The anti-Walton biased article is able to come up with about 2-3 million in potitical donations, and whines about all their charitable donations not being to the charities The Nation prefers.
That's not exactly the claimed 100 times what Soros spend politically every year. Soros spent 27 million just to try and defeat Bush in the last election.
Heck, liberal Bill Gates spends more on liberal causes than the whole family of Walton's do on politics. Not to mention Paul Allen, etc...
The Republican Party gets more in "Hard Money" contributions. Even more since BCRA was passed. These are limited to 2K/person/campaign.
The Democrat Party gets a higher percentage from "Soft Money" contributions and contributions to 527's. These are mostly large dollar contributions by people exceeding the hard money caps.
Recently, they've had around a 4:1 advantage in 527's. You know, the loop hole in BCRA.
Also, your washington post article doesn't say what you said it does about 2002.
George Soros can spend pretty close to 100% of his income and assets on political speech if he wants.
That's because he can afford to pay 0.01% of that total on lawyers to setup as many cookie-cutter 527's and campaign commitees as he likes. He also doesn't need to pool his funds with anyone else to afford an expensive advertisement.
If you want to to the same thing (assuming you aren't as rich), you'll need to also come up with the money for lawyers to find loopholes in campaign finance laws for you. You'll also find that if you want to get together with some other like minded people or give to candidates you like, it's literally a federal offense to spend much unless again, you pay the lawyers.
That's the problem with the elections regulations we have. It doesn't really stop anyone from spending the money, it just pushes the money into places that lawyers find for their clients, screwing people who can't afford to hire a bunch of lawyers.
How come the owner of the NY Times can editorialize all he wants in favor of candidates and issues and publicize it to millions of people right up to election day, but you personally and your friends aren't legally allowed to buy an ad in that same paper 30 days before an election? It doesn't sound like that's "protecting" your speech at all, just the speech of big players, primarily to benefit incumbants.
I just don't happen to know any billionaires off the top of my head who are active politically and primarily support Republican, conservative or libertarian causes in the U.S. with hundreds of millions (or billions, since you suggest a 100 to 1 ratio) of dollars every year. They may exist, as I only personally know the politics of a few billionaires.
However, I'm sure with your opinions, you'll be able to come up with a few. Here's a list of billionaries as a starting point for you.
I'd like to hear about this breed of billionaires you speak of. Maybe I can hit one up for some money for a good cause.
Back in reality, the Democratic party in the U.S. gets much more of it's contributions from large individual contributions than the Republican party does, both in terms of percentage of contributions and in terms of total contributions.
Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
The existing law section 22 is:
(22) Public communication. The term 'public communication' means a communication by means of any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing, or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising.
So yeah, the Democrat's are against Free Speech on the Internet. The (GP) argument that they are also against Free Speech in general and Free Political Speech in particular isn't some sort of massive loophole trying to be created, it just means that they are being consistent in their opposition to Free Speech.
Those of us who agree with the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." wish the bill was simply to delete all of the laws that prohibit political speech in the U.S. That way maybe people who aren't billionaire liberals like George Soros might be able to compete without having to hire a bunch of lawyers first to find the loopholes.
The article and referenced study is useless. It doesn't account for permit fees and the cost of regulation compliance, it doesn't control for the employee's age/experience/skills. It tries to generalize across huge categories of workers (programmer/analyst?) that in reality vary wildly.
The theory that "funny-named people who speak with an accent tend to have a harder time getting hired for as much money" is as equally sound of a conclusion as this guy's conclusion. At least my theory could actually be proved if you used better information in the study. It's a lot harder to prove a mind-reading result with financial data, as opposed to say, a controlled survey of the people who have hired H1-B workers.
The article can be summed up as:
1. Add up some random salary facts 2. Ignore any major controls for those facts 3. Draw completely irrelevent conclusion (He makes a socialogical conclusion reading employers minds based on financial data.) 4. Post a commentary to/. in order to get traffic and notice. Make sure your conclusion is in line with/. reader's financial interests. 4. ???? 5. Profit!
