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EFF: 48 Hours to Stop the Broadcast Flag
The Importance of writes "Think the Broadcast Flag is dead? EFF is warning that Hollywood is trying to sneak the broadcast flag into law as an amendment to a massive appropriations bill. 'If what we hear is true, the provision will be introduced before a subcommittee tomorrow and before the full appropriations committee on Thursday. That gives us 48 hours to stop it.' Action Alert here. List of Senator's phone numbers here."
i'd write my senators, but i can't find my checkbook.
Is playing dirty somehow beneath the good guys? Oh, that's what makes them the good guys...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Philosophy.
The CRIA thing was only introduced as a bill, it's not law yet. Contact your MP. I have.
Why don't all the "special interests" who hate special interests sneaking arbitrary laws into bills get together to outlaw them?
Every bill must have a scope. It must apply to a single budget, or a single government organization, or their subsidiaries. Or it must be a "metabill", which specifies only a collection of bills related in an explicit policy, the exact relationship stated in the metabill.
Of course, Congressmembers should be voting against these big bills, with arbitrary attachments, on the principle of government manageability. But they obviously don't - they're all codependent on letting each other's attachments pass, often regardless of consequences, in exchange for the same favor later on. So we need to force them to stop doing it. Because the mass of laws, their inner complexity and scale, is killing the ability of anyone to participate in our democracy beyond any significant confrontation with the law. When only the lawyers win, we all lose.
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make install -not war
I'm an Australian so when I first heard about rider bills I honestly didn't beleive it. Then I discovered that Australia also had the problem of rider bills at some stage. We recognised them as a problem and we fixed them. We no longer have rider bills. Does any other democracy on earth still have them? Is it impossible for americans to recognise a problem and fix it without ballsing it up? It just seems you have all these parasites gaming your political process and you do nothing about it. You know how everyone knows that US congressmen take bribes? Well, here in Australia, it's illegal for politicians to take bribes. It's like that in the rest of the world too right? So why can't americans recognise something that's so straight forward and simple (politicans should not be permitted to take bribes) and do something about it?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yap yap revolution yap yap. How about running for Congress, on a legitimate reform platform, or backing someone who will? Most of the Constitution has articles, and a "bill" of rights, to institutionalize "revolution", without opening the door to anarchy, mob rule, or - most likely today - corporate fascism without its mediagenic face. The entire House of Representatives, and 1/3 of the Senate are up for grabs in only 18 months. Unless you're willing to throw constitutional representative democracy itself on the line, why don't you just use the revolutionary institutions we've got, to throw out the tyrants? It
s because you sound so much cooler talking about revolution than talking about campaigning for election, right? Actually putting liberty, to say nothing of your life, on the line, has nothing to do with your tough talk.
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make install -not war
As for utilizing the analog hole, yes, that remains possible, but there are serious drawbacks - remember that we're talking about HDTV here - I'm pretty sure all the ways that that actually gets transmitted over the wire transmits the flag.
Now, obviously from a technological standpoint, this means nothing - there will be firmware hacks, instructions on how to assemble a flag stripper from $0.47's worth of parts from Radio Shack, and of course eBay. It will end up being slightly easier than disabling Macrovision, slightly harder than making your DVD-player region free. But the important thing is, it will be illegal!
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm fucking tired of everything I do being made technically illegal, even if it has no tangible effect. I'm not ripping anybody off, I'm not sharing with millions of my closest friends, I'm just trying to record telvision shows when I'm not home, and sometimes watch my DVDs or store my CDs on my computer. I'm not harming anybody, I'm not not paying someone when I should, and so it should. not. be. illegal.
You're right, Duverger's Law (spoiler effect) is a feature (bug!) of the system itself, not any inherent flaw in the platforms of the minor parties. If we used Condorcet voting (not the same as IRV), every party could stand on its own merit. There would be no advantage inherent in being an incumbent party, or having the perception of being one of the most popular.
Of course, if everybody voted honestly instead of strategically there wouldn't be a problem either. But since that's awfully hard to do when the system encourages strategic thinking, we ought to change the system so that it encourages honesty. I don't know how we can have truly representative government if the people don't vote how they really think.
Politics isn't one-dimensional, so why do we think two parties can accurately reflect all political views? Politics is n-dimensional, for the n different issues that have become political. A strong multi-party system where everybody has a representative voice would be a big help.
Constitutionally Correct