" yeah but 72 virgins is a remarkeably limited view of heaven. I mean why would you need more than one virgin?"
Maybe it's 72 at any one time. Perhaps they rotate out, so you get a new batch of 72 every once in a while. And maybe you can multitask. Heaven may be more flexible than you think.
At least muslims have a travel brochure. Jews and Xians have intense views on what hell is like -- check out any Sunday morning megachurch broadcast -- but heaven is badly sketched in. As it stands, hell seems like it has more variety. Lots of stories about harrowing hell, but not may about invading heaven. It's like invading Seattle.
Don't forget drug testing. Purely voluntary -- if you don't mind being unemployed. Of course, only people showing signs of drugging themselves will ever be tested... wasn't that the original purpose?
Man, I thought I was a pessimist. But they're moving so fast towards a corporatist police state that even I'm shocked.
Well, hell yes. Ford makes cars and trucks that go faster than 75 miles per hour, even tho the speed is illegal. They are winking at the speeders. How many people die every year because of that excess capacity for speed? And Ford is not liable... why?
"But why is this so bad? Why shouldn't the creator continue to be paid for his creation? Everyone says this is a horrible thing, but why is it a horrible thing? Is it just because YOU don't want to pay for something, or is their some grander scheme?"
Straw man.
Firstly, the vast, vast major of contracted musicians don't see a penny from their copyrighted works, because they don't own the copyrights -- the labels do. And the labels screw them out of whatever cash they may be entitled to. Even successful artists rarely see a dime until the second or third hit album.
And anyway, copyright and payment is not a bad thing -- if it is limited for a short time. Copyright, however, is now eternal, and the original bargain made by the Constitution's framers is dead. Until copyright is reined in, it is a Bad Thing.
"what does a "free market" mean when there is only a single source of the goods?"
You've changed the definition of the goods. There is ONE source in the world for U2 performances -- U2 itself. That's what concerts are for, to obtain that unique product that only U2 can provide.
BUT, the recordings of the songs are not provided by a monopoly - not anymore - have millions of sources available for repro, are infinitely reproducible at almost no cost, and have a street value of either retail price or free. Amazingly, a lot of people are purchasing the retail package, but free seems to be popular as well. The free market has assigned its values. That the copyright lords do not agree with the reality of the free market doesn't change the reality. The copyright holders should be shudderingly grateful that people are willing to pay anything at all for a 25 cent disc.
"U2 can never compete with the freeloaders on price as long as they have to recoup their costs before they can turn a profit."
Obviously, they can compete. Bono doesn't seem to be hurtin' for money.
Bands, as I said before, rarely make money off of their album sales because of the amazing accounting practices of the recording industry. They DO make money off of their live performances, after the labels eat their share. Live performances are the way to go if you want to eat.
As for the revenues of the labels, who give a crap. They don't give it to their artists, and if you'll recall, they almost slipped a provision into federal law that would have made ALL RECORDINGS "works for hire" -- meaning the payment the artist received for recording the work would have been the LAST payment the artist would ever see, because the copyright would have been owned by the labels forever and ever and ever. And they probably would have taken the payment back from the artists for "expenses" that only they could define.
Wrappin' it up, I can only throw in my only real, extralegal reason for tossing copyright into the trash. Copyright was a deal, a compromise in the Constitution, that let a creator make money for a limited time, and then released the work into the public domain in less than 20 years. That would insure that things like "Huckleberry Finn" would be part of the public heritage, and available for interpretation and expansion or whatever anyone wanted to do with it.
But Twain's writings are STILL COPYRIGHTED, and will be forever; they are held by an IP concern which trades in the stuff like stock certificates. This is the reality. The works of mankind are now product, never to be released.
The deal was broken in the late 20th century. WE did not break it; greedy, selfish and stupid men broke it. They killed copyright by making it eternal, and made it criminal to violate their "property", making "reading" or "copying" equivalent to "stealing". Just the semantic evil of what they've done pisses me off.
Broadcast radio, and to some extent television, generated a sense of community and national identity by providing a common watering hole for all to listen to in times of crisis.
The loss of community radio, IMO, will be the death of our national identity. Reregulate! Break up the conglomerates! Hang the Powellites. Diversify the content. Make those frequencies sacrosanct, or we become a non-nation.
The suburbs are the most inefficient lifestyle possible, and the cities paid for the infrastructure (roads, primarily) that made it possible for them to exist in their isolated splendor.
