"Spike TV"...check "Star Trek Enterprise"...check California canidates...check The MSN Butterfly...check New "Final Fantasy" game...check Any RIAA-signed pop-star...check Basically anything that is popular...check
oh dear, a/. reader who doesn't like FF? Can't be true...
Actually, it's more like a vi vs. emacs discussion:
"VII is the best!" "No! IV is!" "The girl in VIII is pretty hot, though!" "Only the first one really got it right!" "VIII sucks!" "VII sucks!" "VII rocks!"...(thud)
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
I agree, but the point is that the administration really isn't being very consistent and/or honest. I'll hear things on NPR one day and think "didn't they just say the exact opposite in the Spring?"
As far as taxes go, they need to cut spending accordingly. When that happens with a Republican or Democratic administration, bright-orange monkeys will probably fly out of my ass. They simply have too many special interests and political agendas to actually be concerned with running the government for the People's sake. The last decade or more has actually seen a number of power-grab attempts by the government (nationalized healthcare in the 90's and again after 2004, the war on terrorism now, and probably more subtle things as well).
I've heard this elsewhere, too, where about half of a workweek goes towards simply being an employee. It could be more proof of the inefficiency of bureaucracy. Businesses, knowing this, could find ways to streamline. One suggestion I have: giving employees a reason to be efficient by actually having a sound business model or by taking sufficiently interesting risks that employees will go along. Working for a company that strings itself along week-by-week is just horrendous.
Does anyone else remember Bush using enormous budget surplus predictions as justification for a tax cut?
They change their story every six months on a number of topics, and the press eats it up. It is so damn transparent that it is disgusting that the public isn't vomiting every day from it--it's as if they'll eat shit and like it because it came in a candy wrapper.
When I see a bunch of Southern Baptists hijacking multiple airplanes and smashing them into downtown Riyadh or Mecca or whatever, you MIGHT have something to talk about.
So, you didn't see them hijacking your rights with inane laws regarding drugs and sexuality? It doesn't take a bomb to do terrible damage to the freedom of a nation.
First of all, the Oklahoma City bombers were all white Americans. The Unabomber was a white American. Clearly, not all terrorists are "young, middle-eastern men".
Don't forget the olympics and abortion clinic bombers in Georgia. Or those school kids in Colorado. Or the gangs of all colors in our cities. Or organized crime bosses. Or...
I've already read plenty of horror stories about people that couldn't fly and who spent months fighting the national insecurity apparatus trying to understand why they were considered risks and getting it changed.
Yes, but destroying these people's--citizen's-- livelihoods is completely justified by the completely unknowable number of lives saved by the war on terrorism. Yippie!
that number is on the same order of magnatude of the extra time wasted in airports every year
It seems people wouldn't mind waiting their whole lives in line somewhere, if at the end they died of natural causes (perhaps due to blood clots due to standing in line too long).
The reason they don't mind is that waiting in line frees them from thinking, working, doing, acting, and participating. Waiting in line is the greatest form of welfare the government has ever given its people. We should be thankful!
A birth cirtificate or other equivalent paper for immigrants is all I can think of short of under-oath testimony by friends and family. Identity is a slippery animal and can really only rest on the fact that most people are generally honest and have people around them who can testify to who they are.
Basically, identity within a communtiy cannot exist once that community disappears. The USA is losing that community leaving government databases and biometrics to fill the void. We are becoming a hive of sorts but with papers instead of pheromones.
What a bunch of feebleminded doughnut-chomping rentacop government bureaucracy maroons we've got running this show.
A better plan would have been to just replace the passenger cabin air with laughing gas.
So simple, but did they even think about it?
The only domestic terrorists I'm afraid of at this point are John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge.
When fascism (or is it fashionism) is finally in place, you won't be given the chance to worry about them...you'll be much more worried about escaping your own home.
every large business I can think of has more than lived up to it's potential for evil.
They eventually suffer for it. Phillip Morris, for example, earned every penny of that settlement. Monsanto has what's coming to them, too. However, when a government becomes corrupt beyond correction, only a civil war causing millions of deaths will fix it.
Imagine how overworked and useless our government would be if we shrunk it down to the size your suggesting (i.e. small enough to be incoruptable).
