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So after screwing around at Salon.com:
Today's strip is here. And all strips here.

More like: http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/08/26/opus/

you COULD have followed the link which would EVENTUALLY have led you to the comic.

Or they could have just linked to the comic. Because most of us are not going to bother to go looking in September for the other one.

comic

http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/08/26/opus/i ndex.html

The second "censored" strip is dated next Sunday, so I guess it isn't available yet.

And you might end up with a little problem.

http://www.askthepilot.com/upsfire.html

Story that explains the picture:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/09/22/ask thepilot202/print.html

Granted, Smith is a pilot, not an engineer, but he gives a somewhat good explanation of thermal runaway.

Case 1
* FOX doesn't pay their taxes. "Don't worry about it" says Congress. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/02/ 99/e-cyclopedia/302366.stm http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/politics/econo mist_murdoch.htm Presidential Candidates eagerly take handouts from FOX http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070802/ap_on_el_pr/ed wards_news_corp
* Guy videos FOX's Simpson movie. Goes to Jail. http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/simpsons-filmed-on- mobile/2007/08/17/1186857730452.html

Case 2
* SONY regularly cracks the security on customer's computers. No prosecution.
* Some guy does it. 21 months jail. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/20 05/05/va_threatkrew2.html
* Congress decide life jail for hackers would be better: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/02/507 08

Case 3
* Disney Wants the law changed. Law gets changed. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_s prigman.html http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/02/21 /web_copyright/index.html
* What's Congress done for you lately? Health Insurance? Told their own kids to enlist?

Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "There is a growing trend for hacking gangs to break into innocent people's computers to spy, to steal, and to cause damage. This sentence sends out a strong message to other hackers that infecting others with Trojan horses and other malware is not acceptable." So Justice Department: You going to do anything about this, or are you corporate shills too?

McConnell, a retired vice admiral and former director of the National Security Agency, is the current director of defense programs at Booz Allen Hamilton.

With revenues of $3.7 billion in 2005, Booz Allen is one of the nation's biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under McConnell's watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme. As a key contractor and advisor to the NSA, Booz Allen is almost certainly participating in the agency's warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens...

Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, CACI International and a few other corporations, is one of the dominant players in intelligence contracting. Among its largest customers are the NSA, which monitors foreign and domestic communications, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an amalgamation of the imagery divisions of the CIA and the Pentagon that was established in 2003. . . .

Buried deep on the company's Web site, however, I recently found an explanation of a Booz Allen I.T. contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which carries out intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. It states that the Booz Allen team "employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel." TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.

Among the many former spooks on Booz Allen's payroll are R. James Woolsey, the well-known neoconservative and former CIA director; Joan Dempsey, the former chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet and recently executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and Keith Hall, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the nation's spy satellites. . . . .

And in a relationship that has been completely missed in media coverage of his appointment, McConnell is the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors. As INSA chairman, I've been told, McConnell is presiding over an initiative to enhance ties between the intelligence agencies and their contractors and domestic law enforcement agencies.

Greenwald comments: "McConnell's ties to these companies are so deep and numerous that it really rises to the level of conflict of interest for him to demand -- on national security grounds, no less -- that they be granted full immunity from liability for past illegal acts. He is, in essence, demanding immunity for vast numbers of his former partners, clients, associates and scores of business interests in which he had, if not still has, a substantial stake. This conflict is glaring and extreme, but Democrats said nothing about it when granting prospective immunity to this industry at his insistence. Thus far, they have also said nothing in the face of McConnell's demands that this immunity now be made retroactive as well."

McConnell, a retired vice admiral and former director of the National Security Agency, is the current director of defense programs at Booz Allen Hamilton.

With revenues of $3.7 billion in 2005, Booz Allen is one of the nation's biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under McConnell's watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme. As a key contractor and advisor to the NSA, Booz Allen is almost certainly participating in the agency's warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens...

Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, CACI International and a few other corporations, is one of the dominant players in intelligence contracting. Among its largest customers are the NSA, which monitors foreign and domestic communications, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an amalgamation of the imagery divisions of the CIA and the Pentagon that was established in 2003. . . .

Buried deep on the company's Web site, however, I recently found an explanation of a Booz Allen I.T. contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which carries out intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. It states that the Booz Allen team "employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel." TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.

