God, that sounds like some bad tech support joke -
(in Spanish): "Your hard drive failed, sir?" "Yes, yes, it was running fine just a few days ago, but now it won't read or write at all." "Hmm. Odd. Is the drive plugged in and installed properly?" "Yes, I immerssed it in a vat of vegetable oil." "..."(sound of head banging against wall)
Okay, I realize that the popular conception of the war is that France sat around and did nothing while the Americans came to the rescue, but let's look at the actual chronology of the war:
1939:
9/1: Germany invades Poland
9/3: Britain and France declare war on Germany
9/5: USA declares neutrality
France obviously got their asses kicked, but the point is that they were coming to the aid of a defenceless ally.
1941:
12/7: Japan declares war on USA
12/8: USA & Britain declare war on Japan
12/11: Germany & Italy declare war on USA
12/11: USA declares war on Germany & Italy
Isolationism was a popular sentiment in the U.S. at the time, despite what the popular image of the era is. Note that in WW2, the U.S. did not declare war on each of the axis powers until they had declared war on the U.S. first. France, meanwhile, had a mutual-defence pact that obliged them to go to war for their allies. While I agree that the French contribution to the war pales in comparison to the U.S.'s, we shouldn't pretend that they were simply doing nothing, or that the U.S. was simply being alturistic.
Forget it, at this point it's clear that this guy is just trolling. I'd challenge this guy to point to *any* copyright, patent, or trademark office in any country that will let you own an idea(as opposed to complete work, design or logo). If he says he's not talking about those, either - those are the mechanisms by which intellectual property are protected, bud. If not by those methods, then ideas are only "owned" in your dreams.
Yes, I agree with you that military-grade weaponry is a bad thing in the hands of the average consumer. In fact, when I was in Oregon, a guy at work told the rest of us about some guy he knew who was buying up tanks and stuff from army surplus sales, fixing them (apparently a lot of that stuff is not nearly as irreversibly decommissioned as they claim) and driving them around/firing them or whatever out on his huge ranch somewhere in the vast ruralness of the state.
Did you work at Rogue Wave Software, or in the Corvallis area by any chance? I had a friend working in the Rogue Wave offices there, and he told me about a coworker (or was it a friend of a coworker?) that owned bazookas and such, and would spend his free time blowing stuff up on his farm. Maybe it's not so suprising that there was an Al-Qaida cell found to be running a training camp in that state... : /
I think most people here missed the more important part of the speech/article, because of the unfortunate headline. The interesting thing about the article was the vision Mott has for IT in general:
a key point in Mott's presentation: CIOs and IT managers need to focus the lion's share of their IT resources on innovation rather than maintenance of the status quo. Otherwise, said Mott, companies and even entire industries will never realize their full potential.
Industries that don't plan for obsolescence will get out of date and they will turn out to be different industries than what they could have been. said Mott.
...
To get out of the rut of obsolescence, Mott recommended a cultural shift. Rather than spending 85 percent of a company's resources on the status quo or keeping the lights on, and 15 percent on development and innovation, the ratio should be turned around.
Now, how doe this square with the responses to the earlier Ask Slashdot about Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful? Most people there seemed to agree that a lot of the "upgrade cycle" was pointless, but here we have someone from Dell claiming that we should spend even more on useless upgrades becuase the industry depends on it. Hmm.
It doesn't matter that Nintendo licensed the games to these publishers, if you don't know what the licence says. Both the GPL and MS's EULAs are 'licenses', but they are totally different. You cannot assume that something is legal to download because someone once licensed it for a particular platform. It is likely that Nintendo's agreement covered only distribution by cartridge or cassette, and gave Nintendo the right to back out at any time. Given how controlling Nintendo is about their franchises today, it would not be very suprising.
The solution is simple don't send anything to anybody that you don't want them to spread around.
From a quick reading of the article, that appears to be one of the points: that people might stop using e-mail(or any other electronic format) for even friendly letters to friends, because it is so easy to forward. This sort of thing likely would not have happened with snail-mail, since it takes more effort to copy one.
