The man had his problems, but he gave the FBI a mission, tore their nuts off if they tried to do everything and went tooth and nail against corrupt politicians. Say what you will, and there is a lot of bad to be said, but Hoover was a FBI director that would actually get us what we want. He'd just about tell these wholy owned subsidiaries of the **AA to fuck off because we have terrorists to catch and if they got uppity with him, they'd find a few of their skeletons surfacing in their local media back home.
Our local "independent retailers" are often as pricy as our big stores. I live in Harrisonburg, VA which is a college town and our bigger retailers like Sam Goody and FYE actually have been known to be substantially cheaper. I bought a copy of Tool's album Lateralus for $10 at Sam Goody on sale. It has been on sale 2x in the past 1.5 months.
I'll admit that you can often find stuff for a dollar, may be $2, cheaper at our local stores, but usually I feel like I'm getting ripped off if I've checked CDUniverse.com. I usually find THEIR prices are $2-$3 cheaper than our local indie retailers. I've often been amused that I could often buy a CD online and even with the shipping it's $1-$2 cheaper than the local stores, indie and big corporate alike.
Nobody I know likes being reminded everytime about the FBI. Nobody I know likes being forced to watch previews. Nobody I know likes being told what to do with their DVD when they use it for their own purposes unless they take it upon themselves to give copies away to everyone.
It's about the content dammit! People don't buy DVDs for previews, for fancy menus or the damn FBI warning. Most people want the movie, not the 2 hours of celebrity mutual masturbation that is the typical "bonus" disk. I have a better idea for them, find a way to reduce the cost to such a point that you can buy **just** the movie for $10 after sales tax. If they want to make it sooo easy for customers to get the movies they want and make them happy they'd make it so that producing a "lite" DVD is so cheap that they could sell them so inexpensively that a $20 bill would buy you 2 movies.
Of course that would require an entrepeneurial spirit, something they have not known for almost a century. That would require them to take a calculated risk, something that they don't understand the need for. The market won't hold back forever. Americans have technological blinders, but we're not blind. When we see nations like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan that have no analogs to the DMCA sticking their tongues out at us when their gadgets are a good 5-10 years ahead of ours because of the DMCA, et al, Americans will be mad. Why? It won't be just silly gadgets, it'll be a lot of things. First it will be the divisions that make the gadgets like the DVD-VCRs, then it will be the rest of the company that goes overseas. More jobs lost because "artists" were being "ripped off."
I'm more musically inclined than Britney Spears and company. I say fuck the "artists" if we have to choose between their copyrights and a functioning free market. It's more important that 5,000 musicians not get paid for their songs downloaded illegally than 2,500 more manufacturing jobs or any other jobs go everseas because the companies found our copyright laws too stifling.
Everybody has ignored the most obvious factor of musical growth: the advancement of science. The most scientifically advanced societies on Earth also have the most musically diverse cultures as a general rule. The more science has made our lives better, even in peripheral ways, the more musicians have benefited. In 100 years science took us from having a society with only a few major types of music (in no small part because so many modern musical tools hadn't been invented like electric equipment) to having dozens. It made it possible for tens of thousands of musicians to at least effectively supplement their income with their skills. Excuse the hell out of me, but science has done more for copyright holders than copyright law. It was not economically feasible for so many musicians to make a living off of their music 100 years ago, but now thanks to the explosion of technological growth it's definitely possible if you're good.
I have one final proposal for the closet socialists and fascists of the **AA: lobby against budget deficits, pork barrel spending and the peacetime income tax if you want more money. All of the yuppies get the other 30-50% of their income back. What do they do with it? Invest it all or give little johny or suzie more allowance? A lot of the former and probably a lot of the latter as well. What is little johny or suzie going to do, buy blue chip stock shares? Hell no! They're going to go down to Sam Goody, buy an extra $100 worth Nelly, Jay Z, Britney Spears and Metallica.
It's chilling because it holds bloggers to the same level of accountability as CNN/BBC/FoxNews. They have the time and resources to authenticate and publish the other side. I don't have that luxury since I'm a college student who will probably be working part time soon and taking summer classes.
Europe should give liberalism a shot instead of finding every single possible way around it. Hey you never know, give your people freedom and you might actually not be inclined to slaughter each other and Jews like cattle.
Tell that to the soldiers at My Lai who turned on their CO and fired on those killing the civilians there. And in case you didn't notice, I said that national service could also be peacecorps or americorps.
It's not that most of them are corrupt, it's that most of them are too stupid to know better. Our politicians reflect the fact that the average person by sheer virtue of being a citizen is entitled to vote.
It's a stupid, illogical and immoral political goal to let every jackass and ditz vote. Democracy, not religion, in any form where the mob, not those who have served their country, gets to vote is the opiate of the masses. It lets John Q Citizen feel like he's in control. But he's not.
By empowering everyone to vote, you disempower the best and brightest to make positive political change. The best and brightest who have served are who should be voting, not your average dumb fuck who has never served his or her country in the military or (peace || ameri)corps.
If 75% of the public couldn't vote, we'd have the system we want. It'd be clean, effective, respectful of civil rights and technologically progressive. But no, you bumbling foolish defenders of the popular right to vote, you'll never have a good government while the frightened masses call the shots.