Irony is thatthe suburbs are becoming cities now, and are complaining about footing the bills to equip "the people in the sticks". News: suburbs are the sticks, too, and they've cost the US a fortune.
Some years back I wrote a back-of-the-envelope calculation totalling how much Americans had paid for internet access since the very beginning, and then contrasted that figure with the costs of fibering every point and providing eternal high-speed access as a national governmental non-profit project.
It wasn't even close. We could have fibered every home and business in the US ten years ago at a fraction of what we have paid for "competitive" private business to do the pitiful job they do know. Capped uploads, because they are content providers and don't want you competing with them by being a broadcaster; usage monitoring; price increases not mandated by rising costs; capricious repair charges; bribing government officials; locking out private and municipal developers of free 802.11 services; mergers that raise, not decrease, prices; "morals" monitoring, coming soon; union blocking...
We could have gigabit WAN with ethernet jacks in every home. Costs per unit would have dropped because of the enormous clout the purchasing agent would have brought to bear on the manufacturers.
To forestall the first objection I feel coming on, the costs you all will cite for fibering up a home are irrelevant. Those current costs are jacked up enormously for a premium service from natural monopolies. Cost per unit would drop if the profit motive were removed.
Somehow we managed to build highways, provide electricity, natural gas, and telephone service in the US during the 19th and 20th centuries without creating profit-choked monsters to ream us for every penny they could make, and if not for the ideologues in vogue today, we wouldn't be paying them today.
Businesses in the US are based on the Randian corporate model, and are inherent liars and thieves, tho they've developed techniques among their decision makers to pretend that they are not, even to themselves. Regulation is essential, or they will devour anything they can get their hands on.
Widespread WiFi built by citizen contributors, linked by laser or microwave backbones, could have broken this stranglehold, but the first laws are already in place to prevent the possibility.
Internet access is a public utility, and should be treated as such. It is also not a limited resource, like gas or electicity -- scarcity models are not applicable, however much the current providers are trying to imitate scarcity.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever. eBooks do not need a bloody laptop. I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?... lawsuits from publishers?
Terrorism is a description of a methodology, as seen by the attacked.
"Al Qaeda" as a term did not exist prior to a certain (sorry) trial where a criminal termed his movement in that fashion, spinning a tale of massive worldwide organization. He got a reduced sentence, I believe.
His tale was used exclusively by Bush and the neocons after 9-11 (without crediting the source). Point is, there was no "Al Qaeda" in name or organization prior to 9-11 -- but now there is. Any radical fundie who wants to blow something up now will call himself a member of "Al Qaeda". It's a like a decentralized franchise operation.
There were quite a few operatives in this operation. It took coordination, and that takes numbers. BUT. Not that many. This could have been done by four people, total, on the low side. Grandly expanding four psychos into a worldwide "terrorist" army with which we are at war will be Blair's and Bush's instant exploitation.
This is a CRIMINAL act, not an act of war. Timothy McVeigh was not a member of the militant terrorist Michigan Militia, and that group was not at war with the U.S. What bin Laden is, is a nutjob, and he has a small cadre of nutjobs that are with him. He can't declare war. He's not a country. He's a criminal. Send police after him. SAME with these nutjobs.
OTOH, could have been Iraqis bringing the war back to Britain.
Iraq has nothing to do with the f*^&ing "war" on "terror". The people there are fighting us because we invaded and took over their country, incidentally stealing their oil and establishing a permanent military garrison. It's called an insurgency, and insurgents use guerilla tactics. The invader calls it "terrorism". Nut jobs are indeed coming in from around the world, but Bush was falsly invoking them as the cause of the insurgency from day one of the occupation; they are not the primary movers. Iraq did not harbor jihadists. He lied. Iraq NOW has pissed off citizenry that will eventually bring the war to the US and Britain. But we MADE them. They did not exist before.
What makes my fury boil is the way Bush and Blair will idiotically and unashamedly link the criminal act in London to the need to continue the "War on Terror" in Iraq, making the ears of informed people bleed from the sheer pain of listening to the exploitation of death. Iraq may very well have spawned the attacks on London, but IF the attack came from Iraq, then B&B brought it on. Bush actually said, "Bring it on!" when asked about terrorist attacks engendered by his invasion of Iraq.
Well, they've brought it on, either the nutjobs or pissed-off Iraqis. What now, you fake cowboy? Gonna keep killing "terrorists" until the world runs out of them, as you've implied?