If responsibility is pared along with size, then there would at least be better opportunities to put forth the same amount of work but for fewer issues. Congress is a fixed size relative to population, so they would be asked to do less regarding domestic local issues to better focus on foreign policy, international trade, immigration, etc. I believe a highly distributed government allows each level to act smarter. The overall effect is probably one that people would take for granted, anyway.
Oh, I'm much more concerned about CSS than region encoding. I have to violate the law to play a legally purchased DVD under linux.
If these laws aren't overturned with ten years for being unconstitutional, then that's when we get really worried. I definitely agree about CSS.
Soon if Microsoft has it's way, I'll have to violate the law to run linux at all (to bypass DRM built into motherboards and harddisks).
I'm betting that Microsoft will run out of money before they can completely take over the government. Linux-derived systems, Mac OS X, Sun's Java Desktop, etc. are too compelling from both cost and quality standpoints to go unnoticed. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org works on all these platforms, so people and businesses can choose these different systems without fearing being closed off from the world. We will see the market reset itself within five years, IMO.
The only thing the Justice Department provided for Microsoft was publicity of the issues. From what little I've read, it appears the same was true for IBM, also.
Maybe 50 years ago you'd have a point.
I think even today our society isn't mature enough to free migrant workers from low-paid manual labor. When StarTrek replicators are invented, then having to work hard for essential needs will no longer be a problem. That's when the debate over captialism and socialism becomes irrelevant, because the free market will have made itself obselete (this is a good thing, but probably decades or centuries away). Only sufficient technology will allow socialist-leaning idealism to become reality.
Corporations don't care so much about the free market ideal (in fact, they'll do everything in their power to stop it's operation. Take Microsoft now or IBM 50 or so years ago for instance).
This is actually an integral part of the free market. Seeing greed for what it is is one way humans can keep corruption in check. Again, with corporations, wrong-doing is fairly localized as opposed to affecting every citizen in the country. As hard as it might be to stomach, I'd rather see companies like Monsanto fall rather than the USA as a whole. Historians, journalists, and, now, the WWW all play a role in educating the public about what went wrong, and public legal records can give future lawsuits more tools to take down corrupt companies. There is always the issue of frivilous lawsuits collapsing the system, but, that probably has more to do with corporations indemnifying their employees and a perverse sense of just compensation in the minds of juries. If corporations were not so widely granted autonomous human-like identities, this would probably be less of an issue.
The constitution granted congress the power to create copyright laws.
Okay agreed (my post was too generalized), but what about laws that inhibit other people's constitutional rights? DRM that can't be reverse engineered is just dangerous. For example, if a company went out of business without closure regarding their encryption formats, people should have a right to figure out the technology for interoperability. While a company can obscure their formats to any degree, once those formats are in the wild, people can pick at them at will.
How about we make it such that software is protected by neither copyright nor patents!
With the WWW, the first person to post his code gets the credit, and anyone else who claims that code under their name has to face the prior art of the first person. There would be no legal recourse; the surfacing of the truth should be sufficient.
This is probably much more in line with BSD licensing, where anyone can use the code with proper credit given. Given that the WWW/Usenet/etc. provide a widely mirrored hard-to-fake timeline of history, it is extremely unlikely that devious behavior could last long nor is it likely that everything would decompose into anarchy.
Two people who each build a car with four wheels aren't stealing eachother's copyright. I thought this all was settled long ago between Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
This is about whether CORPORATIONS can issue subpoenas. That was NEVER intended by our Government's framers.
It can also be argued that the framers never intended the federal government to make legislation about the media in the first place. Why should the government protect the business model of a company that employs rot13 to protect its products, for example?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see:
"Spike TV"...check
"Star Trek Enterprise"...check
California canidates...check
The MSN Butterfly...check
New "Final Fantasy" game...check
Any RIAA-signed pop-star...check
Basically anything that is popular...check
Yeah, pretty much everything now-a-days is crap.
oh dear, a /. reader who doesn't like FF? Can't be true...
...(thud)
Actually, it's more like a vi vs. emacs discussion:
"VII is the best!"
"No! IV is!"
"The girl in VIII is pretty hot, though!"
"Only the first one really got it right!"
"VIII sucks!"
"VII sucks!"
"VII rocks!"
Why build a neural network that needs training, when we can't even educate the ones that fall out of our wives, girlfriends, and prostitutes?
