> We rely upon half-baked right wing Dr. Strangeloves to choose the > foreign countries that will welcome our invasions...
No we don't. Not unless you include all 19 members of the UN Security Council and every last f***ing one of those Democrats who happily voted in favor of smacking Iraq and now want to say they didn't really mean it. If ever a country needed smacking around it was Iraq, Bush Sr. just couldn't finish the job for diplomatic reasons.
> We rely upon deregulated billionaires to keep our stock market and > investment firms honest...
What the hell are you babbling about? I don't recall too many billionaires working at the SEC. And there aren't any in Congress either, although there ARE some really rich Old Money Democrats there and a couple of.com millionaires.
> We rely upon greedy employers not to send our jobs overseas in > order to ratchet up the stock value and buy themselves extra homes > and diamonds...
Here we have a fundamental misunderstanding of our economic system. Let me give you a clue. It isn't 'our' jobs. Your job is not a right, it isn't your property and your employer is under ZERO obligation to continue paying you. (Unless you have a written employment contract or are in a union that has one.) That is why punching a time clock for someone else has never been the road to economic success.
> So why shouldn't we rely on a convicted monopolist with a track > record of utter failure behind it to keep our national computer > infrastructure secure, too?
Because they are an utter failure when it comes to security. A record for failure eventually trumps political connections. A govt contract can be a boondoggle, but you have to produce SOMETHING eventually. And getting caught as a failure tends to cause all of those 'bought and paid for' friends and allies to suddenly forget they knew you. (see Enron, Worldcon, etc.)
But M$ stays the only choice because so many decision makers don't even think another viable choice even exists. That and the hard realization among those who DO know other choices exist is that a full scale defenstration of Windows would require canning most of their MCSE papered IT staff and recruiting new people.
So quit with the Howard Dean/Noam Choamshy conspiracy crap and get into the real world.
Yes, of course you are correct. We should always trust eveything some nitwit claims on the Net. Nixon opened up trade with China. Couldn't be bothered to fact check that statement before shouting "LIAR" at the top of your lungs.
The archives of PBS's NewsHour differs, with this quote from President Clinton (a dubious source to be sure....):
"PRESIDENT CLINTON: I have decided, as all my predecessors have since 1980, to extend Most Favored Nation status to China for the coming year. Every Republican and Democratic President since 1980 has made the same decision."
Other sources put the year as 1979, either way it appears to be something the other silly Democrat of the late 20th Century started. Nixon normalized diplomatic relations with the People Republic of China.
And remember that MFN status was an adhoc thing renewed on a regular basis until Clinton pushed through a Permanant MFN status during his administration. In other words it was a carrot dangled in front of the Chinese tyrants to encourage change, but Clinton changed that. Not suprising from the traitor who sold/allowed to be sold classified material in exchange for a few lousy campaign contributions.
Oh no, you are wrong. Digital Rights Management is the perfect name. It just depends on how you explain it. Try this:
"You see, now you have too many Rights, this patch will Manage your Rights so you don't have too many. Bill Gates and Jack Valenti will decide how many Rights you need, because otherwise the terrorists will win."
Same with "Trusted Computing":
"Bill Gates doesn't trust your current PC to protect his monopoly. But if you buy one of his new Trusted Computers he can trust it to only run his software, when and how he wants it to run, charging you exactly enough to produce quarterly revenue growth one cent above analyst expectations."
And to the obvious question from the Joe Average Citizen of "But how does this benefit me?" you should reply truthfully, "Since when has any of this been about what is good for you? Your job is to consume."
Damned straight I do. I remember them getting a C&D from Digital Convergence over the CueCat: fiasco. Sounds like good enough hacker ethics for me. But I just d/led the SRPM via RHN. I'm payin' em for the bandwidth might as well use it.
I figured it was assumed that if you assigned a patent the assignee would be the one who must be contactable since the original holder no longer has the ability to negotiate a deal.
It is clear you don't have a clue what the word "Freedom" actually means, and neither did the Jr. Socialists who modded you up. But on the off chance that less committed leftists are also still reading.....
> Free Market Monopolies can result from privatisation of previous > state monopolies,
And this isn't caused by the State? Privatizing a socialist economy (or segment thereof) is difficult. It can be easily botched if attempted by officials who lack any understanding of how a Free Market actually operates. For a current example examine the bungling of the California electrical grid's transition from state owned monopoly to planned economy tarted up for public consumption as a free market.
