Did you ever have any luck communicating across the huge cultural gap between government and hackers? Did you ever feel that they started to get our point of view, that some of them understood how we feel about the way they perceive us?
"Taken" seems to have taken a little bit from "Firestarter", "E.T.", "Sphere" and quite a few others."
Including, as barake pointed out, the Christian Holy Bible. The riot troopers in episode 10 were definitely evocative of Roman soldiers.
How much could this series be thought of as having Taken from CE3K or simply expanded on it? That would depend on just how much Spielberg was involved in the day-to-day as opposed to just being the money guy.
There's a hint of Nietzscheanism toward the end in the idea that Allie is superior because she's a combination of alien intellectualism and human passion. The subtext still reads to me that the aliens are missing something due to their 'more evolved' state, a la GR's Earth: Final Conflict, and that it's the humans who are better. It's almost the Trek prejudice that humans have something special and unique and are superior to other species, but I'll want to watch episode 10 again before I commit to that.
Of course, as "I'm confused! I don't know which genre flick I want to rip off!" filmmaking goes, Taken is still far superior to Event Horizon or Supernova. (It genuiniely pains me to bash an Angela Basset movie.)
And, of course, it's always good to see more of Matt Frewer.
BTW you can't guarantee getting something good if you buy Sony.
To say the very least.
Sony equipment I've bought that crapped out on me: 5.25" floppy disk with no hub reinforcing ring (circa 1985), a Walkman that had a constant skip on the second half of every CD, headphones that leaned to the right, a 20-inch monitor (TV, not computer) that went green after only one year of use, EverQuest, and an Aibo site that would open fine in Opera if you saved it to disk first but was programmed to redirect you to a "MS or Netscape only" page otherwise.
Sony equipment that didn't crap out on me: none.
You heard me right: every last product I *ever* bought from Sony has crapped out on me.
What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable.
The Camarilla Princes are going to be really pissed when they find out they've been running at ( 1 / 10^5 ) / ( 18 / 36346 ) of their optimal capacity.
There's a reason we have Martin Luther King Day and not Malcolm X day.
Yes, and here it is:
"Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary."
We celebrate way too many people who want some freedom, for some people, under some circumstances. Freedom of religion is okay, unless you're a Muslim looking to board an airplane. Freedom of speech is okay, unless your election-stealing leaders are playing at war. Freedom from search and seizure is okay, unless you feel you have the right to smoke marijuana in your own home.
Sooner or later, there's always some exception. There's always some excuse to tell other people what to do. We need to back the only truly ethical social system, the only one that genuinely treats people as equals: no one has the right to tell anyone what they can do. Unfortunately, people want for themselves more than they want for others, and so they start making exceptions for Muslims, or pacifists, or stoners.
I say screw that. We are only as free as the least free among us. (Would someone please attribute that? It is certainly not original with me!) I want freedom without exceptions and I want it for everyone so I can sleep better at night. I want our kids to stop saying a Pledge of Allegiance, and start saying a Pledge of Freedom: "Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary."
The CNN article appears to have been written to give the impression that Alder is anti-metric. It's necessary to read into paragraph 23 out of 26 to find out that Alder is actually pro-metric. Before that, the article quotes Alder so it looks like he's anti-metric.
Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?
Sadly, most people do think this. People want all their problems solved by somebody else. They don't have a sense of responsibility for their own lives.
Proof: The whole history of humankind. People serve government and they like it that way. People are happy to abandon ethical responsibility to an imaginary invisible man in the sky who supposedly made the universe.
More Proof: The statement that gets me in more trouble bar none than any other. It isn't that I think Nazi's have the right to express themselves, even when it's pure genocidal hate speech... it isn't that I believe the best government is no government... it isn't that I think individuals should be allowed to own atomics for when government gets uppity... it isn't that I think that doors that slam too fast should be left that way because slow people losing fingers is Evolution In Action(tm).
It's my belief that learning is the responsibility of the learner, not of the teacher. Nothing generates as many responses, as quickly and with as much frustration, as this one belief of mine, that you are responsible for educating yourself.
That sort of person is never going to want to spend time configuring their BIOS, maintaining their car, or doing anything else they weren't told to do.
Where does something become speech?... Is code speech?
The drafters of the US Consitution were 159 years too early for information theory. I like to entertain the fantasy that if Jefferson were alive today, he'd refer to "freedom of information flow".