Not to mention the fact that they're using the Internet Explorer icon for Galeon, which is a rather blatant trademark violation... they'll probobly get sued by Apple for 'look and feel', too.
I really hope Mandrake has enough sense to keep that stuff out of their final release...
I don't know any store that will take back an open CD case, because they're afraid of the same thing as the record labels - piracy. Really, they need to inform their customers of DRM tech just like they inform them of return policies.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if Microsoft is still making new XBoxes, or did they end production? I remember Wired ran a article a while back about how MS was outsourcing production to a company in Mexico, and how it would be made cheaper than other consoles...
DRM technologies act almost like consoles or OSes - they're a platform for other content, and they have a set of devices that are compatible, and a set of devices that are incompatible with them.
A lot of old CD players have problems with DRM-equipped CDs because DRM uses new technology that isn't installed on old players, or intentionally introduces flaws to the recording to screw up old players. If you unknowingly buy a DRM-equipped CD, it's like if you bought a new game at the store, only to find later that it was a Mac-only or Windows-only game that wouldn't play on your computer.
If you go get a computer game these days, you'll see a requirements label on the box that specifies what kind of computer you'll need, and a content advisory label that tell you how violent it is, etc. GMontag seems to be confusing the purpose of the two. I know I sure as hell would not like to pay $20 for a CD and find out it won't play on my home system...
A lot of people here seem to be of the "Well, so what? Jobs is great!" attitude. I fully agree that Jobs is a great CEO, and that he deserves a lot of money.
What bothers me is this hoopla about how he makes only $1 a year. Basically, he's making such a big deal out of being an almost-unpaid CEO that it makes him look like a politician who yelling and screaming about being honest - it has sorta the oppisite effect, you suspect that something's up.
It makes it look as if he thinks it would look unseemly if he were taking in lots of money. Almost as if he's going overboard trying to look like a saint. Well, he's not - he's their CEO, and there's nothing dirty about getting rewarded for his services. I wish they would just pay this guy upfront.
Linux zealousy and vegetarianism/veganism are both just forms of snobbery for overly wealthy people to throw money at in hopes of appearing socially schismatic.
Oh, please. That "Vegetarian/Veganism is for rich folks only so it's bad" bullshit can be applied to damn near any expensive food preference. In Japan, the older generation grew up with food shortages during the depression, war, or reconstruction so kids were told "Don't have any preferences! Eat what you're given!". That's a good thing to teach kids, imho, but when you grow up and have extra money, it's all right to be choosy. I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, but if someone wants to spend their extra money on eating vegan instead of eating steaks, that's fine with me.
btw, I'm not a linux zealot, either: I have two linux boxes and two windows boxes at home.
Wow, over a thousand comments already - nice to see that Slashdot isn't just a vast wasteland of "In SOVIET RUSSIA" and anti-MS jokes, we can still do old-skool nerd stuff, too:)
Okay, I'll skip the TNG vs. DS9 vs. TOS and Berman vs. Roddenberry debates that seem to be filling up this discussion, and concentrate on the movie itself.
For me, the thing that made the movie less enjoyable than it could have been was that it felt so contrived... like the movie had been cobbled together from bits of other movies, plus focus groups and coproate memos. One in five scenes in that movie felt like it was either cribbed from another movie, or been written by a corporate flack who was afraid of 'rocking the franchise' too much.
In short, it feels like the franchise is steering the movies, instead of the other way around.
"Social engineering" your way into a date?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Are social engineering principles useful in getting a date?
God knows, if there's anything the Slashdot crowd can use, it's *this*...
I'm seeing a lot of reactions along the lines of " Graffiti kicked ass! This sucks!" and responses saying "Graffiti sucks! Newton's better 'cause it can read real handwriting!" and so on. To me, this is all irrelevant because the best input option is neither: it's the keyboard. A lot of people seem to think that handwriting is better because it's more "natural", but they're overlooking a century of experience that tells us that people can be much faster with input using a keyboard. Trying to get a machine to understand handwriting is a cool idea, but why would you bother with that when you can just enter charachters manually, with much better accuracy and speed?
