Copyright infringement was made a crime, rather than a civil infraction subject to actual losses, quite a few years ago. I'm not arguing this case, I'm arguing the concept. If it's not a felony conviction, I don't care as it is irrelevant. Felony or no, it is a crime tried in criminal court and that is insane. You can prick holes in the Hindenberg to declare it a solid wad of foam but it still is a damned giant balloon.
If she lied, it was to avoid being convicted of an asinine "crime" that didn't exist ten years ago, with penalties that they don't impose on actual organized crime members. I'm sure monks in Burma are lying their asses off to tribunals and thugs right now. Don't care. I hope they lie effectively and don't wind up in a pile of dead bodies in the jungle.
If they kick in my door, I hope I have the hard drives in a thermite box. Listen: law enforcement has gone mad. They are shooting puppies and ignoring monsters, and if they kick in your door most likely they can make up an offense, seeing how just about anything other than breathing is now somehow illegal. Anne Frank was breaking the law, and so was the family hiding her. This case is about LISTENING TO MUSIC. And it is a federal crime worthy of rape-me prison. We are living in an insane country.
Finally, someone understands what terror is. It's a state of always being afraid. In this case, we are afraid of a mafia supported by the courts, because they really, really can hurt us, and we are all vulnerable as we all have downloaded songs. A cartel can take anything from us at any time, and they have been blessed by the imbeciles with law degrees.
Make it simple. We don't buy those tracks, ever, ever again. We don't go to the concerts the bands perform in. We don't buy CD's. We don't even download them for free. Nothing, done, over, they are dead to us. Bankrupt them and let them work at an Arby's until they die.
If that seems too harsh, so was this sentence. Live and let die. Eat the meat, pay the butcher. Send the message back to the source: you want to play for the mafia? Fine. Don't expect the love. It's not their fault? Tough. It's the law of the market, as opposed to the law of the tasers and prisons.
We'd better get out our wallets. Hundreds of billions of songs have been shared around the world since the invention of cassette tape. Maybe trillions. Hard to tell.
so we all owe, what, ten grand per each song we've taped or recorded or copied into a file. Call it a trillion tunes recorded OR LISTENED TO. Don't forget, eventually they will con a judge or senator and most certainly a jury into believing that listening without paying is infringement.
$10,000 * 1,000,000,000,000 = $10,000,000,000,000,000. Ten quadrillion dollars.
That's the answer to you "law and order" types. We all owe ten quadrillion dollars. Since that kind of money isn't even in circulation, we'd best call the Federal Reserve and warn them of some serious inflation coming up. And the Treasury better get cracking on printing up that ten quadrillion in SINGLES, 'cause that's how we're going to pay the fines. Hell. Better yet, pennies.
And you "law and order" types? The ink is still wet on the laws that made copying a song a criminal felony. Those laws were purchased after the government was sold to wealthy interests during the Reagan administration on up to the present ohmygod disaster. Anything can be a felony, now. They merely have to drop a few bucks into the coin slot of our new, streamlined, business-responsive neocon/neoliberal government engine.
We somehow managed to kill a million people in Iraq and no one seems to be up on charges. Some things are important, I guess, and some people aren't. Murder on a Hitlerian scale is a "partisan" issue not worthy of criminal investigation, but some computer downloading 24 FUCKING songs is a felony case worthy of a quarter million dollar fine and a stretch in prison.
As I understood it, Lenovo always made Thinkpads. If you have a Thinkpad, even used, you are using a Chinese product.
On the bright side, Americans are slowly deciding to pay attention to the fact that they really don't make anything anymore. To enrich the CEOs and stockholders, we outsourced manufacturing. Now, our dollar is tanking for that very reason. Karma: the shrinking dollar value means that the prices of overseas goods will double or more. We be screwed. The only real winners of the outsourcing ideology will be the select few who gamed the movement and made hundreds of billions of bucks by canning Americans. Soon to come: where will they be spending that money? They sure as hell aren't about to build factories for those spoiled Americans who want health insurance and regular raises. They are waiting for the economy to tank, so they can buy up real estate at rock bottom prices, and wait for better times to sell at even more insane profit. Capitalism is fun! If you are at the top five percent income bracket. The rest of us, oh well, that's life.
