I humbly and respectfully suggest that you consider the possiblity that 20th-century laws such as the DMCA will have little if any application in the post economic-collapse world. Whatever concepts of judicial balance that these laws attempted to provide in the era before the economic collapse will be rendered meaningless in the new post-collapse realities.
I suggest that you adapt your own point-of-view of technology law to the possibility that all laws regarding software/firmware and reverse-engineering will be ignored in the not-to-distant future. If your business or career depends upon the enforcement of these laws, please consider expanding your career path strategy or business model to include the likelihood that these can and will not be enforced by the authorities in the manner that they are currently.
Unlike most juvenile Slashdot comment posters, I am being serious and not sarcastic.
thank you for your reference to this newsletter. It's not mine. I suspect that it's a parody.
I, however, am quite serious. Economic collapse means a completely different way of dealing with the technologies and the laws covering the technology of the pre-collapse era.
Economic collapse means that there is going to be a lot of disagreement over things like copyright and royalty payments that were accepted in the 20th-century pre-collapse era. People were willing to pay for copyright and royalties when they had money or the reasonable expectation of making money. Economic collapse means no more easy money. No more easy money means no more copyright or royalty payments. Attempts to collect scarce resources like money for pre-collapse concepts like copyright WILL be challenged in the post-collapse era. Most likely with violence.
In the post-collapse era, the resources of the police are going to be too stretched to put everyone in jail who uses violence to protect what little that they have remaining after the collapse. And they are unlikely to imprison anyone who is actually making life in the post-collapse era easier for everyone. Such as people who are willing to adapt complex pre-collapse technology to the new reality.
If all this sounds like a cheap distopian science-fiction book, so be it. As I said in the previous message, when even the Republicans are talking about a serious economic collapse unfolding, then you know the world is changing. The more adaptable you are to these massive changes, the better off that you will be in the coming years and decades.
Given their current mentality, I doubt that Apple will survive long in the economic collapse that the politicians assure us is currently unfolding. The copyright and DMCA laws won't survive long either. The lawyers and courts (and Slashdot writers) will be arguing fine points and legal technicalities long after these laws cease being enforced in the real world.
I'm a simple-minded person. So correct me if I am misunderstanding this situation:
Apple makes a little plastic box with an LCD screen, a battery, and a circuit board and sells it to people in retail stores. And they claim that there is some kind of law that prohibits anyone who buys this little plastic box from opening it, determining how it works, and telling other people how to make it work better. Unless, of course, they pay Apple more money beyond the money that was paid for the little plastic box at the retail store.
If this is a correct interpretation of the situation, then I have to agree that this company is delusional and that they will have a difficult time adjusting to 21st-century reality. These marketing major fantasies may have had some credibility in the 20th-century, but they are meaningless as the economy collapses.
Reality is reality. If you are exploring the circuitry and firmware of a little plastic box and someone comes up to you and tells you that you are engaged in illegal activity by doing so, politely simply to ask them to go away and something constructive with their short time on Earth. If they persist or attempt to physically prevent you from your examinations of your property (your little plastic box and circuit board), then just shoot them. Don't even give it a second thought. There are far too many people in the world, and the fewer delusional assholes running around making trouble for the rest of us, the better. They won't be missed. When even Republicans are talking about economic collapse, then you know that It's a new world out there. Anything that you can do to make the world a better place for reality-based people to live in (such as sharing iPhone knowledge and applications), to more welcome you are in the new world of the post-20th century fantasies.
If you are going to Afghanistan and you are a Slashdot reader then it is quite likely that you are going to Afghanistan as a solder.
If that is the case then you should say good by to your family or don't go at all. It is your choice. Your country doesn't depend on the status of Afghanistan for its freedom or economic security. Your family depends on you for its freedom or economic security. If you go to the other side of the world for some vague and undefined reason like duty or honor, then you are betraying your family.
If you are going to be a solder in a strange and distant land then you should accept the fact that you are a solder. YOU are leaving your home for the purpose of killing people in the place that you are going to. You must reasonably expect that the people there are going to kill you for being there. Being concerned about your family only complicates the situation and makes it difficult for you to focus on what you are doing: which is killing the people in the place that you are going to.
You can believe that the people who have dedicated their lives to killing you for being in their country have said good by to their families. They have told their families that they are going to fight the invader, they expect to be killed, and the family should consider him to be dead already.
This is what solders have done since the beginning of time. You are no different. You should not pretend otherwise. Forget your family.
If you are not a solder then there are only two reasons that you could be going to Afghanistan. One is to be a worker in non-governmental organization. You should stay home. The Afghan people don't need NGOs. The Afghan people generally try to kill NGO workers. Since you are not a solder, you have no legal or moral way to protect yourself from those are quite successfully killing the NGO workers in Afghanistan. Be an NGO worker in your own country.
The only other possibility is that you are a drug dealer. Afghanistan is the world's largest supplier of heroin. You should stay home. The world, your country, and your family don't need any more heroin dealers. Go work at a McDonalds instead.
When grasping the fact that the copyright barons are taking over the Justice Dept, remember that there is fundamental shift happening in the media industry.
The media industry is basically a 20th-century phenomenon. The technology of the 20th-century created a structure where the best musicians of the world sold their musical in the format of fixed recordings through a centralized company. The recordings are the product. Under this structure, the musicians (and actors) become stars or mini-deities.
The main idea here is that the recordings (of music or filmed performance) are the product that is sold on concept of a fixed price regardless of the 'artist' or the quality of the performance. The unnoticed aspect of this model is that there is NO interactivity between the recordings and the people who buy the recordings.
The 21st-century entertainment media model is one of increasing interactivity between the recording and the person buying the recording. Starting with crude television-based video games in the 1980s, there has been a strong increase in the amount of interaction between the person 'consuming' the entertainment product and the entertainment product itself. The RIAA/MPAA can't reproduce this interactivity, neither can the companies who create fixed product (audio CDs, films). But this interactivity is becoming the key aspect of the entertainment experience that people (especially young people in their teens and twenties) are willing to pay for.
The more that the RIAA/MPAA are successful at forcing people away from obtaining low-cost fixed recordings, the more that they drive their core consumer base into interactive entertainment products that they don't control. They don't seem to realize this, primarily because the RIAA/MPAA companies are stuck in the 20th-century. The Slashdaughters generally grasp this concept, but they are mostly young and technologically oriented. They are the demographic most likely to copy RIAA/MPAA product, this is true, but they are also the first people to move beyond RIAA/MPAA product to meet their entertainment needs.
