This is utter silliness. So what if you review the code? So what if there are "open standards"? The code you review can be swapped out on election day any number of ways! I mean, you are all programmers, mostly. How can you possibly fall for this? And there is code on the point of voting, code at the accumulators boxen, running Windows may I add, code at HQ adding up the accumulators' totals. It's the work of a morons's minute to swap out vote totals, or change the code at the point of voting to simply flip the voter's choice undetectably -- printing out a "receipt" that is worthless as record of what actually happened. The code can be changed and then replaced instantly. Or more likely, why bother? Who the hell can tell what code is really running on the box? The problem here is you all have a religious belief that when you ask a computer a question, you'll get an honest answer. But these are dedicated boxen, controlled by humans who are extremely motivated to alter the results. You can't beat them. You can only remove the means. No computers system should ever come near an election.
Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours. Although, really, what the hell is the hurry to finish an election? Why not take a week? Someone REALLY wants to alter those votes. They want it quick, unmonitored, and completely open to tampering, and somehow this is the Only Way To Do It?
This idiocy wouldn't stand if we didn't have Kourictainment for a news media... god.
Kiddyporn Internet Paradox: To know kiddy porn exists on the internet, one has to download it. Since one does not download it, one cannot know there is kiddyporn on the internet. Therefore the authority is a perv or is making up statistics he couldn't possibly possess. Or a politician pandering to panicking parents.
Also:
Terry Pratchett's Witchburning Rule: Witches don't burn (usually its just an old woman no one likes), but they often are the ones doing the burning.
Catbeller's Corollary to the Witchburning Rule: Want to find a kiddy porn aficianado? Check the prosecutor's office, kiddyporn division. Who else knows where the kiddyporn is? If it exists? Hell, they're probably the only ones offering the crap. Who else HAS kiddyporn?
The problem is, hackers/cyberpunks don't control the manufacture of hardware. Corporations do. Trusted Computing still exists, or at least the idea does; Apple uses encryption and foolery to make sure their OS only works with authorized hardware. The techniques to lock out hackers is improving. The hackers can crack, of course -- but the answer to that is a boot smacking your face into the ground. They have shown linear accelerated success in introducing ever-more draconian laws, and such will eventually drive even the most rebellious hacker into submission. The tricks that HS and the CIA have used against "terrorists" will eventually be used against hardware hackers. All one needs do is modify the definition of "terrorism". It's already been done.
The only solution is political. The good news is that it doesn't require the majority of the people to become sane and take control, merely an effective minority. The trick is to become sophisticated enough to become effective... and that requires at first the courage to define the problem in its totality.No wishful thinking about the means and motives of the powerful. They WILL try everything I mentioned. We must counter with words and deeds. The true weapon of the hacker is always social engineering. We just need to take it up to the next level.
By "checking in", I meant that they could corrupt the process by requiring manufacturers of high-capacity devices - chipsets, controllers, everything -- to force the devices to log in to a registrar periodically and dump its content list. Encrypting your content would automatically cause your validation to fail (what are you hiding? ISPs already do this with VPN tunneling -- red flag the user and even perhaps terminate the account, and no doubt report you to the national police, HS). Else the device deactivates until a registrar unlocks it, or enters a default crippled mode -- and reports same to the registrar. Microsoft already does this with Vista, tho not exactly the same way. Storage devices could become corporate/government/third party regulated devices. The manufacture, use, or distribution of non-sanctioned storage could itself be a criminal violation.
And counting on China to build devices that don't conform isn't going to work. They will be brought to heel eventually. It's just a matter of time and money.
One possible way out is open source hardware -- and chip-fabs-in-a-box that may be feasible soon. But believe it, they will have thought of that too -- even now some EPROM burners are illegal to possess. I'd imagine object printers will be treated as anti-IP nuclear devices.
Those 99% "stuck" downloads are poisoned payloads being seeded by private tracker goon companies. They are also logging your activity at the same time. If you get a "stuck" download, comment and report so that others will stop using the torrent. Oh, alternate explanation: your ISP may be forcing a reset on your connection, over and over and over and over...
Well done. And remember, newer nanotech is coming which will give us solid-state storage with terabyte capacities. Eventually it'll be petabytes. As you say, all we have to do is sneakernet the drives to each other, snowballing the number of tunes and videos on each individual drive.
Imagine the day when you could carry the Library of Congress (which probably will be copyrighted as a work itself) around in your pocket.
