That is the problem with Religion in general. Everyone has their own personal belief and set of definitions, which do not neatly mesh necessarily. I think your first definition of "lack of belief in a deity" is probably closest to the dictionary definition of atheism. Of course the belief that presented more evidence one might believe sounds more like an agnostic, which to me is someone who does not believe they have enough evidence to believe one way or the other.
Of course I don't believe in being dogmatic about things generally, especially things we cannot be certain about. I also don't believe in forcing my beliefs on others, though I am wont to spek of them persuasively and at length...
Which is therefore a religion. Atheism is the belief, in the absense of any scientific evidence either way, that there is no deity just as theism is the belief in a deity under the same circumstances. They are both religions, and both equally irrational viewpoints defended, well, religiously.
In the immortal words of Rush "You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. / If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Or to put it another way, if on a form you are asked to choose your religion and you choose to put "atheist" or "none" or even "not applicable," that is your religious belief.
I find it hard to believe that Public School Teachers have much money for the National Endowment for the Arts, but if they contribute to it, it is their business. The rest of your argument makes very little sense. Perhaps you shoudl clarify what exactly you are talking about and perhaps give some links.
Re:the big problem and the maybe big solutions
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
I am actually very interested in hearing more about the groups infiltrating protests and causing problems. I rememeber learning about FBI infiltrating dissident groups as a matter of course. What intrigued me most was a chain of events that surrounded the WTO protests.
IIRC, an artist in New York created a film in which FBI agents in masks created riots on purpose during millenial celebrations in order to justify increasing their power. The FBI had the web site on which this film was shown shut down by fiat, and forced the artist to apologize. However, there were protests around the millenium in which the exact process depicted in the artists' film became reality. The protests were suppressed violently by police, the media claimed there were riots, and martial law was declared in Seattle and LA for awhile.
The main stream media footage was interesting because it only showed police officers destroying property whereas the story was that protestors were destroying property. There were reports from local business people that the protestors were peaceful, welcome, and good for business (patronizing local coffee shops, etc). There were other reports that were not in the mainstream media however, of groups of people with black masks who were in among the protestors creating havoc on purpose. There have been claims these were some kind of government plant, but without more data it is hard to know the truth.
If you know anything about this or have links to data, feel free to let me know.
As for the elites, the problem for them is that no ones power lasts forever. I have heard some wild conspiracy theories but no one has claimed (afaik) that for instance the Ptolomies and Caesars are still stirring up trouble, though they did so for centuries before losing their place in history. The other problem is that their way is dead. It is also death and will be for us if we follow it.
The old paradigm of wars on a whim or for the personal reasons of a select few individuals is dead. It is true that to some degree it still happens, but people will not simply accept it in this package; they have to be given a reaosn which is valid for them. Eventually, I believe, this whole sordid practice will be done away with altogether. It is embarrassing even for the elites, though pulling it off is a way to show power. WWI was probably the last time it happened overtly. The Iraq war came very close, but I think if you ask the soldiers on the ground why they went they would say it was to foster democracy. If that does not happen the elites will have to choose a different face for themselves than Bush.
True democracy and freedom has always been the enemy of anyone who tries to make themselves an elite. Since the US is the most powerful nation in the world, and since power only comes in this country by paying homage to that idea, it is unlikely it will be eradicated swiftly, though it has been eroded with time. I think the only way it could be smothered effectively would be to make the US a subordinate nation to the EU where many of our most cherished freedoms are considered nonessential (true freedom of speech and press, right to bear arms, etc).
The only hope for the human race's survival lies in eliminating the elite from the equation. There must be true democracy which spreads worldwide at first, and then to the stars. I think in the US anyone who runs on a platform of granting true freedom would be at an advantage over every other candidate for office, and would bring record numbers of voters to the polls. I think the elites would have to acknowlege defeat in such a case, and a politician or group thereof successfully using mob rule would be able to eliminate the influence of current elites essentially forever. This is something they understand and woudl not yield to without a fight, but ultimately they cannot win, not only because the numbers are against them and they woudl kill the golden goose, but because if they do win everyone on this planet will die. Their way is death.
In general I agree with you. However websites will not do the job. The Media(I think that the plural is medeorce) will continue to whail thier drums and as H.L. Mankin said "freedom of the press is best when you own the press. Joe sixpack if he thinks of the net at all is probaly too busy playing Fanasty league ball or downloading porn. When I graduated from school in the 50's about 15% of the population could not read above a 5th grade level the figure now is about 20% and getting worse. (ask someone when they last read a book.
You are correct in saying websites alone will not do the job. I am thinking, however, that if you make enough noise the media will not be able to ignore you because of their hunger for ratings. Even though alan keyes was almost completely unreported on during the 1996 election, he was able to get some press when he got arrested for daring to show up to a debate for presidential candidates.
The point is to get enough people to want to see your website, then make sure your message is coherent to everyone. Then hope your message is truly what a majority of people want to hear. If all of these things are true I think you do have a real chance.
I do agree with you it is not easy. However there are already a few who are doing it; in fact I saw a senatorial candidate from Louisiana on/., and recently I was chatting people up on some random instant messenger thingie and ran into a Libertarian candidate from my area. These people have not been elected afaik, but I think they have not pushed it as far as it needs to go.
I also should reiterate my point about public events. You have to go where Joe sixpack is. Maybe that means convincing someone to let you speak at a rock concert. Maybe that means throwing a free rock concert. Maybe that means streaking across the football field in the superbowl halftime show. IBM got a lot out of spraypainting sidewalks, for crying out loud.
If you support digital freedom, maybe you should tell Joe Sixpack you are on his side when he plays fantasy league ball and downloads porn. The people I oppose oppose these things, by the way. They think porn is something to be combatted on all sides (though I think a lot of it is a smokescreen to divert people's attention) and that fantasy league ball violates IP. Tell Joe you will protect his porn and fantasy ball and he might vote for you.
Of course the other thing that needs to happen to get attention is to prove that you are different from other politicians. Bill Clinton got a lot of milage out of pretending to be different, but imagine what would have happened if he was *really different!* Uniqueness is cherished in famous people and leaders even as it is quashed among the masses. The same people who might think men should be beaten up for wearing women's clothing and earrings might cheer like madmen for Dennis Rodman, etc. So be different, prove you are different.
