We're seeing the exact process by which people create governments to protect our rights.
Since when are governments in FL imposed by the management? To mirror the process in truth the residents of SL would need to organize themselves within SL. In any event, rights are best protected by not creating an organization specifically designed to violate rights with impunity in the first place. Governments have plenty of profitable uses -- for those with a lax enough sense of ethics to get involved in them -- but upholding universal rights isn't one of those uses.
Terrorists don't care if you're afraid. They care that you are dead.
Well in that case they're not being very effective, are they? Last time I checked "terrorism" was close to the bottom of the list for causes of death, well below car accidents, lung cancer (from smoking), or plain, old-fashioned homicide.
No, the goal of terrorism is to kill a handful people in a very public (and, ideally, highly publicized) way, the better to inspire terror in a large population. In other words, terrorism exists to make people afraid, and we play right into their hands by dwelling on such events and enacting these (necessarily) ineffectual "security" measures. They carry out one attack, killing a few thousand people, and then sit back and watch while the U.S. government and its peers curtail the freedom of millions in response.
I see it as proof that God DOES exist as the odds of each evolutionary step happening as it does are so slim to be qualified as a miracle, IMHO.
This is a common misunderstanding. Looked at the same way, the various events you experienced since waking up this morning were all extremely unlikely, when you look at the details and not just the broad patterns. What are the odds, for example, that you would wake up the precise nanosecond that you did? However, none of the alternatives were significantly more likely, so the event was clearly not miraculous.
Evolution is the same way. Looking back, the combination of events leading from non-living non-self-replicating molecules to humans seems extraordinarily unlikely, and yet at each step along the way what actually happened was not much less likely than any of the other things that might have happened. Even an event with only a one-in-a-million chance of occurring at any given time has about a 74% chance of happening given a million opportunities; given enough time, just about anything is likely to happen at least once. That this process eventually led to us rather than some other kind of organism is a matter of merest chance -- but why shouldn't it lead to us? We were no less likely a result than most other possible organisms, and rather more likely than some.
Teaching Darwin is fine. Teaching Darwin as a counter to religion is just wrong.
Evolution is not contrary to religion in general -- although it's definitely contrary to the Christian creation myths. Rather, it's simply one more area in which a religious explanation has been rendered unnecessary. However, as ways of seeking out truth, the scientific method -- the search for objective models of the observable universe which asymptotically approach the truth -- and adherence to non-verifiable, and thus subjective, religious ideology are necessarily in conflict with each other.
The relevant difference is that USB is synchronous whereas Firewire is asynchronous. In terms of raw bitrates, USB is faster (480 Mbps vs. 400 MBps), but with a USB HDD you have to wait until the current block is completely transferred before you can request the next one; this makes it impossible to take full advantage of that raw capacity. With Firewire you can request blocks to be queued for transfer as the bus becomes available, meaning that you have less latency and higher overall bus saturation.
Moving from theory to practice, I have an external HDD enclosure with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connectivity. Bulk data transfer is measurably faster when the enclosure is connected through Firewire. If you have a Firewire port available I would certainly recommend using it rather USB 2.0 for external bulk data storage.
It's like you're deliberately missing the point here. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this.
The operation of a receiver is altered by the presence of any transmitter.
Not really. The receiver still operates exactly the same way, it's just that there are more/less/different radio waves for it to receive.
This doesn't just apply to radios; it's a general theory of how property rights apply to arbitrary emissions by one person interacting in any way with another person's property. The content of the emissions -- or lack thereof -- is irrelevant. If I have a radio set to an open channel, listening to the background noise of the universe, and you open a transmitter broadcasting a sine wave, then the interaction of your signal with my radio is an infringement on my property rights in the radio, one for which damages would apply -- hard-to-define damages, but damages nonetheless. If I had a stone in my yard and you started operating a transmitter, that would technically infringe on my rights in the stone -- but there could be no damages, since the stone isn't at all sensitive to radio emissions and there is thus no way the signal passing through the stone could affect me.
So how does one delineate borders when discussing spectra?
If you haven't gotten it by now you probably never will, but there simply are no borders in spectra. As I've been saying all along, there are only borders in real property, and ways in which emissions (including radio signals) may affect the physical objects inside those borders.
And for real property, how does one substantiate borders?
I don't know, how about putting up a fence? Or you could always stand at the border and tell people where your property starts. Or put up signs. Seriously, this is a long-solved issue. The only criteria is that you have to be able to say "this is my property" such that other people know what "this" refers to -- what's inside it and what's outside it. There's some measure of "community standards" in how property is customarily embordered in any given area, but any system which effectively and rationally communicates the difference between your property and everything else will serve.
