It is pretty well established that a good government represents the people it governs, ergo a good government is a representative government. It is certainly possible for, say, a monarch to choose to represent the will of the people, but it is uncommon. When it does happen the kings and queens are held in very high regard for centuries. You can, however go centuries without having a good government under a monarchy.
When you build the government to be representative from the start, you give it the best chance of being a good government. What really makes our government amazing is its ability to correct itself. For example, the Supreme Court once ruled that slavery was constitutional. Pretty messed up, right? Later, after some massive changes among the people and given the time for the former justices to be replaced, the decision was overruled by a later Supreme Court, and slavery was ruled unconstitutional, as it should be (at least, according to our culture). No group is too powerful, no mistake is uncorrectable, and even "the final word" is really only "the final word... for now".
A representative government will always maintain the least oppressive state the culture will allow it to maintain. This is because it resists oppression by its very nature. If you feel oppressed in a representative government, you are in a vast minority.
...And a republic can only work when there are many third-parties to choose from and allow your voice to be heard.
That's nonsense, the danger of democracy is the tyranny of the majority and of mob rule. It does not take any third parties to mitigate those, all it takes is decreasing the size of the mobs and increasing the influence of the minorities. Hence in federal government, thousands of people are represented by a single representative, shrinking the size of the mob, preventing mob rule. This is mirrored in state and local governments. To prevent Tyranny of the Majority, we do a few things. First, we enhance the power of the minority to make it more difficult to abuse them - this is why each state in the House of Representatives has a number congressmen determined by their population, but the Senate always has two Senators from each state. This means that even though California has something like 300 times the population of Alaska, it is really only 3-4 times more powerful in congress. The majority does have greater say, but not enough that they can ignore the minority.
The second thing we do is split our government into three branches of equal power. One branch is directly elected (congress), another is partially directly elected (Executive/President), and the third is not elected at all but appointed (Judicial). Each has specific duties and powers designed to balance against abuses by the other two.
Our system is not structured to work well with more than two large parties. It isn't a requirement or prohibition, but in order to elect a president by the vote of the people a candidate must recieve more than 50% of the electoral vote. If that doesn't happen, Congress just picks, which is not ideal.
In reality, you're only talking about one election for one branch of government when you argue for three or more parties, and it is the one branch that it won't work for. If you're serious about a third party, you need to build a presence in congress, where you are more likely to get a person in office who can begin making changes and building influence. There are far too few independants, and none of anything else in congress to do anything worthwile at the moment, and the presidency is like a hail mary pass from outside the stadium - it would be incredible if it succeeded.
Often times the best people for a job are the ones who've screwed up in a similar way in the past and have learned from the mistake. They can be far less likely to do the same thing again than someone who has never been presented with the same situation.
However, since it revealed a character flaw, that person is still not ideal. The ideal person is someone who was presented with the same situation and did not abuse their sensitive position.
In other words, the man (or woman, obviously) you want for this job is the man who was estranged from his wife, who then moved herself and their son in with a new boyfriend, yet resisted illegaly searching the federal database for information about the guy and instead went about it another way.
That's who you want here, though the guy who learned from his mistakes would not be the worst choice in the world.
'I am distressed by the inconsistencies between my recollection and the contemporaneous documents, but I assure you that the mistake was inadvertent, and that I have at all times taken full responsibility for what I know to have been a grave error in judgment,'
Read that again, maybe three or four times if you have to. Focus on one clause at a time really think about what he is saying before you move on to the next one.
He is saying the discrepancy between what he told congress and what the documents say was inadvertant, that is the mistake he is talking about. In fact he says he is distressed that his recollection was flawed. I.e. misleading Congress was a mistake, as in not what he was trying to do, he simply remembered things slightly differently than they apparently were. That happens all the time to me, I'm sure it does to you as well. Abusing his position, however, he has always claimed full responsibility for as "a grave error in judgment".
Learn to read, please. It will help.
All that said, I still wouldn't trust this guy as head of the TSA. It may have been just one mis-judgment in a long career of good judgments, but the TSA is so fucked up as it is we don't need someone who may be going on personal vendettas via airline security.
Exactly. The talking heads call it a "war on terror" and all the while it's our own government who tries to keep us afraid with colored charts and media scaremongering. Then some fucking moron tries to blow up a plane and ends up lighting his nuts on fire and the government agents have an excuse to further terrorize the citizens. They will continue to let the occasional bomber through every now and then, and the cycle will continue.
There is an old saying that applies here: Never ascribe to malice that which can readily be explained by incompetance.
The TSA believes in what they are doing, as does the DHS. They are not creating increasingly inconvenient security measures to instill terror, they are honestly trying to prevent the next attack.
However, their misguided attempts at this do not prevent new attacks, it simply terrorizes the citizens, making their lives worse.
There is nothing TSA has in place right now that would stop hijackers from sneaking box cutters on to airplanes once again and hijacking the plane. I know this because in the past year a friend of mine accidentally snuck a box cutter through at least 6 TSA screenings, maybe even more since he wasn't sure exactly when he put the thing in his bag. The only measure that has been implimented that would have any effect at all is the pilots locking the cockpit door. That's it.
The hijackings wouldn't get very far today, however, in spite of the TSA's ineptitude, because the conventional wisdom for what to do in a hijacking has changed. It used to be thought that it was best to wait it out, and in the end everyone goes home. Today we know we need to act immediately, and while a few may get hurt, there is no scenario where an entire plane full of passengers is defeated by a hijacker.
So what do we gain from TSA? Nothing, that's what. Just keep the cockpit locked and act when someone tries to hijack the plane. Done. Flying is safe once again.
Add to that the fact that if all they have to go on is a hunch or gut instinct they are far less likely to actually get a warrant. It goes like this:
DA: I need a warrant, this guy is our guy! Judge: What is your evidence? DA: I have no evidence, but I know it's him! Judge: Uh... ok, I can't just give out warrants for no reason. DA: But he's the guy!
Etcetera etcetera. Now, they don't exactly need a lot of evidence, and what they have doesn't need to be all that solid to get a warrant, but if they're just fishing they usually don't get it.
