ssri's, maoi's, and the other assorted antidepressants are not really "altering the way the neural system works," so much as aiding the system recover from an imbalance.
I've heard a major sleep researcher mention at a respected conference that a significant number of users of the new antidepressants are developing serious, irreversible sleep disorders - the sort where they'll never get a full, sound night of sleep again in their lives, with all that that entails.
This isn't published yet, AFAIK, but the guy heads one of the top sleep research labs in the world, so his anecdotal report should not be dismissed lightly - not nearly as lightly as we dose millions with new chemicals without fully scoping the consequences (in this case in large part because there's so much we just don't know yet in neuroscience).
Since I'm just out of range of RFB I was just scanning through the FM dial to find anything at all to listen to while the NH and VT public radio stations run their news drones. With a high-end receiver I got maybe 10 other stations, all on the same continuum from country to rock. The public interest simply isn't served by having more than three of these stations - the playlists overlap so completely that any three of 'em would be sufficient to rotate the entire playlist of all ten a couple times a week, at least. So what's this crap doing on my airwaves, when there are people literally ready to volunteer both time and transmitters to put better stuff up in the spaces between, or even right in its place?
If spectrum is so limited, why is it filled so redundantly with the same junk? When there's a true shortage of something, it's human nature to use it more carefully.
For the record, Raymond wrote: 'Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl.'
Phipps responded that Java is not a scripting language, so it is meaningless to make such a comparison.
Yes but... Java's main success is as a way of writing server pages (since the "Write once, run anywhere" promise was bull, and it's mostly been too damn slow for complex client apps). The competition there is scripting languages - Python, Perl, PHP. And even if you want cross-platform client apps, the Python QT bindings provide a pretty good way to go without Java.
Having got involved with Java when it was first out was a good way to learn to take anything Sun claims with a grain of salt.
There are those who argue that having both individual and corporate income taxes results in double taxation, since whatever corporations take in goes to individuals, whether employees or stockholders, who are taxed on that amount. So let's end double taxation by abolishing the income tax for individuals and taxing only corporations. This is the only way to avoid an immanent future where governments intrude far-too-far onto individual privacy rights.
Would people just avoid doing business in corporate form in order to avoid taxation if we did this? No, most people would rather have the protection from individual legal liability which "corporate cover" provides. Tax would be seen as a form of insurance well worth it for any enterprise facing significant liability potential - which is any business large enough to have enough customers that a statistical likelihood of injury due to its products or services exists.
Of course criminal corporations (like the Mob) might start ducking taxes. Oh, wait....
Contrary to all the "invest in a mortgage" replies, assuming you're quite young, you may be doing the better thing. Get clever enough at setting up this stuff and the difference in your future income can be far better return than the increase in the value of a specific property. Housing in most places is in a bubble right now - not everywhere, but in most US cities it's as bad an investment as dot.com's in '99 (unless you can turn it fast enough at a profit). But the world will be increasingly networked, the networking will be in large part wireless, and the engineering of specific installations will not be outsourced offshore. So go for it.
Um, there's no monthly fee for the Dish PVR. The one I have (think it's a 508) occassionally ends up in a software loop that requires a reboot (maybe every 2-3 months) but otherwise works quite nicely. Image quality is much better than normal cable. The features on the PVR are fewer than on a Tivo, but then I find Tivo's graphics and sound effects annoying. As for outages in bad weather - yes, in severe thunder storms the signal can be lost for some minutes. Funny thing is, here in Vermont the local Adelphia cable also gets its signal via satellite, and also goes out in those storms. Snow has never affected my signal - and we do see a lot of that.
The word 'biased' is biased! Another way of saying the same thing is "Groklaw has an orientation." The opposite of having an orientation is to be disoriented. So, for instance, in the recent history of American politics the Republicans have had an orientation. The Democrates, more concerned with not being "biased," have been disoriented - until Dean came along and rubbed their nose in the mess they were complicit in making.
If your orientation is towards good things, and you maintain your orientation, you're going to take a strong stand against wicked shit that gets in the way. This is not "biased" or "unfair." It's the only alternative to "Lie down and take it." (And if you don't think anything is good, and worthy of orienting towards, you have a serious psychiatric problem which should be treated ASAP - not a good philosophical point.)
sending an electronic mail message addressed to the electronic mail address of the recipient requesting that the recipient provide delivery information including a postal address for the gift
Consider the old way of sending a telegraph message: You address the message with something like "John Smith, Smith Associates, Milwaukee" - and let's also say that you're telegraphing flowers, or perhaps the gift of song with a singing telegram. Then the telegraph company has to figure out the physical address for this John Smith. So, if this is after the invention of the telephone, they might even pick it up and ask to operator to connect them to John Smith of Smith Associates, and ask "Mr. Smith, what's your street address please? We have a telegram to deliver."
