How many people have been arrested for digital "theft" so far? Even if this isn't illegal (and I think it is), a "disorderly conduct" charge or something like that could probably be made to stick.
No newsstand or any other specific place was cited. No quotes from anyone who actually did it or actual "victims" were used. The closest anyone comes is the one who said that she took pictures out of a hair style catalogue to a hairdresser to avoid taking the actual (heavy) book. A human face is the sort of thing highly compressed low-res images do best. There's a very big difference between this (which probably is fair usage and grabbing a magazine full of text and images frame-by-frame.
Hand scanners might make sense, but low-res mobile phone cams?
How many newsstands are going to let a cell phone user stand and photograph every page a 100 page magazine? What's the quality going to be like? JPGs including text images are rather hard to read unless a very low level of compression is used. Are mobile phones that much better at handling text detail in uploadable pictures? More to the point, isn't the pixel count in a mobile phonecam low enough that reproducing copy that might be typeset at 1200-2400 dpi is sort of hopeless?
What's the billing per image as uploaded via mobile? At more than 10 cents USD / frame, it would be generally cheaper to buy the magazine even assuming the user's time is worth nothing.
Has anyone actually seen this done and what the results look like?
If this really is a serious concern, spend the extra penny and shrinkwrap the suckers. Busting the shrinkwrap is vandalism of merchandise. No new law is needed.
I think some content providers are trying to get some PR support for anti-technology copy control legislation of some sort in Japan... i.e. something that looks good to elected officials who don't think terribly hard about what they're being asked to support.
An anti-spam bill passed, just not that idiotic one that you wanted - you know, the one that would have clogged the legal system with every leech in the universe suing for 500 bucks for every e-mail they recieve.
And you have a problem with this because?
Do you fear getting tied up in small claims court by working anti-spam legislation?
I'd actually like to hear more of this, one would think this would make legislators more likely to vote against the bill, lest they find their daughters in porn spam pics dumped into their e-mails.
What's a good guy going to do about the Hollywood entertainment cartel?
I don't think Rowlings is going to turn Harry Potter into Rambo, or that the audience would go for a happy ending full of burning buildings and either corpses or people screaming in death agony.
Look at how the first US commercial railroads were financed. (hint: the Feds played a large part in that, too.)
In a successful society, the national government funds or finds a way to assist the private sector with large high-risk projects that the private sector can't justify to ordinary investors.
Abandoning our current manned space programs is not going to get us to a more far reaching goal anytime sooner.
Neither will leaving it in place. NASA is running in place right now. What can be learned from the Shuttle and the kind of work going on in it has been learned. What's needed is to replace it, and we need a new goal, space industrialization. Once a space industrial infrasrructure is in place, space exploration will be cheap, easy, and moderately safe.
We should look towards the past for the kind of government-based incentives that built modern aviation.
"Provide us with safe commercial flights to a space station for $1,000,000/passenger and we'll send 100 people per year."
"Provide us with freight delivery to orbit at $20/pound and we'll guarantee 1,000,000 pounds of payload.
The second is possible via railgun or if the nanotube materials can be manufactured in the real world, via Space Elevator.
Remember that commercial aviation got started with the USPS contracted for regular airmail delivery.
Real space industrialization will not only bring scientific advances that will dramatically impact every one of the fields you mention (with space industrialization, do you think the number of trained IT people needed will go down?), but will make possible zero-g manufacturing techniques which will reduce prices for the most sophisticated technological products required to provide the services you are asking for.
Do you have any idea what defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs would do for the price of semiconductors? How easy it would be to build Class 1 IC fabs?
How about alternatives to fossil fuel and nuclear plants? The conditions in space make it a great place to grow semiconductors for solar cells, and an easy place to assemble them into solar power satellites.
Earlier generations of space technology made possible the infrastructure that enables people like you to whine about spending on space via the Internet. You might consider reliable weather forecasting a little thing, but you obviously also aren't old enough to remember what it was like before weather satellites. Knowing the weather in advance in hurricane territory can mean the difference between life and death. Or of harvesting a crop before weather conditions disastrous for your crop happen.
People thought government funded exploration of the American West a waste of money. Until the railroads were built. Cheap transportation to orbit and beyod will cause people to see space as a place to make money and create useful goods and services for the people on Earth and the growing off-planet population.
ot be won by anyone until the spaceworkers complain about too may Starbucks
Don't know if you intended this or not, but you are exactly correct. When space industrialization is taken for granted, when booking a flight to Mars can be done at your local travel agency, when I can walk down a space station corridor and get some xeroxes run up at Kinko's, and stop for coffee afterwards at Starbucks, when I can stop off and get a space suit at Best Buy or Circuit City either here or on the moon along with a few sticks of DRAM for the office PCs,then the space race will be won.
