This, ladies and gentlemen is the entire point of the exercise. Induce the consumer behavior to check with the RIAA members before doing anything with the media you have legitimately purchased.
"Check with us before doing anything with the media you purchased or else we'll drag you into court." is the explicit threat. That one in 20,000 isn't going well is a fantastic track record. The RIAA is already lawyered-up and ready to drag it out. What individual can afford the fight? Certainly not the ones the RIAA has chosen to prosecute.
And yet nothing will be done by American consumers to reign in another abusive cartel.
There aren't even consequences if a warm body gets fired. Reputation means practically nothing to the next employer.
Your comments suggest you've never been forced to scrape the bottom of the wage barrel before or have any awareness at all of how an HR office complies with laws or how a low-wage worker is hired.
I'll go with your assumption that there is somewhere a statute that is violated. What's the penalty for this crime? Probably a slap on the wrist.
I'll go with you one further and assume there is a serious crime, with lots of precedence that some prosecutor can win:
Let's say the rebates are for $20: $26,000 is the amount of the crime. Let's say the rebates are for $50: $65,000 is the amount of the crime. What's the cost to prosecute? Way more than $65,000 after judges, courtrooms and prosecutor costs are estimated. That's not even considering what happens when the rebate processor lawyers-up and drags this thing down and out.
The company gets a day of bad press and that's about it. HP's CEO/board members got away with far, far worse with practically no penalty whatsoever. Certainly nothing that won't be forgotten in a couple of years.
Laws are to prosecute the individuals and corporations without enough money to lawyer-up.
Bottom of the barrel wage earners working an admittedly unglamorous job tosses a few out. Where's the crime? Who's going to prosecute? Which State regs apply?
Rebates are a racket, always have been. I know from experience because I admin'd them years ago for a peripherals manufacturer.
This one stands an extremely low probability of actually improving comcast's service from a consumer-geek perspective. Quick and dirty reasons why:
1. Comcast is in up to their necks with municipal politicians. They need campaign contributions from Comcast. 2. Comcast is in up to their necks with state politicians too. 3. What's the penalty here? Certainly not meaningful enough to warrant the expense of a trial. 4. Since when do consumers Comcast's terms of service? They'll spew the usual free-market pablum as a polite way to tell unhappy customers to go elsewhere. Except they know there may be no elsewhere in many cases.... Not their problem.
For everyone that refuses to believe nothing will come of it, who's going to pay the law firm to drag Comcast into court on a state-by-state basis?
As someone who has traversed just a tiny bit of the variety of off-highway terrain Nevada/Arizona/Utah/East California has to offer, I find it doubtful he could put it down safely. If he went due north, then it doesn't get any easier to land it.
Let's imagine for a minute he gets insanely lucky and lands without killing himself. He's exposed to some of the hottest, driest weather in the US. How much drinking water is in single-engine plane? How much water could he carry if he were crazy enough to consider walking out?
The cost of medicine has gone up because we can treat more diseases now.
Are these cures more widely available? Are they getting cheaper? What is the likelihood any given treatment that is less profitable than a current product is being researched?
The treatments are expensive because a huge amount of regulation and up front costs is piled behind the treatments.
I thought the justification used to sell privatization was lowered costs and greater access? Instead, you are suggesting they provide more expensive cures. Are you serious about the "harm" regulations provide in this instance?
let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?
That's already the case in the pharmaceuticals industry. Supposedly independent academic research has long ago been purchased by drug manufacturers in exchange for the Dean showing a great bottom line.
Has the cost of medicine in general gone down?
Is there more access to the medical system?
What about drugs that cure diseases in countries that can't afford to pay? Do they get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorder research?
Please abandon this kind of thinking. A market-like system creates as many problems as the one it replaces. Only it's more virulent, harms consumers a multitude of ways and benefits a very, very select few. As Microsoft and AT&T have proven, even regulation doesn't shut down a monopoly.
Consumers are very forgiving and patient when it comes to Microsoft. That's consumers of all kinds not just Ma and Pa Sixpack.
Eventually, most users will be forced to switch to Vista. Sure, they'll lose a few to the consumers who have knowledgeable IT friends and family recommending other OS's. The way forward is to provide no feedback to Microsoft on their products. (ex. not sending those stupid crash reports) Other than evangelizing other OS's, it is a sure-fire way for Microsoft to develop another bad product.
