Perhaps you can see this combination because you can get cheap/free computers capable of wifi reception but to escape public housing you might need an extra $3-4 hundred a month in income.
The question isn't whether it's possible to do it under some subset of linux. I'll concede that you can do just about everything under some subset of Linux. The point I made is that it doesn't work generally, everywhere. It should be the same for KDE & Gnome as well as every other window manager out there.
In the Mac world once you figure out that command-Q quits, command-x cuts, command-p prints etc. you don't have to learn how to execute the same functionality on different programs, they're all the same. With system services, that uniformity of user experience will grow so when you add a word to the services based dictionary in a post to slashdot (using Omniweb), that word will no longer be flagged in your services compliant word processor.
Linux has a long way to go on this front and due to its wide open nature will likely take its time reaching the same uniformity of user experience across apps. That uniformity is a powerful technique for lowering the amount of time needed to pick up new programs.
It's also important not to minimize the significance of this new application category. Do you think that Microsoft partisans don't count Quicken and MS Money and the other 8 or 10 Windows accounting packages merely because they are not unique? I can see the sense of putting a stable requirement but useful and unique? That's a double standard vis a vis the Windows world.
Quickbooks is coming back to the Mac along with many other developers. For the first time in many a year the number of people departing the platform is far exceeded by the number of firms joining. The entire open source world made an adjustment so that for the first time ever Apple is a supported platform bringing thousands of applications to the Mac and this guy is talking about how Apple isn't on developer's radar screens?
He might not be wrong about his personal experience but any productive thoughts he has about the business relevance or long term viability of Apple certainly didn't make it into the article.
Perhaps the lawsuit filed against MS for infringing on patents might have been a clue for those who did due diligence? The reality is that MS customers have been burnt in a huge fraud (NOT MS' first) and they'll eventually get their pound of flesh from MS on that basis. The question is when will TCO figures start to include the differential cost of due diligence when dealing with Microsoft?
I've been saying this for years. It's not about the monopoly, it's about the fraud. The Democrats started this ball rolling because they felt anti-trust law was under pressure in academia. A lot of hot shots in the economics field were challenging the whole intellectual framework that underpins it so they needed a big bad scalp to show that the old dog of anti-trust was still useful. Microsoft fit the bill because whatever else, it has accumulated a lot of enemies by underhanded dealings. The Republicans acted like a bull seeing red and instead of doing the smart thing and insisting that MS' wrongdoings be prosecuted under other statutes, started defending MS in reflexive opposition to Democrat persecution of business.
The competitors were happy that somebody was taking a lead pipe to MS for any reason whatsoever. Those who have been burned by MS weren't interested in issues of philosophy either.
And look where we end up. We have one more consent decree and MS still acting illegally and screwing their customers only now there's no stomach to point out that both major political parties in the US played power politics instead of working to solve the problems raised by having a major technology player be, in essence, a criminal enterprise.
It's actually worse since both the number of firms doing actual due diligence and the number of firms who refuse to believe MS on *anything* will be going sharply up. It's also likely due to the nature of these firms, that those most affected (and thus most likely to change their behavior) are large enterprise accounts, the holy grail that is MS' hope to escape commoditization of its dominant markets.
Sure the EULA covers it in saying you have license to use this software. I wonder if the disclaimer section is annulled if they knowingly provided fraudulent info?
I thought MySQL introduced transaction support for 4.0 (supposedly ready for production at 4.1). I suspect that it will eventually gain the features it's missing though MS SQL will likely continue with its two biggest liabilities, MS Legal and MS business ethics.
That sounds like a missing product niche, pre-formatted CDRW disks for a nickel extra a disk. UDF formatting takes no time if somebody else has already done it.
Palladium is the MS instantiation of the concept of DRM. The problem isn't that a Palladium or other DRM schemes exist, the point is that a sitting Senator of the US has introduced legislation to make such schemes mandatory. Will it pass this Congress? Probably not for many technical reasons but is there a safe majority that would never let this get through? I'm not so sure. Creating just such a mandatory scheme is very high up on the to do list of the MPAA/RIAA and friends. Where these organizations are concerned, fair use is a dirty word.
