Those of us that consider freedom to be important and the democratic process only one of many means to that end are not surprised by this. Global governance on a world as ethnically diverse as this one is almost innately authoritarian. The reason that the US model of representative republican rule works so well is because there are no fundamental differences between the cultures of the 50 states. The EU's and UN's proponents in some cases don't understand that, but largely don't care because they have "more important" goals like knocking the US down a peg.
I rarely agree with anything put out by CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network), but one of their commentators said something like this about one world government: "It will be run by rich elitists who consider it their so-called burden to make the 'tough choices' for the ignorant masses." That describes the situation perfectly. We are ignorant peasants at best, savages at worst to most of the global elite. Don't kid yourselves that global government is possible on Earth.
This reminds me of the so-called international law. Law means that it applies to everyone. A treaty doesn't work that way. The Geneva Conventions and all that jazz aren't true law, they're just that, conventions. If the US never signed them, the US would not have to follow them. The international law has always been a slightly more civilized version of the "law of the jungle." It is just the most powerful imposing their vision of a better world on the rest. Those that complain about the US not giving a rat's ass about the UN, why should we? The UN has libya and the Sudan in prominent positions including the "human rights commission." A terrorist state and a genocidal state respectively!!!!
Give up on the idea of international law and government. It is better that every war criminal get a slap on the wrist in their own country (if it's an American, they'll probably get executed in the US depending on the offense) than have people pulled before a global government. We live in a world where American Conservatives are the progressives and the international socialists the reactionaries. If Saddamn got tried in an American court, he'd have 2x the rights he'd have under the World *cough*Kangaroo*cough* Court. Isn't it ironic that the so-called "progressives," the left, have created an unaccountable world court that gives less rights than the judiciary created by the American right? Of course it isn't, the concept of a court is still new in the left's mind. We should applaud their efforts, it's a step up from gulags, logais and NAZI concentation camps.
More regulation of ICANN is necessary. It should be forced open no matter what is required for that to happen. ICANN is a good place to start with dismantling the unaccountable global government in the making.
How hard would it be for them to put in the developer builds a little code to pop up a splash screen everytime that safari loads that reminds the user that it is a developer, not end-user build unless they disable that in the preferences?
This won't change anything. People have been speaking out against this since day one. Lot's of very eloquent commentary from every political faction has been written against it and nothing has changed. It won't change because our political class has forsaken then principles of our founders. To our politicians, they're keeping the bread and butter on the table. The ignorant peasants are being served in the "big picture" by loss of liberty in the smaller ones in their minds. Our wealth matters more to politicians than our freedom. I'm sick of those who argue that we can't know what the original intent of Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 is because our founders gave us our first IP laws.
There's always ebates.com's 4% money back deal for buying from barnes and nobles' website (and they have a long-running special, buy two or more items and get free shipping). Yeah, Amazon, you're not making it any easier on me.
Seriously, if everyone is using OO, Apache, Evolution, etc, does it really matter whether it's on Linux, *BSD, OSX or OpenBeOS? I'd even include Windows into that category until Microsoft basically makes supporting OSS on Windows next to impossible which I don't foresee.
We should all chip in
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 5, Funny
and buy him a Dell PC running Windows XP, IIS, Microsoft Office, Visual Studio.NET and Internet Explorer!
I used to love Linux but I got sick and tired of how stuck in the past Linux is. KDE, GNOME, the various popular WMs, let's face it... they can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. I have no doubt that many will choose Linux because they're such cheapskates that they'd rather spend $500-$1500 for a PC running Linux than several thousand for a quality PowerMac or PowerBook. But those of us who spend more time using our systems than tinkering with them will probably almost always choose OSX over Linux. The simple reality is that Linux sucks as a desktop. Trying to make Linux a desktop OS is like trying to make an octapus by nailing more legs onto a dog.
Many of the crackheads that think Linux is a great desktop right now need a reality check. Linux doesn't:
Easily and cleanly add new hardware devices on the fly in an interactive manner when necessary
Autodetect and mount new partitions the way OSX and Windows do. When you add a new drive to OSX that it can read it's useable right then and there. With Linux you have to usually hack/etc/fstab
Have a single, consistent or mostly consisten user interface.
Make updating as easy as a few mouse clicks for John Q. Citizen.
There are more issues as well, not the least of which is the Linux developers' love affair with C and PERL (and occassionally C++). Most Linux users just don't get it. The average person using a computer makes a mouse look like it has the bravery of a Navy SEAL. If people get scared jumping from Office 2000 to Office XP then they'll be typically terrified of Windows->Linux. Apple is first and foremost a platform provider. If OpenOffice and other great OSS dominate its desktop then they really won't give a rat's ass. I'm sure that if Apple were not quite so much under Microsoft's thumb then they'd be actively engaged in porting OpenOffice. Linux won't liberate the desktop, OpenOffice and Chandler will. If you seriously do like Linux as a desktop then fine. There's no reason the market has to be controlled by any one UNIX be it Linux or OS X. Linux advocates need to realize though that in order for OSS to cover all of its bases, OS X must be a strong and viable platform. Every user that abandons the Microsoft plantation for a new UNIX running OO, etc is a user advancing the cause of personal freedom in computing.
