It reminds me of the doctor that gave glasses to my nieces. Turns-out their eyes were not perfect but still good enough that they never needed those glasses. He was just trying to earn money. Shitbag.
As for the brain sciences, I have yet to see them do anything worthwhile. The psychoanalysis seems okay (talking is good for the soul), but all this other crap is bogus. Chopping into people's brains (and turning one of the Kennedy girls into a vegetable), hitting them with electroshock, locking-up people and then never letting out*, filling them with drugs they don't need, and on and on. It's the modern version of a witch doctor, but instead of magic words they wrap-up their BS in science technobabble. It's caused FAR more harm than it's cured.
* * Back in the 1950s a perfectly healthy Ph.D. admitted himself to a hospital, so he could see the treatment for himself. He then stopped faking being sick, and acted perfectly normal to simulate being "cured", but they refused to release him. Eventually his friends had to "break him out". Even when the patient is cured, they don't let him escape.
But if the porn does not travel across state lines (i.e. I get it from a nearby town), then where is the authority? Answer: It isn't there.
Furthermore the 1st amendment forbids Congress from outlawing obscenity, due to protection of the free press. Any such law is null. "The purpose of a written constitution is to bind-up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities." - Thomas Jefferson, 1782 (back when Virginia was still an independent nation)
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
All works that are created belong to everyone else, unless the author locks it in a safe out of view. The legal privilege we call an "exclusive right" for a "limited time", doesn't prevent copying of his ideas (which is a right given to us by nature). It merely gives the author a way to recover lost earnings from the sale of his book. Nothing more.
Possession of photos of a rape victim should not be a crime, just the same as possession of photos of murder victims is not a crime. Some people get off on the latter, but that doesn't mean we should outlaw it.
And nudity? It is never illegal regardless of age (as ruled by the Supreme Court). That's why nudist websites are allowed to exist.
The word you are looking for is oligarchy - unelected men that sit on the top and make the rules.
Kinda like our unelected Supreme Court Oligarchs. (I'm still trying to find the part of the US Constitution that the Court claims allows them to ban obscene material. I swear it's not there, even though they claim it is. Hmmm.)
I hate moral dictatorship. It doesn't matter if it's coming from a Muslim government, the Church of Rome, or politicians. Ya know... it's my life. If I want to be an asshole that looks at porn, doesn't go to church, and keeps to himself, I have that right. Stop trying to force me to adopt your moral beliefs.
So this HAYSTACK program. Would it work in the US and EU? It appears the answer is "no" since it was specifically designed for Iraq.
Ooops read my mind! It would save a lot of money to have a 5 watt Torrent-downloading plug to download my favorite TV shows,* versus leaving my ~150 watt computer running all the time. Some quick math: 0.140 kilowatt * 24 * 365 * 12 cents per KWh == about 140 dollars saved.
Okay maybe not a lot of money. In fact: Never mind. I'll just use my laptop to save electricity.;-)
* * Trivia - 5 watt is the US-enforced maximum wattage allowed on Digital TV converter boxes.
Linux does the job admirably, with even the most full-featured distro like Debian being able to slot into the flash memory provided you're economical with what you install (scrap Gnome and KDE for starters!). Or Damn Small Linux and other distros of its ilk will do the job just fine too.
They always forget Puppy, which is a heck of a lot easier to use than DSL. Puppy can fit in as little as 32 megabytes with a full desktop even a kid could use.
.....and 512Mb DDR2 RAM.
Woah. I feel like I stepped into the Nintendo and Sega wars. 512 megabits == 64 megabytes in normal human parlance. i.e Twice as much as I have in my old Windows98 laptop and equal to what was in my OS 9 mac.
>>>Cool... we can go to web pages! >>>Eh, I like Netscape better.
Funny but not entirely accurate. Mosaic was the #1 browser of the day (1993-94), followed by Netscape which maintained its #1 spot until 1999 when Microsoft finally surpassed them.
Here's my own personal history: - Mosaic for Amiga 500 (1993) - Awesome. It's like a BBS but worldwide. Or Usenet with pictures. Wish I had something faster than a 2 kbit/s modem. - - Netscape? No I'm sticking with Mosaic. - What's that? Netscape was written by the Mosaic guys? Okay I'll try it. - Microsoft has a web browser? Hahahahaha. - - Mozilla Netscape 6 - wow this is pretty bad, but IE 5 sucks worse. - Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - yay! And of course IE6 is still the suck. - Whaddya mean I "have" to use IE at work? Why won't you let me install Firefox? Frak. (I have tried every IE ever released but the only one I ever used was IE6, and only because the boss forces me to.)
