Slashdot Mirror
Saving the Net
An anonymous reader writes "Doc Searls, editor at Linux Journal, has a very insightful editorial that brings it all together - the FCC media consolidation ruling, SCO vs. Linux, why broadband is under attack by telcos and cable systems, why we lost Eldred vs. Ashcroft, what's really interesting about Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a very astute observation about the vast gulf between Liberals and Conservatives."
How about we all agree to disband and join bbs's ?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
From the article: But they avoid visiting a fact that should be deeply troubling to every candidate running (and then governing) for money rather than for voters: Dean's lead is owed to a huge number of small donations, not to a small number of large special interests. If he's being bought, it's by his voters. This is a New Thing. It's also been made possible by the Net.
This was part of what the internet was all about: democratizing the ability of an individual outside the established powers to enter into competition or publication or public recognition. Dean has been smart about this and so far, he certainly has my vote.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I'm happy with AOL and MSN. They provide all I need. I find more useful content on there anyway then I do on the "internet"
over stealing music?
:D
Oh wait it's just copyright infringement
score -1 Troll insightful flamebait
Dean is interesting and better than any of the other candidates but he's for the death penalty which would be yet another setback for the progression of civilization.
Bring Nader back.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
When will Americans learn what "liberal" really means? Many Americans use it as if it is an insult, and they seem ignorant to the fact that the United States was founded on the basis of liberalism.
The author spends too much time polarizing this into a liberal vs. conservative issue. That's a meaningless division, much like republican vs. democrat. Obviously he has a lot of issues with what he deems as conservatives, so he's stereotyping them and lashing out.
(As a side note, the raw meaning of the term "conservative" is pretty interesting in regard to his issues. You could say that people who want music and software to be free are "liberal." You could also say that people who think that a UNIX-alike is the pinnacle of operating system design are "conservative.")
To paraphrase a common saying, do not attribute to consipracy that which can be adequately explained by greed.
There's little doubt that there's movements working against what much of the Linux communities believe in, but there's no Big Bad hidden agenda here -- just simple, petty and local greed.
Regards,
--
*Art
Terminator is trying to ..excuse me RIAA/MPAA is trying to get Arnold to run for President under their banner..
Not a joke people..
Its time for Revolution...
Don't Tread on OpenSource
And who embodies better money and greed than croporations, who themselves are bigger than many countries?
The robber barons of yesteryear must be staring in stupendous awe from hell!!!
The only 'major' piece missing is a simple and cheap form of active aiming to keep the transmitter and receiver reliably pointing at each other. There's a project for someone.
Well, I'll just go build my own internet... with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the internet.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
Move the whole thing to Canada.
Seriously now. You want Howard Dean? We've got a party full of them. We just keep electing them, and we can't stop ourselves.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
OK, AOL would never let you play streamed Harry Potter movies on it, but you could use the web and run office applications, which would keep most of us happy. Wouldn't it?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
That article just seemed to be a collection of random quotes thrown together without one original thought from the author or even an underlying explanation of how they fit together.
A great example is the quote from the National Review. It is a great quote and specifically attacks the changes that have happened in copyright law. At the end of the quote the article "author" says "National Review is a conservative magazine. John Bloom is a conservative columnist. This is significant." But he doesn't go on to explain WHY this is significant. Is it because the author is surprised that a conservative can have an intelligent thought?
In other things he is just plain wrong. He states that "Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media)." Yet it is the democrats who are most in the pocket of big business. Here is a clue - Hollywood is 99.9% liberals. The other 0.1% is Drew Carey. Senator Hollings is a Democrat. DMCA was signed by a Democrat into law. Mary Bono may be a Republican but only in name.
If you think that the internet is failing than this article is a great sign it isn't. The fact that any unintelligent schlub could post an article like this and receive praise for it proves it.
The word consumer, as a whole, is also a source of aggravation. It implies a notion of being fed, of being given content that you don't necessarily desire. And this is precisely what this notion of "distributors of intellectual property" is demanding of you. Sit down in front of your computer/TV, pay an exorbitant fee, and watch the same old boring content and advertisement barrage over and over again. The great thing about the current computer is its ability to allow for the construction of content, not its ability to supply it. This is further amplified by the Internet, and the accompanying ease of distribution and immense audience. For instance, a musician could record a song onto his computer and sell it via the Internet, or a graphic artist could market his art. In the future, perhaps even an independent film company could market it's wares online. A future dictated by DRM and "property" restrictions allows only a few select companies to digitally "watermark" their media in a manner which the now-crippled computer can read. Does anyone honestly believe that these same companies that desire such immense control will relinquish it in the future to independents desiring to sell to the same market?
Suddenly a person is no longer an individual, but a forced consumer of multiple mega-corporations. The prospect is as disturbing as it is possible. The myth of "intellectual property" is curbing and inhibiting the free expression of ideas and content, precisely what copyright law was intended to promote.
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Quick! Call Al Gore!
... money. Plain and simple.
When a lot of big companies start seeing a potential to see their profits tumble they will react agressively to protect their interests. Is it any wonder that the media companies are worried that millions of people around the world are sharing millions of music tracks and films? Are the software companies worried about people downloading software? The answer is yes.
Do such companies want to control the internet? Undoutedly. Can you imagine the potential for a company like Disney to broadcast Disney.tv to every household on the planet with an internet enabled tv? Wow... you are talking serious money there, but people can already do it - for free at the moment.
I think a lot of these people identify the internet as this 'Holy Grail' to make billions, if only they had the final, killer ingredient. Whilst this potential exists, where there's money there's immense power and this power will try to bend, distort and manouever the internet as best it can towards its vested interests.
"Bring Nader back."
Just say No to Nader. He wants the government to control basic personal decisions that should be left up to the people involved in them (such as economic decisions). We can do better than revert to totalitarian government.
Howard Dean seems to be a very unusual candidate with regard to the use of technology and the tech crowd in general. How about we try to get an interview with him? We can ask him about DMCA, Patriot act and stuff like that. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who actually heard of Slashdot?:)
He appeared on Lessig's blog which has (I would guess) a lot fewer readers than Slashdot, so it seems likely he would agree, if we approached it right. Does anyone know his campaign people, so we can find out?
This is a frequent criticism of Modern Democracy. For the moment we'll hold aside the fact that Ancient Democracy was available only to property-holding males (something the republicans I'm sure would love to bring back). Ancient Democracy was not about getting paid, in salary or in kind; in was civic duty.
Modern Democracy, at least as practiced in the USA, is all about money. And as has been said about corruption, "...follow the money." Why don't american politicians finally prove that they're not the lords of a corrupt system, but the leaders of a just system and ban soft money.
I knew then, knew utterly,
the deal done in my heart forever,
though how I knew not,
nor ever have.
Very smart.
The author does an excellent job of synthesizing a number of disparate, troubling issues going on in our society at the moment into a very coherent whole.
If you can understand that democracies are only as good as their voters' information systems, or that markets are only as healthy as the exchange of goods, services, and ideas in them is free, then you should be able to appreciate where the author is going.
The reason esoteric issues like telecom and media regulation, and intellectual "property" law end up commanding such a large amount of attention in the community is because both of these, people are realizing, are not just important, but absolutely essential, to maintaining those very important American principles.
A cheap, ubiquitous communications medium. The free flow of information which respects, but it is not outrageously hobbled by, the rights of authors... It's only our economy, and our democracy, at stake.
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I once told a friend, "There is far more Stupidity than Evil in the world."
I have since unfortunately found the corollary, "Sufficient Stupidity combined with enough Power is effectively indistinguishable from Evil."
Something like that applies here, "Sufficient Greed combined with enough Power/Wealth can effect the appearance of a Conspiracy."
Think "Greedy Lemmings," and it can look like a Conspiracy.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Already read about how It's The End Of The Internet As We Know It.
:oP
First off this the vast gulf between Liberals and Conservatives, I don't exactly know what to say to this except no shit that's like saying there's a huge contrast between black and white, seems to me that possibly stating the obvious is a little too much this early in the wonderful work day.
Second off, why is everyone making SCO the talk of the town? It's the right of every american to be able to sue another american, but that doesn't mean their right. How many civil suits are just tossed out every year? I mean lets face it folks, if the hens in the hen house are going to spread the rumors at least focus on the fact that everyone except SCO has stated they don't haev a leg to stand on. Quit bringing them up all the damned time, it's really insanely getting old and quite frankly it's time to call a spade a spade. SCO/Caldera/Whatever was a viable company back in the day with DR DOS, Caldera OpenLinux, and other software packages. They led the way in easy linux installers and netware networking code, and they really did bring the idea of a nice easy system to reality. But like everything else this was copied and innovation stopped, henceforth Caldera stopped being a real player in the market. There was a little wind in their sail when they went after the LSB, but alas hard to push for LSB when you're suing the L.
So it's a ploy for them to pretend like their still a player in the game when they haven't been on the playing roster for nearly 3 years and a few exhibition games don't count. They're like the Harlom Globtrotters of the Linux World, except they really suck at what they do, so I guess they're not like the Harlem Globtrotters of the Linux World.
Lastly I know everyone seems all "scared" of media companies getting to big, but entertainment is quite possibly the most cut-throat industry in all the world. There are so many avenues for entertainment and leisure that these companies will stop at nothing to try and score the almigty buck. And will they ever stop, nope. Ask yourself, do you own a TV, does it watch commercial/cable television. Do you remember the last mt. dew commercial you saw? Then really stop bitching because you're part of your own self-identified problem. Don't bite the hand that feeds ya, whether you acknowledge it or not. I like commercial television, and I like television. I don't mind getting independent news from the web and independent publications (right and left wing newsletters are great reading).
Enlighten yourself and be an example to others. Don't just bitch about everything all the time. Anyone can whine, it takes someone actually doing something to make a difference.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
"Then how does this explain Al Gore's presence on Apple board of directors given that OS X is a "UNIX-alike"? :-)"
Show me one other unix with a sophisticated leading-edge GUI just like OS X
The potential he has to revolutionize politics is worth voting for.
I dont agree with everything he says, but hes the only politician who actually cares what we think.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
1. Open document editor - okay Word.
2. Type in some text
3. Click File--Save
4. Enter filename: Net
5. Done... the Net is saved!
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The other [factor] is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises. Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments. That's what's happened with broadcasting and telecom.
Lest we forget, it is actually the Democratic Party that is more in the pocket of Hollywood and the media companies, while the Republican Party tends to favor "big business" in general. Both parties have their share of guilt in all this mess. The DMCA was passed with bipartisan (i.e. substantial Democratic) support and was signed into law by a Democrat (Clinton). Trial and IP lawyers also tend to support the Democrats (cf. John Edwards). (Over-)deregulation of the media and telecoms industries took place largely during the Clinton Administration (though it started in the first Bush Administration).
I seriously doubt that Howard Dean is any angel on this, either. He's just as much a politician as any other. His rhetoric about being from the "Democractic wing of the Democratic Party" is a little ironic, given that he's against gun control, is hardly a pacifist (he supported Gulf War I and interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo), etc. etc. etc. I don't see him as being a liberal at all (neither in the modern "leftist" sense nor in the older Jeffersonian sense), but an opportunist like any other.
FWIW given my own political positions I'll probably be voting for "anything but Dubya", but I dislike the idolizing that Dean has been benefitting from of late. And I also dislike disingenuous attacks on one party or the other...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
"And who embodies better money and greed than croporations, who themselves are bigger than many countries?"
Governments embody greed: look at all the tax hikes, and the "power creep" that seems to be the rule as governments always tend to amass more wealth, control, and percentage of the economy. Corporations typically get money by working for it; earning it. Not taking it at gunpoint like governments do.
Not all Democrats are Liberal or Progressive.
Dean is a moderate, not a liberal, just like Bush isnt a real conservative, hes a moderate.
Meaning not everything they do follows their ideology.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I second that e-motion. Bad pun, sorry.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
People walking past the connection beams and getting the laser light aimed at their eye. Big lawsuits here.
If it gets really popular, you get to see all of the beams of light around you everywhere, thus creating a new game for children where they walk to places trying to dodge or jump over the lights like in a movie where a thief is trying to get a well protected diamond or something. That would be the good part, as the people who disregard the beams would break the connection making anyone playing online Quake very, very mad.
On a serious note, I don't think it's feasible. Too much interference from other light in the same spectrum, like...say...the sun.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
From the article: And I'm hearing from people who insist that Linux is not exactly ownerless, either. "Linux is a registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds" appears on 268,000 Web documents, Google tells me. In at least one sense, these folks say, Linus owns Linux. That means it is, in a limited sense, proprietary.
This should really be corrected. The trademark is simply on the name. You can't go write your own software and call it Linux. But the software and code is as far from proprietary as you can get. If Linus started wrecking Linux with patches, you could take the code, rename it, and have your own kernel. This guy should RTFL (license) before he writes an article.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
As another poster pointed out, it's plain and simple greed. The big media companies want perpetual copyright so they can continue to milk those works as long as possible. Copyright to a media company is the same as a manufacturing company's raw materials or even inventory. Manufacturing organizations are taxed on their inventory; if the big media companies want to own all that copyright, they should be taxed on it.
The real issue here is that the overwhelming majority of people at large are not aware of these issues. Anyone attempting to educate the masses on such things are immediately shut out as hippie radicals. The only people really working at these issues are the ones who stand to make a profit on them (i.e. the big media companies). Those same people working relentlessly for profit via copyright are the ones who are so quick to equate Linux, open source, anything public domain, etc to communism.
The cruel irony here is that the very people who label public domain as communism are the same people who are robbing our freedoms.
Sigh. Linux and the Internet were great while they lasted.
I'm a hardcore conservative, and I'm not sure how much I agree with this definition. To my way of thinking, it's not a matter of "rewarding the strong". It's a matter of incentive --- if people are going to be taken care of no matter whether or not they do any useful work, they simply aren't likely to do any useful work. It's more a matter of rewarding effort than of rewarding strength. Granted, there are some serious problems with the way capitalism works too, and it does often turn out that the "stronger" ones do better. But I think that's the nature of freedom. You can't truly have freedom without the possibility of great success or great failure.