Bingo. But, since we've bought into the "free market fixes everything" idea 100% in the US, we're gonna be boned. Even tho every example of telecom rollout has screwed us over to the tune of tens of billions of wasted bucks, we keep handing them the keys to the cash register.
Figure out how much muni WiFi would have cost, total. Then add up all the future private company bills for service. Yup. We're screwed. I've always said that the real cost is the TOTAL charge for every customer since the inception of service, added up. It's fun to figure out how much a taxpayer-paid nationalized internet would have cost, and then add up every wireless, cable, telephone and DSL bill since the beginning of private service. Ans: we've been massively overcharged.
Do we pay for roads like this? Airports? Harbors? Altho it's interesting to note that embedded GPS and cell systems have led to a pilot project for a state to charge your car per mile driven. So we'll get it both coming and going, first taxes and bonds, then a usage charge.
The ultimate question is: where is the money going? Who's making billions unfettered by regulation?
The 4th amendment and its applicability to private businesses is just fine. What happened is the SCOTUS has been, well, fucked up with right-wingers who consistently side with expanded police powers since the Nixon administration. Hell, they limited the scope of the 9th amendment, with no justification, because the 9th trumps a lot of this idiocy (9th: just because we didn't list a right doesn't mean it doesn't exist). This reign of witches will pass, but since Bush picked some REALLY young men for the SCOTUS, you may have noticed, it may be a half century or more (considering life extending tech available in the future) before these screw-you-there's-a-drug-war-on idiots die and we replace them with scholars who understand that cops ain't a country.
"Does that come from the Constitution, Congressional Statute, or an old episode of "Father Knows Best"? "
It comes from every damned judge, lawyer, and cop who ever busted and bankrupted someone who didn't know he broke the law. Somehow, it should apply to the cop as well. That would be a concept we call "justice". A concept almost considered communistic in the US, it seems.
Silly free men, insisting that they not turn out their pockets or submit ID on demand to whomever demands it. What are they thinking? That we are free? Only businesses and police have rights. We have the right to stop making a fuss and go along. Tase him, bro. Submission is freedom, freedom is slavery, kookookachoo.
CostCo and Sam's Club are membership-only operations. You sign a contract with them which states that they can examine your bags and your receipts.
In any other store, NO, they do not have a right to frisk you or grab your bags. Everyone including the cops assume that they have the right, and they are mistaken. Another example of corporate "rights" overriding the 9th amendment right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches. Government can't do it, and sure as hell private corporations can't. And NO, kids, just 'cause the Constitution doesn't mention that businesses can't violate your rights doesn't mean they can. Ninth amendment. Otherwise there's no point in having rights, if all it takes to remove them is to step inside private property. And I do think that the people who wrote the Constitution thought, "Hey, if the citizen refuses the smith's demand to turn out his pockets, these silly rules about human rights don't apply. Let the goodman be beaten and imprisoned if he doth not provide his identification papers to the guards. We wrote these rules for only the Federal government to follow, not to interfere with a businessman's power on his own property." Yeah, Jefferson would have gone along with that.
Well, you could hit the torrent or eMule downloads, as the books have been scanned years back for your pleasure. Then you could curl up with your Touch iPod or iPhone and read the -- D'OH! They won't let us have an eBook reader app other than Web 2.0.
'cause USB was invented by Intel at the same time Firewire was put out by Apple (around 1999), and Intel became very good indeed at manipulating the motherboard market (using the old tactics like discount or supply refusal to manufacturers) to freeze out Firewire. eSATA I assume is the same story? USB will always dominate because Intel dominates. And Microsoft goes along with Intel; they draaaagggged their feet bringing Firewire to Windows. Ya seriously think that a piece of silicon controlling a firewire port costs more than a USB controller? These are parts that cost a couple of dollars. Firewire is Apple's baby, and even tho Apple charges nothing for licensing, political pressure became a marketing factor even to this day. Even tho the price difference to manufacture is nonexistent, the market droids have slotted Firewire as a high-profit niche product and aren't about to budge, 'cause they'd lose money cutting the price. eSATA, dunno about the politics there, but I'd guess it's much the same story.
