...an all-in-one device that combines a set-top cable box, stereo receiver, DVD player, digital video recorder and PC.
Let's see, at Fry's a cable box is about $50, on Craig's List a stereo is about $30, at Best Buy a DVD player is about $39, a digital camcorder is about $250, and a PC on the web at PriceWatch is about $400.
So AMD is selling the whole package at about $3000? Jeez, such a deal. What does AMD stand for anyway? Advanced Money Disease?
You Know that is going nowhere. They didn't even mention what amazing new DRM that they'll be throwing in for free!
There is a real downside to all the 'do-good' funding for curing diseases and fixing the obvious sources of all the infant mortality in the undeveloped world. That is, all the children that would have died grow up. And they grow up to find that there is no jobs or housing or resources available for them. So they move to the city and live in discarded garbage slapped-together shacks and sell worthless stuff on the street...and make more babies.
Consider the starry-eyed 1960's-era Peace Corps volunteer who went to Pakistan and spent several years teaching rural villagers to dig wells and integrate low-cost high-efficiency sanitation. The children of the village stopped dying as they used too. 90 percent lived to adulthood instead of sixty percent. A job well done and she returns home to the USA, finishes her degree in Sociology, and marries her instructor, a graduate student a few years older. They prosper and have several childern themselves who prosper, get degrees, and go live in the big city.
But the children from the village where she served didn't prosper. The economy of the local country was ossified and couldn't grow to meet the needs of all the new young people who were suddenly there. One in particular was quite smart and had learned English from a young American woman who had lived in his rural village for several years when he was a child. He goes to the university, graduates, and finds that there simply are no jobs. He has no connections in the upper class that run the government and no money to bribe anyone. He can't get a visa to go anywhere. It wouldn't matter anyway, he has no money.
So he hangs out in the coffeeshop. He argues with the religious students but gradually comes to be a true believer. One night he is brought to a special group of believers who convince him that he has been chosen by Allah to be a shaheed, a glorious marytr. He gets a new suit, a fake passport and a visa, and a plane ticket to America. He meets people who provide him with a belt of high explosives. He walks into a skyscraper, goes to the richest office, and Allah be praised! blows himself up along with all the people in the office.
And one of the people that he killed happened to be the son of the woman who was the Peace Corps Volunteer who came to his village many years ago and instituted the changes that made it possible for him to survive to adulthood and martyrdom. So instead of one woman crying at the loss of a baby in a poor rural village, there are two women crying for the senseless loss of their children. One is a distant poor village and one in a wealth American suburb.
This is Peace Corps Syndrome. Rich people trying to 'help make the world a better place' and only making it worse because the changes that they made unbalanced the political ecology that held the undeveloped society together. This is why all the rich foundations that want to spend so much ill-gotten money to 'help humanity' will eventually fail. If Gates were serious about making world a better place then he would give $100 to all the people who bought his companie's operating system and then lost hours or weeks of work when the OS crashed and destroyed all their work. I know that this has happened to everyone at some time.
The USA does not have offical stocks of biological weapons. All development of biological weapons was stopped by President Nixon in 1969.
One may argue that the various psychopathic presidents that we have had then have reactivated the biowarfare programs secretly. But I don't believe that this is so. Millions of people in the military and private defense industries don't like bioweapons and wouldn't keep secret programs operating secretly. It has been alleged but never proven that AIDS was the result of a secret biowarfare program in the 1970s. If this were so then there would be proof independent and verifiable available by now.
The Soviets, on the other hand, have had secret and illegal (violation of international treaties) biowar programs such as BIOPREPARAT in operation until the late 1980s. British PM Thatcher demanded that they be ended and dismantled under international supervision. The Soviets and the Russians after the end of the USSR have complied. There may be remaining stockpiles that weren't destroyed of anthrax, plague, and, worst of all, smallpox in private hands. But these stockpiles, should they exist, are illegal and the current Russian government would not hesitate to kill anyone that they found possessing them.
The Cold War is over and it is time to leave the Cold War mentality behind; even as a joke. Such thinking that it is OK to possess or create weapons of unbelievable destructive power because the evil other side has them is a perfect example of Cold War mentality that must be left in the horrific history of the 20th century.
Psychopathic morons like the rulers of North Korea belong back in the 20th century also. Or allowed to reign over their own little patch of hell until the time comes that they pass from the earth.
When you say 'humanity', you must be referring to all the 'unwashed masses' in the poor and dusty regions of the earth. In the developed sections, we (the women, that is) take pills that allow us to have unlimited sex without wanton reproduction. We tend to be very careful about creating more children than we can afford to take care of (and that our environment can support).
It is the dirt poor humans, those still controlled by narrow-minded males obsessed with religious superstition, that multiply until every natural resource is consumed. Pay less attention to Palestine and Yemen and more to Italy and Japan and you will see that this is true.
With all the talk about 'theft' and 'piracy' it's easy to lose track of who the real thieves are here. It's the global media corporations who stole the public domain by bribing the politicians to implement a permanent extension of copyright.
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
Another option for all the obsolete NTSC televisions is for people to set up neighborhood broadcasting stations.
I assume, and this might be crazy on my part, that all of the stations that the obsolete TVs used to receive will be blank or raw static. In this case, people who set up illegal small area broadcast stations are getting a free communications medium along with an attentive audience. Play videos such as Hollywood films (if you're already illegal due to your broadcasting, then what difference does copyright infringement make?) and/or YouTube-type stuff and intersplice it with your own political viewpoints instead of commercials. Keep loose and mobile with your transmitter. It will only be the poor people who will be watching your illegal broadcasts because all the middle-class will have cable.