This would certainly clear up the "is code speech?" question, as well as issues like pornograhy and encryption. If information flow is protected, all of the excuses for censorship go away. Speech is too often narrowed down for political purposes, when the intent was to liberate expression from political forces.
I'd suggest a Freedom of Information Amendment, but I think the acronym FOIA is already taken.
and I put them in the site template, so they appear on every page. These are referer links, which mean that they check the page you are linking from. When I finish making changes to a page, I click those links in sequence, and if my page doesn't pass, I fix the XHTML or CSS that's causing the problem.
Depending on the type of page, I might make them bold and obvious, with the checkmark graphics that W3C offers, or I might hook them to a bullet or a period so they're obscure and don't become a design element.
I use absolute positioning to do layout that people often do with tables, and my sites look fine in anything from IE to lynx to Mozilla.
OK. We get it! You're a girl. Your userid is Ellen Ripley. You sign your posts "Ellen". Your sig also says "Ellen Ripley" in it. We get it. You're a girl. You're on slashdot. Do you want a medal?
Calm down, Beavis! I learned my posting style in USENET news in the more civilized and genteel -- one might even say quaint, rural or old-fashioned -- legendary and distant days of yore... okay, 1987... so that's how I format my posts here.
You can shut off signatures by visiting your Comment Options page and checking "Disable Sigs".
I can't help you with the userid, name or low frustration threshold issues.
Sometimes you just have to hold on to people who know the emerging markets, even if they do not share the same ideology.
True, but lots of corporations don't believe this. Profit in modern corporations is like God in organized religion. Large corporations say they're about Profit, but they are really about maintaining the corporate culture. Anyone who isn't a true believer must go.
The corporation I worked for was, for the most part, staffed at the line-management level with mindless functionaries. We would piss away hundreds if not thousands of dollars every week for the sake of doing things the company way. We'd bend over forward time after time after time to accomodate repeat customers who were losing us money by the continued presence of their job in the store. Why? Because corporate culture demands not profit, but accomodation and competition. Don't piss anyone off! Don't let them go to the other company! If it were about profit, we would have sent these problem customers to the competiton. They could have crippled our competition in no time at all.
(I'm not pro-profit in any big way, but I do think that a genuine profit motive makes a company a better member of its community than corporate culturalism, by way of ordinary free-market forces. I think it's sad that ruthless profit-mindedness would actually improve the current situation.)
Or look at election workers. I saw some on television the other day after local primaries and they were jumping up and down like little kids because their candidate won. That wasn't about believing in and striving for an ideal, or doing an important job; that was about Our candidate won! Yay!
I feel that over time, this culturalism percolates to higher and higher levels in any given social structure. Without some kind of check against culture becoming the end instead of the means, soon the entire institution in question is run by these tribal idiots. At this point, the people serve the culture instead of the culture serving the people.
Open source is about convincing the world that it is a better development methodology.
Open source is a better development methodology. It has created -- without government help, anti-competitive practices or huge amounts of corporate money -- software that is more stable, more useful, more reliable and more capable than the software stamped out by Microsoft and other corporate giants. Free software advocates have done this at a price that literally can't be beat, and more often than not, they've done it from a goodness of heart and an idealism that makes me wish Lennon were alive to see it.
Most of its adherents would be perfectly happy it it killed off proprietary software, thus eliminating "choice".
Wow, I don't know where to start with this one. First, are you seriously proposing that it is even possible to eliminate your freedom to choose to buy proprietary software? You and your business associates are free to keep the sub-par software you're using now, and you are free to continue developing with it. How is this eliminating choice? Just because we don't want to use the huge steaming pile of crap that is proprietary software doesn't mean you have to stop.
Second, even assuming free software could 100% eliminate proprietary software, the process by which free software creators would like to do this is by giving people more freedom of choice. They're not going around holding guns to people's heads and saying "use our software", they're just writing it and giving it away! People are trying it, they're finding that it's better, and they're sticking with it. Yay, good guys!
They explictly reject the choice to produce and use proprietary software as a freedom.... the "freedom to choose" may be your philosophy, or Tim O'Reilly's philosophy, but it is not that of free software or open source.
This is a blatant distortion of what is stated by the FSF and Stallman, to the degree that I'm wondering if you read the same words as I did. Your implication that they are advocating a removal of your choice is simply wrong. Just because members and supporters of the FSF, Stallman or anyone else rejects a choice doesn't mean they oppose your right to choose it for yourself. They believe in and strive for an extremely idealistic position, but that advocacy is their personal exercise of freedom, and their vigorous public advocacy of their ideas is their social exercise of freedom.
