The point is that it a user can't expect to just sit on their ass and have someone else inform them about all their choices.
Why should I have to make a choice? I bought Windows, I expect it to work.
It's called personal responsibility. If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Yes. It's Ford's responsibility to ensure their cars are fit for the purpose for which they were designed. If their cars fall apart, the "no one's stopping you from buying a Toyota" defense is no defense at all.
I should point out that a healthy industry is not an excuse for stealing intellectual property.
There is no such thing as "intellectual property." Your house is property. Your car is property. The disc on which a movie is recorded is property. The contents of the movie? It's copyrighted material. A completely different set of rules apply than those for your house, your car, or the tools you bought at Sears.
But there's that commercial with the guy whose the stuntman and... and... he goes through all that work and you can watch his movie with just a single click... and... P2P rapes 3rd world children...
This commercial elicits a hostile response everywhere I've seen it. People can't seem to keep themselves from snickering at it or flipping off the screen. I resist the urge, because I know that after the 3rd time or so it gets annoying, even to people who dislike the commercial, but still... if one or two people do this in every theater the commercial is shown, it negates the effect of the ad. I hope.
How come they never do a commercial with J.Lo's publicist? "I spend all week threatening newspaper columnists who say bad things about J.Lo. How am I supposed to continue to earn my $400,000 a year salary if filesharing makes the movie industry 15 percent less profitable?" [Close-up as a single tear rolls down her cheek.]
Obviously the majority of economies in the world today are mixed.
Right. So how come a country has to be doctrinaire Marxist before I can call it socialist? You don't require that the form of capitalism practiced in a given country be "pure," before you call it capitalist. Seems I'm being held to a higher standard.
The defining characteristic of socialism in the West is state ownership of key industries. Many countries are socialist by that standard, although some privatization has taken place in the past 20 years. In Norway, the state once owned all of the petroleum industry and now owns about 70 percent of it. Income taxes are steeply graduated. Most public utilities are state owned. Telecommunications is state owned. Health care is run by the state. Housing is built by the state. TV and radio are government administered. If Norway isn't socialist, then the word has no meaning. It's certainly much more socialist than the United States. And yet, their society doesn't seem to be on the verge of collapse. Contrast Norway's state-owned oil industry, and all the good it does for the people there, with the privatized "capitalist" oil industry in Russia, where a few corrupt robber barons grabbed everything and shipped the money off to Swiss bank accounts.
From the link:The Norwegian economy is a prosperous bastion of welfare capitalism, featuring a combination of free market activity and government intervention.
Most 20th-century socialists, such as those in the Labor parties of Europe, actually advocated "mixed" economies, with key sectors (oil, railroads, telecommunications, health care) owned by the state and other industries in private hands. Hardly any advocated the abolition of all private property. Not in the US and Western Europe, anyway. In the '80s, economist Milton Friedman pointed out that nearly all the planks of the (1920s?) platform of the Socialist party of the US had been achieved. He pointed this out as if it were a bad thing, but personally, I think we're better off for having Social Security and unemployment insurance.
There's a difference between "socialism" as defined by Marx and the form that was later defined by political leaders who called themselves socialists. I bring this to your attention because some people act as if the only form socialism ever took was in Stalin's Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia. It's not so.
HINT: Open a history book and look at how they used to power ships.
HINT TWO: It has something to do with wind.
I don't think ending all forms of mechanized transport developed during the past 2 centuries is on Greenpeace's agenda. I think some of them even--gasp!--travel on airplanes. Oh no! Will the hypocrisy never cease?
I wasn't talking about Monica. I was talking about Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaderick.
None of these incidents were proved. The case was so thin that ultimately, lacking any other provable offense, Starr had to prosecute Clinton for perjuring himself in testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Anyway, what does his private life have to do with the public stands he takes on issues that matter to women?
They have a "mandate" to protect the ocean? From whom?
From their members. It's why the group exists.
What authority does Greenpeace have? If someone is dumping toxic waste in international waters, clubbing baby seals, or killing the dolphins that get caught in their nets does Greenpeace have the right to do anything about it?
