Re:How do you find it?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Welcome back. Things have changed a lot in the last 8 years. People with your kind of skills are becoming rarer while the number of people that commit on line "crimes" has increased.
The hot issue for many of us concerns the idea of Fair Use, copyright, and copyright enforcment. Government regulations have been changed and are changing in favor of the same kinds of large corporations that claimed huge damages against you during your less than ideal experiance with the Judidical System.
My question is this. What are your thoughts on the continued expansion of corporate copyright enforcement rights, including the legalization of some of the techniques you were convicted of using?
Do you trust corporate america to weild the tools you've used and helped pioneer and what if any regulation do you consider both accecptable and feasable?
Hydrogen's potential energy as related to other objects is low, yes. But the curve you're thinking of is the energy benfit curve from fusion. (Iron tops the curve with Hydrogen at the bottom).
Now, yes, that means that there are lots of elements you could use that will generate more energy than hydrogen. But I belive the people of a little island called Bikini will agree with me when I say Hydrogen produced a pretty substantial quantity of energy as well under that process.
Burning? That might be something else. I belive we use Hydrogen for that because it's easy to come by and you can bind a whole lot of them to various ring-shaped chemicals.
Person A = 500,000 - 15% taxes (75,000) = 425000 Person B = 30,000 - 15% taxes (4,500) = 25500
Now here's the interesting part...
Disposeable income for person A... 500,000 - 18,000 = 482000 Disposeable for person B... 30,000 - 18,000 = 12,000
Tax as a precentage of disposeable income... 75,000/482,000 = 15.56% 4500/12000 = 37.5%
So the teacher will be paying more than DOUBLE the taxes (as a portion of her income after necessities) than the person making 500k a year. Since we can't control expenditures for necessities is this really fair?
Spam (as much as it pains me to say this) has nothing to do with theft, at least not from teh Governmental Regulation side of things.
The US post office gives reduced rates to groups that send mail in bulk. In effect this is no different. The net effect is the same, extra strain on your mailbox (and if you say that's not true you've never had a box collapse under the deluge of catalogs around November), a waste of your time, and a waste of your resources (tax money to pay those postmen and higher stamp rates).
No, the government has been licencing people to spam us for a long time. They just haven't been charging enough. I think the key is to make sure that any spam tax that goes into effect is sufficiently robust as to ensure its effectiveness.
Of course! How could I have been so stupid. All this time I've been studying the history of the Soviet Union I've been focusing on the influence of the three pirmary economic models (Stalin, Bukharin, Trotsky) and not on the actions of Right Wing American Presidents. How foolish of me to have assumed that the Soviet Union's downfall was brough about by it's own hardline policies, it's economic collapse, and it's general failure to supply even basic necessities to its people!
Why, if I'd only realised that the massive Soviet missile buildup and bomber buildup had caused the collapse of the economy I could have revolutionized my thesis!
My only question is this. How would I have defended that thesis with the knowledge that the USSR never engaged in those buildups and that the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" tauted by Nixon in his first campaign were nothing more than a clever KGB scheme? Those inflatable tank regiments in the buffer zone do the argument some real damage too.
I continualy hear all this about the "liberal press." Yet when campaign season rolls around it's never that way. I just keep wondering when all these paranoid right wingers are going to wake up.
The JOURNALISTS are libreal. Yes. Everyone knoes that. Education tends to do that to people (no that's not a barb, that's a political reality).
At the same time WEALTH tends to make people conservitive. The independent newspaper has gone from the rule to the exception in this country. The media today is the buisness of massive congolmerates. Media is big buisness, and we're all really clear on who the party of big buisness is.
Are there libreal aspects to our media? Certainly. The West Wing pushes a liberal agenda... but then who's really against lowering the infant mortality rate, championing the cause of the downtroden, and fighting for education in the privacy of their own home when it doesn't cost them a dime?
But the question we should be asking ourselves is not "is that reporter a liberal" but rather, is the overall media prespective biased against conservitives.
