Linux based distros and bsd's, ect. don't need Joe Average any more than Joe needs them. But would definately benifit from Joe.
Maybe most Joe's can't program thier vcr let alone an application or game. However the more Joe's that can and do use OSS *nixes, the more apps that will be written. And while not all of them are going to be OSS many will. Plus alot of people doing free coding are doing it for recognition and practice and developing a marketable history. You can get that doing work on OSS apps for Linux and such, but with windows being dominant it's a significant draw for coding in ones free time. More people are likely to see/use your OSS app if you write it for windows. Developement houses write more windows code and will value that experience more. And so on.
Just because 'Joe' can't code hello world, don't dissmis his power in defining the marketplace and defacto standards, and thus what many people code for.
The really good news, is that with Linux and OSS is that it's not an eigther/or choice, both can be done, by whom ever chooses to do so,and that is the real benifit of OSS.:)
Yeah that would explain it. Especially if the digital manipulations affected large regions. Some manipulations can cause close but not identicle colors to become the same and otherwise introduce patterns that png compresses easier.
Seems like what your doing could fit both definitions, art and photo, depending on what your doing to the photos.
Personally I prefer lossless encoding, and would like a really good lossless or near lossless format for photgraphics that could gain significant popularity.
In your case I'd stick with png or other lossless format (some programs, psp and adobe for example, have thier own formats that save a lot of state information such as layers, undo stacks, etc.). for working and only use a lossy format for copies of the final image, say for posting on a web page or e-mailing interested parties. Saving partly finished work in a lossy format, loading for mor work, re-saving new image, etc. would be BAD five or six itteration of that and the image would be so degraded as to useless.
I think that it'd be useful for there to be a legal standard for how a EULA must be presented to a user to be binding.
How about, not binding unless read, agreed to, and signed BEFORE you buy/download the software for a start.
I think shrinkwrap liscenses are a load of bull and they should be just as struck down as they were when they were tried on other products some time ago.
Also the requirement for 'plain language' was a good thing in the proposed bill, however a requirement of prominance and a reasonable effort to make shure it's actually read would be nice as well.
Plus some of the vagueness needs to be taken care of. As it currently stands some spyware could get through and some non-spyware could be 'caught'. I believe someone else mention the update feature on software, though I'd rather not have more than a notice be automatic, or at least require auto-updating to be turned on. McAfee's updater is broken, it tries silently EVERY 5 MINUTES. And if you've configured windows to automatically connect it'll quite happily do so and if your paying by the minute..........
HEH, with the recursive acronym craze of OSS people, who also tend to faver png, I'm not suprised at the confusion, esp with the wikipedia article. I think I'd heard that version myself.
Also IIRC, png and several of it's bretheren started as *nix file formats. PNG PBM PGS(?) and others. A case of meme overlinking in the brain:)
The difference is that you already got the ticket. If you did 50 in a 40 10 years ago you don't get a ticket for it next year.
I guesse I was a little vague. My anology should have been clearer, sorry.
What I meant was if you broke the law tuesday and got caught, just because what you did became leagle wednessday doesen't eleminate your crime tuesday or get you out of the fine and/or time in jail.
Being that IP law is largely civil is more likely to have an effect. but IANAL eigther so I can't say for certain.
However going back to my analogy if what you did tuesday was somthing you did daily, you only have to worry about the times before wednessday when it became leagle. And they can only go after damages from time frame the patent existed. Once it expires anyone can use, or continue to use as the case may be, the formerly patened device without fear of further charges of infringement.
Exactly, I wish someone tell the anime newsgroups about this. I can understand that early on png support was limited. But that's just not true anymore.
Now even IE and OE support PNG directly, and as much as we may decry it,those two programs are the broswer and usenet readers used by 80%+ of the people on the web (and most others support png, many since thier inception) . There is just no excuse anymore except ignorance.
And even if lossy vs non lossy is confusing, "use png for art/cartoons/comics and jpg for photo's and stuff that looks just like a photo or your files will be huge and take forever to send/recieve" should be fairly simple to get. add to the fact that almost every image program and image viewer support both and it should be a no brainer.
