I mean, I would also *expect* a concert with 20.000 attending to cost significantly less than 10 concerts of 2000 people. Thus you would expect the larger concert to have cheaper tickets.
In practice it tends to be the other way around, with bigger concerts being -more- expensive than small ones.
The president is the biggest problem. Whenever you elect *one* person, it's a natural that it'll turn into a competition between the two biggest players for the same core voting-groups.
For electing larger assemblies, it's obvious to anyone that the only sensible thing is to have these be representational more or less in the same proportion as the population.
So, if 10% of the voters vote green, the greens should get (more or less) 10% of the chairs. Your districts don't do this, but there's plenty of systems that do.
For example, in Norway the country is divided in "fylke", and each fylke sends a number of representatives to the Storting. (fylke with higher population sends more, allthough the smaller ones are sligthly "overrepresentated") But these candidates are proportional, thus there are no district-borders to mess with in the first place. If 10% of the people in Oslo vote for "SV" (one of the left parties) SV gets to send aproximately 10% of the representatives from Oslo. (in this case probably 2, Oslo sends 17 in total)
Yes. A lot like a safe. But with one very important difference:
Only one person needs to break open the safe, thereafter the content can be shared freely with everyone, and shared in a matter so that each person gets the entire contents of the safe.
Stopping 99% of all people from opening the safe is no good if the last 1% then share the result freely. It doesn't actually matter very much (if at all!) that perhaps 10% of the population are capable of, and willing to, make a mp3 from a normal CD while perhaps only 0.1% are capable of, and willing to, DivX from a drm-protected DVD.
You don't need to look at theory. Facts will do. 95% of all DVDs contain drm, in the form of CSS and region-coding. This has as far as anyone can tell more or less zero impact on the availability of movies online. The chief restraint seems to be that for many people downloading GBs of data still takes time, and watching movies on the PC is less attractive. This *used* to be true for mp3s.
Today ? What is more convenient if you want to listen to the music ? A unencumbered high-quality mp3 or a crappy non-cd that won't play in the car or in the cd, and that is a hassle to rip to a more portable format ?
That's a lot like saying we should defend the freedom to imprison innocents.
It goes without saying that in order for a freedom to be upheld, someone else is going to have to be restricted from taking that freedom away.
As for restricting developers, that's clearly nonsense. Stallmanns ideas and licenses have precisely -ZERO- influence on your own licensing unless you yourself voluntarily choose to build your program using components that are under the GPL (or similar).
It would be possible, but it's not the case. The generated code is open for anyone to inspect, and there's nothing obviously fishy about it. Have a look yourself if you doubt it.
One can agree or disagree with RMS all one likes. (personally I tend to agree more and more often) But even if one disagrees with his opinions, one cannot seriously consider him not credible.
He's been working on the very same thing for something like a quarter century. In all those years his message has been 100% consistent. It is, and always was, extremely clear not only exactly where he stands, but also why.
He's been explaining it in great detail, and with an amazing display of patience at answering the same stupid questions a million times.
It's quite simple really. He believes that freedom is good and important. He believes that taking peoples freedom away is morally wrong. He believes you should not voluntarily accept givig up your freedoms. He believes that the freedom to help your neighbour and friend, the freedom to tinker with, improve, or even just mess up the items you own is one such freedom worth keeping.
Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone can seriously disagree with any of that.
Assuming your definition of "working" is "requires you to buy one single copy, then you can distribute a million copies".
And assuming the lack of cracked iTunes-files on the sharing networks is not simply a consequence of the same content being available in more popular and easier formats. Why would anyone care to crack and upload a itunes-file aslong as the same song is going to be ten times as popular as a plain old mp3 ?
You can turn it around and say: There's no content on iTunes that isn't also circulating freely on the sharing-networks in unprotected form. Thus the DRM on iTunes fails at preventing piracy.
I suspect that the airlines will demand the information themselves as a precondition of flying with them.
That won't work. You seem to misunderstand the situation.
The thing is, the airlines, in Europe, already collect all this information (or for the part they don't nessecarily, like email-adress, I'm certain the US accepts this field being left blank) while handing out the ticket. For example, by nesecity they'll know how you paid for your ticket, at what date you ordered it, if you bougth a one-way or return ticket and so on.