If they can rig a "mirror", you get a photon drive for spacecraft. Hell, for starships. I'd like to see that mirror. I've no doubt some clever wanker can exploit physics to do it, and I await his/her paper.
A society of cowards and a leadership that promulgates fear to stay in power. That's it in a nutshell.
No matter how many speakers you taze, no matter how many KB&R detention facilities you build, no matter how many radio trackers and bugs you put on your kids and employees, no matter how many strip searches and drug tests you all inflict on each other, the basic problem, the one creating these new police states, is that you are all conditioning yourselves to be cowards, and cowards are never safe enough. The level of security you are demanding not only for your persons, but to keep your tender ears from hearing things be said you do not wish to hear, is infinite. The number of people you need to kill overseas to feel safe is impossible to limit. And the more you squeeze those you fear, the more they will hate you and rise up against you, thus making you more afraid and more demanding of more police and more locks and more cameras. I understand Miami cops are now carrying military weaponry. Yet no one feels any safer.
Cowards die a thousand deaths. True cowards kill a thousand people to not die those thousand deaths, and yet still die those thousand times. Stupid people are always afraid, and you can't cure stupid.
The day is here and past. Now what? Do we fight, or do we leave? Canada is gearing up to become a police state under its new leader. France ditto. Where do you go?
I recall that President. Clinton was heckled frequently. I don't recall anyone getting electrocuted. They got to have their say.
Police states are a sickness that grow with public approval.
Electrocution without trial for the crime of speaking out of turn has generally not been held to be the American way. But for righties, it apparently now is. Until they become the loony minority.
"If this were a police state, you never would have heard about this. "
No. In police states, the police are GLAD to let people know what happens when you get out of line. Police states aren't secret societies.
"People were happy the annoyance was gone, not that the kid was tasered."
Precisely. Police states aren't foisted on societies. The society has to be sick first, THEN the police state and the torturing beings.
And, BTW, the kid will have permanent damage to his brain and nervous system.
And, also, would you have been happy had those "rioters" in the 2000 Dade county recount been tasered? They turned out to be campaign staffers pretending to be rioters. Somehow, they managed to shut down the recount and not be arrested, and certainly weren't tasered. Betcha lots of people would have sued and the news media would have been scandalized, even after it turned out they were fake "citizens". But a liberal college student, well, fuck the hippy, right?
The time to start blocking new police state tactics is before they even have a chance to finish developing their shiny new toys.
And as for false alarms, um... they use lie detectors now, and they are pretty much garbage. But you still can be fired, convicted, what have you, based on the tech developed by a B&D nut who invented Wonder Woman. The same basic technique is used in Scientology's e-meter. Junk.
We talk about this now. We stop it before it gets out of the gate. There is no reason to develop such tech but for to oppress you and me. Our lords will not permit themselves to be subjected to such surveillance. Bush will be in Patagonia, and no one will ever know where Cheney will be; likewise the newer corporate/police lords will never be under scrutiny. Listen: the Bushies delete ALL THEIR EMAIL and TEXT communications, which are public property guarded by federal law, and no one even blinks. And we're to be monitored for our thoughts and heartbeats? The "black" budget is now over sixty billion dollars a year. You can buy a world for that kind of money. A world where the mighty ones sit in private virtual castles and make a fortune trading in our fear and imprisonment.
There are certain types of humans that will seize power and control if you present them with the opportunity. We must intelligently monitor such developments and block it if we can. This is the cost of being free.
No, Bush's people lied to the American people. GOOD government employees in the intelligence community leaked the fact that it was a lie. Government !=bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement was made a crime, rather than a civil infraction subject to actual losses, quite a few years ago. I'm not arguing this case, I'm arguing the concept. If it's not a felony conviction, I don't care as it is irrelevant. Felony or no, it is a crime tried in criminal court and that is insane. You can prick holes in the Hindenberg to declare it a solid wad of foam but it still is a damned giant balloon.
