Two years ago I brought basic concerns about misuse of patent law and the DMCA to my Congressman, Goodlatte (R-VA). He said that I was either a thief or advocated stealing because I opposed his bill and that a lot of technical people did too. You see, they don't care what the actual coders think, they care what corporations and unions' leaders think.
Stop acting like Congress represents you. It gets auctioned off every year and CFR isn't going to fix it. It is the 2-party system that is to blame. Even if you outlawed bribery on the pain of death under our current system you'd see no meaningful change. It is because only the best looking and/or most ruthless people get into office.
I'm a CS student and a regular voter and supporter of the LP and 85% of its positions (I only disagree on its espionage and immigration policies, I support the CIA and believe immigration should be heavily restricted). I was talking the other day with probably the only girl in our department who genuinely "gets it" with coding. She's better than most of the guys and we were talking about politics and she said agreed that universal democracy is a bad idea. She said that most of the women she knows that voted for Clinton in 92 did so because he was the sexiest candidate and she said that in her opinion such idiots should be disenfranchised.
Most geeks don't understand political people. I have been around enough of them and have been drug into political conversations enough to know exactly how they think. Invariably political people tend to be scumbags. They practically get off on social and political discussions and yet they have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change.
I am a semi-Stalinist Socialist-turned-Libertarian. I learned from history that only **one** system of government works for a long time and that's a Liberal republic. Liberalism is the key to the salvation of the human race and that's what both conservatives and leftists cannot understand. The Liberalism of Locke, Friedmon and co. is an experiment in true civilization. Stop bitching about how Bush and co. undermine democracy. Fuck democracy. You want to see real democracy unleashed on a nation? Read up on Socrates' last days on this Earth. The summaray execution of Socrates by committee for his beliefs is the true face of democracy. It is as vile and vicious as any communist or fascist government that has ever existed. Be concerned about your natural rights, the rights that are inherent to your being a human being such as your right to own property, speak freely, defend yourself and be secure in your home and person. I would rather live under a benevolent dictatorship such as a platonic republic that respects my rights than a democratic system that lets "the people" get whatever they want.
Democracy doesn't work. The average person doesn't have the intellectual maturity and education to wield the political power that is the vote. I would rather lose my right to vote and know that my representative truly is a peer than have an aristocrat lord over me like I'm a sheep that needs to be herded. Excuse the hell out of me, Congress, but I know more about computers than all of you combined. If our representatives were chosen at random from the bourgiouse then we'd have representatives who could actually relate to us and would see us as equals. We'd also have a system where they don't have to take shit off of us or special interests and can do the right thing. Choose them at random from the bourgiouse, give them one term in office and if they take bribes lynch them from the nearest tree in DC.
Afterall the government never sells your information to corporations (think most DMVs). It never collects whatever data it can just in case it never needs it (Carnivore, USA PATRIOT Act dragnetting). It never undermines your ability to defend yourself against violent and deranged fucks (gun control, school zero tolerance policies). It never limits your free speech rights or your access to information (DeCSS cases, CDA, DMCA and again the PATRIOT Act). Its punishments never go over the top for those that commit non-egregious offenses (40 years for posession of a kilo of cocaine, $250K in fines for copying 10 DVDs). And of course our elected officials make great role models for kids (damn, I'd now be having to find exceptions, not examples).
In short, too many people trust their government. It's easy to believe that "we're the government." But we aren't. Who in their right mind believes 90% of what is on the federal and state law books would be there if we had a republic where representatives were chosen like jurors, not by popular vote? Our corrupt political class loves to say "it's in the public interest." You see, we don't see their "bigger picture" that includes the so-called benefits of having the government possess the full medical records of its citizens. Afterall it takes only one bill or amendment to one that gives insurance corporations full access to this. It's one thing to let them demand you give it to them to get insurance, it's another to force the people at gun point, which is how all laws are ultimately enforced, to give their information to the government who then can sell it to raise some more money needed to hide part of the proof of its fiscal irresponsibility.
So again sheeple, repeat after me. "We're the government. This happens because we want it to. Democracy works and the people are in charge. You can trust your government. Bahh baahhhh baaahhhh"
Instead of scaling back its operations and looking for useless projects that could be eliminated to fund core services, the state blithely adds new taxes. Why not just do something really progressive like *gasp* privatize the public healthcare and housing services. Let poor citizens in good standing keep their houses, apartments, etc that they get from public housing. You want to give them a sense of pride? Do that or give them a really really small 0% interest mortage on it to the tune of say.... $50-$100 a month. That way they're paying their way like everyone else and surprise, surprise the rest of California isn't paying for them anymore, and is now getting money back!
California is what Socialism on a greater scale in the US would be like. Non-essential public services such as free healthcare for the indigent, public housing and welfare services aren't here to actually fix a problem, they're here to punish the middle and upper classes. Don't give me that bullshit about "that's not really Socialism." No shit sherlock, Socialism exists only on paper and in the head of utopian hippies who are pathologically incapable of dealing with reality. The reality is that big government destroys civil rights and encourages violence. You want to make a difference? Vote for a Libertarian and take that percentage of your income that would have gone to welfare and give it to a homeless shelter or a free medical clinic. Those people genuinely care. The money won't get lost in a bureacracy and will actually help the poor.
I live in Virginia so I can only watch CA's problems from afar. CA's problems are of their own making. The people of california deserve this problem. I have no respect for a group of people that have police departments as institutionally corrupt as the LAPD yet have enough faith in the government that they think gun control will protect them. You can't trust your own fucking cops and yet you give up more rights to big brother. What will it take Californians? Bin Laden getting ahold of a stolen nuclear weaponing and vaporizing LA for the majority of you to realize the government can't provide for and can rarely pre-emptively protect you?
