Slashdot Mirror
RIAA and BSA's Lawyers Taking Top Justice Posts
An anonymous reader writes "Following the appointment of RIAA's champion Donald Verrilli as associate deputy attorney general, here's a complete roundup of all the RIAA and BSA-linked lawyers comfortably seated at top posts at the Department of Justice by the new government. Not strange, since US VP Joe Biden is well known for pushing the copyright warmongers' agenda in Washington. Just in case you don't know, Verrilli is the nice man who sued the pants off Jammie Thomas."
So true, we need to start electing engineers. While lawyers focus on ideological agendas, engineers focus on efficiency and effectiveness. (Just an observation, of course there are ideological engineers and efficiency-focused lawyers, but as a whole, lawyers are looking out for themselves and engineers try and see the big picture and how everything is interrelated.)
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
I'm currently more interested in this as a real test of the Obama administration's sincerity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7870049.stm
If Obama can't come forward and say to us "Yes, your courts can now open that evidence" then it is evidence of one important fact. Obama is a fraud.
He cannot possibly on one hand talk of bringing those guilty of torture to justice and then prevent us doing so on the other.
I think that it's actually our government that's playing up here because they do not want it coming out in the open that our security services were equally guilty of assisting in torture, but all Obama needs to do to make that clear is come forward. By the sounds of it our foreign secretary hasn't even approached the Obama administration yet and if that's true then it's a local issue, if that's not true then the world has bigger problems.
If he can't then yeah, I think he's a fraud and yeah, I think these RIAA appointments possibly are more than just a case of hiring experienced lawyers (i.e. did they work for the RIAA because they believed the cause, or for the money?).
I truly hope it's not too much to ask to at last have an important world leader that can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
When grasping the fact that the copyright barons are taking over the Justice Dept, remember that there is fundamental shift happening in the media industry.
The media industry is basically a 20th-century phenomenon. The technology of the 20th-century created a structure where the best musicians of the world sold their musical in the format of fixed recordings through a centralized company. The recordings are the product. Under this structure, the musicians (and actors) become stars or mini-deities.
The main idea here is that the recordings (of music or filmed performance) are the product that is sold on concept of a fixed price regardless of the 'artist' or the quality of the performance. The unnoticed aspect of this model is that there is NO interactivity between the recordings and the people who buy the recordings.
The 21st-century entertainment media model is one of increasing interactivity between the recording and the person buying the recording. Starting with crude television-based video games in the 1980s, there has been a strong increase in the amount of interaction between the person 'consuming' the entertainment product and the entertainment product itself. The RIAA/MPAA can't reproduce this interactivity, neither can the companies who create fixed product (audio CDs, films). But this interactivity is becoming the key aspect of the entertainment experience that people (especially young people in their teens and twenties) are willing to pay for.
The more that the RIAA/MPAA are successful at forcing people away from obtaining low-cost fixed recordings, the more that they drive their core consumer base into interactive entertainment products that they don't control. They don't seem to realize this, primarily because the RIAA/MPAA companies are stuck in the 20th-century. The Slashdaughters generally grasp this concept, but they are mostly young and technologically oriented. They are the demographic most likely to copy RIAA/MPAA product, this is true, but they are also the first people to move beyond RIAA/MPAA product to meet their entertainment needs.
As the economic structure of the 20th-century fades, then so will the influence (and bullying ability) of the global media companies. As long as the RIAA/MPAA lawyers don't understand or control the emerging fields of interactive entertainment, it doesn't matter if the control the US Justice Department. They will remain 20th-century wolves chasing 20th-century sheep.
It depends. There's good reason to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope tests of your theories - first order approximations to see if your idea makes sense. You won't be able to do that if you can't do basic arithmetic in your brain. Maybe at some point we'll be able to tie computers directly into our brains so that just thinking an equation provides us with the solution, but until that happens somebody who can do the math in his brain will have an edge. Indeed, unless you always whip out the calculator at the cash register, it could mean you're also an easier mark to rip off.
I'm reminded of a couple of chapters in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War where Wil Wachendon enters a chess tournament where he plays unassisted against computer-assisted chess players. He gets his butt whipped by the computer-assisted players. That changes his attitude regarding using computer assist to solve problems. However I think the reverse would be true as well, the computer-assisted players who had never learned to play without the help of a computer would also be at a disadvantage because some of the pattern recognition abilities required for chess would never have developed as strongly. Sure it's fiction, but good SF writers put some pretty strong reality checks on their fiction
Similarly, while you can use Mathematica to do analytical solving of integration problems or differential equations, if you haven't done some of it by hand then you won't have as good an intuitive feel for what the equations that you are manipulating actually mean. That could seriously limit your ability to make new discoveries. But yeah if your ambition is to work on a road crew, you probably won't need to know all of your times tables up to 12x12 by heart.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Under a first order approximation the earth is flat. There's no relativity or quantum mechanics.
Using a computer does not preclude understanding basic mathematics. However, *NOT* using a computer will make it impossible to have an understanding of a growing part of mathematics.
Try to get an understanding of non-linear dynamics without a computer. Chaotic systems. Not to mention that computers are being used in mathematical proofs of theorems. The four-color map was proved over 30 years ago, with computers, and still today no one has found a way to prove it by hand.
I don't mean that paper and pencil should be abolished, and doing math in the head is still an essential ability in everyday life. But computers are also essential, there can be no teaching of science and mathematics without computers.