Their processors aren't as fast as Intel's but for the price, they're so much better. If a $500 AMD processor is almost as fast as a $800 Intel processor, that $300 buys an iPod. Most of the people I know share that view. So what if a 3.8Ghz Xeon performs better than a Athlon64 3800, the Athlon is $300 cheaper!
Think of how low they could cut the costs of production and distribution which would allow them to sell their products at a lower price, which would make them more attractive to the groups most likely to pirate their goods. I guess I just don't understand why the MPAA's members would rather sit around and piss and moan about piracy instead of trying to defeat it. It's not like it's impossible to make a good deal of extra money off of it.
Personally, I blame the fascist culture of "right to profit" that has developed. If I build a house that looks identical to yours, have I stolen your house? Do you have a right to tell me to pay you a royalty on the sale of my house? How about the original developer, does he/she?
If corporations affected by technology would invest their money into researching the new technology and finding ways to update their business model, they'd do well for themselves. But that would require effort and a pretense of competition. It's easier to make the small companies earn their place in the market than make the big ones justify their size and reach.
A number of my peers like to bitch about how "Swing is hard to learn" and I get called an elitist for laughing at them. Of course, unlike most of them I have tried to learn other toolkits and have come to the conclusion that Swing's design really is the de facto gold standard for how a GUI toolkit should be arranged for practical development. It is fast, extremely logically structured and the documentation is really straight to the point for when you need to look stuff up.
I could never get used to Windows Forms. It still amazes me that the layout manager concept isn't considered a standard part of the UI toolkit design process now. Developers shouldn't have to automatically manage most GUI layouts.
Electronic voting is a guaranteed way to have a dictatorship. Once a closed source machine is in charge of counting your votes, as long as the number matches the participants, who could challenge it, it's a machine. Say good bye to minor parties if this becomes mainstream.
People love to act like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What they often forget, is that your new "friend" may be equally as much your enemy as your declared enemy. Usually, it is best to just let your enemies kill each other with their own resources.
I frequently make use of dictionary.com when I write on my blog. Almost every one of my spelling mistakes comes from typing faster than my brain can translate abstract concepts into English, which is why we have proofreading.
I will agree with you that the ones modded down can be the most interesting. I personally find moderation systems to be nothing more than "democratic censorship." It is amusing how we howl at the government for deciding what opinions should be heard, but so few really care that many discussion forums like slashdot and freerepublic.com are some of the worst censors online.
What worries me is that we take this attitude over into our politics. We think it's ok to mod down an idea we think is really stupid, which is the equivalent of screaming shut up and trying to take away the microphone from a speaker. I just worry sometimes that eventually people will be accustomed to this attitude and want the government to really start acting like this.
But then at least slashdot is nowhere near as bad as some of the political forums like freerepublic, where posting an article from a locally (as in local to the site) controversial writer can get you banned. I have been banned numerous times for posting articles that made them think. There is a basically an official censor who trolls around and arbitrarily tells people to "pipe down" or "knock it off" and if he/she/it (such a ball-less individual is probably a eunic or hermaphrodite) doesn't like your post, bye bye to your account.
It's private censorship, but it is still censorship. It may not be protected by the first amendment, but if we respect the first amendment then we should err on the side of letting people troll than risk silencing them.
What's next, American public schools that teach and don't allow bullying? Parents that actually take care of their kids? Lions that like to frollick in a pasture with sheep?
The first step for the corporate elite in the 1870s-1930s was to try to remove the idea from the public consciousness that natural law is a legitimate basis for our legal system. Then it began to push for a steady expansion of intellectual property law into previously unacceptable domains. Originally patents were very hard to get, you had to produce something truly unique, now you can patent business models!
This is all part of a general push away from an ownership society to a corporatist renter society. Capitalism is not to blame here, fascism is, because it is capitalist doctrine that is directly at odds with copyright holders. Capitalism gave us the concept of a government protecting everyone's property rights and not regulating most aspects of the economy to ensure that no class of business had an advantage over another. It was fascism that gave birth to the idea of controlling the economy to "protect industry."