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
I agree, but the point is that the administration really isn't being very consistent and/or honest. I'll hear things on NPR one day and think "didn't they just say the exact opposite in the Spring?"
As far as taxes go, they need to cut spending accordingly. When that happens with a Republican or Democratic administration, bright-orange monkeys will probably fly out of my ass. They simply have too many special interests and political agendas to actually be concerned with running the government for the People's sake. The last decade or more has actually seen a number of power-grab attempts by the government (nationalized healthcare in the 90's and again after 2004, the war on terrorism now, and probably more subtle things as well).
Only 50% of time on projects?
I've heard this elsewhere, too, where about half of a workweek goes towards simply being an employee. It could be more proof of the inefficiency of bureaucracy. Businesses, knowing this, could find ways to streamline. One suggestion I have: giving employees a reason to be efficient by actually having a sound business model or by taking sufficiently interesting risks that employees will go along. Working for a company that strings itself along week-by-week is just horrendous.
And what makes me really sick is to see how the money does not get used, but is merely vanishing in all kinds of nonsense...
Oh, you said Italy...you almost had me convinced you are from South Carolina.
Does anyone else remember Bush using enormous budget surplus predictions as justification for a tax cut?
They change their story every six months on a number of topics, and the press eats it up. It is so damn transparent that it is disgusting that the public isn't vomiting every day from it--it's as if they'll eat shit and like it because it came in a candy wrapper.
When I see a bunch of Southern Baptists hijacking multiple airplanes and smashing them into downtown Riyadh or Mecca or whatever, you MIGHT have something to talk about.
So, you didn't see them hijacking your rights with inane laws regarding drugs and sexuality? It doesn't take a bomb to do terrible damage to the freedom of a nation.
First of all, the Oklahoma City bombers were all white Americans. The Unabomber was a white American. Clearly, not all terrorists are "young, middle-eastern men".
Don't forget the olympics and abortion clinic bombers in Georgia. Or those school kids in Colorado. Or the gangs of all colors in our cities. Or organized crime bosses. Or...
half a century of trying
Then stop trying and actually figure out a solution that doesn't require gunship helicopters.
I hope people read my comment above as sarcastic... these things are too opaque to some Slashdot readers, it seems.
I've already read plenty of horror stories about people that couldn't fly and who spent months fighting the national insecurity apparatus trying to understand why they were considered risks and getting it changed.
Yes, but destroying these people's--citizen's-- livelihoods is completely justified by the completely unknowable number of lives saved by the war on terrorism. Yippie!
that number is on the same order of magnatude of the extra time wasted in airports every year
It seems people wouldn't mind waiting their whole lives in line somewhere, if at the end they died of natural causes (perhaps due to blood clots due to standing in line too long).
The reason they don't mind is that waiting in line frees them from thinking, working, doing, acting, and participating. Waiting in line is the greatest form of welfare the government has ever given its people. We should be thankful!
MEDICAL HISTORY this limited 5 million record jetblue database is nothing but the tip of the iceberg.
So Democrats are terrorists, too, now. That's just great (think mandatory national universal health care).
So how do they know who is a citizen?
A birth cirtificate or other equivalent paper for immigrants is all I can think of short of under-oath testimony by friends and family. Identity is a slippery animal and can really only rest on the fact that most people are generally honest and have people around them who can testify to who they are.
Basically, identity within a communtiy cannot exist once that community disappears. The USA is losing that community leaving government databases and biometrics to fill the void. We are becoming a hive of sorts but with papers instead of pheromones.
What a bunch of feebleminded doughnut-chomping rentacop government bureaucracy maroons we've got running this show.
A better plan would have been to just replace the passenger cabin air with laughing gas.
So simple, but did they even think about it?
The only domestic terrorists I'm afraid of at this point are John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge.
When fascism (or is it fashionism) is finally in place, you won't be given the chance to worry about them...you'll be much more worried about escaping your own home.
When I hear the word extreme in an advertising campaign, I think of this.
Damn that was funny. He should try some of that tie-died ketchup, next.
Will Extreme Programming work on this CPU?
Well, perhaps not until Microsoft releases "Windows XP Service Pack to the Max!"
every large business I can think of has more than lived up to it's potential for evil.
They eventually suffer for it. Phillip Morris, for example, earned every penny of that settlement. Monsanto has what's coming to them, too. However, when a government becomes corrupt beyond correction, only a civil war causing millions of deaths will fix it.
