Well, it's more like driving through Burger King's Drive-Thru, and finding as you're about to order your burger that the inside of your car suddenly covered in ads for McDonalds.
How did it get covered? Well, it turns out that the mechanic who provided the "free installation" on your car tires installed a little robot that popped out and pastered ads all over the dashboard, and it said right there, on the fifth page of the terms and conditions for free tire installation, under paragraph 72, subsection B, term IV "Our mechanic may make other modifications to your vehicle in return for agreeing to install the tires for free"
Ultimately the question here is not "Is the malware company contemptable?", it's "Who has the right to sue them? A local business, or you?"
Hey, great, I've turned this one into another car analogy. But I think mine kind of works.
In fairness, the guy's been pontificating for years. People who pontificate a lot usually end up being the same types of people who go out and end up leading particular projects, simply because they're the most outspoken. One of the biggest ironies of Open Source is that the movement was inspired, in part, by complaints that Richard M Stallman was "too political." ESR swept in as an anti-Stallman, not anti-Stallman in the sense of being non-political, but in having many opinions that gelled easier with the general libertarian-streak popular amongst the computing community of the time.
I'm not a great fan of ESR. I think the OSI almost passed into irrelevence under his reign (and was staggered after they choose Russ Nelson to succeed him to find out Nelson, at the time at least, was "more of the same, only with even less tact and social skills") While "Open Source" made an impact with the name, the OSI itself seemed to have relatively few successes under its belt, with often the most promoted successors being absurdly controvertial. It's interesting that one of the first messes Nelson and his successors had to deal with, for example, were the number of incompatible licenses.
Why were there incompatible licenses? Because, under ESR's active encouragement, every major business dipping a toe in the water were producing their own customized licenses that usually only minimally furfilled the requirements of the Open Source definition, usually being some form of "copyleft for you, proprietary if we want it for us." This severely damaged the usability of much of the code entering the Free Software world. The worst case were the original APSL (Apple) "Open Source" licenses, which even contained provisions allowing Apple to arbitrarily stop people from distributing APSL licensed code in the future. Only after heavy lobbying from the FSF and a war within the OSI did Apple fix this and other headline issues.
Raymond's saying the GPL isn't necessary now. I can't say I agree. The GPL remains the perfect license for both Open Source and the wider area of Free Software. A company that releases code under it knows any competitor using it will have to contribute any advances they make back. In the real world, where 90% of commercial programming is done in-house to create in-house applications, no license comes closer to meeting corporate requirements. And Raymond's wrong about Linux. The problem with Linux is not that it's protected under the GPL, it's that it hasn't been protected strongly enough - that is, there's not enough enforcement of the GPL when it comes to Linux. There are still frequent attempts to sneak proprietary device drivers into the kernel, for example. This directly hurts free software, because information about how those drivers work becomes unavailable. Users aren't able to fix bugs. Users of other, less famous, free operating systems are unable to create compatible drivers themselves.
One can probably make a whole bunch of ad-hominem comments here about why he isn't supportive about the GPL, but ultimately, it doesn't matter. We're going through problem after problem caused by people thinking they're being "practical" and screwing it up for everyone else. Linus adopts Bitkeeper. X11 users use nVidea drivers. If no-one else will, at least we'll always have the FSF to "get it" if those who like little centralized pockets of meritless power don't.
The area between the 96th and 128th KB may have been available for expansion, but it was the area from 768k onwards that was predominantly used for that. I'm not sure what you mean by the second point, it sounds like a low level technical detail that has nothing to do with the QL's memory map.
Your other comments are interesting but I doubt they show I'm wrong. My key comment was about compatability. I seriously doubt that you were able to use your existing disk drive controller cards et al with the cards you used to add memory (and CPU!) above the 1Mb limit.
I'm happy to be proven wrong if that is the case, but it does look to me like you're protesting that I somehow claimed the QL was unexpandable, when all I said was that due to an early, dumb (IMHO;), design decision, succeeding QLs would have had to have a hole in the memory map above 768k if they were to remain compatable with hardware for the previous version.
In practice, Sinclair never developed a successor, and the companies that produced QL clones and other expansion systems tended to get around the limitation by including the most popular upgrades in the hardware they were releasing. ie, yes, your old disk drive controller was now obsolete, but it was ok, because your Thor had a disk drive controller built in, so you didn't need the old controller any more.
