There is a difference between an idea, and a specific implementation of the idea. In your example the United States took the idea for the wheel and fire from Europe and Africa, but did not steal their actual wheels or fires. The UN does not want to take the idea for an internet (other countries are already free to develop their own internets should they choose), they want to take the specific internet that was created in the United States.
I'd just like to relate what my best friend, who is a sergeant on the ground in Iraq, said to me in a recent email. (I posted it in an earlier subject, but I think it's even more relevant here.)
"I'm not sure people understand that we are a much greater threat to ourselves and our way of life than any terrorist could represent, even with the most heinous plans and horrific weapons. The freedoms we curtail, and the unchecked empowerment we grant our government, has the potential to do real harm to the foundation of our nation, whereas terrorists can only damage buildings and kill people. This may sound callous, but at some point you have to decide that there are ideals that are bigger than any personal loss."
This comes from someone who is shot at daily, and who came within inches of death when his humvee was decimated by a VIED. (And to respond to someone's complaint before - I didn't include my buddies name because I haven't been able to ask him if he'd be alright with it. He only gets access to email every couple of weeks.)
I'd just like to relate what my best friend, who is a sergeant on the ground in Iraq, said to me in a recent email.
"I'm not sure people understand that we are a much greater threat to ourselves and our way of life than any terrorist could represent, even with the most heinous plans and horrific weapons. The freedoms we curtail, and the unchecked empowerment we grant our government, has the potential to do real harm to the foundation of our nation, whereas terrorists can only damage buildings and kill people. This may sound callous, but at some point you have to decide that there are ideals that are bigger than any personal loss."
This comes from someone who is shot at daily, and who came within inches of death when his humvee was decimated by a VIED.
This makes me wonder if Apple has designed a network Ipod that could download songs over a cell network. In my imagination of the product, it wouldn't function as a phone, because that would add unnecessary functionality. Apple has shown that extra functionality isn't always desired by consumers, especially if it's unrelated or inelegant.
It would look exactely the same as the current Ipod. I think you could browse the store fairly efficiently if they indexed the songs by artist and song title - I bet you could keep it to four clicks maximum without too much scrolling to get to a song from the main index.
I'm in law school. I just took Constitutional Law. I am staring at the full text of the Constitution.
1. There is no preamble to the Bill of Rights incorporated into the text of the Constitution. Congress may have written a preamble when the Bill of Rights was composed, but it's not included in the Constitutional text.
2. The first ten amendments are amendments, just like the last 17 amendments.
3. Any part of the Constitution can be amended. ANY part. There are no exceptions. The Supreme Court cannot declare an amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional, because amendments are part of the Constitution. Even the part of the Constitution specifying how we amend the constitution can be amended. There is no "do not amend clause." Through amendments to the Constitution, Congress and the States could abolish the Executive. They could abolish the Judiciary. They could abolish Congress. Congress and the States could, in geek speak, "deltree Federal_Government." Whether it is a good idea to amend the Constitution is another idea altogether.
Actually, it's probably the NSA who'd be doing most of the spying on us. It's their primary job. Plus, they have a larger budget than the FBI and CIA combined, IIRC.
It's not just the US that is responsible for this. The United Nations through one of its subgroups, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is involved as well.
What happens is that the ICAO releases a non-binding recommendation about the format of passports. For example, they recently released a recommendation that passports should have RFID tags AND biometric identification. Then governments who want to adopt these technologies but fear public outcry can simply say "Our passports are going to follow the technical standards outlined by the ICAO." Sounds much more innocuous than saying "We're putting RFID chips and your facial and retinal scans on your passports." It's a technique called "policy laundering."
"Only" user interface? ARG!!!
I cannot understand why user interface seems a secondary consideration to the Slashdot crowd. In case no one remembers, portable MP3 players were pretty much limited to us geeks before the iPod came along. Why? Because the interfaces were terrible. Sure, there are other reasons the iPod succeeded with the masses (sexiness + marketing blitz), but I believe the excellent user interface was primary among them. Heck, I'm a computer engineer and I don't care how many bells and whistles a new toy has if it isn't a pleasure to use.