On a side note, as a conservative, I'm very strongly against the modern notion of "intellectual property". I'm all for property rights, capitalism, and the free market. But as the article mentions, copyright isn't a property right and shouldn't be treated as one. I believe in the Constitution above everything else, as far as politics go. And in the thinking of the founders, copyright cannot be a property right. Property is a right that the founders envisionsed as being inherent to mankind --- right up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rights like that cannot be infringed by the state. They are not granted by the state. They are inherent to the people. But, the Constitution allows Congress to GRANT and LIMIT copyright. If copyright were an inherent right, they would have protected it as such --- they certainly wouldn't have given Congress the authority to "grant" it. Therefore I must conclude that the notion of "intellectual property" is thoroughly unconstitutional, and thus I cannot support it.
From the article:
Worse, [the Internet] was designed as an end-to-end system, where all the power to create, distribute and consume are located at the ends of the system and not in the middle.
The Net's end-to-end nature is so severely anathema to cable and telco companies that they have done everything they can to make the Net as controlled and asymmetrical as possible.
But the phone system is also end-to-end in nature. Cable and telco companies know they are just selling access, same as they sell access to the phone system or the cable system (most cable providers produce little by way of content; that's left to people like USA Networks and HBO.)
I think the situation at the telcos and cablecoms is far more complicated than how the author protrays. Witness the trouble Verizon took recently to block the subpoena of a customer whom the RIAA wanted. And one of the megacorps is Sony who both sells music and produces devices to copy that music.
News from the future:
July 23rd, 2008
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today upheld the Pre-emptive Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA), which gave the private armies employed by the sole remaining media corporation the power to declare and pursue war against individuals on US soil - who can then be designated as "enemy combatants" and tried by military tribunals created by our glorious leader, Grand Marshall Rupert Murdoch.
Omnimedia spokesmen hailed the ruling, calling it a victory for intellectual property rights, and saying that it vindicated their use of nuclear weapons against the city of Palo Alto, where their intelligence indicated that the source of all the world's pirated content, the so-called "Universal Inserter," was hiding.
Mere minutes after the blast, the Universal Inserter uploaded an illegal copy of Charlice's new video (purchase a license to view title) [goatse.cx], to his partner in crime, the Universal Downloader. Experts believe the upload is genuine.
The attorney representing the Universal Inserter, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has drawn considerable controversy for refusing to acknowledge that his client even exists, was unavailable for comment as he is being held on charges of aiding and abetting the enemy at the Omnimedia detention center in Gautonomo Bay.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Get me in touch with these people...imagine what they can do with my Opteron! I'll give 'em some hardware, and we can build a space station protected by sharks with freaking lasers in their heads...it can't take much money, if they can have an OS running without any actual electronic components. Will $100 + opteron do it?
Liberalism when America was founded was very different than the liberalism of today. Originally it meant one who supports liberty, and in fact "liberal" was a derivative of "liberty". Thomas Jefferson's party, which today is the Democratic Party, was where most people called "liberals" were found. But their platform was very different than modern Democrats. Liberalism of that day was much more in synch with today's Libertarian Party, in that they believed liberty meant the government keeping its nose out of both your personal affairs (civil liberties, etc.) and staying out of your pocketbook. Though that does not equate to favoritism for the rich as some modern conservatives try to do, it also does not mean favoritism for the not-so-rich, which is standard fair for the modern liberal.
When socialist ideas took over the Democrats, which FDR perhaps was the culmination of that, "liberal" stuck to the party rather than the ideology. The school of thought that was once called "liberal" then had no word for it as the word then came to be associated with socialistic ideas, which is sort of amusing when you think about Insoc's goals with Newspeak ("1984") to eliminate concepts by eliminating words to express them. Though some invented words like "classical liberal", "market liberal" as the guys at Cato like to say, or the more common "libertarian", which came into popularity when the Libertarian Party was created about 30 years ago and coined the new definition for the word.
So yes, America was founded on liberalism, but not the modern liberalism that is associated with socialic ideas that we see in the Democrat/FDR vision of the Welfare State. It was more of a "libertarian" liberalism. Digging through writing by Jefferson and company strongly reflect this premise. You will find about zero support for socialist ideas in the writings of those "liberals". So to say that America was "founded on the basis of liberalism" is very misleading if you let the reader assume it was modern day liberalism of the Democrats. The liberals of 1776 have little in common with the liberals of 2003.
A hurricane came unexpectedly. The ship went down and was lost. A man found himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing. Only bananas and coconuts.
Used to 5-star hotels, this guy had no idea what to do, so for the next four months he ate bananas, drank coconut juice and longed for his old life and fixed his gaze on the sea, hoping to spot a rescue ship.
One day, as he was lying on the beach, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. It was a rowboat, and in it was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. She rowed up to him and in disbelief, he asked her:
"Where did you come from? How did you get here?"
"I rowed from the other side of the island," she said. "I landed here when my cruise ship sank."
"Amazing," he said. "I didn't know anyone else had survived. How many are there? You were lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you."
"It's only me, "she said, "and the rowboat didn't wash up; nothing did."
He was confused. "Then how did you get the rowboat?"
"Oh, simple, " replied the woman. "I made the rowboat out of materials that I found on the island. The oars were whittled from Gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree."
"B-B-But that's impossible," stuttered the man. "You had no tools or hardware. How did you manage?"
"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. "On the other side of the island there is a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgettable ductile iron. I used that for tools, and used the tools to make the hardware. But enough of that," she said. "Where do you live?"
Sheepishly, he confessed that he had been sleeping on the beach the whole time.
"Well, let's row over to my place, then," she said. After a few minutes of rowing she docked the boat at a small wharf. As the man looked to the shore he nearly fell out of the boat. Before him was a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman tied up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man could only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walked into the house, she said casually:
"It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down, please; would you like a drink?"
"No, no thank you," he said, still dazed. "I can't take any more coconut juice."
"It's not coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have a still. How about a Pina Colada?"
Trying to hide his amazement, the man accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk.
After they had exchanged their stories, the woman announced, "I'm going to slip into something comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom."
No longer questioning anything, the man went into the bathroom. There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge were fastened onto it's end inside a swivel mechanism. "This woman is amazing," mused. "What next?"
When he returned, she greeted him wearing nothing but vines - strategically positioned - and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckoned for him to sit down next to her.
"Tell me, " she began, suggestively, slithering closer to him, "we've been out here for a very long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for all these months. You know..." She stared into his eyes.
He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You mean--?" he replied...... "You mean.....I can check my e-mail from here?"
Oh yeah, there was some other stuff about lunix and teh intarweb and stuff, but nothing that we haven't heard about a jillion times before, and he's only using it as a push up bra to sell his saggy dug story. I'm sure we'll all rush to get in our own views on Our Rights Online without bothering to read Doc's rant, but it's getting a bit boring taking part in the Slashdot circle jerk. Yes, eternal copy right bad, puppies good. Frankly I'd rather just skip the pretence that we've read the article, and just grill Doc on why he hates America so much.
Black powah, bruthas!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
To win conservative minds on limiting extensions of copyrights, it is a good idea to prove that these limitations may have a greater economic benefit than extending them. I have seen some work in this area, but none that definitively proves this theory.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
but my experience with PhD's tells me that intelligence and possesing a PhD does not neccesarily correlate.
;)
with me it does of course
This is just a pipe-dream. But I often wondered if the Internet could be reborn though another connection medium. I was thinking it being based on quantum communication. The reason for QC would be that it can't be controlled by the FCC, has the ability to (in theory) be accessed wirelessly and at a global level.
Life is not for the lazy.
This may sound a bit like communism to conservative sensibilities, unless it is made clear that the Net belongs to that class of things (gravity, the core of the Earth, the stars, atmosphere, ideas) that cannot be owned and even thinking about owning it is ludicrous.
Except that there are no upkeep costs on gravity, the stars, the core of the Earth or ideas. OK, maybe some upkeep on atmosphere.
The Net isn't a natural resource like everything he describes - it's powered by electricity, hubs, routers and computers. All of these things are owned. To say that 'thinking about owning it is ludicrous' is simply ignoring how most telco operators and backbone providers operate.
Is the water supply something that cannot be owned? The sewer system? The electricity grid? That's where the Net should be - an owned resource that is open to all.
He didn't sign the PATRIOT act, and he has pledged to repeal it if elected. He's also pledged to scale back our military in favor of education, equal rights for lesbians and gays, accept the Kyoto treaty, and a lot of other things that sound really good to me.
Check it out:
http://kucinich.us/issues/issue_10key.htm
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Many unsigned musicians provide free downloads of their music on their websites as a way to attract more fans, for example my friend Rick Walker. Many such musicians, while relatively unknown, are as good as any major label band and certainly an improvement over the pablum they serve up on ClearChannel.
You can find many more examples in my new article:
-
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
The article also explores some of the historical and legal issues behind copyright, and suggests steps the file traders can take to make file sharing legal.If you're a musician who offers downloads of your music, I can link to your band's website from the article if you give my article a reciprocal link. Please follow the instructions given here.
(I just posted a new draft if you read it before.)
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Name one Republican senator that voted against the DMCA.
accept the Kyoto treaty
I was under the impression that such treaties needed to be ratified by the Congress (specifically the Senate, I think?), rather than the president.
For that matter, every other item you mention above is under direct control of the congress. Sure, it sounds good, but that doesn't mean any of it is likely to happen under any circumstances.
Once a week, skip-out on lunch, pizza, beer, cigs, 'bucks, whatever your vices are. Once a month, send $20 to H Dean.
You should come out ahead,(PROFIT!) by reducing your budgeted expenses, earning a tax deduction, and increasing the likelihood that America will get out of the Bushes.
Fellow geeks, it isn't THAT hard to suffer slightly. You've been suffering hard, for far too long, under the Bush regime. Do you really want another 4 years of this?
Don't forget to talk to your elders about your views. They actually go out to the polls and vote, more than your peers....
"...the Internet is a technological advancement of Arpanet, not an ideological one."
Are you seriously saying that the ideology behind Arpanet is the ideology behing the Internet (as a research and knowledge facilitator) or the Internet (as a commercial enterprise)? That seems slightly... well...
That has to be the most FUD-ridden article I've ever read. I thought Slashdot was for news, not liberal rantings. Or are they now one and the same?
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Yeah, especially when you are trying to herd a bunch of stubborn cats like geeks. The problem is that geeks, who mostly espouse libertarian values, have been sucked into the John Wayne individualism that permeates conservative thought. Until geeks learn to embrace the concepts behind words like "solidarity" and "cooperation," any concerted effort by technologists to combat more organized institutions is destined to wither on the vine.
But good luck anyway.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Gawd I find it so ammusing that you can actually say things like, Well just create a new standard, port Linux to it, and everything will be OK. Do you really believe that or are you just spouting off at the mouth?
When will you learn that despite how much you resent it the is NO company in the world that woudl do such a thing. To do so would be to throw money away and most companies don't like to do that.
So, in closing, YOU ARE AN IDIOT!!!
I think the situation is even worse than the author describes. The media companies are turning copyright into a property right, which is bad enough, but they are also ensuring that they don't actually transfer any property rights when you buy from them.
They are setting up a sort of feudal system, where they own all the property, and we are merely serfs who get to pay rent to access the property.
It is important to restore some balance in the copyright law between the public and the media companies; but I think it is equally important to define what property rights (i.e. fair use rights) consumers have when they buy a CD or a DVD.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Much of our society is not fit to vote. They don't pay attention to the issues, they don't critically think about what they see and hear and they sure as hell don't have enough passion to keep a fire lit under our leaders' asses. Giving every tom, dick, harry, jane and sally the right to vote is the perfect way to guarantee that you will have a government that does represent us. "Swing voters" are only at best about 20% of the electorate, the rest are pretty much 50/50 both major parties. If we could get rid of the other 80%'s right to vote then we'd have an electorate filled mostly with at a minimum semi-critical thinkers.
It's taboo to say that just because you're a citizen doesn't mean you are fit to wield any form of political power. Of course it all goes back to the inability of most Americans to pass a moral judgement against someone's behavior and beliefs. How often do we hear "well that's their culture and it's just different from ours?" I'm in college and I hear that all the time. I get a look of utter disgust like I'm a member of the KKK when I suggest that not everyone is biochemically equal and that certain cultural practices are barbaric and worthy of our deepest contempt. When I criticized many African and Middle Eastern countries for tolerating female circumcision I got a little bit of "how dare you criticize Africa you honkey" from some of the blacks there.
You want to get rid of corruption? It won't end with banning soft money. You have many reforms needed on top of that.
1) Make it a class 4-6 felony to give soft money. You know what that felony class range is? Around 10 years to life as possible sentences.
2) Pass a constitutional amendment waiving 8th amendment protection for those attempting to corrupt the government so that if you catch a lobbyist trying to bribe someone you can execute them if they are a repeat offender. Waive the same protection for elected and appointed government officials
3) Allow each state to pass its own ethics rules. Allow each state to issue a warrant for the arrest of a member of Congress from their delegation who has violated their rules. Also give the state police the power to place their member of Congress under arrest anywhere in the US and extradite them to their state for criminal prosecution.
4) Give each state legislature the power to pass a vote of no confidence in their congressional delegation.
5) Create a new form of impeachement for the executive branch where if a simple majority of state legislatures pass a vote of no confidence in a member of the cabinet they're out and if 2/3 or more vote on the President he's removed.
6) Since we're also talking about democratic reforms how about we pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting judges from ordering appropriations of taxpayer money and creating public policy. They can rule it unconstitutional, but not create it.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The word "liberal" in the world outside the USA has the meaning that "libertarian" has inside the USA.
For many years Americans had no word for "liberal" because they didn't need one. As an earlier poster said, the USA was founded on the principle of liberalism, and nobody involved in US politics wasn't a liberal. The US constitution is one of the best and clearest statements of liberal principles in history.
Some time later, some Americans started to dislike the liberal principles of the constitution. They therefore tried to say that it meant something other than what it said. This needed a lot of interpretation. Because they interpreted the constitution "liberally", and because the word Liberal wasn't in use in US politics at that point, they called themselves "liberals".
That is why "liberal" means the opposite in the USA of what it means in the rest of the (English and French speaking) world.
Of course, now that liberalism is a matter of political dispute in America, liberals need to call themselves something. They can't call themselves "liberals", as they would elsewhere, because the word has been stolen by their opponents. That is the origin of the term "libertarian".
It's all rather like why private schools in Britain are called "public schools".
