Um, because it is pretty much illegal for the libertarians to run in a whole slew of districts... and even the districts where it is legal, the laws on financing and advertising are such that there would be no legal way to advertise for libertarians. And even then, most voting districts are so gerimandered, that they are the exclusive property of one party.
So are we going to have "News for Sports Nerds" as well? Like the dorky guys who know every single sports score from every game in every sport in every country that ever happened? The guys who have 5 TVs to watch every single game, but get out of breath walking up a flight of stairs.
What about "News for Drama Nerds"? I heard there is a new bitchin' annotated version of the Complete Works of Shakespeare coming out... as well as a new biography of Author Miller! Sweet!
I have unused resources, why shouldn't someone else get them? Because if someone is pirating movies, or trading child porn, or planning a terrorist attack, you will probably go to jail or be sued?
Look, I agree with you, it is a good thing to share your abundance with your community. But we live in a society where that just isn't possible. If I build a pool, and I leave the pool open and allow all the people in my community to swim for free, it is only a matter of time before some kid drowns and I get sued. It would be nice to leave the pool open for everyone to enjoy, but it is just not possible in the real world.
Anonymous open wifi is the same issue. In the next few years, you are going to see a lot of people totally screwed for leaving their wifi open. Even if it is morally OK to leave the wifi, even if it is a totally positive thing, we live under a legal system that forces us to be paranoid of our neighbors. You will, eventually, either close your wifi or find yourself being sued or going to jail.
I mean, I am sure the A380 is a brilliant piece of engineering. If you are looking for a piece of nationalistic achievment, like the U.S. moon landing or something like that, the A380 certainly does the trick. It is a technological marvel, really... a show peice of excellent European engineering.
But I don't expect the A380 to be a financial success. Market success != admiration for engineering achievment.
OK, of course driving is more dangerous than flying. But you are missing the point.
People will freak out about aircrashes, or terrorism, or serial killers, or shark attacks, or whatever random thing that kills people in a dramatic way, despite what the statics are!
I mean, that is why we had people freaking out about SARS or Bird Flu, when the normal old-fashion forms of flu kill millions every year worldwide. Or why there is no restrictions of buying a swimming pool and installing it in your backyard, but people freak out about gun control, despite the fact that the pool is 100 times more likely to kill someone. That is why we spend billions on a "War on Terror", but don't spend billions on a "War on Lightening", despite the fact that more Americans have been struck by lightening than killed by terrorism in the last 20 years. Or why schools are turning into prisons with metal detectors, random searches, etc., despite the fact that schools are safer than most people's homes.
When one of these planes crashes, and you have 600 people dead, people are going to freak out! It doesn't have to be rational, or reasonable... most of the laws being made nowadays are knee jerk reactions to some sensationalized problem. I bet if I took the time to question you, I could find some issue which you are hysterically irational about. Modern politics and popular culture is based on this hysteria. These planes are not going to be immune.
There are more serious sci-fi books being published, more serious sci-fi movies and TV shows being made, than ever before. Hell, there is more serious fiction and drama being produced than ever before. You doom and gloom complaints are complete fiction. We are seeing a golden age of both good science fiction, and good entertainment in general.
The top 10 hollywood blockbuster movies are not the entirety of culture, and neither is the top 5 TV shows. If that is all you see, then it is because you aren't even making a remote effort to find good culture. Right now, people have 1000 TV channels, DVD rental clubs, the internet, there has never been so much diversity and quality in the entertainment we have available in all of history.
It doesn't matter if you voted Republican, or Democrat... If you voted for either big party, you voted for party that 100% explicitly supports National Security Letters!
The difference between the Republicans and Democrats is when Clinton tried to pull this shit, the Republicans actually stopped it... Where as when the Republicans did this kind of shit, the Democrats said "Yes Mr. Bush, whatever you say! We stand behind you 100%!".
Actually, the French are pretty much the most militant European power. France maintains a nuclear arsenal, they have the largest military in Europe, and their Foreign Legion is pretty much always at war somewhere in the world (according to some people, Legionaries are more likely to be killed during a tour of duty than U.S. soldiers are in Iraq). Historically with the war in Algeria, in Indochina, etc., France has probably fought more wars since WWII than the U.S.. I mean, have you ever heard of Bob Denard or Jacques Foccart? The whole Francafrique policy?
You can call the French bastards if you want, but they certainly aren't surrender monkeys. France didn't avoid the war in Iraq because they were afraid to fight, they avoided the war in Iraq because they had spent 20 years supplying Saddam with weapons in exchange for oil rights, and getting rid of Saddam was not in their economic interests.
