Please, your arguments (especially about being rational) would go over a lot better if you checked your facts.
It is you who needs to check your facts. Your claim to rationality would be significantly enhanced if you didn't cling to unsubstantiated fiction in order to defend your point of view.
Posted by Charos on Jun 3, 2000 Removed some dead links - 3/29/2001
I'll post a few links...the first few don't have scientific backing and just mention him being catholic...have you ever read Mein Kampf? I have and there is a quote directly from that book where Hitler says something along the lines of "I always have been, and will always be a catholic"
* http://www.richardhoskins.com/hrempir.htm
(read the section on WW2...a small quote "Adolf Hitler was a Catholic. As leader of the German state he signed a concordant with the Pope in 1934 in which it was agreed that he would protect Church assets in Germany in return for Catholic political endorsement and support.")
* http://www.oaktree.net/maranatha/promise.htm
* http://www.americanatheist.org/aut97/T1/editor.htm l
* http://ragnarok.umbc.edu/leonenet/1999-2/6445.html
* http://www.americanatheist.org/aut97/T1/editor.htm l
* http://christianbiblestudy.org/MOS/_MOSOPS/Hitlerc h.htm
OK...I could put more links...but I think you get the idea...but just in case...here's a direct quote from Hitler:
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the One, who once in loneliness surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them." --Adolf Hitler, (1889 - 1945) Hitler's Speech in Munich APRIL 12, 1922
Need I go on? Hitler was a devout Catholic who paid his church taxed 'till the day he died...In fact both Pius XI and XII praised him as one of gods warriors...
Even today, when I refer to Hitler's Catholicism in conversation or a speech, it immediately becomes apparent that I have said something "not quite nice," and I am often challenged. Nontheists, I then explain, know that many modem tyrants, whether petty tyrants such as Richard Nixon, or more successful tyrants such as Hitler, have regarded themselves as exemplary Christians, an estimate their followers had no trouble accepting. Hitler's religiosity--he was a Catholic until his death--is often glossed over, but it is critical in understanding his motivation.
I have often reflected, wistfully, on how much happier modern history might have been had Hitler been brought up as an atheist, an agnostic, or, at least, a Unitarian. Born and bred a Catholic, he grew up in a religion and in a culture that was anti-semitic, and in persecuting Jews, he repeatedly proclaimed he was doing the "Lord's work."
You will find it in Mein Kampf.- "Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."
Hitler said it again at a Nazi Christmas celebration in 1926: "Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews . . . The work that Christ started but could not finish, I--Adolf Hitler--will conclude."
In a Reichstag speech in 1938, Hitler again echoed the religious origins of his crusade. "I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord's work. "
Hitler regarded himself as a Catholic until he died. "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so," he told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals, in 1941.
There was really no reason for Hitler to doubt his good standing as a Catholic. The Catholic press In Germany was eager to curry his favor, and the princes of the Catholic Church never asked for his excommunication. Religions encourage their followers to hold authority in unquestioning respect; this is what makes devout religionists such wonderful dupes for dictators.
Relax, you still have Stalin to reference as an athiest regime that committed atrocity. Of course, that argument wanes a little when we see the Christians engaging in the most infamous atrocities of the twentieth century, doesn't it, but it still goes to show that religion, while a cause of terrible desctruction and great hatred between peoples, isn't the only such cause.
Re:And what's special about that?
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 2
Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source.
That piece of code was the TCP/IP stack. You know, the thing that let the Windoze users join the rest of us on the internet without having to download and install a third party, shareware application (trumpet). It was taken from FreeBDS, whose license allows its code to be incorporated into proprietary products.
In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.
I can and I have, and your argument [yes, I know you're arguing from the cartel's perspective, to underscore the very valid point you make thereafter, but nevertheless it] ignores some facts that become apparent to most people who sit down and think about it: no book, no piece of music, no painting, no film, no play, no poem, nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything more complex that 'gah gah goo goo' builds upon the works of others, either directly (Walt Disney's remake of the Brother's Grimm) or indirectly (George Lucas borrowing heavilly from classical literature (including elements of Greek tragedy) in star wars Episodes IV and V, movies, from Christian Mythology in Episode 1, and from Teletubbies in Episodes I and II. Copyright grants artists (or, more commonly for everyone but print authors, and even many of them in Hollywood, their employer, a corporation) an absolute monopoly on their work for a period of time greater than most people will ever hope to live. This stifles the creative interaction that culture relies on, and is responsible in no small part for our limited choices in music, entertainment, and the fact that our modern culture has, in many ways, become a "vast cultural wasteland." It isn't because the people are inherently without aesthetic taste, or like it this way, it is because mass production produces for the Least Common Denominator, and everyone else is forbidden to improve upon it for the next 90 years (or life+75 if an artist retains personal possession of their copyright)!
The argument you present vis-a-vis barter also ignores many fundamental aspects of free software (and other collaborative commons)... what is taking place isn't some simple, ineffecient barter economomy. In contrast, it is a very dynamic and effective collaboration that has shown itself in nearly every respect to be more effecient and more productive than its proprietary equivelent. RMS and Torvalds together put together a complete Unix-like operating system for the Intel architecture by 1993 (RMS, to his credit, actually had his stuff compiling on a dozen or more architectures, and only a few years later Torvald's kernel was compiling on several other platforms as well) while several other company's efforts languished and ultimately failed, despite their having taken even more time to develope that the free software folks did. Other, similar examples abound (Apache, FreeBSD after the source was freed, etc.)
They have even outstripped Microsoft on technical merits, by orders of magnitude, despite the immense wealth Microsoft brings to the table, and the fact that nearly every hardware manufacturer donates their device drivers to Microsoft's efforts, something they are only now starting to do in large numbers for GNU/Linux (and more commonly they provide specs, or in the case of Nvidia and others, not even that).
Even you can contribute. If you read my novel and offer constructive criticism, you have played a part in that process. If you use a piece of software and report a bug, you have contributed something back. If you're savvy enough to fix the bug and submit a patch, so much the better... but a bug report even without a patch is a very worthwhile contribution.
You're second point, however, is dead on: the copyright cartels will have absolutely no shame, or compunction, in taking from the public commons and then pissing on it in turn. Perhaps our "fifth column" of enthusiastic CGI artists will help some, but I wouldn't count on it (most people tend to chose their jobs over political idealism, and many over personal ethics), and I certainly wouldn't be so foolish as to bet it will be enough to prevent the digital dark ages Hollywood, the Recording Industry, and Microsoft are trying to ram down our unwilling throats.
You pay a man an honest wage for an honest days work.
But... but, that's not the American way! The American way is all about pleasing the shareholders.
Um, no. That is the corporate way. The American way is an honest wage for an honest day's work. The fact that America let large corporations hijack its government and undermine its constitution during the anti-communist ferver of the cold war may mean America kneels beneath their jackbooted heels, but it does not mean that corporatism is the ideal to which the country aspires.
Quite the opposite, in fact, and a backlash to this sort of crap is brewing.
give me one thing you can do on a p2p network that you can't do anouther way.
Make content scalable to any arbitrary level of demand, on the fly. That is what FreeNet can do, by replicating data on demand to more and more nodes the more it is requested. P2P is the first and to my knowledge only architecture on the net that has this capability, a capability that could well revolutionize the usefulness of the net. And I'm not talking about serving up pr0n or mp3s, I'm talking about making popular webcasts and websites more available and more accessible, rather than less. I'm talking about an approach that solves many of the scalability issues inherent in the net today.
The reverse of the slashdot effect: popular data becomes more available rather than less, with the cost shared by those requesting the data, thereby lowering the bar for those who wish to provide said data (a much nicer alternative to being forced to upgrade your web service when your site gets linked to by slashdot).
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal[sic] shit really easy.
First, what you just described is a form of censorship, it just happens to be a form you agree with.
Second, if they were serious about preventing copyright violations they would have to remove all means by which students can share files, which must include scp, ftp, http, irc, IM, and email, to name just a few.
The bigger question is, does film piracy affect revenue at all? A film is not like music: Nevermind and Sticky Fingers will be just as valuable to me in ten years, and I'll listen to them a lot as a soundtrack to whatever else I'm doing. A film takes 100% of my concentration, (well most of it anyway) and you can't watch a film while you do something else..so film and music piracy are vastly different things.
Copyright violations of films definitely affect revinue, at least in the details. Whether or not it affects the overall bottom line, and if so in which direction, is debatable.
