...like IBM cheerfully made punch card systems to computerise the Final Solution.
I believe that there is a mistake in the statement above. "The Final Solution" was a code term used by the German Nazis to refer to their policy of the systematic murder for all European Jews which they implemented between 1941 and 1945.
The punch cards made by IBM (I believe) were developed after the end of World War Two for data storage and input to early large computer systems. IBM did however work very closely with the Apartheit South African government to register and monitor all non-European South Africans. But they did not engage in systematic genocide of these people in the way that the German Nazis did against the Jewish people.
These matters even after many years are still quite sensitive. It is important to be very accurate and not simply metaphorical in statements such as this.
Questions concerning the exact involvement of IBM in the holocast could be referred to the Simon Wiesenthal centers in Vienna and Los Angeles, or the Holocast museums in Israel and Washington DC.
This kind of bullshit thing happened to me thirty years as a result of 'possession of marijuana' conviction for the residue on the inside of a pipe. Nearly destroyed my will to live for ten years.
Although you feel alone, you're not. Neither are you a criminal. You are an American political felon, which is a long way from being any kind of criminal. The people who did this to you are morons, buffoons, and dim-witted stooges of the political system
I recommend getting every piece of documentation that you can on your case. Arrest records, court and baliff records; anything and everything. Scan it, make copies on disk, and safeguard the originals.
I also recommend studying a foreign language with the idea of leaving the USA and becoming a citizen of a different country. One quarter of the people in the USA can claim German descent. Germany has a right to return law giving immigration priority to foreigners of German background. Israel has an open immigration policy for any Jewish person worldwide. If you are African-American, consider studying French, as it is the common language of Africa.
The USA was founded on the principal that those citizens that aren't allowed to have representation in the government have no moral or ethical obligiation to pay taxes to that government. Your right to vote was stolen from you by representatives of this government, i.e. you have taxation without representation. Discretely ask around about tax evading techniques.
To the greatest extent possible, stay in school and learn valuable skills that in demand both in the USA and other countries.
Stay healthy. Eat decent foods. Avoid heroin and meth. Avoid going into the military. Avoid religious cults.
All in all, don't get 'bummed out' over this. A lot of what happened to you (and is also happening to millions of others) is just insanity on auto-pilot. Don't hate yourself, and try not to hate the individuals who did this shit to you.
I just got through reading the latest New York Times magazine which featured many long and detailed articles on DVD and the movie industry.
The amount of disturbance to the industry caused or even potentially caused by Div-X converting and downloading is so tiny compared to the amount of resources and ill-will generated by their heavy-handed response to this so-called threat that one must come to the conclusion that the MPAA leadership is mentally unbalanced.
They are acting like the people who wash their hands ten times after touching a public door handle. They just aren't being rational.
The NYT Magazine articles mentioned that each DVD sale of $15 brings $9.00 of pure profit to the film studios that they don't have to share with anyone. This is the source of all the profit in the film industry. This is the fuel that is making the current entertainment boom possible.
Hundreds of millions of DVDs are sold each year and billions will be sold in the coming years.
Why are they so obsessed with ten thousand or so people sharing rotgut quality Div-X copies? Especially when each one takes several hours to download?
Even at minimum wage the wages for the amount of time spent downloading a stupid DivX is more than the price of a pristine DVD of the same title.
Nothing about this makes any sense.
It will probably just fade as embarrassment when the MPAA actually examines the real numbers involved and comes to its senses.
"Ja, Ja, I wrote that. That is my property. You pay me now."
- quote from a drunken Danish drummer
Actually no, Lars, you didn't write that. And you have no real claim to its ownership.
In fact, all rock music and much pop music on the global charts was written originally by a little old blind African-American man who most of his elderly years sitting on a porch playing a guitar in front of general store in Gazeebo, Mississippi. A team of music historians in the 1930s on a WPA grant recorded his songs for the Library of Congress. A group of young folkies in the late 1950s in Greenwich Village found the records while researching 'the authentic sound'. The folk records made their way to England where the popular pop bands at the time were looking for a way to energize their stale 'boy-loves-girl' sound. Add lots of fuzz boxes, reverb, groupies, marijuana, and FM radio play and you have the current billion dollar music industry.
But it was all written originally by that little blind ex-slave playing his guitar in Mississippi.
Why would I bother with this when I already have an alternative that is free of charge, more secure, and has more content?
Exactly.
What the global music corporations (all five of them) don't seem to grasp is that P2P is so successful because millions of people are sharing. That means that they are deciding what they want to place in the P2P library.
Music sellers have never before had a way to specifically identify which person likes which performer. Now a technique arises where people list on their PC that is open to the world exactly which recordings they like best and are willing to share with others. And they are getting all this focused market research for free!
So what do they do? They try to take this gift from the gods and destroy it and put all their most loyal and interested customers in prison for giving them this information about their marketing preferences.
So what if people are listening to recordings for free? It doesn't matter to them. They aren't even paying for all the recordings; the artist's do. The costs of producing the recording and media is taken from the sales receipts and added to the artist's signing advance payment loan.
Imagine if you went to college on the same financial terms. You get a loan for tution to a college wholely owned by the group of five corporations that would 95% of the colleges in the world. Then when you graduate, you not only have to pay back every penny of the loan, but you only get to keep $2 of every $15 of salary that you make for your entire working life. And the college corporation decides what you will major in and where your job is going to be.
That's two different threads with no segue, I know. The inability of the global media corporations to use the marketing data given to them by P2P and the stretch of an analogy between artist-music company relations and college-student financial relations. But, hey, this is slashdot!
Your emphasis is wrong...
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
All the slashdot posters are placing their emphasis into the wrong areas. Most people are going on about the legal aspects of this activity.
Well, the legal aspects are secondary to the fact that this person is a serious private librarian. And he is doing a major public service by collecting all of this music into a single library.
Does the RIAA have a library like this? Do they have anyone who could build a library like this? Do any of the big five global record companies have a library like this? Could they build a library like this?
I don't think so.
This is a major achievement. Forget the chickenshit laws and celibrate the acomplishment.
With the systematic destruction of the public domain by the global media corporations, these people who are making a serious effort to preserve culture OUTSIDE of a corporate framework are major heroes!
We are facing a situation were the cultural media artifacts (audio recordings, books, and magazines) of first half of the 20th century are being systematicly destroyed by the media corporations. They will not release the material that they claim to legally own into public domain (in order to protect the half dozen or so copyrights that are still commercially valid from that era, they locked up the entire cultural output of the era), and they won't release it commercially because it is no longer profitable. That means that hundreds of years in the future there will be a big gap in the cultural record for all of the output the first half of the 20th century. The books are being pulped as the paper wears out, and the media recordings are buried in permanent copyright extensions, which is a wholescale theft of the public domain.
Future cultural historians will TREASURE the work of these 'illegal' private librarians who are quietly working to preserve the culture.
They deserve our support, not ridicule!