Among the many former spooks on Booz Allen's payroll are R. James Woolsey, the well-known neoconservative and former CIA director; Joan Dempsey, the former chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet and recently executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and Keith Hall, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the nation's spy satellites. . . . .

And in a relationship that has been completely missed in media coverage of his appointment, McConnell is the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors. As INSA chairman, I've been told, McConnell is presiding over an initiative to enhance ties between the intelligence agencies and their contractors and domestic law enforcement agencies.

Greenwald comments: "McConnell's ties to these companies are so deep and numerous that it really rises to the level of conflict of interest for him to demand -- on national security grounds, no less -- that they be granted full immunity from liability for past illegal acts. He is, in essence, demanding immunity for vast numbers of his former partners, clients, associates and scores of business interests in which he had, if not still has, a substantial stake. This conflict is glaring and extreme, but Democrats said nothing about it when granting prospective immunity to this industry at his insistence. Thus far, they have also said nothing in the face of McConnell's demands that this immunity now be made retroactive as well."

However, if broadcast spectrum was just a free-for-all of everyone doing whatever the hell they wanted, it would be chaos, since people would be free interfere like hell with each other's uses without there being a particularly clear cut way of determining what's okay and what isn't. Thus, the broadcast spectrum is more or less owned by the government who then leases out the spectrum under various conditions.

except that this is TOTALLY WRONG.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radi o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio

http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.ht ml
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/14/lessig_explai ns_open.html
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003708.shtml
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/12 /spectrum/index.html

To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

The term "Special Education" is supposed to apply to the low and the high end. The high end gets ignored because those kids are going to learn even in spite of you. What different needs does a gifted student have? Do any of you even know? Here's a hint: they're not just smarter. It's not IQ that determines giftedness. You almost need a whole different environment for gifted children in the same way that ED kids get a classroom with an attached crisis room. With NCLB's mandates of Adequate Yearly Progress in certain measurable areas, it's all schools can do to get enough Special Ed teachers to bring the low end up and deal with the mountain of paperwork that is Special Education.

NCLB is designed to take money out of public schools and move it to private schools. This is accomplished by increasing the Federal government's role in education to the point where people get fed up and opt out. Can't afford to opt out? Maybe vouchers are the solution! Perhaps you should vote GuilianiVote Giuliani. Private schools have an easier time dealing with the high end because they're equipped to dismiss whoever they want. With "free and appropriate public education" guaranteed to all children, private schools couldn't do what they do without public schools there to catch the ones they throw out. The private school around here notifies their students sometime around January that they're not going to be invited back the following year. Guess where they end up.

This problem has been around a lot longer than NCLB though. Teachers don't know how to deal with kids "smarter" than we are. I use quote marks because it's not simply a matter of intellect. It doesn't happen to me that often that my students outthink me but it does make me uncomfortable when it does. It doesn't help that a lot of times such kids have a sort of learned-smartass attitude. You have to push through that, often many times per year, to get them to let you offer them something worth their time. Lots of teachers aren't emotionally equipped to handle that kind of thing because they have an authoritarian style. As in: "I don't care how smart you think you are there's no way you know more than me I'm an adult."

It also doesn't help that special needs are so misunderstood that people boil kids down to smart/average/dumb. Most kids with learning disabilities have average or above average intelligence. Special needs aren't a case of kids being lazy or stupid.

Yeah there is a big shortage of people willing to debunk climate change and/or the possibility that human activitycould possibly have an impact on something as big as the Earth. What surprises me is the sheer number of people so obviously threatened that their sacred lifestyle might be disrupted? or whatever it is that makes them so eager to bet my their life on the fact that climatologists could be wrong. Why not assume they are right just in case, would that be so wrong? Plan for the worst possible scenario seeing as how all that would take is to assume a bit of responsibility for your environment. Try to keep emissions down, build things that last, behave more sustainably.

personally, ive always thought deliberately disrupting the US economy would be counter-productive, since all the major economies are interelated. Anyways, i just wanted to refer to this salon article that debunks that dailytelegraph post. bottom line, the original author has no real authority on the issue and is just coming up with scary nonsense. aside from that, the idea of botnets serving the economic interests of international corporations or countries is a great idea. could you imagine spamming ForeX servers or even the stock markets prior to the release of sensitive data, you could make buckets of money with that kind of control over speculation.

