I'm by no means an experienced ZOPE user but I got ZOPE/CMF/CMFBoard up and running in about 45 minutes. There was nothing insanely complicated about setting it up. Then I set up a webfolder to be able to drop content in through explorer.
Alot of the setup issues you might see could be curtailed by using a known ZOPE host. They've already taken all the steps to get the products set up and then you just have to worry about getting content up and maybe customizing some templates.
Plone is an excellent package to get the majority of what you need in a neat tidy install with little to no setup required. Plus unlike ZOPE/CMF Plone uses XHTML/CSS and has good localization.
What's really funny is after going to Zombo I went to SunnCom.com not SunnComm.com. Well at SunnCom.com their banner add at the bottom says "StudentsReview.com" - and something about "uncensored reviews" I about fell out of my chair.
Check your law. Commercial speech is not in the same class as either the press or public speech. The constitution and prior case law creates a separation between the two and allows for the limitation of commercial speech. As well it defines what points "free speech" can be limited based on how it's used and motive.
Advertisement is no more free speech than is signing a check for your favorite candidate. Free interchange of ideas and/or goods does not require that advertisements be without control or common sense. Otherwise we'd still have snake oil salesmen wondering around promising the moon and stars if you drink their remedies. It's bad enough that we have these drug companies floating false studies as a means to back up their exagerated claims. Think of what it would be like if we allowed them to say just whatever the hell they wanted to - how would that promote "free speech" or "free interchange". It wouldn't. Free speech isn't a license to lie, it's not a permit to exagerate or warp the truth, it's a mechanism of law given to the PEOPLE so that they can freely and openly criticise their government and when necessary companies and others that abuse their very powerful positions.
The problem in advertising today is that the market is saturated. Every vertical and horizontal surface, every book, every magazine, TV show, radio show, tape, dvd, CD insert, restaurant menu, bathroom, cereal box, and milk jug in America is covered with one form of advertisement or another. It's become so much static to most people that the best the most advertisers can hope for is that they flood enough of their trademark or buzzword out there that we'll be imprinted with it and familiar with it enough to maybe buy it if we're in the position to do so.
Most companies now spend more in marketing and advertising than they do on research and development. Sometimes like within the pharmaceutical companies it's dispraportionate to say the least (think millions vs. billions). All the while they are ignoring the signs that the consumers they are trying to reach are just overwhelmed, tired, and burnt out. The consumers don't want to get another SMS message about Viagra, they've seen everyone and their brother push 10-10-blah blah blah, they could care less about penis enlargement, they got the oxy-clean and it sucked... and on and on and on. They're tired of getting burned by products that are nothing like they are represented to be and they're tired of seeing advertisements that say absolutely NOTHING about the product (livitra!!!!) They're tired of 1/6 of their screen being taken up by ads during the broadcast and then 22 minutes of an hour long show being commercials. They're frustrated with not being able to watch ANY show without seeing some dumbass branding icon covering a corner of the screen.
And what do the advertisers and networks do in response to this burn out - attempt to stoke the fires by finding NEW ways to reach the customer. HELLO!!! IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE LISTENING?!? YOU'RE SCARING AWAY CUSTOMERS NOT DRAWING THEM IN. They're checking out, they're ditching their TV's, they're watching only DVD's, reading books, hiking. They don't want more ads, they want entertainment, and they sure as hell don't want ads weakly disguised as entertainment, newstainment, infotainment, or any other "snazzy" new term.
So when the industry won't listen and won't learn and won't even attempt to come to the level of the consumer then what choice does the consumer have? Government regulation! Yes it's sad but true. See companies continue to profit not because of growth or new business but by making lower quality products, selling at higher prices, and outsourcing everything imaginable. Then when sales can no longer produce any profit and all of the costs have been cut there are three choices buy out, sell out, sue (rinse and repeat).
Once they take one of these strategies it becomes an endless cycle. They get a few years maybe of more of the same cost cutting out sourcing, growth through acquisition, money from investors who think they see a profit. Then a few years down the line they spin off the businesses again, promise new and better products and start the cycle over.
We see it right now. The RIAA companies have merged so many times that theres hardly anyone left, costs are high despite cost cutting measures, sales are low despite massive marketing efforts. The only out increase advertising and SUE the consumer. 'Of course it's the consumers fault that profits are down and if they just couldn't skip over our advertisements or block them out then they'd have to pay'.
Look at the entertainment market today. You have perfectly good shows being cancelled because advertisers don't know how to market to that group of a million people. They can't figure out what product this demographic or that demographic will respond to so when their spots fail to bring in any new sales they drop it and great shows go away. And who loses - the consumer.
