The Stockade was a bunch of people not wanting to pay tax, it wasn't exactly the French Revolution... It might be deleted from the history books anyway, and instead kids will learn about Bradman's great batting...
As per being conservative, aren't we not? The Hanson case, Fielding in the senate, net filtering, pixelising and beeping everything on TV that is even moderately sexual, banning books, censoring the "Want longer lasting sex" ads in Sydney, not that progressive, is it? Howard, Abbot and especially Ruddock (plus their Exclusive Bretheren friends..) were about as progressive as the Spanish Inquisition. Now the new bunch is just as bad, Rudd calling the Hanson photos disgusting without actually seeing them (and raid police taking them from the not even open exhibition!), that braindead Conroy pushing the filtering "to save the children" and, if you listen to talk-back radio, at least half of the population agreeing with the filtering - that's scary. How many millions of taxpayer money was spent on that Christian festival in Sydney? While, of course, financial support for a couple of cultural institutions was just cancelled by the federal govt.
Yes, we are overly conservative. During the last ~15 years thing went bad to worse.
I guess it *is* a republic, but are you sure about the democratic bit? I have my doubts... I heard something about some illegal wiretaps, as in the government illegally listening to telephone conversations of citizens... Of course I might have been mistaken and the news was about the Stasi or the Securitate or something, after all, a *democratic* country would never allow its government to illegally spy on its citizens...
The Sovie Union was *not* communism. It was socialism (which, in turn, is *not* social democracy), a temporary state until communism can be built. This whole idea of socialism was not ni the original Marxist stuff, it was a later addition. Read a bit of Lenin (his most prominent book that has been translated to English is the "State and Revolution") and it will be much clearer. As of the 80's they finished putting down the basis of communism, if you listened to the blurb from the 1st of May speeches.
To put it in picture: in the East-European countries at the end of the war by and large there were 2 major leftwing parties: the communists and the social democrats. The former wanted to have a socialist state (i.e. dictature of the proletariat - an openly authoritarian system) so that they can build a communist state, where the dictature simply disolves. The social democrats had an ideology pretty much like the Scandinavian model (so what you have in Sweden or Norway). In every single country the communists pretty much got rid of the social democrats (of course, the Soviet military presence was kind of helpful...) and then 40 years of socialism followed. Of course, humans being humans, even at the very early stages some animals, as Orwell so brilliantly put it, became more equal than the others...
An other common misconception is that in communism you can't have property. That's not true. You can have personal property, what you can not have is the means of production. That is, you can't have a factory. You can't have the equipment with which you can exploit others. Yes, it is silly, especially with today's technologies, but Marx lived more than a century ago and at that time the "factory owner" and "factory worker" were much clearer categories, the most glaring difference being the ownership of the factory.
The problem with your explanation of specially aligned atoms getting excited and then emitting photons in sync is that (as you remember from the quantum physics that you refer to) the energy between the excited and ground states of the electron is very well defined. Now that energy corresponds to one particular wavelength of a photon. Therefore, no matter what colour the light you shine onto your reflective surface, you would get only one particular colour back. I have a mirror that does not seem to behave like that, even though it is a polished metal thingly, i.e. it contains identical atoms of a single kind.
Also, "...when you shine a black light on a white surface...", what exactly is black light? If you mean the UV light, then yes, you get UV reflected back to you, but you can not see it, just as you could not see the light you shone on the surface. The white material seems to shine becase not all UV is reflected. Some of it indeed excites electrons that emit radiation, all sorts of electrons in all sorts of different configurations (in case of T-shirts or a plastic pen i.e. things containing complex molecules) so that their excitation energies are different, therefore the emitted light is not monochromatic. However, that process is not reflection. It is the same process that your fluorescent light uses: it creates UV by electircally exciting low pressure mercury vapour, then that UV is absorbed by the phosphor (that white stuff on the inner surface of the tube), the white stuff gets excited and emits light (not white, actually, but they trick your eyes to *see* it more or less white). There's no reflection in the whole process.