I really don't believe that NTSC broadcasting is going to go away in the USA. There's too much of an audience that would be lost for the advertisers.
There is a plan and I don't know if it has been implemented as of yet, to put RFID tags into every new American passport issued. Supposedly for 'security' etc...
This is truly stupid and dangerous because the people out there who believe that they were put on this planet by some god for the sole purpose of killing Americans (and there are a lot of people out there like that) can set up a small RFID detector in a public place and know exactly who is and who isn't an American as people move through the place. It doesn't matter that the data from the RFID can't be interpreted; all they need to know is whether someone causes the machine to trigger.
Of course the RFID detector could be responding to a tag that is not on a passport. But there will be a time between the wide implementation of RFID tags in American passports only and their widespread use for other things. During this time, the criminals may simply decide to kidnap and murder anyone who triggers their RFID machine and then let their benvolent and merciful god decide whether the random murdered stranger was an American infidel or a blessed martyr.
Now smart people (that's you Slashdaughters) will keep their new passports in lead-shielded passport folders in order to prevent random RFID targeting in foreign countries. But how many people are going to know about this? The first time any American gets criminalized as a result of a passport RFID ID then the people in US government who are responsible for this insane idea should be fired.
This silly idea that the West will do the 'brainwork', the conceptualizations, design, and marketing while the East will do the manufacturing and support is finally showing its weakest point. That is the assumption that the brainwork and the handwork are actually equal.
In reality the hand-work, the manufacturing and support is much more important. The brainwork is absurdly overpaid. The West would be well advised to rebuild their factories and discard their media/celebrity obsessed culture before they find that they have sunk to the level that China was 100 years ago.
So if you find yourself in trouble in UK, say it's late in the evening and you find yourself surrounded by drunken soccer hooligans who want to assault you. You yell "help!" and nothing happens. Authorities don't care.
But yell "Allah Akhbar!" and the police and the army will be there in minutes!
England must be a strange place. Because I can't understand how a free operating system like Linux can cost 100,000 pounds more on 200 computers than a proprietary system that costs $100 per computer when bought retail.
Is Microsoft UK actually paying people to install Windows on their PCs? Is there some magic turning point where $100 (@60 pounds) becomes cheaper than free? Do English librarians actually know the concept of money?
What is it? Training costs? It costs the same to train system administrators to run Linux as it does to run Windows. They are both systems that are equally complex.
Is someone being paid off? Surely not in England! If I bribe an English library system to adopt an expensive proprietary operating system over a free one and the bribee comes right out and says that the free system costs 100,000 pounds more than the proprietary system, do the people in England just shake their heads and agree that it must be so because English librarians are just, so,... correct.
I'm just so clueless here. Could someone please explain this?
So get 'unspoiled'. Take some LSD and go watch the movie like millions of other people did when it was released. You'll be just amazed. Can't find any LSD? Ah, well, that was the 'other space program' that we lost since the 1960s.
Actually though, you're kind of lucky. The original 2001:A Space Odyssey was really long and boring. Its 'magic' depended upon its special effects and the degree that they were taken seriously at the time. Now, they would be really boring.
Still watching this film would allow to catch the occasional 'baby boomer' joke. Like: "Open the pod bay door, HAL" "Sorry, Dave" "Open the door, HAL" "No, Dave" "Control Alt Delete, HAL" "Sorry Daaaav...... zip, grind, splat"
What do you expect? It's Singapore... The authorities there have always had a hard-on for extreme punishments for activities that often aren't even considered crimes in civilized countries. It's almost as if the Singapore authorities were trying outdo the Americans and the Germans in the 'Asshole Country of the Century' contest. Imagine the horror if these guys ever managed to excape their little Orwellian island.
Hold on you say! Singapore has gone from a backward malarial ridden third-world port city-state to a state-of-the-art communications and manufacturing center as good as anyplace in the world as a result of the focus and vision of Lee Qwan-Yew and his associates. And in less than forty years. And they will continue to advance as they shift from manufacturing to USA-style design and brain-power activities. The total fascist control of every citizen's lifestyle is necessary and good thing. It is the 'Asian way, where benevolent guidance of a wise leader concentrates the energy of the people to great heights'. Western-style laisse-faire in both the commercial and private spheres, wouldn't work here.
As a hippie, a pothead, an electronic designer, a programmer, a libratarian, and an American, I say that this is total bullshit. One must ask, as one watches another Western tourist led to gallows or the torture caning chamber for being caught with a tiny amount of harmless cannibus, how many of these beautiful skyscrapers were financed with money that came from the Golden Triangle and Afganistan opium fields.
Singapore is an insane place. Civilized people, expecially the young and those without a lot of money, are best advised to avoid it.
This kind of patent nonsense is primarily good only for developing countries. Places where people don't pay much attention and even less money to the rich corporations that claim to own technology.
If the patent isn't enforced then the people who aren't paying millions of dollars to use technology that is in general usage are better off relatively to those companies in the wealthy countries that are exposed to patent lawsuits (on common everyday technology).
This just encourages patent shell companies in the rich countries to file harassment lawsuits based on dubious patients against other companies in rich countries. It's an economic drag that the wealthy countries inflict upon themselves. Smart people in the developing world just ignore these lawsuits wherever they receive them. Or they just sell their products at lower costs to other developing countries.
There I was thinking it was the job of society (i.e. the people themselves) to decide what rights people should have, and the job of the government to put into place laws describing and safeguarding (and where appropriate, limiting) those rights.
Guess I'm just getting old.