I think people are consistently misinterpreting what the SCOTUS divined.
They did not say that the Grokster creators were touting downloading copyrighted material. They did not say that the creators had failed to emphasize the legal uses over the "illegal" ones. After all, the entire defense was based on the legal uses for Grokster and similar sharing services.
They ARE saying that Grokster's creators are liable because and ONLY BECAUSE THEY WROTE THE THING. The mere act of writing the code was with the intent, per the SCOTUS, of getting around the shutdowns of earlier systems -- the "infamous" Napster was mentioned -- and that in and of itself was the reason that they could be sued.
They can be sued because they wrote a Napster-like system after Napster was shut down with the intent of restarting Napster-like behavior on downloaders' parts.
No amount of finger shaking or on-page disclaimers -- which are indeed there after all -- would be enough to get the creators off the hook.
The ACT of creating Grokster was sufficient provocation for lawsuit. Write a Grokster, you're fucked, because, in their opinion, you did it to promote downloading stuff that is copyrighted.
No advertisements for legal use, no amount of scolding your users will be sufficient to keep the RIAA from suing you.
The SCOTUS made a value judgement. They said 90% of the sample taken were of "illegal" downloads, in a statistical analysis (I assumed the plaintiff paid for); the remaining ten percent wasn't enough. They simply used their "common sense", and killed filesharing in the United States.
An "unnamed US battlefield doctor" is quoted? No medical journal publication? No details? Unknown "research" center? READY TO TEST ON HUMANS IN A YEAR? BULLSHIT. Never would happen. Not in a year, not from one dinky study. And cold blood would damage the tissues. And I can't imagine how the dog's mind would survive intact, but that's just me.
If they are not common carriers, they are screwed.
Common carriers are not held liable for the communications of their users. Informations services, whatever the hell those are, may be.
Since they are ISP's, that means that some ISPs now may have to actively police what you are doing online, in case you are violating some law. Wait for it. They have just entered hell -- or WE have.
An occupier would deal with the issue of an armed populace thusly: if a townsman fires on an occupation soldier, they take the women of the town and rape them, take the children away (better than just killing them - uncertainty is true hell), torture a random selection of the men, and kill everyone at the very end. The property is divvied up amongs the survivors of the dead soldier's family. It would be televised, of course.
The U.S. in Iraq has been quietly kidnapping family members of people they want to "question" and holding them in our lovely facilities until the "rebel" surrenders. You may not hear about it on CBS, but the news is out there if you want to find it.
The occupied country has to really, really want to win if it wants to kick out invaders by pistol power. You have to be utterly ruthless. Taking a potshot at a passing tank wouldn't qualify. You'd have to blow up installations, knowing full well you're taking your own people out as well. More than a rifle, more than a shotgun -- it takes will, and organization.
You can't win revolutions by sniping at tanks from behind a tree. The guns in our houses won't win us a lick of freedom. They just make us feel better. Freedom comes from watching who you vote for, watching what they vote for, watching where the money is going, caring about foreign policy, understanding history, understanding current events, and never, ever letting an idiot run your country.
And the rest of you, when are you joining up? The Army is in desperate need of you. Recruitment is down, nothing is helping. Three? Only three?
If all the young people who wanted this war would join up today, there'd be more than enough boots on the ground. You'd help the soldiers who are stuck there today, undermanned, live.
There is no excuse. You think the invasion and occupation is worth dying for? You think Bush and Rice and Cheney didn't lie their asses off?
JOIN. That's what war is about, sacrifice.
When are you sacrificing yourself?
If you don't think the occupation and asset seizure is worth your career, your education, your reproductive organ's attachment to your nether regions, or your very life -- then you have no right to support this war, demand its continuation, or demand that OTHERS SERVE IN YOUR PLACE.
Join, and help a private contractor making a thousand dollars per diem in the Green Zone see another day.
JOIN. Or oppose the war. You have no other options, Young Republicans.
You've misunderstood the purpose of antitrust law. The finding of monopoly status does not put MS under the gun for movement in the OS sphere. After all, they own that arena.
The idea of antitrust is to prevent a monopoly from using its exclusive position in one market to create monopoly positions in new markets, which is what MS tries to do at every opportunity. Bill is VERY against antitrust law, for obvious reasons.
But as you say, this DOJ is owned by MS and hands-off ideologues. There will not be antitrust movement against MS in this generation - if ever.
