It should be pointed out that the actual creator, in this case, has long since died.
Not exactly. The creator of LOTR, Tolkien, has died. But the creators of the derivative work referenced in the article are alive and well, and not getting their fair share. The studio executives, who create nothing but trouble, are getting what should belong to the creators of the actual work. That's what I was getting at.
It's tough to know who to root for in this, the studio, who uses account schemes to hoard all the profit for themselves or the descendants of someone creative who's livelihood is basically paid for with residual income on works they had no part in creating.
I feel the same way here. However part of the reason for the life+70 years idea (and similar notions) is that the family of the creator can reap rewards in a similar fashion to the widows and children receiving a pension. The ideal state is that the creator himself gets to choose who inherits the estate and thus any royalties due. Since providing for your family and making life easier for your children are prime motivators for economic activity it makes sense to extend that here at least to some degree. How far we go, well, is hard to say.
I'm more concerned with the situation where the inheritors are either not family (don't know the case here), especially not ones designated by the author of the work, and cases where the inheritor of the property is at odds with the wishes of the author in their use of the property. For instance cases where large corporations somehow manage to own something like this and milk it (or worse, shelve it). I once read that Nietzsche's sister exercised her strict control over his work in such a way that she has been accused of editing, suppressing, or even twisting some aspects of it. Some people really took exception to Tolkien's son editing and publishing the unpublished works of Tolkien. It sucks when someone who does not appreciate the original artist becomes the sole controller of that work and reaps all the benefits besides. I'm not thinking that's the case here, but I could be wrong. After all, I am biased... I liked the Peter Jackson movies, and I watched the Bakshi cartoons before I read the books. Yes I liked them, too, heretic that I am.
Oh I don't disagree that Apple locked these things down in the first place. I just wanted to point out that there are unofficial workarounds to fix the problems. Apple has never locked anything down well enough to prevent clever people from actually doing cool things with the system. That's because a lot of the drive behind locking things down in the first place was to protect the user-friendly experience, not necessarily to stop people from using their computers in an unorthodox fashion.
As far as that goes, they are miles ahead of Microsoft and some others one could mention. After all they did release the code for the core of their bright shiny new OS.. ok so they entered into agreements that basically meant that the crown jewel that makes it most remarkable remains closed, but the open bits (and embracing more commodity hardware) are what make hacks like the above possible.
Yeah, if you can do that, then I can do that. Report the extortion attempt and get on with your life.
You have to get the extortionist's iris first, and he wasn't foolish enough to stick it in a camera that could easily be nicked or in pictures that were published, because he knows someone might get hold of that data and do something nefarious with it.
I'm guessing they'll use some kind of watermarking. But, do you really want every photo you take to be unambiguously traced back to you? On one hand, photos you take can be traced back to you. On the other hand, the watermarking or metadata could probably be removed by a third party. It seems lose-lose for the camera owner.
I would be most concerned that this type of thing could be used to retaliate against people who photograph politically sensitive subjects, like police brutality. The trend is to punish people for filming things like that rather than punishing the people abusing their power already. This would just be another tool to be used for that purpose. Of course it could be used to catch criminals as well, like paedophiles, so that's another likely avenue for the argument to take.
I don't see how this is helpful at all in protecting photographers' IP, which is the claimed use for this data. If you take a photograph and I copy the photograph, the watermark can be used to prove that YOU took the photo, but it does not help us determine that it was I who copied the photo.
If the programmer is low paid their work is being reviewed via the QA process. Now say what you will and laugh all you want about the idea of Microsoft QA, but I can assure you that the odds of one single programmer being bribed and inserting malicious code into a core library is pretty low.
More like, by the time his code makes it through QA/review/standard revisions, it will be incomprehensible compared to what it was originally and his clever little trojan won't work anymore:D.
QuickTime, Real Player, Acrobat, Flash, etc., etc., are all technologies that most people experience inside their browser. They're all just more stuff you need to download to get your browser to work. If the web was just HTML, it would be pretty boring. And Slashdot wouldn't exist.
Sure slashdot would exist. That was one of the better things slash allowed. Since the pages are served staticly after being modified on the server by a perl cgi script... or does your html-only world eliminate cgi as well?
"However, ISO has the same idiotic notion as the UN that all countries are equal"
Got any better ideas? Population? Oh yeah, letting China and India take 1/3 of the votes is a great idea. Democracy? Well, first, you have to define democracy.
This depends on whether you are talking about the ISO or the UN. But with respect to the UN I do think that it would make sense to create a parallel organization that only admits democracies and gives votes based on population. Maybe certain measures would require a given country's delegates (who would be elected) to submit the question to a ballot in their home country. It would take time to work out details, and yeah defining democracy would take awhile (look how long it took them to define a table at the Paris peace talks, or define peace at the Camp David accords) but it would be interesting. The most immediate effect would be that with a lot of world problems being decided in a body that ONLY allows democracies, it would put pressure on other countries to comply with that definition. After all the same countries that started the UN would be in that club right from the start (No not China and probably not Russia. But pretty much all of Europe, a lot of the western hemisphere, Japan, and a whole lot of other important countries).