Plus there is the fact that the cop must now convince a minimum of two more people that you are a likely suspect. That protects you from assholes a lot more.
There's more to democracy than simple "majority rules".
Actually no, there isn't. That is why no government has ever been successful as a democracy. The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is one is a tyranny of the majority while the other is a tyranny of the minority.
The system that works uses democracy in very limited amounts, structuring the government such that it is still run by a minority, but each member of that minority represents a larger minority. Together, all members of the country are represented fairly. Because it is structured, the power differential between the minority groups and the majority groups can be balanced adequately, and the tyranny of the majority can be mitigated, if not completely eliminated, without resorting to the tyranny of the minority.
This is called a Representative Republic, and it is how most western countries operate these days. It is a far cry from democracy, but that is a very good thing.
Its not the same as staring at the sludge in the bottom of a test tube.
Are you kidding? Do you not realize how many scientific discoveries occur because scientists were looking at one thing and found something totally unexpected? It kind of defines "discovery".
Not all things are predicted, in fact most things aren't.
Look at vulcanized rubber for example, it was a complete accident. Goodyear had the basics in place, but it wasn't until he accidentally dropped some of it on the iron stove he was using to boil it in sulphur, and bingo! It was perfect. Without that invention we would not have rubber today, as natural rubber only maintains its elasticity under a small range of temperatures. The whole world had given up except for Goodyear (and I'm sure a couple others like him), but it was a pure accident that completed the discovery. And even then nobody believed him. Heh, such is science and discovery.
Can you use any muscles? I imagine you must, because you can communicate here on slashdot which requires moving muscles in some way.
Furthermore, what kind of an idiot would want to use this on a home computer? Other than a nerd with a 12 year old mindset about using new tech toys because "their frickin shweet man!"
This is going to be used in things like prosthetics, in a plethora of military applications, to operate a cell phone, gps, or computer in your car without having to take your hands off the wheel, etc.
You know it just amazes me how trapped in your own little world you *nix fanboys are. There is life outside the desktop man, and there are a hell of a lot more places to use a computer than in your basement. You need to broaden your horizons a bit, mmkay?
Note: I am not a Microsoft fanboy, in fact I used to be vehemantly anti-Microsoft. I've mellowed since I realized how many people trash Microsoft based on other people's experiences, or just because they are the "big bad guy". If you look at things a bit more fairly, you can much better discern between what is bullshit and what isn't. Frankly, there is a hell of a lot of bullshit here on slashdot.
Ummm... if that $5b a year produces something like this, then it is totally worth it. Do you realize how many applications there are for a muscle-based input device? I can tell you right now using a home computer is probably least among them. We're talking things like prosthetics, a whole range of military applications, video games, and that's just scratching the surface. This is the kind of thing that can generate whole new industries.
If what they have is real MS will have made far more than they've spent on R&D for the past 5-10 years, maybe more. This is why you spend so much on R&D with no results for years - penny pinchers with no vision will kill the future of a company by killing its R&D program in the name of saving a few bucks a year. Idiots.
Furthermore, the core technologies, the ones developed by the R&D teams, in Vista and Windows 7 are fantastic. It was mostly political bullshit and poor design decisions that ruined Vista. They seem to have corrected the mistake with 7, and you get what I would argue is currently the most advanced OS on the market.
Look at Google - 95% of their income comes from their advertising revenues from adwords and searches. If they stopped all of their new research (chrome, android, etc), they would probably double their profits for the next two years. However, I doubt it would take more than three years before they started to decline, and after four or five they would be replaced by Bing as the biggest search engine on the net.
People who focus on this year only, and not on future potential, don't create great companies. They tend to be the ones who destroy them. God forbid your board of directors can see no further than the current quarter's earnings. That company is doomed.
If you have the DVD, there is nothing to stop you from playing the DVD, so there was obviously something else messed up in ether a driver or other software problem preventing it.
The copy protection on DVDs is not the same as the DRM on media files, there is no shared key or anything of the sort. It is simply encryption designed to make it difficult to copy (it has also been very, very cracked).
Ciniplayer, Realplayer, and Media player all fall back to some inner working in Windows to authenticate & play a DVD.
No, they don't. It is based on what is read from the disk itself. Like I said, it was probably a hosed driver or something. There isn't a key in windows that plays DVDs, the key is on an area of the DVD that is not writable on writeable DVDs. That makes direct copying impossible, the encryption must be circumvented entirely before it can be written to a new DVD.
That wasn't a problem with DRM, you simply didn't actually fix whatever the virus screwed up.
Culture is what allows humans to thrive as a species.
That is true.
The fact that books can be easily copied is why humans are still not living in caves.
That's a lot of hyperbole, but in spirit, that is also true.
Information is of real practical value to society. It's not just about lining the pockets of some author or some publisher for a few decades.
That is also very true.
The only reason you exist is "book piracy".
The only reason you get to enjoy a posh Western lifestyle is "book piracy".
That couldn't be further from the truth.
You stopped analyzing where all the books come from far too soon.
It's actually copyright that is the reason we have so many books around which can be pirated in the first place. I personally think musicians and artists would still be able to manage just fine without copyright, though the fat cat music industry execs would be in serious trouble.
Writers however can't expect to make money by going on world-wide readings of their books unless they are poets or short story authors. They rely entirely upon book sales, and since the advent of copyright nothing has threatened the livelihood of writers like digital reproduction of books. Books aren't like other mediums, there is no good way to profit from writing a book than to sell copies of that book.
If an author cannot profit from writing a book, he cannot continue writing books. Whatever idiotic concept you may have about "information wants to be free" or whatever bullshit philosophy you have, a man has to eat. If a man can't eat by writing books, books will not be written. Period.
Here is the copyright clause (it is also the bases for patents) in the Constitution, it should give you a very clear idea of its exact purpose, and exactly how it has been abused by those fine men and women who are supposed to be representing we the people, but who instead care more about their lobbyists:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
When they were hashing it out, one of James Madison's proposals, which helped form the clause, was "to encourage, by proper premiums & provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries".
