Safety issues on the ISS?
Who the hell cares about that, anyway?
The ISS's only purpose is to hang there for a few years before NASA declares it defunct, lets it burn up in the atmosphere, and then makes grandiose plans for the next-generation, multi-billion-dollar, goddamn boondoggle.
We let Skylab and Mir fall and burn... so what makes you think the ISS will end up any different?
We spend $10K per kilogram or pound (I forget) to hoist entirely reusable stuff to orbit, but that's still not enough money invested to consider re-using any of it.
Re-use is never in the plans, because USAGE itself was never really in the plans either.
The ISS is the side-effect of the gaping-wide aerospace welfare program.
At least $8 billion that I know of was spent, without a kilogram making it to orbit yet.
Eight billion dollars without a single launch?
If that doesn't make it obvious what's going on, then nothing will for you.
Any of ISS's problems are irrelevant, because it has already served it's purpose.
Safety?
Maintenance?
Science?
Shit, the only other project goal on the hidden agenda is to let it fall, and then to use the failure to propose something bigger, better, and guaranteed more expensive.
"We have a bigger dick than the Europeans, Russians or Chinese."... and aerospace companies gotta eat, too.
After all, it's only tax money, and it's plain to see how little oversight governs that.
... of the Vichy government officials, when they explained that they shipped Jews (and probably other listed undesirables) into the German territory of their masters while not realizing they were being sent off to be killed.
Similarly, corporations who whine that they didn't know about the conditions of their subcontracted work (sweatshops, etc.) are also, equally liable and contemptible for their WILLFUL IGNORANCE.
Any corporate manager or officer can surf the net for 30 minutes and at least suspect that something is rotten in Denmark (or in this case, Pakistan).
They make no effort to know since they know otherwise full well that they'd find wrongdoing.
"Don't tell me, I don't want to know" is the standard CEO quote.
I must then remind you of the limits of your definitions.
Capitalism by itself doesn't exist.
It exists in a sea of Human currents.
And we are finding out how it fares when exposed to the current of immoral and insatiable greed.
To paraphrase Elbert Hubbard, a capitalist is a person with savings and a home.
Given the disappearance of savings in America, and combined with the trend of home loans that won't be paid off over the lifetime of the loan, and you end up with very few of these defined Capitalists in America today.
Savings and a home imply stability, and stability implies some sort of philosophy of life... morality, if you will.
It's this line of reasoning that compels me to summarize that we need a moral Capitalism.
Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?
Huh?
I didn't realize the USA had a space program.
You can take your "space race" sentiments and stick them firmly up your backsides.
The last space race was a race to the bottom, and we've piles of rusting equipment in America to prove it.
Fads and glitter can't replace a soundly built, functional space transportation system that serves to feed Human enterprise and living.
We never had such a system, and still today, mention manufacturing and living in space environments and people will give you that "what a nutter" look.
Government has only proven itself incapable of understanding how to expand culture into space.
Myself, I'm placing my hopes on private enterprise seeking out exploitation of space transportation and eventually mining of energy and material resouces.
Come back with a better argument... unless you concur that corporations can get away with "manslaughter" in this fashion and the individual can't... aaaand, no, paying a fine (corporation) isn't the same as being jailed (individual).
I fail to have any sympathy for a guy who runs a meth lab.
Your sympathy for the abuse of criminals can only lead in time that some guy claiming that he has a lack of sympathy for your being arrested for, say, posting on Slashdot.
Even criminals have rights, and enforcement and judicial people have restrictions.
Those who are accused are the ones in most need of strict attention to civil rights, since they run afoul of the mechanisms that purports to serve those rights.
But don't let these sentiments dissuade you.
Your attitude is very prevalent amongst the American population.
I am merely waiting for your nasty Empire to destroy itself as every Empire must... from internal contradictions as well as external violence.
As Nathra Nader (father to Ralph Nader) has paraphrasedly said, a widespread feeling of "it can't happen here" only hastens the end.
Other than that, your article appeared particularly cogent.
America had been aligned into an Orwellian world of constant terror of the rest of the world, from the Cold War onward, and we have the utter gall to wonder why the future is not appealing?
Education systems in America are producing the best educated morons the world has probably ever seen since the British Empire, and there we are with a finger up our collective nose, lamenting the lack of workable foresight?
Generations of space development have been so obviously wasted on producing a welfare system for aerospace companies, the US Air Force, and NASA in general, and yet we still hem and haw and demand that practical applications still exist?
I'm not buying the lies, I won't honor the ignorance, and I won't tolerate the frauds any-friggin'-more.
My eyes are now as open as my mouth, and it can only take death to close them.
Space development is gone... squandered on a massive bureaucracy that is unable to launch anything without spending billions of dollars, and is still unable to launch anything that is really useful, like a goddamn factory or habitat.
Their mission of launching people into space was lost to the more preferred mission of launching money into people's pockets.
Cultural development is gone... lost in fear and loathing as the Western World's flagship (America) heads straight towards wrecking upon the reef of Empire.
Profit motives have displaced the Human condition, and a vast hole in Human culture is still growing.
It can crash all Human civilization for many generations.
We have dared to put a price tag on a child's smile.
We are done.
Any fool can see this.
Hopefully some microculture somewhere in South America, Africa or Asia will arise from our (probably radioactivity- and bacteria-infested) ruins and build a better world.
Cold fusion is the poster boy for what is wrong with modern science practice.
Like the cart pulling the horse, agenda is leading all aspects of investigation.
The end result doesn't function.
Now, I'm not densedly supposing that agenda (bias, philosophy... call it what you will) can't serve a purpose in science.
Facts don't decide how to investigate... people have to sift facts and decide how to pursue things.
That decision process is biased.
But... as one other poster pointed out, doing "science by press release" is an extraordinarily bad practice.
It oozes political need while letting sharp investgation fall by the wayside.
In addition, I often wonder if the majority of scientists today are simply too badly trained to even begin to address their serious lack of objectivity.
As their mentors become progressively more whores for government and industry grants, that agenda-rich attitude can only pervade their students.
The developing product is what we clearly see today:
cold fusion is still an "I don't know" topic when all they had to do was run some arguably cheap and computationally simple experiments.
Forgetting to take into account mass and heat loss from evaporation?
These people aren't scientists.
Let's not forget the brouhaha over Pons's and Fle.'s legendary reluctance to be forthcoming about methods in order to have their experiment duplicated.
That alone should have had the claim laughed off the press (non full disclosure is a hallmark of a hoax).
But it wasn't... since once again, agenda oozed into the picture and certain scientists could milk grants on the basis of uncertainty and greed.
Cold fusion is right freakin' up there with perpetual motion.
PM claims are easy to debunk... on non-disclosure terms alone.
We should be relegating CF to the same graveyard of fraud.
Data just sits there, on computers that tend to just sit there most of the time.
Why can't we get them to organize all that data for us?
I've been asking this question since the early 1990s.
When I took a job at PictureTel's tech support, I really saw the need.
