I'm not sure that's fair. I'm sure these aren't planned to replace the manned bomber fleet, but rather to provide a new alternitive for certain things.
Carriers provide the ability to project power and do so well, but they only cover a small circle on the surface of the Earth. Our forward bomber bases similarly have a fairly small footprint, though bigger than a carrier. This still leaves huge portions of the world out of US reach. While an extended bomber mission with in-air refueling brings these areas into range, such a mission is expensive and very rough on the pilots.
The other side of this option is the balistic missile. ICBMs and MRBMs are both very accurate weapons, though AFAIK they do not approach the accuracy of the guided munitions we've seen our government cooking off in Iraq recently. Accuracy aside, however, people see a ballistic inbound and tend to get jumpy. Doubly so if it's launched from the United States or the former Soviet Union.
A hypersonic bomber allows the kind of responce time an ICBM exhibits (ok, a bit longer) while not encouraging everyone and their brother to whip out the 2,000,000 sunblock. A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets. A larger number would allow a massive projection of power at a moments notice.
A lot of this depends on what the pricetag is on these things. If Boeing can churn them out for $250 Million to $500 Million I think they'll be a valuable asset. If they come with a price tag like the B-2 Spirit maybe we need to rethink these things.
Contents [sic] filters (as now mandated for libraries receiving federal funding, thanks to the oh-so-technically-savvy U.S. Supreme Court) still can't reliably tell the difference between breasts as in breast cancer and breasts as in porno.
Did you read the decision? The Court ruled that the filters in place were legal (not required) and the laws requireing them to be in place were legal (but repealable). Furthermore, the Court ruled that this was the case ONLY if the filters could be taken down on demand if an of age user requested to see a site blocked by them.
In short, the Court said that the State does have a compelling interest in protecting the innocence of minors, but that such an interest can not supercede the right of an adult to read and see what he/she damn well pleases in accordance with his or her 1st ammendment rights.
CNN does not constitute an authoritive legal source. Do your own research.
More true than you probably realize. Most P2P applications don't make it terribly obvious how to disable sharing (as opposed to how to download files). The result is that it would be entirely plausable that major Sharers are providing files unintentionaly.
Granted, the file they are stored in is "My Shared Files" or whatnot... but does shared there mean files I'm sharing or files that were shared with me? There are ambiguities here that definately prevent criminal charges (to say nothing of the fact that Copyright infringement is, in most (all?) cases a civil violation anyhow).
Point being that some of these people will have clever lawyers. Many of them will get off or have charges dropped. The final point is this.
There is no legal way to kill these networks
You can discourage people from using them through scare tatics (which is what the RIAA is trying to do), but nothing they can do within the United States is going to have much of an effect. As long as I can stick a server in Zimbabwe and serve files off of it there's jack shit the RIAA can do about it. They don't want to run the risk of sueing the actual downloaders because that exposes a lot of their policy to judicial scruteny. How well would the idea that you own the rights only to files ripped from your copy of the CD hold up in court (as opposed to my right to download rips of the content I own)? They don't know, and won't risk it.
Once again the RIAA proves itself little more than a collection of jack booted thugs engaging in terror tactics to frighten its market into compliance with its desires. Unfortuately, much like the undertow of a sinking ship, the death throws of a dieing regime can be dangerous to hapless bystanders.
Better yet... email him and attach a ripped copy of song from a CD you own. Mention that by reading this email (and thus having the attachment) he is inviolation of the DMCA etc and should be driving a railroad spike through his hard-drive right now.
But those methods are consistantly struck down by the Courts as being insufficient grounds.
First off, if there's not a clear shot of the person's face, there's no way of knowing WHO was driving the car. Even if there was a clear shot, if the police department is using some sort of automated system to mail the tickets it's likely to get enough falty tickets (since it would mail to the person the plates are registered to) to be removed as a legitmate method of distributing tickets etc in the first place.
This kind of technology, especialy given that it is currently only accessable after a crash, is a great way to determine who is actualy at fault. Now, you might argue that there is the danger that this technology will be used out of its intended context, providing data on drivers who have not yet injured someone or their property with their car. But to do that these recorders would have to be equiped with a LOT of new equipment. First among them is GPS and a navigational map of every area the car can reach. Of course all of that data would have to be provided wirelessly, as speed limits change, traffic patterns evolve (or devolve as the case may be) and the timing on stoplights changes.
No, I'm not worried about these invading my privacy. The infrastructure requirements to do this would so far outstrip the possible income to the States and the police departments as to make this a giant hole into which to throw money.
Unquestioning loyalty to the Fatherland is the only defence against the tyrannies and injustices of the lesser peoples of the world. This country is alone in the world. We are a nation of great people, superior in morals, technology, and ideology.
No, Dictators love people like you. Mindless rally behind the flag syndrome, senceless trust in the lies spewed forth by those corrupted by money and power... you're a despots dream.
Mr Bush points to an enemy in the shadows, one that lurks among us and strikes invisibly and without warning. He calls them terrorists.
Adolph Hitler pointed to an enemy in the shadows, one that lurked among the people of Germany and struck invisibly and without warning. He called them Jews.
The enemy within is a powerfull force, it makes people distrust those who question, those who dare to speak freely. The enemy within encourages people to place their trust in their leaders to save them. The very nature of that enemy also divests those leaders of all responcibility.
How can we call this safe? How can you feel patriotism at a time like this?
I see little american flags trailing behind SUVs on the interstate and in my minds eye the rallies at Nuremburg spring to mind. Hundreds chant "U - S - A" and I hear "Seig Heil!" My country stands on a slippery slope.
Secret military tribunals and the formation of a nebulous "Department of Homeland Security" define the political climate of this last year. Land of the free....
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind....And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. how do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." -- William Shakespeare.
As usual the Slashdot crowd, while my first goto on technical matters, isn't quite up to speed on the legal side of things. While I am not a lawyer I'm more or less married to one, so let me see if I can clarify this.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that certain types of material can be declared "obscene." This differs from material that is just offensive. Obscene material offends the sensibilities of the community it is in so much that the rights of one person to have/view that material infringes on everyone elses right not to have to deal with it.
