Especially the part where he says that he wants to install an OS without actually booting it at any point. I kinda stopped reading after that, admittedly.
Just barely. SGI managed to shoehorn large-system support into Linux, but it's extremely hinky.
Compare to an operating system like IRIX -- from where the large-system support in Linux came --that has been scaling to hundreds of processors since the mid-1990s, and that in recent months has been scaling to thousands of processors.
Compared to a true scalable OS, both Solaris and Linux come up short.
Interesting piece of totally unrelated trivia: Do you know what Oracle is running their in-house database on? A cluster of Xserves. There was a press release a couple of months ago.
I believe oligopoly would be the correct term to describe this.
Yes... except no. There are literally hundreds of independent labels.
I'm talking about supporting a band whose label is represented by the RIAA without directly supporting the RIAA
So you want to pay the guys who played the instruments, but not the engineer who recorded them. Or the guy who installed the microphones. Or the guy who found them. Or the guy who marketed them.
You can't pick and choose which parts you want to pay for. When you order a meal at a restaurant, you can't pay for the food but not the labor.
We all know who the real thieves are
Yes, we do. Your delusions of moral certitude impress no one.
Heard the phrase 'Then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything'
Yes. It's always quoted by raving nutcases who are more interested in rabid conspiracy theories than they are in anything having to do with the real world.
So congratulations Captain Obvious, you've informed us that regardless of how the RIAA chooses to distribute a recording, the cost to initially record it was the same. WHAT GENIOUS.
I'd respond to this further, but I've already had way more than the recommended daily dose of irony for today. Try me again some other day when the idea of somebody being sarcastic with me while being unable to spell the word "genius" doesn't send me into a petit mal seizure.
That's right, kids. Prejudice and hatred are only wrong if they result in a body count. Casual, everyday hate is just fine, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise!
Hate, hate, hate. We hate Microsoft, we hate the RIAA, we hate Bush, we hate the Patriot Act, we hate the MPAA, we hate Halliburton and we hate rich corporate bosses, but most of all we hate anybody who tries to tell us we're wrong. That's the Slashdot way.
When I say "digital downloads" are pure profit, I'm saying that it costs them far far far less to reach the customer when compared to physical media.
If the delivery were all the company were selling, you might have a point. As it is, though... no.
It's not irrational hate. It's logical hate.
That's a contradiction in terms.
If I pay for recordings, I am supporting the RIAA and their oligopy.
I think you meant "oligopoly," but that's not right either. The RIAA is not in any way exclusive. It's merely an industry association made up of the largest record companies. There are hundreds of smaller labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA.
I oppose their price hike on digital downloads, my argument being that it costs them less to produce.
This is, of course, false. If you said that it costs them less to distribute, you'd be right. Which is why downloads nearly always cost less than retail CDs. But the costs of production remain precisely the same.
I don't have a moral or ethical problem downloading music without paying for it.
Then you are a fool. On top of being a thief, but you already knew that.
I support the artist, and try to avoid supporting the RIAA while doing so.
A band without a record label is just a bunch of guys with guitars.
Personally, I would rather oppose it in the interest of debate, conversation and ultimately freedom.
Just what the hell does any of this have to do with freedom?
In the words of John Lennon
Oh, sorry. I just sort of naturally assumed that you were an adult. I didn't realize that you were still an angst-ridden teenager.
That's no longer true -- now you can produce identical results with WELL less than $100K in equipment.
Dude, you're out of your mind. The studio alone -- I'm talking about just the room here -- will cost $100,000 to build. And that's before you actually wire it with microphones or anything.
Setting aside for a minute the whole "Look at me, I just made up a word" thing, what you're referring to isn't any kind of "opoly." There are lots of independent record companies that don't belong to the RIAA.
But I'm pretty sure those two auction houses recently were both colluding and abusing a monopoly.
By definition, if there's two, there's not a monopoly.
It's not a question of "nothing they do with the price can be wrong because it's their product".
Actually, it pretty much is. The legal definition of collusion is very, very narrow. For obvious reasons. And as I've explained, anti-trust laws don't even come close to applying.
But you're not free to distribute those copies as you see fit.
After the copyright expires? Of course you are.
Grandparent poster was advocating a limit to how long a company is allowed to sell music at a given price, after which it would be free, or cheaper.
No such limit exists, nor should it.
