"Few people in this country are capable of fighting the trained, organized military that's in place."
Members of that military force certainly are.
Their commanders are capable of leading them.
Given a divisive enough issue, you will see them fighting against their own command. That's what a revolution is. Not some quaint "people" versus "the authority."
In America, we don't actually have any issues that would be serious enough to drive a group of military commanders to forfeit their lives in order to stop the tyranny that is their commanding government.
All talk of revolution should be kept hypothetical, with that fact in mind.
When you consider the sort of social and political forces that would be neccessary and sufficient to spark an actual revolution in the United States, you must temper those notions against an awareness of just how damned comfortable the status quo is for the average reasonable person. Note that the typical American lives indoors, eats regular meals, enjoys a basic liberty, and generally believes that everything is pretty much hunky dory. Even the ones who don't like the current administration, tend to believe in the integrity of the system as a whole. And you sure as hell don't have the kind of problems that would stimulate large scale simultaneous opposition from whole military units and entire states, and it's hardly conceivable that millions of peasants are going to suddenly find themselves with no greater cause than the dismantling of the political system that they live under.
Hell, you can't even get them to vote on whether to change the bus route.
Revolution is so far off the radar it's not even funny.
"Yes but we both know that at this point, having a few guns is no match for our current governments arsenal. Any revolution would have to be a quick coup."
You don't see the real nightmare scenario. There isn't an issue big enough to incite a true revolution in the US today. When such an issue does present itself, it will be strong enough of a cause to break the loyalty of people who hold positions of military command and political power.
The quaint picture of puny militiamen with hunting rifles should be erased, and replaced with a much uglier picture of an entire division of a modern army turning its force against its own authority -- amid full support of a significant part of the population.
People have to get pretty pissed off before they ever see anything like this. Election debacles and a negative second derivative on the economic curve won't do it. Genunine strife for a few decades might be a good start, especially if coupled with real tyranny in government.
After a revolution starts, the people tend to get sick of it quite quickly. They will accept almost any new system that can be implemented. Because of that, it's not always an improvement, and sometimes opens the door to an even worse tyranny than they had to begin with.
"IMO any unsolicited cold call during dinner time should be a 900 call with the charges being credited to me."
Hmm. You're kinda sorta joking, but I just realized, a system where anybody not on your whitelist pays an exponentially increasing fee to you per minute would be great. The people who need to speak to you get to speak their peace in the first minute which is free, where you then have the choice to let them continue for free, or if you take no action the billing starts...
$1 for the 2nd minute. e^(rt) each additional minute. They can hangup whenever they want to. Need an instant payment system of course. Friends and family and legit business associates can be exempted. Solicitors can call, and they can try to persuade you to let them talk for free, or they can pay to talk to you, or they can hang up.
"We're talking about phones -- you don't bear any significant costs from receiving a call."
If I'm working, and you interrupt me by ringing my phone, that's annoying. I can understand if it's an accident, wrong number, etc. If it's important to me that you called me, that's another thing.
But, if I answer the phone, I know within a fraction of a second whether you need to talk to me, and whether it was important to me that you called. And I let you know that just as quickly.
If you do not *immediately* excuse yourself and disappear, you've crossed the line into wasting my time, which starts to affect my livelihood at that instant. After that moment, I want to start billing you for an hour or fraction thereof, of my time.
My beef with telemarketers is not that they call me with their pitch, it's that they do not disappear at the first "No."
And then they don't disappear at the first "Fuck no, and I cannot believe I just ruined a flute track to answer the phone."
Well, I do turn the phone off when recording, but, it's still a nuisance, and I really do think they should be billable if they don't fuck right off.
We had something similar happen to PageNet in Texas, around '94. It took down the whole *statewide* paging system for more than 12 hours. They didn't really have a way to purge the system, they just had to wait for all the pages to go through. That did cross the line into actionable negligence, but I don't know whatever came of it.
"Local governments can't generate revenue if they dismiss cases."