The right to commit acts of civil disobedience, and be arrested for it, is well established in all societies that we consider free and democratic. They have as much right to ram a whaling ship as the whaling ship does to poach whales. Things are a little different on the high seas. It's not like you can call 911 and have the police show up and arrest the perpetrators.
I neither need nor want you to understand/agree with my choice of vahicles.
It's not just me, though. There is a mountain of empirical data showing why SUVs are bad. If you choose to ignore that, for no other reason than personal vanity, then you're an asshole.
You want to make SUVs more fuel efficient? Raise gas prices to double the current level. Apart from the civil disorder it would cause, I can see people shifting to fuel-efficient cars in a split second. THAT is Capitalism. Voting with your dollar.
That is NOT capitalism. That is consumers reacting to a price. The same thing happens in communist economies, or any other economy for that matter. Taxing a product to discourage its consumption is hardly "capitalist." A true free market approach would allow the supply and demand for oil to set the price. But that approach doesn't take environmental and other side-effects into account, so some people have decided some centralized planning is necessary. Since this planning doesn't involve the transfer of the means of production from private hands to the state, we can consider it "regulated" capitalism. But government intervention in the market is hardly a capitalist mechanism. It's an acknowledgement that capitalist mechanisms sometimes need to be tweaked to do more good for more people.
Capitalism means capital--the means of producing other goods--is in private hands. It isn't "voting with your dollars." There is no such thing as voting with your dollars. "Voting" makes it sound democratic, but there is nothing democratic about someone with a lot of money taking away your rights because you have less money. Just because Americans "vote with their dollars" to keep children in Burma making shirts for pennies an hour doesn't mean that is where the discussion should end. How the hell should I know under what conditions my shirt was made? I thought I was just buying a shirt! I didn't vote to oppress anybody! Sometimes a well-organized effort to steer dollars to or away from a certain product has an effect. But it's impossible to get this information about every product we consume. Purchasing isn't voting. We need to vote with our votes, not our dollars. Our dollars simply aren't enough, most of the time, particularly when so many of them are owned by so few. Voting with your dollars isn't capitalism, it's plutocracy.
Please state even ONE communist or socialist country which is rich, which feeds all of its people, and keeps them all "Happy".
Norway. The state controls the oil industry and has used the proceeds to fund a generous welfare state and invest in industries to keep the country afloat when the oil runs out. They seem pretty happy with that state of affairs; certainly no less happy than some places where the oil is in private hands. Ask a single mom in Texas, with no health insurance or vacation, if she'd trade places with a person of similar social rank in Norway. I don't think she'd have a problem with it.
It's wrong to oppress women, unless you're Bill Clinton.
What a bizarre turn your search for hypocrisy takes. Oh my god, he had an affair with a woman who was much younger than him. Therefore, he wants to send them all back to the kitchen. How do you justify this enormous leap of logic? Connect the dots for me.
It's wrong for us to drive SUVs but Greenpeace can pollute the ocean in their big ass boat.
Their mandate is protecting the ocean. How are they supposed to get to the middle of the ocean without a big-ass boat? What a weird argument you are trying to make.
I'll even condone your SUV. If you regularly need to transport large groups of people through inhospitable terrain, then you're perfectly justified owning an SUV. If you commute by yourself in one, though, you're an asshole.
These are the same folks that like to release (um, set free) non-native mink into the natural environment causing devestation of the local animal population, right?
Not that I'm aware of. Do you have a documented instance of this? Here's an article on a mink farm raid. It says that no one claimed responsibility. I've seen such acts attributed to groups "like" Greenpeace, PETA, and the ALF. But Greenpeace is "like" these groups in the same way that terrorist groups in Iraq were "like" al Qaida. That is: They're totally different. The association exists only in the statements of someone who finds it advantageous to tar all their opposition with the same brush.