The best example I can think of would be something like Hard Core Anal Action MCXVII in an all quaker community.
The Court ruled that in cases like that the community has the right to ban the material from sale and public display localy.
In the case of violence it is very hard to make such a case, especialy on a large scale basis. We are a violent culture. Unloading, as Kurt Vonegutt put it, weapons that cost more than a high school on a third world country, garnered some of the highest ratings of the spring television season. As a people we love violence, and we see it every day. As long as the 7:00 news has more blood, guts, and gore than Vice City you're not going to see a ban on violent video games standing up to any sort of legal scrutiny.
The artical you reference (link reproduced here for ease of use) leaves a few things out. The Soviets trained their dogs by putting bits of food under tanks. The dogs would be released, and would find the food under the tank. The idea was that when you strapped bombs to them and released them in combat they'd run under the enemy tanks and blow them up.
Only problem was, the Soviets didn't have any German tanks to train them on. So they used their own tanks in some cases, and poor mockeries of the German models.
The result was that the dogs were totaly ineffective in tank battles because they would destroy Russian tanks nearly as often as they would Nazi units.
The Soviet used K9 Toops to such effect at Stalingrad largly because of the near total absence of Soviet Armor at that city, especialy in the later parts of the battle.
That design would be even more popular at any resturant charging less than 20 for an entree. I've worked a few and the amount of theft that goes on is astounding. The biggest draw for this sort of thing woudl be keeping the employees out of the cash drawer.
When in a democracy, more than 80% of the people support something then by definition it should become legal.
What I think you mean is that it will become legal. If 80% of the populace is behind something strongly and firmly no amount of money will buy a politicians vote. You simply can not win an election if 4 out of 5 people won't vote for you because of your stance on an issue.
That said, just because 80% of the population is in agreement about something doesn't mean it should become legal. Should is a moraly judgemental phrase. I've lived long enough to know that the mob is a fickle thing, and that with a little work it can be convinced to do things like... oh... exterminate a religious minority.
Moving right along.... you feel that large quantities of money have no place in the American political system, at least insofar as buying votes goes.
Two points along those lines.
1.) There is not a single respected poltical scientist out there who will agree that corporations, PACs, Interest Groups, etc buy votes with their money. They argue that these people buy "access"... I.E. the right to have their opinions heard, not agreed with. Evidence does favor this, though I am inclined to agree it is a matter of semantics.
2.) This countrys constitution was written more or less to protect the economic interests of the men who wrote it. Our entire government is based around the ultimate power of the people, but more specificly around the power of the elite to manipulate the will of the people within the framework of a system that preserves the power of the allmighty buck. There is lots of great writing on this topic to lengthy to quote/include here.
What is really comes down to is that there is a difference between "moral" and "legal." I feel it is moraly wrong that money has the influence in politics it has. Nonetheless, is it illegal to forbid contributors that option. Contributions are a form of political speech, a most hallowed tradition in the United States.
Regardless of their nature as being freely available teasers, they are still protected by copyright law and thus subject to restrictions as to redistribution.
Well.... no. Not really. Fortunately for the internet community copyright law exists largely as caselaw rather than as actual portions of US code. While the US code does address much of this topic, the details are in the case law and the devil, as they say, is in the details.
First off remember that everything you produce is copywritten. This post is copywritten, so is the one I responded to. In fact, were it not for the extensive case law my quoting your post in responce could be copyright infringement (please don't sue me!).
However, when something is posted in a public place, like a discussion forum on Slashdot, or on trailers.apple.com or whatever a thing called an "Implied Licence" springs into being. The idea is that the owner has placed his work in a place where it is so easily copied and so easily accessable to the general public that he must expect it to be coppied.
This doesn't mean you can copy and paste essays from the internet, you've still got to give credit where credit is due. Nonetheless, no court in this country would ever find against you in a copyright case wherein you were charged with illegaly distributing a released movie trailer over a P2P network or whatnot.
Same goes for publicly available drivers, shareware, etc. So long as you don't modify the item so that the creator is not credited you're golden.
Same goes for games and movies. You can't copyright an idea.... only the manefestation of that idea. So while the bullet time scene of Trinity about to whoop ass in the Matrix is copywritten, the concept of bullet time is not only uncopywritten, but uncopywriteable.
I didn't say you fundamentaly should I said you fundamentaly do.
I don't know if it's good or not that we consider an 8 year old girl a "better candiate" for a liver transplant than a life-long alcoholic. Nonetheless, we do.
Steping outside the role of medicine now....
Does the government have the moral right to refuse the pony up for transplants or other expensive medical procedures required by a condition a patient brought upon themselves? This is idle curiosity, I hold no terribly strong opinion either way.
When you blow your liver apart from drinking too much you fundamentaly rank lower on the transplant list than the 8 year old girl down the hall suffering from a bizarre liver failure.
I'm not saying that hospitals should turn away lung cancer patients who smoked a lot or something like that. I'm not sure I'm ok with my tax dollars going to bail them out of their highly self destructive habit though.
Of course, in a system where you don't want some disgruntled govt beurocrat making the calls it's better to fund than not to fund.
Re:I still don't see how P2P is infringement.
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You mean how a public library has to close at certain times so the librarian can go home, sleep, shower, eat, get laied, whatever?
Or perhaps how University libraries will frequently be spread out over several buildings, and will leave only one building open after hours for student use.
I'm not aware of any federal law regulating how libraries are required to keep hours.
HOWEVER I am aware that most of the laws congress passes say things like "this superceeds all other written law on this topic etc etc yada yada yada" so even though there's an apparent loophole in the Fair Use laws, other more recent laws may close that loophole.
Your arguments hold more water when you read my post.
Am I in the minority? Probably. But I did this because it's just wrong to take something that you didn't pay for.