For all of humanity.
Especially for the first trillionaires, who will make their fortunes off space-based resources.
Learn something about the history of technology before you expose your ignorance in public. The first major market for integrated circuits was aerospace.
You forgot Afghanistan, which is in even worse shape after a year of the benevolent rule of the American Empire.
With respect to the US government taking responsibility for its actions towards foriegn nationals, the Bush Administration isn't especially good at taking responsibility for its actions directed at its citizens.
However, there are some forms of stupidity a major nation can survive. Falling behind in technology isn't one of them.
The technology you are using to put your ill-formed thoughts onto the Internet mainly comes from semiconductor devices invented for the first aerospace applications where weight and space were at extreme premiums.
The nation benefiting most from the technologies that comes from successful space projects (of course I don't mean the Shuttle, that would have been a success if closed out 10 years ago) will be the nation that makes the projects.
If America wants to buy its new high tech from China and India and exit the superpower business shortly afterwards, they should ignore the space programs both countries are planning.
It's about time we got a new technology driver other than the consumer sector, the idea that space is back in that role could be a very good thing.
Open Secrets doesn't break out video games as a separate category from entertainment yet.
Anybody know how much they paid Lieberman off via campaign contribution to decide video games are no longer Satanic EVIL!!! ?
While it isn't necessarily true that Lieberman's previous call for censorship and regulation in that industry were in fact, a shakedown intended to get them to pay him "protection" money, that's the way to bet.
The solutions you suggested that I haven't already tried I'll look into.
what do you know about real small businesses?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Your emotional defense appears to be grounded in GOP-created images of small businesses and fantasies about Ayn Rand heroes, not in the reality of a small business manager.
With respect to businesses not being able to afford to let employees take vacations, why is it that in every other industrialized country, small businesses manage to find a way to allow employees to do this?
Even China, widely acclaimed as the last example of robber-baron 19th century capitalism mandates workers 3 weeks paid vacation/year.
Are you saying that America has the least competent small-business managers/owners in the world?
Well, if you actually meet a payroll, maybe you bring down the average a bit.
Decryption isn't necessary, all the cracker needs to get is the "confidence level" that the image submitted to the sensors matches the image hash in the database.
I don't think this can be worked around in any way that winds up with a usable product.
The people who make the decisions don't read the technical literature because they can't.
They make decisions based on vendor presentations and canned demos.
They also wonder why the stuff never works quite as well after they spend our money on it. Usually, they blame the IT staff they saddled with this crap to begin with.
You don't like this? Vote for leaders who aren't lawyers.
is to protect Microsoft and DRM customers from the public.
Who's going to protect either MS or us?
As I understand it, X-Box was intended as a testbed for "Trustworthy Computing". A small bunch of dedicated fanatics cracked it.
How many million people are going to try to make a rep for themselves by trying to crack Palladium / TCPA, and will all of them be "good guys" who at least will let us who subscribe to BugTraq and Full Disclosure know where the security holes are?
it may interest you that I am not even in the US. Unfortunately US decisions on copyright etc. have a massive effect on other countries - so for someone like me, I can't even vote jerks like GWB out of office, all I can do is hope you freaks in the states will wake up and do it for me.
Your personal choices are a hell of a lot more local than that.
Should have figured you were out of the USA. There's a big difference growing up knowing that politicians are more or less openly for sale and living in a place where politicians that get bought are risking jail and angry voters.
If you don't want the kind of mess US tech people are in right now, find a local group opposiing the EUCD (EU Copyright Directive), join it, and encourage it to move. As I understand it, most EU countries have public financing of political campaigns. In the USA, it's pay-per-vote.
This means in theory, the concerns of a local geek group are just as important as the concerns of a friendly RIAA lobbyist from the US.
More so, because your local group votes locally. The RIAA lobbyist can't even get away with bribery if he's watched carefully.
I expect to be heading for EU sooner or later, and I'd very much like to see the EUCD rescinded, all its national enabling legislation in the bit-bucket, and the *AA lobbyists chased back to America.
"Big Brother Inside"-for real this time
on
Gates and Security
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· Score: 1
Looks like he sees the 1984 vision not coming true as a problem and feels that updating it is the solution.