No you're off by about five years. In the early 90s when almost everyone was using V.32 modems (9k or 14k), the ITU-T standards committee was dragging its feet developing a faster speed. So various companies went-ahead and released 19k and 24k modems, which were completely non-standard, so they could not use ITU designations. Instead they created marketing names like "Turbo" or "V.FAST" or whatever.
Eventually the ITU-T relased V.34 which allowed 28k and 33k speeds, and did not work with the non-standard Turbo or V.FAST modems. Then came the new digital modem which abandoned the old analog techniques, so it jumped to V.90 (56/33k) and finally V.92 (56/48k). .
>>>I'm on Comcast now, and I have a feeling that one day I'll look back on today and think, 'Man, I didn't know what fast was.'
I only have 750k. That might seem slow to you, but hulu.com and other sites allow me to adjust the video resolution where you really only need a 250k line to watch them. I simply don't see any reason to spend more than $20 for internet..... never did in the past.:-)
When I'm on the road I use 50k. It takes about 4 hours to bittorrent a single episode of Stargate (or whatever). Not the greatest deal but computers don't need sleep, so I just let it run all night, and grab several episodes per day.
That's elitist to deny people, especially if the computer is just collecting dust in your closet. We all started out ignorant. I'd sooner give the computer to someone in need, teach them the basics (click here to connect; type here to do a search), and then conveniently disappear.;-) Oftentimes if my poor neighbor calls me up, "My net won't connect," I'll help fix the phoneline, but if it's to install some game I tell her to read the manual that came with it.
I'm more inclined to help my brother, since he did carry the furniture from his truck to my apartment.
Microsoft must be taking a page out of Apple's software business. The latest version of Safari and iTunes won't work on my 10.4 Mac, and it's not even that old (four years). Microsoft must have thought: 'Hmmm, if Apple can make their web browser not work on 10.4 and force users to upgrade, we can do the same with our browser and force people to abandon XP!" Evil is as evil does. .
>>>IE's improved quite a bit recently...
Does it have a built-in dictionary to redline my mis-spelled typos? Does it allow addons like WOT or NoScript? Does it have anything like Opera Turbo for slow dialup/wireless connections, or Opera Link to store bookmarks online and unify all your favorites across the Desktop, Laptop, and Cellphone? Does it have a built-in newsgroup and email client like seaMonkey has? Does IE have any compelling reason for my going back to it?
No.
TRIVIA: Other ancient browsers for home PCs, that predate IE
17 years - Mosaic on the Commodore Amiga (April 1993) 17 years - Cello for IBM PC (June 1993) 16 years - DOSlynx for IBM PC (April 1994) 16 years - iBrowse for Commodore Amiga (May 1994) 16 years - Netscape in December 1994 (succeeded by Mozilla/seaMonkey)
No BFG committed civil fraud, and I am the victim stuck with a broken card. I have a right as the victim to use existing laws or credit card regulations to force BFG to replace that broken card, per the warranty.
It always amazes me how people le themselves be abused by corporations.
- A company sends you a defective product. Company refuses to replace it. You do what? Nothing. - A company sells you working product, but it dies within the warranty period. You do what? Nothing.
Well fuck that. There are ways to FORCE corporations to do the right thing (i.e. honor warranty and replace your broken card). Here's what I would do. And don't give me crap about illegality - speeding and not honoring warranties is illegal too. THEY are the crooks and they are no different than Al Capone.
- Buy a brand-new graphics card from the Crooks called BFG. - Return the old card with delivery confirmation. - Wait 1 month. - File a credit card dispute after the one month mark, explaining that they sold you defective product, you returned it, and you'd like a refund. Please and thank you. .
>>>If they were "reputable" would they be burning people with "lifetime" warranties? >>>BFG can't have it both ways. You can't be "reputable" and "crooked" at the same time.
I have a feeling BFG is flat broke, and unable to honor the warranty due to financial near-bankruptcy. It's similar to how I mailed a dollar to renew my Atari Age magazine in 1984, but Atari was unable to fulfill the order because Atari was billions in debt. Apple did the same thing to me in 1996 when they were in similar dire straits. (Of course that still doesn't excuse them.)