An example of a more successful transition was the AT&T breakup. It allowed unlimited participation by competitors for the long distance business and allowed a large degree of real freedom from day one. The result was a couple of years of confusion followed by the current situation where flat rate long distance is now offered as an option to most Americans. Even the local loop monopoly is rapidly eroding under pressure from wireless, the CLECs and even cable and power companies in some areas.
> Now for your abusive usage of the term freedom. Sure it's nice to be > free from goverment intervention. And to be free from healthcare if > you can't afford it, and to be free from any social net if the market > doesn't like your skills.
It would be a wonderful world indeed! For we would be FREE! Freedom is just that, free. Free to succeed or fail. Free to crawl into a gutter with a bottle of Mad Dog or shake the foundations of the world with your drive and determination and then to reap the rewards thereof. You can't be truly free if the State claims the right to make decisions for you.
You want healthcare, buy insurance or pay as you go. Can't afford the gold plated policy, buy the HMO; it is still far better care than 90% of the world's population gets. And if we removed the government from healthcare it would be a damned lot more affordable anyway.
As for getting a job, that is your own responsibility, not mine. Choose poorly and you might end up flipping burgers while you acquire different skills, but why is that my responsibility?
But in the end I object to the unwritten assumption behind that bilge you just spouted. It assumes that the average American is a selfish, uncaring bastard and that therefore enlightened folk like yourselves must assume the mantle of wise and benevolent protector and pass down commandments from on high, for our own good. That you claim the right to determine what is best for us, to the right of first claim on the produce of our labors and to redistribute that income according to your own more enlightened notions. That without your guidance we would be but brute savages, living in a dystopic hell. I have news for you, man was a lot kinder to his fellow man before the welfare state. Poverty rates were as low or lower, families were intact and charitable giving was a lot more common before the kind and loving State started raking off far more than the 10% that God (read as the Church) thought was the most He could get away with.
> Your conception of freedom is skewed and naive. Taking bread from > the guys in the palace and giving it to the guy who starves on the > street, doesn't decrease any relevant freedom of the former and > frees the later of hunger.
We don't have guys in a palace here. So I must assume you are referring to the 'evil rich'. Yes, taking their bread against their will is the most wicked thing a State can ever do. It means the plebs have decided to vote themselves bread and circuses and the elected officials have forsaken their oaths of office. One of the cornerstones of Freedom in the western tradition is the Right to Property. You can't revoke that Right for some without it ceasing to be a Right for all, instead becoming a privledge,
You kids and your one dimensional political ideas. Of course it isn't ALL your fault, you are a product of public education. I'm a libertarian, which is about as far from a rightwinger as it is from socialism.
And yes I do blame the meddling of the State in the Free Market for monopolies. Let us examine your example of a sugar monopoly in Sweden. I live in Louisiana and know all about government intervention in the sugar business. We take money at gunpoint from our citizens and use it to subsidize our local sugar farmers and enforce import quotas so that we can all pay more for sugar... somehow this is explained as 'good for us.' Damned if I can see how though. Force South American sugar farmers out of business, encourage them to turn back to the real cash crop of the region (cocoa leaves) so we can spend even more money burning them out in the name of fighting the 'Drug War'. And of course we pay out the butt for a product that should by all rights be cheap and plentiful.
If there is a sugar monopoly in Sweden it must be government imposed, otherwise the Swedes would simply import as much sugar as they pleased from those same South America sugar farmers at market prices. This would cause any local cartel to quickly lose any monopolistic pricing power. There would also be little barrier to entry for an aspiring sugar farmer unless the power of the State forbids it. (We have plenty of examples of that sort of crap here in the 'land of the free'.)
Spoken like an ignorant leftie that has never studied economics. Monopolies are not a result of capitalism and leading capitalist thinkers have understood their danger for at a century or two. Monopolies are almost always the result of intervention in the free marketplace by the State. However many respectable (Capitalist, as opposed to Marxist) economists will grudgingly admit to the State having both the power and the responsibility to break up Monopolies when they appear.
Personally I'm more Libertarian than that. I hold that the only power the State should have over monopolies is to correct it's mistake that lead to it. For example in Microsoft's case the government should adopt a pure POSIX requirement in government purchasing. That and an open document interchange format would level the playing field without undue meddling in the marketplace. All the state would be doing is ceasing to assist the monopolist by using it's influence over it's subjects[1] to enforce the monopoly.