I don't see what "misconception" you're driving at
The misconception is that the price of a given work on the open market is related to whether that work is still protected by copyright or not. When the copyright expires, stuff does not suddenly become free for the taking.
Let's concoct a fictitious example because I'm too lazy to go look up a real one right now. Let's say there's a movie called "My Trip to France." This movie was made in 1920, and so is long out of copyright now. But the only existing master of this movie is a film negative sitting in a vault owned by Mister Louis B. Meyerstein.
The copyright has expired, you say, so you should be able to have a copy of "My Trip to France" for free. Louis B. Meyerstein is unimpressed by this reasoning, and offers to sell you a copy on DVD for $19. "Outrage!" you cry. "The copyright has lapsed!" Meyerstein replies, "All that means is that if you have a copy you are free to make a copy. It doesn't mean that I'm legally obligated to give you a copy of the copy I already have."
See the misconception? "Public domain" does not automatically equal "free." Or even "cheap." It just equals "no longer protected by law."
No, of course I'm not interested in selling my collection. I went to all the trouble of ripping my CDs into iTunes. Why would I have done that if I didn't want the music?
No, the choice is between hauling them across the country or putting them in storage here.
colluding to raise prices, that's price-fixing, abuse of monopoly
Pick one, please. It can't be both. Collusion only happens when there are many players in an industry that make an illegal deal to fix prices. By definition, collusion can't happen in a monopoly industry.
Instead of just rattling off everything bad you can think of, howzabout saying things that are actually... well, if not true, at least plausible? (Do I really have to point out here that there's zero evidence of collusion in this instance?)
The real problem is that when you sell the 3 billionth pill, they have recouped their costs to make that product.
To continue the drug analogy, the 3 billionth pill of Viagra certainly covers the costs of developing Viagra... but it doesn't come close to the cost of developing the 16 other drugs that the company released to the market that year.
In the drug industry, R&D costs are enormous. In the media industry, it's the cost of production that's enormous. Most drugs, like most movies or CDs or what have you, do not recover the investment that went into making them.
So it's not as simple as you make it out to be. Not by a country mile.
Note, though, that even though they've recouped their costs, the price never quite seems to go down to the price of over-the-counter drugs.
This isn't apropos of anything, but the price of drugs do, in fact, drop precipitously when the patents expire. Haven't you heard of the "brand vs. generic" thing?
That has nothing to do with the media industry, though, so pardon the digression.
They didn't incur any costs for the band making the recording, they charged them for it.
Except you're ignoring the costs involved in finding the band in the first place, transportation and other necessities, hotels and other perks, not to mention the costs associated with marketing and promotion. These costs are huge.
Quite a bit of the money goes to people who don't really deserve it, the recording studio.
I beg your pardon? Do you think professional audio equipment is free? Do you think talented recording engineers work for nothing? Of course recording studios deserve their money. They work for what they receive, just like you and I do.
This hate against the recording studios isn't irrational
Oh, don't be silly. Of course it is. Have you read the other comments in this discussion?
seeking to subsidize their own failures with the success of a few bands rather than simply dump said failed projects
I don't think arguing that we should have less music just because not all music is commercially successful will go very far. Do you?
Actually, it's kind of the other way around. Title 17 (the DMCA hasn't existed for years now) prohibits the circumvention of access-control mechanisms, but fair use is a defense. In other words, it is illegal to circumvent access controls, but if your purpose in circumventing them is to make a use which would otherwise be considered fair, it's no harm, no foul.
Not for nothing, but I buy music on iTunes even when it's available on CD. The reason is simple: space. Over the fifteen years or so between the time I went to college and when Apple opened iTunes for business, I collected nearly a thousand CDs. (Used CD stores are cool.) They're all sitting up there in the attic right now collecting dust, because I've long since ripped them into iTunes. I'm thinking of moving sometime this year, and I've gotta give some serious thought to whether to haul the CDs cross-country with me.
Buying another CD which I will put on a shelf and never actually listen to doesn't make sense to me. Just give me the bits. In the space of two hundred-gigabyte hard drives, I can store all my music plus a near-line backup. Much better.
Like I said, that doesn't really mean anything. I was just throwing a different point of view out there.
That same argument has been applied to the pharmaceutical companies. It was bogus then, and it's bogus now. Yes, it only costs the company twelve cents to produce each pill. But that's only for the second pill. The first pill costs four hundred million dollars.
