Yes, it tells us that copyright is taking pretty seriously by most people. It tells us that you are highly unlikely to find a jury that is sympathetic to the infringment of the rights of others. It tells us that no matter how despicable the RIAA may be, they are still legally correct. It tells us that the fantasy legal arguments often waved about on Slashdot are fantasies that hold no weight in a courtroom.
Yes. This is absolutely correct. I know plenty of people who don't ever download anything that they didn't pay for.
Keep in mind too that juries are often made up of idiots. I'm American and I last served on a jury 4 years ago. While we were in the jury room at one point about 4 or 5 guys on the jury tried to top each other by seeing which one of them was the most incompetent computer user. I have never seen anything like it. They were each trying to convince the others that they were the stupidest when it came to technology. Fortunately our case was a case that had nothing to do with technology, but you see, these are the kinds of people who serve on American juries.
I have become convinced from personal observation that about 5-10% of the US population is obsessed with rules and punishing those who break them. They have no sympathy at all for anyone who breaks any rule and want the full punishment possible given to these people. So I think what happens is that by pure chance sometimes you get 1 or 2 of these people on a jury and they are pushing very vocally for the defendant to get punished for "stealing" because "stealing is wrong" and "we can stop others from doing it by punishing this guy". Then maybe you have some of those technophobes I talked about from my jury and it's not hard to see that you might have 3 or 4 people who just simply see the case as this - "Stealing is wrong. The defendant stole. He MUST be punished for this AND we need to send a message to others to not do this". Then you've got maybe 8-9 people left on the jury who say "I just want to get out of here ASAP. The defendant did it. Let's just punish them like the others want so we can get out." So this kind of verdict doesn't surprise me.
Remember that some of the people who choose to fight may simply be delusional about their chances in court. I have the impression that this applies to the Thomas case in particular.
I
but the problem, as I see it, is people have largely stopped honking, so they'll just sit behind such an oblivious person and just wait. If people honked, we could get things moving again. It doesn't have to be a nasty lean on the horn, just a toot-toot.
Let me guess. You live in the northeastern US, right? I don't. The reason that people don't honk as much is that even a simple quick toot can be taken as an insult that must be responded to with violence, be it via agressive driving or perhaps even pulling a gun on the person who honked. One of my friends and her husband (both from Massachusetts but living at the time in the Deep South) got into a life threatening situation over honking at a car in front of them and I am convinced that the only thing that kept them from being shot was that they were able to do some fancy driving that got them away from the car that ended up chasing them.
See, this whole thing just illustrates what I realized some years ago. Coca Cola Company = Microsoft. Think about it. Just like Microsoft can't innovate to save its life and instead prefers to operate either by reacting to what others in the industry do or by giving customers something that they don't want, that's how the Coca Cola Company works. So what did Pepsi do this year? They gave us Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, both of which used real sugar instead of corn syrup. So what is Coke's answer to this? Fizzy milk.
Some years ago I read an article on baseball stadiums, which is actually relevant in terms of possibly explaining why NASA would view the tapes of the original moon landing as expendable. Essentially the article said that in the USA in the 1960s everybody was obsessed with tearing down the old to make room for the new. This started in the 1950s but really got going in the 1960s. One example of it was that many American cities (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Atlanta and probably others) built giant "multi-purpose" stadiums to house both baseball and football teams. Old baseball only stadiums were often torn down (Forbes Field) or moved (Crosby Field - mostly moved to Kentucky) to make way for what were eventually called "cookie cutter" stadiums that all looked identical and were meant to house everything from baseball and football to concerts and motocross rallies. These stadiums ended up being "jack of all trades, master of none" offering bad viewing for all sports. But that was how things apparently were in the 60s. Throw out the old to make room for the new. So when you have an entire society that seems to be dedicated to the belief that you can only make progress by destroying the past and building on top of it, yes, I can certainly believe that NASA in such a climate considered the films to be worthless and not worth keeping.
This reminds me of a little known incident that happened in the mid 1990s. For a while, AT&T ran a service called 1-800-OPERATOR where you could call this number and get AT&T to connect you to a long distance call. For those who don't know, we're required (at least in most of the USA if not all of it) to pick a long distance service provider. That company does not have to be who you get local telephone service from. It was possible to place long distance calls with someone other than your long distance provider by simply dialing an access number that belonged to that company and you would get billed for the call from that company. So for example you might have, say, BellSouth as your long distance provider, but you could dial an access number and place calls on Sprint if Sprint offered a better rate. No need to change providers that way. So AT&T decided that it would be smart to get in on this too and lower their rates. So the way it worked was that you called 1-800-OPERATOR and someone at AT&T would connect you to your long distance call and charge you whatever rate AT&T had for the service. AT&T promoted this service on national television commercials and spent a lot of advertising money on it. Anyway, I had a friend at the time who worked for MCI in their marketing department. She told me that MCI had reserved the telephone number that corresponded to 1-800-OPERATER. MCI spent zero dollars advertising and simply waited for people who couldn't spell to call that number and they placed the call for the person and made the money off it. She told me "You would not believe how much money we made off this". Some months after the campaign started, AT&T quietly pulled the plug on it. I always assumed that too many people couldn't spell "operator" correctly and they were tired of giving business to MCI for nothing.
Some years ago back when The Far Side was still in production, I remember one cartoon that showed some scientists around a blackboard with a tank nearby that had dolphins in it. One of the scientists said "There's another one of those aw-blah es-pan-yol sounds" and he was about to put another mark next to "aw-blah es-pan-yol" on the blackboard. Of course "shoy bi" (in whatever direction) could mean something in a non-English language, but to be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean that the monkeys understand that language. I'm not sure that this "experiment" really accomplished anything as the ability of these monkeys to, in theory, differentiate prefixes may have nothing at all to do with how human infants accomplish the same thing. Wow, that was some really useful research there. I can't wait for their next report that shows that monkeys have been known to eat food every day and they have periods of inactivity every day where for hours they seem to be unconscious.
I'm sure he was banking on a bit of taxpayer funds and cutting deals with the electric company to get that done. My guess is they voted him down.
That may well be right, but that doesn't mean that such was smart thinking on his part. I am one of the rare print subscribers to USA Today (yes there are still some of us left) and it seemed like almost every week there was some giant ad that his company paid for telling Americans to contact Congress and support his wind farm project to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I think a rather significant portion of his plan was that some government entity, be it Texas or the USA, would get behind it and pony up the money necessary to get the power to a distribution system.