One more thing: what is the time delay between the mirror absorbing an image and then emitting it? It must be a constant value (*very* constant) otherwise mirrors could not reflect coherent (i.e. laser) light (well, they could but the reflected light would not be coherent any more) and as far as I know laser and mirrors work with each other at a most intimate level?
About this reminding... Should we all just send them a postcard, with a big "1789" written on it?
By the way, the system used on Tranai (see Robert Sheckley) is pretty efficient to keep the people's opinion in mind: every public servant has a big seal hanging from the neck. Now every citizen can go to the Voting Booth at any time and press the "like" or "dislike" button by the name of any politician. If there are too many "dislike"-s, then the seal, well, undergoes a very rapid exothermic behaviour, thus making the position vacant for an eager, new and hopefully more popular politician.
As any EU Council member would point it out, your problem is that you think about yourself as "taxpaying citizen". Now that's completely wrong. Try "serf" instead.
The EU has been marching towards a new feudalism for a long time. It's no accident that when the EU Constitution (that would give the Council even more power and even less oversight) was voted down, it was quickly renamed to 'treaty' so that the people need not be asked about it (except that Ireland was not playing ball).
The EU serves the interests of a ruling elite, not the interest of the people. The people are there to serve the ruling elite, nothing more.
"I've seen lots of Nudist websites displaying Mom, dad, and child naked at the beach, but that is NOT porn."
In Australia, it definitely is kiddieporn. They are working on tightening the law in New South Wales so that photo artists can't take nude photos of underage persons "under the cover of artistic freedom" (recently a photo of a naked teen was taken from an art galery by a SWAT team). Chances are that soon in Australia it will be illegal to photograph your own child naked.
Unfortunately our former and present governments and oppositions are full of righteous, deep-Christian politicians who will deliver us from evil, whether we want it or not. After all, Australian parliament starts with the Lord's Prayer every day.
The sad thing is that the Australian population is swallowing it hook, line and sinker, praise the Lord and our moral saviour, the Government! Mind you, blessed are the meek...
Owning Iceland? A TERRORIST state?! The last thing England wants to own! They are working on putting it on the Axis of Evil list, now that North Korea is off it.
"... treating the entire process like an economic system, with publishers as bidders at an auction, authors as sellers, and the community at large as consumers."
Not really, not at least in biomed papers. With those the scientist actually *pays* the publisher to print the article. A paper, especially if it contains colour images (microscopic slides, colourful graphs etc) can set you back by several thousand dollars. That's why there's a little disclaimer under each article that states that since the author paid for the publication, the article legally is paid advertisement.
So no, the authors are not sellers. Only the publishers are the sellers, selling article space to the scientists, advertisement space to corporations and the end result back to scientists. The scientists who publish don't even get the complimentary free copy, although as an author, you can ask them to send you the PDF that you sent them in the first place; now this service is free. On the other hand, if you want the whole magazine on your bookshelf, fork out $200 for a single issue.
It is a wonderful business model:
- Get the article from scientist (free) - Send it to other scientists for peer review (free) - Accept it and charge the author (income) - Sell the advertisement space, at least 50% of the mag (income) - Print the mag (expense) - Sell the mag *way* above production/distribution cost (income) - Keep the copyright to every article so that the author can't republish it without paying you (possible income) - Profit!!!
The Underpants Gnomes had no clue about business...
Plus there are further tricks - if you manage to bribe the execs of some research association so that membership in the assocation also means a compulsory subscription to your periodical, then the customer base is guaranteed. Of course it is usually sold as "we had to increase our membership fee, but now membership also includes a complimentary subscription to magazine X". This of course increases your readership, making your ranking higher among the sci mag list.
Ah, yes. Chances are that the money they take from the scientist is public money from some research grant. Yet the copyright to the article belongs to the publisher, a private organisation that actually has very little to do with scientific research and everything to do with making profit. That's clever! Even better, that when research grants are awarded, they check your publication record. If you published your articles on the Web, that is worth exactly nothing. Publishing a handful of articles in a couple of those high-ranking expensive publications significantly increases your chance to get a grant, so that you can publish some more...