Obviously this is referring to land, mainly. Most other things have inherently clear borders; an apple's borders, for example, are clearly at the surface of the apple, and the same applies to most man-made objects. Some areas where borders are harder to delineate are water and air. This doesn't mean that they can't be owned, only that one has to be rather clearer than usual when defining the borders, and put some thought into what kinds of borders make sense. For fishing rights, for example: are you claiming a particular geographic region of ocean, or a particular school of fish, or perhaps some combination of the two? This is an area where there isn't as much well-known precedence to fall back on.
What I'm getting at is that if you drill down your theory of property rights to it's most basic level, it breaks down -- no one can do anything since it will infringe someone else's rights.
Which is why I'm not saying that property boundaries should be considered absolute. All sorts of things can affect other people's property, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally. Most of these interactions can be -- and are -- safely ignored. Only damage resulting from a property right violation matters, because any response will be limited in proportion to the damage inflicted. If you strictly avoid passing the boundaries of other people's property then, by definition, you cannot cause any damage or incur any debt of restitution or retribution. That is the safe route. However, you can cross those boundaries provided you are careful not to interfere wi
Strange thing was..I could PLAY it...but, none of the ways I had to rip it would work....
If you can play a DVD in mplayer you can save the video to disk with the -dumpstream option. Some disc/drive combinations may have trouble with high read rates; try stepping down the drive speed with mplayer's -dvd-speed option -- speed 4 usually works even on the more reluctant discs. If all else fails you could try -dvd-speed 1, which is the same as the normal playback rate.
Well, I used mplayer to play Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and (just recently) 3 and didn't have any trouble, so maybe it's just the particular manufacturing batch your disc was part of. A defect of some sort, perhaps.
I've run into some individual discs that were so scratched or dirty that my computer simply wouldn't recognize them as video DVDs, and certain "copy-prevention" methods may contribute to making the DVDs more fragile, but I have yet to run into any major DVDs that wouldn't play in mplayer. In fact, it should be impossible to make a video DVD that will play in a authorized software and hardware DVD players and yet not in mplayer, since they interact in the same way with the DVD drive.
problem solved, still has encryption and it did not cost you a dime.
Doesn't always work. Try it with Pirates of the Caribbean 2...won't work. Sony did something weird like putting in bad sectors on purpose that blow up bit for bit copying....
Try starting playback first with VLC or mplayer or whatever. You don't have to watch the whole thing, just wait until the video starts and then quit. I'm not sure what changes, but many discs that report read errors initially read just fine after they've been properly "initialized" by a software DVD player.
Or you could just do something like "mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile 'file.mpg'" to save the raw, decrypted MPEG-2 video stream to a file. Even if you make a bit-for-bit copy of the disc you'll have to use an unauthorized player to use it, since you can't write the CSS key areas to a blank DVD+/-R and I seriously doubt any of the authorized software players will accept an encrypted ISO image as input. Under the circumstances you might as well remove the encryption up front and save yourself some trouble later.
I believe that KDE's print subsystem has the same sort of print-to-PDF support under Linux by default. Even many non-KDE Linux programs can be configured to use KDE's print system through a 'lpr' substitute, giving them the same functionality.
So someone broadcasting for commercial gain is not directly damaged by an interfering transmitter? They have been using that spectrum to communicate, yet when their transmission is overwhelmed by another broadcaster, there is no problem with that?
This shouldn't be that hard to understand, particularly since it's so close to you own views. The spectrum is not owned. The ability to communicate is not owned. The equipmentis owned, and any signal which alters the operation of any equipment is an infringement on the owner's property rights in the equipment. The operation of a transmitter is not typically impacted by the presence of other transmitters, even ones that cause interference. The operation of a receiver is altered by the presence of any transmitter. If the transmitter's signal preexists the use of the receiver then the receiver must accept the presence of that signal; if the receiver's use preexists the transmitter then the transmitter must ensure that the receiver is not impacted by the transmitter's signal.
To cast this into somewhat more familiar terms, let's say I buy some property adjacent to yours. If I were to erect a spotlight and aim it at your property, that would be an infringement of your property rights and you would have every right to make me stop doing that, if you wished to do so. On the other hand, if I were there first, and I already had a spotlight trained on that area -- perhaps for security reasons -- then in buying that property you would have to accept the presence and use of the spotlight to the same extent it had been used in the past. However, the right to operate the spotlight does not imply the right to have the light reach its intended destination: you would be justified in erecting a wall on the edge of your property to block the light if you so chose.