What he wrote is called "research" and "journalism". He talked to the principals, traced the FUD campaign to its source, and connected the dots.
His second major point after the main story was that NO ONE ELSE bothered to do the work to investigate the bittorrent-is-infected meme and where it came from. Who benefits, indeed.
It's a breakdown in all levels of news accuracy since the destruction of the old network news organizations and the rise of for-profit tabloid schlock. Fun to read is not the same as "real".
It's called journalism. You don't agree with the conclusion, state your reasons and sources. Is Dvorak wrong about the source of the Bittorrent smear? Is it outrageous, considering 24 years of MS underhanded attacks on competitors, that they are now launching a long-term smear-and-envelop campaign against a protocol that doesn't have a meter built-in to pump money into MS?
Attack-the-man isn't an interesting comment. It's Fox News.
The "Snow Crash" world is as dystopian as it gets. The US government becomes just another corporation, torturing and drugging its employees in an endless paranoid self-important meaningless power fantasy; pollution is totally uncontrolled, the last wildernesses in Alaska are invaded and ruined by White People in Giant Motorhomes. Prisons are private and are as generic as 7-11's, used by private police corporations to dump any one they damned want gone. Communities are gated, patrolled, armed, openly racist and fascist. The US armed forces have become Uncle Bob's Army, inc., in addition to a jillion little private armies. The CIA has gone private. The land is stripmalled from coast to coast. Everything is a franchise. People are starving and living in shacks. GOOD apartments for people like Hiro are former storage lockers. Every plot of land is corporate and a sovereign state. The U.S. is DEAD.
Slashdot Mirror
The odds of a single neutrino impacting a single atom of your body is astronomically remote.
This issue, EM saturation, hasn't been addressed, and because of utility and profit, never will be.
But Heinlein was ahead of us all. "Waldo".
" yeah but 72 virgins is a remarkeably limited view of heaven. I mean why would you need more than one virgin?"
Maybe it's 72 at any one time. Perhaps they rotate out, so you get a new batch of 72 every once in a while. And maybe you can multitask. Heaven may be more flexible than you think.
At least muslims have a travel brochure. Jews and Xians have intense views on what hell is like -- check out any Sunday morning megachurch broadcast -- but heaven is badly sketched in. As it stands, hell seems like it has more variety. Lots of stories about harrowing hell, but not may about invading heaven. It's like invading Seattle.
Don't forget drug testing. Purely voluntary -- if you don't mind being unemployed. Of course, only people showing signs of drugging themselves will ever be tested... wasn't that the original purpose?
Man, I thought I was a pessimist. But they're moving so fast towards a corporatist police state that even I'm shocked.
Well, hell yes. Ford makes cars and trucks that go faster than 75 miles per hour, even tho the speed is illegal. They are winking at the speeders. How many people die every year because of that excess capacity for speed? And Ford is not liable... why?
"But why is this so bad? Why shouldn't the creator continue to be paid for his creation? Everyone says this is a horrible thing, but why is it a horrible thing? Is it just because YOU don't want to pay for something, or is their some grander scheme?"
Straw man.
Firstly, the vast, vast major of contracted musicians don't see a penny from their copyrighted works, because they don't own the copyrights -- the labels do. And the labels screw them out of whatever cash they may be entitled to. Even successful artists rarely see a dime until the second or third hit album.
And anyway, copyright and payment is not a bad thing -- if it is limited for a short time. Copyright, however, is now eternal, and the original bargain made by the Constitution's framers is dead. Until copyright is reined in, it is a Bad Thing.
"what does a "free market" mean when there is only a single source of the goods?"
You've changed the definition of the goods. There is ONE source in the world for U2 performances -- U2 itself. That's what concerts are for, to obtain that unique product that only U2 can provide.
BUT, the recordings of the songs are not provided by a monopoly - not anymore - have millions of sources available for repro, are infinitely reproducible at almost no cost, and have a street value of either retail price or free. Amazingly, a lot of people are purchasing the retail package, but free seems to be popular as well. The free market has assigned its values. That the copyright lords do not agree with the reality of the free market doesn't change the reality. The copyright holders should be shudderingly grateful that people are willing to pay anything at all for a 25 cent disc.
"U2 can never compete with the freeloaders on price as long as they have to recoup their costs before they can turn a profit."
Obviously, they can compete. Bono doesn't seem to be hurtin' for money.
