Certainly one would hope that someone paying big bucks for a guide/farmer to rig up something like these remote systems would, for the $1000 bucks they're charging, also pack and ship the meat on dry ice. The only time I don't take the meat, personally, is when I'm ridding some farmer of a serious varmint. Say, groundhogs. Colonies of those critters will dig holes in cow pastures and end up breaking cattles' legs. Or they'll totally undermine a crop by chewing through root networks, etc. In many places, the natural predators have been completely or largely removed, but the scavengers are still around... so, a shot groundhog, left in the field where it was killed, will usually be gone the next morning, having become a nice dinner for turkey vultures, foxes, coyotes, and so on.
But for the remote hunter - who presumably is considering something like this because he can no longer physically get out into the field - I'd certainly like to think that someone doing business like that is focused clearly on the utlimate destination of the meat. Incidentally, a lot of hunters will keep some portion of the kill, and then clean and package the rest for donation to local shelters, foodbanks, etc.
Another reply to your post, though, did sum it up clearly: every time someone picks up a cold cut sub at Subway, they're passively enjoying the fact that someone else wacked a cow for them. Most kids have absolutely no idea where that meat comes from, and I think every one of them ought to personally break a few chickens' necks before they get in the habit of ordering 6-pack of McNuggets. And if they're really classy, they'll start enjoying Pheasant McNuggets they hunt and prepare themselves. And while spending all that time tromping around fields bird hunting, they'll learn about a jillion other facets of the natural world, including natural selection, weather dynamics, physics (can't shoot without good old Newtonian physics!), soil health, and the benefits of actually walking around everyday and getting some exercise. And nothing makes the average person more cognitively connected to the consequences of violence than the act of deliberately commiting some, and then cleaning the guts out of that to which you did it. It's sobering, thought-provoking, and can be a very fulfilling social experience when it's taught correctly and in the right light. Anyone providing remote hunting has got to consider how to maintain that part of the process in the mind of the hunter.
No, the amoraility in hunting is killing another living animal for fun, and claiming it's a "sport".
Except, you call it a "sport" and I call it "putting lean, healthy meat in my freezer, and helping to manage wildly out of balance deer populations."
I know a lot of hunters, and I don't know a single one - at all - that takes pleasure, per se, in the act of killing the animal they're taking. The nearest thing to it would be the pride they take in being good at it - which results (by way of a well placed shot) in a humane kill, and less wasted meat.
Now, I do know people that take great joy in swatting mosquitos, or killing rats in their house, etc. Those are people that kill a creature just for their own convenience/happiness. But those are as likely to be non-hunters as hunters.
What makes you so sure that someone who love venison (and has hunted deer all his life specifically to put that lean, healthy meat in his freezer for the many meals that it provides), who finds themselves in a wheelchair all the sudden (as an example), isn't going to pay the hunt host to ship him the venison on dry ice the next day? I for one definately like to pick and choose the animals that I serve. I'd rather avoid a stinky, too-mature older buck, for example. You have to see them walk past your blind or tree stand to size up the animal - pretty much like people choose the lobster from the tank at a restaurant.
"hunting" over the Internet isn't respectable at all
How about with your bare hands? Ok, how about with a rock? A spear? A bow? An old-fashioned flint-lock rifle? A shotgun? A modern high-powered rifle? That same rifle with a high-power scope on it, allowing a 200-yard shot?
So, where do you draw the line? As humans, our main hunting tool is our mind, followed shortly by our social nature. Meaning, plenty of elder Native Americans who knew the habits of the tribe's traditional prey would go along with the younger folk to provide advice on the hunt, but let the younger members actually deliver the lethal blow and run down the game. That's just an older, analog version of the topic being discussed here. Man is a tool user, and would have died off a long time ago without that trait. The nature of the tool has evolved tremendously over time, but I'd say that remote-controlled rifles are less of a change, in principle, than when we graduated from clubbing the animal to death (or running up and poking it with sharp sticks, hoping to get it to bleed to death) to being able to shoot an arrow right through its heart from a tree branch, killing it more or less instantly. Perhaps that change didn't seem "respectible" either, at the time - but the meal was just as good, and the animal died much more quickly and without a great, bloody foot chase.
The old 'kill the deer to save it from dying' arguement... wonder how the ecosystems of the world managed at all for so many millions of years before humans came around to 'balance' it all.
So, you'd rather go back, what - 500 years? There are many times more deer in North America now than there were 500 years ago. Or 1000 years ago. Or 10,000 years ago.
Human hunters have played a roll in balancing out the hoofstock population for tens of thousands of years. Canines and felines in one form or another have been doing so long before that, but according, generally, to the same rule: killing off some of the herd improves the health of the species. Too many in one area, and all of them become weaker from disease and food shortages. Hunting by non-human critters usually snagged the old, weak, or diseased animals, or the young ones being raised by unworthy (unprotective) parents. The humans tend to hunt the larger, healthier animals where possible, so that puts pressure on the dumber ones... creating smarter, wilyier animals.
Deer populations are reaching terrible numbers, in terms of their health. This is most easily dealt with through expanded hunting, and the game agencies in every state adjust the numbers allowed per hunter, the length and timing of the season, and geography of the zones involved... all to most effectively maintain a healthy herd.
Your ignorance of the matter is, alas, very typical of too many people. And that's what drives voting, policymaking, and media coverage (or lack of it) on this topic. That hunting has, in a few short generations, become so alien to so many people (who get their meat in tidy plastic-wrapped packages at the store) is amazing and distressing to me. I'd even go so far as to say that the lack of exposure to hunting (and the first-hand experience of the conequences of weapon use) is one of the reasons that more and more kids now see violence as an abstraction.
Why is 'whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine' appended to the end of this story?
Because an unbelievable number of people think like that. You know, people who wear nice leather shoes, eat some meat with their dinner, and who have a domestic cat that, despite eating three times a day in the kitchen, stalks and kills neighborhood songbirds just because it's fun. People are spectacularly hypocritical and uninformed about this stuff, and know nothing about the monumental amount of work and cash that hunters put into wildlife management programs and wilderness preservation.
On tonight's dinner menu at my house: pheasant that my wife, my dog, and I laboriously hunted in South Dakota last October. During that outing we pumped a couple thousand dollars into the vapor-thin local economy, walked over miles and miles of farmland, always filling in the host farmers on what we saw in their cornrows and pastures. The "innocent animal" bit only makes sense if you also consider mosquitos innocent, the earthworms that get sliced up by farm equipment creating vegan meals to be innocent, and so on. Bah. This topic is so rife with nonsensical, contradictory emotional baggage and anthropomorphized Disney-esque pablum. Yeesh.
