"Of course, you've just broken the law. No matter how innocent your intentions, you are a criminal"
Not to nitpick, but the word criminal is not appropriate, no matter what the RIAA, the MPAA, the Church of Scientology, or whatever copyright holding group does to make that label stick.
It's a civil violation, tried as a civil case if one is filed. "Copyright Criminal" is a misnomer.
But you are right about the cloud of laws.
Another point to be made is that a hostile entity, such as a business competitor, cranky prosecutor, or an unscrupulous cult, can use this environment to target anyone they want aced -- just about anyone alive, if investigated, could be accused or tried on breaking some law, somewhere. Even if the charge is baseless, the damage is done to one's reputation and pocketbook. I can think of many cases where this has happened, but at the risk of starting a flamewar, think back to the last few years, and what a few determined people did to massacre the President. And all criminal charges were found baseless. But he's toast anyway.
Some posters to the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup copyright their postings. I don't think it slows down the Sci. organization from playing with the posts; power annuls copyright law. So, if you aren't part of a rich or influential corporation, forget it. The law is only for those who can afford it. (How would you take an infringer to court? How much cash and time do you have?)
Testify, Brother! I hope this doesn't make my earlier post (Star Trek? Dune?) too redundant. Star Trek isn't even science fiction. It's sci-fi, the slower, uneducated younger brother of SF. I'm not flamebaiting: it's just a fact. There is no science or even logic in Star Trek. It's a naval/new frontiers entertainment vehicle. It uses SF conventions, but a scientist has a hard time preventing him/herself from groaning at the illogic of the transporters, power requirements for assembling matter from energy, and humanoid aliens that can intermarry with Terrans and even speak a lovely British flavor of English. The Great Bird got a lot right, but SF he did not make. It is a great show. But not good for futuristic previews.
Guys, there *was* science fiction before there was sci-fi. By that I mean that force fields, tractor beams, and even pressor beams (opposite of tractor) existed in magazine SF decades before Rodenberry pulled the well-worn parts off the shelf and gave them a Mod paint job. Not a flame; just a reminder that the genre has older and deeper roots than just cheezy TV shows.
You pretty much got it at the last. Guerrila warfare in any meaningful sense in a developed nation consists of a data war, games played in politics, courts, and media. Guns wouldn't last long against GPS, armor, perfect communications, satellite monitors and immense databases crammed with info about everyone (eventually). And wait til monitor camera kiosks start popping up everywhere. A Glock and a couple of streetsweepers mean didley against a nation where the private cops outnumber the municipal and the military bases are omnipresent. The dream of the lone warrior dies hard, though.
So, are you going to take a gun and shoot the judge? If not, at what point would you? When exactly does your gun ever become useful? And if history came to a crossroads in the U.S., and you did indeed took out your guns to fight the evil government, exactly how long do you think you'll last against a Cobra gunship? Great idea for the 1780's, but useless now.
'Twas done in Chicago a long, long time ago, as well as many of the suburbs. This has got to be the cleanest area of the country. This is mostly the effect of a religiously conservative oligarch mayor who, for instance, had outdoor restaurants banned because he thought they were "unsanitary". In the burbs, well, that area IS the most politically conservative group of voters in the country. Curiously, the areas of the U.S. I find to be covered in strip bars were... pretty much any place in the Bible Belt! The more conservative the lifestyle, the more copression relief you find just outside of town.
Sigh, one thing. It ain't the "politicians' fault", it's our collective fault. Politicians are useful for scapegoats, no? I'm surprised we don't annoint them with blood. Remember: "We have met the enemy, and he is Us." - Pogo
Both the Earth and the Moon are gravity wells. And you may recall that in TMIAHM the device is called a catapult. Clarke actually thunk it up in the '40's. It was masssively developed by the space colony work groups in the early eighties for the lunar soil launcher. It's actually a linear motor. The military nowadays calls them railguns, and wants to use them as cannon. It does work best in vacuum, but it certainly works in earth's atmosphere. Room for the compressed air to move aside is critical, so tunnels are out. Picture a maglev train with a shuttle or transport as a payload. As the big H wrote, let the track go across a level plain. The launcher+ship, magnetically suspended, picks up a few hundred MPH of speed. Then *gradually* up a high mountainside, petering out in the thinner air, which is very important. Acceleration can increase because air presssure drops fast with minimal altitide increase. The let the thing spring up and off, at which point you kick in the rockets. Saves a TON of fuel, and is electrically powered. Essentially eliminates the first stage of a normal rocket. Sure it can be done. But it won't. NASA has enough trouble convincing voters and representatives that *rockets* can work, much less explain linear induction mass drivers. We are at the mercy of our people's ignorance.
