All electric motors are also electric generators, and all electric generators are electric motors;
All transmitters are receivers, and all receivers are transmitters;
All microphones are loudspeakers, and all loudspeakers are microphones
So, it's probably just my usual paranoid suspicions, but how easily could one of these things -- or, more likely, a more advanced, optimised version -- be turned into a bug that "listens" to the vibrations put on a large flat surface by, say, casual conversation?
more acuretly we will all be charged a little extrea for the murchendice.. oh wait that is what is instituded.
Well, even more accurately, we will all be charged a little extra for blank CD-Rs, not for the "pirated" merchandise (which would be audio CDs or perhaps DVDs). In other words, the intent is to use an admittedly second-hand way to reduce copyright infringement. And you should always be wary of second-hand ways of achieving social goods, because they often fail and often exacerbate the situation.
Worst part is that a tax on cigarrettes would be fought vigorously and there would be national debate
No, the worst part is, cigarette taxes are use-based (you only pay them if you actually smoke), while these are broad-based (you pay even if you only back up, say, digital photos) -- yet the latter is less controversial than the former.
This means that stopping the casual piracy of videos is unenforceable, and as such consumers are free to illegaly copy videos, and the companies involved have been justly compensated.
Since everyone has to pay the levy, and not everyone is pirating, the companies might have been compensated but they have not been justly compensated. This whole model is intrinsically unjust.
Imagine a proposed law that said, since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, all customers at every store will be stopped, background-checked, and strip-searched.
Why is it that all of the *new* media content has attracted so much bad practise
Because people have learned, in Old Media, all the way they could have screwed the author, the consumer, and the public, if only they had known. But they accidentally let all these roadblocks, legal and social, arise that raise expectations in Old Media. Ahhhh, but in New Media, there are no such blocks.
Precedent will be allowed to apply only and exactly to the extent it helps maximize the profits of the corporations. Otherwise, it will be used and discarded -- just like those artists, those consumers, and that public.
Biologists extracting blood cells from T-Rex bones can get a fairly good idea of an upper limit for the bone's age, based on home much the organic material has decayed.
The only dating method using how "much the organic material has decayed" that I know of would be radiocarbon 14 dating. C14 has a half-life of about 5000 years, so it cannot be used reliably for more than, let's say, 10 iterations. (That would be one part in 1000, approximately.) That puts its usefulness back to maybe 50,000 years. We can increase the accuracy by about a factor of 1000 and still only push back that date by a factor of 2 (to 100,000 years).
Worse still, the whole "dating" part depends on assumptions of the constancy of the ratio of C14 to C12, which have to be taken more or less for granted.
However, dating of really old fossils comes from dating the rock in which they are found. These inorganic methods use other radioisotopes, and can be reliable all the way out to 4 billion years, with no necessary assumption about constant abundances. So these methods, which are nearly armchair physics, establish the geological age of the Earth.
The fossil record is "tied to" Darwinian theory only in that the latter is the most successful explanation of the former. Fossils are found things, not theoretical constructs. Determining their sge depends a lot on physics (through radioactive dating) but only weakly, if at all, on biology.
Or receive a massive neutrino impact the day before. (Thats not because neutrinos travel faster than light! But because the star stars sending them a day before it explodes.)
I thought the discrepancy came from the fact that neutrinos pass through matter much more easily than light, which needs to bounce its way clear.
The problem that Final Fantasy encountered was bringing an anime-esque film to the mainstream audience.
The problem that Final Fantasy encountered was that its plot was so twisted, poorly explained, and generally nonsensical that it proved impossible to care about the characters, their future, or indeed what the heck was even going on... another case of too cool CGI, too flawed writing.
Your point there is an excelent example, the USSR renounced the first strike, but they NEEDED to maintain their Neuclear arsonal to contain the US!
Wow, is this a textbook case of things being taken in a different sense than offered. Of the two nations, I think any reasonable reading of history will show that -- for all the faults, flubs, and even arrogance of the United States -- it was incalculably less aggressive and expansionist than the USSR. If anything, the US nukes (and the refusal to renounce first-strike) were needed by the US to contain Soviet aggression.