As the economic structure of the 20th-century fades, then so will the influence (and bullying ability) of the global media companies. As long as the RIAA/MPAA lawyers don't understand or control the emerging fields of interactive entertainment, it doesn't matter if the control the US Justice Department. They will remain 20th-century wolves chasing 20th-century sheep.
The above comment is so true. This whole project has the odor of Asian 'group-think' about it. So before you call me a racist (and you will), let me define this concept.
The Koreans seem obsessed with the idea that they are as smart, driven, tough, and visionary as anyone else in the world, without exception. That is fine and well; it's good for them and it's good for everyone else. And for the most part it is true that they are as smart, driven, and tough as anyone.
But they are also a small nation, different and culturally isolated. They have a history of being crushed by their neighbors and suffering disproportionately for it. They have 1.2 billion Chinese to the West, 100 million Japanese to the West, and in theory 300 million Russians to the North (although there is a lot a territory between Korea and where the Russians actually live). They are surrounded by people who aren't concerned about the best interests of the Korean people and have been for thousands of years.
This affects their culture and even the basic way of thinking of the Korean people. Which is, to the rest of the world, paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change. They also tend to create a reality distortion field around themselves. This causes them to see certain things as far more important than they actually are. They have a tendency to confuse symbolism with reality.
So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic projects that have marginal long-term benefit.
Like this one. What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country? There might be some military advantage, but I can't think of any. The whole project seems like a 'pissing contest', a 'anything you can do, we can do better'- type of project.
Maybe I'm wrong. But here's a country that is split in half and the northern half is in the control of the most brutal and fascist dictatorship on Earth. This is country that has been on the edge of suicide for 50 years. And they don't have much hope of changing the situation in the next 50 years.
Maybe the North will implode when 'Dear Leader' dies. Maybe the North will launch their huge invasion of the South that they have been preparing for during the past 50 years. Everyone used to worry that a new Korean Civil War would suck the neighboring countries into a giant pan-Asia war. But that is unlikely to happen now. Chinese young people love everything Korean. Even the Japanese and Koreans have entered a era of mutual respect and peaceful acceptance. It's possible that the North part of Korea will enter the civilized world without a major bloodbath. But, since Korea has an obsessive, violent, self-absorbed, and fanatical, and quite possibly, mentally unbalanced culture, it is very possible the entire country could fall into a huge suicidal bloodbath while the rest of the world watches helplessly.
But not likely, the South of Korea makes a lot of things that the world needs. People have a lot of money invested there. It's not a place like Palestine, which could experience a final solution to its situation without having any effect on the rest of the world.
So, we should congratulate the Koreans in their latest accomplishment and huge infrastructure project. It's quite possible that we could learn a lot from their experience in wiring the entire country.
There should be No digital TV conversion ever... Total techno-blasphemy for me to say this in SlashdotLand, but it is never-the-less true.
The 20th-century is over. This means that the idea that there is always going to be a new exciting technical innovation that should be implemented as soon as possible is outdated. We need to keep the technology that works, regardless of how old or inefficient that it is.
The 21st-century, which we are on the verge of entering, will be categorized by rapid transformation in some technical areas and very slow change in other areas. Analog TV works. It reaches everyone. It is the only mass medium that reaches everyone. It should not be abandoned in order to give the spectrum away to various corporations. These are public airwaves; public spectrum.
I am beginning to suspect that the conversion to digital TV from NTSC will never happen. As the economy continues to collapse and more ethnic groups and larger numbers of people enter the poverty class, it will become less likely that the government will allow this transformation to occur. In June the deadline for conversion will be pushed back again. Eventually the Digital TV conversion, like the space program, will be abandoned and forgotten.
Except among the Slashdot crowd. Don't mod me down to minus a million for saying this. Respect free speech that includes opinions that differ from yours. This is what makes the USA great, not its technology.
These endless idiotic sequels are an indication that Hollywood is in a creative slump, not unlike the one in the late 1960's. The creative types have run dry and are grasping at straws.
Do them a favor. Ignore them. Refuse to take them seriously. If you want the next Memento, Reservoir Dogs, or Slumdog Millionaire, do it yourself with ultra-cheap equipment. Do a five minute key scene from your favorite sci-fi book, and post it on YouTube.
if you're a filmmaker and have ever thought to yourself "Hey, I bet a remake of 'It's a Wonderful Life' starring Ice Cube and some sassy kids would be great!" please, dear God, stay out of Hollywood.
This is wrong thinking because it assumes that Hollywood still has validity. Of course hacks with vile ideas are going to go to Hollywood. And yes, they will get $100 million to make another truly stupid movie. And yes of course the so-called critics will proclaim it 'edgy, bordering on greatness... an exciting new approach to a well-loved story'.
Ignore them. Use all your intellect and energy to pretend that they don't exist. Don't even bother to put them down. Hollywood is a state of mind, put it out of your mind and it will cease to exist.
I was a total movie addict. I used to go see everything. It took about ten years for me, but I have reached the point where I wouldn't even imagine going to a first-run movie anymore from Hollywood. I've already seen whatever movie that Hollywood makes, even the ones that they haven't made yet.
Go to the library and get some free DVDs of older movies. Older can mean anything from the 1980s to the 1930s. The Hollywood stars of today are second-rate reincarnations of the stars of the past. The same faces and character types keep reappearing every 40-50 years. Discover Cary Grant, Glenn Ford, Bogart, Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, William Powell. Today's actresses are precocious children compared to Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Kate Hepburn, Myra Loy, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, and hundreds of forgotten other women stars.
Any other subject I would say to fight this situation. But economics is a subject that is best taken not too seriously. 'Garbage in; Garbage out', not ceterius paribus is the key phrase in Econ to remember.
Econ students have the dubious distinction of being one of the few disciplines where the theory that they are being taught in school is directly contradicted in real-world newspaper headlines. Then, 10 years later, people get PhDs explaining why the previous theories were 'incorrect'.
Are you being graded on your notes that you are surrendering to the so-called teacher? If not, then don't take any notes. Econ is mostly bullshit anyway. Just give back to the 'teacher' on your final exam the same nonsense that was fed to you in class?
Might I ask, you aren't going into debt to pay tuition for Econ classes? If so, change your major soon. Bullshit is like software; it should be free. Don't get fooled into paying for economics classes. Study something that will actually pay for itself in the future. I suggest studying advanced electro-chemical battery technology or mag-lev railroad engineering.
This Simonetta creature is just another vanilla Neo-Nazi with Indophobic racialist obsessions and relies on old British-colonial propaganda to justify her views.
"This Simonetta creature" ??? Not woman?, not person?, not citizen? but creature!! That's a good one.
