"You don't buy the music you buy permission to experience it."
No. I bought the music, the media it was recorded on, and the right to copy and remix it any way I like. What I don't have is the right to copy and redistribute without permission from the *copyright* owner, which is NOT the same as the owner of the music. Music is not property, and it cannot be owned any more than an idea can be owned. The idea of illegal redistribution was envisioned to be illegal CD manufactories and suchlike, NOT Joe Suburban copying records onto tape.
I have fair use rights to copy the music for personal use, which by common law for over thirty years meant, among other rights, the right to make copies and share it with friends. Music companies have tried to outlaw this, but legislatures and courts had skillfully ducked around finding such copying "unlawful". Up until recently, the infraction was a civil one, not criminal, which meant the infringer was liable for civil damages limited to actual monetary damages caused to the copyright holder -- less than a few bucks per album copied. Record companies didn't bother suing people for dozens of dollars, so massive copists like Metallica's band members, who copied thousands of other people's albums from vinyl to tape when they were young and poor, got away clean.
Now, with skillful placement of bribes to congressmen and a 30+ campaign to put Federalist Society judges on the bench, it's criminal to copy music, and the "damages" per individual copist is judged in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars -- obvious horseshit.
I don't mean to drown out your other points, as they are worthy. But we can't let them own this "license to experience on the correct media" meme. To win a semantic war, you can't let the enemy redefine the terms of the argument.
It's South Korea. After a year, they'll be selling US support. Millions of well-educated and disciplined geeks learning linux all at once... yipes. They'll be the evangelists to the world, not us.
How, exactly, is pointing out that the introduction of the HD, a fully realized technology, would discommode the HD-DVD and BluRay warriors? 1 terabyte CD-sized would cream the 30-50 meg disc standard. A LOT of money has been spent on developing the HD/Blu-Ray tech and lobbying companies for support. You think the HD people are gonna get a voice in any of this? The market is not free -- it is organized by companies for companies, and the best and most useful tech is not necessarily the one that wins.
Reality check: the Internet is a communications protocol. Not a physical entity. Not metaphor: phone system of olde. Anyone who walked into your home could pick up a phone and commit wire fraud, any number of identity theft scams using your phone number, could call Mexico (happened to us) hundreds of times and stick you for the bill.
Were you liable for these acts because your phone did not have a physical lock on it? (No encryption back then for normal folk).
Metaphor holds because people accessing your wireless access are not breaking into your house; they are merely picking up a party-line phone. This phone was DESIGNED to be a part-line system. Anyone on it understands that. Act accordingly.
And encryption is nonsense. I've been around long enough to know that ANY security system can be hacked. Just hold your breath and wait.
Here's a solution: leave the law the hell off the Internet. Let mesh networks blossom, leave people the fuck alone, let video fly through the air, lasr backbones branch from neighborhood to neighborhood, phone companies strange to death -- LEAVE US ALONE. The laws covering child porn, fraud, harrassment et all already existed. This is an issue of command and control, not "crime". If businesses don't want to be hacked, let them collectively build an encrypted PRIVATE system on fiber and data lines, just like they used to, and keep off the citizen's internet.
The company is out there, they have the tech, they're waiting for an investor.
sometimes, the world is just too dense to change. D'ya think the BluRay/HD-DVD consortia want ANOTHER player, one that makes them look like tools, to enter the market? The Holographic Discs and cards are going to moulder to death in a dark media corner if the boys at the two competing standards have anything to say about it.
" Um, I'm Canadian, actually, but nice try." Difference being? I'd love to live in Canada, but come on, tell us when we're wrong! World currencies are ascendent, while the US dollar is plunging. The Chinese decoupled from the dollar months ago. We've begun our final approach to Depression Airport. "alarmist rhetoric" We've killed 100,000 innocent people, imprisoned and tortured thousands more, sometimes to death, and maimed thousands of the same innocent. The water in Baghdad, when running, contains fecal matter. The administration and Italy under Berlusconni are implicated in fabricating the documents used to justify invading a non-hostile country and destroying it. The entire planet wants us to go away and die, and lose a few pounds while we're at it. BTW, even Afghanistan wasn't at war with us; we killed them to feel better. The real perpetrators walked away, and are still at large and laughing at us... The US killed 33 times the number of innocents killed on 9/11, has already invaded Syria and is attempting to use crappy documents to overturn their government (while we're using their torturers!). We've had special forces in Iran for over a year marking bomb targets. We've not moved because we don't have the manpower; too much cake, not enough mouth. This week documents popped up showing the administrations post-Castro Cuba planning, which involves supporting "freedom fighters" we're to pay for, and a lovely plan on cutting up their economy to benefit ourselves. Invade and Liberate! We're going to have a party and get cheap Cuban hookers! Yeah! Frag! America Fuck Yeah!
