You think I took your eye, so you take my eye. I forget that I took your eye (or claim I didn't), so I take your eye. You take mine, I take yours, and before you know it, we have a feud, which leaves the whole world blind.
The essential lesson is that the only way you stop violence is to -- guess what? Stop violence!
I don't always agree with that -- sometimes, you kill him because you know he was going to kill you. (Not because you thought he might -- see Iraq.) But I do think that attitude applies here -- revenge is pointless, and also counterproductive.
If the superior pirated wins out, and the legitimate media industries lose money and slow production, they too will also experience a similar loss in value. Even more unfortunately, the "piracy industry" will only experience this loss a significant time after the copyright holders, after the damage has been done.
And since you can't do anything about piracy, that is why these legitimate industries need to wake up now and adapt yesterday.
You say the **AA has taken the wrong approach, using fear to rule their IP domain, but I don't really see a superior approach. You say they should start looking at how to make their product more attractive, but that's very difficult.
Actually, we have some plans for that, but I'd rather not discuss them. NDA and all. My main reason for saying this, repeatedly, is to get someone else thinking about the problem, in case we lose.
I will say that while at least you have the right problem now, you're still looking at it entirely the wrong way. And I will say that it has been done successfully before -- there exist things that have practically no DRM, yet are not ever pirated, because the pirated copy, despite being bit-for-bit identical and perfectly functional, is of much less worth than the original.
And I will not say more than that, yet.
If you want to stay in touch, I'll get back to you once I'm allowed to say something, and we can continue the discussion then...
They could, at significant initial expense to them, undercut their own prices in an attempt to compete with pirates, but there are problems. The pirated copies will always be cheaper and simpler to acquire (no stores, online or otherwise, no logging in, no credit cards, etc, etc).
You'd be amazed how convenient it can be made. Even with a credit card, an online store can be made slicker than BitTorrent.
And they're really the only group who has the size to weather such a downsize. How will smaller labels cope?
Many of them already have -- simply by being so small in the first place. For example: Bands selling on their own website. They suddenly have absolutely zero costs except bandwidth and servers, which, with Amazon S3 and EC2 (and similar services), have been completely commoditized. There's still the initial cost of making the music, of course, but without the ass-raping record deals, they'll actually be making more doing entirely live shows.
One example: I went to see Umphrey's McGee. They really only very rarely record something in a studio -- 99% of their stuff is live, and slightly different every time (they jam, and they jam WELL.) When I walked out of the concert, they had a pair of slightly-larger-than-desktop-sized towers... of CD burners. They could probably burn some 30 CDs at once. So, as I walked out the door, I was able to buy, on CD, the concert I'd just listened to -- burned from a recording made, literally, minutes ago.
How do we know piracy won't increase rapidly once they fold?
Well, what's the alternative?
But, the fact that Umphrey's McGee still exists and is still making money should tell you something about that. And wasn't there some more recognizable band that recently did a "name your own price, including free" stunt on their website?
There's also talk about a change in business model, but so far, all we have are theoretical suggestions, and Radiohead, a band with a lot of fame and money releasing a single album that a third of people downloaded for free.
That's who I was looking for. But you just proved my point: Two thirds of them bought it, and Radiohead still made a fortune on it.
Copyright, as a business model, is beautifully competitive, only affecting works their creator chooses it to affect.
Well, yes, but then there isn't really a viable infrastructure for micropayments.
Paypal.
I generally load my account up with a hundred dollars or so, and if I go over that, it can draw straight from my bank account via wire transfer. I've never seen charges for that wire transfer.
Sorry, forgot. ClamAV for Windows is here. The other link is to the main ClamAV package, which really is meant more to run on a Linux mailserver, scanning every message as it goes through.
To clarify, ClamWin is a Windows GUI for ClamAV. So if you're just looking for something to install on Windows, you only need to download ClamWin. (Or Avast, if you'd prefer that.)
First, there's open source, which is great if you can remember to scan your hard drive every now and then. (I keep waiting for someone to bundle this on a boot CD.)
Then, for more sophisticated protection, there's avast and AVG. Of course, these mostly focus on anti-virus.
I recommend Avast, and I use Clamwin, because the only place a virus scanner really helps someone with good online habits is when you've downloaded a file which you know is suspect, and you'd like to scan it prior to use.