No... you're just beginning to understand why the Americans chose to seperate themselves from the British 230 years ago.
The Americans have a completely different view of what constitues basic human liberty than the British do. The USA and the UK might seem to be mirror images of each other to the observers from far distant shores, but under the surface there are some fundamental differences.
'Getting old' just means that you've seen more and more examples of these differences manifest themselves over the years, and have become more sensitive to them.
The report goes on to say that: 'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government...
Well, actually, no... It's a basic human right to be able to access the cultural sphere. The statement above is simply a crypto-fascist bureaucrat's attempt to justify stealing control over cultural access from the music industry and hoarding it for himself.
Now I don't want to all libertarian on ya, and all that, BUT... Being able to listen to music or watch video or interact with any cultural form on a machine that you own is a fundamental and basic right that comes with the purchase of the machine. It's really time to put that concept into the forefront of all discussions of the topic of so-called intellectual property (a contradiction of terms, actually).
No entity, whether governmental, corporate, religious, or whatnot, has a authority (or the 'job') to control people's (that includes you and me and everyone else) access to the common human culture that we share. That we share with ourselves, our ancestors, and all future generations to come.
This is the starting point of all discussions on the subject, not the distant final dream. This is what Thomas Paine must have felt when constructing his work on basic liberty, Common Sense, two hundred plus years ago. This deep inner belief that certain things are basically not negotiable, like the right of people to use computers to access cultural activities in any way that the computers are able to do.
I should have fact checked it better before submission, and for that I apologize...
no, you need not bother apologizing. No one believed you in the first place.
It is inconceivable that a Republican appointee to the head of the FCC would come out against further consolidation of media ownership. Your story set off all the bullshit detectors of every politcally savvy Slashdaughter. There was simply no way that it could be true, and it wasn't.
I was wondering to myself if it were actually April 1 already. It's an equinox and I pay more attention to the season and the daylength than I do to the months. I was afraid that I had gotten six months out of sync somehow.
The 8086 was very similar to the 8085, so it was trivial to translate ASM code that ran on 8085 to 8086...
At the risk of appearing totally irrelevant to the 21st century, I must take a certain amount of exception to the statement above.
The 8086 with its segmented address architecture was ('is'?) the most seriously difficult microprocessor to program ever built. The only reason that it got put into the PC in the first place is due to the recommendation of Bill Gates, who was one of the world's best microprocessor programmers at the time.
I would venture to say that the decision to use the Intel 8086 instead of the far more advanced but more expensive Motorola 68000 set back microprocessor software development by about six years. It wasn't until the late 1980's with the release of fast dependable CPUs and storage, along with interactive programming languages like Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, that PC software development went beyond having one guy who wrote most of the code for each major software application. That also limited the company to one major piece of application software for which they were known, i.e. Lotus for spreadsheets, Ashton-Tate for word processors.
Software for the PC would be more advanced today if the Intel 8086 were actually similar to the Intel 8085. But it's all water under the bridge now...
Seriously, Television and video are the best look into another culture possible. The argument that posting Japanese television video is a violation of so-called intellectual property is completely negated by the value of having a window into Japan available to the rest of the world.
The one thing that the so-called intellectual property 'owners' don't understand is that the only thing worse than having someone view your video without paying is to have no one interested in viewing your video at all. And every step that they take to close off access to public viewing of their video products sends the public into other directions for interesting videos. Directions that are not under the control of the video or music industries and directions that are unable to generate profits for the video and music industries.
That is the whole point of the YouTube phenomenon. Young people are very interested in seeing videos that are outside of the control of the global media giants. And interested in not paying money for the experience. Any normal person could figure this out, but media executives and lawyers are not normal people. Their brains work differently.
In other words, the media industry needs to learn that removing your products from the new general media outlets seriously decreases long-term demand for your products. And a serious decrease in demand means for them a serious decrease in the advertising revenue stream.
One would think that they would have learned this lesson from the demise of network television over the past twenty years. But again, their brains just don't work like ordinary brains do.
The global media companies will be gone in twenty years, Good riddance!
RIAA doesn't really work outside of the West. The concept just doesn't seem to catch on in places that have real poverty. The idea that people could be forced to suffer disproportional consequences from listening to musical recordings is absurd in most of the developing world.
For instance, try telling someone in the southern regions of the former USSR that, you, as a representive of the American media conglomerates, are going to take a year's salary from them as a result of their making a cassette copy of some American pop song for their friend. They will laugh in your face. Persist and they will drag you out behind the wood shed and beat your head to a bloody pulp. Which in this case is a reasonable and responsible thing to do. Only in the West would people actually give thousands of dollars of their own money to the RIAA for making copies of musical recordings.
Everywhere else in the world the RIAA would have to take a number and get in line with all the other criminal organizations for their opportunity to extort people's money. Seriously, they wouldn't last a month anywhere outside the USA and Europe.
As people become richer, they have fewer children. As people become poorer, they have more children.
The rich people are much more selective about the number of children that they have. They are willing and able to invest more into each child that they produce.
The poor have always had many children. For one thing, they don't have the access to birth control that allows the rich and middle classes to have unlimited sex (without barrier-style birth control methods like condoms, crevical caps, and diaphrams) without pregnancies. Two, historically about half of the children of the poor die before productive maturity in mid adult years. And, three, the poor have been indoctrinated by culture and religion to have as many babies as possible.
It has only been in the recent historical era, about the past hundred years, that most of the children that the poor have reach 'productive maturity'. By that I mean not only adulthood, but also get past the self-destructive cultural brainwashing like military 'service', reckless driving, and binge intoxications that kills so many young males.
