I was going to make your point about most of everything being crap, but you made it so very well.
I'll just add that I've cleaned up hideous code in C, C++, ASM, Perl, Basic, VB, ObjectPAL, and probably other languages. Usually because somebody didn't know a simpler way to accomplish the task and ended up reinventing the wheel, or used a bubble sort where a quicksort would do, etc. Or, in nasty cases, coded their own quicksort as an optimization, because they didn't realize the libraries contained a quicksort routine...
I think my code has gotten easier to read and less crufty in languages like perl because things that would have been such a pain in C (for instance) are just a line or two of code. This lets you get down to the business of writing the program, not the functions.
(The side effect of this though is programmers who do terribly complex list operations without an understanding of what would be involved in coding them manually, and thus no idea of what is involved in processing them. But that's my example of why formal education (forcing you to do stuff that doesn't immediately make sense, like ASM) is really a good thing.)
Perl can make an unreadable program, but it'd be an unreadable C program, just ten times longer. And I'm sure many of the people I've worked with (myself included I'm sure, at times) could mangle it even with Python, if we were rushed.
Nobody can really be dumb enough to think that companies will pass savings back to the consumer. Hell, even if they did, it'd make much more of a difference to shop at a discount store like Costco that simply did large-number statistics rather than individial studies.
Stores want your buying habits linked to your identity so that they can sell them to more unscrupulous marketers who'll do things that even poor Joe Average Consumer and his friend Mr Sixpack would care about.
Finally, you haven't shown anything. You obviously don't understand what a proof is. You simply obnoxiously stated your opinion and demanded that I accept it.
I agree about the overabundance of lawsuits, but here I think you misunderstood the intent of the post...
If someone lists you on their blackhole list claiming that you are running an open relay and refuses to change your status once you are not, you might have a libel case.
Not that people shouldn't be added to a "once ran an open relay" list that doesn't get blocked, but which gets added to the block list again more easily, or which people scan occasionally to check their compliance.
I don't know how well the lists are being run now, but a year or so ago there was a lot of scandal about list maintainers using them to unfairly hush their critics. In that case they aren't maintaining a list of people they don't accept email from, they're maintaining a list of people they claim have committed an offense worthy of being ignored. There's a subtle difference there. If they had said "I hold a grudge against these people for various reasons from having an open relay to having insulted my sister" then they would be in the clear.
I don't really care that Brin didn't adress a certain thing, I'm not trying to say that he's right, just that I think surveillance technology will eventually get to the point he describes and there are multiple ways a future with that technology can play out.
If surveillance technology remains obvious, big cameras, easily detectable broadcasts, then there will be a privacy gap. The rich can afford better scans and smaller cameras.
But I think eventually cameras will be so small you won't be able to easily spot them and that they'll do encrypted bursts of pictures on spread spectrum. It'll appear to be random noise unless you know the key or manage to get close enough to the camera just when it sends.
I don't believe that the rich are ever going to hire only other rich people to take care of their houses and country clubs, so the "poor" (or really, anyone) will have a chance of accessing them. There will also be more people looking to snoop on any given rich person than on any given poor person.
Now, I don't think that a society where everyone is snooping on everyone is a good one, by any means. But I don't think laws will protect the people from it. (If the police could use hidden cameras and catch all the "baddy of the week" who would support laws preventing this? "Just think of the children...")
So, being that I think 90% of the people are going to get snooped on, I think their only defense is going to be snooping on everyone else. It'll be harder for politicians to push for opressive laws if you can find pictures of them and their family violating these proposed laws.
To summarize, I don't see it as an ideal world by any means, but I think it's inevitable in one form or another.
There are many other concerns than just the lowest price. Many people shop at service oriented stores, paying up to 10% more for wider aisles and having their groceries bagged for them. If you want the lowest prices then you can shop at the Walmarts and Costcos.
Personally I'd rather spend an extra percent or two in order to not deal with the unscrupulous types trying to correlate all data about me in order to make a buck or two. And I really doubt they'd pass the savings on to the customers anyways, it's just make their profits a bit sweeter and like I said, I don't give a damn about their profitability.