Isn't it possible that Lewis liked Christianity in many ways, but also wondered why, in his lifetime, he'd seen his sort of "decent Christian people" need to pick up arms to stop the wicked from ruling the world and corrupting millions of more young minds? Atheist that I am, I have to have at least some respect for someone like Lewis that imagines a synthesis of Christianity and a more temporal justice that might improve the daily lot of humanity by taking care of some evil here and now. The bible is full of the faithful killing off bad guys... why would Lewis tell allegorical stories based on the bible, and stop short of some of those vivid tales?
How about if budget was no issue, and there were enough polite, trained Bobbies to stand at every street corner, 24x7, db-meter in hand? Same (even better) net effect, and the bonus of being a deterrent to all sorts of other petty (and not so petty) crime.
But that's completely ridiculous, money-wise, so you have to lean on technology to increase manpower, just like we do in so many other ways. The capacity to do something Orwellian doesn't mean that's the policy or the intent. But being able to address serious quality of life issues, like sidewalks outside certain clubs that never cease to be obnoxiously loud, isn't privacy invasion, and definately is exactly the sort of thing that you'd hope a municipal government would take seriously.
They can't throw manpower at it, but they can leverage tools like this. Persistent, especially night-time, noise levels are one of the main reasons that a lot of people can't stand living in denser urban settings, and that fuels suburban sprawl, fuel consumption, wasted commuting hours and a thousand other inefficiencies. Making Urban Hive Life less miserable by enforcing noise ordinances (along with trash cleanup and vandalism prosecution) seems like an eminently useful thing to do. There are too many freakin' people in the world, and if we have to live packed together so we can afford to live, then the least we can do is find speedy, low man-hour ways to deal with that small percentage of us that insist on making a goddamn 100db racket at 2:00AM. Society seems to frown on me actually dealing with it personally (since polite requests will go ignored by people that don't already understand they're being jerks, and I'm not legally empowered to engage in any other form of pursuasion), so this type of solution seems to make sense - it allows LEOs to respond, over time, to more complaints, and to better weigh who's making reasonable complaints.
That's why most professionals and experts are switching to them.
Would that be... most people in the room with you right now? Most of your friends? I work with 300 people. One of their wives bought a Mac because it was "pretty" and she saw it, literally, in the window at a Mac store in a Virginia shopping mall. Now, there are probably quite a few more Macs in use within that group of people, but I will suggest, right now, that "most" of them have not/are not switching. They are all professionals, and all experts.
Statistics, man! Back this stuff up! Most people sure I'm right, prefer vanilla ice cream, and think George Soros founded the whole Open Soros Movement.
Oh, and on the subject: I think the OP should just throw a dart and buy an all-in-one mobo. He can use the spare NIC to multi-home, and just disable the other stuff. Most of the time, though, the maker's drivers make the install/use a lot simpler than sucking down that extra 10 watts and busying up his expansion slots and hoping all the parts get along nicely.
Not really. I could spend my life seeking Bluebeard's buried treasure, but that doesn't imply that the treasure exists. Just that we're looking, me hearties.
But we want to avoid the notion that the buried treasure (as a type of thing that we've seen before) simply cannot be found, or that it doesn't obey the laws of physics... that sort of thing. Saying that because the treasure is hard to find, and you haven't found it yet, doesn't make it appropriate, for example, to tell school kids that one, equally likely possibility is that it was raised up into the heavens by faeries, where the ghost of Bluebeard sits on the right hand of the ghost of Blackbeard causing other treasures to do tricks with the laws of thermodynamics and whatnot.
The two definitions of science both seem reasonably sound
I don't know, though. Semantics is an issue. The "continuing investigation" makes it sound as though there simply can never be any facts discovered. Whereas the previous "seeking explanations" posits that there are explanations, and that science's job is to find them. It's subtle, but that's an important distinction.
Maybe they should have rounded up the known Al Qaeda members in the US (at least two of the hijackers were known by the governement to be associated with Al Qaeda and to have entered the US), beefed up security on the planes, kept pilots informed, and perhaps most importantly, sifted through FBI field reports to see if there were any leads (there were several).
So all of these things should have been Bush's personal responsibility as he worked with the agencies, as staffed, that he had just inherited from 8 years of the Clinton administration? If it's your sense that the White House should be deciding what FBI reports are or are not worth correlating or pursuing, then you're probably not expecting them to get much else done. Did you supposed that his predecessor was doing that?
If you'll exhibit a little intellectual honesty, here, you'll concede that the structural problems (such as the compartmentalizaion of the FBI and CIA) that contributed to that failure were never going to get corrected by congress without a massive stimulus such as 9/11. And now we've John Negroponte, who has that job.
I'd argue that security on planes, right now, is still inadequate. And that we still have people getting on board under false identities or with questionable baggage, etc. And yet look at the flack the feds are getting for the security measures that are in place, inadequate though they are. Can you imagine, before thousands of Americans were killed by terrorists flying planes, getting even a fraction of the current policies and practices in place? It would never have happened, under Bush OR Clinton. But it would have been nice, under Clinton, to have actually taken up on Sudan's offer for Bin Laden's handover. Or to have actually done something more concrete following the attack on the Cole or the destruction of two embassies.
What we need is people who understand that rights arent centered arround feelings, or "what's in it for me" attitude - they are centered arround facts.
So, if I take something from you (say, an hour of your time, the manuscript for the novel you're working on, or the money from your checking account), the fact is that I now have it. So, presto, despite anyone's "feelings," as you put it, I've just re-defined your rights? That's BS, and you're missing the entire point. If you can talk someone who creates things for a living into not caring whether, or in what way, her work is or is not paid for, then great! You've got a convert. Obviously you have no respect for (in fact, you obviously hate) people who prefer to have some influence over whether or not they've worked for free. Since you're so annoyed by those people, you surely wouldn't want to be entertained by anything they've created, since that would be intellectually dishonest. So, obviously, you choose not see any commercial films, or listen to the radio, or do anything else that would get those people paid for what they invested time and money to produce. So, since you don't care about those artists, why do care what their business arrangements are? You've obviously found a lot of people who are willing to entertain you for free, and you're obviously satisfied with the films, books, and recordings that they produce. Why worry about the "control freaks" you hate so much when you wouldn't want anything they produce anyway? And no one else you care about would want it either, so just leave those dinosaurs to die off, and focus instead on your idyllic alternate universe, where being able to take something makes it right to do so.
Sure, the dog can't pick out the right canned food on the shelf, but it can see a car coming from two blocks away, sense unstable ground, and pick up on unsavory people's body language in a second. I'm not blind, but walking with my dogs alerts me to things I'd never notice otherwise - they are truly amazing critters. I hope my eyes are good for the rest of my life, but hopefully we'll have direct visual cortex stimulation from implants or some other solution before I have to depend on a mobile robot to help me get around. In the meantime, it's Fido for me.