The software rental model is intended to be the final blow to the idea that customers should have a property right in software. Pseudo-capitalists can come out all they like about how "choice" is what really matters, but choice is utterly irrelevent in every respect when basic property rights are not an option anymore. When no one can own their software in any way, to any degree, the difference between competitors becomes inherently pathetic and trite, just like the major parties in 2000 and 2004.
So what happens? Software companies use patents to protect their business model where copyright law isn't enough, by going after upstarts offering an ownership-friendly model.
But what many geeks and nerds won't get out of this, is that this battle has been raging for not a few decades but for about 144, the first battle being the American Civil War. The public schools frequently gloss over three very curious facts about the Civil War, because that would make Abraham Lincoln look like the most fascist stooge in American history:
The founders of the CSA, when you read a bit of their writings, were rabidly anti-corporation by the standards of their day, and despised the system of "internal development" which was basically corporate welfare that was fueled by the tariff.
Over 600,000 Americans, by today's population about 4,200,000-5,000,000 died in a war to protect the rights of corporations. Kinda hard to argue it was to protect slaves, and not corporations, seeing as how it came hot on the heels of the dred scott ruling.
Now does it become clearer, when you consider the almost 1 and a half century history of this fight, why the federal government really is a government of the people, by the people and for the corporations? Look at the push for things like UCITA, the goal is to essentially in the long run whittle down and destroy the state contract laws and nationalize them, so that the states, the governments much closer to you and your wishes, and thus further from corporate control than the feds, cannot protect you from the monied interests.
There never has been a conspiracy, because the elite has always had the audacity to operate in the open. For the last several decades, they have unabashedly eschewed any pretense of being Adam Smith-style capitalists and their economic model draws upon a more sophisticated, and moderately liberal version of Mussolini's fascist doctrines. What do you think, "protecting and advancing American economic interests" really means? Adam Smith would call it that vile system of Mercantilism which was an influence on socialism and at odds with laisez faire capitalism.
People have asked me why I vote libertarian, it is because they are capitalists. The party was born and bred from an ideological pedigree concerned with the minimization of the elite's power and influence and the preservation of an ownership society
I'm just so glad that you got the point that I made, which was who in their right mind would release screenshots that would risk creating a perceived association between Apple's icon set and XOrg or a desktop environment knowing how rabid apple is about protecting their interfaces. Is the high you get from saying, "oooh look at that post, I get to act like a condescending asshole now" worth being an anti-social prick?
who the hell has the balls to rip off **APPLE**'s icon set? Do these OSS monkeys not understand that for the first time in history, God will be on the sidelines taking notes on how to be "truly wrathful?"
What I'd like to know is when mainstream distribution makers will build and configure XOrg so that it performs well. My experience with Fedora 2 and 3Test1 was not good. My PowerBook G4 running at 1Ghz running Panther outperformed KDE 3.3 w/ XOrg 6.8.99 from fedora development on a Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 512MB of ram.
To buy a few albums from ITMS out of principle. I just bought one of the Cocteau Twins' albums last night. I just might buy the other two out of spite for Microsoft.
I remember the "don't copy that floppy" bullshit which was a lot more imaginative than the new campaign they're trying. It didn't work then, it won' work now. The ones they tried to indoctrinate last time became the "file sharing generation" for God's sake.
At many schools the attitude is already decidedly against those groups. At my university, James Madison University in Virginia, AudioGalaxy usage was so high that we almost had our own self-contained AG system because that's how many local users had that many mp3s to share. The university only eventually busted users for bandwidth abuse when it got to the point that people in certain dorms couldn't even really use basic online university services like webmail.
Our CS program is also basically MS free and we're starting to get some real recognition by the NSA and DoHS for our information security work. Most of the CS and many of the other classes I've seen outside the department also are pretty hostile toward the views of these groups.
Good work, thanks libraries. However, the situation is much better on most campuses than many would believe.