Let people give money to every party that has met the constitutional test required to be on the ballot. Only a sum less than or equal to $1000-$5000. Make it a felony punishable by pain of corporate liquidation for an incorporated entity to donate to a party or candidate. Meaning if Microsoft ever gives even $1 to the RP or DP then it will be summarily folded as a corporation and its assets redistributed to its shareholders. Same with unions. If the UAW gives a bunch of money, its assets will be distributed equally among its dues paying members and the union will be abolished by the US Government.
Money is not speech, but an advertisement is. If Microsoft or the UAW wants to run ads to help candidates, that's fine. But what you don't want is for them to able to legally give a lot of money to the parties. Include in the provisions banning corporate donations a provision that they cannot funnel money to individuals for the purpose of circumventing the law. You have no right to seriously propose that you take away the right to speak favorably about a candidate in public. You do have a right to demand that their ability to receive funds be extremely limited.
My parents used to think I was a lefty because of this issue. They couldn't be convinced of why it should be a right to make your own mp3s/oggs, etc. So I started barraging them with story after story of the media interests being unethical and eventually they understood why I feel the way I do. For my dad, a staunch conservative, the CBDTPA was the real catalyst because of its mandate on the entire computer industry. That's when he said enough is enough, the media cartels are socialist parasites.
They need to learn that DRM hurts their sales
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 2, Insightful
DRM at restriction systems hurt their relationship with buyers like me. I buy a lot of IP, in fact IP accounts for virtually all of the non-essential things I buy. I own a hell of a lot of CDs and still buy a lot of CDs when I find something I like. I am the type of customer that they depend on, not little sally who loves her some Britney. I am to them, what the PowerMac and Powerbook owners are to Apple, the backbone of the bottomline. Not surprisingly, I own one of each as well.
Burning buyers like me by not letting me make MP3s or Oggs is a stupid move. Not only do I buy a lot, I keep in contact with my congresscritter. I let him know that it ain't piracy, but rather self-righteous greedy fucks at Sony, Columbia, Universal, et al that are killing off their own market by treating customers like criminals. They can of course do that because copyrights to the degree we have gone now are not capitalist. They are a socialist construct. If you don't like the price of a CD you cannot buy a competing product. Korn doesn't compete with Gravity Kills because they're totally different types of music and they don't play each other's songs. Why don't the copyright crusaders argue that hard drives compete with lawn mowers because if I buy 5 200GB hard drives I probably won't have the money for a new riding lawn mower.
I'd rather be buying DVD Audio, but hey, until I can rip it into very high quality data it's useless to me. My idea of a playlist is Winamp or XMMS, not a 200 DVDA changer set on shuffle.
I think I'll buy stock in Apple and RedHat now. I'm sure your users are just going to love having to buy a new PC in order to use your next OS. I'm sure they're also going to love hearing little johnny's complaints that his MP3s and DivXs don't work anymore. Oh wait, don't forget grandpa, grandma, auntie, mom and pops. Yeah, the entire American family is now getting in on the act.
How about offering a complete end-to-end production setup that is streamlined to be able to produce small quantities of merchandise, records, etc for artists who aren't signed? How about investing in companies like PropellerHead so that they can guide the development of production tools so that they can reduce studio costs and eventually build "micro studios" that can be fit inside a garage. Imagine say..... TimeWarner buying PowerMacs, installing a lot of great production software and building quality, low-cost "studios" for artists they sign. That'd be a hell of a lot less expensive than plunking down $250K-$1M for studio time. All they'd have to do is get the band's best cut, send it to the techs to clean it up and press it. They could probably save as much as $800K per record or maybe even more doing that.
The first big label to say, "no no, technology is ou--my--friend" is the going to be the one that owns the industry. I'm surprised that one of these labels hasn't already contact Steve Jobs and asked him to help them "get with it" technologically. You'd think that at least one of the bean counters in accounting would realize that personal computers could greatly cut down on their cost. DRM isn't good for labels, versatile PCs which can hold lots of cheap digital music are. They should be offering free 64-96k oggs as samples and downloads for say.... $.75 a song for a 350K VBR Ogg or MP3. I give my friends music occassionally to sample, but if the labels did that, I'd just tell them to stop being a cheap mofo and buy the damn downloads.
Let their proposals deepen the tech slump then cause it to bottom out altogether. When several million more Americans and H1-B workers lose their jobs, a few major corps go bankrupt and the US economy tanks, all we'll need to do is provide colorful roadmaps to the corporate headquarters of the **AA and their major members to the lynch mob of unemployed workers who lost their jobs so Korn, Britney and JLo could make that extra 50 record sales. I'm not kidding. I say let their proposals go through, deeply scar the US economy and get the EFF to run very vitriolic ads on TV about the DMCA, et al saying "This depression is the direct result of the legislation that the RIAA and MPAA demanded. You can thank them for little johnny having to grow up on welfare now." I would go so far as to say that they should subtely hint that the system is entirely broken and that the people have no **peaceful** recourse against these companies and trade groups. Encourage the public to view electing new leaders not a viable way to "solve the problem" but rather the ideal alternative may be...... extra-legal.
It's only inevitable that Apple will own most, if not all, of the good production tools. They'll figure out a way to make them easier to use and who knows, maybe they'll eventually build custom boards for PowerMacs that can turn them into a MIDI controller.
On that note, the group most likely to keep Microsoft from dropping MacOffice is its stockholders. They don't see Apple as a threat, they see its userbase as a great source of revenue for a major stock in their portfolio. Unless revenues on MacOffice collapse, MS execs will be roasted if they drop it. All the while, Apple quietly builds up its portfolio of music/movie production tools.....
perspective from a CS student
on
The Future of Java?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My first two programming classes were in Java. I really think we would have had more fun learning the same concepts in Python. The thing that I've come to love the most about Python is that it doesn't force you to build an entire class just to test a feature. It's a great language to encourage CS students do their own experimenting with.
