I don't think that the man should be running to Canada. If he is going to commit such inflammatory actions then I think he should take up the responsibility and face the injustice that
he has provoked in order to showcase his cause, otherwise, he will just cause the erosion of more of our freedoms.
Yeah what the fuck ever man. You ain't the one facing time in the big house. If I have a choice between being somebodies bitch and bounding over to Bampf, that ain't even a choice. Besides, he'll have a much louder voice outside of jail than inside it. I'm all for martyrdom and sacrificing yourself for principles when it's appropriate, but that only works whenever people give a shit. 99% of America doesn't care about this, so he'd be hard pressed to accomplish anything positive from jail.
It's the same situation as illegally copying mp3s or downloading movies off of gnutella. It's illegal, and it's robbing the ones who created it by allowing you to sit around and watch it without even looking at their ads--their one source of lifeblood. How would you like it if your source of income was subverted based solely on the cry "Information wants to be free!!!"?
It's time for this new piracy-happy mentality to die. Seriously.
Too bad it won't. Look man, no matter how loudly the sanctimonious lawyers for the MPAA, et al., scream the genie is out of the bottle. Digital is here, and if it's digital, it can be copied easily. Copyright protections only deter, they don't stop. And in the era of the Internet, it only takes one person to break the copyprotection for the entire world to have access. This cannot be stopped.
This is really starting to show striking similarities to the War on Drugs. Consider: The RIAA has for the most part neutered Napster. So what has happened? Aimster, Gnutella, Freenet, and good-ol IRC have seen increased use. And guess what? Every day more and more people become more and more educated about the back alleys of the net, and they're able to find stuff more and more easily. This, too, will not stop.
So here's the deal, man: Either a) we set our sites towards totalitarianism, or b) we rethink the way our current intellectual property system is set up. I think I prefer b).
- Rev.
Mesquite! Home sweet home.
on
Quakecon...
·
· Score: 2
Just for all you random/.ers out there who are curious about these kinds of things, Mesquite is the kind of town where the star tailback can throw someone down two flights of stairs and not worry about any kind of disciplining from the administration. How might I know this, you may ask? Because, dear friends, *I* got thrown down two flights of stairs by the star tailback. My sin was smoking on the 2nd floor balcony of the high school. Said halfback disapproved of my behavior and showed me his disapproval by launching me down the stairs.
He got 2 detentions. I got a sprained shoulder. When we went to the office the office helper flirted with him. "Bitch, you want this fucking rube?" I remember thinking. 'Course, he *was* a football player. That means he has a big dick!
We would have sued, but we couldn't even begin to afford the court fees and shit. Plus, well, I was a freshmen and didn't want to rock the boat.
So! Come to QuakeCon, then LEAVE. I graduated from high school there and haven't been back unless absolutely requried. Say, for a QuakeCon. If you want to wander around the DFW area there are much better places to do it.
So your telling me that 100,000 years of the waste being so toxic we have to store it in a big fuckin hole in the ground, is safer than anything we got? You better remove your CIA implant.
Yup, I'm saying that exact thing. Consider:
Coal-generated power releases both greenhouse gases *and* (as another poster pointed out) low level radioactive materials.
Hydroelectric dams lead to the release of large amounts of methane, again a greenhouse gas.
Gas & oil have the same problems: dirty emissions that aren't just problems for the greenhouse, but are also stinky.
Clean sources such as solar and wind powered generators just do not produce enough power to meet consumer demand.
More efficient vehicles and appliances will *still* not curb the global increase in demand for power. Remember, you have China and India who are both moving up, up, UP into the new technological era, and that's over 2 billion peoples that are going to want power sockets. That's something along the lines of 20 gigawatts of increased demand. *At best* increased efficiency of powered items will only lower this demand by 1 or 2 gigawatts.
We can either a) chose not to build more power plants and have the problems California is currently suffering through go global, or b) be smart about it. Nuclear seems the smart choice.
Well, here we go again. The powers that be have decreed that nuclear power is a Good Thing(tm), so now we have the forces opposing them are ramping up their efforts to show why this is not the case. I expect to see an increase in similar studies throughout the Bush/Cheney administration.