Sounds pretty close to what you mistakenly think Piracy is for, doesn't it?
Piracy is nothing more than assholes taking what they don't deserve and have no right to take. There is nothing beneficial to society as a whole about piracy. It only undermines society.
Before copying was cheap, copyright was unnecessary because it was almost impossible to harm the livelihood of the author, meaning the maximum amount of works were being produced. I would agree that overall the number of works produced at this time was severly limited by the ability of whoever commissioned a work being produced to pay a living wage to an author for as long as it takes to produce the work. That is why most of the literature we have from before the printing press is in the form of plays and poems and songs, which could be performed over and over for a fee which the writer and performers could live off of.
So yes, we don't have many written works from Ancient Greece. Some of the reason for that is surely because many of them didn't survive.
We have a lot of literature from Ancient Greece, obviously only a tiny fraction of what was produced due to the reasons you describe, but we do have a lot. They are almost all poems and plays. We don't have anything resembling a book from the time period.
The printing press made copying significantly cheaper, which then made the original work worth significantly less. There may not have been many straight up authors (not playwrites or poets) at the time, but I'm sure what few there were quickly began having a very difficult time making money. One of the few actual books being maintained was the Bible, and the people who produced it were terrified of the printing press. This exact scenario I describe played out with the Bible until Copyright was introduced to stop it.
Along comes the copyright, granting temporary exclusive rights to copy an original work for a set number of years. It was difficult to police for anything but large-scale copy operations, but that didn't matter, those were mostly the ones that cost the author their livelihood. Copies on the small scale were generally poor and temporary, they didn't matter. Mass copying was expensive enough that anything less didn't matter.
Fast forward to today, and with the advent of digital technology. The cost to reproduce a book in perfect quality is vertually nothing, and hundreds of thousands of copies can be made in seconds. Now your neighbor is better at mass producing a book than an expensive printing operation of old.
Now what? Writers and publishers are afraid they won't be able to make a living writing and publishing books any more. That is not a fear based in fantasy. If writers and publishers cannot make a living writing and publishing books then the number of books written and published will drop. It is not that hard. The whole point of copyright is to make sure writers and publishers have a reason to keep writing and publishing books.
If the intentions of copyright have been compromised, then it needs to be fixed. Fixing copyright does not mean extending the protection out a hundred years past the author's death, and it doesn't mean making previoiusly legal actions effectively illegal by making laws that apply only to digital works. Putting up a barrier to casual copying, thereby limiting the damage digital copies can do, while still being fair to the purchasers of those digital copies is perfectly reasonable and brings the digital age back in line with what has worked in the past. The DRM in the ePub format does exactly that. The DRM Amazon uses is more like what the music industry tries to use, which is overbearing and unfair to the consumer.
The purpose of copyright is to serve the public interest. Whether authors happen to benefit from this or not is utterly irrelevant, save for how this factors into the overall public interest. It isn't a reward; it's more like a bribe. And like any bribe, it should be the least amount that gets the job done, where the value received by giving the bribe is greater than the cost of paying it out.
WTF? A bribe is dirty money to get people in a position of power to perform a favor. The promise of copyright is an incentive to produce more works of art. How in the hell can you even begin to equate that to a bribe? Copyright IS a reward, it's "Yaaay! You made something! Just for that you get sole copyrights on it for X number of years!". Sounds like a reward to me! It's not payment for services, the government isn't handing out cash directly to authors thanks to copyright, or anything even remotely similar to a bribe.
Frankly, your screwed up view of what copyright is and what it should be is part of the reason copyright is such a mess right now.
Copyright came about in the first place because third parties began copying and selling other people's books, undercutting them and driving them out of work. No Copyright = very few new literary works. Any halfway decent book gets stolen and mass produced for less than the original author (who more than likely spent several years working on it, if it is a good book) can sell it for and still survive on. If an author cannot make a living by selling his work, he doesn't stay in the business. Right now, only bad authors are driven out of the business. With no copyright, ALL authors of any merit will eventually be driven out of the business. All we'll be left with are techwriters writing manuals and other shit that nobody really wants to read.
Copyright is a GOOD thing. Copyright ABUSE is bad - that includes unfair DRM and unfair legislation regarding copyright. That's what the music industry was doing with their DRM, and what big business has been doing pushing copyright extensions (which are absolutely ridiculous now). The up and coming ePub DRM does not abuse copyright, and a lot of publishers and manufacturers are getting on board with it. It seriously gives you about the same usage rights as you have with paper book.
I really need to preview more carefully, "...the publishing industry is full of dumbasses..." should obviously be "...the publishing industry is not full of dumbasses...".
While it isn't being done with a smartphone yet, there are already a lot of homebrew OCR setups that do exactly that with a digital camera, generally set in a home-made frame of some sort over the book. Then they just run it through some OCR software and there you go, digitized book.
You can set something like that up for less than $50.
The real solution, of course, is to use a sensible, fair DRM. Not like what the music industry tried, but something that brings digital books in line with physical books as far as portability, tradeability, lending, etc.
Fortunately, unlike the music industry, the publishing industry is full of dumbasses, and they have come up with a standard, open format that does just that: ePub. I don't know why Cory Doctorow doesn't know about it yet, but it is gaining a lot of ground among everybody but Amazon. Oddly enough, more and more publishers are creating ebooks in ePub format, and then converting it into Amazon's proprietary format for sale on the Kindle.
This gives me hope that Amazon's model won't last for too much longer.
- it makes it very easy for repressive regimes to track who bought what: a handful of authentification servers have that info. granted, we may not feel concerned by that right now, but a good part of the world is, and you never know what will happen to us later on. Recent events show that corporations are all too happy to oblige any request from any "big market" government.
If you don't know already, unless you are paying cash for everything the government can already track exactly what you buy, and have bought, for years. It's nothing new with ebooks. Head down to Barnes and Nobel and pay with a credit or check card and the government can track that purchase if they want to.
- it even makes possible to recall a book, possibly to change it, which conjures uneasy visions of the Ministry of Truth.