Well, bits 24-31 didn't exist on the 68000. It wasn't until, IIRC, the 68020 that Motorola produced something capable of addressing the entire 4G range the Ax index registers were capable of addressing.
But... anyway, the technique you mention was used by Microsoft in AmigaBASIC. IIRC, the extra byte was used to store type information or something similar. The result was that by AmigaOS 2, Commodore had to drop bundling the interpreter, as AmigaOS 2 was originally intended to be for the (68020 based) A3000.
Not that it was ever a particularly good BASIC. Many critics have described it as obviously half finished. But it was just about the only language with anything resembling access to the lower level features of the OS that came with the machine, so it was a real loss in that respect.
That'd be bits 22 and 23. (If the 68000 had had a 32 bit external address bus, it'd have been able to address 4 gigs, not 16 megs); but, in any case, I think the article was talking about the 68000's maximum address space, not the Mac's - the criticism, after all, was about how Apple was making poor use of the 68000.
If you think that was bad BTW, the Sinclair QL had a 68008, which had an external 20 bit address bus (maximum of 1M, like the 8088); Sinclair decided in its infinite wisdom to put all the perpherals in the top 256k or so giving the machine the same 640k RAM limit (because RAM started at 128k) as the PC and ensuring that, if they ever came out with a better device, and it was to have some compatability with its predecessor, there'd be a hole right there in the memory map.
Re:And Paramount's response?
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P2P and TV
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And by providing someone with a monopoly of limited times, they're given an incentive to develop in the first place. Does it promote science and the useful arts to remove investment from all but the cheapest, can be done in one's spare time, types of art?
Do you know how many movies would be made if it wasn't for copyright, compared to today? Make a guess, given the average cost of a two hour movie is well into the millions, most of the ones you've heard of costing 10s of millions. How, exactly, are they going to be funded if their makers know that nobody has to pay them a damned thing to use the movie?
I'm pretty sure you have that backward. PEBL is a family, as is RAZR. The first RAZR is the V3. The first PEBL is the V6. They'll be adding models within each family over time.
This makes sense given it's what Motorola does generally. The V6x range are all pretty similar in style and appearance, likewise the T7xx series. When actual names have been used in the past, the Timeports, the StarTACs, etc, they've never applied to one single phone model. If they're going to heavily market the RAZR, they're not going to do it for a one off phone, especially when the defining characteristic they're marketing is the thing's form factor.
PEBL is, likewise, about a form factor (as is SLVR)
Nope. My T720 works great. I switched from Nokia two years ago after finding each phone I got from them was worse than the one previous.
The first phone I ever got was from Motorola too (a "Graphite", a phone made specifically for one2one in the UK), and that was solid as a rock. Unusually, it had a fairly reasonable UI too, despite being from 1997 or so.
It's not the same phone but it is part of the same family. (Ok, I should mention that someone's suggested fairly convincing evidence it's a fake, so I feel silly continuing here, but, in the name of science, or at least stupidity, let me do so.) Motorola appears to be using the document to suggest they're building out three "new" families of phone: RAZR, PEBL, and SLVR. The first RAZR phone has been released, the V3. Motorola has announced a PEBL V6. Without commentary, it's not certain what the presenter/hoaxer was saying for definite, but one assumes they're saying the iTunes phone is a PEBL model.
If (and it's a big if) the iTunes phone is in the PEBL family, then it's a flip phone. The only reason it'd be on the slide by the other PEBL phones is if this is the case. So, in the world of the presentation, that's what we're looking at.
Whether the presentation is, in fact, real, is another debate.
Lastly, does this thing look like anything Apple would actually sanction? I mean, seriously. Use your critical thinking skills. Apple has some very rigorous standards for their branding, and they only allow their logos to appear on products that they have approved. Something this big, I can't imagine Steve Jobs himself not being personally involved with. And this does not look like anything either Apple or Jobs would ever allow out there. Not just because it's ugly (though there is that), but it just looks so completely different from their design ethos. Apple is not going to have their first iTunes phone be a mini-Xbox.
The HP iPod? As AppleTurns once observed, people have seen corpses that colour.
In any case, it's not an Apple phone, it's a Motorola phone. The focussing on this as "Apple would never design/approve the design of something that looks like..." thing stuff is largely misplaced. It's sold by Motorola and it's going to play music, under license, from iTunes. It's not an Apple product.
