"At a glance, it looks like either the RIAA has made a huge mistake, or Walton's identity was stolen."
I'd correct this to "At a glance, it looks like either the ISP has made a huge mistake, or Walton's identity was stolen" since it was the ISP who identified Walton as the person assigned the IP address.
It makes you wonder if perhaps Robin bought herself a 'net connection on mom's credit card. I wonder if she had a wireless gateway and someone was borrowing it?
"When you say "MythTV does more" you might quantify that -- It does more with television viewing. MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media"
I've installed and run both, and this is just silly. MythTV is much better than Freevo at TV viewing, but MythTV also does more other things. As I said before, this is mainly a matter of maturity -- MythTV has more functionality integrated into it than Freevo, but over time many of the MythTV modules/capabilities have been copied (not literally -- but same functionality reimplemented, often copying design, graphics, etc.) -- from MythTV into Freevo. there's nothing wrong with that, of course -- all's fair in open source.
To be more specific:
TV viewing: MythTV: watch/timeshift TV, including pause/rewind/fast-forward of live tv. supports multiple tuners, optimizing allocation of recordings across multiple tuners based on user preferences. picture-in-picture from multiple tuners. Automatic commercial detection and skipping. Background transcoding into MPEG4. persistent searches (a la TiVo wishlists). Freevo: simple timeshifting, one tuner, no preferences/rules.
Music: MythTV: listen to music, play/RIP CD's. cddb lookups when RIPing. Freevo: the same, but adds album cover art (nice!), though it requires a lot of work to set up (copy graphics, edit a text file, etc.). Both systems should add support for embedded album art.
Play movies: essentially the same.
Image viewer: essentially the same.
Weather: essentially the same, because someone copied the MythWeather module into Freevo. (new code, same design, graphics).
Telephony: MythTV: make/receive VOIP and videoconference calls. Freevo: nope.
Games: MythTV: yep (all the usual Linux emulators). Frevo: Same.
Web/RSS: - MythTV: has web browser, RSS reader. Also, MythWeb, a web server interface for administering WebTV remotely. - Freevo: no web or RSS. More limited web server interface.
Architecture: - MythTV: multiple back-ends for storage and tuners, multiple-front-ends for viewing the same media in different locations. - Freevo: all on one PC.
To be clear, I certainly have nothing against the Freevo project. But having run both Freevo and MythTV, MythTV is far more mature.
That being said, both projects basically work, and neither of them is as easy to set up and use as a TiVo. Luckily they both have tons of users and contributors, so they'll keep improving. We all win!
I'm amazed that they wrote up the Freevo project without even mentioning the MythTV project, which is far more mature (i.e. dues more, works a lot better, has more users and developers). Aside from doing more and working better, MythTV has a nice, scalable architecture that allows you to have multiple back-ends (storage and video encoding) and multiple front-ends (control and playback) so that you can have (for example) a big MythTV back-end in the basement with tons of storage and a couple of tuner cards, and have lightweight MythTV front-ends (which can run on an X-Box (for example, see http://www.killefiz.de/k/machines/xbox-mythtv-fron tend/) or a Mac. And since mythtv is available via apt-get install mythtv-suite it's really easy to set up and play around with on any Linux box. The latest version adds MythPhone, which is a fun way to play around with voice over IP and videophones. I'll admit that I spend more time in MythGame (runs all MAME games, etc.).
From trying both projects, the only interesting thing about Freevo is that the front-end is written in Python, which is a nice language but is slow, while MythTV is written in C++, which is an annoying language but is fast.
"while an ISP -shouldn't- be responsible for the content that host, they almost always end that way in court."
Why is that? Are you saying that as an ISP you get dragged into court to defend the content of your customers' web sites?
"We tend to have very restrictive TOS/AUPs on things you would expect like adult content, and then more on sites that promotes bigotry, racism, etc."
