Joke's on the MPAA et al... a lot of us stopped giving you any of our money through that channel (if not completely) quite some time ago. Also, have they seen how well the TSA nonsense has benefited the airlines' incomes? Guess what? People have less need/desire to watch their movies than to travel. I applaud this measure of aiming squarely and carefully at their own feet and firing.
As a kid, I wondered why they didn't just get gasoline from the stored-in-a-cave DeLorean. I don't wonder any more though. Any DeLorean owner will tell you, don't leave the car sitting with the same gasoline more than six months, especially without a fuel stabilizer. I doubt the Hill Valley General Store stocked Sta-bil in 1885, so I'm guessing Doc Brown drained it.
Although this has been used in stand-up comedic routines to great effect, George and Lorraine probably wouldn't fight about Marty being possibly fathered by Calvin Klein, due to the fact that he's the youngest of their three children, and his conception and birth occur long after George and Lorraine last saw Calvin's face.
That's a lot of textbooks, teacher's salaries, roads to be paved, police/fire stations to NOT be closed etc etc etc..
Or another few days of the Drug War... or the Iraq War... or the Afghanistan War... or...
At least Google's expenditures generally benefit us as a side effect of their pursuit of profit. For every tax dollar paving roads and educating youth, how many more are spent in ways completely detrimental to the population?
Corporations, by design, are a kind of entity who's life revolves around money. Not oxygen, food, trust, family, joy, good, or evil. Just money. They are designed to maximize shareholder value, period.
Periodically, people of the "free" countries elect representatives to office. These elected humans take various oaths to represent those humans who elected them, and to do "good" for such human people.
The corporations and the politicians are both quite responsible for how this system works and they both contribute copiously to maintaining this system... but ask which one is violating trust, being hypocritical, behaving in an evil manner, etc... and the answer is pretty clear.
Which of these entities should be jailed? Which of these entities can be jailed? Which one is violating the spirit and/or letter of their oaths or charters?
All that said, corporations and humans playing shell games with taxation will continue until a major overhaul of the tax system... this is much more complicated than the summary or even TFA can get into. Much more glaring examples of corporate & politician cooperation to exploit or damage the people abound. Were the people of the US threatened in any way, shape, or form by Iraq? Then who actually benefited by the US invasion? Are the people of the US threatened in any way, shape, or form by copyright terms not being extended? Then who actually benefited by each retroactive extension and all of the additional laws and treaties?
So the Ninth Circuit court says it is perfectly okay to place the item without a warrant... Anyone have a citation of law or precedent that "you don't automatically own things that others have stuck to your property and left, without informing you?" If someone vandalizes your car by placing a sticker on it, regardless of that person's job, that sticker belongs to you. You can remove it, add crap to it, destroy it, or peel it off carefully and sell it on ebay. The same should apply to magnetic items, lest everyone get stuck with a Jesus Fish that the vandal can demand back.
Placing it without warrant is unethical; demanding it back is more unethical, and another matter entirely.
And that would have been an excellent premise for rebooting an '80s cartoon franchise into live action films. Alas, it's too complicated or something, so no plot at all was chosen instead.
We are all too busy trying to figure out how and why we are all getting obese and getting diabetes to concern ourselves with where the government and big business is taking our country.
Corn subsidy making a nearly "free" sweetener additive for nearly all food products and the trend of suburban sprawl, together. But the question being answered doesn't actually move people forward towards recognizing the police state bullshit... there's still Dancing with the Jersey Superheroes to watch or something.
When I first read the news a couple years ago about the first produced memristers, I was thrilled... and a little frightened. I did not expect actual AI to happen in my lifetime. The description of memristers is very well aligned with the functional description of a neuron. Given how we pack zillions of transistors into cheap, commodity hardware, this discovery will lead to a whole different level and type of computing... and even life,... itself! I sound like a hyperbole-prone Dr. Frankenfurter on crack here, but I'm quite serious.
