Most of France's Nuclear Plants are on the German border so that they can sell excess power to Germany and other North Central European countries.
Plus if the Germans ever invade again, they can just pop out the drain plugs and hop on the TGV to San Tropez.
it's just about good old robber-baron style capitalism, big companies who are well-connected with the government abusing the rights of consumers to protect their profits...
In China, the communist party is the greatest robber-baron capitalist. They will do anything to maintain control, including killing millions of people for trival reasons. And as communists, they are the least likely to implement any technological change that will benefit the middle classes (at least those who are not in the party) while also crushing any fashion style or personal expression outside their strict puritanical viewpoints. Communists are capitalists without due process laws, fascists without swazticas, and wacko religious fundamentalists all rolled up into one. They are bad news.
Despite all of the 'dot-com' excitement and digital change in the past twenty years in the West, we tend to forget that China is still under the political control of the Communist Party. Even with all the talk about serving the people and all of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political theory, the communist party is going to be the most backward, reactionary, brutal, and oppressive institution in any country that is still run by communists.
I don't wish to sound like a old cold-war, earth-burning, Dr. Strangelove flag-waving American buffoon. Nevertheless, certain facts must be faced. And one of those facts is that regardless of where one's political stance is the communist party is going to be the most backward, reactionary, brutal, and oppressive institution in any country that is still run by communists. This is true no matter how stylish or technologically-aware the young people are in that country. The government in any communist country is still going to act like dictatorial thugs; making arbitrary and senseless decisions without any due process of international law.
Now I know that you all are going to say that George Bush acts the same way. But American blockhead brutality (at least in the USA) is a far cry less from what passes as ordinary administration in any communist country. And this also applies to 'strong man' crypto-dictatorships in the post-Soviet orbit.
So don't be surprised at this heavy-handed nonsense. The whole point of the Information Age is that the primary guidance of society passes from those who rule through systematic application of violence to those who guide by controlling the flow of information. China will enter the Information Age eventually, but it won't be easy or painless.
I bought a Logitech keyboard with lots of Logitech buttons. Its keyboard driver was about 8 megabytes long, for a keyboard driver.
Then I found that the buttons weren't reprogrammable in the manner that the sales literature led me to believe.
Then, worst of all, I found that the function keys wouldn't work as assigned with ordinary programs correctly unless I remembered to press this tiny little key in the corner of the keyboard every single time that I turned the PC on. I finally was able to trade the keyboard with someone who actually thought that all the stupid worthless buttons were a good idea even after I explained their limitations.
Logitech is truly lame. If everyone wouldn't buy their stupid stuff, then they wouldn't have enough money to do things like develop a mouse that notifies you that you have email. Logitech's greatest advantage over everyone else is that they make their stuff with 'egg-shell' white plastic instead of beige 'dirty-white' plastic. Fashion things like that are very important in the Macintosh community but less so in the real world.
In the Netherlands, there is long tradition of working together for the common good. Everybody shares a heritage and for the most part, a vision of what Dutch society should be like.
But New Orleans is the most racial segregated city this side of South Africa. And it's got a lot of history of race relations. Not much of it is good. The city has always been divided; and each side would be willing to just look the other way if something were to happen that caused the other side be destroyed. There is not much sense of one common New Orleans society shared by the blacks and the whites. Each side thinks that the city would be a better place if there were only far fewer of the other group.
It was the African-American sections of the city that suffered the most flood damage. A large percentage of the Euro-Americans with more money moved to the suburban parishes (usually Jefferson Parish next door) starting in the 1970's.
Look at a map of flooded areas. The flooding starts right on the parish line. In regards to NOLA area, the black areas are under water and the white areas are dry. Outside the city everyone is under water.
This bad racial heritage has really twisted the local New Orleans mentality, regardless of how much people like to pretend that it hasn't. Jefferson Parish (where most of the white people live(d) in New Orleans) is the home of former Ku Klux Klan leader (and Republican governor candidate) David Duke. White racism is widespread and not far below the surface there. It's like Bensonhurst NYC or Federal Hill Providence RI, except everyone is Cajun and redneck instead of Soprano. Same general mentality. Everyone gets along fine with 'those people' as long as they stay 'over there', in Orleans parish.
It occured to me that someone could have destroyed NOLA without a hurricane by simply parking a few trucks full of diesel and fertilizer next to the weakest levee. It was the levee break and not the hurricane that made NOLA uninhabitable.
Anyway, I hope Lestat got out OK. And his Rue Royale house didn't get flooded.
If it keeps on raining, levee's gonna break.
When the levee breaks, got no place to stay..
All last night, sat on the levee and moaned.
it's got what it takes to make a mudman leave his home Led Zeppelin 1971
Kazaa is used by millions of people who don't understand how to set up and use bit-torrents (myself included). Kazaa is the reincarnation of the original Napster.
At this point, Kazaa is the world's public library although it is a little light on the European Classical, American Jazz, and world music. The people who most like these genres have yet to understand that their music must be converted to high-quality MP3 or OGG and made available on the Kazaa network if it is going to stay alive after the cultural holocast.
Haven't heard of the cultural holocast yet? That's where the four global entertainment corporations get legal control of every piece of music ever recorded or published, put unbreakable DRM on every recording, then one-by-one throw away the DRM unlocking keys on the older recordings because the 'product' is 'not profitable'. Expect this to happen within twenty years (you are thinking long term, aren't you?) unless the brave and commendable illegal file sharers continue to preserve our world culture (yes, even Britteny...) for ourselves and future generations.
There is no copyright anymore, it was the first casuality of the culture wars.
Sorry, no longer accepting anyone's copyright laws...After the global entertainment corporations stole the public domain by paying off American politicians to pass laws that enact a de facto extension of the copyright period. Then trick various courts around the world to accept this purchased American version of indefinite copyright extension as local law by international treaty.
Imagine that you have bought a car with time payments. You make a payment every month and after a predetermined number of months, you own the car. Imagine that the finance company pays off the politicians to extend the number of payments that you have to make every time that you get near the scheduled last payment. They claim that granting you title would cause undue hardship on the people who have come to depend on your monthly payments. No unbribed judge anywhere would accept this.
Copyright is the same way. By granting an exclusive right to collect payments for using a creative work, the copyright law also has a definite time period for which these payments must be made. After that period, the former copyright owner can't legally force payments from users. The copyright ownership transfers to the public. Bribing politicians to pass laws extending copyright periods on works in the current schedule is theft because it steals from the public the funds that they would not have to pay according to the agreed-upon original copyright schedule. The theft of the public domain is the greatest theft of creative works in history. Digital copying is chicken feed compared to this.
When a contract is broken as a result of bad faith, all of its provisions are broken. Therefore we no longer accept any copyright restrictions on any creative works, regardless of their age. When the global entertainment corporations are willing to restore the public domain, then we will be willing to consider DRM and the re-start of the purchase of creative works. Until then, forget it. Does this hurt the 'artists'? Maybe, maybe not. But where were they when the the public domain was stolen?
No one is going to allow some judge somewhere to shut down Kazaa. It's simply too important now. Kazaa is the world's new public library for creative works. Along with Wikipedia for general information and FreeNet for censored political coverage, it is the one of the primal forces of the new Information Age.
It's time for the world governments to begin to understand this. In the new Information Age, it's not the people who control the violence (the police, the military, the mafia,...) who set the agenda, it's the people who control the information. That's us, folks! Kazaa will be destroyed only if we allow it. And, I, for one, of the many millions of Kazaa users, suggest that we keep it.
This is of course dependent on the ultimately bogus claim of "unbreakable drm", which will never exist.
