Right of First Sale 4. Defendants shall not impair or limit in any manner the ability and right of consumers to lawfully sell or transfer ownership of the Charlie Pride CD to others who shall have the equal ability to download related digital music files;
What a breath of fresh air. I think this is what the music labels are really after here. Not mass piracy (ala asian copy shops) but abridging first sale rights. And the good news is that in this and the adobe vs. softman case, the courts are upholding our rights.
So now the battle shifts to hardware and standards bodies, as the content cartels will try to get through firmware what they can't achieve in the courts.
Note that I'm not asking wether or not they have a reason. Sure, you can limit piracy by controlling every possible environment in which a game is played. But do they have a right to shut down a clean reverse engineered network, just because they use their own network is an anti-piracy device?
If I sell a car, and one of my anti-theft devices is to place some sort of homing beacon under the hood, which is maintained and serviced at special approved dealers, then can I shut down independent mechanics who also service the car?
One key is to charge people as indirectly as possible. Some other ideas:
pay for more bandwidth
micro ads (mentioned below)
personalization: xxx@slashdot.org email, rdf headlines sent to your pda.
pay for more functionality: message your friends. A more customizable moderation system: ignore the mods of your foes/ ignore "offtopic" mods, etc.
subtract free functionality but only for the hardcore users. I.e. best set up is if the average user didn't notice a big difference (no huge page filling iframes). Say the typical user could only post 15 comments a month. Then you'd have to pay {small amount} for unlimited postings. Note that by logging in as AC this still lets the po' folk post, but it's targetted at the hard core guys who are more likely to pay.
How these changes are done is often as important as what the changes are:
I think this would be a good "Ask Slashdot" topic. Seriously. Why not lay out the finances, what's needed and how soon, and then let's bandy about some ways to make a subscription site like this work. Why do it behind closed doors? You might find some pretty clever ideas from the user base. Aslo, I for one, would have great respect for any company that honestly dealt with its users and included them in the decision making process. Or at least made some gestures in this direction. It would bring you so much goodwill. And we know you gotta pay the bills (little taquitos might loom on horizon. Somebody has to feed Katz.). But instead of making us feel like we are being led by the nose to a more and more annoying site until we pay (i.e. the Salon approach) -- be upfront about what's needed and we'll help you make slashdot work.
When setting up our office in China last year, we decided to give Red Flag a try
Well at least someone tried the Chinese version. Tell me -- how "Chinese" was it? Were all the man pages translated? what kinds of character support? icons?
Not a troll, I just thought the review was a bit light on details -- they should have gotten an actual Chinese speaker to evaluate the distro.
actually, it's the ad revenues which drive up the costs.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that require that the cast of friends get $1,000,000/episode. That figure is determined by the add revenues. The only required costs are those for film, make up, food and lodging for the actors/producers. The other stuff is determined by market forces arguing over a potential revenue stream. Same for sporting events.
The many well produced foreign films, which were created in a different economy for under $100,000,000 testify to this. And magazines were highly profitable in the last century and they derived the bulk of their revenues from subscriptions. The only problem is when market forces inflate salaries and then revenues drop for the newcomers. The problem is from a time lag in a nonlinear feedback response, since markets are very chaotic. The costs inherent in the content or medium are very low.
Every person who chooses to watch Sopranos by downloading instead of subscribing to the services is taking money out of the pocket of HBO.
Every person who chooses to watch Sopranos by..
watching the show at their friend's house
borrowing it from a lending library
borrowing a tape from a friend
watching (future) reruns on another channel
..instead of subscribing to the services is taking money out of the pocket of HBO.
There is always a public space: libraries, friends, free boradcast outlets ...and a commercial space: hbo
Now hbo, when analyzing their market size, knows that the public space can cut into the private space, and so it adds services and convenience to offset this. It's not revolutionary to assume that changing technologies can expand the public space, and hbo needs to adjust their marketing startegy accordingly.
It cuts both ways, changing technology forced people to buy several copies of the same thing: vhs --> dvd, lp--> cd
And changing technology often creates entirely new markets: movies, radio, tv, cable
So sometimes the public space shrinks and sometimes it grows in proportion. It's not theft, it's not taking money out of anyone's pockets, since no one has a right to be profitable.
Cable owes it's existance to a cool new distribution medium, which definately cuts into the profits of the broadcast networks. boohoo. Note that in the beginning cable did nothing but recycle old tv leftovers.
Perhaps the tables are turning again, and now ISP's, websites which stream media on demand, and those who sell bandwidth/hard drives will cut into HBO subscription rates. boohoo.
The relative size/importance of knowledge is a good argument, and I tend to use it when explaining to Europeans why many in the US are not bilingual. But I don't think it works so well in this case because
We've got troops in half the world, so the relative importance to an American of, say, Slovenia, is much higher than to an Aussie.
The flipside of your argument is that our responsibility to be aware of the world is proportional to our influence over it. Living in a democracy, it's no excuse to say "I never approved of this atrocity". So it starts to be pretty important that people know what's going on, say in Uzbekistan. And who we are going to bed with there. Many in the rest of the world are pissed off/amazed at how we allow our government to send military aid to regimes who are conducting mass murder (e.g. Turkey), or train/give loans to security forces in repressive, fanatical regimes (Saudi Arabia). They rightly conclude that popular ignorance lets our govt. get away with murder. So the responsibility to be more informed than everyone else is on our shoulders. In this respect, it doesn't matter how much geography a Canadian knows.
What about those places where the local telco has a monopoly on isp services? It might not care about user pressure.
The obvious thing to do with open relays is to use them yourself. If top party leaders/businessmen in China suddenly found pro Taiwanese rants in their inbox, or penile enlargement ads, then I think the Chinese Telco would become very responsive to closing the relays.
