So, if you want to bring up playing around with fantasies...
Um, let's say someone believes that his country has a right to occupy a piece of land because 3000 or so years ago his ancestor obediently offered up his son to be a human sacrifice because a voice he heard in his head told him to. The voice in his head later rescinded its instructions to kill the guy's son, because he showed that he would value the approval of the voice in his head over that of a little boy one of his wives dropped off for him. This of course showed that human sacrifice was a-okay with the people of time, of course, but that's a talk for another time.
Okay, and then we have the guy who obtained great favor with his voice in his head when he offered up his virgin daughter to the mob for rape and/or murder if the would leave the three guys (who he suspected to be angels) alone.
Then we another guy who listened to the voice in HIS head which told him to clear town with his family because the voice was fixing to burn everyone alive because they were pissing the voice off. A wife looked back as they were leaving, the guy says, and was turned into a box of Morton's salt. At least that's what he told her kin when they asked where the hell she was.
Then we have the guy who heard a voice telling him to build a boat, put two of everything in it, and wait out a world flood which later no one else remembers happening, like, say, the Chinese, having been around for 4000 years or more.
That's reality-based community, not like them D&D fantasists.
You wouldn't want people who had strange ideas about reality in the ranks of your specialist armed forces.
Journalists do not merely have "rights" granted to them by law. People get this wrong.
Your rights, journalists' rights, are not granted to you by lawmakers. The right to speak is not "given" to us by the constitution or Congress; it is assumed to be a natural human right, beyond the control of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, the First Amendment merely states that the right may not be abridged. IT DOES NOT GRANT THE RIGHT, AND THAT RIGHT CANNOT BE TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU. You have that right no matter how many secret Presidential orders exist. The extremists infesting the Congress and the Judiciary and yes, the White House up to Bush himself, don't understand their own Constitution. We do NOT merely have the rights "given" to us by the founders and the government. According to the Nineth Amendment, the Constitution is NOT to be construed as excluding rights not listed. Specifically it says we DO have rights that are not listed, and that they need NOT be listed or granted by Congress to exist and be protected by the government. This is the basis of the "right to privacy", BTW. If we think we have a right that does not infringe others' rights, custom and common sense grants it to us. It's up to us to keep our rights, not to beg lawmakers and stormtroopers with plasma guns and recording devices to give them back to us. They won't. They don't think you have any.
Do journalists have the right to speak, and does it superceded trade secret laws the journalist has no part in? Of course. Just because no laws have been passed "granting" them this right does not mean they do not have it. Laws exist for libel or slanderous or life-threatening speech, and they seem to work fine. But truthful reporting is none of those.
Trade laws do NOT usurp the bill of rights. Commercial interests do not have more rights than mere human beings.
Congress shall make NO LAW abridging the freedom to speak. Anonymous speech has been upheld for two hundred years. Any lawyer or congresscritter who thinks he outranks natural rights, or thinks that they have the power to take them away with a whim, is dead fucking wrong.
And you don't outrank the First Amendment either, Steve Jobs. Slap yourself with a wet iBook. You've gone too far. Remember who the hell you were.
"And after an **AA person presents to the court a full audit of your network and sees your PCs as locked down but not your network...."
Read that again. The **AA is auditing my network. An industry group. Auditing. My. Network.
Not their province. I damn the laws that let INDUSTRY GROUPS conduct audits of MY PROPERTY. I gave them no such permission.
Get off of my property, varmint. Southwestern Bell doesn't get to monitor my phone conversations for defamation, and they bloody own the network. I will not stand for an industry rooting through my logs for possible cash making possiblities.
Why does the government need to find individual computers?
Not so simple:
What is the danger to the world that an individual PC is unidentified?
Compared to that danger, is the loss of anonymous free speech worth it?
If the answer is yes, then do we ourselves get to identify the PC's of CEO's, congressmen, celebrities, and other Upper Class members? Or is anonymity reserved for those who are rich enough, famous enough, powerful enough, or connected enough to hide?
