Even if every registered voter[1] who did not vote in the 2000 election voted for Nader, the leading third party candidate, he couldn't win.
Of the 51 states (including D.C.), Nader could not win 24 of them even if every registered voter who didn't vote, voted for him. Of the remaining 27, he would need to win 26 of them to win, and he wasn't even on the ballot in 3 of them.
But, for the sake of argument, let's say he was (if those people were going to vote for him he would likely be on the ballot). In the 26 states (the one he doesn't win necessarily being one of the eight that only has 3 electoral votes), there were 35 million registered voters who didn't vote. He would need 27 million of those votes (ideally proportioned among the states to give him just enough to win each state) to win the election. He only got 3 million total in the whole country. That's 9 times more than he actually got and assuming that these 27 million people would have voted only for him and no other third party candidate.
More realistically, of the 56 million[2] registered voters who did not vote, evenly proportioning them across the country percentage wise, he would have needed roughly 53 million votes in order to win. In other words, close to 18 times as many votes as he actually got with none of them going to any other candidate. Bush and Gore only got 50 million each.
So, even if you could convince those 56 million people to vote and to vote for a third party candidate, the vast majority would have to agree on a single third party candidate to even have a shot at getting one elected. This just isn't going to happen. If a third party candidate could get that many votes, he would most likely be running for one of the two majors.
[1] The reason I'm not counting unregistered voters is that the data includes a "significant number" of people above voting age but aren't eligible to vote. If you want to count non-registered voters too, it's possible, but extremely unlikely.
[2] North Dakota has no voter registration and Wisconsin has registration at the polls. In those cases I am using the number of people above voting age as the registered voters for that state.
You know, I have accepted that being a target of marketing is an evil that is part of the cost of living in a capitalist society. With this as a given, I would rather that I was offered products that I might actually be interested in.
Theoretically, I agree with this. But my concern is that they aren't going to use their knowledge of my environmentalist leanings to build a more environment friendly car. They're going to use their knowledge of my love of Star Trek to get Patrick Stewart to try to convince me to buy whatever it is they're selling.
This is why I am not particually hostile towards google ads...
Google ads are pretty unintrusive, obvious that they are ads, and have actually been useful more than once. But I believe this will be the exception rather than the rule.
slashdotters will spot the magic phrase "RFID", and remember that this is something the hivemind has told them they're against.
Why don't you wait until someone actually makes the argument before you start tearing it apart?
That you assume everyone will think this is a bad idea means you don't understand why they think some uses of RFID is a bad idea. Try understanding the other side before you condemn it.
Re:Noticed the trend as well
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Steel Bolt Hacking
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You will never "lock in" a single digit of a PIN combination on one a electronic combination lock by running through numbers. What you will do is send through a bunch of alarms to the guard.
Classic blunder from "War Games": Joshua trying to crack the nuclear missile launch codes and locking in digits of the code. "He's got four numbers. Another 5 minutes and he'll have all of them!" This is a security system, not MasterMind(tm).
Re:Noticed the trend as well
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Steel Bolt Hacking
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· Score: 2, Informative
I learned how to pick locks in college. It was a valuable skill in the dorms where people were consistently locked out by their roommates. Housing charged you $25 to let you back in. I charged $20.
An interesting side effect, I'm sure one that goes with just about any skill most people don't have, is the number of times you see people in movies doing it absolutely wrong.
We don't have to deal with that now, and having a 'rural tyranny' instead of an 'urban tyranny' is not an improvement.
The flaw in your argument is the assumption that the concerns of rural communities are necessarily in direct conflict with those in urban communities. They are not. In many cases both can be addressed without adversely impacting either party. That more people live in urban communities does not make the concerns of rural communities less important. In fact, most people in urban communities aren't directly affected one way or the other by what happens in rural communities.
Secondly, the whole idea of the electoral college does one thing and one thing only; it focused candidate attention on where they can pick up electoral votes, instead of what matters to the country as a whole.
The country as a whole is best served by its elected officials addressing the most issues the people are concerned with and not the one issue that concerns the most people. In a simple majority popular vote, the candidates need only address the one or two issues that concern the majority of the people and can completely ignore the issues of the minority that, most likely, the majority don't care one way or the other about. That more people live in New York does not mean the issues concerning Idaho don't need to be addressed. The electoral college, in all but the biggest blowouts, forces the candidates to address the issues in most states in order to be elected.