It's a no brainer. If you have 0 abuse staff and 1,000,000 censors -- change the definition of debate.
Forwarding a mail to abuse@blah or postmaster@blah with the single word "spam" and full headers should be all the info you need.
AFAIK, a sysadmin or postmaster should already understand the headers. So the only thing left which might confuse a non english speaking (yet otherwise competent) admin is the obscure single word "spam".
the only meaningful statistic (for your point) is median wages, not average income.
Income includes govt. payments to the poor, and stock dividends to the rich. If you are concerned about the middle class, then you should measure wages, not income {ASIDE: yes, though 50% own some stock, 1% still own 50% of all stock, and most stocks owned are a replacement for pensions, and so should not be counted as wages for a realistic trendline analysis, since in previous years future pension benefits (for working adults) were not counted as wages either}
Another point in the smoke and mirrors: don't count household income, since over the past four decades women have gone to work increasing #'s, thereby inflating the figures. Certainly we should not be thankful to the corps you admire so much for making it more difficult for single income households to survive.
The reason why statisticians prefer to use median over average is because median income figures are a more measure of how the "average" person is doing. i.e. -- you care about what the "average" american earns as opposed to what the sum of all income of all americans/#of americans is. Bill Gates and a few other outliers tend to skew the distribution.
Median wages have fallen fairly steadily since about 1973 (in fixed dollars), and then began to increase in the second part of the 90's. we are now almost back up to 1973 levels at around 29,000 per year.
That's pretty damn good for the planet as a whole, but rather mediocre for a first world nation. Note that, around 1800, the U.S. was by far the richest nation on earth, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, calories per capita, death rates, etc. This was before the age of corporate power, so it may be hard for you to believe. Until around the 1970's we were still at the top of the pack, although europe had wwII to deal with. Since then we;ve slipped to the bottom half of the top 15 or so industrialized nations in terms of the figures cited above (except possibly the calories/person) as well as more modern measures such as literacy, availability of health care, divorce rates, etc.
Are you, uh, satisfied with 30 years of stagnating wages? I'm not. Plot those figures against a chart of the Dow to see how thankful we should be to the corporations for almost keeping up with our parents' standard of living.
Well, although I'm not qualified to judge your thought experiment (I'd have a physics degree except I didn't, uh, take any labs), I don't see how you are measuring anything except the position of your particle.
Unless, of course, you mean to fire these lasers continuously everywhere all at once, and measure speed in terms of real time tracking. I think what you would find then is that, when the results of all of the "hits" are viewed on some (3d -- ofcourse) viewer, the particle appears as a kind of "cloud" which drifts through space, spreading out until ultimately it fills whatever container your experiment is in. -- i.e. there are several postions and speeds at the same time.
This is assuming that your laser doesn't interfere with the particle in any significant way.
I say write it up and ask for a grant. The department of energy has some decent lasers and plenty of cash.
It's silly to blame Cisco for supplying the firewall to China
Ethics aside, it's certainly not silly to give a company bad p.r. because of its actions.
Cisco spends millions every year testifying to it's goodness. It sponsors athletic competitions, art groups, etc. It fosters a corporate image, and that corporate brand justifies a portion of the mark up on Cisco products. If you don't believe this, then ask yourself why p.r. departments exist, or why a company which sells routers would air tv commercials at all.
Most modern states employ a much more effective filter than anything Cisco could come up with:
People don't want to criticize their own govt's, or take responsibility for what their leaders do.
In fact, the "Great Firewall" China is using is a sign of the leadership's political naivete.
A system in which dissenting views are allowed (limited) exposure -- only to be swamped out by flag-waving and soundbytes -- gives people the illusion that they are living in an open society and participating in an open debate. But as long as vast swathes of history and unpopular facts are not widely known, critics will seem as though they are coming from left field and will be generally ignored, if not hated. Ironically, this small amount of openness serves to "immunize" the populace from taking opposing views seriously.
"In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."
IMNSHO, if the Chinese leadership does a good enough job in K-12 education of instilling patriotism and belief in the fundamental justness of the regime, as well as making sure that the govt. view dominates most "respectable" news outlets and debate forums, then those rare voices arguing for, say, a withdrawal from Tibet will seem like traitorous whackos. Further, pride from allowing dissenting voices to be heard will even further reinforce the fundamental belief that they are the "good guys" in every conflict.
The heisenberg uncertainty principle (In terms of "classical" 1920's quantum mechanics) goes as follows:
a particle has associated to it a "wave function", which at each point of your world has a complex value. The absolute value (squared) of this wave function is interpereted as the probability density that your particle is at that position.
So, for instance, if your wave function has a constant value of 1/2 on the interval from 0 to 2, then you know with certainty that it lies between 0 and 2. And the odds of it living in the region between 0 and 1 is equal to (length of region)*1/2 = 1/2.
For more complicated distributions, you have to integrate to find where the probability of your particle being in a given region.
Now, the notion of having a probability density for position is nothing new. The radical step here is to say that
the probability distribution for a particle's momentum (read: velocity) is the fourrier transform of its postion probability distribution.
So, basically, quantum mechanics tells you how to get the momentum distribution if you're given the position distribution, with some additional data (i.e. the potential, which in my example above is zero).
Geometrically, this process can be described in terms of summing sinusoidal waves of differing frequencies.
So, for instance, a wave with period 1 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1. The wave with period 2 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1/2 (squared?--I forgot), etc. If you add the two waves together, you'll have a particle which will have a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1 and a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1/2. The function that these two added waves represents is the probability distribution for position.