I'm personally ambivalent to Java. I like it for some things, but the only real reason I want to learn it is because so many use it. I just recently discovered wxPython and think it's probably easier for me than Swing or AWT.
The best thing that could come from Java for development as a whole IMO is Javadoc. If that tool were extended to support C++, C#, VB.NET, Python, PERL, etc it would make everyone's lives easier. Seriously, has anyone seen better documentation than Sun's Javadocs from something so big and complex as Java's libraries?
I'm really excited about Mono because I really like VB.NET and C#. I think the ability to use any language you want with the same libraries is a very important strength that.NET has over Java. I know there are other languages that __can__ targe the JVM, but Sun doesn't exactly seem to be pushing that. I'll never understand why though. Java could be made into their platform's equivalent of C# and they could develop their own clone of VB for Java. Hmmmm VB-J? It'd be great if they'd build VB and ObjectPascal compilers that target the JVM.
I have been tossing around ideas for how to maintain a global liberal republic because of a story I've been toying around with. The problem is, how do you hold elected leaders at such a high position of power accountable to ordinary people. My solution is a bottom->up republic where the local governments can force issues on the states which can force it on the nation. You have say..... 20 counties that each are petitioned by a certain number of their residents. That forces them to call on the state assembly with a mandate to consider a resolution in favor of the petitions. Extrapolate that accross the entire country. If a sufficent number of states pass the resolution then Congress must immediately drop all debate and debate the action demanded by the states. Depending on the situation say, if the issue is corruption then it would go to the President with a mandate to order an investigation. It would be non-negotiable, he would be required to order a full investigation and carry out legal action demanded by the states in order to preserve the integrity of the federal system. If the President refused, the states could bypass Congress and issue a "vote of no confidence" in the President or as appropriate in the entire Congress. In such a case you would have to get permission from your state assembly to run in the new election. That way in the event of mass-corruption, the few good leaders could be easily put back into power... and it would give the people the opportunity to elect an even better leader if say they grew tired of his/her lack of principles on key issues.
Congress is convinced that it can decide for itself what ethics it will hold its members to and the President doesn't have the balls to order the FBI to launch a reign of terror on corrupt Congresscritters. Congress was terrified of the ABSCAM investigation because the FBI royally pissed on their parade. They're very afraid of federal law enforcement being ordered to take action against them because despite what many believe, the majority of agents in the major agencies are very good at what they do.
The FBI in probably six months could dig up so much dirt on Congress that it would cause our elected government to collapse because >80% of them would be before a grand jury facing felony charges. What we need is consistent and merciless prosecution of corrupt elected leaders. I would like to see a permanent independent council office established that would be charged with policing them and that would have a large group of investigators from the FBI.
We also need to remove the bullshit precedent that everything is interstate commerce from our legal system. That is the ruling that lets these jerkoffs justify their passage of this law. Without that ruling, the courts would strike it down within a week of its being passed because it would be so clearly unconstitutional on its face that the US AG would have no case to argue. We need a constitutional court similar to France's and IMO, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to make it a capital offense to be found guilty of a certain number of instances of corruption such as 5 or more quid-pro-quos.
Don't they understand that this will only serve to legitimze the very behavior they complain about? Everyone I know that has found out about the levies in the US has cared even less because of that.
The end result is that they were fighting for something many of us value. The US legal system is still heavily based on common law which means that a precedent set here would help us. Once again the ignorance of many "geeks" and "nerds" is astounding. It never ceases to amaze me how many take a "principled stand" yet don't have the balls to do anything themselves. I bet most of Verizon's critics on this issue can't even get off their dead asses and write their Congress(man || woman) on issues they rant and rave about on/.
Go ahead, call me a troll and label my post flamebait. I at least write my congresscritter on a regular basis and am one of the few in my area that has the balls to call out my representative in public on issues I believe in. I have confronted him before in front of a large body of people on the DMCA, a bill he is very proud of having been involved with.
It's pathetic how loud and shrill the bitching of slashdot's resident armchair revolutionaries can get.
So you think you can tell everyone else to STFU because they're not from your city? Well then asshole, stop electing congressmen that tell my state, VA what guns are legal to own, what is legal to say, how much of our income we deserve to keep, where our national guard troops get sent because your bleeding heart asshole representatives decide we need to help some pissant 3rd world nation and more important, stop taking our fucking money and resources and paying for your god damn social programs with it!
Oh no, that would require you to really respect the federal system. If I can't criticize your local government then you cannot elect representatives that tell me and mine what to do. Don't like that? Go fuck yourself. How the hell do posts like yours get modded up?
Was this not tried before their analog of the US Supreme Court? Say what you will about the American legal system, but when you're acquitted or found innocent the state can't appeal it to a higher court.
I have noticed that too often it seems that IP holders, **especially** copyright holders, tend to think that any demand that they be held to the same standards and expectations that everyone other manufacturer is constitutes a draconian restriction of their "rights." Many of the ones I've debated in other forums act like "my shit doesn't stink because I made this so you can't tell me what to do." They think that because it's "their property" they can restrict how their customers use it no matter what. There is a valid argument in some cases such as licensing source code so you can make a derivative product for your company or agency's needs, but off-the-shell? Who the hell are they to do such things?