The thing is, the US government demands the airlines hand over all of this information on their passengers if flying into the US.
This ruling now says that doing so would be a violation of EU data-protection laws, thus the airlines cannot legally comply with the US request.
That puts them in a bind. This would change precisely not at all if the data should be handed to a US private company instead of US intelligence.
I'm sure some solution will be found, shutting down all Europe->USA fligths so that one could get into the US from Europe only by flying by a third country (such as Canada or Mexico) is unthinkable.
Sure, on the physical level they have nothing in common whatsoever.
But they're called "computer virus" for a reason, and in many ways they do indeed function similarily:
They both consists of code.
For them to do anything, this code must be interpreted by a host.
They need to trick the host into interpreting the code.
The host has defences, created to prevent the previous step from happening.
They're usually restricted to a certain type of host.
Their presence can cause symptoms ranging from mildly irritating to outrigth deadly for the host.
For the purpose of this discussion, I'd say they're pretty much identical. It's well-known that large areas of monoculture, say in agriculture, increases the risk that a single plant-disease can wipe out a large area completely, whereas a more diverse environment, such as a forest, is very unlikely to be wiped by a single plant-disease, because it consists of hundreds to thousands of different plants, and they're unlikely to all be equally vulnerable to a single disease.
Fact is, if your 3 DNS-servers run completely different operating-systems and completely different dns-software, the odds are lower that a single vulnerability will knock them all out. For the same reason, if you've got one GSM-phone, one POTS-landline and one sip-over-cabletv-internet phone it's fairly likely any problem which hits one of them will leave the others working. (the possible single-point-of-failure here could be electrical power, POTS-phones normally get all the power they need over the phone-line though)
Yes, having the Rolling Stones play in a stadium, the way they do it now, costs millions. The crew, the equipment, the show, the preparations, the stage to be built etc etc etc all adds up to huge sums.
Then people pay like $150 each to stand a mile away from the stage and watch the show on giant (also expensive) screens. The performers themselves can hardly be seen from such a distance at all. At which point you have to wonder why you didn't just shell out $15 for a DVD of the concert instead.
I hugely prefer smaller concerts. I don't *NEED* the huge special-effects investments. Some of the best concerts I've been to basically consisted of a handful people with instruments. Definately the best concert I've been to was Nightwish in Dresden last year. It had really fucking good music, and tons of enthusiastic fans. Cost like $50/ticket and had no more than perhaps 1500 people attending.
I welcome this move. Ticketmaster are welcome to suck those silly enough to go to that kind of show dry. Meanwhile the rest of us get to hear more and better music for less money.
but the US non-ratification of this treaty is pretty much a non issue to me.
Well, this particular treaty was just an example. I agree that the US is closer to following the treaty than many other countries that *DID* ratify it. But I still think you guys should get around to ratifying it.
I actually suspect that it's not just work-pressure and "more important issues" that's prevented you from signing it. I think there's one very concrete issue. Unless I'm mistaken (I may be, I freely admit that my knowledge of US law is full of holes), some states in the US allow a person to receive a death-penalty for a crime commited while a child. (for the purpose of this treaty, child is simply defined as "under 18")
You'd have to end that. And I imagine that isn't totally uncontroversial with some voter-groups.
As far as idealism goes, what's better, living our lives based on those ideals or making sure that our government has fully put its weight behind a treaty that no sane person would disagree with?
I don't see how one excludes the other. And I do beleive there are sane persons who, for example, disagree that physical punishment of children is unaccaptable or that capital punishment should be reserved for adults. (if not done away with alltogether)
I'll put it this way: I'm glad Thailand has signed this treaty. How far have they progressed in shutting down the child sex industry there?
Not far enough. But I don't see how the fact that children suffer in Thailand is an argument in favor of ratifying the treaty in the US being unimportant. More like the oposite; after you yourself ratified it it would be easier to put more pressure on other signatories to actually take steps to fully comply with it.
Child abuse is endemic in much of the world and it's great that those countries have ratified the treaty, but I really really don't give a shit about all the countries that already frowned upon and dealt with the abuse of children before the treaty, so ya know, the US, Canada, Europe, all those places.