If you're American, then you should learn Spanish because it's your countrie's second language.
If you're Canadian, then you should learn French because it's your countrie's second language.
If you are only interested in getting the college elective requirement satisfied, then go with French or Spanish because half of the words are the same as in English. German has a lot of simple words that are the same as English, but it gets really difficult after the first semester.
Any other language is far too much a pain in the ass to fool with. There will always be someone around that knows some English if you go to these places.
If you're a young male American, then whatever you do, don't study Arabic! You'll be the first one drafted after all the National Guard 35-year-old, weekend-warriors, '$150 extra a month and one weekend playing Rambo in the woods' people are returned home from their 'service' in the never-to-end Iraqi War.
All in all, take French. Even if you hate the French, it's still an easy language to study in order to get the college elective requirement done with. Second best choice would be Spanish, because you'll actually be able to talk to people after college. It will be real handy if there are no jobs when you get out of college and have to go work at the Burger King. Or want to go someplace really cheap to live that's warm and doesn't have psychotic police always shaking you down.
Should we seriously believe that The Ukraine has more computer programmer productivity and output than:
China - 1.3 billion people and a booming economy with millions of students studying technology?
Korea - where 1/4 of the people have at-home broadband, and like China, has millions of people working in the technology industry?
Taiwan - where nearly everything technological that isn't specifically designed to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap is designed, programmed, and manufactured?
Japan - With the world's second largest economy and a world leader in electronic R&D and embedded-systems computers?
I think some second-rate journalist got an all-expenses-paid government tour and spent a lot of time with Hot, Available Ukrainian Brides-to-be and then wrote up this wild fantasy of Ukrainian computer mastery in order to get invited back on next year's government tour.
Before America, many of the native tribes of North America lived in fear of constant raids from the other tribes. Now the native Americans have a blue passport that assures them safe passage nearly anywhere in the world. Before America, the natives spoke a language of the tribe and maybe the language of next tribe over the hills. Maybe a few hundred people spoke this language, maybe a few thousand. Now most native Americans speak and understand English, which is understood by a billion people throughout the world. Many natives also speak a ancient tribal language also.
Before America, when a native child got sick, the father will pray and chant with the medicine man to the Great Spirit. More often than not, the child would die. Now when a native child gets sick, the father and the medicine man chant to the Great Spirit. Or they do until the mother gets pissed off and makes him take the child to the reservation hospital. Usually the child recovers fully.
Yes, the land was taken. Yes there were massacres. Yes there was cultural desolation. Yes there were new diseases and ruthless intoxicants introduced that there was no defence against.
But the worst is over. The massacres and cultural destruction will not happen again. Native American tribal values and traditions can rise again and become a valued and trusted part of all North American society. Native Nations populations will grow up to and beyond the levels before the Europeans arrived.
All this can happen, should the people of the tribal nations wish for it to happen and work to make it happen.
Both the Ham radio and the Open Source groups restricted public participation and benefit by requiring the mastery of obsolete and difficult knowledge skills.
The Hams required mastery of Morse code long after there was no real use for it in order to get an operator's broadcast license. The Open Source Computer group expected its adherents to master difficult and obsolete Unix command line syntaxes and structures long after the easier GUI interface was widely accepted.
The Ham radio lure was cheap and random long-range communication. This function has been replaced by cheap global e-mail. The open source lure was cheap and powerful computer programs and access. That function has been replaced by cheap and global Microsoft Windows.
Anyone else the the cover article in last month's Architectural Digest about Rod Stewart's mansion in Bel Air?
This is what happens when people actually belive this bullshit about the necessity of giving money to 'hurting artists'.
Artists are more than adequately compensated by both the payment that they receive from performing and, more importantly, from the connections and networking contacts that they make from being the most in-demand class of people socially.
Nobody needs to feel guilty for not giving money to 'artists', especially rock stars.
It's only when 'artists' completely and totally fuck up their contracts and have all of their money stolen from them (like the Rolling Stones in the 1960s and Billy Joel in the late 1970s) that they have justification for really making a serious effort to suck as much money as possible from their audience.
But even then they tend to overdue it. They find themselves sitting in their mansions and Lear Jets publicly demanding that their fans be put in prison for listing to their music without paying them even more and more money.
Try not to spill your daily cocktail on your antique Chippendale furniture there, Mr. Stewart!
I keep thinking of Denis Leary's comment that 'After John Lennon died, we should have gotten into the Partridge Family bus and gone around and killed every one of these rock stars!'.
-and-
"We live in a country where John Lennon can take six bullets in the chest with Yoko Ono standing right next to him and not one bullet!. Now we got twenty more years of Aaii Yah Yah Yah... Explain that to me, God!"
-and-
"It's good that Jesus died when he was thirty. Yeah, cause if he had lived to be forty, he'd be walking around Jerusalem with a big beer gut and an entourage of twelve disciples doing everything that he said."
I have this reoccuring nightmare that I will be denied future Medicare (the USA system for providing medical care for old people) benefits when the system goes backrupt in ten years.
The excuse that they will use is that I ate to much red meat or candy bars in my middle-aged years. The source of this denial of benefits was the data collected on all the grocery store purchases made from the early 2000's on.
I try to obtain the grocery store cards without giving any name and address in order to inhibit the grocery corporations from tracking and databasing my diet. Safeway (as always) was the absolute worst. I had to go through three levels of management before they would issue me a Safeway Club card without my giving them any personal information. Why are grocery stores tracking my purchases anyway?
Am I paranoid? Sure!
Am I crazy? I don't think so.
After all, if I told you thirty years that in the future you would have to pee in a bottle in order to determine whether you smoked (anything) within the past month in order to get any job, you would have said that I was crazy and paranoid. But now you too piss in the fucking bottle to get any job.
The bottom line...don't trust any corporation or believe their propaganda. It's best to assume a 'prisoner's dilemma' best-defence strategy for dealing with any corporation. Start with a positive move and then do exactly back to them whatever they do to you, positive or negative.
I used to buy lots of electronic things at Fry's Electronics. About 1/3rd to 1/2 of what I bought I ended up returning.
I did it because I couldn't get any information about the items without buying them, trying them, and returning the ones that I didn't want.
With the multitude of web sites offering information about electronics today, I rarely return things that I buy at Fry's. I'll return something if I can't get it to work correctly, and can't get it to work correctly within an hour of taking the package out of the shopping bag.
Of all stores, Fry's should be the one with the super incredible website that explains and documents everything that they sell and have sold. But their web site is stupid and embarrassing, with no technical documentation.
If I were in charge of Fry's, I'd make their website as rich and detailed on product information and customer support as Microsoft's or Amazon's website.
I'll load it with 80 pounds of primo BC bud and send it off on its little journey across the sound. Ten to fifteen hours later, I'll be waiting at the little cove outside Sequim, Washington with my new SUV ('just $100 down, show your paycheck stub, and drive off the lot in your new SUV!!', says the radio ad).
