If they are distributing intellectual property illegally then they must already be breaking some law. Right?
Laws were made generic enough to protect us even from a digital age. However Americans were not made smart enough to understand this.
I think the reason we need more laws is because when we prosecute someone we want to be able to provide a stack of laws they broke so the sentence can be as harsh as we would like it to be, in case we need to make another example out of someone. We're so good at that.
Oh yeah? Back in my day I had to write games on a 1 Mhz computer with no hard drive and 64K of RAM. It could run super fast at 2 Mhz if I turned off the graphics.:)
Now I'm curious... what were you writing games on?
I think that's related to capitalism. We're not working to make stable hardware that never needs to be replaced. We're working to make money and provide consumers a product they can purchase over and over again. Products and simply widgets. And if your widget is broke then we recommend you buy a replacement.
We know that its possible to design an OS, for example, that can update itself by downloading all patches over the net. XP has a similar feature. But do you think it would ever be in Microsoft's interest to give you an OS that would continually update itself over the net without requiring some form of payment?
I just upgraded my linux kernel among other things using apt-get. But the only reason I can do that on Linux is because Linux developers often care less about money than they do their own products.
But this is all my opinion. So please ignore everything I just said. Its not important. Be happy.:)
Working for what you get is not greed, its slavery.
Greed is hiring hundreds of thousands of people to work for you, then taking a nice big chunk of the profits as your salery.
We shouldn't be forced to work. Everything should be free so we can choose what we want to do with our time. Some of us have to work but all that work can be volutary.
There was a time, before computerized industrial automation, when everyone had to work in order to make enough for everyone. But today that is not neccessary.
Don't you see the real problem? Its human nature plain and simple to act stupidly. Get rid of the carrot and they won't have any incentive to act stupidly. Plus it will give us scientists and people who really do use our brains the ability to educate the rest of you when you stop worrying about so much about money and jobs and thinks that really don't matter.
We could use civilization and society to give everyone everything they want. We already do, for the most part, but we waste so much that we have to work 8 hours a day to make up for it. Some of us have to work more than that. And that isn't right, is it?
If so I hope Earthlink sues Mailblocks and its execs out of existence. I hate childish corps and any members of the board that thinks these type of actions are justified. They should be shot on site, but I'll settle for life in prison, stripped of all their valuable possessions and enslaved to do repetitively mindless physical labor for the rest of their days.
The fastest way to win is to lose. Let them have their way and reshape the environment how they would choose. While they are doing that organize on our own and create a new environment. The proper environment for people to live in. The proper rule set. Etc. This requires many bright minds and a lot of man-hours. And there's much to draw from. But anyway when the time is right, when everything is almost hopelessly fucked up, then launch a huge propoganda campaign with the right leaders in place ready to take control. Through democracy you can take back everything, but you must frist be prepared to solve ALL OF THE PROBLEMS. And I don't think you're ready for that, just yet.
After mucking around with TurboTax for a couple years I just started doing my taxes by hand. You can download the forms from the IRS, print out the 10 neccessary forms and tables pages, and with a calculator complete your taxes in less time than it would take to read all the advertisements, type in your serial number and activation codes and click "No" through the 5 million popups to buy shit. What pissed me off was after an hour of doing all of that it prints out some forms I have to mail in. WTF? I thought it was supposed to be electronic. That was enough of that.
Taxes are not difficult. Those forms were designed for the average American to do their taxes. They're really quite stupid. Its like hand holding through 2 or 3 simple math problems. The difficulty, for me, is reading through all that nonsensical verbage. I really wish people would get to the point more often and learn how to communicate effectively.
But why send out scare letters when you're a cable company? You can just play scare tactics in video segments on every channel 24/7 until your public votes the way you want them to. Notice how CNN and Fox changed their programming post 9/11. 24/7 coverage and horror and a limited amount of factual information. Just enough to give the impression you want to have lasting in everyone's hearts and minds when they go into that voting booth. Mmmmm. The air smells so ironic today.
They'll never go bankrupt. I'm sure our conservative republican government would gladly pay their bills so us poor Americans can keep our cable TV. We know how precious our TV is to each and every one of us.
And I believe him. If you look at why all these events that shape our history happen you will see that the motivating factors behind almost every action is somehow related to money.
How can a system based on greed possible build a good healthy society?
I bet mankind is smart enough to design a society that can give its people everything they want without needing any form of currency.
