There's no such thing as Mach 4.4 Mach 4 was originally going to be the testbed for the University of Utah's research, but they left it off with doing little more than fix some of the problems in Mach 3. They went on to specify and implement their own environment, which is called Flux.
Then the FSF then picked up Mach 4 for use with HURD.
Io was discovered (and named?) by Galileo. I'm not sure if it was named after her, but Io was one of Zeus's mistresses. I believe he turned her into a cow to hide her from Hera, or some such. It's been a few years since I've read much mythology, so I may have her mistaken for another myth.
Natural diamonds are expensive because of the De Beers monopoly.
Producing diamonds, which has been done for ages, would be cheaper than extracting them from Jupiter's gravity well. So finding a "diamond mountain" on Jupiter would be about as useful as that giant piece of copper ore they found years ago in the U.S. Since it would be so expensive to mine it where it is, it just sits there.
Cryogenically preserving people will probably never happen, given the cellular damage caused by the process. Of course I can't prove this, so don't take what I say as an absolute, but rather just a gut feeling.
Of the animals that naturally enter a state of cryogenic stasis, they're usually very simple organisms that spend a good portion of their time dehydrating their body before being frozen.
Doesn't exactly sound like a fun process to go through.
It would seem to repair the cellular damage caused by cryogenic stasis, we'd already be well on our way to being able to preserve the state of our cells indefinitely, without having to be frozen. And this is no small feet, eh?
Oceans, though, aren't a requirement of life. There are many deep core humanly poisonous gas loving organisms that live here on earth. If we can find it here, perhaps we can elsewhere.
We can't really count out Mars, or any other planet or satellite, yet. This is primaraly due to the extremes that we've seen life live on here on earth, and the small amount of exploration we've done of the surface of any other planet in the solar system.
As for Io, it seems there could be some form of life similar to the deep core organisms on earth.
If nothing else, we could always find life on neighboring planets that originated from earth, as a small amount of ejecta from the planet no doubt has contained something or another. Then there's the possability of contamination from our various space vessels....
It's hard to imagine that we're alone in the universe, or even in our solar system. Certainly we're not apt to find human-scale intelligent life in our solar system, but any naturally occuring phenomena (like life) has a tendancy to manifest itself more than once.
Even if you were to disregard theories and somewhat inconclusive evidence regarding global warming, the distribution of these (and other) chemicals by man poses a health risk to not only humans, but also plant life, indigenous animal life, and natural monuments.
People often stop at refuting global warming (at least in their minds), and totally ignore the many other damaging effects of man's actions on the various ecosystems. After all, all that matters is their gas eating SUVs and their 50" television that helps coal energy plants stay in business.
Sun Microsystems doesn't tend to license their software for mission critical applications. You'll note in all of their licenses, they explicitly state that their software is non intended for many uses for which one could really call it a matter of life or death.
Secondly, if the toolkit were to be worked on by every tom, dick, or harry, and your precious "secret" code relied on it, how exactly is your program reliable? You must realize that if the toolkit is loaded with bugs, then your product will fail.
To open up one's source code does not place one in the position of allowing every person in the world to contribute to your releases. If you are concerned with the stability of your software, then you can screen and analyze the work of contributors, or simply ignore it altogether. At the same time you provide other people with the ability to learn, or to adapt their software to their personal needs.
There's a difference between "taking over the world," and converting Sun or any other commercial Unix vendor to a new graphical toolkit. It seems for some odd reason, that you believe that while you and whatever corporations you deal with continue to engineer products using an aged and somewhat lacking toolkit, that regardless of the sheer quantity of other developers using free or pseudo-free toolkits, you are the world.
The model of closed software that you embrace so much, ironically, is used by the very people attempting to have legally less and less responsability for their work. Where free software writers are often financially unable to provide support or gurantees for their work (which is why corporations like Redhat are there to pick up the slack), the companies that you consider to be the world are attempting to free themself of liability simply because it might cut into their profit margins.