On the anti-spyware front, there's Spybot S&D, which has been known about for ages, and is still good.
The reason McAfee sucks isn't necessarily anything to do with its relative security, vs Norton/Symantec or anyone else. It's that the others are so much smaller and lighter -- McAfee and Symantec are both bloated performance hogs -- something you really can't afford on something that runs in the background 24/7 -- and Norton in particular is buggy as all hell -- something you really can't afford on something that controls every file access and network connection.
And all of them are completely unnecessary, now that there's so much out there as good or better, and free (for home use, at least).
The reason for the subject "My god" is that you're on Slashdot and you need to be told. I thought it was public knowledge already; guess not.
And, if I had to, I would use a Mac and File Vault.
MAC stands for Media Access Control. Mac is short for Macintosh. As a fanboy, you should know that.
Of course, I'd much more likely use Linux and either GPG, LUKS, or TrueCrypt, or Windows and GPG, FreeOTFE, or TrueCrypt, depending on what needed to be secured and from whom. In fact, that's exactly what I do, and it doesn't cost me a dime. (Well, except the Windows license itself, which costs the company I work for quite a bit...)
We are the ones who are constantly telling people to implement things like encryption.
They either think we're paranoid, or... I don't know what the fuck they think. Probably just don't want to deal with it...
So now they've been bitten, and now they "get it".
Any time someone finally admits you've been right all along, especially when it's a bit too late to prevent the damage, is cause for both glee and frustration.
Now, I'm not saying that them adopting encryption now is a bad thing, though maybe the particular product they chose is...
What makes TrueCrypt less "mature" than, say, LUKS or good ol' Cryptoloop?
And no software can give you the ability to encrypt boot partitions. Where do you suppose the software itself is stored, then? Maybe the Magical Crypto Fairies will decrypt it from the hard disk first thing? (Of course, I can always throw my boot partition on another device -- I currently boot my laptop off a USB stick.)
I currently boot my laptop off a USB stick. While I have only configured it to use every single partition encrypted (Linux root, swap, and shared NTFS with Windows), it would be a small step to encrypt the whole disk. (Of course, then I couldn't boot Windows.) I don't currently have passphrases on the key files on that USB stick, but I don't use it for anything else, and, again, that would be a small step.
Obviously, the USB stick cannot itself be encrypted. Must there be some BIOS support for it, then? And if so, what's to prevent the BIOS from being as easily compromised as my USB stick?
Unless you're using a trusted computing chip, I don't really see how you can get much more secure than that.
There is OpenOTFE for Windows, but, unfortunately, it won't encrypt the Windows boot partition, and for some really strange reason, it doesn't support the Windows Defrag API. (Thus, just about any defragger on Windows won't be able to defrag this drive, but some defraggers on Linux might.)
I just checked that page, and while I may be jumping the gun a bit, I see no mention of "backup" or "tape". Thus, I can only conclude that unless their backup software itself separately encrypts the backup, or unless the backups are full disk images (taken while the OS is shut down), the backups will not be encrypted.
Of course, those are a couple of assumptions, but they're pretty likely ones.
And the problem was more than just choosing a classification system. There were also the technical challenges of actually implementing it, unless you mean to imply that someone would Ask Slashdot and then use 3x5 index cards.
First, there are always going to be the people who will, say, fuck their own (ugly) cousin and have ten or twelve children. For that matter, the relative "pickiness" of women is, itself, a selectable trait -- a woman who is not picky at all may well have more children than a woman who is picky. If we had two sub-species, one which values intelligence in some form (humor, etc) and one which doesn't, seems to me, without some "survival of the fittest" going on, there's no way to select out the truly "easy" people of both sexes.
And it gets worse...
Morons are more likely to have huge numbers of children. Intelligent people know about birth control, and are more likely to actually ask questions like "Do I really want a child?" And without that "survival of the fittest", it's a problem where, although everyone would be better off if we all stopped breeding so much, if one person does continue to breed, they will be more successful. So, unless population control laws can work (China's trying), we are pretty much doomed, like the Moties of "The Mote in God's Eye", to overpopulate ridiculously until our civilization falls completely, and then, hopefully, we can start over.
And it gets worse...
