Besides, a lot of U.S. TV shows are produced there. Including an unlikely number of SF shows:
I feel compelled to point out here that the X-Files didn't begin to suck until after they moved production from Canada to California...
(To be fair, the first season in california was actally really good. The Sucking did not begin until the *second* California-filmed season. But we can chalk this up to inertia. Canadian inertia.)
Trying to save a TV show that even its defenders rarely describe in terms nicer than "it wasn't THAT bad", and whose plot is going to be wrapped up at the end of the season whatever you do.
While you've got all this excitement and energy and potential funding, why not direct it into more potentially productive efforts-- like, trying to get Paramount or some other production company to put together a new, GOOD show? (Preferably maybe even one Rick Berman is not associated with!)
There were rumors about William Shatner trying to go over Berman's head and pitch a series set at StarFleet; I think that would be pretty damn cool. Heck, there's a lot of potentially cool ideas within the Star Trek universe, continuity-error-ridden as it is, you could set a show around. You don't necessarily need Enterprise. And even without Star Trek (though I realize that's what the people pushing for enterprise to continue really want) I'm sure there's no shortage of directors, actors etc who would jump at the chance to do a sci fi tv show, if only some people could talk some studio into greenlighting it.
Television is allegedly a passive medium. Yet for once, for this moment, you've got a huge number of television viewers to stand up and decide that they want to participate. I think that has the potential to be pretty cool, if that were directed toward some productive end. But that potential is currently being wasted on lost causes.
You can't buy lawfully made copies of new release movies on Betamax; who's to say DVD Video won't wither as well?
I'd say HD-DVD's much more likely to go the way of the Betamax. DVDs right now have enormous inertia, an installed base, and a wide variety of currently available titles. HD-DVD has none of these yet, and looks like it's about to get into a confusing and painful format war with Blu-Ray, under which circumstances many consumers may choose to stick with their (still working) DVDs.
And after New Year's Day 2007, a "normal TV" will no longer receive terrestrial broadcast signals without an expensive set-top box.
Utter bunk. That was originally supposed to have happened years ago. The FCC keeps having to push the deadline back because nobody wants HDTVs and no one's buying them. I see little reason to believe they really mean it this time either. Anyway, my TV doesn't receive terrestrial broadcast signals already, seemingly thanks to my apartment's position in relation to a large hill. It is a monitor for my DVD player and Gamecube.
They don't care about piracy. This isn't, and never has been, about piracy.
What they care about is control.
They care about linux distributions adding support to play HD-DVD movies, but not paying license fees to the DVD forum.
They care about HD-DVD players cropping up that allow you to fast-forward past the trailers at the beginning of the movie, the ones where a licensed player, when you say "fast forward", says "no".
They care about people making players behind their back which openly flaunt the "region locking" mechanisms that make regional price discrimination possible.
They care about products like DVDXCopy which allow consumers to exercise their fair use rights and do God knows what with the products they purchase.
These are the things they're trying to stop or hinder. Their choice of technology simply reflects that. AACS will do little in the short run and nothing in the long run to prevent piracy. But the legal barriers the media companies paid to erect will allow AACS to keep all four of the above things off of the general commercial market.
That is to say, DVD player models that get cracked, in theory they're supposed to stop using those keys in future DVDs. Just like they're describing with AACS.
It's just that it didn't make a difference because a flaw was found in the way the CSS keys worked (or something like that) which meant that once you found a single key, you could brute force all the others really quickly. So the original DeCSS people found a single key, then broke about 100 more... which meant that none ever really got revoked since they'd have to revoke all of them to make any difference.
The other thing I'm wondering. This won't make much difference if the market winds up going with Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD. Given the people involved, of course, I can't imagine the bluray "protection" will be too much nicer, I'm just curious. I'm sticking with my normal TV and DVD player anyway.
That said, spam doesn't obey jurisdictional boundaries. Any single country can only solve a small part of the problem, and any spam incident often involves over 3 jusrisdictions that may be in separate countries (sender, spambot, recipient, etc). That's a logistical nightmare that isn't soluble outside of a dream world.