When you say that "digital downloads are pure profit," you're assuming that the record company has already recovered its costs. This is practically never true. The only reason the record companies are able to stay in business at all is because a small number of blockbuster artists make them a fortune, which subsidizes all the music they sell that never breaks even.
If you want to irrationally hate somebody, knock yourself out. Of course, it's basically equivalent to irrationally hating Jews or black people, but hey, it's a free country. All I ask is that you base your irrational hate on things that are at least true.
You do realize that people who make things are free to ask whatever price they want for them, right? If Record Company X decides to ask $2 per song instead of $1 per song, there doesn't have to be a why. The music is theirs. They can sell it for whatever price they want... or they can opt not to sell it at all. Whatever they want.
When copyright runs out, you can no longer force people to pay your for the music you own.
A common misconception.
If something is offered for sale and you take it without paying for it, you're guilty of stealing. This is true no matter what the thing is. So if somebody is offering for sale CDs of public-domain music and you just take one without paying for it, you're a thief.
However, once you buy a copy, you're free to make as many copies of that copy as you want. Because the person who sold you the copy doesn't hold the exclusive copyright, you see.
No, see, understand that what makes a smart person is the capacity to learn even when there is no teacher around.
That's not what smart means. You're talking about somebody who's talented or gifted. That's something entirely different. A person who's smart is a person who knows things, not merely a person with capacity.
For many fields, there simply is no teacher to tell you this is how to do things. You have to make them up as you go. Research into new areas is unteachable simply because noone knows how to do it yet.
Sigh. Of the entire corpus of human understanding, only a tiny fraction is on the edge. The unspeakably vast majority of everything human beings think about has already been thought about.
That's why we have schools. To teach children what we, as a culture, already know.
To be a truely smart person, you need to be able to learn without direction.
The one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
What if the school is providing a substandard education, providing a hostile atmosphere toward learning, hires incompetent teachers, or has any other problems that are directly related to the school?
Then that school will be fixed. There's already a law on the books to deal with it. It's called the No Child Left Behind Act. It forces schools that don't meet minimum standards to rectify their problems. It's not something we can do by snapping our fingers. It's a process, and a long process at that. It's going to take another 8 years to get all of America's public schools up to minimum standards. But we're doing it.
Suggesting the public schools are "obsolete," to use the silly term that started all this, is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
What about the fact that schools only give students a very narrow prespective on life, one that is often irrelevant to the actual world they will experience?
Irrelevant. The purpose of school is to educate, not to "give students a perspective on life." That kind of touchy-feely nonsense is what led to the problems our schools now face.
did not like the cirriculum and the cirriculum that I found midly interesting was rather pitiful in quality
Translation: I refused to apply myself. I was led to water, but I could not be made to drink.
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Evidence -- if any were needed -- that being named teacher of the year is not out of reach of even the biggest fools among us.
The school system we have -- which Gatto so dismissively described as consisting of "cells" --exists because it's evolved to meet our needs. Is it the best system possible? No. Is it the best system we have? Yes.
If Gatto or anybody else wants to improve our schools, he should try improving our schools. Simply complaining about them won't help anyone.
The "legal entity" which is represented by your marriage is not a real person, and does not need a right to political speech.
That's actually untrue. If you file jointly, you can claim political contributions made from a joint account as a deduction on your tax return. Also, you can jointly check that little box on your return that says you want to donate a dollar to the Presidential campaign fund.
Married couples have very explicitly recognized rights to political speech.
I think the problem, however, lies in your utter dismissal of any sort of group activity. By classifying everything that's not just a single individual acting alone as an "artificially defined legal entity," you're just dismissing everything out of hand. By your reasoning, the local rotary club should be legally prohibited from sponsoring a political rally. Your neighborhood church should be legally prohibited from inviting the mayor to its Sunday social. But does it stop with political speech? Can the rotary club sponsor the local AAA baseball team? Can the church hire a band to play at the picnic? Or are those things unlawful expressions of a right that's reserved solely for individuals by some imaginary amendment to the Constitution that you've concocted inside your head?
Slashdot Mirror
Especially the part where he says that he wants to install an OS without actually booting it at any point. I kinda stopped reading after that, admittedly.
Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs
Just barely. SGI managed to shoehorn large-system support into Linux, but it's extremely hinky.
Compare to an operating system like IRIX -- from where the large-system support in Linux came --that has been scaling to hundreds of processors since the mid-1990s, and that in recent months has been scaling to thousands of processors.