Because many sociological traits are sort-of inherited, also -- parents influence their children, and the kissing cousins above are much more likely to have backwards attitudes like insulting their children for going to college or something ("You think you're smarter than me, boy?"), this is both a genetic and a sociological phenomenon. The intelligent will get more intelligent, but fewer in number, and the unintelligent will reproduce like rabbits. And they don't like the intelligent, simply because they are intelligent -- so we get people complaining about things like "intellectual elitism."
There's really only one solution.
Intelligent people need to not only use their sexual selection, as you say, but they need to breed as fast as they fucking can. (Literally.) If you can't raise them all, give them up for adoption. If you're sick of the marriage cycle (and if the woman is, understandably, sick of labor), start donating sperm/eggs.
As a pick-up line, it probably won't have a high success rate, but at least, if it ever works, I've likely found an intelligent woman!
Maybe after a couple generations of that, we can try the population control laws.
Society may see the action I took as unacceptable in the eyes of 'normal' people.
Ad hominim attack. My relative "normality" has nothing to do with whether his action is unacceptable.
I felt that by not taking evasive action as a father in the right direction
No, that's called "offensive action", fuckwad. "Evasive action" would be to leave town, find somewhere away from sex offenders. After all, he did have the list.
Also, since when is premeditated murder the "right direction"? What kind of role does that set for his son?
I might as well have taken my child to some swamp filled with alligators
Except there was only one "alligator" in this case.
and had them tear him to pieces.
Neither alligators nor sex offenders will automatically tear children to pieces. They can, but it doesn't mean they will.
It's no different.
Were that really true, people who raise children near alligator-filled swamps would be justified going out and hunting them, as a pre-emptive action. But of course, they aren't justified in that action. They're justified in building fences to keep the alligators out of their yards, or to keep them in the swamp.
So, following the guy's own analogy, if it really is no different, the right thing for him to do would be to put an alarm system in his house.
This statement also seems a bit off in that it implies that the previous analogy wasn't just an analogy -- that this guy actually was going to take his son to an alligator-filled swamp if he didn't kill a sex offender. If that's the case, he's clinically insane, as, quite obviously, it is possible to live in places other than alligator-filled swamps and not kill sex offenders.
Because of a government agency's screwup, it's suddenly not A-OK to murder a released convict?
Wait -- when was it ever OK to murder a released convict?
If the man actually HAD been a child molester, you would never have heard of this story.
Actually, you would. (Sibling posts have links.)
Eh, the murderer was twisted, but at least he was protecting his kid. The murdered guy was a sick child molester, so he deserved it anyway, right?
I hope I never get as cynical about other people as you are right now.
If we really believed these things, why would we be releasing child molesters anyway?
The sex offender list isn't any more wrong because of this. The murder isn't any more wrong because of the list's screwup (and the victim isn't any less of a sick person because of it).
True, but a little publicity never hurt. I wonder how many people didn't even know about this list until they read about this murder in the news?
All this is is just another example why a sex offender list is stupid and unconstitutional
Stupid, yes. But unconstitutional?
I know my rights, and I'm fairly sure there isn't a right not to be on lists.
Now, it might be a good amendment -- making ex-cons officially done with the system. If you've served your time, the government should officially reinstate you as a citizen, end of story. Things like parole only work if it's either an alternate way of serving the same sentence, or punishment for how you served your sentence. (Bad behavior could get years added, good behavior could get you on parole instead.)
It takes the 'people can be reformed' position in allowing for the release of rapists ( both those who prefer adults and those who prey on children ), and then takes the opposite position with the creation of lists of people who are 'going to do it again'.
You know, you could see things as not quite so black and white.
Maybe it's a list of people who might do it again, and thus bear close watching? If they reform, good for them. If they don't, we were warned.
Playing devil's advocate, actually -- I really don't like making these lists public. (Although, of course, there's always the philosophy that if you don't want to be on the list, don't rape or molest people.)
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." -- Gandhi
Rape is better than murder, and a lot of people support the death penalty.
Rape is torture, and a lot of people were outraged at the very suggestion that the US engages in torture.
Murder as punishment is currently at least carried out humanely -- lethal injection is designed to insure that they feel no pain. And a lot of people don't even support that.
I like the high road from an idealistic point of view, but revenge is so very sweet.
