I dunno. Judging from the comments above it looks like there's lotsa people here who have the same irrational hatred of Gore as of Apple, which if you'll remember has been "going out of business" for about twenty years now. The only other subject I've seen this kind of fixation on in the general media is Woodstock (Clinton-hating isn't as mainstream but even more irrational among its adherents). There seem to be a lot of people who would feel quite good if any of the above were to have their asses handed to them. Very strange.
Yes, I think Park has something of a parallel agenda as well that he's not acknowledging. For example Podkletnikov (he of the antigravity effect that's dismissed as too impossible to even be wrong) may well have discovered something real. And I've seen some parapsychology stats (Ganzfield stuff from Cornell) that are at least as indicative as the original research that suggested aspirin could make heart attacks less likely (which was 4 out of 10,000 cases in the survey).
The position that we scientifically and fundamentally understand the entirety of the nature of the universe isn't a scientific position but a religious one, since it isn't based on facts but faith. It resembles the concept of "the free market" (isn't one, never been one, may never be one) in faith-based economics.
There's actually a long-running lawsuit between the Milne estate and Disney about this. I believe it was in the LA Weekly about three months ago. And of course there's the letter Disney sent Stravinsky about allowing them to use his music in the original Fantasia, where they say that they could just as well use it without his permission. And DON'T get me started about how Buena Vista (Disney's distro arm) is so over-the-top lawyer-driven, I've got a boyfriend whose company had to hire two full-timers (out of a workforce of two dozen) just to deal with them.
I'd rave here about Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away as superior to anything Disney's done in twenty years, except THEY'RE owned by Disney too. You can expect American releases of Miyazaki's (spelling?) other films in Disney's own sweet time.
At least they haven't bought Apple yet, though with Disney's stock price in freefall it might go the other way around . . .
Yes, but there's a difference between expanding the pond and getting a good share on your merits, and controlling access to the pond by monopolistic means. Perhaps Windows is the software equivalent of Britney Spears or those boy bands. Viruses are typically concerned with reproducing and surviving, not creating new things.
I haven't bought a new CD in years, except from the artists themselves. And they often just give it to me, since I'm a musician too and they know I'm poor. (I give them CD-Rs of my own stuff.)
The meetup was fun and pleasantly geeky too. I'm not sure Sit & Spin is really the right place for meeting, though. Pluses: all-ages (I think we had a few folks who'd be underage at a bar), reasonably centrally located, and not much cigarette smoke. Minuses: it was hard to find table space, there was intrusive background music that limited conversation to a six-foot radius (if that), no network access, and it's not all-ages after 8:30 or so.
Bars aren't all-ages (and usually have smoke and too-loud music), and restaurants may have unrealistic expectations about everybody ordering food. Internet cafes and coffeehouses may be the best locales for this.
The Zeitgeist is a nice space but Pioneer Square is a little out of the way and somewhat dangerous as well (it's where Seattle's original Skid Road was). The Speakeasy would've been a good place to meet, unfortunately it burned down last year. The Hurricane might work if we could reserve a table or two ahead of time. It might also be worth it to check out the Vivace Roasteria (at Denny & Broadway on Capitol Hill, overlooking the reservoir), they've got some space and are open late, IIRC.
Anyhow, thanks to everybody for making it, I'm looking forward to next month. And I hope the guy who photo'd the meetup posts the images!
Well, I appreciate that you are willing to spend so much time trying to make yourself clear -- it'd've taken me at least half an hour just to type your response, much less draft it in this tiny little text window -- and your bullying and belligerence certainly seem of a piece with your arguments, so I'm sure you believe what you're saying and not just trolling.
In fact, in my opinion it would take some searching to find better proof than in your response that the US has suffered materially, morally, and (dare I say it) spiritually from the grotesque and disastrous policies of the Cold War, and that it is heedless about the consequences of its actions then and now. You, sir, are not all that distinguishable from a terrorist. So I guess they have already won.
But then it can be said with some truth that the Nazis (and Japanese, at least economically) won WW II, too. As you admit above, our government, in the name of fighting Communists, acted like Nazis (in some cases -- see the history of Operation Paperclip, for example -- imported them, even assigned them to continue their inhumane experiments, in order to preserve freedom of course). Indeed I would argue that in the area of geopolitics the policies frozen into place during the Cold War (supporting and installing dictatorships and other oppressive governments, though the Cold War was hardly the beginning -- see our history in Central America earlier in the last century, a la Tom Lehrer's "Send the Marines": "They've got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we _like_ can be elected") was, like your comments, far more like the Nazis than the Founding Fathers. And this attitude continues under Bush 1.5, what with that recent unpleasantness in Venuzuela, where our military advised and supported (via a Navy ship) the attempted coup. We must make the world safe for the multinational looters like the IMF, Citibank, et cetera -- after all, the American Dream these days seems to be that we can all aspire to a cut of the swag.