The little sucker can drive itself up the ramp into my new SUV with tinted windows right up from the dock.
Then a leisurely six hour drive back to Portland and it's 'happy, happy, happy...all of the time' (like the Ramones used to say) for all my friends in Southeast Portland.
Underwater robots that can go long distances on the seabed with 20-50 kilos of 'sensitive goods', use GPS to maintain their course (if GPS works underwater), wait quietly at a predetermined destination upon arrival, and then float to the surface and signal their exact location to a pick-up cigar boat would be a dream to smugglers.
'Log dead trees?'
Man, you are not thinking about the real possiblities that these machines offer!!
The big new wave in PC audio should be to revitalize the programmable music synthesizers that died ten years ago. Let's start with open-source virtual MiniMoogs and ARP Odyssey clones that use GigaHertz PC CPU speeds to make instruments that sound as good as the originals. Then let's make some serious musical instruments like additive synths like K5 clones along with real exciting and inexpensive controllers that plug into USB and legacy slots.
It's a shame that MIDI equipment never 'took off' in a big way in music equipment sales in the early 1990s. I believe that could have revitalized the retail music store business.
But all the MIDI items offered for sale in that initial market window were completely underdocumented, poorly implememented, terribly supported, and overpriced.
The big manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha, Kawai, and Korg) should have pooled together to offer a $10 MIDI interface for the PC and given away voice editor and sequencer software (including source code) for every model that they offered.
That would have been tough on all the little software companies selling $150 voice editors for synths that sold a total of 5000 units worldwide, but it would have energized the market for synths and tone modules to the level of guitars and amps.
Today all the $100 voice editor companies are gone and the advanced $1600 synths of 1990 are sold on eBay for $50-$200. The only software still available for them is Atari ST programs run on the PC through an emulator (the STeem emulator).
The rare MIDI auxiliary device (such as controller pedals or switcher) gets sold at an undervalued price due to the uncertainity of whether it can still be used.
If I had an extra million dollars and an extra twenty IQ points then I would make a serious attempt to revitalize the MIDI industry with open-source programs and equipment selling at 1/20th the cost that it did when the first MIDI wave ended ten years ago. The fact that the music equipment industry is still run by nitwits like Roland (who are still fighting attempts to open-source the MT-32 which was obsolete 15!! years ago) just fills me with despair.
It's so convenient today to copy some friends Music Collection onto mobile storage. Thousands of *new* songs transfered within minutes. And there's nothing the RIAA can do about it.
What the RIAA plans to do about it is to pass a law requiring all audio playback devices to have a chip that detects a watermark in the audio file. The chip will have a unique number embedded into it. The first time that the audio playback device is used, it will have to be connected to a PC that has an internet connection. The number in the chip will be transmitted to the manufacturer.
Each individual music file will have to have the watermark number linked in some way to the chip number in the audio playback device. The individual music file will only play on one audio playback device, and only after the RIAA get payment and downloads permission for the audio device to play the specific music file.
Future versions of this 'DRM from Hell' will incorporate micropayments for each listening of the music file, in addition to the initial purchase cost of the music recording. The cost of all this technology will be subtracted from the artist's royalities.
Not to say that artists don't deserve money for their work,
Well, yes, to say that rock stars don't deserve money for their work. They don't. Most of what the 'produce' is just stolen from lesser-known albums of many years ago. Plus most rock stars are assholes. And far, far overpaid. (Seen Rod Stewart's huge mansion in last month's Architectural Digest?)
For one, you can't stop it by going after people that don't have enough money to pay for cds.... If they ultimately actually lowered the price to a more convenient number maybe people will by them.
Sure you can. Just take all of a person's money and they don't buy any more bootleg CDs.
When a cartel controls the price, they always raise the price. Noticed the $59/barrel oil yet?
Going after college students who have enough to worry about is a horrible way to get support. Its a negative campaign that'll end up hurting them.
They're in it for the money, honey. College students have the money. When you run a successful extortion campaign against people who have money, and you do it over and over successfully, you don't get hurt in the long run. You get rich.
College students never fight back against extortion and they have a lot of money. They're willing to give up their money to extortionists especially when threatened by extortionists with lawsuits and criminal records that the extortionists claim will destroy their future careers.
College students are perfect targets for the RIAA gangsters. Since RIAA extortion is so amazingly successful, (and a far more secure profit center than selling records, which is hit-or-miss at best), you can expect it to expand in the future to thousands of lawsuits every month.
The only way that non-violent people can stop themselves from being constantly 'shaken down' by extortionist gangsters is to hire people who are more violent than the gangsters or have immunity from laws against violence. The problem with hiring mercenaries to destroy gangsters is that the mercs often want as much in payment as the gangsters are taking. The problem is the same with those who have legal immunity to use violence against gangsters (that is, the FBI and the police). They demand less money for their services than the gangsters, but claim instead the right to use violence against you to support any 'Mickey mouse' law or regulation that gets passed by corrupt politicians.
Sooner or later, because they appear to be picking their targets at random, the RIAA is going to try to extort thousands of dollars from a person who doesn't have the money and doesn't care what happens to corporate lawyers who are trying to destroy their life. This person will contact the lawyer for a meeting upon receiving his extortion notice. At the meeting the person will pull out a gun and calmly, coolly, and without remorse or emotion blow the brains out of the RIAA lawyer all over the table.
By picking their targets at random, the RIAA appears to ignore the principal tenet of being a successful extortionist:
You can take many, many things from a rich person before they even notice that anything is missing,
but you can only take very little from a poor person before they kill you to protect whatever little material things that they have.
Pornography is any art form that changes its level of aesthetic merit according to the level of sexual arousal of the viewer.
An image that has no more appeal to a male when he sexually aroused than when he isn't is not porn. An image that is equally appealing in aesthetics to a male regardless of whether he is or is not sexually aroused is not porn.
An image that seems tacky, vulgar, tasteless, ugly, and degrading to a male when not aroused but gains greatly in aesthetic value ("wow, totally hot!!!") when he becomes aroused is porn.
An image that induces sexual arousal may or may not be porn. It depends primarily on the male and period of time since his last ejaculation.
This question is further complicated by the fact that porn is not a binary aesthetic category. Some images are a little pornographic and some much more so. Plus there are many cultural factors. Images of female breasts are sexually arousing in some cultures, but not others.
With so little real guidelines to label porn, governments draw specific lines. Currently in the USA, the photographic image of penis inserted into another person's body is porn by definition. So are the images of a woman presenting her body for insertion by a penis if the image displays a clear image of the vaginal area.
Porn is not illegal in the USA, but the display of its legally-defined images is regulated in public places.
I attended a booksigning for the new hardcover coffee table book of the Suicide Girls portraits about a month ago at Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon.
