If you think this "undercut the competitive bidding process", then you've never, ever, had anything to do with contracts procurement.
If a government is large enough to have a competitive bidding process at all, then this offer won't make any structural difference; the trial year and free cameras would be a point in their favor, yes, as it should be, but the contract would still be subject to competitive bidding. (If a vendor presents a bill for many $k's, there better be a properly-bid contract for it.)
And certainly the free equipment isn't exactly a new or innovative thing to do, as anybody who has ever seen an ad for a burglar alarm system can attest.
Before opining on the subject, perhaps Tim could have actually interviewed somebody who knows something about the government procurement process? (Corporate/government procurement is complex enough to be a complete career; shouldn't have been difficult to find somebody to interview.)
Really, Tim talking about something he has insufficient knowledge of, instead of doing a short interview with somebody who DOES know what they are talking about, is a not-infrequent problem here. (He occasionally even gets some of the basics of the site's favorite topic, IP law, completely wrong.)
What's with the comments about Federal Appeals courts?
What's with this comment: "In a relative rarity, the state Appeals Court decides [PDF] to get out ahead of the issue, rather than wait for precedential decisions to trickle down from the federal courts."
Huh? This statement makes no sense at all. If a State appeals court receives a case, they need to issue a decision; that being their job. Certainly a decision might be slow in coming if that exact issue was currently being litigated in a higher court, but other than that, they have to make SOME ruling one way or another; there's very few cases where a court can just throw up it's hands and punt it upwards without ruling.
That bit about the loss of the "high ground" for economic espionage was incorrect
I read the linked article about the loss of "Moral High Ground" for economic espionage, and the linked article certainly made that statement but didn't back it up.
Economic Espionage refers to the practice of a state actor spying on commercial enterprises in the target country and passing that information onto commercial enterprises in their own country for economic advantage.
However, the evidence presented merely showed that the US hacked into foreign companies; no evidence, at all, was presented stating that this information was passed onto US companies for commercial gain.
Independent of the wisdom of the law (personally, I think short-term rentals should be subject to some regulation, but not to the point where they are effectively prohibited), the idea that you can be prosecuted when you publicly admit you are violating a law is not controversial; a speaker at a government hearing does not receive automatic immunity for doing so.
And suing AirBnB makes perfect sense also; AirBnB is not merely a listing service that could try and get by with 230 immunity, they also handle reservation tracking, communications, and process payments. The idea that they should bear some liability for owners not complying with the law is not particularly outlandish. (Just like a bank routinely processing sacks of cash from a random customer is liable for money laundering.)
Errr... no, Uber's cars don't pass taxi regulations
Uber's vehicles do not meet the same requirements as taxis. In fact, governments that attempt to enforce taxi rules on Uber quickly results in the company throwing a temper tantrum, and operating anyway until the city either gives in, or imposes a fine, at which point they leave town rather than comply with the law.
Because some regulations are influenced by lobbyists, the solution is to not have any regulations at all and let anybody do whatever the *bleep!* they want? Is that your plan?
Any given movie has TWO customers; theaters and movie-goers. Completely alienating one group of those customers (movie theaters) to the advantage of another (movie-goers) would probably not end well for anybody involved.
It's all well and good for this website to propose studios go to 0-day and tell theaters "Getting asses in your seats vs. their living room is your problem now", but in the real world, a theater is not going to take that lying down, and will, naturally, prefer to show and market releases by studios that have more favorable terms.
It may be hard for the editors of this website to believe, but studios have more on their minds than just piracy. (Although given that most new-release piracy consists of blurry copies of somebody pointing a camera at the screen, I agree that it's not really much of a threat.)
Either the work in question is covered under copyright, or it isn't. Either this use is fair use, or it isn't. It doesn't become less copyrighted, or the use any more fair, simply because Lexis/Nexis is a large company.
I have a hard time getting angry about that first one...
I have a hard time getting angry about a fake press release in an attempt to get a gang hit called off; in fact, I applaud the creativity involved here. Unless the Does themselves are upset about this plan (which I doubt), I don't really care if the press feels butt-hurt.
And I'm not sure how the subsequent things mentioned in this article are connected, other than having to do with the same police department.
Yeah, Steele's plea probably isn't going to buy much
With all this dirt pending on Hansmeier, Steele's promise to spill the beans probably won't buy him very much, which accounts for the odd nature of the deal. (It appears to be a "I throw myself at the mercy of the court" sort of thing, rather than much of a quid pro quo for turning.)