So tell me what are the options? Dropping out doesn't seem to have made TV any better. Most people I know watch maybe a hour or two a week and TV continues to get worse. Movies are crap with few exceptions, music is garbage, I can't pick up a magazine or a newspaper without being frustrated by the amount of ads. How EXACTLY do we get through to the companies that they need to knock it off with all of the damn advertising (aside from direct government regulation).
It was called macrovision and it's still around. I bought a couple of DVD players not too long ago, one for the living room, one for the kids room. I hook both up to the vcr's and from vcr to tv in the respective rooms. The JVC shows a perfect picture, the Emerson VCR (about 2 years older) shows a macrovision picture fading in and out on brightness.
I've even seen some of the DVD drives for pc's say that they require specific hardware that adheres to their copy protection methods. Of course I always go for the box without that label but...
It's all crap. This is to keep honest people honest and does nothing to the real infringers/counterfeiters out there.
The problem being regulated really is a trade practice. Which the FTC would have jurisdiction over. Unfortunately the practice involves communication which falls in the FCC's lap also. So in a sense it's a shared jurisdiction issue.
The FTC should have the right to decide how the business practice is exercised and what rules are binding to that process up until the telemarketer gets onto the phone. If the business practice is curtailed then there's really not much left for the FCC to do but deal with the content and types of communication going out after the telemarketer is actually on the phone.
See one deals with the situation before the call and one deals with it during and after the call.
And thus you point out a great problem with the provisions of law - the need for interpretation.
To an extent interpretation is needed to help with growth and change and to apply law to new situations. This keeps us from needing to continually update laws. Unfortunately it also ties us up in the court system, keeps people from pursuing business ventures, leads to millions of frivolous lawsuits, and lands many people in jail or fined for things that they just did not understand were wrong.
The laws are obtuse and often strung together in such a way that it's impossible to decipher what the intent of the law truly is. This might be because of the times in which laws were written. Maybe the fact that our system of notation just keeps appending things on to the end instead of keeping true revision records. Or the fact that laws are interpreted by precendents from earlier court decisions and thus a "standard" interpretation is repeated over and over as "fact".
If a law gets passed and then gets clarification in the court system no one goes back and re-writes the law for easier reading. So where the examples you show above might today read better as:
this only pertains to two properties:
Sound recordings - analog or digital regardless of storage media type or recording method.
Computer software not embodied(embedded) in hardware (i.e. computers, rom, flash memory, or other circuit/chip type electronic devices).
In todays electronic documents we may also be able to hyperlink more specific terms like "embedded" to define them either in context or in general. Unfortunately I don't see us reorganizing our method of creating laws any time in the next hundred years. There's no QA process and no Bugtraq available for that.
How about what they got was that doing what you love and other people love for you to do is rewarding both emotionally and financially. You both win.:)
There's always The Brain (thebrain.com) which has a pretty high geek factor but works on a fairly simple premise that data can be organized many different ways in ones brain and provides paths to information based on those associations.
ZOPE has something similar to this in the form of "TOPICS" which are queries that organize content across the CMS. Pretty handy and allows a wide range of ways to organize data within a website.
These major corporations don't allow their industries to be "ruined". Take a look at the diamond industry. There you have a material that is actually quite abundant but kept in a fake myth of "rarity". Scientists can produce diamonds in a lab much cheaper than digging it out of the ground and yet people still buy diamonds. Part of that is the hype machine behind the diamond industry and the other part is this monopoly of the natural diamond keeping a hold on how many diamonds are in the market.
The industries that we would worry about failing already have such close ties with the government that laws would quickly get passed about where/when a product can be used and how it's labeled as to "protect" jobs.
Don't worry noone's going out of business with these discoveries.
Bullshit, we can blame ourselves for overconsumption and the NIMBY's (Not In My BackYard) more than the environmentalists.
I hate that knee-jerk response to everything - "It's the environmentalists fault".
Even with all the technology that we've created to make lower power devices we just find a way to get more devices. I saw how they were working on LED's as a better, more efficient lightsource that can do task lighting for about 1 watt of power. I mention this at work and some jackass comes up behind me and says how cool it would be to be able to have a wall full of them and be able to change the color of his walls with his mood - POWER SAVINGS - what power savings?