If you graph the sum of these two waves, you'll find a funny shape which has constructive interference in some places and destructive interference in other places. Typically, it will look like a steep hill near the origin (where cosine is 1), with smaller hills as you go out. By piling on more and more waves, you can get the resuting wave function to be pretty damn steep at the origin, and the outlying hills very small and shallow. This corresponds to a high degree of certainty that the particle can be found near the origin -- but the price paid is using a lot of waves (i.e. many different possible speeds).
In general, the more localized (in space) the wave function, the more waves will be needed to build it up. And with only one sinusoidal wave, you have (basically) no information about where the particle will be.
Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is a count on how many momentum waves are needed to localize a particle within a particular region.
Note that it has nothing to do with whatever tool is used for measurement, or who performs the measurement, or in which geographic location the measurement takes place.
Unfortunately, many pop sci books try to "explain" the principle by claiming that the act of measuring momentum must somehow interfere with position, hence the ambiguity. This is deceitful, since measuring a particle does change it's wave function to the corresponding eigenvector, but heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't describe what happens to a particle after measuring it (i.e. the position distribution collapses to a delta function), it describes a relationship between the number of "possible" positions and the number of "possible" momenta the particle has. Little of one implies a lot of the other.
And this ambiguity, far from being an engineering problem, is perhaps the central insight of classical quantum mechanics.
N.B. -- as in all pop-sci accounts, I've told a few lies here. I've ignored units, the issue of continuous vs. discreet eigenvectors, etc. I've muddled speed, momentum, and velocity. But what really bugs me is that the lies which are told in most pop sci accounts are rather fundamental i.e. they want people to believe a theorem or physical insight, and so they "explain" it with some other related insight. The result is that people believe what the books say, but for the wrong reasons. I.e. acceptancy at the price of understanding. Sorry for the rant.
There are a couple of predictions which (so far) have been stunningly correct. I have every confidence that they will continue to predict the future with a high-degree of accuracy. At least for the course of my lifetime.
the computer you want costs $2,000
(sci-fi) AI is 25 years away
transportation (e.g. flying cars, monorails) will be painless and efficient in 20 years
housecleaning (e.g. rubber/stainless furniture) will be fast and painless in 30 years
despite stunning and ethically mind bending advances in genetic engineering and biochemistry, most people will still die due to lack of sanitation, vaccines, nutrients, and preventive care.
In 15 years, we'll have cold fusion kitchen appliances.
privacy will continue to erode
median wages will not rise significantly (~20%) above the levels enjoyed around 1973.
A well-aimed 105MM round will do the job quite well, however - and they're cheap!
That might be the problem. Remember the Korean War, in which our Army was pathetically supplied, to the point that some GI's scavenged boots off of enemy dead, while a huge part of the defense budget was going straight to Boeing. This wouldn't be the first time that a horribly expensive (read B-2., star wars, etc.) program was funded at the expense of things like more exercises, housing, pay, etc. for the troops. There's a reason why the Air Force is short on pilots, and it's not due to lack of prestige.
some confusion: The website defacements are a different legal proceeding, which will be brought against him, and he'll probably be convicted for that. If you read the court transcripts, you'll notice that neither the prosecution nor defense brought up the website defacements in this bail hearing, which was strictly to determine wether he was a menace to society in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and wether, as the prosecution claimed, he would blow up the olympics if he was allowed to travel back to California on his own.
No one, that I'm aware of, is defending his defacement of websites. And when he gets back to CA, he will face trial for that. But many people are concerned that a person who engaged in non-violent (no one claims he committed any violence) protests at the WEF was held in prison incommunicado and declared a terrorist by the FBI. Also, you might be interested to know that the charges dropped against him did not involve website defacements -- that's a separate legal track.
Acting legally with respect to article 51 does not mean just writing a letter to the UN. It means submitting a resolution to the security council, and having the security council pass that resolution. It's not enough for a state to just write a memo and declare itself to be following the UN charter, anymore than it is for you to declare yourself with a memo to be a law abiding citizen. The US submitted no such resolution for the reasons I cited. In fact, this quick memo sent to top the UN was, according to your sources, "interpreted [by diplomats] to mean that the U.S. did not feel the need to ask the UN for endorsement of the military strikes.." -- in other words, the anarchy which you attack in weak institutions, yet prize in powerful states. Sorry to have the truth disturb your rants.
People who tell others to rise up in violent revolt, provide descriptions of how to rise up in violent revolt, and are caught with instruments to engage in violent revolt aren't civilians.
Well, some of them are states, some are institutions, and some are yes, citizens such as yourself. Reread your own posts and apply whatever standards you use to judge others to yourself. You've advocated a bit of bloodshed and denial of others' humanity already in this thread. But it's different when the gun points in the other direction.
It would be possible to arrest him for having the molotov cocktails in his home. Counts as an unregistered firearm or some such. I stand by my other points.
The interesting question is why they dropped the charges. I can only think of 2 reasons:
a deal in which they agreed to drop the charges in exchange for not being sued for holding him incommunicado (unlikely, IMNSHO).
they didn't have evidence of molotov cocktails and this was the same sort of FUD as the "fertilizer" which turned out to be half a bag of topsoil.
Having read the SA's affadavit, I'm feeling that Austin probably should be in jail.
I had the same feeling, but then I read the defense statement, and it turns out that most of the things in the affidavit are lies and FUD. Seriously. That's partly why I was so angry in this case. Make the guy seem like Osama so the judge will issue warrants and deny bail -- pretty sleazy. In the affidavit, a half opened bag of top soil becomes bomb making fertilizer. Stereo wires become bomb making equipment. Arrest records turn out to be jaywalking tickets. Lying to police turns out to be "I'm not sure where I parked, but it's somewhere in Brooklyn". And of course they ignore all of the evidence on his behalf (voluntarily identifying himself, giving permission to the fbi to search his car and home, etc.). Anyways, it's all academic at this point, so maybe the FBI just wanted their pint of blood and were willing to publicly tar and feather this guy in the media when they had no evidence against him.
