or paying too much in shipping costs to offer the service at a reasonable price.
Netflix overcame that "hurdle" by the very, very fraudulent practice of throttling. I wouldn't call that an innovation.
I was a Netflix user when it first came out, and cancelled the service only because I didn't rent enough discs for it to be useful. Now I use Blockbuster because their delivery is faster (there's a distribution center next town over so I get my DVDs in 1 day, sometimes less if I time it right).
That said, I never really thought of the service as 'novel' - I considered it the logical extension of video rental stores in the real world. It's not what I would consider 'non-obvious' which is one of the conditions of a patentable innovation.
What Netflix DID do was bring together a lot of good ideas and put them in one place (internet, a list of movies you want to rent, not having to leave the house). Sort of like MySpace did and why it has far surpassed all other social networking sites. Yet, in neither case does that seem to me to be the development of a novel idea - it is simply good business practice.
I understand, and I disagree. When some old dead people said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I do not believe they were talking about corporations.
I agree completely.
Now I'm confused.
Ok, let's see here..
Your tone indicates that you agree with me that corporations are artificial creations that should have no more power or influence than a tree or other inanimate object.
Agreed. Key word in that sentence is should. The reality is far different:
Yet your words say you believe them to be more powerful than any individual.
Exactly. Individuals have to sleep and individuals (for the most part) have limited wealth and resources. How can you compete against an entity that has essentially limitless access to resources, the law and lawmakers?
You quote the government when it gives corporations power, yet you don't agree that it is solely from the government that their power is derived.
Their power is derived from the government as much as my inalienable rights are derived from the government, which is not at all. Their power USED to be derived from the government - until 1886, when the government abdicated that power and allowed corporations to become free entities. Now they have as much freedom as you or I do.
In fact, it sounds like you exactly agree with me, but disagree with what the government did so vehemently that you disagree with everyone when it comes to corporations.
Sorry if it came across that way. My vehemence is very real, in fact; there is very little more responsible for the direction our world is going than corporate power (not that nothing is more responsible, just very few things).
I just re-read my original post and I see the source of your confusion. I mixed my statements of what corporations powers are with how they should be and the end result is a mishmash of confusion. My only real disagreement was with this statement from your original post:
Corporations aren't citizens. Corporations have no rights. Corporations are constructs of the government that exist at the whims of the government.
What I'm saying is that that used to be true. It is no longer true.
Sorry about the confusion. That's what I get for quick posting:P I hope my reply has clarified things.
That's what government wants too, so that they can control you, take your money, and socially engineer. That is why groups are called 'minorities' and 'under privileged' and not.. gasp.. PEOPLE. How about going back to less government and more liberty? Corporations do not have the right to take our liberty and more than government. They do not have the right to store our private information and use it for whatever they want.
I agree completely.
Furthermore, some of the richest people come from Hollywood. Lets stop buying and watching movies and listening to music. That will show them! Those greedy wealth builders!
I think this part was tongue in cheek, but it's actually becoming an increasingly valuable suggestion, I guess mostly because so much of what comes out of the media conglomerates is total crap.
It doesn't really matter. Once one person gets the key, they can decrypt the movie and distribute it with bittorrent. Invalidating keys will only anger legitimate consumers and reduce sales.
As it should be. Best way to get people to hate DRM and finally understand what it is.
That or, just get mad at people doing the cracking, but even dense people can't stay THAT dense for very long.
Just to gauge the reaction, I explained the DMCA to my mother one day in plain English and she was aghast. People who don't hang out on here all day tend to not know these things.
And it's really not for lack of intelligence or comprehension. It's due to a systematic, purposeful lack of education - the content companies are much happier with few people even knowing what DMCA means, much less what it actually does.
You always purchased the right to view it under whatever restrictions they decided to impose.
Bullshit. Do you even know what copyright means? The ONLY right conferred to the copyright holder is the right to distrubute and make copies of the work.
It does NOT give them the right to tell me how to watch it. They don't get to put ANY restrictions on how I watch it - I could watch it naked in a bath of baked beans standing on my head and they can't say a damn thing about it, much less how much computer has to behave when the movie is playing.
Actually, you paid for the right to watch the movie with the restrictions put upon the media by the manufacturer.
I don't usually use this word, but BULLSHIT. I paid for the right to watch the movie - that's all. I did NOT pay to allow the producer to tell me how I could watch it (listen to it, read it, whatever). Ever heard of Fair Use? It means that once I've legally purchased it, it's mine to do with what I want, within the bounds of copyright law.
It's apologists like you that let these companies get away with wholesale cultural theft.
Strong words but I am so sick and tired of seeing people be perfectly fine with what these big media conglomerates are doing to copyright, fair use, and consumer rights. YOU may be perfectly willing to give up those rights, but I am not.
