"The only thing we might be able to do is use the very same technology on those that use the technology on us."
Geez, I wish it were that simple.
Remember when they were playing around with the NAFTA and the H1B programs, and people who had spent much money educating themselves complained that the exportation of jobs would dilute the value of the effort they had invested in their education...
But the stuff got passed anyway. Jobs were exported to where labor was cheaper. Just because you had invested in yourself was no guarantee you would benefit from it.
Then a few years later, we figure out how to use technology to bypass traditional routes of music distribution - and those who had spent much money producing those works complained that the replication of the works out of their control diluted the value of the effort they invested in producing it.
In this case, laws protecting the ones who had made investments were passed.
What works for the goose does not necessarily work for the gander. Especially if Congress is involved.
So we snoop on everybody... Geez, who has the time to sort through all this stuff?
Already, I am way too swamped with information I can't process it all, and many businesses I have to deal with ( insurance companies and anything to do with retirement investments ) know this and send me reams and reams of meaningless data.
Ever tried to read those phone-book prospectus they send? Or tried to understand whats really covered in that insurance policy? Or know what you should do with those proxies?
So somehow the government is going to collect and store all this data on all of us. How many of us will be needed to snoop on the rest of us? How many of us will be actually earning our keep, rather than coercing (taxing) it away from someone else? Will our economy, already crumbling from the effects of our inefficiency, absorb yet more non-productive loading? We are already running a helluva national debt. I know we think Joe Taxpayer is going to somehow foot the bill for this whole thing, but I get the idea we are kinda in for a surprise similar to the one some astronauts got when they tried to push some overstressed things beyond their limit. Once the infrastructure collapses, we may have to start off at a very low level again. What scares me is that it seems to me that technology has outpaced our means of maintaining it without a sophisticated infrastructure in place to do so. Given the resources of a machine shop, could you produce anything you needed to keep cars running?
I have large areas of my life in collapse already from not "making time" to pay due diligence to numerous busyworks. ( I put "making time" in quotes, because I really can't make time, I only can divert it from something else. ) - I simply can't see where we as a public can afford all this busywork trying to keep tabs on everybody else.
I just read the article.. and it sure looks like there is a bug in there somewhere.
The article claimed exactly the design you describe.
"Kaiko is designed to float to the surface and emit a tracking signal if its tether is broken. Although searchers briefly detected the beacon, they were unable to locate the probe and suspected it has either drifted off site or sunk to the bottom."
I would assume the sub has local batteries, albeit rechargeable via the tether, for cacheing energy. As you noted, in the event the sub detected its tether being broken ( I would probably try to sense a loss of power feed ), use the cached energy in the battery to blow the ballast tanks.. or maybe have some sort of fire extinguishing system using liquid CO2 that could be routed into the ballast tanks to insure floatation in failsafe mode.
I am not privy to the design plans, but somehow this whole episode reeks of a malfunction of some failsafe system. I find it difficult to conceive of some design engineer not hedging his bets against something as inevitable as a severed tether.
Another poster noted RF being lossy underwater. My guess would been to place piezoelectric sonar transducers on the hull and ping them in the event the sub considered itself lost. It wouldn't take that much energy, but if you knew what kind of racket you were listening for, it would stand out from the normal oceanic noises.. kinda like those old war sub stories of marooned submariners taking a wrench and tapping out the morse code for SOS on the steel hull of the submarine.
When I read your post, I considered my automobile.
A 1977 Toyota Corolla. A nice old car. No electronics at all in the engine systems. Everything is all old-school. Points. Coil. Carburetor. And reliable as all getout.
Sure, the car performance slowly gets crappy once in a while when the points begin deteriorating.. but its not a sudden failure, and its pretty obvious to me what the problem is when it shows up... a few minutes with the timing light and I have the problem under control.
