Google "ip telphony" and "india" and you'll see lots of articles. A few years ago villages were beginning to make wide use of IP telephony via computers and some governments went so far as to sniff and destroy packets carrying voice messaging. Other areas simply firewalled out the relevant ports. They eventually figured out it was an impossible case to ban such use, but that won't stop anyone from taxing them.
Don't forget you don't have to tax EVERYONE or regulate EVERYONE. All you have to do is tax and regulate the biggest players in the field and soon no one else wants to enter the game. It might be impractical to tax every individual, but even India has managed to tax certain players. Make it too expensive to organize properly, and the technology will be doomed.
Remember: Napster didn't "invent" p2p, or mp3, or swapping ripped CDs. All Napster did was commoditize the service. And once commoditized, it was easily squashed. A dozen others may have taken its place, but the only profit left in the industry seems to be made by exploiting user's computers in unethical manner. The powers in charge are determined that p2p facilities of any sort are too be unprofitable until they can figure out how to recover their monopoly controls - and government is all about control. One hand washes the other because both are bound to the same chain...
As a schoolchild of the sixties I can assure you "brainwashing" is nothing new at all.
Anyway, I don't see anything new here at all. Yeah, there's way too much corporate influence in the classroom - so let's talk about all those schools that have replaced milk machines and cafeteria lines with soda and sandwich vending machines and made the Nike swoosh part of their campus decor.
When I was in the sixth grade I was grounded from recesses for weeks because I started a petition for longer recesses. an innocent bit of play snowballed within a day and soon there were dozens of handwritten copies of my petition circulating in classrooms. When they found out it was me who started it, rather than take the opportunity to demonstrate real world governenace, I instead got a lecture and made to write something stupid like "I will not create disturbances in class." Which, ironically, means I really did get a lesson in the real world - unfortunately, not the real world as we had been told in the classroom (petitioning the government, speaking out, etc). Obviously this real lesson had a lasting effect on me, as I still can't remember what it was I was supposed to write but the message sent still rings clear 30 years later: don't try to buck the man or you'll get stepped upon.
This program is certain to spawn a new generation of adults with similar memories. Indoctrination of this sort is doomed to fail as soon as the child begins to realize she can think for herself.
Now, getting back to those school lunches and corporate sports programs...
All this time we keep focusing on how bad IP law is going to keep us in the technological dark ages compared to our more adaptable evolutionary cousins abroad - but really it's looking more and more like the tax-mad politicians are the true enemies of evolution. It was easy to look at the nonsense going on in India with the government attempting to ban IP telephony and criticise, but it appears our own politicians are determined to prove once and for all India (has) had nothing on us.
What do you mean "the" ISP? Newsgroups are carried by MY ISP and I'm on dialup. They're carried by AOL, the various Bells, Cox, Roadrunner, Earthlink - I don't know of an ISP that DOESN'T carry newsgroups. I also subscribe to Easynews, an ISP which most definitely carries newsgroups - it's their business.
for the last years I've had just a few channels - I cancelled my tivo subscription long ao because I didn't find $70 a month worth of stuff to watch in exchange for the $70 or so a month I was paying. But lately I've been wondering what I might be missing.
The other day I was laying in a hospital bed waiting to go into surgery to get my deviated septum fixed. Decided to flip on the TV and see what I've been missing... flip... flip.. flip...
I turned it off and went to sleep until the nurse came in and gave me a shot of demerol.
It would be great if there were something on to watch. As it is, though, all I ever watch anymore is Survivor and Star Trek and West Wing. If I want to see west wing in HD or Star Trek I just download it from usenet - and it ain't locked down, as I would imagine these gadgets are.
If Hollywood wants me to subscribe to one of these services, they better start showing something worth paying for.
No, scratch that... they better start showing a lot of stuff worth paying for. And without the DRM nonsense.
Usenet is only peer to peer in the sense of servers mirroring one another - it's not hard to send out takedown notices these days and, from what I can see (via my dealings with easynews), providers don't ask questions when served. So to essentially kill the "open" groups all it would take is a few weeks of careful attention from the US copyright holders and bye-bye a.b.s.complete-cd and the rest. All that would be left is the indie stuff and the world music (and maybe not even much of that) and whatever was left in the spanish, korean and russian groups.
Of course this just drives the networks to the binary.pgp groups, the zip groups, etc - but that sure cuts a hole in circulation. You go from "free for all" to "free for me and you" - essentially killing the entire concept of usenet.