Also imagine two more things, sadly. "IP" corporations will make the manufacturers of such superstorage encrypt their devices and register the keys with the corporations/government, and no doubt will make the devices snitch you out by making them periodically check in with a registrar with a list of naughty things you may have; and possession of such devices, most certainly possession of unregistered/unlicensed content will bear the penalty of years in prison, or even the death penalty. George Hearst's men shot his miners who pocketed gold nuggets during the first Guilded Age. We are entering another. This time the evil men can track our movements and actions minutely. This age will be a police state beyond even my sad imagination. Actually it will be a death sentence to resist the new lords of IP: if you resist arrest, they will stun you, possibly killing you. If you try to flee the country, they may shoot you dead. If you are imprisoned and try to escape, they will shoot you and kill you. Death is the penalty for ultimately refusing to bend the knee and take it in the ass. And your friends will sadly shake their heads at your obdurate refusal to accede to the law, and Youtubers will guffaw as the taser darts stop your heart, cheering on the thugs who are shutting your fool mouth up.
Here's a little line for all of you. When people ask you why you should care if the guvmint/Comcast/shadow creatures of the corporate world/ monitors your location, communications, downloads, reading material, mail, and traveling accessories if you've done nothing wrong, ask them the simple question:
Why do you have shades on your windows if you've nothing to hide?
If the protection of our precious kids/selves/intellectual property is more important than the right to not be monitored, then build all houses out of glass and let everyone see what we do. It's the same damned thing. If you've nothing to hide, put cameras in every corner of your house and let the government record.
You all won't do it, because you know damned well you all do something illegal somewhere. Corporations break the law every minute of their existence. A lot of you smoke leaves. A lot of you sleep with people you know you shouldn't. You read things that would affect people's opinion of you. You listen to music and watch video without license of the copyright holder.
Anyway, keep the bugs off your glasses and the smokies off your asses. I'd say "Peace", but we're not ever going to get that with greedy bastards convincing us to roll our pants down on command.
No, no no! Those thousands if not millions of people are PEDOPHILES. They should all be shackled with transponders, addresses listed on the internet, their bosses notified, prevented from ever voting or holding office, and perhaps spend a little time in FMITA prison. I'm sure many would applaud. At least two or three million men in the world haven't downloaded a picture of a nude teenager; I'm sure the world can manage on a skeleton staff of males until a new generation comes of age to take the place of the vile criminals.
ISPs have used the common carrier designation because common carriers, such as phone companies, are exempt from policing their networks for illegal activity. Phone companies are not required to monitor everyone's conversations for illegality. If a new designation is now used, it is at the behest of all the censors, "pirate" hunters, "anti-terrorist" warriors and secret police spooks who want the ISPs to become listening posts.
Another protocol, another internet. No dot coms this time. No businesses allowed. Just people talking, freely. I call it CommonSense, or the Tom Paine network, or Samizdat.
Wireless points. No commercial carriers. Cheap disposable relays, solar powered if possible. Cheap enough so that one doesn't cry when the FCC finds and destroys the relays in their new War on Terrorist Networking and IP thieves. Build in encryption intelligently. NO wiretaps. No reading each other's messages. No backbones, unless someone wants to set up one pro bono using IR lasers or microwave links on rooftops. Extremely redundant. Use the TV frequencies if possible.
As for radio interference, here's a starting point: someone once posited (no time to research) that interference is a data processing problem, not a physical limitation. If some genius can run with that, it's imaginable that the FCC's excuse for regulation -- limited bandwidth -- could be be annulled.
Major point -- it must NOT interface with the old Darpanet-derived internet we know and love. Call it quits; the business sharks have coopted it, the governments of the world have claimed jurisdiction, the telcos literally claim ownership of the circuits and therefore the owners of the internet itself.
The human race had unencumbered, uncensored, SECRET communications for its entire history. "Talking" and "writing letters" and "making phone calls", we called it. The stars did not fall, liberty was not crushed, and The Enemy did not kill us all.
Yep. RCN hasn't done it in my market yet. But Comcast, oh yes, it has been smiting us P2P people mightily. I used Comcast's network three times in the last four months. Only one download made it. Swear to Dios, every other file download attempt crapped out after an initial good start -- and then I had to physically restart every damned switch and router on that path, 'cause they became nonresponsive. For *months*. Like a dog being hit by a stick, I learned never to touch P2P.
Well, my current Mac Mini Core 2 Duo, without dedicated video card, displays on-air 1080p without a hiccup -- barely -- but it works. And with VLC as my video player, I've been able to play any video format I've cared to play.
Limbaugh is an ignorant liar, and Stewart is anything but. They are not equivalent. The truth isn't in between the "extremes" of two maniac political groups. A fact is true, or it is not. It doesn't care about your opinion, or some arbitrary spectrum erected by public figures, mostly "news"people, to shield their asses from having to form an intelligent judgement about the news they present.