I've been actively boycotting Hollywood since the DeCSS debacle, and have talked several friends and family members into doing the same. That having been said, I do see movies on HBO (condo association pays for it, so I get the channel whether or not I want it), and I have downloaded a couple of movies just for the wow factor. I later deleted them, as that is not an activity I want to be involved in, particularly if and when the entertainment cartels start sending jackbooted thugs around to people's homes.
So, my anectdotal evidence as one datapoint among millions, which may or may not be representative of any trends, pro or con, on this issue, but certainly demonstrate that copyright violations do impact revinue:
1) Spiderman. Good movie... I saw it on a crappy, cam avi. Good, but not good enough for me to go to the theatre and violate my boycott.
2) Star Wars II: a movie I was actually going to go see (in its 3rd or 4th week, to minimize the percentage of my money that would go back to Hollywood vs. what goes to the theatre). A crappy CAM version that sucked, though not nearly as much as the movie itself did. After seeing how BAD that movie was I avoided it like the plague, and will never buy it on video, dvd, or pay to see it in a theatre. That act of copyright violation cost Lucas not just the one movie ticket sale, about $9.50 here in Chicago, but all the movie ticket sales of my friends whome I warned not to go see such a shitty movie. It is debatable whether we all would have gone on the same night, so some of those sales were lost anyway, due to the crappy quality of the movie, including probably my own, since I would have seen it much later than my friends. Difficult to know exactly now that would have played out, but clearly it did affect who went to see what, or didn't, and when.
2) Lord of the Rings: a beautiful movie. Absolutely brilliant (and a high quality DVD rip). I just purchased the director's cut collector's box, my first DVD purchase since the DeCSS debacle (and quite possibly my last, at least for a time) because the movie was so good, I enjoyed it so much, and I did want to reward and support the creators of the movie with my money, despite boycotting their industry in general. This was a $50.00 sale that would not have happened had I not downloaded and watched the movie illegally, as I never would have gone to see it in the theatre (indeed, I didn't anyway) and would have been content to wait for it to come out on HBO in a few months/years.
Taken together, do these three copyright violations help, or hurt, the industry? Difficult to say (more difficult, because I don't do that sort of thing anymore, indeed I stopped shortly after I began, once the 'wow, neat!' factor wore off), but affect it they certainly did.
(Oh, and it's Pyrrhic, not phyrric. Even without the correct spelling, it still refers to Pyrrhus, so you should at least capitalize it as a proper noun. Classical education ain't what it were.)
I normally loathe and despise grammar nazis (of which I most emphatically do not classify your post), for a couple of reasons: I don't spel very well myself, and web fora are notoriously lacking in spelling checkers, and I find the thought being communicated more important than the fine details of writing (exception: formal works for publication), particularly in casual forums such as this.
All that having been said, yours is the first such correction I'm actually greateful for. My education was public (which is arguably the antithese of classical these days), and Pyrrhic, while I understand the phrase from having seen it in many contexts where the meaning was apparent, was something I never knew the origin of (and probably wouldn't have managed to spell anyway). So for the first time in the 15 years I've been on the 'net (and perhaps the last), I just want to say thanks for that little tidbit of information...
Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science, suggests exactly that... that calculus has gotten us this far but may not get us much further, that many of the problems and discouragements in modern physics stems from the fact that the universe doesn't operate according to calculus, that calculus merely describes some aspects of it and there are other aspects, perhaps even those most fundamental aspects, of the universe that are simply inimical to calculus as a tool to accurately describe them.
Of course, he extends Fredkin's notion of using cellular automata rules (and variations on cellular automata) as a different tool with which aspects of the universe not amenable to calculus could be more accurately described, modelled, and predicted.
Since math is a human invention, it would not be terribly surprising to discover the natural world not necessarilly conducive to a complete and full description using only that tool, but somehow, if we ever do hack through to whatever lies beneath, we'll find even a combination of Newton's calculus, Fredkin's cellular automata, and who knows what other analytical tools we come up with, when taken together, will probably still be inadequate to describe and unify the whole thing.
Which of course is why so many people cop out with the whole God mythos... because figuring out the universe and how it works is hard, and humans seem to always crave easy answers.
"Copyright owners are entitled to use whatever formats they want to use," von Lohmann said. "If they really want to protect their content they can go back to vinyl."
How is THAT going to stop people? It simply makes it harder to rip?
Exactly. I ripped some of my old vinyl years ago and encoded it to... you guessed it, burnable CD. This was before MP3 became so popular.
It was easy... just use a turntable, a good amp, plug the line out into the line in of your sound card, adjust a few settings in aumix, capture to wav format, run sox to convert to CD format, and burn. Obviously the last step could be replaced with "run oggenc/lame to convert to ogg/mp3."
What I find more interesting is how much the consumer electronics and media companies have alienated their best customers. Here we have a new format that truly is innovative, interesting, and does offer superior quality, and here, on a forum of technophiles, the reaction is almost universally skeptical, ranging from "no way in hell would I buy that crippled crap!" to "so what?" with only an occasional, lonely voice piping up with "hey, its actually pretty cool, and we CAN get around the copy protection nonsense."
This should strike fear into the hearts of the Sonys and Pioniers of the world... the very people historically most inclined to buy these sorts of new formats (speaking as one who owns several thousand dollars of Laserdisks from the 80's and 90's) are completely turned off by the watermarking and copy protection crap they are putting into this.
That is the reason I do not own an HDTV, that is the reason I do not purchase DVD (well, actually the DeCSS suit is the reason I'm boycotting DVDS), that is the reason I will no longer be buying CDs, and it is the reason I feel absolutely no compulsion to upgrade my stereo equipment (who knows what they've crippled without telling us)... and these were all things I used to spend a great deal of money on.
They've alienated many, perhaps most, of their early adopters, and that doesn't bode at all well for the future of any new formats that group tries to foist off on us.
Yeah, This assumes that nobody ever backed up any data, noone saved their work to CD, no digital photographers kept their pictures, no videographers saved threir work to CD, and that the single use for CDrs is to pirate music.
Yes, they are exceptionally dishonest figures.
The small company I work for, employing around 50 people, goes through over 900 blank CDRs each year. Not to copy music, not even to copy data CDs.
Most (730 or so) are used to make daily backups of our database, on a medium that will last 20 years or more. The others are used to burn boot CDs, Linux installation CDs (Gentoo, Debian, etc.), store critical config files for later recovery in the event of a catastrophe, and so on.
At home, I use CDs to backup data on (mostly again Linux distros, pictures I've taken of travels with my digital camera, home videos I've converted to DivX format, and so on. Some TV shows I've recorded to hard disk, like all of B5 and Max Headroom, also get burned to CD or DVD... its much more durable than videotape, with a much better picture, much better sound, and much more convinient. All of which is perfectly legal, as I share none of this with anyoen else, via the internet or any other means).
The number of CDRs and DVD-R(W)s I have purchased in the last year personally probably number around 200. Of those, exactly 0 have been used to make copies of music, legal or otherwise.
Now, I am just one data point, and I don't know if my usage is more reflective of the common person's usage (convinient, reliable, and durable data storage) or not, but I'll bet its pretty damn common for those who buy 100+ CDRs each year, and a hell of a lot more representative than the dishonest figures those thugs as the European equivelent of the RIAA are throwing around.
People who think the moon landings were a hoax are never going to be convinced otherwise by anything anyone says, NASA or otherwise.
Not entirely true.
I have a friend who is pretty intelligent, but has an unfortunate weakness in being gullible to certain "newsoid" broadcasts. Its very odd... the guy actually is quite smart, but after seeing the Fox News special claiming the moon landings were fake he was mostly convinced, and accussed me of being closed minded and dense when I laughed at him.
So I did a little googling (something he should have done before ever admitting to anyone other than his wife, who is similarly a little "too open minded" about fringe conspiracy theories, that he took such a thing seriously) and pointed him to an excellent site debunking the entire broadcast point by point, with clay models and lighting to demonstrate the optical features of each "faked" shot.
In other words, I pointed him to a web site that proved, picture by picture, that every piece of "evidence" presented by the media whores of Fox was in fact farcical, and that the reporter should have been emberrassed at his own lack of basic scientific understanding on each and every point.
My friend, somewhat abashed, was convinced, and was more than a little annoyed that a major television network would present such garbage as "news."
