We may not have extensive, cool underground caves, but we do have a nearly unlimited resource of young college-aged girls in warm sunny California weather right on the beach with an advanced technical university that can turn out underpaid interns by the droves. So suck it Quincy. =P
I am not usually one to pick on double negatives as I abuse them myself plenty. However, this was needless obfuscation and, at first glance, was confusing enough to take away from the content of your sentence.
Colonial rebels are the result of over privileged middle/upper class folk being bitchy about not being allowed to drink tea, grow their crops without taxes, and import goods to the colonies without tarriffs.
Yup, it fits, your brushing off the issue probably sounds pretty similar to the British aristocracy back in the late 1700's. What's the point of such an experiment? To display how absurd such logic is. So fighting for what many folk perceive to be their right to accessible content is not nearly as important as so much other stuff in the world? Well sure, of course. That doesn't mean we should ignore the issure entirely however. Sometimes caring about things that seem trivial to the majority, but are very important to a vocal minority, can lead to great changes in the world. Prior to the rebellion (revolution) in America, few Brits cared about or took seriously the values of the colonists. There were more important things to them in the world, like the arms race with the French and maybe keeping an eye on those pesky Hessians (Germans). However, for the folk in the colonies, things like freedom were worth fighting and dying for, and they weren't as worried about the French or Hessians.
Similarly, here in America, there are quite a few folk that have decent healthcare. It may not be the best in the world, but as long as they stay healthy, that's not a priority on their list of values. Is that stupid and short-sighted? Maybe. Were the American colonists' lack of focus on the French stupid and short-sighted? Maybe. But it seemed to work out well enough in the end for the colonists.
You're right, there are some very important issues to be concerned about in the world today. Things like healthcare and nuclear arms treaties have had the spotlight for a couple decades now. Does that mean we should ignore the issues that are dear to various ideological minorities? Nah. Years ago the Green party formed because it was concerned about the environment. That concern paled in comparison to worry about the Cold War so the Greens were marginalized. Now, with the whole climate change explosion, suddenly a lot of people think the Greens should have been taken more seriously.
Maybe right now healthcare seems like the most important thing to a lot of folk, but in the future, looking back, fighting for free content may seem like the more important issue at the time because doing so would have helped prevent the growing threat of an Orwellian corporatist society. For all we know, freedom fighters 30 years from now will be looking back at the Pirate Party as the only rational folk on Earth at the time since they had gumption and foresight. Maybe not. We can't say.
What we can say is that even though some issues seem irrelevant now, that doesn't mean the third parties that form around the issue should be ignored. That third party may not have an answer to every single problem, but its very existence shows that their particular pet issue is, indeed, considered a problem by a significant chunk of people in society.Staying informed and vigilant of all of the various issues is far more important and useful than caring about only the few, 'big,' issues that are basking in the public spotlight.
For that reason, any Pirate Parties, in my opinion, should be watched and given critical scrutiny, as should the Tea-Partiers, the Greens, the LIbertartians, and a host of other ones. Sweeping them off as irrelevant because you think you know their constituent base is naive.
Now now, don't attack the man, he raised an interesting point:
it's the fact that music itself is becoming less and less important, so less value is placed on it. Music is now something you listen to while studying, something you put on in the car or at a party, not something to be enjoyed for its own sake. The advent of portable music devices insure that it's everywhere all the time, utterly trivial to get, and not something you'd feel attachment to. We value what we have to work to get, and getting music nowadays is not work at all.
I hadn't ever thought about that before, the fact that many folk take music as a given since it permeates everywhere these days. I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but it is a decently insightful observation with regards to the values our culture has. The reason we don't value music enough to pay as much as we used to, these days, may very well be because we can see, hear, and access music everywhere. That doesn't just involve iPods and such, but also the fact that music now plays, regularly, in many lobbies of public areas, at restaurants, on elevators, and so on. Sure, that has been happening far longer than just the last couple of decades, but it was a lot more complicated and costly to get a clunky cassette recording playing in a mobile elevator than it is to use a nice little mp3 player. At least, that seems like it would be the case.
That said, the poster made an interesting point in that regard. However, I would agree to you that generalizing and saying the younger generations, or just people in general, valuing music as an art less these days in not necessarily true. These younger generations, just like those before them, have both artists and consumers in them. Saying whether current generations have fewer art lovers and more consumers would, in my opinion, require a decent study to be a valid point however.
Just a hint to any slashdotters in that area, a few of my friends a couple years back watched a small meteor impact up near Sonora Pass in California. It was close by so they took a weekend and went camping up on the pass. They wandered about relatively aimlessly looking for any rocks that seemed odd or out of place. When they found a suspect, they used some magnets they had brought to see if it was ferrous. Eventually, they found one small chunk of rock (think size of your hand) that the magnet stuck to out of sheer luck. They brought it back, had it evaluated by someone (can't recall who, but someone at a nearby university), and ended up selling it for just over $1000 since it was, legitimately, a small chunk of the meteor. If any dotters have a taste for adventure and have a weekend to kill near the area that this impacted, you should go out and see what you can find. It might pay off.
it's clear that the EFF won't be happy until piracy is 100% legal.
