It doesn't justify the murder, but hell, people die every day. Thousands of people will die in the time it takes to read this post. Of those thousands of people that are moments away from dying, I would say it is a safe bet that at least a few of them are truly wonderful and good people and that the world will be a worse place for their leaving it... and chances are you won't give two shits about a single one of them.
Now, some ass hole spammer is dead. Is it sad? Eh, it is sad in the way that anyone dying is sad, and well, people dying is not that sad. We manage to make it through each day cheerfully despite the massive amounts of death going on the world. So one guy who has made a name for himself by being a complete asshole is dead. It is hard to drum up any sort of negative feelings when plenty of completely good humans dropped dead within hours of his doing so and most people didn't shed a tear for them either.
For better or for worse, this is entirely true. The only people who get onto juries are people who want to be on a jury... or are too stupid to escape. It is pretty easy to simply give lawyers the 'wrong' answer when they question you for a jury pool. Hell, one off handed comment loud enough to be heard by a lawyer about the defendants sex/race/religion/haircut is more than enough to get yourself tossed with no repercussions.
I am pretty sure that you can ask your average Chinese factory worker who has gone from a protection economy that was literally starving him to death, or an Indian white collard worker who now lives something that would be considered middle class by American standards if they are 'winning', and they will say hell yes. India doesn't long for the 'good old days' of their protectionist economy that kept everyone equally poor. China sure as hell doesn't long for the glorious days of the people's revolution where over 20 million people died to starvation.
So yes, you can rattle on 'the revolution, man'... or you could actually go visit one of these places and ask the people if they have gone from accepting that life will be miserable until they day they die early, or if they are now hopeful for a better future. God forbid Americans maybe slow down their rapid wealth creation as 2 billion other poor people get a tiny taste of the pie. Yeah, what we REALLY need is global trade tarrifs. That way, we can wall off those poor suckers in the developing world back into their shit hole, and watch as our own economy rapidly collapses under the realization that building.2 cent widgets can't be done at $12 / hour. You really sing of a bright future. History has pretty well taught that nation that go down the protectionist rout see nothing be abject misery at worst, and a stalling of living standards at best.
Yeah, Apple accidentally locked the phone so that they only work on AT&T. If someone unlocks the phone at Apple accidentally breaks the unlock again... well shit. It was an accident. Apple decided to offer an exclusive phone to a single carrier to get a cut of the cellphone bill profits, pure and simple. Apple didn't need AT&T's brand name to sell a phone... in fact, it is AT&T that needed Apple. They could have sold the phone as an open phone that could work with any carrier anywhere in the world. They instead decided to try and do everything they could to lock down the device, and than break any attempts to LEGALLY (DMCA makes an exception for cell phone unlocking) unlock the device.
Stop making excuses for it. AT&T is the devil and Apple happily made a deal with them to score some fat cash. They didn't have to, but they did. If you are okay with that, accept it, and stop making excuses for them. If you are not okay with that, do yourself a favor and don't buy an iPhone.
There are no successful consumer rent-a-song services. Sony has failed and Microsoft abandoned it's entire "Plays for Sure" market when it launched the Zune, which is another failure. Every college service paid for by student fees is neglected and many have been withdrawn. I neither live on a college campus nor use a Zune. Anyone who bought a locked down device like a Zune is a moron. Rhapsody has been around for a few years and has done me well for well over a year.
No, it's awful everywhere, but your rent-a-song service will be too when they have people hooked. It's not like the industry will do anything different once they have things locked up again. If everyone was on some kind of rental program, they would continue to limit variety and sell you the difference separately. That's the way the RIAA model works. It's not about promoting talent, it's about creating scarcity. And here is the fun thing. If it ever gets awful, guess what I will do? I will cancel my service and find a happy alternative (which might not even be music). This is the fun thing about a capitalist system is that so long as you are not a moron, you can just stop giving them money. Until then, shelling out $15 a month to run rampant downloading every song I ever feel the fancy to listen to is very pleasant. I have over 8000 songs from every single genera imaginable bouncing around my computer. To have listened to such a diverse bunch of music so whimsically on iTunes, I would have dumped $8000... and that is for the "you don't really own it" DRMed version. Thanks, I'll pass.
So, you can shake your fists all you want about how subscription is the devils doing and will never work... while I will merrily go indulge in a sudden urge for 90's ska and go download a few albums to listen to later.
As one who has never used a subscription service (I'm one of the low-volume types) I ask this: if your subscription ceases, do you still have access to the music you already downloaded? No, if your subscription dies for whatever reason, you have a period of a month or what not, and then your music dies. That said, as a Rhapsody subscription user, I don't find it to be a big deal. If my music was to die tomorrow, I would shrug, find another all-you-can-eat subscription service, and redownload the handful of tracks that I would want to download again.
The value of a subscription service really depends upon your musical tastes. If you are a genera hopper who likes to download everything and anything, listen to it a few times, and forget it, subscription services can not be beaten. I have 8000 songs sitting around in my library at the moment. Obviously, buying 8000 songs on iTunes is going to be FAR more expensive. Clearly, I didn't need to download that many. Many I downloaded, didn't like, and moved on. Other times, I download something, love it, and then went and download everything else I could think of like it.
If you view your music as a 'collection', then subscription services will leave you sour, especially if you are only looking for a handful of albums. If you view listening to music as thoughtless exploration, than a subscription service will leave you very satisfied.
I personally am the type to hear some 90's ska by accident somewhere, get nostalgic, and load a gig or two of ska onto my MP3 player for a couple of weeks before I move on to other things. I have tried blowing 10+ dollars on an album that I might or might like. I don't get my rocks off shopping around and trying to make a good purchasing decision. I like to gleefully run through the (digital) aisles throwing everything into my cart and leave without paying (well, minus that monthly fee of course). If that sounds like fun, then subscriptions are the way to go.
Lets put it this way; if you liked Napster of ye ol' yesterday because it was a chance to download music that you have always liked, subscription might not work for you. If you liked ye Napster of ol' because for the first time you got to listen to piles of music you had never heard before, subscription will probably be very satisfying. If you liked Napster because it was free, well, there is always bittorrent.
At least in the case of Monster.com, the only thing taken was the stuff you could have gotten off anyone's resume. Sure, that can help a phishing scam, but it isn't the end of the world. This is far far bigger. Having credit card numbers stolen is a very big deal. If those 1200 posted were all that was stolen, then this will just be a minor inconvenience. E-bay will contact everyone and get those numbers promptly canceled. If on the other hand the 1200 posted numbers were just a display and proof that the hack had happened and that there were more stolen, then there is a very serious problem.
Even as it stands, unless E-bay can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that only those posted were the ones stolen, anyone credit card number that e-bay has should be held as suspect for potentially having been stolen. Ebay has really dropped the ball. It will be interesting to see how they scramble to deal with this.
Cost of living in the US is generally higher because we have to pay for medical insurance, hospital visits, childcare/daycare, etc, almost entirely out of our own pockets, in addition to all the taxes we already pay. In most European countries, those kinds of services are provided through some kind of government-run socialized program paid for by your taxes. Here in the states we have to handle those things entirely on our own and they cost a lot, so we have to earn more to be able to do that. Uh, you need a new IT job. If you are getting paid 80,000 a year and not getting health insurance from your company, you are getting jacked. Health care in the US is not really a big issue for people working good salaried jobs as the employer tends to pick up most (if not all) of the tab. Throw on top of that the fact that the US has a lower cost of living and lower taxes that much of western Europe, and if money is what you are after, the US is a good place to work.
