"Stop trying to redefine the English language to remove meanings you don't like. It has been accepted that it is possible to "steal" information just by copying it for longer than you have been around. You're the one tilting at windmills."
It is not stealing. Those who are trying to pervert the word are those DQing. No surrender. George Orwell and Hayakawa would understand my point. Tyranny really begins when words are perverted, and freedom becomes impossible to fight for because you've no common language with those you need to make understand that they are being tyrannized.
L. Ron Hubbard has ruined the minds of thousands by systematically redefining common words until the real world could no longer communicate with his followers. "Crime" means something different to a Hubbardite than it does to you -- it means to counter Hubbard. There are no other crimes possible to them, after they are converted. And it's all done with redefinition. The bastard knew that, knew what semantic warfare was, knew how to destroy people's freedom.
The human mind uses words(=symbols) to understand the universe. Change the word, you change the universe.
So. NO. No surrender. Bastards tried to win by redefining the word "steal". To stop them, one must halt every corrupted, unwinnable argument about copyright and insist that the terms used in the argument MEAN THE SAME TO ALL PARTIES IN THE DISPUTE. Never stop, never give in. Or there is no hope, none, for the human race, for the symbol redefinition technique is infinitely flexible.
Use of the VCR (and Tivo and ReplayTV) to strip or fast-forward through commercials was part of the reason to use that tech. You mean all we millions were liable for civil damages? Where were the advertisers' torts then? How much do we owe them -- trillions? We don't. I'm sure we would have heard from them by now.
I think they didn't sue anyone because they had no case. And I don't think they have one now by simply extrapolating the earlier legality of earlier tech to cover digital recordings. Analog and digital recordings are no different, other than the manner in which they record, and the interests' assertions that they are different are not substantiated by anything other than just that, assertions, endlessly marketed. Digital video files seem difference to old powerful dingos like Senator Stevens of Alaska, and that is the advertisers and "IP owners" go through them to enact these laws. That, and media people are instinctively terrified and resentful of the new media tech that threatens their own power, hence their acquiesence to the rewriting of the concept of "theft" as applying to copying or recording in a manner that was completely legal before PCs started performing the task.
BUT -- your post is spot-on. Here's my take.
We the people who watch and record and even trade these video files have no contractual obligation to the advertisers who purchased the commercial time sandwiched into the TV schedule. I don't really care if they don't like it. It's not my problem. I can record and strip the commercials, and have been doing so since '87, when I bought my first VCR. However, I sometimes love to watch an old tape of mine and see the old commercials. I don't hate the things, I merely assert that I've no contract to watch them.
If the business model cannot support the fact that I can record and alter programs, then it should die and TV programmers should go out of business. However much they think they have the right to make people watch commercials, we can switch them off. Calling it "theft" is a new perversion of the English language. What they want is nothing less than a technological police state unlike anything the world has ever seen, for the sole purpose of maintaining a business model that may be no longer viable. We give up the fourth amendment, the right to be secure in our homes against unreasonable searches, so that TELEVISION ADVERTISERS can stay rich? Say WHAT? America dies so that they can live?
People made art long before advertisers took it over. People will make it long after we, optimistically, remove advertisers from the equation (not that we could: artists like lots of money, too). They've no right to live by legislating a police state to make sure people watch their jingles.
Just the obscentity of making the word steal work hard to mean "skipping commericals" or "recording a program" should make any person furious. Steal means "taking something away from someone". An object. I don't care how many millions they pour into marketing the concept, "steal" means "steal". Recording and watching video is not stealing, nor is it rape, perjury, contract breaking, barratry or murder. It's recording video. We've done it legally for over 25 years without being called thieves, and we aren't thieves now.
This puts me in mind of another use for a nice, cheap ebook device. It could read books to the blind. Call me blind as well, I never thought of it before I read the article.
At risk of going even further offtopic, what would be the chances of makezining a cheap ebook device from parts? I only ask because this article causes me to think that its a cultural travesty that no one makes an open-spec ebook for less than a hundred bucks. We need reading devices for so many things; textbooks, saving paper, saving our backs when we lift those boxes of books on moving day, and now letting blind people read without assistance. We need them, and never will know how much we can't live without them until someone makes one that people want to use.
We watched Futurama on TV. For free. Thieves are we? Deadbeat hippies? We taped Futurama for free. Were we stealing? Communist infiltrators of Hollywood? We Tivoed for free. We stole the shows? (Are any missing?) We downloaded the shows. HOW IS THAT DIFFERENT?
Taping, Tivoing, and watching were all Nielson-free (only a thousand damned families are Nielsoned at a time!) and didn't cost us a dime. How is downloading different? This makes NO logical sense. Nothing is stolen. Nothing has changed except that the video is a file and you can send it over a wire instead of passing a tape to your buddy at work.
Every method of recording has caused executives to scream that they were being robbed, and every method has accompanied even more profits for those same executives. And frankly, making a profit using a specific technology does not mean that the universe and human law must change to enable a profit in the future. Sometimes a business dies because it no longer can make a profit because the world changed around it. Passing laws forbidding technology and corrupting the language and criminalizing perfectly legal and previously unimpeachable behavior are what is wrong! I personally think the corruption of words is the vilest of crimes against humanity. Change the meaning of a word, and you can disarm the sane for lack of mutually understandable terms with the rest of the speakers of the language. Just say "thief" and the debate is over with no argument possible, because the word has been coopted by liars whose ultimate goal is to make even more money and control people.
