It's so nice to see Business Week reporting on these abuses. We need a wider audience to know about this crap. Any of their readers here? It would feel even nicer to know that it's in their print edition. It'd be nicer it it were an editorial. In Money or Fortune. Too much of what we do is preaching to the choir.
The article did a great job linking to other articles in the text, one of them explaining how region coding DVDs forces regular customers to become criminals in order to watch the movies they've bought. A pleasant breath of fresh air from a more mainstream niche media player.
When you want to stay in and the nearest unit in a real, chauvanism-heavy branch is 40 miles away, you don't ask, just go to their silly 2 week MOSQ and live in a 5 Ton for the rest of your career. 13F is sweet, but that was an even worse drive to get to. Now I live in another BN's area, drive past my BN's other batteries & HQ, past BDE and an infantry unit just to get there, but I like my battery. Just once, I'd like to do something simple that makes sense, you know?
That's it, you trolling bastard. I've been biting my tongue up to now, but you've gone too far. Rhesus monkeys are perfectly decent animals, and I cannot see any mutations that could make one as horrifying as my current president. I have turned your email address in to the ASPCA, and you can expect to hear from them this week about your slandering of those simians in comparing them to a much lower form of simian. Your other points were reasonable and well thought out, but I could not stand by quietly and let that comment go unanswered.
Oh I forgot, its the USA, where people have ack-ack guns in their gardens!
With all the people we go around pissing off, that's the only way I can be sure that my tomato patch is secure from terrorists. A blimp over my neighborhood would only help- I could have a smaller stack of ammo out there, meaning more fresh, juicy tomatoes for me!
Re:Appropriations bill to build new hangars?
on
Zeppelins on Patrol?
·
· Score: 2
I don't exactly see Boeing, McDonald Douglas, or Newport News fitting into the bidding process too well
Oh, it'll be one of them. The beauty of government contracts is that you don't need to have the product or service that you're selling when you bid. You just push back the timetable, include the startup costs in the bid, then go hire some of Zeppelin's senior people and go to work. Remember: A strong domestic airship industry is vital to our national security. The added startup costs simply give the government the chance to demonstrate how committed they are to supporting it. And no, it's not about fighting terrorism; it's about fighting personal freedoms.
astronomical infringements of free speech in smaller countries get tossed into the bin of obscurity that is the Your Rights Online section.
Surprisingly enough, those smaller countries don't represent that large a chunk of/.'s readership. Something that far removed from our world needs to be on a grand scale for us to even hear about it. We casually refer to the Great Firewall of China, even use it to describe the efforts of other fscked up countries. Nobody here really gets infuriated about it, we just point and laugh, say "oh, those sad, silly Chinese" and move on.
Actions like this (the repression) are all most of us ever hear about far-off places. I've written off vast tracts of the globe as simply irrational. "Yeah, those Turks. At least they're not bombing Kurds today," and move on. It has nothing to do with foreign countries, actually; near the top of my list are California, inside the D.C. Beltway and generally everything else south of the Mason-Dixon line. I have had to go to those places, where cultural and linguistic similarities let me deal relatively easily with their irrationality. I won't have too much of an issue with traveling to western Europe, but the rest of the world? I'll only see it if they behave more irrationally than usual and my unfortunate ass gets deployed there.
Relatively minor infringements of the rights by my own government, which is literally constituted to protect those rights, are much more important to me. A government that violates its own constitution has no legitimacy. As a citizen who votes, pays taxes and submits to military service (I'm a pacifist- it's weird), abuses by the government infuriate me. Abuses by other governments, which tend to have no contitutional requirements or even cultural traditions of individual rights obviously offend me far less, if at all.
When was the last time you saw a triangle? The 2 points of your ears can tell you where the third point is. They're a little close together, and pointing in opposite directions, so they're less accurate than your eyes, but they still do a pretty good job.
"Once you use any Microsoft product on a machine, you must use it until you replace the machine"?:)
Well, I guess I voided the license on my current copy of Windows. Do they have to send someone now to take away the CD that I've never used? Hell, since I'm using GPLed software now, I'm doubly voiding my license.
The last thing we need is for the ethical arguments to shut down any of this public research. The uses of it are ethically scary, but I'd feel a lot better with MIT pushing forward with the research than any company doing it. The school will keep people updated on where they've gotten with it, and the world will be better able to judge how much to believe video. It'll be really interesting to see what constitutes proof in 20 years. If the research is done in the open, we might even still be able to believe in it.
Why wait to get the PVR? They're great little devices now.
Because want one that'll get info from my guide channel, not one that's crippleware to force you into subscriptionware that the fscking illiterate courts will turn into spyware. I also want to tape off of it so I can archive things on an old fashioned shelf.