It's a balancing act. First we have a grid that's just too old and extremely expensive to update. There's a mix of powerplants that are aging, there's poor planning, no incentive to change energy usage habbits, poor city design that promotes heat which in turn increases energy consumption due to airconditioners, extra showers, fans, and refridgerators. Then you have people who don't want a soot belching powerplant in their backyard, or off their favorite camping spot, nor do they want to pay extra for a more expensive cleaner burning plant, or pay extra tax dollars to have research into alternative plans like more efficient solar/wind/water/et al. Somewhere in there you have the environmentalists trying to conserve as much of nature as humanly possible before we end up having to chop down all the trees just to put up oxygen factories because we cut down too many of the fucking trees.
Noone wants to compromise their lifestyle to get to plan X, Y or Z.
My feeling is that we need a decentralized system where power is created in much smaller "nodes" and distributed from those points. Nodes could be created in house basements or in larger buildings and be connected to more evenly distribute power over shorter distances reducing the waste that happens when power has to be transmitted over miles and miles of cable to a destination. Additional efficiencies could be found as nodes throttle based on time of day and demand for their area. Grid failures would be reduced because nodes could throttle based on the failure of other nodes. We need more expensive but higher efficiency (and somewhat safer (no oil fires)) superconductor main lines. We need more incentive and more instructions on how we can save power and reduce use and what power saving products are good and can in turn save us money. We need much more diverse power sources Wind/Sun/Hydro/GeoThermal/FuelCell/Gas/Cleaner-Saf er Nuclear in much higher mix than we do today. We also need more cradle to cradle industries that take waste products and turn them into fuel for the next industry - reducing power consumption and limiting the need to dig more out of or cut more off of the earth.
I want giant catapillar like machines like TBM's that crawl through landfills chewing up trash and spitting out useful products. Sorting all the garbage into recycled materials and fermenting the rest as fuel to continue on in it's job or produce energy for nearby cities.
I want to see someone come up with a plan that doesn't attempt to single out ONE group of people as THE PROBLEM.
I saw an article I think on joeuser about a trip to the future and how medicine worked. The visitor stated how even with all the medical advances that people still didn't live past the age of 125-130. The problem was that while organs could be transplanted and through proper diet and pharmacology be kept healthy enough to survive, the brain was the key failing point. They cured alzheimers and another disease cropped up in it's place, after that another, and another. No matter the treatment or the chemical stabilizers used to keep the brain from oxydizing or losing neurons there was always something that ended up failing.
I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't too far from the truth.
That's typically been a pretty small percentage of titles (although unecessarily growing daily). And what does that say to the consumer - the recording industry can spend MORE money to create a censored record that Wal-Mart can sell for the same price as the less expensive to produce uncensored content and yet Sam Goody sells the uncensored product at a higher rate.
Let's talk fact. What we're talking about is not piracy, is not theft, it's copyright infringement which has it's own set of laws and regulations. The RIAA/MPAA hope that by associating more negative words with the act of copyright infringement they'll disuade the general public from infringement - just like all those FBI warnings at the beginning of VHS tapes is supposed to disuade home users from copying the tapes.
The fact is that IP laws are difficult to enforce especially during a time when so many other things seem more important. Additionally the bigger problem for MPAA/RIAA is not home user swapping but the rampant copyright infringement of counterfitting happening in Asia and the third world nations. Those areas are the only areas these companies have to grow into and they can't because the black market is so much cheaper and more convenient for the consumer.
These corporations know exactly what the cause of their current financial problems are. Should they admit that the problem is just a cycle or due to their own inability to react consumers requests for services and the consumers changing taste in music? Yes. Will they? No.
They need to keep shareholders investing money. The way to do that is to show that sales are artificially slowed due to "piracy". If "piracy" were stopped their sales would be up - so just wait to sell that stock because they're on top of it.
The fact is that many consumers who are internet enabled are finding that there's a wider range of music available online than there is at Sam Goody. They're finding that Sam Goody has stopped selling the music they like to listen to and has turned into little more than a top 40 store. They've also found that some of the artists that they liked that Sam Goody et al still sell, have jumped to the pop ship and no longer have any edge.
Since being online my music tastes have shifted because I've been able to find music from Germany, France, Japan, Russia, etc. Plus I've been able to find more independent bands that fit my tastes instead of "Joe Radio Listener" (which is who Sam Goody typically stocks for).
The fact is that Sam Goody and all the little mall music stores chains are getting hit hard and it has less to do with copyright infringement than it does to do with changing times. Wal-mart can sell a CD for $13 and Sam Goody sells the same CD for $18.99. While Sam Goody et al are going out of business a lot of local independent record shops that don't cater to the top/pop 40 crowd are thriving. They're thriving because they have or can get what people really want and that generates loyalty and cash flow.