Personally, I'm still all for nuclear power. There just seems to be this weird yin/yang thing that governs the generation of power, and nuclear power seems to be the one that -- when done properly -- causes the least harm. Coal plants put massive quantities of shit into the air, windmills & solar arrays don't generate enough to be worthwhile, and hydroelectric dams a) dessimate vast sections of land, and b) let off crazy amounts of methane from decomposing vegetable matter.
So RAH for nuclear. It's cheap, lasts a long time, and apart and aside from the occasionally annoying meltdown, it's perfectly safe.
This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know who actually makes the Sparc? I know Apple outsources to Motorola for the PPC stuff, but I've never heard who does Sun's dirty work. I'm pretty sure it's not Sun, cuz I've they don't seem like the kind of outfit to have their own wafer fab.
Why should we take away the artist's right to sign over the rights to his works? It's not like a creator is forced to sign a record deal. The means exist for self distribution already.
Gotta disagree with you there, man. If you want to be a financially successful recording artist, you must sign a contract given to you by one of the RIAA members. All the companies have -- for all practical purposes -- the same contract. (It amounts to a cartel, but don't tell them that!) The reason I think this right should be non-transferable is based on history; namely, that moneyed interests are able to suppress rights at the expense of the general welfare.
Wish I were more eloquent, but I hope this clears things up somewhat.
I know this sounds trite, but I think we should all mark our calendars as today being the day that Napster finally sunk into the grave, or at least sunk into a coma from which it will likely never recover. Yes yes, people have been saying this for months in relation to other events surrounding Napster, and I am not saying that those claims weren't true. But today it has come to light that Napster is sleeping with the enemy from the technology side, not just the legal side. They now have absolutely no moral leg to stand on insofar as the "Free as in Beer" philophy goes.
Sad. There are alternatives available, to be sure, but none have the simplicity of Napster. I'm even having a hard time finishing my Bill Hicks collection, goddammit!
Side note: I think that we should push for legislation that allows for a person (or persons) to be designated as the "primary creator" of any given work, without possiblity of that role being signed over to an Evil Industrial Corporation. If at any time that person(s) or their heirs wishes to release the work into the public domain, they can. Or they could stipulate in their will that works X, Y and Z are in the public domain, but A and B aren't.
Now we're all gonna have to dip into our pockets so that SETI can add search capabilities for *this*. Man, I wish the aliens would just go rap on G. Dubya's noggin and say "Howdy" instead making us waste all this energy on screensavers that probably are gonna result in jack squat.
But I think that it should be placed prominently on/.'s front page, and forwarded to every interested legal party that has dealings with copyright. In fact, dear FreeUser, I hope that you find the time to expand your post into an essay. I believe your writing skills are such that you could easily get accepted by Salon or something similar.
Bravo. You managed to put succintly into words something that just about everyone here intuitively knows, but few have the skill to express it so clearly.
I would like to make a prediction. I predict that this case will not come out in 2600's favor. Why? Because the "old-school" copyright philosophy is so heavily entrenched in our legislatures and judiciary that other (copyleft) views are midunderstood, misrepresented, or (in this case) not mentioned at all. At root there seems to be a philosophical difference between the MPAA, et al., and the open source community, namely the benefit of strong copyright protection. There are those (Phil Greenspun?) who have provided good evidence that a business model based on openness can lead to success, with no need for "proprietizing" the product. This is not your typical liberal v. conservative issue, because the open-sourcers are extremely pro-free market. Their emphasis rests heavier upon the "free" part.
Nevertheless, this is a relatively new point of view to take and one that does not have much support in the legal community. In fact, the wind seems to be blowing in the direction of stronger copyright enforcement, not weaker. So long as the prevailing view in legal circles is "weak copyright leads to a weaker economy" this battle will not be won in the courts, IMHO.
There are only two things that are worth getting horizontal over in life: having sex, and riding those motorcycles from Akira. If the game doesn't let me be able to ride those things, then I ain't buyin it. Those were just about the sweetest pieces of personal hardware I've ever seen on the big screen, and that's saying alot considering stuff like Major Kusanagi's inviso-suit-thingy and the various flavors of body armor that pops up consistenly in anime. They just looked so freakin cool!
The next morning my friend is back workign on it and the woman tells him that God told her that the problem was with the CD-ROM drive. After looking around, my friend finds out that someone had pluged the CD-ROM's ribbon cable in backward and that was causing the problem.
