"All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer."
It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.
"This 'service' that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation."
If that was a certainty, there would have been enough evidence to convict them already. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but entrapment stinks. You can turn anyone into a criminal if you offer the right price.
Samsung is [b]hoping[/b] that the Z5 will work smoothly with the range of subscription music services that support the Microsoft PlaysForSure digital music standard.
Heh, yeah. Shouldn't they KnowForSure(TM) if it'll work smoothly?
"I therefore ask *everyone* reading this to constantly correct anyone and everyone you hear talking about 'piracy' and remind them that they are talking about copying, *not* the murdering and the pillaging and the violating of young virgins with heaving busoms."
That's a terrific suggestion. I do this all the time in forum and blog discussions, actually. If the best arguments the anti-filesharing jackboots have against filesharing involve outrageous hyperbole and comparisons to murder, I think they've pretty much lost the debate. It's certainly difficult to discuss actual issues with such people.
Not all people consider sharing of information and media to be "illegitimate". The idea that culture can be controlled and bottled up by powerful media companies is a quaint 20th century notion.
You are quite correct in questioning the effect of any ban. Bit-torrent networks and other types of filesharing are rooted in basic human behaviour and desires. That's not going to change any time soon.
"Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."
If people need and want bandwidth, the market will happily comply and keep increasing it. I've already got 55 megabit fibre to my house where I live. Besides government regulation and controls, I can't think of any reason telecommunication companies cannot meet the demands of Internet users.
Although they haven't built it to support Safari for editing, the styles in a completed page include text shadows, which look really nice but are only supported in Safari so far. So Google engineers are viewing their pages in Safari, even if they haven't made the application itself work.
It's not at all surprising to hear the endless stories of government cops ticketing or even arresting people on false charges all the time. After all, it's not like you hired them. It's not like they're responsible to citizens; they don't lose pay or get fired for poor performance, except under the most unusual circumstances.
In spite of the best intentions of many police officers to "stay honest" (whatever that means to them), their masters are the politicians who make the rules, civil servants trying to increase their department budgets, and police bureaucrats trying to protect their piece of turf in the state protection racket. The amount of true protection to citizens that is required to please these special groups is pretty low.
Compare your experience to the behaviour of private police on university campuses and other institutions. They're paid to assist visitors, keep everyone safe, and protect their customers. Pay and employment are linked to performance in a meaningful manner.
If the Houston police chief was the police chief in any number of other countries, he might just get his way with in-home cameras. Perhaps that day will come in the US too.
It's no wonder private security is such a booming business. It's not like you can get real security from the government -- only intrusion and bullying.
Dude, universal freedom doesn't come from democracy. Democracy is just a clever way of taking money from Group A and giving it to Group B while the fat cats in power profit. Instead of taking responsibility, politicians can blame the voters. It's corruption with votes and bureaucracy as the primary tools instead of coups and assassinations.
Freedom is served not by majoritarianism, but by laws that respect and protect a person's basic rights as a human being. Neither the US nor Chinese governments do this very well, which is too bad but hardly a surprise. American democracy has shown a remarkable propensity for eroding rights, both those of citizens at home and those of the foreign "illegal combatants" that disappear into gulags, never to be seen again.
Yeah, I can't exactly see independently-minded Chinese lining up to keep their important documents and links at Yahoo! Desktop (or whatever Yahoo comes up with).
"The best thing with moral is that you can have your own. There is no Real Moral(tm)"
That's a tough argument to win. Can I kill you and take your stuff, so long as I decide it's allowed by "my own" moral system?
It's much easier to defend the idea that morality is absolute, starting with axiomatic principles like human self-ownership. It's all about how we respect the essential rights of our fellow humans. In fact, you can't even defend the idea of subjective morality effectively without this axiom.
"Global Warming is a very complicated issue. Definately things are getting warmer, this is know. Definately a natural cycle is contributing to it, this is known."
Here's an interesting point. The fact that temperature and other characteristics of Earth's climate are cyclical suggests that the effects of higher-than-average temperatures at one point in time result in lower-than-average temperatures at a later point in time. I.e. global heating is not a run-away effect like some people suggest, but a cyclical effect that will self-correct and cause cooling later on (which in turn will cause heating again, as the cycle continues).
Nature is full of such cyclical, non-linear systems. An over-abundance of wolves one year depletes the food supply (e.g. deer) with starvation resulting and the next year there are fewer wolves than normal, so the deer multiply and thrive. Rinse and repeat.
Climate cycles are still poorly understood. Scientists don't know all the reasons that warm temperatures over one period of time cause cooling at a later time.
If human civilization is indeed influencing the cycles, we might just be making the cycles more extreme, or shorter.
