I find that this law actually makes a sane and calm attempt to address the problem.
How, exactly, do you characterize as sane and calm an attempt to grant the draconian, almost Orwellian and arguably unconstitutional powers the DoJ already has been gifted since 9/11 to a special interest consortium, which is to be used against the citizens which are, on paper at least, the lawful masters of both the government and every corporation granted charter by that government?
Social evolution in action: corporations are more efficient -- better adapted to their environment -- than nation-states.
Nation-states, in their day, were more efficient than kingdoms; which were more efficient than city-states; which were more efficient than tribes; which were more efficient than individuals.
I don't like it, but I accept that it's nature's way: the strong flourish, the weak fail.
Mein Gott, what can we do?
About corporate power? We can do nothing.
What you and most everyone seems to have forgotten is that corporations are legal fictions, created by the state, and granted privileges by the state.
Corporations do not have rights. All assertions and arguments that they do are bullshit based on bad money buying bad law. See also: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394), and subsequent cases in which corporate counsel got inattentive Justices to introduce into case law rulings based on a headnote which was no part of that first case in which the Chief Justice remarked before arguments that all the Justices were of the opinion that corporations were protected under the 14th Amendment as persons.
Corporations are creatures of the State. They are not Citizens. Citizens are the masters of the State. This current conflict over P2P and the RIAA in general is but a small part of the really big battle, wherein corporations seek to be elevated to the rank of Citizen, and thereby lawful masters of their only lawful master, lord and creator. Do the math.
I'd rather they regulated showing all the illegal stuff that they show on TV.
How would that work, exactly?
It wasn't until 1967 that the US Supreme Court ruled that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Before that time, it was illegal in many states to marry "outside one's race." If only "legal stuff" were allowed on the airwaves, The Jeffersons would have been banned if it had been in circulation pre-1967.
The definition of what's legal and not changes over time, and is always subject to interpretation... that's what all those lawyers and judges spend some of their time doing. While it may seem perfectly obvious and unquestionable to you or to me that consensual relations between mentally and emotionally stable adults should not be illegal, there are plenty of folks who hold a rather different view, and the conflict of those views is often played out on legal battlefields.
Beyond that, how would such a system of regulation handle the portrayal of lawful and absolutely essential actions such as solving crimes, if it could not portray the crime? How could there be a meaningful treatment of the effects of abuse if the ugly reality of it cannot be brought into the light of day?
Your plan is much more about censorship than any currently in place. Laws are not the answer. Regulating the consumption of inappropriate, obscene, vulgar, profane, or illegal acts presented in the form of entertainment should begin and end with the Individual, not the State.
Re:Another symptom of programming viewed as a comm
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 1
All seem to be symptoms of the perverted view corporations have taken when viewing source code and programming as neither science nor art, but just another commodity. ...
Thinking that you're going to get _any_ use out of the cheapest functional code once it has been taken out of context (and probably not properly documented, or readable) is lunacy.
Speaking of context... both science and art are commodities, at the end of the day. All attempts to dismiss or obfuscate this fact are naive delusions at the benign end of the scale, and actionable fraud at the other end.
I donate my geek skills to a non-profit here in San Francisco (an experience which has given me new insight into the phrase "legacy systems")... I scavenge hardware for parts off the free listings on craigslist.org. The usability and quality is generally better than what we get from donations (usually from local businesses looking to get rid of ancient hardware at no cost, just like you).
If you live in an area covered by craigslist, just post a listing in the free section... someone will take it off your hands, I assure you. Or, take a few moments to locate a worthy local non-profit or charity and make a call or two. Even if the ones you call have no need for it, chances are they know some other org that would love to have it.
Recycling is just one part of resource lifecycle management... don't forget about reduction and reuse.
hfsplusutils has come a long way since I first tried it some while ago... I find it indispensible now with all my old Macs dual-booting with Mac OS something-or-other/various PPC Linux distros.
hfsplusutils isn't exactly simple to use on the command line, but a few well-written shell scripts make it manageable.
Googling "hfsplusutils" brings up hits for both BSD & Linux distros on page one.
Homeowners can be jailed when trespassers drown in their pool, because the pool falls under the heading of, "Attractive Nuisance."
Close, but...
Damages relating to Attractive Nuisances are tortious in nature, not criminal. Civil liability and criminal guilt are different worlds.
