sad part is, from my outsider's perspective anyway, that is actually supposed to be the correct responce on the part of american citizens to a government that has become opressive and is stripping their liberties in the interests of the elite few.
of course, it'll never Happen, at least not in a useful way, because those in a position to enact it are those who benifit from it not happening. meh *shrugs*
... i hit the funny button then went 'hold on... patent law is one of the major factors in the shinanigans surrounding the big pharmaceutical companies... damnit, it's not funny when it's True!' :S
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
actually, i suspect it Is. at least in part.
note that is != was, but the big corporations with their lobbiests basically control the is on this matter.
... any entity that rellies on neo-classical economics as it's main point of relevance has negative economic value.
and the stock/share market is not an indicater of anything except how many people have been conned into the latest 'bubble' (which are more like sand piles, actually, but whatever)
mind you, NZ has this thing where the phone companies are obligated to wire up any new house that's built on a road that already has a phone line (if you live waaaaaaaaaaaay out in the countryside you have to help pay for running a cable out there though), and i believe standard practice is to accept emergency services calls even from 'disconnected' lines (they certainly take them from cell phones that otherwise shouldn't be able to make a call for various reasons). they're also not Allowed to charge for local calls from residentual land lines. though they do charge something like NZ$50 or so a year for the service plan.
this is a legacy of the state owned telephone company being privitized (with heavy regulation).
oddly, we don't really have to deal with telemarketers beyond the fact that even door to door salesmen seem to like to make apointments rather than just show up (and thus get in the habit of calling people in the area they're going to to say they're going to show up so they know who not to even bother with etc. they're actually less pushy on the phone than you'd expect). Surveys and polls, on the other hand...
mind you, i should really just add this to the pile of 'ways NZ is weird'.
amusing fact: in NZ at least, no one leaves voice mail, because no one Checks their voice mail (well, ok, 'no one' is probably an exageration, but this is very common) because you get charged money to check it and most phone calls aren't worth it.
mind you, a lot of people refuse to leave messages on answering machines and will just hang up and try again later, too. well, for personal calls, anyway. at least in part due to the whole phone tag thing, i think.
(oddly, for some baffling reason, i have friends who refuse to call my landline despite the fact that i spend the vast majority of my time at home, prefering instead to ring my cell. never mind that i bought it purely because various groups insisted on sending notifications by txt message and failing at e-mail. note that these people live in the same city as me, so the landline call would be Free if made from a residential landline, and Still cheaper than calling my mobile from theirs if they're not on the same network i am (most of them aren't). last i checked anyway. this despite the fact that if they're using the cell network they may as well just send me a txt message most of the time :S)
mind you, NZ's always had a high usage of phones... some years back they were upgrading the exchanges, had some japanese technicians over helping out... the japanese guys thought they were conducting a load test because of how much work the equipment was having to do. imagine their surprise to discover that it was just normal usage. our exchanges apparantly run close to capacity a lot of the time. heh. (so said my friend who works for the phone company, anyway.)
i'm pretty sure the goal here is 'elites', assuming that no one who actually lives in the real world could possibly be liberal...
and given the usual US citizen's definition of liberal (anyone who's not strongly right wing economically, and thus is clearly a communist :S) this is actually a sanner definition than usual.
after all, the common man is hardly in wall street or government...
...
in most contexts, when it comes to free trade, common sense would consider things on a city-region level, not a national one, and tell you that free trade is a great way to gut your city-region's ability to actually function and grow over the long term. (hyper-specialisation leads to massive profits followed by stagnation, then colapse. free trade greatly encourages hyper-specialisation.)
(check out Jane Jacobs books on the economy of cities (that's actually the title of one of them) for the logic, and David Orrell's Econo Myths (or possibly economyths. the way it's written on the cover is a bit confusing.) for why common sense and current mainstream economic theory have little or nothing to do with each other.)
so, all IP laws except trademarks can bugger off, and trademarks need to be reassessed and reapplied and generally abused less, or something like that, yah?
somewhat true, somewhat not.
also been gone over every damn time something like this comes up.
(and it's not unheard of for people to make this claim, and the Inverse, on the same subject)
that being a whole different argument reguarding the use of diesel powered container ships, in some ways.
ultimately it's not, though that's just one more factor to weigh up, and given the nature of container ships, they just load something else up anyway. (which might reduce the number of trips per year by one or two i suppose, but in most cases, so far as i can tell and where possible, it's cheaper to send the data accross the oceans and print more locally, thus eliminating that cost. other wise the books tend to make up a very small part of a mixed shipment to the destination in question.)
On the post: Broadcasters To Sue Time Warner Cable For Making It Easier For People To See Their Shows & Ads
Re: Re: Re:
of course, it'll never Happen, at least not in a useful way, because those in a position to enact it are those who benifit from it not happening. meh *shrugs*
On the post: Sometimes It's Better To Just Let People Copy Your Content Than Deal With Licensing
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Sometimes It's Better To Just Let People Copy Your Content Than Deal With Licensing
Re: Re: Re: Even if "Take it for free!" was written in bold, red letters...
note that is != was, but the big corporations with their lobbiests basically control the is on this matter.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Geohot Goes On Vacation; Sony Accuses Him Of Fleeing Legal Action
Re: Re: Expect...
