The base Shuffle player holds 512 MB of music in a proprietary format.
I still have no reason to stop using my 2 year old Philips Sports CD/MP3 player/thingy which holds 700 MB per CD. In most cases, that's enough to hold any given artist's or band's complete works. And yes, I still drag around one of those CD casebooks (that multiplies my portable music holdings x 21, or 14 GB making round numbers) in my bag and I carry my own ready to go rechargeable batteries (another MAC fuckup, or so I have heard). The player never skips - and I mean never. It won't skip when you run or even if you hit it.
What I am missing is the size factor. That's right, the Shuffle kicks my player's ass for size. I guess the Shuffle is the size of a lighter. But my system has other features I find useful...
Then again, I go straight from personal player to car stereo with my burned MP3 CDs in EAC/LAME/VBR format. I don't need any extra devices (or cost for same) to negotiate between players because the players do not have talk to each other. The media they play is common between them. For that matter, I can take these burned CDs to any computer and still get joy from them. It is my habit to burn the install for Foobar 2K on each disk and close the disk session (making it readable on more drives). So I am covered with my personal Sport player, most DVD players (which also connects me to most stereos nowadays), most computers, and I also have a player in my car.
More than once I have had a friend listening to some rarer examples of my music holdings say something like, "This is good stuff. I never got around to buying anything by Foetus - but man, is it ever great." I turn right around and say: "Here, take this CD disk. It's his complete works to date. If you like it, support the artist."
This generosity costs me $0.15 or so for the media and I can go straight home and burn another identical CD from my music server. BTW, my 300 GB music server is duplicated offsite, away from my own home, and in the keeping of my nephew. Every six months I update my nephew's copy via a removeable drive, and at the same time I take away the latest Linkin Park tunes because he rips all of his music using my exact strategy to a particular directory.
Now before one of you corporate cocksucking copyrights assholes tries to whine about giving away another artist's complete works I have two things to say about that: 1] People have traded stuff like this since forever, we just did it on other media (cassette tapes, CDA CDs, etc) - remember in the movie "High Fidelity" when the protagonist keeps making those kick-ass tapes for his pals? Same deal here. 2] Catch the part where this isn't a music sale anyway, that's what "I never got around to buying anything by XXXXXXX" means. Given this new exposure, the artist might still gain a reward at his next concert or with his next music release. Given the specific example of Foetus, I'd say you do really want his album artwork and lyrics to hand - he does it all himself. 3] In the case of sharing my complete server contents with my nephew (indeed, the whole networked household over there) my purpose is to maintain a usable backup offsite. If they get use from it I consider it win-win. My nephew seems to like the directories for Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, and Astrud Gilberto.
Yeah, I know - the Linkin Park things defies all logic...
I have such a lot of music already that I rarely find anything new of interest. But practically everything I bought in the last year was from a defunct San Francisco label named "City of Tribes." Beyond that it was a pair of Bill Laswell CDs, one by Lydia Lunch, and the latest Kraftwerk. Most of that stuff I had to purchase without ever hearing a single note beforehand - I just had to trust in the type of music I was buying. The Kraftwerk I downloaded first - and after I found I liked it, I bought it. I wanted a clean copy to rip to my music server.
Yeah, it's all lies. People don't really do that...
It's pretty well established that we have the right to make backup copies of media we have actually purchased. DRM schemes stand in the way of exercising that right.
The pretense is that every media container you own - CD, DVD, book, magazine, etc - is a licensed copy of that type of media alone. You do not have the right of use for the exact same content in another form.
This is all nonsense, of course. And we have let them build a business on the nonsense for far too long.
The best filter is to not go where you do not wish to go. If you end up at the wrong place, click away.
The problems with this bill will certainly include: 1. They are trying to place a financial burden on the wrong party, a party that should not be responsible for the behavior of its consumer base. 2. Products already exist to do this worjk at the user level: net nany or whatever. 3. What you do in the privacy of your own home cannot "shock the senses of the community" - um, because they cannot see, nor should they know what it is precisely you are doing in there, in your own home.
Bottom line: There is no societal concern here such that the law makes any sense. If you want such service for your own home computers, the services exist - the financial burden for doing so cannot be shifted to an uninterested and innocent ISP. The state cannot pretend to legislate what people are doing in their own homes - and that's what this is really about.
The only difference I see is that the original statement includes a precise ratio. But from a policy standpoint it makes no difference because your MAIN purpose is supposed to be that no innocent person is wrongly convicted. Period.
It isn't a hostage negotiation, no one is actually trading anything 10 to 1.
