This is the best, cheapest solution. Photocopying the IDs would also be a good idea. The fear of video surveillance will deter most thieves.
However, you might not to run these on a very regular basis, especially if they're in a relatively remote location. There is a non-trivial chance that a bunch of guys with guns could show up and take everything (including your surveillance equipment). If, based on your location, you think the cops would show up in 5 minutes with a 911 call you're okay.
IOW, don't run your LAN party in a rough neighborhood.
Others cited the Courtney Love article. Dig into it and you can find lots of similar stories from independent artists.
You won't hear one word about this from the major labels. If you're a media person and you want to talk about their contracts they'll hang up on you. According to them, anything even remotely related to their finances is confidential. One of the reasons they're not independent anymore is to hide their financial filings, which are basically fraudulent.
A phone with a web browser IS the definition of "smartphone".
The iPhone has a PDA form factor. It does all those PDA functions you discuss. It's perhaps a media player first and PIM second, but it's still a PDA that makes phone calls, as opposed to a small and light REAL cellphone with dedicated dialing buttons, long talk time, etc.
Exactly which patent stops someone from opening a lab and doing research?
Give me a list of medications approved by the FDA in the last 10 years that aren't owned by the big (5 or 7 I don't remember) pharmaceutical companies, like Glaxo-Smith-Klein. Devices (artificial legs, etc.) don't count. I think there are maybe a dozen, as opposed to the THOUSANDS approved by the big players. Part of this is just that testing is expensive, but the other part is that LAWYERS are expensive and it's much easier just to sell your medicine to one of the big players rather than try to beat their lawyers.
Don't be absurd. They've been monopolies since the beginning of time because no one wants multiple sets of wires runnings through their neighborhood, or multiple sets of water pipes, or multiple sets of gas pipes, etc.
In most countries there is only a single set of pipes because the the GOVERNMENT OWNS THE PIPES. Private contracts merely have "service contracts" to maintain the GOVERNMENT OWNED infrastructure. What has happened in the US is that the government built the infrastructure (insert anything you want here) and then GAVE it to private industry to exploit.
The ReactOS project has been around over 10 years. I assure you that Microsoft knows about it. If they were going to try and crush the life out of them, they would've done it before now, when they have an XP-level beta release possibly coming out this year.
I've actually worked on ReactOS, before I was disqualified. It's not going anywhere. Microsoft has never gone after them because they're still in the alpha stage. They HAVE gone after WINE. If you use real Windows DLLs in your distribution it's illegal. This is why nobody packages "MS Office for Linux".
Codeweavers has paid MS for permission. This is why their products cost money.
SAMBA, as I said, was created through laborious network sniffing. MS has no case against SAMBA and there are now a lot of storage vendors eager to defend SAMBA. But this approach had limited the ability to add new features to SAMBA, like running a Windows Domain.
There are "pain points" that developers are avoiding to keep Microsoft off their backs. One of the big ones is Domain Controllers/Active Directory. ReactOS is leaving this out entirely due to threats by Microsoft, and SAMBA isn't implementing it either. Because without AD, you have no Windows network. And as long as they control the LAN server, they control the LAN. Another is DirectX.
Surely this makes it hard to become a big new contributor? All the existing contributors already know eachother and they won't want to dump eachother's work.
It's more subtle.
The big problem with getting code into the kernel is "coding style". It's not enough to know C and operating system development, and even Linux kernel development. You have to know the particular coding style favored by kernel developers (and this varies from developer to developer) which isn't documented anywhere. So your contribution won't even be considered because it's too difficult to integrate. And contrary to what you may hear, most of this is due to "My way is the best way" egos rather than actual technical reasons.
So in order to meaningfully contribute you HAVE to start small with reading huge chunks of the existing code, and then writing your code to conform to that (regardless of whether you like the way it's written or not).
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.
Considering that the iPhone *IS* a smartphone, and you you spent the WHOLE POST claiming it was dramatically better than other smartphones, I'm very confused. If all you want is a standard cellphone, the iPhone is ridiculously overpriced and difficult to use (compared to a standard cellphone with a dedicated dialpad and buttons). If you do a lot of email, you want a Blackberry. If you do a lot of data entry OTHER than email, you want a Windows Mobile device. If you want a media player, you get an iPhone.
The only person who's ever to blame is the one who's doing something illegal such as violating the content owner's copyright.
