"Roxio can do whatever they want. They are not obligated to anyone for anything and that includes CD writing software. Why do you think they owe you their software? "
I just yesterday responded to someone's post about the "fact" that the free market is in business to serve its customers. The market wants the ability to burn a CD. The suppliers have decided to remove that ability. Where is the market force?
The corporations are the customers, not us. We are just expenses and factors, like factory and plant.
On occasion, yes, you control prices. Otherwise the "competitive companies" mysteriously raises their prices in lockstep. Whyfore are cable TV rates rising?
Businesses exist to service stockholders, not their customers. Customers are just a factor to be managed, like suppliers or office space. With a little help from their lawyers and business managers, they can manipulate prices into ever higher spirals.
Adam Smith was not a prophet of the lord, just a theoretician.
If competition should be driving prices down and service up across the board, where the hell is the broadband? And when it is there, why is it metered so brutally? Ans: too many pigs feeding at the trough.
Well, to be Devil's Advocate, why in the world should they know what OS they are operating? Do you know what brand of motor is pumping coolant in your fridge? It shouldn't be necessary for a consumer to have be a tech wizard to use a browser, tho of course it is.
It's sort of like the early decades of autos, when everyone had to be a mechanic to get home from a field trip across town.
Well, enjoy the wizardhood:) Someday we won't need tech wizards to get the car moving, and then what happens to all the arrogant tech people? Who will they be calling ugly dates then? I think they might be the ugly dates at that point... careful where you point that metaphorical gun, it might be pointing the wrong way...
Failed on what criteria? How do you measure that? America's poor were in shitty shape before spending programs appeared after the Depression, and they are in much better shape now. If you had grown up poor, you would not be so glib.
It's arguable that whatever programs "failed" did so because white affluent people wanted the poor warehoused in the inner city in tall buildings, and then white businesses fled away to the 'burbs and annihilated the employment and retail sectors. And because school funding is dependent alsmot totally on property taxes, the suburbs funded well-endowed schools, and the poor neighborhoods couldn't fund construction paper, much less good education.And the adequate teachers fled to the 'burbs in droves. And the drug war gave street gangs money and influence and destroyed what little stability was there to begin with.
Rinse and repeat for five generations, then blame the poor and Guvmint for what people did en masse of their own free will.
The plane did not cost one hundred million dollars, and it did not fail. The research for the know-how cost tens of millions, the plane cost bupkis, and the Pegasus booster failed.
Well, as to the first point, it may be that free market competition may keep most pipes open and free. But think about it -- how free is the market now, and how free will it be after a few years of mega-acquisitions? Is it possible for all pipes to be owned in some sense by very few entitites, all interested in shutting down "copyrighted" material transfer? I seem to remember that some ISP's, especially cable TV companies that also owned broadband, had some scheme to detect constant large-sized data transmissions and block them -- because they would be video, most probably. Though I think it didn't happen. Think about it: if you had a fat pipe, what would stop you from narrowcasting HBO over the net? Or the Playboy channel? It's in the fat pipe owners best biz interests to keep speed or volume down. Or at least control it. As for competition, they'd be content owners too, most likely. Indy ISPs will be gobbled up like goldfish in the next decade by large IP conglomerates. Wanna bet? Sigh. Sucker bet, already is happening.
As for it happening only under commnism, uh-uh. A very small group of self-interested corporations can eventually buy up the pipes and content and then, in a sort of multopolistic cooperation like oil companies do, shut off the pipes for "pirates". Markets are only free if we maintain vigilance, and we ain't. It's a matter of supply and demand... they'll have the supply, and they'll demand anything they damn well like.
Hm. It may be that they can never monitor all traffic over the net. But they can however target select individuals and "make examples" of them. I know it's brutal and unfair, but these enforcers are without pity. They may make enough high-profile destructions of "pirates'" lives that others will stop attempting to use freenets.
As for your second point about encryption being non-controlled, I hope so. But remember this is a game of mindshare, and already people are sniffing that if you are encrypting traffic, you are doing something illegal. It's the old "if you're innocent, you won't mind peeing into this cup" idea that everyone has bought into.