It is obvious that his intention is to build "Big Brother" into our computers.
willingness to work with the federal government on combating terrorism and to tout his company's Trustworthy Computing initiative and its controversial next-generation secure computing base,"
Why do kids need to be taught to spy on their parents when the never-sleeping eye of Microsoft will be on them all the time? Gates' vision of the worldwide network of informers, being built into our computers by MS assisted by Intel, etc. is technologically realizable.
However, it depends on our buying their products. "Security" is one of the main reasons foriegn governments and major corporations both in and out of the US are switching to *nix.
Do we have an Open Source mole inside MS giving Chairman Bill bad advice? (VBG)
Red Hat 9 is on the other HD,this is a dual boot box. I'll think about going full-time with Linux when someone comes up with an Open Source vector draw app that'll read my Corel Draw 8 files. I said vector-draw, not bit-map/paint, so don't tell me about GIMP, that's something GIMP does not do.
However, I run Eudora, not Outhouse Express, and ZoneAlarm renames file attachments so they can't be opened by accident. (as in click and you got a prompt asking if you really want to do this?)
There really isn't an excuse to get nailed by this even for Windoze users for the most part, "executable file attachment from somebody I don't know" =! CLICK HERE. These virus-generated e-mails all have a generic look to them, I dump them unopened into my virus-contaminated folder for later cleanup .
But you are giving up from the get-go because you think it will be impossible.
It is because I know far more about this than the "average Joe" that I say without the startup money, it is impossible. I've been involved in enough lost causes to know one when I see one. You want to play with a lost cause and "fighting the good fight"? Go ahead. I have something better to do, figure out how to arrange the rest of my life so I can stay in technology.
The bad guys have unlimited time and many people who care enough and have the money to give them the money they need to operate, even when they need megabuck chunks of money to work with.
We have no such people. Even after the dot.bomb crash, there are still MANY high-tech multimillionaires and for that matter, a significant number of high-tech billionaires who could give startup money to an NRA/AARP style PAC out of petty cash. There are far more high-tech people with serious money than there will ever be associated with the Hollywood entertainment cartel. Hardly surprising, high-tech is the dog, Hollywood is the tail, so why is the tail wagging the dog?
Anybody in the high-tech scene willing to give megabucks to political efforts won't do it without either a short-term ROI or immediate tax deduction.
Get this straight. There is NOT A SINGLE PERSON OR SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE IN THE ENTIRE HIGH TECH SCENE WHO CAN AFFORD THE STARTUP FUNDING REQUIRED TO GET A VIABLE HIGH-TECH COMMUNITY POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE GOING WHO CARES ENOUGH TO DO THIS.
I used the word scene above where most people would use community.
I do not believe there is a high-tech community worth fighting for in the USA. A community pulls together in time of trouble, people step forward to do what is needed even when it's hard and even expensive in terms of money to do so. People who have made fortunes in a community will put them on the line when the shit hits the fan. Well, it has, and where are they?
Our high-tech "leadership" is the same bunch of people who are busy outsourcing high-tech jobs to India.
Don't look to our so-called leaders to help protect our rights or our community or for that matter, even to protect the future of their own industries.
All they care about is what'll bump up next quarter's profits enough to trigger their options and/or bonuses. By the time their current courses of action comes back to haunt their companies, they'll have cashed out and will either be in walled communties or estates or will have gotten out of the USA.
This scene isn't a community. It's just a leaderless and ineffective mob, and that's all it's ever going to be. At best, it's an army willing to be led but with no leaders and no firepower.
The money is out there given the leadership to mobilize it properly. Remember how few people it took to raise the money to make Blender Open Source?
I'd like to be proved wrong. There's even a chance that I could be proved wrong.
If within the next month or so (if you want an exact date, go look up the latest filing deadlines on the Federal and all the state Election Commission sites for the 2004 elections... when will it be impossible to file Federally and in at least 20 states?), someone or a small group comes forward with $1M for the startup funding for a PAC, then this "scene" will have proved that it has the potential to become a true community and will be given a chance to prove in the Darwinian sense that it is fit to survive.
If it's proved that there is a community worth fighting for, those of us with a clue about politics will show up for the fight, and the odds on winning are pretty good.
The odds on this are so low that you might as well start planning for the "we lost" future now at an individual level.
Do you have a family and a need to keep making money? Do you have to stay in the USA?
For realizing that tax-deductible money won't win this war.
However, there's a big difference between supporting a single lobbyist with minimal to zero budget for influencing legislators and starting the core of a NRA/AARP-style organization.