Imagine if the **AA could find a way to implement this! Every musician and actor paying them to be included on a CD or in a film, plus selling ads even smack in the middle of a CD (music stops, someone screams about the advantages of washing powder X, music continues) and making it compulsory that members of any civil organisation buy a certain number of CDs or DVDs every month. Those Hollywood dudes know diddly squat about making profit.
"With encrypted links being made ever easier, and the/. story recently of Google pushing an easier to use secure protocol, these tracking schemes will ultimately fail, at vast taxpayer expense."
Unless, of course, the govt declares that apart from itself, the financial institutions and possibly big business organisations anyone using encryption is a terrorist. The good old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra. Therefore, if you try to hide anything, you must be plotting against democracy and thus must disappear swiftly and without trace...
When you talk about the subsidizing of leeches, I take you mean the **AA?
I mean, they are not operating on a free market, are they? They have a government granted monopoly to charge money for 100-150 years for the same thing over and over again. Do *you* have the right to charge for your singular production output for an infinite number of times?
What's more, the **AA do not create anything. They are the middlemen, or rather, middle-organisations for they are not natural persons. Yet, they keep enjoying the government granted benefits long after the actual human being creators of the things they control are dead.
Note, I do *not* download books, movies or music. I can afford to buy what I want and I have a really large collection of books, CDs and DVDs. Yet, I have no problem with pirated material at all when for example the publisher decides that they do not offer the material any more or in the format I want it (film X is only available on VHS for $60 - a pirated, reasonably good quality copy on DVD+R from eBay at $12 is the way to go, although I would have paid $30 for the real DVD, had it been available).
Piracy is, to a large extent, an indications that the market has been distorted significantly. Often the pay-per-view proponents come up with the analogy of a concert or a theatre, you have to pay every time you want to see the performance. True. However, the artist *has to perform* every time as well. What the entertainment industry wants is to perform once and be paid for eternity. Preferably without paying the artist at all...
Why should a kid, who was born decades after Walt Disney went fertiliser, pay royalty to a corporation when he buys a keyring with a mouse on it? In what way does it advance the arts and culture of humanity?
Laws come and go. The US had seggregation laws not so long ago. No there aren't, in fact the opposite is true. On the other hand, seggregation probably generated no direct corporate income, while IP does, so at the end of the day you probably are right, IP is here to stay.
The fact that he was nasty or not has nothing to do with the DMCA violation. If someone broke the law then he broke the law, no matter that by breaking the law he uncovered some other criminal act. You can not break and enter so that you can prove that your neighbour is running some extortion racket. The police can, if they have a proper authorisation from a judge, but you can not. If you do, you might go to jail while your neighbour might actually walk.
Now the government clearly stated that they are above the law; they are the sovereign, they make the law and the law applies only to their royal subjects, serfs and lesser vermins also known as "the people". This system is known as democracy. It is in stark contrast with the system of tyranny, where there is a tyrant, a sovereign making the law that only applies to his royal subjects, serfs and other vermins also known as the "oppressed".
Maybe, but then it introduces other flaws. The whole idea behind the Internet (as in the IP) is a distributed system, because it is more resilient. USENET was truly distributed. If a server went down and all of its disks turned into scrap metal, no problem. Every article could be found on thousands of servers. Only the direct clients of the broken server were affected and even them only until the server got repaired and it sucked all the articles onto its shiny new disks from the other feeds. Web forums and mailing lists are centralised beasts (like the whole internet is getting more and more centralised) and if/.'s server(s) crash and burn, the *nobody* has/. access until an alternate site is set up and everything is reloaded from a backup, assuming that a backup exists.
Apart from the reliability, it also had a social aspect. It was virtually impossible to delete something from USENET. Yes, you could send the cancel messages, but they either worked or not and if there was just 1 copy anywhere not cancelled on any list that single item could re-feed the entire system. With the web based thing if you take something down, then probably there are still copies of it on people's drives and they will upload them to some other (possibly shadier) sites but then you have to know that the thing is out and actively search for it. USENET was a damned good democracy spreader with very little control over it. I do believe that every oppressive organisation (business and government alike) must have hated it with a passion - there was no way of sending a C&D letter to USENET (CoS tried it with very little success...).
