MEMO: Privacy and Intellectual Property Protection Policy of NorthByNorthwestern University
Anyone (hereafter referred to as "we") in the employ of NBNWU designated by appropriate management can monitor any activities of any student, employee, or casual visitor to to your dorm at any time. We reserve the right to record any activities, up to and including really gymnastic-quality sex. We reserve the right to distribute said information and cool tapes if we want to. Get over it.
If you (student/employee/casual sex encounter) do not like this, we suggest therapy for your sad case of paranoia.
If you (student) do not like this, you are free to quit this institution and become free to obtain any employment you desire in the fast-growing field of janitorial work.
We reserve the right to give your ass up to the Feds on command. Or even if we feel they may be interested. Or if you seem suspicious to us in any way.
We feel that you (student/employee/casual encounter) should feel safer in the hands of a benevolent power such as We; what are you complaining about, hippy? Something to hide? Hmm?
We are broke, and are of necessity closing down Student Health Services for lack of funds. This will not deter us from investing 23 million dollars in an all-campus surveillance system necessitiated by the vicious attack on one of our coeds by Millie the pit-poodle.
All independent ad-hoc "dark" networks, and of course independently created wireless networks are forbidden as they violate the purpose of maintaining the public safety of NBNWU; unmonitored communications are sadly reliquated to the distant past. 9-11 9-11 9-11, and of course, 9-11.
We at NBNWU also feel that consistent with our finest traditions of preparing our graduates for the rigors of the working world, our students should acclimate themselves to the weekly anal examinations, virginity and drug tests, and loyalty oaths prepared by your loving administration. We love our President, our God, and our Alumni Association.
Your tuition will be raised by 15% this year. If you have a problem with this, take it up with the 10,000 people waiting to get in behind your expelled butt.
I just thought. Subdermal would be too easy to cut out.
Maybe inserting the chip directing into the bone marrow would be the way they'd eventually go. So that amateur surgeons can't get it out without hospitalization.
And taking it out oneself would be a one-way ticket to federal prison, no doubt at all.
Well, manufacturing anything costs trees. To build a factory, you need to cut down trees. To build the walls and furniture, trees. To produce all the paper that everone insists on in business, more trees. To open a mine to extract ore, you need to clear the land. To run the mine, you need trees for various things. To make plastics, you need trees for manufacturing, paper, wood for the executive fireplaces, paper for the candy wrappers the plant workers eat.
If you want to talk real waste of trees, let's talk about product packaging. My God.
I love trees in the same sense Tolkien did. But at least you can grown more, if you don't just slice everything down for the least cost and cause erosion of the topsoil.
Q: why isn't the U.S. planting millions of oak, maple, cherry and other hardwood trees in all the acres it's given away to lumber companies? Bad management and greed. Pine grows faster, so you get a new forest more quickly after nuking the last one. So fast-growing soft wood is being planted.
Op: we need to plant forests made of varieties of hardwoods, to minimize monoculture danger, and maintain them so that future generation can have decent wood instead of the glue and pulped pine that we've grown used to. In other words, reregulate the lumber companies, and put the government back in the management seat. And, oh yeah, regulate the wood prices. We're being royally ripped off for the wood we already own.
Read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to see how you can throw megatonnage at the Earth for cheap.
Did Gerard K. O'Neil live in vain? The trick is to be on top of the gravity well, and throw things down that already were up there. Lifting them off of the Earth first is absolutely nuts.
The rock would be moving at something like Mach 30 - at any rate at miles per second. The atmosphere is around 60 miles deep. It would be a blink. For it to be faster than a blink, for you, you'd have to know it was coming, be focused on the spot in the sky, and follow it. 60 miles/7 mps (supposing)= 9 and a fraction seconds to boom. Then you'd wait for the supersonic shock wave. Depends on how close you are to the impact(s). If you don't know it was coming, you'd maybe see a short flash of light, followed by death in a second or at most a minute or two. As for my Armageddon reference, I belive I was dead on. If you were in Manhattan, ground zero, you'd have seen a brief flash followed by a supersonic shock wave in less than a couple of heartbeats. It'd be like nuclear detonations, only without the radiation. As Heinlein said in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just like a sparks from a hammer. Just a really BIG hammer.