I hope that "they", whoever they might be someday, will never have the computing power to recontruct the traffic bouncing over all those nodes. But remember -- they may indeed have it someday. Imagine quantum processors... who knows.
Remember that Aimster has tried using the DMCA to make decryption of it's own P2P traffic illegal. But I would say they will fail: at the sound of being fatalistic, the courts will side with the RIAA/MPAA etc. It's not the letter of the law the courts are enforcing -- they are trying to proactively "protect" corporate interests against "thieves". Remember the Napster case at all times...
I always like the wireless alternative to the wired internet, but wait -- it can be sniffed very easily. How about a rooftop network of ruby lasers, in reduntant arrays? That may be workable and private. I'll let you real tech people sweat those details out.
I'd just liek to close saying that it's not The Guvmint I fear, it's corporate power using governement force to maintain power and control.. and profits... at the expense of freedom.
The majority of Americans never understand their own rights. Polls demonstrate this, man-on-the-street interviews show this.
As the Salon article mentions, we've lost the idea war. Americans by and large buy the idea that ideas and songs and suchlike are private property, and that the "owners" can charge whatever they like for them.
Free market capitalism, such as we Americans practice, for all its strengths, does clash violently at times with free speech and other rights. And Amurricans tend to come down on the side of business... because rights don't get them rich, businesses do.
We don't understand what's really important anymore. And we have no sense of history. We have the most leisure time of any culture ever, but we don't use it to grow wiser about ourselves, imo. We load up our kids time with soccer and softball and proggy classes, and the adults fill their time up with ever-more silly hobbies... I just wonder how it'd be if anyone actually thought about anything for a while... eh.
Well, you are a Canadian. What are Canadians going to do about it? I'm not being nationalistic, I'm just curious and hopeful. Will you fight this type of enforcement when it comes for you?
It's not just the RIAA versus the world. It's what Abraham Lincoln fretted about -- the unchecked power of corporations. They have most of the rights of individuals, but almost none of the responsibilities. I'm not socialist or even libertarian, but I'm no fool, and worse than any communism is corporatism. At least a communism is putatively under the people's control. Corporations, from Exxon to Scientology, have no masters, and no limits.
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned that corporations have only one purpose: to make profits for the shareholders. I disagree with that: corporations may be non-personal entities under the law, but in reality, they are powerful entities controlled by men and women who are vindictive and greedy -- and who cannot be touched for damages done at their command. It's the ultimate totalitarianism. As Heinlein once said in "Friday", and I paraphrase: so you want to attack IBM. WHERE IS IBM? Does it have an address? Can you go talk to it? Who is IBM?
And that from a rabid libertarian who thought Ayn Rand was a wuss. Even he was alarmed.
Well, an encrypted information flow would make the system invulnerable to government control... not. Aimster, remember?
And there are two ways that the "guvmint" can shut down encrypted P2P:
1. Simply permit the corporations who own the pipes, which will also increasingly own copyrighted content as well, to block all high-speed, or even high-volume, data transfer over their networks.
2. Make encryption illegal. You don't think they can? It just takes about three levels of judiciary to do it. Napster had non-infringing uses, but that didn't stop only two levels of the judiciary shutting it down.
Clinton was not a "liberal". That was a tag lazy newsmen and the Dittoheads and their ilk used so often it is now "truth". Clinton was a business conservative, and a moderate socially. He was intensively conservative religiously.
Saying he was "liberal" over and over and over again does not make it so.
Well, the world isn't the United States. For one thing, the U.S. is home to the world's largest oil companies, which aren't all that interested in anything not coming out of the ground. Another, LAND. Solar farms don't work in Japan, which is, to put it gently, overpopulated. Countries like Japan or England or Germany can't unroll miles of mylar on the ground. Solarsats take all the infrastructure and move it into space, where's there's room.
They are also permanent. Besides the beaming equipment, which I assume burns out after time, the solar cells last for a long, long, time.
And a solarsat isn't fragile -- there is no wind, no rain, no earthquakes, no gekkos. It just works, year after year.