So the patent is on doing something that's often been done before but doing it using a computer. The only novelty is that now we have computers. So they're trying to get a monopoly on a business method that's been around for over a century, just in case anyone wants to use a computer in the course of their business while using this method. Yet, using a computer is not exactly a novel idea these days. So what's supposed to be patentable here?
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
So they are "government documents" but not "official business." And it's not stealing because they were "disclosed" by someone making a mistake setting up security. You heard it straight from the Senate Majority Leader's staff: If a sysadmin mistake allows you to get into a system, then everything in the system is freely "disclosed" and there's no penalty for copying it.
Also, documents can be "government" but not "official" - presumably the Republican Party is the only "official" government by now?
So if I have a great new business concept, and I need a bunch of computers set up in some specific way to realize it - and I'm clueless or impatient enough to want to just hire a big firm to handle this rather than figure out who the right twenty-something geniuses are and bring them on staff (gee, didn't that strategy work well for the dot.com'ers) - seems like all this lingo is about promises to deliver it in the most trouble-free, transparent order. Which may involve some brilliant hacks, but it's pretty mundane stuff. Plumbing mostly.
The real question is how I can get smarter about what I demand. Most US corporations are being run by the clueless. If they really had great new ideas, yeah you can hire the technologists to take care of them. But as long as your ideas are just like other ideas that have already been done, of course an experienced technology source can put together a system like that for you, because they've done it before. All this marketing speak isn't about something new, it's about selling you this year's model of the same old car - fins on the Cadillac.
Now, technology that actually help you be smarter about what to demand - that would be transformative and at the same time render the accumulated experience of the big tech suppliers relatively worthless.
When you concentrate on something it becomes prettier. Where is this true? It's true when you're in an external space that's beautiful, for one. For instance, in a club with good live jazz, where you can fall into being more aware of the space the sounds are in than you'd normally be aware of any space - and yet meet yourself in that space, finding yourself also able to concentrate clearly on other stuff you normally leave far in the background.
Okay, so the therapeutic technique you describe is to simulate an aspect of reality that's pretty much there when you're in good external spaces.
It's also much like a standard form of meditation: concentrating on a candle flame. Or concentrating on an image of a diety. The object of concentration, like great live music, becomes richer in your experience at the same time as you're able to better resolve other aspects of life. (Thus has power often in the past been ascribed to statuary.)
Schools don't want concentration, don't want trained attention of this sort. They're mostly ugly spaces, something even less interesting than a factory aesthetic (where at least there's real production being done). That's why 2/3rds of our kids leave them for the factory jobs that no longer are there, instead of sloughing on through a few more years to pass through college - despite that colleges are more often decent aesthetic spaces.
William James wrote cogently of the need to teach concentration as fundamental to education. The problem for our current schools is that kids who can concentrate will mostly want out of them. Because when you can concentrate at will, your will is often not going to be towards the less rewarding concentration on a teacher who typically was among the stupidest cohort at college.
I'd suggest seeing if there's a descendent of the old "free school" movement in your area for your daughter. She's probably too smart for her teachers. But she should learn concentration, whether through immersion in art, practice of traditional concentrative meditative techniques, or the techno repackaging of those techniques that you describe.
Clark said yesterday that it's a lie that government can't keep us absolutely safe from another terrorist attack. Surely no one at/. will stand in the way of Clark's capability as president to keep us safe?
Can anyone recommend a good, legal, offshore Internet-based bank? Not for the purpose of hiding anything from the IRS, but just to maintain privacy of normal transactions. After all, it's not illegal to bank in Switzerland, as long as there's no criminal intent involved.
Work up this morning from a dream in which I was framing a/. submission on the question of why car manufacturers aren't aren't offering fully modularlized vehicles - sort of like you start with a front end option, add a drive-train option, add a rear option (so you get a lot of Ranchero-like hybrids). The best profits are in the vehicles people see more utility in (like pickup trucks) - this way you see more utility for you.