I've got a moderately sized investment portfolio now (retirement) and I do select funds based on what they are invested in. Partly because I don't want to have to whine when a company gets busted and the stock tanks.
But really, I don't see why investing in a company obviously involved in illegal activities is any better when you stand to make money off of it. I can see why it's more attractive, but that's not supposed to matter is it? (You wouldn't forgive a thief who stole a Porsche would you, just because it was a very attractive target?)
The only thing that hurts about not investing in fraudulent companies is that the people who do get huge payoffs from it. That doesn't mean we should all sell out though, it means instead that we should try to put a stop to it so that the honest people don't get penalized.
I realize that the patent office can't put enough work into it to make sure that the patents really are going to stand up in court, but some of the patents granted are just ridiculous. Especially the ones granting control of a huge subject, like SS's patent on the network delivery of digital data.
What you're missing is that society is already headed towards the future you describe. But it'll be a future where laws are applied only to the poor, for the benefit of the rich.
And I don't know where you get the idea that this requires extra laws. I think it requires that extra laws aren't passed.
And as to who gets to watch who... There are a lot more poor people and the rich will never seperate too far. They need maids and nannies and butlers, etc. The rich will of course have more ability to watch any individual poor person, but there will be a thousand poor people willing to watch and record the rich person.
Neither future will be good, but the one that doesn't include selectively enforced laws to punish the poor even more than now.
I wonder if the patent office will ever be sued (though there are some hoops to jump through to be able to do this) for gross negligence, or something. Some of the patents they're letting through are fraudulent, in a way that should be obvious to a member of the profession, let alone a supposedly skilled examiner.
I can picture a company like AOL or Microsoft having the money to sue the PTO for reimbursment of their court costs against SightSound, or some other jerkwater company consisting of a patent and a flock of lawyers.
While I'm sure big companies like IBM have patented their share of obvious gadgets they've also got some real patents and this general weakening of patents (what's a patent worth, every idiot can get one) stands to hurt them a lot.
I'd love to see the government called to the carpet for their failures and the consequences those have had on the populace.
Their profitability doesn't concern me. If they can't show me a direct benefit to me, I'm not going to want them snooping.
If they can convince me that there is a benefit, I'll opt-in. But perhaps I value my privacy more than you and am willing to pay 2% higher prices (or whatever) to keep it.
Someone with your sig shouldn't speak of things trollish. Pot, Kettle, and all that.
If I want to know "about" a band I can use google. But if I want to hear them I pretty well need to get a CD, listen to the radio or MTV, or download an MP3.
I'm not saying that downloading an MP3 is legal, but I'm saying that if I was to do so it would either benefit the band or not affect them. Either I'd not care about the music and delete the MP3 to save space, or I'd like it and want to get more, at which point I'd buy the CD, or support them in whatever way they wanted.
That said, "Stealing" and "Theft" both require the victim to lose something. If I copy a song it doesn't deprive them of it, so it's not theft or stealing. There's a specific term for it "copyright violation", I suggest you use it.
As for airplay, are you suggesting that kickbacks and payola don't dominate the industry? If so there are many people with more experience than me and likely than you, who would vehemently disagree.
Thanks for the background. I didn't know there was even a specific quote that was being mangled.
Yes, my point is that if the law is so complex that a properly schooled adult can't be expected to know it (or easily understand it and know where to find a definitive answer at any rate) they shouldn't be expected to follow it. (Properly schooled would, I guess, mean grade 12 education - the end of the state funded schooling.)
If you've read Brin's earlier essays on this, I think the idea is that we all become (potentially) watchers.
If the government passes laws against civilian access to cameras, etc, it won't stop the government, or the rich. But the poor will not only be out of the loop (illegal cameras are expensive cameras) but they'll be punished if they ever compete.
If the laws put everyone on an equal footing then people can watch the rulers and the rich even while they're being watched themselves. Sure, no individual watcher is above corruption, but if we're all corrupted, does it count as corruption, or a changing society? If there are laws against the monitoring (as opposed to the use of knowledge from monitoring) it'll be hard to punish the people with smaller cameras, and police even now tend to go after the poor instead of the rich. If however the laws prevent the use of knowledge gained through snooping, we'll have the ammunition needed to take on the rich and powerful if they ever abuse their power enough for "us" to find it worth whistle-blowing.
