Why should I? givedanabuck.com is a website aiming at raising $1 million through $1 donations from random people. Where will that money go? MacBook Airs, fancy dinners and maybe some angel funding for various start-ups that the webmaster deems interesting. He says that if the Million Dollar page and Facebook can so easily convince people to give away money, why couldn’t he?
What some lawyers and some companies learned a long time ago is that if you want to keep something private in the age of the Internet, you shouldn’t be coming up with ridiculous legal threats to protect its privacy. It will just blow over and get in the mainstream, generating crazy page hits. Push hard to get some documents kept out of a magazine, and you will get a lot of attention. Try hard to hide code you’ve leaked, and it will multiply.
Take your customers and their friends for idiots and you will get buried. Wow, I hope Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is not what Harvard hopes all of its students turn out to be like. «Continue Reading»
I’ve made a quick note before about Dozier law firm. What I thought to be just some ridiculous claim by some random attention-seeker seems to be far worse. tdaxp reports on the adventures of this colourful bunch of morons regularly, so I won’t reiterate here all of that. But in terms of the complete and utter lack of sense their ‘view source’ claim is, we have a quick and dirty ‘source mirror‘ script on Freesome, showing just how easy it is to legally circumvent. To this, I would add the following short points:
I’ve complained before that companies are rarely, if ever, penalised for loosing personal information of their clients. But here we have a recent case where some punishing is going to be done. Only, to the wrong people.
Activating your credit card in a bus full of people when you can’t quite hear the person on the other end, nor can they hear you. But everyone around is doing that just fine.
If you’ve managed to get a job in a large corporation we can assume you’ve undergone some form of schooling in your life. Operating a plunger is NOT a technical job - you should be able to do it at this point. Life’s harder than that, you know.
Could somebody tell all these fuckers that wear Che Guevara tee shirts to at least know who he was, so that they can decide whether wearing his face on their fat bellies is really what they want to do.
Not that I ever hoped otherwise, but miss Rich Bitch Hilton is out of prison. You’re all probably wondering why the heck I’m so bothered about this. I think such explanations aren’t necessary - just remember that we’re all supposed to be equal in front of and under the law.
Certainly if the MPAA keeps throwing numbers around about how much camcording is actually done in Canada, they’re bound to get it right eventually. Only thing is, they wouldn’t know it and most people wouldn’t really believe it anyway - they’ve been crying ‘wolf’ for too long now.
It shows how much research the MPAA has actually done. Most private bittorrent trackers recommend going and seeing certain movies in the cinema because a CAM quality release is not going to do justice to a release. Anyone who’s ever watched one knows the typical problems - faded colours, un-synced audio, people moving in the frame. Sure, now releasers have HD cameras, direct digital audio lines and access to preview screenings so some of those issues are slowly going away.
People ask me why I think piracy is OK. I don’t think stealing is OK. I don’t think deception is OK. I do, however, believe in rewarding those that indeed deserve it. Are the movie cartels now trying to dupe consumers into watching movies they hate? I’ve come across enough flicks that had their best moments squished together in a 45 second trailer. I’ve seen movies that were set for box-office failure by their advertisers yet became cult classics. I look upon a pirated release as an extended preview. Everybody I know still likes the little bonuses that come with a collector’s edition DVD. I think failing to realize this very issue is what might drive some online video stores à la iTunes into the ground: pricing should not be such that it has ownership in mind, but more of an advertising-and-service charge. I will not spend $10 or $15 or $20 for a movie I don’t know if I will like; I would throw $5 or so and then go out and get the DVD if it’s worth it. Yes, there is such a thing as artistic worth, and I think the MPAA might have forgotten what is, exactly, that they’re supposed to be taking our money for.