Frankly, so am I, but the point remains... there are a lot of reasonable people who have an unfortuante, ingrained trust of the media (many of the same people will decry the media, but believe the next newscast all the same), and these people can and often are conviced by reasonable, factually, easy-to-understand counterarguments.
Indeed, fighting bad speech with good speech is the best way to offset this sort of thing.
That, and openly jeering at the Fox Media Whores perpetrating this disgusting fraud on the people of America whenever they show their faces in public (a little social humiliation is just what those clowns need. No, let me rephrease: a great deal of social humiliation is just what those clowns need).
The case was settled, so if you want to blame someone, blames the Bush Administration Justice Department for the weak terms it sought,
Oh, I think most nonpartisan observers (and of course those partisan observers in the anti-microsoft camp) already do blame the Bush administration for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
But there were nine states which did not settle, and which are perfectly entitled to persue an appeal against this ruling, and certainly should do so.
So the supreme court may well end up ruling on this case. The poster suspects it will do no good because of other apparent cases of corruption in other rulings by the supreme court (he doesn't cite any, but I suspect the election ruling of 2000 is one of those he had in mind, and on that one I'd have to agree).
If the digitizer is already accessible (which it is if others, e.g. S. Korea, have already been using them with GNU/Linux), then the handwriting tools have already been written.
My Ipaq running Linux recognizes my handwriting just fine. So does the Sharp a colleague of mine has. I do not know if sharp's software is free(dom), but the software running on my ipaq is.
I think that's selling OS X a little short. It *is* a Unix OS.
I would tend to agree, but Apple themselves refer to it as "unix-like", and as others have pointed out, not all unix-style configuration changes affect the operating system's behavior the way one would expect.
I thought I was going to do this too, but once I started using it I didn't see the reason. There are several good Linux distros for the PPC, but why would you really want to use them?
I am used to living far enough up the exponential curve of technological and scientific progress that I see a measurable, and observable, change in the technology available to me every morning when I get up.
Perhaps this comes from being spoiled by distributions like Gentoo, where every morning I can run an 'emerge rsync' followed by an 'emerge -up world' and see a whole bunch of packages I can upgrade, and by issuing a couple of other commands, a whole list of new packages I can install.
It is like having Christmas every single day, and it is a pleasure that becomes very addictive. Mac OS X, no matter how slick, smooth, well designed, and delightful, will probably never offer me that. It does, however, offer me one thing I do not currently have under GNU/Linux, namely the ability to quickly and easilly burn my own videos or tv recordings to DVD, so that feature alone would make dual booting worthwhile.
But, regardless of how snazzy OS X might be, I'll never give up my morning Gentoo updates until they pry my digital freedoms from my cold, dead hands... which is why Apple and IBM are so smart in making their hardware platforms reasonably open and accessible, and why AMD and Intel, with their collusion on the Palladium/DRM front, are so incredibly short sighted and foolish in comparison. (Estimates are that Mac OS and GNU/Linux vie for 2nd place behind Microsoft... and Linux has on occasion surpassed Apple in terms of number of users. In any event, the two communities are quite comparable in size, so alientating one or the other, by either side, would be incredibly foolish... and right now it is AMD and Intel, by kowtowing to the Microsoft Monolopy on Palladium, who are doing the alienating, while Apple and IBM appear quite open and friendly in comparison).
Probably because the author is in bed with Microsoft, and knows that the operating system isn't as irrelevant as he would have us believe. The whole piece is a classical example of intellectual dishonesty and little more than an advertisment for his product, and the microsoft operating system it runs on (and is laced with all kinds of false claims as to stability, etc. of that operating system).
The operating system may become invisible, but a properly written interface will be portable. No one will have to know how to use the "operating system" that powers their hardware, but they may figure out that some are more reliable at running their Interface Of The Future (TM) than others.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. What you are describing is a world of open standards to which everyone can read and write, the foundation of the internet, and a prerequisite to any sort of open computing.
Unfortunately, the now unfettered Microsoft Monopoly has a vested interest in closed computing, as do the copyright and media cartels with whom they are colluding to bring us 'trusted' computing, in which the word trust is ironically well suited, though not in the way their marketing department would have us think.
The Microsoft/Hollywood Trust, which seeks to impose 'trust'ed computing upon us through palladium, DRM, and Fritz "Disney" Hollings-style legislation, is all about closed computing, and to them, in order to impose their draconian vision upon our digital future, the operating system is not only not irrelevent, it is critical to imposing the restrictions upon the users they wish to impose.
Which means our choice in operating systems is very critical to us as users, and will likely define what freedoms we enjoy and are denied, irrespective of whether or not we use old fashioned GUI or CL interfaces, or some fancy "3d streaming files" or whatever other nonsense this particular individual envisions.
1) AMD and Intel have both embraced Microsoft's Pallaadium "trusted" computing nonsense, which may quite possibly be leveraged lock free operating systems out of the platform at some point in the future. IBM and Apple in contrast ARE NOT DOING THIS (at least at present), giving us the very ironic possibility that it will be Apple hardware in the future that is open (and able to dual boot alternative operating systems) and NOT Intel/AMD.
2) The laptops have noticably longer battery life than their equivelent Intel counterparts
3) and snazzy 16:10 displays...
4) The high end model now comes with a DVD-RW burner and software
5) The OS is Unix-like. Dual boot OS X with Gentoo PPC GNU/Linux, and you have the best of all possible worlds.
That last point is the most important. My next laptop will almost certainly now be an Apple, with the DVD-RW burner. Of course, I'm not going to order them until shipping times become a couple of days, rather than a month, and I'll probably prefer just going to the store to buy one I can take home with me, but with this new release the Intel platform, with its Microsoft pre-installed crap (that I blow away anyway), its short battery life and no non-external DVD-RW burning options, has lost me as customer. Palladium has likely made that loss perminent.
So yes, unlike many such promotional stories, I think this is a big deal, it is certainly News for Nerds, and for many readers, myself included, it is certainly Stuff That Matters.
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
You are right, our outraged ranting on slashdot won't make it otherwise.
However, our outraged ranting to our families, our friends, our coworkers, and our business associates (over beer, after work, etc.) will make all the difference in the world.
I have already shocked, appalled, and outraged numerous people simply by telling them what has been going on. It is particularly effective when it is done in response to "I think my PC is broken, it no longer plays my music" (oops, you saved your music in windoze media format and didn't unclick the DRM option. You won't be able to forget to do that in the next version of windows, because there won't be an option to unclick, everything will be 'protected.'... leading to... show me this ogg-vorbis stuff you've been talking about!), "This is strange, I can't play the CD in the car but it works fine at home" (ah, you bought a crippled CD. Welcome to the future the Recording Cartels have planned for us... you're only allowed to play that CD in specially authorized players), and so on.
I have educated a pretty large number of non-savvy people about what is going on with the DMCA (Sklyrov, etc.), the RIAA (Janis Ian, Prince, etc. al documenting the recording industry's rape of artists AND consumers, etc.), and the MPAA (Fritz Disney Hollings et al), and they are pissed. Not at me, for ranting about technical issues they don't care about, but at these organizations and our hopelessly corrupt, wicked government. They are pissed because it has become painfully obvious that we do live under the tyranny of evil men, with apparently no way out, and they are sick of giving money to such.
So now they buy less CDs, attend less concerts, and go to less movies than before. Not a complete boycott like myself, but they are spending less and they are much, much more aware.
Which brings me to the the point of all this: there is one way in which WE, not THEY, can and should win:
Simply stop buying their crap.
Like music? Listen to independent artists ONLY. Do not buy any CDs from any record company, buy them direct from the artist or not at all. And if they are crippled, return them and publicly blacklist the artist for what they've done.
Like movies? Go see independent films only. If you cannot get over your pathetic addiction to the mindless bread and circuses of Hollywood, at least avoid seeing movies during the first two weeks of release (when most of the revninue goes to the studios), instead wait and see the movies in third or fourt weeks (when most of the revinue goes to the local thatre). Not as good as a proper boycott, but better than following the stampede.
In the end, though, is to simply be unforgiving of such people. Don't buy their stuff now, and don't ever buy it again. Get enough of your friends to feel likewise, and they will falter, even ultimately perish.
No one likes losing their freedom, and everyone sees it happening. Until now, they've only had the vague notion that 'the government' is taking away their freedoms and 'it doesn't seem to matter who we elect.'
Now there is a specific target for that ire, for that anger, a specific, relatively small group of companies that are actively, methodically, and deliberately stripping us of our freedoms, and use government collussion or, at best, apathy go do it.
