I suspect the Ipod could be used to make inroads to the PDA market. Hell, it already has the memory, hard drive and screen. It just needs a stylus and perhaps 2 bootup modes.
In any case, the hardware isn't too far away what's needed, it would be the software (Ipod OS) that needed to be developed....
On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] or selecting other free word editors?
Indeed, contrary to the article, Microsoft has more to benefit than Apple, IMO. Isn't Office the second moneymaker next to Windows? Would they really abandon all that mac territory to OO? If OO got a foothold in the mac market, it might just sprread that much faster.....
By the way, OpenOffice is excellently ported under the name of NeoOfficeJ to the Mac. I have it on two powerbooks.
The 9/11 terrorists all had valid IDs. What's to stop the next batch of terrorists from getting valid Real IDs?
That's the problem - they had valid ID. But there is a plethora of valid IDs out there. For instance, a birth certificate, which may or may not have foot prints, is considered a valid ID for applying for other IDs. How does a birth certificate IDentify anybody in this day and age?????!!!!! In 99% of cases, it's a non-standard scrap of paper (every county has a different looking one) you happen to have on your person.
Actually, I don't see the problem with a national ID. Any time this issue comes up, we have a bunch of fear mongering over some such rights.
But right now, our system is deeply flawed. We are IDed by our Social Security # in a mass of places and financial applications - which is leading to ever increasing Identity theft. Who would have thought? A 9-10 digit number with a name attached, which one has to give out everywhere, to be used in ID theft?
And we also have the problem of at least 50 different driver's licenses. Not just standards, but different looking. How is someone supposed to acknowledge a fake ID from another state? Much less the problems of someone applying for a driver's license in say Maryland because they lost theirs in Pennsylvania for whatever odd reason.
A national ID, with biometric info, may not be a bad idea, of telling the authorities YOUR ARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.
Do I trust the government of implementing this correctly? Well, that's another issue.
After using iTunes, who wants to sift through a bunch of songs of questionable quality, infectiousness, and organization. Really, what a waste of time.
I take it then, that iTunes has standards and doesn't offer downloads of Britney Spears, Boy bands, etcetera?
The other silly thing about the free version is that it doesn't have "full-screen" feature unlike all other free media players I know of out there...... you have to upgrade to the pro version for that.
Let's do a comparison between Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X box owners.
I wonder if "windows owners" will come out as thieves? Especially as this is a more relevant to downloading, I don't think an iPod can surf the web and download anything..... but boxen can!
There's another reason as well. If Microsoft's actions limit the number of people who can view the files, there will be more of a push by consumers to get web sites like CNN.com that use Windows Media exclusively to support more formats. I think that Microsoft's hope is that this will keep people from migrating away from Windows, but I think it will have the opposite effect.
I never understood why so many sites have their video on a dumbass proprietary format. Do the PHBs mandate this, or are the webmasters/otherTechiesinvolved so clueless not to use a free/open format? Not everybody has windows or wants the hell that is real-player.
Is it bandwidth savings? Are the proprietary formats superior?
Film takes quite a lot of volume compared to the biggest memory sticks/mini drives of various type - and that ratio will go continue tilting in favor of digital as time goes on. I don't see any real savings over digital when you go on a trip and have to take a crapload of pictures.
As for batteries - perhaps some heavy duty all-terrain cameras can have a hand-crank instead or in addition to batteries - like some flashlights these days or the $100 notebook:
People might buy it just for the coolness factor (like some do with Mac products in general).
But I agree, as long as it's mostly a hardware mod with minimal software integration, this is a half-assed solution.
Personally, I'm waiting for Apple come back into the PDA arena - one that could fit in the PCMIA slot of their notebooks for automatic syncing (or cooler still, a very thin one that would lock in to the top - behind the screen of their notebooks, perhaps in the center being a replacement light-up apple symbol like on the powerbook - letting you access notebook data without turning on the notebook completely).
I don't have to withstand harrassment as part of my respect to free speech. In fact, your right to free speech stops when you start interfering with my rights. You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you can't make remarks to your secretary that qualify as sexual harrassment, and you can't call me to make a prank call. That is not an exhaustive list."