The PATRIOT Act wouldn't have passed if the soccer moms and country-club dads of America who put their selfish interests above national service early on were told, "hey we don't give a fuck what you think" by the government. Why? Because why would the politicians care what those who can't vote think. They'd be a lot more concerned because the people WHO DO CARE would be voting. You know those types, the ones who generally care about their country and don't vote Republicrat because that's what their family has always voted for or something similarly stupid.
You don't need to vote if the government runs well and respects your rights. I'd rather live under a dictator who does both than a democratic system of government that considers my rights subject to the whims of the mob. Get the government out of our lives, disenfranchise everyone who isn't a veteran of the military, peacecorps or americorps and let those who do care fix the mistakes.
I learned to hate the idea of submitting myself to the mob in our education system. I got a taste of what the Columbine killers went through, just a taste mind you. It was there that I learned why dictators consider mass participation the easiest way to power: the masses don't think, only a minority do and when properly manipulated the masses will crush those who do think.
They testify that releasing the code to their competitors would constitute a clear and present danger to national security then give the source 3 months later to a communist country. Excuse the hell out of me, either MS doesn't care or they are too daft to read the obvious writings on the wall. Anyone who has read anything on how the Chinese view us militarily knows that the PLA's documents call for "alternative means" to take out the US's critical infrastructure and military forces. I'm sorry, but given their history with our legal system, I think they are some of the most disgusting treasonous scum in corporate America.
The only thing worse was IIRC Boeing it was that moved Loral rocket technology to China to launch satellites knowing damn well that much of that technology was dual purpose. Now the PRC has missile technology that is approaching ours. Thank you corporate America, may so many of you be among the first up against the wall.
Your right to try to turn a profit ends where our national security is concerned. I don't give a flying fuck why Microsoft released Windows' source code to them, but that alone is grounds to punish them by shit-canning their products in the federal government. Every desktop should be switched to MacOS X and/or Linux and MS Office replaced with OpenOffice. We have to draw a line in the sand and scream at them YOUR BEHAVIOR IS NOT ACCEPTABLE YOU UNPATRIOTIC FUCKERS!
I agree that tossing out ideas must remain legal, but there are different types of vaporware. I for one see no reasons why it should be legal to imply that you have a reasonable capability to deliver something when you know that you probably don't. That is called initiating fraud in libertarian terms. If I tell you I can build a house for you and all I know how to build is a basic shed, but I'm in the process of learning how to build a nice house, don't you think that's not merely tossing out an idea but rather fraud?
2) Internet Explorer, for when you absolutely must not be affected by the 1 vulnerability found in Opera and Mozilla.
3) If you divide the number of bugs found in IE (30) by its userbase (98%) you'll find our product is only 30% defective whereis if you divide their number of bugs (1) against their userbase (2%) you'll find a product that is 50% defective. We all know that the number of bugs varies with the number of users, not the code quality. Right...... right?
Is that the line between law enforcement officers as peace officers and law enforcement officers as oppressors is very thin in most situations. The federal law enforcement apparatus is slowly beginning to aspire to KGB-level power over the population.
Look at Waco for instance. I'm not a fan of cults like the Branch Davidians, but the use of military-grade hardware like small tanks against a compound that is guarded by a bunch of yokels with at best automatic weapons is a great cause for concern. What most people don't know is that Waco was so badly screwed up that it had to be deliberate. It is not a conspiracy theory to say that the FBI and other agencies wanted to make an example out of them because they had something like 6 months to a year where David Koresh walked everday to wal-mart for supplies. I come from a federal law enforcement family and both my parents agree that in light of how many opportunities they had to NOT make an explosive situation it was literally criminal what the feds did. Same goes for Ruby Ridge.
The majority of police working in these areas don't care about your freedom or your privacy anymore. If they did they'd have given up on bullshit like the Clipper Chip and export regulations. We live in a society in which it is not feasible to keep our technology under wraps. It would be trivial for Al Qaeda to smuggle PGP out of our country; all they'd have to do is get someone inside our country, buy a single copy and send it from a public library to the Middle East.
We can only lose by listening to these security chicken littles because if we did everything we could to make our country secure, we'd resemble a slightly right-wing version of the Soviet Union. There would be no public internet access, no freedom of mobility, no right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined), no right to security in your house and person, no freedom of association, and probably no property rights either. I won't live like that and I consider anyone who would to be worthy of death. They aren't human and because they reduce themselves so low they are a disgrace to our species. Not that I advocate murdering them, but rather I only laugh my ass off at them when they get hurt or killed. Good riddance, we need more people that won't change their lives to accomodate the terrorists, whether they're associates of Al Qaeda, have a General Services rank or call themselves Representative or Senator.
Government can't protect you preemptively, that is the indirect moral of this story. The police can pick up the pieces and get justice, but that's usually about it. Here's a novel thought, let's legalize assassinating terrorists. But this was never about terrorism and national (or is it fatherland) security, it was about big government justifying its Cold War level of control over the people. The worst parts of Communism aren't dead, they're festering in the White House and most of the law and order Republican types can't see that they've already lost. Bob Barr was kicked out because he had the audacity to call out Bush on issues like TIPS where he said, "this program smacks of the very fascist and communist governments that we have faught for so long."
So it's not healthy to be a true patriot and political traditionalist in America anymore. You call for a modern form of the government we started out with (in other words, nothing like slavery) and you're called idealistic, short-sighted and soft-headed. The irony of it is that the true hard-headed people have always advocated limited government and a simultaneously isolationist and Machiavellian foreign policy. We'd be a lot more secure if we minded our own business and made people pay handsomely in blood for every single violent transgression against us. For example we'd have fewer problems with Saudi-funded terrorists if after every such attack against us, the CIA sent its SOG commandos into Saudia Arabia and blew up a few civilian targets. You want respect in war and politics? Show that if you have to choose between doing the right thing and surviving that the former never gets in the way of the latter.