My mom used to work at the welfare office for the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago. She used to listen to some of her fellow workers sitting at screens, data mining the client's records for people who weren't at home during working hours. They were using the information to rob the empty homes during lunch hours. True story.
Technology gives bad people with power ever more ways of fucking you over. If they DON'T need the tool, don't give it to them. We didn't need RFID passports before, and we don't need them now. Misdirection is afoot. What ELSE are they adding to the passports besides RFID? Get that question answered, and you'll know how they are fucking us in brand new ways.
When a corporation or a government (in the U.S., indistiguishable now) wants a new way to track people, it's never for the citizens' good, but for their own. Acquiesence to tyranny happens a tiny bit at a time. In twenty years, a whole generation of the world's people will have grown up in a virtual prison, and won't even notice.
Instead of siphoning off votes from the anti-Republican party, why not just take over the Democratic party and make it what you want it to be?
Or, if the Republicans are jetisoned from power next year and for a generation after that, since that looks increasingly likely, maybe take over the shell of that discredited monster, instead of the Democratic party, and make it what you will.
Making a new party won't work. The other two own every way to power. Sometimes the way to kill a dragon is to make sure you get swallowed, then hack it to bits from within... sorry, a D&D flashback. For you Mech fans, a better analogy would be to kick open the door of the mech's control room and take over the robot from within. Ah, metaphors...
So he treated her like shit, and she blew him. And made another date. If he'd been polite, and calmly made his point, he'd have been unfun and a spineless nerd.
Women: "Why are guys such assholes? Where are all the nice men who treat us with minimum respect?"
They die virgins, and never reproduce. Because women like assholes. They're more fun.
Kinda explains why the assholes tend to all be physically similar: they're all fathered by, like, some really vicious, amoral, yet fun dude who do everyone's wife. All the dudes in the Clark Street and Lincoln avenue bars in Chicago are the same 6'1" baseball cap wearing guy with a lantern jaw and no respect for any woman in the house. They're all related to some dude with XYY chromosomes from KY who passed through Lake Forest 28 years ago.
As long as women want to be treated like fools, they will be. Shrug.
It is GPS. Every phone sold this year and forevermore in the US has GPS built in. You have a tracking device on you. It's a done deal. There is an option on the phone menu to "turn it off", but if you believe that they won't turn it back on unbeknownst to you if a cop or a government official or a businessman with a nice fat bribe asks it be done, well...
"Some of us don't think that governments should be able to make threats to businesses and affect the way they're run."
True. And you are ideologues, and you have control of the government now. And you are wrong on all counts. Corporations are licensed to exist by the grace of the people through their elected representatives and the laws that they enact. Businesses are not godlike entities subject only to their own whims, able to manipulate markets to their advantage. Businesses exist by our sufferance; we do not exist by theirs.
"Whatever power Bill Gates may have, he certainly doesn't have the power to take a penny of my earnings if I don't want him to have it."
Wrong and wrong. Microsoft has had a "PC tax" for decades, getting a cut of the price of any PC sold, even if it had no MS product on it, by abusing their power and punishing anyone who refused to pay the MS tax by taking away their purchase discount. That is how they built their business, how they abused their monoploy to make more monopoly. Tens of billions of dollars are siphoned from our pockets involuntarily. And we are stuck with crappy OS's because it was cheaper to but MS's OS on a box than, say, DR-DOS, because the businesses had to pay for TWO OS's. You've worked for Bill for quite a while now.
"He can't put me in prison for refusing to pay him or for disobeying his orders."
REALLY? Try copying a single copy of Windows onto all your boxes. Call Bill and tell him what you've done. Refuse to go to court, refuse to pay the fine, refuse to show up to prison. See what happens.