Maybe the carmakers are afraid that such modular creations wouldn't have as much brand identity, that the brand would effectively be more the individual customer than the manufacturer. But why should that matter if it sells? And think about the downstream revenue - get in a fender-bender, just replace that module - less work for repair shops, more orders to the factory.
A lot of this stuff can be summarized as "The man in the middle attacks." Media as intermediation. The corporation as the "person" behind depersonalization.
It's pretty clear that the artist has ownership rights to some high degree, and that the purchaser of the art has ownership rights. Similarly for the farmer and the those sitting down to eat. But in our system of middlemen the artist and farmer on average barely scrape by, often holding a second job to do that, while those about to "consume" get an abundance of adulterated junk of low artistic and nutritional quality while our money makes the middlemen very comfortable indeed. Meanwhile the farms and music makers are forced to consolidate into megafarms and megastars....
What would happen if our food middlemen decided to add substances to, say, the potatoes of one distributor that would poison only those who ate the meat of another distributor? You don't, after all, have to eat those potatoes. You don't have to buy those copy-protected CDS, either, or combine them with musical equipment they won't work in. (My DVD player plays CDs. Just why should I want to buy a separate CD player to play the crippled ones?) But clearly something's wrong here. Food from different suppliers should be as fully compatible as possible. Musical items from different suppliers, likewise.
Anything else is restriction of the fundamental ownership rights of the artist/farmer and the appreciator/eater. The laws need to be restructured so that the middle men are allowed only those rights which in no way infringe on the fundamental rights owners, who produce and consume whatever the middlemen distribute. Distribution should be recognized not as ownership, but as the relation of a cargo carrier to the cargo carried.
And we must realize that anything which robs from the final customer also robs from the original producer. The century-long history of the obliteration of small farmers due to the stranglehold on markets by middlemen amply demonstrates the economic principles involved when middlemen are allowed too much sway. One way to address this is to alter the balance of laws so that fictitious corporate "persons" never have rights equal to individual living persons - whether the persons who play music, the persons who run family farms, or the persons who enjoy a good tune with a good meal.
Ever been to mississippi? Georgia? Alabama? Texas? Wyoming? These all have levels of povery that make places in Mexico and India look rich.
India has substantial private wealth in the hands of its upper and upper-middle classes. English rule largely left the princely fortunes intact - there are still many families in India worth 10s and even 100s of millions of dollars. And below them families which have hidden stashes of gold and jewels they've been amassing for centuries. The 100 million best off people in India have wealth comparable to the 100 million best off Americans - even though there are also the 100s of millions of Indians living in such often-total poverty.
As more immigrants come into America to drive down the costs of servants and menial labor, we will come increasingly to resemble India - palaces for the rich and squalor for the rest. America is a young civilization yet, India an ancient and wise one. There is much to learn from them, especially regarding the institution of a caste system. Let us not be too proud, as they show us the way to our inevitable future.
Has anyone figured how many abortions this would prevent in those parts of the world where female fetuses are often selectively aborted, or even abandoned post-birth?
In a couple of generations, this could greatly ameliorate the export of tech jobs, too. Meanwhile, people would pay for this. The black market opportunities are worth 100s of billions.
Coincidently, I watched this Bond film for the first time on the PVR last night. This was Blofeld's scheme - the threat of sterilizing whole species. I would recommend supplying pretty female fish with atomizers with the active chemical....
The Dutch make up about 20% of the world's filesharing individuals
Yeah, the Dutch are very serious music fans. Your random small bar is likely to have thousands of dollars of high-end sound system professionally tuned to the room, and bartenders who are a serious about DJ'ing as serving beer. They particularly like American musics, from current pop to the most obscure and most historical. Combine this with a visual capacity which extends from the Golden Age through the present (particularly in architecture and design, as well as painting) and you can begin to wonder how they so well balance their mentality across the senses. A hint: much of their language use is ironic - they aren't quite so colonized by opinion perhaps, and so go more with their senses rather than stay blinded by what they think they know. Or maybe it's something they're smoking?
Note to RIAA: You can't convict me based on these thoughts which cross my mind. I am just a common carrier, and the origins and endpoints of these thoughts are elsewhere. I do not store them in this flesh.
From the corporate point of view DRM is good precisely because many clever kids will find their way around it. This teaches a disrespect for law and ethics that creates a good crop for the mega-businesses to recruit their next generation of executives from. Success in tomorrow's economy requires both practice in cheating, and deftness in not getting caught. A wide array of breakable, but challenging laws pertaining to things young people care about assures our corporate citizens the cleverness and teeth necessary to preserve their freedom. No patriot should oppose this.