I didn't have time to find a link to the actual program (it was 20/20 I believe) but below is a link to a Salon article that discusses the study that prompted the show.

The gun was placed in the children's regular daycare facility, and that was a critique of the experiment - it was argued that it was a too comfortable setting. The original researcher chose a daycare setting because she had seen a news story about kids finding a gun near their daycare. They notified an adult, but they picked up the gun and carried it to the adult.

http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/hot/1999/06/02/hard y/?pn=1

And that study also says it decreases with urbanization. Perhaps "nature deficit disorder"?
    http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02/ Louv/index.html

In any case it's not a study looking between cultures, but across one specific culture. And global studies of happiness show many "poorer" countries overall reporting greater happiness.

    "Nigeria tops happiness survey"
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.st m
"Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, while Russia, Armenia and Romania have the fewest. But factors that make people happy may vary from one country to the next with personal success and self-expression being seen as the most important in the US, while in Japan, fulfilling the expectations of family and society is valued more highly. "

    "Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young"
    http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generatio n_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates."

Well, the Bush administration is against the bill, so I suppose I ought to be for it.

I think journalists often use anonymity irresponsibly. It's not just used for whistleblowers exposing shady dealings and national conspiracies. It's also used to hide legitimate conflicts of interest from public view. In the run-up to the Iraq war,

Does anyone remember that time when a source on the Iraq war, who demanded that he only be referred to as a "senior administration official", came across as a bit of a Dick?

Anonymity shouldn't be used for trivial reasons, and it shouldn't be used to give those in power a soapbox for publishing self-serving disinformation. Hint: if you're interviewing an administration official who thinks the president is about to rush us into a disastrous war, anonymity might be right for you. If you're interviewing an official who wants to use anonymity to make his pro-war opinions sound like they're coming from a more legitimate and objective source than, well, him... the American people deserve to know how credible the source is.

The law itself is probably a good idea, but journalists have lately been willing to grant anonymity to clearly undeserving sources.

Well, the Bush administration is against the bill, so I suppose I ought to be for it.

I think journalists often use anonymity irresponsibly. It's not just used for whistleblowers exposing shady dealings and national conspiracies. It's also used to hide legitimate conflicts of interest from public view. In the run-up to the Iraq war,

Does anyone remember that time when a source on the Iraq war, who demanded that he only be referred to as a "senior administration official", came across as a bit of a Dick?

Anonymity shouldn't be used for trivial reasons, and it shouldn't be used to give those in power a soapbox for publishing self-serving disinformation. Hint: if you're interviewing an administration official who thinks the president is about to rush us into a disastrous war, anonymity might be right for you. If you're interviewing an official who wants to use anonymity to make his pro-war opinions sound like they're coming from a more legitimate and objective source than, well, him... the American people deserve to know how credible the source is.

The law itself is probably a good idea, but journalists have lately been willing to grant anonymity to clearly undeserving sources.

Imagine that his band signs with a major label and gets treated like this: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html Or this: http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/print.html Just imagine them working for FREE for their first two CD's. Filesharers are not your brother's enemies, the RIAA is! If he wants to make money off his music, have HIM make it available on his OWN web site. He should explain (respectfully) that he loves to make music, but also needs to pay the bills, so will you kindly buy some of his merchandise? Let me say this: if he comes off having YOUR attitude, I can see why no one wants to support him and his band!

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimates that EVs operating in the Los Angeles Basin would produce 98 percent fewer hydrocarbons, 89 percent fewer oxides of nitrogen, and 99 percent less carbon monoxide than ICE vehicles.

In a study conducted by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, EVs were significantly cleaner over the course of 100,000 miles than ICE cars. The electricity generation process produces less than 100 pounds of pollutants for EVs compared to 3000 pounds for ICE vehicles. (See Table 3)

[...]

CO2 emissions are also significantly lower. Over the course of 100,000 miles, CO2 emissions from EVs are projected to be 10 tons versus 35 tons for ICE vehicles (5).

Many EV critics remain skeptical of such findings because California's mix of power plants is relatively clean compared to that in the rest of the country. However, in Arizona where 67 percent of power plants are coal-fired, a study concluded that EVs would reduce greenhouse gases such as CO2 by 71 percent (6).

[source]

From a pure energy efficiency standpoint (BTUs per mile), electric vehicles are about twice as efficient, even if the electricity generation process is only 39% efficient (about what you'd expect from coal, the lossiest form) (same source).