If the United States is aggressive at the dawn of the 21st century, it's a way more subtle and, dare I say, benign than the aggression of a Nazi Germany, or a Soviet Russia, or even -- on a smaller scale -- of Hussein's Iraq. The US honestly has no interest in "ruling" foreign lands or expanding an "empire" to control the world. We of course like to have things go our way, and we are pretty good at convincing ourselves that our way is the only "right" way... that what's good for the US is automatically good for humanity. And we of course go wrong in doing so. But the spread of American hegemony does not, generally, come from force of arms but from force of economics. Like it or not, people want the lifestyle they see in the American media, or at least, people want noticeable fractions of that lifestyle. They like having enough to eat, and having education, and having medicine, and having TVs and SUVs and jeans. The American economy is good at making these things (and American corporations are distressingly good at getting others to make these things cheaply) and so American culture spreads.
But if you think that keeping Jordache out of the Urals, or MTV out of Saudi Arabia, or McDonalds out of China, somehow merits maintaining or using a nuclear stockpile, then something's seriously unbalanced. People get antsy about the actions of the US because the US economy seems a lot like a steamroller to them. And you're either part of the steamroller, as they say, or part of the pavement.
That is the uneasiness driving a lot of anti-American sentiment in the world.
Do you complain about the lack of adult material in other films you take your kids to see? No? So why this one?
Other than those drooling over Portman, there hasn't been much call for "adult" content in Star Wars. On the other hand, a lot of us fans were disappointed, because -- unlike the original three -- Phantom Menace lacked any connection to human stories. Star Wars became so popular not due to its special effects (though that helped "hook" people) but due to its adoption of Campbellian mythical archetypes, at a time the nation -- and the world -- yearned for that. The struggle of Good versus Evil appears to be very obvious, but there is just enough depth in "A New Hope" to give it legs. And in "Empire" and "Return", the symbolism is ratcheted up a notch.
But in "Menace", Lucas failed to tap that vein of mythic commonality. Instead, "Menace" had to shout at you: "Ooo! Look! I'm epic, I'm sweeping. See? Foreshadowing here! Look! Look!" Good writers don't tell you how exciting the roller coaster ride was. Good writers make you feel like you've been on the ride. With "Menace" Lucas proved he's lost any feel for the elemental that he might once have had.
Star Wars: A New Hope wasn't targeted at kids or adults. It was meant for anyone who appreciated adventure, who wrestled with their identity, who enjoyed a good story. "Menace" was targeted, and that's what ruined it.
One of the possible reasons why the germans failed build a nuclear weapon that has been suggested (as they certainly had the capacity and the scientists to accomplish it at the beginning of the war, when they had actually started to develop it) was that the scientists on the team tried to slow down the project to the extent that Germany couldn't complete it
While this has been suggested for years, the evidence that the German team actually tried to slow down, or prevent, the success of the German A-bomb project, is dubious at best. Most of the evidence consists of statements made long after the war, when the survivors had very strong reasons for claiming to have been secretly on the side of goodness and light.
It isn't even clear that the Germans ever really had the capacity to build a nuclear stockpile, at least, not without completely dismantling their conventional armies. Very few people seem to understand how massive an industrial base is needed to isolate and purify U235 and plutonium. Once you know the right ratios, you can cut some corners... but at the outset, you need tremendous industrial might. Or, to put it another way, the US -- the world's largest economic engine by far, even then -- barely pulled it off after four years of intense effort and no attacks on its mainland. The German Reich, at war for six years and under bombardment for much of that time, was much less likely to achieve the Bomb, even if everyone had pulled together. The Japanese, who barely had the resources to hold the territory they had conquered, were light years from where they would have had to have been.
Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding. Albert Einstein.
"Would you have peace? Prepare then for war." Should we do more dueling quotes, as it's amusing -- if utterly pointless. Speaking as both a phycisist and a fan of Einstein's, who the hell cares what he says about world politics? The man was a genius at physics. His record in geopolitics is less obvious. It doesn't mean he's wrong. It just means he's not an authority to be quoted and obeyed.