So as long as they are going in the right direction this is a good thing
Right! Threatening Taiwan, that's a good thing. Lying about how much independence they'd allow to thrive in Hong Kong, that's a good thing. Controlling the information that people in the country can read (like filtering out this site!), that's a good thing. So, how many years of inching forwards and backwards towards the right thing makes it OK?
powerful oligarchies which run big business and government
What? China is completely corrupt in this regard. The communist government there directly involves itself in private business to a degree that would never be tolerated in the US.
The US is not a democracy
Right, the US is a republic, with democratically elected representatives in the legislature, and executives elected by the states.
'one person/one vote' NOT 'one dollar/one vote'
Well, that doesn't even make sense. No one pays to vote, and no one gets paid to vote. If you mean, do organizations like moveon.org take huge amounts of cash from people like George Soros to push certain issues and candidates before an election, then you're at least making the connection of money to politics in an indirect way.
Most of Europe and Canada offer much better models for democracy then the US
Except that those arrangements often allow people with only a small portion of the votes to hold office. It's not always the best fit for making definitive policies.
Plenty of musicians, for example, only make a modest living. Killing off their sales actually does impact their standard of living.
Meanwhile, a significant portion of the world's population is starving
Which is certainly alleviated by being able to use their broadband internet connections to avoid paying artists for their entertainment.
Pollution is everywhere, and we don't have a sustainable energy source
I know, and you're suggesting that by using p2p and skipping the whole pay-the-artist part, we'll reduce trips to the retail store in giant SUVs to buy plastic disks that were pumped out of the ground. Oh, wait! We can avoid those things and not rip off the artists, by actually paying for the entertainment we want!
Violence and war is wide spread
Certainly what we need, then, is an entire generation of people growing up thinking that the things people produce have no value, and that everyone is entitled to the fruits of everyone else's work for free. We should all just work for the state, pay big taxes, and get everything for free! Then there'd be no war. Certainly that would eliminate the types of people that slaughter whole villages in Darfur. Or the ones that think women should be trapped at home in their Burkhas on pain of death, and be willing to blow up people in line for a job in order to show how right they are. And definately, making sure that Peter Jackson, even as people rave about his craftsmanship, doesn't get a dime out of the cool people who know better than to pay for such things... that will foster a better sense in the world of why it's not helpful for North Korea to have a big fat nuclear tantrum as they starve their people to death in work camps.
You propose a false dichotomy, and imply that dealing with such things are mutually exclusive. Well hell, while there are hungry people in the world, I don't know how you can consider it appropriate to enjoy any music at all! How can you live with yourself? Or maybe there's no joy in it when it's ripped off, thus making it OK.
because I think it is wrong for the ENTERTAINERS to get a few pennies out of the twenty dollars I spend to purchase an item that costs all of about five dollars to make and distribute.
Well, I usually pay about $12-13 when I buy a CD, and most artists see about.50 to.85 for the many hours I enjoy that CD. Not bad, if they sell 100k of them, on top of other touring income, airplay, and the rest. But I'm not an idiot for thinking that's an OK deal if the artist does, too. And there's the rub: you say you don't like that arrangement, and you say you don't buy the CDs, and we'll assume you don't find (without paying, anyway) some other means by which to lay hands on music by artists that have chosen that arrangement. Because, that's what they have chosen. If you're right about all the money that artists can make by dealing directly with the public, then we're just going to have to wait a little while for the other people to change gears, right? So, why, in the meantime, is it appropriate for so many people to rip these people off?
Only rather than the RIAA getting the profits, the band, the people ACTUALLY DOING THE ENTERTAINING, are making money.
This line of thinking is such a hoot. I spent years working with touring acts and live performances from biker bar bands to big, globally popular acts. Over those years I designed and hung lights, humped and operated rigs with half a million bucks worth of sound gear, oversaw the unloading of 40 trailers a night for arena shows, worked crowd control, dealt with concessions people, the t-shirt people, the utilities, the parking people, the facilities management, the cops, the medics, the talent agents, the lawyers, the union reps, the insurance people, the banks, the bus drivers, the talent, and certainly the fans. Unless you're thinking that all of those people (without whom a decent sized concert performance would not take place) should work for free, then you'll admit that the people "doing the entertaining" are not the only ones that see, or should see, all of the proceeds. There are plenty of times when a 5000-seat venue, at $50 per seat (for a quarter-million dollar gross at the door) turns into about $10-15k for the talent (before taxes and a lot of other expenses)... and that's about the money they'd make off CD sales of the same volume.
The food chain in the studio music business is different, but musicians who go that route use the industry to deal with all of that crap for them, just like the people who fill larger arenas pay people to deal with all of that stuff.
The RIAA and MPAA want to own all of Art
Hyperbolic tinfoilish rants don't help your credibility, here. "Those Who Have Not Paid" for a CD aren't a bit different, ethically, than the people that cheat the rest of the concertgoers when they hop a fence and take in that performance they didn't pay for.
money comes at the expense of the ENTERTAINERS, the people producing the art in its myriad forms that we so enjoy, and to claim that this is somehow morally right is a perversion of logic of the highest order
If someone who is part of a musician's ability to get their recordings out to a huge audience, and all of the business support people that are part of that picture, right down to the guy that designs the liner notes and the UPS guy that puts those CDs in the hands of the neighborhood Starbucks manager, is making money at the "expense" of an artist, then so is the electrician at the concert venue and the cop that helps protect the cash at the box office. Grow up.
You seem to be going out of your way to be inflammatory.
No, not really. There's no way, and you know it, that anyone would bother campaigning to give kids some perspective on copyright infringement if it weren't for the huge issue of "scor[ing] free stuff." The concern, and I think it's a very real and legitimate one, is that by not making a stink about that rampant problem, that we're absolutely cultivating a culture of entitlement, especially among younger kids.
No one is going to suggest that every facet of copyright law is a perfect fit with our evolving economy and society. But the other side of the equation - the wholesale ripping off of material by people who, because there's a fairly low-risk means by which to rip it off, have simply disabled their internal ethical compass - has got to be addressed. The expectation that a movie that just cost someone $100+M to make will now be wildly ripped off, and that a lot of people who would have offset the investment in the movie will now just rip off a copy instead of paying for the entertainment experience - it's hugely impacting the creative business. That documentary filmaker you're worried about is just as able, though a touch less likely, to get ripped off as Peter Jackson is.