But "those places" are the ones who are putting pressure on the less well-behaved countries to put an end to the abuse. Part of that pressure consists of requests and demands that ratified treaties be respected, and you can't very well argue that if you yourself never even ratified the thing.
I agree US ratifying the treaty would not end the abuses. But it'd be a step in the right direction.
I also think you underestimate the impact in the western world somewhat. I know for a fact that, for example, Norwegian and Swedisch immigration-law was rewritten to take the treaty into account. The practical result being that some families that would otherwise be returned to wherever they come from are allowed to stay in some situations, because of considerations for the child(ren).
Are there bigger problems ? Sure. There always is.
Sure they'd notice if it "looked like crap", but let's be real, even with the downscaling, the contant is still higher-rez than that of current-generation DVDs.
Yes, it's downgraded, I'm still not sure consumers are going to notice or care all that much.
A CD that is poorly encoded as 128Kbps CBR mp3 is also significantly degraded, most people couldn't care less.
Hell, 99% of the movies that are transfered illegally over the net today are recompressed in ways that significantly degrades them. People overwhelmingly do not care.
If you want to watch episode X of Simpsons, it's just not that important if the picture-quality is plain old NTSC or if it's 1080p. Nor if the sound is 96kbps mono mp3 or 5.1 dolby surround. People just don't care. Or atleast they don't care all that much.
You get to a point that's "good enough" and people stop caring. Witness the lack of success for the various projects that's tried to make the "next, improved" version of the CD (SACD, DVD-audio), higher sampling-rates, larger samples, more channels. People overwhelmingly completely fails to care.
Sure. Everyone except the two major parties sees that if a state sends say 7 people to the electoral college, and the votes in that state are oh, say 50% Democrat, 35% Republican, 10% Green, 5% Other, then the sensible distribution of people sent would be something sort of proportional to that, rather than 7 Democrats any noone else. (yeah, I'm aware there's differences today between how different states handles this)
But the thing is -- the only ones who can change the voting system, are precisely the only ones who have no interest in doing so. (the two major parties)
My bad. I misremembered. You're correct -- you guys did sign on to the treaty, you just haven't managed to actually ratify it at any point during the last oh 17 years or so.
I agree there's (lots of!) places in the world where its worse to grow up than in the US.
But don't you find this line of reasoning sort of uncomforting ?
I already heard, "Sure Gitmo totally ignores any number of human rights and/or american values, but China is worse, so that's ok." today. (ok, so I'm paraphrasing it...)
And now you come saying you care about rigths for children when the situation in USA has deteriorated to that of a third world country.
Seriously, is THAT your ambition ? To compete with the third world on conditions for children, to compete with China on human rigths ? That's what "Land of the free" is about ?
Forgive me for being underwhelmed. I was sort of of the impression that US ideals hung somewhat higher than that....
Sure. The two-party system and the election-system that reinforces that and effectively disenfranchises a large portion of the population is at the heart of the problem. Won't change for the better either. I mean, why would the Republicans *or* the Democrats vote in favor of election-reform that would diminish their own influence ?
Yeah. But the thing is, software that allows you to write letters to grandma and surf the web is also commoditized today.
Paying $600 for software that'll enable you to do things you could also do with $0 software is ridicolous on a $100 computer. On a $3000 computer it's also silly, but there it's not silly to quite the same degree, atleast you can argue if the software increases the utility of your $3000 machine by 20%, it's worth it.
The $700 computer with XP and MS-Office, on the other hand, is unlikely to sell as well as the $100 computer with Linux and OpenOffice, and even more unlikely to be 7 times as useful.
You'r rigth. With the current voting-system there'll never be real choise. And many voters (for example those living in a state which is very clearly republican) has no voice at all in the presidential elections.
It's a chicken and egg situation; in order for the situation to improve, those with power (i.e. the big two) would need to change the laws.
But why would they change the laws in a way that would give themselves less power ? So, the fox guards the henhouse, and the chickens don't get much say in the matter.
I wasn't talking of Bush. Ok, so he's a little bit worse than the main alternative. But to an Europena, your two main parties are, if not indistinguishable, then atleast occupying spots on the political spectrum extremely close to oneanother.