I agree with Nutria. I can speak Russian pretty well (not fluent, but still pretty good) and I've spent a good deal of time in Ukraine. There are a lot of similarities between Ukraine and Russia and some differences. In Russia, the government basically doesn't care at all that criminals steal from the west. Their attitude is "It sucks to be you!" to the victims and as long as the criminals are causing problems for people outside of the country and potentially paying taxes on what they steal, they will continue to look the other way. In Ukraine, the government does not particularly like having citizens rip off people in the west. Russia has proven that it can't be trusted to respect borders where ethnic Russians live (look at Georgia) and Ukraine's population is roughly 40% Russian. (Long story short - Krushchev gave the Crimea to Ukraine in the 1950s. That plus the fact that what is now eastern Ukraine is mostly inhabited by ethnic Russians has led to a significant chunk of what is now Ukraine being strongly Russian in character.) The current Ukrainian government is essentially ethnic Ukrainian and they fear the embrace of Mother Russia with good reason. My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and her great grandparents were murdered by Stalin's henchmen in the 1930s. So the government of Ukraine has pushed forward a pro-EU and pro-NATO policy specifically because it is the only way to guarantee that Russia won't invade on some pretext and annex Ukraine like they did to those regions in Georgia. So the Ukrainian government doesn't like it when people in Ukraine rip off the west because that just hurts the ability of Ukraine to appear stable enough to eventually get into NATO and the EU.
People in the ex-USSR just got ruined by living there. As a general rule, they are fairly immoral (a good number of people are highly unethical and dishonest) and they are "live for today" to an extreme. They also have a sense of entitlement that is just impossible to understand if you have never been there. They honestly think that the west got rich by essentially holding them back (the Soviet government pretty much convinced them of that) and that robbing the west is just payback for past sins the west committed against them. So this attitude makes it easy to find people who want to steal from the west. Then you have an incredibly corrupt police and judicial system. All you have to do is just pay the judge enough money prior to the trial and you will win - it's guaranteed. And the police can easily be bribed to overlook any crime, botch any investigation, or to go examine your enemies and cause problems for them. You can see that the main government in Kiev has an interest in Ukrainians behaving ethically as such furthers their plans for EU and NATO membership which in turn protects them from Russian invasion. However, the citizens in general (foolishly in my opinion) don't believe that Russia would really invade and they have no concept of delayed gratification, so when given a choice between stealing and immediately profiting from it or being honest, they will choose to steal. Why not? Even if they get arrested, the odds are high that they can bribe their way out of it.
Maybe we can employ the same logic for speeding tickets. $1.9 million because I may be able to go 105 in a 35 despite the fact that I was going 40. Downloading 24 songs is not worth destroying someone's life over. Look at the penalties for vehicular homicide and tell me the fine fits the crime.
1) The problem is not with the legal system, per se, in my opinion. It's with the jury part of the legal system. I've said this before, but it's still how I feel - the problem with this case is that the defendant has apparently engaged in willful behavior that makes her look dishonest to the jury. She has twice not fully informed her lawyers of everything she did. Basically I see the defendant as a delusional woman who thinks that by simply fighting she can beat the RIAA. I think the most recent trial proved that no jury is ever going to find in her favor. Yes, certainly the damages are absolutely insane, but that's the fault of the jury. Had she asked for a bench trial, I'm sure she still would have lost but the damages would have been a lot more reasonable. She and her attorneys have been taking jury trails because, as someone else said, she wants to hit a home run. That is, to get out without paying a dime. It seems to me based on what I read about the trial that she clearly did download songs using an ID that only belonged to her. There just really is no realistic chance she is ever going to get cleared no matter how many trials she gets.
2) The infamous Stallworth case (the DUI death) is a bad example to cite. Basically what happened was that yes, Stallworth was DUI for sure, but the death was caused because the pedestrian essentially jumped in front of the car. If he had been driving the speed limit and not been drunk the accident would still have happened. The accident was considered to be 100% the fault of the pedestrian and that's why Stallworth isn't going to jail for very long. I know people would like to believe that this crazy, drunk football player was weaving all over the road and just ran down an innocent pedestrian, but that's now how it happened.
They have done more to give legitimate anti-spam efforts a black eye than ANY legislative attempts to 'solve' the problem ever could.
I -used- to believe that 'collateral damage' was a legitimate 'tactic' in the fight against spammers. I've grown up since then.
You get a big high five from me on that. On my previous job, SORBS caused us a lot of problems. It was very difficult to get off their lists once they listed you and if I remember correctly they also had a policy of not telling you why you were listed to begin with. I remember that one of the guys in our main European office was able to make friends with one of the SORBS guys in the same country and get some information about why we were blacklisted. Normally they didn't tell you why you were blacklisted, but this was some "countryman to countryman" special favor this SORBS guy did for us. We had a lot of email problems because some customers would use only SORBS for dealing with spam so if you're on the list, your email doesn't go through to them. I'm not saying that SORBS couldn't have been a useful minor part of an anti-spam solution, but all I saw was customers who blindly trusted SORBS and only SORBS and that made our life hell. I agree that I no longer think that SORBS' collection of tactics is legitimate. There are better ways to deal with spam and if SORBS dies, well, sign me up to dance on their grave.
Go look up the news for Tamil Tigers and War Crimes trials, Europe and the US want the Sri Lankan govt. to be punished, whilst China Russia and India don't:
That is completely untrue. In fact, the only evidence I can find is that the UK in particular seems a lot more interested in prosecuting Tamil Tigers than the Sri Lankan government.
Here in the USA we have a lot of Tamil immigrants. Some from India. Some from Sri Lanka. They make a lot of noise. I personally know a Tamil family and they are constantly trying to rally US support to "stop the killing" or whatever the phrase of the day is.
The fact is that the Tamil Tigers upped the ante in international terrorism and blazed the path for Al Queda to follow. While the family I know does not favor the Tigers per se, like almost all Tamils from or in Sri Lanka, they weren't real upset when things were going well for the Tigers and there was de facto self rule in Sri Lanka in Tiger controlled territory. I can promise you that at least unofficially the US position is that the Tigers got what they deserved and it sucks to be them.
The only reason the US cares about Iran is that a change of government might lessen Iran's desire for nuclear weapons and might be somewhat less inclined to support Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. Yes, indeed the verious "Stan" countries "play ball" as you said, but they also don't seek nuclear weapons, support Hezbollah and work to destroy Israel and deny the Hollocaust.