The US government more than ever is taking a stance against anything resembling terrorism. If it looks like it, smells like it, quacks like it, then by God it wouldn't look too good for ol' fedgov to be supporting it now would it? Lawlessness like this is a form of terrorism and I wouldn't be surprised if Berman's GOP competitor accuses him of various things not the least of which is trying to legalize terrorism by the wealthy against the rest of us.
On a different note, let the MPAA continue such proposals! The more people see the kind of system they want the more they'll see them as nogoodniks. You win over people on this issue in my experience by showing them over and over again that these aren't cool people, that they're really self-righteous tyrants. I have no sympathy for all of the leftists in Hollywood who have no problem lobbying for Socialism, but who complain when we "redistribute their wealth." You can't impose a welfare state on me and expect me to even give consideration to the idea that I might be doing something unethical by copying copyrighted works for myself or my friends.
Microsoft doesn't have a guaranteed powerbase. Many companies will eventually come to the conclusion that freedom from BSA audits and the like means more than TCO. I bet most companies would rather have that peace of mind that cheap software if they had to choose one over the other.
Reason's commentary cuts both ways against the left and the right. Of course that's going to happen when you have mag and site written by Libertarians, Objectivists and Lockean Liberals.
First of all, Reason is the one major publication other than a Linux rag or The Nation, that would get it right off the bat. The Reason Foundation does what its conservative counterparts screech about doing, but never get around to: rolling back government involvement in ours lives. They can claim credit to saving Indianapolis taxpayers around $600M because they put together a plan to privatize all non-essential government services.
This is very bad news for the content cartels. While many people may not know about Reason, most Libertarians do and a lot of Libertarians who actually sided with the cartels will probably be swayed over against them. My father is frequently amazed (he's a staunch conservative) at how many times he's been forced to agree with a position taken by Reason Online because it just "makes sense" more than anything from the National Review. I've long said that Libertarians and Classical Liberals better represent the conservative platform than Conservatives themselves.
I read this in their print magazine. This is not a turning point against the cartels, but it is certainly a major blow. There are two types of the Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality." Reason in my experience wins over the former quite easily on most issues because its arguments are realistic and it proposes how we can balance morality and individual rights in its articles related to vice and stuff like that.
One of the things that IIRC I've seen argued in Reason articles on drug prohibition is that stripping drug users of free medical care even if they are veterans would do 10x more to stop drug usage than jail terms. They frame such issues in terms that the Right can appreciate and make it very clear that such programs are nothing more than government subsidizing licensious behavior.
Invariably Reason ends up kicking its conservative competitors' asses on a regular basis. It indirectly exposes them for the statist hypocrites that they are such as ol' Goldberg over at NRO who thinks that those who are complaining of slippery slopes in regard to the PATRIOT Act and DeptHS are whiny paranoid nuts. This is an article that every/.'er in the US should keep bookmarked in case they need it against a cartel shill.
My dorm room was only big enough to fit one full size box and that means that I need a box that can be both a regular desktop and a development machine all in one. I have a few old PCs that I could have used for a development box if I had had more room. I could have installed Debian or RedHat and simply compiled most of the stuff over SSH. I wanted a Mac then and now because for me OSX does everything I could want and I love how Apple is taking OSS and making really cool stuff from it like Safari. Safari is unbelievable. All in all I have to say that Linux would be great for a lot of development, but I do a lot more than write software for my own use and class. Cygwin is really slow in WinXP on my PC (1.7Ghz P4, 256mb of RAM) and no faster than GCC/Make/Autoconfig/etc on my PowerBook G3.
The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer. Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform. I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation. What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs. Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple? Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!" Microsoft is seriously underestimating how much its users like their freedom. We have a whole generation of up-and-coming users who will have major purchasing power in the next few years. Microsoft would do well to remember that most of the Napster crowd is in college now, getting ready to leave college or has been out for a while. Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a right to get them for free, but I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti the time of day when he says that I can't view my movies and music anywhere and however I choose to.
Microsoft cannot and will not sell the average user on why they need DRM. If people really cared about audio quality they'd be using DVD-Audio over CD-Audio and would be ripping their own CDs at no less than 192kbps VBR. The content cartels and Microsoft as I said, will not be able to justify why the "sharecropper" model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
The last time I checked, the CBDTPA was not even before a committee to vote on because it still has such an extreme taint of public hatred on it that makes most Congresscritters squeemish about even looking at it. Palladium is a voluntary enforcement of the CBDTPA. It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft. And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter. I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater. Java on Linux compared to OSX? Puhlease! Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS. There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another. The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop. Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above. All too often I've found that the only people who really think that Linux or BSD is the universal hammer fit for every nail mankind encounters are people whose boxes are running Mandrake, with graphical login and never touch the command line. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great for a lot of things, but it shouldn't even try against OS X. It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Both parties together represent the ideal combination of ideologies needed to create a system ripe for mass-control of the populace. The Democrats don't really represent the better parts of the left, they represent the worst and same for the Republicans on the Right. IMO our system would be a lot more (Classical) Liberal if it were a 3 way control by the Libertarian, Green and Reform parties.