And, unlike (most) governments, companies are something we as individuals can topple.
Should we just accept everything the news media feeds us? So naive...
No, but twenty seconds of rational thought will debunk any of the conspiracy notions being bandied about by the imbecelic media whores of Fox News.
The Russians were watching very closely, and would have cried foul had anything been "faked"
Amateur radio enthusiasts tracked the saturn v's trajectory as well, and monitored the radio signal being sent back to earth
The astronauts left mirrors behind, off of which we still bounce lasers today to measure the (increasing) distance to the moon.
The "facts" as given by the moronic and scientifically illiterate media whores of Fox are trivially debunked
For any conspiracy or coverup to have worked would have required a worldwide media conspiracy, on the part of several neutral nations as well as several nations who were, at the time, military foes (China, Russia, Eastern Europe)
Sorry, but when conspiracies start to reach "Nowhere Man" levels, they simply don't exist. (If you don't understand the television reference be glad, be very glad. Arguably the worst show to ever air on American TV).
Skepticism is only called for when strong evidence hasn't been presented by those making incredible claims. If NASA hadn't sent back radio signals, video, pictures, brought back lunar material, left "we were here" mirrors lying around, and had their telemetry and every vector tracked by literally thousands of different people, then some skepticism would perhaps be in order. However, they did all that and more... making their claims backed by a plethora of evidence only someone with an agenda ("I'll make my career detracting from mankind's greatest triumph of the Media Whore Network [Fox]") could possibly ignore. As such, it is the likes of Fox that are making incredible claims, without a shred of credible evidence to back it up. In short, sir, your skepticism is woefully misdirected, and, yes, poeple who are skeptical of the lunar landings in light of a mountain of evidence should be laughed at and mocked the same way someone who is "skeptical" about the spherical shape of the earth would be when they trott their "flat as a plate" theory out.
Furthermore, just because I believe in God, you start attacking me with "religious zealots stop trying to invade our homes with their tripe and force their lifestyles through legislation down our throats... when one of them feels compelled to troll for validation, sympathy, or 'respect'."
No. I made no claim that you were a zealot, I made the claim that the social convention of politeness which requires skeptics to remain silent and 'respectful' when the religious expound upon their beliefs, or merely insinuate their beliefs, into a converstation is inappropriate, and that I have no intention of abiding by such social conventions so long as there are zealots trying to cram their beliefs down my throat through the media, through government, through social engineering, and outright evangelism.
Unless you are one such zealot, that could hardly be interpreted as an attack on you. An attack on religious zealotry, perhaps. More to the point, it was a clear attack on an asinine social convention that requires reason remain silent when confronted with religious unreason, dogma, or expressions of 'faith.'
You assume that I am a 'religious zealot' who is trying to force you to believe something that you don't. I have respect for each persons beliefs.
I made no assumptions, nor claims, about you, personally. That you interpreted my statement as such says a lot more about your sensitivity to the issue than it does about my comments.
I am willing to discuss such beliefs rationally, I am willing to not force my beliefs on another. I respect the atheist, but it seems that you do not respect the theist.
I have little respect for evangelical theists who are, by the very definition of what they do, trying to do exactly what I described. Whether one would consider them 'zealots' or not is largely a matter of subjective perception... I think you can probably guess where I come down on that.
I am delighted to read that you do not fall into that category. You would probably be surprised that I have friends who are Christian who are also very non-evangelical, and whom I respect despite their religious quirks.
Do I respect those quirks themselves, or the theistic mindset. In general, most of the time, for most such beliefs, no (there are rare exceptions). Do I respect theists? That depends on the theist in question, and what other attributes they have, good and bad, independent of their theism. Ghandi and Buddha come to mind as two theists for whome I have a great deal of respect, while (and here I lose by default I suppose, according to Godwin's law) Hitler[1], Chirac, and George Bush (either one) are some for whome I have absolutely no respect. In all those cases the respect, or contempt, I have, has absolutely nothing to do with their theism, and everything to do with their other human attributes.
[1]Hitler was a devout Catholic, a little slice of history many Christians try to rewrite because of their discomfort with it. The irony is that it isn't really necessary: Stalin was a legitimate 'athiest' regime which committed atrocity, while Hitler was a Christian regime that committed atrocity. As an aside, that is why I do not claim religion as the one evil of humankind, I view nationalism, ethnicsm (incl. racism), and religion as the three great evils of humankind, which, taken together, account for nearly all of the violence and mayhem people have committed against one another. Indeed, if you remove those, you are left with a tiny, tiny fraction of conflicts which are purely economic in nature... a thought rather alien to Americans, who cling to the myth that all conflict is economic at its base, but a perception with which most of the rest of the world is quite familiar, and quite comfortable.
The primary evidence for God is that, hey, look, there's a whole universe out there. I cannot seem to find anyone who put this universe here and just wrote God's name on it.
So if and when advanced extra-terrestrials show up and claim to have created the earth, and humankind, will that count as evidence sufficient to prove the non-existence of God?
After all, that exact strategy worked very well for the spanish conquistadores when they invaded and destroyed the Aztec Empire.
Having someone willing to claim that they did something, rather than (mythical, hypothetical being such as God or Santa Clause) doesn't disprove the existence of (God | Santa Clause) any more than the opposite proves their existence.
Both beliefs remain purely faith-based, with no logical, rational evidence to support either. Yes, the one is more popularly embraced, and has managed to construct a social taboo on expressing skepticism thereof in public settings, but that in no way makes it more legitimate or reasonable.
Citation of Veeck v Southern Building Code removed.
I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see some semblance of sanity making it into our judicial system. Would that this had happened 70 or 80 years ago, when the practice of submitting legislation to which one owns the copyright to city councils for passage first reared its ugly head.
Saying "that's the same order of silliness as a belief in Santa Clause" is an attack.
An "attack" to point out the similarity in the two belief systems (faith based, rather than rational or scientific)? Only if one believes the belief in Santa Clause and flying reindeer to be a silly belief, and are so insecure in one's own faith-based beliefs to equate the willingness of others to express their skepticism as an assault.
Which, I agree, describes most (though thankfully not all) Christians, indeed most religions as a whole (though again, thankfully not all. Two interesting exceptions are various sekts of Wicca and Buddhism, though again, not all).
Since there is exactly as much evidence for the existence of Santa Clause as there is for the existence of God, and since neither belief withstands the scrutiny of science and occams razer unless faith is invoked, how do you choose which belief is the sillier?
By popular vote (more people believe in the one than the other, so that brand of silliness is therefor not silly)?
I, for one, think that belief in God makes metaphysical sense, and that to not believe in God doesn't.
There are those who believe the opposite, of course. Indeed, there are likely those (of tender years) who believe the same of Santa Clause.
Is pointing out the indefensibility of their position an attack, an act of cruelty, or merely an offer of education?
I always find it interseting how Christians feel they have a right to expound upon their own beliefs with one breath, then denounce anyone who speaks out an opposing opinion with the next, labelling it an "attack" or worse.
Frankly, when religious zealots stop trying to invade our homes with their tripe and force their lifestyles through legislation down our throats, when these same zealots stop trying to have their beliefs taught in our schools, and stop trying to seduce and convert our children to their way of thinking, almost always against the wishes of their parents, in short, when religious zealots stop their nearly unceasing attacks (in virtually every forum, every medium, and every political process) on reason and the rights of others to disagree and live differently, then, and only then, will I consider the possibility of remaining discretely silent when one of them feels compelled to troll for validation, sympathy, or "respect" by announcing their beliefs to everyone present and deriding those of everyone else.
Until such a day (which is unlikely in the extreme), those of us who think rationally and remain skeptical have a civic and ethical duty to point out the ludriciousness of such beliefs when they are expounded upon, lest they drive the last remaining shreds of the enlightenment and rational thought from our society.
I think the guy's point was that the mirror isn't good for one shot; it'll pretty much vanish, and the laser'll keep going.
Perhaps not, but ablation takes time, so either designing one-shot disposable mirrors should be practical (just make the reflective material really, really thick), or do without the mirror and aim the turret manually.
Either would work, and the laser would still be much faster than a bullet or missile, which is traditionally aimed in the same, low tech manner.
Just as a correction, they are releasing their WWII era documents. And try to refrain from making wildly opinionated and unsupported comments about something as sensitive as religion...any religion.
Yes.
