Huge Win for Consumers RIAA vs Verizon overturns some decisions!
Grok Headline matches for Huge Win for Consumers RIAA vs Verizon overturns some decisions!
The RIAA went after 477 Consumers today!
The RIAA went after 477 Consumers today!04/28/2004 07:01 PM The carnage continues, the RIAA will someday come to the realization
that you can sue and litigate all you want...
Briefly: Verizon opens global phone to consumers
Briefly: Verizon opens global phone to consumers09/01/2004 03:38 PM roundup Plus: IBM, Honda team on voice-driven car navigation...Linux
seller completes name change...SAP names new VP...Amazon opens floor
to political pundits.
MPAA and RIAA urge states to protect consumers from P2P scourge
MPAA and RIAA urge states to protect consumers from P2P scourge06/18/2004 10:19 PM After being handily defeated in their quest against P2P applications
such as Kazaa in Federal Courts, the lobbyists would now like states
to consider action against such software on the grounds that they harm
consumer interest.
How Big (Or Small) Was The Verizon Win Over RIAA Subpoenas?
How Big (Or Small) Was The Verizon Win Over RIAA Subpoenas?12/22/2003 04:09 PM While lots of people were celebrating on Friday when the Appeals Court
overturned the rulings against Verizon and said that the RIAA
had to file lawsuits before they could get subpoenas for customer
info from ISPs, many people were realizing that this wasn't that
big a victory. Lots of us expect that the RIAA will just get its
friends in Congress to amend the DMCA to change the law to include
these types of subpoenas (though, I still think opening up the DMCA
for amending is a risky thing for them to do, as it could backfire on
the RIAA). Others point out that all this really means is that the RIAA will now
file John Doe lawsuits first, which will compel the ISPs to reveal
the names anyway. The difference here, though, is that the RIAA can
get in a lot more trouble if it comes to light that they're filing a
number of frivolous lawsuits, rather than just filing bad subpoenas.
Verizon Starts Selling World Phone to Consumers (Reuters)
Verizon Starts Selling World Phone to Consumers (Reuters)09/01/2004 01:23 PM Reuters - Verizon Wireless said on Wednesday its
stores have begun selling a phone from Samsung Electronics
(005930.KS) that was designed to work on mobile networks around
the world.
Verizon Ordered To Identify Kazaa User To RIAA
Verizon Ordered To Identify Kazaa User To RIAA01/22/2003 06:38 PM All it took was a little threat from the "church of the holy lawsuit"
(aka $cientology) with a lawsuit against Google for listing websites
critical of the ...
SBC Case Against The RIAA Transferred To Same Court That Decided Against Verizon
SBC Case Against The RIAA Transferred To Same Court That Decided Against Verizon12/02/2003 12:12 AM While SBC has been claiming that their
case against the RIAA is somehow different from the Verizon case
which the
RIAA won, they're now going to have to convince the same
court that their case really is different. Originally, the case
was scheduled to be heard in California, which meant they weren't
bound to the original Verizon ruling in Washington DC. However, the
RIAA requested that the case be moved to DC, and the California court
complied. This makes it much more difficult for SBC, who has to prove
that the reasons they believe the RIAA has violated their customers'
privacy is somehow different than the similar claims Verizon made last
year.
"We conclude that a subpoena may only be issued to an ISP engaged in
storing on its servers material that is infringing or is the subject
of infringing activity," the Appeals court ruled, further stating ISPs
acting as a "mere conduit for the transmission of information" are not
subject to the DMCA subpoenas.
The court did not take issue with the law under which the RIAA
filed its claims, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act ( DMCA , 1998).
The court was very
critical of the RIAA position, however, referring to one argument
as "border[ing] on silly."
This case began when the RIAA requested
information from Verizon about a customer, alleged to have copied
numerous music files illegitimately.
Court overturns finance ministers
Court overturns finance ministers07/13/2004 05:28 AM The European Court of Justice overturns the decision of EU finance
ministers to suspend action against Germany and France over budget
deficits.