Can you yell "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" in a somewhat crowded, very tense country?
And here you said it- Nothing _you_ can't fix. However about the rest of the 99% population?
To be fair, many Printer manufactures don't give good or any drivers for linux and I hate cups.
Plus my parents are the type of people who couldn't fix their issues in Windows either, hence the switch to linux - otherwise when I went to their place, I had the joy of fixing whatever was wrong with their computers that week - usually malware/spyware.
OTOH, many people get help for Ubuntu at Ubuntu forums and they don't seem to be experts either.
I do not want to go through the pain of reconfiguring every single text file just to install a damn printer/wlan/scanner/etc. cards.
Ubuntu has a printer wizard actually. The only file I ever had to edit was a X file to input values to my monitor for Horizontal and Vertical Sync, because otherwise my monitor would be only settable to 640x480. But that was a year ago, a fresh install from a newer version Ubuntu distro detects my monitor automatically.
At least with windows I can just pop a cd (or download the binary dirver), install it, and expects it to work 99% of the time.
This isn't my experience. My linksys v100 ethernet card always was a PITA to install (and it was marked as windows compatitble). So was my HiTi printer - it had to get reinstalled on every boot up. Not to mention the amount of software I had to install just to protect the Windows box....
All in all I'm a live and let live type but Plan9? Are you NUTS?
Pretty much:)
I think with community support, P9 has the potential to be much better than linux. I wish they opened it completely though (not the source, that's open).
I'm sorry to hear that - I never used RedHat/Fedora Core myself - but I've reinstalled in other distros with less disasterous results. But then I keep data on a seperate harddrive (or partition) from the system (install) harddrive or partition.
That's because reinstalling most Linux distros is a godd*mn pain in the ass, takes forever, and one wrong click could destroy all your existing data.
I'll just assume you haven't installed a major linux distro lately. Ubuntu was so simple, my parents were able to install it on their previous Windows computers (in the office) which were infected with spyware. They have other issues with it (setting up printing) but nothing I can't fix.
As for destroying existing data - there are better distros that don't touch existing data, but I never had problems with Ubuntu with this. Install time - well, I don't have a stopwatch with me but it was under an hour on a P4 2.6Ghz HT with 512MB ram - hardly state of the art, but not too old either.
BTW, not a linux fanboy - I'd prefer if the world went with Plan9 or even a new Lisp OS would take the world by storm. But that's because Plan9 has less braindamage than *nix, which in turn has less braindamage than Windows.
Lisp OS because, well, it's different. I'd love to see one in action since I fell in love with Lisp in general.
To give the Microsoft engineers some credit, at least they anticipated that people would need to reinstall their OS.
Oh yes. That must be because Linux is installed by OEMs so much, that the developers behind it don't think about making it easy for an enduser to install - silly me.:)
I have a better idea. Why don't you make a RAM drive to put you swap file/partition on! That will make swapping real fast!!!!
(HINT: Browsers only use the disk cache when they have filled up the memory cache...)
Because that would be filled up with memory for all my swapped programs, not just my browser. I only want certain programs speeded up, not the ones my OS is deciding to put in the background/swap-out - mostly because my software ramdrive was small to begin with.....
I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation. Of course, the advantage of a hardware add-on is that, otherwise, you have to part with a portion of your system ram to make it into a ramdrive and of course, it was not always economical to add more ram (limited # of slots or too expensive for a huge single stick of ram) - the PCI card effectively just doubles the number of ram slots you have.....
Cenatek also has a Solid State Disk hardware solution available for a long time: http://www.cenatek.com/
But it's always been ridiculously expensive to me for what basically is ram on a PCI board.
A ramdisk is very nice for any files (or a shitload of small files) that get read and written to a lot but don't get loaded into system memory for some reason. I used to use a software one (emulated another drive as "G:\" back when I used Windows) and pointed my browser there for it's cache folder into it - speeded up the whole surfing experience with already visited webpages...
[quote]I think that worst polluters should be mandated to make the switch first. Get rid of diesel and makes trucks and large work vehicles use bio-diesel.[/quote]
Bio-diesel needs to be farmed, it's doesn't provide a win in energy over diesel. And it would be much more expensive if not for subsidies.