Amazon has already done this before, and it is one of the reasons I will never buy an ebook that does not allow me to have a copy of it separate from the company I purchased it from.
Oddly enough, Sony is very good about this, and the ePub format can be moved from device to device freely for non-DRM titles, and nearly as freely for DRM titles (after a certain point you would need to get the built in device limit raised, which they will do for you with purchase verification).
I've been trying to get all you nay-sayers to stop looking at the Kindle and check out the other manufacturers and booksellers using ePub, It is an open, international format that has adressed most all of the copyright concerns for publishers and the DRM concerns for readers in one fell swoop, and it is becoming very very popular (Sony already uses it exclusively for all their ebooks, and there are many online retailers that use it). It enables online libraries without breaking copyright as well. I am thoroughly impressed with the format, because it adresses nearly every single concern listed so far on this thread.
The only people who I can't see liking ePub are Amazon (so in love with their lock-in DRM), and people who just want free books and don't want to give publishers and authors their fair share. They can just buzz off in my opinion, the publishers and authors are moving in the right direction here, unlike what the music industry did. There will not need to be any big battles here, because they are already addressing everyone's concerns in a fair way.
Go on and google it, it's the wave of the future for ebooks. I really hope Amazon gives in soon, but they are still top dog at the moment and don't seem to be losing much ground. Till then, a pox on all things Kindle.
It is also important to note that, before copyright, there were far, far fewer books written then their are today. There were very few entertainment books 300 years ago, they were all political satire, or history books, or similar. Most of what survives as literature from the ancient world are things like plays or poems, which were performed for a price which allowed the author to continue. Look at almost all greek liturature, they are mostly plays or histories or oral traditions. Same with Shakespear, all plays. There were very few actual books that have survived from the time because there were very few books actually written.
Since the advent of Copyright, coupled with advances in printing which allowed authors to profit directly from their writings, literature has exploded around the world. If we abolish that then literature will eventually go back to being a performance piece, and the really good writing will dry up or be converted to $60 a seat plays and TV shows.
I really don't think you want that, even though it is exactly what you are advocating.
What we need is sensible DRM that conforms to the spirit of copyright, which is to reward authors for contributing to our culture while at the same time getting that literature out to as many people as possible. DRM in music did not follow the spirit of copyright, which is why it is so hated. However, ePub is an ebook format that is gaining ground fast, and it DOES follow the spirit of copyright.
Frankly, writers and text publishers seem to be a lot smarter than musicians and music industry moguls. They have always been much more amiable to the giving and sharing of books than their musical equivalents have been, and they are approaching this problem the right way. They don't want to charge you every time you read a book, like the RIAA does when you listen to a CD, they just want to make sure they don't get driven out of a job because one person buys a book and gives it to 5,000 of his closest friends.
It is fair and reasonable, and so far the only big ebook asshat right now is Amazon, all the other big players are amiable to being fair to the readers. Amazon, however, is relying on name recognition and their initial popularity to lock their customers into their own system, excluding all others. I really wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
And, the idea is that I can give (very unlikely) or loan that book. I couldn't with an ebook
You can with ePub, the Adobe ebook format. Sony sells books in the format exclusively, Barnes & Nobel offers it as an option, and a number of other online stores and smaller ebook manufactuers are starting to use it as well. It has DRM at the publisher's discression, but the DRM is reasonable and still allows the lending and trading of the ebook, as well as moving it from device to device. To give you an idea of the DRM's flexibility, it allows online libraries to start lending books over the internet without breaking copyright.
It brings ebooks pretty close to the same usefulness as physical books.
I'm sorry, what.txt files are no longer readable?.pdf files?.rtf?
The formats that are any good stick around for a very, very long time..doc changes all the time because Microsoft is run by asswipes, any other good document standard doesn't change much.
If you need someone to remind you to move your ebooks from the old hard drive to the new hard drive when the technology changes, then nobody can help you.
If a format is standardized and used ubiquitously for ebooks, like pdf's are for business documents of all sorts, then the format will not go away - it will simply move with everything else. Adobe actually has an ebook format like that that many publishers and retailers and ebook reader manufacturers are jumping on board with and using en-mass, paving the way to eliminating the multi-non-standardized-format nonsense we have now. Amazon will probably be the last to come on board though, and I would avoid the kindle like the plague until they do.
Just make your next ebook reader a non-Amazon device and you'll be 3/4 there, missing only the DRM'd content already on your Kindle. Everybody else is moving toward using the most reasonable format around - ePub. It's an Adobe format, so you know it's good, and it's based on the Open Publishing Standard. I would be very surprised to find that, should the format d'jour change, that ePub would not be convertable to another format.
It does have optional DRM, but the DRM lets you treat the digital copy as a book - you can lend it out, you can move it from device to device, etc. They do have limits on the number of devices you can move an ebook to (5), but if you happen to run up against that it's just a phone call to fix. Not perfect, no, but it's damn close.
ePub is also enabling libraries, who can now check books out thanks to the DRM. They basically send you a copy with a timed expiration, and lock the copy in their inventory for the same amount of time. This allows them to comply with copyright law, which would be difficult without DRM.
Anyway, enough gushing about ePub, I'm just really excited about where ebooks are going and I am impressed that the majority of companies in the business are pushing for a DRM that actually makes digital books equivalent to physical books - not lesser or greater.
It's a good time to be a reader.
P.S. Textbooks on anything but those outrageously expensive large-fromat ebook readers suck monkey balls. Just sayin. They aren't all that fun on computer screens either, but can have advantages over dead tree in some situations. For big textbooks, I'd stick to paper for now.
That's all well and good until dead tree publishers go out of business and books are no longer (or at least not as often) printed at all.
Then you don't get the second option.
What we need is a digital format we can be reasonably sure will stick around for the long haul, and if it doesn't stick around we need to know that it can be converted to new formats. If we have that, then we have something close to the security of a dead tree book.