Personally I think the UN has proven itself almost as useless as the League of Nations. We (the US) should still participate, but it's become mired in its own faulty institutions. It seems incapable as a body of preventing war or solving conflicts in any other way than war (which was the point of creating the UN in the first place). The members are to blame, but the system itself will need serious hacking to fix the problems that allow the members to muck it up in the first place.
Recognize the privacy problem up front and don't join in the first place.
Exactly. I mean.. WTF?! When will people understand that information that you PUBLISH ON THE INTERNET is not private? If you want something to be kept private, don't publish it.
Gandalf: "Keep it secret. Keep it safe."
later..
Gandalf: "Is it secret? Is it safe?"
Frodo: "I uploaded it to my MySpace page and wrote the translation and your instructions in my blog. But only my friends can read it..."
Studios are scumbags. They do "creative" accounting so that no film ever makes money on paper. If you get suckered into accepting net points you will never EVER see a dime. Gross points are the real money and even then they find ways of hiding that money.
TFS says that they did indeed agree to take a percentage of the gross receipts, not the net.
And yes, Studios are scumbags; it's just another example of how fucked IP law is in this country, such that unrelated corporations reap all the rewards and profits and the actual creators of IP get jack.
If I walk into a brick and mortar store do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past? No, it does not happen.
Yes they can and they do. As a matter of fact this is how it works. When you try to pay by check, if you have dicked over anyone recently (your check was bad) it gets recorded and stays on your record until resolved. Meanwhile each time you pay by check the seller can check whether you have negative feedback on the check system.
If you pay by debit or credit card, again, the seller checks whether you actually have the funds before accepting the transaction. It's all done relatively automagically, so maybe you didn't notice.
Fundamentally the only question relevant to the seller (and this is what the poster was complaining about) is whether they are going to get paid for the item they are shipping. Tools to determine this are important to a seller, just as tools to determine that the seller is trustworthy are important to the buyer.
The payment problem is partially solved by escrow/paypal/the credit system. I'm not sure how things like boats and cars get handled in that case, however.
Hmm.... I thought the US Constitution only applied to US Citizens inside US borders. There I go being naive again.
Naive indeed. In any case the people in TFA were ALL US Citizens inside US Borders. The lady who lost her laptop was on her way *out* of the country, for instance.
Thanks. That is in fact very informative. I had heard this claim by various conspiracy wonks over the years but never any details, so it smelled like a myth. We haven't quite had a full blown martial law except in limited circumstances (for instance, National Guard used to quell LA Riots, Blackwater used in New Orleans during/after Katrina). It does seem to me that for an emergency to warrant the temporary suspension of normal processes (and therefore technically a loss of rights) it would have to be pretty bad, and even then the effect of these suspensions should be limited. Blanket uses of the power is an abuse, which IMHO really is a use of a power that does not truly exist.
Yes, right. Nobody would ever think of monitoring international internet connections now, would they? Echelon must be a myth.
Echelon, smeschelon. At least with this method, both the government and I can read my data together. Maybe like a bedtime story. The other way, they take my laptop (AND DATA!) and lock it up for years (or forever) and I cannot access it then.
If you apply a little historical perspective, you'll find that these issues move back and forth over time, and that to a large extent a seletive focus on the negative combined with recent increases in the flow of information have created an illusion of a slow, steady march toward oppression. In truth I'd say the long-term trends have been positive.
That is a very good point. After all, Washington's responses to Shay's Rebellion, and the Whiskey Rebellion, were pretty nasty. That's right at the beginning. The second president we had (Adams) suspended Habeas Corpus and prosecuted newspapers for printing things he didn't like.
But that is why the checks and balances are there. The whole point is that even the founding fathers knew they were not perfect and natural inclination would lead men to abuse what power they were given. The only problem is in order for checks and balances to work people have to be willing and able to step up to the plate and do their duty when called upon. Which is why I blame Congress for failing to stop a runaway executive and instead opting to continue to abuse its power as well. As things stand, all three branches of our Government are out of whack and the Fourth Estate is complicit in the crime. The only solution there is to use the system as given and replace the faulty bits so we can get back on the road again. We got lucky before, so maybe this will actually happen.
Note that frogs are more intelligent than people. They will jump out of the pot even when the temperature only rises slowly. Snopes
Snopes was wrong; see this comment for details, or just jump ahead to the wikipedia article. Two degrees per minute is pretty damn fast, and far faster than the gradual heating used in the original frog boiling experiment. Gradual is relative, I guess.
If wikipedia is wrong it can be corrected by anyone. If snopes spreads urban legends how can we rectify the foolishness? I realize we're just screwed with MythBusters. That's pure entertainment.
Thank you for your well-reasoned response. However I think it does tend to prove my point.
I understand that most (or at least many) people who advocate what are currently called "Pro-Life" positions are good decent people with the best of intentions. But that is precisely the point. You will not be the enforcers. The people who waterboard and extraordinarily render at whim, who once tortured people who were advocating for what are now among the "pro-choice" rights will be the enforcers.
