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People who decided to work for royalties by and large get fucked. Don't forget that.

I sneer at people who work for LONG TERM royalties. Notice how I mentioned 5 years and such in my post? I'm not for the abolishment of copyright, or for people profiting from it. I'm for the abolishment of a single work providing a lifetime of security. If someone is just living off of royalties, they're contributing exactly jack and shit to society. Copyright was not meant to be a gravy train. It was meant to provide people incentive to create new things. When they stop creating new things and adding to society, copyright has failed.

It's not hypocrisy that I work a safe, cushy job with a salary. A good band that gets popular and really uses a 10 year copyright term will make much more than I'd dream of in 10 years. That's the risk/reward. If they spend it all on hookers, booze and blow and have nothing left after copyright expires, that's not my problem. Those were their bad decisions. You seem to be under the assumption that if you're a creator or an artist, you are somehow OWED profitability, and perpetual income. You aren't. I don't get paid next year for the work I did yesterday. I won't get paid in 20 years for the work I did yesterday. That's what keeps me contributing to society. How much is RCA contributing to society? Nothing with regards to Elvis' music, aside from charging a hefty fee to buy his recordings. They're not creating anything, and they're definitely draining out of it by leveraging copyright of what is now a cultural icon, and rightfully should belong to America as a whole.

I don't abuse hedge-fund managers because they take a high-risk job with a big chance of failure, and they don't have copyrights on managing hedge funds which ensures that they'll get paid 150 years from now on work they did today. Actors and studios will, which isn't right. They don't have to keep working, because the system sets up a gravy train for their type of work.

I am not a hypocrite. I understand the game perfectly. You, however, do not seem to. Go look at an economics textbook, couple that with a couple of history texts, and then get back to me. I simply expect people to behave as if this were a capitalist economy, rather than trying to game the legal system into protecting a socialist style of governmental support for non-work.

everyone here needs to go out and read the The Index http://www.indexonline.org/ , enlightening, I myself am Canadian and found a few nasties about us there too. Every country has censorship, China just stands out cause there censhorship goes to 11.

It seems each country is paranoid about different things. In the US it is breasts and terrorists. In Canada and Europe it is any mention of racial or ethnic differences, and in China it is anything that makes the gov't look bad. It is not that all of these are equal sins by a long-shot, but each country has places to improve.

....even some US companies....google for one...some other unexpected ones like Barracuda spam filters as well. from my spam filter's regional settings page....
 
"Chinese (PRC) Government Compliance: Yes No This may be required within the People's Republic of China to filter government specified keywords. "
 
Sad and funny. the sad is obvious, the funny is the US people crying foul while the US companies are saying "how much will you pay for us to censor them".
 
Not that i'm protecting them at all, but before people get high and mighty about their censorship, maybe you could convince your own country to stop helping them first.
 
everyone here needs to go out and read the The Index http://www.indexonline.org/ , enlightening, I myself am Canadian and found a few nasties about us there too. Every country has censorship, China just stands out cause there censhorship goes to 11.

Australia, being a modern free westernized country, is not going to ban Google

It's usually 5 years in my experience..

"Scientists predict that the pill to cure cancer will be available in about 5 years"
"Scientists predict that the flying car will be available in the shops in about 5 years"
etc. etc.

Papers like the daily mail take a few random facts and build an entire mythology around them... unfortunately they don't just do it for their science pieces - the daily mail is legendary for doing it with political issues too (google for the 'daily mail island' sketch.. still as funny now as it was then). Of course they're in a competition with the daily express for who can be most outrageously right wing (the mail - the paper that supported hitler just prior to WW2 - as a *massive* head start though).

Actually they said that scenes of torture and the blood and gore content where also higher than the submitter claimed.
I don't understand the flack over this. The game isn't banned it's rating was just changed. Those ratings are voluntary and are not enforced by law.
It isn't even like alcohol and cigarettes. A store can choose to sell pretty much any game to anyone. No will get fined or go to jail for it.
It's not like they are banning it.
Unlike here http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/347/eu.shtml or here http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1596751 it isn't government enforced like here http://www.caslon.com.au/censorshipguide17.htm
or like this move to censor internet video http://www.indexonline.org/en/indexindex/articles/ 2005/3/european-union-official-papers-offer-plans- t.shtml
Over all I don't see any reason to get all worked up over this.

The real story for this conference is the sad irony of having an information summit in Tunis, which violently suppresses freedom of expression.

You can read lots more stories here. I'm pretty surprised the freedom-loving editors at slashdot didn't pick this up as a separate story, it's much more important than Stallman's RFID-tinfoil stunt.

Sweden, which this year tried to put a Pentecostal pastor in jail for anti-gay (i.e. traditional Christain) views.

Canada, of course, where the most extreme form of political correctness is now law (is that country run by Vietnam-era draft dodgers and their descendants)?:

Advertisers in Canada also must adhere to a strict set of guidelines adopted voluntarily by the industry, but no less effective than the government regulations. Under their dicta, a national restaurant chain was recently forced to pull a television spot showing a helpless dad trying to prepare dinner for the kids (he eventually gives up and takes them out for burgers and fries). A hearing officer ruled that the commercial "reinforced negative stereotypes" about men that "cannot be excused by an attempt to engage in humor."

Washington Post, Steven Perlstein, December 12, 1999

Sadly even Britain is now about to pass a religious villification law. Even Slashdot referred to it though of course almost no-one here got the larger gist of the story.

Please remember my post when Slashdot again runs the yearly report from "Project Censored" about "under-reported" storied or the latest yearly index from Reporters San Frontiers which puts the US at 22 because reporters can be subpoenaed by courts (jailing anyone for "hate speech" doesn't matter when it comes to freedom of speech in neo-feudal Europe, I guess).

It's because of the U.K.'s libel laws, which are so restrictive that it's basically illegal to allege (or, apparently, even sell anything alleging) anything negative about a person or organization unless you can prove it in court. We are not legally prohibited from selling it there; that is, I don't think any British censorship board has declared the book to be illegal. But we have been sued for making it available. And people call the U.S. litigious...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/02/amazon_pay s_libel_damages_again (I don't work for Amazon)
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20021219_bri tain.shtml
http://www.urban75.org/archive/news013.html

The armaments race created an atmosphere which not only made it difficult to work for the promotion of disarmament and peace but also threatened to muzzle freedom of speech.

Inevitably, the crusade lost impetus and faded away.

But Linus Pauling marched on; for him, retreat was impossible.

I hope that after we determine that we are not going to 100% eliminate the "terror threat" and regain some sense (and abolish some laws), that our excesses are not forgotten.

He doesn't talk about technology specifically, but he makes some interesting observations about what 9/11 has done to accelerate our progression toward a 1984-like totalitarian state. That was a forbidden topic in rally-'round-the-flag media at the time. It has since been published in edited form in several different languages -- most recently in Spain's El Pais about two weeks ago (untranslated version).

He's the kind of author whose opinion is so highly valued that the networks will fly out to Italy to solicit it, but they pull the plug on him in mid-sentence when he says something "unpopular" on live television. If the name sounds familiar, here are some helpful tidbits:

• You may remember his cameo in Gattaca -- he played the murderous director ("Jerome? Is this... the approach path we discussed? Quite right.")
• He's Al Gore's cousin (their grandfather was the first Senator of Oklahoma)
• He ran for Congress against JFK (and lost), but through some cosmic irony his mother later married Jackie Kennedy's stepfather