And don't forget the fact that China has MFN (most favored nation) trade status despite the blatant disregard for human rights. Then compare this to our embargoes against Cuba, whose only crime is having a lot of anti-Castro supporters in Florida who would vote against Bush for lifting any sanctions on the island nation.
Well, if I had $1100 I certainly wouldn't send it to Iraq. That money sure as hell won't benefit me. Unfotunately, that's probably about what I am paying.
My point is, we live in a society. Paying for things that may not directly benefit us is an unavoidable part of the equation. If I don't own a car, does that mean I don't get any benefit from the portion of my taxes used to pave roads? Of course not.
If you want complete control over your finances, I suggest moving to the Arctic tundra.
Have we finally had our fill of the nonsensical "greed is good" and "government is evil" mantras? Did it take the recent corporate scandals to help us come to our senses on the issue of public vs. private?
Perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part. Personally, I don't place myself in either camp. It all depends on the product being produces. Do I want a for-profit company making decisions about my medical coverage? Hell no! Do I want the government making my car? Of course not!
In this case, it only makes sense that a critical infrastructure like Internet service be provided by the state. Charging me $50/month for my broadband connection seems ridiculously high. Either the the cable company is terribly inefficient or they will be making money hand over fist far into the future.
We all know companies set prices where they will make the most profit, the public be damned, with no obligation to social justice issues. They don't care if nearly 33% of the population can't aford to shell out $50/month for broadband. All that matters to them is that it will make them more money if they gouge those who can afford to pay and leave lower income folks out in the cold.
On MSN, a search for "windows sucks" returns 211,377 results. "Linux sucks" yielded only 132,328. On Google we get 427,000 for "windows sucks" and 386,000 for "linux sucks." "slashdot sucks" got 69,000 results in Google and 28,238 on MSN.
My point? Who says I need one? I'm just here to report the facts.
One thing I can't help but wonder is how these changes in the medium we distribute music on...
You should say "manufacture" here. However, manufacturing the chips is only one part of the equation. You need to figure out how to rival the distribution/marketing power of the record companies will you solve the problem. If I can make a million copies of my song for 10 cents it doesn't do me any good without channels for getting mass audiences to listen and buy the music.
The bottom line is that in the music world, you need serious money to make serious money. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that this technology would increase your odds of getting a lucky break.
Nowhere in the article is anyone quoted as saying "CD's will be history in 5 years". Record companies are going to pick the next medium base on two criteria:
1) Will it sell?
2) Can it stop unauthorized copying?
I'm sure record companies are eyeballing many potential storage technologies to replace CDs. But the article doesn't give one good reason why these chips will be tha annointed one.
Where I vote, they seem to have the ideal solution. Voter takes the ballot, draws a line in a box next to the candidate, inserts the ballot into a small machine no bigger than a suitcase. The machine stores all the ballots inside of it. At the end of the night, the machine prints out the results on a piece of register tape. If there is ever a question about their accuracy, you have paper ballots to refer to.
The article has been entirely removed from the archive. I tried to find it using their advanced search function and the article in question simply doesn't exist.
The dominant "oh well" attitude expressed is a bit hypocritical.
What's funny is that when a company like Belkin or Verisign perverts "neutral" technology in order to make money, the Slashdot crowd goes nuts: "They can't do that," and "This is an outrage!" Why? Because these companies are abandoning solid principles that founded the Internet and that many technologist believe in. The Internet will become a chaotic mess if such behavior continues unchecked.
Time magazine was founded on principles as well, namely that the truth shall be uncovered and good journalistic pratices will be adhered to. Sure it's an impossible goal. But to deliberately conceal the truth and erase history is a direct abandonment of those principles. It's a bad thing that's going on here.
Just as we get upset over Verisign's hijacking of the Internet, we can't let a huge mega-corporation like Time-Warner, that controls such a large chunk of the media landscape, think it's OK to shape our perception of reality to suit their corporate interests.
Thanks for pointing this out. As pop culture continues to morph into shop culture, the entertainment field becomes nothing more than a huge stage for product placement. Television shows sponsored by Palmolive are one thing, but when once-respected magazines sell their entire reputation to make a few bucks selling songs, you know we're just riding one huge spiraling merry-go-round into the crapper. Read Time and understand where reality stops and the bullshit begins.
I've got an old Apple IIe sitting in my basement circa 1982. Last year, I fired it up and was still able to play games I had stored on 5 1/4" floppies. Long live magnetic media, or rather, magnetic media lives long!