Your electoral system ensures that it stays that way -- only two major parties, and those two competing for the same core of voters, which mean the two parties won't be all that much different.
It'd be an improvement tossing out Bush. But it wouldn't be enough. Tossing out Bush, doing away with the electoral college, reforming campaign-financing, opening up a lot more of government in general, oh, and chaning to a voting-system that allows people to actually vote for their favorite candidate, would be a start.
They're dismissive of it because as the physical hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, the prices they demand for software that is otherwise free (both senses) become more and more ridicolous.
It's one thing to have a $90 operating-system and a $500 office-suite on a modern developer-laptop costing in total maybe $3000. It's expensive.
But it's simply ridicolous to suggest people should buy a $100 computer, and then add $600 in software.
Hardware-prices are falling rapidly. This leaves them in a squeeze as they'd like to continue charging high prices for their boxed software. OpenOffice and friends only add to the pain.
Agreed. Neither foreign policy, not human rigths is something China should be proud of.
But here's the thing -- noone acts as if China are doing particularily well in these areas, neither do China currently act as "world police", waving the banner of freedom and democracy, and claiming to be chief protector of those values.
For that matter, China doesn't even particularily seem to care if other countries ignore human rigths.
When you go out in the world, invade other countries, wave the banner of freedom and democracy around, it is to be excepected that people will be bothered by this "image" and see it as fake when they're confronted by stuff like Gitmo.
There are (lots of!) places worse than Gitmo in China, no doubt about it.
But the thing is, like you say, US citizens are free to protest Gitmo. They're even free to toss out those politicians responsible for trampling americas reputation in the mud. Yet they do not. To me that's a mystery.
Most americans I know are *proud* of their freedoms. Consider human rigths *important*. Want the world to have more freedom and less torture, less inhumane punishments, less repression, less people in jail without a fair trial. That's why I don't understand why you tolerate such abuses from your own government.
At last: "We may be bad, but atleast we're better than China" is true. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it ? If you have to compare yourself to *China* to come out the winner, just how deeply have you sunk ?
Sure, you're not alone in refusing to sign the convention on childrens rigths, you share that honor with Somalia. That give a warm cuddly feeling ?
The thing is, I don't get it. I'm absolutely positive, if you where to read the declaration
(available here) for the US public and ask if they're in favor or not, literally 95% (or more) would be in favor, and you're a democracy, so I don't understand why you don't demand your government gets with the program.
Whats in it for you is treble damages if you should ever later happen to implement anything even remotely related to one of the patents you've commented upon earlier -- they're gonna claim it must be willfull infringement since you had read the patent-application and thus "must" know your implementation infringes.
It really works like that: reading patents to try and make sure you're not infringing anything, *increases* your vulnerability to patent-trolls. Coders should avoid even looking at patents as far as that is possible.
Opening the 360 to install something (i.e. a mod chip) is not something the 360 was designed for. You're not supposed to open the 360, hence it's a "misuse"
Correct. So damages that are a direct result of this would not be covered. If you made the motherboard broken during your attempt to solder on a new BIOS, you'd not be covered.
Damages that are unrelated to this are however covered. So, if you *do* install a new BIOS, and half a year later the power-supply melts, MS will have to replace that at their cost. They can't come screaming that your mod has "voided" your guarantee. The only way they could get away with not replacing it would be showing evidence that the broken powersupply was likely a result of the mod. (unlikely, I'd say)
A standard warranty includes the option, at manufacturers descretion, to repair or replace the unit.
I'm explicitly saying that in many countries, the rigths you have by law are *more* extensive than those offered by volunty "warranties" from the manufacturer, which makes the "warranty" useless.
For example, in Norway if a product breaks in its first year it's at the *consumers* discretion if you'll accept a repair, or demand a replacement. (There's an exception if replacement is unproportionally expensive, if the clock in your new car is broken, you won't get away with demanding that the dealer replace the entire car.)
A "standard warranty" (i think you're in error when you assume such a beast exists -- the warranties I've seen differ hugely in conditions and coverage) is simply irrelevent aslong as the rigths you have by law eclipse those you have by law. I'm aware that in i.e. USA you have very few rigths under law, I'm just saying that's not universally true.