What is being touted out as illegal piracy nowadays used to be 100% legal before the internet. That is to say, I wouldn't get sued for copying my best friends tape of the Beach Boys top 30 Greatest Hits cassette tape. If I do the same thing now (copy my best friend's copy) using different technology (a hard drive, a CD drive, and a networking cable as opposed to a cassette tape and cassette recorder), I am somehow, magically, an evil pirate that wants to destroy the very principles that the entire entertainment industry is founded upon. Bullshit!
Recording shows with a VCR off of my TV used to be legal. Now it's supposedly illegal piracy to record those shows off the internet even if I still pay for them on TV and just miss the time they are airing. Copying my best friends old cassette tape used to be legal. Nowadays copying my friends CD using the internet is illegal. The only thing that has changed is technology and the slow detriment to my civil liberties. That said, if the EFF doesn't stop until this so-called, "piracy," is 100% legal again I say more power to them. They working to restore society back to simpler times, from a more civilized age (and no, I won't put quotes around that last part because it's old enough that it should be within the fair use domain by now).
It's obvious from their language that they want to prevent anyone from putting pressure on Sweden or the PirateBay to stop piracy.
And why the hell, might I ask you, shouldn't they? I am a United States citizen and I am appalled by the idea that companies in the United State (read RIAA/MPAA) should have enough clout or pressure in our government to convince them to put pressure on any foreign entity! It is not my country's right or duty to impose its will on other countries. If another country wants to give the US the finger and say, "Screw you guys and your crappy laws, we're going to keep hosting this website." That is their right as a country and a society. Basic principles of respect for another person's society should be enough to show that is the case.
Of course, if in issuing that, "Screw you," statement, the government comes to the conclusion that the other country is somehow threatening the safety and welfare of our society, that is another matter entirely. If another country is proposing a significant threat to the safety of US citizens (like N. Korea developing ICBM technology), then the US government has the responsibility to take action in order to mediate the threat. However, Sweden hosting a website that lets me or anyone else download Lady Gaga's most recent top hit is not a threat to my, or any other US citizen's safety. Neither is it bringing about the downfall of our economy or society so what the hell business does my government have in meddling about in Sweden's affairs? If some other country tried to do this to US society, you could be damned sure most of us would be up in arms about it. If China, for instance, said the US has to close down Google because that company makes it too hard for China to keep its citizens harmonized then we, as US citizens, would gladly go tell the government of China to go fuck itself. Similarly, I expect Sweden to do the same thing to us. I also expect US citizens, that hold any level of respect for themselves and others, to speak out and call bullshit when our government is doing something blatantly stupid and inappropriate.
The US government does NOT need to be concerned with what websites Sweden is hosting. It needs to be concerned with its own inflating deficit, the crappy state of healthcare in our nation, and ensuring the progress and growth of R&D intensive projects which serve to better society (like, say, alternative energy, or the space program). It doesn't need to give a damn about which musician records are being sold where. The only reason I can think of that our government would care about such a stupid thing would be if, in some crazy manner (I am being sarcastic by the way), some politicians and corporate lobbyists joined together in a corrupt agreement to ensure that the will of a bunch of rich bastards in Southern California will be imposed on people halfway around the globe.
So yes, the EFF should protest the government putting pressure on Sweden or any other country for allowing their citizens the freedom to access websites and content they deem acceptable. It is, after all, called the Electronic Freedom Foundation (not the US Electronic Freedom Foundation). Likewise, any self-respecting US citizen should do the same thing. It's not our damn business which websites Sweden decides to allow. Sheesh.
Yeah, good luck with that. Considering that most companies that run massive server farms and data centers use Linux to at least some extent, considering that many, 'dumb,' terminals such as cash registers and medical displays use some form of Linux, and considering that many embedded systems and controllers use some brand of Linux, outlawing Linux would be entirely retarded, not to mention overtly expensive, devastating to the economy, and protested from just about every industry. Hell, I would wager that even some of the computers that media content is produced on uses some form of Linux at some point in the stage for either storage or communication or some other such thing.
Now, maybe someone would try to outlaw, "non-commercial" Linux use, but that doesn't change the fact that the commercial users would still develop the kernel, would still release apps for it, and would still file bug reports for it. That being the case, anyone who wanted to use it would find a way to do so.
Don't get me wrong, its good to remain vigilant for potential retarded mandates like this, but trying to implement a ban on Linux would go over about as well as trying to implement a ban on telephones.