I think you'll find the answer is no. Did the media go after Lott following his comments? Of course. Did they not also persue Clinton and Monica after their ignoble trist?
While there are countless incidences of highly conservitive bias in the media (for an entertaining read on this check out Stupid White Men and other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation - Michael Moore) I am hard pressed to come up with many liberal ones.
The Supreme Courts exists to perserve the constitution as a living document. Their job is to make sure that the language pened 200+ years ago is interpreted and applied to our society today.
So now that the government has hydrogen bombs and the NRA is trying to get assault weapons legalized can we all just step back and realize that a tyranical government can turn places like Ruby Ridge into a smoking hole in the ground?
Tyranical or not, mere firearms are -=not=- going to topple a government that has smart bombs, cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons.
President Bush announced before a joint session of Congress today that the United States will "fight a global war against SPAM." Citing the dramatic increase in SPAM over the past decade and forcasts that this trend will continue, Bush called for the funding of a federal initiative to "track down SPAMers with global reach."
Dubbing China, South Korea, and Nigeria the "axis of Potted Meat" the the President warned of "the gravest possible consequences" for States continuing to harbor and support SPAMers.
"Under my authority as commander and chief of the United States armed forces I have ordered surgical strikes against... routers in these countries," Bush said. "This is only the first step."
Under a presidential directive US warplanes are now enforcing a "no fly zone" over Austin Minnesota, headquarters of Hormel Foods. The administration declined to comment on this quarentine.
The point is this. Travel in space requires a reaction mass. The problem with a reaction mass is you have to carry it with you. The distance you can reasonably travel is a function of how patient you are and how much of your mass you have remaining by the time you get out of whatever gravity well you're in.
The earth has a larger gravity well than the moon. Consequently, constructing a longer range vehicle in the moons gravity allows you to save power and time lifting that device clear of your launch site. Using a smaller craft to lift, say, humans... from the earth to your longer range probe saves you the need to lift your reaction mass for the longer trip initialy.
So a better anaology would be climbing a mountain. You have a friend who lives half way up the mountain. It makes more sence to walk to his house and then resupply and climb to the summit from there instead of bringing all your provisions for the entire trip from the mountain base.
Well, that depends. I'd say the time period for doing squat about the Large Killer Rock (tm) would be between 6 and 2 years to impact... depending on election cycles of course.
Were do you think electricity comes from? Check this page for a hint.
A Segway will be running, mostly on coal power. Now what do you think burns cleaner, gasoline or coal? Electrical vehicals are a load of crap until we develop a cleaner way to provide electricity in bulk.
Sometimes I wonder. How much money is there, really, in the SPAM buisness? Let me rephrase that... how much money is there to be made by selling things to the people you SPAM?
I don't know of anyone who's bought from a SPAMer. Not one. No one I know seems to know of someone who's done that either. Even at two degrees of seperation that's a fairly large number of people.
I've often wondered if the money to be made in SPAMing comes from selling the "verified" address list you've aquired to other SPAMers. The messages seem to serve as a form of confirmation (afterall, you know which ones get returned as undeliverable).
For some reason it wouldn't supprise me to learn that the turnover in the SPAM industry is very high and that it's just feeding on itself... a kind of twisted pyramid scheme.
Ok someone has to explain this and being married to a High School government teacher is proving advantagious in this case.
The United States operates under a system called Federalism. Under this system power is divided between National, State, and Local governments. Each government is responcible for enacting its own laws. -=However=- under the supremacy clause of the United States constitution no law passed by a lower government can contradict a law passed by a higher one.
Example -- The United States Congress (and president) passes a law stating that it shall be illegal for a person to posess more than 50 gallons of Jolt cola per person in his household. The State of Vermont may not pass a law which increases that limit to 75 gallons, or rather it can, but the National limit of 50 gallons will superceed that. (I'm getting to the point here). Vermont could pass a law lowering that limit to 30 gallons, however, and there would be no conflict.