"He can't break into my house and search for drugs. He can't send my sons to war. He hasn't incinerated any religious sects, and none of his agents has shot a mother in the head while she was holding her baby. He doesn't even seem interested in doing any of these things."
Yet. You've gone off the rails. Corporations can and do kill people; you just don't hear about it. A diamond mine strike in Africa got some workers killed -- no one in jail last I heard. Corporations exist so that no one has personal responsiblity for their actions. Bhopal disaster in India. No on in jail. Union organizers rotting in holes. No one in jail. Poisonous landfills all over, cancer everywhere around them. No one in jail. Businesses DO kill. And you're thinking the future will be just like the present: after generations of priviledge and total power, you don't think the amoral, law-free corporations of 2100 won't kill with impugnity? You cut the sapling down while saws can still cut it, not wait until it's an unkillable forest.
And Bill doesn't have to break into your house to perform a search: with XP and Vista, he doesn't have to. He just built it into your license to use XP.
Nope. Monopolies destroy "free markets". That's what Adam Smith, no less, said. And he was right. If the result of a "free market" is the permanent elimination of a free market, then you've hit a recursive loop and have fallen off the flat earth.
And here's a thing: a nation doesn't maintain free markets to enable companies to do whatever they want. Free markets are maintained for the benefit of the common good, so that prices are kept sane, product can't be embargoes on personal whim, and we the people have a market responsive to our needs, NOT THE COMPANY'S.
Corporations are licensed legal fictions designed to remove personal liability from the exectives of same. They exist for our purposes - the market is not kept free for their benefit, but for ours.
Letting busineses grow into monopolies, unregulated, will just create a new feudalism which will in no way be a free market enabling a free people. The only people "free" in a world without business regulations will be the owners of the businesses.
We regulate monopolies so we can retain free markets. That's not just Adam Smith, it's the law.
Yup. If they don't want to sell in South Korea, then SC should be able to buy from OEM's, or just have product shipped from the states without involving MS.
But Microsoft won't let that happen, will it? They claim they can control distribution of their software down to the processor level.
So yes, it does make sense to control an abusive monopoly that refuses to have software RESOLD to a country they've decided to embargo. Last I heard, Microsoft wasn't a nation.
South Korea: "Obey the damned law. You are crushing competitive businesses by abusing your monopoly position in the market."
Microsoft: "We know. That's what we do. Altho we aren't a monopoly. Really. Now, exempt us from the law, or we don't do business in South Korea. That's what we call 'crushing laws we don't like'. It's a thing we monopolies do. Fuck you, and God Save Ayn Rand."
"They have the right to do whatever they want with it."
NO. Monopolies do NOT have the right to do whatever they want with their monopoly control. That's why they're monopolies, that's why we regulate them more than competitive companies. They dictate terms and kill free markets. We LIKE free markets.
They are a monopoly, and monopolies are regulated for JUST THIS REASON. Microsoft is demanding that legal investigations into their anticompetitive actions be halted, or they will cripple South Korea by refusing to sell them product. That is the CLASSIC REASON why monopolies are anti-free market!
NO. THEY DON'T GET TO DECIDE WHERE THERE PRODUCT IS SOLD. THEY ARE AN ABUSIVE MONOPOLY. They've lost the right. That's why we r-e-g-u-l-a-t-e them, even if Bush's government won't touch them because they hate monopoly regulations.
This isn't an "opinion", this is established law. They are not free agents anymore. They don't get to throttle their "enemies".
A monopoly corporation can dictate terms to an entire nation, demanding to be exempt from their laws. Let them do what they want, or they cripple South Korea. Who will stop them?
How Bush fucked us over, #34,451: appointing industry lobby lawyers to the Justice Department who simply ignored the findings of the courts, letting Microsoft go unmolested and whole at the beginning of this numskull's reign. The world will be paying for that for another decade.
Go Linux. It's the pinhole of sunlight you sight at the top of the rubble blocking the collapsed mineshaft entrance. We might make it out of here...
If you don't want to participate, don't. Stop stuffing the threads with posts about how lame everyone's questions, knowledge and motivations are.