Bands, as I said before, rarely make money off of their album sales because of the amazing accounting practices of the recording industry. They DO make money off of their live performances, after the labels eat their share. Live performances are the way to go if you want to eat.
As for the revenues of the labels, who give a crap. They don't give it to their artists, and if you'll recall, they almost slipped a provision into federal law that would have made ALL RECORDINGS "works for hire" -- meaning the payment the artist received for recording the work would have been the LAST payment the artist would ever see, because the copyright would have been owned by the labels forever and ever and ever. And they probably would have taken the payment back from the artists for "expenses" that only they could define.
Wrappin' it up, I can only throw in my only real, extralegal reason for tossing copyright into the trash. Copyright was a deal, a compromise in the Constitution, that let a creator make money for a limited time, and then released the work into the public domain in less than 20 years. That would insure that things like "Huckleberry Finn" would be part of the public heritage, and available for interpretation and expansion or whatever anyone wanted to do with it.
But Twain's writings are STILL COPYRIGHTED, and will be forever; they are held by an IP concern which trades in the stuff like stock certificates. This is the reality. The works of mankind are now product, never to be released.
The deal was broken in the late 20th century. WE did not break it; greedy, selfish and stupid men broke it. They killed copyright by making it eternal, and made it criminal to violate their "property", making "reading" or "copying" equivalent to "stealing". Just the semantic evil of what they've done pisses me off.
They declared war on the human race, not me.
Broadcast radio, and to some extent television, generated a sense of community and national identity by providing a common watering hole for all to listen to in times of crisis.
The loss of community radio, IMO, will be the death of our national identity. Reregulate! Break up the conglomerates! Hang the Powellites. Diversify the content. Make those frequencies sacrosanct, or we become a non-nation.
The suburbs are the most inefficient lifestyle possible, and the cities paid for the infrastructure (roads, primarily) that made it possible for them to exist in their isolated splendor.
Irony is thatthe suburbs are becoming cities now, and are complaining about footing the bills to equip "the people in the sticks". News: suburbs are the sticks, too, and they've cost the US a fortune.
Some years back I wrote a back-of-the-envelope calculation totalling how much Americans had paid for internet access since the very beginning, and then contrasted that figure with the costs of fibering every point and providing eternal high-speed access as a national governmental non-profit project.
It wasn't even close. We could have fibered every home and business in the US ten years ago at a fraction of what we have paid for "competitive" private business to do the pitiful job they do know. Capped uploads, because they are content providers and don't want you competing with them by being a broadcaster; usage monitoring; price increases not mandated by rising costs; capricious repair charges; bribing government officials; locking out private and municipal developers of free 802.11 services; mergers that raise, not decrease, prices; "morals" monitoring, coming soon; union blocking...
We could have gigabit WAN with ethernet jacks in every home. Costs per unit would have dropped because of the enormous clout the purchasing agent would have brought to bear on the manufacturers.
To forestall the first objection I feel coming on, the costs you all will cite for fibering up a home are irrelevant. Those current costs are jacked up enormously for a premium service from natural monopolies. Cost per unit would drop if the profit motive were removed.
Somehow we managed to build highways, provide electricity, natural gas, and telephone service in the US during the 19th and 20th centuries without creating profit-choked monsters to ream us for every penny they could make, and if not for the ideologues in vogue today, we wouldn't be paying them today.
Businesses in the US are based on the Randian corporate model, and are inherent liars and thieves, tho they've developed techniques among their decision makers to pretend that they are not, even to themselves. Regulation is essential, or they will devour anything they can get their hands on.
Widespread WiFi built by citizen contributors, linked by laser or microwave backbones, could have broken this stranglehold, but the first laws are already in place to prevent the possibility.
Internet access is a public utility, and should be treated as such. It is also not a limited resource, like gas or electicity -- scarcity models are not applicable, however much the current providers are trying to imitate scarcity.
'Tis a line from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
... lawsuits from publishers?
Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever. eBooks do not need a bloody laptop. I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
I was watching the "Daily Show" with John Stewart last night.
He showed a clip of Bush being asked by a reporter about the increased level of violent attacks in Iraq.
Bush smiled and started chuckling. Laughing. In the reporters face. In all our faces.
Death is so funny. Reporters are so funny when they ask about your war and the death you cause.
Yell at the insane man in the White House.
Terrorism is a description of a methodology, as seen by the attacked.
"Al Qaeda" as a term did not exist prior to a certain (sorry) trial where a criminal termed his movement in that fashion, spinning a tale of massive worldwide organization. He got a reduced sentence, I believe.
