I think the question is valid since we are dealing with large cartels. If the fee is small enough, there's nothing stopping (for example) Sony from using revenue generated by their "profitable" and "commercially viable" properties to fund the lockdown of their "out-of-print" properties.
Yet another problem caused by the inequality between large corporations and individuals. If the fee was large enough for Sony not to justify paying to lockdown their out-of-prints, then the average everyday layperson wouldn't be able to afford it for their own properties.
If you get caught being bad, the correct procedure is to not care.
If you get caught being bad, the correct procedure is to blame the person who caught you for interfering with your being bad, denounce them as unpatriotic, then continue being bad as if you had every right to do so.
Back on topic - What burns me the most about this is when the Plame affair was happening, Bush announced that he was going to make sure that the guilty party was properly punished. I guess in his world: the sky is green, the grass is blue, and "properly punished" really means "commuting sentence". Though I guess since Libby was really only Cheney's fall guy for Plamegate that he didn't deserve the punishment anyway, but still... What happened to keeping up appearances?
It seems like they are doing more blatantly illegal things every day, apparently just to prove that they can do it, get away with it, and do more illegal things tomorrow - safely locked behind a "citizens don't care" wall. How much longer are we going to continue this charade? When are we going to start caring in numbers large enough to make a difference?
Speaking of Global Warming: I would guess that the increase in lawsuit activity over the past 50-odd years might look similar to the Global Warming temperature curve over the same time period...
Can we stop Global Warming simply by getting all the lawyers to shut up...? What they spew is pretty close to methane...
Theft aside, how could this possibly inconvenience paying customers when it is done a single time while paying for it?
This process will be very similar to that used by stores to disable the security chip in the packaging.
The downside is it will have about the same rate of success. How many times have you walked out of a Best Buy or a Circuit City and had the alarm go off for an item that didn't have the security scan device disabled? How many times have you seen it happen to others? The difference here is that if the disable doesn't take, you won't know about it until you get home and open the package. And in the case of a DVD you don't plan to watch the minute you get home, you might not notice this until days, possibly even weeks later. Imagine what will happen if you try to take it back later to get it fixed? Oh - you threw out your receipt? You must have stolen this one, go pay for it (again) if you want it desensed...
The point of this law is for the RIAA to finally start building a coffin for aftermarket sales. Even though they got their profit from the first sale, they get zero profit from aftermarket sales. If they can't get the profit from every sale - even if it means double dipping on the same cd - then they feel that nobody should.
And the reason why we're just going to bend over and take it is the same reason why we're grabbing ankles for the DMCA: the politicians that make the laws were bought and paid for a long time ago and they aren't available for purchase in the aftermarket.
For right now they are still duly elected and answerable to the public.
When was the last time a politician of the USA asked the public what it wanted? I don't remember hearing of any time during this century...
Politicians used to poll their constituents on a regular basis to find out what we want our government to do. Now they sit back and wait for the lobbyists (legal bribers) to come tell them what the rich corporations want them to do - often against the wishes of their constituents. Their political party comes to them telling them how the "Party Line" will be voting in today's session and informing them of the consequences if they violate solidarity. And since 2000 the political back-biting from above paints them as heretics/terrorists for not supporting our new Führer.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - When we give up our freedoms to fight for them, we've already lost.
It might not be a darwin award candidate, but it's still a hefty dose of evolution fodder - a group of creatures that are too stupid to survive as a group will eventually die out. Texans (many of them anyway) are a special breed - they tend to kill each other quite often and are constantly finding new ways to do so. This is just the latest way they've found.
Unfortunately I had started to use WMP because most of the other programs are crap or I need four seperate ones to do everything WMP does.
I love hearing this attitude, though I can't for the life of me understand it. If you have a toolbox, do you only keep one tool in it? Or do you have several different tools, all of which are the best tools for some (each different) specific task?
I would love to only ever need a hammer, but I sometimes find a screwdriver is much better for certain jobs. Trust me, this is from experience. I grew up with several carpenters in my family and I grew up to be a computer engineer...:)
Does that mean I should use a mediocre tool just because it handles all my A/V computer needs? Or would I be better off purposely making a decision to get the best tool possible for each task? X player for playing audio, Y player for playing video, Z ripper for importing DVD's, etc. Maybe the problem is that I care about making sure my A/V needs are the best they can be, but the only reason why I even have WMP on my machine is so the codecs can be used by my other players.