The convenient thing here is that jurisdictional boundaries are often accompanied by physical boundaries, such as the atlantic ocean. There is a known number of internet links into the United States. If we can use legislative means to ensure that spam originates outside the U.S., that has the potential to make technical solutions to the spam problem vastly easier.
Spam is not a technological problem. It is a commercial problem taking advantage of imperfection in technology. You probably can't solve the spam problem through purely technical means, since supply and demand-- the thing that's actually driving spam-- has shown itself adept at surmounting technical barriers. You can, however, if you target spam's commercial nature, make relatively sure at least that at no point does their cashflow come from within the U.S..
Right now spam is usually filtered using a brownian model. As a result, spammers have begun structuring their emails so as to target brownian models. How many spams have you gotten lately with the subject line ending in confiscate ok wallop yls oblivion?
If we move to filtering spam using markov models, spammers will begin structuring their emails so as to target markov models. Look forward to all your spams ending in 500-word blocks of text from a copy of MegaHAL trained on old grandmothers' email boxes.
Re:Mindshare and image bloodbath for BitKeeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 2
I don't care what they're tired of, if a software vendor is very plausible to at some point become suspicious of me (or decide they don't like something that an organization I'm affiliated with is developing) and suddenly start refusing to sell me their products, that isn't a piece of software I would feel comfortable becoming dependent on.
BK doesn't want me using their products in certain ways? Well, I don't want to be paying money for a product from a company who maintains such a massive degree of interest in dictating what I do with it. More to the point I would expect people for whom the day to day functioning of their versioning system is business critical might be less than interested in buying products from a company that may at any time choose to cut off support because they're "tired" of something you're doing.
Re:Slashback? Some info on Bit Keeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Perhaps it would be helpful if you would read the Wikipedia article on Bitkeeper, which explains what Bitkeeper is, why it is relevant to the linux kernel, and why its relevance to the linux kernel might be controversial enough to make it a slashdot news item.
Maybe the slashdot eds should start [?]-linking Wikipedia articles in story blurbs the way they used to with Everything2...
This is a visualization technology, and not actually connected to the idea of moving around literal molecules. That is to say, the technology on display here allows you to move around molecules in a computer model, but those molecules are computer constructs and don't actually exist.
If someday we find a way to manipulate single molecules with such precision that we can mechanically and specifically control their movement freely, then we could of course use a technology such as this one to specify those movements. However such manipulation of molecules is the "hard part" of nanotechnology and not likely to happen any time soon. When nanotechnology becomes feasible it seems most likely that for a very long time we will be stuck with using assembly methods which are much more indirect.
The technology is however it seems immensely useful to people, such as biologists, who wish to understand and visualize how molecules, once constructed by whatever means, will interact with each other in a theoretical model.
The next big wave, I think, will be once having abolished content by replacing it with aggregators, we begin to move from there into the creation of content through the aggregation of aggregators.
As an anology, this can work in the same way that lambda-calculus and set theory may be used to provide a basis for the integers. We may define the null aggregator, which contains no sites, as "one" and an aggregator which aggregates the "one" aggregator as "successor to one". From this point we are in a position to define the basic arithmetic operators in terms of RSS operations on aggregators.
Taking our lead from this concept we may define more complex data structures which themselves represent content. For a practical example we may imagine a rooted tree of aggregators, aggregating the aggregators beneath them, which when taken as a whole encode an XML document.
I think "content", once we find ways to represent and create it, will represent a major innovation the evolution of the internet.
One could argue that if a proof ever contains repetitive elements, then this is a bad thing and you want to be adding some sort of abstraction to the proof anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn't the ability for the computer to perform flawlessly, the problem is in our ability to accurately specify to the computer what we want it to do. It's the whole "fast working idiot" thing, mechanical perfection isn't much good if we wind up just directing the computer to perfectly, flawlessly do the wrong thing very quickly. We have enough trouble convincing ourselves real-world software is going to do what we wanted it to after it compiles; and in that case we at least have the advantage we can run it and test it to see if it does what we expect. With software-generated proofs, not so much, since the program IS the test.
I think computer aided logic can be useful if we just think of a proof-generating software program as a funny, mechanically verifiable sort of abstraction, but you find yourself making an argument that rests on assuming that a computer program you wrote does what you think it does then this is problematic.