Good for you, you're part of the relitively small group of people who have been sufficiently indoctrinated into the Judeo-Christian moral ethic of our society that it remains with you despite a partial reversion to a state of nature. You're the type of person that would be among the first to attempt to form a government because the rule of law appeals to you. This would be a great argument against what I said except I specificly pointed it out in my post
As for the other crap, whatever. Look at the 21st century USA. Freedoms are being taken left and right and the populace is just taking it. Governments can't tighten the screws? Like hell they can't.
Never said they couldn't. I said that when people are granted a freedom they've done without for a very long time, or are otherwise relived of a brutaly repressive regime they are generaly none to thrilled to have it back and will fight tooth and nail against it. If you'd read my post you'd know that.
So yes, the US is enduring a period of having freedoms stripped away left and right at the moment. Unfortunately for the point you're tring to make those freedoms were in place earlier and are being lost now. In order for this to at all address my point they would have to have been taken away, reinstated fairly recently, and then revoked again.
An excelent example of this might well be the draft. The draft represents the removal of a freedom, specificly the freedom not to die for my country (agree with it, disagree with it, whatever, in the state of nature it's a freedom).
We did away with the draft shortly after Vietnam. Freedom reinstated. Pressure removed. Now, how would the American people react to a new draft? Think they'd take it lying down? Would all those kids who burned their draft cards back in the 60s be dancing with glee to see their children carted off to die in a jungle somewhere?
Before you post the knee jerk reaction to my conclusions, please read my reasoning. It helps to facilitate intelectual discourse.
Ok, and those are all excelent arguments. I agree 100%.
I'm also honest enough to say "I'm down with the whole 'free' thing"
I went into college a drone. I listened to a top 40 radio station, bought top 40 albums. I ate what the RIAA fed me.
My freshman year in college this nifty program called Napster popped up.
Today I listen to Classic Rock, Blues (New Orleans blues in particular), Jazz, and Creole/Island music. Top 40 makes me heave.
Practicly every single artist I listen to I found over Napster and the subsequent P2P networks that popped up in its place. I -=never=- would have found these artists without these services, and I certainly wouldn't have blown 20 bucks on a whimsical decision to pick up an obscure blues artist's album just to see if I liked it.
Do I buy CDs now? Yes. And most of my money goes to the smaller less well known recording companies that deal in the particular niche of the market I'm interested in.
I know it's not my right to infringe on other's copyrights. I know it's illegal. My argument is this. There are two categories of copyrights I've violated.
1 - The music I listened to, hated, and never listened to again. I will never buy these albums, and I never would have. Net loss to Artist, Record Company, Etc -- $0.00
2 - The music I loved, listen to today, and enjoy. I never would have paied for these albums without these free samples of the music to listen to. Because of these samples I have bought albums. Net Gain for Artist, Record Company, Etc -- Quite a bit.
The problem is there's no way to prevent the "bad apples from spoiling the bunch." For every user like me who buys the content we love and uses the system to introduce our selves to new styles of music there are a thousand Brittney Spears fans who are downloading her latest single "I'm a Ditzy Slut in Spandex" and costing her and the company she sold her soul to millions.
Ultimately the RIAA is gonna have to decided if the free publicity this generates is worth the losses to the teenybopper pirates. In the final analysis I think (hope) they'll see these networks as free advertising. Unfortunately, that may be a long time in coming.
Until then $1.00 a track isn't great, but it's not bad either. Anyone know if iTunes files will work on other devices or will those tracks only play on the little Apple doohickey?
Re:Download AND Pay?
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Why would you goto a job and earn money when you can just take it from somebody else?
Downloading music and stealing money are both illegal and wrong.
Please tell me you're smarter than that. People refrain from steeling or whatever because it's moraly WRONG?
Read up on Social Contract theory. There's lot of different Social Contracts (Locke, Montesque, etc) but I'll outline one in breif.
In the State of Nature human beings are lawless and anarchistic. It's like Faith says in Buffy, "See, Want, Take." The strong prevail over the weak. Governments are formed to protect the weak from the strong. Those who submit to these governments give up some of their freedoms (freedom to steal, freedom to kill, etc) in exchange for certain garuntees (protection, equal standards, etc).
Do people refrain from stealing because it's wrong? Some do, certainly, but the majority do so because their fear the consequences. Governments can put you in jail for stealing. If an individual considers this to be a reasonably probable outcome of theft they will likely refrain from doing so. Simple cost benefit analysis.
This is why it only takes a few people to start a looting spree. Take Iraq last month. I seriously doubt that the entire city of Baghdad was just waiting for the US forces to show up so they could make off with everything in every shop, store, and office in the city. A few individuals decided that the fall of Saddam's government made the risk accecptable. They got away with it. Suddenly everyone else realised two things.
1 - The government (such as it exists) is incapable of stoping this or unwilling to do so.
2 - If everyone else gets it for free and I don't I'm behind.
Now to bring this back to music.
People didn't copy music that terribly much before the Internet Music Craze (great phrase, wonder who came up with it) because it was difficult and because it wasn't the status quo to do so. Same goes for video tapes. Remember when people actualy worried about that FBI warning?
The IMC (lots of letters in that phrase) changed the status quo. Suddenly EVERYONE was getting music for free. When that happens no one wants to be the chump who's paying for it. More to the point, with apparently no consequences for downloading the music the action wasn't really "illegal" anymore... at least not in the sence that illegal means getting punished for doing it.
Human kind WILL revert back to the state of nature if governments fail to enforce the laws. Similarly, once pressure is let off, society will generaly not let it be put back in place without overwhelming force. Example -- The Soviet Union. Under Stalin the Soviets ruled with an iron (or rather steel) fist. When Khrushchev came to power he first let a bit of the pressure off. The populace reacted, and despite the development of hardline elements in his government later on, he was unable to tighten the screws back down. Once freedoms, long lost, had been enjoyed the government was unable to take them back without extraordinary measures.
It will be interesting to see how this will play out for the music industry. Will an iTunes like solution be enough to bring the industry out of the flat spin it's entering? I don't know. I'm not buying Time Warner stock though.