The vector argument you give is interesting though. I have no way of telling that this is the case, but I'll take your word for it.
Well, the hoaxer must have pasted a lot of other stuff in then, because it does seem to be included in a section on their headline, next generation, phones of which the RAZR is the first and PEBL, including this phone, is the next. If the iTunes phone is in a presentation that doesn't focus on that kind of stuff, I assume you mean the whole "phone shapes" thing (about three sequential slides, first two focussing on shape and last focussing on design) should have been removed too.
If it's a fake, it's a pretty impressive one from what I can see.
While it doesn't look it at first, it's not impossible this is some kind of long flip phone (the shape, well, width to length ratio, isn't that far off my closed T720), with the keys on the inside. That would explain the apparent thickness.
Or it could be that you dial using the scrollwheel. Goodness help us if that's the case, as I've used iPod Linux before which has a similar scheme, and it's horrible.
Gut feeling: it's cheap to add, and the "photo" feature of the iPod photo is considered a "nice-to-have" that will generally improve the odds of the standard iPod selling (by people who like to carry around a lot of photos to show relatives and friends, for example. If my fiance didn't have a job that required being on the phone a lot, I'd be getting her one) without necessarily being capable of selling itself in a more expensive model.
I can see why a $500 "iPod Photo" couldn't sell, but I think a $299 model has a lot more viability.
A post that puts the above quote in context and essentially demonstrating the parent is deliberately deceiving people as to what Greenpeace said is further down buried in this thread, so I'll requote:
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace estimates that if the project yields any results at all, it will not be until the second half of this century.
"At a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project," it said.
Given your attempt to give the above context using the following "rejoiner":
You know, because it would be horrible to have this as an emmissions-free source of energy. Incredible.
which relies upon a presumption that Greenpeace is against the technology rather than the timings involved in developing it (and hence has given most people who replied to this the impression that this is, in fact the case), I'm calling the parent a liar. It's very clear he both knew what Greenpeace were saying and that you were, through selective quoting and begs-the-question argument, attempting to mislead.
Yes. The funny thing though is that that experience would never have happened at home, as you're generally advised to have your "rear speakers" level with where you're sitting, not behind you. I guess, for the most part, this is because sound coming from behind you when you're watching something in front of you is at best distracting and at worst, well, unnatural.
I've been in a theater (a real one, not a cinema) where actors decided to do something "behind the audience". That's a relatively common thing to do and it always comes across badly, in my experience.
To add my 2c: I like surround sound. When a DVD has been mastered with it in mind, it can make a big difference, though I think the subwoofer actually makes a bigger difference and usually most of us get the subwoofer as part of the package that gets us the surround. 13.1? Nah. For a living room, that's just absurd. Not unless I have a very, very, large living room at any rate.
Libertarianism isn't nihilism. Crime is still crime. If some private citizen actually decided to invade a country, it would be a CRIME.
Well, it would be a crime if there was a law against it. For the most part, the probability is that a libertarian government would pass such a law, but because of practicality rather than ideology: if someone of Libertaristan nationality, living in Libertaristan, "invades" Massachusetts in order to "liberate" it, Libertaristan is going to be royally screwed.
But it goes without saying that such a law would be considered a little controvertial.
The only reason Cecil Rhodes isn't regarded in history as a criminal is because he had the backing of the British Empire.
Not really. Queen Victoria was furious. And the argument that his mining groups were "agents of the crown" is really only grounded in the notion that any corporation of the time nominally was. It wasn't that his actions were approved by any government, and there was little functional or political difference between his companies and what we'd think of today as corporations. Many libertarians, of course, would argue that modern corporations are also "agents of the crown" (or agents of government) because of the special privileges granted to them that are not available to private citizens. I'm not so sure this is the case, but whatever.
The real reason Cecil Rhodes got away with it was simpler: the area of Africa he took over wasn't advanced enough to be anything but roundly defeated, and it had no allies (beyond, ironically, Queen Victoria) so there were no messy international entanglements to worry about. And with the simplistic "Britain at #1" politics of the time, by the time the consequences hit home, it would have been politically unpopular to try to find a way to punish him.
To a pure libertarian, business interference in government is every bit as wrong as government interference in business.