I know plenty of file swappers. I know those that buy no music, but then they didn't before file swapping. I know those, like my friend Laurie, who downloads gigs of music a week, but also spends about $60 a month on new CD's (not CDR's). I don't think it's accurate to say that EVERY file swapper is infringing, nor is it accurate to say (and studies have proven this) that file swappers purchasing decreases.
Mostly people are buying at Wal-mart or wherever happens to be convenient to shop and not making special trips to the mall for what they can get at any store close to home. It used to be that you could get something different at a music specialty store like Sam Goody - that's no longer true.
Yeah when people say Oklahoma is great it's usually not because what you find there but what you don't find. If you want small town living with a few of the modern trappings like a super wal-mart then there are plenty of places to go in OK.
If you want entertainment it's best to live in/near OKC, Tulsa, maybe Norman but the entertainment is still pretty slim comparatively.
Nice try but wrong. Currently St. Louis, MO. I lived in Oklahoma up until 5 years ago - so 25 years of living there all over Yukon (graduated from there), Mustang, Bethany, Moore, and OKC.
Ah to be young and bored in Oklahoma again... this reminds me just how little there is to do there. You either work yourself to death, drink the boredom away, or find a hobby like this guy (which I assume involves both).
The point is first to get the proof. If we have proof that there's anyone out there and we know where they are (or did) transmit from then we can start looking for more information and in different formats.
There are a lot of "pointless" projects out there, cold fusion, AI, room temperature superconduction, teleportation, time travel, an end to world hunger, "peace keeping", Battlestar Galactica as visioned by Richard Hatch. Luckily there are still dreamers out there wasting their time and money trying the impossible. Who know's maybe they'll succeed.
So then is it just a matter of making the environment right so that criminal C can't recruite new toadies. Or that it becomes so prohibitively expensive to do so that he might as well be in a ligitimate business venture over an illegal one. This might make it easier to sneak under covers into organized crime.
Underlings are the lynch pin of organized crime, they're the sweat shop workers working for cheap and getting dirty doing it. If the underlings become scarce then the kingpins have to start doing their own work which opens them up to scrutiny.
Then again I don't exactly like the idea of filling up the prisons more than they are unless those prisons can do something to reform the criminals and get them on a better path. Our current penal system does little to nothing for this. Punishment is supposed to be a means to an end (reform). Too often today people dispise the idea of criminals getting an education or bettering themselves while being punished. They'd rather that they go without and be held down "because that's what punishment is about".
It's a bad can of worms but I'd rather see 100% enforcement and we start working on the problems than selective enforcement and status quo.
"We only prossecute those people that do this often and will be seen by the media to deter other criminals."
So in other words it's okay to break the law as long as you're not in that top 5% of people that they choose to make an example out of.
What would be nice to see is 100% enforcement and then letting the punishment befit the severity of the crime and the prior record of the criminal. I think that 100% prossecution would be a much better deterent than the subjective pick and choose based on multiple factors crap that they seem to be wanting to use. Maybe you walk away with a ticket, maybe you get a year and a sizeable fine, maybe you get 4 years, but if you break the law you get SOMETHING bad.
In my mind you don't create laws and then selectively enforce them. It too easily gives the appearance of favoritism/negligence/stupidity.
I'm personally sick to death of the roll over scenarios - get criminal A arrested but give him immunity because he leads you to criminal B which you give immunity to because he leads you to criminal C which is the big high profile catch. Meanwhile criminal A and B go back out into the world to continue down the path and eventually either work for another criminal C or become criminal C themselves. Start making it difficult for the henchmen by JUST PROSSECUTING THEM, no deals. Then actually reforming them in the Department of Corrections facilities and puting them back on the streets with jobs and something worthwhile to do.
As you take those people out of the loop and the friends and peers of those people see that IT DOESN'T PAY they'll be less likely to be the next henchman for criminal C or more likely to turn in the big guys they know about before even getting involved.
Never EVER underestimate exactly how bad Sci-fi channel can suck. EVER. Think that they can't top the suckiness of the original try
Tremors the Series, NOW SHOWING 'The Arrival 2' (since the first one didn't suck nearly enough), Dune, Children of Sucking Dune, Scare Tactics, sucking for showing Braveheart ON SCI-FI!
The suck award goes to Sci-fi channel for pullin' out all the stops and finding every single giant reptile/bug/sea-critter movie ever made and playing them relentlessly as well as every teen slasher horror flick. Now I know what horror truly is - TV execs without a clue as to who their fanbase is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm by no means an experienced ZOPE user but I got ZOPE/CMF/CMFBoard up and running in about 45 minutes. There was nothing insanely complicated about setting it up. Then I set up a webfolder to be able to drop content in through explorer.