Another side of it is that most of the computer work done in the buisness world isn't high level programing. It's Word Processing, Spreadsheets, etc.
That work isn't done by/. readers, its generaly done by people who are still a little wary of computers, people who will -=never=- open their case up out of deep seated fear.
Recent generations of Linux (Mandrake in particular in my experiance) have worked hard to overcome the "hard to install" problem Linux has faced. There is still a long way to go.
A pigeon of less than average intelegence can install the overwhelming majority of software produced for windows if you glue a sunflower seed to the "n" key. Software instalation on *nix can be a serious headache. Sure, it's free... but if you have to get the $45,000 a year linux tech in to install every peice of software it's not gonna fly.
Linux still FEELS like a Geek's OS. And well, that's because it is. Personaly, I love it. My Mother (who is the yardstick by which I measure all user interfaces) is TERRIFIED simply by watching Linux boot. Linux needs to take a tip from the WinZip people. When you install it it needs to BE in idiot mode automaticly. Hide all the stuff that you wouldn't want your Mom to have to deal with. We geeks can turn it on if we want to.
These principals trickle all the way through the OS. I love the control Linux gives me. I love being able to tweek and adjust things to suit my fancy. At the same time I realize that 9/10s of the market just wants "the damn thing to work."
If Linux is ever going to be SERIOUS competition for Microsoft, both on the home desktop and on the buisness desktop it needs to start by accepting the dumbing down of the user interface. As a professer of mine once said the interface should be "intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer."
Oh... final point. As long as the command line is a necessary portion of the Linux OS it can not succeed. I hate the fact that this is true, but your average secritary hasn't used the command line in 8 years (since Win95 came out). It frightens them now. Take a cue from MS and relegate it to a tiny little box that most people just overlook. Sucks to do it that way, but the market demands it.
I think Niel Stephenson had the best ideas about this. E-Paper is the ULTIMATE PDF. The system needs only rudimentry image processing and a few other features built into it.
Use this technology to extend to Real Space what we allready do in Virtual Space. No computer user has any problem with the idea that a 200 page document can be represented as an icon. Extend that. Why not have that same 200 page document represted as a single page? Images, animations, graphs, even minorly interactive material can be included with fairly tiny changes.
Point is there's no need for this to allow any sort of high end use. Games? Why bother? The intent would be to use these in place of larger, bulkier documents. There's no need to replace the Walt Disney World flyers with these, but one detailing the US taxcode might be usefull to some people.
Hear Hear! The voice in my head has been screaming "I think therefore I am" since the begining of this thread.
As usual, no mod points when I need em.....
It frustrates me that not only this reviewer but apparently most of the/. croud are upset that Matrix II isn't presenting them with new and groundbreaking philosophical ideas. Most of us here have a hard time with the classic German philosophers, have never heard of the more prominant eastern ones, and still don't understand the agagory of the cave (all of which, by the way, come to light in The Matrix).
99.99% of this audiance wouldn't know groundbreaking philosophy if it jumped up and bit them, myself included. I'm happy to see a movie at least incorporating some of the classic works of philosophy in an engaging manner.
Most people watching this movie can't recognise philosophical content without a thick dusty textbook infront of them. In that light their views on it don't carry a lot of weight with me.
I've been trying to beet this through people's heads for years now. Terrorists don't have a problem with you specificly. They don't have this burning urge to see every last American dead... they have nothing against the individual American at all.
They have a HUGE (and some would say legitimate) greviance against the American government and the actions of our country.
As a tiny faction of a very poor and politicaly irrelevant society how can they incite change in that which they dislike? Unlike the wealthy westerners we associate with they can't lobby Congress or take our ambasadors out to dinner to talk things over. The money isn't there.
So they turn to the only option open to them, violence.
September 11 was a poorly calculated move. Look at it objectively. The targets were military (pentagon), economic (world trade center), and probably governmental (Congress? Whitehouse?). These people were protesting the actions of the American economic/political/military machine through violence.
Remember, terrorism has an agenda. When a terorrist does something so horrific that others of his ilk around the world stand up and repudiate him (look at Quadafi's actions on Sept 11-12, 2001) he's screwed up. The objective is lost. They are trying to incite change, not wrath and revenge.
Will we see a biological or nuclear act of terrorism in the future? The CIA says yes, and I'm inclined to agree with them. HOWEVER, it will not be from a small group seeking to affect a change in the policies of the American government. It will be an act of State Sponsored terrorism, terrorism as an act of war.
Before you flame me, I'm not appologising for what these people did. It was horrific, terrible, and utterly wrong. Violence is not an acceptable way to make your political opinions known, and reguardless of the significance of the targets, the casualties were civilians. That's low.
What I am saying is that these people had an objective, a goal. They failed in that goal because what they did was such an atrocity. If the US wants to avoid acts of terrorism in the future perhaps the millions we invest in homeland security should go to making life suck a little less in the distant corners of the world.
Ok, get your nose out of the McCarthy hearings and realize that "Anti-American" doesn't have to be about flag waving and generaly nationalistic crazyness.
The grandparent has an EXCELENT point. A precident wherein companies are liable for software bugs, especialy bugs that they weren't aware of at release time, would drasticly increase the risk associated with selling software in South Korea.
If you'll reach way back to the introduction to software engineering course you probably took in college you'll remember that it is impossible to exhostivly test most any program. The range of inputs is simply to vast to allow exhostive testing in our lifetimes, especially by a human.
That said, a verdict pinning liability on a Software vendor for not exhostivly testing a product is a bad thing.
Now to that Anti-American bit. Belive it or not there are a lot of people out there who think the good ol US of A is an overgrown school yard bully with thermonuclear weapons. In that light, there are a large number of people who would love to be able to stick it to a filthy rich corporate icon of capitalistic America and laugh all the way to the bank. We're not talking about Anti-Americanism as in Joe McCarthy, we're talking about Anti-Americanism as in France.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that's fair. I'm sure these aren't planned to replace the manned bomber fleet, but rather to provide a new alternitive for certain things.