Um, the gas will indeed stick around for tens of thousands of years at least. And one can keep adding more. Not that I'm a proponent of the idea -- I like the idea of a "nature preserve" like Antarctica to be used as a model for Mars. Free solar space with artifical habitats can provide millions of time more living room, and create a economy like nothing we can imagine now. Mars is tiny. A waste of time to terraform it. I kind of like it as is. The nations of the earth will never do it tho. Only a wealthy space-based civilization would ever have the resources and will to undertake the project. And the type of people who will go into space aren't the types who care much about pristine states of planets. They'll torch the place.
I think the phrase "bah" pretty much sums up why we will never unfsck our own planet. If you don't care, why will your decendants? They'll be used to a fscked up planet. And they'll do the same thing to Mars. If self-interest is the only motivator, the biosphere is doomed.
You're not thinking broadly here -- you could do it with machines. "Bootstrapping". Seed Mars with machines that build both O2 crackering units, AND a duplicate of themselves. Stir in raw material scratched from the gound, then wait several years, and watch geometric growth in action. Such automated growth is a natural for immense frontiers with a critical (to say the least) manpower shortage.
Exactly right. As long as we keep growing our numbers, the situation will keep getting worse. If a cheap area becomes known, people will flood to it. Traffic will snarl. Prices will rise. People will blame liberals or taxes or minorities for the problems and bail, bringing with them to some less crowded area the same factors that ruined the place they came from in the first place: demand for single house contruction. Lots of yard. Winding roads. No public trans, to keep out the poor people. Bigger highways, forgetting that the transfer points are the bottlenecks. Pumping their school tax money from their old, crowded home district into the new one's, thus crippling the older locale's educational system. This will continue 'til the land runs out. Then what?
Even without no-growth initiatives, the land would be covered with single-family houses in a couple of decades. And people would still be screaming for more. Without densely-packed housing, like apartment buildings, home prices are going to explode. This is the simply the most obvious result of the population bomb. You can't have constant growth forever. Only cancers try that, and they don't fare too well after the initial success.
I did the work/lunch for 9 hours, drive for four-five for almost ten years. Factor in showering and preparing for work, and you basically have no life. No, it's no fun. I'd seriously think of junking the career if I had to do it again. What good is money when you won't have a life until you are 65?
>>In my opinion, the solution isn't to pack people together tightly like cattle in a feedlot (that leads to other problems, like increased crime) I don't think this is true. It's a perception of numbers problem: if you increase population density by a factor of a hundred, miracle of miracles, the crime rate goes up about 100 times as well. This misperception has caused urban areas no small amount of tax erosion. Feedback loop, anyone? Perception causes tax shrinkage causes perception causes shrinkage... The last half century has created an tech culture that grew up in burbs, wants burbs, and can't understand any other lifestyle. As for the rural congenstion caused by urban drivers: uh-uh. Most people in the US are suburbanites. Those people SUV-ing around the countryside are burbies! And they are probably scoping out the next concentric ring of burb building. The spreading can't go on forever. In less than a century, the U.S. could be a solid blanket of minimalls and aluminum siding connected by 6-laners. I agree, though: telecommuting is a must for tech companies. Silicon Valley exists more for the look of it rather than the need of it.
"I don't know about anyone else, but the media pisses me off. " By posting this, you are now part of the "Media". The overused, undefined, and lamentable used of the word "Media" is the scandal of this age. What the hell is the "Media"? Why is it the Enemy? If it's the Enemy, exactly why are you reading this? If you don't want to read news stories, and thus avoid the Evil Liberal Propaganda, what the hell are you going to get your news from?
>>More likely, they'll start selling web server software to support their IE product. Ironic, isn't it? That's how Netscape was forced to create income after Microsoft's free Explorer product forced Netscape to give away Navigator. Justice.... is served. > Court adjourned.
The Ben Bova story was a novel called "The Duelling Machine", which twisted my mind at a very early age. It was written in the sixties or seventies.