As for cheap, after the initial construction, whatevcer it costs, the sat just keeps paying for itself, without stopping. The well doesn't run dry, there are no spills. And we don't have to pave over the deserts, either.
Not that your idea isn't good! It is pretty cheap to panel desert areas.
Why wasn't the posting allowed to be presented in context? Let's be open to the obvious. The judge and the DA are Scientology sympathizers. The organization has been installing people into power for over fifty years, and in addition, have no compunctions about blackmail or threats, implied or explicit. Look at Florida last year: they managed to viciously remove a coroner who dared to say that a woman who died in their custody had died of dehydration and forced bedrest. These bastards got her REMOVED and disgraced, and no one will investigate how it happened. I don't think a DA or a judge is any harder to influence.
The War on Drugs? You got it. It's Prohibition III, the return of the police state. Prohibition III is going to make the War on Dugs look like a high school student council resolution. To prosecute this war (on the population of the world) for the conglomerates, the police agencies are going to need total access to our networks and our PC's. And they'll get it.
And our children will never understand what we'll be complaining about. "But dad, you're such a bleeding-heart liberal! Of course they have to scan our house for e-textbooks. It's to prevent theft! And don't you have a cache of txt e-book files? I don't know, I should tell the teacher..."
That's an intellectually lazy comment, and so trite. Listen, "TV" hater: it's a video screen. They want to control what you see on it. And no, your PC will not override it. And they will have this power forever. All over the world.
The press is not tar and feathering Bush. He has gotten a free ride, considering his past, and his Reaganesque hiding from press conferences where he does not come off very informed. Clinton was racked by 24/7 MonicaStain-NBC deathwatches, Faux News/RNC rumor planting, yadda yadda. The amazing thing is, they couldn't find a thing on a man who came up through Arkansas politics, even though billionaries funded investigations and the press wanted him dead. You have to be pretty clean to run that guantlet.
People skills? You mean he can charm his way past answering questions? Better organized? You mean other people are running the presidency? Focus? on what? No hubris? You mean he isn't a know-it-all (intelligent)? LESS PARTY BAGGAGE: ARE YOU INSANE? I guess his objectives are yours then. Ethics? The funeral industry scandal in Texas, his failed companies, cocaine use tho he denies fed aid to students convicted of even pot, dirty tricks against McCain, and the unbelievable dirty tricks campaign waged in Florida to get himself elected? Using his own rules for manual recounts, he lost. Even if he had won, the torturing of law by Saunders and the Supremes will always tar him with stealing the presidency. Loyalty? To whom??
Companies owning IP is not a state that the framers of copyright law envisioned.
Copyright was envisioned as enabling individual to profit from their ideas - in a limited fashion - for 20 years.
As the article states, ideas spring from other ideas, and to lock all of these ideas up will paralyze creativity, given the logical end.
Copyright is now forever. Period. And conglomerates own it. And can buy more. And use the profits to buy even more. The endgame is several powerful entities owning all IP, and metering it out at their own prices, forever.
Companies also do not exist to protect their employees. They exist to protect shareowner's profits. See Rambus? They make nothing. They employ no one, really. But they, like others, can end up owning significant portions of the hardware market by acquisitions and litigation.
Totalitarianism is what will happen if this goes unchecked.
And give up on Communist Russia. They all gone now. The only totalitarian state left is us.
They'll kick in your door, shoot and kill your ass if you have a gun, cause they are bulletproff and have many more and bigger guns. Then they'll take away your network. Then they'll charge your estate court fees, policemen's salary spent, and hourly charges of the copyright cops who rifled your data after yer dead.
Interstate highways were built into areas that had almost no one living there - Utah, the Dakotas, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, on and on. There was no economic justification for it. There were damned few people there. The creation of the IHS by federal tax dollars gave those underpopulated states the capability to add citizen/voters - not to mention all those water projects, at the Fed taxpayers' expense.
Trains were very efficient people movers. But the railroads made a lot of enemies over time, and the nationwide consensus was to spend them out of existence.