>>>that's what software is - virtual reconfiguration of the computer, on the fly
Really? So I can upgrade my C64 from 160x200 to 1280x1020 resolution, if I just type in the right software? Wow...... Okay obviously I disagree with you, and I weill stick to my original comment: A computer is limited by its hardware. It's fixed; the circuit does not change. A brain is not..... it can learn new things and change it connections.
Well of course, but weren't we supposed to have neural nets by now? I had heard in the 1980s that computers would have neural nets by 2000 and be as smart as people's brains. In reality we had Pentium 3's and G3 PowerPCs that were slow and just as dumb as the CPU inside my old Atari and C64 computers. I'm sure we'll be able to do it someday, but not by 2020 as Kurzweil claims. He is being overly optimistic just like previous prognosticators. Maybe by 2100.
Also the question is whether or not you could recreate that neural net, simply by encoding one human's DNA into software code. Like Kurzweil is claiming you can do. Answer: No. He's making an illogical assumption.
BTW this guy's name sounds familiar. Wasn't he mentioned in the X-Files?;-)
(1) Childs was wrong. You don't withhold passwords from your employer. It's his property, and he's allowed to be an idiot with his own property.
(2) But having been accused of the crime, I would have run away rather than stick around in California. There are a lot of decent IT jobs in the Northeast..... almost 3000 miles away from the SF Government's reach. No different than running from Spain to Poland to start a new life.
>>>The market is already stagnant and dominated by entrenched natural monopolies.
I have almost 15 different companies to choose from for my Wireless internet. What monopoly are you speaking of? .
>>>Our prices and service levels are the laughing stock of the planet.
The US is the second fastest continent-sized federation in the world, second to Russia but ahead of the EU, China, Canada, Austalia, Brazil, and so on. Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
As for prices - I don't know. Have not done much research comparing the average EU price to the average US price.
>>>So if there is a video service on your cell phone, should the data transfer for that video be network neutral? G/V are saying no, and the Dems are saying yes.
Google/Verizon is correct. There is no need for the government where a monopoly does not exist. The wired internet, which is mostly a Cable/Telephone duopoly needs regulating, but the wireless net does not. Most people have over ten providers to choose from. If one of those blocks access to whatever video you're trying to watch, you can change to another provider that does not.
No monopoly == no need to regulate/impose net neutrality. Of course it's worth mentioning that if the government (a monopoly) blocks the video, then you're out of luck.
A computer is a fixed system. If you tell it to do A (via software), you know you will get B, based upon knowledge of how the circuits are hardwired. The same can not be said of the human brain, because it has the ability to change its hardware (via growing new connections between neurons).
Find your old PCs, install some dialup software (like NetZero)*, and give it away to anyone who does not have a computer. That's how I got my brother, then my niece, then a poor neighbor online. So +3 additional devices. If all the geeks did this with old PCs or laptops, we could add several million internet devices within a year.
Wow. I agree with every post in this thread. A few random thoughts:
(1) If I was a singer or author I'd try the usual routes of going to the Megacorps and trying to get published to magazines (like Asimov's Science Fiction) or radio/CD/itunes. But I'd also distribute my music via youtube. If it's good people will grab it and make it popular, and I will have "made a name for myself".
(2) I have an FM Radio in my portable player, and I think it's great. When I get bored with my current playlist I can switch to the radio to hear something new. Or hear the news. Or the weather if the sky looks dangerous. I'll never buy a portable that doesn't have a radio built in.
(3) Obviously the RIAA has no chance of reaching their goal. The US government has zero authority to force MP3 players or phones to have radios. It simply does not exist in the constitution. (Such a power, if it exists, is reserved to the Member States or the People.)
>>>Not only be innocent, but be able to prove it if you do anything that can be misinterpreted.
That's assuming they give you a chance. In my experience most managers fire the employee (or contractor) and have him escorted out of the building without any opportunity to access the logs on their computer (and thereby prove innocence). You are tried, judged, and presumed guilty automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>Where's the profit in that?
It reminds me of the doctor that gave glasses to my nieces. Turns-out their eyes were not perfect but still good enough that they never needed those glasses. He was just trying to earn money. Shitbag.