In a civil matter involving an injured party and an accused l33t hax0r, it would be interesting to see attractive nuisance brought up in court by the plaintiff's counsel in response to a claim that it was a trojan attack. Problem is, in most venues, attractive nuisance applies only to the liability of property owners for injuries done to trespassing minors. In most venues, a property owner owes nothing to adult trespassers beyond not willfully or wantonly injuring them, and certainly owes nothing to an injured third party even if the injury was done with a chainsaw stolen from his property.
You seem to have mistaken rights for privileges. It's a common mistake, as well as a common fallacy played upon by those who wish to deprive people of some rights by fraud instead of force by persuading them that those rights were only on loan in the first place. Rights CANNOT be given, nor legislated into existence - they can only be taken away by force or fraud - that is the unique nature of rights. A right requires no intercession to exist, and only intercession can abridge it.
Your statement, children do NOT have all the rights adults have, is actually true, but not in the context nor for the reasons you wish for us to accept. They are denied the exercise and enjoyment of those rights because those rights have been abrogated. The responsibility inherent in rights is not to interfere with the rights of others... a responsibility which has been roundly and soundly rejected and neglected by the government, in part encouraged by the uninformed consent of myopic fools such as yourself.
The US Constitution does not say, "Here, have some rights. Enjoy."
It does not spell out what the citizenry is allowed to do. It proscribes the government from acting against the already extant rights of its masters, the People.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...
the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed...
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
No person shall be... subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury... (this right is not given, but depends upon the State taking certain actions on behalf of the accused... if these actions are not taken, the right is abridged)
the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States...
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Telco giant AT&T rushed to withdraw two notices sent to business partners and customers asking for the IP addresses of all outbound SMTP servers because of a 'human error' gaffe.
HEIGHT: The height of a building is measured from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the structural top of the building. This includes spires, but does not include television antennas, radio antennas, or flag poles. Height is listed in both meters and feet and is rounded to the nearest integer. This is the official criterion used by the Council in determining ranking.
OTHER MEASURES OF HEIGHT: In an effort to reflect other aspects of the statistical height of a building, additional information is shown for buildings ranked in the top ten. (All of the following measurements begin at the sidewalk level of the main entrance of the building.)
To Structural Top: Height to structural top of the building (the Council's official criteria as defined above).
To Highest Occupied Floor: Height to the floor of the highest occupied floor of the building.
To Top of Roof: Height to the top of the roof.
To Tip of Spire/Antenna: Height to the tip of spire, pinnacle, antenna, mast, or flag pole.
Of course, the leaders in each of these categories claim that they are the "tallest building." Then of course there's the debate over whether radio towers such as the CN Tower count as buildings.
the "From:" line is currently pretty much only advisory
Apparently a lot of MTAs took the advice of the From: header to the point of DDOSing the mailboxes of those named in the spoofed header with bounces. So, while you are technically correct in your statement, the practical reality is much different.
it's too easy to put in the wrong "From:" line accidentally when configuring mail systems
There is a difference between negligence and malice. Thus, they have that silly notion of proving intent to commit a crime in addition to the commission of the crime itself (hence the diffference between manslaughter and murder 1, in the extreme case, or the difference between a tortious instance of neglect and a prosecutable instance of malice, in the more common case).
People who promote violence against the innocent as a means of freedom are nothing more than disturbers of the peace who deserve their punishments.
You mean, like Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US Government's war of aggression against a sovereign nation, which has resulted in over 7000 civilian deaths in pursuit of regime change?
I support anyone's right to complain about our government and call for change, but not the promotion of fear and violence.
You mean like the US Government's exploitation of a national tragedy in much the same way the Reichstag fire was exploited to suspend civil liberties?
Gee, Skippy, thanks for the heads-up, but I've been playing in this sandbox a while (note the increasingly rare 5 digit uid).
The fact remains that two of the major reasons that spam continues to be a problem is that too many people either just accept it as "one of those things" they have to deal with as part and parcel of the electronic age, or they actually think that spammers have a right to hijack other people's property and time.
Since I'm pretty sure it's still illegal for me to personally hunt down spammers and plink them with my DE.50AE M-VII or show them a little hot and heavy lovin' with my Mossberg, I have to settle for doing my part by reminding people that spam is not a Free Speech issue whenever the subject comes up, wherever that may be. The fact that UCE is a property rights issue has fuckall to do with whether the post to which I replied was a troll.