Incidently, I'm not knocking the interface on the H340. I'm just constantly frustrated that so many people dismiss UI as marginally important.
Good lord...welcome to slashdot
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The poor guy asks for advice building an e-bike, and 50% of the +3 comments are "Why don't you just peddle (you lazy f*ck)?" Because I'm sure that thought NEVER CROSSED HIS MIND. Ever.
I researched spyware this past summer with a professor of mine at law school. The main flaw with all the proposed spyware legislation (there are around 10 pieces of it at the state and federal levels) is that it focuses on regulating "spyware" itself, rather than dealing directly with what bothers us about spyware. This is especially problematic because spyware is defined to cover a hopelessly broad array of software. As a result, two different legal issues have been handcuffed together. These two issues are information privacy and trespass.
Information privacy covers all the collection and use/abuse of personally identifiable information. This concern is not unique to spyware. It also exists in the use of bank records, medical information, etc. The EU has done a better job than us of consolidating information privacy concerns into a coherent body of law. In the US we have a legal patchwork that covers each use of personal information separately.
Trespass covers the installation, disclosure of functionality, and uninstallation of programs. There is a strong analogy here to real property, where you have some control over who comes onto your property, what they do there, and your right to expel them. One area that is in flux (and it is not unique to computer software) is that burying something in legalese in a license agreement may no longer be viewed as giving someone notice. This view is already being taken by some courts with regard to boilerplate contracts for products like cellphones.
In the end, this legislation is flawed because the legislators failed to identify the distinct issues of information privacy and trespass and address them separately. Identifying and separating issues is rule #1 when it comes to the understanding the law. I would imagine this mistake was made because this law involves technology, which probably makes legislators think they need to write completely new law. Sometimes this is the case, but often it is better to extend the laws we have developed over hundreds of years.
Yea, there's definetely a ton of underhanded politics going on in Chicago, which is probably why we have the Daley dynasty. (The story of what happened when Daley Sr. died is fascinating, NPR did a story on it when they did a special on Harold Washington). On the flip-side, Mayor Daley Jr. isn't so bad. True, he verges on totalitarian dictator. However, I think he does generally have what HE thinks are the interests of Chicagoans in mind. While his dad was an unabashed racist and classist, this Daley has done a better job of spending money all around the city. I'll tell you what, the city has never looked better. Chicago, at least when you're actually on the street, used to be an ugly ass city. Under Daley, Lower Wacker got redone, we've got planters all around the downtown and EVERYONE who visits the city thinks it looks great. Millenium Park, while overbudget and way overtime, has been a huge success (turned an ugly railyard into gorgeous park and ampitheater). Also, thanks to Daley Chicago now has a huge amount of bikelanes and bikeracks, far more for its size than New York. They even have bus racks on the city buses. On the flip side, I've heard a lot of city workers have had their salary raises frozen, so I don't know what the exact cost of these improvements has been.
Hmm...talk about lazy, how about reading the article? This is not about avoiding paddling out to catch a wave, it's about surfing where there are no waves.
I wouldn't have bothered responding, except I can't believe this was modded +5 insightful.
This guy seems to fit somewhere between Steve Jobs and the Iraqi information minister on the RDF meter. Now if he starts talking about IBM "surrendering", I think that will tip the scales.
My completly self-serving question is: How does it stack up to a machine I can buy myself for gaming in terms of price performance? Here's the system I'm about to build myself -
$85 - AMD XP 2600+
$140 - 1 Gig (2x512) Kingston 2700 DDR ram
$150 - Chaintech Nforce2 board (raid 0, surruond sound, ethernet)
$160 - 160 GB (2x80) Western Digital Special Edition drives, 7200rpm, striped raid 0 for speed
$360 - Radeon 9800 pro 128
$230 - Sony DRU-500A mutliformat DVD burner
$120 - some descent computer case
$180 - Win XP
$50 - Descent keyboard and mouse
Total - $1475
A comparable (except obvious diff of OS and processor) 1.6 Ghz Apple system comes to $2820, and that's without the raid harddrive setup. How much better is the apple system going to do at games? I realize that's not the entire (or even a big part) of the computer market, but it is MY market:), and I'd be interested to know.