Frankly, I don't think people who post top40 type stuff (the type of music most likely to be policed by this software) are helping "the cause." All they're doing is helping hype the people who have been running the show the last century - if those people want their stuff off the channels, I say more power to'em and I hope this lets them finally shoot off that last leg they have left standing. Let's see'em try to serve a takedown notice when I post Shiva in Exile or Brad Sucks... or even Linda.
This is definitely one of those "Doh!" moments. As in "why didn't I think of that?"
With all the crap patents we hear about in this forum, it's great to read about a simple, obvious invention that someone actually invented - an idea that's actually worth some real credit.
But it still makes me wanna kick myself for not thinking of it first.
I actually have many of those PID numbers still here on my shelf from when we were filling the office with emachines picked up from officemax. And I filled out the lindows claim form just to check out lindows (couldn't get it installed on ANY of my computers but that's another story) but why would I waste time filling out this "rebate coupon" form? I have to download the damn pdf, print it, spend my time filling it out, stamping it, then waiting for the return of... a discount coupon for more Microsoft crap?
Yeah... sssuuuuure.... I'm gonna do that right now!
I have no friends. I also (almost) never get spam or virii. My cousin started mailing me a lot one time, but I kept telling her to stop sending me all that aol shit until she finally did and I haven't heard from her since.
Every now and then I get an email telling me I sent someone a virus, but those are always being returned from the "russian women" mailing list I was on a year ago. Since every person I contact gets their own "from address" at my domain, I never see third party spam. Either folks like ebay and paypal and my cc company and amazon and yahoo are true to their word, or they see that from address with their name on it and know I would know immediately who leaked my email address, so they don't. Seems to work pretty well, and I don't have to rely on everyone using encryption (although I wish they did).
surprised no one replied to your comments. When I started reading about that thing yesterday I was still high from the surgery I had in the morning so I thought better not to comment. After looking at it again I have to say that "even high, it looked like a stupid design."
Solar>electrolysis>Hydrogen>fuel cell>conversion - what a stupid and wasteful chain of supply. Now I understand why BP and the oil companies are so into hydrogen - not because of the sale of hydrogen, but because of all that money they expect to make on their PV arrays! Batteries aren't 100%, but dumping and then reclaiming from the AC line is about as efficient as you can get, and if you have access to the mains AC any other storage (more than a few hours) is just a stupid waste of money.
If that thing cost $70k with all that crap either they were GIVEN all the collectors and electronics or the house cost $1000 to build. And if I could build a house like that for $1000 then I think I might need to consider cashing out and moving to Malaysia... they speak french over there, don't they?
An entry level programming job can't be good today for more than 40-50k even in a high income market. And an entry level waiting job is more like 12k - so are you comparing what you COULD, given a good waiting position make? Or entry level to entry level?
Maitre'D in a good restaraunt can net over 100k - it's an esteemed job many people work years for. And think about this: Rocco can't outsource his wait staff to India, china, or anywhere else...
Doesn't matter if the coercion and exploitation are separate - in the end it balances out. The only unjust alternative is nothingness which is what we've had more of before than now. Whether it's the laborer making Nikes or the russian kid posing for boris' website, the economics will balance out. Yuan's community will increase its awareness of economics and will eventually realize their power to overcome just as our own labor force did nearly a century ago - the difference is now they have that choice. Svetlana will have an alternative to living on the street and watching her friends freeze to death in doorways, and when she becomes an adult she has the greater awareness of how to prevent her own child from falling into the same trap she fell into.
Or maybe neither of them succeed... but many others will.
One thing is certain: neither would have had the income they have had it not been for that "exploitation." These are two diverse ends of the very worse of that (very) bad exploitation, but they will both have the same result: an increased economic status for the individual and, ultimately, the community - which will inevitably result in the people of that community cracking down on their perceived injustices. Either way, it's better than Yuan's family starving to death or Sveta freezing under a bridge with a sack of spray paint in her lap.