Then you had the off-line reading, that is not an issue if you have 24/7 several Mb/s access, but is an issue for people with intermittent or slow access (oh yes, there *still* are people like that!).
So, while USENET had no flashy interface, in many respects it was a helluva better system that web forums and mailing lists. As the Net got more and more commercialised, the S/N ratio nosedived on USENET. If it could be cleaned from the spam rubbish somehow I'd take it any day over any Web based flashy groupthing.
On the thought of civil disobedience, I remember an old joke about Stalin...
Stalin and Beriya walk around in some rural area, to see how things are going. They see a peasant tending some crops. "What are you sowing?" asks Stalin. The peasant doesn't say anything, just spits and continues working. Beriya gets furious, he wants to call the Checa to punish the peasant but Stalin, who is in a good mood, stops him. "Let it go, he's just a grumpy peasant and remember, at the end it will be ours anyway." As they start to walk away the peasant turns to them: "I'm sowing hemp. It will make a good, strong rope."
> I'm a white guy and my girlfriend is African. I have to wear sunblock... she doesn't. Is that a racist comment?
Man, that's not just racist but also sexists! Next you will declare that one of you is not a Christian! With such lack of morale, you probably don't even think about the children!
I think the fallacy of your argument is that you have the implicite, and rather misguided, assumption that the government actually represents the interest of the public.
In reality, the government's role is controling the public in the interest of the government's paymasters. So no, the government won't sue the ISPs for VoIP possibly transferring conversations about terrorism, kiddieporn, MP3 downloads or other satanic subjects. The government will mandate the ISPs to record and store every VoIP conversation and provide access to the recorded messages to any police agent, secret agent, government agent, music or movie industry representative, other industry representative and possibly the janitor, assuming that the janitor has enough money to finance the next election campaign of some politician.
I don't think that greenies have a problem with the power plant per se. The plant itself is fairly safe and clean and all that. The problem is with the waste. That stuff is both highly radioactive and very toxic and remains so for tens of thousands of years. So you need to find a storage method that you can guarantee to remain safe for many times the time it took us to evolve from the stone axe to the nuclear reactor. On top of that, you have to also guarantee that it is stored in a way so that bad guys can't get their hand on it, which is rather hard.
I believe that if the nuclear industry was working in a U in E out basis, the greenies would organise thanksgiving rock orgies around the plants. Alas, the current ones work on the U in E + really longlasting really dangerous waste out basis and that last term makes the greenies itch.
That is not exactly true. Size *does* matter. A particle that is a few micrometers in diameter can not enter a cell for it is as big or bigger than a cell itself. A particle only a few nanometers in diameter (i.e. a few tens of atoms wide) can easily enter a cell and wreac havoc in the molecular machinery of a cell. In addition, concentration also matters. There is about 0.05% CO2 in the ambient air. If you increase it 100-fold, to 5%, most people get really sick. If there are some given nanopartciles around you in very low concentration and suddenly the concentration increases 100 or 1000 fold due to being released from a nanotech household item, things might get nasty.
There is nothing inherently evil in radiocative materials, they occur in nature and we are subject of background radiation all the time. Yet, I would not be keen to use some household item that has been made from say Co(60). Yes, cobalt is just a metal found in nature and yes, there is a background gamma radiation anyway, but still...
> Just put loads of debris in the same orbit at a greatly different speed
Unfortunately, the same orbit means the same speed - different speeds, different orbits. You need to create an orbit that crosses the satellite's orbit at some point and wait until your debris and the satellite meet at the crossing (since their orbiting times are different, they will, if you wait long enough).
Slashdot Mirror
The Stockade was a bunch of people not wanting to pay tax, it wasn't exactly the French Revolution... It might be deleted from the history books anyway, and instead kids will learn about Bradman's great batting...
As per being conservative, aren't we not? The Hanson case, Fielding in the senate, net filtering, pixelising and beeping everything on TV that is even moderately sexual, banning books, censoring the "Want longer lasting sex" ads in Sydney, not that progressive, is it?