I understand your logic in that you say that it does not follow that absolute enforcement is required for a law to be effected. After all, the government has not mandated governors in all cars despite the speed law. But they will continue to intrude and will continue to try to enforce this law, to the point that there were recent wailings and gnashing of teeth over the government demanding all gps data from certain cars that were capable of recording it, and the like. Okay so Universal Drug Testing is not so completely the law as you describe, but the testing does become more ubiquitous all because of the illegality of the drugs. It is the same with anything else. MP3s are illegal, so the RIAA gets to hack your computer for no reason. Etc, etc.
Fundamentally though you're missing the point that in order to make abortion illegal in this country you have to overturn Roe v. Wade. In order to do that you *must* invalidate the fundamental right to privacy because that is the right on which the case was decided. The Judges did not say a woman has a fundamental right to an abortion so much as she has a fundamental right to regulate her own body and work conjunction with her doctor to deal with any and all reproductive health issues without anyone else poking their nose in there. They recognized it was not absolute and gave the state a valve in that at some point restrictions have to be allowed, else the end is people being allowed to dash their child's brains out on a rock like the old days. But ultimately they decided that the decisions made in early pregnancy are up to the woman. She should be allowed to keep track of when she got pregnant, what she's going to do, etc, rather than some government tallymaster making her prove how many terminated pregnancies were miscarriages versus abortions.
In any event I think you guys are going about this entirely the wrong way. I'm reasonably certain that whereas the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps are divided roughly down the middle, with strong variations within each "camp," the number of people who would prefer less abortions is closer to 99-100%. If reducing abortion is your goal, you need to recognize this is a SOCIAL issue and not just something you can slap a law at and have go away. It did not work last time we tried your way, for obvious and predictable reasons, and the result will likely be even worse next time.
Oddly enough, the "Pro-Life" camp seems to directly be working to INCREASE the number of abortions by their actions. If you want to decrease abortions you would need to:
1) INCREASE sex education, so that people understand how they become pregnant and what they can do to prevent it, as well as how to properly deal with the situation should it arise. Currently "Pro-Life" is pretty consistently AGAINST all education in this area.
2) INCREASE access to contraception. If people do not become pregnant they do not need abortions.
3) INCREASE stem cell and cloning research, and the like. Yes, that is what I said. INCREASE it. The same tech used for cloning might someday lead to the ability to transplant fetuses, which would basically allow you to go to the same doctor you go to to get your baby killed, and instead give it away without a time limit (these babies can be frozen) or the necessity to carry to term yourself at 13 years of age. You might even have the baby yourself later under these circumstances. The other genetic research can lead to cures to genetic disease which is anothe
I think what the poster mangled saying was that people will elect Clinton because she promises to deliver the things which by her own admission she has not delivered on (she's been working on it for 35 years! Why does she think it is a positive point?) while forgetting that she will also be doing the things that she HAS been working on "for 35 years," i.e. a decrease in civil liberties.
Incidentally, as Senator she has voted for the PATRIOT ACT, the authorization of force against Iraq, and the authorization of force against Iran. She did apparently vote against the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which, given her record to date was actually surprising. Of course, Obama voted against all of these things, except the PATRIOT Act, (he was not a Senator when it was passed). However, both Obama and Clinton voted to renew the PATRIOT Act.
Snopes is wrong. Or at the very least they did not properly reproduce the experiment. The experiment was supposed to show that raising the temperature *gradually* will eventually result in a cooked frog. That is what the original experiment, performed by G Stanley Hall, provided. Snopes.com did an experiment where the temperature was raised incredibly quickly and declared "myth busted." Sorry, but that is not how science works. If you want to invalidate results, you need to reproduce the original conditions of the experiment, not make up things out of your ass. If you want to perform a different experiment, that is fine, but it has to make sense. Boiling frogs quickly and having them jump out does not prove that a frog will not allow itself to be boiled slowly.
I would argue that a security setup that relied on IE wasn't really a "security" setup. If it depends on the client, it's pretty much by definition not secure.
This is true, but given the nature of web attacks danger is going to be relative to the safety of the client. If the admin has used group policies and such to lock down IE it can theoretically be made secure. Firefox is more secure in some measures but it does have holes from time to time and no real central management facility like IE. You could deliver firefox+noscript and updates to people's systems, but AFAIK you can't enforce, distribute, and lock in changes. I'd do both (lock down IE and deliver Firefox + updates) and push them to firefox, but that's up to the admin as far as where they are going to focus resources. It probably would not be a bad idea to have the internal dns server block (return 127.0.0.1 or a negative result) some list of known bad pages that was updated... (or drop the connection at the firewall, preferably both) come to think of it there must be an rbl out there that covers malware pages.. Firewall/dns blocking is going to be your only non-client-dependant figleaf against web attacks, and that is not really a full solution.
Actually the Defense expenditures for 2008 amount to 19% of the federal budget. But facts probably don't matter to you.