Bush lied, we are in a stupid war of aggression against an innocent nation for its oil; Bush fucked up and we were attacked on 9-11; Bush fucked up by obsessing about his daddy's would-be killer and committing our resources to Iraq while bin Laden left and formed a proto-state in NW Pakistan, which BTW DOES have working nuclear weapons; Bush lied and established a total-surveillance police state while he and his cronies brazenly destroyed all records of presidential communications by routing them through Republican mail servers (we can see YOU bitches but you will never see US); Bush did in fact dodge his service and then destroyed a good journalist who dared to out him (story told for a third time, its just that America ignored the Boston Globe and BBC Newsnight investigations); he's out to start a war with Iran; he's bankrupted us by borrowing from the future to steal his oil now; he's gutted health care, environmental and consumer laws, privatized military, intelligence, and government functions into corporations who don't have to obey laws; frankly immunized said corporations from prosecution, turning ANY American corporation into a auxillery of the unitary executive, effectively making the corporate world a branch of the Executive, immune from the Justice Department, thus creating a classic fascist hegemony; corrupted and coopted the Justice Department into a private rubber stamp for his political assassinations (what the fuck, we imprisoned TOMMY CHONG?) while at the same time creating a vaccuum in which he need not fear charges or convictions on ANY crime (compare this to a stained dress and six blowjobs); let's not forget a million dead people and the annihilation of the cradle of civilization, though everyone does.
Limbaugh actively denies or obfuscates, actually admitted being a torchbearer for Bush. He has no cred, as he has damned himself with his own mouth. Stewart has met an astounding standard of journalistic (!) excellence by refusing to accept bullshit, refusing to bow to the UE. They are not equivalent, just because they talk on microphones. And Limbaugh is, in fact, a big fat idiot.
Giant walls of ice, fire, and layers and layers of silt erased the evidence of ancient cities and civilizations from the history books.
We're covering the earth with roads and homes; the chances that we will ever dig down in the most obvious places to find early civilizations are pretty much non-existent. However, technology might provide an answer some day -- some unknown process might give us underground scans in great detail.
I'm with the first poster on this. 1600 centuries more or less in our present form? No way did they not have languages, cities, towns at least. How many hundreds of Cimmerias existed? How many floods, how many religions have come and gone? How many gods have been birthed and died? Were there roads on what is now the floor of the Mediterranean sea? Whole countries? How old is Egypt, really? We know there were kingdoms before the unification of the upper and lower kingdoms. How old is Chinese civilization? How many times have humans taken to the sea in ships, only to lose the technology in a dark age? Were there sailing vessels a hundred thousand years ago? All the evidence rotted, then was crushed under the ice, or is buried under rain forests.
Goodness, we don't want to make businesses pay money for stuff.
Arnold: the business community had no problem spending money to build the infrastructure to take our privacy away. They must have collectively spent hundreds of billions on the computer systems, the software, and the deals they made to trade the details of our lives to the highest bidder. They are now cooperating with a police state unrivaled in history, giving over our finances, our communications, our very second-to-second physical locations to shadowy figures who sneer at the courts.
They also have no problem making billions exploiting the data they spent so much money accumulating and processing.
Businesses have no "right" to accumulate data and exploit it anymore than they have a right to dump poison in a river. Profit for shareholders is not an excuse. You want to be bastards, pay the bastard tax. And corporations are government creatures, not freeholds. They exist under government license. They have NO OTHER existence other than through the government. Without the government, they are just shopkeepers with known addresses. They are shielded from liability and personal exposure for crimes. You want to play with the government, play by the government's rules. Cry me a river.
The RIAA and other "intellectual property" (nonsense term) holders are using laws passed by Congress, not invoking rights. The term "rights" must be defined properly in the context given, and the RIAA et al are intentionally sowing semantic confusion by invoking the term.
There are Lockean (?) "Rights". "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...". The right to be secure in your home and possessions against unreasonable and unwarranted search and seizure. The right to know the charges against you when you are arrested. The right to confront your accuser. The right to speak -- and not just on your own damned property. The right not to be beaten at will by the government or its agents. Stuff like that.
The term "copyright", like the term "royalty", is derived from the privilege granted by the monarch of England to print a book within his domain. It is not a "right" in the Constitution, nor is the current definition of a sacred right derivable from the passage concerning copyright. The original framers fought over the concept. Some regarded the idea of copyright a holdover from England and the Crown, and thought it impeded intellectual progress and free speech. The remainder, and I'm guessing there were a few published authors in that crowd, wanted to make money from their works and prevent others from selling copies without royalties, etc.