His tale was used exclusively by Bush and the neocons after 9-11 (without crediting the source). Point is, there was no "Al Qaeda" in name or organization prior to 9-11 -- but now there is. Any radical fundie who wants to blow something up now will call himself a member of "Al Qaeda". It's a like a decentralized franchise operation.
There were quite a few operatives in this operation. It took coordination, and that takes numbers. BUT. Not that many. This could have been done by four people, total, on the low side. Grandly expanding four psychos into a worldwide "terrorist" army with which we are at war will be Blair's and Bush's instant exploitation.
This is a CRIMINAL act, not an act of war. Timothy McVeigh was not a member of the militant terrorist Michigan Militia, and that group was not at war with the U.S. What bin Laden is, is a nutjob, and he has a small cadre of nutjobs that are with him. He can't declare war. He's not a country. He's a criminal. Send police after him. SAME with these nutjobs.
OTOH, could have been Iraqis bringing the war back to Britain.
Iraq has nothing to do with the f*^&ing "war" on "terror". The people there are fighting us because we invaded and took over their country, incidentally stealing their oil and establishing a permanent military garrison. It's called an insurgency, and insurgents use guerilla tactics. The invader calls it "terrorism". Nut jobs are indeed coming in from around the world, but Bush was falsly invoking them as the cause of the insurgency from day one of the occupation; they are not the primary movers. Iraq did not harbor jihadists. He lied. Iraq NOW has pissed off citizenry that will eventually bring the war to the US and Britain. But we MADE them. They did not exist before.
What makes my fury boil is the way Bush and Blair will idiotically and unashamedly link the criminal act in London to the need to continue the "War on Terror" in Iraq, making the ears of informed people bleed from the sheer pain of listening to the exploitation of death. Iraq may very well have spawned the attacks on London, but IF the attack came from Iraq, then B&B brought it on. Bush actually said, "Bring it on!" when asked about terrorist attacks engendered by his invasion of Iraq.
Well, they've brought it on, either the nutjobs or pissed-off Iraqis. What now, you fake cowboy? Gonna keep killing "terrorists" until the world runs out of them, as you've implied?
Maybe we should stop paying for Slashdot then.
Oh, wait...
I think people are consistently misinterpreting what the SCOTUS divined.
They did not say that the Grokster creators were touting downloading copyrighted material. They did not say that the creators had failed to emphasize the legal uses over the "illegal" ones. After all, the entire defense was based on the legal uses for Grokster and similar sharing services.
They ARE saying that Grokster's creators are liable because and ONLY BECAUSE THEY WROTE THE THING. The mere act of writing the code was with the intent, per the SCOTUS, of getting around the shutdowns of earlier systems -- the "infamous" Napster was mentioned -- and that in and of itself was the reason that they could be sued.
They can be sued because they wrote a Napster-like system after Napster was shut down with the intent of restarting Napster-like behavior on downloaders' parts.
No amount of finger shaking or on-page disclaimers -- which are indeed there after all -- would be enough to get the creators off the hook.
The ACT of creating Grokster was sufficient provocation for lawsuit. Write a Grokster, you're fucked, because, in their opinion, you did it to promote downloading stuff that is copyrighted.
No advertisements for legal use, no amount of scolding your users will be sufficient to keep the RIAA from suing you.
The SCOTUS made a value judgement. They said 90% of the sample taken were of "illegal" downloads, in a statistical analysis (I assumed the plaintiff paid for); the remaining ten percent wasn't enough. They simply used their "common sense", and killed filesharing in the United States.
He did indeed secretly check into a hospital under an assumed name last week. Refreezing?
An "unnamed US battlefield doctor" is quoted?
No medical journal publication?
No details?
Unknown "research" center?
READY TO TEST ON HUMANS IN A YEAR? BULLSHIT. Never would happen. Not in a year, not from one dinky study.
And cold blood would damage the tissues. And I can't imagine how the dog's mind would survive intact, but that's just me.
If they are not common carriers, they are screwed.
Common carriers are not held liable for the communications of their users. Informations services, whatever the hell those are, may be.
Since they are ISP's, that means that some ISPs now may have to actively police what you are doing online, in case you are violating some law. Wait for it. They have just entered hell -- or WE have.