#include sco-rant.h
#include visionary-emulator.h
#include some-other-guys-ideas.h
void main()
{
printf();
}
This statement is ludicrous. Linus owns the name Linux, not the operating system. There is a very big difference. He owns none of the code. He only has control over what can be called Linux. So far he seems to have been pretty lenient with that trademark as there are over a hundred distros and most, if not all of them, use the word Linux in some part of their name.
Time makes more converts than reason
First off, all these moves by huge orginisations are more reactionary than predatory. Things are changing quickly, and they can't deal with it to well.
What I think is happening, is we are moving into a democratic technocracy. Where the major policy decisions and values are being forced by the nature of the technology and not the nature of government. Copyrights are a classic example. No matter how many laws you pass, no matter how many troops you send out, they are effectively dead, and unenforcable - unless you become an absolute police state, something that is not likely to happen in normal democratic governments - even though they are trying very hard at it.
In a way this is a natural progression, and is good. Technology allows our society to move away from mob rule. I have a right not to be taxed and regulated so much even if the popular mob thinks otherwise.
http://ronja.twibright.com/
(Exactly what you were talking about!)
Tony.
Ludicrous? Tell that to those guys who'll sell you plots on the moon and the planets in our solar system.
Apparently they just said 'all of that is ours' and it now actually is because no one complained (check the FAQ).
Finally, a note from the company's self-proclaimed Head Cheese: At the time if the writing of this news letter I need to let all of you know I have been presented a wonderful acknowledgment from the Congress of the United States. I have been named co-chairman of the Republican Congressional Business Advisory Council. I have also been given the National Republican Leadership Award and most recently I have been issued the highest honor the National Republican Congressional Committee has, the prestigious Republican Gold Medal.
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
How would you propose the `bulls` force a homocidal criminal who cares little for doing what you expect or ask? If they cared they wouldn't be there. How do you force them? You can't. Why give them an opportunity to escape and reinfect society?
The problem with death-sentences not being a detterant, as I see it, is that they are not linked to the crime as a consequence for murder. The temporal distance is to great for society to keep in its consciousness. Consquences need to be swifter with more media attention. Remind us, comfort us...
There will, are, were a few innocents `murdered` by the state but honestly I don't mind. Its not me or anyone I know.
It's not about politics. At least not as how we normally think about it.
The idea that "property" is the one all-consuming right that we have, quite frankly is self-destructive. Sure, property is important...but copyright is exactly that. IP is bullshit.
To go a step further, the reason for this is the belief that we can all "do it ourselves". That somehow, we can pull ourselves up from the bootstraps and make ourselves successful is frankly...bullshit.
There are more important things than business, and money and profit.
Culture and society.
Those are the most important things we have. Without those things, everything else is meaningless. We need to start to realize that.
I agree with a limited copyright. My idea? Copyright should last for 20 years, or until the commercial aspect is gone. If you take something off the market, put it in the public domain. Allow those that care about the culture to nurture it.
They are conservative ideas however. One of the problem is that nobody can refute them in the current political enviroment. Make a sneeze toward it and you called a commie.
How can you fix it?
I don't know..
I'm not entirely certain how that post could be modded down as flamebait. It is very historically accurate. Liberalism was essentially "usurped" by the socialist movement in the early parts of the 20th century. Perhaps usurped is not a good word since I don't think it was some sort of intentional plot, heh heh, but it's the only word I can think of at the moment. Whatever the case may be, liberalism's definition has changed drastically since the founders. Early writing by Ayn Rand, for example, do not directly refer to the words "liberal" but certainly reflects sentiment, albeit her personal opinion, of regret over this very political shift from old liberalism to modern socialistic liberalism. So the claim of the orginal post that our nation was founded on the principles of liberalism truly is factually misleading without clarification since the definition used by those long dead founding liberals truly is completely different than the definition modern readers will think of when they read the claim.
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
Apparently Orrin Hatch is trying to change that.
About time too. Who needs to send troops to 'liberate' a foreign country when you can just send the Pres to kick some ass?
Warning: May contain nuts
" Do all people benefit when neo-cons give out tax breaks that benefit the super rich most of all, welllll that's tough to say, but essentially the answer is: no"
Where does this happen? Most of those who receive fair and proportional tax breaks under the plan of Bush (sort of a neo-con) are the non rich, working families.
By the way, the amount of money that the government has given" anyone in tax breaks is $0. A tax break is never a gift. Stealing less is not a gift.
It's very frustrating for me, and hard for me to understand. To me, the best way to live is to learn as much as you can, and try to find the best choices for yourself by gathering as much information as is possible (or feasible; you don't want to spend 2 hours researching where you will eat lunch today). Art and creation are, I believe, some of the most fun you can have without being naked (not that that's excluded...)
But a lot of people seem really, truly content with being told what to eat, wear, listen to, drive, vote for, support, etc. There are people who always vote Democrat/Republican without any consideration for the actual candidate. There are people that prefer McDonald's to real food. Most people just do what their friends do, and how did their friends start doing it? What's the source? I guess there's no way to be sure, but I'm betting it was an advertisement.
Maybe it's because it makes life easy. You listen to music to relax, and thinking about it is too hard. It's easier to watch TV than to read a book. It's easy to enjoy fast food, because it's a collection of chemicals designed to be pleasing to the largest number of people. No dangerous sharp edges for you to beware.
Similarly, most people don't want to create. Artistic effort is difficult, requiring many hours to produce something. TV can be enjoyed now. Learning how to really cook would be hard, and my family needs dinner today. Hamburger Helper is good enough. It was a hard day at work and I have a lot on my mind. I don't have time to be creative.
Now, there's great joy to be had in take-out pizza, beer, and Brotherhood of the Wolf. Some days, it's nice to let someone else take the helm. But Einstein understood that we have to keep our brains moving in new directions in order to keep them alive (he played the violin). If all you do is work and consume, you are a unit. I couldn't stand it.
(Some people take great joy in their work, which is wonderful, and ideal even. But being one-dimensional is still bad. You'll get further if you stretch your mind in new directions as often as possible; you may be surprised at how related two seemingly dissimilar things really are.)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
"- Pot is safer than Beer"
On a societal level, pot is not as dangerous because its abuse is greatly limited by anti-drug abuse laws and prosecution.
On an individual level, pot is a lot more dangerous, with toxins that stay in the body a lot longer than with beer. Also, pot abuse is forced on those who are near by. Smoke a joint, anyone near you smokes it too. Beer consumption in contrast is a private matter.
It's not just the President, either. Take a look at Senators and Representatives, too. You don't even have to do an in-depth analysis. If your Senator doesn't get it, vote him/her out. Period. You might even get away with simply voting younger. If the average age of Congress dropped 20 years we'd have a different government.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
It is greedy to want to spend the money you earn the way you want it, and it is especially greedy oppose the idea that Ted Kennedy can take your money and spend it the way he wants to.
Go figger.
This is the key point from the article, the heart of what's wrong with the anti-IP movement and the Slashdot crowd:
On such a simple scale, it was clear how the majority of the Court would vote. Not because they are conservative, but because they are Americans. We have a (generally sensible) pro-property bias in this culture that makes it extremely hard for people to think critically about the most complicated form of property out there--what most call "intellectual property." To question property of any form makes you a communist. Yet this is precisely our problem: To make it clear that we are pro-copyright without being extremists either way.
So deep is this confusion that even a smart, and traditionally leftist, social commentator like Edward Rothstein makes the same fundamental mistake in a piece published Saturday. He describes the movement, of which I am part, as "countercultural," "radical," and anti-corporate. Now no doubt there are some for whom those terms are true descriptors. But I for one would be ecstatic if we could just have the same copyright law that existed under Richard Nixon..."
Through history the "there should be no such thing as private property!" movement has been driven by those who simply don't have much private property of their own and thus would like some of yours. This is the perception most of the mainstream has of the "it's our right to download movies and software!" crowd; that they simply want something for free because they lack the resources to pay.
You ask why we middle-Americans side with the big-media companies, but the answer is we don't. We side with the very basic American idea of you not being able to move into my houses with twenty of your hippy friends in the name of "property belongs to everybody!!! Who cares that we didn't build or maintain or earn or buy it!!!"
Someone will shout back that this isn't the argument of the anti-IP side, and I understand; but that's how it sounds to us. You didn't write or film or fund the movie. So why do you claim a "right" to see it free?
The author of the article is absolutely right; if you want to win the debate you must make it more about reforming copyright laws to make them more reasonable (the mainstream can get down with that), and less about "YOU EVIL CAPITALISTS DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP ANYTHING TO YOURSELVES WITHOUT SHARING WITH US!!!" The average American will NEVER come over to that side.
The ability to own property is as fundamental a freedom to this country as free speech or the right to privacy. If you want to change the minds of the masses (and you must if you want the politicians and CEO's to change theirs; bribes or no bribes they will go with the flow of public opinion in order to stay in office) you must re-frame the argument in that way... or watch your movement slowly die as the open-trading technology window closes. And it WILL close.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
You do realise that just like BS stands for 'Bullshit', Ph.D. just stands for Piled higher and Deeper?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There's an old story about a chess player who makes a deal with the Devil. Satan, through his sub daemons, agrees to make the chess player the best chess player in the world on two conditions... 1) He relinquishes his soul (standard boilerplate stuff) 2) After he dies, he'll play a game of chess every day with Satan.
Man agrees, becomes undisputed champion, beats Deep Blue blindfolded, etc. Eventually, he dies, goes to Hell, and sits down to play his first game with Satan. It's then that he realizes that Satan is, quite literally, an idiot.
..In my eyes, the biggest problem with the structure of the telecom industry and the ensuing problems that this creates for conent providers is the fact that it COSTS to upkeep the system. Millions of miles (I'm guessing here) of copper and fiber crisscross this planet and somebody has to go out there and maintain it. That costs incredible amounts of money, which in turn (partly) justifies the incredible expense for bandwidth and operations.. ..If we had no 'lines' tying us down but rather high speed (100 Mbit+) wireless nodes for everything the cost of ownership would plummet (only having to invest in transmission towers and satillites, which I do understand is a pretty hefty pricetag, but you can't tell me its more expensive than paying for the upkeep of all the installed copper/fiber around this country..and the world for that matter).. I'm simplifying here because I really don't understand the intricacies of the telecom industry when it comes to upkeep, but this is what I'm logically, from my limited knowledge, concluding about the situation.. ..One could say..that just as the recording industry's business model is becoming outdated because of the advent of new and cheap digital reproduction technologies, Telecom's structure with the use of 'lines' is outdated because those lines stifle the ability for the consumer to make choices as to what provider they want to use. I understand its not as simple as I'm posing here, but without dedicated 'lines' that have to be owned and upkept one would have to admit the ballgame would get a whole lot more interesting as far as how telco's and content providers would have to operate in order to win the customer's (I hate the word consumer, it really does sound like I'm being 'fed' something rather than entering into a negotiation to buy a product..)trust.. ..Or something to that effect..
this article is basically worthless as an analysis of the political context of media , cable and telecom regulation. Searls psychologizing of liberal vs. conservative perspectives towards market regulation is tendentious and ahistoric - and a bit dishonest to boot.
Who thinks that the following statement really addresses the differences between liberal vs. conservative approaches to market regulation --
"Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally."
anyone familiar w/ the history of telecom and cable regulation recognizes that their current incarnations are the product a regulatory model predicated upon the same skepticism towards markets and property that Searls espouses. It wasn't conservatives that sought to create regulated communications monopolies - it was people like Doc Searls. This regulation subsidized infrastructure investments , prevented competition and the development of alternative infrastructures , and generally enabled the corporations operating these infrastructures to achieve the scale and diversity of operations that now enable them to threaten the viability of the internet. Cable and telecom corporations are largely political beasts , they would never have arisen in their current forms if exposed to market forces. Both liberals and conservatives have contributed to the situation that we're facing.
The author of the article makes some interesting speculations, but would have been better served by doing some research before waxing philosophical.
First, at least with DSL, the main reason that it's usually asymmetric in favor of download speed is a technical one -- issues arise with crosstalk. Check out http://www.commweb.com/article/COM20011010S0005 for a more thorough discussion.
Also, the reason the Supreme Court ruled the way it did in Eldred v. Ashcroft wasn't because of confusion about what kind of right copyright is or anything so abstract. The court said that since the term of copyright enacted by the Sonny Bono CTEA was still limited, it was constitutional. It's not the court's job to decide what length of term is appropriate to protect innovation; that's why Congress was given that charge by the Constitution. If you, like most thinking human beings, don't agree with the copyright term lengths, your representatives are where you should look for relief.
In short, it seems that much of what the author is attributing to Big Media changing the notion of copyrights and the nature of the 'Net is due to technical concerns of one kind or another. Does that mean the threat isn't there? No, but we're not going to get anywhere by misunderstanding its origins.
The Republican Party is geared towards saving people money.
Sounds good so far ... most people consider saving money to be a good thing.
This is the key issue for Republican politics, regardless of all the morality bullshit they spew.
Well, if you are immoral, then you don't understand morality. You can't image actually having it, so you impute weird motives instead of just listening to what people say.
If you're greedy, you vote Republican, whether it's for an end to the estate tax or a $300 tax refund loan.
How is it greedy to want to save money? Your own money?
I put in the extra hours, I got the deliverable done on time, I did the work, why shouldn't I keep my money? How is that greedy? I think that coveting other people's money is what is greedy.
For Republicans, nothing would be better than for Dean to go against Bush. Dean will make McGovern look like a winner. The Gay Marriage issue alone will keep him from picking up a single southern state, his remarks about the Military will lose him even more.
Go Dean!
...Are recieving the LEAST amount of dollars in these tax cuts "for families" as you stated. Sure cut their taxes 50 dollars a month and cut the robber-baron billionaire's taxes so they get an extra 500,000 (0?) a month. What's a poor corporation to do but send their job's oversea's so as to get that couple extra zero's bushites won't give em'? That's what they'll do because they are upset when they get a couple strings cut from the arms and legs of one more pupet president.