This isn't Greenpeace's M.O. They're out to save the whales, not the minks. They have snuck onto mink farms to film the minks being (illegally) fed whale meat. They were there because of the whale meat, though, not the minks. (Not that they're fans of the fur industry; it's just not their mandate the way opposition to whaling is.)
To be fair to the ecoterrorists, it seems more likely that their objective was to economically damage the farming operation, not some hippy-dippy fantasy about happy minks roaming freely in their non-native habitat. I agree, though, that it would be more environmentally responsible to kill the minks rather than set them free. But that's another reason why it's not Greenpeace's M.O. Greenpeace is an environmental group; the people who did this were most likely animal rights' activists.
I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans.
Michael Moore hired fact-checkers from the New Yorker to check every detail of Fahrenheit 9/11. There is no way in hell Ann Coulter would ever do that. Her entire shtick is beating up straw men, the Big Lie, showing a little leg, and of course, being a complete Nazi.
In Roger and Me, he had a clip where Ronald Reagan visited Flint Michigan, promising to bring economic properity that did not exist during the end of the 1970s. The film then explained that GM immediately closed a plant and laid off thousands of workers.
I don't think anyone came away from that movie with the impression that Reagan was personally responsible for closing the plants in Flint immediately after he visited. If Moore claimed that GM *immediately* closed the plant after Reagan's speech, then, well, that's false and you're right to debunk it. But this doesn't undermine Moore's point: Supply-side tax cuts and free trade did not lead to prosperity in Flint. While we were supposedly enjoying an economic boom, Flint was suffering through an economic depression that is almost unimaginable, due to most of its industry being moved to Mexico and Canada, helped along by Reagan's policies. It was perfectly valid to illustrate the disparity between Reagan's rhetoric and the reality in places like Flint; but he should have indicated that Reagan's speech took place 7 years earlier.
Remember, slander and libel are *NOT* protected free speech in America.
Since the standards for libel and slander are higher for someone who is considered a "public figure," I'd have to say that libel and slander *are* protected free speech in America. Ie, something that would be considered libel if you wrote it about your next door neighbor might not be libel if you wrote it about the president. What a country!
And always remember the cardinal rule of journalism: You cannot libel a dead person. Now that Reagan's dead, you can say whatever you like about him and it doesn't matter if it's true! So let 'er rip!
And besides, one of the greatest lessons to be learned from this movie (though I would have thought it would have been learned much earlier than this) is as follows: Never try and forcefully hide information from the public. The more you try and supress it, the more intreaguing it becomes and the more demand there is for it.
This is a comforting thought, but here's what bothers me: When information suppression succeeds, we don't know about it! We only hear about it when someone like Michael Moore succeeds in getting his film made. What about a filmmaker who hasn't won an Oscar, and only has a shot at making a modest profit? Should he or she have to take into consideration Disney's interest in keeping its tax breaks for its Florida theme parks when he makes his movie?
This is what the apologists for media consolidation told us would not happen. "Corporations don't care about the content of the film," they said. "They only care if they can make a profit on it." But here is a case of a movie that, pretty clearly, was a good money-making proposition, but Eisner turned it down because of its content. This is something we should not be complacent about as more and more media is owned by fewer and fewer people. It's great that we can now distribute via Internet (for now), but movies, TV, and newspapers are still where it's at in terms of who controls society.
A friend sent me an invite, and I registered, but I haven't used the account. Not sure what the big deal is supposed to be. OK, it's searchable. Why can't everyone just ssh to their mail servers and grep the spool? Is the average user this clueless? If they don't have an ssh client installed, then they're just beyond hopeless as far as I'm concerned. They don't deserve to get their e-mail.
"Fair use" is part of copyright law. You're allowed to reprint part of a copyrighted book, for example, in order to critique it in a book review.
Ripping a CD to mp3 is allowed not because it is "fair use," but because copyright simply doesn't apply. Copyright (oddly enough) has nothing to say about copying, but only about distribution. Ripping a CD is not fair use, it's unregulated use. Therefore, it shouldn't be against the law to circumvent a device that is intended to prevent you from doing something that is perfectly legal.
