Really?
First part is false if you live in the UK: format shifting is considered infringement, as it deprives the author of funds they could have gathered by providing it to you in that format.

"Just download it and do the same" -- are you saying that my iTunes downloads don't give me the same freedom to format shift as if I bought a CD?

"you are taking money out of his pocket just the same as if you lifed a bag of chips from 7-11" -- No. If I downloaded something without paying when I would have gladly paid $10 if the free version hadn't been available, I am depriving the author of potential profit. If I walk out of 7-11 without paying for physical goods, I've taken something with tangible value and deprived the store of it (and deprived them of selling it to someone else who would be willing to pay the $2.50).

Look at it this way: if an audio track is on a website next to a "donate" icon, anyone in the world can download it and donate. The cost is the cost to serve the bits, plus the sunk cost of producing the audio track.

If a bag of chips is sitting on a shelf next to a "donate" jar, anyone who is locally present can take the bag of chips. Once that's done, all that is left is the jar, possibly with some money in it.

Where things break down is that we have a concept built around the exchange of value. I might have a bag of chips, you might know how to fix a leaky faucet. In exchange for the bag of chips, I could a) fix your leaky faucet (this is exchange of goods for services) or b) tell you how to fix your faucet (exchange of goods for information). Music is exactly like the second one of these, even though some people conflate it with the first.

If I told you "you can't tell anyone else how to fix a leaky faucet without paying me first" you'd probably just ignore me.

Many music contracts are, however, written up this way, so that the distributor gets the right to say who can tell who (and how) how to fix that faucet. If someone breaks their agreement not to tell, and then tells a bunch of other people how to fix the faucet, are those other people suddenly taking money out of the pocket of the guy who sold this information to the distributor?

Think about that.

And as someone who has produced both software and music, I agree 100% with the parent on this. And I'm not posting AC :)

I get paid for what I produce, not for what other people experience/consume. This is the case for most developers of intellectual property. It's the next level up: the lawyers/distributors/vendors that require payment for distribution of intellectual property. A lot of their work would vanish if Congress made such a move, because their jobs are artificially created.

Anyone who actually produces intellectual property who would feel threatened by things becoming free needs to take a hard look at why they feel threatened. Do they feel like they are currently being paid more than what they develop is actually worth on an open market?

You forgot about recording, producing, post-producing and distributing -- these all have copyright law attached to them too.

This is actually why recording companies exist -- they navigate the legal morass so that individuals don't have to.

However, it seems to me it'd make more sense these days to incorporate an entity for each album you produce, so that if someone takes umbrage with your composition/writing/performance/format/recording/production/post-production/distribution, you can just dissolve that incorporation and your own livelihood and the fate of all other music is still protected. And you wouldn't end up being beholden to a recording company who does pretty much the same thing, but takes most of the profits.

I think people are coming at this from two sides. On the one side, there's the possibility of trusted CAs issuing duplicate certs for the same namespace. You can't really avoid this if you accept those CAs as trusted; the risk is the same no matter which CA you actually use.

However, on the other side, you have CAs being beholden to a local government, looking at rejection of certs, not acceptance. If I have a cert signed by a CA in a country that disagrees with something I post on my website, they can revoke my cert, preventing all access to my site without even going through the domain registrars.

And if you look at it this way, you can see that the upcoming CA issues will go down the exact same path Domain Registrars have walked for the past 20 years. From a deployment standpoint, there's really no difference between the two: they both involve a federated central authority that assigns a specific value to a specific grantee, to enable others to access said grantee. As the cost decreases, the abuse increases, as seen recently with such things as .ninja domains and their abuse. Free certs will be abused in similar ways.

So the only real benefit is that your encrypted data will be hidden amongst other encrypted data in transit, making on-the-wire (or on-the-wifi) analysis much more difficult. Verifying the endpoints and avoiding certificate abuse will become much more difficult, as there will be much more data to sort through. Even crowd-sourcing the reputation of certs can be gamed, if the abusers are anticipating it.

Yeah; I never said it was a good thing; just exploring possible reasoning for doing it.

However, in this case it would be more like "we called up some German doctors" -- knowing that there was a strong likelihood they had Nazi ties, but focusing on their shared research instead of actively searching out those who are outside their ethical boundaries.

Slippery slopes, and all that.

More likely they worked together to develop various psychological models that had nothing to do with torture, but could easily be applied to them. They could also have been working together to answer the question "Where is the line in the sand between interrogation and torture?" This would be important to the APA as well, as they have very specific rules about what kind of experiments can be run by their members. Defining that border area by consulting with a group that doesn't have their restrictions would allow them to be clearer in laying out their own guidelines, to prevent their members from doing things that could cause lasting psychological or physical harm to those they're testing.

Which raises the question: Why do they have two products that are free? One that they market, and one that they test, and pawn off as the marketed item?

The problem here is that they were submitting one product for testing, and using the certification gained by that testing to represent another product.

My guess is that this was done so that the product they distribute in China is 100% Chinese, but they get the one that's essentially BitDefender certified to raise acceptance.

Ah; I see... you have some magical point at which skin pigmentation affects people's ability to write and use wheels. Might this be why I not only mentioned Egypt, whose inhabitants some might not consider "black enough" but also Sudan? Is this skin pigmentation dark enough for you to call "black"?