The fact that you probably consider your one-liner to be a great personal achievement - representing your highest and your best potential - and therefeore must surely think my several paragraphs a veritable magnum opus representing a huge investment of time and personal sacrifice, has fuckall to do with the fact that some of us actually use language to convey meaning to other people - as a matter of course, not as the rare exception.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
Advertisers lease space on billboards. They give money to the owner of said property (the billboard) in consideration of its appropriate use by them. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers pay publishers to have their adverts printed. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers give money to networks and local stations to run their adverts. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Spammers use network and computing resources that do not belong to them and for which they have not paid anything in consideration of use, often relaying through other networks (and hijacking bandwidth and CPU cycles that would otherwise be used for legitimate and probably profitable tasks) in an attempt to hide their origin. The processing of UCE on the receiving machines takes CPU cycles and ultimately otherwise useful and profitable time away from the owners of those resources. There is no legitimate contractual agreement there, anymore so than if I spraypainted my company's logo on your garage door in the dark of night and left it to you to bear the cost of cleaning it up. It's just advertising, right?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
Print and broadcast advertising are what keep publishers and networks in business, and what keeps the cost at the point of consumption of print and broadcast media in the range of free to a few dollars per unit for the consumer, but there is no binding agreement between the consumer and the network or publisher requiring the consumer to watch or read the adverts in consideration of consuming the product (the content of the magazine or TV show).
Freedom of speech != a right to a captive audience, and most certainly not at the audience's expense.
And, as an aside, if the profitability of a product or service rests solely on the success or failure of its "million dollar ad campaign," one surely must question just how innovative it could possibly be.
I suppose I should have quoted to what exactly I was replying (from the original post)...
Maybe we don't NEED an industry to feed us "content" anymore. Maybe we can make it up and share it amongst ourselves. Maybe we'll pay those of us who we really like. Maybe we won't be bamboozled by the bright lights of big money spectacles anymore.
Creating for the sake of creating and giving the fruits of one's labours away for the communal good might look good in some THC-induced mental fog, but people have to eat, and generally that involves trading value for value (money for art, in turn traded by the artist for food, etc). There's a reason the phrase starving artist is a part of our cultural lexicon. Those who don't wish to starve find ways to distribute their product|content|art|whatthefuckever through profitable channels. Yes, corporate vultures profit from the artists work as well, perhaps moreso than they should, but since you the consumer are no part of the contract between artist and distributor, you the consumer have no say in the arrangement except in whether you choose to buy the product or not. If you do choose to buy it, the distribution of the money isn't up to you any longer, as that money no longer belongs to you.
The problem isn't the RIAA or the MPAA, it's the corporate welfare state (that we have allowed to come about) that has allowed such organizations to thrive. Don't blame them, they're just getting while the getting's good (which is exactly the same thing that all you "information wants to be free" people do or would like to do).
So, amongst ourselves, without all the big budget and hype, we could have produced LotR or Star Wars IV thru VI (my baby nephew could have done Episode I in between naps, so we won't go there)?
And all this time I was thinking it took creative genius, a little luck, and a lot of hard work (to the exclusion of life sustaining activities such as working to pay the bills and put food on the table) to create all that content that just wants to be free.
By "state funded" you mean of course paid for by me, the taxpayer, meaning that it's my property, and I have the right to utilize my property for the purpose for which it is intended.
The vaccinations are only effective for around 10 years. I was vaccinated in the 60s as a child and again in the 80s in the military. The latter one might still be marginally effective against naturally occuring smallpox, but as has been pointed out, it's more likely than not that any bioattack using smallpox will be resistant to the cowpox (not pus, why do all you people keep saying that?) based vaccine.
While I do agree with your conclusion that Internet access is not even close to being a basic (or any other kind of) right, I must emphatically disagree with the premise you use to reach that conclusion.
"Basic rights" have not the first thing to do with survival. Needs do not mandate rights any more than desires do.