Should an author's family benefit, for a good long time, from his work? Some artists invest years of their lives in works that turn out to have serious impact. They do that work instead of other work that might benefit their family in the near term. So what if we can't find the copyright holder for an obscure work? That being awkward doesn't make Faulkner's work inconsequential to the family or friends to whom he left it. If an author doesn't want to have his work protected, he's got all sorts of ways to waive his rights. Why not simply try to convince creative people to give up their rights, and let those that see the work as a profession and an investment make the decision as they see fit?
Should we make sure those works can't be copied either, until those copies which do remain have crumbled into dust?
I don't think you'll find that archivists, libraries, and preservationists are running into lots of trouble with this. You know exactly what this is about: an entire generation that's being trained to think that a the large part of a life's work should be free for the taking, and that there's nothing wrong with making pet entertainment slaves out the very artists they claim to like and respect.
Should researchers face criminal prosecution merely for discussing the copyright protection measures of a new gadget?
When the intent of the discussion is clearly to divulge a closely held trade secret, then the intentional damage does come across just like most other intentional damage, yes. But that's exactly what juries are for - to insert rationality into the picture - and it can cut both ways.
If a few kids can get a dose of critical thinking out of an hour's discussion about whether or not artists are their pets, as opposed to hard working people, then let's hear it for the Boy Scouts (who normally give me the hives, actually). I'm not a big corporation, but I'm sure as hell interested in being able to enforce the terms under which my work is distributed by other people. The real "power grab" in question is the millions of "grabs," every day, that thoughtless twits make for stuff they don't want to pay for. If you really want to make a rational case for softening IP law in some way, then work your ass off, right now, to stop the wholesale piracy that is completely drowning out any other discussion. If you take away the unalterable fact of massive piracy, you set the stage for a more sensible conversation about the subtleties of documentary fair use, the wisdom of estate rights, and so on. But we're talking there about a few cases of academic interest for every million cases of ripped off just-published (or even not yet published!) material.
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Speed - what haven't we figured out about that? What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to obey the speed limits haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to drive as fast as they like, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to speed, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the driver who obey the speed limit) is that the people that speed are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying speeding in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Such fresh, incredible wit!
Let's see, I'll try again with DBJML (don't be a jackass markup language):
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Rip People Off [without waiving your own rights because you choose to violate someone else's, considering the likely consequences to be cheaper than paying for entertainment, and not being worried at all about the actual ethics of doing so] - what haven't we figured out about that?
What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to pay entertainers for their work haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to free movies and music, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to rip off the artists, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the artists) is that the people that are too lazy to be able to afford to pay for their entertainment are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying piracy in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Huh. I didn't have to change that very much at all.
Certainly the risks are higher, in open source development, of people bailing out of the effort. But pretty much any organization of any size engaged in such projects ("closed" or otherwise) has issues like this.
I've run into problems with departing web admins and SSL cert renewals, domain management absent the original admin/tech contacts, or just simple stuff like having to crack ZIP files because the project manager has gone on to greener pastures. So far I have yet to beat the paper backup in the company management's private safe, with the In Case Of Death, Open Me label on it. For multi-developer projects, there's usually a central figure - sort of an Alpha Dog - no matter how peer-ish the project is supposed to be.
So if you're a Bush supporter, it's not possible to be skeptical about the specific ways in which the war on terrorism is being practiced, for example?
But there was nothing granular at all about the OP's message - he paints with a broad brush and invites the drawing of certain conclusions as much by the sort of information he doesn't bring up, as by the snarky tone and sarcasm.
it's a singularly unproductive way to discuss anything
We'll have to disagree, here. I can't think of anything more appropriate, when someone tosses around adolescent rhetoric about science and defense/security, than to poke a stick at him to find out what his motivation is for insulting what (we must presume to be) his fellow scientists.
to be attacked regardless of any actual merits in their specific opinions
But the OP's the one doing exactly what you're critiizing. He's the essence of the jihadist mindset: a sweeping condemnation including a few carefully chosen polarizing words, and a deliberate avoiding of any rational discourse to back up the slam. Calling people on what they say is hardly rhetorical jihadism - it's having a low threshold of tolerance for people who flail around, idealogically, on emotional topics and with deliberate blindness to the depth of the issues at hand.
"Comabatting Terrorism = A Scam!", "Scientists With Possibly Related Research = Money Grubbing Stooges!" The sensibilities that produce comments intended to make those points, or that make the original comments knowing that there will be little room for a different interpretation, are driven by either a woeful underappreciation for the actual threats we face (which is just embarassing), or are driven by a particularly short-sighted and venomous political hatred, which I think is closer to the mark.
You seem to have taken the original post almost personally
Clearly his disdain was intended as a comment on the people he was describing (the low-stooping scientists). That you saw him commenting on the system, rather than taking his words as he used them, suggests that you have a view of a broken system, and heard some piece of your thoughts reinforced by what he said. Absent the nuances of a face to face conversationn in this venue, and lacking a number of the conventional mechanisms by which comments are shown to mean other than what they say, it's fair to interpret his post more or less at face value.
adult world hasn't figured out how much creedence to give IP rights
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Rip People Off - what haven't we figured out about that?
What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to pay entertainers for their work haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to free movies and music, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to rip off the artists, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the artists) is that the people that are too lazy to be able to afford to pay for their entertainment are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying piracy in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Sure, past tense just like "this guy has raped in the past, more than once" and such.
That Saddam had them and refused to demonstrate where they went (and in fact kept up all sorts of tap-dancing to keep people from finding out), is exactly why one of the most reasonable conclusions was that he was still hiding them. That, given the man's regularly horrible behavior (like gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait, publicly sending cash to the families of suicide bombers, providing medical services to Al Queda members, and keeping old airliners around for attack training) is exactly what lead the US intelligence community and that of dozens of other countries to conclude that he was up to no good. And with the events in Afghanistan demonstrating that thuggish regional regimes were very vulnerable, the concern that he'd start spreading his toys (as he likely did) to places like Syria called for action. Hindsight is perfect, of course. But we make guesses every day about what we think people will do, and we base those guesses on past and current behavior.
Of course it is a flare-up of passions after the death of the young girl in Florida at the hands of her former sex-offender neighbor
My point is that these repeat offenses happen all the time. Every month. It would seem that absent a "flare-up," nothing will get done. We do have a waiting period, and it's perpetual (or, at least as long lived as the time between these more media-drenched events). Please don't confuse this with any interest on my part in unreasonable legislation. But the absence of reasonable legislation is exactly why these flare-ups keep happening.
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Certainly one would hope that someone paying big bucks for a guide/farmer to rig up something like these remote systems would, for the $1000 bucks they're charging, also pack and ship the meat on dry ice. The only time I don't take the meat, personally, is when I'm ridding some farmer of a serious varmint. Say, groundhogs. Colonies of those critters will dig holes in cow pastures and end up breaking cattles' legs. Or they'll totally undermine a crop by chewing through root networks, etc. In many places, the natural predators have been completely or largely removed, but the scavengers are still around... so, a shot groundhog, left in the field where it was killed, will usually be gone the next morning, having become a nice dinner for turkey vultures, foxes, coyotes, and so on.