I'm assuming that there will develop a corporate cultural consumption mentality that is primarily 'pay-per-view'. To listen to a recording on a DRM play-back audio machine, you would need to be connected to the internet (most likely through a permanent wireless background connection). Then the DRM key would be transferred to your audio machine each time that you made a music selection and 'listening fee' would be automatically deducted from the DRM funds allotted from your bank account. All this would happen very quickly in the background. Look how fast the debit cards can transfer money from your bank account to the grocery store, it gets done in about 15 seconds while you wait in the checkout line. In the future, the DRM debit card will be built right into the audio playback device. Of course, not having a DRM debit card built into your audio playback device will be illegal, and bounty hunters will make their living hunting down people who listen to 20th century recordings (with unlimited copyright extensions) without paying the entertainment corporations (either of them by that time).
The whole point about fighting DRM in 2005 is whether or not cultural activities are a basic human right or a commodity that can be permanently owned by a corporation. Are you going to be legally obligated to pay a fee for that song that keeps playing in your head (what the Germans call an 'ear-worm') because the song was played to you incessantly while you were growing up?
The most probable consequence of having DRM on CDs and download MP3s is that there will be a fork in the popularity of music. Music with DRM will have one clique or group of followers and non-DRM (or pre-DRM) will have a different group. These groups will generally be unaware of each other's music (because less and less music is being exposed to a general audience through broadcast radio).
The non-DRM and pre-DRM (albums released before the widespread implementation of unbreakable DRM on CDs) will not appeal to the DRM crowd because it will have a 'old' or 'amateur' character to it. DRM music will not appeal to the sharers because it will be too expensive to buy and it will seem 'plastic' or 'corporate'.
This split may develop not unlike the traditional splits in American pop music along racial and class lines. In the 20th century musical trends would all eventually cross lines and there would be the occasional crossover recording between black pop music (originally called "Rhythm'n'Blues" in order to allow the records to be sold in white stores in the days of racial segregation) and middle-class white "Top40" music. This probably won't happen as much in the coming music legality segregation era (where people who trade the non-DRM music can and will be put in prison for their activities).
The file sharers won't associate with the corporate poppers because they won't be able to trust that the more monied people who can afford to buy the DRM recordings won't turn them into the Copyright police for a reward. (Or to keep themselves out of prison if they get offered a '3 years or 3 names' deal should they get caught doing their own file sharing.) The file sharers will make much effort to keep their own culture (their own 'illegal' recordings) secret. That would be completely opposite of the situation today, where everyone tries to make others aware of especially interesting recordings.
The file share community in the future will have many of their favorite recordings come from albums that were released on CD in years before unbreakable DRM when it was easy to convert CDs to MP3s and distribute them. They (the file sharers) will not be engrossed in the current corporate pop culture trends. This will become one of the ways that the copyright police (or bounty hunters) will identify file sharers. They won't know who the latest corporate pop stars are. They have a parallel culture that will have been defined as illegal, and therefore kept secret.
Needless to say, the entertainment corporations will covertly allow the illegal 'parallel' file sharing culture to remain in place because whenever a recording appears that is good enough to crossover to the corporate culture, it can be released without paying any royalities to the musicians. This would be similar in manner to the way that record companies in the 1950's and 1960's would pay black entertainers next to nothing for the rights to their recordings and then collect millions of dollars for decades from record sales and broadcast fees.
I'm rather intrigued that no one is exploring the consequences that the coming unbreakable DRM will have on popular culture.
"Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If that happens, they will stop being made," said Mr. Jackson
I'll be glad to do anything that I can to help - help the pirates, that is - if anything that I can do will help stop another $150 million lame remake of silly old movie from being made.
Who needs a $150 million remake of King Kong? Not you, not me, and certainly not anyone in the film industry.
These people get huge salaries and bonuses to be creative. Endless nonsense remakes of stupid television shows and moldy old classic movies is not being creative. Which means that they are not doing their job. Which means that they should be replaced with people who are creative.
That dark cloud over Hollywood is the choking residual fallout from $10 billion dollars wasted in the past five years on bad, boring, useless, and numbing remakes of disposable television shows and fifty-year-old 'B' movies.
C'mon, you guys are Hollywood. You are supposed to be better than this.
What usually happens in cases like this is that the "offending product" is withdrawn from the USA market.
It is replaced by a more expensive device that has the patented function. Usually this replacement device is not as good as the device that it is replacing in other functions. Sales of the general item category fall somewhat.
Someone else releases a device that does everything that the expensive initial replacement device did only it is much better and cheaper. It has a software hook into the firmware or, more likely currently, has the firmware in a FLASH ROM chip with an undocumented software boot-loader. On a web site that is not USA-based run by fans of the device, a new version of the firmware appears along with loading code in Windows that allows the reFLASHed new better and cheaper unit to do everything that the patent-holder's replacement device can do. Only now the newest device is doing it cheaper and better.
In the final result there are two devices on the market. A cheap, powerful, fully-functional device selling outside the USA and a mediocre expensive crippled version selling in the USA and meeting all the extortionist legal requirements.
Then the cheap, powerful, fully-functional device selling outside the USA is offered on websites for shipment to the USA (the so-called 'gray market'). The Americans end up with the expensive junk and the rest of the world gets high-quality newer and better merchandise. This enables the manufacturer to offer multi-level realistic pricing to the middle-classes of the rest of the world while still cashing in on the American market, with its huge appetite for impulsive junk purchases.
Then the whole process starts again for the next round. An example of the happening recently with a similar product would be region-restricted DVD players.
The decline in movie attendance has been a long time coming. The basic industry has been on a major growth spurt since the mid-1990's. Every year has seen a growth, usually double digit in percentage.
And this is all with the same formula movies, a declining theater experience (the addition of commercials, cell phones, higher prices, etc...), and rapidly growing alternatives (inexpensive DVDs, near cinema quality interactive video games, and the Internet).
One also has to question if there has been a decline in revenue or a decline in the growth rate of revenue. Often public relations flacks for entertainment corporations or Hollywood journalists are a little unclear on the difference between the two.
Basically the movie industry has finally reached a level of saturation after a long period of growth. The real question is whether the industry will be able to maintain a secure level of revenue (say the level of a few years ago), or whether they will actually experience a real and (to them) severe decline in both revenue and attendance.
This has happened before in 'da biz'. There was a severe decline in the late 1950s due to saturation and a new technology (home television) and another lesser decline in the early 1970's (due primarily to a cultural shift from the WWII generation to the baby boomers). The television challenge was met by big blockbuster productions with new 'super theater' technologies like Cinerama (an early IMAX big-screen experience). The baby boomer challenge was met by recycling old movie plots and film grammars into big budget productions like Jaws and the first Star Wars series.
My guess is the the industry will pluck their butts out of the fire this time by pushing for digital screen theaters coupled with lower cost productions. There is going to be a tense transition period because of the cost of converting the theaters to digital screens will come at the same time that it will be necessary to reduce admission fees to regain audience numbers.
The good part is that every revenue squeeze in the movie business has resulted in a burst of new high-quality films from independent and previously unrecognized sources. The television squeeze of the 1950s led to interest in the European films and the French New Wave. The early 1970s squeeze enabled small powerfully films from new directors like Scorsese, De Alma, and Coppolla.
A unforeseen concern for the movie studios is that with DVDs and powerful PCs, people are able to re-edit and illegally release big movies according to their own vision. The most famous example so far has been "The Phantom Edit" version of the The Phantom Menace Star Wars movie of 1999. This was a benign effort to remove a character and tighten the editing flow (to change slightly the film grammar).