This doesn't even begin to cover the other benefits of electric cars, which I gush about elsewhere.

What is true for electric cars is doubly true for electric lawnmowers, which are about the most pollutingest things around. Unlike automotive ICEs, mower motors generally don't have catalytic converters. Thus, a little bit of mowing goes a long way.

I'd suggest going in on an electric lawnmower with the neighbors. Not because they're particularly expensive. There is an e-mower at costco.com for about $200, which is a hundred dollars cheaper than any of the mowers at sears.com. Froogle came up with one for $128 from ACE Hardware, and I found an old mower on eBay for fifteen bucks (supposedly it still runs). No, I suggest sharing because it's a way to put five or six mowers out of commission, while saving garage space.

Regarding the speculation that this particular car model might be vastly less efficient than normal electric vehicles, I don't see why you'd expect that. It's probably not that much heavier than a standard EV (fewer batteries, more motor, should just about wash out), and I can't think of anything else that would make this model orders of magnitude less efficient in EV mode.

Some logical part of me does understand that most people are going to put their immediate sense of need or convenience ahead of abstract concepts like conservation. But for the most part, when I hear someone whining about how they can't bear to part with their conveniences, as they hungrily sap what little is left on this increasingly dessicated husk of a planet, it makes me want to go on a random crotch-punching spree. So please, don't bother trying to convince me that you're just being realistic. Fifty more years of

I'm not say _this_ guy in particular is the trojan horse for the end of an anonymous Internet, but it's one step closer.

At this point in the game, it's assumed all traffic is being monitored through the Telco's. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_n sa/index_np.html

Having an NSA friendly agent running the IETF will make their jobs much easier. I boldly predict next to nothing will be done publicly by this guy. I have a feeling he will be **very** busy not as chair, but as an NSA rep who just happens to chair the IETF. Very subtle but important distinction similar to using RNC email accounts at the whitehouse.

All this just after Microsoft decides to come down to pirate copy prices in China
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/07/10/microsof t_china/index.html

Now that they have no competition, they can mark the price back up a thousandfold where it belongs.

Cover their "losses"? How do you lose something you never had to begin with?

Especially when you remember that some of these political appointees were, shall we say, totally unqualified for any job, given their only major was in law from a fundamentalist christian "university". Read (or re-read): "Are We Rome?"

Dear Americans: please impeach that chimp already (I am trying to stay polite here).

Dear American Scientists: I hope you'll still be able to work at a (non-federal) University. Good luck.

Dear Slashdot Republican supporters: please don't bother answering this post. Thank you.

Improved en-route traffic control is a fine idea, and should help save fuel and shorten flight times, but I seriously doubt if it will have a significant impact on delays.

Over at Salon (ad-view required for non-registered users), Patrick Smith has had a convincing couple of articles making the case that delays are a side-effect of airlines using more smaller airplanes to move passengers around with more flexibility. More operations (take-offs and landings) with fewer passengers per operation means airports operate near or at capacity, which makes the whole system react to what might otherwise be localized disruptions, like weather delays or mechanical problems.

The other driver is economics -- airlines aren't stupid, they've noticed that even if they make passengers uncomfortable, lock them in airplanes in the tarmac for hours, never tell them what's going on, and take away their snacks and pillows, the passengers will nevertheless keep coming back. The only thing that makes them go away is raising fares. As long as this is true, service will get worse, and fares will go down.

Improved en-route traffic control is a fine idea, and should help save fuel and shorten flight times, but I seriously doubt if it will have a significant impact on delays.

Over at Salon (ad-view required for non-registered users), Patrick Smith has had a convincing couple of articles making the case that delays are a side-effect of airlines using more smaller airplanes to move passengers around with more flexibility. More operations (take-offs and landings) with fewer passengers per operation means airports operate near or at capacity, which makes the whole system react to what might otherwise be localized disruptions, like weather delays or mechanical problems.

The other driver is economics -- airlines aren't stupid, they've noticed that even if they make passengers uncomfortable, lock them in airplanes in the tarmac for hours, never tell them what's going on, and take away their snacks and pillows, the passengers will nevertheless keep coming back. The only thing that makes them go away is raising fares. As long as this is true, service will get worse, and fares will go down.