Howard, Abbot and especially Ruddock (plus their Exclusive Bretheren friends..) were about as progressive as the Spanish Inquisition. Now the new bunch is just as bad, Rudd calling the Hanson photos disgusting without actually seeing them (and raid police taking them from the not even open exhibition!), that braindead Conroy pushing the filtering "to save the children" and, if you listen to talk-back radio, at least half of the population agreeing with the filtering - that's scary. How many millions of taxpayer money was spent on that Christian festival in Sydney? While, of course, financial support for a couple of cultural institutions was just cancelled by the federal govt.
Yes, we are overly conservative. During the last ~15 years thing went bad to worse.
I guess it *is* a republic, but are you sure about the democratic bit? I have my doubts... I heard something about some illegal wiretaps, as in the government illegally listening to telephone conversations of citizens... Of course I might have been mistaken and the news was about the Stasi or the Securitate or something, after all, a *democratic* country would never allow its government to illegally spy on its citizens...
The Sovie Union was *not* communism. It was socialism (which, in turn, is *not* social democracy), a temporary state until communism can be built. This whole idea of socialism was not ni the original Marxist stuff, it was a later addition. Read a bit of Lenin (his most prominent book that has been translated to English is the "State and Revolution") and it will be much clearer. As of the 80's they finished putting down the basis of communism, if you listened to the blurb from the 1st of May speeches.
To put it in picture: in the East-European countries at the end of the war by and large there were 2 major leftwing parties: the communists and the social democrats. The former wanted to have a socialist state (i.e. dictature of the proletariat - an openly authoritarian system) so that they can build a communist state, where the dictature simply disolves. The social democrats had an ideology pretty much like the Scandinavian model (so what you have in Sweden or Norway). In every single country the communists pretty much got rid of the social democrats (of course, the Soviet military presence was kind of helpful...) and then 40 years of socialism followed. Of course, humans being humans, even at the very early stages some animals, as Orwell so brilliantly put it, became more equal than the others...
An other common misconception is that in communism you can't have property. That's not true. You can have personal property, what you can not have is the means of production. That is, you can't have a factory. You can't have the equipment with which you can exploit others. Yes, it is silly, especially with today's technologies, but Marx lived more than a century ago and at that time the "factory owner" and "factory worker" were much clearer categories, the most glaring difference being the ownership of the factory.
The problem with your explanation of specially aligned atoms getting excited and then emitting photons in sync is that (as you remember from the quantum physics that you refer to) the energy between the excited and ground states of the electron is very well defined. Now that energy corresponds to one particular wavelength of a photon. Therefore, no matter what colour the light you shine onto your reflective surface, you would get only one particular colour back. I have a mirror that does not seem to behave like that, even though it is a polished metal thingly, i.e. it contains identical atoms of a single kind.
Also, "...when you shine a black light on a white surface...", what exactly is black light? If you mean the UV light, then yes, you get UV reflected back to you, but you can not see it, just as you could not see the light you shone on the surface. The white material seems to shine becase not all UV is reflected. Some of it indeed excites electrons that emit radiation, all sorts of electrons in all sorts of different configurations (in case of T-shirts or a plastic pen i.e. things containing complex molecules) so that their excitation energies are different, therefore the emitted light is not monochromatic. However, that process is not reflection. It is the same process that your fluorescent light uses: it creates UV by electircally exciting low pressure mercury vapour, then that UV is absorbed by the phosphor (that white stuff on the inner surface of the tube), the white stuff gets excited and emits light (not white, actually, but they trick your eyes to *see* it more or less white). There's no reflection in the whole process.
One more thing: what is the time delay between the mirror absorbing an image and then emitting it? It must be a constant value (*very* constant) otherwise mirrors could not reflect coherent (i.e. laser) light (well, they could but the reflected light would not be coherent any more) and as far as I know laser and mirrors work with each other at a most intimate level?
About this reminding... Should we all just send them a postcard, with a big "1789" written on it?
