at least this type of censorship is activated at the consumer level, not the broadcaster level. Besides, most parents won't even use it, either because they're too inept to program a vcr or, if parents do manage to operate the vee chip, because no self-respecting kid would allow such a curtailing of their rights to violence on tv.
The new software plays DVDs and also rips CD audio into well-compressed WMA files (a proprietary format that combines good sound quality with smaller file sizes than MP3).
And I'm sure microsoft will be as open with their wma format as the mp3 format was.
Exactly. The problem isn't with the rating, it's with the way rating is going to be carried out. The best and most obvious comparison can be made with film; all film except pr0n is put on the regular shelves, at least where I live (Halifax, NS) - and the rating is just on the box.
Even if all current videogame stores had seperate rooms already, taking the 18+ games off the regular shelf restricts their use more than necessary. The consumer only needs the basic information; anything else goes to creating a stigma, and is comperable to public shameing.
It isn't very hard to understand, Mr. T. You'll have to upgrade hw regardless of os. The difference in cost, and thus the savings, comes from the fact that you won't have to pay for your system software, at the very least. As for the vm, they can use wine.
Your answer lies in the names of microsoft os-es. Windows 95, 98, 2000,... just to keep current, they (like most everyone else) probably need to upgrade every few years. You'd save a lot of money if you eliminated the cost of upgrading.
My my.. harsh words! Let my try and clear up your confusion. The RIAA is selling more cds now than they did in 1996, 1997, 1998, or 1999. That's a fact. A few studies I've heard mentioned have concluded that napster users buy more records. Napster, therefore, has helped the riaa sell records - simply because the riaa holds 90% of the music market in the US.
But, you ask, 'how the fuck is (napster) going to get rid of (the riaa)?' I answer by pointing out the age-old reason why artists sign onto the riaa in the first place: because, without the riaa, they cannot get national, let alone international, distribution. With napster, any artist - local legend or megastar - can have their music distributed, worldwide, without going through the riaa. And, presuming that anyone who uses napster has a web browser, they can also sell their records (through snail mail) to their newfound audience. Do you get it now?
You're making no sense, though you might like to think you were. First, you're assuming all artists don't want their music traded. Second, you're assuming artists have control of their music. If they singed with an riaa member, they do not have control of their music - the riaa does. Third, you're ignoring (as another poster has mentioned) the difference between cashless exchange of music and the profit-based excange of information. Lastly, you are ignoring the difference between the action of contributing to the CDDB - an action taken to make that information freely available to all who want it, and that of the artist's recording of music, and the subsequent purchcasing of that music by the riaa - an action taken to control information with the aim of profiting from people's use of it.
Man, dude, you used to get it. You'd point to Chuck D; you'd let others know that the average napser used buys more records than the average music-listener, and that cd sales have been going up every year napster has been around. You'd be calm when people called you a theif, and tell them about how the record contracts before napster were shit for the artist, and how the idea of copyright should be put into serious question because the record companies wern't needed anymore. That the RIAA was a group of middlemen desperatly trying to regain control of a market whose whole existance was owed to the fact that, in bygone times, you had to buy a phyiscal record to be able to play music at home. You'd give all the old platitudes about how the cat can't be put back in the bag. Most importantly, you'd know that you spent more money on music after napster than before. You'd know that your the amount of music you knew after napster was much greater than before. You'd know that you really wanted that special-edition LP by that band you heard on napster.
But you've changed, dude. Now, you sit quite as people call you a thief; or worse, you jump on the bandwagon yourself can say that the whole napster thing was nothing more than a mass looting of the riaa's accounts. Man, I hate to say it, but.. you're conforming. And, by the speed of your change, I might even think that you were conforming while napster was around.
I may be wrong, but why wouldn't they just match mp3 filenames with song/album names from the cddb database? I realize that not all albums in the cddb are controlled by the riaa, but since when in this whole affair has exactitude been the prime concern?
Ah, trolling. IHBT; YHBT. More specifically, YTHBT. But to get back to the serious matter at hand...