The electoral college system is not perfect and there are arguments that state boundaries, or geographic boundaries in general, are not representative of the issues concerning the citizens, it is vastly superior to a popular vote where only the biggest issues get any attention.
The warning here is apparently vague and leading by a very short time period.
That only lessens the degree, not the offense.
To continue the analogy perhaps this would be like Ford telling a favored customer, say Hertz (if they buy Fords I don't know) that next week they will be announcing some kind of advisory so Hertz should not service any cars this week and get ready for a big round of service next week.
If Ford did this they would still be withholding information from other Ford owners. But, more likely, Ford would tell the dealerships who would in turn notify any customers that called for service. But, since most computer maintenence is done in house rather than at a dealership, it doesn't apply.
My point about what premium customers get was to address all the comments in this thread that this is a revenue scam by MS. Premium customers get a heck of a lot of servicing and help. They don't buy it for a day or two of vague advance warning about patches
Like I said, I don't care anything at all about the premium service except for this aspect of it. That the other benefits of the premium service make it a good value doesn't make this behavior any better.
but you can see how MS has perhaps decided to do this to 1) curry favor with important customers, and 2) make the premium subscription more attractive.
Of course I see why they did it. That doesn't make it right. They're adding value by creating an artificial scarcity of information that a) doesn't cost them anything more to make public and b) helps protect users of their software from their own defects.
If you hate all companies that exist to make money, well then you hate MS, m'k?
Not all anti-MS sentiments are "MS bashing". Sometimes MS actually does things that deserve criticism. This is one of them. No, it's not the crime of the century, but it's still wrong to withhold important information so that their premium customers can get it first.
And if you believe that companies who offer service contracts are bad, then let's all take a moment to crap on RedHat, etc. too. Service contracts for software have been standard practice for... decades probably.
I make most of my living from service contracts. Service contracts are a valuable service to a company that doesn't want to do their own maintenance. But every system I install carries a one year warranty, and if a manufacturer recall or defect comes up, I tell all the people it applies to, not just the ones that have service contracts. And I certainly don't use it as leverage to get people to buy my service contracts.
Would you agree that car manufacturer's who sell extended warranties are also benefitting from their own shoddy workmanship?
No, because cars generally come with a standard warranty[1]. The difference being that everyone who buys the car gets the warranty, so it is in the manufacturer's best interest to keep the defects to a minimum. If the warranty is only available to people who have chosen to purchase it, unless most people do, then there is no incentive for the manufacturer to prevent defects, and can use them in order to push the "premium" service. The extended warranty, at that point, is simply a convenience to the buyer of a car with already relatively few defects (or a scam, depending on the warranty, but that's a different argument).
Premium customers get a lot more than this.
What else they get is irrelevant. The point is that Microsoft can only inform the premium customers first by withholding the information from non-premium customers. Information that is about defects in their own products and could possibly cause harm to the users. It is no more responsible than a car manufacturer, to extend your analogy, withholding recall information from their non-premium customers. Giving a cup-holder or a brick of gold with it doesn't make it more responsible.
[1] Yes, I am aware that the cost of the warranty is built into the price of the car. It doesn't change anything. If everyone gets the warranty and the car has a large number of defects, the cost of the warranty to the manufacturer means they have to charge more for the car and they will lose business to a company with cheaper, more reliable cars.
To some extent you already get this. If you want extra security, you can pay for a security guard, otherwise you fall back on the regular police service.
And how about health service - in the UK (and I suspect many other places in the world), if you want immediate treatment, you pay (or get your insurance to pay) to go private. If you don't pay, you end up at the back of the NHS waiting list.
Except that your security team isn't robbing you and your health providers aren't making you sick (at least they shouldn't be). The service the premium customers are paying for is protection from Microsoft's own defects. They are essentially profiting from their own shoddy workmanship.
Well since RIAA doesn't want you to believe that downloading music, at all, is illegal, it follows that either your reading comprehension of the article's point is wrong, or the article is lying.
I misspoke. I meant to use the term "file-sharing" rather than "downloading" although the article, and many other people, use the two interchangeably.
Or did RIAA just start telling people not to buy music from iTunes, et al, because they suddenly decided that they don't want the profits they're getting from downloaded music?
Last I checked, the RIAA still frowned on purchasing a song from iTunes and sharing it with your friends. There is plenty of music that it is legal to do this with and that is what the article was pointing out.