By the way, the system used on Tranai (see Robert Sheckley) is pretty efficient to keep the people's opinion in mind: every public servant has a big seal hanging from the neck. Now every citizen can go to the Voting Booth at any time and press the "like" or "dislike" button by the name of any politician. If there are too many "dislike"-s, then the seal, well, undergoes a very rapid exothermic behaviour, thus making the position vacant for an eager, new and hopefully more popular politician.
As any EU Council member would point it out, your problem is that you think about yourself as "taxpaying citizen".
Now that's completely wrong. Try "serf" instead.
The EU has been marching towards a new feudalism for a long time. It's no accident that when the EU Constitution (that would give the Council even more power and even less oversight) was voted down, it was quickly renamed to 'treaty' so that the people need not be asked about it (except that Ireland was not playing ball).
The EU serves the interests of a ruling elite, not the interest of the people. The people are there to serve the ruling elite, nothing more.
"...nor follows instructions very well."
You have obviously never tried to read a VCR instruction manual that was translated to English in China...
"I've seen lots of Nudist websites displaying Mom, dad, and child naked at the beach, but that is NOT porn."
In Australia, it definitely is kiddieporn. They are working on tightening the law in New South Wales so that photo artists can't take nude photos of underage persons "under the cover of artistic freedom" (recently a photo of a naked teen was taken from an art galery by a SWAT team). Chances are that soon in Australia it will be illegal to photograph your own child naked.
Unfortunately our former and present governments and oppositions are full of righteous, deep-Christian politicians who will deliver us from evil, whether we want it or not. After all, Australian parliament starts with the Lord's Prayer every day.
The sad thing is that the Australian population is swallowing it hook, line and sinker, praise the Lord and our moral saviour, the Government! Mind you, blessed are the meek...
Owning Iceland? A TERRORIST state?!
The last thing England wants to own!
They are working on putting it on the Axis of Evil list, now that North Korea is off it.
"... treating the entire process like an economic system, with publishers as bidders at an auction, authors as sellers, and the community at large as consumers."
Not really, not at least in biomed papers.
With those the scientist actually *pays* the publisher to print the article. A paper, especially if it contains colour images (microscopic slides, colourful graphs etc) can set you back by several thousand dollars. That's why there's a little disclaimer under each article that states that since the author paid for the publication, the article legally is paid advertisement.
So no, the authors are not sellers. Only the publishers are the sellers, selling article space to the scientists, advertisement space to corporations and the end result back to scientists. The scientists who publish don't even get the complimentary free copy, although as an author, you can ask them to send you the PDF that you sent them in the first place; now this service is free. On the other hand, if you want the whole magazine on your bookshelf, fork out $200 for a single issue.
It is a wonderful business model:
- Get the article from scientist (free)
- Send it to other scientists for peer review (free)
- Accept it and charge the author (income)
- Sell the advertisement space, at least 50% of the mag (income)
- Print the mag (expense)
- Sell the mag *way* above production/distribution cost (income)
- Keep the copyright to every article so that the author can't republish it without paying you (possible income)
- Profit!!!
The Underpants Gnomes had no clue about business...
Plus there are further tricks - if you manage to bribe the execs of some research association so that membership in the assocation also means a compulsory subscription to your periodical, then the customer base is guaranteed. Of course it is usually sold as "we had to increase our membership fee, but now membership also includes a complimentary subscription to magazine X". This of course increases your readership, making your ranking higher among the sci mag list.
Ah, yes. Chances are that the money they take from the scientist is public money from some research grant. Yet the copyright to the article belongs to the publisher, a private organisation that actually has very little to do with scientific research and everything to do with making profit. That's clever! Even better, that when research grants are awarded, they check your publication record. If you published your articles on the Web, that is worth exactly nothing. Publishing a handful of articles in a couple of those high-ranking expensive publications significantly increases your chance to get a grant, so that you can publish some more...
Imagine if the **AA could find a way to implement this! Every musician and actor paying them to be included on a CD or in a film, plus selling ads even smack in the middle of a CD (music stops, someone screams about the advantages of washing powder X, music continues) and making it compulsory that members of any civil organisation buy a certain number of CDs or DVDs every month. Those Hollywood dudes know diddly squat about making profit.
