Meh. As long as the whole violation of human rights thing has stopped I don't care.
Well, it stopped for Vincent Foster quite a while ago.
Seeing as how a large portion of Obamas' picks were former Clinton-ites, including Hillary herself, better watch what you say and what secrets you're privy to or you may have a terminal walk in the park. At least Bush was more open about letting people know he'd have your ass waterboarded if you were a captured terrorist that they wanted information from.
I'm not so sure this administration will make any fine distinctions between foreign terrorist enemies or domestic political enemies, or waterboarding and just having people snuffed because it's expedient. No pesky prisoners to stir up bad PR and damage the polling numbers or testify later.
But that's OK. This administration is "above the law", according to them.
The parliament building has been occupied since yesterday and..... CNN has yet to notice it. At all. Amazing.
Not so amazing.
They just don't want to give angry US citizens who are already organizing in ever-larger numbers for Tea Partys any ideas that might end up putting their Messiahs' and the new spendulous-taxulous liberal-Democrat U.S. regimes' "New Order" at risk, especially as U.S. citizens have firearms.
Your original post did not give any room for discussion. I will debate the 'degree' of societal enforcement any-day and any-time.
You changed the subject by reconciling the topic from an absolute solution to a more tempered idea.
That was my point.
If you choose to take it that way. I simply assumed that there was an understanding that *some* basic rules are necessary to any civilized interaction. I should know better though, you're correct. This *is* Slashdot, after all.
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual.
So it's OK if someone poisons your water by pouring toxic waste into the river (to save a few bucks), thereby forcing the entire populace to import their water / install expensive systems to clean it up (thousands of people multiplied by much more than you saved) ???
So it's OK if you hire armed gun-men and snipers (because you have the money) to dominate a good fishing river and place gill-nets across the river to catch 100% of the fish for personal profit even if it destroys that resource forever ???
So it's OK if your burn down the next 10 houses around you because you didn't want to have trash handled properly and you decided to put up a home-built incinerator that let fly-ash go uncontrolled.... too bad that they didn't leave their yard as bare dirt and chop down their trees for your convenience ???
Sorry, but the only 'repression' here is _NOT_ having (at least some) areas where society outweighs the individual. I can't believe your at +5 for that drivel.
Look, nobody is saying there doesn't need to be rules. Those rules however need to be the absolute minimum needed for society to function in order for individuals to have freedom.
When a society gets to the point where there are so many laws, rules, regulations, codes, etc etc, on and on, to the point where no human can possibly live a normal life without being in violation of something, usually multiple-somethings, or when a government punishes its' citizens for voicing dissent, or uses its' punitive powers (criminal, financial, or otherwise) to do social engineering in an attempt to change peoples' beliefs and behaviors to what *it* considers "acceptable", then that's much, much too far and that government has far, far too much power.
That was the whole premise for the structure of the US government originally. Just enough short of anarchy to maintain order and a functioning nation, nothing more. This is what Thomas Paine meant with that quote in my previous post. *That* is what the US has forgotten.
That is why we in the US have been steadily losing our freedoms for a long time. That is 95% (or more) of the reason for the troubles in the US we see today. That is why it will only get worse as time goes on unless there are radical changes in how the government works and how & what the citizens think about and expect from government.
The more a government can provide, the more it can take away. The more it protects, the more it can destroy. It is up to the people. They have been conditioned and dumbed-down, their abilities for independent critical thinking dulled, so as to expect all things from government so therefor government now has the power to take all things away.
The more power a government is given to do "good things", the more power it has to do bad. This is not not right-left, liberal-conservative, or any other political credo. It's just the way governments work because they are ultimately run by flawed, imperfect people.
I really hate this idea that the individual overrides the social, it's a very narrow minded view that causes no end of grief. Sure, we would like to believe we're all unique and special, but it's just not true. We're part of a bigger "machine", just cogs. Sure, we can have individual ideas and attitudes, but we aren't here to merely satisfy our own individual wants. If that's the case we'd be solitary creatures.