See, the thing is that someone already DID take a shot at the Defense Department. Happened in September.
Yes, and you seem to agree with their logic of "kill the anarchist". I disagree with this logic. Surprisingly enough, you use sept. 11 to support your argument, which reveals that it is not an argument at all, but merely vitriol. Read point 3 above.
What you don't understand is that might always makes right.
So you are an "anarchist" according to your definition of the term, and yet you think those who live by "The law of thew jungle" should be killed..
The US, BTW, did NOT violate ANY "international law" by attacking Afghanistan. It invoked its right to self-defense under the UN charter.
Shouting aside, that's just not true. The US made no such appeal to the UN charter. The reasoning from the state department was -- 'we are justfied in waging war on "terrorism" [an abstract noun, mind you] and don't need to appeal to the UN or any other international body.' Actually, the reason is simple. The charter allows countries to use force for self-defense only in response to an "armed attack". The phrase "armed attack" has meaning, and it must be on-going. So you cannot defend yourself against an armed attack after the fact. For example, if an army were to invade the US from Mexico, we could use force to repel that army. But we would not be justified in invading Mexico after the invading army was destroyed. Nor could we cite the UN Charter as a justification to bomb some other country (i.e. Russia) which trained or supported the invading army. You may not like it, but that is the defintion of armed attack which the US itself helped create when the UN charter was written. For these and other reasons, the state department never cited the UN charter as a justification for bombing of Afghanistan.
I mind the viewpoints of people whose goal in life is to kill me and destroy the society I am a part of. Killing them before they kill me seems like a good idea,
Yet again you make my point for me. It seems that you accede to my observation of your true motives if only the word "distasteful" is replaced by a stronger adjective. Yet it's this form of ideological justification of violence which you and your intellectual brethren in Al-quaeda use to support the killing of civilians.
uhh, I know the charges have been dropped. But I was responding to a poster who basically said this guy had it coming to him. Well,
he was detained for 4 days without access to a phone (or lawyer).
he was denied bail because the FBI claimed he was a menca to the community.. and then dropped the charges against him.
during the bail hearing they accused him of possessing "weapons of mass destruction" and of being a terrorist -- they lied to the judge in order to keep him in jail.
Maybe you have no problems with the above points, but I do. This is not a "conspiracy theory" -- read the story.
It would be rather difficult to gain evidence for a criminal case without inconvenience to those poor, mistreated suspects.
If you can explain to me how the above points were needed to gain evidence or investigate, then be my guest.
The FBI investigated him for over a month before this and found, basically, nothing. But even if these steps are necessary, and everyone who is arrested can be treated this way, several laws as well as constitutoinal amendments would need to be repealed to justify this sort of treatment.
If he's a real anarchist, then shooting him should be perfectly legal. After all, he believes in the rule of the jungle.
1) That's not what many (most?) anarchists believe. Most don't view anarchism as a philosophy of government but as a meta-analysis -- i.e. How should we evaluate power? -- with the idea that as soon as some power structure is no longer absolutely necessary, then it should be dismantled. Anarchim is a process of constantly questioning and reevaluating how much power people cede to institutions.
1a) Even if that is what they believed, it would not make shooting them "legal" or justifiable.
2) Many believe in the "rule of the jungle" -- in some aspects. For instance, Reagan rejected the decisions of the World Court when the US was convicted of terrorism in Nicaragua (killing civilians, mining the harbors, etc.). Bush (jr.) violated international law by attacking afghanistan without a resolution in the UN Security Council, or even in the general assembly. That is also a form of anarchism, and by your logic, this means that it would be "legal" to shoot the entire Defense department and heads of government of almost all nations.
3) But I suspect the real reason why you think shooting anarchists is ok has nothing to do with their perceived lack of respect for law and order. Several presidents and law enforcement organizations have routinely flouted and continue to ignore/subvert their own regulations and outside checks on their powers. So perhaps the deciding factor here is not anarchism but the fact that you find this person's views distateful, and so it's ok to shoot him, in which case you've more in common with him than you realize.
Just because they didn't find anything it doesn't mean he wasn't going to do something.
I see. This is sort of like the opposite of innocent until proven guilty. But who knows, if you prefer the pre-emptive strike approach, there are plenty of third world regimes which share your suspicion of protesters.
If I am a cop and I see a kid with a gas mask at a protest I am going to definitely just looking for him to do something wrong.
Sounds reasonable. But the anaogy is if you are a protester and have been gassed before (simply for protesting) then you might decide to bring a mask the next time -- I hope that sounds reasonable to you, too.
Moreover, there is a difference between "watching" a suspicious person before he does something wrong, and arresting him, holding him incommunicado for 4 days, and detaining him for an additional 10 days before you realize that you don't have any real evidence against him, and of course keeping his car and wallet.
Moreover, in their attempt to keep him in jail the FBI lied to at least one judge, spread lots of FUD, and acted in an abusive way, generally. Now you should agree that that's a lot different from "keeping an eye out" when someone wears a gas mask. The problem is that if the target is unpopular or upsets people in this post 9/11 nation, then the govt. can do just about anything they want to him, and they will keep the sympathy of people such as yourself. I hope you rethink your views on this.
Yes. He would have set NY on fire with the lighter, no doubt. The gas mask might have allowed him to (illegally) breathe should the police decide to attack him. Note that there was no molotov cocktail found on him. Nor was there any fertilizer in his car.