It was different than I thought it would be. The Suicide Girls concept actually is not porn-oriented. The young woman who developed the idea and took the original photos said that she wanted to capture the unique spirit of the women that she knew and hung out with in Southeast Portland. The Suicide Girls concept is about sharing the self-actualization of women in Portland's post-punk subculture. Suicide Girls was developed to be a celbration of attitude of young women rather than specifically providing a visual stimulation for male sexual climax.
The Suicide Girls website is primarily designed to provide a place for other women who share the same lifestyle throughout the world to find each other. It's not intended to be a porn site although it has the secondary effect of invoking male sexual arousal. It does that rather well and that goes a long way to pay the overhead costs, but it is not the site's main purpose.
That's what gives the Suicide Girl photos the ambience that they are mocking male sexuality as opposed to the standard porn approach of manipulating male sexuality for profit.
Many of the original models attended the event since the website started here in Portland and they live here. Talking to them afterwards they seemed just like ordinary people, not porn stars.
As for the 'ownership' of the name, the author said that it just "came from an old song".
Nintendo should just lighten up and forget this nonsense. I suspect that the name probably originated somewhere else because a Japanese Nerd video game giant corporation would not be likely to come up with a name like this. Personally, I suspect that William Burroughs thought it up, and a search of his novels from the 1950s and 1960s would find it as a casual reference.
I hate to puncture all your Mars Mission fantasies, but I should point out one little thing to all you red, white, and bluers...
Your country is broke. Flat out busted, no money... Living on global welfare.
Trillions of dollars in debt with no real potential of every paying it off.
A third of your tax revenues goes just to pay the interest on the massive debt.
And....
Your country is addicted to war. You can't go ten years without sneaking off to some worthless third-world shithole to blow things up and kill thousands of people because they were just hanging around. You are a psychopathic people and you have been ever since you murdered most the natives originally in your land.
We had hope that you would get some kind of treatment for the national mental disorder. But it doesn't look like that will happen. We are not sure how long we can avoid bringing this problem of yours out into the open. We're not sure what to do about it either. Since you're violent and crazy it's usually best to pretend that you don't have a problem.
And...
Your political system is frozen in absolute corruption and you no longer have the ability to make the changes that you need to do to regain your health. By the way, this absolute corruption of your political system have led to select leaders that are certifiably insane. But they look good so we don't say much about it.
Therefore....
We caution you against to caught up into these Mars Mission fantasies. You run the risk of pissing off the people who are picking up the tab for your illusions and games. They might pull the plug on your reality-distortion machine. They might even cut off your medication.
Things could get ugly. You're nowhere as strong as you think you are. And your people are a lot dumber than they used to be.
Could someone recommend good Poker learning software? I used to use Vegas Johnny for MS-DOS, but it had timing loops that prevented it from working on any PC using a CPU beyond 386.
will breed themselves out of existence within 1 generation.
How do you breed yourself out of existence? Breeding is making children. If you are good enough at what you do that you are able to attract females willing to have children with you, then how are you going out of existence in one generation?
Perhaps the comment means to imply that because there is so much more opportunity for addictive gamblers to lose everything much more quickly, they will be preceived as undesirable breeding mates by females and therefore will not pass on their addictive gambling genetic matrix beyond one more generation.
But American corporations turned the tides in the 1980s, undermining labor and outsourcing manufacturing to other countries without the labor or environment protections in the US, while reducing those safeguards here.
The fundamental root cause of this exploitation is not the mean greedy management. I do not wish to imply that the management is not mean and greedy, rather this greed is enabled by the fact that the population in the developing world is exploding far faster than the economy is growing. In the USA, Canada, Euro Union, and Japan, the economy grows more or less at the same rate as the population.
In the developing world and the poor parts of the countries listed above (especially the USA), the population grows much faster than the economy. Millions of young people leave school and the village to come to the city to look for non-existant work.
If the population in the developing world were not exploding, there would not likely be such mean sweatshops. But it is exploding and will continue to explode, far faster than the local economy will now ever be able to grow to meet the needs of the new people.
Some developing or mid-level countries have serious population limiting programs in place. The most severe is, as everyone knows, is China with its 'one-child' policy. Even more successful but not as well-known is Iran. An example of having no government population policy would be Mexico, whose population nearly doubled in 30 years from 45 million to 85 million with little real growth in the economy. The Mexican government, like the Philipines, handles all the surplus people by sending them to other countries and relying in the money earned there being sent home.
An example of a deliberate government policy of forcing population growth to impose a foreign policy on a hostile neighbor is Palestine. Although the 'country' is dirt poor and has no resources or long-term prospects, the government enforces of policy of unrestrained population growth. This is a specific policy to increase the number of people (and their misery) in the face of an actually shrinking economy in order encourage the other countries of the world to put pressure on Israel to change its occupation policies. This is like the beggars in India who scar and maim their childern in order to have them bring in more money from the pitying passerbys.
There are no answers, only a greater awareness of the situation and the dimensions of the tragedy. However if answers and new approaches do come, they won't come from governments, laws, or religions. They will come from Nerds and their technology!
And every product will be the latest most-advanced DRM implementation that came out the R&D labs.
The consumer electronics companies are going to be hard pressed to deal the 'vintage is better' mentality should it ever hit them. This is where people actually pay a premium for older used electronic goods and buy the newest, latest, and greatest only as second choice if something new is not available.
This seems absurd because it has never happened in consumer electronics before. But if the big companies start sneeking in DRM into their newest models, and, if content that plays on the older equipment won't play on the new equipment, the a secondary market will start alongside of the markeet for the latest stuff. Sony and friends will be the last to know because their market for new stuff will still be growing, and they won't be paying attention to the parallel market. Until some-day some-one notices that the price on eBay for 5-year-old handheld DVD players is double the price of the latest HiDef UltraDVD players that have ten times the resolution and features.
I see something like this happening on eBay already in the obscure electronic niche of guitar effects devices: the stompboxes like distortions, chorus, phase shifters, and wah-wah pedals. {eBay: Musical Instruments-Guitar-Parts,Accessories-Effects Pedals}
Here you might find a ratty old metal box containing a dozen old resistors and five transistors selling for $800 while a new plastic pedal with a custom VLSI-DSP (very large scale integration digital signal processor) chip and a hundred surrounding support components selling for $14. The difference in price being due, of course, to the 'rich warm tone' of the vintage device that was hand-made by an old hippie electronic genius who actually used to smoke weed with Jimi Hendrix and designed the device according to what Jimi used to say he wanted his guitar to sound like.
Boutique electronics...and I'm not sure how Sony is going to eventually handle it. Maybe they will release retro versions of old DVD players ( without DRM ) so people can 'fall in love again' with old classics like Lord of the Rings and, snicker, snicker, here it comes...anything with Lindsey Lohan.
Slashdot Mirror
...like IBM cheerfully made punch card systems to computerise the Final Solution.
I believe that there is a mistake in the statement above. "The Final Solution" was a code term used by the German Nazis to refer to their policy of the systematic murder for all European Jews which they implemented between 1941 and 1945.