The problem with this that has cropped up again and again throughout history is that when humans attempt to place the society's needs over the individual as an ethos of governance, individual ideas and attitudes are, and must be, suppressed.
The more emphasis placed on society's wants and needs over the individual, the more thorough and brutal the repression, indeed oppression, of individual ideas and attitudes. Especially when it comes to criticism of the society's leaders and their laws.
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual. It's been proven repeatedly throughout history up to the present day that it causes no end of grief including genocide, wars of aggression, and brutal oppression.
A healthy society and its' governance should impact as little as possible on individual freedoms, ideas, and attitudes.
"That government is best that governs least."-Thomas Paine
Sadly, we have forgotten Thomas Paine and are the worse for it.
Only stuck in LEO in terms of manned missions...we send autonomous to other planets fairly regularly. The theoretical knowledge is well-known, the technical skill is also available. What are we missing in terms of having to go through a learning curve?
Launching a small robot probe weighing a few hundred kilos and designing, building, testing, and launching an entirely-new Apollo-class CM/SM & LM manned interplanetary spacecraft system weighing many tons along with an entirely-new Saturn-V class launch vehicle are two entirely different things. The Saturn-V launch vehicle has reigned for decades as the worlds' most complex and powerful machine ever built by Man.
To build a launch system of that magnitude would, at this point, require almost another Kennedy-esque program to get it done in anything like ten or more years. We can't simply copy the Saturn-V, as even if they could even find all the plans and specs that have been lost, many many materials & components are obsolete and the companies that made them history along with the plans & specs, or couldn't be manufactured any longer due to environmental laws and regulations.
Not to mention that most of the aerospace engineers with the knowledge & experience have retired or died, with few to replace them as there has been no market for those skills, therefor few getting the necessary education. It could require a whole generation or more to design, build, and successfully launch another system equivalent to the Apollo/Saturn-V.
It would also necessitate a political change to the current risk-averse political atmosphere, as there will almost certainly be some spectacular failures with the possible deaths of more than one crew of astronauts. Politically, it's much safer to maintain what was started in other administrations, as failures can be blamed on others.
Besides, there probably won't be much of a US space program of any sort whatsoever before long, as soon we'll be too busy trying to pay back the staggering debts this administration is running up for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and taking wheelbarrows of near-worthless US dollars to the store for a loaf of bread.
The link at the top of Badphoenixcops [blogspot.com] points to a video of cops cutting the wires to video cameras before they help themselves to the owners goods and money
What is the URL of this video? I was not able to find any such link.
The problem though in the USA, if you go through with the IR shielding your home/property, you will get your door kicked/rammed in with a swarm of cops following...and they will have a search warrant to find that marijuana grow room you have hidden.
Then, when they find nothing but a pasty, paranoid nerd sitting at a computer with, at most, a couple downloaded pictures of Natalie Portman, you take them to court and sue the crap out of them.
Profit!
Of course, their *is* a small but non-trivial risk to consider that one or more of the cops in the "swarm" will decide to stomp the crap out of you, mace you, taser you, or shoot you just because they're having a bad day or feel they need to discourage others from making their IR-snooping technique worthless and decide to make an example out of you for the benefit of the other perps...err...citizens.
How about talking to the government about giving NASA a big funding boost (hey, why not as long as we're going into debt for trillions for bankers and stock-traders anyway?) and getting some serious and ambitious manned missions planned?
Nothing gets kids fired up about science as much as the thought of growing up to be an astronaut. Back during the space programs' heydays of the '60s and '70s, it was actually *cool* to do well in school, science in particular.
Since the rollback of manned space exploration missions public enthusiasm for science & research along with technical education, particularly among children, has dwindled. It's not so much a matter of motivating individual students as it is giving the generation a goal to push for other than becoming some anonymous corporate cog in some corporate lab researching cereal sugar-coatings or lower-cost hairbrush manufacturing methods.
Firstly, the Government didn't ban all useful weapons, they banned semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and provided tighter licensing controls for people purchasing rifles or pistols.