The people have on paper usually two choices. Two choices isn't a choice, it's a coin flip and a mockery of representative republican values. Both parties have tried for years to convince the public that having 10-190 people officially registered on the ballot is irresponsible because it creates chaos somehow. Having two people on the ballot is akin to having only one choice in most races. Hell in my last congressional election, we had literally only one choice for the House.
The average slashdotter is too sheltered or politically and socially immature to see most of those points. Who here thinks a lot of the Right loves the PATRIOT Act? FreeRepublic is a very right wing website and when the PATRIOT part deux was discussed, no less than 85% of the posts were calling for Bush and Ashcroft's heads on pikes out on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if they seriously pushed it.
Guess what, most people don't care about computers. I know this may come as a shock to you, but really, most see it is a paper weight with moving parts. Your "whose operating system is better" arguments are like an intellectual form of the old "whose dick is bigger" arguments but are so far above most people that they just shrug it off as some poor nerd's latest (and failing) attempt to be better than everyone else.
If you're really smarter, you won't need to ram it down people's throats. People **knew** I was smart. With minimal effort I got straight As in all of my AP classes which are harder than most of the college courses I've taken at my unviersity by an order of magnitude and I go to one of Virgina's best schools. I didn't have to walk around with signs plastered to me saying "bow to Einstein 2.0" Hell I took half the time that most of my peers did to complete my AP US Government exam and I outscored most of them anyway, I got a 5 after taking only 40 minutes to complete 4 essay questions.
As for you meeting girls at your LUG, good for you. Maybe one day you'll wake up to the realization that unless you're as laid back as your average stoner or a lazy and complacent fuck who doesn't care about your skills, you'll end up competing with your girl if she's a fellow computer nerd. If you can handle one, look for an artist or a musician. But if you're anything like most nerds I've met, you can't. Most nerds I've met have little respect for any artist or musician who doesn't kick ass at what they do. That comes from the "my shit doesn't stink" attitude they have. Which I guess is their way of living in denial, afterall we geeks tend to steal your spotlights all too often.
Our geeks were edgier than most kids. We were the types that listened to Gravity Kills, Nine Inch Nails, various heavy/death metal, played very violent games, new about cult stuff, you name it. We also weren't very physical diminutive either. I was one of them and was and still am as imposing physically as many of the jocks that I went to HS with. If we were playing chess and someone was actually an asshole enough to fling our chessboard across the room, they'd better be a good fighter because we were more than capable of holding our own in a fight. I could probably kick a lot of our jocks' asses then and now. Most of the school was nice and accepting, but my first high school wasn't. Even there a lot of the rules still applied: don't fuck with the geeks because we're built like normal people and are not pussies like the nerds.
I can't even begin to count the number of times one of my geek friends or I prevented a fight by growing cold toward the other person. They were too afraid because it became a matter of "dude he might fucking kill me!" for that idiot. I will also say this about nerds: most geeks I know tend to find them exceedingly annoying. The nerds I grew up around were perpetually like little kids and didn't fully understand what people were doing to them. What made most of the geeks dark was that we were nerds for a while but grew up and began confronting what was happening. To me the nerdish naivete is a form of weakness because it's either a separation from reality or a total denial of reality. For many that I've seen it's the latter. My reaction is simple: how they hell can you let people do this to you? When a jock tried to knock me to ground by running up and jumping on my back in PE I didn't cry to the coach I grabbed his arm, ducked and threw him over my shoulder onto the indoor basketball court. From that day on the jocks respected me and left me alone.
For copyright holders as paranoid as corporate copyright holders, it's all about control. It has to be, they can't legally decide that "this is enough money" once they make a good profit because even though that might keep their customers happy, it won't satisfy their stockholders. Individual copyright holders can analyze a situation and realize that they have more to gain by letting 75% of their users/readers/views/listeners bootleg their works. Corporations don't have that luxury.
So that presents a problem. I'm a classical liberal, I believe that freedom from tyranny is more important than wealth, the former begets the latter and that the latter does not reinforce the former. If anything one can look at today's corporate society to see a society where freedom is sacrificed to make a buck. The democratic process control by two parties is in large part responsible for this situation. The only solutions could never be put into effect because monied interests of all stripes control the system. It doesn't matter whether they're labor, capital, environmentalists, "consumer rights" (whatever the hell that is), anti-abortionists, you name it. They're almost all invariably against the public good which is the protection of natural rights.
There are two solutions I can foresee. One painful, one not so painful. The first is to bar corporations from owning intellectual property. The movie studios for example would "loan money" to steven spielberg to produce a copyrighted work that he would own that the parent corporation would have an exclusive right to distribute, but not own. The other solution is to simultaneously remove anti-freedom nuts like Valenti and give legal protection to copyright owning corporations that allow bootlegging on some meaningful scale to keep their customers happy.
Strong copyright advocates need to learn that America doesn't have the culture to stomach the laws they want. It never has, those laws fly in the face of hundreds, if not almost a thousand years of Anglo-American customs and traditions. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, did not believe that the law should allow for private ownership of ideas. I'm sure almost none of them would approve of our current system. As a very liberal Christian I find it repulsive to allow for patents on anything other than very specific physical product designs. To me, allowing patents on anything else is an affront to God's creation as all knowledge is ultimately the creation of God, not man. Knowledge exists independently from human understanding, it awaits discovery, not creation, by man.