Of course, not carrying ID is a crime in the eyes of many, but he gave his full name to the police when questioned. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
Right of First Sale
4. Defendants shall not impair or limit in any manner the ability and right of consumers to lawfully sell or transfer ownership of the Charlie Pride CD to others who shall have the equal ability to download related digital music files;
What a breath of fresh air. I think this is what the music labels are really after here. Not mass piracy (ala asian copy shops) but abridging first sale rights. And the good news is that in this and the adobe vs. softman case, the courts are upholding our rights.
So now the battle shifts to hardware and standards bodies, as the content cartels will try to get through firmware what they can't achieve in the courts.
Let's hear from the EFF folks.
Can Blizzard do this?
Note that I'm not asking wether or not they have a reason. Sure, you can limit piracy by controlling every possible environment in which a game is played. But do they have a right to shut down a clean reverse engineered network, just because they use their own network is an anti-piracy device?
If I sell a car, and one of my anti-theft devices is to place some sort of homing beacon under the hood, which is maintained and serviced at special approved dealers, then can I shut down independent mechanics who also service the car?
One key is to charge people as indirectly as possible. Some other ideas:
pay for more bandwidth
micro ads (mentioned below)
personalization: xxx@slashdot.org email, rdf headlines sent to your pda.
pay for more functionality: message your friends. A more customizable moderation system: ignore the mods of your foes/ ignore "offtopic" mods, etc.
subtract free functionality but only for the hardcore users. I.e. best set up is if the average user didn't notice a big difference (no huge page filling iframes). Say the typical user could only post 15 comments a month. Then you'd have to pay {small amount} for unlimited postings. Note that by logging in as AC this still lets the po' folk post, but it's targetted at the hard core guys who are more likely to pay.
How these changes are done is often as important as what the changes are:
I think this would be a good "Ask Slashdot" topic. Seriously. Why not lay out the finances, what's needed and how soon, and then let's bandy about some ways to make a subscription site like this work. Why do it behind closed doors? You might find some pretty clever ideas from the user base. Aslo, I for one, would have great respect for any company that honestly dealt with its users and included them in the decision making process. Or at least made some gestures in this direction. It would bring you so much goodwill. And we know you gotta pay the bills (little taquitos might loom on horizon. Somebody has to feed Katz.). But instead of making us feel like we are being led by the nose to a more and more annoying site until we pay (i.e. the Salon approach) -- be upfront about what's needed and we'll help you make slashdot work.
No native man pages + default login as root could spell trouble. heh.
Anyways, thanks for the info. I think we should give the chinese linux distros as much goodwill as possible. A bigger install base is a Good Thing.
When setting up our office in China last year, we decided to give Red Flag a try
Well at least someone tried the Chinese version. Tell me -- how "Chinese" was it? Were all the man pages translated? what kinds of character support? icons?
Not a troll, I just thought the review was a bit light on details -- they should have gotten an actual Chinese speaker to evaluate the distro.
actually, it's the ad revenues which drive up the costs.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that require that the cast of friends get $1,000,000/episode. That figure is determined by the add revenues. The only required costs are those for film, make up, food and lodging for the actors/producers. The other stuff is determined by market forces arguing over a potential revenue stream. Same for sporting events.
The many well produced foreign films, which were created in a different economy for under $100,000,000 testify to this. And magazines were highly profitable in the last century and they derived the bulk of their revenues from subscriptions. The only problem is when market forces inflate salaries and then revenues drop for the newcomers. The problem is from a time lag in a nonlinear feedback response, since markets are very chaotic. The costs inherent in the content or medium are very low.
Every person who chooses to watch Sopranos by..
watching the show at their friend's house
borrowing it from a lending library
borrowing a tape from a friend
watching (future) reruns on another channel
..instead of subscribing to the services is taking money out of the pocket of HBO.
There is always a public space: libraries, friends, free boradcast outlets
...and a commercial space: hbo
Now hbo, when analyzing their market size, knows that the public space can cut into the private space, and so it adds services and convenience to offset this. It's not revolutionary to assume that changing technologies can expand the public space, and hbo needs to adjust their marketing startegy accordingly.
It cuts both ways, changing technology forced people to buy several copies of the same thing: vhs --> dvd, lp--> cd
And changing technology often creates entirely new markets: movies, radio, tv, cable
So sometimes the public space shrinks and sometimes it grows in proportion. It's not theft, it's not taking money out of anyone's pockets, since no one has a right to be profitable.
Cable owes it's existance to a cool new distribution medium, which definately cuts into the profits of the broadcast networks. boohoo. Note that in the beginning cable did nothing but recycle old tv leftovers.
Perhaps the tables are turning again, and now ISP's, websites which stream media on demand, and those who sell bandwidth/hard drives will cut into HBO subscription rates. boohoo.
We've got troops in half the world, so the relative importance to an American of, say, Slovenia, is much higher than to an Aussie.
The flipside of your argument is that our responsibility to be aware of the world is proportional to our influence over it. Living in a democracy, it's no excuse to say "I never approved of this atrocity". So it starts to be pretty important that people know what's going on, say in Uzbekistan. And who we are going to bed with there. Many in the rest of the world are pissed off/amazed at how we allow our government to send military aid to regimes who are conducting mass murder (e.g. Turkey), or train/give loans to security forces in repressive, fanatical regimes (Saudi Arabia). They rightly conclude that popular ignorance lets our govt. get away with murder. So the responsibility to be more informed than everyone else is on our shoulders. In this respect, it doesn't matter how much geography a Canadian knows.
What about those places where the local telco has a monopoly on isp services? It might not care about user pressure.