I find the end of privacy to be inevitable, so I want some way to ensure we don't end up with 1984. I'd rather everyone could stare at me and vice versa (we'd all get over sexual hangups fairly soon) instead of only the elite few who control the police. Especially if those people could also watch the police and the officials, seeing that they followed their own laws.
It wouldn't be an ideal world, but it'd be better than others, and I think we're headed in that direction, like it or not.
The heft of a good book is nice, but mainly I think because it implies a lot of content.
You can do this with e-books. Sort your directory listings by size.:)
I do like paper books and I own many shelves full of them, but they're a pain when I move, I can't search them, and they eventually wear out (and would be destroyed in a fire).
But I don't desire to see paper go away, just to be an option.
Really, for collector value, or just wall-covering I'd prefer to buy an ebook and get a poster, instead of a physical book. The poster at least is designed to be used just by being looked at. Books only look impressive in a collection.
The bit about businesses being allowable, as long as they follow laws, is something we should have today. But really, it shouldn't need to be said.
There should be the basic assumption that a business has no rights aside from those the owner has. (As free from search/seizure as they are, etc.)
And you know, that mandatory education isn't totally a bad idea. It's almost universally recognized that children aren't masters of their existance, so it's not like people see it as slavery.
Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, but it should be. Our laws are so complex you have to consult an attorney before doing almost anything, if you want to remain on the right side of the law. IMHO part of reducing government to a usable level would be to simplify the laws to the point where the product of our education system could understand them all, and not piece by piece, but where they could hold enough of them in their mind to check for contradiction. Only at that point will people really be treated as true adults - told the rules and expected to live by the rules. Unfortunately this requires people to be educated to a certain minimum level.
Now, mandatory standard education isn't a good thing IMHO, but making it mandatory that a child be educated is different. I think there should be a written exam you need to pass to be counted as a legal adult. If you're a natural genius and don't need teaching, fine. If your parents home-school you, fine. But if you aren't being educated I think it's in everyone's best interests if you are forced to get one. Otherwise the state has no recourse but to treat you as a child, someone incapable of taking responsibility.
Taxes may be akin to "theft at gunpoint" but I don't feel they'd be that way if we had two things.
1) Accountability - independent auditors (or ourselves) checking the government books and civilian oversite commitees.
2) The ability to refuse to pay tax, at which point we opt out of the whole social contract. So work for a few years, buy a bit of Montana, and opt out of the system. (Perhaps being required to put up a lifetime's worth of tax for defense, or something that protects you regardless). But anyways, something achievable by the libertarians who feel hard done by. If they want to visit the rest of the country they can do so as foreign citizens from then on.
Oh yes, I forgot the ground-breaking court decision that established that one person could rant about something, write it up, post it, and it would settle a hotly contested topic for the rest of time.
Oh wait, that never happened. Which just means that the issue is still open.
And when are you ever going to go away? Your trolling gets tiresome. You obviously hate Slashdot with a passion (do they refuse to post your stories?) as seen by your sig yet you won't simply shut up and go away.
Yawn. Yet another pretentious windbag basing their predictions off of their own desires.
It's faster to read off of a monitor, or PDA, they can hold a lot more for their size than a paperback book can, and they offer many things books don't, such as a search capability.
Not only do most people (those who try, instead of babbling about how much they love the old media) find they read more quickly on an ebook, but they find it's more comfortable because they don't need to flip pages, hold it in the light, or anything else which may be awkward. Most ebooks even offer an automatic scroll feature which means you don't need to push 'page down'.
You should consider that the reasons books have survived as long as they have is that computers weren't available through most of our history and certainly until a few years ago, they weren't convenient enough for reading from.
btw, books haven't stayed the way they were for 500 years. They've gotten smaller and lighter, almost as if people realized that the words were important and the book just provided a way to carry them around.
Have fun letting the world pass you by, just so you can claim "true fan" status and snub any advances. I won't try to force you to do anything, though I may mock you for your stuborn denial of reality.