We will get Blu-ray and HD-DVD Windows support when the media and software companies decide we're finally allowed to watch the content we rightfully and legally purchased
Chances are I can get a cell phone contract down here cheaper than you can get it in the USA, and get a better deal (coverage, service, etc) too.
Sick part is you can. I can't find the reference at the moment but the US is woefully behind the rest of the developed world in terms of cell phone advancements and service quality.
Not to mention the fact that many of the supposed-dirt-cheap cell phones aren't even available in the US, because the manufacterers and service providers don't want them here - they know they can charge more for those items so they don't even CARRY the cheap stuff. Now how goddamn fair is that.
Basically it sorta cracks me up when I hear the kind of "giving us any responsibilities or limiting our power in any way would ruin the economy" bullshit that comes from the USA's corporate psychopaths and their apologists.
Psychopaths is the right word. We've gone way beyond "profit at all costs." Now it's "profit at all costs, and make damn good and sure you rape people and that they love it!"
Something like $100.00 per person for exposing data in an insecure method. This could easily be passed in a bill/law under negligent handling of person data.
Ok, no. If the RIAA can get you for $150,000 PER SONG, you should be able to sue these companies for much more than that, because you haven't spoiled just one sale - they've spoiled potentially your entire LIFE.
No, we're talking $250,000 minimum per person, and credit monitoring and credit repair services, free for life.
That kind of penalty would get these companies to actually sit up and take notice.
$100 per person is chump change to most of these companies.
Re:Consumers don't care about their privacy
on
The Death of Privacy
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· Score: 1
and way more immediately important than much of the stuff learned there.
Oh come on, that's just FUD.
Obviously knowing the population of every state capital should be of paramount importance. Who the flying frick cares if you never learn to protect your data?
At least you know information you're going to forget 2 weeks from now anyway.
Corporations aren't citizens. Corporations have no rights. Corporations are constructs of the government that exist at the whims of the government.
Maybe this is why you don't care about unreasonable laws... because this statement is completely untrue.
Corporations have all the rights of an individual, except that they're completely immune from prosecution (the company can continue to exist and do business; only its officers can be criminally charged.. but not civilly, as the corporation shields them from those).
Within just a few decades, appointed judges had redefined the "common good" to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit -- no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed. Corporations had obtained control over resources, production, commerce, jobs, politicians, judges and the law. Workers, citizens, cities, towns, states and nature were left with fewer and fewer rights that corporations were forced to respect.
They also use their considerable WEALTH to force their point of view which is that everyone is commoditized.
Which is why we are all called 'consumers' and 'market groups' rather than.. gasp.. PEOPLE.
If our humanity can be rejected, we can be made into some static quantity to be counted and controlled. And that's what wealth-builders really want.. because humans with rights and desires are an unstable element. How dare your humanity get in the way of wealth!
The code doesn't check for null after a memory allocation? Isn't the C++ standard to throw an exception instead of returning null when an allocation fails?
If the code in question is wrapped in a try-catch block, it could be a false positive.
But then, I don't know the specifics of how the testing software determines if the code doesn't properly check for null - that is, I don't know if it also checks for the try-catch.
it is structually impossible to do so becuase the only method that can produce such a tally is DIRECT OBSERVATION and that is prohibitied.
Not at all. With punch cards, or even "write an X next to the candidate you vote for", nobody puts their name on the ballot - and yet it is perfectly countable when someone looks at the ballot to tally the vote. You get direct observation, without knowing whose vote you're tallying.
Closed voting works just fine when the voter's identity is anonymous and you have a concrete, verifiable voting record (e.g., one on paper).
It perhaps gets more difficult if you have Californian-style ballots which include dozens of separate items (e.g. citizens' referenda). Not sure how practicable it is to count all this by hand, but perhaps the Presidential ballot could be treated differently?
When I volunteered on the voting staff there a few years ago, it wasn't a problem. The votes were all counted within 2 hours of being submitted to the sorting center - and these were punch card ballots that had to be hand verified and hand fed into counting machines.
So yeah, you're right - electronic voting really isn't buying us anything, and in fact is probably selling out quite a bit more than we bargained for.
Sigh.. this is how democracies end. When confidence in the voting process dies, that is the beginning of the end of a nation's freedom.
If you think there's no difference between $50 headphones and $100 headphones - I'm talking about MSRP here, not sharper image markup - then you're sadly mistaken. Maybe you're one of those people who can't hear the degradation in a 128kbps mp3 as compared to the CD or something.
I could never tell the difference until I started doing work in signal processing. Prior to that, I simply didn't know what an artifact sounded like, so I wasn't aware I was hearing them.
It's kind of like how Westerners generally can't hear the nuances in Asian languages - they're there, but you just don't know what to listen for until someone teaches you.
