Every person has within them a book to write. And for most, that's exactly where it should stay, to paraphrase Mark Twain. If it were possible to write a story that could be published after a person's death, I might think about it -- but publishing details of an event that could endanger a person's life is criminally stupid.
You are naive. Many crooks are monumentally stupid. Many are too stupid to live, in fact. They die, stupidly. The 'master criminal' looks great in the fiction media, but he doesn't appear in real life that often. I doubt that this dirtbag is any Einstein, given that he is STUPID enough to bring a weapon along during his burglary.
Stupidity and desperation are two very different things. And very smart people in history have done very stupid things. It's naive of you to assume a person's intelligence is the only, or even an important, factor in their behavior.
You do know there are countries where you can run to that you cant be extradited from. Problem is 99.99785% of all criminals are too stupid to do that. Hell this specific dork cant stop posting on facebook.
*face palm* There's one of you in every discussion like this.
1. This guy did an armed robbery. Do you really think there's a lot of countries out there that are going to welcome that with open arms? Reason for citizenship application: "I luv my gun and robbin' shit." Request granted! He didn't do it for political reasons, or because he has dual nationality and the country he's fleeing to doesn't consider it a crime, etc.
He could flee to a relatively isolated area and probably rest easy knowing that the authorities have better things to worry about than him. But then, that's what bounty hunters are for -- these people can take the risks required to grab him and get him to the border because they're not agents of the government paying them for the collar. You think those "$100,000 reward for capture" posters don't look appealing? A plane ticket, a little bit of research, and a criminal's ego is all it takes to bring home the bacon.
Sometimes it's not taunting -- sometimes it's a guy who's just tired of running. Sometimes it's a person who has no choice but to keep running, but wants to get caught. Before you jump to conclusions, let me share--
True story:
There was someone once upon a time who had gotten in with the wrong crowd. As it turns out, there's quite a demand for computer geniuses in the underworld and after being noticed and blackmailed, this person was in the unenviable position of having to assist an organized criminal group in defeating the electronic and physical security of various operations. S/he couldn't go to the authorities directly because s/he was being watched constantly by the co-conspirators and if s/he tried to leave s/he would be killed. So this person started leaving subtle clues behind in the equipment that s/he tampered with and elsewhere at the scene. This group was later responsible for clearing out several floors of a skyscraper and police were able to follow the clues left behind (or as you would call them "taunts") to eventually locate the person behind it and shut the group down. That person served a few years in jail, and later became best friends with the arresting officer. This individual now works as a consultant to the agency responsible for the arrest, helping them to gather electronic evidence.
Even the dumbest criminal knows by now that posting online under your own name when you're wanted by the cops is stupid. I'm forced to conclude there's a non-obvious motive for this behavior.
How much do we know about the ways in which Apple uses rumors to gin up interest in new products?
I thought it was pretty clear -- it's a cheap way to gauge interest and reactions to a product before it's release. People weren't excited about two batteries in the iPhone... whoosh, it doesn't get that. People get excited about wifi blamo, it makes it into the final product. It saves millions in market research, focus groups, etc. Oh yeah, and everybody talking about a product, getting all excited, even though they haven't the foggiest what it'll be -- that's free word of mouth press. That's the kind of publicity that Google has paid tens of millions for with Droid -- and people still only shrug at it.
There is an annoying thing in American media that every second has to have some sort of sound in it. Really, its almost like welfare for sound people that work in media. But honestly, I like that NASA TV goes for long stretches of silence. I don't want talking heads jabbering on about stupid shit. If I want people jabbering and pontificating about stupid shit, I'll just jack into slashdot, and that way I can be one of them.
You are laboring under the delusion that most broadcasting aims to communicate information. It may do that, but that's not the goal. The goal is to distract you from the dullness of that room you're sitting in. The one with the glowing rectangle and the odd smells. It's there to placate you and entertain you, blinding you to the fact that most of us will waste the forty-odd years of our life working jobs that contribute little or nothing to the betterment of others or the world, that for all those years of work we have a couch, a few trinkets, in some suburban house, while the next generation struggles with answering how they can make a difference -- something that recurs generation after generation, only to perish because society has no real use for it. Television in today's society serves the same purpose that alcohol and recreational drugs serve: To make the pain of mere existance a little more bearable.
The problem isn't that television rots your brain -- the problem is you, like a lot of people on slashdot, have an odd quirk of personality in that novelty is stimulating. For most people, routine is what refreshes and prepares them for the uncertainties, which is the exact opposite of how we interact with the world.