But the neat thing is that if I ever have a problem when the car won't start, its pretty simple to find out why. Its simple enough that you can usually fish through the ignition circuit with nothing more sophisticated than a light bulb. The carburetor is pretty simple.. you can look right in and see if the fuel looks to be injected properly.. or pour some in directly if you suspect that lack of fuel is why it isn't starting. ( of course, it won't run for long with just a swig of fuel, but you did verify the problem ).
Pretty simple thing.. but I really like it for its simplicity. The problem here is that I view the car as a machine I have to take me where I want to go, I do not see it as some possession I have whose function is to impress someone else.
I love simplicity.
It gives me great comfort to know exactly what my things do, how they do it, and how to fix them if they go wrong. For this reason, I will probably never give up my old DOS system and its assorted debuggers ( softice, etc. ). Its to the point I can run this old stuff on anything, and know exactly whats amiss if I get a hiccup. I really can't figure out why I want more complexity in my life... I am already overwhelmed by all this new stuff that comes out that I have no idea how to maintain properly or how to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
And that's why I keep my old car. Its right at a quarter-century old, and still runs great. And requires only a miniscule amount of my resources to maintain it.
DAMM! No sooner than I had replied, the system responded that it undid the moderation I did to this forum. Although I only used two modpoints in this forum.. it still made a difference to those two posters I modded.
Don't repeat my mistake and comment to a forum you've moderated. I wasn't thinking. Just because the system lets you do it does not mean there won't be a penalty for doing so.
I won't do this again.
Please don't waste your modpoints on this.. there are way too many deserving posters here.
Mea culpa! Sorry, guys, for slipping a digit. Thanks, AC, for the heads-up. If I had not already contaminated my ability to moderate this forum, I would bump you up one for this. I think you slipped a sequence too, but you recognized the bug and pointed it out. Good enuf.
I must have been thinking of that little coax line I use all the time.. RG-174.. its tiny and flexible and I use it a lot for general purpose shielded line..
I googled around and I see I meant to say:
RS-274D . I include the Google hotlink while I had it up for verification so the rest of you can look at the gerber formats and specs if you are so inclined.
Incidentally, AC... I note PADS PCB ( Power PCB ) also uses.PCB suffix.. do you know if the files are interchangeable between Protel and PADS?
( I still use PADS PCB for DOS.. It makes Gerber files. I really like that old proggie.)
Look around the site. Look for any info they may be an industry standard gerber file.
Gerber files are what is sent to a photoplotter to make the masks for etching printed circuit boards. They are standard across the industry, coming in two flavors, RS-174D and RS-174X, which differ mostly in how the aperture tables which define pad and trace sizes and widths are implemented.
Protel's software is a graphics editor for making and editing printed circuit board manufacturing files, so there may be other editors that might be able to read it.
If you are unable to open the PCB files, most likely you may have to lay out the circuit board yourself if you wanna make one.
Thanks.. I just linked over from your post and read it. Yup. That's the one I got.
It scared the bejeebies out of me when I got my email. I was reading Slashdot at the time it came in. I loaded it, saw it, and thought oh s*t... More crap for me to have to straighten out. Then I noted they did not have my name.. but somehow had my email addy.. what business in their right mind would send email of such a nature to people who they did not even know the name of? As far as that goes, what business in their right mind would ask for information again that you have already given them?
So, I went to the best buy website and they had a snippet on their front page regarding a scam, unfortunately, I could not read it as I am not running the scripting languages their website requires. I do not run it as I have security concerns concerning rogue hostile applets. So I googled for +"best buy" +"hoax" and got three reports. I read them. Yup. Thats what I got. By this time, I wasn't scared any more, my fear had mutated to pure anger.