Support data came in from customers, engineers, other techs, managers, salesmen... and this blizzard of poorly unorganized, misspelled, rumor-filled, mostly textual files became a towering stack of data in a relatively short period of time -- and this was just the crap on our PCs!
(BTW, the mainframe programs were useful for a few lookups, but were mostly worthless for getting the job done... translate to "solve the customer's problem".)
So, I ran some ideas through my head about all this text.
Why couldn't a program crawl through all of that crapola and organize indexes from it?
As it turned out, web search engines are very large versions of my initial ideas (obvious, really) but they still don't work to the levels I am still thinking about, and their sheer size is an impediment to the daily indexing needs of... well, just about anyone who saves files and links onto their computers.
The freely- (and perhaps almost endlessly-) indexing database object ("fido"?) seems to still not exist.
It can't be that hard (the effort put into building the first versions of Netscape must have been harder).
Files of text contain icons (words) that can be compared to other icons in other files.
Which icons?
ALL OF THEM!
(With sensible exclusions, LikelyPrepositions.English.exclude.lib, etc.)
It can make these comparisons exactly (ASCII matches) or as loosely as you'd care to set it (i.e. "owl"="sparrow").
OR... you can have good ol' fido run the range of comparisons, letting you inspect whatever index you'd care to, later, whenever, never.
Hell, what does it matter?
It's only CPU time and disk space.
Keep that puppy chuggin' along 24hrs a day indexing stuff.
They're only index files, too; by definition, smaller than the data they keep track of.
Too bad I didn't stuff all of this into a Powerpoint {tm} presentation and shop around for venture capital in 1999.
He hee!
Savants Have All the Reputation of Movie Critics
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What's Always Next?
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· Score: 1
The predictions themselves suffered from the unreality effects of selection bias and narrow vision.
"Selection bias" means that selectors (basically, media folk) picked them out on their own judgment, and they decided which predictions gained dispersal.
It's just a model of media controls that the educated person has at least some notion of.
The "narrow vision" problem is epidemic in Human thinking.
People were ready to posit things like "flying cars", without sound speculation on the infrastructure that would support such items.
A thing like a flying car must operate on fuel of some kind.
That fuel must be distributed and afforded.
The cars themselves imply some level of skill, thus training.
Safety issues... routing issues... liability issues... even a short list of these things is harrowing -- and missing entirely from the predictions.
The end products overall followed a pattern of technocratic worship... technophilia.
The pattern dictates technological expansion that continues to "improve" lifestyles in ways that can only apply to ever narrowing sectors of population, OR, apply in ways that expand too quickly and must crash therefore.
Humans are not so far removed from their animal origin, so my rule of thumb with predictions is to test how far from the animal the predicted item takes us.
If the metric is too big, then it's likely to be hogwash of some kind.
It'll either never surface, or it'll boom and bust as the bad idea it ever was.
True dat.
But let's not forget Featuritis.
Billy-Boy's right that they've been doing the best they can... while operating on an overdrive to stuff more sexy features into Windows CV (Current Version) and Windows NV (Next Version).
There are only so many hours in the day to stuff the turkey, so you can only expect the 11th hour meat inspection to fall short of FDA standards.
Billy and his monkey-dancin' posse were constantly rewarded for their Bad Code Production Line {tm}, and it's twice more the pity that lost business to Linux is the only signal of strength that will reach their receiver.
Myself, I can see the future convulsions of the We Did Our Best giant, and Open Source material will have to run the gamut of legal hurdles put into place through the influence of Billy's Billions.
SCO's attempt is just a prelude.
I'm glad I have my Slackware Linux CDs.
Even a refined tech expert like a Congressman can't figure out how to kill the data on those CDs with some sort of Internet Kill Signal {tm}, even an EMP.
And I can use Open Source to surf the Internet safely.
Re:Priorities: Electrons Before Silicon
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Spray-On Computers
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· Score: 1
I got my start in common and electronic hardware in my teens.
I stand by my statements.
Anything electronic should be the benefit of our modern age.
My particular quote "gee, electronics... how expensive can that be?" dealt with the electronics that controlled the engine, the motor, and regulated the output.
You are talking about the motor/generator part.
And that's another thorny issue.
The West has been making electric motors for over 100 years.
In fact, this page shows a company that started making such things in 1893.
Motors and generators are a very mature technology.
Combined with their pervasive presence in general stuff for sale, I'd say that motors can't be that expensive all around.
I just did a bit of surfing, and at least this surplus place (at first glance, new electric motors don't seem to have website prices) shows AC motors at roughly $50/kW.
So, with a surplus or quality used engine and motor, with some controlling electronics, I can't imagine that you'd spend more than $150 with smart shopping.
$200 on the outside.
And this causes me to question a $400 generator, considering their economy of scale.
I suspect that (along with items for home pools) the price is significantly set by consumer desperation.
Your link to the Generator FAQ 1.0 was very informative, but illustrated by implication how unprepared our wired-up civilization is for emergency bypasses.
Homes are installed with one heating system (often dependent upon two power/fuel sources to run), one lighting system, and one food-storage system.
If the ng or electric fails, you simply lose your heat.
If the electric fails, you lose your perishable food and lighting.
There just aren't alternatives... not just the alternatives themselves, but there aren't any bypass interfaces for them.
There should be hookups for an electric generator, and for wood/coal stoves.
This is the Achilles Heel of our civilization.
It has little to do with cost, and much to do with our attitude.
For example, the bank HQ I work at was hit by the Aug 2003 power outage.
They have a truly enormous deisel generator on their roof, and that cut in automatically once the power was truly off (there was some battery holdover, but I digress).
The generator kept our data center and PBX alive... but everyone else in the building was gone.
Everyone... including the item processors who must process those thousands of checks every day as contractually promised.
As I later discovered, the generator has enough capacity to keep the data center, the PBX and item processors alive, but entire other floors, including the cash vault, facilities, private banking, international, etc.
Oh, yes, they're taking NOW about wiring all that up, but that's not the point.
It should have been wired up to emergency power from the beginning.
But it fell by the wayside from our so-called civilized attitude.
We get fat and happy, and as a result fall prey to a fantasy of security.
Look... during the outage, across southern Michigan gasoline stations were dead for days, since the pumps ran on electricity.
Gas stations have... gee, I dunno, GAS available?
And maybe you can use gas to run a generator to run the pumps?
Am I the only one who can see this?
Patent Abusing Scum {C} {tm} {R}... heck, you deserve recognition for the phrase.
We are entering an era in America (and to an increasing extent, Europe) where businesses have lost competitive edge and are starting to use the blanketing powers of government in order to secure a revenue stream.
Obviously, the high cost of governmental access means correspondingly high costs of entry for others... which is precisely the point.
This is serious matter and we are headed for a similar doom that the Midwest is facing... just like you can't effectively tax a dead economy, you can't effectively mandate business support.
People will retreat into their homes and do their own thing (power generation, open source, bypassing security features on everything, doing your own unlicensed electrical and plumbing work, etc.).