You know, it seems like there was a time when gods did more impressive feats than telling old women that their CD-ROM cable is in backwards. What happened to parting oceans, annihilating entire populations in opposing nations, plagues of locusts, and so forth? If the best God can do is simple tech support type activities then you can color me unimpressed.
This is only tangentially related to the story at hand, but I would just like to compliment Google on a job done extremely well. They have successfully built the fastest search engine out there, using open methodologies and without whoring themselves out like any number of other search engines. They continue to add interesting (and [gasp!] useful) features such searching PDF documents and their translation engine. They have really helped the Open Directory Project along, as well.
There are successful.coms out there, but I think their business practices are so foreign to the "regular" business community that they aren't quite sure how to handle it.
BTW: Anyone else see a philosophical relationship between Google and ArsDigita?
Well, looks like we have yet another example of a corporate hegemony abusing it's powers via threats of lawsuits. Same story, different day.
So what? I have serious doubts that bitching about it on/. is going to change a goddamn thing. In fact, I have serious doubts that *anything* is going to change a goddamn thing. Give money to the EFF or EPIC or whoever, but it doesn't fucking matter. The governments of the world continue to give more and more power to moneyed interests with little regard for the good of democracy or freedom. Modern governments almost exclusively represent the will of multinationals, and I just refuse to consider this a Good Thing(tm) no matter what the Randroids say. *Anything* that throws a wrench in the ability for corporations to make money is vilified, ridiculed, or just ignored. Witness Bruce Schneier's highly-ignored testimony before the committee considering the DCMA, or or the FBI pulling unknown shenangians related to the recent world trade meeting in Quebec.
Nothing can beat capitalism. Nothing. Not guns, not religion, not science, not hedonism. When you get in the way of capitalism, you will get fucked and you won't even get a reach-around. Go ahead, bitch about it on/. or wherever. It won't change a fucking thing. Especially when the vast majority of the population are TV zombies, Q3/B&W/CS zombies, NFL/NHL/NBA zombies, or just plain idiots.
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. That's the best advice I've heard. Of course, I'm writing this from my cushy job in a cubicle, sitting on a Sun Ultra.
One of the things that the recent dot-com bust has shown is the difficulty of making money off of a website, especially in the so-called B2C arena. Generally speaking, those sites have done the best that offer tangible goods, such as eBay and Amazon./. does fine by providing information only via it's banner ads, but/. is an exception because of the huge amount of traffic it receives.
None of these are ideal, and none (with the exception of VB funding) will bring huge amounts of cash to your bank account. If you are simply seeking to recoup costs, you will probably want to go the banner ad/goodwill route. If you're trying to make a profit, however, you'll need a business plan on some solid relationships.
Roblimo, think, if you had a daughter, and we stopped the war on drugs, as you would like to see happen. Now they are everywhere. Easy to get.
Let me spell this out for you, in bold so that hopefully it will have more impact:
No one - not NORML, not the Lindesmith Center, not the November Coalition, NO ONE - is proposing making crack available to schoolchildren. Just because it's legal for adults doesn't mean that it's legal to be bought or sold by people under the age of 18! It's illegal to sell tobacco to kids! You really think that if pot is legalized that we would start selling it in cafeterias? No! Of course not!
Geez man, use some common sense. It's easier for kids to get pot than it is for them to get beer. Which of those substances is currently illegal?
OH, and by the way: I do have kids. Two of them. Thank you.
Only difference is that the amount of smoke consumed by tobacco growers is typically much higher than that consumed by marijuana smokers. Tobacco smoke and pot smoke are -- despite popular opinion to the contrary -- mostly analogous insofar as the respective concentration of carcinogens (but not active ingredients) are concerned. Cigarette smokers, however, typically ingest much higher amounts over their lifetime than do pot smokers.
Of course, if you smoke tobacco *and* pot, your chances of something bad happening are higher.
Moral of the story? If you're going to smoke something, smoke pot, not tobacco.
At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likel to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
Brah-VO, my good man. I wholeheartedly concur and applaud your clarity in expressing something I too have felt for a long time. The attitudes you describe seem to have come to a head during the 1980's with hack comics ridiculing anything and everything they could get there hands on, and the subsequent assimilation of those attitudes into the population as a whole. Don't like Christians? Make fun of them! Don't like evolution? Make fun of it! Don't like Clinton? Make endless jokes about cigars or "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." And on and on and on. To me, it seems like simple mental laziness: it is very easy to ridicule those ideas which you oppose. It's harder to research them and come up with supporting or contradicting data.