I'm amazed that your lawyers would allow you to use such an AUP. Last time I had to deal with the issue (hosted a few thousand sites back in the 90's), the lawyers pretty much insisted that our AUP was restricted to saying that sites couldn't do anything illegal (because the law requires it) or abuse their bandwidth (because it would affect other customers), and to NOT be in the business of monitoring their content. Once you put in amorphous terms like "no promoting bigotry" you create an immense liability because you've just made yourself responsible for your customers' sites. The extreme case of making this mistake is when Prodigy moderated public bulletin boards, leading to many thousands of lawsuits against Prodigy (at immense cost to them) because they'd made themselves responsible for any "objectionable" post that they missed, and on the flip side, they were also in trouble for deleting posts that the poster thought was not "objectionable". About the closest I've seen in years is some sort of "respond to complaints" term...
Yep. I wouldn't expect the phone company to refuse to provide phone service to the KKK, and I wouldn't expect an ISP to refuse to host their web site. As wrong as I think the KKK is, I don't think that the government should be in the business of controlling political speech, since I think that the people that wrote the US Constitution got it basically right.
Whether you support or oppose the ISNA site, ISP's aren't responsible for the content of the sites that they host, and should (IMO) make their decisions based on business issues. For example, hosting spammers is bad because those people abuse the internet, violating the ISP's Acceptable Use Policy (and aside from the moral issues, attracting counter-attacks that are a PITA for an ISP to deal with). The idea that an ISP would terminate a site's hosting due to the site's content (assuming it's not illegal to host the site) is pretty creepy.
That being said, the ISP can accept or reject customers for any reasons that it wants, so long as it's not violating its contracts and isn't discriminating illegally (sex, race, religion, etc.). (This is all assuming US law -- I have no idea what Iranian law requires of ISP's, etc.) And, on the flip side, ISNA should be able to freely move their site to another ISP, transfer DNS, have adequate notice from the ISP before termination to manage a transfer, etc. That should all have been covered by their contract.
What I can't see is why this is a big deal. If one ISP doesn't want to host ISNA, they can terminate them but should be required by their contract to give them adequate notice, and access to the servers, to move to another ISP. If the ISP didn't give them that, ISNA should sue them. If ISNA had adequate notice and didn't move their site, they're being lame.
"Companies don't want to lose in court. Most will want to be damned sure that the problem was not their fault before denying a warranty claim."
In my experience, the opposite is true -- many companies (short sighted ones, but there's no shortage of them) will initially attempt to deny nearly all claims. This (IMO) is because the person handling the claims has been told to minimize warranty costs to the company, so they have a strong incentive to weed out fake or weak claims. So by forcing the customer to have to do the work to prove the claim, they cut out a large percentage of warranty claims. This isn't merely academic -- the cost of providing the warranty support on a device is typically far more than the profit made selling the device (provide replacement, cover shipping, have technician examine unit, etc.). So if you have a 5% return rate, that could easily wipe out the profit on the other 95%, but if you reject most of the claims, you could make money instead of lose money. And the cost to the company of annoying a customer is low, because you make so little on each sale.
I'm not saying that this is a _good_ thing, just that the economics for consumer electronics, where margins are very tight, provide a strong incentive to finger-point as much as possible. The best response (IMO) is to stay calm and document everything in writing; most companies see themselves not as trying to screw their customers so much as protect themselves from people who break their equipment and want the company to pay for it. So if you show that you know what you're talking about, and are polite about it, they'll do the right thing.
Things are different in high-end markets, because the profit margin on the products is higher. This means that there's (1) money to cover higher quality customer support, and (2) more incentive to make customers happy, because future sales are more valuable.
"But even if Enterprise is cancelled, all may not be lost: Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film"
This sentence contradicts itself. If Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film then all _is_ lost. If Paramount announced that anybody else was working on a new Trek feature film, and that Rick Berman had been fired for destroying Star Trek over the past twenty years.