Rights per se cannot be given nor legislated into existence, they can only be taken by force or outlawed (basically the same thing, as law carries the weight of the threat of force by the state); such is the unique nature of rights. The U.S. Constitution was crafted and amended in recognition of this fact; nearly every single amendment to it is worded in the negative, not prescribing what rights are to spring into existence by fiat, but instead proscribing the taking away of that which already exists without reliance upon any man or any state for its continuance save that it not be stolen away by force or fraud. The system was not designed to give us our due, but to ensure that what we possess in ourselves is not forcibly removed from us.
There is no basic right to food, water, or shelter. The only right associated with such things is the right to pursue them.
The people who proposed the change and the people who will ultimately decide upon its constitutionality were not elected by anyone. They are political appointees and career bureaucrats, elected by no one and accountable to few.
If you consider how long we've been waiting for this, I'd say we can hang on a couple more months.
And Puma certainly looks awesome from what I could see.
I've been working with Puma for a while now (NDAed, of course), and there are a few issues that Apple apparently considered show-stoppers that other companies would ship with and fix later (M$ service packs, anyone?)
As a Mac developer for a company that has a very close relationship with Apple, I like getting bleeding edge OS builds usually only hours after they are done. As an Apple/Mac user since the very beginning, I like knowing that when they do ship, it's working product.
Slashdot Mirror
How, exactly, do you characterize as sane and calm an attempt to grant the draconian, almost Orwellian and arguably unconstitutional powers the DoJ already has been gifted since 9/11 to a special interest consortium, which is to be used against the citizens which are, on paper at least, the lawful masters of both the government and every corporation granted charter by that government?
What you and most everyone seems to have forgotten is that corporations are legal fictions, created by the state, and granted privileges by the state.
Corporations do not have rights. All assertions and arguments that they do are bullshit based on bad money buying bad law. See also: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394), and subsequent cases in which corporate counsel got inattentive Justices to introduce into case law rulings based on a headnote which was no part of that first case in which the Chief Justice remarked before arguments that all the Justices were of the opinion that corporations were protected under the 14th Amendment as persons.
Corporations are creatures of the State. They are not Citizens. Citizens are the masters of the State. This current conflict over P2P and the RIAA in general is but a small part of the really big battle, wherein corporations seek to be elevated to the rank of Citizen, and thereby lawful masters of their only lawful master, lord and creator. Do the math.
RTFA? Nah, I thought not. There is no claim of it being the telescope used in the discovery.
The telescope was made by the discoverer of Pluto. Is that not enough "bragging rights" for you?
How would that work, exactly?
It wasn't until 1967 that the US Supreme Court ruled that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Before that time, it was illegal in many states to marry "outside one's race." If only "legal stuff" were allowed on the airwaves, The Jeffersons would have been banned if it had been in circulation pre-1967.
The definition of what's legal and not changes over time, and is always subject to interpretation... that's what all those lawyers and judges spend some of their time doing. While it may seem perfectly obvious and unquestionable to you or to me that consensual relations between mentally and emotionally stable adults should not be illegal, there are plenty of folks who hold a rather different view, and the conflict of those views is often played out on legal battlefields.
Beyond that, how would such a system of regulation handle the portrayal of lawful and absolutely essential actions such as solving crimes, if it could not portray the crime? How could there be a meaningful treatment of the effects of abuse if the ugly reality of it cannot be brought into the light of day?
Your plan is much more about censorship than any currently in place. Laws are not the answer. Regulating the consumption of inappropriate, obscene, vulgar, profane, or illegal acts presented in the form of entertainment should begin and end with the Individual, not the State.
I donate my geek skills to a non-profit here in San Francisco (an experience which has given me new insight into the phrase "legacy systems")... I scavenge hardware for parts off the free listings on craigslist.org. The usability and quality is generally better than what we get from donations (usually from local businesses looking to get rid of ancient hardware at no cost, just like you).
If you live in an area covered by craigslist, just post a listing in the free section... someone will take it off your hands, I assure you. Or, take a few moments to locate a worthy local non-profit or charity and make a call or two. Even if the ones you call have no need for it, chances are they know some other org that would love to have it.
Recycling is just one part of resource lifecycle management... don't forget about reduction and reuse.
hfsplusutils has come a long way since I first tried it some while ago... I find it indispensible now with all my old Macs dual-booting with Mac OS something-or-other/various PPC Linux distros.
hfsplusutils isn't exactly simple to use on the command line, but a few well-written shell scripts make it manageable.