Rhetorical exuberance aside, "this Simonetta creature" lives in a city that has no leper beggars selling their babies. We got vanilla people, we got Neo-Nazis, we got Indophobes, we got racialists, we got obsessives, we have beggars, we even have a few Daughters of the American Revolution, which is about as close to British-colonial propaganda as we're likely to ever get,...
But..
We have no god-damn lepers selling their children in the streets of MY city...Because we are civilized and we have certain basic fundamental standards of the inalienable quality of life for all persons who exist in MY city!
So deal with your lepers before you call me a 'creature', motherfucker!
I visited India as a teenager in 1968. We went to Calcutta in the eastern part of the country.
I remember thousands of beggars on the street. All of them dirt poor and in horrible condition. But what I remember most is the dozens of begging lepers with missing limbs and faces pushing their baby children into our faces. Trying to sell their babies to 13-year-old American tourist for a few pennies.
Now as programmer I hear a lot about the 'rise' of India. About how they are the biggest democracy in the world, how they have the world's largest 'middle class', how much development there is now in the electronics and technological sectors, how much energy and spirit there is among the young people and how smart and ready they are to bring their talent and knowledge to the world.
I always ask them (well not always, after all, one must be discreet and diplomatic)... Have you been to Calcutta? Are the thousands of beggars still in the street? Are the lepers still trying to sell their babies to tourists for pennies?
I ask..if India is so advanced, so democratic, so full of spirit and energy, then why are the beggars and lepers still there in the street?
Almost always at this point the conversation ends. I get the meanest look possible from the Indian and they walk away.
But every now and then the other person that I am talking to from India just looks at me and says that it is the will of the Gods that these people are in such a horrible condition. That they are this way because in previous lives they were horrible people and if they were to be helped, then the Gods themselves would be angry at us for meddling with their placement of people on the earth and that we could end up as lepers and beggars ourselves in our next lives if we were to help them.
Sometimes they even try to explain to me the four levels of humans in the natural order. But usually they just give me the old dirty look and walk away as if they were just discovering that I was a subhuman placed into an European/American body as a joke played on the world by one of their Gods.
But for someone with a Christian European/American upbringing, it's hard for me to ignore the begging lepers. And it's hard for me to listen about the rise of India and their space/moon program. It's hard for me take India seriously since I've had baby lepers shoved in my face and 30 years later have some IIT graduate tell me that this happens because some six-armed blue elephant-headed god wants it to happen.
So, my Indian brothers and sisters, ignore the porn and deal with beggars.
I used to be an electronic technician in the medical device field (until I got fired for cutting through impenetrable FDA red tape regulations too many times).
I have noticed the unbelievable cost difference between medical equipment and consumer electronics that use the same technology. This is due I believe to the cost-plus guaranteed-giant-profit mentality of the entire medical industry in the USA. Every part of the industry; the lawyers, the doctors, the administrators, the drug dealers, the insurance companies, the equipment makers, the FDA regulators, everyone, is working to drive the costs up without any consideration whatsoever for the long term consequences. And these consequences are the premature painful deaths of millions of people who are denied health care in the USA, both now to a limited extent and in the future to a much greater extent.
I'm toying with the idea of an underground health movement that uses 'open-source' medical equipment that is cheap and safe, but illegal because it can't get FDA approval. Nothing in the USA gets FDA approval if it is created outside of the insaisibly greedy medical industry. I've come to the conclusion that whenever people in the USA talk about the need for 'extensive testing and ultimate safety' for medical equipment, they are expressing a code word for getting paid off big time.
Following your line of logic it'd seem the logical extreme would be bombing continents for the good of the "civilised" western world.....and you live very comfortably in a country that has 10,000 hydrogen bombs... for peaceful purposes.
Just what the world needs...more babies born to people living on $1 a day, and growing up to be cannon fodder for terrorist religious fanatics.
Now before you call me a fascist and a racist and a sexist and a whatever-the-fuck-ist, please do consider that the population growth curve is approaching vertical. And we are beginning to enter the phase of history that Malthus predicted (after a long delay for technological development) where there would be exponential population growth and linear growth of the resources needed to sustain all these people.
In other words, we don't need all the people that would be 'saved' by building incubators from junk automobile parts. It's cruel, yes, I know. But that's why Allah put white people on the earth, to make the cruel decisions necessary for the survival of the species, so you don't have to.
You have your band and your music and you've recorded a good-sounding album using ProTools...
Now what?...
Now you contact the internet radio station that podcasts or webcasts music that is similar to yours. You send them your best three minute song. They play on their webcast and include it in their daily--updated downloadable podcast MP3 file of newly arrived music. You song is linked in their data base of downloadable file collections (a 'mix-tape' MP3 file of similar songs by different bands) so when someone likes a song on the podcast file that is similar to yours, they know what file and songs to download from the data base of the Podcaster.
If the downloader likes your song and wants a few more songs by your band, then he/she can download two or three more from the PodCaster's data base. And, the downloader can buy the CD that you recorded from the Podcaster. You get half of the price paid for the CD and the Podcaster gets the other half (for business expenses, etc...).
The material is self-promoting using the interactive characteristics of web. And neither the PodCaster or the band has to have anything to do with the 20th Century media monopolies like the record/media companies or Clear Channel. Your audience is 21st century; your people have no need for record companies or Clear Channel and would be embarrassed to be associated with them.
Oh, this model doesn't encourage the rock-star phenomenon which is a characteristic of 20th-century mass-media centralized-distribution-of-entertainment-product patterns of thinking for both the audiences and the bands.
When you buy a car and don't have all the money at once, you get a loan and you pay it off in small amounts at regularly scheduled intervals. WHEN you buy the car, the number of intervals and the amount of money that you are spending for the car is fixed. You and the seller agree on a price. That price is the number of car payments that you are going to make. When you have finished making all those payments, you own the car.
If, right before your last scheduled payment, the seller says that you must now make ANOTHER 20 or 30 payments in order to own the car, then he is stealing your money by breaking the legal sales contract. Which said X number of payments for ownership of the car.
Copyright works the same way. The owner of the copyright gets fixed payments for a fixed number of years for allowing the 'property' to be used. After that period of time, the 'property' passes into the public domain, where no one has to pay the copyright owner for using the 'property'.
By changing the number of years that an item is in copyright, the lawmakers are breaking a legal contract between the public and the copyright owner. They are stealing money from the public and giving it to the (what is supposed to be the former) copyright owner. They are stealing the public domain.
This often happens after the copyright owners give money to the people who are changing the law. They are bribing the lawmakers to get the lawmakers to give public resources (the intellectual property public domain) to them. They, the copyright owners who bribe and the lawmakers who take these bribes, should both be sent to prison.