For all you know, that person who was in front was some alcoholic who had drunk themselves two steps into scerosis of the liver or some celebrity figure or other type of bigwig.
Things like this help to defeat the image of the web as the online wild west which makes it harder to lobby for fundamental changes to be forced on the architecture. Kinda hard to paint it as a force for "darkening our childrens' hearts" as Bush insinuated it often was in the 2000 election when it is being used effectively to save lives.
As I have said before on my site, there is ample reason to believe that the police are the "standing army" that our founders warned us of. Let's look at what our founders worried about, what the police and military are today
Standing army of our founders' day and age:
Enforced many of the laws. Remember the infamous Star Chamber courts for history classes? Military courts for civilians, often American colonists.
Frequently violated the rights of the people, often in the name of law and order.
Could basically do what they wanted when it was convenient for the state; not held to the strict standard that you have to disobey an illegal order.
The police of our day and age:
Frequently take on what were once military jobs such as detaining unlawful combatants, fighting those who come to our soil to blow up your women and children (hey that was warfare, not terrorism just 30 years ago....)
Frequently disregard the civil liberties of the public, including going so far as to try to instill the attitude that anyone more concerned with civil liberties than fighting crime is "pro-crime."
Frequently disregard the rule of law when it means that one of their own will get "ratted out." The boys in blue are notorious for taking the attitude that a cop can "screw up" because "they are human" even when a civilian doing the same thing would get locked up. Ever heard of cases where the police didn't get busted because none of them would speak ill of even their corrupt comrades?
No knock raids, unprecedented surveillance, military grade equipment, they are a paramilitary, not "peace officers" anymore. Don't ever, ever make the mistake of assuming that they are peace officers anymore. Between their militarization in tactics/armament, and the legal powers that put us at a distinct disadvantage, they are closer to an occupying army than what they were originally created to be.
If you think that gun control is "common sense" yet you are worried about issues like police powers then ask yourself who you would really trust with a gun. The police, many of whom are neurotic, egotistical control freaks (that's why they are attracted to positions of power, surprise, surprise....) or your neighbor? How about your own family and friends. People you can trust.
See I trust the latter, because I come from a law enforcement family that has former law enforcement from both the state and federal agencies. I have seen many more law enforcement officers in personal settings than the average person so I have a good idea of what the personality types are. Trust me, people, especially those who think gun control is a good idea, these are often some of the last people that deserve a state sanction to abridge your liberties while carrying a firearm.
The best thing that could happen to our civil liberties would be for the average citizen to be able to own any weapon that the cops can use, for the government to not be able to register those weapons and for the people to have a right to use force to resist unlawful arrest. Oh wait, unlawful arrest basically doesn't exist anymore because who are you to tell a cop that they don't have a legitimate reason to detain your unconvicted (probably felon) ass? See my point?
Anyone who has had to really use Windows XP knows that the current versions of Linux distributions have fallen down miserably in terms of performance and "shininess" in the GUI. Both of those are important if you want a credible, OSS challenge from Linux. For those that question the latter, I would remind them that the "shininess" of a GUI is one of the biggest things that consumers use to gadge as "modern." It's not a good metric by any means, but it is one that must be taken into serious consideration.
A lot of work on Syllable would go a long way toward hurting Longhorn. If enough Linux guys would get involved with the underpinnings so that Vanders and the rest of the team could take a break to work on the GUI system, it'd be a damn good OSS desktop by the time Longhorn gets here. As it stands right now, their labor is too divided to get its hardware support good enough to boot on many systems. Come on people, it'd be a quick investment of time that'd pay large dividends later.
There is nothing resembling a majority opinion on the copyright issue here. No one has demonstrated reasonably, what a reasonable person is on this issue. A reasonable person might conclude that a small amount of restriction on the right to own a gun is acceptable to keep insane people from owning one. A reasonable person might think that 20 years is acceptable for certain white collar crime.
But what does a reasonable person now think about something as subjective as "inducing copyright violations?" To my neighbor that might be Kazaa. To me that might be a company pushing a MP3 player specifically designed to break any commercial DRM system. To my parents that might be all MP3 players.