Some crimes are simply unfair, Jim Crow voting laws being the classic example. And some laws protect evil activity. THAT'S what we're talking about here. Laws that protect evil activity.
The person designing the security is generally trying to do the best that they can to balance security against annoyance of said security of customers, knowing full well that it's only a matter of time before that security is broken.
Not really. Most DRM is made by fly-by-night companies who are deliberately cheating their customers. They often claim it can do things it can't and the security is often very weak (because weak security is EASY).
a particular heavy metal band wanted to play a charity concert with the proceeds going to a UK charity for a kids charity,... It was a small concert, tickets sold out partly because they have a huge following and partly because they were cheap, £5 if memory serves.... The DVD was pretty cheap too, I think around £8.50 including shipping.
Special case.
Most artists don't control their own music, and a big label wouldn't even CONSIDER giving away a substantial part of the profits. If the artist begs, they'll take part of HIS share ($0.02 per album) and give it to the charity. They probably wouldn't be allowed to do a special charity concert DVD.
Most artists would have charged a LOT more for the concert, like $500 instead of $5 because that's the part of revenue they control. It's also a bit unreasonable to ask more for the DVD than people paid for the actual concert.
Most of the people on that forum are kids. Kids don't have any money, for charities or anything else. You want something out of kids? Take their TIME. Offer to send kids free concert t-shirts if they do something to promote the charity (handing out flyers, posting billboards and messages, appearing on television, etc.). I've worked with Amnesty International this is how they get so many kids involved, asking them to PARTICIPATE rather than asking for cash.
Imagine a CPU that can apply AES encryption to sensitive blocks of RAM. In that case, you'd have to tap the CPU's L2 cache (not likely without expensive tools) to extract anything decrypted.
The tools to decrypt that data in memory will HAVE to be widely available. People need to debug stuff and encrypting everything makes debugging, and therefore ANY DEVELOPMENT, virtually impossible. Microsoft found this out the hard way with signed driver requirements. They made signing a requirement and then immediately backed off because it made debugging drivers near-impossible.
Going to the homes of major label executives and shooting them in the face is good.
People DIE because of the crap the major labels pull. They ROB people. Often very poor and very unstable artists who are driven to suicide or drug overdose because of the financial ruin brought on them by the major labels.
1.) Ripping off artists to make sure they don't get paid is okay.
You simply have no experience in the industry. New artists make, AT ABSOLUTE BEST, $0.02 per album sale. That's TWO CENTS. So in order to make a decent living ($40,000 per year) off album sales they would have to sell TWO MILLION albums per year. If you're an artist who makes all his money off album sales you will starve to death, quite literally.
2.) Artists are victims of evil, oppressive record labels even though they willingly signed their contracts.
Just about all radio and TV time is bought and paid for. If you want to get on the radio and TV, you have to sign with one of the major labels, who will not give you ANY money on your albums. Yes, they'll cheat you out of that $0.02 per album too.
In fact, in recent years they've been getting into the incredibly scammy loan business where they loan artists the money to produce the album at 30% interest and then STEAL that money from the artists and then send collection agencies after the artists for not paying back the loans.
And when I say STEAL, I mean STEAL. They will do things like write you a bad check for an advance. Ask for direct deposit to your checking accounts and then write fake checks out of your accounts. They figure artists don't have any money or lawyers (except they ones THEY'RE providing) so they're "easy marks".
Your average used car salesman or professional con artist is a saint next to A&R people.
4.) Piracy is okay because it's free advertising and other people will eventually pay those artists through t-shirts or something.
No, this is why piracy is bad. Piracy is good because it hurts the big record labels, and anything that helps bring down the big labels is good. Going to the homes of major label executives and shooting them in the face is good. The only way in which piracy of major label music is bad is that piracy DOES help the labels by providing very valuable free advertising.
The reason power is a monopoly is because of the wiring issue.
And? Power *IS* a monopoly. Trash service *IS* a monopoly. Water *IS* a monopoly. Telephone *IS* a monopoly. Any they're not monopolies because of "evil socialism", socialism means nationalization. They're monopolies because big companies bribed politicians into giving them monopolies.
Name the industry that is so dominated by patents that newcomers can't enter it.
The pharmaceutical industry. Virtually no newcomers due to interlocking patent issues.
The problem is that no one has had the balls to produce a redesigned, absolutely, positively, 100%-compatible Windows clone. And don't give me the old wrong answer about "Microsoft will just change Windows to make it incompatible." That's always been crap. Sure, Microsoft can break their own products, but they can't break everyone else's products, and you can also keep an antitrust war chest to sue Microsoft if they tried to make Office incompatible.