And if they get to hide, but not us, isn't the very security we buy with our freedom to be anonymous then a sham? A method of control, the way Scott Ritter the ex-Marine weapons was slimed with kiddie-porn allegations from law enforcement that were just happening to be monitoring his habits just as he was being vindicated in his proclamations that the war's justifications were fake? BTW: the charges were dropped after his cred was ruined. Nice job burning the witch, Rove. Power to monitor coupled with the power to accuse and charge is the power to silence anyone, anytime for any reason and suffer NO CONSEQUENCES. Who was charged with sliming Ritter at such a politically convenient time for the Bushites? No one. And in the future, when they come for you, no one will save you or punish your accusers. Who themselves are anonymous and untouchable.
Are YOU safe from ruin is someone monitors you 24 hours a day?
If they can justify monitoring your internet usage, or track anyone they like, the legal precedent is set to monitor anyone, anytime, for any reason or non-reason, such as political/economic personal assassination. Not just your PC. What would stop them from establishing cameras on poles in front of your house to monitor your comings and goings? Microphones? They can already "sneak and peak" with a judges rubberstamp and no subpoena. They are establishing precedent to track your car with devices planted without warrant.
The current administration is currently using security laws to crush lawsuits about the detention and torture of people taken secretly after 9/11. Tom Delay used Homeland Security, illegally, to track down the Texas Democrats last year to bring them home to force a vote to disenfranchise Texas democrats - no penalties for him, and a precedent and example was set. The security apparatus established during the hysteria is being used to crush political oppostion to the President and his party; they have shown that they are abusing their power, and care nothing that anyone knows.
The internet is the last, only hope for anonymous gatherings and free speech left in the world, and they, the amalgamate they are desperately shutting down the last means of mankind to speak to power without getting arrested or ruined for claiming their birthright.
I've not the skills to fix this technically. But we need a new communications system, asap, that is not under U.S. control or capable of being traced or monitored. I've got zilch. Is there a way of making a new pipe that CAN'T be subverted or controlled by the power mad? This is a serious question, and we may need an answer really soon.
"- There is no blanket shield law for journalists in the US. Nothing along the lines of doctor-patient or lawyer-client privelege. There are some laws for more specific cases, but nothing generic."
It's called the First Amendment.
This situation is simple. The judge believes trade law overrides the First amendment, as well as 200+ years of journalistic tradition.
This is becoming increasingly common. Americans don't understand and don't care about their civil rights. And when judges become so pro-business that the First becomes a null, we've gone over the top at last.
All the more sad that so many Bush judges are now on the bench. The current situation is only a precursor to the next fifty years of amazing new findings by rightist judges. The legal atmosphere will be unrecognizable to anyone freshly imported from the 20th century.
And I am ashamed, horrified that Apple, of all companies, is doing this. I'm reconsidering my future purchases of their products.
Getting scooped on your product launch is part of being a free society. Any NDA's one has with one's employees is NOT the journalist's problem. A major part of journalism (pre-Bushism) is the cultivation of secret sources that reveal things their bosses don't like revealed. And Thinksecret is a news outlet, in the Ben Franklin tradition. If a gay call boy can get a daily pass under a fake name to the White House FOR TWO YEARS to be an undercover shill, and not be charged, and Robert Novak can out a CIA agent along with an entire CIA front company to ruin a White House critic without being arrested for treason, a man can report on an Apple product without being ruined.
Oil companies should not be permitted to buy this company, or the patents.
Guess who owns nickel-metal hydride battery patents? Yup. Exxon-Mobil. No electric cars here, move along, nothing to see.
If there is a threat to their business model, energy companies will buy out the corporation which developed the tech and drown it in the nearest toilet.
"Same thing as when an officer pulls you over and asks if it's OK to search your vehicle. A nice respectful "sorry, but I refuse to surrender my 4th ammendment rights under the Constitution of the United States." is all you need to say.":( I'm sorry, but the Renquist Supreme Court disagreed with you this year in the matter of impromptu car searches, in this case by drug-sniffing dogs. The usual rightist judges ruled that not only can police pull you over "just because", but that they can sic the drug-sniffers on your person and vehicle. It's important to win the War on Drugs, you see. A metaphor growing with interpretation, it seems.