I think the RIAA is not really concerned about online communities like this one.
They will be if this becomes popular.
Things like this make it easier for an RIAA label to sign a band.
Things like this make it unnecessary for a band to sign with a label. And that's really the crux of the matter. The recording industries business model has been the creation/promotion of superstars and the selling of plastic disks. The plastic disks are no longer needed and sites like this make promotion available to bands without the help of the labels. While these sites will probably not produce superstars like the labels do, it will make it easier for musicians to make a living making music. They won't make as much as the superstars, but there will be more musicians doing it.
but downloading copyrighted materials you don't have permission for that belong to someone else is.
No one was claiming otherwise. The point of the article was that the RIAA would like you to believe that downloading music, at all, is illegal.
Let's not forget that a lot of the anti-copyright sentiment around here magically disappears whenever we have a GPL violation article.
Slashdot is not a single entity. It is a community of people who each have their own opinions.
It is also entirely possible to simultaneously hold the views that copyright law is being abused but also has parts that are good without contradicting yourself.
Even for/. that statement seems a bit paranoid. I doubt that the RIAA would try to entrap people that are legally trading music the RIAA doesn't own when they have plenty of people actually illegally trading music they can go after.
Unless their primary goal is to protect their obsolete business model, but they wouldn't do that....
It makes it about a thousand times easier to do without getting caught. It also makes it possible to share the view with just about anybody you like instead of just describing it. It's worse by several orders of magnitude. And that's ignoring that nobody should be doing it at all, camera or not.
A cop parked in the same place would also see everything. So what?
Um, there's a world of difference between a cop and a video camera. It's a question of persistence and transparency. A cop is not likely to remember every single event that happens, only the unusual ones. A cop is much more obvious than a camera. And a cop can actually stop a crime in progress whereas a video camera can only record it. A cop is not likely to know the woman I am walking down the street with is not my wife, and "accidentally" tell everyone in an effort to discredit me should I criticize the government publicly. A cop is also not likely to remember every person involved in a protest against government policy. In short, the opportunity for a video camera to be abused is much, much greater than a cop witnessing the same event.
If your window shades are open, the cops can look in. If they happen to see your stash sitting on the counter, they have probable cause.
And what's to prevent them from watching someone who forgot to close their shades while dressing?
The fact that the witness to the crime is not a person is irrelevant. If the videotape shows that you did indeed run a red light, and the facts are indisputable, what does it matter that a cop didn't see it? Just because a police officer didn't see it, doesn't mean that you didn't break the law.
The problem is that the cameras record everything, not just crimes.
Dude, LONE GUNMEN, 6months before WTC/911, what was the pilot episode about?
yes, a plane flying towards WTC to be crashed into it.
Okay, how many people watched it? How many people believed it was a real possibility? How do you explain that the hijackers were able to take control of an airliner where they were considerably outnumbered with nothing more than box cutters if the passengers didn't think they would survive?
Whats the point of locking the cockpit door, the dudes will just threaten to open a side door and really screw things up
Because even if they do, they will not be able to take control of the plane to get it to it's target. Even with a door open, the pilot will be able to maintain some control over the aircraft and, if necessary, ditch it someplace where the crash won't hurt anyone else. The point being that the hijackers won't be able to get it to its target and use it as a weapon. They may be able to coerce the pilot into changing his flight plan, but not to the point of flying the plane into a building.
What you need in a plane is an automated way by the pilot to put sleeping gas in the plane to KNOCK everyone out with in seconds, then you can walk in , and tie em up. How about a RED panic button near each door like trains have STOP pulleys, just put those on the plane and it will dump sleeping gas everywhere but the cockpit.
And furthermore, third parties _have_ won before. There have been several times in America's history when there have been viable third parties. The Republicans started out as a third party.
That was 150 years ago. Since then, independent candidates have had no significant influence in either the House or the Senate. In 1897 there were 12 Senators (out of 90, 13%)[source] from three different independent parties. In 1859, there were 39 (out of 238, 16%) [source] independent seats in the House from four different parties. That was the most independents ever got. And in the last 100 years, independents have never held more than 3% of the House or 4% of the Senate. So, yeah, technically, they do win sometimes, but not enough to matter in the slightest.
There's a strong tendency for the system to return to a two party system after that, but that just means you need to pick the right third party, which has an actual intent to change the system, preferably to some kind of concensus format.