These are capitalist corporations. Their goal is to make money. People are willing to buy censorship technology (just look at any government office). Why do you act shocked that this is happening?
Good point. Unfortunately if Nokia and Siemens didn't sell it, somebody else would. Nokia surprises me, but not Siemens. The Germans have always loved money and they have no ethical problems with doing business with unfriendly states. I can remember back when Ronald Reagan was president that there were issues with German companies that made illegal or quasi-illegal deals with various unfriendly nations just to make a little money, so this kind of thing has gone on for some time.
You must have attended a very very small school. Most US schools have different courses based on skill level. Your conclusions about the US school system are therefore wrong. They are merely conclusions about very small schools.
Really? "Most US schools" have this? Maybe your school did, but my high school, which had over 1300 students in grades 10-12, most assuredly did not. Well, if your definition of "different" means "two", then mine did. My high school (that's "secondary school" for all you non-North Americans) offered one advanced level class in chemistry, math, English and Social Studies. Entry into those classes was restricted to the brighter students (I got in - lucky me). Then they had normal level classes in all those subjects that everyone else took. Granted, I graduated in the 1980s, but I don't know what the heck school you went to, but I tend to think that your experience is the atypical one here and not that of the guy who posted.
This is how I saw the trial from what I read. I am not a lawyer, but my best friend is and I know a decent amount about the law thanks to him. This is just how I see it and in my non-lawyer viewpoint, I could be wrong about things.
It seemed to me that she pulled a fast one on her attorneys. They seemed caught off guard with the revelation that her disk drive was changed by Best Buy after the date she had specified in her previous trial. Oops! I think it was pretty much "game over" at that point. Her attorneys now had to improvise a defense on the spot and you saw how well that worked.
The defendant seems to project a real aura of arrogance and dishonesty. This is twice now that juries have bitch slapped her with huge compensatory damages. I'm sure if we met her in person that we would think that she is a master manipulator and she has twice convinced attorneys that some great wrong has been done to her and yet both times in trial she looked completely guilty when her web of lies fell down. Now all we can hope for is a 3rd trial based on technicalities, but at this point I think it's pretty hopeless. Her case is pathetic and she's not going to win. It really hurts those who have been wronged by the RIAA that this delusional and manipulative woman has been a test case for fighting back.
On another related note, I was going to say that if BluRay and AACS do end up getting reliably cracked and 'free' copies of films can be made then the bizarre twisted thing is that it might just end up making BluRay ubiquitously popular and give it the critical mass it needs to pull DVD back.
"End up getting reliably cracked"? "Free copies"?
I guess you don't keep up, so let me break the news to you. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT (in caps and bold face so you don't miss it) of BluRay discs can be cracked and copied. Every single one of them. It's been true for more than 1 year now, maybe even a year and a half. The final BluRay encryption standard, BD+, which was said (I think) to be able to last "forever" lasted a couple of months before it was cracked.
If you troll Bit Torrent or Usenet sites, you can find complete rips or at worst smaller conversions (down to DVD dual layer size) of any popular BluRay disc available.
Thank you for posting this. This is a perfect example of how Chinese groupthink works.
I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article where an angry ex-wife put some false allegations about her ex-husband online (this was also in China) and the guy ended up being constantly harassed until the government stepped in and protected him and put the ex-wife in jail for lying. I've heard of similar stories happening with "online justice" in South Korea where people just believe whatever horrible thing someone says online about another person.
What really bothers me about China is that many young people there seem to have this patriotic fervor that's based in nothing more than believing what the government tells them. I would be shocked if someone asked Chinese students why they are so angry about Taiwanese independence or Tibetan independence (or even autonomy) and that had anything to say beyond "They are now and always have been part of China". I've been to Taiwan and except for a few crazy pro-independence nut jobs, most people there just want to be left alone by China and nothing more than that. They don't wish any ill on China, they just want to be left alone. It seems to me that the Chinese government actually likes to encourage this irrational "Everything we say and do is right" attitude. It makes the population easier to control when they are incapable of independent thought.
Finally I read the original article and I found some aspects troubling. First of all, some people figured out where the kitten killing in China occurred by recognizing things in the video. No problem them. But then it says that someone recognized the shoes the girl wore and knew they were ordered online. OK, maybe these shoes are only available online and someone knew that. Fine. But then it says that they figured out who ordered them and went after her. Hmm... serious lack of privacy here. So it's not the government asking the business to see who did this but just an angry mob and the company apparently gave them the info. What? Was there only one woman who ordered the shoes? So how on earth from this paltry information did they figure out who did it? I don't know. It sounds kind of fishy to me but if true, I guess it says a lot about China that all you have to do is get an angry mob and businesses will give out all your personal info to them.
You, Mr. Anonymous Poster, are in a lost cause. All I can do is provide suggestions for your next job. Why?
1) Your ratio of employees to IT people is hopeless for you. Prior to our being bought out by a Fortune 500 company, the company I work for had a rough ratio of 15 employees for 1 IT person. At worst it was probably 20 to 1, but that was before I began to work here.
2) If you have to ask this question, the odds are extremely high that you will not be able to change things where you are at.
I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years. In my experience, IT has to get the upper hand from the beginning or it's too late. You can't get control of your situation after people have already learned not to respect you. I have a colleague that I've worked with twice in my career and he was great at setting up expectations immediately upon arrival. If people wanted something done that was complete b.s., he had no problems telling them to their face that they were idiots. The "Scotty approach" also can work wonders. If it will take 10 minutes to do, say it will take 1 hour or 2 hours. Do it in 20 minutes. Then wait to give them the results until towards the end of the time you specified. Sometimes do it very quickly after giving them longer expectations and you'll look like a genius for doing it sooner than expected.
Being nice and friendly can also help and if your co-workers actually start to like you and respect you, they may ease off on what they ask you to do.
The bottom line is that you have to be a jerk at some points early on and confront people and tell them that you can't or won't do what they asked for and tell them why. Don't sugar coat. If they are idiots, explain why the request is stupid. You don't have to necessarily say "You are an idiot" to them, but you definitely have to say things like "If I do this, it will take days to do and the return on my expended time is not worth it as everything else will have to wait for days until I finish this unimportant task". You have to be willing to do something like that.
It also helps if you're wiling to leave if things suck and everyone doesn't respect you. Being unwilling to get out takes away any ability to try to make changes.