I'd love to ride Amtrak -- it would be fun. But because they must support themselves, they are always more expensive than driving the IHS, or even sometimes, flying!
The IHS did not pay for itself -- it was created by Federal welfare. The train system had its nuts cut off by fiat. They must raise the money to support themselves by passenger fees, while trucking companies and airlines are taxpayer supported entities, far, far, more than the trains are.
The other point I'd like to make is -- less affluent people use Amtrak. Amtrak is being given special scrutiny by law enforcement. Do the mental math; they're after the poorer people.
No, no NO: there is a difference between a car and a DVD. Legally speaking, a car is a lump of metal, and you bought it, tough noogies if it gets broken. But media, especially movies, that we purchase we can legally copy for backup or personal purposes. Legal cases fought for, and won. What the DMCA has done is make even the mere analysis of the encryption used on DVD's illegal, so the so-called Fair Use copying of your DVD becomes impossible. The RIAA and MPAA have sidestepped Fair Use by making the method necessary to decrypt media illegal to even look at. So copies cannot happen, even tho you are legally entitled to it. So if your DVD breaks, or your New Shiny Encrypted Audio CDs have a scratch, too damned bad. And they are winning the PR war in papers, TV, and online news services, who regularly describe people trying to copy their own damned disks as "pirates".
A nastier effect of the legal underhandedness in the RIAA/MPAA/SPA war against Fair Use is the fear on the part of manufacturers of producing digital storage or playback units that can store video or audio. Where the hell are the hard drive-equipped audio components that could store 10,000 MP3's? Where are the laptop-dervived audio units that should play MP3's in my car? The manufacturers are afraid of getting sued, under recent legal precedent that even MAKING equipment that could facilitate "piracy" is de facto illegal becaues the MPAA/RIAA could possibly lose 2 cents. The *possiblity* is all that is required now in court, and the manufacturer could be liable for damages.
Nope. I'm surprised at science-oriented people sometimes. They understand math, but they are blind when it comes to population growth mechanics.
Asimov once wrote an essay. In that essay he simply used arithmetic. He extropolated the growth of humanity *in terms of mass* using today's growth figures (total population doubling every 33-40 years).
In less than 2000 years, our collective mass is equivalent to the entire planet Earth.
In less than 6000 years, EVERY ATOM IN THE UNIVERSE would be converted to human beings.
And this is not postulating personal immortality! Take the death rate out of the equation (a very simple one) and we turn the universe into soylent green in less than 4,000 years.
Oh, and postulating the universe is a thousand times bigger than we think it is won't help either. Even a million times bigger. The doubling rate eats all those scales, and burps in a few hundred years. Geometric growth is deadly to any species. Unlimited growth is a cancer -- and cancer is ultimately a messy death, both for the "host", and the *cancer itself*.
Space colonization is wonderful, but even if we had instantaneous interstellar transport, and infinite tech to process EVERYTHING into subdivisions, it does not relieve us of the utter necessity to control our numbers. It isn't a matter of philosophy: the crunches come locally when population exceeds sanity -- it's called a die off.
We have no problem understanding why deer need to be "harvested", or when fisherman neeed to slack off a bit to keep fish from dying out. But in our own heads, we never see these problems as applying to us. But Malthus and arithmetic always has the last laugh.
If we could achieve immortality, I would suggest we GET RID THE OF CARS. With a seventy or so year life span, the horrendous carnage that autos cause is acceptable -- the odds of dying that way are high, but not insupportable. But with a longer span, the odds of you getting whacked by our favorite death machine become a near-certainty. And how many people die in trains compared to cars?
If you wanna live forever, get rid of streets full of cars.
This is about posting a list of people whom one doesn't like,with their names, addresses, phone numbers and commuting habits. This is about solicitation to kill those people. Those doctors have been targeted for death by Jesus, and at least one is already dead. 'Nuff said.
Slashdot Mirror
"Roxio can do whatever they want. They are not obligated to anyone for anything and that includes CD writing software. Why do you think they owe you their software? "
I just yesterday responded to someone's post about the "fact" that the free market is in business to serve its customers. The market wants the ability to burn a CD. The suppliers have decided to remove that ability. Where is the market force?