Personally, I'm the opposite. I realize that this particular idiot getting raped might provide that much more incentive for no one else to do what he did. I also do believe the fucker deserves it.
But I don't think that we, as a society, should encourage that. It's a stupid, sentimental, idealistic concept, but part of what makes us better than the murderers, rapists, terrorists, etc, is that we don't torture. No matter how much someone deserves it, or how much information we stand to gain from it, the ends do not justify the means.
I have heard that the RIAA makes more money on ringtones than on any other kind of media.
So yes, they are scared shitless about new media, unless it comes with DRM. Another Slashdot story quoted some MPAA guy (I think), who claimed that the reason they don't want consumers to "space-shift" is so they can charge us for it.
But I don't remember where the second paragraph comes from, exactly, and I can't really confirm the first. You're welcome to try, though.
Except that they are claiming that mp3s outside your shared folder are yours, but they are no longer authorized copies once they enter your shared folder?
That's a step beyond claiming that "making available" is piracy, which is a step beyond what most of us accept as piracy.
I do agree with your assessment, though. Nothing is helped by intellectual dishonesty and exaggeration.
Why did they pirate, and not just boycott them? If you can't answer that satisfactorily, trust me, they will construe it as greed on the consumers' part.
I should point out, first, that "so sick and tired of the MAFIAA's bullshit" refers to the anti-piracy measures, not the content itself. A case could be made about the content, too...
It is actually a matter of greed -- of simple economics, really, something they should understand.
Right now, the pirated product is of higher worth than the purchased product.
Worth, not value. If I remember Econ 101, worth is defined as the absolute worth of a good or service, and value would be, roughly, a ratio of worth to price. So what I am saying is, even if both were free, I would choose the pirated product simply because it is a better product -- ironically (hey, I'm using it right!) because I don't have to sit through anti-piracy ads.
I am not trying to say that it is the right thing to do. I am trying to say that they are going about this entirely the wrong way. You can't make piracy much less attractive than it is -- they've pumped about as much fear into the system as they can, and more will backfire. Has backfired, actually -- when I pirate, I don't have to watch a movie accusing me of being a pirate, but when I purchase, or go to the theater, I have to watch "You wouldn't steal a car..." FUCK THAT.
About all they can do is make it seem more likely that you'll be hit harder, but there's really not much more they can do about that, either. There's only so many people you can fine, and after a certain amount of fining, harsher penalties really doesn't matter. It's the difference between a shitload of money and a fuckton of money.
What they have to start looking at is, what can they do to make the real product more attractive?
Oh, by the way -- they don't have a clue. Just recently, I found a slip of paper in an HD-DVD case. It had a picture of a blank DVD with this slogan: "Don't get burned." Which shows just how much they understand piracy -- people don't burn them, they download and watch on their computer, or listen on their iPod. But nevermind that -- on the back of the paper was something about how "When you buy a DVD, you're getting the very best in picture and sound quality..." News flash: We don't care. (And in the rare case we do care, there are full DVD ISOs out there, and very high-quality HD-DVD and Blu-Ray rips.)
That's why they lost music, why they're resorting to ringtones -- they assumed people gave a flying fuck about the audio difference between an MP3 and a CD.
Pretty weak trump. We have laws for one purpose: to restrict freedom for public benefit. That really can't be used as a trump card against a law, because if followed through, it could be used as a trump card on any law.
In this country, we have laws to secure freedom. The entire purpose of having a legal system, rather than anarchy, is to secure individual freedom, in that if someone kills you, they've limited your freedom in a very big way.
But say I take you word for word on this: "restrict freedom for public benefit." Seems to me that consumers are a larger portion of the public than record labels and movie studios. Seems to me that there's a larger "public benefit" to giving the stuff away if we have to.
I argue, and I'll continue to argue, that the burden should be on proponents of a law to convince us why we need it. Not having that law should be the default. That's right in line with "innocent until proven guilty" -- I don't have to "prove my innocence", you have to prove my guilt.
At least, that's the idealist view -- that's how I think it should be, and that's the American dream I fell in love with as a kid. I realize that "public benefit" really means who can provide more campaign contributions, and the reason we have laws these days is either to boost someone's political career or to line someone's profits.
