If you think there's no difference between Dems and Reps, vote for another candidate. There are lots of greens, libertarians, independents, whatever.
While there are some situations where third party votes don't count as much as those for Dems or Reps, they are never wasted: Voting for Nader, etc. scares the crap out of the two big parties because it shows them that you're not an apathetic sheep. It also encourages them to take whatever single issue the third party is championing more seriously. If all the non-voters instead voted for a third party or independent candidate, they could even win!
This is all true: The cost of living is much higher in the West than elsewhere, and I wish I could mod the parent up.
But don't forget that the standard of living is much lower in third world countries, even taking prices into account. The people who the corporations want us to compete against often have to do without things we take for granted, like running water, (relatively) clean air and health care. (Well, okay, Americans are increasingly having to do without that last one too, but even the U.S. has still some medicare/medicaid and welfare safety net, inadequate though it is.)
It's true that conditions in some countries are improving, often because of the money brought in by people working for Western companies. But as conditions impriove, wages increase the corporations will abandon them for cheaper slums elsewhere. We see this happening in Mexico, where U.S. companies that a few years ago went there for cheap labor are now relocating to China. It's a race to the bottom, and we're in freefall.
Because Unions are evil and communist and un-American. Haven't you been listening to the mass media?
Unless workers compete with each other and with sweatshop slaves, stockholder value might be slightly lessened. Don't you know it's un-patriotic not to accept a pay cut, or to refuse to work twice as hard when half your co-workers have been right-sized on to the strreet?
And don't even think of pointing out that CEOs' pay increases exponentially even as the middle class becomes destitute. That's just the natural order, and you're a traitor if you don't pledge allegiance to the president. It's your own damned fault if your skin is the wrong color or your daddy isn't a millionaire.
The point made by Bill Joy and others is not that scientific knowledge is bad, but that specific technological research should be directed towards things that are likely to be beneficial rather than harmful. For example, genetic engineering is best used to increase crop yields or cure inherited diseases, not to make seeds infertile or to make the HIV virus spread as easily as the common cold.
The other problem with the baseball park analogy is that a baseball park has a finite size and seating capacity. People who sneak in may occupy seats that could otherwise be sold, block the view of paying customers, lengthen the lines at concessions/bathrooms, and (very slighly) increase the expense of cleaning and maintaining the park. None of this applies to copyright infringement.
The take-home lesson: your vote doesn't count; what the media report counts.
Not quite true. The lesson for Democrats is that they need to win by a decisive margin, not a relatively small one that can be overturned by the Supreme Court. That means people need to go out and vote against Bush.
You're not xenophobic, just parochial, but that's reasonable. While there are no direct affects, cases like this do matter to the rights of Americans and other non-Norwegians.
Politicians in all countries use "international harmonization" as an excuse to deny people rights (see, for example, the recent court ruling in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which argued that copyright extensions just bring America into line with Europe), so it's better for all of us if they don't have that excuse.
Then there is the relatively borderless nature of the Internet: If it's legal to post DeCSS in Norway, there's no practical way for the authorities to stop people in other countries from accessing it. Sure, the MPAA will ask for every cable and satellite link to Norway and other less repressive countries to be severed, but that's (so far) beyond even their lobbyists' power.
Prohibition isn't really over. Look at the ludicrous War on Drugs.
Still, "plain old lawbreaking" is better than obeying a stupid law. Real civil disobedience is even better, but I'm not going to turn myself in for downloading a song or smoking a joint, and I suspect that neither are most people.
They should encase the movie theater in a Faraday cage, or set up a transmitter to jam the signal. Unfortunately, the latter is illegal in most countries (including US): the FCC position is that the airwaves within your home belong to Sprint PCS (or whoever), not you.
Consumers don't exist. Producers don't exist. We're both just equal partners accepting one person's services or products for the bartered exchange for another.
How can a person and a giant corporation be considered "equal partners" in a contract, when the corporation can afford teams of lawyers working full-time? The individual person is always at a huge disadvantage.
Furthermore, despite ranting about the evils of government, corporations always rely on the government to enforce contracts. If you really believed in small government, you'd want enforceable contracts to be a very small subset of all the possible "agreements" that can be entered into.
N0, it's closer to "a tourist from Texas is jailed in Europe for working for a company that broke European law." There's a difference. Dmitry was just a (part time) employee, and his job did not involve breaking U.S. law. He wrote the program in Russia, and he personally was not actually selling it
Companies that break laws should be punished, of course. (I'm assuming an ideal world, with no DMCA.) But ordinary employees who aren't involved in the illegal activity should not.
If Google pays this guy off, every other spammer will try the same thing. Its only real option is to fight back hard, which is what it's doing. If Google can set a legal precedent now, other spammers will be discouraged.
This is so stupid. I thought the business model was to sell the server, and give away the client for free. They're actually hurting themselves in the long run: If there isn't a free player that doesn't run unobtrusively, people will move to WMA, Ogg, MP3, etc.
The police can always find you when you call 911 from a regular phone. The database at the 911 call center displays your exact address at the instant the phone rings, regardless of whether you're unlisted or blocking caller ID.