Then you will end up with a bunch of protected "enterprises" with such a vanishing customer base that catastrophe will result.
One aspect of the catastrophe is door-kicking to go after those self-working folk that have now been branded as criminals.
I sometimes spend time thinking about where exactly corporate-controlled government will take us all.
The patent issue (read: broken patent system) brings the matter to a fine point of introspection.
With everything being unwisely patented, doing anything will put your probability near.999 of crossing someone's patent.
Like our current situation of having an excessive quantity of laws, this will lead to widespread criminal activity, and the social system of respecting lawfulness can only decrease significantly.
I have a book called the "handbook of space pioneers" that is a work of fiction outlining the experiences of intersteller colonizers.
One colonist had spend the first half of her life on Earth, and noted that anything that was done required about 10 more people to write justifications for it.
This is the possible future we are facing with our corporate-dominated social mandates, but the book failed to address that people tolerate only so much "government peeking into their bedrooms".
That future is highly metastable and will collapse into conflicts often, like a Toronto riot.
Mandating individual actions only works up to a point and only for so long.
After that, you find yourself on the 78th floor of a skyscraper that is about to be hit by a jetliner, a missile, or brought down by high-explosives packed into the basement.
Patents have a clear history of public benefit, and a clear philosophy therefrom.
But the current system is being used in an elitist fashion that has very little public benefit in mind.
The crime of crossing it has now become the moral imperative.
This alone should be enough of a call for the involved legislatures to realign patent laws to make up for the abuse... by Patent Abusing Scum {C} {tm} {R}!
Yeh, that's just what we need.
Spray-on computers.
I hope they come with some serious spray-on batteries since I'll probably need to output my data by freakin' candlelight.
Pardon my belligerence, but I just spent some time looking for electric generators.
Electricity.
Remember that?
It's what makes your goddamn computer go in the first place.
And for the life of me, I can't find a generator (especially one fueled by natural gas or propane) to save my life for less than 400 bucks.
Priorities!
We are lacking priorities.
As a result, we risk computing by candlelight.
So I say:
screw spray-on computers.
We need multisourced power... so when one source fails the others can make up for it.
While we're on the topic... what makes the generator so damned expensive to begin with?
There's a fueled engine; this is a widely available commodity, since yard appliances like lawnmowers use them.
There's an electric motor wired as a generator; again, this is a commodity item.
Then there's some magic electronics that converts the output to 120V@60Hz; gee, electronics... how expensive can that be?
Believe me, I've been seriously considering building my own generator.
I've learned from long ago that the price of something depends on what you call it.
If you want a work bench, you'll pay through the nose if you go looking for a "work bench"... but if you go looking for a "door" on "bench legs", it's much cheaper.
It seems that in looking for an "electric generator", I'm looking for a terribly expensive item, and I may well have to shop around for an "propane engine connected to an electric motor connected to a voltage regulator".
SourceForge.
Sheesh, what our society really needs is an GadgetForge to compensate for the tunnel vision of the economy that provides us with all we'd want, just as long as we want a narrow selection of items ("any color you want, as long as it's black").
There are two problems here, one related to the physical structure, and the other to the socioeconomics behind the structure.
The first thing is the physical structure.
It's a grid, and by its very nature it allowed a power problem to spread beyond any rational failure area.
Hence, I've no faith in a larger or finer-grained grid.
If we're going to have a grid, what's needed are more responsible nodes, and more ability to control local areas.
Toledo OH (where I am now) came back online because of reliance on local power.
The second thing is the socioeconomics.
The grid failed because it was designed to fail, by the nature of interconnections and failsafes that are prone themselves to failure... due to underinvestment and lack of mandatory oversight.
That much was perfectly clear before the outage, a la "deregulation" and California's recent woes.
The outage is just the next level of expression of the effects of systemic degradation.
From the take-everything-and-invest-nothing culture behind electrical power these days, I've no faith in the outcome of any grid changes.
The entire culture of investment wants nothing to do with planning for decades of reliability.
Short-terms and profiteering are now the rule, and these are society destroyers, but people are so enamored by the false glitter of wealth they refuse to acknowledge this.
Anyone with a sense of community, culture and history will understand this, but those people are long out of positions of influence.
Soooo... go on and continue with your senseless blather about globalization of this, that and the other thing.
There will be only two benefits for such things:
people like you will feel very good about the world since it will be all glittery until the fall, and even more millionaires will arise from skimming the profits off of ever larger operations.
If you are willing to step back from the impending doom we face from burning investment capital like it was cordwood -- and from shifting as much profit as possible to the investors -- you can explore the ideas of decentralization.
It seems inane -- what with endless demands for observation time on the world's telescopes -- to just let the Hubble burn up.
The $200M/yr price tag sounds suspicious to me, too.
Along with your proposed teleoperations, perhaps the public could convince NASA to invest in a booster for the Hubble, to put it into a higher orbit that extends the lifespan much beyond the equipment lifetimes... say, centuries.
Once done, the Hubble's access codes and blueprints can be auctioned off.
Then the lucky winner will have to manage the Hubble however they can.
They can rent time on NASA's dishes to comm with the Hubble.
Hell, in this viewpoint, the Hubble can be a moneymaker for NASA.
Look, it's obvious that you've fallen for their line of bullpucky.
Identity fraud is easy to fight.
When people run up charges in your name, they almost always don't do it over your signature.
Companies will try to pretend that that doesn't matter, since they just looooove the loose methods they use to make the money flow faster into their wallets.
But you know the truth -- they must prove it was you, and without a piece of paper with your signature, they just can't do that.
This will take a while to establish.
Don't give up and don't fall for their official, final-sounding terms like "confirmed", "verified", "authorized" and other crap like that.
Their "confirmations" won't hold up in court, and they know it, and they are counting on you not knowing it.
So, stop being a scared-straight yuppie and start acknowledging how these companies are consummate law-breakers who will do anything to stick you with a bill.
You acted in good faith, but it is they who've invested in a fast-and-loose system that's so open to fraud.
They (not you) should bear the costs of their lack of investment in a secure system.
Firstly, your assertions about debt ratios don't match what has happened in America for the last generation. The debt bar has been raised in one form or another. Either the debt standard was raised (qualifying many more people for loans), or people accepted the greater costs of being considered greater risks (and note that they still got the loans). Look at how many people have accepted that housing alone will swallow 1/3 to 1/2 of their income... in the previous era, people were aiming for 1/4.
Secondly, in an important way, the interest has become more important than the principal. Over the life of long-term loans, the interest becomes the pie and the principal becomes just a slice. Many shorter-term loans are becoming rollover scams, this converting them to long-term versions.
Hence, the interest isn't irrelevent for many debts. Sure, from the creditor point of view, it'll hurt if you lose the principal, since you've already got it booked as some sort of asset... but after 30 years you've already collected 2.54xPrincipal off of the sucker.