The real issues with health care in the US comes from people who are working either low end positions (Walmart, McDonalds, etc.) or working contract positions. These are the poor SOBs who have a hard time with healthcare. You can still buy healthcare outside of an employer, but it tends to be costly, you take a tax hit that people getting it through the employer don't take, and, well, it is voluntary. For better or for worse, even people that could afford healthcare take a look at the cost, consider their risk of actually needing it, and skip out.
Plus, here in the states, most people have to commute a really long way by car to get to their jobs, whereas in Europe the distances travelled by car for daily commute probably average less because (1) there just isn't as much sprawl, and (2) there's better public transit. The cost of owning, maintaining, and refueling a car adds up. Most people in the US choose to commute a long distance by car. It isn't like the US has some horrible housing and renting crisis that makes it so that you can't live right next to your job. Instead, what you get are a lot of people who want a big backyard instead of a smaller backyard or apartment. Throw on top of that nearly tax free (and thus cheap) gas prices, and commuting from your big cheap house to work becomes a viable option if big houses with big backyard is your thing. It is a matter of taste more than anything else.
There are a lot of nice thing about living in western Europe, but cheaper cost of living really isn't one of them.
The market has to be bigger than your mom for the service to really work. The fun thing about digital distribution is that that is not actually true. Me and my mom (and maybe a few more) is a big enough market. Rhapsody doesn't lose anything by offering up the service. Niche services are completely viable when the cost to roll out the niche service is small. So long as the service is making money, why not include it?
Really, most people would take $15 a month and buy a CD, but no one is really spending that kind of money and that's why these services continue to fail. These services don't "continue to fail". Virgin is the first such service that I know of that failed due to financial hardship. My understanding that while Napster is taking it in the shorts, Rhapsody is doing very well for itself cleaning up the not-iPod market. They don't rely on a subscription model, they just offer it up. Instead of blindly assuming that everyone wants exactly the same thing, they offer up pay-per-download that makes some people happy, and subscriptions that make others happy. Instead of taking one group or the other, they take both. The only good reason to avoid snagging both markets is if the company in question has a captive audience and thinks they can make more with a pay-per-download style (that would be Apple I am talking about).
The music industry would be very happy indeed if they could convince people to spend ten times what they currently do, give them nothing better than broadcast radio and keep them hooked into it with restrictions that hork their computer and music at the same time. Broadcast radio in your area must be very remarkable because never in my entire life has my radio played exactly (or any) of what I want to here without commercials when I want to hear it. Where I live, broadcast radio consists of a handful of shitty stations playing either pop shit out in the assembly line of the music industry. I am pretty sure with my music subscription I listen to any song by any artist whenever I want. I am pretty sure radio doesn't do that.
Fee services are greedy and won't work. According to this BBC story, people spend about $25/year on music. Plans that ask for this amount per month or multiples of it per year are doomed to fail. Great, and the average person has one testicle, half a penis, and one tit. I suggest you avoid a career in swimsuit design.
The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience. If you are the type that would pay $15 / month for access to nearly every single song ever recorded and don't give two shits if you 'own' it or not, subscription services work fine. People who pick subscriptions view music the same way they view the Internet. They want it there, they want access to it all the time, and if one day their service goes under they just go out and get another one. Sure, all your music is 'gone'... except for the fact that you can merrily go and redownload anything your cared about in a day or two's time with a new service. If you are the type of music listener that goes through piles of artists each month and like to listen to anything that might catch your fancy, subscription services are a steal.
If on the other hand you are the type who has a narrow focus in music, like just a few artists, listen to the same albums over and over, listen to music rarely, or get your rocks off collecting things, than clearly a subscription plan is not for you. Most of the services that offer music subscription services offer both models for the very reason that while the average human has one testicle and one fully developed breast, the average human is not who you are trying to sell to. It makes perfect sense to sell single songs and albums to the type who get off on that sort of thing, and to sell subscription plans to those who get off on that.
For me personally, the subscription works very well. My interest in music is far too casual to justify researching music before I buy it. My tastes wander too quickly, and they are far too fickle. I don't often listen to musicians more than a few times, and I enjoy the exploration of different genera and artists far more than I enjoy listening to a few tried and trued favorites. For me, a music subscription works wonderfully. I get full access to any song I could want to listen to, and I nothing about downloading something and listening to it because I have already paid a flat rate.
If the only option out there was iTunes style pay-per-download, I probably would not bother buying music at all. I might be the minority, but Rhapsody is getting my buck while iTunes isn't simply because they offer it and iTunes doesn't.
The DRM issue is a whole different can of worms. Access controls on subscription services make sense. Access controls that can be killed for things you pay a buck per pop for is just downright stupid. You are a moron if you pay for DRMed single shot music. The whole point of BUYING the music instead of just subscribing to it is the assurance that your collection will always be there.
Personally, I think you take your chances when you buy DRMed music with the expectation of keeping it forever. iTunes, Virgin, Rhapsody... whoever, if they DRM the music, than they ultimately have control of that music. If you are paying for control of that music, you damn well should make sure you actually have it.
If as soon as they cut the mike and the police started to take him away he had simply turned and left, he would not have been arrested. The police started to escort him away, and instead of going quietly and getting thrown to the curb for acting like an ass hat despite multiple attempts to get him to please respect the hundred other people there, he decided that it would be a good idea to start fighting the police. Hell, if he had just calmly stepped down he probably could have talked the police into letting him stay. Instead he went from ranting even after the mike was dead to screaming and fighting police. Not surprisingly, he was ejected.
Look, if you are on private property, act like an ass, and police come to escort you away, just quietly walk out. You won't be arrested, they will just throw you to curb. Start yelling and fighting with the police and you just turned a polite escort out the door into trespassing and immediately move onto resisting arrest.
The police should not have zapped the guy, and the police should get in trouble for it. That said, zapping this ass hole was the only injustice committed. If you go to a public forum and are asked to please respect the rules of the forum, just do it. There are a few hundred other people who came too who are also respecting the rules. If everyone had acted like this ass hole, the forum would have been 2 hours of hyperventilating nut jobs ranting, and a few minutes of a nearly president sitting there saying nothing. Go, respect the rules, or expect to get ejected so that people who came to listen can actually listen. Want to rant like a fucking idiot? Sit on the sidewalk and yell at people as they come out of the building. You won't get arrested... then again, most people will happily walk on past instead of being held captive in their seats wishing to god you would just shut the fuck up so that Kerry could talk.
This is not a speech issue. You can legally be tossed to the curb from private property in the US for pretty much whatever reasons the property owner decides. In this case, the school had set up a forum and asked people to please keep their damn questions short. Having been to many such forums, I appreciate the fact that they cut his mike. Nothing is more irritating then coming to listen to someone speak, only to have some ass hole give a 5 minute speech before finally asking a question.