And for each phone, I used the FM receiver exactly once, when I was trying out all the features, and never again. Because I stopped listening to radio about 15 years ago. ClearChannel, the RIAA, etc... turned it into worse crap than it already was, and the MP3 revolution (which they so vigorously fought; remember them trying to stop the Diamond Rio from being released?) made life better for "consumers" all the way around. The only genres of music I listen to lately are ones that have no dedicated channels, and only have drive-time shows in 2 or 3 major US cities. And advertisements are infuriating to listen to.
Frankly the only FM feature I've used more than once on my phones has been the FM transmitter in my last couple of phones when I've had a rental car and wanted to pipe in acceptable music.
I love having the do-everything sorts of phones that have emerged. I'm now at the point that I require a decent camera, a voice recorder, a mini web browser, an email client, a GPS, an MP3 player, a timer, a flashlight, a calculator, an address book, a calendar, etc... all in one device, and my last few phones have met those needs. The FM receivers were not a requirement... just a "oh, that's nice too, I guess," feature.
His "series of tubes" diatribe was funny, highly entertaining stuff in and of itself. If he was a late night comedian, I doubt many if any slashdotters would be venting "good riddance" at this man's death. But the context of his series of tubes diatribe was something else. He was making law, law applicable to an arena most slashdotters hold dear, and he demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter, while demonstrating that he was supporting a position he was paid to support, without regard of how that would impact the People. That made him more than a silly old man... that put him in a very dishonorable position.
Personally, I think that paled in comparison to his behavior during the hearings on record high gas prices, where he nastily shot down colleagues who wanted the record-profit-making oil company executives to be under oath. You can find the written quotes (near end of article) easily enough, but if you can find video, you will see that his attitude indicated he was firmly siding with those executives over any public interest, before the hearings even began.
This man occupied a job "for the people" while feeling far more beholden to his corporate sponsors. It was obvious from so many incidents in which he was involved... from his own words and deeds, let alone his funding. I'm not thrilled at his death, but I certainly don't lament it. I'm not thrilled because he was just one obvious example, in a system that entirely favors and rewards the kind of misdeeds he performed. That system is still in place. Those hating the player are only behaving shamefully if they're failing to hate the game in this case. Those in the wrong are those who think Stevens was especially bad in any way other than getting his behavior more airtime in the media (because he was funny about it). I only wish all senators, etc... were as entertaining, so that more of their behavior would be spotlighted in the same way.
... and I'd like to know where you got it, because I would also like a DVD player that does what I want.
MPlayer plus downloaded torrents of films does exactly what I want. Here's the related Info Graphic.
The MPAA would like to decide what kind of equipment you may and may not purchase, and how that equipment will and will not operate in your home. I've decided I do not support their business model, nor the distortions in the concept of copyright that they purchased.
All that said, check out the Apex brand. My first DVD player purchase was their AD-600A, with its "You should not be here" titled menu in which you could switch regions and turn off Macrovision. Back then, I got my info about acceptable DVD players from Nerd Out, which cataloged which brands and models had secret, owner empowering features.
The debates on who has better evidence, which makes more sense, etc... have been rehashed over and over in this science-disabled country, and without foundational logic, people go with their emotions, more often than not, on both sides of this issue!
Here's the real test, the real question that can easily show which should be taught in school, in a science class, etc... for nearly any topic, not just evolution:
What can you do with what you've learned?
If children spend time learning "God did it. The end." as the answers regarding how this world works, what can they do with that "learning?" Meanwhile, people who learned of evolution, how DNA actually works, genotypes, phenotypes, the work of the monk Gregor Mendel... what can they do with what they learned? We already see it. Genetic engineering is very real, it works, it's involved in many of the products in our grocery stores. Animal husbandry, going back thousands of years was a prior step. Selective breeding of plants and animals betrayed an understanding, although not thorough, that traits change over generations, based on how breeding worked out. If a person is taught, and actually believes, that that observed and heavily used mechanism doesn't exist, didn't happen, doesn't work, and that a deity did everything contrary to any such observations, what is that person going to successfully do in these fields?