Your post reminds me of what will (I predict) one day be a moving token to the freedoms we've lost, and hopefully a spark for what (I predict) is the coming revolution; a book called Vacation by my best friend's brother.
The desire to leave.. the desire to walk away, and to be free, is one I have observed becoming more and more powerful as the years wear on. This is how you know an end of some sort is coming. What the end leads to, is impossible to tell; but we know it must be something.
In our world, though, there is no place left to walk away to. We've exhausted our capacity to avoid the inevitable: it is here, now. Now, we will have to fight for the permanent freedom we want. And it'll be a battle the likes of which the world has never witnessed - not one just of guns and bombs, but of ideologies 12,000 years in coming.
28 days is the current limit, although the government wanted 90 days.
28 days in the UK (although as I understand it, it used to be far less than that prior to the passage of RIPA. Please correct me if I'm wrong.).
It is 3 days in the US, and yet there are men held as 'enemy combatants' in Guantanemo Bay who have been there going on 3+ years. And yet still nobody raises a loud enough stink to get that behavior ruled unconstitutional.
I simply fail to comprehend the world we live in.
which is why the treatment meted out at airports these days is making me absolutely furious, having had enough friends and relatives who were on the receiving end of this.
My mom's fiance is various shades of South American and has relatively dark skin. He is routinely searched at airports.
In the US, apparently racial discrimination is OK if it's all in the name of 'stopping terrorism.'
Again.. I simply fail to comprehend the world we live in.
I don't see an automatic due process issue because the state isn't meting out any punishment to those who are listed (i.e. there's no state-led deprivation of life, liberty, or property).
Are we reading the same article?
To argue that this ruling/law does NOT lead to that issue is at best intellectually dishonest, and at worst blatantly unethical. Getting placed on this list has all the same effects as having been found guilty of a crime - without having been so judged. If that doesn't smack of the elimination of due process, nothing can.
The very purpose of the punishments meted out to sex offenders IS to deprive them of liberty and property - that's the punishment for violating a culture's moral tenets. To treat someone like a convicted criminal whey they may not have even been charged - I simply cannot fathom how anyone would find this acceptable.
Children have no knowledge or experience regarding sex.
Tell that to my sister who knows full well what sex and the related body parts are and what they do. Still a virgin, but damn if she isn't sharp and knows what's what. (I will not mention here how old she is but she is well under the age of majority).
The question is not one of knowledge and experience, it is one of emotional maturity. It takes us far longer than we realize to fully grasp the emotional ramifications of sex - and that point is usually long after we have it for the first time.
Sex with children is not a human need.
We have thousands of years of human history where sex with 12-13 year olds was considered perfectly normal due to short human life spans. While we no longer need to reproduce at such a young age, that is not itself an indicator of a child's maturity or knowledge on the subject.
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I was a Netflix user when it first came out, and cancelled the service only because I didn't rent enough discs for it to be useful. Now I use Blockbuster because their delivery is faster (there's a distribution center next town over so I get my DVDs in 1 day, sometimes less if I time it right).
That said, I never really thought of the service as 'novel' - I considered it the logical extension of video rental stores in the real world. It's not what I would consider 'non-obvious' which is one of the conditions of a patentable innovation.
What Netflix DID do was bring together a lot of good ideas and put them in one place (internet, a list of movies you want to rent, not having to leave the house). Sort of like MySpace did and why it has far surpassed all other social networking sites. Yet, in neither case does that seem to me to be the development of a novel idea - it is simply good business practice.
Ok, let's see here..
Agreed. Key word in that sentence is should. The reality is far different:
Exactly. Individuals have to sleep and individuals (for the most part) have limited wealth and resources. How can you compete against an entity that has essentially limitless access to resources, the law and lawmakers?
Their power is derived from the government as much as my inalienable rights are derived from the government, which is not at all. Their power USED to be derived from the government - until 1886, when the government abdicated that power and allowed corporations to become free entities. Now they have as much freedom as you or I do.
Sorry if it came across that way. My vehemence is very real, in fact; there is very little more responsible for the direction our world is going than corporate power (not that nothing is more responsible, just very few things).
I just re-read my original post and I see the source of your confusion. I mixed my statements of what corporations powers are with how they should be and the end result is a mishmash of confusion. My only real disagreement was with this statement from your original post:
What I'm saying is that that used to be true. It is no longer true.
Sorry about the confusion. That's what I get for quick posting
I think this part was tongue in cheek, but it's actually becoming an increasingly valuable suggestion, I guess mostly because so much of what comes out of the media conglomerates is total crap.
That or, just get mad at people doing the cracking, but even dense people can't stay THAT dense for very long.