The last time I checked the US Constitution (sorry, I haven't looked what constitutions for other nations), there was no guaranteed right to the sale of ad space as a viable business strategy. If you want to wait a while, I'm sure the day is coming when Congress makes ad removal a copyright crime. Until then, I'd recommend moving to a subscription model.
I'm a big fan of sarcasm as it often puts a funny face on the ugly truth. However, there are times when it is not appropriate. Imagine a NASA engineer having a sig like, "You think your car is a death trap, try flying one of these babies!" A sentiment like that would show the person doesn't take their mission very seriously. Not a good thing when working on an something very important to the rest of society.
If I were the head of Diebold, I'd want to get the idea across to my employees that the project we were working on was very important. Programming these machines should have done with absolute attention to detail and not with a "this project is a waste of time" attitude I think this e-mail exhibits. Yeah, it's not exactly a "fun" attitude to have, but there are other times and places for fun. It's just not appropriate in this case.
Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem -- delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
Whether you've got a powerful central political body indoctrinating citizens about the Party or a wide array of powerful corporations constantly bombarding individuals with messages to consume, the result is the same: a sick society. Having corporations esentially buying air time to express a political view in our schools is disgusting and sick way of of paying for our woefully underfunded schools.
No, we don't have a Gulag yet. But having individuals being threatened with financial ruin for "dealing" a.99 song to others comes pretty close.
The day is fast coming when the almight buck rules everything. The West appears to be losing all that it learned from the Enlightment about Truth, Beauty, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. No we never quite lived up to those ideals but we always seemed to be heading in the right direction. Lately, it looks like we're headed backward into a time when raw, naked power is the only thing that matters and is the only virtue to be admired.
The SCI FI Channel will premiere a new documentary on the Kecksburg incident hosted by Bryant Gumbel, The New Roswell: Kecksburg Exposed, on Oct. 24 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Can you say "Salem Witch Trials" and "McCarthyism"? One of the reasons the Patriot is so dangerous is that there is the potential for it to be perverted and twisted to meet the objectives of the administration who enforces it. I'd be very careful about branding everyone a "terrorist" for common criminal activity or for having unpopular political/religious ideologies. That's not the road I think we want to head down.
Yeah, you're right, so long as citizens like you remain frozen with mistrust of the government.
We, meaning regular citizens, need to get involved in government, not live in fear of it. And that means a lot more than voting (though half of us registered voters don't even do that). This is a democracy, remember? You can work to affect change. But so long as we continue to just throw up our hands and chant "government is evil" over and over, you can bet the government we eventually end up with will be straight out of your worst nightmare.
The facts are these: organized money and power beats the vague wishes of unorganized masses every time. It's only when the unorganized masses cooperate to check the power of the powerful interests that things hold together. Unfortunately, the senses of the unorganized masses have been dulled by complete bullshit and have lost any kind of reasoning ability. They are cowering sheep ready to be slaughtered.
Plain and simple: If you are not working with some other person or organization to stop powerful interests, you are part of the problem.
Note: This post has been censored for your reading pleasure.
Jesus, what else is this a**hole going to say? It'd be great if they could say what's really on their mind:
"Profit is our number one motivation. F*ck the Internet, f*ck standards, f*ck all you others who get in the way of us making a profit. We are duty bound to make money for our shareholders and we aren't going to apologize for it. Now f*ck off."
Instead, we all pretend they are making valid arguments when they talk about "service to the community," "innovation," and all the other "we care" b*llsh*t they spew. The bottom line is that when anything gets in the way of the bottom line, they will f*ck their own mothers to get ahead. The sooner we realize it the better.
It seems to me, copyright laws were written with publisher in mind. The high penalties prevent a company like Random House from lifting a work from McGraw Hill and selling and distributing the books. Fining a 15 year-old $100,000 for sharing the latest Limp Bizkit single is just a little out of whack. The "crime" doesn't fit the punishment.
In the days before the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) came onto the scene, the precursor to the FCC in the US, the radio spectrum was an absolute mess. Broadcasters could blast out a signal on any frequency at any time and drown out abutting programs. That's because where there are no laws or rules, there can only be chaos.
Could we be witnessing the same thing happening to the Internet? Will it slowly evolve into a near useless channel of communication as it becomes more and more corporatized and balkanized? If it does, it won't be long before Internet jockeys start demanding regulation and some kind of government cop to enforce standards and other general agreements for how the Internet should behave.
When will that day come? Who knows. Maybe 5 years, maybe 25. Perhaps it'll happen during the gale force wind of anti-corporate sentiment that's currently brewing in middle America. But the real trick will be to stop the corporations from dominating the regulatory process like they did with radio and television. I hope and pray the ideals the Internet was founded upon survive this process. We'll have to wait and see and petition hard for our respective governments to do the right thing.