On the post: On NYT Paywall, Citigroup says 'Good Buy'; Techdirt says 'Hello!?!'
Re: Time to down grade Citigroup.
and the stock/share market is not an indicater of anything except how many people have been conned into the latest 'bubble' (which are more like sand piles, actually, but whatever)
On the post: Phone Calls Are So Last Century
Re:
... i find this bizzare.
mind you, NZ has this thing where the phone companies are obligated to wire up any new house that's built on a road that already has a phone line (if you live waaaaaaaaaaaay out in the countryside you have to help pay for running a cable out there though), and i believe standard practice is to accept emergency services calls even from 'disconnected' lines (they certainly take them from cell phones that otherwise shouldn't be able to make a call for various reasons). they're also not Allowed to charge for local calls from residentual land lines. though they do charge something like NZ$50 or so a year for the service plan.
this is a legacy of the state owned telephone company being privitized (with heavy regulation).
oddly, we don't really have to deal with telemarketers beyond the fact that even door to door salesmen seem to like to make apointments rather than just show up (and thus get in the habit of calling people in the area they're going to to say they're going to show up so they know who not to even bother with etc. they're actually less pushy on the phone than you'd expect). Surveys and polls, on the other hand...
mind you, i should really just add this to the pile of 'ways NZ is weird'.
On the post: Phone Calls Are So Last Century
Re: Re:
On the post: Phone Calls Are So Last Century
Re: Re: I agree...and also
mind you, a lot of people refuse to leave messages on answering machines and will just hang up and try again later, too. well, for personal calls, anyway. at least in part due to the whole phone tag thing, i think.
(oddly, for some baffling reason, i have friends who refuse to call my landline despite the fact that i spend the vast majority of my time at home, prefering instead to ring my cell. never mind that i bought it purely because various groups insisted on sending notifications by txt message and failing at e-mail. note that these people live in the same city as me, so the landline call would be Free if made from a residential landline, and Still cheaper than calling my mobile from theirs if they're not on the same network i am (most of them aren't). last i checked anyway. this despite the fact that if they're using the cell network they may as well just send me a txt message most of the time :S)
mind you, NZ's always had a high usage of phones... some years back they were upgrading the exchanges, had some japanese technicians over helping out... the japanese guys thought they were conducting a load test because of how much work the equipment was having to do. imagine their surprise to discover that it was just normal usage. our exchanges apparantly run close to capacity a lot of the time. heh. (so said my friend who works for the phone company, anyway.)
On the post: Some In The Press Realizing That Copyright Industry Claims Of 'Losses' From 'Piracy' Are Bunk
Re: Re: Judge: LimeWire damages 'Absurd'
On the post: On NYT Paywall, Citigroup says 'Good Buy'; Techdirt says 'Hello!?!'
Re: Re:
and given the usual US citizen's definition of liberal (anyone who's not strongly right wing economically, and thus is clearly a communist :S) this is actually a sanner definition than usual.
after all, the common man is hardly in wall street or government...
On the post: Reason #247 Why You Should Pay For The NYTimes: To Keep Its Dead Obituary Writers Employed
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Zappos Gives Up On Canada Due To Customs Problems
Re:
in most contexts, when it comes to free trade, common sense would consider things on a city-region level, not a national one, and tell you that free trade is a great way to gut your city-region's ability to actually function and grow over the long term. (hyper-specialisation leads to massive profits followed by stagnation, then colapse. free trade greatly encourages hyper-specialisation.)
(check out Jane Jacobs books on the economy of cities (that's actually the title of one of them) for the logic, and David Orrell's Econo Myths (or possibly economyths. the way it's written on the cover is a bit confusing.) for why common sense and current mainstream economic theory have little or nothing to do with each other.)
On the post: Zappos Gives Up On Canada Due To Customs Problems
Re:
On the post: Court Rejects Google Book Scanning Settlement With The Authors Guild
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Top Hacker Rejects Job Offer From Sony Over PS3 Jailbreak Legal Strategy
Re: Re: Sony? Another fine product from the people who brought us World war Two...
On the post: Best Selling Author Turns Down Half A Million Dollar Publishing Contract To Self-Publish
Re: If you're already famous
also been gone over every damn time something like this comes up.
(and it's not unheard of for people to make this claim, and the Inverse, on the same subject)
On the post: Best Selling Author Turns Down Half A Million Dollar Publishing Contract To Self-Publish
Re: Re: Re: Generation Gap?
ultimately it's not, though that's just one more factor to weigh up, and given the nature of container ships, they just load something else up anyway. (which might reduce the number of trips per year by one or two i suppose, but in most cases, so far as i can tell and where possible, it's cheaper to send the data accross the oceans and print more locally, thus eliminating that cost. other wise the books tend to make up a very small part of a mixed shipment to the destination in question.)
On the post: Apple Sues Amazon Over App Store Name
Re: Oh, good
On the post: How Copyright Filters Present A Serious Challenge To DJ Culture
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
pay attention to the snowflakes :D
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