They first asked him to please ask a question. He refused. They waited. They again requested he ask a question and sit down. They waited. He refused. They then finally cut the mike to give him a hint. They asked him to please step down and let Kerry answer. At this point he again refused. Being on private property, they started to remove him with not intentions of arresting him. At this point, he started to resisted being ejected... and that is the point where he committed a crime. You can't resist being removed from private property. Once you do, you are trespassing. Even then, I imagine they probably would not have bothered to go any further then throw him to the curb, but he CONTINUED to resist until they had half a dozen offers trying to hold the asshole down.
Everything up until this point is 100% a-okay. You can legally eject people from private property for acting like an ass hat, and you can arrest them if they continue to act like an ass hate and not leave. The only questionable thing in the entire incident is the tazering. He probably should not have been tazered because it was an escalation of force that was probably not needed. For that, this incident should certainly be looked into. Everything other than the tazering though is fine. Act like a shit head in a public forum on private property, refuse multiple requests to respect the forum, refuse to leave when asked, resist when forcibly removed, well, a pair of handcuffs and a slap on the wrist from a judge is what you win.
Moral of the story? Police; don't zap people unless it is needed. Lunatics ranting in a public forum; respect the rules of the forum and don't act like a shit head.
True, but I hardly believe that the framers of the constitution envisioned that 'limited use' would get interpreted as 120 years of copyright protection for a piece of work that is made by an anonymous author. That is right, an AC post is automatically copyrighted in the US for 120 years. You can not legally reprint an AC's post from Slashdot made today until the year 2127. It is even worse if I posted something today and than died 80 years from now. In that case, my Slashdot rantings would be under copyright until the year 2157. The fucking singularity could have been done and over with for a hundred years, and my random posts on Slashdot would still be automatically copyrighted.
Further, even if you could some how argue with a straight face 'limited time' meant "as long as congress keeps kicking the date out... which will be forever", that still ignores the whole "to promote the useful arts". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that protecting an ACs post on Slashdot for 120 fucking years is not "promoting the useful arts". I really doubt that anyone creating copyrighted material would have been disuaded from producing that content if they had learned that the copyright would only last for 30 years, instead of 70 years AFTER that are dead and buried in the ground. If you need 70 years after you are dead to collect your due on your copyrighted material, I have a feeling it probably is not "useful art".
I don't disagree with anything you are saying, but the chance to fix the problem by changing what it means to retire is already well out of hand. The US might still be on the tipping point, but barring massive social change "old Europe" is already in trouble. The problem comes that when you have a democracy, majority (or something roughly like that) wins. It is pretty rare except under extreme duress that the majority will vote itself harm. Between people who would be harming themselves, people who see their retirement just around the corner, and people who are sympathetic to retired people, you have a majority or near majority that is not going to vote for the long term. Instead, these groups will band together to vote to take more away from the working folks to support the ever increasing cost of supporting the non-working crowd.
True, it would be wise in long term interest of the country to adopt a more rational view which would reexamine retirement and exactly how much the retiree should be saving themselves and how much of the tab working folks will have to pick up. That said, how often do voting population bother to really think through deep socio-economic questions, much less vote long term after having pondered them?
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; I just want to point out since someone pulled up the original text, the FOR LIMITED TIMES piece. Unless you consider 20 years + however long Micky Mouse was copyrighted, that whole FOR A LIMITED TIME has been thrown from a sky scrapper, pissed on, eaten by a cow, which was than eaten by a human, shit out into on airplane bathroom on the way to china, sucked from the airplane, dumped into a Chinese sewer, which emptied directly into a highly polluted river without being processed, which was drunk by a human, pissed back into the polluted river, which was drank by a fish, which concentrated the bullshit in its fat, and was again eaten by a human, and subsequently shit out again.
I guess what I am trying to say is that if the constitution was the guide, the current copyright laws would be flushed down the toilet, into the sewer, through a drain pipe, out into a lake, drunk by a moose....
There is a world of difference between being told that you can spend X dollars on charity, and deciding without consulting corporate HQ that you are going to pick out a class of customers and refuse to sell to them.
Look, the idea could have been genius. His policy might have resulted in increased sales because it made parents feel empowered and more likely to go buy from there. That still doesn't change the fact that unless you own the company, it isn't your place to make such a sweeping policy decisions as kicking out a portion of your shoppers because their grades suck.
This is more an issue of responsibility and trust than it is bad policy (which it probably also is). Even if his policy had resulted in increased local sales, it is still the sort of thing that you really need to check back with HQ about. There could very well be unintended consequences. Notably, some people could look at what he is doing and imply link between bad grades and video games. His store could be used as the poster child for some retarded crusading politician looking for a way to regulate on free speech (Romney and Hillary in particular have an ugly record in free speech). There are a whole host of things that made this a really bad idea. If he wanted to float the idea to corporate and take responsibility for a drop in sales, he would be in the clear. Deciding unilaterally to refuse to serve to certain customers? That will get you fired in just about any store, and rightfully so.
Negative and zero population growth have their own problems. If you have a growing population, that means that the number of working people is on the rise, while the number of non-workers rises, but not as fast. You end up with some ration of working people to non-working people. This is a very important ratio, especially as you move further down the path of strong social programs. If you have zero or negative population growth, you end up with a situation where the non-working population (mostly due to retirement) starts to rise in comparison to the working population. If you need to pay for the non-working people, either through company pensions, social security, or another social programs, that means you shifter a heavier and heavier burden onto the non-working population. To compound this problem, in industrialized nations life expectancy tends to go up. So, not only is the working population not growing any faster, but the non-working population is sticking around longer and growing bigger because people are not dying as fast.
Parts of Europe faces this probably in a pretty dramatic way. Japan faces this problem in an extremely dramatic fashion because not only do they have low fertility rates, but they have extremely low immigration rates. The US is in a slightly better position because its fertility rates, while low, are still positive, and the US has relatively high levels of immigration. This is a problem for all developed nations though. I am not saying that the situation is untenable, but it is going to start becoming extremely painful as the working to non-working ration starts to climb. For democracies, this is an almost irresistible problem. As the population of non-workers grows, they gain more political power and have a greater ability to vote themselves greater transfer of payments from the workers. The only good solution for the workers (short of leaving the country) is to constantly increase their productivity so that they can support the grown population of non-workers without feeling great decreases in their own standard of living.
Simply put, low population growth is not a magic bullet. For developed nations, low population growth is far more a problem than high population growth. For the developing world, the high population growth rates are damning simply because if their economy is not growing to keep up, they will find themselves more and more impoverished. The one advantage that the developed world has when it comes to dealing with their population problem (low population growth) is that they can always open up the gates on immigration a little bit more and increase their working population that way. It isn't a perfect solution, but it beats living in a world where you have a massive non-working population being supported by a handful of workers shelling out vast chunks of wages in taxes to support them.
I have a better idea. How about you just stop buying Apple products? These days, I would take MS over Apple any day of the week. Even better, I can pick neither one of them and rest easy at night. Going to the Apple world is like entering someone's personal fiefdom. Sure, Apple might not control the entire market, but once you step into the Apple world they control just about every single aspect of that world. If you want a single company in control of all of your electronics, go with Apple and get your iBook, iPhone, iTunes, and iPod. Your products will certainly play nice with each other, even if they don't play nice with anyone else. If nothing else, you will easily fall into the shiny white plastic aesthetic of Apple and find that Apple marketers will work tirelessly to make you feel cool for doing it. That said, I feel that I can survive without a team of marketers making sure that my gadgets make me feel cool.