"With encrypted links being made ever easier, and the /. story recently of Google pushing an easier to use secure protocol, these tracking schemes will ultimately fail, at vast taxpayer expense."
Unless, of course, the govt declares that apart from itself, the financial institutions and possibly big business organisations anyone using encryption is a terrorist. The good old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra. Therefore, if you try to hide anything, you must be plotting against democracy and thus must disappear swiftly and without trace...
A rebuttal using factual, verifyable and logically coherent argument with no emotional content or leaning in either way.
You must have forgotten at what site you were logged in...
When you talk about the subsidizing of leeches, I take you mean the **AA?
I mean, they are not operating on a free market, are they? They have a government granted monopoly to charge money for 100-150 years for the same thing over and over again. Do *you* have the right to charge for your singular production output for an infinite number of times?
What's more, the **AA do not create anything. They are the middlemen, or rather, middle-organisations for they are not natural persons. Yet, they keep enjoying the government granted benefits long after the actual human being creators of the things they control are dead.
Note, I do *not* download books, movies or music. I can afford to buy what I want and I have a really large collection of books, CDs and DVDs. Yet, I have no problem with pirated material at all when for example the publisher decides that they do not offer the material any more or in the format I want it (film X is only available on VHS for $60 - a pirated, reasonably good quality copy on DVD+R from eBay at $12 is the way to go, although I would have paid $30 for the real DVD, had it been available).
Piracy is, to a large extent, an indications that the market has been distorted significantly. Often the pay-per-view proponents come up with the analogy of a concert or a theatre, you have to pay every time you want to see the performance. True. However, the artist *has to perform* every time as well. What the entertainment industry wants is to perform once and be paid for eternity. Preferably without paying the artist at all...
Why should a kid, who was born decades after Walt Disney went fertiliser, pay royalty to a corporation when he buys a keyring with a mouse on it? In what way does it advance the arts and culture of humanity?
Maybe it was Great A'Tuin doing a roll, and that's what we saw. The strange spectra, of course, is due to the octarin.
Laws come and go. The US had seggregation laws not so long ago. No there aren't, in fact the opposite is true.
On the other hand, seggregation probably generated no direct corporate income, while IP does, so at the end of the day you probably are right, IP is here to stay.
The fact that he was nasty or not has nothing to do with the DMCA violation. If someone broke the law then he broke the law, no matter that by breaking the law he uncovered some other criminal act. You can not break and enter so that you can prove that your neighbour is running some extortion racket. The police can, if they have a proper authorisation from a judge, but you can not. If you do, you might go to jail while your neighbour might actually walk.
Now the government clearly stated that they are above the law; they are the sovereign, they make the law and the law applies only to their royal subjects, serfs and lesser vermins also known as "the people". This system is known as democracy. It is in stark contrast with the system of tyranny, where there is a tyrant, a sovereign making the law that only applies to his royal subjects, serfs and other vermins also known as the "oppressed".
Maybe, but then it introduces other flaws. /.'s server(s) crash and burn, the *nobody* has /. access until an alternate site is set up and everything is reloaded from a backup, assuming that a backup exists.
The whole idea behind the Internet (as in the IP) is a distributed system, because it is more resilient.
USENET was truly distributed. If a server went down and all of its disks turned into scrap metal, no problem. Every article could be found on thousands of servers. Only the direct clients of the broken server were affected and even them only until the server got repaired and it sucked all the articles onto its shiny new disks from the other feeds.
Web forums and mailing lists are centralised beasts (like the whole internet is getting more and more centralised) and if
Apart from the reliability, it also had a social aspect. It was virtually impossible to delete something from USENET. Yes, you could send the cancel messages, but they either worked or not and if there was just 1 copy anywhere not cancelled on any list that single item could re-feed the entire system. With the web based thing if you take something down, then probably there are still copies of it on people's drives and they will upload them to some other (possibly shadier) sites but then you have to know that the thing is out and actively search for it. USENET was a damned good democracy spreader with very little control over it. I do believe that every oppressive organisation (business and government alike) must have hated it with a passion - there was no way of sending a C&D letter to USENET (CoS tried it with very little success...).