The punch cards made by IBM (I believe) were developed after the end of World War Two for data storage and input to early large computer systems.
IBM did however work very closely with the Apartheit South African government to register and monitor all non-European South Africans. But they did not engage in systematic genocide of these people in the way that the German Nazis did against the Jewish people.
These matters even after many years are still quite sensitive. It is important to be very accurate and not simply metaphorical in statements such as this.
Questions concerning the exact involvement of IBM in the holocast could be referred to the Simon Wiesenthal centers in Vienna and Los Angeles, or the Holocast museums in Israel and Washington DC.
Thank you,
Simonetta
This kind of bullshit thing happened to me thirty years as a result of 'possession of marijuana' conviction for the residue on the inside of a pipe. Nearly destroyed my will to live for ten years.
y /f antasy.htm
Although you feel alone, you're not. Neither are you a criminal. You are an American political felon, which is a long way from being any kind of criminal. The people who did this to you are morons, buffoons, and dim-witted stooges of the political system
I recommend getting every piece of documentation that you can on your case. Arrest records, court and baliff records; anything and everything. Scan it, make copies on disk, and safeguard the originals.
I also recommend studying a foreign language with the idea of leaving the USA and becoming a citizen of a different country. One quarter of the people in the USA can claim German descent. Germany has a right to return law giving immigration priority to foreigners of German background. Israel has an open immigration policy for any Jewish person worldwide. If you are African-American, consider studying French, as it is the common language of Africa.
The USA was founded on the principal that those citizens that aren't allowed to have representation in the government have no moral or ethical obligiation to pay taxes to that government. Your right to vote was stolen from you by representatives of this government, i.e. you have taxation without representation. Discretely ask around about tax evading techniques.
To the greatest extent possible, stay in school and learn valuable skills that in demand both in the USA and other countries.
Stay healthy. Eat decent foods. Avoid heroin and meth. Avoid going into the military. Avoid religious cults.
All in all, don't get 'bummed out' over this. A lot of what happened to you (and is also happening to millions of others) is just insanity on auto-pilot. Don't hate yourself, and try not to hate the individuals who did this shit to you.
Good luck,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeaut
I just got through reading the latest New York Times magazine which featured many long and detailed articles on DVD and the movie industry.
The amount of disturbance to the industry caused or even potentially caused by Div-X converting and downloading is so tiny compared to the amount of resources and ill-will generated by their heavy-handed response to this so-called threat that one must come to the conclusion that the MPAA leadership is mentally unbalanced.
They are acting like the people who wash their hands ten times after touching a public door handle. They just aren't being rational.
The NYT Magazine articles mentioned that each DVD sale of $15 brings $9.00 of pure profit to the film studios that they don't have to share with anyone. This is the source of all the profit in the film industry. This is the fuel that is making the current entertainment boom possible.
Hundreds of millions of DVDs are sold each year and billions will be sold in the coming years.
Why are they so obsessed with ten thousand or so people sharing rotgut quality Div-X copies? Especially when each one takes several hours to download?
Even at minimum wage the wages for the amount of time spent downloading a stupid DivX is more than the price of a pristine DVD of the same title.
Nothing about this makes any sense.
It will probably just fade as embarrassment when the MPAA actually examines the real numbers involved and comes to its senses.
"Oh, baby, baby..."
"Ja, Ja, I wrote that. That is my property. You pay me now."
- quote from a drunken Danish drummer
Actually no, Lars, you didn't write that. And you have no real claim to its ownership.
In fact, all rock music and much pop music on the global charts was written originally by a little old blind African-American man who most of his elderly years sitting on a porch playing a guitar in front of general store in Gazeebo, Mississippi. A team of music historians in the 1930s on a WPA grant recorded his songs for the Library of Congress. A group of young folkies in the late 1950s in Greenwich Village found the records while researching 'the authentic sound'. The folk records made their way to England where the popular pop bands at the time were looking for a way to energize their stale 'boy-loves-girl' sound. Add lots of fuzz boxes, reverb, groupies, marijuana, and FM radio play and you have the current billion dollar music industry.
But it was all written originally by that little blind ex-slave playing his guitar in Mississippi.
Why would I bother with this when I already have an alternative that is free of charge, more secure, and has more content?
Exactly.
What the global music corporations (all five of them) don't seem to grasp is that P2P is so successful because millions of people are sharing. That means that they are deciding what they want to place in the P2P library.
Music sellers have never before had a way to specifically identify which person likes which performer. Now a technique arises where people list on their PC that is open to the world exactly which recordings they like best and are willing to share with others. And they are getting all this focused market research for free!
So what do they do? They try to take this gift from the gods and destroy it and put all their most loyal and interested customers in prison for giving them this information about their marketing preferences.
So what if people are listening to recordings for free? It doesn't matter to them. They aren't even paying for all the recordings; the artist's do. The costs of producing the recording and media is taken from the sales receipts and added to the artist's signing advance payment loan.
Imagine if you went to college on the same financial terms. You get a loan for tution to a college wholely owned by the group of five corporations that would 95% of the colleges in the world. Then when you graduate, you not only have to pay back every penny of the loan, but you only get to keep $2 of every $15 of salary that you make for your entire working life. And the college corporation decides what you will major in and where your job is going to be.
That's two different threads with no segue, I know. The inability of the global media corporations to use the marketing data given to them by P2P and the stretch of an analogy between artist-music company relations and college-student financial relations. But, hey, this is slashdot!
All the slashdot posters are placing their emphasis into the wrong areas. Most people are going on about the legal aspects of this activity.
Well, the legal aspects are secondary to the fact that this person is a serious private librarian. And he is doing a major public service by collecting all of this music into a single library.
Does the RIAA have a library like this? Do they have anyone who could build a library like this? Do any of the big five global record companies have a library like this? Could they build a library like this?
I don't think so.
This is a major achievement. Forget the chickenshit laws and celibrate the acomplishment.
With the systematic destruction of the public domain by the global media corporations, these people who are making a serious effort to preserve culture OUTSIDE of a corporate framework are major heroes!
We are facing a situation were the cultural media artifacts (audio recordings, books, and magazines) of first half of the 20th century are being systematicly destroyed by the media corporations. They will not release the material that they claim to legally own into public domain (in order to protect the half dozen or so copyrights that are still commercially valid from that era, they locked up the entire cultural output of the era), and they won't release it commercially because it is no longer profitable.
That means that hundreds of years in the future there will be a big gap in the cultural record for all of the output the first half of the 20th century. The books are being pulped as the paper wears out, and the media recordings are buried in permanent copyright extensions, which is a wholescale theft of the public domain.
Future cultural historians will TREASURE the work of these 'illegal' private librarians who are quietly working to preserve the culture.
They deserve our support, not ridicule!
If you're American, then you should learn Spanish because it's your countrie's second language.
If you're Canadian, then you should learn French because it's your countrie's second language.