Why Stanislaw Lem doesn't get more attention on this News for Nerds site I just don't understand. Maybe it's just a general adversion to works in translation. But look beyond works like Solaris which is a clever book, though not so great, and of the film adaptations one was dull and the other cheesy.
Translation -
I'm American. I don't like to think. I am incapable of understanding the work of a genius like Andrei Tarkovsky. Even the remake with Clooney didn't work for me because despite being shorter, I still had to think about it. And there wasn't enough stuff being blown up.
By the way, I'm American so I'm allowed to say that.
Oh how I wish that this could be read by Mr. Lynton, but unfortunately even if he read it, he JUST WOULDN'T GET IT anyway.
Lynton refers to how Sony has essentially closed shop in South Korea because those sneaky Koreans can download his DVDs too fast, so they have no incentive to buy them. Well, I'll tell you why people in South Korea and elsewhere are bypassing Sony. It's your fault. And I'm going to explain why it's your fault and I'm not even going to go down the path of telling you that American movies mostly suck. While that's certainly true, that's not why South Koreans and others aren't buying from your stores.
Hollywood, which includes you Mr. Lynton, is its own worst enemy. Let's take a look at what you release to foreign markets. There's a huge demand for region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs around the world. Know why? It's because region 1 DVDs mean quality. Region 1 DVDs typically use progressive video and high quality audio (DTS for example). Region 1 DVDs often have extras and while personally I'm not real fond of extras most of the time, the marketplace here seems to want it. Let's look at what you give to people in South Korea, which is region 3 for those keeping score. Well, you often release a film with zero extras. You sometimes give them interlaced video and lower quality audio choices (AC3 only and at low bit rates). I have no idea if the subtitles you give them are any good or are as bad as some of those bad English subtitles we used to get on Hong Kong movies in the past. And here's the best part of all - you and your cabal have "persuaded" almost every single DVD manufacturer to stop making DVD players that can have the region settings changed. So now Samsung, a very large company in, hmmm, South Korea, simply does not make a DVD player anywhere in the world now that can be made region free. They are not alone in this. I participate in a large video forum and you know what one of our most popular questions from new members is? How can I make my DVD player region free? You know what the answer is? Often it is "You can't". So you, Mr..Lynton, sold an inferior product to your customers around the world and in your paranoia over piracy made sure that they could not buy a superior product from region 1 and watch it on their TVs at home. And to top it all off, while you and your Hollywood buddies have slit your own throats you are convinced that someone else has done you wrong. What's really sad is that doing things like having region codes to begin with and convincing Samsung and others to stop making consumer friendly DVD players has caused those customers to look for alternatives - "free" copies of your DVDs that don't have region codes in them so they can play them at home. So no, I don't feel sorry for you because you did this to yourself and what you and your buddies in Hollywood think that consumers want is not what they want at all. If you want to fix this, put out better product overseas and start encouraging those same DVD player manufacturers to make region free DVD players because until you give up on region coding and finally understand how much we, your potential consumers, hate it, you're basically grasping at sand and not understanding why it's running through your fingers.
Interesting misspelling
on
Space Vulture
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· Score: 0, Redundant
From the review: The most noticeable was the heroin's apparent inability to do much for herself.
heroine - chief female character in a story, play, etc.
heroin - narcotic drug
Sigh. Need to do better proofreading, JR Peck.
They also claim I am from Belgium, I am obviously from Luxembourg.
I used to work at a US office of a large French company, so I have some insights into this statement that might not be apparent to the typical American. Consider this as if he had said:
They also claim I am from Alabama. I am obviously from Tennessee.
and you'll have a rough idea of what he is saying and why he doesn't like it to be said that he's from Belgium.
Actually, you are wrong. Designing an air cooled system is hard. You have to deal with problems of filtration (there will be dust - but where do you want it to build up?), ensuring that the flow goes where you want, turbulence, finding room for the ducting, designing the system so that components do not mask other components, and needing to handle high volumes of air. With properly designed water cooling, you have a few quite simple heat removal blocks and a simple plumbing system which can route pretty much anywhere.
The reality is that there are pros and cons to water cooling vs. air cooling and people have to weigh both and decide what works for them. While your post is essentially correct, it's also a bit heavy on the theoretical. I remember working at a place that had water cooled IBM mainframes. This was a US government facility and it was in a building I almost never had to go to. I remember downtimes there because "the water chiller is down" or there was a leak and a hellacious mess of water was under the floor. So please do not continue to suggest that water cooling is 100% great and has no flaws. People went to air cooling for a reason - to stop having to deal with the messes that could happen when there were leaks or downtimes when the water chilling device broke down.
Hell, even with other author's works it's the best approach. They are completely different media after all, and require completely different approaches to storytelling.
I think this is a very good comment. A currently popular Sci Fi author is scheduled to have the first (to my knowledge) film made from one of his books in the next year or two. This author is not universally liked, so I'm not naming him so as to avoid starting an endless thread on his works. Anyway, he said that once you agree to sell the rights to a movie from something you wrote, you give up all rights to how the movie comes out. Maybe you get lucky and it turns out like Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings. Or maybe you end up like Isaac Asimov and arguably none of the movies based on your books are very good. But you agree, as an author, once you take the money that control is gone from you to Hollywood. If you can't live with the chance that it might not turn out like you want, he said you shouldn't sell the rights.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is a great example. The late great Andrei Tarkovksy directed a film based on this in the early 1970s in the USSR. Many people, including me, consider this film to be a classic, but Lem hated it. Tarkovsky changed a lot of things from the book (I think for the better) and Lem was bitter about it for all of his life. The 2002 film starring George Clooney was a big failure and many hate it, but Lem himself loved it because he considered it to be true to his original story. Go figure.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign
Unlike you, I am perfectly willing to take my chances with life in a world in which mosquitoes have been eradicated. Unfortunately for me, I seem to hold a minority opinion on this. It seems to me that if malaria and other mosquito borne diseases were a bigger problem in North America and Europe that people wouldn't be suggesting that eliminating them might be a bad idea but instead would be focused on killing them all.
Nope. Letting the RIAA pick the "forensics expert" does absolutely nothing to ensure that a fair and impartial expert is chosen. I'd think all that would do is make it very easy for the RIAA to set up a forensics lab of their own that could potentially plant evidence on the mirror copy. Then what do you do? They could always claim that your copy, which is minus the planted evidence, was "tampered with". I see no good out of this, but if NewYorkCountyLawyer disagrees, I would welcome an opportunity to be educated out of my error here.
Slashdot Mirror
That ought to tell you something.