IE, a European country suddenly is doing "too well" in the US, so they just nationalized?
The idea is more than Microsoft is breaking the law and refusing to comply with legal judgments against them.
This has nothing to do with "success". Many companies are perfectly capable of becoming and staying successful without breaking the law.
If the people who own stock in Microsoft don't want to have to deal with the repercussions of the EU taking action against Microsoft, they should direct the Microsoft board to comply with the law in countries where they do business.
Europeans love to talk tough about how their software industry is just going to _pulverize_ the US's, but if everyone just keeps ignoring the other guy's copright, there won't be much industry left.
A more important question in my eyes is, if the European software industry knows for a fact that they will be held to the laws of the E.U., but American companies selling in the E.U. will not, how much will that help them?
MS would threaten it, maybe stop selling Windows in Europe for a few weeks, then both sides would panic and split the difference.
Another possibility is that MS could stop selling Windows in Europe and Europe could respond by nationalizing the copyright on all Microsoft, Inc properties and releasing them into the public domain. Meaning they wouldn't need Microsoft to sell windows. Hey, look at that trade surplus with the U.S. abruptly swell.
Might be a bit difficult to pull off technically, but at some point the EU is going to do something if it wants to be considered a group of sovereign countries with their own laws, as opposed to just a funny kind of U.S. territory to which the constitutional protections on human rights don't apply. Cave on this and they'll be walked all over for the rest of their existence.
Yes, but this ordinance isn't particularly what concerns me, since I don't live in the CIty of San Francisco now and will very probably not in future either. (The situation there as regards housing costs and transportation is just not nice.)
What concerns me is that these kinds of laws are showing up a lot, and I don't know what the ones that might appear in future, or in places where I do live, might mean or say.
Don't accept money from a political party/candidate for your blog
Well I'm certainly not planning on soliciting money from political parties or candidates for my website. And in the unlikely scenario some candidate's political campaign came to me and said "hi, I'm with such and such campaign, we want to help sponsor your website", I would say "thanks, but I must decline as that would create a conflict of interest".
But what worries me is, if I just have one single "donate here" button on the front of the website, and I'm getting my money from what appear to me to just be paypal accounts, how do I determine exactly where that money is coming from? Is it my responsibility to find out? Is it my responsibility legally if I fail to find out? Since we now have this idea floating around that money from certain kinds of sources, or accepted for certain kinds of purposes, is Bad, it seems the only options I have in order to avoid accidental violation of some hypothetical future law is to either decline to accept general donations at all when operating a political speech website, or scrupulously follow the passage and letter of new campaign finance laws to ensure I'm not doing anything in my funding or speech that might qualify as campaign finance ungood. Well, I'm certainly not willing to do the latter.
I'm sure that's what the textbook or dictionary or whatnot says those words mean. I'm sure that's how you explain those words to your class. I'm even sure there must be somewhere mediums for formal debate where those words hold those meanings and are possibly even useful for expression.
Unfortunately, outside of a classroom or maybe a handful of political journals, language is defined by use, not authority. Which means academia isn't the one who gets to decide what "liberal" and "conservative" mean. The television is the one who gets to decide.
And unfortunately what the television says right now is that "left" means "liberal", "right" means "conservative", and that both of these words simultaneously hold so many different contradictory meanings that they cease to have any meaningful definition whatsoever.
there's a difference between actively, with government help, SILENCEING people who say things against a political correctness, and simply not liking them.
There certainly is. And the so-called "left" doesn't tend any more or less toward this than the so-called "right". Certain groups have at different times over the last sixty years been more likely to go with the latter thing you mention than the former. This hasn't had to do with where they lie on the supposed political spectrum. It has to do with who, at that moment in time, has held enough power to be able to abuse it.
However if you think political correctness, or wielding the government like a club to enforce political correctness, is something the "left" does and the "right" doesn't, this is just because you're a libertarian delusionally trying to convince yourself that the Republican party in some way speaks for you. It isn't backed by what happens in reality.
