I hardly know where to begin on this one. But I'll start with this:
Of course it's easy to see how capitalism gets its bad name, given the retarded poster children that get all the press
It seems to me that capitalism gets all the good press round here and that Socialism is attacked and vilified at every turn - look at the original article, it lumps socialism with fascism, what sort of goonery is that?
A complaint that capitalism is not getting a fair crack of the whip in the media is untrue - I'm sick of hearing free-market rhetoric that challenges to shake off the reigns of governmental control (my government!) and to let business blindly run the world with it's invisible hand. No thanks! The results of that laissez-faire mentality were exactly what stimulated Engels (a capitalist himself) to investigate how a better society could be run.
I really sympathize and empathize with the Libertarian emphasis on freedom and the dignity and sovereignty of the individual but I don't believe that these can be achieved through business. They can only be acheived through ensuring that monopoly and aggregation of resources unto indviduals is prevented by the common, agreed will of the people.
PROPERTY IS THEFT!
as Proudhon declared and I heartily agree with him. A world which denies that we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a world that endorses the mad policies of the free-market that allow the accumulation and sequestration of capital unto individuals by cheating and exploiting their fellow humans.
To return to the topic of this article, I fully support the call to take action against the motion picture companies. Is this best achieved through a boycott?
I think as the writer himself points out that it is impossible to boycott effectively. It is far more effective to purchase ethical alternatives - rather than buy nasty Starbucks coffee, purchase from Bridgehead by mail, bring your own coffee to work in a flask etc. W.r.t. the movies...hmm..pretty centralized industry there - are we strong enough to go to no movies? Or are there independent alternatives that we can support instead.?
The future, where your only freedom is the freedom to make money
Well, isn't that what the free-market is? No? Then you must be talking about introducing some sort of regulations - sounds like government to me.
Interestingly the War Resisters League addresses this point, arguing that the inclusion of the madatory spending is a tactic designed to minimze the public perception of military spending, in booklets that they put out regularly - to quote from them:
The percentages are Federal Funds, calculated after removing Trust Funds( such as Social Security), which are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or what you don't) on April 15 goes only to the Federal Funds portion of the budget. The government practice of combining Federal and Trust Funds (the so-called "Unified Budget") began in the 1960's during the Vietnam War. The government presentation makes the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller.
"Past military" is represented by veteran's benefits plus 80% of the interest on the national debt. If there had been no military spending, most (if not all) of the national debt would have been eliminated.
Would you also recommend it for desktop use? I've not been able to figure out why Linux caught on and FreeBSD didn't. I never heard anything about BSD until after I'd started using Linux in 1995. There must be some sort of catch. And I am _not_ trolling here. I know people get quite hot under the collar about this subject and I don't know why - I'm merely an ignorant RH6.1 user that's used RH apart from brief and unsuccesful flirtations with other distros.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then? 60%? Where did you come up with that figure?
Sorry, that's 60% of the discretionary budget, which is about 35% of the total Federal Budget. Those figures come from the Office of Management and Budget. I don't have an URL for that, but if you want a paper reference you can see a bar chart in Z Nov.1997 pg.41. This was about $265 billion then. A more recent source is Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2000 pg. 27 which cites a figure of $263 billion. This is in the context of a piece which talks about how Ben&Jerry's co-founder Cohen wants to divert some of that money towards education - a goal support by 79% of Americans in one poll. Hope that helps and sorry I couldn't give an URL.
You want high taxes, government rationed healthcare and oppressive gun control?
I'll just suggested a couple of things based on my experience of having lived for years in countries other than the U.S (nothing like experience for a different perspective) and having visited many others:
High taxes - unless you're in the very top niche of society you get a hell of a lot more back from taxes than you put in, both direct (healthcare and public transport) and indirect ( a less alienated, disenfranchised population means less crime, more relaxation)
Government rationed health-care - again, unless you're one of the very rich you get a better deal out of this. Waiting lists are negligible really in the U.K. and Denmark. I'd rather have democratically controlled healthcare than plutocrat controlled as I've no chance of being a plutocrat!