The best part of all of this, is that this sort of damage is often seen in rural areas, where scientific thought is not as prevalent... but a large percentage of dwellers in rural areas are involved in farming, which is a great show of humans making use of and manipulating the mechanics of evolution. So while their children learn to deny those mechanics, a child from a more advanced civilization, elsewhere, learns genetic engineering, gets employed by Monsanto or some such, and ends up profiting greatly in deals where terms are dictated to farmers, and farmers are sued for raising crops that received cross pollination from nearby "intellectual property" protected crops, etc... The outcome here is, in a darkly humorous way, analogous to Evolution of the Species by Natural Selection.
Why assume more heroin addicts? Cigarettes are legal, but the userbase is shrinking. An effective education campaign and regulations on advertising would be much easier to enact for a "new" legal industry when not having to fight against lobbying from an entrenched well-monied industry alliance.
And we don't have all the incidental crime around cigarettes that we do around banned drugs. As for the people who choose to use them? When did you last hear of someone committing violence whilst high on heroin? However, when did you last hear of violence committed by those involved in the heroin trade, or in the suppression of the heroin trade? And it goes way beyond obvious "drug war" activity in US cities. Consider the ongoing death toll, and the US tax dollar toll, in Afghanistan and all around the world where "US interests" concerning the drug trade is violently enforced and violently responded to by those involved in production and distribution. Money and lives wasted, continuously, forever. Much more violence and actual crime than you could expect, even if the heroin userbase increased dramatically, which it likely would not.
Visit or read about cities where the government is less concerned with "vice" and prohibition and more concerned with infrastructure, and see if there is more or less violence, more or less of the kind of problems that would impact your life negatively... Then visit or read about Juarez, Mexico and the Texas border towns in that region. Do the users of any drug you can think of cause that kind of problem because of the drug itself?
You do understand that net effect would be more people killed by both groups as there will be more heroin addicts?
Reconsider your assumptions about net effects. We are witnessing, all the time, in the news, the net effects of these drugs being banned, and the body count is pretty high.
I understand where you're going with that. However, few of the banned drugs are patentable... so think acetaminophen instead of the corporate drug-of-the-week. And the government is so heavily invested in the "war" that they certainly wouldn't blink at setting up some heavy regulations towards purity, labeling, advertising laws, etc....
And finally, alcohol. Alcohol is a problem. Banning alcohol was much more of a problem. Corporations are presently very involved in alcohol. They're also heavily involved in acetaminophen. I'd rather have them involved in some processes than my next door neighbor (like acetaminophen or meth), and on the others, like alcohol or marijuana, I can't see an issue either way.
A lot more people get injured or killed by people on alcohol than by people on heroin. I'm okay with beer at my local grocer... if they sell heroin there, how can I be less okay with it? Back before the "drug war" insanity, they did sell it at the local grocer! And they taxed it!:-)
I'll tell you, as a non-drug user (besides caffeine and rare alcohol), that the War on Drugs itself is at fault for such misconceptions. You see, I've known people who habitually and recreationally use various banned substances. As a result, I knew that most of the government messages regarding drugs were complete fabrications. Not familiar or interested in the specifics, I treated all of this information as suspect. Only after talking to an experienced drug user did I discover that "yeah, meth is really bad, dangerous, addictive, and horrible." When the government message and the War on Drugs treats things like marijuana as something significantly scary, evil, dangerous, etc... compared to tobacco and alcohol, they do a disservice to everyone. When someone obtaining a recreational substance less dangerous than alcohol also has the opportunity to buy much more dangerous things, and has the same "information" about them, that's where the whole "gateway drug" problem comes in.
My take: put all of it on store shelves and provide real actual data about the stuff being sold. Those who want to kill themselves on meth are people who will cause problems anyway... at least under that situation they won't burn down an apartment complex manufacturing it, or rob houses to pay for a habit no more costly than Night Train.
Make them legally equal, but informationally distinguished, as opposed to the current, more dangerous reversed situation. And this just applies to one benefit...eliminating a ton of violent crime, property crime, and wasted tax dollars would be mere side effects.