The problem with your analysis is that it really doesn't fit the law. It's the losing argument in the betamx case. The relevant legal standard is whether the device, method, etc. has substantial non-infringing uses. Clearly, the general purpose PC is chock full of non-infringing uses. It's not a pirating machine, but a useful machine that can be used by evil people to break the law.
People who have their rights infringed don't gain the right to alter uninvolved innocents lives, property, or behavior just because it makes it easy to fix their problem with wrong doers. There is something called the presumption of innocence. what you are consenting to is a regime where we are all guilty until proven innocent and we must carry around (and pay for!) our own electronic minder to ensure that we are not acting criminally today.
As for data being tied to one program being beneficial, I actually don't find that to be something that appeals to me but I wouldn't ban such a program. But the conversation isn't about DRM but Palladium. While I might concede that there is a market for DRM, Palladium comes complete with Microsoft's legal department attached. This is a 'feature' that radically changes my opinion because MS legal has such a demonstrated history of bad faith and bad behavior that it entirely evicerates any prospective chance that Palladium will turn into anything other than the stuff of nightmares.
Finally, I again urge you to study the corpus of christian doctrine. I don't think you're going to find much support for your stand that negotiation and compromise, in other words not putting your bottom line non-negotiables out as a first position, is immoral just doesn't command much respect in pretty much every branch of christianity I've ever heard of.
Asking for the whole loaf and settling for half a loaf is just how most legislation gets done. It's standard practice and raises no moral difficulties.
Actually, I'm using an OS X box. Palladium is a concern for us too. Believe me, a three year old in a properly configured account can work that OS just fine. Leaving a three year old with access to cds so he can 'feed' them to his little sister is not such a bright idea. Thus we have a physical media problem. Pardon me if I don't trust the creaters of CSS to manage what I can do with the movies I've purchased. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command may be worth purchasing once but 5 or 6 times? I think not.
I agree that a digital camera would be helpful in working around the restrictions of copying. A microphone would work fine as well to get a snippet of a sound track. The question remains why does the RIAA/MPAA get to decide the method of legal copying? Why do they get to mandate that I have to purchase inferior copying tools to replace the superior (but now palladium disabled) copying tool of the general purpose PC?
Yes, Sony is likely not to break out of interoperability mode because of customer protest but customer discomfort doesn't always work. Did DR-DOS users succesfully stop MS from breaking their favorite OS? Or did Lotus 1-2-3 users outrage at MS' purposefully breaking compatibility prompt a fix and a commitment never to do that again? The answer is clear in both cases. DRM, to be done right, needs to be implemented by a company with a corporate culture that is trustworthy and there must be enough of an escape hatch for people to leave if the controlling firm goes bad. As far as corporate culture goes, MS starts off as the poster boy for corporate bad faith. The only reason that the paranoid scenarios are plausible is that in multiple cases paranoid scenarios have been documented as actual fact years later in court.
As for your being a christian, so am I. If you think christianity requires you to abandon your secular duty as a citizen and not speak up against injustice in a democratic republic then I suggest you hit the books a bit more and study our shared faith. Rendering unto Caesar is more than paying your taxes in a society that elects representatives to form a government.
I have a 1.5 year old who loves to teethe on CDs. I have a 3 year old who thinks its a blast to watch her teethe on CDs/DVDs. I *love* making disk images and automounting them for my kid when he logs onto his account so he can play his kids games, and watch his movies.
Now what crime have I committed? None. Would a palladium system allow me to copy The Lion King to disk? Are you kidding? How about taking a few frames and incorporating them into a report for school (classic fair use)? You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think so.
Now would I complain and bitch about Sony CDs only for Sony CD players? Sure I would and so would most parents. Why? Because we would have one more (in reality many more) thing to listen to our kids whine about having to get in order to be acceptable to the in crowd.