Just curious why no one is comparing these suckers to AMD SMP systems. I would assume AMD SMP is slower, but they're going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than Xeon systems, and probably cheaper than these new macs.
Just curious, I'll probably look the stuff when I get off of work. However, if anyone wants to assist my laziness and look it up before then, be my guest!
I read the dismissal. There is nothing in it prohibiting him from saying anything about the case, settlement, or the RIAA. Also, the "search engine" that is back is a dummy search engine (there are no real files there), so it also does not violate the dismissal. So if the RIAA is trying to back out for either of those two reason, yes they are doing something wrong.
Boy do I ever remember battletech. I had a birthday party there back in middle school, and it was amazing. I think we had all 8 or so machines filled, and it so added to the realism and fun being in enclosed in those cockpits with all the screens and buttons and lights...so sweet.
Though I can't remember, was that stuff at Navy Pier or North Pier?
Here's a letter that I wrote to my representitives (which I fould at the EFF site). It is a little bit bombastic and inflamatory, but when you're writing off a random letter like this I think it's necessary to get their attention.
Representitives-
I wish to bring a disturbing article concerning remarks made by Senator Orrin Hatch regarding remotely destroying the computers of copyright violaters to your attention. I ask your attention not just as a constituent, but also as a computer engineer and student at Northwestern Law school. In case you are already aware of the article, let me say that the Senator's ideas are dangerous, unconstitutional, and demonstrate to me a complete disconnect with the Senators supposed job of serving the people, as opposed to serving corporations and himself - according to the article the senator is a copyright holder who made $18,000 last year.
In this article (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030617/ap_on_hi_te/downloading_music) Senator Hatch endorses giving copyright holders the ability to remotely destroy the computers of people who download illegal music. Here is an exerpt from the article -
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Even without getting into a discussion of the way copyright law has been perverted so as to prevent material from ever entering the public domain (I challenge you to find material that has entered the public domain via any process except an artist explicitly contributing it to the public domain), the idea of giving copyright holders vigilante power, especially in a case where they cannot possibly know the value of what they are destroying, defies reasonable explanation. What if an email from a soldier to his mother was on the destroyed computer? What if it was an innocent relative's entire financial records? Taken to an extreme, it is possible that a person could hold the cure for cancer on their computer, all to be wiped out because a copyright holder thinks that person has violated the law.
Finally, if you have a moment further I ask you to consider this. I would just like to say that intellectual property is explicitly different from other properties. Whereas when you create something physical, like a piece of furniture, it is very clear that you should own that one piece of furniture completely because you paid for each piece of it, and all the labor was your own. Furthermore, your building that piece of furniture does not prohibit someone else from doing it. However, with every single piece of intellectual property, a person has truley stood on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization, and owes a debt to everyone from the first human who harnassed the power of fire and basic tools to more modern day people such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The intellectual property owner owes a huge debt to society, because their idea isn't composed solely of their own contribution - it is one tiny part in an idea composed of the work of centuries of human effort. This is why an intellectual property holder owes a debt to society, and why they should be granted limited rights for a limited time over their idea or creation. In the constitution, intellectual property rights were created expressly with the idea of promting the useful arts and sciences, not to compensate those who came up with the ideas. The compensation was merely viewed as a necessary way to motivate people to innovate. However, if we follow the intent of the constitution this compensation should not our primary goal, rather it should be the promotion of the useful arts and sciences for the good of society at large.
One of the first things they ask you when you dial 911 is if it is an emergancy. They are simply a dispatch service. You can actually use them to call your local police department to ask about parking tickets (though it is nicer to look in your phone book instead).
