Why can't we easily download NPR content in a friendly format?
Some local NPR affiliates release their broadcasts in open formats even through nationally NPR does not. BTW, why are you still listening to NPR? It really isn't "public" media anymore, and the political slant is about as right wing as fox news. Pro-war, pro-religion, pro-corporatism. "Nationalist Public Radio" perhaps? "National Pentagon Radio"? I prefer Democracy Now! for my news. They offer one hour ogg vorbis streams every day.
The article summery mentions "web" or "website" five times. I expect the corporate media to confuse http with the whole Internet, but slashdot should be better. Don't these laws impact security researchers investigating POP, SSH, SMTP, IMAP, various game services, various chat services, and etc other Internet protocols just as much as http? Why only point out the impact on the web in that case?
...in any human society there will be dickwads, because selfishness and evil are part of the human nature too. The solution is as much representative democracy as you can afford. The problem is that the representatives are also dickwads. Representative democracy often becomes just another branch of capital or religion. Direct participatory democracy is better.
A just and democratic society requires an informed and ethical populice. We could have this if people's ideas about politics and ethics weren't warped by capital and the church. What if scientists had equal access to the media and school system as religious people do? What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church? What if advertising became useless because consumers would research products based on independent reports instead of listening to the marketing propaganda? What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions. Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
(amazing how a murderous lout hides inside all you revolutionary types, isn't it?). Thanks for proving my point. You're previous posts indicated that you would defend dictatorships. Your side would be doing the mass murdering, and I hope that I would have the courage to use force to stop you. If that isn't the case and you too would oppose the use of violence for means other than preventing harm...then I have no quarrel with you. A lot of leftist revolutionary types are assholes...but so are a lot of moderate liberals and reformists, not to mention the far right reactionaries and the authoritarians. There are many ethical revolutionaries, and I'm sure their are ethical moderates too (I just disagree with their tactics). I doubt their are many ethical fascists.
Micky Fucking Mouse as a character is trademarked, not patented! All trademarks last in perpetuity as long as they continue to be used commercially by their owner. Exact copies of films or other works that he appears in are copyrighted, not patented either! Mistakes like yours are the very reason we need to stop using the term Intellectual Property.
Somalia may not have a functioning government, but it certainly has plenty of religion and capitalism. I want to do away with all three (and any other unjust authoritarian systems). I think Libertarian Fundamentalism or Libertarian Capitalism are basically dangerous ideas that lead to something like Somalia in practice. Government isn't the only evil around, and if you just weaken government without a larger social transformation towards democracy and an ethical informed populous, then the balance that kept other powers in check would be upset and chaos would rein.
Your argument is that because dictators are good at oppressing people and some people will always try to be dictators, that therefore we must support dictatorship? You're a fucking asshole and if I ever encounter you in a revolutionary situation, I will fucking kill you and anyone else in your fascist/Stalinist/Christian/whatever army.
Look, I have no idea whether or not we can create a perfect egalitarian society. I just know that fighting oppression will always make our society better.
Lenin and Trotsky crushed the workers movement in Russia and the Ukraine; Stalin destroyed any chance of it even returning. The USSR was ruled by a military bureaucratic elite, not by the majority of the population.
Even though it was an unjust system, it was economically successful. Central planning can be more efficient than a free market in many situations. Russia went from a feudal empire with a low tech agrarian economy to a fully electrified, computer developing, space exploring, super-power in a single generation. In the middle of this development, they faced the largest losses of any nation in WWII, yet still managed to pull through. Comparing the economy of the USSR to the USA or Western Europe is absurd. Given the sort of technology and population that they had available, a far more fair comparison would be between the USSR and Brazil. The Soviets didn't do too bad. Moreover, when capitalism returned to the USSR, poverty, disease, homelessness, malnutrition, and nearly every human indicator got worse. Russia is only starting to recover due to an oil boom.
Humans care about their own interests. It doesn't make sense for a majority to work for the interests of a minority (whether that minority is the Communist Party or the Board and Shareholders). Socialism just means economic democracy. Anarchism just means socialism implemented by the workers themselves, not a vanguard elite. Libertarian socialism seams like a good idea to me.
Sociologically impossible. Man is a social animal and creates hierarchies. This has been true in every human society ever. Including supposedly egalitarian ones like the USSR and present-day Cuba.