I recently got a Handspring Treo for christmas, and I'm already used to the controls - I didn't have to waste time teaching myself a new writing system, or trying to teach the thing my handwriting style. When I need to enter 'Q', I just press the button that says 'Q'. How much simpler can you get?
I've noticed that a lot of new handhelds (Treo, Blackberry, Hiptop) have integrated keyboards instead of handwriting-recognition. I think this is because the "gimmick" factor of writing on a computer have faded, and people are more concerned about usability now. It's just too bad Palm decided to go to another flaky "writing system" instead of putting a decent keyboard in.
Okay, so they're going to use network visualization software to make it look more interesting to the audience. It'll probobly be way too flashy and 'Hollywood' to be useful.
Here's a question - Does anyone know of visualization software that would be actually useful in detecting patterns or attacks in network traffic?
Re:Both sides should be slapped with a wet saucer
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 1
I suggest you go check out Tom Mahood's Blue Fire site. It has not been updated since the late '90s, but he spent a lot of time investigating various area 51-related stuff, and has put a lot of his findings online. He's a skeptic of the whole "alien saucer" theories, but has some interesting ideas of his own about what was going on at area 51.
Check out his "Hunt for 928" page - He spent a couple of years tracking down a crashed spyplane. Very cool.
Re:Given up on Mandrake
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 1
Well it's not as though your average newbie is going to want to set up two IP addresses for the same machine, is it ?
If you want to set up something like that you've obviously got some level of knowledge about TCP/IP networking (i.e. which packets you want to route via which interface, etc.).
I think that Mandrake is good, but I have to disagree with you here. Lots of newbies have two IP adresses now, usually when they have a cable modem and a LAN. I have had this kind of setup since when I used NT 4.
In NT, there is a config window for each interface, with all of the relavant configuration stuff avaiable(IP adress, DNS, Sharing, Proxy, etc). In Mandrake, I had netconf and some other GUI tool. However, they were so wierd and unintuitive that I ended up doing everything by command-line. I actually bought a copy of the Linux Network Administrator's Guide and learned all about the workings of TCP/IP. I guess that would make me a slightly more 'advanced' user than a newbie, like you said. The point is, however, that I did not need to go to such lengths in NT just to set up my cable modem and LAN. I don't know if a newbie would be willing to put up with that.
Okay, I see there are already a bunch of (pro|anti)-(free trade|WTO|EU|Nintendo) posts here, most of them without a clear understanding of the situation. I guess the headline made it seem like the EU was dictating what Nintendo could charge. That is false. The ruling was about Nintendo stopping third-party distributors from importing games from countries where they were cheaper. To clarify:
1) The ruling is *pro*-free trade, as it's basically punishing Nintendo for stopping import-export within the EU.
2) Nintendo *is* alloweed to charge whatever it wants, and charge different prices in different countries. What they cannot do is stop people or companies from re-selling to countries where the products are more expensive.
3) The ruling is based on actions in the mid-90's. It does not have anything to do with the market currently, I think things have changed since then. Anyone from Europe care to comment?
So flame on, but please flame on based on facts, not false statements.
Maybe *you* should take a civics lesson... The concept of "judicial review", or the court's ability to overthrow laws that are unconstitutional are not in the constitution. It was set as a precedent in the Marbury vs. Madison decision. It is possible to have unconstitutional laws that violate the rights of the majority, but in practice most unconstitutional laws don't target the majority of people, so in those cases the SC ends up ruling for the minority.
I'd like to see you quote the part of the constitution that says "The president is supposed to be elected by a simple majority of the public". It doesn't - but the traditional understanding is that the system is supposed to do something like that, which is why people got pissed when GWB got elected with a negative majority.