This isn't an excuse - it's a simple fact of life. Yeah, it would be great if everyone in the world could do whatever the fuck they want and we all had whatever we need provided to us and life was shiny and sunny all the time - but we don't live in that world. The tools of this new economy help bring us all a little closer to that end but we still have a long way to go. And, in the bide, most of the complaining I hear - just like yours - amounts to litle more than a moralizing defense of your own self interest. Yeah, it sucks that Yuan makes fifty cents a day and lives in a cardboard box and little Sveta has to suck boris' dick when she's not in front of the camera - but at least Yuan can feed his family without having to huddle on the roadside at night and Sveta has a warm bed to sleep in and proper medical attention when she needs it. And no one is forcing you to support Boris OR Nike.
Consider this: I practice what I preach - I avoid wal-mart like the plague, damn near everything I use in my life is recycled cast-offs (from the car I drive to the laptops I reurbish and resell to the vintage clothes I buy). Even my entertainment comes from artists who trade online and my custom made clothes come from an online tailor - and in both these cases that usually means overseas. So am I to be damned for supporting artists who get essentially nothing (as opposed to nearly nothing, as in the domestic releases) from their recordings? Or for buying tailored clothing from one of those "sweat shops" in Taiwann that employs garment workers at a premium because the clothes they make all have to be custom cut to my (very large) measurements and stitched to my preference?
And what are the alternatives? Make my own clothes? From cloth made in China or Pakistan? Or grow my own cotton, have it ginned, then pay a weaver? Where does it end? And who benefits from me growing my own clothing? How does it help my neighbor if my entire life is so consumed with basic self sufficiency that I end up living in economic poverty? I can afford to pay Yuan to stitch my clothing - I don't even know of a tailor in my own community that actually makes the clothes they sell. And I'm not going to buy "off the rack" imports then pay for alterations - as I already pointed out I can get that done better, cheaper, by doing the import part myself.
So what of you? I'm not asking you this to attack you, I'm asking you this because I know where I'm coming from, but I have very little insight into your approach - and from what I see in your post, it just looks like more of the same cheap talk.
Coercive exploitation is a bad thing - but what makes the bad stu
Exploitation is not a dirty word. Coercion is a bad thing (if you can spell it) but everybody exploits and this is a good thing. When I go to work every day I am exploiting my skill and knowledge. When a farmer sells his goods he is exploiting his farmland, his skill, his work, and his knowledge. Whether this is a good thing for the farmer or not depends entirely upon how the farmer chooses to exploit these resources. If he is responsible in his exploitation he can continue to be profitable - if he is careless and irresponsible, his land will wither and so will his livelihood.
By exploiting the lower cost of skilled workers in another country a company makes itself richer - which is what any company wants to do. But in the process it also enriches that country by raising the minimum standard of living for everyone in that community - the IT workers have jobs and money, which means the panhandlers have richer folks to beg from. Meanwhile the IT workers become more sophisticated in their interactions. Ultimately, everyone benefits - just ask the folks of Japan, Philippines, Ireland, etc. The company may pack up and leave, but in their wake they leave all sorts of resources the community can make use of - if that community is smart - or, they can give up and the place turns into another Flint, Michigan.
I remember, not too long ago, when most folks I knew in this industry were excited about the new opportunities these tools give us all. Remember how we were talking about how folks would be able to "telecommute" and do their jobs from anywhere? How farmers would be able to form their own cooperatives, purchasers would be able to co-op their buying power, and all that other great stuff? Well, we have all that now - and who are we to deny these opportuinnities to others?
I think it's fucking fantastic these folks have many of the same opportunities I do. I buy and sell shit on ebay, supporting my hobby and earning income - ten years ago I couldn't do any of that. I can access data on just about anything in an instant - ten years ago I had to order books and stockpile them in my office. My entire office has turned into a sotrage room now because all that data (and more) fits in a small box on my desktop.
I work in a call center (for now) and I listen to people spew xenophobic shit every day and I'm delighted at every opportunity that creates to tell them how I'm coming to work every day simply because I enjoy the competition (well, and for the health insurance).
This is the fuure we were so excited about. Sorry so many of you have forgotten this in your devolution against evolution.
If you have a problem with corporations, stop supporting the corporations you despise. But don't blame the technology, and don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep, or blame the sun for baking the earth.
and ya know what? the fact is it WASN'T running like complete shit before it died. And yes, it WAS gradual. That motor has had a variety of issues since Ford introduced it, and this particular one has always had some slap happy pistons. Ford would only replace those motors under the most dire circumstances, and so this one never met that muster. did the pistons finally slap themselves to pieces? It burned a little oil, but not enough I'd expect six scored cylinders. And yes, there are a number of causes of several cylinders having unequal compression - camshasfts have lobes that inevitably wear, and they're going to be more likely to wear if there's two of'em stuck waaay up on top of the motor where any of a dozen orifices could gather and clump contaminants like a fat man's heart after all-you-can-eat fried clam night and the Howard Johnson's.