Apparently, we have differing opinions on what constitutes "useful" and for what purpose.
On the contrary, Police have reported that gun crime has reduced over the past 10 years since the gun buy-back scheme.
Well, i suppose if you have, for example, 100 murders committed by gun in one time period, ban guns, then 200 murders are committed the next time period, only not by gun, you can say that *gun* crime has been reduced.
Pro-Gun lobyists and Gun Dealers continue to say that the source of illegal guns are imports but they fail to provide any verifiable information.
Police and Scholars alike say that the majority of guns used in crimes today are either stolen or bought from Dealers or Licensed gun owners.
Neither have the pro-ban people provided anything but theories and speculation, no verifiable information other than "we say so".
There still is no explanation of why my post was marked "Flamebait" other than "I don't like what you said, but don't have any valid arguments to present, so I'll mod you down".
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism?
Shortly after the government banned all useful weapons so that they didn't need to fear the people anymore.
Followed by;
Mod parent up. Note how Orwellian Orwell's home country has also gotten after the effective banning of all firearms and how they're on the verge of banning knives, now, too, in a desperate attempt to legislate civility.
Both posts make valid points.
Why are objections or alternative viewpoints to the idea of governments taking away citizens' means to defend themselves "Flamebait"?
Is it now crimethink to object to being at anyone with a weapons' mercy? Have the media and the progressives really done such a thorough job of convincing everyone they can't trust themselves with sharp, pointy things or things that go "bang!"?
I mean, c'mon! If *you* were to be handed a gun or knife, would you turn into a blood-thirsty, murderous criminal (barring being a criminal for the weapon possession alone)? If you're of the opinion that if you had a gun you wouldn't start knocking over convenience stores or shooting people in the street, why do you think it's different for your neighbor?
Banning weapons won't keep them out of the hands of criminals and won't stop violent crimes from being committed. The only thing that banning law-abiding citizens from owning weapons *will* accomplish is rendering them helpless against the government.
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;...
Well, just convene a meeting with only those Senators that agree. It said nothing about any minimum number, just that two-thirds of those *present* concur. It doesn't even say that it must be done publicly. Call over Pelosi, Reid, and Frank to the White House at 3AM on a Sunday and have them "concur". Heck, they could even leave the "classified" status in place so that any Senators that oppose the treaty would be in violation if they attempted to tell anyone what they objected to.
I need clarification. If my internet station broadcasts nothing but public domain works or freely-distributable works, why would I have to pay fees to anybody?
That's an excellent question. Too bad the US Congress and the CRB (Copyright Royalty Board) don't deign to answer to mere sheep like us. Until, of course, the day when some sheep get pissed off enough to stalk them, run them off the road on their way somewhere, haul their asses out of their vehicle at gunpoint, and shoot them in the back of the head alongside the road.
Just wait. Pretty soon the Used CD market won't exist, because corporations will wisely only make songs/albums available by download. You'll have no choice but to "buy new".
You'll always have the choice of not buying. There's a lot of free stuff available and there are also indie labels that are not affiliated with RIAA and buddies.
Oh, they're already well down the road to dealing with those problems.
Audience not buying? Place a tax on blank CDs, DVDs, hard drives, etc and give the proceeds to the labels and movie studios.
Indie means of marketing & distribution allowing artists to bypass the media cartels? Pass a law such as was done in the US to impose disproportionately-large "broadcasting" fees on things like internet radio collected and managed by a recording industry company (SoundExchange), and by collecting these "license fees" on non-RIAA affiliated artists, force them to either sign up or lose that money. The only way an internet radio station may avoid paying these much-higher-than-over-air broadcast fees is if they file ahead with a copy of a contract with each individual artist for each individual work, making record-keeping and administration costs skyrocket. Both sides, the indie artists and the internet broadcasters, are therefor punished, discouraged, and harassed.
As can be seen, they are already working on eliminating or severely limiting any alternate means of artists to market & distribute their work without them getting the lions' share of the money.