As nasty as the RIAA is, they don't hold a candle to the tobacco companies: the only industry whose product, used as recommended, causes cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. Except that people freely choose to smoke, knowing the risks. The dangerous of smoking have been common knowledge for the last 30-40 years. There is nothing more nasty about the tobacco companies than their are the companies that manufacture mountain climbing equipment.
The morality of an action has nothing to do with the intent. If someone thinks they are helping you by kicking you in the head, they are still doing you harm. And if they think they are harming you by curing a disease, they are still doing good.
In this case, YouTube might be acting to maximize its profits, but the way it is doing so benifits the rest of us. Society is benifited by having a place where it can freely exchange video, and it would be harmed by effectively criminalizing such a service. Therefore Youtube is right, and Viacom is wrong, despite the fact that both are simply trying to make money.
If the water froze and then unfroze, the expansion/contraction could have damaged the disk. Also, we are not talking pure H2O here, if the flood damage was from water that backed up out of the sewers or something, it could contain chemicals and/or microorganisms that would break down the plastic, sediment that could scratch the surface, etc.
Flood damage is not quite the same as submerging a CD in your bathtub.
In the case of the article, they were talking about ANALOG AUDIO TAPES!!! The article is about analog technology (i.e. microfilm, analog audio tape of voice recordings, etc.) vs digital technology (digital tape, CDs, hard drives). How the hell did YOU get rated insightful?
The power of digital backup isn't creating one indestructable copy... The power is creating massive amounts of redunant copies. For the cost of one high quality tape, I could create 50 copies of a CD, and mail them to 50 different locations.
I will pay $60 for a console game, easy. A) I know it works on my system. B) It is legal to resell it when I am done, and recoup some of the costs. C) I am getting subsidized hardware.
However, for a PC game from Steam, where you can't resell the game, where your PC might not be enough to get optimum performance from the game, where you have paid the full unsubsidized cost for the hardware, and especially on the PC where they release beta products that need to be patched before they work properly... then definitly a fair price would be around $20 or $30.
If you are comparing $60 for a console game, and $60 for a PC game, it is not a valid comparison.
The U.S. produces vast more corn, grain, and the like than the U.S. needs (or other countries can pay us for). The U.S. could lose a good chunk of its farms, and still produce more food than we as a country need.
If the value of certain crops are so low, that farmers can only afford to operate with huge welfare checks from the federal government, then maybe the country needs to produce less of those crops, ya think?
What if General Motors and Ford said that they want to make twice as many automobiles as Americans can afford to purchase, and that the government should pay for tens of thousands of cars that people don't need or want... because "cars don't magically appear in the car dealership". You would think it was crazy, and you would be outraged. Well then, when farmers want the same thing, they should expect the same thing.
If there was half as many corn growers in the U.S., there would still be plenty of corn, and the market price would be such that corn formers would be able to make a living without government welfare checks.
And, if you include carbon sinks into the equation (the U.S. has a lot of forest and vegetation per capita), the U.S. becomes comparable or better than many places in Western Europe. (of course, including carbon sinks also greatly improves Canada and Australia)
The need for a "high quality" consumer sound card doesn't exist anymore. Most of the super-cheap sound cards or audio embedded on the motherboard is comparable to your average consumer electronics (i.e. your Sony stereo system). Most computers have more than enough processing power to handle all the wavetable stuff.
And if you need high quality (you are an audiophile, or you are doing pro or wannabe-pro recording), you would jump up to professional recording hardware, which would cost you only marginally more than a Creative Labs product.
My SoundBlaster card was a lot of fun back in the day though. At that time, sampled sound playback was still somewhat of a novelty, and the soundblaster was pretty damn cool.
Intellectual "property" is not a natural right. Intellectual "property" is a privledge granted by the state. The founding fathers of the U.S., who were hardcore supporters of property rights and capitalism (so don't accuse what I am saying of being some sort of hippie anti-property or anti-capitalist stance), clearly intented copyright to be a brief monopoly granted by the government to "promote science and the useful arts" when they added the copyright clause to the constitution. Copyright was intended to benifit the public at large by making information more free and openly available, not to garantee the copyright holder a profit or for them to dictate how the information should be used.
Viacom's copyright exists to make Viacom's content widely and freely available to whoever wants it. When Viacom exercises their copyright in such a way that it no longer serves the public interest, then the government has a moral duty to revoke their copyright privledges. It is clear that Viacom has abused and continues to abuse its obligation to serve the public with its copyright privledges, and so therefore all their "rights" should be forfeit.