2007 Federal Budget [wikipedia.org]
But nearly a trillion dollars a year being spent on the war in Iraq are not even in the budget. Which has in turn helped the debt more than double. And no end in sight for that monster because no one has been brave enough to propose what would have to be done to get rid of a debt that exceeds the government's annual income going on 10 times, especially while prosecuting a war that costs almost as much as the national income.
And then leftists hypocritically object to such things as creationism being taught in public schools without realizing it's another form of the exact same intolerant violence they wholeheartedly embrace when it suits their own proselytizing agendas.
Intolerance and force are two-edged swords. If Creationism is taught in public schools then belief in your religion is being enforced by law. This goes for mandatory school prayer (which is the only school prayer that is actually currently illegal) as well. Both violate the 1st amendment because the government is not supposed to establish and maintain religions. If children were punished for praying in school or talking about creationism that would violate the 1st amendment as well, because it violates their free exercise and expression. However what you are talking about is voting against making Genesis 1 part of the Federally Mandated Curriculum, or allowing it to be made part of the State Mandated Curriculum, which would be very wrong; asking for such measures is indeed asking for the force of government to be brought to bear against the minds of your fellows. The twisting and intellectual dishonesty that has been perpetrated in this particular area of law by pastors in my view is disgraceful both from a religious standpoint (BECAUSE THEY ARE LYING!) and from a standpoint of a free citizen (because they are advocating the removal of rights, especially those that are specifically enumerated in the Constitution).
It is a strange sort of intellectual dishonesty that leads one to characterize a crusade to eradicate civil rights as one to promote freedom. But it has been done before. After all, the abolition of slavery was said to violate States' Rights and property rights of owners. The abolition of the Jim Crow laws was said to violate the rights of business owners to discriminate. It's just that in this case people are arguing for new laws (mandatory school prayers written by the goverment; mandatory Genesis 1 in every science class) taking away people's right to freedom of religion in the guise of protecting those very rights. That takes a special kind of asshole IMHO.
I've noticed that pro-choice people frequently assert that if abortion were to be made legal, the country that made it illegal what have to revert to all kinds of 1984-esque techniques to actually prevent abortions. This is true. The problem is that just because something is illegal does not mean it has to be - or even can be - arbitrarily enforce. For example: child abuse is illegal but that does not mean the government can trample rights at will to prevent child abuse. If you are seen beating your kid, you are likely to be arrested. If you aren't seen beating your kid, the cops have no right to break down your door and check.
First off, your example is invalid because the cops may indeed break down the door and check on your kids. First off if they had any suspicion that someone was in danger within they have the right via exigent circumstances to enter and inspect the premises and goings on therein. If there is any reason to believe you have been abusing your children Child Protective Services can and will conduct an investigation which. may or may not include multiple visits. There are a lot of problems in the system right now and it is overburdened at present, but it does happen.
As far as 1984 measures for abortion there was another example given in which indeed women are being inspected for signs of abortion. This is at least part of the reason that Roe V Wade was decided on the basis of privacy rights. If you want to make *having* an abortion illegal (in other words prosecute mothers) you would have to allow that they have no right to privacy because regulating pregnacies is a pretty intimate business. I might give you a pass on the outlawing doctors providing abortions bit, but the social issue can't be decided like a political one, divorced of context. If abortions are made illegal there has to be a reason and enforcement, and both are intrusions into the privacy of individuals at a very basic level.
Historically this sort of thing was already done in the past in response to laws against abortion and prostitution as well as fears of venereal disease (and laws pertaining to that). In Victorian England women were indeed carted off semirandomly by police to undergo thorough gynecological examinations for various things including evidence of abortion, pregnancy, and disease. Since these examinations were required to determine illegal activities, they managed to become legally mandated. In this country, we have laws against all sorts of things which basically lead directly to the loss of any rights at all once someone is suspected of breaking them, or worse, BECAUSE they might be suspected of breaking them if we can just get round some of these pesky rights long enough to nab some evidence.
For instance, random universal drug testing. It should be illegal as a violation of the 4th amendment, but it is not, and the continuous justification for this is that drugs are illegal. We need to throw away the 4th amendment to catch people using drugs on their own time, so we do. We seize their property without a trial as well, once again, because drugs are illegal and being able to seize property before the trial helps make it harder for drug dealers to hire big expensive lawyers. So.. right to property and presumption of innocence... OLD HAT.
If you think for one minute that the same bunch of folks who literally peek in people's bedroom windows to enforce sodomy laws are going to blanche at having to have women regularly inspected throughout their pregnancies to ensure proper fetal health and that no laws protecting the child were broken (abortion, intoxication in pregnancy)I think you have not been paying attention.
Yes, Ron Paul says he's Pro-Life, and Republican. So.. not getting my vote, th
Slashdot Mirror
It should be pointed out that the actual creator, in this case, has long since died.
Not exactly. The creator of LOTR, Tolkien, has died. But the creators of the derivative work referenced in the article are alive and well, and not getting their fair share. The studio executives, who create nothing but trouble, are getting what should belong to the creators of the actual work. That's what I was getting at.