But the point being: thanks to all those adaptable electronic controls, the motor only occasionally ran poorly no matter what. A couple of times it didn't start well, but then a minute later it started right up... until one bright and shiny morning, it didn't start at all.
A friend of mine drives a '65 Chevy Nova as his weekend cruiser. He also has a '65 Mustang and two '34 Pickups he installed with modern V6 powerplants and transmissions. His one "modern" car is a ten year old Caravan.
Lots of folks are driving around in 20-30 year old cars. Contrast with this: I recently had a 1995 Lincoln Town Car with one of those "state of the art" 4.6l modular v-8 engines go tits up. Spent a week screwing with it because I'm too cheap to pay the dealership to work on it - replaced a bunch of junkyard type parts - pip crank sensor ($20), ign module ($400 new, BTW), fuel pump, filter, etc. Nothing helped and I didn't have a compression gauge that would reach down to those spark plug holes buried deep in the heads.
So we hauled it 50 miles to the nearest dealership and left it with them - two days and $150 later I find out "it's dead." Simple as that - the fucking thing is dead. A new engine is thousands of dollars and even repairs are incredibly expensive because of all the labor involved to remove things like cylinder heads (all those valvetrain parts are now on the heads, so you have chains and gears and high pressure oil passages through head gaskets). And the engine has, like, 30PSI compression on all the cylinders but two. Why? Don't know and it'd cost several hundred dollars just to find out how extensive the damage is. Meanwhile a USED '95 Towne Car is like $3000, which means it's cheaper to send this one to the junkyard than to fix it.
End result? Now instead of having a ten year old car on the road after extensive repairs, it'll be a ten year old car permanently off the road. One less used automonbile in the chain to support with aftermarket parts, one less used car on the road to provide an alternative to a NEW CAR PURCHASE.
And that's where we're going. Just like those shiny new computers that die a month after their three year warranty runs out and cost as much to fix as buying a whole new computer, we'll end up with cars that are so expensive to fix it's cheaper to buy a NEW ONE. It's not about selling "parts" - manufacturers don't make nearly as much of cataloging, shipping and reselling a $400 part as they make off selling a whole new car. It's all part of planned obsolesence - not just of cars and computers, but an attempt to make obsolete "antiquated" concepts like quality and craftsmanship. Replace art with graphic design; intellect with economics.
RIAA EQ wasn't standardized until the 1950's. And even then there were some holdouts - early preamps all have "eq knobs" for playing back LPs, as each record publisher had their own standard they insisted was superior (most likely due to the fact they didn't have to pay an licensing fees on their own standard tech).
And implimenting such a curve digitally is an essentially trivial exercise, so I fail to see how that would be an issue here. Anyone who is capable of extracting high quality audio from the PICTURE of a record groove is surely going to be well prepared to apply whatever EQ the publisher applied to the recording... even if that "equalization" came from the acoustic resonances of an artist bellowing directly into a recording horn.
The thing is, they still have the high resolution scans of the recordings. Playing music from digitized pictures of recordings is not new at all, this being only one more step in the evolution. But now that the project has more mainstream attention and funding, the LOC will be creating an archive of many digitized recordings that might otherwise have been lost due to their having been written off as "unplayable."
Like all technology, this will surely improve. And, as it does, those digital pictures can be "replayed" again and again - even after the original source has decayed to a puddle of jelly.
DOC files are a stupid security risk. And no, they ain't free. Here's what I suggest:
take that DOC file, open it, and edit it. Put some stupid or even overtly offensive remarks under the school's letterhead, then return it to the sender. Explain how easy it is for anyone to edit a DOC file and how much they potentially risk by making their official letterhead a format owned by the company that filled the world with the least secure computers since the VIC20. If you're really feeling adventurous check out the previous edits and see what kind of embarassing things you can find to revive from the file itself and include those in open text.
Signed PDF files can still be had, but they're much more secure and they're also just about as ubiquitous when it comes to people being able to make use of the information within. Provide a link to ghostscript and show'em how easy it is to install a pdf "printer" with (most of) the bells and whistles.
firewalls won't do it. the problem is all those browser exploits, and how are you going to stop users from clicking shit on the web? How do you make people run windows updates?