I know that the potential for coercion and domination is always there, but the actual maintenance of massive oppressive structures like corporations, armies, or churches isn't inevitable.
Authoritarian communism is no better than capitalism. I side with Bakunin against Marx, with the Makhnovists and the Kronstadat rebels against Lenin and Trotsky, and with the Spanish Anarchists against the Stalinists. Cuba has achieved considerable success in spite of US sponsored terrorism and embargo. However, Castro's corruption, suppression of free speech and freedom to travel/associate, and just being a fucking dictator makes Cuba an unfree society. There aught to be another Cuban revolution.
Can we ever live purely without any hierarchies? I don't know. However, the authority which creates any kind of oppression - it can be economic, political, gender, race or any other form of discrimination - is illegitimate. We start with the premise that men and women are free but, for many reasons, have become slaves. We are the Capital's slaves, the State's slaves, prejudices' salves, in short, slaves for many reasons. Any action based on authority that contributes in the tightening or extension of this slavery, is based on illegitimate authority. It must, then, be denounced and overcome. A priori, the utilization of authority is always illegitimate, until the contrary is proven. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can't prove it, then it should be dismantled. There are plenty of people did exactly this throughout history. The labor movement, women's rights, anarchism, anti-authoritarian socialism, LGBT rights, indigenous rights, etc. We live in a better society because of their struggles.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and childishly cry out against IP. Without IP, the only things actually worth anything in this world would be land and expensive objects (factories, etc) built on land. And that's not a world you'd like to live in. If those things can also be owned by corporations, than no, this is not the sort of world that I want to live in. I'd actually like to throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the bathtub and sink! Along with throwing out IP, I'd like to throw out capitalism, religion, and government. Private ownership of the means of production is theft. Land and factories should be managed by workers and consumers, not rich people. Mental labor should also be done in a participatory democratic manner, rather than under the tyranny of wage labor.
That's like saying: I've seen way too many people confuse the term "operating system", "distribution", and "application". So let's stop using the term "software"! Good point. Actually, it's even worse. I often see people confuse "Internet", "browser", and "world wide web". We really should be more specific whenever we can.
People use the term "Intellectual Property" s because they are collectively a class of property rights of immaterial objects. But the laws dealing with each of these property rights are totally different. People don't use the term "physical property rights" to describe everything from personal possessions, to real estate, to custody of a child. Even though all these things involve owning something material, we don't lump them together because the laws that regulate them are completely different. The same is true for IP.
Normal folk get confused because -- well, normal folk get confused about a lot of things not related to their everyday lives. Let's see YOU not get confused about the type of tar to use on a highway if you're not a civil engineer. These things are very much related to our lives. People are just kept in the dark so that they can continue to be exploited. Every consumer or producer of music, machines, literature, software, etc should know something about copyright and/or patent law. Every Internet user should have basic knowledge of TCP/IP. Every car owner should know something about auto mechanics, highway construction, and global climate change. If you depend on something, you aught to understand it at some basic level! Once you understand it, you can start to make informed decisions about how to run it in your own best interests. If we're ever to live in a free society, one without politicians and bosses, we need to start taking charge of our own lives, learning about our environment, and rationally and democratically managing our own affairs. Human beings are naturally intelligent and curious. We want to learn about the world around us. It takes years of schooling and corporate media exposure to drive the ability to think out of a perfectly functional human. If we lived in a participatory democracy, our natural curiosity could be encouraged instead of stifled, and we would try to understand how the technology that we depend on works. By the way I'm not a civil engineer, nor am I a car owner, so I really have little reason to know much about highway tar. However, I do have experience with laying asphalt, filling cracks, and sealcoating roads. Highways are mostly made of asphalt these days, not true tarmac. Sealcoats may contain either asphalt or (coal) tar or both. Sealants probably also have water, clay fillers, latex, polymers (including plastic), and etc other stuff in them.
What sane nation would allow 60 year patents? Russia's claims should be laughed out of the international arena.
(I also agree with Richard Stallman that we need to stop using the term "Intellectual Property". I've seen too many people confuse copyrights, patents, licenses, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. Whenever we can be specific, we should use the correct term: in this case it's patent.)