Also note that if I'm reading his statements on the site correctly, Bruce is basically, asking for help to cover his expenses in talking to legislators.
He is NOT starting a PAC (Political Action Committee) to collect and disburse contributions to political candidates.
Otherwise, he'd be talking about raising millions of dollars and filing the paperwork legally required to start a PAC in Washington,DC with the Federal Elections Commission and whatever state Elections Commissions (if any) whose filing deadlines haven't already come and gone.
If he actually does have this in mind, I'll retract the above statement as quickly as I can get here and post.
I wish Bruce Perens well, and have a great deal of respect for the guy, but we will NOT win the war without a PAC capable of both mass action and raising enough money to make our elected officials stand up and take notice of what's coming for them if they don't get with the program.
The price of freedom at this point is measured in megabucks.
The sad part about this is that as a user/developer community, we actually could raise more money than Hollywood. With a few corporate consumer products vendors on board, we could outspend them 5-10x in the political arena, spend enough money on mass media to make them treat us with respect, and dictate any terms we consider reasonable to Hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad I could help.
No newsstand or any other specific place was cited. No quotes from anyone who actually did it or actual "victims" were used. The closest anyone comes is the one who said that she took pictures out of a hair style catalogue to a hairdresser to avoid taking the actual (heavy) book. A human face is the sort of thing highly compressed low-res images do best. There's a very big difference between this (which probably is fair usage and grabbing a magazine full of text and images frame-by-frame.
Hand scanners might make sense, but low-res mobile phone cams?
How many newsstands are going to let a cell phone user stand and photograph every page a 100 page magazine? What's the quality going to be like? JPGs including text images are rather hard to read unless a very low level of compression is used. Are mobile phones that much better at handling text detail in uploadable pictures? More to the point, isn't the pixel count in a mobile phonecam low enough that reproducing copy that might be typeset at 1200-2400 dpi is sort of hopeless?
What's the billing per image as uploaded via mobile? At more than 10 cents USD / frame, it would be generally cheaper to buy the magazine even assuming the user's time is worth nothing.
Has anyone actually seen this done and what the results look like?
If this really is a serious concern, spend the extra penny and shrinkwrap the suckers. Busting the shrinkwrap is vandalism of merchandise. No new law is needed.
I think some content providers are trying to get some PR support for anti-technology copy control legislation of some sort in Japan... i.e. something that looks good to elected officials who don't think terribly hard about what they're being asked to support.
And you have a problem with this because?
Do you fear getting tied up in small claims court by working anti-spam legislation?
Do you call yourself a "Direct Marketer"?
I'd actually like to hear more of this, one would think this would make legislators more likely to vote against the bill, lest they find their daughters in porn spam pics dumped into their e-mails.
I don't think Rowlings is going to turn Harry Potter into Rambo, or that the audience would go for a happy ending full of burning buildings and either corpses or people screaming in death agony.
Come to think of it, I'd find that entertaining.
Look at how the first US commercial railroads were financed. (hint: the Feds played a large part in that, too.)
In a successful society, the national government funds or finds a way to assist the private sector with large high-risk projects that the private sector can't justify to ordinary investors.
Neither will leaving it in place. NASA is running in place right now. What can be learned from the Shuttle and the kind of work going on in it has been learned. What's needed is to replace it, and we need a new goal, space industrialization. Once a space industrial infrasrructure is in place, space exploration will be cheap, easy, and moderately safe.
We should look towards the past for the kind of government-based incentives that built modern aviation.
"Provide us with safe commercial flights to a space station for $1,000,000/passenger and we'll send 100 people per year."
"Provide us with freight delivery to orbit at $20/pound and we'll guarantee 1,000,000 pounds of payload.
The second is possible via railgun or if the nanotube materials can be manufactured in the real world, via Space Elevator.
Remember that commercial aviation got started with the USPS contracted for regular airmail delivery.
Do you have any idea what defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs would do for the price of semiconductors? How easy it would be to build Class 1 IC fabs?
How about alternatives to fossil fuel and nuclear plants? The conditions in space make it a great place to grow semiconductors for solar cells, and an easy place to assemble them into solar power satellites.
Earlier generations of space technology made possible the infrastructure that enables people like you to whine about spending on space via the Internet. You might consider reliable weather forecasting a little thing, but you obviously also aren't old enough to remember what it was like before weather satellites. Knowing the weather in advance in hurricane territory can mean the difference between life and death. Or of harvesting a crop before weather conditions disastrous for your crop happen.