An occupier would deal with the issue of an armed populace thusly: if a townsman fires on an occupation soldier, they take the women of the town and rape them, take the children away (better than just killing them - uncertainty is true hell), torture a random selection of the men, and kill everyone at the very end. The property is divvied up amongs the survivors of the dead soldier's family. It would be televised, of course.
The U.S. in Iraq has been quietly kidnapping family members of people they want to "question" and holding them in our lovely facilities until the "rebel" surrenders. You may not hear about it on CBS, but the news is out there if you want to find it.
The occupied country has to really, really want to win if it wants to kick out invaders by pistol power. You have to be utterly ruthless. Taking a potshot at a passing tank wouldn't qualify. You'd have to blow up installations, knowing full well you're taking your own people out as well. More than a rifle, more than a shotgun -- it takes will, and organization.
You can't win revolutions by sniping at tanks from behind a tree. The guns in our houses won't win us a lick of freedom. They just make us feel better. Freedom comes from watching who you vote for, watching what they vote for, watching where the money is going, caring about foreign policy, understanding history, understanding current events, and never, ever letting an idiot run your country.
USB relies on mediation from the CPU, among many other things that slow it down compared to Firewire. No Firewire thumb drives, I see. Geez.
And the rest of you, when are you joining up? The Army is in desperate need of you. Recruitment is down, nothing is helping. Three? Only three?
If all the young people who wanted this war would join up today, there'd be more than enough boots on the ground. You'd help the soldiers who are stuck there today, undermanned, live.
There is no excuse. You think the invasion and occupation is worth dying for? You think Bush and Rice and Cheney didn't lie their asses off?
JOIN. That's what war is about, sacrifice.
When are you sacrificing yourself?
If you don't think the occupation and asset seizure is worth your career, your education, your reproductive organ's attachment to your nether regions, or your very life -- then you have no right to support this war, demand its continuation, or demand that OTHERS SERVE IN YOUR PLACE.
Join, and help a private contractor making a thousand dollars per diem in the Green Zone see another day.
JOIN. Or oppose the war. You have no other options, Young Republicans.
Operation Yellow Elephant Help a Young Republican Join Today!
You've misunderstood the purpose of antitrust law. The finding of monopoly status does not put MS under the gun for movement in the OS sphere. After all, they own that arena.
The idea of antitrust is to prevent a monopoly from using its exclusive position in one market to create monopoly positions in new markets, which is what MS tries to do at every opportunity. Bill is VERY against antitrust law, for obvious reasons.
But as you say, this DOJ is owned by MS and hands-off ideologues. There will not be antitrust movement against MS in this generation - if ever.
What he wrote is called "research" and "journalism". He talked to the principals, traced the FUD campaign to its source, and connected the dots.
His second major point after the main story was that NO ONE ELSE bothered to do the work to investigate the bittorrent-is-infected meme and where it came from. Who benefits, indeed.
It's a breakdown in all levels of news accuracy since the destruction of the old network news organizations and the rise of for-profit tabloid schlock. Fun to read is not the same as "real".
It's called journalism. You don't agree with the conclusion, state your reasons and sources. Is Dvorak wrong about the source of the Bittorrent smear? Is it outrageous, considering 24 years of MS underhanded attacks on competitors, that they are now launching a long-term smear-and-envelop campaign against a protocol that doesn't have a meter built-in to pump money into MS?
Attack-the-man isn't an interesting comment. It's Fox News.
An eBook reader. Please.
It's not the trailers that will make you want to rip your eyes out. It's the COMMERCIALS for local businesses.
I paid twenty bucks to sit there. I want to see the movie. At the time they stated it was to start, not twenty minutes afterwards.
You can feel the anger in the audience, unfocused yet building, as the 30th commercial/trailer starts up...
The "Snow Crash" world is as dystopian as it gets. The US government becomes just another corporation, torturing and drugging its employees in an endless paranoid self-important meaningless power fantasy; pollution is totally uncontrolled, the last wildernesses in Alaska are invaded and ruined by White People in Giant Motorhomes. Prisons are private and are as generic as 7-11's, used by private police corporations to dump any one they damned want gone. Communities are gated, patrolled, armed, openly racist and fascist. The US armed forces have become Uncle Bob's Army, inc., in addition to a jillion little private armies. The CIA has gone private. The land is stripmalled from coast to coast. Everything is a franchise. People are starving and living in shacks. GOOD apartments for people like Hiro are former storage lockers. Every plot of land is corporate and a sovereign state. The U.S. is DEAD.