They compromised. A LIMITED term of copyright, about 15 years I think, after which the candle can light as many other candles as it could manage. Think of it as a government-granted business license, which it certainly is. Much like corporate licenses, they are not Locke-inspired, any more than dog licenses.
The Sonny Bono Act, may he burn in bad hair hell, effectively removed the concept of limited time licenses and made the copyright eternal. It is now a "limited" time of a century or more, and no doubt will be extended after that, and after that extension another and another. And the copyright passes mainly into the hands of yet another eternal licensee, the corporation. The sum of all the writings of mankind are now no longer writings, but as property by the new corrupted definition, and are held by immortal beings who now have us by the collective retina and cochlea.
This is not what copyright is. This is stealing, robbery at gunpoint, of the heritage of mankind: our ideas expressed. We now must beg leave, and pay hard, to listen to music, or read a book, or print a picture.Even the IDEA of a book or a tune or a picture is now "owned". No framer of the Constitution would recognize this, would decry it and oppose it fiercely. Yet no American in the future will oppose it; the RIAA and MPAA have representatives even now lecturing little children in school about these important "rights" that they have always had. They look over their future customers like butchers sizing up veal cattle. Cha-ching forever.
Somehow we managed over two centuries of existence without this concept of eternal "property". The US completely rejected the concept of European copyright throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. We only recognized our own copyrights, and freely printed American editions of European works without paying up. So Europeans give us the hairy eyeball when we yak about the holy copyright laws.
The IDEA of copyright is to further the culture of mankind, to let a thousand voices speak and millions derive and copy and dream new ideas from the old -- after the author has a few years to make a buck. And JUST a few years. This is why book authors and musicians always had day jobs. Copyright was not intended to be a police-enforced welfare program for the friends and family of authors, or the immortal clouds we call corporations.
"-then I hope the supreme court would get off its fundament, and rule that the copyright system in place was broken and counter to the reason why it was established, and send a message to Congress to either fix it, or scrap it."
The majority of the Supreme Court just told a German citizen whom the Bush administration kidnapped and tortured to go fuck himself. I wouldn't hold my breath for sanity from this bunch, and Bush made sure to pick really young candidates to represent his views for a very long time. And with life extension tech developing, we may have this pack of Know-Nothings with us for the rest of the century, maybe even longer.
Well, we can hope the Antarctic ice shelf falls into the sea in less than an hour; then the ocean would surge up and maybe the smug bastards in the Supreme Court will drown en masse. Divine justice can be harsh.
But by doing so, the idiotic fines established by Congress will come under review and may well be reduced or eventually eliminated because of the publicity generated. She is taking a hit for the team. But for the grace of RIAA goes all of us. If these idiot laws were enforced, we'd all owe the RIAA and MPAA quadrillions of dollars in infringement penalties for *listening to music* and *watching video*, which is what file sharing is about. And let's not forget about all those cassette and VHS tape copies we made. If the statute of limitations is moved back about 30 years, some of you scoffers out there will owe billions to the RIAA. The RIAA and MPAA will own America. And somehow, SOMEHOW, not a penny will arrive in the pockets of the artists. Amazing, huh?
I admit that *I* shared My Documents once upon a time, years ago. I spotted my error when I noticed people uploading sensitive docs. Caught it in time, I think; thank god for ISPs slowing down upload traffic on KaZaa's ports. If you are not extremely careful when clicking on those directory trees, you can make a really nasty problem for yourself.
Reality is that music is not property, never has been, never can be. An idea, a song, cannot be caged in a box and sold on the shelves, no matter how many chimps state that they own it. The concept is contrary to the intent of the Constitution and its framers. Song is as old as the human mind. We've sung songs, listened to songs around the fire long before the RIAA existed and will sing them among the stars millenia after the mafia-backed cokeheads and their Scientology-esque lawyers are dust on the earth.
And I don't see a mention of felony or no in the article. The article seems incomplete about the actual laws broken and charges made, other than the phrase "copyright infringement", which last we saw in the 90's was a civil matter resulting in a few hundred dollars in penalties based on actual dollar loss rather than a QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR judgement for 24 songs. I've no more time to waste here.
I'm glad I stopped listening to music after they capped Napster. Make it a crime, call it whatever. It's against everything copyright was intended for. This is a cartel torturing people for money. Enough with the nitpicking.