You misunderstood. Part of being human, not being an animal, is to understand what love really means. Most people don't. They prove this everyday by their actions and their words. I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who understand love. But I didn't know what it really was until a couple years ago when I read Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hanh. Now I have some vague understanding. But love is a verb. To love someone is not just to understand what it is but to put it into action, etc. I have a lot to learn, but at least I recognize that. I think we all have a lot to learn.
First understand that a human as I described them would never hate or mistreat anything. It understands love and would nurrish the seeds of joy, even in all you dirty little animals.
I have higher expectations of mankind because of some of the popular texts they have written, such as the Bible. Its about time they started acting like they were human instead of animals. Don't you agree?
By dehumanizing them I'm hoping to strike a nerve that might make them consider my words' deeper meaning. That they are incomplete. They are no more subhuman than an ignorant child, but they are not intelligent if their actions and words are woven together with hate, jealousy, selfishness, etc. A human is selfless by my definition. The average American is not.
Anyway, I enjoyed your reply. Emotions were running high when I was writing some of that and I probably couldn't classify myself as human just yet by my own definition. I am not that selfless, yet. I still hate, etc. But not as much as I used to. At least now I can safely say I would never allow the hand to get chopped off of anyone who would steal from me. And I think that's a step in the right direction.
Just look at yourselves. How much money do you spend to print out all the currency? How much money do you spend on computers to count it for you? How much money do you spend on scientific studies of how that currency is used? How much time do you and everyone you know and all the store checkers spend counting out those coins and bills? Time is money. How much time do you spend doing your taxes? How many people are employeed by the IRS? National Treasury? Banks? Credit institutions?
All forms of entertainment, all forms of news and public information and politics exist for one purpose. Money. They don't play ball because they like it, they play to get paid. We let them play so we can get paid. We work to get paid. And we run for office to get paid.
When will all of this finally sink in that all of the inefficiency and corruption in the system is caused by MONEY!
Just get rid of it, let the computers manage our resources and work together to create a communist socialist democracy, a government of the people by the people for the people who's purpose is to see to it that every person in their nation is provided for. That means that they are given the proper environment for education and the pursuit of happiness among other things. We need cooperation and community here, not individuality and selfishness.
Or else we might as well just work the rest of our lives to pay for all the commercials and war, to pay for all the money.
Yeah, but no self respecting person is going to obey the DMCA as if it were a real law.
If we treated all laws the same, if the punishment for decrypting a copyrighted work that you purchased from the store was the same as stealing it, then all our laws lose their meaning. Either that or the concept of who owns the property you buy and put in your home has to be readressed on a national level.
I knew we should have demanded an explanation for those tags they put on matresses. Now it has gotten out of hand.
I'm not affraid I would act illegaly, although I know many ways to modify digital video and access data stored on harddrives. Good thing I'm not a cop, huh?;)
But I might have my concerns if the officer could turn off the camera whenever he liked. I don't trust you or anyone else. You'd use your system against me every chance you got if it would make you money and you could get away with it. That's not paranoia, my friend, its perception, ahh-ite?
If I am going to be under surveillence as a citizen then I vote to put EVERYONE under surveillence especially the police, government, authority figure of your choice since they are holding the loaded firearm.
I still have problems with DRI on ATI cards. I think I'm still using the vesa driver at home right now because I was too lazy to troubleshoot the problem I was having getting the driver to work.
I'd just keep browsing google and hacking/etc/X11/XF86Config, checking/var/log/XFree86.log, etc.
I can't figure out if its X or something else. But on one of my RedHat 8.0 systems it keeps paging out all the running processes into swap when the system runs overnight. I wake it up in the morning and it takes about 10 minutes to page everything back into RAM or something. It might just be X or a leaky process somewhere. But I think that symptom was fixed on RedHat 9.
I file all my taxes by hand now. I download the PDFs from the IRS website, print out the relevant forms, tax table, etc. And sit down with no distractions for a couple hours to finish it peacefully. It gets easier and easier every year.
I'm not too concerned about money. I'm more concerned about the time I spend managing my money. Which is why I do this stuff my own way. Without taking anyone's advice or asking for help. And I bet within a year or two I'll have my taxes automated, like my bill payments, so I only have to type the info on my W2 in once and have my 1040 printed out, ready to mail.