So I switched back to Slashdot, angry as all getout and submitted the damn thing as a story. In my anger, I did not really do it right - they had something better to run, but in my mind, I was so pissed off over it that I wanted to run it past Slashdot and everyone else at that hour I could. I tried to hit the local TV news websites and tip them off to what was flying over the net at that hour. (around 9PM), but these commercial websites are useless. Its hard enough just trying to get a commercial website to load anymore unless you run the latest browser and its plug-ins. And forget trying to contact these guys on a dialup. No way can you ping them up in a minute and transfer a news tip to them, as they wanna load you up with several megabytes of useless stuff. So I tried to post to local TV channels 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 to no avail. It was an experience in frustration to see this stuff flying over the net and being helpless to share it. I thought maybe it was something like when I saw the SQL slammer worm suddenly show up.. I figured if they noted the hoax on the 10PM news, it may keep others from falling for it.
Normally I view spam as a royal pain in the arse, but when they attempt to use it to deceive me, my frustration is quickly replaced by an intense urge to see to it they can't do it again.. I guess its the same thing I feel when some varmint takes it into its head to take a bite out of me.. then I don't wanna rest until I see dead varmint.
Its been my experience that even though you find out which IP the harvesting spider operated from, they only sell their harvested stuff to mass marketers, which proceed through several layers of people before ending up in the hands of those doing the mass mailings.
These guys come like a thief in the night. They load your page like any other search engine spider. Its like knowing the face of the guy who went through your neighborhood, trying every door knob in the guise of distributing an advertising flyer, then later he disclosed to other thieves, unknown to you, whose at home during the day and who is not.
Yes, its helpful in building a case, like knowing who is going through a neighborhood trying all the doors, but catching the actual guy in the act is not as easy.
Some of this spam is really getting nasty. Just two days ago, I received this spam in my box purporting to be from the fraud department of Best Buy regarding CD players some guy in New York is trying to buy with my credit card. It seemed a really professional email, except they didn't know my name, and apparently had to get my email addy from a national credit bureau agency. When the links did not point as shown, I really became leery. The whole thing was apparently a ruse to get me to log into their site and disclose all sorts of personal information, playing on my fear that if I did not do so, the fraudulent transaction would complete.
Watch out, guys. There's a lot of deception going on out there.
Any tools and techniques we make to help us find out who these little rascals are is really welcome. Being some students just got nailed for their life savings for just their involvement in sharing a few songs, I trust this same environment can be used for those involved in internet scams which often cost not just a few record sales, but often substantial, I mean really substantial, grief for the victim.
No matter how hard we try ( that is, even if we attempt to try ), we are gonna break somebody else's interpretation of what's right all the time.
I think this episode just verified that observation.
The scary thing is that because none of us are perfect, anyone with an axe to grind can mill through the most innant details of our personal lives and bring it to the public attention, that of our wife, boss, friends, co-workers, etc.., highly magnifying what they think we did wrong.
This could be quite a way for one to harass another.
Like, now Senator Hatch himself has gone onto public record as advocating destruction of other's private property.. what if instead of some government official talking about destruction of other's property, it was somebody else talking about it? Where are we going to draw the line between a "patriot" and a "terrorist"?
Maybe they will develop some technology... such as rewriting a CDROM's flash code to spin the rom at a much higher speed than it was designed for, resulting in destruction of the CD...
But consider the counter side of this...
Once this code is released, there will be those who trap it and disassemble it to find out how it does its dirty deed... then its modified for a viral payload.
Dekashizl, you hit right on a concern I have toyed around with for years...
"But hey, who's to say we're not all just part of one big infinitely cyclical postmodern technological revolution 10s of thousands of years old... "
I was hoping we would find the answer on the moon.
Consider, if mankind in any point since creation of Earth itself had risen to the point we are in now... even if it were millions of years ago... they would have sent stuff to the moon and left their mark there, just as we have.
On Earth, weather, corrosion, and human nature have a tendency to destroy artifacts. But if they landed it on the moon, its safe there.. safe from weather, corrosion, and the hands of those not savvy enough to get there. Much less accessible than say, trying to hide it in a pyramid, where it is a constant target for looters. We already have a quantity of unexplainable items on Earth... but then these could be hoaxes or just flat misunderstood.
It is a great curiousity of mine to see them map the moon and look for any anomolies ( shades of the Tycho monolith as in 2001-A Space Odessey? ). If we find anything there, its gonna be one helluva study to find out how it got there.