All the morally reprehensible things done by the Taliban made me sick... made me wish we'd use our military might to remove them from power, back in the late 1990s when I read about them. But our government doesn't make its military decisions that way. The US invaded/liberated Afghanistan for all sorts of reasons, but the horrible shit perpetrated on the people by the theocracy was not one of those reasons. And then, without finishing the damn job, our government concocts an excuse to go play in Iraq. To liberate the one mostly secular nation in the neighborhood from the one guy who could keep animalistic Sunni/Shiite violence at bay with his even stronger threat of brutality. And the Taliban regained a foothold, retook parts of Afghanistan, killed and maimed more innocent people for doing things like letting girls go to school because they had the idiotic idea that they could resume having a civil culture now that the US ousted the Taliban... but our government had to get distracted. Our administration had to work the re-election angles. Our large military industrial contractors needed another country's wrecked infrastructure to rebuild. And so the Taliban are back. And the Taliban have spread. And when the US military leaves the region, the Taliban will control more than they did before the US military got involved. Heck of a job.
Do not make the mistake of thinking the US military is ever deployed for reasons of morality, or justice, or freedom, or any such ideal. Those are ideals held by humans (and not enough of them). Governments, organized religions, corporations, etc... have different motivational structures, different needs, different everything.
The Zipit Z2 is easy to flash with Linux, has a MiniSD slot for additional storage, built in Wifi, Querty backlit keyboard, 320x240 screen, 312MHz ARM chip.
People making custom distros for it have already managed to cover all aspects of the machine's hardware... lid switch, backlight adjustments, etc... I bought mine on clearance at Target in October, and it's an adequate pocket Linux box for me while I wait for my Pandora. Here's a sampling of what people are doing with it:
Funny thing is, it's more like a parent of the DeLorean... When John Z DeLorean was originally forming up the idea, he was calling it the DSV, DeLorean Safety Vehicle. Second batch of scans on this page: http://www.entermyworld.com/history/delorean-documents
Funny enough, I did buy it in college (and Broodwar), but over the years, downloaded and installed pirated versions with NoCD cracks (until the patch that allowed NoCD) many many more times than I installed from the original media, due to convenience. It was often easier to just re-download the ISOs than to dig through my boxes of CDs. And a couple years ago, I bought the Starcraft Battlechest version because I couldn't find my old original SC keys and had been using generated ones so long, while wanting to play around on Battle.net and to get ready for SCII.
The SCII beta looks beautiful, and is already playable offline with modifications, sans any form of authentication. I will buy the game after release, if the patches make it less onerous. I'm extremely unimpressed with the removal of LAN play. I paid twice for the full-featured original, despite one annoying form of DRM (CD in drive), but this must-talk-through-server-to-ruin-first-sale-doctrine thing is a violation of the nature of copyright. I feel no need to respect copyright in cases where the publisher disrespects copyright to begin with. Like a poster said above, and like I've said in the past... DRM invalidates copyright, because it nearly eliminates any chance of the work going public domain after the limited copyright term... that and purchased laws extending copyright terms to the point that they're now effectively limitless.
The PTC is an indecent group. To abuse a Twain quote, these people really do want to outlaw steak because babies can't chew it. It's even worse though... Their aim is to turn every television show into saccharin, content-less, right-wing Abrahamic-style "morality" approved, child-oriented programming, without exception. These are the same people who performed an automated letter writing campaign thing when Janet Jackson's nipple threatened to destroy the very fabric of society, thereby getting the massive increase in FCC "obscenity" fines a few years back.
On further thought, the steak and babies analogy actually fails with these people... after all, a nipple is one of the very first things a baby should see.
You suggest that with great, game-changing, new technology, innovation and advancement will crumble because that new technology won't be compatible with lame, ancient economic models? Perhaps, on the road to sci-fi level, awesome technology, there will also be some nice developments in the world of economics too.
Slashdot Mirror
Joke's on the MPAA et al... a lot of us stopped giving you any of our money through that channel (if not completely) quite some time ago. Also, have they seen how well the TSA nonsense has benefited the airlines' incomes? Guess what? People have less need/desire to watch their movies than to travel. I applaud this measure of aiming squarely and carefully at their own feet and firing.