This precludes the notion that someone can purposely not use the property in question; then anyone who comes along and uses that property could claim that they are "homesteading". How does one mediate claims of intentional disuse against claims of "homesteading" rights?
I should have made myself a bit clearer; by "use" (a specialized term in this context) I mean any intentional purpose to which property can be put, including use as a nature preserve or whatever. You don't have to strip-mine the area to claim it as your own. The main thing is that you have to take responsibility for it; if you're operating a preserve and some creature escapes from it, or fire spreads from it (etc.), then you, as the owner, would be accountable for any damage that results, whereas if the same happened with unowned land no one would be responsible. Most would also argue that you need to delineate the borders somehow, so that people know when they're trespassing, and that there needs to be some degree of connection between you and the property you're homesteading beyond simply making an unsupported claim. (E.g. for a nature preserve, actually having been there for a reasonable period of time -- more than just passing through -- would probably be considered important.)
No, it's not a straw man. Your argument was based on that assumption; I do not believe the assumption is valid.
I still maintain that your argument was directed at an assumption you read into my comment, that I was claiming that property rights exist in radio spectra, which is not what I had intended to portray and which I never said directly. A prohibition on transmissions which destructively interfere with existing users (transmitters and receivers) based on their property rights in their equipment is no less protection of users than than property rights in the spectra itself would be. However, I can see how there could be a misunderstanding on that point. In the end I suppose it really doesn't matter whether it was a straw-man argument or not. Moving on...
Maybe I should have asked you to define "users" since now that apparently only means receivers...
By "users" I mean both transmitters and receivers. However, only the receiver is damaged directly by an interfering transmitter, so only the receiver can authorize legal action against the newcomer. The right is in the use of the device, not the spectra itself; the transmitter can keep transmitting despite the newcomer, but the receiver can no longer receive the intended signal with their device.
As for your true position, you are essentially granting squatters' rights to radio spectra receiving capability?
Certainly, if by "squatters' rights" you mean good, old-fashioned homesteading, the only way to establish a property rights in the first place. The idea is quite simple: the use of a resource in a certain way over time confers the (property) right to continue using it in that same way in the future.
When you homestead something you must accept any pre-existing environmental conditions; you cannot force existing owners to alter their use of their property to suit you. Conversely, once you've homesteaded something others cannot change those environmental conditions relevant to your use of your property without your consent.
You make the assumption that radio spectra are equivalent to land, that property rights should apply. Your point is only valid if this assumption is true -- but it doesn't need to be true. We do not inherently need to assign property rights to the spectra.
Absolutely false. You are arguing against a straw man, not knowing my true position on the matter.
For the record, my position is that (a) as you say, radio spectra are not property, and thus not subject to ownership; and (b) radio-sensitive devices are property, subject to ownership, and new electromagnetic emissions which interfere in the operation of such devices infringe on the owner's property right in the device itself.
Consider for a moment the extreme case of operating an EMP device directed at someone else's property, with the effect that their equipment is disabled by the extreme electromagnetic emissions. The property rights violation in this case is clearly that you have created a signal which destructively interferes with their property. Scale that down a bit and have my position on radio interference: if someone has a radio-sensitive device, and your transmission interferes in its operation -- perhaps by overpowering an existing FM station they have traditionally been able to receive clearly -- then you are infringing upon the property rights of the owner of that radio receiver. (The broadcaster would have no claim, since you're not interfering with their equipment, but they might choose to assist the receiver in ending your interference.)
A truly free-market stance would open up the spectrum to all, and let the strongest signals win.
Close, but not quite. A "truly free-market" system would protect existing users of a radio channel (frequency/bandwidth/location) from interference by newcomers. This is the homesteading principle applied to radio (or radio-sensitive devices, if you prefer). What you describe -- "let the strongest signal win" -- is a complete absence of property rights relating to radio and electronic interference, and in the absence of property rights there is no market, free or otherwise.
American tech workers would rather die of starvation then pay a measly $100 a month (or less) in union dues for a union that gets them an additional $1k-2k more income.
I don't know about you, but adherence to moral principles is worth a whole lot more to me than a measly $1-2k extra annually. You misrepresent the anti-union group's arguments by casting the issue in purely financial terms.
Anyway, $100 a month ($1200 annually) for $1000 return would be a rather poor deal even without considering the strong moral and ethical arguments against coercing others out of work for your own benefit.