The obvious thing to do with open relays is to use them yourself. If top party leaders/businessmen in China suddenly found pro Taiwanese rants in their inbox, or penile enlargement ads, then I think the Chinese Telco would become very responsive to closing the relays.
It's a no brainer. If you have 0 abuse staff and 1,000,000 censors -- change the definition of debate.
Forwarding a mail to abuse@blah or postmaster@blah
with the single word "spam" and full headers should be all the info you need.
AFAIK, a sysadmin or postmaster should already understand the headers. So the only thing left which might confuse a non english speaking (yet otherwise competent) admin is the obscure single word "spam".
the only meaningful statistic (for your point) is median wages, not average income.
Income includes govt. payments to the poor, and stock dividends to the rich. If you are concerned about the middle class, then you should measure wages, not income {ASIDE: yes, though 50% own some stock, 1% still own 50% of all stock, and most stocks owned are a replacement for pensions, and so should not be counted as wages for a realistic trendline analysis, since in previous years future pension benefits (for working adults) were not counted as wages either}
Another point in the smoke and mirrors: don't count household income, since over the past four decades women have gone to work increasing #'s, thereby inflating the figures. Certainly we should not be thankful to the corps you admire so much for making it more difficult for single income households to survive.
The reason why statisticians prefer to use median over average is because median income figures are a more measure of how the "average" person is doing. i.e. -- you care about what the "average" american earns as opposed to what the sum of all income of all americans/#of americans is. Bill Gates and a few other outliers tend to skew the distribution.
Median wages have fallen fairly steadily since about 1973 (in fixed dollars), and then began to increase in the second part of the 90's. we are now almost back up to 1973 levels at around 29,000 per year.
That's pretty damn good for the planet as a whole, but rather mediocre for a first world nation. Note that, around 1800, the U.S. was by far the richest nation on earth, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, calories per capita, death rates, etc. This was before the age of corporate power, so it may be hard for you to believe. Until around the 1970's we were still at the top of the pack, although europe had wwII to deal with. Since then we;ve slipped to the bottom half of the top 15 or so industrialized nations in terms of the figures cited above (except possibly the calories/person) as well as more modern measures such as literacy, availability of health care, divorce rates, etc.
Are you, uh, satisfied with 30 years of stagnating wages? I'm not. Plot those figures against a chart of the Dow to see how thankful we should be to the corporations for almost keeping up with our parents' standard of living.
heh.
Well, although I'm not qualified to judge your thought experiment (I'd have a physics degree except I didn't, uh, take any labs), I don't see how you are measuring anything except the position of your particle.
Unless, of course, you mean to fire these lasers continuously everywhere all at once, and measure speed in terms of real time tracking. I think what you would find then is that, when the results of all of the "hits" are viewed on some (3d -- ofcourse) viewer, the particle appears as a kind of "cloud" which drifts through space, spreading out until ultimately it fills whatever container your experiment is in. -- i.e. there are several postions and speeds at the same time.
This is assuming that your laser doesn't interfere with the particle in any significant way.
I say write it up and ask for a grant. The department of energy has some decent lasers and plenty of cash.
It's silly to blame Cisco for supplying the firewall to China
Ethics aside, it's certainly not silly to give a company bad p.r. because of its actions.
Cisco spends millions every year testifying to it's goodness. It sponsors athletic competitions, art groups, etc. It fosters a corporate image, and that corporate brand justifies a portion of the mark up on Cisco products. If you don't believe this, then ask yourself why p.r. departments exist, or why a company which sells routers would air tv commercials at all.
Most modern states employ a much more effective filter than anything Cisco could come up with:
People don't want to criticize their own govt's, or take responsibility for what their leaders do.
In fact, the "Great Firewall" China is using is a sign of the leadership's political naivete.
A system in which dissenting views are allowed (limited) exposure -- only to be swamped out by flag-waving and soundbytes -- gives people the illusion that they are living in an open society and participating in an open debate. But as long as vast swathes of history and unpopular facts are not widely known, critics will seem as though they are coming from left field and will be generally ignored, if not hated. Ironically, this small amount of openness serves to "immunize" the populace from taking opposing views seriously.
Ralph Reed said it best:
"In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."
IMNSHO, if the Chinese leadership does a good enough job in K-12 education of instilling patriotism and belief in the fundamental justness of the regime, as well as making sure that the govt. view dominates most "respectable" news outlets and debate forums, then those rare voices arguing for, say, a withdrawal from Tibet will seem like traitorous whackos. Further, pride from allowing dissenting voices to be heard will even further reinforce the fundamental belief that they are the "good guys" in every conflict.
The heisenberg uncertainty principle (In terms of "classical" 1920's quantum mechanics) goes as follows:
a particle has associated to it a "wave function", which at each point of your world has a complex value. The absolute value (squared) of this wave function is interpereted as the probability density that your particle is at that position.
So, for instance, if your wave function has a constant value of 1/2 on the interval from 0 to 2, then you know with certainty that it lies between 0 and 2. And the odds of it living in the region between 0 and 1 is equal to (length of region)*1/2 = 1/2.
For more complicated distributions, you have to integrate to find where the probability of your particle being in a given region.
Now, the notion of having a probability density for position is nothing new. The radical step here is to say that
the probability distribution for a particle's momentum (read: velocity) is the fourrier transform of its postion probability distribution.
So, basically, quantum mechanics tells you how to get the momentum distribution if you're given the position distribution, with some additional data (i.e. the potential, which in my example above is zero).
Geometrically, this process can be described in terms of summing sinusoidal waves of differing frequencies.
So, for instance, a wave with period 1 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1. The wave with period 2 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1/2 (squared?--I forgot), etc. If you add the two waves together, you'll have a particle which will have a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1 and a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1/2. The function that these two added waves represents is the probability distribution for position.