It's the same with cell phones, only less accurate of course. Some allow users to turn off the more advanced GPS-type features, so that the phone company isn't tracking them everywhere they go, but the feature will be reactivated automatically when they dial 911.
Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.
Unfortunately, a alot of telemarekting is no longer done by unqualified, minimum-wage people who would otherwise be unemployed. It's outsourced to 3rd-world sweatshops, or even to US prisons.
999 is the traditional British number. 112 is the standard European number. (As Britain is in Europe, you can use either there.) Because of all the different languages in Europe, the phone companies are supposed to have multi-lingual people at the call center to help international travelers, so it's useful to know.
No number is ideal, but 911 is perhaps worse: Most office PBXs make you dial 9 for an outside line, then you have to dial 1 for a long-distance call, then the area code, which may begin with 1. After a long day making phone calls at the office, people can quite easily forget that their home phone doesn't need a 9, and so dial 911 by mistake.
The GPL already protects against patent abuse. It doesn't protect against trademark suits, which is probably for the best: People who buy Red Hat (to take the best-known example) Linux do have a right to expect that the program they're installing is actually Red Hat Linux, not some other version.
Better yet - why burden the ISP with the added expenses (and bad PR!) of logkeeping at all? This solution would require no new laws; it'd merely have HomeSec allocate a portion of its budget to install a packet sniffer with a hella-fast RAID array at the chokepoints - and log the URLs (and SMTP headers, and USENET headers, and P2P requests, and Freenet requests) themselves.
I thought that Carnivore and Echelon already did this!
The thing is, this doesn't give Big Brother all the information he needs. Logs of Web requests, for example, may only contain a user's IP address. This can be traced to an ISP, but Big Brother then needs some way to know which user was assigned a particular DHCP address at a particular time.
Actually, no joke. There've already been studies which show that this kind of crap is actually more dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving (itself as dangerous as drunk driving), because a voice interface to a Web page is so awkward.
Slghtly OT, but didn't the Supreme Court find that a federally mandated "fltering" system is unconstitutional? Maybe it was just in some strange parallel Universe where the constitution still applies?
The Junkscience site was created by Philip Morris's PR company, specificially to spread lies about how smoking is good for you. You can read about it here.
I find it odd that so many popular TV shows feature court rooms, yet people are reluctant to participate in the real thing. I love jury duty: It's a chance to play a part in making the system work, exercise power, and perhaps improve things.
But then I seem in the minority. I also like voting, for example.
Lawyers and judges have a duty to the law, so they may actually be prevented from mentioning jury nullification. This is the case in the UK: Jurors are allowed to "nullify" a law, but a lawyer who told them this would be held in contempt of court.
Defendants are allowed to mention jury nullification, though, and often do so in cases involving stupid laws (drug possession, etc.). Lawyers sometimes get around the ban by arguing that one law violates another law --- for example, they can say that the law against marijuana violates human rights law in cases where people are using it medically. The jury then gets to decide which law is most important.
There was a famous case involving a group of peace protesters who broke into an arms factory and smashed up a fighter jet that the company was about to (legally) sell to a foreign dictator. They were charged with vandalism and found not guilty, because they argued that the planes would be used for murder (a worse crime than vandalism).
Slashdot Mirror
If you think there's no difference between Dems and Reps, vote for another candidate. There are lots of greens, libertarians, independents, whatever.
While there are some situations where third party votes don't count as much as those for Dems or Reps, they are never wasted: Voting for Nader, etc. scares the crap out of the two big parties because it shows them that you're not an apathetic sheep. It also encourages them to take whatever single issue the third party is championing more seriously. If all the non-voters instead voted for a third party or independent candidate, they could even win!
This is all true: The cost of living is much higher in the West than elsewhere, and I wish I could mod the parent up.
But don't forget that the standard of living is much lower in third world countries, even taking prices into account. The people who the corporations want us to compete against often have to do without things we take for granted, like running water, (relatively) clean air and health care. (Well, okay, Americans are increasingly having to do without that last one too, but even the U.S. has still some medicare/medicaid and welfare safety net, inadequate though it is.)
It's true that conditions in some countries are improving, often because of the money brought in by people working for Western companies. But as conditions impriove, wages increase the corporations will abandon them for cheaper slums elsewhere. We see this happening in Mexico, where U.S. companies that a few years ago went there for cheap labor are now relocating to China. It's a race to the bottom, and we're in freefall.
Because Unions are evil and communist and un-American. Haven't you been listening to the mass media?
Unless workers compete with each other and with sweatshop slaves, stockholder value might be slightly lessened. Don't you know it's un-patriotic not to accept a pay cut, or to refuse to work twice as hard when half your co-workers have been right-sized on to the strreet?
And don't even think of pointing out that CEOs' pay increases exponentially even as the middle class becomes destitute. That's just the natural order, and you're a traitor if you don't pledge allegiance to the president. It's your own damned fault if your skin is the wrong color or your daddy isn't a millionaire.