But for the remote hunter - who presumably is considering something like this because he can no longer physically get out into the field - I'd certainly like to think that someone doing business like that is focused clearly on the utlimate destination of the meat. Incidentally, a lot of hunters will keep some portion of the kill, and then clean and package the rest for donation to local shelters, foodbanks, etc.
Another reply to your post, though, did sum it up clearly: every time someone picks up a cold cut sub at Subway, they're passively enjoying the fact that someone else wacked a cow for them. Most kids have absolutely no idea where that meat comes from, and I think every one of them ought to personally break a few chickens' necks before they get in the habit of ordering 6-pack of McNuggets. And if they're really classy, they'll start enjoying Pheasant McNuggets they hunt and prepare themselves. And while spending all that time tromping around fields bird hunting, they'll learn about a jillion other facets of the natural world, including natural selection, weather dynamics, physics (can't shoot without good old Newtonian physics!), soil health, and the benefits of actually walking around everyday and getting some exercise. And nothing makes the average person more cognitively connected to the consequences of violence than the act of deliberately commiting some, and then cleaning the guts out of that to which you did it. It's sobering, thought-provoking, and can be a very fulfilling social experience when it's taught correctly and in the right light. Anyone providing remote hunting has got to consider how to maintain that part of the process in the mind of the hunter.
Heh. While normally a great defender of artists' rights to direct the near-term fate of their material, I'll let you have that one on the house!
No, the amoraility in hunting is killing another living animal for fun, and claiming it's a "sport".
Except, you call it a "sport" and I call it "putting lean, healthy meat in my freezer, and helping to manage wildly out of balance deer populations."
I know a lot of hunters, and I don't know a single one - at all - that takes pleasure, per se, in the act of killing the animal they're taking. The nearest thing to it would be the pride they take in being good at it - which results (by way of a well placed shot) in a humane kill, and less wasted meat.
Now, I do know people that take great joy in swatting mosquitos, or killing rats in their house, etc. Those are people that kill a creature just for their own convenience/happiness. But those are as likely to be non-hunters as hunters.
What makes you so sure that someone who love venison (and has hunted deer all his life specifically to put that lean, healthy meat in his freezer for the many meals that it provides), who finds themselves in a wheelchair all the sudden (as an example), isn't going to pay the hunt host to ship him the venison on dry ice the next day? I for one definately like to pick and choose the animals that I serve. I'd rather avoid a stinky, too-mature older buck, for example. You have to see them walk past your blind or tree stand to size up the animal - pretty much like people choose the lobster from the tank at a restaurant.
"hunting" over the Internet isn't respectable at all
How about with your bare hands? Ok, how about with a rock? A spear? A bow? An old-fashioned flint-lock rifle? A shotgun? A modern high-powered rifle? That same rifle with a high-power scope on it, allowing a 200-yard shot?
So, where do you draw the line? As humans, our main hunting tool is our mind, followed shortly by our social nature. Meaning, plenty of elder Native Americans who knew the habits of the tribe's traditional prey would go along with the younger folk to provide advice on the hunt, but let the younger members actually deliver the lethal blow and run down the game. That's just an older, analog version of the topic being discussed here. Man is a tool user, and would have died off a long time ago without that trait. The nature of the tool has evolved tremendously over time, but I'd say that remote-controlled rifles are less of a change, in principle, than when we graduated from clubbing the animal to death (or running up and poking it with sharp sticks, hoping to get it to bleed to death) to being able to shoot an arrow right through its heart from a tree branch, killing it more or less instantly. Perhaps that change didn't seem "respectible" either, at the time - but the meal was just as good, and the animal died much more quickly and without a great, bloody foot chase.
The old 'kill the deer to save it from dying' arguement ... wonder how the ecosystems of the world managed at all for so many millions of years before humans came around to 'balance' it all.
So, you'd rather go back, what - 500 years? There are many times more deer in North America now than there were 500 years ago. Or 1000 years ago. Or 10,000 years ago.
Human hunters have played a roll in balancing out the hoofstock population for tens of thousands of years. Canines and felines in one form or another have been doing so long before that, but according, generally, to the same rule: killing off some of the herd improves the health of the species. Too many in one area, and all of them become weaker from disease and food shortages. Hunting by non-human critters usually snagged the old, weak, or diseased animals, or the young ones being raised by unworthy (unprotective) parents. The humans tend to hunt the larger, healthier animals where possible, so that puts pressure on the dumber ones... creating smarter, wilyier animals.
Deer populations are reaching terrible numbers, in terms of their health. This is most easily dealt with through expanded hunting, and the game agencies in every state adjust the numbers allowed per hunter, the length and timing of the season, and geography of the zones involved... all to most effectively maintain a healthy herd.
Your ignorance of the matter is, alas, very typical of too many people. And that's what drives voting, policymaking, and media coverage (or lack of it) on this topic. That hunting has, in a few short generations, become so alien to so many people (who get their meat in tidy plastic-wrapped packages at the store) is amazing and distressing to me. I'd even go so far as to say that the lack of exposure to hunting (and the first-hand experience of the conequences of weapon use) is one of the reasons that more and more kids now see violence as an abstraction.
Why is 'whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine' appended to the end of this story?
Because an unbelievable number of people think like that. You know, people who wear nice leather shoes, eat some meat with their dinner, and who have a domestic cat that, despite eating three times a day in the kitchen, stalks and kills neighborhood songbirds just because it's fun. People are spectacularly hypocritical and uninformed about this stuff, and know nothing about the monumental amount of work and cash that hunters put into wildlife management programs and wilderness preservation.
On tonight's dinner menu at my house: pheasant that my wife, my dog, and I laboriously hunted in South Dakota last October. During that outing we pumped a couple thousand dollars into the vapor-thin local economy, walked over miles and miles of farmland, always filling in the host farmers on what we saw in their cornrows and pastures. The "innocent animal" bit only makes sense if you also consider mosquitos innocent, the earthworms that get sliced up by farm equipment creating vegan meals to be innocent, and so on. Bah. This topic is so rife with nonsensical, contradictory emotional baggage and anthropomorphized Disney-esque pablum. Yeesh.
...perhaps the most egregious scene is...