This is how it started It's not hard to understand From coast to coast they're lying At a CEO's command From Nationalist Public Radio CNN and ABC Big Brother's spewing propaganda From the Disinformation Ministry
They say the economy is booming We hear the homeless beggar's cries They say we help poor countries We see bombs falling from the skies Reality doesn't exist They're trying to say But some of us decided There is another way
(Chorus) Seize the airwaves Seize the time Lying to the people Is the real crime When it's all owned by corporations And theirs is the only word We will seize the airwaves Speak freely and be heard
Someone got a transmitter Started up a station Then the idea spread Right across the nation Like the land and water The air must be free So let us shout together "Fuck the FCC"
(Chorus)
And we'll do it all together In a grassroots style Breaking down the fences Throughout this whole square mile It's the new Town Meeting It's the way the news should be The rulers call it chaos We say it's democracy
So when you turn on the radio And you've had it with this shit From 88 to 107 Makes you want to have a fit When you listen to the music And it's all the same pop song Start up a pirate station 'Cause that's where you belong
You want to be published? Buy and run your own printing press or radio station.
Sure, I can afford to buy or make the equipment, that's not the problem. Artificial government granted monopolies on spectrum licensing is. In the case of print, my market will be small...but I guess I can grow if people are interested in my work and my sales are successful. In the case of radio, my market will be near 0 unless I can afford to license real spectrum (AM, FM, long range S band). I don't have any place to start. The FCC hasn't even embraced low power FM (but thankfully people are still fighting for community radio).
Your mouth is your own, and pens and paper are really, really cheap. Beyond that, it's not about speech, it's about publishing, and that's a different story.
But ability to publish really does define free speech. The government isn't allowed to say that something can be spoken but not printed. Both forms are equally protected. The same should apply to broadcast. Under capitalism, however, private companies own the means of mass production. My ability to speak out is insignificant compared to News Corporation's ability. I as an individual am being told that I can speak audio but not over the radio; all the while corporations are free to speak over any and all media. Meaningful justice requires some level of equality. Our "democracy" grossly violates any sense of equality with it comes to the ability to speak out.
Almost even the most totalitarian societies will allow the drunken idiot rant in the public square. No one will listen to them. In a high tech, fast paced technological society, no one will listen to anyone speaking in the public square! Genuine free speech requires the freedom to speak where someone can hear you. In 2007, the ability to speak and be heard is provided through access to technology. Radio (including broadcast TV) is completely out of the picture as a means of two way communication for the working class...not because the tech is too expensive, but because the rich run the government (the guys with the guns). They conspire to keep us from speaking. If the same sort of regulations on broadcasts applied online it would cost you $10,000 to license your server because the hosting companies would want a government monopoly on providing content. Thankfully, because the (largely unregulated) Internet spans many nations and has been good for Wall Street, the corporate parties haven't put much effort into imposing such restrictions.
The FCC argues that the spectrum is limited and freeing it would mean whoever had the strongest transmitter would just drown everyone else out. This may have been true 50 years ago...but with intelligent spread spectrum tech, it simply no longer applies. Besides, if you are going to regulate the air, why should money be the determining factor in deciding who gets to go on? Why can't communities vote on regional spectrum allocation? Why can't the whole nation vote on the rights to long range RF communication? The corporate dominated regulated world ended up being just as bad as the "most wattage x-mitter wins" world would have been. Both mean that the rich monopolize public mass communication.
And that's where you're wrong. The FCC (aka, the Gubmint) regulates AM and FM broadcasts. They do not, however, regulate satellite broadcasts.
Nope, you're wrong. The FCC may not regulate obscenity on Satellite radio, but you can be damn sure they will shut me down if I start broadcasting over the the same range of the spectrum (S band) that XM uses, in a manner powerfully enough to drown XM out and get my broadcasts in. The FCC regulates the radio spectrum. They allow a good amount of freedom to use some frequencies for short range communication (including some sections of S band...such as 2.4 Ghz for wifi). However, I stand by my original statement that there's no possibility for a person of moderate income to do long range audio over radio communications that a wide audience could receive (even if they can obtain the proper equipment). Licensing of the spectrum keeps almost everyone* but corporations and religion off the air.
*Fortunately, non-profits and universities get to run a few stations.