*This* is why I get irritated with Saturday Night Live, MadTV, and Letterman Leno & Maher. They feign criticism, but the only "solution" offered is along the lines of "that's fucking stupid." As true as that statement might be at times, it doesn't solve any problems in and of itself. It's mental masturbation, nothing more.
The Ten Commandments tell us, "Thou shalt not rape!" The Bible also tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Let's see here...
Rape is not forbidden by the 10 Commandments.
The Bible is one big pack of lies, front to back.
Porn is not rape. It's consensual, you dope. Like any other job, people do it to make money. I'm pretty sure they enjoy it because their acting abilities suck. I don't think they could pull off faking it too convincingly.
Sometimes I like to love my neighbors by watching them fuck.
It runs women through a blender, converting their bodies into liquified youth.
What the hell is "liquified youth"? Christ on a crutch, you ever been to Denny's? Denny's is apprently much MUCH harder on women than porn is.
Pornography kills women's souls.
Except, of course, that "soul" is a mythological term without any basis in reality. But it sure does let you make blanket statements and judge what's good for others! If it turns their SOUL away from GOD it must be bad, and probably made illegal!
It would depend on what kind of mother she was. If she was a good mom and it turned out that she was a prostitute, no, I don't think I'd have a problem.
"I am Randroid. Altruism bad. Greed GOOD. Ayn Rand greater author than Joyce & Shakespeare combined. All your economic philosophies are belong to us. Freud was a dink. There is only Ayn. Ayn. Ayn. Ayn."
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I don't think that the man should be running to Canada. If he is going to commit such inflammatory actions then I think he should take up the responsibility and face the injustice that he has provoked in order to showcase his cause, otherwise, he will just cause the erosion of more of our freedoms.
Yeah what the fuck ever man. You ain't the one facing time in the big house. If I have a choice between being somebodies bitch and bounding over to Bampf, that ain't even a choice. Besides, he'll have a much louder voice outside of jail than inside it. I'm all for martyrdom and sacrificing yourself for principles when it's appropriate, but that only works whenever people give a shit. 99% of America doesn't care about this, so he'd be hard pressed to accomplish anything positive from jail.
- Rev.It's the same situation as illegally copying mp3s or downloading movies off of gnutella. It's illegal, and it's robbing the ones who created it by allowing you to sit around and watch it without even looking at their ads--their one source of lifeblood. How would you like it if your source of income was subverted based solely on the cry "Information wants to be free!!!"?
It's time for this new piracy-happy mentality to die. Seriously.
Too bad it won't. Look man, no matter how loudly the sanctimonious lawyers for the MPAA, et al., scream the genie is out of the bottle. Digital is here, and if it's digital, it can be copied easily. Copyright protections only deter, they don't stop. And in the era of the Internet, it only takes one person to break the copyprotection for the entire world to have access. This cannot be stopped.
This is really starting to show striking similarities to the War on Drugs. Consider: The RIAA has for the most part neutered Napster. So what has happened? Aimster, Gnutella, Freenet, and good-ol IRC have seen increased use. And guess what? Every day more and more people become more and more educated about the back alleys of the net, and they're able to find stuff more and more easily. This, too, will not stop.
So here's the deal, man: Either a) we set our sites towards totalitarianism, or b) we rethink the way our current intellectual property system is set up. I think I prefer b).
- Rev.Just for all you random /.ers out there who are curious about these kinds of things, Mesquite is the kind of town where the star tailback can throw someone down two flights of stairs and not worry about any kind of disciplining from the administration. How might I know this, you may ask? Because, dear friends, *I* got thrown down two flights of stairs by the star tailback. My sin was smoking on the 2nd floor balcony of the high school. Said halfback disapproved of my behavior and showed me his disapproval by launching me down the stairs.
He got 2 detentions. I got a sprained shoulder. When we went to the office the office helper flirted with him. "Bitch, you want this fucking rube?" I remember thinking. 'Course, he *was* a football player. That means he has a big dick!
We would have sued, but we couldn't even begin to afford the court fees and shit. Plus, well, I was a freshmen and didn't want to rock the boat.