Let's take another case of purposeful incompatibility. Rail lines in the former USSR are different gauge than most everywhere else. Don't ask why, they just did it. It's an opt-in system. You don't have to take the train and wait for 2 hours while they change wheel assemblies back and forth. But do you really think that across the decades that a majority was actually complacent about the situation? I doubt it.
You make a key concession when you admit that Palladium will be "beyond the capabilities of most computer professionals to subvert". That implies that some will be able to subvert and those who can will have a portion who will actually do it and distribute the results. Think how exploits are created and passed on to script kiddies. This will be the prompt for the next step, making the scheme mandatory.
As for how to fight for what you believe in, I find your tactics naive and unrealistic. You'll always get taken for a sucker if you don't stake out defensible positions and never lead with your bottom line position.
It's acutally much more likely that N. Korea will invade. If they don't tamp things down, sanctions are eventually going to be applied to bring them in line with the IAEA and N. Korea has said sanctions=war. since S. Korea now has twice the population and five times the economy I'm really trying to figure out how the N. Koreans are going to survive since neither the PRC, nor Russia is going to support an invasion heading south.
The only reason the S. Koreans are really scared of them is they have 30k artillery pieces within range of Seoul. They're not very mobile or very survivable but they'll last long enough to obliterate the city.
The US strategy seems obvious, scare the bejeezus out of the N. Koreans by successfully occupying Iraq, give enough support to the indigenous democrats to kick out the mullah regime in Iran and then walk into talks and say, we really would rather not have to deal in harsh measures. Would you like to survive to peacefully reunify with S. Korea? Drop the nukes, this time for real.
Given the right immunity deal (thanks EU for making that harder with the ICC) and exile package, I'm sure a deal could be swung.
Marriage isn't mandated when you sleep with someone. Alimony grows out of marriage and is part of a voluntary contract, and again, employment contracts are also voluntary in a way that copyright is not.
Without any actual agreement, I'm restricted from running certain programs on my computer (servers) to serve up certain data that I have (movies, songss, etc). This restriction is legal, Constitutional, but does infringe on my rights as much as the old English royal monopolies did. The Constitution does not grant rights but recognizes them, which is why we have things like the 9th and 10th amendments and why a significant fraction of the founding fathers were against a bill of rights on exactly the grounds that future generations of bozos would come to feel that only the rights written in the Constitution existed and all else was controlled by the government.
If you pipe muzak into an elevator, in what sense have I asked you to provide me with this? The only sense is some larger advancement of the arts and sciences social contract. But the ability to tinker, to create new things out of our own equipment is a fundamental basis for advancing the arts and sciences and just as valid as any band or movie company creating art. DRM and Palladium require that this sort of tinkering be substantially curtailed (and likely eliminated) in order for them to work. If the playback system is open enough to tinker, it's open enough to override DRM.
So here we end up with the arts and sciences being retarded by taking a very flexible piece of equipment (the general purpose personal computer) and making it a closed rigid system in order that other types of creators may more securely exploit their legal monopolies. I find that absurd. I find it doubly absurd because the tradeoffs are not being debated on those terms by our legislators who are, after all, our designated representatives for all this mess.
Palladium is useless without an underlying hardware base that is 100% compliant with it. If you can play media on a non-DRM system, you'll just make a virtual machine that is non-DRM and run your media from inside the virtual machine. We don't need faster processors to do that already (albeit at lower quality than native) a chip generation or two further down the road and the difference won't even be humanly detectible.
If Palladium can be so easily circumvented the only reason to spend money developing, pushing, and deploying it is to prepare for the day when it *does* become mandatory. Is that too hard to figure out?
The 2nd amendment people fight mandatory gun registrations on the same grounds. After the 10th or 15th country that went from registration to confiscation and full bans you draw the line further out where it's still politically viable to resist. The same logic holds true for the banning of the open system general purpose computer.