How many young people do you know these days that download stuff willy nilly without a second thought? How many young folk do you know that, when they can't convince Mom or Dad to buy them the next CD, find a way to get it off the internet or from a friend for free? How many college dorms exist were kids swap huge external hard drives full of content they will never listen to just because they can? How many of those folk stop and think, "What I am doing is so wrong. Maybe I should stop?"
As future generations mature in an age where computer technology is integrated into their cell phones which never leave their hand from the day they turn 6 years old they will learn that the information floating about on the intratubes is ripe for the picking. They will figure out that the $10 connection cable for their latest LG phone will provide them with limitless free downloads as opposed to being nickel and dimed by Rhapsody. Kids don't have a lot of money as a general rule of thumb. Thus, they find out easy ways to get what they want for cheap or for free. Those skills just get refined as they grow older and more intelligent and bold. As the older generations that remember the top 40 and billboard charts become obsolete and die off, so will their entertainment business methods. The iGeneration is going to take this industry by the balls and burn it to the ground, whether they mean to or not. Similarly some inventive and ambitious young folk will find better, cheaper, faster ways of producing the goods for the insatiable entertainment appetite of society and they will make a fortune.
Big media are going to find out, very quickly, how ineffective litigious tactics are when applied to scores of well-fed pop music fanboys and fangirls. If a 13 year old girl can't afford the latest copy of the Jonas Brothers newest CD, you can be damned sure she will still find a way to get it, be it legal or illegal. Litigation cannot stand the onslaught of pubescent hormones and irrational decisions that drive younger generations to obsess over music and movies.
So yeah, the RIAA and MPAA can litigate and throw a temper-tantrum. Technological innovations and an obsession the latest trendy content will prevail. Even the best equipped army will be overcome by a sufficiently large horde of brain hungry zombies. In this case, the zombies want music and movies rather than brains.
As Larry Ellison said a while back, software is one of the very few areas of technology that are more fashion-conscious than women's clothes.
But, like fashion in general, there are always some folk who would rather dress down and look ridiculous than wear the latest popped-collar button t-shirt. How else do you explain a phenomenon like Linux and any of the thousands of non-fashionable pieces of software associated with it? Sure, a lot of people do things for purely consumer/material reasons. However, there will always be the goats in the herd of sheep doing things for other reasons. I would even go so far as to posit the theorem that most of human progress could be attributed to the efforts of that small goat minority.
That being said, while I agree that Miller's observations, and yours, are rather intriguing, I would be very disinclined to attribute them to an entire society or species such as aliens. In any sufficiently complex level of life, each individual will be distinct enough that a few will always deviate from the norm for a given trait. Even if 90% of a species, alien or human, becomes addicted to entertainment and consumption, there will always be that 10% that are genetic mutants when compared to the rest that cause a significant deviation, and, thus, perturbation, from and to the status quo. That said, I am not sure that such material trends in a species could permeate homogeneously enough to stagnate said species.
Explorer types are driven to "find their fix" in VR environments because we are currently not expanding our physical borders of knowledge.
That's a fairly interesting idea. After all, how many folk do we all know that clamber about being bored all the time? How many folk say, time and again, that there is no place to go exploring? Hell, I live in a relatively small town in California, surrounded by national forests and beachfront, and I have met quite a few folk, both intelligent and curious, that swear there is no new place to explore and find. They swear that all of the dark places on the maps have been filled in. With tools like Google maps at our whim, it's easy to see how this perception permeates. However, it's important to note that just because an aircraft or satellite imaged an area, that doesn't mean that we know anything about that area. All we know is what it looks like from way up there. We don't know if there is some rare organism or phenomenon existing in that patch of green on Google maps. That said, it's important that we do get out and explore. It's important that we do get out and look for new things. We shouldn't do this just in space, but even here on the Earth's surface, and for that matter, below it (oceans).
I wonder how true your thought is, that many people don't feel the need to explore because they don't see a means or a possibility to expand our physical borders of knowledge. One way or another, though, I am glad that some of us folk out there still like to hack our way through the berry vines and poison oak in search of that perfect waterfall.
I am not a big fan of man movies founded on religion and faith, but I always enjoyed The Boondock Saints. The second one, which was just recently released on film, had a great, inspiring speech about this very thing. Quoted below:
Rocco: Men build things, then we die. It's in our fucking DNA! THAT'S WHAT WE DO!
Murphy MacManus: And when it all falls down?
Rocco: We build it right back up again.
Connor MacManus: But this time bigger. BETTER!
Rocco: Look! Look what we can do. Look how fuckin' beautiful we are. You think the men that built all this had it easy?
Murphy MacManus: Hard men!
Connor MacManus: Doing hard shit!
The exception to this is diaries, and now many people maintain those any more.