People thought government funded exploration of the American West a waste of money. Until the railroads were built. Cheap transportation to orbit and beyod will cause people to see space as a place to make money and create useful goods and services for the people on Earth and the growing off-planet population.
Don't know if you intended this or not, but you are exactly correct. When space industrialization is taken for granted, when booking a flight to Mars can be done at your local travel agency, when I can walk down a space station corridor and get some xeroxes run up at Kinko's, and stop for coffee afterwards at Starbucks, when I can stop off and get a space suit at Best Buy or Circuit City either here or on the moon along with a few sticks of DRAM for the office PCs,then the space race will be won.
For all of humanity.
Especially for the first trillionaires, who will make their fortunes off space-based resources.
Make friends with google.
With respect to the US government taking responsibility for its actions towards foriegn nationals, the Bush Administration isn't especially good at taking responsibility for its actions directed at its citizens.
However, there are some forms of stupidity a major nation can survive. Falling behind in technology isn't one of them.
The nation benefiting most from the technologies that comes from successful space projects (of course I don't mean the Shuttle, that would have been a success if closed out 10 years ago) will be the nation that makes the projects.
If America wants to buy its new high tech from China and India and exit the superpower business shortly afterwards, they should ignore the space programs both countries are planning.
It's about time we got a new technology driver other than the consumer sector, the idea that space is back in that role could be a very good thing.
Anybody know how much they paid Lieberman off via campaign contribution to decide video games are no longer Satanic EVIL!!! ?
While it isn't necessarily true that Lieberman's previous call for censorship and regulation in that industry were in fact, a shakedown intended to get them to pay him "protection" money, that's the way to bet.
The solutions you suggested that I haven't already tried I'll look into.
With respect to businesses not being able to afford to let employees take vacations, why is it that in every other industrialized country, small businesses manage to find a way to allow employees to do this?
Even China, widely acclaimed as the last example of robber-baron 19th century capitalism mandates workers 3 weeks paid vacation/year.
Are you saying that America has the least competent small-business managers/owners in the world?
Well, if you actually meet a payroll, maybe you bring down the average a bit.
I don't think this can be worked around in any way that winds up with a usable product.
They make decisions based on vendor presentations and canned demos.
They also wonder why the stuff never works quite as well after they spend our money on it. Usually, they blame the IT staff they saddled with this crap to begin with.
You don't like this? Vote for leaders who aren't lawyers.
Who's going to protect either MS or us?
As I understand it, X-Box was intended as a testbed for "Trustworthy Computing". A small bunch of dedicated fanatics cracked it.
How many million people are going to try to make a rep for themselves by trying to crack Palladium / TCPA, and will all of them be "good guys" who at least will let us who subscribe to BugTraq and Full Disclosure know where the security holes are?
Your personal choices are a hell of a lot more local than that.
Should have figured you were out of the USA. There's a big difference growing up knowing that politicians are more or less openly for sale and living in a place where politicians that get bought are risking jail and angry voters.
If you don't want the kind of mess US tech people are in right now, find a local group opposiing the EUCD (EU Copyright Directive), join it, and encourage it to move. As I understand it, most EU countries have public financing of political campaigns. In the USA, it's pay-per-vote.
This means in theory, the concerns of a local geek group are just as important as the concerns of a friendly RIAA lobbyist from the US.
More so, because your local group votes locally. The RIAA lobbyist can't even get away with bribery if he's watched carefully.
I expect to be heading for EU sooner or later, and I'd very much like to see the EUCD rescinded, all its national enabling legislation in the bit-bucket, and the *AA lobbyists chased back to America.
It is obvious that his intention is to build "Big Brother" into our computers.
willingness to work with the federal government on combating terrorism and to tout his company's Trustworthy Computing initiative and its controversial next-generation secure computing base,"
Why do kids need to be taught to spy on their parents when the never-sleeping eye of Microsoft will be on them all the time? Gates' vision of the worldwide network of informers, being built into our computers by MS assisted by Intel, etc. is technologically realizable.
However, it depends on our buying their products. "Security" is one of the main reasons foriegn governments and major corporations both in and out of the US are switching to *nix.
Do we have an Open Source mole inside MS giving Chairman Bill bad advice? (VBG)
However, I run Eudora, not Outhouse Express, and ZoneAlarm renames file attachments so they can't be opened by accident. (as in click and you got a prompt asking if you really want to do this?)
There really isn't an excuse to get nailed by this even for Windoze users for the most part, "executable file attachment from somebody I don't know" =! CLICK HERE. These virus-generated e-mails all have a generic look to them, I dump them unopened into my virus-contaminated folder for later cleanup .