You've no constitutional protection if you do not consent to idle searches, according to our beloved SCOTUS. Which is soon going to lose its soft and fuzzy interpretation of civil rights such as they demonstrated in that case, when Bush puts, oh say, ASHCROFT on the bench. Chief Justice Scalia, the Judge of God, Clarence Thomas, the Judge Who Doesn't Ask Questions, and Ashcroft... then Gonzalez, the Bush pal who wrote the new rules stating that torture is okay if the President thinks so, AND that the President is not subject to the laws of the U.S. or the oversight of Congress.
A true fascism is coming. Dogs in your car while you are getting your retinas scanned will be the least of it.
If you give a minute's thought, the "we-can-kick-you-out" rule will render a protestor unable to show at the local Sam's Club -- which now may be the only store in most rural/small towns of the United States. You can protest, and then shop at the 7-11 or gas station for the rest of your life. Until they decide you need to register for a card to shop in their stores. Face FORWARD: turn to the LEFT: place your fingertips in the ink pad, please....
Point hammered: if we let businesses require anything they like to shop at their stores, we are under a tyranny. Businesses are not feudal keeps, subject only to the King. They are corporations which hold a license to exist granted by US through our representatives. A. License. To. Exist. Not a right. They have no rights. If they want to operate stores, they can follow OUR rules. This is the basic failure of American imagination in the 21st century. We don't think we are in charge of anything personally, or think we have civil rights or even a basic right to privacy. BUT we think businesses can do anything they like. Corporations are not only legal citizens with civil rights -- they are the ONLY CITIZENS WITH ANY RIGHTS.
This insane belief has to be rooted out of the national mind and exposed to sunlight.
" How hard would it be to chuck a Knoppix disk in your CD drive and boot from it?"
Very. As of two days ago, it unmounted its own CD drive. Embarrassing, and I don't want to learn how to fix it -- it won't boot anymore. Embarrassing and weird.
That's the ONLY argument they have. Analog copying degrades over generations, but digital is perfect every time: therefore, it should be outlawed.
It's nonsense. Few people copied for mutliple generations of tapes, or at least for so many generations that it became unusable. And they pulled that argument out of their bunghole. It's deflecting and worthless.
Fair Use. It's what we've always had. We have the right to make copies of what comes on our TV's. Or radio. TV and radio, may I remind the universe, are government (citizen) granted business monopolies, money machines, to broadcast in the public good. The "good" part has been destroyed in the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, mergers, ideological takeovers of news departments of ALL over-air networks and worst of all, the paid-commerical "shows" that eat up airtime that is supposed to be filled with content in exchange for the license to broadcast. There was no provision in that granted monopoly over bandwidth for the businessmen to tell people what they could do with the content after it was broadcast, other than restrictions on selling access. That's why theaters can show TV show on their screens, but can't charge admission. Broadcasters should not be permitted to tell us, the people who granted them their CONTROLLED monopoly over OUR bandwidth, what we can do with the content. We can record, timeshift, and commercial strip. We can. If they don't like it, they are free to leave the TV industry and get a job doing something useful. We'll have no trouble finding someone to replace Disney, GE, or Viacom as stewards of our news and entertainment. Get lost if you don't like the rules, you greedy bastards.
This question was settled over twenty years ago! Recording TV is not bloody piracy. The broadcasters are trotting out the same stupid arguments they made before the bench then, but this time the semantic war redefining basic terminology is making the fight unwinnable by the sane.
Copying TV is not piracy. Passing copies around is not piracy. I know, I know, HBO is pay per view. But guess what? We've been recording the shows on VCR's for years. Passing them out to friends without cable. AND NO ONE CARED. Because it's not piracy, ie SELLING the tapes, and two, it didn't hurt HBO, it only made it more popular and made more people want to subscribe. As for satellite TV and similar, they've already bought laws making recordings almost impossible anyway.
But broadcast TV is being shot through my body right now. The idea is to have as many people watch as possible. At least for the last 65 years or so. We've been recording for almost thirty years, we've beaten back the loons who tried to make it a felony, and now they're back and winning, for God's sake.
The court system is stacked with extremely business friendly judges now, thanks to twenty five years of pro-free market Presidents, and there's no way of stopping them, especially since the regulators Bush appointed were lobbyists for the very industries they now regulate. It's a looting party for corporations. The legal precedents and semantic nastiness will be with us for the rest of our lives. Technology is being roped and tied by greedy gamers of the system, so it may not save us in the end. There won't be a place in the world you can manufacture tech not approved of by the powers in the U.S. God, they're raiding in Russia! The advance of corporate government is relentless, and largely ignored by the very people it locks into its worldview.