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
Doc Searls makes the mistake of attempting to blame the problem on a conservative mindset in the entertainment and telecom industries. He rehashes the same old misconception: left=open, right=good old boys club; left=fairness, right=tyranny of the powerful. It's easy to find how this is not true, using his own article. He says how the telecoms are used to operating in a regulated environment. So who regulated the environment, but liberal legislators who wanted to promote (ding, ding, ding) FAIRNESS. If you have a natural monopoly, it's not inherently ILLEGAL. However, trying to ARTIFICIALLY extend the monopoly past its possible lifespan or use your position to gouge customers is not allowed by antitrust laws. He also inexplicably uses a sports metaphor (make it, take it) and makes me wonder if the liberal idea of baskeball would require putting weights on Allan Iverson to make it more "fair". Similarly, he jokingly admits that he'd like to have the same copyright law that existed under Nixon. The irony is that the mess that is our current copyright law was introduced under the Carter administration.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Or follow the Tour de France from my office.
Or buy books online.
Or email pictures to grandma.
Or ...
(lookout, the sky is falling, and I'm sure its because of a (right/left wing) conspiracy).
Beavis: Mm. Hehh, hehheh. mmm.
Butthead: Huh huh uhhuhuh huuhhu.
" Because you wouldn't have got there other than for society. Society producing art, literature, reading materials"
Society does nothing: all of this is something accomplished by individuals.
"I'm not a communist - I don't think that everybody should get identical paychecks, but I'm not grossly against making sure that everybody has a living wage and decent healthcare."
The wage should be set as part of a deal between employer and employee, and only them. It should be for the value of the work, nothing more nothing less.
The problem with "living wage" and minimum wage laws is that they force employers to become welfare agencies by paying people money they did not earn: a handout, not an honest living.
If you're greedy, you vote Republican.
:)
If you're wasteful, you vote Democrat.
Now mod me up
Well, for starters you don't actually need to line up at some office to immigrate, most of the paper-work can be done remotely these days. And the border is open enough that you can come here and work with almost no red tape.
But the real reason is that generally we don't want any of you: Canada only accepts for immigration the world's best and brightest, and in general those on the top of the pyramid in first-world countries aren't willing to risk losing their status by emigrating.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
"How is it meaningless? There are wide-ranging, noticeable differences in our society depending who's in power."
It is a matter of perspective. If you are in the vast middle, the mainstream, the differences are very real. If you sit way out there on the fringe (Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, the Klan, CPUSA, Aryans), then you tend to lump the 99% who do not agree with you as being all the same thing: "Them".
As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.
And if you want to really piss off a conservative, you can then point out that this idea--Strong good, weak bad--is Satanist dogma.
On the other hand, the reverse--Strong Bad--answers his email in a really funny manner.
BILL: But if we change the constitution....
KID: We can pass all sorts of crazy laws!
BILL: Now you're talking!
" Canada only accepts for immigration the world's best and brightest"
Only after those bright enough to reject socialism and inferior medical care go to the U.S.
(in every sense!)
In all seriousness, your Canada comment points out how /.'s American bias is starting to distort reality: just because the US government screws up the US Internet doesn't mean the rest of the Internet will be significantly effected.
Americans are now a minority online, and as we all know, the Internet routes around damaged legal jurisdictions. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the Internet is the long run is for the creation of a Great Firewall of America like in Signal to Noise and let the rest of us get along with our surfing.
Why do people keep modding this jerk up?
Its Evil Adrian himself hes making other accounts to mod himself up
This is not a new concept: whoever controls information outlets controls what the readers of that content see. Ever wonder why there is a King James Version of the Bible? or a New International version? They started from arguments between groups that eventually resulted in new bibles being printed. The same thing happens with movies and music. Anyone over 40 can give you the name of a song they like that got remade recently and an incident where some kid thought the remake was the original, giving credit to the new artist. Or old TV movies/series that get remade to the same effect.
Every time a new distribution media comes along it is usually controlled easily and readily because startup costs and production tended to be centralized. Publishing companies need printing presses, music and TV need studios, etc. People who want to control the distribution can easily do so by cutting it off or regulating it at the source. Distribution was also easily controlled since transportation cartels tended to be monopolies or oligopolies that would make deals with producers or get taken over by them. Localized distrubitors could be bullied with threats of price wars or bribed with treats of guarenteed monopolies in their area (much as states do with wine distribution contracts these days). Yet the internet is an entirely different entity, in that distributor and publisher have been combined into one and that no one corporation can hope to realistically control even the majority of computer-based infrastructure.
As with any new medium, test cases arise that will set precedent for how to approach this new medium. Companies with the money are bribing Congressional officials to guarentee their copyrights and change the nature of them from honorable, respectable, limited right to an exact piece material into exclusive right to repress any and every idea even remotely based on the original idea for 75-100 years. Innovation has slowed dramatically as a result, and this would decimate engineering and scientific progress if the same ideas ever became law in those fields. Yet now people can readily copy material and distribute (publish) it with the click of a mouse. There's no time to tax it, regulate it, put it through a middleman, or anything else. Copyright laws were changing even before the internet came about, and music oligopolies were exploiting the populace for decades, but now they can be circumvented with ease. This infuriates the companies since fair-market value for their material turns out to be so much lower than their formerly enforcable prices were. Thus, in a backlash, they now want to charge more to "make up for lost profit" and have Draconian copyrights and copyright enforcement laws to protect their material ad infinitum whether it is justifiable or not.
What really makes this tricky is that the infrastructure is diverse and the battlefield is international. Laws are limited only to the country they are made in. Ultimately it would take the UN to write legislation for anything realistic to apply to the entire planet, so the companies are going for the next-best thing: arresting or bankrupting anyone in the US involved in "copyright violation" and trying to force other countries to do the same. They do this by threatening trade sanctions by bemoaning their loss of revenues due to "pirates", legitimate or otherwise, and getting pity from some of the populace. It also helps that these same companies also tend to own TV and news stations as well as many congressmen who rely on those sources to get re-elected.
It will be difficult to fight this war from our end since we lack the resources and congresmen of these giant companies. How do we fight back legally? First, get some like-minded friends together and write your congressmen and see if they won their last election by a thin margin. If they are not solidly rooted in their district, they will very likely listen to what you and your voting friends have to say. Second, if you are not already, get regist
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
As many other posters have pointed out, suggesting optical links for anything larger than a LAN party must be a joke (you're not an idiot, right?). A much more reasonable suggestion is the launch of publicly-controlled communications microsatellites.
Perhaps the launch vehicle could be built on some of that X-Prize technology that keeps generating press-releases. We might actually have to find some radio spectrum a little more useful than the visual range (since it's in space, I assume we only have to worry about interference and not licensing?). But the cost of launching a few satellites that communicate with off-the-shelf minidishes would almost certainly be lower overall than setting up line-of-sight laser connections. And the open source community already knows enough about routing (and is now starting to do hardware projects) that the design is not a major obstacle.
I can see the inevitable reply now. (something about profit?).
resistance is futile.
A belief in the rule of laws over the rule of socialluy favored or well-placed men. Nothing more, nothing less.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Surely copyright ("copy right") is there just to give the creator of the work the ability to control their creation and to make money from it, right?
As this article describes, the creator's copy right was meant to be held only for a limited time after which the work would enter the public domain. So the true reason that this copy right is given is not so that the creator or the 'owner' of the copyright could make money, but instead to give motivation for the creation of content for the good of society.
So I say we need to start giving the term 'copyright' a different spin. It isn't just the right of the owners to prevent copying, but also (perhaps moreso) the right of everyone to copy. We should talk of these copyright extensions not as strengthening the rights of the owners, but weakening those of everyone else.
Remember that it is your tax dollars that pay to give this limited right to the authors and to protect it. When copyrights were 14-28 years, there was an excellent chance that all the work which your tax dollars were paying to protect (and therefore effectively partially subsidizing) would be free for your use within your lifetime. That is no longer the case.
1) Identify core values near and dear to the slashdot crowd (copyright, civil liberties, all that).
2) Rank each candidate based on their votes and political statements on these core values
3) Prof^H^H^H^H Publish!
Seriously, the NRA does it, NARAL does it, lots of groups do it. I await the day when a candidate goes up to the podium and says "Slashdot gives me an A+ rating, vote for me!"
I'm a Canadian (who works in the US) and I've noted (given my constant exposure to it) that American politics are very, very strange.
It seems that a large number of Americans see politics as some sort of sport or game, where "our team" plays against "their team" with control of the Presidency, House, Senate etc as both goal and a means of keeping score.
As such, it seems that many, many voters look straight past the issues, and instead vote for their "team" regardless of the conduct of the actual players.
A prime example is what happened to Bill Clinton, and what is now (not) happening to Dubya.
Clinton is an articulate, intelligent man. He is also a known philanderer who had an affair on the job and lied about it. And despite this character flaw, during his two terms as President, the US did pretty well.
Yet despite his intelligence and demonstrated competance, he and his wife were the targets of levels of harrassment and abuse, orchestrated by "the other side", to a degree that was downright Orwellian. Once the affair (and the subsequent lie) was exposed, he was hauled in front of an impeachement hearing, ostensibly for lying to the American People.
Now I cannot condone the lie, although I can understand it - the man was trying to protect his private life. Martial fidelity is a deeply personal subject and nobobody wants his dirty laundry aired publically.
But at the end of the day, the issue of if Clinton had an affair or not, or if he lied about it or not, had zero impact on the type of job he was doing as President.
But now....
We have a President who plays for the other team; the team that went to such extrordinary lengths to try and bring down the former President. this President, too, has been caught in a lie, also presented directly to the American people. But unlike the former President's lie, THIS lie was used to justify taking the country to war against another nation. Unlike Clinton's hummer, Dubya's lie about Iraq buying nuclear material resulted in enormous taxpayer expendature and American deaths.
The latter lie is more serious than the former by several orders of magnitude, but is is going unchallenged, from what I can see because the journalists who should be going after Dubya for his misconduct play for his team.
If this isn't corruption, I don't know what is.
So then, I ask you - are you capable of breaking away from your "team" and voting for someone based on concience and consideration of the issues, or are you forever tied to support the candidate with the (R) behind his name?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
There is a technology which is out there could be put to good effect in an area such as this. I've always felt that it would be great to have a two teir internet. One tier is an authenticated, non anonymous Internet, where you log on and every site you visit knows who you are. This solves some problems, such as having to create new accounts for every website you go to, allows shops to track your habits etc, all the things that happen to us in the real world whenever we use a credit card. If you dont like it dont use it.
A second teir then is provided for people who want to be anonymous. This is how the internet works today.
This way the big companies get what they want (ability to control and track us as consumers) and the people get what they want (most people just want to go online, buy something, look at some sites with as little hassle as possible. The second Tier which is anonymous continues to provide all the freedoms that more indepth net users wish to have.
Best of both worlds.
The astute among you will realise that to an extent this is what Microsoft tried to do with Passport but it was doomed to failure, not because it was a bad idea but because it was Microsoft. No one was going to let Microsoft have all that information so noone got involved.
Obviously a central repository of Personal details (only actually has to store a person name and a Globally unique ID - information relevant to each individual site can be held at the site) will cost money, so let the companies that sign up for it pay the price. They get customers willing to use it because its trustworthy, people are more willing to log in, because they dont have to remember yet another login and password.
Now why not set this up as a W3C standard, with a company (a bit like network solutions for domains) assigned to handle it and all companies wishing to implement it paying for it.
With the above ideas everyones happy.
Good saying: If you are under 20 and already a Republican, then you have no heart. If you are over 30 and still a Democrat, then you have no brain.
I think this quote is merely a common example of an acadmic stating something that is painfully obvious as though it were an insight. This happens all the time in academia and it's because they get the good weed so they're euphoric about all sorts of pedestrian ideas. Not only that, they kid themselves that the zit-faced suburban coeds they're bagging are so hot. But I digress.
It's not at all useless to speak of conservative -vs- liberal. In fact, it's one of the finest topics around. But you have to listen to my opinions to know what's really going on. And since you're so interested, allow me to enlighten:
The difference is that liberals have a fatal faith in logic that does them no favors in the political realm where rhetoric takes precedence. This is hardly a mystery. The Democratic party is secretly known as the Teacher's Union Party. (Shh.) And we all know that teachers have a terrible time in politics. If you doubt it, just look into your average classroom. The problem is, they're pedantic. They are dying to pretend a logical explanation about why you shouldn't pull people's hair or cheat on your exam is going to solve the problem.
Conservatives, on the other hand, don't give a flying fuck about logic as long as it makes money and keeps them in power. Cross your fingers and salute the flag. This is why the conservatives always bounce back despite a collection of absolutely absurd and contradictory moral positions.
The moral is, fuck em' all. Don't take anybody too seriously. The way to save the net is to get your local utility to offer broadband. It's quite simple. Think globally, act locally.
this article is indicative of a disturbing trend within the Linux and Open Source communities. Both are increasingly becoming coopted by leftists , or at least seem to be adopting alot of leftist rhetoric. I'm not a conservative , but see no value in harassing and alienating them for political advantage. Does open source software really need more enemies ?
This is one of the most important issues of our time. By alowing a monopoly on digital communication we beg the eventual end to free speech and debate. Yes it is about content control and who has it. Ironic but
The Founding Fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author [was] still alive. After 28 years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England, who tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material.
In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would never happen, they said.
Well, it's happened. It's happened because for years now Congress has allowed it to happen. We now have an exact replica of the medieval Stationers' Company, which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions--and it's worked...
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
The big companies want the anonymous internet to not exist, so that they don't have to compete with it. There have already been all sorts of corporate, tracked networks -- tenet, compuserve, AOL, prodigy, etc. None of them take off because the big company's business models essentially depend on being able to meter people's own behavour back to themselves.
This hippy pie-in-the-sky shit of "you do what you want, we'll do what we want" is what gives marijuana a bad name.
What the other guys want is to control you. You can't just say, "ok, MPAA, you have what you want on this internet and I'll go over here and trade movies on this new one I built."
First, I'm not sure it's in real nead to be saved. It is evolving. New technologies are replacing old ones. More people are sending email with phones than reading usenet news with rn or nn on Wise green text terminals. Oh, I'm so scared.
Second, Arguements about cable open access, etc, are really the same arguement as access to any restricted markets, public utilities, telcos, cable, airline, radio, tv, and medical sectors. By the way how many of you want to start your own hospital or electric company? Some serious barriers are there. Not the least of which is capital.
However, it was once said that there is money waiting in banks earning very little interest waiting for people with vision and good ideas. Ideally if you had the expertise to enter one of these markets, and really knew your stuff you could get the other resources you needed with investors.
However, the current Government says it is in the public good I'm not allowed to start my own radio station and likewise not in the public good to start my own private water company (pipes not bottles). Why?