I haven't done any research as such, but everything I've heard of has to phone home. I don't want a lifetime subscription- I want an appliance. Any suggestions? Seriously- please.
First, I don't think any of what you said was cheap, or an attack.
Past that, while borrowing & ripping and downloading are, in a practical sense, identical, the first is an abuse of fair use while the second is farther along- individual piracy. At least that's the way I see the difference.
I'm with you on seeing p2p as a "protest" as stupid. They're linked, though, protest and p2p. I'm voting with my mouse, and it's not going to the major studios' sites. If I couldn't p2p, I'd go back to almost entirely doing without. There're a few bands that I go out and buy, but that's very limited. The money I spend on music hasn't gone down any, so there're no "lost sales" that my hard drive has stolen from the hard-working stiffs at the RIAA. So I don't feel bad about it. My music purchases have gone up, if anything- I simply have more money now, it's not some noble p2p sentiment. That's just where I'm at.
The majority of funding for programs comes from corporate donations which is money received through traditional advertising mechanisms.
And the majority of that traditional advertising is a simple "this program was made possible by a grant from the XYZ Corporation." It isn't in your face, it doesn't annoy anyone and doesn't turn an hour show into 35-40 minutes worth of crap. It does, however, fund programming and create a brand association. ABC Corp. interrupts my shows with shitty ads. XYZ Corp. funded that Nova episode.
The few things I do watch aren't on PBS, though. I'll buy a PVR when it all gets sorted out and that'll be fun.
To boil it down: breaking the law will not convince them you are right.
No. But bad laws are worse that they at first seem. They destroy respect for the law. I have largely written off copyright law, because it is more of a Microsoft EULA (or rather a Disney EULA?) than a way that Americans choose to be governed. I'm more in favor of buying CDs than my wife, but it is a horribly inefficient way of supporting the artists. I might as well simply download them instead. I paid for my version of LimeWire, by the way. That wasn't a copyright issue so much as a support issue.
To boil it down: being a bunch of assholes creates an enormous public backlash against your position, no matter what laws you buy.
Most p2p people aren't abusing fair use. Borrowing and ripping a friend's CD, that's abusing it. The rest simply don't care. That's got nothing at all to do with fair use. The real abusers of fair use are the companies.
If this legislation (and consequential social shift) sets the precedent for removal of the human factor in our societal system, where will it end?
What do you mean, where will it end? Big tobacco has been held liable for the deaths of people who didn't simply continue to smoke, but actually started smoking when the warnings were on the packs. Cities have sued gun manufacturers for making faulty products (?). Personal responsibility went away a long time ago, my friend.
Just because two events occur at the same time doesn't mean one is the cause of the other.
You're a troll, man!
One airplane's contrail filmed from sattelites turning into a large cloud might be a fluke. Six aren't. Or are you saying NASA faked that just like the moon landings? Come on.
Mountains, trees, ducks, all cause effects on the weather. There are a lot more birds and bats in this world than planes. They probably have a larger effect on the weather than planes do.
Um, ducks don't leave contrails. Did you even read the article? The contrails left by the few military transports up at the time started out no wider than the airplane's wing, but in a few hours had become clouds covering 20,000 square Km. Repeatedly. This had never been noticed before because those skies were usually crossed by hundreds of flights, not ones and twos.
We have had a glimpse at how planes affect the weather. It is very interesting- they are not necessarily damaging it, but it has become quite obvious that they do affect it. Now it's something we have to keep in mind and keep an eye on.
What sort of license comes with a piece of hardware? I agree not to reverse engineer this box so as to build my own and sell them at a lower price... Except that we already know that you can't sell it for less. The only problem is that once the OSS community gets itself in gear to really take advantage of MS' subsidy, MS will stop shipping boxes. They're already losing money anyway, what're a few warehouse fires added to that? I loved this article, though. That's real pretty.
The police ability to hand off the search to a third party can easily be abused to circumvent fourth amendment protections. The boundary between an agent of the police and the police themselves can be fuzzy.
Well, as my (hope I never actually need one) lawyer would ask the judge: just who actually executed this warrant that you signed? Finding information and giving it to the police is one thing; executing a warrant is something entirely different. Who conducted the search? The cop who had an envelope delivered to him? Hell no. Now it law enforcement just called up the ISP and asked for information, it'd be (arguably) legal. Anyone actually executing a search warrant, however, is an agent of the police, no matter where their paycheck comes from.
I can't ransack somebody's place just because some cop has a warrant. Why, because I'm not an agant of the police. If I had necessary skills that they don't, then they would approach me and ask me (the ISP) to execute their warrant for them. That would make me an agent for them.