No, they can't. In order to re-implement Windows you would need access to the source code, and if anyone who has access to the source code tries to re-implement part of Windows Microsoft will sue them and win easily. Nor could any former Microsoft employee or anyone with extensive experience developing for Windows aid in the project. This is the whole point of the "open source" movement.
It is simply not possible to make a "clean room" clone of, say, Windows 2000. In this context "clean room" clone means the developers have absolutely no experience with Microsoft products whatsoever, have never seen Microsoft source, have never worked for Microsoft or near Microsoft and have no idea how to program anything in Windows. Typically they developers have to go out of their way to remain willfully ignorant about they product they are trying to re-implement (to prevent lawsuits, see above). It is far too complicated to make EXACTLY the same systems from scratch. SAMBA was accomplished through extremely slow and painful network traffic sniffing.
And this is all despite European court rulings requiring Microsoft to open interfaces. Rather than comply Microsoft has been soaking up billions in fines. The fact that MS is willing to pay $2 BILLION rather than open their source code should give you some idea of how big a war chest you would need to fight them on this issue.
And individual companies can't make antitrust claims, only the government. And the US government is reluctant to make anti-trust claims for companies they're completely dependent on, like Boeing and Microsoft. The previous anti-trust suit really only went forward due to bribery by Sun (also a big contractor).
Just ask Joseph Lieberman. He got kicked out of the damn party. Not for failure, not retroactively, but because he votes like a Republican, period.
PLEASE mod the parent up.
Do you know why I'm not a Republican? Because the Republicans refuse to toss out racists and religious nuts like George Allen, Ted Stevens, Strom Thurmond, Larry Craig, etc. And that's just the Senate.
Defense contractors were really pissed at Clinton. He almost canceled Joint Strike, the greatest waste of money in human history. They played hardball to keep these programs afloat (like Boeing's refusal to keep supporting the Harrier II).
That's true to a degree, but ultimately, whether you consider yourself "pro-choice," "pro-life," whatever, you're arguing over one action--aborting a fetus. And those on one side want that to be legal, and the other want it to be illegal. The rest is just semantics.
Exactly. The abortion debate isn't about "where life begins" but whether or not we should put doctors in prison for performing abortions.
I don't see many (and I'll bow to your preferences and use the term "pro-choice") pro-choice people arguing against the government's vital role in funding Planned Parenthood for instance.
The issues are unrelated. Planned Parenthood spends the vast majority of it's money on prenatal care, screenings for cervical cancer and other ailments, screening for STDs, and providing birth control. Poor Americans can't afford these services out of pocket. So funding Planned Parenthood is more about universal health care than about abortion per se.
I think current Federal law requires Planned Parenthood to pay for abortion services with other funds anyway.
People don't want a return to the Fairness Doctrine, which didn't work.
People want a complete ban on all political advertising. And when I say complete ban, Absolutely nobody under any circumstances can put a single ad on television, radio, internet, or print saying anything about the election other than voter registration. Advertising should be limited solely to the written statements by each candidate in the voter guide and in hosted debates during prime time that all broadcasters are required to carry free of charge. Any violation results in the broadcaster's license being permanently pulled and large fines for print publications. Hell, I could live with just banning political advertising on TV and radio.
This is because modern politicians are whores who spend most of their time collecting money to spend on political advertising. The corrupt nature of this process drives them to further corruption.
This is what people want. Don't say that we LITERALLY can't do it because we can. Tobacco and liquor advertising is extremely tightly controlled. Bans on advertising illegal drugs have been pretty effective. Congress has repeatedly passed laws that basically do this. What's preventing it are crazy Supreme Court Justices who say that "money = speech", unless that speech has something to do with illegal drugs or children.
Why are so many supposedly liberal-minded people so... illiberal?
My guess is experience. If you read right-wing forums and left-wing forums for a while you'll quickly find a significant difference. Right-wing blogs are filled with racism, hate speech, and death threats. On left-wing forums most of this stuff (and the posters) is quickly deleted.
And I'm talking about the popular forums, like LittleGreenFootballs, WorldNetDaily, and FreeRepublic. I'm sure someone can come up with unpopular conservative blogs and forums that aren't filled with threats and hatred.
Not to (borrowing your term) pidgeonhole anyone or anything...