The last ticket I got was in Garland Texas. There was no possible way I could have been where they said I was, doing what they said I was doing (some kind of illegal turn). The fact was, I had been going the opposite direction from what they claimed.
I went to court, fully expecting to not beat the system, but at least I wanted to try.
Well, I told the District Attorney that the officer said I was going from the West and turned North, when the fact of the matter was that I live *here*, and I was going from *here* to *here* just like I do every day, (which pretty much showed just how wrong the ticket was), and that was that. I got the form signed, and no ticket.
If it's harassment or sexual harassment, it's still a problem. Two wrongs don't make a right. Even if they didn't have the right to call you, doing so didn't give you the right to impugn theirs.
I might knowingly tresspass on your lawn, but does that give you the right to kidnap me and torture me in your basement?
>my roommates mad fun of me saying they could sue me
If you cross the line into threatening them, or into sexual harrassment, they just might have a case.
Of course, as you surely learned, the whole sickass punk approach does not work.
What has worked for me is simply answering the phone "Phoenix emergency"
If they didn't get right off the phone immediately, I'd get all snippy voiced and say "why have you called 911 sir? do you have an emergency?" They don't actually know in the call center whether they've dialed 911 or not. They think they have your name/address/number but there's enough doubt that this kills them. I had to stop when the only TM's that called me were the police asking for money for their balls.
My girlfriend doesn't appreciate my abuse. Apparently having walked a few miles in their shoes, it's not possible to hate them. They are just doing the only job available where they live probably, and are to be pitied. If you say the magic words "take me off your list", you might help them out while not helping their industry.
I don't really subscribe to that view, and I agree that taking a noisy dump while they tell you about the resort they want you to visit, is much more fun.
"Resort? *plop* But you're talking about *grunnt* a resort in the town where I live? *grunt* why would I want to go to a *fart* resort in the town where I live? *sprinkle* wouldn't a resort in maui or the south of france be cooler? *flussssssssssssssssh*
>The problem with fines is that they end up being >looked at as the cost of doing business.
Actually, the Federal agencies have that figured out pretty well. An organization really cannot get away with violating a Federal law repeatedly and just paying the fine, not for very long. The individuals responsible for the organization start getting treated like the mobsters they are. They may not get the justice they deserve, most of the time, but it does get unpleasant enough that companies do not simply make a routine of breaking the law, getting caught, and paying the fine. Do this with environmental regulations, safety and health, tax accounting, or interstate commerce, and you might just do time.
If the works amount to evidence of a crime, protecting the copyright should be a much lower priority than protecting the right of the people to know that a crime has been committed, that the evidence exists, and that it can be presented before a court.
If some asshole records a song about how he's going to do an assassination, then he goes and does it, do you think the copyright is going to make one bit of difference to the state? Do you think that is going to stop the press from using it if they get hold of it? Do you think anyone will care about the fucking copyright at that point?
Well, if we are looking at evidence that the management of Diebold knowingly falsified acceptance testing and certification of voting machines, we hold in our hands evidence of a very serious crime. Copyright is not a defense, and attempting to use it as a tool to cover up a crime is an abuse of the law, and should be regarded as an aggravating factor of the crime.
"How can one of Bush's top fundraisers be allowed to run the company producing the computerized voting machines to tally his votes in the next coup de corp?"
How could you claim to be a free country if you had a law that specifically prevented that individual from doing so? The conflict of interest is clear, perhaps, but there seems to be no problem with disclosure. You want to be the first one down the slope where you decide what ventures people may or may not invest in? You want to use the theory that there might be a vast right-wing conspiracy as your criterion to make that decision? You willing to do this without evidence?
The Diebold memos are evidence of poor management, and poor quality control processes. Possibly there is even evidence of some fraud, but it looks like the fraud is limited to a coverup of quality deficiencies. It's a long, long way from here to exposing the conspiracy that finally brings down the house of cards on top of The Man.