Yes, it tells us that copyright is taking pretty seriously by most people. It tells us that you are highly unlikely to find a jury that is sympathetic to the infringment of the rights of others. It tells us that no matter how despicable the RIAA may be, they are still legally correct. It tells us that the fantasy legal arguments often waved about on Slashdot are fantasies that hold no weight in a courtroom.
Yes. This is absolutely correct. I know plenty of people who don't ever download anything that they didn't pay for.
Keep in mind too that juries are often made up of idiots. I'm American and I last served on a jury 4 years ago. While we were in the jury room at one point about 4 or 5 guys on the jury tried to top each other by seeing which one of them was the most incompetent computer user. I have never seen anything like it. They were each trying to convince the others that they were the stupidest when it came to technology. Fortunately our case was a case that had nothing to do with technology, but you see, these are the kinds of people who serve on American juries.
I have become convinced from personal observation that about 5-10% of the US population is obsessed with rules and punishing those who break them. They have no sympathy at all for anyone who breaks any rule and want the full punishment possible given to these people. So I think what happens is that by pure chance sometimes you get 1 or 2 of these people on a jury and they are pushing very vocally for the defendant to get punished for "stealing" because "stealing is wrong" and "we can stop others from doing it by punishing this guy". Then maybe you have some of those technophobes I talked about from my jury and it's not hard to see that you might have 3 or 4 people who just simply see the case as this - "Stealing is wrong. The defendant stole. He MUST be punished for this AND we need to send a message to others to not do this". Then you've got maybe 8-9 people left on the jury who say "I just want to get out of here ASAP. The defendant did it. Let's just punish them like the others want so we can get out." So this kind of verdict doesn't surprise me.
Remember that some of the people who choose to fight may simply be delusional about their chances in court. I have the impression that this applies to the Thomas case in particular.
I but the problem, as I see it, is people have largely stopped honking, so they'll just sit behind such an oblivious person and just wait. If people honked, we could get things moving again. It doesn't have to be a nasty lean on the horn, just a toot-toot.
Let me guess. You live in the northeastern US, right? I don't. The reason that people don't honk as much is that even a simple quick toot can be taken as an insult that must be responded to with violence, be it via agressive driving or perhaps even pulling a gun on the person who honked. One of my friends and her husband (both from Massachusetts but living at the time in the Deep South) got into a life threatening situation over honking at a car in front of them and I am convinced that the only thing that kept them from being shot was that they were able to do some fancy driving that got them away from the car that ended up chasing them.
See, this whole thing just illustrates what I realized some years ago. Coca Cola Company = Microsoft. Think about it. Just like Microsoft can't innovate to save its life and instead prefers to operate either by reacting to what others in the industry do or by giving customers something that they don't want, that's how the Coca Cola Company works. So what did Pepsi do this year? They gave us Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, both of which used real sugar instead of corn syrup. So what is Coke's answer to this? Fizzy milk.
Some years ago I read an article on baseball stadiums, which is actually relevant in terms of possibly explaining why NASA would view the tapes of the original moon landing as expendable. Essentially the article said that in the USA in the 1960s everybody was obsessed with tearing down the old to make room for the new. This started in the 1950s but really got going in the 1960s. One example of it was that many American cities (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Atlanta and probably others) built giant "multi-purpose" stadiums to house both baseball and football teams. Old baseball only stadiums were often torn down (Forbes Field) or moved (Crosby Field - mostly moved to Kentucky) to make way for what were eventually called "cookie cutter" stadiums that all looked identical and were meant to house everything from baseball and football to concerts and motocross rallies. These stadiums ended up being "jack of all trades, master of none" offering bad viewing for all sports. But that was how things apparently were in the 60s. Throw out the old to make room for the new. So when you have an entire society that seems to be dedicated to the belief that you can only make progress by destroying the past and building on top of it, yes, I can certainly believe that NASA in such a climate considered the films to be worthless and not worth keeping.
This reminds me of a little known incident that happened in the mid 1990s. For a while, AT&T ran a service called 1-800-OPERATOR where you could call this number and get AT&T to connect you to a long distance call. For those who don't know, we're required (at least in most of the USA if not all of it) to pick a long distance service provider. That company does not have to be who you get local telephone service from. It was possible to place long distance calls with someone other than your long distance provider by simply dialing an access number that belonged to that company and you would get billed for the call from that company. So for example you might have, say, BellSouth as your long distance provider, but you could dial an access number and place calls on Sprint if Sprint offered a better rate. No need to change providers that way. So AT&T decided that it would be smart to get in on this too and lower their rates. So the way it worked was that you called 1-800-OPERATOR and someone at AT&T would connect you to your long distance call and charge you whatever rate AT&T had for the service. AT&T promoted this service on national television commercials and spent a lot of advertising money on it. Anyway, I had a friend at the time who worked for MCI in their marketing department. She told me that MCI had reserved the telephone number that corresponded to 1-800-OPERATER. MCI spent zero dollars advertising and simply waited for people who couldn't spell to call that number and they placed the call for the person and made the money off it. She told me "You would not believe how much money we made off this". Some months after the campaign started, AT&T quietly pulled the plug on it. I always assumed that too many people couldn't spell "operator" correctly and they were tired of giving business to MCI for nothing.
Some years ago back when The Far Side was still in production, I remember one cartoon that showed some scientists around a blackboard with a tank nearby that had dolphins in it. One of the scientists said "There's another one of those aw-blah es-pan-yol sounds" and he was about to put another mark next to "aw-blah es-pan-yol" on the blackboard. Of course "shoy bi" (in whatever direction) could mean something in a non-English language, but to be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean that the monkeys understand that language. I'm not sure that this "experiment" really accomplished anything as the ability of these monkeys to, in theory, differentiate prefixes may have nothing at all to do with how human infants accomplish the same thing. Wow, that was some really useful research there. I can't wait for their next report that shows that monkeys have been known to eat food every day and they have periods of inactivity every day where for hours they seem to be unconscious.
I'm sure he was banking on a bit of taxpayer funds and cutting deals with the electric company to get that done. My guess is they voted him down.
That may well be right, but that doesn't mean that such was smart thinking on his part. I am one of the rare print subscribers to USA Today (yes there are still some of us left) and it seemed like almost every week there was some giant ad that his company paid for telling Americans to contact Congress and support his wind farm project to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I think a rather significant portion of his plan was that some government entity, be it Texas or the USA, would get behind it and pony up the money necessary to get the power to a distribution system.