If you are only interested in getting the college elective requirement satisfied, then go with French or Spanish because half of the words are the same as in English. German has a lot of simple words that are the same as English, but it gets really difficult after the first semester.
Any other language is far too much a pain in the ass to fool with. There will always be someone around that knows some English if you go to these places.
If you're a young male American, then whatever you do, don't study Arabic! You'll be the first one drafted after all the National Guard 35-year-old, weekend-warriors, '$150 extra a month and one weekend playing Rambo in the woods' people are returned home from their 'service' in the never-to-end Iraqi War.
All in all, take French. Even if you hate the French, it's still an easy language to study in order to get the college elective requirement done with. Second best choice would be Spanish, because you'll actually be able to talk to people after college. It will be real handy if there are no jobs when you get out of college and have to go work at the Burger King. Or want to go someplace really cheap to live that's warm and doesn't have psychotic police always shaking you down.
Should we seriously believe that The Ukraine has more computer programmer productivity and output than:
China - 1.3 billion people and a booming economy with millions of students studying technology?
Korea - where 1/4 of the people have at-home broadband, and like China, has millions of people working in the technology industry?
Taiwan - where nearly everything technological that isn't specifically designed to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap is designed, programmed, and manufactured?
Japan - With the world's second largest economy and a world leader in electronic R&D and embedded-systems computers?
I think some second-rate journalist got an all-expenses-paid government tour and spent a lot of time with Hot, Available Ukrainian Brides-to-be
and then wrote up this wild fantasy of Ukrainian computer mastery in order to get invited back on next year's government tour.
We must not take these snow-jobs seriously.
Before America, many of the native tribes of North America lived in fear of constant raids from the other tribes. Now the native Americans have a blue passport that assures them safe passage nearly anywhere in the world. Before America, the natives spoke a language of the tribe and maybe the language of next tribe over the hills. Maybe a few hundred people spoke this language, maybe a few thousand. Now most native Americans speak and understand English, which is understood by a billion people throughout the world. Many natives also speak a ancient tribal language also.
Before America, when a native child got sick, the father will pray and chant with the medicine man to the Great Spirit. More often than not, the child would die. Now when a native child gets sick, the father and the medicine man chant to the Great Spirit. Or they do until the mother gets pissed off and makes him take the child to the reservation hospital. Usually the child recovers fully.
Yes, the land was taken. Yes there were massacres. Yes there was cultural desolation. Yes there were new diseases and ruthless intoxicants introduced that there was no defence against.
But the worst is over. The massacres and cultural destruction will not happen again. Native American tribal values and traditions can rise again and become a valued and trusted part of all North American society. Native Nations populations will grow up to and beyond the levels before the Europeans arrived.
All this can happen, should the people of the tribal nations wish for it to happen and work to make it happen.
Both the Ham radio and the Open Source groups restricted public participation and benefit by requiring the mastery of obsolete and difficult knowledge skills.
The Hams required mastery of Morse code long after there was no real use for it in order to get an operator's broadcast license. The Open Source Computer group expected its adherents to master difficult and obsolete Unix command line syntaxes and structures long after the easier GUI interface was widely accepted.
The Ham radio lure was cheap and random long-range communication. This function has been replaced by cheap global e-mail. The open source lure was cheap and powerful computer programs and access. That function has been replaced by cheap and global Microsoft Windows.
Let the shitstorm begin!
Right, but it does nothing to help the artist.
Anyone else the the cover article in last month's Architectural Digest about Rod Stewart's mansion in Bel Air?
This is what happens when people actually belive this bullshit about the necessity of giving money to 'hurting artists'.
Artists are more than adequately compensated by both the payment that they receive from performing and, more importantly, from the connections and networking contacts that they make from being the most in-demand class of people socially.
Nobody needs to feel guilty for not giving money to 'artists', especially rock stars.
It's only when 'artists' completely and totally fuck up their contracts and have all of their money stolen from them (like the Rolling Stones in the 1960s and Billy Joel in the late 1970s) that they have justification for really making a serious effort to suck as much money as possible from their audience.
But even then they tend to overdue it. They find themselves sitting in their mansions and Lear Jets publicly demanding that their fans be put in prison for listing to their music without paying them even more and more money.
Try not to spill your daily cocktail on your antique Chippendale furniture there, Mr. Stewart!
I keep thinking of Denis Leary's comment that 'After John Lennon died, we should have gotten into the Partridge Family bus and gone around and killed every one of these rock stars!'.
-and-
"We live in a country where John Lennon can take six bullets in the chest with Yoko Ono standing right next to him and not one bullet!. Now we got twenty more years of Aaii Yah Yah Yah... Explain that to me, God!"
-and-
"It's good that Jesus died when he was thirty. Yeah, cause if he had lived to be forty, he'd be walking around Jerusalem with a big beer gut and an entourage of twelve disciples doing everything that he said."
I have this reoccuring nightmare that I will be denied future Medicare (the USA system for providing medical care for old people) benefits when the system goes backrupt in ten years.
The excuse that they will use is that I ate to much red meat or candy bars in my middle-aged years. The source of this denial of benefits was the data collected on all the grocery store purchases made from the early 2000's on.
I try to obtain the grocery store cards without giving any name and address in order to inhibit the grocery corporations from tracking and databasing my diet. Safeway (as always) was the absolute worst. I had to go through three levels of management before they would issue me a Safeway Club card without my giving them any personal information. Why are grocery stores tracking my purchases anyway?
Am I paranoid? Sure!
Am I crazy? I don't think so.
After all, if I told you thirty years that in the future you would have to pee in a bottle in order to determine whether you smoked (anything) within the past month in order to get any job, you would have said that I was crazy and paranoid. But now you too piss in the fucking bottle to get any job.
The bottom line...don't trust any corporation or believe their propaganda. It's best to assume a 'prisoner's dilemma' best-defence strategy for dealing with any corporation. Start with a positive move and then do exactly back to them whatever they do to you, positive or negative.
I used to buy lots of electronic things at Fry's Electronics. About 1/3rd to 1/2 of what I bought I ended up returning.
I did it because I couldn't get any information about the items without buying them, trying them, and returning the ones that I didn't want.
With the multitude of web sites offering information about electronics today, I rarely return things that I buy at Fry's. I'll return something if I can't get it to work correctly, and can't get it to work correctly within an hour of taking the package out of the shopping bag.
Of all stores, Fry's should be the one with the super incredible website that explains and documents everything that they sell and have sold. But their web site is stupid and embarrassing, with no technical documentation.
If I were in charge of Fry's, I'd make their website as rich and detailed on product information and customer support as Microsoft's or Amazon's website.
Here's my $600.
Deliver it to Victoria, BC.
I'll load it with 80 pounds of primo BC bud and send it off on its little journey across the sound. Ten to fifteen hours later, I'll be waiting at the little cove outside Sequim, Washington with my new SUV ('just $100 down, show your paycheck stub, and drive off the lot in your new SUV!!', says the radio ad).