Diesel engines also last longer and has less maintenance, this should be considered versus gasoline engines.
[quote]Instead of giving tax incentives for people to buy the largest gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks, charge a penalty on anything that gets under 30mpg with a sliding scale. The worse your gas milage the more you pay.[/quote]
People are penalized by definition, when they buy low MPG vehicles - the gas is taxed.
One other problem is that people buy vehicle with engines out of proportion to the speed they can achieve (legally or illegally) on roads. In Europe, despite having a higher speed limit in some countries, engines tend to be smaller on average (1.8 liter to 2.2 liter) versus here where we have (3.0 liters and up) in a lot of cars - mostly because engine size is taxed - the bigger the engine, the higher the tax. This contributes a lot to MPG even if the cars are otherwise identical.
I have previously said that Blu-ray/HD-DVD is dead like laserdisc and that I'm hoping for HVD.
I've thought about it, and in a way I'm wrong. Hardware formats will cease to matter.
CDs were the last major hardware "format" to evolve for music since the 80s. Attempts to supercede it and succeed it in that arena have failed. There will not be another major hardware format for music because it now comes as files. People are now so accustomed to music as files, that even joe consumer will download them from various pay-for services. Perhaps a time will come when the downloaded music will be superior to CD in quality, but there will not be another hardware format war for music - it's all digital.
I don't know if we reached that point with movies - but if not with DVD, then with the next generation - the hardware the data is on will be essentially meaningless, do we fight whether SD, Sony Memorysticks, or Compact Flash Sticks or the way to store music?
In 10-15 years, definitely, the underlying hardware will stop dominating how movies are stored. Through anime torrents, porn:P, ripping DVDs and other web entertainment, people are already accustomed to storing movies as files - it's only a matter of time they want all their movies as such (for convenience).
I'm still betting HVD will gain a foothold in movies just because every computer will have a HVD-RW drive based on the storage space alone (tens of GBs for Blu-ray, HD-DVD versus 300GB to 1.5TB on HVD). But soon thees hardware formats will be meaningless other than transporting the movies if no other means exist - there will not be another king of hardware media formats like CD for music or DVD for movies.
Sure, I'd love to, that is if you'd explain to me how they're going to pay off their social security obligations without slowing down US economic growth - and thus making it impossible for the US economy to pay off it's already maxed out debt - and thus forcing SSI to default or be paid off with hyperinflated money - and thus the no social security scenario that you were talking about anyhow. At least in my scenario they'd be let loose into a healthy economy and not a collapsed one. At least in my scenario, people could get money back to invest and create wealth and thus retirement income, rather than total collapse. At least in my scenario, charity resources would be maximized and not wiped out when they're needed most. The problem isn't making sure that dependent people are funded to aviod a wave of crime, the problem is making sure that those who fund do so freely to the benefit of all.
I don't disagree with all your ideas - but you are attacking the wrong structures. To a certain point, social structures can protect and grow the economy. Witness that the FDIC was set up to deal with the problems banks (private industry) were having in the 20's and the FDIC allowed people to trust putting their money back in the banks again (everybody was pulling money out of the banks causing the banks to bankrupt as they were investing with some of the money and didn't have it liquid, as more banks crashed, more people rushed to banks to pull out their money causing more bankruptcies).
That is example of good "socialism" in action. An element of "socialism" is necessary; we live in society afterall. Just like we need an element of capitalism - because sometimes people need a kick in the ass to work - inherently people are like children - they take what they can without giving thanks - we can be all lazy greedy selfish bastards - that's how we survived as a species. Too much pure socialism or pure capitalism is too much of a good thing. You are going in the extreme of pure capitalism.
You say you want to protect the right to bear arms.
Okay, but then you want to reduce some social services to a nil to cut cost because of national debt.
Last year, the US Federal Government was projected to take in $1.8T but spend $2.3 - I mean holy shit! $500 billion dollars debt in 1 year alone. And it's probably higher as I heard that the government regularly writes I.O.U. against the recent and current surplus Social Security tax income and spends it on other crap (one wonders why Bush didn't go against this practice in his save Social Security Drive).