I'm not assuming anything, we know for a fact that new Vista-only hardware features and software are shipping or in development, and that will only become more common as time goes on.
And what do you suppose will happen to that if consumers flat-out refuse them?
Do you see any ME-only stuff?
If someone wants to stick with XP on a new system, they'll not be totally left out in the cold for a while, but they'll be a more future-proofed with Vista.
Which is, as I said, an assumption.
Now, I do hope that Microsoft fixes Vista, and that everything you've said comes true. But it is too early to tell.
The only assumptions being made here are by you, that your (or my) personal dislike of Vista amounts to anything more than pissing in the wind.
Personal dislike is one thing. Outright defectiveness is another.
Example: Microsoft's HD-DVD Interactivity Jumpstart does not work with Vista, and does not work with Windows Media Player 11. It does, however, require a minimum of Windows XP and Media Player 10. I therefore had to install XP on my brand new work Vista laptop, very first thing.
Slashdot Mirror
You think I took your eye, so you take my eye. I forget that I took your eye (or claim I didn't), so I take your eye. You take mine, I take yours, and before you know it, we have a feud, which leaves the whole world blind.
The essential lesson is that the only way you stop violence is to -- guess what? Stop violence!
I don't always agree with that -- sometimes, you kill him because you know he was going to kill you. (Not because you thought he might -- see Iraq.) But I do think that attitude applies here -- revenge is pointless, and also counterproductive.
But I don't think that's the quote.
There was a quote, from a major exec (of something, I forget what), which basically confirms all of that.
And since you can't do anything about piracy, that is why these legitimate industries need to wake up now and adapt yesterday.
Actually, we have some plans for that, but I'd rather not discuss them. NDA and all. My main reason for saying this, repeatedly, is to get someone else thinking about the problem, in case we lose.
I will say that while at least you have the right problem now, you're still looking at it entirely the wrong way. And I will say that it has been done successfully before -- there exist things that have practically no DRM, yet are not ever pirated, because the pirated copy, despite being bit-for-bit identical and perfectly functional, is of much less worth than the original.
And I will not say more than that, yet.
If you want to stay in touch, I'll get back to you once I'm allowed to say something, and we can continue the discussion then...
You'd be amazed how convenient it can be made. Even with a credit card, an online store can be made slicker than BitTorrent.
Many of them already have -- simply by being so small in the first place. For example: Bands selling on their own website. They suddenly have absolutely zero costs except bandwidth and servers, which, with Amazon S3 and EC2 (and similar services), have been completely commoditized. There's still the initial cost of making the music, of course, but without the ass-raping record deals, they'll actually be making more doing entirely live shows.
One example: I went to see Umphrey's McGee. They really only very rarely record something in a studio -- 99% of their stuff is live, and slightly different every time (they jam, and they jam WELL.) When I walked out of the concert, they had a pair of slightly-larger-than-desktop-sized towers... of CD burners. They could probably burn some 30 CDs at once. So, as I walked out the door, I was able to buy, on CD, the concert I'd just listened to -- burned from a recording made, literally, minutes ago.
Well, what's the alternative?
But, the fact that Umphrey's McGee still exists and is still making money should tell you something about that. And wasn't there some more recognizable band that recently did a "name your own price, including free" stunt on their website?
That's who I was looking for. But you just proved my point: Two thirds of them bought it, and Radiohead still made a fortune on it.
You misunderstand me; I'm not tal
Paypal.
I generally load my account up with a hundred dollars or so, and if I go over that, it can draw straight from my bank account via wire transfer. I've never seen charges for that wire transfer.
Yes, Pasties.
Sorry, forgot. ClamAV for Windows is here. The other link is to the main ClamAV package, which really is meant more to run on a Linux mailserver, scanning every message as it goes through.
To clarify, ClamWin is a Windows GUI for ClamAV. So if you're just looking for something to install on Windows, you only need to download ClamWin. (Or Avast, if you'd prefer that.)
First, there's open source, which is great if you can remember to scan your hard drive every now and then. (I keep waiting for someone to bundle this on a boot CD.)
Then, for more sophisticated protection, there's avast and AVG. Of course, these mostly focus on anti-virus.