Respect for personal freedoms has nothing whatsoever to do with who you support in the class struggle, or what percentage of what Rush Limbaugh says you disagree with.
Oh, by the way, insofar as your seeming David Koresh reference there goes, it should probably be noted that hoarding unregistered weapons and shooting FBI agents are usually not considered constitutionally protected forms of expression.
I guess I might as well make an attempt to make a comment like this near the top of the discussion, since the discussion below seems already to be devolving into "you're a liberal" "omfg no YOU'RE a liberal" high-school clique bickering.
There is no such thing as a "liberal"
There is no such thing as a "conservative"
Anyone who uses either of these words-- ever-- is just trying to set up some kind of straw man argument
If someone tries to use these words on you, don't try to argue with them, don't let them troll you, just ignore them and walk away.
So now the government has the right to regulate speech so long as the person performing that speech receives some sort of monetary restitution for this?
Perhaps there are better ways to create fair campaign finance regulations than this.
As for me, I'm frankly unsure to what extent I can prevent this from affecting me. I will probably be creating a politics-related website within the near future which will eventually explicitly cover elections and such, but I am starting to fear I will be unable to run it off of a donation model since apparently if the wrong person clicks that paypal "support this site" link I suddenly mutate from being a free citizen exercising my right to operate a free private press into... well, something else. I wonder, is it possible to be infected with the you're-a-PAC-now virus if your hosting-bill funding comes from selling t-shirts?
I was just pointing out that the only reason Apple's aac's play on other platforms is that it's not their technology - they'd lock us out in a heartbeat if it was.
Well, Apple owns and owns licenses to quite a few technologies which are alternately proprietary and "theirs", at least one of which the iPod supports. Maybe there's a reason when they selected an audio distribution format they chose to go with an open standard that isn't theirs instead of one of the closed ones that they own?
Slashdot Mirror
OK.. why on earth am I at score:4 and this is at score:2? It answers the question...
... okay maybe I guess that isn't the wisest thing to be saying, but still.
Crackhead moderators, moderating me up...
...what?
Besides, a lot of U.S. TV shows are produced there. Including an unlikely number of SF shows:
I feel compelled to point out here that the X-Files didn't begin to suck until after they moved production from Canada to California...
(To be fair, the first season in california was actally really good. The Sucking did not begin until the *second* California-filmed season. But we can chalk this up to inertia. Canadian inertia.)
So you've got this money.
And you've got all this energy.
And what are you doing with it?
Trying to save a TV show that even its defenders rarely describe in terms nicer than "it wasn't THAT bad", and whose plot is going to be wrapped up at the end of the season whatever you do.
While you've got all this excitement and energy and potential funding, why not direct it into more potentially productive efforts-- like, trying to get Paramount or some other production company to put together a new, GOOD show? (Preferably maybe even one Rick Berman is not associated with!)
There were rumors about William Shatner trying to go over Berman's head and pitch a series set at StarFleet; I think that would be pretty damn cool. Heck, there's a lot of potentially cool ideas within the Star Trek universe, continuity-error-ridden as it is, you could set a show around. You don't necessarily need Enterprise. And even without Star Trek (though I realize that's what the people pushing for enterprise to continue really want) I'm sure there's no shortage of directors, actors etc who would jump at the chance to do a sci fi tv show, if only some people could talk some studio into greenlighting it.
Television is allegedly a passive medium. Yet for once, for this moment, you've got a huge number of television viewers to stand up and decide that they want to participate. I think that has the potential to be pretty cool, if that were directed toward some productive end. But that potential is currently being wasted on lost causes.
You can't buy lawfully made copies of new release movies on Betamax; who's to say DVD Video won't wither as well?
I'd say HD-DVD's much more likely to go the way of the Betamax. DVDs right now have enormous inertia, an installed base, and a wide variety of currently available titles. HD-DVD has none of these yet, and looks like it's about to get into a confusing and painful format war with Blu-Ray, under which circumstances many consumers may choose to stick with their (still working) DVDs.
And after New Year's Day 2007, a "normal TV" will no longer receive terrestrial broadcast signals without an expensive set-top box.