It is OK to laugh at an adult who believes in Santa Clause, and with the right judge, you can probably get said adult committed and their next-of-kin awarded power of attorney.
But do not ever question religious beliefs, or express unflattering opinions thereof, and for god's sake don't ever imply that religious beliefs might be on the same order of silliness as a belief in Santa Clause!
Conviniently, we have decided pointing out the foolishness of adults who believe in modern day myth to be rude, while of course their expounding on the eternal torture of those who do not believe in precisely those same myths, or do believe in those same myths, but with slightly differing interpretations thereof, and proseletyzing such beliefs to others, whether or not the victim of such proseletyzing wants to hear it, is merely an "expression" of their "faith."
So have some tolerance, and for crying out loud stop calling a jack-of-diamonds a jack-of-diamonds.
This won't stand up; "Restraint of Trade" comes to mind. Either the list must be made free to telemarketers because it is a law with selective application (no calls only to those on the list) which they must follow, or the fines will be dropped on appeal. You cannot force a company to pay for information it needs to keep itself legal every quarter.
Sure you can.
An even worse example are building codes...laws that define how you may and may not build your house, to what standards, etc. In many locales private companies actually own the copyright on the law! They typically will sell you a copy for a few hundred dollars, and it is not legal to distribute a copy of the law to anyone else as a public service, as doing so would violate copyright.
Yet building codes persist, and are rarely if ever struck down.
Yes, it should be illegal and unconstitutional to copyright public law, or to charge people for the information they need to comply with a law and its mandates. In a rational, sane society it would be.
But not in ours, unfortunately.
Of course, a rational or sane society would not have a system of monopoly by government fiat in place (e.g. Patents) that demonstrably slows scientific progress, or one that demonstrably inhibits artistic expression (copyrights), but that is a discussion for another day.
Slashdot Mirror
It is. She should have returned the videos. What a whiner.
Amen.
God is real unless declared integer
#define FALSE 0
int God=0;
It is you who needs to check your facts. Your claim to rationality would be significantly enhanced if you didn't cling to unsubstantiated fiction in order to defend your point of view.
[source: http://www.enteract.com/~digialex/arc-t/debates-h
And, if that isn't enough, there's
[source: http://www.ffrf.org/pennstation/hitler.html]
And, of course, if you don't believe these accounts, you can read the citations yourself from the horses mouth:
http://www.skeptictank.org/flist071.htm
Relax, you still have Stalin to reference as an athiest regime that committed atrocity. Of course, that argument wanes a little when we see the Christians engaging in the most infamous atrocities of the twentieth century, doesn't it, but it still goes to show that religion, while a cause of terrible desctruction and great hatred between peoples, isn't the only such cause.
Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source.
... what is taking place isn't some simple, ineffecient barter economomy. In contrast, it is a very dynamic and effective collaboration that has shown itself in nearly every respect to be more effecient and more productive than its proprietary equivelent. RMS and Torvalds together put together a complete Unix-like operating system for the Intel architecture by 1993 (RMS, to his credit, actually had his stuff compiling on a dozen or more architectures, and only a few years later Torvald's kernel was compiling on several other platforms as well) while several other company's efforts languished and ultimately failed, despite their having taken even more time to develope that the free software folks did. Other, similar examples abound (Apache, FreeBSD after the source was freed, etc.)
... but a bug report even without a patch is a very worthwhile contribution.
That piece of code was the TCP/IP stack. You know, the thing that let the Windoze users join the rest of us on the internet without having to download and install a third party, shareware application (trumpet). It was taken from FreeBDS, whose license allows its code to be incorporated into proprietary products.
In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.
I can and I have, and your argument [yes, I know you're arguing from the cartel's perspective, to underscore the very valid point you make thereafter, but nevertheless it] ignores some facts that become apparent to most people who sit down and think about it: no book, no piece of music, no painting, no film, no play, no poem, nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything more complex that 'gah gah goo goo' builds upon the works of others, either directly (Walt Disney's remake of the Brother's Grimm) or indirectly (George Lucas borrowing heavilly from classical literature (including elements of Greek tragedy) in star wars Episodes IV and V, movies, from Christian Mythology in Episode 1, and from Teletubbies in Episodes I and II. Copyright grants artists (or, more commonly for everyone but print authors, and even many of them in Hollywood, their employer, a corporation) an absolute monopoly on their work for a period of time greater than most people will ever hope to live. This stifles the creative interaction that culture relies on, and is responsible in no small part for our limited choices in music, entertainment, and the fact that our modern culture has, in many ways, become a "vast cultural wasteland." It isn't because the people are inherently without aesthetic taste, or like it this way, it is because mass production produces for the Least Common Denominator, and everyone else is forbidden to improve upon it for the next 90 years (or life+75 if an artist retains personal possession of their copyright)!
The argument you present vis-a-vis barter also ignores many fundamental aspects of free software (and other collaborative commons)
They have even outstripped Microsoft on technical merits, by orders of magnitude, despite the immense wealth Microsoft brings to the table, and the fact that nearly every hardware manufacturer donates their device drivers to Microsoft's efforts, something they are only now starting to do in large numbers for GNU/Linux (and more commonly they provide specs, or in the case of Nvidia and others, not even that).
Even you can contribute. If you read my novel and offer constructive criticism, you have played a part in that process. If you use a piece of software and report a bug, you have contributed something back. If you're savvy enough to fix the bug and submit a patch, so much the better
You're second point, however, is dead on: the copyright cartels will have absolutely no shame, or compunction, in taking from the public commons and then pissing on it in turn. Perhaps our "fifth column" of enthusiastic CGI artists will help some, but I wouldn't count on it (most people tend to chose their jobs over political idealism, and many over personal ethics), and I certainly wouldn't be so foolish as to bet it will be enough to prevent the digital dark ages Hollywood, the Recording Industry, and Microsoft are trying to ram down our unwilling throats.
You pay a man an honest wage for an honest days work.
But... but, that's not the American way! The American way is all about pleasing the shareholders.
Um, no. That is the corporate way. The American way is an honest wage for an honest day's work. The fact that America let large corporations hijack its government and undermine its constitution during the anti-communist ferver of the cold war may mean America kneels beneath their jackbooted heels, but it does not mean that corporatism is the ideal to which the country aspires.
Quite the opposite, in fact, and a backlash to this sort of crap is brewing.
give me one thing you can do on a p2p network that you can't do anouther way.
Make content scalable to any arbitrary level of demand, on the fly. That is what FreeNet can do, by replicating data on demand to more and more nodes the more it is requested. P2P is the first and to my knowledge only architecture on the net that has this capability, a capability that could well revolutionize the usefulness of the net. And I'm not talking about serving up pr0n or mp3s, I'm talking about making popular webcasts and websites more available and more accessible, rather than less. I'm talking about an approach that solves many of the scalability issues inherent in the net today.
The reverse of the slashdot effect: popular data becomes more available rather than less, with the cost shared by those requesting the data, thereby lowering the bar for those who wish to provide said data (a much nicer alternative to being forced to upgrade your web service when your site gets linked to by slashdot).
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal[sic] shit really easy.
First, what you just described is a form of censorship, it just happens to be a form you agree with.
Second, if they were serious about preventing copyright violations they would have to remove all means by which students can share files, which must include scp, ftp, http, irc, IM, and email, to name just a few.
The bigger question is, does film piracy affect revenue at all? A film is not like music: Nevermind and Sticky Fingers will be just as valuable to me in ten years, and I'll listen to them a lot as a soundtrack to whatever else I'm doing. A film takes 100% of my concentration, (well most of it anyway) and you can't watch a film while you do something else..so film and music piracy are vastly different things.
... I saw it on a crappy, cam avi. Good, but not good enough for me to go to the theatre and violate my boycott.
Copyright violations of films definitely affect revinue, at least in the details. Whether or not it affects the overall bottom line, and if so in which direction, is debatable.
I've been actively boycotting Hollywood since the DeCSS debacle, and have talked several friends and family members into doing the same. That having been said, I do see movies on HBO (condo association pays for it, so I get the channel whether or not I want it), and I have downloaded a couple of movies just for the wow factor. I later deleted them, as that is not an activity I want to be involved in, particularly if and when the entertainment cartels start sending jackbooted thugs around to people's homes.