See, it's considered *tradition* in some parts of the country(quaint, I know) that if you vote for representative X, Mr. X is supposed to jook out for the interests of his constituency and his state first, and the financial interests of those out-of-state CEO's second. When those financial interests involve screwing consumers, inluding taking away fair use rights, there should be no question about where they stand. I'm curious about your comment about "the interests of EVERYONE", as it is quite apparent that Jack Valenti's interests are quite oppsed to the general public's interests(and rights). A majority is by definition the closest you can get to "EVERYONE" if there are two sides that disagree.
No, Congress's job is to represent the majority - it's the Supreme Court's job to slap them down when they infringe on the rights of the minority. (at least, if it's a right as defined in the constitution)
As a side note - are you seriously comparing copyright infringement to slavery?
I care about my fair use rights to copy content for my personal use. I with all of you on that. I DO NOT care about my rights to mass distribute media to anonymous people.
How can they know what you're using personally and what you're giving to 50,000 people on the internet? Answer - they can't. There is no technical way that I can think of determining whether that CD you just burned is just for personal use, or whether you're going to sell it, or what. Unfortunately, since current technologies can't tell the differnece between lawful copying and unlawful sharing, they want to get rid of all forms of copying, essentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Traditional copyright laws do protect artists and publishers, but the MPAA/RIAA does not like the fact that you first have to drag them into court, and give them a fair hearing. For one thing, it's not economically feasable to go after all the violators, and second, it gives them bad PR. Copy protection schemes are simply a way around the copyright laws. To put it another way, the RIAA/MPAA's tactics are to traditional copyright enforcement what the post-9/11 security measures are to traditional law enforcement. They don't want to prosecute people for breaking the law, they want to prevent the law from being broken in the first place. Expect more draconian controls to be set up in both areas.
Remember, copy protection is not the same thing as copyright protection.
P.S. To hear an interesting discussion of napster, mp3 & the recording industry, download this mp3, a panel discussion from H2K with Jello Biafra.(yes, it is legally available)
Slashdot Mirror
God, that sounds like some bad tech support joke -
(in Spanish):
"Your hard drive failed, sir?"
"Yes, yes, it was running fine just a few days ago, but now it won't read or write at all."
"Hmm. Odd. Is the drive plugged in and installed properly?"
"Yes, I immerssed it in a vat of vegetable oil."
"..."(sound of head banging against wall)
I wonder if that broke the warranty...
Okay, I realize that the popular conception of the war is that France sat around and did nothing while the Americans came to the rescue, but let's look at the actual chronology of the war:
1939:
9/1: Germany invades Poland
9/3: Britain and France declare war on Germany
9/5: USA declares neutrality
France obviously got their asses kicked, but the point is that they were coming to the aid of a defenceless ally.
1941:
12/7: Japan declares war on USA
12/8: USA & Britain declare war on Japan
12/11: Germany & Italy declare war on USA
12/11: USA declares war on Germany & Italy
Isolationism was a popular sentiment in the U.S. at the time, despite what the popular image of the era is. Note that in WW2, the U.S. did not declare war on each of the axis powers until they had declared war on the U.S. first. France, meanwhile, had a mutual-defence pact that obliged them to go to war for their allies. While I agree that the French contribution to the war pales in comparison to the U.S.'s, we shouldn't pretend that they were simply doing nothing, or that the U.S. was simply being alturistic.
Forget it, at this point it's clear that this guy is just trolling. I'd challenge this guy to point to *any* copyright, patent, or trademark office in any country that will let you own an idea(as opposed to complete work, design or logo). If he says he's not talking about those, either - those are the mechanisms by which intellectual property are protected, bud. If not by those methods, then ideas are only "owned" in your dreams.
Yes, I agree with you that military-grade weaponry is a bad thing in the hands of the average consumer. In fact, when I was in Oregon, a guy at work told the rest of us about some guy he knew who was buying up tanks and stuff from army surplus sales, fixing them (apparently a lot of that stuff is not nearly as irreversibly decommissioned as they claim) and driving them around/firing them or whatever out on his huge ranch somewhere in the vast ruralness of the state.