That's it really, financial and other resources aside, why?
Simple. In the USA anyway. The people, most of them, don't care. They don't have 28 year expirations anymore, as the article points out the founders intended, because they don't want it. What????? Point the finger at the people.
Why not, it is a democratically elected represented government. Electoral College issues aside *sigh*, the US congress and even most state govenments are run by people the citizens locally elect. The citizens think MICKEY MOUSE is cool, so why penailze Disney by putting the mouse into the public domain.
But isn't this a really interesting theory, if it really is ultimately the people who are the problem, then doesn't something like the Electoral College make sense. The idea there being that the people were either too ignorant or had little to no economic, that is to say property, to have a real interested in their own welfare, so obviously those with an interest and the mind/knowledge should do it for them. The latter property issue being a good justification to not allowing people who are flat broke from voting, as they will only vote for freebees and handouts rather than the public good. Oooooopsss isn't that what one US polical party has been accusing the the other of doing, encouraging in fact that kind of voting record, say in Labor Unions, the black community, the poor. Oh how this is all so relevant to modern politics.
But I digress, back to the third point, or was it the fourth. The people, the mob, can at times be morons when it comes to politics. So why not have those with the citizens best interests at heart make the decisions for them. This works, that is to say the Electoral College idea works only in theory. As we have seen it worked out over time, the political theory and the practical reality are different. Even though the College has failed, the underlying problem it addressed, that the people were going to vote or not vote, active apathy, for things not in their best interests still exists. People still don't care their US House just did XYZ; or their US Congressman ABC.
They are all just a bunch of [enter negative view of government comment here]. The funny thing with that is the Government, as it relates to the democrative (gov theoy here, not party) process the peole are the reason it has the negatives in the first place.
So anyone have a better idea? Pure rule directly by the people fails, apparently the voter apathy or outright bad voting decisions seem to get in the way again. So much for the classical right. What about the glorious socialism touted by the classical left as successful in those great economical bastions of Scandinavia for example. My guess is it can't scale, look at China and the failure of socialist solutions in the United States. You don't even have to look across the country, in terms of scale, to see it. Even in relatively small m
------ Michael A. Romig
I think people need to learn to make the kind of statements like those made in this article without using the term liberal or conservative.
As an outsider (not an American) I see and fail to understand many posts that say, "I agree completely with the ideas and that something has gone wrong, but what he says about [insert my affiliation here] is untrue and unfair. [insert opposing affiliation here] is worse for the following three reasons. Therefore this is a poorly written article."
The next post then comes to the defense of the offended party, and the argument continues, the important ideas and the call for action forgotten.
I'd rather be parsing. --Jive5
What is the going rate for a politician nowdays - is it some sort of sliding scale based on level in government? If we all chipped in 2 bucks could we buy a senator? Or perhaps we could buy a lot of little polititians. Im just asking because this appears to be the only way we are going to get a fair shake.
You can follow the Tour de France from your office, but you can't set up your own web cast of your own event.
You can buy books online, but you can't sell them. (Might be pirated! Besides, what about the license agreement in the front cover ?)
You can email pictures to grandma, and maybe she can email pictures to you, but as soon as you or grandma emails a funny snap to half a dozen friends, the account is "temporarily disabled" while a Ashcroftian functionary tries to figure out if you are competeing with Time magazine.
Because of the artificial asymmetry of cable modems (there is no hardware reason why upstream shouldn't equal downstream) much of this is already partly true.
Rob Malda started this site from his dorm room. Sadly, because of port blocking and restrictions on hosting servers, college kids of today can't do the same. The barrier to entry in the web world is slowing being raised to that of a $250 / mo rackspace account.
Bill Clinton's administration gave us the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. So why do people blame Bush?
What Bush 43 Supreme Court appointee decided the Eldred v. Ashcroft case? Answer: There are no Bush 43 Supreme Court appointees.
Why does Slashdot post these flamebate, political articles?
" What! That's crazy!!! What kind of law would allow someone like Geroge W. Bush to become president... oh wait."
It's that ding-dang old Constitution: the President has to win enough states which then send electors which choose the President.
Money, power, politics, control, generations.
Whenever there is a source of money or the chance of a source of money, people will try to control it. This is most dramatically seen by the instability of African states where oil or diamonds are discovered.
Secondly, the dispossed young are forever trying to redefine their world while those with money and power are forever trying to stop this happening. Think of the many Latin American dictatorships: old men in the army killing young protesting students.
What is happening to the Net is not unlike a coup d'etat, a modern right-wing hunger for money and power using 'civilized' tools but tools nonetheless: manipulation of language and the media, manipulation of laws and the courts, manipulation of trade and economics.
This is not a new kind of drama. It is the age-old story of revolution and counter-revolution.
Just because we're talking about 'copyright' does not mean the debate is polite, decent, or even restrained. When enough money and power are on the table, there is no big difference between disenfranchising people for arbitrary crimes, and executing people for arbitrary crimes. The end always justifies the means.
We are, IMHO, seeing the exposure of a 'vast right-wing conspiracy': Clinton was right to describe it so, wrong to think he was the target. We are all the the targets.
Luckily America is still a democracy, and there is exactly one way to unroll this movement towards an extremist right-wing state: the ballot box.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Greedy is being unwilling to pay your share, while voting for politicians who are spending more than this country can afford.
Greedy is lobbying for a tax cut on your multi-million dollar income and trust fund dividends at the expense of hard-working people who struggle to make ends meet.
Does this include all Republicans? Of course not. Just the ones who actually influence government policy-- and they pay for this privilege by buying the TV commercials and funding the "think tanks" that do so much to get your vote.
"A prime example is what happened to Bill Clinton, and what is now (not) happening to Dubya."
Why not be fair to both sides and say "Slick Willy and Dubya", or "Clinton and Bush"? Your insistence on silly insults for your enemies tosses any idea that you are objective out the window.
"Now I cannot condone the lie, although I can understand it - the man [Clinton.... or Slick Willy?] was trying to protect his private life."
It had nothing to do with his private life. Clinton agreed: he agreed to the White House ethics program that prohibited such boss-employee interactions. Also, this lie was quite relevant to another case: where Clinton actually sexually harassed another employee.
You are also conveniently forgetting the whoppers that Clinton told that were on public policy matters. He had a reputation for this long before he was caught lying to rig a civil case.
" THIS lie was used to justify taking the country to war against another nation. Unlike Clinton's hummer, [insert dumb insult of Bush]'s lie about Iraq buying nuclear material resulted in enormous taxpayer expendature and American deaths."
1) Bush did not lie. His "16 words" was true. He told us that British intelligence said something: a true statment
2) The statement in question, brought into play by a Clinton operative, had little or no effect on the U.S. decision in regards to Iraq.
So, this statement had no impact, and it was not a lie.
"The latter lie is more serious than the former by several orders of magnitude, but is is going unchallenged"
This statement, while not a lie, is a major topic in the U.S. media these days.
Searls seemed quite honest in his article that Democrats are to blame for creating the sick regulatory environment that brought about this mess.
His point, however, has to do with the here-and-now of a Republican controlled government. What he's saying is that in trying to "dismantle" media regulation in an inept fashion *, Republicans are only allowing its unhealthy spawn to metastasize.
* Though I would suggest that big-money campaign contributions have as much to do with the flawed deregulation plan as ineptitude.
""I entirely agree. So let's put a stop to this tax break for homeowners that effectively subsidises the middle class at the expense of the working poor."
First, a tax cut is not a subsidy in any way.
Second, if it is at anyone's espense, it is that of our rich leaders and bureacrats, who have trouble meeting the definition of "working" and "poor".
" In that case I nominate Alistair Cook [bbc.co.uk] for president. It'd be nice to have an intelligent, well-educated, man with a grasp of history and both national and international politics in the White House."
We already have one: we put him there in 2000. (There is an E on the end of Cooke, did you know?)
> THE ARPANET/INTERNET WAS ORIGINALLY BUILT TO WITHSTAND PHYSICAL ATTACK. THAT WAS THE REASON. THAT IS WHY IT WAS BUILT.
To my memory, Internet was created in CERN for free exchange of [scientific] ideas:
www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.asp
Doesn't that corrrespond to what is now the Open Source? You can call it an ideology. It were this continent's greedy screwheads that tried (and trying) to use if to profit (I remember the idea of charging $0.002 per page which was utterly ridiculous).
Alternative WiFi internet, mentioned in the first few posts, is a good thing. I think we will be there finally.
UNDERSTOOD?!?!?
Yes and no. You'll note that in the recent FCC decision that sought to allow expanded ownership of TV stations, it was the Democrats who voted No.
You'll notice that not a single Republican voted against the DMCA, and precious view against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
I believe the Democrats have advanced some corrupt decisions regarding Copyright law, and they may not be entirely trustworthy on other issues having to do with the media. However, I see with my own two eyes that the current Republican President and Congress are actively trying to tear apart the last regulations that keep the media diverse and free.
Furthermore, it's hard to ignore the present makeup of our government. When a guy like Searls tears into Conservatives, he's simply being realistic. These are the people running the show right now, and whatever happens has to be explained in the context of their ideology.
" List 10 positive things about America, without couching it in Liberal rhetoric. Just 10 positive things. I dont think you can"
10 * NPR is still on the air, and every taxpayer is seeing that it thrives, even the right-wingers
9 * We've got CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC. They just have Fox
8 * Tom Daschle controls the senate
7 * Dixie Chicks. They're naked, and their
liberal
6 * Public education vouchers? Not here not now!
5 * The percent of the economy controlled by government is getting larger
4 * Rather, Jennings, Brokaw: we still have our own in the anchor chairs
3 * They can't get any right-wing judges past our fillibusters
2 * We still control the Supreme Court
1 * Clinton did get more actual votes in 2000
"has everyone forgotten what a sleeper cell is?"
Is that where you lock up Woody Allen for having sex with his daughter?
Yeah, you know, I know and he knows. What he's pointing out is that others are misrepresenting this. Microsoft talks about "gatekeepers" exerting control over free software projects, though they have given up the famous bus atack. SCO is playing on the confusion between the Linux kernel and ALL of free software. How else can they make the insane statement, "Linux is an illegal derivative of Unix."? Thanks for bringing up the concept. There are some people who don't understand the nature of free software. Now to correct the confusion people unforetunate enough to have never directly used free software, repeat that 268,000 times.
Sounds hard? Well it is, because there's billions of dollars of propaganda aimed at convincing you that every idea has an owner and is therefore a kind of property. It's ugly when someone like Madonna thinks no one should ever sing her songs in a public place without first asking for permision and then paying her. It's really gaulling when the same people try to convince you that the same thing is true, in however small a degree, of the most widely know piece of free software in the world. They want you to think that even Linux has an "owner" who you owe something too. Correcting this perception is difficult.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is easier and cheaper than ever to have a net presence and therefore add whatever content you wish. I can put up a website or message board in my house, and as long as the traffic isn't too high, they don't care. True, my cable company doesn't want me hosting a website/message board that gets a lot of hits, but I'm only paying $40/month for relatively huge bandwidth. If my Internet presence becomes large, then it only stands to reason that I should pay extra for that.
There are still plenty of domain hosting sites out there that are extremely cheap. I have a friend with a website and he pays $8/month! I grant you his site has low traffic, but if his site generates more traffic, he can easily upgrade the service agreement.
As for selling books online and the Ashcroftian comment, those are simply absurd. I could just as easily say something like, "the anarchy of the net spread to the real world and civilization collapsed." Both are theoretically possible, but not realistic.
When the stuff you suggested actually starts happening, give me a call, I'll be right beside you. Until then, the call to arms is simply alarmist ranting.
"Saving The Net" is not an argument that will go far with the vast majority of voters. Don't forget that the vast majority of 'Net users use it primarily for occasional email. To these people, the 'Net is just a faster way to send a letter. If the 'Net went away, they would say, "that's such a shame. I have to spend more on stamps now."
Most people just don't care about the untapped power of the Internet, and won't care until their ISP bills get too high. At that point, they'll ask a few questions and then just give in to the higher bill.
My first response would be to show them how to use the 'Net to do things that matter to ordinary people; things like unlimited free long distance calling. People have to be given something that can only be provided on the Internet, whatever that turns out to be, can be done as easily as using a telephone, and that would be devastating to lose. Without that extreme, not enough people are going to care about the Internet being controlled by a single gigantic corporation.
you may have a point. Just as the republican party of Abraham Lincoln is not the same republican party of jesse helms and company.
"jumping the two together doesn't make what you say true. Hillary Clinton is much more moderate, like her husband, than Ted Kennedy."
all 3 of them are strong liberals, not moderates. If anything, Hillary is more to the left than Ted Kennedy is (considering her major attempt to nationalize health care)
From my experience, I'd have to say that at least in this part of America, "Liberal" means "what used to be called 'Moderates', before Bush's War".
;)
Greetings from sunny Florida.
return us to the that age of localized community forum..
If enough people within a populated area run an open wireless hub, a community 'freenet' can be built across a small city or town.
"and deficits and (in the case of Clinton) debts were reduced. Economic growth accompanied most of the debt reductions."
The national debt actually increased greatly during the Clinton administration. Does a couple of trillion count for anything anymore?
Don't confuse defecit and debt, it is easy.
"Just as the republican party of Abraham Lincoln is not the same republican party of jesse helms and company."
Name one thing Helms did or said that was racist in his last couple of decades in office (a period after he and liberal Democrat Byrd were blatantly racist).
" when there are other people down the street who can barely afford to eat ramen and have no hope of going to college based on their socio-economic background?
Fuck you if you're rich and don't want to pay taxes"
What about those rich who don't want to pay taxes (which end up enriching other rich people) and want to pay them much more directly to the poor through charities?
"Taxing the wealthy is *not* about punishing them for being wealthy. It is about redistribution of wealth, which is a good thing"
That is a bad thing: it is based on greed and a government that is way too powerful that thinks it knows best how to run your private life.
"If wealthy people pay no or little tax, they continue to get wealthy. When wealthy people amass a fortune and do not have anything to do with it, it's called hoarding (see also "middle ages"). "
It is not your damn business what someone has in their wallet. Wealth is not zero sum. Get your greedy paws out of other's wallets and make your own wealth.
" From my experience, I'd have to say that at least in this part of America, "Liberal" means "what used to be called 'Moderates', before Bush's War"."