With so many films being made with the same actors and the same plots, it won't be too long before completely new movies start to appear comprised of sampled scenes from all these films rearranged with new dialog and sub-plots. Expect the industry to over-react when the first of these films begin to circulate. Especially when home video manipulation technologies evolve to the point of being able to do pseudo-blue screening and other synthetic cinema digital effects on sampled cinema.
Suzie's about to lose her anal virginity. After that happens, her ass will be very loose.
Bobby's about to lose his button. After that happens, his collar will be very loose.
There's no real need to invoke extreme vulgarity when all that you are trying to do is make a grammar point.
Getting into the habit of being extremely and unnecessarily vulgar is easy, but it's a difficult habit to break. And it can be very costly if you misjudge the extent that it might cause offence.
There is very little crime in the manner of home break-ins and street mugging in Japan. So a 'house-sitting robot' should best call the owner to determine what the issue is before calling the police.
If it is determined that a crime is happening, then the police can be called. The crimes are recorded and the criminals can be captured. Eventually the robot makers will figure out that the recordings of the crimes should not be stored in the robot itself since the criminals will be destroying the robot pronto after breaking into the house.
Japan has a lot more social cohesion than the US or Europe. People and police generally know who the criminals are. Street criminals can expect to get caught. It establishes credibility for a job as soldier in the major white-collar organized-crime syndicates of Japan. I know, that doesn't seem too bright, but street criminals usually aren't that bright.
This is one more good reason to 'pirate' textbooks, 'pirate' meaning to convert the words and images on the paper to a commonly used digital format like PDF. And distribute them. For free.
By the way, are the tuition costs going to go down now that the library has been converted into a coffeehouse? Or are they going to go up in order to cover the costs of all the DRM thats going to be added to the new materials?
What passes for school is such shuck and jive. We should develop our own curricula, based on what's really important and relevant.
As with software, if you disagree with the terms and conditions music is sold under, then don't buy it and support what matches your philosophies.
I must respectfully disagree with this statement. To refuse to buy the DRMed material and refuse to listen to or watch it is to agree with the concept that the people who put the restrictions of the use had the moral authority to do so. You are agreeing that culture can and should be denied to people now and in the future for arbitrary reasons.
If you disagree with DRM and its implication that media and culture can actually be owned, then by all means beg, borrow, copy, and steal the material on the encoded media.
Remember these guys stole the public domain by paying off the politicians to indefinitely extend the copyright lengths. They therefore have no claim to any material that can be placed on digital media. Anything they say can not be trusted.
Copyright is basically a pricing issue. After an agreed period of time, the material goes out of copyright and into public domain. Preventing material from entering public domain is the real theft. These people are the real thieves. And in a civilized society, thieves don't get to decide what the property laws are going to be.
These guys plan to use DRM to deny forever any material entering the public domain. We have a duty to future generations to remove the DRM from any material encoded on any digital format, regardless of how old or new it is or who believes that they 'own' it.
These guys don't control the information age; we control the information age. Because we created it. If we don't want DRM, DRM won't exist.
In all seriousness, we would prefer to have no artificially imposed restrictions on digital media.
None of it works. None of it does any good for any party. All of it only restricts what should not be restricted.
Anyone who works on Digital Restriction Management (please don't tell me that the acronym is wrong, the above is correct in intent, thank you) simply doesn't understand the fundamental and underlining change of consciousness that the Information Age is bringing about. The whole point of the digital media and personal computer revolution of the past 30 years is to expand human potential, not to attempt to lock it into some obsolete corporate, communist, or religious framework.
Let's be united and clear about this from the first posts: DRM sucks, and we don't want it. Any of it; in any form.
describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online.
Individual tastes are always shifting. The internet doesn't really have that much to do with it. It all depends on the individual and their mood. This person would have found new music at some other source (the library, perhaps? Or blasting out of car window at a red light?) because they were in the mood for new music.
Sometimes I go months without listening to anything newer than 1968. I'll run Kazaa for hours searching for obscure pop songs from 1963-1968. It's as if music just stopped in the early 1970's. Others feel the same with perhaps different time periods.
For music period focus, the internet is invaluable. But for just exposure to different music, it's not the best medium. You need to know nearly exactly what you want before you can find it on the net.
A better way to get exposure to different music is to become part of drive share. This is where a hard drive (an older one with maybe 30 Gigabytes) is traded for one that is filled with each sharer's favorite music. Each person swaps an old drive with another person. The drives have the other person's favorite music on it. Each person puts only a gigabyte or so of music on it. Eventually you get a hard drive that has the favorite music of 30 different people with each person putting hundreds of minutes of their favorite music on it. No one makes judgement of the other's selections: no one erases the other's partition: no one hassles with so-called copyright issues.
The old method of music distribution and dissemination is rapidly fading and no realistic model is taking its place. You know that when an industry reaching the point where they trying to put its best customers in jail and extort large amounts of money from them because they can't resolve a pricing issue, the industry is in a lot of trouble.
I'm finding it all amusing. I especially like the part about how if the 'artists' aren't paid, then they won't produce any more quality product. Like if enough people copy Rod Zombie tracks, he's going to go sell insurance. Or if people don't pay $18 for Pink CDs, she's going to get discouraged and become a network applications engineer. Yeah, right... Popular music 'artists' and stars don't really have much choice about what they do, they are going to continue to do it whether they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or not. What the RIAA is really saying is that if people stop paying $18 for junk music, the music company executives will actually have to find some way to justify their huge salaries and perk packages. Heaven forbid! The 'artists' will just go back to whatever shithole that they were discovered from.
The real issue with the RIAA is whether music can really be bought and sold anymore. The concept that five people playing the same songs as everybody else with slightly different words and chord patterns can go to a recording studio for a week and a hundred million dollars comes to the record company is simply breaking down. It's dependent on a 20th century centrallized media and distribution model. It used to work and work well; it doesn't anymore. Putting people in prison and extorting money from them isn't going to change anything except cause the occasional music industry lawyer to get shot by people who disagree with the concept that they have to pay a fine for being the one in a million singled out by the RIAA to be fined for downloading some stupid inconseqencial pop song.
Music is like air. Everybody takes it in, puts it back out. It's absurd to claim that somebody wrote a pop or rock song that is basicly the same as the pop and rock songs that have been playing on the radio for the past 40 years. Music is simply part of the environment, no one can realistically claim to 'own' it. It doesn't matter what the law is. This is the new reality.
The upper-middle-class (both those that have lots of money and those who have lots of education) will be buying hybrids and other smaller cars that get very good fuel economy.
As the price of gasoline continues to go up, people who are currently driving giant SUVs (here I'm talking about Mommy going a mile to the supermarket in a vehicle that is almost as big as a space shuttle) will sell them off to the lower middle class and working class people.
Then as they break and wear out, the working class people won't repair them. Instead they will strip out the non-functioning systems. Here's a scenario from 2008:
Some light on the dash goes on that says "Engine problem". You take it to the dealer who charges you $80 to plug in an OBD cable and find out what the problem is. They say that it's a bad Bi-Nitrogen Catalytic Emission sensor (don't tell me that this doesn't exist, I know it. This is a scenario). It has an 89 cent microcontroller and a $3 relay in a $2 little plastic box. It costs $369.87 and you have to replace all four if one goes out because there 'calibrated' to each other.
So is the working-class guy going to replace the dohickey? No way. He goes to his brother-in-law's cousin who knows this guy who can take care of these little SUV problems. Year after year the car works less and less. Finally it doesn't pass emissions testing and can't get a registration renewal. Joe Six-Pack just say's the hell with it and drives it anyway, maybe even with a fake license plate year sticker.