Alot of the setup issues you might see could be curtailed by using a known ZOPE host. They've already taken all the steps to get the products set up and then you just have to worry about getting content up and maybe customizing some templates.
Plone is an excellent package to get the majority of what you need in a neat tidy install with little to no setup required. Plus unlike ZOPE/CMF Plone uses XHTML/CSS and has good localization.
What's really funny is after going to Zombo I went to SunnCom.com not SunnComm.com. Well at SunnCom.com their banner add at the bottom says "StudentsReview.com" - and something about "uncensored reviews" I about fell out of my chair.
Check your law. Commercial speech is not in the same class as either the press or public speech. The constitution and prior case law creates a separation between the two and allows for the limitation of commercial speech. As well it defines what points "free speech" can be limited based on how it's used and motive.
Advertisement is no more free speech than is signing a check for your favorite candidate. Free interchange of ideas and/or goods does not require that advertisements be without control or common sense. Otherwise we'd still have snake oil salesmen wondering around promising the moon and stars if you drink their remedies. It's bad enough that we have these drug companies floating false studies as a means to back up their exagerated claims. Think of what it would be like if we allowed them to say just whatever the hell they wanted to - how would that promote "free speech" or "free interchange". It wouldn't. Free speech isn't a license to lie, it's not a permit to exagerate or warp the truth, it's a mechanism of law given to the PEOPLE so that they can freely and openly criticise their government and when necessary companies and others that abuse their very powerful positions.
The problem in advertising today is that the market is saturated. Every vertical and horizontal surface, every book, every magazine, TV show, radio show, tape, dvd, CD insert, restaurant menu, bathroom, cereal box, and milk jug in America is covered with one form of advertisement or another. It's become so much static to most people that the best the most advertisers can hope for is that they flood enough of their trademark or buzzword out there that we'll be imprinted with it and familiar with it enough to maybe buy it if we're in the position to do so.
Most companies now spend more in marketing and advertising than they do on research and development. Sometimes like within the pharmaceutical companies it's dispraportionate to say the least (think millions vs. billions). All the while they are ignoring the signs that the consumers they are trying to reach are just overwhelmed, tired, and burnt out. The consumers don't want to get another SMS message about Viagra, they've seen everyone and their brother push 10-10-blah blah blah, they could care less about penis enlargement, they got the oxy-clean and it sucked... and on and on and on. They're tired of getting burned by products that are nothing like they are represented to be and they're tired of seeing advertisements that say absolutely NOTHING about the product (livitra!!!!) They're tired of 1/6 of their screen being taken up by ads during the broadcast and then 22 minutes of an hour long show being commercials. They're frustrated with not being able to watch ANY show without seeing some dumbass branding icon covering a corner of the screen.
And what do the advertisers and networks do in response to this burn out - attempt to stoke the fires by finding NEW ways to reach the customer. HELLO!!! IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE LISTENING?!? YOU'RE SCARING AWAY CUSTOMERS NOT DRAWING THEM IN. They're checking out, they're ditching their TV's, they're watching only DVD's, reading books, hiking. They don't want more ads, they want entertainment, and they sure as hell don't want ads weakly disguised as entertainment, newstainment, infotainment, or any other "snazzy" new term.
So when the industry won't listen and won't learn and won't even attempt to come to the level of the consumer then what choice does the consumer have? Government regulation! Yes it's sad but true. See companies continue to profit not because of growth or new business but by making lower quality products, selling at higher prices, and outsourcing everything imaginable. Then when sales can no longer produce any profit and all of the costs have been cut there are three choices buy out, sell out, sue (rinse and repeat).
Once they take one of these strategies it becomes an endless cycle. They get a few years maybe of more of the same cost cutting out sourcing, growth through acquisition, money from investors who think they see a profit. Then a few years down the line they spin off the businesses again, promise new and better products and start the cycle over.
We see it right now. The RIAA companies have merged so many times that theres hardly anyone left, costs are high despite cost cutting measures, sales are low despite massive marketing efforts. The only out increase advertising and SUE the consumer. 'Of course it's the consumers fault that profits are down and if they just couldn't skip over our advertisements or block them out then they'd have to pay'.
Look at the entertainment market today. You have perfectly good shows being cancelled because advertisers don't know how to market to that group of a million people. They can't figure out what product this demographic or that demographic will respond to so when their spots fail to bring in any new sales they drop it and great shows go away. And who loses - the consumer.