I find collectors markets tend to get in the way of people who want to enjoy/use an item for what it was meant.
Book collectors like large books, so hard-covers get released and a year later, as an after-though, paperbacks come out. If it wasn't for the collectors they'd likely all be paperback size, but some with hard covers and real bindings.
In gaming, Magic the Gathering was made not as a game, but as a collectable card series that a game was based around. They designed "rare" cards into the system and then wondered why gameplay sucked when anyone with the cash could buy a better deck than the majority of the people.
The funny thing is that very little made to be collectible ends up being profitable for the collectors. Magic cards aren't anywhere near as valuable now because the number of different rares kept increasing until most people got sick of it. Hard cover books are printed in enough quantity to ensure that they're never worth anything, unless they happen to be misprinted.
Wah. If the stockholders didn't like the idea of courts and federal marshalls interfering with profits they should have avoided buying stock from a company that had broken the law and was obviously doing so again.
Maybe the loss of some money will teach them. Nothing else seems to reach people anymore.
Funny that. I would consider buying stock in a company that was breaking the law (and doing it publicly) to be something wrong. I'd consider it perfectly fair if investors who bought MS stock lost their money.
And if someone's mutual fund bought MS, they should have checked what the fund was buying.
The government intrusion here is limited to the government asking to see evidence pertaining to an open case. Seems perfectly reasonable.
Would you expect health inspectors to ignore looking at a particular set of freezers (being actively used) simply because the company claimed the freezer design was a trade secret?
MS is just lucky that Bill and a bunch of employees didn't get to spend 90 days in jail for contempt when they lied to the judge. (Technically, fabricated evidence, which I guess counts as perjury. The "Windows barely runs without IE" video that was shown to be doctored.)
They're being asked to hand over evidence (that will be kept secret, unlike usualy trial proceedings) for a trial, not to GPL it and release it.
Also, Microsoft (Bill and various employees) have repeatedly lied to the court. (Remember the Windows-without-IE video?) The fair thing to do would be to toss everyone involved with that into jail for ninety days and hit them with a whopping fine (in relation to the ammount of money they were attempting to save by lying) for it.
The state governments are perfectly justified in asking for this.
Would either of them survive if all book ever printed were on the net in nice format, and free?
That's what the music companies face. There's *no* way they can stop it. They can slow it, and inconvenience people, but they can't stop it. In fact, short of buying opressive laws, they can't even slow it much.
I'm sure the big music companies will be around in ten years. Hell, Rome "fell" in the 400s but the "Roman Empire" in a lesser form lasted until the 1400s.
What the big music companies won't be doing in ten years is controlling things the way they do now. Sure, it'll always take huge marketing muscle to make a Britney, but if radio stations and MTV (the publicity arm of the music companies) lose popularity you'll be able to buy that publicity like with anything else. I doubt you'll ever make it *huge* without backing, but that backing could be from a marketing firm that's not considered part of the music industry.
And really, as long as it breaks the monopoly and the industry associations, who cares what the exact form is?
Good for you, for doing your own tests instead of just repeating what you've been told, regardless of if it's "MP3s suck" or "MP3s rock".
I kept getting told that MP3s suck so I got really good earbuds ($80 earbuds aren't the best or anything, but they beat anything else in my pricerange and have better bass than my stereo speakers) and my fiance and I did some tests.
At 128 with Audio Catalyst, MP3s are easily recognizable (not always bad, but different). At 128 with LAME (and EAC) we could barely tell. At 192VBR (-r3mix) we couldn't tell any difference.
We really should get an OGG encoder installed and try encoding with it, smaller is always better, if the quality is the same as people suggest.
btw. Can you name a song or two that stands out in your listening test, and how to tweak the EQ to highlight the difference? It's somewhat academic because we don't listen to music that way, but it would be good to have something obvious we can use to demonstrate audio artifacts. Is it one of the default settings in Winamp, or what?
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I was going to make your point about most of everything being crap, but you made it so very well.