The Connection Machine CM-4 (http://www.corestore.org/cm5.htm) had tons of LED's that generally indicated system status (e.g. CPU activity), and were both nice to look at and sometimes useful for debugging (you could see inefficient communications patterns, which really slow things down when using thousands of CPU's). But the LED's were actually controlled by Z80's (!) that could be programmed independently, to scroll messages, play pong, etc.
So sure, your PC may have 4,095 CPU's fewer (heh, heh) but it can have a nifty LED display wired into the RAM... one more step
As far as I can see, the programmer's claims are pretty reasonable. That is, he's claiming that he was paid to implement a system that could be used to change votes to force a particular candidate to win that couldn't be detected by "black box" testing. This is a relatively simple exercise, given the fundamental problems in the DRE model, and a not unreasonable thing to implement in order to educate people about the risks of voting systems. A real, working system is a much better way to communicate a threat than a discussion of a hypothetical risk.
He then claims that he got the impression that the person who paid him to do it wanted to use the system to steal real elections. Given the other things that people have done historically to steal elections (e.g. take legal voters off of voter rolls, have lawyers challenge absentee ballots, record dead people's votes, etc.), so it's not hard to imagine someone willing to extend those efforts into software engineering. Of course, the execute this, the hard part isn't writing the software, it's getting the software into the DRE's to take over the voting process -- that's the step that is clearly illegal, and would leave evidence all over the state/country.
You're missing the real value to IBM in buying Apple.. MacOS X is the best OS on the planet, and IBM can sell it to 10x as many people as Apple.
Don't forget that many years ago IBM was all set to license NeXTSTEP as its standard OS for _everything_. Unfortunately (as I've been told by both IBM and NeXT employees over the years) at the last minute Jobs blew up the deal because he wasn't willing to give up control.
Apple and IBM have worked together before. Admittedly the track record is a bit spotty (Taligent/Pink, PowerPC Reference Platform) but there's clearly an appeal in two of the leading non-Microsoft technology companies working together to challenge MS. I wouldn't be shocked if they tried it again.
"Or even the CAN-SPAM law itself.. It explicitly ALLOWS politicians and political surveys to still solicit. Yes, they are ABOVE THE LAW. Why?"
Betcause (to repeat myself) in the US political speech is protected by the Constitution. The CAN-SPAM law cannot limit political speech, or it would be overturned in the courts as unconstitutional.
I can't understand the point of the rest of your post. Could you please explain again?
"Considering what the KKK supports (death to Blacks, Catholics, and jews), and what spammers want (sell you stuff).. Why are we against spammers?"
Because the right to Free Speech (in the US) specifically protects political speech. The KKK, as horrible as it is, is engaging in political dialogue, and it's important for the proper functioning of democracy that political dialogue be protected. And, in particular, it's only unpopular political speech requires active protection.
Spammers, on the other hand, are simply bugging people to sell them stuff. That's not protected speech.
"Patents protect the "inventor" from other people competing against them with duplicate products/processes/whatever. They do not protect the holder from competition in the marketplace."
In an ideal world you might be right. In practice, patents can be so broad that they cover any means of doing something, and a company with an aggressive patent strategy can very effectively block anyone else from competing in their arena. Look for example at GemStar -- even though they failed completely with their products, they patented everything even remotely related to on screen TV listings, to the point where TV Guide (!) was forced to merge with them because the Gemstar patents prevented them from competing in the electronic program guide market, because there's no way to work around basic patents such as on displaying TV listings in a grid on the screen, or clicking a button to record a TV program. Not a specific means of implementing the grid, but actually ANY display of tv programs in a grid on screen, is exclusively Gemstar's. But they're not the only company using fundamental patents -- Motorola got the patent on the heat sink on the transistor, and made many, many $millions on it. And don't get me started on how Philo T. Farnsworth was treated by RCA, who used their broad radio patent portfolio to take over his invention, and crush all competition.
"I read something that suggested that they print the paper trail at the end of the night. Since the printed paper trail is never reviewed by the voter, this is essentially worthless IMO."