Anyhow, the history of the world is a big topic to try to bite off in a space like this, and I doubt I've changed your mind even a little bit. But thanks for playing!
ps: You might read the Constitution sometime. It's a pretty fine set of rules for a civilization. It's too bad no one here's allowed to follow them anymore.
But what if we hadn't spent six trillion dollars on nukes (or was it 42 trillion? there was a study once), creating nuke-pollution timebombs at Hanford and elsewhere, experimenting on our own population and spreading cancer from fallout, fostering proliferation and Russia's arsenal.
Maybe we could have fed, educated and housed our own people instead of developing the military-industrial(-entertainment) complex that's made us so vulnerable. And there wouldn't be ex-Russian rogue nukes that could be shipped, totally undetected by the technofix of SDI, and detonated here, as we're being warned by our government. (I believe you may have heard of a recent movie concerning that.)
After all, after you've got enough to destroy the world three times over, isn't the rest a bit of a waste? (As Robert Sheckley said a long time ago, America created the word overkill and then proceeded to demonstrate its practical applications.) What was the collateral damage, for us in this country and for that matter every living thing on the fucking planet?
We've threatened to use nukes at least half a dozen times in the last half century (including the Berlin blockade), we've shown we can't abide by the rules of the rest of civilization, and _you_ feel secure?
Already happened. Five years ago I saw a package of spray-on insecticide with the notice "Use of this product not in accordance with the instructions is a violation of Federal law." So if I used it to clean a mirror the Feds would be after me, eh?
We had one here at UWashington, KCMU, that got gradually corporatized by the station manager over ten years . . . then Paul Allen bought it. I don't know what it's like now, as I gave up listening to radio a few years ago.
I've come across a few good streaming webstations lately, but when I'm not on the DSL I just listen to CDs.
Or you can just listen to your high-quality public radio station and enjoy thoughtful content from intelligent people who only want your money every few months.
Name one "high-quality public radio station". Maybe you're lucky enough to have one in your area but all I ever hear is NPR/"Some Slightly Different Things Considered That Won't Upset Our Commercial Sponsors, I Mean Underwriters" crap. (And don't get me started about PBS.) "Public" radio in the US is by and large a disgrace wrapped in a farce.
How true. You don't think being an official predatory monopoly (or the well-known history of leverage tactics that led to that status) has anything to do with it, do you?
I beg to differ, just a bit. There are thousands of great musicians in the world, and most of them aren't signed with the big five record companies (and the record companies wouldn't know what to do with them anyhow, they're so inefficient that they need multimillion sales to survive). And there's more great music (and more crap) being recorded these days than ever before because anyone with an increasingly small bit of cash can buy multitrack recording gear (or use software).
I've been doing home recording for twenty years now, doing my own producing and engineering, and I've never paid for time in a studio. Hell, I own an 8-track digital studio (paid $2500 five years ago, you can get twice the tracks for half that now and it burns CDs) and it fits in a suitcase. I'm not saying I'm equipped to record orchestras or big-ass rock bands -- you need a ton of mikes and several acoustically-separated rooms for corporate rock -- but it's enough for 95% of the electronica out there, most of which is recorded at home anyway.
Where I completely agree with you is that corporate marketing and distribution is the bottleneck. There's something to be said for gatekeepers as crap filters, but the RIAA and their clan (including payola-driven radio) have been corrupted through and through by greed.
ps: Sterling's Distraction is a great sf-political read, though he got blindsided by reality when it comes to open source -- occupational hazard when you're writing close to the edge of journalism.
Don't make the SPAlike assumption that all those CD blanks were used for copying copyrighted music. I use CD-Rs to make and back up my own music, as well as for other data backup.
You want to use Netscape or Opera, you drop it in and it works great. End of problem.
That's great, can I get those preinstalled like IE when I buy the computer? Would it be possible to buy the computer without IE but with Netscape or Opera preinstalled? End of case, if these are true.
Whatever MS did that can be an illegal use of its monopoly, I cannot accept that adding features--whatever they may be--to a product should be illegal.
They're not illegal, they're illegally used in the maintenance of a monopoly, is the issue. And the assertion that the code can't be factored out of the OS, for which a doctored video was submitted as faked evidence.