TV? Recording? PIRACY? Why not just call it rape or murder? The penalties would be less severe.
"I just ordered the older 40GB photo that includes all the accessories for $356. This sounded like a good deal to me so hopefully I didn't make a bad decision. "
There's a grace period when Apple changes prices during which you can kvetch and exchange your not-so-good deal for the new shiny good deal.
"(which leads to the crazy logic that the judge outright says that the FCC has no right to make this rule but he'll do nothing about it)"
That would make him a liberal activist judge. Horrors.
You've a point about the manufacturers. Damn. It takes months to set up a manufacuring line with or without the flag. They're screwed -- they might have to flog cards or PVR's crippled with the control mechanism for months until they get rid of the inventory, or else have to eat a season's worth of profit if they are compelled to destroy them.
I seem to recall that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to manufacture/sell phone phreaking equipment. Almost certainly illegal:)
How much "theft" did these two engender? Did they ever go to jail, considering how well known their criminal past is?
And where would the personal computing world be today if they had been arrested and ruined as this guy will be?
Apple is going down the path to corporate hell. Steve! remember where you came from. You might be destroying someone who will implant the first artificial eye, or who will finally bring medical information processing into the twentieth century. The kid didn't hurt you or your company.
For all those slashdotters over time who have read articles about the Patriot Act, or online surveillance, or dark people being tortured in Gitmo, or cameras on every fire hydrant and trackers in every car and phone, and said: Who Cares? this one's for you, something you actually can care about:
" The record is long taken. Another bit of the space race the Russians did first! Source"
THANKS! I've always wanted some info about Sex in Space. However, it still begs the question as to anyone has claimed the hetero OR homosexual flag. The Russian man and woman in question were both married to other people, and would not confess the adultery, so no official record there. And no gay astronauts have leapt forward for the prize, either, so the Grand Prize of First Coupling in Space is still (publically and officially) open for all comers. Um.
"Also, you do not need a woman for sex."
I covered my ass thusly: "The record for first man-woman sex in orbit is open for the taking!"
"I'm pretty sure that phones will retain the option activate GPS all the time or only when dialing 9-1-1."
Granted, but remember, when you boil a frog to death, do it slowly, so the frog doesn't notice.
It's only a matter of whim on the White House's part that would enable the GPS when you aren't aware. A mere flip of a software switch.
If you think they won't, then why is the GPS component mandatory? You'd think they'd let the consumer make the choice, no?
First they'll nail a pedophile or a murderer, and people will say "yay". Then it'll be used for The Sake of The Children, then for corporate tracking of employees. Then, after everyone is so-whatting the complaints - after all, what are you hiding? - the defacto tracker will be on at HS's whim. You'll never even notice the bits switch on in your data transmission. And Americans won't give a damn.
The killer app for spaceflight and orbital hotels is sex, my friends. Zero G, bounce off of the ceiling and invent new positions sex.
NASA is a collection of southern Methodists, historically. They NEVER talk about sex. We had a husband and wife team in orbit on the Shuttle over ten years back. Since there hasn't been any public record of Russians gettin' some on those long stays in the Salyut, the world record was ripe for the taking if the crew had given the couple some privacy. Never heard of it later, so I assume Americans kept their well-deserved title for Puritan respectabilty.
The primary business model for orbital hotels is SEX SEX SEX. And I still haven't heard a peep from reporters about this. The record for first man-woman sex in orbit is open for the taking!
Slashdot Mirror
" Chinese and many other civilizations have flood stories. "
But they don't believe it really happened. They call their stories "stories".
And their stories don't mention that they were wiped out and replaced by the family of some guy from the middle east.
So, if you want to bring up playing around with fantasies...
Um, let's say someone believes that his country has a right to occupy a piece of land because 3000 or so years ago his ancestor obediently offered up his son to be a human sacrifice because a voice he heard in his head told him to. The voice in his head later rescinded its instructions to kill the guy's son, because he showed that he would value the approval of the voice in his head over that of a little boy one of his wives dropped off for him. This of course showed that human sacrifice was a-okay with the people of time, of course, but that's a talk for another time.