One day the cops stop him and run the VIN through the DMV computer. They confiscate the vehicle and tow it. It gets sold at a police auction to a wholesaler who sells it again to an illegal immigrant no questions asked, no papers. It's back out on the street.
This is the real future of the car. Millions and millions of loud, junky, polluting, giant stupid and ugly half-broken SUVs. All driven by guys with no money and serious attitude problems.
Thanks a lot, Detroit. It's nice to know that we can count on you for well-balanced long-term positive solutions to our tranportation needs! How's you stock ratings? Still as junky as the SUVs that you sell?
An astute observation about the origins of the movie's tag line. The actual quote "...Remember, Remember, the fifth of November" is from an obscure song by John Lennon called Remember.
This song is one of the centerpieces of Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album released in late 1970. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had just completed an extended session of Primal Scream therapy under Dr. Arthur Janov which cured him of heroin addiction and post-Beatle-breakup depression.
The album is simple, beautiful, and haunting. This song is just John (on piano) and Ringo (on drums) with lots of echo.
Lennon was at that time the world's biggest rock star and could get away with releasing an album for the sole reason of exorcising deeply personal demons. The record sold poorly, However, his next recording, Imagine, was an instant worldwide success and is still played on rock radio stations worldwide. This song Imagine led directly to Lennon's murder by a young man who had spent three weeks prior to the murder in a fundamentalist Christian commune/retreat in North Carolina. In a manner that preshadowed the Salman Rushdie affair in the late 1980s, the fundamentalists believed that Lennon needed to be assassinated because he had released a hit record with the lyrics "Imagine there's no heaven..." and other contra-religious expressions. When the young assassin showed up at the commune with a fanatical obsession with Lennon and end-of-the-world fantasies, it was a straight-forward task to convince him that Lennon's death would hasten the second coming. They cult-brainwashed him for three weeks, procured for him a powerful handgun, trained him on it, bought him a ticket to NYC, and set him off.
Ten days later, Lennon was dead.
Maybe they should move some of these elephants to Palestine, since the Israelis have built a 2-foot thick - 15-foot high wall around the place already.
It's an idea that is taking a long, long time become developed and it is very slowly coming into clarity among the power elite. The idea that the more that you use technology to focus the systematic application of violence for the control of society, the less of this violence can be used against those who create the technology.
The people who develop and engineer technology that is used to direct violence (directed violence being the police, the military, and the mafia, as opposed to random criminal acts) can ensure that this violence is never directed against themselves by building safeguards into the technology that prevents it from being used against those of the technology 'guild'. Technologists need to develop a new consciousness that transcends nationalism and corporatism and focuses on the idea that we should put the needs of the global tech community above the needs of the various governments, corporations, and religions.
High tech terrorism exists because the technicians are willing to give a higher loyalty to the religious fanatics who order other technical people to be randomly killed than they do to technical people that they are killing. This is wrong. We should protect ourselves first. Since we design and build the technology, we should ensure that the technology is not used against us. We should start doing this by refusing to use high technology against other members of the global tech community regardless of their nationality, religion, or corporate affiliation.
It's time for a very quiet, very discrete shift in loyalty in the global tech community. We need to develop the deep idea that our primary allegiance is to our own people, and our secondary allegiance is to God, country, and corporation.
Generals, CEOs, mullahs, and presidents can never make world peace or progress. They simply have too much gain from constant endless wasteful war. But since the modern means of directing violence is increasing based on technology, we, the designers and builders of this technology, have more control over the systematic application of violence than the nominal rulers of society.
Why should we care if the government, the police, the fascist mullahs, or the mafia is using technology against the people? Just as long as they are not using it against our people.
This meme is one of the primal ideas of the new Information age that is developing out of the excesses and breakdowns of the Nation-State Age.
I realize that this is a 'geek' site. Nevertheless, I am compelled once again to point out that plotting, planning, and financing a trip to Mars is about the biggest waste of public funds possible. (No corporation, especially a corporation with stockholders, would dream of wasting funds in such a spectacularly stupid fashion).
Take all the people who are currently seriously spending public money on a trip to Mars. Divide that by the amount of money being spent on these people. Take all these people and instead buy them round trip tickets to Paris and have them spend several days in Mlle. Monique's Maison de la Magnifique. They'll be happy. We'll be happy that they didn't blow all that money on science fiction fantasy. Or send them to Amsterdam, feed them some space cake and let them loose in the red-light district. Trip to the red planet indeed!
Space exploration is nothing more than welfare for the geeks. It consumes tons of money and contributes nothing of any value to anyone who doesn't have a billion dollar no-bid US government contract.
But we learn so much from space research!
We don't learn shit from space research. Any peripheral knowledge gained would have been gained much cheaper by focusing the research on the subject in the first place.
The world may blow up or self-destruct and space research will provide us with a Noah's Ark
Son, LSD and religious fundamentalism doesn't mix. If you want rapture, go to Mlle. Monique's Maison de la Magnifique. You'll get raptured. By the way, LSD and super-sex doesn't mix well either. Focus on one at a time.
A trip to Mars will inspire humanity to a new vision... A movie about a trip to Mars will inspire humanity to a new vision, and be much cheaper. Besides all the billions spent on the trips to the Moon sure did a lot for world peace, didn't it?
Any justification for spending billions on a trip to Mars is going to just as valid 200 years from now. Think long term. The money spent on a trip to Mars would be better spent on a global systematic defense against a global pandemic, like 1918 influenza or the 1348 black plague.
Hell, the money would be better spent on brain research to determine why a fanatical minority feel that a trip to Mars would be such a good thing.
Before mod'ing me into the minus regions, consider that the questions that I'm raising are going to get stronger as real problems get more serious and justifications for space expenditure get more ludicrous.
I started BBSing in 1985 with a 300 baud modem and Commodore ('commode') 64.
Things are much better now. I downloaded a game back in 1986 for the C64. It was 25K bytes in size and took 20 minutes to download. (It took almost that long to load from the Commodore 64 floppy disk drive.) Now I get downloads of old pop songs from Kazaa! in minutes.
To connect to a BBS outside of your local telephone dialing zone, you had to pay long distance fees; high long-distance fees - by the minute. Now you can connect to anyone on earth with an e-mail address for free.
The sense of community generated by the BBS network is found now in specialized Yahoo! Groups. And they're free. You don't need hundreds of dollars of specialized equipment or hundreds of hours of training to establish and maintain them. Even intercontinental telephone calls are free when using Skype or some other VoiP. Not long ago (within my lifetime), intercontinental messaging was $1 a word.
Massive personal file-sharing services similar to FTP is available freely now from Yahoo! Geocities. Want to share a file with anyone that has a downloadable internet connection? Put it on your free Geocities website. I do this with the data sheets of specialized old integrated circuits that I buy and sell on Bay and schematics of guitar effects that map out.
Did I say eBay? Global near-free auctions of the most specialized items imaginable. Find a buyer for anything. PayPal handles the always sticky financial arrangements at a reasonable charge, even currency conversions. I've even sold guitar effects boxes to people who don't speak English. I sold an MXR Phase 90 to a guitarist in Italy and all e-mail communications went through the SysTran on-line translator between Italian and English. A micro transaction between individuals on the opposite sides of the world who don't speak a common language. But we both had a high number of 100% positive feedback eBay ratings, a communications channel, a translation service, and a common financial entity.
Things are definitely getting better as a result of the global communications revolution. All this would have been science fiction when BBS networking started 25 years ago. Now it's beginning to become commonplace.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of France's Nuclear Plants are on the German border so that they can sell excess power to Germany and other North Central European countries.