Then you had the off-line reading, that is not an issue if you have 24/7 several Mb/s access, but is an issue for people with intermittent or slow access (oh yes, there *still* are people like that!).
So, while USENET had no flashy interface, in many respects it was a helluva better system that web forums and mailing lists. As the Net got more and more commercialised, the S/N ratio nosedived on USENET. If it could be cleaned from the spam rubbish somehow I'd take it any day over any Web based flashy groupthing.
"...Hollywood and all other companiers with IP content..."
Run it by me again, what's exactly the connection between "Hollywood" and "intellectual" ?
On the thought of civil disobedience, I remember an old joke about Stalin...
Stalin and Beriya walk around in some rural area, to see how things are going.
They see a peasant tending some crops. "What are you sowing?" asks Stalin.
The peasant doesn't say anything, just spits and continues working.
Beriya gets furious, he wants to call the Checa to punish the peasant but Stalin,
who is in a good mood, stops him. "Let it go, he's just a grumpy peasant and
remember, at the end it will be ours anyway." As they start to walk away the
peasant turns to them: "I'm sowing hemp. It will make a good, strong rope."
> I'm a white guy and my girlfriend is African. I have to wear sunblock ... she doesn't. Is that a racist comment?
Man, that's not just racist but also sexists! Next you will declare that one of you is not a Christian!
With such lack of morale, you probably don't even think about the children!
I think the fallacy of your argument is that you have the implicite, and rather misguided, assumption that the government actually represents the interest of the public.
In reality, the government's role is controling the public in the interest of the government's paymasters. So no, the government won't sue the ISPs for VoIP possibly transferring conversations about terrorism, kiddieporn, MP3 downloads or other satanic subjects. The government will mandate the ISPs to record and store every VoIP conversation and provide access to the recorded messages to any police agent, secret agent, government agent, music or movie industry representative, other industry representative and possibly the janitor, assuming that the janitor has enough money to finance the next election campaign of some politician.
I don't think that greenies have a problem with the power plant per se. The plant itself is fairly safe and clean and all that. The problem is with the waste. That stuff is both highly radioactive and very toxic and remains so for tens of thousands of years. So you need to find a storage method that you can guarantee to remain safe for many times the time it took us to evolve from the stone axe to the nuclear reactor. On top of that, you have to also guarantee that it is stored in a way so that bad guys can't get their hand on it, which is rather hard.
I believe that if the nuclear industry was working in a U in E out basis, the greenies would organise thanksgiving rock orgies around the plants. Alas, the current ones work on the U in E + really longlasting really dangerous waste out basis and that last term makes the greenies itch.
That is not exactly true. Size *does* matter. A particle that is a few micrometers in diameter can not enter a cell for it is as big or bigger than a cell itself. A particle only a few nanometers in diameter (i.e. a few tens of atoms wide) can easily enter a cell and wreac havoc in the molecular machinery of a cell. In addition, concentration also matters. There is about 0.05% CO2 in the ambient air. If you increase it 100-fold, to 5%, most people get really sick. If there are some given nanopartciles around you in very low concentration and suddenly the concentration increases 100 or 1000 fold due to being released from a nanotech household item, things might get nasty.
There is nothing inherently evil in radiocative materials, they occur in nature and we are subject of background radiation all the time. Yet, I would not be keen to use some household item that has been made from say Co(60). Yes, cobalt is just a metal found in nature and yes, there is a background gamma radiation anyway, but still...
But how about a government owned *non* monopoly? Just an other player? Without the need of making a profit (but making enough to sustain itself)?
> Just put loads of debris in the same orbit at a greatly different speed
Unfortunately, the same orbit means the same speed - different speeds, different orbits.
You need to create an orbit that crosses the satellite's orbit at some point and wait until your debris and the satellite meet at the crossing (since their orbiting times are different, they will, if you wait long enough).