Technicly when you get down to the heart of it taxes come out to a couple very easy math problems.
Subtract the amount you paid from the amount you owe. But somewhere in there you need to subtract the taxes you paid to your state, etc. Its really quite simple.
If we discussed this very topic at length I bet we could write a very simple tutorial.
But this is what I want you to think about. How much money does it cost America just to do its taxes? And how much of your life is spent worrying about money and taxes, waiting in lines at the post office, buying Turbo Tax, etc.
When its too late. When we decide that we want to take all that money and time back so we can spend it with our family.. we only have money to thank for all it has done for us.
It has given us the freedom to fully explore all aspects of human nature.
In fact the definition of love in the dictionary is wrong. Can anyone be surprise that noone loves anyone else? We think of love as being sexually attracted to someone. It is not.
Love is caring about their wellbeing, wanting no harm to come to them physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. Nowhere does American society define love this way. Americans have a very selfish definition of love. Love by definition is selfless.
How did things get this bad? Why aren't we meeting on a weekly basis to take action against this annoying destruction of the public domain?
First how did things get this bad.. We let it happen. We were walking TV and all of a sudden the US passed the DMCA and a bunch of patents and.. No, actually its always been this bad. America has always been the property of Ford.
On to your next question. We are meeting on a weekly, daily, hourly basis to discuss these things. Its called slashdot.:)
Unfortunately we have no political power. But we do have far more "word of mouth" power.
But I have no faith in anyone ever fixing the system because almost noone knows what the verb love really means. Nobody understands that concept.
If you love someone you could never give them the death penalty or cut off their hand or hurt them physically in any way. Even if they are a terrorist. See, you don't understand what it really means to love your neighbor.
I define human as an intelligent being that loves all other humans, and right now the lot of you look like a bunch of animals to me.
Slashdot Mirror
But everyone already knows the life of a citizen is more valuable than the life of a terrorist.
There is a very fine line between being a patriot and a nazi, huh?
Hell yeah! I'd buy that game. :)
If they are distributing intellectual property illegally then they must already be breaking some law. Right?
Laws were made generic enough to protect us even from a digital age. However Americans were not made smart enough to understand this.
I think the reason we need more laws is because when we prosecute someone we want to be able to provide a stack of laws they broke so the sentence can be as harsh as we would like it to be, in case we need to make another example out of someone. We're so good at that.
And you know what laws make? Criminals.
They're trying to build a prison, another prison system! For you and me.. *grin*
Oh yeah? Back in my day I had to write games on a 1 Mhz computer with no hard drive and 64K of RAM. It could run super fast at 2 Mhz if I turned off the graphics. :)
Now I'm curious... what were you writing games on?
I think that's related to capitalism. We're not working to make stable hardware that never needs to be replaced. We're working to make money and provide consumers a product they can purchase over and over again. Products and simply widgets. And if your widget is broke then we recommend you buy a replacement.
:)
We know that its possible to design an OS, for example, that can update itself by downloading all patches over the net. XP has a similar feature. But do you think it would ever be in Microsoft's interest to give you an OS that would continually update itself over the net without requiring some form of payment?
I just upgraded my linux kernel among other things using apt-get. But the only reason I can do that on Linux is because Linux developers often care less about money than they do their own products.
But this is all my opinion. So please ignore everything I just said. Its not important. Be happy.
Yeah.
What's so sad is how much damage the RIAA will do on its way out.
Too bad those rich greedy people running the show never get to spend any time in our fine prison system.
Want to know the real reason they're collecting all this information?
:)
They want to make us better consumers.
Working for what you get is not greed, its slavery.
Greed is hiring hundreds of thousands of people to work for you, then taking a nice big chunk of the profits as your salery.
We shouldn't be forced to work. Everything should be free so we can choose what we want to do with our time. Some of us have to work but all that work can be volutary.
There was a time, before computerized industrial automation, when everyone had to work in order to make enough for everyone. But today that is not neccessary.
Exactly, now you're starting to understand.
This is why we have to get rid of money.
Don't you see the real problem? Its human nature plain and simple to act stupidly. Get rid of the carrot and they won't have any incentive to act stupidly. Plus it will give us scientists and people who really do use our brains the ability to educate the rest of you when you stop worrying about so much about money and jobs and thinks that really don't matter.
