Notice that if you don't now have a business relationship wiht SCO you arn't subject to suts from SCO.
The Microsoft license in question brings you into the domain of a legal relationship wiht Microsoft for the listed protocols. Microsoft also reserves the right to ammend the license.
You may now, or in the future, agree to use the protocols "or whatever part of the protocols Microsoft may own" in ways aproved by Microsoft.
So, by signing the license agreement you agree to legal exposure to Microsoft's will. They, if they own the *slightest* part of a protocol they have reason to beleive you are using, can come into your place of business and harass you out of that business.
That includes palces where your business has business if they "beleive" you have violated the license by sharing their beef with a third party.
They have the money, and they have the lawyers, they just don't have cause (yet) to muck around in your life.
You don't have to be "right" to sue someone. You only have to be able to prove to the court that you *thought* you were right afterwards to avoid a penalty. The total size of the penalty Microsoft could "soak up" for driving SAMBA or Linux contributors out of business could be rather extreme compared to the bankrolls of thost contributors.
The license doesn't taint the *protocols* it taints the *programmers* who can then taint the *projects*.
It is completely legal for you to sign away your rights to nearly anything (in business anyway) look at the latest EULA rulings, which support that clicking a button marked "I agree" and which to you means "install what I bought you stupid program" is binding even though it doesn't grant you anything and grants them everything. It's a "valid contract of adhesion" according to the court.
How much more adhesive is your signature on papers that tacitly admits that you recognize and ceed interest to *your* *use* of TCP/IP to microsoft because you beleive they *may* have interest in it.
A lot really.
And it only has to be enough intrest to bankrupt you or drag you into court for months on end, if all they really want is to keep you out of the GPL pool.
If the license is harmless, then it is unnecessary, pretty much by definition.
In short, this thing they want you to sign isn't a "pure license" like the GPL, it's a "contractual license" and so its a "contract." One of who's terms is that the other party can change the terms at will.
How about this. I've got this license here. I *may* have IP interests in the fifth-wheel (that thing on between the tractor and trailer in an 18-wheeler rig) and several other important automotive innovations and fundimental functions. This list of 140 devices and conceptual elements of shiping and receivng and transportation may use some of my interests. You could be exposed to liability if you don't license these things from me (and possibly the unnamed other people who may also onwn some of this stuff). Just to be safe, sign this free agreement at no cost, where you agree to keep whatever I may own under terms favorable to me. I promise that I will never sue, this is just for your protection. I can change the terms once you have signed, but only if I find it necessary.
Sign here. I promise you it can only help you be safe. [and then I can stop terrorists and child pornogrophers from driving drunk someday, or something, yea...]
Smart? Hmmm, very smart. (If you are Me/Microsoft... the rest of you/us... not so much.)
Ask yourself. If this is not intended to make money, because it is free. And with it you are protecting yourself from being sued by Mcirosoft, who could just decide not to sue you for what they don't own anyway, why is Microsoft spending good money on lawyers and publicity to get you to sign the thing. If it were toothless, why not just print a public pledge in the New York Times?
Answer: they want YOUR NAME !EXPLICITLY! on a piece of THEIR PAPER that says you will do
In some of these "interesting results" the op-scan ballots were fed into machines which scanned them, then did things like subtract extra votes.
Some of these ballots and machines produced circumstances of N registered voters and N+X (where X is positive) votes recorded. [This is as likely to have been stuffing by humans as mechanical error.]
In may of the criticisims, the problem is not that the "ballots" were "misintrpreted" but that the data path from the big box (into which you fed your paper) to the BIG BOX where all the numbers were recorded over modems and flash-card-insertion, were NOT SECURE and NOT AUDITED.
See, it stops being a matter of how the voter markes down his ballot when the data path can be made to lie. The "butterfly ballot" thing was something of a red herring.
I previously posted this idea, so I'll give the short version.
You track the ballots through the system.
The voting stations shred "blank" ballots, or ballots that need amending, after scanning them, then print "new" ballots with the the relevant selections on them.
The actual "balot box" scans and stores the balots *AND* prints an MD5 (or similar) checksum of the vote for the voter to take home and keep.
The polling place publishes a list of checksums later for the voter to check.
The software is open source, so anybody with a hand scanner and a laptop could verify the barcode/dot-splash.
Via means I will not repeat at length (use of UUIDs and cryptographically secure forward-only logging and such) any ballot can be traced through the system (which is why the "blanks" are chosen from a bin at random to start their process). Part of the information recorded on the ballot would be "balot definition file" checksums and the software versions/dates/sizes/whatever.
Polls and regions can be spot-checked. Whole piles of ballots can be re-scanned.
Finally, the individual voting machines send their logs via one means, and the ballot boxes send their results by a separate means.
There is sort of a diminishing sum (some people will check in and get their ballots, and maybe even go to a voting station, but they may then not cast their vote, taking the thing away with them instead) that is reasonable, and after that, or in the case of an increased sum of events, the alternate counting is generated.
None of the machines at the polls themselves are "networked" by anthing other than the ballots.
In short, you are "voting on paper" but you get a three-sided verification of events (not just a scalar number of 300 votes yea, 200 votes nay, from a town of 450 8-).
At the end of the night you have a pile of "recoreded" ballots, and a pile of "discarded" ballots and a heaping mound of confetti, several CDs full of logs. And an posthumus analysis of the logs and the results would *have* to match. If the total "Bush votes recorded" minus the total "Bush votes recanted" (remember the editing) from the individual machines is not in keeping with the number of "Bush votes cast" (remember, a statistically insignificant number of people won't stuff the paper in the ballot box scanner) the investigation is automatic.
Such a system can be "proved" internally correct to within a miniscule margin of error, or will reveal its internal errors and flaws to reasonable scruteny. Honest mistakes will be obvious (this voting software number isn't the correct one, ibid for the vote definition data file.)
You get all the benefits of machine voting (no hanging and pregnant chads, each ballot is a "perfect" print out) (consistent logging that can _demonstrate_ the paper flow) (voter receipts that don't allow for vote sales) while keeping the accountablility of real paper ballots.
But let's face it, at some boundary of any voting system there will have to end up being one or more people you "trust". After all, you don't need to rig the voting machine if you pay the guy who gets on the phone to tell the world what happened, to lie.
As I said, if you want the detailed plans and justificaitons, browse my message history.
As for profitability of the Open Source software? Screw that. The supplier makes his money on the nicely equitable (chargable) paper-handling systems (custom hardware scanner/shreders, ballot printers, etc).
This is totally doable, I have the base design, I don't have the risk capital./sigh.
Yes, the US Constitution is a garantee *REGUARDLESS*, not a trade. not a "deal". The wrongs that exist today are wrong as an absolute measure not "because of slavery." *THAT* is my *POINT*.
The phrase and sentiment "because of slavery" damages your argument and adds nothing. It's self defeating. Did Clinton apoing black people to his staf "because of slavery" and so "despite their qualifications"? I certianly hope not. "Because of slavery" does not add to the dignity of a single black child.
It is suffiecnt, and a damn sight _more_ _effective_ to walk in to a room of non-black people and say "this is broken, it needs to be fixed because of the _future_", than it will _ever_ be to say "this is broken and it needs to be fixed because of the _past_."
Nobody wants to pay for the past, the future is where they are going to be spending the rest of their lives and is worth an effort.
I _don't_ "want to ignore this issue" "because of semantics" I want you to understand that when a room full of white people hear (say, on TV for instance) "300 years of opression" or "because of slavery", on the average, and in the apparent absence of black people, they just say "not that again" and blow off every single word the presenter has uttered.
That isn't a argument, it isn't "my position", it's an observable fact.
Getting ignored is not an effective way to make any point to anyone.
The reason that our generation is still having to "deal with it" is because the previous generation, using your exact same argument, failed to do so.
If I walked up to you and demanded ten dollars because of something your great great grandfather did to mine, and I had incontravertable proof of that deed, how would you react?
If I walked up to you and demanded ten dollars from you because somebody "like" your great great grandfather did something bad to somebody "like" mine how much more would you not care to pass me the money?
The word "reparation" and all its variation is your _enemy_. That is my sole point of contention here.
Stop reducing black people to "the pittiful descendents of slaves", and leave them "a part of our populous with urgent problems tody".
Argue to the future, not to the past.
It is not "unfair" that "our generation has to do the right thing" because *EACH* generation has to do the right thing in order to make the way for the next generation. The very fact that you are separating out "remeding the past" as "unfair" means that you, yourself, already know "reparations" and the arguments based thereon are doomed. _You_ think it's "unfair" already. How do you think the white son of a white family that moved here one generation ago, or three, feels about your "reparations"? How about the Indians, Native Americans, and "hispanics"? How about the black man newly emegrated who doesn't want to be seen as ex-property and who isn't descended from slaves? How about the VAST MAJORITY of people descended from white people who couldn't afford slaves and were as powerless to change the economic realities of their times as they are today?
See? There is no audience for reparations because most people alive today werent even involved, even by blood line.
I *know* that nobody on either side of my family owned a black slave in this country. Am I _exempt_ from the tarrif? Do I then have no duty to redress the problems facing black men in this country? Do I get to call "unfair" and trump out?
You tell me not to "deny the problem". I never did. I am just trying to say that every time you justify the need for a solution "becaus of black slavery" everybody who *doesn't* feel responsible says "oh, that doesn't apply to me" and goes on about their business.
I'm telling you to change your wording if you want to caputre your audience. Nothing more, nothing less.
And P.S. the huns didn't sack rome over "cultural differences", those were coincidental, they sacked Rome over gold. Hence the "sack" part, as in "carrying loot away in a [sack]". Cultural differences separate people into groups that don't have to be cared about. Cultural differences turns "us" into "us and them" and "them" never get a fair shake. Do the math.
No, I am aproaching this as if the advocates like youreself, despite being right about most of the problems and needed actions, are deliberately phrasing their arguments in a way that is certian to fail.
Do you think clinton had the highest black apointment rate "because of slavery"? I doubt it...
Every time you say "because of slavery", reparations, or any variation thereof, you hurt your cause. Period. The cause is ststainable, the "justification" is unnecessary.
I would walk into the NAACP get behind a podium and say this, no problem. I think they'd understand. I would hope that _they_ _already_ don't think their rights and expectations hinge on the fact of black slavery.
Pretty much, that's all I've said.
You have said a _lot_ more than "[I] have a duty as a citizen to help fix this situation". You have variously called me a racest and such, and you have attacked me for things you _presumed_ I would say.