Well, the problem for many of us with libertarians is that there are as many opinions about what libertarianism is as there are libertarians themselves. Debates about whether a military should be private and whether adventures like Bush's Iraq invasion would have been less of an issue conducted outside of the sphere of government aren't exactly uncommon. I could argue that believers in democracy do not generally advocate violence, yet apparently we're in Iraq overthrowing Saddam Hussein with the most violent and extreme methods we currently have ('cos that's what war is) in the name of democracy. And a whole lot of people who consider themselves (small d) democrats (that is, advocates of democracy) are in favour of it, including Bush and Blair.
For "liberty", it doesn't even limit itself to international invasions. Libertarians, in my experience, have radically different opinions from each other on such basics as abortion, drugs, land ownership (google for "Royal Libertarian"), the right of free speech as it relates to employees and their employer's treatment of them, etc. I'm not saying this is a particularly bad thing, I just think it's perhaps wrong to write a "Well, libertarians would never stand for such a thing!" comment over something as obviously controvertial as what a citizen does in another country's juristiction with his own money.
I'm a bit stunned, however, that people still regard private citizens are more dangerous to liberty than kings and tyrants. They justify this by providing an extremely rare exception like Cecil Rhodes, as if the countless examples of tyranny over the millenia somehow don't count.
You're making a meaningless distinction (and it's worth noting that my comments about the 19th Century went beyond Rhodes.) The truth is that any group with power is liable to abuse it. It doesn't matter whether the power is violent or economic.
My real problem is with people who have power. Much of the good sid
Except that, contrary to Slashdot rumour, only governments can have armies.
Tell that to Cecil Rhodes!
(Well, you can't, he's dead. But he raised a private army and used it to take over an area of Africa now known as Zimbabwe. Ah, the 19th Century. Private armies. Debtors prisons. Children working as coal miners. Pure libertarianism in action. How can you not want to go back to those days?)
FWIW, if the Nokia 9500 had a 10G HD in it like my iPod and came with the relevent stuff necessary to play MP3s, yes, I'd crave it.
I have having my pockets stuffed with miscellaneous gadgets. Generally speaking, only my phone goes with me whereever I go. My iPod stays at work. I don't have a PDA. The "does one thing 'well'" thing is overrated. There's no reason why we can't have something that does three things well.
Funny, I just read the same opinion and ended up with an entirely different point of view. In fact, I'm trying to work out how you drew the conclusions you did. You've essentially ignored most of the issues SCOTUS came up with (it simply is false to suggest that SCOTUS was only interested in the three arguments you mention.)
I think SCOTUS, essentially, nailed StreamCast to the wall. Evidence was brought up that showed that StreamCast actually went into business intending to be sued (page 7: [t]he goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued.
It's the best way to get in the new[s].) for the publicity, that they intended to take over from Napster in the event that Napster was closed by a court doing the exact same thing, and even that they actively encouraged users to download tracks they knew the bulk of which would be unauthorized, for example, by allowing users to search for music in the Top 40 (page 8)
Further, the quotes you make either have absurd questions against them or you draw dubious distinctions. SCOTUS mentions the 90% argument because this is clearly not the same as the Sony case. The vast majority of users, argued SCOTUS at the time, are performing a legal act. The VCR was a legal machine because it was marketed as a device to perform certain, legal, operations and because that's how it was used. SCOTUS notes that simply is not true of Morpheus.
SCOTUS mentions that maintainers of Morpheus and Grokster actually helped people perform acts that were clearly illegal. Your response is to ask "And? What is Grokster supposed to do about that, exactly? Place PSA-style ads that say "Sharing copyrighted files is wrong and illegal."...how does that help stop infringement?" The answer is quite simple: you say no. When someone says "How can I use Grokster/Morpheus/MyLittlePirate/etc to download Revenge of the Sith", you say "I can't help you. That movie is copyrighted and not authorized for redistribution on our networks."
It's hardly difficult.
Finally, the court is not saying that if the Sony case had been set in 2005 and the device in question was a DVR, Sony would have lost. The entire judgement explains specifically why the Sony case is frankly irrelevent to P2P. One, the latter, is a device primarily built and marketed to infringe copyrights, the other is a device primarily built and marketed to do a certain type of copying that is perfectly legal (ie time shifting). That's what the entire judgment is about. It has nothing to do with anything being "digital". There is nothing in the judgement at all suggesting that because something is digital it's different. The difference is the use. If it has substantial non-infringing use, then it's still legal. P2P has some legal uses, but StreamCast's Morpheus in particular is, predominantly, for trading in unauthorized material, illegally, and they've gone into business intending to exploit that and encourage it.