This actually is a good idea. If the porn files were maybe one half sex imagery and one half encrypted private data, and there was no easy way to separate the two halves, then people would download, store, and upload the files in order to view the porn. Anyone who had data in the private section of the file could download it from various P2P sites.
The cost of filming and creating the porn file would be covered by the people who would be using the file for long-term distributed storage. Say a 1.5Gigabyte file that was an hour of MP4 video entertainment and 500 megabytes of distributed storage. The fees received by the producers for the storage would pay for the video production costs. Since porn is cheap to produce, this may solve the problem of piracy and secure storage at the same time.
Incorporate yourself as a 'record company', and then call all your videos and documents your product, your intellectual property. Join the RIAA and paste BIG warning labels on the opening screen/page of every file stating a 100-year prison sentence and 100 billion dollar fine for every instance of unauthorized copying of any of these files.
Naturally the files will get copied and stored by thousands of people. The files will get stored on secret third-world sharers dedicated to illegally preserving and presenting the world's culture.
Then in a few years from now, when you want a file, just search for it on BitTorrent or Kazaa!.
The record companies don't realize it, but the internet has changed them from being musical recording distribution companies to being digital storage companies. The whole point of the P2P networks is not to pirate so-called intellectual property but instead to ensure that the digital files (into which this 'intellectual property' has been formatted) don't get destroyed by media damage or obsolescence.
The P2P networks were a gift from the computer nerds to the recording industry; a little transition present to get them from the 20th to the 21st century. It's sad that they don't have a clue as to what to do with our gift to them.
Born 1953, college degrees in Economics and Electronics.
In a situation like this, the wise and honorable thing to do is get the text any way possible, copy it, and pass it along... freely... to any one else who may be interested in it.
We must never forget, and we must have as our prime consideration here, that the media corporations have adopted a de-facto legal state of endless and permanent copyright for themselves by constantly extending the copyright period. Since they are are doing this, they are preventing any new material from entering the public domain. They have effectively stolen the public domain from us and future generations.
Having done this, they have absolved us from any ethical and moral obligation to recognize the authority of any copyright law.
To protect our culture, which includes books, movies, television shows, and software, we can, will, and should copy and distribute any copyrighted materials as widely and as freely as we can.
When they restore the public domain, and allow the materials that passed through the period of copyright that was in legal effect when the material was created to enter public domain, then, and only then, should we listen to any arguments regarding legitimate copyright considerations.
Until then, to hell with them, their copyright laws, and the politicians that they have bribed into passing these laws.
Future generations will understand and appreciate what we are doing with our P2P networks and underground distribution systems.
All financial considerations involved are private business contracts between the authors and publishers. They don't concern us. Our networks and distribution systems were operating before they signed these contracts, so they knew of our existence and our effect on their royalties. They signed up anyway.
Every time a Space story hits Slashdot, I write a little note to remind all the dreamers in Slashdotland that there is going to be no real space program in the future.
The USA is broke. There is no money for manned space exploration. What that means is that there is a lot of talk and a lot of plans and a lot of projects with cool names in the works, but, one by one, they will be quietly abandoned.
The good news is that as the real space program shrinks, the Hollywood fantasy space program gets bigger and bigger. It's cheaper and more profitable to make a series of 100 million dollar StarTrek and StarWars movies than it is to actually put people in space. And they both accomplish the same thing: make millions of people feel good. Make them feel as if they are part of a new age of mankind. Make them feel as if they are reaching for the stars. Where their God will manifest Himself to them and enlighten them with their true destiny.
In a few years all this will be apparent. And when people as 'What happened to the space program? Where did it go?', then you can tell them that it went to AIG in November 2008. It was given to the men who stole the money, hid it, transferred it to their Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts, and fled to Dubai to live luxurious untouchable lives. A final present from the Bush administration to the American people. The last thing that the Republican party did before disappearing.
But actually there really won't be too many people that care about what happened to the space program. They will be far more concerned with protecting themselves from the lawless heavily-armed and bloodthirsty militias roaming and plundering the suburbs. They will be concerned about the lack of food, lack of jobs, lack of electricity, lack of health care, lack of everything.
The space program will resume and be better than ever before. But it will in 100-200 years from now. Not in our lifetime.
We are different... we make software out of nothing. Then we give it away. We take the other software that our peers have written. We use this software to improve the real things in our lives. Our children live better because we do this. Your children live better because we do this.
They are different from us. They fly in corporate jets to world financial capitals in order to beg for billions of our dollars from the public treasury to cover their incredibly irresponsible and maleficent behavior and decisions. Under their system of economic governance, when they mess up on a scale like this, then they are supposed to go under and live in cardboard boxes under the highway. Not us.
Now they tell us that things will get bad if we don't buy their junk mediocre products. As if our lives depend on their sales of Saturn cars, Cheetos, and salad shooters.
Well, fuck them. Yes, we are different. They need us: we don't need them.
By the way, if they fucked up so badly that they have to have a trillion dollars of the public funds to correct their mistakes, then why are we still being forced to take urine tests?
Why stay in the USA? If you have reasonably good software product and a market for this software, then you can move to anywhere in the world to write this code. Then set up a company in the new host country, pay off the local district attorney, market and support your product over the internet, and use local American companies to be your local distributors and handholders.
You don't even have to live in this other country as you are creating the software. Contact some local lawyers to set up a software corporation headquartered in that country. And I don't mean some poor third-world country (although they have many advantages) either. Think Finland, Singapore, or Dubai.
If your company is headquartered in some other country, then it becomes much more difficult for your present (soon to be former) company to harass you. Especially if the lawyers in the new host country are competent enough to keep your management and ownership hidden.
Besides, if the new software that you introduce is as good as you believe that it will be, then the company with the older mediocre software is going to be too busy maintaining their market share to spend much time trying to destroy their new competitors. Especially if you take measures to protect yourselves.
"'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,'
Jeez, you don't have to physically make anything anymore and you don't actually have to ship anything anymore. All you have to do is put up a web site and let people send you money...lots of money.
But you're not sure if this incredible change in your cost-of-goods-sold structure is going to make up for your astonishing incompetence as an marketing executive?
I don't know, guy, maybe you ought to be exploring career opportunities in fast-food-service industry. And let some unemployed electronics tech have a shot at your present so-called job.
Slashdot Mirror
I humbly and respectfully suggest that you consider the possiblity that 20th-century laws such as the DMCA will have little if any application in the post economic-collapse world. Whatever concepts of judicial balance that these laws attempted to provide in the era before the economic collapse will be rendered meaningless in the new post-collapse realities.