In terms of humanity's effect on the environment, there are worse problems (in my opinion) than global warming.
"I see no reason why this situation will be any different."
Because unlike Dark Matter, the neutrino didn't account for 90% of the missing mass; just a tiny portion.
We could also throw out relativity, and make up some local dark matter to supplement Newton's equations, but I think relativity works better.
Ultimately, the important thing in science is to have a theory that predicts phenomena well. If one of the new theories does that, we've made progress.
"The market is already awash in cell phones. Granted, few of them have the panache of the iPod, and they are bloated in pointless features that could be done much better. The profit margins for cell phones are much slimmer than the iPod, even for something high-end like the RAZR. Could Apple produce something with both iPod and cellphone technology crammed into it, and still charge a reasonable market price for it?"
I think you're absolutely right. The cell phone business is complicated, political, expensive to get into, and over-regulated. They'd have to produce phones for different cell technologies and networks, and the chances are slim any North American cell provider would sell feature-rich iPhones or hook them up. Service providers prefer locked-down phones, and they want you to pay *them* for every photo you transfer and every song you listen to.
The idea that Apple would want to turn into a cell phone network is also silly. What happens when they want to sell in Canada or Japan or China? Their cash reserves would be better spent on just about anything than being sunk into the money-hole of the telecommunications business.
Remember, the iPod was designed as a computer accessory, and it was intended to be an extension of the Mac platform (despite its success among PC users). Like all Apple products, it was introduced in the hopes it would sell more Macintoshes. If Apple has a mobile data and communications device on the way, it too will be an extension of your Mac. It'll have iChat AV for voice and video communications, but it won't use the cell phone networks; it'll bypass them completely and use wi-fi wherever it's available. It'll be a whole new ground-up approach to the PDA, just like the iPod was to MP3 players. It'll be convenient like a Blackberry, functional like an iBook, and sleek like an iPod.
Assuming you mean "never took off", I'd say you're wrong. Plenty of external hard disks use FW800 for fast transfers, and the actual data rates you get are typically twice that of FW400 and three times that of sucky old USB. My next machine will need to have at least one FW800 port, and I'd like it to be another Mac. Apple?
Very likely, since British voters who don't see the movie can't nominate it for a BAFTA award. In fact, I think some of the important deadlines have already passed, and most film award voters need working screeners in order to stop on top of recent films.
Getting nominated for a major awards ceremony like the British Film Academy's goes a long way in giving your film publicity and extra filmgoers. It also improves your chances of Oscar nominations, which *do* have a significant effect on a film's bottom line.
In other words, Spielberg could lose a lot of money because of the studio's copy protection cock-up.
You've just illustrated the cycle by which the market corrects itself, wage prices being the usual economic signal (Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). It's not really a boom-bust cycle, though, since the market tends to make corrections quickly.
However, market interference tends to send the wrong signals to market participants, resulting in booms and busts. Here's a typical boom-bust cycle:
1. New Industry (IT, dot-com, whatever) emerges with strong growth potential.
2. Government creates below-market interest rates and expands money supply to "encourage growth".
3. Cheap credit causes over-investment and excess demand in new Industry.
4. Labour market mistakes over-investment for real potential, and labour supply (graduates, immigrants) expands. This is the boom period.
5. Over-investment (see 3) results in over-supply and poor profits. Businesses contract and the market rate for labour decreases as the economy seeks equilibrium.
6. Market equilibrium is denied, as the government legislates anti-immigration laws, tariffs, and possibly even wage protection laws.
7. High operating costs force many otherwise solvent businesses in the Industry to fold. Derivative industries also fold or contract because tariffs are keeping prices artificially high.
8. Government lowers artificial interest rate further to keep money flowing into the Industry. Over-supply situation persists.
9. When rates can go no lower, the majority of businesses in the Industry consolidate or go bankrupt. High frictional unemployment results because of workers who mistook over-capitalization for true market demand and learned the wrong skills. This is the bust period, which lasts until the misallocation of capital (investment, labour, etc) is remedied.
"I think the RIAA should sue anyone who sings music."
Sing happy birthday at your kid's birthday party, and they just might. After all, Warner pretends to own that particular combination of musical tones and lyrics.
Slashdot Mirror
"All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer."
It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.
"This 'service' that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation."
If that was a certainty, there would have been enough evidence to convict them already. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but entrapment stinks. You can turn anyone into a criminal if you offer the right price.
Samsung is [b]hoping[/b] that the Z5 will work smoothly with the range of subscription music services that support the Microsoft PlaysForSure digital music standard. Heh, yeah. Shouldn't they KnowForSure(TM) if it'll work smoothly?