According to the same people protesting against the war now, we're supposed to be stuck in Afghanistan fighting the wily Taliban who teach us the same lesson they dealt to the Soviets a decade ago as hundreds of thousands starve to death because of US indifference to their suffering.
Ooops.
The anti-war crowd is getting a record of chicken little exaggeration of casualties and of covering up how bad these regimes are.
The entire copyright regime is an impediment to freedom. It (the right to copy) is specifically impinged as a societal bargain (a real honest to God social contract) that creators push along the arts and sciences faster than normal and in exchange get to have a limited monopoly for limited times.
When you look at such things as Palladium, you have to ask, is this going to advance or retard the progress of the arts and sciences? I think it will retard it so I'm against it. I end up losing rights without promised access to new and wonderful goodies. That's no bargain so we either remake the deal or call it off. If the RIAA/MPAA piss off enough people, the latter will be what gets passed.
Even if you don't buy the idea of energy independence (frankly I think the oil majors have been positioning themselves for many years to make the transition out of oil and Bush is their boy to make it happen on their terms) surely you can't believe that cheap and easy ways to kill inconvenient dictators are not of interest to the current administration?
Please look up the history of mohair and honeybee subsidies and how long the emergency tax on telecom lasted to pay for the Spanish-American war. Oh and by the way, what *did* happen to our helium reserve for our prospective military blimp fleet?
Given enough legal pull, dead organizations/movements can survive for many decades. When they're firmly attached to the body politic, these ticks need to be forcibly removed. The real question is *which* strategy is best for removing them? Do we create a proxy fight and get major labels to pull out of bully boy tactics? Do we go the legal route? Do we create better, alternate distribution and steal their best talent away?
Strategy is all up in the air right now. What won't work is doing nothing and waiting for them to die.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you can see this combination because you can get cheap/free computers capable of wifi reception but to escape public housing you might need an extra $3-4 hundred a month in income.
The question isn't whether it's possible to do it under some subset of linux. I'll concede that you can do just about everything under some subset of Linux. The point I made is that it doesn't work generally, everywhere. It should be the same for KDE & Gnome as well as every other window manager out there.
In the Mac world once you figure out that command-Q quits, command-x cuts, command-p prints etc. you don't have to learn how to execute the same functionality on different programs, they're all the same. With system services, that uniformity of user experience will grow so when you add a word to the services based dictionary in a post to slashdot (using Omniweb), that word will no longer be flagged in your services compliant word processor.
Linux has a long way to go on this front and due to its wide open nature will likely take its time reaching the same uniformity of user experience across apps. That uniformity is a powerful technique for lowering the amount of time needed to pick up new programs.
It's also important not to minimize the significance of this new application category. Do you think that Microsoft partisans don't count Quicken and MS Money and the other 8 or 10 Windows accounting packages merely because they are not unique? I can see the sense of putting a stable requirement but useful and unique? That's a double standard vis a vis the Windows world.
Quickbooks is coming back to the Mac along with many other developers. For the first time in many a year the number of people departing the platform is far exceeded by the number of firms joining. The entire open source world made an adjustment so that for the first time ever Apple is a supported platform bringing thousands of applications to the Mac and this guy is talking about how Apple isn't on developer's radar screens?
He might not be wrong about his personal experience but any productive thoughts he has about the business relevance or long term viability of Apple certainly didn't make it into the article.
Let me know when every application in Linux, cuts, copies and pastes in the same way.
Linux is great at a lot of things but having every program conform to one set of user interface standards is not one of them.
Perhaps the lawsuit filed against MS for infringing on patents might have been a clue for those who did due diligence? The reality is that MS customers have been burnt in a huge fraud (NOT MS' first) and they'll eventually get their pound of flesh from MS on that basis. The question is when will TCO figures start to include the differential cost of due diligence when dealing with Microsoft?
It astounds me to no end the amount of money that is spent on products with long legal contracts without significant legal review.
This is just so, so wrong when you have a company like MS who has a very well established relationship of legal chicanery.