The two party system is the whole problem. People don't vote for third party candidates because of the fear that their last choice ("the greater of two evils") will win.
Two things would happen in that scenario. First of all, there are a lot of people who grit their teeth and vote for one of the two main parties because they want the lesser evil to win. The third party candidates might have some attractive ideas, however they don't currently have a chance in hell of winning. However if third party candiates start getting double digits and the Republicans and Democrats drop down into the 20s, then a _lot_ of these people are going to start looking across the no longer great divide and start switching camp when they realize those third parties now have a chance.
Let's assume you're right. Why hasn't it happened yet? We've had the same two parties for 150 years. Do you really believe we are the first to think there's something wrong with it? The fact is that it hasn't happened because the system is seriously stacked against third party candidates.
A system that statistically encourages a two party system is a big problem, however half of the population choosing not to vote is a big problem too.
And you don't see the connection between the two? You can't see how not having anyone worth voting for can cause people to lose faith in the system? These are lazy whiners to you? Open your eyes.
Voting for one of the two main candidates supports the system.
Which is what most people who vote do.
Voting for a third party candidate does not.
It perpetuates the system because you are engaging in behavior that cannot possibly change anything and validates the system that makes it so.
they did a lot more to change the system and get a lot more credit in my mind than the people who sat on their assess and did nothing.
Because you hold on to the false hope that working within the broken system can somehow fix it. It can't. The only people who have the power to change the system are in power because of it.
come up with another viable (and legal) solution for changing the system,
Plenty have been proposed including changing the voting process itself to allow for second choices. The reason the two party system is so unfair is that you can only indicate your first choice. Choosing just one is only meaningful when there are only two choices. Third party candidates would have a much greater chance if people could select one of the major parties as their second choice: they wouldn't have to fear their "worst" choice winning because they didn't select the one that could beat him.
But that won't ever happen because the only people who can make it happen would be cutting their own throats.
Not being able to choose good is a bad thing. However, choosing the lesser evil is still preferable to voting. Choosing a third party candidate who may be a lesser evil will go a lot farther in making sure that there will eventually be good choices, than not voing at all.
When people continually choose between the lesser of two evils, evil is all they will have to choose from. The system prefers people who will give favors in return for campaign financing. One of the INDUCE Act's sponsors is Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. Take a look at the campaign funding for him and his opponents. Who do you think will win? Then look at who's been funding him. Tell me there's no correlation.
As long as these assholes keep getting elected, this will never stop. That his opponent might be worse than him does not in any way make him more qualified to serve. And choosing the lesser of two evils only perpetuates this cycle.
There's a slight flaw in what you're saying. It only takes half the people to change the system.
Those half would have to agree and be in the right states to make a difference. The only thing they do agree on is that the system is broken.
Instead of sitting on their asses complaining about how the system is broken, why don't they do the small amount of work necessary to find some third party candidate who is interested in changing the systtem?
The only people who can change the system are in power because of it. The system cannot be changed by working within the system. Third party candidates cannot win.
if all the whiners and lazy people got off their asses and voted and the Republicans and Democrats started "winning" the elections with 26% of the vote, you would start seeing some changes pretty damn fast.
What do you base this on? I fail to see how continuing to elect one of the two major parties, by whatever margin, will change anything.
They haven't lost faith in the system, they're just lazy or poor losers and they're blaming the system for their own problems.
Ah, so you can read minds. You should have just said so in the first place. Do not pretend to know the motivations of anyone you haven't personally spoken to. You want to believe they are lazy whiners because it's easier than admitting there might be something bigger wrong.
Complaining about the state of affairs when you haven't voted is like complaining that it's too hot in your car when all you have to do is roll the window down.
This is, of course, assuming that rolling the window down will make it cooler.
In Greece the voting is mandatory. The one who doesn't fulfill her social obligation to be responsible is fined. Greece is the oldest democracy.
Making voting mandatory simply increases the number of uninformed voters. Personally, I'd rather the people who can't be bothered stay home and leave the decision making to those who care.
Make people care and they will find their way to the polls all by themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of them have Presidents in the last 150 years been members of?
Here's a hint: it's less than 3.
Here's another hint: it's 2.
Yes, there are other parties. No, they don't have the slightest chance of winning.
If any third party candidate could get that many votes, he'd be running as one of the two majors.
I've done the math on this.