Florida Judge Overturns Law in Right-to-Die Case
Florida Judge Overturns Law in Right-to-Die Case05/06/2004 04:03 PM A Florida judge has ruled unconstitutional a law allowing Gov. Jeb
Bush to order the feeding of a woman who doctors say is in a
persistent vegetative state.
25 U.S. Soldiers Hurt as Bus Overturns in Kuwait (Reuters)
25 U.S. Soldiers Hurt as Bus Overturns in Kuwait (Reuters)02/17/2004 04:13 AM Reuters - Twenty five U.S. soldiers were injured
when their bus overturned near an air force based used by
Kuwaiti and American-led forces in northern Kuwait, a spokesman
for the U.S. military said Tuesday.
Ukrainian Court Overturns Part of New Election Laws
Ukrainian Court Overturns Part of New Election Laws12/25/2004 05:17 PM A court ruled that a new limit on the number of Ukrainians allowed to
vote at home violated the constitutional rights of ill and disabled
people.
Ukrainian Court Overturns New Limit on Homebound Voters
Ukrainian Court Overturns New Limit on Homebound Voters12/26/2004 01:34 AM A court ruled that a new limit on the number of Ukrainians allowed to
vote at home violated the constitutional rights of ill and disabled
people.
Court overturns ruling in Microsoft patent dispute over keyboard
The Idea: We
spend much of our lives making decisions. Too often we use the wrong
tools to make them, and, not surprisingly, end up making the wrong
decisions. Or putting off making a decision at all.
When I was in university
(1970s)
everyone thought Decision Support Systems would be the wave of the
future. Computers would be able to factor in all the criteria and
information and virtually make the decision for us. But while
technology has been helpful in organizing the information needed to
make decisions, it has only simplified and streamlined the
decision-making process in a few narrow areas, where little or no
judgement is called for. Most of us still spend an astronomical amount
of our time making decisions (or putting off making them) and looking
for information pertinent to decisions we need to make next.
In a complicated
situation, such as deciding what an allergic patient is suffering
from,
more sophisticated tools are needed to understand all the variables
(decision criteria and alternatives) and how they affect the decision.
Systems Thinking
methodology, and the NASA process illustrated at right, are examples
of
tools appropriate for complicated decisions. The decision-making
process is systematic.
Understand the information underlying the decision, and the
cause-and-effect relationships between elements of this information.
From this understanding of the 'mechanics' of the system, identify all
of the decision alternatives. Then assess the criteria that affect
your
decision, and how important each criterion is, and the best
alternative
'pops out'. Review the decision to ensure that it 'makes sense' (and
if
it doesn't, go back and change the 'map' of the system, the
alternatives, the criteria and/or the weights until a sensible
decision
is produced).
There are two main dangers with this methodology. The first is that if
the environment is actually complex, and we have reduced it to merely complicated, the system map will be
incomplete and erroneous, and so will the list of alternatives from
which the decision is made.
The second danger is that we will have actually made the decision
based
on more subjective criteria, and we will therefore deliberately bias
the system map, the alternatives, the decision criteria and the
weights
to yield the predetermined answer. This is bad enough when we do it
knowingly and deliberately, to justify a decision we have made in our
own minds based on fuzzy or unfathomable logic, or no logic at all.
But
there is some evidence that we do this all the time, perverting what
could be a useful decision-making process into a misleading and
slanted
decision-justifying process.
There is little doubt, for example, that the selective ignoring and
distortion of facts, dubious cause-and-effect analysis, selective and
incomplete enumeration of alternatives and biased weighting was used
to
justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of its posing a threat to
US security. The result was 'sold' to the American public as a logical
decision, when it was either nothing of the sort, or else was the
result of logic and information that the administration was unwilling
to share with the citizens.
There are software to
ols
that take you through the NASA complicated-environment decision-making
process in more detail. I don't think they address either of the two
dangers above, but they can take you through the process if the number
of variables, relationships and decision criteria get unwieldy.