As for the brain sciences, I have yet to see them do anything worthwhile. The psychoanalysis seems okay (talking is good for the soul), but all this other crap is bogus. Chopping into people's brains (and turning one of the Kennedy girls into a vegetable), hitting them with electroshock, locking-up people and then never letting out*, filling them with drugs they don't need, and on and on. It's the modern version of a witch doctor, but instead of magic words they wrap-up their BS in science technobabble. It's caused FAR more harm than it's cured.
*
* Back in the 1950s a perfectly healthy Ph.D. admitted himself to a hospital, so he could see the treatment for himself. He then stopped faking being sick, and acted perfectly normal to simulate being "cured", but they refused to release him. Eventually his friends had to "break him out". Even when the patient is cured, they don't let him escape.
But if the porn does not travel across state lines (i.e. I get it from a nearby town), then where is the authority? Answer: It isn't there.
Furthermore the 1st amendment forbids Congress from outlawing obscenity, due to protection of the free press. Any such law is null. "The purpose of a written constitution is to bind-up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities." - Thomas Jefferson, 1782 (back when Virginia was still an independent nation)
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
No.
All works that are created belong to everyone else, unless the author locks it in a safe out of view. The legal privilege we call an "exclusive right" for a "limited time", doesn't prevent copying of his ideas (which is a right given to us by nature). It merely gives the author a way to recover lost earnings from the sale of his book. Nothing more.
Possession of photos of a rape victim should not be a crime, just the same as possession of photos of murder victims is not a crime. Some people get off on the latter, but that doesn't mean we should outlaw it.
And nudity? It is never illegal regardless of age (as ruled by the Supreme Court). That's why nudist websites are allowed to exist.
The word you are looking for is oligarchy - unelected men that sit on the top and make the rules.
Kinda like our unelected Supreme Court Oligarchs. (I'm still trying to find the part of the US Constitution that the Court claims allows them to ban obscene material. I swear it's not there, even though they claim it is. Hmmm.)
I hate moral dictatorship. It doesn't matter if it's coming from a Muslim government, the Church of Rome, or politicians. Ya know... it's my life. If I want to be an asshole that looks at porn, doesn't go to church, and keeps to himself, I have that right. Stop trying to force me to adopt your moral beliefs.
So this HAYSTACK program. Would it work in the US and EU? It appears the answer is "no" since it was specifically designed for Iraq.
>>>Torrent Slaves
Ooops read my mind! It would save a lot of money to have a 5 watt Torrent-downloading plug to download my favorite TV shows,* versus leaving my ~150 watt computer running all the time. Some quick math: 0.140 kilowatt * 24 * 365 * 12 cents per KWh == about 140 dollars saved.
Okay maybe not a lot of money. In fact: Never mind. I'll just use my laptop to save electricity. ;-)
*
* Trivia - 5 watt is the US-enforced maximum wattage allowed on Digital TV converter boxes.
From the article:
Linux does the job admirably, with even the most full-featured distro like Debian being able to slot into the flash memory provided you're economical with what you install (scrap Gnome and KDE for starters!). Or Damn Small Linux and other distros of its ilk will do the job just fine too.
They always forget Puppy, which is a heck of a lot easier to use than DSL. Puppy can fit in as little as 32 megabytes with a full desktop even a kid could use.
.....and 512Mb DDR2 RAM.
Woah. I feel like I stepped into the Nintendo and Sega wars. 512 megabits == 64 megabytes in normal human parlance. i.e Twice as much as I have in my old Windows98 laptop and equal to what was in my OS 9 mac.
>>>Cool... we can go to web pages!
>>>Eh, I like Netscape better.
Funny but not entirely accurate. Mosaic was the #1 browser of the day (1993-94), followed by Netscape which maintained its #1 spot until 1999 when Microsoft finally surpassed them.
Here's my own personal history:
- Mosaic for Amiga 500 (1993)
- Awesome. It's like a BBS but worldwide. Or Usenet with pictures. Wish I had something faster than a 2 kbit/s modem.
-
- Netscape? No I'm sticking with Mosaic.
- What's that? Netscape was written by the Mosaic guys? Okay I'll try it.
- Microsoft has a web browser? Hahahahaha.
-
- Mozilla Netscape 6 - wow this is pretty bad, but IE 5 sucks worse.
- Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - yay! And of course IE6 is still the suck.