You have no right to make a profit at providing tax services. If the government decides that it would save tax payers more money to contract out to write its own software for free public use then that's it's obligation, not privelege. Taxes cost us money. Paying $50-$100 for tax software adds to that. If the IRS decides that it'd be easier and cheaper for the public to get free software from the government to streamline taxes then so be it.
Many of our founders felt that lawyers shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress or as the President because it'd be a conflict of interest. Afterall, if a lawyer can vote on the law, they can essentially vote themselves into a lucrative occupation at everyone else's expense.
I'm a geek. I am in pretty decent condition, am fairly muscular and have been told I should play football because of my build. I am also one of the better CS students at my university.
Congress shall have no power to abridge the rights secured by any clause in the Constitution of the United States of America to protect the creative and useful works of inventors and artists. It shall possess no authority to limit, alter or remove protection of private property secured by any state, governing body subordinate to a state or autonomous territory under the jurisidiction of the United States Constitution. Furthermore Congress shall not be empowered to pass any law or support any public policy that restricts research into a useful endeavor regardless of whether public knowledge of the findings of said scientific inquiry would damage the rights secured to inventors and artists.
Section 2
The legal classification of copyrighted goods beyond the protection of those basic rights necessary to the protection of intellectual property shall be declared at the discession of each member state of the United States of America. Each state shall possess full regulatory power to determine the legality of modes of distribution of intellectual property that is sold within its borders so it can best protect the private property rights of its citizens.
Section 3
All intellectual property law addressing the creation of devices whose improper usage could lead to minor or serious violations of the law shall be judged by the law as to whether they have any legitimate legal uses. A single meaningful legal use shall constitute grounds to prohibit the restriction or banning of such goods and services. Any law that grants an extension to existing intellectual property's legal protection shall be considered an ex post facto law.
People will demand legal change because if there really are more than a handful of prosecutions little Johny or little Suzy is now potentially in the DoJ's legal crosshair. I've met more than a few people who were self-righteous about it until they found out how absurd it was and that their kids and kids they thought were really great kids could sit in a federal prison for 3 years and be literally bankrupt before the age of 18. You see, most people think you're directly ripping off the artists when they hear piracy. They're not thinking their kid with his small mp3 and divx collection.
I would like to think you can appreciate the fact that most porn is nowhere near as clean as Playboy and Perfect 10. I'm an extremely jaded and cynical person yet I am repulsed by most porn out there. I would have to say that I agree, Playboy and Perfect 10 type stuff is not innately damaging. But I absolutely cannot agree that pornography in general isn't harmful. It's a little known fact that child pornography's main use is to show children that "it's ok, everybody does it." I have a relative that enforced the federal child porn laws who told me that the real danger is no the porn, but what pedophiles do with it. Obviously you're not advocating letting child pornography be viewable, but my example illustrates how it can be used to warp a child's mind to make them pliable. I would consider that damage. The only real damage I could fully agree that is possible would be damage to how the child views sexual relationships. Once the child is a teen, I think it'd have marginal impact, but before that I think it could have serious problems depending on the child.
I will say though that I think filters are worthless. My punk and ska site that I maintained 3-4 years ago and the Libertarian Partr's website were blocked by my HS's filters because the former was "pornography" and the latter was "drug advocacy." Filter software just lets either some left wing or right wing nutcase force his agenda on the public. The better system would be to require people register before they can use a computer and revoke their access if they're caught deliberately looking at porn. Hey if people can't remember, to log out.... after a few get burned the rest will learn to abide by the rules.
I believe that people would sober up very quickly if they had the power of a legislator. I think most Americans would also have the basic sense to tell John Q. Weasle from the Whee Cheatum and Howe lobby group to fuck off. I should rephrase my previous comment. I think most Americans simply don't have the desire to push for change because they think they. I also think many of them are not observant enough to see through politicians' bullshit. If people could have seen Bush's political goals in 1999 I doubt he'd be in office today. They just like the sound of "compassionate conservatism" and went with it. They never put two and two together with what "compassionate conservatism" really is. It's a pseudo-fascist system. My congressman is an asshole to most of the people that disagree with him because he can be, he runs unchallenged. There was no other name on the ballot for God's sake.
The solution is not a total elimination of the democratic process at the federal level, but its marginalization. There are other things that should be done to add checks and balances.
Remove the unconstitutional size restrictions on the House of Representatives so that CA can have say..... 130 representatives, VA 45, you get the idea.
Abolish the districting system and go to proportional representation. There is no logic in saying that people in an arbitrarily defined region have the same views and interests. My Congressman is so statist on IP that I'd rather vote for Boucher or a Libertarian in VA.
Give the state legislatures a power of a vote of no confidence in both Congress and the Presidency. If 2/3s of the states vote on the President, he's removed. If 2/3s of the states vote, all of Congress is removed and new elections around the country called. If a state considers its representatives too corrupt it can issue a selective removal notice on the condition that a state grand jury has issued an idictment for an action committed by the rep/senator that is an ethics crime in their home state. If a Senator violates his/her state's trust on the other side of the US, I see no reason to not let a state court issue a warrant for their arrest which would prompt the US Marshalls to arrest them and extradite them to their home state for prosecution.