I recommend Avast, and I use Clamwin, because the only place a virus scanner really helps someone with good online habits is when you've downloaded a file which you know is suspect, and you'd like to scan it prior to use.
On the anti-spyware front, there's Spybot S&D, which has been known about for ages, and is still good.
The reason McAfee sucks isn't necessarily anything to do with its relative security, vs Norton/Symantec or anyone else. It's that the others are so much smaller and lighter -- McAfee and Symantec are both bloated performance hogs -- something you really can't afford on something that runs in the background 24/7 -- and Norton in particular is buggy as all hell -- something you really can't afford on something that controls every file access and network connection.
And all of them are completely unnecessary, now that there's so much out there as good or better, and free (for home use, at least).
The reason for the subject "My god" is that you're on Slashdot and you need to be told. I thought it was public knowledge already; guess not.
And, if I had to, I would use a Mac and File Vault.
MAC stands for Media Access Control. Mac is short for Macintosh. As a fanboy, you should know that.
Of course, I'd much more likely use Linux and either GPG, LUKS, or TrueCrypt, or Windows and GPG, FreeOTFE, or TrueCrypt, depending on what needed to be secured and from whom. In fact, that's exactly what I do, and it doesn't cost me a dime. (Well, except the Windows license itself, which costs the company I work for quite a bit...)
Look at the subject, though.
Apparently, they're willing to pay for 60,000 licenses, rather than one slightly more intelligent admin?
We are the ones who are constantly telling people to implement things like encryption.
They either think we're paranoid, or... I don't know what the fuck they think. Probably just don't want to deal with it...
So now they've been bitten, and now they "get it".
Any time someone finally admits you've been right all along, especially when it's a bit too late to prevent the damage, is cause for both glee and frustration.
Now, I'm not saying that them adopting encryption now is a bad thing, though maybe the particular product they chose is...
What makes TrueCrypt less "mature" than, say, LUKS or good ol' Cryptoloop?
And no software can give you the ability to encrypt boot partitions. Where do you suppose the software itself is stored, then? Maybe the Magical Crypto Fairies will decrypt it from the hard disk first thing? (Of course, I can always throw my boot partition on another device -- I currently boot my laptop off a USB stick.)
Explain what the requirement of FDE is.
I currently boot my laptop off a USB stick. While I have only configured it to use every single partition encrypted (Linux root, swap, and shared NTFS with Windows), it would be a small step to encrypt the whole disk. (Of course, then I couldn't boot Windows.) I don't currently have passphrases on the key files on that USB stick, but I don't use it for anything else, and, again, that would be a small step.
Obviously, the USB stick cannot itself be encrypted. Must there be some BIOS support for it, then? And if so, what's to prevent the BIOS from being as easily compromised as my USB stick?
Unless you're using a trusted computing chip, I don't really see how you can get much more secure than that.
There is OpenOTFE for Windows, but, unfortunately, it won't encrypt the Windows boot partition, and for some really strange reason, it doesn't support the Windows Defrag API. (Thus, just about any defragger on Windows won't be able to defrag this drive, but some defraggers on Linux might.)
I just checked that page, and while I may be jumping the gun a bit, I see no mention of "backup" or "tape". Thus, I can only conclude that unless their backup software itself separately encrypts the backup, or unless the backups are full disk images (taken while the OS is shut down), the backups will not be encrypted.
Of course, those are a couple of assumptions, but they're pretty likely ones.
Disclaimer: I'm not the grandparent poster.
They considered that, and discarded it.
And the problem was more than just choosing a classification system. There were also the technical challenges of actually implementing it, unless you mean to imply that someone would Ask Slashdot and then use 3x5 index cards.
First, there are always going to be the people who will, say, fuck their own (ugly) cousin and have ten or twelve children. For that matter, the relative "pickiness" of women is, itself, a selectable trait -- a woman who is not picky at all may well have more children than a woman who is picky. If we had two sub-species, one which values intelligence in some form (humor, etc) and one which doesn't, seems to me, without some "survival of the fittest" going on, there's no way to select out the truly "easy" people of both sexes.
And it gets worse...