"They seem to believe that, having once provided value, they are now entitled to be paid in perpetuity, without earning it."
My sentiments exactly.. If I fixed your car, do I have a right to exact a fee per mile from you for as long as you continue to use the fix I put in? As a design engineer, I design stuff all the time for my employer, and I get paid to do so. Some of my stuff makes for a good return on investment, some of it doesn't. But that doesn't mean I design one good product and hold the company hostage for it. I stop work, I don't get paid anymore. I can't just burp something out then retire on it. I think a lot of people think they can do this, and are trying their darndest to enact this paradigm into law. I see it only as a maneuvering ploy for people who don't produce a thing to enjoy the top fruits of society by arranging things so they control whether or not anything gets done, and guarantee them once they can get "rights" to something, they can hold others hostage for it like landlords exacting rent from tenants.
But being in the virtual world, no-one needs your virtual building when they can coin their own at the push of a button.
So, I see this push for "property rights" ( when they don't necessarily belong to the author but are readily signed away as part of employment agreements) as being part of continuing the status quo between tenants and landlords. There will be those who earn their keep through the sweat of their brow. There will be the "owning class" who justify their existence by merely owning things.
The "owning class" will do everything in their power to protect their interests.
They use the word "theft" as it psychologically connotes a much stronger and repulsive act than "copyright violation".
Powers-that-be that have legal power feel free to coin law that benefits them.
Other powers-that-be that have technical intellect feel free to coin technology that benefits them.
This discussion has gone on since recorded history.. even Plato, in his book "Republic", written some 370-380 years BC brings up the enigma of "justice" and whether or not it is just a construct designed by the stronger to retard the efforts of the weaker interest.
So, special interests enjoin Congress to pass Law.
And coders circumvent the law they don't believe in.
Of course, RIAA expects the legal system, funded by the public-at-large, to represent their interests as codified into the law they lobbied for.
And the people hold their own beliefs on what they feel is rightfully theirs, no matter what the RIAA or their lobbied Congressmen pass.
So, whats in a word? Shakespeare noted that " a rose by any other name still smells just as sweet."...
But we like to use powerful words that have a psychological impact... like "theft".
Like, does the Patriot Act have anything to do with Patriotism? Or is Patrick Henry ("Give me Liberty or Give me Death?") just some crackpot out of our history books?
Although technically not redundant, the parent , as worded, looks like a "trash" post, and received the appropriate moderation.
I reply to this in the spirit you are the parent poster which asked "Is the NewsHour the same length as 60 Minutes? " and did a typo, meaning "Is the NewsHour the same show as 60 Minutes?"
I reply giving you the benefit of the doubt, knowing you may not be in America or familiar with the networks..
The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour is run on the PBS network.
Although both are news shows, they are NOT the same show.
And, please, referring to the slashdot community as "fucktards" is kinda pointless.. it really doesn't solve anything, it just pisses folks off and if they have a mod point laying around, they will just be inclined to use it to drive you under the ground.
"Why should I go spend $20 on a cd when i'm I can't even play it in my computer, nor am I sure it will play in my car cd player."
Hmmm. So your source material is not to spec standards.. but if you have to "fix" it so it works.. then the source != destination... that means its NOT an "exact copy" as claimed...
Slashdot Mirror
Now you have another faction on your ass.. those who don't know how to spell...
Remember when they were playing around with the NAFTA and the H1B programs, and people who had spent much money educating themselves complained that the exportation of jobs would dilute the value of the effort they had invested in their education...
But the stuff got passed anyway. Jobs were exported to where labor was cheaper. Just because you had invested in yourself was no guarantee you would benefit from it.
Then a few years later, we figure out how to use technology to bypass traditional routes of music distribution - and those who had spent much money producing those works complained that the replication of the works out of their control diluted the value of the effort they invested in producing it.
In this case, laws protecting the ones who had made investments were passed.