Slashdot Mirror
It is pretty well established that a good government represents the people it governs, ergo a good government is a representative government. It is certainly possible for, say, a monarch to choose to represent the will of the people, but it is uncommon. When it does happen the kings and queens are held in very high regard for centuries. You can, however go centuries without having a good government under a monarchy.
When you build the government to be representative from the start, you give it the best chance of being a good government. What really makes our government amazing is its ability to correct itself. For example, the Supreme Court once ruled that slavery was constitutional. Pretty messed up, right? Later, after some massive changes among the people and given the time for the former justices to be replaced, the decision was overruled by a later Supreme Court, and slavery was ruled unconstitutional, as it should be (at least, according to our culture). No group is too powerful, no mistake is uncorrectable, and even "the final word" is really only "the final word... for now".
A representative government will always maintain the least oppressive state the culture will allow it to maintain. This is because it resists oppression by its very nature. If you feel oppressed in a representative government, you are in a vast minority.
...And a republic can only work when there are many third-parties to choose from and allow your voice to be heard.
That's nonsense, the danger of democracy is the tyranny of the majority and of mob rule. It does not take any third parties to mitigate those, all it takes is decreasing the size of the mobs and increasing the influence of the minorities. Hence in federal government, thousands of people are represented by a single representative, shrinking the size of the mob, preventing mob rule. This is mirrored in state and local governments. To prevent Tyranny of the Majority, we do a few things. First, we enhance the power of the minority to make it more difficult to abuse them - this is why each state in the House of Representatives has a number congressmen determined by their population, but the Senate always has two Senators from each state. This means that even though California has something like 300 times the population of Alaska, it is really only 3-4 times more powerful in congress. The majority does have greater say, but not enough that they can ignore the minority.
The second thing we do is split our government into three branches of equal power. One branch is directly elected (congress), another is partially directly elected (Executive/President), and the third is not elected at all but appointed (Judicial). Each has specific duties and powers designed to balance against abuses by the other two.
Our system is not structured to work well with more than two large parties. It isn't a requirement or prohibition, but in order to elect a president by the vote of the people a candidate must recieve more than 50% of the electoral vote. If that doesn't happen, Congress just picks, which is not ideal.
In reality, you're only talking about one election for one branch of government when you argue for three or more parties, and it is the one branch that it won't work for. If you're serious about a third party, you need to build a presence in congress, where you are more likely to get a person in office who can begin making changes and building influence. There are far too few independants, and none of anything else in congress to do anything worthwile at the moment, and the presidency is like a hail mary pass from outside the stadium - it would be incredible if it succeeded.
Often times the best people for a job are the ones who've screwed up in a similar way in the past and have learned from the mistake. They can be far less likely to do the same thing again than someone who has never been presented with the same situation.
However, since it revealed a character flaw, that person is still not ideal. The ideal person is someone who was presented with the same situation and did not abuse their sensitive position.
In other words, the man (or woman, obviously) you want for this job is the man who was estranged from his wife, who then moved herself and their son in with a new boyfriend, yet resisted illegaly searching the federal database for information about the guy and instead went about it another way.
That's who you want here, though the guy who learned from his mistakes would not be the worst choice in the world.
'I am distressed by the inconsistencies between my recollection and the contemporaneous documents, but I assure you that the mistake was inadvertent, and that I have at all times taken full responsibility for what I know to have been a grave error in judgment,'
Read that again, maybe three or four times if you have to. Focus on one clause at a time really think about what he is saying before you move on to the next one.
He is saying the discrepancy between what he told congress and what the documents say was inadvertant, that is the mistake he is talking about. In fact he says he is distressed that his recollection was flawed. I.e. misleading Congress was a mistake, as in not what he was trying to do, he simply remembered things slightly differently than they apparently were. That happens all the time to me, I'm sure it does to you as well. Abusing his position, however, he has always claimed full responsibility for as "a grave error in judgment".
Learn to read, please. It will help.
All that said, I still wouldn't trust this guy as head of the TSA. It may have been just one mis-judgment in a long career of good judgments, but the TSA is so fucked up as it is we don't need someone who may be going on personal vendettas via airline security.
Exactly. The talking heads call it a "war on terror" and all the while it's our own government who tries to keep us afraid with colored charts and media scaremongering. Then some fucking moron tries to blow up a plane and ends up lighting his nuts on fire and the government agents have an excuse to further terrorize the citizens. They will continue to let the occasional bomber through every now and then, and the cycle will continue.
There is an old saying that applies here: Never ascribe to malice that which can readily be explained by incompetance.
The TSA believes in what they are doing, as does the DHS. They are not creating increasingly inconvenient security measures to instill terror, they are honestly trying to prevent the next attack.
However, their misguided attempts at this do not prevent new attacks, it simply terrorizes the citizens, making their lives worse.
There is nothing TSA has in place right now that would stop hijackers from sneaking box cutters on to airplanes once again and hijacking the plane. I know this because in the past year a friend of mine accidentally snuck a box cutter through at least 6 TSA screenings, maybe even more since he wasn't sure exactly when he put the thing in his bag. The only measure that has been implimented that would have any effect at all is the pilots locking the cockpit door. That's it.
The hijackings wouldn't get very far today, however, in spite of the TSA's ineptitude, because the conventional wisdom for what to do in a hijacking has changed. It used to be thought that it was best to wait it out, and in the end everyone goes home. Today we know we need to act immediately, and while a few may get hurt, there is no scenario where an entire plane full of passengers is defeated by a hijacker.
So what do we gain from TSA? Nothing, that's what. Just keep the cockpit locked and act when someone tries to hijack the plane. Done. Flying is safe once again.
Add to that the fact that if all they have to go on is a hunch or gut instinct they are far less likely to actually get a warrant. It goes like this:
DA: I need a warrant, this guy is our guy!
Judge: What is your evidence?
DA: I have no evidence, but I know it's him!
Judge: Uh... ok, I can't just give out warrants for no reason.
DA: But he's the guy!
Etcetera etcetera. Now, they don't exactly need a lot of evidence, and what they have doesn't need to be all that solid to get a warrant, but if they're just fishing they usually don't get it.