The government states that it is illegal to copy copyrighted materials for other than some particular purposes.
Don't you have it backwards? It's the particular purpose--redistributing a work in its entirety--that copyright restricts.
Ripping a CD to mp3 isn't something copyright "permits" you to do. It isn't "fair use." It's use that the copyright holder simply doesn't have a right to have any control over. DRM, therefore, isn't a means of protecting the copyright holder's legal rights. It's just something they do because they can. That's why it's wrong to make a law against circumventing DRM. It creates a new right for copyright holders where none existed before--the right to continue controlling how you use your property after they've sold it to you. It isn't merely the protection of copyright, it's the creation of a new right that benefits very few at the expense of many other things that we ought to value more highly.
I think it's reasonable that Apple limits the number of times a playlist can be burned to CD. On the other hand, I don't think it should be illegal for me to circumvent that if I have a reason to. They shouldn't have a legal right to restrict the way I use something I've purchased from them. If they want to come at me for selling CDs of music I don't own the rights to, that's fine. But that's what they should have to do. Not take rights away from everybody just to preempt a few thieves.
You probably agree with me, but I think the semantic distinction--that copyright applies only to a particular case, and all other copying is unregulated--is an important distinction.
Dude, you're on crack. I live in SF. It's hardly ever 90, especially in the summer, which is when the fog rolls in. It's actually warmer in the fall. Here's a graph.
The average high temperature in the warmest month is around 70 degrees.
The only microclimate of note in the Bay Area extends from Pacifica to Sausilito.
Um, yeah. Most people call the area that extends from Pacifica to Sausalito by its name: San Francisco. Throw in Colma, South SF, Daly City, Millbrae and San Mateo too, I guess.
We get 200+ days of zero clouds a year here at a minimum, every year. Portland gets 200+ days of the opposite.
In the peninsula, where Linus lived, it is often sunny and the temperature occasionally gets up into the 90s.
In San Francisco, the weather varies by neighborhood, but nowhere is the temperature ever higher than 80 degrees F on a regular basis. The Mission is known for being sunny; the Sunset is foggy. The neighborhoods aren't that far apart physically, but the city's hilliness causes weather to vary depending on whether there is a hill blocking the wind from the ocean in your neighborhood.
And then there are the Santa Cruz mountains, on the southern edge of Silicon Valley. These might be somewhat like Portland. I don't know if they're technically a rainforest, but it is quite rainy there. There are redwoods, and ferns, and giant banana slugs.
Oakland is a little bit warmer and sunnier than San Francisco. East of there, it gets hotter and hotter until you reach the scorching Central Valley.
Suffice it to say that there is no such thing as "Bay Area" weather. It's the land of microclimates.
nobody seems to be posting mp3's of the music I like.
That's because it's 2004. Those of us who weren't frozen in our caves in 1990 sold our Mudhoney CDs back to the store. The stores tried to give them away, but people kept giving them back. Now they're buried in landfills around the world, where they will remain, not decomposing, for centuries. That's why you can't find mp3s of your ancient caveman music. Catering to the Unfrozen Caveman demographic just doesn't seem to be a very high priority.
(Besides, my sound system is within arms reach, it cost more than my PC, and it sounds a lot better. I've never seen why I should bother to copy tracks from my CD's to my PC and put up with degraded quality.)
Whoa! Are you that "Unfrozen Caveman Sysadmin" that everyone's been talking about? You know. The one who was frozen in 1990 and unfrozen in 2004?
I'm intrigued by this "CD" technology of which you speak. Is that some kind of codec, similar to mp3? Tell me more!
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI tells us that somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 crimes a year are prevented when the intended victim pulls a gun.
You just flat-out made these statistics up. The FBI doesn't keep statistics on "crimes prevented by gun ownership." Stop lying.
The point is that it a user can't expect to just sit on their ass and have someone else inform them about all their choices.
Why should I have to make a choice? I bought Windows, I expect it to work.