I'll just add that I've cleaned up hideous code in C, C++, ASM, Perl, Basic, VB, ObjectPAL, and probably other languages. Usually because somebody didn't know a simpler way to accomplish the task and ended up reinventing the wheel, or used a bubble sort where a quicksort would do, etc. Or, in nasty cases, coded their own quicksort as an optimization, because they didn't realize the libraries contained a quicksort routine...
I think my code has gotten easier to read and less crufty in languages like perl because things that would have been such a pain in C (for instance) are just a line or two of code. This lets you get down to the business of writing the program, not the functions.
(The side effect of this though is programmers who do terribly complex list operations without an understanding of what would be involved in coding them manually, and thus no idea of what is involved in processing them. But that's my example of why formal education (forcing you to do stuff that doesn't immediately make sense, like ASM) is really a good thing.)
Perl can make an unreadable program, but it'd be an unreadable C program, just ten times longer. And I'm sure many of the people I've worked with (myself included I'm sure, at times) could mangle it even with Python, if we were rushed.
Oh get over yourself.
Nobody can really be dumb enough to think that companies will pass savings back to the consumer. Hell, even if they did, it'd make much more of a difference to shop at a discount store like Costco that simply did large-number statistics rather than individial studies.
Stores want your buying habits linked to your identity so that they can sell them to more unscrupulous marketers who'll do things that even poor Joe Average Consumer and his friend Mr Sixpack would care about.
Finally, you haven't shown anything. You obviously don't understand what a proof is. You simply obnoxiously stated your opinion and demanded that I accept it.
Never mind. We'll never agree.
I agree about the overabundance of lawsuits, but here I think you misunderstood the intent of the post...
If someone lists you on their blackhole list claiming that you are running an open relay and refuses to change your status once you are not, you might have a libel case.
Not that people shouldn't be added to a "once ran an open relay" list that doesn't get blocked, but which gets added to the block list again more easily, or which people scan occasionally to check their compliance.
I don't know how well the lists are being run now, but a year or so ago there was a lot of scandal about list maintainers using them to unfairly hush their critics. In that case they aren't maintaining a list of people they don't accept email from, they're maintaining a list of people they claim have committed an offense worthy of being ignored. There's a subtle difference there. If they had said "I hold a grudge against these people for various reasons from having an open relay to having insulted my sister" then they would be in the clear.
I don't really care that Brin didn't adress a certain thing, I'm not trying to say that he's right, just that I think surveillance technology will eventually get to the point he describes and there are multiple ways a future with that technology can play out.
If surveillance technology remains obvious, big cameras, easily detectable broadcasts, then there will be a privacy gap. The rich can afford better scans and smaller cameras.
But I think eventually cameras will be so small you won't be able to easily spot them and that they'll do encrypted bursts of pictures on spread spectrum. It'll appear to be random noise unless you know the key or manage to get close enough to the camera just when it sends.
I don't believe that the rich are ever going to hire only other rich people to take care of their houses and country clubs, so the "poor" (or really, anyone) will have a chance of accessing them. There will also be more people looking to snoop on any given rich person than on any given poor person.
Now, I don't think that a society where everyone is snooping on everyone is a good one, by any means. But I don't think laws will protect the people from it. (If the police could use hidden cameras and catch all the "baddy of the week" who would support laws preventing this? "Just think of the children...")
So, being that I think 90% of the people are going to get snooped on, I think their only defense is going to be snooping on everyone else. It'll be harder for politicians to push for opressive laws if you can find pictures of them and their family violating these proposed laws.
To summarize, I don't see it as an ideal world by any means, but I think it's inevitable in one form or another.
You always stoop to insults so quickly.
There are many other concerns than just the lowest price. Many people shop at service oriented stores, paying up to 10% more for wider aisles and having their groceries bagged for them. If you want the lowest prices then you can shop at the Walmarts and Costcos.
Personally I'd rather spend an extra percent or two in order to not deal with the unscrupulous types trying to correlate all data about me in order to make a buck or two. And I really doubt they'd pass the savings on to the customers anyways, it's just make their profits a bit sweeter and like I said, I don't give a damn about their profitability.
What an easy brush-off.