The government grants private monopolies for speech over the airwaves supposedly for the "public interest", but really for the corporate elite that run America. You don't have the right to broadcast audio speech over radio waves at frequencies and strengths that would give you a mass audience unless you pay massive licensing fees that are prohibitive to any working class individual. This means that religion and capitalism maintain their cruel grip on the consciousness of the American public through manufactured deceptions on a massive scale. AM, FM, Satellite, it's all the same. How anyone can justify this by saying that it's a "free market" that lets people "vote with their dollars" is beyond me. How can "voting with your dollars" be democratic? One class of people have literally billions of these dollar-votes at their disposal while another has negative dollar-votes (debit). We need social democratic management of the means of speech in a mass society. True free speech can only prosper when both the right to speak and the right to be heard is available to all equally.
You can tunnel just about any service over any other on a TCP/IP network. Do they plan on blocking http? email? ssh? ping? If so, why offer any network access at all? If not, I'm sure the students are already at work with various stegenographic and tunneling techniques that let your share files over unconventional services. Also, when I share with my college peers, I generally just do so using a usb disk drive that I carry with me. I can move tens of gigs of data in just a few minutes. Does the university plan on doing a full cavity search of all students to make sure that they don't possess any readable/writable media? This is the information age. You can't stop people from sharing information! (fucking Luddites)
A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.
"The Gates Foundation's grants to Discovery are not the only connection Microsoft has to the institute. Mark Ryland, who heads the institute's Washington office, is a former Microsoft executive, and a Microsoft employee named Michael Martin is a current member of Discovery's board. "
If Gates helps fund transportation projects that the Discovery Institute is working on, that means that DI has more money to spend on it's ID chicanery. If Gates refused to give money to the Discovery Institute, than the organization would need to spread out it's funds more thinly, leaving less over for ID bullshit.
Microsoft has hurt the global economy to the tune of billions of dollars in lost productivity because of security vulnerabilities, unstable software, and proprietary formats. All the while better alternatives have existed but legal and marketing efforts by Microsoft have kept them out of the public's hands. Bill Gates has used his ill gotten wealth to push patented drugs on Africa which has probably lead to massive death since generic drugs could be mass produced much more easily. The Gates foundation has also funded The Discovery Institute, the main group preaching intelligent design lies. If the EU were to imprison all present and past members of the board of directors and executives of MS and seized all of Microsoft's wealth, they would not be going overboard. They would help millions of people and control a known industrial menace. Perhaps a nuclear attack on Redmond would be going to far, but I'm not sure.
If your a free software user, why would you be buying non-free games in the first place?
I play quake3, tremulous, and OpenArena just fine on my ubuntu laptop with intel graphics. By the time the doom3 engine is released as free software, intel graphics will support it just fine. If more people buy hardware that actually works with free software, than companies that sell floss compatible hardware will succeed in the marketplace. This will mean that more hardware on the market will support free software. More people will find free software easy to use and it's market will grow. You have a nice positive feedback loop right there. Eventually more gaming companies will take id's lead and release their old engines as free software so that we can use and further develop them. Game companies can still make money on new engines and on game data.
I agree that binary drivers are a bad idea and the package management works best in a unified way. However, I like the 3D wiz bang graphics. Please note that they do not require binary drivers to do 3D, at least not if you get intel graphics. Why Linux users continue to buy products that don't work with free software is beyond me.
As long as all your hardware is the same, deploying a uniform image should be possible using simple tools that have been a part of any *nix system for decades. I don't see why you would need to purchase "enterprise" anything. First install the OSes you want on one the Macs (OSX and Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD, whatever). Configure everything as you want it to be on the image. Then boot that Mac using some medium other than the disk you just did the install to (cd boot, network boot (I imagine x86 macs can use PXE just like most intel systems)). Mount a network drive and use dd to make an image of the disk you did the install on. Then write a script for doing the re-imaging. All it would need to do would be to mount that network drive and dd the image from there to the disk. You could do checksums to make sure the transfer worked if you want to get fancy. Store this script on the pxe server or boot cd, or whatever you choose to use to boot the Macs that are getting imaged. You can even set it to autorun so all anyone doing the re-imaging has to do is put in the boot cd and reboot, or connect the Mac to be re-imaged to the same LAN as the networked server and reboot. This seams like pretty much what you would do when setting up imaging for PCs, Sun workstations, whatever. Is there something in particular about Macs that make them more difficult to work with? (I'm not a Mac user)
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't we easily download NPR content in a friendly format?