It's not hard to be different from real politicians. First off, tell the truth. If you make/made a mistake, admit the hell out of it. DON'T hide it! Also, if you make a promise, follow through. be honest! Do things that truly benefit everyone in your constituency, rather than a select few. And lastly, be CONSISTENT! The defining mark of the typical politician is that they promise one thing today and do something completely opposite tomorrow. Also, what they vote for today they will vote against tomorrow. They also tend to vote for things not because they believe in them but because they are told to by their party leaders or are trading votes. DON'T DO THAT!
Distinguishing yourself, drawing attention to yourself, and promoting a consistent message trumps everything the rich, corporate-backed politicos might try to do. If enough people who felt this way had the guts to go out and do it, we would never have the problems we face today.
Re:the big problem and the maybe big solutions
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you, however I have not yet given up hope for the US. There is something about the US, its traditions, its history and culture, that makes it particularly attractive to me. I think it is also the most likely Earth-Nation to achieve true freedom and spread it to the world. Granted we are moving in the oposite direction now.
The main weakness of the Star Chambers and Conspiracies and Elites, etc, is that they still have to pretend to follow the rules. George Bush declared he would be President no matter what before the election started, but he had to make at least a pretense of following the rules so as not to upset everything.
The founding fathers of the US realized and acknowleged that no government rules without the consent of the people, and no rights can be taken away that are not given away. The Elites actually thrive on people like you and I decrying their subversion of the country, because the more people believe they have no rights and the Elites can do as they Will, the more it becomes so.
There are real physical barriers, besides societal barriers, to any ordinary person assuming the power of the Elites. But with sufficient grass-roots support anything can happen. This is why women and minorities can vote now (unless Republicans get away with shenanigans). Then again, look at the shenanighans they get up to. The Republicans could not have gotten away with stationing police in Florida to keep out all minorities and poor. They had to hide it by saying they would only check for drivers' licenses, warrants, insurance, stuff like that. They could not stop all the black people voting, but they made sure police had as comprehensive a list of names of black criminals (even dead ones) as possible and only went by names in stopping people voting.
None of the people who were stopped from voting should have been stopped. It is a throwback to the old days when poll taxes and literacy tests were used to target minorities and keep them from voting. But doing thinsg the way they did clouds the issue, divides the potential opponents of what they do. In essence, they are following the rules of democracy (though not to the letter and certainly not in spirit).
This means, of course, that if opposing political leaders gained broad support and could prove they had large numbers of votes they could not simply be ignored. To ignore something like that would be to give up the game, and it is very important that some semblance of freedom and democracy be kept around to keep people happy. Otherwise they would revolt. They would disobey.
This is another reason why I feel the US is important. In the Middle East and Asia, there are horrible despotic governments which are almost universally hated. However, no one does anything about them, partially because of the way they respond, but also because of the history these people share. Millenia of compliance with the rules, of bowing their heads to sadistic monsters who cared not a whit for anyone have taken their toll. The history of much of the world is exactly that. People who do not even understand the value of Freedom.
There was an old Beer commercial in which Fidel Castro walks into a bar and tries an American beer and gets hooked. He says "Now that I've had a taste of Capitalism... I think I want more!" In America (North and South) though the European governments tried to enforce the old way, people learned to escape, and eventually having tasted freedom as it had not been felt by their ancestors for tens of millenia naturally hungered for more.
In the US this rebellious spirit became an important cultural meme, codified by the writings which founded this country and are taught in our schools. This is something that the Elites try to suppress even within the very school system in which these things get taught, but they leak out. Even though during the 1960's researchers who tried to get people on the street to sign a petition which was the Declaration of Indepen
Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly that most artists of any kind are failures if you measure their success in terms of money. In fact some of the most successful artists in the world (in terms of renown and prestiges, etc) died in abject poverty, forgotten. These are simple facts of history, and anyone who cares to get to know an artist will quickly find this out. Even rich artists continually point it out.
I just kind of thought your points on artists not getting paid were a little out of context, and you kept repeating it so it is obvious this point is important to you. I think when we talk about getting money for copyrights we are talking specifically about those rare cases when someone writes the Great American Novel or somesuch. I mean, technically I have a copyright on this post but I don't expect anyone to pay me money for it:P.
I agree to some degree with your copyright suggestions, but it also seemed odd that you were arguing with someone who wanted to reduce the length of copyrights. Clearly they don't propose to reduce them as much as you do, but you are both on the same side, really. I also don't think anyone is suggesting that they should found their sole basis of retirement/supporting their family on the mp3s of their bathtub farts.
One of the problems I have seen is that many artists are not really good at anything else. Some aren't even good at doing the slum-jobs like restaurant work and fast food and such. They may be very good at their chosen field of art, but they are also not likely statistically to see a dime from that. I think a person like that should make their best shot because otherwise they have literally no chance. I think people have less chance of being the world's most successful waiter/dishwasher than being the next big rock phenom or something.
I myself have a varied interest in art, but I quickly learned computers will feed me. As a result, my art fell to the wayside. It probably would never have amounted to much, but then it is certain not to if I never work at it. That is the otehr problem. Good art is hard to do and takes practice. You should probably work on it as much as you would a job at a startup company, if not more. This is hard if you work another job to pay your bills. This is also probably why many early authors had patrons or an inheritence or something.
I hope that you do have success and someday perhaps someone will notice your art. I did not mean to downplay the importance of your message, but there was such a sense of pain and anger in your posts I had to wonder if there was not something more. Now that I know there was, I don't know if I feel better or worse about having mentioned it. Though I might be interested in seeing some of your art...
Well, I thought they took paypal, but it looks like they do not. You can snail mail them money orders and such, though. From their subscription page:
Sign up for a TransGaming subscription at $5 per month, with a minimum three-month payment. Once you have created an account and logged in, you will need to choose your subscription period and make your initial payment. We accept most major credit cards, but at this time we do not accept debit cards or American Express. You can also pay by international certified check or money order for subscriptions of twelve months of more (US Dollars only); we will activate your account as soon as we receive it. If you would like to pay by gift certificate, please send the gift certificate number to support@transgaming.com and we will activate your account.