I say that a reasonable person is subjective here because the topic itself is so ill-defined.
I haven't actually seen anything that suggests that P2P protocols themselves might be banned, rather that certain companies will get their asses handed to them. BitTorrent has been often use illegitimately, but it is not billed as a big time file sharing network a la Kazaa. The fact that it is often used by geeks for legitimate purposes means that any judge who ruled against it on a "reasonable person" basis would probably get slapped down on appeals.
Which brings me to the next reason I'm not too concerned with this bill. A reasonable person standard on something like this is highly subjective. There is no general public opinion upon which a consistent, long term reasonable person standard could be based. The SCOTUS will probably realize that and slap it down as unconstitutionally vague.
Seriously people, if ya'll want to really make the copyright cartels eat crow, go out and buy music from non-RIAA labels like Century Media. If you've never heard of Lacuna Coil, they're an Italian metal band that is getting really big thanks to a stint on Headbangers' Ball and touring with Ozzfest. They're damn good AND not RIAA affiliated according to the RIAA Radar site. Century Media has a lot of affiliates, and chances are that if you buy European or underground metal, it's not RIAA affiliated.
Don't pirate software or movies, at least not openly. If you're going to do movies, go to blockbuster, rent a new release, rip it, use dvd2one or dvdshrink and burn it to a DVD-R instead of fueling the propaganda about file sharing networks. Afterall, if rental rates increase, they have no excuse that people aren't using legitimate means to watch movies;)
Let the receiver of the grant only patent the ideas granted from public research for 5 years.
As much as I support most of the Libertarian Party's positions on the vast majority of issues, I think there is a place for government funding of general scientific research. A case could be made that spending more money on scientific research and less on social welfare would benefit the poor much more.
The way I see it, if the government were to get rid of the social welfare programs and take maybe 10-20% of the budget and put it into "quality of life" research grants, the poor would have a higher quality of life. Think about it. Money going into:
1) enhanced crops means cheaper and safer food 2) genetic research means cheaper medicalcare 3) automotive research for hydrogen and electric-powered vehicles means cleaner air and water
All of which benefit society much more than tossing a wad of cash at the nearest "underpriveleged" person.
They should donate their JVM to the Mozilla Foundation. Having a high quality, open source JVM would further undermine Sun's position in the Java market AND it would create a buffer against Microsoft's.NET. However, I don't think it would do much good against those that want to build on Mono.
Slashdot Mirror
It couldn't possibly be that part time developers guided by a core contingent from Real is far cheaper for them than having it all inhouse....
Their processors aren't as fast as Intel's but for the price, they're so much better. If a $500 AMD processor is almost as fast as a $800 Intel processor, that $300 buys an iPod. Most of the people I know share that view. So what if a 3.8Ghz Xeon performs better than a Athlon64 3800, the Athlon is $300 cheaper!
Think of how low they could cut the costs of production and distribution which would allow them to sell their products at a lower price, which would make them more attractive to the groups most likely to pirate their goods. I guess I just don't understand why the MPAA's members would rather sit around and piss and moan about piracy instead of trying to defeat it. It's not like it's impossible to make a good deal of extra money off of it.
Personally, I blame the fascist culture of "right to profit" that has developed. If I build a house that looks identical to yours, have I stolen your house? Do you have a right to tell me to pay you a royalty on the sale of my house? How about the original developer, does he/she?
If corporations affected by technology would invest their money into researching the new technology and finding ways to update their business model, they'd do well for themselves. But that would require effort and a pretense of competition. It's easier to make the small companies earn their place in the market than make the big ones justify their size and reach.
A number of my peers like to bitch about how "Swing is hard to learn" and I get called an elitist for laughing at them. Of course, unlike most of them I have tried to learn other toolkits and have come to the conclusion that Swing's design really is the de facto gold standard for how a GUI toolkit should be arranged for practical development. It is fast, extremely logically structured and the documentation is really straight to the point for when you need to look stuff up.