While we're speaking of housing, my parents built their own house in 1952. They took out a $10000 loan to cover the costs of building it, and paid it off in 9 years. They love to quote their 1950s loan terms in detail to the remortgaging sharks that constantly call them. What has happened is a cultural shift of mentality. The previous generations were cautious with debt and did things for themselves. We are drowning in our own affluence, and as Thomas Jefferson warned, we are waking up slaves on the continent our fathers conquered.
While we're still talking about housing, a friend of mine asked me recently "why aren't you buying a house?". I gave him an ear-full:
1. Housing today is at least 50% overpriced.
2. The local area is heading downhill, with bimonthly announcements of layoffs.
3. A house is the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
Sooo... buying the most expensive thing, also horribly overpriced, when you don't know if you'll have a job next year... yeah, sign me up for that kind of stupidity.
In summation, measuring risk in this kind of environment is really quite silly.
I spoke about cops shooting people, not with a qualification about "innocence". The standard operation of that system is that cops can shoot on the vauge basis of "I feared for my life", and it seems that cops fear for their lives merely by meeting with people on the street who don't immediately drop to the ground and put their hands behind their heads. It's a systemic case of "all people who are suspected are guilty". Hence, the cops tend to shoot people who "moved alarmingly" or "didn't stop when ordered", and all other such rigmarole terms for the disguised brutality of our policing systems.
But, hey, either your analogy is bad, or your systemic conception of legality is.
Class actions lawsuits are the job programs for lawyers, just like NASA is a jobs program for the aerospace industry.
Each member of the class gets a pittance, since usually the larger the claimed class, the more "clout" (define that as you will) wielded by the prosecution team.
This is especially true with a low-Human-impact crime, like overcharging.
The end product is the same... the lawyers, lawyer teams, and law firms get hefty cash compensation, while the class members get compensation that is usually so intellectually insulting that it's not worth wiping your arse with the resulting paperwork token.
I recall the AOL class actions and their outcomes... truly, they were poster children for this kind of thing.
I consider this kind of thing almost essentially out of the hands of the public.
The lawyers have figured out how to ride to wealth on the backs of widespread small offences.
I'd suggest that for a fix I'd say whyyyy there oughta be a law... but we all know that it would be left up to lawyers to place restrictions on the behavior of their own class, which seldom occurs to any meaningful degree.
You may as well expect a police review board to be critical about cops shooting people; they just don't do that since there is no dissenting viewpoint in the oversight mechanism to begin with.
Sir, you are incorrect.
I believe it was Andrew Jackson who said something like "a jury is the best defense against bad lawmaking".
If you believe in the concept of a responsible representative or judge, you'd have to expand the franchise of responsibility to the citizen, else you run the now-being-realized risk of class enforcement and resulting warfare.
We The People are the last line of defense against the corruption of the political system.
Admittedly, this system can itself be corrupted, as the current economic structure clearly shows.
The People need to value and practice a culture of responsibility -- involvement and judgment.
We are the basis of the law.
Of course, current and popular opinions hardly honor that tradition.
The average of opinion about liberty is not greater liberty but actually none at all (since every individual wants a different thing banned).
For example, we haven't obeyed the 2nd amendment since the 1930s, and culturally there is no acceptance of it.
This didn't lead to a further amendment... the people, the legislatures, and the courts collectively decided to ignore it.
Your comments would be actual criticism if they contained anything but insults.
But since college fails to teach critical thinking, I suppose I'm not surprised.
If you are doing the college thing now, I can see the point of your ire:
you were fooled, and no one likes to be fooled.
But hey, don't get mad at me... you're the one who is spending 4-5 years in college to just have a 4-year career, at most.
You are in an ever-growing mass of fools, and eventually the economic reality of your bad choices must come home to roost.
I work in IT again, and I'm surrounded by people with degrees who have no place to go, and who earn no more than I do.
I hope to eventually stir up some spirited discussions about their bad choices, to help jump-start the reality that must strike.
The reality is (of course) that they were pushed into college by economic forces who planned on capitalizing on their desires while saddling them with the debts.
Do you have any cogent rebuttal?
Graciously, I'll even wait while you look up the word "cogent".
The arrogance and mistreatment coming out of the recording industry, combined with the corrupt actions of the Congress, makes copyrights a game of the elite.
Hence, I have as little respect for it as I would have for some fop strutting around America with some European royal title.
Anyway, grabbing a song off of a site, board or p2p user is hardly a violation of copyright, since (waaaait for it, this is important) I claim fair use.
For almost all of the songs I've grabbed, I eventually buy the disc.
This is similar to when I zip down my local highway at 70mph, right past the sign that says "SPEED LIMIT 60".
I don't care about the technical aspects of law-breaking... I abide by the spirit of law.
Just as a jury member should be doing (ref. the Fully Informed Jury Association), We The People are the judge of the law, not that overpaid, elitist punk behind the podium.
If the entertainment industry wants me to tone back my claim of fair use, then they should really clean up their act.
Taking an MP3 song from some Russian site primarily hurts the industry, not the artists (since in practice I can't hurt the artists more than the industry is doing right now).
But I've been hurting the industry for years... I buy my CDs used for much less than new retail prices.
And my CDs seem likely to last me for the rest of my life.
(But don't think that that method itself is not under threat.
I know people who run used book stores, and every so often the book industry makes noises about regulating and therefore taxing them on the sales of their books.
I'm sure the used CD industry has been similarly threatened for the same reasons... the manufacturing industry wants a piece of each sale, not just the first one.
Luckily for Lady Justice, the used industry is too unstable and laborious to regulate... making it singularly pathetic that those are the only things that protect us.)
As for the Congress... yes, the Constitution is all too clear about limiting copyrights.
But the Congress simply ignored that.
Since war has already been declared, don't be shocked when you see me firing shots.
Soooo... to the RIAA, I invite you to spend yourselves into debt trying to chase me down.
You won't win, because you can't win.
Your desire to sit back and collect income (one aspect of the modern American social disease) has cost you all your ability to adapt to social change.
The entire SUV debacle only demonstrates how the build-to-order thing can't reach out to the people who need it most.
Mainstream auto industry is overly concerned with selling on the basis of style and performance, not longevity and efficiency.
Combine that with BTO's starting price, and you can see that the man with the magic combination of Eli Whitney and Henry Ford probably still hasn't been born.
I think of each model of car or truck as a hand-crafted machine that has been fed through a StarTrekkian matter duplicator.
Sure, each model is like each other member of its class, but jump between classes and you run into significant compatibility problems.
These classes exist due to pressures of style, not function (car, van and truck differences aside).
The industry has been artificially complicated, and the concept of workability with the equipment has long fallen by the wayside (if indeed it ever had any predominance in automotive management).
It would really be nice if someone did come up with a Unicar (I have forgotten the citation -- you'd have to google it), so you can buy into a car that is reconfigurable and repairable for 10 years.
But this kind of mentality is the one of a man who expects to own something, not to rent it for the rest of his life.
Obviously, with car and house prices being as they are in America, this is now a nation of renters, not owners, so the Unicar is as dead as the Edsel.