So tell me what are the options? Dropping out doesn't seem to have made TV any better. Most people I know watch maybe a hour or two a week and TV continues to get worse. Movies are crap with few exceptions, music is garbage, I can't pick up a magazine or a newspaper without being frustrated by the amount of ads. How EXACTLY do we get through to the companies that they need to knock it off with all of the damn advertising (aside from direct government regulation).
It was called macrovision and it's still around. I bought a couple of DVD players not too long ago, one for the living room, one for the kids room. I hook both up to the vcr's and from vcr to tv in the respective rooms. The JVC shows a perfect picture, the Emerson VCR (about 2 years older) shows a macrovision picture fading in and out on brightness.
I've even seen some of the DVD drives for pc's say that they require specific hardware that adheres to their copy protection methods. Of course I always go for the box without that label but...
It's all crap. This is to keep honest people honest and does nothing to the real infringers/counterfeiters out there.
The problem being regulated really is a trade practice. Which the FTC would have jurisdiction over. Unfortunately the practice involves communication which falls in the FCC's lap also. So in a sense it's a shared jurisdiction issue.
The FTC should have the right to decide how the business practice is exercised and what rules are binding to that process up until the telemarketer gets onto the phone. If the business practice is curtailed then there's really not much left for the FCC to do but deal with the content and types of communication going out after the telemarketer is actually on the phone.
See one deals with the situation before the call and one deals with it during and after the call.
To an extent interpretation is needed to help with growth and change and to apply law to new situations. This keeps us from needing to continually update laws. Unfortunately it also ties us up in the court system, keeps people from pursuing business ventures, leads to millions of frivolous lawsuits, and lands many people in jail or fined for things that they just did not understand were wrong.
The laws are obtuse and often strung together in such a way that it's impossible to decipher what the intent of the law truly is. This might be because of the times in which laws were written. Maybe the fact that our system of notation just keeps appending things on to the end instead of keeping true revision records. Or the fact that laws are interpreted by precendents from earlier court decisions and thus a "standard" interpretation is repeated over and over as "fact".
If a law gets passed and then gets clarification in the court system no one goes back and re-writes the law for easier reading. So where the examples you show above might today read better as:
this only pertains to two properties:
In todays electronic documents we may also be able to hyperlink more specific terms like "embedded" to define them either in context or in general. Unfortunately I don't see us reorganizing our method of creating laws any time in the next hundred years. There's no QA process and no Bugtraq available for that.
"You probably can't throw a rock in Hell without hitting a studio exec."
No but it sure would be fun to try for a few hours.
How about what they got was that doing what you love and other people love for you to do is rewarding both emotionally and financially. You both win. :)
There's always The Brain (thebrain.com) which has a pretty high geek factor but works on a fairly simple premise that data can be organized many different ways in ones brain and provides paths to information based on those associations.
ZOPE has something similar to this in the form of "TOPICS" which are queries that organize content across the CMS. Pretty handy and allows a wide range of ways to organize data within a website.
These major corporations don't allow their industries to be "ruined". Take a look at the diamond industry. There you have a material that is actually quite abundant but kept in a fake myth of "rarity". Scientists can produce diamonds in a lab much cheaper than digging it out of the ground and yet people still buy diamonds. Part of that is the hype machine behind the diamond industry and the other part is this monopoly of the natural diamond keeping a hold on how many diamonds are in the market.
The industries that we would worry about failing already have such close ties with the government that laws would quickly get passed about where/when a product can be used and how it's labeled as to "protect" jobs.
Don't worry noone's going out of business with these discoveries.
Bullshit, we can blame ourselves for overconsumption and the NIMBY's (Not In My BackYard) more than the environmentalists.
f er Nuclear in much higher mix than we do today. We also need more cradle to cradle industries that take waste products and turn them into fuel for the next industry - reducing power consumption and limiting the need to dig more out of or cut more off of the earth.
I hate that knee-jerk response to everything - "It's the environmentalists fault".
Even with all the technology that we've created to make lower power devices we just find a way to get more devices. I saw how they were working on LED's as a better, more efficient lightsource that can do task lighting for about 1 watt of power. I mention this at work and some jackass comes up behind me and says how cool it would be to be able to have a wall full of them and be able to change the color of his walls with his mood - POWER SAVINGS - what power savings?