Enough manipulation of the English language. Watching a show is not stealing, and it is not a character flaw. I'm tired of being called a criminal because I don't have a meter embedded in my head.
For free. It costs us nothing but electricity. Cable excluded, if you put up some rabbit ears.
So how are we paying for what we watch again? Commercials? We've had VCRs for over twenty years, and they have these fast-forward things. I used to sit there with the remote and hit PAUSE every time a commercial came on, and resumed when the screen went dark just before the show resumed. Rarely did I watch the commercials even when I wasn't zapping commercials. I don't think the advertisers went broke, and I don't think television networks went broke either.
And there's this Tivo thing the kids are all talking about.
So how is free taping or Tivoing not the same as downloading? They don't get paid either way. How is the download magically criminal and damaging?
fMRIs. New flavor of MRI machine that "determines" whethere you are lying. And perhaps eventually act as a crude mind scanning device as they learn more about the human brain. Coming... this year.
And the book "The Culture of Fear", which inspired Mike Moore to make "Bowling with Columbine", pretty much nails what's happened. America is ruled by fear, and fear makes money and power. Nothing new about that; people went to prison or were executed for being anarchists, atheists, sodomites, communists, socialists, jews, in one way or another, in the US for all its history. And let's not forget the biggest fear of all, used to manipulate us for over a hundred years: the dangerous blacks.
What's important is that the fear police have tools they've never had before, technological and legal. They've no laws to follow, so they can do what they like to us. And now with the internet and digital telephony and cheap surveillance and GPS, they can lock us into a prison that we can't escape. All for fear.
And none of those things will make us one bit "safer". There is no safety in life, and never will be. What we need is a rational ability to assign probabilty to risk, and fear accordingly. For instance, what are the odds of getting killed in your car opposed to being killed by "terrorists"? And why the discrepancy in response, other than stupidity on the part of the manipulated and cold calculated fear manipulation by those who will get infintite power and endless wealth making people "safe" from nearly nonexistent threats.
Nah. Since we decided that government was the enemy, and too icky to monitor as our collective duty as citizens. We let it get out of hand because we were lazy and because we don't care.
Democracy requires that every citizen be an adult and care about what the government does, not complain that we aren't soverign, whatever that means, and refuse to participate. You aren't soverign, you're a citizen of a democracy.
Bush's election and reelection are both symbolic and the triumph of the apathy and ignorance of the American public at large. And it's an old problem. Read Mark Twain, who spent his life trying to get people to care.
OUTSIDE? What about that "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy" argument used by the Supreme Court to permit surveillance at work and in public? And soon, GPS tracking of your phone as evidence?
Or is surveillance only permitted to those who have power?
By the way, the thing the homeowners were doing is called "sousveillance".
The cops-are-dicks-no-they-aren't-you-are argument is getting to me.
The point, the thing, the idea to ponder, is that the Surveillance Society we've been told was inevitable, and that we should just shut up, get over it, especially if we've nothing to hide, DOES NOT APPLY TO THE AUTHORITIES.
They can chip us, line the streets with cameras, track us with mini-drones, track our cell phones with E911, eventually GPS and track our cars, take our DNA and fingerprints, track our finances, our phone calls, our text messages and chats and emails. They are even now set up, with the courts greased prior to the introduction, to use fMRIs as super-lie detectors and someday even crude mind-scanning devices. All these things we are supposed to get over, 911 911 911.
But TRY PUTTING A CAMERA ON THEM AND YOU WILL GET YOUR ASS DRAGGED TO COURT AND PUT IN JAIL, ACLU BOY.
The New Surveillance Society is for the proles, not the overlords. And don't trust Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Renquist, and Thomas to rule such behavior unconstitutional; they will be fully on board.
Sure, Lazarus Long mentions rebudding teeth as a part of a long list of antigeria techniques used at the Howard Clinics in "Time Enough For Love".
But even he would say it was an obvious step. We've been needing this for as long as there've been people... BUT KUDOS for you, sir, for remembering science fiction didn't start on television and movies. Or anime.
There's treasure in the golden age of science fiction. A lot more imagination than displayed in current "sci-fi", which is to science fiction as Hostess cupcakes are to food. Thinking about it, the readers of golden-age SF went on to build moonships. Current sci-fi readers have a hard time thinking about driving electric cars. Difference of breadth of imagination.
Opening shot: Boring White Dude and Sarcastic Babe Magnet Skaterboy
BWD: Hello... does it feel hot in here to you?
SBMS: Yeah. But it always is a little warm. You just have to dress right... are you okay?
BWD: Ahhhhh... you might want to stay back -- ARRRRAAAAGHHH! I'm BURNING!!
SBMS: Stopdropandroll! Ah, man that has to hurt!
BWD: I'm okay. It's just the epidermis.
SBMS: [leaving for Japan with Kevin Rose] Old people suck, and they're also pretty flammable. Don't hang out with them. I rule. Macs get laid. JAGERMEISTER SHOTS! Line 'em up, and show me the Japanese chicks!
Alex: [shot of him passed out on floor next to toilet] ooohhh goddd.
I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint....
****
It's worth reading, that and Choicepoint's responses. Palast (American with a BBC broadcast) has an entire chapter on the subject called "Double Cheese with Fear" in his book on the subject, "Armed Madhouse".