You are right that I have _barely_ read your posts, because as I was saying, as soon as you start talking about reparations YOU LOSE YOUR AUDIENCE. That includes the part where people start blowing you off and only hearing/reading sound bytes and fragments.
Remember that "... even _I_ can barely... I'm *programmed* to..." part of my very first comment. I wasn't making that up. As soon as you say "300 years of oppression, all your words blur in the minds ear to "wah woa wha waah" like charlie brown's teacher.
*THAT* was my *POINT*.
What rallies the congregation is not always best posted on the billboard, the audiences are different, so the speech must change to be effective. See, you probably don't really care about, say, "some filthy (papest|protestant) decrying some fine upstanding (protestant|catholic) in ireland", neither do I. They do care. We are not moved. See, change of audience means change of focus for justifications.
"We (white people) owe them (black people) for three hunred years of slavery" is not an effective message out here in the practical, wider world.
Drop the historical injustice and focus on the current injustice, the message will get through better. I promise.
Failure to profit is not the same as loss. It's a fine hair, but an important one. The only way that failure to profit exists as anything statistically significant is if you were certian to watch the movie no matter what the cost.
By extension, every time you go over to a friends house and watch his copy of some movie that you didn't pay for, is the MPAA suffering a "loss"? If you go to Blockbuster and rent a movie for four dollars and watch it alone, and then the next day you rent another and watch it with three friends, was the transaction on the second day a "loss" for the MPAA? Did your three friends "steal" the movie or did the four of you "share" it?
The simple fact is that only the small-term details of "sharing" have changed because of the internet, which has made "your living room" infinately large.
In practical terms, all evidence suggests that as sharing on line increases, so do rental and purchase revenues.
Suing your customer and cutting off word of mouth, to deprive the people who wouldn't have paid anyway access to the data stream that otherwise increases your gross profits by getting your material to the people who _will_ pay is TERRIBLY STUPID as a business position.
You need to do some research. Start with the U.S. Constitution, section eight, paragraph eight:
[Congress shall have the power] "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
See that "limited time" up there? "Property" rights are not thus limited, real property is for ever, as a matter of law. Whatever these limited rights are, they aren't property by definition.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
See that "receives light without darkening me", Jefferson understood. The legal phrase is "non rivalrous goods". If I can not deprive you of a thing, I can not commit "theft". Look it up.
Do I take it that Thomas Jefferson was a socialist and beneath your contempt on maters relating to the U.S. Constitution?
They're called books, laws, and legal opinions. You should read some before you start publicly voicing your opinion. You'll look smarter... 8-)
And no, my entire post cannot "be summed up as some sort of demand that blacks ask nicely for they're Civil Rights".
It could _actually_ be summed up nicely by saying "blacks should demand their civil rights without trying to justify them as repayment and reparations. Their rights exist as an absolute, completely without the 'but my pappy' crap, and whenever someone says 'but they were slaves and that means they deserve more' everybody stops listening and nothing gets done."
I never said to forget the past. I never said most of what you have read into my words.
"...Why isn't the uniqueness of this cultural heritage highlighted instead of being dismissed as a deficiency?"
Well that would be because it *IS* a "deficiency" when you are trying to get a job.
Let's put this "rich cultural herratage" in perspective for a sec, by putting taking it into a completely different context.
I don't speak a word of chineese. I work with people who speak chineese quite fluently. They also do a pretty good job of speaking american english. I will ceede that each one of these people is probably smarter than I am because they could learn a second langage while I couldn't. But you know what, their "pretty good" english is still a significan liability to them, not because I cannot communicate well with them, but because my companies customers cannot communicate well with them. Lots of mistakes are made, and that makes these arguably smarter people rather expensive to employ.
Now, if this "highlighted heritage" sounded more like a heritage and less like a speach impediment, it wouldn't be treated like a lack of education. But that's just not the way it is working out.
Boo hoo, that sounds terrible...
But I make that statement with the full knowledge that were I stranded in Costa Rica (again), or anywhere in Africa, or virtually anywhere else in the world, my college education would be worth squat and I'd be lucky to get a job washing dishes. That would be *true* because my "cultural heritage" would be "dismissed as a deficency" in something like seventy percent of the world.
So if you are in Iowa, and you can't speak uniform american english you are screwed.
You beleive "there is no relativisim here" but you demand redress because of relative factors like "historical injustice" perpitraited on their long-dead (dare I say it?) RELATIVES (I guess I do dare 8-) instead of the simple fact that what is happening _TODAY_ is just plain wrong. Aparently only your _approved_ relavatisim is valid.
Your statements about the irrevelance of my points because "In most of [my cases], there was a foreign invader" is intellectually junct. People have always had to live in the same country with those who invaded them. (Ask any person in Iraq today, they can explain it to you quite well I suspect.) Besides, that "most" pretty much takes care of the argument fromthe get go. But even still, is your "lilly white" ass struggling to make reparations to the "native americans" your ancestors "invaded" and drove off of that land you say is filled with injustice?
You are exactly right when you say "These people are owed their due under the Constitution." But then you get TOTALLY WRONG ALL OVER AGAIN with "White America's relationship with black America has been funded on credit and now the debt is due". There was no such agreement, not with the blacks, not with the indians, not with the chineese, not with anybody.
I cannot think of any passage in the constitution that says that people get their rights only _after_ being reamed for some set period of time. (We do now have the USA PATRIOT act, but I don't think that is constitutional... 8-)
The rights are enough, their effective absence is a SERIOUS PROBLEM, the oppression happening today is terrible. But none of that has one wet-slap to do with "reparations for slavery" and you cannot make it so no matter how much you simper and wish it were so.
As for the reparations to the Jews, that is under the two-generation statute of limitations. It is a redress of an affront to living memory. Those "reparations" were ALSO paid from the bank accounts that were filled with the money stolen from the Jews. This was a simple redress of harm done to still-living persons. *That* is different because the spesific monies still existed and an actual accounting was possible with respect to a list of actual individuals.
Aparently all I've managed to tell you is NOTHING...
You aparently cannot read.
Keep holding yourself down my brother, it's what you seem best at.
You say I'm racest because I am trying to tell you that your aproach isn't workable, and I tell you how come black slavery doesn't make you any more special or deserving of some cash prize compared to any other descendent of an oppressed person?
You say I'm racest because I don't buy your racest justifications for your own self-centerd feelings of unfulfilled entitlement?
Nobody will take you seriously when you demand reperations, because *everybody* deserves reperations for *something* back there somewhere. And not "way back", but just contemporarily back. Do you know how many white men were slaves in that same period? (I'm guessing no.) Quite frankly, my cut-off point is two generations. If you havn't shaken hands with the enslaved ancestor the statue of limitations is expired. I don't see you offering reperations to the chineese workers that were killed after the age of black slavery in order to build the transportation infrastructure (railroads) do I? Do I see you running overseas to give a cheque to the people who your government is exploiting and killing for oil today? I don't beleive I do.
Face it, your high horse is down here in the mud with the rest of us.
And nobody likes a whiner.
I am not trying to deny your place in this world, I'm trying to tell you that this world doesn't owe you a thing that it magically does owe someone else.
Demand your share because you deserve it for who you are, not who great grand parents were.
Besides, did my ancestors own black slaves? Do you know? Do I know? (I do know, it so happens, and none of them did; but I bet you think I owe you soemthing anyway because I am white...) I am descended from Strongbow however, so should I send my black reparation check to the Ireland?
You seem to feel that "this country's foundation" is limited to the purely local events. Like the USA has no basis in its own history, and that somehow there is some sort of conservation of injustice. You have all these myopic theories that just happen to star you as the beneficiary.
I was just trying to tell you that your audience isn't listening *BECAUSE* you are bringing up things your _audience_ thinks are IRRELEVANT because it is to late to change any of that, and it is a few drops of blood on the floor of the abattoir.
You tell me that I don't understand the foundation of this country simply because my scope isn't focused on your grevance. Quite frankly your herratage is one pretty-tiny list of grevances snuggled inside a much longer and more serious set of problems.
I fully apreciate that a black man is way more likely to end up in jail than any other ethnic group.
I know that the life expectancy and infant mortality for blacks is much wors than for whites.
I know that young black people are getting an consistently and persistently inferior education.
I know that all of the above are contributing factors to the systematic financial restraint of black people (it's harder for black people to get credit, good jobs, etc.)
All of these things need to be fixed. Not "addressed" not "workded out" but FIXED.
NONE OF IT, however, needs to be fixed "because of 300 years of oppression".
It needs to be fixed because it is wrong *TODAY* and it weakens EVERYBODY when we are raising an undereducated and angry group of people who are getting screwed TODAY.
See, "today" and "tomorrow", THOSE are the words of social change. Those are the words of people with a future. The argument can be made without "you hurt my forebearers so you owe me."
The more you simper and whine about this (noun) owing you that (whatever) because of who your great grandparents were, the closer you come to a word-substitution joke about rich white kids.
Youre demands are falling on deaf ears precisely because
No, it is _certain_ that they cannot. But they can strangle the US slowly or damn fast. Damn fast would be better, because then "Survivor Joe" on his couch will take notice and fight back.
That isn't middle ground. You are a PAYING CUSTOMER. Nobody expects you to pay for everything indiscriminantly. In the context of the discussion at least.
In finer degrees of granulatity, for any given work you are either one who will pay, and does, or one who wouldn't and doesn't.
The thing I was saying DOES NOT EXIST is the person who, if you snuck back in time and took away all his downloads, would have bought all the crap he downloaded.
It is the "each download represents a lost sale" guy who "would have bought" which is a complete fantasy of the ??AA.
There are only two types of people that the ??AA cna sue. Those who are their customers and who will/will-have/or would-have bought because of their exposure to the music... and those who wouldn't have bought period.
In the former case, they got their cash.
In the latter case, they didn't lose a dime because the sod didn't want the tripe.
In both cases, they got free advertising.
THE LAW SUITS ARE STUPID.
The greedy clods need to adapt to the new business conditions, and generallly STFU.
These are the same people who said "the VCR is to the Movie Industry and the American People, what the Boston Strangler is to women out alone at night."
They were wrong then (go into any Blockbuster for demonstrable proof) and they are wrong now.
Meanwhile, their legal machanations are COSTING ME MONEY. Not only do they raise prices but they cost court time and so tax dollars (etc).
And all of this is being done because they wish in their greedy little souls, to CREATE a whole new, otherwise non-existent guy. They want to "realize" the profit from that non-existent guy who *might* have bought.
The point of COPYRIGHT is that WE ALL "OWN" IT, and we are letting the creators "borrow it back from the common pool of culture" as a reward for creating it. That reward is given in the hopes that the creators of culture will create more.