Copyright holders better learn pretty quickly that the states can really piss on their parade because unbeknownst to many otherwise legally astute individuals, the states, not the feds, have total sovereignty within their borders. That means your little EULA can be balled up and chucked in the trash by NY, CA, VA, etc. They can make it a class 6 felony punishable by 20 years in a state prison for knowingly distributing "copy-restricted" CDs and what can the copyright holder do? Abide by the law or go to prison, that's what. Right now my state, VA, could pass a law declaring off the shelf licenses null and void and there would be no recourse because VA has the right to invalidate any contract within its borders. It can say, "we don't give a rat's ass who you think you are and what jurisdiction you want to be covered in. You are selling your products in Virginia to a resident of Virginia and that means you are under **our** jurisdiction, not Washington State's!"
Personally I think the system would just be better off if each state would invalidate EULAs and make it a felony to sell copy-restricted media within their borders. The feds cannot stop that, period. They can allow theoretically it to pass from point A to point B, but they cannot give the greenlight to Walmart to seel Britney's latest hacked up CD if the state says Walmart cannot. There is no real market for IP. Either you accept the terms of the copyright holder or you go to hell. That's not a market, that's a socialist-style monopoly. Copyright holders need to respect that, if they did they'd be richer, we'd be freer and more supportive of them IMO.
It is the responsibility of the USSC to keep the government in line. It is the body which says "Whoa! Time out kiddies, this is not permitted by our nation's constitution!" If you have a government (Congress and Executive office) that is systematically violating the US Constitution then the USSC is obligated to make sweeping changes to correct their wrongs and bring the policies inline with the US Constitution. A Liberal (Locke, not Marx) court would have to nearly overthrow the US Government now to make it constitutional. And yes, that would be an activist court, but it would have to be activist to restore the integrity of the US Constitution
Congress throws out whatever shit it wants to and it sticks because the courts won't actively rip them a new one by reversing 75% of what they pass which is how it should be done. Congress doesn't have the authority to pass probably the vast majority of what it does.
You're turning their iTunes product into a vehicle for violating copyright law. In this day of paranoia about anything and everything that can be used for such purposes, they have a reason in that alone to take action.
Did a lot of slashdot users miss the memo that was sent out first in 1998 and sent out again to all of us a few days ago that the US Government and copyright holders are both against us on this issue?
Wake up idiots, look at what the RIAA did to the RIO player years back. That was benign compared to the ability to share music through iTunes. Apple could potentially face a serious lawsuit over iTunes if they didn't take action.
And third parties should not be able to air political commercials.
So you think that you should be allowed to silence people because they agree or disagree with the views of a candidate? How is that __not__ a restriction on political speech?
The "Election Fund" can be paid into by anyone who wants, as well as a portion of tax proceeds being put into it. The money from that fund is then divided equally amongst ALL of the candidates for the office it is for.
How about you just ban all group donations and let individuals give only $1000 per candidate. Let people give $2000, divided into two $1000 donations to their top two picks. Come on, don't tell me that in a system where 5, 7, 11, etc candidates are up for election on a ticket you don't have a first and second pick? There's nothing wrong with letting people give to each campaign up to $1000. There is something wrong with $300,000 to a party though.
People may end up with $100K as their election budget and no more. It means they have 30 seconds informative commercials and lots of pamphlets. Sounds good to me.
Not to me. I want a healthy republican system. I don't want a system that lets candidates be the sole individuals with political voices in the media. I want groups like the NRA to be able to make public rebuttles of gun control arguments and NARAL able to do the same with anti-abortion arguments. I want people to be able to challenge candidates' honesty and positions without fear of imprisonment or fines. You obviously don't. How can you feel comfortable with a system that is so one-sided?
Not saying this is the obvious best solution, but it would allow for auditting of each candidates campaign since you know how much they can spend so you just track their receipts and it's easy to find out who is cheating most of the time.
Not true. Suppose they claim to have put out only 5,000 pamphlets, but someone gave them under the table the funds to print 50,000? How are you going to count that? Go count each pamphlet? I hope you love dumpster diving, that'll become one of the requirements for working for the FEC......
Neuter the power of the state so that it can only carry out its primary mandate: to protect the safety of the public and protect the public liberty. I'm a Liberal, I see no ethical qualms with eliminating the right to collective lobbying on pain of imprisonment for a class 6 felony. It should be assumed that those that represent economic interests whether they be capital or labor are in it to bend the state to one side rather than keep it on the straight and narrow. Lobbying is a perversion of the first amendment.
Our forefathers did not envision such a concept and we must take that it into account. The "right to petition the government for redress of grievances" means that an individual or group have a God-given right to let their opinions be known to the state, but no where does that give them the right to provide for week long vacations for a Senator and his family, buy his wife a $25,000 ring as a "gift" for hearing what they have to say or other similar bullshit. That's called bribery and our founders were fanatically against corruption and abuse in government. I cannot imagine them supporting the idea that lobbying is a legal activity in its current form.
Campaign finance legislation isn't the solution because you cannot stop under the table bribes in any meaningful way. I can see only a few things that would help, but unfortunately, most of America seems to think big government is still cool, even though it's the reason we have this corruption in the first place. Who in their fucking minds thinks that a corporation would bother lobbying if the US Supreme Court would actually undo the "everything is commerce" ruling on the commerce clause and thus limiting the regulatory power of the federal government to a very narrow set of areas? A lot of people, because they want a bigger and bigger maze of legislation for corporations and people to move through. The system only benefits lawyers, not you, not me, not most of/., not most of the US!
Let the states prosecute corrupt congresscritters and let **any** state bring criminal chargers against a corrupt president and his entire administration. Don't rely on a centralized law enforcement system, let the states play an active role in purging these assholes. Go one further, make accepting a quid-pro-quo a capital offense for an elected official. If they get greeted by a state or federal cop after they win the election who tells them, "Remember, it took $17M to elect you, but if you use your power to betray the confidence of the public, it will take us only $.17 to remove you."