Googling "hfsplusutils" brings up hits for both BSD & Linux distros on page one.
Perhaps you have a different dictionary than the rest of us, but ITYM "which is within their means" where you said "of choice."
Close, but...
Damages relating to Attractive Nuisances are tortious in nature, not criminal. Civil liability and criminal guilt are different worlds.
In a civil matter involving an injured party and an accused l33t hax0r, it would be interesting to see attractive nuisance brought up in court by the plaintiff's counsel in response to a claim that it was a trojan attack. Problem is, in most venues, attractive nuisance applies only to the liability of property owners for injuries done to trespassing minors. In most venues, a property owner owes nothing to adult trespassers beyond not willfully or wantonly injuring them, and certainly owes nothing to an injured third party even if the injury was done with a chainsaw stolen from his property.
You seem to have mistaken rights for privileges. It's a common mistake, as well as a common fallacy played upon by those who wish to deprive people of some rights by fraud instead of force by persuading them that those rights were only on loan in the first place. Rights CANNOT be given, nor legislated into existence - they can only be taken away by force or fraud - that is the unique nature of rights. A right requires no intercession to exist, and only intercession can abridge it.
Your statement, children do NOT have all the rights adults have, is actually true, but not in the context nor for the reasons you wish for us to accept. They are denied the exercise and enjoyment of those rights because those rights have been abrogated. The responsibility inherent in rights is not to interfere with the rights of others... a responsibility which has been roundly and soundly rejected and neglected by the government, in part encouraged by the uninformed consent of myopic fools such as yourself.
The US Constitution does not say, "Here, have some rights. Enjoy."
It does not spell out what the citizenry is allowed to do. It proscribes the government from acting against the already extant rights of its masters, the People.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...
the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed...
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
No person shall be ... subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury... (this right is not given, but depends upon the State taking certain actions on behalf of the accused... if these actions are not taken, the right is abridged)
the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States...
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
I swear, I was nowhere near that gaffe.
Here's a site I stumbled across a couple years ago that supports both your criteria and that used to proclaim Taipei the tallest:
High-Rise Buildings Database There are 4 recognized criteria for determining height...Of course, the leaders in each of these categories claim that they are the "tallest building." Then of course there's the debate over whether radio towers such as the CN Tower count as buildings.
Apparently a lot of MTAs took the advice of the From: header to the point of DDOSing the mailboxes of those named in the spoofed header with bounces. So, while you are technically correct in your statement, the practical reality is much different.
There is a difference between negligence and malice. Thus, they have that silly notion of proving intent to commit a crime in addition to the commission of the crime itself (hence the diffference between manslaughter and murder 1, in the extreme case, or the difference between a tortious instance of neglect and a prosecutable instance of malice, in the more common case).
dude, you do know you've just been trolled?
Gee, Skippy, thanks for the heads-up, but I've been playing in this sandbox a while (note the increasingly rare 5 digit uid).
The fact remains that two of the major reasons that spam continues to be a problem is that too many people either just accept it as "one of those things" they have to deal with as part and parcel of the electronic age, or they actually think that spammers have a right to hijack other people's property and time.
Since I'm pretty sure it's still illegal for me to personally hunt down spammers and plink them with my DE .50AE M-VII or show them a little hot and heavy lovin' with my Mossberg, I have to settle for doing my part by reminding people that spam is not a Free Speech issue whenever the subject comes up, wherever that may be. The fact that UCE is a property rights issue has fuckall to do with whether the post to which I replied was a troll.
The fact that you probably consider your one-liner to be a great personal achievement - representing your highest and your best potential - and therefeore must surely think my several paragraphs a veritable magnum opus representing a huge investment of time and personal sacrifice, has fuckall to do with the fact that some of us actually use language to convey meaning to other people - as a matter of course, not as the rare exception.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
Advertisers lease space on billboards. They give money to the owner of said property (the billboard) in consideration of its appropriate use by them. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers pay publishers to have their adverts printed. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers give money to networks and local stations to run their adverts. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Spammers use network and computing resources that do not belong to them and for which they have not paid anything in consideration of use, often relaying through other networks (and hijacking bandwidth and CPU cycles that would otherwise be used for legitimate and probably profitable tasks) in an attempt to hide their origin. The processing of UCE on the receiving machines takes CPU cycles and ultimately otherwise useful and profitable time away from the owners of those resources. There is no legitimate contractual agreement there, anymore so than if I spraypainted my company's logo on your garage door in the dark of night and left it to you to bear the cost of cleaning it up. It's just advertising, right?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
Print and broadcast advertising are what keep publishers and networks in business, and what keeps the cost at the point of consumption of print and broadcast media in the range of free to a few dollars per unit for the consumer, but there is no binding agreement between the consumer and the network or publisher requiring the consumer to watch or read the adverts in consideration of consuming the product (the content of the magazine or TV show).