I got rid of 16 copies of Sobig.E today.
And which job do you have, janitor or prostitute?
It is because I know far more about this than the "average Joe" that I say without the startup money, it is impossible. I've been involved in enough lost causes to know one when I see one. You want to play with a lost cause and "fighting the good fight"? Go ahead. I have something better to do, figure out how to arrange the rest of my life so I can stay in technology.
The bad guys have unlimited time and many people who care enough and have the money to give them the money they need to operate, even when they need megabuck chunks of money to work with.
We have no such people. Even after the dot.bomb crash, there are still MANY high-tech multimillionaires and for that matter, a significant number of high-tech billionaires who could give startup money to an NRA/AARP style PAC out of petty cash. There are far more high-tech people with serious money than there will ever be associated with the Hollywood entertainment cartel. Hardly surprising, high-tech is the dog, Hollywood is the tail, so why is the tail wagging the dog?
Anybody in the high-tech scene willing to give megabucks to political efforts won't do it without either a short-term ROI or immediate tax deduction.
Get this straight. There is NOT A SINGLE PERSON OR SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE IN THE ENTIRE HIGH TECH SCENE WHO CAN AFFORD THE STARTUP FUNDING REQUIRED TO GET A VIABLE HIGH-TECH COMMUNITY POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE GOING WHO CARES ENOUGH TO DO THIS.
I used the word scene above where most people would use community.
I do not believe there is a high-tech community worth fighting for in the USA. A community pulls together in time of trouble, people step forward to do what is needed even when it's hard and even expensive in terms of money to do so. People who have made fortunes in a community will put them on the line when the shit hits the fan. Well, it has, and where are they?
Our high-tech "leadership" is the same bunch of people who are busy outsourcing high-tech jobs to India.
Don't look to our so-called leaders to help protect our rights or our community or for that matter, even to protect the future of their own industries.
All they care about is what'll bump up next quarter's profits enough to trigger their options and/or bonuses. By the time their current courses of action comes back to haunt their companies, they'll have cashed out and will either be in walled communties or estates or will have gotten out of the USA.
This scene isn't a community. It's just a leaderless and ineffective mob, and that's all it's ever going to be. At best, it's an army willing to be led but with no leaders and no firepower.
The money is out there given the leadership to mobilize it properly. Remember how few people it took to raise the money to make Blender Open Source?
I'd like to be proved wrong. There's even a chance that I could be proved wrong.
If within the next month or so (if you want an exact date, go look up the latest filing deadlines on the Federal and all the state Election Commission sites for the 2004 elections... when will it be impossible to file Federally and in at least 20 states?), someone or a small group comes forward with $1M for the startup funding for a PAC, then this "scene" will have proved that it has the potential to become a true community and will be given a chance to prove in the Darwinian sense that it is fit to survive.
If it's proved that there is a community worth fighting for, those of us with a clue about politics will show up for the fight, and the odds on winning are pretty good.
The odds on this are so low that you might as well start planning for the "we lost" future now at an individual level.
Do you have a family and a need to keep making money? Do you have to stay in the USA?
If you don't have a very de
However, I think a high-tech PAC would be dealing a hell of a lot more with e-mail fundraising than with paper and postage.
The economics of this would be similar to spam, but the delivery would be to double-opt-in mailing lists... which is OK by definition.
However, there's a big difference between supporting a single lobbyist with minimal to zero budget for influencing legislators and starting the core of a NRA/AARP-style organization.
Also note that if I'm reading his statements on the site correctly, Bruce is basically, asking for help to cover his expenses in talking to legislators.
He is NOT starting a PAC (Political Action Committee) to collect and disburse contributions to political candidates.
Otherwise, he'd be talking about raising millions of dollars and filing the paperwork legally required to start a PAC in Washington,DC with the Federal Elections Commission and whatever state Elections Commissions (if any) whose filing deadlines haven't already come and gone.
If he actually does have this in mind, I'll retract the above statement as quickly as I can get here and post.
I wish Bruce Perens well, and have a great deal of respect for the guy, but we will NOT win the war without a PAC capable of both mass action and raising enough money to make our elected officials stand up and take notice of what's coming for them if they don't get with the program.
The price of freedom at this point is measured in megabucks.
The sad part about this is that as a user/developer community, we actually could raise more money than Hollywood. With a few corporate consumer products vendors on board, we could outspend them 5-10x in the political arena, spend enough money on mass media to make them treat us with respect, and dictate any terms we consider reasonable to Hollywood.