I think it is human nature to make initial decisions quickly and on
the basis of the best information available that fits with our existing
frames of understanding,
and to change our minds after that reluctantly. No software or other
tool is going to correct that, and make us more open-minded. We need
to
acknowledge that our decision on what television programs to watch
today, or what websites to visit, for example, is unlikely to be
changed by adding more rigour to the decision-making process. Even the
way we 'map' the system: assess the situation, gather facts, assess
unknowns, and connect the dots of causality and implication, are
filtered by our existing frames, the mental models through which we
perceive and conceive. The best any tool can do is to draw our
attention to facts, relationships, alternatives and criteria we might
have missed.
What would be more useful is a tool that would allow us to see how
others facing the same decision process would go through these same
steps, and would give us some appreciation of how our frames colour
our
decision-making. And of course, it would be useful to capture and tap
the Wisdom of
Crowds
-- the collective decision that many informed, independent people
would
make using the information, alternatives and criteria personally
available to them through their
frames of understanding.
In a complex
situation, not all of the pertinent information and variables are
known or even
knowable, so cause-and-effect analysis is of limited use, and even the
universe of appropriate decision alternatives is likely to be too
large
to enumerate.
Commentary: Four key Web services decisions11/11/2003 09:14 PM Architectures and standards for securing Web services will evolve
rapidly, but one consistent theme in the developing standards is the
need to support a wide variety of scenarios.
Timing Looks Right for Storage Decisions09/17/2004 06:34 PM The Chicago event will bring together more than 500 IT storage
professionals to rate vendors' products, check out the latest
announcements and decide what's worth buying.
Odd keyboard mapping decisions
Odd keyboard mapping decisions03/23/2005 01:05 PM I've recently upgraded from Office v.X to Office 2004 (yes, I do use
Microsoft products -- ones I've even used my own money to buy) and for
reasons I don't quite understand they decided to do... odd things with
some of the keyboard mappings. Most folks who use OS X are familiar
with using command-tab and command-shift-tab to cycle through the
different running applications on your system. It even gets a spiffy
GUI boost, along with some clever tricks you can play. (Like being
able to send command-key sequences to apps, which is something of a
mixed feature) You...
Active Decisions 7 Guided Selling03/14/2003 01:28 AM Active Decisions, a San Mateo, California-based vendor, is in the
vanguard of a fledgling CRM niche: guided selling. "What we do is help
corporations effectively engage their customers by understanding what
the customers want from a preference and product standpoint,"
president and CEO Jeffrey Dunn told CRM Buyer Magazine.
Storage Decisions show parades new products09/23/2004 08:06 PM IT managers may need more storage to handle all the storage
announcements that occurred at this week's Storage Decisions show in
Chicago as well as several other independent announcements.
Ancient Wisdom: Leave the Decisions Up to Individuals
The Idea: Open Space offers
a process for decision making that is the exact opposite of that used
in most Western organizations: A collective understanding emerges from conversations,
and individuals are then
entrusted to decide what should be done.
One of the things that really
struck me in my recent conversati
on
with Chris Corrigan about Open Space meeting protocols, Appreciative
Inquiry ("discover pattern, dream/envision, design, do") and the Four
Practices ("opening, inviting, holding/making room,
acting/practicing")
was how it turns the hierarchical business model of doing things on
its
head. In business, the decisions on what to do are usually made by a
few 'experts' (executives, specialists etc.) and then those decisions
are carried out (if they know what's good for them) by everyone else.
Here's how Chris & Michael explain the process of acting using Open Space: "It is the
personal and individual (I, me, my) pursuit of the good that
we invite,
in the space that we provide." The
knowledge and understanding that prompts the decisions on what to do
come from collective
activity, and the decision about precisely what to then do is entrusted to each individual. The
individuals who are (if the process has gone well) inspired to action
have the context
to know best what exactly should be done in their own area, community,
job, or situation. In business, the 'experts' cannot hope to have the
Wisdom of Crowds (all of the individual knowledge and context of
everyone affected), and hence are prone to make wrong, even
dysfunctional decisions. The frustrated, untrusted employees are
forced
to implement these decisions, or quit, or, as more often happens, find
'workarounds' that allow them to implement what they know really needs to be done without too
obviously ignoring the instructions from the top.