There is NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Read the law.
If you came into my house and took my couch or TV that _WOULD_ be "stealing" because you would then DEPRIVE ME OF MY COUCH AND TV. But when someone listens to, or even COPIES movies and music, the place where they got it from STILL HAS IT.
Quite frankly if you had a Star-Trek-Like "replicator" and you wanted to come into my house and point it at my couch and TV to make a copy, there would be no "theft". The question would then be a matter of "access". If I didn't let you in, then you would be guilty of "entering". If you had to damage or subvert something to gain entry you would be guilty of "breaking and entering". If you "broke" but didn't then "enter" because someone showd up, you would be guilty of "vandalisim" or "tampering".
See how all of those words are *DIFFERENT*?
If I let you in, then there was no crime at all.
Comparing the violation of Copyright to Theft as EQUAL PROPOSITIONS is INVALID.
The correct issue, the VALID comparison to P2P copying happening today, would be comming to my house and taking pictures of some pictures I willingly have hung in my window. If those pictures are mine to display publically, then do I have any expectation that requires you *not* to take those pictures? If those pictures were covered within other peoples copyright, am I breaking the law in having them? displaying them? taking no measure to prevent their potographing them?
I DO NOT SUPPORT THE VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT (especially for comercial purposes), but I do understand that in the modern paradigm it will be essentially unstoppable.
MY POINT IS that in the presence of the changing cultural and technological paradigm, JUST AS THE INVENTION OF THE CAMERA probably "damaged" painters but created photographers, easy digital communication will muck up the business models of the "stupider" "distributors" because "pure distribution" no longer _needs_ professional distributeors.
Having those distributors SUE THEIR CUSTOMERS CAN, IN NO WAY, RECREATE THE NEED FOR THEIR JOBS.
The law suits are just a waste of everybodies time an money. The horse had left the barn and elvis has left the building. This legal delaying-action will not keep these people roling in the easy dough of yesteryear. Ask the village potter and the stationers guild, they can tell you all about it.
Any yet, there are still potters and stationers, and you can indeed still buy a buggy whip if you so chose.
And people make *fortunes* with photography.
The ??AA people are at a crucial (for them) evolutionary juncture.
Their law suits are like listening to your little brother whine about his melting popsicle. The thing is going to melt no matter how much he complains, but if he'd *eat* the damn thing there wouldn't be a problem. Yea, either way he is going to achieve the state of "bare stick" but it is his choice where the sugar-water goes.
The RIAA, in particular, exists solely to *DISTRIBUTE* music. Don't really need that any more, at least not in the scale previously required. So sad, too bad.
And yet, people want the box, and the disk, and the liner notes, and the cool poster. They want that stuff badly enought that there is a market for special editions and my hosuehold contains no less than five distinct (purchased) versions of "Dark Side of the Moon" in three distinct media formats. This didn't happen because I and my Room Mate were legally required to do this. It happened because the value was worth the money.
There isn't (well, wasn't supposed to be, anyway 8-) any implication of absolutes, or requirement of indiscriminant purchases by idealized comsumers.
Nobody expects anyone to buy everyting in a class or category.
Tak it in terms of the conversation.
There are only two groups of people that the ??AA *CAN* *SUE*.
The first group is "their customers", that is, the people who will buy their products.
The second group is "not their customers", the people who will not buy.
There is no legal threat that will magically turn members of the second group into members of the first. That's what advertising and "free media" were for in the first place.
"File Sahring" and the ??AA's problems with same, is not about lost revenue, it's about lost _CONTROL_. They are losing control of the "free media" and they are "ascared" [8-)].
But there is no profit in suing your customers, and there is no value in trying to "capture a market" full of people who won't buy.
There is no third group of people who, faced with a lack of free media, will then fall over themselves to buy all the things they would have been exposed to for free. *THAT* is a pipe dream, but unfortunately it is the one that the ??AA is selling to politicians (because they have the same dream about voters 8-).
No matter what the truth, no matter what you said before or how valid your position, the instant you say "300 years of opression" we stop listening and thinking about your position.
Talk about how things are today. Talk about how they must be better tomorrow. Give numbers. Provide passion. All of that is good, and it works. You'll at least have a chance of getting your message across.
But say "300 years" and it all flys out the window, you might as well have stayed home.
This is not a "racest position" this a statement of well understood cultural bias. I am comming right out and _telling_ _you_ what that alien thing is that seems to secretly unite white men of european dissent. This is what is happening in our minds behind that inscrutable and perplexing white-man-grin. That is what is passing between us when we do that glance-around as you are speaking. It's what is happening behind-the-scenes when you get that strange feeling that you are losing your audience. Honestly and truely.
I'm a pragmatic liberal white male, a truck-driving pusdo-redneck, a homosexual, and a European mongrel of the most pervasive kind. I am a prime example of one of your greatest potential allies in the white establishment(*), and even _I_ cannot force my self to keep listening when people talk about "historical injustice". I have been pre-programmed to tune that out, and that programming runs almost impossibly deep. What chance do you think you are going to have with an old-south good-old-boy.
For two thousand years "western culture", or the men in it anyway, have been weened on "suck it up" and "take it like a man." It's _engrained_ in our cultural psyche. Take. Own. Conquer. Belittle and discard the weak. We are raised to devalue *ANYONE* who compains about past injustice. Just watch any two white boys, age 12, pick on a third and you will get the picture.
Really.
I'm just trying to tell you something here.
Watch some "hick comedy" sometime. "(She|They) are talking about *that* again" is the gal-darn _refrain_ of every white male complaining about "them" no-matter _who_ "they" happen to be this time.
Most of the glass ceiling that women and minorities run into is simply a loss of audience. Like magic, there are certian things you can say or do that turn your words to "blah blah blah" _instantly_. When you do those things that make any particular people stop listening to you, you lose the power to influence those people. If you want to get anywhere with us, you have to cut that out.
Why do you think that the white-male media always trots out King's "I have a Dream" speach? It was by no measure the most intellegent or insightful thing he said. He was much deeper and more eloquent later in his mission. But it is a powerful image and it unremittingly looks forward. We are *programed* to respect that. Read a press release some time, any press release, but especially one from a company who has "had a bad last quarter."
I'm not telling you your wrong to _feel_ the ways you feel. I'm just trying to tell you that when you *say* it you are shooting yourself in the foot.
The word "injustice" is almost enough right there, but "historical injustice"? Please. You might as well put on floppy shoes and a clown nose. There has been virtually no _historical_ _justice_. The "injustice" is just background noise. Everybody, every ethnic people, every cultural group, every political class, was screwed for "their turn" in european/western history.
You will *NEVER*, no matter how you "[call] a spade a spade", find your ideas or solutions have fallen on fertile ears when you cast your argument in terms of reparations of *ANY* sort. The very mention of the idea _salts_ _the_ _earth_ you are trying to sow.
There has never, in all of recorded history, been a conclave of white european men gathered together discussing "reparations" for the socally injured, where that conversation did _NOT_ end in a chuckle of "yea, sure, any day
That makes you "a person who buys". You are using your access (which isn't really that different than your ability to borrow physical media) as a selection technique.
There are no "people who use p2p/etc as a replacement for home buying" for peculiar but no perfectly zero values of "no". (If you get my drift.)
There is no version of turing off P2P that nets "more custom" in any statistically valid sense. The people who will buy, buy and the people who won't, don't.
In truth there is a seven (?) step gradient for any given work/product.
People who will snarf any content because it is free and that is "their only terms" of acceptance.
People who will throw away _your_ content even if they get it for free; they don't want it and won't keep it.
People who will own your content if it is free and effortless to require, but will not exert any economic or personal force (above "trace levels") to acquire what you are selling.
People will own your content at "discount price", they don't accept your list price, but there is a reasonably non-zero price they will pay.
People who will own your product/content at list price.
People who are willing to pay a _premium_ price because they desire your product/content.
And "Early Adopters"/"Fans"/"collectors" who will pay unreasonable prices for personal motives.
The various ??AA people fantasize that if they could get rid of sharing and free access, everybody would be magically bumped one-to-several categories towards premium client status. In this fantasy nobody would be forced from free, nearly free, or pirate-only to "will not own".
Theis "promotion" paradigm is central to their "evidence" because they imagine that each transaction is a "theft", a "lost" full-to-premium price opportunity.
This is a pure pipe-dream.
For instance, back in the Napster day, in the middle of a intellectual discussion of "thematic principles" my roommate and I downloaded EIGHT DISTINCT (and truely horrific) versions of "Little Bunny Foo Foo" by various artists with various target audiences.
Horrific is an understatement on this stuff.
There is _NO_ (and I *REALLY* mean *NO*) chance that we would have paid 99 cents per track, or even one sent per track, to complete this conversation and buy this tripe.
The intellectual persuit was valid, the points were made and appreciated.
But there is no conceivable scenerio that would allow a rational human to model this as eight dollars of "lost revenue".
It is not as flawed as you presume. The period is highly unstable and subject to external forces, but eventually it swings.
When you repress your own businesses, the market goes elsewhere. That is the free market theory at least. To date the swing of the pendlum often leaves countries totally devistated in its wake if it goes to far, but the regions recover even if the political systems don't.
I beleive that the current economic trends are tanamount to disaster and if the "ugly" can come on fast enough to be noticed by the populace they may act to fixe it.
We are boiling frogs here (to mix a metaphore). If the "Broadcast flag" (for instance) were to "suddenly go live tomorrow" it would be gone in a year. If we let it ease in slowly we may be stuck with it for decades.
As it is now, the "rising rate-rate of litigation" (yes, rate twice) is enough that our economic partners around the world are starting to notice and scatter. But consider that this change of rate has been exhibited almost solely in my lifetime (or more correctly in Ralph Nader's professional lifetime). It has not yet become ensconsed in our "perminant" way of life, it hasn't outlived a generation cradle-to-grave. It isn't "tradition", so it is possible to escape it *IF* we can get the public to see the precipice.
I don't really "wish" for the colapse as some kind of nielist orgastic ideal. I have just become convinced that it is essentially enevitable.
(To continue to mix metaphores) we *really* need to pull the band-aid(tm) off quick, or we are going to lose a _heck_ of a lot of hair... 8-)
But even if the entire United States colapses economically (which would be hard to do given that we grow lots of food) business and creativity will simply rise somewhere else.
It's not a pretty pendulum. It's not a "local" pendulum. But the cycle persists.
Wehn it gets totally out of wack, we (editorial we not royal or possessive we) throw a war...
Oh wait...