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This is utter silliness. So what if you review the code? So what if there are "open standards"? The code you review can be swapped out on election day any number of ways! I mean, you are all programmers, mostly. How can you possibly fall for this? And there is code on the point of voting, code at the accumulators boxen, running Windows may I add, code at HQ adding up the accumulators' totals. It's the work of a morons's minute to swap out vote totals, or change the code at the point of voting to simply flip the voter's choice undetectably -- printing out a "receipt" that is worthless as record of what actually happened. The code can be changed and then replaced instantly. Or more likely, why bother? Who the hell can tell what code is really running on the box? The problem here is you all have a religious belief that when you ask a computer a question, you'll get an honest answer. But these are dedicated boxen, controlled by humans who are extremely motivated to alter the results. You can't beat them. You can only remove the means. No computers system should ever come near an election.
Canada does (did? sigh) vote using a manual process with real time oversight by suspicious characters from both parties present -- you know, the process we decided was mad in Florida in 2000. Somehow they finish up their elections in hours. Although, really, what the hell is the hurry to finish an election? Why not take a week? Someone REALLY wants to alter those votes. They want it quick, unmonitored, and completely open to tampering, and somehow this is the Only Way To Do It?
This idiocy wouldn't stand if we didn't have Kourictainment for a news media... god.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market.
How would you know?
Kiddyporn Internet Paradox: To know kiddy porn exists on the internet, one has to download it. Since one does not download it, one cannot know there is kiddyporn on the internet. Therefore the authority is a perv or is making up statistics he couldn't possibly possess. Or a politician pandering to panicking parents.
Also:
Terry Pratchett's Witchburning Rule: Witches don't burn (usually its just an old woman no one likes), but they often are the ones doing the burning.
Catbeller's Corollary to the Witchburning Rule:
Want to find a kiddy porn aficianado? Check the prosecutor's office, kiddyporn division. Who else knows where the kiddyporn is? If it exists? Hell, they're probably the only ones offering the crap. Who else HAS kiddyporn?
.ox (skull and bones sideways. I always thought it should be the country code for PirateBay-stan.
The problem is, hackers/cyberpunks don't control the manufacture of hardware. Corporations do. Trusted Computing still exists, or at least the idea does; Apple uses encryption and foolery to make sure their OS only works with authorized hardware. The techniques to lock out hackers is improving. The hackers can crack, of course -- but the answer to that is a boot smacking your face into the ground. They have shown linear accelerated success in introducing ever-more draconian laws, and such will eventually drive even the most rebellious hacker into submission. The tricks that HS and the CIA have used against "terrorists" will eventually be used against hardware hackers. All one needs do is modify the definition of "terrorism". It's already been done.
The only solution is political. The good news is that it doesn't require the majority of the people to become sane and take control, merely an effective minority. The trick is to become sophisticated enough to become effective... and that requires at first the courage to define the problem in its totality.No wishful thinking about the means and motives of the powerful. They WILL try everything I mentioned. We must counter with words and deeds. The true weapon of the hacker is always social engineering. We just need to take it up to the next level.
By "checking in", I meant that they could corrupt the process by requiring manufacturers of high-capacity devices - chipsets, controllers, everything -- to force the devices to log in to a registrar periodically and dump its content list. Encrypting your content would automatically cause your validation to fail (what are you hiding? ISPs already do this with VPN tunneling -- red flag the user and even perhaps terminate the account, and no doubt report you to the national police, HS). Else the device deactivates until a registrar unlocks it, or enters a default crippled mode -- and reports same to the registrar. Microsoft already does this with Vista, tho not exactly the same way. Storage devices could become corporate/government/third party regulated devices. The manufacture, use, or distribution of non-sanctioned storage could itself be a criminal violation.
And counting on China to build devices that don't conform isn't going to work. They will be brought to heel eventually. It's just a matter of time and money.
One possible way out is open source hardware -- and chip-fabs-in-a-box that may be feasible soon. But believe it, they will have thought of that too -- even now some EPROM burners are illegal to possess. I'd imagine object printers will be treated as anti-IP nuclear devices.
Those 99% "stuck" downloads are poisoned payloads being seeded by private tracker goon companies. They are also logging your activity at the same time. If you get a "stuck" download, comment and report so that others will stop using the torrent. Oh, alternate explanation: your ISP may be forcing a reset on your connection, over and over and over and over...
Well done. And remember, newer nanotech is coming which will give us solid-state storage with terabyte capacities. Eventually it'll be petabytes. As you say, all we have to do is sneakernet the drives to each other, snowballing the number of tunes and videos on each individual drive.
Imagine the day when you could carry the Library of Congress (which probably will be copyrighted as a work itself) around in your pocket.