But what about the military? Last year, it's budget was $420B. In some circles, they say after wiping off the government distortion in the budget, the military actually sucked up over $600B.
So why not cut the military first. Not 100%, of course (just like Social Services, there's a place for it) but there is room there to downsize. Perhaps by cutting all the pork in all areas, and also by pulling out of Iraq and not providing "nation building" (I believe that a people's county has to pull itself up by their own bootstraps. without that determination, they won't have/grow the will for it at any stage in the game) we would save enough money to reduce our national debt.
Now who knows what other similiarities they have? Perhaps we'll find out that they actually torture prisoners in secret locations to fight the war on terror, similiar as China tortures a diverse range of seperatists for their own "war on terror":
Btw, downloading or copying stuff isn't piracy, it's not like we're robbing anyone, physically stealing property. The media industry hates us because of their so-called "loss of REVENUE", which IMHO may set a dangerous precedent. I mean, if they get their way, what's to stop them from litigating with anyone who simply doesn't buy their stuff?
You are right. It's not outright theft, but it's copyright infringement. Making it sound like a-okay for all sides is not particularly good (or sympathetic for our side) in economies where what a reasonable portion of the population do for a living is producing the intangible - movies, cds, writing software, research......
A copyright is selfexplanatory in its name, because theoretically gives the owner sole the sole right to copy (and distribute). This is given by society so that, in theory, works would be shared. Of course, in exchange for this (society's) protection and recognizing that much of who we are is influenced by previous public domain (Disney - see Grimm Brothers) works, copyrights were to expire in a somewhat timely manner (that part got totally perverted) and those works go into public domain.
In America, at least, I would surmise you would be infringing under that right when you make a copy (downloaded or not - like borrowed from a friend) on your harddrive of something you don't legitimately have. Legitimate back-ups should be covered under Fair-Use (downloading songs from CDs you own would be legal too, thought the distributor is in a gray area......)
In any case, it's not that I agree with Mega-corps - they perverted the system far too much in their own greed so that much of their current woe I view as justified payback.
But then, I don't really sympathize with the downloaders - it's a type of complete selfishness in it's own way and the mega-corps only really lose if people lose interest in their wares completely and move onto other avenues of entertainment (perhaps going to a local band's concert). Even if their stuff is downloaded for free, the big corps gain (retain) the image of being the only game in town for musicians and other entertainers - ie mindshare. OTOH, if their wares were to become ignored, they would shrivel up and die....
I know, back in the day, that slogan it meant something, where one paid the premium rather than go with some 'cheap' knockoff like the K5 (AMD) or a Cyrix chip.
Now that slogan has little revelance.
But "Leap Ahead" is so utterly uninspiring, with a designed by committee or consultant feel, where the overall effect is similiar to that of a '82 dodge with 300K miles getting a new $199 paint job by Maaco.
Intel isn't Apple (Think Different.) It would have done better if it stuck to it's old slogan but make it mean something again with better product.
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I suspect the Ipod could be used to make inroads to the PDA market. Hell, it already has the memory, hard drive and screen. It just needs a stylus and perhaps 2 bootup modes.
In any case, the hardware isn't too far away what's needed, it would be the software (Ipod OS) that needed to be developed....
Indeed, contrary to the article, Microsoft has more to benefit than Apple, IMO. Isn't Office the second moneymaker next to Windows? Would they really abandon all that mac territory to OO? If OO got a foothold in the mac market, it might just sprread that much faster.....
By the way, OpenOffice is excellently ported under the name of NeoOfficeJ to the Mac. I have it on two powerbooks.
That's the problem - they had valid ID. But there is a plethora of valid IDs out there. For instance, a birth certificate, which may or may not have foot prints, is considered a valid ID for applying for other IDs. How does a birth certificate IDentify anybody in this day and age?????!!!!! In 99% of cases, it's a non-standard scrap of paper (every county has a different looking one) you happen to have on your person.
Actually, I don't see the problem with a national ID. Any time this issue comes up, we have a bunch of fear mongering over some such rights.