It strikes me as funny, many people I know who make a distinct choice to get seperate tools for one group of tasks (like woodwork, model planes, electronics, or car repair) see absolutely nothing wrong with using only one tool for all their computer A/V needs - just because it does all their needs - even though it pretty much sucks large and hairy at most of them. These are the same people who think iTMS is better than buying a CD, so I guess they aren't thinking too much of their A/V experience...
- Hitler was never elected. He lost to Hindenberg in the 1932 elections. However, the Nazis won 37 percent of the vote and became the largest party in the Reichstag (parliament). To placate them, in January 1933 Hindenberg named Hitler Chancellor. In 1929 when the Weimar Government had collapsed, Hindenberg had invoked emergency powers for the Chancellor and cabinet, so this made Hitler effectively head of government. By February the Reichstag had burned and the Nazis had used it as an excuse to gain police state powers and give Hitler the power to make laws without the parliament. If you are going to learn the lessons of history, first you have to get the history correct.
I know - never bite the AC's hook. But this does bring up an excellent point.
Hitler may not have been truly elected, but he rose to power anyway despite (or rather because) of those election results. Does this mean any possible lessons from this are unjustified just because he wasn't really elected? I don't think so. In this case, how the person got to power is far less important than what they did once they got it, and this should not cause us to ignore such a situation now that it's happening again. To do so would be extremely foolish.
So I was wrong about Hitler getting elected - it still doesn't change the validity of my argument. Besides, last I heard there was still some debate as to whether bush was truly elected or not, so this difference may be even less critical. We shouldn't trust our leaders (whether elected or not) when they blatently abuse their power to keep it. Wasn't that one of the lessons we were trying to teach the world when we invaded Iraq to go after Saddam? Funny little world, isn't it?
Sorry, that's what I get for thinking the quote was in context, which was in a reply to a post claiming that people think the 2008 elections will be indefinitely postponed. Silly me. Of course the repubs wouldn't try to postpone the 2004 election, since they already had that one in the bag and didn't have to worry about such things until the end of our tyrant's second term.
Remember - Hitler was elected before he stopped holding elections, and many of his other techniques are in use today. Using fear to keep us in line, claiming we are always minutes away from being attacked. Casting political opponents and outspoken citizens as being unpatriotic simply because they disagree. Starting wars under false pretense to keep the military growing at a rate that is able to sustain a police state. I especially like how Bush used the word "Nazi" this past friday as a general term to describe people who are fighting him in congress. I've never seen a blacker pot or kettle. Hermann Göring has a famous quote citing the best way to steal and hold political power - it's a good read, and every single thing in it is currently being done by the Bush administration. Are we going to learn from history before it becomes too late to do anything about it?
- she said. "No one is thinking of postponing the elections."
Always remember, there is a difference between thinking and doing. And since we have a sitting president who isn't allowed to think on his own... you do the math.
Since I'm expected to wait, that delay implies that the telemarketer's time is worth much more than mine. On a whim, I actually waited once - almost 5 minutes - before ripping the telemarketer a new one over ignoring the DNC list. It's bad enough I get put on hold when I'm calling someone, so it's really quite insulting to be put on hold (without asking) by someone who's calling me to ask for money or tell me who I should vote for.
I also can't believe they think they'll sell something after potentially insulting the customer. If nothing else, the dead-air-delay will guarantee I won't sign up for whatever anal raping they happen to be selling.
- What I'm getting at is I'm afraid that lot of inventions will be deemed "obvious" in hindsight when in fact it was quite original.
Which is quite true, but not the intended situation from the article. How many patents have been awarded to companies that were only reworded versions of ideas that have already been in use for years in the intended market? How many such stories do we see here on/.?
The impact on OSS is that someone could find a truly innovative idea, put it into use in a "free" product, but not have the resources necessary (the product is "free" - no money made as profit) to apply for a patent of it. I don't know how much a patent costs, but since lawyers are involved I assume it must be at least 1/4 of a shitload. Anyway - some company taking advantage of the "free" OSS product notices the truly innovative idea, assumes it wasn't patented, files their own patent - rewording as necessary in case their assumption was wrong, gets awarded the patent anyway, then sues the original programmer and every offshoot project on Sourceforge for stealing their "obvious" idea.