Oppressive gun control - well, this one's debatable, but I'd rather see less guns about. Crime prevention happens not through fear of violence but through creating honest citizens. As far as defending ourselves from the government - well, not much chance of that I'd say with Pop's old.22
I don't agree with the idea of eliminating anonymous moderation. The reason is that there would then be "political" pressure on people to make moderations that they secretly don't agree with. Anonymous peer review is fair and works well in other fields. But it would be good if there were a lower threshold for removal of moderators.
I certainly agree with removing the bonus +1 for those with high karma. Karma of a poster should be available as a clickable link so that those with an authoritarian mind-set can look to see what everyone else is saying before making their own minds up. I don't really like the expression "Fuck the Karma Whores" though - presumably they'd expect extra karma for that.
I'm going to use my +1 in an ironic and self-mocking sense now.
Interesting perspective. I understand what you're saying about educating people and feeding them as the most basic rights. I don't think that I agree that this has to happen to the exclusion of other rights though. Is it not possible to do both at the same time? I think this might work more effectively. I'm not surprised by the Western media's attention to Falun Gong (or FaLan Gong) though - from their simple perspective anything against the CCP is good no matter what - hence their support of Chiang Kai Chek's descendant state.
um.. MODERATORS.. would you please either moderate this guy up, or moderate down the knob calling all the protestors "crackheads"
Agreed, his content free rant equates to a dismissal of the issues raised by very thoughtful people who protested in an amazingly peaceful and effective way.
Well, I've got to give it to you that you're pretty reasonable and responded in a logical and convincing manner to my points. As for the last one, I'm afraid we have to agree to disagree, my criteria were based on all three of the things that you find to be bad!
Ok, slap on my wrist for hyperbole accepted, I should have said, "those that blindly advocate free-trade as the sole means to obtain human-rights, a healthy environment, and food and work for all are engaged in religious thinking"
If you choose to ignore or disbelieve the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of free trade over protectionism, I suppose this might seem a 'religious' or 'magical' belief to you. If so, have a nice life.
Wow, sounds good. How about a couple of links or citations of the "overwhelming empirical evidence"? I suspect that you are going to have trouble providing these because there are no free-trade situations happening. Even NAFTA is a trade-agreement, one that allows companies to ride rough-shod over the national laws and rights of labour organizations. Anything that is supposed to somehow work out is fuzzy, ill-defined and religious, in short where's your proof? If you haven't got any then you engaging in belief which is a central facet of religion.
But it [the US] does (most of the time) strive to approach those goals.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then? That seems to indicate "striving" in the same way that a crack-addict "strives" to resist.
Jackbooted thugs breaking into a certain Danish home probably indicate much bigger, more threatening players in the big-stakes game of Global Domination.
Care to provide some information as to which home this was and what colour the jackboots were, or are you merely indulging in propaganda?
Whilst I can't condone any organisation, be it a private company or a national government, imposing censorship and 1984-style mind control, at least there's some semblance of directness about what they're doing. The film industry seems to much prefer subterfugue, lies, intimidation, threats, and tactics remeniscent of 1940's Germany.
Well, as regards the admirable directness of the Chinese being similar or dissimilar to 1940's Germany, which part of the 40's are you talking about? After Hitler? or during the "admirably direct" extermination camp part of the 40's?
Your post is a masterpiece of evasion, innuendo and non-sequitur, congratulations, you've confused yourself and others.
The schools I went to never had such brainwashing. Is the state of education in the US really so bad? Don't answer this, I probably already know the answer.
Well, that depends on what class you belong to here - rich people get a pretty good education, better than some Europeans!;)
Open Your eyes, and see what your government does wrong, this is more important to you than what happens on the other side of the planet.
Well, that hasn't actually been true for a long time and it's becoming less true by the day. Yes, we should open our eyes to the problems of our own governments, but we can't ignore other nations! We are affected by them and by trans-national corporations, we should know as much about them as we can stomach! You can unfortunately no longer develop an isolated perfect society - if you ever could: remember all the socialist debate about one-nation socialism vs. global socialism?