The Bill of Rights was put in place, not to define the freedoms of the people, but to constrain the power of the government. Read it. Congress shall make no law.... The right of the people to * shall not be abridged... and of course, All powers not specified in this Constitution are reserved for the States and the people of the United States.
Key point there -- The BOR does not deliminate the freedoms of the people, it sets boundaries for the government. But remember, those boundaries -=only=- apply to the National government.
The 14th ammendment incorporates much of the constitution upon the States, or rather, it created a way for the Court to do so. IIRC, the only ammendment from the BOR not so incorporated is the 2nd (right to keep/bare arms).
So yes, in the United States we assume that you have right X unless stated otherwise. It doesn't have to be explicitly stated, implied powers are a big part of our legal system, and 99% of what our National government does are things the constitution only implies it can do (establishing a National Bank for example).
The origional poster, however, had a point. Every US citizen should know one thing coming into this debate. Our legal system does -=not=- allow for conflicting laws. A law either superseeds another or it does not. Dominance is clear. If dominance is -=not=- clear it is up to the Court to determine what is meant by the two laws. That decision becomes precident, which has the force of law (in most cases).
I'm going to play the devils advocate and champion the "The MPAAA released it theory here"
Ok, your first major assumpion: If these people really believe that the internet is one big conduit to steal music and movies
Lets get real people. They don't belive this any more than Phillip Morris belived that smoking was healthy. These people are in the buisness of making movies based on the statistical sampling of a population (to determine what will sell). Don't you think they have access to the very same statistics you and I do?
They -=know=- just as well as we do that they're not loosing revenue to pirated movies. The numbers aren't there. They -=know=- that the overwhelming majority of their target audiance for every movie they release (execpt maybe Sneakers or whatever) is so technologicaly clueless as to require tech support to find the "any" key.
Given that, what would you do? Push Congress to enact tougher laws daming the P2P flow. Why? Because while your target audiance may not be tech savy today, in 30 years -=our=- kids (who are damn sure going to be recompiling the kernal when they're four are going to be the target audiance. And then they -=will=- loose money hand over fist.
Furthermore, creating this kind of situation does allow price fixing! If enough Senators and Congresscritters are convinced that the Movie Industry really does need to change $9.55 for a ticket to re-coup the costs of movie piracy then there is no way in hell the Justice Department will ever prosecute (yes, I know the JD isn't run by the Congress, I also know what log rolling is).
Remember, all the figures here are ethereal. HPACOS may shatter all box office records. But the MPAA can still point to Kazaa and say, " Well, we can find some 1.3 Million copies of this file world wide, which indicates that we lost (9.55 x 1.3Million) 12.4 million in potential revenues."
As long as the MPAA counts every downloaded movie as a lost ticket sale (and probably a lost VHS sale, a lost DVD sale, and several more for the various special editions) they will never loose this argument. They will -=always=- be in the hole because the ASSUMPTION is that they are in the hole. No data can exist to disprove the assumption because in order to get that data you need to get 1.3 million people (or whatever) to admit to commiting a CRIME.
Lets be clear on one thing. The Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine in the 1930s was tolerated for one reason. Stalin was a bastard, but he was our bastard. Granted, this wasn't true at the time, but it was true by the time the world found out abou it.
Also, lets keep in mind that Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine was not technicaly speaking Genocide, nor was it an racialy motivated hate crime. Stalin starved that area because it produced bread... not because he considered them to be an inferior portion of the Soviet Empire.
Finaly, please remember that all of this is predicated on the guilt complex germany developed over its brush with the extreme conservitive nature of facism and Nazism (nothing against conservitives, that's just the way it is). The Soviet Union experianced such a guilt complex only during the early years of the Khrushchev regime, and only beacuse of Khruschev's "Secret Speeches" which lamblasted Stalin and his politaly motivated killings. At no time has anyone in in the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union given all that much of a shit about the 30 Million who died in the Great Famine of the Ukraine.
Before we all go off the deep end on the EU for these laws lets remember what got them there in the first place.