Some background since most on slashdot don't really know much of anything about the American Right. There are two major types of conservatism. The first is derisively called "paleoconservatism" by the groups that dominate rags like the National Review. The other are the "neoconservatives" which make up the majority of the major Republican leaders that are rabidly pro-big business, additional police powers and take their pro-Israel views to the point of treasounous activity.
The conservative movement has for well over 20 years been split along these lines. People like David Frum at the NR have really made this split deeper in recent years. Frum is notorious for his denunciations of the "paleos" because they typically deeply opposed the War in Iraq. Fancy that, traditional conservatives not seeing any legitimate reason to deploy 200-300K US troops, marines, sailors and airmen to a country we had no formal threat of attack from. He and others have been known to agitate for foreign policy that puts the interests of Israel at the same level or higher than the interests of the US. Where I come from, a "paleoconservative" family with libertarian leanings now, that's called low-level treason.
I feel sorry for the Israelis and support their right of self-defense but do not support their armed theft of more Palestinian land, especially that land outside their soverign territory. My principles dictate that the ethics that I demand of my government be universal and thus since I support domestic property rights, I see no reason not to condemn the armed Israeli theft of Palestinian land. So what does that make me in neocon land? An anti-semite because I believe that the interests of Israel are ALWAYS subordinate to US interests in the eyes of a patriot and the US should condemn Israel for siezing land they have no title to. What's worse in the eyes of the neocons? I think that there is no ethical issue for a **law-abiding** Palestinian (not a terrorist supporter) to use any force up to deadly force to stop Israeli soldiers from bulldozing their house down.
The neocons are the "big business is good because big business is great in scope of operations" branch. The paleos tend to be very skeptical of how good big business really is for our country. They don't support left-wing regulations usually, but they rarely come out and rabidly defend big corporations. The paleos on FreeRepublic tend to bash Microsoft right and left and tend to roast Gates for his leftist views. A good number of them even claim to use Linux or MacOS X and Mozilla.
Paleoconservatism and Libertarianism are natural political allies. The paleos have the large organized numbers and the Libertarians have the political groups like the Cato and Reason foundations which are more than capable of opening a full can of whup ass on the neocons in the public debate.
I am a political Libertarian and an economic pluralist. Economically I am both a a Libertarian Capitalist and Libertarian Socialist, I don't see any reason why we can't have for-profit companies coexisting with privately controlled workers' cooperatives. It is from that perspective that I think it's obvious that most paleos, ie the real conservatives, have a reason to support this bill and fight the major content cartels. Unlike the neocons, they tend to not feel the need to redefine freedom nor do they feel the need to keep pushing for a bigger and bigger picture to keep people from noticing the very scary fine print details. Heard about that Left-Right anti-PATRIOT coallition? Chances are the rank-and-file members of the Right there are paleos. Bush has lost the support of most Paleos I've met and talked to, if the democrats run a good person (ie a nice person, not someone like Hitlery Clinton) Bush very well get his ass handed to him in 2004.
They don't have iTunes for another platform yet so in order to stay completely legitimate in the eyes of the labels and public they had to do this. Once they have a Windows version there will be no reason for them to not expand that.
Until then I don't see the big deal. You can burn your downloads to a CD right? Just burn them to a CD and then rip the CD as oggs or mp3s if you really need to share.
This is all about propaganda. If Apple stays 110% on the right side of the law while still being liberal in its feature set then that's a major accomplishment. It will only further undermine the subscription models and similar schemes.
As long as you can burn to a CD and rip that CD, Apple is just doing stuff like this for show. It's so that they can more easily hit the labels right back in the face if they get taken to court for one of the typical bogus reasons.
They can't even grasp basic economics. They flood the market with trash like Dumb and Dumberer and Final Desination 2 and wonder why, according to Jack Valenti (can he be trusted at all?), they gross an average of only $52M a year. The movie studios basically know how to make a movie that will bring in heaping piles of cash. Look at the Matrix and LOTR. The problem is that they are so greedy that they can't accept that at the end of the day, if they produce a few good movies a year and call it even, they will more likely than not come out ahead more easily than if they put out many times that.
The music industry has an excuse, music fans are often fickle and can throw out a band after one CD because their style "isn't cool anymore." Most music is disposable because people don't want anything artistic or refreshingly original. I listen to old stuff by The Cult occassionally as well as more recent stuff like Stabbing Westward. You don't see that kind of rock anymore. It's the same tuned-down, crunch-your-head-off distortion filled, 3 power chord bullshit. I mean WTF is up with a band like the All American Rejects? I just started playing bass a week ago after having been playing guitar on a semi-active basis for 5 months and can play at least one of their bass lines they're that fucking simple! Swing, Swing has only 4 notes in the entire bass line and you just hit them as 8th notes in sets of 8. Again, pathetic... even I a total newbie write cooler bass lines than that. I want my recording contract now that I know that the bar has been thrown out, not lowered.