So, my anectdotal evidence as one datapoint among millions, which may or may not be representative of any trends, pro or con, on this issue, but certainly demonstrate that copyright violations do impact revinue:
1) Spiderman. Good movie
2) Star Wars II: a movie I was actually going to go see (in its 3rd or 4th week, to minimize the percentage of my money that would go back to Hollywood vs. what goes to the theatre). A crappy CAM version that sucked, though not nearly as much as the movie itself did. After seeing how BAD that movie was I avoided it like the plague, and will never buy it on video, dvd, or pay to see it in a theatre. That act of copyright violation cost Lucas not just the one movie ticket sale, about $9.50 here in Chicago, but all the movie ticket sales of my friends whome I warned not to go see such a shitty movie. It is debatable whether we all would have gone on the same night, so some of those sales were lost anyway, due to the crappy quality of the movie, including probably my own, since I would have seen it much later than my friends. Difficult to know exactly now that would have played out, but clearly it did affect who went to see what, or didn't, and when.
2) Lord of the Rings: a beautiful movie. Absolutely brilliant (and a high quality DVD rip). I just purchased the director's cut collector's box, my first DVD purchase since the DeCSS debacle (and quite possibly my last, at least for a time) because the movie was so good, I enjoyed it so much, and I did want to reward and support the creators of the movie with my money, despite boycotting their industry in general. This was a $50.00 sale that would not have happened had I not downloaded and watched the movie illegally, as I never would have gone to see it in the theatre (indeed, I didn't anyway) and would have been content to wait for it to come out on HBO in a few months/years.
Taken together, do these three copyright violations help, or hurt, the industry? Difficult to say (more difficult, because I don't do that sort of thing anymore, indeed I stopped shortly after I began, once the 'wow, neat!' factor wore off), but affect it they certainly did.
(Oh, and it's Pyrrhic, not phyrric. Even without the correct spelling, it still refers to Pyrrhus, so you should at least capitalize it as a proper noun. Classical education ain't what it were.)
...
I normally loathe and despise grammar nazis (of which I most emphatically do not classify your post), for a couple of reasons: I don't spel very well myself, and web fora are notoriously lacking in spelling checkers, and I find the thought being communicated more important than the fine details of writing (exception: formal works for publication), particularly in casual forums such as this.
All that having been said, yours is the first such correction I'm actually greateful for. My education was public (which is arguably the antithese of classical these days), and Pyrrhic, while I understand the phrase from having seen it in many contexts where the meaning was apparent, was something I never knew the origin of (and probably wouldn't have managed to spell anyway). So for the first time in the 15 years I've been on the 'net (and perhaps the last), I just want to say thanks for that little tidbit of information
Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science, suggests exactly that ... that calculus has gotten us this far but may not get us much further, that many of the problems and discouragements in modern physics stems from the fact that the universe doesn't operate according to calculus, that calculus merely describes some aspects of it and there are other aspects, perhaps even those most fundamental aspects, of the universe that are simply inimical to calculus as a tool to accurately describe them.
... because figuring out the universe and how it works is hard, and humans seem to always crave easy answers.
Of course, he extends Fredkin's notion of using cellular automata rules (and variations on cellular automata) as a different tool with which aspects of the universe not amenable to calculus could be more accurately described, modelled, and predicted.
Since math is a human invention, it would not be terribly surprising to discover the natural world not necessarilly conducive to a complete and full description using only that tool, but somehow, if we ever do hack through to whatever lies beneath, we'll find even a combination of Newton's calculus, Fredkin's cellular automata, and who knows what other analytical tools we come up with, when taken together, will probably still be inadequate to describe and unify the whole thing.
Which of course is why so many people cop out with the whole God mythos
"Copyright owners are entitled to use whatever formats they want to use," von Lohmann said. "If they really want to protect their content they can go back to vinyl."
... you guessed it, burnable CD. This was before MP3 became so popular.
... just use a turntable, a good amp, plug the line out into the line in of your sound card, adjust a few settings in aumix, capture to wav format, run sox to convert to CD format, and burn. Obviously the last step could be replaced with "run oggenc/lame to convert to ogg/mp3."
... the very people historically most inclined to buy these sorts of new formats (speaking as one who owns several thousand dollars of Laserdisks from the 80's and 90's) are completely turned off by the watermarking and copy protection crap they are putting into this.
... and these were all things I used to spend a great deal of money on.
How is THAT going to stop people? It simply makes it harder to rip?
Exactly. I ripped some of my old vinyl years ago and encoded it to
It was easy
What I find more interesting is how much the consumer electronics and media companies have alienated their best customers. Here we have a new format that truly is innovative, interesting, and does offer superior quality, and here, on a forum of technophiles, the reaction is almost universally skeptical, ranging from "no way in hell would I buy that crippled crap!" to "so what?" with only an occasional, lonely voice piping up with "hey, its actually pretty cool, and we CAN get around the copy protection nonsense."
This should strike fear into the hearts of the Sonys and Pioniers of the world
That is the reason I do not own an HDTV, that is the reason I do not purchase DVD (well, actually the DeCSS suit is the reason I'm boycotting DVDS), that is the reason I will no longer be buying CDs, and it is the reason I feel absolutely no compulsion to upgrade my stereo equipment (who knows what they've crippled without telling us)
They've alienated many, perhaps most, of their early adopters, and that doesn't bode at all well for the future of any new formats that group tries to foist off on us.
Yeah, This assumes that nobody ever backed up any data, noone saved their work to CD, no digital photographers kept their pictures, no videographers saved threir work to CD, and that the single use for CDrs is to pirate music.
... its much more durable than videotape, with a much better picture, much better sound, and much more convinient. All of which is perfectly legal, as I share none of this with anyoen else, via the internet or any other means).
Yes, they are exceptionally dishonest figures.
The small company I work for, employing around 50 people, goes through over 900 blank CDRs each year. Not to copy music, not even to copy data CDs.
Most (730 or so) are used to make daily backups of our database, on a medium that will last 20 years or more. The others are used to burn boot CDs, Linux installation CDs (Gentoo, Debian, etc.), store critical config files for later recovery in the event of a catastrophe, and so on.
At home, I use CDs to backup data on (mostly again Linux distros, pictures I've taken of travels with my digital camera, home videos I've converted to DivX format, and so on. Some TV shows I've recorded to hard disk, like all of B5 and Max Headroom, also get burned to CD or DVD
The number of CDRs and DVD-R(W)s I have purchased in the last year personally probably number around 200. Of those, exactly 0 have been used to make copies of music, legal or otherwise.
Now, I am just one data point, and I don't know if my usage is more reflective of the common person's usage (convinient, reliable, and durable data storage) or not, but I'll bet its pretty damn common for those who buy 100+ CDRs each year, and a hell of a lot more representative than the dishonest figures those thugs as the European equivelent of the RIAA are throwing around.
People who think the moon landings were a hoax are never going to be convinced otherwise by anything anyone says, NASA or otherwise.
... the guy actually is quite smart, but after seeing the Fox News special claiming the moon landings were fake he was mostly convinced, and accussed me of being closed minded and dense when I laughed at him.
... there are a lot of reasonable people who have an unfortuante, ingrained trust of the media (many of the same people will decry the media, but believe the next newscast all the same), and these people can and often are conviced by reasonable, factually, easy-to-understand counterarguments.
Not entirely true.
I have a friend who is pretty intelligent, but has an unfortunate weakness in being gullible to certain "newsoid" broadcasts. Its very odd
So I did a little googling (something he should have done before ever admitting to anyone other than his wife, who is similarly a little "too open minded" about fringe conspiracy theories, that he took such a thing seriously) and pointed him to an excellent site debunking the entire broadcast point by point, with clay models and lighting to demonstrate the optical features of each "faked" shot.
In other words, I pointed him to a web site that proved, picture by picture, that every piece of "evidence" presented by the media whores of Fox was in fact farcical, and that the reporter should have been emberrassed at his own lack of basic scientific understanding on each and every point.
My friend, somewhat abashed, was convinced, and was more than a little annoyed that a major television network would present such garbage as "news."
Frankly, so am I, but the point remains
Indeed, fighting bad speech with good speech is the best way to offset this sort of thing.
That, and openly jeering at the Fox Media Whores perpetrating this disgusting fraud on the people of America whenever they show their faces in public (a little social humiliation is just what those clowns need. No, let me rephrease: a great deal of social humiliation is just what those clowns need).
The case was settled, so if you want to blame someone, blames the Bush Administration Justice Department for the weak terms it sought,
Oh, I think most nonpartisan observers (and of course those partisan observers in the anti-microsoft camp) already do blame the Bush administration for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
But there were nine states which did not settle, and which are perfectly entitled to persue an appeal against this ruling, and certainly should do so.