I'm waiting to see what they'll try next. Maybe DRM-enabled instruments that automatically deduct micropayments whenever certain copyrighted note combinations (which can be as few as three notes based on court cases) are played?
Your argument is that people who create a more desirable product equate to someone stealing another person's work. Creation of new products is wonderful. Theft and distribution of another person's work is wonderful too. Only one is morally correct.
In the case of Gutenberg, the "product" was still books. The printing press simply enabled one man unskilled in calligraphy to print a book without employing teams of scribes, and to reprint it exactly over and over. Did Gutenbergs' invention "steal" the scribes' labor?
Now, I believe that anyone should be free to do with their work whatever they will. What I do not believe in is creating laws that rob the majority of rights to benefit a few far beyond protections afforded to most skills and professions and use our tax dollars to enforce an artificial scarcity and even deprive people of their freedom at the point of a gun in pursuit of this artificial scarcity.
I think of some of the problems we as a society are encountering in regard to copyright in the age of the internet and perfect digital copies as being similar in many ways to the problems we will face when copying of physical objects becomes cheap and ubiquitous like "replicator" technology from the Star Trek series. Both are disruptive to old business models and paradigms, but attempting to stop their development and use is an exercise in futility and will only result in loss of freedom.
>>>What if the world has changed in such a way that intending to "sell" some easily-copied series of ones and zeros is no longer a viable business plan?
I can not imagine such a world. A computer without software is pretty worthless, so there will always be a need for programmers and they deserve to get paid for their labor. (Although I suppose we could shackle them to plantations like my ancestors were, and force them to write programs for free.)
Of course if you know of an alternate way to get software for computers without having to pay the laborers, please share. I'm open to new ideas.
You don't charge for the ones and zeros. You charge to keep the system that uses those ones and zeros operating smoothly. Redhat does such a business with a free operating system at it's core. The operating system itself is free. The value-added is the support.
I'm a musician. I'm in a moderately-successful band. The music we write and record is free. Anyone can download it from my bands' website and hundreds of other places on the 'net and encourage it as a promotional tool. In this age we realize that selling recordings is a dead business model. We ask for donations if people enjoy our music recordings. We make the bulk of the money in performances and merchandise. We're currently setting up a system to record a live performance and offer it for sale there at the venue to audience members.
These are the kinds of business models that are independent of the need for rules enforcing artificial scarcity. I'd highly recommend taking a long hard look at your business model and tailoring it to obviate the need for similar protections involving the creation and enforcement of artificial scarcity.
Now that we got that out of the way, the question is: did this person commit a crime? IMHO he did. He did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment. If you disagree, consider this: You spend a year of your life developing a program, with plans to sell it for income, but instead I simply TAKE the program off bittorrent. I have stolen your labor without just compensation.
What if the world has changed in such a way that intending to "sell" some easily-copied series of ones and zeros is no longer a viable business plan? Should medieval scribes have convinced the King to have Gutenberg burned at the stake or have him thrown him in a dungeon and his invention destroyed? Should the horse-carriage and buggy-whip makers have had Henry Ford imprisoned?
Selling something is business. Business is risk. The world changes, peoples' tastes change. There are no guarantees of continuing profit. Should the Lawrence Welk estate have had Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry imprisoned because their "rock n' roll" destroyed the incomes of thousands that profited from "Big Band", jazz, and other musical styles?
The ability to make a profit from a particular business model is an opportunity, not a right. The only way to guarantee future profitability of current business models is to halt all scientific, technological, and cultural/societal change or progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. As long as the whole violation of human rights thing has stopped I don't care.
Well, it stopped for Vincent Foster quite a while ago.
Seeing as how a large portion of Obamas' picks were former Clinton-ites, including Hillary herself, better watch what you say and what secrets you're privy to or you may have a terminal walk in the park. At least Bush was more open about letting people know he'd have your ass waterboarded if you were a captured terrorist that they wanted information from.