I'm not a big fan of jpg myself, it works great for photographic material on webpages, but jpeg artifacts annoy the heck out of me for some reason. And png is great for non-photgraphic images. Probably whats needed is a smarter format that can handle both types, with and and without loss. Though it'd probably have to have 3 or 4 algorithyms, but zip's have more than one and chooses them fairly intelligently with no user imput.
Jpeg could be better in it's subset if more programs would analyse the image a bit and at least try and pick good settings, and notify the user of them should they go in to edit the setting. I also believe the program should warn users what image types are apropriate for jpeg compression and which types do better under png and other types.
Actually iirc it's mng that does animation, png does not. Perhaps you shouldn't try to flame someone without at least checking to see if you have any fule to flame with.
Except PNG and Jpeg are not designed for the same kind of images. It goes beyond lossy/non-lossy issues. Jpeg - lossy, use on photos (has lossless mode in the standard even though not always implemented) Png - lossles, designed for art/cartoon/human created images.
I have a couple of posts earlier about this so I won't go into it further to save people from hearing the full rant all 3 times:)
Except PNG isn't really that good for photos. cartoons,art, and other human created images is what it doese best. I'm not shure if there is a good lossless format designed for photographic images out there. Don't get me wrong, png IS a Good Thing for what it's designed for and I have a personal pet peeve with people who jpeg where png is appropriate, and even being lossless png appropriate material can be smaller as a png than as a jpg. see my rant earlier about this.
Only 3x. I'll take guesse here that most of what you store in png format is art/cartoon stuff and not photographic type pictures.
Png is designed for created images where color values remain fairly constant over sizable chunks of the image, and is designed to be lossless.
Jpeg on the other hand is designed to deal with photographic images where the colors make small changes changes fairly constantly and have some high contrast areas. It is then compressed in a lossy manner that takes into acount both the nature of the image and how the human eye sees it by discarding detail on the color level and smaller intensity luminance changes, while trying to keep a bit more detail in higher contrast areas of the image.
These two types of images don't often cross compress well. Png makes little sense for photo's unless you have to have a lossless format that's non-obscure, though there are other such.
Whereas using jpeg for say backing up scans of a comic book (maybee an expensive rare one you still want to read/view safely) isn't really a good idea because at the same settings it can take 2-5 times the space a photo of the same resolution would, all but negating the savings of lossy compression. I hate running into sites that don't know this and use jpg for cartoon images, I can't get broadband here and hate when a page takes forever to load because the "web-designer" hasn't bothered to learn to use the right format for images on page. The anime newsgroups have the same idiot problem, they post a 450k jpeg which would have been about 220k in png.
Unfortunately if by some small miracle the patent is valid, the would probably still be liable for infringement during the time the patent existed. If you do 50 in a 40 and get a ticket, you don't somehow get off if the speed limit on the road is raised to 55 AFTER you got got speeding.
Unless the patent laws work different than other laws, I assume what would matter is if they infringed during the lifetime of the patent. Hopefully the prior art claims pan out.
Personaly I think patents on software are a bad idea in general, at least under the same terms as hardware patents, the mediums are too different. If we need some kind of special patent like protection, say for a truly novel and clever algorithym, then a five to ten year protection on a very well defined algorithym would make sense. Imho patent law should prohibit any kind of discriminatory licensing in the last half of thier term. And they should be more like trade marks. No stealth patents where you just sit on it until a lot of people are using it and industries are dependent on it. If you don't call people on it when you discover thier using it, then your effectively giving them a free liscense to use it. Though I do believe simply sending a verifiable notice that product x uses patent y should be enough to count, as long as you let them know you have a patent that applies, even if you don't ask for any specific remedy at that time.
It's been a while so this may have changed, but diet coke syrup (the stuff you mix with carbonated wate to get fountain diet coke) was once on the local list of things you had to have MSDS for in this state.
"hmmm... Maybe they're acting weird is because they're engaged in illegal deals with the country in question? Nah, that can't be the case.... it's always the American's fault... always!"
Might also help explain why certain countries with veto power refused to do anything other than sign useless resolution after useless resolution. And why Saddam thought he could get away with not following them.