This present era with so much population growth is directly dependent and resultant from massive amounts of cheap energy, primarily oil. As we pass through Peak Oil, when half of all the oil on Earth has been found, refined, and burned, we will find that it is increasingly difficult to keep the poor people alive and well, regardless of how much they breed. As the oil era passes and the price of oil climbs each year, more and more of the poor sections of the Earth will become like present-day Palestine. That is hopelessly overcrowded; with no resources or solid government; endlessly locked in a civil war that prevents the economic growth needed to sustain its population.
The rich are not engaged in an unforseen policy of extinction, they are enacting an understood but unspoken policy of population sustainablility at lower levels than at the present. It is the poor that are breeding themselves into unsustainable levels. Levels that will inevitably result in a massive 'die-off' in the not-too-distant future.
It seems like this is just a desperate stunt for the geeks at Intel who were wounded in their college years by the taunt that they were 'only engineers' and not 'artists'.
But in the real world, NYC artists are absurd people with absolutely nothing that justifies their claim to be artists by any historical or cultural definition of the term. It is actually the engineers that are artists because they are taking raw physical materials, mixing them with organized pure intelligence, and forming them into designs and products that add beauty and meaning to people's lives.
NYC 'artists' don't really do that. They don't really do much of anything. But they are absolute masters at convincing people with personal and social inferiority complexes (like Intel geeks) that they are somewhat mediocre because they are not resonating with the subtle affections of the NYC artist tribe.
What Intel should be doing is convincing the mass public that they are the real artists of society by going into detail (but not too much detail) with a description of what actually is involved in creating a new microprocessor: the beauty, complexity, and elagance of the precise form involved.
This is what they do best. That 'bunny suit' campaign was stupid and embarrassing. That is what probably led to the NYC artists deriding the Intel geeks and tricking them into becoming stooges for the NYC artist tribe, as they appear to have done with this latest 'art project collaberation'.
So who is the RIAA going to sue? They have to sue someone. After all, that's all they do nowdays since the equalization of the vinyl records is no longer as profitable as extortion. (and because there aren't as many gold records to award as in previous years).
Any time a robot plays something, it is going to sound like something that the RIAA holds 'rights' to. So the robot is 'infringing' on 'their' copyrights. But, uh, sueing a robot is hard. They don't respond to threats. They ignore injunctions. Robots don't give a shit about human law, man, they just wanna rock'n'roll.
So are they going after the programmer?
"Your Honor, Let it be known that after 2.345 hours of playing a 130 beats per minute tempo, in the key of G#, if the human misses the beat by 0.256 seconds, the robot under inditment will consistently and 'knowingly' play the first three notes of "Free Bird". This is a willfull violation of copyright. We want $100,000,000,000.00; payable in monthly installments."
But the great thing about robots is no only can they now play music, but, with a little tweaking, they can also tear the fingers and toes off of entertainment lawyers. Accidently, of course, but AI routines can get a little unpredictable when clogged with human legal chaos. Shit happens.
Personally, when I want to play along with a machine I use a Zoom 900x series guitar effects DSP with the early 1970's Rolling Stones fed into the analog mix channel. Mix your guitar with lots of reverb, overdrive, a touch of delay, and a dollop of attitude.
When you get a robot to do what Keith Richards does, let me know.
One must also consider that there is a lot of overhead in any project of this size. And overhead is expensive. Especially in Europe. They have to pay for all their overpriced bureaucrats, all of Brussells overpriced Eurocrats, all the standards documentation requirements, all the different languages, all the training costs, all the 'calm-the-public' costs.
Plus all the subsidies like the opera, the East German social-integration costs, the legacy costs from their escapades of sixty years ago that left 70 million people dead, the schools, the pensions for the millions of the old people living now, the pensions for the millions of old people thirty years from now, the costs of training the people who don't speak the same languages as everyone else in Germany but who actually do a lot of the actual work, etc...
All this nonsense is completely missing the point. The point is to get a education that works for you. The academic bias of the educational establishment has led to the devastation of the vocational training classes and an overemphasis on college-prep education.
Not everyone 'needs' to go to college; not everyone needs an intellectual classical education. In fact most people don't. People need to learn skills that will allow them to get a good satisfying job. A job that pays enough to support a family (along with your partner's wages).
An educational system that sends more than 20% of its graduates to college to learn literature, history, Western Civ, etc... is failing its society. Educational systems should start training people to do what they want to do much earlier than they do now. If you want to be a game programmer then you should start learning graphic design and computer programming at ten years old. If you want to be a rock star then you should be able to study music, electronics, and fashion starting at ten. If you want to be a fireman then start learning chemistry, anatomy, and phys ed at an early age.
It doesn't matter to the people in vocational training if they plagerize from someone else; it only matters that they learn the material that they need to know. If they cut-and-paste it or copy it by hand from an encyclopedia, SO WHAT?!?
We don't need 20 million term papers about the symbiology found in the works of John Milton. We don't need 20 million people learning Foucault. We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels.
We don't need people who give a fuck about whether someone is copying someone else's term paper.
Come on, people, join the real world. The real world is changing. None of this stupid shit that seems so important now will make any difference twenty years from now. Pay attention to what's seriously important. The educational establishment (in any country) is no longer seriously important. [..and stop going in deep debt from paying for useless college tuition...]
"the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.""
The joy of copying 3000 songs in high-quality compressed audio from your friend's hard disk to your hard disk for free is infinitely more enjoyable than paying $16 for a piece of vinyl that holds 10 songs and lasts 100 plays before scratching or wearing out the high frequencies.