I'll take the chaos and diversity of the city over Apple's quiet little aesthetically pleasing, shiny white, gated suburban community.
Re:Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
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· Score: 1
There are countless examples of where someone thought they were perfectly able to drive after drinking, only to kill a family of three after finding out that they could NOT drive.
Unhealthy food also kill people, and in far greater quantity than drunk drivers. Not every single possible avenue for the defense of human lives is worth defending. Throwing people in jail for life if they break the speed limit and executing anyone caught drinking and driving would also result in safer roads. That doesn't mean that it is a wise policy.
Stuffing a multi-hundred dollar alcohol detector into a car isn't a worthwhile policy either. Drunks will still drive, they will just wear gloves so the steering wheel can't detect the alcohol in their sweat. On the other hand, people who have never driven even slightly tipsy in their entire life (that would be me) get to throw a few extra hundred dollars into their car AND add one more pain in the ass system to break and cripple my car.
We don't need a nanny state that tells you what to eat, when to sleep, where to work, and how to live every single second of your life ensuring that you don't possibly hurt yourself. Thankfully, people like you are still in the minority in the US. That said, I hear that Britain is working on your nanny state utopia.
Pirates are not fixing broken products. You are justifying the illegal behavior. If people did not pirate, then copy protection would not have to be so annoying, and it would not be as experimental and prone to bugs. Copy Protection only exists to attempt to curtail illegal behavior.
Certainly pirates to pirate. I never stated otherwise. That said, the utility that a pirate serve to ME(a person who always buys his software legally) is that they do indeed fix broken products. When anti-pirating functions impair the users ability to use software, the pirate generally has the fix. Sure, copy protection would not be so annoying if there were no pirates, but then again, I wouldn't need to use pirate cracks to fix software that I bought if copy protection wasn't so damn annoying, would I?
Tell me, in your world, what do you do when you lose a CD key? Throw out the CD? When you buy a product like Morrowind with copy protection that makes the game literally unplayable, what do you do, smile and shrug it off? When Sony installs a root kit onto your computer when you put their CD into your CD drive, do you just throw your hands up an accept them tampering with your OS and opening up vulnerabilities to virus?
Copy Protection only exists to attempt to curtail illegal behavior. Let's use another analogy. Why have Police?
Your analogy is an excellent one, you just don't follow it to its logical conclusion. If the the goal is 'prevent illegal' behavior, than the solution is simple. Make the punishment for any crime broken execution, give police unlimited ability to search without warrant, and abolish constitutional protections. You will have a society without illegal acts taking place. It is no place I would want to live, but you will certainly achieve your utopia where no one commits crimes.
The truth is that police ARE constrained in what they can and cannot do. They are constrained because they are not supposed to be a burden on society. They are constrained because there is a very strong presumption of innocence. We do not seek to prevent illegal actions by any and all means. Instead, we balance law and order with liberty.
Software should be much the same. Copy protection should recognize the reality that there WILL be piracy. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop this. The only thing copy protection can do is prevent casual piracy. Software copy protection should be the equivalent of a shitty lock on a plywood door. It should be just enough to remind the user that piracy is a no-no and make it take a small amount of effort to break it, but it shouldn't so intrusive (as copy protection often can be) that
Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
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Insert car analogies here I would not buy a car that won't start if a seatbelt is not engaged or it makes me take a fucking breathalyzer test. Why? Because I don't need my damn car to decide if I can drive or not. I am very well capable of doing this on my own. If I want to drive my car from my front yard to the back yard without a seat belt on, I should be able to. If I want to swish my mouth with mouthwash before I drive my car, I damn well have the right to. Further, you better believe that I would be supremely pissed off if either one of these 'features' malfunctioned and left me with a car that refuses to start. People who want to get around the protections almost certainly will with a minimal amount of effort. Like most 'protection' schemes, it is the people who would don't need the protecting who suffer......which reminds me of the infamous Morrowind copyright protection. This copyright was so painfully crippling that it brought to top of the line computers to their knees. For a solid week after release you could literally only play Morrowind if you cracked it. Granted, they finally came to their senses and released a patch to fix (turn off) the copy protection, but that is exactly the sort of issue that crops up with intrusive copy protection.
What if you lost your serials to the Battlefield 1942 install discs? Then, this product you purchased will no longer install. Gee. You spent money on a product that now decides you cannot play it, because you fail to jump through the proper hoop. If you want to be able to uninstall and reinstall, you have to keep track of more than just game discs. It's a restriction, and not one that will lift a few months down the road. You just happen to accept that restriction. No, sadly enough, I go out and find a CD key off the Internet. I go to the pirates because they are the only one willing to fix the broken product. I always feel my blood pressure rise a little when I have to sift through Warez pr0n sites to find the damn code to activate a product that I own.
These anti-piracy measures only cripple ligament users. Cracks crack EVERYTHING. The life of piracy protection on a piece of software measures its existence in hours. In the end, the pirates pirate what they will without being slowed down in the slightest by the copyright protection. In the end, consumers who actually pay for the product get the shit end of the stick. They either suffer massive system slows downs like in Morrowind, spyware and system vulnerabilities like with Sony's CD protections, or simply get an inert hunk of data should they end loosing their CD key... all the while, pirates play perfectly functional versions of what consumers bought. The only people who can't break the copy protection are the poor suckers who are least likely to violate it.
First, the DoJ just said that it was legal to offer non-neutral services. It said that it is legal because it is. You can be pissed off at the DoJ for saying it, but not saying it wouldn't make it any less true. The legislator is responsible for passing net neutrality laws, not the DoJ. The DoJ couldn't "mandate" net neutrality even if they wanted to.
Second, the whole 'net neutrality' debate is descended into the heights of ideological idiocracy. I would swear listening to the two sides that taking a step in one direction or the other will lead to all good thing or all evil.
The simple truth is that there are good reasons to have 'net neutrality', and good reasons why it sucks. Giving bandwidth owners the ability to delay certain packs comes with both consequences and rewards. Throttling Bit Torrent is very good for some people, and very bad for others. So how about we quit this mindless ideological spouting and talk about the real costs and benefits?
God forbid, if we stepped back from ideological rhetoric we might even find a solution that is not one extreme or another and that balances bandwidth providers fear of filling up their series of tubes (the internet is not a dump truck!) with consumer fears that AT&T is going to kill VOIP without telling anyone.
I wont bother with stating my political beliefs to avoid the left/right flame war, but sufficient to say I loath both democrats and republicans. I don't have minor issues with the candidates; I have large ideological divides with all of them. I am pretty sure I am not alone.
What do I do election day? I vote. I vote because not voting doesn't separate you from the lazy bastard with no opinion who can't part with an hour of his time once every 2 years. Such people are not worthwhile for politicians to court and you don't want to be associated with them. Instead of voting for someone you loath just slightly less then the alternative, I suggest simply voting no. Walk into the polling station and in the blank field, write in "none of the above" and check it. Is "none of the above" going to win? Probably not. You can even simply hand in a blank ballot. If more people were to do this, than there would start to be noticeable discrepancies between the number of people who voted, and the number of people who voted for one of the two choices. Make this discrepancy large enough, and you might start turning heads. Politicians would see groups of people who are pissed, but not so apathetic that they won't vote.