How many wars does any given "we" get before the world calls a time-out? 8-)
The people who never buy were never your customers, and never would be, so they don't represent any lost revenue if they snarf.
People who do buy, will buy, and so _they_ don't represent any lost revenue.
But the people who _do_ _buy_ have to pay for the legal bullshit of the stupid and greedy ??AA types who *imagine* money floating around, that they "would have gotten", and people like ME, A PAYING CUSTOMER, GET SPLASHED WITH THE ??AA SHIT of having to deal with CSS and whatnot.
And I have to *watch* them make my country look like a collective bunch of ASSHATS.
By chasing non-existent "revenue" in the name of a non-existent "market", ??AA dickheads COST ME MONEY.
The snarffers are rubes, and represent an miniscule entropy cost to the movie people at _worst_.
Movies deprived from the public? ZERO. Money lost to movie snarfers? ZERO. Money stolen from my pocket to satisfy ??AA zietgiest? Something greater than zero.
"Product" "Taken" without paying? ZERO. [copyright was infringed. Copyright is not a property right, at least not yet, and god help us if it ever becomes one...]
Money wasted? Yep, by the ??AA pissing into the wind.
Time wasted? You-betcha. Here we are paying the cash entropy cost of our time because ASSHATS are SUING COLLEGE STUDENTS for MYTHICAL REVENUE.
I think, the point is, that BECAUSE they are "not paying customers", they represent ZERO lost revenue.
The presumption that the ones who don't buy, WOULD buy if they couldn't download is specious at best.
The total, _ACTUAL_ "lost revenue" to movie snarfing is almost certianly LESS than the cost of one lawyer for one case.
These people should be persuing the people who MINT and SELL full bootlegs. This online trading stuff is literally NOTHING.
It's actually probably even a net gain from word of mouth.
(And I have *NEVER* downloaded a movie via USENET, any p2p application, or similar. I BUY DVDs.)
The people who will buy, buy. The people who won't, don't. The people who *may* don't exist.
Only the industrial bootleggers represent actual lost revenue. The "traders" are only a threat the the CERTIAN DREAMS OF AVERICE of certian ??AA organizations.
So it is STUPID to piss off your customers and splashing them with shit because you are chasing the shadow of a penny you _thought_ you _might_ _have_ seen rolling down a sewer.
USENet isn't really all that centralized, and it isn't as well known. Nobody _really_ "administers" it and nobody with money really runs it.
It is peer-to-peer and egalatarian as hell, but everybody (with linux anyway) already has the software and you have to search it *by* *hand*. It is SUPER EASY to forge a message, especially if the forger is an admin of a host system.... *any* host system in the net.
Nobody really has the power to unilaterally remove any of the content in particular, and even the venerable "cancel message" can be blocked. As long as any USENET backbone exists almost any message can "pibby-back" through the "blocked" parts of the net as a crosspost.
It is just too soft a target to really take any action against. Don't beleive me, just look at what is flowing there. The borderline kiddy-porn that is in the alt.binaries.(whatever) group is unstopable.
Besides, there are enough stupid people involved that you can't keep titty-pictures out of alt.sex.pictures.erotica.gay.male. What a dumb waste of time to try to *send* those pictures in that forum. What a DUMB waste of time trying to STOP those pictures from being sent in that forum.
What an _incridible_ waste of time trying to filter, find, and catch every single USENET server site in an attempt to really trace the sources of movie fragments....
If *you* had to "go after" USENET where would *YOU* start?
P.S. Remember: Drugs, Terrorisim, and Kiddy Porn are the root passwords to the US Constitution.
Now that we have proven we are sheeple who will roll over for just about anything as long as the spin is right, why *SHOULDN'T* they sue?
As far as I am concerned, at this point we should all be doing our best to hasten the decline.
Everybod jump on the pendlum and push. It's gotta swing trough it's arc before there will be any relief. The United States of America has to legislate and litigate itself into its role as a backwater far off the information super-highway, before anything here can get fixed.
The sooner the rest of the world leaves us in the economic and Intellectual Property [sic] dust, the better.
In fact, if the corporations can make enough of a mess SOON ENOUGH, it could even prevent the stupid legislation.
Sue Away, MPAA! (hey it rymes, it should be their new slogan! 8-)
As environmental pressure increases, the organisim is forced to evolve.
So it will be _best_ for the world if we can all get the pressure up as fast as possible.
Plus we know how much credibility the US now has overseas. The more they win here, the freer the rest of the world will be. They *know* (hopefully) that if they follow our lead, then they will enevitably end up with a Bush of their own.
"Compensation and Reparation" and the general backward-looking "but your great-great-great grandparents were bad to our great-great-great grandparents" thinking is what leads to things like "ethnic clensing" TWELVE HUNDRED YEARS after one ethnic group invaded another in the general area of the world we know today as Bosnia.
Remember it, Resent it, whatever, but every time you bring it up you lose market-share. Ask the IRA.
White people became world invaders because for century after century the different white countries were invading eachother and taking eachoters candy. It was all an accident of geography and erosion (great farmland right next to very-old mountains with easily accessible coper and tin).
Don't fish for reperations. The (us) white people wont buy it. If we generally subscribed to the doctrine of reperations we would spend so much time paying eachother for slights going back thousands of years that your three-hundred would barely make hay.
Ask the Scotts. Ask the Irish. Ask the Slavs (from which the word SLAVE is derrived for a reason which you can rather easily guess.) Ask the Jews.
And it isn't that white people are evil, but with generation after generation of this struggle for the verdant lowlands of europe they were just *bound* to come up with "might makes right."
Let's face it, if Africa or India had such easy access to metals, and if their farmland was better, then their older cultures would have totally owned Eurpoe and Asia long before the Greeks decided that gravity was explained by "the fact" that apples contained little spirits that wanted to be closer to the earth.
Dont say "we deserve better treatment than we are getting because of the last 300 years" (etc) it makes you sound craven and helpless.
Say "we deserve better treatment than we are getting" and leave it at that.
This white culture that you blame is pretty tied up in "god helps those who help themselves" and "might makes right" and all sorts of things like that.
Exercise your power, demand fair pay for fair work (and then some 8-), speak to the future. Stop talking about what you deserve because of past events. Look to the future. Own today.
Any white person who thinks reparations would be a good idea, is thinking it (secretly at least) in a "give them a pat on the head and they'll go away" way. You don't _want_ a pat on the head... trust me.
Really, Ask a Scott, they were taking it from behind 700 years before Britton even knew there _was_ an Africa. They haven't forgotton, but they did figure out quite a while back that there never would be thirty acres and a mule.
Ask yourself why English is a pollyglot of French and German.
It would be nice to imagine that "Manifest Destiny" was the last gasp of that sort of thing, but it wasn't.
Every day you are doing, through your government, to Iraq and the middle east AND Isrial, the EXACT SAME THING over Oil, that Dibers did to Africa over diamonds and "peices of india."
It would take a little less than a glance through a good encyclopedia to make most of this stuff evident./sigh
It is interesting and Ironic that the original use of "terrorisim" meant "when a government controls its OWN populace by means of fear and terror" and refers to the french "Reign of Terror". (Louis the 14th? I don't remember.)
Terrorisim is *STILL* an example of a government controlling its own populace using fear, just now however the object of that fear is vague and foreign, and so sustainably diffuse.
Remember, the Population Control Color today is Orange. There is a "credible threat" that something somewhere may be threatened, but we have no information about anyone anywhere threatening anthing in particular in within any spesific timeframe.
Thank you Mr. Dibold, Thank you Mr. Rove, and thank you whomever it was that discreated the Americas [sic]public shcool [sic] and standeric [sic] testing.
On this aspicous day I would like also to spare a word for the Democrats who realized how much safer they'd be under my handlers benificent rule; and also to the cuban-americans in Florida who somehow managed to misconestimated [sic] my promise to oust Castro; and that word is "sucker" eh, I mean "thanks" suckers.
Now to the issues of poverty in America, I promise you, with all my heart, that those who do not receive the jail time they deserve will lead our efforts to _liberate_ the political issues and persons my handlers find to be expedient at any given time.
I promise you my full inattention [sic] span and that no poor child will be left behind in our effort to draft a new way of life for the people of the wolrd. Our leadership will burn brightly in the streets and bodies of our friends around the world and that No Nation Shall Rise Above My Vision for America.
====
Seriously, to the rest of the world... I am sorry that two-thirds of the population of my home country is too apathetic to vote, and that some sixty million of the people who can, are to afriad of "evil faggots sneaking into their institutions and destroying their children's chance to marry" (or whatever, it doesn't make sense from here either) or are so fearful or gullable that they beleive that Iraq attacked America.
Be warned, stupidity is catching.
Please expect either some festering environmental policy or a "friendly interventionalist action" to pour forth from our Country into yours any time.
For those who don't know, I have "good reason to beleive" that "unofficially" word has leaked down that America will begin Nuclear Testing (as in "boom! oh... pretty!") in the near future. Nothing has been said, mind you, but look how well Bush carried Los Alamos (and no, that isn't my only source for that, but it is just a rumor)...
Just consider, Bush cannot be "reelected" so he'll be a off his "good behavior" as a (classic) second-term president.
I'd ask if some nice Canadian computer company were looking for experienced programmers, but this isn't a problem that can be usefully fled, and besides, for all I know Bush may declare Canda a target for the next crusade. He clearly doesn't understand things like the descrimination of fact from desire, or the stupidity of pissing off a neighboring country. Fortunately Cuba is right next to Brother Jeb and Bush has already promised an attack there, so maybe Castro can solve the "Bush Dinasty" problem.
So no change in the foreign policy: No (enfranchised) Blood for (cheap) Oil; use the children of poor and "those godless sand-people" [but I dont mean you Bin Laden, you're a family friend] to keep it $52 (USD) per barrel.
Really Europe, Africa, and our "alies". Get a clue. You are in an unhealthy relationship. We get drunk on "family values", beat our [pick a word], belittle our children [US possessions] and have no respect for our selves beyond a post-adolecent fascination with our "prowess".
Why in the world would you think we mean it _this_ time when we say we won't hit? You loan us money, you let us into your house.
Stop being a bunch of enablers, can't you see we are sick and need help?
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi...
====
And it's not a crusade, it's a liberation of the holy land...
The right to life begins at conception and ends at birth...
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that if you don't now have a business relationship wiht SCO you arn't subject to suts from SCO.
The Microsoft license in question brings you into the domain of a legal relationship wiht Microsoft for the listed protocols. Microsoft also reserves the right to ammend the license.
You may now, or in the future, agree to use the protocols "or whatever part of the protocols Microsoft may own" in ways aproved by Microsoft.