Qt is a commercial toolkit, providing a level of support to any commercial vendor, that you would find with Motif, if not more. It's sad that again and again you pair somewhat unrelated things together when you comment on them.
The moon is bathed in a lot of radiation from the sun. Without an atmosphere, I'd not want to spend large amounts of time on it.
Nuking the moon en masse would probably blow a lot of material free from its gravity, too. Not that this has anything to do with what you said, but it does sound pretty cool.
The worst thing of all would be the defacement of our only natural satelite. Sort of like what corporations seem to feel like doing. Just goes to show how small bombs really are, in comparison to six billion crazy humans.
I'd dare venture the dotter mindset is "I think of only myself. Me. Me. Me." but perhaps I'm mistaken here.
This is exactly what posting of *seven* mirrors of binaries, while not providing mirrors for the code release, and then attempting to capitalize on this by selling CDs to people is. Thinking of one's ability to profit off of a supply shortage they could help remedy, over providing a service to people.
Apparently putting people first is childish. What a truly sad world you live in.
If for some reason I wanted the binaries, this might be useful. However, you conveniently leave the distribution of the actual useful part to the Open Group, and their miserable two servers.
But you probably aren't doing that to sell CDs, that would be immoral, and you're not immoral.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
No, the opposite is not true. Perhaps you should spend more time following EPA (and non-Government organizations, too, for that matter) reports regarding these things.
According to the EPA, from 82-92 there was a 10 million acre loss of range land with a 26% increase in urban land consumption.
From the '97 National Resources Inventory: "Since 1982, cropland, including land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), declined 13 million acres, pastureland almost 14 million acres, and rangeland 12 million acres. Forestland increased by 800,000 acres. The largest increase in acreage by land use was for development, about 30 million acres, from 5 percent of the land area in 1982 to more than 7 percent in 1997. "
Also: "The 1997 NRI indicates that an annual average of 54,000 acres of wetlands was lost from 1992-97 on cropland, pastureland, and land enrolled in CRP, while an average of 30,000 acres was gained. Nearly two-thirds of the lost wetland acres was due to agricultural production, the rest to non-agricultural activities such as development."
And: "From 1992-97, the national rate of development more than doubled to 3 million acres per year."
From Trends in the Potential for Environmental Risk from Pesticide Loss from Farm Fields: "there are still areas of the country where there is no evidence of progress, and areas where risk levels for protection of drinking water, fish, algae and crustaceans remain high."
From the USDA's Understanding Agricultural Water Quality Problems: "Nearly 20 percent of sampled wells in the study unit have nitrate concentrations exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's maximum contaminant level."
From The Greenhouse Gases in the United States 1998 Executive Summary: "Total U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases in 1998 increased by 0.2 percent from their 1997 level, below the average growth rate of the 1990s (1.2 percent). During 1998, crude oil prices dropped by one-third and the U.S. economy expanded at a 3.9-percent annual rate. The slowing of growth in emissions resulted in part from a muchm wamer-than-usual winter in 1998 and in part from lower emissions from the industrial sector. Overall, 1998 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were about 10 percent higher than 1990 emissions. Since 1990, U.S. emissions have increased at an annual rate of 1.2 percent, slightly faster than population (1.1 percent) but more slowly than energy consumption (1.4 percent), electricity consumption (2.2 percent), or gross domestic product (GDP) (2.6 percent)."
From the EIA: "The United States is a major source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, primarily because our economy is the largest in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population--but about a quarter of world gross domestic product (GDP)--the United States produces over 20 percent of total anthropogenic carbon emissions. Current projections show U.S. emissions increasing by 1.2 percent annually between 1995 and 2015 absent any policy interventions (see Figure 4). The emissions for the other 28 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are expected to increase at a similar rate. Developing (non-OECD) countries, with 81 percent of the world's population and per capita emission rates that are currently very low, are expected to increase emissions dramatically as nations such as China and India fuel economic development with fossil energy. EIA projects that non-OECD carbon emissions will increase at an annual rate of 2.9 percent between 1995 and 2015."