It's called personal responsibility. If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Yes. It's Ford's responsibility to ensure their cars are fit for the purpose for which they were designed. If their cars fall apart, the "no one's stopping you from buying a Toyota" defense is no defense at all.
I should point out that a healthy industry is not an excuse for stealing intellectual property.
There is no such thing as "intellectual property." Your house is property. Your car is property. The disc on which a movie is recorded is property. The contents of the movie? It's copyrighted material. A completely different set of rules apply than those for your house, your car, or the tools you bought at Sears.
But there's that commercial with the guy whose the stuntman and... and... he goes through all that work and you can watch his movie with just a single click... and... P2P rapes 3rd world children...
This commercial elicits a hostile response everywhere I've seen it. People can't seem to keep themselves from snickering at it or flipping off the screen. I resist the urge, because I know that after the 3rd time or so it gets annoying, even to people who dislike the commercial, but still... if one or two people do this in every theater the commercial is shown, it negates the effect of the ad. I hope.
How come they never do a commercial with J.Lo's publicist? "I spend all week threatening newspaper columnists who say bad things about J.Lo. How am I supposed to continue to earn my $400,000 a year salary if filesharing makes the movie industry 15 percent less profitable?" [Close-up as a single tear rolls down her cheek.]
Obviously the majority of economies in the world today are mixed.
Right. So how come a country has to be doctrinaire Marxist before I can call it socialist? You don't require that the form of capitalism practiced in a given country be "pure," before you call it capitalist. Seems I'm being held to a higher standard.
The defining characteristic of socialism in the West is state ownership of key industries. Many countries are socialist by that standard, although some privatization has taken place in the past 20 years. In Norway, the state once owned all of the petroleum industry and now owns about 70 percent of it. Income taxes are steeply graduated. Most public utilities are state owned. Telecommunications is state owned. Health care is run by the state. Housing is built by the state. TV and radio are government administered. If Norway isn't socialist, then the word has no meaning. It's certainly much more socialist than the United States. And yet, their society doesn't seem to be on the verge of collapse. Contrast Norway's state-owned oil industry, and all the good it does for the people there, with the privatized "capitalist" oil industry in Russia, where a few corrupt robber barons grabbed everything and shipped the money off to Swiss bank accounts.
From the link:The Norwegian economy is a prosperous bastion of welfare capitalism, featuring a combination of free market activity and government intervention.
Most 20th-century socialists, such as those in the Labor parties of Europe, actually advocated "mixed" economies, with key sectors (oil, railroads, telecommunications, health care) owned by the state and other industries in private hands. Hardly any advocated the abolition of all private property. Not in the US and Western Europe, anyway. In the '80s, economist Milton Friedman pointed out that nearly all the planks of the (1920s?) platform of the Socialist party of the US had been achieved. He pointed this out as if it were a bad thing, but personally, I think we're better off for having Social Security and unemployment insurance.
There's a difference between "socialism" as defined by Marx and the form that was later defined by political leaders who called themselves socialists. I bring this to your attention because some people act as if the only form socialism ever took was in Stalin's Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia. It's not so.
HINT: Open a history book and look at how they used to power ships.
HINT TWO: It has something to do with wind.
I don't think ending all forms of mechanized transport developed during the past 2 centuries is on Greenpeace's agenda. I think some of them even--gasp!--travel on airplanes. Oh no! Will the hypocrisy never cease?
I wasn't talking about Monica. I was talking about Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaderick.
None of these incidents were proved. The case was so thin that ultimately, lacking any other provable offense, Starr had to prosecute Clinton for perjuring himself in testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Anyway, what does his private life have to do with the public stands he takes on issues that matter to women?
They have a "mandate" to protect the ocean? From whom?
From their members. It's why the group exists.
What authority does Greenpeace have? If someone is dumping toxic waste in international waters, clubbing baby seals, or killing the dolphins that get caught in their nets does Greenpeace have the right to do anything about it?