[1] Free people are citizens, unfree ones are subjects. We stopped being a Republic over a century ago.
Yes they should, and for a similar reason. Applying for a patent is asking the Government to grant you an exclusive monopoly on an idea for as long as 19 years. Anyone wanting to use that idea MUST be able to contact you to work out a deal so you have to be willing to release your contact information for that purpose. I'd say failure to maintain current information should be grounds for voiding a patent.
> That is partially the reason, of course, why the Patriot act is so > terrible - you simply won't hear about abuses of it, since that is > the intention of it.
Up to a point. But when it comes up for renewal the DOJ will need to show some pretty compelling examples where using the USA PATRIOT Act actually stopped some terrorists. And expect Congress to dig for failures and abuses. That means opening the books on at least the first year or two of records. Unlike many here, I don't have as much of a problem with the government doing secret spy stuff and keeping it secret for a period of time. But only while an operation is ongoing, once it is over and done they HAVE to open the records or they cross the line between acts required to maintain security in a dangerous world and becoming a bigger problem themselves.
Sorry, but it most certainly is. Forbidding the mere discussion of copy restriction schemes certainly runs smack into "Congress shall make no law...." and if you can't figure that much out on your own you are part of the problem. The Constituition isn't a hard document to read, you don't need to be a lawyer or philosopher to understand the plain language of the Founding Fathers. They didn't write any weasel words or leave anything ambigious, it is mostly stark Thou Shalt... Thou Shalt Not sort of rules.
> The concept behind it was rather needed, which is to say extending > copyright (or at least atempting to define copyright) for digital > products.
What does the distribution media have to do with copyright? Copyright is copyright, whether graven on stone tablets, stamped onto 120mm aluminum and acrylic discs, beamed down from a geostationary sat or downloaded via a DSL circuit via Gnutella.
> *This* bill however, does nothing to clarify the legal code, nor > does it help to resolve any existing problems therin. Further most > people know what P2P is and they can imeditatly see why such a bill > would be a bad thing. It's not going to go anywhere.
Don't bet on it. They are playing the trump card; "Do it for The Children!" and that trick often works. Sure they only have a pair of jackoff, noname congresscritters for now, but they don't EXPECT to pass it this session. But watch it turn up again next year.... during an election year. As far as I'm concerned no living Congresscritter is innocent of violating their oath of office so we are only safe when the legislature is out of session.
> A rally call of "Remember the DMCA" is all well and good, but there > are much more dangerous pushes for legislation (see patriot act II) > out there with a far biger push (see Ashcroft and the US goverment) > to get them passed.
Actually I'm far more worried about DMCA than Patriot. Patriot was an expected excess after an excessive provacation. But even then Congress at least had enough sense to write in a sunset clause and it is unlikely to be renewed. And while longterm Patriot would pose a greater threat to civil liberties I haven't heard of a lot of abuses of Patriot but DMCA is being wielded as a club against a LOT of people. And DMCA has no sunset clause.
Are you sure you aren't just so blinded by hatred of Bush and Ashcroft you are seeing the ghost of Sen. Mcarthy[sp?] behind every rock? Does seem to be a common meme here on/.
> Well I am my own small ISP and I move about 10,000 emails a day for me > any my clients (much of which is spam). _I_ would still have to pay an > outragious sum for a cert...
Which is the entire point. Your ISP and my ~3000 system are supposed to get the hell off the net and leave it to AOL, MSN, Earthlink and few other large players. This is just another attempt at that and hopefully it will fail. It won't do a damned thing to stop spam, that is for sure. Anyone believe any of the DSL/Cable providers will do one damned thing extra to stop their users from canning the pink meat like substance? Now does anyone think their will be a single cert revocation on one the big players for allowing spam to continue? Didn't think so. Nothing to see here, move along.
Looks like a nice machine with default software that is a bit lame. But since that is now easily fixable, I can think of a few folks in dialup hell that I'll probably be crossing off my Xmas list.:)
> Not every company is willing to open source all their software and > make it free.
I'm down with that. They can be as closed as they want, it is a free country. But if they want me to BUY their hardware they have to do it on my terms. And my terms are Free/Open source drivers. I will NOT buy closed hardware again. Been there, done that and have the lousy t-shirt. Never again.
