of the defenders of strong IP law. You didn't see the contract, it wasn't even mentioned, but by God you implicitly signed some ephemeral social contract allegedly brokered 200 years ago by our forefathers in some secret masonic temple lacking euclidian geometry hidden away from common knowledge. But this implicit contract, really is there... we swear.
I could never get a site of mine listed in any category, even personal, on Yahoo. They take forever and you have to practically pay them off to have have a shot at getting listed, even though they have a freebie option. If they'd open up their directory to a "community-maintained and policed" system, they'd have an incredibly useful system. Imagine if a Yahoo user could add a comment to an entry saying, "I found this useful for researching topic XYZ." You could have tons of metadata to enhance the search engine, and categories could be peer-moderated by people who pay a $5 processing fee to Yahoo to have a Yahoo rep receive a photo ID by fax proving that you're a real person, not some troll signing up for the 15th time in a row.
Yahoo could have made a lot of money if they'd bought Google, let them take over the entire search and directory side of Yahoo and opened up the directories to a community process.