Protests that are suppressed in China aren't reported to the people or are at least reported with the best possible spin for the governmnent.
Yes, this happens in China, yes it's bad. Does it not happen here? Well, from my perspective most reporting is extremely biased in favour of the status quo. Take the Seattle coverage, how much of the media focussed on the insignificant and unrepresentative trouble caused by a surprisingly small minority of the crowds? How much did it focus on the brutality of using tear-gas? I really have to disagree with such a rosy assessment.
HUH??! Communism (theoretically speaking, i.e. Marxism) is absolutely and utterly at odds with totalitarianism. In fact, democracy was supposed to evolve into communism (through a few steps), and culminate in the dissolution of government. Government by the people, for the people. The problem with communism is that it assumes that if people are equal and happy, avarice, greed, and powerlust will die out. Never going to happen.
I really have to question your equation of communism with Marxism! Communism is nothing more nor less than the principle that there are no indvidual property rights. All goods are common property and the use of them should be determined by the community.
This is separate from Marxism which admits this principle and builds a very specific structure on it that could fairly be construed as authoritarian and totalitarian. This was one of the main differences in the 1st Working Men's International which split at the Hague Congress 1972 over issues of authority. The Libertarian Communists/Anarchists such as Bakunin were expelled. They believed in autonomous federations. Marx believed in dictatorship of the proletariat. Definitely totalitariansim.
The near-religious belief that free-trade will somehow cure all problems is so naive and pollyanna-ish that it beggars belief. Add to this that the U.S. does not practice free-trade and you have to wonder are the advocates of it aware of the the disjunction of reality and fantasy.
In short, in the U.S. we have the rule of law, which may not always be enforced evenly. In China there is rule by fiat of the Party, which guarantees uneven standing under the law. Yes, the U.S. is far from perfect, but I don't think you can compare the full history of both countries (remember, the U.S. has about four times as much) without deciding that China has a much more oppressive government.
I'd certainly agree that China has a more oppressive govt and did so in my original post. I do question the idea that the constitution protects us though. The constitution is implemented legally through interpretations by the courts - yes, they are argued about publically, but they are still utlimately decided by the judiciary. So, an original constitutional provision can come to take on very specific interpretations which may be different from the original intent. Therefore we are, as you say under the rule of law. So too are the Chinese, under the rule of law of the party. That makes it a good deal easier to chop-and-change the rules when there is no reference document that has to be fought over, so yes, the U.S. is better that way. However, it's by no means perfect here and there is a real democratic deficit here where the legislators, elected officials and the educated are in the loop and running the country and the vast majority don't even vote. Also, our democratic obligations and pretensions to justice shouldn't just stop at our borders, we inflict much suffering on other countries through our attacks on them whether by using our weight as a trading partner to enforce sanctions (on Cuba and Iraq) or militarily attacking them covertly (Nicaragua, Guatemala, etc.etc.).
So in my mind it feels wrong for people to be getting so upset about China when we've got plenty on our own plate that we should deal with first.
that I thought of just as I finished posting this: Where does this sort of thing leave the much-vaunted "freedom of the net that is inherent in it's technological structure"? Do/. think that there will be blocking filters put in place in China to stop too much information about democracy filtering in?
More importantly where is this information going to come from? A lot of us are assuming that it's going to come from the West, but all they're likely to get from here is a lot of crap about eating Big Macs in Ford Explorers with a PalmPilot in your pocket is going to make you happy. As far as I understand it the Chinese govt. is very happy with consumerism and is moving rapidly towards a consumer society, this has been part of its official policy for the last 7 years. So, where's the disturbing democratic free-thought coming from?