I could go on and on with the quotations, but it's a waste of my time. I suggest you stop spewing the Ayn Rand rhetoric and take a look at some of the facts. Even our "improvement" in our rate of destruction in some environmental issues is a matter of social beliefs, and not economic growth. The technology developed to help reduce damage isn't constructed because it was economical for the businesses, but because of our "draconian" environmental laws. You won't find many corporate lobbyists fighting for forcing industries to institute expensive reform.
The best thing we can do is to first straighten our own act up, prevent corporations from just moving their industries to other countries without environmental laws (Gee, there's that free market! And they get $.30 labor to boot!), donate technological advances to developing industrial nations (China, India,...), while providing them incentives to insitute reforms. Of course we can't expect them to reform while we still promote environmental protection with our mouth, and toss our disposable U.S. crap into the landfill with our hands.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
Too many in a region, perhaps. If instead of worrying about personal economics, we worried about social reform and environmental protection, we'd be in much better shape.
People should breed in a responsible manner. If not for the sake of the environment, for the sake of the children they so eagerly look to bring into existance. It shouldn't be a matter of Government, but personal respect of the long-term survival of the planet's ecosystem, and the suffering of children raised in a hostile environment.
If you can't feed yourself, don't have children. Do you like starving? Do you think they will?
Of course we all, collectively, should remove the problems of being able to feed the population. Until then, making increasingly more children in a strained environment will help no one.
What good is a planet expended of all of its resources? Or a planet where we drive land requirements for farming down, but requirements for living up. We're not at an overpopulation limit, now, and the point is we never should be.
It's amazing how industrial nations, for all of their advancement, continue to create unbelievable amounts of waste and destruction. Every time I see a yet another disposable product on the shelves, I feel a certain amount of sadness.
And unfortunate aspect of modern agriculture is the increase in non-natural means of fertilizing land. This may be a good way of easing the burden of shifting crops, and going through the hassle of managing your own nitrogen cycle, but at the same time it has an impact on the wildlife and neighboring sources of water.
This said, there's certainly a decrease in the total land area used for agriculture, due to improvements in agriculture, and the increasing inability for U.S. farmers to stay in business.
India and China aren't really members of the third world, but rather have a large distinction between classes of wealthy and poor, with a large portion of their populace falling in the latter. With a large gap in education between the classes, and with marginal interest in the ruling class to care after the poor, you're not apt to see their situation improve.
A free market never helps the poor, only social reform does. A free market to a man without money, is akin to food to a dead man. If anything, a free market in the Libertarian sense, simply condemns a large group of people to poverty, while they're forever exploited by their owners. It's little more than economic feudalism.
For the record, I'm assuming what you really meant is "How is overpopulation a problem for us, now?" and not "Overpopulation is good!" If this is the case, then I'll somewhat agree with you. There is no world overpopulation problem, but there are many local overpopulation problems. China, India, many African countries, etc are having problems with feeding their current population properly. The land they live upon, apparently, simply can't support the number of people that they have.
Of course populations in industrial nations are actually on a decline, or are projected to be in the near future. The U.S. is currently just barely replacing the people that die off, for instance. This, hopefully, will mean that there will never been a global overpopulation problem, because one can speculate that because this is occuring to developed nations, now, that given help in reaching this point, other countries will follow the same pattern.
For our current world population, there really is the world land area and technologies to grow sufficient amounts of food for everyone. If people in overpopulated areas gradually moved to less densely populated regions, living areas could also be guranteed to everyone.
Unfortunately people care more about finances than providing the neccesities of life to all people. Sad, really.
Providing a remote interface to a locally run piece of software, and distributing the software via a network filesystem, to be run remotely are different beasts.
Though I won't add anything of importance to the statements already made to this, I'd like to add my support to what they've said.
Your article didn't talk at all about the effects on my.mp3.com, but rather how the RIAA uses a broken model and only hurt themselves by asking the courts to enforce the laws regarding their intellectual property rights.