I could never get used to Windows Forms. It still amazes me that the layout manager concept isn't considered a standard part of the UI toolkit design process now. Developers shouldn't have to automatically manage most GUI layouts.
Electronic voting is a guaranteed way to have a dictatorship. Once a closed source machine is in charge of counting your votes, as long as the number matches the participants, who could challenge it, it's a machine. Say good bye to minor parties if this becomes mainstream.
People love to act like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What they often forget, is that your new "friend" may be equally as much your enemy as your declared enemy. Usually, it is best to just let your enemies kill each other with their own resources.
I frequently make use of dictionary.com when I write on my blog. Almost every one of my spelling mistakes comes from typing faster than my brain can translate abstract concepts into English, which is why we have proofreading.
I will agree with you that the ones modded down can be the most interesting. I personally find moderation systems to be nothing more than "democratic censorship." It is amusing how we howl at the government for deciding what opinions should be heard, but so few really care that many discussion forums like slashdot and freerepublic.com are some of the worst censors online.
What worries me is that we take this attitude over into our politics. We think it's ok to mod down an idea we think is really stupid, which is the equivalent of screaming shut up and trying to take away the microphone from a speaker. I just worry sometimes that eventually people will be accustomed to this attitude and want the government to really start acting like this.
But then at least slashdot is nowhere near as bad as some of the political forums like freerepublic, where posting an article from a locally (as in local to the site) controversial writer can get you banned. I have been banned numerous times for posting articles that made them think. There is a basically an official censor who trolls around and arbitrarily tells people to "pipe down" or "knock it off" and if he/she/it (such a ball-less individual is probably a eunic or hermaphrodite) doesn't like your post, bye bye to your account.
It's private censorship, but it is still censorship. It may not be protected by the first amendment, but if we respect the first amendment then we should err on the side of letting people troll than risk silencing them.
What's next, American public schools that teach and don't allow bullying? Parents that actually take care of their kids? Lions that like to frollick in a pasture with sheep?
The first step for the corporate elite in the 1870s-1930s was to try to remove the idea from the public consciousness that natural law is a legitimate basis for our legal system. Then it began to push for a steady expansion of intellectual property law into previously unacceptable domains. Originally patents were very hard to get, you had to produce something truly unique, now you can patent business models!
This is all part of a general push away from an ownership society to a corporatist renter society. Capitalism is not to blame here, fascism is, because it is capitalist doctrine that is directly at odds with copyright holders. Capitalism gave us the concept of a government protecting everyone's property rights and not regulating most aspects of the economy to ensure that no class of business had an advantage over another. It was fascism that gave birth to the idea of controlling the economy to "protect industry."
The software rental model is intended to be the final blow to the idea that customers should have a property right in software. Pseudo-capitalists can come out all they like about how "choice" is what really matters, but choice is utterly irrelevent in every respect when basic property rights are not an option anymore. When no one can own their software in any way, to any degree, the difference between competitors becomes inherently pathetic and trite, just like the major parties in 2000 and 2004.
So what happens? Software companies use patents to protect their business model where copyright law isn't enough, by going after upstarts offering an ownership-friendly model.
But what many geeks and nerds won't get out of this, is that this battle has been raging for not a few decades but for about 144, the first battle being the American Civil War. The public schools frequently gloss over three very curious facts about the Civil War, because that would make Abraham Lincoln look like the most fascist stooge in American history:
Now does it become clearer, when you consider the almost 1 and a half century history of this fight, why the federal government really is a government of the people, by the people and for the corporations? Look at the push for things like UCITA, the goal is to essentially in the long run whittle down and destroy the state contract laws and nationalize them, so that the states, the governments much closer to you and your wishes, and thus further from corporate control than the feds, cannot protect you from the monied interests.