South Korea is a developed country with 50 million citizens, if that answers your question.
"I therefore ask *everyone* reading this to constantly correct anyone and everyone you hear talking about 'piracy' and remind them that they are talking about copying, *not* the murdering and the pillaging and the violating of young virgins with heaving busoms."
That's a terrific suggestion. I do this all the time in forum and blog discussions, actually. If the best arguments the anti-filesharing jackboots have against filesharing involve outrageous hyperbole and comparisons to murder, I think they've pretty much lost the debate. It's certainly difficult to discuss actual issues with such people.
"most BT traffic is illegitimate"
Not all people consider sharing of information and media to be "illegitimate". The idea that culture can be controlled and bottled up by powerful media companies is a quaint 20th century notion.
You are quite correct in questioning the effect of any ban. Bit-torrent networks and other types of filesharing are rooted in basic human behaviour and desires. That's not going to change any time soon.
"Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."
If people need and want bandwidth, the market will happily comply and keep increasing it. I've already got 55 megabit fibre to my house where I live. Besides government regulation and controls, I can't think of any reason telecommunication companies cannot meet the demands of Internet users.
Although they haven't built it to support Safari for editing, the styles in a completed page include text shadows, which look really nice but are only supported in Safari so far. So Google engineers are viewing their pages in Safari, even if they haven't made the application itself work.
It's not at all surprising to hear the endless stories of government cops ticketing or even arresting people on false charges all the time. After all, it's not like you hired them. It's not like they're responsible to citizens; they don't lose pay or get fired for poor performance, except under the most unusual circumstances.
In spite of the best intentions of many police officers to "stay honest" (whatever that means to them), their masters are the politicians who make the rules, civil servants trying to increase their department budgets, and police bureaucrats trying to protect their piece of turf in the state protection racket. The amount of true protection to citizens that is required to please these special groups is pretty low.
Compare your experience to the behaviour of private police on university campuses and other institutions. They're paid to assist visitors, keep everyone safe, and protect their customers. Pay and employment are linked to performance in a meaningful manner.
If the Houston police chief was the police chief in any number of other countries, he might just get his way with in-home cameras. Perhaps that day will come in the US too.
It's no wonder private security is such a booming business. It's not like you can get real security from the government -- only intrusion and bullying.
Dude, universal freedom doesn't come from democracy. Democracy is just a clever way of taking money from Group A and giving it to Group B while the fat cats in power profit. Instead of taking responsibility, politicians can blame the voters. It's corruption with votes and bureaucracy as the primary tools instead of coups and assassinations.
Freedom is served not by majoritarianism, but by laws that respect and protect a person's basic rights as a human being. Neither the US nor Chinese governments do this very well, which is too bad but hardly a surprise. American democracy has shown a remarkable propensity for eroding rights, both those of citizens at home and those of the foreign "illegal combatants" that disappear into gulags, never to be seen again.
Unfortunately, 20,000 dead Iraqis and a similar number of Afghanis never had a chance to lodge objections with the Olympic Committee.
Yeah, I can't exactly see independently-minded Chinese lining up to keep their important documents and links at Yahoo! Desktop (or whatever Yahoo comes up with).
Give the Slashdot editors credit for ingenuity; I had no idea they'd come up with a way to misspell numbers. :)
I wonder ... while it's not an ideal solution, could he open two Netflix accounts to split his rentals between and lose the heavy renter status?
Heh, I think it's more like a restaurant offering to sell you their own brand of anti-acid pills or Pepto Bismol with your meal. :)
"Only $4.99, sir, and you'll probably need it considering the ingredients we use."
"The best thing with moral is that you can have your own. There is no Real Moral(tm)"
That's a tough argument to win. Can I kill you and take your stuff, so long as I decide it's allowed by "my own" moral system?
It's much easier to defend the idea that morality is absolute, starting with axiomatic principles like human self-ownership. It's all about how we respect the essential rights of our fellow humans. In fact, you can't even defend the idea of subjective morality effectively without this axiom.
"Global Warming is a very complicated issue. Definately things are getting warmer, this is know. Definately a natural cycle is contributing to it, this is known."
Here's an interesting point. The fact that temperature and other characteristics of Earth's climate are cyclical suggests that the effects of higher-than-average temperatures at one point in time result in lower-than-average temperatures at a later point in time. I.e. global heating is not a run-away effect like some people suggest, but a cyclical effect that will self-correct and cause cooling later on (which in turn will cause heating again, as the cycle continues).
Nature is full of such cyclical, non-linear systems. An over-abundance of wolves one year depletes the food supply (e.g. deer) with starvation resulting and the next year there are fewer wolves than normal, so the deer multiply and thrive. Rinse and repeat.