I'm not so sure this administration will make any fine distinctions between foreign terrorist enemies or domestic political enemies, or waterboarding and just having people snuffed because it's expedient. No pesky prisoners to stir up bad PR and damage the polling numbers or testify later.
But that's OK. This administration is "above the law", according to them.
Where's Segal when we need him?
Strat
The parliament building has been occupied since yesterday and..... CNN has yet to notice it. At all. Amazing.
Not so amazing.
They just don't want to give angry US citizens who are already organizing in ever-larger numbers for Tea Partys any ideas that might end up putting their Messiahs' and the new spendulous-taxulous liberal-Democrat U.S. regimes' "New Order" at risk, especially as U.S. citizens have firearms.
For now.
Strat
Your original post did not give any room for discussion. I will debate the 'degree' of societal enforcement any-day and any-time.
You changed the subject by reconciling the topic from an absolute solution to a more tempered idea.
That was my point.
If you choose to take it that way. I simply assumed that there was an understanding that *some* basic rules are necessary to any civilized interaction. I should know better though, you're correct. This *is* Slashdot, after all.
Strat
This is not not right-left...
Oops. I guess I got a little "two not-ty" there! :P
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual.
So it's OK if someone poisons your water by pouring toxic waste into the river (to save a few bucks), thereby forcing the entire populace to import their water / install expensive systems to clean it up (thousands of people multiplied by much more than you saved) ???
So it's OK if you hire armed gun-men and snipers (because you have the money) to dominate a good fishing river and place gill-nets across the river to catch 100% of the fish for personal profit even if it destroys that resource forever ???
So it's OK if your burn down the next 10 houses around you because you didn't want to have trash handled properly and you decided to put up a home-built incinerator that let fly-ash go uncontrolled.... too bad that they didn't leave their yard as bare dirt and chop down their trees for your convenience ???
Sorry, but the only 'repression' here is _NOT_ having (at least some) areas where society outweighs the individual. I can't believe your at +5 for that drivel.
Look, nobody is saying there doesn't need to be rules. Those rules however need to be the absolute minimum needed for society to function in order for individuals to have freedom.
When a society gets to the point where there are so many laws, rules, regulations, codes, etc etc, on and on, to the point where no human can possibly live a normal life without being in violation of something, usually multiple-somethings, or when a government punishes its' citizens for voicing dissent, or uses its' punitive powers (criminal, financial, or otherwise) to do social engineering in an attempt to change peoples' beliefs and behaviors to what *it* considers "acceptable", then that's much, much too far and that government has far, far too much power.
That was the whole premise for the structure of the US government originally. Just enough short of anarchy to maintain order and a functioning nation, nothing more. This is what Thomas Paine meant with that quote in my previous post. *That* is what the US has forgotten.
That is why we in the US have been steadily losing our freedoms for a long time. That is 95% (or more) of the reason for the troubles in the US we see today. That is why it will only get worse as time goes on unless there are radical changes in how the government works and how & what the citizens think about and expect from government.
The more a government can provide, the more it can take away. The more it protects, the more it can destroy. It is up to the people. They have been conditioned and dumbed-down, their abilities for independent critical thinking dulled, so as to expect all things from government so therefor government now has the power to take all things away.
The more power a government is given to do "good things", the more power it has to do bad. This is not not right-left, liberal-conservative, or any other political credo. It's just the way governments work because they are ultimately run by flawed, imperfect people.
Strat
I really hate this idea that the individual overrides the social, it's a very narrow minded view that causes no end of grief. Sure, we would like to believe we're all unique and special, but it's just not true. We're part of a bigger "machine", just cogs. Sure, we can have individual ideas and attitudes, but we aren't here to merely satisfy our own individual wants. If that's the case we'd be solitary creatures.
The problem with this that has cropped up again and again throughout history is that when humans attempt to place the society's needs over the individual as an ethos of governance, individual ideas and attitudes are, and must be, suppressed.
The more emphasis placed on society's wants and needs over the individual, the more thorough and brutal the repression, indeed oppression, of individual ideas and attitudes. Especially when it comes to criticism of the society's leaders and their laws.