Give the states the power to issue a "notice of nullification" if 2/3 of them agree on it for any federal law they find objectionable. Imagine how much easier it would be to remove the USA PATRIOT Act this way.
Ultimately what we need is a system where John Q Citizen doesn't need to worry about what his government is doing. This could be easily accomplished if we'd abide by the US Constitution but that'd get rid of all of the free bread and circus. It's a very tricky situation. I worry that we're not damned if we do and damned if we don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of us that consider freedom to be important and the democratic process only one of many means to that end are not surprised by this. Global governance on a world as ethnically diverse as this one is almost innately authoritarian. The reason that the US model of representative republican rule works so well is because there are no fundamental differences between the cultures of the 50 states. The EU's and UN's proponents in some cases don't understand that, but largely don't care because they have "more important" goals like knocking the US down a peg.
I rarely agree with anything put out by CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network), but one of their commentators said something like this about one world government: "It will be run by rich elitists who consider it their so-called burden to make the 'tough choices' for the ignorant masses." That describes the situation perfectly. We are ignorant peasants at best, savages at worst to most of the global elite. Don't kid yourselves that global government is possible on Earth.
This reminds me of the so-called international law. Law means that it applies to everyone. A treaty doesn't work that way. The Geneva Conventions and all that jazz aren't true law, they're just that, conventions. If the US never signed them, the US would not have to follow them. The international law has always been a slightly more civilized version of the "law of the jungle." It is just the most powerful imposing their vision of a better world on the rest. Those that complain about the US not giving a rat's ass about the UN, why should we? The UN has libya and the Sudan in prominent positions including the "human rights commission." A terrorist state and a genocidal state respectively!!!!
Give up on the idea of international law and government. It is better that every war criminal get a slap on the wrist in their own country (if it's an American, they'll probably get executed in the US depending on the offense) than have people pulled before a global government. We live in a world where American Conservatives are the progressives and the international socialists the reactionaries. If Saddamn got tried in an American court, he'd have 2x the rights he'd have under the World *cough*Kangaroo*cough* Court. Isn't it ironic that the so-called "progressives," the left, have created an unaccountable world court that gives less rights than the judiciary created by the American right? Of course it isn't, the concept of a court is still new in the left's mind. We should applaud their efforts, it's a step up from gulags, logais and NAZI concentation camps.
More regulation of ICANN is necessary. It should be forced open no matter what is required for that to happen. ICANN is a good place to start with dismantling the unaccountable global government in the making.
Because the average Mac owner is more likely to be able to afford Adobe's software.
How hard would it be for them to put in the developer builds a little code to pop up a splash screen everytime that safari loads that reminds the user that it is a developer, not end-user build unless they disable that in the preferences?
This won't change anything. People have been speaking out against this since day one. Lot's of very eloquent commentary from every political faction has been written against it and nothing has changed. It won't change because our political class has forsaken then principles of our founders. To our politicians, they're keeping the bread and butter on the table. The ignorant peasants are being served in the "big picture" by loss of liberty in the smaller ones in their minds. Our wealth matters more to politicians than our freedom. I'm sick of those who argue that we can't know what the original intent of Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 is because our founders gave us our first IP laws.
There's always ebates.com's 4% money back deal for buying from barnes and nobles' website (and they have a long-running special, buy two or more items and get free shipping). Yeah, Amazon, you're not making it any easier on me.
Seriously, if everyone is using OO, Apache, Evolution, etc, does it really matter whether it's on Linux, *BSD, OSX or OpenBeOS? I'd even include Windows into that category until Microsoft basically makes supporting OSS on Windows next to impossible which I don't foresee.
and buy him a Dell PC running Windows XP, IIS, Microsoft Office, Visual Studio.NET and Internet Explorer!
I used to love Linux but I got sick and tired of how stuck in the past Linux is. KDE, GNOME, the various popular WMs, let's face it... they can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. I have no doubt that many will choose Linux because they're such cheapskates that they'd rather spend $500-$1500 for a PC running Linux than several thousand for a quality PowerMac or PowerBook. But those of us who spend more time using our systems than tinkering with them will probably almost always choose OSX over Linux. The simple reality is that Linux sucks as a desktop. Trying to make Linux a desktop OS is like trying to make an octapus by nailing more legs onto a dog.
Many of the crackheads that think Linux is a great desktop right now need a reality check. Linux doesn't:
There are more issues as well, not the least of which is the Linux developers' love affair with C and PERL (and occassionally C++). Most Linux users just don't get it. The average person using a computer makes a mouse look like it has the bravery of a Navy SEAL. If people get scared jumping from Office 2000 to Office XP then they'll be typically terrified of Windows->Linux. Apple is first and foremost a platform provider. If OpenOffice and other great OSS dominate its desktop then they really won't give a rat's ass. I'm sure that if Apple were not quite so much under Microsoft's thumb then they'd be actively engaged in porting OpenOffice. Linux won't liberate the desktop, OpenOffice and Chandler will. If you seriously do like Linux as a desktop then fine. There's no reason the market has to be controlled by any one UNIX be it Linux or OS X. Linux advocates need to realize though that in order for OSS to cover all of its bases, OS X must be a strong and viable platform. Every user that abandons the Microsoft plantation for a new UNIX running OO, etc is a user advancing the cause of personal freedom in computing.