There's nothing more unpleasant than hearing the supposedly "free" world mouthing off about repression in other places. Yes, I'd rather live in the U.S. than China, before anyone asks, because it is "free-er". But the structures in place here have a lot in common with the more obviously totalitarian ones than many would like to admit. The article talks about:
The crime of leaking state secrets has been used to jail journalists and is often invoked against opponents of the Communist Party.
Funnily enough we've seen exactly the same thing here, both in the past during the 30's - 50's when Communism was a little too popular for comfort (we can all afford to be tolerant about it now because it hasn't an ice-cube's chance in hell of making a revival anytime soon!) and more recently with the "nuclear secrets leak" where funnily enough a scientist who just happened to be from China (our big opponent supposedly) was accused of betraying state secrets.
Yes, that's a far cry from having to have/. monitored every day by a special FBI task force *hi guys!*, however, consider the fact that there are STILL twelve documents in the FBI files on the John Lennon investigation which they won't release. I wonder what would be the fate of any web-site that put them up if they got hold of them?
Also, while China is bad and all, We the people are still trading with the buggers, not mention Indonesia, Burma, anywhere else horrible you care to mention.
Building huge data bases on people is extrmley scary, and at present laws don't really exist to protect peoples privacy, or information.
Nah. That's just paranoia, mostly it's manufacturers and retailers who want to be able to serve you better. They want to be able to respond to the free-market and listen to what their customers are telling them. Companies are often perceived as uncaring, deaf monoliths, but really they're just there to do your bidding. So why are you so scared of them?
Like you say, this is nothing new, they're collecting information all the time. What really kills me are things like the grocery cards or airmiles - the bastards are asking us to work for them by providing a false reward. If they can afford to give away the airmiles then they should give them away. The cunning aspect of this tactic is that they've already got enough people doing it so that if you don't then you lose out. I hate it! If I were to sell my shopping data I'd expect a lot more money than that. Save us from the idiots.
The only really postive thing that you can do is to fill out false and misleading information voluntarily on as many survey forms as you can, my father introduced me to this idea when I was quite young and they started collecting this data with grocery cards. Soon we had a pretty wacky family to go down on the unimportant cards: 3 bachelors uncles of ages 13, 53 and 93 lived with us and were employed respectively as: a stockbroker (earnings > $100,000 per annum), unemployed, and a garbage-man (30-50,000). There were also more subtle pieces of disinformation, altering the amount of products of a particular type that one was supposed to be buying up or down, some estimatedly reasonable fraction.
Perhaps it does no good ( I can see our outlier being eliminated from the data set pretty quickly) but at least it did them no good!
What I was attempting to say however that if you have something valuable and don't protect it very well you can more expect it to be stolen, wrong it may be but badly protected valuables get stolen.
This is true, yet even if I leave valuables in public view and they are stolen, does the thief not get prosecuted at the public expense? As far as I am aware this happens all the time to shoplifters etc.
The argument that the "tax-payer" shouldn't be paying for large companies legal expenses in this case is a totally separate one from the (IMHO) main argument: Jon is publishing information about how to do it. It's like being prosecuted for having a web-site that details how to shop-lift.
As I read through the article I felt that they were making a lot of special pleading for MW2K and had a subjective feeling that RH6.1 was doing reasonably well. It was interesting to see that the "results" were that MW2K somehow ended up the winner. Putting it first in the category of security seems like it's still something to be proven.
I know the following is going to be unpopular and get me flamed, but just give it a second thought:
What is the best way to protect your personal possessions from theft, 1) Buy good locks for your doors and windows, or 2) Leave the door open and sue anyone who steals anything.
I don't understand your argument. It sounds like you are saying that the MPAA is choosing option number 2, but it's not!. It would seem to me that the CSS system is an attempt to put good locks on the doors and windows. Now a clever lock-picker has shown the world how to open those locks. Should he be sued for publishing this information? No. Even if one did agree with the principle that one should not be allowed to use media which one buys in one's own way on one's own machines for one's own personal use(which I don't agree with to forestall any argument!), then what should be punished under the law is that physical violation itself. To punish someone that tells you how to do it is ludicrous. It means that writers of murder mysteries should be rounded up as accomplices to any murders that are committed!