If she lied, it was to avoid being convicted of an asinine "crime" that didn't exist ten years ago, with penalties that they don't impose on actual organized crime members. I'm sure monks in Burma are lying their asses off to tribunals and thugs right now. Don't care. I hope they lie effectively and don't wind up in a pile of dead bodies in the jungle.
If they kick in my door, I hope I have the hard drives in a thermite box. Listen: law enforcement has gone mad. They are shooting puppies and ignoring monsters, and if they kick in your door most likely they can make up an offense, seeing how just about anything other than breathing is now somehow illegal. Anne Frank was breaking the law, and so was the family hiding her. This case is about LISTENING TO MUSIC. And it is a federal crime worthy of rape-me prison. We are living in an insane country.
Stealing music? My God! When did you find out it was missing? Did you file a police report?
Finally, someone understands what terror is. It's a state of always being afraid. In this case, we are afraid of a mafia supported by the courts, because they really, really can hurt us, and we are all vulnerable as we all have downloaded songs. A cartel can take anything from us at any time, and they have been blessed by the imbeciles with law degrees.
Make it simple. We don't buy those tracks, ever, ever again. We don't go to the concerts the bands perform in. We don't buy CD's. We don't even download them for free. Nothing, done, over, they are dead to us. Bankrupt them and let them work at an Arby's until they die.
If that seems too harsh, so was this sentence. Live and let die. Eat the meat, pay the butcher. Send the message back to the source: you want to play for the mafia? Fine. Don't expect the love. It's not their fault? Tough. It's the law of the market, as opposed to the law of the tasers and prisons.
Screw us and you starve.
We'd better get out our wallets. Hundreds of billions of songs have been shared around the world since the invention of cassette tape. Maybe trillions. Hard to tell.
so we all owe, what, ten grand per each song we've taped or recorded or copied into a file. Call it a trillion tunes recorded OR LISTENED TO. Don't forget, eventually they will con a judge or senator and most certainly a jury into believing that listening without paying is infringement.
$10,000 * 1,000,000,000,000 = $10,000,000,000,000,000. Ten quadrillion dollars.
That's the answer to you "law and order" types. We all owe ten quadrillion dollars. Since that kind of money isn't even in circulation, we'd best call the Federal Reserve and warn them of some serious inflation coming up. And the Treasury better get cracking on printing up that ten quadrillion in SINGLES, 'cause that's how we're going to pay the fines. Hell. Better yet, pennies.
And you "law and order" types? The ink is still wet on the laws that made copying a song a criminal felony. Those laws were purchased after the government was sold to wealthy interests during the Reagan administration on up to the present ohmygod disaster. Anything can be a felony, now. They merely have to drop a few bucks into the coin slot of our new, streamlined, business-responsive neocon/neoliberal government engine.
We somehow managed to kill a million people in Iraq and no one seems to be up on charges. Some things are important, I guess, and some people aren't. Murder on a Hitlerian scale is a "partisan" issue not worthy of criminal investigation, but some computer downloading 24 FUCKING songs is a felony case worthy of a quarter million dollar fine and a stretch in prison.
God **** America. Really.
As I understood it, Lenovo always made Thinkpads. If you have a Thinkpad, even used, you are using a Chinese product.
On the bright side, Americans are slowly deciding to pay attention to the fact that they really don't make anything anymore. To enrich the CEOs and stockholders, we outsourced manufacturing. Now, our dollar is tanking for that very reason. Karma: the shrinking dollar value means that the prices of overseas goods will double or more. We be screwed. The only real winners of the outsourcing ideology will be the select few who gamed the movement and made hundreds of billions of bucks by canning Americans. Soon to come: where will they be spending that money? They sure as hell aren't about to build factories for those spoiled Americans who want health insurance and regular raises. They are waiting for the economy to tank, so they can buy up real estate at rock bottom prices, and wait for better times to sell at even more insane profit. Capitalism is fun! If you are at the top five percent income bracket. The rest of us, oh well, that's life.