Slashdot Mirror
...an all-in-one device that combines a set-top cable box, stereo receiver, DVD player, digital video recorder and PC.
Let's see, at Fry's a cable box is about $50, on Craig's List a stereo is about $30, at Best Buy a DVD player is about $39, a digital camcorder is about $250, and a PC on the web at PriceWatch is about $400.
So AMD is selling the whole package at about $3000? Jeez, such a deal. What does AMD stand for anyway? Advanced Money Disease?
You Know that is going nowhere. They didn't even mention what amazing new DRM that they'll be throwing in for free!
There is a real downside to all the 'do-good' funding for curing diseases and fixing the obvious sources of all the infant mortality in the undeveloped world. That is, all the children that would have died grow up. And they grow up to find that there is no jobs or housing or resources available for them. So they move to the city and live in discarded garbage slapped-together shacks and sell worthless stuff on the street...and make more babies.
Consider the starry-eyed 1960's-era Peace Corps volunteer who went to Pakistan and spent several years teaching rural villagers to dig wells and integrate low-cost high-efficiency sanitation. The children of the village stopped dying as they used too. 90 percent lived to adulthood instead of sixty percent. A job well done and she returns home to the USA, finishes her degree in Sociology, and marries her instructor, a graduate student a few years older. They prosper and have several childern themselves who prosper, get degrees, and go live in the big city.
But the children from the village where she served didn't prosper. The economy of the local country was ossified and couldn't grow to meet the needs of all the new young people who were suddenly there. One in particular was quite smart and had learned English from a young American woman who had lived in his rural village for several years when he was a child. He goes to the university, graduates, and finds that there simply are no jobs. He has no connections in the upper class that run the government and no money to bribe anyone. He can't get a visa to go anywhere. It wouldn't matter anyway, he has no money.
So he hangs out in the coffeeshop. He argues with the religious students but gradually comes to be a true believer. One night he is brought to a special group of believers who convince him that he has been chosen by Allah to be a shaheed, a glorious marytr. He gets a new suit, a fake passport and a visa, and a plane ticket to America. He meets people who provide him with a belt of high explosives. He walks into a skyscraper, goes to the richest office, and Allah be praised! blows himself up along with all the people in the office.
And one of the people that he killed happened to be the son of the woman who was the Peace Corps Volunteer who came to his village many years ago and instituted the changes that made it possible for him to survive to adulthood and martyrdom. So instead of one woman crying at the loss of a baby in a poor rural village, there are two women crying for the senseless loss of their children. One is a distant poor village and one in a wealth American suburb.
This is Peace Corps Syndrome. Rich people trying to 'help make the world a better place' and only making it worse because the changes that they made unbalanced the political ecology that held the undeveloped society together. This is why all the rich foundations that want to spend so much ill-gotten money to 'help humanity' will eventually fail. If Gates were serious about making world a better place then he would give $100 to all the people who bought his companie's operating system and then lost hours or weeks of work when the OS crashed and destroyed all their work. I know that this has happened to everyone at some time.
The USA does not have offical stocks of biological weapons. All development of biological weapons was stopped by President Nixon in 1969.
One may argue that the various psychopathic presidents that we have had then have reactivated the biowarfare programs secretly. But I don't believe that this is so. Millions of people in the military and private defense industries don't like bioweapons and wouldn't keep secret programs operating secretly. It has been alleged but never proven that AIDS was the result of a secret biowarfare program in the 1970s. If this were so then there would be proof independent and verifiable available by now.
The Soviets, on the other hand, have had secret and illegal (violation of international treaties) biowar programs such as BIOPREPARAT in operation until the late 1980s. British PM Thatcher demanded that they be ended and dismantled under international supervision. The Soviets and the Russians after the end of the USSR have complied. There may be remaining stockpiles that weren't destroyed of anthrax, plague, and, worst of all, smallpox in private hands. But these stockpiles, should they exist, are illegal and the current Russian government would not hesitate to kill anyone that they found possessing them.
The Cold War is over and it is time to leave the Cold War mentality behind; even as a joke. Such thinking that it is OK to possess or create weapons of unbelievable destructive power because the evil other side has them is a perfect example of Cold War mentality that must be left in the horrific history of the 20th century.
Psychopathic morons like the rulers of North Korea belong back in the 20th century also. Or allowed to reign over their own little patch of hell until the time comes that they pass from the earth.
When you say 'humanity', you must be referring to all the 'unwashed masses' in the poor and dusty regions of the earth. In the developed sections, we (the women, that is) take pills that allow us to have unlimited sex without wanton reproduction. We tend to be very careful about creating more children than we can afford to take care of (and that our environment can support).
It is the dirt poor humans, those still controlled by narrow-minded males obsessed with religious superstition, that multiply until every natural resource is consumed. Pay less attention to Palestine and Yemen and more to Italy and Japan and you will see that this is true.
With all the talk about 'theft' and 'piracy' it's easy to lose track of who the real thieves are here. It's the global media corporations who stole the public domain by bribing the politicians to implement a permanent extension of copyright.
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
Another option for all the obsolete NTSC televisions is for people to set up neighborhood broadcasting stations.
I assume, and this might be crazy on my part, that all of the stations that the obsolete TVs used to receive will be blank or raw static. In this case, people who set up illegal small area broadcast stations are getting a free communications medium along with an attentive audience. Play videos such as Hollywood films (if you're already illegal due to your broadcasting, then what difference does copyright infringement make?) and/or YouTube-type stuff and intersplice it with your own political viewpoints instead of commercials. Keep loose and mobile with your transmitter. It will only be the poor people who will be watching your illegal broadcasts because all the middle-class will have cable.