I am sure that this is great technology, but it will only encourage the airlines to continue to switch from large aircraft to so-called regional jets. Since the total number of people flying is either stable or increasing, the net result is that there are more smaller aircraft in the air today that ever before. That's what's causing the delays.

Salon recently published a good description of the problem, written by an airline pilot.

free search engines such as Wikia

The "free" part of Wikia is people working for free for Wikia. Wikia may have the same problem AOL did with the Fair Labor Standards Act. AOL used to have unpaid "community leaders" with some administrative powers, but they had to stop doing that, or pay them.

Wikia exists to monetize fancruft. The largest Wikia projects are related to Star Wars, DC Comics, Doom, Yu-Gi-Oh, Halo, etc. That doesn't lead to a search engine, unless your searches are mostly about Wookies.

Hillary Clinton, who stands a very good chance of being elected in 2008?

Not if she has all of her assets frozen as a result of speaking out against the war. The Pentagon has accused her, in print, of "boosting enemy propaganda." That can't be far away from "undermining efforts to promote political reform..."

The results are incorrect. Slovenia can't be on the list - they haven't even discovered dentistry

(M)y view is that the spoiler obsession, born of the Internet's fan-geek culture, is the enemy of real criticism, real discussion and maybe even real thought ... - Andrew O'Hehir

More recently, see Michael Gordon's articles in the last few weeks, which prompted a rather harsh reaction from even the Times' Public Editor.

They are poor businessmen if they think the way to get the most profits is to scare everyone out of the business with ridiculous fees.

The industry is based on the once high costs of recording, broadcast and physical distribution. Now that all of those things are cheap, they have to create expenses to maintain their position. In a free market, the value of recorded music will fall below that of a performance - in other words, you will be able to get it for a song. Perpetual copyright laws to control the history of music, antiquated spectrum allocation, and judicial extortion all create costs where none should exist. The measure of their success is that better than 90% of music is sold by two or three companies.

No, the artists are not rewarded.

And why doesn't Bush go through the courts? Maybe because he doesn't think he is constitutionally obligated , and he feels that it unnecessarily dillutes executive power to do so.

You even admit that he would get any warrant he wants through FISA... this is a phantom "threat" to your civil liberties, but it is a very real potential threat to the constitutional balance of power. If he acknowledges some need for the FISA court in this circumstance, it sets precedent. There is more at stake here than your "feelings"... there certainly is no practical difference to YOU than if the FISA court was consulted.

Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public?

although not really my taste, Dec. 20, 1969 might do:

No. 1, "Abbey Road," the Beatles
No. 2, "Led Zeppelin II," Led Zeppelin
No. 3, "Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas," Tom Jones
No. 4, "Green River," Creedence Clearwater Revival
No. 5, "Let It Bleed," the Rolling Stones
No. 6, "Santana," Santana
No. 7, "Puzzle People," the Temptations
No. 8, "Blood Sweat & Tears," Blood Sweat & Tears
No. 9, "Crosby, Stills & Nash," Crosby, Stills & Nash
No. 10, "Easy Rider" soundtrack (featuring the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Steppenwolf)

If the band has been backed by a label, they've already been paid by the label to license their music and sell it.

Fuck You Real Hard. Only the vapid tripe that evolutionary rejects like you call "entertainment" ever gets in the bargain bin. Everything I download (and it's 100+G / month) is out of .

I don't pay for software because I'm yet to see $1 in return on investment.

I don't pay for movies because, if said movie hasn't made an obscene profit* in the first week-end, it is considered a commercial failure anyway. (I'm not buying into the "rental" racket : shop-owners who pay $150 for the right to rent a DVD without bonuses and sometimes even lacking the original audio! Boycott.)

*obscene profit : cost $ 10e6, makes ten times that in the two first days. Poor, poor Hollywood. Boohoo.

I do pay for every thing that can not be copied at zero cost. I believe in capitalism : everything is worth exactly its production cost, taking into account paying everyone involved in producing said thing, so that they can buy things.

Don't even think of replying before you've read http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/ and http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/albini .html

Ah, so what you're saying in a nutshell is that everyone you know are horrible thieves who don't care about the artists they are listening to or the music industry in general? Good to know.

There are plenty of artists who understand that making a copy is not theft. They have already provided more music than you could listen to with the rest of your life. See the internet archive's live music depositories and magnatune for a start.