That's all fine and good, but can't they work around all this with a well worded subpoena?
Are these lawsuits a waste of time and money? Why don't we just give Microsoft the Whitehouse and the United Nations?
The lawsiuts may be pointless idealism (you know, trying to force compliance with the law), but the White House got sold in 2000 and the UN couldn't agree on how many of each animal to load into an ark if it had been raining for a month. No danger of them siding with MS.
They must be spending 50% of their time focusing on how to write viruses and works to make Windows systems break and puke. They must be working really hard on developing algorithms by which Linux can be used to crack and break Windows systems.
I thought MS wrote all the software needed to make Windows break and puke. Isn't a nic all you need to crack a Windows box?
(I do have a history of defending Microsoft by trashing irrational arguments, but mainly because I would prefer to see more intelligent discussion of why they suck and what they need to do better rather than knee-jerk anti-MS zealotry.)
I think it's mainly habit at this point, but they deserve it. After all the crap that MS has shoved down our throats for years, they do not get the "innocent until proven guilty" status anymore. Every OS of theirs that I've had to use has been brain dead. The last version of Word that I liked ran on 3.1. I can't give anything from them the benefit of the doubt anymore. Anything that has their name anywhere near it is automatically bad, because I am one fed-up consumer. They aren't even worth my time to find out if a new product works or not. I just don't want it.
The article did a great job linking to other articles in the text, one of them explaining how region coding DVDs forces regular customers to become criminals in order to watch the movies they've bought. A pleasant breath of fresh air from a more mainstream niche media player.
There are jails inside the US, and the FBI is good at strongarming others to forget for a bit that they are soverign nations.
Considering the girth of the National Guard, I think we can take some comfort in those words.
To correct your first impression of me: I'm an 11H being forced against my will to chief a how. Much better living conditions here, though.
That's it, you trolling bastard. I've been biting my tongue up to now, but you've gone too far. Rhesus monkeys are perfectly decent animals, and I cannot see any mutations that could make one as horrifying as my current president. I have turned your email address in to the ASPCA, and you can expect to hear from them this week about your slandering of those simians in comparing them to a much lower form of simian. Your other points were reasonable and well thought out, but I could not stand by quietly and let that comment go unanswered.
With all the people we go around pissing off, that's the only way I can be sure that my tomato patch is secure from terrorists. A blimp over my neighborhood would only help- I could have a smaller stack of ammo out there, meaning more fresh, juicy tomatoes for me!
Oh, it'll be one of them. The beauty of government contracts is that you don't need to have the product or service that you're selling when you bid. You just push back the timetable, include the startup costs in the bid, then go hire some of Zeppelin's senior people and go to work. Remember: A strong domestic airship industry is vital to our national security. The added startup costs simply give the government the chance to demonstrate how committed they are to supporting it. And no, it's not about fighting terrorism; it's about fighting personal freedoms.
Surprisingly enough, those smaller countries don't represent that large a chunk of /.'s readership. Something that far removed from our world needs to be on a grand scale for us to even hear about it. We casually refer to the Great Firewall of China, even use it to describe the efforts of other fscked up countries. Nobody here really gets infuriated about it, we just point and laugh, say "oh, those sad, silly Chinese" and move on.
Actions like this (the repression) are all most of us ever hear about far-off places. I've written off vast tracts of the globe as simply irrational. "Yeah, those Turks. At least they're not bombing Kurds today," and move on. It has nothing to do with foreign countries, actually; near the top of my list are California, inside the D.C. Beltway and generally everything else south of the Mason-Dixon line. I have had to go to those places, where cultural and linguistic similarities let me deal relatively easily with their irrationality. I won't have too much of an issue with traveling to western Europe, but the rest of the world? I'll only see it if they behave more irrationally than usual and my unfortunate ass gets deployed there.
Relatively minor infringements of the rights by my own government, which is literally constituted to protect those rights, are much more important to me. A government that violates its own constitution has no legitimacy. As a citizen who votes, pays taxes and submits to military service (I'm a pacifist- it's weird), abuses by the government infuriate me. Abuses by other governments, which tend to have no contitutional requirements or even cultural traditions of individual rights obviously offend me far less, if at all.
When was the last time you saw a triangle? The 2 points of your ears can tell you where the third point is. They're a little close together, and pointing in opposite directions, so they're less accurate than your eyes, but they still do a pretty good job.
And you just have to tell them that /home is a bigger, better My Documents folder!
Well, I guess I voided the license on my current copy of Windows. Do they have to send someone now to take away the CD that I've never used? Hell, since I'm using GPLed software now, I'm doubly voiding my license.