- Whaddya mean I "have" to use IE at work? Why won't you let me install Firefox? Frak. (I have tried every IE ever released but the only one I ever used was IE6, and only because the boss forces me to.)
>>>V.92 'V.Fast'?
No you're off by about five years. In the early 90s when almost everyone was using V.32 modems (9k or 14k), the ITU-T standards committee was dragging its feet developing a faster speed. So various companies went-ahead and released 19k and 24k modems, which were completely non-standard, so they could not use ITU designations. Instead they created marketing names like "Turbo" or "V.FAST" or whatever.
Eventually the ITU-T relased V.34 which allowed 28k and 33k speeds, and did not work with the non-standard Turbo or V.FAST modems. Then came the new digital modem which abandoned the old analog techniques, so it jumped to V.90 (56/33k) and finally V.92 (56/48k).
.
>>>I'm on Comcast now, and I have a feeling that one day I'll look back on today and think, 'Man, I didn't know what fast was.'
I only have 750k. That might seem slow to you, but hulu.com and other sites allow me to adjust the video resolution where you really only need a 250k line to watch them. I simply don't see any reason to spend more than $20 for internet..... never did in the past. :-)
When I'm on the road I use 50k. It takes about 4 hours to bittorrent a single episode of Stargate (or whatever). Not the greatest deal but computers don't need sleep, so I just let it run all night, and grab several episodes per day.
That's elitist to deny people, especially if the computer is just collecting dust in your closet. We all started out ignorant. I'd sooner give the computer to someone in need, teach them the basics (click here to connect; type here to do a search), and then conveniently disappear. ;-) Oftentimes if my poor neighbor calls me up, "My net won't connect," I'll help fix the phoneline, but if it's to install some game I tell her to read the manual that came with it.
I'm more inclined to help my brother, since he did carry the furniture from his truck to my apartment.
>>>The upcoming version won't work on Windows XP
Microsoft must be taking a page out of Apple's software business. The latest version of Safari and iTunes won't work on my 10.4 Mac, and it's not even that old (four years). Microsoft must have thought: 'Hmmm, if Apple can make their web browser not work on 10.4 and force users to upgrade, we can do the same with our browser and force people to abandon XP!" Evil is as evil does.
.
>>>IE's improved quite a bit recently...
Does it have a built-in dictionary to redline my mis-spelled typos? Does it allow addons like WOT or NoScript? Does it have anything like Opera Turbo for slow dialup/wireless connections, or Opera Link to store bookmarks online and unify all your favorites across the Desktop, Laptop, and Cellphone? Does it have a built-in newsgroup and email client like seaMonkey has? Does IE have any compelling reason for my going back to it?
No.
TRIVIA: Other ancient browsers for home PCs, that predate IE
17 years - Mosaic on the Commodore Amiga (April 1993)
17 years - Cello for IBM PC (June 1993)
16 years - DOSlynx for IBM PC (April 1994)
16 years - iBrowse for Commodore Amiga (May 1994)
16 years - Netscape in December 1994 (succeeded by Mozilla/seaMonkey)
>>>You've committed civil fraud, congratulations.
No BFG committed civil fraud, and I am the victim stuck with a broken card. I have a right as the victim to use existing laws or credit card regulations to force BFG to replace that broken card, per the warranty.
It always amazes me how people le themselves be abused by corporations.
- A company sends you a defective product. Company refuses to replace it. You do what? Nothing.
- A company sells you working product, but it dies within the warranty period. You do what? Nothing.
Well fuck that. There are ways to FORCE corporations to do the right thing (i.e. honor warranty and replace your broken card). Here's what I would do. And don't give me crap about illegality - speeding and not honoring warranties is illegal too. THEY are the crooks and they are no different than Al Capone.
- Buy a brand-new graphics card from the Crooks called BFG.
- Return the old card with delivery confirmation.
- Wait 1 month.
- File a credit card dispute after the one month mark, explaining that they sold you defective product, you returned it, and you'd like a refund. Please and thank you.
.
>>>If they were "reputable" would they be burning people with "lifetime" warranties?
>>>BFG can't have it both ways. You can't be "reputable" and "crooked" at the same time.
I have a feeling BFG is flat broke, and unable to honor the warranty due to financial near-bankruptcy. It's similar to how I mailed a dollar to renew my Atari Age magazine in 1984, but Atari was unable to fulfill the order because Atari was billions in debt. Apple did the same thing to me in 1996 when they were in similar dire straits. (Of course that still doesn't excuse them.)
