Hey, I get paid salary. I get paid to do a job, not to work a certain number of hours. My salary is based off of an expected number of work hours, but I go over and under that number constantly. I'll work 44 hours one week and 36 the next.
So, don't tell me what amount of my time needs to be productive. That's between me and my employer and my employment contract.
And the article states that 40 minutes a day on Twitter. So, where did you pull those b.s. numbers from ... oh yeah, they're b.s., we all know where they came from. If an employee is spending three quarters of their time not working, then there probably is a problem, but it's not Twitter, and Twitter shouldn't be singled out because of it. Now, if you want to readjust your numbers from supposedly someone spending most of their day fudging about to the true number of about 10% ...
Of course it would be hard for someone putting in 25% of the time effort to be as productive as someone putting in 100%. But, I can guarantee you that someone putting in 90% of the time can be as if not more productive than someone putting in 100%.
Honestly that feature alone completely removes any hard ties from B&N and sells me on the nook. At that point I can put on any book I want. The problem with the Kindle is that you can only put books purchased through Amazon on it, at least with the nook you never need to actually purchase a book if all you load on it are freely available ePub and PDF files.
And it looks like a slick piece of hardware. There's also the feature that allows you to take it into a brick & mortar store and read eBooks for free in-store (not sure on specifics on this but it seems pretty cool). And it plays MP3s which will be great for language learning eBooks that have audio lessons along with them.
Personally, I'm sold on the nook. I've wanted an eReader, but the Kindle is too totalitarian and Sony has done little as a company to instill customer loyalty with its media divisions and their near-black hat security measures.
All of my books are going to be open ePub files or PDF files anyway, so "lending" anyone a book will be as simple as copying from my memory stick onto their nook. The "lending" restrictions only apply if you are dealing with B&N purchased eBooks. I have an iPod full of MP3s, and I'll have a nook full of PDFs.
Isn't any anti-establishment musician or musical group that signs a record contract with a major record label by definition a "sell out"? They've sold their music to the music industrial complex and no longer are making music for the fans, but are making it for the shareholders.
To ever be truly punk rock, you'd have to first refuse to be a cog in the machine. Once you sign a contract, you get your cog membership card and secret decoder ring; you're no longer punk rock anyway.
The only way to not be a "sell out" and have a record contract is never to have ideals to begin with. Then there's nothing to "sell out" of.
Standard Anonymous Commenter Response Sheet
(please check ONLY ONE response, as checking both options will result in a tear in the space-time continuum as if you divided by zero)
[X] This ONLY works because it is an established franchise with name value recognition. It would NEVER work for the small-time developer without massive amounts of marketing.
[ ] This ONLY works because it is a small venture without the need for a lot of money. It would NEVER work for a big name established developer that needs to pay the bills.
OPTIONAL
(you may check as many of these options as you like, relevancy not required)
[X] They have a right to get paid!
[X] Won't someone think of the children!
[ ] If they have nothing to hide, then what's the problem?
[ ] It doesn't matter how many lives get ruined as long as no guilty person goes free.
[ ] Copyright/trademarks/patents are good, if you are against them you are an anarchist.
[ ] Mike is a poo poo head.
"Literally! A giant spider. And I didn't get it at the time because I still lived in Jersey. Now I live in Los Angeles, I get it. Spider's a good idea. Wasn't then. But I was young." - Kevin Smith, Comic Book: The Movie
"I know that reasonable people will fully agree with me."
Fully reasonable people know that two wrongs do not make a right, and that committing immoral acts makes one immoral whether or not the end result is moral.
"Whether that document is fake or not, is of little relevance."
It is of entire relevance. When a person is suing other people and produces forged evidence, then how trustworthy is every other piece of evidence they put forth? Not very.
So, if they lie in court, then how can their claim to be harmed by the defendants at all be trusted, because they are likely lying in that regard, too.
"Let's concentrate on the real issue here"
Yes, let's do that.