The point made by Bill Joy and others is not that scientific knowledge is bad, but that specific technological research should be directed towards things that are likely to be beneficial rather than harmful. For example, genetic engineering is best used to increase crop yields or cure inherited diseases, not to make seeds infertile or to make the HIV virus spread as easily as the common cold.
The other problem with the baseball park analogy is that a baseball park has a finite size and seating capacity. People who sneak in may occupy seats that could otherwise be sold, block the view of paying customers, lengthen the lines at concessions/bathrooms, and (very slighly) increase the expense of cleaning and maintaining the park. None of this applies to copyright infringement.
The take-home lesson: your vote doesn't count; what the media report counts.
Not quite true. The lesson for Democrats is that they need to win by a decisive margin, not a relatively small one that can be overturned by the Supreme Court. That means people need to go out and vote against Bush.
Politicians in all countries use "international harmonization" as an excuse to deny people rights (see, for example, the recent court ruling in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which argued that copyright extensions just bring America into line with Europe), so it's better for all of us if they don't have that excuse.
Then there is the relatively borderless nature of the Internet: If it's legal to post DeCSS in Norway, there's no practical way for the authorities to stop people in other countries from accessing it. Sure, the MPAA will ask for every cable and satellite link to Norway and other less repressive countries to be severed, but that's (so far) beyond even their lobbyists' power.
Still, "plain old lawbreaking" is better than obeying a stupid law. Real civil disobedience is even better, but I'm not going to turn myself in for downloading a song or smoking a joint, and I suspect that neither are most people.
They should encase the movie theater in a Faraday cage, or set up a transmitter to jam the signal. Unfortunately, the latter is illegal in most countries (including US): the FCC position is that the airwaves within your home belong to Sprint PCS (or whoever), not you.
How can a person and a giant corporation be considered "equal partners" in a contract, when the corporation can afford teams of lawyers working full-time? The individual person is always at a huge disadvantage.
Furthermore, despite ranting about the evils of government, corporations always rely on the government to enforce contracts. If you really believed in small government, you'd want enforceable contracts to be a very small subset of all the possible "agreements" that can be entered into.
There's a difference. Dmitry was just a (part time) employee, and his job did not involve breaking U.S. law. He wrote the program in Russia, and he personally was not actually selling it
Companies that break laws should be punished, of course. (I'm assuming an ideal world, with no DMCA.) But ordinary employees who aren't involved in the illegal activity should not.
If Google pays this guy off, every other spammer will try the same thing. Its only real option is to fight back hard, which is what it's doing. If Google can set a legal precedent now, other spammers will be discouraged.
This is so stupid. I thought the business model was to sell the server, and give away the client for free. They're actually hurting themselves in the long run: If there isn't a free player that doesn't run unobtrusively, people will move to WMA, Ogg, MP3, etc.
It's the same with cell phones, only less accurate of course. Some allow users to turn off the more advanced GPS-type features, so that the phone company isn't tracking them everywhere they go, but the feature will be reactivated automatically when they dial 911.
Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.
Unfortunately, a alot of telemarekting is no longer done by unqualified, minimum-wage people who would otherwise be unemployed. It's outsourced to 3rd-world sweatshops, or even to US prisons.
No number is ideal, but 911 is perhaps worse: Most office PBXs make you dial 9 for an outside line, then you have to dial 1 for a long-distance call, then the area code, which may begin with 1. After a long day making phone calls at the office, people can quite easily forget that their home phone doesn't need a 9, and so dial 911 by mistake.
The GPL already protects against patent abuse. It doesn't protect against trademark suits, which is probably for the best: People who buy Red Hat (to take the best-known example) Linux do have a right to expect that the program they're installing is actually Red Hat Linux, not some other version.
I thought that Carnivore and Echelon already did this!
The thing is, this doesn't give Big Brother all the information he needs. Logs of Web requests, for example, may only contain a user's IP address. This can be traced to an ISP, but Big Brother then needs some way to know which user was assigned a particular DHCP address at a particular time.
Not strictly true. There's a 1 in 2^2048 chance that you'll 'get lucky' and guess the correct key. Next to no chance, I guess.
Actually, no joke. There've already been studies which show that this kind of crap is actually more dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving (itself as dangerous as drunk driving), because a voice interface to a Web page is so awkward.
Slghtly OT, but didn't the Supreme Court find that a federally mandated "fltering" system is unconstitutional? Maybe it was just in some strange parallel Universe where the constitution still applies?
The Junkscience site was created by Philip Morris's PR company, specificially to spread lies about how smoking is good for you. You can read about it here.
But then I seem in the minority. I also like voting, for example.
Defendants are allowed to mention jury nullification, though, and often do so in cases involving stupid laws (drug possession, etc.). Lawyers sometimes get around the ban by arguing that one law violates another law --- for example, they can say that the law against marijuana violates human rights law in cases where people are using it medically. The jury then gets to decide which law is most important.
There was a famous case involving a group of peace protesters who broke into an arms factory and smashed up a fighter jet that the company was about to (legally) sell to a foreign dictator. They were charged with vandalism and found not guilty, because they argued that the planes would be used for murder (a worse crime than vandalism).