Dean's improbable sprint to internet cash-and-glory will only get him so far. And then the incredibly labor intensive huge Democratic machine will have to take over.
If you look at Dean's main Website and official blog you'll notice that it's not just fundraising that's going on. There are 150,000 people involved in Dean Meetups and thousands more have already sent over 100,000 handwritten letters to voters in New Hampsire and Iowa. Plus there are scores of independent websites discussing and promoting Dean from various perspectives. He's got more troops on the ground than the Democratic Party - particularly if you count the union troops he's already recruited as his and not the Democrats', per se.
What Dean's doing isn't taking over the "Left Wing" or even the Democratic Party so much as it is taking over the middle of the road. He's steamrolling right down the center with a good dose of traditional American common sense (although his invocation of Thomas Paine is a bit lame, at least it's an error in the right direction). He's redefining what the center of the road means.
And this whole thing about his - and his fans' - "anger" is just off the point. George W. is an idiot, and he's calling the Emperor naked and saying clearly that we should replace him with all haste. People aren't angry at Bush so much as disappointed and disgusted because Bush doesn't live up to the Main Street American values that Dean invokes.
The cynicism of the corporate-owned press is that we don't have any values to speak of beyond consumerism and the money to support our "American way" habits (and their advertisers). According to this cynicism all politicians are a bit false, so calling them naked is a bit beside the point. Dean's not a cynic, not false, and is using the Net to communicate directly with others who love America and see higher ideals as once again attainable by it, rather than a continued slide into blustering corruption.
He' proving the Republic still has some blood in its veins. He's no Thomas Jefferson (alas), but could well become the best US president since FDR.
Slashdot Mirror
ssri's, maoi's, and the other assorted antidepressants are not really "altering the way the neural system works," so much as aiding the system recover from an imbalance.
I've heard a major sleep researcher mention at a respected conference that a significant number of users of the new antidepressants are developing serious, irreversible sleep disorders - the sort where they'll never get a full, sound night of sleep again in their lives, with all that that entails.
This isn't published yet, AFAIK, but the guy heads one of the top sleep research labs in the world, so his anecdotal report should not be dismissed lightly - not nearly as lightly as we dose millions with new chemicals without fully scoping the consequences (in this case in large part because there's so much we just don't know yet in neuroscience).
Since I'm just out of range of RFB I was just scanning through the FM dial to find anything at all to listen to while the NH and VT public radio stations run their news drones. With a high-end receiver I got maybe 10 other stations, all on the same continuum from country to rock. The public interest simply isn't served by having more than three of these stations - the playlists overlap so completely that any three of 'em would be sufficient to rotate the entire playlist of all ten a couple times a week, at least. So what's this crap doing on my airwaves, when there are people literally ready to volunteer both time and transmitters to put better stuff up in the spaces between, or even right in its place?
If spectrum is so limited, why is it filled so redundantly with the same junk? When there's a true shortage of something, it's human nature to use it more carefully.
For the record, Raymond wrote: 'Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl.'
... Java's main success is as a way of writing server pages (since the "Write once, run anywhere" promise was bull, and it's mostly been too damn slow for complex client apps). The competition there is scripting languages - Python, Perl, PHP. And even if you want cross-platform client apps, the Python QT bindings provide a pretty good way to go without Java.
Phipps responded that Java is not a scripting language, so it is meaningless to make such a comparison.
Yes but
Having got involved with Java when it was first out was a good way to learn to take anything Sun claims with a grain of salt.
There are those who argue that having both individual and corporate income taxes results in double taxation, since whatever corporations take in goes to individuals, whether employees or stockholders, who are taxed on that amount. So let's end double taxation by abolishing the income tax for individuals and taxing only corporations. This is the only way to avoid an immanent future where governments intrude far-too-far onto individual privacy rights.
Would people just avoid doing business in corporate form in order to avoid taxation if we did this? No, most people would rather have the protection from individual legal liability which "corporate cover" provides. Tax would be seen as a form of insurance well worth it for any enterprise facing significant liability potential - which is any business large enough to have enough customers that a statistical likelihood of injury due to its products or services exists.
Of course criminal corporations (like the Mob) might start ducking taxes. Oh, wait....