However I will buy closed source software. Provided it isn't important and has little longterm value.... i.e. games. Closed software mixed with a Free OS is a timebomb. It bitrots very quickly. I had hell getting VMWare 2 running on RH7.2 and it broke again when I went to 7.3 and I still haven't had the time to get it running again. Needless to say I don't depend on VMWare. It won't be much longer before it just doesn't work at all, probably when the 2.6 kernel becomes standard. And I'm not just picking on VMWare, any closed app suffers the same fate eventually. With a game it usually doesn't matter since I will have moved on to the next shiny toy.
I don't know about the original poster, but it is clear you haven't a clue. Here is how your example resolves:
If the photographer supplied the proper releases to the porn sites they are only obligated to remove the unlicensed content when advised of it's true status. They are then free to sue the photographer, but they will have to get in line behind the original victim. Only if they can't show proof of having obtained the material legally do they have to worry. But in the special case of pr0n they wouldn't be worried about the lawsuits with the victim, but the feds who will throw them in ass pounding federal prison for distributing pr0n without the model releases that proves they aren't dealing in kiddie porn. (Yes you really are guilty until proven innocent in the pr0n game. Welcome to Amerika, where we will violate any Right in the name of The Children.)
But there is NO precedent where a victim could demand to get the list of customers and demand that they pay/destroy the material/etc.
I am old school. Only quote enough to keep the conversation intact, and on a threaded website vs mail, not much is really needed.
And I did refer to the omitted "reload" (whatever that is, sounds like a hack though and not just drop in a disc and open/dev/dvd) method as undesirable "hackery".
Now go away and play with your PS/2 until you grow up and get an account. And in the future, just because someone disses a product you happen to own don't take it as a personal affront, makes you sound like a 14 year old fanboy.
About as useful as tits on a bull. Playstation2 can play DVDs without any hackery, access to that should be considered a minimum level of vendor support.
> 2. You can.
That isn't what I read elsewhere, but I haven't actually purchased any of the PS/2 stuff yet. (Because of the limited usefulness of it. If I could build a settop box, say a mythtv frontend, I'd be interested.)
> 3. If you want to write the driver, go right ahead. Nobody's stopping > you.
Wrong answer. If the hardware specs were out public, iee1394 would already be there. But if the hardware vendor wants me to consider their port a good faith effort at a complete and usable platform, they should provide support for ALL of the hardware in THEIR box. Would you buy a Mac if MacOS didn't support all of the hardware? Or only saw the optical drive if you booted in a special mode that only let you play prerecorded media?
You aren't nearly cynical enough. Of course he did it, he got caught red handed and 'fired the marketing co' had you read the article.
He did it because he knew he COULD. The sort of zealots he attracts will either insist he is innocent or rationalize it away. If you push one hard enough they will finally justify it under the time honored lie of the socialists/liberals/progressive/whateverthehellnew wordtheydishonortomorror camp that the ends justify the means.
> Why wasn't this tidbit of info in the original post?
Because Dean was hyped as 'net savvy' and should never have done it for a single day. Besides, after the first day the whole load had probably been delivered and they could 'terminate their relationship' and disclaim responsibility. After all, who could say different? No account lying scum spammers aren't going to pop up out of their hole to fight a press release battle with the well oiled PR machine of a presidential campaign. Where is the profit in that? Sounds like Dean really IS net savvy, in an evil sort of way.
While I'm also a Niven fan, perhaps a better book to diagnose this pathology would be Thomas Sowell's _Vision of the Annointed_. Niven just drops those little nuggets of wisdom into the text, while with non-fiction works like Sowell's you get one of the whole stone tablets.
Slashdot Mirror
> We rely upon half-baked right wing Dr. Strangeloves to choose the
.com millionaires.
> foreign countries that will welcome our invasions...
No we don't. Not unless you include all 19 members of the UN Security Council and every last f***ing one of those Democrats who happily voted in favor of smacking Iraq and now want to say they didn't really mean it. If ever a country needed smacking around it was Iraq, Bush Sr. just couldn't finish the job for diplomatic reasons.
> We rely upon deregulated billionaires to keep our stock market and
> investment firms honest...