Okay, and then we have the guy who obtained great favor with his voice in his head when he offered up his virgin daughter to the mob for rape and/or murder if the would leave the three guys (who he suspected to be angels) alone.
Then we another guy who listened to the voice in HIS head which told him to clear town with his family because the voice was fixing to burn everyone alive because they were pissing the voice off. A wife looked back as they were leaving, the guy says, and was turned into a box of Morton's salt. At least that's what he told her kin when they asked where the hell she was.
Then we have the guy who heard a voice telling him to build a boat, put two of everything in it, and wait out a world flood which later no one else remembers happening, like, say, the Chinese, having been around for 4000 years or more.
That's reality-based community, not like them D&D fantasists.
You wouldn't want people who had strange ideas about reality in the ranks of your specialist armed forces.
He's a Republican, and he is a schill. And it isn't the first time he's been called that; you just never hear it on TV.
Actually, the correct appellation is "traitor".
"FYI: In the state of California, it's a criminal matter. Breaking a binding NDA is illegal."
Contract law is not criminal law. If it is, California needs to take some Prozac.
Journalists do not merely have "rights" granted to them by law. People get this wrong.
Your rights, journalists' rights, are not granted to you by lawmakers. The right to speak is not "given" to us by the constitution or Congress; it is assumed to be a natural human right, beyond the control of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, the First Amendment merely states that the right may not be abridged. IT DOES NOT GRANT THE RIGHT, AND THAT RIGHT CANNOT BE TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU. You have that right no matter how many secret Presidential orders exist. The extremists infesting the Congress and the Judiciary and yes, the White House up to Bush himself, don't understand their own Constitution. We do NOT merely have the rights "given" to us by the founders and the government. According to the Nineth Amendment, the Constitution is NOT to be construed as excluding rights not listed. Specifically it says we DO have rights that are not listed, and that they need NOT be listed or granted by Congress to exist and be protected by the government. This is the basis of the "right to privacy", BTW. If we think we have a right that does not infringe others' rights, custom and common sense grants it to us. It's up to us to keep our rights, not to beg lawmakers and stormtroopers with plasma guns and recording devices to give them back to us. They won't. They don't think you have any.
Do journalists have the right to speak, and does it superceded trade secret laws the journalist has no part in? Of course. Just because no laws have been passed "granting" them this right does not mean they do not have it. Laws exist for libel or slanderous or life-threatening speech, and they seem to work fine. But truthful reporting is none of those.
Trade laws do NOT usurp the bill of rights. Commercial interests do not have more rights than mere human beings.
Congress shall make NO LAW abridging the freedom to speak. Anonymous speech has been upheld for two hundred years. Any lawyer or congresscritter who thinks he outranks natural rights, or thinks that they have the power to take them away with a whim, is dead fucking wrong.
And you don't outrank the First Amendment either, Steve Jobs. Slap yourself with a wet iBook. You've gone too far. Remember who the hell you were.
"And after an **AA person presents to the court a full audit of your network and sees your PCs as locked down but not your network...."
Read that again. The **AA is auditing my network. An industry group. Auditing. My. Network.
Not their province. I damn the laws that let INDUSTRY GROUPS conduct audits of MY PROPERTY. I gave them no such permission.
Get off of my property, varmint. Southwestern Bell doesn't get to monitor my phone conversations for defamation, and they bloody own the network. I will not stand for an industry rooting through my logs for possible cash making possiblities.
Why does the government need to find individual computers?
Not so simple:
What is the danger to the world that an individual PC is unidentified?
Compared to that danger, is the loss of anonymous free speech worth it?
If the answer is yes, then do we ourselves get to identify the PC's of CEO's, congressmen, celebrities, and other Upper Class members? Or is anonymity reserved for those who are rich enough, famous enough, powerful enough, or connected enough to hide?