The corporations are the customers, not us. We are just expenses and factors, like factory and plant.
On occasion, yes, you control prices. Otherwise the "competitive companies" mysteriously raises their prices in lockstep. Whyfore are cable TV rates rising?
Businesses exist to service stockholders, not their customers. Customers are just a factor to be managed, like suppliers or office space. With a little help from their lawyers and business managers, they can manipulate prices into ever higher spirals.
Adam Smith was not a prophet of the lord, just a theoretician.
If competition should be driving prices down and service up across the board, where the hell is the broadband? And when it is there, why is it metered so brutally? Ans: too many pigs feeding at the trough.
Well, to be Devil's Advocate, why in the world should they know what OS they are operating? Do you know what brand of motor is pumping coolant in your fridge? It shouldn't be necessary for a consumer to have be a tech wizard to use a browser, tho of course it is.
:) Someday we won't need tech wizards to get the car moving, and then what happens to all the arrogant tech people? Who will they be calling ugly dates then? I think they might be the ugly dates at that point... careful where you point that metaphorical gun, it might be pointing the wrong way...
It's sort of like the early decades of autos, when everyone had to be a mechanic to get home from a field trip across town.
Well, enjoy the wizardhood
Failed on what criteria? How do you measure that? America's poor were in shitty shape before spending programs appeared after the Depression, and they are in much better shape now. If you had grown up poor, you would not be so glib.
It's arguable that whatever programs "failed" did so because white affluent people wanted the poor warehoused in the inner city in tall buildings, and then white businesses fled away to the 'burbs and annihilated the employment and retail sectors. And because school funding is dependent alsmot totally on property taxes, the suburbs funded well-endowed schools, and the poor neighborhoods couldn't fund construction paper, much less good education.And the adequate teachers fled to the 'burbs in droves. And the drug war gave street gangs money and influence and destroyed what little stability was there to begin with.
Rinse and repeat for five generations, then blame the poor and Guvmint for what people did en masse of their own free will.
End of line.
The plane did not cost one hundred million dollars, and it did not fail. The research for the know-how cost tens of millions, the plane cost bupkis, and the Pegasus booster failed.
>>(too much LDS in college ;-)
Too many Mormon coeds wreck your memory?
Well, as to the first point, it may be that free market competition may keep most pipes open and free. But think about it -- how free is the market now, and how free will it be after a few years of mega-acquisitions? Is it possible for all pipes to be owned in some sense by very few entitites, all interested in shutting down "copyrighted" material transfer? I seem to remember that some ISP's, especially cable TV companies that also owned broadband, had some scheme to detect constant large-sized data transmissions and block them -- because they would be video, most probably. Though I think it didn't happen. Think about it: if you had a fat pipe, what would stop you from narrowcasting HBO over the net? Or the Playboy channel? It's in the fat pipe owners best biz interests to keep speed or volume down. Or at least control it. As for competition, they'd be content owners too, most likely. Indy ISPs will be gobbled up like goldfish in the next decade by large IP conglomerates. Wanna bet? Sigh. Sucker bet, already is happening.
As for it happening only under commnism, uh-uh. A very small group of self-interested corporations can eventually buy up the pipes and content and then, in a sort of multopolistic cooperation like oil companies do, shut off the pipes for "pirates". Markets are only free if we maintain vigilance, and we ain't. It's a matter of supply and demand... they'll have the supply, and they'll demand anything they damn well like.
Hm. It may be that they can never monitor all traffic over the net. But they can however target select individuals and "make examples" of them. I know it's brutal and unfair, but these enforcers are without pity. They may make enough high-profile destructions of "pirates'" lives that others will stop attempting to use freenets.
As for your second point about encryption being non-controlled, I hope so. But remember this is a game of mindshare, and already people are sniffing that if you are encrypting traffic, you are doing something illegal. It's the old "if you're innocent, you won't mind peeing into this cup" idea that everyone has bought into.