Even if every registered voter[1] who did not vote in the 2000 election voted for Nader, the leading third party candidate, he couldn't win.
Of the 51 states (including D.C.), Nader could not win 24 of them even if every registered voter who didn't vote, voted for him. Of the remaining 27, he would need to win 26 of them to win, and he wasn't even on the ballot in 3 of them.
But, for the sake of argument, let's say he was (if those people were going to vote for him he would likely be on the ballot). In the 26 states (the one he doesn't win necessarily being one of the eight that only has 3 electoral votes), there were 35 million registered voters who didn't vote. He would need 27 million of those votes (ideally proportioned among the states to give him just enough to win each state) to win the election. He only got 3 million total in the whole country. That's 9 times more than he actually got and assuming that these 27 million people would have voted only for him and no other third party candidate.
More realistically, of the 56 million[2] registered voters who did not vote, evenly proportioning them across the country percentage wise, he would have needed roughly 53 million votes in order to win. In other words, close to 18 times as many votes as he actually got with none of them going to any other candidate. Bush and Gore only got 50 million each.
So, even if you could convince those 56 million people to vote and to vote for a third party candidate, the vast majority would have to agree on a single third party candidate to even have a shot at getting one elected. This just isn't going to happen. If a third party candidate could get that many votes, he would most likely be running for one of the two majors.
[1] The reason I'm not counting unregistered voters is that the data includes a "significant number" of people above voting age but aren't eligible to vote. If you want to count non-registered voters too, it's possible, but extremely unlikely.
[2] North Dakota has no voter registration and Wisconsin has registration at the polls. In those cases I am using the number of people above voting age as the registered voters for that state.
Sources:
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm
http://www.fec.gov/pages/2000turnout/reg&to00. htm
You know, I have accepted that being a target of marketing is an evil that is part of the cost of living in a capitalist society. With this as a given, I would rather that I was offered products that I might actually be interested in.
Theoretically, I agree with this. But my concern is that they aren't going to use their knowledge of my environmentalist leanings to build a more environment friendly car. They're going to use their knowledge of my love of Star Trek to get Patrick Stewart to try to convince me to buy whatever it is they're selling.
This is why I am not particually hostile towards google ads...
Google ads are pretty unintrusive, obvious that they are ads, and have actually been useful more than once. But I believe this will be the exception rather than the rule.
slashdotters will spot the magic phrase "RFID", and remember that this is something the hivemind has told them they're against.
Why don't you wait until someone actually makes the argument before you start tearing it apart?
That you assume everyone will think this is a bad idea means you don't understand why they think some uses of RFID is a bad idea. Try understanding the other side before you condemn it.
You will never "lock in" a single digit of a PIN combination on one a electronic combination lock by running through numbers. What you will do is send through a bunch of alarms to the guard.
Classic blunder from "War Games": Joshua trying to crack the nuclear missile launch codes and locking in digits of the code. "He's got four numbers. Another 5 minutes and he'll have all of them!" This is a security system, not MasterMind(tm).
I learned how to pick locks in college. It was a valuable skill in the dorms where people were consistently locked out by their roommates. Housing charged you $25 to let you back in. I charged $20.
An interesting side effect, I'm sure one that goes with just about any skill most people don't have, is the number of times you see people in movies doing it absolutely wrong.
We don't have to deal with that now, and having a 'rural tyranny' instead of an 'urban tyranny' is not an improvement.
The flaw in your argument is the assumption that the concerns of rural communities are necessarily in direct conflict with those in urban communities. They are not. In many cases both can be addressed without adversely impacting either party. That more people live in urban communities does not make the concerns of rural communities less important. In fact, most people in urban communities aren't directly affected one way or the other by what happens in rural communities.
Secondly, the whole idea of the electoral college does one thing and one thing only; it focused candidate attention on where they can pick up electoral votes, instead of what matters to the country as a whole.
The country as a whole is best served by its elected officials addressing the most issues the people are concerned with and not the one issue that concerns the most people. In a simple majority popular vote, the candidates need only address the one or two issues that concern the majority of the people and can completely ignore the issues of the minority that, most likely, the majority don't care one way or the other about. That more people live in New York does not mean the issues concerning Idaho don't need to be addressed. The electoral college, in all but the biggest blowouts, forces the candidates to address the issues in most states in order to be elected.
The electoral college system is not perfect and there are arguments that state boundaries, or geographic boundaries in general, are not representative of the issues concerning the citizens, it is vastly superior to a popular vote where only the biggest issues get any attention.