I suspect many of the conversations Steele is having with the Feds consist of: Steele: "I can totally tell you how Hansmeier was behind [insert X nefarious scheme here] Fed: "Yeah, we knew that already, and don't try to pretend you didn't have a lot to do with it. Tell us something we don't know that won't lead to you getting shredded on the stand when you testify to it."
Okay, businesses being morons by continually raising prices while providing a sub-par product they happen to have a monopoly on is nothing new.
What's interesting is the environment this is all happening in.
The top rated scripted show on TV last year was the Walking Dead, with an 18-49 share of 8.8. Using a chart from 1995, that would have put them between #13 "Murphy Brown" and #14 "Hope and Gloria"; I vaguely remember Murphy Brown, and I don't remember it being a smash it. The most-watched broadcast entry, Big Bang Theory, would have tied for #50.
Despite the numbers for almost every single show being far lower than what would have been acceptable a couple decades ago, we are currently living in what is regarded by many TV critics as a "Golden Age of TV". Never before have we had such an embarrassment of riches; shows that are excellent by any reasonable standard.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that all this has been brought about by the cutthroat competition; we aren't tied to The Big Four and a tiny handful of cable stations any more, so there's more pressure to carve out a niche by producing something new and different.
P.S. Yeah, there's oceans of worthless schlock too... gotta put something on those hundreds of stations, but hey, you don't have to watch that either.
A content-neutral intermediary like FedEx isn't "selling copies [of the work]", they are just running off print jobs for a client. They aren't liable for the same reason we don't charge the UPS guy if he delivers a package that happens to have drugs in it.
If FedEx were to advertise: "We will provide copies of 'X' for 'non-commercial use'" you might have a point. But they don't.
Durn it; my attempt at emphasis got interpreted as an unclosed HTML tag.
What I meant to say is that cannabis-based drugs cannot enter the FDA approval process until the DEA allows cannabis to be obtained more easily for research. The FDA and DEA are on opposite ends of the Executive Branch org chart and barely talk to each other; you are blaming the wrong agency.
The FDA hasn't approved any cannabis-related drugs because said drugs haven't gone through the approval process. They can't enter said process until the -->DEA
Errr... There is no "right to repair" law for cars. There is the Magnuson-Moss warranty act, which gives you permission to have non-warranty maint./repair done elsewhere, and it won't void your warranty, but that's it. Automakers are required to provide neither instructions nor parts to outside parties. (The OBD system is required to use some standard codes (mainly dealing with emissions, and things that could effect them), but nothing beyond that.)
Now, in practice, most automakers DO provide repair instructions to outside parties, and will sell parts to anybody, because few car owners would put up with dealer-only maintenance, but they are not required to.
Okay, it's not actually hilarious if you were one of the people who was affected by their bullshit test results...
Anyway... I find it hilarious that a bunch of Venture Capitalists who knew nothing at all about medicine or biotech (there are VC's who routinely fund operations like this, and they stayed very far away) were willing to throw all sorts of money at a young woman whose only assets were dressing like a young, female, blonde, attractive Steve Jobs, and whose business plan consisted of nothing more than a rhetorical question: "Wouldn't it be great if we could run a lot of blood tests on a few drops of blood?" Well, yes, it would, but she did not then, and of course has not demonstrated since that she (or her company) has the least *bleep!*-ing clue how to reach that goal.
The Jobs-ian Reality Distortion Field does not actually work when there are actual results to be measured, laws to be complied with, and people to not kill.
At the time NPR dropped comments, commenters made up all of 0.06% of their readership. Virtually any effort at all doesn't really make sense if they are that small of a fraction of the userbase. It'd make about as much sense as making sure your new website worked well with Windows Phone and Blackberries.
I'm not saying all sites are like NPR, but for them it was a perfectly rational choice.
Websites have access to their user stats, and know how much comments cost them. You don't. Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd just say "comments are more trouble than they are worth", but most of us are capable of reading between those particular lines.
"Right, except calling any of this "competition" is being rather generous."
Why?
DirectTV DOES directly compete with cable providers in the TV market. They each offer roughly-equivalent services, but with different features and pricing. Sounds like the exact definition of "competition" to me.
I think the ICANN transition is bad, but for different reasons
I'm not worried about the Big, Bad, Reds taking over the internet, but certainly ICANN itself is problem free.
It's a shame that exactly the wrong tack was taken trying to stop the transition, because ICANN has real, genuine, problems relating to accountability, and they routinely flout their own accountability measures, and seek to have the ones they have in place watered down.
Not turning over the contract until those problems were fixed would have been a good idea, but there's no hope for that now, since Ted Cruz wanted to make a complete fool of himself.