R-r-r-r-regulation! Jesus, when are we going to wake out of the ideological stupor that holds that there's no place for government in a utopia? Despite what your Republican and Libertarian friends tell you, regulation can be a good thing.
Gotta love it. When you try to balance the playing field and have genuine, open competition by allowing number portability, the corporations can find a loophole to slant it in their favor. And once again we see that the embracing of deregulation by corporations is merely a ruse to get government off their backs so they can make obscene profits from customers.
I'm all for capitalism. However, it works best when there is a somewhat equal distribution of wealth. If corporations are permitted to squeeze every last dime from consumers and workers pockets, we will soon find our economy in shambles.
The regulatory pendulum has swung to far in one direction. It's time to put the regulatory squeeze back on corporations. We must ensure that, instead of leeching off our economic engine, corporations contribute to it in a healthy, productive way.
I just spoke with an admin who oversees a public school system network that runs a bunch of Windows machines. He says that despite being up to date on all the patches and having good security procedures, he feels like the network could just crumble and go down at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget the fact that China has MFN (most favored nation) trade status despite the blatant disregard for human rights. Then compare this to our embargoes against Cuba, whose only crime is having a lot of anti-Castro supporters in Florida who would vote against Bush for lifting any sanctions on the island nation.
My point is, we live in a society. Paying for things that may not directly benefit us is an unavoidable part of the equation. If I don't own a car, does that mean I don't get any benefit from the portion of my taxes used to pave roads? Of course not.
If you want complete control over your finances, I suggest moving to the Arctic tundra.
Perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part. Personally, I don't place myself in either camp. It all depends on the product being produces. Do I want a for-profit company making decisions about my medical coverage? Hell no! Do I want the government making my car? Of course not!
In this case, it only makes sense that a critical infrastructure like Internet service be provided by the state. Charging me $50/month for my broadband connection seems ridiculously high. Either the the cable company is terribly inefficient or they will be making money hand over fist far into the future.
We all know companies set prices where they will make the most profit, the public be damned, with no obligation to social justice issues. They don't care if nearly 33% of the population can't aford to shell out $50/month for broadband. All that matters to them is that it will make them more money if they gouge those who can afford to pay and leave lower income folks out in the cold.
My point? Who says I need one? I'm just here to report the facts.
You should say "manufacture" here. However, manufacturing the chips is only one part of the equation. You need to figure out how to rival the distribution/marketing power of the record companies will you solve the problem. If I can make a million copies of my song for 10 cents it doesn't do me any good without channels for getting mass audiences to listen and buy the music.
The bottom line is that in the music world, you need serious money to make serious money. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that this technology would increase your odds of getting a lucky break.
1) Will it sell?
2) Can it stop unauthorized copying?
I'm sure record companies are eyeballing many potential storage technologies to replace CDs. But the article doesn't give one good reason why these chips will be tha annointed one.
Where I vote, they seem to have the ideal solution. Voter takes the ballot, draws a line in a box next to the candidate, inserts the ballot into a small machine no bigger than a suitcase. The machine stores all the ballots inside of it. At the end of the night, the machine prints out the results on a piece of register tape. If there is ever a question about their accuracy, you have paper ballots to refer to.
The article has been entirely removed from the archive. I tried to find it using their advanced search function and the article in question simply doesn't exist.
What's funny is that when a company like Belkin or Verisign perverts "neutral" technology in order to make money, the Slashdot crowd goes nuts: "They can't do that," and "This is an outrage!" Why? Because these companies are abandoning solid principles that founded the Internet and that many technologist believe in. The Internet will become a chaotic mess if such behavior continues unchecked.
Time magazine was founded on principles as well, namely that the truth shall be uncovered and good journalistic pratices will be adhered to. Sure it's an impossible goal. But to deliberately conceal the truth and erase history is a direct abandonment of those principles. It's a bad thing that's going on here.
Just as we get upset over Verisign's hijacking of the Internet, we can't let a huge mega-corporation like Time-Warner, that controls such a large chunk of the media landscape, think it's OK to shape our perception of reality to suit their corporate interests.
Thanks for pointing this out. As pop culture continues to morph into shop culture, the entertainment field becomes nothing more than a huge stage for product placement. Television shows sponsored by Palmolive are one thing, but when once-respected magazines sell their entire reputation to make a few bucks selling songs, you know we're just riding one huge spiraling merry-go-round into the crapper. Read Time and understand where reality stops and the bullshit begins.