Morons are more likely to have huge numbers of children. Intelligent people know about birth control, and are more likely to actually ask questions like "Do I really want a child?" And without that "survival of the fittest", it's a problem where, although everyone would be better off if we all stopped breeding so much, if one person does continue to breed, they will be more successful. So, unless population control laws can work (China's trying), we are pretty much doomed, like the Moties of "The Mote in God's Eye", to overpopulate ridiculously until our civilization falls completely, and then, hopefully, we can start over.
And it gets worse...
Because many sociological traits are sort-of inherited, also -- parents influence their children, and the kissing cousins above are much more likely to have backwards attitudes like insulting their children for going to college or something ("You think you're smarter than me, boy?"), this is both a genetic and a sociological phenomenon. The intelligent will get more intelligent, but fewer in number, and the unintelligent will reproduce like rabbits. And they don't like the intelligent, simply because they are intelligent -- so we get people complaining about things like "intellectual elitism."
There's really only one solution.
Intelligent people need to not only use their sexual selection, as you say, but they need to breed as fast as they fucking can. (Literally.) If you can't raise them all, give them up for adoption. If you're sick of the marriage cycle (and if the woman is, understandably, sick of labor), start donating sperm/eggs.
As a pick-up line, it probably won't have a high success rate, but at least, if it ever works, I've likely found an intelligent woman!
Maybe after a couple generations of that, we can try the population control laws.
Ad hominim attack. My relative "normality" has nothing to do with whether his action is unacceptable.
No, that's called "offensive action", fuckwad. "Evasive action" would be to leave town, find somewhere away from sex offenders. After all, he did have the list.
Also, since when is premeditated murder the "right direction"? What kind of role does that set for his son?
Except there was only one "alligator" in this case.
Neither alligators nor sex offenders will automatically tear children to pieces. They can, but it doesn't mean they will.
Were that really true, people who raise children near alligator-filled swamps would be justified going out and hunting them, as a pre-emptive action. But of course, they aren't justified in that action. They're justified in building fences to keep the alligators out of their yards, or to keep them in the swamp.
So, following the guy's own analogy, if it really is no different, the right thing for him to do would be to put an alarm system in his house.
This statement also seems a bit off in that it implies that the previous analogy wasn't just an analogy -- that this guy actually was going to take his son to an alligator-filled swamp if he didn't kill a sex offender. If that's the case, he's clinically insane, as, quite obviously, it is possible to live in places other than alligator-filled swamps and not kill sex offenders.
...
Whee, that was fun! Did I win?
Wait -- when was it ever OK to murder a released convict?
Actually, you would. (Sibling posts have links.)
I hope I never get as cynical about other people as you are right now.
If we really believed these things, why would we be releasing child molesters anyway?
True, but a little publicity never hurt. I wonder how many people didn't even know about this list until they read about this murder in the news?
Stupid, yes. But unconstitutional?
I know my rights, and I'm fairly sure there isn't a right not to be on lists.
Now, it might be a good amendment -- making ex-cons officially done with the system. If you've served your time, the government should officially reinstate you as a citizen, end of story. Things like parole only work if it's either an alternate way of serving the same sentence, or punishment for how you served your sentence. (Bad behavior could get years added, good behavior could get you on parole instead.)
You know, you could see things as not quite so black and white.
Maybe it's a list of people who might do it again, and thus bear close watching? If they reform, good for them. If they don't, we were warned.
Playing devil's advocate, actually -- I really don't like making these lists public. (Although, of course, there's always the philosophy that if you don't want to be on the list, don't rape or molest people.)
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." -- Gandhi
Rape is torture, and a lot of people were outraged at the very suggestion that the US engages in torture.
Murder as punishment is currently at least carried out humanely -- lethal injection is designed to insure that they feel no pain. And a lot of people don't even support that.
Personally, I'm the opposite. I realize that this particular idiot getting raped might provide that much more incentive for no one else to do what he did. I also do believe the fucker deserves it.
But I don't think that we, as a society, should encourage that. It's a stupid, sentimental, idealistic concept, but part of what makes us better than the murderers, rapists, terrorists, etc, is that we don't torture. No matter how much someone deserves it, or how much information we stand to gain from it, the ends do not justify the means.
...if we didn't?
Especially on an issue where it really does matter.
I have heard that the RIAA makes more money on ringtones than on any other kind of media.
So yes, they are scared shitless about new media, unless it comes with DRM. Another Slashdot story quoted some MPAA guy (I think), who claimed that the reason they don't want consumers to "space-shift" is so they can charge us for it.