"And why dont we just print more money to solve poverty?"
Thanks, Bill O'Reilly, for the neocon view. Never invest in a better world, 'cause it's useless and a crutch to the poor. Let, say, McDonalds open private academies to train the proles for their true place in life. Are there no workhouses?
And by the way, we're taking back all those highways we built with public monies to move the big asses of university graduates around for free. After all, why not print money and give it to them, if free roads work sooo well?
And BTW, Bush is printing and borrowing money, the biggest amounts in history, not to solve poverty, but to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and build a police state around the world. It apparently is okay to print money to solve wealth?!
Give us libertarian types, say, western Oregon, as in independent nation.
We'll let people do what they like as long as they don't hurt each other or the environment. I'm strongly tempted to outlaw religion in the government, just to simplify things. Hm, and make religious indoctrination of minors cause for divorcing parents, but ZING! let's let that lie. (Though I'd wonder what a nation running on the Golden Rule [masochists excepted] would develop into. Probably a nice place to live.) Cults NOT WELCOME. They who want to take freedom away don't get to play.
Hm. instead of taxes, how about lotteries with lots of winners? Stir things up economically, all the cash sloshing around. It's like paying voluntary taxes, with the possiblity of getting lucky and rich.
No laws against gambling, prostitution, drugs, or nudity. However, BIG laws against doing things to get money to gamble or doing idiot things under the influence. Punish the behavior of people, not what they do for fun. Get high? Fine. Drive a car? NOT fine. Yell on the street while intoxicated? Dump you in a cold bath, buddy. Bother other people, hurt other people, there's a problem. But do not punish people for acts prescribed by the book of Leviticus. 'Sides, I don't think I should die for sleeping with a menstruating woman, God.
People could write anything they like, make any game they like. Read anything they like. Run any network they like. No spying, except to keep an eye on the U.S. trying to sneak its way back in. Real free markets, no monopolies, by which I mean no secret or natural price manipulation. Like, doctors required to post fees in advance, so you could shop for the best price. (I've a feeling there'd be no doctors). No corporations -- personal responsiblity for actions! No Blue Laws. No religonists telling you what to look at, for the sake of (their) children. If you're naughty, you are kicked out into the U.S. No soup for you.
Sorta like Norway, I guess.
Let Americans decide which country they'd like to live in. The free one or the "moral", "safe" one with all the cameras and listeners.
And private prisons, with more being built every year. Many, many prisons. They do intend to put us in them, ya know. It's amazing how many crimes one finds when prisons make so much money. Why, you have to invent NEW crimes, just to keep the locals employed watching all those prisoners.
Here. It would be nice if the NPR music program on Saturdays after Prairie Home Companion had downloadable archived programs, so I could provide a link, but no.
On that program, an artist explained that the record label was providing him, and this was his old, out-of-payback music mind you, that he was making less than five cents for every dollar of downloaded music sold. He explained that they STILL were contractually charging for breakage, for stamping, and for a new line item, "new media technology charge" which was around ten percent of the total. In his words, they were charging for the switchover to a digital format. Mind you, they don't do a thing after the AAC or MP3 is cut, but they are charging for research and noodling new tech. He and some other older, wiser artists are suing the crap out of their labels to force contract changes.
Musicians DO NOT make music when they sign up for labels. Oh, the very successful ones make money after the first two hit albums -- if they are smart and get good lawyers. But the labels are smarter than any young band and will filet them for the rest of their lives, give any chance.
Two reasons to download music from file sharers: One, artists (almost) never get paid. The labels steal everything except concert take, and they are working hard on that. Two, the copyright contract that was stipulated in the Constitution, limited time copyright for eventual release to public domain in order to stimulate works, was broken by the new "IP" owners. Labels are cancers which have maneuvered themselves between the artist and their cash, and now have created a police state to maintain that status quo. Music now is eternal property protected by a fledgling corporate police state monitoring all communications. Deal's off. Starve them.
Pay the artists DIRECTLY by sending them cash, if you care; do not provide a single dime to the labels. I've boycotted industry music since Napster was meddled with, and I hope y'all will join me.
We killed one hundred thousands civilians in Iraq. That's why the world is screaming about 15 more. I guess 15 more people don't count to you, because it "isn't proven" other than the dead bodies of kids shot in the back of the head, and all the witnesses, and the length Rumsfeld went to cover it up.
Americans can't process news in context.
Bush lied about Iraq wanting to attack us. He lied about them being connected with 9-11. He ignored every sane voice in the CIA and the military and the rest of the world, and invaded and conquered a helpless country, killing at least 30,000 and a statistically certain 70,000 more. We can't be sure because he claims we don't count the dead on the other side.
We alloted the oil fields to the four international oil companies, who have issued marching orders to the people of Iraq, dictating pricing and threats of retaliation if they are ever cut out of the deal. We stole their oil. We stole their treasury and looted it.
We rounded up anybody who looked at us funny and put them in concentration camps. We tortured the prisoners.
We let loose mercs and thugs and killers to steal and kill at will. The troops on the ground hate those 1000 dollar a day bastards. Remember the SA merc who shot innocent people from a vehicle, taped it, and set it to music, then released his video on the internet? That's a atom of what's happened on the ground there.
There's almost no power. Shit is coming out of Bagdad's water faucets. Literal manure. The contractors ran off with duffel bags of money and fixed jack shit.