And shock waves aren't sound, so they can move quite quickly. The air itself would be moving at hypersonic speeds, mixed with vaporized solid matter from ground zero. Dust, really fast dust, and gravel.
A hundred foot object would punch through at many miles per second, so time to ablate would be short. A few seconds in the atmosphere at most. (The scenes in Armaggedon of rocks tumbling down were silly; in reality you would barely have time to blink before you were dead from the shock wave. FLASH: blink: dead) It may break up into fragments, which doesn't help much in the kinetic energy department, IE we still get hit with tens of thousands of tons at many miles per second.
Little objects like a grapefruit weren't a hundred feet wide. A hundred foot wide ball or potato-shaped rock could break up and would rain down millions of grapefruits at n miles/sec., if it broke up at all. Think of a hundred thousand ton blast of buckshot at 5 miles/sec. Or a 100K ton cannonball at the same speed.
"Not so scary if it's accurate and the person who `wants to lie` is being asked questions about the rape of your girlfried, the murder of your child, or the bombing of Madrid."
You forgot about the children. What about the precious children? Pedos everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And commies too... oops, wrong decade. Damned Reds/pinkos/anarchists/Kaiser-lovers/Spanish/pedos/spree killers/pornspreaders/fill-in-enemy-HEREs.
It's always about the enemy, the threats around us, that justify putting another lock on the human mind and body.
Just thought of this. How many people have been killed or hurt by all the truly sick pervs; and how many people have been killed by governments (read: frightened mobs) trying to root out the criminals, malcontents, and badthinkers?
No contest.
People need to learn risk analysis, and apply it to all these broad efforts to lock people down for their own good. Numbers, what are the numbers? What are the odds that you will be attacked by someone who doesn't get detected by WeKnowWhereYouAreNet Incorporated, wholly-owned subsidiary of Haliburton, and what are the odds that you will be swept up in a hysterical arrest, have your property confiscated or sold, your body shipped off to a gulag without charge or trial? And don't say it can't happen, cause it did two years ago. The ways we can be monitored or controlled are nearly infinite. At some point, you have to choose:
Do you want to be safe from the evildoers, but not from the jailors, or do you want to take an infinitesimal chance that evildoers might touch you somehow, but you get to live free?
Just to keep history straight: our judicial system (just about) worked, with the exception of the conservative appeals judges giving Judge Jackson a special hate-filled working over after he found against Microsoft.
The problem was the Bush Justice Department. Ashcroft simply refused to do anything, and let the decision be unenforced, thus snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The judicial system worked, after all those long years. Bush, who believes any regulation of business is socialistic if not outright communistic, according to an old Harvard business professor of his, finds the anti-monopoly laws distasteful in the extreme, and his cohorts are vetted to agree with such beliefs. When Bush was elected, the Microsoft case was effectively lost.
There is also a constitutional amendment, 9th I think, that says we have rights about other matters than those enumerated by the Constitution itself; that just because the rights are not mentioned, it does not mean they do not exist. We can claim a right to privacy: there is no reason for us not to do so. It is not forbidden to claim the right. Just the opposite.
Found it:
Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
*** I scanned the new Iraqi constitution: it has the same clause.
I do not like this meme. We do not only have those rights which were conferred upon us in the 1780's. We do have a right to surf anonymously. It can be taken away, or ignored, but you do have it. It's up to you to keep it.
It sounds a little like sour grapes on your side, and this is someone not on any particular side saying this.
Point is, Bill HAS sold you out, and that is that. Game over, put on your walking shoes and get going.
Will Jobs do it as well? Hypothetical and irrelevant; the PC side has done it. Jobs hasn't, and he could have. If you want an new non-"Trusted" box on your desk in the near future, you'll have to pick up a G5 or G6.
The New York Times (and others) sponsored a recount, results of which were pretty much suppressed for months after the count was done.
Gore won, if all discernable votes were counted. Done deal.
The Supreme Court's 5 Bush sympathizers had over four days to release their decision to let a structured recount in Florida proceed; they maliciously waited until 30 minutes before the deadline expired to release the decision. The case was a fix, and Bush was installed by Scalia and company.