I'm actually interested in what people have thought about this very topic, AND I'm not a petabyte database expert. So it's news to me. And probably is to you as well.
The seal is used in movies, too. No one seems to care about that, either.
The Onion, along with Comedy Central, are practically the only media outlets that have actually hurt the Bushists in the last five years. They are Cheney's #1 targets for vengeance.
Although he might want to hurry up. One of his little campaigns for payback is about to bear fruit as a series of indictments from a federal prosecutor. He's going to be a busy man, trying to take down the justice system.
And one more thing: help finance the project by making it the ultimate Reality TV show. How much do broadcast rights to watching the early days of the colonization of Mars cost? And send some real damned people too, not just white male engineers from Ohio. Send some artists, some writers, some women, for crissakes. Record everything. Even if you can't go to Mars, you can experience it vicariously. What a show...
Been waiting to make exactly that point. Yup, the Apollo Syndrome at work. Send Presbyterians on a very expensive round trip to Mars (no sex allowed -- see the latest NASA news) to pick up rocks to Work Out the Origin of the Solar System and to Find Evidence That Life Once Existed On Mars. Expensive, useless, and oh so juiceless.
If you want to go to Mars, send people to Mars on a one-way trip. Land hospital modules, food, equipment to build housing and greenhouses, rovers, everything. Land the supply drops a few times a year. If someone wants a round trip, let them take a trip to Bermuda.
Sink or swim, do or literally die. If they can't make the greenhouses work, keep dumping MRE's on them indefinitely: food doesn't take up much mass. A smart group will keep making O2 and housing until they lick the groceries problem. They'll have to: no choice.
I'd go. And NASA can kiss my ass about the "no sex" rule. Grow up, you would-be Cotton Mathers.
Slashdot Mirror
"You don't buy the music you buy permission to experience it."
No. I bought the music, the media it was recorded on, and the right to copy and remix it any way I like. What I don't have is the right to copy and redistribute without permission from the *copyright* owner, which is NOT the same as the owner of the music. Music is not property, and it cannot be owned any more than an idea can be owned. The idea of illegal redistribution was envisioned to be illegal CD manufactories and suchlike, NOT Joe Suburban copying records onto tape.
I have fair use rights to copy the music for personal use, which by common law for over thirty years meant, among other rights, the right to make copies and share it with friends. Music companies have tried to outlaw this, but legislatures and courts had skillfully ducked around finding such copying "unlawful". Up until recently, the infraction was a civil one, not criminal, which meant the infringer was liable for civil damages limited to actual monetary damages caused to the copyright holder -- less than a few bucks per album copied. Record companies didn't bother suing people for dozens of dollars, so massive copists like Metallica's band members, who copied thousands of other people's albums from vinyl to tape when they were young and poor, got away clean.
Now, with skillful placement of bribes to congressmen and a 30+ campaign to put Federalist Society judges on the bench, it's criminal to copy music, and the "damages" per individual copist is judged in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars -- obvious horseshit.
I don't mean to drown out your other points, as they are worthy. But we can't let them own this "license to experience on the correct media" meme. To win a semantic war, you can't let the enemy redefine the terms of the argument.
"Linspire=HUGE updates."
There's this "bittorrent" thing I've been hearing about...
It's South Korea. After a year, they'll be selling US support. Millions of well-educated and disciplined geeks learning linux all at once... yipes. They'll be the evangelists to the world, not us.
How, exactly, is pointing out that the introduction of the HD, a fully realized technology, would discommode the HD-DVD and BluRay warriors? 1 terabyte CD-sized would cream the 30-50 meg disc standard. A LOT of money has been spent on developing the HD/Blu-Ray tech and lobbying companies for support. You think the HD people are gonna get a voice in any of this? The market is not free -- it is organized by companies for companies, and the best and most useful tech is not necessarily the one that wins.
all the metaphors, my my.
Reality check: the Internet is a communications protocol. Not a physical entity.
Not metaphor: phone system of olde. Anyone who walked into your home could pick up a phone and commit wire fraud, any number of identity theft scams using your phone number, could call Mexico (happened to us) hundreds of times and stick you for the bill.
Were you liable for these acts because your phone did not have a physical lock on it? (No encryption back then for normal folk).