Please be sure that you have read the Installation FAQ list and other documentation on this site to ensure that your hardware and software meet the minimum system requirements for WineX. Also note that WineX is a work in progress and not all Windows games are supported.
That second part is important, too. One of the biggies is your video card has to be supported fully (with 3d) under Linux. I found out that my built-in radeon on my motherboard will not cut it as ATI has not (yet?) given the right info/drivers for it. Last I checked, NVidia cards were supported up to the latest with drivers (I think) from their site, and ATI drivers are available through Radeon 8500. There are open-source Radeon drivers and the Nvidia drivers are closed source (but regularly updated).
Winex is free as in beer if you are willing/able to compile from CVS. I was not able to do this trivially before, but I may have had other problems which are now more apparent under my current Linux Distro. Subscription gives you the right to vote for games you want and gets you easier-to-install binaries. Source-based distributions actually make it easier to compile from cvs, but they are not for everyone. Another option is to purchase one of the distributions which comes with Winex and a subscription.
My current favorite source based distribution is also supposed to make it easier to install the nvidia drivers, though nvidia's instructions for manually doing this seemed straightforward. I have not tried this yet, but it is looking more and more like that is what I will do to alleviate my 3d problem. I had planned to buy a beefy video card anyway.
I would also encourage you to get involved with LUGS in your area both by meeting with them when they have meetings and by participating in their mailing lists. These are excellent sources of information. You can also email me at rifter0x0000 at yahoo dot com if you want more ideas/advice/etc.
Ultimately we need more Linux resources on the net to help people, and people who use linux need to be a resource. I also think it is important that Linux users settle for nothing less than total functionality, in other words we should be able to use Linux for everything you would want to use a computer for. That is almost true now, with some caveats, but I want to puzzle out and eliminate the caveats. I think anyone who can code or write documentation should work on this goal as well.
I hope that you have good luck in trying linux. If it does not work for you at first, try try again and seek help. I tried many distributions befor eI settled on one I woudl like for my purposes, and then I changed my mind again:). But remmeber Linux == choice and if you don't like something about it, it is likel
This part of the DMCA is very good and very clear. It is unfortunate that it must give such power to plaintiffs; however, due to the penalty of purjury assumed by the plaintiff illegitimate accusations can easily cause a counter-suit and thus the system is balanced.
Unfortunately in the case of the RIAA this perjury clause is not being enforced. They have repeatedly shut down sites that held only original material under the claim that they own the copyright to it. They have repeatedly claimed to own the copyrights to material which is clearly not theirs, and have at least implied if not explicitly said that they own copyrights to all music.
None of these things are true, but the RIAA has been getting away with it. I think someone should use the teeth of the DMCA to bite the RIAA in the ass! Then we would see how they like the DMCA.
Re:SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
Ah but you must obtain tinfoil that contains no backdoors put in by the gnomes of zurich... and there is the rub. Their secret tinfoil monopoly foils all such attempts! You will be assimilated!:)
Re:SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
German courts have already slapped them in the face.
That reminds me.. whatever became of that abermahung (sp?) anyway? Didn't SCO have until last Friday to disclose their findings to the Germans or face their wrath? Sounds like they and the new of the world (and even/.) are ignoring it.
Re:SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
SCO's current Market Cap is about $75 million. If you could get 10,000 people together, each would have to put up at least $7500 to be able to completely buy out SCO. Of course, once you started buying large amounts of SCO stock, the price would start going up so you'll actually need more. Better count on getting at least $10,000 each from 10,000 poeple.
Well, that's down about 25Million from when this story started going crazy on slashdot a couple of weeks ago. Past history not being a gauge of future performance and all that, but hypothetically we could wait another couple of weeks and they will be at 50 million. Then your hypothetical slashdotter would have to contribute $5000, the cost of a RealDoll or original Aibo, to take SCO. Get 100,000 slashdotters together and this becomes $500. (Yes it is unlikely to get 100,000 slashdotters to agree on anything, but that is like 1/6 of the population of/.)
Of course this is not how the business works, anyway. I am not a market analyst/businesscritter/MBA/whatever.. but I am pretty sure based on avid cnn watching that whereas market capitalization and suchlike weigh in on determination of price, all prices are negotiated and based on many otehr factors as well. Then the FTC gets to weigh in and make sure that this is not a case of Microsoft buying Intuit or something.
I am not sure that even if we could get the money together SCO would sell to the LInux Community. Some of the players involved have (I think) been involved in this dance before, which has been enabled by the UNIX-being-a-deadly-IP-beachball problem. It should not have been corporate IP in the first place. It was designed in a collaborative project completely off the cuff and covertly by employees of a company that was legally barred from being in the computer business in the first place. It was added to by any number of people who had nothing to do with these corporations whose work was then thrown at them as corporate IP when they tried to use it for other things.
Sadly, I had thought SCO released the old UNIX code that had caused so much trouble into the public domain. No one is really following that part of the story, though. OH well.
Re:Bridgeman vs. Corel - a major victory
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
If you take a screenshot of the clip art is the new image violating the DMCA? After all the watermarking data is not removed form the original picture, it just isn't there in the new picture...
I essentially agree with you here, and I am glad someone brought this up. I would like to make a few points here.
Putting restrictions on the sharing of ideas slows down human progress. It is an artificiality that was introduced in the feudal period of human development and society, it was designed to seperate the "classes" to restrict knowledge and enjoyment and ideas in general from "the royals" and "the commoners". Among all things, the "royals" were known for greed and exploitation. That "owning" the ideas let them enjoy that power, to maintain it, but it stagnated our humaness, and created more problems than it solved. It was...wrong. it was an extension of gluttony and greed. It was abnormal before that time. It's a relatively short time period in our human history that "owning" an idea has been considered normal. We have a term for that part of our history, it was the "dark ages", aptly named.
There are a lot of bad ideas out of the feudal period, and unfortunately a lot of people in the ruling class today wax nostalgic for this period and are trying to bring it back (the Bush family is an example, some people would throw in the Kennedys and some other famous families). The very idea that we can have a ruling class in a democratic republic is a holdover from Roman and Feudal times.