(What's the big rush, anyway? The US Govt. has not interfered with ICANN/IANA one bit over the years. Who cares if China and Russia don't like the US holding the contract? If they don't like it, they can make their own damn internet, which is more-or-less what they'd prefer anyway.)
On the post: Taser Seeking To Lock Down Body Camera Market With 'Free' Camera Offer To Law Enforcement Agencies
So much fail with this article
If a government is large enough to have a competitive bidding process at all, then this offer won't make any structural difference; the trial year and free cameras would be a point in their favor, yes, as it should be, but the contract would still be subject to competitive bidding. (If a vendor presents a bill for many $k's, there better be a properly-bid contract for it.)
And certainly the free equipment isn't exactly a new or innovative thing to do, as anybody who has ever seen an ad for a burglar alarm system can attest.
Before opining on the subject, perhaps Tim could have actually interviewed somebody who knows something about the government procurement process? (Corporate/government procurement is complex enough to be a complete career; shouldn't have been difficult to find somebody to interview.)
Really, Tim talking about something he has insufficient knowledge of, instead of doing a short interview with somebody who DOES know what they are talking about, is a not-infrequent problem here. (He occasionally even gets some of the basics of the site's favorite topic, IP law, completely wrong.)
On the post: State Appeals Court Says There's An Expectation Of Privacy In Vehicle Data Recorders
What's with the comments about Federal Appeals courts?
Huh? This statement makes no sense at all. If a State appeals court receives a case, they need to issue a decision; that being their job. Certainly a decision might be slow in coming if that exact issue was currently being litigated in a higher court, but other than that, they have to make SOME ruling one way or another; there's very few cases where a court can just throw up it's hands and punt it upwards without ruling.
On the post: New Regulations Appear To Authorize Chinese Law Enforcement To Hack Into Computers Anywhere In The World
That bit about the loss of the "high ground" for economic espionage was incorrect
Economic Espionage refers to the practice of a state actor spying on commercial enterprises in the target country and passing that information onto commercial enterprises in their own country for economic advantage.
However, the evidence presented merely showed that the US hacked into foreign companies; no evidence, at all, was presented stating that this information was passed onto US companies for commercial gain.
On the post: Miami Officials Promise To Crack Down On Airbnb Homeowners Who Spoke Up About Bad Regulations
This is a legit thing for the gov. to do
And suing AirBnB makes perfect sense also; AirBnB is not merely a listing service that could try and get by with 230 immunity, they also handle reservation tracking, communications, and process payments. The idea that they should bear some liability for owners not complying with the law is not particularly outlandish. (Just like a bank routinely processing sacks of cash from a random customer is liable for money laundering.)
On the post: Miami Officials Promise To Crack Down On Airbnb Homeowners Who Spoke Up About Bad Regulations
Errr... no, Uber's cars don't pass taxi regulations
On the post: Trump's Internet Brigades Shocked To Realize The Government Just Sold Them Out On Privacy
Let me get this straight...
On the post: Movie Studios Considering Tightening Release Windows When They Should Be Eliminating Them
It comes from the dual-customer nature of movies
It's all well and good for this website to propose studios go to 0-day and tell theaters "Getting asses in your seats vs. their living room is your problem now", but in the real world, a theater is not going to take that lying down, and will, naturally, prefer to show and market releases by studios that have more favorable terms.
It may be hard for the editors of this website to believe, but studios have more on their minds than just piracy. (Although given that most new-release piracy consists of blurry copies of somebody pointing a camera at the screen, I agree that it's not really much of a threat.)
On the post: Court Says Posting Georgia's Official Annotated Laws Is Not Fair Use, And Thus Infringing
The size of the company in question is irrelevant
On the post: California Police Department Can't Keep It Real; Deploys Fake Press Releases And Fake Affidavits
I have a hard time getting angry about that first one...
And I'm not sure how the subsequent things mentioned in this article are connected, other than having to do with the same police department.
On the post: Man Actually Arrested For Assault With A Deadly Tweet
Re: Re:
But "Harass or intimidate"? What exactly is "harassment" or "intimidation" in a manner worthy of a criminal charge?
On the post: Things Looking Even Worse For Prenda's Paul Hansmeier: Bankruptcy Fraud On Deck
Yeah, Steele's plea probably isn't going to buy much
I suspect many of the conversations Steele is having with the Feds consist of:
Steele: "I can totally tell you how Hansmeier was behind [insert X nefarious scheme here]
Fed: "Yeah, we knew that already, and don't try to pretend you didn't have a lot to do with it. Tell us something we don't know that won't lead to you getting shredded on the stand when you testify to it."