And then you attempt to claim otherwise, and just make an ass out of yourself. I'd say that's fairly rude.
Though I won't add anything of importance to the statements already made to this, I'd like to add my support to what they've said.
Your article didn't talk at all about the effects on my.mp3.com, but rather how the RIAA is uses a broken model and only hurt themselves by asking the courts to enforce the laws regarding their intellectual property rights.
And then you attempt to claim otherwise, and just make an ass out of yourself. I'd say that's fairly rude.
Actually, you're slightly incorrect. Musicians used to make money, also, by selling the sheet music that they composed.
Somewhat unrelated, music stores attempt to compensate for the great unkown of the content of CDs, by providing boots for listening to a few seconds of various songs. Unfortunately, this seems limited to music you'd hear on the radio anyway, but it's a step in the right direction.
The lawsuit wasn't over the use of mp3s, or mp3.com's usual mp3 distribution system, but rather over their 'broadcasting' of copyrighted music, based upon their CD authentication scheme.
This case has no real impact on the use of mp3 as a format for the distribution of music, nor will any other. The RIAA may dislike the entire concept of music distribution without their cut, but their real beef is with the proliferation of their property, without compensation.
Regardless of whether or not one believes the recording industry deserves to earn a living, they're legally entitled to. And just because it's easy to steal their intellectual property, doesn't somehow make the industry an "obsolete business model" or whatever other nonsense people use to rationalize the theft.
In the future increasingly more artists may go their own way with online music distribution, and then perhaps use their profits to distribute on CD, tape, or whatever else, themselves. They may even form loose co-ops to cut costs. Of course it may not splinter like this, and we'll be stuck with the giant corporations we have today.
Generally speaking, it would seem better to instead of using thievery and unrealistically looking to end intellectual property, to promote the distribution of music by individual artists, or small artist co-ops, or public domain music. Instead of saying that "most music is crap" and not worth my money" to rationalize theft, go out and construct or support your preferred model.
Attempting to deny the recording industry of their ability to function seems unrealistic and rather unjust, even if they are yet another evil and stupid end result of U.S. economics.
You're apparently not well versed in these treatise, which require countries to enforce international intellectual property laws. The agreements of the WIPO and WTO allow corporations to sue and seek damages for IP infringements.
You were mistaken in thinking that this is a matter of U.S. law, when it's a matter of international law.
There's a large difference between educated well-informed commentary, and ignorant ranting.
No, these really aren't related at all. U.S. cryptography law, while banning the export iof strong cryptography, didn't have laws regarding the import of cryptography. These projects would probably have continued outside of U.S., for non-U.S. citizens, speculation is fairly pointless, so I will end it there. These cryptography projects were never violating international intellectual property treatise, unlike this Russian lyrics server.
The stark difference between the cryptography projects is that not only was it legal to export strong encryption (in their countries), where as Russia has local copyright law, and international copyright law. This project is illegal *there* as well as here.
They'll simply proceed legally against the Russian organization, and perhaps lobby the U.S. Government to enforce the intellectual property treatise that Russia has agreed to, as a member of the WTO.
Russia currently has a virgin economy, and if it wants it to ever grow so that Russia can be a serious world power, again, instead of the joke that it is, they'll oblige large corporate pressures. It's simply a matter of how hard American corporations wish to press situations where a country refuses to enforce agreements. If anything, publicizing this site will lead to its downfall.
It's rather amazing how generally ignorant people seem to be about international intellectual property treatise. I suggest you read up about the WIPO, the WTO, and the various (Paris, Berne,...) agreements I mentioned in another post.
This isn't just *U.S.* law. Also keep in mind that Russia is currently recieving a great deal of aid from the U.S. Government, and is very interested in the capital our gigantic corporations are willing to put into them.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as Mach 4.4
Mach 4 was originally going to be the testbed for the University of Utah's research, but they left it off with doing little more than fix some of the problems in Mach 3. They went on to specify and implement their own environment, which is called Flux.