I suggest that you adapt your own point-of-view of technology law to the possibility that all laws regarding software/firmware and reverse-engineering will be ignored in the not-to-distant future. If your business or career depends upon the enforcement of these laws, please consider expanding your career path strategy or business model to include the likelihood that these can and will not be enforced by the authorities in the manner that they are currently.
Unlike most juvenile Slashdot comment posters, I am being serious and not sarcastic.
thank you for your reference to this newsletter. It's not mine. I suspect that it's a parody.
I, however, am quite serious. Economic collapse means a completely different way of dealing with the technologies and the laws covering the technology of the pre-collapse era.
Economic collapse means that there is going to be a lot of disagreement over things like copyright and royalty payments that were accepted in the 20th-century pre-collapse era. People were willing to pay for copyright and royalties when they had money or the reasonable expectation of making money. Economic collapse means no more easy money. No more easy money means no more copyright or royalty payments. Attempts to collect scarce resources like money for pre-collapse concepts like copyright WILL be challenged in the post-collapse era. Most likely with violence.
In the post-collapse era, the resources of the police are going to be too stretched to put everyone in jail who uses violence to protect what little that they have remaining after the collapse. And they are unlikely to imprison anyone who is actually making life in the post-collapse era easier for everyone. Such as people who are willing to adapt complex pre-collapse technology to the new reality.
If all this sounds like a cheap distopian science-fiction book, so be it. As I said in the previous message, when even the Republicans are talking about a serious economic collapse unfolding, then you know the world is changing. The more adaptable you are to these massive changes, the better off that you will be in the coming years and decades.
Given their current mentality, I doubt that Apple will survive long in the economic collapse that the politicians assure us is currently unfolding. The copyright and DMCA laws won't survive long either. The lawyers and courts (and Slashdot writers) will be arguing fine points and legal technicalities long after these laws cease being enforced in the real world.
The Neanderthals all died 30000 years ago because they were violent, stupid, and unable to adapt to changes in their environment.
We don't need new Neanderthals. We already have Republicans.
I'm a simple-minded person. So correct me if I am misunderstanding this situation:
Apple makes a little plastic box with an LCD screen, a battery, and a circuit board and sells it to people in retail stores. And they claim that there is some kind of law that prohibits anyone who buys this little plastic box from opening it, determining how it works, and telling other people how to make it work better. Unless, of course, they pay Apple more money beyond the money that was paid for the little plastic box at the retail store.
If this is a correct interpretation of the situation, then I have to agree that this company is delusional and that they will have a difficult time adjusting to 21st-century reality. These marketing major fantasies may have had some credibility in the 20th-century, but they are meaningless as the economy collapses.
Reality is reality. If you are exploring the circuitry and firmware of a little plastic box and someone comes up to you and tells you that you are engaged in illegal activity by doing so, politely simply to ask them to go away and something constructive with their short time on Earth. If they persist or attempt to physically prevent you from your examinations of your property (your little plastic box and circuit board), then just shoot them. Don't even give it a second thought. There are far too many people in the world, and the fewer delusional assholes running around making trouble for the rest of us, the better. They won't be missed. When even Republicans are talking about economic collapse, then you know that It's a new world out there. Anything that you can do to make the world a better place for reality-based people to live in (such as sharing iPhone knowledge and applications), to more welcome you are in the new world of the post-20th century fantasies.
If you are going to Afghanistan and you are a Slashdot reader then it is quite likely that you are going to Afghanistan as a solder.
If that is the case then you should say good by to your family or don't go at all. It is your choice. Your country doesn't depend on the status of Afghanistan for its freedom or economic security. Your family depends on you for its freedom or economic security. If you go to the other side of the world for some vague and undefined reason like duty or honor, then you are betraying your family.
If you are going to be a solder in a strange and distant land then you should accept the fact that you are a solder. YOU are leaving your home for the purpose of killing people in the place that you are going to. You must reasonably expect that the people there are going to kill you for being there. Being concerned about your family only complicates the situation and makes it difficult for you to focus on what you are doing: which is killing the people in the place that you are going to.
You can believe that the people who have dedicated their lives to killing you for being in their country have said good by to their families. They have told their families that they are going to fight the invader, they expect to be killed, and the family should consider him to be dead already.
This is what solders have done since the beginning of time. You are no different. You should not pretend otherwise. Forget your family.
If you are not a solder then there are only two reasons that you could be going to Afghanistan. One is to be a worker in non-governmental organization. You should stay home. The Afghan people don't need NGOs. The Afghan people generally try to kill NGO workers. Since you are not a solder, you have no legal or moral way to protect yourself from those are quite successfully killing the NGO workers in Afghanistan. Be an NGO worker in your own country.
The only other possibility is that you are a drug dealer. Afghanistan is the world's largest supplier of heroin. You should stay home. The world, your country, and your family don't need any more heroin dealers. Go work at a McDonalds instead.
When grasping the fact that the copyright barons are taking over the Justice Dept, remember that there is fundamental shift happening in the media industry.
The media industry is basically a 20th-century phenomenon. The technology of the 20th-century created a structure where the best musicians of the world sold their musical in the format of fixed recordings through a centralized company. The recordings are the product. Under this structure, the musicians (and actors) become stars or mini-deities.
The main idea here is that the recordings (of music or filmed performance) are the product that is sold on concept of a fixed price regardless of the 'artist' or the quality of the performance. The unnoticed aspect of this model is that there is NO interactivity between the recordings and the people who buy the recordings.
The 21st-century entertainment media model is one of increasing interactivity between the recording and the person buying the recording. Starting with crude television-based video games in the 1980s, there has been a strong increase in the amount of interaction between the person 'consuming' the entertainment product and the entertainment product itself. The RIAA/MPAA can't reproduce this interactivity, neither can the companies who create fixed product (audio CDs, films). But this interactivity is becoming the key aspect of the entertainment experience that people (especially young people in their teens and twenties) are willing to pay for.
The more that the RIAA/MPAA are successful at forcing people away from obtaining low-cost fixed recordings, the more that they drive their core consumer base into interactive entertainment products that they don't control. They don't seem to realize this, primarily because the RIAA/MPAA companies are stuck in the 20th-century. The Slashdaughters generally grasp this concept, but they are mostly young and technologically oriented. They are the demographic most likely to copy RIAA/MPAA product, this is true, but they are also the first people to move beyond RIAA/MPAA product to meet their entertainment needs.