On the post: The Cord Cutting The Cable Industry Says Isn't Happening, Keeps Happening
The content trends have been fascinating
What's interesting is the environment this is all happening in.
The top rated scripted show on TV last year was the Walking Dead, with an 18-49 share of 8.8. Using a chart from 1995, that would have put them between #13 "Murphy Brown" and #14 "Hope and Gloria"; I vaguely remember Murphy Brown, and I don't remember it being a smash it. The most-watched broadcast entry, Big Bang Theory, would have tied for #50.
Despite the numbers for almost every single show being far lower than what would have been acceptable a couple decades ago, we are currently living in what is regarded by many TV critics as a "Golden Age of TV". Never before have we had such an embarrassment of riches; shows that are excellent by any reasonable standard.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that all this has been brought about by the cutthroat competition; we aren't tied to The Big Four and a tiny handful of cable stations any more, so there's more pressure to carve out a niche by producing something new and different.
P.S. Yeah, there's oceans of worthless schlock too... gotta put something on those hundreds of stations, but hey, you don't have to watch that either.
On the post: Important Ruling On Perennially-Problematic Creative Commons Non-Commercial License
No, that's not what they are doing
If FedEx were to advertise: "We will provide copies of 'X' for 'non-commercial use'" you might have a point. But they don't.
On the post: Jury Acquits Restaurant Owner Of Obstruction Charges For Tweeting Out Photo Of Teens Involved In Police Alcohol Sting
Re: Re: Re: Confidential Informants
What I meant to say is that cannabis-based drugs cannot enter the FDA approval process until the DEA allows cannabis to be obtained more easily for research. The FDA and DEA are on opposite ends of the Executive Branch org chart and barely talk to each other; you are blaming the wrong agency.
On the post: Jury Acquits Restaurant Owner Of Obstruction Charges For Tweeting Out Photo Of Teens Involved In Police Alcohol Sting
Re: Re: Confidential Informants
On the post: Apple Wants To Stop You Fixing Your iPhone And iPad: Source Says It Will Testify Against 'Right To Repair' Legislation
There is no car "right to repair" law
Now, in practice, most automakers DO provide repair instructions to outside parties, and will sell parts to anybody, because few car owners would put up with dealer-only maintenance, but they are not required to.
On the post: Theranos's Insane Campaign To Punish Whistleblower, Who Happened To Be Famous Boardmember's Grandson
What a hilarious mess...
Anyway... I find it hilarious that a bunch of Venture Capitalists who knew nothing at all about medicine or biotech (there are VC's who routinely fund operations like this, and they stayed very far away) were willing to throw all sorts of money at a young woman whose only assets were dressing like a young, female, blonde, attractive Steve Jobs, and whose business plan consisted of nothing more than a rhetorical question: "Wouldn't it be great if we could run a lot of blood tests on a few drops of blood?" Well, yes, it would, but she did not then, and of course has not demonstrated since that she (or her company) has the least *bleep!*-ing clue how to reach that goal.
The Jobs-ian Reality Distortion Field does not actually work when there are actual results to be measured, laws to be complied with, and people to not kill.
On the post: MacWorld, PCWorld Kill Site Comments Because They 'Value And Welcome Feedback'
Commenters aren't a big deal for most sites
I'm not saying all sites are like NPR, but for them it was a perfectly rational choice.
Websites have access to their user stats, and know how much comments cost them. You don't. Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd just say "comments are more trouble than they are worth", but most of us are capable of reading between those particular lines.
On the post: DOJ Sues DirecTV, Calling It A 'Ringleader' of Collusion Over Regional Sports Programming
Why is calling it competition "generous"?
Why?
DirectTV DOES directly compete with cable providers in the TV market. They each offer roughly-equivalent services, but with different features and pricing. Sounds like the exact definition of "competition" to me.
On the post: Ridiculously Stupid: 4 State Attorneys General File Totally Bogus Lawsuit Against Internet Transition
I think the ICANN transition is bad, but for different reasons
It's a shame that exactly the wrong tack was taken trying to stop the transition, because ICANN has real, genuine, problems relating to accountability, and they routinely flout their own accountability measures, and seek to have the ones they have in place watered down.
Not turning over the contract until those problems were fixed would have been a good idea, but there's no hope for that now, since Ted Cruz wanted to make a complete fool of himself.
(What's the big rush, anyway? The US Govt. has not interfered with ICANN/IANA one bit over the years. Who cares if China and Russia don't like the US holding the contract? If they don't like it, they can make their own damn internet, which is more-or-less what they'd prefer anyway.)
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