We need to limit the amount of commerical launches or we risk ruining space for the next few generations. If this extra money means less satilites are launched for companies that will go bust before they are ever used then it is good money.
No, it'll just mean garbage collection vehicles will be needed sooner or later.
This will probably be needed anyway as an increasing number of manned vehicles and orbiting space stations go into orbit. There's junk up there dating from the earliest Soviet Union programs. Some is of actual historical value, some can simply have a thruster attached and deorbited into the ocean. Most is in known orbits. It's all going to either be gotten rid of or Murphy's Law dictates it's going to come through somebody's vacuum-tight window at a mile or two/second.
Your politicians can't legally collect political payoffs from Hollywood. If you can catch them collecting the illegal kind, package the evidence properly and get their asses sent to jail.
This limits the interest your politicians can have in what the Hollywood lobbyists have to say to them.
Any EU country that refuses to accept the EU Copyright Directive and related regulation / legislation has an automatic competitive advantage in the area of technology over one whose laws are paid for by movie/music industry lobbyists. The really cool new consumer products, both hardware and software will be made in places Hollywood doesn't control.
High tech user community activism with the right kind of education has a very good chance of winning if you people get your acts together RIGHT NOW.
So go for it.
you have nothing to say worth reusing
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
Who's going to be out there raising money for political action to get the post-election anti-tech legislation Congress is going to deliver taken off the books? GeekPAC? (snicker?)
Sure people are going to be pissed off and eventually, they might even get around to writing their Congresscritters about it. By the time this can be translated into any kind of action, what do you think is going to be left of high-tech in the USA?
High-tech vendors? They'll simply move whatever R&D that's left in the USA to India and figure on selling dumbed-down versions of the stuff they ship to free countries into the US market. Perhaps they even figure that this will be helpful in wiping out small competitors.
It's invididual developers and small companies that have to worry.
Once these bills are passed, we will simply no longer be able to do business as usual. You haven't read things like CBDTPA and the Broadcast Working Group recommendations, have you?
I'll try to make this real simple for you so you can return to the herd and moo contentedly as your civil liberties disappear forever despite the mighty accomplishments of "the good guys".
Politicians generally vote in accordance to what the public supports.
That gives Hollings 330,317 reasons to introduce and work for any bills the record / movie industries want.
Here are the number of reasons the EFF, VTW, CDT, Public Knowledge have given Hollings to be on our side, to the nearest dollar. $0
This is what Howard Berman got from the *AA organizations:
TV/Movies/Music $40,500
This gives him 40,500 reasons to work for the movie/music industries.
Here are the number of reasons the EFF, VTW, CDT, Public Knowledge have given Berman to be on our side, to the nearest dollar. $0
These organizations can NOT give money to politicians.
The contributions I mentioned don't count the larger contributions made through law firms and lawyers on behalf of various industries including movie and record companies, I don't know all the players.
The bad guys are spreading money around by the barrel. There aren't any good guy organizations worth mentioning doing this. So who are the politicians going to listen to day in and day out:?
Believe what you want to believe, but your beliefs are completely rooted in total, blissful ignorance.
Remember, with respect to any specific law, the bad guys only have to win once. Their resources are effectively unlimited and they can try again and again and again until an obscure amendment to a law nobody ever heard of or a "must pass" appropriations bill gets added and suddenly. . . it's a bad law.
The best EFF and the rest of the alphabet soup geektivist civil liberties groups can do is fight a holding action.
The reason is that by definition, a non-profit organization can't contribute a single dollar to a political campaign.
We can't beat the bad guys in the long run, without at minimum, having our own top-bracket lobbyists working congressionsal offices, matching them dollar for dollar, having full-time legislative analysts checking EVERY bill and relevant agency regulation for booby-traps, and full-time staff answering phones and opening mail (like the snailmail with our $5 and $20 and $100 contributions) and e-mail and running mailing lists to let us know when it's time to send a message through Congress via their fax gateway.
In other words, we need our own PAC with enough startup budget to set up the infrastructure and do the election commission filings (e.g. FEC) required to legally collect and spend money in DC and each of the 50 states.
This hasn't happened and won't happen. Nobody with the startup money will put it into any "geektivism" organization that isn't tax-deductible, it isn't enough to feel good, the people who can write $1M checks demand tax-writeoffs as well.
If somebody was willing to do the right thing today, it is probably (perhaps the problem can be fixed by throwing a shitload of money at it) too late for a NRA/AARP style PAC to go into business in time to intervene in the 2003-2004 election cycle.