Then the FSF then picked up Mach 4 for use with HURD.
Io was discovered (and named?) by Galileo. I'm not sure if it was named after her, but Io was one of Zeus's mistresses. I believe he turned her into a cow to hide her from Hera, or some such. It's been a few years since I've read much mythology, so I may have her mistaken for another myth.
Natural diamonds are expensive because of the De Beers monopoly.
Producing diamonds, which has been done for ages, would be cheaper than extracting them from Jupiter's gravity well. So finding a "diamond mountain" on Jupiter would be about as useful as that giant piece of copper ore they found years ago in the U.S. Since it would be so expensive to mine it where it is, it just sits there.
Cryogenically preserving people will probably never happen, given the cellular damage caused by the process. Of course I can't prove this, so don't take what I say as an absolute, but rather just a gut feeling.
Of the animals that naturally enter a state of cryogenic stasis, they're usually very simple organisms that spend a good portion of their time dehydrating their body before being frozen.
Doesn't exactly sound like a fun process to go through.
It would seem to repair the cellular damage caused by cryogenic stasis, we'd already be well on our way to being able to preserve the state of our cells indefinitely, without having to be frozen.
And this is no small feet, eh?
Oceans, though, aren't a requirement of life. There are many deep core humanly poisonous gas loving organisms that live here on earth. If we can find it here, perhaps we can elsewhere.
We can't really count out Mars, or any other planet or satellite, yet. This is primaraly due to the extremes that we've seen life live on here on earth, and the small amount of exploration we've done of the surface of any other planet in the solar system.
As for Io, it seems there could be some form of life similar to the deep core organisms on earth.
If nothing else, we could always find life on neighboring planets that originated from earth, as a small amount of ejecta from the planet no doubt has contained something or another. Then there's the possability of contamination from our various space vessels....
It's hard to imagine that we're alone in the universe, or even in our solar system. Certainly we're not apt to find human-scale intelligent life in our solar system, but any naturally occuring phenomena (like life) has a tendancy to manifest itself more than once.
Even if you were to disregard theories and somewhat inconclusive evidence regarding global warming, the distribution of these (and other) chemicals by man poses a health risk to not only humans, but also plant life, indigenous animal life, and natural monuments.
People often stop at refuting global warming (at least in their minds), and totally ignore the many other damaging effects of man's actions on the various ecosystems. After all, all that matters is their gas eating SUVs and their 50" television that helps coal energy plants stay in business.
Sun Microsystems doesn't tend to license their software for mission critical applications. You'll note in all of their licenses, they explicitly state that their software is non intended for many uses for which one could really call it a matter of life or death.
Secondly, if the toolkit were to be worked on by every tom, dick, or harry, and your precious "secret" code relied on it, how exactly is your program reliable? You must realize that if the toolkit is loaded with bugs, then your product will fail.
To open up one's source code does not place one in the position of allowing every person in the world to contribute to your releases. If you are concerned with the stability of your software, then you can screen and analyze the work of contributors, or simply ignore it altogether. At the same time you provide other people with the ability to learn, or to adapt their software to their personal needs.
There's a difference between "taking over the world," and converting Sun or any other commercial Unix vendor to a new graphical toolkit. It seems for some odd reason, that you believe that while you and whatever corporations you deal with continue to engineer products using an aged and somewhat lacking toolkit, that regardless of the sheer quantity of other developers using free or pseudo-free toolkits, you are the world.
The model of closed software that you embrace so much, ironically, is used by the very people attempting to have legally less and less responsability for their work. Where free software writers are often financially unable to provide support or gurantees for their work (which is why corporations like Redhat are there to pick up the slack), the companies that you consider to be the world are attempting to free themself of liability simply because it might cut into their profit margins.
Qt is a commercial toolkit, providing a level of support to any commercial vendor, that you would find with Motif, if not more. It's sad that again and again you pair somewhat unrelated things together when you comment on them.