I'm an agnostic on the general issue of whether browsing integration is appropriate for any OS, but I can say that the Mac OS doesn't have any browser integration in the sense we're talking here -- the interface to the file system is resolutely non-HTML, what OS-level rendering there is is (as others have pointed out) only used for help viewing, and the platform is browser-agnostic, not hardwired to IE or Netscape.
Next time you go off like that, remember: Rush Limbaugh sez that calling people names just proves you don't have a real argument. And he should know, cuz he made up "feminazi" and likes calling people like the Senate Majority Leader names (when he isn't calling him a minion of Satan).
I don't see New Scientist as being any more prone to "pseudo-prophetic babble" than Slashdot (or the Wall Street Journal, for that matter). So no, I think you are trolling.
Copyrights may revert back on current artists but their contracts will still be valid and future artists will have new contracts that will have the "work-for-hire" status without a doubt.
Errr, maybe they will, but do you really think that taking all their creative rights because they were "hired" by you is legitimate? Who are you, anyway?!
Sorry guy but I didn't vote for that representative, they were imposed on me by the $$. ("Low voter participation is the hallmark of a contented democracy." -- Mitch McConnell, US Senator).
Name names, if you don't mind. Otherwise there's no difference. The lesser of two evils is still evil. And if "tburkho" is not a plant, let him represent himself. When the choice is between A and B (out of A to Z), is there much choice?
I don't think that anybody believes that "representative democracy" c. 1780 scales too well when there's 250X as many people.
So please name someone who represents you,otherwise I figure you're a RIAA plant. It's great to be paid for your opinions, but we're interested in what real people think.
(Don't forget, the rights are slowly making their way to the public domain; it's not perpetual.)
Yes, but you and I will be dead by that time. Nothing since about 1920 is in public domain yet, and the terms just keep being extended. That's not representative democracy -- you voted on it? I sure didn't -- that's corporate fascism. (Look it up.)
Perhaps he would want his surviving relatives to enjoy the fruits of his labors. No doubt he worked hard his whole to provide for them as well. If anything, that was his primary purpose in life: to provide well for his wife, children, and family.
I love the way "perhaps" turns into "no doubt" and then "if anything", without any new information being introduced. You probably have an excellent future ahead of you as an astroturfing corporate hack... if you aren't a paid one already.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. Judging from the comments above it looks like there's lotsa people here who have the same irrational hatred of Gore as of Apple, which if you'll remember has been "going out of business" for about twenty years now. The only other subject I've seen this kind of fixation on in the general media is Woodstock (Clinton-hating isn't as mainstream but even more irrational among its adherents). There seem to be a lot of people who would feel quite good if any of the above were to have their asses handed to them. Very strange.
Yes, I think Park has something of a parallel agenda as well that he's not acknowledging. For example Podkletnikov (he of the antigravity effect that's dismissed as too impossible to even be wrong) may well have discovered something real. And I've seen some parapsychology stats (Ganzfield stuff from Cornell) that are at least as indicative as the original research that suggested aspirin could make heart attacks less likely (which was 4 out of 10,000 cases in the survey).
The position that we scientifically and fundamentally understand the entirety of the nature of the universe isn't a scientific position but a religious one, since it isn't based on facts but faith. It resembles the concept of "the free market" (isn't one, never been one, may never be one) in faith-based economics.
Pigs can apparently act as vectors for transmitting avian viruses to humans.
There's actually a long-running lawsuit between the Milne estate and Disney about this. I believe it was in the LA Weekly about three months ago. And of course there's the letter Disney sent Stravinsky about allowing them to use his music in the original Fantasia, where they say that they could just as well use it without his permission. And DON'T get me started about how Buena Vista (Disney's distro arm) is so over-the-top lawyer-driven, I've got a boyfriend whose company had to hire two full-timers (out of a workforce of two dozen) just to deal with them.
I'd rave here about Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away as superior to anything Disney's done in twenty years, except THEY'RE owned by Disney too. You can expect American releases of Miyazaki's (spelling?) other films in Disney's own sweet time.
At least they haven't bought Apple yet, though with Disney's stock price in freefall it might go the other way around . . .
Yes, but there's a difference between expanding the pond and getting a good share on your merits, and controlling access to the pond by monopolistic means. Perhaps Windows is the software equivalent of Britney Spears or those boy bands. Viruses are typically concerned with reproducing and surviving, not creating new things.
Nice post, but one minor point:
"You fork over an outrageous sum of money, and Adobe takes it -- but you get a copy of Photoshop."
I'm just not sure that you will actually own the program, I believe the EULA will state that Adobe owns it and are just licencing it to you.
I haven't bought a new CD in years, except from the artists themselves. And they often just give it to me, since I'm a musician too and they know I'm poor. (I give them CD-Rs of my own stuff.)