If you attempt to manhandle me from the premises, I may resist, but I can't complain about a few bruises.
If you taser me then expect a severe and violent reaction at the time, and expect legal action afterwards.
IMHO the right to expel trespassers should not be limited to those who are personally capable of overpowering them in a hand-to-hand fight; that would reduce us to "might makes right". If you refuse to leave when asked, and thus make the owner expel you from their property by force, you should be thankful they chose to employ a taser instead of something more lethal. Once you've refused to leave peaceably, any necessary threat or use of force would be justified.
You must mean RAID 1. With RAID 0 (Striping) any one drive would only contain half the data; a pulled drive wouldn't be a valid backup and there's be no way to rebuild the new drive from the remainder.
Not a bad system, though, in general. Perhaps a bit expensive ($240/year?), but certainly convenient enough once you get it set up.
I found amusing how there are already various comments wondering how would that affect negatively to their health insurance... However, I find it unfortunate to see that it can be used against those people by the same corporations who are supposed to look for your health... go capitalism!
It appears to me that they're mainly worried that the genetic aspects of their health are more risky than they and their insurers previously thought, meaning that the premiums they were paying before were unfairly low. Once their risk is more accurately determined there's obviously no way to justify grouping them with other lower-risk clients.
Prohibiting the rate adjustments, or moving to a socialized health insurance system, would merely externalize the risk onto the other clients. This is clearly the wrong approach, since a fundamental element of civilization is reducing or eliminating any individual's ability to externalize their costs onto others; to codify such an externality into law would be a significant step backwards as a society.
It's not unreasonable. My cordless phone didn't require a password, and I'd be pretty upset to find my neighbor using it.
One major difference there is that cordless phones come with both the base station and the handset, so it's reasonable to assume they work together, and that other handsets will associate with their own base stations. In contrast, when your laptop automatically connects to a wireless network immediately after plugging in the access point it's hardly unreasonable to assume others could do the same.
I think access points should come with a password out of the box.
That would be a worthwhile change. If enough people become aware of the issue I'm sure that will become the new default; until then ease-of-installation dominates, and passwords make achieving a working wireless link much more complex.
I tried to create my own one time pad by XORing the Windows install CD with the Ubuntu install.... My computer burst into flames...
I realize this was meant as a joke, but what you describe is not a one-time pad. Your secret key consists not of the ~700MB XORed contents of the CDs, but merely of the choice of CDs and the fact that you XORed two of them together. A large key-space, to be sure, but you'd probably get much better security with standard public-key encryption.
Therefore, $237/troy ounce is the minimum price of gold given a free market and assuming mining corporations are profit-seeking enterprises.
Not quite. That's the minimum price for newly-mined gold, since if the offered price were any lower no one would bother to mine it (at a loss). However, the price of gold itself can be lower if the demand can be satisfied from the existing supply -- which is all the gold available for purchase, not just the amount mined in a given year. If the demand were to disappear -- if no one wanted more gold than they already had -- then the price would drop to zero regardless of the supply or the cost of mining it. (Obviously this is an unlikely occurrence, since the demand for gold for both ornamental and industrial uses is ancient and rather more stable than demand for most other goods.)
Two, and IANAL or a telco buy [sic], but I think the government has these guys on a leash somewhat because we the taxpayers essentially paid for the creation of the network they're now charging for you [sic], and that money was given based on them being common carriers.
Comcast (the primary target here) is not a telco. It's trying to move into that market via VoIP, but it never received federal funds to do so; its network and equipment are privately funded and owned, and should remain so. Nationalizing the cable networks via regulation won't solve anything any more than doing the same with the telco's networks solved anything. The real culprits here are the local governments, and to some extent the states, due to their habit of handing out lucrative monopoly franchises and thus killing any possibility of intra-regional competition. Such merchantilist practices must be eliminated before any significant progress can be expected.
Your information is significantly out of date. No major paper currencies are currently backed by anything but tradition. A few minor ones are, at best, "pegged" to other paper currencies.
In order to be "backed" by something you must be able to take the note or bill to the issuer and receive the indicated goods in exchange. With e.g. a Federal Reserve Note ("dollar" bill) this is not possible -- the indicated goods (one dollar, legally defined as a specific quantity of gold or silver) are not offered in exchange by the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, and in fact cannot be offered at the indicated exchange rate due to the enormous discrepancy between the number of notes on the market (paper and electronic) and the available reserves.
These guys didn't make a copy - they took the original. They now have it. The original owner does not.