Compared to a true scalable OS, both Solaris and Linux come up short.
The raw number of new Sun boxen
For the love of all that's good and holy, tell me that was a typo.
Interesting piece of totally unrelated trivia: Do you know what Oracle is running their in-house database on? A cluster of Xserves. There was a press release a couple of months ago.
I found that amusing.
I believe oligopoly would be the correct term to describe this.
... except no. There are literally hundreds of independent labels.
Yes
I'm talking about supporting a band whose label is represented by the RIAA without directly supporting the RIAA
So you want to pay the guys who played the instruments, but not the engineer who recorded them. Or the guy who installed the microphones. Or the guy who found them. Or the guy who marketed them.
You can't pick and choose which parts you want to pay for. When you order a meal at a restaurant, you can't pay for the food but not the labor.
We all know who the real thieves are
Yes, we do. Your delusions of moral certitude impress no one.
Heard the phrase 'Then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything'
Yes. It's always quoted by raving nutcases who are more interested in rabid conspiracy theories than they are in anything having to do with the real world.
So congratulations Captain Obvious, you've informed us that regardless of how the RIAA chooses to distribute a recording, the cost to initially record it was the same. WHAT GENIOUS.
I'd respond to this further, but I've already had way more than the recommended daily dose of irony for today. Try me again some other day when the idea of somebody being sarcastic with me while being unable to spell the word "genius" doesn't send me into a petit mal seizure.
That's right, kids. Prejudice and hatred are only wrong if they result in a body count. Casual, everyday hate is just fine, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise!
Hate, hate, hate. We hate Microsoft, we hate the RIAA, we hate Bush, we hate the Patriot Act, we hate the MPAA, we hate Halliburton and we hate rich corporate bosses, but most of all we hate anybody who tries to tell us we're wrong. That's the Slashdot way.
Dude, you were right on until you got to the end. Then you blew it.
There's no such thing as "fair use right." Fair use is a defense against a civil violation. It's not an entitlement.
You were doing so good, too. Better luck next time.
When I say "digital downloads" are pure profit, I'm saying that it costs them far far far less to reach the customer when compared to physical media.
... no.
If the delivery were all the company were selling, you might have a point. As it is, though
It's not irrational hate. It's logical hate.
That's a contradiction in terms.
If I pay for recordings, I am supporting the RIAA and their oligopy.
I think you meant "oligopoly," but that's not right either. The RIAA is not in any way exclusive. It's merely an industry association made up of the largest record companies. There are hundreds of smaller labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA.
I oppose their price hike on digital downloads, my argument being that it costs them less to produce.
This is, of course, false. If you said that it costs them less to distribute, you'd be right. Which is why downloads nearly always cost less than retail CDs. But the costs of production remain precisely the same.
I don't have a moral or ethical problem downloading music without paying for it.
Then you are a fool. On top of being a thief, but you already knew that.
I support the artist, and try to avoid supporting the RIAA while doing so.
A band without a record label is just a bunch of guys with guitars.
Personally, I would rather oppose it in the interest of debate, conversation and ultimately freedom.
Just what the hell does any of this have to do with freedom?
In the words of John Lennon
Oh, sorry. I just sort of naturally assumed that you were an adult. I didn't realize that you were still an angst-ridden teenager.
Sorry for wasting your time.
That's no longer true -- now you can produce identical results with WELL less than $100K in equipment.
Dude, you're out of your mind. The studio alone -- I'm talking about just the room here -- will cost $100,000 to build. And that's before you actually wire it with microphones or anything.
OK, technically it's abuse of a quintopoly.
Setting aside for a minute the whole "Look at me, I just made up a word" thing, what you're referring to isn't any kind of "opoly." There are lots of independent record companies that don't belong to the RIAA.
But I'm pretty sure those two auction houses recently were both colluding and abusing a monopoly.
By definition, if there's two, there's not a monopoly.
It's not a question of "nothing they do with the price can be wrong because it's their product".
Actually, it pretty much is. The legal definition of collusion is very, very narrow. For obvious reasons. And as I've explained, anti-trust laws don't even come close to applying.
You just dedicated a hundred words to arguing with me over semantics, and I'm the one playing word games?
I call a canned cola beverage a "pop" and an oblong sandwich a "hoagie." Want to bitch at me about those too?
But you're not free to distribute those copies as you see fit.
After the copyright expires? Of course you are.