The meetup was fun and pleasantly geeky too. I'm not sure Sit & Spin is really the right place for meeting, though. Pluses: all-ages (I think we had a few folks who'd be underage at a bar), reasonably centrally located, and not much cigarette smoke. Minuses: it was hard to find table space, there was intrusive background music that limited conversation to a six-foot radius (if that), no network access, and it's not all-ages after 8:30 or so.
Bars aren't all-ages (and usually have smoke and too-loud music), and restaurants may have unrealistic expectations about everybody ordering food. Internet cafes and coffeehouses may be the best locales for this.
The Zeitgeist is a nice space but Pioneer Square is a little out of the way and somewhat dangerous as well (it's where Seattle's original Skid Road was). The Speakeasy would've been a good place to meet, unfortunately it burned down last year. The Hurricane might work if we could reserve a table or two ahead of time. It might also be worth it to check out the Vivace Roasteria (at Denny & Broadway on Capitol Hill, overlooking the reservoir), they've got some space and are open late, IIRC.
Anyhow, thanks to everybody for making it, I'm looking forward to next month. And I hope the guy who photo'd the meetup posts the images!
Well, I appreciate that you are willing to spend so much time trying to make yourself clear -- it'd've taken me at least half an hour just to type your response, much less draft it in this tiny little text window -- and your bullying and belligerence certainly seem of a piece with your arguments, so I'm sure you believe what you're saying and not just trolling.
In fact, in my opinion it would take some searching to find better proof than in your response that the US has suffered materially, morally, and (dare I say it) spiritually from the grotesque and disastrous policies of the Cold War, and that it is heedless about the consequences of its actions then and now. You, sir, are not all that distinguishable from a terrorist. So I guess they have already won.
But then it can be said with some truth that the Nazis (and Japanese, at least economically) won WW II, too. As you admit above, our government, in the name of fighting Communists, acted like Nazis (in some cases -- see the history of Operation Paperclip, for example -- imported them, even assigned them to continue their inhumane experiments, in order to preserve freedom of course). Indeed I would argue that in the area of geopolitics the policies frozen into place during the Cold War (supporting and installing dictatorships and other oppressive governments, though the Cold War was hardly the beginning -- see our history in Central America earlier in the last century, a la Tom Lehrer's "Send the Marines": "They've got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we _like_ can be elected") was, like your comments, far more like the Nazis than the Founding Fathers. And this attitude continues under Bush 1.5, what with that recent unpleasantness in Venuzuela, where our military advised and supported (via a Navy ship) the attempted coup. We must make the world safe for the multinational looters like the IMF, Citibank, et cetera -- after all, the American Dream these days seems to be that we can all aspire to a cut of the swag.
Anyhow, the history of the world is a big topic to try to bite off in a space like this, and I doubt I've changed your mind even a little bit. But thanks for playing!
ps: You might read the Constitution sometime. It's a pretty fine set of rules for a civilization. It's too bad no one here's allowed to follow them anymore.
But what if we hadn't spent six trillion dollars on nukes (or was it 42 trillion? there was a study once), creating nuke-pollution timebombs at Hanford and elsewhere, experimenting on our own population and spreading cancer from fallout, fostering proliferation and Russia's arsenal.
Maybe we could have fed, educated and housed our own people instead of developing the military-industrial(-entertainment) complex that's made us so vulnerable. And there wouldn't be ex-Russian rogue nukes that could be shipped, totally undetected by the technofix of SDI, and detonated here, as we're being warned by our government. (I believe you may have heard of a recent movie concerning that.)
After all, after you've got enough to destroy the world three times over, isn't the rest a bit of a waste? (As Robert Sheckley said a long time ago, America created the word overkill and then proceeded to demonstrate its practical applications.) What was the collateral damage, for us in this country and for that matter every living thing on the fucking planet?
We've threatened to use nukes at least half a dozen times in the last half century (including the Berlin blockade), we've shown we can't abide by the rules of the rest of civilization, and _you_ feel secure?
Already happened. Five years ago I saw a package of spray-on insecticide with the notice "Use of this product not in accordance with the instructions is a violation of Federal law." So if I used it to clean a mirror the Feds would be after me, eh?
We had one here at UWashington, KCMU, that got gradually corporatized by the station manager over ten years . . . then Paul Allen bought it. I don't know what it's like now, as I gave up listening to radio a few years ago.
I've come across a few good streaming webstations lately, but when I'm not on the DSL I just listen to CDs.