For crissakes, people who say something needs to be secure before it can be trusted really get on my nerves. Anyone who's waded out of the shallow end of the pool on security (of any kind) knows one of the fundamentals of security is that it isn't perfect. No matter how good you make your mouse-trap, there will someday be a better mouse. The more realistic analysis is to ask yourself what the acceptable risk is. Or, put another way, you should strive to ensure that the security is more difficult to break than the value of whatever it is that is being protected.
Throwing the car keys onto the dining table, pulling a bottle of vodka from the freezer and taking a few shots... the perfect end to a usually cold, wet and crappy day in the so-called western-civilisation.
"I asked many people why they drank so much but never received an explanation that I fully understood. It was the tales of their escapades while under the influence of drink that brought me nearest to comprehending their need for it. It seemed to give them a few hours of freedom from rules which, during the rest of their lives, they reluctantly obeyed. If this was true, then in the example of my life lay a cure for drunkenness... never to conform at all." ~ Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
Amazing. They believe in advanced quantum physics AND Santa. Most ordinary people would just say "he doesn't exist" around the age of 9 and move on. But not geeks!
Your post doesn't take into account that as our computers have increased in complexity, our need for bandwidth has risen lock in step with that. We're paying them not just to maintain the existing connection, but also to upgrade it to support higher-demand applications at a nominal pace. But because these companies have an effective monopoly on the right of ways to your house -- a monopoly granted to them by municipalities, there is no competition and thus no incentive to do so. So they have been making a huge profit by delaying or avoiding upgrading. As anyone who has been a network administrator will tell you, the network will run without any problems until it gets very close to or at maximum capacity. And the moment it reaches that threshold, everything goes to hell. That's what started happening globally at major ISPs in this country over the past few years.
If they had been progressively upgrading -- as rising aggregate network utilization suggested they should, this wouldn't be a problem. But they decided to place short term profit over long term sustainability and now we're paying the price: We are locked into using their service (or none at all) and they are raising prices to pay for those upgrades now. In the midst of an economic depression unlike any seen since before WWII, Comcast and other major ISPs have been reporting enormous profits. The average profit a business makes is about 5% -- the rest is production cost and administration (including labor costs). Comcast's profitability last quarter? It rose 22% in Q3 2009, and it's overall profit margins are about 20%.
Now explain to me how a company has a profit margin that increases by 22% when the unemployment rate in this country is at record levels and we're in the middle of a several-year long dry spell. Monopoly power, pure and simple. They've got tens of millions of customers paying through the nose because they don't have any alternative. Does that 250GB cap seem so reasonable now?
I would like to think that when iron-fisted copyright proves to be a failure, we will learn from this and find more reasonable approaches. But the utter failure of Prohibition hasn't stopped us from implementing similar laws. I would like to believe that a cultural war has been won, that when the old guard retires those who replace them will have a more enlightened viewpoint. I truly want to believe that. But I really don't see much precedent for it.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. This is not a reason to give up hope or be cynical! We are in the middle of a social revolution that has few outward signs. Unlike generations past, the revolution that is happening now exists in fragmentary communications and a collectivistic movement that lacks any real core. It seems to be created by an unspoken understanding between its participants. That is to say, the participants of the digital community to varying degrees develop the same coping mechanisms to frame their understanding of this environment. These coping mechanisms develop into ideas and beliefs that we then form the basis of our interactions with other members. This doesn't require any indoctrination, or central leadership to accomplish. Mere exposure to the environment alone seems to predispose people to a certain kind of thinking that cuts across barriers of country, culture, sex, and race.
We have no real leaders for our digital culture, and yet the culture is there. This is unprecidented. There are very, very few social movements that organize around principals instead of individuals who exemplify those ideals. Whether you live in Iran or America, Africa or Europe, the same values systems are spontaniously developing. While the state of the art has advanced at an incredible rate, our methods of understanding and interacting within the new social spaces created by that aren't changing that much. It's a stable environment evolving at rate sufficiently slow to allow culture to form.
That, in and of itself, is amazing. Forget copyright for a moment and consider all the other social advances that are taking place because of our digital interconnectedness -- and then realize that there are only a very few friction points in this revolution! That is also unprecidented in modern history.
Copyright won't end anytime soon, but I'm suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It's something we built extraneous to it, rather than being a fundamental part of it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existance of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism that's been developed and interposed between ourselves and our environment. That's not a judgement on its sustainability nor its justification for existance (or lack thereof).
Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existance only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.
All I'm suggesting is that cost to society outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Everyone's bought into it and driven up its cost, but like any market-driven force it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, but that's nothing compared to what
And thats why you shouldn't clone dinosaurs with Frog DNA.
Because somehow a complex organism will spontaniously change its sex and demand equal rights? Because I betcha that was the scariest part of the movie for republicans. Oh yeah... and velociraptors.
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is a large corporation charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
So what's happened is that this entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It's become a moot point. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war. At this point the only thing these corporations can do is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. That's pretty much what they're doing.
But what does this mean for the average person? Well, it means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. And all the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing because there's a small core of people like you and I, here on slashdot, that do understand the implications of what they're doing and we continually search for ways to screw them over and liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is, economically and politically, structurally identical to the Prohibition, except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combatting a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, and sell people material goods and services they don't really need, we cannot change the fundamental aspects upon which our generation has built a new society out of.
You can't stop people talking -- and just as we have physical connections to each other, increasingly we have digital connections to one another as well. These connections have, and continue to, actively resist attempts at control because doing so fundamentally impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. We will naturally seek the methods which give us the greatest freedom to express ourselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness, and it goes far, far beyond copyright. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. Forces of nature are unpredictable and in the end it always wins.
Then again, probably not -- "shameless" isn't really the same thing as "dangerous", is it?
No, it isn't. Try skydiving, or a little bit of activism like writing to your congresscritters, maybe a small protest. Something to show that you're willing to take a few risks here and there -- just not so much that you look like a freak or a creep.:)
Only problem is that women apparently don't *want* someone who understands their needs. Otherwise, I wouldn't still be single, and I'd actually get *replies* to my plentyoffish profile.:p
Pulling a page from the lesbian handbook here, but it works for hetero couples too; Don't actually be bad, but look like you could be. It's the same reason horror flicks are so popular with my friends -- it's a safe kind of scare. It's the chills down the back of your spine, but you're still in control.
I am a huge fan of the digital TV conversion, since the picture is so good (better than cable or satellite digital), and not encrypted. I didn't pay much above the coupon price for my analog converter boxes, either.
The picture is good. But that's no excuse for what they did. Switching to a widescreen format meant that for those still using standard TVs, 33% of the available viewing space was lost for those who stuck with it. For those who upgraded, the smallest LCD TV sets cost over $500. Comparably, they were about twice as expensive as the previous generation. That's a lot of cash to be forking out at a time when we're in a recession and 10% or more of the population is unemployed -- let alone under-employed. We all knew the prices were being fixed, but it took the government two years to blow the whistle on it -- and even with the fines they still came out way ahead. So the FCC collected billions from the spectrum auction, the LCD manufacturers collected billions more by creating artificial shortages and price fixing schemas, and all of that came out the pockets of every person who bought a DTV.
3G services do NOT use the freed up spectrum. They use already-allocated space. As to what does use that new spectrum? Well... nothing you'd care about. In fact, very little at all right now. The licenses have been sold, but the consumers haven't seen any benefit. Don't worry though -- you'll be paying for the licenses those companies bought. One way or another, you'll pay.
3G is a joke, but it's not a funny one. The FCC promised that we'd start to see high speed wireless internet now that the spectrum's been auctioned off. But like everything else, they seem to have lied -- shoving costs down the consumer's throat in the middle of a recession, raking in the money with a smile from the auctions... Everything about the so-called digital transition was a scam. Price fixing of LCD TV prices, running out of converter boxes -- and charging twice as much as they were worth in the store to soak up the free money those vouchers gave them... hmph.
Where's the alternatives here? They all have bandwidth caps. None of them are investing in the backhaul infrastructure. The network coverage is a joke, the handsets have disabled tethering, locked in the search engines... I mean, hell -- a pringles can and a wifi card does better than every other solution we have here in the United States for mobile internet. What the hell happened?
Hey... nine months of pregnancy and giving birth have to count for something, right?
Yes. Your mom popped out a smart geek boy. We need more of those in the world. They make excellent friends on the whole, and they don't scream and run away when I invite them over to hang out with a bunch of my female friends.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Every person has within them a book to write. And for most, that's exactly where it should stay, to paraphrase Mark Twain. If it were possible to write a story that could be published after a person's death, I might think about it -- but publishing details of an event that could endanger a person's life is criminally stupid.