Bingo. But, since we've bought into the "free market fixes everything" idea 100% in the US, we're gonna be boned. Even tho every example of telecom rollout has screwed us over to the tune of tens of billions of wasted bucks, we keep handing them the keys to the cash register.
Figure out how much muni WiFi would have cost, total. Then add up all the future private company bills for service. Yup. We're screwed. I've always said that the real cost is the TOTAL charge for every customer since the inception of service, added up. It's fun to figure out how much a taxpayer-paid nationalized internet would have cost, and then add up every wireless, cable, telephone and DSL bill since the beginning of private service. Ans: we've been massively overcharged.
Do we pay for roads like this? Airports? Harbors? Altho it's interesting to note that embedded GPS and cell systems have led to a pilot project for a state to charge your car per mile driven. So we'll get it both coming and going, first taxes and bonds, then a usage charge.
The ultimate question is: where is the money going? Who's making billions unfettered by regulation?
I want to read my eBooks on it. 'nuff said.
The unpatriotic ACLU lawyers generally work pro bono. As in for free. I don't think the government or corporate lawyers do the same.
The 4th amendment and its applicability to private businesses is just fine. What happened is the SCOTUS has been, well, fucked up with right-wingers who consistently side with expanded police powers since the Nixon administration. Hell, they limited the scope of the 9th amendment, with no justification, because the 9th trumps a lot of this idiocy (9th: just because we didn't list a right doesn't mean it doesn't exist). This reign of witches will pass, but since Bush picked some REALLY young men for the SCOTUS, you may have noticed, it may be a half century or more (considering life extending tech available in the future) before these screw-you-there's-a-drug-war-on idiots die and we replace them with scholars who understand that cops ain't a country.
"Does that come from the Constitution, Congressional Statute, or an old episode of "Father Knows Best"? "
It comes from every damned judge, lawyer, and cop who ever busted and bankrupted someone who didn't know he broke the law. Somehow, it should apply to the cop as well. That would be a concept we call "justice". A concept almost considered communistic in the US, it seems.
Silly free men, insisting that they not turn out their pockets or submit ID on demand to whomever demands it. What are they thinking? That we are free? Only businesses and police have rights. We have the right to stop making a fuss and go along. Tase him, bro. Submission is freedom, freedom is slavery, kookookachoo.
CostCo and Sam's Club are membership-only operations. You sign a contract with them which states that they can examine your bags and your receipts.
In any other store, NO, they do not have a right to frisk you or grab your bags. Everyone including the cops assume that they have the right, and they are mistaken. Another example of corporate "rights" overriding the 9th amendment right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches. Government can't do it, and sure as hell private corporations can't. And NO, kids, just 'cause the Constitution doesn't mention that businesses can't violate your rights doesn't mean they can. Ninth amendment. Otherwise there's no point in having rights, if all it takes to remove them is to step inside private property. And I do think that the people who wrote the Constitution thought, "Hey, if the citizen refuses the smith's demand to turn out his pockets, these silly rules about human rights don't apply. Let the goodman be beaten and imprisoned if he doth not provide his identification papers to the guards. We wrote these rules for only the Federal government to follow, not to interfere with a businessman's power on his own property." Yeah, Jefferson would have gone along with that.
Well, you could hit the torrent or eMule downloads, as the books have been scanned years back for your pleasure. Then you could curl up with your Touch iPod or iPhone and read the -- D'OH! They won't let us have an eBook reader app other than Web 2.0.
Almost there, almost there.
'cause USB was invented by Intel at the same time Firewire was put out by Apple (around 1999), and Intel became very good indeed at manipulating the motherboard market (using the old tactics like discount or supply refusal to manufacturers) to freeze out Firewire. eSATA I assume is the same story? USB will always dominate because Intel dominates. And Microsoft goes along with Intel; they draaaagggged their feet bringing Firewire to Windows. Ya seriously think that a piece of silicon controlling a firewire port costs more than a USB controller? These are parts that cost a couple of dollars. Firewire is Apple's baby, and even tho Apple charges nothing for licensing, political pressure became a marketing factor even to this day. Even tho the price difference to manufacture is nonexistent, the market droids have slotted Firewire as a high-profit niche product and aren't about to budge, 'cause they'd lose money cutting the price. eSATA, dunno about the politics there, but I'd guess it's much the same story.