I believe you are right in placing the entry into Western Civilization of the intellectuial property idea within feudal times. This was a time during which only priests and royals were allowed to read, and no one outside of those classes was allowed to have/see books, etc etc. Ideas were suppressed then as they are now, but with much more ease and vehemence. We are lucky we have the internet. However, there is another group which bears study.
The ancient Egyptians were the IP kings. They believed that their technology was magic and should not be shared. They had the predecessor to the aibo in domestic cats, wherein they strictly controlled ownership and tried to prevent leakage not only of the physical cats but of the training techniques, etc. Part of the result of this seems to me to be that modern cats are not trained nearly so well as the Egyptian ones were.
Of course a less innocuous problem, besides other Egyptian techniques being lost (like embalming, medicine, and hieroglyphics), at times even to Egyptians and in some cases "forever" (or until someone turns up a papyrus that has not been turned into sandals by Bedouins) is the fact that the few times the Egyptians were conquered by outside forces, it seems to have been because their technology stagnated and others got better toys. They were lucky their empire continued in some form nevertheless, though it did ultimately crumble. Had they shared technology they might have been better off and the world would definitely be better off today. Maybe they could have traded some medicinal techniques for some iron techniques, for example.
I am not an egyptologist, and I am going from memory, so some of my historical points may be off, though I would imagine some kind (or not:) ) slashdotter will correct me in such cases...)
Our technology is such now, in extremely recent times, that copies of ideas are practically free,effortless, and the sharing far and wide just as easy. It is THE closest thing to a "replicator" we have. This is an amazing time. Would anyone really complain about a material object replicator? I doubt it, if everyone got to use one. It would be so fantastic the inventor would be feted across the planet. So, this complaining by the royal feudal idea owners about our only true replicator is a demand to stay stuck in that sort of archaic feudalism, the dark ages, the age of incredible greed, and incredible want.. That's all it is once you strip away the rhetoric.
I have no doubt that if someone did make a replicator it would be suppressed and declared illegal. Even if a company got hold of them and marketed them somehow there
Most people in the US have internet access. In fact they all do if they care to visit a local library or school.
In many parts of the world, electricity, water and sewage are a big challenge and people do not have food, much less a computer. Nevertheless even many impoverished areas have internet cafes. I used to correspond regularly with people from Africa who were able to go into town and use the cafe. In the Philipines, the Catholic Church is providing internet access through cafes in rural areas where people do not have electricity in their homes.
The biggest barrier to internet access is not poverty, it is totalitarianism. Despots know that they will have trouble when people have a voice. So they prevent any attempt by charitable organizations to change that. In fact I daresay that if these countries had better internet access they would have less poverty.
It has certainly done a lot for India, and at least one cocky Indian on slashdot has claimed his country's economy (of which 60% used to be bribery) is now growing faster than that of the US and has a major tech component. Today even starving children on the streets of India can get on the internet because companies have placed kiosks all over. The smart ones will learn how to use a computer and not starve anymore.
Yes, most people do not have a computer. Probably most cannot access the internet, though I think that will soon change due to publicly accessable portals. As that changes the world will get better. And we were here to see it happen.
Re:Well, what's good for the goose...
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
If they are really infringing on your copyrights, I say go to town. They have to eat their dogfood and take their medicine. Besides, it's not like they really care about content creators.
BTW the reelection rate for US Senators is 98% its a fixed game.
This is because:
1) Established players get to pick who runs and is on a ballot
2) Most elections where two candidates even exist from the two major parties, have a pretty clear choice (though neither are generally particularly palatable).
3) Only Republicans or Democrats get any media attention
However, there is a simple way to fix this. First, grab hold of the media. What? You don't have a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation backing you? Well you have $8.95 to register a domain name with godaddy.com and $4 a month to host a web site, don't you? Now you control the media.
Second, come up with a decent platform. It really can't be hard to beat what they have going every 2-6 years, really.
Now, run like a mother and draw as much attention to yourself as possible. Pull media stunts, post on slashdot, whatever you can do. If you can get enough attention drawn to your site and have a compelling message that is better than the rest of the candidates, maybe you will win!
Now I understand there are still barriers here, but the internet presents the ordinary Joe's first real chance to get in the political ring. And remember, if you get enough potential voters and petition (depending on the state/county/whatever venue you are running in) they have to put you on the ballot.
The main thing is unless we try to take back our country we won't get anywhere. This goes double for any dissatisfied euros reading this post!:P
This isn't just with bears, it's a common case with deer too. Have you ever seen a deer painted bright orange? This means the deer has agressively approached people before trying to get food. It's painted orange because if it happens again then the rangers have to destroy the deer.
I wonder what would happen if you washed the paint off these deer?
On a more serious note, it is sad when wildlife are killed because people are stupid. But I have to wonder, do the rangers *have* to kill them? It's too bad there isn't something else we can do with rogue bears and such, like put them somewhere they are less likely to encounter humans, or at the very least give them to a zoo. I know zoos are bad, too, but are they worse than bullets?
Right now I am mentally picturing someone playing virtual snake in an open field. He is running back and forth, dodging imaginary obstacles and following invisible paths.
And then he steps on a *real* snake because he wasn't watching where he was going! **FATALITY!**
You can move the balloons and whatnot to a new location, and leave a note in the cache at the old location specifying the GPS coordinates of the new location. After a while this makes it harder for a geocacher to eventually find the balloons, because he has to traverse all the nodes. But park rangers love it because if a cache turns out to be in an environmentally sensitive area that is sensitive to foot traffic, insertion and deletion is a very fast process.
BALLOOONS? So *you're* the one! Crimeny!
What's the point of a geocache if you mark it with balloons? If you leave balloons outside then wildlife will definitely choke on it.
But a raccoon can get into just about anything that's not padlocked shut. And even *that* won't stop a bear.
This is true. Of course the rules explicitly prohibit putting food in the containers, so it is less likely. In my experience racoons and bears will do just about anything to get at food, but I am less sure about balloons.
Granted, they are curious creatures, so it woudl depend entirely on their curiousity. I don't think a raccoon can get into an ammo can however.
Slashdot Mirror
Well consider that plane #4, which crashed into a field, had nearly all the passengers on their cell phones simultaneously...