I work in a call center right now, and I routinely get calls from folks with NIS and ZA on their fucked up spyware laden systems.
This is where I never got all those people who used to tell me (before I knew who he was) I sounded like you-know-who. Because YOU right now sound a lot like him, and this is just one of the areas where I completely disagree and, in fact, am sure you've failed completely in your arguments.
Or, to adopt your rather trite anaology: If the public good is the farmer (or the content of his filed) and the carrot is copyright (or maybe copyright is the stick holding the carrot - whatever), then the artist is the mule... and the mule just wants the damn carrot.
If there were no copyright everything would be free and there would be no (or little) profit for reproduction and distribution of creative works. Maybe that would be ok, maybe not - but you cannot deny profit is the historical motive - at least in the US - for copyright.
The copyright "fair exchange" is exactly how the law ensures artists get paid for those works they eventually release into the "public domain." That the exchange is becoming increasingly less fair and inevitably robbing the artists at the expense of publishers shows how the system has failed. But that failure began (at the very latest) when I was a teenager - long before we had even heard of "the internet" and a time when computers had toggle switches and teletype "displays."
If you want to talk semantics, the very word "profit" didn't appear in Title 17 until the 1970s, during the RIAA's first round of paid protection.
However...
As far back as 1790 the "exclusive right to profit" was absolutely part of the protections afforded. To wit:
"the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof....shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books...."
And you can feel free to look that up right here. If you'd like some precedent, we got that, too - a case going back to the 1800's when a photographer prevailed against a lithographer who lifted his work to the tune of 85,000 copies. And, in fact, due to the expense and complexity of reproducing printed works and distributing them (at that time), it was exactly this sort of abuse copyright (in this country) was meant to prevent - i.e. publishers were obligated to secure license before printing or distributing any author's works.
Feel free to look up others as well - like Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Ben Franklin...
In fact, it says the exclusive right to profit from...
It's all about profit. The argument we are faced with now is "how do I profit from sharing the recording I bought three days ago?" If I buy the recording, rip it, and post it to usenet, how exactly have I profited? The other posts were there whether I posted or not, so it's not as if I have "traded" anything.
Copyright is not obsolete. Copyright is what keeps GPL intact, and it's what prevents Time Warner and CBS and MTV from just taking "free" stuff from up-and-coming artists (and artists from other countries and jurisdictions) and dumping it into their stable of "media."
The problem is they are trying to equate a corporation hijacking someone else's work with an individual doing it. Sony or CBS hijacking Madonna's work would do infinitely more damage to Maverick records than would ME posting her work to usenet... but the money changers would have us believe they are somehow comparable offenses.
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Don't forget you don't have to tax EVERYONE or regulate EVERYONE. All you have to do is tax and regulate the biggest players in the field and soon no one else wants to enter the game. It might be impractical to tax every individual, but even India has managed to tax certain players. Make it too expensive to organize properly, and the technology will be doomed.
Remember: Napster didn't "invent" p2p, or mp3, or swapping ripped CDs. All Napster did was commoditize the service. And once commoditized, it was easily squashed. A dozen others may have taken its place, but the only profit left in the industry seems to be made by exploiting user's computers in unethical manner. The powers in charge are determined that p2p facilities of any sort are too be unprofitable until they can figure out how to recover their monopoly controls - and government is all about control. One hand washes the other because both are bound to the same chain...
Anyway, I don't see anything new here at all. Yeah, there's way too much corporate influence in the classroom - so let's talk about all those schools that have replaced milk machines and cafeteria lines with soda and sandwich vending machines and made the Nike swoosh part of their campus decor.
When I was in the sixth grade I was grounded from recesses for weeks because I started a petition for longer recesses. an innocent bit of play snowballed within a day and soon there were dozens of handwritten copies of my petition circulating in classrooms. When they found out it was me who started it, rather than take the opportunity to demonstrate real world governenace, I instead got a lecture and made to write something stupid like "I will not create disturbances in class." Which, ironically, means I really did get a lesson in the real world - unfortunately, not the real world as we had been told in the classroom (petitioning the government, speaking out, etc). Obviously this real lesson had a lasting effect on me, as I still can't remember what it was I was supposed to write but the message sent still rings clear 30 years later: don't try to buck the man or you'll get stepped upon.