Note that this has nothing to do with Communism or capitalism, which is the thesis the author's trying to build. The R&D regimes are actually identical: invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge. In Capitalism, there is a financial incentive to move the military technologies into the civilian world: to make a profit on consumer goods. In fact, there are often the implication that military contracters intentionally leak technology to move them into the civilian use quicker (I don't know if the implication is true, but the fact that they are accused of doing so implies they have the incentive). Under Communism, the incentive is to keep technology secret as long as possible, as there is no real benefit or way to profit from moving the technology to the civilian economy.
Psychology isn't science, anyway. Psychiatry (which actually requires an MD), Neurology, etc. is generally scientific. But Psychology is pseudo-science, designed to fill the gap in a liberal arts education after they removed the old-fashion "Bible Study" or "Ethics" courses from the ciriculum.
Research from psychologists is like research from creationists - Technically, we shouldn't discount their research based on who they are, but in reality it is almost always flawed. As a person who lives in a world where I can't possibly check out the details of every single scientific study, a good rule of thumb is to consider every bit of research coming from psychologists to be bullshit.
Much better to watch the violent shows, and then complain to the government to change them than to bother to lift your finger and press a button to change the channel.
It only seems wierd to you, because you are pro-censorship. Free minded people understand that any sort of censorship is the product of an irrational and fearful mind, and no form of censorship is legit. If anything, the "reasonable" forms of censorship or more dangerous, because they are less likely to evoke the proper outrage.
But the U.S. attitude is no more absurd than the European attitude. Both systems are rigidly authoritarian, and only an authoritarian would find one more "reasonable" than the other.
It CAN stop piracy if it is a MMOG like say Anarchy Online, or a game that people play exclusivly online like Counterstrike. Having it connect to the internet to play the local single player is lame, because it a decent cracker can simply bypass the part that needs to go online to play. But if using the company's servers is part of the critical functionality of the game (like an MMOG), then there is no way to pirate the game other than to hack the actual server (which is far more difficult).
Why can't Viacom give away this content for free? Aside from the fact that YouTube content is a horribly compressed, low resolution clip no longer than 15 minutes in length and so it can't really show Viacom's content properly - Viacom already gives their best content away, free, in high definition across the air waves. In fact, before video recorders were available, pretty much everyone got their video content for free... yes people still spent a lot of money to create video content.
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Um, because it is pretty much illegal for the libertarians to run in a whole slew of districts... and even the districts where it is legal, the laws on financing and advertising are such that there would be no legal way to advertise for libertarians. And even then, most voting districts are so gerimandered, that they are the exclusive property of one party.
So are we going to have "News for Sports Nerds" as well? Like the dorky guys who know every single sports score from every game in every sport in every country that ever happened? The guys who have 5 TVs to watch every single game, but get out of breath walking up a flight of stairs.
What about "News for Drama Nerds"? I heard there is a new bitchin' annotated version of the Complete Works of Shakespeare coming out... as well as a new biography of Author Miller! Sweet!
Look, I agree with you, it is a good thing to share your abundance with your community. But we live in a society where that just isn't possible. If I build a pool, and I leave the pool open and allow all the people in my community to swim for free, it is only a matter of time before some kid drowns and I get sued. It would be nice to leave the pool open for everyone to enjoy, but it is just not possible in the real world.
Anonymous open wifi is the same issue. In the next few years, you are going to see a lot of people totally screwed for leaving their wifi open. Even if it is morally OK to leave the wifi, even if it is a totally positive thing, we live under a legal system that forces us to be paranoid of our neighbors. You will, eventually, either close your wifi or find yourself being sued or going to jail.
The Concord was a fantastic airplane too.
I mean, I am sure the A380 is a brilliant piece of engineering. If you are looking for a piece of nationalistic achievment, like the U.S. moon landing or something like that, the A380 certainly does the trick. It is a technological marvel, really... a show peice of excellent European engineering.
But I don't expect the A380 to be a financial success. Market success != admiration for engineering achievment.
OK, of course driving is more dangerous than flying. But you are missing the point.
People will freak out about aircrashes, or terrorism, or serial killers, or shark attacks, or whatever random thing that kills people in a dramatic way, despite what the statics are!