Did you work at Rogue Wave Software, or in the Corvallis area by any chance? I had a friend working in the Rogue Wave offices there, and he told me about a coworker (or was it a friend of a coworker?) that owned bazookas and such, and would spend his free time blowing stuff up on his farm. Maybe it's not so suprising that there was an Al-Qaida cell found to be running a training camp in that state... : /
I think most people here missed the more important part of the speech/article, because of the unfortunate headline. The interesting thing about the article was the vision Mott has for IT in general:
a key point in Mott's presentation: CIOs and IT managers need to focus the lion's share of their IT resources on innovation rather than maintenance of the status quo. Otherwise, said Mott, companies and even entire industries will never realize their full potential.
Industries that don't plan for obsolescence will get out of date and they will turn out to be different industries than what they could have been. said Mott.
...
To get out of the rut of obsolescence, Mott recommended a cultural shift. Rather than spending 85 percent of a company's resources on the status quo or keeping the lights on, and 15 percent on development and innovation, the ratio should be turned around.
Now, how doe this square with the responses to the earlier Ask Slashdot about Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful? Most people there seemed to agree that a lot of the "upgrade cycle" was pointless, but here we have someone from Dell claiming that we should spend even more on useless upgrades becuase the industry depends on it. Hmm.
It doesn't matter that Nintendo licensed the games to these publishers, if you don't know what the licence says. Both the GPL and MS's EULAs are 'licenses', but they are totally different. You cannot assume that something is legal to download because someone once licensed it for a particular platform. It is likely that Nintendo's agreement covered only distribution by cartridge or cassette, and gave Nintendo the right to back out at any time. Given how controlling Nintendo is about their franchises today, it would not be very suprising.
The solution is simple don't send anything to anybody that you don't want them to spread around.
From a quick reading of the article, that appears to be one of the points: that people might stop using e-mail(or any other electronic format) for even friendly letters to friends, because it is so easy to forward. This sort of thing likely would not have happened with snail-mail, since it takes more effort to copy one.
Not to mention the fact that they're using the Internet Explorer icon for Galeon, which is a rather blatant trademark violation... they'll probobly get sued by Apple for 'look and feel', too.
I really hope Mandrake has enough sense to keep that stuff out of their final release...
I don't know any store that will take back an open CD case, because they're afraid of the same thing as the record labels - piracy. Really, they need to inform their customers of DRM tech just like they inform them of return policies.
The sony ad is saying that because they Japanese are shorter, they are closer to the circuit board and better able work on the parts.
:P
Damn! I'm Japanese, maybe I should go into electrical engineering so I can have a competitive advantage in job interviews!
Did that movie cover MS products, by any chance? "If bugs were features, windows would be feature-rich."
Speaking of which, does anyone know if Microsoft is still making new XBoxes, or did they end production? I remember Wired ran a article a while back about how MS was outsourcing production to a company in Mexico, and how it would be made cheaper than other consoles...
DRM technologies act almost like consoles or OSes - they're a platform for other content, and they have a set of devices that are compatible, and a set of devices that are incompatible with them.
A lot of old CD players have problems with DRM-equipped CDs because DRM uses new technology that isn't installed on old players, or intentionally introduces flaws to the recording to screw up old players. If you unknowingly buy a DRM-equipped CD, it's like if you bought a new game at the store, only to find later that it was a Mac-only or Windows-only game that wouldn't play on your computer.
If you go get a computer game these days, you'll see a requirements label on the box that specifies what kind of computer you'll need, and a content advisory label that tell you how violent it is, etc. GMontag seems to be confusing the purpose of the two. I know I sure as hell would not like to pay $20 for a CD and find out it won't play on my home system...
- Hokuto
About your .sig...
:P
SONY. Because caucasians are just too damn tall.
What's that supposed to mean? Did you hit your head on the ceiling of your PS2 or something? Get an Xbox, dude.
A lot of people here seem to be of the "Well, so what? Jobs is great!" attitude. I fully agree that Jobs is a great CEO, and that he deserves a lot of money.