So the supreme court may well end up ruling on this case. The poster suspects it will do no good because of other apparent cases of corruption in other rulings by the supreme court (he doesn't cite any, but I suspect the election ruling of 2000 is one of those he had in mind, and on that one I'd have to agree).
If the digitizer is already accessible (which it is if others, e.g. S. Korea, have already been using them with GNU/Linux), then the handwriting tools have already been written.
My Ipaq running Linux recognizes my handwriting just fine. So does the Sharp a colleague of mine has. I do not know if sharp's software is free(dom), but the software running on my ipaq is.
5) The OS is Unix-like
... which is why Apple and IBM are so smart in making their hardware platforms reasonably open and accessible, and why AMD and Intel, with their collusion on the Palladium/DRM front, are so incredibly short sighted and foolish in comparison. (Estimates are that Mac OS and GNU/Linux vie for 2nd place behind Microsoft ... and Linux has on occasion surpassed Apple in terms of number of users. In any event, the two communities are quite comparable in size, so alientating one or the other, by either side, would be incredibly foolish ... and right now it is AMD and Intel, by kowtowing to the Microsoft Monolopy on Palladium, who are doing the alienating, while Apple and IBM appear quite open and friendly in comparison).
I think that's selling OS X a little short. It *is* a Unix OS.
I would tend to agree, but Apple themselves refer to it as "unix-like", and as others have pointed out, not all unix-style configuration changes affect the operating system's behavior the way one would expect.
I thought I was going to do this too, but once I started using it I didn't see the reason. There are several good Linux distros for the PPC, but why would you really want to use them?
I am used to living far enough up the exponential curve of technological and scientific progress that I see a measurable, and observable, change in the technology available to me every morning when I get up.
Perhaps this comes from being spoiled by distributions like Gentoo, where every morning I can run an 'emerge rsync' followed by an 'emerge -up world' and see a whole bunch of packages I can upgrade, and by issuing a couple of other commands, a whole list of new packages I can install.
It is like having Christmas every single day, and it is a pleasure that becomes very addictive. Mac OS X, no matter how slick, smooth, well designed, and delightful, will probably never offer me that. It does, however, offer me one thing I do not currently have under GNU/Linux, namely the ability to quickly and easilly burn my own videos or tv recordings to DVD, so that feature alone would make dual booting worthwhile.
But, regardless of how snazzy OS X might be, I'll never give up my morning Gentoo updates until they pry my digital freedoms from my cold, dead hands
Why does the OS have to be universal?
Probably because the author is in bed with Microsoft, and knows that the operating system isn't as irrelevant as he would have us believe. The whole piece is a classical example of intellectual dishonesty and little more than an advertisment for his product, and the microsoft operating system it runs on (and is laced with all kinds of false claims as to stability, etc. of that operating system).
The operating system may become invisible, but a properly written interface will be portable. No one will have to know how to use the "operating system" that powers their hardware, but they may figure out that some are more reliable at running their Interface Of The Future (TM) than others.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. What you are describing is a world of open standards to which everyone can read and write, the foundation of the internet, and a prerequisite to any sort of open computing.
Unfortunately, the now unfettered Microsoft Monopoly has a vested interest in closed computing, as do the copyright and media cartels with whom they are colluding to bring us 'trusted' computing, in which the word trust is ironically well suited, though not in the way their marketing department would have us think.
The Microsoft/Hollywood Trust, which seeks to impose 'trust'ed computing upon us through palladium, DRM, and Fritz "Disney" Hollings-style legislation, is all about closed computing, and to them, in order to impose their draconian vision upon our digital future, the operating system is not only not irrelevent, it is critical to imposing the restrictions upon the users they wish to impose.
Which means our choice in operating systems is very critical to us as users, and will likely define what freedoms we enjoy and are denied, irrespective of whether or not we use old fashioned GUI or CL interfaces, or some fancy "3d streaming files" or whatever other nonsense this particular individual envisions.
1) AMD and Intel have both embraced Microsoft's Pallaadium "trusted" computing nonsense, which may quite possibly be leveraged lock free operating systems out of the platform at some point in the future. IBM and Apple in contrast ARE NOT DOING THIS (at least at present), giving us the very ironic possibility that it will be Apple hardware in the future that is open (and able to dual boot alternative operating systems) and NOT Intel/AMD.
2) The laptops have noticably longer battery life than their equivelent Intel counterparts
3) and snazzy 16:10 displays...
4) The high end model now comes with a DVD-RW burner and software
5) The OS is Unix-like. Dual boot OS X with Gentoo PPC GNU/Linux, and you have the best of all possible worlds.
That last point is the most important. My next laptop will almost certainly now be an Apple, with the DVD-RW burner. Of course, I'm not going to order them until shipping times become a couple of days, rather than a month, and I'll probably prefer just going to the store to buy one I can take home with me, but with this new release the Intel platform, with its Microsoft pre-installed crap (that I blow away anyway), its short battery life and no non-external DVD-RW burning options, has lost me as customer. Palladium has likely made that loss perminent.
So yes, unlike many such promotional stories, I think this is a big deal, it is certainly News for Nerds, and for many readers, myself included, it is certainly Stuff That Matters.
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
... leading to ... show me this ogg-vorbis stuff you've been talking about!), "This is strange, I can't play the CD in the car but it works fine at home" (ah, you bought a crippled CD. Welcome to the future the Recording Cartels have planned for us ... you're only allowed to play that CD in specially authorized players), and so on.
You are right, our outraged ranting on slashdot won't make it otherwise.
However, our outraged ranting to our families, our friends, our coworkers, and our business associates (over beer, after work, etc.) will make all the difference in the world.
I have already shocked, appalled, and outraged numerous people simply by telling them what has been going on. It is particularly effective when it is done in response to "I think my PC is broken, it no longer plays my music" (oops, you saved your music in windoze media format and didn't unclick the DRM option. You won't be able to forget to do that in the next version of windows, because there won't be an option to unclick, everything will be 'protected.'
I have educated a pretty large number of non-savvy people about what is going on with the DMCA (Sklyrov, etc.), the RIAA (Janis Ian, Prince, etc. al documenting the recording industry's rape of artists AND consumers, etc.), and the MPAA (Fritz Disney Hollings et al), and they are pissed. Not at me, for ranting about technical issues they don't care about, but at these organizations and our hopelessly corrupt, wicked government. They are pissed because it has become painfully obvious that we do live under the tyranny of evil men, with apparently no way out, and they are sick of giving money to such.
So now they buy less CDs, attend less concerts, and go to less movies than before. Not a complete boycott like myself, but they are spending less and they are much, much more aware.
Which brings me to the the point of all this: there is one way in which WE, not THEY, can and should win:
Simply stop buying their crap.
Like music? Listen to independent artists ONLY. Do not buy any CDs from any record company, buy them direct from the artist or not at all. And if they are crippled, return them and publicly blacklist the artist for what they've done.
Like movies? Go see independent films only. If you cannot get over your pathetic addiction to the mindless bread and circuses of Hollywood, at least avoid seeing movies during the first two weeks of release (when most of the revninue goes to the studios), instead wait and see the movies in third or fourt weeks (when most of the revinue goes to the local thatre). Not as good as a proper boycott, but better than following the stampede.
In the end, though, is to simply be unforgiving of such people. Don't buy their stuff now, and don't ever buy it again. Get enough of your friends to feel likewise, and they will falter, even ultimately perish.
No one likes losing their freedom, and everyone sees it happening. Until now, they've only had the vague notion that 'the government' is taking away their freedoms and 'it doesn't seem to matter who we elect.'
Now there is a specific target for that ire, for that anger, a specific, relatively small group of companies that are actively, methodically, and deliberately stripping us of our freedoms, and use government collussion or, at best, apathy go do it.
And, unlike (most) governments, companies are something we as individuals can topple.
No, but twenty seconds of rational thought will debunk any of the conspiracy notions being bandied about by the imbecelic media whores of Fox News.
Sorry, but when conspiracies start to reach "Nowhere Man" levels, they simply don't exist. (If you don't understand the television reference be glad, be very glad. Arguably the worst show to ever air on American TV).