Maybe not in written paper form, but certainly many people maintain and update their own blogs, notes, and other status updates on things like Myspace, Facebook, and blogspot. Surely those resources would be a good source for the same type of information that is maintained in diaries. I suppose diaries had/have the added advantage of usually being considered private, so more information may be disclosed in them. However, it's become pretty apparent that there are still many netizens that don't think enough about privacy to keep their blogs and facespaces more discriminatory than a typical diary they would keep.
That said, I wonder if the Library of Congress could find a way to archive the blogosphere.
Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work?
And that, my friend, is precisely why the cost plus contracts that fund the defense industry always run over budget and over schedule. In my experience working for big government contractors, this is precisely the common schedule of most engineers on the project, and this is precisely why nearly no work gets done.
Didn't we just see a story about a week ago about Groklaw's content being requested for archiving in the Library of Congress? I'd say that's some pretty good recognition....
And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism.
Yeah, members of the, 'official,' news agencies like Reuters are just running around getting themselves shot by helicopters. Slackers.
Seriously, I just dropped Puppy Linux on an old laptop of mine and one of the first packages I installed, that was freely available in the repositories, did exactly this. Hell, I could pipe the output from that utility into a perl script that popped up a big red box on the network admins display if the state changes.
For that matter, you could probably homebrew a shell script that monitors the/dev files on your systems and reports usb usage. I like how some of our tax dollars fund bloated agencies to come up with solutions that unshaven hackers in their mom's basements figured out years ago.
Huh. Well I suppose that's a decent enough explanation. It still seems like a flip up screen or some kind integrated, fold out prop up (like a standing picture frame) would significantly improve it.
I don't have the time to read the full report, yet...
Thanks for your patience...
Now, that said, no matter how important you think you are, nothing in your post was worthy enough to require an anonymous coward posting. Take off the mask.;)
No, I got that in the summary and in the linked to PDFs. My point was that I don't think either the RIAA or the MPAA are ethical enough to keep themselves from citing the first part of this study of evidence of a big problem. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to quote the first half of the summary that acknowledges that current data shows piracy is a problem. Then, by conveniently not mentioning the latter part of the study that acknowledges such data is inaccurate, any agency can pretty easily say, "See, we have this government sponsored investigation that quite clearly states...."
Context is everything, and if there is one thing that PR firms have demonstrated time and again its that they can spin up negative publicity by removing whatever context they want. We see news shows and corporations and other entities do this all the time. These tactics, I would wager, are far from being below the RIAA/MPAA.
That said, I am hoping the GAO reiterates their second point, that current studies are total BS, enough times throughout the report that such clever presentation tactics would be moot.
Could someone please explain to me the appeal of this tablet architecture? I personally find the need to keep hunching over my lap, desk, or table to stare down at papers terribly uncomfortable and annoying. That's part of the reason I stopped printing stuff and just do most of my work digitally nowadays. With a traditional desktop or laptop I can flip the screen up or set up an upright monitor. This allows me to square my shoulders, look straight ahead, and save my neck the hours of pain-inducing craning that college got me used to via handwritten homework. In other words, these tablets seem extraordinarily sucky in terms of ergonomics. While I am not one to traditionally complain, I really hate the idea of having a computer that I have to hunch over to use.
Perhaps I am missing something and these tablets are able to be stood on their side and operated efficiently while upright, but every demonstration I have seen shows folks hunched over with their shoulders forward, necks craned, and hands drawn inwards towards the small keyboard/input interface. How, in any way, are these devices so amazing as to sacrifice basic comfort and usability for them? Frankly I just don't see why anyone would want to use these over a traditional laptop or, hell, even one of those hybrid tablet PC devices that allow for use in both flip-down and flip-up modes.
The GAO needs to say, in very explicit terms, just what they are referring to as piracy. For instance, are they talking about the folk that knock off DVDs, repackage them in semi-legitimate looking boxes by the thousands, and pawn them off on the streets and on Ebay? Or are they talking about the folk that torrent [Insert Latest Blockbuster Title Here]. The summary and highlights both talk about risks and issues such as pirated, knock-off pharmaceuticals being a safety problem (although the scope of the issue, they admit, is hard to determine). That's all fine and dandy and more data and investigation certainly does need to be conducted.
However, the GAO needs to be very strict in saying that, "These harmful effects are caused, particularly, by these harmful activities." Using the blanket term piracy just screams for some bastards at the RIAA/MPAA to hold up investigations like this in some PR forum and say, "See, it really is a problem, we're not just pissing into the wind! Neener, neener, neener," when, in fact, the investigation may be looking into an entirely different market, like the above cited case of pharmaceuticals. I don't have the time to read the full report, yet, but I hope the GAO will be responsible enough to be very clear about which activities, precisely, seem to be correlated with which results. The less they use the term, "piracy," which is a term that has been completely bloated, raped, and thrashed over the past decade or so, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
We may not have extensive, cool underground caves, but we do have a nearly unlimited resource of young college-aged girls in warm sunny California weather right on the beach with an advanced technical university that can turn out underpaid interns by the droves. So suck it Quincy. =P
which is not unimportant
I think you mean:
which is important
I am not usually one to pick on double negatives as I abuse them myself plenty. However, this was needless obfuscation and, at first glance, was confusing enough to take away from the content of your sentence.