The IP cartels are greedy and they're not bound to full market forces. Whoever heard of a Korn CD competing with a TRUSTCompany CD? They don't, except for this week's $15 allowance. Buy one this week, buy the other next week. They won't learn because the government is going to step in like a good fascist state and save them from the pirhannas of capitalism that are now about to descend upon them. America will slip backward, other countries will take our economic lead, but a bunch of neocons will be able to sleep peacefully at night knowing that the market is safe for Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit. Too bad that a bunch of our IT sector will be in ruins and our economy's growth will be fizzling out. "Property rights" will be have been protected, except for your right to modify your DVD-R/RW or DVD player so it can play non-CSS DVD-Rs. Hey, property rights in the neocon world belong only to those who produce, not those who consume.
I'm a neo-liberal/libertarian and yes, I openly and freely admit that I vehemently hate neo-conservatism and wish enlightenment for them first, and if that doesn't work a pox on them.
How does the RIAA reconcile its support of the DMCA's provisions against the publication of documents detailing the defects in copy restriction systems with the following part of the first amendment of the US Constitution: "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech; or of the press."
Also how does the RIAA reconcile such language in copyright law with the legal fact that the 1st amendment is supposed to supercede, Article I, Section 8 which was in the original body of the Constitution amended by the Bill of Rights?
Makes it sound like a niche OS. Come on, doesn't eComStation imply that's only good for one thing? This alone will help make it hard for OS/2 to make a comeback of any kind.
Look, I don't like Bush anymore than the next guy here, but the UN has had it coming for a long time. They are a bunch of spineless beaucrats that love rubbing elbows with corrupt fascist and socialist dictators like Saddamn Hussein. They had already authorized the usage of force long before the bullshit about needing a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th resolution came about. The UN makes a debating club look productive and thoughtful. They form a committee to discuss the ramifications of forming a committee who is charged with determining whether acting on their threat of war is justified.
Which it isn't. The UN has no legitimacy in the US because it is a form of government organization and it has very little consent from the governed in our country. I don't like Bush, I'll be honest about that. I think his policies are reckless, irresponsibile and I dread the day that Hitlery Clinton gets a shot at using the PATRIOT Act. Just imagine, release a new equivalent of DeCSS and you're a terrorist. Well you were before the government captured you and made you disappear.
It says a lot about so many people that they respect an organization that puts Libya and the Sudan on a human rights commission. While they're at it, why not put the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers on a racial sensitivity panel?
I have seen many good examples of conservative and libertarian/neo-liberal foes of copyright expansionism bolstering their ranks by drawing strong analogies between copyright expansionism and gun control. Many who are uneasy about file sharing are becoming even more uneasy about the prospect of supporting an intellectual cousin of gun control. And it makes sense to them, because file sharing does have legal applications and in order to stop it, the cure is tantamount to a scorched earth policy in regard to our software/hardware/IT/consumer electronics industries.
If apple were to officially port Mono to OSX and help build it into a robust development tool and environment then it would be possible for them to build.NET bindings for OSX that would run on both the PPC 970 and Opteron.
Apple has nothing to lose by including Linux and if it gets there, OpenBeOS in that. MacOS X is already arguably light years behind Linux as a desktop OS and OpenBeOS will take a good 2-3 years to get where OS X is today. Apple has about as much reason to worry about being overrun by Linux and OpenBeOS (and other OSS platforms) on the desktop as the US military has to worry about the Kurds and Turks.
That said, I think that if Apple really wanted to drop an A bomb on Microsoft, they could spend a cool $25M to buy BeOS, integrate any cool parts they can use and dump the rest into the hands of the OSS world. What makes a Macintosh great is that it is a true all-in-one experience. The software "just works" with the hardware and that will always appeal to a lot of users. PCs are utilitarian and no pretty. Hell if I had the money I'd buy a PowerMac based on the PPC 970 rather than buy a very nice used car.
If rights are not innate, regardless of culture then they don't exist. A right is something that can be restricted as punishment for a crime, but cannot be taken away. You can take away a felon's right to own a gun during his punishment period, but not so when it is over. If you believe that we can't judge them because they're different, you can't judge anyone's actions or views because you embrace moral relativism. Your opinion is no better, or more right then mine or theirs. Meaning who are you to judge the Nazis? They're right too, because their moral views are no less correct than yours since no one's are innately right. If that sounds like a reductio ad absurdum, it's because moral relativism IS absurd.
Oh that's great
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Tell the greedy politicians that they get something out of doing their job, which is supposed to be enforcing the law. $64B in taxes? That's a **great** way to ensure that jack-booted thugs with M-16s, AK-47s, MP5s or Styr-Augs (depending on the PD) bust down as many doors as possible to make sure that $64B is protected. That's of course assuming that eliminating piracy won't damage or destroy other sectors of the economy. People, $64B is ~$24B more than we spend on the insane WoD. I know that will get spread over many countries, but that's still a damn big incentive even if it's only an extra $5B to the general fund.
Imagine Palladium getting mandated to make this possible. No Macintosh anymore or similar platforms. Probably no WordPerfect either as it will cost Corel too much to get certified. Linux? Bye bye SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, et al. It will be an industry dominated by a handful of giants. Our spineless, ignorant politicians have long ago forgotten that it is small and medium-sized business, not the giants, that run most of the economy. If those go under, unemployment will skyrocket, both parties will have egg on their faces and knowing America these days, we won't have a third party gaining power, we'll have 2 party weasles giving people heaping buckets full of Socialism.