Unless you live in a state that is so close that it is too close to call, your vote for 'anyone but that other guy' isn't going to do any good. Spend your vote sending a message, not padding or not even denting Hillary's lead in Connecticut or Julian's lead in Texas. If the electoral point in your state is already a foregone conclusion, spend your vote to voice your displeasure. A 4% 'none of the above vote' would mean a hell of a lot more than one candidate already destine to win by a 10% marine gaining or losing that 5%.
Mmm, what is that smell? Smells like a dumb reactionary that believes everything he reads on the internet, even when it doesn't even begin to cite a source. If you believe uncited unexplained claims, then you are just acting like a dumb sucker. I am pretty sure nowhere in any states law does it say, "You can't sell low emission cars 'cause the corporations, big oil, Iraq, Haliburton, and George Bush 666 Ahahaha!".
This discussion has over 300 posts and yet no one has found a single law to explain that stupid and statement in the article that is made without even a shred of citation. When a few thousand Slashdotters can't FTFL (find the fucking law), it probably doesn't exist and this is just a case of shitty/sensational/biased journalism.
Far more likely? California provides some sort of subsidy or mandate for selling the cars and other states don't. The brain dead journalist in question probably couldn't wrap his small mind around the difference between a subsidy in California, and a law BANNING ALL GREEN CARS IN THE US EXCEPT CALIFORNIA!!1!!!!111!
Please, read the crap you dredge off the internet with a critical eye instead of gobbling up every piece of sensationalist crap you run across.
Perhaps I have missed it, but I have yet to see a single source (other then a bad article which fails to cite its own source) that the 'it is illegal to sell this car outside of CA' statement is true. Personally, I call bullshit. Either the car is not allowed to be sold because it gets its green status by cutting some regulatory corner that makes it a hazard, or the entire claim is pure and unadulterated bullshit.
The issue is that when they Wright brothers made their first airplane, a POS it was, but it was a CHEAP. The made the airplane on a shoe string budget. It doesn't take a rocket scientsit (ha ha) to figure out that if you can build something workable cheaply, in a few years you can probably build something better or cheaper still. Airplanes got better. Now compare this to rockets. Space capable rockets are frigging expensive. There is work to get it cheaper, but no two brothers are going to build a space shuttle in thier backyard.
As far as land grabs on Mars, think about what you are saying. If you were a government and decided for some reason you desperatly needed land, would you A) spend trillions of dollars getting a few dozen people to Mars where they can suck vacuum and live a few months and a few trillion dollars away from the next resupply or B) simply build a sea colony on that 2/3 of the world that no one has touched. The oceans have barely been minded and they could hold the entire population of the world without breaking a sweat. Best of all, if your sea colony breaks or you simply want to go see your parents for Chirstmas, you just jump in a boat/sub/airplane and get there in a few hours just a few hundred dollars shorter.
If we are so not desperate for minerals and 'land' that we are not willing to exploit that big blue hunk of exploited territory that covers over 2/3 of the Earth, it is simply insane to think that we are going to blow a few trillion dollars throwing a few dozen people to a lifeless vacuum world months and a few trillion dollars away from sending or recieving anything of value.
When the ocean has been fully exploited, THEN you might have an argument for colonizing other hunks of rock. Until then, talk of colonizing Mars is flatly ignoring reality.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't justify the murder, but hell, people die every day. Thousands of people will die in the time it takes to read this post. Of those thousands of people that are moments away from dying, I would say it is a safe bet that at least a few of them are truly wonderful and good people and that the world will be a worse place for their leaving it... and chances are you won't give two shits about a single one of them.
Now, some ass hole spammer is dead. Is it sad? Eh, it is sad in the way that anyone dying is sad, and well, people dying is not that sad. We manage to make it through each day cheerfully despite the massive amounts of death going on the world. So one guy who has made a name for himself by being a complete asshole is dead. It is hard to drum up any sort of negative feelings when plenty of completely good humans dropped dead within hours of his doing so and most people didn't shed a tear for them either.
For better or for worse, this is entirely true. The only people who get onto juries are people who want to be on a jury... or are too stupid to escape. It is pretty easy to simply give lawyers the 'wrong' answer when they question you for a jury pool. Hell, one off handed comment loud enough to be heard by a lawyer about the defendants sex/race/religion/haircut is more than enough to get yourself tossed with no repercussions.
I am pretty sure that you can ask your average Chinese factory worker who has gone from a protection economy that was literally starving him to death, or an Indian white collard worker who now lives something that would be considered middle class by American standards if they are 'winning', and they will say hell yes. India doesn't long for the 'good old days' of their protectionist economy that kept everyone equally poor. China sure as hell doesn't long for the glorious days of the people's revolution where over 20 million people died to starvation.
.2 cent widgets can't be done at $12 / hour. You really sing of a bright future. History has pretty well taught that nation that go down the protectionist rout see nothing be abject misery at worst, and a stalling of living standards at best.
So yes, you can rattle on 'the revolution, man'... or you could actually go visit one of these places and ask the people if they have gone from accepting that life will be miserable until they day they die early, or if they are now hopeful for a better future. God forbid Americans maybe slow down their rapid wealth creation as 2 billion other poor people get a tiny taste of the pie. Yeah, what we REALLY need is global trade tarrifs. That way, we can wall off those poor suckers in the developing world back into their shit hole, and watch as our own economy rapidly collapses under the realization that building
Yeah, Apple accidentally locked the phone so that they only work on AT&T. If someone unlocks the phone at Apple accidentally breaks the unlock again... well shit. It was an accident. Apple decided to offer an exclusive phone to a single carrier to get a cut of the cellphone bill profits, pure and simple. Apple didn't need AT&T's brand name to sell a phone... in fact, it is AT&T that needed Apple. They could have sold the phone as an open phone that could work with any carrier anywhere in the world. They instead decided to try and do everything they could to lock down the device, and than break any attempts to LEGALLY (DMCA makes an exception for cell phone unlocking) unlock the device.
Stop making excuses for it. AT&T is the devil and Apple happily made a deal with them to score some fat cash. They didn't have to, but they did. If you are okay with that, accept it, and stop making excuses for them. If you are not okay with that, do yourself a favor and don't buy an iPhone.
So, you can shake your fists all you want about how subscription is the devils doing and will never work... while I will merrily go indulge in a sudden urge for 90's ska and go download a few albums to listen to later.
The value of a subscription service really depends upon your musical tastes. If you are a genera hopper who likes to download everything and anything, listen to it a few times, and forget it, subscription services can not be beaten. I have 8000 songs sitting around in my library at the moment. Obviously, buying 8000 songs on iTunes is going to be FAR more expensive. Clearly, I didn't need to download that many. Many I downloaded, didn't like, and moved on. Other times, I download something, love it, and then went and download everything else I could think of like it.
If you view your music as a 'collection', then subscription services will leave you sour, especially if you are only looking for a handful of albums. If you view listening to music as thoughtless exploration, than a subscription service will leave you very satisfied.
I personally am the type to hear some 90's ska by accident somewhere, get nostalgic, and load a gig or two of ska onto my MP3 player for a couple of weeks before I move on to other things. I have tried blowing 10+ dollars on an album that I might or might like. I don't get my rocks off shopping around and trying to make a good purchasing decision. I like to gleefully run through the (digital) aisles throwing everything into my cart and leave without paying (well, minus that monthly fee of course). If that sounds like fun, then subscriptions are the way to go.