My country Iceland was bought between 1947-54(shortly after the US supported us in declaring independance in 1944) with the Marshall plan which was a program to help european countries after WWII. (I don't know about a single Icelander that died in WWII)
Hmmm. Perhaps that was because the US helped defend Iceland, taking over garrison duties from the British to make the country less desirable of invasion to the Germans (who were busy scarfing up all of Scandinavia at the time). Indeed, the independence of Iceland was brought about precisely because Denmark had been conquered and the Western Allies did not want to see Iceland in the hands of the Axis.
The Imperial Union of American states has been slowly and steadily "Americanizing" the world via financial aids, supporting dictators, the media and wars fought in the name of some great cause.
Ah. You're right. We should have left Europe to starve in the late 1940s. That would have been much more humanitarian. Face it: The United States saved Europe, in the Second World War and after. We certainly didn't do it alone, and we certainly didn't do it all for selfless devotion. But we certainly did it. And what's more, we kept our soldiers in harm's way for 50+ years to ensure the freedom of Western Europe.
Does the Unites States make mistakes? Do we act from base impulses from time to time? Do we, to our shame, support dictators and autocrats? Alas, yes, and far too often. But the world is still a better place for American involvement than it had been without. We still hold ourselves to ideals and we still shudder when it becomes clear what lengths we've gone to.
There is hope for the United States. And that is hope for humankind.
In the closing days of the war, the Japanese were developing the Atomic Bomb. Had we given them another year by invading Japan, they might have dropped the bomb on us!!! They were getting pretty close by the end of the war. There is even some sketchy evidence that points to them testing a very small one in Manchuria.
I don't think so. I do a lot of reading on WWII and have never seen anything that even hinted at a real Japanese atomic program. It's abundantly clear that from about early 1944 onward, the Japanese simply lacked the industrial capacity to develop a nuke. People forget that the Manhatten Project was, for its day, on the scale of the Apollo program or harder. The Germans never came close, and they had the second-best scientific/industrial machine going.
The Japanese certainly requested German technical help on the bomb but it's not clear any of it was ever transmitted.
There are only two options for dealing with such people. One is to eliminate any civil liberties, and spot them as they're about to attack. The other is to kill them in place. I'll opt for the "Kill in Place" method, since I see no reason to screw up a perfectly good society.
If this society has truly reached the point that the "best" option appears to be "nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark", then I think it is already screwed up and doesn't need more work along those lines...
Fortunately, mainstream American society is nowhere as bloodthirsty as this post would make it seem.
Knowing this and the idiocy behinds the huge arms race, there was a feeling of peace in that your enemy would not use nuclear weapons against use and you wouldn't use it against them. It was at an equilibrium (maybe not an ideal one, but still maintain stability in the world) Now with this new release, other countries are not so sure that the US will be holding back on the use of nuclear weapons.
Actually, Mutual Assured Destruction works only if you credibly believe your enemy will use nukes. During the bad old days of the Cold War, the United State never officially ruled out a first-strike attack. The reasoning was, MAD works only if your enemy is uneasy about his reckoning of your ability and intent. Anything that constrained, a priori, the actions of the US would give the USSR better insight into what could and could not be tolerated; thereby, perhaps, enticing them into a military adventure that would lead to a nuclear exchange.
The Soviets, of course, renounced first-strike early on. This left the world in one of those odd Cold War paradoxes: One bloc would not renounce first-strike, yet no one seriously believe the United States ever actually contemplated any conditions under which it would strike first. On the other hand, the other bloc had renounced the use of nuclear weapons, yet no one seriously believed the Soviets actually felt constrained by their "promise".
Just because we have a new medium (internet streaming) doesn't mean we throw out the existing laws on copyright.
Actually, historically, it does mean exactly that. Then the laws are modified, pulled, twisted, reworked, and shoehorned so as to cover the new medium, but usually with new features.
Originally, performed music wasn't covered at all by copyright, which was assumed to cover only printed works.
Originally, mechanical reproduction of music wasn't covered (player pianoes, anyone?). Congress eventually invented the idea of a mandatory license.