Good for you on providing a mirror.
the CSS system is there to protect against piracy and to enforce the region coding system. I am angered by the abuse of the region coding system, a DVD disk costs about twice as much in the UK as it does in the US, and quite often does not have as many added extras (interviews, clips etc..). The region coding system forces us to buy often inferior products at always exaggerated prices
...
1) Attempting to control legal use of a legally purchased product is futile,
Well, on the evidence that you've submitted there, they're attempting to control the illegal use of illegally purchased products. I don't agree with it, but they're saying that they only want to sell a particular thing in the UK and you're trying to get around it.
In short, there's a big difference between defending Jon's right to publish the decryption code and defending the use of that code to facilitate individual cracking no matter how much we may personally agree with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's easy to see how capitalism gets its bad name, given the retarded poster children that get all the press
It seems to me that capitalism gets all the good press round here and that Socialism is attacked and vilified at every turn - look at the original article, it lumps socialism with fascism, what sort of goonery is that?
A complaint that capitalism is not getting a fair crack of the whip in the media is untrue - I'm sick of hearing free-market rhetoric that challenges to shake off the reigns of governmental control (my government!) and to let business blindly run the world with it's invisible hand. No thanks! The results of that laissez-faire mentality were exactly what stimulated Engels (a capitalist himself) to investigate how a better society could be run.
I really sympathize and empathize with the Libertarian emphasis on freedom and the dignity and sovereignty of the individual but I don't believe that these can be achieved through business. They can only be acheived through ensuring that monopoly and aggregation of resources unto indviduals is prevented by the common, agreed will of the people.
PROPERTY IS THEFT!
as Proudhon declared and I heartily agree with him. A world which denies that we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a world that endorses the mad policies of the free-market that allow the accumulation and sequestration of capital unto individuals by cheating and exploiting their fellow humans.
To return to the topic of this article, I fully support the call to take action against the motion picture companies. Is this best achieved through a boycott?
I think as the writer himself points out that it is impossible to boycott effectively. It is far more effective to purchase ethical alternatives - rather than buy nasty Starbucks coffee, purchase from Bridgehead by mail, bring your own coffee to work in a flask etc. W.r.t. the movies...hmm..pretty centralized industry there - are we strong enough to go to no movies? Or are there independent alternatives that we can support instead.?
The future, where your only freedom is the freedom to make money
Well, isn't that what the free-market is? No? Then you must be talking about introducing some sort of regulations - sounds like government to me.
The percentages are Federal Funds, calculated after removing Trust Funds( such as Social Security), which are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or what you don't) on April 15 goes only to the Federal Funds portion of the budget. The government practice of combining Federal and Trust Funds (the so-called "Unified Budget") began in the 1960's during the Vietnam War. The government presentation makes the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller.
"Past military" is represented by veteran's benefits plus 80% of the interest on the national debt. If there had been no military spending, most (if not all) of the national debt would have been eliminated.
Interesting, no?
Would you also recommend it for desktop use? I've not been able to figure out why Linux caught on and FreeBSD didn't. I never heard anything about BSD until after I'd started using Linux in 1995. There must be some sort of catch. And I am _not_ trolling here. I know people get quite hot under the collar about this subject and I don't know why - I'm merely an ignorant RH6.1 user that's used RH apart from brief and unsuccesful flirtations with other distros.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then? 60%? Where did you come up with that figure?
Sorry, that's 60% of the discretionary budget, which is about 35% of the total Federal Budget. Those figures come from the Office of Management and Budget. I don't have an URL for that, but if you want a paper reference you can see a bar chart in Z Nov.1997 pg.41. This was about $265 billion then. A more recent source is Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2000 pg. 27 which cites a figure of $263 billion. This is in the context of a piece which talks about how Ben&Jerry's co-founder Cohen wants to divert some of that money towards education - a goal support by 79% of Americans in one poll. Hope that helps and sorry I couldn't give an URL.