Fraud pretty much changes all the rules of the game.
I've been saying this for years. It's not about the monopoly, it's about the fraud. The Democrats started this ball rolling because they felt anti-trust law was under pressure in academia. A lot of hot shots in the economics field were challenging the whole intellectual framework that underpins it so they needed a big bad scalp to show that the old dog of anti-trust was still useful. Microsoft fit the bill because whatever else, it has accumulated a lot of enemies by underhanded dealings. The Republicans acted like a bull seeing red and instead of doing the smart thing and insisting that MS' wrongdoings be prosecuted under other statutes, started defending MS in reflexive opposition to Democrat persecution of business.
The competitors were happy that somebody was taking a lead pipe to MS for any reason whatsoever. Those who have been burned by MS weren't interested in issues of philosophy either.
And look where we end up. We have one more consent decree and MS still acting illegally and screwing their customers only now there's no stomach to point out that both major political parties in the US played power politics instead of working to solve the problems raised by having a major technology player be, in essence, a criminal enterprise.
It's actually worse since both the number of firms doing actual due diligence and the number of firms who refuse to believe MS on *anything* will be going sharply up. It's also likely due to the nature of these firms, that those most affected (and thus most likely to change their behavior) are large enterprise accounts, the holy grail that is MS' hope to escape commoditization of its dominant markets.
Sure the EULA covers it in saying you have license to use this software. I wonder if the disclaimer section is annulled if they knowingly provided fraudulent info?
I thought MySQL introduced transaction support for 4.0 (supposedly ready for production at 4.1). I suspect that it will eventually gain the features it's missing though MS SQL will likely continue with its two biggest liabilities, MS Legal and MS business ethics.
When inkjets can do multipart forms, they'll truly kill the line printer.
That sounds like a missing product niche, pre-formatted CDRW disks for a nickel extra a disk. UDF formatting takes no time if somebody else has already done it.
Palladium is the MS instantiation of the concept of DRM. The problem isn't that a Palladium or other DRM schemes exist, the point is that a sitting Senator of the US has introduced legislation to make such schemes mandatory. Will it pass this Congress? Probably not for many technical reasons but is there a safe majority that would never let this get through? I'm not so sure. Creating just such a mandatory scheme is very high up on the to do list of the MPAA/RIAA and friends. Where these organizations are concerned, fair use is a dirty word.
The problem with your analysis is that it really doesn't fit the law. It's the losing argument in the betamx case. The relevant legal standard is whether the device, method, etc. has substantial non-infringing uses. Clearly, the general purpose PC is chock full of non-infringing uses. It's not a pirating machine, but a useful machine that can be used by evil people to break the law.
People who have their rights infringed don't gain the right to alter uninvolved innocents lives, property, or behavior just because it makes it easy to fix their problem with wrong doers. There is something called the presumption of innocence. what you are consenting to is a regime where we are all guilty until proven innocent and we must carry around (and pay for!) our own electronic minder to ensure that we are not acting criminally today.
As for data being tied to one program being beneficial, I actually don't find that to be something that appeals to me but I wouldn't ban such a program. But the conversation isn't about DRM but Palladium. While I might concede that there is a market for DRM, Palladium comes complete with Microsoft's legal department attached. This is a 'feature' that radically changes my opinion because MS legal has such a demonstrated history of bad faith and bad behavior that it entirely evicerates any prospective chance that Palladium will turn into anything other than the stuff of nightmares.
Finally, I again urge you to study the corpus of christian doctrine. I don't think you're going to find much support for your stand that negotiation and compromise, in other words not putting your bottom line non-negotiables out as a first position, is immoral just doesn't command much respect in pretty much every branch of christianity I've ever heard of.
Asking for the whole loaf and settling for half a loaf is just how most legislation gets done. It's standard practice and raises no moral difficulties.