It's even stupider than you think. The "paper trail" that was ruled to satisfy the requirement only prints out the daily total being printed on a printer inside the voting machine at the end of the day. A poll worker supposedly collects the printout, but since it's the same number on the RAM card, with no record of the actual votes, it doesn't prove anything.
Yeah, it would have been clever for the timber companies to operate in a sustainable manner instead of stripping the land so that the government had to step in to prevent them from turning the entire state (except for the parts visible from highways -- gotta keep it pretty for tourists) into a mud flat with occasional crappy pine trees.
Of course, american management is never any good at looking at the long term issues if it might mean missing out on next quarter's bonus.
The sad thing is that the loggers are screwed by their management, but are told that it's the government's fault, and they believe it.
When I look at their site, it looks almost painfully balanced. Look at their 'find your candidate' page. For each topic, they have one site at each extreme. ----- Want to know more about the issues before you try Find Your Candidate? Check out these informational links on hot campaign issues first:
The U.S. in Iraq Cost of War U.S. Department of Defense
Same-Sex Marriage American Family Association GLAD
Tax Cuts Citizens for Tax Justice The Heritage Foundation
The Environment Environmental Protection Agency Earth Justice
Reproductive Choice Abortionfacts.com National Abortion Federation
The Economy Economic Policy Institute CATO Institute
First Amendment First Amendment Center School Prayer
Social Security Social Security Reform Center Urban Institute ---- I guess just the fact that they're trying to get kids to vote makes them Democrats. Real Republicans would be suing...:-)
"Japan really had an opportunity to start over when their systems were being built and rebuilt after WWII"
I'd look at it a bit differently. In Japan, they had minimal infrastructure in place after the war, so they had no choice but to build a new, clean system. In the US, the telco's could have done the same thing, but instead they decided that they'd rather waste billions of dollars trying to find a use for the copper wires and switches that they'd already paid for. It turns out, of course, that it would have been cheaper for them to have simply written off the old copper network and deployed fiber (which some new telco's have done, and are doing very well vs. the old telco's once you factor in the dinosoaur's legislative maneuverings), and the end result would have been a much lower cost, higher performance network. Oops! We'd have been better off if the telco management hadn't had the option of being short sighted.
"I am old enough (and then some;-)) to remember 20-25 years ago, and journalism was not much different from what it is now."
I disagree vehemently. Back in the 70's, TV news programs were viewed as a public service that the networks provided in return for being granted access to the airwaves, not as a promotional/entertainment channel. So you saw real reporters (not actors) reporting the news, investigating the issues and reporting the truth (as they saw it, admittedly). Now, "journalists" are more actors than reporters, and they think that if they look good and repeat whatever they've been told that they've done their jobs. So instead of doing their jobs, they simply engage in "he said/she said" stories in which the viewers have no idea of what's actually true, just that two sides disagreed, presented on an equal footing. Occasionally they throw in the occasional "gotcha" to boost ratings. And then you have UPN and Fox, which cover the release of DVD's of their hit TV shows as "news". Pathetic. The result is that they've allowed the partisan extremists to drown out civility in public debate, because people being reasonable and discussing things in a rational manner isn't as entertaining as having extremists throw chairs at each other. Admittedly there are a few real news programs (60 Minutes is generally quite good, etc.) but they're hard to find in the flood of pseudo-news and people screaming at each other.
It'd be nice if the FCC did it's job, and required network news programs to actually provide real news.
Slashdot Mirror
"At a glance, it looks like either the RIAA has made a huge mistake, or Walton's identity was stolen."
I'd correct this to "At a glance, it looks like either the ISP has made a huge mistake, or Walton's identity was stolen" since it was the ISP who identified Walton as the person assigned the IP address.
It makes you wonder if perhaps Robin bought herself a 'net connection on mom's credit card. I wonder if she had a wireless gateway and someone was borrowing it?