Linux? Let's assume the kiosk distro has hotplugging enabled. Flash drive mounts, But the files.... Are not executable! So, the hostile doesn't have the opportunity to change permissions much less execute something on a flash drive.
OSX? Flashdrive mounts. Hmmm can't install anything without su/sudo.
You're a big company, pay for people to look after your infrastructure.
1. They might do that. Only the problem may not have been in IT per-se. I can easily imagine someone from another department purchasing the kiosks then throwing the request to connect the kiosk to the store's network over the so-called wall to IT. That's just one plausible scenario.
2. Don't be surprised when the kiosk manufacturer comes back and says, "Hey, I don't provide secured operating systems running on the computer inside the kiosk I manufacture."
3. The likelihood the kiosk in question ran windows is high given the compromise.
When I posted a similar observation yesterday, I was modded a troll. The RIAA can drag this out for at least 6-12 months on negotiating the security payment alone. Add another 6-12 months on other procedural road blocks alone.
The RIAA **still** wins. Months and months of lawyering costs for supposedly violating copyright. That's the story they want every consumer to know and fear.
It would be very misguided thinking to believe that the Rule of Law applies to the RIAA.
It's called teaming on windows and we use it. In fact, we had a flaky NIC just the other day. I'm not sure how many cards/vendors support teaming outside of HPaq.
On linux, it's called bonding. This is a killer feature.
I had some very limited professional experience with LAWA in the last couple of years. (LAWA runs LAX) I have no doubt there is quite a bit of consultant the usual chicanery going on whereby they don't actually hire qualified IT people, just people an elected official or two or three may know. The IT staff on hand is most likely has quite limited authority. Other than hiring more consultants they know to document the failure, little will ever come of it.
How is that scenario possible you ask? Well, LAWA is a HUGE cash cow for the city/county so there are naturally quite a few political contributors lined up to get their goods/services contracts fulfilled.
Your proposition leads to a perpetual legal affair generating fees to a point for which there is no "upside" to the original winner of the case. This, of course is the intention on the RIAA's side who have the lawyers on salary for just this purpose.
US Marshals collect the money U.S. Marshals are involved in State judicial affairs? Really?
A quick visit to http://www.usmarshals.gov/ shows *no* method or process by which a Federal agency can collect funds on behalf of a State judicial matter. Maybe you are thinking of asset forfeiture?
Despite the courts awarding this person some money, there's nothing that says the RIAA **has** to pay.
Most likely scenario the individual gets nothing. At all. Sure, she can farm it out to a collections agency, but they'll get nothing. This is the classic problem with most court judgments. The Good Guy may get their day in court, but there's no mechanism to compel the Bad Guy to pay.
OT: I was going to use "Therein lies the rub" as the title, but it looks like that is an abuse of the original phrase.
-Right of resale? Ignore it and litigate -Personal use freedoms? Ignore them and litigate.
It's a "risk premium" attached to entertainment media. The only way to get the discount is to cede control of your media. A pejorative term for "risk premium" is a "terrorism tax."
Sadly, righteous indignation is the only thing that I see in these discussions.
Your average big-business has license compliance overhead already and fully expects to pay for software that comes with a complex use license and most likely an equally complex service contract.
The same companies probably have a huge number of undocumented Linux servers doing mundane tasks, but they are outside the scope of getting Legal involved in most instances.
The kind of sale Lenovo is targeting will have Legal expecting to review a complex license and support agreements with the pc purchase a (likely) small part of a larger deal.
Slashdot Mirror
..over 20,000 lawsuits filed...
This, ladies and gentlemen is the entire point of the exercise. Induce the consumer behavior to check with the RIAA members before doing anything with the media you have legitimately purchased.
"Check with us before doing anything with the media you purchased or else we'll drag you into court." is the explicit threat. That one in 20,000 isn't going well is a fantastic track record. The RIAA is already lawyered-up and ready to drag it out. What individual can afford the fight? Certainly not the ones the RIAA has chosen to prosecute.
And yet nothing will be done by American consumers to reign in another abusive cartel.
And it will certainly sound like the truth.
Which meets the objective of the whole cartel.
Your comment is imperious at best.
There aren't even consequences if a warm body gets fired. Reputation means practically nothing to the next employer.