The warning here is apparently vague and leading by a very short time period.
That only lessens the degree, not the offense.
To continue the analogy perhaps this would be like Ford telling a favored customer, say Hertz (if they buy Fords I don't know) that next week they will be announcing some kind of advisory so Hertz should not service any cars this week and get ready for a big round of service next week.
If Ford did this they would still be withholding information from other Ford owners. But, more likely, Ford would tell the dealerships who would in turn notify any customers that called for service. But, since most computer maintenence is done in house rather than at a dealership, it doesn't apply.
My point about what premium customers get was to address all the comments in this thread that this is a revenue scam by MS. Premium customers get a heck of a lot of servicing and help. They don't buy it for a day or two of vague advance warning about patches
Like I said, I don't care anything at all about the premium service except for this aspect of it. That the other benefits of the premium service make it a good value doesn't make this behavior any better.
but you can see how MS has perhaps decided to do this to 1) curry favor with important customers, and 2) make the premium subscription more attractive.
Of course I see why they did it. That doesn't make it right. They're adding value by creating an artificial scarcity of information that a) doesn't cost them anything more to make public and b) helps protect users of their software from their own defects.
If you hate all companies that exist to make money, well then you hate MS, m'k?
Not all anti-MS sentiments are "MS bashing". Sometimes MS actually does things that deserve criticism. This is one of them. No, it's not the crime of the century, but it's still wrong to withhold important information so that their premium customers can get it first.
And if you believe that companies who offer service contracts are bad, then let's all take a moment to crap on RedHat, etc. too. Service contracts for software have been standard practice for... decades probably.
I make most of my living from service contracts. Service contracts are a valuable service to a company that doesn't want to do their own maintenance. But every system I install carries a one year warranty, and if a manufacturer recall or defect comes up, I tell all the people it applies to, not just the ones that have service contracts. And I certainly don't use it as leverage to get people to buy my service contracts.
Would you agree that car manufacturer's who sell extended warranties are also benefitting from their own shoddy workmanship?
No, because cars generally come with a standard warranty[1]. The difference being that everyone who buys the car gets the warranty, so it is in the manufacturer's best interest to keep the defects to a minimum. If the warranty is only available to people who have chosen to purchase it, unless most people do, then there is no incentive for the manufacturer to prevent defects, and can use them in order to push the "premium" service. The extended warranty, at that point, is simply a convenience to the buyer of a car with already relatively few defects (or a scam, depending on the warranty, but that's a different argument).
Premium customers get a lot more than this.
What else they get is irrelevant. The point is that Microsoft can only inform the premium customers first by withholding the information from non-premium customers. Information that is about defects in their own products and could possibly cause harm to the users. It is no more responsible than a car manufacturer, to extend your analogy, withholding recall information from their non-premium customers. Giving a cup-holder or a brick of gold with it doesn't make it more responsible.
[1] Yes, I am aware that the cost of the warranty is built into the price of the car. It doesn't change anything. If everyone gets the warranty and the car has a large number of defects, the cost of the warranty to the manufacturer means they have to charge more for the car and they will lose business to a company with cheaper, more reliable cars.
To some extent you already get this. If you want extra security, you can pay for a security guard, otherwise you fall back on the regular police service.
And how about health service - in the UK (and I suspect many other places in the world), if you want immediate treatment, you pay (or get your insurance to pay) to go private. If you don't pay, you end up at the back of the NHS waiting list.
Except that your security team isn't robbing you and your health providers aren't making you sick (at least they shouldn't be). The service the premium customers are paying for is protection from Microsoft's own defects. They are essentially profiting from their own shoddy workmanship.
Well since RIAA doesn't want you to believe that downloading music, at all, is illegal, it follows that either your reading comprehension of the article's point is wrong, or the article is lying.
I misspoke. I meant to use the term "file-sharing" rather than "downloading" although the article, and many other people, use the two interchangeably.
Or did RIAA just start telling people not to buy music from iTunes, et al, because they suddenly decided that they don't want the profits they're getting from downloaded music?
Last I checked, the RIAA still frowned on purchasing a song from iTunes and sharing it with your friends. There is plenty of music that it is legal to do this with and that is what the article was pointing out.
I think the RIAA is not really concerned about online communities like this one.
They will be if this becomes popular.