These guys didn't "take" anything: they fraudulently misrepresented themselves as someone else in order to gain access to a server. That's the only part they're actually guilty of, although they would, of course, be liable for any costs resulting from this fraud.
Phishing and fraud are irrelevant. I[f] you phish or otherwise fraudulently obtain someone's bank account number and PIN, and subsequently empty their account of their "virtual money" (it's all just bits, right?) you have stolen from them. It is theft, pure and simple.
No, it's still fraud, and the victim of the fraud is the bank. (If you look carefully you'll find that deposits, unlike the contents of a safety-deposit box, belong to the bank until they are withdrawn, not the depositor.) How the bank's misfortune at being defrauded affects the depositor depends entirely on the account agreement in place.
but really, is this the outcome we're all rooting for? Ignoring copyrights?
Yes. That's the only viable answer. Copyrights are not a natural right, and they are no longer generally desirable, practical, or even enforceable in their intended role as priviledge-based incentives. The only sustainable answer is to do away with them. Eventually the law itself will be updated to reflect this fact; in the meantime ignoring them wherever possible is the only way to limit the damage they can cause.
Everyone will be up in arms when Microsoft misappropriates or ignores GPL copyrights, but somehow, because it's the big, bad RIAA/MPAA, we are supposed to turn the other cheek?
You are making the common mistake of observing the conflicting responses of separate groups in different contexts and interpreting it as hypocrisy. Some are pro-copyright and pro-GPL; some are anti-copyright and anti-GPL; still others are anti-copyright but see the GPL as a tool to thwart the existing copyright regime while it lasts, as it has in fact been described by the GPL's authors on more than one occasion. None of these positions are hypocritical on their own, and I doubt you'll find many individual posters who are truly anti-copyright but unconditionally pro-GPL as you described.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when are governments in FL imposed by the management? To mirror the process in truth the residents of SL would need to organize themselves within SL. In any event, rights are best protected by not creating an organization specifically designed to violate rights with impunity in the first place. Governments have plenty of profitable uses -- for those with a lax enough sense of ethics to get involved in them -- but upholding universal rights isn't one of those uses.
Well in that case they're not being very effective, are they? Last time I checked "terrorism" was close to the bottom of the list for causes of death, well below car accidents, lung cancer (from smoking), or plain, old-fashioned homicide.
No, the goal of terrorism is to kill a handful people in a very public (and, ideally, highly publicized) way, the better to inspire terror in a large population. In other words, terrorism exists to make people afraid, and we play right into their hands by dwelling on such events and enacting these (necessarily) ineffectual "security" measures. They carry out one attack, killing a few thousand people, and then sit back and watch while the U.S. government and its peers curtail the freedom of millions in response.
This is a common misunderstanding. Looked at the same way, the various events you experienced since waking up this morning were all extremely unlikely, when you look at the details and not just the broad patterns. What are the odds, for example, that you would wake up the precise nanosecond that you did? However, none of the alternatives were significantly more likely, so the event was clearly not miraculous.
Evolution is the same way. Looking back, the combination of events leading from non-living non-self-replicating molecules to humans seems extraordinarily unlikely, and yet at each step along the way what actually happened was not much less likely than any of the other things that might have happened. Even an event with only a one-in-a-million chance of occurring at any given time has about a 74% chance of happening given a million opportunities; given enough time, just about anything is likely to happen at least once. That this process eventually led to us rather than some other kind of organism is a matter of merest chance -- but why shouldn't it lead to us? We were no less likely a result than most other possible organisms, and rather more likely than some.
Evolution is not contrary to religion in general -- although it's definitely contrary to the Christian creation myths. Rather, it's simply one more area in which a religious explanation has been rendered unnecessary. However, as ways of seeking out truth, the scientific method -- the search for objective models of the observable universe which asymptotically approach the truth -- and adherence to non-verifiable, and thus subjective, religious ideology are necessarily in conflict with each other.
The relevant difference is that USB is synchronous whereas Firewire is asynchronous. In terms of raw bitrates, USB is faster (480 Mbps vs. 400 MBps), but with a USB HDD you have to wait until the current block is completely transferred before you can request the next one; this makes it impossible to take full advantage of that raw capacity. With Firewire you can request blocks to be queued for transfer as the bus becomes available, meaning that you have less latency and higher overall bus saturation.
Moving from theory to practice, I have an external HDD enclosure with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connectivity. Bulk data transfer is measurably faster when the enclosure is connected through Firewire. If you have a Firewire port available I would certainly recommend using it rather USB 2.0 for external bulk data storage.