And if they get to hide, but not us, isn't the very security we buy with our freedom to be anonymous then a sham? A method of control, the way Scott Ritter the ex-Marine weapons was slimed with kiddie-porn allegations from law enforcement that were just happening to be monitoring his habits just as he was being vindicated in his proclamations that the war's justifications were fake? BTW: the charges were dropped after his cred was ruined. Nice job burning the witch, Rove. Power to monitor coupled with the power to accuse and charge is the power to silence anyone, anytime for any reason and suffer NO CONSEQUENCES. Who was charged with sliming Ritter at such a politically convenient time for the Bushites? No one. And in the future, when they come for you, no one will save you or punish your accusers. Who themselves are anonymous and untouchable.
Are YOU safe from ruin is someone monitors you 24 hours a day?
If they can justify monitoring your internet usage, or track anyone they like, the legal precedent is set to monitor anyone, anytime, for any reason or non-reason, such as political/economic personal assassination. Not just your PC. What would stop them from establishing cameras on poles in front of your house to monitor your comings and goings? Microphones? They can already "sneak and peak" with a judges rubberstamp and no subpoena. They are establishing precedent to track your car with devices planted without warrant.
The current administration is currently using security laws to crush lawsuits about the detention and torture of people taken secretly after 9/11. Tom Delay used Homeland Security, illegally, to track down the Texas Democrats last year to bring them home to force a vote to disenfranchise Texas democrats - no penalties for him, and a precedent and example was set. The security apparatus established during the hysteria is being used to crush political oppostion to the President and his party; they have shown that they are abusing their power, and care nothing that anyone knows.
The internet is the last, only hope for anonymous gatherings and free speech left in the world, and they, the amalgamate they are desperately shutting down the last means of mankind to speak to power without getting arrested or ruined for claiming their birthright.
I've not the skills to fix this technically. But we need a new communications system, asap, that is not under U.S. control or capable of being traced or monitored. I've got zilch. Is there a way of making a new pipe that CAN'T be subverted or controlled by the power mad? This is a serious question, and we may need an answer really soon.
"- There is no blanket shield law for journalists in the US. Nothing along the lines of doctor-patient or lawyer-client privelege. There are some laws for more specific cases, but nothing generic."
It's called the First Amendment.
This situation is simple. The judge believes trade law overrides the First amendment, as well as 200+ years of journalistic tradition.
This is becoming increasingly common. Americans don't understand and don't care about their civil rights. And when judges become so pro-business that the First becomes a null, we've gone over the top at last.
All the more sad that so many Bush judges are now on the bench. The current situation is only a precursor to the next fifty years of amazing new findings by rightist judges. The legal atmosphere will be unrecognizable to anyone freshly imported from the 20th century.
And I am ashamed, horrified that Apple, of all companies, is doing this. I'm reconsidering my future purchases of their products.
Getting scooped on your product launch is part of being a free society. Any NDA's one has with one's employees is NOT the journalist's problem. A major part of journalism (pre-Bushism) is the cultivation of secret sources that reveal things their bosses don't like revealed. And Thinksecret is a news outlet, in the Ben Franklin tradition. If a gay call boy can get a daily pass under a fake name to the White House FOR TWO YEARS to be an undercover shill, and not be charged, and Robert Novak can out a CIA agent along with an entire CIA front company to ruin a White House critic without being arrested for treason, a man can report on an Apple product without being ruined.
"And Gates is rich."
And will buy every one of those patents.
Game. Set. Match.
New Rule:
(which congress should pass but never will)
Oil companies should not be permitted to buy this
company, or the patents.
Guess who owns nickel-metal hydride battery patents? Yup. Exxon-Mobil. No electric cars here, move along, nothing to see.
If there is a threat to their business model, energy companies will buy out the corporation which developed the tech and drown it in the nearest toilet.
Instead of "local Sam's Club" I meant "local Wal-Mart".
You sign a contract with Sam's Club which probably lets them demand to search you upon exiting.
I MEANT Wal-Mart. No contract there that they can enforce, and they are pretty much the only store left in a lot of the U.S.
"Same thing as when an officer pulls you over and asks if it's OK to search your vehicle. A nice respectful "sorry, but I refuse to surrender my 4th ammendment rights under the Constitution of the United States." is all you need to say." :(
I'm sorry, but the Renquist Supreme Court disagreed with you this year in the matter of impromptu car searches, in this case by drug-sniffing dogs. The usual rightist judges ruled that not only can police pull you over "just because", but that they can sic the drug-sniffers on your person and vehicle. It's important to win the War on Drugs, you see. A metaphor growing with interpretation, it seems.