I would rather have a tangible backup for when my hard drive crashes. ... t may take time, but I'm going to be more than happy to re-rip 900 CDs than spend another $900 to buy the albums again.

That is one service the music publishers actually provide. Pressed CDs are tangible and durable. This small service is more than outweighed by predatory practices that screw everyone but a few executives at three big music companies. If you want to look for harm to artists, look no further than the monopoly distorted market for music. They are not doing well in a non-free market. The user is faced with the fact that CDs and albums are the only legal way to get your hands on the vast majority of recorded music history.

I'm not so happy about re-ripping. The beauty of free music is that you can copy your properly ripped and tagged archive as often as you like. My entire music collection is never more than an grsync away from another jukebox.

Oh but the artist should perform at concerts to make his money! Well that was simplistic and quite frankly unfair. Why should a musical artist be forced to make money by touring? Why can't his song be a commodity like any other work of fiction? When E-books are shared, do you expect the book author's main source of income being from performing public readings?

You seem to have forgotten that the author's books are available in the library to be checked out and read for free. This has been the case for a long time, and somehow authors still manage to make money. It should be noted that only the really popular authors can generally earn enough from writing to not have any other kind of job, but even those generally must keep writing to continue to earn enough to support themselves/their family/etc. There are exceptions, I doubt J. K. Rowlings will need to write another book for the rest of her life for example, but most authors have to continue to write to earn money. By your logic those authors shouldn't have to keep writing to earn a living, they wrote the book once they should be paid for it forever right? Musicians have to tour and continue writing more music for the same reasons that authors continue to write -- so they can continue to earn money. I don't think that's unfair at all, they get paid for what they do, but to make a living from it they have to work at it. You know, just like the rest of the world.

The problem being that your assumptions are based on the knock off being of inferior quality and not an exact digital reproduction. When talking about songs, each digital copy of a song in the wild lowers the value of the authentic song file. Why pay for something you can get for free?

And now I can answer this question better. I buy books, even though I can get those books at my public library for free. Some books I buy new, some I get used. So why would I buy a book when I can get it free? Because I want to own my own copy, I want to support the author, etc. The same applies to music, and the success of the iTunes store proves that people will pay for music even when it's available for free. Those who are downloading and not buying anything will likely never buy anything, they just don't think it's worth money. Some will buy music in the future, they can't afford it now (teens and college students fit into this category pretty well). Some people will also buy more music because they were able to test-listen to it for free first.

To be fair, I am mostly irritated by the idea of giving an artist (or ticketmaster) a valid reason for charging even more money for a concert. It would be nice if a concert ticket remained within the economic means of an average teenager/young adult.

I don't see why this would raise the price of tickets, most artists/bands already have to make all their money from concerts because of the horribly unfair contracts the record labels force them into. If they're managing to make money from current ticket prices there's no reason (beyond inflation) that prices should go up.

I was led to believe that an artist tours to promote their album...

You were lead wrong then, sorry. This was probably true up to around the 1960s, maybe 1970s, but nowadays artists/bands must tour to make a living. Often they have to do so to pay back the record companies too. Don't take my word for it though, Courtney Love gave a great speech about it (the link is a transcription of her speech). Steve Vai has a copy of his letter up that he sent to congress about the record companies' accounting practices. Finally, Steve Albini has an an article up also telling how the contracts work in the record compani

Funny you should ask that. It has been over 30%.

(Crap: hit submit instead of preview. It's like rain on my wedding day.)

Still wrong. It's We treat Cuba like we do because the CIA's plot to assassinate Castro was stopped by Bobby Kennedy. (Source)

Torture is only effective as a means of intimidation against the population, not as a tool for information. Other occupying powers have used torture in that way. It not only leads to largely worthless intelligence, it confirms suspicions, hardens resolve and leads to extremism, as can be seen in use of torture against Qtub, Zawahiri, et al.

I encourage you to read Suskind's book on torture, or at least this article. Or at least think beyond what you see on 24.

You'll have to read David Talbot's book, "Brothers" in order to find those (a truly awesome, exhaustively researched book - unlike that pathetic crapola full of omissions and errors from Bugliosi). Massive props to Mr. Talbot.

Prostitution isn't illegal in many parts of the world, but it's certainly not a pleasant way to live your life.