In the rest of the country, the moderates and conservatives support the President, while the liberal third does not.
Last president, the third that did not support the president was the conservatives.
I don't know where you've been, but we currently have a $450bn projected deficit for the year 2003, and that number may grow to $500bn by the end of the year. This number, along with the trillions of debt that Reagan and Bush created, are essentially a loan taken out in your name, and in the name of every taxpayer in the USA.
After the Bush tax cut, the rich still pay a much higher percentage and actual amount than the non-rich.
Ah yes. Because you're one of the millions of people who don't actually look at your paycheck before you cash it. Maybe I can help you, by pointing out the 7.5% Social Security tax that the government withdraws from your check, along with the additional 7.5% that the government demands from your employer (money that you could be getting paid, otherwise.) And even though this isn't "income tax", it's being used to fund the war in Iraq, Congressional Pork, and who knows what else. If it looks like a tax, smells like a tax... Then it's a tax.
But the great thing about Social Security tax is that you only pay that 15% on the first $88,000 of your income. So under Bush's new tax cuts someone who declares $70,000 of income pays 35.03% of their income to the Federal Government, while someone who makes $1,000,000 pays only 33.81%. So much for fair.
And that's without any fancy deductions, which the wealthier earner will almost certainly be better able to take advantage of. Ask George Bush, who only paid 29% in 1999, on $900,000 worth of income. It's without counting the dividend and capital gains tax cuts which are likely to disproportionately benefit the wealthier person (I don't ever make more than a few hundred per year in dividends.)
Basically, anyone who believes this shit is pulling out their wallet and handing it over to someone who makes more than 10 times what they do. They're doing this, while our budget bleeds, because they think it's "fair"-- though they obviously haven't done the math. They're doing this because they feel that making the wealthy wealthier will somehow help our economy, when the problem currently on the demand side, eg it's people like the middle class and working class that we need to have extra cash to burn.
And somehow, the Republican Party is able to raise ever larger amounts of money. Hmm. I wonder where it's coming from. Basically, if you believe any of this is right, just or fair, then you're a sucker.
All Americans, left and right, are part of the liberal tradition. It's the foundation of our country's political history. I wince everytime someone criticizes "liberals" because they really should be criticizing people on the "left". America was founded on the "liberal" ideals of John Locke, who was a big proponent of private property.
You must mean financially trounced? With Gore winning the popular vote and Bush squeaking by in the Supreme Court, there's really no debating that this was the closest presidential election ever.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Brin only says that because he has less power than he'd like.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
"This number, along with the trillions of debt that Reagan and Bush created,"
What selective memory! Clinton added slightly more to the debt than Reagan did, and a lot more than Bush I did.
"are essentially a loan taken out in your name, and in the name of every taxpayer in the USA."
No, it is not. Enact Bush's full tax cuts, and give him the line-item veto, and the debt will start to go down.
"Maybe I can help you, by pointing out the 7.5% Social Security tax that the government withdraws from your check, along with the additional 7.5% that the government demands from your employer (money that you could be getting paid, otherwise.)"
What are you saying? Do you want cut Social Security? What happened to the fiction that it was a "trust fund"? Time to rip a page out of the Democrat play book?
"So under Bush's new tax cuts someone who declares $70,000 of income pays 35.03% of their income to the Federal Government, while someone who makes $1,000,000 pays only 33.81%. So much for fair."
You are forgetting to put in the family-related deductions that the average $70,000 gets that impacts little on the rich guy.
"Basically, anyone who believes this shit is pulling out their wallet and handing it over to someone who makes more than 10 times what they do."
That is exactly what happens when we pay money to the Federal Government. Ever see how rich Corazine is?
"They're doing this because they feel that making the wealthy wealthier will somehow help our economy"
They aren't making the wealthy wealthier. The wealthy make themselves wealthier through their own work and investment.
" it's people like the middle class and working class tha"
Who are you trying to exclude here? Most of the rich are working class (that is how they get and stay rich). The unemployed? They are neither working class nor middle class.
"Basically, if you believe any of this is right, just or fair, then you're a sucker."
No, I just oppose greedy policies. It certainly is not fair in comparison to a much lower, fairer flat tax.
...or at least starting to change their mind.
a p/ 20030720/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_poll_4
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/
"With Gore winning the popular vote and Bush squeaking by in the Supreme Court,"
Bush won by barely squeaking by in the actual vote counts in Florida. The Supreme Court did little of consequence: they let the actual vote count in Florida, as it did in the 49 other states.
EvilA, you are probably one of the most self-righteous people I've encountered in this forum. In post after post your rants and name calling reveal an obvious close-mindedness. It's not that I disagree with your positions (though I do in some cases), it's your utter confidence that you need not listen to others, and that their disagreeing with you is a license to badger them. Sorry to post AC, but I have no interest in a dialog with someone with so little regard for the process of civil dialog itself.
In our reality, the share of Congressional pork has swung wildly towards the Republican side:
Fiscal conservatives grab for pork projects behind scenes
Democrat pork gets the chop
In fact, a recent study showed that on average, Republican Senators command several times as much pork as their Democrat brethren. This is a reversal from the days of Democratic Congress, but it's not just a change of party, but an enormous change of degree. The amounts are starggering. How does this happen to such a viruous party? Because they control the House and Senate, of course. But that's not the only reason.
See, since even before our little tragedy in 2001, George Bush has not seen fit to keep his promise to avoid massive government deficits. September 11th, the bad economy, these are all excuses. Naturally, they haven't stopped him from spending on things near and dear to his heart, like Missile Defense or issuing massive tax cuts.
But what most people don't realize is that these programs have a price. Congresscritters, in this case, particularly Republican Congresscritters, who chafed under Clinton-- a Democrat who actually dared Congress into balancing the budget-- have found that they can now use that excuse to their heart's content. All of the taps are open, and without a pesky balanced budget to guilt them into fiscal responsibility, they can spend, spend, spend. On garbage.
Even better, with Bush periodically coming to Congress to ask some huge favor, like support for the war in Iraq, or his tax cuts, or Missile Defense, the Republicans can get a lot of quid pro quo fom the White House. It's a neat little deal. Essentially, Bush will talk tough about government spending, but he won't actually do anything to reign it in (at least not when it comes to his loyal Republican senators.)
So we all pay the price for this foolishness. And still, many people are so completely out of their minds that they still try to blame the Democrats as though this were 1985 and Madonna was in style. Get over it and be a goddamn patriot. Give a shit about your country.
The USA is a democratic republic, not a democracy. It is actually heading more in the direction of a democracy (note the recent increase in referrenda and trivial constitutional amendments), but is still nevertheless a republic. If you read the history of ancient republics (e.g. Rome) you will note that "being bought" was not just a problem, but THE problem. In Rome's case, it eventually led to the creation of the Roman Empire, which was just the Republic in a "fully bought" state.
What do you think would happen if only one person bought off most of the Congresscritters? I bet you would say, "A revolution". If you think that is what would save us, perhaps you ought to read up on Marius and Sulla, and what happened after their nice little civil war.
Ancient Democracy on the other hand, has much more in common with what we in America might call "Local Politics". Which makes sense when you realize that very few of the ancient democratic city-states had a population of over 100,000. (Sorry, that's a guess; no time to check the numbers today).
I think everyone, even the Congresscritters themselves, realize that we need to make a system that can't be bought. The question is how. I believe that a more direct democracy is the answer. While direct democracy has it's problems (esp. in a nation where WWF has higher ratings than CSPAN), it is a lot harder to buy the loyalty of 280 million people than 535...
The King James Bible was indeed the result of dispute, but it worked in the opposite direction. King James wanted to undermine the authority of the Church's leaders by creating a Bible accessible to the laymen.
To us, the language of the King James is difficult, but in the day, it was common.
"Naturally, they haven't stopped him from spending on things near and dear to his heart, like Missile Defense or issuing massive tax cuts."
Tax cuts aren't spending. Missile Defense? Hard to argue with this one, defense is one of the few legitimate things the feds are supposed to spend money on.
"a Democrat who actually dared Congress into balancing the budget-"
Nice alternate history. Clinton, before the Republicans came along, passed wildly unbalanced defecit spending budgets. After 1984, the red ink started flow slower as the Newties balked Clinton's budgets. Clinton, of course, opposed the balanced budget amendment.
"And still, many people are so completely out of their minds that they still try to blame the Democrats as though this were 1985"
It is easy to blame the guilty. Tom Daschle has been working to prevent economic recovery on the hopes that it will help Democrats at the polls.
We can all discuss and rant and argue all day long about how and why our rights and freedoms are being taken away, but until we take real action and encourage others to do the same, nothing is going to change. None of us have political power. But fortunately, a successful grassroots movement is far more powerful than ANY politicians or lobbyists.
So are you ready to put your money where your mouths are? Do you really want to save the Net? Here's how:
1.) Open Source - No, not just a free lunch where available - instead think about making it your career. The more companies that switch to OSS solutions, the weaker the established proprietary empires become and the greater the resistance to any bogus legal challenges. The Open Source movement is only hindered by a lack of consultant-developers who can simultaneously make a living by meeting clients needs and help write the software to enable their own and others ability to do so. Offer cheaper and better solutions and you will have customers.
2.) Alternative Media - Simply put, don't support the existing media empires. Whether that means canceling your $80/mo supreme cable or satellite package, waiting for movies to hit the rental store, not buying RIAA music or going to signed bands' concerts, or whatever, the revenue stream to these greedy and abusive oligopolists must be redirected elsewhere for change to ever happen. Instead, use the money you would have spent on supporting independent artists. And if you're going to use P2P, use it to spread legal, alternative content. Otherwise, you just help advertise for the establishment. And if you're really connected to your local music scene, why not help your favorite artists get online and establish an Internet fanbase that'll eventually allow them to tour and sell concert tickets.
3.) Have you been successful at 1.) and/or 2.)? Write some articles on how you did it, encourage others to become entrepreneurs in your footsteps, and generally let the world know that a choice exists. There are a lot of people who would love to break from the mold, but aren't convinced it's possible.
4.) Support groups like the EFF. I consider this a political option and therefore less powerful than 1. and 2., but it can still make a difference in the meantime.
If there is any static IP DSL with reasonable bandidth and price 768/$60 avalible at home, and you don't get it and run a server(s) on it, you are part of the problem. Throw your DHCP based cable modem in the river! It's not real Internet.
And you call yourself a geek!
Go ahead and flame me, I am full of love. :)
PS: COLOs don't count they don't help this problem.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Yes and no. You'll note that in the recent FCC decision that sought to allow expanded ownership of TV stations, it was the Democrats who voted No. You'll notice that not a single Republican voted against the DMCA, and precious view against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
All true. But you will also notice that the Democrats are hardly blame-free in all of this. Sen. Fritz Hollings (a Democrat) was one of the main offenders in the whole debate (though of course Sen. Orrin Hatch is as well).
Like I said, on balance I tend to favor the Democrats (in spite of a number of things). Read my journal if you don't think that's true. But the article seemed to be pinning the blame for things like the DMCA squarely on the Republicans and "conservatives" (whatever that means), which is flatly wrong IMO.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Great, now be honest about how we got those things you mentioned. If you think Liberals are responsible for those items, you are nuts. Save for Americans public school system which sucks beyond belief. Progressive taxation is nothing more than stealing from someone to give to someone else. But overall, not bad. I'll bet you gave yourself a headache coming up with the list.
I liked the article. Doc makes some terrific points. However, he was unclear on one that is of great concern to me. Here's a copy of the comments and question I posted.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Hey, Doc,
Great article, thanks! However, I would like to ask for clarification on one point. From your article:
"I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
a public domain, and therefore
a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved..."
While there is certainly some truth to the fact that parts of the 'net have become a terrific marketplace, there is also the problem of 'net abusers -- spammers -- to consider.
If I interpret your words above literally, it seems to me that you are saying that any 'net-connected device is in the public domain, free for anyone to use as they please.
This is certainly not the case. As a fully self-hosted small business owner, my servers are my own. I pay out of my pocket to operate and maintain them, and keep them connected, and I'm not about to leave them open to things like spammer abuse and mail relaying. In fact, as of this moment, I have several entire countries blocked from sending mail to me because of their widspread spammer infestations.
So, here's my question: When you say "public domain," are you referring to the transmission medium itself (a concept that I have no problem with at all), or the "intelligence" at each end of a connection?
If it's the latter, I've got a BIG problem with that.
Looking forward to your reply. Thanks much.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
While failing it for frosty piss, you did, erstwhile, create the first anti upstart post. For that, sir, I salute you.
Remember kids, it will always be about the CLIT!!!
To the GNAA, one from the vault:
You're an idiot.
A moron of the highest order. You're so stupid it's a wonder you can remember to breathe. Intelligent ideas bounce off your head as if it were coated with Teflon. Creative thoughts take alternate transportation in order to avoid even being in the same state as you. If you had an original thought it would die of loneliness before the hour was out.
On an intelligence scale of 1 to 10 (10 corresponding to the highest attainable IQ) your rating is so far into negative numbers that one would need to travel into another quantum reality in order to even catch a distant glimpse of it. Your personality is that of a rabid Chihuahua intent on destroying its own tail. You are walking, talking proof that you don't have to be sentient to survive.
You are wholly without any redeeming social grace or value. If God ever decides to give the planet an enema you'd better run like the wind because anywhere you stand is a suitable place for The Insertion. There is no animal so disgusting, so vile, that it deserves comparison to you, for even the lowest, dirtiest, most parasitic member of the animal kingdom fills an ecological niche. You fill no niche. To call you a parasite would be injurious to the thousands of honest parasitic species.
You are worse than vermin, for vermin do not pretend to be what it is not. You are truly human garbage. You are a fraudulent, lying, predatory charlatan. You are of less worth than a burnt-out light bulb. You will forever live in shame. You have nothing intelligent to say, and Godwin's Law does not apply when writing about you.
Mothers gather their children close when you appear. You are an aberration, a corruption, and a boil that needs to be lanced. You are a poison in need of being vomited. You are a tooth so rotten it infects the whole body. You are sperm that should have been captured in a condom and flushed down a toilet. I don't like you. I don't like anybody who has as little respect for others as you do. Go away, you swine.
You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Meaningful to no one, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are a waste of flesh. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease. You puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meat-slapper.
On a good day, you're a halfwit. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are.