It's tough to know who to root for in this, the studio, who uses account schemes to hoard all the profit for themselves or the descendants of someone creative who's livelihood is basically paid for with residual income on works they had no part in creating.
I feel the same way here. However part of the reason for the life+70 years idea (and similar notions) is that the family of the creator can reap rewards in a similar fashion to the widows and children receiving a pension. The ideal state is that the creator himself gets to choose who inherits the estate and thus any royalties due. Since providing for your family and making life easier for your children are prime motivators for economic activity it makes sense to extend that here at least to some degree. How far we go, well, is hard to say.
I'm more concerned with the situation where the inheritors are either not family (don't know the case here), especially not ones designated by the author of the work, and cases where the inheritor of the property is at odds with the wishes of the author in their use of the property. For instance cases where large corporations somehow manage to own something like this and milk it (or worse, shelve it). I once read that Nietzsche's sister exercised her strict control over his work in such a way that she has been accused of editing, suppressing, or even twisting some aspects of it. Some people really took exception to Tolkien's son editing and publishing the unpublished works of Tolkien. It sucks when someone who does not appreciate the original artist becomes the sole controller of that work and reaps all the benefits besides. I'm not thinking that's the case here, but I could be wrong. After all, I am biased... I liked the Peter Jackson movies, and I watched the Bakshi cartoons before I read the books. Yes I liked them, too, heretic that I am.
Oh I don't disagree that Apple locked these things down in the first place. I just wanted to point out that there are unofficial workarounds to fix the problems. Apple has never locked anything down well enough to prevent clever people from actually doing cool things with the system. That's because a lot of the drive behind locking things down in the first place was to protect the user-friendly experience, not necessarily to stop people from using their computers in an unorthodox fashion.
As far as that goes, they are miles ahead of Microsoft and some others one could mention. After all they did release the code for the core of their bright shiny new OS .. ok so they entered into agreements that basically meant that the crown jewel that makes it most remarkable remains closed, but the open bits (and embracing more commodity hardware) are what make hacks like the above possible.
Yeah, if you can do that, then I can do that. Report the extortion attempt and get on with your life.
You have to get the extortionist's iris first, and he wasn't foolish enough to stick it in a camera that could easily be nicked or in pictures that were published, because he knows someone might get hold of that data and do something nefarious with it.
I'm guessing they'll use some kind of watermarking. But, do you really want every photo you take to be unambiguously traced back to you? On one hand, photos you take can be traced back to you. On the other hand, the watermarking or metadata could probably be removed by a third party. It seems lose-lose for the camera owner.
I would be most concerned that this type of thing could be used to retaliate against people who photograph politically sensitive subjects, like police brutality. The trend is to punish people for filming things like that rather than punishing the people abusing their power already. This would just be another tool to be used for that purpose. Of course it could be used to catch criminals as well, like paedophiles, so that's another likely avenue for the argument to take.
I don't see how this is helpful at all in protecting photographers' IP, which is the claimed use for this data. If you take a photograph and I copy the photograph, the watermark can be used to prove that YOU took the photo, but it does not help us determine that it was I who copied the photo.
If the programmer is low paid their work is being reviewed via the QA process. Now say what you will and laugh all you want about the idea of Microsoft QA, but I can assure you that the odds of one single programmer being bribed and inserting malicious code into a core library is pretty low.
More like, by the time his code makes it through QA/review/standard revisions, it will be incomprehensible compared to what it was originally and his clever little trojan won't work anymore :D.
We hope...
QuickTime, Real Player, Acrobat, Flash, etc., etc., are all technologies that most people experience inside their browser. They're all just more stuff you need to download to get your browser to work. If the web was just HTML, it would be pretty boring. And Slashdot wouldn't exist.
Sure slashdot would exist. That was one of the better things slash allowed. Since the pages are served staticly after being modified on the server by a perl cgi script... or does your html-only world eliminate cgi as well?
"However, ISO has the same idiotic notion as the UN that all countries are equal"
Got any better ideas? Population? Oh yeah, letting China and India take 1/3 of the votes is a great idea. Democracy? Well, first, you have to define democracy.
This depends on whether you are talking about the ISO or the UN. But with respect to the UN I do think that it would make sense to create a parallel organization that only admits democracies and gives votes based on population. Maybe certain measures would require a given country's delegates (who would be elected) to submit the question to a ballot in their home country. It would take time to work out details, and yeah defining democracy would take awhile (look how long it took them to define a table at the Paris peace talks, or define peace at the Camp David accords) but it would be interesting. The most immediate effect would be that with a lot of world problems being decided in a body that ONLY allows democracies, it would put pressure on other countries to comply with that definition. After all the same countries that started the UN would be in that club right from the start (No not China and probably not Russia. But pretty much all of Europe, a lot of the western hemisphere, Japan, and a whole lot of other important countries).