What the hell are you babbling about? I don't recall too many billionaires working at the SEC. And there aren't any in Congress either, although there ARE some really rich Old Money Democrats there and a couple of
> We rely upon greedy employers not to send our jobs overseas in
> order to ratchet up the stock value and buy themselves extra homes
> and diamonds...
Here we have a fundamental misunderstanding of our economic system. Let me give you a clue. It isn't 'our' jobs. Your job is not a right, it isn't your property and your employer is under ZERO obligation to continue paying you. (Unless you have a written employment contract or are in a union that has one.) That is why punching a time clock for someone else has never been the road to economic success.
> So why shouldn't we rely on a convicted monopolist with a track
> record of utter failure behind it to keep our national computer
> infrastructure secure, too?
Because they are an utter failure when it comes to security. A record for failure eventually trumps political connections. A govt contract can be a boondoggle, but you have to produce SOMETHING eventually. And getting caught as a failure tends to cause all of those 'bought and paid for' friends and allies to suddenly forget they knew you. (see Enron, Worldcon, etc.)
But M$ stays the only choice because so many decision makers don't even think another viable choice even exists. That and the hard realization among those who DO know other choices exist is that a full scale defenstration of Windows would require canning most of their MCSE papered IT staff and recruiting new people.
So quit with the Howard Dean/Noam Choamshy conspiracy crap and get into the real world.
> ... it's about the Rights of Bill. Makes much more sense that way.
I really like that. Short, simple and pretty darned accurate. I can't really add anything to that, so I'm quoting it to get it posted with my bonus.
Yes, of course you are correct. We should always trust eveything some nitwit claims on the Net. Nixon opened up trade with China. Couldn't be bothered to fact check that statement before shouting "LIAR" at the top of your lungs.
The archives of PBS's NewsHour differs, with this quote from President Clinton (a dubious source to be sure....):
"PRESIDENT CLINTON: I have decided, as all my predecessors have since 1980, to extend Most Favored Nation status to China for the coming year. Every Republican and Democratic President since 1980 has made the same decision."
Other sources put the year as 1979, either way it appears to be something the other silly Democrat of the late 20th Century started. Nixon normalized diplomatic relations with the People Republic of China.
And remember that MFN status was an adhoc thing renewed on a regular basis until Clinton pushed through a Permanant MFN status during his administration. In other words it was a carrot dangled in front of the Chinese tyrants to encourage change, but Clinton changed that. Not suprising from the traitor who sold/allowed to be sold classified material in exchange for a few lousy campaign contributions.
Oh no, you are wrong. Digital Rights Management is the perfect name. It just depends on how you explain it. Try this:
"You see, now you have too many Rights, this patch will Manage your Rights so you don't have too many. Bill Gates and Jack Valenti will decide how many Rights you need, because otherwise the terrorists will win."
Same with "Trusted Computing":
"Bill Gates doesn't trust your current PC to protect his monopoly. But if you buy one of his new Trusted Computers he can trust it to only run his software, when and how he wants it to run, charging you exactly enough to produce quarterly revenue growth one cent above analyst expectations."
And to the obvious question from the Joe Average Citizen of "But how does this benefit me?" you should reply truthfully, "Since when has any of this been about what is good for you? Your job is to consume."
Damned straight I do. I remember them getting a C&D from Digital Convergence over the CueCat: fiasco. Sounds like good enough hacker ethics for me. But I just d/led the SRPM via RHN. I'm payin' em for the bandwidth might as well use it.
I figured it was assumed that if you assigned a patent the assignee would be the one who must be contactable since the original holder no longer has the ability to negotiate a deal.
It is clear you don't have a clue what the word "Freedom" actually means, and neither did the Jr. Socialists who modded you up. But on the off chance that less committed leftists are also still reading.....
> Free Market Monopolies can result from privatisation of previous
> state monopolies,
And this isn't caused by the State? Privatizing a socialist economy (or segment thereof) is difficult. It can be easily botched if attempted by officials who lack any understanding of how a Free Market actually operates. For a current example examine the bungling of the California electrical grid's transition from state owned monopoly to planned economy tarted up for public consumption as a free market.
An example of a more successful transition was the AT&T breakup. It allowed unlimited participation by competitors for the long distance business and allowed a large degree of real freedom from day one. The result was a couple of years of confusion followed by the current situation where flat rate long distance is now offered as an option to most Americans. Even the local loop monopoly is rapidly eroding under pressure from wireless, the CLECs and even cable and power companies in some areas.