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The man had his problems, but he gave the FBI a mission, tore their nuts off if they tried to do everything and went tooth and nail against corrupt politicians. Say what you will, and there is a lot of bad to be said, but Hoover was a FBI director that would actually get us what we want. He'd just about tell these wholy owned subsidiaries of the **AA to fuck off because we have terrorists to catch and if they got uppity with him, they'd find a few of their skeletons surfacing in their local media back home.
Our local "independent retailers" are often as pricy as our big stores. I live in Harrisonburg, VA which is a college town and our bigger retailers like Sam Goody and FYE actually have been known to be substantially cheaper. I bought a copy of Tool's album Lateralus for $10 at Sam Goody on sale. It has been on sale 2x in the past 1.5 months.
I'll admit that you can often find stuff for a dollar, may be $2, cheaper at our local stores, but usually I feel like I'm getting ripped off if I've checked CDUniverse.com. I usually find THEIR prices are $2-$3 cheaper than our local indie retailers. I've often been amused that I could often buy a CD online and even with the shipping it's $1-$2 cheaper than the local stores, indie and big corporate alike.
Nobody I know likes being reminded everytime about the FBI. Nobody I know likes being forced to watch previews. Nobody I know likes being told what to do with their DVD when they use it for their own purposes unless they take it upon themselves to give copies away to everyone.
It's about the content dammit! People don't buy DVDs for previews, for fancy menus or the damn FBI warning. Most people want the movie, not the 2 hours of celebrity mutual masturbation that is the typical "bonus" disk. I have a better idea for them, find a way to reduce the cost to such a point that you can buy **just** the movie for $10 after sales tax. If they want to make it sooo easy for customers to get the movies they want and make them happy they'd make it so that producing a "lite" DVD is so cheap that they could sell them so inexpensively that a $20 bill would buy you 2 movies.
Of course that would require an entrepeneurial spirit, something they have not known for almost a century. That would require them to take a calculated risk, something that they don't understand the need for. The market won't hold back forever. Americans have technological blinders, but we're not blind. When we see nations like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan that have no analogs to the DMCA sticking their tongues out at us when their gadgets are a good 5-10 years ahead of ours because of the DMCA, et al, Americans will be mad. Why? It won't be just silly gadgets, it'll be a lot of things. First it will be the divisions that make the gadgets like the DVD-VCRs, then it will be the rest of the company that goes overseas. More jobs lost because "artists" were being "ripped off."
I'm more musically inclined than Britney Spears and company. I say fuck the "artists" if we have to choose between their copyrights and a functioning free market. It's more important that 5,000 musicians not get paid for their songs downloaded illegally than 2,500 more manufacturing jobs or any other jobs go everseas because the companies found our copyright laws too stifling.
Everybody has ignored the most obvious factor of musical growth: the advancement of science. The most scientifically advanced societies on Earth also have the most musically diverse cultures as a general rule. The more science has made our lives better, even in peripheral ways, the more musicians have benefited. In 100 years science took us from having a society with only a few major types of music (in no small part because so many modern musical tools hadn't been invented like electric equipment) to having dozens. It made it possible for tens of thousands of musicians to at least effectively supplement their income with their skills. Excuse the hell out of me, but science has done more for copyright holders than copyright law. It was not economically feasible for so many musicians to make a living off of their music 100 years ago, but now thanks to the explosion of technological growth it's definitely possible if you're good.
I have one final proposal for the closet socialists and fascists of the **AA: lobby against budget deficits, pork barrel spending and the peacetime income tax if you want more money. All of the yuppies get the other 30-50% of their income back. What do they do with it? Invest it all or give little johny or suzie more allowance? A lot of the former and probably a lot of the latter as well. What is little johny or suzie going to do, buy blue chip stock shares? Hell no! They're going to go down to Sam Goody, buy an extra $100 worth Nelly, Jay Z, Britney Spears and Metallica.
It's chilling because it holds bloggers to the same level of accountability as CNN/BBC/FoxNews. They have the time and resources to authenticate and publish the other side. I don't have that luxury since I'm a college student who will probably be working part time soon and taking summer classes.
Europe should give liberalism a shot instead of finding every single possible way around it. Hey you never know, give your people freedom and you might actually not be inclined to slaughter each other and Jews like cattle.
I'm still a student not a veteran, but plan on military service after college
Tell that to the soldiers at My Lai who turned on their CO and fired on those killing the civilians there. And in case you didn't notice, I said that national service could also be peacecorps or americorps.
It's not that most of them are corrupt, it's that most of them are too stupid to know better. Our politicians reflect the fact that the average person by sheer virtue of being a citizen is entitled to vote.
It's a stupid, illogical and immoral political goal to let every jackass and ditz vote. Democracy, not religion, in any form where the mob, not those who have served their country, gets to vote is the opiate of the masses. It lets John Q Citizen feel like he's in control. But he's not.
By empowering everyone to vote, you disempower the best and brightest to make positive political change. The best and brightest who have served are who should be voting, not your average dumb fuck who has never served his or her country in the military or (peace || ameri)corps.
If 75% of the public couldn't vote, we'd have the system we want. It'd be clean, effective, respectful of civil rights and technologically progressive. But no, you bumbling foolish defenders of the popular right to vote, you'll never have a good government while the frightened masses call the shots.
The PATRIOT Act wouldn't have passed if the soccer moms and country-club dads of America who put their selfish interests above national service early on were told, "hey we don't give a fuck what you think" by the government. Why? Because why would the politicians care what those who can't vote think. They'd be a lot more concerned because the people WHO DO CARE would be voting. You know those types, the ones who generally care about their country and don't vote Republicrat because that's what their family has always voted for or something similarly stupid.