I mean, that is why we had people freaking out about SARS or Bird Flu, when the normal old-fashion forms of flu kill millions every year worldwide. Or why there is no restrictions of buying a swimming pool and installing it in your backyard, but people freak out about gun control, despite the fact that the pool is 100 times more likely to kill someone. That is why we spend billions on a "War on Terror", but don't spend billions on a "War on Lightening", despite the fact that more Americans have been struck by lightening than killed by terrorism in the last 20 years. Or why schools are turning into prisons with metal detectors, random searches, etc., despite the fact that schools are safer than most people's homes.
When one of these planes crashes, and you have 600 people dead, people are going to freak out! It doesn't have to be rational, or reasonable... most of the laws being made nowadays are knee jerk reactions to some sensationalized problem. I bet if I took the time to question you, I could find some issue which you are hysterically irational about. Modern politics and popular culture is based on this hysteria. These planes are not going to be immune.
There are more serious sci-fi books being published, more serious sci-fi movies and TV shows being made, than ever before. Hell, there is more serious fiction and drama being produced than ever before. You doom and gloom complaints are complete fiction. We are seeing a golden age of both good science fiction, and good entertainment in general.
The top 10 hollywood blockbuster movies are not the entirety of culture, and neither is the top 5 TV shows. If that is all you see, then it is because you aren't even making a remote effort to find good culture. Right now, people have 1000 TV channels, DVD rental clubs, the internet, there has never been so much diversity and quality in the entertainment we have available in all of history.
It doesn't matter if you voted Republican, or Democrat... If you voted for either big party, you voted for party that 100% explicitly supports National Security Letters!
The difference between the Republicans and Democrats is when Clinton tried to pull this shit, the Republicans actually stopped it... Where as when the Republicans did this kind of shit, the Democrats said "Yes Mr. Bush, whatever you say! We stand behind you 100%!".
Actually, the French are pretty much the most militant European power. France maintains a nuclear arsenal, they have the largest military in Europe, and their Foreign Legion is pretty much always at war somewhere in the world (according to some people, Legionaries are more likely to be killed during a tour of duty than U.S. soldiers are in Iraq). Historically with the war in Algeria, in Indochina, etc., France has probably fought more wars since WWII than the U.S.. I mean, have you ever heard of Bob Denard or Jacques Foccart? The whole Francafrique policy?
You can call the French bastards if you want, but they certainly aren't surrender monkeys. France didn't avoid the war in Iraq because they were afraid to fight, they avoided the war in Iraq because they had spent 20 years supplying Saddam with weapons in exchange for oil rights, and getting rid of Saddam was not in their economic interests.
The morality of an action has nothing to do with the intent. If someone thinks they are helping you by kicking you in the head, they are still doing you harm. And if they think they are harming you by curing a disease, they are still doing good.
In this case, YouTube might be acting to maximize its profits, but the way it is doing so benifits the rest of us. Society is benifited by having a place where it can freely exchange video, and it would be harmed by effectively criminalizing such a service. Therefore Youtube is right, and Viacom is wrong, despite the fact that both are simply trying to make money.
Well, actually...
If the water froze and then unfroze, the expansion/contraction could have damaged the disk. Also, we are not talking pure H2O here, if the flood damage was from water that backed up out of the sewers or something, it could contain chemicals and/or microorganisms that would break down the plastic, sediment that could scratch the surface, etc.
Flood damage is not quite the same as submerging a CD in your bathtub.
In the case of the article, they were talking about ANALOG AUDIO TAPES!!! The article is about analog technology (i.e. microfilm, analog audio tape of voice recordings, etc.) vs digital technology (digital tape, CDs, hard drives). How the hell did YOU get rated insightful?
The power of digital backup isn't creating one indestructable copy... The power is creating massive amounts of redunant copies. For the cost of one high quality tape, I could create 50 copies of a CD, and mail them to 50 different locations.
I will pay $60 for a console game, easy. A) I know it works on my system. B) It is legal to resell it when I am done, and recoup some of the costs. C) I am getting subsidized hardware.
However, for a PC game from Steam, where you can't resell the game, where your PC might not be enough to get optimum performance from the game, where you have paid the full unsubsidized cost for the hardware, and especially on the PC where they release beta products that need to be patched before they work properly... then definitly a fair price would be around $20 or $30.
If you are comparing $60 for a console game, and $60 for a PC game, it is not a valid comparison.
The U.S. produces vast more corn, grain, and the like than the U.S. needs (or other countries can pay us for). The U.S. could lose a good chunk of its farms, and still produce more food than we as a country need.