Your comments suggest you've never been forced to scrape the bottom of the wage barrel before or have any awareness at all of how an HR office complies with laws or how a low-wage worker is hired.
Count yourself lucky.
I'll go with your assumption that there is somewhere a statute that is violated. What's the penalty for this crime? Probably a slap on the wrist.
I'll go with you one further and assume there is a serious crime, with lots of precedence that some prosecutor can win:
Let's say the rebates are for $20: $26,000 is the amount of the crime. Let's say the rebates are for $50: $65,000 is the amount of the crime. What's the cost to prosecute? Way more than $65,000 after judges, courtrooms and prosecutor costs are estimated. That's not even considering what happens when the rebate processor lawyers-up and drags this thing down and out.
The company gets a day of bad press and that's about it. HP's CEO/board members got away with far, far worse with practically no penalty whatsoever. Certainly nothing that won't be forgotten in a couple of years.
Laws are to prosecute the individuals and corporations without enough money to lawyer-up.
Bottom of the barrel wage earners working an admittedly unglamorous job tosses a few out. Where's the crime? Who's going to prosecute? Which State regs apply?
Rebates are a racket, always have been. I know from experience because I admin'd them years ago for a peripherals manufacturer.
Back to work!
If no one prosecutes.
This one stands an extremely low probability of actually improving comcast's service from a consumer-geek perspective. Quick and dirty reasons why:
1. Comcast is in up to their necks with municipal politicians. They need campaign contributions from Comcast.
2. Comcast is in up to their necks with state politicians too.
3. What's the penalty here? Certainly not meaningful enough to warrant the expense of a trial.
4. Since when do consumers Comcast's terms of service? They'll spew the usual free-market pablum as a polite way to tell unhappy customers to go elsewhere. Except they know there may be no elsewhere in many cases.... Not their problem.
For everyone that refuses to believe nothing will come of it, who's going to pay the law firm to drag Comcast into court on a state-by-state basis?
This story and the one before it are not why I check /.
If I want garbage like this, I'll check Yahoo.
Nevada is not a giant dry lake bed.
As someone who has traversed just a tiny bit of the variety of off-highway terrain Nevada/Arizona/Utah/East California has to offer, I find it doubtful he could put it down safely. If he went due north, then it doesn't get any easier to land it.
Let's imagine for a minute he gets insanely lucky and lands without killing himself. He's exposed to some of the hottest, driest weather in the US. How much drinking water is in single-engine plane? How much water could he carry if he were crazy enough to consider walking out?
The cost of medicine has gone up because we can treat more diseases now.
Are these cures more widely available? Are they getting cheaper? What is the likelihood any given treatment that is less profitable than a current product is being researched?
The treatments are expensive because a huge amount of regulation and up front costs is piled behind the treatments.
I thought the justification used to sell privatization was lowered costs and greater access? Instead, you are suggesting they provide more expensive cures. Are you serious about the "harm" regulations provide in this instance?
let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need?
That's already the case in the pharmaceuticals industry. Supposedly independent academic research has long ago been purchased by drug manufacturers in exchange for the Dean showing a great bottom line.
Has the cost of medicine in general gone down?
Is there more access to the medical system?
What about drugs that cure diseases in countries that can't afford to pay? Do they get the same amount of research as erectile disfunction and mood disorder research?
Please abandon this kind of thinking. A market-like system creates as many problems as the one it replaces. Only it's more virulent, harms consumers a multitude of ways and benefits a very, very select few. As Microsoft and AT&T have proven, even regulation doesn't shut down a monopoly.
Consumers are very forgiving and patient when it comes to Microsoft. That's consumers of all kinds not just Ma and Pa Sixpack.
Eventually, most users will be forced to switch to Vista. Sure, they'll lose a few to the consumers who have knowledgeable IT friends and family recommending other OS's. The way forward is to provide no feedback to Microsoft on their products. (ex. not sending those stupid crash reports) Other than evangelizing other OS's, it is a sure-fire way for Microsoft to develop another bad product.
Linux?
; en-us;555324&sd=rss&spid=3198 And then there's the very permeable "user mode" security that isn't what it claims to be.
Let's assume the kiosk distro has hotplugging enabled. Flash drive mounts, But the files.... Are not executable! So, the hostile doesn't have the opportunity to change permissions much less execute something on a flash drive.