Carriers provide the ability to project power and do so well, but they only cover a small circle on the surface of the Earth. Our forward bomber bases similarly have a fairly small footprint, though bigger than a carrier. This still leaves huge portions of the world out of US reach. While an extended bomber mission with in-air refueling brings these areas into range, such a mission is expensive and very rough on the pilots.
The other side of this option is the balistic missile. ICBMs and MRBMs are both very accurate weapons, though AFAIK they do not approach the accuracy of the guided munitions we've seen our government cooking off in Iraq recently. Accuracy aside, however, people see a ballistic inbound and tend to get jumpy. Doubly so if it's launched from the United States or the former Soviet Union.
A hypersonic bomber allows the kind of responce time an ICBM exhibits (ok, a bit longer) while not encouraging everyone and their brother to whip out the 2,000,000 sunblock. A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets. A larger number would allow a massive projection of power at a moments notice.
A lot of this depends on what the pricetag is on these things. If Boeing can churn them out for $250 Million to $500 Million I think they'll be a valuable asset. If they come with a price tag like the B-2 Spirit maybe we need to rethink these things.
Contents [sic] filters (as now mandated for libraries receiving federal funding, thanks to the oh-so-technically-savvy U.S. Supreme Court) still can't reliably tell the difference between breasts as in breast cancer and breasts as in porno.
Did you read the decision? The Court ruled that the filters in place were legal (not required) and the laws requireing them to be in place were legal (but repealable). Furthermore, the Court ruled that this was the case ONLY if the filters could be taken down on demand if an of age user requested to see a site blocked by them.
In short, the Court said that the State does have a compelling interest in protecting the innocence of minors, but that such an interest can not supercede the right of an adult to read and see what he/she damn well pleases in accordance with his or her 1st ammendment rights.
CNN does not constitute an authoritive legal source. Do your own research.
More true than you probably realize. Most P2P applications don't make it terribly obvious how to disable sharing (as opposed to how to download files). The result is that it would be entirely plausable that major Sharers are providing files unintentionaly.
Granted, the file they are stored in is "My Shared Files" or whatnot... but does shared there mean files I'm sharing or files that were shared with me? There are ambiguities here that definately prevent criminal charges (to say nothing of the fact that Copyright infringement is, in most (all?) cases a civil violation anyhow).
Point being that some of these people will have clever lawyers. Many of them will get off or have charges dropped. The final point is this.
There is no legal way to kill these networks
You can discourage people from using them through scare tatics (which is what the RIAA is trying to do), but nothing they can do within the United States is going to have much of an effect. As long as I can stick a server in Zimbabwe and serve files off of it there's jack shit the RIAA can do about it. They don't want to run the risk of sueing the actual downloaders because that exposes a lot of their policy to judicial scruteny. How well would the idea that you own the rights only to files ripped from your copy of the CD hold up in court (as opposed to my right to download rips of the content I own)? They don't know, and won't risk it.
Once again the RIAA proves itself little more than a collection of jack booted thugs engaging in terror tactics to frighten its market into compliance with its desires. Unfortuately, much like the undertow of a sinking ship, the death throws of a dieing regime can be dangerous to hapless bystanders.
Better yet... email him and attach a ripped copy of song from a CD you own. Mention that by reading this email (and thus having the attachment) he is inviolation of the DMCA etc and should be driving a railroad spike through his hard-drive right now.
But those methods are consistantly struck down by the Courts as being insufficient grounds.
First off, if there's not a clear shot of the person's face, there's no way of knowing WHO was driving the car. Even if there was a clear shot, if the police department is using some sort of automated system to mail the tickets it's likely to get enough falty tickets (since it would mail to the person the plates are registered to) to be removed as a legitmate method of distributing tickets etc in the first place.
This kind of technology, especialy given that it is currently only accessable after a crash, is a great way to determine who is actualy at fault. Now, you might argue that there is the danger that this technology will be used out of its intended context, providing data on drivers who have not yet injured someone or their property with their car. But to do that these recorders would have to be equiped with a LOT of new equipment. First among them is GPS and a navigational map of every area the car can reach. Of course all of that data would have to be provided wirelessly, as speed limits change, traffic patterns evolve (or devolve as the case may be) and the timing on stoplights changes.
No, I'm not worried about these invading my privacy. The infrastructure requirements to do this would so far outstrip the possible income to the States and the police departments as to make this a giant hole into which to throw money.
Jawol mein Herr.
Unquestioning loyalty to the Fatherland is the only defence against the tyrannies and injustices of the lesser peoples of the world. This country is alone in the world. We are a nation of great people, superior in morals, technology, and ideology.
No, Dictators love people like you. Mindless rally behind the flag syndrome, senceless trust in the lies spewed forth by those corrupted by money and power... you're a despots dream.
Mr Bush points to an enemy in the shadows, one that lurks among us and strikes invisibly and without warning. He calls them terrorists.
Adolph Hitler pointed to an enemy in the shadows, one that lurked among the people of Germany and struck invisibly and without warning. He called them Jews.
The enemy within is a powerfull force, it makes people distrust those who question, those who dare to speak freely. The enemy within encourages people to place their trust in their leaders to save them. The very nature of that enemy also divests those leaders of all responcibility.
How can we call this safe? How can you feel patriotism at a time like this?
I see little american flags trailing behind SUVs on the interstate and in my minds eye the rallies at Nuremburg spring to mind. Hundreds chant "U - S - A" and I hear "Seig Heil!" My country stands on a slippery slope.
Secret military tribunals and the formation of a nebulous "Department of Homeland Security" define the political climate of this last year. Land of the free....
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind....And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. how do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." -- William Shakespeare.
As usual the Slashdot crowd, while my first goto on technical matters, isn't quite up to speed on the legal side of things. While I am not a lawyer I'm more or less married to one, so let me see if I can clarify this.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that certain types of material can be declared "obscene." This differs from material that is just offensive. Obscene material offends the sensibilities of the community it is in so much that the rights of one person to have/view that material infringes on everyone elses right not to have to deal with it.