Grandparent poster was advocating a limit to how long a company is allowed to sell music at a given price, after which it would be free, or cheaper.
No such limit exists, nor should it.
I don't see what "misconception" you're driving at
The misconception is that the price of a given work on the open market is related to whether that work is still protected by copyright or not. When the copyright expires, stuff does not suddenly become free for the taking.
Let's concoct a fictitious example because I'm too lazy to go look up a real one right now. Let's say there's a movie called "My Trip to France." This movie was made in 1920, and so is long out of copyright now. But the only existing master of this movie is a film negative sitting in a vault owned by Mister Louis B. Meyerstein.
The copyright has expired, you say, so you should be able to have a copy of "My Trip to France" for free. Louis B. Meyerstein is unimpressed by this reasoning, and offers to sell you a copy on DVD for $19. "Outrage!" you cry. "The copyright has lapsed!" Meyerstein replies, "All that means is that if you have a copy you are free to make a copy. It doesn't mean that I'm legally obligated to give you a copy of the copy I already have."
See the misconception? "Public domain" does not automatically equal "free." Or even "cheap." It just equals "no longer protected by law."
No, of course I'm not interested in selling my collection. I went to all the trouble of ripping my CDs into iTunes. Why would I have done that if I didn't want the music?
No, the choice is between hauling them across the country or putting them in storage here.
colluding to raise prices, that's price-fixing, abuse of monopoly
... well, if not true, at least plausible? (Do I really have to point out here that there's zero evidence of collusion in this instance?)
Pick one, please. It can't be both. Collusion only happens when there are many players in an industry that make an illegal deal to fix prices. By definition, collusion can't happen in a monopoly industry.
Instead of just rattling off everything bad you can think of, howzabout saying things that are actually
The real problem is that when you sell the 3 billionth pill, they have recouped their costs to make that product.
... but it doesn't come close to the cost of developing the 16 other drugs that the company released to the market that year.
To continue the drug analogy, the 3 billionth pill of Viagra certainly covers the costs of developing Viagra
In the drug industry, R&D costs are enormous. In the media industry, it's the cost of production that's enormous. Most drugs, like most movies or CDs or what have you, do not recover the investment that went into making them.
So it's not as simple as you make it out to be. Not by a country mile.
Note, though, that even though they've recouped their costs, the price never quite seems to go down to the price of over-the-counter drugs.
This isn't apropos of anything, but the price of drugs do, in fact, drop precipitously when the patents expire. Haven't you heard of the "brand vs. generic" thing?
That has nothing to do with the media industry, though, so pardon the digression.
They didn't incur any costs for the band making the recording, they charged them for it.
Except you're ignoring the costs involved in finding the band in the first place, transportation and other necessities, hotels and other perks, not to mention the costs associated with marketing and promotion. These costs are huge.
Quite a bit of the money goes to people who don't really deserve it, the recording studio.
I beg your pardon? Do you think professional audio equipment is free? Do you think talented recording engineers work for nothing? Of course recording studios deserve their money. They work for what they receive, just like you and I do.
This hate against the recording studios isn't irrational
Oh, don't be silly. Of course it is. Have you read the other comments in this discussion?
seeking to subsidize their own failures with the success of a few bands rather than simply dump said failed projects
I don't think arguing that we should have less music just because not all music is commercially successful will go very far. Do you?
If you are going to drink the corporate kool-aid, play by the corporate rules.
Thanks for providing the necessary code words. Now I can file you away as an idiot and ignore you in the future.
Actually, it's kind of the other way around. Title 17 (the DMCA hasn't existed for years now) prohibits the circumvention of access-control mechanisms, but fair use is a defense. In other words, it is illegal to circumvent access controls, but if your purpose in circumventing them is to make a use which would otherwise be considered fair, it's no harm, no foul.
Not for nothing, but I buy music on iTunes even when it's available on CD. The reason is simple: space. Over the fifteen years or so between the time I went to college and when Apple opened iTunes for business, I collected nearly a thousand CDs. (Used CD stores are cool.) They're all sitting up there in the attic right now collecting dust, because I've long since ripped them into iTunes. I'm thinking of moving sometime this year, and I've gotta give some serious thought to whether to haul the CDs cross-country with me.
Buying another CD which I will put on a shelf and never actually listen to doesn't make sense to me. Just give me the bits. In the space of two hundred-gigabyte hard drives, I can store all my music plus a near-line backup. Much better.