It's like you're deliberately missing the point here. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this.
This doesn't just apply to radios; it's a general theory of how property rights apply to arbitrary emissions by one person interacting in any way with another person's property. The content of the emissions -- or lack thereof -- is irrelevant. If I have a radio set to an open channel, listening to the background noise of the universe, and you open a transmitter broadcasting a sine wave, then the interaction of your signal with my radio is an infringement on my property rights in the radio, one for which damages would apply -- hard-to-define damages, but damages nonetheless. If I had a stone in my yard and you started operating a transmitter, that would technically infringe on my rights in the stone -- but there could be no damages, since the stone isn't at all sensitive to radio emissions and there is thus no way the signal passing through the stone could affect me.
If you haven't gotten it by now you probably never will, but there simply are no borders in spectra. As I've been saying all along, there are only borders in real property, and ways in which emissions (including radio signals) may affect the physical objects inside those borders.
I don't know, how about putting up a fence? Or you could always stand at the border and tell people where your property starts. Or put up signs. Seriously, this is a long-solved issue. The only criteria is that you have to be able to say "this is my property" such that other people know what "this" refers to -- what's inside it and what's outside it. There's some measure of "community standards" in how property is customarily embordered in any given area, but any system which effectively and rationally communicates the difference between your property and everything else will serve.
Obviously this is referring to land, mainly. Most other things have inherently clear borders; an apple's borders, for example, are clearly at the surface of the apple, and the same applies to most man-made objects. Some areas where borders are harder to delineate are water and air. This doesn't mean that they can't be owned, only that one has to be rather clearer than usual when defining the borders, and put some thought into what kinds of borders make sense. For fishing rights, for example: are you claiming a particular geographic region of ocean, or a particular school of fish, or perhaps some combination of the two? This is an area where there isn't as much well-known precedence to fall back on.
Which is why I'm not saying that property boundaries should be considered absolute. All sorts of things can affect other people's property, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally. Most of these interactions can be -- and are -- safely ignored. Only damage resulting from a property right violation matters, because any response will be limited in proportion to the damage inflicted. If you strictly avoid passing the boundaries of other people's property then, by definition, you cannot cause any damage or incur any debt of restitution or retribution. That is the safe route. However, you can cross those boundaries provided you are careful not to interfere wi
If you can play a DVD in mplayer you can save the video to disk with the -dumpstream option. Some disc/drive combinations may have trouble with high read rates; try stepping down the drive speed with mplayer's -dvd-speed option -- speed 4 usually works even on the more reluctant discs. If all else fails you could try -dvd-speed 1, which is the same as the normal playback rate.
Well, I used mplayer to play Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and (just recently) 3 and didn't have any trouble, so maybe it's just the particular manufacturing batch your disc was part of. A defect of some sort, perhaps.
I've run into some individual discs that were so scratched or dirty that my computer simply wouldn't recognize them as video DVDs, and certain "copy-prevention" methods may contribute to making the DVDs more fragile, but I have yet to run into any major DVDs that wouldn't play in mplayer. In fact, it should be impossible to make a video DVD that will play in a authorized software and hardware DVD players and yet not in mplayer, since they interact in the same way with the DVD drive.
Try starting playback first with VLC or mplayer or whatever. You don't have to watch the whole thing, just wait until the video starts and then quit. I'm not sure what changes, but many discs that report read errors initially read just fine after they've been properly "initialized" by a software DVD player.
Or you could just do something like "mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile 'file.mpg'" to save the raw, decrypted MPEG-2 video stream to a file. Even if you make a bit-for-bit copy of the disc you'll have to use an unauthorized player to use it, since you can't write the CSS key areas to a blank DVD+/-R and I seriously doubt any of the authorized software players will accept an encrypted ISO image as input. Under the circumstances you might as well remove the encryption up front and save yourself some trouble later.
I believe that KDE's print subsystem has the same sort of print-to-PDF support under Linux by default. Even many non-KDE Linux programs can be configured to use KDE's print system through a 'lpr' substitute, giving them the same functionality.
This shouldn't be that hard to understand, particularly since it's so close to you own views. The spectrum is not owned. The ability to communicate is not owned. The equipment is owned, and any signal which alters the operation of any equipment is an infringement on the owner's property rights in the equipment. The operation of a transmitter is not typically impacted by the presence of other transmitters, even ones that cause interference. The operation of a receiver is altered by the presence of any transmitter. If the transmitter's signal preexists the use of the receiver then the receiver must accept the presence of that signal; if the receiver's use preexists the transmitter then the transmitter must ensure that the receiver is not impacted by the transmitter's signal.