Not white vs black, but rich vs poor
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The way you've phrased your argument you're letting the "upper class" (different from the wealthy, as there are wealthy people who aren't bastards) succeed in their perpetual goal of setting the impoverished lower classes against each other.
In your kidnapping example, in the US the real dividing line is not white vs. colored as it is about rich vs. poor, or more correctly powerful vs. powerless. This is easy to confuse, because there happens to be strong correlations between race and income (for at least partially historical reasons). The fact is that poor white people have more in common with poor black people than they do with wealthy/powerful whites - a fact that the many wealthy whites (the afore mentioned "upper class") want to hide, conciously or unconciously. Why? Because setting the poorest people against each other keeps them from realizing how bad their situation is and demanding better.
I've simplified this argument greatly because I'm at work and don't want to take an hour or more off to give this topic the nuanced argument it deserves. I like my employers, they're good folks:).
Um, I like macs, I think they're generally well designed and pretty, but...
"As for the cost, I don't really see it. My powerbook was three grand which is comparable for the same setup in an Intel/AMD world."
Not from what I've found. First, you can't really find a comparable setup, because the Intel/AMD setups all weigh at least a pound or two more than the Apple:). But when it comes to price and performance, Apple can't touch the Intel setups. In comparison to the 17" Powerbook, I can get a Sony GRX with 16" screen, 512 DDR ram, a 1.8 GHz P4, wifi, and an optical drive that burns even more formats than the Superdrive. You loose bluetooth and you have 32 instead of 64 meg of Video ram, but the setup costs $900 less. And that's sony, hardly the least expensive of the intel laptop makers (it was just the first one I found that had a roughly comparable setup.
I love apple, I love the ipod, I love the idea of the iTunes store, but I can't stand the apple users RDF.
Slashdot Mirror
Has there been any word on whether the iPhone will be able to stream music to an Airport Express using the Airtunes interface?
There is a difference between an idea, and a specific implementation of the idea. In your example the United States took the idea for the wheel and fire from Europe and Africa, but did not steal their actual wheels or fires. The UN does not want to take the idea for an internet (other countries are already free to develop their own internets should they choose), they want to take the specific internet that was created in the United States.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.279 5:/
They haven't put the bill online yet, but once they do in the next day or two this will link to it.
I'd just like to relate what my best friend, who is a sergeant on the ground in Iraq, said to me in a recent email. (I posted it in an earlier subject, but I think it's even more relevant here.)
"I'm not sure people understand that we are a much greater threat to ourselves and our way of life than any terrorist could represent, even with the most heinous plans and horrific weapons. The freedoms we curtail, and the unchecked empowerment we grant our government, has the potential to do real harm to the foundation of our nation, whereas terrorists can only damage buildings and kill people. This may sound callous, but at some point you have to decide that there are ideals that are bigger than any personal loss."
This comes from someone who is shot at daily, and who came within inches of death when his humvee was decimated by a VIED. (And to respond to someone's complaint before - I didn't include my buddies name because I haven't been able to ask him if he'd be alright with it. He only gets access to email every couple of weeks.)
I'd just like to relate what my best friend, who is a sergeant on the ground in Iraq, said to me in a recent email.
"I'm not sure people understand that we are a much greater threat to ourselves and our way of life than any terrorist could represent, even with the most heinous plans and horrific weapons. The freedoms we curtail, and the unchecked empowerment we grant our government, has the potential to do real harm to the foundation of our nation, whereas terrorists can only damage buildings and kill people. This may sound callous, but at some point you have to decide that there are ideals that are bigger than any personal loss."
This comes from someone who is shot at daily, and who came within inches of death when his humvee was decimated by a VIED.
This makes me wonder if Apple has designed a network Ipod that could download songs over a cell network. In my imagination of the product, it wouldn't function as a phone, because that would add unnecessary functionality. Apple has shown that extra functionality isn't always desired by consumers, especially if it's unrelated or inelegant.