I really don't believe that NTSC broadcasting is going to go away in the USA. There's too much of an audience that would be lost for the advertisers.
There is a plan and I don't know if it has been implemented as of yet, to put RFID tags into every new American passport issued. Supposedly for 'security' etc...
This is truly stupid and dangerous because the people out there who believe that they were put on this planet by some god for the sole purpose of killing Americans (and there are a lot of people out there like that) can set up a small RFID detector in a public place and know exactly who is and who isn't an American as people move through the place. It doesn't matter that the data from the RFID can't be interpreted; all they need to know is whether someone causes the machine to trigger.
Of course the RFID detector could be responding to a tag that is not on a passport. But there will be a time between the wide implementation of RFID tags in American passports only and their widespread use for other things. During this time, the criminals may simply decide to kidnap and murder anyone who triggers their RFID machine and then let their benvolent and merciful god decide whether the random murdered stranger was an American infidel or a blessed martyr.
Now smart people (that's you Slashdaughters) will keep their new passports in lead-shielded passport folders in order to prevent random RFID targeting in foreign countries. But how many people are going to know about this? The first time any American gets criminalized as a result of a passport RFID ID then the people in US government who are responsible for this insane idea should be fired.
This silly idea that the West will do the 'brainwork', the conceptualizations, design, and marketing while the East will do the manufacturing and support is finally showing its weakest point. That is the assumption that the brainwork and the handwork are actually equal.
In reality the hand-work, the manufacturing and support is much more important. The brainwork is absurdly overpaid. The West would be well advised to rebuild their factories and discard their media/celebrity obsessed culture before they find that they have sunk to the level that China was 100 years ago.
No chance of that actually happening, though.
So if you find yourself in trouble in UK, say it's late in the evening and you find yourself surrounded by drunken soccer hooligans who want to assault you. You yell "help!" and nothing happens. Authorities don't care.
But yell "Allah Akhbar!" and the police and the army will be there in minutes!
England must be a strange place. Because I can't understand how a free operating system like Linux can cost 100,000 pounds more on 200 computers than a proprietary system that costs $100 per computer when bought retail.
... correct.
Is Microsoft UK actually paying people to install Windows on their PCs? Is there some magic turning point where $100 (@60 pounds) becomes cheaper than free? Do English librarians actually know the concept of money?
What is it? Training costs? It costs the same to train system administrators to run Linux as it does to run Windows. They are both systems that are equally complex.
Is someone being paid off? Surely not in England! If I bribe an English library system to adopt an expensive proprietary operating system over a free one and the bribee comes right out and says that the free system costs 100,000 pounds more than the proprietary system, do the people in England just shake their heads and agree that it must be so because English librarians are just, so,
I'm just so clueless here. Could someone please explain this?
So get 'unspoiled'. Take some LSD and go watch the movie like millions of other people did when it was released. You'll be just amazed. Can't find any LSD? Ah, well, that was the 'other space program' that we lost since the 1960s. ...... zip, grind, splat"
Actually though, you're kind of lucky. The original 2001:A Space Odyssey was really long and boring. Its 'magic' depended upon its special effects and the degree that they were taken seriously at the time. Now, they would be really boring.
Still watching this film would allow to catch the occasional 'baby boomer' joke. Like: "Open the pod bay door, HAL" "Sorry, Dave" "Open the door, HAL" "No, Dave" "Control Alt Delete, HAL" "Sorry Daaaav
What do you expect? It's Singapore... The authorities there have always had a hard-on for extreme punishments for activities that often aren't even considered crimes in civilized countries. It's almost as if the Singapore authorities were trying outdo the Americans and the Germans in the 'Asshole Country of the Century' contest. Imagine the horror if these guys ever managed to excape their little Orwellian island.
Hold on you say! Singapore has gone from a backward malarial ridden third-world port city-state to a state-of-the-art communications and manufacturing center as good as anyplace in the world as a result of the focus and vision of Lee Qwan-Yew and his associates. And in less than forty years. And they will continue to advance as they shift from manufacturing to USA-style design and brain-power activities. The total fascist control of every citizen's lifestyle is necessary and good thing. It is the 'Asian way, where benevolent guidance of a wise leader concentrates the energy of the people to great heights'. Western-style laisse-faire in both the commercial and private spheres, wouldn't work here.
As a hippie, a pothead, an electronic designer, a programmer, a libratarian, and an American, I say that this is total bullshit. One must ask, as one watches another Western tourist led to gallows or the torture caning chamber for being caught with a tiny amount of harmless cannibus, how many of these beautiful skyscrapers were financed with money that came from the Golden Triangle and Afganistan opium fields.
Singapore is an insane place. Civilized people, expecially the young and those without a lot of money, are best advised to avoid it.
This kind of patent nonsense is primarily good only for developing countries. Places where people don't pay much attention and even less money to the rich corporations that claim to own technology.
If the patent isn't enforced then the people who aren't paying millions of dollars to use technology that is in general usage are better off relatively to those companies in the wealthy countries that are exposed to patent lawsuits (on common everyday technology).
This just encourages patent shell companies in the rich countries to file harassment lawsuits based on dubious patients against other companies in rich countries. It's an economic drag that the wealthy countries inflict upon themselves. Smart people in the developing world just ignore these lawsuits wherever they receive them. Or they just sell their products at lower costs to other developing countries.
There I was thinking it was the job of society (i.e. the people themselves) to decide what rights people should have, and the job of the government to put into place laws describing and safeguarding (and where appropriate, limiting) those rights.
Guess I'm just getting old.