Originally, one could not have made personal copies of over-the-air broadcasts. Then VCRs came along and the courts -- followed eventually by Congress -- carved out new space for personal copies.
The point I'm making is simple: Copyright law most certainly adapts to new technologirs. There is no a priori reason that previous models, like radio, should (or should not) be applied to Internet streaming.
Take a lesson from 1984: The most effective means of control, for a tyrant, is to convince people that the terrible system in place (a) will always be in place and, more crushingly, (b) has always been in place. Don't subscribe to the manufactured history of the RIAA.
What is going on? Why is the RIAA hellbent on staying in the 20th century? Seriously... if anyone can answer that for me without being flippant, I'd love it.
I would think that this is obvious: The RIAA wants unshared control of the music industry. Are they opposed to downloading songs? Not at all -- witness PressPlay and such. They are of course opposed to anyone else having a say in downloading songs.
I imagine it's something similar here. They like Internet streaming but don't like the idea of small, free stations providing it. They can set the rates high enough to drive out every competitor. Don't be surprised in a year or two if you see RIAA-supported "Internet radio", wherein the major labels make sweatheart deals with one another to get around the exorbiant fees they'll charge every else.
Once more, with feeling, from Cosmo of Sneakers:
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
What if the programmers had a vested interest in making sure that such bugs *did exist*.
Which is why you watch your programmers like a hawk, since they work for you. And which is why you keep your hand in, keeping yourself a part of the maintenance of your mission-critical code, or of your laws. And which is why you make very sure that your programmers can't accept bribes from the vendors selling narrow, expensive solutions.
You didn't take issue with the poster's claim that said reforms would serve mostly to preserve the demican/republicrat duopoly.
Actually, I didn't take issue because that wasn't the point I was trying to address. I was trying to address the attitude that "Well, we can't fix it completely -- new ways of corruption will be found -- so we should fix it at all." As a matter of fact, I do not agree that this would simply solidify Democrat/Republican dominance; I do not believe strong evidence has actually been offered in that vein. And I wonder, if that's true, why major players in the parties fought so stenuously against it. Are we to believe that was all a feint? Why were members on both sides of the aisle decrying the "death of the parties" due to the recent bill?
Imagine if the approach to computer security issues was, "Well, we know there's a buffer-overrun vulnerability here. But even if we fix this, there'll just be another one somewhere else. We can't guarantee bug-free code. So why bother patching at all? Why even try?"
I suppose you can argue that the system is so far gone that patching cannot help, it can but delay the inevitable. That, I guess, is a matter of personal judgment and valuation. I do not believe the system is that far gone. So I want to make it work as much as I can, knowing full well that we'll fall short of ideal.
They design and prototype a car, then they perform the service of duplicating that car. Anyone with the necessary resources could duplicate that car, if not for the state-granted monopoly they have.
Here you get into an analogy that could muddy the waters, because there are two ways in which, say, Ford "owns" the newest Taurus. Ford does indeed own the actual, physical cars that have been produced and are sitting on a lot. To use one, you must purchase it; otherwise, it is stealing. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
On the other hand, Ford would claim to "own" the design, via the patents and possibly copyrights. (I'm not sure under which part of the IP regime a design of a car would fall.) But they don't own the design. When I see the car, I immediately take in the exterior design; and now I "own" it too.
Of course, precisely because the state has granted an exclusive right to Ford to copy that design -- that is, to "fix it in tangible form" through the production of another physical car -- Ford can control distribution and reap the benefit of their intellectual output. I don't see how that differs from books or music at all. In both cases, the corporation holds a copyright or a patent; it does not "own" the idea expressed.
The IP part of this seems, again, to be more of a service thing. How do I know? Because Ford can license the right to copy the design to someone else -- a subcontractor or whatever. Then that someone else -- who already "owns" the design -- is granted the legal right to make copies of the design and fix them in the physical form of an actual car.
I don't think the given example undermines me at all.
The other people (the ones I like to call "stupid"), think (or, perhaps "hope" is a better word) that this time, contrary to past evidence, government will pass a law without unintended (or intended) consequences that act against the advertised intent.