I've got a moderately sized investment portfolio now (retirement) and I do select funds based on what they are invested in. Partly because I don't want to have to whine when a company gets busted and the stock tanks.
But really, I don't see why investing in a company obviously involved in illegal activities is any better when you stand to make money off of it. I can see why it's more attractive, but that's not supposed to matter is it? (You wouldn't forgive a thief who stole a Porsche would you, just because it was a very attractive target?)
The only thing that hurts about not investing in fraudulent companies is that the people who do get huge payoffs from it. That doesn't mean we should all sell out though, it means instead that we should try to put a stop to it so that the honest people don't get penalized.
I realize that the patent office can't put enough work into it to make sure that the patents really are going to stand up in court, but some of the patents granted are just ridiculous. Especially the ones granting control of a huge subject, like SS's patent on the network delivery of digital data.
What you're missing is that society is already headed towards the future you describe. But it'll be a future where laws are applied only to the poor, for the benefit of the rich.
And I don't know where you get the idea that this requires extra laws. I think it requires that extra laws aren't passed.
And as to who gets to watch who... There are a lot more poor people and the rich will never seperate too far. They need maids and nannies and butlers, etc. The rich will of course have more ability to watch any individual poor person, but there will be a thousand poor people willing to watch and record the rich person.
Neither future will be good, but the one that doesn't include selectively enforced laws to punish the poor even more than now.
I wonder if the patent office will ever be sued (though there are some hoops to jump through to be able to do this) for gross negligence, or something. Some of the patents they're letting through are fraudulent, in a way that should be obvious to a member of the profession, let alone a supposedly skilled examiner.
I can picture a company like AOL or Microsoft having the money to sue the PTO for reimbursment of their court costs against SightSound, or some other jerkwater company consisting of a patent and a flock of lawyers.
While I'm sure big companies like IBM have patented their share of obvious gadgets they've also got some real patents and this general weakening of patents (what's a patent worth, every idiot can get one) stands to hurt them a lot.
I'd love to see the government called to the carpet for their failures and the consequences those have had on the populace.
Their profitability doesn't concern me. If they can't show me a direct benefit to me, I'm not going to want them snooping.
If they can convince me that there is a benefit, I'll opt-in. But perhaps I value my privacy more than you and am willing to pay 2% higher prices (or whatever) to keep it.
Someone with your sig shouldn't speak of things trollish. Pot, Kettle, and all that.
If I want to know "about" a band I can use google. But if I want to hear them I pretty well need to get a CD, listen to the radio or MTV, or download an MP3.
I'm not saying that downloading an MP3 is legal, but I'm saying that if I was to do so it would either benefit the band or not affect them. Either I'd not care about the music and delete the MP3 to save space, or I'd like it and want to get more, at which point I'd buy the CD, or support them in whatever way they wanted.
That said, "Stealing" and "Theft" both require the victim to lose something. If I copy a song it doesn't deprive them of it, so it's not theft or stealing. There's a specific term for it "copyright violation", I suggest you use it.
As for airplay, are you suggesting that kickbacks and payola don't dominate the industry? If so there are many people with more experience than me and likely than you, who would vehemently disagree.
Thanks for the background. I didn't know there was even a specific quote that was being mangled.
Yes, my point is that if the law is so complex that a properly schooled adult can't be expected to know it (or easily understand it and know where to find a definitive answer at any rate) they shouldn't be expected to follow it. (Properly schooled would, I guess, mean grade 12 education - the end of the state funded schooling.)
If you've read Brin's earlier essays on this, I think the idea is that we all become (potentially) watchers.
If the government passes laws against civilian access to cameras, etc, it won't stop the government, or the rich. But the poor will not only be out of the loop (illegal cameras are expensive cameras) but they'll be punished if they ever compete.
If the laws put everyone on an equal footing then people can watch the rulers and the rich even while they're being watched themselves. Sure, no individual watcher is above corruption, but if we're all corrupted, does it count as corruption, or a changing society? If there are laws against the monitoring (as opposed to the use of knowledge from monitoring) it'll be hard to punish the people with smaller cameras, and police even now tend to go after the poor instead of the rich. If however the laws prevent the use of knowledge gained through snooping, we'll have the ammunition needed to take on the rich and powerful if they ever abuse their power enough for "us" to find it worth whistle-blowing.