Same way they make money out of tobacco, not to mention basic vegatables, etc?
I'd say relatively few people want to do this kind of gardening. It's time consuming, a little bad weather or blight can undo everything you've done, it's safe to say that given the choice, most people would rather buy something than make it if doing the latter gives you no better a product and takes too much of your time.
Don't forget that the constitution does, actually, mandate copyright, and therefore the notion that copyright infringement devices would be a "non-enumerated right" is very, very, dubious at best.
Slashdot Mirror
How did it get covered? Well, it turns out that the mechanic who provided the "free installation" on your car tires installed a little robot that popped out and pastered ads all over the dashboard, and it said right there, on the fifth page of the terms and conditions for free tire installation, under paragraph 72, subsection B, term IV "Our mechanic may make other modifications to your vehicle in return for agreeing to install the tires for free"
Ultimately the question here is not "Is the malware company contemptable?", it's "Who has the right to sue them? A local business, or you?"
Hey, great, I've turned this one into another car analogy. But I think mine kind of works.
I'm not a great fan of ESR. I think the OSI almost passed into irrelevence under his reign (and was staggered after they choose Russ Nelson to succeed him to find out Nelson, at the time at least, was "more of the same, only with even less tact and social skills") While "Open Source" made an impact with the name, the OSI itself seemed to have relatively few successes under its belt, with often the most promoted successors being absurdly controvertial. It's interesting that one of the first messes Nelson and his successors had to deal with, for example, were the number of incompatible licenses.
Why were there incompatible licenses? Because, under ESR's active encouragement, every major business dipping a toe in the water were producing their own customized licenses that usually only minimally furfilled the requirements of the Open Source definition, usually being some form of "copyleft for you, proprietary if we want it for us." This severely damaged the usability of much of the code entering the Free Software world. The worst case were the original APSL (Apple) "Open Source" licenses, which even contained provisions allowing Apple to arbitrarily stop people from distributing APSL licensed code in the future. Only after heavy lobbying from the FSF and a war within the OSI did Apple fix this and other headline issues.
Raymond's saying the GPL isn't necessary now. I can't say I agree. The GPL remains the perfect license for both Open Source and the wider area of Free Software. A company that releases code under it knows any competitor using it will have to contribute any advances they make back. In the real world, where 90% of commercial programming is done in-house to create in-house applications, no license comes closer to meeting corporate requirements. And Raymond's wrong about Linux. The problem with Linux is not that it's protected under the GPL, it's that it hasn't been protected strongly enough - that is, there's not enough enforcement of the GPL when it comes to Linux. There are still frequent attempts to sneak proprietary device drivers into the kernel, for example. This directly hurts free software, because information about how those drivers work becomes unavailable. Users aren't able to fix bugs. Users of other, less famous, free operating systems are unable to create compatible drivers themselves.
One can probably make a whole bunch of ad-hominem comments here about why he isn't supportive about the GPL, but ultimately, it doesn't matter. We're going through problem after problem caused by people thinking they're being "practical" and screwing it up for everyone else. Linus adopts Bitkeeper. X11 users use nVidea drivers. If no-one else will, at least we'll always have the FSF to "get it" if those who like little centralized pockets of meritless power don't.
Your other comments are interesting but I doubt they show I'm wrong. My key comment was about compatability. I seriously doubt that you were able to use your existing disk drive controller cards et al with the cards you used to add memory (and CPU!) above the 1Mb limit.
I'm happy to be proven wrong if that is the case, but it does look to me like you're protesting that I somehow claimed the QL was unexpandable, when all I said was that due to an early, dumb (IMHO ;), design decision, succeeding QLs would have had to have a hole in the memory map above 768k if they were to remain compatable with hardware for the previous version.
In practice, Sinclair never developed a successor, and the companies that produced QL clones and other expansion systems tended to get around the limitation by including the most popular upgrades in the hardware they were releasing. ie, yes, your old disk drive controller was now obsolete, but it was ok, because your Thor had a disk drive controller built in, so you didn't need the old controller any more.