There never has been a conspiracy, because the elite has always had the audacity to operate in the open. For the last several decades, they have unabashedly eschewed any pretense of being Adam Smith-style capitalists and their economic model draws upon a more sophisticated, and moderately liberal version of Mussolini's fascist doctrines. What do you think, "protecting and advancing American economic interests" really means? Adam Smith would call it that vile system of Mercantilism which was an influence on socialism and at odds with laisez faire capitalism.
People have asked me why I vote libertarian, it is because they are capitalists. The party was born and bred from an ideological pedigree concerned with the minimization of the elite's power and influence and the preservation of an ownership society
I'm just so glad that you got the point that I made, which was who in their right mind would release screenshots that would risk creating a perceived association between Apple's icon set and XOrg or a desktop environment knowing how rabid apple is about protecting their interfaces. Is the high you get from saying, "oooh look at that post, I get to act like a condescending asshole now" worth being an anti-social prick?
who the hell has the balls to rip off **APPLE**'s icon set? Do these OSS monkeys not understand that for the first time in history, God will be on the sidelines taking notes on how to be "truly wrathful?"
What I'd like to know is when mainstream distribution makers will build and configure XOrg so that it performs well. My experience with Fedora 2 and 3Test1 was not good. My PowerBook G4 running at 1Ghz running Panther outperformed KDE 3.3 w/ XOrg 6.8.99 from fedora development on a Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 512MB of ram.
To buy a few albums from ITMS out of principle. I just bought one of the Cocteau Twins' albums last night. I just might buy the other two out of spite for Microsoft.
I remember the "don't copy that floppy" bullshit which was a lot more imaginative than the new campaign they're trying. It didn't work then, it won' work now. The ones they tried to indoctrinate last time became the "file sharing generation" for God's sake.
At many schools the attitude is already decidedly against those groups. At my university, James Madison University in Virginia, AudioGalaxy usage was so high that we almost had our own self-contained AG system because that's how many local users had that many mp3s to share. The university only eventually busted users for bandwidth abuse when it got to the point that people in certain dorms couldn't even really use basic online university services like webmail.
Our CS program is also basically MS free and we're starting to get some real recognition by the NSA and DoHS for our information security work. Most of the CS and many of the other classes I've seen outside the department also are pretty hostile toward the views of these groups.
Good work, thanks libraries. However, the situation is much better on most campuses than many would believe.
For all you know, that person who was in front was some alcoholic who had drunk themselves two steps into scerosis of the liver or some celebrity figure or other type of bigwig.
Things like this help to defeat the image of the web as the online wild west which makes it harder to lobby for fundamental changes to be forced on the architecture. Kinda hard to paint it as a force for "darkening our childrens' hearts" as Bush insinuated it often was in the 2000 election when it is being used effectively to save lives.
As I have said before on my site, there is ample reason to believe that the police are the "standing army" that our founders warned us of. Let's look at what our founders worried about, what the police and military are today
Standing army of our founders' day and age:
The police of our day and age:
No knock raids, unprecedented surveillance, military grade equipment, they are a paramilitary, not "peace officers" anymore. Don't ever, ever make the mistake of assuming that they are peace officers anymore. Between their militarization in tactics/armament, and the legal powers that put us at a distinct disadvantage, they are closer to an occupying army than what they were originally created to be.
If you think that gun control is "common sense" yet you are worried about issues like police powers then ask yourself who you would really trust with a gun. The police, many of whom are neurotic, egotistical control freaks (that's why they are attracted to positions of power, surprise, surprise....) or your neighbor? How about your own family and friends. People you can trust.
See I trust the latter, because I come from a law enforcement family that has former law enforcement from both the state and federal agencies. I have seen many more law enforcement officers in personal settings than the average person so I have a good idea of what the personality types are. Trust me, people, especially those who think gun control is a good idea, these are often some of the last people that deserve a state sanction to abridge your liberties while carrying a firearm.
The best thing that could happen to our civil liberties would be for the average citizen to be able to own any weapon that the cops can use, for the government to not be able to register those weapons and for the people to have a right to use force to resist unlawful arrest. Oh wait, unlawful arrest basically doesn't exist anymore because who are you to tell a cop that they don't have a legitimate reason to detain your unconvicted (probably felon) ass? See my point?