The whole purpose of labels like "conservative" and "liberal" is to pidgeonhole people. If you don't like it, deny the label.
The point the OP was making is that modern conservatives have essentially abandoned was was called "conservatism" as little as 10 years ago. George Bush and his supposedly conservative Congress expanded government more than any administration in US history. They increased spending more than any administration in history. They had/have the most irresponsible fiscal policy of any US administration. They, at best, gave lip service to social conservative issues like pornography, abortion and gay rights, not even attempting to push forward legislation on these issues. Civil liberties were, at one time, an important conservative issue which has been abandoned in favor of weird special rights. They've even gone after federalism by attempting to centralize security authority in the Federal government. Aside from "strong national defense", it's difficult to ascertain what conservative principles modern conservative still hold.
(who are, imho, 99% of the time liberal).
I don't know how many cars I've seen with "Support our troops!" yellow ribbons, Bush/Cheney '04 stickers, NRA stickers, etc. A lot more than 1%. Where do you live? It must be very left-leaning. Even in a leftist enclaves like Berkeley or Austin I would expect to see a more even split.
(1) You would expect governments to underreport crime, not overreport. There's also the problems that most governments record *reported* crime, which is always lower than the actual crime figure
Typically, yes. And that's what I was claiming. That the crime statistics of Taiwan are lower than those of the US because Taiwan is lying about them. The US has the higher crime statistics because the US is the more honest about crime, not because their crime rates are actually higher.
(2) That doesn't mean al governments are deliberately lying. They sometimes just use different metrics to determine what is a crime and what isn't. There's also the problem that in most cases governments record *reported* crime, which is always lower than the actual crime figure.
Actually, no. Most governments report convicted criminals, which is really a measure of how the justice system works, not how many crimes are actually committed. Reporting is an even worse metric because it depends on police accurately keeping reports, which just doesn't happen. The reports that are kept by the police are biased in a dozen different ways.
There simply isn't a good way to measure crime statistics. The definition of "crime" varies wildly from state to state. The enforcement and political situations vary wildly (Is political violence a "crime"?).
(3) An error margin doesn't make statistics useless.
I agree. There isn't a "margin of error" for crime statistics. They're completely made-up nonsense. Looking at crime statistics would tell you that Afghanistan is one of the safest places in the world and that the USA is hell on earth.
That's the textbook definition of LLC. Corporations also try to limit their liability through legislation. That's why it's near-impossible to successfully sue corporations over criminal matters, they've shifted the corporate liablity (the board hires assassins to kill union organizers) to individual employees (that manager was "acting on his own").
All companies are required to limit their liability.
No, they're not. Companies are not required to limit their liability AT ALL because there is no conceivable way to enforce such a rule. How could a company act to reduce ALL possible liability if you can sue over literally anything?
Most companies DO try to limit their liability as much as possible. That's the whole point of "Limited Liability Corporations". But there is no specific legal requirement to do so. If you think there is, please cite a statute.
Shareholders can take managers to court if they willfully reduce the value of the company's shares.
Yes, "willfully reduce". As in they're deliberately trying the destroy the company, usually through fraud and embezzlement. Shareholder lawsuits without evidence of fraud ALWAYS fail, and even with evidence, they USUALLY fail. You have to prove INTENT (they have to me malicious, not incompetent) which is very difficult.
Saying something like:... [we] will fight for freedom of speech first, profits second...
That could also come under the term willful.
No, it wouldn't. See above. Hell, if they said "We're going to invest all the company's money in crack cocaine." even though that's completely illegal they STILL probably wouldn't have a case because management is being honest.
Shareholders complain to the board which then fires the managers. They don't sue because it's almost always a waste of time and money.
Please mod Kadin2048 and other similar posters up.
E-waste "recycling" means murdering poor people. Period. If you separate out your valuable e-waste it will be sent to China or elsewhere, the gold will be stripped with vats of hydrochloric acid, then the acid and the remaining components will be dumped IN THE MIDDLE of poor neighborhoods. E-waste workers, often child SLAVES, have lifespans measured in 10 years or so.
Just throw the stuff out with the trash.
And yes, this applies to waste in California. All the recent laws do is give the "recyclers" more money. What is needed is laws that make exporting e-waste completely illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
This is the best, cheapest solution. Photocopying the IDs would also be a good idea. The fear of video surveillance will deter most thieves.