The right to commit acts of civil disobedience, and be arrested for it, is well established in all societies that we consider free and democratic. They have as much right to ram a whaling ship as the whaling ship does to poach whales. Things are a little different on the high seas. It's not like you can call 911 and have the police show up and arrest the perpetrators.
I neither need nor want you to understand/agree with my choice of vahicles.
It's not just me, though. There is a mountain of empirical data showing why SUVs are bad. If you choose to ignore that, for no other reason than personal vanity, then you're an asshole.
You want to make SUVs more fuel efficient? Raise gas prices to double the current level. Apart from the civil disorder it would cause, I can see people shifting to fuel-efficient cars in a split second. THAT is Capitalism. Voting with your dollar.
That is NOT capitalism. That is consumers reacting to a price. The same thing happens in communist economies, or any other economy for that matter. Taxing a product to discourage its consumption is hardly "capitalist." A true free market approach would allow the supply and demand for oil to set the price. But that approach doesn't take environmental and other side-effects into account, so some people have decided some centralized planning is necessary. Since this planning doesn't involve the transfer of the means of production from private hands to the state, we can consider it "regulated" capitalism. But government intervention in the market is hardly a capitalist mechanism. It's an acknowledgement that capitalist mechanisms sometimes need to be tweaked to do more good for more people.
Capitalism means capital--the means of producing other goods--is in private hands. It isn't "voting with your dollars." There is no such thing as voting with your dollars. "Voting" makes it sound democratic, but there is nothing democratic about someone with a lot of money taking away your rights because you have less money. Just because Americans "vote with their dollars" to keep children in Burma making shirts for pennies an hour doesn't mean that is where the discussion should end. How the hell should I know under what conditions my shirt was made? I thought I was just buying a shirt! I didn't vote to oppress anybody! Sometimes a well-organized effort to steer dollars to or away from a certain product has an effect. But it's impossible to get this information about every product we consume. Purchasing isn't voting. We need to vote with our votes, not our dollars. Our dollars simply aren't enough, most of the time, particularly when so many of them are owned by so few. Voting with your dollars isn't capitalism, it's plutocracy.
Please state even ONE communist or socialist country which is rich, which feeds all of its people, and keeps them all "Happy".
Norway. The state controls the oil industry and has used the proceeds to fund a generous welfare state and invest in industries to keep the country afloat when the oil runs out. They seem pretty happy with that state of affairs; certainly no less happy than some places where the oil is in private hands. Ask a single mom in Texas, with no health insurance or vacation, if she'd trade places with a person of similar social rank in Norway. I don't think she'd have a problem with it.
It's wrong to oppress women, unless you're Bill Clinton.
What a bizarre turn your search for hypocrisy takes. Oh my god, he had an affair with a woman who was much younger than him. Therefore, he wants to send them all back to the kitchen. How do you justify this enormous leap of logic? Connect the dots for me.
It's wrong for us to drive SUVs but Greenpeace can pollute the ocean in their big ass boat.
Their mandate is protecting the ocean. How are they supposed to get to the middle of the ocean without a big-ass boat? What a weird argument you are trying to make.
I'll even condone your SUV. If you regularly need to transport large groups of people through inhospitable terrain, then you're perfectly justified owning an SUV. If you commute by yourself in one, though, you're an asshole.
These are the same folks that like to release (um, set free) non-native mink into the natural environment causing devestation of the local animal population, right?
Not that I'm aware of. Do you have a documented instance of this? Here's an article on a mink farm raid. It says that no one claimed responsibility. I've seen such acts attributed to groups "like" Greenpeace, PETA, and the ALF. But Greenpeace is "like" these groups in the same way that terrorist groups in Iraq were "like" al Qaida. That is: They're totally different. The association exists only in the statements of someone who finds it advantageous to tar all their opposition with the same brush.
This isn't Greenpeace's M.O. They're out to save the whales, not the minks. They have snuck onto mink farms to film the minks being (illegally) fed whale meat. They were there because of the whale meat, though, not the minks. (Not that they're fans of the fur industry; it's just not their mandate the way opposition to whaling is.)