Skepticism is only called for when strong evidence hasn't been presented by those making incredible claims. If NASA hadn't sent back radio signals, video, pictures, brought back lunar material, left "we were here" mirrors lying around, and had their telemetry and every vector tracked by literally thousands of different people, then some skepticism would perhaps be in order. However, they did all that and more
Furthermore, just because I believe in God, you start attacking me with "religious zealots stop trying to invade our homes with their tripe and force their lifestyles through legislation down our throats... when one of them feels compelled to troll for validation, sympathy, or 'respect'."
... I think you can probably guess where I come down on that.
... a thought rather alien to Americans, who cling to the myth that all conflict is economic at its base, but a perception with which most of the rest of the world is quite familiar, and quite comfortable.
No. I made no claim that you were a zealot, I made the claim that the social convention of politeness which requires skeptics to remain silent and 'respectful' when the religious expound upon their beliefs, or merely insinuate their beliefs, into a converstation is inappropriate, and that I have no intention of abiding by such social conventions so long as there are zealots trying to cram their beliefs down my throat through the media, through government, through social engineering, and outright evangelism.
Unless you are one such zealot, that could hardly be interpreted as an attack on you. An attack on religious zealotry, perhaps. More to the point, it was a clear attack on an asinine social convention that requires reason remain silent when confronted with religious unreason, dogma, or expressions of 'faith.'
You assume that I am a 'religious zealot' who is trying to force you to believe something that you don't. I have respect for each persons beliefs.
I made no assumptions, nor claims, about you, personally. That you interpreted my statement as such says a lot more about your sensitivity to the issue than it does about my comments.
I am willing to discuss such beliefs rationally, I am willing to not force my beliefs on another. I respect the atheist, but it seems that you do not respect the theist.
I have little respect for evangelical theists who are, by the very definition of what they do, trying to do exactly what I described. Whether one would consider them 'zealots' or not is largely a matter of subjective perception
I am delighted to read that you do not fall into that category. You would probably be surprised that I have friends who are Christian who are also very non-evangelical, and whom I respect despite their religious quirks.
Do I respect those quirks themselves, or the theistic mindset. In general, most of the time, for most such beliefs, no (there are rare exceptions). Do I respect theists? That depends on the theist in question, and what other attributes they have, good and bad, independent of their theism. Ghandi and Buddha come to mind as two theists for whome I have a great deal of respect, while (and here I lose by default I suppose, according to Godwin's law) Hitler[1], Chirac, and George Bush (either one) are some for whome I have absolutely no respect. In all those cases the respect, or contempt, I have, has absolutely nothing to do with their theism, and everything to do with their other human attributes.
[1]Hitler was a devout Catholic, a little slice of history many Christians try to rewrite because of their discomfort with it. The irony is that it isn't really necessary: Stalin was a legitimate 'athiest' regime which committed atrocity, while Hitler was a Christian regime that committed atrocity. As an aside, that is why I do not claim religion as the one evil of humankind, I view nationalism, ethnicsm (incl. racism), and religion as the three great evils of humankind, which, taken together, account for nearly all of the violence and mayhem people have committed against one another. Indeed, if you remove those, you are left with a tiny, tiny fraction of conflicts which are purely economic in nature
The primary evidence for God is that, hey, look, there's a whole universe out there. I cannot seem to find anyone who put this universe here and just wrote God's name on it.
So if and when advanced extra-terrestrials show up and claim to have created the earth, and humankind, will that count as evidence sufficient to prove the non-existence of God?
After all, that exact strategy worked very well for the spanish conquistadores when they invaded and destroyed the Aztec Empire.
Having someone willing to claim that they did something, rather than (mythical, hypothetical being such as God or Santa Clause) doesn't disprove the existence of (God | Santa Clause) any more than the opposite proves their existence.
Both beliefs remain purely faith-based, with no logical, rational evidence to support either. Yes, the one is more popularly embraced, and has managed to construct a social taboo on expressing skepticism thereof in public settings, but that in no way makes it more legitimate or reasonable.
I believe that you may be mistaken.
Citation of Veeck v Southern Building Code removed.
I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see some semblance of sanity making it into our judicial system. Would that this had happened 70 or 80 years ago, when the practice of submitting legislation to which one owns the copyright to city councils for passage first reared its ugly head.
Saying "that's the same order of silliness as a belief in Santa Clause" is an attack.
An "attack" to point out the similarity in the two belief systems (faith based, rather than rational or scientific)? Only if one believes the belief in Santa Clause and flying reindeer to be a silly belief, and are so insecure in one's own faith-based beliefs to equate the willingness of others to express their skepticism as an assault.
Which, I agree, describes most (though thankfully not all) Christians, indeed most religions as a whole (though again, thankfully not all. Two interesting exceptions are various sekts of Wicca and Buddhism, though again, not all).
Since there is exactly as much evidence for the existence of Santa Clause as there is for the existence of God, and since neither belief withstands the scrutiny of science and occams razer unless faith is invoked, how do you choose which belief is the sillier?
By popular vote (more people believe in the one than the other, so that brand of silliness is therefor not silly)?
I, for one, think that belief in God makes metaphysical sense, and that to not believe in God doesn't.
There are those who believe the opposite, of course. Indeed, there are likely those (of tender years) who believe the same of Santa Clause.
Is pointing out the indefensibility of their position an attack, an act of cruelty, or merely an offer of education?
I always find it interseting how Christians feel they have a right to expound upon their own beliefs with one breath, then denounce anyone who speaks out an opposing opinion with the next, labelling it an "attack" or worse.
Frankly, when religious zealots stop trying to invade our homes with their tripe and force their lifestyles through legislation down our throats, when these same zealots stop trying to have their beliefs taught in our schools, and stop trying to seduce and convert our children to their way of thinking, almost always against the wishes of their parents, in short, when religious zealots stop their nearly unceasing attacks (in virtually every forum, every medium, and every political process) on reason and the rights of others to disagree and live differently, then, and only then, will I consider the possibility of remaining discretely silent when one of them feels compelled to troll for validation, sympathy, or "respect" by announcing their beliefs to everyone present and deriding those of everyone else.
Until such a day (which is unlikely in the extreme), those of us who think rationally and remain skeptical have a civic and ethical duty to point out the ludriciousness of such beliefs when they are expounded upon, lest they drive the last remaining shreds of the enlightenment and rational thought from our society.
I think the guy's point was that the mirror isn't good for one shot; it'll pretty much vanish, and the laser'll keep going.
Perhaps not, but ablation takes time, so either designing one-shot disposable mirrors should be practical (just make the reflective material really, really thick), or do without the mirror and aim the turret manually.
Either would work, and the laser would still be much faster than a bullet or missile, which is traditionally aimed in the same, low tech manner.
Just as a correction, they are releasing their WWII era documents. And try to refrain from making wildly opinionated and unsupported comments about something as sensitive as religion...any religion.
Yes.
It is OK to laugh at an adult who believes in Santa Clause, and with the right judge, you can probably get said adult committed and their next-of-kin awarded power of attorney.
But do not ever question religious beliefs, or express unflattering opinions thereof, and for god's sake don't ever imply that religious beliefs might be on the same order of silliness as a belief in Santa Clause!
Conviniently, we have decided pointing out the foolishness of adults who believe in modern day myth to be rude, while of course their expounding on the eternal torture of those who do not believe in precisely those same myths, or do believe in those same myths, but with slightly differing interpretations thereof, and proseletyzing such beliefs to others, whether or not the victim of such proseletyzing wants to hear it, is merely an "expression" of their "faith."
So have some tolerance, and for crying out loud stop calling a jack-of-diamonds a jack-of-diamonds.
This won't stand up; "Restraint of Trade" comes to mind. Either the list must be made free to telemarketers because it is a law with selective application (no calls only to those on the list) which they must follow, or the fines will be dropped on appeal. You cannot force a company to pay for information it needs to keep itself legal every quarter.
Sure you can.
An even worse example are building codes...laws that define how you may and may not build your house, to what standards, etc. In many locales private companies actually own the copyright on the law! They typically will sell you a copy for a few hundred dollars, and it is not legal to distribute a copy of the law to anyone else as a public service, as doing so would violate copyright.
Yet building codes persist, and are rarely if ever struck down.
Yes, it should be illegal and unconstitutional to copyright public law, or to charge people for the information they need to comply with a law and its mandates. In a rational, sane society it would be.
But not in ours, unfortunately.
Of course, a rational or sane society would not have a system of monopoly by government fiat in place (e.g. Patents) that demonstrably slows scientific progress, or one that demonstrably inhibits artistic expression (copyrights), but that is a discussion for another day.