If they can rig a "mirror", you get a photon drive for spacecraft. Hell, for starships. I'd like to see that mirror. I've no doubt some clever wanker can exploit physics to do it, and I await his/her paper.
A society of cowards and a leadership that promulgates fear to stay in power. That's it in a nutshell.
No matter how many speakers you taze, no matter how many KB&R detention facilities you build, no matter how many radio trackers and bugs you put on your kids and employees, no matter how many strip searches and drug tests you all inflict on each other, the basic problem, the one creating these new police states, is that you are all conditioning yourselves to be cowards, and cowards are never safe enough. The level of security you are demanding not only for your persons, but to keep your tender ears from hearing things be said you do not wish to hear, is infinite. The number of people you need to kill overseas to feel safe is impossible to limit. And the more you squeeze those you fear, the more they will hate you and rise up against you, thus making you more afraid and more demanding of more police and more locks and more cameras. I understand Miami cops are now carrying military weaponry. Yet no one feels any safer.
Cowards die a thousand deaths. True cowards kill a thousand people to not die those thousand deaths, and yet still die those thousand times. Stupid people are always afraid, and you can't cure stupid.
The day is here and past. Now what? Do we fight, or do we leave? Canada is gearing up to become a police state under its new leader. France ditto. Where do you go?
I recall that President. Clinton was heckled frequently. I don't recall anyone getting electrocuted. They got to have their say.
Police states are a sickness that grow with public approval.
All Michelle Malkin will give you is herpes, son. That's not a reputable news source.
Europeans: gaze upon the naked Republican in his glory.
Electrocution without trial for the crime of speaking out of turn has generally not been held to be the American way. But for righties, it apparently now is. Until they become the loony minority.
"If this were a police state, you never would have heard about this. "
No. In police states, the police are GLAD to let people know what happens when you get out of line. Police states aren't secret societies.
"People were happy the annoyance was gone, not that the kid was tasered."
Precisely. Police states aren't foisted on societies. The society has to be sick first, THEN the police state and the torturing beings.
And, BTW, the kid will have permanent damage to his brain and nervous system.
And, also, would you have been happy had those "rioters" in the 2000 Dade county recount been tasered? They turned out to be campaign staffers pretending to be rioters. Somehow, they managed to shut down the recount and not be arrested, and certainly weren't tasered. Betcha lots of people would have sued and the news media would have been scandalized, even after it turned out they were fake "citizens". But a liberal college student, well, fuck the hippy, right?
The time to start blocking new police state tactics is before they even have a chance to finish developing their shiny new toys.
And as for false alarms, um... they use lie detectors now, and they are pretty much garbage. But you still can be fired, convicted, what have you, based on the tech developed by a B&D nut who invented Wonder Woman. The same basic technique is used in Scientology's e-meter. Junk.
We talk about this now. We stop it before it gets out of the gate. There is no reason to develop such tech but for to oppress you and me. Our lords will not permit themselves to be subjected to such surveillance. Bush will be in Patagonia, and no one will ever know where Cheney will be; likewise the newer corporate/police lords will never be under scrutiny. Listen: the Bushies delete ALL THEIR EMAIL and TEXT communications, which are public property guarded by federal law, and no one even blinks. And we're to be monitored for our thoughts and heartbeats? The "black" budget is now over sixty billion dollars a year. You can buy a world for that kind of money. A world where the mighty ones sit in private virtual castles and make a fortune trading in our fear and imprisonment.
There are certain types of humans that will seize power and control if you present them with the opportunity. We must intelligently monitor such developments and block it if we can. This is the cost of being free.
No, Bush's people lied to the American people. GOOD government employees in the intelligence community leaked the fact that it was a lie. Government !=bad.