The idea that they are somehow trying to remove your rights is made out of whole cloth.
You and I are meant to be free; governments, as the executors of the will of the people, are not.
The troubling thing is how often this needs to be said. There are regular postings here which imply that government agencies have the same rights as, for instance, an ordinary business.
Is the idea that government is deliberately straightjacketed, is held to an artificially high standard, not taught in public schools anymore? Isn't this covered in high school civics classes, for instance?
The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.
... some people simply cannot learn from a book!!!!... the vast majority of people have a hard time learning material on their own with only a dry text book to guide them.
Tough. Being unable to learn from a book is like being unable to write on paper with a pen. It's a basic and required literacy skill and if you don't have it, you need to get it.
Your statement is the learning equivalent of saying "some people simply cannot drive with a gas pedal... they need someone to ride with them and operate the gas". Wrong. You can't drive a car without knowing how to use the gas pedal, and you can't learn without being able to pull information from a book.
It may not be the student's fault. Some secondary schools are tax-funded day care centers, and issue diplomas for attendance. I feel for those who've been short-changed this way, but that doesn't help the students. The driver's licence doesn't enable you to drive, it just certifies that you can. You still can't actually drive a car if you don't understand the basic operation of the gas pedal. You can sit down and wait to be magically transported to your destination, but you're not going anywhere if you don't know how to use the pedal.
Likewise, you can't learn if you don't know how to absorb the accumulated knowledge of those who came before you. The job of the person at the front of the classroom is not to digest knowledge for students, because it can't be done. The learning process involves exactly one person, the student. The only one who can teach you is you.
If a teacher is able to make the learning process easier, that's a nice bonus. In the end, though, the student must be responsible for learning, or never learn. That includes the responsibility of picking up the basic tools of the trade, and one of them is learning by reading a book.
Eventually the RIAA is going to have to realize that album sales aren't going to be bringing in the big bucks anymore...
You're shoveling the RIAA's spin. The recording labels are not losing money because of mp3 downloads. They still make huge money; profits go up every year. The idea that mp3 downloads are hurting sales is pure RIAA propaganda.
... [they] are going to have to focus on promoting concerts, t-shirts, and other things that can't be ripped from the web.
They probably will try this, but right now artists live on ancillary income way more than on retail sales. I don't think it's a good idea for that income to start going to the labels now.
More important, the technology finally exists for artists to make and distribute their music without any need for the labels. Why should artists give 95% of their sales revenue to a bunch of suits? That money could go into the artists' pockets, and it should.
Can I force another property to stop blocking my radio waves?
Not morally.
What you're really asking is whether you can force people to allow you access to their property. The short answer is no, it's their property. If they want to keep radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, smoke, fog, air pollution, sonic energy from bass-heavy car stereos, neighborhood pets and children, communists, capitalists or hippies off their property, they have the right to do that.
I mean, what if I live next door to a cinema and they install this? Suddenly I can't receive mobile phone calls in my house because I'm in the shadow of the cinema!
Tough. You shouldn't have presumed access to their property.
Okay, so we don't link to the NPR page, we just *type* the link. Then our new keeping-up-with-the-fascists browsers automagically 'linkify' it for us. (Opera has no trouble heating up URIs sent to me by email, for instance.)
NPR is showing an "if she weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood and therefore a witch" degree of technical qualifications on this issue. (They must have hired Dvorak.) To prevent linking, they would have to prevent us from even *mentioning* the URI. Maybe we should make sure no one mentions any URIs at all, anywhere, ever.
Hmmm, maybe it's not a mistake. NPR is Democratic/liberal, right? As opposed to Republican/conservative? I know one group wants my money and one wants to tell me what I can say, but I can never remember which is which.
Slashdot Mirror
Paul was better cast (and a better actor).
"Dude! What's mine say?"
"Sweet! What's mine say?"
Did you ever have any luck communicating across the huge cultural gap between government and hackers? Did you ever feel that they started to get our point of view, that some of them understood how we feel about the way they perceive us?
... any mention about how the Internet was designed to survive nuclear attack immediately terminates that thread.
550 THREADTERM (nuclear)
223 DETECT THREADTERM (nuclear)
224 ACK THREADTERM (nuclear)
227 REROUTING TO ALTERNATE THREAD SERVER
"Taken" seems to have taken a little bit from "Firestarter", "E.T.", "Sphere" and quite a few others."