20 billion in cash on pallets went missing. That was Iraqi money, not ours. We stole it.
We refused to let any Iraqis in on the rebuilding contracts. they went to American, well-connected republican contractors only. Who stole the money. Iraqis are not permitted to rebuild their own country. And oh yes, we paid the contractors with Iraqi money, so they are broke.
American troops, 90 percent of them, still think that they are punishing the country that attacked us on 9-11. Why? The Armed Forces only show Fox News Channel. The only radio they get piped in is Rush Limbaugh and NPR (which isn't exactly a bastion of truth about the war since the "cleanup" by Bush's enforcers). The soldiers have their web access to news filtered so they don't hear about, oh, Bush's lying about Saddam and 9-11. This all means that they still think they are kicking the asses of the enemies of America.
There aren't any "terrorists" in Iraq. There are pissed off patriots trying to kick out a conquering army.
These are the reasons why 15 who-cares people shot in the head on their knees makes the world scream. Deal with it. GET SOME PERSPECTIVE. Join the Reality Based Community, as Rove called it.
If stalking on the Internet is okay, then so is stalking in real life. If they can, without cause other than curiosity, check what you've ever said to anybody (remember, the datamining the NSA et al are devising are done by private entities, who have no reason not to sell the information to anyone who wishes to pay), see who you've talking to (a DailyKos reader, eh? Commie. Not our type of people), see what porn you like, check to see if you're easy to talk into bed -- not all filtering is to block bad immoral types -- some of it will be to find a hot chick employee who gives it up. The possibilities are endless.
Henry Ford used to hire private investigators to follow his employees around to check on their moral fiber. No doubt hornier employers used PI's to find blackmail fodder against female employees. And male, too.
There's no business reason to spy on people. We've gotten along for thousands of years with employers being in the dark, and they can damned stay that way. There are however an infinite number of evil reasons to spy on people.
I wonder how many politicians and businessmen will let their private lives be monitored by their employess. After all, politiicians are public employees, and therefore subject to monitoring. And businessmen are entrusted with corporate licenses, granted by the public through the government, and so therefore should be watched closely, with publically available records datamined from all possible sources, including sex lives and phone conversations.
This is hell on earth. And not many people give a damn.
Last I checked, the big telecom companies are making dumptruck loads of cash off their internet and telephone and cable services.
If demand goes up, then, according to theory, the companies will build up lots of new capacity to take care of the demand, using those bucketloads of cash.
They aren't.
Instead, they are using the cash to buy up their competitors and float lobbyists to lie for them. This is Enronish manipulation of the supply of bandwidth. They aren't taking care of the customers' needs. They are taking care of their own. This is why we used to regulate public services. They cheat, underfund infrastructure, and rake in more cash.
Scarcity = more money. Fake scarcity == way more money, AND they want to use the faked up shortages to establish control over who uses the pipes and how. The free market doesn't exist: it presupposes that the operators are insensate to the market forces around them. They aren't. They see trends and manipulate supply and law to bend money and control to themselves.
This is only going to get worse. And the only solution, wireless, is being corporatized and licensed to yet more corporations who will want to control the pipes.
"Nowhere will you find my real name associated with my slashdot or myspace account--though you may be able to link them."
The whole point of the activities of Negroponte and Gonzales is to lead up to linking everything. Two year minimum usage logs mean they have the IP address, the customer name, the sites they link to, and any accounts they may have on MySpace or others, nicely linked and tied up with a bow. The Internet is now over as you knew it. It is a police state, and they are tracking your every move.
Mythbusters set up the kite experiment, just as Franklin had proposed, and passed some minor lighting (million volts, no biggee) through the system.
First off: if the string were dry, it simply burned up and broke the circuit.
Second: if they wet the string down, Mr. Ballistic Gel Franklin had enough current crossing his ticker to kill him. With a million volts. Now, lightning usually is measured in hundreds of million of volts. If BF had been sitting a rainstorm holding a stringed kite, nicely grounded, his Nikes would have been smoking, and he'd be dead.
Hmp. Years ago an MIT outfit also created eInk, and look how quickly that's hitting the market. MIT became an IP factory some years ago, and that's affected how they release tech, tho I couldn't tell you how, other than it seems slower.
The thing to avoid like the end of the world is selling the patents to Exxon-Mobile, as was the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery tech. Exxon-Mobile is not, er, the very best steward of technologies that could supplant the internal combustion engine. This tech sounds like the promised land for electric cars. We've the motors, the controllers, the charging tech. We just need power storage, and it's TKO for the IC engine. Electric cars have more torque, if they don't have to worry about ekeing out range because of the battery limitations. They cost much less per mile to use. And you can convert your own car for less than ten thousand dollars. Tech's there. And fewer moving parts, no oil pan, no radiators, no coolant, no catalytic converters, no muffler, no fuel filters to clog; ah paradise. Just electricity and a motor and a road. Damned things will last twenty years or more. Which might explain why car manufacturers don't like EC's.
Hurry, MIT! We're in a spot here. Oil, wars, price gouging, pollution. We need EC's, and it looks like you'll be sitting on the capacitor tech we need. Just, give it away, save the world?
Slashdot Mirror
"Stop trying to redefine the English language to remove meanings you don't like. It has been accepted that it is possible to "steal" information just by copying it for longer than you have been around. You're the one tilting at windmills."