However, you might not to run these on a very regular basis, especially if they're in a relatively remote location. There is a non-trivial chance that a bunch of guys with guns could show up and take everything (including your surveillance equipment). If, based on your location, you think the cops would show up in 5 minutes with a 911 call you're okay.
IOW, don't run your LAN party in a rough neighborhood.
Others cited the Courtney Love article. Dig into it and you can find lots of similar stories from independent artists.
You won't hear one word about this from the major labels. If you're a media person and you want to talk about their contracts they'll hang up on you. According to them, anything even remotely related to their finances is confidential. One of the reasons they're not independent anymore is to hide their financial filings, which are basically fraudulent.
A phone with a web browser IS the definition of "smartphone".
The iPhone has a PDA form factor. It does all those PDA functions you discuss. It's perhaps a media player first and PIM second, but it's still a PDA that makes phone calls, as opposed to a small and light REAL cellphone with dedicated dialing buttons, long talk time, etc.
Forgot to respond to this one:
Exactly which patent stops someone from opening a lab and doing research?
Give me a list of medications approved by the FDA in the last 10 years that aren't owned by the big (5 or 7 I don't remember) pharmaceutical companies, like Glaxo-Smith-Klein. Devices (artificial legs, etc.) don't count. I think there are maybe a dozen, as opposed to the THOUSANDS approved by the big players. Part of this is just that testing is expensive, but the other part is that LAWYERS are expensive and it's much easier just to sell your medicine to one of the big players rather than try to beat their lawyers.
Don't be absurd. They've been monopolies since the beginning of time because no one wants multiple sets of wires runnings through their neighborhood, or multiple sets of water pipes, or multiple sets of gas pipes, etc.
In most countries there is only a single set of pipes because the the GOVERNMENT OWNS THE PIPES. Private contracts merely have "service contracts" to maintain the GOVERNMENT OWNED infrastructure. What has happened in the US is that the government built the infrastructure (insert anything you want here) and then GAVE it to private industry to exploit.
The ReactOS project has been around over 10 years. I assure you that Microsoft knows about it. If they were going to try and crush the life out of them, they would've done it before now, when they have an XP-level beta release possibly coming out this year.
I've actually worked on ReactOS, before I was disqualified. It's not going anywhere. Microsoft has never gone after them because they're still in the alpha stage. They HAVE gone after WINE. If you use real Windows DLLs in your distribution it's illegal. This is why nobody packages "MS Office for Linux".
Codeweavers has paid MS for permission. This is why their products cost money.
SAMBA, as I said, was created through laborious network sniffing. MS has no case against SAMBA and there are now a lot of storage vendors eager to defend SAMBA. But this approach had limited the ability to add new features to SAMBA, like running a Windows Domain.
There are "pain points" that developers are avoiding to keep Microsoft off their backs. One of the big ones is Domain Controllers/Active Directory. ReactOS is leaving this out entirely due to threats by Microsoft, and SAMBA isn't implementing it either. Because without AD, you have no Windows network. And as long as they control the LAN server, they control the LAN. Another is DirectX.
Surely this makes it hard to become a big new contributor? All the existing contributors already know eachother and they won't want to dump eachother's work.
It's more subtle.
The big problem with getting code into the kernel is "coding style". It's not enough to know C and operating system development, and even Linux kernel development. You have to know the particular coding style favored by kernel developers (and this varies from developer to developer) which isn't documented anywhere. So your contribution won't even be considered because it's too difficult to integrate. And contrary to what you may hear, most of this is due to "My way is the best way" egos rather than actual technical reasons.
So in order to meaningfully contribute you HAVE to start small with reading huge chunks of the existing code, and then writing your code to conform to that (regardless of whether you like the way it's written or not).
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.
Considering that the iPhone *IS* a smartphone, and you you spent the WHOLE POST claiming it was dramatically better than other smartphones, I'm very confused. If all you want is a standard cellphone, the iPhone is ridiculously overpriced and difficult to use (compared to a standard cellphone with a dedicated dialpad and buttons). If you do a lot of email, you want a Blackberry. If you do a lot of data entry OTHER than email, you want a Windows Mobile device. If you want a media player, you get an iPhone.
The only person who's ever to blame is the one who's doing something illegal such as violating the content owner's copyright.
Some crimes are simply unfair, Jim Crow voting laws being the classic example. And some laws protect evil activity. THAT'S what we're talking about here. Laws that protect evil activity.