The problem is that when you explicitly substitute the personal opinions of the judge over that of the legislature, you grant the judge power he is not supposed to be wielding in our constitutional separation of powers legal system.
One judge's opinion of what "harms society" vs. what "benefits society" will differ from another judge's and one of them is going to differ from your opinion. It's not up to the judge to make that determination.
If the law is outdated, then get it changed in the proper manner. The technical term for judges that change the law to "benefit society" based on their personal opinion is "dictator", or at best "oligarchy".
In this case, tough cases make bad law if a judge insists on trying to shoehorn his preferred result into laws that don't apply.
You apparently have a false view of the role of judges in our legal system is.
Judges are to apply the law as written in light of the precedents whose purpose has been to clarify ambiguous areas in the law, not just make up rulings to fit whatever they think is "good" and find something to justify it after the fact.
If you disagree with how the law applies to a specific set of circumstances (like this case), then that's what legislators represent you for, to accomplish changing the law or making a new law that is better.
If no precedent applies, than a judge simply has to rule what he can within the bounds of what does apply. In this case, if the law doesn't contemplate this sort of copying event and there is nothing that prohibits it, then the lawsuit should get tossed out. If this sort of action by Google falls under the copyright restrictions as they exist and no exemptions apply, than the publishers should win. If Google's actions do fall under an existing exemption, then Google should prevail.
If you personally don't like the result of the law applied fairly and accurately, don't put the burden on the judges, they aren't supposed to change things like that and in fact are required by their oath of office to NOT change things based on their personal views of what is good or bad copyright policy.
Instead, put the burden on a jury to refuse to order any damages (There is a reason we have a right to jury trials in the US. One of which is that they are the ones in the legal system who are supposed to judge the fitness of the law itself as it applies to a specific case, as a safeguard against legal injustice.) and more particularly on the legislatures who among the thousands of pages of new laws they put on the books every year, can't find time to adjust copyright law to account for big electronic search engines connected to the internet.
We once spent an extra $250K on hardware to buy a pair of 2 cpu Alpha boxes instead of a pair of 4 cpu Sun boxes for our Oracle RAC setup because it saved us literally about $1,000,000 bucks in Oracle licenses and at the time, the performance level between the two was similar.
Unlimited per cpu licenses are expensive for Oracle, although they have come way down the last couple of years, they're still ridiculous.
"maybe $1000-$2000 one time charge for oracle + 18% / year"
Are you kidding? Have you ever priced out a real Oracle license for a web-based application? (IE unlimited users or CPU basaed, which is what Oracle requires for anything that allows the general Internet to use it).
The way Dish DVRs in general work is that they record the encrypted, compressed (and currently MPEG2, MPEG4 coming early next year) broadcast stream directly to the drive.
Then, every time it's played back, they decrypt it using a smartcard and hardware MPEG decoder just before outputting the video.
The two major features of this process are:
1. Lower disk storage requirements for the compressed version. 2. The content stays encrypted, even on disk.
Some newer Dish DVRs have USB and firewire ports. The current speculation is that the firewire ports are designed to work with things like the PocketDish. The original specs called for firewire to be available for DVD recorders and such, but that's been vaporware so far. Speculation is that conflicts with content providers has slowed that process down, if not killed it completely as a future feature.
It wouldn't make much sense for DISH to violate their existing process by decoding/decompressing video and then sending the results to the PocketDISH. It would make a LOT of sense for them to just pass the recorded broadcast streams over to the PocketDish hard drive via firewire and then have the PocketDish perform the decoding and decompressing. A side benefit is that it still leaves the files accessible, but still encrypted the same as the broadcast feed is, essentially leaving a DRM-like situation in place.
Guess what? They have these really neat boxes now that let you record tv shows to a hard drive and skip the commercials while watching them at your leisure. I understand there are lots of people who make them now, commercially or home grown.
It's also nice for watching football games, where you can watch a full game in an hour, since you can just skip the between-plays waiting times.
So no need to watch any more commercials and no need to be tied to a broadcast schedule.
And of course there is already another paper calling into question the physical model used by the paper in the story summary.