It's a balancing act. First we have a grid that's just too old and extremely expensive to update. There's a mix of powerplants that are aging, there's poor planning, no incentive to change energy usage habbits, poor city design that promotes heat which in turn increases energy consumption due to airconditioners, extra showers, fans, and refridgerators. Then you have people who don't want a soot belching powerplant in their backyard, or off their favorite camping spot, nor do they want to pay extra for a more expensive cleaner burning plant, or pay extra tax dollars to have research into alternative plans like more efficient solar/wind/water/et al. Somewhere in there you have the environmentalists trying to conserve as much of nature as humanly possible before we end up having to chop down all the trees just to put up oxygen factories because we cut down too many of the fucking trees.
Noone wants to compromise their lifestyle to get to plan X, Y or Z.
My feeling is that we need a decentralized system where power is created in much smaller "nodes" and distributed from those points. Nodes could be created in house basements or in larger buildings and be connected to more evenly distribute power over shorter distances reducing the waste that happens when power has to be transmitted over miles and miles of cable to a destination. Additional efficiencies could be found as nodes throttle based on time of day and demand for their area. Grid failures would be reduced because nodes could throttle based on the failure of other nodes. We need more expensive but higher efficiency (and somewhat safer (no oil fires)) superconductor main lines. We need more incentive and more instructions on how we can save power and reduce use and what power saving products are good and can in turn save us money. We need much more diverse power sources Wind/Sun/Hydro/GeoThermal/FuelCell/Gas/Cleaner-Sa
I want giant catapillar like machines like TBM's that crawl through landfills chewing up trash and spitting out useful products. Sorting all the garbage into recycled materials and fermenting the rest as fuel to continue on in it's job or produce energy for nearby cities.
I want to see someone come up with a plan that doesn't attempt to single out ONE group of people as THE PROBLEM.
I saw an article I think on joeuser about a trip to the future and how medicine worked. The visitor stated how even with all the medical advances that people still didn't live past the age of 125-130. The problem was that while organs could be transplanted and through proper diet and pharmacology be kept healthy enough to survive, the brain was the key failing point. They cured alzheimers and another disease cropped up in it's place, after that another, and another. No matter the treatment or the chemical stabilizers used to keep the brain from oxydizing or losing neurons there was always something that ended up failing.
I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't too far from the truth.
Because the government freely admits that they denied him these rights due to national security. How's that for faith in the system.
"Ass pirates off the starboard bow, ARRRRR!"
That's typically been a pretty small percentage of titles (although unecessarily growing daily). And what does that say to the consumer - the recording industry can spend MORE money to create a censored record that Wal-Mart can sell for the same price as the less expensive to produce uncensored content and yet Sam Goody sells the uncensored product at a higher rate.
Let's talk fact. What we're talking about is not piracy, is not theft, it's copyright infringement which has it's own set of laws and regulations. The RIAA/MPAA hope that by associating more negative words with the act of copyright infringement they'll disuade the general public from infringement - just like all those FBI warnings at the beginning of VHS tapes is supposed to disuade home users from copying the tapes.
The fact is that IP laws are difficult to enforce especially during a time when so many other things seem more important. Additionally the bigger problem for MPAA/RIAA is not home user swapping but the rampant copyright infringement of counterfitting happening in Asia and the third world nations. Those areas are the only areas these companies have to grow into and they can't because the black market is so much cheaper and more convenient for the consumer.
These corporations know exactly what the cause of their current financial problems are. Should they admit that the problem is just a cycle or due to their own inability to react consumers requests for services and the consumers changing taste in music? Yes. Will they? No.
They need to keep shareholders investing money. The way to do that is to show that sales are artificially slowed due to "piracy". If "piracy" were stopped their sales would be up - so just wait to sell that stock because they're on top of it.
The fact is that many consumers who are internet enabled are finding that there's a wider range of music available online than there is at Sam Goody. They're finding that Sam Goody has stopped selling the music they like to listen to and has turned into little more than a top 40 store. They've also found that some of the artists that they liked that Sam Goody et al still sell, have jumped to the pop ship and no longer have any edge.
Since being online my music tastes have shifted because I've been able to find music from Germany, France, Japan, Russia, etc. Plus I've been able to find more independent bands that fit my tastes instead of "Joe Radio Listener" (which is who Sam Goody typically stocks for).
The fact is that Sam Goody and all the little mall music stores chains are getting hit hard and it has less to do with copyright infringement than it does to do with changing times. Wal-mart can sell a CD for $13 and Sam Goody sells the same CD for $18.99. While Sam Goody et al are going out of business a lot of local independent record shops that don't cater to the top/pop 40 crowd are thriving. They're thriving because they have or can get what people really want and that generates loyalty and cash flow.