Contrary to all the "invest in a mortgage" replies, assuming you're quite young, you may be doing the better thing. Get clever enough at setting up this stuff and the difference in your future income can be far better return than the increase in the value of a specific property. Housing in most places is in a bubble right now - not everywhere, but in most US cities it's as bad an investment as dot.com's in '99 (unless you can turn it fast enough at a profit). But the world will be increasingly networked, the networking will be in large part wireless, and the engineering of specific installations will not be outsourced offshore. So go for it.
Um, there's no monthly fee for the Dish PVR. The one I have (think it's a 508) occassionally ends up in a software loop that requires a reboot (maybe every 2-3 months) but otherwise works quite nicely. Image quality is much better than normal cable. The features on the PVR are fewer than on a Tivo, but then I find Tivo's graphics and sound effects annoying. As for outages in bad weather - yes, in severe thunder storms the signal can be lost for some minutes. Funny thing is, here in Vermont the local Adelphia cable also gets its signal via satellite, and also goes out in those storms. Snow has never affected my signal - and we do see a lot of that.
'Groklaw is biased' whispers
The word 'biased' is biased! Another way of saying the same thing is "Groklaw has an orientation." The opposite of having an orientation is to be disoriented. So, for instance, in the recent history of American politics the Republicans have had an orientation. The Democrates, more concerned with not being "biased," have been disoriented - until Dean came along and rubbed their nose in the mess they were complicit in making.
If your orientation is towards good things, and you maintain your orientation, you're going to take a strong stand against wicked shit that gets in the way. This is not "biased" or "unfair." It's the only alternative to "Lie down and take it." (And if you don't think anything is good, and worthy of orienting towards, you have a serious psychiatric problem which should be treated ASAP - not a good philosophical point.)
If only the Democratic candidates had resumes better than:
* Demonstrated leadership capabilities
* Against special interests
* For the middle class
On the other hand, maybe those writing tech resumes could learn from the politicians and insert a few lines trashing the other applicants?
sending an electronic mail message addressed to the electronic mail address of the recipient requesting that the recipient provide delivery information including a postal address for the gift
Consider the old way of sending a telegraph message: You address the message with something like "John Smith, Smith Associates, Milwaukee" - and let's also say that you're telegraphing flowers, or perhaps the gift of song with a singing telegram. Then the telegraph company has to figure out the physical address for this John Smith. So, if this is after the invention of the telephone, they might even pick it up and ask to operator to connect them to John Smith of Smith Associates, and ask "Mr. Smith, what's your street address please? We have a telegram to deliver."
So the patent is on doing something that's often been done before but doing it using a computer. The only novelty is that now we have computers. So they're trying to get a monopoly on a business method that's been around for over a century, just in case anyone wants to use a computer in the course of their business while using this method. Yet, using a computer is not exactly a novel idea these days. So what's supposed to be patentable here?
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
So they are "government documents" but not "official business." And it's not stealing because they were "disclosed" by someone making a mistake setting up security. You heard it straight from the Senate Majority Leader's staff: If a sysadmin mistake allows you to get into a system, then everything in the system is freely "disclosed" and there's no penalty for copying it.
Also, documents can be "government" but not "official" - presumably the Republican Party is the only "official" government by now?
So if I have a great new business concept, and I need a bunch of computers set up in some specific way to realize it - and I'm clueless or impatient enough to want to just hire a big firm to handle this rather than figure out who the right twenty-something geniuses are and bring them on staff (gee, didn't that strategy work well for the dot.com'ers) - seems like all this lingo is about promises to deliver it in the most trouble-free, transparent order. Which may involve some brilliant hacks, but it's pretty mundane stuff. Plumbing mostly.
The real question is how I can get smarter about what I demand. Most US corporations are being run by the clueless. If they really had great new ideas, yeah you can hire the technologists to take care of them. But as long as your ideas are just like other ideas that have already been done, of course an experienced technology source can put together a system like that for you, because they've done it before. All this marketing speak isn't about something new, it's about selling you this year's model of the same old car - fins on the Cadillac.
Now, technology that actually help you be smarter about what to demand - that would be transformative and at the same time render the accumulated experience of the big tech suppliers relatively worthless.
When you concentrate on something it becomes prettier. Where is this true? It's true when you're in an external space that's beautiful, for one. For instance, in a club with good live jazz, where you can fall into being more aware of the space the sounds are in than you'd normally be aware of any space - and yet meet yourself in that space, finding yourself also able to concentrate clearly on other stuff you normally leave far in the background.