Like I said, that doesn't really mean anything. I was just throwing a different point of view out there.
That same argument has been applied to the pharmaceutical companies. It was bogus then, and it's bogus now. Yes, it only costs the company twelve cents to produce each pill. But that's only for the second pill. The first pill costs four hundred million dollars.
When you say that "digital downloads are pure profit," you're assuming that the record company has already recovered its costs. This is practically never true. The only reason the record companies are able to stay in business at all is because a small number of blockbuster artists make them a fortune, which subsidizes all the music they sell that never breaks even.
If you want to irrationally hate somebody, knock yourself out. Of course, it's basically equivalent to irrationally hating Jews or black people, but hey, it's a free country. All I ask is that you base your irrational hate on things that are at least true.
You do realize that people who make things are free to ask whatever price they want for them, right? If Record Company X decides to ask $2 per song instead of $1 per song, there doesn't have to be a why. The music is theirs. They can sell it for whatever price they want ... or they can opt not to sell it at all. Whatever they want.
When copyright runs out, you can no longer force people to pay your for the music you own.
A common misconception.
If something is offered for sale and you take it without paying for it, you're guilty of stealing. This is true no matter what the thing is. So if somebody is offering for sale CDs of public-domain music and you just take one without paying for it, you're a thief.
However, once you buy a copy, you're free to make as many copies of that copy as you want. Because the person who sold you the copy doesn't hold the exclusive copyright, you see.
No, see, understand that what makes a smart person is the capacity to learn even when there is no teacher around.
That's not what smart means. You're talking about somebody who's talented or gifted. That's something entirely different. A person who's smart is a person who knows things, not merely a person with capacity.
For many fields, there simply is no teacher to tell you this is how to do things. You have to make them up as you go. Research into new areas is unteachable simply because noone knows how to do it yet.
Sigh. Of the entire corpus of human understanding, only a tiny fraction is on the edge. The unspeakably vast majority of everything human beings think about has already been thought about.
That's why we have schools. To teach children what we, as a culture, already know.
To be a truely smart person, you need to be able to learn without direction.
The one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
What if the school is providing a substandard education, providing a hostile atmosphere toward learning, hires incompetent teachers, or has any other problems that are directly related to the school?
Then that school will be fixed. There's already a law on the books to deal with it. It's called the No Child Left Behind Act. It forces schools that don't meet minimum standards to rectify their problems. It's not something we can do by snapping our fingers. It's a process, and a long process at that. It's going to take another 8 years to get all of America's public schools up to minimum standards. But we're doing it.
Suggesting the public schools are "obsolete," to use the silly term that started all this, is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
What about the fact that schools only give students a very narrow prespective on life, one that is often irrelevant to the actual world they will experience?
Irrelevant. The purpose of school is to educate, not to "give students a perspective on life." That kind of touchy-feely nonsense is what led to the problems our schools now face.
did not like the cirriculum and the cirriculum that I found midly interesting was rather pitiful in quality
Translation: I refused to apply myself. I was led to water, but I could not be made to drink.
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Evidence -- if any were needed -- that being named teacher of the year is not out of reach of even the biggest fools among us.
The school system we have -- which Gatto so dismissively described as consisting of "cells" --exists because it's evolved to meet our needs. Is it the best system possible? No. Is it the best system we have? Yes.
If Gatto or anybody else wants to improve our schools, he should try improving our schools. Simply complaining about them won't help anyone.
Might only require a single amendment.
Like the 14th, for instance?
The "legal entity" which is represented by your marriage is not a real person, and does not need a right to political speech.
That's actually untrue. If you file jointly, you can claim political contributions made from a joint account as a deduction on your tax return. Also, you can jointly check that little box on your return that says you want to donate a dollar to the Presidential campaign fund.
Married couples have very explicitly recognized rights to political speech.
I think the problem, however, lies in your utter dismissal of any sort of group activity. By classifying everything that's not just a single individual acting alone as an "artificially defined legal entity," you're just dismissing everything out of hand. By your reasoning, the local rotary club should be legally prohibited from sponsoring a political rally. Your neighborhood church should be legally prohibited from inviting the mayor to its Sunday social. But does it stop with political speech? Can the rotary club sponsor the local AAA baseball team? Can the church hire a band to play at the picnic? Or are those things unlawful expressions of a right that's reserved solely for individuals by some imaginary amendment to the Constitution that you've concocted inside your head?