We could use civilization and society to give everyone everything they want. We already do, for the most part, but we waste so much that we have to work 8 hours a day to make up for it. Some of us have to work more than that. And that isn't right, is it?
I think the same thing can be said about all patents and probably trademarks too.
If so I hope Earthlink sues Mailblocks and its execs out of existence. I hate childish corps and any members of the board that thinks these type of actions are justified. They should be shot on site, but I'll settle for life in prison, stripped of all their valuable possessions and enslaved to do repetitively mindless physical labor for the rest of their days.
Nope.
The fastest way to win is to lose. Let them have their way and reshape the environment how they would choose. While they are doing that organize on our own and create a new environment. The proper environment for people to live in. The proper rule set. Etc. This requires many bright minds and a lot of man-hours. And there's much to draw from. But anyway when the time is right, when everything is almost hopelessly fucked up, then launch a huge propoganda campaign with the right leaders in place ready to take control. Through democracy you can take back everything, but you must frist be prepared to solve ALL OF THE PROBLEMS. And I don't think you're ready for that, just yet.
After mucking around with TurboTax for a couple years I just started doing my taxes by hand. You can download the forms from the IRS, print out the 10 neccessary forms and tables pages, and with a calculator complete your taxes in less time than it would take to read all the advertisements, type in your serial number and activation codes and click "No" through the 5 million popups to buy shit. What pissed me off was after an hour of doing all of that it prints out some forms I have to mail in. WTF? I thought it was supposed to be electronic. That was enough of that.
Taxes are not difficult. Those forms were designed for the average American to do their taxes. They're really quite stupid. Its like hand holding through 2 or 3 simple math problems. The difficulty, for me, is reading through all that nonsensical verbage. I really wish people would get to the point more often and learn how to communicate effectively.
I just love the irony.
But why send out scare letters when you're a cable company? You can just play scare tactics in video segments on every channel 24/7 until your public votes the way you want them to. Notice how CNN and Fox changed their programming post 9/11. 24/7 coverage and horror and a limited amount of factual information. Just enough to give the impression you want to have lasting in everyone's hearts and minds when they go into that voting booth. Mmmmm. The air smells so ironic today.
They'll never go bankrupt. I'm sure our conservative republican government would gladly pay their bills so us poor Americans can keep our cable TV. We know how precious our TV is to each and every one of us.
"Money is the greatest detriment to science."
And I believe him. If you look at why all these events that shape our history happen you will see that the motivating factors behind almost every action is somehow related to money.
How can a system based on greed possible build a good healthy society?
I bet mankind is smart enough to design a society that can give its people everything they want without needing any form of currency.
You misunderstood. Part of being human, not being an animal, is to understand what love really means. Most people don't. They prove this everyday by their actions and their words. I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who understand love. But I didn't know what it really was until a couple years ago when I read Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hanh. Now I have some vague understanding. But love is a verb. To love someone is not just to understand what it is but to put it into action, etc. I have a lot to learn, but at least I recognize that. I think we all have a lot to learn.
First understand that a human as I described them would never hate or mistreat anything. It understands love and would nurrish the seeds of joy, even in all you dirty little animals.
I have higher expectations of mankind because of some of the popular texts they have written, such as the Bible. Its about time they started acting like they were human instead of animals. Don't you agree?
By dehumanizing them I'm hoping to strike a nerve that might make them consider my words' deeper meaning. That they are incomplete. They are no more subhuman than an ignorant child, but they are not intelligent if their actions and words are woven together with hate, jealousy, selfishness, etc. A human is selfless by my definition. The average American is not.
Anyway, I enjoyed your reply. Emotions were running high when I was writing some of that and I probably couldn't classify myself as human just yet by my own definition. I am not that selfless, yet. I still hate, etc. But not as much as I used to. At least now I can safely say I would never allow the hand to get chopped off of anyone who would steal from me. And I think that's a step in the right direction.
Just look at yourselves. How much money do you spend to print out all the currency? How much money do you spend on computers to count it for you? How much money do you spend on scientific studies of how that currency is used? How much time do you and everyone you know and all the store checkers spend counting out those coins and bills? Time is money. How much time do you spend doing your taxes? How many people are employeed by the IRS? National Treasury? Banks? Credit institutions?
All forms of entertainment, all forms of news and public information and politics exist for one purpose. Money. They don't play ball because they like it, they play to get paid. We let them play so we can get paid. We work to get paid. And we run for office to get paid.