Can you imagine the uproar when my grandma and yours are asked to set up a little drug certification laboratory in their kitchens?
I don't have to imagine... where do you think I get my crack?
None of the software I use at home or at work was purchased
Fair enough; though I can assume, from that statement, that you would like to enact a law which would force all developers to release code under the GPL! Commie!
I doubt Linus will put a backdoor into my software. It is possible, but he has been trustworthy in the pas.
Yeah, Linus is trusted in my PGP prefs, too. That's irrelevent, though, due to the fact that Linus hardly contributes to the kernel development anymore. That fact is made all the worse, seeing as most of the original work wasn't done by Linus anyway, that no-good slacker.
You've ACd, so I'm not sure if you're going to read this, or if this is even a troll, but that being said (or tbs - a new internet contraction!)... You may not be able to catch, especially as a citizen with no direct authority over the federal government other than your vote, the 'irregularities' which seem to inevitably pop up when there is a large-scale program, but I would also submit to you that you'd not be able to catch the small-scale 'irregularities' (aka theft/fraud) that occurs when such programs are instituted on a small scale. And, if the 'small scale' you are speaking about is on a town, county, or even state level, the total amount of ill-used money will probably be equal, or greater, than what would have been stolen with the feds. Not only that, but there is a clear logical reason why one would want to insititute such programs on a federal level - namely, citizens who are equally needy in different parts of the nation are given equal benifits. Otherwise, the quality of social services would fluctuate from area to area based on the wealth and priorities of different local governments.
In short, federal funding of essentail social services has a clear benifit - more equal distribution of services - , and the drawback you mention is counterbalanced by a similar, and most probably equal, drawback when such programs are instituted on a local scale.
We had these for 30 years and where are the results?
Don't ask me.. ask the kid who had at least some roof over his head rather than living in a shantytown.. ask the student who managed to go to college because of a government bursery.. ask the old man who was given only meal by a government-funded soup kitchen. Ask someone whose only access funding for a needed medical operation or drugs for a heart condition comes from Uncle Sam. And so on. Basically, look at those who have benifiitted. If you expect a government service to end poverty, or get rid of a social ill entierly, you're asking alot; you're probably asking too much. What you should put through your mind, however, is an idea of how things would be for the poor if there were no government services given to the poor who need them. And then tell me how you would provide for your family if you were ever unemployed, or the most you could earn was $5 per hour - without any outside help. And they're dead. Unless you can prove god takes MasterCard, I don't see how they'll be needing their money. Having such a tax allows some of their money to go to good use.. be it through donations to charity to avoid the tax (a common practice) or through the common use of their money by it's taxation.
First, I don't really know what you mean when you say' 'these wonderful gov't programs of yours have never worked'. In what way - in that they haven't achived their goals, or that they haven't been a fiscal success? They have made small but perceptable improvements many people's lives. They have educated some people who would otherwise not have had an education. I will admit that they didn't end all poverty, or improve the university education levels to 99% of potential students; that dosen't change the fact that they have helped, and are helping, a lot of the peole who wouldn't otherwise have that help.
Saying public-service programs do harm to 'these very black underclass people you claim to want to help' is even more perplexing. Are you refering to the 'welfare-bum' boogyman? In that case, all I can say to you is that you should check the facts; the vast (i.e. 95%+) of people on welfare have no desire to stay on welfare,while a statistic that sticks out in my mind from a debate on welfare reform in Ontario (Canada) stated that around 1-3% of people use it for extended (1 year+) periods of time. How any other government program could do harm, or at least do more harm than good, will be beyond me until you enlighten me.
All that being said, how would you help the poor? Would you help the poor? Basically, I can't see how removing an economic advantage recieved by the poorest would help them. Because of the way the system works, most poor already have little opportunity.. denying, or not supplying as well as you could, a benifit to them seems like the last thing you should do.
That argument makes little sense. First of all, giving a tax cut - regardless of size (in percentage) - to and lower income earners would have a immediate and substatial effect on their lives. While being able to afford food which is marginally better, or being able to heat one's house a few degrees warmer in winter is not - by most standards - a huge deal, being kept from doing this is a substatial detriment to the daily life.