Crush
is FreeBSD better than Linux for scalability?
You want high taxes, government rationed healthcare and oppressive gun control?
I'll just suggested a couple of things based on my experience of having lived for years in countries other than the U.S (nothing like experience for a different perspective) and having visited many others:
I don't agree with the idea of eliminating anonymous moderation. The reason is that there would then be "political" pressure on people to make moderations that they secretly don't agree with. Anonymous peer review is fair and works well in other fields. But it would be good if there were a lower threshold for removal of moderators.
I certainly agree with removing the bonus +1 for those with high karma. Karma of a poster should be available as a clickable link so that those with an authoritarian mind-set can look to see what everyone else is saying before making their own minds up. I don't really like the expression "Fuck the Karma Whores" though - presumably they'd expect extra karma for that.
I'm going to use my +1 in an ironic and self-mocking sense now.
Interesting perspective. I understand what you're saying about educating people and feeding them as the most basic rights. I don't think that I agree that this has to happen to the exclusion of other rights though. Is it not possible to do both at the same time? I think this might work more effectively. I'm not surprised by the Western media's attention to Falun Gong (or FaLan Gong) though - from their simple perspective anything against the CCP is good no matter what - hence their support of Chiang Kai Chek's descendant state.
um.. MODERATORS.. would you please either moderate this guy up, or moderate down the knob calling all the protestors "crackheads"
Agreed, his content free rant equates to a dismissal of the issues raised by very thoughtful people who protested in an amazingly peaceful and effective way.
Well, I've got to give it to you that you're pretty reasonable and responded in a logical and convincing manner to my points. As for the last one, I'm afraid we have to agree to disagree, my criteria were based on all three of the things that you find to be bad!
If you choose to ignore or disbelieve the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of free trade over protectionism, I suppose this might seem a 'religious' or 'magical' belief to you. If so, have a nice life.
Wow, sounds good. How about a couple of links or citations of the "overwhelming empirical evidence"? I suspect that you are going to have trouble providing these because there are no free-trade situations happening. Even NAFTA is a trade-agreement, one that allows companies to ride rough-shod over the national laws and rights of labour organizations. Anything that is supposed to somehow work out is fuzzy, ill-defined and religious, in short where's your proof? If you haven't got any then you engaging in belief which is a central facet of religion.
But it [the US] does (most of the time) strive to approach those goals.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then? That seems to indicate "striving" in the same way that a crack-addict "strives" to resist.
That sounds likely. So do you know of any Chinese sites that are revisionist or questioning the status quo there?
Jackbooted thugs breaking into a certain Danish home probably indicate much bigger, more threatening players in the big-stakes game of Global Domination.
Care to provide some information as to which home this was and what colour the jackboots were, or are you merely indulging in propaganda?
Whilst I can't condone any organisation, be it a private company or a national government, imposing censorship and 1984-style mind control, at least there's some semblance of directness about what they're doing. The film industry seems to much prefer subterfugue, lies, intimidation, threats, and tactics remeniscent of 1940's Germany.
Well, as regards the admirable directness of the Chinese being similar or dissimilar to 1940's Germany, which part of the 40's are you talking about? After Hitler? or during the "admirably direct" extermination camp part of the 40's?
Your post is a masterpiece of evasion, innuendo and non-sequitur, congratulations, you've confused yourself and others.
Crush
The schools I went to never had such brainwashing. Is the state of education in the US really so bad? Don't answer this, I probably already know the answer.
Well, that depends on what class you belong to here - rich people get a pretty good education, better than some Europeans! ;)
Open Your eyes, and see what your government does wrong, this is more important to you than what happens on the other side of the planet.
Well, that hasn't actually been true for a long time and it's becoming less true by the day. Yes, we should open our eyes to the problems of our own governments, but we can't ignore other nations! We are affected by them and by trans-national corporations, we should know as much about them as we can stomach! You can unfortunately no longer develop an isolated perfect society - if you ever could: remember all the socialist debate about one-nation socialism vs. global socialism?