So, by signing the license agreement you agree to legal exposure to Microsoft's will. They, if they own the *slightest* part of a protocol they have reason to beleive you are using, can come into your place of business and harass you out of that business.
That includes palces where your business has business if they "beleive" you have violated the license by sharing their beef with a third party.
They have the money, and they have the lawyers, they just don't have cause (yet) to muck around in your life.
You don't have to be "right" to sue someone. You only have to be able to prove to the court that you *thought* you were right afterwards to avoid a penalty. The total size of the penalty Microsoft could "soak up" for driving SAMBA or Linux contributors out of business could be rather extreme compared to the bankrolls of thost contributors.
The license doesn't taint the *protocols* it taints the *programmers* who can then taint the *projects*.
It is completely legal for you to sign away your rights to nearly anything (in business anyway) look at the latest EULA rulings, which support that clicking a button marked "I agree" and which to you means "install what I bought you stupid program" is binding even though it doesn't grant you anything and grants them everything. It's a "valid contract of adhesion" according to the court.
How much more adhesive is your signature on papers that tacitly admits that you recognize and ceed interest to *your* *use* of TCP/IP to microsoft because you beleive they *may* have interest in it.
A lot really.
And it only has to be enough intrest to bankrupt you or drag you into court for months on end, if all they really want is to keep you out of the GPL pool.
If the license is harmless, then it is unnecessary, pretty much by definition.
In short, this thing they want you to sign isn't a "pure license" like the GPL, it's a "contractual license" and so its a "contract." One of who's terms is that the other party can change the terms at will.
How about this. I've got this license here. I *may* have IP interests in the fifth-wheel (that thing on between the tractor and trailer in an 18-wheeler rig) and several other important automotive innovations and fundimental functions. This list of 140 devices and conceptual elements of shiping and receivng and transportation may use some of my interests. You could be exposed to liability if you don't license these things from me (and possibly the unnamed other people who may also onwn some of this stuff). Just to be safe, sign this free agreement at no cost, where you agree to keep whatever I may own under terms favorable to me. I promise that I will never sue, this is just for your protection. I can change the terms once you have signed, but only if I find it necessary.
Sign here. I promise you it can only help you be safe. [and then I can stop terrorists and child pornogrophers from driving drunk someday, or something, yea...]
Smart? Hmmm, very smart. (If you are Me/Microsoft... the rest of you/us... not so much.)
Ask yourself. If this is not intended to make money, because it is free. And with it you are protecting yourself from being sued by Mcirosoft, who could just decide not to sue you for what they don't own anyway, why is Microsoft spending good money on lawyers and publicity to get you to sign the thing. If it were toothless, why not just print a public pledge in the New York Times?
Answer: they want YOUR NAME !EXPLICITLY! on a piece of THEIR PAPER that says you will do
In some of these "interesting results" the op-scan ballots were fed into machines which scanned them, then did things like subtract extra votes.
Some of these ballots and machines produced circumstances of N registered voters and N+X (where X is positive) votes recorded. [This is as likely to have been stuffing by humans as mechanical error.]
In may of the criticisims, the problem is not that the "ballots" were "misintrpreted" but that the data path from the big box (into which you fed your paper) to the BIG BOX where all the numbers were recorded over modems and flash-card-insertion, were NOT SECURE and NOT AUDITED.
See, it stops being a matter of how the voter markes down his ballot when the data path can be made to lie. The "butterfly ballot" thing was something of a red herring.
I previously posted this idea, so I'll give the short version.
/sigh.
You track the ballots through the system.
The voting stations shred "blank" ballots, or ballots that need amending, after scanning them, then print "new" ballots with the the relevant selections on them.
The actual "balot box" scans and stores the balots *AND* prints an MD5 (or similar) checksum of the vote for the voter to take home and keep.
The polling place publishes a list of checksums later for the voter to check.
The software is open source, so anybody with a hand scanner and a laptop could verify the barcode/dot-splash.
Via means I will not repeat at length (use of UUIDs and cryptographically secure forward-only logging and such) any ballot can be traced through the system (which is why the "blanks" are chosen from a bin at random to start their process). Part of the information recorded on the ballot would be "balot definition file" checksums and the software versions/dates/sizes/whatever.
Polls and regions can be spot-checked. Whole piles of ballots can be re-scanned.
Finally, the individual voting machines send their logs via one means, and the ballot boxes send their results by a separate means.
There is sort of a diminishing sum (some people will check in and get their ballots, and maybe even go to a voting station, but they may then not cast their vote, taking the thing away with them instead) that is reasonable, and after that, or in the case of an increased sum of events, the alternate counting is generated.
None of the machines at the polls themselves are "networked" by anthing other than the ballots.
In short, you are "voting on paper" but you get a three-sided verification of events (not just a scalar number of 300 votes yea, 200 votes nay, from a town of 450 8-).
At the end of the night you have a pile of "recoreded" ballots, and a pile of "discarded" ballots and a heaping mound of confetti, several CDs full of logs. And an posthumus analysis of the logs and the results would *have* to match. If the total "Bush votes recorded" minus the total "Bush votes recanted" (remember the editing) from the individual machines is not in keeping with the number of "Bush votes cast" (remember, a statistically insignificant number of people won't stuff the paper in the ballot box scanner) the investigation is automatic.
Such a system can be "proved" internally correct to within a miniscule margin of error, or will reveal its internal errors and flaws to reasonable scruteny. Honest mistakes will be obvious (this voting software number isn't the correct one, ibid for the vote definition data file.)
You get all the benefits of machine voting (no hanging and pregnant chads, each ballot is a "perfect" print out) (consistent logging that can _demonstrate_ the paper flow) (voter receipts that don't allow for vote sales) while keeping the accountablility of real paper ballots.
But let's face it, at some boundary of any voting system there will have to end up being one or more people you "trust". After all, you don't need to rig the voting machine if you pay the guy who gets on the phone to tell the world what happened, to lie.
As I said, if you want the detailed plans and justificaitons, browse my message history.
As for profitability of the Open Source software? Screw that. The supplier makes his money on the nicely equitable (chargable) paper-handling systems (custom hardware scanner/shreders, ballot printers, etc).
This is totally doable, I have the base design, I don't have the risk capital.
/sigh...
Yes, the US Constitution is a garantee *REGUARDLESS*, not a trade. not a "deal". The wrongs that exist today are wrong as an absolute measure not "because of slavery." *THAT* is my *POINT*.
The phrase and sentiment "because of slavery" damages your argument and adds nothing. It's self defeating. Did Clinton apoing black people to his staf "because of slavery" and so "despite their qualifications"? I certianly hope not. "Because of slavery" does not add to the dignity of a single black child.
It is suffiecnt, and a damn sight _more_ _effective_ to walk in to a room of non-black people and say "this is broken, it needs to be fixed because of the _future_", than it will _ever_ be to say "this is broken and it needs to be fixed because of the _past_."
Nobody wants to pay for the past, the future is where they are going to be spending the rest of their lives and is worth an effort.
I _don't_ "want to ignore this issue" "because of semantics" I want you to understand that when a room full of white people hear (say, on TV for instance) "300 years of opression" or "because of slavery", on the average, and in the apparent absence of black people, they just say "not that again" and blow off every single word the presenter has uttered.
That isn't a argument, it isn't "my position", it's an observable fact.
Getting ignored is not an effective way to make any point to anyone.
The reason that our generation is still having to "deal with it" is because the previous generation, using your exact same argument, failed to do so.
If I walked up to you and demanded ten dollars because of something your great great grandfather did to mine, and I had incontravertable proof of that deed, how would you react?
If I walked up to you and demanded ten dollars from you because somebody "like" your great great grandfather did something bad to somebody "like" mine how much more would you not care to pass me the money?
The word "reparation" and all its variation is your _enemy_. That is my sole point of contention here.
Stop reducing black people to "the pittiful descendents of slaves", and leave them "a part of our populous with urgent problems tody".
Argue to the future, not to the past.
It is not "unfair" that "our generation has to do the right thing" because *EACH* generation has to do the right thing in order to make the way for the next generation. The very fact that you are separating out "remeding the past" as "unfair" means that you, yourself, already know "reparations" and the arguments based thereon are doomed. _You_ think it's "unfair" already. How do you think the white son of a white family that moved here one generation ago, or three, feels about your "reparations"? How about the Indians, Native Americans, and "hispanics"? How about the black man newly emegrated who doesn't want to be seen as ex-property and who isn't descended from slaves? How about the VAST MAJORITY of people descended from white people who couldn't afford slaves and were as powerless to change the economic realities of their times as they are today?
See? There is no audience for reparations because most people alive today werent even involved, even by blood line.
I *know* that nobody on either side of my family owned a black slave in this country. Am I _exempt_ from the tarrif? Do I then have no duty to redress the problems facing black men in this country? Do I get to call "unfair" and trump out?
You tell me not to "deny the problem". I never did. I am just trying to say that every time you justify the need for a solution "becaus of black slavery" everybody who *doesn't* feel responsible says "oh, that doesn't apply to me" and goes on about their business.
I'm telling you to change your wording if you want to caputre your audience. Nothing more, nothing less.
And P.S. the huns didn't sack rome over "cultural differences", those were coincidental, they sacked Rome over gold. Hence the "sack" part, as in "carrying loot away in a [sack]". Cultural differences separate people into groups that don't have to be cared about. Cultural differences turns "us" into "us and them" and "them" never get a fair shake. Do the math.
No, I am aproaching this as if the advocates like youreself, despite being right about most of the problems and needed actions, are deliberately phrasing their arguments in a way that is certian to fail.
... I'm *programmed* to..." part of my very first comment. I wasn't making that up. As soon as you say "300 years of oppression, all your words blur in the minds ear to "wah woa wha waah" like charlie brown's teacher.
Do you think clinton had the highest black apointment rate "because of slavery"? I doubt it...
Every time you say "because of slavery", reparations, or any variation thereof, you hurt your cause. Period. The cause is ststainable, the "justification" is unnecessary.
I would walk into the NAACP get behind a podium and say this, no problem. I think they'd understand. I would hope that _they_ _already_ don't think their rights and expectations hinge on the fact of black slavery.
Pretty much, that's all I've said.
You have said a _lot_ more than "[I] have a duty as a citizen to help fix this situation". You have variously called me a racest and such, and you have attacked me for things you _presumed_ I would say.
You are right that I have _barely_ read your posts, because as I was saying, as soon as you start talking about reparations YOU LOSE YOUR AUDIENCE. That includes the part where people start blowing you off and only hearing/reading sound bytes and fragments.