Personally I think the UN has proven itself almost as useless as the League of Nations. We (the US) should still participate, but it's become mired in its own faulty institutions. It seems incapable as a body of preventing war or solving conflicts in any other way than war (which was the point of creating the UN in the first place). The members are to blame, but the system itself will need serious hacking to fix the problems that allow the members to muck it up in the first place.
Point taken; however ...
Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !
Actually you can. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !
You have to convert them first; you can do that in Itunes.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !
It works with wine apparently, or Crossover Office.
Google Knows All.
Recognize the privacy problem up front and don't join in the first place.
Exactly. I mean .. WTF?! When will people understand that information that you PUBLISH ON THE INTERNET is not private? If you want something to be kept private, don't publish it.
Gandalf: "Keep it secret. Keep it safe."
later ..
Gandalf: "Is it secret? Is it safe?"
Frodo: "I uploaded it to my MySpace page and wrote the translation and your instructions in my blog. But only my friends can read it..."
Gandalf: "Goddamnit!"
Studios are scumbags. They do "creative" accounting so that no film ever makes money on paper. If you get suckered into accepting net points you will never EVER see a dime. Gross points are the real money and even then they find ways of hiding that money.
TFS says that they did indeed agree to take a percentage of the gross receipts, not the net.
And yes, Studios are scumbags; it's just another example of how fucked IP law is in this country, such that unrelated corporations reap all the rewards and profits and the actual creators of IP get jack.
If I walk into a brick and mortar store do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past? No, it does not happen.
Yes they can and they do. As a matter of fact this is how it works. When you try to pay by check, if you have dicked over anyone recently (your check was bad) it gets recorded and stays on your record until resolved. Meanwhile each time you pay by check the seller can check whether you have negative feedback on the check system.
If you pay by debit or credit card, again, the seller checks whether you actually have the funds before accepting the transaction. It's all done relatively automagically, so maybe you didn't notice.
Fundamentally the only question relevant to the seller (and this is what the poster was complaining about) is whether they are going to get paid for the item they are shipping. Tools to determine this are important to a seller, just as tools to determine that the seller is trustworthy are important to the buyer.
The payment problem is partially solved by escrow/paypal/the credit system. I'm not sure how things like boats and cars get handled in that case, however.
Hmm.... I thought the US Constitution only applied to US Citizens inside US borders. There I go being naive again.
Naive indeed. In any case the people in TFA were ALL US Citizens inside US Borders. The lady who lost her laptop was on her way *out* of the country, for instance.
Thanks. That is in fact very informative. I had heard this claim by various conspiracy wonks over the years but never any details, so it smelled like a myth. We haven't quite had a full blown martial law except in limited circumstances (for instance, National Guard used to quell LA Riots, Blackwater used in New Orleans during/after Katrina). It does seem to me that for an emergency to warrant the temporary suspension of normal processes (and therefore technically a loss of rights) it would have to be pretty bad, and even then the effect of these suspensions should be limited. Blanket uses of the power is an abuse, which IMHO really is a use of a power that does not truly exist.
Yes, right. Nobody would ever think of monitoring international internet connections now, would they? Echelon must be a myth.
Echelon, smeschelon. At least with this method, both the government and I can read my data together. Maybe like a bedtime story. The other way, they take my laptop (AND DATA!) and lock it up for years (or forever) and I cannot access it then.
Perceived corruption http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html USA ranks 20th.
20th! Damnit W and K Street need to work harder then. I'm pretty sure they were shooting for #1. :D
If you apply a little historical perspective, you'll find that these issues move back and forth over time, and that to a large extent a seletive focus on the negative combined with recent increases in the flow of information have created an illusion of a slow, steady march toward oppression. In truth I'd say the long-term trends have been positive.
That is a very good point. After all, Washington's responses to Shay's Rebellion, and the Whiskey Rebellion, were pretty nasty. That's right at the beginning. The second president we had (Adams) suspended Habeas Corpus and prosecuted newspapers for printing things he didn't like.
But that is why the checks and balances are there. The whole point is that even the founding fathers knew they were not perfect and natural inclination would lead men to abuse what power they were given. The only problem is in order for checks and balances to work people have to be willing and able to step up to the plate and do their duty when called upon. Which is why I blame Congress for failing to stop a runaway executive and instead opting to continue to abuse its power as well. As things stand, all three branches of our Government are out of whack and the Fourth Estate is complicit in the crime. The only solution there is to use the system as given and replace the faulty bits so we can get back on the road again. We got lucky before, so maybe this will actually happen.
Note that frogs are more intelligent than people. They will jump out of the pot even when the temperature only rises slowly. Snopes
Snopes was wrong; see this comment for details, or just jump ahead to the wikipedia article. Two degrees per minute is pretty damn fast, and far faster than the gradual heating used in the original frog boiling experiment. Gradual is relative, I guess.
If wikipedia is wrong it can be corrected by anyone. If snopes spreads urban legends how can we rectify the foolishness? I realize we're just screwed with MythBusters. That's pure entertainment.
Thank you for your well-reasoned response. However I think it does tend to prove my point.