The best example I can think of would be something like Hard Core Anal Action MCXVII in an all quaker community.
The Court ruled that in cases like that the community has the right to ban the material from sale and public display localy.
In the case of violence it is very hard to make such a case, especialy on a large scale basis. We are a violent culture. Unloading, as Kurt Vonegutt put it, weapons that cost more than a high school on a third world country, garnered some of the highest ratings of the spring television season. As a people we love violence, and we see it every day. As long as the 7:00 news has more blood, guts, and gore than Vice City you're not going to see a ban on violent video games standing up to any sort of legal scrutiny.
Hope this helps.
Well almost.
The artical you reference (link reproduced here for ease of use) leaves a few things out. The Soviets trained their dogs by putting bits of food under tanks. The dogs would be released, and would find the food under the tank. The idea was that when you strapped bombs to them and released them in combat they'd run under the enemy tanks and blow them up.
Only problem was, the Soviets didn't have any German tanks to train them on. So they used their own tanks in some cases, and poor mockeries of the German models.
The result was that the dogs were totaly ineffective in tank battles because they would destroy Russian tanks nearly as often as they would Nazi units.
The Soviet used K9 Toops to such effect at Stalingrad largly because of the near total absence of Soviet Armor at that city, especialy in the later parts of the battle.
Just an interesting footnote to history.
That design would be even more popular at any resturant charging less than 20 for an entree. I've worked a few and the amount of theft that goes on is astounding. The biggest draw for this sort of thing woudl be keeping the employees out of the cash drawer.
Where's my mod points when I need em?
When in a democracy, more than 80% of the people support something then by definition it should become legal.
What I think you mean is that it will become legal. If 80% of the populace is behind something strongly and firmly no amount of money will buy a politicians vote. You simply can not win an election if 4 out of 5 people won't vote for you because of your stance on an issue.
That said, just because 80% of the population is in agreement about something doesn't mean it should become legal. Should is a moraly judgemental phrase. I've lived long enough to know that the mob is a fickle thing, and that with a little work it can be convinced to do things like... oh... exterminate a religious minority.
Moving right along.... you feel that large quantities of money have no place in the American political system, at least insofar as buying votes goes.
Two points along those lines.
1.) There is not a single respected poltical scientist out there who will agree that corporations, PACs, Interest Groups, etc buy votes with their money. They argue that these people buy "access"... I.E. the right to have their opinions heard, not agreed with. Evidence does favor this, though I am inclined to agree it is a matter of semantics.
2.) This countrys constitution was written more or less to protect the economic interests of the men who wrote it. Our entire government is based around the ultimate power of the people, but more specificly around the power of the elite to manipulate the will of the people within the framework of a system that preserves the power of the allmighty buck. There is lots of great writing on this topic to lengthy to quote/include here.
What is really comes down to is that there is a difference between "moral" and "legal." I feel it is moraly wrong that money has the influence in politics it has. Nonetheless, is it illegal to forbid contributors that option. Contributions are a form of political speech, a most hallowed tradition in the United States.
Just some thoughts.
Regardless of their nature as being freely available teasers, they are still protected by copyright law and thus subject to restrictions as to redistribution.
Well.... no. Not really. Fortunately for the internet community copyright law exists largely as caselaw rather than as actual portions of US code. While the US code does address much of this topic, the details are in the case law and the devil, as they say, is in the details.
First off remember that everything you produce is copywritten. This post is copywritten, so is the one I responded to. In fact, were it not for the extensive case law my quoting your post in responce could be copyright infringement (please don't sue me!).
However, when something is posted in a public place, like a discussion forum on Slashdot, or on trailers.apple.com or whatever a thing called an "Implied Licence" springs into being. The idea is that the owner has placed his work in a place where it is so easily copied and so easily accessable to the general public that he must expect it to be coppied.
This doesn't mean you can copy and paste essays from the internet, you've still got to give credit where credit is due. Nonetheless, no court in this country would ever find against you in a copyright case wherein you were charged with illegaly distributing a released movie trailer over a P2P network or whatnot.
Same goes for publicly available drivers, shareware, etc. So long as you don't modify the item so that the creator is not credited you're golden.
Same goes for games and movies. You can't copyright an idea.... only the manefestation of that idea. So while the bullet time scene of Trinity about to whoop ass in the Matrix is copywritten, the concept of bullet time is not only uncopywritten, but uncopywriteable.
Just FYI.
I didn't say you fundamentaly should I said you fundamentaly do.
I don't know if it's good or not that we consider an 8 year old girl a "better candiate" for a liver transplant than a life-long alcoholic. Nonetheless, we do.
Steping outside the role of medicine now....
Does the government have the moral right to refuse the pony up for transplants or other expensive medical procedures required by a condition a patient brought upon themselves? This is idle curiosity, I hold no terribly strong opinion either way.
At the same time, lets be reasonable.
When you blow your liver apart from drinking too much you fundamentaly rank lower on the transplant list than the 8 year old girl down the hall suffering from a bizarre liver failure.
I'm not saying that hospitals should turn away lung cancer patients who smoked a lot or something like that. I'm not sure I'm ok with my tax dollars going to bail them out of their highly self destructive habit though.
Of course, in a system where you don't want some disgruntled govt beurocrat making the calls it's better to fund than not to fund.
You mean how a public library has to close at certain times so the librarian can go home, sleep, shower, eat, get laied, whatever?
Or perhaps how University libraries will frequently be spread out over several buildings, and will leave only one building open after hours for student use.
I'm not aware of any federal law regulating how libraries are required to keep hours.
HOWEVER I am aware that most of the laws congress passes say things like "this superceeds all other written law on this topic etc etc yada yada yada" so even though there's an apparent loophole in the Fair Use laws, other more recent laws may close that loophole.
Your arguments hold more water when you read my post.
Am I in the minority? Probably. But I did this because it's just wrong to take something that you didn't pay for.