You want to argue with William Blackstone? The precise quote from Blackstone's "Commentaries" is: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." It is a foundational statement in our system of jurisprudence and every law school student learns it. It's known as the "Blackstone ratio."
I never dreamed that anyone would question the wisdom of that statement.
Free markets do not have potentially immortal corporate entities that have huge advantages over natural persons. At one time people would practically sell their souls over to these power-mongering entities just to get their foot in the door of a given media industry. The internet may change the need to do that. The internet is changing the face of all media - that is, unless it is halted by the moneyed interests described above.
The gatekeepers are a dying breed. No one is interested in protecting their exclusive right to shit that lasts over 100 years. And I don't mean the govt. that sucks corporate cock, I mean the people that have to actually obey or disobey the law. A century ago civil disobedience meant riots in the streets, today it means using the internet to exchange information - much of which properly belongs to the commons.
"The verdict, let it be said, was well within reason. Circumstantial evidence plus motive justified the finding of guilt. The defense failed to knock down the charges against Peterson with fresh evidence."
See, that's what happened right there. The expectation - mainly because of the media frenzy - was that Peterson had to overcome a fundamental presumption of guilt. The exact opposite is supposed to happen, a presumption of innocence is supposed to be a substantial hurdle for the prosecution but in reality it operates as more of a mere dip in the road. Juries want to rubber stamp what the government claims; and more importantly they will follow the non verbal cues given to them by the judge. This is all pretty well documented.
People locally really wanted that Peterson guy to "Frey" - and that joke is all over the internet. Google it up and you will have a deeper understanding of what went down. I would even argue that there was an issue for the jurors to NOT find Peterson innocent. A lot of negative attention would have been heaped on any juror that wanted to find Peterson "not guilty." The social demands and pressure are overwhelming.
Nope, you actually have this wrong - no one can actually understand what happens except a juror. Why not? Because through the media (court tv etc) you get both more and less than a jury ever gets to see. So all the rest is just noise.
FWIW, the policy is supposed to be that guilty men go free provided no innocent person ever gets convicted. I could just as easily suggest that your standard is far too low.
And BTW, I don't have to follow the story closely because it gets broadcast quite loudly anyway. Everything you stated as hard evidence is merely circumstantial evidence. Some of it is probably lies. Happens all the time. And finally, I don't even care if the guy is guilty because I have no interest in the matter.
As to the how important the rest is, it remains quite important because we know that a fairly high number of people are being wrongly convicted.
"In 1999, the "Innocence Project" analyzed 62 exonerations in the United States. They found that mistaken eyewitnesses were a factor in 84 percent of the wrongful convictions, police misconduct was a factor in 50 percent of the cases, prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in 42 percent, fraudulent or tainted evidence in 33 percent, incompetent legal defenses in 27 percent, false confessions 24 percent, and snitches or informants in 21 percent."
I know it's just a stupid TV show, but one of the things I find amusing about "House" is how little the main character trusts the words and opinions of his patients. His whole rule of thumb there is that "patients lie." I would take this further and say that "people lie." Sometimes they lie on accident, they lie by omission, and they lie on purpose. People lie all the time because the truth is very hard to know. Sometimes they tell the truth as they know it, and that truth ends up being quite useless. People lie.
Listen, Scott Peterson could be guilty. All I was saying is that there is no hard evidence of that fact, none that I heard. Could he have done it? Sure. Did he do it? I don't know.
I wouldn't kill a man thinking there was any doubt as to his guilt.
BTW, I actually did not follow the case that closely. I don't care about stuff like that - it's all bread and circuses to me. What I never heard though was that there was anything like clear, compelling evidence that he was almost certainly the killer.
Wrap your head around the possibility that it's morally wrong to put a man under the death penalty just because there is a very strong suspicion that he is the killer. That's not enough - the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Is Scott Peterson the murderer in question? I have reasonable doubts that make it impossible to arrive at that conclusion. YMMV.
The 12 people that matter found him guilty. But then they found all of those people that are now exonerated by DNA evidence guilty too.
I think it raises a lot of questions about our degree of certainty within our system of justice - don't you? I don't know if it still holds, but Illinois suspended carrying out death penalties until DNA evidence could make more headway into the legal system. What was happening was that we were putting to death mainly men of color with little to no evidence - and we now know that we were sometimes doing it wrongly, that we had the wrong men.
I would think that all people that care about TRUTH would be offended at that fact.
While I understand where you are coming from, I think you may be naive to the point of stupidity.
You would come forward as a good person, as a good citizen, as someone who seeks the truth.