Secondly, your argument oversimplifies the situation drastically. It's not like country's divided between those who earn a few thousand per day and those who earn a few thousand per year. There is, generally speaking, a small group of very rich people, a very large group of middle-income (comprimising the lower, mid, and upper - middle class - around 70% of the population, afaik) earners, and a small (though larger than the 'very rich' group) group of low-income people. One's options, when planning tax cuts, arn't limited to either Bill Gates or Bill Gates' custodian. A tax break given to middle-income earners would give most of them a perceptable improvement in life, be it through long term or short term spending. A tax break for the 'rich' (for the sake of argument, those whose access to non-paper money is greater than $1m.. but don't hold me to that) would probably give them any significant improvement in life. The difference between eating two meals a day rather than three meals per day is much greater than the difference between taking 4 trips abroad per year rather than taking 5 trips abroad per year.
Finally, taxing the rich more than the poor is not exploitation of the rich by the poor. It is taxation according to need, and ability to pay - the only rational way to organize a tax structure. Simply put, were the tax system to be based on absolute equality, tax rates would be set according to the lowest economic denominator, the poor. Were this to be done,and you taxed the everyone as much as you taxed the poor, you would either have a destitue government, or a destitue lower class.
The salon article did a much better job of describing why the estate tax is a good thing than I ever could. Still, think of this - do you think more good would be done by having the Chicago Defender owned by the family that currently owns it by not having the estate tax, rather than using the money generated by the estate tax to fund essential public-service programs which directly help the readership of that, and nearly all, newspapers in the nation?
There will always be isolated examples of low- and mid- income people and buisnesses that are hurt by the estate tax. What you should keep in mind, however, is that a repeal of the estate tax would help all wealthy citizens, while helping few poor citizens. In short, look at the bigger picture.
Re:Classic stupid *poster* mistake...
on
The Dot in .mars
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· Score: 1
... and the question to that bafflingly obvious comment was Could there come a day when astronauts or colonies of people living on Mars could communicate with Earth in real-time?
Classic stupid reporter question..
on
The Dot in .mars
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· Score: 1
From the article: We don't know of a way today to convey information between Earth and Mars at a speed faster than the speed of light. [It takes light six to eight minutes to travel the round-trip distance.] We don't foresee a way to get rid of the latency in the communications.
... there must be some sort of webpage which collects this type of quote somewhere.
Why not have a system which shares files in the same way as napster, but records in a db the name and band/composer of each song downloaded. The users of the system would pay a subsciption fee to access the system, and the money gained from the subscription fees would be sent to all artists whose songs were traded over the network, either sending a fixed fee per song (it wouldn't be hard to top what most artists get from current record deals, afaik) or a share of the subscription fees, according to how often their songs were downloaded. That way, artists could happily put their own songs online, perhaps even hosting them themselves, with no concerns over just payment or distribution. The advangate to the artist would be the ability to bypass the fleecing they get from riaa-ites; the advantage to the user would be having a system with all the advantages of napster, but with the added value of having a system whose future is more certain than that of a knat, and the ethical benifit gained by knowing you arn't ripping off artists more than the riaa.
I'll preface this by saying almost everything I know about communist theory comes from a single two-term course, so I'm not the definitive source. Marx himself fills that position nicely. That being said...
The flaw you point out - who determines need, and who fills that need - is, truthfully, never fully addressed, even by Marx. Marx's reasoning, to greatly summarise (if you have free time, I suggest reading The German Ideology, or buying (!) 'The Marx Engles Reader', edited by Robert Tucker) is that there will be at some point a revolution by the working classes of the world, after which a society will develop in which everyone will willingly inhabit a system where each individual does the work which they want to do, and takes only what they require. This 'state' would have no government as it is known now, and the only person who determines your need would be your (honest) self
There are several remarkably serious problems with this system - who decides what infrastructure to build and where, what to do with people who don't follow the rules, etc. . The reason communism has and had such an influence and pull over people is not the system itself, but the basis for it - that there is a pattern to history (oppression of the ruled classes by the ruling class, revolt by the rulled class, establishment of a new ruling class who in turn oppresses the new ruled class), that the pattern is reaching a climax with the new (in Marx's time) simplification of class conflict into a bourgeoisie and proletariat, and - this is where theory comes in - that the only way history can go after this simplification of class conflict is to a system in which class conflict, and therefore conflict (economic and otherwise) itself, is no more. And the fact that if there was a consensus in a population to agree to the to/from principal, it could work. It's just the consensus that's the bitch.