Some local NPR affiliates release their broadcasts in open formats even through nationally NPR does not. BTW, why are you still listening to NPR? It really isn't "public" media anymore, and the political slant is about as right wing as fox news. Pro-war, pro-religion, pro-corporatism. "Nationalist Public Radio" perhaps? "National Pentagon Radio"? I prefer Democracy Now! for my news. They offer one hour ogg vorbis streams every day.
The article summery mentions "web" or "website" five times. I expect the corporate media to confuse http with the whole Internet, but slashdot should be better. Don't these laws impact security researchers investigating POP, SSH, SMTP, IMAP, various game services, various chat services, and etc other Internet protocols just as much as http? Why only point out the impact on the web in that case?
...in any human society there will be dickwads, because selfishness and evil are part of the human nature too. The solution is as much representative democracy as you can afford.
The problem is that the representatives are also dickwads. Representative democracy often becomes just another branch of capital or religion. Direct participatory democracy is better.
A just and democratic society requires an informed and ethical populice. We could have this if people's ideas about politics and ethics weren't warped by capital and the church. What if scientists had equal access to the media and school system as religious people do? What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church? What if advertising became useless because consumers would research products based on independent reports instead of listening to the marketing propaganda? What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions. Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
(amazing how a murderous lout hides inside all you revolutionary types, isn't it?). Thanks for proving my point.
You're previous posts indicated that you would defend dictatorships. Your side would be doing the mass murdering, and I hope that I would have the courage to use force to stop you. If that isn't the case and you too would oppose the use of violence for means other than preventing harm...then I have no quarrel with you. A lot of leftist revolutionary types are assholes...but so are a lot of moderate liberals and reformists, not to mention the far right reactionaries and the authoritarians. There are many ethical revolutionaries, and I'm sure their are ethical moderates too (I just disagree with their tactics). I doubt their are many ethical fascists.
Micky Fucking Mouse as a character is trademarked, not patented! All trademarks last in perpetuity as long as they continue to be used commercially by their owner. Exact copies of films or other works that he appears in are copyrighted, not patented either! Mistakes like yours are the very reason we need to stop using the term Intellectual Property.
Somalia may not have a functioning government, but it certainly has plenty of religion and capitalism. I want to do away with all three (and any other unjust authoritarian systems). I think Libertarian Fundamentalism or Libertarian Capitalism are basically dangerous ideas that lead to something like Somalia in practice. Government isn't the only evil around, and if you just weaken government without a larger social transformation towards democracy and an ethical informed populous, then the balance that kept other powers in check would be upset and chaos would rein.
Your argument is that because dictators are good at oppressing people and some people will always try to be dictators, that therefore we must support dictatorship? You're a fucking asshole and if I ever encounter you in a revolutionary situation, I will fucking kill you and anyone else in your fascist/Stalinist/Christian/whatever army.
Look, I have no idea whether or not we can create a perfect egalitarian society. I just know that fighting oppression will always make our society better.
Lenin and Trotsky crushed the workers movement in Russia and the Ukraine; Stalin destroyed any chance of it even returning. The USSR was ruled by a military bureaucratic elite, not by the majority of the population.
Even though it was an unjust system, it was economically successful. Central planning can be more efficient than a free market in many situations. Russia went from a feudal empire with a low tech agrarian economy to a fully electrified, computer developing, space exploring, super-power in a single generation. In the middle of this development, they faced the largest losses of any nation in WWII, yet still managed to pull through. Comparing the economy of the USSR to the USA or Western Europe is absurd. Given the sort of technology and population that they had available, a far more fair comparison would be between the USSR and Brazil. The Soviets didn't do too bad. Moreover, when capitalism returned to the USSR, poverty, disease, homelessness, malnutrition, and nearly every human indicator got worse. Russia is only starting to recover due to an oil boom.
Humans care about their own interests. It doesn't make sense for a majority to work for the interests of a minority (whether that minority is the Communist Party or the Board and Shareholders). Socialism just means economic democracy. Anarchism just means socialism implemented by the workers themselves, not a vanguard elite. Libertarian socialism seams like a good idea to me.
Sociologically impossible. Man is a social animal and creates hierarchies. This has been true in every human society ever. Including supposedly egalitarian ones like the USSR and present-day Cuba.
I know that the potential for coercion and domination is always there, but the actual maintenance of massive oppressive structures like corporations, armies, or churches isn't inevitable.