That is the problem with Religion in general. Everyone has their own personal belief and set of definitions, which do not neatly mesh necessarily. I think your first definition of "lack of belief in a deity" is probably closest to the dictionary definition of atheism. Of course the belief that presented more evidence one might believe sounds more like an agnostic, which to me is someone who does not believe they have enough evidence to believe one way or the other.
Of course I don't believe in being dogmatic about things generally, especially things we cannot be certain about. I also don't believe in forcing my beliefs on others, though I am wont to spek of them persuasively and at length...
This whole subject is pretty thorny though.. :)
Which is therefore a religion. Atheism is the belief, in the absense of any scientific evidence either way, that there is no deity just as theism is the belief in a deity under the same circumstances. They are both religions, and both equally irrational viewpoints defended, well, religiously.
In the immortal words of Rush "You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. / If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Or to put it another way, if on a form you are asked to choose your religion and you choose to put "atheist" or "none" or even "not applicable," that is your religious belief.
I find it hard to believe that Public School Teachers have much money for the National Endowment for the Arts, but if they contribute to it, it is their business. The rest of your argument makes very little sense. Perhaps you shoudl clarify what exactly you are talking about and perhaps give some links.
I am actually very interested in hearing more about the groups infiltrating protests and causing problems. I rememeber learning about FBI infiltrating dissident groups as a matter of course. What intrigued me most was a chain of events that surrounded the WTO protests.
IIRC, an artist in New York created a film in which FBI agents in masks created riots on purpose during millenial celebrations in order to justify increasing their power. The FBI had the web site on which this film was shown shut down by fiat, and forced the artist to apologize. However, there were protests around the millenium in which the exact process depicted in the artists' film became reality. The protests were suppressed violently by police, the media claimed there were riots, and martial law was declared in Seattle and LA for awhile.
The main stream media footage was interesting because it only showed police officers destroying property whereas the story was that protestors were destroying property. There were reports from local business people that the protestors were peaceful, welcome, and good for business (patronizing local coffee shops, etc). There were other reports that were not in the mainstream media however, of groups of people with black masks who were in among the protestors creating havoc on purpose. There have been claims these were some kind of government plant, but without more data it is hard to know the truth.
If you know anything about this or have links to data, feel free to let me know.
As for the elites, the problem for them is that no ones power lasts forever. I have heard some wild conspiracy theories but no one has claimed (afaik) that for instance the Ptolomies and Caesars are still stirring up trouble, though they did so for centuries before losing their place in history. The other problem is that their way is dead. It is also death and will be for us if we follow it.
The old paradigm of wars on a whim or for the personal reasons of a select few individuals is dead. It is true that to some degree it still happens, but people will not simply accept it in this package; they have to be given a reaosn which is valid for them. Eventually, I believe, this whole sordid practice will be done away with altogether. It is embarrassing even for the elites, though pulling it off is a way to show power. WWI was probably the last time it happened overtly. The Iraq war came very close, but I think if you ask the soldiers on the ground why they went they would say it was to foster democracy. If that does not happen the elites will have to choose a different face for themselves than Bush.
True democracy and freedom has always been the enemy of anyone who tries to make themselves an elite. Since the US is the most powerful nation in the world, and since power only comes in this country by paying homage to that idea, it is unlikely it will be eradicated swiftly, though it has been eroded with time. I think the only way it could be smothered effectively would be to make the US a subordinate nation to the EU where many of our most cherished freedoms are considered nonessential (true freedom of speech and press, right to bear arms, etc).
The only hope for the human race's survival lies in eliminating the elite from the equation. There must be true democracy which spreads worldwide at first, and then to the stars. I think in the US anyone who runs on a platform of granting true freedom would be at an advantage over every other candidate for office, and would bring record numbers of voters to the polls. I think the elites would have to acknowlege defeat in such a case, and a politician or group thereof successfully using mob rule would be able to eliminate the influence of current elites essentially forever. This is something they understand and woudl not yield to without a fight, but ultimately they cannot win, not only because the numbers are against them and they woudl kill the golden goose, but because if they do win everyone on this planet will die. Their way is death.
In general I agree with you. However websites will not do the job. The Media(I think that the plural is medeorce) will continue to whail thier drums and as H.L. Mankin said "freedom of the press is best when you own the press. Joe sixpack if he thinks of the net at all is probaly too busy playing Fanasty league ball or downloading porn. When I graduated from school in the 50's about 15% of the population could not read above a 5th grade level the figure now is about 20% and getting worse. (ask someone when they last read a book.
You are correct in saying websites alone will not do the job. I am thinking, however, that if you make enough noise the media will not be able to ignore you because of their hunger for ratings. Even though alan keyes was almost completely unreported on during the 1996 election, he was able to get some press when he got arrested for daring to show up to a debate for presidential candidates.
The point is to get enough people to want to see your website, then make sure your message is coherent to everyone. Then hope your message is truly what a majority of people want to hear. If all of these things are true I think you do have a real chance.
I do agree with you it is not easy. However there are already a few who are doing it; in fact I saw a senatorial candidate from Louisiana on /., and recently I was chatting people up on some random instant messenger thingie and ran into a Libertarian candidate from my area. These people have not been elected afaik, but I think they have not pushed it as far as it needs to go.
I also should reiterate my point about public events. You have to go where Joe sixpack is. Maybe that means convincing someone to let you speak at a rock concert. Maybe that means throwing a free rock concert. Maybe that means streaking across the football field in the superbowl halftime show. IBM got a lot out of spraypainting sidewalks, for crying out loud.
If you support digital freedom, maybe you should tell Joe Sixpack you are on his side when he plays fantasy league ball and downloads porn. The people I oppose oppose these things, by the way. They think porn is something to be combatted on all sides (though I think a lot of it is a smokescreen to divert people's attention) and that fantasy league ball violates IP. Tell Joe you will protect his porn and fantasy ball and he might vote for you.
Of course the other thing that needs to happen to get attention is to prove that you are different from other politicians. Bill Clinton got a lot of milage out of pretending to be different, but imagine what would have happened if he was *really different!* Uniqueness is cherished in famous people and leaders even as it is quashed among the masses. The same people who might think men should be beaten up for wearing women's clothing and earrings might cheer like madmen for Dennis Rodman, etc. So be different, prove you are different.