Remember that "... even _I_ can barely
*THAT* was my *POINT*.
What rallies the congregation is not always best posted on the billboard, the audiences are different, so the speech must change to be effective. See, you probably don't really care about, say, "some filthy (papest|protestant) decrying some fine upstanding (protestant|catholic) in ireland", neither do I. They do care. We are not moved. See, change of audience means change of focus for justifications.
"We (white people) owe them (black people) for three hunred years of slavery" is not an effective message out here in the practical, wider world.
Drop the historical injustice and focus on the current injustice, the message will get through better. I promise.
Failure to profit is not the same as loss. It's a fine hair, but an important one. The only way that failure to profit exists as anything statistically significant is if you were certian to watch the movie no matter what the cost.
By extension, every time you go over to a friends house and watch his copy of some movie that you didn't pay for, is the MPAA suffering a "loss"? If you go to Blockbuster and rent a movie for four dollars and watch it alone, and then the next day you rent another and watch it with three friends, was the transaction on the second day a "loss" for the MPAA? Did your three friends "steal" the movie or did the four of you "share" it?
The simple fact is that only the small-term details of "sharing" have changed because of the internet, which has made "your living room" infinately large.
In practical terms, all evidence suggests that as sharing on line increases, so do rental and purchase revenues.
Suing your customer and cutting off word of mouth, to deprive the people who wouldn't have paid anyway access to the data stream that otherwise increases your gross profits by getting your material to the people who _will_ pay is TERRIBLY STUPID as a business position.
Suing your customers is always bad business.
You need to do some research. Start with the U.S. Constitution, section eight, paragraph eight:
[Congress shall have the power] "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
See that "limited time" up there? "Property" rights are not thus limited, real property is for ever, as a matter of law. Whatever these limited rights are, they aren't property by definition.
And to quote a paper found online in under two minutes:
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
See that "receives light without darkening me", Jefferson understood. The legal phrase is "non rivalrous goods". If I can not deprive you of a thing, I can not commit "theft". Look it up.
Do I take it that Thomas Jefferson was a socialist and beneath your contempt on maters relating to the U.S. Constitution?
They're called books, laws, and legal opinions. You should read some before you start publicly voicing your opinion. You'll look smarter... 8-)
P.P.S.
And no, my entire post cannot "be summed up as some sort of demand that blacks ask nicely for they're Civil Rights".
It could _actually_ be summed up nicely by saying "blacks should demand their civil rights without trying to justify them as repayment and reparations. Their rights exist as an absolute, completely without the 'but my pappy' crap, and whenever someone says 'but they were slaves and that means they deserve more' everybody stops listening and nothing gets done."
P.S.
I never said to forget the past. I never said most of what you have read into my words.
"...Why isn't the uniqueness of this cultural heritage highlighted instead of being dismissed as a deficiency?"
Well that would be because it *IS* a "deficiency" when you are trying to get a job.
Let's put this "rich cultural herratage" in perspective for a sec, by putting taking it into a completely different context.
I don't speak a word of chineese. I work with people who speak chineese quite fluently. They also do a pretty good job of speaking american english. I will ceede that each one of these people is probably smarter than I am because they could learn a second langage while I couldn't. But you know what, their "pretty good" english is still a significan liability to them, not because I cannot communicate well with them, but because my companies customers cannot communicate well with them. Lots of mistakes are made, and that makes these arguably smarter people rather expensive to employ.
Now, if this "highlighted heritage" sounded more like a heritage and less like a speach impediment, it wouldn't be treated like a lack of education. But that's just not the way it is working out.
Boo hoo, that sounds terrible...
But I make that statement with the full knowledge that were I stranded in Costa Rica (again), or anywhere in Africa, or virtually anywhere else in the world, my college education would be worth squat and I'd be lucky to get a job washing dishes. That would be *true* because my "cultural heritage" would be "dismissed as a deficency" in something like seventy percent of the world.
So if you are in Iowa, and you can't speak uniform american english you are screwed.
You beleive "there is no relativisim here" but you demand redress because of relative factors like "historical injustice" perpitraited on their long-dead (dare I say it?) RELATIVES (I guess I do dare 8-) instead of the simple fact that what is happening _TODAY_ is just plain wrong. Aparently only your _approved_ relavatisim is valid.
Your statements about the irrevelance of my points because "In most of [my cases], there was a foreign invader" is intellectually junct. People have always had to live in the same country with those who invaded them. (Ask any person in Iraq today, they can explain it to you quite well I suspect.) Besides, that "most" pretty much takes care of the argument fromthe get go. But even still, is your "lilly white" ass struggling to make reparations to the "native americans" your ancestors "invaded" and drove off of that land you say is filled with injustice?
You are exactly right when you say "These people are owed their due under the Constitution." But then you get TOTALLY WRONG ALL OVER AGAIN with "White America's relationship with black America has been funded on credit and now the debt is due". There was no such agreement, not with the blacks, not with the indians, not with the chineese, not with anybody.
I cannot think of any passage in the constitution that says that people get their rights only _after_ being reamed for some set period of time. (We do now have the USA PATRIOT act, but I don't think that is constitutional... 8-)
The rights are enough, their effective absence is a SERIOUS PROBLEM, the oppression happening today is terrible. But none of that has one wet-slap to do with "reparations for slavery" and you cannot make it so no matter how much you simper and wish it were so.
As for the reparations to the Jews, that is under the two-generation statute of limitations. It is a redress of an affront to living memory. Those "reparations" were ALSO paid from the bank accounts that were filled with the money stolen from the Jews. This was a simple redress of harm done to still-living persons. *That* is different because the spesific monies still existed and an actual accounting was possible with respect to a list of actual individuals.
So to are the (nothing to do with white peo
Aparently all I've managed to tell you is NOTHING...
You aparently cannot read.
Keep holding yourself down my brother, it's what you seem best at.
You say I'm racest because I am trying to tell you that your aproach isn't workable, and I tell you how come black slavery doesn't make you any more special or deserving of some cash prize compared to any other descendent of an oppressed person?
You say I'm racest because I don't buy your racest justifications for your own self-centerd feelings of unfulfilled entitlement?
Nobody will take you seriously when you demand reperations, because *everybody* deserves reperations for *something* back there somewhere. And not "way back", but just contemporarily back. Do you know how many white men were slaves in that same period? (I'm guessing no.) Quite frankly, my cut-off point is two generations. If you havn't shaken hands with the enslaved ancestor the statue of limitations is expired. I don't see you offering reperations to the chineese workers that were killed after the age of black slavery in order to build the transportation infrastructure (railroads) do I? Do I see you running overseas to give a cheque to the people who your government is exploiting and killing for oil today? I don't beleive I do.
Face it, your high horse is down here in the mud with the rest of us.
And nobody likes a whiner.
I am not trying to deny your place in this world, I'm trying to tell you that this world doesn't owe you a thing that it magically does owe someone else.
Demand your share because you deserve it for who you are, not who great grand parents were.
Besides, did my ancestors own black slaves? Do you know? Do I know? (I do know, it so happens, and none of them did; but I bet you think I owe you soemthing anyway because I am white...) I am descended from Strongbow however, so should I send my black reparation check to the Ireland?
You seem to feel that "this country's foundation" is limited to the purely local events. Like the USA has no basis in its own history, and that somehow there is some sort of conservation of injustice. You have all these myopic theories that just happen to star you as the beneficiary.
I was just trying to tell you that your audience isn't listening *BECAUSE* you are bringing up things your _audience_ thinks are IRRELEVANT because it is to late to change any of that, and it is a few drops of blood on the floor of the abattoir.
You tell me that I don't understand the foundation of this country simply because my scope isn't focused on your grevance. Quite frankly your herratage is one pretty-tiny list of grevances snuggled inside a much longer and more serious set of problems.
I fully apreciate that a black man is way more likely to end up in jail than any other ethnic group.
I know that the life expectancy and infant mortality for blacks is much wors than for whites.
I know that young black people are getting an consistently and persistently inferior education.
I know that all of the above are contributing factors to the systematic financial restraint of black people (it's harder for black people to get credit, good jobs, etc.)
All of these things need to be fixed. Not "addressed" not "workded out" but FIXED.
NONE OF IT, however, needs to be fixed "because of 300 years of oppression".
It needs to be fixed because it is wrong *TODAY* and it weakens EVERYBODY when we are raising an undereducated and angry group of people who are getting screwed TODAY.
See, "today" and "tomorrow", THOSE are the words of social change. Those are the words of people with a future. The argument can be made without "you hurt my forebearers so you owe me."
The more you simper and whine about this (noun) owing you that (whatever) because of who your great grandparents were, the closer you come to a word-substitution joke about rich white kids.
Youre demands are falling on deaf ears precisely because
So I am dyslexic, and you were clever enough to pick up on a spelling error.
My aern't we impressive.
Go team...
No, it is _certain_ that they cannot. But they can strangle the US slowly or damn fast. Damn fast would be better, because then "Survivor Joe" on his couch will take notice and fight back.
That isn't middle ground. You are a PAYING CUSTOMER. Nobody expects you to pay for everything indiscriminantly. In the context of the discussion at least.
In finer degrees of granulatity, for any given work you are either one who will pay, and does, or one who wouldn't and doesn't.
The thing I was saying DOES NOT EXIST is the person who, if you snuck back in time and took away all his downloads, would have bought all the crap he downloaded.
It is the "each download represents a lost sale" guy who "would have bought" which is a complete fantasy of the ??AA.
There are only two types of people that the ??AA cna sue. Those who are their customers and who will/will-have/or would-have bought because of their exposure to the music... and those who wouldn't have bought period.
In the former case, they got their cash.
In the latter case, they didn't lose a dime because the sod didn't want the tripe.
In both cases, they got free advertising.
THE LAW SUITS ARE STUPID.
The greedy clods need to adapt to the new business conditions, and generallly STFU.
These are the same people who said "the VCR is to the Movie Industry and the American People, what the Boston Strangler is to women out alone at night."
They were wrong then (go into any Blockbuster for demonstrable proof) and they are wrong now.
Meanwhile, their legal machanations are COSTING ME MONEY. Not only do they raise prices but they cost court time and so tax dollars (etc).
And all of this is being done because they wish in their greedy little souls, to CREATE a whole new, otherwise non-existent guy. They want to "realize" the profit from that non-existent guy who *might* have bought.
NO, YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG.
The point of COPYRIGHT is that WE ALL "OWN" IT, and we are letting the creators "borrow it back from the common pool of culture" as a reward for creating it. That reward is given in the hopes that the creators of culture will create more.