If instead you'd pissed about with the clutch pedal mechanism then there's a risk you burned out the clutch because your modifications didn't let it close properly. Then they'd tell you where to go.
Sure. But nobody expects MS (or anyone) will fix a product that you yourself broke, that's not the point.
When MS says "installing a mod will void your warranty" this sounds, to me atleast, like they're saying they'll not undertake any warranty-repairs on a modded xbox. I'm just pointing out in Scandinavia they won't get away with this -- if they want to refuse warranty-repair *they* have to show that the problem is likely due to consumer misuse. I gave a practical example: If you solder in a new BIOS, and then half a year later the DVD-drive goes broken, they'd still have to replace the broken DVD-drive. (unless there was some good evidence that the broken DVD-drive was a direct result of your mod)
A quick check just now shows that I can, from western Norway, reach several servers in the US with ping-times of 100 -> 150 ms.
Light moves 300.000 km/s and the distance from western Europe to eastern USA is on the order of 6000 km, so minimum physically possible pingtimes would be about 40ms.
In practice, this means including the inevitable router-lag and the failure of network-cables to go in a straigth line, we're not likely to ever see much better ping-times than currently, 100ms or so is about as good as it gets, realistically speaking.
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I mean, I would also *expect* a concert with 20.000 attending to cost significantly less than 10 concerts of 2000 people. Thus you would expect the larger concert to have cheaper tickets.
In practice it tends to be the other way around, with bigger concerts being -more- expensive than small ones.
For electing larger assemblies, it's obvious to anyone that the only sensible thing is to have these be representational more or less in the same proportion as the population.
So, if 10% of the voters vote green, the greens should get (more or less) 10% of the chairs. Your districts don't do this, but there's plenty of systems that do.
For example, in Norway the country is divided in "fylke", and each fylke sends a number of representatives to the Storting. (fylke with higher population sends more, allthough the smaller ones are sligthly "overrepresentated") But these candidates are proportional, thus there are no district-borders to mess with in the first place. If 10% of the people in Oslo vote for "SV" (one of the left parties) SV gets to send aproximately 10% of the representatives from Oslo. (in this case probably 2, Oslo sends 17 in total)
Only one person needs to break open the safe, thereafter the content can be shared freely with everyone, and shared in a matter so that each person gets the entire contents of the safe.
Stopping 99% of all people from opening the safe is no good if the last 1% then share the result freely. It doesn't actually matter very much (if at all!) that perhaps 10% of the population are capable of, and willing to, make a mp3 from a normal CD while perhaps only 0.1% are capable of, and willing to, DivX from a drm-protected DVD.
You don't need to look at theory. Facts will do. 95% of all DVDs contain drm, in the form of CSS and region-coding. This has as far as anyone can tell more or less zero impact on the availability of movies online. The chief restraint seems to be that for many people downloading GBs of data still takes time, and watching movies on the PC is less attractive. This *used* to be true for mp3s.
Today ? What is more convenient if you want to listen to the music ? A unencumbered high-quality mp3 or a crappy non-cd that won't play in the car or in the cd, and that is a hassle to rip to a more portable format ?
It goes without saying that in order for a freedom to be upheld, someone else is going to have to be restricted from taking that freedom away.
As for restricting developers, that's clearly nonsense. Stallmanns ideas and licenses have precisely -ZERO- influence on your own licensing unless you yourself voluntarily choose to build your program using components that are under the GPL (or similar).
Guess what; you're free to not do that.
It would be possible, but it's not the case. The generated code is open for anyone to inspect, and there's nothing obviously fishy about it. Have a look yourself if you doubt it.
One can agree or disagree with RMS all one likes. (personally I tend to agree more and more often) But even if one disagrees with his opinions, one cannot seriously consider him not credible.
He's been working on the very same thing for something like a quarter century. In all those years his message has been 100% consistent. It is, and always was, extremely clear not only exactly where he stands, but also why.
He's been explaining it in great detail, and with an amazing display of patience at answering the same stupid questions a million times.