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual. It's been proven repeatedly throughout history up to the present day that it causes no end of grief including genocide, wars of aggression, and brutal oppression.
A healthy society and its' governance should impact as little as possible on individual freedoms, ideas, and attitudes.
"That government is best that governs least."-Thomas Paine
Sadly, we have forgotten Thomas Paine and are the worse for it.
Strat
Don't the editors actually look at the site at all?
You *ARE* new here, aren't you? :P
Only stuck in LEO in terms of manned missions...we send autonomous to other planets fairly regularly. The theoretical knowledge is well-known, the technical skill is also available. What are we missing in terms of having to go through a learning curve?
Launching a small robot probe weighing a few hundred kilos and designing, building, testing, and launching an entirely-new Apollo-class CM/SM & LM manned interplanetary spacecraft system weighing many tons along with an entirely-new Saturn-V class launch vehicle are two entirely different things. The Saturn-V launch vehicle has reigned for decades as the worlds' most complex and powerful machine ever built by Man.
To build a launch system of that magnitude would, at this point, require almost another Kennedy-esque program to get it done in anything like ten or more years. We can't simply copy the Saturn-V, as even if they could even find all the plans and specs that have been lost, many many materials & components are obsolete and the companies that made them history along with the plans & specs, or couldn't be manufactured any longer due to environmental laws and regulations.
Not to mention that most of the aerospace engineers with the knowledge & experience have retired or died, with few to replace them as there has been no market for those skills, therefor few getting the necessary education. It could require a whole generation or more to design, build, and successfully launch another system equivalent to the Apollo/Saturn-V.
It would also necessitate a political change to the current risk-averse political atmosphere, as there will almost certainly be some spectacular failures with the possible deaths of more than one crew of astronauts. Politically, it's much safer to maintain what was started in other administrations, as failures can be blamed on others.
Besides, there probably won't be much of a US space program of any sort whatsoever before long, as soon we'll be too busy trying to pay back the staggering debts this administration is running up for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and taking wheelbarrows of near-worthless US dollars to the store for a loaf of bread.
Strat
The link at the top of Badphoenixcops [blogspot.com] points to a video of cops cutting the wires to video cameras before they help themselves to the owners goods and money
What is the URL of this video? I was not able to find any such link.
The problem though in the USA, if you go through with the IR shielding your home/property, you will get your door kicked/rammed in with a swarm of cops following...and they will have a search warrant to find that marijuana grow room you have hidden.
Then, when they find nothing but a pasty, paranoid nerd sitting at a computer with, at most, a couple downloaded pictures of Natalie Portman, you take them to court and sue the crap out of them.
Profit!
Of course, their *is* a small but non-trivial risk to consider that one or more of the cops in the "swarm" will decide to stomp the crap out of you, mace you, taser you, or shoot you just because they're having a bad day or feel they need to discourage others from making their IR-snooping technique worthless and decide to make an example out of you for the benefit of the other perps...err...citizens.
Strat
How about talking to the government about giving NASA a big funding boost (hey, why not as long as we're going into debt for trillions for bankers and stock-traders anyway?) and getting some serious and ambitious manned missions planned?
Nothing gets kids fired up about science as much as the thought of growing up to be an astronaut. Back during the space programs' heydays of the '60s and '70s, it was actually *cool* to do well in school, science in particular.
Since the rollback of manned space exploration missions public enthusiasm for science & research along with technical education, particularly among children, has dwindled. It's not so much a matter of motivating individual students as it is giving the generation a goal to push for other than becoming some anonymous corporate cog in some corporate lab researching cereal sugar-coatings or lower-cost hairbrush manufacturing methods.
Strat
There still is no explanation of why my post was marked "Flamebait"...
Oops. Should have been "...why that post...".
Firstly, the Government didn't ban all useful weapons, they banned semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and provided tighter licensing controls for people purchasing rifles or pistols.
Apparently, we have differing opinions on what constitutes "useful" and for what purpose.