Media lobbying group sues four individuals (for files linked from a website that are not stored on that website) and makes up fake documents to show a connection that isn't there between another company and one of the individuals for the purpose of getting money out of the individual for actions of completely different people on a website the four individuals do not own. That's the real issue here.
Except that's not how the law is designed to work. You can't punish one person for what other people are doing. You can't use a person as an "example" to other people, because that's not fair to the person being made an "example" of. The ends do not justify the means, and mistreating one person to send a message to other infractioners is immoral.
The court needs to look at one person and say "what damages did this one person cause?" And the retribution should be according to that person's situation.
This idea of "preventative" punishment is grossly immoral and disgusting.
If he wants to look at a closer source, Scott Adams has done a lot with getting Dilbert on-line. In fact, Dilbert is one of the only comic strips I read regularly because of how accessible Scott Adams has made the strip. With the amount of marketing he throws around with the strip hawking Dilbert on just about everything, I can only image he's making a decent amount of money off of "free".
In Nevada, prostitution and gambling are left to county regulations to decide their legality and a county is only allowed to have one or the other.
So, in Las Vegas (Clark County), gambling (games of skill) is legal but prostitution is not. In the surrounding counties (where the "ranches" are), prostitution is legal but non-slots gambling is not.
In a related story, the doctor's offices are now filing a lawsuit requiring a judge to shut down the phone number for the solar company because it is receiving confidential information that it didn't ask for.
Wait ... oh that's right. It's only the Internet where people can get away with that sort of thing. People's e-mail accounts mean nothing compared to the all powerful fax machine.
Photocopiers aren't new. Teachers have been photocopying educational materials for DECADES. Why is it now a problem? Oh, that's right, it's just a money grab ... there is nobody actually in threat of going out of business because of teachers photocopying magazine articles and a couple pages from different textbooks to round out their course material.
There are no new damages, there are no damages at all. It's a problem that is only a problem because someone finally saw some dollar signs and wants as much of it as they can get. They see the music industry making grabs at everybody, and now its time for book publishers to try to get some for themselves.
If they make their data available through a public API, then I don't see where there is any misuse of their data. Whether or not the API is documented does not mean if it's public (security through obscurity is not security) ... they would have an authentication system in place for non-public API calls.
And in their initial legal threat, what the hell does this mean:
"You need to know it is unlawful and a violation of our copyright and intellectual property rights for you to build a system that obtains our content from any source other than to obtain an expressed license from West World Media for legal usage of our content."
The sentence starts talking about their rights, and somehow in midsentence goes into talking about accessing a license for usage. It's not that this person needs IP law explained to them, but that the originating website needs to hire a lawyer that understands English. I know legalese is a different language, but at least it usually follows proper English sentence structures.
If the website has a problem with this guy's app, they could close up their API and require an API key to access their data. Having a wide open API means they're giving access to their data away. If they come down on this developer, he should post their undocumented API for all the web to use, forcing the originating site to either sue hundreds of small-time web programmers ... or hire one of them to fix their system.
Screen scraping a site for data and then reusing that isn't nearly as cut & dry, but c'mon ... it's an open API, what do they expect?!? That's what an API is for! So other systems can interact with your system. If your system is giving away too much information to the wrong people, then you should fix your system. Threatening a lawsuit to cover bad programming? Wow. Not very original, but still ... wow.
So, for the .001% of crimes that are actual good examples of computer uses ... I'm for that. But, I'm against the 99.999% of the other cases you're ignoring that are bad examples.
I'd rather the police do real detective work for that hit & run you're so concerned about, than have them running amok creating ever more restrictive police states.
If police didn't favor enforcing vice crimes because of revenue (Police Auction This Weekend! Everything Must Go!) over solving actual crimes with victims, then your arguments wouldn't feel so hollow.
Re: Re: The Very Concept of "Sale" has been Under Attack
As my old guitar teacher used to say:
"Your right to swing your arms ends at my face."
A person can buy a gun and shoot it off all that want. As long as they don't interfere with someone else's rights. So, as soon as the bullet injures somebody or their property, then you've violated THEIR rights.