This program is certain to spawn a new generation of adults with similar memories. Indoctrination of this sort is doomed to fail as soon as the child begins to realize she can think for herself.
Now, getting back to those school lunches and corporate sports programs...
All this time we keep focusing on how bad IP law is going to keep us in the technological dark ages compared to our more adaptable evolutionary cousins abroad - but really it's looking more and more like the tax-mad politicians are the true enemies of evolution. It was easy to look at the nonsense going on in India with the government attempting to ban IP telephony and criticise, but it appears our own politicians are determined to prove once and for all India (has) had nothing on us.
What do you mean "the" ISP? Newsgroups are carried by MY ISP and I'm on dialup. They're carried by AOL, the various Bells, Cox, Roadrunner, Earthlink - I don't know of an ISP that DOESN'T carry newsgroups. I also subscribe to Easynews, an ISP which most definitely carries newsgroups - it's their business.
The other day I was laying in a hospital bed waiting to go into surgery to get my deviated septum fixed. Decided to flip on the TV and see what I've been missing... flip... flip.. flip...
I turned it off and went to sleep until the nurse came in and gave me a shot of demerol.
It would be great if there were something on to watch. As it is, though, all I ever watch anymore is Survivor and Star Trek and West Wing. If I want to see west wing in HD or Star Trek I just download it from usenet - and it ain't locked down, as I would imagine these gadgets are.
If Hollywood wants me to subscribe to one of these services, they better start showing something worth paying for.
No, scratch that... they better start showing a lot of stuff worth paying for. And without the DRM nonsense.
Of course this just drives the networks to the binary.pgp groups, the zip groups, etc - but that sure cuts a hole in circulation. You go from "free for all" to "free for me and you" - essentially killing the entire concept of usenet.
Frankly, I don't think people who post top40 type stuff (the type of music most likely to be policed by this software) are helping "the cause." All they're doing is helping hype the people who have been running the show the last century - if those people want their stuff off the channels, I say more power to'em and I hope this lets them finally shoot off that last leg they have left standing. Let's see'em try to serve a takedown notice when I post Shiva in Exile or Brad Sucks... or even Linda.
With all the crap patents we hear about in this forum, it's great to read about a simple, obvious invention that someone actually invented - an idea that's actually worth some real credit.
But it still makes me wanna kick myself for not thinking of it first.
Yeah... sssuuuuure.... I'm gonna do that right now!
Every now and then I get an email telling me I sent someone a virus, but those are always being returned from the "russian women" mailing list I was on a year ago. Since every person I contact gets their own "from address" at my domain, I never see third party spam. Either folks like ebay and paypal and my cc company and amazon and yahoo are true to their word, or they see that from address with their name on it and know I would know immediately who leaked my email address, so they don't. Seems to work pretty well, and I don't have to rely on everyone using encryption (although I wish they did).
Solar>electrolysis>Hydrogen>fuel cell>conversion - what a stupid and wasteful chain of supply. Now I understand why BP and the oil companies are so into hydrogen - not because of the sale of hydrogen, but because of all that money they expect to make on their PV arrays! Batteries aren't 100%, but dumping and then reclaiming from the AC line is about as efficient as you can get, and if you have access to the mains AC any other storage (more than a few hours) is just a stupid waste of money.
If that thing cost $70k with all that crap either they were GIVEN all the collectors and electronics or the house cost $1000 to build. And if I could build a house like that for $1000 then I think I might need to consider cashing out and moving to Malaysia... they speak french over there, don't they?
Maitre'D in a good restaraunt can net over 100k - it's an esteemed job many people work years for. And think about this: Rocco can't outsource his wait staff to India, china, or anywhere else...
Or maybe neither of them succeed... but many others will.
One thing is certain: neither would have had the income they have had it not been for that "exploitation." These are two diverse ends of the very worse of that (very) bad exploitation, but they will both have the same result: an increased economic status for the individual and, ultimately, the community - which will inevitably result in the people of that community cracking down on their perceived injustices. Either way, it's better than Yuan's family starving to death or Sveta freezing under a bridge with a sack of spray paint in her lap.