Now we are faced with the problem of getting a judge and 12 potentially non-technical people to notice the "obvious" sequence of events as being in the wrong order. And that's only if the original programmer can afford the lawyer to defend himself, otherwise it's settlement city. How many times has a patent been overturned because the patentholder sued somebody? I honestly don't know, but from the number of stories we complain about here that don't I'm guessing it can't be many.
The end result is that people involved in OSS will be less likely to want to create truly innovative ideas. Innovation will most definitely slow down simply because there will be less people who actually try.
Other False Positives: I've heard tales of people buying legitimate PC's from big name vendors (like Packard-Dell) with legitimate licenses. WGA runs fine for a couple of weeks, then starts claiming the OS is pirated. The PC has a license key sticker on it and the license key matches the one in the OS. Theoretically, Packard-Dell is getting these stickers from Microsoft. Is Microsoft sending sheets with duplicate license keys (ie: VLK's) to Packard-Dell for distribution to customers? Is Packard-Dell now a distributor of pirated versions of XP?
- The users of these XP versions are your false negatives.
Other False Negatives: How about from the referenced article? The person testing WGA used a key that had been posted on a site for around 2 years. While it may be a VLK, it's certainly not from a 0-day, slipstreamed, pre-keyed, custom WinXP disc via a torrent. Microsoft had ample opportunity to search for pirated keys before implementing WGA, and it stands to reason that they would have had tens (if not hundreds) of employees combing the net for them. Yet an easily findable key in a list of 5 keys on a two year old web page was skipped from their blacklist?
Basically - Micro$oft screwed the pooch big time on the implementation of WGA. I have a legitimate key on my XP box, but I refuse to allow WGA on it because it's nothing more than a protection racket.
- First, Bush can not even run for re-election again as he is already serving his second term. In the US, presidents for about the past 60 years have been limited to 2 terms by the US Constitution.
I'm not trying to start an argument with this response, but this statement reminded me of something I heard a couple months ago: Bush's cronies have a proposal already drummed up to repeal the 22nd amendment and have been trying to get congress to grease it up and push it through for a couple of years now.
- The key is that those fat, lazy, apathetic people who, like you apparently, don't feel their vote count, get up and vote out the incumbents.
Just because I feel my vote is being ignored doesn't mean I don't vote. I do vote. Every election. And when I vote this fall, I will doing my damnedest to help unseat Santorum - just like you (you didn't say how you'd be voting, but we can all hope).
We live in a society where we are told from early childhood that "Every Vote Counts", yet we have a presidential election system that actually allows a candidate with less than the majority vote to take office. No matter what happened in Florida in 2000, there were over 200,000 votes from other states that were effectively ignored by the Electoral College. In fact, the state representatives in the Electoral College aren't even required to delegate their points the same way as their state did - they can give the election to one candidate even if the regular votes were 100% for the opposition!.
We have an election system which allows the newly elected to skew voter districts in their favor so they can keep being elected no matter what the populace really thinks. Representatives can be shuffled around after election day such that they can represent a group of citizens that didn't vote for them or possibly get voted out next time because of party influence.
And we have a governmental body that is working very hard to keep a dishonest election system intact so they can continue to keep power. Voting out the incumbents will never change this system until all of the incumbents get unseated at once. If a few get voted out the ones left chalk it up to standard deviation and continue going about ruining our lives. If every incumbent lost their job all at once they won't be able to explain it away so easily. However, only 1/3 max of our reps can be voted out at a time, so I'd be willing to bet the next group will continue trying to ruin our lives the same way.
That is why I feel like my vote isn't important - but it doesn't stop me from trying anyway.
- If you don't like how the laws are written, that's fine, then lobby to get them changed.
I'm sorry - I seem to be missing the millions of dollars necessary to hire someone to bribe a politician and get a bad law changed. Regular people simply don't have this option available.
Someone else said that we have this thing called 'voting'. I am honestly wondering when the last time was that voting actually mattered in the US. Every election we get the same rhetoric, shoveled in, then shoveled out. If the office changes residents, the new guy continues the job exactly like the old guy because he/she/it is afraid to change the status quo or to upset their party line. Voting doesn't change shit, it only changes the shovel.
- The way I see it, the congress is worried about the billions of Dollars that's sipping out of the country.