It would look exactely the same as the current Ipod. I think you could browse the store fairly efficiently if they indexed the songs by artist and song title - I bet you could keep it to four clicks maximum without too much scrolling to get to a song from the main index.
Any thoughts?
I'm in law school. I just took Constitutional Law. I am staring at the full text of the Constitution.
1. There is no preamble to the Bill of Rights incorporated into the text of the Constitution. Congress may have written a preamble when the Bill of Rights was composed, but it's not included in the Constitutional text.
2. The first ten amendments are amendments, just like the last 17 amendments.
3. Any part of the Constitution can be amended. ANY part. There are no exceptions. The Supreme Court cannot declare an amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional, because amendments are part of the Constitution. Even the part of the Constitution specifying how we amend the constitution can be amended. There is no "do not amend clause." Through amendments to the Constitution, Congress and the States could abolish the Executive. They could abolish the Judiciary. They could abolish Congress. Congress and the States could, in geek speak, "deltree Federal_Government." Whether it is a good idea to amend the Constitution is another idea altogether.
Actually, it's probably the NSA who'd be doing most of the spying on us. It's their primary job. Plus, they have a larger budget than the FBI and CIA combined, IIRC.
Being a Chicagoan who is similarily deprived of Fat Tire, I share your outrage.
It's not just the US that is responsible for this. The United Nations through one of its subgroups, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is involved as well.
What happens is that the ICAO releases a non-binding recommendation about the format of passports. For example, they recently released a recommendation that passports should have RFID tags AND biometric identification. Then governments who want to adopt these technologies but fear public outcry can simply say "Our passports are going to follow the technical standards outlined by the ICAO." Sounds much more innocuous than saying "We're putting RFID chips and your facial and retinal scans on your passports." It's a technique called "policy laundering."
"Only" user interface? ARG!!! I cannot understand why user interface seems a secondary consideration to the Slashdot crowd. In case no one remembers, portable MP3 players were pretty much limited to us geeks before the iPod came along. Why? Because the interfaces were terrible. Sure, there are other reasons the iPod succeeded with the masses (sexiness + marketing blitz), but I believe the excellent user interface was primary among them. Heck, I'm a computer engineer and I don't care how many bells and whistles a new toy has if it isn't a pleasure to use. Incidently, I'm not knocking the interface on the H340. I'm just constantly frustrated that so many people dismiss UI as marginally important.
The poor guy asks for advice building an e-bike, and 50% of the +3 comments are "Why don't you just peddle (you lazy f*ck)?" Because I'm sure that thought NEVER CROSSED HIS MIND. Ever.
I researched spyware this past summer with a professor of mine at law school. The main flaw with all the proposed spyware legislation (there are around 10 pieces of it at the state and federal levels) is that it focuses on regulating "spyware" itself, rather than dealing directly with what bothers us about spyware. This is especially problematic because spyware is defined to cover a hopelessly broad array of software. As a result, two different legal issues have been handcuffed together. These two issues are information privacy and trespass.
Information privacy covers all the collection and use/abuse of personally identifiable information. This concern is not unique to spyware. It also exists in the use of bank records, medical information, etc. The EU has done a better job than us of consolidating information privacy concerns into a coherent body of law. In the US we have a legal patchwork that covers each use of personal information separately.
Trespass covers the installation, disclosure of functionality, and uninstallation of programs. There is a strong analogy here to real property, where you have some control over who comes onto your property, what they do there, and your right to expel them. One area that is in flux (and it is not unique to computer software) is that burying something in legalese in a license agreement may no longer be viewed as giving someone notice. This view is already being taken by some courts with regard to boilerplate contracts for products like cellphones.
In the end, this legislation is flawed because the legislators failed to identify the distinct issues of information privacy and trespass and address them separately. Identifying and separating issues is rule #1 when it comes to the understanding the law. I would imagine this mistake was made because this law involves technology, which probably makes legislators think they need to write completely new law. Sometimes this is the case, but often it is better to extend the laws we have developed over hundreds of years.