So! Come to QuakeCon, then LEAVE. I graduated from high school there and haven't been back unless absolutely requried. Say, for a QuakeCon. If you want to wander around the DFW area there are much better places to do it.
- Jesus Christ, King of the Jews, Son of God
So your telling me that 100,000 years of the waste being so toxic we have to store it in a big fuckin hole in the ground, is safer than anything we got? You better remove your CIA implant.
Yup, I'm saying that exact thing. Consider:
Coal-generated power releases both greenhouse gases *and* (as another poster pointed out) low level radioactive materials.
Hydroelectric dams lead to the release of large amounts of methane, again a greenhouse gas.
Gas & oil have the same problems: dirty emissions that aren't just problems for the greenhouse, but are also stinky.
Clean sources such as solar and wind powered generators just do not produce enough power to meet consumer demand.
More efficient vehicles and appliances will *still* not curb the global increase in demand for power. Remember, you have China and India who are both moving up, up, UP into the new technological era, and that's over 2 billion peoples that are going to want power sockets. That's something along the lines of 20 gigawatts of increased demand. *At best* increased efficiency of powered items will only lower this demand by 1 or 2 gigawatts.
We can either a) chose not to build more power plants and have the problems California is currently suffering through go global, or b) be smart about it. Nuclear seems the smart choice.
- Rev.Yes to both. Mostly, however, I'm just ranting.
- Rev.
Well, here we go again. The powers that be have decreed that nuclear power is a Good Thing(tm), so now we have the forces opposing them are ramping up their efforts to show why this is not the case. I expect to see an increase in similar studies throughout the Bush/Cheney administration.
Personally, I'm still all for nuclear power. There just seems to be this weird yin/yang thing that governs the generation of power, and nuclear power seems to be the one that -- when done properly -- causes the least harm. Coal plants put massive quantities of shit into the air, windmills & solar arrays don't generate enough to be worthwhile, and hydroelectric dams a) dessimate vast sections of land, and b) let off crazy amounts of methane from decomposing vegetable matter.
So RAH for nuclear. It's cheap, lasts a long time, and apart and aside from the occasionally annoying meltdown, it's perfectly safe.
- Rev.
This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know who actually makes the Sparc? I know Apple outsources to Motorola for the PPC stuff, but I've never heard who does Sun's dirty work. I'm pretty sure it's not Sun, cuz I've they don't seem like the kind of outfit to have their own wafer fab.
- Rev.
Why should we take away the artist's right to sign over the rights to his works? It's not like a creator is forced to sign a record deal. The means exist for self distribution already.
Gotta disagree with you there, man. If you want to be a financially successful recording artist, you must sign a contract given to you by one of the RIAA members. All the companies have -- for all practical purposes -- the same contract. (It amounts to a cartel, but don't tell them that!) The reason I think this right should be non-transferable is based on history; namely, that moneyed interests are able to suppress rights at the expense of the general welfare.
Wish I were more eloquent, but I hope this clears things up somewhat.
- Rev.I know this sounds trite, but I think we should all mark our calendars as today being the day that Napster finally sunk into the grave, or at least sunk into a coma from which it will likely never recover. Yes yes, people have been saying this for months in relation to other events surrounding Napster, and I am not saying that those claims weren't true. But today it has come to light that Napster is sleeping with the enemy from the technology side, not just the legal side. They now have absolutely no moral leg to stand on insofar as the "Free as in Beer" philophy goes.
Sad. There are alternatives available, to be sure, but none have the simplicity of Napster. I'm even having a hard time finishing my Bill Hicks collection, goddammit!
Side note: I think that we should push for legislation that allows for a person (or persons) to be designated as the "primary creator" of any given work, without possiblity of that role being signed over to an Evil Industrial Corporation. If at any time that person(s) or their heirs wishes to release the work into the public domain, they can. Or they could stipulate in their will that works X, Y and Z are in the public domain, but A and B aren't.
Too simple to work.
- Rev.Now we're all gonna have to dip into our pockets so that SETI can add search capabilities for *this*. Man, I wish the aliens would just go rap on G. Dubya's noggin and say "Howdy" instead making us waste all this energy on screensavers that probably are gonna result in jack squat.
Aliens on the brain... And my ass hurts. Hmm.