Give us an issue worthy enough to incite military commanders to reject their source of authority, and we will. Not before then. Not without outside assistance.
Yes. The time that most people seem to spend watching TV, I normally spend doing calculus or practicing music. I'm not boring to me, but I'm sure I am boring to you, which I really don't care about.
I think it's quite possible that we have transitioned between a generation that finds it inconceivable to NOT watch TV, to another one that does not find TV important at all.
When I first stopped watching TV, right after the OJ Simpson car chase, whatever year that was, people treated me to everything from incredulity to ridicule about it. Almost no-one was able to simply accept the idea that I literally didn't watch TV, didn't own one, didn't feel like it was missing.
See, a whole lot of popular culture comes from last night's tube. People see it as a personal problem of theirs that you aren't hip to everything that's been popular recently. So it took a while for concepts like "survivor" to sink in as "a tv thing" sometimes. There are a TON of celebrities that seem to be household names, and I don't know who they are (nor do I care.)
These days, I do own a TV, but that's largely because the DVD, VHS, and sometimes CATV are necessary for university work. Otherwise, CATV is largely a side effect of my internet connection.
Let's see, in the past year, I think I've watched a few news programs (it's been a busier year than most, what with a war and all), Maybe one or two Simpsons episodes, and something called "Queer Eye." That's it. My cats watch more TV than I do.
>Isn't there some sort of penalties for filing >false lawsuits?
The penalty for filing a lawsuit with weak evidence is, you don't win the suit.
The penalty for knowlingly testifying with false information is quite severe.
However, all we get are press releases. The depositions will have much less sensational claims. You can lie all you want in a press release, at least up to the point where you tread on someone else's rights (e.g., libel, trademark infringement, etc.)
Did you somehow have the idea that everything you read in the news journal is true? Do you think there is some law that makes it a crime to make false statements to the press?
We haven't seen any depositions yet, and we haven't heard any testimony, and we haven't heard a judge's opinion yet. We simply are not to that phase of the process at all.
There are factors that preclude SCO from changing its story, but they tend to lead to dismissal of the case, not more serious consequences.
You can lie all you want to until you are giving sworn testimony.
"All they need to do is discredit the GPL so as to make it unenforceable."
The best they can hope for with this strategy is to make it unenforceable against them, with respect to the specific works in question.
The outcome of this lawsuit will have no effect on any other code, nor will it affect any other party besides SCO and IBM. This lawsuit would create a judgement on the record, but that does not mean it becomes a precedent which subsequent cases will follow as law.
It does mean that the matter of SCO v. IBM can be used as evidence in future hearings. But that's all. This lawsuit won't create law respecting the GPL in general.
I don't know about that. I think it would likely slag on for a hundred years, with no winner.
After the piss is already in the wine, I don't think nukes are so scary anymore. See, once somebody nukes LA, DC, NYC, and Des Moines once, and after that becomes part of our history and we move on from it, it won't seem so scary anymore (it won't be "unthinkable" anymore).
So the notion that nukes alone can settle a war go out the window. People adapt, and go back to living in dispersed territories, maybe. But it doesn't end WWIII (which any "US versus China" scenario probably represents), which goes on, and on, and on.
Nuclear weapons might start WWIII, but they aren't the end-of-the-world sort of destruction that we'll probably wish they were when this comes down. Rather, they'll be one of those severely annoying tragic things that you can't really do much about, like living in LA despite quakes. You can only play this trump card one time.
I don't understand the very notion of the US having a concentration camp inside the borders of Cuba, a communist country, and the sworn enemy of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
"Few people in this country are capable of fighting the trained, organized military that's in place."
Members of that military force certainly are.
Their commanders are capable of leading them.
Given a divisive enough issue, you will see them fighting against their own command. That's what a revolution is. Not some quaint "people" versus "the authority."
In America, we don't actually have any issues that would be serious enough to drive a group of military commanders to forfeit their lives in order to stop the tyranny that is their commanding government.
All talk of revolution should be kept hypothetical, with that fact in mind.