Isn't it possible that Lewis liked Christianity in many ways, but also wondered why, in his lifetime, he'd seen his sort of "decent Christian people" need to pick up arms to stop the wicked from ruling the world and corrupting millions of more young minds? Atheist that I am, I have to have at least some respect for someone like Lewis that imagines a synthesis of Christianity and a more temporal justice that might improve the daily lot of humanity by taking care of some evil here and now. The bible is full of the faithful killing off bad guys... why would Lewis tell allegorical stories based on the bible, and stop short of some of those vivid tales?
but when was the last time a Jew ever came to your door and tried to get you to convert?
Actually, just the other day I had a Jews For Jesus guy at my door. He was spectacularly crazy.
How about if budget was no issue, and there were enough polite, trained Bobbies to stand at every street corner, 24x7, db-meter in hand? Same (even better) net effect, and the bonus of being a deterrent to all sorts of other petty (and not so petty) crime.
But that's completely ridiculous, money-wise, so you have to lean on technology to increase manpower, just like we do in so many other ways. The capacity to do something Orwellian doesn't mean that's the policy or the intent. But being able to address serious quality of life issues, like sidewalks outside certain clubs that never cease to be obnoxiously loud, isn't privacy invasion, and definately is exactly the sort of thing that you'd hope a municipal government would take seriously.
They can't throw manpower at it, but they can leverage tools like this. Persistent, especially night-time, noise levels are one of the main reasons that a lot of people can't stand living in denser urban settings, and that fuels suburban sprawl, fuel consumption, wasted commuting hours and a thousand other inefficiencies. Making Urban Hive Life less miserable by enforcing noise ordinances (along with trash cleanup and vandalism prosecution) seems like an eminently useful thing to do. There are too many freakin' people in the world, and if we have to live packed together so we can afford to live, then the least we can do is find speedy, low man-hour ways to deal with that small percentage of us that insist on making a goddamn 100db racket at 2:00AM. Society seems to frown on me actually dealing with it personally (since polite requests will go ignored by people that don't already understand they're being jerks, and I'm not legally empowered to engage in any other form of pursuasion), so this type of solution seems to make sense - it allows LEOs to respond, over time, to more complaints, and to better weigh who's making reasonable complaints.
That's why most professionals and experts are switching to them.
Would that be... most people in the room with you right now? Most of your friends? I work with 300 people. One of their wives bought a Mac because it was "pretty" and she saw it, literally, in the window at a Mac store in a Virginia shopping mall. Now, there are probably quite a few more Macs in use within that group of people, but I will suggest, right now, that "most" of them have not/are not switching. They are all professionals, and all experts.
Statistics, man! Back this stuff up! Most people sure I'm right, prefer vanilla ice cream, and think George Soros founded the whole Open Soros Movement.
Oh, and on the subject: I think the OP should just throw a dart and buy an all-in-one mobo. He can use the spare NIC to multi-home, and just disable the other stuff. Most of the time, though, the maker's drivers make the install/use a lot simpler than sucking down that extra 10 watts and busying up his expansion slots and hoping all the parts get along nicely.
Not really. I could spend my life seeking Bluebeard's buried treasure, but that doesn't imply that the treasure exists. Just that we're looking, me hearties.
But we want to avoid the notion that the buried treasure (as a type of thing that we've seen before) simply cannot be found, or that it doesn't obey the laws of physics... that sort of thing. Saying that because the treasure is hard to find, and you haven't found it yet, doesn't make it appropriate, for example, to tell school kids that one, equally likely possibility is that it was raised up into the heavens by faeries, where the ghost of Bluebeard sits on the right hand of the ghost of Blackbeard causing other treasures to do tricks with the laws of thermodynamics and whatnot.
The two definitions of science both seem reasonably sound
I don't know, though. Semantics is an issue. The "continuing investigation" makes it sound as though there simply can never be any facts discovered. Whereas the previous "seeking explanations" posits that there are explanations, and that science's job is to find them. It's subtle, but that's an important distinction.
Maybe they should have rounded up the known Al Qaeda members in the US (at least two of the hijackers were known by the governement to be associated with Al Qaeda and to have entered the US), beefed up security on the planes, kept pilots informed, and perhaps most importantly, sifted through FBI field reports to see if there were any leads (there were several).
So all of these things should have been Bush's personal responsibility as he worked with the agencies, as staffed, that he had just inherited from 8 years of the Clinton administration? If it's your sense that the White House should be deciding what FBI reports are or are not worth correlating or pursuing, then you're probably not expecting them to get much else done. Did you supposed that his predecessor was doing that?
If you'll exhibit a little intellectual honesty, here, you'll concede that the structural problems (such as the compartmentalizaion of the FBI and CIA) that contributed to that failure were never going to get corrected by congress without a massive stimulus such as 9/11. And now we've John Negroponte, who has that job.
I'd argue that security on planes, right now, is still inadequate. And that we still have people getting on board under false identities or with questionable baggage, etc. And yet look at the flack the feds are getting for the security measures that are in place, inadequate though they are. Can you imagine, before thousands of Americans were killed by terrorists flying planes, getting even a fraction of the current policies and practices in place? It would never have happened, under Bush OR Clinton. But it would have been nice, under Clinton, to have actually taken up on Sudan's offer for Bin Laden's handover. Or to have actually done something more concrete following the attack on the Cole or the destruction of two embassies.
What we need is people who understand that rights arent centered arround feelings, or "what's in it for me" attitude - they are centered arround facts.
So, if I take something from you (say, an hour of your time, the manuscript for the novel you're working on, or the money from your checking account), the fact is that I now have it. So, presto, despite anyone's "feelings," as you put it, I've just re-defined your rights? That's BS, and you're missing the entire point. If you can talk someone who creates things for a living into not caring whether, or in what way, her work is or is not paid for, then great! You've got a convert. Obviously you have no respect for (in fact, you obviously hate) people who prefer to have some influence over whether or not they've worked for free. Since you're so annoyed by those people, you surely wouldn't want to be entertained by anything they've created, since that would be intellectually dishonest. So, obviously, you choose not see any commercial films, or listen to the radio, or do anything else that would get those people paid for what they invested time and money to produce. So, since you don't care about those artists, why do care what their business arrangements are? You've obviously found a lot of people who are willing to entertain you for free, and you're obviously satisfied with the films, books, and recordings that they produce. Why worry about the "control freaks" you hate so much when you wouldn't want anything they produce anyway? And no one else you care about would want it either, so just leave those dinosaurs to die off, and focus instead on your idyllic alternate universe, where being able to take something makes it right to do so.
Sure, the dog can't pick out the right canned food on the shelf, but it can see a car coming from two blocks away, sense unstable ground, and pick up on unsavory people's body language in a second. I'm not blind, but walking with my dogs alerts me to things I'd never notice otherwise - they are truly amazing critters. I hope my eyes are good for the rest of my life, but hopefully we'll have direct visual cortex stimulation from implants or some other solution before I have to depend on a mobile robot to help me get around. In the meantime, it's Fido for me.