You might like to call them "stupid". That's a far cry from meaning that they are, in fact, stupid. Of course the law would have unintended consequences. All but the most trivial of human interactions have unintended consequences. You deal with them as they arise. Or do you really think that leaving the system in place as it is will somehow allow it to magically heal?
Just because campaign finance reform is hard -- just because democratic vigiliance is hard -- just because good government is hard -- does not mean we shouldn't strive for campaign finance reform, or democratic vigilance, or good government. We buy a few years where the most egregious offenses are choked off. Then slimy operators find new egregious offesnes, and we choke those off.
Saying that the solution to campaign abuses is to eliminate the government is much like saying that the solution to cancer is to eliminate the patient. Sure, the cancer is gone... but the cost is high.
Government, like humanity, is far from perfect. But it has uses, and those uses are legitimate, not stolen from the polity as a whole. Yes, we need constant dialog on how large government should be and what role it should play, and a priori it is far from wrong to say it should be smaller. But most people on slashdot who group themselves under the banner "libertarian" arguen that the only good size for government is zero, or -- more usually and more honestly -- "just large enough to protect what I have, but not so large as to restrict me at all".
I don't see government as a necessary evil -- not because it isn't necessary (it is) but because it isn't evil.
I will never show you source code I've written for certain programs and that is my right.
Then of course you've never published the source code and so it doesn't fall under the purview of copyright. Public domain refers to the fact that -- as Jefferson pointed out -- once an idea is shared even once, it cannot any longer be owned. Thus extraordinary and explicit means -- i.e., copyright law -- is required to secure to the author any monetary benefit, so as to encourage production.
The whole brouhaha over intellectual output arises from a misunderstanding of the basic realities of economics for non-tangible items.
Bravo. I'm tired of this flawed mindset that there is no proper role for government, that government is intrinsically (and unfixably) flawed, and that government is responsible for all that is ill and none that is good in the world.
That kind of junk thinking is fine in the freshman dorms but it's really time for people to grow up some.
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So, it's probably just my usual paranoid suspicions, but how easily could one of these things -- or, more likely, a more advanced, optimised version -- be turned into a bug that "listens" to the vibrations put on a large flat surface by, say, casual conversation?
Well, even more accurately, we will all be charged a little extra for blank CD-Rs, not for the "pirated" merchandise (which would be audio CDs or perhaps DVDs). In other words, the intent is to use an admittedly second-hand way to reduce copyright infringement. And you should always be wary of second-hand ways of achieving social goods, because they often fail and often exacerbate the situation.
No, the worst part is, cigarette taxes are use-based (you only pay them if you actually smoke), while these are broad-based (you pay even if you only back up, say, digital photos) -- yet the latter is less controversial than the former.
Since everyone has to pay the levy, and not everyone is pirating, the companies might have been compensated but they have not been justly compensated. This whole model is intrinsically unjust.
Imagine a proposed law that said, since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, all customers at every store will be stopped, background-checked, and strip-searched.
Because people have learned, in Old Media, all the way they could have screwed the author, the consumer, and the public, if only they had known. But they accidentally let all these roadblocks, legal and social, arise that raise expectations in Old Media. Ahhhh, but in New Media, there are no such blocks.
Precedent will be allowed to apply only and exactly to the extent it helps maximize the profits of the corporations. Otherwise, it will be used and discarded -- just like those artists, those consumers, and that public.
The only dating method using how "much the organic material has decayed" that I know of would be radiocarbon 14 dating. C14 has a half-life of about 5000 years, so it cannot be used reliably for more than, let's say, 10 iterations. (That would be one part in 1000, approximately.) That puts its usefulness back to maybe 50,000 years. We can increase the accuracy by about a factor of 1000 and still only push back that date by a factor of 2 (to 100,000 years).
Worse still, the whole "dating" part depends on assumptions of the constancy of the ratio of C14 to C12, which have to be taken more or less for granted.
However, dating of really old fossils comes from dating the rock in which they are found. These inorganic methods use other radioisotopes, and can be reliable all the way out to 4 billion years, with no necessary assumption about constant abundances. So these methods, which are nearly armchair physics, establish the geological age of the Earth.