Well, what did you all expect?
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
The homogenization of the media was started under the Reagan Revolution of the Eighties. Remember the elimination of the Equal Time provisions for broadcasters? The removal of the limit of the number of outlets a single individual or corporation could own? This was hailed as victories for free speech. Inevitably, the free market will permit the most powerful or most politically motivated (there is a difference) to eat all the magazines, TV networks, radio stations, newspapers and new internet media companies in the US. The money generated will also enable the purchase of non-US assets, creating a world-wide monopoly set. One, two, or three companies will remain, almost certainly opposed to unions, liberals, government controls of any sort. And we all watched as it happened. The time to protest was when the deregulation occured. The conglomerates are too powerful now to stop. You wanted a totally free market? Well, you got it. Congrats. Total freedom for the richest is near-slavery for the poorest. I'm a libertarian, and even I understand this. Government is necessary. Here's another point: this is not a monopoly today - not the way Microsoft is. If Microsoft had won the Internet, they not only would own AOL and Time-Warner, but due to the utter control of the OS and hardware would have shut every other competitor out of the market. Game would have been REALLY over.
Very few doubt the existance of extrasolar planets, since there are now over 20 documented discoveries. What they used to use was the "wobble" method, which detected the wiggle of a star orbiting a common center of mass with a VERY large planet (smaller Earth-like planets are millions of times less massive, and so harder to spot by that factor). What was announced a week back was the detection of an *eclipse* of a star's light by a planet (lucky eclipse!). THIS news is about detecting the actual sig of a material planet, as opposed to a mathematical deduction. Scientists love multiple methodological confirmations. Faith ain't part of science. Yup. They want to say, "We REALLY know now that they exist."
Free oxygen in the presence of enormous energy and other elements would be rare indeed, unless the atmosphere/surface of the planet was a blazing plasma. It'd be ionized then, i think. This planet is 3 Jupiter masses, and too close to the primary to be in the bio zone. It'd be too hot for solid lead, for that matter. But, wait a decade or two. There are orbital scopes on the drawing boards that could resolve *continents*! --I believe spectroscopy can indeed distinguish free O2 from oxides.
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Not to nitpick, but the word criminal is not appropriate, no matter what the RIAA, the MPAA, the Church of Scientology, or whatever copyright holding group does to make that label stick.
It's a civil violation, tried as a civil case if one is filed. "Copyright Criminal" is a misnomer.
But you are right about the cloud of laws.
Another point to be made is that a hostile entity, such as a business competitor, cranky prosecutor, or an unscrupulous cult, can use this environment to target anyone they want aced -- just about anyone alive, if investigated, could be accused or tried on breaking some law, somewhere. Even if the charge is baseless, the damage is done to one's reputation and pocketbook. I can think of many cases where this has happened, but at the risk of starting a flamewar, think back to the last few years, and what a few determined people did to massacre the President. And all criminal charges were found baseless. But he's toast anyway.
Some posters to the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup copyright their postings. I don't think it slows down the Sci. organization from playing with the posts; power annuls copyright law. So, if you aren't part of a rich or influential corporation, forget it. The law is only for those who can afford it. (How would you take an infringer to court? How much cash and time do you have?)
Testify, Brother! I hope this doesn't make my earlier post (Star Trek? Dune?) too redundant. Star Trek isn't even science fiction. It's sci-fi, the slower, uneducated younger brother of SF. I'm not flamebaiting: it's just a fact. There is no science or even logic in Star Trek. It's a naval/new frontiers entertainment vehicle. It uses SF conventions, but a scientist has a hard time preventing him/herself from groaning at the illogic of the transporters, power requirements for assembling matter from energy, and humanoid aliens that can intermarry with Terrans and even speak a lovely British flavor of English. The Great Bird got a lot right, but SF he did not make. It is a great show. But not good for futuristic previews.
Guys, there *was* science fiction before there was sci-fi. By that I mean that force fields, tractor beams, and even pressor beams (opposite of tractor) existed in magazine SF decades before Rodenberry pulled the well-worn parts off the shelf and gave them a Mod paint job. Not a flame; just a reminder that the genre has older and deeper roots than just cheezy TV shows.