"When you say "MythTV does more" you might quantify that -- It does more with television viewing. MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media"
I've installed and run both, and this is just silly. MythTV is much better than Freevo at TV viewing, but MythTV also does more other things. As I said before, this is mainly a matter of maturity -- MythTV has more functionality integrated into it than Freevo, but over time many of the MythTV modules/capabilities have been copied (not literally -- but same functionality reimplemented, often copying design, graphics, etc.) -- from MythTV into Freevo. there's nothing wrong with that, of course -- all's fair in open source.
To be more specific:
TV viewing:
MythTV: watch/timeshift TV, including pause/rewind/fast-forward of live tv. supports multiple tuners, optimizing allocation of recordings across multiple tuners based on user preferences. picture-in-picture from multiple tuners. Automatic commercial detection and skipping. Background transcoding into MPEG4. persistent searches (a la TiVo wishlists).
Freevo: simple timeshifting, one tuner, no preferences/rules.
Music:
MythTV: listen to music, play/RIP CD's. cddb lookups when RIPing.
Freevo: the same, but adds album cover art (nice!), though it requires a lot of work to set up (copy graphics, edit a text file, etc.). Both systems should add support for embedded album art.
Play movies: essentially the same.
Image viewer: essentially the same.
Weather: essentially the same, because someone copied the MythWeather module into Freevo. (new code, same design, graphics).
Telephony:
MythTV: make/receive VOIP and videoconference calls.
Freevo: nope.
Games:
MythTV: yep (all the usual Linux emulators).
Frevo: Same.
Web/RSS:
- MythTV: has web browser, RSS reader. Also, MythWeb, a web server interface for administering WebTV remotely.
- Freevo: no web or RSS. More limited web server interface.
Architecture:
- MythTV: multiple back-ends for storage and tuners, multiple-front-ends for viewing the same media in different locations.
- Freevo: all on one PC.
To be clear, I certainly have nothing against the Freevo project. But having run both Freevo and MythTV, MythTV is far more mature.
That being said, both projects basically work, and neither of them is as easy to set up and use as a TiVo. Luckily they both have tons of users and contributors, so they'll keep improving. We all win!
I'm amazed that they wrote up the Freevo project without even mentioning the MythTV project, which is far more mature (i.e. dues more, works a lot better, has more users and developers). Aside from doing more and working better, MythTV has a nice, scalable architecture that allows you to have multiple back-ends (storage and video encoding) and multiple front-ends (control and playback) so that you can have (for example) a big MythTV back-end in the basement with tons of storage and a couple of tuner cards, and have lightweight MythTV front-ends (which can run on an X-Box (for example, see http://www.killefiz.de/k/machines/xbox-mythtv-fron tend/) or a Mac. And since mythtv is available via apt-get install mythtv-suite it's really easy to set up and play around with on any Linux box. The latest version adds MythPhone, which is a fun way to play around with voice over IP and videophones. I'll admit that I spend more time in MythGame (runs all MAME games, etc.).
From trying both projects, the only interesting thing about Freevo is that the front-end is written in Python, which is a nice language but is slow, while MythTV is written in C++, which is an annoying language but is fast.
"while an ISP -shouldn't- be responsible for the content that host, they almost always end that way in court."
Why is that? Are you saying that as an ISP you get dragged into court to defend the content of your customers' web sites?
"We tend to have very restrictive TOS/AUPs on things you would expect like adult content, and then more on sites that promotes bigotry, racism, etc."
I'm amazed that your lawyers would allow you to use such an AUP. Last time I had to deal with the issue (hosted a few thousand sites back in the 90's), the lawyers pretty much insisted that our AUP was restricted to saying that sites couldn't do anything illegal (because the law requires it) or abuse their bandwidth (because it would affect other customers), and to NOT be in the business of monitoring their content. Once you put in amorphous terms like "no promoting bigotry" you create an immense liability because you've just made yourself responsible for your customers' sites. The extreme case of making this mistake is when Prodigy moderated public bulletin boards, leading to many thousands of lawsuits against Prodigy (at immense cost to them) because they'd made themselves responsible for any "objectionable" post that they missed, and on the flip side, they were also in trouble for deleting posts that the poster thought was not "objectionable". About the closest I've seen in years is some sort of "respond to complaints" term...