It's not hard to be different from real politicians. First off, tell the truth. If you make/made a mistake, admit the hell out of it. DON'T hide it! Also, if you make a promise, follow through. be honest! Do things that truly benefit everyone in your constituency, rather than a select few. And lastly, be CONSISTENT! The defining mark of the typical politician is that they promise one thing today and do something completely opposite tomorrow. Also, what they vote for today they will vote against tomorrow. They also tend to vote for things not because they believe in them but because they are told to by their party leaders or are trading votes. DON'T DO THAT!
Distinguishing yourself, drawing attention to yourself, and promoting a consistent message trumps everything the rich, corporate-backed politicos might try to do. If enough people who felt this way had the guts to go out and do it, we would never have the problems we face today.
I agree with you, however I have not yet given up hope for the US. There is something about the US, its traditions, its history and culture, that makes it particularly attractive to me. I think it is also the most likely Earth-Nation to achieve true freedom and spread it to the world. Granted we are moving in the oposite direction now.
The main weakness of the Star Chambers and Conspiracies and Elites, etc, is that they still have to pretend to follow the rules. George Bush declared he would be President no matter what before the election started, but he had to make at least a pretense of following the rules so as not to upset everything.
The founding fathers of the US realized and acknowleged that no government rules without the consent of the people, and no rights can be taken away that are not given away. The Elites actually thrive on people like you and I decrying their subversion of the country, because the more people believe they have no rights and the Elites can do as they Will, the more it becomes so.
There are real physical barriers, besides societal barriers, to any ordinary person assuming the power of the Elites. But with sufficient grass-roots support anything can happen. This is why women and minorities can vote now (unless Republicans get away with shenanigans). Then again, look at the shenanighans they get up to. The Republicans could not have gotten away with stationing police in Florida to keep out all minorities and poor. They had to hide it by saying they would only check for drivers' licenses, warrants, insurance, stuff like that. They could not stop all the black people voting, but they made sure police had as comprehensive a list of names of black criminals (even dead ones) as possible and only went by names in stopping people voting.
None of the people who were stopped from voting should have been stopped. It is a throwback to the old days when poll taxes and literacy tests were used to target minorities and keep them from voting. But doing thinsg the way they did clouds the issue, divides the potential opponents of what they do. In essence, they are following the rules of democracy (though not to the letter and certainly not in spirit).
This means, of course, that if opposing political leaders gained broad support and could prove they had large numbers of votes they could not simply be ignored. To ignore something like that would be to give up the game, and it is very important that some semblance of freedom and democracy be kept around to keep people happy. Otherwise they would revolt. They would disobey.
This is another reason why I feel the US is important. In the Middle East and Asia, there are horrible despotic governments which are almost universally hated. However, no one does anything about them, partially because of the way they respond, but also because of the history these people share. Millenia of compliance with the rules, of bowing their heads to sadistic monsters who cared not a whit for anyone have taken their toll. The history of much of the world is exactly that. People who do not even understand the value of Freedom.
There was an old Beer commercial in which Fidel Castro walks into a bar and tries an American beer and gets hooked. He says "Now that I've had a taste of Capitalism... I think I want more!" In America (North and South) though the European governments tried to enforce the old way, people learned to escape, and eventually having tasted freedom as it had not been felt by their ancestors for tens of millenia naturally hungered for more.
In the US this rebellious spirit became an important cultural meme, codified by the writings which founded this country and are taught in our schools. This is something that the Elites try to suppress even within the very school system in which these things get taught, but they leak out. Even though during the 1960's researchers who tried to get people on the street to sign a petition which was the Declaration of Indepen
Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly that most artists of any kind are failures if you measure their success in terms of money. In fact some of the most successful artists in the world (in terms of renown and prestiges, etc) died in abject poverty, forgotten. These are simple facts of history, and anyone who cares to get to know an artist will quickly find this out. Even rich artists continually point it out.
I just kind of thought your points on artists not getting paid were a little out of context, and you kept repeating it so it is obvious this point is important to you. I think when we talk about getting money for copyrights we are talking specifically about those rare cases when someone writes the Great American Novel or somesuch. I mean, technically I have a copyright on this post but I don't expect anyone to pay me money for it :P.
I agree to some degree with your copyright suggestions, but it also seemed odd that you were arguing with someone who wanted to reduce the length of copyrights. Clearly they don't propose to reduce them as much as you do, but you are both on the same side, really. I also don't think anyone is suggesting that they should found their sole basis of retirement/supporting their family on the mp3s of their bathtub farts.
One of the problems I have seen is that many artists are not really good at anything else. Some aren't even good at doing the slum-jobs like restaurant work and fast food and such. They may be very good at their chosen field of art, but they are also not likely statistically to see a dime from that. I think a person like that should make their best shot because otherwise they have literally no chance. I think people have less chance of being the world's most successful waiter/dishwasher than being the next big rock phenom or something.
I myself have a varied interest in art, but I quickly learned computers will feed me. As a result, my art fell to the wayside. It probably would never have amounted to much, but then it is certain not to if I never work at it. That is the otehr problem. Good art is hard to do and takes practice. You should probably work on it as much as you would a job at a startup company, if not more. This is hard if you work another job to pay your bills. This is also probably why many early authors had patrons or an inheritence or something.
I hope that you do have success and someday perhaps someone will notice your art. I did not mean to downplay the importance of your message, but there was such a sense of pain and anger in your posts I had to wonder if there was not something more. Now that I know there was, I don't know if I feel better or worse about having mentioned it. Though I might be interested in seeing some of your art...
Well, I thought they took paypal, but it looks like they do not. You can snail mail them money orders and such, though. From their subscription page:
Sign up for a TransGaming subscription at $5 per month, with a minimum three-month payment. Once you have created an account and logged in, you will need to choose your subscription period and make your initial payment. We accept most major credit cards, but at this time we do not accept debit cards or American Express. You can also pay by international certified check or money order for subscriptions of twelve months of more (US Dollars only); we will activate your account as soon as we receive it. If you would like to pay by gift certificate, please send the gift certificate number to support@transgaming.com and we will activate your account.