There is NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Read the law.
If you came into my house and took my couch or TV that _WOULD_ be "stealing" because you would then DEPRIVE ME OF MY COUCH AND TV. But when someone listens to, or even COPIES movies and music, the place where they got it from STILL HAS IT.
Quite frankly if you had a Star-Trek-Like "replicator" and you wanted to come into my house and point it at my couch and TV to make a copy, there would be no "theft". The question would then be a matter of "access". If I didn't let you in, then you would be guilty of "entering". If you had to damage or subvert something to gain entry you would be guilty of "breaking and entering". If you "broke" but didn't then "enter" because someone showd up, you would be guilty of "vandalisim" or "tampering".
See how all of those words are *DIFFERENT*?
If I let you in, then there was no crime at all.
Comparing the violation of Copyright to Theft as EQUAL PROPOSITIONS is INVALID.
The correct issue, the VALID comparison to P2P copying happening today, would be comming to my house and taking pictures of some pictures I willingly have hung in my window. If those pictures are mine to display publically, then do I have any expectation that requires you *not* to take those pictures? If those pictures were covered within other peoples copyright, am I breaking the law in having them? displaying them? taking no measure to prevent their potographing them?
I DO NOT SUPPORT THE VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT (especially for comercial purposes), but I do understand that in the modern paradigm it will be essentially unstoppable.
MY POINT IS that in the presence of the changing cultural and technological paradigm, JUST AS THE INVENTION OF THE CAMERA probably "damaged" painters but created photographers, easy digital communication will muck up the business models of the "stupider" "distributors" because "pure distribution" no longer _needs_ professional distributeors.
Having those distributors SUE THEIR CUSTOMERS CAN, IN NO WAY, RECREATE THE NEED FOR THEIR JOBS.
The law suits are just a waste of everybodies time an money. The horse had left the barn and elvis has left the building. This legal delaying-action will not keep these people roling in the easy dough of yesteryear. Ask the village potter and the stationers guild, they can tell you all about it.
Any yet, there are still potters and stationers, and you can indeed still buy a buggy whip if you so chose.
And people make *fortunes* with photography.
The ??AA people are at a crucial (for them) evolutionary juncture.
Their law suits are like listening to your little brother whine about his melting popsicle. The thing is going to melt no matter how much he complains, but if he'd *eat* the damn thing there wouldn't be a problem. Yea, either way he is going to achieve the state of "bare stick" but it is his choice where the sugar-water goes.
The RIAA, in particular, exists solely to *DISTRIBUTE* music. Don't really need that any more, at least not in the scale previously required. So sad, too bad.
And yet, people want the box, and the disk, and the liner notes, and the cool poster. They want that stuff badly enought that there is a market for special editions and my hosuehold contains no less than five distinct (purchased) versions of "Dark Side of the Moon" in three distinct media formats. This didn't happen because I and my Room Mate were legally required to do this. It happened because the value was worth the money.
The wailing and the suing....? not so much.
That makes them "the people who buy".
There isn't (well, wasn't supposed to be, anyway 8-) any implication of absolutes, or requirement of indiscriminant purchases by idealized comsumers.
Nobody expects anyone to buy everyting in a class or category.
Tak it in terms of the conversation.
There are only two groups of people that the ??AA *CAN* *SUE*.
The first group is "their customers", that is, the people who will buy their products.
The second group is "not their customers", the people who will not buy.
There is no legal threat that will magically turn members of the second group into members of the first. That's what advertising and "free media" were for in the first place.
"File Sahring" and the ??AA's problems with same, is not about lost revenue, it's about lost _CONTROL_. They are losing control of the "free media" and they are "ascared" [8-)].
But there is no profit in suing your customers, and there is no value in trying to "capture a market" full of people who won't buy.
There is no third group of people who, faced with a lack of free media, will then fall over themselves to buy all the things they would have been exposed to for free. *THAT* is a pipe dream, but unfortunately it is the one that the ??AA is selling to politicians (because they have the same dream about voters 8-).
That is the point I was trying to make.
No matter what the truth, no matter what you said before or how valid your position, the instant you say "300 years of opression" we stop listening and thinking about your position.
Talk about how things are today. Talk about how they must be better tomorrow. Give numbers. Provide passion. All of that is good, and it works. You'll at least have a chance of getting your message across.
But say "300 years" and it all flys out the window, you might as well have stayed home.
This is not a "racest position" this a statement of well understood cultural bias. I am comming right out and _telling_ _you_ what that alien thing is that seems to secretly unite white men of european dissent. This is what is happening in our minds behind that inscrutable and perplexing white-man-grin. That is what is passing between us when we do that glance-around as you are speaking. It's what is happening behind-the-scenes when you get that strange feeling that you are losing your audience. Honestly and truely.
I'm a pragmatic liberal white male, a truck-driving pusdo-redneck, a homosexual, and a European mongrel of the most pervasive kind. I am a prime example of one of your greatest potential allies in the white establishment(*), and even _I_ cannot force my self to keep listening when people talk about "historical injustice". I have been pre-programmed to tune that out, and that programming runs almost impossibly deep. What chance do you think you are going to have with an old-south good-old-boy.
For two thousand years "western culture", or the men in it anyway, have been weened on "suck it up" and "take it like a man." It's _engrained_ in our cultural psyche. Take. Own. Conquer. Belittle and discard the weak. We are raised to devalue *ANYONE* who compains about past injustice. Just watch any two white boys, age 12, pick on a third and you will get the picture.
Really.
I'm just trying to tell you something here.
Watch some "hick comedy" sometime. "(She|They) are talking about *that* again" is the gal-darn _refrain_ of every white male complaining about "them" no-matter _who_ "they" happen to be this time.
Most of the glass ceiling that women and minorities run into is simply a loss of audience. Like magic, there are certian things you can say or do that turn your words to "blah blah blah" _instantly_. When you do those things that make any particular people stop listening to you, you lose the power to influence those people. If you want to get anywhere with us, you have to cut that out.
Why do you think that the white-male media always trots out King's "I have a Dream" speach? It was by no measure the most intellegent or insightful thing he said. He was much deeper and more eloquent later in his mission. But it is a powerful image and it unremittingly looks forward. We are *programed* to respect that. Read a press release some time, any press release, but especially one from a company who has "had a bad last quarter."
I'm not telling you your wrong to _feel_ the ways you feel. I'm just trying to tell you that when you *say* it you are shooting yourself in the foot.
The word "injustice" is almost enough right there, but "historical injustice"? Please. You might as well put on floppy shoes and a clown nose. There has been virtually no _historical_ _justice_. The "injustice" is just background noise. Everybody, every ethnic people, every cultural group, every political class, was screwed for "their turn" in european/western history.
You will *NEVER*, no matter how you "[call] a spade a spade", find your ideas or solutions have fallen on fertile ears when you cast your argument in terms of reparations of *ANY* sort. The very mention of the idea _salts_ _the_ _earth_ you are trying to sow.
There has never, in all of recorded history, been a conclave of white european men gathered together discussing "reparations" for the socally injured, where that conversation did _NOT_ end in a chuckle of "yea, sure, any day
That makes you "a person who buys". You are using your access (which isn't really that different than your ability to borrow physical media) as a selection technique.
/shudder 8-)
There are no "people who use p2p/etc as a replacement for home buying" for peculiar but no perfectly zero values of "no". (If you get my drift.)
There is no version of turing off P2P that nets "more custom" in any statistically valid sense. The people who will buy, buy and the people who won't, don't.
In truth there is a seven (?) step gradient for any given work/product.
People who will snarf any content because it is free and that is "their only terms" of acceptance.
People who will throw away _your_ content even if they get it for free; they don't want it and won't keep it.
People who will own your content if it is free and effortless to require, but will not exert any economic or personal force (above "trace levels") to acquire what you are selling.
People will own your content at "discount price", they don't accept your list price, but there is a reasonably non-zero price they will pay.
People who will own your product/content at list price.
People who are willing to pay a _premium_ price because they desire your product/content.
And "Early Adopters"/"Fans"/"collectors" who will pay unreasonable prices for personal motives.
The various ??AA people fantasize that if they could get rid of sharing and free access, everybody would be magically bumped one-to-several categories towards premium client status. In this fantasy nobody would be forced from free, nearly free, or pirate-only to "will not own".
Theis "promotion" paradigm is central to their "evidence" because they imagine that each transaction is a "theft", a "lost" full-to-premium price opportunity.
This is a pure pipe-dream.
For instance, back in the Napster day, in the middle of a intellectual discussion of "thematic principles" my roommate and I downloaded EIGHT DISTINCT (and truely horrific) versions of "Little Bunny Foo Foo" by various artists with various target audiences.
Horrific is an understatement on this stuff.
There is _NO_ (and I *REALLY* mean *NO*) chance that we would have paid 99 cents per track, or even one sent per track, to complete this conversation and buy this tripe.
The intellectual persuit was valid, the points were made and appreciated.
But there is no conceivable scenerio that would allow a rational human to model this as eight dollars of "lost revenue".
(... seriously... horrific...
It is not as flawed as you presume. The period is highly unstable and subject to external forces, but eventually it swings.
When you repress your own businesses, the market goes elsewhere. That is the free market theory at least. To date the swing of the pendlum often leaves countries totally devistated in its wake if it goes to far, but the regions recover even if the political systems don't.
I beleive that the current economic trends are tanamount to disaster and if the "ugly" can come on fast enough to be noticed by the populace they may act to fixe it.
We are boiling frogs here (to mix a metaphore). If the "Broadcast flag" (for instance) were to "suddenly go live tomorrow" it would be gone in a year. If we let it ease in slowly we may be stuck with it for decades.
As it is now, the "rising rate-rate of litigation" (yes, rate twice) is enough that our economic partners around the world are starting to notice and scatter. But consider that this change of rate has been exhibited almost solely in my lifetime (or more correctly in Ralph Nader's professional lifetime). It has not yet become ensconsed in our "perminant" way of life, it hasn't outlived a generation cradle-to-grave. It isn't "tradition", so it is possible to escape it *IF* we can get the public to see the precipice.
I don't really "wish" for the colapse as some kind of nielist orgastic ideal. I have just become convinced that it is essentially enevitable.
(To continue to mix metaphores) we *really* need to pull the band-aid(tm) off quick, or we are going to lose a _heck_ of a lot of hair... 8-)
But even if the entire United States colapses economically (which would be hard to do given that we grow lots of food) business and creativity will simply rise somewhere else.
It's not a pretty pendulum. It's not a "local" pendulum. But the cycle persists.