I agree with Nutria. I can speak Russian pretty well (not fluent, but still pretty good) and I've spent a good deal of time in Ukraine. There are a lot of similarities between Ukraine and Russia and some differences. In Russia, the government basically doesn't care at all that criminals steal from the west. Their attitude is "It sucks to be you!" to the victims and as long as the criminals are causing problems for people outside of the country and potentially paying taxes on what they steal, they will continue to look the other way. In Ukraine, the government does not particularly like having citizens rip off people in the west. Russia has proven that it can't be trusted to respect borders where ethnic Russians live (look at Georgia) and Ukraine's population is roughly 40% Russian. (Long story short - Krushchev gave the Crimea to Ukraine in the 1950s. That plus the fact that what is now eastern Ukraine is mostly inhabited by ethnic Russians has led to a significant chunk of what is now Ukraine being strongly Russian in character.) The current Ukrainian government is essentially ethnic Ukrainian and they fear the embrace of Mother Russia with good reason. My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and her great grandparents were murdered by Stalin's henchmen in the 1930s. So the government of Ukraine has pushed forward a pro-EU and pro-NATO policy specifically because it is the only way to guarantee that Russia won't invade on some pretext and annex Ukraine like they did to those regions in Georgia. So the Ukrainian government doesn't like it when people in Ukraine rip off the west because that just hurts the ability of Ukraine to appear stable enough to eventually get into NATO and the EU.
People in the ex-USSR just got ruined by living there. As a general rule, they are fairly immoral (a good number of people are highly unethical and dishonest) and they are "live for today" to an extreme. They also have a sense of entitlement that is just impossible to understand if you have never been there. They honestly think that the west got rich by essentially holding them back (the Soviet government pretty much convinced them of that) and that robbing the west is just payback for past sins the west committed against them. So this attitude makes it easy to find people who want to steal from the west. Then you have an incredibly corrupt police and judicial system. All you have to do is just pay the judge enough money prior to the trial and you will win - it's guaranteed. And the police can easily be bribed to overlook any crime, botch any investigation, or to go examine your enemies and cause problems for them. You can see that the main government in Kiev has an interest in Ukrainians behaving ethically as such furthers their plans for EU and NATO membership which in turn protects them from Russian invasion. However, the citizens in general (foolishly in my opinion) don't believe that Russia would really invade and they have no concept of delayed gratification, so when given a choice between stealing and immediately profiting from it or being honest, they will choose to steal. Why not? Even if they get arrested, the odds are high that they can bribe their way out of it.
Maybe we can employ the same logic for speeding tickets. $1.9 million because I may be able to go 105 in a 35 despite the fact that I was going 40. Downloading 24 songs is not worth destroying someone's life over. Look at the penalties for vehicular homicide and tell me the fine fits the crime.
1) The problem is not with the legal system, per se, in my opinion. It's with the jury part of the legal system. I've said this before, but it's still how I feel - the problem with this case is that the defendant has apparently engaged in willful behavior that makes her look dishonest to the jury. She has twice not fully informed her lawyers of everything she did. Basically I see the defendant as a delusional woman who thinks that by simply fighting she can beat the RIAA. I think the most recent trial proved that no jury is ever going to find in her favor. Yes, certainly the damages are absolutely insane, but that's the fault of the jury. Had she asked for a bench trial, I'm sure she still would have lost but the damages would have been a lot more reasonable. She and her attorneys have been taking jury trails because, as someone else said, she wants to hit a home run. That is, to get out without paying a dime. It seems to me based on what I read about the trial that she clearly did download songs using an ID that only belonged to her. There just really is no realistic chance she is ever going to get cleared no matter how many trials she gets.
2) The infamous Stallworth case (the DUI death) is a bad example to cite. Basically what happened was that yes, Stallworth was DUI for sure, but the death was caused because the pedestrian essentially jumped in front of the car. If he had been driving the speed limit and not been drunk the accident would still have happened. The accident was considered to be 100% the fault of the pedestrian and that's why Stallworth isn't going to jail for very long. I know people would like to believe that this crazy, drunk football player was weaving all over the road and just ran down an innocent pedestrian, but that's now how it happened.
You're kidding, right?
They have done more to give legitimate anti-spam efforts a black eye than ANY legislative attempts to 'solve' the problem ever could.
I -used- to believe that 'collateral damage' was a legitimate 'tactic' in the fight against spammers. I've grown up since then.
You get a big high five from me on that. On my previous job, SORBS caused us a lot of problems. It was very difficult to get off their lists once they listed you and if I remember correctly they also had a policy of not telling you why you were listed to begin with. I remember that one of the guys in our main European office was able to make friends with one of the SORBS guys in the same country and get some information about why we were blacklisted. Normally they didn't tell you why you were blacklisted, but this was some "countryman to countryman" special favor this SORBS guy did for us. We had a lot of email problems because some customers would use only SORBS for dealing with spam so if you're on the list, your email doesn't go through to them. I'm not saying that SORBS couldn't have been a useful minor part of an anti-spam solution, but all I saw was customers who blindly trusted SORBS and only SORBS and that made our life hell. I agree that I no longer think that SORBS' collection of tactics is legitimate. There are better ways to deal with spam and if SORBS dies, well, sign me up to dance on their grave.
Go look up the news for Tamil Tigers and War Crimes trials, Europe and the US want the Sri Lankan govt. to be punished, whilst China Russia and India don't:
That is completely untrue. In fact, the only evidence I can find is that the UK in particular seems a lot more interested in prosecuting Tamil Tigers than the Sri Lankan government.
Here in the USA we have a lot of Tamil immigrants. Some from India. Some from Sri Lanka. They make a lot of noise. I personally know a Tamil family and they are constantly trying to rally US support to "stop the killing" or whatever the phrase of the day is.
The fact is that the Tamil Tigers upped the ante in international terrorism and blazed the path for Al Queda to follow. While the family I know does not favor the Tigers per se, like almost all Tamils from or in Sri Lanka, they weren't real upset when things were going well for the Tigers and there was de facto self rule in Sri Lanka in Tiger controlled territory. I can promise you that at least unofficially the US position is that the Tigers got what they deserved and it sucks to be them.
The only reason the US cares about Iran is that a change of government might lessen Iran's desire for nuclear weapons and might be somewhat less inclined to support Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. Yes, indeed the verious "Stan" countries "play ball" as you said, but they also don't seek nuclear weapons, support Hezbollah and work to destroy Israel and deny the Hollocaust.