As the economic structure of the 20th-century fades, then so will the influence (and bullying ability) of the global media companies. As long as the RIAA/MPAA lawyers don't understand or control the emerging fields of interactive entertainment, it doesn't matter if the control the US Justice Department. They will remain 20th-century wolves chasing 20th-century sheep.
The above comment is so true. This whole project has the odor of Asian 'group-think' about it. So before you call me a racist (and you will), let me define this concept.
The Koreans seem obsessed with the idea that they are as smart, driven, tough, and visionary as anyone else in the world, without exception. That is fine and well; it's good for them and it's good for everyone else. And for the most part it is true that they are as smart, driven, and tough as anyone.
But they are also a small nation, different and culturally isolated. They have a history of being crushed by their neighbors and suffering disproportionately for it. They have 1.2 billion Chinese to the West, 100 million Japanese to the West, and in theory 300 million Russians to the North (although there is a lot a territory between Korea and where the Russians actually live). They are surrounded by people who aren't concerned about the best interests of the Korean people and have been for thousands of years.
This affects their culture and even the basic way of thinking of the Korean people. Which is, to the rest of the world, paranoid mentally unbalanced, and unlikely to change. They also tend to create a reality distortion field around themselves. This causes them to see certain things as far more important than they actually are. They have a tendency to confuse symbolism with reality.
So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic projects that have marginal long-term benefit.
Like this one. What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country? There might be some military advantage, but I can't think of any. The whole project seems like a 'pissing contest', a 'anything you can do, we can do better'- type of project.
Maybe I'm wrong. But here's a country that is split in half and the northern half is in the control of the most brutal and fascist dictatorship on Earth. This is country that has been on the edge of suicide for 50 years. And they don't have much hope of changing the situation in the next 50 years.
Maybe the North will implode when 'Dear Leader' dies. Maybe the North will launch their huge invasion of the South that they have been preparing for during the past 50 years. Everyone used to worry that a new Korean Civil War would suck the neighboring countries into a giant pan-Asia war. But that is unlikely to happen now. Chinese young people love everything Korean. Even the Japanese and Koreans have entered a era of mutual respect and peaceful acceptance. It's possible that the North part of Korea will enter the civilized world without a major bloodbath. But, since Korea has an obsessive, violent, self-absorbed, and fanatical, and quite possibly, mentally unbalanced culture, it is very possible the entire country could fall into a huge suicidal bloodbath while the rest of the world watches helplessly.
But not likely, the South of Korea makes a lot of things that the world needs. People have a lot of money invested there. It's not a place like Palestine, which could experience a final solution to its situation without having any effect on the rest of the world.
So, we should congratulate the Koreans in their latest accomplishment and huge infrastructure project. It's quite possible that we could learn a lot from their experience in wiring the entire country.
There should be No digital TV conversion ever... Total techno-blasphemy for me to say this in SlashdotLand, but it is never-the-less true.
The 20th-century is over. This means that the idea that there is always going to be a new exciting technical innovation that should be implemented as soon as possible is outdated. We need to keep the technology that works, regardless of how old or inefficient that it is.
The 21st-century, which we are on the verge of entering, will be categorized by rapid transformation in some technical areas and very slow change in other areas. Analog TV works. It reaches everyone. It is the only mass medium that reaches everyone. It should not be abandoned in order to give the spectrum away to various corporations. These are public airwaves; public spectrum.
I am beginning to suspect that the conversion to digital TV from NTSC will never happen. As the economy continues to collapse and more ethnic groups and larger numbers of people enter the poverty class, it will become less likely that the government will allow this transformation to occur. In June the deadline for conversion will be pushed back again. Eventually the Digital TV conversion, like the space program, will be abandoned and forgotten.
Except among the Slashdot crowd. Don't mod me down to minus a million for saying this. Respect free speech that includes opinions that differ from yours. This is what makes the USA great, not its technology.
These endless idiotic sequels are an indication that Hollywood is in a creative slump, not unlike the one in the late 1960's. The creative types have run dry and are grasping at straws.
Do them a favor. Ignore them. Refuse to take them seriously. If you want the next Memento, Reservoir Dogs, or Slumdog Millionaire, do it yourself with ultra-cheap equipment. Do a five minute key scene from your favorite sci-fi book, and post it on YouTube.
if you're a filmmaker and have ever thought to yourself "Hey, I bet a remake of 'It's a Wonderful Life' starring Ice Cube and some sassy kids would be great!" please, dear God, stay out of Hollywood.
This is wrong thinking because it assumes that Hollywood still has validity. Of course hacks with vile ideas are going to go to Hollywood. And yes, they will get $100 million to make another truly stupid movie. And yes of course the so-called critics will proclaim it 'edgy, bordering on greatness... an exciting new approach to a well-loved story'.
Ignore them. Use all your intellect and energy to pretend that they don't exist. Don't even bother to put them down. Hollywood is a state of mind, put it out of your mind and it will cease to exist.
I was a total movie addict. I used to go see everything. It took about ten years for me, but I have reached the point where I wouldn't even imagine going to a first-run movie anymore from Hollywood. I've already seen whatever movie that Hollywood makes, even the ones that they haven't made yet.
Go to the library and get some free DVDs of older movies. Older can mean anything from the 1980s to the 1930s. The Hollywood stars of today are second-rate reincarnations of the stars of the past. The same faces and character types keep reappearing every 40-50 years. Discover Cary Grant, Glenn Ford, Bogart, Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, William Powell. Today's actresses are precocious children compared to Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Kate Hepburn, Myra Loy, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, and hundreds of forgotten other women stars.
Any other subject I would say to fight this situation. But economics is a subject that is best taken not too seriously. 'Garbage in; Garbage out', not ceterius paribus is the key phrase in Econ to remember.
Econ students have the dubious distinction of being one of the few disciplines where the theory that they are being taught in school is directly contradicted in real-world newspaper headlines. Then, 10 years later, people get PhDs explaining why the previous theories were 'incorrect'.
Are you being graded on your notes that you are surrendering to the so-called teacher? If not, then don't take any notes. Econ is mostly bullshit anyway. Just give back to the 'teacher' on your final exam the same nonsense that was fed to you in class?
Might I ask, you aren't going into debt to pay tuition for Econ classes? If so, change your major soon. Bullshit is like software; it should be free. Don't get fooled into paying for economics classes. Study something that will actually pay for itself in the future. I suggest studying advanced electro-chemical battery technology or mag-lev railroad engineering.
This Simonetta creature is just another vanilla Neo-Nazi with Indophobic racialist obsessions and relies on old British-colonial propaganda to justify her views.
"This Simonetta creature" ??? Not woman?, not person?, not citizen? but creature!! That's a good one.