You've no constitutional protection if you do not consent to idle searches, according to our beloved SCOTUS. Which is soon going to lose its soft and fuzzy interpretation of civil rights such as they demonstrated in that case, when Bush puts, oh say, ASHCROFT on the bench. Chief Justice Scalia, the Judge of God, Clarence Thomas, the Judge Who Doesn't Ask Questions, and Ashcroft... then Gonzalez, the Bush pal who wrote the new rules stating that torture is okay if the President thinks so, AND that the President is not subject to the laws of the U.S. or the oversight of Congress.
A true fascism is coming. Dogs in your car while you are getting your retinas scanned will be the least of it.
If you give a minute's thought, the "we-can-kick-you-out" rule will render a protestor unable to show at the local Sam's Club -- which now may be the only store in most rural/small towns of the United States. You can protest, and then shop at the 7-11 or gas station for the rest of your life. Until they decide you need to register for a card to shop in their stores. Face FORWARD: turn to the LEFT: place your fingertips in the ink pad, please....
Point hammered: if we let businesses require anything they like to shop at their stores, we are under a tyranny. Businesses are not feudal keeps, subject only to the King. They are corporations which hold a license to exist granted by US through our representatives. A. License. To. Exist. Not a right. They have no rights. If they want to operate stores, they can follow OUR rules. This is the basic failure of American imagination in the 21st century. We don't think we are in charge of anything personally, or think we have civil rights or even a basic right to privacy. BUT we think businesses can do anything they like. Corporations are not only legal citizens with civil rights -- they are the ONLY CITIZENS WITH ANY RIGHTS.
This insane belief has to be rooted out of the national mind and exposed to sunlight.
" How hard would it be to chuck a Knoppix disk in your CD drive and boot from it?"
Very. As of two days ago, it unmounted its own CD drive. Embarrassing, and I don't want to learn how to fix it -- it won't boot anymore. Embarrassing and weird.
That's the ONLY argument they have. Analog copying degrades over generations, but digital is perfect every time: therefore, it should be outlawed.
It's nonsense. Few people copied for mutliple generations of tapes, or at least for so many generations that it became unusable. And they pulled that argument out of their bunghole. It's deflecting and worthless.
Fair Use. It's what we've always had. We have the right to make copies of what comes on our TV's. Or radio. TV and radio, may I remind the universe, are government (citizen) granted business monopolies, money machines, to broadcast in the public good. The "good" part has been destroyed in the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, mergers, ideological takeovers of news departments of ALL over-air networks and worst of all, the paid-commerical "shows" that eat up airtime that is supposed to be filled with content in exchange for the license to broadcast. There was no provision in that granted monopoly over bandwidth for the businessmen to tell people what they could do with the content after it was broadcast, other than restrictions on selling access. That's why theaters can show TV show on their screens, but can't charge admission. Broadcasters should not be permitted to tell us, the people who granted them their CONTROLLED monopoly over OUR bandwidth, what we can do with the content. We can record, timeshift, and commercial strip. We can. If they don't like it, they are free to leave the TV industry and get a job doing something useful. We'll have no trouble finding someone to replace Disney, GE, or Viacom as stewards of our news and entertainment. Get lost if you don't like the rules, you greedy bastards.
This question was settled over twenty years ago! Recording TV is not bloody piracy. The broadcasters are trotting out the same stupid arguments they made before the bench then, but this time the semantic war redefining basic terminology is making the fight unwinnable by the sane.
Copying TV is not piracy. Passing copies around is not piracy. I know, I know, HBO is pay per view. But guess what? We've been recording the shows on VCR's for years. Passing them out to friends without cable. AND NO ONE CARED. Because it's not piracy, ie SELLING the tapes, and two, it didn't hurt HBO, it only made it more popular and made more people want to subscribe. As for satellite TV and similar, they've already bought laws making recordings almost impossible anyway.
But broadcast TV is being shot through my body right now. The idea is to have as many people watch as possible. At least for the last 65 years or so. We've been recording for almost thirty years, we've beaten back the loons who tried to make it a felony, and now they're back and winning, for God's sake.