Colonial rebels are the result of over privileged middle/upper class folk being bitchy about not being allowed to drink tea, grow their crops without taxes, and import goods to the colonies without tarriffs.
Yup, it fits, your brushing off the issue probably sounds pretty similar to the British aristocracy back in the late 1700's. What's the point of such an experiment? To display how absurd such logic is. So fighting for what many folk perceive to be their right to accessible content is not nearly as important as so much other stuff in the world? Well sure, of course. That doesn't mean we should ignore the issure entirely however. Sometimes caring about things that seem trivial to the majority, but are very important to a vocal minority, can lead to great changes in the world. Prior to the rebellion (revolution) in America, few Brits cared about or took seriously the values of the colonists. There were more important things to them in the world, like the arms race with the French and maybe keeping an eye on those pesky Hessians (Germans). However, for the folk in the colonies, things like freedom were worth fighting and dying for, and they weren't as worried about the French or Hessians.
Similarly, here in America, there are quite a few folk that have decent healthcare. It may not be the best in the world, but as long as they stay healthy, that's not a priority on their list of values. Is that stupid and short-sighted? Maybe. Were the American colonists' lack of focus on the French stupid and short-sighted? Maybe. But it seemed to work out well enough in the end for the colonists.
You're right, there are some very important issues to be concerned about in the world today. Things like healthcare and nuclear arms treaties have had the spotlight for a couple decades now. Does that mean we should ignore the issues that are dear to various ideological minorities? Nah. Years ago the Green party formed because it was concerned about the environment. That concern paled in comparison to worry about the Cold War so the Greens were marginalized. Now, with the whole climate change explosion, suddenly a lot of people think the Greens should have been taken more seriously.
Maybe right now healthcare seems like the most important thing to a lot of folk, but in the future, looking back, fighting for free content may seem like the more important issue at the time because doing so would have helped prevent the growing threat of an Orwellian corporatist society. For all we know, freedom fighters 30 years from now will be looking back at the Pirate Party as the only rational folk on Earth at the time since they had gumption and foresight. Maybe not. We can't say.
What we can say is that even though some issues seem irrelevant now, that doesn't mean the third parties that form around the issue should be ignored. That third party may not have an answer to every single problem, but its very existence shows that their particular pet issue is, indeed, considered a problem by a significant chunk of people in society.Staying informed and vigilant of all of the various issues is far more important and useful than caring about only the few, 'big,' issues that are basking in the public spotlight.
For that reason, any Pirate Parties, in my opinion, should be watched and given critical scrutiny, as should the Tea-Partiers, the Greens, the LIbertartians, and a host of other ones. Sweeping them off as irrelevant because you think you know their constituent base is naive.
it's the fact that music itself is becoming less and less important, so less value is placed on it. Music is now something you listen to while studying, something you put on in the car or at a party, not something to be enjoyed for its own sake. The advent of portable music devices insure that it's everywhere all the time, utterly trivial to get, and not something you'd feel attachment to. We value what we have to work to get, and getting music nowadays is not work at all.
I hadn't ever thought about that before, the fact that many folk take music as a given since it permeates everywhere these days. I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but it is a decently insightful observation with regards to the values our culture has. The reason we don't value music enough to pay as much as we used to, these days, may very well be because we can see, hear, and access music everywhere. That doesn't just involve iPods and such, but also the fact that music now plays, regularly, in many lobbies of public areas, at restaurants, on elevators, and so on. Sure, that has been happening far longer than just the last couple of decades, but it was a lot more complicated and costly to get a clunky cassette recording playing in a mobile elevator than it is to use a nice little mp3 player. At least, that seems like it would be the case.
That said, the poster made an interesting point in that regard. However, I would agree to you that generalizing and saying the younger generations, or just people in general, valuing music as an art less these days in not necessarily true. These younger generations, just like those before them, have both artists and consumers in them. Saying whether current generations have fewer art lovers and more consumers would, in my opinion, require a decent study to be a valid point however.
Just a hint to any slashdotters in that area, a few of my friends a couple years back watched a small meteor impact up near Sonora Pass in California. It was close by so they took a weekend and went camping up on the pass. They wandered about relatively aimlessly looking for any rocks that seemed odd or out of place. When they found a suspect, they used some magnets they had brought to see if it was ferrous. Eventually, they found one small chunk of rock (think size of your hand) that the magnet stuck to out of sheer luck. They brought it back, had it evaluated by someone (can't recall who, but someone at a nearby university), and ended up selling it for just over $1000 since it was, legitimately, a small chunk of the meteor. If any dotters have a taste for adventure and have a weekend to kill near the area that this impacted, you should go out and see what you can find. It might pay off.
it's clear that the EFF won't be happy until piracy is 100% legal.