You don't need to vote if the government runs well and respects your rights. I'd rather live under a dictator who does both than a democratic system of government that considers my rights subject to the whims of the mob. Get the government out of our lives, disenfranchise everyone who isn't a veteran of the military, peacecorps or americorps and let those who do care fix the mistakes.
I learned to hate the idea of submitting myself to the mob in our education system. I got a taste of what the Columbine killers went through, just a taste mind you. It was there that I learned why dictators consider mass participation the easiest way to power: the masses don't think, only a minority do and when properly manipulated the masses will crush those who do think.
They testify that releasing the code to their competitors would constitute a clear and present danger to national security then give the source 3 months later to a communist country. Excuse the hell out of me, either MS doesn't care or they are too daft to read the obvious writings on the wall. Anyone who has read anything on how the Chinese view us militarily knows that the PLA's documents call for "alternative means" to take out the US's critical infrastructure and military forces. I'm sorry, but given their history with our legal system, I think they are some of the most disgusting treasonous scum in corporate America.
The only thing worse was IIRC Boeing it was that moved Loral rocket technology to China to launch satellites knowing damn well that much of that technology was dual purpose. Now the PRC has missile technology that is approaching ours. Thank you corporate America, may so many of you be among the first up against the wall.
Your right to try to turn a profit ends where our national security is concerned. I don't give a flying fuck why Microsoft released Windows' source code to them, but that alone is grounds to punish them by shit-canning their products in the federal government. Every desktop should be switched to MacOS X and/or Linux and MS Office replaced with OpenOffice. We have to draw a line in the sand and scream at them YOUR BEHAVIOR IS NOT ACCEPTABLE YOU UNPATRIOTIC FUCKERS!
I agree that tossing out ideas must remain legal, but there are different types of vaporware. I for one see no reasons why it should be legal to imply that you have a reasonable capability to deliver something when you know that you probably don't. That is called initiating fraud in libertarian terms. If I tell you I can build a house for you and all I know how to build is a basic shed, but I'm in the process of learning how to build a nice house, don't you think that's not merely tossing out an idea but rather fraud?
If you really have to ask yourselves that you have an issue with real morality.....
1) Isn't one vulnerability one too many?
2) Internet Explorer, for when you absolutely must not be affected by the 1 vulnerability found in Opera and Mozilla.
3) If you divide the number of bugs found in IE (30) by its userbase (98%) you'll find our product is only 30% defective whereis if you divide their number of bugs (1) against their userbase (2%) you'll find a product that is 50% defective. We all know that the number of bugs varies with the number of users, not the code quality. Right...... right?
Is that the line between law enforcement officers as peace officers and law enforcement officers as oppressors is very thin in most situations. The federal law enforcement apparatus is slowly beginning to aspire to KGB-level power over the population.
Look at Waco for instance. I'm not a fan of cults like the Branch Davidians, but the use of military-grade hardware like small tanks against a compound that is guarded by a bunch of yokels with at best automatic weapons is a great cause for concern. What most people don't know is that Waco was so badly screwed up that it had to be deliberate. It is not a conspiracy theory to say that the FBI and other agencies wanted to make an example out of them because they had something like 6 months to a year where David Koresh walked everday to wal-mart for supplies. I come from a federal law enforcement family and both my parents agree that in light of how many opportunities they had to NOT make an explosive situation it was literally criminal what the feds did. Same goes for Ruby Ridge.
The majority of police working in these areas don't care about your freedom or your privacy anymore. If they did they'd have given up on bullshit like the Clipper Chip and export regulations. We live in a society in which it is not feasible to keep our technology under wraps. It would be trivial for Al Qaeda to smuggle PGP out of our country; all they'd have to do is get someone inside our country, buy a single copy and send it from a public library to the Middle East.
We can only lose by listening to these security chicken littles because if we did everything we could to make our country secure, we'd resemble a slightly right-wing version of the Soviet Union. There would be no public internet access, no freedom of mobility, no right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined), no right to security in your house and person, no freedom of association, and probably no property rights either. I won't live like that and I consider anyone who would to be worthy of death. They aren't human and because they reduce themselves so low they are a disgrace to our species. Not that I advocate murdering them, but rather I only laugh my ass off at them when they get hurt or killed. Good riddance, we need more people that won't change their lives to accomodate the terrorists, whether they're associates of Al Qaeda, have a General Services rank or call themselves Representative or Senator.
Government can't protect you preemptively, that is the indirect moral of this story. The police can pick up the pieces and get justice, but that's usually about it. Here's a novel thought, let's legalize assassinating terrorists. But this was never about terrorism and national (or is it fatherland) security, it was about big government justifying its Cold War level of control over the people. The worst parts of Communism aren't dead, they're festering in the White House and most of the law and order Republican types can't see that they've already lost. Bob Barr was kicked out because he had the audacity to call out Bush on issues like TIPS where he said, "this program smacks of the very fascist and communist governments that we have faught for so long."