The fossil record is "tied to" Darwinian theory only in that the latter is the most successful explanation of the former. Fossils are found things, not theoretical constructs. Determining their sge depends a lot on physics (through radioactive dating) but only weakly, if at all, on biology.
I thought the discrepancy came from the fact that neutrinos pass through matter much more easily than light, which needs to bounce its way clear.
The problem that Final Fantasy encountered was that its plot was so twisted, poorly explained, and generally nonsensical that it proved impossible to care about the characters, their future, or indeed what the heck was even going on... another case of too cool CGI, too flawed writing.
Wow, is this a textbook case of things being taken in a different sense than offered. Of the two nations, I think any reasonable reading of history will show that -- for all the faults, flubs, and even arrogance of the United States -- it was incalculably less aggressive and expansionist than the USSR. If anything, the US nukes (and the refusal to renounce first-strike) were needed by the US to contain Soviet aggression.
If the United States is aggressive at the dawn of the 21st century, it's a way more subtle and, dare I say, benign than the aggression of a Nazi Germany, or a Soviet Russia, or even -- on a smaller scale -- of Hussein's Iraq. The US honestly has no interest in "ruling" foreign lands or expanding an "empire" to control the world. We of course like to have things go our way, and we are pretty good at convincing ourselves that our way is the only "right" way
But if you think that keeping Jordache out of the Urals, or MTV out of Saudi Arabia, or McDonalds out of China, somehow merits maintaining or using a nuclear stockpile, then something's seriously unbalanced. People get antsy about the actions of the US because the US economy seems a lot like a steamroller to them. And you're either part of the steamroller, as they say, or part of the pavement.
That is the uneasiness driving a lot of anti-American sentiment in the world.
Other than those drooling over Portman, there hasn't been much call for "adult" content in Star Wars. On the other hand, a lot of us fans were disappointed, because -- unlike the original three -- Phantom Menace lacked any connection to human stories. Star Wars became so popular not due to its special effects (though that helped "hook" people) but due to its adoption of Campbellian mythical archetypes, at a time the nation -- and the world -- yearned for that. The struggle of Good versus Evil appears to be very obvious, but there is just enough depth in "A New Hope" to give it legs. And in "Empire" and "Return", the symbolism is ratcheted up a notch.
But in "Menace", Lucas failed to tap that vein of mythic commonality. Instead, "Menace" had to shout at you: "Ooo! Look! I'm epic, I'm sweeping. See? Foreshadowing here! Look! Look!" Good writers don't tell you how exciting the roller coaster ride was. Good writers make you feel like you've been on the ride. With "Menace" Lucas proved he's lost any feel for the elemental that he might once have had.
Star Wars: A New Hope wasn't targeted at kids or adults. It was meant for anyone who appreciated adventure, who wrestled with their identity, who enjoyed a good story. "Menace" was targeted, and that's what ruined it.
Um, because Lucas isn't going to notice your miserable $8 fit of pique?
While this has been suggested for years, the evidence that the German team actually tried to slow down, or prevent, the success of the German A-bomb project, is dubious at best. Most of the evidence consists of statements made long after the war, when the survivors had very strong reasons for claiming to have been secretly on the side of goodness and light.
It isn't even clear that the Germans ever really had the capacity to build a nuclear stockpile, at least, not without completely dismantling their conventional armies. Very few people seem to understand how massive an industrial base is needed to isolate and purify U235 and plutonium. Once you know the right ratios, you can cut some corners... but at the outset, you need tremendous industrial might. Or, to put it another way, the US -- the world's largest economic engine by far, even then -- barely pulled it off after four years of intense effort and no attacks on its mainland. The German Reich, at war for six years and under bombardment for much of that time, was much less likely to achieve the Bomb, even if everyone had pulled together. The Japanese, who barely had the resources to hold the territory they had conquered, were light years from where they would have had to have been.
"Would you have peace? Prepare then for war." Should we do more dueling quotes, as it's amusing -- if utterly pointless. Speaking as both a phycisist and a fan of Einstein's, who the hell cares what he says about world politics? The man was a genius at physics. His record in geopolitics is less obvious. It doesn't mean he's wrong. It just means he's not an authority to be quoted and obeyed.