Due to some butterfly effect fallout from Marty McFly's adventures in 1955, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, on September 1, 1979, decided to make the maximum speedometer reading 85 mph, instead of the 95 mph maximum from the original timeline, in which Doc Brown purchased the DeLorean.
As a kid, I wondered why they didn't just get gasoline from the stored-in-a-cave DeLorean. I don't wonder any more though. Any DeLorean owner will tell you, don't leave the car sitting with the same gasoline more than six months, especially without a fuel stabilizer. I doubt the Hill Valley General Store stocked Sta-bil in 1885, so I'm guessing Doc Brown drained it.
Although this has been used in stand-up comedic routines to great effect, George and Lorraine probably wouldn't fight about Marty being possibly fathered by Calvin Klein, due to the fact that he's the youngest of their three children, and his conception and birth occur long after George and Lorraine last saw Calvin's face.
Or another few days of the Drug War... or the Iraq War... or the Afghanistan War... or...
At least Google's expenditures generally benefit us as a side effect of their pursuit of profit. For every tax dollar paving roads and educating youth, how many more are spent in ways completely detrimental to the population?
Corporations, by design, are a kind of entity who's life revolves around money. Not oxygen, food, trust, family, joy, good, or evil. Just money. They are designed to maximize shareholder value, period.
Periodically, people of the "free" countries elect representatives to office. These elected humans take various oaths to represent those humans who elected them, and to do "good" for such human people.
The corporations and the politicians are both quite responsible for how this system works and they both contribute copiously to maintaining this system... but ask which one is violating trust, being hypocritical, behaving in an evil manner, etc... and the answer is pretty clear.
Which of these entities should be jailed? Which of these entities can be jailed? Which one is violating the spirit and/or letter of their oaths or charters?
All that said, corporations and humans playing shell games with taxation will continue until a major overhaul of the tax system... this is much more complicated than the summary or even TFA can get into. Much more glaring examples of corporate & politician cooperation to exploit or damage the people abound. Were the people of the US threatened in any way, shape, or form by Iraq? Then who actually benefited by the US invasion? Are the people of the US threatened in any way, shape, or form by copyright terms not being extended? Then who actually benefited by each retroactive extension and all of the additional laws and treaties?
So the Ninth Circuit court says it is perfectly okay to place the item without a warrant... Anyone have a citation of law or precedent that "you don't automatically own things that others have stuck to your property and left, without informing you?" If someone vandalizes your car by placing a sticker on it, regardless of that person's job, that sticker belongs to you. You can remove it, add crap to it, destroy it, or peel it off carefully and sell it on ebay. The same should apply to magnetic items, lest everyone get stuck with a Jesus Fish that the vandal can demand back.
Placing it without warrant is unethical; demanding it back is more unethical, and another matter entirely.
And that would have been an excellent premise for rebooting an '80s cartoon franchise into live action films. Alas, it's too complicated or something, so no plot at all was chosen instead.
After reading more, I realize this is an actual tragic death. The first couple times I saw the headline, I thought it was certainly an Onion article.
Corn subsidy making a nearly "free" sweetener additive for nearly all food products and the trend of suburban sprawl, together. But the question being answered doesn't actually move people forward towards recognizing the police state bullshit... there's still Dancing with the Jersey Superheroes to watch or something.
When I first read the news a couple years ago about the first produced memristers, I was thrilled... and a little frightened. I did not expect actual AI to happen in my lifetime. The description of memristers is very well aligned with the functional description of a neuron. Given how we pack zillions of transistors into cheap, commodity hardware, this discovery will lead to a whole different level and type of computing... and even life, ... itself! I sound like a hyperbole-prone Dr. Frankenfurter on crack here, but I'm quite serious.