So as long as they are going in the right direction this is a good thing
Right! Threatening Taiwan, that's a good thing. Lying about how much independence they'd allow to thrive in Hong Kong, that's a good thing. Controlling the information that people in the country can read (like filtering out this site!), that's a good thing. So, how many years of inching forwards and backwards towards the right thing makes it OK?
powerful oligarchies which run big business and government
What? China is completely corrupt in this regard. The communist government there directly involves itself in private business to a degree that would never be tolerated in the US.
The US is not a democracy
Right, the US is a republic, with democratically elected representatives in the legislature, and executives elected by the states.
'one person/one vote' NOT 'one dollar/one vote'
Well, that doesn't even make sense. No one pays to vote, and no one gets paid to vote. If you mean, do organizations like moveon.org take huge amounts of cash from people like George Soros to push certain issues and candidates before an election, then you're at least making the connection of money to politics in an indirect way.
Most of Europe and Canada offer much better models for democracy then the US
Except that those arrangements often allow people with only a small portion of the votes to hold office. It's not always the best fit for making definitive policies.
The copyright holders are still making millions
Plenty of musicians, for example, only make a modest living. Killing off their sales actually does impact their standard of living.
Meanwhile, a significant portion of the world's population is starving
Which is certainly alleviated by being able to use their broadband internet connections to avoid paying artists for their entertainment.
Pollution is everywhere, and we don't have a sustainable energy source
I know, and you're suggesting that by using p2p and skipping the whole pay-the-artist part, we'll reduce trips to the retail store in giant SUVs to buy plastic disks that were pumped out of the ground. Oh, wait! We can avoid those things and not rip off the artists, by actually paying for the entertainment we want!
Violence and war is wide spread
Certainly what we need, then, is an entire generation of people growing up thinking that the things people produce have no value, and that everyone is entitled to the fruits of everyone else's work for free. We should all just work for the state, pay big taxes, and get everything for free! Then there'd be no war. Certainly that would eliminate the types of people that slaughter whole villages in Darfur. Or the ones that think women should be trapped at home in their Burkhas on pain of death, and be willing to blow up people in line for a job in order to show how right they are. And definately, making sure that Peter Jackson, even as people rave about his craftsmanship, doesn't get a dime out of the cool people who know better than to pay for such things... that will foster a better sense in the world of why it's not helpful for North Korea to have a big fat nuclear tantrum as they starve their people to death in work camps.
You propose a false dichotomy, and imply that dealing with such things are mutually exclusive. Well hell, while there are hungry people in the world, I don't know how you can consider it appropriate to enjoy any music at all! How can you live with yourself? Or maybe there's no joy in it when it's ripped off, thus making it OK.
because I think it is wrong for the ENTERTAINERS to get a few pennies out of the twenty dollars I spend to purchase an item that costs all of about five dollars to make and distribute.
.50 to .85 for the many hours I enjoy that CD. Not bad, if they sell 100k of them, on top of other touring income, airplay, and the rest. But I'm not an idiot for thinking that's an OK deal if the artist does, too. And there's the rub: you say you don't like that arrangement, and you say you don't buy the CDs, and we'll assume you don't find (without paying, anyway) some other means by which to lay hands on music by artists that have chosen that arrangement. Because, that's what they have chosen. If you're right about all the money that artists can make by dealing directly with the public, then we're just going to have to wait a little while for the other people to change gears, right? So, why, in the meantime, is it appropriate for so many people to rip these people off?
Well, I usually pay about $12-13 when I buy a CD, and most artists see about
Only rather than the RIAA getting the profits, the band, the people ACTUALLY DOING THE ENTERTAINING, are making money.
This line of thinking is such a hoot. I spent years working with touring acts and live performances from biker bar bands to big, globally popular acts. Over those years I designed and hung lights, humped and operated rigs with half a million bucks worth of sound gear, oversaw the unloading of 40 trailers a night for arena shows, worked crowd control, dealt with concessions people, the t-shirt people, the utilities, the parking people, the facilities management, the cops, the medics, the talent agents, the lawyers, the union reps, the insurance people, the banks, the bus drivers, the talent, and certainly the fans. Unless you're thinking that all of those people (without whom a decent sized concert performance would not take place) should work for free, then you'll admit that the people "doing the entertaining" are not the only ones that see, or should see, all of the proceeds. There are plenty of times when a 5000-seat venue, at $50 per seat (for a quarter-million dollar gross at the door) turns into about $10-15k for the talent (before taxes and a lot of other expenses)... and that's about the money they'd make off CD sales of the same volume.
The food chain in the studio music business is different, but musicians who go that route use the industry to deal with all of that crap for them, just like the people who fill larger arenas pay people to deal with all of that stuff.
The RIAA and MPAA want to own all of Art
Hyperbolic tinfoilish rants don't help your credibility, here. "Those Who Have Not Paid" for a CD aren't a bit different, ethically, than the people that cheat the rest of the concertgoers when they hop a fence and take in that performance they didn't pay for.
money comes at the expense of the ENTERTAINERS, the people producing the art in its myriad forms that we so enjoy, and to claim that this is somehow morally right is a perversion of logic of the highest order
If someone who is part of a musician's ability to get their recordings out to a huge audience, and all of the business support people that are part of that picture, right down to the guy that designs the liner notes and the UPS guy that puts those CDs in the hands of the neighborhood Starbucks manager, is making money at the "expense" of an artist, then so is the electrician at the concert venue and the cop that helps protect the cash at the box office. Grow up.
You seem to be going out of your way to be inflammatory.
No, not really. There's no way, and you know it, that anyone would bother campaigning to give kids some perspective on copyright infringement if it weren't for the huge issue of "scor[ing] free stuff." The concern, and I think it's a very real and legitimate one, is that by not making a stink about that rampant problem, that we're absolutely cultivating a culture of entitlement, especially among younger kids.
No one is going to suggest that every facet of copyright law is a perfect fit with our evolving economy and society. But the other side of the equation - the wholesale ripping off of material by people who, because there's a fairly low-risk means by which to rip it off, have simply disabled their internal ethical compass - has got to be addressed. The expectation that a movie that just cost someone $100+M to make will now be wildly ripped off, and that a lot of people who would have offset the investment in the movie will now just rip off a copy instead of paying for the entertainment experience - it's hugely impacting the creative business. That documentary filmaker you're worried about is just as able, though a touch less likely, to get ripped off as Peter Jackson is.
Should an author's family benefit, for a good long time, from his work? Some artists invest years of their lives in works that turn out to have serious impact. They do that work instead of other work that might benefit their family in the near term. So what if we can't find the copyright holder for an obscure work? That being awkward doesn't make Faulkner's work inconsequential to the family or friends to whom he left it. If an author doesn't want to have his work protected, he's got all sorts of ways to waive his rights. Why not simply try to convince creative people to give up their rights, and let those that see the work as a profession and an investment make the decision as they see fit?