Plus if the Germans ever invade again, they can just pop out the drain plugs and hop on the TGV to San Tropez.
it's just about good old robber-baron style capitalism, big companies who are well-connected with the government abusing the rights of consumers to protect their profits...
In China, the communist party is the greatest robber-baron capitalist. They will do anything to maintain control, including killing millions of people for trival reasons. And as communists, they are the least likely to implement any technological change that will benefit the middle classes (at least those who are not in the party) while also crushing any fashion style or personal expression outside their strict puritanical viewpoints. Communists are capitalists without due process laws, fascists without swazticas, and wacko religious fundamentalists all rolled up into one. They are bad news.
Despite all of the 'dot-com' excitement and digital change in the past twenty years in the West, we tend to forget that China is still under the political control of the Communist Party. Even with all the talk about serving the people and all of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political theory, the communist party is going to be the most backward, reactionary, brutal, and oppressive institution in any country that is still run by communists.
I don't wish to sound like a old cold-war, earth-burning, Dr. Strangelove flag-waving American buffoon. Nevertheless, certain facts must be faced. And one of those facts is that regardless of where one's political stance is the communist party is going to be the most backward, reactionary, brutal, and oppressive institution in any country that is still run by communists. This is true no matter how stylish or technologically-aware the young people are in that country. The government in any communist country is still going to act like dictatorial thugs; making arbitrary and senseless decisions without any due process of international law.
Now I know that you all are going to say that George Bush acts the same way. But American blockhead brutality (at least in the USA) is a far cry less from what passes as ordinary administration in any communist country. And this also applies to 'strong man' crypto-dictatorships in the post-Soviet orbit.
So don't be surprised at this heavy-handed nonsense. The whole point of the Information Age is that the primary guidance of society passes from those who rule through systematic application of violence to those who guide by controlling the flow of information. China will enter the Information Age eventually, but it won't be easy or painless.
I bought a Logitech keyboard with lots of Logitech buttons. Its keyboard driver was about 8 megabytes long, for a keyboard driver.
Then I found that the buttons weren't reprogrammable in the manner that the sales literature led me to believe.
Then, worst of all, I found that the function keys wouldn't work as assigned with ordinary programs correctly unless I remembered to press this tiny little key in the corner of the keyboard every single time that I turned the PC on. I finally was able to trade the keyboard with someone who actually thought that all the stupid worthless buttons were a good idea even after I explained their limitations.
Logitech is truly lame. If everyone wouldn't buy their stupid stuff, then they wouldn't have enough money to do things like develop a mouse that notifies you that you have email. Logitech's greatest advantage over everyone else is that they make their stuff with 'egg-shell' white plastic instead of beige 'dirty-white' plastic. Fashion things like that are very important in the Macintosh community but less so in the real world.
In the Netherlands, there is long tradition of working together for the common good. Everybody shares a heritage and for the most part, a vision of what Dutch society should be like.
But New Orleans is the most racial segregated city this side of South Africa. And it's got a lot of history of race relations. Not much of it is good. The city has always been divided; and each side would be willing to just look the other way if something were to happen that caused the other side be destroyed. There is not much sense of one common New Orleans society shared by the blacks and the whites. Each side thinks that the city would be a better place if there were only far fewer of the other group.
It was the African-American sections of the city that suffered the most flood damage. A large percentage of the Euro-Americans with more money moved to the suburban parishes (usually Jefferson Parish next door) starting in the 1970's.
Look at a map of flooded areas. The flooding starts right on the parish line. In regards to NOLA area, the black areas are under water and the white areas are dry. Outside the city everyone is under water.
This bad racial heritage has really twisted the local New Orleans mentality, regardless of how much people like to pretend that it hasn't. Jefferson Parish (where most of the white people live(d) in New Orleans) is the home of former Ku Klux Klan leader (and Republican governor candidate) David Duke. White racism is widespread and not far below the surface there. It's like Bensonhurst NYC or Federal Hill Providence RI, except everyone is Cajun and redneck instead of Soprano. Same general mentality. Everyone gets along fine with 'those people' as long as they stay 'over there', in Orleans parish.
It occured to me that someone could have destroyed NOLA without a hurricane by simply parking a few trucks full of diesel and fertilizer next to the weakest levee. It was the levee break and not the hurricane that made NOLA uninhabitable.
Anyway, I hope Lestat got out OK. And his Rue Royale house didn't get flooded.
If it keeps on raining, levee's gonna break.
When the levee breaks, got no place to stay..
All last night, sat on the levee and moaned.
it's got what it takes to make a mudman leave his home Led Zeppelin 1971
Kazaa is used by millions of people who don't understand how to set up and use bit-torrents (myself included). Kazaa is the reincarnation of the original Napster.
At this point, Kazaa is the world's public library although it is a little light on the European Classical, American Jazz, and world music. The people who most like these genres have yet to understand that their music must be converted to high-quality MP3 or OGG and made available on the Kazaa network if it is going to stay alive after the cultural holocast.
Haven't heard of the cultural holocast yet? That's where the four global entertainment corporations get legal control of every piece of music ever recorded or published, put unbreakable DRM on every recording, then one-by-one throw away the DRM unlocking keys on the older recordings because the 'product' is 'not profitable'. Expect this to happen within twenty years (you are thinking long term, aren't you?) unless the brave and commendable illegal file sharers continue to preserve our world culture (yes, even Britteny...) for ourselves and future generations.
There is no copyright anymore, it was the first casuality of the culture wars.
Sorry, no longer accepting anyone's copyright laws...After the global entertainment corporations stole the public domain by paying off American politicians to pass laws that enact a de facto extension of the copyright period. Then trick various courts around the world to accept this purchased American version of indefinite copyright extension as local law by international treaty.
Imagine that you have bought a car with time payments. You make a payment every month and after a predetermined number of months, you own the car. Imagine that the finance company pays off the politicians to extend the number of payments that you have to make every time that you get near the scheduled last payment. They claim that granting you title would cause undue hardship on the people who have come to depend on your monthly payments. No unbribed judge anywhere would accept this.
Copyright is the same way. By granting an exclusive right to collect payments for using a creative work, the copyright law also has a definite time period for which these payments must be made. After that period, the former copyright owner can't legally force payments from users. The copyright ownership transfers to the public. Bribing politicians to pass laws extending copyright periods on works in the current schedule is theft because it steals from the public the funds that they would not have to pay according to the agreed-upon original copyright schedule. The theft of the public domain is the greatest theft of creative works in history. Digital copying is chicken feed compared to this.
When a contract is broken as a result of bad faith, all of its provisions are broken. Therefore we no longer accept any copyright restrictions on any creative works, regardless of their age. When the global entertainment corporations are willing to restore the public domain, then we will be willing to consider DRM and the re-start of the purchase of creative works. Until then, forget it. Does this hurt the 'artists'? Maybe, maybe not. But where were they when the the public domain was stolen?
No one is going to allow some judge somewhere to shut down Kazaa. It's simply too important now. Kazaa is the world's new public library for creative works. Along with Wikipedia for general information and FreeNet for censored political coverage, it is the one of the primal forces of the new Information Age.
It's time for the world governments to begin to understand this. In the new Information Age, it's not the people who control the violence (the police, the military, the mafia,...) who set the agenda, it's the people who control the information. That's us, folks! Kazaa will be destroyed only if we allow it. And, I, for one, of the many millions of Kazaa users, suggest that we keep it.
Or MLK day, where the government celibrates the contributions of the African-American people by paying everyone to stay home being lazy and shiftless.
This is of course dependent on the ultimately bogus claim of "unbreakable drm", which will never exist.