The result in business (as I keep saying) is that things are the way
they are for a reason -- and usually the reason is that the
knowledgeable employees have brilliantly found a way to do what needs
to be done while still appearing
to be conforming to the relatively ignorant and often
counterproductive
instructions from the boss. It doesn't take new employees long to
catch
on to this incongruity between what actually happens on the front line
and what the manuals, directives, plans and organization charts would
have you believe are happening. In fact the whole new field of
'cultural anthropology' in business entails spending enough time to
study this incongruity, and gently and sheepishly report back to the
executives, experts, specialists and consultants the perfectly good
reasons why their advice and instructions are being ignored.
Only a few organizations (Semco
and WL
Gore
are reputedly among them) actually use the Open Space approach to
run their operations. This is, after all, scary stuff for
executives who get paid to make good, tough decisions. Yet most tribal
communities (other than those that have been coerced into using
Western
governmental structures) have used the Open Space approach
successfully
for tens of thousands of years. In Open Space cultures nobody tells you what to
do.
Why do our business, social and political organizations ignore this
obvious wisdom? Is it arrogance on the part of the executives? Is it a
means for 'experts' to justify their large salaries? Are line staff
complicit so they can always say they were just following orders when
things go wrong? How and why did the mistrust and disempowerment of
the
front lines arise? Is it because modern organizations, public and
private, are just so big they have become unmanageable, and
command-and-control is hence a charade to avoid acknowledging the
endemic reality of inefficiency, disconnectedness, distrust and chaos
in big organizations, to their customers and other stakeholders?
Diagram above: The 'classic'
decision-making process, adapted from NASA.
OCBC's Prestige customers get help with financial decisions
Will Good Legal Decisions Lead To Bad Laws?12/24/2003 01:25 PM For every good legal decision concerning file sharing networks in the
past week, it becomes increasingly likely that the entertainment
industry will simply push
for more bad laws to get around these judges who dare to
understand the law and the reason why they make sense. Of
course, as powerful as the entertainment industry lobby is, I'm
hopeful that any attempt to make changes to various intellectual
property laws will at least open up the debate - and potentially get
the laws changed in the other direction, promoting openness and
collaboration, rather than artificial monopolies and systems that
hinder innovation and creativity.
Shark Tank: Why you should leave these decisions to experts
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26236-2005Apr4.html track
this site | 6 links
Grok Description matches for Huge Win for Consumers RIAA vs Verizon overturns some decisions! GrokA matches for Huge Win for Consumers RIAA vs Verizon overturns some decisions!
Huge Win for Consumers RIAA vs Verizon overturns some decisions!
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
In a complicated
situation, such as deciding what an allergic patient is suffering
from,
more sophisticated tools are needed to understand all the variables
(decision criteria and alternatives) and how they affect the decision.
Systems Thinking
methodology, and the NASA process illustrated at right, are examples
of
tools appropriate for complicated decisions. The decision-making
process is systematic.
Understand the information underlying the decision, and the
cause-and-effect relationships between elements of this information.
From this understanding of the 'mechanics' of the system, identify all
of the decision alternatives. Then assess the criteria that affect
your
decision, and how important each criterion is, and the best
alternative
'pops out'. Review the decision to ensure that it 'makes sense' (and
if
it doesn't, go back and change the 'map' of the system, the
alternatives, the criteria and/or the weights until a sensible
decision
is produced).
In a complex
situation, not all of the pertinent information and variables are
known or even
knowable, so cause-and-effect analysis is of limited use, and even the
universe of appropriate decision alternatives is likely to be too
large
to enumerate.