Should we make sure those works can't be copied either, until those copies which do remain have crumbled into dust?
I don't think you'll find that archivists, libraries, and preservationists are running into lots of trouble with this. You know exactly what this is about: an entire generation that's being trained to think that a the large part of a life's work should be free for the taking, and that there's nothing wrong with making pet entertainment slaves out the very artists they claim to like and respect.
Should researchers face criminal prosecution merely for discussing the copyright protection measures of a new gadget?
When the intent of the discussion is clearly to divulge a closely held trade secret, then the intentional damage does come across just like most other intentional damage, yes. But that's exactly what juries are for - to insert rationality into the picture - and it can cut both ways.
If a few kids can get a dose of critical thinking out of an hour's discussion about whether or not artists are their pets, as opposed to hard working people, then let's hear it for the Boy Scouts (who normally give me the hives, actually). I'm not a big corporation, but I'm sure as hell interested in being able to enforce the terms under which my work is distributed by other people. The real "power grab" in question is the millions of "grabs," every day, that thoughtless twits make for stuff they don't want to pay for. If you really want to make a rational case for softening IP law in some way, then work your ass off, right now, to stop the wholesale piracy that is completely drowning out any other discussion. If you take away the unalterable fact of massive piracy, you set the stage for a more sensible conversation about the subtleties of documentary fair use, the wisdom of estate rights, and so on. But we're talking there about a few cases of academic interest for every million cases of ripped off just-published (or even not yet published!) material.
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Speed - what haven't we figured out about that? What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to obey the speed limits haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to drive as fast as they like, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to speed, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the driver who obey the speed limit) is that the people that speed are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying speeding in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Such fresh, incredible wit!
Let's see, I'll try again with DBJML (don't be a jackass markup language):
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Rip People Off [without waiving your own rights because you choose to violate someone else's, considering the likely consequences to be cheaper than paying for entertainment, and not being worried at all about the actual ethics of doing so] - what haven't we figured out about that?
What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to pay entertainers for their work haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to free movies and music, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to rip off the artists, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the artists) is that the people that are too lazy to be able to afford to pay for their entertainment are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying piracy in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Huh. I didn't have to change that very much at all.
Certainly the risks are higher, in open source development, of people bailing out of the effort. But pretty much any organization of any size engaged in such projects ("closed" or otherwise) has issues like this.
I've run into problems with departing web admins and SSL cert renewals, domain management absent the original admin/tech contacts, or just simple stuff like having to crack ZIP files because the project manager has gone on to greener pastures. So far I have yet to beat the paper backup in the company management's private safe, with the In Case Of Death, Open Me label on it. For multi-developer projects, there's usually a central figure - sort of an Alpha Dog - no matter how peer-ish the project is supposed to be.
So if you're a Bush supporter, it's not possible to be skeptical about the specific ways in which the war on terrorism is being practiced, for example?
But there was nothing granular at all about the OP's message - he paints with a broad brush and invites the drawing of certain conclusions as much by the sort of information he doesn't bring up, as by the snarky tone and sarcasm.
it's a singularly unproductive way to discuss anything
We'll have to disagree, here. I can't think of anything more appropriate, when someone tosses around adolescent rhetoric about science and defense/security, than to poke a stick at him to find out what his motivation is for insulting what (we must presume to be) his fellow scientists.
to be attacked regardless of any actual merits in their specific opinions
But the OP's the one doing exactly what you're critiizing. He's the essence of the jihadist mindset: a sweeping condemnation including a few carefully chosen polarizing words, and a deliberate avoiding of any rational discourse to back up the slam. Calling people on what they say is hardly rhetorical jihadism - it's having a low threshold of tolerance for people who flail around, idealogically, on emotional topics and with deliberate blindness to the depth of the issues at hand.
"Comabatting Terrorism = A Scam!", "Scientists With Possibly Related Research = Money Grubbing Stooges!" The sensibilities that produce comments intended to make those points, or that make the original comments knowing that there will be little room for a different interpretation, are driven by either a woeful underappreciation for the actual threats we face (which is just embarassing), or are driven by a particularly short-sighted and venomous political hatred, which I think is closer to the mark.
You seem to have taken the original post almost personally
Clearly his disdain was intended as a comment on the people he was describing (the low-stooping scientists). That you saw him commenting on the system, rather than taking his words as he used them, suggests that you have a view of a broken system, and heard some piece of your thoughts reinforced by what he said. Absent the nuances of a face to face conversationn in this venue, and lacking a number of the conventional mechanisms by which comments are shown to mean other than what they say, it's fair to interpret his post more or less at face value.
adult world hasn't figured out how much creedence to give IP rights
What? It's completely unambiguous, and there are very clear-cut laws on the books. You Cannot Rip People Off - what haven't we figured out about that?
What you probably mean to say is that the part of the population that doesn't like to pay entertainers for their work haven't yet brainwashed enough eventual voters into thinking that they have an entitlement to free movies and music, and thus we haven't yet changed the laws to make it so. Right now it's unambiguously illegal to rip off the artists, and the only variable is the number of people that think it should be OK. The good news (for the artists) is that the people that are too lazy to be able to afford to pay for their entertainment are also, generally, too intellectually lazy to even go through the motions of justifying piracy in terms that the rest of the productive economy will endorse.
Sure, past tense just like "this guy has raped in the past, more than once" and such.
That Saddam had them and refused to demonstrate where they went (and in fact kept up all sorts of tap-dancing to keep people from finding out), is exactly why one of the most reasonable conclusions was that he was still hiding them. That, given the man's regularly horrible behavior (like gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait, publicly sending cash to the families of suicide bombers, providing medical services to Al Queda members, and keeping old airliners around for attack training) is exactly what lead the US intelligence community and that of dozens of other countries to conclude that he was up to no good. And with the events in Afghanistan demonstrating that thuggish regional regimes were very vulnerable, the concern that he'd start spreading his toys (as he likely did) to places like Syria called for action. Hindsight is perfect, of course. But we make guesses every day about what we think people will do, and we base those guesses on past and current behavior.
Of course it is a flare-up of passions after the death of the young girl in Florida at the hands of her former sex-offender neighbor
My point is that these repeat offenses happen all the time. Every month. It would seem that absent a "flare-up," nothing will get done. We do have a waiting period, and it's perpetual (or, at least as long lived as the time between these more media-drenched events). Please don't confuse this with any interest on my part in unreasonable legislation. But the absence of reasonable legislation is exactly why these flare-ups keep happening.