The little sucker can drive itself up the ramp into my new SUV with tinted windows right up from the dock.
Then a leisurely six hour drive back to Portland and it's 'happy, happy, happy...all of the time' (like the Ramones used to say) for all my friends in Southeast Portland.
A couple days later, do it all again.
"logging underwater dead trees???"
Underwater robots that can go long distances on the seabed with 20-50 kilos of 'sensitive goods', use GPS to maintain their course (if GPS works underwater), wait quietly at a predetermined destination upon arrival, and then float to the surface and signal their exact location to a pick-up cigar boat would be a dream to smugglers.
'Log dead trees?'
Man, you are not thinking about the real possiblities that these machines offer!!
The big new wave in PC audio should be to revitalize the programmable music synthesizers that died ten years ago. Let's start with open-source virtual MiniMoogs and ARP Odyssey clones that use GigaHertz PC CPU speeds to make instruments that sound as good as the originals.
Then let's make some serious musical instruments like additive synths like K5 clones along with real exciting and inexpensive controllers that plug into USB and legacy slots.
It's a shame that MIDI equipment never 'took off' in a big way in music equipment sales in the early 1990s. I believe that could have revitalized the retail music store business.
But all the MIDI items offered for sale in that initial market window were completely underdocumented, poorly implememented, terribly supported, and overpriced.
The big manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha, Kawai, and Korg) should have pooled together to offer a $10 MIDI interface for the PC and given away voice editor and sequencer software (including source code) for every model that they offered.
That would have been tough on all the little software companies selling $150 voice editors for synths that sold a total of 5000 units worldwide, but it would have energized the market for synths and tone modules to the level of guitars and amps.
Today all the $100 voice editor companies are gone and the advanced $1600 synths of 1990 are sold on eBay for $50-$200. The only software still available for them is Atari ST programs run on the PC through an emulator (the STeem emulator).
The rare MIDI auxiliary device (such as controller pedals or switcher) gets sold at an undervalued price due to the uncertainity of whether it can still be used.
If I had an extra million dollars and an extra twenty IQ points then I would make a serious attempt to revitalize the MIDI industry with open-source programs and equipment selling at 1/20th the cost that it did when the first MIDI wave ended ten years ago. The fact that the music equipment industry is still run by nitwits like Roland (who are still fighting attempts to open-source the MT-32 which was obsolete 15!! years ago) just fills me with despair.
It's so convenient today to copy some friends Music Collection onto mobile storage. Thousands of *new* songs transfered within minutes. And there's nothing the RIAA can do about it.
What the RIAA plans to do about it is to pass a law requiring all audio playback devices to have a chip that detects a watermark in the audio file. The chip will have a unique number embedded into it. The first time that the audio playback device is used, it will have to be connected to a PC that has an internet connection. The number in the chip will be transmitted to the manufacturer.
Each individual music file will have to have the watermark number linked in some way to the chip number in the audio playback device. The individual music file will only play on one audio playback device, and only after the RIAA get payment and downloads permission for the audio device to play the specific music file.
Future versions of this 'DRM from Hell' will incorporate micropayments for each listening of the music file, in addition to the initial purchase cost of the music recording. The cost of all this technology will be subtracted from the artist's royalities.
Not to say that artists don't deserve money for their work,
Well, yes, to say that rock stars don't deserve money for their work. They don't. Most of what the 'produce' is just stolen from lesser-known albums of many years ago. Plus most rock stars are assholes. And far, far overpaid. (Seen Rod Stewart's huge mansion in last month's Architectural Digest?)
For one, you can't stop it by going after people that don't have enough money to pay for cds.... If they ultimately actually lowered the price to a more convenient number maybe people will by them.
Sure you can. Just take all of a person's money and they don't buy any more bootleg CDs.
When a cartel controls the price, they always raise the price. Noticed the $59/barrel oil yet?
Going after college students who have enough to worry about is a horrible way to get support. Its a negative campaign that'll end up hurting them.
They're in it for the money, honey. College students have the money. When you run a successful extortion campaign against people who have money, and you do it over and over successfully, you don't get hurt in the long run. You get rich.
College students never fight back against extortion and they have a lot of money. They're willing to give up their money to extortionists especially when threatened by extortionists with lawsuits and criminal records that the extortionists claim will destroy their future careers.
College students are perfect targets for the RIAA gangsters. Since RIAA extortion is so amazingly successful, (and a far more secure profit center than selling records, which is hit-or-miss at best), you can expect it to expand in the future to thousands of lawsuits every month.
The only way that non-violent people can stop themselves from being constantly 'shaken down' by extortionist gangsters is to hire people who are more violent than the gangsters or have immunity from laws against violence. The problem with hiring mercenaries to destroy gangsters is that the mercs often want as much in payment as the gangsters are taking. The problem is the same with those who have legal immunity to use violence against gangsters (that is, the FBI and the police). They demand less money for their services than the gangsters, but claim instead the right to use violence against you to support any 'Mickey mouse' law or regulation that gets passed by corrupt politicians.
Sooner or later, because they appear to be picking their targets at random, the RIAA is going to try to extort thousands of dollars from a person who doesn't have the money and doesn't care what happens to corporate lawyers who are trying to destroy their life. This person will contact the lawyer for a meeting upon receiving his extortion notice. At the meeting the person will pull out a gun and calmly, coolly, and without remorse or emotion blow the brains out of the RIAA lawyer all over the table.
By picking their targets at random, the RIAA appears to ignore the principal tenet of being a successful extortionist:
You can take many, many things from a rich person before they even notice that anything is missing,
but you can only take very little from a poor person before they kill you to protect whatever little material things that they have.
Pornography is any art form that changes its level of aesthetic merit according to the level of sexual arousal of the viewer.
An image that has no more appeal to a male when he sexually aroused than when he isn't is not porn. An image that is equally appealing in aesthetics to a male regardless of whether he is or is not sexually aroused is not porn.
An image that seems tacky, vulgar, tasteless, ugly, and degrading to a male when not aroused but gains greatly in aesthetic value ("wow, totally hot!!!") when he becomes aroused is porn.
An image that induces sexual arousal may or may not be porn. It depends primarily on the male and period of time since his last ejaculation.
This question is further complicated by the fact that porn is not a binary aesthetic category. Some images are a little pornographic and some much more so. Plus there are many cultural factors. Images of female breasts are sexually arousing in some cultures, but not others.
With so little real guidelines to label porn, governments draw specific lines. Currently in the USA, the photographic image of penis inserted into another person's body is porn by definition. So are the images of a woman presenting her body for insertion by a penis if the image displays a clear image of the vaginal area.
Porn is not illegal in the USA, but the display of its legally-defined images is regulated in public places.
I hope that this helps clear up your confusion.
I attended a booksigning for the new hardcover coffee table book of the Suicide Girls portraits about a month ago at Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon.