What works for the goose does not necessarily work for the gander. Especially if Congress is involved.
Already, I am way too swamped with information I can't process it all, and many businesses I have to deal with ( insurance companies and anything to do with retirement investments ) know this and send me reams and reams of meaningless data.
Ever tried to read those phone-book prospectus they send? Or tried to understand whats really covered in that insurance policy? Or know what you should do with those proxies?
So somehow the government is going to collect and store all this data on all of us. How many of us will be needed to snoop on the rest of us? How many of us will be actually earning our keep, rather than coercing (taxing) it away from someone else? Will our economy, already crumbling from the effects of our inefficiency, absorb yet more non-productive loading? We are already running a helluva national debt. I know we think Joe Taxpayer is going to somehow foot the bill for this whole thing, but I get the idea we are kinda in for a surprise similar to the one some astronauts got when they tried to push some overstressed things beyond their limit. Once the infrastructure collapses, we may have to start off at a very low level again. What scares me is that it seems to me that technology has outpaced our means of maintaining it without a sophisticated infrastructure in place to do so. Given the resources of a machine shop, could you produce anything you needed to keep cars running?
I have large areas of my life in collapse already from not "making time" to pay due diligence to numerous busyworks. ( I put "making time" in quotes, because I really can't make time, I only can divert it from something else. ) - I simply can't see where we as a public can afford all this busywork trying to keep tabs on everybody else.
I am not privy to the design plans, but somehow this whole episode reeks of a malfunction of some failsafe system. I find it difficult to conceive of some design engineer not hedging his bets against something as inevitable as a severed tether.
Another poster noted RF being lossy underwater. My guess would been to place piezoelectric sonar transducers on the hull and ping them in the event the sub considered itself lost. It wouldn't take that much energy, but if you knew what kind of racket you were listening for, it would stand out from the normal oceanic noises.. kinda like those old war sub stories of marooned submariners taking a wrench and tapping out the morse code for SOS on the steel hull of the submarine.
Professor Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report.
And d'fim, if I had points, I would have given you a good mod for that post.. but lacking those, I'll just do a little busywork.
A 1977 Toyota Corolla. A nice old car. No electronics at all in the engine systems. Everything is all old-school. Points. Coil. Carburetor. And reliable as all getout.
Sure, the car performance slowly gets crappy once in a while when the points begin deteriorating.. but its not a sudden failure, and its pretty obvious to me what the problem is when it shows up... a few minutes with the timing light and I have the problem under control.
But the neat thing is that if I ever have a problem when the car won't start, its pretty simple to find out why. Its simple enough that you can usually fish through the ignition circuit with nothing more sophisticated than a light bulb. The carburetor is pretty simple.. you can look right in and see if the fuel looks to be injected properly.. or pour some in directly if you suspect that lack of fuel is why it isn't starting. ( of course, it won't run for long with just a swig of fuel, but you did verify the problem ).
Pretty simple thing.. but I really like it for its simplicity. The problem here is that I view the car as a machine I have to take me where I want to go, I do not see it as some possession I have whose function is to impress someone else.
I love simplicity.
It gives me great comfort to know exactly what my things do, how they do it, and how to fix them if they go wrong. For this reason, I will probably never give up my old DOS system and its assorted debuggers ( softice, etc. ). Its to the point I can run this old stuff on anything, and know exactly whats amiss if I get a hiccup. I really can't figure out why I want more complexity in my life... I am already overwhelmed by all this new stuff that comes out that I have no idea how to maintain properly or how to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
And that's why I keep my old car. Its right at a quarter-century old, and still runs great. And requires only a miniscule amount of my resources to maintain it.
Thanks for running this past us, Simoniker.
I'll be looking for it.
Don't repeat my mistake and comment to a forum you've moderated. I wasn't thinking. Just because the system lets you do it does not mean there won't be a penalty for doing so.
I won't do this again.
Please don't waste your modpoints on this.. there are way too many deserving posters here.