If the value of certain crops are so low, that farmers can only afford to operate with huge welfare checks from the federal government, then maybe the country needs to produce less of those crops, ya think?
What if General Motors and Ford said that they want to make twice as many automobiles as Americans can afford to purchase, and that the government should pay for tens of thousands of cars that people don't need or want... because "cars don't magically appear in the car dealership". You would think it was crazy, and you would be outraged. Well then, when farmers want the same thing, they should expect the same thing.
If there was half as many corn growers in the U.S., there would still be plenty of corn, and the market price would be such that corn formers would be able to make a living without government welfare checks.
Actually, the U.S. is fourth in per-capita CO2 production according to the most popular account system, with Canada, Australia, and someone else being higher than the U.S..u se-emitters/
/ denver_2003/2759983.stm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/gmaps/greenho
And, if you include carbon sinks into the equation (the U.S. has a lot of forest and vegetation per capita), the U.S. becomes comparable or better than many places in Western Europe. (of course, including carbon sinks also greatly improves Canada and Australia)
Also, if you count China's man-made coal fires (which, like carbon sinks, are conviently kept out of most greenhouse gas statistics), China produces more CO2 per capita as well as overall.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2003
The need for a "high quality" consumer sound card doesn't exist anymore. Most of the super-cheap sound cards or audio embedded on the motherboard is comparable to your average consumer electronics (i.e. your Sony stereo system). Most computers have more than enough processing power to handle all the wavetable stuff.
And if you need high quality (you are an audiophile, or you are doing pro or wannabe-pro recording), you would jump up to professional recording hardware, which would cost you only marginally more than a Creative Labs product.
My SoundBlaster card was a lot of fun back in the day though. At that time, sampled sound playback was still somewhat of a novelty, and the soundblaster was pretty damn cool.
Intellectual "property" is not a natural right. Intellectual "property" is a privledge granted by the state. The founding fathers of the U.S., who were hardcore supporters of property rights and capitalism (so don't accuse what I am saying of being some sort of hippie anti-property or anti-capitalist stance), clearly intented copyright to be a brief monopoly granted by the government to "promote science and the useful arts" when they added the copyright clause to the constitution. Copyright was intended to benifit the public at large by making information more free and openly available, not to garantee the copyright holder a profit or for them to dictate how the information should be used.
Viacom's copyright exists to make Viacom's content widely and freely available to whoever wants it. When Viacom exercises their copyright in such a way that it no longer serves the public interest, then the government has a moral duty to revoke their copyright privledges. It is clear that Viacom has abused and continues to abuse its obligation to serve the public with its copyright privledges, and so therefore all their "rights" should be forfeit.
Psychology isn't science, anyway. Psychiatry (which actually requires an MD), Neurology, etc. is generally scientific. But Psychology is pseudo-science, designed to fill the gap in a liberal arts education after they removed the old-fashion "Bible Study" or "Ethics" courses from the ciriculum.
Research from psychologists is like research from creationists - Technically, we shouldn't discount their research based on who they are, but in reality it is almost always flawed. As a person who lives in a world where I can't possibly check out the details of every single scientific study, a good rule of thumb is to consider every bit of research coming from psychologists to be bullshit.
Much better to watch the violent shows, and then complain to the government to change them than to bother to lift your finger and press a button to change the channel.
It only seems wierd to you, because you are pro-censorship. Free minded people understand that any sort of censorship is the product of an irrational and fearful mind, and no form of censorship is legit. If anything, the "reasonable" forms of censorship or more dangerous, because they are less likely to evoke the proper outrage.
But the U.S. attitude is no more absurd than the European attitude. Both systems are rigidly authoritarian, and only an authoritarian would find one more "reasonable" than the other.
It would have been way more awesome if they discovered enormous amounts of frozen pizza on Mars.
It CAN stop piracy if it is a MMOG like say Anarchy Online, or a game that people play exclusivly online like Counterstrike. Having it connect to the internet to play the local single player is lame, because it a decent cracker can simply bypass the part that needs to go online to play. But if using the company's servers is part of the critical functionality of the game (like an MMOG), then there is no way to pirate the game other than to hack the actual server (which is far more difficult).
Why can't Viacom give away this content for free? Aside from the fact that YouTube content is a horribly compressed, low resolution clip no longer than 15 minutes in length and so it can't really show Viacom's content properly - Viacom already gives their best content away, free, in high definition across the air waves. In fact, before video recorders were available, pretty much everyone got their video content for free... yes people still spent a lot of money to create video content.