Hmmm. Perhaps that was because the US helped defend Iceland, taking over garrison duties from the British to make the country less desirable of invasion to the Germans (who were busy scarfing up all of Scandinavia at the time). Indeed, the independence of Iceland was brought about precisely because Denmark had been conquered and the Western Allies did not want to see Iceland in the hands of the Axis.
Ah. You're right. We should have left Europe to starve in the late 1940s. That would have been much more humanitarian. Face it: The United States saved Europe, in the Second World War and after. We certainly didn't do it alone, and we certainly didn't do it all for selfless devotion. But we certainly did it. And what's more, we kept our soldiers in harm's way for 50+ years to ensure the freedom of Western Europe.
Does the Unites States make mistakes? Do we act from base impulses from time to time? Do we, to our shame, support dictators and autocrats? Alas, yes, and far too often. But the world is still a better place for American involvement than it had been without. We still hold ourselves to ideals and we still shudder when it becomes clear what lengths we've gone to.
There is hope for the United States. And that is hope for humankind.
I don't think so. I do a lot of reading on WWII and have never seen anything that even hinted at a real Japanese atomic program. It's abundantly clear that from about early 1944 onward, the Japanese simply lacked the industrial capacity to develop a nuke. People forget that the Manhatten Project was, for its day, on the scale of the Apollo program or harder. The Germans never came close, and they had the second-best scientific/industrial machine going.
The Japanese certainly requested German technical help on the bomb but it's not clear any of it was ever transmitted.
If this society has truly reached the point that the "best" option appears to be "nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark", then I think it is already screwed up and doesn't need more work along those lines...
Fortunately, mainstream American society is nowhere as bloodthirsty as this post would make it seem.
Actually, Mutual Assured Destruction works only if you credibly believe your enemy will use nukes. During the bad old days of the Cold War, the United State never officially ruled out a first-strike attack. The reasoning was, MAD works only if your enemy is uneasy about his reckoning of your ability and intent. Anything that constrained, a priori, the actions of the US would give the USSR better insight into what could and could not be tolerated; thereby, perhaps, enticing them into a military adventure that would lead to a nuclear exchange.
The Soviets, of course, renounced first-strike early on. This left the world in one of those odd Cold War paradoxes: One bloc would not renounce first-strike, yet no one seriously believe the United States ever actually contemplated any conditions under which it would strike first. On the other hand, the other bloc had renounced the use of nuclear weapons, yet no one seriously believed the Soviets actually felt constrained by their "promise".
Gotta love that Cold War.
Actually, historically, it does mean exactly that. Then the laws are modified, pulled, twisted, reworked, and shoehorned so as to cover the new medium, but usually with new features.
Originally, performed music wasn't covered at all by copyright, which was assumed to cover only printed works.
Originally, mechanical reproduction of music wasn't covered (player pianoes, anyone?). Congress eventually invented the idea of a mandatory license.
Originally, one could not have made personal copies of over-the-air broadcasts. Then VCRs came along and the courts -- followed eventually by Congress -- carved out new space for personal copies.
The point I'm making is simple: Copyright law most certainly adapts to new technologirs. There is no a priori reason that previous models, like radio, should (or should not) be applied to Internet streaming.
Take a lesson from 1984: The most effective means of control, for a tyrant, is to convince people that the terrible system in place (a) will always be in place and, more crushingly, (b) has always been in place. Don't subscribe to the manufactured history of the RIAA.
I would think that this is obvious: The RIAA wants unshared control of the music industry. Are they opposed to downloading songs? Not at all -- witness PressPlay and such. They are of course opposed to anyone else having a say in downloading songs.
I imagine it's something similar here. They like Internet streaming but don't like the idea of small, free stations providing it. They can set the rates high enough to drive out every competitor. Don't be surprised in a year or two if you see RIAA-supported "Internet radio", wherein the major labels make sweatheart deals with one another to get around the exorbiant fees they'll charge every else.