Follwing WWII West Germany (it wasn't technicaly this yet, but lets call a duck a duck shall we?) and the German court system ammended the Constitution of Germany, making the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) illegel and unconstitutional.
This was mostly just a show of good faith, as no one in their right mind would profess themselves as a Nazi in allied occupied Germany.
In recent years, however, neo-Nazi parties have been gaining force in Germany, particularly in former East Germany. The German Government has been unable to crack down on these groups because of the assumed political bias against the East that prevades the state. That is -- the East Germans belive that the Westerners dislike them, and thus any move against a pro-nazi East German party would be reguarded as an expression of that East-West bias, and not a hardline stand against Naizism.
Consequently Germany has explored some back channels with the EU to provided these anti-hate speach laws. These laws will allow Germany to act against these Nazistic hate groups without drawing fire from the entering eastern states for political persecution.
The German people have a deep and abiding guilt complex over the crimes their nation committed in the 1930s and 1940s. I have seen few reactions in my world travels as contemptuous and self depreciatating as those the Germans have against any vestige of the Nazi era. While I do not support censorship in general, I think that the German nation has a lot of healing to do. Perhaps in the future these laws can be relaxed, but for now they are important and must remain.
Lets remember that what lobbiests buy with their donations is not votes, but access. The evidence just isn't there to suggest that campaign donations influence voting patterns significantly (amazing but true, I didn't belive it myself until I saw the numbers).
Take the NRA for example. It gives money to anti-gun control congressmen in huge quantities. Were they anti-gun control before the NRA ever gave them a dime? Would they be pro-gun control if the NRA stoped handing them money? We don't know. We do know that the NRA also gives money to congressmen who vote against the bills it likes. True, they give less, but they still give.
What we do know, and can prove, is that if you've given a huge quantity of money to a congressman you have his atttention and can demand his time. When a bill comes before the house banning, Teflon coated bullets for example, the NRA can ask for face time with the congressmen its helped get elected. It can be reasonably sure that it will get that time.
I just wanted to make that point. Money does not buy votes. It buys the right to make arguments. If no one argues against you... well.... that's someone elses problem.
Why were you reaching for your wallet? I understand that its exciting to see the beginings of an officialy sanctioned movie distribution system online. Nonetheless, there are some major problems with this.
However, Harry Potter and the other Warner titles in the deal, such as Mars Attacks and Dial M for Murder, are sold separately as a download for about $US4 ($7.30).
Like this for example. I can download this movie (call it 700 MB) over my fairly quick little connection here (1 Mb/s peek) and spend 8 (bits/byte) x 700 MB = 5600 min or about 1.5 hours downloading the movie. I can then watch it for upto and including 24 hours.
Or... I could get in my car, drive to Blockbuster, and rent the DVD for about $5.00. I can watch it for at least two days, probably three if I rent it at the right time, and spend about 10 to 20 mins depending on traffic conditions.
I could be completely wrong, but this sounds a little like a primitive ancestor of the kind of "Rod Logic" system Neil Stevenson describes in "Diamond Age"
Apolo didn't demonstrate the ability to REACH the USSR. It demonstrated the ability of the United States to hit a target with precision at distance. The moon is a good deal further away. Landing someone there in tact takes a good deal more precision.
The Apolo project thus demonstrated the United State's ability to land a warhead on a similarly small target. Remember that the Cold War wasn't just about practical solutions, it was about perception.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps I'm providing context. God forbid.
Welcome back. Things have changed a lot in the last 8 years. People with your kind of skills are becoming rarer while the number of people that commit on line "crimes" has increased.
The hot issue for many of us concerns the idea of Fair Use, copyright, and copyright enforcment. Government regulations have been changed and are changing in favor of the same kinds of large corporations that claimed huge damages against you during your less than ideal experiance with the Judidical System.
My question is this. What are your thoughts on the continued expansion of corporate copyright enforcement rights, including the legalization of some of the techniques you were convicted of using?
Do you trust corporate america to weild the tools you've used and helped pioneer and what if any regulation do you consider both accecptable and feasable?