That's exactly it. From the blurb...
- "While online gambling companies generate half their sales from U.S. gamblers, the industry is operated almost completely by companies beyond the reach of U.S. regulators."
This is the entire problem. The online gambling companies aren't taxable. The real goal of this regulation is to get the industry to start begging to be taxed by the US just so they can continue that half of their own revenue stream.
Which is why the xxAA are only suing people who don't have enough money to properly fight back in a real court of law. Suing thousands of people who can't afford to fight for infringement of an unconstitutional law is a profit point. Suing people who can afford to fight back long enough to get a court high enough to do something about the unconstitutional law would stop those incremental profits.
I hope I didn't come across with any attitude in my reply, so I apologize if it came off that way. Having a degree in Computer Engineering, I am (unfortunately) very aware that even the simplest electronic/electric circuit can go bad - especially from age and use. Since most physics models choose to ignore it, wear-and-tear does not violate any law of physics that I know of.
What I was trying to show in my orig post is that I have a system that is in some ways similar to yours (multi-XP), and in other ways more complex (plus assorteds), and that it "just works" without special effort. I have actually had a hub go bad and seen the very same problems you're describing. The hub was about 5 years old and had been in near constant use since first plugged in. Logic tells me that if the software worked before the problem and the settings remained unchanged, then something must have changed outside of the software. After swapping NIC's and cables with no success replacing the hub fixed the problem. YMMV - just telling you what fixed a problem I had that was similar to yours.
- No, it is a 10mb/s HUB. When I said hub I meant HUB. The damn thing costs $40 new TODAY, and I have no clue why. (I bought it back in 1997 or so)
Your hub is from '97? Wow. Are you sure it's not a hub issue? You've swapped/replaced the hub to verify this?
My home network consists of: 1 XP desktop 1 XP desktop (wireless) 1 XP laptop (occasionally wireless) 1 98 desktop 1 linux desktop (acting as web server) 1 w2k desktop (acting as firewall/router - don't ask, it was NOT my first choice:)
All are connected to a single hub, the wireless via a simple secure WAP attached to said hub. All of my machines can see and access shares on each other (including Samba on the web server) without any problems at all - with the exception of my firewall, which has all network connectivity disabled barring firewall/routing functions.
How? It all just works. I used hardcoded addresses with DHCP disabled and no DHCP server. The only time the network ever "broke" (loosely defined: more than one machine having iffy problems losing other machines/shares) was when the hub went bad. Replaced it and the network magically started working again with no networking changes on any machine.
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What I want to know is: Where can we find someone, almost anyone, that stands up for traditional citizen values above their own self-interest?
I think the question is valid since we are dealing with large cartels. If the fee is small enough, there's nothing stopping (for example) Sony from using revenue generated by their "profitable" and "commercially viable" properties to fund the lockdown of their "out-of-print" properties.
Yet another problem caused by the inequality between large corporations and individuals. If the fee was large enough for Sony not to justify paying to lockdown their out-of-prints, then the average everyday layperson wouldn't be able to afford it for their own properties.
Back on topic - What burns me the most about this is when the Plame affair was happening, Bush announced that he was going to make sure that the guilty party was properly punished. I guess in his world: the sky is green, the grass is blue, and "properly punished" really means "commuting sentence". Though I guess since Libby was really only Cheney's fall guy for Plamegate that he didn't deserve the punishment anyway, but still... What happened to keeping up appearances?
It seems like they are doing more blatantly illegal things every day, apparently just to prove that they can do it, get away with it, and do more illegal things tomorrow - safely locked behind a "citizens don't care" wall. How much longer are we going to continue this charade? When are we going to start caring in numbers large enough to make a difference?
Speaking of Global Warming: I would guess that the increase in lawsuit activity over the past 50-odd years might look similar to the Global Warming temperature curve over the same time period...
Can we stop Global Warming simply by getting all the lawyers to shut up...? What they spew is pretty close to methane...
The downside is it will have about the same rate of success. How many times have you walked out of a Best Buy or a Circuit City and had the alarm go off for an item that didn't have the security scan device disabled? How many times have you seen it happen to others? The difference here is that if the disable doesn't take, you won't know about it until you get home and open the package. And in the case of a DVD you don't plan to watch the minute you get home, you might not notice this until days, possibly even weeks later. Imagine what will happen if you try to take it back later to get it fixed? Oh - you threw out your receipt? You must have stolen this one, go pay for it (again) if you want it desensed...