Metaphor holds because people accessing your wireless access are not breaking into your house; they are merely picking up a party-line phone. This phone was DESIGNED to be a part-line system. Anyone on it understands that. Act accordingly.
And encryption is nonsense. I've been around long enough to know that ANY security system can be hacked. Just hold your breath and wait.
Here's a solution: leave the law the hell off the Internet. Let mesh networks blossom, leave people the fuck alone, let video fly through the air, lasr backbones branch from neighborhood to neighborhood, phone companies strange to death -- LEAVE US ALONE. The laws covering child porn, fraud, harrassment et all already existed. This is an issue of command and control, not "crime". If businesses don't want to be hacked, let them collectively build an encrypted PRIVATE system on fiber and data lines, just like they used to, and keep off the citizen's internet.
LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE, YOU WANKERS!
The company is out there, they have the tech, they're waiting for an investor.
sometimes, the world is just too dense to change. D'ya think the BluRay/HD-DVD consortia want ANOTHER player, one that makes them look like tools, to enter the market? The Holographic Discs and cards are going to moulder to death in a dark media corner if the boys at the two competing standards have anything to say about it.
" Um, I'm Canadian, actually, but nice try." Difference being? I'd love to live in Canada, but come on, tell us when we're wrong!
World currencies are ascendent, while the US dollar is plunging. The Chinese decoupled from the dollar months ago. We've begun our final approach to Depression Airport.
"alarmist rhetoric" We've killed 100,000 innocent people, imprisoned and tortured thousands more, sometimes to death, and maimed thousands of the same innocent. The water in Baghdad, when running, contains fecal matter. The administration and Italy under Berlusconni are implicated in fabricating the documents used to justify invading a non-hostile country and destroying it. The entire planet wants us to go away and die, and lose a few pounds while we're at it. BTW, even Afghanistan wasn't at war with us; we killed them to feel better. The real perpetrators walked away, and are still at large and laughing at us...
The US killed 33 times the number of innocents killed on 9/11, has already invaded Syria and is attempting to use crappy documents to overturn their government (while we're using their torturers!). We've had special forces in Iran for over a year marking bomb targets. We've not moved because we don't have the manpower; too much cake, not enough mouth. This week documents popped up showing the administrations post-Castro Cuba planning, which involves supporting "freedom fighters" we're to pay for, and a lovely plan on cutting up their economy to benefit ourselves. Invade and Liberate! We're going to have a party and get cheap Cuban hookers! Yeah! Frag! America Fuck Yeah!
My mom used to work at the welfare office for the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago. She used to listen to some of her fellow workers sitting at screens, data mining the client's records for people who weren't at home during working hours. They were using the information to rob the empty homes during lunch hours. True story.
Technology gives bad people with power ever more ways of fucking you over. If they DON'T need the tool, don't give it to them. We didn't need RFID passports before, and we don't need them now. Misdirection is afoot. What ELSE are they adding to the passports besides RFID? Get that question answered, and you'll know how they are fucking us in brand new ways.
When a corporation or a government (in the U.S., indistiguishable now) wants a new way to track people, it's never for the citizens' good, but for their own. Acquiesence to tyranny happens a tiny bit at a time. In twenty years, a whole generation of the world's people will have grown up in a virtual prison, and won't even notice.
Instead of siphoning off votes from the anti-Republican party, why not just take over the Democratic party and make it what you want it to be?
Or, if the Republicans are jetisoned from power next year and for a generation after that, since that looks increasingly likely, maybe take over the shell of that discredited monster, instead of the Democratic party, and make it what you will.
Making a new party won't work. The other two own every way to power. Sometimes the way to kill a dragon is to make sure you get swallowed, then hack it to bits from within... sorry, a D&D flashback. For you Mech fans, a better analogy would be to kick open the door of the mech's control room and take over the robot from within. Ah, metaphors...
In case you younguns don't recall, TV in the U.S. was always free to watch, and free to record on your VCR.
This is nothing less than a Castro-like attempt to reprogram the minds of an entire culture. TV programs as property you can "steal"? WTF????
Don't let them reprogram ya, kids! Cry "bullshit" and let loose the dogs of war.
So he treated her like shit, and she blew him. And made another date. If he'd been polite, and calmly made his point, he'd have been unfun and a spineless nerd.