The other option: our high-tech vendors stop doing the "deer in the headlights" thing, stop being hypnotized with the promise of endless profits out of the catalogues of the major content owner members of *AA (MPAA/RIAA) organizations if they only make unbeatable DRM. The promise is bullshit anyway, it depends on fiber bandwidths to every home anyway.
By the time 10Mbps to every US home happens, the vendors will have had to move their R&D and production operations to free countries anyway.
The war is for all practical purposes over in the USA.
The place to make a stand? Probably the EU.
Most countries have publically funded election campaigns, meaning Hollywood can't legally buy politicians and anti-American sentiment is growing. So if you're in the EU and you aren't part of a high-tech political activist group, join one. If you can't find one in your nation, start one. Find people who already know the political game and learn how to play to win.
If the EU doesn't get it, the center of technology development not only moves out of the USA, but out of the Western world to places Hollywood can't buy off. India and China, for instance.
The Chinese are already planning for a future in which the rest of the world buys its tech from them. They are already working on plans for a permanent manned moon base. They are already designing and fabricating their own CPUs.
Public broadcasting has gotten to the point where if corporate sponsors don't like the programming, it won't be aired. Google under:
"Pacifica Foundation" protest
to see just what has happened to public broadcasting the last few years. Basically, PBS is just another corporate outlet targeted at an upscale demographic. Since they don't target to the Foxnews audience but instead, to a literate audience, of course the programming looks different. However, the represented interests are the same.
A public figure largely waives the right to privacy. If she didn't want people interested in various details of her private life, what the hell is she doing in show business and with a publicity budget?
She can't claim she didn't know, anybody who's ever walked by a supermarket checkstand knows the sort of crap published about celebrities.
A public figure is news by definition. What Streisand and "Miss Vermont" are whining about is news made about them that they do not control. Just like the RIAA complains about music content they don't control. I have no sympathy for any of them.
If what is published about either is untrue, they have the right to sue for libel and slander. They have no more right to prior restraint on published material than you or I do.
This woman is no more morally fit to be an example of what young teen girls should be, which is what she seems to be doing for a living, than the priests fired from the Catholic Church for molesting children are examples of the finest in couseling young people.
Though it could be argued that a pedophile is less dangerous. A pedophile generally only endangers the kids he's in contact with. That woman and that judge endanger us all.
There were tens of thousands of public comments posted at the FCC site. A handful were pro-media consolidation.
The FCC commissioners who voted for this only care about what Bush tells them to do. Bush cares what his political campaign contributors and spin doctors and handlers tell him to do.
Where did you get the idea that Bush cares what we think?
Therefore, whatever you think Clear Channel is today is whatever the consumers wanted.
Clear Channel's customers are:
The overt advertisers who buy commercials.
The covert advertisers, i.e. the major record labels who buy ad slots for tracks from the records they want you to buy. Remember, EVERY song you hear on a major radio station is a paid ad by a record company.
The consumers are NOT radio station customers, and the connection between whatever the consumers want and whatever is played on a major chain radio station is a hell of a lot more tenuous than you think.
Yes. The people running the Big 5 major labels via payola.
Guess what. EVERY song you listen to on a chain-owned radio station is a paid placement. If you didn't know that, you have no business posting on any public policy issue having to do with music.
People ARE voting with their dollars by NOT buying music as much as they used to. That's why every major label is in financial trouble.
Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
No, YOU are. The reason why the comments you don't like got up-modded (I've never seen one of my comments hit 5 so fast) is that on this subject, everyone else is better informed than you are. Listen instead of sniveling, maybe you'll learn something if you are capable of doing so.
The rest of us use the Net to get to a lot of foriegn press sites and to the sites of the newsmakers (and their enemies) themselves and lots of other places. While they have their own local biases, at least they generally aren't owned by the people who 0wN Bush.
If companies like Clear Channel and CBS DIDNT do a good job, they wouldnt be as big as they are
The whole point of becoming a monopoly is that one doesn't have to bother to spend money on putting out good products or new, radically good ideas anymore. The public will either buy whatever swill you give them or leave the market.
Of course, an increasing number of people are leaving the market.
Certainly, there are people who look forward to the 'latest and greatest' music from their Clear Channel station. Just as you look forward to the home version of the successor to XP.
Who "sponsors" major PBS programming? Most of the time, it's Fortune 50 companies like ADM that the general public has never heard of, but the upscale demographic PBS caters to have.