Slashdot Mirror
Two years ago I brought basic concerns about misuse of patent law and the DMCA to my Congressman, Goodlatte (R-VA). He said that I was either a thief or advocated stealing because I opposed his bill and that a lot of technical people did too. You see, they don't care what the actual coders think, they care what corporations and unions' leaders think.
Stop acting like Congress represents you. It gets auctioned off every year and CFR isn't going to fix it. It is the 2-party system that is to blame. Even if you outlawed bribery on the pain of death under our current system you'd see no meaningful change. It is because only the best looking and/or most ruthless people get into office.
I'm a CS student and a regular voter and supporter of the LP and 85% of its positions (I only disagree on its espionage and immigration policies, I support the CIA and believe immigration should be heavily restricted). I was talking the other day with probably the only girl in our department who genuinely "gets it" with coding. She's better than most of the guys and we were talking about politics and she said agreed that universal democracy is a bad idea. She said that most of the women she knows that voted for Clinton in 92 did so because he was the sexiest candidate and she said that in her opinion such idiots should be disenfranchised.
Most geeks don't understand political people. I have been around enough of them and have been drug into political conversations enough to know exactly how they think. Invariably political people tend to be scumbags. They practically get off on social and political discussions and yet they have no real desire or capacity as a general rule to effect positive change.
I am a semi-Stalinist Socialist-turned-Libertarian. I learned from history that only **one** system of government works for a long time and that's a Liberal republic. Liberalism is the key to the salvation of the human race and that's what both conservatives and leftists cannot understand. The Liberalism of Locke, Friedmon and co. is an experiment in true civilization. Stop bitching about how Bush and co. undermine democracy. Fuck democracy. You want to see real democracy unleashed on a nation? Read up on Socrates' last days on this Earth. The summaray execution of Socrates by committee for his beliefs is the true face of democracy. It is as vile and vicious as any communist or fascist government that has ever existed. Be concerned about your natural rights, the rights that are inherent to your being a human being such as your right to own property, speak freely, defend yourself and be secure in your home and person. I would rather live under a benevolent dictatorship such as a platonic republic that respects my rights than a democratic system that lets "the people" get whatever they want.
Democracy doesn't work. The average person doesn't have the intellectual maturity and education to wield the political power that is the vote. I would rather lose my right to vote and know that my representative truly is a peer than have an aristocrat lord over me like I'm a sheep that needs to be herded. Excuse the hell out of me, Congress, but I know more about computers than all of you combined. If our representatives were chosen at random from the bourgiouse then we'd have representatives who could actually relate to us and would see us as equals. We'd also have a system where they don't have to take shit off of us or special interests and can do the right thing. Choose them at random from the bourgiouse, give them one term in office and if they take bribes lynch them from the nearest tree in DC.
Afterall the government never sells your information to corporations (think most DMVs). It never collects whatever data it can just in case it never needs it (Carnivore, USA PATRIOT Act dragnetting). It never undermines your ability to defend yourself against violent and deranged fucks (gun control, school zero tolerance policies). It never limits your free speech rights or your access to information (DeCSS cases, CDA, DMCA and again the PATRIOT Act). Its punishments never go over the top for those that commit non-egregious offenses (40 years for posession of a kilo of cocaine, $250K in fines for copying 10 DVDs). And of course our elected officials make great role models for kids (damn, I'd now be having to find exceptions, not examples).
In short, too many people trust their government. It's easy to believe that "we're the government." But we aren't. Who in their right mind believes 90% of what is on the federal and state law books would be there if we had a republic where representatives were chosen like jurors, not by popular vote? Our corrupt political class loves to say "it's in the public interest." You see, we don't see their "bigger picture" that includes the so-called benefits of having the government possess the full medical records of its citizens. Afterall it takes only one bill or amendment to one that gives insurance corporations full access to this. It's one thing to let them demand you give it to them to get insurance, it's another to force the people at gun point, which is how all laws are ultimately enforced, to give their information to the government who then can sell it to raise some more money needed to hide part of the proof of its fiscal irresponsibility.
So again sheeple, repeat after me. "We're the government. This happens because we want it to. Democracy works and the people are in charge. You can trust your government. Bahh baahhhh baaahhhh"
because after you use it on OSX you'll grow disillusioned with other implementations thanks to Apple's improvements in the JVM and Swing/AWT :)
Instead of scaling back its operations and looking for useless projects that could be eliminated to fund core services, the state blithely adds new taxes. Why not just do something really progressive like *gasp* privatize the public healthcare and housing services. Let poor citizens in good standing keep their houses, apartments, etc that they get from public housing. You want to give them a sense of pride? Do that or give them a really really small 0% interest mortage on it to the tune of say.... $50-$100 a month. That way they're paying their way like everyone else and surprise, surprise the rest of California isn't paying for them anymore, and is now getting money back!
California is what Socialism on a greater scale in the US would be like. Non-essential public services such as free healthcare for the indigent, public housing and welfare services aren't here to actually fix a problem, they're here to punish the middle and upper classes. Don't give me that bullshit about "that's not really Socialism." No shit sherlock, Socialism exists only on paper and in the head of utopian hippies who are pathologically incapable of dealing with reality. The reality is that big government destroys civil rights and encourages violence. You want to make a difference? Vote for a Libertarian and take that percentage of your income that would have gone to welfare and give it to a homeless shelter or a free medical clinic. Those people genuinely care. The money won't get lost in a bureacracy and will actually help the poor.
I live in Virginia so I can only watch CA's problems from afar. CA's problems are of their own making. The people of california deserve this problem. I have no respect for a group of people that have police departments as institutionally corrupt as the LAPD yet have enough faith in the government that they think gun control will protect them. You can't trust your own fucking cops and yet you give up more rights to big brother. What will it take Californians? Bin Laden getting ahold of a stolen nuclear weaponing and vaporizing LA for the majority of you to realize the government can't provide for and can rarely pre-emptively protect you?