Pointing out to someone that their ideas resemble some aspects of communism (I've always boiled communism down to 'from each his ability, to each his need', but that's just me..) is as necessary as pointing out to someone that they're writing in english, or that they're using http to access slashdot. If, however, the poster had said his ideas wern't communist, your comment would be unimpeachable. The point made was concerning software, not political ideologies.
The parent post is just flamebait... if you'd read the links in the article, or even the parent post itself, you would see that. Don't belive everything you read, even if it uses tactful language.
Intangible, copyable items have (for the last century at least) always straddled the line between consumer and corporate control. Music, books, videos, and the like have delt with this by regulating (but not enforcing, on a wide or copy-by-copy scale at least) some ways of using the product (publically broadcasting music without permission, making copies of books or music for amigos, etc). In short, copyright laws. What's new, in my mind at least, is the concept that a merchant or producer of a product (copyable or otherwise) has the right to not only control ways of using the product, but also where and for how long the product is used.
I don't see how this can last for much longer, however... most of the corporations who demand the new restrictions are in the usa, and -for better or for worse - the us is one of the more litigation-happy nations on earth. Somewhere, sometime (maybe even the 2600 decss appeal) the concept of this new level of control will probably be judged untenable. -enough jkatzing for today. back to osx!-
I'm drunk, and I read this thinking 'what does this fucker know!?! I'm a person who hasn't coded anyhing except first year cs shite, and he thinks the new os of my fav computer company is bad? fuck him!' just thought i'd mention that! hahahahahahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Slashdot Mirror
at least this type of censorship is activated at the consumer level, not the broadcaster level. Besides, most parents won't even use it, either because they're too inept to program a vcr or, if parents do manage to operate the vee chip, because no self-respecting kid would allow such a curtailing of their rights to violence on tv.
The new software plays DVDs and also rips CD audio into well-compressed WMA files (a proprietary format that combines good sound quality with smaller file sizes than MP3).
And I'm sure microsoft will be as open with their wma format as the mp3 format was.
Even if all current videogame stores had seperate rooms already, taking the 18+ games off the regular shelf restricts their use more than necessary. The consumer only needs the basic information; anything else goes to creating a stigma, and is comperable to public shameing.
It isn't very hard to understand, Mr. T. You'll have to upgrade hw regardless of os. The difference in cost, and thus the savings, comes from the fact that you won't have to pay for your system software, at the very least. As for the vm, they can use wine.
Your answer lies in the names of microsoft os-es. Windows 95, 98, 2000, ... just to keep current, they (like most everyone else) probably need to upgrade every few years. You'd save a lot of money if you eliminated the cost of upgrading.
But, you ask, 'how the fuck is (napster) going to get rid of (the riaa)?' I answer by pointing out the age-old reason why artists sign onto the riaa in the first place: because, without the riaa, they cannot get national, let alone international, distribution. With napster, any artist - local legend or megastar - can have their music distributed, worldwide, without going through the riaa. And, presuming that anyone who uses napster has a web browser, they can also sell their records (through snail mail) to their newfound audience. Do you get it now?
You're making no sense, though you might like to think you were. First, you're assuming all artists don't want their music traded. Second, you're assuming artists have control of their music. If they singed with an riaa member, they do not have control of their music - the riaa does. Third, you're ignoring (as another poster has mentioned) the difference between cashless exchange of music and the profit-based excange of information. Lastly, you are ignoring the difference between the action of contributing to the CDDB - an action taken to make that information freely available to all who want it, and that of the artist's recording of music, and the subsequent purchcasing of that music by the riaa - an action taken to control information with the aim of profiting from people's use of it.
www stands for something: world wide web. So, the average dolt would assume that 'www' denotes a website.