Gore won the popular, and would have won the electoral, had the state been permitted time to resume the recount. And, oh yes, those military votes cast after (AFTER? WTF???) the election was over should never have been permitted.
If Gore had won in this fashion, the last three years would have been unremitting hell for the citizens of the U.S. as they would have listened to endless whining and reports on the latest GOP lawsuit against the election results. Not speculation: fact. They were going to run a four year blitz to delegitimize Gore, had he won. And oh yes, the recounts would have lasted for MONTHS. Crooked, crooked liars.
The problem is simple: the interpretation of "good faith" is up to the raiding corporation.
Scientology is going to LOVE this. Anywhere, anytime, in they come through the windows! Frozen bank accounts! Jail! And all they have to do is ASK?
Yeah, you can take them to court. After all your stuff is gone, your bank accounts locked up, and your person seized.
Does no one remember alt.scientology.war in Wired magazine? Time magazine? Arnie Lerma? The first spam assault back in 97-98, with over 1 million spam messages and forgeries posted to alt.religion.scientology?
They were the first copyright abusing corporate entity, and the first to use spam as a weapon. And they are still #1 for suppressing coverage of their activities. Does no one remember what they did when they didn't have the law on their side? They were raiding THEN.
No one can stand up to the Hubbardites in Europe anymore if even a fraction of this insanity becomes law. Xenu.net will have its hosting ISP's doors kicked in the week after this passes. It'll be illegal in real terms to talk about their "secret" teachings on the internet. This is an eternal gag order.
Music? Movies? That's kiddy stuff. The nuclear strength copyright maniacs are what we have to worry about.
Believe it or not, the publishing industry has been trying to get rid of public libraries for the past few years for just the reason you cite.
They're trying, but historical inertia is thwarting them so far. That's why they went nuts tying in all sorts of penalties for copying books to e-media. And why you can't buy an cheap ebook reader with a good b&W hi-def screen. They lost on libraries, and they'll be damned if they lose control of the handheld ebook market. Damn, the losses alone on textbooks!
Anyone know of any open source projects to build a cheap, good, capacious ebook reader?
The problem arises when people start posting these DVD rips to P2P networks and sharing them. Then it is theft.
Nooooooooo, no, NO. Then it is copyright infringment, what used to be a civil offense. Not a crime. Not theft.
NOT theft. NOT stealing. You've taken nothing from anyone. You've made a copy. Not pilfering, stealing, lifting, grabbing, legging it over the fence, absconding, or knackering. A making of a copy. You're distributing it for free. Not a criminal offense. Merely a copyright violation.
The MPAA's clients do NOT own the movie. They own the physical tapes. The do have the right to determine who makes commercially distributed copies of same. The "movie" is an series of images and sounds. The movie is not owned, no matter what they repeat endlessly.
Originally the right to copy expired after a decent interval. It no longer expires. There was a deal, you see, when copyright law was established; the creator gets the right to control copies IN EXCHANGE FOR the right to eventually expire, and release the work into the public domain. The deal is now unilaterally trashed. Works are now "property", and nothing goes into public domain.
Since the deal is dead, I don't feel like listening to their blathering about "rights". They've taken away all mankind's rights. Screw theirs.
February 29, 2004 The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
OCIAL Security retirement benefits are going to have to be cut, Alan Greenspan announced last week, because there just is not enough money to pay the promised benefits. President Bush said those already retired or "near retirement age'' should not worry. They will get their promised benefits.
That, in short form, was the story carried on front pages and television news programs across the country.
But there is an element that was forgotten in the rush of news. It dates back 21 years to the events that catapulted Mr. Greenspan into national prominence and led to his becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.
Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan, who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.
On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance. After Congress adopted the plan, Mr. Greenspan rose to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
This year someone making $50,000 will pay $6,200 in Social Security taxes, half deducted from their paycheck and half paid by their employer. That total is about $2,000 more than the government needs in order to pay benefits to retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled, government budget documents show.
So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?
The advance payments have all been spent.
Congress did not lock away the Social Security surplus, as many Americans believe. Instead, it borrowed the surplus, replacing the cash with Treasury notes, and spent the loan proceeds paying the ordinary expenses of running the federal government.