I hope that "they", whoever they might be someday, will never have the computing power to recontruct the traffic bouncing over all those nodes. But remember -- they may indeed have it someday. Imagine quantum processors... who knows.
Remember that Aimster has tried using the DMCA to make decryption of it's own P2P traffic illegal. But I would say they will fail: at the sound of being fatalistic, the courts will side with the RIAA/MPAA etc. It's not the letter of the law the courts are enforcing -- they are trying to proactively "protect" corporate interests against "thieves". Remember the Napster case at all times...
I always like the wireless alternative to the wired internet, but wait -- it can be sniffed very easily. How about a rooftop network of ruby lasers, in reduntant arrays? That may be workable and private. I'll let you real tech people sweat those details out.
I'd just liek to close saying that it's not The Guvmint I fear, it's corporate power using governement force to maintain power and control.. and profits... at the expense of freedom.
>>Corporate profits are more important than the risk of violence against doctors and their patients? Yes. Exactly.
The majority of Americans never understand their own rights. Polls demonstrate this, man-on-the-street interviews show this.
As the Salon article mentions, we've lost the idea war. Americans by and large buy the idea that ideas and songs and suchlike are private property, and that the "owners" can charge whatever they like for them.
Free market capitalism, such as we Americans practice, for all its strengths, does clash violently at times with free speech and other rights. And Amurricans tend to come down on the side of business... because rights don't get them rich, businesses do.
We don't understand what's really important anymore. And we have no sense of history. We have the most leisure time of any culture ever, but we don't use it to grow wiser about ourselves, imo. We load up our kids time with soccer and softball and proggy classes, and the adults fill their time up with ever-more silly hobbies... I just wonder how it'd be if anyone actually thought about anything for a while... eh.
Well, you are a Canadian. What are Canadians going to do about it? I'm not being nationalistic, I'm just curious and hopeful. Will you fight this type of enforcement when it comes for you?
It's not just the RIAA versus the world. It's what Abraham Lincoln fretted about -- the unchecked power of corporations. They have most of the rights of individuals, but almost none of the responsibilities. I'm not socialist or even libertarian, but I'm no fool, and worse than any communism is corporatism. At least a communism is putatively under the people's control. Corporations, from Exxon to Scientology, have no masters, and no limits.
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned that corporations have only one purpose: to make profits for the shareholders. I disagree with that: corporations may be non-personal entities under the law, but in reality, they are powerful entities controlled by men and women who are vindictive and greedy -- and who cannot be touched for damages done at their command. It's the ultimate totalitarianism. As Heinlein once said in "Friday", and I paraphrase: so you want to attack IBM. WHERE IS IBM? Does it have an address? Can you go talk to it? Who is IBM?
And that from a rabid libertarian who thought Ayn Rand was a wuss. Even he was alarmed.
Well, an encrypted information flow would make the system invulnerable to government control... not. Aimster, remember?
And there are two ways that the "guvmint" can shut down encrypted P2P:
1. Simply permit the corporations who own the pipes, which will also increasingly own copyrighted content as well, to block all high-speed, or even high-volume, data transfer over their networks.
2. Make encryption illegal. You don't think they can? It just takes about three levels of judiciary to do it. Napster had non-infringing uses, but that didn't stop only two levels of the judiciary shutting it down.
Clinton was not a "liberal". That was a tag lazy newsmen and the Dittoheads and their ilk used so often it is now "truth". Clinton was a business conservative, and a moderate socially. He was intensively conservative religiously.
Saying he was "liberal" over and over and over again does not make it so.
Advanced Idea Mechanics. If I spent 20 years reading comics, I at least can pontificate.
Well, the world isn't the United States. For one thing, the U.S. is home to the world's largest oil companies, which aren't all that interested in anything not coming out of the ground. Another, LAND. Solar farms don't work in Japan, which is, to put it gently, overpopulated. Countries like Japan or England or Germany can't unroll miles of mylar on the ground. Solarsats take all the infrastructure and move it into space, where's there's room.
They are also permanent. Besides the beaming equipment, which I assume burns out after time, the solar cells last for a long, long, time.