With that claim, you are accusing the President of treason-level lying, because pre-emption was exactly the reason he gave for going to war.
Sorry, that was more my take on it than a statement as to why GWB chose to goto war, I Really should have said somthing like: This conflict could also be seen not as a pre-emptive war but,a resumption of a previous conflict when one party failed to live up to the cease fire treaty.
Mea Culpa on the phrasing, but it doese seem accurate to say he (Saddam) wasn't going to go by the rules.
Besides, the US was not a party to that agreement, It was been Iraq and the UN (of which US is just one member)! If the US had gone to the UN and properly demanded that either (a) sanctions against Iraq be dropped as ineffective, or (b) Iraq be forcibly put into compliance, then all indications are that UN approval would've come through by around February, 2004.
Most likely it would have been a., if eigther, as countries with veto power had to much money invested in Iraq to really want to force the trade sanctions.
As far as the Weapons and intelligence issue goes it's quite clear that even though he kept saying he didn't have any, he wanted the world to believe he had them. Why else would he not simply demonstrate he didn't. The inspectors were NOT there to play detective, they were there to VERIFY thier destruction and other elements of compliance. Saddam was require to give pro-active help to them in thier job. That's not what he did.
I can't really comment to much on the natural resources argument (though I can see how somthing like that could apply. but in EVERY case? on both sides of 'the coin'). Still significant resource like that can't be just wrote off as 'oh it's make them to lazy to be any trouble to anyone', especially when Saddams track record was just the opposite.
Still what worries me is with so many so certain he still had such weapons is the chance he shuffled them offstage into the hands eigther another unsavory government or equally bad group of individuals.
I dunno, maybe because the topic is about the FBI rading Arizone state schools. Last I checked both were still in the USA. (which would place him under b).
However since he was moded funny it has occured to me he was just trying to be funny. In which case I should have had a C) your Joking right. In that case I'm sorry I didn't get the joke.
Personally I download very little that's still under copyright. Almost never if it's still publicly available in fact I can only think of a few songs, all from the same disk that won't play in my cd-rom because the idiot copy protection scheme I don't feel like trying to bypass.
A few other item's haven't been available to the public for many years, except one in a really cheesy version I hate on a soundtrack.
Personally I am all for the concept of copyright as ORIGINALLY INTENDED. a few years (10-20 on books and movies, a bit less on software) as I have NO problem with people making money off of thier efforts that way. What I have against the *IAA is thier tactics and attempts to undermine the meaning of copyright as a tempory granted priivilage. Instead they want to treat it like property rights, in perpetuity, at the expense of all concerned (including themselves in the long run), and take excessive actions to protect it. They buy^H^H^H lobby congressmen, try to get the right to hack others computers if they MIGHT be filesharing 'thier' work, instantiate lawsuits against thousands in an extortionlike manner, make pseudo-cd's that in at least on case cost many people a repair bill when they tried to play it on thier computers. And so on.
While some are just being hippocritical (by only see-ing copyright law as good when it supports free as in beer things) many more are just simply angered by those companies that abuse the concept of IP, by eighter the *IAA's tactics listed above, or by ignoring the GPL for thier own selfish gain.
If Jefferson and Madison are "extremely obscure historic figures" for you then a) I feel sorry for you, and B) I seriously question your ability to partake in this discussion with any credibility.
He wasn't confusing the isue, he was actually discusing in a more complete context. But I suppose if the subject was math you would make the same arguement if someon brought up multiplication and long division.
Minor nitpick, but Iraq has the 3rd largest reserve of oil. Not exactly 3rd world (despite the despot's keeping many of civilian living that poor or worse).
Saddam had already proven he had no qualms about attacking neighboring countries or useing chemical weapons on his own people let alone others.
He was not obeying the U.N. resolutions, the cease fire agreement (you know the one that says we'll stop pounding on you as long as you do x,y, and z).
Also a good portion of the world believed he had large amounts of proscribed weapons(instead of the tiny amounts found so-far), and his behouviour right up to the end only lent credibility to that perception.