Try to edit your responses of unn
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
"The Supreme Court's choice did in fact have enormous consequences, namely deciding who was president. Agreed that they decided to let the vote stand, but this shouldn't mask the fact that the choice was put before them and theirs to make, and IIRC there were some rather tough questions they had to wrestle with."
The Florida voters had decided this in November. The Court could have ruled two ways: to let the existing vote stand, or to allow a certain odd limited vote that Gore wanted. Newspapers including the Miami Herald checked on this later: Gore would have lost this exact vote he asked the court for.
If the result is the same regardless, how is it of enormous consqeuences?
Yes, the race was certainly close.
What happened to conservatism. Doc has a quote that I think holds the answer:
"Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments."
In the past conservatives were for the free market. They were for individual initiative. They were for rewarding hard work. Many conservatives of the past would be right at home in the libertarian movement today. That was the conservatism of the forties and fifties. Then it changed ever so slightly. The new emphasis was on business. To be a conservative was to be pro-business. This wasn't a great change, since to be pro-business in the sixties and seventies was to be in favor of free markets and individual initiative and hard work.
The problem is that businesses changed but the conservative mantra did not. The family farm gave way to big agribusiness. Getting a loan from the local bank to start a shop disappeared in favor of wooing venture capital. Private business was all but replaced by public corporations. This happened during the eighties and nineties.
Now it is the aptly named naughts, and the world has been turned upside down. When Dean looks like a conservative, there is something terribly wrong with modern conservatism. It's time to slap these people upside the head and say that Sleepycat Software is every bit as worthy as Oracle, that your local ISP is every bit as worthy as SBC. It's time to take conservatism back to its roots, and make it favor free markets and enterprises once more, instead of this pandering to corporations.
p.s. I'll leave my rant against the modern liberal, and their preference of unions instead of workers, for another time...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The original thread comment seems to point the blame to the Dem side when anyone with a clue knows that both the Dems and the Reps are just as willing to sell out to media giants. This is not a one specific party issue.
Yes Clinton was the spawn of satan. But look at the deficit Bush Jr. is running. It is comparable only to Reagans.
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
" Yes Clinton was the spawn of satan. But look at the deficit Bush Jr. is running. It is comparable only to Reagans."
As long as it doesn't get as big as Clinton's which was larger.
Actually this is what GNUnet was designed for. From the GNUnet FAQ:
I agree entirely with your desire, but I find GNUnet is exactly the implementation we seek. In your post, you seek a reimplementation even of DNS, but in my opinion, centralized namespace control is one of the failings of the IPv4 internet we know and hate, and GNUnet fixes even that because its namespaces are "first-come, first-serve," enforced through public-key cryptography, and thus not subject to any centralized authority. This is A Good Thing(TM).
Why don't we just establish an overlay internetwork between like minded people, and use our own addresses schema within it.... GNoIN? (Geeknet over Internet)
Why not name it "InnerNet" ?
The actual action for the first one is wrong.
You worship Satan:
should read
You should run for office.
Should I sell my RHAT shares?
Should I install T2 Extreme DRM tonight?
Should I pay for music at BuyMusic instead of P2P?
What are you going to do when Hollywood and Dean join forces?
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
" Kind of how unions usually give to Dems? :)"
Unlike money from NOW, NRA, ACLU, RTL, union money is typically stolen. Most union members are there against their will (forced to join by closed shop rules), and then they are forced to give political money to the PAC against their will (Pay up or be fired, or we'll at least shoot your poodle). Courts have time and again ruled that this is illegal, and rightly so.
Unions do not deserve any respect as any sort of legitimate special interest group until they either make sure membership is 100% voluntary (no closed shop), or make the PAC money entirely "opt-in" (instead of "We'll harass you if you opt out".
This is not a problem with PIRG, Sierra Club, or MoveOn.org: not single person is forced to join or pay any of these groups.
The real culprit is money and greed.
Money is not sentient and cannot be the culprit behind anything. Greed is a completely subjective notion and cannot be the culprit behind anything.
And who embodies better money and greed than croporations, who themselves are bigger than many countries?
If I were to accept your notion that there is some level of money and/or power that an entity could obtain that would suddenly push it over the mythical "greedy" barrier, then I would say that governments beat out corporations any day of the year. Governments, in their quest for money and power, have killed millions, destroyed lives, taken over businesses, forced people into labor, forced people into slavery, taken people's life savings, forced people to have abortions, the list goes on and on. More people have been killed by their own governments than they have by anything else in the history of humanity. You seem to think that possession of money is evidential of evil. I think that the destuction of life, liberty, and property is evidential of evil.
The robber barons of yesteryear must be staring in stupendous awe from hell!!!
Hell is a superstitious belief.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
You will note that I did not say that I agreed with the "modern" idea of "liberal", which is what Dean is effectively claiming to be.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
an article on "bundled" contributions
Why do I h8 apple?
Or do you support the drug war? Conservative/liberal are both about groupthink.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
And that is different how?
"This is not a new concept: whoever controls information outlets controls what the readers of that content see. Ever wonder why there is a King James Version of the Bible? or a New International version? They started from arguments between groups that eventually resulted in new bibles being printed."
Entirely incorrect. The King James Bible started about 400 years before the NIV or any of the modern versions. It was the last of a number of English translations that started with William Tyndale, called the father of the modern english bible, who was burned at the stake along with his bibles by the Catholic Church who didn't want a bible in the common tongue. About 90% of his new testament is the same as the King James. He didn't complete the old testament, he was killed before then. His last prayer as the flames rose about him was that God would open the eyes of the King of England, and He did.
I'm leaving out some of the history, such as his friends in the court of Henry the 8th who managed to eventually get Tyndale's bible and later versions used by, or the other persecututions and murders under Thomas Moore or Bloody Mary or bible believers. If you search on the key terms above, however, you can find many sites about the above history and come to your own conclusions.
For 200+ years, the King James bible was virtually the only one used in the churches however, so the above wouldn't be accurate.
PS:
www.biblebelievers.com is one site for looking at differences in bible versions. Most of the new bibles are made for commercial purposes, and are copyrighted. This is a change when the churches took a more active role in protecting bibles.
Politics has always been about blood and money. Money is used to influence people to think your way. Blood is used when money doesn't work.
I was at his rally in Santa Fe on June 28 (the same day I announced to run for President - see my website: www.christian2004.com) and his talk was the same Democratic line we have heard for a long time. This is not new politics. Dean's approach is still about money. Getting money from small donations is easier thru the internet but it is still the same old politics.
Leaving all the arguments of how people pirate music over P2P networks and such there is also the issue of Fair Use with IP.
/. it's no so much about the content but about *controlling* the content. If I can't record and save the big game in a format that makes it conveinent for me they can resell it to me later. If they control the bands that are allowed to play I might not ever know that there are better ones out there. If they control the movies that are being produced (Of course how this will change is much more complicated due to the budgets involved but it's the same basic idea.) they can use shills to say "Must see!" over and over until I am under the impression that I must be missing something.
When dealing with real property it's pretty easy to establish fair use. Does Joe Blow have a right to park on my lawn during the big football game? Nope, thats a pretty clear cut deal there. But what about the big game thats being broadcast and recorded by my TiVo? Even though I don't have any rights to say rebroadcast that game for profit shouldn't I be able to move that TV game from the TiVo in my living room to the one in my bedroom whenever I want? Or archive it for later viewing? Ahhh, now we are getting into murky waters.
Now the courts have allready established long ago that "time shifting" is legal and thus thwarted big medias attempt to stifle fair use but they are relentless, at every turn unless forced not to they will limit fair use with cry's of "piracy!" as their reasons for doing so.
And looking at a larger picture we see why they wish to do so, as has been so often pointed out here on
Bottom line, while many people do pirate IP content that does not mean that there should be no fair use. It's, imo, the cost of doing buissness in IP and if you don't like the risk go find something else to do.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
My problem with what you have written is that you sound as though you are reinterating 10 "truths".
However, you do come off sounding very American.
1. Usually, but by no means always.
2. Depends on where you look.
3. Okay, but given their freedom, don't you think we deserve better press?
4. Irrelavent if you can't afford it.
5. Used to be true, but not anymore.
6. Most other countries tend to think the world should be like them, too.
7. True, until they see the cost.
8. What?
9. America has no public school system.
10. Church and state are not separate in America.
--Richard
How greedy is it to sit and contemplate whether you are going to have steak or lobster tonite, or whether your kids are going to a private boarding school in connecticut or massachusetts, when there are other people down the street who can barely afford to eat ramen and have no hope of going to college based on their socio-economic background?
It's not greedy at all. Take my father as an example--he was born dirt-poor in the sticks of small-town Iowa. He's worked 60-hour weeks ever since he was fifteen years old, save for his law school days, when he was only working 40s so he could "concentrate on school". Once in his life he took a two-week vacation--for his honeymoon--but other than that, he's only taken a maximum of ten days. He joined the Army partially to help cover his college debts; and today he's a respected, esteemed, semi-retired member of the bar... and wealthy.
So. How greedy is it for Dad, who's worked 60-hour weeks for the last fifty years, to say "you know, I want to eat lobster tonight"? I think the man's entitled to it. Of course, you, who know how to spend Dad's money better than he does, and who obviously know how hard Dad has worked for it, have different ideas of what Dad is entitled to.
There's that word, "entitlement". Oooh. Bogeyman. The left thinks the right is allergic to it, that the right wants to shut down all entitlements. Nothing is further from the truth. Conservatives believe there are very few entitlements; the rest is just wishful thinking of the way the world should be.
You're entitled to liberty--entitled to make your own decisions for yourself, not having them imposed upon you by the government. This includes the liberty of making your own economic decisions.
You're entitled to work as hard as you like, or as little as you like. Nobody's cracking a whip over your shoulders. Don't want to work? Don't have to work. Want to work hard? You can work hard.
You're entitled to the fruits of your labors. What you build with your own two hands, you're entitled to own. And you can trade this entitlement--remember the "entitled to economic liberty" thing?--in a fair marketplace; if you want to take RIAA's money and give them the fruits of your labor, you can. The government's not forcing you to do it, nor is it forcing you not to do it.
Those are entitlements, and they all stem from the same basic entitlement: human beings are entitled to political and economic liberty. Everything else that gets swept under the rubric of "entitlement" is just people desperately wishing the world was otherwise than it was.
You have no entitlement to take my money out of my pocket to engage in your own private "redistribution of wealth" schemes. That's not liberty; that's tyranny. That's you making these decisions for me. You can try it if you like, but expect to get socked in the jaw. I don't give a damn about the money; money is a whore. I give a damn about your attempt at turning me into your slave.
If you make $500,000/yr and the government wants 30%, you aren't starving.
In the dot-com boom I was getting paid $100,000 a year. By your logic I was living on easy street, right? The reality is I got evicted from my apartment and was homeless in my car for a few days. Let's look at the math:
From a starting salary of $100,000, take away $50,000 right off the top between California and Federal income taxes. Wham--presto--gone.
From the $50,000 left, take away $36,000 for rent. I was living in a one-bedroom garret in San Francisco and property values were so overinflated that I was paying $3,000 a month just in rent.
From the $14,000 left, take away $3,000 for utilities. California power crisis is a bitch, don't you know.
From the $11,000 left, take away $6,000 for car payments on a five-year-old used car.
From the $5,000 left... that's what you have to live on for a year. That has to put gas in the car, that has to put money
Didn't you watch Demolition Man? They will change the constitution to allow him to run.
...democrats are sloth, republican are greed.
Sloth because nobody got rich off welfare, but it is enough to not need to further contribute...
"And in California, Prop 13. Which is a subsidy to people who own their own home."
I looked it up. This proposition provides absolutely no subsidy of any kind to anyone, let alone homeowners.
" Of those, I don't think John Edwards is going anywhere, he'll win his state at the most. Even if he did get nominated,"
Edwards is one of the losers. Replace him with Leiberman as a real contender.
Americans don't really like attorneys, and Edwards is one of the worst kind: he has made himself very rich filing frivolous lawsuits. Look for the guy to sue Kerry if he loses primaries to him.
"The rich don't need a tax cut. The rich need a profit. They're not getting a profit from Bush. They're getting handouts"
Everyone who pays taxes needs a tax cut. The rich, too. They, like other taxpayers, are having the government take less from them. Handout? No. The total money given to them is $0.
So either you change the constitution or the semantics of "American". I'd say the most simple solution is to make Austria a new state of the USA.
Here in Sweden we debate whether joining the European Union was such a clever choice after all. Many claim that we have to, since we cannot make it on our own. How about allowing more states to join the USA so that we actually have some real alternatives to contemplate?
I think that networks that build on the concept of WASTE may offer the revival of BBS-like communities. It has the potential to tie together the community members in a similar fashion to BBS. With a BBS, you have to have a friend with the number. With a WASTE network, you have to have a friend with the public key.
.02 CDN cents. Hope they were worth the mod points =)
But I think that WASTE would have to adopt a more server-centric role to foster the community of a BBS. You would have a central server, offering a bulletin board, doors, and file sharing. It would be pretty cool to be able to set up your own little community for you and your friends just by running a server on your home system. Sure, you can do that now by setting up phpBB with a dyDNS account, but for some reason I see the WASTE concept being easier to advertise and implement (the privacy aspect helps as well). The community could be private or public, and I believe that the community that would grow from such a network could resemble the BBSes of old in a way. Not a replacement, but an alternative.
My
Mars
At root, the meaning of "liberal" is something akin to "freedom". The difference between the way Americans and the rest of the world use the word "liberal" is caused by the different areas of life that they apply the word to.
In the US, "liberalism" is typically applied to social/moral issues. Thus "liberals" support the freedom of people to take drugs, have gay sex, burn the flag, run around naked, etc.
The rest of world tends to apply "liberal" to the economic sphere. Such "liberals" are typically anti-union, anti-minimum-wage, and support the right of business to be free to do whatever the hell they want. That is why, for example, the Liberal Party in Australia is the right-wing party of big business.
Simple really...
Both peoples' deficits were disturbing (and I'm much more inclined to vote Republican.)
Clinton had thrown up his hands just before the Internet boom and said, sorry Charlie, 200 billion dollar deficits as far as the eye could see. Half a trillion dollars a year, well, a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.