I still think Dark Matter is something of a kludge that is going to be displaced by a real explanation sometime and that there is a good possibility that using general relativity (as in this paper) is going to lead to that real explanation, but teaching any of these theories as "facts" just demonstrates the lack of knowledge by the teacher. They are simply alternative theories that somewhat fit with most recent measurements.
You do realize that at some point, the music/video/whatever leaves the integrated circuit and heads out to the device that displays/amplifies/whatever it, right? That consumer electronic devices aren't one big monolithic IC?
The reason things like DBS encryption/protection DO work is that they are specifically designed to NOT output signals that don't meet their criteria. In a system that is designed to output everything it's decoding, there's going to be an output of the signal by definition because that's what the system is there for.
1. Buy cheap TV/DVD player/Tuner/etc... that legitimately decodes the signal (or eventually simulate it in software) 2. Remove signal decoding hardware/software from cheap device 3. Output perfect digital copies to your own blank media in order to give/sell them to others to copy 4. ?????? 5. Profit!
DRM just raises the dififculty level of making "perfect" digital copies, it doesn't actually prevent it as long as anyone can buy a cheap device that decodes and provides an output of the information.
It's the old "you can't have your cake and eat it too" problem. You can't let someone play something, then expect to be able to prevent them from re-recording that play of it.
What DRM does do in the long run (IMHO), is reduce the ranks of IP piracy to those who are willing to go to greater efforts to break the DRM, thus empowering the professional pirates in it for the money at the expense of their normal customer who would just copy it for themselves instead of setting up a whole worldwide internet business based on it.
As a good companion to the book you site, that explores issues of historical progress and cultures from an academically sound perspective, I think you would find "Conquest and Cultures: An International History" by Thomas Sowell thought provoking.
It has a bit too much information for most general audiences, but for anyone interested enough in the topic to do some reading, it's very informative.
I personally like to take a subject and read as many different books on that subject that I can find in a short time, so that I can compare all of the available information to form my own opinions from. If you like to read in that manner at all, then I figured you'd appreciate the recommendation.
The obvious solution to that dilemma is to have the voter use whatever computer/machine to create the human-and-machine readable ballot, let them look it over all they want before they leave the voting booth, then they actually vote by dropping their particular ballot into the ballot counting machine next to the judges.
Just like they do in most places right now, stick a serial number on each ballot and record the serial numbers you give out to each registered voter (not recorded matched to the individual) so that they can't be easily duplicated.
Then you can have the machines count the ballots to get an instant total, the person who voted can be sure that their vote was created and fed into the machine as they requested, and as a last resort in a dispute, you can process every individual ballot by a human instead of by a machine, or re-run them through the machine, or whatever you want to do with them, since you still have a physical human and machine readable ballot.
Do some basic checks like matching the number of registered voters whose signed in with the number of ballot serial numbers given out with the number of votes recorded by the machine and you're set. In an intense dispute, you can individually verify that the serials on the ballots the machine is counting matches exactly with the list of serials the judges gave to the voters.
A system where you can use an electronic or physical voting machine to make marking your ballot easy, the voter can physically see that their ballot is filled out properly, you get an instant machine counted vote total, you can recount the votes manually or automatically and as long as you have an observer/judge from each interested party at the polling place (as under the current system), they can watch and be able to 100% verify that the counted vote total is accurate and that the process has been followed.
See, the flaw in electronic voting isnt't the user interface, it's in the storage and transmission of the vote results. That's where we need the transparency, because that's the major fraud potential.
I agree with you that it would be better if the software was open source and available to all, but the $795 price tag is still an enhancement for the small company that might have had to pay $75-150/hour for a lawyer and/or paralegal to do a complete search and analysis for them manually.
While the really large company is already in a better position to pay an even higher fee to get the information.
'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'
The one with the most money to throw around has always had an advantage in patent (or any other type of) litigation. This software doesn't change that.
What it does do is make the process more efficient, which reduces use of resources that can now be spent on something more productive, rather than having been "wasted" on patent litigation.