> Now for your abusive usage of the term freedom. Sure it's nice to be
> free from goverment intervention. And to be free from healthcare if
> you can't afford it, and to be free from any social net if the market
> doesn't like your skills.
It would be a wonderful world indeed! For we would be FREE! Freedom is just that, free. Free to succeed or fail. Free to crawl into a gutter with a bottle of Mad Dog or shake the foundations of the world with your drive and determination and then to reap the rewards thereof. You can't be truly free if the State claims the right to make decisions for you.
You want healthcare, buy insurance or pay as you go. Can't afford the gold plated policy, buy the HMO; it is still far better care than 90% of the world's population gets. And if we removed the government from healthcare it would be a damned lot more affordable anyway.
As for getting a job, that is your own responsibility, not mine. Choose poorly and you might end up flipping burgers while you acquire different skills, but why is that my responsibility?
But in the end I object to the unwritten assumption behind that bilge you just spouted. It assumes that the average American is a selfish, uncaring bastard and that therefore enlightened folk like yourselves must assume the mantle of wise and benevolent protector and pass down commandments from on high, for our own good. That you claim the right to determine what is best for us, to the right of first claim on the produce of our labors and to redistribute that income according to your own more enlightened notions. That without your guidance we would be but brute savages, living in a dystopic hell. I have news for you, man was a lot kinder to his fellow man before the welfare state. Poverty rates were as low or lower, families were intact and charitable giving was a lot more common before the kind and loving State started raking off far more than the 10% that God (read as the Church) thought was the most He could get away with.
> Your conception of freedom is skewed and naive. Taking bread from
> the guys in the palace and giving it to the guy who starves on the
> street, doesn't decrease any relevant freedom of the former and
> frees the later of hunger.
We don't have guys in a palace here. So I must assume you are referring to the 'evil rich'. Yes, taking their bread against their will is the most wicked thing a State can ever do. It means the plebs have decided to vote themselves bread and circuses and the elected officials have forsaken their oaths of office. One of the cornerstones of Freedom in the western tradition is the Right to Property. You can't revoke that Right for some without it ceasing to be a Right for all, instead becoming a privledge,
> Spoken like a true ignorant rightie.
You kids and your one dimensional political ideas. Of course it isn't ALL your fault, you are a product of public education. I'm a libertarian, which is about as far from a rightwinger as it is from socialism.
And yes I do blame the meddling of the State in the Free Market for monopolies. Let us examine your example of a sugar monopoly in Sweden. I live in Louisiana and know all about government intervention in the sugar business. We take money at gunpoint from our citizens and use it to subsidize our local sugar farmers and enforce import quotas so that we can all pay more for sugar... somehow this is explained as 'good for us.' Damned if I can see how though. Force South American sugar farmers out of business, encourage them to turn back to the real cash crop of the region (cocoa leaves) so we can spend even more money burning them out in the name of fighting the 'Drug War'. And of course we pay out the butt for a product that should by all rights be cheap and plentiful.
If there is a sugar monopoly in Sweden it must be government imposed, otherwise the Swedes would simply import as much sugar as they pleased from those same South America sugar farmers at market prices. This would cause any local cartel to quickly lose any monopolistic pricing power. There would also be little barrier to entry for an aspiring sugar farmer unless the power of the State forbids it. (We have plenty of examples of that sort of crap here in the 'land of the free'.)
Spoken like an ignorant leftie that has never studied economics. Monopolies are not a result of capitalism and leading capitalist thinkers have understood their danger for at a century or two. Monopolies are almost always the result of intervention in the free marketplace by the State. However many respectable (Capitalist, as opposed to Marxist) economists will grudgingly admit to the State having both the power and the responsibility to break up Monopolies when they appear.
Personally I'm more Libertarian than that. I hold that the only power the State should have over monopolies is to correct it's mistake that lead to it. For example in Microsoft's case the government should adopt a pure POSIX requirement in government purchasing. That and an open document interchange format would level the playing field without undue meddling in the marketplace. All the state would be doing is ceasing to assist the monopolist by using it's influence over it's subjects[1] to enforce the monopoly.
[1] Free people are citizens, unfree ones are subjects. We stopped being a Republic over a century ago.