Utter bunk. That was originally supposed to have happened years ago. The FCC keeps having to push the deadline back because nobody wants HDTVs and no one's buying them. I see little reason to believe they really mean it this time either. Anyway, my TV doesn't receive terrestrial broadcast signals already, seemingly thanks to my apartment's position in relation to a large hill. It is a monitor for my DVD player and Gamecube.
They don't care about piracy. This isn't, and never has been, about piracy.
What they care about is control.
They care about linux distributions adding support to play HD-DVD movies, but not paying license fees to the DVD forum.
They care about HD-DVD players cropping up that allow you to fast-forward past the trailers at the beginning of the movie, the ones where a licensed player, when you say "fast forward", says "no".
They care about people making players behind their back which openly flaunt the "region locking" mechanisms that make regional price discrimination possible.
They care about products like DVDXCopy which allow consumers to exercise their fair use rights and do God knows what with the products they purchase.
These are the things they're trying to stop or hinder. Their choice of technology simply reflects that. AACS will do little in the short run and nothing in the long run to prevent piracy. But the legal barriers the media companies paid to erect will allow AACS to keep all four of the above things off of the general commercial market.
That is to say, DVD player models that get cracked, in theory they're supposed to stop using those keys in future DVDs. Just like they're describing with AACS.
It's just that it didn't make a difference because a flaw was found in the way the CSS keys worked (or something like that) which meant that once you found a single key, you could brute force all the others really quickly. So the original DeCSS people found a single key, then broke about 100 more... which meant that none ever really got revoked since they'd have to revoke all of them to make any difference.
The other thing I'm wondering. This won't make much difference if the market winds up going with Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD. Given the people involved, of course, I can't imagine the bluray "protection" will be too much nicer, I'm just curious. I'm sticking with my normal TV and DVD player anyway.
That said, spam doesn't obey jurisdictional boundaries. Any single country can only solve a small part of the problem, and any spam incident often involves over 3 jusrisdictions that may be in separate countries (sender, spambot, recipient, etc). That's a logistical nightmare that isn't soluble outside of a dream world.
The convenient thing here is that jurisdictional boundaries are often accompanied by physical boundaries, such as the atlantic ocean. There is a known number of internet links into the United States. If we can use legislative means to ensure that spam originates outside the U.S., that has the potential to make technical solutions to the spam problem vastly easier.
Spam is not a technological problem. It is a commercial problem taking advantage of imperfection in technology. You probably can't solve the spam problem through purely technical means, since supply and demand-- the thing that's actually driving spam-- has shown itself adept at surmounting technical barriers. You can, however, if you target spam's commercial nature, make relatively sure at least that at no point does their cashflow come from within the U.S..
Right now spam is usually filtered using a brownian model. As a result, spammers have begun structuring their emails so as to target brownian models. How many spams have you gotten lately with the subject line ending in confiscate ok wallop yls oblivion?
If we move to filtering spam using markov models, spammers will begin structuring their emails so as to target markov models. Look forward to all your spams ending in 500-word blocks of text from a copy of MegaHAL trained on old grandmothers' email boxes.
I don't care what they're tired of, if a software vendor is very plausible to at some point become suspicious of me (or decide they don't like something that an organization I'm affiliated with is developing) and suddenly start refusing to sell me their products, that isn't a piece of software I would feel comfortable becoming dependent on.
BK doesn't want me using their products in certain ways? Well, I don't want to be paying money for a product from a company who maintains such a massive degree of interest in dictating what I do with it. More to the point I would expect people for whom the day to day functioning of their versioning system is business critical might be less than interested in buying products from a company that may at any time choose to cut off support because they're "tired" of something you're doing.
Perhaps it would be helpful if you would read the Wikipedia article on Bitkeeper, which explains what Bitkeeper is, why it is relevant to the linux kernel, and why its relevance to the linux kernel might be controversial enough to make it a slashdot news item.
Maybe the slashdot eds should start [?]-linking Wikipedia articles in story blurbs the way they used to with Everything2...
This is a visualization technology, and not actually connected to the idea of moving around literal molecules. That is to say, the technology on display here allows you to move around molecules in a computer model, but those molecules are computer constructs and don't actually exist.