Slashdot Mirror
Safety issues on the ISS? Who the hell cares about that, anyway? The ISS's only purpose is to hang there for a few years before NASA declares it defunct, lets it burn up in the atmosphere, and then makes grandiose plans for the next-generation, multi-billion-dollar, goddamn boondoggle. We let Skylab and Mir fall and burn ... so what makes you think the ISS will end up any different?
... and aerospace companies gotta eat, too.
After all, it's only tax money, and it's plain to see how little oversight governs that.
We spend $10K per kilogram or pound (I forget) to hoist entirely reusable stuff to orbit, but that's still not enough money invested to consider re-using any of it. Re-use is never in the plans, because USAGE itself was never really in the plans either.
The ISS is the side-effect of the gaping-wide aerospace welfare program. At least $8 billion that I know of was spent, without a kilogram making it to orbit yet. Eight billion dollars without a single launch? If that doesn't make it obvious what's going on, then nothing will for you.
Any of ISS's problems are irrelevant, because it has already served it's purpose. Safety? Maintenance? Science? Shit, the only other project goal on the hidden agenda is to let it fall, and then to use the failure to propose something bigger, better, and guaranteed more expensive. "We have a bigger dick than the Europeans, Russians or Chinese."
... of the Vichy government officials, when they explained that they shipped Jews (and probably other listed undesirables) into the German territory of their masters while not realizing they were being sent off to be killed.
Similarly, corporations who whine that they didn't know about the conditions of their subcontracted work (sweatshops, etc.) are also, equally liable and contemptible for their WILLFUL IGNORANCE. Any corporate manager or officer can surf the net for 30 minutes and at least suspect that something is rotten in Denmark (or in this case, Pakistan). They make no effort to know since they know otherwise full well that they'd find wrongdoing. "Don't tell me, I don't want to know" is the standard CEO quote.
I must then remind you of the limits of your definitions. Capitalism by itself doesn't exist. It exists in a sea of Human currents. And we are finding out how it fares when exposed to the current of immoral and insatiable greed.
... morality, if you will.
It's this line of reasoning that compels me to summarize that we need a moral Capitalism.
To paraphrase Elbert Hubbard, a capitalist is a person with savings and a home. Given the disappearance of savings in America, and combined with the trend of home loans that won't be paid off over the lifetime of the loan, and you end up with very few of these defined Capitalists in America today. Savings and a home imply stability, and stability implies some sort of philosophy of life
Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?
Huh? I didn't realize the USA had a space program.
You can take your "space race" sentiments and stick them firmly up your backsides. The last space race was a race to the bottom, and we've piles of rusting equipment in America to prove it. Fads and glitter can't replace a soundly built, functional space transportation system that serves to feed Human enterprise and living. We never had such a system, and still today, mention manufacturing and living in space environments and people will give you that "what a nutter" look.
Government has only proven itself incapable of understanding how to expand culture into space. Myself, I'm placing my hopes on private enterprise seeking out exploitation of space transportation and eventually mining of energy and material resouces.
Two Words {tm}: Union Carbide.
... unless you concur that corporations can get away with "manslaughter" in this fashion and the individual can't ... aaaand, no, paying a fine (corporation) isn't the same as being jailed (individual).
Come back with a better argument
I fail to have any sympathy for a guy who runs a meth lab.
... from internal contradictions as well as external violence.
As Nathra Nader (father to Ralph Nader) has paraphrasedly said, a widespread feeling of "it can't happen here" only hastens the end.
Your sympathy for the abuse of criminals can only lead in time that some guy claiming that he has a lack of sympathy for your being arrested for, say, posting on Slashdot.
Even criminals have rights, and enforcement and judicial people have restrictions. Those who are accused are the ones in most need of strict attention to civil rights, since they run afoul of the mechanisms that purports to serve those rights.
But don't let these sentiments dissuade you. Your attitude is very prevalent amongst the American population. I am merely waiting for your nasty Empire to destroy itself as every Empire must
Other than that, your article appeared particularly cogent.
... A. Because We Don't Have One.
... squandered on a massive bureaucracy that is unable to launch anything without spending billions of dollars, and is still unable to launch anything that is really useful, like a goddamn factory or habitat.
Their mission of launching people into space was lost to the more preferred mission of launching money into people's pockets.
... lost in fear and loathing as the Western World's flagship (America) heads straight towards wrecking upon the reef of Empire.
Profit motives have displaced the Human condition, and a vast hole in Human culture is still growing.
It can crash all Human civilization for many generations.
America had been aligned into an Orwellian world of constant terror of the rest of the world, from the Cold War onward, and we have the utter gall to wonder why the future is not appealing?
Education systems in America are producing the best educated morons the world has probably ever seen since the British Empire, and there we are with a finger up our collective nose, lamenting the lack of workable foresight?
Generations of space development have been so obviously wasted on producing a welfare system for aerospace companies, the US Air Force, and NASA in general, and yet we still hem and haw and demand that practical applications still exist?
I'm not buying the lies, I won't honor the ignorance, and I won't tolerate the frauds any-friggin'-more. My eyes are now as open as my mouth, and it can only take death to close them.
Space development is gone
Cultural development is gone
We have dared to put a price tag on a child's smile. We are done. Any fool can see this. Hopefully some microculture somewhere in South America, Africa or Asia will arise from our (probably radioactivity- and bacteria-infested) ruins and build a better world.
Cold fusion is the poster boy for what is wrong with modern science practice.
... call it what you will) can't serve a purpose in science.
Facts don't decide how to investigate ... people have to sift facts and decide how to pursue things.
That decision process is biased.
... as one other poster pointed out, doing "science by press release" is an extraordinarily bad practice.
It oozes political need while letting sharp investgation fall by the wayside.
... since once again, agenda oozed into the picture and certain scientists could milk grants on the basis of uncertainty and greed.
... on non-disclosure terms alone.
We should be relegating CF to the same graveyard of fraud.
Like the cart pulling the horse, agenda is leading all aspects of investigation. The end result doesn't function.
Now, I'm not densedly supposing that agenda (bias, philosophy
But
In addition, I often wonder if the majority of scientists today are simply too badly trained to even begin to address their serious lack of objectivity. As their mentors become progressively more whores for government and industry grants, that agenda-rich attitude can only pervade their students. The developing product is what we clearly see today: cold fusion is still an "I don't know" topic when all they had to do was run some arguably cheap and computationally simple experiments. Forgetting to take into account mass and heat loss from evaporation? These people aren't scientists.
Let's not forget the brouhaha over Pons's and Fle.'s legendary reluctance to be forthcoming about methods in order to have their experiment duplicated. That alone should have had the claim laughed off the press (non full disclosure is a hallmark of a hoax). But it wasn't
Cold fusion is right freakin' up there with perpetual motion. PM claims are easy to debunk
Data just sits there, on computers that tend to just sit there most of the time. Why can't we get them to organize all that data for us?
... and this blizzard of poorly unorganized, misspelled, rumor-filled, mostly textual files became a towering stack of data in a relatively short period of time -- and this was just the crap on our PCs!
(BTW, the mainframe programs were useful for a few lookups, but were mostly worthless for getting the job done ... translate to "solve the customer's problem".)
So, I ran some ideas through my head about all this text.
Why couldn't a program crawl through all of that crapola and organize indexes from it?
... well, just about anyone who saves files and links onto their computers.
The freely- (and perhaps almost endlessly-) indexing database object ("fido"?) seems to still not exist.
... you can have good ol' fido run the range of comparisons, letting you inspect whatever index you'd care to, later, whenever, never.
I've been asking this question since the early 1990s. When I took a job at PictureTel's tech support, I really saw the need. Support data came in from customers, engineers, other techs, managers, salesmen
As it turned out, web search engines are very large versions of my initial ideas (obvious, really) but they still don't work to the levels I am still thinking about, and their sheer size is an impediment to the daily indexing needs of
It can't be that hard (the effort put into building the first versions of Netscape must have been harder). Files of text contain icons (words) that can be compared to other icons in other files. Which icons? ALL OF THEM! (With sensible exclusions, LikelyPrepositions.English.exclude.lib, etc.) It can make these comparisons exactly (ASCII matches) or as loosely as you'd care to set it (i.e. "owl"="sparrow"). OR
Hell, what does it matter? It's only CPU time and disk space. Keep that puppy chuggin' along 24hrs a day indexing stuff. They're only index files, too; by definition, smaller than the data they keep track of.
Too bad I didn't stuff all of this into a Powerpoint {tm} presentation and shop around for venture capital in 1999. He hee!
The predictions themselves suffered from the unreality effects of selection bias and narrow vision.
... routing issues ... liability issues ... even a short list of these things is harrowing -- and missing entirely from the predictions.
... technophilia.
The pattern dictates technological expansion that continues to "improve" lifestyles in ways that can only apply to ever narrowing sectors of population, OR, apply in ways that expand too quickly and must crash therefore.
"Selection bias" means that selectors (basically, media folk) picked them out on their own judgment, and they decided which predictions gained dispersal. It's just a model of media controls that the educated person has at least some notion of.
The "narrow vision" problem is epidemic in Human thinking. People were ready to posit things like "flying cars", without sound speculation on the infrastructure that would support such items. A thing like a flying car must operate on fuel of some kind. That fuel must be distributed and afforded. The cars themselves imply some level of skill, thus training. Safety issues
The end products overall followed a pattern of technocratic worship
Humans are not so far removed from their animal origin, so my rule of thumb with predictions is to test how far from the animal the predicted item takes us. If the metric is too big, then it's likely to be hogwash of some kind. It'll either never surface, or it'll boom and bust as the bad idea it ever was.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us. [...] But like other flashes in the pan, it retreated as quickly as it had appeared.
Like hell it did. It has been ingrained into the Geek Kollective. For Great Justice!
True dat. But let's not forget Featuritis. Billy-Boy's right that they've been doing the best they can ... while operating on an overdrive to stuff more sexy features into Windows CV (Current Version) and Windows NV (Next Version).
There are only so many hours in the day to stuff the turkey, so you can only expect the 11th hour meat inspection to fall short of FDA standards.
Billy and his monkey-dancin' posse were constantly rewarded for their Bad Code Production Line {tm}, and it's twice more the pity that lost business to Linux is the only signal of strength that will reach their receiver.
Myself, I can see the future convulsions of the We Did Our Best giant, and Open Source material will have to run the gamut of legal hurdles put into place through the influence of Billy's Billions. SCO's attempt is just a prelude. I'm glad I have my Slackware Linux CDs. Even a refined tech expert like a Congressman can't figure out how to kill the data on those CDs with some sort of Internet Kill Signal {tm}, even an EMP. And I can use Open Source to surf the Internet safely.
I got my start in common and electronic hardware in my teens. I stand by my statements.
... how expensive can that be?" dealt with the electronics that controlled the engine, the motor, and regulated the output.
You are talking about the motor/generator part.
And that's another thorny issue.
... not just the alternatives themselves, but there aren't any bypass interfaces for them.
There should be hookups for an electric generator, and for wood/coal stoves.
... but everyone else in the building was gone.
Everyone ... including the item processors who must process those thousands of checks every day as contractually promised.
As I later discovered, the generator has enough capacity to keep the data center, the PBX and item processors alive, but entire other floors, including the cash vault, facilities, private banking, international, etc.
... during the outage, across southern Michigan gasoline stations were dead for days, since the pumps ran on electricity.
Gas stations have ... gee, I dunno, GAS available?
And maybe you can use gas to run a generator to run the pumps?
Am I the only one who can see this?
Anything electronic should be the benefit of our modern age. My particular quote "gee, electronics
The West has been making electric motors for over 100 years. In fact, this page shows a company that started making such things in 1893. Motors and generators are a very mature technology. Combined with their pervasive presence in general stuff for sale, I'd say that motors can't be that expensive all around. I just did a bit of surfing, and at least this surplus place (at first glance, new electric motors don't seem to have website prices) shows AC motors at roughly $50/kW.
So, with a surplus or quality used engine and motor, with some controlling electronics, I can't imagine that you'd spend more than $150 with smart shopping. $200 on the outside. And this causes me to question a $400 generator, considering their economy of scale.
I suspect that (along with items for home pools) the price is significantly set by consumer desperation. Your link to the Generator FAQ 1.0 was very informative, but illustrated by implication how unprepared our wired-up civilization is for emergency bypasses. Homes are installed with one heating system (often dependent upon two power/fuel sources to run), one lighting system, and one food-storage system. If the ng or electric fails, you simply lose your heat. If the electric fails, you lose your perishable food and lighting. There just aren't alternatives
This is the Achilles Heel of our civilization. It has little to do with cost, and much to do with our attitude. For example, the bank HQ I work at was hit by the Aug 2003 power outage. They have a truly enormous deisel generator on their roof, and that cut in automatically once the power was truly off (there was some battery holdover, but I digress). The generator kept our data center and PBX alive
Oh, yes, they're taking NOW about wiring all that up, but that's not the point. It should have been wired up to emergency power from the beginning. But it fell by the wayside from our so-called civilized attitude. We get fat and happy, and as a result fall prey to a fantasy of security.
Look
Patent Abusing Scum {C} {tm} {R} ... heck, you deserve recognition for the phrase.
... which is precisely the point.
... just like you can't effectively tax a dead economy, you can't effectively mandate business support.
People will retreat into their homes and do their own thing (power generation, open source, bypassing security features on everything, doing your own unlicensed electrical and plumbing work, etc.).
Then you will end up with a bunch of protected "enterprises" with such a vanishing customer base that catastrophe will result.
One aspect of the catastrophe is door-kicking to go after those self-working folk that have now been branded as criminals.
.999 of crossing someone's patent.
Like our current situation of having an excessive quantity of laws, this will lead to widespread criminal activity, and the social system of respecting lawfulness can only decrease significantly.
... by Patent Abusing Scum {C} {tm} {R}!
We are entering an era in America (and to an increasing extent, Europe) where businesses have lost competitive edge and are starting to use the blanketing powers of government in order to secure a revenue stream. Obviously, the high cost of governmental access means correspondingly high costs of entry for others
This is serious matter and we are headed for a similar doom that the Midwest is facing
I sometimes spend time thinking about where exactly corporate-controlled government will take us all. The patent issue (read: broken patent system) brings the matter to a fine point of introspection. With everything being unwisely patented, doing anything will put your probability near
I have a book called the "handbook of space pioneers" that is a work of fiction outlining the experiences of intersteller colonizers. One colonist had spend the first half of her life on Earth, and noted that anything that was done required about 10 more people to write justifications for it. This is the possible future we are facing with our corporate-dominated social mandates, but the book failed to address that people tolerate only so much "government peeking into their bedrooms". That future is highly metastable and will collapse into conflicts often, like a Toronto riot. Mandating individual actions only works up to a point and only for so long. After that, you find yourself on the 78th floor of a skyscraper that is about to be hit by a jetliner, a missile, or brought down by high-explosives packed into the basement.
Patents have a clear history of public benefit, and a clear philosophy therefrom. But the current system is being used in an elitist fashion that has very little public benefit in mind. The crime of crossing it has now become the moral imperative. This alone should be enough of a call for the involved legislatures to realign patent laws to make up for the abuse
Yeh, that's just what we need. Spray-on computers. I hope they come with some serious spray-on batteries since I'll probably need to output my data by freakin' candlelight.
... so when one source fails the others can make up for it.
... what makes the generator so damned expensive to begin with?
There's a fueled engine; this is a widely available commodity, since yard appliances like lawnmowers use them.
There's an electric motor wired as a generator; again, this is a commodity item.
Then there's some magic electronics that converts the output to 120V@60Hz; gee, electronics ... how expensive can that be?
... but if you go looking for a "door" on "bench legs", it's much cheaper.
It seems that in looking for an "electric generator", I'm looking for a terribly expensive item, and I may well have to shop around for an "propane engine connected to an electric motor connected to a voltage regulator".
Pardon my belligerence, but I just spent some time looking for electric generators. Electricity. Remember that? It's what makes your goddamn computer go in the first place. And for the life of me, I can't find a generator (especially one fueled by natural gas or propane) to save my life for less than 400 bucks.
Priorities! We are lacking priorities. As a result, we risk computing by candlelight. So I say: screw spray-on computers. We need multisourced power
While we're on the topic
Believe me, I've been seriously considering building my own generator. I've learned from long ago that the price of something depends on what you call it. If you want a work bench, you'll pay through the nose if you go looking for a "work bench"
SourceForge. Sheesh, what our society really needs is an GadgetForge to compensate for the tunnel vision of the economy that provides us with all we'd want, just as long as we want a narrow selection of items ("any color you want, as long as it's black").
There are two problems here, one related to the physical structure, and the other to the socioeconomics behind the structure.
... due to underinvestment and lack of mandatory oversight.
That much was perfectly clear before the outage, a la "deregulation" and California's recent woes.
The outage is just the next level of expression of the effects of systemic degradation.
... go on and continue with your senseless blather about globalization of this, that and the other thing.
There will be only two benefits for such things:
people like you will feel very good about the world since it will be all glittery until the fall, and even more millionaires will arise from skimming the profits off of ever larger operations.
The first thing is the physical structure. It's a grid, and by its very nature it allowed a power problem to spread beyond any rational failure area. Hence, I've no faith in a larger or finer-grained grid. If we're going to have a grid, what's needed are more responsible nodes, and more ability to control local areas. Toledo OH (where I am now) came back online because of reliance on local power.
The second thing is the socioeconomics. The grid failed because it was designed to fail, by the nature of interconnections and failsafes that are prone themselves to failure
From the take-everything-and-invest-nothing culture behind electrical power these days, I've no faith in the outcome of any grid changes. The entire culture of investment wants nothing to do with planning for decades of reliability. Short-terms and profiteering are now the rule, and these are society destroyers, but people are so enamored by the false glitter of wealth they refuse to acknowledge this. Anyone with a sense of community, culture and history will understand this, but those people are long out of positions of influence.
Soooo
If you are willing to step back from the impending doom we face from burning investment capital like it was cordwood -- and from shifting as much profit as possible to the investors -- you can explore the ideas of decentralization.
Credit is due: You have ahold of a good idea.
... say, centuries.
Once done, the Hubble's access codes and blueprints can be auctioned off.
Then the lucky winner will have to manage the Hubble however they can.
They can rent time on NASA's dishes to comm with the Hubble.
Hell, in this viewpoint, the Hubble can be a moneymaker for NASA.
It seems inane -- what with endless demands for observation time on the world's telescopes -- to just let the Hubble burn up. The $200M/yr price tag sounds suspicious to me, too.
Along with your proposed teleoperations, perhaps the public could convince NASA to invest in a booster for the Hubble, to put it into a higher orbit that extends the lifespan much beyond the equipment lifetimes
Look, it's obvious that you've fallen for their line of bullpucky.
Identity fraud is easy to fight. When people run up charges in your name, they almost always don't do it over your signature. Companies will try to pretend that that doesn't matter, since they just looooove the loose methods they use to make the money flow faster into their wallets. But you know the truth -- they must prove it was you, and without a piece of paper with your signature, they just can't do that.
This will take a while to establish. Don't give up and don't fall for their official, final-sounding terms like "confirmed", "verified", "authorized" and other crap like that. Their "confirmations" won't hold up in court, and they know it, and they are counting on you not knowing it.
So, stop being a scared-straight yuppie and start acknowledging how these companies are consummate law-breakers who will do anything to stick you with a bill. You acted in good faith, but it is they who've invested in a fast-and-loose system that's so open to fraud. They (not you) should bear the costs of their lack of investment in a secure system.
Zathrus, I'm not buying what you're selling.
... in the previous era, people were aiming for 1/4.
... but after 30 years you've already collected 2.54xPrincipal off of the sucker.
... buying the most expensive thing, also horribly overpriced, when you don't know if you'll have a job next year ... yeah, sign me up for that kind of stupidity.
Firstly, your assertions about debt ratios don't match what has happened in America for the last generation. The debt bar has been raised in one form or another. Either the debt standard was raised (qualifying many more people for loans), or people accepted the greater costs of being considered greater risks (and note that they still got the loans). Look at how many people have accepted that housing alone will swallow 1/3 to 1/2 of their income
Secondly, in an important way, the interest has become more important than the principal. Over the life of long-term loans, the interest becomes the pie and the principal becomes just a slice. Many shorter-term loans are becoming rollover scams, this converting them to long-term versions.