I'd like to see an ammendment:
1. No tax increase without 2/3 supermajority or (actual, real, declaration of) war.
2. No deficits without 2/3 supermajority or war.
3. All laws expire 10 years after they are signed unless renewed by a supermajority. Such vote must take place within six months before expiration. (to prevent officials from using delaying tactics to force expiration, or some even more sinister purpose.)
Actually, I'd pass an ammendment that any law at all must have a 9/10ths supermajority to pass. If you can't get 90% of the people to agree something should be a law, then it probably shouldn't. It's rediculous to have this abstraction of might makes right hinge on an ephemeral 50.01%. You get what you deserve -- laws based on what professional liars can convince a bare majority for an instant in time -- and then the law applies forever and ever.
Those of you who study math and computer science should realize what a terrible idea a simple 51% is for that reason.
Consider a high IQ society that allows the top 2% in. Now consider that they allow the top 2% of any one of dozens of tests. There'll be a ton of people who can't get in on one, but who can statistically on another. Thus they're not really top 2% but rather top 5% or more.
Well, this is even worse, except that 50.01% turns into laws on average based on what the bottom 25% or so think are good ideas. Throw in laws from bought out congressmen and the never-expire rule, and bam! A country can do nothing but spiral ever downward.
Either hes a conservative or hes a socialist, you cannot be in between because these two are polar opposites.
Its not the fact that hes religious, because I dont think anyone who believes in the death penalty is truely religious.
I just dont understand his logic because he doesnt follow any. You cant be conservative at home but a liberal internationally, giving countries welfare, and providing universal healthcare for Iraqis while not doing anything at home. Giving medicine, and money to fix AIDS in Africa but not spending any money to prevent SARs at home.
Bush is illogical and a hypocrite, hes spent more than Clinton yet says Democrats want big government? Government is bigger now than its ever been, thats not conservative.
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I dont save any money, I dont see republicans giving tax cuts to the poor, the ones who really need them.
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Farm subsidies,Steel subsidies, Money to Africa, Money to Iraq, Money to Afganastan, Money to Isreal, billions and billions of dollars of special interest tax breaks to the rich, why is there a cap on taxes? The $80,000 cap, why does it exist? What about giving the rich bigger tax cuts than the middle class? Isnt that an entitlement?
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Just because I could in theory go on welfare now, because I'm poor, doesnt mean its easier to live on welfare.
The government makes you work while on welfare, you have absolutely no privacy while on welfare, you lose freedom, you must sign tons of paper work, and the check really isnt even that big, maybe enough money to buy food.
Instead of being on welfare, I myself just get free food when its offered. I mean thats all welfare pays for, FOOD, unless you have kids.
I'd think Universal healthcare does benefit the middle class, thats a democrat idea,
You are right democrats use money to provide a safety net, and Republicans want you to have no safety net.
But please do not assume Republicans dont waste money, Republicans waste more of your money than the Democrats.
Who is giving 15 billion to Africa? 20 billion to Turkey, billions to Afganastan, Billions to isreal, HUNDREDS of billions rebuilding Iraq.
All of these countries are essentially on welfare thanks to the Republicans, the same Republicans dont want you to have welfare.
Iraq will have Universal Healthcare, Africa will have Universal Healthcare, both countries get free food, Isreal is getting economic support, Schools are being built in these countries, guess what, ALL WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS!
Republicans give welfare to the third world, Democrats give welfare domestically.
NEITHER ARE CONSERVATIVE. Both want to make government bigger, Republicans just want to pretend like they are conservative by cutting taxes while they spend a fortune and grow government.
I think the Democrats cater to the middle class moreso than the Republicans, Welfare was reformed under president Clinton, Under Clinton your salary rose greater than it did in 30 years, you had middle class people finally starting to buy stock!
The Democrats were responsible for creating a BIGGER middle class, they create a bigger middle class by helping the lower class rise up to middle class, once you get to middle class theres not so much help, but by having a safety net, and having a way out of the middle class, it helps with class mobility.
In a Republican world, based on their ideology, there is no way to move up in class, its impossible.
How can you get a better job if theres no public schools ? How can you move up in class without financial aid to help you pay for college? How can you move up in class if you dont live long enough to do so, because theres no universal healthcare?
Republicans want to limit competition by keeping the classes seperate, its divide and conquer, while the middle class and lower middle class fight over stuff like welfare and entitlements, they continue to take more of Americans resources from you while you do all the work to create it.
So yeah Republicans are smarter than Democrats, because they have you doing all the work like a bunch of slaves while they take all the credit, money, and reap all the benefits.
You cant have healthcare even though you are the nurse in the hospital, but the CEO who does nothing but go to meetings and give speeches for a living, he has healthcare.
You kids dont get to go to school because you dont have the money to afford a private school, forget the fact that your kids may be smarter or work harder, but a richer yet dumber kid can go to a private school and get a free ride to Yale.
Is this fair? You work hard all your life and have nothing to show for it, but these lazy Republicans who happen to have been born rich, get to give themselves entitlements, tax cuts, etc?
Lets not forget Republicans have their welfare too, its called corperate welfare, when the rich CEO's company is about to go out of business, all they have to do is make a call to the Republican government and get a nice bailout, hell they might even get subsidies.
One phonecall to the FCC and they can take over the media. The Republicans control all the money, therefore they control America. The only way to g
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The big corperations will take Bush's tax cut money and use that to hire workers over seas.
So Bush is just giving more jobs to India.
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It doesnt matter how many votes you get, it matters what states you win.
The democrats dont NEED more votes, they need more states.
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Why should we give money to these countries? Why should we be protecting Isreal? I mean conservatives believe the poor should help themselves right?
So Bush is no conservative.
Why give 15 Billion to Africa? Let them solve the Aids problem themselves, and let Iraq rebuild their own damn country.
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Very cool idea! ...
...
;)
...
;) be productive!
had an idea too
call it UBERnet layered over the
hard internet.
using UDP to broadcast your UBERnet address.
speed:
"Slammer's attack was ruthless and quick,
spreading hundreds of times faster than
the Code Red virus or Nimda worm. Yet it
started with a single killer packet. The
tiny worm hit its first victim at 12:30 am
Eastern standard time. The machine - a
server running Microsoft SQL - instantly
started spewing millions of Slammer clones,
targeting computers at random. By 12:33 am,
the number of slave servers in Slammer's
replicant army was doubling every 8.5 seconds."
run a UEBERnet name server process:
it tells what ports you got to offer.
it registers about 50 user (max) and parent
UEBERNET name servers (UnS).
you start your UBERnet client which looks
for the closesed/youngest UnS (he's your BOSS)
and registers your name with it.
the UBERnet client starts the UnS locally
(now your the youngest).
Uebernet client will service request from
the webbrowser etc
the oldest UnS is the ROOT-UEBERnet (like beeing ROOT DNS). if this one goes off-line, which tends to happen with DIAL-UP users, the next oldest one becomes BOSS etc.
consider the Server-Client tandem a productiv
WORM or VIRUS! GET INFECTED!
this would be cool because you could get a
name: uebernet.pirhana or just PIRHANA!
and you could keep it even if you drop offline.
you would re-register with UBERnet as soon as you go on-line again (with an new IP-adresse!).
the network will remember you.
guessing:
200 million user-names, 60 million dial-up
user using UBERnet on-line at any given time.
every UnS would just have to service/remember
3.33_ names
it would be interesting to see
the LIST of UBERnet-names flow around the world,
because when america goes to bed asia is waking up(?)
this would be a great distributed computing experiment/example.
we would be free from registering www-addresses and static/hard IP. but still have all the benefits of both. you could even run your own SMTP/APACHE/IRC/FTP/... services!
you get
me@pirhana.UNet!
www.pirhana.UNet!
dynamicBIND, yeah! staticBIND, buh!
Don't flame and tell me it's UBERkill
why this hasn't happend yet? ask the goverment (NSA, FBI, CIA, carnivor etc.)
Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and achievement. They hate rewarding weakness for the same reason a parent hates rewarding kids' poor grades. This, more than anything else, is what makes conservatives so radically different from liberals. It's why favorite liberal buzzwords like "fairness" and "opportunity" are fingernails on the chalkboards of conservative minds. To conservatives, those words are code-talk for punishing the strong and rewarding the weak. As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.
While it's inevitable that in any given industry 'winners' - companies that dominate that industry - emerge, it's important to understand how those companies became 'winners'. If these companies, or company as the case may be, became 'winners' because of unfair and/or illegal business practices, then these companies should be held under scrutiny.
If conservatives like 'winners' and 'strength' but also like 'competition', then how do they feel about monopolies, or virtual monopolies? It doesn't seem consistent to favor 1 or even several companies dominating a given market, as one result of such dominance would seem to be less consumer choice. Even several companies dominating a market could ultimately lead to collusion.
I also wonder what favoring 'strength' translates to in terms of public policy. Do we turn our backs on the poor, since they're 'weak'? What about foreign policy? Do we attack weaker nations that have resources we need/want, just because they're weaker and because we can attack them, with impunity?
Is the traditional American ethos of justice and fair play that we pride ourselves on destined to be replaced with one of 'Might makes right'?
Eastern Catholics use vulgate (local language) and always have. Don't universalize a pissing match if it doesn't fit the facts. For a very long time, latin *was* vulgate and the western church never really wanted to let go of one language.
" Incidentally, 'libertarian' used to mean a libertarian socialist, ie an anarchist."
That's a couple of contradictions there. "Libertarian socialist" = one who is for personal freedom but is for totalitarian control of economics"?
Socialist vs anarchist? That's the most government vs the least government.
Libertarian socialist, and socialist anarchist are oxymorons.
"Exactly! When the Shrub was promising tax cuts and said, "It's your money", he somehow neglected to mention the $3 trillion of debt (or whatever the amount was/is) and to remind us, "It's your debt".
It is the government's debt, caused by their own bungling. The debt can be taken care of by reducing waste and unnecessary "services" and handouts, without soaking the taxpayer for their mistakes.
" It sure does! We are paying taxes based on the 1975 assessment of this house. That's a HUGE tax break."
A tax break is not a subsidy. When someone swipes less of what you earned, it is not a gift, welfare, or subsidy.
It takes a real twist to call it a subsidy. Hey! Do you have underwear? You only have it because the government has not taken it. It is a government subsidy, and we are paying for your underwear!
"Why is socialism bad? It works in so many other countries (see also: Europe)."
Is that sarcastic? Or do you not realize that the countries in Europe that were most socialist were nightmare hellholes of environmental devastation, economic despair, and lack of human rights?
Countries like Sweden are barely socialist, as most of the economy remains controlled by the public instead of the State (even though the State controls a greater percentage than in the U.S.). If you want to see what socialism does when it is much more fully implemented, look at pre 1990 Czechoslovakia, Hungrary, Poland, and the others.
"[Kerry] recently found out that he's of Jewish heritage and given the problems with the middle east, I'm not sure the average American wants to enflame the region more (I personally don't have a problem with this but there are a lot of people who would)."
So Kerry would anger the neo-nazis just because of his (?) ethnic heritage? Out of the many reasons, this is the wrong reason to vote against Kerry. If it comes down to this, vote for him to give the Nazis hell.
" Moderate? Bush is a religous ideologue. Or a radical nationalist. And quite possibly a facist. This is clearly the most extremist government I've lived under, I don't know how you can call it moderate."
He is not an "idealogue": he is much more of a pragmatist. There is nothing "radical nationalist" or fascist about him. He's less extreme than Clinton, so the only way he is the most extremist you have lived under is if he is the only one you have lived under.
I recall something like this showing up in "Demolition Man," the Sly Stallone movie modeled somewhat after Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_.
Sorry, I was figuring on a bi-weekly basis. That should have been:
In my area even housing used over 70 hours/ 2 week s just by itself.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"All the original proponents of anarchism, from Proudhon to Kropotkin, called themselves socialists."
It's a wonder their brains did not explode from the drastic contradiction. No wonder their ideas mean nothing in the real world.
"Socialism does not mean 'government control of all industry'."
It means government control of economic matters (not just industry)
"Socialism means 'workers control the means and products'"
That is not true at all in practice, as socialist governments are considered to be that because of government control of economics (not "worker" control).
"anarchists are for self-managed factories, cooperatives and communes, etc."
The contradiction arises again. It takes a very strong government to enforce such management rules and living rules on people (as opposed to letting the people involved work it out for themselves). Strong government negates anarchy.
""Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,"
No, freedom without socialism is just that: freedom. No problem of the injustice of socialism (which is unjust because people take your decisions and power away from you for no good reason)
"For more info try www.anarchistfaq.org"
Been there. I also know about the oxymoronic Emma Goldsman, who called herself an anarchist, but fought for more government control and restrictions over what people could do.
www.socal-freenet.com
-M@
" This is bang on and the term for it is "Wage Slavery"."
That is an inaccurate term, since thereis no slavery involved.
" Even into the early 1900s American workers were being killed if they even thought about unionizing."
Now, union thugs commit violence against workers who don't want to be in the union.
"These same pressure tactics are used today. Not violence, but simply the threat of mass lay-offs"
Thanks to "closed shop", workers are laid off for refusing to join the union.
Danke Schön, mein Freund. :)
You just made my day
(Adolf)
De nada, mi amigo... I enjoy the trolling rivalry, reminiscent of early ninties hip hop animosity.
*looks over shoulder for gun toting rival faction trolls*
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
" 10. No they are not, most if not all laws are hevily based on the Bible, Scripture of a Single religion.
Have you ever actually bothered to look at list of laws and statutes? Hardly any of these can be connected to the Bible. The few that are, like "adultery", if found, really stand out and tend to be ignored.
" 10. No they are not, most if not all laws are hevily based on the Bible, Scripture of a Single religion."
Second, even assuming that your quite-ignorant-of-the-law assertion were true, you've still made no case.
Even if all laws were based on the Bible, this would not mean "church and state". Just because you "like" the Bible does not mean you are churchgoing (or even attached to a single church). A large percentage of Americans fit this.
If it were true (and it is not) that most laws are bible-based, this would mean that there was a religion-state connection, NOT a church-state connection.
"If you think that lawmakers, judges, and others dont heavily base everything they do off of whatever religious background they have, you are a fool."
That these lawmakers are allowed to follow their conscience only shows that there is freedom.
"and social security should be phased out in a manner which still gives benefits to those who were promised them, and even allows voluntary contributions for those who already have an account established"
Agreed, but isn't it simpler to stop the whole thing, and give everyone a check for the amount that they paid in?