To be fair to the ecoterrorists, it seems more likely that their objective was to economically damage the farming operation, not some hippy-dippy fantasy about happy minks roaming freely in their non-native habitat. I agree, though, that it would be more environmentally responsible to kill the minks rather than set them free. But that's another reason why it's not Greenpeace's M.O. Greenpeace is an environmental group; the people who did this were most likely animal rights' activists.
ask yourself, "What problem does this solve?"
The problem of people not upgrading hardware often enough to suit the manufacturers' bottom lines?
I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans.
Michael Moore hired fact-checkers from the New Yorker to check every detail of Fahrenheit 9/11. There is no way in hell Ann Coulter would ever do that. Her entire shtick is beating up straw men, the Big Lie, showing a little leg, and of course, being a complete Nazi.
In Roger and Me, he had a clip where Ronald Reagan visited Flint Michigan, promising to bring economic properity that did not exist during the end of the 1970s. The film then explained that GM immediately closed a plant and laid off thousands of workers.
I don't think anyone came away from that movie with the impression that Reagan was personally responsible for closing the plants in Flint immediately after he visited. If Moore claimed that GM *immediately* closed the plant after Reagan's speech, then, well, that's false and you're right to debunk it. But this doesn't undermine Moore's point: Supply-side tax cuts and free trade did not lead to prosperity in Flint. While we were supposedly enjoying an economic boom, Flint was suffering through an economic depression that is almost unimaginable, due to most of its industry being moved to Mexico and Canada, helped along by Reagan's policies. It was perfectly valid to illustrate the disparity between Reagan's rhetoric and the reality in places like Flint; but he should have indicated that Reagan's speech took place 7 years earlier.
Remember, slander and libel are *NOT* protected free speech in America.
Since the standards for libel and slander are higher for someone who is considered a "public figure," I'd have to say that libel and slander *are* protected free speech in America. Ie, something that would be considered libel if you wrote it about your next door neighbor might not be libel if you wrote it about the president. What a country!
And always remember the cardinal rule of journalism: You cannot libel a dead person. Now that Reagan's dead, you can say whatever you like about him and it doesn't matter if it's true! So let 'er rip!
And besides, one of the greatest lessons to be learned from this movie (though I would have thought it would have been learned much earlier than this) is as follows: Never try and forcefully hide information from the public. The more you try and supress it, the more intreaguing it becomes and the more demand there is for it.
This is a comforting thought, but here's what bothers me: When information suppression succeeds, we don't know about it! We only hear about it when someone like Michael Moore succeeds in getting his film made. What about a filmmaker who hasn't won an Oscar, and only has a shot at making a modest profit? Should he or she have to take into consideration Disney's interest in keeping its tax breaks for its Florida theme parks when he makes his movie?
This is what the apologists for media consolidation told us would not happen. "Corporations don't care about the content of the film," they said. "They only care if they can make a profit on it." But here is a case of a movie that, pretty clearly, was a good money-making proposition, but Eisner turned it down because of its content. This is something we should not be complacent about as more and more media is owned by fewer and fewer people. It's great that we can now distribute via Internet (for now), but movies, TV, and newspapers are still where it's at in terms of who controls society.
(Yeah, I know this was probably a troll)
I wasn't trolling. I thought it was pretty clear that I was kidding. Makes me laugh...
A friend sent me an invite, and I registered, but I haven't used the account. Not sure what the big deal is supposed to be. OK, it's searchable. Why can't everyone just ssh to their mail servers and grep the spool? Is the average user this clueless? If they don't have an ssh client installed, then they're just beyond hopeless as far as I'm concerned. They don't deserve to get their e-mail.
"Fair use" is part of copyright law. You're allowed to reprint part of a copyrighted book, for example, in order to critique it in a book review.
Ripping a CD to mp3 is allowed not because it is "fair use," but because copyright simply doesn't apply. Copyright (oddly enough) has nothing to say about copying, but only about distribution. Ripping a CD is not fair use, it's unregulated use. Therefore, it shouldn't be against the law to circumvent a device that is intended to prevent you from doing something that is perfectly legal.