Authoritarian communism is no better than capitalism. I side with Bakunin against Marx, with the Makhnovists and the Kronstadat rebels against Lenin and Trotsky, and with the Spanish Anarchists against the Stalinists. Cuba has achieved considerable success in spite of US sponsored terrorism and embargo. However, Castro's corruption, suppression of free speech and freedom to travel/associate, and just being a fucking dictator makes Cuba an unfree society. There aught to be another Cuban revolution.
Can we ever live purely without any hierarchies? I don't know. However, the authority which creates any kind of oppression - it can be economic, political, gender, race or any other form of discrimination - is illegitimate. We start with the premise that men and women are free but, for many reasons, have become slaves. We are the Capital's slaves, the State's slaves, prejudices' salves, in short, slaves for many reasons. Any action based on authority that contributes in the tightening or extension of this slavery, is based on illegitimate authority. It must, then, be denounced and overcome. A priori, the utilization of authority is always illegitimate, until the contrary is proven. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can't prove it, then it should be dismantled. There are plenty of people did exactly this throughout history. The labor movement, women's rights, anarchism, anti-authoritarian socialism, LGBT rights, indigenous rights, etc. We live in a better society because of their struggles.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and childishly cry out against IP. Without IP, the only things actually worth anything in this world would be land and expensive objects (factories, etc) built on land. And that's not a world you'd like to live in.
If those things can also be owned by corporations, than no, this is not the sort of world that I want to live in. I'd actually like to throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the bathtub and sink! Along with throwing out IP, I'd like to throw out capitalism, religion, and government. Private ownership of the means of production is theft. Land and factories should be managed by workers and consumers, not rich people. Mental labor should also be done in a participatory democratic manner, rather than under the tyranny of wage labor.
That's like saying: I've seen way too many people confuse the term "operating system", "distribution", and "application". So let's stop using the term "software"!
Good point. Actually, it's even worse. I often see people confuse "Internet", "browser", and "world wide web". We really should be more specific whenever we can.
People use the term "Intellectual Property" s because they are collectively a class of property rights of immaterial objects.
But the laws dealing with each of these property rights are totally different. People don't use the term "physical property rights" to describe everything from personal possessions, to real estate, to custody of a child. Even though all these things involve owning something material, we don't lump them together because the laws that regulate them are completely different. The same is true for IP.
Normal folk get confused because -- well, normal folk get confused about a lot of things not related to their everyday lives. Let's see YOU not get confused about the type of tar to use on a highway if you're not a civil engineer.
These things are very much related to our lives. People are just kept in the dark so that they can continue to be exploited. Every consumer or producer of music, machines, literature, software, etc should know something about copyright and/or patent law. Every Internet user should have basic knowledge of TCP/IP. Every car owner should know something about auto mechanics, highway construction, and global climate change. If you depend on something, you aught to understand it at some basic level! Once you understand it, you can start to make informed decisions about how to run it in your own best interests. If we're ever to live in a free society, one without politicians and bosses, we need to start taking charge of our own lives, learning about our environment, and rationally and democratically managing our own affairs. Human beings are naturally intelligent and curious. We want to learn about the world around us. It takes years of schooling and corporate media exposure to drive the ability to think out of a perfectly functional human. If we lived in a participatory democracy, our natural curiosity could be encouraged instead of stifled, and we would try to understand how the technology that we depend on works. By the way I'm not a civil engineer, nor am I a car owner, so I really have little reason to know much about highway tar. However, I do have experience with laying asphalt, filling cracks, and sealcoating roads. Highways are mostly made of asphalt these days, not true tarmac. Sealcoats may contain either asphalt or (coal) tar or both. Sealants probably also have water, clay fillers, latex, polymers (including plastic), and etc other stuff in them.
What sane nation would allow 60 year patents? Russia's claims should be laughed out of the international arena.
(I also agree with Richard Stallman that we need to stop using the term "Intellectual Property". I've seen too many people confuse copyrights, patents, licenses, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. Whenever we can be specific, we should use the correct term: in this case it's patent.)
A song to accompany my rant.
(Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0)
Download ogg audio of Pirate Radio Song
This is how it started
It's not hard to understand
From coast to coast they're lying
At a CEO's command
From Nationalist Public Radio
CNN and ABC
Big Brother's spewing propaganda
From the Disinformation Ministry
They say the economy is booming
We hear the homeless beggar's cries
They say we help poor countries
We see bombs falling from the skies
Reality doesn't exist
They're trying to say
But some of us decided
There is another way
(Chorus)
Seize the airwaves
Seize the time
Lying to the people
Is the real crime
When it's all owned by corporations
And theirs is the only word
We will seize the airwaves
Speak freely and be heard
Someone got a transmitter
Started up a station
Then the idea spread
Right across the nation
Like the land and water
The air must be free
So let us shout together
"Fuck the FCC"
(Chorus)
And we'll do it all together
In a grassroots style
Breaking down the fences
Throughout this whole square mile
It's the new Town Meeting
It's the way the news should be
The rulers call it chaos
We say it's democracy
So when you turn on the radio
And you've had it with this shit
From 88 to 107
Makes you want to have a fit
When you listen to the music
And it's all the same pop song
Start up a pirate station
'Cause that's where you belong
(Chorus)
You want to be published? Buy and run your own printing press or radio station.
Sure, I can afford to buy or make the equipment, that's not the problem. Artificial government granted monopolies on spectrum licensing is. In the case of print, my market will be small...but I guess I can grow if people are interested in my work and my sales are successful. In the case of radio, my market will be near 0 unless I can afford to license real spectrum (AM, FM, long range S band). I don't have any place to start. The FCC hasn't even embraced low power FM (but thankfully people are still fighting for community radio).
Your mouth is your own, and pens and paper are really, really cheap. Beyond that, it's not about speech, it's about publishing, and that's a different story.
But ability to publish really does define free speech. The government isn't allowed to say that something can be spoken but not printed. Both forms are equally protected. The same should apply to broadcast. Under capitalism, however, private companies own the means of mass production. My ability to speak out is insignificant compared to News Corporation's ability. I as an individual am being told that I can speak audio but not over the radio; all the while corporations are free to speak over any and all media. Meaningful justice requires some level of equality. Our "democracy" grossly violates any sense of equality with it comes to the ability to speak out.
Almost even the most totalitarian societies will allow the drunken idiot rant in the public square. No one will listen to them. In a high tech, fast paced technological society, no one will listen to anyone speaking in the public square! Genuine free speech requires the freedom to speak where someone can hear you. In 2007, the ability to speak and be heard is provided through access to technology. Radio (including broadcast TV) is completely out of the picture as a means of two way communication for the working class...not because the tech is too expensive, but because the rich run the government (the guys with the guns). They conspire to keep us from speaking. If the same sort of regulations on broadcasts applied online it would cost you $10,000 to license your server because the hosting companies would want a government monopoly on providing content. Thankfully, because the (largely unregulated) Internet spans many nations and has been good for Wall Street, the corporate parties haven't put much effort into imposing such restrictions.
The FCC argues that the spectrum is limited and freeing it would mean whoever had the strongest transmitter would just drown everyone else out. This may have been true 50 years ago...but with intelligent spread spectrum tech, it simply no longer applies. Besides, if you are going to regulate the air, why should money be the determining factor in deciding who gets to go on? Why can't communities vote on regional spectrum allocation? Why can't the whole nation vote on the rights to long range RF communication? The corporate dominated regulated world ended up being just as bad as the "most wattage x-mitter wins" world would have been. Both mean that the rich monopolize public mass communication.
And that's where you're wrong. The FCC (aka, the Gubmint) regulates AM and FM broadcasts. They do not, however, regulate satellite broadcasts.
Nope, you're wrong. The FCC may not regulate obscenity on Satellite radio, but you can be damn sure they will shut me down if I start broadcasting over the the same range of the spectrum (S band) that XM uses, in a manner powerfully enough to drown XM out and get my broadcasts in. The FCC regulates the radio spectrum. They allow a good amount of freedom to use some frequencies for short range communication (including some sections of S band...such as 2.4 Ghz for wifi). However, I stand by my original statement that there's no possibility for a person of moderate income to do long range audio over radio communications that a wide audience could receive (even if they can obtain the proper equipment). Licensing of the spectrum keeps almost everyone* but corporations and religion off the air.
*Fortunately, non-profits and universities get to run a few stations.