And the reason why we're just going to bend over and take it is the same reason why we're grabbing ankles for the DMCA: the politicians that make the laws were bought and paid for a long time ago and they aren't available for purchase in the aftermarket.
Politicians used to poll their constituents on a regular basis to find out what we want our government to do. Now they sit back and wait for the lobbyists (legal bribers) to come tell them what the rich corporations want them to do - often against the wishes of their constituents. Their political party comes to them telling them how the "Party Line" will be voting in today's session and informing them of the consequences if they violate solidarity. And since 2000 the political back-biting from above paints them as heretics/terrorists for not supporting our new Führer.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - When we give up our freedoms to fight for them, we've already lost.
It might not be a darwin award candidate, but it's still a hefty dose of evolution fodder - a group of creatures that are too stupid to survive as a group will eventually die out. Texans (many of them anyway) are a special breed - they tend to kill each other quite often and are constantly finding new ways to do so. This is just the latest way they've found.
I would love to only ever need a hammer, but I sometimes find a screwdriver is much better for certain jobs. Trust me, this is from experience. I grew up with several carpenters in my family and I grew up to be a computer engineer...
Does that mean I should use a mediocre tool just because it handles all my A/V computer needs? Or would I be better off purposely making a decision to get the best tool possible for each task? X player for playing audio, Y player for playing video, Z ripper for importing DVD's, etc. Maybe the problem is that I care about making sure my A/V needs are the best they can be, but the only reason why I even have WMP on my machine is so the codecs can be used by my other players.
It strikes me as funny, many people I know who make a distinct choice to get seperate tools for one group of tasks (like woodwork, model planes, electronics, or car repair) see absolutely nothing wrong with using only one tool for all their computer A/V needs - just because it does all their needs - even though it pretty much sucks large and hairy at most of them. These are the same people who think iTMS is better than buying a CD, so I guess they aren't thinking too much of their A/V experience...
- Hitler was never elected. He lost to Hindenberg in the 1932 elections. However, the Nazis won 37 percent of the vote and became the largest party in the Reichstag (parliament). To placate them, in January 1933 Hindenberg named Hitler Chancellor. In 1929 when the Weimar Government had collapsed, Hindenberg had invoked emergency powers for the Chancellor and cabinet, so this made Hitler effectively head of government. By February the Reichstag had burned and the Nazis had used it as an excuse to gain police state powers and give Hitler the power to make laws without the parliament. If you are going to learn the lessons of history, first you have to get the history correct.
I know - never bite the AC's hook. But this does bring up an excellent point.
Hitler may not have been truly elected, but he rose to power anyway despite (or rather because) of those election results. Does this mean any possible lessons from this are unjustified just because he wasn't really elected? I don't think so. In this case, how the person got to power is far less important than what they did once they got it, and this should not cause us to ignore such a situation now that it's happening again. To do so would be extremely foolish.
So I was wrong about Hitler getting elected - it still doesn't change the validity of my argument. Besides, last I heard there was still some debate as to whether bush was truly elected or not, so this difference may be even less critical. We shouldn't trust our leaders (whether elected or not) when they blatently abuse their power to keep it. Wasn't that one of the lessons we were trying to teach the world when we invaded Iraq to go after Saddam? Funny little world, isn't it?
Godwin's Law still doesn't change the fact that sometimes the analogy is true.
Sorry, that's what I get for thinking the quote was in context, which was in a reply to a post claiming that people think the 2008 elections will be indefinitely postponed. Silly me. Of course the repubs wouldn't try to postpone the 2004 election, since they already had that one in the bag and didn't have to worry about such things until the end of our tyrant's second term.
Remember - Hitler was elected before he stopped holding elections, and many of his other techniques are in use today. Using fear to keep us in line, claiming we are always minutes away from being attacked. Casting political opponents and outspoken citizens as being unpatriotic simply because they disagree. Starting wars under false pretense to keep the military growing at a rate that is able to sustain a police state. I especially like how Bush used the word "Nazi" this past friday as a general term to describe people who are fighting him in congress. I've never seen a blacker pot or kettle. Hermann Göring has a famous quote citing the best way to steal and hold political power - it's a good read, and every single thing in it is currently being done by the Bush administration. Are we going to learn from history before it becomes too late to do anything about it?