I find the end of privacy to be inevitable, so I want some way to ensure we don't end up with 1984. I'd rather everyone could stare at me and vice versa (we'd all get over sexual hangups fairly soon) instead of only the elite few who control the police. Especially if those people could also watch the police and the officials, seeing that they followed their own laws.
It wouldn't be an ideal world, but it'd be better than others, and I think we're headed in that direction, like it or not.
What was your book about?
:)
The heft of a good book is nice, but mainly I think because it implies a lot of content.
You can do this with e-books. Sort your directory listings by size.
I do like paper books and I own many shelves full of them, but they're a pain when I move, I can't search them, and they eventually wear out (and would be destroyed in a fire).
But I don't desire to see paper go away, just to be an option.
Really, for collector value, or just wall-covering I'd prefer to buy an ebook and get a poster, instead of a physical book. The poster at least is designed to be used just by being looked at. Books only look impressive in a collection.
The bit about businesses being allowable, as long as they follow laws, is something we should have today. But really, it shouldn't need to be said.
There should be the basic assumption that a business has no rights aside from those the owner has. (As free from search/seizure as they are, etc.)
And you know, that mandatory education isn't totally a bad idea. It's almost universally recognized that children aren't masters of their existance, so it's not like people see it as slavery.
Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, but it should be. Our laws are so complex you have to consult an attorney before doing almost anything, if you want to remain on the right side of the law. IMHO part of reducing government to a usable level would be to simplify the laws to the point where the product of our education system could understand them all, and not piece by piece, but where they could hold enough of them in their mind to check for contradiction. Only at that point will people really be treated as true adults - told the rules and expected to live by the rules. Unfortunately this requires people to be educated to a certain minimum level.
Now, mandatory standard education isn't a good thing IMHO, but making it mandatory that a child be educated is different. I think there should be a written exam you need to pass to be counted as a legal adult. If you're a natural genius and don't need teaching, fine. If your parents home-school you, fine. But if you aren't being educated I think it's in everyone's best interests if you are forced to get one. Otherwise the state has no recourse but to treat you as a child, someone incapable of taking responsibility.
Taxes may be akin to "theft at gunpoint" but I don't feel they'd be that way if we had two things.
1) Accountability - independent auditors (or ourselves) checking the government books and civilian oversite commitees.
2) The ability to refuse to pay tax, at which point we opt out of the whole social contract. So work for a few years, buy a bit of Montana, and opt out of the system. (Perhaps being required to put up a lifetime's worth of tax for defense, or something that protects you regardless). But anyways, something achievable by the libertarians who feel hard done by. If they want to visit the rest of the country they can do so as foreign citizens from then on.
Oh yes, I forgot the ground-breaking court decision that established that one person could rant about something, write it up, post it, and it would settle a hotly contested topic for the rest of time.
Oh wait, that never happened. Which just means that the issue is still open.
And when are you ever going to go away? Your trolling gets tiresome. You obviously hate Slashdot with a passion (do they refuse to post your stories?) as seen by your sig yet you won't simply shut up and go away.
The corporations could, maybe, track sales data. If they sell 100 boxes of cereal X and 10 of cereal Y, they could stop making as much of cereal Y.
Yawn. Yet another pretentious windbag basing their predictions off of their own desires.
It's faster to read off of a monitor, or PDA, they can hold a lot more for their size than a paperback book can, and they offer many things books don't, such as a search capability.
Not only do most people (those who try, instead of babbling about how much they love the old media) find they read more quickly on an ebook, but they find it's more comfortable because they don't need to flip pages, hold it in the light, or anything else which may be awkward. Most ebooks even offer an automatic scroll feature which means you don't need to push 'page down'.
You should consider that the reasons books have survived as long as they have is that computers weren't available through most of our history and certainly until a few years ago, they weren't convenient enough for reading from.
btw, books haven't stayed the way they were for 500 years. They've gotten smaller and lighter, almost as if people realized that the words were important and the book just provided a way to carry them around.