If you graph the sum of these two waves, you'll find a funny shape which has constructive interference in some places and destructive interference in other places. Typically, it will look like a steep hill near the origin (where cosine is 1), with smaller hills as you go out. By piling on more and more waves, you can get the resuting wave function to be pretty damn steep at the origin, and the outlying hills very small and shallow. This corresponds to a high degree of certainty that the particle can be found near the origin -- but the price paid is using a lot of waves (i.e. many different possible speeds).
In general, the more localized (in space) the wave function, the more waves will be needed to build it up. And with only one sinusoidal wave, you have (basically) no information about where the particle will be.
Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is a count on how many momentum waves are needed to localize a particle within a particular region.
Note that it has nothing to do with whatever tool is used for measurement, or who performs the measurement, or in which geographic location the measurement takes place.
Unfortunately, many pop sci books try to "explain" the principle by claiming that the act of measuring momentum must somehow interfere with position, hence the ambiguity. This is deceitful, since measuring a particle does change it's wave function to the corresponding eigenvector, but heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't describe what happens to a particle after measuring it (i.e. the position distribution collapses to a delta function), it describes a relationship between the number of "possible" positions and the number of "possible" momenta the particle has. Little of one implies a lot of the other.
And this ambiguity, far from being an engineering problem, is perhaps the central insight of classical quantum mechanics.
N.B. -- as in all pop-sci accounts, I've told a few lies here. I've ignored units, the issue of continuous vs. discreet eigenvectors, etc. I've muddled speed, momentum, and velocity. But what really bugs me is that the lies which are told in most pop sci accounts are rather fundamental i.e. they want people to believe a theorem or physical insight, and so they "explain" it with some other related insight. The result is that people believe what the books say, but for the wrong reasons. I.e. acceptancy at the price of understanding. Sorry for the rant.
the computer you want costs $2,000
(sci-fi) AI is 25 years away
transportation (e.g. flying cars, monorails) will be painless and efficient in 20 years
housecleaning (e.g. rubber/stainless furniture) will be fast and painless in 30 years
despite stunning and ethically mind bending advances in genetic engineering and biochemistry, most people will still die due to lack of sanitation, vaccines, nutrients, and preventive care.
In 15 years, we'll have cold fusion kitchen appliances.
privacy will continue to erode
median wages will not rise significantly (~20%) above the levels enjoyed around 1973.
A well-aimed 105MM round will do the job quite well, however - and they're cheap!
That might be the problem. Remember the Korean War, in which our Army was pathetically supplied, to the point that some GI's scavenged boots off of enemy dead, while a huge part of the defense budget was going straight to Boeing. This wouldn't be the first time that a horribly expensive (read B-2., star wars, etc.) program was funded at the expense of things like more exercises, housing, pay, etc. for the troops. There's a reason why the Air Force is short on pilots, and it's not due to lack of prestige.
He ADMITTED to the web site defacements, ..
some confusion: The website defacements are a different legal proceeding, which will be brought against him, and he'll probably be convicted for that. If you read the court transcripts, you'll notice that neither the prosecution nor defense brought up the website defacements in this bail hearing, which was strictly to determine wether he was a menace to society in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and wether, as the prosecution claimed, he would blow up the olympics if he was allowed to travel back to California on his own.
No one, that I'm aware of, is defending his defacement of websites. And when he gets back to CA, he will face trial for that. But many people are concerned that a person who engaged in non-violent (no one claims he committed any violence) protests at the WEF was held in prison incommunicado and declared a terrorist by the FBI. Also, you might be interested to know that the charges dropped against him did not involve website defacements -- that's a separate legal track.
Acting legally with respect to article 51 does not mean just writing a letter to the UN. It means submitting a resolution to the security council, and having the security council pass that resolution. It's not enough for a state to just write a memo and declare itself to be following the UN charter, anymore than it is for you to declare yourself with a memo to be a law abiding citizen. The US submitted no such resolution for the reasons I cited. In fact, this quick memo sent to top the UN was, according to your sources, "interpreted [by diplomats] to mean that the U.S. did not feel the need to ask the UN for endorsement of the military strikes.." -- in other words, the anarchy which you attack in weak institutions, yet prize in powerful states. Sorry to have the truth disturb your rants.
People who tell others to rise up in violent revolt, provide descriptions of how to rise up in violent revolt, and are caught with instruments to engage in violent revolt aren't civilians.
Well, some of them are states, some are institutions, and some are yes, citizens such as yourself. Reread your own posts and apply whatever standards you use to judge others to yourself. You've advocated a bit of bloodshed and denial of others' humanity already in this thread. But it's different when the gun points in the other direction.
It would be possible to arrest him for having the molotov cocktails in his home. Counts as an unregistered firearm or some such. I stand by my other points.
The interesting question is why they dropped the charges. I can only think of 2 reasons:
a deal in which they agreed to drop the charges in exchange for not being sued for holding him incommunicado (unlikely, IMNSHO).
they didn't have evidence of molotov cocktails and this was the same sort of FUD as the "fertilizer" which turned out to be half a bag of topsoil.
Having read the SA's affadavit, I'm feeling that Austin probably should be in jail.
I had the same feeling, but then I read the defense statement, and it turns out that most of the things in the affidavit are lies and FUD. Seriously. That's partly why I was so angry in this case. Make the guy seem like Osama so the judge will issue warrants and deny bail -- pretty sleazy. In the affidavit, a half opened bag of top soil becomes bomb making fertilizer. Stereo wires become bomb making equipment. Arrest records turn out to be jaywalking tickets. Lying to police turns out to be "I'm not sure where I parked, but it's somewhere in Brooklyn". And of course they ignore all of the evidence on his behalf (voluntarily identifying himself, giving permission to the fbi to search his car and home, etc.). Anyways, it's all academic at this point, so maybe the FBI just wanted their pint of blood and were willing to publicly tar and feather this guy in the media when they had no evidence against him.