Things like this make it easier for an RIAA label to sign a band.
Things like this make it unnecessary for a band to sign with a label. And that's really the crux of the matter. The recording industries business model has been the creation/promotion of superstars and the selling of plastic disks. The plastic disks are no longer needed and sites like this make promotion available to bands without the help of the labels. While these sites will probably not produce superstars like the labels do, it will make it easier for musicians to make a living making music. They won't make as much as the superstars, but there will be more musicians doing it.
but downloading copyrighted materials you don't have permission for that belong to someone else is.
No one was claiming otherwise. The point of the article was that the RIAA would like you to believe that downloading music, at all, is illegal.
Let's not forget that a lot of the anti-copyright sentiment around here magically disappears whenever we have a GPL violation article.
Slashdot is not a single entity. It is a community of people who each have their own opinions.
It is also entirely possible to simultaneously hold the views that copyright law is being abused but also has parts that are good without contradicting yourself.
Even for /. that statement seems a bit paranoid. I doubt that the RIAA would try to entrap people that are legally trading music the RIAA doesn't own when they have plenty of people actually illegally trading music they can go after.
Unless their primary goal is to protect their obsolete business model, but they wouldn't do that....
Why exactly would you need a camera to do that?
It makes it about a thousand times easier to do without getting caught. It also makes it possible to share the view with just about anybody you like instead of just describing it. It's worse by several orders of magnitude. And that's ignoring that nobody should be doing it at all, camera or not.
A cop parked in the same place would also see everything. So what?
Um, there's a world of difference between a cop and a video camera. It's a question of persistence and transparency. A cop is not likely to remember every single event that happens, only the unusual ones. A cop is much more obvious than a camera. And a cop can actually stop a crime in progress whereas a video camera can only record it. A cop is not likely to know the woman I am walking down the street with is not my wife, and "accidentally" tell everyone in an effort to discredit me should I criticize the government publicly. A cop is also not likely to remember every person involved in a protest against government policy. In short, the opportunity for a video camera to be abused is much, much greater than a cop witnessing the same event.
If your window shades are open, the cops can look in. If they happen to see your stash sitting on the counter, they have probable cause.
And what's to prevent them from watching someone who forgot to close their shades while dressing?
The fact that the witness to the crime is not a person is irrelevant. If the videotape shows that you did indeed run a red light, and the facts are indisputable, what does it matter that a cop didn't see it? Just because a police officer didn't see it, doesn't mean that you didn't break the law.
The problem is that the cameras record everything, not just crimes.
Dude, LONE GUNMEN, 6months before WTC/911, what was the pilot episode about?
yes, a plane flying towards WTC to be crashed into it.
Okay, how many people watched it? How many people believed it was a real possibility? How do you explain that the hijackers were able to take control of an airliner where they were considerably outnumbered with nothing more than box cutters if the passengers didn't think they would survive?
Whats the point of locking the cockpit door, the dudes will just threaten to open a side door and really screw things up
Because even if they do, they will not be able to take control of the plane to get it to it's target. Even with a door open, the pilot will be able to maintain some control over the aircraft and, if necessary, ditch it someplace where the crash won't hurt anyone else. The point being that the hijackers won't be able to get it to its target and use it as a weapon. They may be able to coerce the pilot into changing his flight plan, but not to the point of flying the plane into a building.
What you need in a plane is an automated way by the pilot to put sleeping gas in the plane to KNOCK everyone out with in seconds, then you can walk in , and tie em up. How about a RED panic button near each door like trains have STOP pulleys, just put those on the plane and it will dump sleeping gas everywhere but the cockpit.
Yeah, that won't get abused.
>Third party candidates cannot win.
Says who?
History.
And furthermore, third parties _have_ won before. There have been several times in America's history when there have been viable third parties. The Republicans started out as a third party.
That was 150 years ago. Since then, independent candidates have had no significant influence in either the House or the Senate. In 1897 there were 12 Senators (out of 90, 13%)[source] from three different independent parties. In 1859, there were 39 (out of 238, 16%) [source] independent seats in the House from four different parties. That was the most independents ever got. And in the last 100 years, independents have never held more than 3% of the House or 4% of the Senate. So, yeah, technically, they do win sometimes, but not enough to matter in the slightest.
There's a strong tendency for the system to return to a two party system after that, but that just means you need to pick the right third party, which has an actual intent to change the system, preferably to some kind of concensus format.