You are naive. Many crooks are monumentally stupid. Many are too stupid to live, in fact. They die, stupidly. The 'master criminal' looks great in the fiction media, but he doesn't appear in real life that often. I doubt that this dirtbag is any Einstein, given that he is STUPID enough to bring a weapon along during his burglary.
Stupidity and desperation are two very different things. And very smart people in history have done very stupid things. It's naive of you to assume a person's intelligence is the only, or even an important, factor in their behavior.
You do know there are countries where you can run to that you cant be extradited from. Problem is 99.99785% of all criminals are too stupid to do that. Hell this specific dork cant stop posting on facebook.
*face palm* There's one of you in every discussion like this.
1. This guy did an armed robbery. Do you really think there's a lot of countries out there that are going to welcome that with open arms? Reason for citizenship application: "I luv my gun and robbin' shit." Request granted! He didn't do it for political reasons, or because he has dual nationality and the country he's fleeing to doesn't consider it a crime, etc.
He could flee to a relatively isolated area and probably rest easy knowing that the authorities have better things to worry about than him. But then, that's what bounty hunters are for -- these people can take the risks required to grab him and get him to the border because they're not agents of the government paying them for the collar. You think those "$100,000 reward for capture" posters don't look appealing? A plane ticket, a little bit of research, and a criminal's ego is all it takes to bring home the bacon.
Sometimes it's not taunting -- sometimes it's a guy who's just tired of running. Sometimes it's a person who has no choice but to keep running, but wants to get caught. Before you jump to conclusions, let me share--
True story:
There was someone once upon a time who had gotten in with the wrong crowd. As it turns out, there's quite a demand for computer geniuses in the underworld and after being noticed and blackmailed, this person was in the unenviable position of having to assist an organized criminal group in defeating the electronic and physical security of various operations. S/he couldn't go to the authorities directly because s/he was being watched constantly by the co-conspirators and if s/he tried to leave s/he would be killed. So this person started leaving subtle clues behind in the equipment that s/he tampered with and elsewhere at the scene. This group was later responsible for clearing out several floors of a skyscraper and police were able to follow the clues left behind (or as you would call them "taunts") to eventually locate the person behind it and shut the group down. That person served a few years in jail, and later became best friends with the arresting officer. This individual now works as a consultant to the agency responsible for the arrest, helping them to gather electronic evidence.
Even the dumbest criminal knows by now that posting online under your own name when you're wanted by the cops is stupid. I'm forced to conclude there's a non-obvious motive for this behavior.
How much do we know about the ways in which Apple uses rumors to gin up interest in new products?
I thought it was pretty clear -- it's a cheap way to gauge interest and reactions to a product before it's release. People weren't excited about two batteries in the iPhone... whoosh, it doesn't get that. People get excited about wifi blamo, it makes it into the final product. It saves millions in market research, focus groups, etc. Oh yeah, and everybody talking about a product, getting all excited, even though they haven't the foggiest what it'll be -- that's free word of mouth press. That's the kind of publicity that Google has paid tens of millions for with Droid -- and people still only shrug at it.
There is an annoying thing in American media that every second has to have some sort of sound in it. Really, its almost like welfare for sound people that work in media. But honestly, I like that NASA TV goes for long stretches of silence. I don't want talking heads jabbering on about stupid shit. If I want people jabbering and pontificating about stupid shit, I'll just jack into slashdot, and that way I can be one of them.
You are laboring under the delusion that most broadcasting aims to communicate information. It may do that, but that's not the goal. The goal is to distract you from the dullness of that room you're sitting in. The one with the glowing rectangle and the odd smells. It's there to placate you and entertain you, blinding you to the fact that most of us will waste the forty-odd years of our life working jobs that contribute little or nothing to the betterment of others or the world, that for all those years of work we have a couch, a few trinkets, in some suburban house, while the next generation struggles with answering how they can make a difference -- something that recurs generation after generation, only to perish because society has no real use for it. Television in today's society serves the same purpose that alcohol and recreational drugs serve: To make the pain of mere existance a little more bearable.
The problem isn't that television rots your brain -- the problem is you, like a lot of people on slashdot, have an odd quirk of personality in that novelty is stimulating. For most people, routine is what refreshes and prepares them for the uncertainties, which is the exact opposite of how we interact with the world.
For crissakes, people who say something needs to be secure before it can be trusted really get on my nerves. Anyone who's waded out of the shallow end of the pool on security (of any kind) knows one of the fundamentals of security is that it isn't perfect. No matter how good you make your mouse-trap, there will someday be a better mouse. The more realistic analysis is to ask yourself what the acceptable risk is. Or, put another way, you should strive to ensure that the security is more difficult to break than the value of whatever it is that is being protected.