Actually, I'm using an OS X box. Palladium is a concern for us too. Believe me, a three year old in a properly configured account can work that OS just fine. Leaving a three year old with access to cds so he can 'feed' them to his little sister is not such a bright idea. Thus we have a physical media problem. Pardon me if I don't trust the creaters of CSS to manage what I can do with the movies I've purchased. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command may be worth purchasing once but 5 or 6 times? I think not.
I agree that a digital camera would be helpful in working around the restrictions of copying. A microphone would work fine as well to get a snippet of a sound track. The question remains why does the RIAA/MPAA get to decide the method of legal copying? Why do they get to mandate that I have to purchase inferior copying tools to replace the superior (but now palladium disabled) copying tool of the general purpose PC?
Yes, Sony is likely not to break out of interoperability mode because of customer protest but customer discomfort doesn't always work. Did DR-DOS users succesfully stop MS from breaking their favorite OS? Or did Lotus 1-2-3 users outrage at MS' purposefully breaking compatibility prompt a fix and a commitment never to do that again? The answer is clear in both cases. DRM, to be done right, needs to be implemented by a company with a corporate culture that is trustworthy and there must be enough of an escape hatch for people to leave if the controlling firm goes bad. As far as corporate culture goes, MS starts off as the poster boy for corporate bad faith. The only reason that the paranoid scenarios are plausible is that in multiple cases paranoid scenarios have been documented as actual fact years later in court.
As for your being a christian, so am I. If you think christianity requires you to abandon your secular duty as a citizen and not speak up against injustice in a democratic republic then I suggest you hit the books a bit more and study our shared faith. Rendering unto Caesar is more than paying your taxes in a society that elects representatives to form a government.
I have a 1.5 year old who loves to teethe on CDs. I have a 3 year old who thinks its a blast to watch her teethe on CDs/DVDs. I *love* making disk images and automounting them for my kid when he logs onto his account so he can play his kids games, and watch his movies.
Now what crime have I committed? None. Would a palladium system allow me to copy The Lion King to disk? Are you kidding? How about taking a few frames and incorporating them into a report for school (classic fair use)? You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think so.
Now would I complain and bitch about Sony CDs only for Sony CD players? Sure I would and so would most parents. Why? Because we would have one more (in reality many more) thing to listen to our kids whine about having to get in order to be acceptable to the in crowd.
Let's take another case of purposeful incompatibility. Rail lines in the former USSR are different gauge than most everywhere else. Don't ask why, they just did it. It's an opt-in system. You don't have to take the train and wait for 2 hours while they change wheel assemblies back and forth. But do you really think that across the decades that a majority was actually complacent about the situation? I doubt it.
You make a key concession when you admit that Palladium will be "beyond the capabilities of most computer professionals to subvert". That implies that some will be able to subvert and those who can will have a portion who will actually do it and distribute the results. Think how exploits are created and passed on to script kiddies. This will be the prompt for the next step, making the scheme mandatory.
As for how to fight for what you believe in, I find your tactics naive and unrealistic. You'll always get taken for a sucker if you don't stake out defensible positions and never lead with your bottom line position.
It's acutally much more likely that N. Korea will invade. If they don't tamp things down, sanctions are eventually going to be applied to bring them in line with the IAEA and N. Korea has said sanctions=war. since S. Korea now has twice the population and five times the economy I'm really trying to figure out how the N. Koreans are going to survive since neither the PRC, nor Russia is going to support an invasion heading south.
The only reason the S. Koreans are really scared of them is they have 30k artillery pieces within range of Seoul. They're not very mobile or very survivable but they'll last long enough to obliterate the city.
The US strategy seems obvious, scare the bejeezus out of the N. Koreans by successfully occupying Iraq, give enough support to the indigenous democrats to kick out the mullah regime in Iran and then walk into talks and say, we really would rather not have to deal in harsh measures. Would you like to survive to peacefully reunify with S. Korea? Drop the nukes, this time for real.
Given the right immunity deal (thanks EU for making that harder with the ICC) and exile package, I'm sure a deal could be swung.