The US government more than ever is taking a stance against anything resembling terrorism. If it looks like it, smells like it, quacks like it, then by God it wouldn't look too good for ol' fedgov to be supporting it now would it? Lawlessness like this is a form of terrorism and I wouldn't be surprised if Berman's GOP competitor accuses him of various things not the least of which is trying to legalize terrorism by the wealthy against the rest of us.
On a different note, let the MPAA continue such proposals! The more people see the kind of system they want the more they'll see them as nogoodniks. You win over people on this issue in my experience by showing them over and over again that these aren't cool people, that they're really self-righteous tyrants. I have no sympathy for all of the leftists in Hollywood who have no problem lobbying for Socialism, but who complain when we "redistribute their wealth." You can't impose a welfare state on me and expect me to even give consideration to the idea that I might be doing something unethical by copying copyrighted works for myself or my friends.
Microsoft doesn't have a guaranteed powerbase. Many companies will eventually come to the conclusion that freedom from BSA audits and the like means more than TCO. I bet most companies would rather have that peace of mind that cheap software if they had to choose one over the other.
Reason's commentary cuts both ways against the left and the right. Of course that's going to happen when you have mag and site written by Libertarians, Objectivists and Lockean Liberals.
First of all, Reason is the one major publication other than a Linux rag or The Nation, that would get it right off the bat. The Reason Foundation does what its conservative counterparts screech about doing, but never get around to: rolling back government involvement in ours lives. They can claim credit to saving Indianapolis taxpayers around $600M because they put together a plan to privatize all non-essential government services.
/.'er in the US should keep bookmarked in case they need it against a cartel shill.
This is very bad news for the content cartels. While many people may not know about Reason, most Libertarians do and a lot of Libertarians who actually sided with the cartels will probably be swayed over against them. My father is frequently amazed (he's a staunch conservative) at how many times he's been forced to agree with a position taken by Reason Online because it just "makes sense" more than anything from the National Review. I've long said that Libertarians and Classical Liberals better represent the conservative platform than Conservatives themselves.
I read this in their print magazine. This is not a turning point against the cartels, but it is certainly a major blow. There are two types of the Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality." Reason in my experience wins over the former quite easily on most issues because its arguments are realistic and it proposes how we can balance morality and individual rights in its articles related to vice and stuff like that.
One of the things that IIRC I've seen argued in Reason articles on drug prohibition is that stripping drug users of free medical care even if they are veterans would do 10x more to stop drug usage than jail terms. They frame such issues in terms that the Right can appreciate and make it very clear that such programs are nothing more than government subsidizing licensious behavior.
Invariably Reason ends up kicking its conservative competitors' asses on a regular basis. It indirectly exposes them for the statist hypocrites that they are such as ol' Goldberg over at NRO who thinks that those who are complaining of slippery slopes in regard to the PATRIOT Act and DeptHS are whiny paranoid nuts. This is an article that every
My dorm room was only big enough to fit one full size box and that means that I need a box that can be both a regular desktop and a development machine all in one. I have a few old PCs that I could have used for a development box if I had had more room. I could have installed Debian or RedHat and simply compiled most of the stuff over SSH. I wanted a Mac then and now because for me OSX does everything I could want and I love how Apple is taking OSS and making really cool stuff from it like Safari. Safari is unbelievable. All in all I have to say that Linux would be great for a lot of development, but I do a lot more than write software for my own use and class. Cygwin is really slow in WinXP on my PC (1.7Ghz P4, 256mb of RAM) and no faster than GCC/Make/Autoconfig/etc on my PowerBook G3.
The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer. Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform. I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation. What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs. Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple? Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!" Microsoft is seriously underestimating how much its users like their freedom. We have a whole generation of up-and-coming users who will have major purchasing power in the next few years. Microsoft would do well to remember that most of the Napster crowd is in college now, getting ready to leave college or has been out for a while. Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a right to get them for free, but I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti the time of day when he says that I can't view my movies and music anywhere and however I choose to.
Microsoft cannot and will not sell the average user on why they need DRM. If people really cared about audio quality they'd be using DVD-Audio over CD-Audio and would be ripping their own CDs at no less than 192kbps VBR. The content cartels and Microsoft as I said, will not be able to justify why the "sharecropper" model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
The last time I checked, the CBDTPA was not even before a committee to vote on because it still has such an extreme taint of public hatred on it that makes most Congresscritters squeemish about even looking at it. Palladium is a voluntary enforcement of the CBDTPA. It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft. And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter. I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater. Java on Linux compared to OSX? Puhlease! Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS. There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another. The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop. Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above. All too often I've found that the only people who really think that Linux or BSD is the universal hammer fit for every nail mankind encounters are people whose boxes are running Mandrake, with graphical login and never touch the command line. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great for a lot of things, but it shouldn't even try against OS X. It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Both parties together represent the ideal combination of ideologies needed to create a system ripe for mass-control of the populace. The Democrats don't really represent the better parts of the left, they represent the worst and same for the Republicans on the Right. IMO our system would be a lot more (Classical) Liberal if it were a 3 way control by the Libertarian, Green and Reform parties.