Yea, there's definetely a ton of underhanded politics going on in Chicago, which is probably why we have the Daley dynasty. (The story of what happened when Daley Sr. died is fascinating, NPR did a story on it when they did a special on Harold Washington). On the flip-side, Mayor Daley Jr. isn't so bad. True, he verges on totalitarian dictator. However, I think he does generally have what HE thinks are the interests of Chicagoans in mind. While his dad was an unabashed racist and classist, this Daley has done a better job of spending money all around the city. I'll tell you what, the city has never looked better. Chicago, at least when you're actually on the street, used to be an ugly ass city. Under Daley, Lower Wacker got redone, we've got planters all around the downtown and EVERYONE who visits the city thinks it looks great. Millenium Park, while overbudget and way overtime, has been a huge success (turned an ugly railyard into gorgeous park and ampitheater). Also, thanks to Daley Chicago now has a huge amount of bikelanes and bikeracks, far more for its size than New York. They even have bus racks on the city buses. On the flip side, I've heard a lot of city workers have had their salary raises frozen, so I don't know what the exact cost of these improvements has been.
Hmm...talk about lazy, how about reading the article? This is not about avoiding paddling out to catch a wave, it's about surfing where there are no waves.
I wouldn't have bothered responding, except I can't believe this was modded +5 insightful.
This guy seems to fit somewhere between Steve Jobs and the Iraqi information minister on the RDF meter. Now if he starts talking about IBM "surrendering", I think that will tip the scales.
My completly self-serving question is: How does it stack up to a machine I can buy myself for gaming in terms of price performance? Here's the system I'm about to build myself -
:), and I'd be interested to know.
$85 - AMD XP 2600+
$140 - 1 Gig (2x512) Kingston 2700 DDR ram
$150 - Chaintech Nforce2 board (raid 0, surruond sound, ethernet)
$160 - 160 GB (2x80) Western Digital Special Edition drives, 7200rpm, striped raid 0 for speed
$360 - Radeon 9800 pro 128
$230 - Sony DRU-500A mutliformat DVD burner
$120 - some descent computer case
$180 - Win XP
$50 - Descent keyboard and mouse
Total - $1475
A comparable (except obvious diff of OS and processor) 1.6 Ghz Apple system comes to $2820, and that's without the raid harddrive setup. How much better is the apple system going to do at games? I realize that's not the entire (or even a big part) of the computer market, but it is MY market
Just curious why no one is comparing these suckers to AMD SMP systems. I would assume AMD SMP is slower, but they're going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than Xeon systems, and probably cheaper than these new macs.
Just curious, I'll probably look the stuff when I get off of work. However, if anyone wants to assist my laziness and look it up before then, be my guest!
I read the dismissal. There is nothing in it prohibiting him from saying anything about the case, settlement, or the RIAA. Also, the "search engine" that is back is a dummy search engine (there are no real files there), so it also does not violate the dismissal. So if the RIAA is trying to back out for either of those two reason, yes they are doing something wrong.
Boy do I ever remember battletech. I had a birthday party there back in middle school, and it was amazing. I think we had all 8 or so machines filled, and it so added to the realism and fun being in enclosed in those cockpits with all the screens and buttons and lights...so sweet. Though I can't remember, was that stuff at Navy Pier or North Pier?
Here's a letter that I wrote to my representitives (which I fould at the EFF site). It is a little bit bombastic and inflamatory, but when you're writing off a random letter like this I think it's necessary to get their attention.
p /20030617/ap_on_hi_te/downloading_music) Senator Hatch endorses giving copyright holders the ability to remotely destroy the computers of people who download illegal music. Here is an exerpt from the article -
Representitives-
I wish to bring a disturbing article concerning remarks made by Senator Orrin Hatch regarding remotely destroying the computers of copyright violaters to your attention. I ask your attention not just as a constituent, but also as a computer engineer and student at Northwestern Law school. In case you are already aware of the article, let me say that the Senator's ideas are dangerous, unconstitutional, and demonstrate to me a complete disconnect with the Senators supposed job of serving the people, as opposed to serving corporations and himself - according to the article the senator is a copyright holder who made $18,000 last year.