What is being touted out as illegal piracy nowadays used to be 100% legal before the internet. That is to say, I wouldn't get sued for copying my best friends tape of the Beach Boys top 30 Greatest Hits cassette tape. If I do the same thing now (copy my best friend's copy) using different technology (a hard drive, a CD drive, and a networking cable as opposed to a cassette tape and cassette recorder), I am somehow, magically, an evil pirate that wants to destroy the very principles that the entire entertainment industry is founded upon. Bullshit!
Recording shows with a VCR off of my TV used to be legal. Now it's supposedly illegal piracy to record those shows off the internet even if I still pay for them on TV and just miss the time they are airing. Copying my best friends old cassette tape used to be legal. Nowadays copying my friends CD using the internet is illegal. The only thing that has changed is technology and the slow detriment to my civil liberties. That said, if the EFF doesn't stop until this so-called, "piracy," is 100% legal again I say more power to them. They working to restore society back to simpler times, from a more civilized age (and no, I won't put quotes around that last part because it's old enough that it should be within the fair use domain by now).
It's obvious from their language that they want to prevent anyone from putting pressure on Sweden or the PirateBay to stop piracy.
And why the hell, might I ask you, shouldn't they? I am a United States citizen and I am appalled by the idea that companies in the United State (read RIAA/MPAA) should have enough clout or pressure in our government to convince them to put pressure on any foreign entity! It is not my country's right or duty to impose its will on other countries. If another country wants to give the US the finger and say, "Screw you guys and your crappy laws, we're going to keep hosting this website." That is their right as a country and a society. Basic principles of respect for another person's society should be enough to show that is the case.
Of course, if in issuing that, "Screw you," statement, the government comes to the conclusion that the other country is somehow threatening the safety and welfare of our society, that is another matter entirely. If another country is proposing a significant threat to the safety of US citizens (like N. Korea developing ICBM technology), then the US government has the responsibility to take action in order to mediate the threat. However, Sweden hosting a website that lets me or anyone else download Lady Gaga's most recent top hit is not a threat to my, or any other US citizen's safety. Neither is it bringing about the downfall of our economy or society so what the hell business does my government have in meddling about in Sweden's affairs? If some other country tried to do this to US society, you could be damned sure most of us would be up in arms about it. If China, for instance, said the US has to close down Google because that company makes it too hard for China to keep its citizens harmonized then we, as US citizens, would gladly go tell the government of China to go fuck itself. Similarly, I expect Sweden to do the same thing to us. I also expect US citizens, that hold any level of respect for themselves and others, to speak out and call bullshit when our government is doing something blatantly stupid and inappropriate.
The US government does NOT need to be concerned with what websites Sweden is hosting. It needs to be concerned with its own inflating deficit, the crappy state of healthcare in our nation, and ensuring the progress and growth of R&D intensive projects which serve to better society (like, say, alternative energy, or the space program). It doesn't need to give a damn about which musician records are being sold where. The only reason I can think of that our government would care about such a stupid thing would be if, in some crazy manner (I am being sarcastic by the way), some politicians and corporate lobbyists joined together in a corrupt agreement to ensure that the will of a bunch of rich bastards in Southern California will be imposed on people halfway around the globe.
So yes, the EFF should protest the government putting pressure on Sweden or any other country for allowing their citizens the freedom to access websites and content they deem acceptable. It is, after all, called the Electronic Freedom Foundation (not the US Electronic Freedom Foundation). Likewise, any self-respecting US citizen should do the same thing. It's not our damn business which websites Sweden decides to allow. Sheesh.
The solution? Outlaw Linux
Yeah, good luck with that. Considering that most companies that run massive server farms and data centers use Linux to at least some extent, considering that many, 'dumb,' terminals such as cash registers and medical displays use some form of Linux, and considering that many embedded systems and controllers use some brand of Linux, outlawing Linux would be entirely retarded, not to mention overtly expensive, devastating to the economy, and protested from just about every industry. Hell, I would wager that even some of the computers that media content is produced on uses some form of Linux at some point in the stage for either storage or communication or some other such thing.
Now, maybe someone would try to outlaw, "non-commercial" Linux use, but that doesn't change the fact that the commercial users would still develop the kernel, would still release apps for it, and would still file bug reports for it. That being the case, anyone who wanted to use it would find a way to do so.
Don't get me wrong, its good to remain vigilant for potential retarded mandates like this, but trying to implement a ban on Linux would go over about as well as trying to implement a ban on telephones.
Those were my thoughts exactly.