- Rev.
But I think that it should be placed prominently on /.'s front page, and forwarded to every interested legal party that has dealings with copyright. In fact, dear FreeUser, I hope that you find the time to expand your post into an essay. I believe your writing skills are such that you could easily get accepted by Salon or something similar.
Bravo. You managed to put succintly into words something that just about everyone here intuitively knows, but few have the skill to express it so clearly.
:wq
- Rev
I would like to make a prediction. I predict that this case will not come out in 2600's favor. Why? Because the "old-school" copyright philosophy is so heavily entrenched in our legislatures and judiciary that other (copyleft) views are midunderstood, misrepresented, or (in this case) not mentioned at all. At root there seems to be a philosophical difference between the MPAA, et al., and the open source community, namely the benefit of strong copyright protection. There are those (Phil Greenspun?) who have provided good evidence that a business model based on openness can lead to success, with no need for "proprietizing" the product. This is not your typical liberal v. conservative issue, because the open-sourcers are extremely pro-free market. Their emphasis rests heavier upon the "free" part.
Nevertheless, this is a relatively new point of view to take and one that does not have much support in the legal community. In fact, the wind seems to be blowing in the direction of stronger copyright enforcement, not weaker. So long as the prevailing view in legal circles is "weak copyright leads to a weaker economy" this battle will not be won in the courts, IMHO.
- Rev.There are only two things that are worth getting horizontal over in life: having sex, and riding those motorcycles from Akira. If the game doesn't let me be able to ride those things, then I ain't buyin it. Those were just about the sweetest pieces of personal hardware I've ever seen on the big screen, and that's saying alot considering stuff like Major Kusanagi's inviso-suit-thingy and the various flavors of body armor that pops up consistenly in anime. They just looked so freakin cool!
- Rev.The next morning my friend is back workign on it and the woman tells him that God told her that the problem was with the CD-ROM drive. After looking around, my friend finds out that someone had pluged the CD-ROM's ribbon cable in backward and that was causing the problem.
You know, it seems like there was a time when gods did more impressive feats than telling old women that their CD-ROM cable is in backwards. What happened to parting oceans, annihilating entire populations in opposing nations, plagues of locusts, and so forth? If the best God can do is simple tech support type activities then you can color me unimpressed.
Touched by an Angel: Agitprop for the Xians.
This is only tangentially related to the story at hand, but I would just like to compliment Google on a job done extremely well. They have successfully built the fastest search engine out there, using open methodologies and without whoring themselves out like any number of other search engines. They continue to add interesting (and [gasp!] useful) features such searching PDF documents and their translation engine. They have really helped the Open Directory Project along, as well.
There are successful .coms out there, but I think their business practices are so foreign to the "regular" business community that they aren't quite sure how to handle it.
BTW: Anyone else see a philosophical relationship between Google and ArsDigita?
Well, looks like we have yet another example of a corporate hegemony abusing it's powers via threats of lawsuits. Same story, different day.
So what? I have serious doubts that bitching about it on /. is going to change a goddamn thing. In fact, I have serious doubts that *anything* is going to change a goddamn thing. Give money to the EFF or EPIC or whoever, but it doesn't fucking matter. The governments of the world continue to give more and more power to moneyed interests with little regard for the good of democracy or freedom. Modern governments almost exclusively represent the will of multinationals, and I just refuse to consider this a Good Thing(tm) no matter what the Randroids say. *Anything* that throws a wrench in the ability for corporations to make money is vilified, ridiculed, or just ignored. Witness Bruce Schneier's highly-ignored testimony before the committee considering the DCMA, or or the FBI pulling unknown shenangians related to the recent world trade meeting in Quebec.
Nothing can beat capitalism. Nothing. Not guns, not religion, not science, not hedonism. When you get in the way of capitalism, you will get fucked and you won't even get a reach-around. Go ahead, bitch about it on /. or wherever. It won't change a fucking thing. Especially when the vast majority of the population are TV zombies, Q3/B&W/CS zombies, NFL/NHL/NBA zombies, or just plain idiots.
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. That's the best advice I've heard. Of course, I'm writing this from my cushy job in a cubicle, sitting on a Sun Ultra.
GRRRRrrrrr.