Only twice, in 1999 and 2000, did Congress balance the federal budget without borrowing from the surplus.
Both parties have treated the surplus Social Security taxes as "cash flow to the government," which has been allowable since the Johnson administration started counting Social Security as part of the federal budget, not as a separate budget, said C. Eugene Steuerle, a tax policy advisor to President Reagan.
He said that voters were promised in 1983 that the federal debt would be paid off with the surplus Social Security taxes. The fact that this has not happened and the debt has soared shows that "government usually can only deal with one objective at a time,'' Mr. Steuerle said. Back then, he added, the prime objective was to settle on a Social Security tax rate that would back the system and not have to be tinkered with for decades - not how the surplus would be handled.
He said using the surplus to pay routine bills makes sense to those who believe the government will have tax revenues in the future to repay the borrowed money.
President Bush asserts that making his existing income, gift and estate tax cuts permanent will spur growth that will, in turn, generate more tax revenue in the long run, making that repayment more likely.
Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said that making the cuts permanent will "promote prosperity for American workers'' and that older employees can expect full benefits.
But Mr. Greenspan's new remarks have brought that into question. Other officials have raised doubts. In June 2001, Paul H. O'Neill, President Bush's first Treasury secretary, said all that Americans expecting benefits have is "someone else's promise'' that the paper held by the Social Security Trust Fund will be redeemed with taxes paid later by oth
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MEMO: Privacy and Intellectual Property Protection Policy of NorthByNorthwestern University
Anyone (hereafter referred to as "we") in the employ of NBNWU designated by appropriate management can monitor any activities of any student, employee, or casual visitor to to your dorm at any time. We reserve the right to record any activities, up to and including really gymnastic-quality sex. We reserve the right to distribute said information and cool tapes if we want to. Get over it.
If you (student/employee/casual sex encounter) do not like this, we suggest therapy for your sad case of paranoia.
If you (student) do not like this, you are free to quit this institution and become free to obtain any employment you desire in the fast-growing field of janitorial work.
We reserve the right to give your ass up to the Feds on command. Or even if we feel they may be interested. Or if you seem suspicious to us in any way.
We feel that you (student/employee/casual encounter) should feel safer in the hands of a benevolent power such as We; what are you complaining about, hippy? Something to hide? Hmm?
We are broke, and are of necessity closing down Student Health Services for lack of funds. This will not deter us from investing 23 million dollars in an all-campus surveillance system necessitiated by the vicious attack on one of our coeds by Millie the pit-poodle.
All independent ad-hoc "dark" networks, and of course independently created wireless networks are forbidden as they violate the purpose of maintaining the public safety of NBNWU; unmonitored communications are sadly reliquated to the distant past. 9-11 9-11 9-11, and of course, 9-11.
We at NBNWU also feel that consistent with our finest traditions of preparing our graduates for the rigors of the working world, our students should acclimate themselves to the weekly anal examinations, virginity and drug tests, and loyalty oaths prepared by your loving administration. We love our President, our God, and our Alumni Association.
Your tuition will be raised by 15% this year. If you have a problem with this, take it up with the 10,000 people waiting to get in behind your expelled butt.
(that, or someone make an anime channel, dammit.)
Making a contribution here:
The Anime Network
Hope it helps. Don't know if that network is still around. A pay-channel, tho.
"If you only pay in cash, that is. "
The EU is working on RFID tagging.. wait for it... all their new euros.
EVERY bill will be numbered and traceable.
If it works out, it'll be coming over Stateside soon.
Feel safer yet? I'm guessing bartering will become the Next Big Thing offline.
I just thought. Subdermal would be too easy to cut out.
Maybe inserting the chip directing into the bone marrow would be the way they'd eventually go. So that amateur surgeons can't get it out without hospitalization.
And taking it out oneself would be a one-way ticket to federal prison, no doubt at all.
"Got a nifty concept for ya':
Don't but it if you can't afford it.
Try it on for size."
Let them eat cake, you mean.
'Tis good to be a Republican, ain't it.
Well, manufacturing anything costs trees. To build a factory, you need to cut down trees. To build the walls and furniture, trees. To produce all the paper that everone insists on in business, more trees. To open a mine to extract ore, you need to clear the land. To run the mine, you need trees for various things. To make plastics, you need trees for manufacturing, paper, wood for the executive fireplaces, paper for the candy wrappers the plant workers eat.