So, he's dead.
The only thing dead here is your imagination, He Who Shall Not Be Scored:1.
Dead
He didn't die, he experienced a phase transition and is now at a higher entropy level.
The moment these people are signedup and logged in -- that's when we'll know the locations and capabilities of those cameras.
Throwing the car keys onto the dining table, pulling a bottle of vodka from the freezer and taking a few shots ... the perfect end to a usually cold, wet and crappy day in the so-called western-civilisation.
"I asked many people why they drank so much but never received an explanation that I fully understood. It was the tales of their escapades while under the influence of drink that brought me nearest to comprehending their need for it. It seemed to give them a few hours of freedom from rules which, during the rest of their lives, they reluctantly obeyed. If this was true, then in the example of my life lay a cure for drunkenness... never to conform at all." ~ Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
they don't really "believe" in Santa- but geeks sure like sci fi.
... And girls who call them back after that first date in a TNG uniform. XD *ducking, running*
Amazing. They believe in advanced quantum physics AND Santa. Most ordinary people would just say "he doesn't exist" around the age of 9 and move on. But not geeks!
Your post doesn't take into account that as our computers have increased in complexity, our need for bandwidth has risen lock in step with that. We're paying them not just to maintain the existing connection, but also to upgrade it to support higher-demand applications at a nominal pace. But because these companies have an effective monopoly on the right of ways to your house -- a monopoly granted to them by municipalities, there is no competition and thus no incentive to do so. So they have been making a huge profit by delaying or avoiding upgrading. As anyone who has been a network administrator will tell you, the network will run without any problems until it gets very close to or at maximum capacity. And the moment it reaches that threshold, everything goes to hell. That's what started happening globally at major ISPs in this country over the past few years.
If they had been progressively upgrading -- as rising aggregate network utilization suggested they should, this wouldn't be a problem. But they decided to place short term profit over long term sustainability and now we're paying the price: We are locked into using their service (or none at all) and they are raising prices to pay for those upgrades now. In the midst of an economic depression unlike any seen since before WWII, Comcast and other major ISPs have been reporting enormous profits. The average profit a business makes is about 5% -- the rest is production cost and administration (including labor costs). Comcast's profitability last quarter? It rose 22% in Q3 2009, and it's overall profit margins are about 20%.
Now explain to me how a company has a profit margin that increases by 22% when the unemployment rate in this country is at record levels and we're in the middle of a several-year long dry spell. Monopoly power, pure and simple. They've got tens of millions of customers paying through the nose because they don't have any alternative. Does that 250GB cap seem so reasonable now?
I would like to think that when iron-fisted copyright proves to be a failure, we will learn from this and find more reasonable approaches. But the utter failure of Prohibition hasn't stopped us from implementing similar laws. I would like to believe that a cultural war has been won, that when the old guard retires those who replace them will have a more enlightened viewpoint. I truly want to believe that. But I really don't see much precedent for it.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. This is not a reason to give up hope or be cynical! We are in the middle of a social revolution that has few outward signs. Unlike generations past, the revolution that is happening now exists in fragmentary communications and a collectivistic movement that lacks any real core. It seems to be created by an unspoken understanding between its participants. That is to say, the participants of the digital community to varying degrees develop the same coping mechanisms to frame their understanding of this environment. These coping mechanisms develop into ideas and beliefs that we then form the basis of our interactions with other members. This doesn't require any indoctrination, or central leadership to accomplish. Mere exposure to the environment alone seems to predispose people to a certain kind of thinking that cuts across barriers of country, culture, sex, and race.
We have no real leaders for our digital culture, and yet the culture is there. This is unprecidented. There are very, very few social movements that organize around principals instead of individuals who exemplify those ideals. Whether you live in Iran or America, Africa or Europe, the same values systems are spontaniously developing. While the state of the art has advanced at an incredible rate, our methods of understanding and interacting within the new social spaces created by that aren't changing that much. It's a stable environment evolving at rate sufficiently slow to allow culture to form.
That, in and of itself, is amazing. Forget copyright for a moment and consider all the other social advances that are taking place because of our digital interconnectedness -- and then realize that there are only a very few friction points in this revolution! That is also unprecidented in modern history.
Copyright won't end anytime soon, but I'm suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It's something we built extraneous to it, rather than being a fundamental part of it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existance of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism that's been developed and interposed between ourselves and our environment. That's not a judgement on its sustainability nor its justification for existance (or lack thereof).
Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existance only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.
All I'm suggesting is that cost to society outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Everyone's bought into it and driven up its cost, but like any market-driven force it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, but that's nothing compared to what
And since information wants to be free, I'm going to copy your text and paste it all over the internet :)
As long as you credit me.
And thats why you shouldn't clone dinosaurs with Frog DNA.
Because somehow a complex organism will spontaniously change its sex and demand equal rights? Because I betcha that was the scariest part of the movie for republicans. Oh yeah... and velociraptors.
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is a large corporation charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
So what's happened is that this entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It's become a moot point. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war. At this point the only thing these corporations can do is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. That's pretty much what they're doing.
But what does this mean for the average person? Well, it means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. And all the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing because there's a small core of people like you and I, here on slashdot, that do understand the implications of what they're doing and we continually search for ways to screw them over and liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is, economically and politically, structurally identical to the Prohibition, except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combatting a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, and sell people material goods and services they don't really need, we cannot change the fundamental aspects upon which our generation has built a new society out of.
You can't stop people talking -- and just as we have physical connections to each other, increasingly we have digital connections to one another as well. These connections have, and continue to, actively resist attempts at control because doing so fundamentally impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. We will naturally seek the methods which give us the greatest freedom to express ourselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness, and it goes far, far beyond copyright. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. Forces of nature are unpredictable and in the end it always wins.
Then again, probably not -- "shameless" isn't really the same thing as "dangerous", is it?
No, it isn't. Try skydiving, or a little bit of activism like writing to your congresscritters, maybe a small protest. Something to show that you're willing to take a few risks here and there -- just not so much that you look like a freak or a creep. :)
Only problem is that women apparently don't *want* someone who understands their needs. Otherwise, I wouldn't still be single, and I'd actually get *replies* to my plentyoffish profile. :p
Pulling a page from the lesbian handbook here, but it works for hetero couples too; Don't actually be bad, but look like you could be. It's the same reason horror flicks are so popular with my friends -- it's a safe kind of scare. It's the chills down the back of your spine, but you're still in control.
I am a huge fan of the digital TV conversion, since the picture is so good (better than cable or satellite digital), and not encrypted. I didn't pay much above the coupon price for my analog converter boxes, either.
The picture is good. But that's no excuse for what they did. Switching to a widescreen format meant that for those still using standard TVs, 33% of the available viewing space was lost for those who stuck with it. For those who upgraded, the smallest LCD TV sets cost over $500. Comparably, they were about twice as expensive as the previous generation. That's a lot of cash to be forking out at a time when we're in a recession and 10% or more of the population is unemployed -- let alone under-employed. We all knew the prices were being fixed, but it took the government two years to blow the whistle on it -- and even with the fines they still came out way ahead. So the FCC collected billions from the spectrum auction, the LCD manufacturers collected billions more by creating artificial shortages and price fixing schemas, and all of that came out the pockets of every person who bought a DTV.
3G services do NOT use the freed up spectrum. They use already-allocated space. As to what does use that new spectrum? Well... nothing you'd care about. In fact, very little at all right now. The licenses have been sold, but the consumers haven't seen any benefit. Don't worry though -- you'll be paying for the licenses those companies bought. One way or another, you'll pay.
3G is a joke, but it's not a funny one. The FCC promised that we'd start to see high speed wireless internet now that the spectrum's been auctioned off. But like everything else, they seem to have lied -- shoving costs down the consumer's throat in the middle of a recession, raking in the money with a smile from the auctions... Everything about the so-called digital transition was a scam. Price fixing of LCD TV prices, running out of converter boxes -- and charging twice as much as they were worth in the store to soak up the free money those vouchers gave them... hmph.
Where's the alternatives here? They all have bandwidth caps. None of them are investing in the backhaul infrastructure. The network coverage is a joke, the handsets have disabled tethering, locked in the search engines... I mean, hell -- a pringles can and a wifi card does better than every other solution we have here in the United States for mobile internet. What the hell happened?
Typical woman... thinking that just because men seem to appreciate what they see more, that's all they care about in sex. :p
Well, not all men.. but that one at least. :\
Oh.. go ahead and mod it Troll. It's just a joke!
+1, Adorable.
Hey... nine months of pregnancy and giving birth have to count for something, right?
Yes. Your mom popped out a smart geek boy. We need more of those in the world. They make excellent friends on the whole, and they don't scream and run away when I invite them over to hang out with a bunch of my female friends. :)