But... anyway, the technique you mention was used by Microsoft in AmigaBASIC. IIRC, the extra byte was used to store type information or something similar. The result was that by AmigaOS 2, Commodore had to drop bundling the interpreter, as AmigaOS 2 was originally intended to be for the (68020 based) A3000.
Not that it was ever a particularly good BASIC. Many critics have described it as obviously half finished. But it was just about the only language with anything resembling access to the lower level features of the OS that came with the machine, so it was a real loss in that respect.
If you think that was bad BTW, the Sinclair QL had a 68008, which had an external 20 bit address bus (maximum of 1M, like the 8088); Sinclair decided in its infinite wisdom to put all the perpherals in the top 256k or so giving the machine the same 640k RAM limit (because RAM started at 128k) as the PC and ensuring that, if they ever came out with a better device, and it was to have some compatability with its predecessor, there'd be a hole right there in the memory map.
Do you know how many movies would be made if it wasn't for copyright, compared to today? Make a guess, given the average cost of a two hour movie is well into the millions, most of the ones you've heard of costing 10s of millions. How, exactly, are they going to be funded if their makers know that nobody has to pay them a damned thing to use the movie?
This makes sense given it's what Motorola does generally. The V6x range are all pretty similar in style and appearance, likewise the T7xx series. When actual names have been used in the past, the Timeports, the StarTACs, etc, they've never applied to one single phone model. If they're going to heavily market the RAZR, they're not going to do it for a one off phone, especially when the defining characteristic they're marketing is the thing's form factor.
PEBL is, likewise, about a form factor (as is SLVR)
The first phone I ever got was from Motorola too (a "Graphite", a phone made specifically for one2one in the UK), and that was solid as a rock. Unusually, it had a fairly reasonable UI too, despite being from 1997 or so.
If (and it's a big if) the iTunes phone is in the PEBL family, then it's a flip phone. The only reason it'd be on the slide by the other PEBL phones is if this is the case. So, in the world of the presentation, that's what we're looking at.
Whether the presentation is, in fact, real, is another debate.
One other thing, the PEBL is a family, not a specific phone. Motorola's first PEBL phone appears to be the V6.
In any case, it's not an Apple phone, it's a Motorola phone. The focussing on this as "Apple would never design/approve the design of something that looks like..." thing stuff is largely misplaced. It's sold by Motorola and it's going to play music, under license, from iTunes. It's not an Apple product.
The vector argument you give is interesting though. I have no way of telling that this is the case, but I'll take your word for it.
Suddenly makes sense to me.
If it's a fake, it's a pretty impressive one from what I can see.
Or it could be that you dial using the scrollwheel. Goodness help us if that's the case, as I've used iPod Linux before which has a similar scheme, and it's horrible.
I can see why a $500 "iPod Photo" couldn't sell, but I think a $299 model has a lot more viability.
I've been in a theater (a real one, not a cinema) where actors decided to do something "behind the audience". That's a relatively common thing to do and it always comes across badly, in my experience.
To add my 2c: I like surround sound. When a DVD has been mastered with it in mind, it can make a big difference, though I think the subwoofer actually makes a bigger difference and usually most of us get the subwoofer as part of the package that gets us the surround. 13.1? Nah. For a living room, that's just absurd. Not unless I have a very, very, large living room at any rate.
It could easily be that the major brands of duct tape are just better than the original.
Well, it would be a crime if there was a law against it. For the most part, the probability is that a libertarian government would pass such a law, but because of practicality rather than ideology: if someone of Libertaristan nationality, living in Libertaristan, "invades" Massachusetts in order to "liberate" it, Libertaristan is going to be royally screwed.
But it goes without saying that such a law would be considered a little controvertial.
Not really. Queen Victoria was furious. And the argument that his mining groups were "agents of the crown" is really only grounded in the notion that any corporation of the time nominally was. It wasn't that his actions were approved by any government, and there was little functional or political difference between his companies and what we'd think of today as corporations. Many libertarians, of course, would argue that modern corporations are also "agents of the crown" (or agents of government) because of the special privileges granted to them that are not available to private citizens. I'm not so sure this is the case, but whatever.
The real reason Cecil Rhodes got away with it was simpler: the area of Africa he took over wasn't advanced enough to be anything but roundly defeated, and it had no allies (beyond, ironically, Queen Victoria) so there were no messy international entanglements to worry about. And with the simplistic "Britain at #1" politics of the time, by the time the consequences hit home, it would have been politically unpopular to try to find a way to punish him.