Ahh, I apologize. I jumped to the conclusion of yet another corporation looking to capitalize on supply/demand problems, when I shouldn't have.
Thanks for providing this service to everyone, I'm sure it'll be appreciated.
The moon is bathed in a lot of radiation from the sun. Without an atmosphere, I'd not want to spend large amounts of time on it.
Nuking the moon en masse would probably blow a lot of material free from its gravity, too. Not that this has anything to do with what you said, but it does sound pretty cool.
The worst thing of all would be the defacement of our only natural satelite. Sort of like what corporations seem to feel like doing.
Just goes to show how small bombs really are, in comparison to six billion crazy humans.
I'd dare venture the dotter mindset is "I think of only myself. Me. Me. Me." but perhaps I'm mistaken here.
This is exactly what posting of *seven* mirrors of binaries, while not providing mirrors for the code release, and then attempting to capitalize on this by selling CDs to people is. Thinking of one's ability to profit off of a supply shortage they could help remedy, over providing a service to people.
Apparently putting people first is childish.
What a truly sad world you live in.
If for some reason I wanted the binaries, this might be useful. However, you conveniently leave the distribution of the actual useful part to the Open Group, and their miserable two servers.
But you probably aren't doing that to sell CDs, that would be immoral, and you're not immoral.
No, the opposite is not true. Perhaps you should spend more time following EPA (and non-Government organizations, too, for that matter) reports regarding these things.
...), while providing them incentives to insitute reforms.
According to the EPA, from 82-92 there was a 10 million acre loss of range land with a 26% increase in urban land consumption.
From the '97 National Resources Inventory:
"Since 1982, cropland, including land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), declined 13 million acres, pastureland almost 14 million acres, and rangeland 12 million acres. Forestland increased by 800,000 acres. The largest increase in acreage by land use was for development, about 30 million acres, from 5 percent of the land area in 1982 to more than 7 percent in 1997. "
Also:
"The 1997 NRI indicates that an annual average of 54,000 acres of wetlands was lost from 1992-97 on cropland, pastureland, and land enrolled in CRP, while an average of 30,000 acres was gained. Nearly two-thirds of the lost wetland acres was due to agricultural production, the rest to non-agricultural activities such as development."
And:
"From 1992-97, the national rate of development more than doubled to 3 million acres per year."
From Trends in the Potential for Environmental Risk from Pesticide Loss from Farm Fields:
"there are still areas of the country where there is no evidence of progress, and areas where risk levels for protection of drinking water, fish, algae and crustaceans remain high."
From the USDA's Understanding Agricultural Water Quality Problems:
"Nearly 20 percent of sampled wells in the study unit have nitrate concentrations exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's maximum contaminant level."
From The Greenhouse Gases in the United States 1998 Executive Summary:
"Total U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases in 1998 increased by 0.2 percent from their 1997 level, below the average growth rate of the 1990s (1.2 percent). During 1998, crude oil prices dropped by one-third and the U.S. economy expanded at a 3.9-percent annual rate. The slowing of growth in emissions resulted in part from a muchm wamer-than-usual winter in 1998 and in part from lower emissions from the industrial sector. Overall, 1998 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were about 10 percent higher than 1990 emissions. Since 1990, U.S. emissions have increased at an annual rate of 1.2 percent, slightly faster than population (1.1 percent) but more slowly than energy consumption (1.4 percent), electricity consumption (2.2 percent), or gross domestic product (GDP) (2.6 percent)."
From the EIA:
"The United States is a major source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, primarily because our economy is the largest in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population--but about a quarter of world gross domestic product (GDP)--the United States produces over 20 percent of total anthropogenic carbon emissions. Current projections show U.S. emissions increasing by 1.2 percent annually between 1995 and 2015 absent any policy interventions (see Figure 4). The emissions for the other 28 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are expected to increase at a similar rate. Developing (non-OECD) countries, with 81 percent of the world's population and per capita emission rates that are currently very low, are expected to increase emissions dramatically as nations such as China and India fuel economic development with fossil energy. EIA projects that non-OECD carbon emissions will increase at an annual rate of 2.9 percent between 1995 and 2015."