The two party system is the whole problem. People don't vote for third party candidates because of the fear that their last choice ("the greater of two evils") will win.
Two things would happen in that scenario. First of all, there are a lot of people who grit their teeth and vote for one of the two main parties because they want the lesser evil to win. The third party candidates might have some attractive ideas, however they don't currently have a chance in hell of winning. However if third party candiates start getting double digits and the Republicans and Democrats drop down into the 20s, then a _lot_ of these people are going to start looking across the no longer great divide and start switching camp when they realize those third parties now have a chance.
Let's assume you're right. Why hasn't it happened yet? We've had the same two parties for 150 years. Do you really believe we are the first to think there's something wrong with it? The fact is that it hasn't happened because the system is seriously stacked against third party candidates.
A system that statistically encourages a two party system is a big problem, however half of the population choosing not to vote is a big problem too.
And you don't see the connection between the two? You can't see how not having anyone worth voting for can cause people to lose faith in the system? These are lazy whiners to you? Open your eyes.
Voting for one of the two main candidates supports the system.
Which is what most people who vote do.
Voting for a third party candidate does not.
It perpetuates the system because you are engaging in behavior that cannot possibly change anything and validates the system that makes it so.
they did a lot more to change the system and get a lot more credit in my mind than the people who sat on their assess and did nothing.
Because you hold on to the false hope that working within the broken system can somehow fix it. It can't. The only people who have the power to change the system are in power because of it.
come up with another viable (and legal) solution for changing the system,
Plenty have been proposed including changing the voting process itself to allow for second choices. The reason the two party system is so unfair is that you can only indicate your first choice. Choosing just one is only meaningful when there are only two choices. Third party candidates would have a much greater chance if people could select one of the major parties as their second choice: they wouldn't have to fear their "worst" choice winning because they didn't select the one that could beat him.
But that won't ever happen because the only people who can make it happen would be cutting their own throats.
Not being able to choose good is a bad thing. However, choosing the lesser evil is still preferable to voting. Choosing a third party candidate who may be a lesser evil will go a lot farther in making sure that there will eventually be good choices, than not voing at all.
When people continually choose between the lesser of two evils, evil is all they will have to choose from. The system prefers people who will give favors in return for campaign financing. One of the INDUCE Act's sponsors is Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. Take a look at the campaign funding for him and his opponents. Who do you think will win? Then look at who's been funding him. Tell me there's no correlation.
As long as these assholes keep getting elected, this will never stop. That his opponent might be worse than him does not in any way make him more qualified to serve. And choosing the lesser of two evils only perpetuates this cycle.
You would still advance your interests by voting for the lesser of all evils.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. You don't see the fundamental flaw in not being able to choose good?
There's a slight flaw in what you're saying. It only takes half the people to change the system.
Those half would have to agree and be in the right states to make a difference. The only thing they do agree on is that the system is broken.
Instead of sitting on their asses complaining about how the system is broken, why don't they do the small amount of work necessary to find some third party candidate who is interested in changing the systtem?
The only people who can change the system are in power because of it. The system cannot be changed by working within the system. Third party candidates cannot win.
if all the whiners and lazy people got off their asses and voted and the Republicans and Democrats started "winning" the elections with 26% of the vote, you would start seeing some changes pretty damn fast.
What do you base this on? I fail to see how continuing to elect one of the two major parties, by whatever margin, will change anything.
They haven't lost faith in the system, they're just lazy or poor losers and they're blaming the system for their own problems.
Ah, so you can read minds. You should have just said so in the first place. Do not pretend to know the motivations of anyone you haven't personally spoken to. You want to believe they are lazy whiners because it's easier than admitting there might be something bigger wrong.
Complaining about the state of affairs when you haven't voted is like complaining that it's too hot in your car when all you have to do is roll the window down.
This is, of course, assuming that rolling the window down will make it cooler.
Why should anyone care about the political opinion of someone who can't even be bothered to vote?
The assumption you're making is that the only reason people don't vote is because they're too lazy to.
If half the people have lost faith in the system, it's the system that is broken, not the people.
In Greece the voting is mandatory. The one who doesn't fulfill her social obligation to be responsible is fined. Greece is the oldest democracy.
Making voting mandatory simply increases the number of uninformed voters. Personally, I'd rather the people who can't be bothered stay home and leave the decision making to those who care.
Make people care and they will find their way to the polls all by themselves.