I understand that most (or at least many) people who advocate what are currently called "Pro-Life" positions are good decent people with the best of intentions. But that is precisely the point. You will not be the enforcers. The people who waterboard and extraordinarily render at whim, who once tortured people who were advocating for what are now among the "pro-choice" rights will be the enforcers.
I understand your logic in that you say that it does not follow that absolute enforcement is required for a law to be effected. After all, the government has not mandated governors in all cars despite the speed law. But they will continue to intrude and will continue to try to enforce this law, to the point that there were recent wailings and gnashing of teeth over the government demanding all gps data from certain cars that were capable of recording it, and the like. Okay so Universal Drug Testing is not so completely the law as you describe, but the testing does become more ubiquitous all because of the illegality of the drugs. It is the same with anything else. MP3s are illegal, so the RIAA gets to hack your computer for no reason. Etc, etc.
Fundamentally though you're missing the point that in order to make abortion illegal in this country you have to overturn Roe v. Wade. In order to do that you *must* invalidate the fundamental right to privacy because that is the right on which the case was decided. The Judges did not say a woman has a fundamental right to an abortion so much as she has a fundamental right to regulate her own body and work conjunction with her doctor to deal with any and all reproductive health issues without anyone else poking their nose in there. They recognized it was not absolute and gave the state a valve in that at some point restrictions have to be allowed, else the end is people being allowed to dash their child's brains out on a rock like the old days. But ultimately they decided that the decisions made in early pregnancy are up to the woman. She should be allowed to keep track of when she got pregnant, what she's going to do, etc, rather than some government tallymaster making her prove how many terminated pregnancies were miscarriages versus abortions.
In any event I think you guys are going about this entirely the wrong way. I'm reasonably certain that whereas the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps are divided roughly down the middle, with strong variations within each "camp," the number of people who would prefer less abortions is closer to 99-100%. If reducing abortion is your goal, you need to recognize this is a SOCIAL issue and not just something you can slap a law at and have go away. It did not work last time we tried your way, for obvious and predictable reasons, and the result will likely be even worse next time.
Oddly enough, the "Pro-Life" camp seems to directly be working to INCREASE the number of abortions by their actions. If you want to decrease abortions you would need to:
1) INCREASE sex education, so that people understand how they become pregnant and what they can do to prevent it, as well as how to properly deal with the situation should it arise. Currently "Pro-Life" is pretty consistently AGAINST all education in this area.
2) INCREASE access to contraception. If people do not become pregnant they do not need abortions.
3) INCREASE stem cell and cloning research, and the like. Yes, that is what I said. INCREASE it. The same tech used for cloning might someday lead to the ability to transplant fetuses, which would basically allow you to go to the same doctor you go to to get your baby killed, and instead give it away without a time limit (these babies can be frozen) or the necessity to carry to term yourself at 13 years of age. You might even have the baby yourself later under these circumstances. The other genetic research can lead to cures to genetic disease which is anothe
I think what the poster mangled saying was that people will elect Clinton because she promises to deliver the things which by her own admission she has not delivered on (she's been working on it for 35 years! Why does she think it is a positive point?) while forgetting that she will also be doing the things that she HAS been working on "for 35 years," i.e. a decrease in civil liberties.
Incidentally, as Senator she has voted for the PATRIOT ACT, the authorization of force against Iraq, and the authorization of force against Iran. She did apparently vote against the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which, given her record to date was actually surprising. Of course, Obama voted against all of these things, except the PATRIOT Act, (he was not a Senator when it was passed). However, both Obama and Clinton voted to renew the PATRIOT Act.
Sorry, but snopes says no.
(FWIW, I agree with your point.)
Snopes is wrong. Or at the very least they did not properly reproduce the experiment. The experiment was supposed to show that raising the temperature *gradually* will eventually result in a cooked frog. That is what the original experiment, performed by G Stanley Hall, provided. Snopes.com did an experiment where the temperature was raised incredibly quickly and declared "myth busted." Sorry, but that is not how science works. If you want to invalidate results, you need to reproduce the original conditions of the experiment, not make up things out of your ass. If you want to perform a different experiment, that is fine, but it has to make sense. Boiling frogs quickly and having them jump out does not prove that a frog will not allow itself to be boiled slowly.
Re firefox, what I meant was that you cannot enforce, distribute and lock in configuration changes.
I would argue that a security setup that relied on IE wasn't really a "security" setup. If it depends on the client, it's pretty much by definition not secure.
This is true, but given the nature of web attacks danger is going to be relative to the safety of the client. If the admin has used group policies and such to lock down IE it can theoretically be made secure. Firefox is more secure in some measures but it does have holes from time to time and no real central management facility like IE. You could deliver firefox+noscript and updates to people's systems, but AFAIK you can't enforce, distribute, and lock in changes. I'd do both (lock down IE and deliver Firefox + updates) and push them to firefox, but that's up to the admin as far as where they are going to focus resources. It probably would not be a bad idea to have the internal dns server block (return 127.0.0.1 or a negative result) some list of known bad pages that was updated... (or drop the connection at the firewall, preferably both) come to think of it there must be an rbl out there that covers malware pages .. Firewall/dns blocking is going to be your only non-client-dependant figleaf against web attacks, and that is not really a full solution.