Well, the problem for many of us with libertarians is that there are as many opinions about what libertarianism is as there are libertarians themselves. Debates about whether a military should be private and whether adventures like Bush's Iraq invasion would have been less of an issue conducted outside of the sphere of government aren't exactly uncommon. I could argue that believers in democracy do not generally advocate violence, yet apparently we're in Iraq overthrowing Saddam Hussein with the most violent and extreme methods we currently have ('cos that's what war is) in the name of democracy. And a whole lot of people who consider themselves (small d) democrats (that is, advocates of democracy) are in favour of it, including Bush and Blair.
For "liberty", it doesn't even limit itself to international invasions. Libertarians, in my experience, have radically different opinions from each other on such basics as abortion, drugs, land ownership (google for "Royal Libertarian"), the right of free speech as it relates to employees and their employer's treatment of them, etc. I'm not saying this is a particularly bad thing, I just think it's perhaps wrong to write a "Well, libertarians would never stand for such a thing!" comment over something as obviously controvertial as what a citizen does in another country's juristiction with his own money.
You're making a meaningless distinction (and it's worth noting that my comments about the 19th Century went beyond Rhodes.) The truth is that any group with power is liable to abuse it. It doesn't matter whether the power is violent or economic.
My real problem is with people who have power. Much of the good sid
(Well, you can't, he's dead. But he raised a private army and used it to take over an area of Africa now known as Zimbabwe. Ah, the 19th Century. Private armies. Debtors prisons. Children working as coal miners. Pure libertarianism in action. How can you not want to go back to those days?)
I have having my pockets stuffed with miscellaneous gadgets. Generally speaking, only my phone goes with me whereever I go. My iPod stays at work. I don't have a PDA. The "does one thing 'well'" thing is overrated. There's no reason why we can't have something that does three things well.
I think SCOTUS, essentially, nailed StreamCast to the wall. Evidence was brought up that showed that StreamCast actually went into business intending to be sued (page 7: [t]he goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued. It's the best way to get in the new[s].) for the publicity, that they intended to take over from Napster in the event that Napster was closed by a court doing the exact same thing, and even that they actively encouraged users to download tracks they knew the bulk of which would be unauthorized, for example, by allowing users to search for music in the Top 40 (page 8)
Further, the quotes you make either have absurd questions against them or you draw dubious distinctions. SCOTUS mentions the 90% argument because this is clearly not the same as the Sony case. The vast majority of users, argued SCOTUS at the time, are performing a legal act. The VCR was a legal machine because it was marketed as a device to perform certain, legal, operations and because that's how it was used. SCOTUS notes that simply is not true of Morpheus.
SCOTUS mentions that maintainers of Morpheus and Grokster actually helped people perform acts that were clearly illegal. Your response is to ask "And? What is Grokster supposed to do about that, exactly? Place PSA-style ads that say "Sharing copyrighted files is wrong and illegal."...how does that help stop infringement?" The answer is quite simple: you say no. When someone says "How can I use Grokster/Morpheus/MyLittlePirate/etc to download Revenge of the Sith", you say "I can't help you. That movie is copyrighted and not authorized for redistribution on our networks."
It's hardly difficult.
Finally, the court is not saying that if the Sony case had been set in 2005 and the device in question was a DVR, Sony would have lost. The entire judgement explains specifically why the Sony case is frankly irrelevent to P2P. One, the latter, is a device primarily built and marketed to infringe copyrights, the other is a device primarily built and marketed to do a certain type of copying that is perfectly legal (ie time shifting). That's what the entire judgment is about. It has nothing to do with anything being "digital". There is nothing in the judgement at all suggesting that because something is digital it's different. The difference is the use. If it has substantial non-infringing use, then it's still legal. P2P has some legal uses, but StreamCast's Morpheus in particular is, predominantly, for trading in unauthorized material, illegally, and they've gone into business intending to exploit that and encourage it.
I'd say relatively few people want to do this kind of gardening. It's time consuming, a little bad weather or blight can undo everything you've done, it's safe to say that given the choice, most people would rather buy something than make it if doing the latter gives you no better a product and takes too much of your time.
Don't forget that the constitution does, actually, mandate copyright, and therefore the notion that copyright infringement devices would be a "non-enumerated right" is very, very, dubious at best.