When will all of this finally sink in that all of the inefficiency and corruption in the system is caused by MONEY!
Just get rid of it, let the computers manage our resources and work together to create a communist socialist democracy, a government of the people by the people for the people who's purpose is to see to it that every person in their nation is provided for. That means that they are given the proper environment for education and the pursuit of happiness among other things. We need cooperation and community here, not individuality and selfishness.
Or else we might as well just work the rest of our lives to pay for all the commercials and war, to pay for all the money.
Yeah, but no self respecting person is going to obey the DMCA as if it were a real law.
If we treated all laws the same, if the punishment for decrypting a copyrighted work that you purchased from the store was the same as stealing it, then all our laws lose their meaning. Either that or the concept of who owns the property you buy and put in your home has to be readressed on a national level.
I knew we should have demanded an explanation for those tags they put on matresses. Now it has gotten out of hand.
I'm not affraid I would act illegaly, although I know many ways to modify digital video and access data stored on harddrives. Good thing I'm not a cop, huh? ;)
But I might have my concerns if the officer could turn off the camera whenever he liked. I don't trust you or anyone else. You'd use your system against me every chance you got if it would make you money and you could get away with it. That's not paranoia, my friend, its perception, ahh-ite?
If I am going to be under surveillence as a citizen then I vote to put EVERYONE under surveillence especially the police, government, authority figure of your choice since they are holding the loaded firearm.
I still have problems with DRI on ATI cards. I think I'm still using the vesa driver at home right now because I was too lazy to troubleshoot the problem I was having getting the driver to work.
/etc/X11/XF86Config, checking /var/log/XFree86.log, etc.
I'd just keep browsing google and hacking
I can't figure out if its X or something else. But on one of my RedHat 8.0 systems it keeps paging out all the running processes into swap when the system runs overnight. I wake it up in the morning and it takes about 10 minutes to page everything back into RAM or something. It might just be X or a leaky process somewhere. But I think that symptom was fixed on RedHat 9.
I file all my taxes by hand now. I download the PDFs from the IRS website, print out the relevant forms, tax table, etc. And sit down with no distractions for a couple hours to finish it peacefully. It gets easier and easier every year.
I'm not too concerned about money. I'm more concerned about the time I spend managing my money. Which is why I do this stuff my own way. Without taking anyone's advice or asking for help. And I bet within a year or two I'll have my taxes automated, like my bill payments, so I only have to type the info on my W2 in once and have my 1040 printed out, ready to mail.
Technicly when you get down to the heart of it taxes come out to a couple very easy math problems.
( $money - $tax_bracket_cutoff_amount) * $tax_percentage = $tax
Subtract the amount you paid from the amount you owe. But somewhere in there you need to subtract the taxes you paid to your state, etc. Its really quite simple.
If we discussed this very topic at length I bet we could write a very simple tutorial.
But this is what I want you to think about. How much money does it cost America just to do its taxes? And how much of your life is spent worrying about money and taxes, waiting in lines at the post office, buying Turbo Tax, etc.
When its too late. When we decide that we want to take all that money and time back so we can spend it with our family.. we only have money to thank for all it has done for us.
It has given us the freedom to fully explore all aspects of human nature.
In fact the definition of love in the dictionary is wrong. Can anyone be surprise that noone loves anyone else? We think of love as being sexually attracted to someone. It is not.
Love is caring about their wellbeing, wanting no harm to come to them physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. Nowhere does American society define love this way. Americans have a very selfish definition of love. Love by definition is selfless.
How did things get this bad? Why aren't we meeting on a weekly basis to take action against this annoying destruction of the public domain?
:)
First how did things get this bad.. We let it happen. We were walking TV and all of a sudden the US passed the DMCA and a bunch of patents and.. No, actually its always been this bad. America has always been the property of Ford.
On to your next question. We are meeting on a weekly, daily, hourly basis to discuss these things. Its called slashdot.
Unfortunately we have no political power. But we do have far more "word of mouth" power.
But I have no faith in anyone ever fixing the system because almost noone knows what the verb love really means. Nobody understands that concept.
If you love someone you could never give them the death penalty or cut off their hand or hurt them physically in any way. Even if they are a terrorist. See, you don't understand what it really means to love your neighbor.
I define human as an intelligent being that loves all other humans, and right now the lot of you look like a bunch of animals to me.