That in fact DOES 'help the economy produce more goods or services'. It even helps the 'little guy' by allowing them to do a type of search and analysis with lower resources.
Anyone who thinks that lowering the cost of entry to perform a particular activity helps the big players at the expense of the smaller players needs to go back to economics 101 and stop reading so many technophobe books.
This article is similar to saying 'The low cost of the Apache web server software allows big companies to get a bigger slice of the pie, since they no longer have to pay as much for serving web pages. Since big companies have more web sites per company than little companies, they save so much more money. How will the little people keep up!?!?'
It's complete and utter BS to blame a tool becoming more efficient for how that tool is used by someone.
RTCore also supports zero-copy real-time networking on Ethernet and FireWire (1394) via the LNet extension. LNet enables hard real-time control of networked devices as well as facilitating the use of real-time networking to control data flow and perform fault recovery for enterprise applications.
With tools shipping to do this right now, this may actually make a nice impact in the feasibility of routers/fws/filters/LBs/etc... processing higher-level protocols at nearer wire speed.
What is your belief that the federal response was slow based on? Have you seen a timeline of the response and compared it to previous hurricane responses? Are you personally involved in hurricane responses? Or are you just absorbing what the talking heads on TV tell you to think?
Of course, once you start looking at facts instead of the media's instajudgment how-can-we-bash-Bush party line, you notice that the federal response wasn't slow. Actually, it was faster than in past storm situations.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your beliefs.
From http://homelandresponse.org/full_story.php?WID=139 77 : "Gov. Blanco has complained repeatedly and bitterly behind the scenes that the federal government did not act quickly enough. According to a White House spokesman, she was asked by President George Bush to order the evacuation of New Orleans on Aug. 27, 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck. Blanco, for reasons unknown, waited until Aug. 28. After the levees broke and the city began to flood, the White House spokesman says the president asked if she wanted the federal government to take control of the evacuation of New Orleans. Gov. Blanco asked for 24 hours to think about it."
Nicely summarized, but the information is also available in plenty of other places online.
Perhaps you should leave your outrage at the door of ignorance, since you clearly don't understand that the Mayor and Governor are in charge of their locality, not the President.
The President was practically begging them to evacuate the city before the Katrina hit. Instead, the mayor completely failed to even follow his own city's evacuation plans, leaving thousands of people stranded and on their own.
Those 20% should have been smart enough to get out like the other 80% of the city's population, but to blame Bush for any of it is ridiculous. We don't have a dictatorship here, you know. It's not like he could have waved a magic wand. FEMA has to wait for the locals to declare an emergency and ask for help. It's their city and state, after all.
The basic problem they had in NO is that the city and state have been in Democratic control for decades and are extremely prone to graf and waste. Frankly, the locals simply didn't have their act together, unlike most of the rest of the places the hurricane hit.
Yeah, Nixon was an economic idiot as well and instituted widespread price controls, as had been done in previous wars. From your source, the restrictions had been abolished by 1976. Of course, the wikipedia isn't always 100% accurate.
Carter's administration worked on reducing them as unecessary any more at times, but not as a bad idea. Instead in 1979 he increased them again.
There is simply no way you can make a case that Carter was against price controls in principle or that he really made much of an effort to end them. His administration did some deregulation of the industry, but they didn't get rid of price controls on gas.
The reality is that Reagan did on January 28, 1981, within a week after he took office (actually, I think he signed the order the day he took office, but it only took effect on the 28th), what Carter should have done long before, end the price controls.
Who ended them? Reagan did.
Read through all the links from research institutes, economic histories and newspaper articles and columns.
Try searching for carter ended price controls in contrast and you'll still get articles about Reagan ending them.
Slashdot Mirror
The anti-Walton biased article is able to come up with about 2-3 million in potitical donations, and whines about all their charitable donations not being to the charities The Nation prefers.
That's not exactly the claimed 100 times what Soros spend politically every year. Soros spent 27 million just to try and defeat Bush in the last election.
Heck, liberal Bill Gates spends more on liberal causes than the whole family of Walton's do on politics. Not to mention Paul Allen, etc...