To cast this into somewhat more familiar terms, let's say I buy some property adjacent to yours. If I were to erect a spotlight and aim it at your property, that would be an infringement of your property rights and you would have every right to make me stop doing that, if you wished to do so. On the other hand, if I were there first, and I already had a spotlight trained on that area -- perhaps for security reasons -- then in buying that property you would have to accept the presence and use of the spotlight to the same extent it had been used in the past. However, the right to operate the spotlight does not imply the right to have the light reach its intended destination: you would be justified in erecting a wall on the edge of your property to block the light if you so chose.
I should have made myself a bit clearer; by "use" (a specialized term in this context) I mean any intentional purpose to which property can be put, including use as a nature preserve or whatever. You don't have to strip-mine the area to claim it as your own. The main thing is that you have to take responsibility for it; if you're operating a preserve and some creature escapes from it, or fire spreads from it (etc.), then you, as the owner, would be accountable for any damage that results, whereas if the same happened with unowned land no one would be responsible. Most would also argue that you need to delineate the borders somehow, so that people know when they're trespassing, and that there needs to be some degree of connection between you and the property you're homesteading beyond simply making an unsupported claim. (E.g. for a nature preserve, actually having been there for a reasonable period of time -- more than just passing through -- would probably be considered important.)
I still maintain that your argument was directed at an assumption you read into my comment, that I was claiming that property rights exist in radio spectra, which is not what I had intended to portray and which I never said directly. A prohibition on transmissions which destructively interfere with existing users (transmitters and receivers) based on their property rights in their equipment is no less protection of users than than property rights in the spectra itself would be. However, I can see how there could be a misunderstanding on that point. In the end I suppose it really doesn't matter whether it was a straw-man argument or not. Moving on...
By "users" I mean both transmitters and receivers. However, only the receiver is damaged directly by an interfering transmitter, so only the receiver can authorize legal action against the newcomer. The right is in the use of the device, not the spectra itself; the transmitter can keep transmitting despite the newcomer, but the receiver can no longer receive the intended signal with their device.
Certainly, if by "squatters' rights" you mean good, old-fashioned homesteading, the only way to establish a property rights in the first place. The idea is quite simple: the use of a resource in a certain way over time confers the (property) right to continue using it in that same way in the future.
When you homestead something you must accept any pre-existing environmental conditions; you cannot force existing owners to alter their use of their property to suit you. Conversely, once you've homesteaded something others cannot change those environmental conditions relevant to your use of your property without your consent.
Absolutely false. You are arguing against a straw man, not knowing my true position on the matter.
For the record, my position is that (a) as you say, radio spectra are not property, and thus not subject to ownership; and (b) radio-sensitive devices are property, subject to ownership, and new electromagnetic emissions which interfere in the operation of such devices infringe on the owner's property right in the device itself.
Consider for a moment the extreme case of operating an EMP device directed at someone else's property, with the effect that their equipment is disabled by the extreme electromagnetic emissions. The property rights violation in this case is clearly that you have created a signal which destructively interferes with their property. Scale that down a bit and have my position on radio interference: if someone has a radio-sensitive device, and your transmission interferes in its operation -- perhaps by overpowering an existing FM station they have traditionally been able to receive clearly -- then you are infringing upon the property rights of the owner of that radio receiver. (The broadcaster would have no claim, since you're not interfering with their equipment, but they might choose to assist the receiver in ending your interference.)
Close, but not quite. A "truly free-market" system would protect existing users of a radio channel (frequency/bandwidth/location) from interference by newcomers. This is the homesteading principle applied to radio (or radio-sensitive devices, if you prefer). What you describe -- "let the strongest signal win" -- is a complete absence of property rights relating to radio and electronic interference, and in the absence of property rights there is no market, free or otherwise.
I don't know about you, but adherence to moral principles is worth a whole lot more to me than a measly $1-2k extra annually. You misrepresent the anti-union group's arguments by casting the issue in purely financial terms.
Anyway, $100 a month ($1200 annually) for $1000 return would be a rather poor deal even without considering the strong moral and ethical arguments against coercing others out of work for your own benefit.
IMHO the right to expel trespassers should not be limited to those who are personally capable of overpowering them in a hand-to-hand fight; that would reduce us to "might makes right". If you refuse to leave when asked, and thus make the owner expel you from their property by force, you should be thankful they chose to employ a taser instead of something more lethal. Once you've refused to leave peaceably, any necessary threat or use of force would be justified.