Because want one that'll get info from my guide channel, not one that's crippleware to force you into subscriptionware that the fscking illiterate courts will turn into spyware. I also want to tape off of it so I can archive things on an old fashioned shelf.
I haven't done any research as such, but everything I've heard of has to phone home. I don't want a lifetime subscription- I want an appliance. Any suggestions? Seriously- please.
Past that, while borrowing & ripping and downloading are, in a practical sense, identical, the first is an abuse of fair use while the second is farther along- individual piracy. At least that's the way I see the difference.
I'm with you on seeing p2p as a "protest" as stupid. They're linked, though, protest and p2p. I'm voting with my mouse, and it's not going to the major studios' sites. If I couldn't p2p, I'd go back to almost entirely doing without. There're a few bands that I go out and buy, but that's very limited. The money I spend on music hasn't gone down any, so there're no "lost sales" that my hard drive has stolen from the hard-working stiffs at the RIAA. So I don't feel bad about it. My music purchases have gone up, if anything- I simply have more money now, it's not some noble p2p sentiment. That's just where I'm at.
And the majority of that traditional advertising is a simple "this program was made possible by a grant from the XYZ Corporation." It isn't in your face, it doesn't annoy anyone and doesn't turn an hour show into 35-40 minutes worth of crap. It does, however, fund programming and create a brand association. ABC Corp. interrupts my shows with shitty ads. XYZ Corp. funded that Nova episode.
The few things I do watch aren't on PBS, though. I'll buy a PVR when it all gets sorted out and that'll be fun.
No. But bad laws are worse that they at first seem. They destroy respect for the law. I have largely written off copyright law, because it is more of a Microsoft EULA (or rather a Disney EULA?) than a way that Americans choose to be governed. I'm more in favor of buying CDs than my wife, but it is a horribly inefficient way of supporting the artists. I might as well simply download them instead. I paid for my version of LimeWire, by the way. That wasn't a copyright issue so much as a support issue.
To boil it down: being a bunch of assholes creates an enormous public backlash against your position, no matter what laws you buy.
Most p2p people aren't abusing fair use. Borrowing and ripping a friend's CD, that's abusing it. The rest simply don't care. That's got nothing at all to do with fair use. The real abusers of fair use are the companies.
What do you mean, where will it end? Big tobacco has been held liable for the deaths of people who didn't simply continue to smoke, but actually started smoking when the warnings were on the packs. Cities have sued gun manufacturers for making faulty products (?). Personal responsibility went away a long time ago, my friend.
You're a troll, man!
One airplane's contrail filmed from sattelites turning into a large cloud might be a fluke. Six aren't. Or are you saying NASA faked that just like the moon landings? Come on.
Um, ducks don't leave contrails. Did you even read the article? The contrails left by the few military transports up at the time started out no wider than the airplane's wing, but in a few hours had become clouds covering 20,000 square Km. Repeatedly. This had never been noticed before because those skies were usually crossed by hundreds of flights, not ones and twos.
We have had a glimpse at how planes affect the weather. It is very interesting- they are not necessarily damaging it, but it has become quite obvious that they do affect it. Now it's something we have to keep in mind and keep an eye on.
Well, as my (hope I never actually need one) lawyer would ask the judge: just who actually executed this warrant that you signed? Finding information and giving it to the police is one thing; executing a warrant is something entirely different. Who conducted the search? The cop who had an envelope delivered to him? Hell no. Now it law enforcement just called up the ISP and asked for information, it'd be (arguably) legal. Anyone actually executing a search warrant, however, is an agent of the police, no matter where their paycheck comes from.
I can't ransack somebody's place just because some cop has a warrant. Why, because I'm not an agant of the police. If I had necessary skills that they don't, then they would approach me and ask me (the ISP) to execute their warrant for them. That would make me an agent for them.
That's all fine and good, but can't they work around all this with a well worded subpoena?
The lawsiuts may be pointless idealism (you know, trying to force compliance with the law), but the White House got sold in 2000 and the UN couldn't agree on how many of each animal to load into an ark if it had been raining for a month. No danger of them siding with MS.
I thought MS wrote all the software needed to make Windows break and puke. Isn't a nic all you need to crack a Windows box?
I think it's mainly habit at this point, but they deserve it. After all the crap that MS has shoved down our throats for years, they do not get the "innocent until proven guilty" status anymore. Every OS of theirs that I've had to use has been brain dead. The last version of Word that I liked ran on 3.1. I can't give anything from them the benefit of the doubt anymore. Anything that has their name anywhere near it is automatically bad, because I am one fed-up consumer. They aren't even worth my time to find out if a new product works or not. I just don't want it.