The Republican Party gets more in "Hard Money" contributions. Even more since BCRA was passed. These are limited to 2K/person/campaign.
The Democrat Party gets a higher percentage from "Soft Money" contributions and contributions to 527's. These are mostly large dollar contributions by people exceeding the hard money caps.
Recently, they've had around a 4:1 advantage in 527's. You know, the loop hole in BCRA.
Also, your washington post article doesn't say what you said it does about 2002.
George Soros can spend pretty close to 100% of his income and assets on political speech if he wants.
That's because he can afford to pay 0.01% of that total on lawyers to setup as many cookie-cutter 527's and campaign commitees as he likes. He also doesn't need to pool his funds with anyone else to afford an expensive advertisement.
If you want to to the same thing (assuming you aren't as rich), you'll need to also come up with the money for lawyers to find loopholes in campaign finance laws for you. You'll also find that if you want to get together with some other like minded people or give to candidates you like, it's literally a federal offense to spend much unless again, you pay the lawyers.
That's the problem with the elections regulations we have. It doesn't really stop anyone from spending the money, it just pushes the money into places that lawyers find for their clients, screwing people who can't afford to hire a bunch of lawyers.
How come the owner of the NY Times can editorialize all he wants in favor of candidates and issues and publicize it to millions of people right up to election day, but you personally and your friends aren't legally allowed to buy an ad in that same paper 30 days before an election? It doesn't sound like that's "protecting" your speech at all, just the speech of big players, primarily to benefit incumbants.
I just don't happen to know any billionaires off the top of my head who are active politically and primarily support Republican, conservative or libertarian causes in the U.S. with hundreds of millions (or billions, since you suggest a 100 to 1 ratio) of dollars every year. They may exist, as I only personally know the politics of a few billionaires.
However, I'm sure with your opinions, you'll be able to come up with a few. Here's a list of billionaries as a starting point for you.
I'd like to hear about this breed of billionaires you speak of. Maybe I can hit one up for some money for a good cause.
Back in reality, the Democratic party in the U.S. gets much more of it's contributions from large individual contributions than the Republican party does, both in terms of percentage of contributions and in terms of total contributions.
The bill (One of the shortest you'll see) says:
Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
The existing law section 22 is:
(22) Public communication. The term 'public communication' means a communication by means of any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing, or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising.
So yeah, the Democrat's are against Free Speech on the Internet. The (GP) argument that they are also against Free Speech in general and Free Political Speech in particular isn't some sort of massive loophole trying to be created, it just means that they are being consistent in their opposition to Free Speech.
Those of us who agree with the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." wish the bill was simply to delete all of the laws that prohibit political speech in the U.S. That way maybe people who aren't billionaire liberals like George Soros might be able to compete without having to hire a bunch of lawyers first to find the loopholes.
And yes, "paying for advertising"="speech".
No, on FreeBSD, wget is redundent, as we have the much better "fetch" command. :)
The article and referenced study is useless. It doesn't account for permit fees and the cost of regulation compliance, it doesn't control for the employee's age/experience/skills. It tries to generalize across huge categories of workers (programmer/analyst?) that in reality vary wildly.
/. in order to get traffic and notice. Make sure your conclusion is in line with /. reader's financial interests.
The theory that "funny-named people who speak with an accent tend to have a harder time getting hired for as much money" is as equally sound of a conclusion as this guy's conclusion. At least my theory could actually be proved if you used better information in the study. It's a lot harder to prove a mind-reading result with financial data, as opposed to say, a controlled survey of the people who have hired H1-B workers.
The article can be summed up as:
1. Add up some random salary facts
2. Ignore any major controls for those facts
3. Draw completely irrelevent conclusion (He makes a socialogical conclusion reading employers minds based on financial data.)
4. Post a commentary to
4. ????
5. Profit!
The problem is that when you explicitly substitute the personal opinions of the judge over that of the legislature, you grant the judge power he is not supposed to be wielding in our constitutional separation of powers legal system.