The main reason several countries didn't want to follow through on removing him when it became clear he would never do what he agreed to do is because of thier significant financial investments in Iraq. And quite possibly thier bypassing the embargo illeagly.
Still though setting a precedent for pre-emtive war is not somthing I care for. Fortunately this was not a pre-emtive war, it was a resumption of a previous conflict when one party failed to live up to the cease fire treaty.
As for boycotting the RIAA it isn't working. They aren't getting the idea that what they are doing is wrong. They are proving that they need to do it more. Hurting there bottom line is just going to make the more agressive. You stop buying from them all together and they will become like SCO and be forced to live only as a law suit buisiness. Not what I want to see happen.
Yes, given thier current stance that loss in revenue MUST be from P2P and nothing else*, a quiet boycott won't change how they behave anytime soon.
The best ways to make a boycot work are to write them and tell them you've stoped buying thier products (and why), to get the media's attention in such a way that shows as many involved in a boycot as possible, and to stop downloading thier music! (if few to no songs are being shared online, yet thier down in sales by a huge amount that could not possibly be related to the number swapped they might get it).
The anti-RIAA t-shirt is acutally a good idea. If enough people were wearing t-shirts or whatever that said boycott the RIAA, especialy if they made it hard to connect to p2p, this would help create a 'buzz' that would be hard to ignore. Somthing like "I Won't buy, download, or listen to anything the RIAA produces. Ask me about the big RIAA boycott". Well probably better get someone who's actually good at t-shirt messages.
In summary, for a boycott to work, it'll take more effort than just not buying thier shiny disc's that somtimes plays in cd players and somtimes just locks up your mac.
Mycroft
*e.g.:The bad dip the economy took, the low percieved quality of many of thier cookie cutter bands, the angry people who've gotten sick of thier bullying, copy protection schemes that cause problems, the larger numbers of people hearing of how they mistreat acts, the perception that thier prices are to high, and many more I'm sure.
LOL, I'd heard that they had turned it off a few years ago (or were planning to) but turned it back on after 9/11 so only our stuff would be pin point accurate. though I when I heard about both it was not yet DONE just somthing they said they were going to do. I dunno though. my memory isn't totaly clear on that.
Slashdot Mirror
No more than the original D&D was a tool to lure young children into satan worshiping.
Mycroft
(however If said $cientolllogy was a satanic tool....)
Linux based distros and bsd's, ect. don't need Joe Average any more than Joe needs them. But would definately benifit from Joe. :)
Maybe most Joe's can't program thier vcr let alone an application or game. However the more Joe's that can and do use OSS *nixes, the more apps that will be written. And while not all of them are going to be OSS many will. Plus alot of people doing free coding are doing it for recognition and practice and developing a marketable history. You can get that doing work on OSS apps for Linux and such, but with windows being dominant it's a significant draw for coding in ones free time. More people are likely to see/use your OSS app if you write it for windows. Developement houses write more windows code and will value that experience more. And so on.
Just because 'Joe' can't code hello world, don't dissmis his power in defining the marketplace and defacto standards, and thus what many people code for.
The really good news, is that with Linux and OSS is that it's not an eigther/or choice, both can be done, by whom ever chooses to do so,and that is the real benifit of OSS.
Mycroft
Yeah that would explain it. Especially if the digital manipulations affected large regions. Some manipulations can cause close but not identicle colors to become the same and otherwise introduce patterns that png compresses easier.
Seems like what your doing could fit both definitions, art and photo, depending on what your doing to the photos.
Personally I prefer lossless encoding, and would like a really good lossless or near lossless format for photgraphics that could gain significant popularity.
In your case I'd stick with png or other lossless format (some programs, psp and adobe for example, have thier own formats that save a lot of state information such as layers, undo stacks, etc.). for working and only use a lossy format for copies of the final image, say for posting on a web page or e-mailing interested parties. Saving partly finished work in a lossy format, loading for mor work, re-saving new image, etc. would be BAD five or six itteration of that and the image would be so degraded as to useless.
Mycroft
I think that it'd be useful for there to be a legal standard for how a EULA must be presented to a user to be binding.