- she said. "No one is thinking of postponing the elections."
Always remember, there is a difference between thinking and doing. And since we have a sitting president who isn't allowed to think on his own... you do the math.
Since I'm expected to wait, that delay implies that the telemarketer's time is worth much more than mine. On a whim, I actually waited once - almost 5 minutes - before ripping the telemarketer a new one over ignoring the DNC list. It's bad enough I get put on hold when I'm calling someone, so it's really quite insulting to be put on hold (without asking) by someone who's calling me to ask for money or tell me who I should vote for.
I also can't believe they think they'll sell something after potentially insulting the customer. If nothing else, the dead-air-delay will guarantee I won't sign up for whatever anal raping they happen to be selling.
- What I'm getting at is I'm afraid that lot of inventions will be deemed "obvious" in hindsight when in fact it was quite original.
/.?
Which is quite true, but not the intended situation from the article. How many patents have been awarded to companies that were only reworded versions of ideas that have already been in use for years in the intended market? How many such stories do we see here on
The impact on OSS is that someone could find a truly innovative idea, put it into use in a "free" product, but not have the resources necessary (the product is "free" - no money made as profit) to apply for a patent of it. I don't know how much a patent costs, but since lawyers are involved I assume it must be at least 1/4 of a shitload. Anyway - some company taking advantage of the "free" OSS product notices the truly innovative idea, assumes it wasn't patented, files their own patent - rewording as necessary in case their assumption was wrong, gets awarded the patent anyway, then sues the original programmer and every offshoot project on Sourceforge for stealing their "obvious" idea.
Now we are faced with the problem of getting a judge and 12 potentially non-technical people to notice the "obvious" sequence of events as being in the wrong order. And that's only if the original programmer can afford the lawyer to defend himself, otherwise it's settlement city. How many times has a patent been overturned because the patentholder sued somebody? I honestly don't know, but from the number of stories we complain about here that don't I'm guessing it can't be many.
The end result is that people involved in OSS will be less likely to want to create truly innovative ideas. Innovation will most definitely slow down simply because there will be less people who actually try.
- These are your false positives.
Other False Positives: I've heard tales of people buying legitimate PC's from big name vendors (like Packard-Dell) with legitimate licenses. WGA runs fine for a couple of weeks, then starts claiming the OS is pirated. The PC has a license key sticker on it and the license key matches the one in the OS. Theoretically, Packard-Dell is getting these stickers from Microsoft. Is Microsoft sending sheets with duplicate license keys (ie: VLK's) to Packard-Dell for distribution to customers? Is Packard-Dell now a distributor of pirated versions of XP?
- The users of these XP versions are your false negatives.
Other False Negatives: How about from the referenced article? The person testing WGA used a key that had been posted on a site for around 2 years. While it may be a VLK, it's certainly not from a 0-day, slipstreamed, pre-keyed, custom WinXP disc via a torrent. Microsoft had ample opportunity to search for pirated keys before implementing WGA, and it stands to reason that they would have had tens (if not hundreds) of employees combing the net for them. Yet an easily findable key in a list of 5 keys on a two year old web page was skipped from their blacklist?
Basically - Micro$oft screwed the pooch big time on the implementation of WGA. I have a legitimate key on my XP box, but I refuse to allow WGA on it because it's nothing more than a protection racket.
- First, Bush can not even run for re-election again as he is already serving his second term. In the US, presidents for about the past 60 years have been limited to 2 terms by the US Constitution.
I'm not trying to start an argument with this response, but this statement reminded me of something I heard a couple months ago: Bush's cronies have a proposal already drummed up to repeal the 22nd amendment and have been trying to get congress to grease it up and push it through for a couple of years now.
Just stating - not arguing. Scary if true.
- The key is that those fat, lazy, apathetic people who, like you apparently, don't feel their vote count, get up and vote out the incumbents.
Just because I feel my vote is being ignored doesn't mean I don't vote. I do vote. Every election. And when I vote this fall, I will doing my damnedest to help unseat Santorum - just like you (you didn't say how you'd be voting, but we can all hope).