It does NOT give them the right to tell me how to watch it. They don't get to put ANY restrictions on how I watch it - I could watch it naked in a bath of baked beans standing on my head and they can't say a damn thing about it, much less how much computer has to behave when the movie is playing.
It's apologists like you that let these companies get away with wholesale cultural theft.
Strong words but I am so sick and tired of seeing people be perfectly fine with what these big media conglomerates are doing to copyright, fair use, and consumer rights. YOU may be perfectly willing to give up those rights, but I am not.
There, fixed that for you.
Sick part is you can. I can't find the reference at the moment but the US is woefully behind the rest of the developed world in terms of cell phone advancements and service quality.
Not to mention the fact that many of the supposed-dirt-cheap cell phones aren't even available in the US, because the manufacterers and service providers don't want them here - they know they can charge more for those items so they don't even CARRY the cheap stuff. Now how goddamn fair is that.
Psychopaths is the right word. We've gone way beyond "profit at all costs." Now it's "profit at all costs, and make damn good and sure you rape people and that they love it!"
No, we're talking $250,000 minimum per person, and credit monitoring and credit repair services, free for life.
That kind of penalty would get these companies to actually sit up and take notice.
$100 per person is chump change to most of these companies.
Obviously knowing the population of every state capital should be of paramount importance. Who the flying frick cares if you never learn to protect your data?
At least you know information you're going to forget 2 weeks from now anyway.
[/hyperbole][/sarcasm][/facetiousness]
Damn that sounds like a good plan.
No more of this "$3,500 fine and a promise to behave from now on" slap on the wrist shit we always see in the news.
No, REAL penalties with huge dollars that these companies will actually stand up and pay attention to. Now that's what I'm talking about..
But then, we'd have to buy back all of our congressmen to get something like that on the books.
Corporations have all the rights of an individual, except that they're completely immune from prosecution (the company can continue to exist and do business; only its officers can be criminally charged.. but not civilly, as the corporation shields them from those).
A little History of corporations would be beneficial.
Probably the best quote from the whole summary:
This is what corporations became in the years following the 1886 ruling in Santa Clara County vs. the Southern Pacific Railroad.
And we have so delightfully inherited that tradition.
Corporations were government constructs, once. Now they're independent entities that can do anything they wish, until they get caught.
If our humanity can be rejected, we can be made into some static quantity to be counted and controlled. And that's what wealth-builders really want.. because humans with rights and desires are an unstable element. How dare your humanity get in the way of wealth!
Gah..
But then, I don't know the specifics of how the testing software determines if the code doesn't properly check for null - that is, I don't know if it also checks for the try-catch.
Closed voting works just fine when the voter's identity is anonymous and you have a concrete, verifiable voting record (e.g., one on paper).
So yeah, you're right - electronic voting really isn't buying us anything, and in fact is probably selling out quite a bit more than we bargained for.
Sigh.. this is how democracies end. When confidence in the voting process dies, that is the beginning of the end of a nation's freedom.
It's kind of like how Westerners generally can't hear the nuances in Asian languages - they're there, but you just don't know what to listen for until someone teaches you.
Your post reminds me of what will (I predict) one day be a moving token to the freedoms we've lost, and hopefully a spark for what (I predict) is the coming revolution; a book called Vacation by my best friend's brother.
The desire to leave.. the desire to walk away, and to be free, is one I have observed becoming more and more powerful as the years wear on. This is how you know an end of some sort is coming. What the end leads to, is impossible to tell; but we know it must be something.
In our world, though, there is no place left to walk away to. We've exhausted our capacity to avoid the inevitable: it is here, now. Now, we will have to fight for the permanent freedom we want. And it'll be a battle the likes of which the world has never witnessed - not one just of guns and bombs, but of ideologies 12,000 years in coming.
It is 3 days in the US, and yet there are men held as 'enemy combatants' in Guantanemo Bay who have been there going on 3+ years. And yet still nobody raises a loud enough stink to get that behavior ruled unconstitutional.
I simply fail to comprehend the world we live in.
My mom's fiance is various shades of South American and has relatively dark skin. He is routinely searched at airports.
In the US, apparently racial discrimination is OK if it's all in the name of 'stopping terrorism.'
Again.. I simply fail to comprehend the world we live in.
To argue that this ruling/law does NOT lead to that issue is at best intellectually dishonest, and at worst blatantly unethical. Getting placed on this list has all the same effects as having been found guilty of a crime - without having been so judged. If that doesn't smack of the elimination of due process, nothing can.
The very purpose of the punishments meted out to sex offenders IS to deprive them of liberty and property - that's the punishment for violating a culture's moral tenets. To treat someone like a convicted criminal whey they may not have even been charged - I simply cannot fathom how anyone would find this acceptable.
Thank you. The parent post was edging on thought control and I wanted to reply and liked yours better.
voice_of_all_reason, always a pleasure.