Plus there is the fact that the cop must now convince a minimum of two more people that you are a likely suspect. That protects you from assholes a lot more.
There's more to democracy than simple "majority rules".
Actually no, there isn't. That is why no government has ever been successful as a democracy. The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is one is a tyranny of the majority while the other is a tyranny of the minority.
The system that works uses democracy in very limited amounts, structuring the government such that it is still run by a minority, but each member of that minority represents a larger minority. Together, all members of the country are represented fairly. Because it is structured, the power differential between the minority groups and the majority groups can be balanced adequately, and the tyranny of the majority can be mitigated, if not completely eliminated, without resorting to the tyranny of the minority.
This is called a Representative Republic, and it is how most western countries operate these days. It is a far cry from democracy, but that is a very good thing.
Its not the same as staring at the sludge in the bottom of a test tube.
Are you kidding? Do you not realize how many scientific discoveries occur because scientists were looking at one thing and found something totally unexpected? It kind of defines "discovery".
Not all things are predicted, in fact most things aren't.
Look at vulcanized rubber for example, it was a complete accident. Goodyear had the basics in place, but it wasn't until he accidentally dropped some of it on the iron stove he was using to boil it in sulphur, and bingo! It was perfect. Without that invention we would not have rubber today, as natural rubber only maintains its elasticity under a small range of temperatures. The whole world had given up except for Goodyear (and I'm sure a couple others like him), but it was a pure accident that completed the discovery. And even then nobody believed him. Heh, such is science and discovery.
Can you use any muscles? I imagine you must, because you can communicate here on slashdot which requires moving muscles in some way.
Furthermore, what kind of an idiot would want to use this on a home computer? Other than a nerd with a 12 year old mindset about using new tech toys because "their frickin shweet man!"
This is going to be used in things like prosthetics, in a plethora of military applications, to operate a cell phone, gps, or computer in your car without having to take your hands off the wheel, etc.
You know it just amazes me how trapped in your own little world you *nix fanboys are. There is life outside the desktop man, and there are a hell of a lot more places to use a computer than in your basement. You need to broaden your horizons a bit, mmkay?
Note: I am not a Microsoft fanboy, in fact I used to be vehemantly anti-Microsoft. I've mellowed since I realized how many people trash Microsoft based on other people's experiences, or just because they are the "big bad guy". If you look at things a bit more fairly, you can much better discern between what is bullshit and what isn't. Frankly, there is a hell of a lot of bullshit here on slashdot.
You've got to be retarded if you think this will be used in an office setting.
Ummm... if that $5b a year produces something like this, then it is totally worth it. Do you realize how many applications there are for a muscle-based input device? I can tell you right now using a home computer is probably least among them. We're talking things like prosthetics, a whole range of military applications, video games, and that's just scratching the surface. This is the kind of thing that can generate whole new industries.
If what they have is real MS will have made far more than they've spent on R&D for the past 5-10 years, maybe more. This is why you spend so much on R&D with no results for years - penny pinchers with no vision will kill the future of a company by killing its R&D program in the name of saving a few bucks a year. Idiots.
Furthermore, the core technologies, the ones developed by the R&D teams, in Vista and Windows 7 are fantastic. It was mostly political bullshit and poor design decisions that ruined Vista. They seem to have corrected the mistake with 7, and you get what I would argue is currently the most advanced OS on the market.
Look at Google - 95% of their income comes from their advertising revenues from adwords and searches. If they stopped all of their new research (chrome, android, etc), they would probably double their profits for the next two years. However, I doubt it would take more than three years before they started to decline, and after four or five they would be replaced by Bing as the biggest search engine on the net.
People who focus on this year only, and not on future potential, don't create great companies. They tend to be the ones who destroy them. God forbid your board of directors can see no further than the current quarter's earnings. That company is doomed.
If you have the DVD, there is nothing to stop you from playing the DVD, so there was obviously something else messed up in ether a driver or other software problem preventing it.
The copy protection on DVDs is not the same as the DRM on media files, there is no shared key or anything of the sort. It is simply encryption designed to make it difficult to copy (it has also been very, very cracked).
Ciniplayer, Realplayer, and Media player all fall back to some inner working in Windows to authenticate & play a DVD.
No, they don't. It is based on what is read from the disk itself. Like I said, it was probably a hosed driver or something. There isn't a key in windows that plays DVDs, the key is on an area of the DVD that is not writable on writeable DVDs. That makes direct copying impossible, the encryption must be circumvented entirely before it can be written to a new DVD.
That wasn't a problem with DRM, you simply didn't actually fix whatever the virus screwed up.
Culture is what allows humans to thrive as a species.
That is true.
The fact that books can be easily copied is why humans are still not
living in caves.
That's a lot of hyperbole, but in spirit, that is also true.
Information is of real practical value to society. It's not just about
lining the pockets of some author or some publisher for a few decades.
That is also very true.
The only reason you exist is "book piracy".
The only reason you get to enjoy a posh Western lifestyle is "book piracy".
That couldn't be further from the truth.
You stopped analyzing where all the books come from far too soon.
It's actually copyright that is the reason we have so many books around which can be pirated in the first place. I personally think musicians and artists would still be able to manage just fine without copyright, though the fat cat music industry execs would be in serious trouble.
Writers however can't expect to make money by going on world-wide readings of their books unless they are poets or short story authors. They rely entirely upon book sales, and since the advent of copyright nothing has threatened the livelihood of writers like digital reproduction of books. Books aren't like other mediums, there is no good way to profit from writing a book than to sell copies of that book.
If an author cannot profit from writing a book, he cannot continue writing books. Whatever idiotic concept you may have about "information wants to be free" or whatever bullshit philosophy you have, a man has to eat. If a man can't eat by writing books, books will not be written. Period.
Here is the copyright clause (it is also the bases for patents) in the Constitution, it should give you a very clear idea of its exact purpose, and exactly how it has been abused by those fine men and women who are supposed to be representing we the people, but who instead care more about their lobbyists:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
When they were hashing it out, one of James Madison's proposals, which helped form the clause, was "to encourage, by proper premiums & provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries".