Have fun letting the world pass you by, just so you can claim "true fan" status and snub any advances. I won't try to force you to do anything, though I may mock you for your stuborn denial of reality.
I find collectors markets tend to get in the way of people who want to enjoy/use an item for what it was meant.
Book collectors like large books, so hard-covers get released and a year later, as an after-though, paperbacks come out. If it wasn't for the collectors they'd likely all be paperback size, but some with hard covers and real bindings.
In gaming, Magic the Gathering was made not as a game, but as a collectable card series that a game was based around. They designed "rare" cards into the system and then wondered why gameplay sucked when anyone with the cash could buy a better deck than the majority of the people.
The funny thing is that very little made to be collectible ends up being profitable for the collectors. Magic cards aren't anywhere near as valuable now because the number of different rares kept increasing until most people got sick of it. Hard cover books are printed in enough quantity to ensure that they're never worth anything, unless they happen to be misprinted.
Wah. If the stockholders didn't like the idea of courts and federal marshalls interfering with profits they should have avoided buying stock from a company that had broken the law and was obviously doing so again.
Maybe the loss of some money will teach them. Nothing else seems to reach people anymore.
Funny that. I would consider buying stock in a company that was breaking the law (and doing it publicly) to be something wrong. I'd consider it perfectly fair if investors who bought MS stock lost their money.
And if someone's mutual fund bought MS, they should have checked what the fund was buying.
The government intrusion here is limited to the government asking to see evidence pertaining to an open case. Seems perfectly reasonable.
Would you expect health inspectors to ignore looking at a particular set of freezers (being actively used) simply because the company claimed the freezer design was a trade secret?
MS is just lucky that Bill and a bunch of employees didn't get to spend 90 days in jail for contempt when they lied to the judge. (Technically, fabricated evidence, which I guess counts as perjury. The "Windows barely runs without IE" video that was shown to be doctored.)
They're being asked to hand over evidence (that will be kept secret, unlike usualy trial proceedings) for a trial, not to GPL it and release it.
Also, Microsoft (Bill and various employees) have repeatedly lied to the court. (Remember the Windows-without-IE video?) The fair thing to do would be to toss everyone involved with that into jail for ninety days and hit them with a whopping fine (in relation to the ammount of money they were attempting to save by lying) for it.
The state governments are perfectly justified in asking for this.
Will Amazon win over Borders? Who knows.
Would either of them survive if all book ever printed were on the net in nice format, and free?
That's what the music companies face. There's *no* way they can stop it. They can slow it, and inconvenience people, but they can't stop it. In fact, short of buying opressive laws, they can't even slow it much.
I'm sure the big music companies will be around in ten years. Hell, Rome "fell" in the 400s but the "Roman Empire" in a lesser form lasted until the 1400s.
What the big music companies won't be doing in ten years is controlling things the way they do now. Sure, it'll always take huge marketing muscle to make a Britney, but if radio stations and MTV (the publicity arm of the music companies) lose popularity you'll be able to buy that publicity like with anything else. I doubt you'll ever make it *huge* without backing, but that backing could be from a marketing firm that's not considered part of the music industry.
And really, as long as it breaks the monopoly and the industry associations, who cares what the exact form is?
Good for you, for doing your own tests instead of just repeating what you've been told, regardless of if it's "MP3s suck" or "MP3s rock".
I kept getting told that MP3s suck so I got really good earbuds ($80 earbuds aren't the best or anything, but they beat anything else in my pricerange and have better bass than my stereo speakers) and my fiance and I did some tests.
At 128 with Audio Catalyst, MP3s are easily recognizable (not always bad, but different). At 128 with LAME (and EAC) we could barely tell. At 192VBR (-r3mix) we couldn't tell any difference.
We really should get an OGG encoder installed and try encoding with it, smaller is always better, if the quality is the same as people suggest.
btw. Can you name a song or two that stands out in your listening test, and how to tweak the EQ to highlight the difference? It's somewhat academic because we don't listen to music that way, but it would be good to have something obvious we can use to demonstrate audio artifacts. Is it one of the default settings in Winamp, or what?