In this article (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Even without getting into a discussion of the way copyright law has been perverted so as to prevent material from ever entering the public domain (I challenge you to find material that has entered the public domain via any process except an artist explicitly contributing it to the public domain), the idea of giving copyright holders vigilante power, especially in a case where they cannot possibly know the value of what they are destroying, defies reasonable explanation. What if an email from a soldier to his mother was on the destroyed computer? What if it was an innocent relative's entire financial records? Taken to an extreme, it is possible that a person could hold the cure for cancer on their computer, all to be wiped out because a copyright holder thinks that person has violated the law.
Finally, if you have a moment further I ask you to consider this. I would just like to say that intellectual property is explicitly different from other properties. Whereas when you create something physical, like a piece of furniture, it is very clear that you should own that one piece of furniture completely because you paid for each piece of it, and all the labor was your own. Furthermore, your building that piece of furniture does not prohibit someone else from doing it. However, with every single piece of intellectual property, a person has truley stood on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization, and owes a debt to everyone from the first human who harnassed the power of fire and basic tools to more modern day people such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The intellectual property owner owes a huge debt to society, because their idea isn't composed solely of their own contribution - it is one tiny part in an idea composed of the work of centuries of human effort. This is why an intellectual property holder owes a debt to society, and why they should be granted limited rights for a limited time over their idea or creation. In the constitution, intellectual property rights were created expressly with the idea of promting the useful arts and sciences, not to compensate those who came up with the ideas. The compensation was merely viewed as a necessary way to motivate people to innovate. However, if we follow the intent of the constitution this compensation should not our primary goal, rather it should be the promotion of the useful arts and sciences for the good of society at large.
Thank you for your time.
Adam Grove
One of the first things they ask you when you dial 911 is if it is an emergancy. They are simply a dispatch service. You can actually use them to call your local police department to ask about parking tickets (though it is nicer to look in your phone book instead).
The way you've phrased your argument you're letting the "upper class" (different from the wealthy, as there are wealthy people who aren't bastards) succeed in their perpetual goal of setting the impoverished lower classes against each other.
:).
In your kidnapping example, in the US the real dividing line is not white vs. colored as it is about rich vs. poor, or more correctly powerful vs. powerless. This is easy to confuse, because there happens to be strong correlations between race and income (for at least partially historical reasons). The fact is that poor white people have more in common with poor black people than they do with wealthy/powerful whites - a fact that the many wealthy whites (the afore mentioned "upper class") want to hide, conciously or unconciously. Why? Because setting the poorest people against each other keeps them from realizing how bad their situation is and demanding better.
I've simplified this argument greatly because I'm at work and don't want to take an hour or more off to give this topic the nuanced argument it deserves. I like my employers, they're good folks
khayyam
from the article:
"Creative claims a battery life of 14 hours in the NOMAD Jukebox Zen, slightly higher than that of the iPod."
Hmm, that's actually almost twice the 7.5 hours for the new iPod that I've heard reported.
Um, I like macs, I think they're generally well designed and pretty, but...
:). But when it comes to price and performance, Apple can't touch the Intel setups. In comparison to the 17" Powerbook, I can get a Sony GRX with 16" screen, 512 DDR ram, a 1.8 GHz P4, wifi, and an optical drive that burns even more formats than the Superdrive. You loose bluetooth and you have 32 instead of 64 meg of Video ram, but the setup costs $900 less. And that's sony, hardly the least expensive of the intel laptop makers (it was just the first one I found that had a roughly comparable setup.
"As for the cost, I don't really see it. My powerbook was three grand which is comparable for the same setup in an Intel/AMD world."
Not from what I've found. First, you can't really find a comparable setup, because the Intel/AMD setups all weigh at least a pound or two more than the Apple
I love apple, I love the ipod, I love the idea of the iTunes store, but I can't stand the apple users RDF.