Including, as barake pointed out, the Christian Holy Bible. The riot troopers in episode 10 were definitely evocative of Roman soldiers.
How much could this series be thought of as having Taken from CE3K or simply expanded on it? That would depend on just how much Spielberg was involved in the day-to-day as opposed to just being the money guy.
There's a hint of Nietzscheanism toward the end in the idea that Allie is superior because she's a combination of alien intellectualism and human passion. The subtext still reads to me that the aliens are missing something due to their 'more evolved' state, a la GR's Earth: Final Conflict, and that it's the humans who are better. It's almost the Trek prejudice that humans have something special and unique and are superior to other species, but I'll want to watch episode 10 again before I commit to that.
Of course, as "I'm confused! I don't know which genre flick I want to rip off!" filmmaking goes, Taken is still far superior to Event Horizon or Supernova. (It genuiniely pains me to bash an Angela Basset movie.)
And, of course, it's always good to see more of Matt Frewer.
BTW you can't guarantee getting something good if you buy Sony.
To say the very least.
Sony equipment I've bought that crapped out on me: 5.25" floppy disk with no hub reinforcing ring (circa 1985), a Walkman that had a constant skip on the second half of every CD, headphones that leaned to the right, a 20-inch monitor (TV, not computer) that went green after only one year of use, EverQuest, and an Aibo site that would open fine in Opera if you saved it to disk first but was programmed to redirect you to a "MS or Netscape only" page otherwise.
Sony equipment that didn't crap out on me: none.
You heard me right: every last product I *ever* bought from Sony has crapped out on me.
Ellen
What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable.
The Camarilla Princes are going to be really pissed when they find out they've been running at ( 1 / 10^5 ) / ( 18 / 36346 ) of their optimal capacity.
We Sabbat knew better, of course.
Cousin Ellen
Yes, and here it is:We celebrate way too many people who want some freedom, for some people, under some circumstances. Freedom of religion is okay, unless you're a Muslim looking to board an airplane. Freedom of speech is okay, unless your election-stealing leaders are playing at war. Freedom from search and seizure is okay, unless you feel you have the right to smoke marijuana in your own home.
Sooner or later, there's always some exception. There's always some excuse to tell other people what to do. We need to back the only truly ethical social system, the only one that genuinely treats people as equals: no one has the right to tell anyone what they can do. Unfortunately, people want for themselves more than they want for others, and so they start making exceptions for Muslims, or pacifists, or stoners.
I say screw that. We are only as free as the least free among us. (Would someone please attribute that? It is certainly not original with me!) I want freedom without exceptions and I want it for everyone so I can sleep better at night. I want our kids to stop saying a Pledge of Allegiance, and start saying a Pledge of Freedom: "Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary."
I wish we did have Malcolm X Day.
Ellen
A 'cup' is a convenient measure because by human scale it's a typical unit of consumption.
So they're using the 'bong hit' as a measure in your neck of the woods?
The CNN article appears to have been written to give the impression that Alder is anti-metric. It's necessary to read into paragraph 23 out of 26 to find out that Alder is actually pro-metric. Before that, the article quotes Alder so it looks like he's anti-metric.
A clock?!? Wow!!!
Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?
Sadly, most people do think this. People want all their problems solved by somebody else. They don't have a sense of responsibility for their own lives.
Proof: The whole history of humankind. People serve government and they like it that way. People are happy to abandon ethical responsibility to an imaginary invisible man in the sky who supposedly made the universe.
More Proof: The statement that gets me in more trouble bar none than any other. It isn't that I think Nazi's have the right to express themselves, even when it's pure genocidal hate speech... it isn't that I believe the best government is no government... it isn't that I think individuals should be allowed to own atomics for when government gets uppity... it isn't that I think that doors that slam too fast should be left that way because slow people losing fingers is Evolution In Action(tm).
It's my belief that learning is the responsibility of the learner, not of the teacher. Nothing generates as many responses, as quickly and with as much frustration, as this one belief of mine, that you are responsible for educating yourself.
That sort of person is never going to want to spend time configuring their BIOS, maintaining their car, or doing anything else they weren't told to do.
Ellen
Where does something become speech?... Is code speech?
The drafters of the US Consitution were 159 years too early for information theory. I like to entertain the fantasy that if Jefferson were alive today, he'd refer to "freedom of information flow".