Once more, with feeling, from Cosmo of Sneakers:
Which is why you watch your programmers like a hawk, since they work for you. And which is why you keep your hand in, keeping yourself a part of the maintenance of your mission-critical code, or of your laws. And which is why you make very sure that your programmers can't accept bribes from the vendors selling narrow, expensive solutions.
Sort of like campaign finance reform.
Actually, I didn't take issue because that wasn't the point I was trying to address. I was trying to address the attitude that "Well, we can't fix it completely -- new ways of corruption will be found -- so we should fix it at all." As a matter of fact, I do not agree that this would simply solidify Democrat/Republican dominance; I do not believe strong evidence has actually been offered in that vein. And I wonder, if that's true, why major players in the parties fought so stenuously against it. Are we to believe that was all a feint? Why were members on both sides of the aisle decrying the "death of the parties" due to the recent bill?
Imagine if the approach to computer security issues was, "Well, we know there's a buffer-overrun vulnerability here. But even if we fix this, there'll just be another one somewhere else. We can't guarantee bug-free code. So why bother patching at all? Why even try?"
I suppose you can argue that the system is so far gone that patching cannot help, it can but delay the inevitable. That, I guess, is a matter of personal judgment and valuation. I do not believe the system is that far gone. So I want to make it work as much as I can, knowing full well that we'll fall short of ideal.
Here you get into an analogy that could muddy the waters, because there are two ways in which, say, Ford "owns" the newest Taurus. Ford does indeed own the actual, physical cars that have been produced and are sitting on a lot. To use one, you must purchase it; otherwise, it is stealing. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
On the other hand, Ford would claim to "own" the design, via the patents and possibly copyrights. (I'm not sure under which part of the IP regime a design of a car would fall.) But they don't own the design. When I see the car, I immediately take in the exterior design; and now I "own" it too.
Of course, precisely because the state has granted an exclusive right to Ford to copy that design -- that is, to "fix it in tangible form" through the production of another physical car -- Ford can control distribution and reap the benefit of their intellectual output. I don't see how that differs from books or music at all. In both cases, the corporation holds a copyright or a patent; it does not "own" the idea expressed.
The IP part of this seems, again, to be more of a service thing. How do I know? Because Ford can license the right to copy the design to someone else -- a subcontractor or whatever. Then that someone else -- who already "owns" the design -- is granted the legal right to make copies of the design and fix them in the physical form of an actual car.
I don't think the given example undermines me at all.
You might like to call them "stupid". That's a far cry from meaning that they are, in fact, stupid. Of course the law would have unintended consequences. All but the most trivial of human interactions have unintended consequences. You deal with them as they arise. Or do you really think that leaving the system in place as it is will somehow allow it to magically heal?
Just because campaign finance reform is hard -- just because democratic vigiliance is hard -- just because good government is hard -- does not mean we shouldn't strive for campaign finance reform, or democratic vigilance, or good government. We buy a few years where the most egregious offenses are choked off. Then slimy operators find new egregious offesnes, and we choke those off.
Saying that the solution to campaign abuses is to eliminate the government is much like saying that the solution to cancer is to eliminate the patient. Sure, the cancer is gone... but the cost is high.
Government, like humanity, is far from perfect. But it has uses, and those uses are legitimate, not stolen from the polity as a whole. Yes, we need constant dialog on how large government should be and what role it should play, and a priori it is far from wrong to say it should be smaller. But most people on slashdot who group themselves under the banner "libertarian" arguen that the only good size for government is zero, or -- more usually and more honestly -- "just large enough to protect what I have, but not so large as to restrict me at all".
I don't see government as a necessary evil -- not because it isn't necessary (it is) but because it isn't evil.
Then of course you've never published the source code and so it doesn't fall under the purview of copyright. Public domain refers to the fact that -- as Jefferson pointed out -- once an idea is shared even once, it cannot any longer be owned. Thus extraordinary and explicit means -- i.e., copyright law -- is required to secure to the author any monetary benefit, so as to encourage production.
The whole brouhaha over intellectual output arises from a misunderstanding of the basic realities of economics for non-tangible items.
That kind of junk thinking is fine in the freshman dorms but it's really time for people to grow up some.