Please be sure that you have read the Installation FAQ list and other documentation on this site to ensure that your hardware and software meet the minimum system requirements for WineX. Also note that WineX is a work in progress and not all Windows games are supported.
That second part is important, too. One of the biggies is your video card has to be supported fully (with 3d) under Linux. I found out that my built-in radeon on my motherboard will not cut it as ATI has not (yet?) given the right info/drivers for it. Last I checked, NVidia cards were supported up to the latest with drivers (I think) from their site, and ATI drivers are available through Radeon 8500. There are open-source Radeon drivers and the Nvidia drivers are closed source (but regularly updated).
Winex is free as in beer if you are willing/able to compile from CVS. I was not able to do this trivially before, but I may have had other problems which are now more apparent under my current Linux Distro. Subscription gives you the right to vote for games you want and gets you easier-to-install binaries. Source-based distributions actually make it easier to compile from cvs, but they are not for everyone. Another option is to purchase one of the distributions which comes with Winex and a subscription.
My current favorite source based distribution is also supposed to make it easier to install the nvidia drivers, though nvidia's instructions for manually doing this seemed straightforward. I have not tried this yet, but it is looking more and more like that is what I will do to alleviate my 3d problem. I had planned to buy a beefy video card anyway.
I would also encourage you to get involved with LUGS in your area both by meeting with them when they have meetings and by participating in their mailing lists. These are excellent sources of information. You can also email me at rifter0x0000 at yahoo dot com if you want more ideas/advice/etc.
Ultimately we need more Linux resources on the net to help people, and people who use linux need to be a resource. I also think it is important that Linux users settle for nothing less than total functionality, in other words we should be able to use Linux for everything you would want to use a computer for. That is almost true now, with some caveats, but I want to puzzle out and eliminate the caveats. I think anyone who can code or write documentation should work on this goal as well.
I hope that you have good luck in trying linux. If it does not work for you at first, try try again and seek help. I tried many distributions befor eI settled on one I woudl like for my purposes, and then I changed my mind again :). But remmeber Linux == choice and if you don't like something about it, it is likel
This part of the DMCA is very good and very clear. It is unfortunate that it must give such power to plaintiffs; however, due to the penalty of purjury assumed by the plaintiff illegitimate accusations can easily cause a counter-suit and thus the system is balanced.
Unfortunately in the case of the RIAA this perjury clause is not being enforced. They have repeatedly shut down sites that held only original material under the claim that they own the copyright to it. They have repeatedly claimed to own the copyrights to material which is clearly not theirs, and have at least implied if not explicitly said that they own copyrights to all music.
None of these things are true, but the RIAA has been getting away with it. I think someone should use the teeth of the DMCA to bite the RIAA in the ass! Then we would see how they like the DMCA.
Ah but you must obtain tinfoil that contains no backdoors put in by the gnomes of zurich... and there is the rub. Their secret tinfoil monopoly foils all such attempts! You will be assimilated! :)
German courts have already slapped them in the face.
That reminds me.. whatever became of that abermahung (sp?) anyway? Didn't SCO have until last Friday to disclose their findings to the Germans or face their wrath? Sounds like they and the new of the world (and even /.) are ignoring it.
SCO's current Market Cap is about $75 million. If you could get 10,000 people together, each would have to put up at least $7500 to be able to completely buy out SCO. Of course, once you started buying large amounts of SCO stock, the price would start going up so you'll actually need more. Better count on getting at least $10,000 each from 10,000 poeple.
Well, that's down about 25Million from when this story started going crazy on slashdot a couple of weeks ago. Past history not being a gauge of future performance and all that, but hypothetically we could wait another couple of weeks and they will be at 50 million. Then your hypothetical slashdotter would have to contribute $5000, the cost of a RealDoll or original Aibo, to take SCO. Get 100,000 slashdotters together and this becomes $500. (Yes it is unlikely to get 100,000 slashdotters to agree on anything, but that is like 1/6 of the population of /.)
Of course this is not how the business works, anyway. I am not a market analyst/businesscritter/MBA/whatever.. but I am pretty sure based on avid cnn watching that whereas market capitalization and suchlike weigh in on determination of price, all prices are negotiated and based on many otehr factors as well. Then the FTC gets to weigh in and make sure that this is not a case of Microsoft buying Intuit or something.
I am not sure that even if we could get the money together SCO would sell to the LInux Community. Some of the players involved have (I think) been involved in this dance before, which has been enabled by the UNIX-being-a-deadly-IP-beachball problem. It should not have been corporate IP in the first place. It was designed in a collaborative project completely off the cuff and covertly by employees of a company that was legally barred from being in the computer business in the first place. It was added to by any number of people who had nothing to do with these corporations whose work was then thrown at them as corporate IP when they tried to use it for other things.
Sadly, I had thought SCO released the old UNIX code that had caused so much trouble into the public domain. No one is really following that part of the story, though. OH well.
If you take a screenshot of the clip art is the new image violating the DMCA? After all the watermarking data is not removed form the original picture, it just isn't there in the new picture...
I essentially agree with you here, and I am glad someone brought this up. I would like to make a few points here.
Putting restrictions on the sharing of ideas slows down human progress. It is an artificiality that was introduced in the feudal period of human development and society, it was designed to seperate the "classes" to restrict knowledge and enjoyment and ideas in general from "the royals" and "the commoners". Among all things, the "royals" were known for greed and exploitation. That "owning" the ideas let them enjoy that power, to maintain it, but it stagnated our humaness, and created more problems than it solved. It was...wrong. it was an extension of gluttony and greed. It was abnormal before that time. It's a relatively short time period in our human history that "owning" an idea has been considered normal. We have a term for that part of our history, it was the "dark ages", aptly named.
There are a lot of bad ideas out of the feudal period, and unfortunately a lot of people in the ruling class today wax nostalgic for this period and are trying to bring it back (the Bush family is an example, some people would throw in the Kennedys and some other famous families). The very idea that we can have a ruling class in a democratic republic is a holdover from Roman and Feudal times.