Good for you, you're part of the relitively small group of people who have been sufficiently indoctrinated into the Judeo-Christian moral ethic of our society that it remains with you despite a partial reversion to a state of nature. You're the type of person that would be among the first to attempt to form a government because the rule of law appeals to you. This would be a great argument against what I said except I specificly pointed it out in my post
As for the other crap, whatever. Look at the 21st century USA. Freedoms are being taken left and right and the populace is just taking it. Governments can't tighten the screws? Like hell they can't.
Never said they couldn't. I said that when people are granted a freedom they've done without for a very long time, or are otherwise relived of a brutaly repressive regime they are generaly none to thrilled to have it back and will fight tooth and nail against it. If you'd read my post you'd know that.
So yes, the US is enduring a period of having freedoms stripped away left and right at the moment. Unfortunately for the point you're tring to make those freedoms were in place earlier and are being lost now. In order for this to at all address my point they would have to have been taken away, reinstated fairly recently, and then revoked again.
An excelent example of this might well be the draft. The draft represents the removal of a freedom, specificly the freedom not to die for my country (agree with it, disagree with it, whatever, in the state of nature it's a freedom).
We did away with the draft shortly after Vietnam. Freedom reinstated. Pressure removed. Now, how would the American people react to a new draft? Think they'd take it lying down? Would all those kids who burned their draft cards back in the 60s be dancing with glee to see their children carted off to die in a jungle somewhere?
Before you post the knee jerk reaction to my conclusions, please read my reasoning. It helps to facilitate intelectual discourse.
Ok, and those are all excelent arguments. I agree 100%.
I'm also honest enough to say "I'm down with the whole 'free' thing"
I went into college a drone. I listened to a top 40 radio station, bought top 40 albums. I ate what the RIAA fed me.
My freshman year in college this nifty program called Napster popped up.
Today I listen to Classic Rock, Blues (New Orleans blues in particular), Jazz, and Creole/Island music. Top 40 makes me heave.
Practicly every single artist I listen to I found over Napster and the subsequent P2P networks that popped up in its place. I -=never=- would have found these artists without these services, and I certainly wouldn't have blown 20 bucks on a whimsical decision to pick up an obscure blues artist's album just to see if I liked it.
Do I buy CDs now? Yes. And most of my money goes to the smaller less well known recording companies that deal in the particular niche of the market I'm interested in.
I know it's not my right to infringe on other's copyrights. I know it's illegal. My argument is this. There are two categories of copyrights I've violated.
1 - The music I listened to, hated, and never listened to again. I will never buy these albums, and I never would have. Net loss to Artist, Record Company, Etc -- $0.00
2 - The music I loved, listen to today, and enjoy. I never would have paied for these albums without these free samples of the music to listen to. Because of these samples I have bought albums. Net Gain for Artist, Record Company, Etc -- Quite a bit.
The problem is there's no way to prevent the "bad apples from spoiling the bunch." For every user like me who buys the content we love and uses the system to introduce our selves to new styles of music there are a thousand Brittney Spears fans who are downloading her latest single "I'm a Ditzy Slut in Spandex" and costing her and the company she sold her soul to millions.
Ultimately the RIAA is gonna have to decided if the free publicity this generates is worth the losses to the teenybopper pirates. In the final analysis I think (hope) they'll see these networks as free advertising. Unfortunately, that may be a long time in coming.
Until then $1.00 a track isn't great, but it's not bad either. Anyone know if iTunes files will work on other devices or will those tracks only play on the little Apple doohickey?
Why would you goto a job and earn money when you can just take it from somebody else?
Downloading music and stealing money are both illegal and wrong.
Please tell me you're smarter than that. People refrain from steeling or whatever because it's moraly WRONG?
Read up on Social Contract theory. There's lot of different Social Contracts (Locke, Montesque, etc) but I'll outline one in breif.
In the State of Nature human beings are lawless and anarchistic. It's like Faith says in Buffy, "See, Want, Take." The strong prevail over the weak. Governments are formed to protect the weak from the strong. Those who submit to these governments give up some of their freedoms (freedom to steal, freedom to kill, etc) in exchange for certain garuntees (protection, equal standards, etc).
Do people refrain from stealing because it's wrong? Some do, certainly, but the majority do so because their fear the consequences. Governments can put you in jail for stealing. If an individual considers this to be a reasonably probable outcome of theft they will likely refrain from doing so. Simple cost benefit analysis.
This is why it only takes a few people to start a looting spree. Take Iraq last month. I seriously doubt that the entire city of Baghdad was just waiting for the US forces to show up so they could make off with everything in every shop, store, and office in the city. A few individuals decided that the fall of Saddam's government made the risk accecptable. They got away with it. Suddenly everyone else realised two things.
1 - The government (such as it exists) is incapable of stoping this or unwilling to do so.
2 - If everyone else gets it for free and I don't I'm behind.
Now to bring this back to music.
People didn't copy music that terribly much before the Internet Music Craze (great phrase, wonder who came up with it) because it was difficult and because it wasn't the status quo to do so. Same goes for video tapes. Remember when people actualy worried about that FBI warning?
The IMC (lots of letters in that phrase) changed the status quo. Suddenly EVERYONE was getting music for free. When that happens no one wants to be the chump who's paying for it. More to the point, with apparently no consequences for downloading the music the action wasn't really "illegal" anymore... at least not in the sence that illegal means getting punished for doing it.
Human kind WILL revert back to the state of nature if governments fail to enforce the laws. Similarly, once pressure is let off, society will generaly not let it be put back in place without overwhelming force. Example -- The Soviet Union. Under Stalin the Soviets ruled with an iron (or rather steel) fist. When Khrushchev came to power he first let a bit of the pressure off. The populace reacted, and despite the development of hardline elements in his government later on, he was unable to tighten the screws back down. Once freedoms, long lost, had been enjoyed the government was unable to take them back without extraordinary measures.
It will be interesting to see how this will play out for the music industry. Will an iTunes like solution be enough to bring the industry out of the flat spin it's entering? I don't know. I'm not buying Time Warner stock though.
Another side of it is that most of the computer work done in the buisness world isn't high level programing. It's Word Processing, Spreadsheets, etc.