It's quite simple really. He believes that freedom is good and important. He believes that taking peoples freedom away is morally wrong. He believes you should not voluntarily accept givig up your freedoms. He believes that the freedom to help your neighbour and friend, the freedom to tinker with, improve, or even just mess up the items you own is one such freedom worth keeping.
Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone can seriously disagree with any of that.
And assuming the lack of cracked iTunes-files on the sharing networks is not simply a consequence of the same content being available in more popular and easier formats. Why would anyone care to crack and upload a itunes-file aslong as the same song is going to be ten times as popular as a plain old mp3 ?
You can turn it around and say: There's no content on iTunes that isn't also circulating freely on the sharing-networks in unprotected form. Thus the DRM on iTunes fails at preventing piracy.
That won't work. You seem to misunderstand the situation.
The thing is, the airlines, in Europe, already collect all this information (or for the part they don't nessecarily, like email-adress, I'm certain the US accepts this field being left blank) while handing out the ticket. For example, by nesecity they'll know how you paid for your ticket, at what date you ordered it, if you bougth a one-way or return ticket and so on.
The thing is, the US government demands the airlines hand over all of this information on their passengers if flying into the US.
This ruling now says that doing so would be a violation of EU data-protection laws, thus the airlines cannot legally comply with the US request.
That puts them in a bind. This would change precisely not at all if the data should be handed to a US private company instead of US intelligence.
I'm sure some solution will be found, shutting down all Europe->USA fligths so that one could get into the US from Europe only by flying by a third country (such as Canada or Mexico) is unthinkable.
But they're called "computer virus" for a reason, and in many ways they do indeed function similarily:
For the purpose of this discussion, I'd say they're pretty much identical. It's well-known that large areas of monoculture, say in agriculture, increases the risk that a single plant-disease can wipe out a large area completely, whereas a more diverse environment, such as a forest, is very unlikely to be wiped by a single plant-disease, because it consists of hundreds to thousands of different plants, and they're unlikely to all be equally vulnerable to a single disease.
Fact is, if your 3 DNS-servers run completely different operating-systems and completely different dns-software, the odds are lower that a single vulnerability will knock them all out. For the same reason, if you've got one GSM-phone, one POTS-landline and one sip-over-cabletv-internet phone it's fairly likely any problem which hits one of them will leave the others working. (the possible single-point-of-failure here could be electrical power, POTS-phones normally get all the power they need over the phone-line though)
Yes, having the Rolling Stones play in a stadium, the way they do it now, costs millions. The crew, the equipment, the show, the preparations, the stage to be built etc etc etc all adds up to huge sums.
Then people pay like $150 each to stand a mile away from the stage and watch the show on giant (also expensive) screens. The performers themselves can hardly be seen from such a distance at all. At which point you have to wonder why you didn't just shell out $15 for a DVD of the concert instead.
I hugely prefer smaller concerts. I don't *NEED* the huge special-effects investments. Some of the best concerts I've been to basically consisted of a handful people with instruments. Definately the best concert I've been to was Nightwish in Dresden last year. It had really fucking good music, and tons of enthusiastic fans. Cost like $50/ticket and had no more than perhaps 1500 people attending.
I welcome this move. Ticketmaster are welcome to suck those silly enough to go to that kind of show dry. Meanwhile the rest of us get to hear more and better music for less money.
Well, this particular treaty was just an example. I agree that the US is closer to following the treaty than many other countries that *DID* ratify it. But I still think you guys should get around to ratifying it.
I actually suspect that it's not just work-pressure and "more important issues" that's prevented you from signing it. I think there's one very concrete issue. Unless I'm mistaken (I may be, I freely admit that my knowledge of US law is full of holes), some states in the US allow a person to receive a death-penalty for a crime commited while a child. (for the purpose of this treaty, child is simply defined as "under 18")
You'd have to end that. And I imagine that isn't totally uncontroversial with some voter-groups.
As far as idealism goes, what's better, living our lives based on those ideals or making sure that our government has fully put its weight behind a treaty that no sane person would disagree with?
I don't see how one excludes the other. And I do beleive there are sane persons who, for example, disagree that physical punishment of children is unaccaptable or that capital punishment should be reserved for adults. (if not done away with alltogether)
I'll put it this way: I'm glad Thailand has signed this treaty. How far have they progressed in shutting down the child sex industry there?