One judge's opinion of what "harms society" vs. what "benefits society" will differ from another judge's and one of them is going to differ from your opinion. It's not up to the judge to make that determination.
If the law is outdated, then get it changed in the proper manner. The technical term for judges that change the law to "benefit society" based on their personal opinion is "dictator", or at best "oligarchy".
In this case, tough cases make bad law if a judge insists on trying to shoehorn his preferred result into laws that don't apply.
You apparently have a false view of the role of judges in our legal system is.
Judges are to apply the law as written in light of the precedents whose purpose has been to clarify ambiguous areas in the law, not just make up rulings to fit whatever they think is "good" and find something to justify it after the fact.
If you disagree with how the law applies to a specific set of circumstances (like this case), then that's what legislators represent you for, to accomplish changing the law or making a new law that is better.
If no precedent applies, than a judge simply has to rule what he can within the bounds of what does apply. In this case, if the law doesn't contemplate this sort of copying event and there is nothing that prohibits it, then the lawsuit should get tossed out. If this sort of action by Google falls under the copyright restrictions as they exist and no exemptions apply, than the publishers should win. If Google's actions do fall under an existing exemption, then Google should prevail.
If you personally don't like the result of the law applied fairly and accurately, don't put the burden on the judges, they aren't supposed to change things like that and in fact are required by their oath of office to NOT change things based on their personal views of what is good or bad copyright policy.
Instead, put the burden on a jury to refuse to order any damages (There is a reason we have a right to jury trials in the US. One of which is that they are the ones in the legal system who are supposed to judge the fitness of the law itself as it applies to a specific case, as a safeguard against legal injustice.) and more particularly on the legislatures who among the thousands of pages of new laws they put on the books every year, can't find time to adjust copyright law to account for big electronic search engines connected to the internet.
So are we going to all be expected to hibernate our Robson's now?
Why does this sound like a CowboyNeal joke to me?
We once spent an extra $250K on hardware to buy a pair of 2 cpu Alpha boxes instead of a pair of 4 cpu Sun boxes for our Oracle RAC setup because it saved us literally about $1,000,000 bucks in Oracle licenses and at the time, the performance level between the two was similar.
Unlimited per cpu licenses are expensive for Oracle, although they have come way down the last couple of years, they're still ridiculous.
"maybe $1000-$2000 one time charge for oracle + 18% / year"
Are you kidding? Have you ever priced out a real Oracle license for a web-based application? (IE unlimited users or CPU basaed, which is what Oracle requires for anything that allows the general Internet to use it).
The way Dish DVRs in general work is that they record the encrypted, compressed (and currently MPEG2, MPEG4 coming early next year) broadcast stream directly to the drive.
Then, every time it's played back, they decrypt it using a smartcard and hardware MPEG decoder just before outputting the video.
The two major features of this process are:
1. Lower disk storage requirements for the compressed version.
2. The content stays encrypted, even on disk.
Some newer Dish DVRs have USB and firewire ports. The current speculation is that the firewire ports are designed to work with things like the PocketDish. The original specs called for firewire to be available for DVD recorders and such, but that's been vaporware so far. Speculation is that conflicts with content providers has slowed that process down, if not killed it completely as a future feature.
It wouldn't make much sense for DISH to violate their existing process by decoding/decompressing video and then sending the results to the PocketDISH. It would make a LOT of sense for them to just pass the recorded broadcast streams over to the PocketDish hard drive via firewire and then have the PocketDish perform the decoding and decompressing. A side benefit is that it still leaves the files accessible, but still encrypted the same as the broadcast feed is, essentially leaving a DRM-like situation in place.
Guess what? They have these really neat boxes now that let you record tv shows to a hard drive and skip the commercials while watching them at your leisure. I understand there are lots of people who make them now, commercially or home grown.
It's also nice for watching football games, where you can watch a full game in an hour, since you can just skip the between-plays waiting times.
So no need to watch any more commercials and no need to be tied to a broadcast schedule.
And of course there is already another paper calling into question the physical model used by the paper in the story summary.