You pretty much got it at the last. Guerrila warfare in any meaningful sense in a developed nation consists of a data war, games played in politics, courts, and media. Guns wouldn't last long against GPS, armor, perfect communications, satellite monitors and immense databases crammed with info about everyone (eventually). And wait til monitor camera kiosks start popping up everywhere. A Glock and a couple of streetsweepers mean didley against a nation where the private cops outnumber the municipal and the military bases are omnipresent. The dream of the lone warrior dies hard, though.
So, are you going to take a gun and shoot the judge? If not, at what point would you? When exactly does your gun ever become useful? And if history came to a crossroads in the U.S., and you did indeed took out your guns to fight the evil government, exactly how long do you think you'll last against a Cobra gunship? Great idea for the 1780's, but useless now.
'Twas done in Chicago a long, long time ago, as well as many of the suburbs. This has got to be the cleanest area of the country. This is mostly the effect of a religiously conservative oligarch mayor who, for instance, had outdoor restaurants banned because he thought they were "unsanitary". In the burbs, well, that area IS the most politically conservative group of voters in the country. Curiously, the areas of the U.S. I find to be covered in strip bars were... pretty much any place in the Bible Belt! The more conservative the lifestyle, the more copression relief you find just outside of town.
Well, it ain't news to *you*. I was glad to hear about it.
Sigh, one thing. It ain't the "politicians' fault", it's our collective fault. Politicians are useful for scapegoats, no? I'm surprised we don't annoint them with blood. Remember: "We have met the enemy, and he is Us." - Pogo
Both the Earth and the Moon are gravity wells. And you may recall that in TMIAHM the device is called a catapult. Clarke actually thunk it up in the '40's. It was masssively developed by the space colony work groups in the early eighties for the lunar soil launcher. It's actually a linear motor. The military nowadays calls them railguns, and wants to use them as cannon. It does work best in vacuum, but it certainly works in earth's atmosphere. Room for the compressed air to move aside is critical, so tunnels are out. Picture a maglev train with a shuttle or transport as a payload. As the big H wrote, let the track go across a level plain. The launcher+ship, magnetically suspended, picks up a few hundred MPH of speed. Then *gradually* up a high mountainside, petering out in the thinner air, which is very important. Acceleration can increase because air presssure drops fast with minimal altitide increase. The let the thing spring up and off, at which point you kick in the rockets. Saves a TON of fuel, and is electrically powered. Essentially eliminates the first stage of a normal rocket. Sure it can be done. But it won't. NASA has enough trouble convincing voters and representatives that *rockets* can work, much less explain linear induction mass drivers. We are at the mercy of our people's ignorance.
Um, the gas will indeed stick around for tens of thousands of years at least. And one can keep adding more. Not that I'm a proponent of the idea -- I like the idea of a "nature preserve" like Antarctica to be used as a model for Mars. Free solar space with artifical habitats can provide millions of time more living room, and create a economy like nothing we can imagine now. Mars is tiny. A waste of time to terraform it. I kind of like it as is. The nations of the earth will never do it tho. Only a wealthy space-based civilization would ever have the resources and will to undertake the project. And the type of people who will go into space aren't the types who care much about pristine states of planets. They'll torch the place.
I think the phrase "bah" pretty much sums up why we will never unfsck our own planet. If you don't care, why will your decendants? They'll be used to a fscked up planet. And they'll do the same thing to Mars. If self-interest is the only motivator, the biosphere is doomed.
You're not thinking broadly here -- you could do it with machines. "Bootstrapping". Seed Mars with machines that build both O2 crackering units, AND a duplicate of themselves. Stir in raw material scratched from the gound, then wait several years, and watch geometric growth in action. Such automated growth is a natural for immense frontiers with a critical (to say the least) manpower shortage.
Exactly right. As long as we keep growing our numbers, the situation will keep getting worse. If a cheap area becomes known, people will flood to it. Traffic will snarl. Prices will rise. People will blame liberals or taxes or minorities for the problems and bail, bringing with them to some less crowded area the same factors that ruined the place they came from in the first place: demand for single house contruction. Lots of yard. Winding roads. No public trans, to keep out the poor people. Bigger highways, forgetting that the transfer points are the bottlenecks. Pumping their school tax money from their old, crowded home district into the new one's, thus crippling the older locale's educational system. This will continue 'til the land runs out. Then what?