But you've changed, dude. Now, you sit quite as people call you a thief; or worse, you jump on the bandwagon yourself can say that the whole napster thing was nothing more than a mass looting of the riaa's accounts. Man, I hate to say it, but.. you're conforming. And, by the speed of your change, I might even think that you were conforming while napster was around.
I may be wrong, but why wouldn't they just match mp3 filenames with song/album names from the cddb database? I realize that not all albums in the cddb are controlled by the riaa, but since when in this whole affair has exactitude been the prime concern?
Can you imagine the uproar when my grandma and yours are asked to set up a little drug certification laboratory in their kitchens?
I don't have to imagine... where do you think I get my crack?
None of the software I use at home or at work was purchased
Fair enough; though I can assume, from that statement, that you would like to enact a law which would force all developers to release code under the GPL! Commie!
I doubt Linus will put a backdoor into my software. It is possible, but he has been trustworthy in the pas.
Yeah, Linus is trusted in my PGP prefs, too. That's irrelevent, though, due to the fact that Linus hardly contributes to the kernel development anymore. That fact is made all the worse, seeing as most of the original work wasn't done by Linus anyway, that no-good slacker.
I've seen but the opening scene of the lone gunmen, and I would officially like to register my disgust througout the world.
You may not be able to catch, especially as a citizen with no direct authority over the federal government other than your vote, the 'irregularities' which seem to inevitably pop up when there is a large-scale program, but I would also submit to you that you'd not be able to catch the small-scale 'irregularities' (aka theft/fraud) that occurs when such programs are instituted on a small scale. And, if the 'small scale' you are speaking about is on a town, county, or even state level, the total amount of ill-used money will probably be equal, or greater, than what would have been stolen with the feds.
Not only that, but there is a clear logical reason why one would want to insititute such programs on a federal level - namely, citizens who are equally needy in different parts of the nation are given equal benifits. Otherwise, the quality of social services would fluctuate from area to area based on the wealth and priorities of different local governments.
In short, federal funding of essentail social services has a clear benifit - more equal distribution of services - , and the drawback you mention is counterbalanced by a similar, and most probably equal, drawback when such programs are instituted on a local scale.
Don't ask me.. ask the kid who had at least some roof over his head rather than living in a shantytown.. ask the student who managed to go to college because of a government bursery.. ask the old man who was given only meal by a government-funded soup kitchen. Ask someone whose only access funding for a needed medical operation or drugs for a heart condition comes from Uncle Sam. And so on. Basically, look at those who have benifiitted. If you expect a government service to end poverty, or get rid of a social ill entierly, you're asking alot; you're probably asking too much. What you should put through your mind, however, is an idea of how things would be for the poor if there were no government services given to the poor who need them. And then tell me how you would provide for your family if you were ever unemployed, or the most you could earn was $5 per hour - without any outside help.
And they're dead. Unless you can prove god takes MasterCard, I don't see how they'll be needing their money. Having such a tax allows some of their money to go to good use.. be it through donations to charity to avoid the tax (a common practice) or through the common use of their money by it's taxation.
Saying public-service programs do harm to 'these very black underclass people you claim to want to help' is even more perplexing. Are you refering to the 'welfare-bum' boogyman? In that case, all I can say to you is that you should check the facts; the vast (i.e. 95%+) of people on welfare have no desire to stay on welfare,while a statistic that sticks out in my mind from a debate on welfare reform in Ontario (Canada) stated that around 1-3% of people use it for extended (1 year+) periods of time. How any other government program could do harm, or at least do more harm than good, will be beyond me until you enlighten me.
All that being said, how would you help the poor? Would you help the poor? Basically, I can't see how removing an economic advantage recieved by the poorest would help them. Because of the way the system works, most poor already have little opportunity.. denying, or not supplying as well as you could, a benifit to them seems like the last thing you should do.