But right now, our system is deeply flawed. We are IDed by our Social Security # in a mass of places and financial applications - which is leading to ever increasing Identity theft. Who would have thought? A 9-10 digit number with a name attached, which one has to give out everywhere, to be used in ID theft?
And we also have the problem of at least 50 different driver's licenses. Not just standards, but different looking. How is someone supposed to acknowledge a fake ID from another state? Much less the problems of someone applying for a driver's license in say Maryland because they lost theirs in Pennsylvania for whatever odd reason.
A national ID, with biometric info, may not be a bad idea, of telling the authorities YOUR ARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.
Do I trust the government of implementing this correctly? Well, that's another issue.
I take it then, that iTunes has standards and doesn't offer downloads of Britney Spears, Boy bands, etcetera?
The other silly thing about the free version is that it doesn't have "full-screen" feature unlike all other free media players I know of out there...... you have to upgrade to the pro version for that.
Let's do a comparison between Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X box owners.
I wonder if "windows owners" will come out as thieves? Especially as this is a more relevant to downloading, I don't think an iPod can surf the web and download anything..... but boxen can!
I never understood why so many sites have their video on a dumbass proprietary format. Do the PHBs mandate this, or are the webmasters/otherTechiesinvolved so clueless not to use a free/open format? Not everybody has windows or wants the hell that is real-player.
Is it bandwidth savings? Are the proprietary formats superior?
Which camera are you describing?
I'm finding it hard to get a decent macro camera at that price, especially with that resolution.
Film takes quite a lot of volume compared to the biggest memory sticks/mini drives of various type - and that ratio will go continue tilting in favor of digital as time goes on. I don't see any real savings over digital when you go on a trip and have to take a crapload of pictures.
As for batteries - perhaps some heavy duty all-terrain cameras can have a hand-crank instead or in addition to batteries - like some flashlights these days or the $100 notebook:
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
People might buy it just for the coolness factor (like some do with Mac products in general).
But I agree, as long as it's mostly a hardware mod with minimal software integration, this is a half-assed solution.
Personally, I'm waiting for Apple come back into the PDA arena - one that could fit in the PCMIA slot of their notebooks for automatic syncing (or cooler still, a very thin one that would lock in to the top - behind the screen of their notebooks, perhaps in the center being a replacement light-up apple symbol like on the powerbook - letting you access notebook data without turning on the notebook completely).
Can you yell "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" in a somewhat crowded, very tense country?
To be fair, many Printer manufactures don't give good or any drivers for linux and I hate cups.
Plus my parents are the type of people who couldn't fix their issues in Windows either, hence the switch to linux - otherwise when I went to their place, I had the joy of fixing whatever was wrong with their computers that week - usually malware/spyware.
OTOH, many people get help for Ubuntu at Ubuntu forums and they don't seem to be experts either.
Ubuntu has a printer wizard actually. The only file I ever had to edit was a X file to input values to my monitor for Horizontal and Vertical Sync, because otherwise my monitor would be only settable to 640x480. But that was a year ago, a fresh install from a newer version Ubuntu distro detects my monitor automatically.
This isn't my experience. My linksys v100 ethernet card always was a PITA to install (and it was marked as windows compatitble). So was my HiTi printer - it had to get reinstalled on every boot up. Not to mention the amount of software I had to install just to protect the Windows box....
Pretty much:)
I think with community support, P9 has the potential to be much better than linux. I wish they opened it completely though (not the source, that's open).
I'm sorry to hear that - I never used RedHat/Fedora Core myself - but I've reinstalled in other distros with less disasterous results. But then I keep data on a seperate harddrive (or partition) from the system (install) harddrive or partition.
I'll just assume you haven't installed a major linux distro lately. Ubuntu was so simple, my parents were able to install it on their previous Windows computers (in the office) which were infected with spyware. They have other issues with it (setting up printing) but nothing I can't fix.
As for destroying existing data - there are better distros that don't touch existing data, but I never had problems with Ubuntu with this. Install time - well, I don't have a stopwatch with me but it was under an hour on a P4 2.6Ghz HT with 512MB ram - hardly state of the art, but not too old either.