I believe you are right in placing the entry into Western Civilization of the intellectuial property idea within feudal times. This was a time during which only priests and royals were allowed to read, and no one outside of those classes was allowed to have/see books, etc etc. Ideas were suppressed then as they are now, but with much more ease and vehemence. We are lucky we have the internet. However, there is another group which bears study.
The ancient Egyptians were the IP kings. They believed that their technology was magic and should not be shared. They had the predecessor to the aibo in domestic cats, wherein they strictly controlled ownership and tried to prevent leakage not only of the physical cats but of the training techniques, etc. Part of the result of this seems to me to be that modern cats are not trained nearly so well as the Egyptian ones were.
Of course a less innocuous problem, besides other Egyptian techniques being lost (like embalming, medicine, and hieroglyphics), at times even to Egyptians and in some cases "forever" (or until someone turns up a papyrus that has not been turned into sandals by Bedouins) is the fact that the few times the Egyptians were conquered by outside forces, it seems to have been because their technology stagnated and others got better toys. They were lucky their empire continued in some form nevertheless, though it did ultimately crumble. Had they shared technology they might have been better off and the world would definitely be better off today. Maybe they could have traded some medicinal techniques for some iron techniques, for example.
I am not an egyptologist, and I am going from memory, so some of my historical points may be off, though I would imagine some kind (or not :) ) slashdotter will correct me in such cases...)
Our technology is such now, in extremely recent times, that copies of ideas are practically free,effortless, and the sharing far and wide just as easy. It is THE closest thing to a "replicator" we have. This is an amazing time. Would anyone really complain about a material object replicator? I doubt it, if everyone got to use one. It would be so fantastic the inventor would be feted across the planet. So, this complaining by the royal feudal idea owners about our only true replicator is a demand to stay stuck in that sort of archaic feudalism, the dark ages, the age of incredible greed, and incredible want.. That's all it is once you strip away the rhetoric.
I have no doubt that if someone did make a replicator it would be suppressed and declared illegal. Even if a company got hold of them and marketed them somehow there
most people do not agree with copywrong and the nonsensical notion of "intellectual property"
Kazaa/morpheus, et al. :)
Too bad you could not give us a link or a name.. that sounds like a funny cartoon! :)
Most people in the US have internet access. In fact they all do if they care to visit a local library or school.
In many parts of the world, electricity, water and sewage are a big challenge and people do not have food, much less a computer. Nevertheless even many impoverished areas have internet cafes. I used to correspond regularly with people from Africa who were able to go into town and use the cafe. In the Philipines, the Catholic Church is providing internet access through cafes in rural areas where people do not have electricity in their homes.
The biggest barrier to internet access is not poverty, it is totalitarianism. Despots know that they will have trouble when people have a voice. So they prevent any attempt by charitable organizations to change that. In fact I daresay that if these countries had better internet access they would have less poverty.
It has certainly done a lot for India, and at least one cocky Indian on slashdot has claimed his country's economy (of which 60% used to be bribery) is now growing faster than that of the US and has a major tech component. Today even starving children on the streets of India can get on the internet because companies have placed kiosks all over. The smart ones will learn how to use a computer and not starve anymore.
Yes, most people do not have a computer. Probably most cannot access the internet, though I think that will soon change due to publicly accessable portals. As that changes the world will get better. And we were here to see it happen.
If they are really infringing on your copyrights, I say go to town. They have to eat their dogfood and take their medicine. Besides, it's not like they really care about content creators.
BTW the reelection rate for US Senators is 98% its a fixed game.
This is because:
1) Established players get to pick who runs and is on a ballot
2) Most elections where two candidates even exist from the two major parties, have a pretty clear choice (though neither are generally particularly palatable).
3) Only Republicans or Democrats get any media attention
However, there is a simple way to fix this. First, grab hold of the media. What? You don't have a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation backing you? Well you have $8.95 to register a domain name with godaddy.com and $4 a month to host a web site, don't you? Now you control the media.
Second, come up with a decent platform. It really can't be hard to beat what they have going every 2-6 years, really.
Now, run like a mother and draw as much attention to yourself as possible. Pull media stunts, post on slashdot, whatever you can do. If you can get enough attention drawn to your site and have a compelling message that is better than the rest of the candidates, maybe you will win!
Now I understand there are still barriers here, but the internet presents the ordinary Joe's first real chance to get in the political ring. And remember, if you get enough potential voters and petition (depending on the state/county/whatever venue you are running in) they have to put you on the ballot.
The main thing is unless we try to take back our country we won't get anywhere. This goes double for any dissatisfied euros reading this post! :P
Did your book just get rejected by the publisher or something? Just curious...
This isn't just with bears, it's a common case with deer too. Have you ever seen a deer painted bright orange? This means the deer has agressively approached people before trying to get food. It's painted orange because if it happens again then the rangers have to destroy the deer.
I wonder what would happen if you washed the paint off these deer?
On a more serious note, it is sad when wildlife are killed because people are stupid. But I have to wonder, do the rangers *have* to kill them? It's too bad there isn't something else we can do with rogue bears and such, like put them somewhere they are less likely to encounter humans, or at the very least give them to a zoo. I know zoos are bad, too, but are they worse than bullets?
Right now I am mentally picturing someone playing virtual snake in an open field. He is running back and forth, dodging imaginary obstacles and following invisible paths.
And then he steps on a *real* snake because he wasn't watching where he was going! **FATALITY!**
You can move the balloons and whatnot to a new location, and leave a note in the cache at the old location specifying the GPS coordinates of the new location. After a while this makes it harder for a geocacher to eventually find the balloons, because he has to traverse all the nodes. But park rangers love it because if a cache turns out to be in an environmentally sensitive area that is sensitive to foot traffic, insertion and deletion is a very fast process.
BALLOOONS? So *you're* the one! Crimeny!
What's the point of a geocache if you mark it with balloons? If you leave balloons outside then wildlife will definitely choke on it.
But a raccoon can get into just about anything that's not padlocked shut. And even *that* won't stop a bear.
This is true. Of course the rules explicitly prohibit putting food in the containers, so it is less likely. In my experience racoons and bears will do just about anything to get at food, but I am less sure about balloons.
Granted, they are curious creatures, so it woudl depend entirely on their curiousity. I don't think a raccoon can get into an ammo can however.