Secondly, your argument oversimplifies the situation drastically. It's not like country's divided between those who earn a few thousand per day and those who earn a few thousand per year. There is, generally speaking, a small group of very rich people, a very large group of middle-income (comprimising the lower, mid, and upper - middle class - around 70% of the population, afaik) earners, and a small (though larger than the 'very rich' group) group of low-income people. One's options, when planning tax cuts, arn't limited to either Bill Gates or Bill Gates' custodian. A tax break given to middle-income earners would give most of them a perceptable improvement in life, be it through long term or short term spending. A tax break for the 'rich' (for the sake of argument, those whose access to non-paper money is greater than $1m.. but don't hold me to that) would probably give them any significant improvement in life. The difference between eating two meals a day rather than three meals per day is much greater than the difference between taking 4 trips abroad per year rather than taking 5 trips abroad per year.
Finally, taxing the rich more than the poor is not exploitation of the rich by the poor. It is taxation according to need, and ability to pay - the only rational way to organize a tax structure. Simply put, were the tax system to be based on absolute equality, tax rates would be set according to the lowest economic denominator, the poor. Were this to be done,and you taxed the everyone as much as you taxed the poor, you would either have a destitue government, or a destitue lower class.
There will always be isolated examples of low- and mid- income people and buisnesses that are hurt by the estate tax. What you should keep in mind, however, is that a repeal of the estate tax would help all wealthy citizens, while helping few poor citizens. In short, look at the bigger picture.
... and the question to that bafflingly obvious comment was
Could there come a day when astronauts or colonies of people living on Mars could communicate with Earth in real-time?
We don't know of a way today to convey information between Earth and Mars at a speed faster than the speed of light. [It takes light six to eight minutes to travel the round-trip distance.] We don't foresee a way to get rid of the latency in the communications.
until then, it's napster...
The flaw you point out - who determines need, and who fills that need - is, truthfully, never fully addressed, even by Marx. Marx's reasoning, to greatly summarise (if you have free time, I suggest reading The German Ideology, or buying (!) 'The Marx Engles Reader', edited by Robert Tucker) is that there will be at some point a revolution by the working classes of the world, after which a society will develop in which everyone will willingly inhabit a system where each individual does the work which they want to do, and takes only what they require. This 'state' would have no government as it is known now, and the only person who determines your need would be your (honest) self
There are several remarkably serious problems with this system - who decides what infrastructure to build and where, what to do with people who don't follow the rules, etc. . The reason communism has and had such an influence and pull over people is not the system itself, but the basis for it - that there is a pattern to history (oppression of the ruled classes by the ruling class, revolt by the rulled class, establishment of a new ruling class who in turn oppresses the new ruled class), that the pattern is reaching a climax with the new (in Marx's time) simplification of class conflict into a bourgeoisie and proletariat, and - this is where theory comes in - that the only way history can go after this simplification of class conflict is to a system in which class conflict, and therefore conflict (economic and otherwise) itself, is no more. And the fact that if there was a consensus in a population to agree to the to/from principal, it could work. It's just the consensus that's the bitch.
Pointing out to someone that their ideas resemble some aspects of communism (I've always boiled communism down to 'from each his ability, to each his need', but that's just me..) is as necessary as pointing out to someone that they're writing in english, or that they're using http to access slashdot. If, however, the poster had said his ideas wern't communist, your comment would be unimpeachable. The point made was concerning software, not political ideologies.
The parent post is just flamebait... if you'd read the links in the article, or even the parent post itself, you would see that. Don't belive everything you read, even if it uses tactful language.
I don't see how this can last for much longer, however... most of the corporations who demand the new restrictions are in the usa, and -for better or for worse - the us is one of the more litigation-happy nations on earth. Somewhere, sometime (maybe even the 2600 decss appeal) the concept of this new level of control will probably be judged untenable.
-enough jkatzing for today. back to osx!-
I'm drunk, and I read this thinking 'what does this fucker know!?! I'm a person who hasn't coded anyhing except first year cs shite, and he thinks the new os of my fav computer company is bad? fuck him!' just thought i'd mention that! hahahahahahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh