"Have moral rights any impact on this RIAA issue. Have no idea."
Nope. The american copyright tradition is actually opposed to the idea of moral rights. There were a couple supreme court decisions making this clear. We recognize copyright as being different than the so-called natural rights. As for the berne convention, we rejected that as well. The DCMA was a reaction to the reaction to that attempt. The convention had been rejected but for political and economic reasons (basically to buddy up to europe) Clinton wanted a close duplicate to it and hence the DCMA came about. Read Lessig's books and Saidvyathan (sic? - no idea, read the books last semester) for a better description of it. Copyrights and copywrongs is probably the one you'll want to pick up.
The only reason they didn't find this one is because there were a ton of easier to exploit ones (no, I am not talking from personal experience.) If you had a choice between riding a bike and driving a car, which would you do? If you want to stop ppl by taking away the car, then you got make sure no bikes are lying around either.
"The always insightful Slashdot editorial byline. RTFA - the article (On NewsForge, no less, and framed with three Microsoft ads) says the worm crashed a Unix server. Score one for reliability of "real" operating systems - and unbiased reporting."
100 million windows boxes crashing: $50 billion dollars
1 Unix box crashing: $20 dollars
Look on Gates face when he realizes his OS sucks: priceless
Everything else you can get with IRC...
But I see your argument. It is true, technology is not truely morally nuetral. Things get developed by choice, just becuase the nuclear weapon was developed didn't mean it was ordained by fate. We can decide not to develope it but that is not the human way. It was inevitable, not by fate, but by our world that it would be developed. Things are developed becuase we have a use for them and when those intended uses are violent (against humans) we are at fault for the damage those weapons do. 2000 years ago a carpenter among others noted how great it would be if we all decided we didn't have to dveleope weapons like this, how great the world might be. After 2000 years we are finally beginning to understand what they meant.
"And prior to that, how often were we the aggressor, and how often were we the victim?"
1. The revolution can be argued both ways, so there is no real definite agressor/victim relationship.
2. Barbary coast - the priates seize our ships and make general trouble. So we, with the later help of the brits, kick their asses.
3. war of 1812 - Madison, fed up with the british and french seizing our ships and basically enslaving our sailors, recognizng was was ineveitable told england and france that whoever says they'll stop first will be our ally. Napolean says sure. He doesn't but he says he will. So we declar war on Britian. We fight the most powerful nation on earth to a draw and even win in the opinion of many even though the battle of new orleans was after the treaty (the treaty was mostly status qou - we got a chance to get a couple insignificant islands near upper maine.)
4. The war with mexico. We defeat a mexican tyrant. A bunch of us citizens had moved to texas, and then didn't liek the fact it was part of mexico and hwo they were treated as mexican citizens as comapre to their former us existance. Politically, Santa anna had the better claim but history doesn't mind becuase santa anna was not exactly a saint. Plus spain didn't like him and they were a world power at the time.
5. The american civil war - other than the annoyances of europe which we had to keep out of the war, it was a home only thing.
6. Indian wars - Not nice to the indians, but neither were the brits to the aboringines, the spanish to the aztecs and incas, and just about every other conquerer to the natives. The fact we didn't kill em all or turn them all into slaves probably sets us above the rest.
7. Spanish american war - We thought spain was trying to threaten us. This was largely due to the media which wanted a war. The war was minor, not many got killed, and we eventaully gave everyone of the colonies we took soverienty (puerto rico, cuba, and phillipines - with a presense until they were ready to go it alone).
Comparatively we were nonviolent and non aggressive. We could have done a lot more in the end. Most of our wars didn't end up massacres. We didn't go to war too often for our own political ambitions. We didn't screw the world up too bad. Remember, this idea of a nonviolent war is comparitively new. Sure armies didn't slaughter civilians too much in the last 500 years, usually the civilians were close enough to slaughter each other without the help of the army. The thirties years war had a couple dozen massacres and decimated germany. The crusades are appalling when compared to our wars - massacre in jersulem, scaking of friendly cities, genrally looting, raping, and plundering. The ancient wars were evn worse. When you defeated someone you either enslaved all the inhabitants and/or you killed them. In greece, athens - you repsectable nation - wiped ut a lot of its enemies. They used to give the sons of men who fell in battle armor to demonstrate to their enemies that tehy werent wimps. You kill the father and we arm the sons to get revenge. In the ancient world to the colonial period a lot of people admired nations who were violent and agressive.
As for atomic weapons, millions more japanese would have died if we hadn't used them. That is a whole other discussion though. The nuclear weapon was inevitable the moment someone came up with the idea. Who would you rather have developed it first, us who would not use it in peace, or the russians or germans who would have immediately gone to war.
"How many times can you name where we, as a country, had to defend ourselves in the past 100 years? I can only think of *one* situation... Pearl Harbor."
1. WWI - The Germans decided to sink all our ships going across the atalantic, whether they had muntions (which there is no solid proof they did - the lustania had a secondary explosion cause they hit the coal shute and ignited a coal dust explosion) or just civilian passengers.
2. WWII - Pearl Harbor, didn't want war, did our best to stay out.
3. Korea - If you remember, Korea was divided, democracy on one, communism on the other. As in vietnam, they were supposed to vote after x number of years to decide which they wanted for their whole country. The communist leaders quickly found out that the korean populace would not be voting to keep them in charge and so they invaded the south before a vote could take place.
4. Vietnam - Read history. We orginally did not want to get involved. We got sucked (and suckered)into it. The war was a mess, but what we feared in the first place did happen. We we're worried that if vietnam fell to communism so would loas and cambodia. While you were at home feeling happy and joyful that we were 'no longer opessing the peaceful ppl of vietnam' or some crap, millions of cambodian civilians were being murdered by communists funded by communist vietnam. It was cambodia that payed for our defeat with the lives of millions of innocents.
5. Granada - The government takes our citizens hostage - just like Iran (in granada it was cuban regulars if I am not mistaken).
6. Iran - Ppl took our citizens hostage. We screwed up the rescue mission.
7. Funding of Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war. We didn't like Saddam but we didn't like Iran even more. Better to have your enemies killing each other. In the beginning saddam wasn't a big threat. However, we underestimated his sadism. In saudi arabia they built palaces with the money we gave them, and opressed thier civilians but they were doing that anyway. Saddam when given the power was thought to do much the same. Instead he followed in the shoes of Stalin in Hitler. Not smart, but better a defeated Iran. If Iran had overwhelmed Iraq, we probably would have much the same trouble anyway, only magnified.
8. El salvador. Bad move. Pres. Reagen did it behind congresses back though.
9. Iraq war. We kicked the ass of a country invading its peaceful neighbor. Even the french agree that was a great move.
10. Iraq war 2 - still to close in time to call.
11. Afaganistan - kicked Al quidas ass. Europe was worried (they choose to placate their enemeis, give em just enough so they don't target them and keep em in check when they start to get out of hand- in the end, the whole situation was a barbary coast type thing, we killed instead of being blackmailed.)
12. The whole cold war. Imagine the cambodia killing fields stretched across the whole world. Stalin killed 10's of millions of his own people, he commited atrocities that surpass even hitlers. You could be shot for walking past a wheat field and pulling off 1 or 2 grains. Millions were consigned to communes and starved. He almost lost ww2 cause he wiped out 75% of his officers in the 1930's cause he feared a military coup. How about china? Mao wiped out civilians by the millions too. They invaded countries for no reason at all, even countries like afganistan where the government was favorable to them. Ask the dali lama how nonviolent china was and is. It wasn't just teh fact russia ruined its economy with defense spending, it also ruined it with its practices.
When history looks back on us, it will look at us in comaprision to the butchers of the 20th century and we will come out looking liek saints.
Why not just drop the price of the good box sets (like the led zepplin with the crop circles on the cover) to reasonable prices (5-10 for every cd in it) and just drop regular cds all together? Let the consumer download all the music they want in mp3's but if they want the good version with all the linear notes and stuff they have to go out and buy it. I wouldn't mind paying 20-30 for a good box set (but I am not going to pay 80). The RIAA has to increase the quality of the products they produce if they want to hang onto sales. For the last 15 years the quality of cds haven't gone up at all (in fact they've gone down, cause the music now sucks) and yet they still expect us to pay even more for them. That's a failing business model if I ever saw one. No one in their right mind (or without money to burn) is going to pay 23-25 bucks for just some cd. Everytime I go to the music store and see ppl shelling out loads of cash for britney spears cds i get this mental image of the old loonie tunes cartoon where the granny inherits a fortune and she is sitting in her room chucking money in the fire instead of logs.
I take it you mean Negativland's "These guys are from England (and who gives a shit.)"???
http://www.negativland.com/audiogadgets.html
I think its track 2 from this page. They used a recording of Casey Casum going ape shit and dubbed in some guy on a casio playing the U2 song, and a bunch of random sound clips from the 'weatherman' (mostly ppl saying they want to find him and beat him senseless.)
It already is:
"The real hope here is that people will return to the record store," said Eric Garland, CEO of BigCampagne LLC, which tracks peer-to-peer Internet trends. "The biggest question is whether singling out a handful of copyright infringers will invigorate business or drive file-sharing further underground, further out of reach."...
Consumers already think so little of the music companies, that the lawsuits likely won't make much difference, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc.
"The industry has been backed into a corner, and their image is so bad, the lawsuits are not going to be much of a problem," he said....
At the same time, a decline in CD sales worsened. Between June 15 and Aug. 3, the decline in CD sales accelerated 54 percent. And as of Aug. 3, CD sales were down 9.4 percent over the same period in 2002, according to the Yankee Group.
Just because a person stops file-sharing does not mean they will start buying CDs and boost industry revenue, Bernoff said.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Entertainment/ap2003091 0_351.html
1) Only one of them is affordable
2) The requirements are not unchangable. Why was a reusable rocket a requirement in the first place? Cause they beleived it would be significantly cheaper. In fact, it is significantly more expensive. (The russian can launch 3-5 soyez[sic?] rockets carrying more than the shuttle can carry with money left over on what we pay for one shuttle launch.) The requirement is not having the desired effect and logic dictates that that requirement is thus no longer valid. Solution: come up with new requirements.
The shuttle is a piece of garbage that never has and never will meet the public's expectations of it. And if NASA continues wasting time with them (or shuttle look alikes that are just crap version 2.0), then the agency is going to not meet expectations either. We pay these people with our tax dollars, at least they can do some of the stuff the public wants. They sit on their asses for thirty years, bore the public and waste its money by playing around with super-ineffecient shuttles, and then wonder why their budget keeps getting cut. If the space program can't inspire the public, it will never be able to inspire them to give them more money. They are complaining that 'people have some fixation with going to mars'(the article about the senate lack of vision hearing) and that the public basically should love the ISS and shuttles cause that's what nasa loves and wants to do. Hello??? We are paying for this space program! Do what the public wants for godsakes. It seems the employees are trying to tell the boss they will do what they want to do, and are suprised that the boss (the public) isn't very happy with them. If the poeple have a fixaton with going to mars and ignoring this low orbit crap, then go to mars. It doesn't matter that the low orbit stuff is important (to zero-gravity tomato growers everywhere), if the public doesn't want it and if it isn't what the public wants you to do, then don't turn around and say your doing it anyway! The capsules aren't going to mars but at leats its in the right direction (replacement is the first step in getting rid of the shuttles and the first step in ending Nasa's fixation with low orbit crap.)
But after the columbia failure, NASA is not up for taking any risks (as if they were taking any real risks before) and they don't seem to want to bring stuff down anymore. Case in point: Hubble.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03zd.html
It seems our elected representives agree with us (for a change.) We seem to be stuck on the shuttle and low earth orbit. NASA has about as much vision of the future as the RIAA.
What worries me about this whole RIAA-sueing-everyone-on-earth thing is the effect it is having on our culture. When people have to spend money just to get what in every other century was freely provided, one has to wonder what the effect will be. Will the poor not have music in their lives? Will the young no longer be inspired by great stories simply becuase they can't pay the publisher his outrageous dues? Will the average man on the street have to be worried about the song he hums to himself on the street for fear of being sued? Perhaps the furure of music isn't on cd's at all, perhaps it is the street musician. Maybe, in 100 years when they look back on this time, they'll discuss the rise from the streets of the great musicans and the RIAA and all its assembly-line produced music will only be a footnote.
"Is it any wonder that people would rather escape into a world in which you could hop on a horse and ride for a day or two to escape from oppressive laws"
Yeah, civilization has become oppressive for those of us who wish for an escape. There is no frontiers anymore. I can't even walk into a forest (and I live in a semi-rural area) without running into a "No trespassing" sign. Ride for two days? I would settle for walking for two hours...
I think it is deeper than that; it has to do a lot more with the unknown. They didn't know a lot of things we take for granted. In the fifties and sixties, they wrote about going to mars and how it was going to be a paradise full of weird alien life. There was an adventure into the unknown awaiting at the top of every rocket. Now we know what's out there and it isn't quite so fun. No alien races zipping around in super fast space ships. No interstellar ports anywhere nearby. No hot alien babes on venus just waiting for the ultra-cool space captain to show up. Mars is a barren world covered with rust, dust, and some ice. Venus is a furnace cooled only by the occasional acid rain. We are alone in the solar system (with the possible exception of unintelligent life on Europa - your bacteria buddies aren't quite as cool as robots of death), we haven't met a single alien (unless you count Michael Jackson), and those exotic locations are just a bunch of rocks. Where's the excitement in that? And there are no obvious locations lying around to bring out the imagination. Hell, we will never get to proximus centiari in our life times. In fact we may never get a person there ever. In the fifties, Bardbury thought we have had mars colonized by now. In the golden age of sci fi we could imagine building a ship to get there. There were hundreds of crazy theories floating around that would allow it. And if they could build a rocket, which only two decaades before was as crazy an idea as any of the others, what stopped you from implenting another crazy concept? We put a man in space! Nothing looked impossible.
Now we know it isn't nearly so easy. Bradbury recently (as in the last ten years) said we did it all backwards. We should have gotten through this boring earth exploration in the beginning so we could then have a sustained look outwards. Now we are stuck with the details (in fact, we have stalled on the details.) The way are current space program is going, we'll never even get to mars in our life time. It took like 15 years to get from sputnik to the first man on the moon, in the last thirty we have done basically jack shit. We built a space station (which is only half finished). Big whoop! Ask those appollo guys and they would probably have said it would take only five years to pull something like that off. Instead we are stuck with the crap they call the shuttles and missions that only inspire disgust. Weren't the shuttles and the idea of a reusable rocket to get to space a means and not an ends? The shuttle was only supposed to get people to space, now it seems to be the only reason we go into space. And a space station was supposed to be a blasting off point: a truck stop on the way to somewhere better and farther out. Now it is the destination. In almost all scifi, that was never the case. They imagined us going places, seeing things, and having new and rewarding experiences out in the unknown. Now we go nowhere. The space program look at the earth for the millioneth time and does some groundbreaking great experiment where they found out how good tomato plants grow out there. The modern world has made outer space a dull place of pure science. No excitement. No adventure. Just science - and that isn't any fun.
We wanted indiana jones in space and instead got Ben Stein from 'Ferris Bueller's day off'. As taxpayers, we are paying for NASA, maybe they should start doing some of the stuff WE want.
Last I heard, a nuclear rocket would take 1,000 years jsut to get to proximus centari and that is only our nearest neigbor. Want to send shit to the closest star in the Taurus constellation? It'll take 25,000 years. Only recently will one of our probes (one of the pioneer series I think) actually truly leaving the solar system. Plus the odds of any of it hitting a planet are extremely astronomically low. Even if it did it would burn up in the atmosphere of said planet. And if you can find that crap in space, you already have the technology. So we don't have to worry about our shit screwing up other people's civilizations. In addition, most of the crap we drop in space just falls back into the earths atmosphere and burns up.
Maybe we can blame porn on this too. My computers are under attack by pornographers trying to fill my hard drive with smut! They are just popping up on my screen! I've been...um... checking them... yeah, thats it, checking them to see if there are infected with virii.
If you find your computers full of trojan horses and the boss comes looking just tell him that your under attack by the Chinese! Yep, boss, I didn't put em there...
Slashdot Mirror
"Have moral rights any impact on this RIAA issue. Have no idea."
Nope. The american copyright tradition is actually opposed to the idea of moral rights. There were a couple supreme court decisions making this clear. We recognize copyright as being different than the so-called natural rights. As for the berne convention, we rejected that as well. The DCMA was a reaction to the reaction to that attempt. The convention had been rejected but for political and economic reasons (basically to buddy up to europe) Clinton wanted a close duplicate to it and hence the DCMA came about. Read Lessig's books and Saidvyathan (sic? - no idea, read the books last semester) for a better description of it. Copyrights and copywrongs is probably the one you'll want to pick up.
They don't?!?
The only reason they didn't find this one is because there were a ton of easier to exploit ones (no, I am not talking from personal experience.) If you had a choice between riding a bike and driving a car, which would you do? If you want to stop ppl by taking away the car, then you got make sure no bikes are lying around either.
"The always insightful Slashdot editorial byline. RTFA - the article (On NewsForge, no less, and framed with three Microsoft ads) says the worm crashed a Unix server. Score one for reliability of "real" operating systems - and unbiased reporting."
100 million windows boxes crashing: $50 billion dollars
1 Unix box crashing: $20 dollars
Look on Gates face when he realizes his OS sucks: priceless
Everything else you can get with IRC...
Another day, another flaw in an M$ product. What else is new?
But I see your argument. It is true, technology is not truely morally nuetral. Things get developed by choice, just becuase the nuclear weapon was developed didn't mean it was ordained by fate. We can decide not to develope it but that is not the human way. It was inevitable, not by fate, but by our world that it would be developed. Things are developed becuase we have a use for them and when those intended uses are violent (against humans) we are at fault for the damage those weapons do. 2000 years ago a carpenter among others noted how great it would be if we all decided we didn't have to dveleope weapons like this, how great the world might be. After 2000 years we are finally beginning to understand what they meant.
"And prior to that, how often were we the aggressor, and how often were we the victim?"
1. The revolution can be argued both ways, so there is no real definite agressor/victim relationship.
2. Barbary coast - the priates seize our ships and make general trouble. So we, with the later help of the brits, kick their asses.
3. war of 1812 - Madison, fed up with the british and french seizing our ships and basically enslaving our sailors, recognizng was was ineveitable told england and france that whoever says they'll stop first will be our ally. Napolean says sure. He doesn't but he says he will. So we declar war on Britian. We fight the most powerful nation on earth to a draw and even win in the opinion of many even though the battle of new orleans was after the treaty (the treaty was mostly status qou - we got a chance to get a couple insignificant islands near upper maine.)
4. The war with mexico. We defeat a mexican tyrant. A bunch of us citizens had moved to texas, and then didn't liek the fact it was part of mexico and hwo they were treated as mexican citizens as comapre to their former us existance. Politically, Santa anna had the better claim but history doesn't mind becuase santa anna was not exactly a saint. Plus spain didn't like him and they were a world power at the time.
5. The american civil war - other than the annoyances of europe which we had to keep out of the war, it was a home only thing.
6. Indian wars - Not nice to the indians, but neither were the brits to the aboringines, the spanish to the aztecs and incas, and just about every other conquerer to the natives. The fact we didn't kill em all or turn them all into slaves probably sets us above the rest.
7. Spanish american war - We thought spain was trying to threaten us. This was largely due to the media which wanted a war. The war was minor, not many got killed, and we eventaully gave everyone of the colonies we took soverienty (puerto rico, cuba, and phillipines - with a presense until they were ready to go it alone).
Comparatively we were nonviolent and non aggressive. We could have done a lot more in the end. Most of our wars didn't end up massacres. We didn't go to war too often for our own political ambitions. We didn't screw the world up too bad. Remember, this idea of a nonviolent war is comparitively new. Sure armies didn't slaughter civilians too much in the last 500 years, usually the civilians were close enough to slaughter each other without the help of the army. The thirties years war had a couple dozen massacres and decimated germany. The crusades are appalling when compared to our wars - massacre in jersulem, scaking of friendly cities, genrally looting, raping, and plundering. The ancient wars were evn worse. When you defeated someone you either enslaved all the inhabitants and/or you killed them. In greece, athens - you repsectable nation - wiped ut a lot of its enemies. They used to give the sons of men who fell in battle armor to demonstrate to their enemies that tehy werent wimps. You kill the father and we arm the sons to get revenge. In the ancient world to the colonial period a lot of people admired nations who were violent and agressive.
As for atomic weapons, millions more japanese would have died if we hadn't used them. That is a whole other discussion though. The nuclear weapon was inevitable the moment someone came up with the idea. Who would you rather have developed it first, us who would not use it in peace, or the russians or germans who would have immediately gone to war.
"How many times can you name where we, as a country, had to defend ourselves in the past 100 years? I can only think of *one* situation... Pearl Harbor."
1. WWI - The Germans decided to sink all our ships going across the atalantic, whether they had muntions (which there is no solid proof they did - the lustania had a secondary explosion cause they hit the coal shute and ignited a coal dust explosion) or just civilian passengers.
2. WWII - Pearl Harbor, didn't want war, did our best to stay out.
3. Korea - If you remember, Korea was divided, democracy on one, communism on the other. As in vietnam, they were supposed to vote after x number of years to decide which they wanted for their whole country. The communist leaders quickly found out that the korean populace would not be voting to keep them in charge and so they invaded the south before a vote could take place.
4. Vietnam - Read history. We orginally did not want to get involved. We got sucked (and suckered)into it. The war was a mess, but what we feared in the first place did happen. We we're worried that if vietnam fell to communism so would loas and cambodia. While you were at home feeling happy and joyful that we were 'no longer opessing the peaceful ppl of vietnam' or some crap, millions of cambodian civilians were being murdered by communists funded by communist vietnam. It was cambodia that payed for our defeat with the lives of millions of innocents.
5. Granada - The government takes our citizens hostage - just like Iran (in granada it was cuban regulars if I am not mistaken).
6. Iran - Ppl took our citizens hostage. We screwed up the rescue mission.
7. Funding of Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war. We didn't like Saddam but we didn't like Iran even more. Better to have your enemies killing each other. In the beginning saddam wasn't a big threat. However, we underestimated his sadism. In saudi arabia they built palaces with the money we gave them, and opressed thier civilians but they were doing that anyway. Saddam when given the power was thought to do much the same. Instead he followed in the shoes of Stalin in Hitler. Not smart, but better a defeated Iran. If Iran had overwhelmed Iraq, we probably would have much the same trouble anyway, only magnified.
8. El salvador. Bad move. Pres. Reagen did it behind congresses back though.
9. Iraq war. We kicked the ass of a country invading its peaceful neighbor. Even the french agree that was a great move.
10. Iraq war 2 - still to close in time to call.
11. Afaganistan - kicked Al quidas ass. Europe was worried (they choose to placate their enemeis, give em just enough so they don't target them and keep em in check when they start to get out of hand- in the end, the whole situation was a barbary coast type thing, we killed instead of being blackmailed.)
12. The whole cold war. Imagine the cambodia killing fields stretched across the whole world. Stalin killed 10's of millions of his own people, he commited atrocities that surpass even hitlers. You could be shot for walking past a wheat field and pulling off 1 or 2 grains. Millions were consigned to communes and starved. He almost lost ww2 cause he wiped out 75% of his officers in the 1930's cause he feared a military coup. How about china? Mao wiped out civilians by the millions too. They invaded countries for no reason at all, even countries like afganistan where the government was favorable to them. Ask the dali lama how nonviolent china was and is. It wasn't just teh fact russia ruined its economy with defense spending, it also ruined it with its practices.
When history looks back on us, it will look at us in comaprision to the butchers of the 20th century and we will come out looking liek saints.
Why not just drop the price of the good box sets (like the led zepplin with the crop circles on the cover) to reasonable prices (5-10 for every cd in it) and just drop regular cds all together? Let the consumer download all the music they want in mp3's but if they want the good version with all the linear notes and stuff they have to go out and buy it. I wouldn't mind paying 20-30 for a good box set (but I am not going to pay 80). The RIAA has to increase the quality of the products they produce if they want to hang onto sales. For the last 15 years the quality of cds haven't gone up at all (in fact they've gone down, cause the music now sucks) and yet they still expect us to pay even more for them. That's a failing business model if I ever saw one. No one in their right mind (or without money to burn) is going to pay 23-25 bucks for just some cd. Everytime I go to the music store and see ppl shelling out loads of cash for britney spears cds i get this mental image of the old loonie tunes cartoon where the granny inherits a fortune and she is sitting in her room chucking money in the fire instead of logs.
I take it you mean Negativland's "These guys are from England (and who gives a shit.)"???
http://www.negativland.com/audiogadgets.html
I think its track 2 from this page. They used a recording of Casey Casum going ape shit and dubbed in some guy on a casio playing the U2 song, and a bunch of random sound clips from the 'weatherman' (mostly ppl saying they want to find him and beat him senseless.)
It already is:
1 0_351.html
"The real hope here is that people will return to the record store," said Eric Garland, CEO of BigCampagne LLC, which tracks peer-to-peer Internet trends. "The biggest question is whether singling out a handful of copyright infringers will invigorate business or drive file-sharing further underground, further out of reach."...
Consumers already think so little of the music companies, that the lawsuits likely won't make much difference, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc.
"The industry has been backed into a corner, and their image is so bad, the lawsuits are not going to be much of a problem," he said....
At the same time, a decline in CD sales worsened. Between June 15 and Aug. 3, the decline in CD sales accelerated 54 percent. And as of Aug. 3, CD sales were down 9.4 percent over the same period in 2002, according to the Yankee Group.
Just because a person stops file-sharing does not mean they will start buying CDs and boost industry revenue, Bernoff said.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Entertainment/ap200309
1) Only one of them is affordable
2) The requirements are not unchangable. Why was a reusable rocket a requirement in the first place? Cause they beleived it would be significantly cheaper. In fact, it is significantly more expensive. (The russian can launch 3-5 soyez[sic?] rockets carrying more than the shuttle can carry with money left over on what we pay for one shuttle launch.) The requirement is not having the desired effect and logic dictates that that requirement is thus no longer valid. Solution: come up with new requirements.
The shuttle is a piece of garbage that never has and never will meet the public's expectations of it. And if NASA continues wasting time with them (or shuttle look alikes that are just crap version 2.0), then the agency is going to not meet expectations either. We pay these people with our tax dollars, at least they can do some of the stuff the public wants. They sit on their asses for thirty years, bore the public and waste its money by playing around with super-ineffecient shuttles, and then wonder why their budget keeps getting cut. If the space program can't inspire the public, it will never be able to inspire them to give them more money. They are complaining that 'people have some fixation with going to mars'(the article about the senate lack of vision hearing) and that the public basically should love the ISS and shuttles cause that's what nasa loves and wants to do. Hello??? We are paying for this space program! Do what the public wants for godsakes. It seems the employees are trying to tell the boss they will do what they want to do, and are suprised that the boss (the public) isn't very happy with them. If the poeple have a fixaton with going to mars and ignoring this low orbit crap, then go to mars. It doesn't matter that the low orbit stuff is important (to zero-gravity tomato growers everywhere), if the public doesn't want it and if it isn't what the public wants you to do, then don't turn around and say your doing it anyway! The capsules aren't going to mars but at leats its in the right direction (replacement is the first step in getting rid of the shuttles and the first step in ending Nasa's fixation with low orbit crap.)
But after the columbia failure, NASA is not up for taking any risks (as if they were taking any real risks before) and they don't seem to want to bring stuff down anymore. Case in point: Hubble.
The link
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03zd.html
It seems our elected representives agree with us (for a change.) We seem to be stuck on the shuttle and low earth orbit. NASA has about as much vision of the future as the RIAA.
It's like that season of Dalls were the decided to just can all the shitty episodes by claiming the whole seaon was a dream.
I watch way too much 'true holywood stories'....
What worries me about this whole RIAA-sueing-everyone-on-earth thing is the effect it is having on our culture. When people have to spend money just to get what in every other century was freely provided, one has to wonder what the effect will be. Will the poor not have music in their lives? Will the young no longer be inspired by great stories simply becuase they can't pay the publisher his outrageous dues? Will the average man on the street have to be worried about the song he hums to himself on the street for fear of being sued? Perhaps the furure of music isn't on cd's at all, perhaps it is the street musician. Maybe, in 100 years when they look back on this time, they'll discuss the rise from the streets of the great musicans and the RIAA and all its assembly-line produced music will only be a footnote.
Too bad we can't arm our hard drives and our virtual selves with guns (with the exception of ineffective virtual guns.)
"Is it any wonder that people would rather escape into a world in which you could hop on a horse and ride for a day or two to escape from oppressive laws"
Yeah, civilization has become oppressive for those of us who wish for an escape. There is no frontiers anymore. I can't even walk into a forest (and I live in a semi-rural area) without running into a "No trespassing" sign. Ride for two days? I would settle for walking for two hours...
I think it is deeper than that; it has to do a lot more with the unknown. They didn't know a lot of things we take for granted. In the fifties and sixties, they wrote about going to mars and how it was going to be a paradise full of weird alien life. There was an adventure into the unknown awaiting at the top of every rocket. Now we know what's out there and it isn't quite so fun. No alien races zipping around in super fast space ships. No interstellar ports anywhere nearby. No hot alien babes on venus just waiting for the ultra-cool space captain to show up. Mars is a barren world covered with rust, dust, and some ice. Venus is a furnace cooled only by the occasional acid rain. We are alone in the solar system (with the possible exception of unintelligent life on Europa - your bacteria buddies aren't quite as cool as robots of death), we haven't met a single alien (unless you count Michael Jackson), and those exotic locations are just a bunch of rocks. Where's the excitement in that? And there are no obvious locations lying around to bring out the imagination. Hell, we will never get to proximus centiari in our life times. In fact we may never get a person there ever. In the fifties, Bardbury thought we have had mars colonized by now. In the golden age of sci fi we could imagine building a ship to get there. There were hundreds of crazy theories floating around that would allow it. And if they could build a rocket, which only two decaades before was as crazy an idea as any of the others, what stopped you from implenting another crazy concept? We put a man in space! Nothing looked impossible.
Now we know it isn't nearly so easy. Bradbury recently (as in the last ten years) said we did it all backwards. We should have gotten through this boring earth exploration in the beginning so we could then have a sustained look outwards. Now we are stuck with the details (in fact, we have stalled on the details.) The way are current space program is going, we'll never even get to mars in our life time. It took like 15 years to get from sputnik to the first man on the moon, in the last thirty we have done basically jack shit. We built a space station (which is only half finished). Big whoop! Ask those appollo guys and they would probably have said it would take only five years to pull something like that off. Instead we are stuck with the crap they call the shuttles and missions that only inspire disgust. Weren't the shuttles and the idea of a reusable rocket to get to space a means and not an ends? The shuttle was only supposed to get people to space, now it seems to be the only reason we go into space. And a space station was supposed to be a blasting off point: a truck stop on the way to somewhere better and farther out. Now it is the destination. In almost all scifi, that was never the case. They imagined us going places, seeing things, and having new and rewarding experiences out in the unknown. Now we go nowhere. The space program look at the earth for the millioneth time and does some groundbreaking great experiment where they found out how good tomato plants grow out there. The modern world has made outer space a dull place of pure science. No excitement. No adventure. Just science - and that isn't any fun.
We wanted indiana jones in space and instead got Ben Stein from 'Ferris Bueller's day off'. As taxpayers, we are paying for NASA, maybe they should start doing some of the stuff WE want.
What will Fry do for a job????
Your forgetting the saturn 5's were insanely expensive.
Last I heard, a nuclear rocket would take 1,000 years jsut to get to proximus centari and that is only our nearest neigbor. Want to send shit to the closest star in the Taurus constellation? It'll take 25,000 years. Only recently will one of our probes (one of the pioneer series I think) actually truly leaving the solar system. Plus the odds of any of it hitting a planet are extremely astronomically low. Even if it did it would burn up in the atmosphere of said planet. And if you can find that crap in space, you already have the technology. So we don't have to worry about our shit screwing up other people's civilizations. In addition, most of the crap we drop in space just falls back into the earths atmosphere and burns up.
Maybe we can blame porn on this too. My computers are under attack by pornographers trying to fill my hard drive with smut! They are just popping up on my screen! I've been...um... checking them... yeah, thats it, checking them to see if there are infected with virii.
If you find your computers full of trojan horses and the boss comes looking just tell him that your under attack by the Chinese! Yep, boss, I didn't put em there...