It was different than I thought it would be. The Suicide Girls concept actually is not porn-oriented. The young woman who developed the idea and took the original photos said that she wanted to capture the unique spirit of the women that she knew and hung out with in Southeast Portland. The Suicide Girls concept is about sharing the self-actualization of women in Portland's post-punk subculture. Suicide Girls was developed to be a celbration of attitude of young women rather than specifically providing a visual stimulation for male sexual climax.
The Suicide Girls website is primarily designed to provide a place for other women who share the same lifestyle throughout the world to find each other. It's not intended to be a porn site although it has the secondary effect of invoking male sexual arousal. It does that rather well and that goes a long way to pay the overhead costs, but it is not the site's main purpose.
That's what gives the Suicide Girl photos the ambience that they are mocking male sexuality as opposed to the standard porn approach of manipulating male sexuality for profit.
Many of the original models attended the event since the website started here in Portland and they live here. Talking to them afterwards they seemed just like ordinary people, not porn stars.
As for the 'ownership' of the name, the author said that it just "came from an old song".
Nintendo should just lighten up and forget this nonsense. I suspect that the name probably originated somewhere else because a Japanese Nerd video game giant corporation would not be likely to come up with a name like this. Personally, I suspect that William Burroughs thought it up, and a search of his novels from the 1950s and 1960s would find it as a casual reference.
No, I am not a 'Suicide Girl' myself.
I hate to puncture all your Mars Mission fantasies, but I should point out one little thing to all you red, white, and bluers...
Your country is broke. Flat out busted, no money... Living on global welfare.
Trillions of dollars in debt with no real potential of every paying it off.
A third of your tax revenues goes just to pay the interest on the massive debt.
And....
Your country is addicted to war. You can't go ten years without sneaking off to some worthless third-world shithole to blow things up and kill thousands of people because they were just hanging around. You are a psychopathic people and you have been ever since you murdered most the natives originally in your land.
We had hope that you would get some kind of treatment for the national mental disorder. But it doesn't look like that will happen. We are not sure how long we can avoid bringing this problem of yours out into the open. We're not sure what to do about it either. Since you're violent and crazy it's usually best to pretend that you don't have a problem.
And...
Your political system is frozen in absolute corruption and you no longer have the ability to make the changes that you need to do to regain your health. By the way, this absolute corruption of your political system have led to select leaders that are certifiably insane. But they look good so we don't say much about it.
Therefore....
We caution you against to caught up into these Mars Mission fantasies. You run the risk of pissing off the people who are picking up the tab for your illusions and games. They might pull the plug on your reality-distortion machine. They might even cut off your medication.
Things could get ugly. You're nowhere as strong as you think you are. And your people are a lot dumber than they used to be.
Best just to let things continue as they are.
Could someone recommend good Poker learning software? I used to use Vegas Johnny for MS-DOS, but it had timing loops that prevented it from working on any PC using a CPU beyond 386.
will breed themselves out of existence within 1 generation.
How do you breed yourself out of existence? Breeding is making children. If you are good enough at what you do that you are able to attract females willing to have children with you, then how are you going out of existence in one generation?
Perhaps the comment means to imply that because there is so much more opportunity for addictive gamblers to lose everything much more quickly, they will be preceived as undesirable breeding mates by females and therefore will not pass on their addictive gambling genetic matrix beyond one more generation.
But American corporations turned the tides in the 1980s, undermining labor and outsourcing manufacturing to other countries without the labor or environment protections in the US, while reducing those safeguards here.
The fundamental root cause of this exploitation is not the mean greedy management. I do not wish to imply that the management is not mean and greedy, rather this greed is enabled by the fact that the population in the developing world is exploding far faster than the economy is growing. In the USA, Canada, Euro Union, and Japan, the economy grows more or less at the same rate as the population.
In the developing world and the poor parts of the countries listed above (especially the USA), the population grows much faster than the economy. Millions of young people leave school and the village to come to the city to look for non-existant work.
If the population in the developing world were not exploding, there would not likely be such mean sweatshops. But it is exploding and will continue to explode, far faster than the local economy will now ever be able to grow to meet the needs of the new people.
Some developing or mid-level countries have serious population limiting programs in place. The most severe is, as everyone knows, is China with its 'one-child' policy. Even more successful but not as well-known is Iran. An example of having no government population policy would be Mexico, whose population nearly doubled in 30 years from 45 million to 85 million with little real growth in the economy. The Mexican government, like the Philipines, handles all the surplus people by sending them to other countries and relying in the money earned there being sent home.
An example of a deliberate government policy of forcing population growth to impose a foreign policy on a hostile neighbor is Palestine. Although the 'country' is dirt poor and has no resources or long-term prospects, the government enforces of policy of unrestrained population growth. This is a specific policy to increase the number of people (and their misery) in the face of an actually shrinking economy in order encourage the other countries of the world to put pressure on Israel to change its occupation policies. This is like the beggars in India who scar and maim their childern in order to have them bring in more money from the pitying passerbys.
There are no answers, only a greater awareness of the situation and the dimensions of the tragedy. However if answers and new approaches do come, they won't come from governments, laws, or religions. They will come from Nerds and their technology!
And every product will be the latest most-advanced DRM implementation that came out the R&D labs.
The consumer electronics companies are going to be hard pressed to deal the 'vintage is better' mentality should it ever hit them. This is where people actually pay a premium for older used electronic goods and buy the newest, latest, and greatest only as second choice if something new is not available.
This seems absurd because it has never happened in consumer electronics before. But if the big companies start sneeking in DRM into their newest models, and, if content that plays on the older equipment won't play on the new equipment, the a secondary market will start alongside of the markeet for the latest stuff. Sony and friends will be the last to know because their market for new stuff will still be growing, and they won't be paying attention to the parallel market. Until some-day some-one notices that the price on eBay for 5-year-old handheld DVD players is double the price of the latest HiDef UltraDVD players that have ten times the resolution and features.
I see something like this happening on eBay already in the obscure electronic niche of guitar effects devices: the stompboxes like distortions, chorus, phase shifters, and wah-wah pedals. {eBay: Musical Instruments-Guitar-Parts,Accessories-Effects Pedals}
Here you might find a ratty old metal box containing a dozen old resistors and five transistors selling for $800 while a new plastic pedal with a custom VLSI-DSP (very large scale integration digital signal processor) chip and a hundred surrounding support components selling for $14. The difference in price being due, of course, to the 'rich warm tone' of the vintage device that was hand-made by an old hippie electronic genius who actually used to smoke weed with Jimi Hendrix and designed the device according to what Jimi used to say he wanted his guitar to sound like.
Boutique electronics...and I'm not sure how Sony is going to eventually handle it. Maybe they will release retro versions of old DVD players ( without DRM ) so people can 'fall in love again' with old classics like Lord of the Rings and, snicker, snicker, here it comes...anything with Lindsey Lohan.