Actually the Defense expenditures for 2008 amount to 19% of the federal budget. But facts probably don't matter to you.
2007 Federal Budget [wikipedia.org]
But nearly a trillion dollars a year being spent on the war in Iraq are not even in the budget. Which has in turn helped the debt more than double. And no end in sight for that monster because no one has been brave enough to propose what would have to be done to get rid of a debt that exceeds the government's annual income going on 10 times, especially while prosecuting a war that costs almost as much as the national income.
And then leftists hypocritically object to such things as creationism being taught in public schools without realizing it's another form of the exact same intolerant violence they wholeheartedly embrace when it suits their own proselytizing agendas.
Intolerance and force are two-edged swords. If Creationism is taught in public schools then belief in your religion is being enforced by law. This goes for mandatory school prayer (which is the only school prayer that is actually currently illegal) as well. Both violate the 1st amendment because the government is not supposed to establish and maintain religions. If children were punished for praying in school or talking about creationism that would violate the 1st amendment as well, because it violates their free exercise and expression. However what you are talking about is voting against making Genesis 1 part of the Federally Mandated Curriculum, or allowing it to be made part of the State Mandated Curriculum, which would be very wrong; asking for such measures is indeed asking for the force of government to be brought to bear against the minds of your fellows. The twisting and intellectual dishonesty that has been perpetrated in this particular area of law by pastors in my view is disgraceful both from a religious standpoint (BECAUSE THEY ARE LYING!) and from a standpoint of a free citizen (because they are advocating the removal of rights, especially those that are specifically enumerated in the Constitution).
It is a strange sort of intellectual dishonesty that leads one to characterize a crusade to eradicate civil rights as one to promote freedom. But it has been done before. After all, the abolition of slavery was said to violate States' Rights and property rights of owners. The abolition of the Jim Crow laws was said to violate the rights of business owners to discriminate. It's just that in this case people are arguing for new laws (mandatory school prayers written by the goverment; mandatory Genesis 1 in every science class) taking away people's right to freedom of religion in the guise of protecting those very rights. That takes a special kind of asshole IMHO.
I've noticed that pro-choice people frequently assert that if abortion were to be made legal, the country that made it illegal what have to revert to all kinds of 1984-esque techniques to actually prevent abortions. This is true. The problem is that just because something is illegal does not mean it has to be - or even can be - arbitrarily enforce. For example: child abuse is illegal but that does not mean the government can trample rights at will to prevent child abuse. If you are seen beating your kid, you are likely to be arrested. If you aren't seen beating your kid, the cops have no right to break down your door and check.
First off, your example is invalid because the cops may indeed break down the door and check on your kids. First off if they had any suspicion that someone was in danger within they have the right via exigent circumstances to enter and inspect the premises and goings on therein. If there is any reason to believe you have been abusing your children Child Protective Services can and will conduct an investigation which. may or may not include multiple visits. There are a lot of problems in the system right now and it is overburdened at present, but it does happen.
As far as 1984 measures for abortion there was another example given in which indeed women are being inspected for signs of abortion. This is at least part of the reason that Roe V Wade was decided on the basis of privacy rights. If you want to make *having* an abortion illegal (in other words prosecute mothers) you would have to allow that they have no right to privacy because regulating pregnacies is a pretty intimate business. I might give you a pass on the outlawing doctors providing abortions bit, but the social issue can't be decided like a political one, divorced of context. If abortions are made illegal there has to be a reason and enforcement, and both are intrusions into the privacy of individuals at a very basic level.
Historically this sort of thing was already done in the past in response to laws against abortion and prostitution as well as fears of venereal disease (and laws pertaining to that). In Victorian England women were indeed carted off semirandomly by police to undergo thorough gynecological examinations for various things including evidence of abortion, pregnancy, and disease. Since these examinations were required to determine illegal activities, they managed to become legally mandated. In this country, we have laws against all sorts of things which basically lead directly to the loss of any rights at all once someone is suspected of breaking them, or worse, BECAUSE they might be suspected of breaking them if we can just get round some of these pesky rights long enough to nab some evidence.
For instance, random universal drug testing. It should be illegal as a violation of the 4th amendment, but it is not, and the continuous justification for this is that drugs are illegal. We need to throw away the 4th amendment to catch people using drugs on their own time, so we do. We seize their property without a trial as well, once again, because drugs are illegal and being able to seize property before the trial helps make it harder for drug dealers to hire big expensive lawyers. So .. right to property and presumption of innocence ... OLD HAT.
If you think for one minute that the same bunch of folks who literally peek in people's bedroom windows to enforce sodomy laws are going to blanche at having to have women regularly inspected throughout their pregnancies to ensure proper fetal health and that no laws protecting the child were broken (abortion, intoxication in pregnancy)I think you have not been paying attention.
Yes, Ron Paul says he's Pro-Life, and Republican. So .. not getting my vote, th