The government grants private monopolies for speech over the airwaves supposedly for the "public interest", but really for the corporate elite that run America. You don't have the right to broadcast audio speech over radio waves at frequencies and strengths that would give you a mass audience unless you pay massive licensing fees that are prohibitive to any working class individual. This means that religion and capitalism maintain their cruel grip on the consciousness of the American public through manufactured deceptions on a massive scale. AM, FM, Satellite, it's all the same. How anyone can justify this by saying that it's a "free market" that lets people "vote with their dollars" is beyond me. How can "voting with your dollars" be democratic? One class of people have literally billions of these dollar-votes at their disposal while another has negative dollar-votes (debit). We need social democratic management of the means of speech in a mass society. True free speech can only prosper when both the right to speak and the right to be heard is available to all equally.
...what might be done to make HDMI a little more consumer-friendly?
Drop the DRM.
The Iranian revolutionaries did the same thing to CIA documents in the embassy. The re-assembled documents are available at www.memoryhole.org
I think you mean http://www.thememoryhole.org/
You can tunnel just about any service over any other on a TCP/IP network. Do they plan on blocking http? email? ssh? ping? If so, why offer any network access at all? If not, I'm sure the students are already at work with various stegenographic and tunneling techniques that let your share files over unconventional services. Also, when I share with my college peers, I generally just do so using a usb disk drive that I carry with me. I can move tens of gigs of data in just a few minutes. Does the university plan on doing a full cavity search of all students to make sure that they don't possess any readable/writable media? This is the information age. You can't stop people from sharing information! (fucking Luddites)
A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.
From the article that you linked:
"The Gates Foundation's grants to Discovery are not the only connection Microsoft has to the institute. Mark Ryland, who heads the institute's Washington office, is a former Microsoft executive, and a Microsoft employee named Michael Martin is a current member of Discovery's board. "
If Gates helps fund transportation projects that the Discovery Institute is working on, that means that DI has more money to spend on it's ID chicanery. If Gates refused to give money to the Discovery Institute, than the organization would need to spread out it's funds more thinly, leaving less over for ID bullshit.
Microsoft has hurt the global economy to the tune of billions of dollars in lost productivity because of security vulnerabilities, unstable software, and proprietary formats. All the while better alternatives have existed but legal and marketing efforts by Microsoft have kept them out of the public's hands. Bill Gates has used his ill gotten wealth to push patented drugs on Africa which has probably lead to massive death since generic drugs could be mass produced much more easily. The Gates foundation has also funded The Discovery Institute, the main group preaching intelligent design lies. If the EU were to imprison all present and past members of the board of directors and executives of MS and seized all of Microsoft's wealth, they would not be going overboard. They would help millions of people and control a known industrial menace. Perhaps a nuclear attack on Redmond would be going to far, but I'm not sure.
If your a free software user, why would you be buying non-free games in the first place?
I play quake3, tremulous, and OpenArena just fine on my ubuntu laptop with intel graphics. By the time the doom3 engine is released as free software, intel graphics will support it just fine. If more people buy hardware that actually works with free software, than companies that sell floss compatible hardware will succeed in the marketplace. This will mean that more hardware on the market will support free software. More people will find free software easy to use and it's market will grow. You have a nice positive feedback loop right there. Eventually more gaming companies will take id's lead and release their old engines as free software so that we can use and further develop them. Game companies can still make money on new engines and on game data.
I agree that binary drivers are a bad idea and the package management works best in a unified way. However, I like the 3D wiz bang graphics. Please note that they do not require binary drivers to do 3D, at least not if you get intel graphics. Why Linux users continue to buy products that don't work with free software is beyond me.
As long as all your hardware is the same, deploying a uniform image should be possible using simple tools that have been a part of any *nix system for decades. I don't see why you would need to purchase "enterprise" anything. First install the OSes you want on one the Macs (OSX and Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD, whatever). Configure everything as you want it to be on the image. Then boot that Mac using some medium other than the disk you just did the install to (cd boot, network boot (I imagine x86 macs can use PXE just like most intel systems)). Mount a network drive and use dd to make an image of the disk you did the install on. Then write a script for doing the re-imaging. All it would need to do would be to mount that network drive and dd the image from there to the disk. You could do checksums to make sure the transfer worked if you want to get fancy. Store this script on the pxe server or boot cd, or whatever you choose to use to boot the Macs that are getting imaged. You can even set it to autorun so all anyone doing the re-imaging has to do is put in the boot cd and reboot, or connect the Mac to be re-imaged to the same LAN as the networked server and reboot. This seams like pretty much what you would do when setting up imaging for PCs, Sun workstations, whatever. Is there something in particular about Macs that make them more difficult to work with? (I'm not a Mac user)