Name one "high-quality public radio station". Maybe you're lucky enough to have one in your area but all I ever hear is NPR/"Some Slightly Different Things Considered That Won't Upset Our Commercial Sponsors, I Mean Underwriters" crap. (And don't get me started about PBS.) "Public" radio in the US is by and large a disgrace wrapped in a farce.
Lorenzo Milam, you're needed (again).
How true. You don't think being an official predatory monopoly (or the well-known history of leverage tactics that led to that status) has anything to do with it, do you?
I beg to differ, just a bit. There are thousands of great musicians in the world, and most of them aren't signed with the big five record companies (and the record companies wouldn't know what to do with them anyhow, they're so inefficient that they need multimillion sales to survive). And there's more great music (and more crap) being recorded these days than ever before because anyone with an increasingly small bit of cash can buy multitrack recording gear (or use software).
I've been doing home recording for twenty years now, doing my own producing and engineering, and I've never paid for time in a studio. Hell, I own an 8-track digital studio (paid $2500 five years ago, you can get twice the tracks for half that now and it burns CDs) and it fits in a suitcase. I'm not saying I'm equipped to record orchestras or big-ass rock bands -- you need a ton of mikes and several acoustically-separated rooms for corporate rock -- but it's enough for 95% of the electronica out there, most of which is recorded at home anyway.
Where I completely agree with you is that corporate marketing and distribution is the bottleneck. There's something to be said for gatekeepers as crap filters, but the RIAA and their clan (including payola-driven radio) have been corrupted through and through by greed.
ps: Sterling's Distraction is a great sf-political read, though he got blindsided by reality when it comes to open source -- occupational hazard when you're writing close to the edge of journalism.
Don't make the SPAlike assumption that all those CD blanks were used for copying copyrighted music. I use CD-Rs to make and back up my own music, as well as for other data backup.
That's great, can I get those preinstalled like IE when I buy the computer? Would it be possible to buy the computer without IE but with Netscape or Opera preinstalled? End of case, if these are true.
Aren't you forgetting the previous consent agreement? Did they comply with that?
Whatever MS did that can be an illegal use of its monopoly, I cannot accept that adding features--whatever they may be--to a product should be illegal.
They're not illegal, they're illegally used in the maintenance of a monopoly, is the issue. And the assertion that the code can't be factored out of the OS, for which a doctored video was submitted as faked evidence.
I'm an agnostic on the general issue of whether browsing integration is appropriate for any OS, but I can say that the Mac OS doesn't have any browser integration in the sense we're talking here -- the interface to the file system is resolutely non-HTML, what OS-level rendering there is is (as others have pointed out) only used for help viewing, and the platform is browser-agnostic, not hardwired to IE or Netscape.
Next time you go off like that, remember: Rush Limbaugh sez that calling people names just proves you don't have a real argument. And he should know, cuz he made up "feminazi" and likes calling people like the Senate Majority Leader names (when he isn't calling him a minion of Satan).
I don't see New Scientist as being any more prone to "pseudo-prophetic babble" than Slashdot (or the Wall Street Journal, for that matter). So no, I think you are trolling.
Your score so far: 1 to 1.
Copyrights may revert back on current artists but their contracts will still be valid and future artists will have new contracts that will have the "work-for-hire" status without a doubt.
Errr, maybe they will, but do you really think that taking all their creative rights because they were "hired" by you is legitimate? Who are you, anyway?!
Sorry guy but I didn't vote for that representative, they were imposed on me by the $$. ("Low voter participation is the hallmark of a contented democracy." -- Mitch McConnell, US Senator).
Do you get paid for doing this? I hope so.
Name names, if you don't mind. Otherwise there's no difference. The lesser of two evils is still evil. And if "tburkho" is not a plant, let him represent himself. When the choice is between A and B (out of A to Z), is there much choice?
I don't think that anybody believes that "representative democracy" c. 1780 scales too well when there's 250X as many people.
So please name someone who represents you,otherwise I figure you're a RIAA plant. It's great to be paid for your opinions, but we're interested in what real people think.
(Don't forget, the rights are slowly making their way to the public domain; it's not perpetual.)
Yes, but you and I will be dead by that time. Nothing since about 1920 is in public domain yet, and the terms just keep being extended. That's not representative democracy -- you voted on it? I sure didn't -- that's corporate fascism. (Look it up.)
Perhaps he would want his surviving relatives to enjoy the fruits of his labors. No doubt he worked hard his whole to provide for them as well. If anything, that was his primary purpose in life: to provide well for his wife, children, and family.
I love the way "perhaps" turns into "no doubt" and then "if anything", without any new information being introduced. You probably have an excellent future ahead of you as an astroturfing corporate hack ... if you aren't a paid one already.