I still think Dark Matter is something of a kludge that is going to be displaced by a real explanation sometime and that there is a good possibility that using general relativity (as in this paper) is going to lead to that real explanation, but teaching any of these theories as "facts" just demonstrates the lack of knowledge by the teacher. They are simply alternative theories that somewhat fit with most recent measurements.
You do realize that at some point, the music/video/whatever leaves the integrated circuit and heads out to the device that displays/amplifies/whatever it, right? That consumer electronic devices aren't one big monolithic IC?
The reason things like DBS encryption/protection DO work is that they are specifically designed to NOT output signals that don't meet their criteria. In a system that is designed to output everything it's decoding, there's going to be an output of the signal by definition because that's what the system is there for.
Modify it to:
1. Buy cheap TV/DVD player/Tuner/etc... that legitimately decodes the signal (or eventually simulate it in software)
2. Remove signal decoding hardware/software from cheap device
3. Output perfect digital copies to your own blank media in order to give/sell them to others to copy
4. ??????
5. Profit!
DRM just raises the dififculty level of making "perfect" digital copies, it doesn't actually prevent it as long as anyone can buy a cheap device that decodes and provides an output of the information.
It's the old "you can't have your cake and eat it too" problem. You can't let someone play something, then expect to be able to prevent them from re-recording that play of it.
What DRM does do in the long run (IMHO), is reduce the ranks of IP piracy to those who are willing to go to greater efforts to break the DRM, thus empowering the professional pirates in it for the money at the expense of their normal customer who would just copy it for themselves instead of setting up a whole worldwide internet business based on it.
As a good companion to the book you site, that explores issues of historical progress and cultures from an academically sound perspective, I think you would find "Conquest and Cultures: An International History" by Thomas Sowell thought provoking.
It has a bit too much information for most general audiences, but for anyone interested enough in the topic to do some reading, it's very informative.
I personally like to take a subject and read as many different books on that subject that I can find in a short time, so that I can compare all of the available information to form my own opinions from. If you like to read in that manner at all, then I figured you'd appreciate the recommendation.
The obvious solution to that dilemma is to have the voter use whatever computer/machine to create the human-and-machine readable ballot, let them look it over all they want before they leave the voting booth, then they actually vote by dropping their particular ballot into the ballot counting machine next to the judges.
Just like they do in most places right now, stick a serial number on each ballot and record the serial numbers you give out to each registered voter (not recorded matched to the individual) so that they can't be easily duplicated.
Then you can have the machines count the ballots to get an instant total, the person who voted can be sure that their vote was created and fed into the machine as they requested, and as a last resort in a dispute, you can process every individual ballot by a human instead of by a machine, or re-run them through the machine, or whatever you want to do with them, since you still have a physical human and machine readable ballot.
Do some basic checks like matching the number of registered voters whose signed in with the number of ballot serial numbers given out with the number of votes recorded by the machine and you're set. In an intense dispute, you can individually verify that the serials on the ballots the machine is counting matches exactly with the list of serials the judges gave to the voters.
A system where you can use an electronic or physical voting machine to make marking your ballot easy, the voter can physically see that their ballot is filled out properly, you get an instant machine counted vote total, you can recount the votes manually or automatically and as long as you have an observer/judge from each interested party at the polling place (as under the current system), they can watch and be able to 100% verify that the counted vote total is accurate and that the process has been followed.
See, the flaw in electronic voting isnt't the user interface, it's in the storage and transmission of the vote results. That's where we need the transparency, because that's the major fraud potential.
I agree with you that it would be better if the software was open source and available to all, but the $795 price tag is still an enhancement for the small company that might have had to pay $75-150/hour for a lawyer and/or paralegal to do a complete search and analysis for them manually.
While the really large company is already in a better position to pay an even higher fee to get the information.
'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'
The one with the most money to throw around has always had an advantage in patent (or any other type of) litigation. This software doesn't change that.
What it does do is make the process more efficient, which reduces use of resources that can now be spent on something more productive, rather than having been "wasted" on patent litigation.
That in fact DOES 'help the economy produce more goods or services'. It even helps the 'little guy' by allowing them to do a type of search and analysis with lower resources.