When you consider the sort of social and political forces that would be neccessary and sufficient to spark an actual revolution in the United States, you must temper those notions against an awareness of just how damned comfortable the status quo is for the average reasonable person. Note that the typical American lives indoors, eats regular meals, enjoys a basic liberty, and generally believes that everything is pretty much hunky dory. Even the ones who don't like the current administration, tend to believe in the integrity of the system as a whole. And you sure as hell don't have the kind of problems that would stimulate large scale simultaneous opposition from whole military units and entire states, and it's hardly conceivable that millions of peasants are going to suddenly find themselves with no greater cause than the dismantling of the political system that they live under.
Hell, you can't even get them to vote on whether to change the bus route.
Revolution is so far off the radar it's not even funny.
"Yes but we both know that at this point, having a few guns is no match for our current governments arsenal. Any revolution would have to be a quick coup."
You don't see the real nightmare scenario. There isn't an issue big enough to incite a true revolution in the US today. When such an issue does present itself, it will be strong enough of a cause to break the loyalty of people who hold positions of military command and political power.
The quaint picture of puny militiamen with hunting rifles should be erased, and replaced with a much uglier picture of an entire division of a modern army turning its force against its own authority -- amid full support of a significant part of the population.
People have to get pretty pissed off before they ever see anything like this. Election debacles and a negative second derivative on the economic curve won't do it. Genunine strife for a few decades might be a good start, especially if coupled with real tyranny in government.
After a revolution starts, the people tend to get sick of it quite quickly. They will accept almost any new system that can be implemented. Because of that, it's not always an improvement, and sometimes opens the door to an even worse tyranny than they had to begin with.
"IMO any unsolicited cold call during dinner time should be a 900 call with the charges being credited to me."
Hmm. You're kinda sorta joking, but I just realized, a system where anybody not on your whitelist pays an exponentially increasing fee to you per minute would be great. The people who need to speak to you get to speak their peace in the first minute which is free, where you then have the choice to let them continue for free, or if you take no action the billing starts...
$1 for the 2nd minute. e^(rt) each additional minute. They can hangup whenever they want to. Need an instant payment system of course. Friends and family and legit business associates
can be exempted. Solicitors can call, and they can try to persuade you to let them talk for free, or they can pay to talk to you, or they can hang up.
"We're talking about phones -- you don't bear any significant costs from receiving a call."
If I'm working, and you interrupt me by ringing my phone, that's annoying. I can understand if it's an accident, wrong number, etc. If it's important to me that you called me, that's another thing.
But, if I answer the phone, I know within a fraction of a second whether you need to talk to me, and whether it was important to me that you called. And I let you know that just as quickly.
If you do not *immediately* excuse yourself and disappear, you've crossed the line into wasting my time, which starts to affect my livelihood at that instant. After that moment, I want to start billing you for an hour or fraction thereof, of my time.
My beef with telemarketers is not that they call me with their pitch, it's that they do not disappear at the first "No."
And then they don't disappear at the first "Fuck no, and I cannot believe I just ruined a flute track to answer the phone."
Well, I do turn the phone off when recording, but, it's still a nuisance, and I really do think they should be billable if they don't fuck right off.
We had something similar happen to PageNet in Texas, around '94. It took down the whole *statewide* paging system for more than 12 hours.
They didn't really have a way to purge the system, they just had to wait for all the pages to go through. That did cross the line into actionable negligence, but I don't know whatever came of it.
"Local governments can't generate revenue if they dismiss cases."
The last ticket I got was in Garland Texas. There was no possible way I could have been where they said I was, doing what they said I was doing (some kind of illegal turn). The fact was, I had been going the opposite direction from what they claimed.
I went to court, fully expecting to not beat the system, but at least I wanted to try.
Well, I told the District Attorney that the officer said I was going from the West and turned North, when the fact of the matter was that I live *here*, and I was going from *here* to *here* just like I do every day, (which pretty much showed just how wrong the ticket was), and that was that. I got the form signed, and no ticket.