Let people give money to every party that has met the constitutional test required to be on the ballot. Only a sum less than or equal to $1000-$5000. Make it a felony punishable by pain of corporate liquidation for an incorporated entity to donate to a party or candidate. Meaning if Microsoft ever gives even $1 to the RP or DP then it will be summarily folded as a corporation and its assets redistributed to its shareholders. Same with unions. If the UAW gives a bunch of money, its assets will be distributed equally among its dues paying members and the union will be abolished by the US Government.
Money is not speech, but an advertisement is. If Microsoft or the UAW wants to run ads to help candidates, that's fine. But what you don't want is for them to able to legally give a lot of money to the parties. Include in the provisions banning corporate donations a provision that they cannot funnel money to individuals for the purpose of circumventing the law. You have no right to seriously propose that you take away the right to speak favorably about a candidate in public. You do have a right to demand that their ability to receive funds be extremely limited.
My parents used to think I was a lefty because of this issue. They couldn't be convinced of why it should be a right to make your own mp3s/oggs, etc. So I started barraging them with story after story of the media interests being unethical and eventually they understood why I feel the way I do. For my dad, a staunch conservative, the CBDTPA was the real catalyst because of its mandate on the entire computer industry. That's when he said enough is enough, the media cartels are socialist parasites.
oh yeah, take that ACs!
DRM at restriction systems hurt their relationship with buyers like me. I buy a lot of IP, in fact IP accounts for virtually all of the non-essential things I buy. I own a hell of a lot of CDs and still buy a lot of CDs when I find something I like. I am the type of customer that they depend on, not little sally who loves her some Britney. I am to them, what the PowerMac and Powerbook owners are to Apple, the backbone of the bottomline. Not surprisingly, I own one of each as well.
Burning buyers like me by not letting me make MP3s or Oggs is a stupid move. Not only do I buy a lot, I keep in contact with my congresscritter. I let him know that it ain't piracy, but rather self-righteous greedy fucks at Sony, Columbia, Universal, et al that are killing off their own market by treating customers like criminals. They can of course do that because copyrights to the degree we have gone now are not capitalist. They are a socialist construct. If you don't like the price of a CD you cannot buy a competing product. Korn doesn't compete with Gravity Kills because they're totally different types of music and they don't play each other's songs. Why don't the copyright crusaders argue that hard drives compete with lawn mowers because if I buy 5 200GB hard drives I probably won't have the money for a new riding lawn mower.
I'd rather be buying DVD Audio, but hey, until I can rip it into very high quality data it's useless to me. My idea of a playlist is Winamp or XMMS, not a 200 DVDA changer set on shuffle.
I think I'll buy stock in Apple and RedHat now. I'm sure your users are just going to love having to buy a new PC in order to use your next OS. I'm sure they're also going to love hearing little johnny's complaints that his MP3s and DivXs don't work anymore. Oh wait, don't forget grandpa, grandma, auntie, mom and pops. Yeah, the entire American family is now getting in on the act.
How about offering a complete end-to-end production setup that is streamlined to be able to produce small quantities of merchandise, records, etc for artists who aren't signed? How about investing in companies like PropellerHead so that they can guide the development of production tools so that they can reduce studio costs and eventually build "micro studios" that can be fit inside a garage. Imagine say..... TimeWarner buying PowerMacs, installing a lot of great production software and building quality, low-cost "studios" for artists they sign. That'd be a hell of a lot less expensive than plunking down $250K-$1M for studio time. All they'd have to do is get the band's best cut, send it to the techs to clean it up and press it. They could probably save as much as $800K per record or maybe even more doing that.
The first big label to say, "no no, technology is ou--my--friend" is the going to be the one that owns the industry. I'm surprised that one of these labels hasn't already contact Steve Jobs and asked him to help them "get with it" technologically. You'd think that at least one of the bean counters in accounting would realize that personal computers could greatly cut down on their cost. DRM isn't good for labels, versatile PCs which can hold lots of cheap digital music are. They should be offering free 64-96k oggs as samples and downloads for say.... $.75 a song for a 350K VBR Ogg or MP3. I give my friends music occassionally to sample, but if the labels did that, I'd just tell them to stop being a cheap mofo and buy the damn downloads.
Let their proposals deepen the tech slump then cause it to bottom out altogether. When several million more Americans and H1-B workers lose their jobs, a few major corps go bankrupt and the US economy tanks, all we'll need to do is provide colorful roadmaps to the corporate headquarters of the **AA and their major members to the lynch mob of unemployed workers who lost their jobs so Korn, Britney and JLo could make that extra 50 record sales. I'm not kidding. I say let their proposals go through, deeply scar the US economy and get the EFF to run very vitriolic ads on TV about the DMCA, et al saying "This depression is the direct result of the legislation that the RIAA and MPAA demanded. You can thank them for little johnny having to grow up on welfare now." I would go so far as to say that they should subtely hint that the system is entirely broken and that the people have no **peaceful** recourse against these companies and trade groups. Encourage the public to view electing new leaders not a viable way to "solve the problem" but rather the ideal alternative may be...... extra-legal.
It's only inevitable that Apple will own most, if not all, of the good production tools. They'll figure out a way to make them easier to use and who knows, maybe they'll eventually build custom boards for PowerMacs that can turn them into a MIDI controller.
On that note, the group most likely to keep Microsoft from dropping MacOffice is its stockholders. They don't see Apple as a threat, they see its userbase as a great source of revenue for a major stock in their portfolio. Unless revenues on MacOffice collapse, MS execs will be roasted if they drop it. All the while, Apple quietly builds up its portfolio of music/movie production tools.....