If you want to talk real waste of trees, let's talk about product packaging. My God.
I love trees in the same sense Tolkien did. But at least you can grown more, if you don't just slice everything down for the least cost and cause erosion of the topsoil.
Q: why isn't the U.S. planting millions of oak, maple, cherry and other hardwood trees in all the acres it's given away to lumber companies? Bad management and greed. Pine grows faster, so you get a new forest more quickly after nuking the last one. So fast-growing soft wood is being planted.
Op: we need to plant forests made of varieties of hardwoods, to minimize monoculture danger, and maintain them so that future generation can have decent wood instead of the glue and pulped pine that we've grown used to. In other words, reregulate the lumber companies, and put the government back in the management seat. And, oh yeah, regulate the wood prices. We're being royally ripped off for the wood we already own.
"Kerry: Not Bush. Flip-flopped on issues a bit"
No. He didn't. Pure Bush put-it-in-the-echo-chamber lie. Please don't help the echo.
Read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to see how you can throw megatonnage at the Earth for cheap.
Did Gerard K. O'Neil live in vain? The trick is to be on top of the gravity well, and throw things down that already were up there. Lifting them off of the Earth first is absolutely nuts.
The rock would be moving at something like Mach 30 - at any rate at miles per second. The atmosphere is around 60 miles deep. It would be a blink. For it to be faster than a blink, for you, you'd have to know it was coming, be focused on the spot in the sky, and follow it. 60 miles/7 mps (supposing)= 9 and a fraction seconds to boom. Then you'd wait for the supersonic shock wave. Depends on how close you are to the impact(s). If you don't know it was coming, you'd maybe see a short flash of light, followed by death in a second or at most a minute or two. As for my Armageddon reference, I belive I was dead on. If you were in Manhattan, ground zero, you'd have seen a brief flash followed by a supersonic shock wave in less than a couple of heartbeats. It'd be like nuclear detonations, only without the radiation. As Heinlein said in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just like a sparks from a hammer. Just a really BIG hammer.
And shock waves aren't sound, so they can move quite quickly. The air itself would be moving at hypersonic speeds, mixed with vaporized solid matter from ground zero. Dust, really fast dust, and gravel.
A hundred foot object would punch through at many miles per second, so time to ablate would be short. A few seconds in the atmosphere at most. (The scenes in Armaggedon of rocks tumbling down were silly; in reality you would barely have time to blink before you were dead from the shock wave. FLASH: blink: dead) It may break up into fragments, which doesn't help much in the kinetic energy department, IE we still get hit with tens of thousands of tons at many miles per second.
Little objects like a grapefruit weren't a hundred feet wide. A hundred foot wide ball or potato-shaped rock could break up and would rain down millions of grapefruits at n miles/sec., if it broke up at all. Think of a hundred thousand ton blast of buckshot at 5 miles/sec. Or a 100K ton cannonball at the same speed.
Big mess.
"Not so scary if it's accurate and the person who `wants to lie` is being asked questions about the rape of your girlfried, the murder of your child, or the bombing of Madrid."
s /spree killers/pornspreaders/fill-in-enemy-HEREs.
You forgot about the children. What about the precious children? Pedos everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And commies too... oops, wrong decade. Damned Reds/pinkos/anarchists/Kaiser-lovers/Spanish/pedo
It's always about the enemy, the threats around us, that justify putting another lock on the human mind and body.
Just thought of this. How many people have been killed or hurt by all the truly sick pervs; and how many people have been killed by governments (read: frightened mobs) trying to root out the criminals, malcontents, and badthinkers?
No contest.
People need to learn risk analysis, and apply it to all these broad efforts to lock people down for their own good. Numbers, what are the numbers? What are the odds that you will be attacked by someone who doesn't get detected by WeKnowWhereYouAreNet Incorporated, wholly-owned subsidiary of Haliburton, and what are the odds that you will be swept up in a hysterical arrest, have your property confiscated or sold, your body shipped off to a gulag without charge or trial? And don't say it can't happen, cause it did two years ago. The ways we can be monitored or controlled are nearly infinite. At some point, you have to choose:
Do you want to be safe from the evildoers, but not from the jailors, or do you want to take an infinitesimal chance that evildoers might touch you somehow, but you get to live free?