It is not stealing. Those who are trying to pervert the word are those DQing. No surrender. George Orwell and Hayakawa would understand my point. Tyranny really begins when words are perverted, and freedom becomes impossible to fight for because you've no common language with those you need to make understand that they are being tyrannized.
L. Ron Hubbard has ruined the minds of thousands by systematically redefining common words until the real world could no longer communicate with his followers. "Crime" means something different to a Hubbardite than it does to you -- it means to counter Hubbard. There are no other crimes possible to them, after they are converted. And it's all done with redefinition. The bastard knew that, knew what semantic warfare was, knew how to destroy people's freedom.
The human mind uses words(=symbols) to understand the universe. Change the word, you change the universe.
So. NO. No surrender. Bastards tried to win by redefining the word "steal". To stop them, one must halt every corrupted, unwinnable argument about copyright and insist that the terms used in the argument MEAN THE SAME TO ALL PARTIES IN THE DISPUTE. Never stop, never give in. Or there is no hope, none, for the human race, for the symbol redefinition technique is infinitely flexible.
Use of the VCR (and Tivo and ReplayTV) to strip or fast-forward through commercials was part of the reason to use that tech. You mean all we millions were liable for civil damages? Where were the advertisers' torts then? How much do we owe them -- trillions? We don't. I'm sure we would have heard from them by now.
I think they didn't sue anyone because they had no case. And I don't think they have one now by simply extrapolating the earlier legality of earlier tech to cover digital recordings. Analog and digital recordings are no different, other than the manner in which they record, and the interests' assertions that they are different are not substantiated by anything other than just that, assertions, endlessly marketed. Digital video files seem difference to old powerful dingos like Senator Stevens of Alaska, and that is the advertisers and "IP owners" go through them to enact these laws. That, and media people are instinctively terrified and resentful of the new media tech that threatens their own power, hence their acquiesence to the rewriting of the concept of "theft" as applying to copying or recording in a manner that was completely legal before PCs started performing the task.
BUT -- your post is spot-on. Here's my take.
We the people who watch and record and even trade these video files have no contractual obligation to the advertisers who purchased the commercial time sandwiched into the TV schedule. I don't really care if they don't like it. It's not my problem. I can record and strip the commercials, and have been doing so since '87, when I bought my first VCR. However, I sometimes love to watch an old tape of mine and see the old commercials. I don't hate the things, I merely assert that I've no contract to watch them.
If the business model cannot support the fact that I can record and alter programs, then it should die and TV programmers should go out of business. However much they think they have the right to make people watch commercials, we can switch them off. Calling it "theft" is a new perversion of the English language. What they want is nothing less than a technological police state unlike anything the world has ever seen, for the sole purpose of maintaining a business model that may be no longer viable. We give up the fourth amendment, the right to be secure in our homes against unreasonable searches, so that TELEVISION ADVERTISERS can stay rich? Say WHAT? America dies so that they can live?
People made art long before advertisers took it over. People will make it long after we, optimistically, remove advertisers from the equation (not that we could: artists like lots of money, too). They've no right to live by legislating a police state to make sure people watch their jingles.
Just the obscentity of making the word steal work hard to mean "skipping commericals" or "recording a program" should make any person furious. Steal means "taking something away from someone". An object. I don't care how many millions they pour into marketing the concept, "steal" means "steal". Recording and watching video is not stealing, nor is it rape, perjury, contract breaking, barratry or murder. It's recording video. We've done it legally for over 25 years without being called thieves, and we aren't thieves now.
This puts me in mind of another use for a nice, cheap ebook device. It could read books to the blind. Call me blind as well, I never thought of it before I read the article.
At risk of going even further offtopic, what would be the chances of makezining a cheap ebook device from parts? I only ask because this article causes me to think that its a cultural travesty that no one makes an open-spec ebook for less than a hundred bucks. We need reading devices for so many things; textbooks, saving paper, saving our backs when we lift those boxes of books on moving day, and now letting blind people read without assistance. We need them, and never will know how much we can't live without them until someone makes one that people want to use.
Uh, semantic nonsense.
We watched Futurama on TV. For free. Thieves are we? Deadbeat hippies?
We taped Futurama for free. Were we stealing? Communist infiltrators of Hollywood?
We Tivoed for free. We stole the shows? (Are any missing?)
We downloaded the shows. HOW IS THAT DIFFERENT?
Taping, Tivoing, and watching were all Nielson-free (only a thousand damned families are Nielsoned at a time!) and didn't cost us a dime.
How is downloading different? This makes NO logical sense. Nothing is stolen. Nothing has changed except that the video is a file and you can send it over a wire instead of passing a tape to your buddy at work.
Every method of recording has caused executives to scream that they were being robbed, and every method has accompanied even more profits for those same executives. And frankly, making a profit using a specific technology does not mean that the universe and human law must change to enable a profit in the future. Sometimes a business dies because it no longer can make a profit because the world changed around it. Passing laws forbidding technology and corrupting the language and criminalizing perfectly legal and previously unimpeachable behavior are what is wrong! I personally think the corruption of words is the vilest of crimes against humanity. Change the meaning of a word, and you can disarm the sane for lack of mutually understandable terms with the rest of the speakers of the language. Just say "thief" and the debate is over with no argument possible, because the word has been coopted by liars whose ultimate goal is to make even more money and control people.
Enough manipulation of the English language. Watching a show is not stealing, and it is not a character flaw. I'm tired of being called a criminal because I don't have a meter embedded in my head.