BTW, not a linux fanboy - I'd prefer if the world went with Plan9 or even a new Lisp OS would take the world by storm. But that's because Plan9 has less braindamage than *nix, which in turn has less braindamage than Windows.
Lisp OS because, well, it's different. I'd love to see one in action since I fell in love with Lisp in general.
Oh yes. That must be because Linux is installed by OEMs so much, that the developers behind it don't think about making it easy for an enduser to install - silly me.
Because that would be filled up with memory for all my swapped programs, not just my browser. I only want certain programs speeded up, not the ones my OS is deciding to put in the background/swap-out - mostly because my software ramdrive was small to begin with.....
I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation. Of course, the advantage of a hardware add-on is that, otherwise, you have to part with a portion of your system ram to make it into a ramdrive and of course, it was not always economical to add more ram (limited # of slots or too expensive for a huge single stick of ram) - the PCI card effectively just doubles the number of ram slots you have.....
Cenatek also has a Solid State Disk hardware solution available for a long time:
http://www.cenatek.com/
But it's always been ridiculously expensive to me for what basically is ram on a PCI board.
A ramdisk is very nice for any files (or a shitload of small files) that get read and written to a lot but don't get loaded into system memory for some reason. I used to use a software one (emulated another drive as "G:\" back when I used Windows) and pointed my browser there for it's cache folder into it - speeded up the whole surfing experience with already visited webpages...
[quote]I think that worst polluters should be mandated to make the switch first. Get rid of diesel and makes trucks and large work vehicles use bio-diesel.[/quote]
Bio-diesel needs to be farmed, it's doesn't provide a win in energy over diesel. And it would be much more expensive if not for subsidies.
Diesel engines also last longer and has less maintenance, this should be considered versus gasoline engines.
[quote]Instead of giving tax incentives for people to buy the largest gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks, charge a penalty on anything that gets under 30mpg with a sliding scale. The worse your gas milage the more you pay.[/quote]
People are penalized by definition, when they buy low MPG vehicles - the gas is taxed.
One other problem is that people buy vehicle with engines out of proportion to the speed they can achieve (legally or illegally) on roads. In Europe, despite having a higher speed limit in some countries, engines tend to be smaller on average (1.8 liter to 2.2 liter) versus here where we have (3.0 liters and up) in a lot of cars - mostly because engine size is taxed - the bigger the engine, the higher the tax. This contributes a lot to MPG even if the cars are otherwise identical.
I have previously said that Blu-ray/HD-DVD is dead like laserdisc and that I'm hoping for HVD.
I've thought about it, and in a way I'm wrong. Hardware formats will cease to matter.
CDs were the last major hardware "format" to evolve for music since the 80s. Attempts to supercede it and succeed it in that arena have failed. There will not be another major hardware format for music because it now comes as files. People are now so accustomed to music as files, that even joe consumer will download them from various pay-for services. Perhaps a time will come when the downloaded music will be superior to CD in quality, but there will not be another hardware format war for music - it's all digital.
I don't know if we reached that point with movies - but if not with DVD, then with the next generation - the hardware the data is on will be essentially meaningless, do we fight whether SD, Sony Memorysticks, or Compact Flash Sticks or the way to store music?
In 10-15 years, definitely, the underlying hardware will stop dominating how movies are stored. Through anime torrents, porn:P, ripping DVDs and other web entertainment, people are already accustomed to storing movies as files - it's only a matter of time they want all their movies as such (for convenience).
I'm still betting HVD will gain a foothold in movies just because every computer will have a HVD-RW drive based on the storage space alone (tens of GBs for Blu-ray, HD-DVD versus 300GB to 1.5TB on HVD). But soon thees hardware formats will be meaningless other than transporting the movies if no other means exist - there will not be another king of hardware media formats like CD for music or DVD for movies.
"Nietzche is dead." - God
Same thing here, the consumers determine the viability of a format, not the industry.
I believe HD-DVD and Blu-ray are the Laserdiscs of this day and will both be DOA. I'm hoping for HVD.....
Yeah. Though, unless the professor is very pretty, I don't want necessarily want to see the evidence that she (or he) is a "cockmaster".......