- Rev.One of the things that the recent dot-com bust has shown is the difficulty of making money off of a website, especially in the so-called B2C arena. Generally speaking, those sites have done the best that offer tangible goods, such as eBay and Amazon. /. does fine by providing information only via it's banner ads, but /. is an exception because of the huge amount of traffic it receives.
To answer your question, you have few options:
Banner ads
Co-branding a la Plastic
VC funding
Goodwill of others
Subscriptions
None of these are ideal, and none (with the exception of VB funding) will bring huge amounts of cash to your bank account. If you are simply seeking to recoup costs, you will probably want to go the banner ad/goodwill route. If you're trying to make a profit, however, you'll need a business plan on some solid relationships.
Good luck.
- Rev.Assuming this isn't a troll...
Roblimo, think, if you had a daughter, and we stopped the war on drugs, as you would like to see happen. Now they are everywhere. Easy to get.
Let me spell this out for you, in bold so that hopefully it will have more impact:
No one - not NORML, not the Lindesmith Center, not the November Coalition, NO ONE - is proposing making crack available to schoolchildren. Just because it's legal for adults doesn't mean that it's legal to be bought or sold by people under the age of 18! It's illegal to sell tobacco to kids! You really think that if pot is legalized that we would start selling it in cafeterias? No! Of course not!
Geez man, use some common sense. It's easier for kids to get pot than it is for them to get beer. Which of those substances is currently illegal?
OH, and by the way: I do have kids. Two of them. Thank you.
- Rev.Only difference is that the amount of smoke consumed by tobacco growers is typically much higher than that consumed by marijuana smokers. Tobacco smoke and pot smoke are -- despite popular opinion to the contrary -- mostly analogous insofar as the respective concentration of carcinogens (but not active ingredients) are concerned. Cigarette smokers, however, typically ingest much higher amounts over their lifetime than do pot smokers.
Of course, if you smoke tobacco *and* pot, your chances of something bad happening are higher.
Moral of the story? If you're going to smoke something, smoke pot, not tobacco.
- Rev.At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likel to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
Brah-VO, my good man. I wholeheartedly concur and applaud your clarity in expressing something I too have felt for a long time. The attitudes you describe seem to have come to a head during the 1980's with hack comics ridiculing anything and everything they could get there hands on, and the subsequent assimilation of those attitudes into the population as a whole. Don't like Christians? Make fun of them! Don't like evolution? Make fun of it! Don't like Clinton? Make endless jokes about cigars or "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." And on and on and on. To me, it seems like simple mental laziness: it is very easy to ridicule those ideas which you oppose. It's harder to research them and come up with supporting or contradicting data.
*This* is why I get irritated with Saturday Night Live, MadTV, and Letterman Leno & Maher. They feign criticism, but the only "solution" offered is along the lines of "that's fucking stupid." As true as that statement might be at times, it doesn't solve any problems in and of itself. It's mental masturbation, nothing more.
- Rev.Wrong analogy. Say I invent a mind control device...
This is the right analogy?
i>My GF thinks Counter-Strike is cool....
Propose. Today.
The Ten Commandments tell us, "Thou shalt not rape!" The Bible also tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Let's see here...
Rape is not forbidden by the 10 Commandments.
The Bible is one big pack of lies, front to back.
Porn is not rape. It's consensual, you dope. Like any other job, people do it to make money. I'm pretty sure they enjoy it because their acting abilities suck. I don't think they could pull off faking it too convincingly.
Sometimes I like to love my neighbors by watching them fuck.
It runs women through a blender, converting their bodies into liquified youth.
What the hell is "liquified youth"? Christ on a crutch, you ever been to Denny's? Denny's is apprently much MUCH harder on women than porn is.
Pornography kills women's souls.
Except, of course, that "soul" is a mythological term without any basis in reality. But it sure does let you make blanket statements and judge what's good for others! If it turns their SOUL away from GOD it must be bad, and probably made illegal!
Long walk, short pier, baby.
- Rev. - Rev.It would depend on what kind of mother she was. If she was a good mom and it turned out that she was a prostitute, no, I don't think I'd have a problem.
"I am Randroid. Altruism bad. Greed GOOD. Ayn Rand greater author than Joyce & Shakespeare combined. All your economic philosophies are belong to us. Freud was a dink. There is only Ayn. Ayn. Ayn. Ayn."