On the contrary, Police have reported that gun crime has reduced over the past 10 years since the gun buy-back scheme.
Well, i suppose if you have, for example, 100 murders committed by gun in one time period, ban guns, then 200 murders are committed the next time period, only not by gun, you can say that *gun* crime has been reduced.
Pro-Gun lobyists and Gun Dealers continue to say that the source of illegal guns are imports but they fail to provide any verifiable information.
Police and Scholars alike say that the majority of guns used in crimes today are either stolen or bought from Dealers or Licensed gun owners.
Neither have the pro-ban people provided anything but theories and speculation, no verifiable information other than "we say so".
There still is no explanation of why my post was marked "Flamebait" other than "I don't like what you said, but don't have any valid arguments to present, so I'll mod you down".
Strat
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
Fairness Doctrine.
Shortly after the government banned all useful weapons so that they didn't need to fear the people anymore.
Followed by;
Mod parent up. Note how Orwellian Orwell's home country has also gotten after the effective banning of all firearms and how they're on the verge of banning knives, now, too, in a desperate attempt to legislate civility.
Both posts make valid points.
Why are objections or alternative viewpoints to the idea of governments taking away citizens' means to defend themselves "Flamebait"?
Is it now crimethink to object to being at anyone with a weapons' mercy? Have the media and the progressives really done such a thorough job of convincing everyone they can't trust themselves with sharp, pointy things or things that go "bang!"?
I mean, c'mon! If *you* were to be handed a gun or knife, would you turn into a blood-thirsty, murderous criminal (barring being a criminal for the weapon possession alone)? If you're of the opinion that if you had a gun you wouldn't start knocking over convenience stores or shooting people in the street, why do you think it's different for your neighbor?
Banning weapons won't keep them out of the hands of criminals and won't stop violent crimes from being committed. The only thing that banning law-abiding citizens from owning weapons *will* accomplish is rendering them helpless against the government.
Strat
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;...
Well, just convene a meeting with only those Senators that agree. It said nothing about any minimum number, just that two-thirds of those *present* concur. It doesn't even say that it must be done publicly. Call over Pelosi, Reid, and Frank to the White House at 3AM on a Sunday and have them "concur". Heck, they could even leave the "classified" status in place so that any Senators that oppose the treaty would be in violation if they attempted to tell anyone what they objected to.
Strat
I need clarification. If my internet station broadcasts nothing but public domain works or freely-distributable works, why would I have to pay fees to anybody?
That's an excellent question. Too bad the US Congress and the CRB (Copyright Royalty Board) don't deign to answer to mere sheep like us. Until, of course, the day when some sheep get pissed off enough to stalk them, run them off the road on their way somewhere, haul their asses out of their vehicle at gunpoint, and shoot them in the back of the head alongside the road.
Strat
Just wait. Pretty soon the Used CD market won't exist, because corporations will wisely only make songs/albums available by download. You'll have no choice but to "buy new".
You'll always have the choice of not buying. There's a lot of free stuff available and there are also indie labels that are not affiliated with RIAA and buddies.
Oh, they're already well down the road to dealing with those problems.
Audience not buying? Place a tax on blank CDs, DVDs, hard drives, etc and give the proceeds to the labels and movie studios.
Indie means of marketing & distribution allowing artists to bypass the media cartels? Pass a law such as was done in the US to impose disproportionately-large "broadcasting" fees on things like internet radio collected and managed by a recording industry company (SoundExchange), and by collecting these "license fees" on non-RIAA affiliated artists, force them to either sign up or lose that money. The only way an internet radio station may avoid paying these much-higher-than-over-air broadcast fees is if they file ahead with a copy of a contract with each individual artist for each individual work, making record-keeping and administration costs skyrocket. Both sides, the indie artists and the internet broadcasters, are therefor punished, discouraged, and harassed.
As can be seen, they are already working on eliminating or severely limiting any alternate means of artists to market & distribute their work without them getting the lions' share of the money.