I could go on and on with the quotations, but it's a waste of my time. I suggest you stop spewing the Ayn Rand rhetoric and take a look at some of the facts. Even our "improvement" in our rate of destruction in some environmental issues is a matter of social beliefs, and not economic growth. The technology developed to help reduce damage isn't constructed because it was economical for the businesses, but because of our "draconian" environmental laws. You won't find many corporate lobbyists fighting for forcing industries to institute expensive reform.
The best thing we can do is to first straighten our own act up, prevent corporations from just moving their industries to other countries without environmental laws (Gee, there's that free market! And they get $.30 labor to boot!), donate technological advances to developing industrial nations (China, India,
Of course we can't expect them to reform while we still promote environmental protection with our mouth, and toss our disposable U.S. crap into the landfill with our hands.
Too many in a region, perhaps. If instead of worrying about personal economics, we worried about social reform and environmental protection, we'd be in much better shape.
People should breed in a responsible manner. If not for the sake of the environment, for the sake of the children they so eagerly look to bring into existance. It shouldn't be a matter of Government, but personal respect of the long-term survival of the planet's ecosystem, and the suffering of children raised in a hostile environment.
If you can't feed yourself, don't have children. Do you like starving? Do you think they will?
Of course we all, collectively, should remove the problems of being able to feed the population. Until then, making increasingly more children in a strained environment will help no one.
What good is a planet expended of all of its resources? Or a planet where we drive land requirements for farming down, but requirements for living up. We're not at an overpopulation limit, now, and the point is we never should be.
It's amazing how industrial nations, for all of their advancement, continue to create unbelievable amounts of waste and destruction. Every time I see a yet another disposable product on the shelves, I feel a certain amount of sadness.
And unfortunate aspect of modern agriculture is the increase in non-natural means of fertilizing land. This may be a good way of easing the burden of shifting crops, and going through the hassle of managing your own nitrogen cycle, but at the same time it has an impact on the wildlife and neighboring sources of water.
This said, there's certainly a decrease in the total land area used for agriculture, due to improvements in agriculture, and the increasing inability for U.S. farmers to stay in business.
India and China aren't really members of the third world, but rather have a large distinction between classes of wealthy and poor, with a large portion of their populace falling in the latter. With a large gap in education between the classes, and with marginal interest in the ruling class to care after the poor, you're not apt to see their situation improve.
A free market never helps the poor, only social reform does. A free market to a man without money, is akin to food to a dead man. If anything, a free market in the Libertarian sense, simply condemns a large group of people to poverty, while they're forever exploited by their owners. It's little more than economic feudalism.
For the record, I'm assuming what you really meant is "How is overpopulation a problem for us, now?" and not "Overpopulation is good!"
If this is the case, then I'll somewhat agree with you. There is no world overpopulation problem, but there are many local overpopulation problems. China, India, many African countries, etc are having problems with feeding their current population properly. The land they live upon, apparently, simply can't support the number of people that they have.
Of course populations in industrial nations are actually on a decline, or are projected to be in the near future. The U.S. is currently just barely replacing the people that die off, for instance.
This, hopefully, will mean that there will never been a global overpopulation problem, because one can speculate that because this is occuring to developed nations, now, that given help in reaching this point, other countries will follow the same pattern.
For our current world population, there really is the world land area and technologies to grow sufficient amounts of food for everyone. If people in overpopulated areas gradually moved to less densely populated regions, living areas could also be guranteed to everyone.
Unfortunately people care more about finances than providing the neccesities of life to all people. Sad, really.
Providing a remote interface to a locally run piece of software, and distributing the software via a network filesystem, to be run remotely are different beasts.
Though I won't add anything of importance to the statements already made to this, I'd like to add my support to what they've said.