Hydrogen's potential energy as related to other objects is low, yes. But the curve you're thinking of is the energy benfit curve from fusion. (Iron tops the curve with Hydrogen at the bottom).
Now, yes, that means that there are lots of elements you could use that will generate more energy than hydrogen. But I belive the people of a little island called Bikini will agree with me when I say Hydrogen produced a pretty substantial quantity of energy as well under that process.
Burning? That might be something else. I belive we use Hydrogen for that because it's easy to come by and you can bind a whole lot of them to various ring-shaped chemicals.
They get reported that way because they are.
Lets do some math shall we?
Person A: Income = $500,000/year
Person B: Income = $030,000/year (teacher salary)
Now we'll deduct necessary expenses. These do not change from one person to the next because they are necessities, food, housing, etc.
Rent = $500/month
Foodstuffs = $500/month (for two)
Medical = $250/month (ammortized)
Unplaned Emergancy Expenses = $250/mo
Total = $1500/month
Total per year = 18,000
So back to those Incomes
Person A = 500,000 - 15% taxes (75,000) = 425000
Person B = 30,000 - 15% taxes (4,500) = 25500
Now here's the interesting part...
Disposeable income for person A...
500,000 - 18,000 = 482000
Disposeable for person B...
30,000 - 18,000 = 12,000
Tax as a precentage of disposeable income...
75,000/482,000 = 15.56%
4500/12000 = 37.5%
So the teacher will be paying more than DOUBLE the taxes (as a portion of her income after necessities) than the person making 500k a year. Since we can't control expenditures for necessities is this really fair?
With all due respect, bullshit.
Spam (as much as it pains me to say this) has nothing to do with theft, at least not from teh Governmental Regulation side of things.
The US post office gives reduced rates to groups that send mail in bulk. In effect this is no different. The net effect is the same, extra strain on your mailbox (and if you say that's not true you've never had a box collapse under the deluge of catalogs around November), a waste of your time, and a waste of your resources (tax money to pay those postmen and higher stamp rates).
No, the government has been licencing people to spam us for a long time. They just haven't been charging enough. I think the key is to make sure that any spam tax that goes into effect is sufficiently robust as to ensure its effectiveness.
And mine's worth less than a cup of tea. Without milk, or sugar, or tea.
Of course! How could I have been so stupid. All this time I've been studying the history of the Soviet Union I've been focusing on the influence of the three pirmary economic models (Stalin, Bukharin, Trotsky) and not on the actions of Right Wing American Presidents. How foolish of me to have assumed that the Soviet Union's downfall was brough about by it's own hardline policies, it's economic collapse, and it's general failure to supply even basic necessities to its people!
Why, if I'd only realised that the massive Soviet missile buildup and bomber buildup had caused the collapse of the economy I could have revolutionized my thesis!
My only question is this. How would I have defended that thesis with the knowledge that the USSR never engaged in those buildups and that the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" tauted by Nixon in his first campaign were nothing more than a clever KGB scheme? Those inflatable tank regiments in the buffer zone do the argument some real damage too.
I continualy hear all this about the "liberal press." Yet when campaign season rolls around it's never that way. I just keep wondering when all these paranoid right wingers are going to wake up.
The JOURNALISTS are libreal. Yes. Everyone knoes that. Education tends to do that to people (no that's not a barb, that's a political reality).
At the same time WEALTH tends to make people conservitive. The independent newspaper has gone from the rule to the exception in this country. The media today is the buisness of massive congolmerates. Media is big buisness, and we're all really clear on who the party of big buisness is.
Are there libreal aspects to our media? Certainly. The West Wing pushes a liberal agenda... but then who's really against lowering the infant mortality rate, championing the cause of the downtroden, and fighting for education in the privacy of their own home when it doesn't cost them a dime?
But the question we should be asking ourselves is not "is that reporter a liberal" but rather, is the overall media prespective biased against conservitives.