Lets put it this way; if you liked Napster of ye ol' yesterday because it was a chance to download music that you have always liked, subscription might not work for you. If you liked ye Napster of ol' because for the first time you got to listen to piles of music you had never heard before, subscription will probably be very satisfying. If you liked Napster because it was free, well, there is always bittorrent.
At least in the case of Monster.com, the only thing taken was the stuff you could have gotten off anyone's resume. Sure, that can help a phishing scam, but it isn't the end of the world. This is far far bigger. Having credit card numbers stolen is a very big deal. If those 1200 posted were all that was stolen, then this will just be a minor inconvenience. E-bay will contact everyone and get those numbers promptly canceled. If on the other hand the 1200 posted numbers were just a display and proof that the hack had happened and that there were more stolen, then there is a very serious problem.
Even as it stands, unless E-bay can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that only those posted were the ones stolen, anyone credit card number that e-bay has should be held as suspect for potentially having been stolen. Ebay has really dropped the ball. It will be interesting to see how they scramble to deal with this.
The real issues with health care in the US comes from people who are working either low end positions (Walmart, McDonalds, etc.) or working contract positions. These are the poor SOBs who have a hard time with healthcare. You can still buy healthcare outside of an employer, but it tends to be costly, you take a tax hit that people getting it through the employer don't take, and, well, it is voluntary. For better or for worse, even people that could afford healthcare take a look at the cost, consider their risk of actually needing it, and skip out. Plus, here in the states, most people have to commute a really long way by car to get to their jobs, whereas in Europe the distances travelled by car for daily commute probably average less because (1) there just isn't as much sprawl, and (2) there's better public transit. The cost of owning, maintaining, and refueling a car adds up. Most people in the US choose to commute a long distance by car. It isn't like the US has some horrible housing and renting crisis that makes it so that you can't live right next to your job. Instead, what you get are a lot of people who want a big backyard instead of a smaller backyard or apartment. Throw on top of that nearly tax free (and thus cheap) gas prices, and commuting from your big cheap house to work becomes a viable option if big houses with big backyard is your thing. It is a matter of taste more than anything else.
There are a lot of nice thing about living in western Europe, but cheaper cost of living really isn't one of them.
The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience. If you are the type that would pay $15 / month for access to nearly every single song ever recorded and don't give two shits if you 'own' it or not, subscription services work fine. People who pick subscriptions view music the same way they view the Internet. They want it there, they want access to it all the time, and if one day their service goes under they just go out and get another one. Sure, all your music is 'gone'... except for the fact that you can merrily go and redownload anything your cared about in a day or two's time with a new service. If you are the type of music listener that goes through piles of artists each month and like to listen to anything that might catch your fancy, subscription services are a steal.
If on the other hand you are the type who has a narrow focus in music, like just a few artists, listen to the same albums over and over, listen to music rarely, or get your rocks off collecting things, than clearly a subscription plan is not for you. Most of the services that offer music subscription services offer both models for the very reason that while the average human has one testicle and one fully developed breast, the average human is not who you are trying to sell to. It makes perfect sense to sell single songs and albums to the type who get off on that sort of thing, and to sell subscription plans to those who get off on that.
For me personally, the subscription works very well. My interest in music is far too casual to justify researching music before I buy it. My tastes wander too quickly, and they are far too fickle. I don't often listen to musicians more than a few times, and I enjoy the exploration of different genera and artists far more than I enjoy listening to a few tried and trued favorites. For me, a music subscription works wonderfully. I get full access to any song I could want to listen to, and I nothing about downloading something and listening to it because I have already paid a flat rate.
If the only option out there was iTunes style pay-per-download, I probably would not bother buying music at all. I might be the minority, but Rhapsody is getting my buck while iTunes isn't simply because they offer it and iTunes doesn't.
The DRM issue is a whole different can of worms. Access controls on subscription services make sense. Access controls that can be killed for things you pay a buck per pop for is just downright stupid. You are a moron if you pay for DRMed single shot music. The whole point of BUYING the music instead of just subscribing to it is the assurance that your collection will always be there.
Personally, I think you take your chances when you buy DRMed music with the expectation of keeping it forever. iTunes, Virgin, Rhapsody... whoever, if they DRM the music, than they ultimately have control of that music. If you are paying for control of that music, you damn well should make sure you actually have it.
If as soon as they cut the mike and the police started to take him away he had simply turned and left, he would not have been arrested. The police started to escort him away, and instead of going quietly and getting thrown to the curb for acting like an ass hat despite multiple attempts to get him to please respect the hundred other people there, he decided that it would be a good idea to start fighting the police. Hell, if he had just calmly stepped down he probably could have talked the police into letting him stay. Instead he went from ranting even after the mike was dead to screaming and fighting police. Not surprisingly, he was ejected.
Look, if you are on private property, act like an ass, and police come to escort you away, just quietly walk out. You won't be arrested, they will just throw you to curb. Start yelling and fighting with the police and you just turned a polite escort out the door into trespassing and immediately move onto resisting arrest.
The police should not have zapped the guy, and the police should get in trouble for it. That said, zapping this ass hole was the only injustice committed. If you go to a public forum and are asked to please respect the rules of the forum, just do it. There are a few hundred other people who came too who are also respecting the rules. If everyone had acted like this ass hole, the forum would have been 2 hours of hyperventilating nut jobs ranting, and a few minutes of a nearly president sitting there saying nothing. Go, respect the rules, or expect to get ejected so that people who came to listen can actually listen. Want to rant like a fucking idiot? Sit on the sidewalk and yell at people as they come out of the building. You won't get arrested... then again, most people will happily walk on past instead of being held captive in their seats wishing to god you would just shut the fuck up so that Kerry could talk.
This is not a speech issue. You can legally be tossed to the curb from private property in the US for pretty much whatever reasons the property owner decides. In this case, the school had set up a forum and asked people to please keep their damn questions short. Having been to many such forums, I appreciate the fact that they cut his mike. Nothing is more irritating then coming to listen to someone speak, only to have some ass hole give a 5 minute speech before finally asking a question.
They first asked him to please ask a question. He refused. They waited. They again requested he ask a question and sit down. They waited. He refused. They then finally cut the mike to give him a hint. They asked him to please step down and let Kerry answer. At this point he again refused. Being on private property, they started to remove him with not intentions of arresting him. At this point, he started to resisted being ejected... and that is the point where he committed a crime. You can't resist being removed from private property. Once you do, you are trespassing. Even then, I imagine they probably would not have bothered to go any further then throw him to the curb, but he CONTINUED to resist until they had half a dozen offers trying to hold the asshole down.
Everything up until this point is 100% a-okay. You can legally eject people from private property for acting like an ass hat, and you can arrest them if they continue to act like an ass hate and not leave. The only questionable thing in the entire incident is the tazering. He probably should not have been tazered because it was an escalation of force that was probably not needed. For that, this incident should certainly be looked into. Everything other than the tazering though is fine. Act like a shit head in a public forum on private property, refuse multiple requests to respect the forum, refuse to leave when asked, resist when forcibly removed, well, a pair of handcuffs and a slap on the wrist from a judge is what you win.
Moral of the story? Police; don't zap people unless it is needed. Lunatics ranting in a public forum; respect the rules of the forum and don't act like a shit head.