The police have no such agenda. Their agenda is to provide society with a sense of law and order. That they regularly pin crimes on the most likely suspect is proof of the fact. No one knows the truth, the truth is rarely "outed" during a trial. We solve crimes by pinning them on the most likely person. It gives the appearance of law and order. The most likely suspect is often merely the last person to a see a victim alive, a close family member, a husband, a good friend. God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.
Now I could give a shit about Scott Peterson, but take the example anyhow. Scott Peterson had a pregnant wife, Laci. Many couples become estranged during a wife's pregnancy. Scott took a lover, Amber Frey. Juries don't like cheaters. Cheaters are liars and untrustworthy. FWIW, a very large number of people cheat all the time and we all know that fact. Laci was eventually found in the San Francisco bay, a place where Scott Peterson went boating on Xmas eve. Now, I don't know about you - but many people made much of the fact that Scott went boating on that day - as if it were beyond belief that someone would do such a thing just because he needed to get away or to think for a while. To wrap up, Scott Peterson was convicted because he was cheating on his wife, and was seen boating on the vast body of water in which Laci's body was later discovered. I am not saying that there aren't more details, but those are the main details.
They pinned it on him and gave him the thumbs down routine. The man will die largely based on mere speculation. There's not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence in the whole case. There's an alternate defense explanation for everything the prosecution claims.
A culture of spectacle and sacrifice doesn't care about the truth, it cares about appearances. We pin crimes on the most likely to be guilty, not those that are truly guilty. And there may be a universe of difference between those two categories. Is Scott Peterson "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"? Hell no, but society hates to imagine that there is a murderer loose somewhere. Society likes to nail someone so that the collective can rest easy at night.
Now it turns out that one of my old professors at law school is one of the point men for the whole DNA as evidence movement, his name is Larry Marshall. His big break for DNA evidence came in the Rolando Cruz case. Read about it here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_profi le.php?id=07
The salient bits are: "...under pressure from the community and in the midst of an election year..." and "...a sheriff's department lieutenant recanted testimony he had given in previous trials." Wow, do I mean it's often just politics and cops that lie? Hell yeah...
I quit law school because Larry Marshall gave a speech in which he informed all of us idiot law school students that the most important thing about the practice of law was how the judge was feeling, what kind of day the judge was having. Did the judge just have a fight with his wife? Is he feeling poorly? Does his stomach roil because of the steak sandwich he had at lunch? That's the guy that will decide all of your motions. He probably won't even read your motions except for during the five minutes before he must render a decision while he trembles on the toilet seat before entering the courtroom. If anyone read anything, it was some poor fuck law clerk that rendered an opinion via post-it note on how the judge should decide the issue.
You know how you play 3D shooters instead of doing your homework? Judges are just like you...
So, would I come forward and admit I was the last person to see some now dead chick alive? I would like to say yes, but the real answer is no. In the adversarial process, you are a suspect until you are excluded as a suspect by the evidence. Does that sound like "guilty until proven innocent"? Yes, it does sound a lot like that.
I just don't financially support those holding views with which I disagree. That's one of my own political strategies. There's nothing hypocritical in it.
In the case of someone whose views I support in part, and disagree with in part - I try to simply support the idea and not the person.
I am no expert on this writer, but I did enjoy the Ender series. But yeah, his politics turned me right off and I didn't buy a single one of the books - they were all borrowed from the library.
As best as I can make out, Card is probably all of the following: 1. a conservative, although I think he identifies himself as a democrat 2. LDS, a.k.a Mormon 3. in favor of the war in Iraq
I apologize in advance to those that will think me intolerant, but being LDS is a huge mind-fuck. If you don't see it that way, that's okay with me. But it basically suggests to me that Card is not playing with a full deck.
When calculators were still a classroom novelty, my math teachers insisted on a "no calculators" rule - esp. for exams. You had to know how to do it on paper, showing your work, to move ahead. Once I got to courses like math analysis and calculus the rule no longer applied because most common calculators could only do basic stuff and you didn't advance to those courses without having already proved you could do the basics anyway.
These electronic aids are only useful after you already know how to THINK for yourself.
You can word process until you are blue in the face, but if you don't know how to write with style and brevity a computer will not help you. It will also spell-check the wrong words and show them as correctly spelled - it takes a human being to know which words to use.
Computers merely calculate and are quite dumb: garbage in, garbage out. Computers are not interesting or eloquent.
You can't endlessly extend copyrights without stealing from the commons. Please get off your moral high-horse.
We are just trying to decide who wins: the many who favor the commons - and the natural progression of ideas is towards the commons, BTW; or the moneyed elite who are living off the creations of their betters and robbing from the commons.
