I saw this coming in the mid 2000s. Companies realized it was more cost effective (read:cheaper) to have happy sounding customer service than a good product and knowledgeable staff. For people wondering why they don't just create an environment and products that don't make people angry in the first place it's because that costs money. Lots of it. So you dump the job of cleaning the mess left by management's lousy decisions onto some poor bastard in Bangladesh or some barely literate goof in Alabama. The sad thing is it works. People remember how the interaction felt more than it's content... For anyone who isn't an overly emotional idiot it's incredibly frustrating; and all the robots in the world don't help that.

not really. America's got tons of religious loonies and they don't get on to this sort of stuff because when they do the policy drop a hammer from space on them.

It's about money and control. Always is. The ruling class looks like other way because blokes like this one that got hacked up tend to be progressive. In addition to banging on about atheism they usually want food and medicine for everybody, and that cuts into the budge for private planes and houses the size of skyscrapers.

Whenever human beings do something truly awful it's always, always about money; and lots of it.

Oh, and before anyone thinks I'm saying America's better because we don't tolerate this sort of nonsense; it's not out of the kindness of our hearts, we just haven't felt the need to let religious extremists off their lease. We've got other ways of keeping the working man down...

we got off lightly. It was 4 Adam Sandler Movies, National Treasure 3 and the latest film from Sstar Actor Shia Labeouf

not sure I see a problem with this. If the users were going to stay on the unpaid model and the ad revenue isn't enough to pay for it why bother hoping they convert? It only works for Candy Crush because a few "whales" buy a tonne of stuff, but with music those folks are buying CDs and vinyl for their collection. Might as well cut off the guys who want freebies...

When has America been a free country? Seriously, go read "A People's History of the United States". We've been a heck hole for ages. Hell, the reason we have a Senate is to keep the pleebs from voting themselves land (google it). We've always been a country by the wealthy & for the wealthy. We've always put property rights first and human rights second. I don't know why get so confused when we do stuff like this. We've been doing it since the country was founded...

I haven't read the law in detail but you might be right. That said my understanding from readying summaries from folks who had actually read it ( :P kinda sounds like that bit from Spaceballs, doesn't it? ) was that so long as google wasn't moderating the store then they were more or less in the clear. It was written like common carrier laws. e.g. you can't prosecute the phone company when somebody plans a bank robbery on their cell phone.

In any case from a practical standpoint I'm sure google would win. They've got the money to fight it out and there's plenty of network operators who'd want to maintain some protections. Sorta like how if I link to a pirate song facebook doesn't get sued even though they made money off the ads they served.

Yes and no. There's a lot of evidence his company was encouraging employees to upload copyrighted works. Now that said the massive amount of resources devoted to bringing him down is frustrating...

you'd have to kill our Jury trial system. That's why nobody ever brings these cases to trial. The defense & prosecution each get to pick jurors and It's easy to find one "Tough on Crime" juror who will always side with the prosecutor. They indited those cops in Baltimore but it's just for show and to calm things down. After the dust settles they'll drop the charges. Not because they're complacent, but because they know they can't win, even if the police turned out to be guilty.

The DMCA safe harbor protects them as long as they take it down immediately on request, and google is big enough to weather any lawsuit. Now if you or I were running an app store...

You seem to be confused. They're not incompatible ideas. We can protect our middle class work force without hating brown people. It's like that Bruce Springsteen song, "We take care of our own". You have to be OK yourself before you can help others. Now, this _does_ mean we curtail some of our excesses. But one thing at a time please. Let's stop the race to the bottom first

btw, The false dichotomy you're bringing up is another example of the sort of debate framing that's going on. Nice troll too, btw.

Socialism and Protectionism are _not_ easy answers. That's what makes them real answers. Real answers are _hard_. We're facing a lot of complex problems with a large and incredibly powerful group of individuals trying to sabotage any attempt to solve them.

This is always been a problem of socialists. Our rhetoric sucks because we don't have a grand ideal to lean on. It's so much _easier_ to say if we leave things alone their sort themselves out. It _sounds_ better and it _feels_ better. Sure, it's wrong. But it's a tough sell.

It's like when you were a teenager and didn't want to listen to your parents. I mean that exactly. Your parents weren't right about everything, but if you're middle class enough to be reading this they were probably right about 90%. But nobody remembers that 90%, just the 10% of the time they were wrong. Socialism has the same problem.

And no, Russia and China aren't socialists. Next question please. It takes more than words to be socialist, just like it takes more than sex to be a parent.

into the ideals that were pounded into his skull since childhood. That's the problem. The free market has failed us middle class techs. We can't possibly compete with people who lack food security. Yes, the H1-B program increases the GDP, but that's useless to the middle class since we're getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. The solution is protectionism and socialism, but the 1% have spent our whole lives demonizing these things.

Ask yourself what your high school economics class was like. Were you ever taught there was any way but free market laissez faire economics? Heck, in my class they didn't even bother demonizing it, it just wasn't taught. Libertarianism was a fait accompli. The grandparent, like a lot of /.ers is fighting the same uphill battle. It's the same reason the right wing just won the UK. You take control of the basic discussion and thought processes. Hell, look what we're doing. We're not talking about our standard of living, we're talking about "Job Creators". They've framed the debate in such a way that we can't even start to talk about the real issues.

and I'd like to see it made illegal to tow with a chain (or worse one of those canvas rope thingy's I've seen). For pete's sakes people get a flatbed or at least a proper tow dolly.

Screw protecting the consumer and their maybe $1000 worth of crap in the back of a pickup. What I want to know is that _I'm_ protected from half assed and overworked driver with no insurance moving shit on their days off instead of resting thanks to America's race to the bottom economy.

didn't even bother to read the summary let alone TFA did you? This is about insurance, keeping track of who has it and making sure they're in a position to pay. $1 mil is small potatoes if you get hit by an uninsured driver and injured. A bad accident can result in decades of medical bills and with America's screwed up health care system can run way past that.