I'll take free.
Just to keep history straight: our judicial system (just about) worked, with the exception of the conservative appeals judges giving Judge Jackson a special hate-filled working over after he found against Microsoft.
The problem was the Bush Justice Department. Ashcroft simply refused to do anything, and let the decision be unenforced, thus snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The judicial system worked, after all those long years. Bush, who believes any regulation of business is socialistic if not outright communistic, according to an old Harvard business professor of his, finds the anti-monopoly laws distasteful in the extreme, and his cohorts are vetted to agree with such beliefs. When Bush was elected, the Microsoft case was effectively lost.
There is also a constitutional amendment, 9th I think, that says we have rights about other matters than those enumerated by the Constitution itself; that just because the rights are not mentioned, it does not mean they do not exist. We can claim a right to privacy: there is no reason for us not to do so. It is not forbidden to claim the right. Just the opposite.
Found it:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed
to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
***
I scanned the new Iraqi constitution: it has the same clause.
I do not like this meme. We do not only have those rights which were conferred upon us in the 1780's. We do have a right to surf anonymously. It can be taken away, or ignored, but you do have it. It's up to you to keep it.
What does it take to emmigrate there?
You just described the attire of half the geeks I know.
It sounds a little like sour grapes on your side, and this is someone not on any particular side saying this.
Point is, Bill HAS sold you out, and that is that. Game over, put on your walking shoes and get going.
Will Jobs do it as well? Hypothetical and irrelevant; the PC side has done it. Jobs hasn't, and he could have. If you want an new non-"Trusted" box on your desk in the near future, you'll have to pick up a G5 or G6.
The question really is:
How long until hacking the Trusted Computing code is a federal crime comparable with murder?
Since everyone seems to be in a betting mood, I'd say it'll take about 1 1/2 - 2 years before touching the BIOS puts you in Federal FMITA prison.
We're not getting over it. Get over it.
The New York Times (and others) sponsored a recount, results of which were pretty much suppressed for months after the count was done.
Gore won, if all discernable votes were counted. Done deal.
The Supreme Court's 5 Bush sympathizers had over four days to release their decision to let a structured recount in Florida proceed; they maliciously waited until 30 minutes before the deadline expired to release the decision. The case was a fix, and Bush was installed by Scalia and company.
Gore won the popular, and would have won the electoral, had the state been permitted time to resume the recount. And, oh yes, those military votes cast after (AFTER? WTF???) the election was over should never have been permitted.
If Gore had won in this fashion, the last three years would have been unremitting hell for the citizens of the U.S. as they would have listened to endless whining and reports on the latest GOP lawsuit against the election results. Not speculation: fact. They were going to run a four year blitz to delegitimize Gore, had he won. And oh yes, the recounts would have lasted for MONTHS. Crooked, crooked liars.
Gore won, Bush stole the election.
Get over it.
Remember the FBI dress code? They do indeed worry endless how they look.
"He was CIA trained"
Nope, that was Osama bin Laden. Saddam trained himself. Keep the Evil Doers straight!
The problem is simple: the interpretation of "good faith" is up to the raiding corporation.
Scientology is going to LOVE this. Anywhere, anytime, in they come through the windows! Frozen bank accounts! Jail! And all they have to do is ASK?
Yeah, you can take them to court. After all your stuff is gone, your bank accounts locked up, and your person seized.
Does no one remember alt.scientology.war in Wired magazine? Time magazine? Arnie Lerma? The first spam assault back in 97-98, with over 1 million spam messages and forgeries posted to alt.religion.scientology?
They were the first copyright abusing corporate entity, and the first to use spam as a weapon. And they are still #1 for suppressing coverage of their activities. Does no one remember what they did when they didn't have the law on their side? They were raiding THEN.
No one can stand up to the Hubbardites in Europe anymore if even a fraction of this insanity becomes law. Xenu.net will have its hosting ISP's doors kicked in the week after this passes. It'll be illegal in real terms to talk about their "secret" teachings on the internet. This is an eternal gag order.