This would certainly clear up the "is code speech?" question, as well as issues like pornograhy and encryption. If information flow is protected, all of the excuses for censorship go away. Speech is too often narrowed down for political purposes, when the intent was to liberate expression from political forces.
I'd suggest a Freedom of Information Amendment, but I think the acronym FOIA is already taken.
Ellen
The websites I design contain links to the W3C HTML and CSS validators. The links might look something like this
XHTML 1.0 CSS
and I put them in the site template, so they appear on every page. These are referer links, which mean that they check the page you are linking from. When I finish making changes to a page, I click those links in sequence, and if my page doesn't pass, I fix the XHTML or CSS that's causing the problem.
Depending on the type of page, I might make them bold and obvious, with the checkmark graphics that W3C offers, or I might hook them to a bullet or a period so they're obscure and don't become a design element.
I use absolute positioning to do layout that people often do with tables, and my sites look fine in anything from IE to lynx to Mozilla.
Ellen
OK. We get it! You're a girl. Your userid is Ellen Ripley. You sign your posts "Ellen". Your sig also says "Ellen Ripley" in it. We get it. You're a girl. You're on slashdot. Do you want a medal?
Calm down, Beavis! I learned my posting style in USENET news in the more civilized and genteel -- one might even say quaint, rural or old-fashioned -- legendary and distant days of yore... okay, 1987... so that's how I format my posts here.
You can shut off signatures by visiting your Comment Options page and checking "Disable Sigs".
I can't help you with the userid, name or low frustration threshold issues.
Ellen
Sometimes you just have to hold on to people who know the emerging markets, even if they do not share the same ideology.
True, but lots of corporations don't believe this. Profit in modern corporations is like God in organized religion. Large corporations say they're about Profit, but they are really about maintaining the corporate culture. Anyone who isn't a true believer must go.
The corporation I worked for was, for the most part, staffed at the line-management level with mindless functionaries. We would piss away hundreds if not thousands of dollars every week for the sake of doing things the company way. We'd bend over forward time after time after time to accomodate repeat customers who were losing us money by the continued presence of their job in the store. Why? Because corporate culture demands not profit, but accomodation and competition. Don't piss anyone off! Don't let them go to the other company! If it were about profit, we would have sent these problem customers to the competiton. They could have crippled our competition in no time at all.
(I'm not pro-profit in any big way, but I do think that a genuine profit motive makes a company a better member of its community than corporate culturalism, by way of ordinary free-market forces. I think it's sad that ruthless profit-mindedness would actually improve the current situation.)
Or look at election workers. I saw some on television the other day after local primaries and they were jumping up and down like little kids because their candidate won. That wasn't about believing in and striving for an ideal, or doing an important job; that was about Our candidate won! Yay!
I feel that over time, this culturalism percolates to higher and higher levels in any given social structure. Without some kind of check against culture becoming the end instead of the means, soon the entire institution in question is run by these tribal idiots. At this point, the people serve the culture instead of the culture serving the people.
Ellen
Ellen
Open source is about convincing the world that it is a better development methodology.
Open source is a better development methodology. It has created -- without government help, anti-competitive practices or huge amounts of corporate money -- software that is more stable, more useful, more reliable and more capable than the software stamped out by Microsoft and other corporate giants. Free software advocates have done this at a price that literally can't be beat, and more often than not, they've done it from a goodness of heart and an idealism that makes me wish Lennon were alive to see it.
Most of its adherents would be perfectly happy it it killed off proprietary software, thus eliminating "choice".
Wow, I don't know where to start with this one. First, are you seriously proposing that it is even possible to eliminate your freedom to choose to buy proprietary software? You and your business associates are free to keep the sub-par software you're using now, and you are free to continue developing with it. How is this eliminating choice? Just because we don't want to use the huge steaming pile of crap that is proprietary software doesn't mean you have to stop.
Second, even assuming free software could 100% eliminate proprietary software, the process by which free software creators would like to do this is by giving people more freedom of choice. They're not going around holding guns to people's heads and saying "use our software", they're just writing it and giving it away! People are trying it, they're finding that it's better, and they're sticking with it. Yay, good guys!
They explictly reject the choice to produce and use proprietary software as a freedom.... the "freedom to choose" may be your philosophy, or Tim O'Reilly's philosophy, but it is not that of free software or open source.
This is a blatant distortion of what is stated by the FSF and Stallman, to the degree that I'm wondering if you read the same words as I did. Your implication that they are advocating a removal of your choice is simply wrong. Just because members and supporters of the FSF, Stallman or anyone else rejects a choice doesn't mean they oppose your right to choose it for yourself. They believe in and strive for an extremely idealistic position, but that advocacy is their personal exercise of freedom, and their vigorous public advocacy of their ideas is their social exercise of freedom.
The idea that they are somehow trying to remove your rights is made out of whole cloth.
Ellen
You and I are meant to be free; governments, as the executors of the will of the people, are not.
The troubling thing is how often this needs to be said. There are regular postings here which imply that government agencies have the same rights as, for instance, an ordinary business.
Is the idea that government is deliberately straightjacketed, is held to an artificially high standard, not taught in public schools anymore? Isn't this covered in high school civics classes, for instance?
Ellen
The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.
Ellen
... some people simply cannot learn from a book!!!! ... the vast majority of people have a hard time learning material on their own with only a dry text book to guide them.
Tough. Being unable to learn from a book is like being unable to write on paper with a pen. It's a basic and required literacy skill and if you don't have it, you need to get it.
Your statement is the learning equivalent of saying "some people simply cannot drive with a gas pedal... they need someone to ride with them and operate the gas". Wrong. You can't drive a car without knowing how to use the gas pedal, and you can't learn without being able to pull information from a book.
It may not be the student's fault. Some secondary schools are tax-funded day care centers, and issue diplomas for attendance. I feel for those who've been short-changed this way, but that doesn't help the students. The driver's licence doesn't enable you to drive, it just certifies that you can. You still can't actually drive a car if you don't understand the basic operation of the gas pedal. You can sit down and wait to be magically transported to your destination, but you're not going anywhere if you don't know how to use the pedal.
Likewise, you can't learn if you don't know how to absorb the accumulated knowledge of those who came before you. The job of the person at the front of the classroom is not to digest knowledge for students, because it can't be done. The learning process involves exactly one person, the student. The only one who can teach you is you.
If a teacher is able to make the learning process easier, that's a nice bonus. In the end, though, the student must be responsible for learning, or never learn. That includes the responsibility of picking up the basic tools of the trade, and one of them is learning by reading a book.
Ellen
Eventually the RIAA is going to have to realize that album sales aren't going to be bringing in the big bucks anymore...
... [they] are going to have to focus on promoting concerts, t-shirts, and other things that can't be ripped from the web.
You're shoveling the RIAA's spin. The recording labels are not losing money because of mp3 downloads. They still make huge money; profits go up every year. The idea that mp3 downloads are hurting sales is pure RIAA propaganda.
They probably will try this, but right now artists live on ancillary income way more than on retail sales. I don't think it's a good idea for that income to start going to the labels now.
More important, the technology finally exists for artists to make and distribute their music without any need for the labels. Why should artists give 95% of their sales revenue to a bunch of suits? That money could go into the artists' pockets, and it should.
Ellen
Can I force another property to stop blocking my radio waves?
Not morally.
What you're really asking is whether you can force people to allow you access to their property. The short answer is no, it's their property. If they want to keep radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, smoke, fog, air pollution, sonic energy from bass-heavy car stereos, neighborhood pets and children, communists, capitalists or hippies off their property, they have the right to do that.
I mean, what if I live next door to a cinema and they install this? Suddenly I can't receive mobile phone calls in my house because I'm in the shadow of the cinema!
Tough. You shouldn't have presumed access to their property.
Ellen
That thing looks like the map Vaughn showed Sidney of SD-6!
Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) wants to legalize DoS attacks on P2P networks...
As a Trek fan, I have to wonder if there is not something seriously wrong with people from California named Berman.
Ellen
Okay, so we don't link to the NPR page, we just *type* the link. Then our new keeping-up-with-the-fascists browsers automagically 'linkify' it for us. (Opera has no trouble heating up URIs sent to me by email, for instance.)
NPR is showing an "if she weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood and therefore a witch" degree of technical qualifications on this issue. (They must have hired Dvorak.) To prevent linking, they would have to prevent us from even *mentioning* the URI. Maybe we should make sure no one mentions any URIs at all, anywhere, ever.
Hmmm, maybe it's not a mistake. NPR is Democratic/liberal, right? As opposed to Republican/conservative? I know one group wants my money and one wants to tell me what I can say, but I can never remember which is which.
Ellen