"Then it is Civil Disobedience and hopefully your imprisonment or fines will serve as a rallying point against an unjust law."
I find it interesting that you write that without presumably batting an eye at the screen as you type it. And all while we are discussing mere copyrights!
Imprisonment and fines, eh? Once upon a time it would have been a mere civil suit brought by the damaged party. Why are music and films specially protected realms? Why must I defend my own copyright interests in civil court while the music industry gets the free aid of the FBI?
Think before you talk bullshit...
Ultimately, this isn't about copyrights - it's about economic warfare. We act in the name of the commons...
Now who is morally correct? Now who is the criminal? I would think that in a democratic republic the majority would be correct provided they afforded the minority interest at least a little protection - and they have it via civil court.
We take that which morally belongs to the commons. We are denied the same in the name of elite and moneyed interests. The state aligns itself with the corporations.
You are creating a false contradiction: you are claiming that one can only accept copyrights as a public good if one also accepts the latest time extensions that make it untenable. And to that I must disagree.
It is PERFECTLY reasonable to think that 14-28 years of time is enough for anyone to milk the intellectual and financial benefit from a protected work before allowing it to enter the public domain and allowing it to possibly serve a further public good as part of the intellectual commons.
The hipocrisy is not inherent in what I may or may not do, but rather in the pointless time extensions of copyright laws to a point that no longer makes sense. If such time extensions were not already in place, much of what the RIAA does would no longer make any sense.
Led Zeppelin, for example, would already be in the public domain. Interestingly, if a band is going to build a career on ripping off Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters - weren't they already in the public domain from day one? If not, why not? Why is their theft okay, but your possible theft not okay?
That's a variant of the whole argument against Disney, BTW. Disney has done nothing but build on the back of fairy tales in the public domain. Now they want all of those works protected in some ridiculous way. Oh yeah, let's not overlook the genius of inventing a cartoon mouse that looked like every other roly-poly, shiny-eyed cartoon animal of its era.
Yeah, let's protect that nonsense while committing possibly irreparable harm to the commons. Let's shoot ourselves in the common financial foot, while letting just a few elite people and groups gain at the expense of the many.
Neither side is right. But when the law becomes an ass, people will disrespect it. That's what it IS.
Law is not morality. Law is usually what the "haves" use against the "have nots." The "have nots" are not a bunch of hooligans, they really will respect reasonable limits and rational morality.
When the law makes sense again, people will be less inclined to disrespect it because it will be seen to serve a public good by having a reasonable purpose.
Copyrights should serve as a protection for natural persons. We natural persons do not currently have lifespans reaching over a hundred years. When we see limits like that being codified we know the beneficiary is a fictitious person - a corporate entity or estate.
We respect the creators of good and useful things; and we also expect wealthy heirs and hangers on and to get jobs and become useful to society and not to just live off of royalties because they paid off the right people in D.C.
Let's take it off the internet. Let's make entertainment media useful as a tool for socializing again. I want to meet people of similar interests, bring my portable hard drive with me, and share what's on it with my good friends.
Personally, I can bring 25,000+ mp3 songs ripped with EAC/LAME from my own CDs and vinyl. I can't be alone. Someone out there has all that classical music I still need. You know, all that music that's hundreds of years old...
Interesting how territorial jurisdiction is an important and a valid defense when it comes to acts of torture and what the government is doing or condoning in Gitmo; but if you are an Australian national violating copyrights in the U.S. - FROM AUSTRALIA - then jurisdiction extends over the entire surface of the world and they can extradite your ass into the U.S., grease you up, and bend you over for the legal reaming you are about to receive.
No, but I think it's comparing apples and oranges. Sadly, the courts go your way. Read up on U.S. v Noriega and you shall find what you seek. Here's the best I could google quickly:
http://www.gwu.edu/~jaysmith/Noriega.html
What you are after and the clueless below seem not to understand is the issue of territorial jurisdiction. I think the precedents are wrong-headed, but it is what it is.
Global communications schemes are going to make many extraterritorial acts fall under the reach of the U.S. or whomever wants to prosecute the offense. The legal nightmares have only just begun. If you did it on the internet, you violated a law somewhere at sometime. Sweet dreams...
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The base Shuffle player holds 512 MB of music in a proprietary format.
I still have no reason to stop using my 2 year old Philips Sports CD/MP3 player/thingy which holds 700 MB per CD. In most cases, that's enough to hold any given artist's or band's complete works. And yes, I still drag around one of those CD casebooks (that multiplies my portable music holdings x 21, or 14 GB making round numbers) in my bag and I carry my own ready to go rechargeable batteries (another MAC fuckup, or so I have heard). The player never skips - and I mean never. It won't skip when you run or even if you hit it.