Yes they should, and for a similar reason. Applying for a patent is asking the Government to grant you an exclusive monopoly on an idea for as long as 19 years. Anyone wanting to use that idea MUST be able to contact you to work out a deal so you have to be willing to release your contact information for that purpose. I'd say failure to maintain current information should be grounds for voiding a patent.
> That is partially the reason, of course, why the Patriot act is so
> terrible - you simply won't hear about abuses of it, since that is
> the intention of it.
Up to a point. But when it comes up for renewal the DOJ will need to show some pretty compelling examples where using the USA PATRIOT Act actually stopped some terrorists. And expect Congress to dig for failures and abuses. That means opening the books on at least the first year or two of records. Unlike many here, I don't have as much of a problem with the government doing secret spy stuff and keeping it secret for a period of time. But only while an operation is ongoing, once it is over and done they HAVE to open the records or they cross the line between acts required to maintain security in a dangerous world and becoming a bigger problem themselves.
> The DMCA is not unconstitutional.
/.
Sorry, but it most certainly is. Forbidding the mere discussion of copy restriction schemes certainly runs smack into "Congress shall make no law...." and if you can't figure that much out on your own you are part of the problem. The Constituition isn't a hard document to read, you don't need to be a lawyer or philosopher to understand the plain language of the Founding Fathers. They didn't write any weasel words or leave anything ambigious, it is mostly stark Thou Shalt... Thou Shalt Not sort of rules.
> The concept behind it was rather needed, which is to say extending
> copyright (or at least atempting to define copyright) for digital
> products.
What does the distribution media have to do with copyright? Copyright is copyright, whether graven on stone tablets, stamped onto 120mm aluminum and acrylic discs, beamed down from a geostationary sat or downloaded via a DSL circuit via Gnutella.
> *This* bill however, does nothing to clarify the legal code, nor
> does it help to resolve any existing problems therin. Further most
> people know what P2P is and they can imeditatly see why such a bill
> would be a bad thing. It's not going to go anywhere.
Don't bet on it. They are playing the trump card; "Do it for The Children!" and that trick often works. Sure they only have a pair of jackoff, noname congresscritters for now, but they don't EXPECT to pass it this session. But watch it turn up again next year.... during an election year. As far as I'm concerned no living Congresscritter is innocent of violating their oath of office so we are only safe when the legislature is out of session.
> A rally call of "Remember the DMCA" is all well and good, but there
> are much more dangerous pushes for legislation (see patriot act II)
> out there with a far biger push (see Ashcroft and the US goverment)
> to get them passed.
Actually I'm far more worried about DMCA than Patriot. Patriot was an expected excess after an excessive provacation. But even then Congress at least had enough sense to write in a sunset clause and it is unlikely to be renewed. And while longterm Patriot would pose a greater threat to civil liberties I haven't heard of a lot of abuses of Patriot but DMCA is being wielded as a club against a LOT of people. And DMCA has no sunset clause.
Are you sure you aren't just so blinded by hatred of Bush and Ashcroft you are seeing the ghost of Sen. Mcarthy[sp?] behind every rock? Does seem to be a common meme here on
> And doesn't Texas have some arcane law about how it's legal to shoot
> someone if they're too damn dumb to live?
No, the gag is you can use the defense "He needed killin'." But it is just a gag, nobody (at least in living memory) has even tried using it.
However, it probably SHOULD be a valid defense and a jury should be allowed to accept/reject it depending on the facts of the case.
Guess his Billness should have sent Judge Jackson a one line email:
YHBT YHL HAND
> Well I am my own small ISP and I move about 10,000 emails a day for me
> any my clients (much of which is spam). _I_ would still have to pay an
> outragious sum for a cert...
Which is the entire point. Your ISP and my ~3000 system are supposed to get the hell off the net and leave it to AOL, MSN, Earthlink and few other large players. This is just another attempt at that and hopefully it will fail. It won't do a damned thing to stop spam, that is for sure. Anyone believe any of the DSL/Cable providers will do one damned thing extra to stop their users from canning the pink meat like substance? Now does anyone think their will be a single cert revocation on one the big players for allowing spam to continue? Didn't think so. Nothing to see here, move along.
Looks like a nice machine with default software that is a bit lame. But since that is now easily fixable, I can think of a few folks in dialup hell that I'll probably be crossing off my Xmas list. :)
> For a humorous demonstration of this, there's a South Park episode
> where the kids learn about sex;
Actually there are at least two episodes that bear on this discussion:
610-Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society (This week's rerun) and 507-Proper Condom Use.