How about, not binding unless read, agreed to, and signed BEFORE you buy/download the software for a start.
I think shrinkwrap liscenses are a load of bull and they should be just as struck down as they were when they were tried on other products some time ago.
Also the requirement for 'plain language' was a good thing in the proposed bill, however a requirement of prominance and a reasonable effort to make shure it's actually read would be nice as well.
Plus some of the vagueness needs to be taken care of. As it currently stands some spyware could get through and some non-spyware could be 'caught'. I believe someone else mention the update feature on software, though I'd rather not have more than a notice be automatic, or at least require auto-updating to be turned on. McAfee's updater is broken, it tries silently EVERY 5 MINUTES. And if you've configured windows to automatically connect it'll quite happily do so and if your paying by the minute..........
Mycroft
HEH, with the recursive acronym craze of OSS people, who also tend to faver png, I'm not suprised at the confusion, esp with the wikipedia article. I think I'd heard that version myself. :)
Also IIRC, png and several of it's bretheren started as *nix file formats. PNG PBM PGS(?) and others.
A case of meme overlinking in the brain
Mycroft
I guesse I was a little vague. My anology should have been clearer, sorry.
What I meant was if you broke the law tuesday and got caught, just because what you did became leagle wednessday doesen't eleminate your crime tuesday or get you out of the fine and/or time in jail.
Being that IP law is largely civil is more likely to have an effect. but IANAL eigther so I can't say for certain.
However going back to my analogy if what you did tuesday was somthing you did daily, you only have to worry about the times before wednessday when it became leagle. And they can only go after damages from time frame the patent existed. Once it expires anyone can use, or continue to use as the case may be, the formerly patened device without fear of further charges of infringement.
Mycroft.
Exactly, I wish someone tell the anime newsgroups about this. I can understand that early on png support was limited. But that's just not true anymore.
Now even IE and OE support PNG directly, and as much as we may decry it,those two programs are the broswer and usenet readers used by 80%+ of the people on the web (and most others support png, many since thier inception) . There is just no excuse anymore except ignorance.
And even if lossy vs non lossy is confusing, "use png for art/cartoons/comics and jpg for photo's and stuff that looks just like a photo or your files will be huge and take forever to send/recieve" should be fairly simple to get. add to the fact that almost every image program and image viewer support both and it should be a no brainer.
Mycroft
I'm not a big fan of jpg myself, it works great for photographic material on webpages, but jpeg artifacts annoy the heck out of me for some reason. And png is great for non-photgraphic images. Probably whats needed is a smarter format that can handle both types, with and and without loss. Though it'd probably have to have 3 or 4 algorithyms, but zip's have more than one and chooses them fairly intelligently with no user imput.
Jpeg could be better in it's subset if more programs would analyse the image a bit and at least try and pick good settings, and notify the user of them should they go in to edit the setting. I also believe the program should warn users what image types are apropriate for jpeg compression and which types do better under png and other types.
Mycroft
Err, I do hope that's a joke. I rather suspect it is, but just in case:
png = Portable Network Graphics.
Mycroft
Actually iirc it's mng that does animation, png does not. Perhaps you shouldn't try to flame someone without at least checking to see if you have any fule to flame with.
Mycroft
Except PNG and Jpeg are not designed for the same kind of images. It goes beyond lossy/non-lossy issues. :)
Jpeg - lossy, use on photos (has lossless mode in the standard even though not always implemented)
Png - lossles, designed for art/cartoon/human created images.
I have a couple of posts earlier about this so I won't go into it further to save people from hearing the full rant all 3 times
Mycroft
Except PNG isn't really that good for photos. cartoons,art, and other human created images is what it doese best. I'm not shure if there is a good lossless format designed for photographic images out there. Don't get me wrong, png IS a Good Thing for what it's designed for and I have a personal pet peeve with people who jpeg where png is appropriate, and even being lossless png appropriate material can be smaller as a png than as a jpg. see my rant earlier about this.
Mycroft
Only 3x. I'll take guesse here that most of what you store in png format is art/cartoon stuff and not photographic type pictures.
Png is designed for created images where color values remain fairly constant over sizable chunks of the image, and is designed to be lossless.