What I am missing is the size factor. That's right, the Shuffle kicks my player's ass for size. I guess the Shuffle is the size of a lighter. But my system has other features I find useful...
Then again, I go straight from personal player to car stereo with my burned MP3 CDs in EAC/LAME/VBR format. I don't need any extra devices (or cost for same) to negotiate between players because the players do not have talk to each other. The media they play is common between them. For that matter, I can take these burned CDs to any computer and still get joy from them. It is my habit to burn the install for Foobar 2K on each disk and close the disk session (making it readable on more drives). So I am covered with my personal Sport player, most DVD players (which also connects me to most stereos nowadays), most computers, and I also have a player in my car.
More than once I have had a friend listening to some rarer examples of my music holdings say something like, "This is good stuff. I never got around to buying anything by Foetus - but man, is it ever great." I turn right around and say: "Here, take this CD disk. It's his complete works to date. If you like it, support the artist."
This generosity costs me $0.15 or so for the media and I can go straight home and burn another identical CD from my music server. BTW, my 300 GB music server is duplicated offsite, away from my own home, and in the keeping of my nephew. Every six months I update my nephew's copy via a removeable drive, and at the same time I take away the latest Linkin Park tunes because he rips all of his music using my exact strategy to a particular directory.
Now before one of you corporate cocksucking copyrights assholes tries to whine about giving away another artist's complete works I have two things to say about that:
1] People have traded stuff like this since forever, we just did it on other media (cassette tapes, CDA CDs, etc) - remember in the movie "High Fidelity" when the protagonist keeps making those kick-ass tapes for his pals? Same deal here.
2] Catch the part where this isn't a music sale anyway, that's what "I never got around to buying anything by XXXXXXX" means. Given this new exposure, the artist might still gain a reward at his next concert or with his next music release. Given the specific example of Foetus, I'd say you do really want his album artwork and lyrics to hand - he does it all himself.
3] In the case of sharing my complete server contents with my nephew (indeed, the whole networked household over there) my purpose is to maintain a usable backup offsite. If they get use from it I consider it win-win. My nephew seems to like the directories for Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, and Astrud Gilberto.
Yeah, I know - the Linkin Park things defies all logic...
I have such a lot of music already that I rarely find anything new of interest. But practically everything I bought in the last year was from a defunct San Francisco label named "City of Tribes." Beyond that it was a pair of Bill Laswell CDs, one by Lydia Lunch, and the latest Kraftwerk. Most of that stuff I had to purchase without ever hearing a single note beforehand - I just had to trust in the type of music I was buying. The Kraftwerk I downloaded first - and after I found I liked it, I bought it. I wanted a clean copy to rip to my music server.
Yeah, it's all lies. People don't really do that...
I agree with the above poster, that's the main problem right there: non compliance with standards.
Security is also an issue, certainly. It's less of an issue if you aren't a complete bonehead.
It's pretty well established that we have the right to make backup copies of media we have actually purchased. DRM schemes stand in the way of exercising that right.
I am not a thief. You are an idiot.
Agreed.
The pretense is that every media container you own - CD, DVD, book, magazine, etc - is a licensed copy of that type of media alone. You do not have the right of use for the exact same content in another form.
This is all nonsense, of course. And we have let them build a business on the nonsense for far too long.
I have long since drawn my own line in the sand.
The best filter is to not go where you do not wish to go. If you end up at the wrong place, click away.
The problems with this bill will certainly include:
1. They are trying to place a financial burden on the wrong party, a party that should not be responsible for the behavior of its consumer base.
2. Products already exist to do this worjk at the user level: net nany or whatever.
3. What you do in the privacy of your own home cannot "shock the senses of the community" - um, because they cannot see, nor should they know what it is precisely you are doing in there, in your own home.
Bottom line: There is no societal concern here such that the law makes any sense. If you want such service for your own home computers, the services exist - the financial burden for doing so cannot be shifted to an uninterested and innocent ISP. The state cannot pretend to legislate what people are doing in their own homes - and that's what this is really about.
The only difference I see is that the original statement includes a precise ratio. But from a policy standpoint it makes no difference because your MAIN purpose is supposed to be that no innocent person is wrongly convicted. Period.
It isn't a hostage negotiation, no one is actually trading anything 10 to 1.
You want to argue with William Blackstone? The precise quote from Blackstone's "Commentaries" is: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." It is a foundational statement in our system of jurisprudence and every law school student learns it. It's known as the "Blackstone ratio."