But I don't remember where the second paragraph comes from, exactly, and I can't really confirm the first. You're welcome to try, though.
Except that they are claiming that mp3s outside your shared folder are yours, but they are no longer authorized copies once they enter your shared folder?
That's a step beyond claiming that "making available" is piracy, which is a step beyond what most of us accept as piracy.
I do agree with your assessment, though. Nothing is helped by intellectual dishonesty and exaggeration.
I should point out, first, that "so sick and tired of the MAFIAA's bullshit" refers to the anti-piracy measures, not the content itself. A case could be made about the content, too...
It is actually a matter of greed -- of simple economics, really, something they should understand.
Right now, the pirated product is of higher worth than the purchased product.
Worth, not value. If I remember Econ 101, worth is defined as the absolute worth of a good or service, and value would be, roughly, a ratio of worth to price. So what I am saying is, even if both were free, I would choose the pirated product simply because it is a better product -- ironically (hey, I'm using it right!) because I don't have to sit through anti-piracy ads.
I am not trying to say that it is the right thing to do. I am trying to say that they are going about this entirely the wrong way. You can't make piracy much less attractive than it is -- they've pumped about as much fear into the system as they can, and more will backfire. Has backfired, actually -- when I pirate, I don't have to watch a movie accusing me of being a pirate, but when I purchase, or go to the theater, I have to watch "You wouldn't steal a car..." FUCK THAT.
About all they can do is make it seem more likely that you'll be hit harder, but there's really not much more they can do about that, either. There's only so many people you can fine, and after a certain amount of fining, harsher penalties really doesn't matter. It's the difference between a shitload of money and a fuckton of money.
What they have to start looking at is, what can they do to make the real product more attractive?
Oh, by the way -- they don't have a clue. Just recently, I found a slip of paper in an HD-DVD case. It had a picture of a blank DVD with this slogan: "Don't get burned." Which shows just how much they understand piracy -- people don't burn them, they download and watch on their computer, or listen on their iPod. But nevermind that -- on the back of the paper was something about how "When you buy a DVD, you're getting the very best in picture and sound quality..." News flash: We don't care. (And in the rare case we do care, there are full DVD ISOs out there, and very high-quality HD-DVD and Blu-Ray rips.)
That's why they lost music, why they're resorting to ringtones -- they assumed people gave a flying fuck about the audio difference between an MP3 and a CD.
In this country, we have laws to secure freedom. The entire purpose of having a legal system, rather than anarchy, is to secure individual freedom, in that if someone kills you, they've limited your freedom in a very big way.
But say I take you word for word on this: "restrict freedom for public benefit." Seems to me that consumers are a larger portion of the public than record labels and movie studios. Seems to me that there's a larger "public benefit" to giving the stuff away if we have to.
I argue, and I'll continue to argue, that the burden should be on proponents of a law to convince us why we need it. Not having that law should be the default. That's right in line with "innocent until proven guilty" -- I don't have to "prove my innocence", you have to prove my guilt.
At least, that's the idealist view -- that's how I think it should be, and that's the American dream I fell in love with as a kid. I realize that "public benefit" really means who can provide more campaign contributions, and the reason we have laws these days is either to boost someone's political career or to line someone's profits.
People frequently ask me. Of course, "Linux" is still more frequent.
Ubuntu is an African word which means "Harmony". How much better are you going to get?
And get slammed for unoriginality? No thanks.
Any suggestions other than a "name change"? And let me remind you:
You didn't say Joe had to ask for it by name, you said it had to be worth using for the average Joe.
Well, it is, unless you've got any further objections. Do I hear you rooting for it?
And what do you suppose will happen to that if consumers flat-out refuse them?
Do you see any ME-only stuff?
Which is, as I said, an assumption.
Now, I do hope that Microsoft fixes Vista, and that everything you've said comes true. But it is too early to tell.
Personal dislike is one thing. Outright defectiveness is another.
Example: Microsoft's HD-DVD Interactivity Jumpstart does not work with Vista, and does not work with Windows Media Player 11. It does, however, require a minimum of Windows XP and Media Player 10. I therefore had to install XP on my brand new work Vista laptop, very first thing.