Climate cycles are still poorly understood. Scientists don't know all the reasons that warm temperatures over one period of time cause cooling at a later time.
If human civilization is indeed influencing the cycles, we might just be making the cycles more extreme, or shorter.
In terms of humanity's effect on the environment, there are worse problems (in my opinion) than global warming.
"I see no reason why this situation will be any different."
Because unlike Dark Matter, the neutrino didn't account for 90% of the missing mass; just a tiny portion.
We could also throw out relativity, and make up some local dark matter to supplement Newton's equations, but I think relativity works better.
Ultimately, the important thing in science is to have a theory that predicts phenomena well. If one of the new theories does that, we've made progress.
Every modern style guide shows you how to cite web pages. You need at least the precise URL and the date at which you accessed the page.
What does replacing one term with its opposite accomplish? Comedic effect?
"The market is already awash in cell phones. Granted, few of them have the panache of the iPod, and they are bloated in pointless features that could be done much better. The profit margins for cell phones are much slimmer than the iPod, even for something high-end like the RAZR. Could Apple produce something with both iPod and cellphone technology crammed into it, and still charge a reasonable market price for it?"
I think you're absolutely right. The cell phone business is complicated, political, expensive to get into, and over-regulated. They'd have to produce phones for different cell technologies and networks, and the chances are slim any North American cell provider would sell feature-rich iPhones or hook them up. Service providers prefer locked-down phones, and they want you to pay *them* for every photo you transfer and every song you listen to.
The idea that Apple would want to turn into a cell phone network is also silly. What happens when they want to sell in Canada or Japan or China? Their cash reserves would be better spent on just about anything than being sunk into the money-hole of the telecommunications business.
Remember, the iPod was designed as a computer accessory, and it was intended to be an extension of the Mac platform (despite its success among PC users). Like all Apple products, it was introduced in the hopes it would sell more Macintoshes. If Apple has a mobile data and communications device on the way, it too will be an extension of your Mac. It'll have iChat AV for voice and video communications, but it won't use the cell phone networks; it'll bypass them completely and use wi-fi wherever it's available. It'll be a whole new ground-up approach to the PDA, just like the iPod was to MP3 players. It'll be convenient like a Blackberry, functional like an iBook, and sleek like an iPod.
"FW800 never took on"
Assuming you mean "never took off", I'd say you're wrong. Plenty of external hard disks use FW800 for fast transfers, and the actual data rates you get are typically twice that of FW400 and three times that of sucky old USB. My next machine will need to have at least one FW800 port, and I'd like it to be another Mac. Apple?
Very likely, since British voters who don't see the movie can't nominate it for a BAFTA award. In fact, I think some of the important deadlines have already passed, and most film award voters need working screeners in order to stop on top of recent films.
Getting nominated for a major awards ceremony like the British Film Academy's goes a long way in giving your film publicity and extra filmgoers. It also improves your chances of Oscar nominations, which *do* have a significant effect on a film's bottom line.
In other words, Spielberg could lose a lot of money because of the studio's copy protection cock-up.
You've just illustrated the cycle by which the market corrects itself, wage prices being the usual economic signal (Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). It's not really a boom-bust cycle, though, since the market tends to make corrections quickly.
However, market interference tends to send the wrong signals to market participants, resulting in booms and busts. Here's a typical boom-bust cycle:
1. New Industry (IT, dot-com, whatever) emerges with strong growth potential.
2. Government creates below-market interest rates and expands money supply to "encourage growth".
3. Cheap credit causes over-investment and excess demand in new Industry.
4. Labour market mistakes over-investment for real potential, and labour supply (graduates, immigrants) expands. This is the boom period.
5. Over-investment (see 3) results in over-supply and poor profits. Businesses contract and the market rate for labour decreases as the economy seeks equilibrium.
6. Market equilibrium is denied, as the government legislates anti-immigration laws, tariffs, and possibly even wage protection laws.
7. High operating costs force many otherwise solvent businesses in the Industry to fold. Derivative industries also fold or contract because tariffs are keeping prices artificially high.
8. Government lowers artificial interest rate further to keep money flowing into the Industry. Over-supply situation persists.
9. When rates can go no lower, the majority of businesses in the Industry consolidate or go bankrupt. High frictional unemployment results because of workers who mistook over-capitalization for true market demand and learned the wrong skills. This is the bust period, which lasts until the misallocation of capital (investment, labour, etc) is remedied.
"I think the RIAA should sue anyone who sings music."
Sing happy birthday at your kid's birthday party, and they just might. After all, Warner pretends to own that particular combination of musical tones and lyrics.
That's the best summary of the clash between information freedom and Big Media that I've possibly ever read.