Rhetorical exuberance aside, "this Simonetta creature" lives in a city that has no leper beggars selling their babies. We got vanilla people, we got Neo-Nazis, we got Indophobes, we got racialists, we got obsessives, we have beggars, we even have a few Daughters of the American Revolution, which is about as close to British-colonial propaganda as we're likely to ever get,...
But..
We have no god-damn lepers selling their children in the streets of MY city...Because we are civilized and we have certain basic fundamental standards of the inalienable quality of life for all persons who exist in MY city!
So deal with your lepers before you call me a 'creature', motherfucker!
I visited India as a teenager in 1968. We went to Calcutta in the eastern part of the country.
I remember thousands of beggars on the street. All of them dirt poor and in horrible condition. But what I remember most is the dozens of begging lepers with missing limbs and faces pushing their baby children into our faces. Trying to sell their babies to 13-year-old American tourist for a few pennies.
Now as programmer I hear a lot about the 'rise' of India. About how they are the biggest democracy in the world, how they have the world's largest 'middle class', how much development there is now in the electronics and technological sectors, how much energy and spirit there is among the young people and how smart and ready they are to bring their talent and knowledge to the world.
I always ask them (well not always, after all, one must be discreet and diplomatic)... Have you been to Calcutta? Are the thousands of beggars still in the street? Are the lepers still trying to sell their babies to tourists for pennies?
I ask..if India is so advanced, so democratic, so full of spirit and energy, then why are the beggars and lepers still there in the street?
Almost always at this point the conversation ends. I get the meanest look possible from the Indian and they walk away.
But every now and then the other person that I am talking to from India just looks at me and says that it is the will of the Gods that these people are in such a horrible condition. That they are this way because in previous lives they were horrible people and if they were to be helped, then the Gods themselves would be angry at us for meddling with their placement of people on the earth and that we could end up as lepers and beggars ourselves in our next lives if we were to help them.
Sometimes they even try to explain to me the four levels of humans in the natural order. But usually they just give me the old dirty look and walk away as if they were just discovering that I was a subhuman placed into an European/American body as a joke played on the world by one of their Gods.
But for someone with a Christian European/American upbringing, it's hard for me to ignore the begging lepers. And it's hard for me to listen about the rise of India and their space/moon program. It's hard for me take India seriously since I've had baby lepers shoved in my face and 30 years later have some IIT graduate tell me that this happens because some six-armed blue elephant-headed god wants it to happen.
So, my Indian brothers and sisters, ignore the porn and deal with beggars.
Namaste
I used to be an electronic technician in the medical device field (until I got fired for cutting through impenetrable FDA red tape regulations too many times).
I have noticed the unbelievable cost difference between medical equipment and consumer electronics that use the same technology. This is due I believe to the cost-plus guaranteed-giant-profit mentality of the entire medical industry in the USA. Every part of the industry; the lawyers, the doctors, the administrators, the drug dealers, the insurance companies, the equipment makers, the FDA regulators, everyone, is working to drive the costs up without any consideration whatsoever for the long term consequences. And these consequences are the premature painful deaths of millions of people who are denied health care in the USA, both now to a limited extent and in the future to a much greater extent.
I'm toying with the idea of an underground health movement that uses 'open-source' medical equipment that is cheap and safe, but illegal because it can't get FDA approval. Nothing in the USA gets FDA approval if it is created outside of the insaisibly greedy medical industry. I've come to the conclusion that whenever people in the USA talk about the need for 'extensive testing and ultimate safety' for medical equipment, they are expressing a code word for getting paid off big time.
Following your line of logic it'd seem the logical extreme would be bombing continents for the good of the "civilised" western world... ..and you live very comfortably in a country that has 10,000 hydrogen bombs... for peaceful purposes.
Just what the world needs...more babies born to people living on $1 a day, and growing up to be cannon fodder for terrorist religious fanatics.
Now before you call me a fascist and a racist and a sexist and a whatever-the-fuck-ist, please do consider that the population growth curve is approaching vertical. And we are beginning to enter the phase of history that Malthus predicted (after a long delay for technological development) where there would be exponential population growth and linear growth of the resources needed to sustain all these people.
In other words, we don't need all the people that would be 'saved' by building incubators from junk automobile parts. It's cruel, yes, I know. But that's why Allah put white people on the earth, to make the cruel decisions necessary for the survival of the species, so you don't have to.
Goodness, yes, it must be real. I always trust announcements of science-fiction-like devices that have grammar errors in the press releases.
Where can I invest the what remains of my life savings in this wonderful invention?
You have your band and your music and you've recorded a good-sounding album using ProTools...
Now what?...
Now you contact the internet radio station that podcasts or webcasts music that is similar to yours. You send them your best three minute song. They play on their webcast and include it in their daily--updated downloadable podcast MP3 file of newly arrived music. You song is linked in their data base of downloadable file collections (a 'mix-tape' MP3 file of similar songs by different bands) so when someone likes a song on the podcast file that is similar to yours, they know what file and songs to download from the data base of the Podcaster.
If the downloader likes your song and wants a few more songs by your band, then he/she can download two or three more from the PodCaster's data base. And, the downloader can buy the CD that you recorded from the Podcaster. You get half of the price paid for the CD and the Podcaster gets the other half (for business expenses, etc...).
The material is self-promoting using the interactive characteristics of web. And neither the PodCaster or the band has to have anything to do with the 20th Century media monopolies like the record/media companies or Clear Channel. Your audience is 21st century; your people have no need for record companies or Clear Channel and would be embarrassed to be associated with them.
Oh, this model doesn't encourage the rock-star phenomenon which is a characteristic of 20th-century mass-media centralized-distribution-of-entertainment-product patterns of thinking for both the audiences and the bands.
When you buy a car and don't have all the money at once, you get a loan and you pay it off in small amounts at regularly scheduled intervals. WHEN you buy the car, the number of intervals and the amount of money that you are spending for the car is fixed. You and the seller agree on a price. That price is the number of car payments that you are going to make. When you have finished making all those payments, you own the car.
If, right before your last scheduled payment, the seller says that you must now make ANOTHER 20 or 30 payments in order to own the car, then he is stealing your money by breaking the legal sales contract. Which said X number of payments for ownership of the car.
Copyright works the same way. The owner of the copyright gets fixed payments for a fixed number of years for allowing the 'property' to be used. After that period of time, the 'property' passes into the public domain, where no one has to pay the copyright owner for using the 'property'.
By changing the number of years that an item is in copyright, the lawmakers are breaking a legal contract between the public and the copyright owner. They are stealing money from the public and giving it to the (what is supposed to be the former) copyright owner. They are stealing the public domain.