And a solarsat isn't fragile -- there is no wind, no rain, no earthquakes, no gekkos. It just works, year after year.
As for cheap, after the initial construction, whatevcer it costs, the sat just keeps paying for itself, without stopping. The well doesn't run dry, there are no spills. And we don't have to pave over the deserts, either.
Not that your idea isn't good! It is pretty cheap to panel desert areas.
Why wasn't the posting allowed to be presented in context? Let's be open to the obvious. The judge and the DA are Scientology sympathizers. The organization has been installing people into power for over fifty years, and in addition, have no compunctions about blackmail or threats, implied or explicit. Look at Florida last year: they managed to viciously remove a coroner who dared to say that a woman who died in their custody had died of dehydration and forced bedrest. These bastards got her REMOVED and disgraced, and no one will investigate how it happened. I don't think a DA or a judge is any harder to influence.
The War on Drugs? You got it. It's Prohibition III, the return of the police state. Prohibition III is going to make the War on Dugs look like a high school student council resolution. To prosecute this war (on the population of the world) for the conglomerates, the police agencies are going to need total access to our networks and our PC's. And they'll get it.
And our children will never understand what we'll be complaining about. "But dad, you're such a bleeding-heart liberal! Of course they have to scan our house for e-textbooks. It's to prevent theft! And don't you have a cache of txt e-book files? I don't know, I should tell the teacher..."
That's an intellectually lazy comment, and so trite. Listen, "TV" hater: it's a video screen. They want to control what you see on it. And no, your PC will not override it. And they will have this power forever. All over the world.
The press is not tar and feathering Bush. He has gotten a free ride, considering his past, and his Reaganesque hiding from press conferences where he does not come off very informed. Clinton was racked by 24/7 MonicaStain-NBC deathwatches, Faux News/RNC rumor planting, yadda yadda. The amazing thing is, they couldn't find a thing on a man who came up through Arkansas politics, even though billionaries funded investigations and the press wanted him dead. You have to be pretty clean to run that guantlet.
People skills? You mean he can charm his way past answering questions? Better organized? You mean other people are running the presidency? Focus? on what? No hubris? You mean he isn't a know-it-all (intelligent)? LESS PARTY BAGGAGE: ARE YOU INSANE? I guess his objectives are yours then. Ethics? The funeral industry scandal in Texas, his failed companies, cocaine use tho he denies fed aid to students convicted of even pot, dirty tricks against McCain, and the unbelievable dirty tricks campaign waged in Florida to get himself elected? Using his own rules for manual recounts, he lost. Even if he had won, the torturing of law by Saunders and the Supremes will always tar him with stealing the presidency. Loyalty? To whom??
Companies owning IP is not a state that the framers of copyright law envisioned.
Copyright was envisioned as enabling individual to profit from their ideas - in a limited fashion - for 20 years.
As the article states, ideas spring from other ideas, and to lock all of these ideas up will paralyze creativity, given the logical end.
Copyright is now forever. Period. And conglomerates own it. And can buy more. And use the profits to buy even more. The endgame is several powerful entities owning all IP, and metering it out at their own prices, forever.
Companies also do not exist to protect their employees. They exist to protect shareowner's profits. See Rambus? They make nothing. They employ no one, really. But they, like others, can end up owning significant portions of the hardware market by acquisitions and litigation.
Totalitarianism is what will happen if this goes unchecked.
And give up on Communist Russia. They all gone now. The only totalitarian state left is us.
They'll kick in your door, shoot and kill your ass if you have a gun, cause they are bulletproff and have many more and bigger guns. Then they'll take away your network. Then they'll charge your estate court fees, policemen's salary spent, and hourly charges of the copyright cops who rifled your data after yer dead.
Interstate highways were built into areas that had almost no one living there - Utah, the Dakotas, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, on and on. There was no economic justification for it. There were damned few people there. The creation of the IHS by federal tax dollars gave those underpopulated states the capability to add citizen/voters - not to mention all those water projects, at the Fed taxpayers' expense.