My first two programming classes were in Java. I really think we would have had more fun learning the same concepts in Python. The thing that I've come to love the most about Python is that it doesn't force you to build an entire class just to test a feature. It's a great language to encourage CS students do their own experimenting with.
.NET has over Java. I know there are other languages that __can__ targe the JVM, but Sun doesn't exactly seem to be pushing that. I'll never understand why though. Java could be made into their platform's equivalent of C# and they could develop their own clone of VB for Java. Hmmmm VB-J? It'd be great if they'd build VB and ObjectPascal compilers that target the JVM.
I'm personally ambivalent to Java. I like it for some things, but the only real reason I want to learn it is because so many use it. I just recently discovered wxPython and think it's probably easier for me than Swing or AWT.
The best thing that could come from Java for development as a whole IMO is Javadoc. If that tool were extended to support C++, C#, VB.NET, Python, PERL, etc it would make everyone's lives easier. Seriously, has anyone seen better documentation than Sun's Javadocs from something so big and complex as Java's libraries?
I'm really excited about Mono because I really like VB.NET and C#. I think the ability to use any language you want with the same libraries is a very important strength that
The FBI reports to Bush, not my congresscritter.
I have been tossing around ideas for how to maintain a global liberal republic because of a story I've been toying around with. The problem is, how do you hold elected leaders at such a high position of power accountable to ordinary people. My solution is a bottom->up republic where the local governments can force issues on the states which can force it on the nation. You have say..... 20 counties that each are petitioned by a certain number of their residents. That forces them to call on the state assembly with a mandate to consider a resolution in favor of the petitions. Extrapolate that accross the entire country. If a sufficent number of states pass the resolution then Congress must immediately drop all debate and debate the action demanded by the states. Depending on the situation say, if the issue is corruption then it would go to the President with a mandate to order an investigation. It would be non-negotiable, he would be required to order a full investigation and carry out legal action demanded by the states in order to preserve the integrity of the federal system. If the President refused, the states could bypass Congress and issue a "vote of no confidence" in the President or as appropriate in the entire Congress. In such a case you would have to get permission from your state assembly to run in the new election. That way in the event of mass-corruption, the few good leaders could be easily put back into power... and it would give the people the opportunity to elect an even better leader if say they grew tired of his/her lack of principles on key issues.
Congress is convinced that it can decide for itself what ethics it will hold its members to and the President doesn't have the balls to order the FBI to launch a reign of terror on corrupt Congresscritters. Congress was terrified of the ABSCAM investigation because the FBI royally pissed on their parade. They're very afraid of federal law enforcement being ordered to take action against them because despite what many believe, the majority of agents in the major agencies are very good at what they do.
The FBI in probably six months could dig up so much dirt on Congress that it would cause our elected government to collapse because >80% of them would be before a grand jury facing felony charges. What we need is consistent and merciless prosecution of corrupt elected leaders. I would like to see a permanent independent council office established that would be charged with policing them and that would have a large group of investigators from the FBI.
We also need to remove the bullshit precedent that everything is interstate commerce from our legal system. That is the ruling that lets these jerkoffs justify their passage of this law. Without that ruling, the courts would strike it down within a week of its being passed because it would be so clearly unconstitutional on its face that the US AG would have no case to argue. We need a constitutional court similar to France's and IMO, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to make it a capital offense to be found guilty of a certain number of instances of corruption such as 5 or more quid-pro-quos.
Don't they understand that this will only serve to legitimze the very behavior they complain about? Everyone I know that has found out about the levies in the US has cared even less because of that.
The end result is that they were fighting for something many of us value. The US legal system is still heavily based on common law which means that a precedent set here would help us. Once again the ignorance of many "geeks" and "nerds" is astounding. It never ceases to amaze me how many take a "principled stand" yet don't have the balls to do anything themselves. I bet most of Verizon's critics on this issue can't even get off their dead asses and write their Congress(man || woman) on issues they rant and rave about on /.
Go ahead, call me a troll and label my post flamebait. I at least write my congresscritter on a regular basis and am one of the few in my area that has the balls to call out my representative in public on issues I believe in. I have confronted him before in front of a large body of people on the DMCA, a bill he is very proud of having been involved with.
It's pathetic how loud and shrill the bitching of slashdot's resident armchair revolutionaries can get.
So you think you can tell everyone else to STFU because they're not from your city? Well then asshole, stop electing congressmen that tell my state, VA what guns are legal to own, what is legal to say, how much of our income we deserve to keep, where our national guard troops get sent because your bleeding heart asshole representatives decide we need to help some pissant 3rd world nation and more important, stop taking our fucking money and resources and paying for your god damn social programs with it!
Oh no, that would require you to really respect the federal system. If I can't criticize your local government then you cannot elect representatives that tell me and mine what to do. Don't like that? Go fuck yourself. How the hell do posts like yours get modded up?
Was this not tried before their analog of the US Supreme Court? Say what you will about the American legal system, but when you're acquitted or found innocent the state can't appeal it to a higher court.
I have noticed that too often it seems that IP holders, **especially** copyright holders, tend to think that any demand that they be held to the same standards and expectations that everyone other manufacturer is constitutes a draconian restriction of their "rights." Many of the ones I've debated in other forums act like "my shit doesn't stink because I made this so you can't tell me what to do." They think that because it's "their property" they can restrict how their customers use it no matter what. There is a valid argument in some cases such as licensing source code so you can make a derivative product for your company or agency's needs, but off-the-shell? Who the hell are they to do such things?