I never dreamed that anyone would question the wisdom of that statement.
Free markets do not have potentially immortal corporate entities that have huge advantages over natural persons. At one time people would practically sell their souls over to these power-mongering entities just to get their foot in the door of a given media industry. The internet may change the need to do that. The internet is changing the face of all media - that is, unless it is halted by the moneyed interests described above.
The gatekeepers are a dying breed. No one is interested in protecting their exclusive right to shit that lasts over 100 years. And I don't mean the govt. that sucks corporate cock, I mean the people that have to actually obey or disobey the law. A century ago civil disobedience meant riots in the streets, today it means using the internet to exchange information - much of which properly belongs to the commons.
Why don't you get it? It's basic economics.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chroni cle/archive/2004/11/13/EDG5Q9QOI61.DTL
"The verdict, let it be said, was well within reason. Circumstantial evidence plus motive justified the finding of guilt. The defense failed to knock down the charges against Peterson with fresh evidence."
See, that's what happened right there. The expectation - mainly because of the media frenzy - was that Peterson had to overcome a fundamental presumption of guilt. The exact opposite is supposed to happen, a presumption of innocence is supposed to be a substantial hurdle for the prosecution but in reality it operates as more of a mere dip in the road. Juries want to rubber stamp what the government claims; and more importantly they will follow the non verbal cues given to them by the judge. This is all pretty well documented.
People locally really wanted that Peterson guy to "Frey" - and that joke is all over the internet. Google it up and you will have a deeper understanding of what went down. I would even argue that there was an issue for the jurors to NOT find Peterson innocent. A lot of negative attention would have been heaped on any juror that wanted to find Peterson "not guilty." The social demands and pressure are overwhelming.
Nope, you actually have this wrong - no one can actually understand what happens except a juror. Why not? Because through the media (court tv etc) you get both more and less than a jury ever gets to see. So all the rest is just noise.
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FWIW, the policy is supposed to be that guilty men go free provided no innocent person ever gets convicted. I could just as easily suggest that your standard is far too low.
And BTW, I don't have to follow the story closely because it gets broadcast quite loudly anyway. Everything you stated as hard evidence is merely circumstantial evidence. Some of it is probably lies. Happens all the time. And finally, I don't even care if the guy is guilty because I have no interest in the matter.
As to the how important the rest is, it remains quite important because we know that a fairly high number of people are being wrongly convicted.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/sep2000/inno-
"In 1999, the "Innocence Project" analyzed 62 exonerations in the United States. They found that mistaken eyewitnesses were a factor in 84 percent of the wrongful convictions, police misconduct was a factor in 50 percent of the cases, prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in 42 percent, fraudulent or tainted evidence in 33 percent, incompetent legal defenses in 27 percent, false confessions 24 percent, and snitches or informants in 21 percent."
I know it's just a stupid TV show, but one of the things I find amusing about "House" is how little the main character trusts the words and opinions of his patients. His whole rule of thumb there is that "patients lie." I would take this further and say that "people lie." Sometimes they lie on accident, they lie by omission, and they lie on purpose. People lie all the time because the truth is very hard to know. Sometimes they tell the truth as they know it, and that truth ends up being quite useless. People lie.
Listen, Scott Peterson could be guilty. All I was saying is that there is no hard evidence of that fact, none that I heard. Could he have done it? Sure. Did he do it? I don't know.
I wouldn't kill a man thinking there was any doubt as to his guilt.
BTW, I actually did not follow the case that closely. I don't care about stuff like that - it's all bread and circuses to me. What I never heard though was that there was anything like clear, compelling evidence that he was almost certainly the killer.
Wrap your head around the possibility that it's morally wrong to put a man under the death penalty just because there is a very strong suspicion that he is the killer. That's not enough - the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Is Scott Peterson the murderer in question? I have reasonable doubts that make it impossible to arrive at that conclusion. YMMV.
The 12 people that matter found him guilty. But then they found all of those people that are now exonerated by DNA evidence guilty too.
I think it raises a lot of questions about our degree of certainty within our system of justice - don't you? I don't know if it still holds, but Illinois suspended carrying out death penalties until DNA evidence could make more headway into the legal system. What was happening was that we were putting to death mainly men of color with little to no evidence - and we now know that we were sometimes doing it wrongly, that we had the wrong men.
I would think that all people that care about TRUTH would be offended at that fact.
Oh, I laugh...
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While I understand where you are coming from, I think you may be naive to the point of stupidity.
You would come forward as a good person, as a good citizen, as someone who seeks the truth.