And for each phone, I used the FM receiver exactly once, when I was trying out all the features, and never again. Because I stopped listening to radio about 15 years ago. ClearChannel, the RIAA, etc... turned it into worse crap than it already was, and the MP3 revolution (which they so vigorously fought; remember them trying to stop the Diamond Rio from being released?) made life better for "consumers" all the way around. The only genres of music I listen to lately are ones that have no dedicated channels, and only have drive-time shows in 2 or 3 major US cities. And advertisements are infuriating to listen to.
Frankly the only FM feature I've used more than once on my phones has been the FM transmitter in my last couple of phones when I've had a rental car and wanted to pipe in acceptable music.
I love having the do-everything sorts of phones that have emerged. I'm now at the point that I require a decent camera, a voice recorder, a mini web browser, an email client, a GPS, an MP3 player, a timer, a flashlight, a calculator, an address book, a calendar, etc... all in one device, and my last few phones have met those needs. The FM receivers were not a requirement... just a "oh, that's nice too, I guess," feature.
His "series of tubes" diatribe was funny, highly entertaining stuff in and of itself. If he was a late night comedian, I doubt many if any slashdotters would be venting "good riddance" at this man's death. But the context of his series of tubes diatribe was something else. He was making law, law applicable to an arena most slashdotters hold dear, and he demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter, while demonstrating that he was supporting a position he was paid to support, without regard of how that would impact the People. That made him more than a silly old man... that put him in a very dishonorable position.
Personally, I think that paled in comparison to his behavior during the hearings on record high gas prices, where he nastily shot down colleagues who wanted the record-profit-making oil company executives to be under oath. You can find the written quotes (near end of article) easily enough, but if you can find video, you will see that his attitude indicated he was firmly siding with those executives over any public interest, before the hearings even began.
This man occupied a job "for the people" while feeling far more beholden to his corporate sponsors. It was obvious from so many incidents in which he was involved... from his own words and deeds, let alone his funding. I'm not thrilled at his death, but I certainly don't lament it. I'm not thrilled because he was just one obvious example, in a system that entirely favors and rewards the kind of misdeeds he performed. That system is still in place. Those hating the player are only behaving shamefully if they're failing to hate the game in this case. Those in the wrong are those who think Stevens was especially bad in any way other than getting his behavior more airtime in the media (because he was funny about it). I only wish all senators, etc... were as entertaining, so that more of their behavior would be spotlighted in the same way.
MPlayer plus downloaded torrents of films does exactly what I want. Here's the related Info Graphic.
The MPAA would like to decide what kind of equipment you may and may not purchase, and how that equipment will and will not operate in your home. I've decided I do not support their business model, nor the distortions in the concept of copyright that they purchased.
All that said, check out the Apex brand. My first DVD player purchase was their AD-600A, with its "You should not be here" titled menu in which you could switch regions and turn off Macrovision. Back then, I got my info about acceptable DVD players from Nerd Out, which cataloged which brands and models had secret, owner empowering features.
The debates on who has better evidence, which makes more sense, etc... have been rehashed over and over in this science-disabled country, and without foundational logic, people go with their emotions, more often than not, on both sides of this issue!
Here's the real test, the real question that can easily show which should be taught in school, in a science class, etc... for nearly any topic, not just evolution:
What can you do with what you've learned?
If children spend time learning "God did it. The end." as the answers regarding how this world works, what can they do with that "learning?" Meanwhile, people who learned of evolution, how DNA actually works, genotypes, phenotypes, the work of the monk Gregor Mendel... what can they do with what they learned? We already see it. Genetic engineering is very real, it works, it's involved in many of the products in our grocery stores. Animal husbandry, going back thousands of years was a prior step. Selective breeding of plants and animals betrayed an understanding, although not thorough, that traits change over generations, based on how breeding worked out. If a person is taught, and actually believes, that that observed and heavily used mechanism doesn't exist, didn't happen, doesn't work, and that a deity did everything contrary to any such observations, what is that person going to successfully do in these fields?