Okay, so the therapeutic technique you describe is to simulate an aspect of reality that's pretty much there when you're in good external spaces.
It's also much like a standard form of meditation: concentrating on a candle flame. Or concentrating on an image of a diety. The object of concentration, like great live music, becomes richer in your experience at the same time as you're able to better resolve other aspects of life. (Thus has power often in the past been ascribed to statuary.)
Schools don't want concentration, don't want trained attention of this sort. They're mostly ugly spaces, something even less interesting than a factory aesthetic (where at least there's real production being done). That's why 2/3rds of our kids leave them for the factory jobs that no longer are there, instead of sloughing on through a few more years to pass through college - despite that colleges are more often decent aesthetic spaces.
William James wrote cogently of the need to teach concentration as fundamental to education. The problem for our current schools is that kids who can concentrate will mostly want out of them. Because when you can concentrate at will, your will is often not going to be towards the less rewarding concentration on a teacher who typically was among the stupidest cohort at college.
I'd suggest seeing if there's a descendent of the old "free school" movement in your area for your daughter. She's probably too smart for her teachers. But she should learn concentration, whether through immersion in art, practice of traditional concentrative meditative techniques, or the techno repackaging of those techniques that you describe.
Good answer.
Now, isn't there a standard for the font used in legal filings? Aren't they all in 12-point courier (the equivalent of 10-pitch on a typewriter)?
Yeah, legal documents might as well wear wigs with this dress code, but there you are.
Clark said yesterday that it's a lie that government can't keep us absolutely safe from another terrorist attack. Surely no one at /. will stand in the way of Clark's capability as president to keep us safe?
But I only copy banknotes for backups!
Can anyone recommend a good, legal, offshore Internet-based bank? Not for the purpose of hiding anything from the IRS, but just to maintain privacy of normal transactions. After all, it's not illegal to bank in Switzerland, as long as there's no criminal intent involved.
... it's about mass customization ...
/. submission on the question of why car manufacturers aren't aren't offering fully modularlized vehicles - sort of like you start with a front end option, add a drive-train option, add a rear option (so you get a lot of Ranchero-like hybrids). The best profits are in the vehicles people see more utility in (like pickup trucks) - this way you see more utility for you.
Work up this morning from a dream in which I was framing a
Maybe the carmakers are afraid that such modular creations wouldn't have as much brand identity, that the brand would effectively be more the individual customer than the manufacturer. But why should that matter if it sells? And think about the downstream revenue - get in a fender-bender, just replace that module - less work for repair shops, more orders to the factory.
A lot of this stuff can be summarized as "The man in the middle attacks." Media as intermediation. The corporation as the "person" behind depersonalization.
It's pretty clear that the artist has ownership rights to some high degree, and that the purchaser of the art has ownership rights. Similarly for the farmer and the those sitting down to eat. But in our system of middlemen the artist and farmer on average barely scrape by, often holding a second job to do that, while those about to "consume" get an abundance of adulterated junk of low artistic and nutritional quality while our money makes the middlemen very comfortable indeed. Meanwhile the farms and music makers are forced to consolidate into megafarms and megastars....
What would happen if our food middlemen decided to add substances to, say, the potatoes of one distributor that would poison only those who ate the meat of another distributor? You don't, after all, have to eat those potatoes. You don't have to buy those copy-protected CDS, either, or combine them with musical equipment they won't work in. (My DVD player plays CDs. Just why should I want to buy a separate CD player to play the crippled ones?) But clearly something's wrong here. Food from different suppliers should be as fully compatible as possible. Musical items from different suppliers, likewise.
Anything else is restriction of the fundamental ownership rights of the artist/farmer and the appreciator/eater. The laws need to be restructured so that the middle men are allowed only those rights which in no way infringe on the fundamental rights owners, who produce and consume whatever the middlemen distribute. Distribution should be recognized not as ownership, but as the relation of a cargo carrier to the cargo carried.
And we must realize that anything which robs from the final customer also robs from the original producer. The century-long history of the obliteration of small farmers due to the stranglehold on markets by middlemen amply demonstrates the economic principles involved when middlemen are allowed too much sway. One way to address this is to alter the balance of laws so that fictitious corporate "persons" never have rights equal to individual living persons - whether the persons who play music, the persons who run family farms, or the persons who enjoy a good tune with a good meal.