The police have no such agenda. Their agenda is to provide society with a sense of law and order. That they regularly pin crimes on the most likely suspect is proof of the fact. No one knows the truth, the truth is rarely "outed" during a trial. We solve crimes by pinning them on the most likely person. It gives the appearance of law and order. The most likely suspect is often merely the last person to a see a victim alive, a close family member, a husband, a good friend. God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.
Now I could give a shit about Scott Peterson, but take the example anyhow. Scott Peterson had a pregnant wife, Laci. Many couples become estranged during a wife's pregnancy. Scott took a lover, Amber Frey. Juries don't like cheaters. Cheaters are liars and untrustworthy. FWIW, a very large number of people cheat all the time and we all know that fact. Laci was eventually found in the San Francisco bay, a place where Scott Peterson went boating on Xmas eve. Now, I don't know about you - but many people made much of the fact that Scott went boating on that day - as if it were beyond belief that someone would do such a thing just because he needed to get away or to think for a while. To wrap up, Scott Peterson was convicted because he was cheating on his wife, and was seen boating on the vast body of water in which Laci's body was later discovered. I am not saying that there aren't more details, but those are the main details.
They pinned it on him and gave him the thumbs down routine. The man will die largely based on mere speculation. There's not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence in the whole case. There's an alternate defense explanation for everything the prosecution claims.
A culture of spectacle and sacrifice doesn't care about the truth, it cares about appearances. We pin crimes on the most likely to be guilty, not those that are truly guilty. And there may be a universe of difference between those two categories. Is Scott Peterson "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"? Hell no, but society hates to imagine that there is a murderer loose somewhere. Society likes to nail someone so that the collective can rest easy at night.
Now it turns out that one of my old professors at law school is one of the point men for the whole DNA as evidence movement, his name is Larry Marshall. His big break for DNA evidence came in the Rolando Cruz case. Read about it here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_prof
The salient bits are: "...under pressure from the community and in the midst of an election year..." and "...a sheriff's department lieutenant recanted testimony he had given in previous trials." Wow, do I mean it's often just politics and cops that lie? Hell yeah...
I quit law school because Larry Marshall gave a speech in which he informed all of us idiot law school students that the most important thing about the practice of law was how the judge was feeling, what kind of day the judge was having. Did the judge just have a fight with his wife? Is he feeling poorly? Does his stomach roil because of the steak sandwich he had at lunch? That's the guy that will decide all of your motions. He probably won't even read your motions except for during the five minutes before he must render a decision while he trembles on the toilet seat before entering the courtroom. If anyone read anything, it was some poor fuck law clerk that rendered an opinion via post-it note on how the judge should decide the issue.
You know how you play 3D shooters instead of doing your homework? Judges are just like you...
So, would I come forward and admit I was the last person to see some now dead chick alive? I would like to say yes, but the real answer is no. In the adversarial process, you are a suspect until you are excluded as a suspect by the evidence. Does that sound like "guilty until proven innocent"? Yes, it does sound a lot like that.
I just don't financially support those holding views with which I disagree. That's one of my own political strategies. There's nothing hypocritical in it.
In the case of someone whose views I support in part, and disagree with in part - I try to simply support the idea and not the person.
I am no expert on this writer, but I did enjoy the Ender series. But yeah, his politics turned me right off and I didn't buy a single one of the books - they were all borrowed from the library.
As best as I can make out, Card is probably all of the following:
1. a conservative, although I think he identifies himself as a democrat
2. LDS, a.k.a Mormon
3. in favor of the war in Iraq
I apologize in advance to those that will think me intolerant, but being LDS is a huge mind-fuck. If you don't see it that way, that's okay with me. But it basically suggests to me that Card is not playing with a full deck.
I agree with the above poster.
When calculators were still a classroom novelty, my math teachers insisted on a "no calculators" rule - esp. for exams. You had to know how to do it on paper, showing your work, to move ahead. Once I got to courses like math analysis and calculus the rule no longer applied because most common calculators could only do basic stuff and you didn't advance to those courses without having already proved you could do the basics anyway.
These electronic aids are only useful after you already know how to THINK for yourself.
You can word process until you are blue in the face, but if you don't know how to write with style and brevity a computer will not help you. It will also spell-check the wrong words and show them as correctly spelled - it takes a human being to know which words to use.
Computers merely calculate and are quite dumb: garbage in, garbage out. Computers are not interesting or eloquent.
It takes a human being to THINK.
You can't endlessly extend copyrights without stealing from the commons. Please get off your moral high-horse.
We are just trying to decide who wins: the many who favor the commons - and the natural progression of ideas is towards the commons, BTW; or the moneyed elite who are living off the creations of their betters and robbing from the commons.