I'm assuming that there will develop a corporate cultural consumption mentality that is primarily 'pay-per-view'. To listen to a recording on a DRM play-back audio machine, you would need to be connected to the internet (most likely through a permanent wireless background connection). Then the DRM key would be transferred to your audio machine each time that you made a music selection and 'listening fee' would be automatically deducted from the DRM funds allotted from your bank account. All this would happen very quickly in the background. Look how fast the debit cards can transfer money from your bank account to the grocery store, it gets done in about 15 seconds while you wait in the checkout line. In the future, the DRM debit card will be built right into the audio playback device. Of course, not having a DRM debit card built into your audio playback device will be illegal, and bounty hunters will make their living hunting down people who listen to 20th century recordings (with unlimited copyright extensions) without paying the entertainment corporations (either of them by that time).
The whole point about fighting DRM in 2005 is whether or not cultural activities are a basic human right or a commodity that can be permanently owned by a corporation. Are you going to be legally obligated to pay a fee for that song that keeps playing in your head (what the Germans call an 'ear-worm') because the song was played to you incessantly while you were growing up?
The most probable consequence of having DRM on CDs and download MP3s is that there will be a fork in the popularity of music. Music with DRM will have one clique or group of followers and non-DRM (or pre-DRM) will have a different group. These groups will generally be unaware of each other's music (because less and less music is being exposed to a general audience through broadcast radio).
The non-DRM and pre-DRM (albums released before the widespread implementation of unbreakable DRM on CDs) will not appeal to the DRM crowd because it will have a 'old' or 'amateur' character to it.
DRM music will not appeal to the sharers because it will be too expensive to buy and it will seem 'plastic' or 'corporate'.
This split may develop not unlike the traditional splits in American pop music along racial and class lines. In the 20th century musical trends would all eventually cross lines and there would be the occasional crossover recording between black pop music (originally called "Rhythm'n'Blues" in order to allow the records to be sold in white stores in the days of racial segregation) and middle-class white "Top40" music. This probably won't happen as much in the coming music legality segregation era (where people who trade the non-DRM music can and will be put in prison for their activities).
The file sharers won't associate with the corporate poppers because they won't be able to trust that the more monied people who can afford to buy the DRM recordings won't turn them into the Copyright police for a reward. (Or to keep themselves out of prison if they get offered a '3 years or 3 names' deal should they get caught doing their own file sharing.) The file sharers will make much effort to keep their own culture (their own 'illegal' recordings) secret. That would be completely opposite of the situation today, where everyone tries to make others aware of especially interesting recordings.
The file share community in the future will have many of their favorite recordings come from albums that were released on CD in years before unbreakable DRM when it was easy to convert CDs to MP3s and distribute them. They (the file sharers) will not be engrossed in the current corporate pop culture trends. This will become one of the ways that the copyright police (or bounty hunters) will identify file sharers. They won't know who the latest corporate pop stars are. They have a parallel culture that will have been defined as illegal, and therefore kept secret.
Needless to say, the entertainment corporations will covertly allow the illegal 'parallel' file sharing culture to remain in place because whenever a recording appears that is good enough to crossover to the corporate culture, it can be released without paying any royalities to the musicians. This would be similar in manner to the way that record companies in the 1950's and 1960's would pay black entertainers next to nothing for the rights to their recordings and then collect millions of dollars for decades from record sales and broadcast fees.
I'm rather intrigued that no one is exploring the consequences that the coming unbreakable DRM will have on popular culture.
"Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If that happens, they will stop being made," said Mr. Jackson
I'll be glad to do anything that I can to help - help the pirates, that is - if anything that I can do will help stop another $150 million lame remake of silly old movie from being made.
Who needs a $150 million remake of King Kong? Not you, not me, and certainly not anyone in the film industry.
These people get huge salaries and bonuses to be creative. Endless nonsense remakes of stupid television shows and moldy old classic movies is not being creative. Which means that they are not doing their job. Which means that they should be replaced with people who are creative.
That dark cloud over Hollywood is the choking residual fallout from $10 billion dollars wasted in the past five years on bad, boring, useless, and numbing remakes of disposable television shows and fifty-year-old 'B' movies.
C'mon, you guys are Hollywood. You are supposed to be better than this.
What usually happens in cases like this is that the "offending product" is withdrawn from the USA market.
It is replaced by a more expensive device that has the patented function. Usually this replacement device is not as good as the device that it is replacing in other functions. Sales of the general item category fall somewhat.
Someone else releases a device that does everything that the expensive initial replacement device did only it is much better and cheaper. It has a software hook into the firmware or, more likely currently, has the firmware in a FLASH ROM chip with an undocumented software boot-loader. On a web site that is not USA-based run by fans of the device, a new version of the firmware appears along with loading code in Windows that allows the reFLASHed new better and cheaper unit to do everything that the patent-holder's replacement device can do. Only now the newest device is doing it cheaper and better.
In the final result there are two devices on the market. A cheap, powerful, fully-functional device selling outside the USA and a mediocre expensive crippled version selling in the USA and meeting all the extortionist legal requirements.
Then the cheap, powerful, fully-functional device selling outside the USA is offered on websites for shipment to the USA (the so-called 'gray market'). The Americans end up with the expensive junk and the rest of the world gets high-quality newer and better merchandise. This enables the manufacturer to offer multi-level realistic pricing to the middle-classes of the rest of the world while still cashing in on the American market, with its huge appetite for impulsive junk purchases.
Then the whole process starts again for the next round. An example of the happening recently with a similar product would be region-restricted DVD players.
The decline in movie attendance has been a long time coming. The basic industry has been on a major growth spurt since the mid-1990's. Every year has seen a growth, usually double digit in percentage.
And this is all with the same formula movies, a declining theater experience (the addition of commercials, cell phones, higher prices, etc...), and rapidly growing alternatives (inexpensive DVDs, near cinema quality interactive video games, and the Internet).
One also has to question if there has been a decline in revenue or a decline in the growth rate of revenue. Often public relations flacks for entertainment corporations or Hollywood journalists are a little unclear on the difference between the two.
Basically the movie industry has finally reached a level of saturation after a long period of growth. The real question is whether the industry will be able to maintain a secure level of revenue (say the level of a few years ago), or whether they will actually experience a real and (to them) severe decline in both revenue and attendance.
This has happened before in 'da biz'. There was a severe decline in the late 1950s due to saturation and a new technology (home television) and another lesser decline in the early 1970's (due primarily to a cultural shift from the WWII generation to the baby boomers). The television challenge was met by big blockbuster productions with new 'super theater' technologies like Cinerama (an early IMAX big-screen experience). The baby boomer challenge was met by recycling old movie plots and film grammars into big budget productions like Jaws and the first Star Wars series.
My guess is the the industry will pluck their butts out of the fire this time by pushing for digital screen theaters coupled with lower cost productions. There is going to be a tense transition period because of the cost of converting the theaters to digital screens will come at the same time that it will be necessary to reduce admission fees to regain audience numbers.
The good part is that every revenue squeeze in the movie business has resulted in a burst of new high-quality films from independent and previously unrecognized sources. The television squeeze of the 1950s led to interest in the European films and the French New Wave. The early 1970s squeeze enabled small powerfully films from new directors like Scorsese, De Alma, and Coppolla.
A unforeseen concern for the movie studios is that with DVDs and powerful PCs, people are able to re-edit and illegally release big movies according to their own vision. The most famous example so far has been "The Phantom Edit" version of the The Phantom Menace Star Wars movie of 1999. This was a benign effort to remove a character and tighten the editing flow (to change slightly the film grammar).