True, but I hardly believe that the framers of the constitution envisioned that 'limited use' would get interpreted as 120 years of copyright protection for a piece of work that is made by an anonymous author. That is right, an AC post is automatically copyrighted in the US for 120 years. You can not legally reprint an AC's post from Slashdot made today until the year 2127. It is even worse if I posted something today and than died 80 years from now. In that case, my Slashdot rantings would be under copyright until the year 2157. The fucking singularity could have been done and over with for a hundred years, and my random posts on Slashdot would still be automatically copyrighted.
Further, even if you could some how argue with a straight face 'limited time' meant "as long as congress keeps kicking the date out... which will be forever", that still ignores the whole "to promote the useful arts". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that protecting an ACs post on Slashdot for 120 fucking years is not "promoting the useful arts". I really doubt that anyone creating copyrighted material would have been disuaded from producing that content if they had learned that the copyright would only last for 30 years, instead of 70 years AFTER that are dead and buried in the ground. If you need 70 years after you are dead to collect your due on your copyrighted material, I have a feeling it probably is not "useful art".
I don't disagree with anything you are saying, but the chance to fix the problem by changing what it means to retire is already well out of hand. The US might still be on the tipping point, but barring massive social change "old Europe" is already in trouble. The problem comes that when you have a democracy, majority (or something roughly like that) wins. It is pretty rare except under extreme duress that the majority will vote itself harm. Between people who would be harming themselves, people who see their retirement just around the corner, and people who are sympathetic to retired people, you have a majority or near majority that is not going to vote for the long term. Instead, these groups will band together to vote to take more away from the working folks to support the ever increasing cost of supporting the non-working crowd.
True, it would be wise in long term interest of the country to adopt a more rational view which would reexamine retirement and exactly how much the retiree should be saving themselves and how much of the tab working folks will have to pick up. That said, how often do voting population bother to really think through deep socio-economic questions, much less vote long term after having pondered them?
I guess what I am trying to say is that if the constitution was the guide, the current copyright laws would be flushed down the toilet, into the sewer, through a drain pipe, out into a lake, drunk by a moose....
There is a world of difference between being told that you can spend X dollars on charity, and deciding without consulting corporate HQ that you are going to pick out a class of customers and refuse to sell to them.
Look, the idea could have been genius. His policy might have resulted in increased sales because it made parents feel empowered and more likely to go buy from there. That still doesn't change the fact that unless you own the company, it isn't your place to make such a sweeping policy decisions as kicking out a portion of your shoppers because their grades suck.
This is more an issue of responsibility and trust than it is bad policy (which it probably also is). Even if his policy had resulted in increased local sales, it is still the sort of thing that you really need to check back with HQ about. There could very well be unintended consequences. Notably, some people could look at what he is doing and imply link between bad grades and video games. His store could be used as the poster child for some retarded crusading politician looking for a way to regulate on free speech (Romney and Hillary in particular have an ugly record in free speech). There are a whole host of things that made this a really bad idea. If he wanted to float the idea to corporate and take responsibility for a drop in sales, he would be in the clear. Deciding unilaterally to refuse to serve to certain customers? That will get you fired in just about any store, and rightfully so.
Negative and zero population growth have their own problems. If you have a growing population, that means that the number of working people is on the rise, while the number of non-workers rises, but not as fast. You end up with some ration of working people to non-working people. This is a very important ratio, especially as you move further down the path of strong social programs. If you have zero or negative population growth, you end up with a situation where the non-working population (mostly due to retirement) starts to rise in comparison to the working population. If you need to pay for the non-working people, either through company pensions, social security, or another social programs, that means you shifter a heavier and heavier burden onto the non-working population. To compound this problem, in industrialized nations life expectancy tends to go up. So, not only is the working population not growing any faster, but the non-working population is sticking around longer and growing bigger because people are not dying as fast.
Parts of Europe faces this probably in a pretty dramatic way. Japan faces this problem in an extremely dramatic fashion because not only do they have low fertility rates, but they have extremely low immigration rates. The US is in a slightly better position because its fertility rates, while low, are still positive, and the US has relatively high levels of immigration. This is a problem for all developed nations though. I am not saying that the situation is untenable, but it is going to start becoming extremely painful as the working to non-working ration starts to climb. For democracies, this is an almost irresistible problem. As the population of non-workers grows, they gain more political power and have a greater ability to vote themselves greater transfer of payments from the workers. The only good solution for the workers (short of leaving the country) is to constantly increase their productivity so that they can support the grown population of non-workers without feeling great decreases in their own standard of living.
Simply put, low population growth is not a magic bullet. For developed nations, low population growth is far more a problem than high population growth. For the developing world, the high population growth rates are damning simply because if their economy is not growing to keep up, they will find themselves more and more impoverished. The one advantage that the developed world has when it comes to dealing with their population problem (low population growth) is that they can always open up the gates on immigration a little bit more and increase their working population that way. It isn't a perfect solution, but it beats living in a world where you have a massive non-working population being supported by a handful of workers shelling out vast chunks of wages in taxes to support them.
I have a better idea. How about you just stop buying Apple products? These days, I would take MS over Apple any day of the week. Even better, I can pick neither one of them and rest easy at night. Going to the Apple world is like entering someone's personal fiefdom. Sure, Apple might not control the entire market, but once you step into the Apple world they control just about every single aspect of that world. If you want a single company in control of all of your electronics, go with Apple and get your iBook, iPhone, iTunes, and iPod. Your products will certainly play nice with each other, even if they don't play nice with anyone else. If nothing else, you will easily fall into the shiny white plastic aesthetic of Apple and find that Apple marketers will work tirelessly to make you feel cool for doing it. That said, I feel that I can survive without a team of marketers making sure that my gadgets make me feel cool.
I'll take the chaos and diversity of the city over Apple's quiet little aesthetically pleasing, shiny white, gated suburban community.
There are countless examples of where someone thought they were perfectly able to drive after drinking, only to kill a family of three after finding out that they could NOT drive.
Unhealthy food also kill people, and in far greater quantity than drunk drivers. Not every single possible avenue for the defense of human lives is worth defending. Throwing people in jail for life if they break the speed limit and executing anyone caught drinking and driving would also result in safer roads. That doesn't mean that it is a wise policy.
Stuffing a multi-hundred dollar alcohol detector into a car isn't a worthwhile policy either. Drunks will still drive, they will just wear gloves so the steering wheel can't detect the alcohol in their sweat. On the other hand, people who have never driven even slightly tipsy in their entire life (that would be me) get to throw a few extra hundred dollars into their car AND add one more pain in the ass system to break and cripple my car.
We don't need a nanny state that tells you what to eat, when to sleep, where to work, and how to live every single second of your life ensuring that you don't possibly hurt yourself. Thankfully, people like you are still in the minority in the US. That said, I hear that Britain is working on your nanny state utopia.
Pirates are not fixing broken products. You are justifying the illegal behavior. If people did not pirate, then copy protection would not have to be so annoying, and it would not be as experimental and prone to bugs. Copy Protection only exists to attempt to curtail illegal behavior.
Certainly pirates to pirate. I never stated otherwise. That said, the utility that a pirate serve to ME(a person who always buys his software legally) is that they do indeed fix broken products. When anti-pirating functions impair the users ability to use software, the pirate generally has the fix. Sure, copy protection would not be so annoying if there were no pirates, but then again, I wouldn't need to use pirate cracks to fix software that I bought if copy protection wasn't so damn annoying, would I?