Not far enough. But I don't see how the fact that children suffer in Thailand is an argument in favor of ratifying the treaty in the US being unimportant. More like the oposite; after you yourself ratified it it would be easier to put more pressure on other signatories to actually take steps to fully comply with it.
Child abuse is endemic in much of the world and it's great that those countries have ratified the treaty, but I really really don't give a shit about all the countries that already frowned upon and dealt with the abuse of children before the treaty, so ya know, the US, Canada, Europe, all those places.
But "those places" are the ones who are putting pressure on the less well-behaved countries to put an end to the abuse. Part of that pressure consists of requests and demands that ratified treaties be respected, and you can't very well argue that if you yourself never even ratified the thing.
I agree US ratifying the treaty would not end the abuses. But it'd be a step in the right direction.
I also think you underestimate the impact in the western world somewhat. I know for a fact that, for example, Norwegian and Swedisch immigration-law was rewritten to take the treaty into account. The practical result being that some families that would otherwise be returned to wherever they come from are allowed to stay in some situations, because of considerations for the child(ren).
Are there bigger problems ? Sure. There always is.
Sure they'd notice if it "looked like crap", but let's be real, even with the downscaling, the contant is still higher-rez than that of current-generation DVDs.
Yes, it's downgraded, I'm still not sure consumers are going to notice or care all that much.
A CD that is poorly encoded as 128Kbps CBR mp3 is also significantly degraded, most people couldn't care less.
Hell, 99% of the movies that are transfered illegally over the net today are recompressed in ways that significantly degrades them. People overwhelmingly do not care.
If you want to watch episode X of Simpsons, it's just not that important if the picture-quality is plain old NTSC or if it's 1080p. Nor if the sound is 96kbps mono mp3 or 5.1 dolby surround. People just don't care. Or atleast they don't care all that much.
You get to a point that's "good enough" and people stop caring. Witness the lack of success for the various projects that's tried to make the "next, improved" version of the CD (SACD, DVD-audio), higher sampling-rates, larger samples, more channels. People overwhelmingly completely fails to care.
But the thing is -- the only ones who can change the voting system, are precisely the only ones who have no interest in doing so. (the two major parties)
I agree there's (lots of!) places in the world where its worse to grow up than in the US.
But don't you find this line of reasoning sort of uncomforting ?
I already heard, "Sure Gitmo totally ignores any number of human rights and/or american values, but China is worse, so that's ok." today. (ok, so I'm paraphrasing it...)
And now you come saying you care about rigths for children when the situation in USA has deteriorated to that of a third world country.
Seriously, is THAT your ambition ? To compete with the third world on conditions for children, to compete with China on human rigths ? That's what "Land of the free" is about ?
Forgive me for being underwhelmed. I was sort of of the impression that US ideals hung somewhat higher than that....
Sure. The two-party system and the election-system that reinforces that and effectively disenfranchises a large portion of the population is at the heart of the problem. Won't change for the better either. I mean, why would the Republicans *or* the Democrats vote in favor of election-reform that would diminish their own influence ?
Paying $600 for software that'll enable you to do things you could also do with $0 software is ridicolous on a $100 computer. On a $3000 computer it's also silly, but there it's not silly to quite the same degree, atleast you can argue if the software increases the utility of your $3000 machine by 20%, it's worth it.
The $700 computer with XP and MS-Office, on the other hand, is unlikely to sell as well as the $100 computer with Linux and OpenOffice, and even more unlikely to be 7 times as useful.
It's a chicken and egg situation; in order for the situation to improve, those with power (i.e. the big two) would need to change the laws.
But why would they change the laws in a way that would give themselves less power ? So, the fox guards the henhouse, and the chickens don't get much say in the matter.
Your electoral system ensures that it stays that way -- only two major parties, and those two competing for the same core of voters, which mean the two parties won't be all that much different.
It'd be an improvement tossing out Bush. But it wouldn't be enough. Tossing out Bush, doing away with the electoral college, reforming campaign-financing, opening up a lot more of government in general, oh, and chaning to a voting-system that allows people to actually vote for their favorite candidate, would be a start.