Music? Movies? That's kiddy stuff. The nuclear strength copyright maniacs are what we have to worry about.
Believe it or not, the publishing industry has been trying to get rid of public libraries for the past few years for just the reason you cite.
They're trying, but historical inertia is thwarting them so far. That's why they went nuts tying in all sorts of penalties for copying books to e-media. And why you can't buy an cheap ebook reader with a good b&W hi-def screen. They lost on libraries, and they'll be damned if they lose control of the handheld ebook market. Damn, the losses alone on textbooks!
Anyone know of any open source projects to build a cheap, good, capacious ebook reader?
The problem arises when people start posting these DVD rips to P2P networks and sharing them. Then it is theft.
Nooooooooo, no, NO. Then it is copyright infringment, what used to be a civil offense. Not a crime. Not theft.
NOT theft. NOT stealing. You've taken nothing from anyone. You've made a copy. Not pilfering, stealing, lifting, grabbing, legging it over the fence, absconding, or knackering. A making of a copy. You're distributing it for free. Not a criminal offense. Merely a copyright violation.
The MPAA's clients do NOT own the movie. They own the physical tapes. The do have the right to determine who makes commercially distributed copies of same. The "movie" is an series of images and sounds. The movie is not owned, no matter what they repeat endlessly.
Originally the right to copy expired after a decent interval. It no longer expires. There was a deal, you see, when copyright law was established; the creator gets the right to control copies IN EXCHANGE FOR the right to eventually expire, and release the work into the public domain. The deal is now unilaterally trashed. Works are now "property", and nothing goes into public domain.
Since the deal is dead, I don't feel like listening to their blathering about "rights". They've taken away all mankind's rights. Screw theirs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/weekinreview/29j ohn.html
February 29, 2004
The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
OCIAL Security retirement benefits are going to have to be cut, Alan Greenspan announced last week, because there just is not enough money to pay the promised benefits. President Bush said those already retired or "near retirement age'' should not worry. They will get their promised benefits.
That, in short form, was the story carried on front pages and television news programs across the country.
But there is an element that was forgotten in the rush of news. It dates back 21 years to the events that catapulted Mr. Greenspan into national prominence and led to his becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.
Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan, who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.
On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance. After Congress adopted the plan, Mr. Greenspan rose to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
This year someone making $50,000 will pay $6,200 in Social Security taxes, half deducted from their paycheck and half paid by their employer. That total is about $2,000 more than the government needs in order to pay benefits to retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled, government budget documents show.
So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?
The advance payments have all been spent.
Congress did not lock away the Social Security surplus, as many Americans believe. Instead, it borrowed the surplus, replacing the cash with Treasury notes, and spent the loan proceeds paying the ordinary expenses of running the federal government.
Only twice, in 1999 and 2000, did Congress balance the federal budget without borrowing from the surplus.
Both parties have treated the surplus Social Security taxes as "cash flow to the government," which has been allowable since the Johnson administration started counting Social Security as part of the federal budget, not as a separate budget, said C. Eugene Steuerle, a tax policy advisor to President Reagan.
He said that voters were promised in 1983 that the federal debt would be paid off with the surplus Social Security taxes. The fact that this has not happened and the debt has soared shows that "government usually can only deal with one objective at a time,'' Mr. Steuerle said. Back then, he added, the prime objective was to settle on a Social Security tax rate that would back the system and not have to be tinkered with for decades - not how the surplus would be handled.
He said using the surplus to pay routine bills makes sense to those who believe the government will have tax revenues in the future to repay the borrowed money.
President Bush asserts that making his existing income, gift and estate tax cuts permanent will spur growth that will, in turn, generate more tax revenue in the long run, making that repayment more likely.
Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said that making the cuts permanent will "promote prosperity for American workers'' and that older employees can expect full benefits.
But Mr. Greenspan's new remarks have brought that into question. Other officials have raised doubts. In June 2001, Paul H. O'Neill, President Bush's first Treasury secretary, said all that Americans expecting benefits have is "someone else's promise'' that the paper held by the Social Security Trust Fund will be redeemed with taxes paid later by oth
Dry ice and WATER, mixed together. A lot of CO2, a little water.