I don't disagree with all your ideas - but you are attacking the wrong structures. To a certain point, social structures can protect and grow the economy. Witness that the FDIC was set up to deal with the problems banks (private industry) were having in the 20's and the FDIC allowed people to trust putting their money back in the banks again (everybody was pulling money out of the banks causing the banks to bankrupt as they were investing with some of the money and didn't have it liquid, as more banks crashed, more people rushed to banks to pull out their money causing more bankruptcies).
That is example of good "socialism" in action. An element of "socialism" is necessary; we live in society afterall. Just like we need an element of capitalism - because sometimes people need a kick in the ass to work - inherently people are like children - they take what they can without giving thanks - we can be all lazy greedy selfish bastards - that's how we survived as a species. Too much pure socialism or pure capitalism is too much of a good thing. You are going in the extreme of pure capitalism.
You say you want to protect the right to bear arms.
Okay, but then you want to reduce some social services to a nil to cut cost because of national debt.
Last year, the US Federal Government was projected to take in $1.8T but spend $2.3 - I mean holy shit! $500 billion dollars debt in 1 year alone. And it's probably higher as I heard that the government regularly writes I.O.U. against the recent and current surplus Social Security tax income and spends it on other crap (one wonders why Bush didn't go against this practice in his save Social Security Drive).
But what about the military? Last year, it's budget was $420B. In some circles, they say after wiping off the government distortion in the budget, the military actually sucked up over $600B.
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
So why not cut the military first. Not 100%, of course (just like Social Services, there's a place for it) but there is room there to downsize. Perhaps by cutting all the pork in all areas, and also by pulling out of Iraq and not providing "nation building" (I believe that a people's county has to pull itself up by their own bootstraps. without that determination, they won't have/grow the will for it at any stage in the game) we would save enough money to reduce our national debt.
Well, at least our friendly Bush administration has something in common with Communist China:
c le/2005/09/19/AR2005091901570.html
_ terror.html?breadcrumb=default
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Now who knows what other similiarities they have? Perhaps we'll find out that they actually torture prisoners in secret locations to fight the war on terror, similiar as China tortures a diverse range of seperatists for their own "war on terror":
http://www.cfr.org/publication/4765/chinas_war_on
Nothing to see here, move along people!
You are right. It's not outright theft, but it's copyright infringement. Making it sound like a-okay for all sides is not particularly good (or sympathetic for our side) in economies where what a reasonable portion of the population do for a living is producing the intangible - movies, cds, writing software, research......
A copyright is selfexplanatory in its name, because theoretically gives the owner sole the sole right to copy (and distribute). This is given by society so that, in theory, works would be shared. Of course, in exchange for this (society's) protection and recognizing that much of who we are is influenced by previous public domain (Disney - see Grimm Brothers) works, copyrights were to expire in a somewhat timely manner (that part got totally perverted) and those works go into public domain.
In America, at least, I would surmise you would be infringing under that right when you make a copy (downloaded or not - like borrowed from a friend) on your harddrive of something you don't legitimately have. Legitimate back-ups should be covered under Fair-Use (downloading songs from CDs you own would be legal too, thought the distributor is in a gray area......)
In any case, it's not that I agree with Mega-corps - they perverted the system far too much in their own greed so that much of their current woe I view as justified payback.
But then, I don't really sympathize with the downloaders - it's a type of complete selfishness in it's own way and the mega-corps only really lose if people lose interest in their wares completely and move onto other avenues of entertainment (perhaps going to a local band's concert). Even if their stuff is downloaded for free, the big corps gain (retain) the image of being the only game in town for musicians and other entertainers - ie mindshare. OTOH, if their wares were to become ignored, they would shrivel up and die....
They should have kept "Intel Inside"
I know, back in the day, that slogan it meant something, where one paid the premium rather than go with some 'cheap' knockoff like the K5 (AMD) or a Cyrix chip.
Now that slogan has little revelance.
But "Leap Ahead" is so utterly uninspiring, with a designed by committee or consultant feel, where the overall effect is similiar to that of a '82 dodge with 300K miles getting a new $199 paint job by Maaco.
Intel isn't Apple (Think Different.) It would have done better if it stuck to it's old slogan but make it mean something again with better product.