With so many films being made with the same actors and the same plots, it won't be too long before completely new movies start to appear comprised of sampled scenes from all these films rearranged with new dialog and sub-plots. Expect the industry to over-react when the first of these films begin to circulate. Especially when home video manipulation technologies evolve to the point of being able to do pseudo-blue screening and other synthetic cinema digital effects on sampled cinema.
Suzie's about to lose her anal virginity. After that happens, her ass will be very loose.
Bobby's about to lose his button. After that happens, his collar will be very loose.
There's no real need to invoke extreme vulgarity when all that you are trying to do is make a grammar point.
Getting into the habit of being extremely and unnecessarily vulgar is easy, but it's a difficult habit to break. And it can be very costly if you misjudge the extent that it might cause offence.
Just a thought.
There is very little crime in the manner of home break-ins and street mugging in Japan. So a 'house-sitting robot' should best call the owner to determine what the issue is before calling the police.
If it is determined that a crime is happening, then the police can be called. The crimes are recorded and the criminals can be captured. Eventually the robot makers will figure out that the recordings of the crimes should not be stored in the robot itself since the criminals will be destroying the robot pronto after breaking into the house.
Japan has a lot more social cohesion than the US or Europe. People and police generally know who the criminals are. Street criminals can expect to get caught. It establishes credibility for a job as soldier in the major white-collar organized-crime syndicates of Japan. I know, that doesn't seem too bright, but street criminals usually aren't that bright.
This is one more good reason to 'pirate' textbooks, 'pirate' meaning to convert the words and images on the paper to a commonly used digital format like PDF. And distribute them. For free.
By the way, are the tuition costs going to go down now that the library has been converted into a coffeehouse? Or are they going to go up in order to cover the costs of all the DRM thats going to be added to the new materials?
What passes for school is such shuck and jive. We should develop our own curricula, based on what's really important and relevant.
As with software, if you disagree with the terms and conditions music is sold under, then don't buy it and support what matches your philosophies.
I must respectfully disagree with this statement. To refuse to buy the DRMed material and refuse to listen to or watch it is to agree with the concept that the people who put the restrictions of the use had the moral authority to do so. You are agreeing that culture can and should be denied to people now and in the future for arbitrary reasons.
If you disagree with DRM and its implication that media and culture can actually be owned, then by all means beg, borrow, copy, and steal the material on the encoded media.
Remember these guys stole the public domain by paying off the politicians to indefinitely extend the copyright lengths. They therefore have no claim to any material that can be placed on digital media. Anything they say can not be trusted.
Copyright is basically a pricing issue. After an agreed period of time, the material goes out of copyright and into public domain. Preventing material from entering public domain is the real theft. These people are the real thieves. And in a civilized society, thieves don't get to decide what the property laws are going to be.
These guys plan to use DRM to deny forever any material entering the public domain. We have a duty to future generations to remove the DRM from any material encoded on any digital format, regardless of how old or new it is or who believes that they 'own' it.
These guys don't control the information age; we control the information age. Because we created it. If we don't want DRM, DRM won't exist.
In all seriousness, we would prefer to have no artificially imposed restrictions on digital media.
None of it works. None of it does any good for any party. All of it only restricts what should not be restricted.
Anyone who works on Digital Restriction Management (please don't tell me that the acronym is wrong, the above is correct in intent, thank you) simply doesn't understand the fundamental and underlining change of consciousness that the Information Age is bringing about. The whole point of the digital media and personal computer revolution of the past 30 years is to expand human potential, not to attempt to lock it into some obsolete corporate, communist, or religious framework.
Let's be united and clear about this from the first posts: DRM sucks, and we don't want it. Any of it; in any form.
describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online.
Individual tastes are always shifting. The internet doesn't really have that much to do with it. It all depends on the individual and their mood. This person would have found new music at some other source (the library, perhaps? Or blasting out of car window at a red light?) because they were in the mood for new music.
Sometimes I go months without listening to anything newer than 1968. I'll run Kazaa for hours searching for obscure pop songs from 1963-1968. It's as if music just stopped in the early 1970's. Others feel the same with perhaps different time periods.
For music period focus, the internet is invaluable. But for just exposure to different music, it's not the best medium. You need to know nearly exactly what you want before you can find it on the net.
A better way to get exposure to different music is to become part of drive share. This is where a hard drive (an older one with maybe 30 Gigabytes) is traded for one that is filled with each sharer's favorite music. Each person swaps an old drive with another person. The drives have the other person's favorite music on it. Each person puts only a gigabyte or so of music on it. Eventually you get a hard drive that has the favorite music of 30 different people with each person putting hundreds of minutes of their favorite music on it. No one makes judgement of the other's selections: no one erases the other's partition: no one hassles with so-called copyright issues.
The old method of music distribution and dissemination is rapidly fading and no realistic model is taking its place. You know that when an industry reaching the point where they trying to put its best customers in jail and extort large amounts of money from them because they can't resolve a pricing issue, the industry is in a lot of trouble.
I'm finding it all amusing. I especially like the part about how if the 'artists' aren't paid, then they won't produce any more quality product. Like if enough people copy Rod Zombie tracks, he's going to go sell insurance. Or if people don't pay $18 for Pink CDs, she's going to get discouraged and become a network applications engineer. Yeah, right... Popular music 'artists' and stars don't really have much choice about what they do, they are going to continue to do it whether they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or not. What the RIAA is really saying is that if people stop paying $18 for junk music, the music company executives will actually have to find some way to justify their huge salaries and perk packages. Heaven forbid! The 'artists' will just go back to whatever shithole that they were discovered from.
The real issue with the RIAA is whether music can really be bought and sold anymore. The concept that five people playing the same songs as everybody else with slightly different words and chord patterns can go to a recording studio for a week and a hundred million dollars comes to the record company is simply breaking down. It's dependent on a 20th century centrallized media and distribution model. It used to work and work well; it doesn't anymore. Putting people in prison and extorting money from them isn't going to change anything except cause the occasional music industry lawyer to get shot by people who disagree with the concept that they have to pay a fine for being the one in a million singled out by the RIAA to be fined for downloading some stupid inconseqencial pop song.
Music is like air. Everybody takes it in, puts it back out. It's absurd to claim that somebody wrote a pop or rock song that is basicly the same as the pop and rock songs that have been playing on the radio for the past 40 years. Music is simply part of the environment, no one can realistically claim to 'own' it. It doesn't matter what the law is. This is the new reality.
The upper-middle-class (both those that have lots of money and those who have lots of education) will be buying hybrids and other smaller cars that get very good fuel economy.
As the price of gasoline continues to go up, people who are currently driving giant SUVs (here I'm talking about Mommy going a mile to the supermarket in a vehicle that is almost as big as a space shuttle) will sell them off to the lower middle class and working class people.
Then as they break and wear out, the working class people won't repair them. Instead they will strip out the non-functioning systems. Here's a scenario from 2008:
Some light on the dash goes on that says "Engine problem". You take it to the dealer who charges you $80 to plug in an OBD cable and find out what the problem is. They say that it's a bad Bi-Nitrogen Catalytic Emission sensor (don't tell me that this doesn't exist, I know it. This is a scenario). It has an 89 cent microcontroller and a $3 relay in a $2 little plastic box. It costs $369.87 and you have to replace all four if one goes out because there 'calibrated' to each other.
So is the working-class guy going to replace the dohickey? No way. He goes to his brother-in-law's cousin who knows this guy who can take care of these little SUV problems. Year after year the car works less and less. Finally it doesn't pass emissions testing and can't get a registration renewal. Joe Six-Pack just say's the hell with it and drives it anyway, maybe even with a fake license plate year sticker.