>>>that's what software is - virtual reconfiguration of the computer, on the fly
Really? So I can upgrade my C64 from 160x200 to 1280x1020 resolution, if I just type in the right software? Wow. ..... Okay obviously I disagree with you, and I weill stick to my original comment: A computer is limited by its hardware. It's fixed; the circuit does not change. A brain is not..... it can learn new things and change it connections.
Well of course, but weren't we supposed to have neural nets by now? I had heard in the 1980s that computers would have neural nets by 2000 and be as smart as people's brains. In reality we had Pentium 3's and G3 PowerPCs that were slow and just as dumb as the CPU inside my old Atari and C64 computers. I'm sure we'll be able to do it someday, but not by 2020 as Kurzweil claims. He is being overly optimistic just like previous prognosticators. Maybe by 2100.
Also the question is whether or not you could recreate that neural net, simply by encoding one human's DNA into software code. Like Kurzweil is claiming you can do. Answer: No. He's making an illogical assumption.
BTW this guy's name sounds familiar. ;-)
Wasn't he mentioned in the X-Files?
(1) Childs was wrong. You don't withhold passwords from your employer. It's his property, and he's allowed to be an idiot with his own property.
(2) But having been accused of the crime, I would have run away rather than stick around in California. There are a lot of decent IT jobs in the Northeast..... almost 3000 miles away from the SF Government's reach. No different than running from Spain to Poland to start a new life.
>>>The market is already stagnant and dominated by entrenched natural monopolies.
I have almost 15 different companies to choose from for my Wireless internet. What monopoly are you speaking of?
.
>>>Our prices and service levels are the laughing stock of the planet.
The US is the second fastest continent-sized federation in the world, second to Russia but ahead of the EU, China, Canada, Austalia, Brazil, and so on. Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
As for prices - I don't know. Have not done much research comparing the average EU price to the average US price.
>>>So if there is a video service on your cell phone, should the data transfer for that video be network neutral? G/V are saying no, and the Dems are saying yes.
Google/Verizon is correct. There is no need for the government where a monopoly does not exist. The wired internet, which is mostly a Cable/Telephone duopoly needs regulating, but the wireless net does not. Most people have over ten providers to choose from. If one of those blocks access to whatever video you're trying to watch, you can change to another provider that does not.
No monopoly == no need to regulate/impose net neutrality. Of course it's worth mentioning that if the government (a monopoly) blocks the video, then you're out of luck.
No not really.
A computer is a fixed system. If you tell it to do A (via software), you know you will get B, based upon knowledge of how the circuits are hardwired. The same can not be said of the human brain, because it has the ability to change its hardware (via growing new connections between neurons).
Still 1 billion shy of connecting the whole world.
What's internet access like in 3rd world countries? Are they still using V.92? (56/48k) Or don't they even have that?
Find your old PCs, install some dialup software (like NetZero)*, and give it away to anyone who does not have a computer. That's how I got my brother, then my niece, then a poor neighbor online. So +3 additional devices. If all the geeks did this with old PCs or laptops, we could add several million internet devices within a year.
*
*If they have DSL, use that instead.
Wow. I agree with every post in this thread. A few random thoughts:
(1) If I was a singer or author I'd try the usual routes of going to the Megacorps and trying to get published to magazines (like Asimov's Science Fiction) or radio/CD/itunes. But I'd also distribute my music via youtube. If it's good people will grab it and make it popular, and I will have "made a name for myself".
(2) I have an FM Radio in my portable player, and I think it's great. When I get bored with my current playlist I can switch to the radio to hear something new. Or hear the news. Or the weather if the sky looks dangerous. I'll never buy a portable that doesn't have a radio built in.
(3) Obviously the RIAA has no chance of reaching their goal. The US government has zero authority to force MP3 players or phones to have radios. It simply does not exist in the constitution. (Such a power, if it exists, is reserved to the Member States or the People.)
>>>Not only be innocent, but be able to prove it if you do anything that can be misinterpreted.
That's assuming they give you a chance. In my experience most managers fire the employee (or contractor) and have him escorted out of the building without any opportunity to access the logs on their computer (and thereby prove innocence). You are tried, judged, and presumed guilty automatically.