Also imagine two more things, sadly. "IP" corporations will make the manufacturers of such superstorage encrypt their devices and register the keys with the corporations/government, and no doubt will make the devices snitch you out by making them periodically check in with a registrar with a list of naughty things you may have; and possession of such devices, most certainly possession of unregistered/unlicensed content will bear the penalty of years in prison, or even the death penalty. George Hearst's men shot his miners who pocketed gold nuggets during the first Guilded Age. We are entering another. This time the evil men can track our movements and actions minutely. This age will be a police state beyond even my sad imagination. Actually it will be a death sentence to resist the new lords of IP: if you resist arrest, they will stun you, possibly killing you. If you try to flee the country, they may shoot you dead. If you are imprisoned and try to escape, they will shoot you and kill you. Death is the penalty for ultimately refusing to bend the knee and take it in the ass. And your friends will sadly shake their heads at your obdurate refusal to accede to the law, and Youtubers will guffaw as the taser darts stop your heart, cheering on the thugs who are shutting your fool mouth up.
Here's a little line for all of you. When people ask you why you should care if the guvmint/Comcast/shadow creatures of the corporate world/ monitors your location, communications, downloads, reading material, mail, and traveling accessories if you've done nothing wrong, ask them the simple question:
Why do you have shades on your windows if you've nothing to hide?
If the protection of our precious kids/selves/intellectual property is more important than the right to not be monitored, then build all houses out of glass and let everyone see what we do. It's the same damned thing. If you've nothing to hide, put cameras in every corner of your house and let the government record.
You all won't do it, because you know damned well you all do something illegal somewhere. Corporations break the law every minute of their existence. A lot of you smoke leaves. A lot of you sleep with people you know you shouldn't. You read things that would affect people's opinion of you. You listen to music and watch video without license of the copyright holder.
Anyway, keep the bugs off your glasses and the smokies off your asses. I'd say "Peace", but we're not ever going to get that with greedy bastards convincing us to roll our pants down on command.
No, no no! Those thousands if not millions of people are PEDOPHILES. They should all be shackled with transponders, addresses listed on the internet, their bosses notified, prevented from ever voting or holding office, and perhaps spend a little time in FMITA prison. I'm sure many would applaud. At least two or three million men in the world haven't downloaded a picture of a nude teenager; I'm sure the world can manage on a skeleton staff of males until a new generation comes of age to take the place of the vile criminals.
having sex, watching sex, doesn't hurt you. tobacco kills you. sex!=poison.
And other nations seem to have all the bandwidth fairies they need. Amazing, init?
ISPs have used the common carrier designation because common carriers, such as phone companies, are exempt from policing their networks for illegal activity. Phone companies are not required to monitor everyone's conversations for illegality. If a new designation is now used, it is at the behest of all the censors, "pirate" hunters, "anti-terrorist" warriors and secret police spooks who want the ISPs to become listening posts.
Another protocol, another internet. No dot coms this time. No businesses allowed. Just people talking, freely. I call it CommonSense, or the Tom Paine network, or Samizdat.
Wireless points. No commercial carriers. Cheap disposable relays, solar powered if possible. Cheap enough so that one doesn't cry when the FCC finds and destroys the relays in their new War on Terrorist Networking and IP thieves. Build in encryption intelligently. NO wiretaps. No reading each other's messages. No backbones, unless someone wants to set up one pro bono using IR lasers or microwave links on rooftops. Extremely redundant. Use the TV frequencies if possible.
As for radio interference, here's a starting point: someone once posited (no time to research) that interference is a data processing problem, not a physical limitation. If some genius can run with that, it's imaginable that the FCC's excuse for regulation -- limited bandwidth -- could be be annulled.
Major point -- it must NOT interface with the old Darpanet-derived internet we know and love. Call it quits; the business sharks have coopted it, the governments of the world have claimed jurisdiction, the telcos literally claim ownership of the circuits and therefore the owners of the internet itself.
The human race had unencumbered, uncensored, SECRET communications for its entire history. "Talking" and "writing letters" and "making phone calls", we called it. The stars did not fall, liberty was not crushed, and The Enemy did not kill us all.
Yep. RCN hasn't done it in my market yet. But Comcast, oh yes, it has been smiting us P2P people mightily. I used Comcast's network three times in the last four months. Only one download made it. Swear to Dios, every other file download attempt crapped out after an initial good start -- and then I had to physically restart every damned switch and router on that path, 'cause they became nonresponsive. For *months*. Like a dog being hit by a stick, I learned never to touch P2P.
Well, my current Mac Mini Core 2 Duo, without dedicated video card, displays on-air 1080p without a hiccup -- barely -- but it works. And with VLC as my video player, I've been able to play any video format I've cared to play.