The people have on paper usually two choices. Two choices isn't a choice, it's a coin flip and a mockery of representative republican values. Both parties have tried for years to convince the public that having 10-190 people officially registered on the ballot is irresponsible because it creates chaos somehow. Having two people on the ballot is akin to having only one choice in most races. Hell in my last congressional election, we had literally only one choice for the House.
The average slashdotter is too sheltered or politically and socially immature to see most of those points. Who here thinks a lot of the Right loves the PATRIOT Act? FreeRepublic is a very right wing website and when the PATRIOT part deux was discussed, no less than 85% of the posts were calling for Bush and Ashcroft's heads on pikes out on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if they seriously pushed it.
Guess what, most people don't care about computers. I know this may come as a shock to you, but really, most see it is a paper weight with moving parts. Your "whose operating system is better" arguments are like an intellectual form of the old "whose dick is bigger" arguments but are so far above most people that they just shrug it off as some poor nerd's latest (and failing) attempt to be better than everyone else.
If you're really smarter, you won't need to ram it down people's throats. People **knew** I was smart. With minimal effort I got straight As in all of my AP classes which are harder than most of the college courses I've taken at my unviersity by an order of magnitude and I go to one of Virgina's best schools. I didn't have to walk around with signs plastered to me saying "bow to Einstein 2.0" Hell I took half the time that most of my peers did to complete my AP US Government exam and I outscored most of them anyway, I got a 5 after taking only 40 minutes to complete 4 essay questions.
As for you meeting girls at your LUG, good for you. Maybe one day you'll wake up to the realization that unless you're as laid back as your average stoner or a lazy and complacent fuck who doesn't care about your skills, you'll end up competing with your girl if she's a fellow computer nerd. If you can handle one, look for an artist or a musician. But if you're anything like most nerds I've met, you can't. Most nerds I've met have little respect for any artist or musician who doesn't kick ass at what they do. That comes from the "my shit doesn't stink" attitude they have. Which I guess is their way of living in denial, afterall we geeks tend to steal your spotlights all too often.
Our geeks were edgier than most kids. We were the types that listened to Gravity Kills, Nine Inch Nails, various heavy/death metal, played very violent games, new about cult stuff, you name it. We also weren't very physical diminutive either. I was one of them and was and still am as imposing physically as many of the jocks that I went to HS with. If we were playing chess and someone was actually an asshole enough to fling our chessboard across the room, they'd better be a good fighter because we were more than capable of holding our own in a fight. I could probably kick a lot of our jocks' asses then and now. Most of the school was nice and accepting, but my first high school wasn't. Even there a lot of the rules still applied: don't fuck with the geeks because we're built like normal people and are not pussies like the nerds.
I can't even begin to count the number of times one of my geek friends or I prevented a fight by growing cold toward the other person. They were too afraid because it became a matter of "dude he might fucking kill me!" for that idiot. I will also say this about nerds: most geeks I know tend to find them exceedingly annoying. The nerds I grew up around were perpetually like little kids and didn't fully understand what people were doing to them. What made most of the geeks dark was that we were nerds for a while but grew up and began confronting what was happening. To me the nerdish naivete is a form of weakness because it's either a separation from reality or a total denial of reality. For many that I've seen it's the latter. My reaction is simple: how they hell can you let people do this to you? When a jock tried to knock me to ground by running up and jumping on my back in PE I didn't cry to the coach I grabbed his arm, ducked and threw him over my shoulder onto the indoor basketball court. From that day on the jocks respected me and left me alone.
For copyright holders as paranoid as corporate copyright holders, it's all about control. It has to be, they can't legally decide that "this is enough money" once they make a good profit because even though that might keep their customers happy, it won't satisfy their stockholders. Individual copyright holders can analyze a situation and realize that they have more to gain by letting 75% of their users/readers/views/listeners bootleg their works. Corporations don't have that luxury.
So that presents a problem. I'm a classical liberal, I believe that freedom from tyranny is more important than wealth, the former begets the latter and that the latter does not reinforce the former. If anything one can look at today's corporate society to see a society where freedom is sacrificed to make a buck. The democratic process control by two parties is in large part responsible for this situation. The only solutions could never be put into effect because monied interests of all stripes control the system. It doesn't matter whether they're labor, capital, environmentalists, "consumer rights" (whatever the hell that is), anti-abortionists, you name it. They're almost all invariably against the public good which is the protection of natural rights.
There are two solutions I can foresee. One painful, one not so painful. The first is to bar corporations from owning intellectual property. The movie studios for example would "loan money" to steven spielberg to produce a copyrighted work that he would own that the parent corporation would have an exclusive right to distribute, but not own. The other solution is to simultaneously remove anti-freedom nuts like Valenti and give legal protection to copyright owning corporations that allow bootlegging on some meaningful scale to keep their customers happy.