On the post: Netflix Claims Americans Don't Want Standalone Streaming Movie Service
Re: Re: Hey Huuuuuluuuuuu!
On the post: UK Law Enforcement Tells UK Gov't: Please Don't Kick File Sharers Offline
$$$
On the post: Time To Take Down That Animated Under Construction GIF; GeoCities Goes Away
Re: It was once the place to be
On the post: No, Twitter Use Is Not Costing Companies Billions
Re: Lost in Empire
So, don't tell me what amount of my time needs to be productive. That's between me and my employer and my employment contract.
And the article states that 40 minutes a day on Twitter. So, where did you pull those b.s. numbers from ... oh yeah, they're b.s., we all know where they came from. If an employee is spending three quarters of their time not working, then there probably is a problem, but it's not Twitter, and Twitter shouldn't be singled out because of it. Now, if you want to readjust your numbers from supposedly someone spending most of their day fudging about to the true number of about 10% ...
Of course it would be hard for someone putting in 25% of the time effort to be as productive as someone putting in 100%. But, I can guarantee you that someone putting in 90% of the time can be as if not more productive than someone putting in 100%.
On the post: eBook Market Gets More Crowded... But... Still Many Limitations
Honestly that feature alone completely removes any hard ties from B&N and sells me on the nook. At that point I can put on any book I want. The problem with the Kindle is that you can only put books purchased through Amazon on it, at least with the nook you never need to actually purchase a book if all you load on it are freely available ePub and PDF files.
And it looks like a slick piece of hardware. There's also the feature that allows you to take it into a brick & mortar store and read eBooks for free in-store (not sure on specifics on this but it seems pretty cool). And it plays MP3s which will be great for language learning eBooks that have audio lessons along with them.
Personally, I'm sold on the nook. I've wanted an eReader, but the Kindle is too totalitarian and Sony has done little as a company to instill customer loyalty with its media divisions and their near-black hat security measures.
All of my books are going to be open ePub files or PDF files anyway, so "lending" anyone a book will be as simple as copying from my memory stick onto their nook. The "lending" restrictions only apply if you are dealing with B&N purchased eBooks. I have an iPod full of MP3s, and I'll have a nook full of PDFs.
On the post: Sex Pistols Claiming Trademark Infringement? Because Selling Out Is So Punk Rock
To ever be truly punk rock, you'd have to first refuse to be a cog in the machine. Once you sign a contract, you get your cog membership card and secret decoder ring; you're no longer punk rock anyway.
The only way to not be a "sell out" and have a record contract is never to have ideals to begin with. Then there's nothing to "sell out" of.
On the post: Dungeons And Dragons Online Highlights How Free Can Work As A Part Of A Business Model
(please check ONLY ONE response, as checking both options will result in a tear in the space-time continuum as if you divided by zero)
[X] This ONLY works because it is an established franchise with name value recognition. It would NEVER work for the small-time developer without massive amounts of marketing.
[ ] This ONLY works because it is a small venture without the need for a lot of money. It would NEVER work for a big name established developer that needs to pay the bills.
OPTIONAL
(you may check as many of these options as you like, relevancy not required)
[X] They have a right to get paid!
[X] Won't someone think of the children!
[ ] If they have nothing to hide, then what's the problem?
[ ] It doesn't matter how many lives get ruined as long as no guilty person goes free.
[ ] Copyright/trademarks/patents are good, if you are against them you are an anarchist.
[ ] Mike is a poo poo head.
On the post: Will 'Paranormal Activity' Teach The Movie Industry A Lesson?
Re: Re:
On the post: Peter Sunde Brings Criminal Charges Against BREIN, Claims They Falsified Documents Against The Pirate Bay
Re: Forged docs ok
Fully reasonable people know that two wrongs do not make a right, and that committing immoral acts makes one immoral whether or not the end result is moral.
"Whether that document is fake or not, is of little relevance."