This often happens after the copyright owners give money to the people who are changing the law. They are bribing the lawmakers to get the lawmakers to give public resources (the intellectual property public domain) to them. They, the copyright owners who bribe and the lawmakers who take these bribes, should both be sent to prison.
This actually is a good idea. If the porn files were maybe one half sex imagery and one half encrypted private data, and there was no easy way to separate the two halves, then people would download, store, and upload the files in order to view the porn. Anyone who had data in the private section of the file could download it from various P2P sites.
The cost of filming and creating the porn file would be covered by the people who would be using the file for long-term distributed storage. Say a 1.5Gigabyte file that was an hour of MP4 video entertainment and 500 megabytes of distributed storage. The fees received by the producers for the storage would pay for the video production costs. Since porn is cheap to produce, this may solve the problem of piracy and secure storage at the same time.
Incorporate yourself as a 'record company', and then call all your videos and documents your product, your intellectual property. Join the RIAA and paste BIG warning labels on the opening screen/page of every file stating a 100-year prison sentence and 100 billion dollar fine for every instance of unauthorized copying of any of these files.
Naturally the files will get copied and stored by thousands of people. The files will get stored on secret third-world sharers dedicated to illegally preserving and presenting the world's culture.
Then in a few years from now, when you want a file, just search for it on BitTorrent or Kazaa!.
The record companies don't realize it, but the internet has changed them from being musical recording distribution companies to being digital storage companies. The whole point of the P2P networks is not to pirate so-called intellectual property but instead to ensure that the digital files (into which this 'intellectual property' has been formatted) don't get destroyed by media damage or obsolescence.
The P2P networks were a gift from the computer nerds to the recording industry; a little transition present to get them from the 20th to the 21st century. It's sad that they don't have a clue as to what to do with our gift to them.
Born 1953, college degrees in Economics and Electronics.
In a situation like this, the wise and honorable thing to do is get the text any way possible, copy it, and pass it along ... freely... to any one else who may be interested in it.
We must never forget, and we must have as our prime consideration here, that the media corporations have adopted a de-facto legal state of endless and permanent copyright for themselves by constantly extending the copyright period. Since they are are doing this, they are preventing any new material from entering the public domain. They have effectively stolen the public domain from us and future generations.
Having done this, they have absolved us from any ethical and moral obligation to recognize the authority of any copyright law.
To protect our culture, which includes books, movies, television shows, and software, we can, will, and should copy and distribute any copyrighted materials as widely and as freely as we can.
When they restore the public domain, and allow the materials that passed through the period of copyright that was in legal effect when the material was created to enter public domain, then, and only then, should we listen to any arguments regarding legitimate copyright considerations.
Until then, to hell with them, their copyright laws, and the politicians that they have bribed into passing these laws.
Future generations will understand and appreciate what we are doing with our P2P networks and underground distribution systems.
All financial considerations involved are private business contracts between the authors and publishers. They don't concern us. Our networks and distribution systems were operating before they signed these contracts, so they knew of our existence and our effect on their royalties. They signed up anyway.
Every time a Space story hits Slashdot, I write a little note to remind all the dreamers in Slashdotland that there is going to be no real space program in the future.
The USA is broke. There is no money for manned space exploration. What that means is that there is a lot of talk and a lot of plans and a lot of projects with cool names in the works, but, one by one, they will be quietly abandoned.
The good news is that as the real space program shrinks, the Hollywood fantasy space program gets bigger and bigger. It's cheaper and more profitable to make a series of 100 million dollar StarTrek and StarWars movies than it is to actually put people in space. And they both accomplish the same thing: make millions of people feel good. Make them feel as if they are part of a new age of mankind. Make them feel as if they are reaching for the stars. Where their God will manifest Himself to them and enlighten them with their true destiny.
In a few years all this will be apparent. And when people as 'What happened to the space program? Where did it go?', then you can tell them that it went to AIG in November 2008. It was given to the men who stole the money, hid it, transferred it to their Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts, and fled to Dubai to live luxurious untouchable lives. A final present from the Bush administration to the American people. The last thing that the Republican party did before disappearing.
But actually there really won't be too many people that care about what happened to the space program. They will be far more concerned with protecting themselves from the lawless heavily-armed and bloodthirsty militias roaming and plundering the suburbs. They will be concerned about the lack of food, lack of jobs, lack of electricity, lack of health care, lack of everything.
The space program will resume and be better than ever before. But it will in 100-200 years from now. Not in our lifetime.
We are different... we make software out of nothing. Then we give it away. We take the other software that our peers have written. We use this software to improve the real things in our lives. Our children live better because we do this. Your children live better because we do this.
They are different from us. They fly in corporate jets to world financial capitals in order to beg for billions of our dollars from the public treasury to cover their incredibly irresponsible and maleficent behavior and decisions. Under their system of economic governance, when they mess up on a scale like this, then they are supposed to go under and live in cardboard boxes under the highway. Not us.
Now they tell us that things will get bad if we don't buy their junk mediocre products. As if our lives depend on their sales of Saturn cars, Cheetos, and salad shooters.
Well, fuck them. Yes, we are different. They need us: we don't need them.
By the way, if they fucked up so badly that they have to have a trillion dollars of the public funds to correct their mistakes, then why are we still being forced to take urine tests?
Why stay in the USA? If you have reasonably good software product and a market for this software, then you can move to anywhere in the world to write this code. Then set up a company in the new host country, pay off the local district attorney, market and support your product over the internet, and use local American companies to be your local distributors and handholders.
You don't even have to live in this other country as you are creating the software. Contact some local lawyers to set up a software corporation headquartered in that country. And I don't mean some poor third-world country (although they have many advantages) either. Think Finland, Singapore, or Dubai.
If your company is headquartered in some other country, then it becomes much more difficult for your present (soon to be former) company to harass you. Especially if the lawyers in the new host country are competent enough to keep your management and ownership hidden.
Besides, if the new software that you introduce is as good as you believe that it will be, then the company with the older mediocre software is going to be too busy maintaining their market share to spend much time trying to destroy their new competitors. Especially if you take measures to protect yourselves.
"'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,'
Jeez, you don't have to physically make anything anymore and you don't actually have to ship anything anymore. All you have to do is put up a web site and let people send you money...lots of money.
But you're not sure if this incredible change in your cost-of-goods-sold structure is going to make up for your astonishing incompetence as an marketing executive?
I don't know, guy, maybe you ought to be exploring career opportunities in fast-food-service industry. And let some unemployed electronics tech have a shot at your present so-called job.
I couldn't do any worse than you are.