What bothers me is this hoopla about how he makes only $1 a year. Basically, he's making such a big deal out of being an almost-unpaid CEO that it makes him look like a politician who yelling and screaming about being honest - it has sorta the oppisite effect, you suspect that something's up.
It makes it look as if he thinks it would look unseemly if he were taking in lots of money. Almost as if he's going overboard trying to look like a saint. Well, he's not - he's their CEO, and there's nothing dirty about getting rewarded for his services. I wish they would just pay this guy upfront.
Linux zealousy and vegetarianism/veganism are both just forms of snobbery for overly wealthy people to throw money at in hopes of appearing socially schismatic.
Oh, please. That "Vegetarian/Veganism is for rich folks only so it's bad" bullshit can be applied to damn near any expensive food preference. In Japan, the older generation grew up with food shortages during the depression, war, or reconstruction so kids were told "Don't have any preferences! Eat what you're given!". That's a good thing to teach kids, imho, but when you grow up and have extra money, it's all right to be choosy. I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, but if someone wants to spend their extra money on eating vegan instead of eating steaks, that's fine with me.
btw, I'm not a linux zealot, either: I have two linux boxes and two windows boxes at home.
Wow, over a thousand comments already - nice to see that Slashdot isn't just a vast wasteland of "In SOVIET RUSSIA" and anti-MS jokes, we can still do old-skool nerd stuff, too :)
Okay, I'll skip the TNG vs. DS9 vs. TOS and Berman vs. Roddenberry debates that seem to be filling up this discussion, and concentrate on the movie itself.
For me, the thing that made the movie less enjoyable than it could have been was that it felt so contrived... like the movie had been cobbled together from bits of other movies, plus focus groups and coproate memos. One in five scenes in that movie felt like it was either cribbed from another movie, or been written by a corporate flack who was afraid of 'rocking the franchise' too much.
In short, it feels like the franchise is steering the movies, instead of the other way around.
Are social engineering principles useful in getting a date?
God knows, if there's anything the Slashdot crowd can use, it's *this*...
I'm seeing a lot of reactions along the lines of " Graffiti kicked ass! This sucks!" and responses saying "Graffiti sucks! Newton's better 'cause it can read real handwriting!" and so on. To me, this is all irrelevant because the best input option is neither: it's the keyboard. A lot of people seem to think that handwriting is better because it's more "natural", but they're overlooking a century of experience that tells us that people can be much faster with input using a keyboard. Trying to get a machine to understand handwriting is a cool idea, but why would you bother with that when you can just enter charachters manually, with much better accuracy and speed?
I recently got a Handspring Treo for christmas, and I'm already used to the controls - I didn't have to waste time teaching myself a new writing system, or trying to teach the thing my handwriting style. When I need to enter 'Q', I just press the button that says 'Q'. How much simpler can you get?
I've noticed that a lot of new handhelds (Treo, Blackberry, Hiptop) have integrated keyboards instead of handwriting-recognition. I think this is because the "gimmick" factor of writing on a computer have faded, and people are more concerned about usability now. It's just too bad Palm decided to go to another flaky "writing system" instead of putting a decent keyboard in.
Okay, so they're going to use network visualization software to make it look more interesting to the audience. It'll probobly be way too flashy and 'Hollywood' to be useful.
Here's a question - Does anyone know of visualization software that would be actually useful in detecting patterns or attacks in network traffic?
I suggest you go check out Tom Mahood's Blue Fire site. It has not been updated since the late '90s, but he spent a lot of time investigating various area 51-related stuff, and has put a lot of his findings online. He's a skeptic of the whole "alien saucer" theories, but has some interesting ideas of his own about what was going on at area 51.
Check out his "Hunt for 928" page - He spent a couple of years tracking down a crashed spyplane. Very cool.
Well it's not as though your average newbie is going to want to set up two IP addresses for the same machine, is it ?
If you want to set up something like that you've obviously got some level of knowledge about TCP/IP networking (i.e. which packets you want to route via which interface, etc.).
I think that Mandrake is good, but I have to disagree with you here. Lots of newbies have two IP adresses now, usually when they have a cable modem and a LAN. I have had this kind of setup since when I used NT 4.