Wehn it gets totally out of wack, we (editorial we not royal or possessive we) throw a war...
Oh wait...
How many wars does any given "we" get before the world calls a time-out? 8-)
Actually, you are right, and you are wrong.
The people who never buy were never your customers, and never would be, so they don't represent any lost revenue if they snarf.
People who do buy, will buy, and so _they_ don't represent any lost revenue.
But the people who _do_ _buy_ have to pay for the legal bullshit of the stupid and greedy ??AA types who *imagine* money floating around, that they "would have gotten", and people like ME, A PAYING CUSTOMER, GET SPLASHED WITH THE ??AA SHIT of having to deal with CSS and whatnot.
And I have to *watch* them make my country look like a collective bunch of ASSHATS.
By chasing non-existent "revenue" in the name of a non-existent "market", ??AA dickheads COST ME MONEY.
The snarffers are rubes, and represent an miniscule entropy cost to the movie people at _worst_.
Movies deprived from the public? ZERO.
Money lost to movie snarfers? ZERO.
Money stolen from my pocket to satisfy ??AA zietgiest? Something greater than zero.
"Product" "Taken" without paying? ZERO. [copyright was infringed. Copyright is not a property right, at least not yet, and god help us if it ever becomes one...]
Money wasted? Yep, by the ??AA pissing into the wind.
Time wasted? You-betcha. Here we are paying the cash entropy cost of our time because ASSHATS are SUING COLLEGE STUDENTS for MYTHICAL REVENUE.
I think, the point is, that BECAUSE they are "not paying customers", they represent ZERO lost revenue.
The presumption that the ones who don't buy, WOULD buy if they couldn't download is specious at best.
The total, _ACTUAL_ "lost revenue" to movie snarfing is almost certianly LESS than the cost of one lawyer for one case.
These people should be persuing the people who MINT and SELL full bootlegs. This online trading stuff is literally NOTHING.
It's actually probably even a net gain from word of mouth.
(And I have *NEVER* downloaded a movie via USENET, any p2p application, or similar. I BUY DVDs.)
The people who will buy, buy. The people who won't, don't. The people who *may* don't exist.
Only the industrial bootleggers represent actual lost revenue. The "traders" are only a threat the the CERTIAN DREAMS OF AVERICE of certian ??AA organizations.
So it is STUPID to piss off your customers and splashing them with shit because you are chasing the shadow of a penny you _thought_ you _might_ _have_ seen rolling down a sewer.
USENet isn't really all that centralized, and it isn't as well known. Nobody _really_ "administers" it and nobody with money really runs it.
It is peer-to-peer and egalatarian as hell, but everybody (with linux anyway) already has the software and you have to search it *by* *hand*. It is SUPER EASY to forge a message, especially if the forger is an admin of a host system.... *any* host system in the net.
Nobody really has the power to unilaterally remove any of the content in particular, and even the venerable "cancel message" can be blocked. As long as any USENET backbone exists almost any message can "pibby-back" through the "blocked" parts of the net as a crosspost.
It is just too soft a target to really take any action against. Don't beleive me, just look at what is flowing there. The borderline kiddy-porn that is in the alt.binaries.(whatever) group is unstopable.
Besides, there are enough stupid people involved that you can't keep titty-pictures out of alt.sex.pictures.erotica.gay.male. What a dumb waste of time to try to *send* those pictures in that forum. What a DUMB waste of time trying to STOP those pictures from being sent in that forum.
What an _incridible_ waste of time trying to filter, find, and catch every single USENET server site in an attempt to really trace the sources of movie fragments....
If *you* had to "go after" USENET where would *YOU* start?
P.S. Remember: Drugs, Terrorisim, and Kiddy Porn are the root passwords to the US Constitution.
Now that we have proven we are sheeple who will roll over for just about anything as long as the spin is right, why *SHOULDN'T* they sue?
As far as I am concerned, at this point we should all be doing our best to hasten the decline.
Everybod jump on the pendlum and push. It's gotta swing trough it's arc before there will be any relief. The United States of America has to legislate and litigate itself into its role as a backwater far off the information super-highway, before anything here can get fixed.
The sooner the rest of the world leaves us in the economic and Intellectual Property [sic] dust, the better.
In fact, if the corporations can make enough of a mess SOON ENOUGH, it could even prevent the stupid legislation.
Sue Away, MPAA! (hey it rymes, it should be their new slogan! 8-)
As environmental pressure increases, the organisim is forced to evolve.
So it will be _best_ for the world if we can all get the pressure up as fast as possible.
Plus we know how much credibility the US now has overseas. The more they win here, the freer the rest of the world will be. They *know* (hopefully) that if they follow our lead, then they will enevitably end up with a Bush of their own.
You had me until the compensation/reparation bit.
/sigh
"Compensation and Reparation" and the general backward-looking "but your great-great-great grandparents were bad to our great-great-great grandparents" thinking is what leads to things like "ethnic clensing" TWELVE HUNDRED YEARS after one ethnic group invaded another in the general area of the world we know today as Bosnia.
Remember it, Resent it, whatever, but every time you bring it up you lose market-share. Ask the IRA.
White people became world invaders because for century after century the different white countries were invading eachother and taking eachoters candy. It was all an accident of geography and erosion (great farmland right next to very-old mountains with easily accessible coper and tin).
Don't fish for reperations. The (us) white people wont buy it. If we generally subscribed to the doctrine of reperations we would spend so much time paying eachother for slights going back thousands of years that your three-hundred would barely make hay.
Ask the Scotts.
Ask the Irish.
Ask the Slavs (from which the word SLAVE is derrived for a reason which you can rather easily guess.)
Ask the Jews.
And it isn't that white people are evil, but with generation after generation of this struggle for the verdant lowlands of europe they were just *bound* to come up with "might makes right."
Let's face it, if Africa or India had such easy access to metals, and if their farmland was better, then their older cultures would have totally owned Eurpoe and Asia long before the Greeks decided that gravity was explained by "the fact" that apples contained little spirits that wanted to be closer to the earth.
Dont say "we deserve better treatment than we are getting because of the last 300 years" (etc) it makes you sound craven and helpless.
Say "we deserve better treatment than we are getting" and leave it at that.
This white culture that you blame is pretty tied up in "god helps those who help themselves" and "might makes right" and all sorts of things like that.
Exercise your power, demand fair pay for fair work (and then some 8-), speak to the future. Stop talking about what you deserve because of past events. Look to the future. Own today.
Any white person who thinks reparations would be a good idea, is thinking it (secretly at least) in a "give them a pat on the head and they'll go away" way. You don't _want_ a pat on the head... trust me.
Really, Ask a Scott, they were taking it from behind 700 years before Britton even knew there _was_ an Africa. They haven't forgotton, but they did figure out quite a while back that there never would be thirty acres and a mule.
Ask yourself why English is a pollyglot of French and German.
It would be nice to imagine that "Manifest Destiny" was the last gasp of that sort of thing, but it wasn't.
Every day you are doing, through your government, to Iraq and the middle east AND Isrial, the EXACT SAME THING over Oil, that Dibers did to Africa over diamonds and "peices of india."
It would take a little less than a glance through a good encyclopedia to make most of this stuff evident.
It is interesting and Ironic that the original use of "terrorisim" meant "when a government controls its OWN populace by means of fear and terror" and refers to the french "Reign of Terror". (Louis the 14th? I don't remember.)
Terrorisim is *STILL* an example of a government controlling its own populace using fear, just now however the object of that fear is vague and foreign, and so sustainably diffuse.
Remember, the Population Control Color today is Orange. There is a "credible threat" that something somewhere may be threatened, but we have no information about anyone anywhere threatening anthing in particular in within any spesific timeframe.
Dazzeling.
Thank you Mr. Dibold, Thank you Mr. Rove, and thank you whomever it was that discreated the Americas [sic]public shcool [sic] and standeric [sic] testing.
On this aspicous day I would like also to spare a word for the Democrats who realized how much safer they'd be under my handlers benificent rule; and also to the cuban-americans in Florida who somehow managed to misconestimated [sic] my promise to oust Castro; and that word is "sucker" eh, I mean "thanks" suckers.
Now to the issues of poverty in America, I promise you, with all my heart, that those who do not receive the jail time they deserve will lead our efforts to _liberate_ the political issues and persons my handlers find to be expedient at any given time.
I promise you my full inattention [sic] span and that no poor child will be left behind in our effort to draft a new way of life for the people of the wolrd. Our leadership will burn brightly in the streets and bodies of our friends around the world and that No Nation Shall Rise Above My Vision for America.
====
Seriously, to the rest of the world... I am sorry that two-thirds of the population of my home country is too apathetic to vote, and that some sixty million of the people who can, are to afriad of "evil faggots sneaking into their institutions and destroying their children's chance to marry" (or whatever, it doesn't make sense from here either) or are so fearful or gullable that they beleive that Iraq attacked America.
Be warned, stupidity is catching.
Please expect either some festering environmental policy or a "friendly interventionalist action" to pour forth from our Country into yours any time.
For those who don't know, I have "good reason to beleive" that "unofficially" word has leaked down that America will begin Nuclear Testing (as in "boom! oh... pretty!") in the near future. Nothing has been said, mind you, but look how well Bush carried Los Alamos (and no, that isn't my only source for that, but it is just a rumor)...
Just consider, Bush cannot be "reelected" so he'll be a off his "good behavior" as a (classic) second-term president.
I'd ask if some nice Canadian computer company were looking for experienced programmers, but this isn't a problem that can be usefully fled, and besides, for all I know Bush may declare Canda a target for the next crusade. He clearly doesn't understand things like the descrimination of fact from desire, or the stupidity of pissing off a neighboring country. Fortunately Cuba is right next to Brother Jeb and Bush has already promised an attack there, so maybe Castro can solve the "Bush Dinasty" problem.
So no change in the foreign policy: No (enfranchised) Blood for (cheap) Oil; use the children of poor and "those godless sand-people" [but I dont mean you Bin Laden, you're a family friend] to keep it $52 (USD) per barrel.
Really Europe, Africa, and our "alies". Get a clue. You are in an unhealthy relationship. We get drunk on "family values", beat our [pick a word], belittle our children [US possessions] and have no respect for our selves beyond a post-adolecent fascination with our "prowess".
Why in the world would you think we mean it _this_ time when we say we won't hit? You loan us money, you let us into your house.
Stop being a bunch of enablers, can't you see we are sick and need help?
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi...
====
And it's not a crusade, it's a liberation of the holy land...
The right to life begins at conception and ends at birth...
Nuke a unborn gay babby whale for Jeasus.
Ok Daddy?
Amen.