One day the cops stop him and run the VIN through the DMV computer. They confiscate the vehicle and tow it. It gets sold at a police auction to a wholesaler who sells it again to an illegal immigrant no questions asked, no papers. It's back out on the street.
This is the real future of the car. Millions and millions of loud, junky, polluting, giant stupid and ugly half-broken SUVs. All driven by guys with no money and serious attitude problems.
Thanks a lot, Detroit. It's nice to know that we can count on you for well-balanced long-term positive solutions to our tranportation needs! How's you stock ratings? Still as junky as the SUVs that you sell?
An astute observation about the origins of the movie's tag line. The actual quote "...Remember, Remember, the fifth of November" is from an obscure song by John Lennon called Remember.
This song is one of the centerpieces of Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album released in late 1970. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had just completed an extended session of Primal Scream therapy under Dr. Arthur Janov which cured him of heroin addiction and post-Beatle-breakup depression.
The album is simple, beautiful, and haunting. This song is just John (on piano) and Ringo (on drums) with lots of echo.
Lennon was at that time the world's biggest rock star and could get away with releasing an album for the sole reason of exorcising deeply personal demons. The record sold poorly, However, his next recording, Imagine, was an instant worldwide success and is still played on rock radio stations worldwide. This song Imagine led directly to Lennon's murder by a young man who had spent three weeks prior to the murder in a fundamentalist Christian commune/retreat in North Carolina. In a manner that preshadowed the Salman Rushdie affair in the late 1980s, the fundamentalists believed that Lennon needed to be assassinated because he had released a hit record with the lyrics "Imagine there's no heaven..." and other contra-religious expressions. When the young assassin showed up at the commune with a fanatical obsession with Lennon and end-of-the-world fantasies, it was a straight-forward task to convince him that Lennon's death would hasten the second coming. They cult-brainwashed him for three weeks, procured for him a powerful handgun, trained him on it, bought him a ticket to NYC, and set him off.
Ten days later, Lennon was dead.
Maybe they should move some of these elephants to Palestine, since the Israelis have built a 2-foot thick - 15-foot high wall around the place already.
It's an idea that is taking a long, long time become developed and it is very slowly coming into clarity among the power elite. The idea that the more that you use technology to focus the systematic application of violence for the control of society, the less of this violence can be used against those who create the technology.
The people who develop and engineer technology that is used to direct violence (directed violence being the police, the military, and the mafia, as opposed to random criminal acts) can ensure that this violence is never directed against themselves by building safeguards into the technology that prevents it from being used against those of the technology 'guild'. Technologists need to develop a new consciousness that transcends nationalism and corporatism and focuses on the idea that we should put the needs of the global tech community above the needs of the various governments, corporations, and religions.
High tech terrorism exists because the technicians are willing to give a higher loyalty to the religious fanatics who order other technical people to be randomly killed than they do to technical people that they are killing. This is wrong. We should protect ourselves first. Since we design and build the technology, we should ensure that the technology is not used against us. We should start doing this by refusing to use high technology against other members of the global tech community regardless of their nationality, religion, or corporate affiliation.
It's time for a very quiet, very discrete shift in loyalty in the global tech community. We need to develop the deep idea that our primary allegiance is to our own people, and our secondary allegiance is to God, country, and corporation.
Generals, CEOs, mullahs, and presidents can never make world peace or progress. They simply have too much gain from constant endless wasteful war. But since the modern means of directing violence is increasing based on technology, we, the designers and builders of this technology, have more control over the systematic application of violence than the nominal rulers of society.
Why should we care if the government, the police, the fascist mullahs, or the mafia is using technology against the people? Just as long as they are not using it against our people.
This meme is one of the primal ideas of the new Information age that is developing out of the excesses and breakdowns of the Nation-State Age.
I realize that this is a 'geek' site. Nevertheless, I am compelled once again to point out that plotting, planning, and financing a trip to Mars is about the biggest waste of public funds possible. (No corporation, especially a corporation with stockholders, would dream of wasting funds in such a spectacularly stupid fashion).
Take all the people who are currently seriously spending public money on a trip to Mars. Divide that by the amount of money being spent on these people. Take all these people and instead buy them round trip tickets to Paris and have them spend several days in Mlle. Monique's Maison de la Magnifique. They'll be happy. We'll be happy that they didn't blow all that money on science fiction fantasy. Or send them to Amsterdam, feed them some space cake and let them loose in the red-light district. Trip to the red planet indeed!
Space exploration is nothing more than welfare for the geeks. It consumes tons of money and contributes nothing of any value to anyone who doesn't have a billion dollar no-bid US government contract.
But we learn so much from space research!
We don't learn shit from space research. Any peripheral knowledge gained would have been gained much cheaper by focusing the research on the subject in the first place.
The world may blow up or self-destruct and space research will provide us with a Noah's Ark
Son, LSD and religious fundamentalism doesn't mix. If you want rapture, go to Mlle. Monique's Maison de la Magnifique. You'll get raptured. By the way, LSD and super-sex doesn't mix well either. Focus on one at a time.
A trip to Mars will inspire humanity to a new vision... A movie about a trip to Mars will inspire humanity to a new vision, and be much cheaper. Besides all the billions spent on the trips to the Moon sure did a lot for world peace, didn't it?
Any justification for spending billions on a trip to Mars is going to just as valid 200 years from now. Think long term. The money spent on a trip to Mars would be better spent on a global systematic defense against a global pandemic, like 1918 influenza or the 1348 black plague.
Hell, the money would be better spent on brain research to determine why a fanatical minority feel that a trip to Mars would be such a good thing.
Before mod'ing me into the minus regions, consider that the questions that I'm raising are going to get stronger as real problems get more serious and justifications for space expenditure get more ludicrous.
I started BBSing in 1985 with a 300 baud modem and Commodore ('commode') 64.
Things are much better now. I downloaded a game back in 1986 for the C64. It was 25K bytes in size and took 20 minutes to download. (It took almost that long to load from the Commodore 64 floppy disk drive.) Now I get downloads of old pop songs from Kazaa! in minutes.
To connect to a BBS outside of your local telephone dialing zone, you had to pay long distance fees; high long-distance fees - by the minute. Now you can connect to anyone on earth with an e-mail address for free.
The sense of community generated by the BBS network is found now in specialized Yahoo! Groups. And they're free. You don't need hundreds of dollars of specialized equipment or hundreds of hours of training to establish and maintain them.
Even intercontinental telephone calls are free when using Skype or some other VoiP. Not long ago (within my lifetime), intercontinental messaging was $1 a word.
Massive personal file-sharing services similar to FTP is available freely now from Yahoo! Geocities. Want to share a file with anyone that has a downloadable internet connection? Put it on your free Geocities website. I do this with the data sheets of specialized old integrated circuits that I buy and sell on Bay and schematics of guitar effects that map out.
Did I say eBay? Global near-free auctions of the most specialized items imaginable. Find a buyer for anything. PayPal handles the always sticky financial arrangements at a reasonable charge, even currency conversions. I've even sold guitar effects boxes to people who don't speak English. I sold an MXR Phase 90 to a guitarist in Italy and all e-mail communications went through the SysTran on-line translator between Italian and English. A micro transaction between individuals on the opposite sides of the world who don't speak a common language. But we both had a high number of 100% positive feedback eBay ratings, a communications channel, a translation service, and a common financial entity.
Things are definitely getting better as a result of the global communications revolution. All this would have been science fiction when BBS networking started 25 years ago. Now it's beginning to become commonplace.
Tell us of your experiences.