Trains were very efficient people movers. But the railroads made a lot of enemies over time, and the nationwide consensus was to spend them out of existence.
I'd love to ride Amtrak -- it would be fun. But because they must support themselves, they are always more expensive than driving the IHS, or even sometimes, flying!
The IHS did not pay for itself -- it was created by Federal welfare. The train system had its nuts cut off by fiat. They must raise the money to support themselves by passenger fees, while trucking companies and airlines are taxpayer supported entities, far, far, more than the trains are.
The other point I'd like to make is -- less affluent people use Amtrak. Amtrak is being given special scrutiny by law enforcement. Do the mental math; they're after the poorer people.
No, no NO: there is a difference between a car and a DVD. Legally speaking, a car is a lump of metal, and you bought it, tough noogies if it gets broken. But media, especially movies, that we purchase we can legally copy for backup or personal purposes. Legal cases fought for, and won. What the DMCA has done is make even the mere analysis of the encryption used on DVD's illegal, so the so-called Fair Use copying of your DVD becomes impossible. The RIAA and MPAA have sidestepped Fair Use by making the method necessary to decrypt media illegal to even look at. So copies cannot happen, even tho you are legally entitled to it. So if your DVD breaks, or your New Shiny Encrypted Audio CDs have a scratch, too damned bad. And they are winning the PR war in papers, TV, and online news services, who regularly describe people trying to copy their own damned disks as "pirates".
A nastier effect of the legal underhandedness in the RIAA/MPAA/SPA war against Fair Use is the fear on the part of manufacturers of producing digital storage or playback units that can store video or audio. Where the hell are the hard drive-equipped audio components that could store 10,000 MP3's? Where are the laptop-dervived audio units that should play MP3's in my car? The manufacturers are afraid of getting sued, under recent legal precedent that even MAKING equipment that could facilitate "piracy" is de facto illegal becaues the MPAA/RIAA could possibly lose 2 cents. The *possiblity* is all that is required now in court, and the manufacturer could be liable for damages.
This is getting sick.
Nope. I'm surprised at science-oriented people sometimes. They understand math, but they are blind when it comes to population growth mechanics.
Asimov once wrote an essay. In that essay he simply used arithmetic. He extropolated the growth of humanity *in terms of mass* using today's growth figures (total population doubling every 33-40 years).
In less than 2000 years, our collective mass is equivalent to the entire planet Earth.
In less than 6000 years, EVERY ATOM IN THE UNIVERSE would be converted to human beings.
And this is not postulating personal immortality! Take the death rate out of the equation (a very simple one) and we turn the universe into soylent green in less than 4,000 years.
Oh, and postulating the universe is a thousand times bigger than we think it is won't help either. Even a million times bigger. The doubling rate eats all those scales, and burps in a few hundred years. Geometric growth is deadly to any species. Unlimited growth is a cancer -- and cancer is ultimately a messy death, both for the "host", and the *cancer itself*.
Space colonization is wonderful, but even if we had instantaneous interstellar transport, and infinite tech to process EVERYTHING into subdivisions, it does not relieve us of the utter necessity to control our numbers. It isn't a matter of philosophy: the crunches come locally when population exceeds sanity -- it's called a die off.
We have no problem understanding why deer need to be "harvested", or when fisherman neeed to slack off a bit to keep fish from dying out. But in our own heads, we never see these problems as applying to us. But Malthus and arithmetic always has the last laugh.
If we could achieve immortality, I would suggest we GET RID THE OF CARS. With a seventy or so year life span, the horrendous carnage that autos cause is acceptable -- the odds of dying that way are high, but not insupportable. But with a longer span, the odds of you getting whacked by our favorite death machine become a near-certainty. And how many people die in trains compared to cars?
If you wanna live forever, get rid of streets full of cars.
This is about posting a list of people whom one doesn't like,with their names, addresses, phone numbers and commuting habits. This is about solicitation to kill those people. Those doctors have been targeted for death by Jesus, and at least one is already dead. 'Nuff said.
He was "ex-" at that point. Very ex. Let's be fair.