Working for a large IT company that does harm to its customers and employees is immoral and unpleasant and is selling out. Taking a company's impact on the world into account when choosing to work for them is a good idea unless you want to wake up and realize you're part of the problem. ...and if you think that artists make money signing on to large labels, you're dead wrong on the whole. Take a look for yourself.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/index.html

But then you're probably a troll or the original poster if you feel you need anonymity to say what you've said.

I think there are better links out there but this one will do.

qz

Given that the US is responsible for a full 48% of military spending worldwide, I suspect that some of that money could be spend on other things (education to keep good jobs in the US, rebuilding the gulf coast, etc.) and we'd still be plenty safe.

Currently, we're spending ~$100,000 per minute in Iraq and Afghanistan. Personally, it's not making me feel safer.

AT&T is the same company that cooperates with the government, installing multiple secret rooms used to filter (and store?) your Internet communications. Unfortunately, this isn't some kind of big-brother schizophrenic paranoia.. it's real.

I'm an Apple fanboy myself, but for this reason I canceled my AT&T service and will not purchase an iPhone until they can be unlocked or subscribed with another provider.

More here and here. If you want to watch a Frontline about the domestic survellience program, check it out here.

I used to work in the prevention field for a state agency. It's interesting to see how slowly change comes around. The "gold standard" for this kind of data is the Youth Risk Beahvior Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), done every two years by the CDC. Many states also run their own prevention needs assessments.

While I was never directly involved with these surveys, my understanding was that there was a decent amount of statistical research put into them to try and get the most accurate data possible, so ideally your example of coke use among the impoverished would be thrown out.

Your description of DARE isn't really fair, as that could be any old school, health terrorism type approach (think of the "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs" or aspects of the current Montana Meth Project). DAREs model focussed upon getting police into classrooms, as well as peer role models. Police departments liked it because it let them connect a bit more with the community.

DARE's an interesting program that got a lot of attention, but it's actual impact upon encouraging youth to make healthy decisions has no scientific standing. Hell, some of the studies actually showed that drug use went up after exposure to DARE. One could argue that there was some beneficial aspect, as it stressed to the prevention community that evaluation of programs is as vital as good program design.

Nice deflection from my original request.

I don't think your post matches the challenge of "putting up or shutting up" that I set. I'll grant that absolute contests like that are no fun, but I couldn't let your counterfactual statement stand.

Like so many manufactured scandals, the "trashing" of the White House by Clinton staffers never actually happened - it was ginned up by a Republican machine ready to deliver locker-room dick sizes to a press breathless for scandal - and a year after the story "broke", the truth came out, thanks to the non-partisan GAO.

Hell, read it. I'm tired of trying to make Republicans believe that white is, in fact, white.

From the article:

The White House made 78 staffers available for interviews with the GAO, and clearly spent an enormous amount of energy just to try to stick another scandal to the Clintons. (Gonzales' time alone, billed by the hour, might cost more than the $9,000-plus the GAO blamed on the Clintons.)

Some conservatives. They've been doing the same trick for six years now and spending a shitload of money just to keep the lights on while 68% of people don't even want to get in the front door.

Besides, after Wickard v. Filburn , all commerce is interstate commerce.

And after Raich, all non-commerce is interstate commerce.

Whining of conservatives notwithstanding, Slashdot *is* right. Besides the delusional anarcho-capitalist libertarians who use their ideology as an excuse to deny global warming and promote other idiocy, there's a fairly large portion of the usual Bush-worshiping Islamophobes.

You have to dig pretty deep on the internets to find a real enclave of lefties. Even DailyKos is moderate-left, at best. There's always been a large, highly influential bloc of reflexive Democrat-defenders, for whom all criticism of their team is absolutely unacceptable. Markos himself is the anti-feminist. It's more recently been infiltrated by libertarians, Clintonites, and Ron Paulbots.

The one place I've found sane, intelligent people (and the occasional amusing troll)? Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory. It's an unlikely blend of just about everyone opposed to dictatorship, but it rarely if ever descends into the same kind of swamp that every other forum seems doomed to.

Perhaps what is being discussed is the theme of Ellen Ullman's series "The Dumbing Down of Programming" (here and here). The point is that many of today's so-called programmers have lost touch with what the fundamentals of what it really means to program, having been too deeply insulated from it by the tools they use. Windows development does this isolation to an extreme degree, under GNU/Linux this is far less so, and likely to remain that way.