We all watch Futurama on Fox, on television.
For free. It costs us nothing but electricity. Cable excluded, if you put up some rabbit ears.
So how are we paying for what we watch again? Commercials? We've had VCRs for over twenty years, and they have these fast-forward things. I used to sit there with the remote and hit PAUSE every time a commercial came on, and resumed when the screen went dark just before the show resumed. Rarely did I watch the commercials even when I wasn't zapping commercials. I don't think the advertisers went broke, and I don't think television networks went broke either.
And there's this Tivo thing the kids are all talking about.
So how is free taping or Tivoing not the same as downloading? They don't get paid either way. How is the download magically criminal and damaging?
You eat too much hig-calorie junk.
fMRIs. New flavor of MRI machine that "determines" whethere you are lying. And perhaps eventually act as a crude mind scanning device as they learn more about the human brain. Coming... this year.
And the book "The Culture of Fear", which inspired Mike Moore to make "Bowling with Columbine", pretty much nails what's happened. America is ruled by fear, and fear makes money and power. Nothing new about that; people went to prison or were executed for being anarchists, atheists, sodomites, communists, socialists, jews, in one way or another, in the US for all its history. And let's not forget the biggest fear of all, used to manipulate us for over a hundred years: the dangerous blacks.
What's important is that the fear police have tools they've never had before, technological and legal. They've no laws to follow, so they can do what they like to us. And now with the internet and digital telephony and cheap surveillance and GPS, they can lock us into a prison that we can't escape. All for fear.
And none of those things will make us one bit "safer". There is no safety in life, and never will be. What we need is a rational ability to assign probabilty to risk, and fear accordingly. For instance, what are the odds of getting killed in your car opposed to being killed by "terrorists"? And why the discrepancy in response, other than stupidity on the part of the manipulated and cold calculated fear manipulation by those who will get infintite power and endless wealth making people "safe" from nearly nonexistent threats.
Nah. Since we decided that government was the enemy, and too icky to monitor as our collective duty as citizens. We let it get out of hand because we were lazy and because we don't care.
Democracy requires that every citizen be an adult and care about what the government does, not complain that we aren't soverign, whatever that means, and refuse to participate. You aren't soverign, you're a citizen of a democracy.
Bush's election and reelection are both symbolic and the triumph of the apathy and ignorance of the American public at large. And it's an old problem. Read Mark Twain, who spent his life trying to get people to care.
In other words, take the damned wheel.
Please mod this puppy up.
OUTSIDE? What about that "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy" argument used by the Supreme Court to permit surveillance at work and in public? And soon, GPS tracking of your phone as evidence?
Or is surveillance only permitted to those who have power?
By the way, the thing the homeowners were doing is called "sousveillance".
The cops-are-dicks-no-they-aren't-you-are argument is getting to me.
The point, the thing, the idea to ponder, is that the Surveillance Society we've been told was inevitable, and that we should just shut up, get over it, especially if we've nothing to hide, DOES NOT APPLY TO THE AUTHORITIES.
They can chip us, line the streets with cameras, track us with mini-drones, track our cell phones with E911, eventually GPS and track our cars, take our DNA and fingerprints, track our finances, our phone calls, our text messages and chats and emails. They are even now set up, with the courts greased prior to the introduction, to use fMRIs as super-lie detectors and someday even crude mind-scanning devices. All these things we are supposed to get over, 911 911 911.
But TRY PUTTING A CAMERA ON THEM AND YOU WILL GET YOUR ASS DRAGGED TO COURT AND PUT IN JAIL, ACLU BOY.
The New Surveillance Society is for the proles, not the overlords. And don't trust Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Renquist, and Thomas to rule such behavior unconstitutional; they will be fully on board.
Get over THAT.
Sure, Lazarus Long mentions rebudding teeth as a part of a long list of antigeria techniques used at the Howard Clinics in "Time Enough For Love".
But even he would say it was an obvious step. We've been needing this for as long as there've been people... BUT KUDOS for you, sir, for remembering science fiction didn't start on television and movies. Or anime.
There's treasure in the golden age of science fiction. A lot more imagination than displayed in current "sci-fi", which is to science fiction as Hostess cupcakes are to food. Thinking about it, the readers of golden-age SF went on to build moonships. Current sci-fi readers have a hard time thinking about driving electric cars. Difference of breadth of imagination.
Apple Commercial
Opening shot: Boring White Dude and Sarcastic Babe Magnet Skaterboy
BWD: Hello... does it feel hot in here to you?
SBMS: Yeah. But it always is a little warm. You just have to dress right... are you okay?
BWD: Ahhhhh... you might want to stay back -- ARRRRAAAAGHHH! I'm BURNING!!
SBMS: Stopdropandroll! Ah, man that has to hurt!
BWD: I'm okay. It's just the epidermis.
SBMS: [leaving for Japan with Kevin Rose] Old people suck, and they're also pretty flammable. Don't hang out with them. I rule. Macs get laid. JAGERMEISTER SHOTS! Line 'em up, and show me the Japanese chicks!
Alex: [shot of him passed out on floor next to toilet] ooohhh goddd.
I'd heard that people over forty don't respond as well to eyesight correct. What's the followup on those older patients? what's the failture rate?
http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=502&row=0
...
THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
by Greg Palast
I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
****
It's worth reading, that and Choicepoint's responses. Palast (American with a BBC broadcast) has an entire chapter on the subject called "Double Cheese with Fear" in his book on the subject, "Armed Madhouse".
"And why dont we just print more money to solve poverty?"
Thanks, Bill O'Reilly, for the neocon view. Never invest in a better world, 'cause it's useless and a crutch to the poor. Let, say, McDonalds open private academies to train the proles for their true place in life. Are there no workhouses?
And by the way, we're taking back all those highways we built with public monies to move the big asses of university graduates around for free. After all, why not print money and give it to them, if free roads work sooo well?
And BTW, Bush is printing and borrowing money, the biggest amounts in history, not to solve poverty, but to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and build a police state around the world. It apparently is okay to print money to solve wealth?!
How about this.
Give us libertarian types, say, western Oregon, as in independent nation.
We'll let people do what they like as long as they don't hurt each other or the environment. I'm strongly tempted to outlaw religion in the government, just to simplify things. Hm, and make religious indoctrination of minors cause for divorcing parents, but ZING! let's let that lie. (Though I'd wonder what a nation running on the Golden Rule [masochists excepted] would develop into. Probably a nice place to live.) Cults NOT WELCOME. They who want to take freedom away don't get to play.
Hm. instead of taxes, how about lotteries with lots of winners? Stir things up economically, all the cash sloshing around. It's like paying voluntary taxes, with the possiblity of getting lucky and rich.
No laws against gambling, prostitution, drugs, or nudity. However, BIG laws against doing things to get money to gamble or doing idiot things under the influence. Punish the behavior of people, not what they do for fun. Get high? Fine. Drive a car? NOT fine. Yell on the street while intoxicated? Dump you in a cold bath, buddy. Bother other people, hurt other people, there's a problem. But do not punish people for acts prescribed by the book of Leviticus. 'Sides, I don't think I should die for sleeping with a menstruating woman, God.
People could write anything they like, make any game they like. Read anything they like. Run any network they like. No spying, except to keep an eye on the U.S. trying to sneak its way back in. Real free markets, no monopolies, by which I mean no secret or natural price manipulation. Like, doctors required to post fees in advance, so you could shop for the best price. (I've a feeling there'd be no doctors). No corporations -- personal responsiblity for actions! No Blue Laws. No religonists telling you what to look at, for the sake of (their) children. If you're naughty, you are kicked out into the U.S. No soup for you.
Sorta like Norway, I guess.
Let Americans decide which country they'd like to live in. The free one or the "moral", "safe" one with all the cameras and listeners.
And private prisons, with more being built every year. Many, many prisons. They do intend to put us in them, ya know. It's amazing how many crimes one finds when prisons make so much money. Why, you have to invent NEW crimes, just to keep the locals employed watching all those prisoners.
Here. It would be nice if the NPR music program on Saturdays after Prairie Home Companion had downloadable archived programs, so I could provide a link, but no.
On that program, an artist explained that the record label was providing him, and this was his old, out-of-payback music mind you, that he was making less than five cents for every dollar of downloaded music sold. He explained that they STILL were contractually charging for breakage, for stamping, and for a new line item, "new media technology charge" which was around ten percent of the total. In his words, they were charging for the switchover to a digital format. Mind you, they don't do a thing after the AAC or MP3 is cut, but they are charging for research and noodling new tech. He and some other older, wiser artists are suing the crap out of their labels to force contract changes.
Musicians DO NOT make music when they sign up for labels. Oh, the very successful ones make money after the first two hit albums -- if they are smart and get good lawyers. But the labels are smarter than any young band and will filet them for the rest of their lives, give any chance.
Two reasons to download music from file sharers: One, artists (almost) never get paid. The labels steal everything except concert take, and they are working hard on that. Two, the copyright contract that was stipulated in the Constitution, limited time copyright for eventual release to public domain in order to stimulate works, was broken by the new "IP" owners. Labels are cancers which have maneuvered themselves between the artist and their cash, and now have created a police state to maintain that status quo. Music now is eternal property protected by a fledgling corporate police state monitoring all communications. Deal's off. Starve them.
Pay the artists DIRECTLY by sending them cash, if you care; do not provide a single dime to the labels. I've boycotted industry music since Napster was meddled with, and I hope y'all will join me.
We killed one hundred thousands civilians in Iraq. That's why the world is screaming about 15 more. I guess 15 more people don't count to you, because it "isn't proven" other than the dead bodies of kids shot in the back of the head, and all the witnesses, and the length Rumsfeld went to cover it up.
Americans can't process news in context.
Bush lied about Iraq wanting to attack us. He lied about them being connected with 9-11. He ignored every sane voice in the CIA and the military and the rest of the world, and invaded and conquered a helpless country, killing at least 30,000 and a statistically certain 70,000 more. We can't be sure because he claims we don't count the dead on the other side.
We alloted the oil fields to the four international oil companies, who have issued marching orders to the people of Iraq, dictating pricing and threats of retaliation if they are ever cut out of the deal. We stole their oil. We stole their treasury and looted it.
We rounded up anybody who looked at us funny and put them in concentration camps. We tortured the prisoners.
We let loose mercs and thugs and killers to steal and kill at will. The troops on the ground hate those 1000 dollar a day bastards. Remember the SA merc who shot innocent people from a vehicle, taped it, and set it to music, then released his video on the internet? That's a atom of what's happened on the ground there.