Sounds pretty close to what you mistakenly think Piracy is for, doesn't it?
Piracy is nothing more than assholes taking what they don't deserve and have no right to take. There is nothing beneficial to society as a whole about piracy. It only undermines society.
That actually proves my point.
Before copying was cheap, copyright was unnecessary because it was almost impossible to harm the livelihood of the author, meaning the maximum amount of works were being produced. I would agree that overall the number of works produced at this time was severly limited by the ability of whoever commissioned a work being produced to pay a living wage to an author for as long as it takes to produce the work. That is why most of the literature we have from before the printing press is in the form of plays and poems and songs, which could be performed over and over for a fee which the writer and performers could live off of.
So yes, we don't have many written works from Ancient Greece. Some of the reason for that is surely because many of them didn't survive.
We have a lot of literature from Ancient Greece, obviously only a tiny fraction of what was produced due to the reasons you describe, but we do have a lot. They are almost all poems and plays. We don't have anything resembling a book from the time period.
The printing press made copying significantly cheaper, which then made the original work worth significantly less. There may not have been many straight up authors (not playwrites or poets) at the time, but I'm sure what few there were quickly began having a very difficult time making money. One of the few actual books being maintained was the Bible, and the people who produced it were terrified of the printing press. This exact scenario I describe played out with the Bible until Copyright was introduced to stop it.
Along comes the copyright, granting temporary exclusive rights to copy an original work for a set number of years. It was difficult to police for anything but large-scale copy operations, but that didn't matter, those were mostly the ones that cost the author their livelihood. Copies on the small scale were generally poor and temporary, they didn't matter. Mass copying was expensive enough that anything less didn't matter.
Fast forward to today, and with the advent of digital technology. The cost to reproduce a book in perfect quality is vertually nothing, and hundreds of thousands of copies can be made in seconds. Now your neighbor is better at mass producing a book than an expensive printing operation of old.
Now what? Writers and publishers are afraid they won't be able to make a living writing and publishing books any more. That is not a fear based in fantasy. If writers and publishers cannot make a living writing and publishing books then the number of books written and published will drop. It is not that hard. The whole point of copyright is to make sure writers and publishers have a reason to keep writing and publishing books.
If the intentions of copyright have been compromised, then it needs to be fixed. Fixing copyright does not mean extending the protection out a hundred years past the author's death, and it doesn't mean making previoiusly legal actions effectively illegal by making laws that apply only to digital works. Putting up a barrier to casual copying, thereby limiting the damage digital copies can do, while still being fair to the purchasers of those digital copies is perfectly reasonable and brings the digital age back in line with what has worked in the past. The DRM in the ePub format does exactly that. The DRM Amazon uses is more like what the music industry tries to use, which is overbearing and unfair to the consumer.
The purpose of copyright is to serve the public interest. Whether authors happen to benefit from this or not is utterly irrelevant, save for how this factors into the overall public interest. It isn't a reward; it's more like a bribe. And like any bribe, it should be the least amount that gets the job done, where the value received by giving the bribe is greater than the cost of paying it out.
WTF? A bribe is dirty money to get people in a position of power to perform a favor. The promise of copyright is an incentive to produce more works of art. How in the hell can you even begin to equate that to a bribe? Copyright IS a reward, it's "Yaaay! You made something! Just for that you get sole copyrights on it for X number of years!". Sounds like a reward to me! It's not payment for services, the government isn't handing out cash directly to authors thanks to copyright, or anything even remotely similar to a bribe.
Frankly, your screwed up view of what copyright is and what it should be is part of the reason copyright is such a mess right now.
Copyright came about in the first place because third parties began copying and selling other people's books, undercutting them and driving them out of work. No Copyright = very few new literary works. Any halfway decent book gets stolen and mass produced for less than the original author (who more than likely spent several years working on it, if it is a good book) can sell it for and still survive on. If an author cannot make a living by selling his work, he doesn't stay in the business. Right now, only bad authors are driven out of the business. With no copyright, ALL authors of any merit will eventually be driven out of the business. All we'll be left with are techwriters writing manuals and other shit that nobody really wants to read.
Copyright is a GOOD thing. Copyright ABUSE is bad - that includes unfair DRM and unfair legislation regarding copyright. That's what the music industry was doing with their DRM, and what big business has been doing pushing copyright extensions (which are absolutely ridiculous now). The up and coming ePub DRM does not abuse copyright, and a lot of publishers and manufacturers are getting on board with it. It seriously gives you about the same usage rights as you have with paper book.
I really need to preview more carefully, "...the publishing industry is full of dumbasses..." should obviously be "...the publishing industry is not full of dumbasses...".
While it isn't being done with a smartphone yet, there are already a lot of homebrew OCR setups that do exactly that with a digital camera, generally set in a home-made frame of some sort over the book. Then they just run it through some OCR software and there you go, digitized book.
You can set something like that up for less than $50.
The real solution, of course, is to use a sensible, fair DRM. Not like what the music industry tried, but something that brings digital books in line with physical books as far as portability, tradeability, lending, etc.
Fortunately, unlike the music industry, the publishing industry is full of dumbasses, and they have come up with a standard, open format that does just that: ePub. I don't know why Cory Doctorow doesn't know about it yet, but it is gaining a lot of ground among everybody but Amazon. Oddly enough, more and more publishers are creating ebooks in ePub format, and then converting it into Amazon's proprietary format for sale on the Kindle.
This gives me hope that Amazon's model won't last for too much longer.
- it makes it very easy for repressive regimes to track who bought what: a handful of authentification servers have that info. granted, we may not feel concerned by that right now, but a good part of the world is, and you never know what will happen to us later on. Recent events show that corporations are all too happy to oblige any request from any "big market" government.
If you don't know already, unless you are paying cash for everything the government can already track exactly what you buy, and have bought, for years. It's nothing new with ebooks. Head down to Barnes and Nobel and pay with a credit or check card and the government can track that purchase if they want to.
- it even makes possible to recall a book, possibly to change it, which conjures uneasy visions of the Ministry of Truth.