No... you're just beginning to understand why the Americans chose to seperate themselves from the British 230 years ago.
The Americans have a completely different view of what constitues basic human liberty than the British do. The USA and the UK might seem to be mirror images of each other to the observers from far distant shores, but under the surface there are some fundamental differences.
'Getting old' just means that you've seen more and more examples of these differences manifest themselves over the years, and have become more sensitive to them.
The report goes on to say that: 'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government...
Well, actually, no... It's a basic human right to be able to access the cultural sphere. The statement above is simply a crypto-fascist bureaucrat's attempt to justify stealing control over cultural access from the music industry and hoarding it for himself.
Now I don't want to all libertarian on ya, and all that, BUT... Being able to listen to music or watch video or interact with any cultural form on a machine that you own is a fundamental and basic right that comes with the purchase of the machine. It's really time to put that concept into the forefront of all discussions of the topic of so-called intellectual property (a contradiction of terms, actually).
No entity, whether governmental, corporate, religious, or whatnot, has a authority (or the 'job') to control people's (that includes you and me and everyone else) access to the common human culture that we share. That we share with ourselves, our ancestors, and all future generations to come.
This is the starting point of all discussions on the subject, not the distant final dream. This is what Thomas Paine must have felt when constructing his work on basic liberty, Common Sense, two hundred plus years ago. This deep inner belief that certain things are basically not negotiable, like the right of people to use computers to access cultural activities in any way that the computers are able to do.
I should have fact checked it better before submission, and for that I apologize...
no, you need not bother apologizing. No one believed you in the first place.
It is inconceivable that a Republican appointee to the head of the FCC would come out against further consolidation of media ownership. Your story set off all the bullshit detectors of every politcally savvy Slashdaughter. There was simply no way that it could be true, and it wasn't.
I was wondering to myself if it were actually April 1 already. It's an equinox and I pay more attention to the season and the daylength than I do to the months. I was afraid that I had gotten six months out of sync somehow.
The 8086 was very similar to the 8085, so it was trivial to translate ASM code that ran on 8085 to 8086...
At the risk of appearing totally irrelevant to the 21st century, I must take a certain amount of exception to the statement above.
The 8086 with its segmented address architecture was ('is'?) the most seriously difficult microprocessor to program ever built. The only reason that it got put into the PC in the first place is due to the recommendation of Bill Gates, who was one of the world's best microprocessor programmers at the time.
I would venture to say that the decision to use the Intel 8086 instead of the far more advanced but more expensive Motorola 68000 set back microprocessor software development by about six years. It wasn't until the late 1980's with the release of fast dependable CPUs and storage, along with interactive programming languages like Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, that PC software development went beyond having one guy who wrote most of the code for each major software application. That also limited the company to one major piece of application software for which they were known, i.e. Lotus for spreadsheets, Ashton-Tate for word processors.
Software for the PC would be more advanced today if the Intel 8086 were actually similar to the Intel 8085. But it's all water under the bridge now...
Seriously, Television and video are the best look into another culture possible. The argument that posting Japanese television video is a violation of so-called intellectual property is completely negated by the value of having a window into Japan available to the rest of the world.
The one thing that the so-called intellectual property 'owners' don't understand is that the only thing worse than having someone view your video without paying is to have no one interested in viewing your video at all. And every step that they take to close off access to public viewing of their video products sends the public into other directions for interesting videos. Directions that are not under the control of the video or music industries and directions that are unable to generate profits for the video and music industries.
That is the whole point of the YouTube phenomenon. Young people are very interested in seeing videos that are outside of the control of the global media giants. And interested in not paying money for the experience. Any normal person could figure this out, but media executives and lawyers are not normal people. Their brains work differently.
In other words, the media industry needs to learn that removing your products from the new general media outlets seriously decreases long-term demand for your products. And a serious decrease in demand means for them a serious decrease in the advertising revenue stream.
One would think that they would have learned this lesson from the demise of network television over the past twenty years. But again, their brains just don't work like ordinary brains do.
The global media companies will be gone in twenty years, Good riddance!
RIAA doesn't really work outside of the West. The concept just doesn't seem to catch on in places that have real poverty. The idea that people could be forced to suffer disproportional consequences from listening to musical recordings is absurd in most of the developing world.
For instance, try telling someone in the southern regions of the former USSR that, you, as a representive of the American media conglomerates, are going to take a year's salary from them as a result of their making a cassette copy of some American pop song for their friend. They will laugh in your face. Persist and they will drag you out behind the wood shed and beat your head to a bloody pulp. Which in this case is a reasonable and responsible thing to do. Only in the West would people actually give thousands of dollars of their own money to the RIAA for making copies of musical recordings.
Everywhere else in the world the RIAA would have to take a number and get in line with all the other criminal organizations for their opportunity to extort people's money. Seriously, they wouldn't last a month anywhere outside the USA and Europe.
As people become richer, they have fewer children. As people become poorer, they have more children.
The rich people are much more selective about the number of children that they have. They are willing and able to invest more into each child that they produce.
The poor have always had many children. For one thing, they don't have the access to birth control that allows the rich and middle classes to have unlimited sex (without barrier-style birth control methods like condoms, crevical caps, and diaphrams) without pregnancies. Two, historically about half of the children of the poor die before productive maturity in mid adult years. And, three, the poor have been indoctrinated by culture and religion to have as many babies as possible.
It has only been in the recent historical era, about the past hundred years, that most of the children that the poor have reach 'productive maturity'. By that I mean not only adulthood, but also get past the self-destructive cultural brainwashing like military 'service', reckless driving, and binge intoxications that kills so many young males.