/. readers, its generaly done by people who are still a little wary of computers, people who will -=never=- open their case up out of deep seated fear.
That work isn't done by
Recent generations of Linux (Mandrake in particular in my experiance) have worked hard to overcome the "hard to install" problem Linux has faced. There is still a long way to go.
A pigeon of less than average intelegence can install the overwhelming majority of software produced for windows if you glue a sunflower seed to the "n" key. Software instalation on *nix can be a serious headache. Sure, it's free... but if you have to get the $45,000 a year linux tech in to install every peice of software it's not gonna fly.
Linux still FEELS like a Geek's OS. And well, that's because it is. Personaly, I love it. My Mother (who is the yardstick by which I measure all user interfaces) is TERRIFIED simply by watching Linux boot. Linux needs to take a tip from the WinZip people. When you install it it needs to BE in idiot mode automaticly. Hide all the stuff that you wouldn't want your Mom to have to deal with. We geeks can turn it on if we want to.
These principals trickle all the way through the OS. I love the control Linux gives me. I love being able to tweek and adjust things to suit my fancy. At the same time I realize that 9/10s of the market just wants "the damn thing to work."
If Linux is ever going to be SERIOUS competition for Microsoft, both on the home desktop and on the buisness desktop it needs to start by accepting the dumbing down of the user interface. As a professer of mine once said the interface should be "intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer."
Oh... final point. As long as the command line is a necessary portion of the Linux OS it can not succeed. I hate the fact that this is true, but your average secritary hasn't used the command line in 8 years (since Win95 came out). It frightens them now. Take a cue from MS and relegate it to a tiny little box that most people just overlook. Sucks to do it that way, but the market demands it.
I think Niel Stephenson had the best ideas about this. E-Paper is the ULTIMATE PDF. The system needs only rudimentry image processing and a few other features built into it.
Use this technology to extend to Real Space what we allready do in Virtual Space. No computer user has any problem with the idea that a 200 page document can be represented as an icon. Extend that. Why not have that same 200 page document represted as a single page? Images, animations, graphs, even minorly interactive material can be included with fairly tiny changes.
Point is there's no need for this to allow any sort of high end use. Games? Why bother? The intent would be to use these in place of larger, bulkier documents. There's no need to replace the Walt Disney World flyers with these, but one detailing the US taxcode might be usefull to some people.
Well they could call it Digital Ink, or Dink for short :)
Hear Hear! The voice in my head has been screaming "I think therefore I am" since the begining of this thread.
/. croud are upset that Matrix II isn't presenting them with new and groundbreaking philosophical ideas. Most of us here have a hard time with the classic German philosophers, have never heard of the more prominant eastern ones, and still don't understand the agagory of the cave (all of which, by the way, come to light in The Matrix).
As usual, no mod points when I need em.....
It frustrates me that not only this reviewer but apparently most of the
99.99% of this audiance wouldn't know groundbreaking philosophy if it jumped up and bit them, myself included. I'm happy to see a movie at least incorporating some of the classic works of philosophy in an engaging manner.
Most people watching this movie can't recognise philosophical content without a thick dusty textbook infront of them. In that light their views on it don't carry a lot of weight with me.
More like Solaris.... ;-)
Damnit, where the hell are my mod points?
I've been trying to beet this through people's heads for years now. Terrorists don't have a problem with you specificly. They don't have this burning urge to see every last American dead... they have nothing against the individual American at all.
They have a HUGE (and some would say legitimate) greviance against the American government and the actions of our country.
As a tiny faction of a very poor and politicaly irrelevant society how can they incite change in that which they dislike? Unlike the wealthy westerners we associate with they can't lobby Congress or take our ambasadors out to dinner to talk things over. The money isn't there.
So they turn to the only option open to them, violence.
September 11 was a poorly calculated move. Look at it objectively. The targets were military (pentagon), economic (world trade center), and probably governmental (Congress? Whitehouse?). These people were protesting the actions of the American economic/political/military machine through violence.
Remember, terrorism has an agenda. When a terorrist does something so horrific that others of his ilk around the world stand up and repudiate him (look at Quadafi's actions on Sept 11-12, 2001) he's screwed up. The objective is lost. They are trying to incite change, not wrath and revenge.
Will we see a biological or nuclear act of terrorism in the future? The CIA says yes, and I'm inclined to agree with them. HOWEVER, it will not be from a small group seeking to affect a change in the policies of the American government. It will be an act of State Sponsored terrorism, terrorism as an act of war.
Before you flame me, I'm not appologising for what these people did. It was horrific, terrible, and utterly wrong. Violence is not an acceptable way to make your political opinions known, and reguardless of the significance of the targets, the casualties were civilians. That's low.
What I am saying is that these people had an objective, a goal. They failed in that goal because what they did was such an atrocity. If the US wants to avoid acts of terrorism in the future perhaps the millions we invest in homeland security should go to making life suck a little less in the distant corners of the world.
Well at least one of them won't say anything about what they see......
Ok, get your nose out of the McCarthy hearings and realize that "Anti-American" doesn't have to be about flag waving and generaly nationalistic crazyness.
The grandparent has an EXCELENT point. A precident wherein companies are liable for software bugs, especialy bugs that they weren't aware of at release time, would drasticly increase the risk associated with selling software in South Korea.
If you'll reach way back to the introduction to software engineering course you probably took in college you'll remember that it is impossible to exhostivly test most any program. The range of inputs is simply to vast to allow exhostive testing in our lifetimes, especially by a human.
That said, a verdict pinning liability on a Software vendor for not exhostivly testing a product is a bad thing.
Now to that Anti-American bit. Belive it or not there are a lot of people out there who think the good ol US of A is an overgrown school yard bully with thermonuclear weapons. In that light, there are a large number of people who would love to be able to stick it to a filthy rich corporate icon of capitalistic America and laugh all the way to the bank. We're not talking about Anti-Americanism as in Joe McCarthy, we're talking about Anti-Americanism as in France.