So it's not healthy to be a true patriot and political traditionalist in America anymore. You call for a modern form of the government we started out with (in other words, nothing like slavery) and you're called idealistic, short-sighted and soft-headed. The irony of it is that the true hard-headed people have always advocated limited government and a simultaneously isolationist and Machiavellian foreign policy. We'd be a lot more secure if we minded our own business and made people pay handsomely in blood for every single violent transgression against us. For example we'd have fewer problems with Saudi-funded terrorists if after every such attack against us, the CIA sent its SOG commandos into Saudia Arabia and blew up a few civilian targets. You want respect in war and politics? Show that if you have to choose between doing the right thing and surviving that the former never gets in the way of the latter.
Some background since most on slashdot don't really know much of anything about the American Right. There are two major types of conservatism. The first is derisively called "paleoconservatism" by the groups that dominate rags like the National Review. The other are the "neoconservatives" which make up the majority of the major Republican leaders that are rabidly pro-big business, additional police powers and take their pro-Israel views to the point of treasounous activity.
The conservative movement has for well over 20 years been split along these lines. People like David Frum at the NR have really made this split deeper in recent years. Frum is notorious for his denunciations of the "paleos" because they typically deeply opposed the War in Iraq. Fancy that, traditional conservatives not seeing any legitimate reason to deploy 200-300K US troops, marines, sailors and airmen to a country we had no formal threat of attack from. He and others have been known to agitate for foreign policy that puts the interests of Israel at the same level or higher than the interests of the US. Where I come from, a "paleoconservative" family with libertarian leanings now, that's called low-level treason.
I feel sorry for the Israelis and support their right of self-defense but do not support their armed theft of more Palestinian land, especially that land outside their soverign territory. My principles dictate that the ethics that I demand of my government be universal and thus since I support domestic property rights, I see no reason not to condemn the armed Israeli theft of Palestinian land. So what does that make me in neocon land? An anti-semite because I believe that the interests of Israel are ALWAYS subordinate to US interests in the eyes of a patriot and the US should condemn Israel for siezing land they have no title to. What's worse in the eyes of the neocons? I think that there is no ethical issue for a **law-abiding** Palestinian (not a terrorist supporter) to use any force up to deadly force to stop Israeli soldiers from bulldozing their house down.
The neocons are the "big business is good because big business is great in scope of operations" branch. The paleos tend to be very skeptical of how good big business really is for our country. They don't support left-wing regulations usually, but they rarely come out and rabidly defend big corporations. The paleos on FreeRepublic tend to bash Microsoft right and left and tend to roast Gates for his leftist views. A good number of them even claim to use Linux or MacOS X and Mozilla.
Paleoconservatism and Libertarianism are natural political allies. The paleos have the large organized numbers and the Libertarians have the political groups like the Cato and Reason foundations which are more than capable of opening a full can of whup ass on the neocons in the public debate.
I am a political Libertarian and an economic pluralist. Economically I am both a a Libertarian Capitalist and Libertarian Socialist, I don't see any reason why we can't have for-profit companies coexisting with privately controlled workers' cooperatives. It is from that perspective that I think it's obvious that most paleos, ie the real conservatives, have a reason to support this bill and fight the major content cartels. Unlike the neocons, they tend to not feel the need to redefine freedom nor do they feel the need to keep pushing for a bigger and bigger picture to keep people from noticing the very scary fine print details. Heard about that Left-Right anti-PATRIOT coallition? Chances are the rank-and-file members of the Right there are paleos. Bush has lost the support of most Paleos I've met and talked to, if the democrats run a good person (ie a nice person, not someone like Hitlery Clinton) Bush very well get his ass handed to him in 2004.
They don't have iTunes for another platform yet so in order to stay completely legitimate in the eyes of the labels and public they had to do this. Once they have a Windows version there will be no reason for them to not expand that.
Until then I don't see the big deal. You can burn your downloads to a CD right? Just burn them to a CD and then rip the CD as oggs or mp3s if you really need to share.
This is all about propaganda. If Apple stays 110% on the right side of the law while still being liberal in its feature set then that's a major accomplishment. It will only further undermine the subscription models and similar schemes.
As long as you can burn to a CD and rip that CD, Apple is just doing stuff like this for show. It's so that they can more easily hit the labels right back in the face if they get taken to court for one of the typical bogus reasons.
A rehash of C?
They can't even grasp basic economics. They flood the market with trash like Dumb and Dumberer and Final Desination 2 and wonder why, according to Jack Valenti (can he be trusted at all?), they gross an average of only $52M a year. The movie studios basically know how to make a movie that will bring in heaping piles of cash. Look at the Matrix and LOTR. The problem is that they are so greedy that they can't accept that at the end of the day, if they produce a few good movies a year and call it even, they will more likely than not come out ahead more easily than if they put out many times that.
The music industry has an excuse, music fans are often fickle and can throw out a band after one CD because their style "isn't cool anymore." Most music is disposable because people don't want anything artistic or refreshingly original. I listen to old stuff by The Cult occassionally as well as more recent stuff like Stabbing Westward. You don't see that kind of rock anymore. It's the same tuned-down, crunch-your-head-off distortion filled, 3 power chord bullshit. I mean WTF is up with a band like the All American Rejects? I just started playing bass a week ago after having been playing guitar on a semi-active basis for 5 months and can play at least one of their bass lines they're that fucking simple! Swing, Swing has only 4 notes in the entire bass line and you just hit them as 8th notes in sets of 8. Again, pathetic... even I a total newbie write cooler bass lines than that. I want my recording contract now that I know that the bar has been thrown out, not lowered.