The person designing the security is generally trying to do the best that they can to balance security against annoyance of said security of customers, knowing full well that it's only a matter of time before that security is broken.
Not really. Most DRM is made by fly-by-night companies who are deliberately cheating their customers. They often claim it can do things it can't and the security is often very weak (because weak security is EASY).
a particular heavy metal band wanted to play a charity concert with the proceeds going to a UK charity for a kids charity, ... It was a small concert, tickets sold out partly because they have a huge following and partly because they were cheap, £5 if memory serves. ... The DVD was pretty cheap too, I think around £8.50 including shipping.
Special case.
Most artists don't control their own music, and a big label wouldn't even CONSIDER giving away a substantial part of the profits. If the artist begs, they'll take part of HIS share ($0.02 per album) and give it to the charity. They probably wouldn't be allowed to do a special charity concert DVD.
Most artists would have charged a LOT more for the concert, like $500 instead of $5 because that's the part of revenue they control. It's also a bit unreasonable to ask more for the DVD than people paid for the actual concert.
Most of the people on that forum are kids. Kids don't have any money, for charities or anything else. You want something out of kids? Take their TIME. Offer to send kids free concert t-shirts if they do something to promote the charity (handing out flyers, posting billboards and messages, appearing on television, etc.). I've worked with Amnesty International this is how they get so many kids involved, asking them to PARTICIPATE rather than asking for cash.
Imagine a CPU that can apply AES encryption to sensitive blocks of RAM. In that case, you'd have to tap the CPU's L2 cache (not likely without expensive tools) to extract anything decrypted.
The tools to decrypt that data in memory will HAVE to be widely available. People need to debug stuff and encrypting everything makes debugging, and therefore ANY DEVELOPMENT, virtually impossible. Microsoft found this out the hard way with signed driver requirements. They made signing a requirement and then immediately backed off because it made debugging drivers near-impossible.
Going to the homes of major label executives and shooting them in the face is good.
People DIE because of the crap the major labels pull. They ROB people. Often very poor and very unstable artists who are driven to suicide or drug overdose because of the financial ruin brought on them by the major labels.
1.) Ripping off artists to make sure they don't get paid is okay.
You simply have no experience in the industry. New artists make, AT ABSOLUTE BEST, $0.02 per album sale. That's TWO CENTS. So in order to make a decent living ($40,000 per year) off album sales they would have to sell TWO MILLION albums per year. If you're an artist who makes all his money off album sales you will starve to death, quite literally.
2.) Artists are victims of evil, oppressive record labels even though they willingly signed their contracts.
Just about all radio and TV time is bought and paid for. If you want to get on the radio and TV, you have to sign with one of the major labels, who will not give you ANY money on your albums. Yes, they'll cheat you out of that $0.02 per album too.
In fact, in recent years they've been getting into the incredibly scammy loan business where they loan artists the money to produce the album at 30% interest and then STEAL that money from the artists and then send collection agencies after the artists for not paying back the loans.
And when I say STEAL, I mean STEAL. They will do things like write you a bad check for an advance. Ask for direct deposit to your checking accounts and then write fake checks out of your accounts. They figure artists don't have any money or lawyers (except they ones THEY'RE providing) so they're "easy marks".
Your average used car salesman or professional con artist is a saint next to A&R people.
4.) Piracy is okay because it's free advertising and other people will eventually pay those artists through t-shirts or something.
No, this is why piracy is bad. Piracy is good because it hurts the big record labels, and anything that helps bring down the big labels is good. Going to the homes of major label executives and shooting them in the face is good. The only way in which piracy of major label music is bad is that piracy DOES help the labels by providing very valuable free advertising.
The reason power is a monopoly is because of the wiring issue.
And? Power *IS* a monopoly. Trash service *IS* a monopoly. Water *IS* a monopoly. Telephone *IS* a monopoly. Any they're not monopolies because of "evil socialism", socialism means nationalization. They're monopolies because big companies bribed politicians into giving them monopolies.
Name the industry that is so dominated by patents that newcomers can't enter it.
The pharmaceutical industry. Virtually no newcomers due to interlocking patent issues.
The problem is that no one has had the balls to produce a redesigned, absolutely, positively, 100%-compatible Windows clone. And don't give me the old wrong answer about "Microsoft will just change Windows to make it incompatible." That's always been crap. Sure, Microsoft can break their own products, but they can't break everyone else's products, and you can also keep an antitrust war chest to sue Microsoft if they tried to make Office incompatible.