>You can? Reference?
If it's harassment or sexual harassment, it's still a problem. Two wrongs don't make a right. Even if they didn't have the right to call you, doing so didn't give you the right to impugn theirs.
I might knowingly tresspass on your lawn, but does that give you the right to kidnap me and torture me in your basement?
>my roommates mad fun of me saying they could sue me
If you cross the line into threatening them, or into sexual harrassment, they just might have a case.
Of course, as you surely learned, the whole sickass punk approach does not work.
What has worked for me is simply answering the phone "Phoenix emergency"
If they didn't get right off the phone immediately, I'd get all snippy voiced and say "why have you called 911 sir? do you have an emergency?" They don't actually know in the call center whether they've dialed 911 or not. They think they have your name/address/number but there's enough doubt that this kills them. I had to stop when the only TM's that called me were the police asking for money for their balls.
My girlfriend doesn't appreciate my abuse. Apparently having walked a few miles in their shoes, it's not possible to hate them. They are just doing the only job available where they live probably, and are to be pitied. If you say the magic words "take me off your list", you might help them out while not helping their industry.
I don't really subscribe to that view, and I agree that taking a noisy dump while they tell you about the resort they want you to visit, is much more fun.
"Resort? *plop* But you're talking about *grunnt* a resort in the town where I live? *grunt* why would I want to go to a *fart* resort in the town where I live? *sprinkle* wouldn't a resort in maui or the south of france be cooler? *flussssssssssssssssh*
>How have you handled this?
I put a modem on the pots line.
>The problem with fines is that they end up being
>looked at as the cost of doing business.
Actually, the Federal agencies have that figured out pretty well. An organization really cannot get away with violating a Federal law repeatedly and just paying the fine, not for very long. The individuals responsible for the organization start getting treated like the mobsters they are. They may not get the justice they deserve, most of the time, but it does get unpleasant enough that companies do not simply make a routine of breaking the law, getting caught, and paying the fine. Do this with environmental regulations, safety and health, tax accounting, or interstate commerce, and you might just do time.
If the works amount to evidence of a crime, protecting the copyright should be a much lower priority than protecting the right of the people to know that a crime has been committed, that the evidence exists, and that it can be presented before a court.
If some asshole records a song about how he's going to do an assassination, then he goes and does it, do you think the copyright is going to make one bit of difference to the state? Do you think that is going to stop the press from using it if they get hold of it? Do you think anyone will care about the fucking copyright at that point?
Well, if we are looking at evidence that the management of Diebold knowingly falsified acceptance testing and certification of voting machines, we hold in our hands evidence of a very serious crime. Copyright is not a defense, and attempting to use it as a tool to cover up a crime is an abuse of the law, and should be regarded as an aggravating factor of the crime.
"How can one of Bush's top fundraisers be allowed to run the company producing the computerized voting machines to tally his votes in the next coup de corp?"
How could you claim to be a free country if you had a law that specifically prevented that individual from doing so? The conflict of interest is clear, perhaps, but there seems to be no problem with disclosure. You want to be the first one down the slope where you decide what ventures people may or may not invest in? You want to use the theory that there might be a vast right-wing conspiracy as your criterion to make that decision? You willing to do this without evidence?
The Diebold memos are evidence of poor management, and poor quality control processes. Possibly there is even evidence of some fraud, but it looks like the fraud is limited to a coverup of quality deficiencies. It's a long, long way from here to exposing the conspiracy that finally brings down the house of cards on top of The Man.
"At any rate it made it fairly difficult to get code running on a casino floor slot machine without leaving a definate trail."
:-)
The way you worded that makes me want to believe that you managed, with some difficulty, to do so.
"Many states require you to announce your alligences (R, D, other..)"
Not one of them.
They might record that you voted in a party's primary, but that's quite different from requiring you to announce your allegience or anysuch nonsense.