> Not every company is willing to open source all their software and
> make it free.
I'm down with that. They can be as closed as they want, it is a free country. But if they want me to BUY their hardware they have to do it on my terms. And my terms are Free/Open source drivers. I will NOT buy closed hardware again. Been there, done that and have the lousy t-shirt. Never again.
However I will buy closed source software. Provided it isn't important and has little longterm value.... i.e. games. Closed software mixed with a Free OS is a timebomb. It bitrots very quickly. I had hell getting VMWare 2 running on RH7.2 and it broke again when I went to 7.3 and I still haven't had the time to get it running again. Needless to say I don't depend on VMWare. It won't be much longer before it just doesn't work at all, probably when the 2.6 kernel becomes standard. And I'm not just picking on VMWare, any closed app suffers the same fate eventually. With a game it usually doesn't matter since I will have moved on to the next shiny toy.
> Erm... are you sure this is how the law works?
I don't know about the original poster, but it is clear you haven't a clue. Here is how your example resolves:
If the photographer supplied the proper releases to the porn sites they are only obligated to remove the unlicensed content when advised of it's true status. They are then free to sue the photographer, but they will have to get in line behind the original victim. Only if they can't show proof of having obtained the material legally do they have to worry. But in the special case of pr0n they wouldn't be worried about the lawsuits with the victim, but the feds who will throw them in ass pounding federal prison for distributing pr0n without the model releases that proves they aren't dealing in kiddie porn. (Yes you really are guilty until proven innocent in the pr0n game. Welcome to Amerika, where we will violate any Right in the name of The Children.)
But there is NO precedent where a victim could demand to get the list of customers and demand that they pay/destroy the material/etc.
I am old school. Only quote enough to keep the conversation intact, and on a threaded website vs mail, not much is really needed.
/dev/dvd) method as undesirable "hackery".
And I did refer to the omitted "reload" (whatever that is, sounds like a hack though and not just drop in a disc and open
Now go away and play with your PS/2 until you grow up and get an account. And in the future, just because someone disses a product you happen to own don't take it as a personal affront, makes you sound like a 14 year old fanboy.
> You can, but for playstation discs.
About as useful as tits on a bull. Playstation2 can play DVDs without any hackery, access to that should be considered a minimum level of vendor support.
> 2. You can.
That isn't what I read elsewhere, but I haven't actually purchased any of the PS/2 stuff yet. (Because of the limited usefulness of it. If I could build a settop box, say a mythtv frontend, I'd be interested.)
> 3. If you want to write the driver, go right ahead. Nobody's stopping
> you.
Wrong answer. If the hardware specs were out public, iee1394 would already be there. But if the hardware vendor wants me to consider their port a good faith effort at a complete and usable platform, they should provide support for ALL of the hardware in THEIR box. Would you buy a Mac if MacOS didn't support all of the hardware? Or only saw the optical drive if you booted in a special mode that only let you play prerecorded media?
You aren't nearly cynical enough. Of course he did it, he got caught red handed and 'fired the marketing co' had you read the article.
w wordtheydishonortomorror camp that the ends justify the means.
He did it because he knew he COULD. The sort of zealots he attracts will either insist he is innocent or rationalize it away. If you push one hard enough they will finally justify it under the time honored lie of the socialists/liberals/progressive/whateverthehellne
> Why wasn't this tidbit of info in the original post?
Because Dean was hyped as 'net savvy' and should never have done it for a single day. Besides, after the first day the whole load had probably been delivered and they could 'terminate their relationship' and disclaim responsibility. After all, who could say different? No account lying scum spammers aren't going to pop up out of their hole to fight a press release battle with the well oiled PR machine of a presidential campaign. Where is the profit in that? Sounds like Dean really IS net savvy, in an evil sort of way.
While I'm also a Niven fan, perhaps a better book to diagnose this pathology would be Thomas Sowell's _Vision of the Annointed_. Niven just drops those little nuggets of wisdom into the text, while with non-fiction works like Sowell's you get one of the whole stone tablets.
> You should check your facts before posting stuff like that.
So the original poster was wrong, and you can in fact access:
1. The DVD/CD drive
2. Memory cards.
3. The ieee1394 port
4. The MPEG decoder
If not, perhaps it is you that is wrong... about many things.