The Limbot is invited to tell me just what kind of "ultraliberalism" a Fortune 50 company is likely to sponsor. He is also invited to tell me about how liberal Warren Buffet is (owner of Berkshire, owner of whe Washington Post.
The whining about the "ultra-liberal" mass media used to come from conservatives.
The mass media isn't ultra-conservative, they're the same people who promote and broadcast and sell the entertainment content that the Religious Right whine about.
The proper description for the agenda of both PBS and the mass media is corporatist. The agenda is about social control via news management for the benefit of the people who buy advertising, and that isn't your average "progressive" group and that isn't the average limbot.
Payola isn't that hard to manage when one only has a handful of media chains to pay off to get 100% market coverage.
You tell me how to manage payoffs to 10,000,000 individual Internet Radio broadcasters with nobody noticing. With the first step being how to figure out who is worth paying off.
Which consumers other than semi-technical MS fanatics are actually upgrading to XP?
Usually, end users who buy XP are buying it bundled with their new machines.
However, there are lots of people who are content with their P2/400s running W9.x who aren't feeling real motivated to buy the latest shiny new tech toys.
These people are going to be even less motivated to "upgrade" to W2003 or W2005. Even end users know that their legacy apps will break if they do that (not necessarily, but that's the way to bet), most home users have already been through at least 1 OS upgrade.
I'm running 98SE dual boot with RedHat 9, and I'm completely unmotivated about upgrading the MS side. I'm figuring that I'll either wind up going 100% Linux (maybe if a decent vector draw app ever appears, GIMP IS A PAINT PROGRAM) or buying a Mac.
I'm also running a Duron 900 and 384 megs, but I upgraded from my K6-400 to support Linux.
I think that kind of ATM monopoly unusual except in fairly rural areas. I was very surprised by your saying that Terre Haute had one.
In this relatively remote part of the SF Bay Area, I can think of at least half a dozen. The largest chains out here have most of their local branches in grocery stores.
So someone running a K6/400 and Win98 finds out that they can buy a cheap W2005 so they can continue to use online banking, but they're going to have to buy a new midrange computer (which will presumably have W2005 bundled) to make it run because the real minimum specs for W2005 will be 2GHz and 1G DRAM?
I mean the minimum for running real apps on top of the OS, not the MS specified minimum that allows getting to the desktop.
Do you really think people will buy new computers because their banks say so?
Any bank that tries this is going to see a massive shift to telephone and in-person banking and their profit margin disappear in the short term and any of their customers who need online banking switching to banks that support their current computers.
Even a freebie upgrade is expensive if it means one has to change computers and legacy apps to make it work.
Few people have that kind of loyalty to their banks.
"The acute lethal dose varied from 400 ug/kg (dogs) to 1000 ug/kg (mice) (Appendix 12, page 20) and 1400 ug/kg (rats) (Appendix 12, page 49, Table XXVII)."
If you want to believe you're more radiation-hardened than a dog, go ahead and inhale plutonium dust to your heart's content.
However, 400 MICROGRAMS PER KILOGRAM sounds more like 20 MILLIGRAMS for a 50 kg (110 pound) human to me.
A caffeine LD50 is more like 10 grams (200Mg/kg * 50 kg).
The guy who compared caffiene toxicity to Pu239 apparently thinks nuclear press industry handouts are SCIENCE. Science fiction is more like it, except that most publishers dump crap that obviously contrary to known scientific fact into the bit-bucket.
With someone whose "informed" opinions about nuclear power comes from nuclear industry press releases, dialogue is meaningless anyway.
I rather suspect that a space infrastructure and solar power satellites would be comparable in cost to the thousands or tens of thousands of nuclear plants which would be required to support a nuclear-powered hydrogen infrastructure.
In your scenario, only the nuclear power industry benefits. How long will these thousands of plants stay "hot" after decommissioning? A guess accurate to the nearest thousand years will do fine.
If you want a power plant in your neighborhood, fine. Sell your neighbors on this if you can.
Are you an employee, stockholder, or merely a PR flack for the nuclear industry?
I think you'll find the US has far more luddite encampments dotted around the place, who embrace guns and spurn any sort of government or technology that there are over here, maybe they should be dealt with?
That rumbling under your feet is poor old Ned Ludd spinning in his grave.
Guns are just another kind of technology. Next time you go to a major Linux events, ask the next dozen US Linux types you see about their gun collections. Be prepared to spend a lot of time hearing about arcane details of their personal munitions. Nobody has more enthusiasm about guns than a Libertarian geek.