The best part of all of this, is that this sort of damage is often seen in rural areas, where scientific thought is not as prevalent... but a large percentage of dwellers in rural areas are involved in farming, which is a great show of humans making use of and manipulating the mechanics of evolution. So while their children learn to deny those mechanics, a child from a more advanced civilization, elsewhere, learns genetic engineering, gets employed by Monsanto or some such, and ends up profiting greatly in deals where terms are dictated to farmers, and farmers are sued for raising crops that received cross pollination from nearby "intellectual property" protected crops, etc... The outcome here is, in a darkly humorous way, analogous to Evolution of the Species by Natural Selection.
Why assume more heroin addicts? Cigarettes are legal, but the userbase is shrinking. An effective education campaign and regulations on advertising would be much easier to enact for a "new" legal industry when not having to fight against lobbying from an entrenched well-monied industry alliance.
And we don't have all the incidental crime around cigarettes that we do around banned drugs. As for the people who choose to use them? When did you last hear of someone committing violence whilst high on heroin? However, when did you last hear of violence committed by those involved in the heroin trade, or in the suppression of the heroin trade? And it goes way beyond obvious "drug war" activity in US cities. Consider the ongoing death toll, and the US tax dollar toll, in Afghanistan and all around the world where "US interests" concerning the drug trade is violently enforced and violently responded to by those involved in production and distribution. Money and lives wasted, continuously, forever. Much more violence and actual crime than you could expect, even if the heroin userbase increased dramatically, which it likely would not.
Visit or read about cities where the government is less concerned with "vice" and prohibition and more concerned with infrastructure, and see if there is more or less violence, more or less of the kind of problems that would impact your life negatively... Then visit or read about Juarez, Mexico and the Texas border towns in that region. Do the users of any drug you can think of cause that kind of problem because of the drug itself?
Reconsider your assumptions about net effects. We are witnessing, all the time, in the news, the net effects of these drugs being banned, and the body count is pretty high.
I understand where you're going with that. However, few of the banned drugs are patentable... so think acetaminophen instead of the corporate drug-of-the-week. And the government is so heavily invested in the "war" that they certainly wouldn't blink at setting up some heavy regulations towards purity, labeling, advertising laws, etc....
And finally, alcohol. Alcohol is a problem. Banning alcohol was much more of a problem. Corporations are presently very involved in alcohol. They're also heavily involved in acetaminophen. I'd rather have them involved in some processes than my next door neighbor (like acetaminophen or meth), and on the others, like alcohol or marijuana, I can't see an issue either way.
A lot more people get injured or killed by people on alcohol than by people on heroin. I'm okay with beer at my local grocer... if they sell heroin there, how can I be less okay with it? Back before the "drug war" insanity, they did sell it at the local grocer! And they taxed it! :-)
I'll tell you, as a non-drug user (besides caffeine and rare alcohol), that the War on Drugs itself is at fault for such misconceptions. You see, I've known people who habitually and recreationally use various banned substances. As a result, I knew that most of the government messages regarding drugs were complete fabrications. Not familiar or interested in the specifics, I treated all of this information as suspect. Only after talking to an experienced drug user did I discover that "yeah, meth is really bad, dangerous, addictive, and horrible." When the government message and the War on Drugs treats things like marijuana as something significantly scary, evil, dangerous, etc... compared to tobacco and alcohol, they do a disservice to everyone. When someone obtaining a recreational substance less dangerous than alcohol also has the opportunity to buy much more dangerous things, and has the same "information" about them, that's where the whole "gateway drug" problem comes in.
My take: put all of it on store shelves and provide real actual data about the stuff being sold. Those who want to kill themselves on meth are people who will cause problems anyway... at least under that situation they won't burn down an apartment complex manufacturing it, or rob houses to pay for a habit no more costly than Night Train.
Make them legally equal, but informationally distinguished, as opposed to the current, more dangerous reversed situation. And this just applies to one benefit...eliminating a ton of violent crime, property crime, and wasted tax dollars would be mere side effects.