The government states that it is illegal to copy copyrighted materials for other than some particular purposes.
Don't you have it backwards? It's the particular purpose--redistributing a work in its entirety--that copyright restricts.
Ripping a CD to mp3 isn't something copyright "permits" you to do. It isn't "fair use." It's use that the copyright holder simply doesn't have a right to have any control over. DRM, therefore, isn't a means of protecting the copyright holder's legal rights. It's just something they do because they can. That's why it's wrong to make a law against circumventing DRM. It creates a new right for copyright holders where none existed before--the right to continue controlling how you use your property after they've sold it to you. It isn't merely the protection of copyright, it's the creation of a new right that benefits very few at the expense of many other things that we ought to value more highly.
I think it's reasonable that Apple limits the number of times a playlist can be burned to CD. On the other hand, I don't think it should be illegal for me to circumvent that if I have a reason to. They shouldn't have a legal right to restrict the way I use something I've purchased from them. If they want to come at me for selling CDs of music I don't own the rights to, that's fine. But that's what they should have to do. Not take rights away from everybody just to preempt a few thieves.
You probably agree with me, but I think the semantic distinction--that copyright applies only to a particular case, and all other copying is unregulated--is an important distinction.
SF gets persistant 90+ weather in the summers.
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Dude, you're on crack. I live in SF. It's hardly ever 90, especially in the summer, which is when the fog rolls in. It's actually warmer in the fall. Here's a graph.
http://www.free-weather.com/San-Francisco-Calif
The average high temperature in the warmest month is around 70 degrees.
The only microclimate of note in the Bay Area extends from Pacifica to Sausilito.
Um, yeah. Most people call the area that extends from Pacifica to Sausalito by its name: San Francisco. Throw in Colma, South SF, Daly City, Millbrae and San Mateo too, I guess.
We get 200+ days of zero clouds a year here at a minimum, every year. Portland gets 200+ days of the opposite.
In the peninsula, where Linus lived, it is often sunny and the temperature occasionally gets up into the 90s.
In San Francisco, the weather varies by neighborhood, but nowhere is the temperature ever higher than 80 degrees F on a regular basis. The Mission is known for being sunny; the Sunset is foggy. The neighborhoods aren't that far apart physically, but the city's hilliness causes weather to vary depending on whether there is a hill blocking the wind from the ocean in your neighborhood.
And then there are the Santa Cruz mountains, on the southern edge of Silicon Valley. These might be somewhat like Portland. I don't know if they're technically a rainforest, but it is quite rainy there. There are redwoods, and ferns, and giant banana slugs.
Oakland is a little bit warmer and sunnier than San Francisco. East of there, it gets hotter and hotter until you reach the scorching Central Valley.
Suffice it to say that there is no such thing as "Bay Area" weather. It's the land of microclimates.
All unprotected creatures were 'baked by the equivalent of a global oven set on broil.'"
Thanks for the metaphor. This "heated air" concept is difficult to get across to the layperson.
nobody seems to be posting mp3's of the music I like.
That's because it's 2004. Those of us who weren't frozen in our caves in 1990 sold our Mudhoney CDs back to the store. The stores tried to give them away, but people kept giving them back. Now they're buried in landfills around the world, where they will remain, not decomposing, for centuries. That's why you can't find mp3s of your ancient caveman music. Catering to the Unfrozen Caveman demographic just doesn't seem to be a very high priority.
(Besides, my sound system is within arms reach, it cost more than my PC, and it sounds a lot better. I've never seen why I should bother to copy tracks from my CD's to my PC and put up with degraded quality.)
Whoa! Are you that "Unfrozen Caveman Sysadmin" that everyone's been talking about? You know. The one who was frozen in 1990 and unfrozen in 2004?
I'm intrigued by this "CD" technology of which you speak. Is that some kind of codec, similar to mp3? Tell me more!