Limbaugh is an ignorant liar, and Stewart is anything but. They are not equivalent. The truth isn't in between the "extremes" of two maniac political groups. A fact is true, or it is not. It doesn't care about your opinion, or some arbitrary spectrum erected by public figures, mostly "news"people, to shield their asses from having to form an intelligent judgement about the news they present.
Bush lied, we are in a stupid war of aggression against an innocent nation for its oil; Bush fucked up and we were attacked on 9-11; Bush fucked up by obsessing about his daddy's would-be killer and committing our resources to Iraq while bin Laden left and formed a proto-state in NW Pakistan, which BTW DOES have working nuclear weapons; Bush lied and established a total-surveillance police state while he and his cronies brazenly destroyed all records of presidential communications by routing them through Republican mail servers (we can see YOU bitches but you will never see US); Bush did in fact dodge his service and then destroyed a good journalist who dared to out him (story told for a third time, its just that America ignored the Boston Globe and BBC Newsnight investigations); he's out to start a war with Iran; he's bankrupted us by borrowing from the future to steal his oil now; he's gutted health care, environmental and consumer laws, privatized military, intelligence, and government functions into corporations who don't have to obey laws; frankly immunized said corporations from prosecution, turning ANY American corporation into a auxillery of the unitary executive, effectively making the corporate world a branch of the Executive, immune from the Justice Department, thus creating a classic fascist hegemony; corrupted and coopted the Justice Department into a private rubber stamp for his political assassinations (what the fuck, we imprisoned TOMMY CHONG?) while at the same time creating a vaccuum in which he need not fear charges or convictions on ANY crime (compare this to a stained dress and six blowjobs); let's not forget a million dead people and the annihilation of the cradle of civilization, though everyone does.
Limbaugh actively denies or obfuscates, actually admitted being a torchbearer for Bush. He has no cred, as he has damned himself with his own mouth. Stewart has met an astounding standard of journalistic (!) excellence by refusing to accept bullshit, refusing to bow to the UE. They are not equivalent, just because they talk on microphones. And Limbaugh is, in fact, a big fat idiot.
Giant walls of ice, fire, and layers and layers of silt erased the evidence of ancient cities and civilizations from the history books.
We're covering the earth with roads and homes; the chances that we will ever dig down in the most obvious places to find early civilizations are pretty much non-existent. However, technology might provide an answer some day -- some unknown process might give us underground scans in great detail.
I'm with the first poster on this. 1600 centuries more or less in our present form? No way did they not have languages, cities, towns at least. How many hundreds of Cimmerias existed? How many floods, how many religions have come and gone? How many gods have been birthed and died? Were there roads on what is now the floor of the Mediterranean sea? Whole countries? How old is Egypt, really? We know there were kingdoms before the unification of the upper and lower kingdoms. How old is Chinese civilization? How many times have humans taken to the sea in ships, only to lose the technology in a dark age? Were there sailing vessels a hundred thousand years ago? All the evidence rotted, then was crushed under the ice, or is buried under rain forests.
Goodness, we don't want to make businesses pay money for stuff.
Arnold: the business community had no problem spending money to build the infrastructure to take our privacy away. They must have collectively spent hundreds of billions on the computer systems, the software, and the deals they made to trade the details of our lives to the highest bidder. They are now cooperating with a police state unrivaled in history, giving over our finances, our communications, our very second-to-second physical locations to shadowy figures who sneer at the courts.
They also have no problem making billions exploiting the data they spent so much money accumulating and processing.
Businesses have no "right" to accumulate data and exploit it anymore than they have a right to dump poison in a river. Profit for shareholders is not an excuse. You want to be bastards, pay the bastard tax. And corporations are government creatures, not freeholds. They exist under government license. They have NO OTHER existence other than through the government. Without the government, they are just shopkeepers with known addresses. They are shielded from liability and personal exposure for crimes. You want to play with the government, play by the government's rules. Cry me a river.
The RIAA and other "intellectual property" (nonsense term) holders are using laws passed by Congress, not invoking rights. The term "rights" must be defined properly in the context given, and the RIAA et al are intentionally sowing semantic confusion by invoking the term.
There are Lockean (?) "Rights". "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...". The right to be secure in your home and possessions against unreasonable and unwarranted search and seizure. The right to know the charges against you when you are arrested. The right to confront your accuser. The right to speak -- and not just on your own damned property. The right not to be beaten at will by the government or its agents. Stuff like that.
The term "copyright", like the term "royalty", is derived from the privilege granted by the monarch of England to print a book within his domain. It is not a "right" in the Constitution, nor is the current definition of a sacred right derivable from the passage concerning copyright. The original framers fought over the concept. Some regarded the idea of copyright a holdover from England and the Crown, and thought it impeded intellectual progress and free speech. The remainder, and I'm guessing there were a few published authors in that crowd, wanted to make money from their works and prevent others from selling copies without royalties, etc.