Crush
Protests that are suppressed in China aren't reported to the people or are at least reported with the best possible spin for the governmnent.
Yes, this happens in China, yes it's bad. Does it not happen here? Well, from my perspective most reporting is extremely biased in favour of the status quo. Take the Seattle coverage, how much of the media focussed on the insignificant and unrepresentative trouble caused by a surprisingly small minority of the crowds? How much did it focus on the brutality of using tear-gas? I really have to disagree with such a rosy assessment.
Better countries? Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland.
That was 1872 not 1972, sorry!
HUH??! Communism (theoretically speaking, i.e. Marxism) is absolutely and utterly at odds with totalitarianism. In fact, democracy was supposed to evolve into communism (through a few steps), and culminate in the dissolution of government. Government by the people, for the people. The problem with communism is that it assumes that if people are equal and happy, avarice, greed, and powerlust will die out. Never going to happen.
I really have to question your equation of communism with Marxism! Communism is nothing more nor less than the principle that there are no indvidual property rights. All goods are common property and the use of them should be determined by the community.
This is separate from Marxism which admits this principle and builds a very specific structure on it that could fairly be construed as authoritarian and totalitarian. This was one of the main differences in the 1st Working Men's International which split at the Hague Congress 1972 over issues of authority. The Libertarian Communists/Anarchists such as Bakunin were expelled. They believed in autonomous federations. Marx believed in dictatorship of the proletariat. Definitely totalitariansim.
Regards, Crush
The near-religious belief that free-trade will somehow cure all problems is so naive and pollyanna-ish that it beggars belief. Add to this that the U.S. does not practice free-trade and you have to wonder are the advocates of it aware of the the disjunction of reality and fantasy.
In short, in the U.S. we have the rule of law, which may not always be enforced evenly. In China there is rule by fiat of the Party, which guarantees uneven standing under the law. Yes, the U.S. is far from perfect, but I don't think you can compare the full history of both countries (remember, the U.S. has about four times as much) without deciding that China has a much more oppressive government.
I'd certainly agree that China has a more oppressive govt and did so in my original post. I do question the idea that the constitution protects us though. The constitution is implemented legally through interpretations by the courts - yes, they are argued about publically, but they are still utlimately decided by the judiciary. So, an original constitutional provision can come to take on very specific interpretations which may be different from the original intent. Therefore we are, as you say under the rule of law. So too are the Chinese, under the rule of law of the party. That makes it a good deal easier to chop-and-change the rules when there is no reference document that has to be fought over, so yes, the U.S. is better that way. However, it's by no means perfect here and there is a real democratic deficit here where the legislators, elected officials and the educated are in the loop and running the country and the vast majority don't even vote. Also, our democratic obligations and pretensions to justice shouldn't just stop at our borders, we inflict much suffering on other countries through our attacks on them whether by using our weight as a trading partner to enforce sanctions (on Cuba and Iraq) or militarily attacking them covertly (Nicaragua, Guatemala, etc.etc.).
So in my mind it feels wrong for people to be getting so upset about China when we've got plenty on our own plate that we should deal with first.
More importantly where is this information going to come from? A lot of us are assuming that it's going to come from the West, but all they're likely to get from here is a lot of crap about eating Big Macs in Ford Explorers with a PalmPilot in your pocket is going to make you happy. As far as I understand it the Chinese govt. is very happy with consumerism and is moving rapidly towards a consumer society, this has been part of its official policy for the last 7 years. So, where's the disturbing democratic free-thought coming from?
The crime of leaking state secrets has been used to jail journalists and is often invoked against opponents of the Communist Party.
Funnily enough we've seen exactly the same thing here, both in the past during the 30's - 50's when Communism was a little too popular for comfort (we can all afford to be tolerant about it now because it hasn't an ice-cube's chance in hell of making a revival anytime soon!) and more recently with the "nuclear secrets leak" where funnily enough a scientist who just happened to be from China (our big opponent supposedly) was accused of betraying state secrets.