With respect to anti-government feelings. . . you must be extremely new here. Haven't you ever read a discussion of . . . any stupid government action that affects technology and technologists? Plenty of anti-government feelings and the only people who care about DMCA are people involved in technology.
Unabomber types in caves don't have to worry about state-level super-DMCAs fucking up our ability to secure our computer systems.
The good news is that ES&S / Sequoia / Diebold are owned by major GOP campaign contributors, so expect traditional Republicans to be elected, not Bill Gates.
I think the general solution for your problem and the problem of many people here who have an occasional need for test equipment like signal generators, frequency counters, etc. is to find a connection for used / surplus electronic test gear.
You generally don't need the latest / greatest / hottest for what you're doing, there's probably vacuum tube gear that is alive, well, and will probably solve some of your problems if you poke around a bit for a lot less money than you'd expect, especially if you value your time.
Most metropolitan areas have at least one or two places for this sort of thing.
Google is your friend. Try searching on:
used electronic test
or on the specific gear you want.
Not to say there's anything wrong with this project, it's a cool hack and anyone who gets into electronic hardware is going to have a growing pile of junk to recycle parts off.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it'll just mean garbage collection vehicles will be needed sooner or later.
This will probably be needed anyway as an increasing number of manned vehicles and orbiting space stations go into orbit. There's junk up there dating from the earliest Soviet Union programs. Some is of actual historical value, some can simply have a thruster attached and deorbited into the ocean. Most is in known orbits. It's all going to either be gotten rid of or Murphy's Law dictates it's going to come through somebody's vacuum-tight window at a mile or two/second.
This limits the interest your politicians can have in what the Hollywood lobbyists have to say to them.
Any EU country that refuses to accept the EU Copyright Directive and related regulation / legislation has an automatic competitive advantage in the area of technology over one whose laws are paid for by movie/music industry lobbyists. The really cool new consumer products, both hardware and software will be made in places Hollywood doesn't control.
High tech user community activism with the right kind of education has a very good chance of winning if you people get your acts together RIGHT NOW.
So go for it.
So what's your interest in copyright protection?
Sure people are going to be pissed off and eventually, they might even get around to writing their Congresscritters about it. By the time this can be translated into any kind of action, what do you think is going to be left of high-tech in the USA?
High-tech vendors? They'll simply move whatever R&D that's left in the USA to India and figure on selling dumbed-down versions of the stuff they ship to free countries into the US market. Perhaps they even figure that this will be helpful in wiping out small competitors.
It's invididual developers and small companies that have to worry.
Once these bills are passed, we will simply no longer be able to do business as usual. You haven't read things like CBDTPA and the Broadcast Working Group recommendations, have you?
Politicians generally vote in accordance to what the public supports.
THE VOTES ARE COUNTED IN DOLLARS.
From Open Secrets
2 TV/Movies/Music $330,317
That gives Hollings 330,317 reasons to introduce and work for any bills the record / movie industries want.
Here are the number of reasons the EFF, VTW, CDT, Public Knowledge have given Hollings to be on our side, to the nearest dollar. $0
This is what Howard Berman got from the *AA organizations:
TV/Movies/Music $40,500
This gives him 40,500 reasons to work for the movie/music industries.
Here are the number of reasons the EFF, VTW, CDT, Public Knowledge have given Berman to be on our side, to the nearest dollar. $0
These organizations can NOT give money to politicians.
The contributions I mentioned don't count the larger contributions made through law firms and lawyers on behalf of various industries including movie and record companies, I don't know all the players.
The bad guys are spreading money around by the barrel. There aren't any good guy organizations worth mentioning doing this. So who are the politicians going to listen to day in and day out:?
Believe what you want to believe, but your beliefs are completely rooted in total, blissful ignorance.
Remember, with respect to any specific law, the bad guys only have to win once. Their resources are effectively unlimited and they can try again and again and again until an obscure amendment to a law nobody ever heard of or a "must pass" appropriations bill gets added and suddenly. . . it's a bad law.
The best EFF and the rest of the alphabet soup geektivist civil liberties groups can do is fight a holding action.
The reason is that by definition, a non-profit organization can't contribute a single dollar to a political campaign.
We can't beat the bad guys in the long run, without at minimum, having our own top-bracket lobbyists working congressionsal offices, matching them dollar for dollar, having full-time legislative analysts checking EVERY bill and relevant agency regulation for booby-traps, and full-time staff answering phones and opening mail (like the snailmail with our $5 and $20 and $100 contributions) and e-mail and running mailing lists to let us know when it's time to send a message through Congress via their fax gateway.