The IP cartels are greedy and they're not bound to full market forces. Whoever heard of a Korn CD competing with a TRUSTCompany CD? They don't, except for this week's $15 allowance. Buy one this week, buy the other next week. They won't learn because the government is going to step in like a good fascist state and save them from the pirhannas of capitalism that are now about to descend upon them. America will slip backward, other countries will take our economic lead, but a bunch of neocons will be able to sleep peacefully at night knowing that the market is safe for Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit. Too bad that a bunch of our IT sector will be in ruins and our economy's growth will be fizzling out. "Property rights" will be have been protected, except for your right to modify your DVD-R/RW or DVD player so it can play non-CSS DVD-Rs. Hey, property rights in the neocon world belong only to those who produce, not those who consume.
I'm a neo-liberal/libertarian and yes, I openly and freely admit that I vehemently hate neo-conservatism and wish enlightenment for them first, and if that doesn't work a pox on them.
How does the RIAA reconcile its support of the DMCA's provisions against the publication of documents detailing the defects in copy restriction systems with the following part of the first amendment of the US Constitution: "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech; or of the press."
Also how does the RIAA reconcile such language in copyright law with the legal fact that the 1st amendment is supposed to supercede, Article I, Section 8 which was in the original body of the Constitution amended by the Bill of Rights?
Makes it sound like a niche OS. Come on, doesn't eComStation imply that's only good for one thing? This alone will help make it hard for OS/2 to make a comeback of any kind.
Look, I don't like Bush anymore than the next guy here, but the UN has had it coming for a long time. They are a bunch of spineless beaucrats that love rubbing elbows with corrupt fascist and socialist dictators like Saddamn Hussein. They had already authorized the usage of force long before the bullshit about needing a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th resolution came about. The UN makes a debating club look productive and thoughtful. They form a committee to discuss the ramifications of forming a committee who is charged with determining whether acting on their threat of war is justified.
Which it isn't. The UN has no legitimacy in the US because it is a form of government organization and it has very little consent from the governed in our country. I don't like Bush, I'll be honest about that. I think his policies are reckless, irresponsibile and I dread the day that Hitlery Clinton gets a shot at using the PATRIOT Act. Just imagine, release a new equivalent of DeCSS and you're a terrorist. Well you were before the government captured you and made you disappear.
It says a lot about so many people that they respect an organization that puts Libya and the Sudan on a human rights commission. While they're at it, why not put the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers on a racial sensitivity panel?
I have seen many good examples of conservative and libertarian/neo-liberal foes of copyright expansionism bolstering their ranks by drawing strong analogies between copyright expansionism and gun control. Many who are uneasy about file sharing are becoming even more uneasy about the prospect of supporting an intellectual cousin of gun control. And it makes sense to them, because file sharing does have legal applications and in order to stop it, the cure is tantamount to a scorched earth policy in regard to our software/hardware/IT/consumer electronics industries.
If apple were to officially port Mono to OSX and help build it into a robust development tool and environment then it would be possible for them to build .NET bindings for OSX that would run on both the PPC 970 and Opteron.
and you're not.....
Apple has nothing to lose by including Linux and if it gets there, OpenBeOS in that. MacOS X is already arguably light years behind Linux as a desktop OS and OpenBeOS will take a good 2-3 years to get where OS X is today. Apple has about as much reason to worry about being overrun by Linux and OpenBeOS (and other OSS platforms) on the desktop as the US military has to worry about the Kurds and Turks.
That said, I think that if Apple really wanted to drop an A bomb on Microsoft, they could spend a cool $25M to buy BeOS, integrate any cool parts they can use and dump the rest into the hands of the OSS world. What makes a Macintosh great is that it is a true all-in-one experience. The software "just works" with the hardware and that will always appeal to a lot of users. PCs are utilitarian and no pretty. Hell if I had the money I'd buy a PowerMac based on the PPC 970 rather than buy a very nice used car.
If rights are not innate, regardless of culture then they don't exist. A right is something that can be restricted as punishment for a crime, but cannot be taken away. You can take away a felon's right to own a gun during his punishment period, but not so when it is over. If you believe that we can't judge them because they're different, you can't judge anyone's actions or views because you embrace moral relativism. Your opinion is no better, or more right then mine or theirs. Meaning who are you to judge the Nazis? They're right too, because their moral views are no less correct than yours since no one's are innately right. If that sounds like a reductio ad absurdum, it's because moral relativism IS absurd.
Tell the greedy politicians that they get something out of doing their job, which is supposed to be enforcing the law. $64B in taxes? That's a **great** way to ensure that jack-booted thugs with M-16s, AK-47s, MP5s or Styr-Augs (depending on the PD) bust down as many doors as possible to make sure that $64B is protected. That's of course assuming that eliminating piracy won't damage or destroy other sectors of the economy. People, $64B is ~$24B more than we spend on the insane WoD. I know that will get spread over many countries, but that's still a damn big incentive even if it's only an extra $5B to the general fund.
Imagine Palladium getting mandated to make this possible. No Macintosh anymore or similar platforms. Probably no WordPerfect either as it will cost Corel too much to get certified. Linux? Bye bye SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, et al. It will be an industry dominated by a handful of giants. Our spineless, ignorant politicians have long ago forgotten that it is small and medium-sized business, not the giants, that run most of the economy. If those go under, unemployment will skyrocket, both parties will have egg on their faces and knowing America these days, we won't have a third party gaining power, we'll have 2 party weasles giving people heaping buckets full of Socialism.