This isn't an excuse - it's a simple fact of life. Yeah, it would be great if everyone in the world could do whatever the fuck they want and we all had whatever we need provided to us and life was shiny and sunny all the time - but we don't live in that world. The tools of this new economy help bring us all a little closer to that end but we still have a long way to go. And, in the bide, most of the complaining I hear - just like yours - amounts to litle more than a moralizing defense of your own self interest. Yeah, it sucks that Yuan makes fifty cents a day and lives in a cardboard box and little Sveta has to suck boris' dick when she's not in front of the camera - but at least Yuan can feed his family without having to huddle on the roadside at night and Sveta has a warm bed to sleep in and proper medical attention when she needs it. And no one is forcing you to support Boris OR Nike.
Consider this: I practice what I preach - I avoid wal-mart like the plague, damn near everything I use in my life is recycled cast-offs (from the car I drive to the laptops I reurbish and resell to the vintage clothes I buy). Even my entertainment comes from artists who trade online and my custom made clothes come from an online tailor - and in both these cases that usually means overseas. So am I to be damned for supporting artists who get essentially nothing (as opposed to nearly nothing, as in the domestic releases) from their recordings? Or for buying tailored clothing from one of those "sweat shops" in Taiwann that employs garment workers at a premium because the clothes they make all have to be custom cut to my (very large) measurements and stitched to my preference?
And what are the alternatives? Make my own clothes? From cloth made in China or Pakistan? Or grow my own cotton, have it ginned, then pay a weaver? Where does it end? And who benefits from me growing my own clothing? How does it help my neighbor if my entire life is so consumed with basic self sufficiency that I end up living in economic poverty? I can afford to pay Yuan to stitch my clothing - I don't even know of a tailor in my own community that actually makes the clothes they sell. And I'm not going to buy "off the rack" imports then pay for alterations - as I already pointed out I can get that done better, cheaper, by doing the import part myself.
So what of you? I'm not asking you this to attack you, I'm asking you this because I know where I'm coming from, but I have very little insight into your approach - and from what I see in your post, it just looks like more of the same cheap talk.
Coercive exploitation is a bad thing - but what makes the bad stu
By exploiting the lower cost of skilled workers in another country a company makes itself richer - which is what any company wants to do. But in the process it also enriches that country by raising the minimum standard of living for everyone in that community - the IT workers have jobs and money, which means the panhandlers have richer folks to beg from. Meanwhile the IT workers become more sophisticated in their interactions. Ultimately, everyone benefits - just ask the folks of Japan, Philippines, Ireland, etc. The company may pack up and leave, but in their wake they leave all sorts of resources the community can make use of - if that community is smart - or, they can give up and the place turns into another Flint, Michigan.
I remember, not too long ago, when most folks I knew in this industry were excited about the new opportunities these tools give us all. Remember how we were talking about how folks would be able to "telecommute" and do their jobs from anywhere? How farmers would be able to form their own cooperatives, purchasers would be able to co-op their buying power, and all that other great stuff? Well, we have all that now - and who are we to deny these opportuinnities to others?
I think it's fucking fantastic these folks have many of the same opportunities I do. I buy and sell shit on ebay, supporting my hobby and earning income - ten years ago I couldn't do any of that. I can access data on just about anything in an instant - ten years ago I had to order books and stockpile them in my office. My entire office has turned into a sotrage room now because all that data (and more) fits in a small box on my desktop.
I work in a call center (for now) and I listen to people spew xenophobic shit every day and I'm delighted at every opportunity that creates to tell them how I'm coming to work every day simply because I enjoy the competition (well, and for the health insurance).
This is the fuure we were so excited about. Sorry so many of you have forgotten this in your devolution against evolution.
If you have a problem with corporations, stop supporting the corporations you despise. But don't blame the technology, and don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep, or blame the sun for baking the earth.
But the point being: thanks to all those adaptable electronic controls, the motor only occasionally ran poorly no matter what. A couple of times it didn't start well, but then a minute later it started right up... until one bright and shiny morning, it didn't start at all.
Thanks.. it's mine now. If I ever make a penny from it, I'll send you a check.
Lots of folks are driving around in 20-30 year old cars. Contrast with this: I recently had a 1995 Lincoln Town Car with one of those "state of the art" 4.6l modular v-8 engines go tits up. Spent a week screwing with it because I'm too cheap to pay the dealership to work on it - replaced a bunch of junkyard type parts - pip crank sensor ($20), ign module ($400 new, BTW), fuel pump, filter, etc. Nothing helped and I didn't have a compression gauge that would reach down to those spark plug holes buried deep in the heads.