There's almost no power. Shit is coming out of Bagdad's water faucets. Literal manure. The contractors ran off with duffel bags of money and fixed jack shit.
20 billion in cash on pallets went missing. That was Iraqi money, not ours. We stole it.
We refused to let any Iraqis in on the rebuilding contracts. they went to American, well-connected republican contractors only. Who stole the money. Iraqis are not permitted to rebuild their own country. And oh yes, we paid the contractors with Iraqi money, so they are broke.
American troops, 90 percent of them, still think that they are punishing the country that attacked us on 9-11. Why? The Armed Forces only show Fox News Channel. The only radio they get piped in is Rush Limbaugh and NPR (which isn't exactly a bastion of truth about the war since the "cleanup" by Bush's enforcers). The soldiers have their web access to news filtered so they don't hear about, oh, Bush's lying about Saddam and 9-11. This all means that they still think they are kicking the asses of the enemies of America.
There aren't any "terrorists" in Iraq. There are pissed off patriots trying to kick out a conquering army.
These are the reasons why 15 who-cares people shot in the head on their knees makes the world scream. Deal with it. GET SOME PERSPECTIVE. Join the Reality Based Community, as Rove called it.
If stalking on the Internet is okay, then so is stalking in real life. If they can, without cause other than curiosity, check what you've ever said to anybody (remember, the datamining the NSA et al are devising are done by private entities, who have no reason not to sell the information to anyone who wishes to pay), see who you've talking to (a DailyKos reader, eh? Commie. Not our type of people), see what porn you like, check to see if you're easy to talk into bed -- not all filtering is to block bad immoral types -- some of it will be to find a hot chick employee who gives it up. The possibilities are endless.
Henry Ford used to hire private investigators to follow his employees around to check on their moral fiber. No doubt hornier employers used PI's to find blackmail fodder against female employees. And male, too.
There's no business reason to spy on people. We've gotten along for thousands of years with employers being in the dark, and they can damned stay that way. There are however an infinite number of evil reasons to spy on people.
I wonder how many politicians and businessmen will let their private lives be monitored by their employess. After all, politiicians are public employees, and therefore subject to monitoring. And businessmen are entrusted with corporate licenses, granted by the public through the government, and so therefore should be watched closely, with publically available records datamined from all possible sources, including sex lives and phone conversations.
This is hell on earth. And not many people give a damn.
Last I checked, the big telecom companies are making dumptruck loads of cash off their internet and telephone and cable services.
If demand goes up, then, according to theory, the companies will build up lots of new capacity to take care of the demand, using those bucketloads of cash.
They aren't.
Instead, they are using the cash to buy up their competitors and float lobbyists to lie for them. This is Enronish manipulation of the supply of bandwidth. They aren't taking care of the customers' needs. They are taking care of their own. This is why we used to regulate public services. They cheat, underfund infrastructure, and rake in more cash.
Scarcity = more money. Fake scarcity == way more money, AND they want to use the faked up shortages to establish control over who uses the pipes and how. The free market doesn't exist: it presupposes that the operators are insensate to the market forces around them. They aren't. They see trends and manipulate supply and law to bend money and control to themselves.
This is only going to get worse. And the only solution, wireless, is being corporatized and licensed to yet more corporations who will want to control the pipes.
"Nowhere will you find my real name associated with my slashdot or myspace account--though you may be able to link them."
The whole point of the activities of Negroponte and Gonzales is to lead up to linking everything. Two year minimum usage logs mean they have the IP address, the customer name, the sites they link to, and any accounts they may have on MySpace or others, nicely linked and tied up with a bow. The Internet is now over as you knew it. It is a police state, and they are tracking your every move.
Mythbusters set up the kite experiment, just as Franklin had proposed, and passed some minor lighting (million volts, no biggee) through the system.
First off: if the string were dry, it simply burned up and broke the circuit.
Second: if they wet the string down, Mr. Ballistic Gel Franklin had enough current crossing his ticker to kill him. With a million volts. Now, lightning usually is measured in hundreds of million of volts. If BF had been sitting a rainstorm holding a stringed kite, nicely grounded, his Nikes would have been smoking, and he'd be dead.
Hmp. Years ago an MIT outfit also created eInk, and look how quickly that's hitting the market. MIT became an IP factory some years ago, and that's affected how they release tech, tho I couldn't tell you how, other than it seems slower.
The thing to avoid like the end of the world is selling the patents to Exxon-Mobile, as was the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery tech. Exxon-Mobile is not, er, the very best steward of technologies that could supplant the internal combustion engine. This tech sounds like the promised land for electric cars. We've the motors, the controllers, the charging tech. We just need power storage, and it's TKO for the IC engine. Electric cars have more torque, if they don't have to worry about ekeing out range because of the battery limitations. They cost much less per mile to use. And you can convert your own car for less than ten thousand dollars. Tech's there. And fewer moving parts, no oil pan, no radiators, no coolant, no catalytic converters, no muffler, no fuel filters to clog; ah paradise. Just electricity and a motor and a road. Damned things will last twenty years or more. Which might explain why car manufacturers don't like EC's.
Hurry, MIT! We're in a spot here. Oil, wars, price gouging, pollution. We need EC's, and it looks like you'll be sitting on the capacitor tech we need. Just, give it away, save the world?
He'd just take the opportunity to recharge. Defeats the purpose.