Copyright holders better learn pretty quickly that the states can really piss on their parade because unbeknownst to many otherwise legally astute individuals, the states, not the feds, have total sovereignty within their borders. That means your little EULA can be balled up and chucked in the trash by NY, CA, VA, etc. They can make it a class 6 felony punishable by 20 years in a state prison for knowingly distributing "copy-restricted" CDs and what can the copyright holder do? Abide by the law or go to prison, that's what. Right now my state, VA, could pass a law declaring off the shelf licenses null and void and there would be no recourse because VA has the right to invalidate any contract within its borders. It can say, "we don't give a rat's ass who you think you are and what jurisdiction you want to be covered in. You are selling your products in Virginia to a resident of Virginia and that means you are under **our** jurisdiction, not Washington State's!"
Personally I think the system would just be better off if each state would invalidate EULAs and make it a felony to sell copy-restricted media within their borders. The feds cannot stop that, period. They can allow theoretically it to pass from point A to point B, but they cannot give the greenlight to Walmart to seel Britney's latest hacked up CD if the state says Walmart cannot. There is no real market for IP. Either you accept the terms of the copyright holder or you go to hell. That's not a market, that's a socialist-style monopoly. Copyright holders need to respect that, if they did they'd be richer, we'd be freer and more supportive of them IMO.
It is the responsibility of the USSC to keep the government in line. It is the body which says "Whoa! Time out kiddies, this is not permitted by our nation's constitution!" If you have a government (Congress and Executive office) that is systematically violating the US Constitution then the USSC is obligated to make sweeping changes to correct their wrongs and bring the policies inline with the US Constitution. A Liberal (Locke, not Marx) court would have to nearly overthrow the US Government now to make it constitutional. And yes, that would be an activist court, but it would have to be activist to restore the integrity of the US Constitution
Congress throws out whatever shit it wants to and it sticks because the courts won't actively rip them a new one by reversing 75% of what they pass which is how it should be done. Congress doesn't have the authority to pass probably the vast majority of what it does.
You're turning their iTunes product into a vehicle for violating copyright law. In this day of paranoia about anything and everything that can be used for such purposes, they have a reason in that alone to take action.
Did a lot of slashdot users miss the memo that was sent out first in 1998 and sent out again to all of us a few days ago that the US Government and copyright holders are both against us on this issue?
Wake up idiots, look at what the RIAA did to the RIO player years back. That was benign compared to the ability to share music through iTunes. Apple could potentially face a serious lawsuit over iTunes if they didn't take action.
And third parties should not be able to air political commercials.
So you think that you should be allowed to silence people because they agree or disagree with the views of a candidate? How is that __not__ a restriction on political speech?
The "Election Fund" can be paid into by anyone who wants, as well as a portion of tax proceeds being put into it. The money from that fund is then divided equally amongst ALL of the candidates for the office it is for.
How about you just ban all group donations and let individuals give only $1000 per candidate. Let people give $2000, divided into two $1000 donations to their top two picks. Come on, don't tell me that in a system where 5, 7, 11, etc candidates are up for election on a ticket you don't have a first and second pick? There's nothing wrong with letting people give to each campaign up to $1000. There is something wrong with $300,000 to a party though.
People may end up with $100K as their election budget and no more. It means they have 30 seconds informative commercials and lots of pamphlets. Sounds good to me.
Not to me. I want a healthy republican system. I don't want a system that lets candidates be the sole individuals with political voices in the media. I want groups like the NRA to be able to make public rebuttles of gun control arguments and NARAL able to do the same with anti-abortion arguments. I want people to be able to challenge candidates' honesty and positions without fear of imprisonment or fines. You obviously don't. How can you feel comfortable with a system that is so one-sided?
Not saying this is the obvious best solution, but it would allow for auditting of each candidates campaign since you know how much they can spend so you just track their receipts and it's easy to find out who is cheating most of the time.
Not true. Suppose they claim to have put out only 5,000 pamphlets, but someone gave them under the table the funds to print 50,000? How are you going to count that? Go count each pamphlet? I hope you love dumpster diving, that'll become one of the requirements for working for the FEC......
Neuter the power of the state so that it can only carry out its primary mandate: to protect the safety of the public and protect the public liberty. I'm a Liberal, I see no ethical qualms with eliminating the right to collective lobbying on pain of imprisonment for a class 6 felony. It should be assumed that those that represent economic interests whether they be capital or labor are in it to bend the state to one side rather than keep it on the straight and narrow. Lobbying is a perversion of the first amendment.
/., not most of the US!
Our forefathers did not envision such a concept and we must take that it into account. The "right to petition the government for redress of grievances" means that an individual or group have a God-given right to let their opinions be known to the state, but no where does that give them the right to provide for week long vacations for a Senator and his family, buy his wife a $25,000 ring as a "gift" for hearing what they have to say or other similar bullshit. That's called bribery and our founders were fanatically against corruption and abuse in government. I cannot imagine them supporting the idea that lobbying is a legal activity in its current form.
Campaign finance legislation isn't the solution because you cannot stop under the table bribes in any meaningful way. I can see only a few things that would help, but unfortunately, most of America seems to think big government is still cool, even though it's the reason we have this corruption in the first place. Who in their fucking minds thinks that a corporation would bother lobbying if the US Supreme Court would actually undo the "everything is commerce" ruling on the commerce clause and thus limiting the regulatory power of the federal government to a very narrow set of areas? A lot of people, because they want a bigger and bigger maze of legislation for corporations and people to move through. The system only benefits lawyers, not you, not me, not most of
Let the states prosecute corrupt congresscritters and let **any** state bring criminal chargers against a corrupt president and his entire administration. Don't rely on a centralized law enforcement system, let the states play an active role in purging these assholes. Go one further, make accepting a quid-pro-quo a capital offense for an elected official. If they get greeted by a state or federal cop after they win the election who tells them, "Remember, it took $17M to elect you, but if you use your power to betray the confidence of the public, it will take us only $.17 to remove you."