They're dismissive of it because as the physical hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, the prices they demand for software that is otherwise free (both senses) become more and more ridicolous.
It's one thing to have a $90 operating-system and a $500 office-suite on a modern developer-laptop costing in total maybe $3000. It's expensive.
But it's simply ridicolous to suggest people should buy a $100 computer, and then add $600 in software.
Hardware-prices are falling rapidly. This leaves them in a squeeze as they'd like to continue charging high prices for their boxed software. OpenOffice and friends only add to the pain.
But here's the thing -- noone acts as if China are doing particularily well in these areas, neither do China currently act as "world police", waving the banner of freedom and democracy, and claiming to be chief protector of those values.
For that matter, China doesn't even particularily seem to care if other countries ignore human rigths.
When you go out in the world, invade other countries, wave the banner of freedom and democracy around, it is to be excepected that people will be bothered by this "image" and see it as fake when they're confronted by stuff like Gitmo.
There are (lots of!) places worse than Gitmo in China, no doubt about it.
But the thing is, like you say, US citizens are free to protest Gitmo. They're even free to toss out those politicians responsible for trampling americas reputation in the mud. Yet they do not. To me that's a mystery.
Most americans I know are *proud* of their freedoms. Consider human rigths *important*. Want the world to have more freedom and less torture, less inhumane punishments, less repression, less people in jail without a fair trial. That's why I don't understand why you tolerate such abuses from your own government.
At last: "We may be bad, but atleast we're better than China" is true. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it ? If you have to compare yourself to *China* to come out the winner, just how deeply have you sunk ?
Sure, you're not alone in refusing to sign the convention on childrens rigths, you share that honor with Somalia. That give a warm cuddly feeling ?
The thing is, I don't get it. I'm absolutely positive, if you where to read the declaration (available here) for the US public and ask if they're in favor or not, literally 95% (or more) would be in favor, and you're a democracy, so I don't understand why you don't demand your government gets with the program.
It really works like that: reading patents to try and make sure you're not infringing anything, *increases* your vulnerability to patent-trolls. Coders should avoid even looking at patents as far as that is possible.
Correct. So damages that are a direct result of this would not be covered. If you made the motherboard broken during your attempt to solder on a new BIOS, you'd not be covered.
Damages that are unrelated to this are however covered. So, if you *do* install a new BIOS, and half a year later the power-supply melts, MS will have to replace that at their cost. They can't come screaming that your mod has "voided" your guarantee. The only way they could get away with not replacing it would be showing evidence that the broken powersupply was likely a result of the mod. (unlikely, I'd say)
I'm explicitly saying that in many countries, the rigths you have by law are *more* extensive than those offered by volunty "warranties" from the manufacturer, which makes the "warranty" useless.
For example, in Norway if a product breaks in its first year it's at the *consumers* discretion if you'll accept a repair, or demand a replacement. (There's an exception if replacement is unproportionally expensive, if the clock in your new car is broken, you won't get away with demanding that the dealer replace the entire car.)
A "standard warranty" (i think you're in error when you assume such a beast exists -- the warranties I've seen differ hugely in conditions and coverage) is simply irrelevent aslong as the rigths you have by law eclipse those you have by law. I'm aware that in i.e. USA you have very few rigths under law, I'm just saying that's not universally true.
When MS says "installing a mod will void your warranty" this sounds, to me atleast, like they're saying they'll not undertake any warranty-repairs on a modded xbox. I'm just pointing out in Scandinavia they won't get away with this -- if they want to refuse warranty-repair *they* have to show that the problem is likely due to consumer misuse. I gave a practical example: If you solder in a new BIOS, and then half a year later the DVD-drive goes broken, they'd still have to replace the broken DVD-drive. (unless there was some good evidence that the broken DVD-drive was a direct result of your mod)
A quick check just now shows that I can, from western Norway, reach several servers in the US with ping-times of 100 -> 150 ms.
Light moves 300.000 km/s and the distance from western Europe to eastern USA is on the order of 6000 km, so minimum physically possible pingtimes would be about 40ms.
In practice, this means including the inevitable router-lag and the failure of network-cables to go in a straigth line, we're not likely to ever see much better ping-times than currently, 100ms or so is about as good as it gets, realistically speaking.