You must mean RAID 1. With RAID 0 (Striping) any one drive would only contain half the data; a pulled drive wouldn't be a valid backup and there's be no way to rebuild the new drive from the remainder.
Not a bad system, though, in general. Perhaps a bit expensive ($240/year?), but certainly convenient enough once you get it set up.
It appears to me that they're mainly worried that the genetic aspects of their health are more risky than they and their insurers previously thought, meaning that the premiums they were paying before were unfairly low. Once their risk is more accurately determined there's obviously no way to justify grouping them with other lower-risk clients.
Prohibiting the rate adjustments, or moving to a socialized health insurance system, would merely externalize the risk onto the other clients. This is clearly the wrong approach, since a fundamental element of civilization is reducing or eliminating any individual's ability to externalize their costs onto others; to codify such an externality into law would be a significant step backwards as a society.
One major difference there is that cordless phones come with both the base station and the handset, so it's reasonable to assume they work together, and that other handsets will associate with their own base stations. In contrast, when your laptop automatically connects to a wireless network immediately after plugging in the access point it's hardly unreasonable to assume others could do the same.
That would be a worthwhile change. If enough people become aware of the issue I'm sure that will become the new default; until then ease-of-installation dominates, and passwords make achieving a working wireless link much more complex.
I realize this was meant as a joke, but what you describe is not a one-time pad. Your secret key consists not of the ~700MB XORed contents of the CDs, but merely of the choice of CDs and the fact that you XORed two of them together. A large key-space, to be sure, but you'd probably get much better security with standard public-key encryption.
Not quite. That's the minimum price for newly-mined gold, since if the offered price were any lower no one would bother to mine it (at a loss). However, the price of gold itself can be lower if the demand can be satisfied from the existing supply -- which is all the gold available for purchase, not just the amount mined in a given year. If the demand were to disappear -- if no one wanted more gold than they already had -- then the price would drop to zero regardless of the supply or the cost of mining it. (Obviously this is an unlikely occurrence, since the demand for gold for both ornamental and industrial uses is ancient and rather more stable than demand for most other goods.)
We would if they'd let us.
Comcast (the primary target here) is not a telco. It's trying to move into that market via VoIP, but it never received federal funds to do so; its network and equipment are privately funded and owned, and should remain so. Nationalizing the cable networks via regulation won't solve anything any more than doing the same with the telco's networks solved anything. The real culprits here are the local governments, and to some extent the states, due to their habit of handing out lucrative monopoly franchises and thus killing any possibility of intra-regional competition. Such merchantilist practices must be eliminated before any significant progress can be expected.
Your information is significantly out of date. No major paper currencies are currently backed by anything but tradition. A few minor ones are, at best, "pegged" to other paper currencies.
In order to be "backed" by something you must be able to take the note or bill to the issuer and receive the indicated goods in exchange. With e.g. a Federal Reserve Note ("dollar" bill) this is not possible -- the indicated goods (one dollar, legally defined as a specific quantity of gold or silver) are not offered in exchange by the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, and in fact cannot be offered at the indicated exchange rate due to the enormous discrepancy between the number of notes on the market (paper and electronic) and the available reserves.
These guys didn't "take" anything: they fraudulently misrepresented themselves as someone else in order to gain access to a server. That's the only part they're actually guilty of, although they would, of course, be liable for any costs resulting from this fraud.
No, it's still fraud, and the victim of the fraud is the bank. (If you look carefully you'll find that deposits, unlike the contents of a safety-deposit box, belong to the bank until they are withdrawn, not the depositor.) How the bank's misfortune at being defrauded affects the depositor depends entirely on the account agreement in place.
Yes. That's the only viable answer. Copyrights are not a natural right, and they are no longer generally desirable, practical, or even enforceable in their intended role as priviledge-based incentives. The only sustainable answer is to do away with them. Eventually the law itself will be updated to reflect this fact; in the meantime ignoring them wherever possible is the only way to limit the damage they can cause.
You are making the common mistake of observing the conflicting responses of separate groups in different contexts and interpreting it as hypocrisy. Some are pro-copyright and pro-GPL; some are anti-copyright and anti-GPL; still others are anti-copyright but see the GPL as a tool to thwart the existing copyright regime while it lasts, as it has in fact been described by the GPL's authors on more than one occasion. None of these positions are hypocritical on their own, and I doubt you'll find many individual posters who are truly anti-copyright but unconditionally pro-GPL as you described.