See, the thing is that someone already DID take a shot at the Defense Department. Happened in September.
Yes, and you seem to agree with their logic of "kill the anarchist". I disagree with this logic. Surprisingly enough, you use sept. 11 to support your argument, which reveals that it is not an argument at all, but merely vitriol. Read point 3 above.
What you don't understand is that might always makes right.
So you are an "anarchist" according to your definition of the term, and yet you think those who live by "The law of thew jungle" should be killed..
The US, BTW, did NOT violate ANY "international law" by attacking Afghanistan. It invoked its right to self-defense under the UN charter.
Shouting aside, that's just not true. The US made no such appeal to the UN charter. The reasoning from the state department was -- 'we are justfied in waging war on "terrorism" [an abstract noun, mind you] and don't need to appeal to the UN or any other international body.' Actually, the reason is simple. The charter allows countries to use force for self-defense only in response to an "armed attack". The phrase "armed attack" has meaning, and it must be on-going. So you cannot defend yourself against an armed attack after the fact. For example, if an army were to invade the US from Mexico, we could use force to repel that army. But we would not be justified in invading Mexico after the invading army was destroyed. Nor could we cite the UN Charter as a justification to bomb some other country (i.e. Russia) which trained or supported the invading army. You may not like it, but that is the defintion of armed attack which the US itself helped create when the UN charter was written. For these and other reasons, the state department never cited the UN charter as a justification for bombing of Afghanistan.
I mind the viewpoints of people whose goal in life is to kill me and destroy the society I am a part of. Killing them before they kill me seems like a good idea,
Yet again you make my point for me. It seems that you accede to my observation of your true motives if only the word "distasteful" is replaced by a stronger adjective. Yet it's this form of ideological justification of violence which you and your intellectual brethren in Al-quaeda use to support the killing of civilians.
he was detained for 4 days without access to a phone (or lawyer).
he was denied bail because the FBI claimed he was a menca to the community .. and then dropped the charges against him.
during the bail hearing they accused him of possessing "weapons of mass destruction" and of being a terrorist -- they lied to the judge in order to keep him in jail.
Maybe you have no problems with the above points, but I do. This is not a "conspiracy theory" -- read the story.
It would be rather difficult to gain evidence for a criminal case without inconvenience to those poor, mistreated suspects.
If you can explain to me how the above points were needed to gain evidence or investigate, then be my guest.
The FBI investigated him for over a month before this and found, basically, nothing. But even if these steps are necessary, and everyone who is arrested can be treated this way, several laws as well as constitutoinal amendments would need to be repealed to justify this sort of treatment.
If he's a real anarchist, then shooting him should be perfectly legal. After all, he believes in the rule of the jungle.
1) That's not what many (most?) anarchists believe. Most don't view anarchism as a philosophy of government but as a meta-analysis -- i.e. How should we evaluate power? -- with the idea that as soon as some power structure is no longer absolutely necessary, then it should be dismantled. Anarchim is a process of constantly questioning and reevaluating how much power people cede to institutions.
1a) Even if that is what they believed, it would not make shooting them "legal" or justifiable.
2) Many believe in the "rule of the jungle" -- in some aspects. For instance, Reagan rejected the decisions of the World Court when the US was convicted of terrorism in Nicaragua (killing civilians, mining the harbors, etc.). Bush (jr.) violated international law by attacking afghanistan without a resolution in the UN Security Council, or even in the general assembly. That is also a form of anarchism, and by your logic, this means that it would be "legal" to shoot the entire Defense department and heads of government of almost all nations.
3) But I suspect the real reason why you think shooting anarchists is ok has nothing to do with their perceived lack of respect for law and order. Several presidents and law enforcement organizations have routinely flouted and continue to ignore/subvert their own regulations and outside checks on their powers. So perhaps the deciding factor here is not anarchism but the fact that you find this person's views distateful, and so it's ok to shoot him, in which case you've more in common with him than you realize.
Just because they didn't find anything it doesn't mean he wasn't going to do something.
I see. This is sort of like the opposite of innocent until proven guilty. But who knows, if you prefer the pre-emptive strike approach, there are plenty of third world regimes which share your suspicion of protesters.
If I am a cop and I see a kid with a gas mask at a protest I am going to definitely just looking for him to do something wrong.
Sounds reasonable. But the anaogy is if you are a protester and have been gassed before (simply for protesting) then you might decide to bring a mask the next time -- I hope that sounds reasonable to you, too.
Moreover, there is a difference between "watching" a suspicious person before he does something wrong, and arresting him, holding him incommunicado for 4 days, and detaining him for an additional 10 days before you realize that you don't have any real evidence against him, and of course keeping his car and wallet.
Moreover, in their attempt to keep him in jail the FBI lied to at least one judge, spread lots of FUD, and acted in an abusive way, generally. Now you should agree that that's a lot different from "keeping an eye out" when someone wears a gas mask. The problem is that if the target is unpopular or upsets people in this post 9/11 nation, then the govt. can do just about anything they want to him, and they will keep the sympathy of people such as yourself. I hope you rethink your views on this.
Yes. He would have set NY on fire with the lighter, no doubt. The gas mask might have allowed him to (illegally) breathe should the police decide to attack him. Note that there was no molotov cocktail found on him. Nor was there any fertilizer in his car.
Of course, not carrying ID is a crime in the eyes of many, but he gave his full name to the police when questioned. Go figure.