No, they can't. In order to re-implement Windows you would need access to the source code, and if anyone who has access to the source code tries to re-implement part of Windows Microsoft will sue them and win easily. Nor could any former Microsoft employee or anyone with extensive experience developing for Windows aid in the project. This is the whole point of the "open source" movement.
It is simply not possible to make a "clean room" clone of, say, Windows 2000. In this context "clean room" clone means the developers have absolutely no experience with Microsoft products whatsoever, have never seen Microsoft source, have never worked for Microsoft or near Microsoft and have no idea how to program anything in Windows. Typically they developers have to go out of their way to remain willfully ignorant about they product they are trying to re-implement (to prevent lawsuits, see above). It is far too complicated to make EXACTLY the same systems from scratch. SAMBA was accomplished through extremely slow and painful network traffic sniffing.
And this is all despite European court rulings requiring Microsoft to open interfaces. Rather than comply Microsoft has been soaking up billions in fines. The fact that MS is willing to pay $2 BILLION rather than open their source code should give you some idea of how big a war chest you would need to fight them on this issue.
And individual companies can't make antitrust claims, only the government. And the US government is reluctant to make anti-trust claims for companies they're completely dependent on, like Boeing and Microsoft. The previous anti-trust suit really only went forward due to bribery by Sun (also a big contractor).
Just ask Joseph Lieberman. He got kicked out of the damn party. Not for failure, not retroactively, but because he votes like a Republican, period.
PLEASE mod the parent up.
Do you know why I'm not a Republican? Because the Republicans refuse to toss out racists and religious nuts like George Allen, Ted Stevens, Strom Thurmond, Larry Craig, etc. And that's just the Senate.
Mod parent up.
Federalism is fundamentally undemocratic. One man, one vote.
Please mod the above poster up.
Defense contractors were really pissed at Clinton. He almost canceled Joint Strike, the greatest waste of money in human history. They played hardball to keep these programs afloat (like Boeing's refusal to keep supporting the Harrier II).
That's true to a degree, but ultimately, whether you consider yourself "pro-choice," "pro-life," whatever, you're arguing over one action--aborting a fetus. And those on one side want that to be legal, and the other want it to be illegal. The rest is just semantics.
Exactly. The abortion debate isn't about "where life begins" but whether or not we should put doctors in prison for performing abortions.
I don't see many (and I'll bow to your preferences and use the term "pro-choice") pro-choice people arguing against the government's vital role in funding Planned Parenthood for instance.
The issues are unrelated. Planned Parenthood spends the vast majority of it's money on prenatal care, screenings for cervical cancer and other ailments, screening for STDs, and providing birth control. Poor Americans can't afford these services out of pocket. So funding Planned Parenthood is more about universal health care than about abortion per se.
I think current Federal law requires Planned Parenthood to pay for abortion services with other funds anyway.
The Fairness Doctrine isn't.
You're missing the point.
People don't want a return to the Fairness Doctrine, which didn't work.
People want a complete ban on all political advertising. And when I say complete ban, Absolutely nobody under any circumstances can put a single ad on television, radio, internet, or print saying anything about the election other than voter registration. Advertising should be limited solely to the written statements by each candidate in the voter guide and in hosted debates during prime time that all broadcasters are required to carry free of charge. Any violation results in the broadcaster's license being permanently pulled and large fines for print publications. Hell, I could live with just banning political advertising on TV and radio.
This is because modern politicians are whores who spend most of their time collecting money to spend on political advertising. The corrupt nature of this process drives them to further corruption.
This is what people want. Don't say that we LITERALLY can't do it because we can. Tobacco and liquor advertising is extremely tightly controlled. Bans on advertising illegal drugs have been pretty effective. Congress has repeatedly passed laws that basically do this. What's preventing it are crazy Supreme Court Justices who say that "money = speech", unless that speech has something to do with illegal drugs or children.
Why are so many supposedly liberal-minded people so ... illiberal?
My guess is experience. If you read right-wing forums and left-wing forums for a while you'll quickly find a significant difference. Right-wing blogs are filled with racism, hate speech, and death threats. On left-wing forums most of this stuff (and the posters) is quickly deleted.
And I'm talking about the popular forums, like LittleGreenFootballs, WorldNetDaily, and FreeRepublic. I'm sure someone can come up with unpopular conservative blogs and forums that aren't filled with threats and hatred.
Not to (borrowing your term) pidgeonhole anyone or anything...