These are capitalist corporations. Their goal is to make money. People are willing to buy censorship technology (just look at any government office). Why do you act shocked that this is happening?
Good point. Unfortunately if Nokia and Siemens didn't sell it, somebody else would. Nokia surprises me, but not Siemens. The Germans have always loved money and they have no ethical problems with doing business with unfriendly states. I can remember back when Ronald Reagan was president that there were issues with German companies that made illegal or quasi-illegal deals with various unfriendly nations just to make a little money, so this kind of thing has gone on for some time.
You must have attended a very very small school. Most US schools have different courses based on skill level. Your conclusions about the US school system are therefore wrong. They are merely conclusions about very small schools.
Really? "Most US schools" have this? Maybe your school did, but my high school, which had over 1300 students in grades 10-12, most assuredly did not. Well, if your definition of "different" means "two", then mine did. My high school (that's "secondary school" for all you non-North Americans) offered one advanced level class in chemistry, math, English and Social Studies. Entry into those classes was restricted to the brighter students (I got in - lucky me). Then they had normal level classes in all those subjects that everyone else took. Granted, I graduated in the 1980s, but I don't know what the heck school you went to, but I tend to think that your experience is the atypical one here and not that of the guy who posted.
This is how I saw the trial from what I read. I am not a lawyer, but my best friend is and I know a decent amount about the law thanks to him. This is just how I see it and in my non-lawyer viewpoint, I could be wrong about things.
It seemed to me that she pulled a fast one on her attorneys. They seemed caught off guard with the revelation that her disk drive was changed by Best Buy after the date she had specified in her previous trial. Oops! I think it was pretty much "game over" at that point. Her attorneys now had to improvise a defense on the spot and you saw how well that worked.
The defendant seems to project a real aura of arrogance and dishonesty. This is twice now that juries have bitch slapped her with huge compensatory damages. I'm sure if we met her in person that we would think that she is a master manipulator and she has twice convinced attorneys that some great wrong has been done to her and yet both times in trial she looked completely guilty when her web of lies fell down. Now all we can hope for is a 3rd trial based on technicalities, but at this point I think it's pretty hopeless. Her case is pathetic and she's not going to win. It really hurts those who have been wronged by the RIAA that this delusional and manipulative woman has been a test case for fighting back.
On another related note, I was going to say that if BluRay and AACS do end up getting reliably cracked and 'free' copies of films can be made then the bizarre twisted thing is that it might just end up making BluRay ubiquitously popular and give it the critical mass it needs to pull DVD back.
"End up getting reliably cracked"? "Free copies"?
I guess you don't keep up, so let me break the news to you. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT (in caps and bold face so you don't miss it) of BluRay discs can be cracked and copied. Every single one of them. It's been true for more than 1 year now, maybe even a year and a half. The final BluRay encryption standard, BD+, which was said (I think) to be able to last "forever" lasted a couple of months before it was cracked.
If you troll Bit Torrent or Usenet sites, you can find complete rips or at worst smaller conversions (down to DVD dual layer size) of any popular BluRay disc available.
it is not a good thing.
I'm sure Grace Wang would agree with you.
Thank you for posting this. This is a perfect example of how Chinese groupthink works.
I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article where an angry ex-wife put some false allegations about her ex-husband online (this was also in China) and the guy ended up being constantly harassed until the government stepped in and protected him and put the ex-wife in jail for lying. I've heard of similar stories happening with "online justice" in South Korea where people just believe whatever horrible thing someone says online about another person.
What really bothers me about China is that many young people there seem to have this patriotic fervor that's based in nothing more than believing what the government tells them. I would be shocked if someone asked Chinese students why they are so angry about Taiwanese independence or Tibetan independence (or even autonomy) and that had anything to say beyond "They are now and always have been part of China". I've been to Taiwan and except for a few crazy pro-independence nut jobs, most people there just want to be left alone by China and nothing more than that. They don't wish any ill on China, they just want to be left alone. It seems to me that the Chinese government actually likes to encourage this irrational "Everything we say and do is right" attitude. It makes the population easier to control when they are incapable of independent thought.
Finally I read the original article and I found some aspects troubling. First of all, some people figured out where the kitten killing in China occurred by recognizing things in the video. No problem them. But then it says that someone recognized the shoes the girl wore and knew they were ordered online. OK, maybe these shoes are only available online and someone knew that. Fine. But then it says that they figured out who ordered them and went after her. Hmm... serious lack of privacy here. So it's not the government asking the business to see who did this but just an angry mob and the company apparently gave them the info. What? Was there only one woman who ordered the shoes? So how on earth from this paltry information did they figure out who did it? I don't know. It sounds kind of fishy to me but if true, I guess it says a lot about China that all you have to do is get an angry mob and businesses will give out all your personal info to them.
You, Mr. Anonymous Poster, are in a lost cause. All I can do is provide suggestions for your next job. Why?
1) Your ratio of employees to IT people is hopeless for you. Prior to our being bought out by a Fortune 500 company, the company I work for had a rough ratio of 15 employees for 1 IT person. At worst it was probably 20 to 1, but that was before I began to work here.
2) If you have to ask this question, the odds are extremely high that you will not be able to change things where you are at.
I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years. In my experience, IT has to get the upper hand from the beginning or it's too late. You can't get control of your situation after people have already learned not to respect you. I have a colleague that I've worked with twice in my career and he was great at setting up expectations immediately upon arrival. If people wanted something done that was complete b.s., he had no problems telling them to their face that they were idiots. The "Scotty approach" also can work wonders. If it will take 10 minutes to do, say it will take 1 hour or 2 hours. Do it in 20 minutes. Then wait to give them the results until towards the end of the time you specified. Sometimes do it very quickly after giving them longer expectations and you'll look like a genius for doing it sooner than expected.
Being nice and friendly can also help and if your co-workers actually start to like you and respect you, they may ease off on what they ask you to do.
The bottom line is that you have to be a jerk at some points early on and confront people and tell them that you can't or won't do what they asked for and tell them why. Don't sugar coat. If they are idiots, explain why the request is stupid. You don't have to necessarily say "You are an idiot" to them, but you definitely have to say things like "If I do this, it will take days to do and the return on my expended time is not worth it as everything else will have to wait for days until I finish this unimportant task". You have to be willing to do something like that.
It also helps if you're wiling to leave if things suck and everyone doesn't respect you. Being unwilling to get out takes away any ability to try to make changes.