If someday we find a way to manipulate single molecules with such precision that we can mechanically and specifically control their movement freely, then we could of course use a technology such as this one to specify those movements. However such manipulation of molecules is the "hard part" of nanotechnology and not likely to happen any time soon. When nanotechnology becomes feasible it seems most likely that for a very long time we will be stuck with using assembly methods which are much more indirect.
The technology is however it seems immensely useful to people, such as biologists, who wish to understand and visualize how molecules, once constructed by whatever means, will interact with each other in a theoretical model.
The next big wave, I think, will be once having abolished content by replacing it with aggregators, we begin to move from there into the creation of content through the aggregation of aggregators.
As an anology, this can work in the same way that lambda-calculus and set theory may be used to provide a basis for the integers. We may define the null aggregator, which contains no sites, as "one" and an aggregator which aggregates the "one" aggregator as "successor to one". From this point we are in a position to define the basic arithmetic operators in terms of RSS operations on aggregators.
Taking our lead from this concept we may define more complex data structures which themselves represent content. For a practical example we may imagine a rooted tree of aggregators, aggregating the aggregators beneath them, which when taken as a whole encode an XML document.
I think "content", once we find ways to represent and create it, will represent a major innovation the evolution of the internet.
One could argue that if a proof ever contains repetitive elements, then this is a bad thing and you want to be adding some sort of abstraction to the proof anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn't the ability for the computer to perform flawlessly, the problem is in our ability to accurately specify to the computer what we want it to do. It's the whole "fast working idiot" thing, mechanical perfection isn't much good if we wind up just directing the computer to perfectly, flawlessly do the wrong thing very quickly. We have enough trouble convincing ourselves real-world software is going to do what we wanted it to after it compiles; and in that case we at least have the advantage we can run it and test it to see if it does what we expect. With software-generated proofs, not so much, since the program IS the test.
I think computer aided logic can be useful if we just think of a proof-generating software program as a funny, mechanically verifiable sort of abstraction, but you find yourself making an argument that rests on assuming that a computer program you wrote does what you think it does then this is problematic.
IE, a European country suddenly is doing "too well" in the US, so they just nationalized?
The idea is more than Microsoft is breaking the law and refusing to comply with legal judgments against them.
This has nothing to do with "success". Many companies are perfectly capable of becoming and staying successful without breaking the law.
If the people who own stock in Microsoft don't want to have to deal with the repercussions of the EU taking action against Microsoft, they should direct the Microsoft board to comply with the law in countries where they do business.
Europeans love to talk tough about how their software industry is just going to _pulverize_ the US's, but if everyone just keeps ignoring the other guy's copright, there won't be much industry left.
A more important question in my eyes is, if the European software industry knows for a fact that they will be held to the laws of the E.U., but American companies selling in the E.U. will not, how much will that help them?
but as the NSW government gets more reliant on the company, the more one can expect the code to become proprietry.
This is the entire reason the GPL has become so popular in the first place. It ensures you always have [i]some[/i] escape from such a situation.
MS would threaten it, maybe stop selling Windows in Europe for a few weeks, then both sides would panic and split the difference.
Another possibility is that MS could stop selling Windows in Europe and Europe could respond by nationalizing the copyright on all Microsoft, Inc properties and releasing them into the public domain. Meaning they wouldn't need Microsoft to sell windows. Hey, look at that trade surplus with the U.S. abruptly swell.
Might be a bit difficult to pull off technically, but at some point the EU is going to do something if it wants to be considered a group of sovereign countries with their own laws, as opposed to just a funny kind of U.S. territory to which the constitutional protections on human rights don't apply. Cave on this and they'll be walked all over for the rest of their existence.
Did you read the ordinance?
Yes, but this ordinance isn't particularly what concerns me, since I don't live in the CIty of San Francisco now and will very probably not in future either. (The situation there as regards housing costs and transportation is just not nice.)
What concerns me is that these kinds of laws are showing up a lot, and I don't know what the ones that might appear in future, or in places where I do live, might mean or say.