Jpeg on the other hand is designed to deal with photographic images where the colors make small changes changes fairly constantly and have some high contrast areas. It is then compressed in a lossy manner that takes into acount both the nature of the image and how the human eye sees it by discarding detail on the color level and smaller intensity luminance changes, while trying to keep a bit more detail in higher contrast areas of the image.
These two types of images don't often cross compress well. Png makes little sense for photo's unless you have to have a lossless format that's non-obscure, though there are other such.
Whereas using jpeg for say backing up scans of a comic book (maybee an expensive rare one you still want to read/view safely) isn't really a good idea because at the same settings it can take 2-5 times the space a photo of the same resolution would, all but negating the savings of lossy compression. I hate running into sites that don't know this and use jpg for cartoon images, I can't get broadband here and hate when a page takes forever to load because the "web-designer" hasn't bothered to learn to use the right format for images on page. The anime newsgroups have the same idiot problem, they post a 450k jpeg which would have been about 220k in png.
Mycroft
Unfortunately if by some small miracle the patent is valid, the would probably still be liable for infringement during the time the patent existed. If you do 50 in a 40 and get a ticket, you don't somehow get off if the speed limit on the road is raised to 55 AFTER you got got speeding.
Unless the patent laws work different than other laws, I assume what would matter is if they infringed during the lifetime of the patent. Hopefully the prior art claims pan out.
Personaly I think patents on software are a bad idea in general, at least under the same terms as hardware patents, the mediums are too different. If we need some kind of special patent like protection, say for a truly novel and clever algorithym, then a five to ten year protection on a very well defined algorithym would make sense. Imho patent law should prohibit any kind of discriminatory licensing in the last half of thier term. And they should be more like trade marks. No stealth patents where you just sit on it until a lot of people are using it and industries are dependent on it. If you don't call people on it when you discover thier using it, then your effectively giving them a free liscense to use it. Though I do believe simply sending a verifiable notice that product x uses patent y should be enough to count, as long as you let them know you have a patent that applies, even if you don't ask for any specific remedy at that time.
Mycroft
If linux and bsd are blond and brunett, which o.s. is the redhead.
Mycroft
It's been a while so this may have changed, but diet coke syrup (the stuff you mix with carbonated wate to get fountain diet coke) was once on the local list of things you had to have MSDS for in this state.
Mycroft
Might also help explain why certain countries with veto power refused to do anything other than sign useless resolution after useless resolution. And why Saddam thought he could get away with not following them.
Mycroft
Sorry, that was more my take on it than a statement as to why GWB chose to goto war, I Really should have said somthing like:
This conflict could also be seen not as a pre-emptive war but,a resumption of a previous conflict when one party failed to live up to the cease fire treaty.
Mea Culpa on the phrasing, but it doese seem accurate to say he (Saddam) wasn't going to go by the rules.
Most likely it would have been a., if eigther, as countries with veto power had to much money invested in Iraq to really want to force the trade sanctions.
As far as the Weapons and intelligence issue goes it's quite clear that even though he kept saying he didn't have any, he wanted the world to believe he had them. Why else would he not simply demonstrate he didn't. The inspectors were NOT there to play detective, they were there to VERIFY thier destruction and other elements of compliance. Saddam was require to give pro-active help to them in thier job. That's not what he did.
I can't really comment to much on the natural resources argument (though I can see how somthing like that could apply. but in EVERY case? on both sides of 'the coin'). Still significant resource like that can't be just wrote off as 'oh it's make them to lazy to be any trouble to anyone', especially when Saddams track record was just the opposite.
Still what worries me is with so many so certain he still had such weapons is the chance he shuffled them offstage into the hands eigther another unsavory government or equally bad group of individuals.
Mycroft
I dunno, maybe because the topic is about the FBI rading Arizone state schools. Last I checked both were still in the USA. (which would place him under b).
However since he was moded funny it has occured to me he was just trying to be funny. In which case I should have had a C) your Joking right. In that case I'm sorry I didn't get the joke.