I think you'll find the answer is no. Did the media go after Lott following his comments? Of course. Did they not also persue Clinton and Monica after their ignoble trist?
While there are countless incidences of highly conservitive bias in the media (for an entertaining read on this check out Stupid White Men and other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation - Michael Moore) I am hard pressed to come up with many liberal ones.
Pardon me for pointing out the obvious.
The Supreme Courts exists to perserve the constitution as a living document. Their job is to make sure that the language pened 200+ years ago is interpreted and applied to our society today.
So now that the government has hydrogen bombs and the NRA is trying to get assault weapons legalized can we all just step back and realize that a tyranical government can turn places like Ruby Ridge into a smoking hole in the ground?
Tyranical or not, mere firearms are -=not=- going to topple a government that has smart bombs, cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons.
So that argument is a load of bunk. Next?
Associated Press - WASHINGTON DC
President Bush announced before a joint session of Congress today that the United States will "fight a global war against SPAM." Citing the dramatic increase in SPAM over the past decade and forcasts that this trend will continue, Bush called for the funding of a federal initiative to "track down SPAMers with global reach."
Dubbing China, South Korea, and Nigeria the "axis of Potted Meat" the the President warned of "the gravest possible consequences" for States continuing to harbor and support SPAMers.
"Under my authority as commander and chief of the United States armed forces I have ordered surgical strikes against... routers in these countries," Bush said. "This is only the first step."
Under a presidential directive US warplanes are now enforcing a "no fly zone" over Austin Minnesota, headquarters of Hormel Foods. The administration declined to comment on this quarentine.
Well.... yes but no.
The point is this. Travel in space requires a reaction mass. The problem with a reaction mass is you have to carry it with you. The distance you can reasonably travel is a function of how patient you are and how much of your mass you have remaining by the time you get out of whatever gravity well you're in.
The earth has a larger gravity well than the moon. Consequently, constructing a longer range vehicle in the moons gravity allows you to save power and time lifting that device clear of your launch site. Using a smaller craft to lift, say, humans... from the earth to your longer range probe saves you the need to lift your reaction mass for the longer trip initialy.
So a better anaology would be climbing a mountain. You have a friend who lives half way up the mountain. It makes more sence to walk to his house and then resupply and climb to the summit from there instead of bringing all your provisions for the entire trip from the mountain base.
Lets be fair, we all know that Florida is just the 6th borough of New York. So launch wasn't really in the south :)
Well, that depends. I'd say the time period for doing squat about the Large Killer Rock (tm) would be between 6 and 2 years to impact... depending on election cycles of course.
Why are people so clueless.
Were do you think electricity comes from? Check this page for a hint.
A Segway will be running, mostly on coal power. Now what do you think burns cleaner, gasoline or coal? Electrical vehicals are a load of crap until we develop a cleaner way to provide electricity in bulk.
Sometimes I wonder. How much money is there, really, in the SPAM buisness? Let me rephrase that... how much money is there to be made by selling things to the people you SPAM?
I don't know of anyone who's bought from a SPAMer. Not one. No one I know seems to know of someone who's done that either. Even at two degrees of seperation that's a fairly large number of people.
I've often wondered if the money to be made in SPAMing comes from selling the "verified" address list you've aquired to other SPAMers. The messages seem to serve as a form of confirmation (afterall, you know which ones get returned as undeliverable).
For some reason it wouldn't supprise me to learn that the turnover in the SPAM industry is very high and that it's just feeding on itself... a kind of twisted pyramid scheme.
Ok someone has to explain this and being married to a High School government teacher is proving advantagious in this case.
The United States operates under a system called Federalism. Under this system power is divided between National, State, and Local governments. Each government is responcible for enacting its own laws. -=However=- under the supremacy clause of the United States constitution no law passed by a lower government can contradict a law passed by a higher one.