And I still stand by how I modded it: ( +1,Insightful )
I am not considering whats "legal" or not.. my main concern is what is "right".
And I think Daytona has a pretty good insight on the problem.
Hence, my reaction to his post.I must have been thinking of that little coax line I use all the time.. RG-174.. its tiny and flexible and I use it a lot for general purpose shielded line..
I googled around and I see I meant to say: RS-274D . I include the Google hotlink while I had it up for verification so the rest of you can look at the gerber formats and specs if you are so inclined.
Incidentally, AC... I note PADS PCB ( Power PCB ) also uses .PCB suffix.. do you know if the files are interchangeable between Protel and PADS?
( I still use PADS PCB for DOS.. It makes Gerber files. I really like that old proggie.)
Look around the site. Look for any info they may be an industry standard gerber file.
Gerber files are what is sent to a photoplotter to make the masks for etching printed circuit boards. They are standard across the industry, coming in two flavors, RS-174D and RS-174X, which differ mostly in how the aperture tables which define pad and trace sizes and widths are implemented.
Protel's software is a graphics editor for making and editing printed circuit board manufacturing files, so there may be other editors that might be able to read it.
If you are unable to open the PCB files, most likely you may have to lay out the circuit board yourself if you wanna make one.
It scared the bejeebies out of me when I got my email. I was reading Slashdot at the time it came in. I loaded it, saw it, and thought oh s*t... More crap for me to have to straighten out. Then I noted they did not have my name.. but somehow had my email addy.. what business in their right mind would send email of such a nature to people who they did not even know the name of? As far as that goes, what business in their right mind would ask for information again that you have already given them?
So, I went to the best buy website and they had a snippet on their front page regarding a scam, unfortunately, I could not read it as I am not running the scripting languages their website requires. I do not run it as I have security concerns concerning rogue hostile applets. So I googled for +"best buy" +"hoax" and got three reports. I read them. Yup. Thats what I got. By this time, I wasn't scared any more, my fear had mutated to pure anger.
So I switched back to Slashdot, angry as all getout and submitted the damn thing as a story. In my anger, I did not really do it right - they had something better to run, but in my mind, I was so pissed off over it that I wanted to run it past Slashdot and everyone else at that hour I could. I tried to hit the local TV news websites and tip them off to what was flying over the net at that hour. (around 9PM), but these commercial websites are useless. Its hard enough just trying to get a commercial website to load anymore unless you run the latest browser and its plug-ins. And forget trying to contact these guys on a dialup. No way can you ping them up in a minute and transfer a news tip to them, as they wanna load you up with several megabytes of useless stuff. So I tried to post to local TV channels 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 to no avail. It was an experience in frustration to see this stuff flying over the net and being helpless to share it. I thought maybe it was something like when I saw the SQL slammer worm suddenly show up.. I figured if they noted the hoax on the 10PM news, it may keep others from falling for it.
Normally I view spam as a royal pain in the arse, but when they attempt to use it to deceive me, my frustration is quickly replaced by an intense urge to see to it they can't do it again.. I guess its the same thing I feel when some varmint takes it into its head to take a bite out of me.. then I don't wanna rest until I see dead varmint.
These guys come like a thief in the night. They load your page like any other search engine spider. Its like knowing the face of the guy who went through your neighborhood, trying every door knob in the guise of distributing an advertising flyer, then later he disclosed to other thieves, unknown to you, whose at home during the day and who is not.
Yes, its helpful in building a case, like knowing who is going through a neighborhood trying all the doors, but catching the actual guy in the act is not as easy.
Some of this spam is really getting nasty. Just two days ago, I received this spam in my box purporting to be from the fraud department of Best Buy regarding CD players some guy in New York is trying to buy with my credit card. It seemed a really professional email, except they didn't know my name, and apparently had to get my email addy from a national credit bureau agency. When the links did not point as shown, I really became leery. The whole thing was apparently a ruse to get me to log into their site and disclose all sorts of personal information, playing on my fear that if I did not do so, the fraudulent transaction would complete.
