Politicians can and do dictate the law these days, but they can't dictate economics. If the NSA/CIA/Government pulls too much shit the smart people and business will leave. Also, Mormonism is a cult.
I think the govt has already broken quite a few of its own rules, yet smart people from around the world flock to Google, MIT, and the like. National security letters, the Patriot Act, illicit war.
I would love to live in Berlin, but my family is here in the states, and the NSA would still intercept my communications in Germany, anyway.
I'll take the pirated 1080p version that doesn't have unskipable adverts, copy protection, and the extra commentary track. I don't care about any of the "extra features" that Hollywood seems to sprinkle into every DVD. Their business model is broken, but they are not going to go down without a fight.
I always find it funny that they force the legit users to sit through all that rubbish, having paid good money to watch the movie, yet the pirates skip through all that. I particularly hate the DVDs that force me to watch the trailers for upcoming releases. Come on, if I wanted to watch trailers then I'd go to the cinema! :)
It should really be pointed out that it wasn't the same company. Sony BMG was never a part of Sony, it was simply partially owned by Sony. It's like blaming Apple for something that Pixar did because Jobs owned a substantial portion of both. Doesn't make the act itself any better, but we should stick to the facts.
Except that mere-mortals, like myself, had no idea that "Sony" was not "Sony".
If Sony reaps brand benefits from naming a "partially owned company" "Sony xxx", then Sony should also suffer when one part of the whole does something damaging to the brand.
Exactly. Just a few weeks ago I read an article linked through HN about some 3rd party site branded as some Microsoft store, developed in India that stored passwords/credit card/some sensitive information in clear text... didn't take people long to start beating Microsoft with that stick.
Your clued up person may know the difference, but the average person is not that clued up.
I worked at Sony Music during the time of the rootkit fiasco and I was a bit surprised by the reaction of the internet. There were many organized boycotts of Sony Corporate, Sony Playstation, etc… while nobody tried to boycott any Bertelsmann products (and there are plenty). The irony is that the individual in charge of that division of Sony BMG came over in the merger from Bertelsmann.
While Sony certainly stood to reap the brand benefits, they also reaped almost all of the negative publicity.
Well, no, it's not like that. It was a private venture 50 percent owned by Sony itself, not merely a public venture with a shared big stockholder. Sony had substantial control over the company, which was made substantially of labels spun off from Sony, and which are now fully owned and controlled by Sony. Sony is the successor in interest, getting all of these labels' assets, including their goodwill or lack thereof.
Mainly, though, this corporation, which began with Sony and ended with Sony, fit very well with the Sony culture of abusing consumer trust for additional profit.
Every corporation is a separate legal entity, but since nobody has defined whether "Sony" means "Sony Corporation" or "Sony Group" (which is headed by Sony Corporation) then that's kind of a moot point.
I've not knowingly let anything with "Sony" written on it directly touch machines on my home network since. People think I'm weird...
I do remember seeing an apology and promise from Sony about the incident in the form of a press release. Though my reading of it was "we are sorry they got caught and embarrassed us" and "we promise not to do exactly the same thing in the near future" (which left them open to doing something just as bad right away and open to doing the same thing now, years later, without breaking their word).
Yeah it's pretty impressive parsing of natural language to form financial opinions.
The Bloomberg website or Bloomberg terminal? There's a big difference between the sorts of things you can do with those two, but the website leaves a lot to be desired! Google's finance pages are fairly good at aggregation.
There is no such thing as 'aging' in the traditional sense. As explained by Aubrey De Grey Sens' founder "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...
sens.org
It might not work but it is a _much_ better use of our tax dollars than blowing up brown people in the middle east.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Ben Franklin
Only problem is that the USA has become an even more monstrous empire than the Brits were at the time. Google can be as principled as it wants to be but at the end of the day it is still located in the USA. Btw google and facebook are more than the Nazis/Stasi/KGB could ever imagined.