"Would you feel the same if it was a KKK site?"
Yep. I wouldn't expect the phone company to refuse to provide phone service to the KKK, and I wouldn't expect an ISP to refuse to host their web site. As wrong as I think the KKK is, I don't think that the government should be in the business of controlling political speech, since I think that the people that wrote the US Constitution got it basically right.
Whether you support or oppose the ISNA site, ISP's aren't responsible for the content of the sites that they host, and should (IMO) make their decisions based on business issues. For example, hosting spammers is bad because those people abuse the internet, violating the ISP's Acceptable Use Policy (and aside from the moral issues, attracting counter-attacks that are a PITA for an ISP to deal with). The idea that an ISP would terminate a site's hosting due to the site's content (assuming it's not illegal to host the site) is pretty creepy.
That being said, the ISP can accept or reject customers for any reasons that it wants, so long as it's not violating its contracts and isn't discriminating illegally (sex, race, religion, etc.). (This is all assuming US law -- I have no idea what Iranian law requires of ISP's, etc.) And, on the flip side, ISNA should be able to freely move their site to another ISP, transfer DNS, have adequate notice from the ISP before termination to manage a transfer, etc. That should all have been covered by their contract.
What I can't see is why this is a big deal. If one ISP doesn't want to host ISNA, they can terminate them but should be required by their contract to give them adequate notice, and access to the servers, to move to another ISP. If the ISP didn't give them that, ISNA should sue them. If ISNA had adequate notice and didn't move their site, they're being lame.
"Companies don't want to lose in court. Most will want to be damned sure that the problem was not their fault before denying a warranty claim."
In my experience, the opposite is true -- many companies (short sighted ones, but there's no shortage of them) will initially attempt to deny nearly all claims. This (IMO) is because the person handling the claims has been told to minimize warranty costs to the company, so they have a strong incentive to weed out fake or weak claims. So by forcing the customer to have to do the work to prove the claim, they cut out a large percentage of warranty claims. This isn't merely academic -- the cost of providing the warranty support on a device is typically far more than the profit made selling the device (provide replacement, cover shipping, have technician examine unit, etc.). So if you have a 5% return rate, that could easily wipe out the profit on the other 95%, but if you reject most of the claims, you could make money instead of lose money. And the cost to the company of annoying a customer is low, because you make so little on each sale.
I'm not saying that this is a _good_ thing, just that the economics for consumer electronics, where margins are very tight, provide a strong incentive to finger-point as much as possible. The best response (IMO) is to stay calm and document everything in writing; most companies see themselves not as trying to screw their customers so much as protect themselves from people who break their equipment and want the company to pay for it. So if you show that you know what you're talking about, and are polite about it, they'll do the right thing.
Things are different in high-end markets, because the profit margin on the products is higher. This means that there's (1) money to cover higher quality customer support, and (2) more incentive to make customers happy, because future sales are more valuable.
"But even if Enterprise is cancelled, all may not be lost: Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film"
This sentence contradicts itself. If Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film then all _is_ lost. If Paramount announced that anybody else was working on a new Trek feature film, and that Rick Berman had been fired for destroying Star Trek over the past twenty years.
zap2it.com is run by Tribune. :-)
The Connection Machine CM-4 (http://www.corestore.org/cm5.htm) had tons of LED's that generally indicated system status (e.g. CPU activity), and were both nice to look at and sometimes useful for debugging (you could see inefficient communications patterns, which really slow things down when using thousands of CPU's). But the LED's were actually controlled by Z80's (!) that could be programmed independently, to scroll messages, play pong, etc.