How many young people do you know these days that download stuff willy nilly without a second thought? How many young folk do you know that, when they can't convince Mom or Dad to buy them the next CD, find a way to get it off the internet or from a friend for free? How many college dorms exist were kids swap huge external hard drives full of content they will never listen to just because they can? How many of those folk stop and think, "What I am doing is so wrong. Maybe I should stop?"
As future generations mature in an age where computer technology is integrated into their cell phones which never leave their hand from the day they turn 6 years old they will learn that the information floating about on the intratubes is ripe for the picking. They will figure out that the $10 connection cable for their latest LG phone will provide them with limitless free downloads as opposed to being nickel and dimed by Rhapsody. Kids don't have a lot of money as a general rule of thumb. Thus, they find out easy ways to get what they want for cheap or for free. Those skills just get refined as they grow older and more intelligent and bold. As the older generations that remember the top 40 and billboard charts become obsolete and die off, so will their entertainment business methods. The iGeneration is going to take this industry by the balls and burn it to the ground, whether they mean to or not. Similarly some inventive and ambitious young folk will find better, cheaper, faster ways of producing the goods for the insatiable entertainment appetite of society and they will make a fortune.
Big media are going to find out, very quickly, how ineffective litigious tactics are when applied to scores of well-fed pop music fanboys and fangirls. If a 13 year old girl can't afford the latest copy of the Jonas Brothers newest CD, you can be damned sure she will still find a way to get it, be it legal or illegal. Litigation cannot stand the onslaught of pubescent hormones and irrational decisions that drive younger generations to obsess over music and movies.
So yeah, the RIAA and MPAA can litigate and throw a temper-tantrum. Technological innovations and an obsession the latest trendy content will prevail. Even the best equipped army will be overcome by a sufficiently large horde of brain hungry zombies. In this case, the zombies want music and movies rather than brains.
As Larry Ellison said a while back, software is one of the very few areas of technology that are more fashion-conscious than women's clothes.
But, like fashion in general, there are always some folk who would rather dress down and look ridiculous than wear the latest popped-collar button t-shirt. How else do you explain a phenomenon like Linux and any of the thousands of non-fashionable pieces of software associated with it? Sure, a lot of people do things for purely consumer/material reasons. However, there will always be the goats in the herd of sheep doing things for other reasons. I would even go so far as to posit the theorem that most of human progress could be attributed to the efforts of that small goat minority.
That being said, while I agree that Miller's observations, and yours, are rather intriguing, I would be very disinclined to attribute them to an entire society or species such as aliens. In any sufficiently complex level of life, each individual will be distinct enough that a few will always deviate from the norm for a given trait. Even if 90% of a species, alien or human, becomes addicted to entertainment and consumption, there will always be that 10% that are genetic mutants when compared to the rest that cause a significant deviation, and, thus, perturbation, from and to the status quo. That said, I am not sure that such material trends in a species could permeate homogeneously enough to stagnate said species.
Explorer types are driven to "find their fix" in VR environments because we are currently not expanding our physical borders of knowledge.
That's a fairly interesting idea. After all, how many folk do we all know that clamber about being bored all the time? How many folk say, time and again, that there is no place to go exploring? Hell, I live in a relatively small town in California, surrounded by national forests and beachfront, and I have met quite a few folk, both intelligent and curious, that swear there is no new place to explore and find. They swear that all of the dark places on the maps have been filled in. With tools like Google maps at our whim, it's easy to see how this perception permeates. However, it's important to note that just because an aircraft or satellite imaged an area, that doesn't mean that we know anything about that area. All we know is what it looks like from way up there. We don't know if there is some rare organism or phenomenon existing in that patch of green on Google maps. That said, it's important that we do get out and explore. It's important that we do get out and look for new things. We shouldn't do this just in space, but even here on the Earth's surface, and for that matter, below it (oceans).
I wonder how true your thought is, that many people don't feel the need to explore because they don't see a means or a possibility to expand our physical borders of knowledge. One way or another, though, I am glad that some of us folk out there still like to hack our way through the berry vines and poison oak in search of that perfect waterfall.
Rocco: Men build things, then we die. It's in our fucking DNA! THAT'S WHAT WE DO!
Murphy MacManus: And when it all falls down?
Rocco: We build it right back up again.
Connor MacManus: But this time bigger. BETTER!
Rocco: Look! Look what we can do. Look how fuckin' beautiful we are. You think the men that built all this had it easy?
Murphy MacManus: Hard men!
Connor MacManus: Doing hard shit!
Good stuff...
The exception to this is diaries, and now many people maintain those any more.
Maybe not in written paper form, but certainly many people maintain and update their own blogs, notes, and other status updates on things like Myspace, Facebook, and blogspot. Surely those resources would be a good source for the same type of information that is maintained in diaries. I suppose diaries had/have the added advantage of usually being considered private, so more information may be disclosed in them. However, it's become pretty apparent that there are still many netizens that don't think enough about privacy to keep their blogs and facespaces more discriminatory than a typical diary they would keep.