The court system is stacked with extremely business friendly judges now, thanks to twenty five years of pro-free market Presidents, and there's no way of stopping them, especially since the regulators Bush appointed were lobbyists for the very industries they now regulate. It's a looting party for corporations. The legal precedents and semantic nastiness will be with us for the rest of our lives. Technology is being roped and tied by greedy gamers of the system, so it may not save us in the end. There won't be a place in the world you can manufacture tech not approved of by the powers in the U.S. God, they're raiding in Russia! The advance of corporate government is relentless, and largely ignored by the very people it locks into its worldview.
TV? Recording? PIRACY? Why not just call it rape or murder? The penalties would be less severe.
"I just ordered the older 40GB photo that includes all the accessories for $356. This sounded like a good deal to me so hopefully I didn't make a bad decision. "
There's a grace period when Apple changes prices during which you can kvetch and exchange your not-so-good deal for the new shiny good deal.
"(which leads to the crazy logic that the judge outright says that the FCC has no right to make this rule but he'll do nothing about it)"
That would make him a liberal activist judge. Horrors.
You've a point about the manufacturers. Damn. It takes months to set up a manufacuring line with or without the flag. They're screwed -- they might have to flog cards or PVR's crippled with the control mechanism for months until they get rid of the inventory, or else have to eat a season's worth of profit if they are compelled to destroy them.
I seem to recall that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to manufacture/sell phone phreaking equipment. Almost certainly illegal :)
How much "theft" did these two engender?
Did they ever go to jail, considering how well known their criminal past is?
And where would the personal computing world be today if they had been arrested and ruined as this guy will be?
Apple is going down the path to corporate hell. Steve! remember where you came from. You might be destroying someone who will implant the first artificial eye, or who will finally bring medical information processing into the twentieth century. The kid didn't hurt you or your company.
Don't be a hypocrite.
For all those slashdotters over time who have read articles about the Patriot Act, or online surveillance, or dark people being tortured in Gitmo, or cameras on every fire hydrant and trackers in every car and phone, and said: Who Cares? this one's for you, something you actually can care about:
Your money. They're coming for your money.
YES, IT IS. Same accreditation as Northwestern. Done deal. Times change. A really real university.
" The record is long taken. Another bit of the space race the Russians did first! Source"
THANKS! I've always wanted some info about Sex in Space. However, it still begs the question as to anyone has claimed the hetero OR homosexual flag. The Russian man and woman in question were both married to other people, and would not confess the adultery, so no official record there. And no gay astronauts have leapt forward for the prize, either, so the Grand Prize of First Coupling in Space is still (publically and officially) open for all comers. Um.
"Also, you do not need a woman for sex."
I covered my ass thusly:
"The record for first man-woman sex in orbit is open for the taking!"
"I'm pretty sure that phones will retain the option activate GPS all the time or only when dialing 9-1-1."
Granted, but remember, when you boil a frog to death, do it slowly, so the frog doesn't notice.
It's only a matter of whim on the White House's part that would enable the GPS when you aren't aware. A mere flip of a software switch.
If you think they won't, then why is the GPS component mandatory? You'd think they'd let the consumer make the choice, no?
First they'll nail a pedophile or a murderer, and people will say "yay". Then it'll be used for The Sake of The Children, then for corporate tracking of employees. Then, after everyone is so-whatting the complaints - after all, what are you hiding? - the defacto tracker will be on at HS's whim. You'll never even notice the bits switch on in your data transmission. And Americans won't give a damn.
How is "You're eating your own seed corn, pay more taxes" a TROLL, for god's sake??
Ayn Rand, burn in hell, if there is a god.
The killer app for spaceflight and orbital hotels is sex, my friends. Zero G, bounce off of the ceiling and invent new positions sex.
NASA is a collection of southern Methodists, historically. They NEVER talk about sex. We had a husband and wife team in orbit on the Shuttle over ten years back. Since there hasn't been any public record of Russians gettin' some on those long stays in the Salyut, the world record was ripe for the taking if the crew had given the couple some privacy. Never heard of it later, so I assume Americans kept their well-deserved title for Puritan respectabilty.
The primary business model for orbital hotels is SEX SEX SEX. And I still haven't heard a peep from reporters about this. The record for first man-woman sex in orbit is open for the taking!