Anyone who thinks that lowering the cost of entry to perform a particular activity helps the big players at the expense of the smaller players needs to go back to economics 101 and stop reading so many technophobe books.
This article is similar to saying 'The low cost of the Apache web server software allows big companies to get a bigger slice of the pie, since they no longer have to pay as much for serving web pages. Since big companies have more web sites per company than little companies, they save so much more money. How will the little people keep up!?!?'
It's complete and utter BS to blame a tool becoming more efficient for how that tool is used by someone.
RTCore also supports zero-copy real-time networking on Ethernet and FireWire (1394) via the LNet extension. LNet enables hard real-time control of networked devices as well as facilitating the use of real-time networking to control data flow and perform fault recovery for enterprise applications.
With tools shipping to do this right now, this may actually make a nice impact in the feasibility of routers/fws/filters/LBs/etc... processing higher-level protocols at nearer wire speed.
Nice!
What is your belief that the federal response was slow based on? Have you seen a timeline of the response and compared it to previous hurricane responses? Are you personally involved in hurricane responses? Or are you just absorbing what the talking heads on TV tell you to think?
Of course, once you start looking at facts instead of the media's instajudgment how-can-we-bash-Bush party line, you notice that the federal response wasn't slow. Actually, it was faster than in past storm situations.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your beliefs.
From http://homelandresponse.org/full_story.php?WID=139 77 : "Gov. Blanco has complained repeatedly and bitterly behind the scenes that the federal government did not act quickly enough. According to a White House spokesman, she was asked by President George Bush to order the evacuation of New Orleans on Aug. 27, 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck. Blanco, for reasons unknown, waited until Aug. 28. After the levees broke and the city began to flood, the White House spokesman says the president asked if she wanted the federal government to take control of the evacuation of New Orleans. Gov. Blanco asked for 24 hours to think about it."
Nicely summarized, but the information is also available in plenty of other places online.
Perhaps you should leave your outrage at the door of ignorance, since you clearly don't understand that the Mayor and Governor are in charge of their locality, not the President.
The President was practically begging them to evacuate the city before the Katrina hit. Instead, the mayor completely failed to even follow his own city's evacuation plans, leaving thousands of people stranded and on their own.
Those 20% should have been smart enough to get out like the other 80% of the city's population, but to blame Bush for any of it is ridiculous. We don't have a dictatorship here, you know. It's not like he could have waved a magic wand. FEMA has to wait for the locals to declare an emergency and ask for help. It's their city and state, after all.
When they finally ordered a mandatory evacuation, the Governor and Mayor "at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.".
The basic problem they had in NO is that the city and state have been in Democratic control for decades and are extremely prone to graf and waste. Frankly, the locals simply didn't have their act together, unlike most of the rest of the places the hurricane hit.
Yeah, Nixon was an economic idiot as well and instituted widespread price controls, as had been done in previous wars. From your source, the restrictions had been abolished by 1976. Of course, the wikipedia isn't always 100% accurate.
From the wikipedia, during the 1979 oil crises, the Carter administration instituted price controls.
Carter's administration worked on reducing them as unecessary any more at times, but not as a bad idea. Instead in 1979 he increased them again.
There is simply no way you can make a case that Carter was against price controls in principle or that he really made much of an effort to end them. His administration did some deregulation of the industry, but they didn't get rid of price controls on gas.
The reality is that Reagan did on January 28, 1981, within a week after he took office (actually, I think he signed the order the day he took office, but it only took effect on the 28th), what Carter should have done long before, end the price controls.
Who ended them? Reagan did.
Read through all the links from research institutes, economic histories and newspaper articles and columns.
Try searching for carter ended price controls in contrast and you'll still get articles about Reagan ending them.
See, contrary to the unkown "experts" at wikipedia (whom you may now go correct), the law Carter signed wouldn't have ended price controls on gas until 1985.
So you can stop crediting Carter with ending price controls on gas, since nothing he did actually ever ended them.
Perhaps you should have done a little more reading than just relying on contradictory wikipedia articles?