Hence, the interest isn't irrelevent for many debts. Sure, from the creditor point of view, it'll hurt if you lose the principal, since you've already got it booked as some sort of asset
While we're speaking of housing, my parents built their own house in 1952. They took out a $10000 loan to cover the costs of building it, and paid it off in 9 years. They love to quote their 1950s loan terms in detail to the remortgaging sharks that constantly call them. What has happened is a cultural shift of mentality. The previous generations were cautious with debt and did things for themselves. We are drowning in our own affluence, and as Thomas Jefferson warned, we are waking up slaves on the continent our fathers conquered.
While we're still talking about housing, a friend of mine asked me recently "why aren't you buying a house?". I gave him an ear-full:
1. Housing today is at least 50% overpriced.
2. The local area is heading downhill, with bimonthly announcements of layoffs.
3. A house is the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
Sooo
In summation, measuring risk in this kind of environment is really quite silly.
I spoke about cops shooting people, not with a qualification about "innocence". The standard operation of that system is that cops can shoot on the vauge basis of "I feared for my life", and it seems that cops fear for their lives merely by meeting with people on the street who don't immediately drop to the ground and put their hands behind their heads. It's a systemic case of "all people who are suspected are guilty". Hence, the cops tend to shoot people who "moved alarmingly" or "didn't stop when ordered", and all other such rigmarole terms for the disguised brutality of our policing systems.
But, hey, either your analogy is bad, or your systemic conception of legality is.
Class actions lawsuits are the job programs for lawyers, just like NASA is a jobs program for the aerospace industry.
... the lawyers, lawyer teams, and law firms get hefty cash compensation, while the class members get compensation that is usually so intellectually insulting that it's not worth wiping your arse with the resulting paperwork token.
I recall the AOL class actions and their outcomes ... truly, they were poster children for this kind of thing.
... but we all know that it would be left up to lawyers to place restrictions on the behavior of their own class, which seldom occurs to any meaningful degree.
You may as well expect a police review board to be critical about cops shooting people; they just don't do that since there is no dissenting viewpoint in the oversight mechanism to begin with.
Each member of the class gets a pittance, since usually the larger the claimed class, the more "clout" (define that as you will) wielded by the prosecution team. This is especially true with a low-Human-impact crime, like overcharging.
The end product is the same
I consider this kind of thing almost essentially out of the hands of the public. The lawyers have figured out how to ride to wealth on the backs of widespread small offences. I'd suggest that for a fix I'd say whyyyy there oughta be a law
Sir, you are incorrect. I believe it was Andrew Jackson who said something like "a jury is the best defense against bad lawmaking". If you believe in the concept of a responsible representative or judge, you'd have to expand the franchise of responsibility to the citizen, else you run the now-being-realized risk of class enforcement and resulting warfare.
... the people, the legislatures, and the courts collectively decided to ignore it.
We The People are the last line of defense against the corruption of the political system. Admittedly, this system can itself be corrupted, as the current economic structure clearly shows. The People need to value and practice a culture of responsibility -- involvement and judgment.
We are the basis of the law. Of course, current and popular opinions hardly honor that tradition. The average of opinion about liberty is not greater liberty but actually none at all (since every individual wants a different thing banned). For example, we haven't obeyed the 2nd amendment since the 1930s, and culturally there is no acceptance of it. This didn't lead to a further amendment
Your comments would be actual criticism if they contained anything but insults. But since college fails to teach critical thinking, I suppose I'm not surprised.
... you're the one who is spending 4-5 years in college to just have a 4-year career, at most.
You are in an ever-growing mass of fools, and eventually the economic reality of your bad choices must come home to roost.
If you are doing the college thing now, I can see the point of your ire: you were fooled, and no one likes to be fooled. But hey, don't get mad at me
I work in IT again, and I'm surrounded by people with degrees who have no place to go, and who earn no more than I do. I hope to eventually stir up some spirited discussions about their bad choices, to help jump-start the reality that must strike.
The reality is (of course) that they were pushed into college by economic forces who planned on capitalizing on their desires while saddling them with the debts.
Do you have any cogent rebuttal? Graciously, I'll even wait while you look up the word "cogent".
You hit that nail squarely, sirrah.
... I abide by the spirit of law.
Just as a jury member should be doing (ref. the Fully Informed Jury Association), We The People are the judge of the law, not that overpaid, elitist punk behind the podium.
... I buy my CDs used for much less than new retail prices.
And my CDs seem likely to last me for the rest of my life.
... the manufacturing industry wants a piece of each sale, not just the first one.
Luckily for Lady Justice, the used industry is too unstable and laborious to regulate ... making it singularly pathetic that those are the only things that protect us.)
... yes, the Constitution is all too clear about limiting copyrights.
But the Congress simply ignored that.
Since war has already been declared, don't be shocked when you see me firing shots.
... to the RIAA, I invite you to spend yourselves into debt trying to chase me down.
You won't win, because you can't win.
Your desire to sit back and collect income (one aspect of the modern American social disease) has cost you all your ability to adapt to social change.
The arrogance and mistreatment coming out of the recording industry, combined with the corrupt actions of the Congress, makes copyrights a game of the elite. Hence, I have as little respect for it as I would have for some fop strutting around America with some European royal title.
Anyway, grabbing a song off of a site, board or p2p user is hardly a violation of copyright, since (waaaait for it, this is important) I claim fair use. For almost all of the songs I've grabbed, I eventually buy the disc. This is similar to when I zip down my local highway at 70mph, right past the sign that says "SPEED LIMIT 60". I don't care about the technical aspects of law-breaking
If the entertainment industry wants me to tone back my claim of fair use, then they should really clean up their act. Taking an MP3 song from some Russian site primarily hurts the industry, not the artists (since in practice I can't hurt the artists more than the industry is doing right now). But I've been hurting the industry for years
(But don't think that that method itself is not under threat. I know people who run used book stores, and every so often the book industry makes noises about regulating and therefore taxing them on the sales of their books. I'm sure the used CD industry has been similarly threatened for the same reasons
As for the Congress
Soooo
The entire SUV debacle only demonstrates how the build-to-order thing can't reach out to the people who need it most. Mainstream auto industry is overly concerned with selling on the basis of style and performance, not longevity and efficiency. Combine that with BTO's starting price, and you can see that the man with the magic combination of Eli Whitney and Henry Ford probably still hasn't been born.
I think of each model of car or truck as a hand-crafted machine that has been fed through a StarTrekkian matter duplicator. Sure, each model is like each other member of its class, but jump between classes and you run into significant compatibility problems. These classes exist due to pressures of style, not function (car, van and truck differences aside). The industry has been artificially complicated, and the concept of workability with the equipment has long fallen by the wayside (if indeed it ever had any predominance in automotive management).
It would really be nice if someone did come up with a Unicar (I have forgotten the citation -- you'd have to google it), so you can buy into a car that is reconfigurable and repairable for 10 years. But this kind of mentality is the one of a man who expects to own something, not to rent it for the rest of his life. Obviously, with car and house prices being as they are in America, this is now a nation of renters, not owners, so the Unicar is as dead as the Edsel.