All the morally reprehensible things done by the Taliban made me sick... made me wish we'd use our military might to remove them from power, back in the late 1990s when I read about them. But our government doesn't make its military decisions that way. The US invaded/liberated Afghanistan for all sorts of reasons, but the horrible shit perpetrated on the people by the theocracy was not one of those reasons. And then, without finishing the damn job, our government concocts an excuse to go play in Iraq. To liberate the one mostly secular nation in the neighborhood from the one guy who could keep animalistic Sunni/Shiite violence at bay with his even stronger threat of brutality. And the Taliban regained a foothold, retook parts of Afghanistan, killed and maimed more innocent people for doing things like letting girls go to school because they had the idiotic idea that they could resume having a civil culture now that the US ousted the Taliban... but our government had to get distracted. Our administration had to work the re-election angles. Our large military industrial contractors needed another country's wrecked infrastructure to rebuild. And so the Taliban are back. And the Taliban have spread. And when the US military leaves the region, the Taliban will control more than they did before the US military got involved. Heck of a job.
Do not make the mistake of thinking the US military is ever deployed for reasons of morality, or justice, or freedom, or any such ideal. Those are ideals held by humans (and not enough of them). Governments, organized religions, corporations, etc... have different motivational structures, different needs, different everything.
The Zipit Z2 is easy to flash with Linux, has a MiniSD slot for additional storage, built in Wifi, Querty backlit keyboard, 320x240 screen, 312MHz ARM chip.
People making custom distros for it have already managed to cover all aspects of the machine's hardware... lid switch, backlight adjustments, etc... I bought mine on clearance at Target in October, and it's an adequate pocket Linux box for me while I wait for my Pandora. Here's a sampling of what people are doing with it:
http://zipit.rootnexus.org/
http://hunterdavis.com/archives/category/zipit-hacking
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/zipit-z2-hacking-userland-side-track
http://www.karosium.com/2009/07/zipit2-clock-email-twitter-monitor.html
http://www.openzipit.org/
http://www.hak5.org/?s=zipit&x=0&y=0
Funny thing is, it's more like a parent of the DeLorean... When John Z DeLorean was originally forming up the idea, he was calling it the DSV, DeLorean Safety Vehicle. Second batch of scans on this page: http://www.entermyworld.com/history/delorean-documents
Funny enough, I did buy it in college (and Broodwar), but over the years, downloaded and installed pirated versions with NoCD cracks (until the patch that allowed NoCD) many many more times than I installed from the original media, due to convenience. It was often easier to just re-download the ISOs than to dig through my boxes of CDs. And a couple years ago, I bought the Starcraft Battlechest version because I couldn't find my old original SC keys and had been using generated ones so long, while wanting to play around on Battle.net and to get ready for SCII.
The SCII beta looks beautiful, and is already playable offline with modifications, sans any form of authentication. I will buy the game after release, if the patches make it less onerous. I'm extremely unimpressed with the removal of LAN play. I paid twice for the full-featured original, despite one annoying form of DRM (CD in drive), but this must-talk-through-server-to-ruin-first-sale-doctrine thing is a violation of the nature of copyright. I feel no need to respect copyright in cases where the publisher disrespects copyright to begin with. Like a poster said above, and like I've said in the past... DRM invalidates copyright, because it nearly eliminates any chance of the work going public domain after the limited copyright term... that and purchased laws extending copyright terms to the point that they're now effectively limitless.
The PTC is an indecent group. To abuse a Twain quote, these people really do want to outlaw steak because babies can't chew it. It's even worse though... Their aim is to turn every television show into saccharin, content-less, right-wing Abrahamic-style "morality" approved, child-oriented programming, without exception. These are the same people who performed an automated letter writing campaign thing when Janet Jackson's nipple threatened to destroy the very fabric of society, thereby getting the massive increase in FCC "obscenity" fines a few years back.
On further thought, the steak and babies analogy actually fails with these people... after all, a nipple is one of the very first things a baby should see.
You suggest that with great, game-changing, new technology, innovation and advancement will crumble because that new technology won't be compatible with lame, ancient economic models? Perhaps, on the road to sci-fi level, awesome technology, there will also be some nice developments in the world of economics too.
What CAN'T the Sonic Screwdriver do?