Example -- The United States Congress (and president) passes a law stating that it shall be illegal for a person to posess more than 50 gallons of Jolt cola per person in his household. The State of Vermont may not pass a law which increases that limit to 75 gallons, or rather it can, but the National limit of 50 gallons will superceed that. (I'm getting to the point here). Vermont could pass a law lowering that limit to 30 gallons, however, and there would be no conflict.
The Bill of Rights was put in place, not to define the freedoms of the people, but to constrain the power of the government. Read it. Congress shall make no law.... The right of the people to * shall not be abridged... and of course, All powers not specified in this Constitution are reserved for the States and the people of the United States.
Key point there -- The BOR does not deliminate the freedoms of the people, it sets boundaries for the government. But remember, those boundaries -=only=- apply to the National government.
The 14th ammendment incorporates much of the constitution upon the States, or rather, it created a way for the Court to do so. IIRC, the only ammendment from the BOR not so incorporated is the 2nd (right to keep/bare arms).
So yes, in the United States we assume that you have right X unless stated otherwise. It doesn't have to be explicitly stated, implied powers are a big part of our legal system, and 99% of what our National government does are things the constitution only implies it can do (establishing a National Bank for example).
The origional poster, however, had a point. Every US citizen should know one thing coming into this debate. Our legal system does -=not=- allow for conflicting laws. A law either superseeds another or it does not. Dominance is clear. If dominance is -=not=- clear it is up to the Court to determine what is meant by the two laws. That decision becomes precident, which has the force of law (in most cases).
I'm going to play the devils advocate and champion the "The MPAAA released it theory here"
Ok, your first major assumpion: If these people really believe that the internet is one big conduit to steal music and movies
Lets get real people. They don't belive this any more than Phillip Morris belived that smoking was healthy. These people are in the buisness of making movies based on the statistical sampling of a population (to determine what will sell). Don't you think they have access to the very same statistics you and I do?
They -=know=- just as well as we do that they're not loosing revenue to pirated movies. The numbers aren't there. They -=know=- that the overwhelming majority of their target audiance for every movie they release (execpt maybe Sneakers or whatever) is so technologicaly clueless as to require tech support to find the "any" key.
Given that, what would you do? Push Congress to enact tougher laws daming the P2P flow. Why? Because while your target audiance may not be tech savy today, in 30 years -=our=- kids (who are damn sure going to be recompiling the kernal when they're four are going to be the target audiance. And then they -=will=- loose money hand over fist.
Furthermore, creating this kind of situation does allow price fixing! If enough Senators and Congresscritters are convinced that the Movie Industry really does need to change $9.55 for a ticket to re-coup the costs of movie piracy then there is no way in hell the Justice Department will ever prosecute (yes, I know the JD isn't run by the Congress, I also know what log rolling is).
Remember, all the figures here are ethereal. HPACOS may shatter all box office records. But the MPAA can still point to Kazaa and say, "
Well, we can find some 1.3 Million copies of this file world wide, which indicates that we lost (9.55 x 1.3Million) 12.4 million in potential revenues."
As long as the MPAA counts every downloaded movie as a lost ticket sale (and probably a lost VHS sale, a lost DVD sale, and several more for the various special editions) they will never loose this argument. They will -=always=- be in the hole because the ASSUMPTION is that they are in the hole. No data can exist to disprove the assumption because in order to get that data you need to get 1.3 million people (or whatever) to admit to commiting a CRIME.
Lets be clear on one thing. The Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine in the 1930s was tolerated for one reason. Stalin was a bastard, but he was our bastard. Granted, this wasn't true at the time, but it was true by the time the world found out abou it.
Also, lets keep in mind that Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine was not technicaly speaking Genocide, nor was it an racialy motivated hate crime. Stalin starved that area because it produced bread... not because he considered them to be an inferior portion of the Soviet Empire.
Finaly, please remember that all of this is predicated on the guilt complex germany developed over its brush with the extreme conservitive nature of facism and Nazism (nothing against conservitives, that's just the way it is). The Soviet Union experianced such a guilt complex only during the early years of the Khrushchev regime, and only beacuse of Khruschev's "Secret Speeches" which lamblasted Stalin and his politaly motivated killings. At no time has anyone in in the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union given all that much of a shit about the 30 Million who died in the Great Famine of the Ukraine.
