they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.

Even beyond that, they'll be damned if anybody uses it for free without *them* making something off of it, even when it's a legacy product that has no marketing potential whatsoever. This is part of why copyright law is so screwed up right now - lots of companies work very hard to ensure that nothing they produce ever becomes public domain where it could be freely used by others, which was the entire point of copyright to begin with.

If you have growing users/day, the VC pitch will be much easier.

Or even better, may be able to sidestep the need for VC altogether.

I'm on my third smartphone (seventh phone overall), and I've removed the battery from all of them at one time or another. I replaced a dead battery in two of them, and have had to do a battery pull on all of the smartphones at one time or another due to them being locked up and not responding to the power button. Another anecdote.

(Because when a piece of hardware costs $10,000 and up, and the software which connects to it is utterly useless without that expensive hardware - because it's basically just a dial showing a readout - of course a practical use of programer time is to add an extra pointless $1 anti-piracy hardware component to stop the millions of free copies which will soon flood the intertubes. Sigh.)

Back when I was writing software for industrial laser markers, I had this same discussion with the engineering VP. He wanted to start requiring dongles to run the software, and my reply was, "you mean this $150,000 machine isn't enough of a dongle for you?" I guess he just hadn't thought of it in those terms.

You want a technical solution that shields the pilots/airborne vehicle from lasers? That would be technically impossible.

Impossible? Almost all of the cases in question have involved handheld 532nm green lasers from a substantial distance, so all you really need to do is mix up a coating to apply to the windows that contains the same dye that laser safety goggles use. The filtering wouldn't have to be particularly strong to effectively eliminate the green light, resulting in a slight orangeish tint to the aircraft windows. Alternately, instead of coating the windows you could make filters from plastic sheets that attach to the windows at night using Velcro or some other means. It's not a difficult problem to solve.

5 people makes a majority opinion that decides the law, however. I'm sure that's what the parent poster was getting at.

On the contrary, they showed up every morning and kicked ass and produced great product BECAUSE THEY COULD KICK ASS AND PRODUCE GREAT PRODUCT, because they company was a space where they could do that.

So why isn't the imaginary company in question already giving all of their workers that environment to begin with?

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose should always be part of a productive IT working environment, not used an incentive. Using that as a reward to recognize exceptional effort instead of making it an integral part of the workplace for *everyone* indicates a failure on management's part. If a manager comes to me and tells me that instead of raising my pay to recognize exceptional effort, they're going to give me a working environment that they should have been giving me and my co-workers all along, I'm not going to be impressed in the least. It's like giving a fast-food employee a longer spatula as a reward for his effort so he can flip two burgers at once instead of just one, when they could have increased productivity all along by giving everyone the bigger spatulas.

They make the point that after one's basic needs are met financial incentives and perks are no longer motivating. Instead people are motivated by Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

For me and almost all the IT folks I know, money talks and all the other crap walks. Often, when people don't appear to be motivated by money, it's simply because it's not enough money for the effort being asked. Personal experience - many years ago I was told that I would get a $10K bonus for completing a particular project within six months. This sounds good on the surface until you understand that meeting this deadline would have required an additional 20 hours per week, every week of those six months. Giving up that much more of my life simply was not worth the incentive that was being offered. Had they offered $30K instead, it likely would have been a different story and the company would have recognized hundreds of thousands of dollars in income at least a full quarter earlier than they eventually did. If you "work to live" instead of "living to work", then you realize that "autonomy, mastery, and purpose" is great to have in the workplace, but it doesn't pay for your kids' schooling or that nice European vacation your wife has wanted for years.

Assuming a 40 hour workweek, a 3% "above and beyond" incentive *should* mean they only expect an additional hour and 12 minutes out of you every week. In my experience, a comparable pay increase often comes with the expectation that you're going to be putting in another 10-15 hours per week, and then these fools wonder why no one wants to take them up on such a "great deal".

How hard is that to understand?

Hard enough such that you misunderstood Amazon's position. They're not saying he doesn't have the right to republish the content, but rather that he doesn't have an *exclusive* right. They're not wanting dozens of copies of the same content, i.e., the same Wikipedia article in ebook form, even though it's perfectly legal for someone to do that and Amazon knows it. They're also not wanting stale, out of date content in regards to technical/reference works. The general objective is to reduce customer complaints and improve the overall experience of their store, and my point was that they have no problem with offering dozens of copies of identical PD content, so they're still going to run into the same issues.

And in these cases, in civil court, murder carried a 33000 times greater liability than copyright infringement.

In this particular case it did, but this was a fluke - the defendant was a rich celebrity with deep pockets and the potential for substantial future earnings. If it had been Jammie Thomas instead of OJ, I'm quite sure the damages awarded would have been much, much less.

Yes, we all hate the **AA, but remember that nobody held up these artists at gunpoint and forced them to sign

No, but the government *did* hold the rest of the country at gunpoint and continues to steal (as in "taking from us and making unavailable for our use") what rightfully should have gone into the public domain with the stroke of a pen. That's *my* problem with the way things are.

Of course, you failed to mention that they are available for $0.00.

They're available for free, and they're also available as non-free ebooks on Amazon as well, from dozens of "authors". That's part of the problem - Amazon is enforcing a double standard, and says that they're attempting to "clean up" the marketplace as regards these kinds of tech ebooks, but they're apparently content to let the PD crowd run wild, and it's just as possible to pay money for a crappy version of a PD work as it is to pay money for a crappy collection of Wikipedia tech articles in their store.

Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device.

Yet they allow sales of works in the public domain such as Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, etc., which are freely available in electronic form on the Internet as well. Granted, those titles won't become dated like a technical reference would, but it's still a bit inconsistent on Amazon's part.

I used to be the documentation lead for the Sun Fire X4600

Want. I could only afford a lowly X2100, which is still running 10 or so VMs quite comfortably even now, almost four years later.