Mycroft
Personally I download very little that's still under copyright. Almost never if it's still publicly available in fact I can only think of a few songs, all from the same disk that won't play in my cd-rom because the idiot copy protection scheme I don't feel like trying to bypass.
A few other item's haven't been available to the public for many years, except one in a really cheesy version I hate on a soundtrack.
Personally I am all for the concept of copyright as ORIGINALLY INTENDED. a few years (10-20 on books and movies, a bit less on software) as I have NO problem with people making money off of thier efforts that way. What I have against the *IAA is thier tactics and attempts to undermine the meaning of copyright as a tempory granted priivilage. Instead they want to treat it like property rights, in perpetuity, at the expense of all concerned (including themselves in the long run), and take excessive actions to protect it. They buy^H^H^H lobby congressmen, try to get the right to hack others computers if they MIGHT be filesharing 'thier' work, instantiate lawsuits against thousands in an extortionlike manner, make pseudo-cd's that in at least on case cost many people a repair bill when they tried to play it on thier computers. And so on.
While some are just being hippocritical (by only see-ing copyright law as good when it supports free as in beer things) many more are just simply angered by those companies that abuse the concept of IP, by eighter the *IAA's tactics listed above, or by ignoring the GPL for thier own selfish gain.
Mycroft
If Jefferson and Madison are "extremely obscure historic figures" for you then a) I feel sorry for you, and B) I seriously question your ability to partake in this discussion with any credibility.
He wasn't confusing the isue, he was actually discusing in a more complete context. But I suppose if the subject was math you would make the same arguement if someon brought up multiplication and long division.
Mycroft
Minor nitpick, but Iraq has the 3rd largest reserve of oil. Not exactly 3rd world (despite the despot's keeping many of civilian living that poor or worse).
Saddam had already proven he had no qualms about attacking neighboring countries or useing chemical weapons on his own people let alone others.
He was not obeying the U.N. resolutions, the cease fire agreement (you know the one that says we'll stop pounding on you as long as you do x,y, and z).
Also a good portion of the world believed he had large amounts of proscribed weapons(instead of the tiny amounts found so-far), and his behouviour right up to the end only lent credibility to that perception.
The main reason several countries didn't want to follow through on removing him when it became clear he would never do what he agreed to do is because of thier significant financial investments in Iraq. And quite possibly thier bypassing the embargo illeagly.
Still though setting a precedent for pre-emtive war is not somthing I care for. Fortunately this was not a pre-emtive war, it was a resumption of a previous conflict when one party failed to live up to the cease fire treaty.
Mycroft
Yes, given thier current stance that loss in revenue MUST be from P2P and nothing else*, a quiet boycott won't change how they behave anytime soon.
The best ways to make a boycot work are to write them and tell them you've stoped buying thier products (and why), to get the media's attention in such a way that shows as many involved in a boycot as possible, and to stop downloading thier music! (if few to no songs are being shared online, yet thier down in sales by a huge amount that could not possibly be related to the number swapped they might get it).
The anti-RIAA t-shirt is acutally a good idea. If enough people were wearing t-shirts or whatever that said boycott the RIAA, especialy if they made it hard to connect to p2p, this would help create a 'buzz' that would be hard to ignore. Somthing like "I Won't buy, download, or listen to anything the RIAA produces. Ask me about the big RIAA boycott". Well probably better get someone who's actually good at t-shirt messages.
In summary, for a boycott to work, it'll take more effort than just not buying thier shiny disc's that somtimes plays in cd players and somtimes just locks up your mac.
Mycroft
*e.g.:The bad dip the economy took, the low percieved quality of many of thier cookie cutter bands, the angry people who've gotten sick of thier bullying, copy protection schemes that cause problems, the larger numbers of people hearing of how they mistreat acts, the perception that thier prices are to high, and many more I'm sure.
Now why do I feel like the phrase, "damned if you do damned if you don't" aplies.
Mycroft
LOL, I'd heard that they had turned it off a few years ago (or were planning to) but turned it back on after 9/11 so only our stuff would be pin point accurate. though I when I heard about both it was not yet DONE just somthing they said they were going to do. I dunno though. my memory isn't totaly clear on that.
Mycroft