Tell me, in your world, what do you do when you lose a CD key? Throw out the CD? When you buy a product like Morrowind with copy protection that makes the game literally unplayable, what do you do, smile and shrug it off? When Sony installs a root kit onto your computer when you put their CD into your CD drive, do you just throw your hands up an accept them tampering with your OS and opening up vulnerabilities to virus?
Copy Protection only exists to attempt to curtail illegal behavior. Let's use another analogy. Why have Police?
Your analogy is an excellent one, you just don't follow it to its logical conclusion. If the the goal is 'prevent illegal' behavior, than the solution is simple. Make the punishment for any crime broken execution, give police unlimited ability to search without warrant, and abolish constitutional protections. You will have a society without illegal acts taking place. It is no place I would want to live, but you will certainly achieve your utopia where no one commits crimes.
The truth is that police ARE constrained in what they can and cannot do. They are constrained because they are not supposed to be a burden on society. They are constrained because there is a very strong presumption of innocence. We do not seek to prevent illegal actions by any and all means. Instead, we balance law and order with liberty.
Software should be much the same. Copy protection should recognize the reality that there WILL be piracy. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop this. The only thing copy protection can do is prevent casual piracy. Software copy protection should be the equivalent of a shitty lock on a plywood door. It should be just enough to remind the user that piracy is a no-no and make it take a small amount of effort to break it, but it shouldn't so intrusive (as copy protection often can be) that
These anti-piracy measures only cripple ligament users. Cracks crack EVERYTHING. The life of piracy protection on a piece of software measures its existence in hours. In the end, the pirates pirate what they will without being slowed down in the slightest by the copyright protection. In the end, consumers who actually pay for the product get the shit end of the stick. They either suffer massive system slows downs like in Morrowind, spyware and system vulnerabilities like with Sony's CD protections, or simply get an inert hunk of data should they end loosing their CD key... all the while, pirates play perfectly functional versions of what consumers bought. The only people who can't break the copy protection are the poor suckers who are least likely to violate it.
First, the DoJ just said that it was legal to offer non-neutral services. It said that it is legal because it is. You can be pissed off at the DoJ for saying it, but not saying it wouldn't make it any less true. The legislator is responsible for passing net neutrality laws, not the DoJ. The DoJ couldn't "mandate" net neutrality even if they wanted to.
Second, the whole 'net neutrality' debate is descended into the heights of ideological idiocracy. I would swear listening to the two sides that taking a step in one direction or the other will lead to all good thing or all evil.
The simple truth is that there are good reasons to have 'net neutrality', and good reasons why it sucks. Giving bandwidth owners the ability to delay certain packs comes with both consequences and rewards. Throttling Bit Torrent is very good for some people, and very bad for others. So how about we quit this mindless ideological spouting and talk about the real costs and benefits?
God forbid, if we stepped back from ideological rhetoric we might even find a solution that is not one extreme or another and that balances bandwidth providers fear of filling up their series of tubes (the internet is not a dump truck!) with consumer fears that AT&T is going to kill VOIP without telling anyone.
I wont bother with stating my political beliefs to avoid the left/right flame war, but sufficient to say I loath both democrats and republicans. I don't have minor issues with the candidates; I have large ideological divides with all of them. I am pretty sure I am not alone.
What do I do election day? I vote. I vote because not voting doesn't separate you from the lazy bastard with no opinion who can't part with an hour of his time once every 2 years. Such people are not worthwhile for politicians to court and you don't want to be associated with them. Instead of voting for someone you loath just slightly less then the alternative, I suggest simply voting no. Walk into the polling station and in the blank field, write in "none of the above" and check it. Is "none of the above" going to win? Probably not. You can even simply hand in a blank ballot. If more people were to do this, than there would start to be noticeable discrepancies between the number of people who voted, and the number of people who voted for one of the two choices. Make this discrepancy large enough, and you might start turning heads. Politicians would see groups of people who are pissed, but not so apathetic that they won't vote.
Unless you live in a state that is so close that it is too close to call, your vote for 'anyone but that other guy' isn't going to do any good. Spend your vote sending a message, not padding or not even denting Hillary's lead in Connecticut or Julian's lead in Texas. If the electoral point in your state is already a foregone conclusion, spend your vote to voice your displeasure. A 4% 'none of the above vote' would mean a hell of a lot more than one candidate already destine to win by a 10% marine gaining or losing that 5%.
Mmm, what is that smell? Smells like a dumb reactionary that believes everything he reads on the internet, even when it doesn't even begin to cite a source. If you believe uncited unexplained claims, then you are just acting like a dumb sucker. I am pretty sure nowhere in any states law does it say, "You can't sell low emission cars 'cause the corporations, big oil, Iraq, Haliburton, and George Bush 666 Ahahaha!".
This discussion has over 300 posts and yet no one has found a single law to explain that stupid and statement in the article that is made without even a shred of citation. When a few thousand Slashdotters can't FTFL (find the fucking law), it probably doesn't exist and this is just a case of shitty/sensational/biased journalism.
Far more likely? California provides some sort of subsidy or mandate for selling the cars and other states don't. The brain dead journalist in question probably couldn't wrap his small mind around the difference between a subsidy in California, and a law BANNING ALL GREEN CARS IN THE US EXCEPT CALIFORNIA!!1!!!!111!
Please, read the crap you dredge off the internet with a critical eye instead of gobbling up every piece of sensationalist crap you run across.
Perhaps I have missed it, but I have yet to see a single source (other then a bad article which fails to cite its own source) that the 'it is illegal to sell this car outside of CA' statement is true. Personally, I call bullshit. Either the car is not allowed to be sold because it gets its green status by cutting some regulatory corner that makes it a hazard, or the entire claim is pure and unadulterated bullshit.
The issue is that when they Wright brothers made their first airplane, a POS it was, but it was a CHEAP. The made the airplane on a shoe string budget. It doesn't take a rocket scientsit (ha ha) to figure out that if you can build something workable cheaply, in a few years you can probably build something better or cheaper still. Airplanes got better. Now compare this to rockets. Space capable rockets are frigging expensive. There is work to get it cheaper, but no two brothers are going to build a space shuttle in thier backyard.
As far as land grabs on Mars, think about what you are saying. If you were a government and decided for some reason you desperatly needed land, would you A) spend trillions of dollars getting a few dozen people to Mars where they can suck vacuum and live a few months and a few trillion dollars away from the next resupply or B) simply build a sea colony on that 2/3 of the world that no one has touched. The oceans have barely been minded and they could hold the entire population of the world without breaking a sweat. Best of all, if your sea colony breaks or you simply want to go see your parents for Chirstmas, you just jump in a boat/sub/airplane and get there in a few hours just a few hundred dollars shorter.
If we are so not desperate for minerals and 'land' that we are not willing to exploit that big blue hunk of exploited territory that covers over 2/3 of the Earth, it is simply insane to think that we are going to blow a few trillion dollars throwing a few dozen people to a lifeless vacuum world months and a few trillion dollars away from sending or recieving anything of value.
When the ocean has been fully exploited, THEN you might have an argument for colonizing other hunks of rock. Until then, talk of colonizing Mars is flatly ignoring reality.