It is of entire relevance. When a person is suing other people and produces forged evidence, then how trustworthy is every other piece of evidence they put forth? Not very.
So, if they lie in court, then how can their claim to be harmed by the defendants at all be trusted, because they are likely lying in that regard, too.
"Let's concentrate on the real issue here"
Yes, let's do that.
Media lobbying group sues four individuals (for files linked from a website that are not stored on that website) and makes up fake documents to show a connection that isn't there between another company and one of the individuals for the purpose of getting money out of the individual for actions of completely different people on a website the four individuals do not own. That's the real issue here.
On the post: Why Fining People Can Actually Increase That Activity... An Economics Lesson
Re:
The court needs to look at one person and say "what damages did this one person cause?" And the retribution should be according to that person's situation.
This idea of "preventative" punishment is grossly immoral and disgusting.
On the post: Could Doonesbury Learn Anything From XKCD?
Re: damn, beaten
On the post: Could Doonesbury Learn Anything From XKCD?
On the post: UK Politician's Cross Border Attempt To Terminate Prostitute Review Site Only Bumps Up Traffic
Re: Re: Illegal?
So, in Las Vegas (Clark County), gambling (games of skill) is legal but prostitution is not. In the surrounding counties (where the "ranches" are), prostitution is legal but non-slots gambling is not.
On the post: Doctors In Tennessee Have Been Faxing Patient Info To The Wrong Place For Years
Wait ... oh that's right. It's only the Internet where people can get away with that sort of thing. People's e-mail accounts mean nothing compared to the all powerful fax machine.
On the post: Canadian Copyright Group Sending Huge Bills To Schools For Daring To Teach Kids With Photocopies
Re: Re: Huh...
There are no new damages, there are no damages at all. It's a problem that is only a problem because someone finally saw some dollar signs and wants as much of it as they can get. They see the music industry making grabs at everybody, and now its time for book publishers to try to get some for themselves.
On the post: Can You Copyright Movie Times?
And in their initial legal threat, what the hell does this mean:
"You need to know it is unlawful and a violation of our copyright and intellectual property rights for you to build a system that obtains our content from any source other than to obtain an expressed license from West World Media for legal usage of our content."
The sentence starts talking about their rights, and somehow in midsentence goes into talking about accessing a license for usage. It's not that this person needs IP law explained to them, but that the originating website needs to hire a lawyer that understands English. I know legalese is a different language, but at least it usually follows proper English sentence structures.
If the website has a problem with this guy's app, they could close up their API and require an API key to access their data. Having a wide open API means they're giving access to their data away. If they come down on this developer, he should post their undocumented API for all the web to use, forcing the originating site to either sue hundreds of small-time web programmers ... or hire one of them to fix their system.
Screen scraping a site for data and then reusing that isn't nearly as cut & dry, but c'mon ... it's an open API, what do they expect?!? That's what an API is for! So other systems can interact with your system. If your system is giving away too much information to the wrong people, then you should fix your system. Threatening a lawsuit to cover bad programming? Wow. Not very original, but still ... wow.
On the post: DHS Reveals Some Data On Border Laptop Searches
Re:
On the post: DHS Reveals Some Data On Border Laptop Searches
Oh, they didn't use laptops on the planes to hijack the flights on 9/11.
So, um, 0.
On the post: Obama Administration: New State Secrets Rules = Really, You Can Trust Us
Re: Re: Re: Uh Oh!
I'd rather the police do real detective work for that hit & run you're so concerned about, than have them running amok creating ever more restrictive police states.
If police didn't favor enforcing vice crimes because of revenue (Police Auction This Weekend! Everything Must Go!) over solving actual crimes with victims, then your arguments wouldn't feel so hollow.
On the post: Ownership Or License: The Difference Matters
Re: Re: The Very Concept of "Sale" has been Under Attack
"Your right to swing your arms ends at my face."
A person can buy a gun and shoot it off all that want. As long as they don't interfere with someone else's rights. So, as soon as the bullet injures somebody or their property, then you've violated THEIR rights.
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