Watch out, guys. There's a lot of deception going on out there.
Any tools and techniques we make to help us find out who these little rascals are is really welcome. Being some students just got nailed for their life savings for just their involvement in sharing a few songs, I trust this same environment can be used for those involved in internet scams which often cost not just a few record sales, but often substantial, I mean really substantial, grief for the victim.
I think this episode just verified that observation.
The scary thing is that because none of us are perfect, anyone with an axe to grind can mill through the most innant details of our personal lives and bring it to the public attention, that of our wife, boss, friends, co-workers, etc.., highly magnifying what they think we did wrong.
This could be quite a way for one to harass another.
Like, now Senator Hatch himself has gone onto public record as advocating destruction of other's private property.. what if instead of some government official talking about destruction of other's property, it was somebody else talking about it? Where are we going to draw the line between a "patriot" and a "terrorist"?
From what I read, this sounds like something a terrorist would do...
"You don't agree with me, therefore I blow you up!"
But consider the counter side of this...
Once this code is released, there will be those who trap it and disassemble it to find out how it does its dirty deed... then its modified for a viral payload.
The next SQL slammer could literally be that.
Consider, if mankind in any point since creation of Earth itself had risen to the point we are in now... even if it were millions of years ago... they would have sent stuff to the moon and left their mark there, just as we have.
On Earth, weather, corrosion, and human nature have a tendency to destroy artifacts. But if they landed it on the moon, its safe there.. safe from weather, corrosion, and the hands of those not savvy enough to get there. Much less accessible than say, trying to hide it in a pyramid, where it is a constant target for looters. We already have a quantity of unexplainable items on Earth... but then these could be hoaxes or just flat misunderstood.
It is a great curiousity of mine to see them map the moon and look for any anomolies ( shades of the Tycho monolith as in 2001-A Space Odessey? ). If we find anything there, its gonna be one helluva study to find out how it got there.
Parent links to a porn site.
But being in the virtual world, no-one needs your virtual building when they can coin their own at the push of a button.
So, I see this push for "property rights" ( when they don't necessarily belong to the author but are readily signed away as part of employment agreements) as being part of continuing the status quo between tenants and landlords. There will be those who earn their keep through the sweat of their brow. There will be the "owning class" who justify their existence by merely owning things. The "owning class" will do everything in their power to protect their interests.
Powers-that-be that have legal power feel free to coin law that benefits them.
Other powers-that-be that have technical intellect feel free to coin technology that benefits them.
This discussion has gone on since recorded history.. even Plato, in his book "Republic", written some 370-380 years BC brings up the enigma of "justice" and whether or not it is just a construct designed by the stronger to retard the efforts of the weaker interest.
So, special interests enjoin Congress to pass Law.
And coders circumvent the law they don't believe in.
Of course, RIAA expects the legal system, funded by the public-at-large, to represent their interests as codified into the law they lobbied for.
And the people hold their own beliefs on what they feel is rightfully theirs, no matter what the RIAA or their lobbied Congressmen pass.
So, whats in a word? Shakespeare noted that " a rose by any other name still smells just as sweet."...
But we like to use powerful words that have a psychological impact... like "theft".
Like, does the Patriot Act have anything to do with Patriotism? Or is Patrick Henry ("Give me Liberty or Give me Death?") just some crackpot out of our history books?
I reply to this in the spirit you are the parent poster which asked "Is the NewsHour the same length as 60 Minutes? " and did a typo, meaning "Is the NewsHour the same show as 60 Minutes?"
I reply giving you the benefit of the doubt, knowing you may not be in America or familiar with the networks..
The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour is run on the PBS network.
60 Minutes is run on the CBS network.
Although both are news shows, they are NOT the same show.
And, please, referring to the slashdot community as "fucktards" is kinda pointless.. it really doesn't solve anything, it just pisses folks off and if they have a mod point laying around, they will just be inclined to use it to drive you under the ground.
I pay property tax.