I know plenty of file swappers. I know those that buy no music, but then they didn't before file swapping. I know those, like my friend Laurie, who downloads gigs of music a week, but also spends about $60 a month on new CD's (not CDR's). I don't think it's accurate to say that EVERY file swapper is infringing, nor is it accurate to say (and studies have proven this) that file swappers purchasing decreases.
Mostly people are buying at Wal-mart or wherever happens to be convenient to shop and not making special trips to the mall for what they can get at any store close to home. It used to be that you could get something different at a music specialty store like Sam Goody - that's no longer true.
Yeah when people say Oklahoma is great it's usually not because what you find there but what you don't find. If you want small town living with a few of the modern trappings like a super wal-mart then there are plenty of places to go in OK.
If you want entertainment it's best to live in/near OKC, Tulsa, maybe Norman but the entertainment is still pretty slim comparatively.
Nice try but wrong. Currently St. Louis, MO. I lived in Oklahoma up until 5 years ago - so 25 years of living there all over Yukon (graduated from there), Mustang, Bethany, Moore, and OKC.
Ah to be young and bored in Oklahoma again... this reminds me just how little there is to do there. You either work yourself to death, drink the boredom away, or find a hobby like this guy (which I assume involves both).
The point is first to get the proof. If we have proof that there's anyone out there and we know where they are (or did) transmit from then we can start looking for more information and in different formats.
There are a lot of "pointless" projects out there, cold fusion, AI, room temperature superconduction, teleportation, time travel, an end to world hunger, "peace keeping", Battlestar Galactica as visioned by Richard Hatch. Luckily there are still dreamers out there wasting their time and money trying the impossible. Who know's maybe they'll succeed.
Yeah you could be right on that.
So then is it just a matter of making the environment right so that criminal C can't recruite new toadies. Or that it becomes so prohibitively expensive to do so that he might as well be in a ligitimate business venture over an illegal one. This might make it easier to sneak under covers into organized crime.
Underlings are the lynch pin of organized crime, they're the sweat shop workers working for cheap and getting dirty doing it. If the underlings become scarce then the kingpins have to start doing their own work which opens them up to scrutiny.
Then again I don't exactly like the idea of filling up the prisons more than they are unless those prisons can do something to reform the criminals and get them on a better path. Our current penal system does little to nothing for this. Punishment is supposed to be a means to an end (reform). Too often today people dispise the idea of criminals getting an education or bettering themselves while being punished. They'd rather that they go without and be held down "because that's what punishment is about".
It's a bad can of worms but I'd rather see 100% enforcement and we start working on the problems than selective enforcement and status quo.
Here's what I hear:
"We only prossecute those people that do this often and will be seen by the media to deter other criminals."
So in other words it's okay to break the law as long as you're not in that top 5% of people that they choose to make an example out of.
What would be nice to see is 100% enforcement and then letting the punishment befit the severity of the crime and the prior record of the criminal. I think that 100% prossecution would be a much better deterent than the subjective pick and choose based on multiple factors crap that they seem to be wanting to use. Maybe you walk away with a ticket, maybe you get a year and a sizeable fine, maybe you get 4 years, but if you break the law you get SOMETHING bad.
In my mind you don't create laws and then selectively enforce them. It too easily gives the appearance of favoritism/negligence/stupidity.
I'm personally sick to death of the roll over scenarios - get criminal A arrested but give him immunity because he leads you to criminal B which you give immunity to because he leads you to criminal C which is the big high profile catch. Meanwhile criminal A and B go back out into the world to continue down the path and eventually either work for another criminal C or become criminal C themselves. Start making it difficult for the henchmen by JUST PROSSECUTING THEM, no deals. Then actually reforming them in the Department of Corrections facilities and puting them back on the streets with jobs and something worthwhile to do.
As you take those people out of the loop and the friends and peers of those people see that IT DOESN'T PAY they'll be less likely to be the next henchman for criminal C or more likely to turn in the big guys they know about before even getting involved.
Never EVER underestimate exactly how bad Sci-fi channel can suck. EVER. Think that they can't top the suckiness of the original try
Tremors the Series, NOW SHOWING 'The Arrival 2' (since the first one didn't suck nearly enough), Dune, Children of Sucking Dune, Scare Tactics, sucking for showing Braveheart ON SCI-FI!
The suck award goes to Sci-fi channel for pullin' out all the stops and finding every single giant reptile/bug/sea-critter movie ever made and playing them relentlessly as well as every teen slasher horror flick. Now I know what horror truly is - TV execs without a clue as to who their fanbase is.