Freedom of speech != a right to a captive audience, and most certainly not at the audience's expense.
And, as an aside, if the profitability of a product or service rests solely on the success or failure of its "million dollar ad campaign," one surely must question just how innovative it could possibly be.
I suppose I should have quoted to what exactly I was replying (from the original post)...
Creating for the sake of creating and giving the fruits of one's labours away for the communal good might look good in some THC-induced mental fog, but people have to eat, and generally that involves trading value for value (money for art, in turn traded by the artist for food, etc). There's a reason the phrase starving artist is a part of our cultural lexicon. Those who don't wish to starve find ways to distribute their product|content|art|whatthefuckever through profitable channels. Yes, corporate vultures profit from the artists work as well, perhaps moreso than they should, but since you the consumer are no part of the contract between artist and distributor, you the consumer have no say in the arrangement except in whether you choose to buy the product or not. If you do choose to buy it, the distribution of the money isn't up to you any longer, as that money no longer belongs to you.
The problem isn't the RIAA or the MPAA, it's the corporate welfare state (that we have allowed to come about) that has allowed such organizations to thrive. Don't blame them, they're just getting while the getting's good (which is exactly the same thing that all you "information wants to be free" people do or would like to do).
So, amongst ourselves, without all the big budget and hype, we could have produced LotR or Star Wars IV thru VI (my baby nephew could have done Episode I in between naps, so we won't go there)?
And all this time I was thinking it took creative genius, a little luck, and a lot of hard work (to the exclusion of life sustaining activities such as working to pay the bills and put food on the table) to create all that content that just wants to be free.
By "state funded" you mean of course paid for by me, the taxpayer, meaning that it's my property, and I have the right to utilize my property for the purpose for which it is intended.
The vaccinations are only effective for around 10 years. I was vaccinated in the 60s as a child and again in the 80s in the military. The latter one might still be marginally effective against naturally occuring smallpox, but as has been pointed out, it's more likely than not that any bioattack using smallpox will be resistant to the cowpox (not pus, why do all you people keep saying that?) based vaccine.
While I do agree with your conclusion that Internet access is not even close to being a basic (or any other kind of) right, I must emphatically disagree with the premise you use to reach that conclusion.
"Basic rights" have not the first thing to do with survival. Needs do not mandate rights any more than desires do.
Rights per se cannot be given nor legislated into existence, they can only be taken by force or outlawed (basically the same thing, as law carries the weight of the threat of force by the state); such is the unique nature of rights. The U.S. Constitution was crafted and amended in recognition of this fact; nearly every single amendment to it is worded in the negative, not prescribing what rights are to spring into existence by fiat, but instead proscribing the taking away of that which already exists without reliance upon any man or any state for its continuance save that it not be stolen away by force or fraud. The system was not designed to give us our due, but to ensure that what we possess in ourselves is not forcibly removed from us.
There is no basic right to food, water, or shelter. The only right associated with such things is the right to pursue them.
I have to disagree.
Innocent until proven guilty implies that guilt is presupposed, and that it's just a matter of time until it can be proven.
Simply because many people use language incorrectly does not make that usage valid.
The people who proposed the change and the people who will ultimately decide upon its constitutionality were not elected by anyone. They are political appointees and career bureaucrats, elected by no one and accountable to few.
Nitpick: It's innocent unless proven guilty...
</pet peeve>
I've been working with Puma for a while now (NDAed, of course), and there are a few issues that Apple apparently considered show-stoppers that other companies would ship with and fix later (M$ service packs, anyone?)
As a Mac developer for a company that has a very close relationship with Apple, I like getting bleeding edge OS builds usually only hours after they are done. As an Apple/Mac user since the very beginning, I like knowing that when they do ship, it's working product.
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