Yes, that's a far cry from having to have /. monitored every day by a special FBI task force *hi guys!*, however, consider the fact that there are STILL twelve documents in the FBI files on the John Lennon investigation which they won't release. I wonder what would be the fate of any web-site that put them up if they got hold of them?
Also, while China is bad and all, We the people are still trading with the buggers, not mention Indonesia, Burma, anywhere else horrible you care to mention.
Building huge data bases on people is extrmley scary, and at present laws don't really exist to protect peoples privacy, or information.
Nah. That's just paranoia, mostly it's manufacturers and retailers who want to be able to serve you better. They want to be able to respond to the free-market and listen to what their customers are telling them. Companies are often perceived as uncaring, deaf monoliths, but really they're just there to do your bidding. So why are you so scared of them?
Like you say, this is nothing new, they're collecting information all the time. What really kills me are things like the grocery cards or airmiles - the bastards are asking us to work for them by providing a false reward. If they can afford to give away the airmiles then they should give them away. The cunning aspect of this tactic is that they've already got enough people doing it so that if you don't then you lose out. I hate it! If I were to sell my shopping data I'd expect a lot more money than that. Save us from the idiots.
The only really postive thing that you can do is to fill out false and misleading information voluntarily on as many survey forms as you can, my father introduced me to this idea when I was quite young and they started collecting this data with grocery cards. Soon we had a pretty wacky family to go down on the unimportant cards: 3 bachelors uncles of ages 13, 53 and 93 lived with us and were employed respectively as: a stockbroker (earnings > $100,000 per annum), unemployed, and a garbage-man (30-50,000). There were also more subtle pieces of disinformation, altering the amount of products of a particular type that one was supposed to be buying up or down, some estimatedly reasonable fraction.
Perhaps it does no good ( I can see our outlier being eliminated from the data set pretty quickly) but at least it did them no good!
This is true, yet even if I leave valuables in public view and they are stolen, does the thief not get prosecuted at the public expense? As far as I am aware this happens all the time to shoplifters etc.
The argument that the "tax-payer" shouldn't be paying for large companies legal expenses in this case is a totally separate one from the (IMHO) main argument: Jon is publishing information about how to do it. It's like being prosecuted for having a web-site that details how to shop-lift.
As I read through the article I felt that they were making a lot of special pleading for MW2K and had a subjective feeling that RH6.1 was doing reasonably well. It was interesting to see that the "results" were that MW2K somehow ended up the winner. Putting it first in the category of security seems like it's still something to be proven.
What is the best way to protect your personal possessions from theft, 1) Buy good locks for your doors and windows, or 2) Leave the door open and sue anyone who steals anything.
I don't understand your argument. It sounds like you are saying that the MPAA is choosing option number 2, but it's not!. It would seem to me that the CSS system is an attempt to put good locks on the doors and windows. Now a clever lock-picker has shown the world how to open those locks. Should he be sued for publishing this information? No. Even if one did agree with the principle that one should not be allowed to use media which one buys in one's own way on one's own machines for one's own personal use(which I don't agree with to forestall any argument!), then what should be punished under the law is that physical violation itself. To punish someone that tells you how to do it is ludicrous. It means that writers of murder mysteries should be rounded up as accomplices to any murders that are committed!
Good for you on providing a mirror.
the CSS system is there to protect against piracy and to enforce the region coding system. I am angered by the abuse of the region coding system, a DVD disk costs about twice as much in the UK as it does in the US, and quite often does not have as many added extras (interviews, clips etc..). The region coding system forces us to buy often inferior products at always exaggerated prices
1) Attempting to control legal use of a legally purchased product is futile,
Well, on the evidence that you've submitted there, they're attempting to control the illegal use of illegally purchased products. I don't agree with it, but they're saying that they only want to sell a particular thing in the UK and you're trying to get around it.
In short, there's a big difference between defending Jon's right to publish the decryption code and defending the use of that code to facilitate individual cracking no matter how much we may personally agree with it.