Even without no-growth initiatives, the land would be covered with single-family houses in a couple of decades. And people would still be screaming for more. Without densely-packed housing, like apartment buildings, home prices are going to explode. This is the simply the most obvious result of the population bomb. You can't have constant growth forever. Only cancers try that, and they don't fare too well after the initial success.
Your suburban upbringing is showing :)! Not everything is a ranch house. Stories, remember?
I did the work/lunch for 9 hours, drive for four-five for almost ten years. Factor in showering and preparing for work, and you basically have no life. No, it's no fun. I'd seriously think of junking the career if I had to do it again. What good is money when you won't have a life until you are 65?
WTF happened to my formatting??
>>In my opinion, the solution isn't to pack people together tightly like cattle in a feedlot (that leads to other problems, like increased crime) I don't think this is true. It's a perception of numbers problem: if you increase population density by a factor of a hundred, miracle of miracles, the crime rate goes up about 100 times as well. This misperception has caused urban areas no small amount of tax erosion. Feedback loop, anyone? Perception causes tax shrinkage causes perception causes shrinkage... The last half century has created an tech culture that grew up in burbs, wants burbs, and can't understand any other lifestyle. As for the rural congenstion caused by urban drivers: uh-uh. Most people in the US are suburbanites. Those people SUV-ing around the countryside are burbies! And they are probably scoping out the next concentric ring of burb building. The spreading can't go on forever. In less than a century, the U.S. could be a solid blanket of minimalls and aluminum siding connected by 6-laners. I agree, though: telecommuting is a must for tech companies. Silicon Valley exists more for the look of it rather than the need of it.
"I don't know about anyone else, but the media pisses me off. " By posting this, you are now part of the "Media". The overused, undefined, and lamentable used of the word "Media" is the scandal of this age. What the hell is the "Media"? Why is it the Enemy? If it's the Enemy, exactly why are you reading this? If you don't want to read news stories, and thus avoid the Evil Liberal Propaganda, what the hell are you going to get your news from?
>>More likely, they'll start selling web server software to support their IE product. Ironic, isn't it? That's how Netscape was forced to create income after Microsoft's free Explorer product forced Netscape to give away Navigator. Justice.... is served. > Court adjourned.
The Ben Bova story was a novel called "The Duelling Machine", which twisted my mind at a very early age. It was written in the sixties or seventies.
The homogenization of the media was started under the Reagan Revolution of the Eighties. Remember the elimination of the Equal Time provisions for broadcasters? The removal of the limit of the number of outlets a single individual or corporation could own? This was hailed as victories for free speech. Inevitably, the free market will permit the most powerful or most politically motivated (there is a difference) to eat all the magazines, TV networks, radio stations, newspapers and new internet media companies in the US. The money generated will also enable the purchase of non-US assets, creating a world-wide monopoly set. One, two, or three companies will remain, almost certainly opposed to unions, liberals, government controls of any sort. And we all watched as it happened. The time to protest was when the deregulation occured. The conglomerates are too powerful now to stop. You wanted a totally free market? Well, you got it. Congrats. Total freedom for the richest is near-slavery for the poorest. I'm a libertarian, and even I understand this. Government is necessary. Here's another point: this is not a monopoly today - not the way Microsoft is. If Microsoft had won the Internet, they not only would own AOL and Time-Warner, but due to the utter control of the OS and hardware would have shut every other competitor out of the market. Game would have been REALLY over.
Very few doubt the existance of extrasolar planets, since there are now over 20 documented discoveries. What they used to use was the "wobble" method, which detected the wiggle of a star orbiting a common center of mass with a VERY large planet (smaller Earth-like planets are millions of times less massive, and so harder to spot by that factor). What was announced a week back was the detection of an *eclipse* of a star's light by a planet (lucky eclipse!). THIS news is about detecting the actual sig of a material planet, as opposed to a mathematical deduction. Scientists love multiple methodological confirmations. Faith ain't part of science. Yup. They want to say, "We REALLY know now that they exist."
Free oxygen in the presence of enormous energy and other elements would be rare indeed, unless the atmosphere/surface of the planet was a blazing plasma. It'd be ionized then, i think. This planet is 3 Jupiter masses, and too close to the primary to be in the bio zone. It'd be too hot for solid lead, for that matter. But, wait a decade or two. There are orbital scopes on the drawing boards that could resolve *continents*! --I believe spectroscopy can indeed distinguish free O2 from oxides.