They compromised. A LIMITED term of copyright, about 15 years I think, after which the candle can light as many other candles as it could manage. Think of it as a government-granted business license, which it certainly is. Much like corporate licenses, they are not Locke-inspired, any more than dog licenses.
The Sonny Bono Act, may he burn in bad hair hell, effectively removed the concept of limited time licenses and made the copyright eternal. It is now a "limited" time of a century or more, and no doubt will be extended after that, and after that extension another and another. And the copyright passes mainly into the hands of yet another eternal licensee, the corporation. The sum of all the writings of mankind are now no longer writings, but as property by the new corrupted definition, and are held by immortal beings who now have us by the collective retina and cochlea.
This is not what copyright is. This is stealing, robbery at gunpoint, of the heritage of mankind: our ideas expressed. We now must beg leave, and pay hard, to listen to music, or read a book, or print a picture.Even the IDEA of a book or a tune or a picture is now "owned". No framer of the Constitution would recognize this, would decry it and oppose it fiercely. Yet no American in the future will oppose it; the RIAA and MPAA have representatives even now lecturing little children in school about these important "rights" that they have always had. They look over their future customers like butchers sizing up veal cattle. Cha-ching forever.
Somehow we managed over two centuries of existence without this concept of eternal "property". The US completely rejected the concept of European copyright throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. We only recognized our own copyrights, and freely printed American editions of European works without paying up. So Europeans give us the hairy eyeball when we yak about the holy copyright laws.
The IDEA of copyright is to further the culture of mankind, to let a thousand voices speak and millions derive and copy and dream new ideas from the old -- after the author has a few years to make a buck. And JUST a few years. This is why book authors and musicians always had day jobs. Copyright was not intended to be a police-enforced welfare program for the friends and family of authors, or the immortal clouds we call corporations.
"-then I hope the supreme court would get off its fundament, and rule that the copyright system in place was broken and counter to the reason why it was established, and send a message to Congress to either fix it, or scrap it."
The majority of the Supreme Court just told a German citizen whom the Bush administration kidnapped and tortured to go fuck himself. I wouldn't hold my breath for sanity from this bunch, and Bush made sure to pick really young candidates to represent his views for a very long time. And with life extension tech developing, we may have this pack of Know-Nothings with us for the rest of the century, maybe even longer.
Well, we can hope the Antarctic ice shelf falls into the sea in less than an hour; then the ocean would surge up and maybe the smug bastards in the Supreme Court will drown en masse. Divine justice can be harsh.
But by doing so, the idiotic fines established by Congress will come under review and may well be reduced or eventually eliminated because of the publicity generated. She is taking a hit for the team. But for the grace of RIAA goes all of us. If these idiot laws were enforced, we'd all owe the RIAA and MPAA quadrillions of dollars in infringement penalties for *listening to music* and *watching video*, which is what file sharing is about. And let's not forget about all those cassette and VHS tape copies we made. If the statute of limitations is moved back about 30 years, some of you scoffers out there will owe billions to the RIAA. The RIAA and MPAA will own America. And somehow,
SOMEHOW,
not a penny will arrive in the pockets of the artists. Amazing, huh?
I admit that *I* shared My Documents once upon a time, years ago. I spotted my error when I noticed people uploading sensitive docs. Caught it in time, I think; thank god for ISPs slowing down upload traffic on KaZaa's ports. If you are not extremely careful when clicking on those directory trees, you can make a really nasty problem for yourself.
in Fascist Russia, actually.
Reality is that music is not property, never has been, never can be. An idea, a song, cannot be caged in a box and sold on the shelves, no matter how many chimps state that they own it. The concept is contrary to the intent of the Constitution and its framers. Song is as old as the human mind. We've sung songs, listened to songs around the fire long before the RIAA existed and will sing them among the stars millenia after the mafia-backed cokeheads and their Scientology-esque lawyers are dust on the earth.
Reality, a lovely thing.
And I don't see a mention of felony or no in the article. The article seems incomplete about the actual laws broken and charges made, other than the phrase "copyright infringement", which last we saw in the 90's was a civil matter resulting in a few hundred dollars in penalties based on actual dollar loss rather than a QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR judgement for 24 songs. I've no more time to waste here.
I'm glad I stopped listening to music after they capped Napster. Make it a crime, call it whatever. It's against everything copyright was intended for. This is a cartel torturing people for money. Enough with the nitpicking.