We live in a society where we are told from early childhood that "Every Vote Counts", yet we have a presidential election system that actually allows a candidate with less than the majority vote to take office. No matter what happened in Florida in 2000, there were over 200,000 votes from other states that were effectively ignored by the Electoral College. In fact, the state representatives in the Electoral College aren't even required to delegate their points the same way as their state did - they can give the election to one candidate even if the regular votes were 100% for the opposition!.
We have an election system which allows the newly elected to skew voter districts in their favor so they can keep being elected no matter what the populace really thinks. Representatives can be shuffled around after election day such that they can represent a group of citizens that didn't vote for them or possibly get voted out next time because of party influence.
And we have a governmental body that is working very hard to keep a dishonest election system intact so they can continue to keep power. Voting out the incumbents will never change this system until all of the incumbents get unseated at once. If a few get voted out the ones left chalk it up to standard deviation and continue going about ruining our lives. If every incumbent lost their job all at once they won't be able to explain it away so easily. However, only 1/3 max of our reps can be voted out at a time, so I'd be willing to bet the next group will continue trying to ruin our lives the same way.
That is why I feel like my vote isn't important - but it doesn't stop me from trying anyway.
- If you don't like how the laws are written, that's fine, then lobby to get them changed.
I'm sorry - I seem to be missing the millions of dollars necessary to hire someone to bribe a politician and get a bad law changed. Regular people simply don't have this option available.
Someone else said that we have this thing called 'voting'. I am honestly wondering when the last time was that voting actually mattered in the US. Every election we get the same rhetoric, shoveled in, then shoveled out. If the office changes residents, the new guy continues the job exactly like the old guy because he/she/it is afraid to change the status quo or to upset their party line. Voting doesn't change shit, it only changes the shovel.
> The downside to doing something like this is that you can get someone fired...
These are Telemarketers who consider themselves exceptions to the various "Do-Not-Call" laws. Where's the downside?
- The way I see it, the congress is worried about the billions of Dollars that's sipping out of the country.
That's exactly it. From the blurb...
- "While online gambling companies generate half their sales from U.S. gamblers, the industry is operated almost completely by companies beyond the reach of U.S. regulators."
This is the entire problem. The online gambling companies aren't taxable. The real goal of this regulation is to get the industry to start begging to be taxed by the US just so they can continue that half of their own revenue stream.
Which is why the xxAA are only suing people who don't have enough money to properly fight back in a real court of law. Suing thousands of people who can't afford to fight for infringement of an unconstitutional law is a profit point. Suing people who can afford to fight back long enough to get a court high enough to do something about the unconstitutional law would stop those incremental profits.
I hope I didn't come across with any attitude in my reply, so I apologize if it came off that way. Having a degree in Computer Engineering, I am (unfortunately) very aware that even the simplest electronic/electric circuit can go bad - especially from age and use. Since most physics models choose to ignore it, wear-and-tear does not violate any law of physics that I know of.
What I was trying to show in my orig post is that I have a system that is in some ways similar to yours (multi-XP), and in other ways more complex (plus assorteds), and that it "just works" without special effort. I have actually had a hub go bad and seen the very same problems you're describing. The hub was about 5 years old and had been in near constant use since first plugged in. Logic tells me that if the software worked before the problem and the settings remained unchanged, then something must have changed outside of the software. After swapping NIC's and cables with no success replacing the hub fixed the problem. YMMV - just telling you what fixed a problem I had that was similar to yours.
- No, it is a 10mb/s HUB. When I said hub I meant HUB. The damn thing costs $40 new TODAY, and I have no clue why. (I bought it back in 1997 or so)
:)
Your hub is from '97? Wow. Are you sure it's not a hub issue? You've swapped/replaced the hub to verify this?
My home network consists of:
1 XP desktop
1 XP desktop (wireless)
1 XP laptop (occasionally wireless)
1 98 desktop
1 linux desktop (acting as web server)
1 w2k desktop (acting as firewall/router - don't ask, it was NOT my first choice
All are connected to a single hub, the wireless via a simple secure WAP attached to said hub. All of my machines can see and access shares on each other (including Samba on the web server) without any problems at all - with the exception of my firewall, which has all network connectivity disabled barring firewall/routing functions.
How? It all just works. I used hardcoded addresses with DHCP disabled and no DHCP server. The only time the network ever "broke" (loosely defined: more than one machine having iffy problems losing other machines/shares) was when the hub went bad. Replaced it and the network magically started working again with no networking changes on any machine.