So we hauled it 50 miles to the nearest dealership and left it with them - two days and $150 later I find out "it's dead." Simple as that - the fucking thing is dead. A new engine is thousands of dollars and even repairs are incredibly expensive because of all the labor involved to remove things like cylinder heads (all those valvetrain parts are now on the heads, so you have chains and gears and high pressure oil passages through head gaskets). And the engine has, like, 30PSI compression on all the cylinders but two. Why? Don't know and it'd cost several hundred dollars just to find out how extensive the damage is. Meanwhile a USED '95 Towne Car is like $3000, which means it's cheaper to send this one to the junkyard than to fix it.
End result? Now instead of having a ten year old car on the road after extensive repairs, it'll be a ten year old car permanently off the road. One less used automonbile in the chain to support with aftermarket parts, one less used car on the road to provide an alternative to a NEW CAR PURCHASE.
And that's where we're going. Just like those shiny new computers that die a month after their three year warranty runs out and cost as much to fix as buying a whole new computer, we'll end up with cars that are so expensive to fix it's cheaper to buy a NEW ONE. It's not about selling "parts" - manufacturers don't make nearly as much of cataloging, shipping and reselling a $400 part as they make off selling a whole new car. It's all part of planned obsolesence - not just of cars and computers, but an attempt to make obsolete "antiquated" concepts like quality and craftsmanship. Replace art with graphic design; intellect with economics.
And implimenting such a curve digitally is an essentially trivial exercise, so I fail to see how that would be an issue here. Anyone who is capable of extracting high quality audio from the PICTURE of a record groove is surely going to be well prepared to apply whatever EQ the publisher applied to the recording... even if that "equalization" came from the acoustic resonances of an artist bellowing directly into a recording horn.
Like all technology, this will surely improve. And, as it does, those digital pictures can be "replayed" again and again - even after the original source has decayed to a puddle of jelly.
Signed PDF files can still be had, but they're much more secure and they're also just about as ubiquitous when it comes to people being able to make use of the information within. Provide a link to ghostscript and show'em how easy it is to install a pdf "printer" with (most of) the bells and whistles.
I work in a call center right now, and I routinely get calls from folks with NIS and ZA on their fucked up spyware laden systems.
Or, to adopt your rather trite anaology: If the public good is the farmer (or the content of his filed) and the carrot is copyright (or maybe copyright is the stick holding the carrot - whatever), then the artist is the mule... and the mule just wants the damn carrot.
If there were no copyright everything would be free and there would be no (or little) profit for reproduction and distribution of creative works. Maybe that would be ok, maybe not - but you cannot deny profit is the historical motive - at least in the US - for copyright.
The copyright "fair exchange" is exactly how the law ensures artists get paid for those works they eventually release into the "public domain." That the exchange is becoming increasingly less fair and inevitably robbing the artists at the expense of publishers shows how the system has failed. But that failure began (at the very latest) when I was a teenager - long before we had even heard of "the internet" and a time when computers had toggle switches and teletype "displays."
Time to look for better waters, mr. troll.
However...
As far back as 1790 the "exclusive right to profit" was absolutely part of the protections afforded. To wit:
"the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof....shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books...."
And you can feel free to look that up right here. If you'd like some precedent, we got that, too - a case going back to the 1800's when a photographer prevailed against a lithographer who lifted his work to the tune of 85,000 copies. And, in fact, due to the expense and complexity of reproducing printed works and distributing them (at that time), it was exactly this sort of abuse copyright (in this country) was meant to prevent - i.e. publishers were obligated to secure license before printing or distributing any author's works.
Feel free to look up others as well - like Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Ben Franklin...
It's all about profit. The argument we are faced with now is "how do I profit from sharing the recording I bought three days ago?" If I buy the recording, rip it, and post it to usenet, how exactly have I profited? The other posts were there whether I posted or not, so it's not as if I have "traded" anything.
Copyright is not obsolete. Copyright is what keeps GPL intact, and it's what prevents Time Warner and CBS and MTV from just taking "free" stuff from up-and-coming artists (and artists from other countries and jurisdictions) and dumping it into their stable of "media."
The problem is they are trying to equate a corporation hijacking someone else's work with an individual doing it. Sony or CBS hijacking Madonna's work would do infinitely more damage to Maverick records than would ME posting her work to usenet... but the money changers would have us believe they are somehow comparable offenses.
Nobody can be so stupid as you look... surely you're just trolling now?