A rodent that tends to smell like shit and is uncannily prone to getting rabies. Things like this are why I don't believe in coincidences anymore....
Anyone who has had to really use Windows XP knows that the current versions of Linux distributions have fallen down miserably in terms of performance and "shininess" in the GUI. Both of those are important if you want a credible, OSS challenge from Linux. For those that question the latter, I would remind them that the "shininess" of a GUI is one of the biggest things that consumers use to gadge as "modern." It's not a good metric by any means, but it is one that must be taken into serious consideration.
A lot of work on Syllable would go a long way toward hurting Longhorn. If enough Linux guys would get involved with the underpinnings so that Vanders and the rest of the team could take a break to work on the GUI system, it'd be a damn good OSS desktop by the time Longhorn gets here. As it stands right now, their labor is too divided to get its hardware support good enough to boot on many systems. Come on people, it'd be a quick investment of time that'd pay large dividends later.
For Mac users there is Fire which since going 1.0 is quite nice and polished.
There is nothing resembling a majority opinion on the copyright issue here. No one has demonstrated reasonably, what a reasonable person is on this issue. A reasonable person might conclude that a small amount of restriction on the right to own a gun is acceptable to keep insane people from owning one. A reasonable person might think that 20 years is acceptable for certain white collar crime.
But what does a reasonable person now think about something as subjective as "inducing copyright violations?" To my neighbor that might be Kazaa. To me that might be a company pushing a MP3 player specifically designed to break any commercial DRM system. To my parents that might be all MP3 players.
I say that a reasonable person is subjective here because the topic itself is so ill-defined.
I haven't actually seen anything that suggests that P2P protocols themselves might be banned, rather that certain companies will get their asses handed to them. BitTorrent has been often use illegitimately, but it is not billed as a big time file sharing network a la Kazaa. The fact that it is often used by geeks for legitimate purposes means that any judge who ruled against it on a "reasonable person" basis would probably get slapped down on appeals.
;)
Which brings me to the next reason I'm not too concerned with this bill. A reasonable person standard on something like this is highly subjective. There is no general public opinion upon which a consistent, long term reasonable person standard could be based. The SCOTUS will probably realize that and slap it down as unconstitutionally vague.
Seriously people, if ya'll want to really make the copyright cartels eat crow, go out and buy music from non-RIAA labels like Century Media. If you've never heard of Lacuna Coil, they're an Italian metal band that is getting really big thanks to a stint on Headbangers' Ball and touring with Ozzfest. They're damn good AND not RIAA affiliated according to the RIAA Radar site. Century Media has a lot of affiliates, and chances are that if you buy European or underground metal, it's not RIAA affiliated.
Don't pirate software or movies, at least not openly. If you're going to do movies, go to blockbuster, rent a new release, rip it, use dvd2one or dvdshrink and burn it to a DVD-R instead of fueling the propaganda about file sharing networks. Afterall, if rental rates increase, they have no excuse that people aren't using legitimate means to watch movies
Let the receiver of the grant only patent the ideas granted from public research for 5 years.
As much as I support most of the Libertarian Party's positions on the vast majority of issues, I think there is a place for government funding of general scientific research. A case could be made that spending more money on scientific research and less on social welfare would benefit the poor much more.
The way I see it, if the government were to get rid of the social welfare programs and take maybe 10-20% of the budget and put it into "quality of life" research grants, the poor would have a higher quality of life. Think about it. Money going into:
1) enhanced crops means cheaper and safer food
2) genetic research means cheaper medicalcare
3) automotive research for hydrogen and electric-powered vehicles means cleaner air and water
All of which benefit society much more than tossing a wad of cash at the nearest "underpriveleged" person.
They should donate their JVM to the Mozilla Foundation. Having a high quality, open source JVM would further undermine Sun's position in the Java market AND it would create a buffer against Microsoft's .NET. However, I don't think it would do much good against those that want to build on Mono.