"Then it is Civil Disobedience and hopefully your imprisonment or fines will serve as a rallying point against an unjust law."
I find it interesting that you write that without presumably batting an eye at the screen as you type it. And all while we are discussing mere copyrights!
Imprisonment and fines, eh? Once upon a time it would have been a mere civil suit brought by the damaged party. Why are music and films specially protected realms? Why must I defend my own copyright interests in civil court while the music industry gets the free aid of the FBI?
Think before you talk bullshit...
Ultimately, this isn't about copyrights - it's about economic warfare. We act in the name of the commons...
Now who is morally correct? Now who is the criminal? I would think that in a democratic republic the majority would be correct provided they afforded the minority interest at least a little protection - and they have it via civil court.
We take that which morally belongs to the commons. We are denied the same in the name of elite and moneyed interests. The state aligns itself with the corporations.
What is left to us but our own moral compass?
You are creating a false contradiction: you are claiming that one can only accept copyrights as a public good if one also accepts the latest time extensions that make it untenable. And to that I must disagree.
It is PERFECTLY reasonable to think that 14-28 years of time is enough for anyone to milk the intellectual and financial benefit from a protected work before allowing it to enter the public domain and allowing it to possibly serve a further public good as part of the intellectual commons.
The hipocrisy is not inherent in what I may or may not do, but rather in the pointless time extensions of copyright laws to a point that no longer makes sense. If such time extensions were not already in place, much of what the RIAA does would no longer make any sense.
Led Zeppelin, for example, would already be in the public domain. Interestingly, if a band is going to build a career on ripping off Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters - weren't they already in the public domain from day one? If not, why not? Why is their theft okay, but your possible theft not okay?
That's a variant of the whole argument against Disney, BTW. Disney has done nothing but build on the back of fairy tales in the public domain. Now they want all of those works protected in some ridiculous way. Oh yeah, let's not overlook the genius of inventing a cartoon mouse that looked like every other roly-poly, shiny-eyed cartoon animal of its era.
Yeah, let's protect that nonsense while committing possibly irreparable harm to the commons. Let's shoot ourselves in the common financial foot, while letting just a few elite people and groups gain at the expense of the many.
I think you are missing the point here...
Neither side is right. But when the law becomes an ass, people will disrespect it. That's what it IS.
Law is not morality. Law is usually what the "haves" use against the "have nots." The "have nots" are not a bunch of hooligans, they really will respect reasonable limits and rational morality.
When the law makes sense again, people will be less inclined to disrespect it because it will be seen to serve a public good by having a reasonable purpose.
Copyrights should serve as a protection for natural persons. We natural persons do not currently have lifespans reaching over a hundred years. When we see limits like that being codified we know the beneficiary is a fictitious person - a corporate entity or estate.
We respect the creators of good and useful things; and we also expect wealthy heirs and hangers on and to get jobs and become useful to society and not to just live off of royalties because they paid off the right people in D.C.
Let's take it off the internet. Let's make entertainment media useful as a tool for socializing again. I want to meet people of similar interests, bring my portable hard drive with me, and share what's on it with my good friends.
Personally, I can bring 25,000+ mp3 songs ripped with EAC/LAME from my own CDs and vinyl. I can't be alone. Someone out there has all that classical music I still need. You know, all that music that's hundreds of years old...
Interesting how territorial jurisdiction is an important and a valid defense when it comes to acts of torture and what the government is doing or condoning in Gitmo; but if you are an Australian national violating copyrights in the U.S. - FROM AUSTRALIA - then jurisdiction extends over the entire surface of the world and they can extradite your ass into the U.S., grease you up, and bend you over for the legal reaming you are about to receive.
Now that's what I call "corporate law."
No, he's not joking. But he is a boorish lego-geek-fuck that wants to wave corporate branding in everyone's face as if we cared.
What a loser.
No, but I think it's comparing apples and oranges. Sadly, the courts go your way. Read up on U.S. v Noriega and you shall find what you seek. Here's the best I could google quickly:
http://www.gwu.edu/~jaysmith/Noriega.html
What you are after and the clueless below seem not to understand is the issue of territorial jurisdiction. I think the precedents are wrong-headed, but it is what it is.
Global communications schemes are going to make many extraterritorial acts fall under the reach of the U.S. or whomever wants to prosecute the offense. The legal nightmares have only just begun. If you did it on the internet, you violated a law somewhere at sometime. Sweet dreams...
It's The Golden Rule:
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
Democracy, Republic, Due Process, Rights - all catchy marketing phrases to disguise the ugly face of unbridled Capital.