This present era with so much population growth is directly dependent and resultant from massive amounts of cheap energy, primarily oil. As we pass through Peak Oil, when half of all the oil on Earth has been found, refined, and burned, we will find that it is increasingly difficult to keep the poor people alive and well, regardless of how much they breed. As the oil era passes and the price of oil climbs each year, more and more of the poor sections of the Earth will become like present-day Palestine. That is hopelessly overcrowded; with no resources or solid government; endlessly locked in a civil war that prevents the economic growth needed to sustain its population.
The rich are not engaged in an unforseen policy of extinction, they are enacting an understood but unspoken policy of population sustainablility at lower levels than at the present. It is the poor that are breeding themselves into unsustainable levels. Levels that will inevitably result in a massive 'die-off' in the not-too-distant future.
It seems like this is just a desperate stunt for the geeks at Intel who were wounded in their college years by the taunt that they were 'only engineers' and not 'artists'.
But in the real world, NYC artists are absurd people with absolutely nothing that justifies their claim to be artists by any historical or cultural definition of the term. It is actually the engineers that are artists because they are taking raw physical materials, mixing them with organized pure intelligence, and forming them into designs and products that add beauty and meaning to people's lives.
NYC 'artists' don't really do that. They don't really do much of anything. But they are absolute masters at convincing people with personal and social inferiority complexes (like Intel geeks) that they are somewhat mediocre because they are not resonating with the subtle affections of the NYC artist tribe.
What Intel should be doing is convincing the mass public that they are the real artists of society by going into detail (but not too much detail) with a description of what actually is involved in creating a new microprocessor: the beauty, complexity, and elagance of the precise form involved.
This is what they do best. That 'bunny suit' campaign was stupid and embarrassing. That is what probably led to the NYC artists deriding the Intel geeks and tricking them into becoming stooges for the NYC artist tribe, as they appear to have done with this latest 'art project collaberation'.
So who is the RIAA going to sue? They have to sue someone. After all, that's all they do nowdays since the equalization of the vinyl records is no longer as profitable as extortion. (and because there aren't as many gold records to award as in previous years).
Any time a robot plays something, it is going to sound like something that the RIAA holds 'rights' to. So the robot is 'infringing' on 'their' copyrights. But, uh, sueing a robot is hard. They don't respond to threats. They ignore injunctions. Robots don't give a shit about human law, man, they just wanna rock'n'roll.
So are they going after the programmer?
"Your Honor, Let it be known that after 2.345 hours of playing a 130 beats per minute tempo, in the key of G#, if the human misses the beat by 0.256 seconds, the robot under inditment will consistently and 'knowingly' play the first three notes of "Free Bird". This is a willfull violation of copyright. We want $100,000,000,000.00; payable in monthly installments."
But the great thing about robots is no only can they now play music, but, with a little tweaking, they can also tear the fingers and toes off of entertainment lawyers. Accidently, of course, but AI routines can get a little unpredictable when clogged with human legal chaos. Shit happens.
Personally, when I want to play along with a machine I use a Zoom 900x series guitar effects DSP with the early 1970's Rolling Stones fed into the analog mix channel. Mix your guitar with lots of reverb, overdrive, a touch of delay, and a dollop of attitude.
When you get a robot to do what Keith Richards does, let me know.
One must also consider that there is a lot of overhead in any project of this size. And overhead is expensive. Especially in Europe. They have to pay for all their overpriced bureaucrats, all of Brussells overpriced Eurocrats, all the standards documentation requirements, all the different languages, all the training costs, all the 'calm-the-public' costs.
Plus all the subsidies like the opera, the East German social-integration costs, the legacy costs from their escapades of sixty years ago that left 70 million people dead, the schools, the pensions for the millions of the old people living now, the pensions for the millions of old people thirty years from now, the costs of training the people who don't speak the same languages as everyone else in Germany but who actually do a lot of the actual work, etc...
It all adds up.
All this nonsense is completely missing the point. The point is to get a education that works for you. The academic bias of the educational establishment has led to the devastation of the vocational training classes and an overemphasis on college-prep education.
Not everyone 'needs' to go to college; not everyone needs an intellectual classical education. In fact most people don't. People need to learn skills that will allow them to get a good satisfying job. A job that pays enough to support a family (along with your partner's wages).
An educational system that sends more than 20% of its graduates to college to learn literature, history, Western Civ, etc... is failing its society. Educational systems should start training people to do what they want to do much earlier than they do now. If you want to be a game programmer then you should start learning graphic design and computer programming at ten years old. If you want to be a rock star then you should be able to study music, electronics, and fashion starting at ten. If you want to be a fireman then start learning chemistry, anatomy, and phys ed at an early age.
It doesn't matter to the people in vocational training if they plagerize from someone else; it only matters that they learn the material that they need to know. If they cut-and-paste it or copy it by hand from an encyclopedia, SO WHAT?!?
We don't need 20 million term papers about the symbiology found in the works of John Milton. We don't need 20 million people learning Foucault. We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels.
We don't need people who give a fuck about whether someone is copying someone else's term paper.
Come on, people, join the real world. The real world is changing. None of this stupid shit that seems so important now will make any difference twenty years from now. Pay attention to what's seriously important. The educational establishment (in any country) is no longer seriously important. [..and stop going in deep debt from paying for useless college tuition...]
"the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.""
The joy of copying 3000 songs in high-quality compressed audio from your friend's hard disk to your hard disk for free is infinitely more enjoyable than paying $16 for a piece of vinyl that holds 10 songs and lasts 100 plays before scratching or wearing out the high frequencies.