Amazon has already done this before, and it is one of the reasons I will never buy an ebook that does not allow me to have a copy of it separate from the company I purchased it from.
Oddly enough, Sony is very good about this, and the ePub format can be moved from device to device freely for non-DRM titles, and nearly as freely for DRM titles (after a certain point you would need to get the built in device limit raised, which they will do for you with purchase verification).
I've been trying to get all you nay-sayers to stop looking at the Kindle and check out the other manufacturers and booksellers using ePub, It is an open, international format that has adressed most all of the copyright concerns for publishers and the DRM concerns for readers in one fell swoop, and it is becoming very very popular (Sony already uses it exclusively for all their ebooks, and there are many online retailers that use it). It enables online libraries without breaking copyright as well. I am thoroughly impressed with the format, because it adresses nearly every single concern listed so far on this thread.
The only people who I can't see liking ePub are Amazon (so in love with their lock-in DRM), and people who just want free books and don't want to give publishers and authors their fair share. They can just buzz off in my opinion, the publishers and authors are moving in the right direction here, unlike what the music industry did. There will not need to be any big battles here, because they are already addressing everyone's concerns in a fair way.
Go on and google it, it's the wave of the future for ebooks. I really hope Amazon gives in soon, but they are still top dog at the moment and don't seem to be losing much ground. Till then, a pox on all things Kindle.
It is also important to note that, before copyright, there were far, far fewer books written then their are today. There were very few entertainment books 300 years ago, they were all political satire, or history books, or similar. Most of what survives as literature from the ancient world are things like plays or poems, which were performed for a price which allowed the author to continue. Look at almost all greek liturature, they are mostly plays or histories or oral traditions. Same with Shakespear, all plays. There were very few actual books that have survived from the time because there were very few books actually written.
Since the advent of Copyright, coupled with advances in printing which allowed authors to profit directly from their writings, literature has exploded around the world. If we abolish that then literature will eventually go back to being a performance piece, and the really good writing will dry up or be converted to $60 a seat plays and TV shows.
I really don't think you want that, even though it is exactly what you are advocating.
What we need is sensible DRM that conforms to the spirit of copyright, which is to reward authors for contributing to our culture while at the same time getting that literature out to as many people as possible. DRM in music did not follow the spirit of copyright, which is why it is so hated. However, ePub is an ebook format that is gaining ground fast, and it DOES follow the spirit of copyright.
Frankly, writers and text publishers seem to be a lot smarter than musicians and music industry moguls. They have always been much more amiable to the giving and sharing of books than their musical equivalents have been, and they are approaching this problem the right way. They don't want to charge you every time you read a book, like the RIAA does when you listen to a CD, they just want to make sure they don't get driven out of a job because one person buys a book and gives it to 5,000 of his closest friends.
It is fair and reasonable, and so far the only big ebook asshat right now is Amazon, all the other big players are amiable to being fair to the readers. Amazon, however, is relying on name recognition and their initial popularity to lock their customers into their own system, excluding all others. I really wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
Don't forget James Earl Jones and the Bible - absolutely epic.
And, the idea is that I can give (very unlikely) or loan that book. I couldn't with an ebook
You can with ePub, the Adobe ebook format. Sony sells books in the format exclusively, Barnes & Nobel offers it as an option, and a number of other online stores and smaller ebook manufactuers are starting to use it as well. It has DRM at the publisher's discression, but the DRM is reasonable and still allows the lending and trading of the ebook, as well as moving it from device to device. To give you an idea of the DRM's flexibility, it allows online libraries to start lending books over the internet without breaking copyright.
It brings ebooks pretty close to the same usefulness as physical books.
I'm sorry, what .txt files are no longer readable? .pdf files? .rtf?
The formats that are any good stick around for a very, very long time. .doc changes all the time because Microsoft is run by asswipes, any other good document standard doesn't change much.
If you need someone to remind you to move your ebooks from the old hard drive to the new hard drive when the technology changes, then nobody can help you.
If a format is standardized and used ubiquitously for ebooks, like pdf's are for business documents of all sorts, then the format will not go away - it will simply move with everything else. Adobe actually has an ebook format like that that many publishers and retailers and ebook reader manufacturers are jumping on board with and using en-mass, paving the way to eliminating the multi-non-standardized-format nonsense we have now. Amazon will probably be the last to come on board though, and I would avoid the kindle like the plague until they do.
"They" in the first sentance is supposed to be Sony. Sorry.
Just make your next ebook reader a non-Amazon device and you'll be 3/4 there, missing only the DRM'd content already on your Kindle. Everybody else is moving toward using the most reasonable format around - ePub. It's an Adobe format, so you know it's good, and it's based on the Open Publishing Standard. I would be very surprised to find that, should the format d'jour change, that ePub would not be convertable to another format.
It does have optional DRM, but the DRM lets you treat the digital copy as a book - you can lend it out, you can move it from device to device, etc. They do have limits on the number of devices you can move an ebook to (5), but if you happen to run up against that it's just a phone call to fix. Not perfect, no, but it's damn close.
ePub is also enabling libraries, who can now check books out thanks to the DRM. They basically send you a copy with a timed expiration, and lock the copy in their inventory for the same amount of time. This allows them to comply with copyright law, which would be difficult without DRM.
Anyway, enough gushing about ePub, I'm just really excited about where ebooks are going and I am impressed that the majority of companies in the business are pushing for a DRM that actually makes digital books equivalent to physical books - not lesser or greater.
It's a good time to be a reader.
P.S. Textbooks on anything but those outrageously expensive large-fromat ebook readers suck monkey balls. Just sayin. They aren't all that fun on computer screens either, but can have advantages over dead tree in some situations. For big textbooks, I'd stick to paper for now.
That's all well and good until dead tree publishers go out of business and books are no longer (or at least not as often) printed at all.
Then you don't get the second option.
What we need is a digital format we can be reasonably sure will stick around for the long haul, and if it doesn't stick around we need to know that it can be converted to new formats. If we have that, then we have something close to the security of a dead tree book.