The entire point of calling out Egypt was to draw parallels with Sudan (the cultures lined up quite well, off by time more than by anything else) as everyone knows about Egypt.

So if you're not actually talking about skin pigmentation, and you're not talking genetics, what, pray tell, do you mean by "blacks?" If you're being racist, it's useful to actually define what you mean by race.

Oh yes, and what I didn't add to my other points: Many of the native peoples of North America and the Pacific islands also failed to create a written language or use the wheel. Some of them built quite advanced civilizations.

true

i still feel there is a more nuanced solution to these situations where more benefit is derived

just turning the power switch off seems like a waste of value, however damaged

people are poor and don't have time for a hassle and want to listen to music right now for free. if you yell at them this is wrong, they won't care: they want to listen to music. hardly a grave moral transgression

so they do. because they can. because the internet allows for myriad ways to share files

so what you are left with is a classic situation in human history: new technology changes the balance of power and the old way of doing things is thrown out. let the old guard grimaces and sputters with rage. who cares?

in the future, recorded music will be nothing but free advertising for the artist. the artist gets his income from live shows, ancillary items, advertising, etc. this crazy arrangement used to function with an esoteric strange technology called "radio": music for free, supported by ads, and artists get exposure to make money in other ways. so we're hardly in weird new territory here

is it written somewhere in the bible or the quran that making money off of recorded music is some sort of basic human right? no, there is merely a legal convention from the last one hundred years only, when recorded music existed on physical medium. for thousands of years before that, and now forever more from this century on, you make money form live performance, patronage, ads, ancillary revenue, etc.

idiots gnashing their teeth over a hollow legal arrangement based on a technology that has been leapfrogged don't mean anything except an example of how people can be clueless

the words you say are in defense of a temporary power arrangement, physical media, that is almost done completely fading away

if the music companies were smart, they'd continue to operate the site

"we shut down the pirates! that will end this threat once and for all!"

(two weeks later, 20 more sites)

it should have been:

"this is a popular site. now that we own it we will modify it slightly so that we derive some revenue from it while not pissing off the listeners, thus gracefully transitioning to a new distribution model that listeners desire"

https://www.we-energies.com/re...

Up to 17 cents cheaper per KWH (22c day, 5c night).

Assuming you blow 10kWh per day, primarily between 6am and 11pm, that's upwards of $2.20/day.

If you move your entire 10kWh load to the battery system and charge it over night, it drops you down to $0.50/day.

$1.70 savings per day. That's 2058 days to recoup the $3500 expenditure, or just a bit over 5 1/2 years. Over the ten year warranty period you'll save ~$3000, assuming electricity prices remain constant.

-Rick

Are you managing people, or projects?

I think the problem is, modern managers are expected to herd cats.

The problem isn't the managers, it's the cats.

no one has the money to rebuild an entire redundant fiber rollout

you would need to sink billions to just begin to compete, with no guarantee of a profit (and less with predatory pricing shutting you down)

it's called a natural monopoly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

the financial barrier to market entry is too high

nevermind no one wants their streets constantly torn up to lay competing fiber even if there were multiple googles willing to try to compete as just a sideshow because they have a large cushion of billions in the bank

the problem you identify as the government is actually the corporations: they corrupt and bribe local and state officials

how is that the corporation corrupting your government is the fault of government? you want to remove the corruption and corruptors, not remove the regulations and the government. those are the only things protecting you

this is the problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

so you want to pass laws against that, and enforce them. i didn't say that was easy, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than no government regulation and complete uncontrollable and unstoppable oligopolies that rip customers even more and abuse start up competitors even more, with no accountability or redress (since you removed the government regulation)

if you like capitalism, and i do, what you do is you have the government own the fiber, and maintain it. then various companies lease fractional portions of the cable and offer various services. that pays for the infrastructure. kind of like how we handle wireless spectrum: auction off portions of it. that's how you have fair competition

but that fair competition only works with a platform provided by the government

it's like dealing with a creationist or an antivaxxer

simple basic history and well-established economic facts just don't mean a damn thing to you deluded fucks. it's like the religious tenets of some low iq cult: just keep asserting a simpleminded wrong belief, contrary to all facts and history, and you can continue in your quasireligious moronic bullshit

1. predatory pricing is real

2.. predatory pricing happens constantly

3. only government regulations can catch it and punish it

these are all ironclad bedrock truths of the world you live in

predatory pricing is being used here to drain the upstart fiber service of customers

now cover your eyes and ears like a pridefully ignorant asshole, right?

learn you dumb fuck:

http://www.google.com/#q=preda...

that's a random dip into current news. predatory pricing examples everywhere. tomorrow there will be dozens of new examples

what did you say?

The term predatory pricing comes from the time when massive consolidation of railroads and oil was driving down prices. Smaller competitors sought reasons to stop it. The price increases never came, of course. Same as computers today.

you're a moron

not baseless insult. an objective description of the quality of your thought

what you wrote is hilariously solidly wrong. you blindly and blatantly deny basic facts of a subject matter you inject your puerile ignorance into

you're deluded uneducated wackjob and if you had any shame you would stop lying and making yourself look like a feeble crackpot to anyone who actually understands the simple basics of this subject matter

just shut the fuck up about what you clearly do not understand you dumb ignorant fuck