Women: "Why are guys such assholes? Where are all the nice men who treat us with minimum respect?"
They die virgins, and never reproduce. Because women like assholes. They're more fun.
Kinda explains why the assholes tend to all be physically similar: they're all fathered by, like, some really vicious, amoral, yet fun dude who do everyone's wife. All the dudes in the Clark Street and Lincoln avenue bars in Chicago are the same 6'1" baseball cap wearing guy with a lantern jaw and no respect for any woman in the house. They're all related to some dude with XYY chromosomes from KY who passed through Lake Forest 28 years ago.
As long as women want to be treated like fools, they will be. Shrug.
Fin.
"1 - It won't be accurate as GPS"
It is GPS. Every phone sold this year and forevermore in the US has GPS built in. You have a tracking device on you. It's a done deal. There is an option on the phone menu to "turn it off", but if you believe that they won't turn it back on unbeknownst to you if a cop or a government official or a businessman with a nice fat bribe asks it be done, well...
"Some of us don't think that governments should be able to make threats to businesses and affect the way they're run."
True. And you are ideologues, and you have control of the government now. And you are wrong on all counts. Corporations are licensed to exist by the grace of the people through their elected representatives and the laws that they enact. Businesses are not godlike entities subject only to their own whims, able to manipulate markets to their advantage. Businesses exist by our sufferance; we do not exist by theirs.
"Whatever power Bill Gates may have, he certainly doesn't have the power to take a penny of my earnings if I don't want him to have it."
Wrong and wrong. Microsoft has had a "PC tax" for decades, getting a cut of the price of any PC sold, even if it had no MS product on it, by abusing their power and punishing anyone who refused to pay the MS tax by taking away their purchase discount. That is how they built their business, how they abused their monoploy to make more monopoly. Tens of billions of dollars are siphoned from our pockets involuntarily. And we are stuck with crappy OS's because it was cheaper to but MS's OS on a box than, say, DR-DOS, because the businesses had to pay for TWO OS's. You've worked for Bill for quite a while now.
"He can't put me in prison for refusing to pay him or for disobeying his orders."
REALLY? Try copying a single copy of Windows onto all your boxes. Call Bill and tell him what you've done. Refuse to go to court, refuse to pay the fine, refuse to show up to prison. See what happens.
"He can't break into my house and search for drugs. He can't send my sons to war. He hasn't incinerated any religious sects, and none of his agents has shot a mother in the head while she was holding her baby. He doesn't even seem interested in doing any of these things."
Yet. You've gone off the rails.
Corporations can and do kill people; you just don't hear about it. A diamond mine strike in Africa got some workers killed -- no one in jail last I heard. Corporations exist so that no one has personal responsiblity for their actions. Bhopal disaster in India. No on in jail. Union organizers rotting in holes. No one in jail. Poisonous landfills all over, cancer everywhere around them. No one in jail. Businesses DO kill. And you're thinking the future will be just like the present: after generations of priviledge and total power, you don't think the amoral, law-free corporations of 2100 won't kill with impugnity? You cut the sapling down while saws can still cut it, not wait until it's an unkillable forest.
And Bill doesn't have to break into your house to perform a search: with XP and Vista, he doesn't have to. He just built it into your license to use XP.
"Prosecuting a monoploy" ain't "holding a grudge". Semantic trickery.
Nope. Monopolies destroy "free markets". That's what Adam Smith, no less, said. And he was right. If the result of a "free market" is the permanent elimination of a free market, then you've hit a recursive loop and have fallen off the flat earth.
And here's a thing: a nation doesn't maintain free markets to enable companies to do whatever they want. Free markets are maintained for the benefit of the common good, so that prices are kept sane, product can't be embargoes on personal whim, and we the people have a market responsive to our needs, NOT THE COMPANY'S.
Corporations are licensed legal fictions designed to remove personal liability from the exectives of same. They exist for our purposes - the market is not kept free for their benefit, but for ours.
Letting busineses grow into monopolies, unregulated, will just create a new feudalism which will in no way be a free market enabling a free people. The only people "free" in a world without business regulations will be the owners of the businesses.
We regulate monopolies so we can retain free markets. That's not just Adam Smith, it's the law.