Before we all go off the deep end on the EU for these laws lets remember what got them there in the first place.
Follwing WWII West Germany (it wasn't technicaly this yet, but lets call a duck a duck shall we?) and the German court system ammended the Constitution of Germany, making the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) illegel and unconstitutional.
This was mostly just a show of good faith, as no one in their right mind would profess themselves as a Nazi in allied occupied Germany.
In recent years, however, neo-Nazi parties have been gaining force in Germany, particularly in former East Germany. The German Government has been unable to crack down on these groups because of the assumed political bias against the East that prevades the state. That is -- the East Germans belive that the Westerners dislike them, and thus any move against a pro-nazi East German party would be reguarded as an expression of that East-West bias, and not a hardline stand against Naizism.
Consequently Germany has explored some back channels with the EU to provided these anti-hate speach laws. These laws will allow Germany to act against these Nazistic hate groups without drawing fire from the entering eastern states for political persecution.
The German people have a deep and abiding guilt complex over the crimes their nation committed in the 1930s and 1940s. I have seen few reactions in my world travels as contemptuous and self depreciatating as those the Germans have against any vestige of the Nazi era. While I do not support censorship in general, I think that the German nation has a lot of healing to do. Perhaps in the future these laws can be relaxed, but for now they are important and must remain.
Lets remember that what lobbiests buy with their donations is not votes, but access. The evidence just isn't there to suggest that campaign donations influence voting patterns significantly (amazing but true, I didn't belive it myself until I saw the numbers).
Take the NRA for example. It gives money to anti-gun control congressmen in huge quantities. Were they anti-gun control before the NRA ever gave them a dime? Would they be pro-gun control if the NRA stoped handing them money? We don't know. We do know that the NRA also gives money to congressmen who vote against the bills it likes. True, they give less, but they still give.
What we do know, and can prove, is that if you've given a huge quantity of money to a congressman you have his atttention and can demand his time. When a bill comes before the house banning, Teflon coated bullets for example, the NRA can ask for face time with the congressmen its helped get elected. It can be reasonably sure that it will get that time.
I just wanted to make that point. Money does not buy votes. It buys the right to make arguments. If no one argues against you... well.... that's someone elses problem.
I'm sure he would have checked it out and maybe even switched.... but as it stands he's commiting a crime if he types that in.
On a related note, what if you had linked it? Amazon didn't publish that link.... does that make it legal (by his definition, not any sane persons)
Oops.... that should be 5600 seconds is about 1.5 hours. My bad.
Why were you reaching for your wallet? I understand that its exciting to see the beginings of an officialy sanctioned movie distribution system online. Nonetheless, there are some major problems with this.
However, Harry Potter and the other Warner titles in the deal, such as Mars Attacks and Dial M for Murder, are sold separately as a download for about $US4 ($7.30).
Like this for example. I can download this movie (call it 700 MB) over my fairly quick little connection here (1 Mb/s peek) and spend 8 (bits/byte) x 700 MB = 5600 min or about 1.5 hours downloading the movie. I can then watch it for upto and including 24 hours.
Or... I could get in my car, drive to Blockbuster, and rent the DVD for about $5.00. I can watch it for at least two days, probably three if I rent it at the right time, and spend about 10 to 20 mins depending on traffic conditions.
So what, exactly, is the draw of this?
I could be completely wrong, but this sounds a little like a primitive ancestor of the kind of "Rod Logic" system Neil Stevenson describes in "Diamond Age"
Just a thought.
Apolo didn't demonstrate the ability to REACH the USSR. It demonstrated the ability of the United States to hit a target with precision at distance. The moon is a good deal further away. Landing someone there in tact takes a good deal more precision.
The Apolo project thus demonstrated the United State's ability to land a warhead on a similarly small target. Remember that the Cold War wasn't just about practical solutions, it was about perception.