OSX?
Flashdrive mounts. Hmmm can't install anything without su/sudo.
Windows?
Hmm... Sure, there is an enourmously complicated policy system. But none of which sets noexec on everything on a flash drive... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
You're a big company, pay for people to look after your infrastructure.
1. They might do that. Only the problem may not have been in IT per-se. I can easily imagine someone from another department purchasing the kiosks then throwing the request to connect the kiosk to the store's network over the so-called wall to IT. That's just one plausible scenario.
2. Don't be surprised when the kiosk manufacturer comes back and says, "Hey, I don't provide secured operating systems running on the computer inside the kiosk I manufacture."
3. The likelihood the kiosk in question ran windows is high given the compromise.
When I posted a similar observation yesterday, I was modded a troll. The RIAA can drag this out for at least 6-12 months on negotiating the security payment alone. Add another 6-12 months on other procedural road blocks alone.
The RIAA **still** wins. Months and months of lawyering costs for supposedly violating copyright. That's the story they want every consumer to know and fear.
It would be very misguided thinking to believe that the Rule of Law applies to the RIAA.
It seems the controller in L.A. suggested the same thing years ago. (pdf)
1 2152003.pdf
http://www.lacity.org/ctr/press/ctrpress18616087_
It's called teaming on windows and we use it. In fact, we had a flaky NIC just the other day. I'm not sure how many cards/vendors support teaming outside of HPaq.
On linux, it's called bonding. This is a killer feature.
I had some very limited professional experience with LAWA in the last couple of years. (LAWA runs LAX) I have no doubt there is quite a bit of consultant the usual chicanery going on whereby they don't actually hire qualified IT people, just people an elected official or two or three may know. The IT staff on hand is most likely has quite limited authority. Other than hiring more consultants they know to document the failure, little will ever come of it.
How is that scenario possible you ask? Well, LAWA is a HUGE cash cow for the city/county so there are naturally quite a few political contributors lined up to get their goods/services contracts fulfilled.
1. This is the most reasoned reply of the bunch. Kudos to you.
2. Unfortunately all options presented would affect the judge's electability. The course of action you lay out is a low-probability outcome.
Your proposition leads to a perpetual legal affair generating fees to a point for which there is no "upside" to the original winner of the case. This, of course is the intention on the RIAA's side who have the lawyers on salary for just this purpose.
US Marshals collect the money
U.S. Marshals are involved in State judicial affairs? Really?
A quick visit to http://www.usmarshals.gov/ shows *no* method or process by which a Federal agency can collect funds on behalf of a State judicial matter. Maybe you are thinking of asset forfeiture?
Despite the courts awarding this person some money, there's nothing that says the RIAA **has** to pay.
Most likely scenario the individual gets nothing. At all. Sure, she can farm it out to a collections agency, but they'll get nothing. This is the classic problem with most court judgments. The Good Guy may get their day in court, but there's no mechanism to compel the Bad Guy to pay.
OT: I was going to use "Therein lies the rub" as the title, but it looks like that is an abuse of the original phrase.
For the RIAA, winning cases is not the objective.
-Right of resale? Ignore it and litigate
-Personal use freedoms? Ignore them and litigate.
It's a "risk premium" attached to entertainment media. The only way to get the discount is to cede control of your media. A pejorative term for "risk premium" is a "terrorism tax."
Sadly, righteous indignation is the only thing that I see in these discussions.
Your average big-business has license compliance overhead already and fully expects to pay for software that comes with a complex use license and most likely an equally complex service contract.
The same companies probably have a huge number of undocumented Linux servers doing mundane tasks, but they are outside the scope of getting Legal involved in most instances.
The kind of sale Lenovo is targeting will have Legal expecting to review a complex license and support agreements with the pc purchase a (likely) small part of a larger deal.
The media conglomerates are training consumers otherwise.
The whole point behind those stupid trailers in front of DVD's, stupid FBI warning and RIAA lawsuits is to instill fear.
They want you to believe *they* are the ultimate authority. So far, it's working great.
Care to post a citation supporting your argument? I'm interested.
Depending on where you go for the data, that's still 1/2 to a full month's wages.
I'm very interested to discover how that price decrease decision was made. e.g. was it just not selling? Did the government "recommend" it?