I'm waiting to see what they'll try next. Maybe DRM-enabled instruments that automatically deduct micropayments whenever certain copyrighted note combinations (which can be as few as three notes based on court cases) are played?
Ok, I gotta stop. I'm depressing myself.
Strat
Your argument is that people who create a more desirable product equate to someone stealing another person's work. Creation of new products is wonderful. Theft and distribution of another person's work is wonderful too. Only one is morally correct.
In the case of Gutenberg, the "product" was still books. The printing press simply enabled one man unskilled in calligraphy to print a book without employing teams of scribes, and to reprint it exactly over and over. Did Gutenbergs' invention "steal" the scribes' labor?
Now, I believe that anyone should be free to do with their work whatever they will. What I do not believe in is creating laws that rob the majority of rights to benefit a few far beyond protections afforded to most skills and professions and use our tax dollars to enforce an artificial scarcity and even deprive people of their freedom at the point of a gun in pursuit of this artificial scarcity.
I think of some of the problems we as a society are encountering in regard to copyright in the age of the internet and perfect digital copies as being similar in many ways to the problems we will face when copying of physical objects becomes cheap and ubiquitous like "replicator" technology from the Star Trek series. Both are disruptive to old business models and paradigms, but attempting to stop their development and use is an exercise in futility and will only result in loss of freedom.
Strat
>>>What if the world has changed in such a way that intending to "sell" some easily-copied series of ones and zeros is no longer a viable business plan?
I can not imagine such a world. A computer without software is pretty worthless, so there will always be a need for programmers and they deserve to get paid for their labor. (Although I suppose we could shackle them to plantations like my ancestors were, and force them to write programs for free.)
Of course if you know of an alternate way to get software for computers without having to pay the laborers, please share. I'm open to new ideas.
You don't charge for the ones and zeros. You charge to keep the system that uses those ones and zeros operating smoothly. Redhat does such a business with a free operating system at it's core. The operating system itself is free. The value-added is the support.
I'm a musician. I'm in a moderately-successful band. The music we write and record is free. Anyone can download it from my bands' website and hundreds of other places on the 'net and encourage it as a promotional tool. In this age we realize that selling recordings is a dead business model. We ask for donations if people enjoy our music recordings. We make the bulk of the money in performances and merchandise. We're currently setting up a system to record a live performance and offer it for sale there at the venue to audience members.
These are the kinds of business models that are independent of the need for rules enforcing artificial scarcity. I'd highly recommend taking a long hard look at your business model and tailoring it to obviate the need for similar protections involving the creation and enforcement of artificial scarcity.
Strat
Now that we got that out of the way, the question is: did this person commit a crime? IMHO he did. He did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment. If you disagree, consider this: You spend a year of your life developing a program, with plans to sell it for income, but instead I simply TAKE the program off bittorrent. I have stolen your labor without just compensation.
What if the world has changed in such a way that intending to "sell" some easily-copied series of ones and zeros is no longer a viable business plan? Should medieval scribes have convinced the King to have Gutenberg burned at the stake or have him thrown him in a dungeon and his invention destroyed? Should the horse-carriage and buggy-whip makers have had Henry Ford imprisoned?
Selling something is business. Business is risk. The world changes, peoples' tastes change. There are no guarantees of continuing profit. Should the Lawrence Welk estate have had Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry imprisoned because their "rock n' roll" destroyed the incomes of thousands that profited from "Big Band", jazz, and other musical styles?
The ability to make a profit from a particular business model is an opportunity, not a right. The only way to guarantee future profitability of current business models is to halt all scientific, technological, and cultural/societal change or progress.
Strat
Remember kids,
"Don't swindle that Kindle!"
Three words.... "Contemporary Christian music"
You mean like these guys?
Not exactly your average Christian Contemporary group.
It's quite common to see PRS stickers on the instrument cases of amateur musicians.
Perhaps some of those "PRS stickers" on those instrument cases might be about what's *inside* those cases?
Just sayin'.
Strat
[citation needed]
I'm going to internet meme hell for this comment aren't I?
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