In NT, there is a config window for each interface, with all of the relavant configuration stuff avaiable(IP adress, DNS, Sharing, Proxy, etc). In Mandrake, I had netconf and some other GUI tool. However, they were so wierd and unintuitive that I ended up doing everything by command-line. I actually bought a copy of the Linux Network Administrator's Guide and learned all about the workings of TCP/IP. I guess that would make me a slightly more 'advanced' user than a newbie, like you said. The point is, however, that I did not need to go to such lengths in NT just to set up my cable modem and LAN. I don't know if a newbie would be willing to put up with that.
Okay, I see there are already a bunch of (pro|anti)-(free trade|WTO|EU|Nintendo) posts here, most of them without a clear understanding of the situation. I guess the headline made it seem like the EU was dictating what Nintendo could charge. That is false. The ruling was about Nintendo stopping third-party distributors from importing games from countries where they were cheaper. To clarify:
1) The ruling is *pro*-free trade, as it's basically punishing Nintendo for stopping import-export within the EU.
2) Nintendo *is* alloweed to charge whatever it wants, and charge different prices in different countries. What they cannot do is stop people or companies from re-selling to countries where the products are more expensive.
3) The ruling is based on actions in the mid-90's. It does not have anything to do with the market currently, I think things have changed since then. Anyone from Europe care to comment?
So flame on, but please flame on based on facts, not false statements.
Maybe *you* should take a civics lesson... The concept of "judicial review", or the court's ability to overthrow laws that are unconstitutional are not in the constitution. It was set as a precedent in the Marbury vs. Madison decision. It is possible to have unconstitutional laws that violate the rights of the majority, but in practice most unconstitutional laws don't target the majority of people, so in those cases the SC ends up ruling for the minority.
I'd like to see you quote the part of the constitution that says "The president is supposed to be elected by a simple majority of the public". It doesn't - but the traditional understanding is that the system is supposed to do something like that, which is why people got pissed when GWB got elected with a negative majority.
See, it's considered *tradition* in some parts of the country(quaint, I know) that if you vote for representative X, Mr. X is supposed to jook out for the interests of his constituency and his state first, and the financial interests of those out-of-state CEO's second. When those financial interests involve screwing consumers, inluding taking away fair use rights, there should be no question about where they stand. I'm curious about your comment about "the interests of EVERYONE", as it is quite apparent that Jack Valenti's interests are quite oppsed to the general public's interests(and rights). A majority is by definition the closest you can get to "EVERYONE" if there are two sides that disagree.
No, Congress's job is to represent the majority - it's the Supreme Court's job to slap them down when they infringe on the rights of the minority. (at least, if it's a right as defined in the constitution)
As a side note - are you seriously comparing copyright infringement to slavery?
I care about my fair use rights to copy content for my personal use. I with all of you on that. I DO NOT care about my rights to mass distribute media to anonymous people.
How can they know what you're using personally and what you're giving to 50,000 people on the internet? Answer - they can't. There is no technical way that I can think of determining whether that CD you just burned is just for personal use, or whether you're going to sell it, or what. Unfortunately, since current technologies can't tell the differnece between lawful copying and unlawful sharing, they want to get rid of all forms of copying, essentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Traditional copyright laws do protect artists and publishers, but the MPAA/RIAA does not like the fact that you first have to drag them into court, and give them a fair hearing. For one thing, it's not economically feasable to go after all the violators, and second, it gives them bad PR. Copy protection schemes are simply a way around the copyright laws. To put it another way, the RIAA/MPAA's tactics are to traditional copyright enforcement what the post-9/11 security measures are to traditional law enforcement. They don't want to prosecute people for breaking the law, they want to prevent the law from being broken in the first place. Expect more draconian controls to be set up in both areas.
Remember, copy protection is not the same thing as copyright protection.
P.S. To hear an interesting discussion of napster, mp3 & the recording industry, download this mp3, a panel discussion from H2K with Jello Biafra.(yes, it is legally available)