In other words, we need our own PAC with enough startup budget to set up the infrastructure and do the election commission filings (e.g. FEC) required to legally collect and spend money in DC and each of the 50 states.
This hasn't happened and won't happen. Nobody with the startup money will put it into any "geektivism" organization that isn't tax-deductible, it isn't enough to feel good, the people who can write $1M checks demand tax-writeoffs as well.
If somebody was willing to do the right thing today, it is probably (perhaps the problem can be fixed by throwing a shitload of money at it) too late for a NRA/AARP style PAC to go into business in time to intervene in the 2003-2004 election cycle.
The other option: our high-tech vendors stop doing the "deer in the headlights" thing, stop being hypnotized with the promise of endless profits out of the catalogues of the major content owner members of *AA (MPAA/RIAA) organizations if they only make unbeatable DRM. The promise is bullshit anyway, it depends on fiber bandwidths to every home anyway.
By the time 10Mbps to every US home happens, the vendors will have had to move their R&D and production operations to free countries anyway.
The war is for all practical purposes over in the USA.
The place to make a stand? Probably the EU.
Most countries have publically funded election campaigns, meaning Hollywood can't legally buy politicians and anti-American sentiment is growing. So if you're in the EU and you aren't part of a high-tech political activist group, join one. If you can't find one in your nation, start one. Find people who already know the political game and learn how to play to win.
If the EU doesn't get it, the center of technology development not only moves out of the USA, but out of the Western world to places Hollywood can't buy off. India and China, for instance.
The Chinese are already planning for a future in which the rest of the world buys its tech from them. They are already working on plans for a permanent manned moon base. They are already designing and fabricating their own CPUs.
"Pacifica Foundation" protest
to see just what has happened to public broadcasting the last few years. Basically, PBS is just another corporate outlet targeted at an upscale demographic. Since they don't target to the Foxnews audience but instead, to a literate audience, of course the programming looks different. However, the represented interests are the same.
She can't claim she didn't know, anybody who's ever walked by a supermarket checkstand knows the sort of crap published about celebrities.
A public figure is news by definition. What Streisand and "Miss Vermont" are whining about is news made about them that they do not control. Just like the RIAA complains about music content they don't control. I have no sympathy for any of them.
If what is published about either is untrue, they have the right to sue for libel and slander. They have no more right to prior restraint on published material than you or I do.
Though it could be argued that a pedophile is less dangerous. A pedophile generally only endangers the kids he's in contact with. That woman and that judge endanger us all.
The FCC commissioners who voted for this only care about what Bush tells them to do. Bush cares what his political campaign contributors and spin doctors and handlers tell him to do.
Where did you get the idea that Bush cares what we think?
Clear Channel's customers are:
The consumers are NOT radio station customers, and the connection between whatever the consumers want and whatever is played on a major chain radio station is a hell of a lot more tenuous than you think.
Yes. The people running the Big 5 major labels via payola.
Guess what. EVERY song you listen to on a chain-owned radio station is a paid placement. If you didn't know that, you have no business posting on any public policy issue having to do with music.
People ARE voting with their dollars by NOT buying music as much as they used to. That's why every major label is in financial trouble.
Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
No, YOU are. The reason why the comments you don't like got up-modded (I've never seen one of my comments hit 5 so fast) is that on this subject, everyone else is better informed than you are. Listen instead of sniveling, maybe you'll learn something if you are capable of doing so.
The rest of us use the Net to get to a lot of foriegn press sites and to the sites of the newsmakers (and their enemies) themselves and lots of other places. While they have their own local biases, at least they generally aren't owned by the people who 0wN Bush.
The whole point of becoming a monopoly is that one doesn't have to bother to spend money on putting out good products or new, radically good ideas anymore. The public will either buy whatever swill you give them or leave the market.
Of course, an increasing number of people are leaving the market.
Certainly, there are people who look forward to the 'latest and greatest' music from their Clear Channel station. Just as you look forward to the home version of the successor to XP.
The Limbot is invited to tell me just what kind of "ultraliberalism" a Fortune 50 company is likely to sponsor. He is also invited to tell me about how liberal Warren Buffet is (owner of Berkshire, owner of whe Washington Post.
The whining about the "ultra-liberal" mass media used to come from conservatives.