The /dev/random method is world reknown[ed]
You joke, but this algorithm was sufficient for human evolution. (Hmm, spam as sperm?)
Ever been to mississippi? Georgia? Alabama? Texas? Wyoming? These all have levels of povery that make places in Mexico and India look rich.
India has substantial private wealth in the hands of its upper and upper-middle classes. English rule largely left the princely fortunes intact - there are still many families in India worth 10s and even 100s of millions of dollars. And below them families which have hidden stashes of gold and jewels they've been amassing for centuries. The 100 million best off people in India have wealth comparable to the 100 million best off Americans - even though there are also the 100s of millions of Indians living in such often-total poverty.
As more immigrants come into America to drive down the costs of servants and menial labor, we will come increasingly to resemble India - palaces for the rich and squalor for the rest. America is a young civilization yet, India an ancient and wise one. There is much to learn from them, especially regarding the institution of a caste system. Let us not be too proud, as they show us the way to our inevitable future.
Has anyone figured how many abortions this would prevent in those parts of the world where female fetuses are often selectively aborted, or even abandoned post-birth?
In a couple of generations, this could greatly ameliorate the export of tech jobs, too. Meanwhile, people would pay for this. The black market opportunities are worth 100s of billions.
Coincidently, I watched this Bond film for the first time on the PVR last night. This was Blofeld's scheme - the threat of sterilizing whole species. I would recommend supplying pretty female fish with atomizers with the active chemical....
The Dutch make up about 20% of the world's filesharing individuals
Yeah, the Dutch are very serious music fans. Your random small bar is likely to have thousands of dollars of high-end sound system professionally tuned to the room, and bartenders who are a serious about DJ'ing as serving beer. They particularly like American musics, from current pop to the most obscure and most historical. Combine this with a visual capacity which extends from the Golden Age through the present (particularly in architecture and design, as well as painting) and you can begin to wonder how they so well balance their mentality across the senses. A hint: much of their language use is ironic - they aren't quite so colonized by opinion perhaps, and so go more with their senses rather than stay blinded by what they think they know. Or maybe it's something they're smoking?
Note to RIAA: You can't convict me based on these thoughts which cross my mind. I am just a common carrier, and the origins and endpoints of these thoughts are elsewhere. I do not store them in this flesh.
From the corporate point of view DRM is good precisely because many clever kids will find their way around it. This teaches a disrespect for law and ethics that creates a good crop for the mega-businesses to recruit their next generation of executives from. Success in tomorrow's economy requires both practice in cheating, and deftness in not getting caught. A wide array of breakable, but challenging laws pertaining to things young people care about assures our corporate citizens the cleverness and teeth necessary to preserve their freedom. No patriot should oppose this.
Dean's improbable sprint to internet cash-and-glory will only get him so far. And then the incredibly labor intensive huge Democratic machine will have to take over.
If you look at Dean's main Website and official blog you'll notice that it's not just fundraising that's going on. There are 150,000 people involved in Dean Meetups and thousands more have already sent over 100,000 handwritten letters to voters in New Hampsire and Iowa. Plus there are scores of independent websites discussing and promoting Dean from various perspectives. He's got more troops on the ground than the Democratic Party - particularly if you count the union troops he's already recruited as his and not the Democrats', per se.
What Dean's doing isn't taking over the "Left Wing" or even the Democratic Party so much as it is taking over the middle of the road. He's steamrolling right down the center with a good dose of traditional American common sense (although his invocation of Thomas Paine is a bit lame, at least it's an error in the right direction). He's redefining what the center of the road means.
And this whole thing about his - and his fans' - "anger" is just off the point. George W. is an idiot, and he's calling the Emperor naked and saying clearly that we should replace him with all haste. People aren't angry at Bush so much as disappointed and disgusted because Bush doesn't live up to the Main Street American values that Dean invokes.
The cynicism of the corporate-owned press is that we don't have any values to speak of beyond consumerism and the money to support our "American way" habits (and their advertisers). According to this cynicism all politicians are a bit false, so calling them naked is a bit beside the point. Dean's not a cynic, not false, and is using the Net to communicate directly with others who love America and see higher ideals as once again attainable by it, rather than a continued slide into blustering corruption.
He' proving the Republic still has some blood in its veins. He's no Thomas Jefferson (alas), but could well become the best US president since FDR.