Why Stanislaw Lem doesn't get more attention on this News for Nerds site I just don't understand. Maybe it's just a general adversion to works in translation. But look beyond works like Solaris which is a clever book, though not so great, and of the film adaptations one was dull and the other cheesy.
Translation -
I'm American. I don't like to think. I am incapable of understanding the work of a genius like Andrei Tarkovsky. Even the remake with Clooney didn't work for me because despite being shorter, I still had to think about it. And there wasn't enough stuff being blown up.
By the way, I'm American so I'm allowed to say that.
Oh how I wish that this could be read by Mr. Lynton, but unfortunately even if he read it, he JUST WOULDN'T GET IT anyway.
.Lynton, sold an inferior product to your customers around the world and in your paranoia over piracy made sure that they could not buy a superior product from region 1 and watch it on their TVs at home. And to top it all off, while you and your Hollywood buddies have slit your own throats you are convinced that someone else has done you wrong. What's really sad is that doing things like having region codes to begin with and convincing Samsung and others to stop making consumer friendly DVD players has caused those customers to look for alternatives - "free" copies of your DVDs that don't have region codes in them so they can play them at home. So no, I don't feel sorry for you because you did this to yourself and what you and your buddies in Hollywood think that consumers want is not what they want at all. If you want to fix this, put out better product overseas and start encouraging those same DVD player manufacturers to make region free DVD players because until you give up on region coding and finally understand how much we, your potential consumers, hate it, you're basically grasping at sand and not understanding why it's running through your fingers.
Lynton refers to how Sony has essentially closed shop in South Korea because those sneaky Koreans can download his DVDs too fast, so they have no incentive to buy them. Well, I'll tell you why people in South Korea and elsewhere are bypassing Sony. It's your fault. And I'm going to explain why it's your fault and I'm not even going to go down the path of telling you that American movies mostly suck. While that's certainly true, that's not why South Koreans and others aren't buying from your stores.
Hollywood, which includes you Mr. Lynton, is its own worst enemy. Let's take a look at what you release to foreign markets. There's a huge demand for region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs around the world. Know why? It's because region 1 DVDs mean quality. Region 1 DVDs typically use progressive video and high quality audio (DTS for example). Region 1 DVDs often have extras and while personally I'm not real fond of extras most of the time, the marketplace here seems to want it. Let's look at what you give to people in South Korea, which is region 3 for those keeping score. Well, you often release a film with zero extras. You sometimes give them interlaced video and lower quality audio choices (AC3 only and at low bit rates). I have no idea if the subtitles you give them are any good or are as bad as some of those bad English subtitles we used to get on Hong Kong movies in the past. And here's the best part of all - you and your cabal have "persuaded" almost every single DVD manufacturer to stop making DVD players that can have the region settings changed. So now Samsung, a very large company in, hmmm, South Korea, simply does not make a DVD player anywhere in the world now that can be made region free. They are not alone in this. I participate in a large video forum and you know what one of our most popular questions from new members is? How can I make my DVD player region free? You know what the answer is? Often it is "You can't". So you, Mr.
From the review:
The most noticeable was the heroin's apparent inability to do much for herself.
heroine - chief female character in a story, play, etc.
heroin - narcotic drug
Sigh. Need to do better proofreading, JR Peck.
They also claim I am from Belgium, I am obviously from Luxembourg.
I used to work at a US office of a large French company, so I have some insights into this statement that might not be apparent to the typical American. Consider this as if he had said:
They also claim I am from Alabama. I am obviously from Tennessee.
and you'll have a rough idea of what he is saying and why he doesn't like it to be said that he's from Belgium.
Actually, you are wrong. Designing an air cooled system is hard. You have to deal with problems of filtration (there will be dust - but where do you want it to build up?), ensuring that the flow goes where you want, turbulence, finding room for the ducting, designing the system so that components do not mask other components, and needing to handle high volumes of air. With properly designed water cooling, you have a few quite simple heat removal blocks and a simple plumbing system which can route pretty much anywhere.
The reality is that there are pros and cons to water cooling vs. air cooling and people have to weigh both and decide what works for them. While your post is essentially correct, it's also a bit heavy on the theoretical. I remember working at a place that had water cooled IBM mainframes. This was a US government facility and it was in a building I almost never had to go to. I remember downtimes there because "the water chiller is down" or there was a leak and a hellacious mess of water was under the floor. So please do not continue to suggest that water cooling is 100% great and has no flaws. People went to air cooling for a reason - to stop having to deal with the messes that could happen when there were leaks or downtimes when the water chilling device broke down.
Hell, even with other author's works it's the best approach. They are completely different media after all, and require completely different approaches to storytelling.
I think this is a very good comment. A currently popular Sci Fi author is scheduled to have the first (to my knowledge) film made from one of his books in the next year or two. This author is not universally liked, so I'm not naming him so as to avoid starting an endless thread on his works. Anyway, he said that once you agree to sell the rights to a movie from something you wrote, you give up all rights to how the movie comes out. Maybe you get lucky and it turns out like Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings. Or maybe you end up like Isaac Asimov and arguably none of the movies based on your books are very good. But you agree, as an author, once you take the money that control is gone from you to Hollywood. If you can't live with the chance that it might not turn out like you want, he said you shouldn't sell the rights.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is a great example. The late great Andrei Tarkovksy directed a film based on this in the early 1970s in the USSR. Many people, including me, consider this film to be a classic, but Lem hated it. Tarkovsky changed a lot of things from the book (I think for the better) and Lem was bitter about it for all of his life. The 2002 film starring George Clooney was a big failure and many hate it, but Lem himself loved it because he considered it to be true to his original story. Go figure.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign
Unlike you, I am perfectly willing to take my chances with life in a world in which mosquitoes have been eradicated. Unfortunately for me, I seem to hold a minority opinion on this. It seems to me that if malaria and other mosquito borne diseases were a bigger problem in North America and Europe that people wouldn't be suggesting that eliminating them might be a bad idea but instead would be focused on killing them all.
This makes way too much sense.
Nope. Letting the RIAA pick the "forensics expert" does absolutely nothing to ensure that a fair and impartial expert is chosen. I'd think all that would do is make it very easy for the RIAA to set up a forensics lab of their own that could potentially plant evidence on the mirror copy. Then what do you do? They could always claim that your copy, which is minus the planted evidence, was "tampered with". I see no good out of this, but if NewYorkCountyLawyer disagrees, I would welcome an opportunity to be educated out of my error here.