So sure, your PC may have 4,095 CPU's fewer (heh, heh) but it can have a nifty LED display wired into the RAM... one more step
Then shouldn't that be 100x more memory?
As far as I can see, the programmer's claims are pretty reasonable. That is, he's claiming that he was paid to implement a system that could be used to change votes to force a particular candidate to win that couldn't be detected by "black box" testing. This is a relatively simple exercise, given the fundamental problems in the DRE model, and a not unreasonable thing to implement in order to educate people about the risks of voting systems. A real, working system is a much better way to communicate a threat than a discussion of a hypothetical risk.
He then claims that he got the impression that the person who paid him to do it wanted to use the system to steal real elections. Given the other things that people have done historically to steal elections (e.g. take legal voters off of voter rolls, have lawyers challenge absentee ballots, record dead people's votes, etc.), so it's not hard to imagine someone willing to extend those efforts into software engineering. Of course, the execute this, the hard part isn't writing the software, it's getting the software into the DRE's to take over the voting process -- that's the step that is clearly illegal, and would leave evidence all over the state/country.
You're missing the real value to IBM in buying Apple .. MacOS X is the best OS on the planet, and IBM can sell it to 10x as many people as Apple.
Don't forget that many years ago IBM was all set to license NeXTSTEP as its standard OS for _everything_. Unfortunately (as I've been told by both IBM and NeXT employees over the years) at the last minute Jobs blew up the deal because he wasn't willing to give up control.
Apple and IBM have worked together before. Admittedly the track record is a bit spotty (Taligent/Pink, PowerPC Reference Platform) but there's clearly an appeal in two of the leading non-Microsoft technology companies working together to challenge MS. I wouldn't be shocked if they tried it again.
I can't believe that people are worried about this trivia...
"Or even the CAN-SPAM law itself.. It explicitly ALLOWS politicians and political surveys to still solicit. Yes, they are ABOVE THE LAW. Why?"
Betcause (to repeat myself) in the US political speech is protected by the Constitution. The CAN-SPAM law cannot limit political speech, or it would be overturned in the courts as unconstitutional.
I can't understand the point of the rest of your post. Could you please explain again?
"Considering what the KKK supports (death to Blacks, Catholics, and jews), and what spammers want (sell you stuff).. Why are we against spammers?"
Because the right to Free Speech (in the US) specifically protects political speech. The KKK, as horrible as it is, is engaging in political dialogue, and it's important for the proper functioning of democracy that political dialogue be protected. And, in particular, it's only unpopular political speech requires active protection.
Spammers, on the other hand, are simply bugging people to sell them stuff. That's not protected speech.
The RCA/Pharnsworth story is at http://pd.cpim.org/2002/aug25/08252002_snd.htm and it's interesting reading.
"Patents protect the "inventor" from other people competing against them with duplicate products/processes/whatever. They do not protect the holder from competition in the marketplace."
In an ideal world you might be right. In practice, patents can be so broad that they cover any means of doing something, and a company with an aggressive patent strategy can very effectively block anyone else from competing in their arena. Look for example at GemStar -- even though they failed completely with their products, they patented everything even remotely related to on screen TV listings, to the point where TV Guide (!) was forced to merge with them because the Gemstar patents prevented them from competing in the electronic program guide market, because there's no way to work around basic patents such as on displaying TV listings in a grid on the screen, or clicking a button to record a TV program. Not a specific means of implementing the grid, but actually ANY display of tv programs in a grid on screen, is exclusively Gemstar's. But they're not the only company using fundamental patents -- Motorola got the patent on the heat sink on the transistor, and made many, many $millions on it. And don't get me started on how Philo T. Farnsworth was treated by RCA, who used their broad radio patent portfolio to take over his invention, and crush all competition.
Please go to The Open Voting Consortium and support their work any way you can.
http://www.makethemaccountable.com/myth/Republican sBetterForEconomy.htm from the Bureau of Labor Stastics; Economic Policy Institute.