Strong copyright advocates need to learn that America doesn't have the culture to stomach the laws they want. It never has, those laws fly in the face of hundreds, if not almost a thousand years of Anglo-American customs and traditions. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, did not believe that the law should allow for private ownership of ideas. I'm sure almost none of them would approve of our current system. As a very liberal Christian I find it repulsive to allow for patents on anything other than very specific physical product designs. To me, allowing patents on anything else is an affront to God's creation as all knowledge is ultimately the creation of God, not man. Knowledge exists independently from human understanding, it awaits discovery, not creation, by man.
You have no right to make a profit at providing tax services. If the government decides that it would save tax payers more money to contract out to write its own software for free public use then that's it's obligation, not privelege. Taxes cost us money. Paying $50-$100 for tax software adds to that. If the IRS decides that it'd be easier and cheaper for the public to get free software from the government to streamline taxes then so be it.
Many of our founders felt that lawyers shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress or as the President because it'd be a conflict of interest. Afterall, if a lawyer can vote on the law, they can essentially vote themselves into a lucrative occupation at everyone else's expense.
I'm a geek. I am in pretty decent condition, am fairly muscular and have been told I should play football because of my build. I am also one of the better CS students at my university.
Section 1
Congress shall have no power to abridge the rights secured by any clause in the Constitution of the United States of America to protect the creative and useful works of inventors and artists. It shall possess no authority to limit, alter or remove protection of private property secured by any state, governing body subordinate to a state or autonomous territory under the jurisidiction of the United States Constitution. Furthermore Congress shall not be empowered to pass any law or support any public policy that restricts research into a useful endeavor regardless of whether public knowledge of the findings of said scientific inquiry would damage the rights secured to inventors and artists.
Section 2
The legal classification of copyrighted goods beyond the protection of those basic rights necessary to the protection of intellectual property shall be declared at the discession of each member state of the United States of America. Each state shall possess full regulatory power to determine the legality of modes of distribution of intellectual property that is sold within its borders so it can best protect the private property rights of its citizens.
Section 3
All intellectual property law addressing the creation of devices whose improper usage could lead to minor or serious violations of the law shall be judged by the law as to whether they have any legitimate legal uses. A single meaningful legal use shall constitute grounds to prohibit the restriction or banning of such goods and services. Any law that grants an extension to existing intellectual property's legal protection shall be considered an ex post facto law.
People will demand legal change because if there really are more than a handful of prosecutions little Johny or little Suzy is now potentially in the DoJ's legal crosshair. I've met more than a few people who were self-righteous about it until they found out how absurd it was and that their kids and kids they thought were really great kids could sit in a federal prison for 3 years and be literally bankrupt before the age of 18. You see, most people think you're directly ripping off the artists when they hear piracy. They're not thinking their kid with his small mp3 and divx collection.
I would like to think you can appreciate the fact that most porn is nowhere near as clean as Playboy and Perfect 10. I'm an extremely jaded and cynical person yet I am repulsed by most porn out there. I would have to say that I agree, Playboy and Perfect 10 type stuff is not innately damaging. But I absolutely cannot agree that pornography in general isn't harmful. It's a little known fact that child pornography's main use is to show children that "it's ok, everybody does it." I have a relative that enforced the federal child porn laws who told me that the real danger is no the porn, but what pedophiles do with it. Obviously you're not advocating letting child pornography be viewable, but my example illustrates how it can be used to warp a child's mind to make them pliable. I would consider that damage. The only real damage I could fully agree that is possible would be damage to how the child views sexual relationships. Once the child is a teen, I think it'd have marginal impact, but before that I think it could have serious problems depending on the child.
I will say though that I think filters are worthless. My punk and ska site that I maintained 3-4 years ago and the Libertarian Partr's website were blocked by my HS's filters because the former was "pornography" and the latter was "drug advocacy." Filter software just lets either some left wing or right wing nutcase force his agenda on the public. The better system would be to require people register before they can use a computer and revoke their access if they're caught deliberately looking at porn. Hey if people can't remember, to log out.... after a few get burned the rest will learn to abide by the rules.
I believe that people would sober up very quickly if they had the power of a legislator. I think most Americans would also have the basic sense to tell John Q. Weasle from the Whee Cheatum and Howe lobby group to fuck off. I should rephrase my previous comment. I think most Americans simply don't have the desire to push for change because they think they. I also think many of them are not observant enough to see through politicians' bullshit. If people could have seen Bush's political goals in 1999 I doubt he'd be in office today. They just like the sound of "compassionate conservatism" and went with it. They never put two and two together with what "compassionate conservatism" really is. It's a pseudo-fascist system. My congressman is an asshole to most of the people that disagree with him because he can be, he runs unchallenged. There was no other name on the ballot for God's sake.
The solution is not a total elimination of the democratic process at the federal level, but its marginalization. There are other things that should be done to add checks and balances.
Ultimately what we need is a system where John Q Citizen doesn't need to worry about what his government is doing. This could be easily accomplished if we'd abide by the US Constitution but that'd get rid of all of the free bread and circus. It's a very tricky situation. I worry that we're not damned if we do and damned if we don't.