Yup. If they don't want to sell in South Korea, then SC should be able to buy from OEM's, or just have product shipped from the states without involving MS.
But Microsoft won't let that happen, will it? They claim they can control distribution of their software down to the processor level.
So yes, it does make sense to control an abusive monopoly that refuses to have software RESOLD to a country they've decided to embargo. Last I heard, Microsoft wasn't a nation.
South Korea: "Obey the damned law. You are crushing competitive businesses by abusing your monopoly position in the market."
Microsoft: "We know. That's what we do. Altho we aren't a monopoly. Really. Now, exempt us from the law, or we don't do business in South Korea. That's what we call 'crushing laws we don't like'. It's a thing we monopolies do. Fuck you, and God Save Ayn Rand."
"They have the right to do whatever they want with it."
NO. Monopolies do NOT have the right to do whatever they want with their monopoly control. That's why they're monopolies, that's why we regulate them more than competitive companies. They dictate terms and kill free markets. We LIKE free markets.
They are a monopoly, and monopolies are regulated for JUST THIS REASON. Microsoft is demanding that legal investigations into their anticompetitive actions be halted, or they will cripple South Korea by refusing to sell them product. That is the CLASSIC REASON why monopolies are anti-free market!
NO. THEY DON'T GET TO DECIDE WHERE THERE PRODUCT IS SOLD. THEY ARE AN ABUSIVE MONOPOLY. They've lost the right. That's why we r-e-g-u-l-a-t-e them, even if Bush's government won't touch them because they hate monopoly regulations.
This isn't an "opinion", this is established law. They are not free agents anymore. They don't get to throttle their "enemies".
A monopoly corporation can dictate terms to an entire nation, demanding to be exempt from their laws. Let them do what they want, or they cripple South Korea. Who will stop them?
How Bush fucked us over, #34,451: appointing industry lobby lawyers to the Justice Department who simply ignored the findings of the courts, letting Microsoft go unmolested and whole at the beginning of this numskull's reign. The world will be paying for that for another decade.
Go Linux. It's the pinhole of sunlight you sight at the top of the rubble blocking the collapsed mineshaft entrance. We might make it out of here...
And you don't have an answer to the question.
If you don't want to participate, don't. Stop stuffing the threads with posts about how lame everyone's questions, knowledge and motivations are.
I'm actually interested in what people have thought about this very topic, AND I'm not a petabyte database expert. So it's news to me. And probably is to you as well.
Well, a decent reality show, a la a National Geographic special, not "Survivor".
But fly-on-the-wall coverage of colonizing Mars? Oh, yes, I'd watch.
The seal is used in movies, too. No one seems to care about that, either.
The Onion, along with Comedy Central, are practically the only media outlets that have actually hurt the Bushists in the last five years. They are Cheney's #1 targets for vengeance.
Although he might want to hurry up. One of his little campaigns for payback is about to bear fruit as a series of indictments from a federal prosecutor. He's going to be a busy man, trying to take down the justice system.
And one more thing: help finance the project by making it the ultimate Reality TV show. How much do broadcast rights to watching the early days of the colonization of Mars cost? And send some real damned people too, not just white male engineers from Ohio. Send some artists, some writers, some women, for crissakes. Record everything. Even if you can't go to Mars, you can experience it vicariously. What a show...
Been waiting to make exactly that point. Yup, the Apollo Syndrome at work. Send Presbyterians on a very expensive round trip to Mars (no sex allowed -- see the latest NASA news) to pick up rocks to Work Out the Origin of the Solar System and to Find Evidence That Life Once Existed On Mars. Expensive, useless, and oh so juiceless.
If you want to go to Mars, send people to Mars on a one-way trip. Land hospital modules, food, equipment to build housing and greenhouses, rovers, everything. Land the supply drops a few times a year. If someone wants a round trip, let them take a trip to Bermuda.
Sink or swim, do or literally die. If they can't make the greenhouses work, keep dumping MRE's on them indefinitely: food doesn't take up much mass. A smart group will keep making O2 and housing until they lick the groceries problem. They'll have to: no choice.
I'd go. And NASA can kiss my ass about the "no sex" rule. Grow up, you would-be Cotton Mathers.