Don't accept money from a political party/candidate for your blog
Well I'm certainly not planning on soliciting money from political parties or candidates for my website. And in the unlikely scenario some candidate's political campaign came to me and said "hi, I'm with such and such campaign, we want to help sponsor your website", I would say "thanks, but I must decline as that would create a conflict of interest".
But what worries me is, if I just have one single "donate here" button on the front of the website, and I'm getting my money from what appear to me to just be paypal accounts, how do I determine exactly where that money is coming from? Is it my responsibility to find out? Is it my responsibility legally if I fail to find out? Since we now have this idea floating around that money from certain kinds of sources, or accepted for certain kinds of purposes, is Bad, it seems the only options I have in order to avoid accidental violation of some hypothetical future law is to either decline to accept general donations at all when operating a political speech website, or scrupulously follow the passage and letter of new campaign finance laws to ensure I'm not doing anything in my funding or speech that might qualify as campaign finance ungood. Well, I'm certainly not willing to do the latter.
I'm sure that's what the textbook or dictionary or whatnot says those words mean. I'm sure that's how you explain those words to your class. I'm even sure there must be somewhere mediums for formal debate where those words hold those meanings and are possibly even useful for expression.
Unfortunately, outside of a classroom or maybe a handful of political journals, language is defined by use, not authority. Which means academia isn't the one who gets to decide what "liberal" and "conservative" mean. The television is the one who gets to decide.
And unfortunately what the television says right now is that "left" means "liberal", "right" means "conservative", and that both of these words simultaneously hold so many different contradictory meanings that they cease to have any meaningful definition whatsoever.
At least insofar as slashdot discussions go.
there's a difference between actively, with government help, SILENCEING people who say things against a political correctness, and simply not liking them.
There certainly is. And the so-called "left" doesn't tend any more or less toward this than the so-called "right". Certain groups have at different times over the last sixty years been more likely to go with the latter thing you mention than the former. This hasn't had to do with where they lie on the supposed political spectrum. It has to do with who, at that moment in time, has held enough power to be able to abuse it.
However if you think political correctness, or wielding the government like a club to enforce political correctness, is something the "left" does and the "right" doesn't, this is just because you're a libertarian delusionally trying to convince yourself that the Republican party in some way speaks for you. It isn't backed by what happens in reality.
Respect for personal freedoms has nothing whatsoever to do with who you support in the class struggle, or what percentage of what Rush Limbaugh says you disagree with.
Oh, by the way, insofar as your seeming David Koresh reference there goes, it should probably be noted that hoarding unregistered weapons and shooting FBI agents are usually not considered constitutionally protected forms of expression.
I guess I might as well make an attempt to make a comment like this near the top of the discussion, since the discussion below seems already to be devolving into "you're a liberal" "omfg no YOU'RE a liberal" high-school clique bickering.
There is no such thing as a "liberal"
There is no such thing as a "conservative"
Anyone who uses either of these words-- ever-- is just trying to set up some kind of straw man argument
If someone tries to use these words on you, don't try to argue with them, don't let them troll you, just ignore them and walk away.
So now the government has the right to regulate speech so long as the person performing that speech receives some sort of monetary restitution for this?
Perhaps there are better ways to create fair campaign finance regulations than this.
As for me, I'm frankly unsure to what extent I can prevent this from affecting me. I will probably be creating a politics-related website within the near future which will eventually explicitly cover elections and such, but I am starting to fear I will be unable to run it off of a donation model since apparently if the wrong person clicks that paypal "support this site" link I suddenly mutate from being a free citizen exercising my right to operate a free private press into... well, something else. I wonder, is it possible to be infected with the you're-a-PAC-now virus if your hosting-bill funding comes from selling t-shirts?
What does DRM have to do with it? I thought we were talking about AAC.
Have you ever seen what happens when you put a tiger and a longhorn steer in the same room?
Now THAT'S funny
I was just pointing out that the only reason Apple's aac's play on other platforms is that it's not their technology - they'd lock us out in a heartbeat if it was.
Well, Apple owns and owns licenses to quite a few technologies which are alternately proprietary and "theirs", at least one of which the iPod supports. Maybe there's a reason when they selected an audio distribution format they chose to go with an open standard that isn't theirs instead of one of the closed ones that they own?