That said, I wonder if the Library of Congress could find a way to archive the blogosphere.
Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work?
And that, my friend, is precisely why the cost plus contracts that fund the defense industry always run over budget and over schedule. In my experience working for big government contractors, this is precisely the common schedule of most engineers on the project, and this is precisely why nearly no work gets done.
Didn't we just see a story about a week ago about Groklaw's content being requested for archiving in the Library of Congress? I'd say that's some pretty good recognition....
You mean all those tweets that involved guys talking about how long their penis is weren't Viagra and Extenze ads? Oh dear....
And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism.
Yeah, members of the, 'official,' news agencies like Reuters are just running around getting themselves shot by helicopters. Slackers.
If the editors themselves don't care about the accuracy of the stories, why should I?
Because you're not kdawson, and that's something to be proud of. ;)
Seriously, I just dropped Puppy Linux on an old laptop of mine and one of the first packages I installed, that was freely available in the repositories, did exactly this. Hell, I could pipe the output from that utility into a perl script that popped up a big red box on the network admins display if the state changes.
/dev files on your systems and reports usb usage. I like how some of our tax dollars fund bloated agencies to come up with solutions that unshaven hackers in their mom's basements figured out years ago.
For that matter, you could probably homebrew a shell script that monitors the
Huh. Well I suppose that's a decent enough explanation. It still seems like a flip up screen or some kind integrated, fold out prop up (like a standing picture frame) would significantly improve it.
Well said.
I don't have the time to read the full report, yet...
Thanks for your patience...
;)
Now, that said, no matter how important you think you are, nothing in your post was worthy enough to require an anonymous coward posting. Take off the mask.
No, I got that in the summary and in the linked to PDFs. My point was that I don't think either the RIAA or the MPAA are ethical enough to keep themselves from citing the first part of this study of evidence of a big problem. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to quote the first half of the summary that acknowledges that current data shows piracy is a problem. Then, by conveniently not mentioning the latter part of the study that acknowledges such data is inaccurate, any agency can pretty easily say, "See, we have this government sponsored investigation that quite clearly states...."
Context is everything, and if there is one thing that PR firms have demonstrated time and again its that they can spin up negative publicity by removing whatever context they want. We see news shows and corporations and other entities do this all the time. These tactics, I would wager, are far from being below the RIAA/MPAA.
That said, I am hoping the GAO reiterates their second point, that current studies are total BS, enough times throughout the report that such clever presentation tactics would be moot.
Could someone please explain to me the appeal of this tablet architecture? I personally find the need to keep hunching over my lap, desk, or table to stare down at papers terribly uncomfortable and annoying. That's part of the reason I stopped printing stuff and just do most of my work digitally nowadays. With a traditional desktop or laptop I can flip the screen up or set up an upright monitor. This allows me to square my shoulders, look straight ahead, and save my neck the hours of pain-inducing craning that college got me used to via handwritten homework. In other words, these tablets seem extraordinarily sucky in terms of ergonomics. While I am not one to traditionally complain, I really hate the idea of having a computer that I have to hunch over to use.
Perhaps I am missing something and these tablets are able to be stood on their side and operated efficiently while upright, but every demonstration I have seen shows folks hunched over with their shoulders forward, necks craned, and hands drawn inwards towards the small keyboard/input interface. How, in any way, are these devices so amazing as to sacrifice basic comfort and usability for them? Frankly I just don't see why anyone would want to use these over a traditional laptop or, hell, even one of those hybrid tablet PC devices that allow for use in both flip-down and flip-up modes.
The GAO needs to say, in very explicit terms, just what they are referring to as piracy. For instance, are they talking about the folk that knock off DVDs, repackage them in semi-legitimate looking boxes by the thousands, and pawn them off on the streets and on Ebay? Or are they talking about the folk that torrent [Insert Latest Blockbuster Title Here]. The summary and highlights both talk about risks and issues such as pirated, knock-off pharmaceuticals being a safety problem (although the scope of the issue, they admit, is hard to determine). That's all fine and dandy and more data and investigation certainly does need to be conducted.
However, the GAO needs to be very strict in saying that, "These harmful effects are caused, particularly, by these harmful activities." Using the blanket term piracy just screams for some bastards at the RIAA/MPAA to hold up investigations like this in some PR forum and say, "See, it really is a problem, we're not just pissing into the wind! Neener, neener, neener," when, in fact, the investigation may be looking into an entirely different market, like the above cited case of pharmaceuticals. I don't have the time to read the full report, yet, but I hope the GAO will be responsible enough to be very clear about which activities, precisely, seem to be correlated with which results. The less they use the term, "piracy," which is a term that has been completely bloated, raped, and thrashed over the past decade or so, the better.
Of course, this is just my opinion.