The whole purpose of labels like "conservative" and "liberal" is to pidgeonhole people. If you don't like it, deny the label.
The point the OP was making is that modern conservatives have essentially abandoned was was called "conservatism" as little as 10 years ago. George Bush and his supposedly conservative Congress expanded government more than any administration in US history. They increased spending more than any administration in history. They had/have the most irresponsible fiscal policy of any US administration. They, at best, gave lip service to social conservative issues like pornography, abortion and gay rights, not even attempting to push forward legislation on these issues. Civil liberties were, at one time, an important conservative issue which has been abandoned in favor of weird special rights. They've even gone after federalism by attempting to centralize security authority in the Federal government. Aside from "strong national defense", it's difficult to ascertain what conservative principles modern conservative still hold.
(who are, imho, 99% of the time liberal).
I don't know how many cars I've seen with "Support our troops!" yellow ribbons, Bush/Cheney '04 stickers, NRA stickers, etc. A lot more than 1%. Where do you live? It must be very left-leaning. Even in a leftist enclaves like Berkeley or Austin I would expect to see a more even split.
(1) You would expect governments to underreport crime, not overreport. There's also the problems that most governments record *reported* crime, which is always lower than the actual crime figure
Typically, yes. And that's what I was claiming. That the crime statistics of Taiwan are lower than those of the US because Taiwan is lying about them. The US has the higher crime statistics because the US is the more honest about crime, not because their crime rates are actually higher.
(2) That doesn't mean al governments are deliberately lying. They sometimes just use different metrics to determine what is a crime and what isn't. There's also the problem that in most cases governments record *reported* crime, which is always lower than the actual crime figure.
Actually, no. Most governments report convicted criminals, which is really a measure of how the justice system works, not how many crimes are actually committed. Reporting is an even worse metric because it depends on police accurately keeping reports, which just doesn't happen. The reports that are kept by the police are biased in a dozen different ways.
There simply isn't a good way to measure crime statistics. The definition of "crime" varies wildly from state to state. The enforcement and political situations vary wildly (Is political violence a "crime"?).
(3) An error margin doesn't make statistics useless.
I agree. There isn't a "margin of error" for crime statistics. They're completely made-up nonsense. Looking at crime statistics would tell you that Afghanistan is one of the safest places in the world and that the USA is hell on earth.
That's the textbook definition of LLC. Corporations also try to limit their liability through legislation. That's why it's near-impossible to successfully sue corporations over criminal matters, they've shifted the corporate liablity (the board hires assassins to kill union organizers) to individual employees (that manager was "acting on his own").
All companies are required to limit their liability.
No, they're not. Companies are not required to limit their liability AT ALL because there is no conceivable way to enforce such a rule. How could a company act to reduce ALL possible liability if you can sue over literally anything?
Most companies DO try to limit their liability as much as possible. That's the whole point of "Limited Liability Corporations". But there is no specific legal requirement to do so. If you think there is, please cite a statute.
Shareholders can take managers to court if they willfully reduce the value of the company's shares.
Yes, "willfully reduce". As in they're deliberately trying the destroy the company, usually through fraud and embezzlement. Shareholder lawsuits without evidence of fraud ALWAYS fail, and even with evidence, they USUALLY fail. You have to prove INTENT (they have to me malicious, not incompetent) which is very difficult.
Saying something like: ... [we] will fight for freedom of speech first, profits second ...
That could also come under the term willful.
No, it wouldn't. See above. Hell, if they said "We're going to invest all the company's money in crack cocaine." even though that's completely illegal they STILL probably wouldn't have a case because management is being honest.
Shareholders complain to the board which then fires the managers. They don't sue because it's almost always a waste of time and money.
Dedicated drawing pads are vastly more accurate and durable than touchscreens.
For example, the Intuos is vastly more accurate and durable than the Cintiq.
Please mod Kadin2048 and other similar posters up.
E-waste "recycling" means murdering poor people. Period. If you separate out your valuable e-waste it will be sent to China or elsewhere, the gold will be stripped with vats of hydrochloric acid, then the acid and the remaining components will be dumped IN THE MIDDLE of poor neighborhoods. E-waste workers, often child SLAVES, have lifespans measured in 10 years or so.
Just throw the stuff out with the trash.
And yes, this applies to waste in California. All the recent laws do is give the "recyclers" more money. What is needed is laws that make exporting e-waste completely illegal.