Marriage isn't mandated when you sleep with someone. Alimony grows out of marriage and is part of a voluntary contract, and again, employment contracts are also voluntary in a way that copyright is not.
Without any actual agreement, I'm restricted from running certain programs on my computer (servers) to serve up certain data that I have (movies, songss, etc). This restriction is legal, Constitutional, but does infringe on my rights as much as the old English royal monopolies did. The Constitution does not grant rights but recognizes them, which is why we have things like the 9th and 10th amendments and why a significant fraction of the founding fathers were against a bill of rights on exactly the grounds that future generations of bozos would come to feel that only the rights written in the Constitution existed and all else was controlled by the government.
If you pipe muzak into an elevator, in what sense have I asked you to provide me with this? The only sense is some larger advancement of the arts and sciences social contract. But the ability to tinker, to create new things out of our own equipment is a fundamental basis for advancing the arts and sciences and just as valid as any band or movie company creating art. DRM and Palladium require that this sort of tinkering be substantially curtailed (and likely eliminated) in order for them to work. If the playback system is open enough to tinker, it's open enough to override DRM.
So here we end up with the arts and sciences being retarded by taking a very flexible piece of equipment (the general purpose personal computer) and making it a closed rigid system in order that other types of creators may more securely exploit their legal monopolies. I find that absurd. I find it doubly absurd because the tradeoffs are not being debated on those terms by our legislators who are, after all, our designated representatives for all this mess.
Palladium is useless without an underlying hardware base that is 100% compliant with it. If you can play media on a non-DRM system, you'll just make a virtual machine that is non-DRM and run your media from inside the virtual machine. We don't need faster processors to do that already (albeit at lower quality than native) a chip generation or two further down the road and the difference won't even be humanly detectible.
If Palladium can be so easily circumvented the only reason to spend money developing, pushing, and deploying it is to prepare for the day when it *does* become mandatory. Is that too hard to figure out?
The 2nd amendment people fight mandatory gun registrations on the same grounds. After the 10th or 15th country that went from registration to confiscation and full bans you draw the line further out where it's still politically viable to resist. The same logic holds true for the banning of the open system general purpose computer.
According to the same people protesting against the war now, we're supposed to be stuck in Afghanistan fighting the wily Taliban who teach us the same lesson they dealt to the Soviets a decade ago as hundreds of thousands starve to death because of US indifference to their suffering.
Ooops.
The anti-war crowd is getting a record of chicken little exaggeration of casualties and of covering up how bad these regimes are.
The entire copyright regime is an impediment to freedom. It (the right to copy) is specifically impinged as a societal bargain (a real honest to God social contract) that creators push along the arts and sciences faster than normal and in exchange get to have a limited monopoly for limited times.
When you look at such things as Palladium, you have to ask, is this going to advance or retard the progress of the arts and sciences? I think it will retard it so I'm against it. I end up losing rights without promised access to new and wonderful goodies. That's no bargain so we either remake the deal or call it off. If the RIAA/MPAA piss off enough people, the latter will be what gets passed.
Even if you don't buy the idea of energy independence (frankly I think the oil majors have been positioning themselves for many years to make the transition out of oil and Bush is their boy to make it happen on their terms) surely you can't believe that cheap and easy ways to kill inconvenient dictators are not of interest to the current administration?
Please look up the history of mohair and honeybee subsidies and how long the emergency tax on telecom lasted to pay for the Spanish-American war. Oh and by the way, what *did* happen to our helium reserve for our prospective military blimp fleet?
Given enough legal pull, dead organizations/movements can survive for many decades. When they're firmly attached to the body politic, these ticks need to be forcibly removed. The real question is *which* strategy is best for removing them? Do we create a proxy fight and get major labels to pull out of bully boy tactics? Do we go the legal route? Do we create better, alternate distribution and steal their best talent away?
Strategy is all up in the air right now. What won't work is doing nothing and waiting for them to die.
Sorry, try again, the stuff is very, very light and strong. It's not likely to crush anything above a bug.