I've got an old Apple IIe sitting in my basement circa 1982. Last year, I fired it up and was still able to play games I had stored on 5 1/4" floppies. Long live magnetic media, or rather, magnetic media lives long!
The last time I checked the US Constitution (sorry, I haven't looked what constitutions for other nations), there was no guaranteed right to the sale of ad space as a viable business strategy. If you want to wait a while, I'm sure the day is coming when Congress makes ad removal a copyright crime. Until then, I'd recommend moving to a subscription model.
If I were the head of Diebold, I'd want to get the idea across to my employees that the project we were working on was very important. Programming these machines should have done with absolute attention to detail and not with a "this project is a waste of time" attitude I think this e-mail exhibits. Yeah, it's not exactly a "fun" attitude to have, but there are other times and places for fun. It's just not appropriate in this case.
Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem -- delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
No, we don't have a Gulag yet. But having individuals being threatened with financial ruin for "dealing" a .99 song to others comes pretty close.
The day is fast coming when the almight buck rules everything. The West appears to be losing all that it learned from the Enlightment about Truth, Beauty, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. No we never quite lived up to those ideals but we always seemed to be heading in the right direction. Lately, it looks like we're headed backward into a time when raw, naked power is the only thing that matters and is the only virtue to be admired.
Am I overreacting? I hope so, for our sake.
The SCI FI Channel will premiere a new documentary on the Kecksburg incident hosted by Bryant Gumbel, The New Roswell: Kecksburg Exposed, on Oct. 24 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Can you say "Salem Witch Trials" and "McCarthyism"? One of the reasons the Patriot is so dangerous is that there is the potential for it to be perverted and twisted to meet the objectives of the administration who enforces it. I'd be very careful about branding everyone a "terrorist" for common criminal activity or for having unpopular political/religious ideologies. That's not the road I think we want to head down.
We, meaning regular citizens, need to get involved in government, not live in fear of it. And that means a lot more than voting (though half of us registered voters don't even do that). This is a democracy, remember? You can work to affect change. But so long as we continue to just throw up our hands and chant "government is evil" over and over, you can bet the government we eventually end up with will be straight out of your worst nightmare.
Plain and simple: If you are not working with some other person or organization to stop powerful interests, you are part of the problem.
Dogmatic? Yes. But does that make it wrong?
Note: This post has been censored for your reading pleasure.
Jesus, what else is this a**hole going to say? It'd be great if they could say what's really on their mind:
"Profit is our number one motivation. F*ck the Internet, f*ck standards, f*ck all you others who get in the way of us making a profit. We are duty bound to make money for our shareholders and we aren't going to apologize for it. Now f*ck off."
Instead, we all pretend they are making valid arguments when they talk about "service to the community," "innovation," and all the other "we care" b*llsh*t they spew. The bottom line is that when anything gets in the way of the bottom line, they will f*ck their own mothers to get ahead. The sooner we realize it the better.
It seems to me, copyright laws were written with publisher in mind. The high penalties prevent a company like Random House from lifting a work from McGraw Hill and selling and distributing the books. Fining a 15 year-old $100,000 for sharing the latest Limp Bizkit single is just a little out of whack. The "crime" doesn't fit the punishment.
Could we be witnessing the same thing happening to the Internet? Will it slowly evolve into a near useless channel of communication as it becomes more and more corporatized and balkanized? If it does, it won't be long before Internet jockeys start demanding regulation and some kind of government cop to enforce standards and other general agreements for how the Internet should behave.
When will that day come? Who knows. Maybe 5 years, maybe 25. Perhaps it'll happen during the gale force wind of anti-corporate sentiment that's currently brewing in middle America. But the real trick will be to stop the corporations from dominating the regulatory process like they did with radio and television. I hope and pray the ideals the Internet was founded upon survive this process. We'll have to wait and see and petition hard for our respective governments to do the right thing.
R-r-r-r-regulation! Jesus, when are we going to wake out of the ideological stupor that holds that there's no place for government in a utopia? Despite what your Republican and Libertarian friends tell you, regulation can be a good thing.
I'm all for capitalism. However, it works best when there is a somewhat equal distribution of wealth. If corporations are permitted to squeeze every last dime from consumers and workers pockets, we will soon find our economy in shambles.
The regulatory pendulum has swung to far in one direction. It's time to put the regulatory squeeze back on corporations. We must ensure that, instead of leeching off our economic engine, corporations contribute to it in a healthy, productive way.
I just spoke with an admin who oversees a public school system network that runs a bunch of Windows machines. He says that despite being up to date on all the patches and having good security procedures, he feels like the network could just crumble and go down at any time.