GWB: lost 0.7% of jobs
Clinton: gained 2.4%
GHWB: gained 0.6%
Reagan: gained 2.6%
Carter: gained 3.1%
Ford: gained 1.1%
Nixon: gained 2.2%
Johnson: gained 3.8%
Kennedy: gained 2.3%
And so on. The data goes back to Harding, but I'm not typing it all in.
"I read something that suggested that they print the paper trail at the end of the night. Since the printed paper trail is never reviewed by the voter, this is essentially worthless IMO."
It's even stupider than you think. The "paper trail" that was ruled to satisfy the requirement only prints out the daily total being printed on a printer inside the voting machine at the end of the day. A poll worker supposedly collects the printout, but since it's the same number on the RAM card, with no record of the actual votes, it doesn't prove anything.
Yeah, it would have been clever for the timber companies to operate in a sustainable manner instead of stripping the land so that the government had to step in to prevent them from turning the entire state (except for the parts visible from highways -- gotta keep it pretty for tourists) into a mud flat with occasional crappy pine trees.
Of course, american management is never any good at looking at the long term issues if it might mean missing out on next quarter's bonus.
The sad thing is that the loggers are screwed by their management, but are told that it's the government's fault, and they believe it.
When I look at their site, it looks almost painfully balanced. Look at their 'find your candidate' page. For each topic, they have one site at each extreme.
:-)
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Want to know more about the issues before you try Find Your Candidate? Check out these informational links on hot campaign issues first:
The U.S. in Iraq
Cost of War
U.S. Department of Defense
Same-Sex Marriage
American Family Association
GLAD
Tax Cuts
Citizens for Tax Justice
The Heritage Foundation
The Environment
Environmental Protection Agency
Earth Justice
Reproductive Choice
Abortionfacts.com
National Abortion Federation
The Economy
Economic Policy Institute
CATO Institute
First Amendment
First Amendment Center
School Prayer
Social Security
Social Security Reform Center
Urban Institute
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I guess just the fact that they're trying to get kids to vote makes them Democrats. Real Republicans would be suing...
"Japan really had an opportunity to start over when their systems were being built and rebuilt after WWII"
I'd look at it a bit differently. In Japan, they had minimal infrastructure in place after the war, so they had no choice but to build a new, clean system. In the US, the telco's could have done the same thing, but instead they decided that they'd rather waste billions of dollars trying to find a use for the copper wires and switches that they'd already paid for. It turns out, of course, that it would have been cheaper for them to have simply written off the old copper network and deployed fiber (which some new telco's have done, and are doing very well vs. the old telco's once you factor in the dinosoaur's legislative maneuverings), and the end result would have been a much lower cost, higher performance network. Oops! We'd have been better off if the telco management hadn't had the option of being short sighted.
"I am old enough (and then some ;-)) to remember 20-25 years ago, and journalism was not much different from what it is now."
I disagree vehemently. Back in the 70's, TV news programs were viewed as a public service that the networks provided in return for being granted access to the airwaves, not as a promotional/entertainment channel. So you saw real reporters (not actors) reporting the news, investigating the issues and reporting the truth (as they saw it, admittedly). Now, "journalists" are more actors than reporters, and they think that if they look good and repeat whatever they've been told that they've done their jobs. So instead of doing their jobs, they simply engage in "he said/she said" stories in which the viewers have no idea of what's actually true, just that two sides disagreed, presented on an equal footing. Occasionally they throw in the occasional "gotcha" to boost ratings. And then you have UPN and Fox, which cover the release of DVD's of their hit TV shows as "news". Pathetic. The result is that they've allowed the partisan extremists to drown out civility in public debate, because people being reasonable and discussing things in a rational manner isn't as entertaining as having extremists throw chairs at each other. Admittedly there are a few real news programs (60 Minutes is generally quite good, etc.) but they're hard to find in the flood of pseudo-news and people screaming at each other.
It'd be nice if the FCC did it's job, and required network news programs to actually provide real news.