The mass media isn't ultra-conservative, they're the same people who promote and broadcast and sell the entertainment content that the Religious Right whine about.
The proper description for the agenda of both PBS and the mass media is corporatist. The agenda is about social control via news management for the benefit of the people who buy advertising, and that isn't your average "progressive" group and that isn't the average limbot.
You tell me how to manage payoffs to 10,000,000 individual Internet Radio broadcasters with nobody noticing. With the first step being how to figure out who is worth paying off.
Usually, end users who buy XP are buying it bundled with their new machines.
However, there are lots of people who are content with their P2/400s running W9.x who aren't feeling real motivated to buy the latest shiny new tech toys.
These people are going to be even less motivated to "upgrade" to W2003 or W2005. Even end users know that their legacy apps will break if they do that (not necessarily, but that's the way to bet), most home users have already been through at least 1 OS upgrade.
I'm running 98SE dual boot with RedHat 9, and I'm completely unmotivated about upgrading the MS side. I'm figuring that I'll either wind up going 100% Linux (maybe if a decent vector draw app ever appears, GIMP IS A PAINT PROGRAM) or buying a Mac.
I'm also running a Duron 900 and 384 megs, but I upgraded from my K6-400 to support Linux.
In this relatively remote part of the SF Bay Area, I can think of at least half a dozen. The largest chains out here have most of their local branches in grocery stores.
I mean the minimum for running real apps on top of the OS, not the MS specified minimum that allows getting to the desktop.
Do you really think people will buy new computers because their banks say so?
Any bank that tries this is going to see a massive shift to telephone and in-person banking and their profit margin disappear in the short term and any of their customers who need online banking switching to banks that support their current computers.
Even a freebie upgrade is expensive if it means one has to change computers and legacy apps to make it work.
Few people have that kind of loyalty to their banks.
"The acute lethal dose varied from 400 ug/kg (dogs) to 1000 ug/kg (mice) (Appendix 12, page 20) and 1400 ug/kg (rats) (Appendix 12, page 49, Table XXVII)."
If you want to believe you're more radiation-hardened than a dog, go ahead and inhale plutonium dust to your heart's content.
However, 400 MICROGRAMS PER KILOGRAM sounds more like 20 MILLIGRAMS for a 50 kg (110 pound) human to me.
A caffeine LD50 is more like 10 grams (200Mg/kg * 50 kg).
The guy who compared caffiene toxicity to Pu239 apparently thinks nuclear press industry handouts are SCIENCE. Science fiction is more like it, except that most publishers dump crap that obviously contrary to known scientific fact into the bit-bucket.
I rather suspect that a space infrastructure and solar power satellites would be comparable in cost to the thousands or tens of thousands of nuclear plants which would be required to support a nuclear-powered hydrogen infrastructure.
In your scenario, only the nuclear power industry benefits. How long will these thousands of plants stay "hot" after decommissioning? A guess accurate to the nearest thousand years will do fine.
If you want a power plant in your neighborhood, fine. Sell your neighbors on this if you can.
Are you an employee, stockholder, or merely a PR flack for the nuclear industry?
That rumbling under your feet is poor old Ned Ludd spinning in his grave.
Guns are just another kind of technology. Next time you go to a major Linux events, ask the next dozen US Linux types you see about their gun collections. Be prepared to spend a lot of time hearing about arcane details of their personal munitions. Nobody has more enthusiasm about guns than a Libertarian geek.
With respect to anti-government feelings. . . you must be extremely new here. Haven't you ever read a discussion of . . . any stupid government action that affects technology and technologists? Plenty of anti-government feelings and the only people who care about DMCA are people involved in technology.
Unabomber types in caves don't have to worry about state-level super-DMCAs fucking up our ability to secure our computer systems.
Luddite? What are you smoking?
The good news is that ES&S / Sequoia / Diebold are owned by major GOP campaign contributors, so expect traditional Republicans to be elected, not Bill Gates.
You generally don't need the latest / greatest / hottest for what you're doing, there's probably vacuum tube gear that is alive, well, and will probably solve some of your problems if you poke around a bit for a lot less money than you'd expect, especially if you value your time.
Most metropolitan areas have at least one or two places for this sort of thing.
Google is your friend. Try searching on:
used electronic test
or on the specific gear you want.
Not to say there's anything wrong with this project, it's a cool hack and anyone who gets into electronic hardware is going to have a growing pile of junk to recycle parts off.
The only reason why she didn't already have one is that they just became available.
Doesn't seem like a state that's rabidly afraid of guns to me.