>take back your country
Give us an issue worthy enough to incite military commanders to reject their source of authority, and we will. Not before then. Not without outside assistance.
It doesn't have to be "Open Source" in order to be open to public scrutiny.
I think "accountable" would be a better thing to call what we want.
Fancy running into a rainbow activist on slashdot!
Howdy Ben.
Yes. The time that most people seem to spend watching TV, I normally spend doing calculus or practicing music. I'm not boring to me, but I'm sure I am boring to you, which I really don't care about.
I have fond memories of running a WWIV BBS. So it's cool.
I think it's quite possible that we have transitioned between a generation that finds it inconceivable to NOT watch TV, to another one that does not find TV important at all.
When I first stopped watching TV, right after the OJ Simpson car chase, whatever year that was, people treated me to everything from incredulity to ridicule about it. Almost no-one was able to simply accept the idea that I literally didn't watch TV, didn't own one, didn't feel like it was missing.
See, a whole lot of popular culture comes from last night's tube. People see it as a personal problem of theirs that you aren't hip to everything that's been popular recently. So it took a while for concepts like "survivor" to sink in as "a tv thing" sometimes. There are a TON of celebrities that seem to be household names, and I don't know who they are (nor do I care.)
These days, I do own a TV, but that's largely because the DVD, VHS, and sometimes CATV are necessary for university work. Otherwise, CATV is largely a side effect of my internet connection.
Let's see, in the past year, I think I've watched a few news programs (it's been a busier year than most, what with a war and all), Maybe one or two Simpsons episodes, and something called "Queer Eye." That's it. My cats watch more TV than I do.
>Isn't there some sort of penalties for filing
>false lawsuits?
The penalty for filing a lawsuit with weak evidence is, you don't win the suit.
The penalty for knowlingly testifying with false information is quite severe.
However, all we get are press releases. The depositions will have much less sensational claims. You can lie all you want in a press release, at least up to the point where you tread on someone else's rights (e.g., libel, trademark infringement, etc.)
Did you somehow have the idea that everything you read in the news journal is true? Do you think there is some law that makes it a crime to make false statements to the press?
We haven't seen any depositions yet, and we haven't heard any testimony, and we haven't heard a judge's opinion yet. We simply are not to that phase of the process at all.
There are factors that preclude SCO from changing its story, but they tend to lead to dismissal of the case, not more serious consequences.
You can lie all you want to until you are giving sworn testimony.
"All they need to do is discredit the GPL so as to make it unenforceable."
The best they can hope for with this strategy is to make it unenforceable against them, with respect to the specific works in question.
The outcome of this lawsuit will have no effect on any other code, nor will it affect any other party besides SCO and IBM. This lawsuit would create a judgement on the record, but that does not mean it becomes a precedent which subsequent cases will follow as law.
It does mean that the matter of SCO v. IBM can be used as evidence in future hearings. But that's all. This lawsuit won't create law respecting the GPL in general.
Generally, you have to *do* something "They" don't like. Merely "saying" something is almost never fatal.
>The USA would probably lose any war with China.
I don't know about that. I think it would likely slag on for a hundred years, with no winner.
After the piss is already in the wine, I don't think nukes are so scary anymore. See, once somebody nukes LA, DC, NYC, and Des Moines once, and after that becomes part of our history and we move on from it, it won't seem so scary anymore (it won't be "unthinkable" anymore).
So the notion that nukes alone can settle a war go out the window. People adapt, and go back to living in dispersed territories, maybe. But it doesn't end WWIII (which any "US versus China" scenario probably represents), which goes on, and on, and on.
Nuclear weapons might start WWIII, but they aren't the end-of-the-world sort of destruction that we'll probably wish they were when this comes down. Rather, they'll be one of those severely annoying tragic things that you can't really do much about, like living in LA despite quakes. You can only play this trump card one time.
>keeping them offshore
I don't understand the very notion of the US having a concentration camp inside the borders of Cuba, a communist country, and the sworn enemy of the United States.