Imagine how overworked and useless our government would be if we shrunk it down to the size your suggesting (i.e. small enough to be incoruptable).
If responsibility is pared along with size, then there would at least be better opportunities to put forth the same amount of work but for fewer issues. Congress is a fixed size relative to population, so they would be asked to do less regarding domestic local issues to better focus on foreign policy, international trade, immigration, etc. I believe a highly distributed government allows each level to act smarter. The overall effect is probably one that people would take for granted, anyway.
Oh, I'm much more concerned about CSS than region encoding. I have to violate the law to play a legally purchased DVD under linux.
If these laws aren't overturned with ten years for being unconstitutional, then that's when we get really worried. I definitely agree about CSS.
Soon if Microsoft has it's way, I'll have to violate the law to run linux at all (to bypass DRM built into motherboards and harddisks).
I'm betting that Microsoft will run out of money before they can completely take over the government. Linux-derived systems, Mac OS X, Sun's Java Desktop, etc. are too compelling from both cost and quality standpoints to go unnoticed. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org works on all these platforms, so people and businesses can choose these different systems without fearing being closed off from the world. We will see the market reset itself within five years, IMO.
The only thing the Justice Department provided for Microsoft was publicity of the issues. From what little I've read, it appears the same was true for IBM, also.
Maybe 50 years ago you'd have a point.
I think even today our society isn't mature enough to free migrant workers from low-paid manual labor. When StarTrek replicators are invented, then having to work hard for essential needs will no longer be a problem. That's when the debate over captialism and socialism becomes irrelevant, because the free market will have made itself obselete (this is a good thing, but probably decades or centuries away). Only sufficient technology will allow socialist-leaning idealism to become reality.
Corporations don't care so much about the free market ideal (in fact, they'll do everything in their power to stop it's operation. Take Microsoft now or IBM 50 or so years ago for instance).
This is actually an integral part of the free market. Seeing greed for what it is is one way humans can keep corruption in check. Again, with corporations, wrong-doing is fairly localized as opposed to affecting every citizen in the country. As hard as it might be to stomach, I'd rather see companies like Monsanto fall rather than the USA as a whole. Historians, journalists, and, now, the WWW all play a role in educating the public about what went wrong, and public legal records can give future lawsuits more tools to take down corrupt companies. There is always the issue of frivilous lawsuits collapsing the system, but, that probably has more to do with corporations indemnifying their employees and a perverse sense of just compensation in the minds of juries. If corporations were not so widely granted autonomous human-like identities, this would probably be less of an issue.
The constitution granted congress the power to create copyright laws.
Okay agreed (my post was too generalized), but what about laws that inhibit other people's constitutional rights? DRM that can't be reverse engineered is just dangerous. For example, if a company went out of business without closure regarding their encryption formats, people should have a right to figure out the technology for interoperability. While a company can obscure their formats to any degree, once those formats are in the wild, people can pick at them at will.
How about we make it such that software is protected by neither copyright nor patents!
With the WWW, the first person to post his code gets the credit, and anyone else who claims that code under their name has to face the prior art of the first person. There would be no legal recourse; the surfacing of the truth should be sufficient.
This is probably much more in line with BSD licensing, where anyone can use the code with proper credit given. Given that the WWW/Usenet/etc. provide a widely mirrored hard-to-fake timeline of history, it is extremely unlikely that devious behavior could last long nor is it likely that everything would decompose into anarchy.
Two people who each build a car with four wheels aren't stealing eachother's copyright. I thought this all was settled long ago between Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
My big endian will eat your little endian!
If your big endian has a mouth and teeth, perhaps you could find a career in live-action versions of Japanese cartoons?
This is about whether CORPORATIONS can issue subpoenas. That was NEVER intended by our Government's framers.
It can also be argued that the framers never intended the federal government to make legislation about the media in the first place. Why should the government protect the business model of a company that employs rot13 to protect its products, for example?
We need more natural selection, not less.
Is it more important to protect consumers or producers?
Is it more important to protect citizens or corporations?
Actually, that last one could also be "Is it more important to protect citizens or government?"
The government should be able to defend its actions. Does the DMCA add up? How about the PATRIOT Act? Citizens need to ask these questions daily.