Your article didn't talk at all about the effects on my.mp3.com, but rather how the RIAA uses a broken model and only hurt themselves by asking the courts to enforce the laws regarding their intellectual property rights.
And then you attempt to claim otherwise, and just make an ass out of yourself. I'd say that's fairly rude.
Though I won't add anything of importance to the statements already made to this, I'd like to add my support to what they've said.
Your article didn't talk at all about the effects on my.mp3.com, but rather how the RIAA is uses a broken model and only hurt themselves by asking the courts to enforce the laws regarding their intellectual property rights.
And then you attempt to claim otherwise, and just make an ass out of yourself. I'd say that's fairly rude.
Actually, you're slightly incorrect.
Musicians used to make money, also, by selling the sheet music that they composed.
Somewhat unrelated, music stores attempt to compensate for the great unkown of the content of CDs, by providing boots for listening to a few seconds of various songs. Unfortunately, this seems limited to music you'd hear on the radio anyway, but it's a step in the right direction.
The lawsuit wasn't over the use of mp3s, or mp3.com's usual mp3 distribution system, but rather over their 'broadcasting' of copyrighted music, based upon their CD authentication scheme.
This case has no real impact on the use of mp3 as a format for the distribution of music, nor will any other. The RIAA may dislike the entire concept of music distribution without their cut, but their real beef is with the proliferation of their property, without compensation.
Regardless of whether or not one believes the recording industry deserves to earn a living, they're legally entitled to. And just because it's easy to steal their intellectual property, doesn't somehow make the industry an "obsolete business model" or whatever other nonsense people use to rationalize the theft.
In the future increasingly more artists may go their own way with online music distribution, and then perhaps use their profits to distribute on CD, tape, or whatever else, themselves. They may even form loose co-ops to cut costs. Of course it may not splinter like this, and we'll be stuck with the giant corporations we have today.
Generally speaking, it would seem better to instead of using thievery and unrealistically looking to end intellectual property, to promote the distribution of music by individual artists, or small artist co-ops, or public domain music.
Instead of saying that "most music is crap" and not worth my money" to rationalize theft, go out and construct or support your preferred model.
Attempting to deny the recording industry of their ability to function seems unrealistic and rather unjust, even if they are yet another evil and stupid end result of U.S. economics.
You're apparently not well versed in these treatise, which require countries to enforce international intellectual property laws. The agreements of the WIPO and WTO allow corporations to sue and seek damages for IP infringements.
You were mistaken in thinking that this is a matter of U.S. law, when it's a matter of international law.
There's a large difference between educated well-informed commentary, and ignorant ranting.
No, these really aren't related at all. U.S. cryptography law, while banning the export iof strong cryptography, didn't have laws regarding the import of cryptography. These projects would probably have continued outside of U.S., for non-U.S. citizens, speculation is fairly pointless, so I will end it there. These cryptography projects were never violating international intellectual property treatise, unlike this Russian lyrics server.
The stark difference between the cryptography projects is that not only was it legal to export strong encryption (in their countries), where as Russia has local copyright law, and international copyright law. This project is illegal *there* as well as here.
They'll simply proceed legally against the Russian organization, and perhaps lobby the U.S. Government to enforce the intellectual property treatise that Russia has agreed to, as a member of the WTO.
Russia currently has a virgin economy, and if it wants it to ever grow so that Russia can be a serious world power, again, instead of the joke that it is, they'll oblige large corporate pressures. It's simply a matter of how hard American corporations wish to press situations where a country refuses to enforce agreements.
If anything, publicizing this site will lead to its downfall.
It's rather amazing how generally ignorant people seem to be about international intellectual property treatise. ...) agreements I mentioned in another post.
I suggest you read up about the WIPO, the WTO, and the various (Paris, Berne,
This isn't just *U.S.* law.
Also keep in mind that Russia is currently recieving a great deal of aid from the U.S. Government, and is very interested in the capital our gigantic corporations are willing to put into them.